Scientific surrealism: Creation and rigour in Paul Nougé’s experimental method

Abstract

Abstract The surrealists saw their activity as research, which often resulted in art. However, in surrealist scholarship less attention has been paid to how individual surrealists understood research and how their methods were developed. Many of them, such as Paul Nougé and Roger Caillois, launched serious investigations into the irrational with the aim of acknowledging the affective dimensions of (rational) knowledge. Nougé preferred the rigour of science over literature and mapped out ways to import this rigour into poetics. His unique artistic praxis was based on an understanding of language as neither a transparent medium nor an expression of the subjective, ‘unlimited’ imagination favoured by French surrealism. Instead, Nougé’s notions of language and creative invention were informed by mathematics, in particular the thought of the mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré. For Nougé, scientific research invigorated poetic endeavours as he developed an experimental method that in spirit was closer to mathematics than literary language. The evocation of new phenomena through both science and poetry opened a new view of the human mind: an alternative epistemology of identity, exteriority and the selective evolution of objects.