Introduction

"Poetry should be made by all."
—Lautréamont

The Surrealists initiated the most radically liberating critique of reason of the century. Their brilliant investigations were conducted through art and polemic, manifesto and demonstration, love and politics. But most specially and remarkably, It was through games, play, techniques of surprise and methodologies of the fantastic that they subverted academic modes of enquiry, and undermined the complacent certainties of the reasonable and respectable. Playful procedures and systematic stratagems provided keys to unlock the door to the unconscious and to release the visual and verbal poetry of collective creativity.

These methods and experiments were at the centre of the Surrealist provocation of bourgeois normalities. They borrowed children's games, invented techniques to exploit the unpredictable outcomes of chance and accident, and discovered new and creative uses for automatism. To facilitate their own researches into the secrets of the human heart and mind they appropriated, with magisterial insouciance, procedures of enquiry from the academic disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. They arbitrarily transformed innocent objects into magical images, and reinstated the fetish in the ceremonies of art.

Surrealist games and procedures are intended to free words and images from the constraints of rational and discursive order, substituting chance and indeterminacy for premeditation and deliberation. Surrealism takes the logic and continuity of the dream to have a truly given significance, equalled only by the revelatory power of the unexpected analogy, the marvellous conjunction: . . . I madly love everything that adventurously breaks the thread of discursive thought and suddenly ignites a flare illuminating a life of relations fecund in another way, wrote Breton. Such 'chance encounters' transgress deductive laws and transcend the logical systems of classical rationalism.

Such relations—the spontaneous extra-lucid insolent rapport . . . between one thing and another . . . which common sense hesitates to confront —may be discovered in dreams, in the mental play of poetic reverie, in the induced trance and the systematic disordering of the senses famously prescribed by Rimbaud, and in the practice of automatic techniques. To these solitary exercises of the imagination, significantly freed in each case from the composing rules of logical discourse, the Surrealists added the absorbing and ordered procedures of creative collaboration and the game. These activities they valued especially for their emphatic repudiation of individualistic artistic value, and their potential for collectively achieved revelation.

They have those characteristics of games defined by Roger Caillois, the French critic associated for a time with the Surrealists: they are freely entered into; separated from the run of ordinary 'serious' life, they are circumscribed by their own time and space; they are uncertain, their outcomes not predetermined; they are economically unproductive and not concerned with material interests; they are governed by rules; they are associated with imaginative projection and make-believe. In elaborating the famous definition provided by Huizinga in HOMO LUDENS thus far, Caillois might have added that they are entered into for pleasure, and may bring unpremeditated insights. In many of these aspects they have much in common with art.

In one particular and important respect Surrealist play is more like a

kind of provocative magic. This is in its irrepressible propensity to the transformation of objects, behaviour and ideas. In this aspect of its proceedings Surrealism makes manifest its underlying political programme, its revolutionary intent. The First Manifesto ends: It [Surrealism] leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life. Sweeping and vague as it is, it cannot be doubted that this grand ambition was serious. Subsequent publications and manifestos developed and elaborated a complex of insights relating the life of the individual psyche to the dynamics of society and history, some powerfully original, some simplistic, some absurdly extreme or utopian. This is not the occasion for a history of Surrealist political interventions and provocations, nor for the retelling of the complex story of its own political travails, the bitter arguments, confrontations, expulsions and reconciliations. But there is no other movement in the history of this troubled century, surely, which has linked ideas of revolutionary political change so closely to the operations of magical transformation in art and poetry, and sought to subvert familiar social relations and received ideas in every sphere by subjecting them to rigorously witty and fantastic interrogations.

Here collected for the first time is a compendium of Surrealist games, strategies and procedures. It is for those who wish to employ for themselves the techniques of Surrealist enquiry and discovery; it sets out the rules and directions for playing the games. There has been nothing like it: much of the material gathered here has been previously documented only in obscure journals, or in magazines long since defunct and difficult to come by. It is presented in the spirit of Its subject, to offer the means to fulfill those aims (among others) of Surrealism described by its early historian, Julien Levy:

To exploit the mechanisms of inspiration.

To intensify experience.

We have lived for too long in the dreary region of homo economicus, our lives shadowed by principles of self-interest, utilitarian 'necessities', instrumental moralities. But we are permitted to hope; to revive those great and optimistic words of Breton: Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights We must welcome, as did the Surrealists, the re-entry into modern life of homo ludens, the imaginative man at play, the intuitive visionary.

—Mel Gooding, 1991