Surrealism & Politics – RisePEI

To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution: that is the undertaking round which Surrealism circles in all its books and enterprises. This it might name its most specific process.
—Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: Final Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”

SURREALISM PERSISTS IN THE POPULAR creativeness as a predominantly visible phenomenon. Nearly a century after its founding, the identify stays nearly interchangeable with the work of its most outstanding painterly exponents, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte chief amongst them. Almost as acquainted as their imagery is the motion’s fixation on Freudian psychology: used not as a therapeutic software, however as a thread to plumb the untapped depths of the unconscious, its stifled drives and needs. Far much less acknowledged at present are Surrealism’s engagements with Marxist politics—as fraught, and in the end abortive, as they have been impassioned. The group’s most quick origins have been literary: the follow of “computerized writing” by Philippe Soupault and André Breton (the motion’s chief), aimed to liberate thought from the superintending results of syntax and superego. Like different of the group’s collective experiments, these have been means and never ends. Channeling the remnants of Parisian Dada right into a extra systematic enterprise, Breton, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Pierre Naville, and different founding luminaries aimed toward wholesale social insurgency—an upending of sexual repressions, bourgeois mores, nationalist myths, and non secular dogma, together with the linguistic strictures that promoted and preserved them. As attested within the titles of two of their journals—La Révolution Surréaliste and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution—rebel was no ancillary metaphor to this enterprise, however its driving pressure and supreme function. To that finish, the Surrealists got here—progressively, fitfully, and infrequently uneasily—to reconcile the motion’s metaphysical ambitions with Marxist materialism.

The latter, in any case, had already contributed to a minimum of one profitable revolution in opposition to the prevailing order, the 1917 Bolshevik commandeering of the Russian state. Recognized in Surrealism’s founding manifesto as a quintessential precept (together with the “omnipotence of the dream”), the “disinterested play of thought” thus turned intermittently subordinated to the ministrations of social gathering creed. Briefly becoming a member of the French Communist Social gathering (PCF) himself in 1927, Breton sought to accommodate Surrealism’s “whole subversion” to the totalizing program of revolutionary Marxism in follow. The experiment proved illusory. Rancor and recriminations abounded on all sides. But the very failure of the try deserves consideration as an important chapter within the historical past of twentieth-century cultural politics—a much more complicated phenomenon than the sanitized commodity model of Surrealism that the majority typically reaches us these days. Routinely eclipsed by its museological canonization are the group’s anti-fascist and anti-colonialist activism, Breton’s collaborations with Trotsky and Diego Rivera, in depth Surrealist involvement within the Spanish Civil Struggle, and fewer quantifiable contributions to existentialist philosophy and Situationist principle alike.

In a way, Surrealism’s decline was commensurate with its affect, even ubiquity. Not solely did its ostensibly scandalous objects come to function in museum collections worldwide, its visible methods have been swiftly absorbed into the bloodstream of late capitalist tradition. The waning of the motion after WWII appeared, in keeping with Anselm Jappe in his research Man Debord (1992/99), “brutally patent: for one factor Surrealism was now welcome within the temples
of bourgeois artwork, simply because it was on the planet of promoting.” At the same time as its improvisational dimensions have been siphoned into the supposedly apolitical ascendance of American Summary Expressionism, Breton declared in 1952 a “ultimate break with all of the conformist components of the time.” His pronouncements didn’t sway a youthful technology. Of their journal, Potlatch, the Lettrist group—quick forebears of the Situationist Worldwide—assailed “bourgeois inquisitors like André Breton or Joseph McCarthy.”

Situationism’s most incisive theorist, Man Debord, described Surrealism in 1958 as “completely boring and reactionary,” beholden to each “bourgeois impotence” and “inventive nostalgia.” Certainly, Breton by no means renounced his attachment to visible artwork as a method of psychic and social liberation, and helped stage exhibitions as late as 1960. But that very same 12 months he additionally added his identify to the “Manifesto of the 121,” subtitled the “Declaration Relating to the Proper of Insubordination within the Algerian Struggle,” during which 121 intellectuals condoned civil disobedience for Algerian independence, presaging a lot of the French Left’s activism over the following decade. That very same activism would render Surrealism out of date within the area of radical politics, outmoded by the coed actions and the extra-parliamentary agitation of the New Left at massive. The affect of direct motion was quick; its afterlife nonetheless transcends aesthetics.

Within the Frankfurt College’s tried fusions of Freud and Marx—as in Wilhelm Reich’s comparable efforts earlier than them—we discover echoes of Surrealist precedent, notably within the drive to counter positivism on the one hand and fascist mysticism on the opposite. Communism might promise a social utopia free of sophistication hostilities. However what of the person’s nonmaterial longings and needs? What of the necessity for myths unbeholden to rituals of collectivity, or the panacea of patriotism? When media theorist and activist Stephen Duncombe claims in his 2007 e book, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, that “fantasy and spectacle have develop into the property of fascism,” and calls upon the Left to “construct a politic that embraces the desires of individuals,” it’s upon Surrealism that he attracts, nonetheless deliberately or unwittingly. In present discourse on colonialism’s cultural histories—and the current tense of its racist legacies—we additionally discover reverberations of the Surrealist previous. As highlighted within the exhibition “Surrealism Past Borders,” at the moment on view at Tate Trendy in London, the motion’s worldwide and anti-imperialist orientation fomented offshoots from Cuba to Cairo to Japan. Maybe uniquely among the many early twentieth-century European avant-gardes, the group proved actively and persistently anti-colonialist from its inception.

The Surrealists’ foray into the political realm, which stemmed from their revulsion over Marshal Pétain’s army aggressions in opposition to the Moroccan Berbers within the Rif Struggle of 1921–26, initially took the type of an essay copublished with the Communists within the journal L’Humanité. Having helped spearhead a boycott of France’s colonial exhibitions, a dozen Surrealists would affirm in “Murderous Humanitarianism” (1932):

In a France hideously inflated from having dismembered Europe, made mincemeat of Africa, polluted Oceania and ravaged complete tracts of Asia, we Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of fixing the imperialist struggle, in its persistent and colonial type, right into a civil struggle. Thus we positioned our energies on the disposal of the revolution—of the proletariat and its struggles—and outlined our perspective in direction of the colonial drawback, and therefore in direction of the colour query.

Alongside stalwart signatories like Breton and Éluard, René Crevel and Yves Tanguy, seems Pierre Yoyotte (ca. 1900–1940), a Martinique-born author and creator who, alongside together with his sister Simone, was amongst Surrealism’s first Black members. Likewise, their compatriot and cofounder of the Négritude motion in Francophone literature of the Nineteen Thirties, Aimé Césaire, instructed poet René Depestre in a 1967 interview that he present in Surrealism “a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up completely all the things.” Surrealist concern not just for the “coloration query” however for the cultural and political wrestle in opposition to colonialism beneficial its methods to avant-garde communities of coloration. Linking the “colonial drawback” to a wider class wrestle echoed (and anticipated) discourses starting from Antonio Gramsci’s principle of the “southern query” to decolonization campaigns throughout Africa and Asia.

On the similar time, Surrealism’s largely white members trafficked in “primitivist” objects each rhetorically and actually. Breton’s private assortment included myriad African and Oceanian masks and sculptures, whose “savage” significance he promoted in varied texts and exhibitions. Outstanding Surrealists like Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti included the expressive anatomies of assorted artifacts into their very own work with out regard for his or her ceremonial purposes or origins. To make sure, the “dissident” Surrealist group across the journal Paperwork supplied extra nuanced approaches to far-flung cultures. Anchored by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and others against Breton’s peremptory management, they married anthropological and ethnographic research to irrational explorations of violence, sacrifice, and sacredness. But right here, too, the emancipatory significance of such phenomena devolved not upon their unique (unspecified) topics, however somewhat a choose coterie of French intellectuals. In championing nameless, non-Western artisans, European Surrealists presumed to talk for them, thus assuming the function of self-appointed prophets of a non-bourgeois world.

No much less problematic on this regard have been the Surrealists’ sexual politics. Whereas the members pursued liberation from the stifling establishments of household and monogamy, they did so in prescriptively masculine, heteronormative phrases. Breton’s unreconstructed homophobia additionally meant that Surrealist challenges to erotic propriety excluded same-sex need. The quite a few feminine artists who progressively joined the motion’s ranks, in the meantime, couldn’t undo its abidingly chauvinist bent. For, leaving apart the participation of precise girls, the aesthetic class of “lady” served as a talismanic fetish: tantamount to the “primitive” in its supposed proximity to untamed nature, endowed with a primal, embodied instinct somewhat than a rationalist (and arid) intelligence. Though supposedly gifted with—and emblematic of—a better psychic functionality, feminine Surrealists by no means attained the social or skilled energy of their male counterparts. The “whole subversion” of Breton’s sexual revolution proved, in brief, lower than whole in its very premise.

The Surrealists however believed their campaign for particular person liberation to ivolve a collective emancipation as properly. In collapsing the gap between actuality and dream, poets and artists would supply to all—irrespective of their gender or race—a method of psychic success. In nonetheless small a measure, they noticed the re-enchantment of a spiritually impoverished modernity as a doubtlessly political act. The earliest formulations of such acts evoked a lifetime of the thoughts, somewhat than matter: “The quick sense and function of the Surrealist revolution,” claimed scholar and author Maurice Nadeau in his Paperwork Surréalistes (1948), “will not be a lot to vary something within the bodily and manifest order of issues as to create an agitation in males’s minds.” But Breton quickly learn—and was “transported” by—the French translation of Trotsky’s 1925 biography of Lenin. A imprecise notion of psychic agitation turned progressively—if imperfectly—yoked to facets of worldwide Communism, notably in its non-Stalinist guises. The Surrealists got here in brief order, in keeping with Breton in his 1934 lecture “What Is Surrealism?,” to predicate “the liberation of man upon the proletarian Revolution.” Certainly, in his seminal 1966 essay “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920–36,” artwork historian Robert S. Brief writes:

From fascism, bourgeois mores, capital punishment, the press, lunatic asylums, to skilled sport: the objects of Surrealist polemics paralleled these within the Communist social gathering however in vary prolonged far past them, discovering targets in each part of the superstructure.

NOTWITHSTANDING ITS MARXIST BONA FIDES, the group discovered a cold reception among the many ranks of orthodox Communists. This was not due merely to Breton’s blatant Trotskyist sympathies. Devoted to harnessing private eroticism to (an as but undetermined) social utopia, Social gathering apparatchiks noticed Breton’s “inside mannequin” as anathema to the very essence of Communism: particularly, a subordination of particular person needs to the collective good. By the Surrealists’ personal admission, their revolution was to be a “subjective idealist” one. “What’s Surrealism,” requested the painter André Masson, “if not the collective expertise of individualism?” Breton, Aragon, and Éluard’s respective declarations that their most well-liked exercise was “to sleep”—and therefore to dream—hardly steered the stuff of dialectical materialism. It conjured, in truth, a solipsistic, even counterrevolutionary betrayal of the injunction to construct socialism, somewhat than merely to need or think about it. For all his aptitude for the latter, Breton failed miserably on the sensible duties assigned by his native PCF cell. Known as upon to file a statistical report on the gasoline trade in Italy, he merely shirked his accountability. By 1933 he and most different Surrealists had been proven the door.

They pursued their very own collective imperatives, nonetheless. The Surrealists’ avowal of their desire for dreaming, for instance, got here by the use of a gaggle survey—one among numerous such official inquests printed by the group. Significantly in its emergence out of the nihilist anarchism and radical individualism of Dada, Surrealism sought to self-discipline its energies into extra productive—if not productivist—endeavors. These included the common evaluation of desires, disseminated in a periodical reminiscent extra of a scientific journal than an avant-garde journal. They edited La Révolution Surréaliste at a centralized “Bureau of Analysis,” handled as a critical office somewhat than some bohemian hangout. Regardless of its rift with the Communist Social gathering, the group ended up imitating the latter’s ideological intransigence; Breton commanded varied expulsions and excommunications all through the motion’s lengthy historical past. As late as 1934, in his lecture “What Is Surrealism?,” he recognized the group’s chief considerations as, one, exploring the rapport between acutely aware and unconscious life, and two, “the social motion we must always pursue.” For Aragon, that motion ultimately meant following Communist doctrine on the expense of Surrealist membership. Although he parted methods together with his avant-garde confreres, Aragon continued to pursue some type of lodging between their goals. Addressing the menace of Nazism and the intransigence of Stalinist tradition alike, Breton would coauthor a tract with Trotsky himself in 1938, “Manifesto for an Impartial Revolutionary Artwork,” cosigned in Mexico by Diego Rivera:

We imagine that the supreme process of artwork nowadays is consciously to take an lively half in getting ready the revolution. Nonetheless, the artist can’t serve the wrestle for emancipation until he has internalized its social and particular person content material, until he feels its that means and drama in his very nerves and until he freely seeks to present his inside world a creative incarnation.

Surrealism had for years to navigate the uneven waters between the aesthetic autonomy of modernism and the more and more constrictive dictates of philo-Soviet realism—a treacherous passage that noticed it assailed from the left and proper alike.

But that dilemma proved in some ways propitious. In Brief’s view, Surrealism proceeded “by contradiction and never by argument.” And a language of contradiction—or, extra exactly, of paradox—could possibly be made to serve the dialectical metaphors of Marxist revolution, if not its materialist operations. A living proof is the extent to which Surrealism assimilated the Cubist technique of collage, increasing each its content material and its purposes to portray, cinema, pictures, and photomontage. “The chronotope of revolution,” writes the Filipino activist and mental E. San Juan Jr. in “Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avantgarde” (2003), “is actually a collage, extra exactly a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.” The Surrealists have been drawn to the suggestive energy of objects displaced from their unique context and set into new, allusive frameworks, whether or not within the cityscapes of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico or the “painted collages” of Max Ernst. Bodily dislodgment, which the Surrealists generally referred to as dépaysement (actually: uncountrying, displacement from house), bespoke a possible disruption of that means, and therefore additionally of social and political ramifications. If the impulsions of computerized writing and portray eluded ideological pragmatism, the visible consequence of incongruity (of catachresis, parapraxia, and their varied cognates) held some promise within the area of a political aesthetics.

It’s no coincidence, as an example, that, at the same time as he distanced himself from Surrealism, Aragon eulogized what he referred to as the “revolutionary magnificence” of anti-Nazi photomontages by the German Communist artist John Heartfield. By the point of Heartfield’s 1935 exhibition in Paris, Communist leaders roundly opposed Surrealism on the grounds that its aesthetic couldn’t communicate to the plenty—that its idiom was predicated, in truth, upon a willful refusal of communicability. Whereas not a Surrealist, Heartfield had plainly tailored lots of its methods, together with the Dada he had practiced in Berlin instantly after WWI. In assailing the ironies and iniquities of Nazi propaganda, Heartfield reduce out and reconfigured pictures from the mass media in order to subvert—by the use of visible puns, superimpositions, and radical discrepancies of scale—their unique intention and reception. Disavowing the expressivity of painterly modernism, Heartfield allied himself with the Communist dedication to rationalized collectivity; but in his provocative transposition of acquainted imagery into new contexts, he drew upon Surrealist dépaysement. Printed within the Communist illustrated every day AIZ and titled “The Sleeping Reichstag,” his 1929 photomontage of a somnolent delegate seated atop the German parliament constructing—a picture of negligent dozing somewhat than inventive (and doubtlessly revolutionary) dreaming—will not be far in its primary conceit from Magritte’s modern picture of the Paris Opera inexplicably given over to bucolic smash. Surrealism’s poetry, Aragon writes in “John Heartfield and Revolutionary Magnificence” (1935), constitutes “an finish in itself”; Heartfield’s imagery, against this, suggests “what an artwork for the plenty, that magnificent and incomprehensibly decried factor, could be.”

No quarter remained for Surrealism throughout the ranks of the Communist Worldwide by the mid-Nineteen Thirties. Revolution by no means receded from the previous’s purview, nonetheless. In 1934, the identical 12 months the Soviet Union decreed Socialist Realism the official aesthetic of the Comintern, Yoyotte brilliantly synthesized the potential synergy between Marxism and Freudianism in his essay “Antifascist Significance of Surrealism.” Any potential Communist liberation from financial distress, he writes, would want to handle as properly the widespread “psychological distress” to which fascism additionally appealed with a supplementary “primarily emotional and ideational revolution.” If an emancipatory, egalitarian, and non-nationalist motion for working individuals wouldn’t handle these ideational wants, then a much less liberatory program would—one substituting manufactured spectacle for collective desires. Almost a century on, we discover ourselves in a political predicament not removed from that of Yoyotte and his friends. Because the specter of worldwide fascism stalks democracy as soon as once more, extra is at stake than merely the query of financial poverty or the purity of any ideology outfitted to repair it. The bigger drawback is an abiding psychological malaise, exploited as soon as once more by forces as reactionary as they’re irrational.

This text additionally seems, with further illustrations, within the April 2022 print version of Artwork in America.