[Some months ago appeared, under the initiative of Eric Bragg, Bruno Jacobs and Eugenio Castro the book The exteriority crisis. From the city limits and beyond. Few months later, our friend Mattias Forshage wrote a criticism to that book, as well as to some particular contributions, mostly related to the Madrid group members who participates in the book. As a consequence, those members of the Madrid group and also some friends concerned have written a response to Mattias' criticism. Both, Mattias and all of us have considered that the discussion is of the most relevance and that it has to circulate within the international surrealist community. Texts are available in the following section of this webpage: http://gruposurrealistademadrid.org/textos/otros-textos-el-surrealismo-en-su-presente]

Hi,

A small and odd circle we were, those who eagerly were waiting for the revelation of what the exteriority concept in contemporary surrealism  actually was about. Then came the book which was supposed to hand the tool to the waiting theoretical activist wanderers. Yet still we keep  walking along in the same unenlightened air of our own deficiencies  and unfulfilled desires, as if the tool put in our hands was a mere 
virtual tool, the imagination of the idea of the tool itself conceived  as if it might have taken form but haven’t, perhaps one or the other  variety of the emperor’s new clothes?

But first let’s speak about the book. It is something of a milestone  event that a collective theory book by an international coalition of  contemporary surrealists is being published (did actually somebody do it after La Civilisation surréaliste 1976?) and this is great. The appearance of the book is appealing. Nice format, nice layout, very 
good pictures, really beautiful cover image. Even more important: the good aura of collective internationalist collaboration, of odd theoretical effort from strange angles, I feel that we really should consider if this isn’t to be made a more central task of ours to 
manifest this very type of intervention.

The language on the whole is mystifying. I know this is the spanish  and swedish editors’  way of allegedly speaking “surrealistic”, and in french or spanish this may work as a reference to something in-between Nougéism, Bretonism and Bounourism. But the attempt to convert that particular type of speech act into english has failed and usually sounds merely clumsy. And so, much in the translations, which I believe are the endresult of long discussions between two of the editors, nevertheless end up sounding as quick-and-dirty literal transposals of romanic rhetorics. There are numerous examples of sentences which are even supposed to say something straight-forward, 
but are so stuck in their mystifying and non-english idiom that they end up with the weirdest speaking impediments and simple errors of syntax and reference - see for example the sentence in the introduction supposedly saying that some of the texts have been previously published elsewhere but not others - this sentence actually says something quite different and largely incomprehensible.

On the formal level of the translation, it is also poor and frustrating to refer in an english text to spanish translations of Breton’s works. You just have to check up either an english translation or the original when translating. Far lesser details, which are no serious mistakes but contribute to an unprofessional impression, is the lack of homogenisation of reference style, and lack of internal references within the book (as most authors mostly refer to each other anyway) such as “(cf this volume p 27 Editors’ note.)”or something.

Then for the content of the book, I cannot but conclude that it very neatly falls into two distinct aspects, not just distinct but rather separated by an abyss. On one side we have exciting empirics, the exploration for poetic purposes of various atmospheric environments, and on the other side we have poor theorizing. Stuck in this conflict, 
the book can certainly be regarded as a very good read, with beautiful photographs and haunting documentations of surrealist excursions into certain surrealist landscapes. As long as we are kept curious enough to not just feel offended, then dissatisfaction is one of the dynamic effects of reading.

And on the level of mere documentation, as a building block for eventual theoretization, it is remarkable how very few of the texts at all consider the socioeconomic conditions for the emergence of this kind of places (Eric Bragg’s text is one of the few which mention them, along with more superficial hints by Jose Manuel Rojo). And no one (except for superficial references in Silvia Guiard’s text) speak about the natural (geomorphological in her case) conditions (and there, of course, the translation has mystifyingly refrained from looking up the proper english words for the geomorphological phenomena in question. A “dolina” is in english a doline, it’s as simple as that). Hasn’t it struck any of the editors that all the preferred examples 
are of abandoned environments thus necessitating either a situation  where land is still not yet a limiting factor (arid north america) or  a situation of partly undeveloped and partly declining economy,  still-ongoing urbanisation, relative lack of capital impeding 
exploitation (iberic peninsula)? The refusal of a socioeconomic perspective seems very deliberate at times, and occasionally (such as when Rojo complains over the transformation of abandoned factories into cultural centers) it may start suggesting that old ghost of dalíism, surfascism or radical conservatism: arrogantly 
superordinating an aesthetical perspective over a social one. Hasn’t it struck any of the editors that almost all the preferred examples are from specifically mediterranean climates (you know, wine-growing areas, with arid very warm summers and wet mild
winters; such as in south europe and southwest north america) with the specific vegetation and landscape that produces? This passion for provincial 
given conditions is a tool which can be used for good and for bad, and within the frame of the book there is no real support for a suspicious reading. But on the other hand, considering how one of the editors recently has been ranting polemically for the need for “authencity” (1) of -and the benefits or relative isolation of- surrealist activities of 
different countries, and against new technologies, easily available international contacts etc, the ghost of Heidegger and radical conservatism may seem to be hovering over the horizon. Has so much time passed since the same polemist led the attack against the 
confused nationalist-sounding musings of the Chilean surrealists?

Getting back from sly insinuations to the subject at hand, I want to emphasise that the environments explored, the ambiances mediated, the places and objects, are all very interesting. The best texts are Bragg’s and Corrales’, partly just because they focus consciously on these empirics (and are written without mystifying ambitions). In
both cases I am frustrated that the texts are so short, the moments of suspension so brief, the list of details so short; cause I know both authors have so much material worth writing about, and so many good photographs, so that not only could these uncanny expeditions go on for so much longer for the reader’s pleasure and fear, but there
could also emerge patterns, coincidences, explanations. In the same sense, I  also like the contributions of the cantabrians (Escudero and Ortega), 
of Julio Monteverde and of Guy Girard, of Manuel Crespo, and of Silvia Guiard (the latter is, in her truly haunting contribution, almost the only one who allows herself to dream!). In José Manuel Rojo’s contributions there are several scattered solid bits of such good empirics, and more sparse glimpses in Eugenio Castro’s, but hardly
any at all in Bruno Jacobs’s or Angel Zapata’s.

And then, what is exteriority? For a long time it seemed like just like an voluntarily opaque moniker for surrealist explorations of place in general. Then Castro wrote some things where he seemed to recommend a literal understanding of the term, exteriority simply being that on the outside. But why then make such a fuss over it?
That would seem to imply either an existentialist angoisse or ennui, a general feeling of isolation of the self, making every reference to other people and to the outside world something very dramatic; or a logical-structuralist exaltation over the very binary opposition of interior-exterior and their possible transgression. Or if the exterior 
is not other people or the world in general, it might be specifically the sphere of “outdoors”, which sometimes shows up as an alternative term when people want to speak about “nature” and realise how problematic a concept “nature” is. Jacobs used to write very good very mystifying texts about nature - one of few really good examples of a modern implementation of the ancient discipline of natural philosophy. 

Because again, what’s so dramatic about outdoors? Now in this book, in one of Rojo’s texts and in the introduction (and already in the subtitle), there suddenly seems to be a consensus that exteriority has to do with city limits. The exterior is that which
is ”on and beyond” the city border. Again this seems to be a mere structuralist exaltation. But it has some phenomenological meaning too, which makes sense: inside the border the imposed order seems to reign and structured activities dominate, outside other things may start happening. But this would definitely necessitate a heterogenic 
interpretation of this border, as is explicitly made in Rojo’s text: the city border can appear everywhere, even in the middle of the city. So then it is just an attempt to concretise (or possibly mystify) what we already knew from the earliest crude atopos theory and before that (the czech island game, Edenborg’s concept of “mould of the city”, etc), that the city is a heterogenous space and spots of unorder or  lack of control penetrate the only seemingly homogenous matrix of the ordered city. Focusing on the border shifts attention just a little to the industrial outskirts of cities, where land is slightly cheaper and there often are more dominant arbitrary historical restrictions
based on bureaucratical concerns in city planning, ownership and enterprise tactics, pollution and sanitation demands - and anyway the very industrial use of the lands involves a type of spatial planning differing from the narrow ordering patterns inside the city - so there we have a ruderal landscape, which is more open, looks a bit abandoned 
even when it isn’t (which both has to do with its physical qualities and with the fact that the surrealist or urban explorer usually goes there at night or weekends, when the workers are absent), has more junk and various objects lying around - objects often unrecognisable for visitors without experience in the type of production they are 
utilised for (making them available for production of meaning and fantasies as surrealist objects, that is) - which is irresistably romantic to the naively romantic surrealist. I agree these are exciting environments. But not that “exteriority” manages to seize 
something of their particular attraction.

And the title of this books now proclaims a “crisis of exteriority”. What does this crisis consist in? The introduction doesn’t talk about it, and it seems none of the texts does either. So this is just a mystification too? It does really sound like teenage anguish “Oh it is so difficult for me to reach the outside world”. Or does the crisis consist in the fact that it is only an enlightened few who have realised the importance of this category in thinking? Or should we get more heideggerian-etymological and go back to greek “krisis” and regard it as the decisive point, the decisive point where the ordered city actually ceases and something else takes over, thus again exalting the very notion of the limit?

Excitement over poetic experience is surrealist. Excitement of exploration of unknown environments is surrealist. Theorising over poetic experience in terms of empirical phenomenology in the service of the imagination and of revelation and emancipation is surrealist. Mystification is not surrealist in itself (in the crudest possible sense it is of course antisurrealist as surrealism wants to reveal reality in its entirety) but can very well sometimes be surrealist when it is implemented in a way implementing uncertainty about the given, learnt, ideological, banal, and promoting imagination, unmasking, and new poetic possibilities. Binary oppositions are provisionally useful. Let me paste here a section from my recent post “the out there”:
      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.

The concept of exteriority does not contribute to the clarification of the surrealist aspects of place anything else than the suggestive and useful metaphor “wow, this feels like the city limit”. And it is not for the interested reader to get a clear image of what the
problem actually is: is it a total theoretical surrender to the poststructuralist desire philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and its partly formalist, partly intellectual-fetishist partly antiintellectual implications, transforming the poet, in spite of the talk of
ravaging desire, into a smart tourist in the world of signs? is it a resurrection of existentialist or teenage metaphysics-making of the phenomenon of alienation and pretentious overdramatisation of (often thereby simultaneously realienation of) the experience of transgression? or is it just a bloodless-formal-logic sounding actual 
attempt to conclude something about the real poetic experience of the poetic sense of place? In the latter case, which might perhaps be the most plausible explanation, it would seem like it simply does an inferior job than the previous, admittedly primitive, attempt to grasp something of the phenomenology involved by speaking of “worthless 
places”, which was to a large extent metaphorical and catch-phrasical too, but still somehow rested on a theory of socioeconomic influence on the organisation of space, which slightly more leads into the direction of a possible explanation than the logical-structural metaphor and catchphrase of the exterior (or, for that matter, of the total flatness of Jacobs’s uninspired provisional suggestion elsewhere of “poetic places”). Sorry. It is up to someone else to suggest something more useful now.

The present book is a failure, but an applaudable, enjoyable and partly very beautiful failure. Had there only been less mystification; less of volontary withholding information, volontary restraining analytical thought, confidence in the suggestiveness of logical paradoxes and unresolved philosophical concepts, it would have been 
far more sympathetic too.

Mattias


(1). This was quickly clarified to be a misquotation and withdrawn.