SURREALISM, POLITICS AND CULTURE

Review par John Westbrook

This collection of fourteen studies sets itself the objective of enriching, or even questioning, our understanding of the relationships between surrealism and politics. The reprinting in the first chapter of Robert Short's already classic study, "The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-1936," which dates from the very year of Breton's death, provides both a starting point and a counter-model. Instead of a history of the complex relationships of the surrealist group with various political movements (anarchism, communism, Trotskyism), the studies focus mainly on analyzing the work of the political in surrealism. In their introduction, Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss emphasize this reference to Claude Lefort's thought. Indeed, the political, as a generative principle of categories that construct social space, is situated below and elsewhere than in politics understood in its traditional sense. For them, the critical work of the surrealist imagination effects a recasting of the cognitive categories constitutive of the political. Thus these studies mostly interrogate places of surrealism on the margins of its well-known political commitments — whether it be the image, exhibitions, paranoiac criticism, or a certain conception of failure. It is in these displacements that the principal interest of the ensemble lies (1).

A Politics of the Image

Of the fourteen contributions, eight come from researchers in art history. The analysis of surrealist images — whether works by artists such as Miró, Bellmer or Dalí, or photographic illustrations of surrealist texts — traces the articulation of the political in the cultural. A historical and political contextualization of aesthetic or formal choices allows the authors significant reinterpretations of cultural productions as places of the political. Robert S. Lubar, for example, analyzes the return to figuration in Miró's Still Life with Old Shoe (2) as a staging of the ideological debate concerning the relationships between art and politics at the time of the Spanish war. If Miró refused both political didacticism and abstraction, his search for a political humanism was expressed through a formal meditation that testifies to the ideological fractures of the moment. Alyce Mahon relies on the notion of libidinal economy to read the anagrammatic treatment of the female body in Hans Bellmer as an attempt to set a monstrous feminine to work against the totalitarian and totalizing bodily discourse of Nazi ideology. In doing so, she emphasizes the idea of an essentially feminine surrealism where desire and politics could not be opposed. This politicization of the body is found expressed, on the margins of surrealism, in the photographic work of André Kertész. Amy Lyford detects in his photographs of male bodies broken by war a surrealist aesthetic of the fragment and advertising discourse that produces a — political — critique of the ideology of the return to order in the twenties. These photographs interrogate an ambiguous dialectic between bodies mutilated by war and repressed by an ideology of healthy plenitude and fragmentary bodies that also become objects of consumption and desire.

A Politics of Exhibition

This ideological contextualization allows Elena Filipovic to detect a political project in the theatricality of the 1938 surrealist exhibition, often seen as an aesthetic withdrawal after the years of explicitly political engagement. At a time when the authority of museum or exhibition discourse was becoming the vector of fascist political ideology (the Entartete Kunst exhibition and the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Germany), the scenography of the surrealist exhibition called into question the categories — necessarily ideological — that support an authorized and authoritarian exhibition discourse. Filipovic notes that it is not by chance that The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, which undermines the encyclopedic construction of knowledge from the Enlightenment, served as a catalog for this exhibition. A similar work of critique of artistic categories that support colonial ideology, according to Amanda Stansell, would be at work in the 1931 exhibition "The Truth About the Colonies." For Stansell, the organization of the exhibition according to a collage principle undoes the notions of art object and fetish produced by Western rationality. Beyond a Marxist analysis of imperialism, it is an entire critique of notions of race and a clear awareness of the limits of primitivism that surrealism develops in the thirties. Their critique of Western reason was able to create a space for otherness through which links were forged with black intellectuals such as Senghor and Césaire (3).

A Paranoiac Politics

In a beautiful study, Jonathan P. Eburne makes the link among surrealists between a certain "noir" sensibility — in the cinematic sense — and the contribution of paranoia as an analytical category of the political from the "before" and "after" photos of the Papin sisters published in number 5 of Le Surréalisme A.S.D.L.R. For Eburne, the Lacanian investigations on the motifs — both cause and style — of paranoiac crime integrate into the theoretical change in surrealism through which they sought to elucidate the foundations of the political subject's practice. Style, as symptom, functions as an "epistemological motor" and allows a surpassing of classical notions of motive, causality and representation. In doing so, it brings the surrealists closer to Bataille's group and prepares their common political activities in Contre-Attaque. This link with Bataille is taken up by Jordana Mendelson in a critical manner. Mendelson analyzes Dalí's The Tragic Myth of the Angelus and its multiple transformations of Millet's painting into simulacra of mass products in terms of a personal folklore that would not be far from the manufactured memories of the paranoiac. Dalí's interest in popular culture, postcards, would not be unconnected to this fascination with the anachronistic and its appropriation in fascist discourse following Bataille's analysis.

A Politics of Failure

If the analysis of the work of the political in surrealist images allows multiplying the political points of incidence of surrealism, the movement's inability to achieve a concrete political project provokes the most interesting studies of the collection. In "Surrealism and the Political Physiognomy of the Marvelous," Raymond Spiteri traces in an analysis of the photographic illustration of Nadja the effects of a double failure. If the encounter with Nadja and that with the PCF fall short, it is because the Bretonian conception of a politics of the marvelous that was rooted in the interval between event, image and text, leads to an impasse: the marvelous can reconcile for a moment action and imagination, but does not open onto concrete revolutionary action. This impasse, for Michael Stone-Richards, results precisely from an attempt to surpass the traditional frameworks of revolutionary action. In his contribution, Stone-Richards engages in a very dense reflection on the role of notions of community and failure as foundations of the political in surrealism. Drawing on the work of Jules Monnerot, Hannah Arendt and Maurice Blanchot, he emphasizes the importance of community in the group — a community always reaffirmed in moments of crisis by a collective experience such as that of surrealist objects from 1931. According to him, surrealism encounters Bataille in the notion of an "automatic," formless and acephalic political space. It is in this community, in relation to which surrealism, following Blanchot, is "third party," that emerges a conception of the political that is founded against politics, even revolutionary, based on notions of project. Thus, surrealism is the opposite of utopianism or, rather, reveals itself as a negative and formless utopia. According to Stone-Richards, surrealist reflection on the failure of politics leads to a conception of the political based on negativity, the plurality of voices, and a temporality situated between the time of mourning and loss and a future that always remains open.

The question of surrealist utopianism resurfaces in Don Lacoss's beautiful study on the Ode to Charles Fourier and Arcanum 17. For Lacoss, Breton's interest in utopianism, on his return from the New World, by no means signifies a political withdrawal, but forms an integral part of post-war surrealist radicalism. Fourier was not read as a recipe for a future society, but rather his programmed failure as a force of liberation of the imagination from the political. In the context of a new return to order, whether Gaullist or Stalinist, the poetics of utopian failure would support this "absolute gap" through which surrealism would affirm its ethics of freedom. This ethics and the notion of community it supports are affirmed by Théodore Fraenkel at the end of the book. In an interview dating from 1936, Fraenkel regrets the fact that the surrealist group did not constitute an autonomous political movement with the project of overthrowing, not so much capitalism, as the bourgeoisie and its values. He thus situates the political interest of surrealism precisely at the level of its intervention on the political.

If this ensemble of studies suffers from too great a diversity — compared to the others, the articles by Papanikolas and Greeley, beyond their own interest, seem to me too close to politics — it gives a useful overview of the state of research on surrealism in English. The introduction and a certain number of articles do not hesitate to castigate a vague Anglo-Saxon tradition of studies on surrealism that would reduce the movement to a simple literary and artistic "ism" by evacuating the political and ethical dimension, unlike French criticism (Chénieux-Gendron, Paligot, Janover, Löwy, etc.). One also notes the importance of references to Benjamin, Bataille, and Lacan — leading figures of the theoretical renewal of the seventies and eighties in the United States. The ensemble thus reflects a certain academic radicalism and an attempt to find a political grip for thought at a moment when politics seems to offer, on this side of the Atlantic, no real alternative.

Table of Contents

Raymond Spiteri and Donald Lacoss, "Introduction: Revolution by Night: Surrealism, Politics and Culture"

Chapter I: Robert Short, "The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-1936"

Chapter II: Theresa Papanikolas, "Towards a New Construction: Breton's Break with Dada and the Formation of Surrealism"

Chapter III: Raymond Spiteri, "Surrealism and the Political Physiognomy of the Marvelous"

Chapter IV: Amy Lyford, "Advertising Surrealist Masculinities: André Kertész in Paris"

Chapter V: Jonathan P. Eburne, "Surrealism Noir"

Chapter VI: Amanda Stansell, "Surrealist Racial Politics at the Borders of 'Reason': Whiteness, Primitivism, Négritude"

Chapter VII: Robert S. Lubar, "Painting and Politics: Miró's Still Life with Old Shoe and the Spanish Republic"

Chapter VIII: Jordana Mendelson, "Of Politics, Postcards and Pornography: Salvador Dalí's Le Mythe tragique de l'Angéus de Millet"

Chapter IX: Elena Filipovic, "Surrealism in 1938: The Exhibition at War"

Chapter X: Robin Adèle Greeley, "For an Independent Revolutionary Art: Breton, Trotsky and Cárdenas's Mexico"

Chapter XI: E. San Juan, Jr., "Aimé Césaire's Insurrectionary Poetics"

Chapter XII: Alyce Mahon, "Hans Bellmer's Libidinal Politics"

Chapter XIII: Donald LaCoss, "Attacks of the Fantastic"

Chapter XIV: M. Stone-Richards, "Failure and Community: Preliminary Questions on the Political in the Culture of Surrealism"

Appendix: Théodore Fraenkel, "Notes in the Hand of Léon Pierre-Quint Being the Record of a Conversation"

(1) In Theresa Papanikolas's study, the displacement goes rather from culture toward politics, in the sense that she analyzes the rupture between surrealism and Dada in terms of different conceptions of anarchism. To the individualist anarchism of the Stirnerian type that seduces Tzara, Papanikolas opposes a surrealist response that attempts to navigate between Dada destruction and the construction of return-to-order movements with the help of a conception of creation (automatism) that subverts the authority of cultural systems. Similarly, Robin Adèle Greeley confronts politics more directly in her study on the relationships between Breton and Trotsky. For Greeley, in the context of agrarian reforms and the nationalization of the petroleum industry by President Cárdenas, the encounter between Breton and Trotsky reveals radically different conceptions of the function of revolutionary art. Where Trotsky promotes a sort of artistic anarchism that struggles to become truly a revolutionary gesture, Breton attempts to safeguard a political power for art. To the interest that Trotsky shows in workers' unions, Greeley opposes a Bretonian conception of cultural resistance that finds its representation in Alvarez Bravo's photographs illustrating his "Memories of Mexico."

(2) http://www.moma.org/collection/provenance/items/1094.69.html

(3) The relationships between surrealism and Césaire are the subject of E. San Juan, Jr.'s study, which sees in a "poetics of marronage" in Césaire a resolution to the conflict between surrealist utopianism and the demands of the real. In a Benjaminian reading of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, San Juan emphasizes the importance of mediation between dream and action in Césaire's dialectic — mediation rooted in a historical and cultural specificity.