An exhibition held

We had an exhibition at a commercial gallery (Galleri Lili) in Stockholm throughout the month of April 2014. One of its main focuses was on intermediate forms, and we assembled a relatively large object section in order to investigate various aspects of intermediate objects. The exhibition space was also utilised for a small series of experiments and performances contributing to this investigation.

NN

NYMPH IMAGO- an exhibition about intermediate forms, unknown animals and the crystalised flutter of transformation itself.

As a homage to the revolutionary nature of imagination, the Surrealist Group in Stockholm with friends, issues an invitation to a spring exhibition, a collective attempt to make do with the petrified spirit of the times and conjure forth all the dimensions of reality, to temporary occupy space in order to smuggle down seeds of life between the high-rise buildings.

During three weeks we fill the exhibition space with objects and events which will remain in their moments of transformation: text, image and invisible sea-stars, fossilised nerve signals along the walls and a throng of enigmatic life forms moving in the periphery of the field of vision.

Take a pause from your rusty telephone, drag your body through the payment zones of the city, and help us finding out what it is that moves just behind the set.

Who or what is it that speaks through our mouth, sleeps in our beds, creates in our place? Mythological creatures, socioeconomical contingencies, schizoid partial personaliites, lightnings from the future? What are the prehistorical animals moving between the trembling membranes of the brain?

Through games and speculation you are invited to join forces with the exhibitors and reconstruct, imagine or reveal who was made what and who has made whom, or just to become uncertain about it all at last.

The Stockholm surrealist group and friends

JA

(Coordinators Niklas Nenzén & Lars Rosenström. Original setup of exhibition included John Andersson, Linnea Bergman, Erik Bohman, Christofer Dahlby, Kim Fagerstam, Mattias Forshage, Riyota Kasamatsu, CM Lundberg, Emma Lundenmark, Giuliano Medici, Niklas Nenzén, Lars Rosenström, Hugo Röjgård, Emil Särelind, Ika Österblad. Later participation also by others.)

Your City, part 1

- the technical aspects

Psychogeography consists of drifting-exploring and mythologisation-reenchantment, and if you will of detailed empirical studies. Mythologising your city is a basic poetic task and a task which is usually carried on spontaneously anyway, but emphatically the surrealist tradition holds a few emphases and distinctions which makes its view particular.
    Spontaneous mythologisation has two parts: One is the acknowledgment of historical charging: places of anecdotes about one's predecessors. The other is the rememberance of autobiographical charging: places of anecdotes about oneself.
    These are used by everybody, but there is a huge difference as to how selectively and sensibly they are used.
    A third mechanism, also in general use, but more sensible in its essence, is the exerting of geographical sensibleness itself: recognising places where it feels like something is going to happen, something weird or fantastic or horrible or just unknown, or might be happening if you're only looking the other way, or might have happened and is bristling with eagerness to tell about it.
    But first, let's go back to historical charging. Historical charging is dependent on documentation, and on population size, and on accumulation of madmen, intellectuals, revolutionaries, artists, philosophers etc. The general pattern (with abundant exceptions) would be that small cities often have very little of it, metropolises often have an overabundance, which may even be overwhelming and/or numbing. It is also a matter of the length of the history record itself; so that European cities have more than American cities, south European cities more than north European cities, etc. Length of documented history often goes hand in hand with age of physical artifactual elements too, and as everybody knows, as a rule of thumb old architecture more easily speaks to us than younger, and crude old city planning allows for more excitement than modern city planning. Of course, in some places this means that an "old town", a historical city center with remaining old buildings and street plan, will seem like a thick pastry with immediate atmosphere, layers of anecdotes, and often enough more like a museum than a real environment. This is the trivial level of historical charging.
    Autobiographical charging and sensibility are far less varying than historical charging between sites in terms of absolute conditions; it is of course more a question of where one has been hanging around to make some interesting experiences (of course, very often there is a sharp difference between where one spends most time and where one gets the more interesting experiences).
    Concerning both, from the surrealist viewpoint, selectivity and sensibility are crucial terms. There is no point in becoming a tourist guide. The importance of a thorough historical-geographical investigation is not in listing all the places where something as occurred as items on a list or fetishes, but making them available as suggestions of sites to look for atmospheres and connections. It is not a question of recognising places where things have happened because of the things that have happened there, only because of what objective potential of the place those anecdotes are revealing, what still unrealised parts they suggest, what local charging and what contrast to utilistic use and to surrounding areas it has. What manifest atmosphere of potentiality a place has, as revealed by its anecdotes. Thus it is about the actual spirit of the actual places. Selectivity is not primarily up to your own opinions.
    But, it must be emphasised, it is also a part of your own assuming a prehistory, placing yourself in a tradition. When you actively do that, the places that your precursors have rummaged become an integrated part of your own psychogeographical landscape. In smaller cities, there might be just one or two examples of local poets, revolutionary sects, imaginative criminals and old wizards to build on. There it seems important to investigate every such instance of odd/nonconform usage of the place and its sense of place. In larger cities, there is often the experience of an old surrealist group and perhaps some other objectively affiliated movement to assimilate, various old insurrections, romanticists, symbolists, occultists, alchemists, utopists, etc etc. There is easily lore available for a full "alternative" version of the official history. On top of this, many people with quasireligious and/or unrestrainedly nerdy interests readily allow themselves to get trapped in amazement at the simple fact that freemasonry, occultism, utopianism, various brands of christian, jewish and islamic mysticism all have played a major part in the imaginary structures of those intellectuals or rich guys who have thought out the city planning. In order not to get overwhelmed, it is important to choose particular threads that attach to the associative tentacles of one's own projects, enquiries and sensibilities. This quantitative overload then is a major problem in Paris and Prague, a bit of a problem in London and Berlin, hardly a problem in Stockholm and New York, not at all a problem in Helsinki and Leeds.
    But then there is the third aspect mentioned, that of geographical sensibility, which is the more important. Beyond the spontaneous occasional recognition of this, surrealists have developed methods of actively investigating this and also of experimentally invoking it. This is the strategy of surrealist walking, and of various games involving spatial movement. This is a vast field and a series of essays in itself.

Modes of the possible

(Excerpts from a rather intense email discussion about performance art and some of its implications last autumn, based in an example which we have considered less interesting than the general observations and lines of thought and therefore omitted here, along with a lot of the more peripheral or personally combative points.)

JB:
It is a persistent, goal-oriented effort to solve a puzzle, with which they may not have high hopes of succeeding, only the passion to find new methods of approaching it./.../ The question of body and spirit never finds an answer, but after a passionate and honest attempt at gaining insight, or some kind of result, intuitively, one is once again left at the agnostic point of departure. But if that point would be philosophically or scientifically unsatisfactory, which is also the case regarding "serious" paranormal research, it is not meaningless at all. This is because the answer is found in the work itself: the devotion, the obsession and also the playfulness they possess is in itself a unity of body and spirit, and if performance art is to have a purpose or definition, the process of employing the body in the service of the spirit should be it – in my opinion.
    /.../
    If you take an interest in what music is, you will soon discover that the most important basic qualities are common to all artistic types of expression. I never tire of explaining that my basic view of music is based on music sociologist Christopher Small’s model: music is a social ritual with utopian contents, that is, where people get together to act out an ideal society within spatial and temporal limitations, by the initiation of an intricate network of relations between people, objects and ideas. Where sound structures are only a small, but indispensable component. To varying degrees, it is always about celebrating, confirming and exploring these relations. Small mentions this in passing, but viewing it in this way, as a current, present and time-based activity, makes it possible, from a human perspective, to readily apply this model to all artistic experience. The centre of the activity is what anthropologists call ritual. You could call it »the aesthetic dimension« (to borrow Kant’s expression via Herbert Marcuse, who wrote an excellent book with this title). Art is an other-worldly, or magical, experience of transcending our everyday lives. Anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr has called it a faint remnant of the magic of archaic peoples. But the faintness may indeed vary. For someone like Cecil Taylor, the quality of trance is emphasized in his playing. The connection is exemplified by a comment by an American Indian shaman, after seeing Taylor in concert: »I thought this was secret«; according to Taylor this was the best review he had ever received.

NN:
(...) what you (JB) mean by (...) the idea of virtuality of art. Meaning is achieved when the body is put into the service of the mind in meaningless work that conveys hope. That sounds like existentialism. One has to imagine the performance artist as Sisyphos, that is as being happy, talking with Camus.

MF:
I was reminded by the corporality as a key to performance art. It really is among the most pleasurable aspects (but far more for the performer than for the audience...) that it is hard physical labour of no use. Of course utility can be defined in different ways and one may choose to get stuck in paradoxes. But this is work that is productive and lacks exchange value and lacks a use value according to all conventional criteria of utility. And if one manages to create an atmosphere that allows this ritual potential to start getting realised on a collective basis, which I believe is the core of the model that you (JB) describe as Christopher Small's, then also the audience is pulled into this physical dimension. (On the other hand, the often strong sensation of boredom, sleepiness, spontaneous tickling in the feet, aching butt, or for that matter pain and feeling overrun or pinned down from very high sound volumes, I would rather regard as alienating than utopian physical exchange...) Is this the labor of the body in the service of the spirit? It could also be the other way around. The body is pulling the leg of the spirit. And in the confusion arising in that relationship, yes, the spirit can be realised, and unexpected modes of unity and play and jerky fusions may occur, yes. That is what constitutes its mystique, if you will. You are right there. I do not think NN is right in the interpretation that this is existentialism, because the hope of existentialism consists with a necessary voluntarism in the the very choice of ascribing hope, not in the real hope that may be glimpsed in the type of the work and the type of confusion chosen.
    Nevertheless I think your (JB) explanation of this carries a lot further than the specific expression you are discussing does. This expression seems to be far more nivellating, experimentally placing all imaginable human activities side by side and arbitrarily focusing on one to the point of the absurd but without ascribing it any particular potential. I am sure this is what you describe as play in the context, but play in itself is not nivellating in this postmodern sense, because for play the possibility chosen has an aura and a dynamics from overdetermination by desire, and it is specifically not at all exchangable with anything else.
    Where I want to go is just to once more, as in several discussions, emphasise the distinction between on the one hand a logical potentiality, the very idea that anything is possible, and a manifest possibility, which is the exciting real concrete psychophysical sensation that unexpectedly much is actually possible and it is enticing because it is only that which puts us into contact with the unknown, which is the core of poetry, and which is among the cornerstone of experiencing art and of creating art.
    Earlier I used to criticise CA for getting triggered by what I perceived as merely logical potentiality. He successfully rebuked me and, the way I remember it, emphasised that the logic of desire will make the selection anyway or will step into the activity as a meaning-creating dimension once an activity is chosen. This is quite correct, but also far from dead safe, there are many counterexamples, when instead the path of least resistance, conformism, and/or simple cynicism gets the last word.
    While I kept believing that there was a continuous interplay between logical and manifest potentiality, at least that the moments of the truth of art where in the leap when quantitative (logical) potentiality changed into qualitative (manifest) potentiality. This all sounds fine. But maybe it sounds fine because a hegelian explanation always sounds better than an analytical one. In practice this connection between the two meanings may be almost inexistant: since any genuine artistic activity is based in manifest potentiality, while many artists when they are interviewed or interrogated and expected to explain how their art works often grasp at logical potentiality as a mode of rhetoric and a legitimation; sometimes they will be true to their words and actually make art that expresses the unwillingness to distinguish between good and bad ideas, between hunches worthy of following and those that aren't, between the imaginative and the banal, between the exciting and the deadly boring – but on the other hand there are also those who in spite of these unexciting modes of explanation continues exerting a visionary sensibility in their praxis. That's the way it works. Art.

CA:
I would like to add one or more types of possibility to those listed by MF, and the one which is most important to me is the ontological one.
    If logical possibility is purely speculative and exists by power of the structure of logic, as an additive combinatory extension of a specific emerged pattern, I understand the manigest potentiality of which MF speaks as the experience or epiphany that possibilities are present in a particular moment.
    Now I will refer to these as logical and phenomenological possibility respectively.
    Ontological possibility I would like to see from an objectively rationalist perspective, as referring to a specific geography of possibility unevenly distributed in a dynamically evolving and causally coherent world. The fact that the world is causally coherent leads us to end up in the same question as the rationalists did: Do possibilities not exist at all (strict determinism in Spinoza's style) or does possibilities imply diverging worlds whose different globally coherent principles of selection exclude possibilities within themselves (Leibniz), as well as the question whether determinism can be combined with clinamen or any type of unstable chaotic core.
    What I here refer to as phenomenological possibility does not need to consider these questions. What I here refer to as ontological possibility is not dependent on whether the world is strictly deterministic or not, but instead on whether there are, for the individual human being in a particular moment, several alternatives and a selection is made (regardless of whether the selection couldn't have been made differently based on the dynamical coherence of the world (not of logic)). In this case, this presents itself in the phenomenological sense, but I would like to separate the presentation of this "ontological possibility" from a certain phenomenological singularity which may accompany the perception of the field of possibilities, as an indication of unfolding possibilities or as a receipt that one indeed stands before possibilities.

phenomenological possibility (the appearance of possibility 1)
There might be different singularities for, i e the hunch that there is a dog buried somewhere, that there is more to learn about something, that there is suddenly a wealth of newly acquired alternatives, or a weird object presenting evidence that the world wasn't created the way we thought. I want to distinguish these qualities of the experience from those appearances which are simultaneous with its actualisation, because if one sees a diffuse situation that indulges oneself in an interpretative delirium, then the associated quality of manifest possibility might still occur isolated, for example by elaborating by means of brainwork, without the brain simultaneously pondering a diffuse situation. The singularity, or singularities, I talk about here would be like the sense of possibility, as it presents itself, semi-attached to an actual set of possibilities.

ontological possibiltiy (the appearance of possibility 2)
I would define this as the disenveloping/evolving of a dynamic selective process, such as an interpretative delirium, a selection among alternatives of action or interpretation suggesting themselves and criteria for selection suggesting themselves, speculative fantasies about what one self, organisations, objects or subjects would be able to suggest when their different sides and qualities are combined. This ontological possibility is independent of the question of ontological determinism, and independent of whether the disenvelopment is put to music by the "feeling of possibility" (it could occur unconsciously).
    Thus, I see ontological possibility as an objective operation of the spirit in combination with the workings of other elements (the world) in it.

The virtual

The concept of the virtual has been used in different ways throughout the history of ideas. Most commonly it is synonymous with either the eidetic (the idea), the possible, or the latent. /.../ So is the possible synonymous with the latent? This is a trickier question, but I would like to say no. Both are there and are ontologically real, but the concept of the latent I think should be restricted to something which acts objectively but takes another expression or only is expressed under certain circumstances. /.../ For minds we could say that there are latent tendencies (those that work even when they are not manifested), virtual tendencies (that may be latent or manifest in different situations depending on the actual constitution of the mind or the world), and virtual possibilities (reconfigurations of the virtual constitution of the mind, depending on the totality of the world and thereby not empty logical possibility).
    The separation between the two last mentioned categories perhaps rests on the idea of the statistically probable. Or, on the idea of clinamen. For me, it rests on the idea of time as duration. /.../ This perspective corresponds with the idea of a chaotic core or a clinamen, but retains the idea of a determined virtuality. Time is brought in as a transformatory force, but in contrast to ideas of generative negativity this is about a positive generative field of possibilities actualised in the present and having a virtual structure, including the radically new without being undetermined.
    What I would like to do is putting definitions into discussion to distinguish the virtual from on the one hand the possible and on the other hand the latent. I would also like to distinguish that synthesis of duration form the experience of facing a field of possibilities. This latter distinction is mainly theoretical, but seems important to note. The syntheses of duration continue also when they are not being acknowledged as striking. Though I do believe that the experience of something being full of possibilities often coincides with a synthesising, investigative and selective mental activity before an ambiguous material, testing implications etc. An interpretative delirium or a sudden questioning of habitual conceptions (can carpets fly?).
    One last note about the virtual. If earlier philosophy, inspired by Plato, saw the Idea as something more profound, and perhaps more crystalised, beyond temporary emergences, then post-husserlian philosophy tends to see the eidetic, or virtual, specifically as emergences as such, and that which constitutes the Idea is in large parts temporary emergences (or simulacra). The eidetic is emergence as a whole, and that which is called Idea is temporary and subject to change, with contingencies as raw material. What survives and runs ahead to meet the present, both earlier experience and habitual ways of organising information, constitutes the emergent virtual structure in the present.

/.../

Rituals

Rituals and symbols are everywhere. What makes them magic is their being affirmed. There are magical geographies everywhere. Psychogeographical portals and delimitations. Boundaries and signs that reconfigurate the fields of possibilities of our bodies, our posture, our focuses, what presents itself as possible courses of action. The boundaries separating an audience from performers, separating a performance ritual before an audience from a hazing event at Lundsberg private school, an appointment with the hairdresser, or a wedding.
    /.../ don't believe in the rituals they perform. They are too nihilistic. They may claim they are trying to make a carpet fly. That's bullshit. I can claim I am struggling to make a relationship work, through rituals, That's not bullshit. They may claim they don't care whether they make the carpet rise or not. That it's the attempt and not the result that counts. But they don't try, and that matters to me. I regard it as impossible that the audience possibly during the performance may be struck by the hunch that there might be a small possibility, because this is beyond their suggestive power. Instead we may all unite in a nihilistic giggle about people performing real rituals, while missing their actual magical activity. /.../ I much prefer people trying to conjure up a 4D-printer, and it doesn't matter whether they succeed or not, than people who try to conjur up grants for themselves by ridiculing visionaries.

JB:
It is not just about imagining anything, it is specifically the connection between the real and the virtual that sparks an emotion. Not distinguishing between "make-believe" and "for real", as children do already when they start playing, means that you can confuse things that are in different categories, make a carpet fly, make a relationship work, or create a functional 4D-printer. /.../ Art is both real and make-believe at the same time. One does what one does, but it is also an image, an attempt, a vision to be conveyed and pondered or digested. It doesn't have to be a possibility, but gets the chance of pondering whether it is a possibility or not. I found Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension to describe that way of functioning very well at that time.
    /.../
    But I didn't give any particular significance to performance art being meaningless work? I don't believe in such things, and if so I have expressed myself unclearly. Art is a kind of work, and if it is meaningless it is not art, since the essence is a form of communication (conveying meaning). But then of course one might use meaningless work (of another kind) as an element in art if one so wishes.

NN:
Yes, I intended meaninglessness in a dialectic sense in my comment. /.../ The example with the carpet is significant for this rhetoric: since "everybody knows" that magic doesn't work, they make a meaningless magical effort confirming what we already know. Sartre compares this type of ritual with the fox who, after having reached for the grapes in vain, transforms them "by the power of thought" into "sour", and he calls the magical attitude that makes this transformation come about a flight behavior aiming to make the world more bearable which for good and bad characterises the condition of man. Thereby this performance appeared to me as existentialist lowbrow comedy for me, with all respect for that it may have appeared differently if one would have been there. If defining magic as "power that does not exist" one misses that it is about mental power. And it should preferrably be used for transforming peppercorns into a dragon than the other way around.

JB:
Sure. But I think it is a more precise terminology to refer to this power of the mind as imagination, like surrealists usually do. Calling it magic causes unnecessary misunderstandings, I think: it sounds like one is presupposing supernatural powers where no such powers have any explanatory power. Magical thinking and poetical thinking may in practice be the same processes, but they have different selfunderstandings, and this should not be neglected.

NN:
On the contrary, they have rather coinciding selfunderstandings, as surrealists repeatedly note. Magic according to the european tradition that surrealists usually acknowledge (Novalis, Levi, Paracelsus, Böhme, Swedenborg) stipulates a world image where we are in contact with everything, then, now and in the future, and where all manifestations are regarded as external forms hiding the unknown principles of nature, and where it depends on ourselves whether they world changes in accordance with our will or not. Poetic thinking is a recollection of the worldview of magic in that sense. Imagination on the other hand is a philosophical, psychological and aesthetical concept which may refer to almost anything relating to desire-driven production of mental images, thus a theoretically diverse concept, unproblematically used in everyday language but insufficient in a revolutionary vocabulary – "power to the imagination" and similar. Most of the surrealists that speak theoretically about magic tend to mean that imagination is an obvious element in human actions and being while magic actualises it in a specific connection, often connected with a tradition of naturale philosophy, or the child's wish-based perception of the world, or so-called primitive cultures etc; including Breton (L'Art magique), Bataille, Carrington, Colquhoun, Paz, Alleau, Chazal, etc.

the strategical point of strategy

A recent visit to the comrades in Leeds provided several interesting discussions, including on the subject of strategy - obviously one which it is possible for surrealists to have different opinions on, but perhaps not as different as it first may seem, once a number of demarcations and distinctions have been sorted out. I'd like to relate a couple of points from that discussion to the usual themes of the Icecrawler with methodology and epistemology.

First of all, it must be noted that surrealism embodies a fundamental "antipragmatism" or "antiinstrumentalism" that it shares with anarchism. There is no widely accepted term for this attitude (it might just as well be called antileninism or antiloyolism which both sound rather more specific, and I'll be grateful for suggestions of more general terms) but its application is clear: the aims do not justify the means, because means that are alien to the aims will effectively twist the aims and make the original aims unattainable, while on the other hand, if the means are congenial with the aims they will embody the aim so that they will become meaningful in themselves and not just instrumental. The classic political instance is of course the insistence that freedom will not be attained by authoritarian means, which has at different times been applied against political violence, conspiracy strategies in general, bureaucratic party-building, parlamentarist strategies, self-sacrificing duty ethics, etc etc. In recent decades, the latter application has been among the most popular, after the situationists' (and especially Vaneigem's) pregnant formulations against the activist ethos. (It must be noted however that situationist thought is clearly not unanimous on this point, and Debord's embracing of the hardcore "loyolist" Clausewitz is a case in point.) It is fundamental to the anarchist concept of "direct action", it partly coincides with what different leftist group call anti-authoritarianism and autonomy (or, for some, even libertarianism), it has to do with Fourier's concept of work, with Marx's so-called humanism, it certainly has a lot to do with the dreaming, the rage, and the emphasis on creativity in the tradition of romantical anticapitalism as continued in large parts of modernism and specifically in surrealism. While never being explicitly formulated as such, this was also the issue underlying the political conflicts in surrealism in the 20s and 30s, with the surrealists insisting that revolutionary politics didn't make specifically surrealist experimentation and dreaming obsolete but quite the opposite, and that the resurrection of bourgeois morality and lifestyle in the Soviet Union as well as the mad and bloody power tactics of Stalin meant betraying communism.

As a mere parenthesis, we can note that an inverted loyolism is often presented as the "democratic" spirit today - when the means justify the aims. Anyone who plays according to the rules, obeys laws, appears peaceful, wears a suit, votes, writes letters to the editor, and pleas to the politicians in office, instead of taking things in one's own hands, is then considered good, regardless of the implications of one's ideas. (Elsewhere I have considered this in the context of modern varieties of humanism, and called it "repressive coward humanism".)

This basic strategic concern is related to the purely philosophical distinction between intention ethics and effect ethics, but as a philosophical distinction the latter does not have any immediate applications. An intention ethics emphasises that good intentions are what counts in the end, regardless of the outcome, and an effect ethics emphasises the opposite. The instrumentalist approach is largely fitting with an effect ethics, but an anti-instrumentalist approach could be formulated as either, and very often real contradictions emerge along other lines.

Consider for example how the activist ethos of self-sacrificing for the cause very often serves as a rigid ethical principle independent of whether it achieves any effects whatsoever, often being remarkably untactical and unpragmatic, in the end amounting to "heroic" duty ethics, a principled effacing of individual oddities and "low desires", and a pure voluntarism - making the frenziedly manifested good will everything, and thus ending up in some kind of intention ethics.

There are also other options, of course. There is a broad concept of a "whole human" activist, which was not uncommon in many parts of the early workers movement and went on in parts of anarchism and recently had a brief blossoming in the globalist movements of the 00s. This is about affirming an offensive political content in collective self-organising of everyday life and of demanding a full life in general, coinciding with revolutionary implimentations of humanism (there a numbers of contradictive implimentations of the notoriously ambiguous concept humanism...) and of the classic refusal to make a sharp distinction between personal and political.

But then, the antipragmatism of the anarchists is very often presented as ethics, that is, an abstracted principled doctrine of how to implement good life and fair order. The obvious points inherent in anarchism, remarkably often very effective, are easily available for any thinking person, they even border to the simplistic. In fact, very often their actual subversive effects are due to the unexpected complications and the character of pure obstruction of the application of these simple principles in a rigid way regardless of circumstances and without strategical concerns. An anarchist is always right. Because the anarchist will emphasise these eternal abstract principles rather than take risks and make assessments of circumstances. There is no risk of failure for eternal principles because there are no circumstances that actually put them to test. An anarchist is always right, and will very often be completely uninterested in drawing empirical conclusions, and very often let all opportunities pass through their openmindedly spread fingers like golden sand. This is the very strength and impotence of anarchism all in one.

I think a solution to a great many of the contradictions and shortcomings of this perspective will come via the concept of methodology. Methodology is choosing the right method for each task, and specifically through its central position in science, it concerns formulating your questions and designing your methods in congruence, so that the outcome of your undertaking will give you an answer to your specific question whatever happens. Of course it would be very difficult and probably boring to designate life as rigidly as that, but I think a more general application of methodological concern is to make sure to take risks, to try to spark off dynamics, that will have something to teach us regardless of what the specific outcome will be. And if we disregard the obvious psychological fear of failure in many anarchists, I think this does lie in the anarchist concept of "direct action" too; no meaningful actions are strictly instrumental, in that they are depending on attaining a particular distant goal; all meaningful actions do attain something in themselves. The concept of "direct action" usually envisions this as by manifesting and fulfilling our wishes and desires, and concretely changing circumstances for the better. For the experimentally and methodologically minded it might just as well be about just releasing dynamics, in order to widen the field of possibilities, open for the unexpected, which might change things dramatically, perhaps in a particular direction that will coincide with particular desires, perhaps not, and in either case will be an interesting experience to analyse and build upon. In science, there is no such thing as failure, because negative results are just as informative as positive results are. This is the particular scientific dynamic of experiment and failure. Instrumentalist minds opposed to open-ended experimentation will often regard this as "irresponsible", perhaps especially those who are prone to authoritarian politics. If we disregard the aspect of mere psychological control need in such an attitude, it nevertheless remains quite irrelevant: any serious activity that seriously wants to change things will definitely take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, by learning from them and acting further upon them, and responsibility is in no way necessarily connected with being able to predict consequences, In social relationships, in history just as well as science and in poetry, this is certainly true: the predictable is far less interesting than the unpredictable.

So, the political application of this, I consider strategy. It is merely a methodological formulation, based in theory, in individual desire, in collective dynamics, and the analytical response integrating these factors, of an interventional implementation of experiment and failure. Strategy is for causing dynamic effects that will move beyond ones control in an interesting direction and, while doing that, allow for conclusions. That is politics, that is theory, that is the so-called "art of creating situations". In that sense, surrealism in its concrete manifestations will have to be strategic, regardless of whether it will be consciously directed on the political level or not.

Now, considering strategy does not necessarily imply a lot of things that anti-strategic minds consider it to. First of all, there is of course a simple distinction between strategy and tactics, which can be formulated in very different ways, but for most people, strategy is long-term and tactics is short-term, strategy is choosing methods and tactics is choosing rhetorics and presentation in particular situations, negotiations. General antipragmatism may motivate a despise of tactics (it may be debasing, psychologically destructive, and obstructive to real communication to nervously-servilely or authoritarianly adapt one's message to one's prejudices about the recepients), but not of strategy (which is more about how to actually implement ones ideas and possibly change things at all). And of course, strategical thinking does not imply any one particular strategy. For example, surrealism is not a proselytising movement, it does not seek to maximise the number of adherents and does not try to persuade people. This is however not an antistrategical move but exactly a strategical one: surrealist activity is dependent on each participant's individual passion, original perspective and individual path of approaching surrealism, therefore it has little use for proselytes. But then, admitting this necessarily minoritary character of surrealism and affirming the chance moment in its adhesions, does not in any way contradict the fact that there might be good to increase the contact surfaces with other people, to communicate and invite to communication via internet and public events, simply to increase the probability of the rare chance hits! It does also not favor such extroversion regardless of circumstances, it makes it a strategical question for consideration.

Surrealism's political implications, and the immediate social relevance of its organisation, are I think twofold. It is about manifesting a glimpse of a possible other society and about encouraging uncontrolled dynamics that open up new possibilities. Of course surrealism wants to be effective in that. But it is not willing to go to instrumentalism (loyolism), to do all kinds of boring and bad stuff, including imposing on itself a demand to formulate it in some other language than its own, in order to achieve those effects, because that would be detrimental to its passion, its spirit, its health. It is not necessarily the case that wide attention, especially mass medial attention, will actually increase that efficiency, in fact it is obviously very often the opposite, the public sphere has a dynamic of its own which has a tendency to swallow up creative input for its own means. Surrealism wants to involve all those that are seriously interested and capable of making serious contributions, but it does not want to proselytise and collect souls. For me, it seems like an inevitable conclusion, that the interventions and the organisation are best served by conscious concerns about how to relate to the contemporary situation and how to communicate with people outside the group (primarily with the seriously curious and with friends, in the second place with the general public): this is what I call strategy. These will have to be, as I see it, methodological and experimental rather than either "irresponsibly" instrumental or legitimacy-obsessed ethical, in order to be truly congruent with surrealism.

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

The characteristics in common between practising science and poetry interest me a lot, and are striking on the level that both rest on methodological and experimental epistemological frameworks as opposed to faith, pragmatic comfortableness and happiness in ignorance. However, the word experiment is somewhat ambiguous and experimental is often used to make things look more exciting or more scientific regardless of methodology.

The most common use of experiment is the pragmatical sense of trial and error, which might be a somewhat metaphorical generalisation of the scientific term, and which I will refer to as the TECHNOLOGICAL sense. In the field of technology, there is a task you want to perform and you keep testing procedures until you reach the goal. The small element of improvisation needed just because there isn't a fixed recipe, is there very weak sense of experiment which is at work here.

Either it works to produce the desired effect, and then everything is fine, you may write it down for future use but need not think about why it worked, or it fails, and then you just drop it, you may write it down to avoid repeating it in the future, but need not think about why it failed. You could of course repeat it, for the purpose of refining the procedure. Technology is all about testing whims and varying parameters to produce a certain preconceived effect. Its aims and methods has nothing to do with those of science.

Experiments in cooking, and experiments in politics and social engineering, are usually like this: either they produce the desired effect or not. All too often, experiments in social behavior and in art, music, literature are the same thing, a particular whim may succeed in establishing a person's confidence, or securing a pick-up, or expressing the artists' personal style or a topic set of problematics in a fresh, more efficient way. This is all experimenting in the weak sense, trying out some innovative or just unconventional means of reaching a particular, usually conventional, goal.

Within the framework of science, experiment is something completely different. In a SCIENTIFIC experiment, theories are tested, not ways of attaining goals.

A setup is designed where the outcome of the process will be able to say something crucial about the assumptions that gave rise to it. Very often you test which parameters are crucial for causal effects. The experimental setup is about controlling and varying factors so as to analytically isolate them and so actually identify the significant ones. It is all about producing knowledge. A negative outcome is just as interesting as a positive outcome, since the negative outcome demonstrates what was not a crucial factor.

In everyday settings, the scientific sense of experiment will sometimes go hand in hand with the technological sense. "Let's see if they accept my ideas if I just express them as loud and cursing as I can" and "Let's see if I manage to impress them if I wear this strange jewellery" are technology-style experiments if the primary purpose is to attain the goal, but scientific-style experiments if the important thing is to draw conclusions about the effects of one's own behavior on others (or on some particular set of others).

Scientific experiments should be designed so as to give one outcome if the theory behind it is true and another outcome if the theory behind it is false. The scientific sense of experiment wants to see what happens, under controlled circumstances. It could not give a damn about success and happiness in life, technological development, etc.

Poetry may be described as an experimental science of sorts, but its sense of experiment is yet another one. POETIC experiment is to create something unusual and unconditionally see what it will spark off. In some circumstances, this would best described vulgarisingly, as "stirring a little in the pot", in others more pretentiously as "durable systematic disorder" and "opening the gates to the unknown". Because it is all about the unknown, it is all about leaving behind the domain of habit and predictable effects, about releasing a dynamic which we don't know where it will lead, a path which is dynamic by the very reason that we leave behind the recipes and well-known routes of procedures we master. It is about attaining effects, but not the specific desired effect of technological concerns but the very opposite, the unpredicted effects. Thus the knowledge it seeks to establish is not about deciding between alternatives, about corroborating or falsifying preconceived theories, but of finding new openings, revealing new associations and connections. Therefore, all litterature and art which just struggles to produce certain effects we can dismiss as non-poetic. On the other hand, since scientific experiment and technological experiment are merely ways of testing things, from an epistemological and a pragmatical viewpoint respectively, it is often admitted that both are dependent on imagination to produce something to work on in the first place. Unleashing imagination is the way of the poetic, regardless of whether in cooking, writing, painting, dancing, musicking, everyday social behavior or what.. In the social sphere, such experimental interventions are often referred to as creating situations, and the situationists named their entire movement after them. (but of course acting on social dynamics do require some careful planning, some crude empiricism, and some skills in pragmatism, let us by all means say that revolutionary politics is a big game which require a coordination of all three senses of experiment...)

Failure, in this sense of experiment, is not the occasional "bad trip" but rather the not-too-rare failure to produce some psychic dynamics except conventional reactions. But it lies within the nature of the thing that concerns over effects can not be allowed to attain a primary place in the experiments, it is needed to silence that type of concerns and face the abyss, it is only then that one really abandons the technological sphere of petty task-fulfilling and enters the sphere of adventure. Failure is unavoidable, it may even be grandiose and beautiful.

Scientific and poetic experimentation alike rest on a fundamental break, an epistemological break, often referred to under the french name coupure. In science, that break is part of the conditions: you must leave aside your preconceived ideas, particular expectations, prejudices & habits, spontaneous jumping-to-conclusions pattern recognition, technological and practical concerns, and accept wherever the method leads, whatever the experiment says, regardless of personal opinions and psychic investments.

For poetry, the break is the sine qua non and the defining moment. An unprejudiced investigation into the workings of the imagination, language and sensory experience when facing the unknown.

Now, even though it is all about psychic dynamics and fearless devotion to the unknown conditionlessly, the poetic still has criteria too. We are specifically looking for psychic dynamics which are emancipatory, pleasurable, informative, unusual and strong, but these aspects are all interdependent, and dependent on the impact of the break itself, on the seriousness, resoluteness and fearlessness of the plunge - but also on innovativity and consistency of method, admittedly to some extent also on previous experience, mastery of techniques and good old sensibility (- we could say one does not create poetry, but one evokes it, is claimed by it, channels it, becomes its voice, more or less efficiently; so skills are mostly about the willingness to put one's available means at the service of the poetic).

What characterises poetry is that it deals with the unknown in a qualitative sense (beyond the purely formal characteristic of not being known); it is all about its sense of irreducibility. That irreducibility is the main characteristic of truly poetic psychic dynamics: that which is in a sense endlessly productive in that it can't breduced to any well-known ort well-knowable constellations of personal motives, social interactions, habitual associations of ideas, psychic defenses, etc.

Criteria are important, for evaluation is a crucial part of experiment. It is inherent in an experiment in a technical sense (did it work or not), and obviously the central moment in an experiment in the scientific sense, but I argue that it is crucial also in the poetic sense of experiment. Yes, let everything loose without concerns, but see afterwards how far it got, what it revealed, what heuristic lessons can be integrated into the methods arsenal, what types of dynamism and types of imagery was let loose; how to proceed further into the domains opened. In fact, very much of alleged poetic experimenting stops short in the domain of evaluation, and very often this is where "experimentalness" (or even the very label of poetry!) occasionally fulfills the function of a mere excuse for sloppy methodology, lack of planning, lack of afterthought.

Surrealism is a particular discipline to cultivate and study the specifically poetic experimentation, and also an area where evaluation of poetic experimentation plays an important part; often in an analytical manner, even more often in terms of furthering playing, experimenting, creating according to suggested routes of dynamism, of developing a very openended and changing, yet accumulative and collective, poetic phenomenology and mythology.

In a branch of the recent discussion about the book The crisis of exteriority in the surrealist movement, it turned out that several american surrealists were specifically upset by the fact that I had used the word "failure" about the book. I had said "an applaudable, enjoyable and partly very beautiful failure", but failure I said.

Nikos Stabakis and Johannes Bergmark both, defending the formulation without necessarily subscribing to the view, suggested that failure means something ambiguous or even constructive in an epistemologic or scientific context. Indeed it does. Obviously it was such connotations that made me frivolously employ the word without a thought that it might hurt someone. But nevertheless, in the actual place it was a lot more simple; I meant failure in a plain technical way. I concluded that the book did not launch a new theory or a new useful and clarifying epistemological framework in the field of surrealist investigations into the environment, which I felt it had claimed to do, both in the discussion leading up to the publication, and in the very title and introduction of the book. On the other hand, it was productive in provoking all this discussion, as it had been in provoking some very readable contributions in the book. This is part of the dynamics of failure.

But please snap out of this kneejerk reaction to accusations of failure. Of course it is a central pillar in the "american way of life" that each man must make his own happiness and humanity is spontaneousy divided into winners and losers by their own ambitiousness as an expression of the natural order of things. In this view, success is everything and failure is a catastrophe. But a surrealist view would not coincide with that ideology. First, it would possibly side with a democratic or humanist view, finding this distinction to be rigged, flawed and irrelevant for all important purposes. Then it would take one step further and conclude that in this specific hierarchies which define success and failure in the human sphere, a poet would necessarily have to start by accepting failure, in order to avoid the preconceived struggles over conventional prizes and actually open the door to the vast sphere of all other possibilities. Especially so in an american context. For some, this is the simple analogy between the poet, the mystic and the shaman. For others, it is a very specific political statement: no, we dismiss the future you have designed for us, we won't be taking part in your hunting for positions and your retreats into petty domestic happinesses; investigating the sense of being a human starts with being a loser and investigating the sense of life starts with failure.

Mattias Forshage
(revised version as of 11/9)

surrealism and science

"thought is one and indivisable" (Péret)

Occasionally some people have referred to some kind of contradiction between scientophilia and scientophobia within surrealism. To say that, for example, Breton, Césaire, Colquhoun, Baskine, Seligmann, Artaud, Miró, Péret, Legrand, Jouffroy, Brauner, Chazal, Tarnaud, Jouffroy, Dax, Carrington, Mabille, the majority of the french, czech and latin american surrealists, were against science and Paalen, Mabille, Matta, Rybak, Brunius, Jennings, Davies, Pailthorpe, Hérold, Caillois, Leiris, Nougé, Senecaut, Masson, Ernst, Onslow-Ford, Seligmann, Jorn, Breton, perhaps the majority of english, belgian and scandinavian surrealists plus the whole groups of Dyn and La Main à Plume, were for science is extremely superficial. The function of the thematisation of science in the works of individuals may be predominantly polemical or predominantly curious, but this is only about where individuals like to put the stress. (And any such sorting, such as this one here, will be extremely dubious as it necessarily extrapolates from mere hints in their works, from anecdotal evidence and from the most stupid denial of ambivalence and conflicting data.) The surrealist viewpoint in itself in its historic continuity is fairly unproblematic as long as the questions asked are made more specific.

1. Surrealism is passionately in favor of reality, truth, and the the natural world, and has a distinct taste for empirical data, documentation, objectivity.

2. This taste for documentation and objectivity is often expressed in a pseudoscientific style and pseudoscientific attitudes.

3. Surrealism has no longing to reach inside academic or other institutional structures.

4. Surrealism has no particular love for instrumental rationality or simple logic, but uses them in its quest for knowledge and for everyday purposes just like everybody else.

5. But it also challenges them and remain interested of whatever seems to counter them, get missed by them, be hidden behind them, get unleashed by abandoning them.

6. Surrealism is very often elaborate in its praxis of designing experimental methods, but usually in a more or less improvised way. Methodological concerns do come in, but are only occasionally an important focus.

7. Just like real science itself (but unlike the education system, mass media, and all the other pillars of ideology production) surrealism is very sceptic towards large generalisations based on scientific results and arbitrary applications of detached scientific results on other aspects life, and towards identifying one’s own world view with truth.

8. Surrealism is suspicious, critic and vengeful against all systematic ideology production, where the one carried out under the banner of science is but one, but a fatal one.

9. Surrealism is curious about all unusual thinking. Not for its own sake but for the possibilities of new poetic and epistemological revelations, and secondarily for the disturbance of habit in general as a method of triggering unknown dynamics.

10. Even though its own methodology is usually not that systematically developed, surrealism tends to agree with its “house-philosopher-of-science” Gaston Bachelard that new knowledge is produced foremostly by abandoning prejudice and making epistemological leaps. In one sphere, this is one of poetry’s functionings. In another, this is where the specialised natural sciences investigating our world work.

11. In that sense, surrealism has many reasons to appreciate and make usage of the marvellous worlds of for example particle dynamics, spacetime theory and the whole of quantum physics, scientific cosmology and astronomy in general, meteorology, systems ecology and microbiology, evolutionary theory and genetics, plate tectonics and geomorphology, quaternary geology and palaeoecology, cladistics and probability theory, cybernetics and general linguistics (just because these are the examples mentioned in “Hellchoir”). Such disciplines are creating coherent mythologies animating natural forces in a sense which is counterintuitive but makes poetic sense to our sensory and imaginational experience.

12. Some frameworks making sense of the world are called myths. Their poetic substance do not reside in some purely aesthetic perception beside truth, nor in any profound traditional truth which is fundamentally opposed to autonomous critical examination. They are in themselves not superior to the scientific framework, nor are they inferior. In mythology as well as in science, some domains are revelatory, liberating and poetic, while some are mainly dull or oppressive. Many surrealists are personally more interested in either myth or science, and may from that viewpoint also investigate scientific aspects of myth or the mythical aspect of science. The classic surrealist method is to snatch poetical elements from both, integrating them in a framework ordered by purely imaginational imperatives. But some surrealists keep warning about the ideological and social implications of many such thefts, potentially reproducing various available exotistic ideology or even create a new system of hostile liberal integration into an aesthetic framework; which are valid points even though the specific cases of surrealist appropriation may possibly well elude them. Some surrealists here insist on the need of deep knowledge of the framework in selected other worldviews, or of the principles of science – often surrealism may benefit from epistemological or methodological or comparative points made that way, just as much as from the poetical elements.

13. Thus, surrealism loathes and opposes all ideology and especially narrowminded instrumental reductive confinedly rationalist ideology, but loves the systematic and poetic study of the natural world.

merdarius

Surrealism and the holy crap

Surrealism is a revolutionary poetical movement that strives for the liberation of mankind in all its aspects. This is not a simple task, and we see that the surrealist movement often suffers from weaknesses in making this understood. As we know, this has been a constant problem throughout its history, especially as regards its relations to art and "culture".

Here, we'd like to focus on the problems of unclarity regarding the supernatural and its ideological companion, supernaturalism, and also about some related surrealist hookups which seem to be lacking an honest and critical approach.

It is (more or less!) known that surrealism is actively and explicitly against religion.

Other beliefs of dubious character also occur though, e.g. that surrealism, inspired by the psychoanalytic ideas, sees as its mission to liberate the unconscious from the repression of the superego; that surrealism accepts and likes everything that defies rational thinking, including not only dream and chance but also, for this reason, spiritism, esoterism, chaos, the "wild", "primitive" peoples, everything non-Western, sadism, perversions, crime, serial killers ... all this in opposition, of course, to the prevailing capitalist order, but also in opposition to rationalism itself.

We are sorry to say that the reasons for these miscomprehensions are not only misunderstandings from art scholars or journalists, they are often caused by texts written by surrrealists themselves. In the worst cases, these surrealists appear to be little more than art-producing new-age apologists. In better cases, they are inspired writers that somehow have a difficulty of explaining the limits and circumstances of the surrealist appreciations of dreams or of primitive peoples, for example. Maybe they are actually confused, or maybe lazy. (We're not in the business here of judging who is a surrealist or not - but regardless of the label they might put on themselves, they hold attitudes that we find important to confront and that we think surrealism doesn't benefit from. In some cases we think it's obvious they misunderstand basic concepts of surrealism, in others it might be necessary to modify or clarify the surrealist standpoint. We don't mention names because it's better for those concerned to recognize themselves instead of feeling that they need to defend themselves. If someone should be mentioned, why not Breton himself? Isn't it obvious how exaggerated his trust in Freud was, or that he had an uncritical belief in the abilities of (certain?) clairvoyants, mediums and even astrologists?)

In many surrealist texts, the uncritical repetition of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts is embarrasing (or to say the least outdated). Freud's ideas can at most be taken as an inspiring and fascinating attempt to make a theory about the mind, but not as indisputable truths or undoubtable scientific discoveries about it. It must be admitted that they consist of non-scientific specualtion and partly also of falsifying evidence. Freud's writings have in many ways also been contradicted by later research and discoveries. This might therefore not have been possible to know at the time and the surrealists were also apparently lacking in knowledge about scientific methods and the necessary rigour demanded of scientific investigation. The psychoanalytic "case studies" are of no more scientific value than the many observations of UFO landings and their accompanying "conclusions". The tendency to regard the Freudian concepts as holy and unquestionable, whatever they are, does no good to surrealism.

Alchemy and other occult, esoteric or mystic currents, dead or alive, are other subjects that need to be approached more critically. If they historically could be described as "precursors" to science as well as to surrealism (even though many of them still prevail or have been reintroduced), it must also be clarified in what way they have been doomed to be abandoned: their supernaturalistic (often religious) world-view made (and makes) it impossible for them to significantly advance human knowledge and understanding of the world. (The development of science and critical thinking does this, though.) What remains, at best, is a poetical practice misunderstanding itself as anything else. Their beauty and fascination, then, is also tragic.

To hail alchemy as a watchword, like so many surrealists do, is obscurantistic. Alchemy had certain interesting elements, while others are examples of superstitions and the primitiveness of thinking that we should fight today as ever.

The double tool of surrealism: dialectics (or, why not say "critical thinking?") and analogy can only be useful if they are kept apart but also taken to the extreme. Superstition and supernaturalism are failure to do so.

Esoterics and psychoanalysis have been getting an exagerrated attention from some surrealists also just because they to a large extent are symbol-makers. The mere listing of these conventional symbols in accounts of dreams or "objective chance" experiences are not of specificly surrrealist value. Symbols have no truth value and surrealism is not a symbolism. Symbols, just as anything else, can of course be of poetical value if they appear in a personal mythology relating to actualities in the individual desires. But symbols, looked up in a book in order to write a more juicy text to impress the reader, are just anthropological anecdotes, and to base observations on those is a false drama. There is a literature based on the concept of objective chance, that sometimes seem shallow and fake in the sense that they don't really tell about the poetical value for the individual, they list a number of encounters such as every person has now and then. Chance encounters are valuable to people not because they reveal telepathy or other psychic powers, fate or signs of a higher truth (they don't!), but simply because they consist of coincidences that involve elements who talk to the memories or desires of the persons involved or create a certain kind of beauty or adventure. It's no mysticism. It's a heightening of the sensibility in everyday life.

Among the exaggerated hailings are the ones of "primitive peoples" or anything not belonging to the western civilization. This seems sometimes to have a tendency of a blind embrace, disregarding everything that wouldn't fit into the picture. According to this attitude, primitive peoples have a closer non-exploitative relation to nature, they have a poetic relation to the universe, their art is integrated in all of their lives etc; but it's never mentioned that they might have superstitions, they never have a limited understanding of the world, they don't repress women or children and are never violent. A criticism of western civilization doesn't need this one-sidedness. Maybe it is a misdirected solidarity that comes from the fact that primitive and non-western peoples certainly are repressed groups. That surrealism is against workers' chauvinism is clear and obvious since the 30's confrontations with stalinist "workers' culture", but it's time to abolish also "primitive" or "non-western" chauvinism. Neither they, nor us, benefit from it.

We're not new agers or exotists. We have to be more clear about our relation to magical thinking as a world view. As with alchemy, we have to distinguish things. Magical thinking, stripped of its supernaturalism, is no longer magical thinking. It is poetic sensibility.

Magical thinking has to be replaced by personal mythology and poetical thinking. Magical thinking creates superstitions, conserves lack of understanding and blunts critical thought. It enforces gullibility and authoritarianism. Next step is religion and capitalism. Magical thinking did not die with the development of civilization, it's at the base of capitalist ideology and teams up with its "rationalism". (Isn't it enough to look at commodity fetishism and advertisement?)

Some surrealist writing shows a more or less plain opposition to science in general and might scorn its strict rational methods. This is absurd. What is the point of attacking the scientific method? Surrealism has never been an irrationalism, absurdism, anti-intellectualism or denying rationality. (If it ever had tendencies to it, they should be abandoned!)

Science and the scientific method are among the greatest achievements of the human mind, and are enormously valuable to the understanding of the world and, at least potentially, a great vehicle against human misery; material, social, intellectual as well as spiritual. This doesn't mean that science would be the only source of knowledge or of inspiration, but it can certainly be one of the sources, alongside other expressions of the spirit that are more likely to be mentioned by surrealists; love, desire, creativity, play and curiosity: activities outside of, but not necessarily in opposition to, science.

The scientific method is nothing more than an extension of critical thinking. That scientists are often bought and sold and used for commercial and repressive purposes - much in the same way as artists - is an altogether different affair. Science might be done mainly by experts, but is in its philosophical base egalitarian. (Science should be made by all!) Science's theories about the world can in principle be tested by anyone, provided he or she does it in controlled circumstances and with relevant methods. Anyone that have claims about some part of reality will fail to convince scientifically if the claim can not be confirmed through repeated experiment or (in relevant cases) randomized, double-blind observation. Scientific rigour, thus, is above personal interest and a moral question.

The scientific world is not lacking in self-consciousness about its scope and limitations. We want to draw special attention to the international movement of so-called Skeptics in this matter. Robert T. Carroll, author of the Skeptic's Dictionary (http://skepdic.com/) calls skepticism a "virtue" rather than a philosophical system. The different groups and individuals related to this movement fight frauds and pseudoscience and debunk supernatural claims, in an ongoing fight to protect the mind from charlatans, spiritists, healers, fakirs, astrologers, psychics and other liars, robbers and swines, and defend the status of the scientific method. Many sceptics also fight religious superstitions and their preachers' absurd claims about reality.

There must be no doubt that surrealism whole-heartedly supports these struggles, although with (at least theoretically) a wider and complementary understanding. This is not only a fight for the defence of science. Those "healers" (protected by the freedom of religion, i.e. the freedom to fool and be fooled), can destroy people's lives giving them false hopes, false treatments, false beliefs, false understanding of reality and obediance to false authorities besides giving them stupidifying entertainment and wasting their time. In this way it's also a fight for the defense of the freedom, power and understanding of the human spirit.

Surrealism should be in a special position to properly embrace the whole scope of the reasons to fight supernaturalism: the scientific, political, ideological, moral and poetical reasons. We don't need any mystical, esoteric or psychoanalytical concepts to explain that the human mind by itself (interacting, of course, with the "outer world") is capable of its deductions, productions and inspirations, that the poetic sensibility is not divine or supernatural, but purely human.

Surrealism should be able to appreciate the discoveries and the achievements of the rational and intellectual minds, at the same time demand the same liberty for the imagination and see them as one and the same quest. Surrealism should see the repressions of free inquiry (scientific investigation, research and knowledge), of the freedom of expression and the freedom of imagination as one and the same. The liberation from capitalist and state repression, commercialism, work ethic and careerism is the same as the liberation from priests, superstitions, healers and psychics.

If surrealism will have any significance today, it is still in the struggle for the liberation and expansion of the totality of the human potentials; fighting all the repressions of the mind: from stifling symbolism and stupidifying supernaturalism to repressive ideology and downright ignorance; for the expansion of rational thinking as well as of inspired thinking.

Anna BERGMARK
Johannes BERGMARK

Surrealism and the holy 'nuff

While the text Surrealism and the Holy Crap addresses important issues concerning an uncritical appraisal of esoteric, mystic and symbolistic traditions, it tends to display that same amount of one-sidedness that it intends to critize. Rationalism and science are not in themselves something good, something that advances our struggles. Another problem is that what is needed is not to launch another battle in the field of ideas. Rationalism versus supernaturalism, skepticism versus hoaxism, etc. What is needed is an investigation into the material conditions that give rises to such ideas, their geneaology and relation to existing power structures. Our critique should not be aimed at the ideas as such, but their material base, the suppressing environment that surrounds them, the specific practices which sustain them. How interesting is it to be against an idea? Who cares about ideas anyway? Doesn't the very idea of being able to fight an idea necessarily involve a commitment to a bürgerlicher Öffentlichkeit, to a tradition no more than 200 years old and seriously integrated with capitalist ideology?

Let’s discuss the specifics.

Two quotes from the text:

"Science and the scientific method are among the greatest achievements of the human mind."

"That scientists are often bought and sold and used for commercial and repressive purposes - much in the same way as artists - is an altogether different affair."

The scientific method is a great achievements when it comes to understanding the mechanisms of nature, yes, but while some might argue that it is a great achievement of the human mind (what does that mean?), it's main achievement is as a tool for developing the productive forces of capitalism. And these productive forces are not neutral; the capitalist mode of production has an internal drive to maximize the productive forces in order to subdue more of mankind under the toil of labour. There is no such thing as a neutral discovery, a neutral science, a neutral machine: the capitalist relations of production imbues science with its specific logic. Thus, while science definitively has increased material wealth in society, it has at the same time been instrumental in intensifying labour, repression and global domination of capital. Let me stress this one more time: there is no such thing as a 'pure science', there are specific practices, by specific institutions in specific historical circumstances. Science is one such practices, and while it's method might be very sound, it's employment is not. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with this or that scientist being bought up and used for commercial and repressive purposes. On the contrary, science itself is an internal affair under capitalism, and the individual scientist is completely irrelevant in the broad picture. What is needed is not a naive and uncritical praise of science, but a vision, outline and practice of what the science of the future, i.e. communist science, might look like: how is its method employed, how will it be related to other practices of knowledge, what is its epistemology and most important, what will its relation to rest of society look like?

The same naiveness shows itself in the one-sided praise of rationalism. I'm not sure what rationalism is exactly - perhaps a specific mode of thought related to logical investigations of causality, perhaps a practice in society related to the construction of a public sphere where debates and critical analysis could be conducted, perhaps a philosophical tradition which places emphasis on the ability of the human mind to grasp the totality of nature without empirical investigation - but I'm quite convinced that rational thinking is not bestowed upon us by the grace of our own mind to critical analyse our surroundings and concoct how society best should be constructed. Rational thinking is - just like science - employed through the practices of the capitalist machinery as a means to repress, subjugate and intensifiy the exploitation of mankind. This is of course the dialectic of enlightment, the darkness that springs forth from the back-alleys of rational thinking, where fordist production, colonial enslavement, concentration camps, IBM, the modern HSB-kitchen and such all are based on the same mode of thought.

In the text, one gets the sense that there is a confusion about causality. How can one state that fighting priests is the same as fighting capitalism? While the priest serves ideological purposes, capitalism is not an ideology. Committing oneself to ideological battles is a dead end. If one could gladly choose ones enemies from the realm of ideas, I for one would pick a more interesting and worthwhile opponent than supernaturalism. And if teaming up with other ideological fighters was important, The Skeptics homepage would not be my first alliance (aren’t they just scientific Sverker Olofssons?). When it comes to ideology, the first and foremost task of surrealism is to not become ideological.

Let us not forget who is the real enemy. While local schamans and charlatans might hoax people into bying their useless medicine and miracle potions, it is the major medical companies who on a daily basis exclude a major portion of mankind from vital medical supplies. It it is the major medical companies who put a large portion of the citizens under the spell of pharmaceutics which deterriorates our senses and holds us in a state of chemical conformism. It is the major medical companies who are the chemical landlords of modern capitalism and dominating agents in the sphere of biopolitics. Oh, and it's the major medical companies who use science and the scientific method as their chief productive force.

Therefore: while rational thinking and the scientific method are important practices in the formation of a surrealist mode of thought, they should not be uncritically appraised outside of their historical context. What we seek is the surrational (what the hell is that?), the transgression of the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, and the deployment of specific techniques of attaining knowledge of our surroundings that are neither exclusive nor instrumentalizable. What we don’t need is boring, common sensical, debating this-or-that, one-sided rationality. We are not Noam Chomsky.

JE

Volupte?

VOLUPTÉ?

Our notes from discussions on sensual pleasure
in response to an enquiry from the Paris group
the surrealist group in Stockholm 2005
(delivered long past deadline - as usual - and yet unacknowledged by the Paris group)

1° Comment décririez-vous la volupté ?

First of all, we ask ourselves: What is the point in analyzing sensual pleasure? The experience tend to dissolve in its bodily sensation. The difference between sexual gratification and pleasure is that in the course of gratification you are aware of
the need that you are satisfying so that you are ready to rationalise your experience, but in sensual experience - like vomiting - the experience is not rational.

We agree, however, that the sphere of sensuality is the privileged area for reconcilement of dual concepts. Some of us take the same pleasure in taking a shower as in having human relations. The hypnotizing effect of sensual pleasure can be an experience of fascination and openness to the senses, a bodily joy. Neither reflecting state, nor self-reflecting. A possible dissolving of the limits between self and other natural (unnatural?) processes in the world, a partaking in the weather. Shared sensual pleasure also temporarily making the contradiction between communication and non-communication disfunction. Silence. Sensual pleasure is in that sense a magical act, wherein the dichotomy subject-object disappears. Eating exemplifies this: Eating disgusting things but still feeling that it tastes good. Or the sensual pleasure in
humiliation, in vomiting: vertigo. Shared sensual pleasure: disappointments and the faith in the contradiction that exists between love and sexuality.

Some of us emphasize that sexuality (in acto) is a magnetic field, involving intuitive communication, a further increase of sexual desire, exhaustion, paralysis.

Some of us stress the imaginary aspects of physical contact. The seemingly intensified experiences of psycho-physical sensations within oneiric states; incubi/succubi, developing and exploring pseudo-corporeal states, "touching from a distance", hexed
glances, word magic.

Some of us stress also the undesired aspects of sensual pleasure: the restlessness and laziness that can be one of the trappings of a narrow hedonism. The attitude of (although not the typical behaviour of) consumerism. We don´t think that well-being has a given place as a normal state in our mental topography. General well-being is an old repressive myth that haunts us in the mechanisms of control of social democratic state versus its citizens, and of parents versus children. Wherever well-being is held up as a superordinate goal, justice, truth, passion and curiosity are sacrificed. Hedonistic pleasure and common-sense well-being may have appeared as conflicting forces before; but since the breakthrough of the market mechanisms regarding our physical bodies in the early 80s (exercise, fitness, skin-grills, spas, sadomasochism, hygiene) they≠ve successfully joined forces almost everywhere.

Some of us hold that labour can be sensual pleasure. Not labour in its dead, wage-dictated form, but the living labour of producing both mental and material objects. Depersonalization appears during sensual pleasure as well as during labour, where
the primary actor resides not necessarily in the consciousness, but in some bodily function.

Some of us entertain the idea of the experience of non-contradiction between the body parts inside the body.

Some of us call to mind the states where sensual pleasure fails to trigger a corresponding motion (emotion) in the mind and becomes some irrelevant or an absurd background, establishing a duality between mind and body of another order than the usual disengaged alienation.

Some of us stress the metaphysical aspects of sensual pleasure; as concrete experience of Heideggerean "outholdedness" in "being" and of the irrelevance of good and evil.

(Love and sensual pleasure are not the same thing. It's stupid to talk about psychology.)



2° Pensez-vous que, par delà le plaisir, l'orgasme et sa jouissance, il y a des conditions particulières pour que l'acte sexuel engendre la volupté ? Lesquels ?

We are interested in the dynamic relationship between desire and sensual pleasure, in the romantic sense. It's a form of desire where the actual movements towards the object of desire is more important than the object itself. This specific dynamic can be said to be essential when answering this question. The object of desire is unreachable. A stress on sensual pleasure often connects with a depreciation of the dynamic forces of desire. We
may crudely summarise the romantic method as postponing the fulfillment of desire, not in the Freudian sense of derouting libido for socially useful means, but in order to savour it fully and reenchant reality by impregnating every aspect of it with obsessive imagery (and paranoiac-criticism, mythologisation and objective chance). Some of us see this as a fundamental surrealist and personal strategy. But then again, only inasmuch
as it doesn‚t totally refrain from the dynamics of transgressive behavior!

The imperative is to strive to be perfectly visible.

Where distraction disappears. Peaks. That is, multiple peaks or general leverage instead of single peaks and linear regression. Pansexuality! Love, passion (confusion).

3°) Que nous dit-elle sur notre condition de vivants ?

The non-fourierian organisation of pleasure, the industry of simulation closely linked to the society of the spectacle, the scandalous physical laws of the universe as resembled by the market relation, social-democracy, the repressive sublimation, the repressive tolerance, the poverty of social relations, the organisation of misery and its rationalisation etc etc. And its dialectical transgression.

4°) Quel éclairage vous apporte-t-elle sur le sens de la vie, de la mort, et de leurs reproductions ?

The ephemary nature of sensual pleasure not only resembles, but is closely linked to the ephemary nature of life itself ˆ as exemplified by death.

5°) pensez-vous pouvoir la considérer comme un bien absolu ?

To accept the notion of sensual pleasure as "absolute good" we have to consider to what extent its "absolute" value would be intrinsical (demarcating for or against certain problematic forms of amoralism) or relative (as a part of a the whole of the human experience, which tend to be our general attitude). To reconcile these modes of the absolute is perhaps only possible by adopting an entirely practical point of view, being aware of the arbitrariness of the operation, as did, for example, Eckhart by splitting the absolute into God and Godhead. Are there any practical advantages in uniting a multitudinous field of esteemed experience under the monicker of "sensual pleasure"? Or would such an attitude become hopelessly entangled with the demoralizing atmosphere of logical formalism and celestial hierarchies? Our strategical answer to that question would be: yes. But in the realm of speculation, the idea that sensuality is the only fundamentally real and what characterizes reality actually raises a non-nonsensical onthological question, far from adhering to any onto-theological absolutism. Intuitively it´s hard to reject the hegelian notion that man could experience the absolute in sensual phenomena in line wih how he imagines it in art, conceptualizes it in religion and thinks it in philosophy. But isn't "good" mostly a secondary category which in specific historical contexts are ascribed to imaginations, inventions and initiatives; who needs it to make poetry and revolutions?

6°) Participerait-elle au centre d'une conscience et/ ou d'une inconscience approfondies, du point suprême de l'esprit tel que l'a exprimé André Breton.

On a philosophical level, we could agree to the proposition. But we are quite uncertain, and haven't discussed it enough.

7°) A-t-elle pu inspirer plus ou moins directement quelques civilisations, quelques traditions, quelques utopies ?

The political-economical organisation of keynesianism would probably constitute the most dialectical example of this. While reducing sensual pleasure to its consumistic, commercial base, it nontheless succeded in co-opting it to the incitament of increase of production and social peace. The model of the welfare-state and its organisation through socialdemocracy also implies this kind of structuring of sensual pleasure on a repressive basis for social peace. The current situation is however puzzling: while the industry of simulation have on its own basis succeeded in recuperating and producing the simulacra of pleasure as a means of diverting potential subversive desires into the world of commodification, it can nevertheless not withhold the standards of social peace that keynesianism so successfully could provide during the decades after WWII. Perhaps it doesn't have to. Perhaps the crisis itself is a productive aspect of capitalist recuperation. And thus, we might have to ask ourselves: on what terms is the crisis of pleasure today being founded? How is it used by the capitalist machinery as a means of not only producing commodities (and facilitating their circulation), but also of organising the libidinal desires of modern society. How might this be linked to the fact the sensual pleasure because of its direct, unreflected state of perception is a guarantee of authenticity, while at the same time being the most heavily guarded trophy of the industry of simulation? Can the contemporary crisis be written in the diverted, but yet authentic language of sensual pleasure?

8°) Pourrait-elle, sans pour autant être banalisé ou exploitée, être assumée par une société et à quelles fins ?

Every individual act is hostile to society. Therefore, the democratic organisation of sensual pleasure implies a banalisation of its potentials. True pleasure is undemocratic in
a simple sense. But again, the opposite might also be true. In the unrestricted operations of the pleasure principle during dreaming, a level of collectivity might be attained during waking-life that directly corresponds, or gets enhanced by this operation. By collectivity, we here mean a state of intersubjectivity, where the desires and extensivity of eachsubject is interlinked with others through channels that are not normally controlled by consciousness. However not under democratic control, the conditions for engendering or augmenting such a state might be improved by the collective and democratic efforts of society. In essence, you could say that democracy should be concerned with conditions rather than substance. The substance itself is a collective or individual adventure that could not be reduced to a democratic stature. In this respect, various utopian schemes often have very little to teach us in political terms, while on the other hand the attempts in the early soviet union (cf Reich: The sexual revolution) and in the practice of "radical psychiatrists" deserve to be further built upon.

9°) De l'infiniment petit à l'infiniment grand, concerne-t-elle les phénomènes cosmiques, dont nous appréhendons que la mécanique mais dont les mouvements forcent à l'analogie ?

Possible: However interested we may be in cosmic correspondences, we have nothing substantial to say about it apart from speculation and ephemeral poetic discoveries. The difficulty seems to be one of contexts, and of admitting real differences between separate disciplines of thought. Some of us tend to delve into the context of natural science. Others aremore inclined to intuitive epistemology. The accumulated "expertise" in each field represents of course not only complementary starting-points, but also partly overlap each other, and will do so even more after further research. Thus, we have yet to come up with a mythical scheme that neither vulgarizes scientific methodology nor discredits the scope of poetic sense. To begin with, both a Bataillian "general excess economy" and a model of cosmic passionate attraction (whether in its hermetical or Newtonian form) may be elaborated in both terminologies . Would the concept of sensual pleasure perhaps add something inbetween? Not at first glance, but perhaps we shouldn‚t rule out the possibility entirely.




left unsigned, but elaborated by Christian Andersson, Johannes Bergmark, Kalle Eklund, Jacob Emery, Jonas Enander, Mattias Forshage, Emma Lundenmark, Niklas Nenzén.