Reality check

I sometimes dream about colorful pasts that I have supposedly had, and often end up in analytical deliria concerning how to distinguish ”real” memories from memories ”incepted” by dream content. Recently, I revisited a place where I had supposedly been a regular, and I devised the clever method of asking two trusted friends whether the place was real or not. These two fulfil a function of ”certified friends”, people I trust I will keep seeing also without any specific bonds or shared projects, and therefore, the logic went, they were an external point of reference, not involved in ongoing processes, could not have their own agenda, and were absolutely trustworthy. One of them confirmed the reality of this particular dreamt past, and added the argument that I had been having very fanciful plans about the surrealist group taking over the place, and such a poor connection with reality implies that it must have been a reality to be poorly connected to in the first place.

But elsewhere, such a ”reality check” is often more complicated. Sometimes the question is posed as simplicistically as ”what is dream and what is real”. If we approach this question empirically, not borrowing from various physical and psychological theories which we were taught as gospel in school or in textbooks, instead recognising that things do phenomenologically feel sometimes more real and sometimes less real immediately and regardless of our later intellectual interpretation of them; then what? We would first need a definition of the two states, which would need to be empirically based in our available methods of objectively distinguishing between them, thus we’d need to devise methods and reach definitions only in conjunction with each other, and only then empirically evaluate whether they are actually mutually exclusive.

Actually, modern fiction seems to have made this somewhat easier. With fictional ”universes”, there is always a question of which stories are part of continuity and which are not. This is in fact the same question that some of us keep asking ourselves about our lives in general. Stories that are part of continuity (”real”) are the ones that has consequences for character development, relationships, and long-term plot. In stories outside continuity anything could happen, people can act ”out of character”, do things they will never have to answer for, go on uninhibited sex and violence rampages, they could die, over and over again, the whole logic of the story could collapse and the characters or the writer start speaking directly to the reader/viewer, etc.

Something real, phenomenologically speaking so as not to have to get involved in metaphysical questions which will have to be based outside the investigation, is something that is vivid and ”makes sense”, and especially in the sense of coherence and contingence, something that takes part in ongoing chains of causality and ongoing life processes.

A dream, in a similar framework, can perhaps be tentatively defined as any course of event or other vivid experience which seems to have an inner origin and is experienced with the body at rest.

And perhaps only then we can claim without being misunderstood that surrealism has always been about recognising reality in its entirety, thus being somewhat polemical against all the narrow instrumentalist conceptions of the real which are based on nervously invented restrictions and oppositions. The ”realism” that was professed by vociferous advocates is typically characterised by attempts to circumscribe the real as narrowly as possible. No, all such attempts to represent reality with only a small portion of it (rhetorically a synecdoche) usually fails to convey the experience of reality, which is not the least the experience of a type of fullness and inexhaustibility of reality.

And we see that dream and reality very often overlap. There are of course many dreams that we return from with relief or reluctance that not only feel no less real than anything else, but which also connects with several major ongoing processes in our lives, and do get practical consequences. And, even more strikingly, there is a large portion of our waking life which has no consequences whatsoever, which does nothing to forward our desires or respond to our curiosity, so much time spent at work, or with extensive entertainment, or with various uninteresting chores, or alone at home, or with the family… (Other arenas for social interactions might be just as conventional or dull, but it is typical for the family that any showdowns or any resolution are quickly forgotten and then repeated again and again, and outside the family even conventional social relationships do keep changing at least in terms of the relationships.) Clearly, Swedenborg, Blake and Nerval were pioneers in recognising the ontological status of their dreamlife as real, and instructively, they were also good at making things happen based on this more inclusive, more full, sense of reality.

Surrealism, it has been argued, can be translated with the watchword ”more reality!”

Mattias

Open/closed/closed - political and other implications of organisational heterogenity

Miguel Perez Corrales who (like me) were on the editorial board of What Will Be, has posted a number of blog entries highlighting various part of the contents, which may provide inspirational glimpses to those who do not have the book. Sometimes the angle is surprising, and I had a rather hard time understanding the point of his criticism of either Swedish surrealist veteran Ilmar Laaban, about whom I had written a memorial article, or of me, in one of the posts. As a historical background to the heterogenity of surrealist organisation in the late 40s, where Laaban was involved in several more or less "dissident" forums, I had cited a number of reasons that were historically important for people not to rally uncritically to Breton at that particular time, and I even said that there was a point with a lot of them. Miguel dismisses them with that they mostly smack of stalinism.

Divergences in the 40s
It is an interesting fact that it was indeed the La Main à Plume and other groups in occupied Europe, which had a certain number of, at the time, left-opportunist quasi-stalinist members (several of whom later developed into actual stalinists) - but also many trotskyists and others -, that were the ones who insisted at the time on maintaining the epistemological project within surrealism that is connected with surrealism's hegelianism and which Breton was largely abandoning in his New York exile. The French group during the decades just after the war were indeed more interested in emphasising the esoteric aspect of surrealism's epistemology and the utopian and anarchist aspect of surrealism's politics, but hegelianism and marxism were part of the outlook of many important individuals and subgroups even in France during those times, and had a substantial revival with the revival of surrealist activities themselves in the 60s. Allowing stalinism a monopoly on Marx's thought is something that fashionable liberals and the most simplistic anarchists do. Nevertheless, isn't one of the most crucial things about surrealism's epistemology to see the broad ways in which a traditional, poetic and secret discipline like hermetism/esoterism overlaps with a systematic theory in the philosophical language about change, identity and meaning such as hegelianism (not without precedents: many radical romantics, radical occultists and symbolists did this)? And isn't one of the most crucial things about surrealism's politics that it has affinities with a broad range of emancipatory and revolutionary movements and may join forces with any such specialised agents for periods but cannot be reduced to either? Most of us agree that it was a mistake to join the French stalinist PC in the 30s, but an understandable mistake which had its reasons, and that it was a much more stupid and hardly understandable mistake to do it the 40s (though many surrealists out of respect for the Belgian surrealists or for Jaguer or for Jorn would excuse that too). But this is another question than that of abandoning a systematical theory on society and history (marxism) in favour of some timeless principles (anarchism and utopianism), or abandoning an explicit poetical, epistemological and metaphysical philosophy in 19th century terms (hegelianism) in favour of one obscurely expressed in "timeless" renaissance, medieval and late antiquity terms (hermetism). In both those cases it's not about betting on one horse for the moment, it is more about investigating overlaps and complementing possibilities or of failing to do so. It is also another question than that of either trusting Breton whatever he says and does and wait for him to tell you how the surrealist movement should be organised after the war, or critically considering Breton's position and choosing yourself how to organise. The latter is not less surrealist than the former, and is of course in no way stalinist by implication... We could even note that Breton himself, always an intelligent man regardless of whether one thinks he may be criticised or not, was not sure how to proceed with organisation after the war and famously pondered the question for a couple of years before he relaunched the old surrealist group at the insistance of many of his friends. The plethora of surrealist journals, grouplets and networks in the mid- to late 40s (and also the vast number of adherents rallying to the relaunched group) is indeed one of the most fascinating things about the history of surrealism.

Ilmar Laaban arrives at the Bureau of Surrealist Investigations in Stockholm in 1986

Stalinism 
Then it is a completely different thing that Laaban of course had no sympathy whatsoever for stalinism. Refugees from the Baltic states in the 40s rarely had! It was not the least his activity as a Trotskyist in his youth in Estonia that made it necessary to escape Soviet occupation. While in Sweden he quickly started increasingly leaning towards anarchism during the late 40s. And made it a point, anecdotally, to refuse to stand as a member of the editorial board of imaginist journal Salamander for one issue where one writer insisted on a point which could be considered stalinist in an article about Mayakovsky.
 
But then, I also fail to see any particular "rationalism" in the positions of Waldberg (nostalgia for interwar surrealism, a dash of bataillian mysticism, and a good dose of bourgeois art-world-professional pragmatism) or Caillois (uncompromising insistence on the rigor of the quasiscientific aspect of surrealist experimentation, avoiding any pragmatism, and later turning towards a certain aloof poetic mysticism). As far as I know the "humanism" of Matta was an invective thrown at him a posteriori and bore no relationship to the ideological sense of humanism that surrealism would necessarily oppose (Or maybe he himself was responsible of some ambiguous comments about returning the focus to man when recognisable figures re-entered his paintings? Still far from ideological humanism though)...

"Humanist" paintings by Matta...

Bretonism 
Well, of course, we surrealists are used to seeing raging anti-surrealists using factually motivated criticism of Breton as a pretext for presenting surrealism on the whole as completely illegitimate. But does that really mean that anyone who says that Breton can be criticised, speaks in unison with the stalinists and is allied with fashionable antisurrealist academics? No, I don't think so. Personally, I find it important that a surrealist today is struggling with the accumulated experience and ideas of surrealism and of the brilliant pathfinder Breton. His ideas have a bearing on our daily behavior only inasmuch as we are able to scrutinise what is their liberating core sense and what is historical contingency and temporary tactics including misguided tactics and directions. If Breton is made infallible, then he becomes a "great spirit" in the pantheon of minds, which we can feel inspired by at will, but whose experiences are less crucial to our own, whose organisational concerns need not be ours, whose ideas and actions is something more distant from us, which we are left to leave without concern in our daily life. That is reverence and canon; it is not the sense of being a movement.

Mattias Forshage

Everything not everything

This is a response to one of the themes raised by NN:s "The canopy of z – objectivity and surrealism" below, but less than a passionate defense of a particular standpoints. I just want to explicate to what extent this attitude that "everything remains to be done" as well as its opposite remain compatible with surrealism. Surrealism strives to be that nexus where such contradictions are resolved, but in practice individuals still often feel a larger or smaller affinity for either way of reasoning, and it is often necessary in concrete action to make a choice, which for each particular situation is then primarily a strategical choice.

"Everything remains to be done"

First, the libertarian argument. As enthusiasts of freedom we like to open up, and to stand before and savor, fields of possibilities of maximal range. The feeling that "everything remains to be done" AND that "anything is possible" are fundamental to the phenomenology of freedom. We are always at the starting point. It is simply the locus of the feast.
Second, the anti-authoritarian argument. Poetry must be always reinvented at heart, and previous authorities and simple empirical conclusions are in a sense always irrelevant to the creative impulse. No one is to tell us which mistakes to make and which not. Back-to-basics. Intuition. Blank slate. Joy of rediscovery.
Third, the ludic argument. We must allow our priorities to be dictated by the dynamics of the game itself, to refuse utilistic concerns and control exerted by external agents such as preconceived rational planning.
Fourth, the revolutionary argument. All the things we crave are possible in a generalised way only in a society which is drastically more fair and free than the current. This will change the conditions for everything radically so that we really can't know for certain what will be possible and what not. Therefore our results and plans so far can be nothing but pleasurable and/or subversive exercises, that we don't know for sure if they'll have any relevance at all when things get around.
Fifth, the scientific argument. Whatever results we have shouldn't be extrapolated to generalisations, they do not necessarily tell the truth in any stronger sense than the scientific: it is what resulted from a particular investigation with particular methods. Methods, parameters and circumstances can be varied interminably and it is not easy to say which might cause significant differences, breakthroughs or transformations. The number of remaining experiments is endless.
Sixth, the modest argument. We may have good reasons for a certain disappointment in to what extent the surrealist movement so far has been capable of designing its experiments and formulating its conclusions in a systematic way. The immodest research program is technically really only in its early beginnings and the actual milestone results are few.

"Everything does not remain to be done" (a special case of which is the "we are almost there" suggested by NN)

First, the general historical argument. History is change, and most fundamentally it is change of the configuration of the field of possibilities. What's happened and what we've done so far has led us to a point where certain things have been made possible and certain others not.
Second, the collective historical agent argument. We are part of a movement, and this movement throughout its various incarnations in different activities in different countries in different times, has made a lot of experiences that are ours, and which we should utilise. We have a magnificent treasury of experiences. We can avoid repeating mistakes, we can evaluate historical experiences in order to suggest new strategies, we can continue threads prematurely dropped at precisely the point they were dropped.
Third, the pragmatic argument. Obviously, some paths are better than others. We may have an intuition telling us so, or we might have criteria, and the criteria may be based on assession of dynamism or effect or congeniality with selective affinities. Regardless of which, there are only some paths that are meaningful to embark on, and in some mysterious sense, we are right.
Fourth, the ideology criticism argument. We have learned the classical techniques of seeing through many types of lies, illusions and ideological constructs. From the fundamental Marx and Freud, as well as Darwin and Nietzsche, over feminism, to recent applications in situationism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, there is no shortage of ways to realise how many undertakings would merely serve others' purposes, or serve various regressive, conservative, banal, or counterproductive purposes that are part of oneself. We can see just how many things tried must be abandoned because they – in general or specifically under current circumstances – are filling an objective function opposite to our aims. If we take hardcore recuperation theory and apply it onedimensionally we will get a purely negative and sligtly too powerful criterion, and we might possibly come to the conclusion that there is very little that we are left to continue doing at all, and the only option is the ravaging refusal (because if we see through that too, then we would become mere cynics, which is clearly stillborn). If not, we might use the power of demasking to assess which strategies are viable in spite of criticisms, which options will reach out to countertendencies and make alliances of particular possible significance, which dead ends should be abandoned and which could be refurnished to become new side streams.
Fifth, the constructivist argument; the results we have so far has made unusual experiences and necessitated their conceptualisation and thereby opened up particular new areas of investigation. We have a lot of results that are mainly implemented as the width of questions, investigations and games we are capable of addressing.
Sixth, the immodest argument; those results are, from 1919 on, a radically succesful road of accessing psychic dynamics, poetry, new possibilities, imaginative truth, open rationalism, open realism and integrative power, which is capable of providing not just relevant suggestions but a certain vision of heterogenic wholeness in all meaningful areas of life. We are almost there.

Direct perception

One of these negative sleep epiphanies; this time connected with awakening and nausea.

On my way home in the evening I eat a sandwich with an old date (*). It tastes stale but not really bad.

In the middle of the night I awake and think of the sandwich in my stomach. I am not really feeling sick, but I feel the place of the sandwich in my stomach, and my nervous system is slightly stressed: I am potentially sick. But then it feels like the ground is being pulled from my feet when I think of how extremely strange it is that I was mentally focussing on the eaten sandwich in an immediate way! Isn't it the case that the details assume their meaning by their place in the geography, their place in the narrative and grammar of the text? Don't I have to read the whole landscape, the whole story? Is "direct perception" (direkte Anschauung) actually possible? My head keeps spinning, I am scared. I am convinced that epistemology under normal circumstances rests on a reading of geography as grammar, but that one can be capable of direct perception if for example one is going crazy, or extremely sick. And all the time that eaten sandwich is keeping me reminded of itself, without me having to imagine the entire gasterointestinal system – the absence of the entire 9 meters of it is so dramatically striking, a blank book, a blank map. Is it extremely sick or crazy that I am becoming? Then I fall asleep again.

The dream that followed was obviously geobiographical, and so can be read on the Cormorant council page.

(*) the ambiguity of this formulation became an element in the interpretation of the material. Originally it was just poor linguistic skills, I didn't know the best way to refer casually in english to a slightly old sandwich, the best-before-date of which had already passed.

Tools, animals or islands

So, here I am sitting, struggling to follow my thoughts hoping them to carry me away somewhere, while stile hoping to get something useful out of it all in the end. Thinking must be an adventure. And as all games it has its techniques, its tools and its criteria. Recently I stood before the oneway alley of considering "the concept of the concept" and it actually seemed to open somewhere. Laboring to complete this text, I realised this was an illusion, but some of the minor points still made me want to display this somewhere rather than throw it in the dustbin immediately.

Why, yes, I am totally bored with semantic discussions and definitions, and it seems inexplicable that I have often during the past few years ended up in them, particularly in the process of trying to apply some rigor to talking about surralism (as seen on Icecrawler) but also in more or less fruitless and sometimes painful quarrels with friends over the mere concepts of for example anarchism, utopianism, aesthetics, metaphysics, religion, male/female, metaphor/metonymy etc.

But to begin with, I accept an instrumentalist view of concepts as a bottomline; I consider them basically tools. It is POSSIBLE that they represent a potential underlying pattern of the world contributing to making it meaningful in employing them while talking about it, but that is not necessary in any strong sense, and it is certainly not the case that concepts are there to reveal a logical order of the universe and provide a universal classification of what there is. It is also POSSIBLE that they are some sort of immaterial beings, units of thinking and communication (perhaps like memes?), but that is not necessary in any strong sense and it is thinking and communication in themselves that are vehicles of passion, curiosity, refusal, desire and poetry and therefore weapons of surrealism.

(Some people may laugh when I talk against universal classification since I am professionally and passionately a biological systematist and I am enthusiastic over analytical procedures. Ok, let's get this straight. The reason biological organisms can be meaningfully and universally classified is that they are all historical products springing from the same unique lineage, which makes it possible to approach their diversity with particular and very distinct techniques and criteria, and it clearly delimits the sphere within which such an approach is meaningful. While conceptual analyses are just exercises of thought, experiments to see if something is substantially clarified or not, and can be fun.)

I repeat, I stick to an instrumentalist view and am happy to revive Breton's image from the 1942 Prolegomena of the surrealist toolbench. There is no need to feel obliged to reconcile on an analytical level those different conceptual framework which are operative in different particular spheres, separated by arbitrary historical divisions as much as the distinct diversity of the phenomena themselves - when choice of method and choice of theoretical vocabulary are connected to the sense of coherence of our task as brought about in the explicit historical tradition we're placing ourselves in as well as in the concrete totality of the project from the viewpoint of the spirit, this is still the opposite of eclecticism. (Eclecticism I consider as hotchpotch assemblages of viewpoints unconnected by historical or deep subjective necessity, patched together arbitrarily to fit the superficial whims and compromises of an individual personality, or a coreless organisation, or any project striving desperately to be contemporarily relevant rather than have an inner coherence.)

Of course some alternatives are better than others. And it is not a mere pragmatical question of doing the job; it must be possible to pin down criteria. And from the viewpoint of surrealism, it is not necessarily the logical criteria which are the important ones, such as complete consistency, explicability, non-contradiction, exhaustiveness...

First criterion: operativity - we need a concept only for something that we want to talk about, something interesting enough, and in this sense our population of concepts are determined by our collective and individual desires. The concepts are there as means for our bewonderment, thought, imagination, communication and action visavis the desirable, and therefore subordinate to our purposes in a wide sense. Concepts which do not interact dynamically with our real curiosity towards the unknown, or our moral and political needs, are poor concepts.

Second criterion: explanatory power, predictiveness. In order to apply a concept meaningfully to real phenomena those phenomena must actually have something in common, something which it interesting for us to note, and something which makes it possible for us to assume (predict) with some (statistical) precision other properties of the same phenomena. Strictly ostensive concepts, referring only to the particular aspect we define them to refer to, make up formal languages (mathematics, logics, computer languages) and will usually not have something to say about the world. Some people will defend such a view from a philosophically realist standpoint, but such metaphysical commitments are not necessary; a better rationale for it is purely methodological: if properties are unevenly distributed in the world and not showing a complete finemeshed chaos, then it will be interesting to group phenomena in this way. It is because of this that when concepts are fitted into an effective theory they will be able to reveal hidden or latent properties; they will be symptomatic - not due to an apriori valid theory but due to the testable predictions based on empirical observations about the covariation of properties integrated into such a theory. The best concepts are actually themselves theories, broadly applicable and usually (but not always!) revelatory, such as many of the psychoanalytical concepts, or one of the all-time favourites, the marxian concept of "ideology", suggesting that anyone rigorously defending a rigid system of personal opinions will have invested a lot of their hopes and disappointments in the system to the extent that it will replace and oppose the actual struggle for emancipation...

Third criterion: precision. To be useful (and indeed to be accurately predictive) a concept must have a defined range, it must have criteria or diagnostic characteristics which allows us to choose when not to apply it. This is to avoid arbitrariness as well as to keep at bay any possible urges to universal classification that will squeeze all available phenomena into a limited set of categories, that will be either rigid and thus inadequate to cope with all the heterogenous phenomena, or extremely flexible and thus loose their meaning. Sure, schematic designations can sometimes be revealing and sometimes open up imaginative possibilities, but then as temporary tools to provoke contrast, exception and flight.

Fourth criterion: historical sense. Even though the preceding three criteria could be fulfilled by temporary or individual constructions that bear little resemblance to what others might use the same concept for, such a conceptual arbitrariness will be confusionist and serve only to circumscribe an eventually dogmatic circle of "enlightened" or else to make communication and historical continuity difficult on the whole. In order to be a part of a broader project of increasing knowledge, concepts must be used in a sense which is in continuity with its historical use, considering the various distinctions and developments made over it during the time leading up the present. Of course concepts can be refined and developed, and of course various deviations can be pointed out by acknowledging contradictions with the sense of the concepts themselves, but it must not be denied that the usage made in history is a part of the operative sense of the concept (the "experience" of the concept is founded in the experiences of its defenders) and therefore of the concept itself, and cannot be disregarded without approaching one or other sense of idealist ahistoricism.

MF

experiment and failure revisited

The latest blogpost "Experiment & Failure" was a quick improvisation which I had to revise thoroughly a few days after its first posting, but only a week later other contributors to the merdarius persona and the icecrawler blog delivered an important chunk of criticism. As this was done largely orally and all in swedish anyway, I am now left to paraphrase the criticisms here.

And then I grab the opportunity to seemingly change the subject and acknowledge the recent passing of an old french surrealist comrade, Sarane Alexandrian, who was the grand old man of surrealist occultism, and therefore partly, but only partly, an opposing pole regarding ways of conceiving surrealism.

Sarane Alexandrian im memoriam

Alexandrian, born in Iraq in 1927, was one of the large gang of "dandy surrealists" who were one of several circles bringing new energy into the reconstituted french surrealist group in 1946 after the war. This circle believed strongly in the epistemological priority of poetry, the need for rigorous metaphysical experimentation, and the lack of need for involvement in politics; in parts coinciding with the classical "dissident" surrealist viewpoint of the Le grand Jeu group. Nevertheless, in 1946, this group was in the midst of "official" surrealism; it was specifically the clique forming the first editorial group of the french group's journal Neon in 1948, and they were very active in the organisation of the famous international surrealist exhibition in Paris 1947.

In 1948, most of them were collectively kicked out. At that time, Breton insisted that the group excluded Matta, for still partly obscure reasons; the rationale was that he would have contributed to Gorky's recent suicide by having an affair with Gorky's wife. Large numbers of surrealists opposed or doubted this, friends of Matta, or firmly believing that Matta still represented a spearhead in furthering surrealist research in art, or just questioning the validity of the grounds for the exclusion. The "dandy surrealists" gang were seeing each other a lot in the home of their mentor, Victor Brauner, and were not showing up daily at the regular meetings. For this, they too were suddenly excluded from the group "for factional activity". As the surrealist group was very large at the time, while there were still a lot of different experiences drawn from the war represented and long-term strategies were not at all agreed upon, there were many contradictions around, of which several are not very transparent to us 60 years later.

Alexandrian had also been a member of Cause, the international secretariat founded in the french group to facilitate discussion between surrealist groups in other parts of the world and to inventory and coordinate the various assessments of the historical situation - unfortunately the group was shortlived and another one of its animators, Henri Pastoureau, wrote later in life with withheld bitterness that "it was obvious that the movement preferred to embark in a less systematic direction".

Many of the outcast surrealists of the purge 1948 and the following, even more obscure one, in 1951, remained in various ways true to the surrealist spirit while working in other forums or mostly in personal isolation combined with a mediocre litterary, artistic or scholarly carreer. Alexandrian became a decent historian of modern art, writing a series of sympathetic but not exciting books about surrealist art and similar (some of which were even translated into english) - note for example Le Surréalisme et le rêve - but also a novels and books about utopianism, occultism, etc.

(It is indeed one of the remaining big tasks of surrealist history to shed light on the actual processes involved in these particular purges - a tentative attempt in Richardson's and Fijalkowski's Surrealism against the current must be noted - where the internal surrealist tradition has made it a myth (about irreducible and unexplainable historical necessity) which has not performed too well in competition with the hostile myth of academic historiography that they would be simply the expressions of Breton's arbitrary (unexplained and ultimately unexplainable even within their system) "dictatorial whims".)

Then rather suddenly in recent years, Alexandrian returned to a more active role, as the founder and director of the journal Supérieur inconnu (from 1995) and the centerpoint of the collective around it. This was the respectable midpoint of a minor resurgence of surrealist occultism, maintaining the exploration of poetry in categories clearly not subsuming the perspectives of hermeticism, alchemy, mysterious correspondences, hidden traditions and magic under those of modern science or philosophy. In a certain sense, this is a basic position of surrealism, but there was also something very provocative about it. Also in the very slickness and intelligence with which it was done. Alexandrian himself wrote primary about art. Associated with the journal were other, more picturesque characters like the twoheaded Fabrice Pascaud, who is the surrealist astrologer as well as a trusted orthodox surrealist polemicist (maintaining the rich website Arcane 17) and the weird surrealist gnostic publicist Paul Sanda.

This reborn surrealist occultism (which is more obviously firmly rooted in traditional surrealism for its french exponents than for, i e the english-language contemporary surrealist satanists like ORB editions in Wales and the Tenebraeology) is an important reminder of the width of the sources and practices of the surrealist perspective. Especially since the emphasis and priorities applied on this webpage are often taking a very much other direction, it can be interesting to consider the extent to which the experimentation and concerns for poetic phenomenology retain a shared core throughout different routes in the surrealist project.

And as I don't have too detailed information of the direction of the Supérieur inconnu collective, I am utilising this as a way to reach back to the discussion in the Stockholm surrealist group, where there are different persons defending (at times or consistently) skepticist-rationalist views, rigid-scientofilic views, subjective-sensible views, rigid-marxist views, cynic-ultraradical views, pragmatical-philosophical views, and metaphysical-largesyntheses views - leading to some harsh discussions but still without problems to agree about fundamentals including the need for dismissal of faith, for explicit epistemology, tireless experimentation, devotion to the unknown, methodological concerns, poetic sensibility, in a insistently collective, ludic, critical, subversive, creative context; which is surrealism (insisting on the continuous relevance of the concerns and maintained activities of historical surrealism, rather than any arbitrary modernisation of it into some individual-eclectic art label or faith).

(Disclaimer: Several other surrealists have died this year. The only departure which we perceived as a personal blow was that of our old friend, pioneer surrealist organiser in the US, Franklin Rosemont. But there was also Jean-Marc Debenedetti, Anne Èthuin, Pierre Peuchmaurd, Boguslaw Swacz, Blanca Varela... The fact that we mention Alexandrian's passing is due to subject matters and should not be taken as a sign that we perceive others as less important; we do not have a news blog, and even if we had one we would be reluctant to indulge in the necrophilia of accumulating obituaries.)

Criticisms of "Experiment and failure"

So, the "Experimentation and failure" text brought in a few serious criticisms of specific points.

NN found it dangerously scientistic on a couple of points. The one most interesting to discuss would be the seemingly reifying character of its actually very tentative attempt to define poetic criteria, and the sense of selfcontradiction necessarily discernible in invoking "irreducibility" as a technical criterion and as a resource. The poetic experience, in its constitutive irreducibility, will always try to escape its determinations somehow, and appear as wondrously attaining a new level of coherence, knowledge and pleasure or not, which we might try to describe in different ways with psychological, epistemological, aesthetical or spiritual vocabularies each with their respective ballast of implied value systems of petty personal rewards and usefulness. Perhaps the objectively meaning-generating quality as well as the imaginational promise and practical uselessness of the experience makes the term reenchantment the most accurate.

Nevertheless, the surrealist viewpoint as implimented here will insist on the need to apply discipline, criteria and evaluation, in contrast to whimsy-eclectic-subjective arbitrariness of typical artistic individualism or of private spirituality, and in this respect agreeing with - but emphatically separate from - the chauvinistic-traditionalist applications of such criteria in actual spiritual disciplines as well as in the classicist-conservative-escapist system of aesthetics. In the light of surrealism, it is necessary to indulge collectively and ludically in carefree but laborous experimentation proving that poetry is immanent, readily attainable, unpredictable, not deserving a modest-pacifying type of respect, but actually a weapon of emancipation, revenge, illumination and subversion on all levels, AND that the outcome is not attained automatically nor free to consumistically enjoy nor voluntarily label according to moods, whims or skill of rhetorics, but actually can - and especially regarding the more elaborate collective projects preferrably should - be evaluated from the viewpoint of poetic efficiency, methodology, epistemology, strategy; further dynamics.

Then, the text was criticised by JE for resting on the old image of the lone researcher designating experiments and acquiring personally the knowledge as their end result. This is a very relevant critique. Regardless of whether experiments are designed by single scientists or large groups of scientists (which is different in different branches of science), it can certainly be well argued that the outcome of the scientific process, which is supposed to be knowledge, is not necessarily something residing in the scientists' heads (the entire team or the group leader or the coordinator of groups) and then communicated to colleagues and public. Knowledge might indeed be more accurately be decribed as an objective phenomenon which takes shape among the scientific community as it incorporates and acts upon results of one investigation. The image of knowledge as residing in someone's head may be nothing more than a worn but compelling metaphor which we stick to from the mere force of habit of philosophical education.

In fact, I see no need to stick to a particular ontology of knowledge, and indeed a view of knowledge as an external body which we might find temporarily and partially residing in a tree or a stone, in a particular constellation of people or in any haphazard collective engaging in a particular activity rather than in a particular head, but primarily somewhere inbetween; something which we might contribute to and play with, and which we may be possessed by rather than possess; seems to be a more dynamic and less individualist-humanist view which is probably more useful to surrealism?

Some, and several others before when facing similar texts, have noted that it is potentially misleading to employ the word science in a restricted and somewhat ideal sense of scientific method, which is the core of science in its consitution as science and therefore the core of the meaning of the word. This is a sense of logical realism. It does not imply that, nor have the ambition to make it appear as, all the activities of scientists would be scientific, the ideological institution called science would be privilegedly scientific, etc - in fact quite the opposite, since it is only the recognition of a semantic core of the word science that makes it possible 1) to analytically distinguish between scientific and unscientific attitudes, deeds and claims among or around scientists, 2) to see what is scientific outside the sphere of the institutions of western science, and 3) to recognise that the sum of the social interactions making up the institution of science in the widest sense contains tension, tactical alliances and potentially violent contradictions between the scientific and its opposites, and 4) to see the tendency for this attitude to be unable to be practically manifested in a pure form detached from other ambitions and contradictions, instead being one of several intermingled expressions of, as well as engines fuelling and guiding, human ambitions and behaviors in playing out various social conflicts, utopian longings and pointless games.

MF

towards the solidification and relativisation of atopos theory

Erik Bohman & Mattias Forshage

(from forthcoming international surrealist journal Hydrolith)



Surrealists as urbanists

Nothing could fool us to think that the city is a familiar place. Urbanity is a system of the dynamism of cramping things together, and its most interesting parts will remain that which grows in its interspaces, buds off from its inner limbs, remains its difficultly charted characteristics. There are, of course, all-too-familiar patterns and all-too-obvious conscious motives, of those who want to control the others and those who just want to be left alone. But the unknown always remains a distinct possibility in urbanity's collaging of people, physical and mental environments and thus of social relations in general. And where the unknown emerges, there is always the potentiality of poetry.

Early surrealist investigations into urban flow led to the development of concepts such as objective chance. But most of the arsenal of methods, games and perspectives was never systematised into a particular theory. It was to a large extent up to the surrealists' prodigal children the situationists to cast it in pseudo-academic terms with the theory of the dérive and the theory of psychogeography. These were later recuperated into surrealism, and the surrealists' own investigations of urban environments were refuelled. In this new wave of exploration, additional new perspectives and concepts emerged.

One concept which gained some distribution in the previous decade was that of worthless places (atopoi or atoposes, literally meaning non-places - atopoi being the greek plural which the Leeds surrealist group insisted on, atoposes the ridicule-anglification first utilised by the Stockholm group who introduced the term). It was used in print first in the "Geografi" issue of Stora Saltet (1995). A brief summary of the subject by MF from the "Upphittat" (found objects) Stora Saltet was subsequently published in english in Manticore (as "The poetry of worthlessness"), in spanish in Salamandra and in czech in Analogon. Recently another piece, putting the concept to concrete work, was printed as "Explorations of absence" by the Leeds surrealists in Phosphor #1 (2008). (In the meantime we had found some Plato quote including the term, and not too distantly Roland Barthes had called love an atopos; only recently however it was pointed out to us that in greek it is the common word for something absurd in the mathematical-logical sense. There has also been some internal debate whether the concept was closely related to Foucault's idea of heterotopia, but its affiliations on a purely theoretical level is not of particular importance for a concept we now address as an analytical tool.)

Other surrealist groups pursued their geographical investigations in other directions. The Paris group maintained focus on objective chance and analogical geography in the "Géographie passionelle" issue of S.U.RR., the Madrid group together with individuals elsewhere developed the concept of "exteriority" for epiphanic experiences of sensory presence at certain border locations. Some of these groups were never particularly interested in, or impressed with, the concept of worthless places. This is of course conditioned by differences in direction and local traditions, but a certain role could also be assigned to differences in conspicuousness and function of the locally available such sites.

In this text, we would like to sketch some of these differences in conditions while restating the basic background of organising urban space, and restating, perhaps even forwarding, some principles and perspectives for surrealist investigations into urban geography.


Recognition of worthless places

The emergence of worthless places in urban environments depends on several conditions. Their recognition typically focuses on either of three approaches.

a) that of poetic phenomenology - keeping up the vigilance towards spots conveying a distinct feeling of being out of control and having a distinct diffuse potential (if such a seeming contradiction is excused), of having a hidden history, a hidden usage or a hidden future in the realm of collectivisation and realisation of desires. This is straightforward to apply, but not in a strictly intersubjective way.

b) that focusing on usage (in terms of sociology, ethnology or behavioral ecology) - tracing spots which are generally used in a non-regulated way for activities not at all intended by owners, city planners, entrepreneurs, architects - which people individually or collectively snatch and exploit for various needs. This is obviously the most difficult criterion to apply, since we have no particular interest in acknowledging thousands of semi-secluded spots where males sometimes urinate... we want perhaps to be able to distinguish between using the same spot for a wellbehaved rendezvous or consumption of drinks and entertainments offered on one hand, and on the other hand a non-regulated nothing-buying hangout... and we would possibly like to be able to somehow define non-usage, abandoning to spontaneous decay, as a special category of unintended usage...

c) that of economic history, which allows for the most rigorous definitions - recognising spots of non-productivity in economic terms in the middle of a generally high-productive city-planned area. Being a formal and not a qualitative distinction, this criterion has the advantage of pointing out unexpected and inconspicuous places. On the other hand, it will also cover phenomena which don't interest us in themselves. Still, the determination will then sometimes require vast knowledge in local history and economy, and in practice, even with this criterion, the most obvious instances are diagnostically spotted via one or several of the following:

1. poetic suggestions in accordance with the first approach above,

2. artifacts giving a clear indication of popular usage: such as displaced chairs and sofas, toys, abandoned clothes, notes and drawings, porn magazines, condoms, bottles and beercans, abundance of cigarette butts or garbage in general, etc,

3. an abundant flora of fast-growing, easy-dispersing, more or less globalised, ruderal plants, indicating that no one manages or tidies the spot.

It should be remembered that within surrealism, such a concept with a rigorous definition, is a mere tool for poetic investigation and not something interesting in itself. The gap towards academic cultural geography is still wide. The point here is not refining the concepts, comparing it with other concepts, and debating its merits and failures, the real question is to what extent it actually sharpens our vigilance for the active contradictions and poetic possibilities in the urban environment.

There is a certain correlation between the explanatory power of a concept and how discriminately it is applied. Therefore we here stress certain objective characteristics of atopoi, insisting that the concept will not be obviously applicable to the same extent on a global scale, and that local factors will make it more or less interesting.


Value production in urban settings
- In the lapses of accumulation

The decisive regularities conditioning the distribution of sites of value in the capitalist city give us a methodological starting point from which we can approach the question of the spatial distribution of worthlessness. Here the object is not one of exploration, for which such a method would prove all too general and lacking in inspiration. Rather, it lets us avoid a couple of not-so-productive interpretations of atopoi and their relationship to the capitalist city, culture or whatever might strike the fancy of anyone prone to thinking in abstracts and unmediated totalities. We are prepared to posit the existence of a certain break between the patterns of distribution (or production by chance) sketched herein and the unlikely but constantly reoccurring product. This break is not to be understood along the lines of those pairs of opposites that pretend to say something very profound while hiding difference, particularity or reserving room for them squarely on one side of the opposition. The critique of civilization that proceeds from the a priori positioning of "culture" and "nature" teaches us nothing and substitutes experience with moralist still-lifes. Not in opposites but in living contradiction do we hope to find those sparks of wonder that illuminate the fragility of the present order of things.

The capitalist city is by and large determined by the processes of accumulation and the contradictions inherent in these processes. These imply a tendency towards general urbanisation while effecting local processes of de- and re-urbanisation and a (more or less) dynamic redistribution of people and sites of value according to the needs and limits of accumulation. The ability of capital to impose an urban dynamic governed by its voracious appetite for surplus value is checked by the continual struggle waged in a variety of forms between those who are its agents and those who suffer its consequences. The immense number of contradictions arising from the conditions of the modern city are breeding grounds of the marvellous.

The capitalist city is a structure made out of a number of heterogenous elements. Its development is not a one way street, neither does it develop in a smooth frictionless manner. The tendencies and countertendencies that give rise and direction to the deployment of urban spaces can only result in an uneven development. Just as the global economy simultaneously accumulate massive material wealth and an even more glaring (spiritual, material) poverty, so does the city.

The atopos might be defined negatively as a place that doesn't lend itself to a) production of commodities, b) circulation of commodities, c) reproduction of labour power or d) the reproduction of those apparatuses necessary to secure the conditions of accumulation on the level of society (police, state initiatives, etc). A purely negative definition this far - as a place devoid of value, a lapse in the circuits of accumulation. Such a definition stops short of the aims of surrealist investigation and leaves the place itself a blank, since the same concepts that lets us grasp the patterns of distribution have nothing or very little to say about it. We can go one step further: the definition will rather give us hints as to where and under what conditions one can expect the emergence of atopoi.

The creative destruction through which city development unfolds have an almost inevitable tendency to produce temporal lapses just at those places where economic growth is most apparent, such as in the process of gentrification.

Typically in a modern city there will be a dynamism of worthless places which can be decribed in foucauldian-autonomous terms: on the one hand gentrification and various urban development schemes; the infinite struggles to increase profit, utilising any old and new means of disciplining, exclusion and appropriation; on the other hand popular usage, countering and competing with gentrification by way of various non-regulated non-commercial useless usages. This should preferrably be studied empirically, but it can be assumed that there are always struggles occurring. Places will fall out of order and be reintegrated at a certain pace, which will be different in different cities and different parts of the cities at different times. Acknowledging worthless places a little too publicly will usually lead to their reintegration (if not for direct exploitation then for the ideological exploitation resulting from open recognition of their eventual picturesque qualities). Few largescale triumphs for the popular side are possible within the given socioeconomic order (and will probably often count as steps in a social revolution), but the struggle is perpetual and will produce a variety, at any given moment, of worthless places for leisure and play, indicating the impossibility of total control, inspiring surrealist usage of urbanity and the dreaming of yet unknown senses of urban life.

We recommend some of our enthusiastic friends of the ultraradical variety some caution: city planning cannot be monolithic and is usually not pursuing a hidden agenda. City planning is the chaotic outcome, suboptimal from all viewpoints, of compromises between various concerns and interests; fulfilling a function that is - among other things - disciplinary on the whole largely because this is the involuntary sum of the competetive commercial, political and popular interests. A lot will be about facilitating work and work transports, and offering occasions for entertainment and isolation, based on the joint interests of the capitalists of reproducing labor power and of the people of having at least some fun and getting left in peace to at least some extent. There are always conflicts of usage but also conflicts of planning, and thus small and large spots which fail to conform to intentions or where intentions fail to resolve themselves - the city is a dynamic arena and this has always been obvious to its surrealist users. There are not so few good intentions in some of the political planning, which is then always implemented in a coopted and coopting way but which may simultaneously allow for independent popular possibilities. In fact, various philanthropic and social-liberal ambitions are at least as historically important in city planning as the all-too-often cited examples of purely repressive concerns. Hausmann's avenues and the metaphor of Bentham's Panopticon should at least be accompanied by the various utopian-socialist, early-ecologist, radical-egalitarian, mystic-esoteric etc traces. Sometimes these could challenge the limitations of philanthropic liberalism when taken literally.


Parameters of worthless places

Several types of conditions govern first the emergence and maintenance and second the recognition of worthless places in different parts of the world. Both are very dependent on 1) the general degree of urbanity, 2) the general level of order and orderliness, 3) current local land prices and other market particulars and exploitation conditions.

The general degree of urbanity conditions the availability of worthless places. The denser and more heterogenous the population, and the larger the overall accessability via sidewalks and public transport, the more opportunities for an atopos to emerge, and new social practices.

For example, many North American cities have such a lack of urban density that the concept often will appear to lack application there. Whenever a city is planned under no shortage of land, and driving a car is the normal way of moving in the city rather than walking or using public transport; there will be an abundance of interspaces between all things and no obvious contrast between useful and useless land. When such a concentration is lacking, the flow of messages and chance encounters central to surrealism's appreciation of urbanity, is often decreased to non-urban levels. That certain places are put to popular perverse/detourning usage when decaying under such circumstances too is obvious nevertheless, and proven for example by some of the places found and photographically documented by Eric Bragg in the northern California countryside, but they may perhaps not be best described with the term atopoi or best understood in the framework of urbanity.

Order and orderliness is a crucial factor, but primarily on the level of conditions for discovery of such places. In a city where city planning is partly chaotic, where land market is relatively anarchic, where a major segment of the population lives in poverty or outside conformist lifestyles, where cleaning, public order, construction and renovation tasks are slower or less ambitious, where general mentality is less orderly: worthless places will probably be more abundant but far less conspicuous. And as much of their surrealist function lies in their contrast action they will also often be less interesting.

Market particulars are also crucial for the abundance and the conspicuousness of worthless places. Growing populations of course promote higher land prices, but exploitation rate is also dependent on general income, living standards and the availability of resources for exploitation, and on particular characteristics of entrepeneurs and landlords (oligarchies, mafia, superstitions, political and transnational economical involvment etc). Where the economy and thus the physical shape of the city is more "dynamic"; the worthless places will be less stable, quicker to emerge (drop out of control) but also to disappear (become reintegrated).

This is even more important when it comes to cities in the southern hemisphere or where very large parts of the population is poor: the pressure on available space is great but the capacity to pay for it is low, putting market mechanisms out of use and accentuating social contradictions, and creating a situation where whole neighborhoods and sometimes even whole parts of countries can assume the characteristics of worthlessness. Or the contrast will be organised along other scales or parameters than that of surface area.

There is also the remarkable particulars of for example the great stalinist cities of East Europe, where a certain megalomanic totalitarian regime has been replaced by regimes with distinctly other primary mechanisms of disciplining and social control. These huge squares and avenues, which made ideologic sense and were practically used for propagandistic parades (and for good old hausmannian riot control), have now become senseless. And in the instances there is no capital available for new exploitation of them, they remain basically remain; vast, often ghostly, worthless.

The mapping of such differences will increase our understanding of the fundamental and local differences in possiblities connected with organising of space, (and might facilitate communication between surrealist activities in different places).


The surrealist perspective

Surrealist interventions both theoretical and practical in the area of urban investigations are parallelled by those of others. There are tendencies among academics (in cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, economic history, human ecology, etc etc), subacademics (postmodernists, the art world), activists (struggles for "new commons" and against commercial/policiary control, auto-reduction, squattings etc), subactivists (postsituationists, post-live-role-players) and common boyish adventurers ("urban exploring", parkour), which may be more or less identical in single approaches. The surrealist project might be characterised primarily by the concern for the poetic experience and its phenomenology AND the insistence that this poetry is not primarily subjective, "pure" or religious in nature but dynamic and immanent. On the other hand, surrealists insist on the significance of considering circumstances giving rise to poetic phenomena, to acknowledging several concerns (including the psychological, mythological, scientific, utopian, political, historical) and their mutual conditioning. In this case, if anyone need formulae easy to memorise, we could say we insist on the Empirical, Epistemological and Emancipatory concerns of surrealism.

It is necessary empirical in its focus on poetic experience, but also in letting this experience emerge more distinctly by giving the possibly relevant circumstances in a documentary or (as Breton liked to evoke from Freud) clinical way. This documentation and curiosity for paraphernalia will allow for many new connections and spontaneous criticisms as well as for letting anecdotes take part in larger patterns, unlike those accounts which immediately - spontaneously or laboriously - transforms concrete experience into intoxicated fairytales.

Surrealist perspective is fundamentally directed towards producing new knowledge, not seeking to merely confirm preconceived views. It adresses the unknown in a manner which trusts its productivity, and does not treat it religiously as if it was something fragile. Systematically, ludically and/or intuitively it raises new questions, devises new methods and introduces experimental alterations. It could not be satisfied by our own emotional responses themselves, savouring ambiances like the kick-seeking youth or the sensible dandy flaneur, or by quasitheoretical efforts making up names for phenomena without defining them by any other criteria than this emotional response, or the arbitrary applicability of abstract opposites (such as in the art sphere, the new age sphere, popular psychology, poor structuralism etc). It could also not be satisfied by the repetitive formulation of fundamental questions, as typical for postmodernism, conceptual art in general, and most of contemporary so-called political art, which claimes to critise things by merely thematising them, and repeating the very same questions over and over again. They stop short of ever devising a methodology for actually investigating the thing. This particular antimethodological stance of always formulating questions in an "eternal", unanswerable way is one of the many obvious strategies of pure obscurantism within those dominant sectors of art which are unable to adress the unknown in a more substantial, creative, actually exploratory way.

In fact, the atopos theory as naïvely conceived could be formulated in scientific terms as resting on the assumption that there is a negative correlation between the economic productivity and the poetic productivity of a place. And as this is empirically testable it is not just an assumption but a hypothesis, even if its rigorous testing is not among surrealism's first concerns. It does relate back to something fundamental within the concept of the poetic. However, we are not so sure that this hypothesis is very useful. Instead of that correlation we are inclined to suggest a tentative positive one: Poetic productivity will, on a statistical level, be postiively correlated with local steep gradients in economic productivity. Along these slopes come tumbling, and accumulating, not only various discarded objects (mostly all kinds of garbage but also antiquities and utilitarian objects detached from context) as well as perspecuted persons, plants and animals, and repressed behaviors, stories and contradictions. The friction in such movements will create sparks illuminating the atmosphere of possibilities concentrated at such sites.

Finally, the surrealist perspective is based within the demarcation line introduced in Marx's famous eleventh Feuerbach thesis, interpreting the world with the overall objective of transforming it. This is both in immediate terms, planting seeds of radicalising social exhange with such a place as a nexus, and communicating-challenging individual poetic experience with ludic means, and in the long term, as one area of investigation and intervention among many pointing towards future realisation of generalised poetry in radically changed and self-governed social circumstances.

premonition of a locomotive

Stockholm surrealist group: excerpts from email discussion

EB:
A propos of phantom objects, but not quite a game suggestion yet:
Benjamin borrowed a dear old marxist conflict between form and content, the one between means of production and conditions of production: technical advances do as far as they're able borrow available (social) forms, but will sooner or later end up in conflict with the latter and bring about a formal "revolution". The marxism of the second international placed, as we know, the conflict on the level of the mode of production, while Benjamin interested himself for how the conflict expressed itself on the level of technical innovation.
Benjamin: "When trying to learn them properly, errors and mistakes occurred. From another viewpoint these attempts are the most true proofs that technical production in its initial phase was a prisoner of the realm of dreaming. (During certain stages, not only architecture but also technology bears witness of a collective dream.)"
Marx: "To what extent the old form of the means of production initially dominates the new form, is shown/.../ perhaps most strikingly: the locomotive that was experimentally constructed, before the present locomotives appeared, a locomotive which had two feet that it alternately raised just like a horse"
Thus the horse haunts the locomotive, the canvas the camera, the wood the steel, etc.

MF:
The classical example of a phenomenon contrary to that horse locomotive is what Apollinaire back in his days defined as surrealism "when man set out to reproduce walking, she invented the wheel, which isn't similar to walking at all" (approximate quote). A game could aim at reinventing the wheel, and finding those old idle ghosts haunting us because we are surrealists? Or do we want to find a specific absence in the single objects? What functional-auratic-sentimental inherent object has been completely chased off out of the object at which I am pointing? Which is the unforeseeable wheel which will totally replace the obsolete ridiculousness I am here hugging?

CA:
So, the game would consist of establishing a contact with the exterior, slightly more on the exterior's condition than usually, in order to bring about a transformation instead of the habitual, and thus chasing off the ghosts/ the phantom object part?

NN:
Erik, Erik Homburger Erikson said in a freudian context (three Erik in the same sentence!): The faucet is not a phallos symbol, but the phallos is rather a faucet symbol, since the the faucet would never have been invented if it wasn't for primary experiences of needing to pee while asleep etc, experiences which have very little to do with the aims ascribed to the object. This makes the plausible problem solvings of everyday life into mere post-factum-rationalisations, or distortions of their latent content, which may not at all, or only to a very small extent, have something to do with the formal.
The horse memory of the locomotive ought perhaps to go further back than the horse, to some primary process primordial scenes?
Perhaps that is the explanation of the film manuscript I dreamt in November, "The memories of a locomotive"!

the out there

There is something going on there. Which we want to take part in. Something independent, ragingly chaotic still supremely ordered, something which simply does not await legitimation. With a combination of elusiveness, shapeshifting and omnipresence, it is indeed even difficult to adress it: many of us tries to escape those difficulties by choosing examples and talking about getting out "in the streets" or "in the forest", others talk about "nature" or "wilderness", some matter-of-factly of "outdoors" and recently some about "exteriority".

Due to illness I've spent a series of days indoors, just after I got in the mail two publications which I contributed to and which happened to coincide in time; one surrealist anthology about "the crisis of exteriority" (I don't know what this crisis is and I'm not sure what the editors (Eric Bragg, Eugenio Castro and Bruno Jacobs) mean by exteriority in the first place, my contribution was an old text about worthless places, serving as a background for their more advanced theories) and one literary journal with a "nature" theme (the editor (Jonas Ellerström) even cited my initial whining about the vagueness and problematical character of the theme, and while agreeing with my concerns, he refrained from sharing them by suggesting it to be consciously a vague catchphrase roughly corresponding to the more concrete category of "outdoors").

(Quick note: What is nature? Nature obviously means at least three related but different things; 1) nature as the "ways of the universe", the allencompassing fundamental patterns, 2) nature as the given "raw world" as opposed to culture, both outside and inside ourselves, which works in accordance with a spontaneous order, and 3) nature as the natural environments and biological systems inhabiting it, imagined independent from the human sphere but attractive for us to visit. In different languages, "nature" and its equivalents may be more strongly associated with one or the other, but the ambiguity is usually there, and the sinister gliding between descriptive and normative meanings of the "natural". Ah, I remember, and I can't decide if proudly or ashamedly, how the Stockholm surrealist group tried to hold a taped "round-table-discussion" about "nature" ten years ago and I pretty much obstructed the discussion by demanding to know what the others were talking about.)

The problem is that it is really not a problem. Dualisms may be spontaneous figures of human reason, but the point with them is to get a quick overview of the field in order to proceed to understand the constellation of transgressions and mutuality. All those dualisms of inner-outer, self-others, subjective-objective, culture-nature, artificial-ecological, civilisation-wilderness, have some basic phenomenological reality and are acceptable as provisional tools. The history of western thinking has seen the development of arguments of the impossibility of holding on to them in some stricter sense; in biology, psychoanalysis, marxism, structuralism, dialectics, etc etc; and it seems like those holding on them as basic division at any price are openly reactionary efforts like fascism and some unsophisticated applications of formal logics, or regressive such as unsophisticated applications of philosophical phenomenology or structuralism. So let's just repeat: the domain of the self is not homogenous-unitarian, not sharply delineated from other beings or the external environment, and the human sphere cannot be separated from the rest of the world, indeed human culture (just like other species' cultures) is indeed in a fundamental sense but one mere aspect of our biology, one which has in turn reshaped the planet in our small- and largescale interactions. Both the others and nature are certainly not just out there but in here just as much, and nothing out there has remained untouched.

There are two small points I have to make as a biologist, that the concepts of wilderness and ecological balance are highly dubious empirically and rather corresponds to certain people's projectional fantasies.

That virgin aspect of nature is fantasised by all kinds of primitivists, be they of pacifist or aggressive leanings. Often this is based on mere ignorance, on having no idea to what extent human land use has shaped and differentiated the natural habitats of the world for centuries. It's probably only in recent times that human impact has become, facilitated by technical deveopment but even more necessitated by demands of the economical system, largescale homogenizing enough to be severely detrimental for biological diversity. Most open lands were indeed created by human husbandry (except in very dry or very cold climates) and most natural-looking forests are shaped by some level of human harvesting of wood, animal forage, game, and other resources. The few places that could be regarded as entirely "wild", the few most inaccessible forests, the glacial landscapes, large parts of the deserts, the thundra and the oceans, are part in global circulation and therefore in complex interactions with human outtake, reshaping and littering elsewhere (littering both in terms of spreading both major junk and small civilisation souvernirs, pollution and overnourishment in general). The "wilderness" hailed in the typically american brand of primitivism (which is very significant for some of the religious and utopian movements populating north america in earlier centuries, as well as for certain ecologists and even some of the surrealists in modern times) has indeed been demonstrated to fulfill the function of an ideological construct denying the extent to which the "virginal" north american landscape was indeed shaped by the land use of the native peoples. In fact, much of nature conservation in north america is still only about keeping people out, resting on the same fundamental misanthropy idealising fantasies of a "natural way" in the absence of humans, which is one of the reasons this particular american primitivism is often characterised as "ecofascism". (Let's just be clear here: misanthropy in itself is not necessarily fascist at all, though most of its political implementations are.)

And then for the harmony of "ecological balance", putting in quasiscientific terms this fantasy of the soundness of the state of things in the absence of man. Any stability in nature is in fact a dynamical equilibrium of competing forces; what we see is there because it is the contemporary constellation of each population's "evolutionary stable strategies" visavis each other and other parts of their environment. It will occasionally go off in dynamic developments, sometimes triggered by human involvment and sometimes other factors. Not too often though, if it was highly unstable it simply wouldn't be there for us to see; but as biological systems it cannot be static. Such a sense of dynamic aposteriori order is probably one of the few useful concepts of order anyway. What would it be else? Entropy of course, the only conceivable universal order, when everything moves out of reach for everything else so that nothing should ever happen anymore... But then, on a fundamental level, biological life is specifically a uniquely powerful system of combatting entropy, both on the smallest scale (sorting substances by means of metabolism) and on the largest scales (reshaping the global environments by means of actions of populations, and thereby creating history). And then there is the neurotic sense of order; the denial of everything but the few things in control.

And here, as it lies at heart of the concept of nature, we shouldn't consider ourselves too good to repeating the analogies between the mental and geographical aspects here; the sheltering obsession is similar in so-called rational thinking and in housing. Proclaim a little space reserved for the well-known and controllable; in one area "sound reason" or closed rationalism, in the other indoors or home. Sheltering a fraction of space is not just the political and moral fall of grace that Rousseau was talking about, it also creates a uniquely predictable environment. The space is filled with familiar objects only, with familiar people only or with no other people at all, temperature, light, humidity, any exchange between in and out is regulated, everything regarded as "nature" is kept out.

This creates the sphere of outdoors as something to project desires on simply because it obeys the normal workings of reality: it is where the wind blows, where other species live, where strangers go, and where unexpected encounters occur; the domain of freedom. And at some points we will need to distinguish between the often maddeningly banal, repetitive and petty concerns structuring the larger parts of our social structures and the inspiringly banal, repetitive and petty concerns which seem to dictate the lifes of other lifeforms and their interactions, and which indeed seems to speak directly to us when we visit so-called natural environments. In both types of environments, the point is to make oneself available to the flow of regularities and irregularities which has things to teach us, challenge us and bathe us in the concrete sensory perceptions of all that which is images of freedom and reality - Which is perhaps, perhaps, another appearance form of the same domain of flow that opens up from a point which phenomenologically seems to reside within us whenever we open up ourselves to poetry, through automatism, alchemical labor, falling in love, disorder in the senses, aggressive inspiration, seances and rituals, or whatever. Is it?

MF
(to be continued)
(among other things by a serious attempt to grasp the concept of exteriority of the exteriority surrealists)

Who are the theorists?

and what is surrealist theory?

Surrealist theory is basically a systematical investigation on the discoursive level of various phenomena focusing on what is revealed through a radical poetical perspective. Sometimes it takes the shape of an explicit historical-theoretical investigation of the role played by a certain phenomenon in surrealism's artistic creations, history, organising and collective mythology, but it must be noted that any simple gathering and comparison of such historical information is a mere academic and reifying task as long as it not clearly a prerequisite for an actual investigation of what the radical poetical perspective might reveal.

In surrealism, textual or artistic genres are not paid any respectful attention as such, and many of its products are indeed hybrids and juxtapositions in that respect, but a consequence of that respectlessness is also that the breaking of genre rules does not mean anything in itself. Surrealists simply pursue their poetic investigations in whatever forms it seems to require, and any larger exposition of surrealist works preferrably put things in different such genres side by side, not the least for the very pedagogic purpose of showing that surrealism keeps refusing any reduction to one means of expression: among such gravediggers, the ones who would like to regard it as mere art are in the majority, but occasionally someone likes to regard it as mere poems or mere politics or mere theory. (Nevertheless it was a sad and misdirected complaint campaign that, twenty years ago, demanded the opening of a surrealist bulletin of theoretical discussion for poems and drawings, and thus removed its raison d'etre and sent in an early grave - local specialisations are sometimes needed in order to get somewhere...)

Co-inventors of surrealist theory are, to start with, all of us who keep doing poetical research on the discoursive level aiming for some sense of clarity, from an explicitly surrealist perspective. Systematic thinking. Some have been doing it a lifetime, some do it for a short period. Some haven't written much at all, some have written much in other genres that tends to overshadow their actually theoretical contributions. Some take particular specialised contexts as pretexts for developing surrealist lines of thought: for example in art criticism, social anthropology, history of surrealism, etc. Others rather keep explicating the supposedly surrealist viewpoint, some keep telling anecdotes ascribing a particular epistemological weight to them, and some keep yelling at each other about the relative applicability within surrealism of various elements of situationist, feminist, marxist, structuralist, poststructuralist, occult or psychoanalytical thought, all of which may or may not be considered actual theoretical activity. On the borderline of the theorist trade we have also a lot of people who were foremostly artists and usually write down their theoretical speculations in explicit relation to their aims and methods in their own artistic work.

Then we have a whole bunch of commentators on surrealism who provided such fertile interpretations that their work - though formally secondary - actually takes the ideas further in one way or another. Often these works were published by people who were actually organised in the movement but still were writing books that were predominantly secondary in form.

Then there are the best critics of surrealism; whose criticisms were often very relevant, offered from theoretical viewpoint that could be considered at least partly objectively within surrealism, and which contributed to theoretical development within the movement at least somewhere.

Finally all of those who were more peripherally associated with the movement (in ways ranging from an intimate dialogue to an abstract influence) but whose investigations in particular areas has been recognised as at least partly perfectly surrealist. The names of some of these will be highly controversial with several of my friends... and the work of some does admittedly consist to a large part of academic or massmedial simplifications of received ideas, but might perhaps nevertheless be somehow interestingly effective in their particular formulations?

All of these partake in some way in the adventure into thinking which is one of the fronts of surrealism, and a necessary consequence of its empirical experimentations in creativity, sensibility, art and life. Again, the genre as such cannot be conceived as separate from other areas of surrealist methods and of surrealist life in general, but the difference is now huge between such specialisations which serve to crop down life, create edges for personality markets, or impose actually merely heuristic categorisations on the world in a rigid and hostile way on the one hand, and those which admit their temporary and conditional status, acknowledge other possibiities and connections with other perspectives, and which are motivated by methodological and/or passionate choices... In the second case, a theoretical perspective is a wonderful tool in conceptualising the marvels of the world.

(This text was at one point substantially longer, when I was giving lists of examples of each type of theorists, but then I realised it should be better to drop those parts, both since they threatened to distract my own concentration on the meaningful, and because I expected that if people would react to this text it would be primarily in order to complain why I had omitted, or included, this or that author or put him/her in the wrong category, which seemed beside the point.)

Soluble locus

What is this place called place

Some places are more places than others. But sometimes more is less. Places have tons of determinations. Global coordinate systems, positions assumed in our networks of associations and perceptions, its social productivity, biological productivity, monetary productivity; what it is used for, has been shaped by being used for, what it could possibly be used for if we want; what situated it in relation to surrounding topography, what created its soil layer, what plants and fungi colonised it when, what animals use it when and how, what are the optical and metereological conditions, who died there and who wrote a poem there and who tried to seduce whom there, and so on. This and other aspects difficultly measured will give them particular presences or absences, particular suggestivenesses and expectancies. I am not using the terms atmosphere or ambiance here, just because I sometimes suspect them to be just euphemisms for soul, which I might have said too, but which will often stand in the way of a real investigation of the factors actually involved.

Many intellectuals of conservative leanings tend to mythologise place hierarchically, primarily in terms of patria. Others, more liberal, tend to oligolectically associate places with more or less exotic anecdotes to fit a cosmopolitan image, involving either a globalisation nivellation, or good old tourist exotism, or both intermixed. But, it cannot be empasised enough, the biographical self is just one epistemological organ among others. An important one, providing much of the emotional reverbations, a good deal of the stories, a good deal of all the irrational associations and psychological overdeterminations. But real mythology, which might be described as acknowledging the ghosts we have intercourse with, presupposes availability more than anything, just like poetry, and thus all the biographical material is just a wagonload of suggestions, which might selectively be grabbed and put to use by the meaning in formation, or not. The notion of a patria is a strictly regressive one on the mythological and psychological levels, and of course one usually associated with reactionary political purposes. To see place as a setting for anecdotes is a slightly more dynamic position, but exotism and lack of exotism are equally powerful in potentially hiding specificity and particular possibilities from view. The more interesting a place is, the more it has qualities of terra incognita, something we may have rumors, dreams and prejudices about, but which primarily in itself encourages us to an active investigation of its possibilities. Consider the place a playground, yourself having gotten the task of inventing the game appropriate to it.

In the mid-90s the surrealist group in Stockholm focused much of its geographical investigations in the concept of worthless places (or atoposes), all the corners and borderzones falling between chairs, falling out of use, getting invaded by unintended usages. It could be emphasised that the criterion is largely an economic one and the setting more or less necessarily urban: only in cities is the population dense enough and the land prices high enough for any disused space to be so strongly singled out, to acquire the quality of a focus of resistance and dreaming. Other environments are organised in other ways.

Some other groups picked up the concept, particularly the Leeds group which had already from its beginnings a geographical focus parallelling ours (and preferring the probably more grammatically correct plural form atopoi). In later investigations other aspects have taken the lead, particularly in Madrid, developing concepts largely opaque to us (such as?), or in Eric Bragg's inexhaustible documentation of abandoned environments in northern California, or in Bruno Jacobs' concept of "poetic places", or in SLAG's "urban rockpooling" etc. The interface visavis popular "urban exploring" more or less based in live role playing games and situationist theory, is not yet specified. The many scattered surrealist experiments in natural, rural or suburban environments have been fruitful but perhaps not offered similar methodological conclusions.

In Stockholm we have also focused particularly on dream geography (recently at Kormorantrådet),
both the question of how space is constructed in the dream and how dreams affect our geographical orientation in general.

Together with a sense of nature geography which is perhaps more of my own personal interest, this was investigated in my novel Dreamgeography naturegeography . This sense of nature geography is about how our observations of animals, plants, stones, landforms and weathers are crucial in establishing our sense of space, our psychogeography. In this sense, it is obviously depending on the degree of selective attention and of background knowledge. But there is of course also a sense in twhich these aspects give places their position objectively.

Psychogeography was a slightly different concept when the lettrists developed it and later used it as situationists, focusing particularly on the ideological and counterideological manipulation of mental structures through city planning and experimental urban drifting, and we have, in parallel with an academic discipline which we don't know if it exists or not, deliberately generalised it into a phenomenology of space and strategies of orientation in general.

Birds, which like humans are obsessed with large-scale spatial orientation, rely mostly on visual gestalt but also seem to have a keen sense of magnetism facilitating navigation. The gestalt sense of humans is one the other hand exceedingly complex, usually resulting in quite conflicting signals which are finally resolved in a rational analysis. Here we are. We have no memory of how we might have ended up in this place where we feel we might be. Spatial recognition, if not a pastime among others, will start approaching that beautiful and profane description of mystical knowledge as the instantaneous recollection of the sum of associations to an object (where was it? Joseph Jablonski, "Surrealist implications of chance" 1976, I think). A good guess as to where one is includes all the motionless summer evenings there, all the puns and etymological speculations around its name, the taste of the soil, the ambiguous hopes of dawn, the noise of birds, the land use history, the public transport system leading there, the dream syntheses it will become part of. The notion of home does not make sense. The only adequate identification with place is an experimental and playful one, regardless of whether it lasts for just the duration of an instantaneous practical-joke-type kiss or a moment which lasts for centuries, turning us to stone, and whether we are ultimately capable of distinguishing between the two.

Mattias Forshage 3.iii