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| Collage: Paul Cowdell, Merl Fluin, Patrick Hourihan, Elva Jozef, Jonah Wilberg, Kirsty Woods |
Dear friends,
We are launching
an enquiry the ambition of which is to identify what the surrealist spirit might still mean in a world that appears to
have integrated surrealism into its references and discourses, but in reality
tramples upon its major demands.
It seems to us
necessary, firstly, to clarify what the watchwords love, poetry and freedom stand for today.
We begin by
challenging freedom, with three
questions that you can answer with a word, a sentence or a long speech, or even
criticizing the question. All contributions would be welcome.
1 - Does the word freedom
still seem to you, here and now, inspiring?
This seems an oddly
anxious question. It seems designed to encourage a rather unconvincingly loud
‘YES!’ in the face of difficult odds. The question’s uneasiness points to a
more general anxiety in the enquiry as a whole, moreover, that loses the very
point of freedom.
Idque apud imperitos
humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset
The history of
oppression is littered with the oppressors claiming the language of the
oppressed. They would have our labour, our lives, our loves, our dreams, and
even the very words out of our mouths, but this is not a fight for a
dictionary.
The word ‘freedom’ is
only a shorthand summary of a world we have not yet made, not yet invented, not
yet even imagined. I’m much more interested in making and inventing that world,
but I’m not prepared to let go of the words. They also have a part in that
future, necessary, world, and we want them too.
The attempted
appropriation of such words by our enemies, those who would deny us that
future, may play a rather limited role in drawing attention to the need to
reclaim them. As a student under the Thatcher government I remember explicitly
focusing on their use of words like ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ etc. If I
felt frustrated in their use of words that for me signified a better future yet
to be made rather than their corporate shithole, I also felt that I had to find
ways to change the world to make that future.
The ruling classes
internationally are increasingly employing such words to justify bloody crimes.
State surveillance and the curtailment of democratic rights are justified in
the defence of ‘freedom’. In Britain the mantra of all sections of the ruling
class for the last decade has been that ‘if you are innocent you have nothing
to fear’ from escalating police intrusion. The British ruling class has already
started marking the anniversary of World War I by defending its wholesale
slaughter as a ‘just’ war, a ‘war for democracy’, etc.
Such lies do meet an
instinctual gut opposition, suggesting that the words have not lost their force
but there is still a striving towards their content.
2 - Do you think that freedom could scare some to the
degree that they prefer servitude?
I find this a deeply
unpleasant and self-congratulatory question. It shifts the blame for
capitalism’s crimes onto its victims. The question provides a licence to
dismiss those who may not yet have found ways of articulating their hostility
to this most crushing of political environments by simply branding them
‘scared’. At the same time it can be used to excuse the Elect, those who are
pleased with themselves for not being scared, from any political or poetic
engagement to shatter this brutal world. After all, they do not ‘prefer
servitude’ …
3 - In a recent review (Le Monde, 11th October 2013 - ‘Trois poètes libertaires’) we read: “... this pre- and post-war
spirit of surrealism, which may seem so distant now, in its radical and
desperate freedom.” Do you agree with this judgment?
The liberal press is the
vehicle for all the attempts to take these words out of our mouths. In the
past, when times have been good enough for liberals to be comfortable, they
have been able to mouth some bland progressive platitudes. This led some to
think they were a sort of ally of radical and revolutionary.
They never were,
notwithstanding the former political associations of people like Edwy Plenel.
It was just that they had comfort enough to feel the pangs of social
conscience. Now that times are bad for them too they will become more vitriolic
than ever. We have a duty to defend the real history of Surrealism, but let’s
not spend all our time taking up point after point against these most insipid
and crushing of hostile voices. Attempting to convince liberals is hardly a way
to expend our energy – what would we get for our pains? What would constitute
success in this field?
Nothing can make radical
and desperate freedom seem remote more effectively than spending our time in
this way. A much more fruitful response would be to get on with our
investigation and transformation, not wondering what the neighbours think of us
behind their net curtains. Such anxiety about what the papers say will itself
facilitate the further recuperation of Surrealism. To disprove that requires
more confidence in what we do and say ourselves than in the authority of the
papers.
This question accepts
the premise outlined in the enquiry’s introduction, that the modern world has
‘integrated’ Surrealism’s ‘references and discourses’. We’re not fighting for
‘references and discourses’, we’re fighting for Surrealism and Surrealisation.
The newspapers will, in any case, carry on saying this kind of stuff. We need
to continue inventing and creating and loving and dreaming the world that is
necessary to break out of this hell.
Paul Cowdell
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| Collage: Paul Cowdell, Merl Fluin, Patrick Hourihan, Elva Jozef, Jonah Wilberg, Kirsty Woods |
We are launching an enquiry the ambition of
which is to identify what the surrealist
spirit might still mean in a world that appears to have integrated
surrealism into its references and discourses, but in reality tramples upon its
major demands.
This enquiry seems to me to be largely pointless. It
is from the Surrealist group in Paris, and seems to have been distributed to
Surrealist groups elsewhere in the world. It is to be presumed, therefore, that
both those posing the questions and those answering them are already convinced
that the Surrealist spirit does indeed still have profound and urgent meaning.
If we thought that the Surrealist spirit were no longer meaningful, we would
simply have abandoned it, and we would therefore not be answering this enquiry.
Perhaps there are some members of the Surrealist movement who enjoy repeating
to themselves and each other what they already know, who find comfort in
reaffirming basic principles over and over again as if they were new
revelations. We all need comfort from time to time in this vile world we live
in, and the recitation of platitudes can serve that purpose for some. But
comfort is not progress. If Surrealism wishes to retain and even sharpen its
edge – and the desire to do so seems to be what ultimately lies behind this
enquiry – then we need to raise the bar of international Surrealist discourse,
not content ourselves with the endless revision of Surrealism 101.
It seems to us necessary, firstly, to clarify
what the watchwords love, poetry and freedom stand for today.
I do not agree that it is necessary to clarify the
meaning of these words. Nor do I find the definition of keywords in any way an
exciting, inspiring or, most importantly, poetic
project for the development of Surrealism. Indeed, if the opening paragraph of
this enquiry is correct that the world has integrated Surrealist references and
discourses, one of its most successful methods for doing so has precisely been
to reduce Surrealism to keywords, slogans and signifiers. Let’s proceed by
actively manifesting the Surrealist spirit through acts of revolt and concrete
utopianism, not by reducing that spirit to keywords.
We begin by
challenging freedom, with three
questions that you can answer with a word, a sentence or a long speech, or even
criticizing the question. All contributions would be welcome.
The way this
question is phrased, at a level of abstraction and generalisation that is not
rooted in any historical or social context, renders it meaningless.
I’m not interested
in the word ‘freedom’. I am interested in practices of freedom.
Thinking in terms
of practices of freedom necessitates thinking about context, strategy and
tactics. For example, this enquiry, like most international Surrealist
enquiries these days, has been drafted using software from the US company
Microsoft, and is being distributed by email. This means that the questions and
all of the replies will be surveilled, collected and stored by the United
States National Security Agency. What do we as Surrealists have to say about
that? More importantly, what do we do about it? What do we say and do about
freedom in relation to the resurgence of the Far Right in Europe, or the false
narrative of austerity, or the recriminalisation of homosexuality, or the
precarisation of the working class? Let’s have an enquiry that figures out some
answers to those harder questions, and perhaps we’ll get somewhere interesting.
(For me the underlying strategy for approaching all of these questions is the
rejection of abstract labour. I have already written about this elsewhere, and would be very enthusiastic about discussing it in more depth with
Surrealist comrades.)
On a philosophical
level – the level on which this focus on keywords seems to want to operate,
albeit without reaching very deeply into it – I would say that ‘freedom’ has
greatest significance as one half of the dialectic between freedom and
necessity. The Aufhebung of that dialectic – the vanishing point of the
contradiction, to use the familiar Surrealist terminology – is one of the goals
of Surrealism (but only one). That Aufhebung is something of which we all have
direct, if sometimes only fleeting, experience, during acts of love, creation
or poetic illumination, when freedom and necessity cease to be in contradiction
and are thereby elevated to another plane of reality.
2 - Do you think that freedom could scare some to the
degree that they prefer servitude?
This question enrages
me, since it so easily invites responses that treat those who are not
‘enlightened’ – i.e. anyone other than those answering the enquiry – as dupes
and cowards who lack the intelligence or courage to resist their own
oppression. No one in this world today is ever offered a choice between
servitude and freedom. At best we are offered a choice between servitude and
the struggle against servitude, a struggle that is ridiculed as futile on the
one hand and repressed by brutal violence on the other. Millions of people
around the world bravely engage in that struggle every day nonetheless,
individually and collectively, with whatever meagre means are at their
disposal. The question we should be asking is how we can join all those large
and small struggles together and amplify them to the point where capitalism
cracks. Surrealism has enormous potential to crack capitalism in that way, if
only we can get down to the tactical questions of how to do so most
effectively.
3 - In a recent review (Le Monde, 11th October 2013 - ‘Trois poètes libertaires’) we read: “... this pre- and post-war
spirit of surrealism, which may seem so distant now, in its radical and
desperate freedom.” Do you agree with this judgment?
I don’t give a flying fuck what gets written in Le Monde or any other liberal newspaper.
Merl
Fluin
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| Collage: Paul Cowdell, Merl Fluin, Patrick Hourihan, Elva Jozef, Jonah Wilberg, Kirsty Woods |
Dear friends,
We are launching an enquiry
the ambition of which is to identify what the
surrealist spirit might still mean in a world that appears to have
integrated surrealism into its references and discourses, but in reality
tramples upon its major demands.
It seems to us necessary,
firstly, to clarify what the watchwords love,
poetry and freedom stand for today.
We begin by challenging freedom, with three questions that you
can answer with a word, a sentence or a long speech, or even criticizing the question.
All contributions would be welcome.
1 - Does the word freedom still seem to you, here and now,
inspiring?
Yes and no, or more than this, the implied gap between freedom and
inspiration (or mobilisation), as if
between the unfurled tricolor and its effect on the simple pistolier, being
characteristic of the uninspired liberal conception of freedom – ‘doing what one wants’ – which is left in ruins by the fact
that one lacks the imagination to truly want anything, let alone that the
passion of inspiration transcends the language of wanting and willing, this
being the reason why Breton’s emphasis on the political importance of
imaginative freedom (e.g. in Toward a
Free Revolutionary Art) should be understood as being not merely about a
particular kind of freedom but rather as invoking the essence of freedom – Das Freie – the authentically infinite
playground of imagination in which we approximate ourselves, not only by means
of “the full development of material,
intellectual and moral powers” (Bakunin’s definition) but by simultaneous
exploration and creation, using strange new senses and ancient magical
abilities, of alternate identities and distant realities, each eliciting new
rationalities and so negating every successive rational definition of a freedom
nevertheless defined implicitly in every painting or poem no matter how insane.
2 - Do you think that freedom
could scare some to the degree that they prefer servitude?
Yes, this can be easily verified by means of vivisection and endoscopy.
3 - In a recent review (Le Monde, 11th October 2013 -
‘Trois poètes libertaires’) we
read: “... this pre- and post-war spirit of surrealism, which may seem so
distant now, in its radical and desperate freedom.” Do you agree with this
judgment?
I try to steer clear of judgements, especially judgements about
surrealism.
Jonah Wilberg
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| Collage: Paul Cowdell, Merl Fluin, Patrick Hourihan, Elva Jozef, Jonah Wilberg, Kirsty Woods |
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