FRONT NOIR, WHICH IS NOT WHAT ONE WANTS TO SEE THERE

par Maxime Morel

April 8, 2020

by Louis Janover and Maxime Morel

There are journals or discussion groups that act like revealers of the questions that those who, at such a moment in history, turned to poetry and avant-gardes to discover the ultimate truth asked themselves. Who among them could have failed to question what surrealism was becoming, a movement that from the outset claimed an "absolute non-conformism"? So, hearing today the words of these refractories brings back to memory all the objects of discussion and discord, everything that has traversed this current of thought and this sensibility. Here are the directions that could have or should have been taken, the reasons why they were not taken and which remain nevertheless in suspense while one might believe this history definitively classified.

Front Noir, a journal born from collective reflection on surrealism and Marxism, is the expression of this questioning, at a crucial moment in the history of surrealism, when nothing of the conflicts that the group had to face seemed to relate to such a passage from the open letter that René Daumal addressed to André Breton: "Take care, André Breton, of figuring later in the manuals of literary history, whereas if we were seeking some honor, it would be that of being inscribed for posterity in the history of cataclysms." Is it not, however, the same problem that always torments those who could not be satisfied with the choice of posterity, for honor today is to be inscribed in the manuals of literary history and to defend this and those who have allowed this entry into history. Surrealism is written in literary letters in books, and the cataclysm remains far behind, as a mark of origin.

This inversion is the secret of the post-war positions. The definitive classification is then established, and all the problems that arise for the group actually refer back to the polemics and decisions of the pre-war period, and it suffices to refer to them to understand the reasons for an integration announced in fact and always denied in word. Surrealist art becomes post-war the answer to all questioning, and surrealism will henceforth take its place as a school in chronology, without arousing any astonishment. In the same way, the revolution remains measured by the yardstick of October, with Trotsky as the central figure and obligatory reference, despite the repression of Kronstadt. What remains of the original requirement inscribed in history as an act of birth and testimony of a refusal that grants no grace to any victory? Had Pierre Naville not warned: "Our victory has not come and will never come. We suffer this penalty in advance." What is at the heart of Front Noir made the hidden face of refusal reappear, refusal of this victory of surrealism and of October.

The review that Jérome Duwa offers us is like the illustration of the reading to which the history of surrealism is confronted despite or thanks to the pyramids of studies devoted to it. The reissue of texts and documents published in Front Noir from 1963 to 1967, on the eve of May 68, a date with striking symbolism, brings like a ray of light into the mountain of triumphant hagiography: all the questions that had been asked then set aside are taken up in broad daylight and provide proof that the critical questioning raised by the journal was not only justified, but that it remains central even today. How and why from the Surrealist Revolution, this moment when by its mere presence the movement defines its principle of the future and what it could not be, was born the really existing surrealism, contrary to what it aspired to and wanted to be?

Paradoxically, in his effort to circumvent the problems highlighted by Front Noir, Jérome Duwa makes the importance of this questioning reappear. He circles around all the neuralgic points, removes obstacles by allusion, but to designate what he denies the importance of, he is obliged to refer to what gave birth to Front Noir, the negation by the surrealist group of the ethical principles that founded its existence and defined the contours of the surrealist revolution. Let us see what reductive diversion Front Noir would have engaged in: "The avant-garde functions in a logic of surpassing (the new and the scandal): certainly, the surrealists contested this reduction as early as 1924, since Benjamin Constant is already surrealist in politics or Chateaubriand in exoticism, etc. What does it matter." What does it matter indeed what Benjamin Constant was in politics, what does it matter that the logic of surpassing consists precisely in inscribing the authors of the past in a genealogy destined to classify in history the one who establishes the list. One could speak of black humor when to show that surrealism remained faithful to the poetry-revolution relationship, the author informs us: "This is why Breton turns to Fourier since his American exile. This is why Péret speaks of abandoning the term surrealism since his Mexican exile." One can indeed question the place of this "American exile" in the history of surrealism, but it would not necessarily refer to Fourier and to the abandonment of the term surrealism evoked by Péret since his Mexican exile. But what exactly had happened at the end?

Thus, all the questions to which Front Noir endeavored to respond and put into perspective were none other than those already posed by the Surrealist Revolution. Jérôme Duwa is therefore constrained to return to what made surrealism and which explains what it was and what it did not become, and he does so in a way that legitimizes in a roundabout way the positions taken by the group in opposition to its original principles. Surrealism thus presented has no other history than that which we are given to see at the arrival, when Jean Schuster defines his political position. All this evolution is only the illustration of the historical determinism of avant-gardes: the finality inscribed in the departure excludes in advance any discussion on the possibility of another evolution. This is why the phrase of Sainte-Beuve appears as an epigraph to a Front Noir pamphlet that was taken up in the Études de marxologie: "There are an infinite number of different ways in which a thing that is being done can turn out. When it is done, one sees only one."

But precisely, everything will be done so that it is thus with the surrealist thing. What are the other possibilities that opened up to surrealism and which have been repressed to leave to the "one" of the faces all the space to come? One will search in vain for what the exclusions that shape surrealism mean and of which the Second Manifesto is the illustration, which lashes, with others, Panaït Istrati, Naville and Artaud, of course. This divergence is highlighted by the exclusion of Artaud, and by the presence of the Grand Jeu which imprints on poetic sensibility this incommensurable dimension, absolute poetic of which Roger Gilbert-Lecomte gives the depth, and of which the Surrealist Revolution made the promise alive for a time.

Everything that bothers post-war surrealism is reduced to a detail in its history, which makes it a block without history. Nothing is said either by Jérome Duwa about council socialism, about what it meant, in its relationship to Marxian thought, as a class critique of party Marxism and about the role that Front Noir played in demystifying the Marxism-surrealism relationships. Nothing either about the class function of the Bolshevik party and about the place that Trotsky occupied in the formation of the October myth, at the root of the counter-revolution that developed under the aegis of communist parties, but not only, the Fourth International taking its part in the confusion destined to make unintelligible the social emancipation thought carried by Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Mattick, Pannekoek..., like a poetic current that remained faithful to the Surrealist Revolution.

"It is likely that the surrealists signing and distributing the tract Hungary rising sun in 1956 or going to Cuba in 1967 considered themselves in the direction of the revolution, even if their hope in freedom was not devoid of a certain pessimism." The surrealists? But who, in truth? It is also likely that the fellow travelers and signatories of tracts in favor of the USSR considered themselves in the direction of the revolution and communism, which precisely justifies Front Noir's analysis of the regimes born of the dictatorship of the single Party and of a certain intelligentsia, thinking tip of a revised Stalinism, to which no allusion is made, and for good reason: it allows us to define why those who went in the direction of the tract on Hungary were still seeking the path of the revolution while those who went towards Cuba, a state well established on totalitarian bases, were going in the direction of the counter-revolution. What is highlighted by an analysis based on class criteria such as those found in the elements that Front Noir, while the problem of Stalinism is not even touched upon by Jérôme Duwa, since it suffices in his eyes to estimate to go in the right direction.

We will not know more about the Castro regime and the attraction exerted on the destalinized intelligentsia by this exotic totalitarianism which precisely brought the radical avant-garde back into the sphere of the new intellectual petty bourgeoisie. Apart from a phrase gleaned here and there, any reference is absent to the idea that Front Noir exposes on the dictatorship exercised by Castro — while a text by J. Hartley leaves nothing essential to discover. Similarly, nothing precise is said about the Sédition article which was the only major warning calling on surrealism to revise its copy with respect to the point of view that made the movement respond to the call of the intelligentsia now freed from the orthopedic corset of bourgeois morality. Nothing important for those who don't want to see! What would have been only a "provincial sedition" according to José Pierre will be the last warning before the curtain falls. And the "Open Letter to the Surrealist Group" shows what actors were now advancing towards the front of the stage.

As a revolt against the diversions to which surrealism was subjected after André Breton's death, why not quote the intervention of a surrealist, Nicole Espagnol, a member of the movement for many years. In a mimeographed brochure, "Defects, falsehoods and use of falsehoods," from December 1990, she offers us a florilegium of Jean Schuster's positions, who, since the so-called Manifesto of the 121, embodied the political line of the movement. Devastating charge, and which remains a morally unavoidable testimony, although it lacks the point of critical analysis that would show how and why this tipping could have taken place^1^.

Everything that is and is not discussed in Jérôme Duwa's article provides us with proof by omission that the reading of Front Noir informs us about what is occulted in surrealism's past, and history in general, and what must be brought back to light to understand our society; just as we must answer the questions that Front Noir asked itself to overcome the aporia of surrealism and the reversal that took place in its history. And when the importance of the texts and authors gathered in Front Noir cannot be called into question, we find no element allowing us to show what this critique of the intellectual milieus of which surrealism was now a part means.

According to Jérôme Duwa, for Louis Janover, "the role of the intellectual in the service of council socialism" would be that of an "educator of the working class movement (today untraceable or largely delocalized) bringing 'cultural elements' (p.53) against the brainwashing instituted by society, meaning the School. [...] The risk to be run, which Front Noir does not address, remains in this case that of violence in its complex relationship to justice and terror." But it is precisely this relationship carried by Stalinism and its substitutes that is at the heart of Front Noir's reflection and that Jérôme Duwa does not address for a moment when he speaks, in a quasi-anecdotal mode, of certain positions of post-war surrealism, and of the so-called Manifesto of the 121 while the authors of the text published in Sédition precisely target in the struggles the power of a bureaucracy whose elements we still find today in the regimes in place in decolonized countries. Reducing "the role of the intellectual in the service of council socialism" defended by Front Noir to that of "educator" of the working class amounts to a total inversion of the meaning of this critique, unless we consider what it is, for example, of this education in Proudhonian thought. The class analysis carried by the councils shows that it is the centralized Party that claims to hold the class consciousness of the proletariat and to define at will its revolutionary finality. The "cultural elements" drawn by Front Noir from the Marxian work are precisely intended to make the "totalitarian" role of this conception appear.

Read Front Noir and read Jérôme Duwa's article by relating it to the political and artistic positions of surrealism, and you can understand where we must start today to return to the Surrealist Revolution, and what is missing in the history of surrealism and post-war avant-gardes. Front Noir is from this point of view a revealer and the reactions that this reminder to memory provokes are proof of it.

To put his reading of Front Noir into perspective, Jérôme Duwa places himself from the outset at a philosophical distance, out of reach of criticism: "[...] comes back to me a reflection of an epistemological order on the knowledge of the human past." We will say for our part, and more modestly, that with this text comes back to memory a reflection of a political order on the social and poetic knowledge of the surrealist past which enlightens us on what must be retained from Front Noir and which relates to an idea of emancipation still as alive — this ethics of revolutionary behavior that one likes to confuse with moral judgment to divert the meaning of the radical critique it contains.

Louis Janover and Maxime Morel April 2020

*This text constitutes a reflection about "Épochè" and "sympathy". In reading Front Noir", article-review by Jérome Duwa on "Front Noir. 1963.1967. Surrealism and Council Socialism", published in La Revue des revues, n° 63, spring 2020, p. 105-109.

— One can read on the Site of the Monde Libertaire the Presentation by Louis Janover at the Salon de la revue du livre (October 12, 2019): Front Noir. 1963-1967. Surrealism and Council Socialism. Paris, Non Lieu, 2019, 22 €, site: editionsnonlieu.fr.

^1^ See Louis Janover, "Surrealism between Red and Black", Le Monde libertaire, January 4-10, 1996. We refer here to José Pierre's comments, who has no other criterion, for the relevance of his analysis, than what he wants to hear from André Breton's silence or words: Tracts et Déclarations collectives, t. 2. 1940-1969, Paris, Le Terrain Vague, 1982, p. 231, p. 426 sq., p. 281.