Intersubjectivity
The concept of intersubjectivity allows us to interrogate the basic fact that no individual can exist except in relationships with others. This fact obtains in relation to life: a human infant cannot survive alone, indeed few human adults are able to do so either. It obtains in relation to language: we cannot learn a language without other speakers; conversely if I can use and understand a word then so, in principle, could any other human being, and in this sense no language is ever the private property of one individual, even if only one individual can speak it in practice. It obtains in relation to the psyche: each individual's psychical world, conscious and unconscious, is formed in relation to other subjects, in relation to either their presence or their absence as well as to their meanings for and interactions with the individual.
Intersubjectivity is thus one of the fundamental conditions of human life, in which all individuals are immersed. A woman who sits daydreaming alone in her house is no less entangled in intersubjectivity than a woman who kisses a lover or addresses a crowd. This does not mean, however, that intersubjectivity is always the same, a bland background which can be taken for granted and then forgotten. There are different qualities and intensities of intersubjectivity, at different levels of existence, in different shapes and formations. From the point of view of surrealist praxis, clearly our interests must lie not simply in uncovering different modes of intersubjectivity, but of fostering, provoking, inventing new modes.
For these purposes the surrealist group itself provides both an object of enquiry and an alchemical laboratory. A surrealist group is at the outset a particular type of intersubjectivity, one where there is a sense of shared purpose and identity, there are members and non-members (insiders and outsiders), shared resources, and relatively clear group boundaries (albeit sometimes permeable by our fellow travellers and friends). This type of intersubjectivity can perhaps be designated collective, and is a set of characteristics which a surrealist group would share with many other kinds of group, from a nuclear family to a football supporters' club to a patriotic nation. As such the collective, in and of itself, is not necessarily positive, though not necessarily negative either. What distinguishes a surrealist group from the rest though is of course the nature of its shared identity and purpose. It is surrealism itself which must give a surrealist group its distinctive mode of intersubjectivity -- a mode of the Marvellous, both a discovery and an invention, perpetually wearing around its neck the magic sign: 'To Be Announced'.
Surrealist intersubjectivity
A surrealist group must self-evidently not simply be a group of individuals with a common interest in surrealism. For a group of such individuals the intersubjective would be no more than a passive plane, an inert container within which communication would be no more than a transaction, like an exchange of objects; a plane on which individuals may describe their dreams to one another but could never dream together ...
The conditions of our collective adventure must rather be that we actively seize intersubjectivity as we ourselves are seized by it. Intersubjectivity must for us be a moving flesh, muscular and elastic, opening and closing, pulling us into its depths and pushing us out again into new births. Love, hate, fear, desire, despair and rage will yield to us only insofar as we are prepared to offer our joint and mutual surrender.
The dreams, desires and suffering of a solitary human individual are inconceivable outside its world of other subjects and objects. If this is true of subjectivity in general, how much more intensely must it be felt in a surrealist mode of intersubjectivity? Subjective, objective and intersubjective must for us be brought into a state of ever deeper interpenetration. Clearly this can be fostered through the words and images of surrealist games and experiments. But we must also pay careful attention in our experiments to the extent to which the dimension of intersubjectivity must not be reduced to language or conflated with communication. If the mouth presents itself to us as a delirious organ of intersubjectivity, it does so precisely insofar as speech is not its only or even its primary activity. The world of non-linguistic or non-discursive intersubjectivity is a world of sensuality, blood and breath, of the unsayable, inarticulable, silent and sacred.
Intersubjectivity and Mortality
This silent and sacred dimension is that of mortality. 'An initiation into death, which is the condition and necessary contrast to life, would quicken the forces of life and thereby be a source of knowledge and an erotic reservoir' (Stockholm Surrealist Group 1991). The flesh of desire is always mortal. Our living-dying physical being launches us into a dialectic between the human and the inhuman, subject and object, the pleasure principle and the death drive, the desire to desire and the pull of oblivion. It is also that which constitutes the volume and dimensions of all those sensations, hungers and longings which animate intersubjectivity: mortality and eroticism are the recto and verso of the magic parchment in the golem's chest.
Each death is dialectically linked to each life, but is also a non-dialectical and utterly final negation of the individual subject. Thus in any surrealist group mortality is the limit-horizon of each contributing individual, but is also the vital force from which each individual springs, and must accordingly be the object of an unflinching collective enquiry. For each of us as individuals, the time for collective praxis is as short as the opportunity is precious. And for the eight members of the London Surrealist Group, an awareness of our collective evanescence is no less important than an appreciation of our collective qualities: these eight specific individuals, in all their particularities, are eight relays generating a unique frequency, which each new arrival or departure will transform in ways we cannot predict or control.
The London Surrealist Group in a state of grace
We know axiomatically that poetry is not metaphorical. The flow of our connection is not metaphor but metonymy, not paradigm but syntagm, not condensed but displaced: the angle of this collective passion is not vertical but horizontal. The circuit moves through eight points which are themselves in constant motion, each beating heart as indeterminate as an electron -- at once solid and fluid, its location lost in its velocity, its velocity incalculable in its 64 locations.
Merl
This article was previously published in Arcturus no. 2, 2005
