The Surrealist Civilization Project Burns our Hands

 

The Surrealist Civilization Project Burns our Hands

Thomas Mordant

“Make the activities of play prevail over the superstitions of utility”

Vratislav Effenberger - La Civilization Surréaliste. Payot, 1976

“The idea of surrealist civilization is an unfinished project whose present data calls for immediate developments”

Vincent Bounoure -  La Civilization Surréaliste. last sentence

Because the dream is untimely and dialectical

For more than a decade covering the seventies of the twentieth century, surrealism has been passionately concerned with collective automatism and the project of surrealist civilization that emanates from it.

It was a time when capitalist civilization was severely challenged by vast movements, even in its most powerful and wealthy centres. All capitalist values (from utilitarianism to religion, from prose to calculation), all the institutions (from the army to the family, from business to school, from sedentary life to patriarchy) and all the lifestyles that were linked to it (from productivity, consumption, and spectacle to sports, psychological standards and the mind/body division) were regarded as rotten fruit affected by worms, while the imagination and desire were exalted. 

However, apart from the surrealist civilization no civilizational alternative emerged to meet the demands which were expressed with force, but in a confused and scattered manner.

Shortly after the death of Micheline Bounoure in 1981 and the subsequent seclusion of Vincent Bounoure (see The 31st of June by Vincent Bounoure - URDLA, 2011 edition), the victories of neoliberalism suspended the fragile hopes that surrealism put in social shift and regeneration. This failure, in its deepest reasons, was due to the very low degree to which social movements took the crisis of civilization into account.

The spirit of the surrealist civilization has continued to journey under the bedrock.

We are now entering, hopping arm in arm with capital, into another period of civilizational crisis, which will be marked by cascades of cataclysms and great revolts. The meaning vanishes from what remains of capitalist passions. The loss of meaning also strikes at the ideals of all clumsy, bureaucratic, or partial oppositions to capital.

The noticeable  wear and tear of words, formulas, and fetishized ideas is a healthy process. It goes against the “persistence of the sign to the thing signified”. Ideas have for us a necessary regulatory function but we don’t want to give them any hint of confidence when they separate from their flesh. It is towards the concrete heart of Umour and poetry and towards the joints of the nervous system of games that our desires go.

Since the publication of The Surréalist Civilization in 1976, by editions Payot, the conflict between current forces which want to be, more crudely than ever, the only reality, and those nascent forces of the possible, began to manifest in the deafening form of public notoriety.

The ways and perspectives of the unassemblable puzzle of capitalist civilization have come to a qualitative level, more abruptly,  fanatically and totally rationalist as to the details of all that forms the unity of the spirit and matter of the “human”. In the same movement, the most irrational absurdity has largely opened up to cynical transparency for what we call, strangely, “globalization”.

In the inverse sense, latent desires, poetic and social, determining surrealism in its underground movement, have dug new corridors in the volcanic geological layers of utopias in gestation. The movement is more essential and deeper than it appears, sifted as it is through the fluorescent shells with which we have had to cover ourselves under the blows of silencing clubs and the action of police, armies and capital.

Whether we look in the direction of the worst or in the direction of the best, the gap between the real and the possible, has taken, for all lucid minds, obviously incalculable dimensions.

The surrealist civilization project requires less to be summarized, updated, explained, than to be recreated. This playful creation requires for daydreams as well as for those dreams of the night, new spaces/times for the alchemy of desire, both amorous and experimental.

The surrealist civilization project, combining, in an organic way, the most concretely radical revolt and the most authentic poetry, is lodged in the heart of the living castle of surrealism. Its sclerosis would mean the death of the whole edifice.

Faced with a ghostly civilization that is gambling with our lives and all the poles of the world, surrealism cannot deprive itself of advancing its own civilization project.

Surrealism is a serious game that engenders others

Seen from the inside, surrealism is a game of dangerously serious meanders, and its course is irrigated with a dangerously serious humour.

As recalled in a recent article by our friend Andrea D’Urso, surrealism has been predisposed to numerous attempts at being buried alive. Surrealism’s playfulness leads it to frequently change position, behaviour, mood, and face to such an extent that these not very playful beings that are the undertakers are constantly in search of its corpse. Our gravedigger candidates are thinkers of the metaphysical carnival. The constant, lively subtle dialectic of surrealist games and ideas completely escapes them. But surrealism is dangerous not only for its “reputation”. It is dangerous simultaneously for whats it fights, for itself, for its members, and in more ways than one.

Surrealism was born from a game: individual automatic writing. This game gave birth to others and continues to give birth to them in profusion, and all surrealist practises are related to this game which is based on the expression of the unconscious. The surrealist civilization project was also born out of a game: collective automatic writing. This project drinks from the cup of other collective games, and can only continue by drinking from the cup of new collective games and from their deep and rigorous interpretation. Our attention will continue to be focused in particular on these games, to lead to new perspectives of authentic life.

The fall of the empire of the letter L

To introduce the practise of collective automatic writing, we point out that automatic writing generates failures, preceded moreover by cascades, by moments of loss of creative energy. In the solitude “which stinks of carrion”, as Joyce Mansour says, “the mouth of shadows” ends up closing.

To overcome the failure, André Breton recommended the arbitrary insertion of the letter L, always the letter L. The automatic text is then continued, with the first word to come starting with this letter, the automatic “flow” is revived. By proposing  the game of parallel narratives, Micheline Bounoure gives the means to prevent the failures, rather than resorting to the breakdown service.

Here, in the freshness of its original source, is the proposal of the game of parallel narratives which opened the way to collective automatic writing. Here is her written proposal from 1970 in the Bulletin de Liaison Surréaliste # 1, p.5 (reissued by editions Saveloy in 1977).

Parallel narratives

“Each of the players, at least four, traces, for himself alone, on a piece of paper, the automatic narration of the same event, of which all could have been witnesses. As if the phases of this event had been forgotten, each persons role is to try to make them resurface by pronouncing a reference word which all integrate immediately into the stories which they are developing in particular.

The first player, for example, having the idea of a camel, pronounces this word aloud, and all recount as they hear them the adventures relating to this camel. A few seconds have barely passed when the second player pronounces the word archery (for example) and, very soon after, the third player in turn intervenes, etc. So many players, so many ways to assemble the idea of archery with the camel etc. The automatism of the narrative can only be preserved by  a rapid pace.

The elements of the parallel narratives could also be delivered by a tape recorder or by an outsider.”

 

Game taught to Hervé Delabarre by an unknown traveler - Micheline Bounoure

A Fruit

In practise, players usually take turns launching the marker-words without a tape recorder, at predetermined intervals varying from twenty to sixty seconds. The concern with recounting an event is often abandoned.

The marker-words are generally  integrated easily into the automatic flow of each player with a stimulating effect. I will not mention the frequent exceptions nor the relatively detailed clinical analysis presented by Vincent Bounoure. But the result is paradoxical. Adding common words does not result in orienting the texts towards greater similarity. On the contrary, the singularity of the writings deepens, as well as their subtlety, their originality, their authenticity. Words, indeed, contain in poetry an infinity of latent meanings. The unconscious is a poet and it often chooses instinctively those meanings that are the most subjective and the most buried in the words proposed.

If the solitude of individual automatic writing provokes failures, this is probably because we are not made to express ourselves at our best in solitude, even if, in the current psychosocial conditions, in the civilization of the letter L, partial isolation is so often sought after by specialist creators, in order to avoid the greater isolation which reigns in the domestic herds, directed towards a large variety of slaughterhouses.

(…)

Such is the game, such will the civilization be

Surrealism  can seize a possibility of civilization in the state of play, in the state of seed. However, from a game to a civilization project, there is sometimes only one step.

Conversely, and more easily, one can define a civilization as a set of rules which form a relatively stable social game. It is easily noticeable for civilizations distant in space and time. But capitalist sorcery can also be reduced to a set of a few simple rules. We cannot say that capitalism does not play. Its games thrive in the stinking and suffocating blandness of selfish calculation. It plays in a way that is increasingly stupid, frantic and impersonal. But these games of imperial circus and Russian roulette disgust and annoy us, tire us out, make us anxious, stupify and kill us.

The huge expanding cage of laboratory rats that is the civilization of capital, which weighs more and more heavily upon us, and will perhaps crush us all in its fall, is supported in particular (like elsewhere in bureaucratic societies) with the principle of the formal equality of individuals, their quantitative scaling and their competition.

On the contrary, the surrealist civilization that we are proposing takes its strength from individual uniqueness, infinitely more marked than it seems, if we only consider the behaviours adjusted to the capitalist mold. In our psychosocial ecology project, the extreme singularity of each person’s life strengthens a collective life that encourages singularities to flourish.

Here is a draft of the surrealist civilization project in the form of analogies with the game of collective automatic writing:

First analogy:

Bet on the unconscious

If collective automatic writing plunges its tentacles into the expression of the individual unconscious, the only one that exists, so too is surrealist civilization taking root there.

Our bet on the game of the unconscious is unconditional: the unconscious is what best resists normality. But this bet does not exist without raising multiple questions. It is not without risk. What is expressed by the unconscious, through automatic writing, is still only its manifest content, and yet it already represents a certain chaos.

 The unconscious is very far from being the realm of harmony a priori. Like the dream, automatic writing, which gives pride of place to the death drive, rarely expresses love in its manifest content, unless this love is unacceptable with regard to our own ideals.

And what to do with all our old unconscious hardware: compromise with the most abject normality, complacent obsessions, disguised rehearsals, fashionable perversions, clots of stereotypical fantasies, ballets of transference and de-personalizing identifications?

the unconscious-rebus, through excess of life or excess of death, is however our most precious possession. It is by lifting the repressions that desires will be able to differentiate, sublimate, and harmonize. It is through their expression that we will be able to detect their poetic potentialities on the scale of a civilization.

We live as unwitting parasites, locked up and hunted down, in the civilization of the letter L. Our bet on the expression of the unconscious involves a struggle for the transformation of the unconscious. Amongst our weapons, Umour, systematic revolt, fanatical and antisocial love.

We have no other path towards the surrealist civilization. We will only posses —fleetingly—that which is unknown to us, and which refuses.

Second analogy:

When “equality” is equal in all aspects to “freedom”

The most beautiful magic sign is conventionally expressed  by two approximately horizontal segments of line that are supposed to be “parallel”: it signifies “equality” (=). Equality does not exist in nature, in space-time. Strictly speaking it is a pure mathematical abstraction, but, between humans the praxis of concrete equality turns out to be marvellous and makes each and everyone marvellous. Equality is the only rigour at our disposal to ignite the rainbow fires of the authentic freedom to be other. The magic of equality lies in its power to generate high degrees of difference. Thus, in the dream, the principle of the equality of all things allows the processes of condensation and displacement. 

For poetry to unfold, in the play between equality and difference, it is necessary, with all risk, that equality precede difference, as in the game of opposites invented by Michel Zimbacca. If difference precedes equality, it looses its charm, its energy, in the normative obsession with classifying, discriminating, dominating and being dominated. Left to itself, the classifying obsession splits, cuts, dismembers, tears apart, isolates, crushes and eliminates in a manic fury all that lives, until the final triumph…of equality in death. The privileges of status only balance out in their erasure from human memory.

In the fire of collective automatic writing, the equality and concrete freedom of the players are achieved to the highest point. 

The collective removal of the letter L, as an obligatory remedy, abolishes in the same movement, for whoever speaks, the castes and classes of age, sex, language, clan, status, and “fortune”.

The only differences that can be legitimately exalted between beings, are at the strictly and exclusively individual level of unconscious desire as expressed by automatism. It is at this individual level alone that the differences can take their strength and their maximum multiplicity by freeing the most powerful, subtle, and varied instinctual interactions between each and everyone by shaping the poetry of moving, nomadic, fierce, provocative and beautiful communities.

Third analogy:

When the gift without calculation erases all the alienated faces of the “exchange” die

Just as collective automatic writing is gratuitous, without any preliminary project, neither for oneself nor for others, so surrealist civilization will develop in the greatest gratuitousness. Just as each one launches all the power of the marker-words in the gratuitous game of automatism, with all his strength and without premeditation,  so any surrealist exchange takes birth in the exclusive form of the gift without measure. Let us insist: it is the gratuitous gift, without common measure, neither intellectual, nor aesthetic, nor moral, nor other. Only the fury of the desire to give guarantees the “ascendent sign” of surrealist civilization.

The development of the gift will only have its precious qualitative vigour when the market values and the social ranks cease to vitiate the process of the “gift calling for gift”, leaving it to pure subjectivity.

The uniqueness of equality and concrete freedom is realized in the power to give without measure and to know no other exchange than the gift.

According to the game of parallel narratives, the primordial gift —without being exclusive —will be that of a single person to a community, as is already the case, at times, partially for large-scale creations and discoveries. This gift comes first. This does not exclude the amorous gift (and the friendly gift) from taking an exceptional place in the surrealist civilization. But this form of gift cannot live without the gifts of the collective. The reverse is true of course although less directly imperative, from the perspective of a civilization.

In collective automatic writing, the gifts of marker-words occur rhythmically, at regular intervals, and are obligatory. It is of course understood that gifts, in the surrealist civilization, cannot be made, fortunately, at regular intervals, given the multiple, qualitatively different interactions between the members of a civilization. However, the practise of rhythm, it seems to me, is something to be retained. All our actions of any value on the level of surrealist creation fall within certain rhythms, however complex they may be, and are accomplished in a certain degree of trance.

As for the obligation to give, but to give only what one desires to give voluntarily or not, it seems to me to merge with the obligation to create in common which is established with the birth of the human being —and is generally trampled underfoot in capitalist civilization, a few weeks, a few months, or a few years later.

Fourth analogy:

Luxury, calm, pleasure?

Is it a good or an evil thing that surrealist civilization can be rich and and powerful?

The fact remains, that for decades  it has been possible and relatively easy, through some modifications, to transform a weapons factory, so that it produces something else, for example musical instruments of high quality. 

And today with the development of free software, the power of games played on machines has qualitatively changed, to a point that surprises, everyday, even the most jaded computer scientists.

Surrealist civilization will use luxury, in its own way, a luxury that is finally authentic because it is available to all and subject to the will of desire, in the purest form that we know of in its general manifestations.

the most effective way to fight against positivist alienation, and fascination with the spectacle of technology is to open up the factories and laboratories, the most sophisticated machines and computers, the handling of which seems strangely simple. Playing with technology to identify its healthy uses through Umour and poetry. The candle looses nothing of its charm nor cosmic and subatomic energy its brilliance. But it will be necessary to put a little order into all this jumble of “speed’, “energies”, “knowledge”, “information”, “theories”, “programs”, “genetics”, etc., with which we will have very little to do as long as they remain in the form of false and dazzling appearances. The arrangement of this jumble will undoubtedly remain very modest in relation to the enigma of the crossed gaze of two lovers.

We say that  surrealist civilization will be rich and powerful (just as invention, principle, creation and the meeting and interpretation of “parallel narratives” are rich and powerful) but this power and wealth will be offered to the free caprice of desire, which may be to squander or discard them. Perhaps desire prefers to murmur than to scream —or perhaps the opposite, or sometimes one and sometimes the other —in order to speak poetry. Is there not something else beyond the magnificent poverty of the sage and the wealth of the conqueror who will always suffocate in his timidity?

the surrealist civilization will be neither useful, nor useless, it will be free.

Fifth analogy:

A concrete universalism

The practise, for some, of collective automatic writing is the sensible presentation of a universal power. Just as the development of a surrealist civilization, however small, will be the irrefutable materialization of a concretely universalist movement.

It is not our project to build against the axes of “good” and “evil”, a new world order that we would call “surrealism”. Our project is otherwise ambitious. It is to unravel for everyone the powers necessary to create civilization.

Although the hatching of a surrealist civilization presupposes the destruction of capital and state, supra-state and other powers, which can only be achieved through popular struggles of very great magnitude, our collective project is not, at present, a directly social and political project. It is an “unfinished” civilization project.

Our aims are first of all, qualitative from the point of view of thought as well as from the point of view of action. Do we not wish, for example, taking care not to mix everything up, to put our “surrealist civilization” in contact with certain so-called primitive civilizations, undoubtedly very weakened, but whose vital essence can continue to thrill?

Ody Saban, my love, tells us that, among the primitive civilizations studied, some were both “matriarchal” and particularly egalitarian. It seems to me very probable and of the greatest historical interest, but I do not believe that we have any proof of it, at the present time, let alone any in-depth knowledge. On the other hand, civilizations that have become rare, but some of which are still very much alive —both matrilineal and matrilocal —show us relationships between women and men that are much less unequal than those which prevail in capitalist civilization. The control of women by husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles or their representatives being low there. Some of these civilizations experience almost egalitarian gender relations. It seems that these civilizations are also among the most egalitarian from all points of view and that they are also those where freedoms in love are the most alive. The best book that I know of on this subject is a collective work produced under the critical and attentive direction of Nicole-Claude Mathieu. It is called “ A house without a girl is a dead house” (Editions of the House of Human Sciences, Paris 2007).

Feminism is only contradictory to the past of surrealism for those who indulge in anachronism, in the form of a denial of the movement.

We shouldn’t blame nature either for those current social tendencies which lead to institutional segregation. Prejudices assigning essential differences between humans according to age, race and sex are deeply embedded in peoples minds, to such an extent that we no longer realize the weight, nor the presence of these prejudices, nor the violence of the institutions that produce them. Ideological constructions “valuing” minor differences of natural or cultural origin are one of the worst plagues of humanity.

Surrealist civilization, by bringing the individual and the collective face to face, will give us the chance to get out of the reserved areas of essentialism and predestination.

Equality in love is the purest water of the surrealist civilization, its concrete universalism in the native state.

The surrealist modesty of our civilization project

What perhaps best distinguishes the surrealist movement from all the numerous schools seeking to teach how to “change life”, is that surrealism has had the ability to limit its sensitive, intellectual and material ambitions.

Surrealism limits itself first, with tenacity, to observing the real functioning of thought and of the objective world.

It is by refusing a priori the advantageous position of the master that surrealism has, potentially, but also in fact (although to a disappointing extent) given itself the means to take action, however minimal it may seem, in our ways of feeling, thinking and acting.

Surrealism promises nothing, it is limited to indicating possibilities.

Surrealism is not optimistic. We are all going to die and those who come after us will die too, very fortunately moreover, because if science invented a physiological fountain of youth without a psychic fountain of youth, to preserve the capacity for surprise and wonder to be at hand, science would make of us the most sinister farce one could imagine. In the surrealist civilization, we will also die, until further notice.

Prisoners and insubordinate parasites in the civilization of the letter L, we suffer, like almost everyone, from alienation.

Surrealism is not messianic. We have no plan for developing dazzling capacities, for loving life, for the overcoming of old age, for the rules of an art of living, or for ways to learn, truly and for all, from our children…

It is not that we give up on these matters, nor on so many others that concern us closely, none more than complete emancipation which remains our only law, but we do not think that we already have the outline of precisely determined means which would enable us, one day to achieve these objectives in concrete terms.

If the surrealist civilization project contains “utopian” loads of renewable explosives, in order to clear our paths to the unknown, what we are seeking to build first is a collective, passionate project oriented in a rigorous experimental method, although deprived of any claim of access to different, more futile fantasies of the sciences.

Our project of surrealist civilization demands, ardently, again and again, to be developed before it can one day be socially achievable.

The developments of our project will be the fruit, not only of a debate requiring rebirth but also of new collective playful experiences, and their patient and eager interpretation.

The surrealist civilization, some essential outlines of which were identified in the 1970’s (I give here an imperatively subjective version) and whose other aspects should be freed, as quickly as possible, from an apparent nothingness, will be very different from the profusion of images that we can whirl around the project.

The hunt for collective surrealist games

Under the imperialist civilization of the letter L, which we undergo, there is a time for the mind and a time for action, which most often only very partially overlap in a manifest way. We have to dream, think and debate about the surrealist civilization. But we also have to give it what we have, like a thin stream of of life’s breath to the rhythm of the action.

I will put forward here a very brief draft of a proposal, which is by no means exclusive, for the creation of new ideas and actions of the surrealist civilization project.

The position of collective play in the surrealist movement has changed. It has become internationally one of the major activities around which the others are organized.

Therefore we should perhaps not be too incapable of overcoming the historical reasons for why the project remains poorly understood and poorly known. It is very healthy that our collective games are invented for the lively pleasure of playing, and that the opposite would be ridiculous and ineffective. Surrealism is not programmable and has nothing to do with organized metal tourism.

However, it would be very interesting if after having devoted ourselves, on multiple occasions, to various games, we systematically sort out, amongst the collective games, between those which, in one way or another, can contribute to the surrealist civilization project, and whose enlistment will only be closed with the end of the surrealist civilization or the annihilation of its project, and on the other hand the collective surrealist games which do not directly enter into this project.

Games where the collective and the individual are confronted, simultaneously on an equal footing and in permanent cooperation, like in the game of “parallel narratives” or, in another way, the game of “one in the other” are not the only ones which can help build the surrealist civilization project. Other games, like in the game of opposites, or the games of objects and parallel objects, where players take turns and/or separately, in games of collective creation like the game called “the box of Karel Teige” which can also, by the light which they throw on the relations between collective poetry and individual poetry, help directly in the construction of the surrealist civilization project. I voluntarily cite only those older games that are or should be known to everyone internationally…

On the other hand, certain collective surrealist games have a different function which is, for example, to discover, extensively, and in an unexpected way, the unconscious of each player, taken in isolation —or to find certain laws in our relationship with chance —or to delight us by their power of poetic subversion in the face of social life as it is sold and which stuns us —or by other surrealist wonders that seem, after careful observation of their results, to have only an indirect relationship (which is not less precious for this reason) with the surrealist civilization project. It is also quite possible that several of these games will ultimately prove to be quite fruitful, one way or another, for our project, independently of their other functions, first perceived. So, here is the idea of enriching the surrealist civilization project with new games (or old ones reinterpreted) and also the idea of sorting.

Another question, related to this one. We could probably limit, if only to a small extent, the sacrifices to the provisional little God “Speed-at-work” towards which a few of us feel no obligation to devote ourselves, and to free up, by this means, more energy to think further about our collective games. The interpretation, individual or collective, of a game, can sometimes take years, or more, before revealing its latent potentialities. Outside our domain, it is well known that this is the case for most experimental activities. Within our domain, this is obviously also the case, it is quite clear that the individual automatism discovered in 1919, and then later subject to our surrealist tortures, is far from having revealed all its secrets. 

“The games whose results appear to be of the greatest interest should be disclosed more widely and internationally”. Here is a sentence that may be considered completely useless because it falls under common sense: in general although approximately, the rules of a game are easy to write and translate if it’s a good game. However, when we remember the difficulties, which often arise in showing the value of a game, the importance of each of its rules and the fruits it can bring, difficulties which arise even in the physical presence of people who are, a priori, interested, we can understand the problem there is in ensuring the international distribution of games, which are sometimes complex to grasp and may require some in-depth knowledge, starting with the game of collective automatic writing itself. Playful surrealist praxis requires an essential and long-term initiation, otherwise our games turn into boring and derisory hobbies and the interpretation of these games into homework and drudgery.

I would like us all to be able to perceive, very clearly, that I am encouraging much less an activity than indolence —which for the surrealists corresponds to a trance, a lucid drunkenness which does not always decide. First take the time, the space for reverie about our collective games without dizziness or distraction. Let the mind wander on this subject. What we have to say that is essential can often be summed up in a few ideas. It is good to give these ideas time to mature.

The surrealist civilization project has a vital need for reports of new collective games and new collective experiences, developed to the full extent and intensity necessary, not only  to grow and mutate, but also —and all of this goes together here —to simply survive. It is our games that answer questions that we are unable to coldly ask ourselves. I mean for example, questions which involve the life or death of the surrealist civilization project and therefore of surrealism as a whole. Today, in this period of acute civilizational crisis, which we feel flowing inside our blood, if we reject our project of  civilization, surrealist activities will run aground, one after the other in sidings, “artistic” or not, without possible reverse.

Creation, in the form of individual invention, obviously has an infinitely larger place in the surrealist civilization project than in the grip of capital. To invigorate collective games and creations, it is essential. In the present state of our knowledge, individual thoughts and feelings can interact, to a certain extent, as in the game of “parallel narratives”, as in love, but the fusion of feelings and thoughts leads to their annulment, in the form of dogma and/or in the form of the unfathomable stupidity of hearts. Love is always the meeting of feelings and behaviours without common measure. I can, of course, know the character traits of the woman I love. I can adapt my behaviour to some extent to hers. I can have some idea of the way in which she creates. Authentic love, blinding in some ways, gives, on the other hand, capacities of intuitive and reflexive lucidity towards the loved one which prove remarkable and unique. But to share what is at the source of the feeling of the other, in her love, her hatred, her creation is as impossible for the human being, as to become the other, at least in his current condition. Believing that one can know someone else’s creative feeling, or for that matter one’s own, is worse than reifying (objectifying) it under a pile of sensible and intellectual cliches, furthermore in a “human, all too human” mode.

An individual unconscious can meet another through shocks, guess each other at times and on precise points, know each other in scattered fragments, this is where the possibility of all common creation and of all love and the marvellous resides. Under the cloak that capital tries to cover us with, people are supposed to ignore each other or be alike, which amounts to the exact same thing.

Wanting to build a civilization with the collective game as its sole pivot would truly be a totalitarian temptation. However, the fact remains that without this pivot, no emancipatory civilization is possible.

A complex problem which I will not approach here, is to imagine a living dialectic between individual creation, collective play, and collective attempts at creation.

Sense of meaning and civilization

Formerly, it was said that there was, for the elite, for a few conceited people, and for some “vain and vague gypsies”, something like “a sense of honour”. Oddly enough, it seems one could wash — or give-to-wash —this sense of honour in blood. It is up to us today to wash for all, with our own sap, which belongs to surrealism, the sensitive honour of the word sense.

The “persistence of the sign to the thing signified” has nowadays taken on such an importance that the definition of the word “word” should include a large portion of nonsense.

However, if we remove all subjectivity from the word, the meaning of a butterfly is to be a butterfly, the meaning of a pepper is to be a pepper.. we evolve there, in the order of pure metaphysics, with or without wings, not far from Kyoto, in the 17th century. This can lead some to ecstasy. The result for us surrealists would be rather to bring us to sleep quite quickly. Then the butterfly ceases to be a butterfly —for one who dreams —and becomes, while dancing with the pepper, everything else and its opposite.

Nothing makes sense, if we seek an absolute form of sense in order to forget the current individual necessity of death, and the death of the lost senses. On the other hand we can create an infinity of meanings and live or die amongst some of them.

If there is a general crisis of meaning, and loss of meaning, it is in my opinion that of acts, ideas, representations, words —and all objects —whose manifest content is one-sided, or in any case, has an orientation limited by a sharp acute angle.

It is a salutary crisis. Exclusive meaning is leaking everywhere and can be granted to the blandest, and most insidiously poisonous sauces.

To reenchant the meaning of our actions, we cannot do without a broad-spectrum polysemy. With such, even the “grand words” those “at which everyone laughs” allow themselves to be taken back by life.

The word sense itself approaches us in this way: in French, in English, in other languages, and it seems in Czech this word can be translated as “orientation”, “direction”, “perception” (there would be five distinct senses, but in reality there are many more), “signification”, “sensuality”…From there further meanings can be introduced, into the word sense, at will…at our own risk. Current language does not ignore the sense of humour, running like living water, nor the sense of celebration, in its legitimized meaning —but surrealism knows more subtle meanings and can create them tailor-made!

When several senses meet, in thought or in action, they tend to multiply rather than add up like corpses side by side, green or red, genocides eaten by worms. In the immense forest of the senses poetry can disorient and orient itself as it pleases. Isolated in the polysemic forest, the surrealist child ends up getting lost. It is only though collective creation that polysemy becomes fully authentic.

Dare I say that, for me and in concrete life, the word “revolution” has lost none of its charm, nor the word “love” any of its brilliance? If surrealism continues to dazzle us, it is without doubt, because it often changes its multiple meanings, without ever losing any of its primary meanings.

To slow down, and then stop the frivolous persistence of the sign to the thing signified, the surrealist civilization project aims in particular to learn how to use spades, intending to more deeply and collectively root the organic polysemy, in the depth of subjects and objects, in the foundations of communication and exchange, that is to say of history, at the same moment past, present, and perhaps —why not? —to come.

Do you want to play with us?

You readers, impatient for a new civilization, who are only really surrealists in very fragmentary moments, as the civilization of the letter L wants it to be, do you believe it is possible, desirable, or inevitable, for lack of anything better, to practise and undergo a new poetry, twenty-four hours a day? In this context, pauses and moments of reflection would be won by the poetic spirit.

One of the things that can distract from the perspective of the surrealist civilization, is that surrealist life is steeped in humour like the immense sponge of the “ocean sea” is soaked in salt water which does not quench its thirst. It needs humour more than heroin addicts need their dose, and it rejects any psychic or poetic equivalent of methadone. Black humour, hopeless and despairing, will pass its smooth, cold hand around your neck. It is not nice, it is so serious that nothing seems serious beside it. This humour is exhausting, it can make you, at times, bloodless.

On the other hand, the surrealist player is, so to speak, an “integral hyper-liberal”. Beside his liberalism that of the World Bank is nothing. The problem is that money does not interest him more than anything else. He hardly practises calculation and only takes it into account from time to time, without any preference for more or less. Say the opposite of what he says and he will be happy. Gracefully change the words he writes; automatically change all the signs of the drawing he traces upon the paper; while he describes a painting to you, make others out of the very words he gives you; beautifully make his portrait in the form of an ornate box, as was done in Prague in honour of Karel Teige, and the surrealist player, even if dead, will be happy. Indeed, all this will help him, curiously, to persevere in his being. The unconscious ignores the sense of propriety, of univocal truth, it only asks to be poetically recreated from scratch, wild sui generis, without morality other than that of a certain fury which Breton called the “ascendent sign”. The player like the dream, asks for nothing except to become other, to change his face and body with the wind, to see you rigorously plunder everything he has, everything he is, everything he does. But, of course, he will return the favour, since deep down, you too are “surrealist players”, as your dreams prove.

Do you want to use your reason only to organize your whims and contradictions and to multiply them like flowers in a field? Do you want to participate in the project of a surrealist civilization based on the gift of intense attention and sculpted time? A serious project, solid, liquid, gas, at the edge of the abyss of madness and the monsters of the unconscious. Is this the way you want to live and die, to eat and be eaten before and after your death? is this how you want to find meaning of life in abundance, where none before you has found a crumb? Do you want this solitude? Do you want to share it and open your big baby eyes to a world purified enough to blind you? Yes? Then enter.

Do not close

I end with a question, on which I invite you to reflect. A surreal verbal image can be compared to a civilization. The common understanding imagines that an image has only two main terms : “Dust of suns” for example. But an image has as many terms as we want, given, not only that many nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, etc. can enter into its composition, and that several images can compose more complex ones, but above all, by the existence of polysemy, of the context and the symbolism which differ for each individual.

A verbal image can be compared to a civilization, for example from the point of view of the distance of its terms. Pierre Reverdy thought that the most successful image was the one where the distance between the terms was the greatest.

Surrealism has gradually abandoned this conception. For us, the “ideal” image has a different form than in Reverdy and a different function than the type of remoteness he was looking for. One could say that the “ideal” surrealist image would be the most authentic from the point of view of the unconscious of the one who secretes it. But what does this mean in concrete terms? I do not think anyone has the answer today. It is not very important, since the surrealists are not stressed-out entrepreneurs of urbanism or “spacial planning”, obsessed by the realization of constructions which conform to pre-established plans. However, the question of the image is essential if one considers —as I have just shown very briefly —that a verbal image can be compared to a civilization. Moreover, our project is already an image : the surrealist civilization.  This image contains, and gives rise to others. A forest of language praxis bites onto a desert of stones and we have a passionate responsibility for its psychosocial and poetic ecology.

Thomas Mordant - Spring 2012

Translation by Erik Volet 2021, Published in French in Aspects du Surrealisme International Aujourd’Hui,

ed. Patrick Lepetit, Vocatif, 2020

Image: 

Destruction of a Map by Haifa Zangana