Gareth Brown
Leeds Surrealist Group
Please send your responses to:
Gareth Brown, LEEDS, England
1) With which non-surrealist elements (groups, theories, tendencies, individuals etc.) do you feel a political affinity?
We have no affinity with any political group, theory, tendency or individual.
We presently don't know any tendency that gives us any reason of putting our hopes towards their intentions. We are, on a distance, positive to, or at least not against, those who protest against injustice, oppression and capitalist sweating, but we can't honestly say
that we believe it worthwhile for us to engage our time and power in it. We don't see every opposition against the capitalist order as just as good or bad, but we see a problem with all of them. Either they have some good points but are ineffective, or their effectiveness is fully within the limits of today's repressive tolerance. None of them look like real threats to the capitalist order. We are pessimist anti-capitalists.
The important challenge, we think, is in the development of critical thinking. Our encounter with the "skeptics'" movement has raised our consciousness about common thinking fallacies, and about expressions of gullibility and prejudices that we are not free from ourselves. We want to be able to confront new as well as old ideas with a higher degree of criticism.
The "skeptics'" and atheists' movements, although they're not explicitly political, have for this reason been of our particular interest recently. Among these there are some (especially the "humanists") that have very naive views on politics, morals, rituals and myths. Nevertheless, we see in the skeptics' movement a point that has sometimes been missing in surrealism, the importance of keeping poetical thinking and critical thinking apart and not mix up which one is which.
In politics, we think this is just as important as anywhere else. Here, we also encounter the question about the relationship between the real and the ideal. Surrealists have paid a lot of attention to where they meet and unite. But we have the impression that surrealists make them unite too often, where they shouldn't.
Can they, in theory or practice, in any way, unite in the field of politics? We suspect they probably couldn't and shouldn't. Attempts to do it risk to be idealist in one respect or the other. Politics doesn't seem to be a domain of the ideal, even though the domains of myth and imagination can influence it. We simply need politics for self-defence. We doubt that a political revolution can be very "fun", it's most certainly an act out of a desperate situation, a horrible necessity when misery and humiliation pass the level of the
intolerable. Moreover, we don't identify with talk about "the" revolution, many revolts will probably happen and their success will be measured in relation to their rising of the level of consciousness or not.
The surrealist movement is largely a movement of poets, not of scientists. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate the proper places of poetry, utopia and myth in life and in the world and not repeat some old watchwords if they obscure more than they clarify. Poetry can use all means necessary, including confusion. But if we cause confusion where things should be clarified, we lower consciousness. Utopianism can be seen as a poetic expression, of a quest for freedom and the marvellous, but it can't have a significant importance in politics. Politics is
a domain of the real and the possible, and we'd rather engage in something possible than an impossible (however desirable) with real illusions.
Surrealist politics at the moment seems like a mish-mash of utopianism, activism, ultra-radicalism, feminism, deep ecology, marcusianism, situationism, lazyism, anarchism, marxism and probably more. Should surrealism have a clear line instead of this mix, or just a general position, or nothing at all?
We don't see that surrealism has any specific task or role in revolutionary politics, although our activities might inspire people on different fields. We can act in order to raise consciousness. We can reveal and attack fraud, repression and injustice. We can experiment with life according to inspiration and imagination and share the results. We are revolutionary in this way.
2) Within the sphere of political action or discussion: with which non-surrealist elements (if any) are you actively engaged?
When we lived in Stockholm last year, we joined the Vetenskap Och Folkbildning (VOF), (the swedish association Science and Popular Education, associated to the Skeptics' Movement). Here in Szczecin recently, we participated in a meeting of about 40 people forming a local group of the organization PSR (polish rationalists). One of their concerns right now is to attack the "Konkordat", the agreement between the state and the catholic church, which gives the church resources and priviliges. We'll see if it will be constructive for us to work with them. Before we knew about this, we tried to form an atheist network here, and planned to find ways to attack the recent formation of an exorcist center, intended to attract "customers" from germany as well as from poland.
This page was first published on April 14th, 2008.