SURREALISM AND REVOLUTION

par E. San Juan Jr.

(Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Aimé Césaire)

I. Historical-Materialist Perspectives: Gramsci and Benjamin

[This important article by Prof. E. San Juan was originally published in English in the Working Papers in Cultural Studies at the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA. It seemed suggestive enough to us to be translated into French. However, a number of citations, especially from authors writing in French, were not referenced in their original language, so we could not locate them, and did not consider it useful to rephrase them ourselves.]

In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Philippe Soupault experimented with automatic writing. They tried to describe the murmur of the unconscious, an experience inspired by Rimbaud’s thirst for adventure in search of cosmic knowledge, and Lautréamont’s condemnation of art as a collective enterprise. What above all animates these experimenters is Rimbaud’s prescription in the Letter of the Seer ↑: “The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” According to the critic Georges Lemaitre, analyzing psychic automatism announces the pathos of a disappointing pathology, whereas for Albert Camus, this experience marks the apogee of modern anti-totalitarian nihilism. Both reactions contain a share of truth. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, to support the freedom of imagination and liberate the libidinal energies repressed in the psyche, “super-realism”—a term invented by Guillaume Apollinaire, later contracted to “surrealism”[1]—was born from the nihilist ruins of the Dada movement to serve as a foundation for building a just and free society.

In that same year, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded an innovative journal, Ordine Nuovo, and advocated the formation of a Council of Factories (modeled on the Russian soviets), foreshadowing the creation of a classless society built on the remnants of capitalist hegemony. These innovative initiatives challenged the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, of politics and philosophy based on the axioms of rationality inherited from the Enlightenment, and of egocentric, monadic autonomy.

Beyond mere contemporaneity, what “non-elective affinities” do surrealism and historical materialism (of Marxian derivation) possess, which might allow students of comparative studies to conceive differently the tense relations that have always existed between life and art, between aesthetics and politics? The profound impact of surrealism on twentieth-century culture needs no proof, as evidenced by the achievements in literature, painting, cinema, theater, and other media by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and the New York school of “tachisme” or abstract expressionism.

When Breton published his first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, in which dreams and the unconscious—the matrix of the fantastic and the extravagant hidden in the folds of reality—held a privileged place, Gramsci was the main leader of the Communist Party in Italy. He was then at the forefront of opposition to Mussolini’s seizure of power. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Letters he wrote in his cell, Gramsci, as far as I know, makes no direct reference to Breton or surrealism. But from scattered reflections in his work on modern art and culture, as well as his observations on Italian futurism (Marinetti) and Pirandello, we can surmise the general approach Gramsci would have taken to surrealism as a cultural movement of opposition. In this essay, I will compare Gramsci’s revisionist evaluation of this “scandalous” phenomenon with those of other historical materialists, mainly Walter Benjamin, and the unique “Third World” representative of the European trend, the Caribbean intellectual Aimé Césaire. Since attempts to historicize aesthetics showed the way, ten years before the end of the Cold War, to the neo-Kantian fetishism of the unbridled sublime in all postmodernisms, this re-evaluation of an old controversy may show that the political and ideological commitments of the coming era are at stake.

All commentators agree that Gramsci considers aesthetics as a category of historical materialism. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a particular society, which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and various raw materials (language, sounds, dance steps, film images) are consubstantial. Contrary to the emphasis on transcendental intuition by Benedetto Croce and Herbert Marcuse’s notion of the “essential transcendence” of art with respect to political action, Gramsci favors the materialization of intuition in a perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by a completed worldview. Marx and Engels also emphasize the concrete and spatio-temporal “humanization” of the senses through creative work or practice, broadly decomposed; this dialectical interaction finds a representative avatar in the making of a work of art. In summary, according to Gramsci, the work of art is the “historicization” and objectification of a vision.

Gramsci’s conception of Marxism emphasizes its dialectical method, the focus on processes and relationships at play in a social formation composed of multiple levels of modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This way of “historicizing” life, not only to interpret it but also to transform it, is a guideline for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. Man is “precisely the process of his actions,” writes Gramsci, and “in relation to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, if it is true and to what extent what we do makes us ourselves, creates our own life and our own destiny.” In this passage, knowledge and action aim to combine the past with the present to shape the future.

Although Gramsci does not fully approve of Freudian theory (he nevertheless admits, in the Prison Letters, that psychoanalysis is “a kind of critique of the regulation of sexual instinct”), he does envision a tripartite organization of the psyche when he states: “our true nature can be considered as the sum of instincts and animal drives, and what each tries to appear is in accordance with the socio-cultural model of a historical approach… It seems to me that the true nature of an individual is determined by his struggle to become what he wishes to become.” Informed by both the realms of the id and the ego, Gramsci sees will (shaped by concrete historical conditions) as a determining element of human personality.

According to Gramsci, the Marxist principle of individual essence is analogous to the “sum of social relations,” as he reiterates in the following passage: “Thus, the artist does not write, does not paint—that is, he does not externalize his phantasms—only for his own inventory, to be able to relive the moment of his creation. He is an artist only when he externalizes, objectifies, and historicizes his phantasms[2].” Unquestionably, Gramsci emphasizes the historicity of form: “Form and content have a historical as well as an aesthetic meaning.” Historical form means a given language, while content indicates a way of thinking that is not only historical but sober, expressive… (from Della Volpe). The process of objectifying and historicizing impulses and instinctual needs thus modifies the meaning of the last expression, the “reflections and groupings of perfection and inner plenitude, toward the materiality of the writing process,” in summary, “toward the complex system of cultural relations.”

Surrealism finds an equivalent in Gramsci’s radical return to the material process and its vicissitudes[3]. In Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, we encounter this attention to process, time declined not as inert matter but as a pure random flow of energy:

Pure psychic automatism by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other means, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside of any aesthetic or moral concern.

Surrealism is based on belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected until then, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to definitively ruin all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the reduction of the main problems of life. (A. Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, Idées/NRF p. 37)

This almost Freudian orientation is a pretext for affirming the effective causality of artistic sensibility. Artists intervene to construct, not represent, an artifice that synthesizes the impression of mystery, intuitively conceived in the idea that the unreal aura of objects, the latent depth behind the manifest surface, ultimately frustrates desire. What is necessary is a more ingenious and cunning transgression of limits imposed by tradition, by given norms, and by the doxa of bureaucratic disciplines.

But misunderstandings ensued. Maynard Solomon perceives the tragic flaw of surrealism in the notion of unconscious creativity, a rationale for quietism, but also the motivating force giving rise to constant and creative disequilibrium. In my view, free association is a mediation: the unconscious freely manifests its infinite possibilities when the censorship of the ego is eluded and when non-rational libido is summoned to define itself in strange and enigmatic forms in relation to everyday reality. Note that this reality represents the daily life of the bourgeoisie, a life made up of habits regulated and directed by the vagaries of the market and the iron law of counter-value. The fantasies to which Gramsci refers recall Breton’s dreams, the play of thought through analogy and association, and all sorts of apraxias—what Freud defines as “the psychopathology of everyday life,” the symptoms of repression engendered by daily routine.

This helps us understand why Breton condemns the language of decadent bourgeois usage as denatured and obstructionist: “One pretends not to notice that the logical mechanism of the sentence alone is increasingly powerless, in man, to trigger the emotional jolt that truly gives value to his life.” While stereotyped language blocks “true conviction” or “the real functioning of thought,” to the extent that it can be extracted from conventional forms, it can also be used as “the means of extraordinary lucidity.” Raymond Williams notes that from this perspective, the aim of writing is not communication but illumination, self-illumination even, emphasizing “the experience itself rather than any form of communication.” But Breton asserts that the poetic process is empirical and dynamic; it “presupposes no invisible universe beyond the network of the visible world.” Nor does it imply belief in a determined, linear history or a cult of novelty made fashionable by an aristocratic elite, operating on the principle of an avant-garde ideology.

THE DADAIST INTERRUPTION

To begin, we must retrospectively differentiate the surrealist trans-evaluation of modernity from Dadaism, a movement with which it is often confused. The Dada movement emerged from the chaos of the First World War. During a conference in Zurich in 1922, Paul Valéry evoked a European spirit “cruelly wounded by the war.” According to the works of Tzara, Hugo Ball, and many others, Dadaism aimed to randomly destroy all existing standards of morality and taste through burlesque exhibitions of anarchic frenzy, scandalous openings staged to shock the bourgeoisie, as suggested by Apollinaire in Les Mamelles de Tirésias ↑ or Tristan Tzara in Le Cœur à gaz ↑. By wearing diving helmets and exotic clothes in public urinals, the Dadaists suggested dissolution, futility, the absurdity of meaningless gestures and discourse, and thus reacted against modern existence; in summary, the Dada movement magnified phantasms for their own sake, as appropriate antitheses to dehumanize capitalist mandates and ideological apparatuses. Dadaism favored chance and randomness, foregrounding the uselessness of their actions/artifices compared to the counter-value embodied by the bourgeois institution of art. It attacked the principle of the sacralization of art for art’s sake, fought against the ideology and practice of an aestheticism conceived as the product of the high specialization of art, and protested the loss of its social function in modern industrial societies. Walter Benjamin attributes a revolutionary function to these precursors of the surrealist challenge: “what the Dadaists attempted and achieved was a ruthless destruction of the aura of their creation, which they presented as reproductions by all means of production.” The destruction of the aura (emanating from an organic form and an authentic charisma granted by the innate genius of artists) liberates the vision of the community and saves its damaged memory.

Although surrealism can also be seen as a revolt against bourgeois conventions, it diverges from Dadaism in several ways. Designated as the “prehensile tail of romanticism,” surrealism aims to be a total revolution of the world. With the changes undergone by society (evolution of character and human consciousness), the surrealists criticize the “common sense” of daily rules and practices. Stimulated by Breton’s call to incite a “crisis of consciousness” (in his Second Manifesto, dated 1929), they dare to break through the threshold of reasoned realism to discover new knowledge by practicing a “dizzying descent” into the secret and hidden realms of the psyche. Contrary to what César Vallejo thinks, the surrealists do not want to liberate the mind before abolishing class societies; rather, they believe that material conditions and the means of expression and communication are inseparable. By radically questioning conventional modes of representation, they sought to develop a viable program of social action, a coherent response to the nihilist jargon and easy progressivism of business society, attested by the cult of patriotism, family, religion, wild competition, and the veneration of material goods—symptoms of the perverse reification of social life.

By challenging this status quo internalized in the psyche (the Freudian ego commanded by the reality principle), the surrealists consider the unconscious glimpsed in dreams, fantasies, and irrational behaviors as the repository of utopian possibilities. Such possibilities need to be articulated around a new grammar and syntax of art (counterfeits, slogans, gratuitous demonstrations, watchwords), a stylistic discovery that would overturn the corrupt control of a rational mind centered on discourse. The public Self must be dissolved by operations of subliminal commands, operations revealing certain patterns of the unconscious (condensation, displacement, images from dream work), often described as gratuitous or contingent. “Automatic” texts and spontaneous acts would express dreamlike visions and dissonant images that violate monological, uniform, and mechanical standards. The artist’s execution would synthesize conscious and unconscious materials—a synthesis by negation (for example, the estrangement played by Duchamp’s urinal or Picabia’s ink blot). The contradiction between action and dream, reason and madness, sensation and representation, psychic trace and original myth, would be completely resolved—a hope more than a prophecy—in the multiplicity of surrealist experiences. In the sphere of the unconscious, Breton writes that there is not only “a total absence of contradictions” but also a “lack of temporality.” The pleasure principle thus predominates in a space (both private and public), where censorship (of the ego or the State) is annulled or suspended. Moments of creation and destruction would unite in the aesthetic experience thanks to the surrealist technique, allowing the creation of the aberrant, the incongruous, and the offensive, and thus precipitating a new understanding of the totality of the world.

Like Gramsci, the surrealists then strive to transform the system of cultural relations and artistic practices by forging a new conception of the artist. To effect significant changes in personality and daily life, surrealists need self-discipline, a personal asepsis to preserve accessibility and availability to the solicitations of the unconscious. Such a condition requires problematizing the authority of the author and the academies, arbiters of Establishment taste. Although profoundly libertarian when emphasizing the moral demands of desire, the surrealist ethos precipitates a phase of cosmic passivity—the “wise passivity” of Wordsworth open to pantheistic visitations—but not a permanent one. Since its mission is to change life (Rimbaud) and transform the world (Marx), surrealism eventually requires an evangelical program, a systematic commitment to public discourse or politics. Except for Antonin Artaud and a few others, many surrealists thus joined the French Communist Party or the Trotskyist opposition in the 1930s and 1940s.

With the rise of activist relay in 1925–1930, the mode of pure automatism—writing under hypnosis—was gradually assimilated into a “paranoiac method” in which “distancing” and other forms of defamiliarization in poetry or painting were stimulated.

Two other strategies for objectifying desire and its virtual metamorphoses were discovered: first, the notion of “objective chance,” understood as a “fortuitous conjunction in the world, meaning that the world is greater than the apparent lack of cause would indicate.” This movement seeks to dissolve the conventional criterion of individual intention, objective necessity, and the aura of originality inherited from classical aesthetics. Second, the emphasis on “black humor,” a form of ironic and grotesque humor reminiscent of the Dada movement but also of Rabelaisian satire concerning official monological prejudices (present in Jean Cocteau’s films Le Sang d’un poète and Le Testament d’Orphée, or in Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth).

One could argue that surrealism, inspired by the examples of Novalis, Coleridge, Nerval, and Baudelaire (in addition to Rimbaud and Lautréamont, previously cited), favors the apprehension of madness, trance, hallucinations that destabilize the disciplinary regimes of body and psyche. It is true that the marvelous can only be liberated in gratuitous moments or privileged moments of rupture, when rational consciousness is suspended, neutralized, or annulled. Apollinaire, a poet appreciated by the surrealists, thinks that the artist can reproduce these moments of rupture without prior arrangement or meditation; in this case, the objective is not to create beauty through language or other means, but simply to account for a pure force, a power, an energy. The Polish aesthetician Stefan Morawski draws attention to the surrealist intervention in automatic writing, designed to expose an immediate creative process, undoubtedly characterized by chance (especially in tachisme or the improvisation of jazz artists) and evoking playful pleasure and cognitive illumination. However, surrealism paradoxically requires a will or intention to effect defamiliarization and distancing from reified circumstances, during which art and the artist are commodified. This leads to the need for “organic” intellectual artists (as Gramsci envisioned) who would serve the subordinate classes by addressing them as revolutionary subjects. Surrealism aims to be an ideological organ of interpellation in civil society.

To this is added the surrealist method of the exquisite corpse—the composition of poems by a word game requiring collective participation. Many authors created such poems (inspired by Lautréamont’s argument that everyone is a potential poet). Thus, “the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”—a memorable phrase from this collective game—became the product of a communal session, the direct path to the unconscious. Given the inescapable sociality of language and its semantic parameters, the communication of the surrealist vision passes through material objectification, structures composed of expressive qualities deployed in a dialogic communication network. For example, in Nadja, the framework of daily life serves as an anchor point for the elaboration of a topography of Paris, during a sequence of constant shocks played by the narrator through changes of perspective, improbable but heuristic juxtapositions[4].

It is clear that surrealism does not deny the objective world but actually tries to extract it dialectically: by negating it and transmuting it into a new horizon of meanings. The iconoclastic sociologist Jean Baudrillard criticizes surrealism, which, according to him, remains within the reach of realism, ironically reinforcing it by divinizing the imaginary. Refusing the opposition between the real and the imaginary by positing the principle of the “hyperreal,” Baudrillard tries to surpass the surrealists by locating the unreal “in the hallucinatory resemblance of itself.” Submerged by the intense advertising of newly globalized companies, computerized marketing, and the capital conquest of the last frontiers of the unconscious and remote regions of the “third world,” Baudrillard extends the surrealist understanding to the cybernetic environment of late modernity:

The secret of surrealism was that the most banal reality could become surreal, but only at privileged moments, which still derived from art and the imaginary. Now the whole of everyday political, social, historical, economic reality is incorporated into the stimulative dimension of hyperrealism; we already live out the ‘esthetic,’ hallucination of reality. The old saying, ‘reality is stranger than fiction,’ which belonged to the surrealist phase of the estheticization of life, has been surpassed. There is no longer a fiction that life can confront, even in order to surpass it; reality has passed over into the play of reality, radically disenchanted…

Nevertheless, Baudrillard insists on the term “hyperreal” to establish the distinction, always grasped in the binary logocentrism he claims to have surpassed and which surrealism, for all its offensive polemic and satire, has only managed to elude.

The lure of an independent and autotelic textuality, later glorified by the New American Criticism and invoked by post-structuralists like Baudrillard, never attracted the surrealist sensibility. Like the psychologist Pierre Janet, the surrealists consider the productions of the mind as sensory material or substance, evidenced by recognizable and juxtaposed referents in the famous surrealist topos: “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella!” Poetic analogy is a deliberate act allowing the revelation of affinities and identities (catalyzed by chance, automatism, or erotic experience) between the mind and the external universe and testifying to the intervention of a will seeking to resolve the antinomies of the pleasure principle and the reality principle. “One is like the other”—for the surrealists, this is a revolutionary act since it destroys the rigid calculation of instrumental reason.

Gramsci's position on the relationship between art and politics is more complex than that of orthodox Marxists. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci argues that the artist-intellectual must be "organic" to the working class, that is, he must be integrated into the historical movement of the proletariat. The artist must be a "permanent persuader" who helps to create a new "common sense" and a new culture. This does not mean that the artist must be a propagandist, but rather that he must be aware of the social and political implications of his work.

The artist must be a "collective intellectual' who works within the framework of a "national-popular" culture. This culture must be based on the experiences and aspirations of the working class, but it must also be open to the contributions of other social groups. The artist must help to create a new hegemony, a new way of thinking and feeling that will replace the old bourgeois hegemony.

Benjamin's analysis of surrealism's revolutionary potential is based on his understanding of the relationship between art and politics. He argues that surrealism's emphasis on the unconscious and the irrational can help to break through the rational facade of bourgeois society. He sees surrealism as a form of "dialectical materialism" that can help to reveal the hidden contradictions of capitalism and point the way toward a more just and humane society.

Benjamin's concept of "revolutionary nostalgia" is particularly important for understanding his view of surrealism. This nostalgia is not a longing for the past, but rather a longing for a future that has not yet been realized. It is a form of utopian thinking that is grounded in the material conditions of the present.

Benjamin argues that surrealism's use of montage, collage, and other techniques of defamiliarization can help to create this revolutionary nostalgia. These techniques can help to break through the reified consciousness of modern society and reveal the hidden possibilities for change.

The transition to Aimé Césaire's perspective on surrealism is marked by a shift from the European context to the colonial context. Césaire, a Martinican poet and politician, was one of the founders of the négritude movement, which sought to affirm the cultural identity of black people in the face of colonialism and racism.

Césaire's relationship with surrealism is complex. On the one hand, he was influenced by surrealist techniques and ideas, particularly the emphasis on the unconscious and the irrational. On the other hand, he was critical of surrealism's Eurocentric perspective and its failure to address the specific conditions of colonialism and racism.

Césaire's critique of surrealism is based on his understanding of the specific conditions of colonialism and racism. He argues that surrealism's emphasis on the unconscious and the irrational is not sufficient for addressing the material conditions of colonialism. He sees surrealism as a form of "European narcissism" that fails to recognize the specific experiences and aspirations of colonized peoples.

However, Césaire also recognizes the revolutionary potential of surrealist techniques. He adapts these techniques for anti-colonial purposes, using them to challenge the dominant discourse of colonialism and to affirm the cultural identity of black people.

Césaire's use of surrealist techniques is particularly evident in his poetry, where he uses montage, collage, and other techniques of defamiliarization to challenge the dominant discourse of colonialism. He also uses these techniques to affirm the cultural identity of black people and to point the way toward a more just and humane society.

The conclusion of this comparative analysis suggests that while Gramsci, Benjamin, and Césaire have different perspectives on surrealism, they all recognize its revolutionary potential. They all see surrealism as a form of art that can help to challenge the dominant discourse and to point the way toward a more just and humane society.

However, they also recognize the limitations of surrealism. They all argue that surrealism must be adapted to the specific conditions of different societies and cultures. They all emphasize the importance of grounding surrealist techniques in the material conditions of everyday life.

This comparative analysis suggests that surrealism's revolutionary potential lies not in its techniques alone, but in its ability to adapt these techniques to the specific conditions of different societies and cultures. It suggests that surrealism can be a powerful tool for social and political change, but only if it is used in a way that is grounded in the material conditions of everyday life.

The relationship between surrealism and revolution is complex and multifaceted. As this analysis has shown, surrealism can be understood as a form of revolutionary art that seeks to challenge the dominant discourse and to point the way toward a more just and humane society.

However, the revolutionary potential of surrealism is not automatic. It depends on how surrealist techniques are used and adapted to the specific conditions of different societies and cultures. The examples of Gramsci, Benjamin, and Césaire show that surrealism can be a powerful tool for social and political change, but only if it is used in a way that is grounded in the material conditions of everyday life.

The implications of this analysis for contemporary political and artistic practice are significant. It suggests that artists and intellectuals must be aware of the social and political implications of their work. They must be willing to adapt their techniques to the specific conditions of different societies and cultures.

It also suggests that revolutionary art must be grounded in the material conditions of everyday life. It must be based on the experiences and aspirations of ordinary people, and it must be open to the contributions of different social groups.

Finally, this analysis suggests that the relationship between art and politics is not simple or straightforward. It is complex and multifaceted, and it requires careful attention to the specific conditions of different societies and cultures.

In conclusion, surrealism's revolutionary potential lies not in its techniques alone, but in its ability to adapt these techniques to the specific conditions of different societies and cultures. It suggests that surrealism can be a powerful tool for social and political change, but only if it is used in a way that is grounded in the material conditions of everyday life.