Marcel Sauvage, “Le Fin de Paris” (1932)
This piece considers the ideas and objects typically viewed under the name ‘Surrealism’ and offers three possible entry points into the question of Surrealism’s relationship to radical politics. Beginning with Breton’s two manifestoes of surrealism and then moving onto Surrealism’s influence on Césaire and Miéville’s reading of Marxism’s relationship to fantasy literature will constitute three main interventions in what one could tentatively call the history of Surrealism. The last connection to Miéville’s understanding of the relation between Marxism and fantasy literature requires some work on our part to strength his argument, hence our discussion of a few examples from Capital vol. 1. All of these connections have the sole purpose of clarifying and formulating a true as opposed to false problem for our present. In other words, the connections and arguments made here ultimately aspire to answering this question: is the question ‘does Surrealism have anything left to offer our present moment’ a well formulated or poorly formulated one and why? Each of the following three sections section could very well turn out to develop into an idea of its own. Thus, and given that these are ‘notes for future considerations’, the three sections can be taken separately in their own directions or together by tracing the influences of Surrealism in both the past and present.
Breton’s First and Second Manifesto of Surrealism
In the preface to the 1924 First Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton describes the quintessential character of modern life as one that has approximated an absolute sense of alienation, from both the individual relative to themselves and their world. For Breton, the Europe of 1924 only made a single promise: that this modern condition of everyday life, their worlds, and the opportunities those conditions and worlds afforded for the exercise of the imagination of individuals were radically impoverished ones. The fact one is forced to confront is that modern life can only affirm the belief that, in the end, there is nothing in this world worthy of investing with the power and hopes that come with belief. As he writes:
“Such is the belief in life, in the most precarious aspects of life, by which is meant real life, that in the end belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, more and more discontented day by day with his fate, orbits with difficulty around the objects he has been led to make use of, those which indifference has handed him, or his own efforts, almost always his efforts, since he has consented to labour, at least he has not been averse to chancing his luck (what he calls his luck!). A vast modesty is now his lot…”
Breton goes on to develop what we might call a ‘theory of the imagination’, or at the very least develop an understanding of the importance of imagination and its role in social life in the face of modernity as alienated, subjected to practical necessities, and promising, in the end, that the only thing worth believing in is the slow putting to end of anything worth believing in. As he continues: “That same imagination that knows no limits, is never permitted to be exercised except according to arbitrary laws of utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for long, and at about the age of twenty, prefers, in general, to abandon Man to his unilluminated [sic] destiny.” In the First Manifesto it is clear what Surrealism came to loathe about modernity: the domestication of the powers of the imagination and their application bound to the realm of labour and necessity. And this situation was to be loathed for the simple reason that it was Breton’s belief that the cognitive powers of imagination held a key not only to basic truths regarding the self, the other, and the world, but as well as a necessary means in actualizing aspects of human subjectivity. In other words, in a world that only deepens in its alienation from itself, imagination appeared as a site for the possibility of disalienation and of the creative/artistic activity of individuals freed from necessity and wage-labour.
Even in the realm of cultural production, Breton finds the faculty of imagination to be applied in the most banal and insulting ways: “It feeds on newspaper articles, and holds back science and art, while applying itself to flattering the lowest taste of its readers; clarity bordering on stupidity, the life lived by dogs.” Not so much a plea for hardening the divide between high and low art (and, after all, surrealism if it was to be anything would clearly exist beyond the divide itself), and more of a rejection of this ‘life lived by dogs’, Breton recognized the hegemony held over individuals by a kind of realist/positivism that Breton traces back to Aquinas and Anatole France: “The realistic position…inspired by positivism, from Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, appears to me to be totally hostile to all intellectual and moral progress.”
With the predominance of this ‘culture of a positivism of the everyday’, not only has the quality of cultural products diminished before Breton’s eyes. In addition, the very existence of anything in society that does not conform to an accepted practice within a socially accepted institution or framework has been identified and continues to be treated as something that must be expelled from social life; a sickness from which this culture of positivism is attempting to cure us of: “Under the flag of civilization, accompanied by the pretext of progress, we have managed to banish from the spirit everything that might rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, fancy, forbidding any kind of research into the truth which does not conform to accepted practice.” It is important to note that with the First Manifesto, Breton was by and large still concerned with the issues surrounding surrealist art works; so much so that he in fact claims to have dedicated the studies appended to the Manifesto entirely to poetic surrealism. In 1930, he publishes the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. Contrary to the original manifesto, this Second iteration of surrealism has sharpened its tone (in part due to the significant fall out between members of Breton’s group who he deemed as belonging to the Surrealist movement and those who, during the writing of the second manifesto, were deemed as traitors or apologists for the social order Surrealism sought to attack) and writes with a greater awareness regarding the role of art in light of the possibility of a true revolution in both politics and culture.
While in the First Manifesto surrealism mainly aimed to recuperate the loss and/or alienation of the imagination within individual and social life, the Second Manifesto takes as its target social totality in toto – in its second manifestation, surrealism transformed into an all out attack against the current state of things which ranged from a certain ideological hegemony in the realm of ideas (“Everything tends to make us believe there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined…cease to be perceived as contradictions…one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point”) up to Breton’s famous declarations regarding Surrealisms commitment to the principles of total revolt, non-compromise with the current state of society, and the affirmation that all one can reasonably expect from the world is violence and violence in return:
“…Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and…it still expects nothing save from violence. The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.”
A few comments are merited by a remark as bold as this. First, it should be said, that the above passage can be taken in a metaphorical or analogous manner, since one of the primary means for the Surrealists to bypass the clichés and baseness they attributed to the world around them was the practice of automatic writing. ‘Automatic writing’ aims to aid surrealistic written compositions by helping you “forget about your genius, your talents, and those of others. Tell yourself repeatedly that literature is one of the saddest roads leading to everything. Write swiftly with no preconceived subject, swiftly enough that you cannot retain it, and are not tempted to re-read…” In a sense, we are right to see Breton’s call for the random firing of a gun into a crowd as a vulgarization, provocation, but ultimately a re-purposing of the original example of automatic writing from the First Manifesto. And yet… By contrast, one would also be right to take Breton’s proscription literally. To do so, however, requires paying due attention to the sentence immediately after the one that characterizes the simplest of Surrealist acts. Since it is there where Breton qualifies who the crowd is in the first place: the crowd are those who have, not even once, ‘dreamed of putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization.’ To have never had this dream of revolution, says Breton, is symptomatic of the fact that one belongs to the class in society that benefits from the more general debasement and cretinizations of everyday life. And it is those who have never had this dream to whom the gun is pointed, with their ‘belly at barrel level’, as Breton says. It is only in this way that one can take Breton’s call to arms literally insofar as one as acknowledges the fact that this call to arms is qualified and intended in terms of socio-economic hierarchies that define the present state of affairs.
From Breton to Césaire
or what is anti-colonial about Surrealism?
Yves Tanguy, “Surrealist Map of the World” (1929)
However, if we were to leave aside Breton’s two manifestoes and the modifications seen therein regarding surrealism’s political aspirations, one could still approach the relationship between Surrealism and politics in a variety of ways; most notably through the political declarations written by the Surrealists in support of the anti-imperial struggle in Vietnam and the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria. Additionally, one could equally begin with a straightforward consideration of surrealist art works. Here we may take as our example Yves Tanguy’s ‘Surrealist Map of the World’ from 1929. Tanguy’s piece – and similarly with the ideas and works of Jacques Vaché, Claude Cahun, and Marcel Moore – is an illustration of the particular blend of critique, humor, and subversion mobilized by surrealism itself. As Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley comment regarding Tanguy’s combination of critique, humor, and subversion seen in his map of the world: “The humorous 1929 “Surrealist Map of the World”–drawn by artist Yves Tanguy–omits almost all of Europe (except Paris) and leaves out the entire United States as well. All of this was part of what filmmaker Luis Buñuel called the surrealists “obstinate dedication to fight everything repressive in the conventional wisdom.””
Given this range of possible entry points into the relation between surrealism and its anti-colonial politics, we will limit our focus here on none other than Aimé Césaire. It is Césaire who, perhaps, was best fitted for articulating the importance placed on the imagination and its liberation in the First Manifesto with a thorough going decolonial political analysis. For instance, as Césaire reflects in an interview with Rene Depestres that took place at the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1967:
A.C.: Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor.
R.D.: So you were very sensitive to the concept of liberation that surrealism contained. Surrealism called forth deep and unconscious forces.
A.C.: Exactly. And my thinking followed these lines: Well then, if I apply the surrealist approach to my particular situation, I can summon up these unconscious forces. This, for me, was a call to Africa. I said to myself: it’s true that superficially we are French, we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black.
R.D.: In other words, it was a process of disalienation.
A.C.: Yes, a process of disalienation; that’s how I interpreted surrealism.
From this exchange we see how Césaire came to appreciate something specific to surrealism as a whole: namely, the aspiration of finally doing away with the modern condition of social/individual alienation that is produced by the socio-economic inequalities definitive of their present moment. In the face of France’s ongoing colonial violence, Césaire found in surrealism the desire and search for a new kind of subjectivity; a desire and search that ultimately confirmed his own ideas regarding what to do in the face of colonial violence. As Césaire remarks during the same interview:
R.D.: So you were very sensitive to the concept of liberation that surrealism contained. Surrealism called forth deep and unconscious forces.
A.C.: Exactly. And my thinking followed these lines: Well then, if I apply the surrealist approach to my particular situation, I can summon up these unconscious forces. This, for me, was a call to Africa. I said to myself: it’s true that superficially we are French, we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black.
Césaire’s influence from surrealism, however, must be acknowledged as simply that: an influence. Primarily because while Césaire worked with and drew from the Surrealist tradition, his use of surrealism brought all the tools of the movement into explicit contact with the question of colonialism and colonized subjectivity. In contrast to Césaire’s surrealism, and as highlighted by Martine Antle and Katharine Conley in their essay ‘Dada, Surrealism, and Colonialism’, the main players within the Surrealist movement, despite their best intentions, vacillated between overt expressions of solidarity with colonized subjects while simultaneously engaging in what could be called a fetishization of non-Western objects/icons:
…in 1960, Breton, Leiris, and other surrealists signed the “Manifesto of the 121″ in support of the people of Algeria who had taken up arms against the French government…While these political positions were undoubtedly sincere and even inspiring…in many ways they were contradicted by the surrealists’ enthusiasm for ceremonial objects that French colonialism and a new market for non-Western objects in the Americas made available to them, which they collected and admired as art from a perspective that could be understood today as intellectually colonizing.
Given this back and forth between anti-colonial solidarity and fetishism, Antle and Conley suggest and in a rather straightforward manner, that the Surrealists “were more concerned with the exploration of exoticism than in actual research on the specificity of various colonial contexts.” More than a criticism regarding surrealism’s appropriation of non-Western imagery, Katharine Conley further develops this analysis of the surrealist’s latent ‘exoticism’ in her essay ‘Value and Hidden Cost in André Breton’s Surrealist Collection.’ In this piece Conley foregrounds the contradiction between Breton’s overt anti-colonial writings and beliefs with the fact that Breton himself amassed a collection of non-Western art from those places dominated by colonial and/or imperial rule. In other words, how was one of the founders of the surrealist movement able to justify his anti-colonial politics with his participation in the market of non-Western art objects, whose reality is wholly predicated on the continuation of colonial violence?
In light of these tensions, Césaire stands out as someone who was not interested in art for arts sake, or art as the true means of rebellion, but in amassing a wealth of cultural knowledge from which one could draw upon to discover or construct a new subject; to find a new position from which to assess the use and value of anti-colonial struggle without having recourse to what appeared to be Breton’s dogmatic affirmation of the mystical/spiritual promise of non-Western art practices. For Césaire, this meant developing a position one that was fundamentally black when properly viewed through the lens of what he, along with Léon-Gontran Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor, termed Negritude. As Jayne Cortez has rightfully noted, the concept of negritude was developed to be as broad and subject to many interpretations and applications since it was developed as a tool for accounting for a history as varied as the African Diaspora itself; a history that
…is large, broad, complicated, and crosses many cultures, many languages, many national borders, and a multitude of circumstances…Damas used to say: “Negritude has many fathers but only one mother.” His confidence, solidarity, Pan-Africanism meant Negritude. Negritude as a force that exists to help forge a new world. Negritude as a step used in literature to fight the slave master, to defend oneself against negative images, distorted information, cultural and spiritual imperialism…Negritude as black life, black thought, black attitude and multiculturalism. Negritude as a link between the past, present, and future.
It is in this manner of bringing the merits of surrealism to bear on the colonial question that Césaire remained a Surrealist throughout the course of his life. Additionally one would not be wrong to find in his comments regarding the relationship between poetry and science one of his guiding axioms inspired by surrealism itself: “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.” If surrealism was to live up to its socio-political aspirations there is good reason to believe that it was Césaire, along with Damas, Senghor, and others who belong to the history African diaspora, which brought surrealism closest to its goals. Or as James Baldwin put it: “Only poets, since they must excavate and recreate history, have ever learned anything from it.”
Thus, from the early days of surrealism up to the writings of Césaire that span into the early 1980’s, we can see a certain continuity: namely, the imagination cannot be beholden to the requirements and obligations of necessity, practical activity, what Marx would call ‘the working day’; or just as important, the imagination must be liberated from the colonization of both one’s social and psychic reality, and it must be used to plumb the depths of our unconscious in a project of constructing a new kind of subjectivity: “To make a slave of the imagination, even though what is vulgarly called happiness is at stake, is to fail profoundly to do justice to one’s deepest self. Only imagination realises the possible in me.”
Marx, Brauner, Miéville: Towards a Surrealist Marxism (?)
As we have seen, Surrealism has always maintained some relation to political action and social revolution (whether considered in Breton’s more polarizing rhetoric of the Second Manifesto or in Césaire’s use and innovation of Surrealist methods with respect to the question of colonialism and colonized subjects). However, could we say that there is something ‘Surrealist’ in quality about a thinker such as Marx who not only lived prior to the movement but who gave scant attention to questions surrounding art and art practices? In this final section the working hypothesis we will proceed with is that we, in fact, can call elements of Marx’s thought Surrealist; and Surrealist in the sense that Breton and others would recognize. In order to show this we can begin by comparing two well known passages from Capital vol. 1:
(i). “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”
(ii). “However, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social. From this it follows self-evidently that it can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity.”
What is immediately clear is the change in the meaning of the term ‘commodity’, and as it relates to individuals within society, from the first to the second of these passages from Capital. The important point to make here is that while commodities are our initial, immediate, and most common way of encountering and familiarizing ourselves with social life, commodities themselves indicate a more primary process, or relation: this is the ‘identical social substance’ of labour. That is, we may experience the world as populated mostly by commodities and things as opposed to people and meaningful social ties (i.e., we are atomized, isolated, and alien to other and ourselves). Despite this experience, it is through our collective alienation that we maintain a more profound relation with others as well as ourselves. For Marx, it was important to stress that what gives commodities their value is human labour and not the market, or the ‘law of demand’, or any other principle of bourgeois economics. However, there is one final and well known passage from Marx that will allow us to establish a reasonable basis for our claim that surrealism, in its artistic and political adventures, maintained a relation to Marx in a fundamental way:
“The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of the wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing on its own free will.”
With respect to Marx’s insights and with a view towards surrealism, two examples from surrealist art and theory immediately stand out. First is the painting by Victor Brauner of 1939 entitled Fascination (as seen below). Depicted by Brauner is a table whose component parts include a wolf-like creatures upper torso, head, scrotum, and tail. Seated at the table is a ghostly apparition in female form but whose hair has been transformed into the long neck and head of a bird-like creature. The room is unremarkable relative to the figure at the table and the table itself, though one can see, through what could be a window on the wall the viewer is facing, a landscape that is equally banal yet suggestive of an indefinite horizon or expanse. Additionally of interest is the placement of the scrotum, which one might reasonably attribute to the wolf-table. However, the scrotum is in fact placed directly underneath the female apparitions seat as well as the tables tail; if only to emphasize the already opaque nature and androgynous quality of our social/individual unconscious desires.
The second way in which one can speak of a surrealist tenor of Marx’s thinking can be seen in the work of none other than Marxist and sci-fi/weird fiction author China Miéville. For example, in Miéville’s essay ‘Marxism and Fantasy’, he argues that the fantastic mode of thought and imagination utilized by artists is in fact a good, desirable, or virtuous mode of thinking; a mode of thought which should be preserved and defended in the name of the Marxist tradition. What is pertinent in Miéville’s piece for our purposes here, however, is that he uncovers a surrealism within Marx but not at the level of interpretation, genealogy, etymological analysis, or even historical mapping of various influences. Miéville finds a moment of surrealism within Marx simply by acknowledging a term that has been continuously mistranslated (a term which is especially important for the question of surrealism) in the present editions of the first volume of Capital:
“In a fantastic cultural work, the artist pretends that things known to be impossible are not only possible but real, which creates the mental space redefining…the impossible. This is sleight of mind, altering the categories of the not-real. Bearing in mind Marx’s point that the real and the not-real are constantly cross-referenced in the productive activity by which humans interact with the world, changing the not-real allows one to think differently about the real, its potentialities and actualities. Let me emphatically stress that this is not to make the ridiculous suggestion that fantastic fiction gives a clear view of political possibilities or acts as a guide to political action. I am claiming that the fantastic, particularly because ‘reality’ is a grotesque ‘fantastic form’, is good to think with. Marx, whose theory is a haunted house of spectres and vampires, knew this. Why else does he open Capital not quite with an ‘immense’, as the modern English translation has it, but with a ‘monstrous’ [ungeheure] collection of commodities?”
If we opt for Miéville’s corrective of translating ungeheure as ‘monstrous’ as opposed to ‘immense’, we are brought back to the very nature of commodity fetishism but now understood as that through which Capital appears to us on a daily basis. In other words, following Miéville’s translation, it is not enough to say that Capital appears as an immense aggregated or accumulation of commodities since an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’ still lacks the characteristic of fetishism proper to the whole of capitalist social totality. In other words, we can only say that we are confronted by a commodity when we understand that what we are confronted with is something that was produced by human labour and yet transcends sensuousness to then order and dictate the social relations of labor itself. It is for this reason why the confrontation with commodities is a monstrous thing; something dreamed up in the minds of individuals (or artists), produced by human hands but only to threaten and dominate the one’s who created it.
To follow Miéville, then, means to affirm the reality of a tangible connection between Surrealism and Marx’s own thinking; a connection due to their shared commitment to a mode of thought that seeks to develop an understanding of that which is and that which is not-yet, not-yet-possible, or deemed impossible. It is for this reason that Miéville asserts the notion that fantastic works of literature and art remained oriented toward the possibility of defining or redefining what is held to be impossible (the not-real or not-yet-real). Marx and Surrealism, then, converge upon and affirm the radicality of the idea that “changing the not-real allows one to think differently about the real, its potentialities and actualities.”
photo cred: Patrice Maniglier, 2016
