THE BIRTHING PAINS OF THE MARVELLOUS

I grant you that the morality Surrealism aims at promoting is still in its intuitive phase. It’s quite certain that for the famous “Each man according to his abilities,” “his works,” or “his needs” (materially speaking), not only Surrealism but all poetry worthy of the name has substituted an “Each man according to his desires.” […] In return for abolishing the “verboten” in every tongue, I have no doubt that the most extreme, and even most antisocial, points of desire would soon be absorbed.

(André Breton 1948)

The Unconscious is not a happy place; desire does not always bring joy. To anyone who has ever fallen in love, experienced violence, or simply been woken by a nightmare – that is, to everyone – these truths must be so obvious as to seem not worth stating.

The world against which we struggle is not just the ‘exterior’ world, but also the ‘interior’ world. Insofar as Surrealism seeks to bring these two worlds into communication, it will bring forth not just the beautiful Marvellous which we seek but also, inevitably, the reality we repudiate: the painful, the terrible, the horrific and the repulsive. The extent to which the history of the international Surrealist movement has been marked by acrimony, conflict and pain is testament to Surrealism’s propensity to call forth these monsters. They arise from the Unconscious not only in the sense of the Unconscious of individuals, but also from the Unconscious as an intersubjective force that operates between as well as within us. Collective dreaming can produce nightmares no less horrific than individual dreaming.

Such nightmares demand to be taken seriously as an essential aspect of Surrealism’s pre-figurative nature, just like the Surreality Principle itself. In living by Surrealist ideals we are striving paradoxically to act in harmony with the principles of a reality which does not yet exist but which we ourselves are trying to bring about: “Surreality – a relation in which all notions are merged together – […] the common horizon of religions, magic, poetry, intoxications, and of all life that is lowly – that trembling honeysuckle you deem sufficient to populate the sky with for us” (Louis Aragon 1924).

According to Freud, nightmares are the dreams which bear most clearly the marks of the conflict between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle. Mutual anger and pain among Surrealist comrades bear the marks of the conflict between the Reality Principle of the world as it is and the Surreality Principle of the world as it will be: they are negative signs of the Marvellous, indentations or reverse impressions of the Surreality Principle. The nightmares we live through can guide us no less surely towards our revolutionary goals than our lovelier dreams of the Marvellous, but we must be prepared to regard them without flinching, without evading them or retreating to the comforts of narcissism, without losing courage or taking the easy route of either self-defence or self-blame.

By paying attention to our collective nightmares we can open a path by which those aspects of eroticism which are feared, rejected or abhorred may ultimately become transubstantiated, may stand revealed as a form of the Marvellous which can only be recognised by a fantastic leap of Surrealist Imagination – a leap begun in fear and rage, and ended in love and wonder.

***

The morning after I drafted my first notes on this posting – several months ago now – my close friend Stephen told me that he had dreamt about me that night. In his dream I had told him: “To make sense of a dream you have to make a circle with a monster at one end and an eye at the other. If you run away from the monster, the eye will tell you about your dream.”

Surely this reveals the true meaning of our dream-wars: an eye for an eye to reveal the truth of desire?

THE SURREALITY PRINCIPLE

Surrealism has sometimes been accused – especially by those who, either deliberately or through ignorance, actively misrepresent it – of being a kind of escapism, immersed in a pursuit of fantasies and pleasures which is at best a retreat from reality, and at worst complicit with the hedonism of consumer society. These accusations are risibly false, and yet the ease with which they are made should give us pause. If the place of pleasure in Surrealist praxis appears so childishly simplistic to others, if Surrealist pleasure seems so inadequate to social reality, how are Surrealists to correct such views? Could it be, perhaps, that we Surrealists ourselves have conceived these issues in too simplistic a way? What is the place of pleasure in Surrealism?

One powerful strand of Surrealist thought, developed over several decades, has seen the task of Surrealism as the liberation of the Pleasure Principle from the Reality Principle, where the former is identified with unconscious desires and the latter with the repressive social and political order. It has been argued, for example, that the Pleasure Principle embodies a ‘will to authentic human integrity’; that the Reality Principle stands for the ‘egoistical irresponsibility’ of capitalism and its ecological destructiveness; that these two principles are as implacably opposed to each other as liberty is to repression; and that Surrealism is the demand that ‘the reality principle gives up its throne to the pleasure principle’ (Bruno Solarik, ‘The Walking Abyss’). Influential and inspiring as this argument has been, both politically and imaginatively, I do not follow it. I consider it mistaken in its characterisation of the relationship between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle, and hence mistaken in its conception of the tasks of contemporary Surrealism.

As it has been conceived by many Surrealists, this pleasure/reality dichotomy (Pleasure Principle = authentic integrity and freedom, i.e. good, Reality Principle = repression and irresponsibility, i.e. bad) is at once too clear-cut and too static. In a word, it is simplistic. It assumes that the Pleasure Principle, in all its supposed infantile and aboriginal authenticity, pre-exists the Reality Principle of social conformity, and moreover that it does so in a fully formed state which is then simply repressed by the Reality Principle. Thus the Pleasure Principle is implicitly ascribed a ‘natural’ status which frames it within another dichotomy, that between nature and civilisation; and that dichotomy too is presented as a static and implacable opposition, where nature is equated with goodness and authenticity. This conception of the Pleasure Principle has often been presented as the theoretical basis of the Surrealist rage against what today passes for ‘civilisation’ world-wide. I share the rage, but I reject the theorisation, for the following reasons:

1. I have argued elsewhere (Two Extracts from a Prolegomenon to a Surrealist Manifesto of Eroticism, a.k.a. the first SLAG manifesto) that desire and pleasure are neither ‘natural’ nor ‘originary’, and so I will not rehearse that argument at length here. Suffice it to say that in my view the Pleasure Principle is not a pre-given or natural paradise lost to which we can return by simply overthrowing ‘reality’. This is not least because the infantile pleasures at stake in the Pleasure Principle, from feeding to excretion to physical caresses, are themselves firmly embedded in social reality (the sexual division of labour, the relative material poverty of the child’s carers, variability in family forms which are not always – and certainly not preferably – Oedipal, etc. etc.). Moreover it must not be forgotten that the Reality Principle is no less a part of the Unconscious than the Pleasure Principle and that the latter cannot therefore claim a monopoly on ‘unconscious desires’. The ‘reality’ against which Surrealists struggle is not just the ‘exterior reality’ of capitalism, patriarchy, racism and environmental catastrophe, but also the ‘interior reality’ of egotism, Oedipality and the super-ego. This is precisely why the Surrealist revolution is psychical as well as material – because psychical reality and material reality are inextricably intertwined. Now as always we come back to Breton’s celebrated dictum: ‘“Transform the world,” Marx said; “change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.’ When we have changed the Reality Principle, the Pleasure Principle will also change, and vice versa: an eroticism which is truly free, like a civilisation which is truly free, will have been transfigured beyond recognition.
   
2. It hardly needs restating that Surrealism since its first wave of activity has been concerned to seek the dialectical vanishing point between contradictions. This applies not just to the apparent contradiction between dreams and ‘reality’ but also, paradoxically, between freedom and necessity, as encapsulated in the supremely Surrealist understanding of the necessity of freedom. Moreover the positing of such contradictions as ‘mutually exclusive’ rests on an identitarian logic which is alien to Surrealist thought. Therefore our first impulse when faced with any apparent dichotomy, such as that between ‘pleasure’ and ‘reality’, should not be simplistically to align ourselves with one side or the other, but rather to seek the vanishing point between them by bringing them into dialectical play. In this case, the dialectical play between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle brings forth a new term which embodies the necessity of freedom: the SURREALITY PRINCIPLE.

At the vanishing point between freedom and necessity lies the necessity of freedom. At the vanishing point between exterior reality and interior reality lies Surreality. And at the vanishing point between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle lies the Surreality Principle. Surrealism’s task is to put the Surreality Principle into practice.

This is a paradox: to put the Surreality Principle into practice requires the changing of life and the transformation of the world; but life can only be changed and the world can only be transformed by acting in accordance with the Surreality Principle. In this respect it embodies the Surrealism’s essentially pre-figurative nature: we are striving to follow the principles of a reality which does not yet exist, but which we ourselves are trying to bring about precisely by following its principles.

This is not a question of rejecting the Reality Principle, or of setting up a romanticised version of the Pleasure Principle into which the requirements of thoughtful activity or physical survival, either for the individual or for the collective, somehow do not intrude. But whereas the Reality Principle represses the Imagination in accordance with the demands of accepted social reality, the Surreality Principle demands the abolition of accepted social reality in accordance with the demands of the Surrealist Imagination.

‘Surreality will reside in reality itself and will be neither superior nor exterior to it. And conversely, because the container shall also be the contained. […] I resist with all my strength the temptations which […] might have the immediate tendency to withdraw thought from life as well as place life under the aegis of thought’ (André Breton 1928). The Surreality Principle refuses neither civilisation nor the exercise of Reason. It demands the magical thinking of Surreason in the revolutionary pursuit of new and wholly beautiful forms of civilisation. When dreams, eroticism, chance, poetry, love and freedom are the foundation stones of all activity – only then will the word ‘civilisation’ have any meaning.

SURREASON AND IMAGINATION

It is a common misapprehension that Surrealists, with our love of the irrational, the mad and the nonsensical, favour the Imagination over Reason. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Surrealism.

For us, it is only Imagination which can grasp Truth, perceive Reality, or apprehend Freedom. Imagination is what provokes and is provoked by the Marvellous, that manifestation of poetry in everyday life which gives Surrealism its meaning; Imagination is what touches and is touched by the surreality which Surrealism seeks; Imagination does all things Reason is supposed to do, but does them more passionately, more perceptively, more freely. In other words, for Surrealists, Imagination is the highest form of Reason.

In the words of our comrades in the Stockholm Surrealist Group, ‘Surrealism is the imaginary solution of the contradiction between Enlightenment and Romanticism’. Our surrationality is found at the vanishing point between these two great intellectual movements: it transubstantiates both and is reducible to neither. This must be understood clearly as the politico-philosophical grounds of our repeated attacks on liberalism even – indeed especially – at a time when liberal Enlightenment values such as secularism, tolerance and democracy are coming under attack from the forces of fundamentalism and totalitarianism. Our own attacks on liberalism do not simply rest on a rejection of Enlightenment rationalism in favour of the adrenaline thrills of revolutionary Romanticism. Surrealists spurn liberalism not because we reject the Enlightenment, but because as a movement we have already passed through and beyond it.

It is well known that Surrealism opposes rationalism – culturally, philosophically and politically. Our fanatical devotion to poetry, eroticism, Mad Love and the Marvellous is in itself a total refusal of rationalism in all its forms: bureaucracy, technocracy, the equation of knowledge with domination, the calculation of ends and means, in short, all that can be designated under the rubric of the disenchantment of everyday life. But Surrealism refuses with no less vehemence those bogus forms of re-enchantment, commoditised and/or supernaturalised, which are today being taken as palliatives for the ills of global capitalism and imperialism. Religion, superstition, off-the-peg ‘spirituality’, New Age beliefs ranging from ley lines to crystal healing to goddess worship, all this is just so much delusional shit. Surrealists’ deployment of such apparently mystical forces as tarot, divination, ecstatic visions, the conjuring of demons and the like is not an endorsement of the belief in the supernatural but an alchemical transformation of it into poetry: the distinctively analogical movement of thought of Surrealism is akin to that of magical systems, with the crucial difference that Surrealists revolt against all supernatural or mystical ‘explanations’ which are the enemies of the Marvellous no less than of politico-philosophical materialism.

We treasure the Marvellous not because it offers any glimpses of another world, but because it demonstrates the revolutionary truth of what this world can and must become.

Surrealist Imagination is the only viable form of Reason.

Reason demands Surrealist Revolution as the only viable form of Freedom.

‘Transform the world,’ Marx said; ‘change life,’ Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.

THE END OF CIVILISATION? (Response to an Enquiry)

The following text responds to an enquiry on 'The End of Civilisation?' posed by the Prague Surrealist Group in November 2005. The questions were distributed to members of the international Surrealist movement; responses are being collated and will appear in a future issue of Analogon.


1) Which stage of development (rise, stabilisation, decline) describes our present Euro-American civilisation (i.e. roughly in the period of the Modern Age) in view of the ambitions and qualities by which this period identifies itself and distinguishes itself from other parallel civilisations (Islam, the Third world, etc.)

2) What kind of shift (progressive or regressive) do you perceive within the last 30-40 years? What could you name as the most substantial characterising moment (paradigm, value orientation…) of the civilisational/cultural, social, psychosocial or other transformation.

I will take these two questions together.

There is a level at which the answers to these questions seem fairly obvious. We are living under a form of advanced capitalism which is globalised and consumerist, which can perhaps most pithily be summed up in Debord’s phrase as the Society of the Spectacle, and which is currently inseparable from US imperialism. This has a double aspect. On the one hand, the acceleration of globalisation makes it increasingly difficult to talk about different national ‘societies’ or regional ‘civilisations’ as discrete entities in any meaningful way. On the other hand the interests of US imperialism are well served by the ideology of ‘Western civilisation’ as something which is discrete and indeed in need of aggressive protection from its enemies, in which role they have most recently cast ‘Islamic fundamentalism’.

If one goes beyond this level, however, it appears that these answers – and even the questions themselves – have not yet moved as far as possible beyond the anthropocentrism with which surrealism today is so concerned. The classification of history into ‘periods’, and the narrative of those periods’ ‘evolution’, still places humankind in what Svankmajer has called the leading role. Indeed the problem of how to conceive time outside of anthropocentric history has been before us since at least Arcanum 17. In this book Breton evokes the figure of the child-woman precisely because she is – so he claims – outside time, but I would argue to the contrary this figure is still beholden both to anthropocentrism and to patriarchy. By far the more successful break with anthropocentric time, although Breton himself does not quite recognise this, is embodied in the Percé Rock, which as he notes is not eternal but nevertheless comes in and out of existence outside of any human timescale. Arcanum 17 begins with the marvellous organic and inorganic rhythms of the rock, the sea and the seabirds. I think we can justly regard those rhythms as movements of non-anthropocentric time, as the pulsing of inhuman life. Where Breton inhabits the anthropocentric time of war in 1944, and we inhabit the anthropocentric time of war in 2005, there is also avian time, marine time, mineral time. Thus whereas Breton conjures ‘the salvation of the earth by woman’, I suggest that a more fully anti-anthropocentric view of history might instead imagine the salvation of the earth by seabirds. As surrealism moves in this direction, new fields of enquiry open up before us, from the erotic rhythms of cell division to the alien passions of a coral reef, from the convulsive beauty of whales to the objective chance of microbes.

Here then we have two views of time. One places humankind at centre stage and diagnoses the goods and ills of humanity under its various forms of civilisation – and indeed, one might add, under its forms of barbarism, a concept which is no less anthropocentric than that of civilisation. The other rejects anthropocentrism so decisively that it is a view of time which can barely be called historical at all in any sense in which that term is usually understood. The difficult task of surrealist praxis now is not simply to spurn one of these views in favour of the other, nor to try to fuse them into a single idea, but rather to bring them into dialectical relationship with each other. In doing this we may be able to analyse the current status of human civilisation while at the same time moving beyond the anthropocentric limitations of either civilisation or barbarism.

Not simply 'London Surrealists': A MANIFESTO FOR SURREALIST LONDON

'The matter of our work is everywhere present', wrote the old alchemists, and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone's throw of King's Cross Station.

~ Arthur Machen, Things Near and Far.

The SURREALIST LONDON ACTION GROUP (SLAG) is not simply a group of Surrealists who happen to live in or around the London area. SLAG is a group which celebrates the Surrealist city, and actively seeks the SURREALISATION of London and of the lives of all who live and work in it.

The Surrealist approach to London is psychogeographical first and foremost, but it is NOT the pseudo-poetic, romanticised, nostalgic, all too fashionable – and ultimately conservative approach of, say, Iain Sinclair, or Peter Ackroyd, as presented in the latter's London: the Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000). ‘Psychogeography’ in the commoditised form has become indistinguishable from tourism, and ‘secret London’ just another current in the constant stream of images which alienate us from each other, ourselves and our surroundings in the Society of the Spectacle: a vision infected with what André Breton in the Second Surrealist Manifesto called ‘a cancer of the mind which consists in thinking all too sadly that certain things "are,'' while others, which might well be, "are not".’

Under this regime of the Spectacle, with its tourist ‘experiences’ and its media image-fetishism, many people feel that they know what to expect of London, just as they feel they know what to expect of Surrealism. Superficial aspects of London have been turned into media images, just as the superficial (‘mannerist’) aspects of Surrealism have been adopted by the media and culture industries- this is ‘surrealism’ reduced to style (i.e. 'surrealism' with a small ‘s’), with little or nothing to do with Surrealism as a movement. Genuinely Surrealist London, like the Surrealist Movement itself, is in constant flux, just as reality itself shifts, mutates and so reveals its inconsistencies: ‘a world that some call reality but which is only an incessant discovery; a mystery reborn indefinitely’ (Pierre Mabille).

Surrealist psychogeography is in an altogether different vein. Our expeditions through space and place operate not at the level of the image, but at the level of the encounter, at once more fleeting and more visceral than the mythopoesis-lite of tourism and nostalgia. The city for us is not a passive background or external world to be mapped, recorded, classified, and ultimately rationalised in the spirit of Augustan taxonomy; something to serve us with the illusion of gaining control over the uncontainable, but an active subject, to be conjured as one might conjure an egregore and explored as one might explore a lover. Our encounters with London are not just with its physical locations but also with its dreams, desires, fears and loves, its premonitory horrors and revolutionary hopes: in short, with its SURREALITY.

In London we station ourselves on the periphery of the comprehensible and are taken to the realms of the improbable and beyond, to encounter Imagination grappling with Reason, or to be more precise, Imagination avenging itself upon Reason, joyfully and without mercy. In our 'elective places' - fixed points, multiple magnetic poles in the space-time continuum around which (r)evolve Surrealist place and Surrealist life: the secret roads, ancient subterranean rivers, plague pits, those tear-jerkingly poignant junk shops of the Holloway Road and stalls of Cheshire Street, the murky waters of the Serpentine, the reality-check architectural contrast between the Square Mile and Bethnal Green, the soon-to-be-defiled loveliness of the Lea Valley; and such street names as Bleeding Heart Yard (EC1), Cornflower Terrace (SE22), Black Lion Lane (W6), The Ring (W2), Crutched Friars (EC3), Gothic Road (Twickenham) and Candy Street (E3) - we embrace perpetual correspondences and submit to objective chance, conduct an archaeology of the present and future, discover points of departure into the infinite depths of London's erotic universe. We haunt the city and are haunted by it: we love its absurdity, its sublime kitsch, its artificiality, we delight in its playfulness, no less than its fevers and migraines, capricious cruelties and abominable debaucheries, tantrums and seizures. Marvellous phantoms haunt London: a stroll in the park can become an event of eternal significance, an unfolding of myth, marked by strange encounters, talismanic found objects and chance provocations.

Of course our methods are not confined to London. They can and should be copied and adapted to reproduce the encounter with Surreality in any environment, in any city, town, village or field, elsewhere, anywhere or (with the Surrealist atopos) nowhere. But the SLAG takes London as the centre of its Surrealist explorations and experiences. It is the place where we live Surrealist life. Marooned on the city’s rocks, we dive into the ‘mystery and melancholy of the streets’, and moving like a ‘blind swimmer’ (Max Ernst) we seek out the wonders, the signs and portents, concealed behind the surfaces of the everyday. Ever in pursuit of the ineffable, something that lies just over the horizon of the visible, the habitual, the predictable, the banal – something that endlessly mutates and proliferates, something that ultimately is not a ‘thing’ at all but is movement itself, analogical restlessness, the permanent revolution of metonymy –the Surrealist is like the hero of Georges Limbour’s Le Cheval de Venise, ‘never lost, for the path he takes is always towards what he does not know.’ The Hunting of the Surrealist Snark, the pursuit of Surreality, ought not to be undertaken in the shallow, tainted pools of art books, of paintings in galleries or objects in museums, but in the city streets, in the very heart of the demonic angel where desire is paramount and ‘dream’ and ‘reality’ are indistinguishable, become one. Here we may be privileged to observe the transfiguration of the ordinary into the fabulous.

French Surrealists have seen Paris as both a 'soluble city', and as a woman; the late, Leeds-based Surrealist Anthony Earnshaw saw his city as a slattern; we see our city as a multi-headed OVERLY-EMOTIONAL HERMAPHRODITE, with putrescent erogenous zones, vulvae gaping wide in tunnels and doorways, clitorises in the street furniture, arseholes in alleyways, dildos throbbing and phalloi bursting from the erectile-gherkin architecture. With its myriad snapping jaws and delirious mouths kissing itself with cannibal tongues, London is a city continually devouring itself, digesting itself in an unstoppable act of MAD LOVE.

Paul Cross, Jill Fenton, Merl

February 2006

An emission of the SLAG ~ SURREALIST LONDON ACTION GROUP

SLAG projects are online at: http://labelletenebreuse.blogspot.com
http://robberbridegroom.blogspot.com
Email:

la_belle_tenebreuse@hotmail.co.uk

Surrealist London is a city that will always remain to be invented