JÉRÔME DUWA, SURRÉALISTES ET SITUATIONNISTES, VIES PARALLÈLES

Review par Olivier Penot-Lacassagne

Surrealism and situationism: the rivalry relationship of the second with the first will never cease; it even participates, it seems, in the progressive construction of its identity. The continuous confrontation between the surrealists and the situationists therefore deserved to be studied, with supporting documents, in order to break with blind prejudices, to dismiss naive militant enthusiasms, to disentangle the originality of each to recapture in all its urgency and acuity an essential, often tense, sometimes torn moment in the history of the avant-gardes.

Jérôme Duwa's book, Surréalistes et situationnistes, vies parallèles, relates with rigor and precision this turbulent history that began in 1946 with André Breton's return to Paris, and ended in 1972 with the dissolution of situationism by Debord.

The vulgate of the occultist degeneration of surrealism after 1945 has durably masked the harshness of the engagements and controversies of the fifties. Heirs to a certainly too heavy legacy, but refusing the nostalgic repetition of dated postures, the post-war surrealists largely participated in the debates that agitated the field of the avant-gardes. No doubt the absence of a journal, after the abandonment of Néon in 1949, deprived them for three years of a necessary tribune (the first issue of Médium only appeared in 1952) and let people believe in the exhaustion of the movement. This was not the case however, even if the radical lettrists, led by Debord, did not fail to denounce a superseded group that had had its day. In reality, these years of confrontation between surrealists and situationists veiled an unavowable "kinship" and sometimes common "intentions."

Two dates illustrate this strange opposition, made of reciprocal attention, invective and rejection: 1954 and 1958.

In the name of Marx, of propaganda art and class struggle, Debord and his friends denounce in issue 21 of Potlatch a decrepit Parisian surrealism, turned toward the "eternal," and they approach the Belgian surrealists with whom they present strong theoretical connivances, in particular with Nougé, himself in rupture with Breton. In contact with Henri Lefebvre and the "Socialisme ou Barbarie" group, Debord would admit a few years later the lightness of his Marxist allegiance.

This "exercise in execration of surrealism" knows an extreme point four years later. The journals Internationale situationniste and Bief are born in 1958, and they affirm their singularity by mutually contesting each other. The first issue of IS analyzes with irony what the situationists then call "the bitter victory of surrealism": "In the framework of a world that has not been essentially transformed, surrealism has succeeded," they write in the Editorial Notes. Now this success, which its "multiple degraded repetitions" in the arts and letters would attest to, calls, to thwart it, for a more emancipatory movement. The extraordinary longevity of surrealism has indeed produced "this aberration, inadmissible for Guy Debord, of a movement both integrated into spectacular society and still alive as a contestatory movement" (p. 94).

Certainly, admits Debord, the historical importance of surrealism, as liberating thought of total man, is not contestable, and its past conquests (freedom of mind and morals) are important. But its actuality, supported by a corpus of illusory beliefs (objective chance, poetic writing, occultism, the riches of the unconscious...) strikes it with inanity. The fidelity of neo-surrealists to "this style of imagination" has led them to the "antipodes of modern conditions of the imaginary." To surpass surrealism would therefore be to define a thought and a posture of difference capable of intervening on events and participating in "the transformation of the real."

It goes without saying that the actors of Bief firmly reject this finding of inanity. Deploring once more the inaptitude, commonly shared, to seriously consider post-war surrealism, they oppose to these polemical facilities "an unconditional liberation of the mind" and an absolute freedom of art. "Poetry is above all," writes Benjamin Péret in issue 1 of Bief. To subjugate it to science, to put art under the tutelage of techno-scientific modernity, would be to renounce "changing life."

This quarrel by interposed journals opens the sixties. L'Archibras, which counts seven issues between April 1967 and March 1969, will be the last organ of the Parisian surrealists. The texts of issue 4 (June 1968), special issue and clandestine, will be the subject of legal proceedings. Signed collectively by Vincent Bounoure, Claude Courtot, Annie Le Brun, Gérard Legrand, José Pierre, Jean Schuster, Georges Sebbag and Jean-Claude Silbermann, this issue reports "the language of pure subversion," "the saving flame of rebellion" of the May days: "Let us not crush under the heavy soles of the past, were it relatively recent, the new grass of revolt. It is important on the contrary to underline what the current movement does not owe to anterior experiences or theories, including the most noble, the most worthy of consideration, the most fruitful. This applies in relation to the October revolution as in relation to the Commune, to psychoanalysis as to the various socialist theories, to Bakunin as to Marx, to Marcuse as to Mao-Tse-Tung, to situationism as to surrealism. For one of the reasons why revolted youth has durably shaken the Temple of Ideas is that ideas, precisely, were fossilizing there under a layer of protective dust, far from life, were feeding culture there and no longer the cry."

For the surrealists and for the situationists, 1968 constitutes a large-scale realization of their revolutionary projects. Surrealism reaches its truth and its point of exhaustion that year; situationism enjoys a prestige that exalts it as much as it threatens it. Four years later, Debord will put an end to the experience of the collective he had been leading since July 28, 1957.

"The defeat," finally notes Jérôme Duwa, is "complete" for both movements whose ambition was, despite their differences and their oppositions, and despite the silences or partisan enthusiasms of critics and historians, to reach life itself. The anthology that completes this study, composed of tracts, journal extracts, articles, letters and testimonies, allows us to better grasp "the nature of encounters and relations between surrealists, lettrists and situationists." Let us salute this work that sheds necessary light on this history.