Gifts of compensation

I´m not sure what an artwork is. A sympathetic viewer may hold that an artwork is an item in a class of objects that we have agreed to contemplate in a privileged way, experience freely and discuss openly. A more hostile viewer may argue that an artwork is a commodity that promises to satisfy certain contrived and mystified needs. Both views are relevant, and hardly contradict each other, since they share an emphasis on the social function of artworks. What I´d like an artwork to be – as someone who makes visual images – is probably a shapehifter, a gestalt switch-machine or the transformative meeting-place of interacting living forces. An object that functions like a catalyst, an Alkahest, Prospero´s wand, an internal combustion engine. But more often than not, the concept of art and the category of artworks, as social constructions, are a hindrance or a nuisance to me, or something like an inheritance that must be spent in order to permit these rawer and more subtle qualities to shine through.

It can never be sufficient to make art. One must start somewhere else. What I experience in making images is being two instances in a continuum; both giver and reciever, or creator and spectator. Therefore I tend to expect that the given transfer from one state of mind to another is what also occurs in the transfer of an image from one person to another. Or in the case of artworks: what should have effect. So by pursuing this effect, I drift away from art, and get back to art, without settling. This movement may also represent two states of mind to reconcile, like dreaming and waking life.
 
What the giver and reciever see in the artwork before and after the change is interesting in itself. But what they experience in the mind-state that they fleetingly share in the change is what really matters to me. ”My” mind is usually unable to contain such a shift, so instead a temporary body or a new and specialized organ is developed: the particular artwork. The change the artwork makes can perhaps most bluntly be described as offering a vehicle for the transportation of unconscious aspects into conscious reflection. Still, the experience is not particularly mine. The personal ”art coefficient” of the giver is, with Duchamp´s words, ”like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed”. We need at least two minds or mind-states to perform that equation.
 
Sometimes the vehicle is secondary, while the difference or discrepancy between states of mind and how they can join means everything. Waking up and falling asleep are the mysteries that that point to this. Vast amounts of poetic insight into this liminality is being sacrificed because vehicles were not jotted down on a sketch pad or in a note book. No need to regret the loss though, since hypnagogic, hypnapomic and alike states (lucid dreams, not the least) let us assume that the point of transfer may unfold itself as a place in its own right, like a hovering non-euclidean domain in the very act of cognition, more or less continually, and certainly in areas outside of art-appreciation.
 
Consider for example what happens when we step into new psychic atmospheres by way of some unforeseen arrangement, like the sun passing behind a cloud at the exact moment of a crow´s caw on one´s walk through a forest. Whether such passages happen by chance or are created willfully as artistic devices, in both cases the effect is that a gap between what´s previously experienced as on the one hans natural processes and on the other hand personal efforts is bridged. Hereby micro-reenchantments of the world are instilled, that may lie close to superstition. Artworks then can perhaps be seen as teachers that contribute to the progress of the attention necessary for reenchantments to happen, without a need for superstitious rationalization. They may have personality and be original, like spiritual entities, but all they do is point and mimic. They may grasp your attention through their authority or their charisma, but they never actually rely solely on authority and charisma.
 
That artists really follow hints from nature´s hidden form-creating principles was clearly understood in ancient times. In Aitareya Brahmana, a Vedic text from roughly between 1700–1100 BC, we can read: ”Works of art created by humans are an imitation of divine forms; by utilizing their rhythms, a restructuring of the vibrational rate of the limited human personality is effected.”

Although ”a restructuring of the vibrational rate of the limited human personality” in my view can correspond to the above described dynamic of the relation between giver and reciever, my imagination may not be plastic enough to recognize divine forms as such. But, by taking a hint from cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson´s ”embodiment hypothesis”, I call these lucky arrangements metaphorical situations or metaphorical objects. Lakoff and Johnson´s research suggest that the laws of thought are metaphorical rather than logical and that truth is a metaphorical construction rather than an attribute of objective reality. They suggest that the ontology of our lifeworld is given from metaphors drawn from our experience of having a body, not from the physical sciences or from coherent metaphysical systems. This means that our understanding of one idea, or one ”conceptual domain”, is informed by the terms of another (e.g.: understanding quantity in terms of directionality, like ”prices are rising”).
 
By recognizing metaphor as an epistomological principle one of course arrives in the domain of poetry. Owen Barfield, in Poetic diction, has this to say about the poetic process: ”Seeking for material in which to incarnate its last inspiration, imagination seizes on a suitable word or phrase, uses it as a metaphor, and creates a meaning. The progress is from meaning, through inspiration to imagination, through metaphor, to meaning; inspiration grasping the hitherto unapprehended, and imagination relating it to the already known.”
 
In view of conceptual metaphors it makes sense to me that I, as a figurative artist, am not sure what the difference between an artistic object and a situation is. Or should be sure. For in decisive ways, an artwork can not be an object of knowledge; it reveals too many loose ends stretching into the world of imagination and into the imaginations that make up the world. What I can do, is to try to grasp artistic objects through the situations they evoke, regardless of whether these situations are depicted or imaginary. To me, captivating ideas appear like symbolic mise-en-scenes, filmic stills or picture-poems, that may or may not want to be further objectivized. Making ”sense” of them is to explore the general relationality of their life in thought. And laying out the frozen pattern of divine rhythm, merging the known with the unknown in visual metaphor, is the ongoing self-reflection or epistemological feedback of the body-mind.
 
In fact, visual and linguistic representations are very close, if not sometimes interchangeable. Once while fever-sick, in a hypnagogic revery, I constructed a series of written situations / objects to make my thoughts about the ontology of artworks clearer to myself: that the ”objectivity” of the world is corporeal and poetical rather than physical and conventional. The following phrases can be seen as ”vehicled” language-counterparts to how I approach and create images. I quote these situations here, with brief explications:

”Her eyebrows are adjacent to outer space, the yellow dress takes her away from the beach.”

This image suggested itself as an expression of the feeling-essence or singularity of an astronaut leaving the mothership, floating in space attached only by a rope. But by decoding the situation thus the sign-function of the image takes precedence. So the point here is to forget the astronaut, the information. There were and will be astronauts before and after astronauts, so to speak.
 
”On a day of overcast weather his goalie hat attracts sunlight to his eyes.”
 
A simple everyday magic act is a reliable starting-idea. An idea (putting on a goalie cap for shade) magically attracts a desired situation (sun). Semiotically speaking, a concept is displaced or moved from one logical context to another.
 
”When the rattling door closes, the area is filled up with the barn´s silence.”
 
Atmospheres are essential. Tangible weather or change of weather is nature´s way of creating them. They also thrive on stillness and the dynamic of presence and absence. The silence of composition.
 
”His hands have grown out of apples, he can spit the seeds out of a glass of water.”
 
Imagination can be kick-started by pursuing reversed causality, simultaneity, or spontaneously renegotiated object-relationships.
 
Through these modes of thinking I try to postpone or delay discursive information in favor of the image´s purely sensual clues. An artwork to me is therefore at best initially in some way repulsive or resistant against a certain type of decision-prone curiosity. And vis-a-vis expectations preferrably to some extent incomprehensible.That an image may be saturated with precise thought and still delay enough information to benefit communication on the levels of emotion, intuition and imagination is the possibility I favor. The real power of Prospero was not in his wand but in his books, that is: less in someone having the power to decide what something is than in something being given as potentially available to everyone. That an artwork remains ”nothing but sensual clues” is something worth pursuing, I think, even to the point of trying to convey (subconscious) thoughts that are ”more real than perceptions”. So: corporeal thoughts.

The artistic object may then resemble the ”Frog Prince” from the Grimm brothers´ fairy-tale. Like the frog who´s not yet transformed to a prince, the artwork presents itself as something that either has a fixed or a dual identity, depending on if you ”know the story” or not. Knowing the story of an artwork is nothing complicated, but it is as easy to forget as it is to learn, and in my view Magritte expressed it most succinctly with the phrase ”Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. Or as I like to understand his phrase here: the artwork represents nohing in the world other than your own understanding of the particular arrangement you´re viewing. An understanding that is on the move away from the well-grounded opinion or that is expanding beyond ”my” perspective.
 
And, again in comparison with the frog-prince, the artwork is something whose ”true essence” depends upon the engaged faculties of the reciever to become living, meaningful, engaging, beautiful. There is of course no ”true essence” corresponding to one correct interpretation, at least not in any expressible way. In one way, the artwork functions as a veil we move through on our way to another veil. This movement seems very real to us, since it has a feeling-tone, since it awakens an emotional response and since it has a specific character or momentum. But the visions themselves which we sometimes mistake it for are illusory. Plato said: the image moves toward the objects and away from them, with a ”tone of desire”. Artistic freedom, as it seems to me, lies in moving with one´s desire and in the understanding of how images merge with physical objects on the ”as if”-condition. Therefore I remain suspicious against art that seems too stuck in the art world, fulfilling a concept of art, for the same reasons that I´m wary of art that depends too much on naturalism.
 
At the same time – and this often feels like a paradox – the artwork is unusually concrete, material and objective. In the lacunae of thoughts, when the passage between veils is permitted by the spectator, its ”thereness” may be overwhelming. In the artist´s hands the artistic object remains in a raw state, which the spectator has to accept in order to, again with Duchamp´s words, ”determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale.” The reciever is the one who has to permit the transmutation, which is ultimately not representable by words, by computer screens or by brains. It demands not only a shift of consciousness, but also a thoughtless confrontation, akin to the moment of ”the princess kissing the frog”. It is the overwhelming sense of nearness to the truth, which keeps one going “back from bark to bark to the white-hot kernel” (Breton) without being overcome with or stopped by the inherent absurdity of thought activity.

Making image after image, without this feeling of nearness to truth would be absurd. A world without dusky meaning, without secret signs, is a life acquainted with shadows only. The artist is one such shadow. Empedocles proposed the sign, that if you´re reborn as a poet, a prince or a healer you may have arrived at your last incarnation. The artwork then, to paraphrase the philosopher, is never nearer to us than when it´s neither frog nor prince, but embodies the moment in between.
 
Frog-poets, frog-princes and frog-healers are all in the making of the change.

Niklas Nenzén
(reposted from the lavishly image-populated and high thought-density Niklas Nenzén webpage)

Modes of the possible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The virtual

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

/.../

Rituals

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

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

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

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

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

Atmosphere in Art revisited

Thomas Cole: Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

There are some discussions that I am always trying to avoid, but sometimes fail. One is about the psychology of pictures. A lot of people know a lot about this and it bores me to reconstruct it all on my own for merely polemical purposes. Another one is arguments for and against different strains in surrealist art. It's just not the point. One suggests: Matta? Another says: Magritte. The former says: Matta! The latter insists: Magritte. The former claims: Matta. The latter endures: Magritte. So what?

But I can make one more attempt to avoid those question by addressing the actual interesting questions connected under the heading of atm

How does atmosphere in art work? You can't just draw an atmosphere. Whoever wants to bring in atmosphere into art has to find a way, and at first glance there seems to be two very different ways of bringing that about (later it will turn out that there wasn't just two).

 The most traditionally obvious is to construct an atmosphere, by depicting an imaginary scene where an atmosphere is likely to emerge (or may seem to have already emerged if originally imagined in a visionary manner). By well-known conventions of representation one recreates a three-dimensional scene, which is filled by this tangible absence of rational calming order, an absence that gives rise to this electrical invisible poison gas of the enigmatic, the taste of the unknown. We all know this as the Chirico method, which has been exploited in surrealism for longer than surrealism itself, and has proven strangely inexhaustible. Well, not strangely, since the scene created by the painter is not the major point, but the sense of the unknown that it manages to conjure up within it. But then of course, there is also a whole lot of bad fakes in the genre, all those "standard" surrealist painters that repeat certain supposedly fetishistic objects in different constellations, or paint completely uninteresting scenes where certain objects are out of scale or there is a female breast exposed, or orchestrate some simple puns of sexual or not even sexual character by juxtaposition or transformation, creating scenes that merely reveal recipe or appeal to key stimuli rather than invoke something (but of course also the opposite, all these inadvertently created atmospheres...)

The twodimensional surface with a picture of an atmospheric scene in accordance with this is obviously analogous with a "window" towards this scene (a "window towards the unknown"), and we "read" the picture with the spontaneous skills acquired of translating homogenously coloured areas as distinct surfaces, brightness and order of overlap as distance, lines as delineations of objects, of presupposing a certain perspective, a certain order, as long as anything suggests it. The more it conforms to traditional representation with ordinary clues the easier it becomes for us to trust this flat visual image as an unproblematic representation of a section of a visual field of the rest of the world, with the "solid middle-sized objects" available (and not covered by other objects) within a certain distance within that sector of vision. We go to certain lengths to make up for inadequacies, missing things, or even to fill out that which is merely sketched. No, I didn't want to go into all this standard babble of looking at images, I have to switch track...

Ok, the most logically obvious way to get atmosphere into art, on the other hand, is to address this atmosphere directly, and try to translate it into something visual. In this case you don't need specifically the traditional skills to depict a scene, but you need to seduce the spectator into seeing. If the picture is a window, it is a window not miniaturising the surfaces of middle-size objects to form an image, but something else. We have to somehow suspend the everyday reading of an image and wait for some other reading to emerge. Something subatomical, fourthdimensional, synaesthetical... But for people with no particular synaesthetical capabilities, or no advanced training in reading image parameters not as proportional spatial parameters but as something else, this is usually done by a scale displacement or a simulation of synaesthesia. If it doesn't look like the world as we know it, it might very well depict the microscopic world. Or the vast macroscopic worlds of outer space. Or it may be usually invisible fields rendered visible by some weird staining process: we could be seeing the form of sounds, of thoughts, of smells, of feelings, or of actual atmosphere. Or a mixture of all this. And usually it is through this desperate superimposition of spatial interpretation onto an image which does not give us the traditional clues to be read this way that we co-create this image, and co-create, or are seduced into seeing, its representation of atmosphere itself, with or without the auxiliary fictions of mental entities as part of the translations. This is of course the Matta method.

It was quite revolutionary when the surrealist painters discovered and explored it through the second half of the 30s and during the war (often under the name of "psychological morphologies"), but then it proved remarkably attractive to use this point of departure as an excuse to abandon the fundamental curiosity for the unknown... Several age groups of painters used it as an excuse to revive classic abstraction of one or the other kind, again denying that the picture is a window and depicts the imaginary and instead seeing it as a mere twodimensional surface with a certain distribution of form and colour. Without the discipline of occultism or madness which could ascribe an intense metaphysical meaning to such form and colour, and which made good old abstractionism take part in the quest for the unknown, these new "abstract expressionist" strands, most notably as "action painting" or "New York school" in the US and "tachisme" in France, often struggled to attain a complete absence of spiritual content. Why would anyone be interested? On the other hand, the decidedly surrealist half of "lyrical abstraction" kept it closer to the imaginary sources and kept redirecting it back to them whenever it went astray into those pastures where all cows are equally grey.

(Since the surrealist movement has always been non-doctrinary in stylistic terms and never has been circumscribed in pictorial terms, which by the way again is why things are so difficult for those who insist on regarding surrealism as an art movement, the surrealist movement has welcomed and encouraged those who undertake poetic explorations of the unknown with artistic means regardless of their stylistic choices. And thus, it is always surprising and frustrating when some want to make a big fuss over contradictions in stylistic terms.

Several have insisted that representational art is obsolete and we must abandon the conventions of perspective etc. Well, why? Just because it's old? No, who wants the new for its own sake! Or because the fact that it's old suggests that it is connected with traditional and repressive structures of the mind that we could attain new freedoms by abandoning? Oh, could be, but it is a bit of a far stretch, and so far it seems empirically like the surrealist use of old picture conventions still opens up for more new horizons of the mind than its voluntary abandonment does. Because advertising, pop culture and academic art took over many of the surrealist lessons in this field? Well, if they did, did they immediately acquire the full rights to everything produced through these routes? Yes, this line of thought is suggestive to the radical mind, and over and over again the urge to abandon everything that one can come up with an argument against has proven quite sterile...

On the other hand, others have grumpily insisted that they hate "abstract art", and there was a splinter group (Tendance Populaire Surréaliste) for several decades in France that kept insisting that Breton had betrayed surrealism and that the French surrealist group effectively become antisurrealists just because Breton and others explored lyrical abstraction in the 50s! The TPS have rarely been acknowledged at all in the movements own historiography, mainly because it seemed so far-fetched, beside-the-point and so utterly non-surrealist to have a battle of styles. Because any arguments for a particular style against another might possibly be valid for a particular exploration, or even for an extended exploration in the form of an oeuvre, but as arguments they prove to play on a completely different arena than that of surrealism – it becomes aestheticism or sensation-seeking or fashion strategy or political strategy, but not surrealism.)

Though the two routes I have described are not the only routes. Since the methodology of surrealism is very often about gathering random or apparently insignificant material and seeing meaning emerge from them (emergent properties), a lot of artistic practice within surrealism focus not on the manipulation of evoking atmospheres, but merely on the patient or impatient waiting for them to arise by their own accord. Many of the basic surrealist strains, for one: the immediate, naive figuration, and two: the organic-type morphological fantasy, and three: the ceaseless collaging of more or less random elements, are practices that just go on and on without caring, and that will see atmospheres emerging by chance and overdetermination, just like in reality, only increasing the possibilities, both merely statistically and with automatic sensibility....

MF

the surrealist object part II

- the first steps in poetic semantics of objects

You have noted that so far I have been talking only about the act of constitution of the surrealist objects, the moment of sublation away from the utilistic sphere, the conditions for poetry to possibly emerge.

At this level, surrealist understanding of the object up to now has claimed to rest on mainly two foundations, first that of the object primarily being an object of desire (thus actualising the whole background of Freud's theories) and second that of the object being a unit of objectivity (thus actualising the whole background of Hegel's philosophy). The Freudian and Hegelian contexts are preconditions for the surrealist concept of the object, but it is very likely that the relaxed way they are assumed are missing aspects of the respective theories which it will be interesting to return to before the end.

Equally important but often less explicitly discussed in a theoretical context have been the recognition of the aspect of sensory-imaginational realism, clearly at heart of surrealism but developed theoretically rather in parallell by gestalt psychology, and by Bachelard's and Alleau's symbology (and in some way, but often rather twisted, and I don't them well enough anyway, in structuralism, philosophical phenomenology and semiology?)

So the next step is what goes in the poetic moment, when this "liberated" object actually starts establishing all new relationships it might, largely by means of our associations. I am just beginning my analysis in this field. And since I have recently been talking in a few places of the characteristics of poetic semantics, I hasten to say that this is exactly the same question, and it is probably the same as in the case of pictorial art too, only it will hopefully be easier to see some basic patterns if we retrict ourself to "assemblages" (= the meeting of objects) because we don't have a big problem in circumscribing the least signifying units there.

* There is one sphere of epistemic associations, or metonymical in the narrow sense; the ones that evoke aquired knowledge of previously established associations of the object, so-called background knowledge, which so to speak restores the object into the context it was taken out of. Obviously, this is an ambiguous category here.

* There is one sphere of biographical associations, the arousal of memory of (real or imagined) events where the object was brought up. This is a sphere which involves very individual elements, is partly dependent on simple empiricism and "life experience", and a sphere where most of the strictly speaking emotional response is evoked.

Those two spheres are in a sense central, because they will make up a big part of the experience, in spite of being quite different and separate from a response on the poetic level, but will, once the poetic-level response is there, often be hijacked by it and integrated into the poetic experience.

The poetic response itself is largely on the level of analogy. Or, say some, symbolism. There is a great deal of terminological conflict, ambiguity and opacity here, and care has to be taken in the end (if I may, just by pleading, not wake some of my friends' hobbyhorses red in tooth and claw here? cf i e "Laws of motion")

In here, let's first make a distinction between a static and a dynamic sector.

The static sector is that of established signs, those things that we may not call symbols but rather synthemes if we follow Alleau; the things that have a simple or unambiguous translation or refer to something deliberately hidden. This is the sphere of conventional signs, of conventional systems of symbols, of symbols in Freud's sense, and of those associations that some claim have a biological basis. (In fact, even though evolutionary biology and developmental psychology will have some interesting things to say about this, the old question of environment versus heritage is as uninteresting as usual, because as usual the biological perspective is unable to demonstrate something else than uncontroversial fundamentals as long as it sticks to its own strict methodology and avoids mere speculation, while the empiristic social science perspective is unable to demonstrate anything else than the variability of traits and never their origin or meaning. Both perspectives might deliver interesting suggestions, but when they claim to contradict or even disprove each other they are usually out of their league.) Concretely, this sphere will try (and sometime succeed) to impose certain limits on associations, and it may clearly increase the field of epistemic-metonymic associations (my first category above) by relating to usages in various traditional mythologies, secret languages, folklore, magic and religion (which, in their turn, will also invoke more or less reified moments of dynamic symbolism, to which we then turn):

The dynamic sector is the one we surrealists know well from Reverdy's definition of the poetic image and Lautréamont's standard example, and moves in the direction of symbols in Alleau's sense; connections that produce meaning rather than refer to a preconceived meaning. This is the sphere of poetry strictly speaking. But it must be noted that poetry is an integrative framework that will at will employ all the other modes of association in a dynamising movement. And that by becoming productive, triggering poetic response, cascades of images, atmospheres and suggestions that in turn will provoke concrete suggestions on different levels of both poetic creativity, extrovert action and transforming life experience and life strategies, this is also where they fulfill the famous Feuerbach thesis and start changing the world. And once I have reached this point in my argument, I need to halt and go back to work – maybe this is all in vain and already solved in either of those obscure disciplines that I'm not quite oriented in...)

A suivre.

M Forshage

premonition of a locomotive

Stockholm surrealist group: excerpts from email discussion

EB:
A propos of phantom objects, but not quite a game suggestion yet:
Benjamin borrowed a dear old marxist conflict between form and content, the one between means of production and conditions of production: technical advances do as far as they're able borrow available (social) forms, but will sooner or later end up in conflict with the latter and bring about a formal "revolution". The marxism of the second international placed, as we know, the conflict on the level of the mode of production, while Benjamin interested himself for how the conflict expressed itself on the level of technical innovation.
Benjamin: "When trying to learn them properly, errors and mistakes occurred. From another viewpoint these attempts are the most true proofs that technical production in its initial phase was a prisoner of the realm of dreaming. (During certain stages, not only architecture but also technology bears witness of a collective dream.)"
Marx: "To what extent the old form of the means of production initially dominates the new form, is shown/.../ perhaps most strikingly: the locomotive that was experimentally constructed, before the present locomotives appeared, a locomotive which had two feet that it alternately raised just like a horse"
Thus the horse haunts the locomotive, the canvas the camera, the wood the steel, etc.

MF:
The classical example of a phenomenon contrary to that horse locomotive is what Apollinaire back in his days defined as surrealism "when man set out to reproduce walking, she invented the wheel, which isn't similar to walking at all" (approximate quote). A game could aim at reinventing the wheel, and finding those old idle ghosts haunting us because we are surrealists? Or do we want to find a specific absence in the single objects? What functional-auratic-sentimental inherent object has been completely chased off out of the object at which I am pointing? Which is the unforeseeable wheel which will totally replace the obsolete ridiculousness I am here hugging?

CA:
So, the game would consist of establishing a contact with the exterior, slightly more on the exterior's condition than usually, in order to bring about a transformation instead of the habitual, and thus chasing off the ghosts/ the phantom object part?

NN:
Erik, Erik Homburger Erikson said in a freudian context (three Erik in the same sentence!): The faucet is not a phallos symbol, but the phallos is rather a faucet symbol, since the the faucet would never have been invented if it wasn't for primary experiences of needing to pee while asleep etc, experiences which have very little to do with the aims ascribed to the object. This makes the plausible problem solvings of everyday life into mere post-factum-rationalisations, or distortions of their latent content, which may not at all, or only to a very small extent, have something to do with the formal.
The horse memory of the locomotive ought perhaps to go further back than the horse, to some primary process primordial scenes?
Perhaps that is the explanation of the film manuscript I dreamt in November, "The memories of a locomotive"!

The surrealist bestiary

Ils sont des animaux...

Surrealist imagery is full of organisms, and it is quite obvious that animals make a certain type of particular sense to surrealist sensibility, for several reasons.
1) the marvellous abundancy and diversity of shapes, solutions, lifestyles, oddities, juxtapositions, exceptions in general in the animal kingdom;
2) the way very many animals are very easily subjected to empathy and experimental identifications, as well as easily interpreted as mere distorsions of whatever is human;
3) the way animals are among the everywhere available wonders of given reality, proffering poetic encounters to anyone with a poetic vigilance, especially when combined with a prelidection for walking alone and with somewhat oversensitive hearing, sight and smelling, traditional character traits shared by the poet and the naturalist;
4) the way other animals are related to ourselves but keep making other choices and arrangements, thus serving as reminders of the lack of basis for our own sense of superiority, and providing yet another field of real concrete experience supporting antihumanism;
5) the dynamic roles played by animals in traditional and popular mythologies, including various kinds of old and new folklore of various cultures, contemporary horror and quasiscientific lore, traditional hermetic imagery, etc
6) the sense in which animal diversity demonstrates the wonders possible within a scientific perspective, where pure astonishment and scientific rigor share interests, and especially so in the appreciation of the radically demystifying and antireligious dialectical-historical discipline of evolutionary biology and its fundament the darwinian theory of evolution.

But among humans, including surrealists, it is also quite obvious that some people are more interested in animals than others. And it became even clearer to me when doing a small study in the form of sweeping through my bookshelf for examples of animals in surrealist imagery. Many surrealists just love filling their works with animals and animal-like objects (Breton, Péret, Ernst, Miró, Carrington, Césaire, Lam, Molina, Gomez-Correa, Caceres, Cabanel, Morris, Le Toumelin, Camacho, Toyen, Lacomblez, Joans, Lamantia, West etc etc), some focusing on the concrete sensory experience of animals actually encountered, others on the fantastic character of various exotic animals encountered in books and films, still others on either vaguer (in terms of diagnostic characters) or just less known animalistic presences in the imagination. Others cite them less frequently but still as an important part of their coherent imagery (Desnos, Tzara, Eluard, Dominguez, Brauner, Magritte, Dalí, Mansour, Kahlo etc) - among those we obviously see a sensitivity towards the general surrealist aspects of animals but probably no particular interest. While some others cite remarkably few animals, usually in a very unspecific way ("bird" "fish" "insect" etc) and sometimes notably in a strangely nonsensuous way as if utilised as concepts or symbols rather than in their own right (Arp, Artaud, Char, Paz, Pellegrini, Chazal, Dotremont, Cobra painters) - this is sometimes bodies of work with some kind of a metaphysical focus sometimes corresponding with a lack of sensuous concretion on the whole, and sometimes bodies of work focusing on a more narrowly anthropocentric phenomenology. In a few of the classic surrealists I've seen no obvious references to animals whatsoever (Duchamp, Ray, Tanguy, Sage).
Indeed, animals always run the risk of being utlised as mere nonsensuous symbols (as in religious imagery including hermeticism, including Artaud) or as mere words or shapes without particular meaning in careless automatism (cf Arp with his limited set of word-matter elements, but also for example Franklin Rosemont, whose poems and collages abound with interchangeable animals).

If those latter directions are dismissed as not truly concerned with animals, we could make a temporary distinction between a few fundamental modes of animal fantasy; which I will call animalistic, zoological and field vigilance. The animalistic one is the one focusing on empathy with, alienation and horror before, and fantasies of transformations into, different lifeforms and particularly their wildness, freedom, fierceness, lack of reason - this type of fantasy often targets animals at hand (domestic mammals) or animals representing wildness in popular fantasy (very often the mammals of the african savannah). The other type, which I call zoological, is the more exotistic type of fantasy focusing on diversity of life forms, often covering the strangest possible kinds of animals and the most remote faunas, typically including the sea, the tropical rainforests and the "hidden worlds" of Australia, Madagascar etc. And finally as a third type of fantasy we may regard the simple field vigilance which makes anybody who is outdoors observe remarkable forms and behaviors in the animals surrounding us, of which birds and insects are usually the most conspicuous but all kinds of animals (whose geographical range, habitat choice, diurnal and annual rhythm and behavioral patterns the poet overlaps) may occur as strange encounters.

Much of surrealism's zoological iconography rests solidly on that of Lautréamont and of Lewis Carroll, and to a lesser extent on HP Lovecraft and hermetic philosophy, while also zoologists like Haeckel, Fabre, Darwin, Wallace, Lamarck, Buffon, Say, Linnaeus, Kinsey etc and visionary zoological amateurs such as Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Toussenel, Zötl, Dürer, Bosch etc have inspired many surrealists. Few active surrealists have been professional zoologists themselves (but many have been amateur naturalists) - it seems like the only surrealist dealing with a broad perspective of contemporary zoology (beside myself) has been Desmond Morris; at core a mammalologist and a popular scientist. But many surrealists have been, and are, active amateur naturalists, notably as birdwatchers (Barbaro, Camacho, Cowdell, Digby, Forshage, Hérold, Lamantia etc) or as entomologists (Buñuel, Caillois, Forshage, Starr, Tunnard). Other zoologists with notable and sometimes close relations to the surrealists have included Tom Harrisson, Jean Painlevé and Laurent Schwartz.

A few exposées of surrealist animals have been made before. Kurt Seligmann made a famous collage of "Les animaux surréalistes" reprinted in the Dictionnaire abrégée de Surréalisme 1938, Breton listed a certain number of animals as mythologically important for surrealism during the 40s, Ted Joans compiled a list of surrealist animals in his magazine Dies und Das 1984. All of these listed a small number of animals of particular totemic/mythological value within surrealism, and did not consider the width of the animal kingdom.

It should also be noted that a study such as this cannot give justice to those surrealist painters who invent a lot of animals (Ernst, Brauner, Lam, Carrington, le Toumelin, Morris, Miró, as well as the few animals of Matta, and those - if animals they are - of Tanguy) which are not obvious how to name or classify.

Provisionary conclusions:
it is the classical fierce animals, the classical damned/ evil/ dark animals, the near animals, the classical poetic animals, the hermetic animals and the famous wondrous/ exceptional/ fantastic animals, which most frequently occur in surrealism. Many of surrealism's totem animals clearly belong to several of these categories.

The few most common animals of all in surrealist imagery I'd like to divide into a general and a specific category. The general ones are those very common in human thinking, human language, human life in general, popular image and/or all kinds of poetry. The use surrealism has made of them may be particular but is not quite distinct from popular use. I was in fact a bit surprised to see that the animal perhaps most frequent in surrealism on the whole was the horse, which has never been acknowledged as something totemic for surrealism (but perhaps for a few of its pictorial artists specifically). Other such common animals common in surrealism are corals, snails, butterflies, elephants, lions, cats, wolves, eagles, parrots, owls and nightingales. The more specific ones are the elective affinities, the chosen totems, the selected oddities put to particular use within surrealism. Of those, the most common ones are the octopus, the mantis, the hippocampus, the salamander, the platypus, the anteater, the black swan and the ibis (several others are traditionally recognised as surrealist totems but just not as widespread).

A list of other animals that are frequent in surrealist imagery could include: jellyfish, mussle, centipede, lobster, spider, scorpion, dragonfly, locust, scarab, glowworm, fly, starfish, sea urchin, shark, moray, turtle, kangaroo, sloth, mole, bat, lemur, dog, polar bear, donkey, rhinoceros, pig, deer, giraffe, chamaeleon, iguana, boa, cobra, crocodile, dinosaur, peacock, pelican, cormorant, pigeon, nightjar, bird of paradise, raven, etc etc.

Those occasionally singled out, or still unused but with a big potential according to the parameters discussed, will make up a huge set and include more or less most animals, and the list where I've been collecting such information for this minor study has some 600 different animals. Its voluminous and eternally unfinished nature makes it perhaps less suitable for public view.

Mattias Forshage

the out there

There is something going on there. Which we want to take part in. Something independent, ragingly chaotic still supremely ordered, something which simply does not await legitimation. With a combination of elusiveness, shapeshifting and omnipresence, it is indeed even difficult to adress it: many of us tries to escape those difficulties by choosing examples and talking about getting out "in the streets" or "in the forest", others talk about "nature" or "wilderness", some matter-of-factly of "outdoors" and recently some about "exteriority".

Due to illness I've spent a series of days indoors, just after I got in the mail two publications which I contributed to and which happened to coincide in time; one surrealist anthology about "the crisis of exteriority" (I don't know what this crisis is and I'm not sure what the editors (Eric Bragg, Eugenio Castro and Bruno Jacobs) mean by exteriority in the first place, my contribution was an old text about worthless places, serving as a background for their more advanced theories) and one literary journal with a "nature" theme (the editor (Jonas Ellerström) even cited my initial whining about the vagueness and problematical character of the theme, and while agreeing with my concerns, he refrained from sharing them by suggesting it to be consciously a vague catchphrase roughly corresponding to the more concrete category of "outdoors").

(Quick note: What is nature? Nature obviously means at least three related but different things; 1) nature as the "ways of the universe", the allencompassing fundamental patterns, 2) nature as the given "raw world" as opposed to culture, both outside and inside ourselves, which works in accordance with a spontaneous order, and 3) nature as the natural environments and biological systems inhabiting it, imagined independent from the human sphere but attractive for us to visit. In different languages, "nature" and its equivalents may be more strongly associated with one or the other, but the ambiguity is usually there, and the sinister gliding between descriptive and normative meanings of the "natural". Ah, I remember, and I can't decide if proudly or ashamedly, how the Stockholm surrealist group tried to hold a taped "round-table-discussion" about "nature" ten years ago and I pretty much obstructed the discussion by demanding to know what the others were talking about.)

The problem is that it is really not a problem. Dualisms may be spontaneous figures of human reason, but the point with them is to get a quick overview of the field in order to proceed to understand the constellation of transgressions and mutuality. All those dualisms of inner-outer, self-others, subjective-objective, culture-nature, artificial-ecological, civilisation-wilderness, have some basic phenomenological reality and are acceptable as provisional tools. The history of western thinking has seen the development of arguments of the impossibility of holding on to them in some stricter sense; in biology, psychoanalysis, marxism, structuralism, dialectics, etc etc; and it seems like those holding on them as basic division at any price are openly reactionary efforts like fascism and some unsophisticated applications of formal logics, or regressive such as unsophisticated applications of philosophical phenomenology or structuralism. So let's just repeat: the domain of the self is not homogenous-unitarian, not sharply delineated from other beings or the external environment, and the human sphere cannot be separated from the rest of the world, indeed human culture (just like other species' cultures) is indeed in a fundamental sense but one mere aspect of our biology, one which has in turn reshaped the planet in our small- and largescale interactions. Both the others and nature are certainly not just out there but in here just as much, and nothing out there has remained untouched.

There are two small points I have to make as a biologist, that the concepts of wilderness and ecological balance are highly dubious empirically and rather corresponds to certain people's projectional fantasies.

That virgin aspect of nature is fantasised by all kinds of primitivists, be they of pacifist or aggressive leanings. Often this is based on mere ignorance, on having no idea to what extent human land use has shaped and differentiated the natural habitats of the world for centuries. It's probably only in recent times that human impact has become, facilitated by technical deveopment but even more necessitated by demands of the economical system, largescale homogenizing enough to be severely detrimental for biological diversity. Most open lands were indeed created by human husbandry (except in very dry or very cold climates) and most natural-looking forests are shaped by some level of human harvesting of wood, animal forage, game, and other resources. The few places that could be regarded as entirely "wild", the few most inaccessible forests, the glacial landscapes, large parts of the deserts, the thundra and the oceans, are part in global circulation and therefore in complex interactions with human outtake, reshaping and littering elsewhere (littering both in terms of spreading both major junk and small civilisation souvernirs, pollution and overnourishment in general). The "wilderness" hailed in the typically american brand of primitivism (which is very significant for some of the religious and utopian movements populating north america in earlier centuries, as well as for certain ecologists and even some of the surrealists in modern times) has indeed been demonstrated to fulfill the function of an ideological construct denying the extent to which the "virginal" north american landscape was indeed shaped by the land use of the native peoples. In fact, much of nature conservation in north america is still only about keeping people out, resting on the same fundamental misanthropy idealising fantasies of a "natural way" in the absence of humans, which is one of the reasons this particular american primitivism is often characterised as "ecofascism". (Let's just be clear here: misanthropy in itself is not necessarily fascist at all, though most of its political implementations are.)

And then for the harmony of "ecological balance", putting in quasiscientific terms this fantasy of the soundness of the state of things in the absence of man. Any stability in nature is in fact a dynamical equilibrium of competing forces; what we see is there because it is the contemporary constellation of each population's "evolutionary stable strategies" visavis each other and other parts of their environment. It will occasionally go off in dynamic developments, sometimes triggered by human involvment and sometimes other factors. Not too often though, if it was highly unstable it simply wouldn't be there for us to see; but as biological systems it cannot be static. Such a sense of dynamic aposteriori order is probably one of the few useful concepts of order anyway. What would it be else? Entropy of course, the only conceivable universal order, when everything moves out of reach for everything else so that nothing should ever happen anymore... But then, on a fundamental level, biological life is specifically a uniquely powerful system of combatting entropy, both on the smallest scale (sorting substances by means of metabolism) and on the largest scales (reshaping the global environments by means of actions of populations, and thereby creating history). And then there is the neurotic sense of order; the denial of everything but the few things in control.

And here, as it lies at heart of the concept of nature, we shouldn't consider ourselves too good to repeating the analogies between the mental and geographical aspects here; the sheltering obsession is similar in so-called rational thinking and in housing. Proclaim a little space reserved for the well-known and controllable; in one area "sound reason" or closed rationalism, in the other indoors or home. Sheltering a fraction of space is not just the political and moral fall of grace that Rousseau was talking about, it also creates a uniquely predictable environment. The space is filled with familiar objects only, with familiar people only or with no other people at all, temperature, light, humidity, any exchange between in and out is regulated, everything regarded as "nature" is kept out.

This creates the sphere of outdoors as something to project desires on simply because it obeys the normal workings of reality: it is where the wind blows, where other species live, where strangers go, and where unexpected encounters occur; the domain of freedom. And at some points we will need to distinguish between the often maddeningly banal, repetitive and petty concerns structuring the larger parts of our social structures and the inspiringly banal, repetitive and petty concerns which seem to dictate the lifes of other lifeforms and their interactions, and which indeed seems to speak directly to us when we visit so-called natural environments. In both types of environments, the point is to make oneself available to the flow of regularities and irregularities which has things to teach us, challenge us and bathe us in the concrete sensory perceptions of all that which is images of freedom and reality - Which is perhaps, perhaps, another appearance form of the same domain of flow that opens up from a point which phenomenologically seems to reside within us whenever we open up ourselves to poetry, through automatism, alchemical labor, falling in love, disorder in the senses, aggressive inspiration, seances and rituals, or whatever. Is it?

MF
(to be continued)
(among other things by a serious attempt to grasp the concept of exteriority of the exteriority surrealists)