From: INMAN J S <S.Inman-AT-greenwich.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 12:22:24 GMT
Subject: Re: SurrealMagick


I was interested to get your email and think that your points deserve 
far more attention than I can pay them at present.

I have not read the Vaneigem book, but have heard about its 
translation and forthcoming publication.

If, after I have finished my current spate of work at the end of 
July, there is more to be said, I would live to get my teeth into 
these questions. I am dealing with some of them in this work, a 
research thesis on Surrealism, particularly czech.

For now, I remember reading an interview with Jean Schuster, 
published in New Statesman I think, (I can check) where he points 
out the documentary evidence for Surrealism remaining politically 
active: the preponderance of political collective tracts among the 
collective declarations. This of course is not the thing itself, only 
the trail, as it were, of the snail, not the snail itself. 

The Czech surrealists have produced a body of work, critical and 
creative, despite the many years of working under a totalitarian 
regime (and in some ways because of it) and since the "velvet 
revolution" have published a good part of their work. look up their 
web page for a sample. I have just read a wonderful essay published 
in a journal called Cross-Currents, which was dedicated to east european studies.
It is "The Raw Cruelty of Life" by Vratislav Effenberger, and it sums 
up these perspectives pretty well.

The Leeds Group have recently invented "A Game of Slight 
Disturbances" which offers interesting possibilities of personal, 
and intersubjective perspectives as well as their eruption into the 
public world.

Of course, one thing that always needs to be asked of the "radical 
milieu" is: "What happened to you?" I am thinking of those who ended 
up as maoists, for instance and those who vanished up their own 
arseholes without ever producing a body of work, theoretical, 
creative, politcal, or anything near to the surrealist achievement, 
even at its weakest. The situationists seem to me to be almost alone in, 
while having enough theoretical drawbacks (as I understand them, and 
I am happy to admit the limits of my understanding of them) and 
certainly having done the vanishing up the nether regions trick as 
far as the actual movement was concerned, being able to make 
surrealists uncomfortable with their critique.

Stuart