Open letter to academic students of surrealism
By Mattias Forshage
1. We share a passion. But we are on different sides of a fence. We started off with some kind of negotiating back in ’66 in Cerisy under the recognition that we represented very different approaches to the same topic but possibly should be able to talk to each other – but then our party weakened and was fragmented and turned to focusing on more underground activity, and you thought you were being left alone and unsurveilled so you got cocky. Now it’s gone pretty far, many of us are either desperate or innocent enough to even play along with you entirely on your terms, and many of you have joined our collaborations and collectives probably without properly realising that there was a fence to jump.
Ah but there was, and it was crucial. The “Feuerbach Fence”, if you will. Whether to be content with just interpreting the world, or impatiently trying to put anything to use as a tool of change. Making something a topic for a publication, or integrating it as a component in one’s grappling with life. Surrealism rests on a departure. Surrealism keeps emerging as an abandonment of concerns for its usefulness in cultural categories within bourgeois ideology, we do not wish to find ourselves places within art, literature, politics and scholarship, we do not wish to reform said fields, we want to change the world and transform life.
This may be either difficult or easy to grasp, but it clearly provides a demarcation line, and it may make things more difficult for you. A living topic seems to demand a special kind of seriousness and modesty, if working as you do under an imperative to be impartial, transparent, consequential, unambiguous and provide references. Things look different from the other side and a lot of this may be inaccessible to you. Having living surrealists claiming to practice and embody the thing makes it so much more difficult to do a neat autopsy. Furthermore, it tends to make us ungrateful. Since we are not particularly eager to have our movement committed to an easily circumscribed and easily summarised functional part in art history or whichever humanities subdiscipline, we’re not appeased just by someone saying something nice about surrealism. Because the nice that is being said is typically for all kinds of wrong reasons and objectively working to lay surrealism to rest.
I am not picking a fight here. I am just trying to point out that our positions are objectively different and are connected with different sets of commitments and freedoms. So please note too, that this is not about what type of “representativity” the author of this text might have or lack with regards to the surrealist movement, since I am merely trying to point out the consequences of the difference in the objective positions here.
We could still try to have a discussion, of course. We might force each other to clarify our concepts and conclusions. We might direct each other to certain relevant authors or fields of enquiry. But you would be happier if we simply weren’t there (if the corpse wasn’t talking back, especially if confidently so), and we would be happier if you would focus more on something that was in fact directly useful and constructive in the long term.
2. So, please do a bit more empirical work and a little less interpretative work. This is useful for everybody and not just for your own career.
There is really still a lot to be dug up and clarified about who many persons in the history of surrealism were, and what many surrealist activities were actually doing, what the networks looked like, where the funding came from, and even what backgrounds some famous surrealists came from. Whatever is found while doing empirical groundwork can be useful from all kinds of perspectives, by all kinds of people, all over the world, for a long time ahead. For us, insight into circumstances, details of activities, and perhaps people’s backgrounds contribute to the experience and allows us to further some lines of experimentation that were dropped. For you, it gives you the opportunity to ask more questions, more informed questions, and more answerable questions, and specifically also to dismiss poor hypotheses and interpretations based on various mistaken and trivialising assumptions. And not the least, in the larger perspective, making data available is meaningful for the future since they may become useful in types of explorations which simply have not yet been thought of.
Whereas all these interpretations and reinterpretations are often very schematic, crude and repetitive. Interpretations and reinterpretations can be important too, of course, but mainly if done with vast background knowledge, and either a remarkable sensibility or a particularly clever employment of method, and with a certain modesty and actual critical evaluation concerning the results. But all too often it is just an exercise in employing standard methods or just an excuse to get an opportunity to write about a particular work without actually adding anything at all that hasn’t been said before or which is just pointless or which diminishes rather than opens up the contents of that work. All these little observations based on standard more or less popular psychology, on recognition of influences from within the cultural canon, how often do they actually clarify, open up, and facilitate use of a particular work or a body of work? Not too often. Such trivial observations may earn you a degree or a particular grant, but no one is interested in reading them and they do not contribute to knowledge in any meaningful way.
Perhaps I don’t need to say here that reinterpretations in the light of a general advancement of certain critical angles may need to be done across the board. An obvious example is of course looking at gender strategies. This does not mean that anything said from an antisexist (or anticolonial, etc) perspective is automatically valid – you still need to consider the width of historical circumstances and sensibly consider both openings and obstacles, what was (and is) possible and what was not, for which reasons. Perhaps I don’t need to say here that many particular instances of interpretation can be quite meaningful too, but for individual works, campaigns and tendencies usually when considering them in the light of the surrealist aims and the surrealist experience on the whole, integrating observations from various genres and areas of expression (you know that pictorial art, poetic text, theory, politics, games, music, film, occultism, anthropology etc are not at all as separated for us as they are for you who work within a structure built on specialisation and on partitioning reality into distinct fields), or applying knowledge from other disciplines and sectors which were not obvious to be relevant and thus may reveal things, and doing it sensibly with a degree of selfreflection and criticism. Some people can do it. Perhaps I don’t need to say all this, because I am just trying to make the point that it would be so nice and so useful if the standard student thesis was about digging up and clarifying an empirical material rather than providing one more redundant and unoriginal interpretation of a work.
3. Please exercise some powers of discrimination within your own field, and openly criticise those who do crappy groundwork, pointless interpretations, get basic facts just wrong, or exert an ill hidden aversion and hostility towards the subject that only allows them to see things from a particular viewpoint. Despite the competitive nature of the business, there seems to be quite a widespread “esprit de corps” or embarrassment or just lame powerlessness and it is rather unusual (at least from an external viewpoint) to see fellow scholars simply dismissing scholarly nonsense-talkers, and that the rare such dismissals that do occur don’t really take, and the really bad work keeps popping up and being referred to over and over again.
Come on, no more letting straightforward mistakes and sloppiness due to personal agendas just pass, no more confusing women with the same first name, no more mixing up tragic fates of one and the other, no more this or that person was a stalinist who clearly wasn’t, no more mixing up different 1924 publications, different declarations on similar topics, different positionings and dialogues at different times visavis Freud, or the Communist Party, no more surrealism abandoned politics in the 30s, no more Nadja is a novel, no more surrealism died a particular year, no more CG Jung was a crucial influence on Breton, no more Bataille was as much a leader of the surrealist movement, no more considering some voices as devastating critics of surrealism at dates when they were still active in the movement, nor on the other hand considering second thoughts of long renegades as official and representative statements for surrealism, no more Cocteau was a surrealist, no more Breton was just a boring oaf and a misogynist and a cowardly control-freak who just wanted to rule over people, no more surrealism is misogynistic at core, no more dismissing postwar surrealism as a few old men with a lot of unoriginal pupils and parrots, etc etc etc.
4. So for overall methodology, please study primary texts more than secondary texts. With so much poor scholarship having been produced, it tends to perpetuate itself objectively, keeping itself and its involuntary or malicious myths alive by the combination of scholarly methodology (that you should be aware of what has been done in your topic) and the lack of powers of critical discrimination as to what is reliable and what is not.
It is primary material, sources directly forged within surrealist activity, that makes most sense for situating concepts, concerns, aims and strategies in surrealism. It would be very nice and rather clarifying if a reference to a source text, which actually confirms the occurence within surrealism, would take a larger place than the references to standard secondary works repeating or paraphrasing or interpreting the things that were said in the source text, and doing so correctly or incorrectly, with a certain bias.
Then, beside that, there are of course autobiographical sources, which are problematic and very useful too. They are based in firsthand experience and are very useful for getting circumstances and frames of mind correct, but of course, they also display an individual’s struggle to cope with this experience, often struggling to forcefully rationalise and delineate things that would otherwise still be pertinent and challenging, often reconstructing a single official version where things are actually still unsettled, often specifically aimed to rationalise a person’s abandoning surrealist activity, or their convictions that surrealism is not there anymore, or, on the other hand, nostalgically idealising the oh so alive surrealist years in life, which allows for just as bad rationalisations but still far more proper recognising of the impact and potential of lived situations. An autobiographical source is always a source for what it is talking about as well as for the struggle to rationalise the experience by the person talking. It often remains far more useful for enlightening a reader on what surrealism is about than a bundle of standard historiographical sources cooked up by critics or by academics.
Actually, a proper critical study of secondary texts would be rather useful on the whole if it would clearly point out which of these secondary sources are not reliable and if it would lead students to stop repeating the same types of schematic interpretations and the same types of not-so-original revelations, regardless of whether eternal and completely trivial or just fashionable and simplified….
5. Please stick to a historical sense of surrealism, and do not establish your own original or not-so original interpretations of a much wider circumscription and a rather different content – unless you do it consciously, for the sake of a particular exploration, argue well for it, and evaluate your results. Sure, Bataille and surrealism have a highly intriguing relationship, but all the interesting things highlighted by the arguments for and against a certain circumscription in that case will never be considered by those who are all for liberal inclusions from the beginning. Surrealism is clearly part of the outlook of various popculture icons like David Lynch, Jodorowsky, Topor & Arrabal, Kate Bush, Dario Argento, HR Giger, William S Burroughs, Monty Python, but they hardly represent just as much surrealism as the surrealists who developed surrealism and maintained it in the surrealist movement. It is the historical origins that make up a type case, which everything that you want to include in the same concept will have to be compared with, and especially in terms of perspective, aim, attitude, dynamics and framework, not so much in terms of particular similarities in imagery and references, because that might be a trivial case of direct or indirect influence. Any liberal urge to let anything be a case of a particular concept too, hardly contributes to the clarification of that concept, unless you actually develop a set of criteria based on the historical case, and is true to its origins and related to its historical development.
6. Please modestly realise that there is very little room for you to be creative, to develop surrealism, and to make new discoveries for surrealism, in your academic forums. These are things that surrealists do as part of surrealist activity, which goes on on the other side of the fence. If you are trying to do it without being part of a movement and a spiritual framework, it remains freely floating without an actual connection, there is no one there to assimilate it in a collective experience and play with it and further it, it has no foundation and it has no actual audience, it does not quite have a framework to make sense or not make sense. Also, it tends to be methodologically vague, non-reproducible and more or less arbitrary from the viewpoint of your own discipline, so it is indeed usually poor scholarship.
On the other hand, the unearthing and further exploration of those surrealist precursors that are being integrated into surrealism as parts of surrealist activity only, might clearly be a kind of meeting ground. Several of the surrealists do significant parts of this digging with a scholarly method, where some use and some would perhaps benefit from using certain academic tools – whereas those academics that unravel the hidden histories, connections and biographies are indeed far more useful to surrealism than those who focus on the surrealists themselves!
7. And please modestly realise that the academic framework is not a particularly favorable position for forwarding radicalness. Indeed, there have been numerous efforts and attempts to turn the university into a stronghold of resistance and a place for developing useful radical theory and even practices, and locally it has even worked, mostly in the past, but perhaps somewhere even today. Nowadays in most places it is far more difficult, not the least since an institutional position is strongly associated with a heavy load of administrative tasks as well as productivity demands in terms of either research published or number of students processed and passed. And sure, being something of a retirement home for former activists may make sections of academia a pleasant breathing space in contrast to several other environments, but hardly an active stronghold of struggle.
Clearly, if the stronghold thing works, this objectively situates that academic work on the activist side of the Feuerbach fence too, it is about changing the world and transforming life. Clearly, this has been done mainly within social sciences, where methodological and conceptual rigor are crucial tools for understanding and thus being able to change things, so that the expectancies from within the discipline and those from external more urgent concerns may actually go hand in hand. The overall topic of these disciplines is the society we live in, and thus partake in and contribute to maintaining. Then reinterpretation, furthered vigilance, questioned behavioral standards, and exposure of power relationships may contribute to actually change things.
Whereas surrealism is a different type of activity and depends much more on the irreproducible and elusive, of facing and welcoming ambiguity and the unknown, of relying on chance and involuntary and emergent effects and free associations, and thus clearly ill-fitting within an academic framework, since it is rather an opposite of the academic method. And if someone wants to “reform” the academic standards so as to be able to accommodate these operations too, this actually means watering down the academic method so much that it becomes quite useless and lacks a raison d’etre. There might be single examples where university funding has been successfully diverted to playing surrealist games, instigating exciting experimentation, and pursuing surrealist theory together with students, which may perhaps even facilitate learning, but this is then entirely outside academic standards and technically a case of embezzlement, which is not a bad thing.
8. Please consider surrealist experience as one of the crucial aspects of surrealism. To the surrealists, it is surrealist experience much more than surrealist texts and artworks which is what is being produced by surrealist activity and surrealist creativity. In a sense, this is accessible to everybody if you step back a little bit from your preconceived expectations and categories – but in another sense, it is indeed to a certain extent inaccessible for those who remain on the wrong side of the fence. Clearly, a surrealist can claim anything based on surrealist experience, whereas a surrealism scholar cannot (or at least shouldn’t be able to) claim very much at all, since the scholar needs a reference (and hopefully not just a reference but some kind of critical overview).
Anyway, not just the insight of being informed by surrealist experience, but the recognition that surrealist experience may be a crucial part of what surrealism is, is very often what is blatantly missing in scholarly reconstructions of surrealism. To some extent this must be so, but it would also be very much easier for the scholar to say something insightful and relevant about surrealism if ready to recognise the crucialness of experience, to apply a certain modesty and realise what it is that it might be missing that separates their own schematic and inflexible reconstruction of surrealism from active living surrealism. But then, it is in fact not at all impossible to make surrealist experience a topic of scholarly exploration too, which has been done and is being done by some, but then it is a bit paradoxical, and demands a very sensitive approach, and is certainly not an avenue open to everybody.
9. Please remember that your discipline too is a historical phenomenon with a studiable trajectory. Sure, the scattered scholarly commentary on surrealism had been around for a long time, but as an academic discipline it was quite new when the invitation went out to the colloquium of Cerisy 1966 (and the first specialised journal of yours came the same year). A crucial year, and there are different ways of interpreting the symbolism of it being the year of Breton’s death.
There are of course alternative frameworks for scholarly activity, all with their own conditions and histories, and varying relationships and fates visavis the university world. There has been café intellectuals, workers movement intellectuals and various popular movement intellectuals and activist struggle intellectuals, intellectual critics who were usually either journalists or creative writers themselves, editors, curators, etc. Universities were often but one among many bases for scholarly activity, usually rather difficult to attain as well as not particularly attractive… In the French context for example, surrealism is one of several movements that maintained a completely extra-academic organisation (unlike for example the structuralists, existentialists, marxists, poststructuralists, postmodernists…) which has been important to its integrity (and also probably the reason why it was never widely recognised as for example a philosophy?).
So you were just establishing yourselves as a collective agent in 1966 when we were weakened by a major crisis. And indeed you have grown since, both in the sense that your discipline has spread over the world and involves a lot of students these days, and that standards have gone up a bit and actually many of you get basic facts right and some of you say really interesting things – both of which probably have to do with the fact that it has become much more difficult to be an extra-academic scholar these days. Much more places than before ask for a diploma. Many traditional platforms for intellectual discussion and exploration have been strangled (while many new forums are in some respects far less serious). Those critics who still keep a job are very often either sensationalist clowns struggling across several media to be “influencers”, or just academics with a somewhat wider interface. Of course it is a good thing that the universities nowadays have a broader base of recruitment, but when they are also supposed to deliver a larger part of the scholarly discourse on the whole, it seems quite obvious that this discourse on a societal level has a narrowed focus due to the particular standards and methods as well as the culture and power structure of academia.
But while you have grown, and perhaps grown comfortably assured of not having your own relevance and legitimacy questioned, we have stayed, and it is still we who so to speak hold the founding documents, as well as the right to stay silent, and thus the right to be elusive, and unrecognisable, and if needed, furious.
10. So please do not expect the surrealists to conform to your standards of disinterested civilised discussion. Different sides of the fence, you know. Our secrets may not be secret in a simple sense, it is basically all out in the open if you will, but there are very different perspectives to the secrets of surrealism depending on whether you share the experience and take part or if you don’t. You will probably simply misunderstand what we are doing and why.
For you, surrealism is part of the professional sphere, something which you make or hope to make your living off of, and thus you will have to prove that you and your study of surrealism is nice and competitive and useful for this society – whereas for us, surrealism is the enemy of this society, and when someone wants to pay us for that it is more or less suspicious and probably a bad sign (we might take the money anyway, or at least many of us will under some circumstances, based on a personal calculation of compromises for survival). Your objective aim is to make surrealism something that is containable, understandable, overviewable, and contained, in a scholarly text about it, whereas we on our side do the very opposite, we hope that surrealism is something that will be able to propel us into the unknown at any time and that will metamorphically connect to all aspects of life and reinvent itself and be quite elusive even as it remains quite distinct and recognisable within the framework of our activity and experience.
When we disagree on something, for you it is just a matter of diverging professional opinion, whereas for us it is about life. When you are clearly wrong about something, it is a professional hazard and you can’t really be expected to have had time to read up on everything, whereas for us you are disrespectfully trying to tangle up the vehicle of our deepest aspirations. Many of us will be angry and rude from time to time, mainly because we are defending our collective quest for another society and for poetry and truth and justice, and it is all a matter of life and death and we see no obligation whatsoever to stick to bourgeois standards of civlised behavior, whereas when you lose your temper, you are just lapsing into unprofessional behavior and in a not so relevant way defending your egos (and perhaps your means of livelihood). And especially, many of us will be “secretive” in the sense that we prefer to have much of our most crucial experiences, and sometimes our entire activities, outside the public eye, with a special and sometimes unintelligible concern for integrity. So if some of you will whine that you prefer the surrealism of the welcoming, regularly publishing and frequently posting surrealists before that of the allegedly obscurantist ones, this is on the one hand an indication that you have misunderstood something crucial about what surrealism is, and on the other hand it is an all too understandable personal feeling but not really an opinion at all since it merely objectively states your objective position on the other side of that fence.
You are certainly not in a position to correct us, with logical necessity, since you study surrealism and we practise surrealism, meaning that among other things we are actually making it up as we go, which is something that we can do from our perspective but that you cannot do from yours. Of course based on the standards on our side of the fence, we’ll have to stay true to the spirit of the surrealist tradition but also to the immediate demands of the circumstances of our activity in the present, and even if we come up with something seemingly arbitrary or highly controversial among us, it is still objectively part of surrealist activity, and as such it may again be criticised, from the viewpoint of surrealist activity. We might want to get the facts right or not (it is sometimes easier for us, just because we care with more commitment), but you just have to do it because otherwise you are doing a bad job and there is no point in what you are doing. But we can make surrealism do things, consider things, say things, discover things, problematise things, whereas you can not.
To the extent that you are serious, we might still be interested in discussing with you, because that may contribute to clarification of aspects of surrealism and of creativity and methodology and will benefit all. For us, it is something that we would apply in practice to the extent that it is useful. We might, too, enjoy having you contribute to our enquiries, games and experiments, but in the long term we do that in the hope that you would eventually be seduced to go over to the dark side, to change masters, to eventually become conjoined explorers in the service of poetry rather than disparate vassals in the service of the bourgeois culture’s selfcongratulating knowledge-production industry that is academia.
