STEVEN HARRIS, SURREALIST ART AND THOUGHT IN THE 1930S

Review par John Westbrook

In this ambitious book, the author seeks to unravel the artistic, political, and theoretical skein of the surrealist object in the 1930s. With certain historical rigor, he situates the stakes of the surrealist object within the broader problematic of the avant-gardes of the 1930s: how to conceive their practice in relation to the pitfalls of modernist art and its political instrumentalization? Adopting Peter Bürger's perspective in Theory of the Avant-Garde, Harris distinguishes the avant-garde from modernism by its will to overcome the opposition between art and life (Lebenspraxis). In the context of conflicts between surrealism and the PCF in the 1930s, the object becomes a site where the aporias of a movement that wants to be both practically revolutionary and solidary with international communism while remaining autonomous in its creative research are deepened. While the history of tensions between the surrealist movement and the PCF, from the Congress of Kharkov to the AEAR, is known to the French-speaking public through the work of Jean-Pierre Morel and Carole Reynaud Paligot among others, Robert Short's article—dating from 1966!—has remained the reference in English. Furthermore, Harris distinguishes himself from the analyses that prevail among critics linked to the journal October (Rosalind Krauss, Denis Hollier, Hal Foster) by attempting to go beyond an essentially psychoanalytic reading of surrealist works. Similarly, he rejects the cliché of Bataillean materialism compared to surrealist idealism to support the idea that the surrealist object marks a radical desublimation of art, both through its appeal to eros and its bracketing of notions of artistic mastery. More interesting for a French-speaking audience is precisely the analysis of the surrealist object as a reflection of this tension between art and politics. For Harris, it is through the stake of the surrealist object that one can determine the object of surrealism as a stake that divides the group and propels its progressive theorization at the time.

The five chapters of his book, formerly a thesis, construct a kind of triptych. The first two chapters, "Beyond painting" and "Below politics" examine the surrealist object and its relationship to politics in the early 1930s. According to the author, it is in the passage from the found object to the fabricated object that the properly political desire to find an autonomous place (in relation to art and politics) is expressed. In an analysis of a series of objects published in the third issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution (December 1931), he notes however that two antithetical conceptions of the object are present. In Breton, the object remains linked to psychological automatism and the surrealist metaphor and retains traces of its roots in modernist collage. In Dali, on the other hand, the object reveals itself as metonymic and bases its power on an active expression of an extra-aesthetic point of view: paranoid-critical activity.

In the context of debates on the possibility or necessity of a proletarian culture, notably during the congress of Kharkov, the object becomes the site where surrealism attempts to think its specificity. According to Harris, the overcoming of art required alliance with the PCF, as a revolutionary party. However, the revolutionary culture promoted by the PCF in the early 1930s was based on realistic and documentary translation of proletarian social reality and the desire to create an indigenous proletarian culture. However, refusing their pure and simple instrumentalization, the surrealists attempted to found in the object a practice that wanted to be both an interpretation of the world and an intervention in the world, that is, an active knowledge. By situating their intervention at the level of knowledge and interpretation of the world, the surrealists could withdraw it, in theory, from the cultural grip of the Party while remaining "in the service of the Revolution." Thus, according to Harris, the break with the PCF is not explained by a different political aim, since their positions are quasi-identical, but by a different conception of a revolutionary culture. Here, a certain confusion results from the use of the term "political" in Harris, who does not rigorously distinguish between politics, that is, the explicit positions of groups, and the political as a principle of categorization of the social world (1). If there was de facto agreement on politics in the early 1930s, it is at the level of the political that the profound disagreement between the surrealist movement and the Party deepens.

This distinction could have given more conceptual rigor to the third chapter, "A Delay in Glass," which develops the central argument of the book. Here, Harris situates reflection on the surrealist object as a response to the political imperative of overcoming art in a revolutionary perspective. For him, the surrealist object must be conceived essentially as the site of a scientific exploration that poetically mixes Hegelian philosophical reflection, dialectical materialism, and psychoanalysis. This conception of the object is based on the theorization of relationships between external reality and reality in Les Vases communicants as well as on the notions of objective chance and objective humor. Conceived both "as an intervention in the real from the site of desire, as a materialization of perverse poetry, the object was a form of action that would also be a form of thought, thus incorporating the two spheres that the surrealists attempted to keep in play" (p. 93). However, although the surrealist object is the site where a possible overcoming of the opposition between art and life is outlined, for Breton it also becomes the site where he wants to inscribe a delay in relation to this overcoming. According to Harris, Breton reads in the ideological evolution of the PCF and the political situation in Europe at the moment when the Popular Front is being constituted, the effective impossibility of such an overcoming. The surrealist movement falls back on more "artistic" practices and participation in reviews like Minotaure and Les Cahiers d'art. This retreat reinforces the opposition within the group between those like Breton and Cahun who defend passive automatism and those who, like Caillois, Tzara, or Dali, promote a more activist conception of surrealist experimentation. Thus, despite a fundamental agreement on the object of the movement—that is, surrealism conceived as an experimental practice in the domain of knowledge—the theoretical as well as political divergences sketched in Tzara's Grains et Issus or Caillois's La Nécessité d'esprit led these members to leave the group.

The fourth and fifth chapters mirror the first two, returning first to politics and then more specifically to the object. The fourth chapter, "Avant-Garde and Front Populaire" traces the political evolution of surrealism (and its constellation) at the moment when the PCF returns to a more ecumenical and nationalist definition of culture. Whether in Inquisitions, where one attempts to rethink poetry as function (Tzara) in light of a surrationalist science of man (Bachelard) or in La Critique Sociale, where psychoanalysis comes to reinvigorate Marxist theory, the left opposition to the party's cultural policy is based on a scientific conception of avant-garde practice. Similarly, for Harris, surrealist participation in Minotaure is explained in part by the pluridisciplinary and scientific nature of this review. However, in relation to the question of overcoming the opposition between action and interpretation, the perspective of the members of Inquisitions, who "accept a practical division between action and interpretation in the interest of political efficiency" (p. 147), is opposed to that of Breton who refuses this division in theory, while being reduced to "the political adventure of Contre-attaque to preserve in principle the inseparability of action and interpretation in the face of the defense of an affirmative conception of culture by the Popular Front" (p. 148).

For Harris, the "fanaticism" of Contre-attaque goes hand in hand with the rapprochement of surrealism and artistic institutions—proximity visible in the 1936 surrealist exhibition of objects at the Galerie Ratton and in the pages of Les Cahiers d'art. However, the author notes that in Breton's conception, the object as projection of the mind into the external world establishes a critical relationship to the objects of this world and functions, by analogy, as a political intervention. He undertakes a psychoanalytic and political reading of a surrealist object by Claude Cahun exhibited in 1936. This calls into question the notion of fixed sexual identity by destabilizing the Oedipal economy on one hand and criticizes the national identification of the PCF by bringing together a defense of the Marseillaise by Jacques Duclos and the text of a law on counterfeiting. Thus, Cahun's work expresses the surrealists' refusal to accept a nationalist and defensive conception of culture. Nevertheless, the exhibition venues for these objects (the Galerie Ratton, Les Cahiers d'art) indicate that this critique cannot be formulated without appealing to the artistic institutions and practices that surrealism had long refused.

Harris analyzes the difficulty inherent in this political position and the theoretical divisions between members of the movement in relation to surrealist objects in the fifth chapter, whose title is inspired by an article by Claude Cahun published in Les Cahiers d'art, "Beware of Domestic Objects: Vocation and Equivocation in 1936" (2). At the moment of the political bankruptcy of Contre-attaque, the Surrealist Exhibition of Objects allows reading the return to artistic institutions while Breton attempts to reconnect with or revitalize the role of automatism in surrealism. For Harris, two objects constructed by Breton and Jacqueline Lamba, Le Grand paranoïaque and La Petite mimétique express what, for Breton, opposes him to Dali. On one side, paranoid-critical activity, diachronic, metonymic, active and masculine, displays its extra-aesthetic roots while affirming the primacy of preexisting visual images that must be rigorously reworked. On the other, synchronic, metaphorical, passive and feminine automatism maintains links with modernist collage and is based on verbal images that result from a dialectic of perception/representation in the unconscious and preconscious mind. While Breton enriches his conception of automatism in the 1930s by accentuating the unconscious reconfiguration of data from the external world, Harris sees in the return to automatism, which he analyzes psychoanalytically as a refusal of sexuation that is at the base of culture and therefore of the category of art, a regression that suspends the avant-garde dream of undoing the opposition between interpretation and action, between art and life.

The attention paid to the complexity of the surrealist movement and to the necessity of thinking together artistic, literary, theoretical and political activity is the strength of this book. Similarly, the surrealist object analyzed by Harris focuses and exhibits this necessity. There is however an unresolved tension between the historicist aim that contextualizes surrealist practices through an attentive reading of documents and the analysis of surrealist objects themselves—an analysis that remains in the register of a psychoanalytic reading of works. At this level, Harris does not always clearly distinguish between the theoretical adoption of Freudian discourse by the surrealists and his own "metaphorical" use (p. 12) of this discourse to "read" their practices.

Furthermore, centering the study on objects fabricated by the surrealists leads Harris to situate in the 1930s the crisis of surrealism that results in its redefinition as an experimental and quasi-scientific practice. In fact this crisis is almost consubstantial with the emergence of the movement as such at the end of 1924. We see traces of it in the meeting of January 23, 1925, when Breton declared:

"It is no longer a question of illustrating the surrealist thesis, as we formulate it literarily. Let us recall that surrealism supposes, in order to exist, a particular evolution of which we still see nothing and of which we must above all be ready to undergo all the consequences—moral consequences, eventual participation in an action very different from ours until now, political, social, religious, anti-religious, whatever (3)."

This crisis, which found its expression in the tract La Révolution d'abord et toujours, marked the movement's evolution toward the PCF. At the same time, as Breton remarked in Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme, this crisis—which, through its link with the theme of the Orient had to do with anthropology—was first an epistemological crisis that posed to surrealism "the problem of knowledge." It is precisely this relationship to the Other of narrow Western rationalist culture that is expressed in the primitive objects that the surrealists collected.

When Harris mentions in passing the colonial counter-exhibition, "La Vérité sur les colonies" in 1931 and the primitive objects that the surrealists had exhibited there, it is mainly as a political expression of anti-colonialism. However it is significant that the tract denouncing the fire at the Dutch Indies pavilion at the Colonial Exhibition regrets first of all the scientific prejudice represented by the loss of the "treasures of Java, Bali, Borneo, Sumatra, New Guinea":

"Modern discoveries in art as in sociology would be incomprehensible if one did not take into account the determining factor that was the recent revelation of the art of so-called primitive peoples" (4).

It is unfortunate that Harris did not treat the review Documents as he did for Inquisitions: as an enterprise that developed a theoretical opposition largely internal to the surrealist movement.

The experimental exploration (psychoanalytic, ethnological, as well as poetic) of the Other, whether the Orient, the primitive, or this Other that we carry within ourselves, marks surrealism from the beginning. If, as Harris maintains, the treatment of surrealist works as documents or case studies is more explicit from the Second Manifesto (p. 104), already in the conclusion of that of 1924 did not Breton encourage us to "consider with indulgence the scientific reverie, so unseemly in all respects"? We have not finished scrutinizing the scientific horizon of surrealism as a vanishing point where art and politics, interpretation and action merge.

1. One can see in this regard the collection by Raymond Spiteri and Donald Lacoss, Surrealism, Politics and Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2003).

2. Claude Cahun, "Prenez garde aux objets domestiques," Les Cahiers d'art, 1936, p. 45-48.

3. André Breton, Œuvres, tome 1, Paris, Gallimard, 1988, p. 482.

4. "Premier Bilan de l'Exposition coloniale," Tracts surréalistes et déclaration collectives, tome 1, Paris, Le Terrain Vague, 1980, p. 198.