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have at its disposal, for the purpose of its material actualiza-tion, the entire technical armamentarium which under presentconditions serves only to destroy those prospects. e Surreal-ists were content to mine dreams in order to renew the imageswhose interplay so interested them; they failed to appreciatethat this was another way for the dream to be co-opted by the

dominant mechanisms of deception and fascination (as in thepillaging of dreams by the admen and the manufacturers ofsilent majorities).

Much the same may be said in connection with forms of be-haviour stigmatized as mad by the logic of prot, by the ratio-nality of the commodity system: the contempt which the Sur-realists heaped on torturers in white coats did not inoculatethem against a temptation to co-opt aitudes usually treatedclinically for purely artistic purposes. us, Dal dened hisparanoiac-critical technique as a spontaneous method of ir-

rational knowledge based on the interpretative-critical associ-ation of delusional phenomena, and he applied it notably toViolee Nozires, paronymic variations on whose name naz-ire Nazi, Dinazo, Nez inspired his drawing of a long-nosed gure the sexual symbolism of which evoked both thecharm of the young woman and her fathers aempt to rapeher.

Similarly, an aempt was made to achieve a general reha-bilitation of certain tendencies judged to be pathological. In1928, to commemorate the ieth anniversary of the inven-tion of hysteria, Number 11 of La Rvolution Surralistepub-lished a beautiful series of photographs of female hysterics un-der the title Passionate Aitudes, 1878. Breton and Aragoncommented:

Hysteria is a more or less irreducible mental state character-izedby theoverturningof therelations that obtainbetween thesubject and a moral world to which, in a practical sense, andin the absence of any delusional system, he considers himselfto belong. is mental state answers to the requirements of a

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A Cavalier History ofSurrealism

Raoul Vaneigem

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e Underworld of Dreams and Paresthaesias

Dreams do indeed constitute that marvellous and unitaryworld whose immanence the Surrealists hymned. e Surre-alists theory of dreams, however, never progressed to a de-gree commensurate with the amount of aention they paid to

the subject. Just as they le it to the communists to advancethe cause of revolution, so likewise even their best contribu-tions in this area (those of Breton, in Communicating VesselsandMad Love, or those of Michel Leiris) were simply applica-tions of Freuds arguments ine Interpretation of Dreams.

La Rvolution Surralistewas content merely to publish ac-counts of dreams, but it soon became apparent that oneiric in-spiration also quickly turned into a literary technique. True,the occasional interpretation would endeavour to show howthe beauty of an image can arise from a dreams short-

circuiting of meaning, how the poetic spark may spring from asudden condensation of dierent emotional signicances thatthe dream contradictorily combines, how the illusion of pre-monition follows a particular dream pathway, and how, oncethe space-time of the dream has become identical with thespace-time of myth, the signs of past, present and future maycome to correspond to one another. Yet here too the absence ofany implications of a practical kind took its toll, in this case aretreat into the ideology of the great transparent ones andhidden meanings. Confusedly aware, nonetheless, that mas-tery of dreams would imply mastery of life, and that mean-while those who control survival, who run the governmentand the spectacle, need also to be the guardians of dreams, theSurrealists achieved their most concrete defence of the dreamwhen they targeted the psychiatrists and alienists, psychoana-lytical reformism, thetechnicians of social conditioning andallthe watchdogs of the mental realm. e half-cocked nature ofthis campaign, however, meant that they never eectively de-manded a society in which the fantasy world of dreams would

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In the case of the Surrealists, it was the absence, again, ofa practice concordant with the ideas held by the group thateectively downgraded the beginnings of a genuine psychoan-alytically grounded social campaign along the lines, perhaps,of that conducted by Wilhelm Reich, of whom incidentally theSurrealists knew nothing to a mere technique of revelation

and to mere cultural agitation.is backtracking is already discernible in the Manifesto of

1924. In his encyclopaedic comment on Surrealism, Bretonwrites:

Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior re-ality of certain forms of previously neglected asso-ciations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disin-terested play of thought. It tends to ruin once andfor all all other psychic mechanisms and to sub-

stitute itself for them in solving all the principalproblems of life.

e adjacent dictionary denition runs as follows:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its purestate, by which one proposes to express verbally,bymeans of the wrienword,or inany other man-ner the actual functioning of thought. Dictatedby thought, in theabsence of anycontrol exercisedby reason, exemptfrom anyaesthetic or moral con-cern.

e importance the Surrealists aributed to automatic writ-ingdoes lile to oset theimpression oneoen gets on readingeven their nest texts that themovementgravely misjudged itsown potential riches. By and large the practice of automatism,restricted to writing, failed to lead to any analysis of the ego,any uncovering of fantasiesor strange drives, or any critique of

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with those psychoanalytical methods whereby anyone couldaain beer knowledge of their darker side and their hiddenpossibilities. Once rid of its dusty therapeutic pretensions, theart of psychoanalysis, along with the psychoanalysis of an artmade by all, would be capable, according to the Surrealists, oflaying the groundwork for a radically dierent form of social

behaviour. e failure of this project even before it had beenthoroughly claried was to put the Surrealists at a distinct dis-advantage in their aempt to make common cause with theCommunist Party. e notion did not disappear entirely, how-ever, for in 1945 we nd Gherasim Luca, in hisL Inventeur delamour [eInventorof Love],proposinga limitless eroticiza-tion of the proletariat as a general organizing tool and hold-ing it as a self-evident truth that the dismantling of the initialOedipal position must facilitate the qualitative transformationof love into a universal lever of revolution.

Freud also inspired the Surrealists in their hostility to thepsychiatrists, to the inventors of the very notion of madness,to all who held sway over the world of children (those whom

Jules Celma would later call educastrators). Breton evoked achildhood in which everything, aer all, ought to favour theeective and guaranteed possession of onesel, adding hope-fully that thanks to Surrealism, it seems as if those conditionsmay be restored. e liberation of children Roger- GilbertLecomte would later exclaim why, that would be even nerthan opening the madhouses! And here again is Breton, inNadja: But as I see it, all connements are arbitrary. I still can-not see why a human being should be deprived of freedom.ese are ideas that have since made headway: even if Celmawas met with police repression, even if Ren Vinet was un-able to obtain from the Sorbonne Assembly in May 1968 that acall be issued for the release of all those held in asylums, it isinconceivable that revolutionary movements of the future willfail to place such demands high on the agenda.

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Authors Note

Commissioned in 1970 by a Frenchpublisher whoplanned toissue a series intended for high-school pupils, this Histoire ds-involte du surralismewas wrien in a couple of weeks underthe pressure of a contractual deadline. e fact that the origi-

nal bearer of the name chosen as a pseudonym, Jules-FranoisDupuis, was the janitor of the building where Lautramontdied, and a witness to his death certicate, should be a clearenough sign that this book is not one of those that are particu-larly dear to my heart; it was merely a diversion.

When the original publishers projected series was aban-doned, the manuscript was returned to me. It then languishedfor some years at the house of a friend, who in 1976 showed itto a young publisherof heracquaintance. As a resultit waspub-lished a year later (Nonville: Paul Vermont). It was reprinted in

1988 (Paris: LInstant). Perhaps it is fair to say that, despite itspolemical character and peremptory tone, it remains a usefulschoolbook andone which may steer those just discoveringSurrealism away from a certain number of received ideas.

- R.V.

1. History and Surrealism

e Crisis of Culture

Surrealism belongs to one of the terminal phases in the crisisof culture. In unitary regimes, of which monarchy based on di-vine right is the best known example, the integrative power ofmyth concealed the separation between culture and social life.Artists, writers, scholars and philosophers, just like the peas-ants, the bourgeois, the wielders of power, and even the Kinghimself, had to live out their contradictions within a hierarchi-cal structure which was from top to boom the work of a God,and unchangeable in its very essence.

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e growthof thebourgeois class of merchantsand manufac-turers meant the moulding of human relationships to the ratio-nality of exchange, the imposition of the quantiable power ofmoney with mechanistic certainty as to its concrete truth. isdevelopment was accompanied by an accelerating tendency to-ward secularization which destroyed the formerly idyllic rela-

tionship between masters and slaves. e reality of class strug-gle broke upon history with the same brutality as the reignof economics, which had suddenly emerged as the focus of allpreoccupations.

Once the divine State, whose form constituted an obstacleto the development of capitalism, had been done away with,the exploitation of the proletariat, the forward march of cap-ital, and the laws of the commodity, by everywhere bendingbeings and things to their will, became cumbersome realitiessusceptible neither to the authority of a divine providence nor

to incorporation into the myth of a transcendent order: reali-ties which the ruling class, if it was not to be borne away bythe next revolutionary wave already incontestably foreshad-owed by the Enrags and Babouvists was now obliged at allcosts to conceal from the consciousness of the proletariat.

Out of the relics of myth, which were also the relics of God,the bourgeoisie sought to construct a new transcendent unitycapable of using theforce of illusion to dissolve theseparationsand contradictions that individuals deprived of religion (in theetymological sense of a collective bond with God) experiencedwithin themselves and between each other. In the wake of theabortive cults of the Supreme Being and the Goddess of Rea-son, nationalism in its multifarious guises - from BonapartesCaesarism to the gamut of national socialisms - came to thefore as the necessary but increasingly inadequate ideology ofthe State (whether the State of private and monopolistic capi-talism or the State of capitalism in its socialized form).

Indeed, the fall of Napoleon marked the end of any prospectof reinstituting a unitary myth founded on empire, on the

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Freud and Automatic Writing

A considerable portion of Surrealisms energy was appliedto research into the limits of the possible, into extreme forms,varieties of expression, and the armation or destruction ofthe human phenomenon in its relationships with the world,

as seen from the standpoint of a total liberation of the emo-tions. A multitude of characteristically Surrealist preoccupa-tions arose from this aitude, among them the interest in spir-itualism; the taste for Gothic novels; the experimentation withtechniques of simulation and critical paranoia; the interest inchildhood and in madness; the exploration of the world ofdreams and of the unconscious or subconscious; the analyticalapproach to individual mythologies,as to themythologies of al-legedlyprimitivepeoples (Michel Leiris, Breton, Artaud, Pret);the excursions into Celtic origins (Jean Markale and Lancelot

Lengyel); the infatuation with alchemy and hermetic doctrines;and the construction of a new literary, artistic and philosoph-ical pantheon which rescued many very great names fromthe silence, lies or discredit of ocial culture, among themLautramont, de Sade, Fourier, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin,Germain Nouveau, Oscar Panizza, Antoine Fabre dOlivet,Alphonse Rabbe, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Xavier Forneret,Alfred Jarry, Facteur Cheval, Arnold Bcklin, Monsu Deside-rio, Albrecht Altdorfer, NicolasManuelDeutsch,Urs Graf, JeanMeslier, Pierre-Franois Lacenaire, Paracelsus, Basil Valentine,Achim von Arnim, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Lichtenberg,

Blake, Charles RobertMaturin, Monk Lewis,Adolf Wli, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Douanier Rousseau, Beina, the PortugueseNun, Arthur Cravan, Jacques Vach, Lotus de Pani, and manymore.

e inuence of Freud, whom Breton visited in 1921, wasapparent from the very beginning. When the Bureau deRecherches Surralistes opened at 15 rue de Grenelle, on 11October 1924, its stated aim was to acquaint the general public

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rights of man, the clear implication is that nothing that con-cerns thought, imagination, action, expression or desire mustbe deemed alien to the revolutionary project. e founderingof this project under the helmsmanship of Stalinism and its at-tendant leisms was to reduce Surrealism to a mere generatorof what might be called the special eects of the human. From

this box of tricks, not altogether unlike a Renaissance wonder-cabinet, albeit onericher in wrientestimonialsthan in actualphenomena, Bretonand hiscompanions contrivedto produceashimmering rhetoric, but despite all their eorts they were un-able wholly to conceal the insurrectional purposes for whichall these discoveries had originally been made.

We need to form a physical idea of the revolution, said An-dr Masson in La Revolution Surrealiste, Number 3, and herewe have both a way of gauging the contribution of the humandimension and the key that in a revolutionary situation will

make it possible to loot (while at the same time enriching) theSurrealist storehouse of knowledge.

Before Breton located the moment of revolution in a mythi-cal absolute where individual and collective history were sup-posed to come together, Guy Rosey, in Violee Nozires (1933),wrote the following lines, resounding like a last echo of Mas-sons watchword:

Here revealed at last by another inviolateself of hers

is the personality

unknown and poetic

of Violee Nozires

murderess as one might be

a painter

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prestige of arms or on the mystique of territorial power. Allthe same, there is one trait common to all the ideologies thatevolved either from the memory of the divine myth, or out ofthe contradictions of the bourgeoisie (liberalism), or by wayof the deformation of revolutionary theories (that is, theoriesthrown up by real struggles which feed back into those strug-

gles and hasten the advent of a classless society by remainingnecessarily opposed to all ideology). at common trait is thesame dissimulation or distortion, the same deprecation or mis-apprehension, of the real movement that arises from humanpraxis.

e radical consciousness cannot be reconciled with ide-ology, whose only function is to mystify. What the acutesteighteenth-century consciousness perceived for the most part,in the void le behind by the ebb tide of divine consciousness,was the suering of separation, isolation and alienation. Dis-

enchantment (in the literal sense of the end of the spell castby a unifying God) thus went hand in hand with an awarenessof contradictions that had no chance of being resolved or tran-scended.

As all sectors of human activity proceeded to break apartfrom one another, culture, just as much as the economic, socialor political spheres, became a separate realm, an autonomousentity. And as the masters of the economy gradually built uptheir hegemony over society as a whole, artists, writers andthinkers were le in possession of the consciousness of an in-dependent cultural domain which the imperialism of the econ-omy would be very slow to colonize. ey turned this domaininto a citadel of the gratuitous, but they acted as mercenariesof dominant ideas as oen as they raised the ag of rebellionor revolution.

Victims of the unhappy consciousness, despised by thoseconcerned with nance, trade and industry, these creatorstended in the main to turn culture into a replacement for myth,into a new totality, a reconsecrated space starkly opposed to

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the material spheres of commercial transactionand production.Naturally, since the area they governed was no more than afragment, irreducible to economic terms and cut o from thesocial and the political, they could not aspire to any genuineresuscitation of the unitary myth: all they could do was repre-sent it - and in this respect indeed they were no dierent from

the more astute minds of the bourgeoisie, seeking to build anew myth by resacralizing all those zones where the economydid not intervene directly (no aempt would be made to con-secrate the Stock Exchange, for instance, but the cult of workwas an aempt to sanctify the factory).

e spectacle is all that remains of the myth that per-ished along with unitary society: an ideological organizationwhereby the actions of history upon individuals themselvesseeking, whether in their ownname or collectively, to act uponhistory, are reected, corrupted and transformed into their op-

posite into an autonomous life of the non-lived.We shall understand nothing of Romanticism, nor of Sur-realism, if we lose sight of cultures entanglement with theorganization of the spectacle. To begin with, everything newthrown up by these movements bore the stamp of a rejectionof the bourgeoisie, a refusal of everything utilitarian or func-tional. ere is no artist of the rst half of the nineteenth cen-tury whose work was not grounded in contempt for bourgeoisand commercial values (which of course in no way preventedartists from behaving exactly like bourgeois and taking moneywherever they could get it Flaubert is a case in point). Aes-theticism acquired ideological force as thecontrary of commer-cial value, as the thing which could make the world worth liv-ing in, and which thus held the key to a particular style of life,a particular way of investing being with value that was diamet-rically opposed to the capitalists reduction of being to having.Within the spectacle, it was cultures task to supply validatingrole models along these lines. Gradually, as economic rational-ity created a cultural market, transforming books, pictures or

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must always remain, substantial enough to over-whelm me, it will for all that never acquire thewherewithal to make of me what I wanted to be,as ready and willing as I might be for it to do so.

e choice of life, if not restricted to the role of nourishing

literary or pictorial forms of expression, to the world of im-ages, analogies, metaphors or trick words, is thus apt to leadto an incipient practice, to an embryonic science of man thatis stripped of all positivism, as far removed as can be imaginedfromthe specializedaitude of thescientist, andinhabited bya desire to experiment in every direction, and to document allsuch experimentation to whatever extent might be required.

Knowledge of the Human and its ExperimentalInvestigation

Paul Noug of the Belgian Surrealist group puts his nger ona very important concern of the movement when he writes:

We must turn what can be ours to the very best ac-count. Let man go where he has never gone, expe-rience what he has never experienced, think whathe has never thought, be what he has never been.But help is called for here: such departures, such acrisis, need to be precipitated, so with this in mindlet us create disconcerting objects.

Leaving aside the faith thus placed in the earth-shaeringpower of such objects, whose transformation into commodi-ties and conditioning mechanisms Surrealism failed to foresee,Noug proposition has the great merit that it prohibits fromthe outset any appeal to pure knowledge. Likewise, when therst number of La Rvolution Surraliste reiterated Aragonsformulation, in Une Vague de rves[A Wave of Dreams], tothe eect that We have to arrive at a new declaration of the

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what Ren Daumal called the turning back of Reality towardsits source, and it focused all hopes on the point described byBreton as follows: Everything tends to suggest that the mindmay reach a point whence life and death, real and imaginary,past and future, communicable and incommunicable, and highand low, all cease being perceived as contradictory. So long

as it remained detached from the revolutionary project of thetotal man, however, this outlook could never become anythingmore, at best, than an initiatory or hermetic doctrine

So although Surrealism drew aention to each individualspotential for creativity in everyday life, it failed to spur thecollective actualization of that creativity by means of a revolu-tion made by all in the interests of all; instead, it invited theindividual to lose his way twice over: to engage in a marginalactivity which relied on Bolshevism to spark the revolution-ary process, and to strive for a strictly cultural overthrow of

culture. is de facto renunciation of the possibilities for sub-jective self-realization, even as these were invoked on the liter-ary and pictorial levels, was accompanied by a call to sacrice(from Breton on several occasions) - a call, in other words, tothe castration which is the lynchpin of all hierarchical power.ose who had wanted to restore art to life thus ended upturning direct experience into just one more value on the artmarket. What prevented Surrealism from becoming a culturalcale-trough, aer the fashion of abstract art, existentialism,the nouveau roman, Pop Art, or happenings, was the fact thatunlike Aragon, luard and Dal - Breton, Pret, Tanguy andArtaud did continue, confusedly and spontaneously, to rejectanything in themovementthat deniedtheirsubjectivityor ulti-mateuniqueness. In his Preface for a Reprint of theManifesto(1929), Breton put into words what the best of the Surrealistsalmost certainly felt:

If a system which I make my own, which I slowlyadapt to myself, such as Surrealism, remains, and

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sculpture into commodities, the dominant forms of culture be-came ever more abstract, eventually calling forth anti-culturalreactions. At the same time, the greater the sway of the econ-omy, and the more widely it imposed its commodity system,the greater was the bourgeoisies need to update its spectacu-lar ideological free market as a way of masking an exploitation

that was ever more brutal - and ever more brutally contestedby the proletariat. Aer the Second World War, the collapseof the great ideologies and the expanding consumer market,with its books, records and culturalized gadgets, brought cul-ture to centre stage. e poverty of the mere survival imposedon people accentuated this development by encouraging themto live abstractly, in accordance with models whose universalctions, dominated by stereotypes and images, were continu-ally in need of renewal. Surrealism would pay the price here,in the coin of a co-optation which its heart, if not its intellect,

had always refused.Culture, however, was not a monolith. As a separate sphereof knowledge, it inevitably aested to the splits that had beenbrought about; it remained the locus of partial forms of knowl-edge that claimed to be absolute in the name of the old myth,which, though irremediably lost, was forever being sought af-ter. e consciousness of creators underwent a correspondingevolution, as culture established a parallel market of its own(around 1850?), so giving rise to units of prestige which inthe spectacular system replaced prot, or rened it, and in anyevent interacted with it.

Creators who failed to burst the bubble in which they wereusually content to generate endless reections of themselvesrisked becoming mere producers of cultural commodities orfunctionaries of the ideological-aesthetic spectacle. e man ofrefusal, so dened by the scorn poured upon him by the worldof commerce, could very easily be transformed into a bearer offalse consciousness. When reproached by the businessman fornot having his feet on the ground, the artist tended to appeal

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to the life of the mind. Surrealism bore the traces of this absurdantagonism between mercantile materialismon the one handand Mind (whether in its reactionary or its revolutionary form)on the other.

All the same, the more lucid or sensitive creators succeededin identifying their own condition more or less clearly with

that of the proletariat. e result was a tendency that might becalled radical aesthetics exemplied by Nerval, Stendhal,Baudelaire, Keats, Byron, Novalis, Bchner, Forneret, Blake,etc. for which the quest for a new unity was expressedthrough thesymbolic destruction of theold world,the provoca-tive espousalof thegratuitous, and therejection of commerciallogic and the immediate concrete dimension which that logiccontrolled and dened as the only reality. Hegel would cometo represent the historical consciousness of this aitude.

Another tendency, extending radical aesthetics into a rad-

ical ethics, arose from an awareness of the separatedness ofculture, from the consciousness of thinkers and artists, hith-erto alienated in the pure impotence of the mind, who nowdeveloped creativity as a mode of authentic existence weldedto the critique of the commodity system and of the survival im-posed universally by that system. Marx and Fourier were thistendencys main voices.

Lastly, there was a third current which, without groundingitself as rmly in history as Marx or Fourier, made its basicprinciple the abolition of culture as a separate sphere throughthe realization of art and philosophy in everyday life. is tra-dition runs from Meslier to de Sade, and thence, via PetrusBorel, Hlderlin, Charles Lassailly, Ernest Coeurderoy, JosephDjacque and Lautramont, to Ravachol and Jules Bonnot. It isin fact lessa traditionthan a somewhat serendipitous tracery oftheories and practices constituting a kind of ideal map of radi-cal refusal. ough thrown up by history, and reinserting itselfinto history, oen in violent fashion, this was a heritage withno clear consciousness of its power over that history, no ef-

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Surrealisms way of according all power to passion, it wouldhardly take a Fourier to describe it as a very rocky road.

Subjectivity, which Surrealism simultaneously obscured andilluminated, is one of those fragmentary spheres whose ightsof lyricism may mask their failure to evolve into revolutionarytheory. e very rst issue ofLa Rvolution Surralistequoted

Pierre Reverdys credo according to which e poet must seekthe true substance of poetry everywhere within himself. Andthroughout his work Breton repeatedly emphasizes the irre-ducible aspect of each individual, the magic of the surrenderto chance, the pursuit of adventure real or imaginary, and therevelation of unsuspected desires. In order to remain what itought to be, namely a conductor of mental electricity, poeticthought must in the rst place be charged up in an isolated en-vironment, writes Breton, while Georges Bataille maintainsthat Surrealism is precisely that movement which strips the

ultimate interest bare, emancipating it from all compromiseand resolutely casting it as caprice pure and simple. Yet nei-ther this prescription of Batailles nor Bretons meditations onchance (which Nietzsche dened as yourself bringing your-self to yoursel) opens the way to a practical investment ofthe riches of subjectivity in the collective struggle for the totalliberation of the individual. us subjectivity and its demands,acknowledged but not realized on the social plane, became asource of artistic inspiration and a measure of expressive value,but nothing more. Nothing more, in sum, than that celebratedinner necessity which Kandinsky held to be the one essentialdeterminant of all creation.

Primacy accorded subjectivityin thecultural realm ledto thecall for a new way of feeling, a notion that a curious gurelike Lotus de Palm would successfully nurture in response tothe general enervation of the senses, of thought and of sensa-tion. e Grand Jeu group went ahead of the Surrealists downthe mystical road which conated subjectivity not only withthe new way of feeling but also with the myth of old. is was

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Nevertheless, no maer how oen they denied it, the Surre-alists were continually (and curiously, for readers of de Sade)drawing the Christian distinction between carnal and spirituallove. Here, once again, the point of view of real practice wasnever grasped. What could be more Sadean than the dialecticof pleasure in its dual relationship to love on the one hand and

insurrection on the other? Even the nihilist Jacques Rigaut ac-knowledged that any reconstruction of love must follow thispath: I have ridiculed many things. ere is only one thing inthe world that I have never been able to ridicule, and that ispleasure.

Now it is true that the very same Pret who compiled a su-perb anthology of sublime love also wrote the ejaculatorypoems ofRouilles encages[Caged Rusts - meaningcouilles en-rages, or raging balls - Trans. {available as Mad Balls at

hp://redthread.cjb.net}]. But where exactly do the two objectsof celebration involved here reallycome into conjunction?atthe practical activity of individuals within the Surrealist milieusomehowguaranteed a unity of this kind is a distinctly dubiousproposition. Breton, supposed standard-bearer of every free-dom, was quite capable of the bald assertion, uered during apublic debate on the issue, that he found homosexuals guiltyof begging human tolerance for a mental and moral shortcom-ing that tends to set itself up as a system and paralyse everyundertaking of the kind for which I have any respect. Andhe proceeded to confess, aer deigning to pardon Jean Lorrainand (nothing loath!) de Sade, that he was quite prepared to bean obscurantist in that particular area. is way of promotinga personal distaste to the level of a general law or principle(Breton even threatened to walk out of the meeting if the dis-cussionof homosexuality wasnot abandoned) clearlybespeaksthe worst kind of repressive aitude. During the same debatethe author of Mad Love evinced deep hostility to the idea of aman making love with two women at the same time. If this was

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fective knowledge of its actual potential. In the years between1915 and 1925, however, as history took its revenge upon allits ideological travesties, these isolated voices were revealedas eminently harmonious, called forth as they all were by thepressure for human emancipation.

Dada embodied both the consciousness of the crumbling of

ideology and the will to destroy ideology in the name of au-thentic life. But Dada in its nihilism sought to constitute an ab-solute and hence purely abstract-break. Not only did it fail toground itself in the historical conditions by which it had itselfbeen produced, but, by deconsecrating culture, by mocking itsclaims to be an independent sphere, by playing games with itsfragments, it eectively cut itself o from a tradition forged bycreators who in fact shared Dadas goal, the destruction of artand philosophy, but who pursued this goal with the intentionof reinventing andrealizing artand philosophy once they had

been liquidated as ideological forms, as components of culture in everyones actual life.Aer Dadasfailure, Surrealism for itspart renewed ties with

the older tradition. It did so, however, just as though Dada hadnever existed, just as though Dadas dynamiting of culture hadneveroccurred.It prolonged the yearning for transcendence,asnurtured from de Sade to Jarry, without ever realizing that thetranscendence in question hadnow become possible. It curatedand popularized the great human aspirations without ever dis-covering thatthe prerequisites for their fullment werealreadypresent. In so doing, Surrealism ended up reinvigorating thespectacle, whose function was to conceal from the last class inhistory, theproletariat,bearerof total freedom, thehistory thatwas yet to be made. To Surrealisms credit, assuredly, is the cre-ation of a school-for-all which, if it did not make revolution, atleast popularized revolutionary thinkers. e Surrealists werethe rst to make it impossible, in France, to conate Marx andBolshevism, the rst to use Lautramont as gunpowder, therst to plant the black ag of de Sade in the heart of Christian

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humanism. ese are legitimate claims to glory: to this extent,at any rate, Surrealisms failure was an honourable one.

Dada and Culture in Qestion

Dada was born at a turning-point in the history of industrial

societies. By reducing human beings to citizens who kill andare killed in the name of a State that oppresses them, the modelideologies of imperialism and nationalism served to underlinethe gulf that separated real, universal man from the spectacu-lar image of a humanity perceived as an abstraction; the twowere irreparably opposed, for example, from the standpoint ofFrance, or from the standpoint of Germany. Yet at the very mo-ment when spectacular organization reached what to mindsenamoured of true freedom appeared to be its most Ubuesquerepresentational form, that organization was successfully at-

tracting and enlisting almost all the intellectuals and artists tobe found in therealm of culture.is tendency arose,moreover,in tandem with the move of the proletariats ocial leadershipinto the militarist camp.

Dada denounced the mysticatory power of culture in itsentirety as early as 1915-1918. On the other hand, once Dadahad proved itself incapable of realizing art and philosophy(a project which a successful Spartacist revolution would nodoubt have made easier), Surrealism was content merely tocondemn the spinelessness of the intelligentsia, to point thenger at the chauvinist idiocy of anyone, from Maurice Barrsto Xavier Montehus, who was an intellectual and proud of it.

As culture and its partisans were busily demonstrating howactively they supported the organization of the spectacle andthe mystication of social reality, Surrealism ignored the neg-ativity embodied in Dada; being nevertheless hard put to it toinstitute any positive project, it succeeded only in seing inmotion the old ideological mechanism whereby todays partialrevolt is turned into tomorrows ocial culture. e eventual

12

isolated, indeed, that nota single Surrealist resisted thetempta-tionto turnone or another of themintoan absolute,so creatingan illusory totality.

Love in particular (and justiably so) was the object of Surre-alisms most rmly and consistently sustained hopes. Present-ing the Inquiry into love in Number 12 ofLa Rvolution Sur-

raliste(1929), Breton wrote that If there is one idea which tothis day seems to have escaped every aempt at reduction itis, we believe, the idea of love, alone in its capacity to reconcileevery man, temporarily or not, with the idea of life. On everyoccasion, andat every stage,the Surrealists invoked thedesiredunity of poetry, love andrevolt. ere is no solution outside oflove, proclaimed Breton over and over again. Yet, since he hadfailed to understand that as part of the same process there is nolove without a revolutionof everyday life, Bretonendedup, viathe notion of mad love, promoting a veritable cult of Woman.

e Surrealists opposed libertinism in the name of an electiveand exclusive form of love, but it is an open question whetherthese two antagonistic aitudes do not in the end amount tomuch the same thing, whether a woman elevated to the rankof the Chosen One and a woman fucked lovelessly are not bothbeing treated as objects. Be that as it may, neither Breton norPret ever changed their minds, no maer how closely theystudied Fourier and his detailed theories on this subject.

De Sade oers a pertinent counterweight to the hint of Ro-manticism in this conception of love. Marcel Marin is rightto point out, in hisLes Poids et les mesures[Weights and Mea-sures], that we should thank the Divine Marquis for so ju-diciously enlightening us as to the reality of our nature andfor providing us with a basis for understanding love. LikewiseRen Char, in the second issue ofLe Surralisme au Service dela Rvolution: De Sades legacy is a love atlong last cleansedofthemuck of thecelestial, with all thehypocrisy exposedand ex-terminated: a legacy capableof preservingmen from starvationand keeping their ne stranglers hands out of their pockets.

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my madness to murder anyone, preferably a doc-tor, who came near me. At least this would permitme, like the violent, to be conned in solitary. Per-haps theyd leave me alone.

Fragments of a Project of Human Emancipation

Any aempt at a total revolution of everyday life is con-demnedto failure andfragmentation if it does notembodya co-herentand global negative critique.What is more,such theoret-ical and practical inadequacy means that authentic desires forfreedom are rendered abstract by ideology, even though theymay continue to manifest themselves in the shape of an illu-sory will to transcendence at the ambiguous level of language.

ere is thus a trace, in the Surrealists striving to circum-scribe exceptional or disturbing occasions in lived experience,

of a theory of passionate moments. I payno heedto the emptymoments of my life, wrote Breton, and indeed his entire workrevolves around intensely experienced instants. ese he cele-brates with a lyricism which by no means excludes their criti-cal analysis, but which, since it fails to incorporate them intoa generalized social practice, succeeds only in sealing them inthe amber of aesthetic emotions. e verbal always carries theday, and, sadly, the only consistency aained by Surrealismwas that of its self-justication in cultural terms. ese revolu-tionaries of the heart were fated to carry out their revolutionsolely in the realm of the mind.

e points at which the old world was crumbling were emi-nentlyperceptible to the Surrealists,and theysurroundedtheseareas with an aura that lent them a certain omnipotence. Mo-ments of love, encounter, communication, subjectivity - allwere allegedly unied by a shared quality of freedom, yet inreality they remained isolated so long as no heed was beingpaid to the fact that liberation as a material force cannot bedetached from the overall emancipation of the proletariat; so

52

co-optation of late Dadaism, the transformation of its radical-ism into ideological form, would have to await the advent ofPop Art. In the maer of co-optation, Surrealism, its protes-tations to the contrary notwithstanding, was quite sucientunto itself.

e ignorance that Surrealism fostered with respect to the

dissolution of art and philosophy is every bit as appalling asthe ignorance Dada fostered with respect to the opposite as-pect of the same tendency, namely the transcendence of artand philosophy.

e things that Dada unied so vigorously included Lautra-monts dismantling of poetic language, the condemnation ofphilosophy in opposing yet identical ways by Hegel and Marx,the bringing of painting to its melting point by Impressionism,or theatre embracing its own parodic self-destruction in Ubu.What plainer illustrations could there be here than Malevich

with his white square on a white ground, or the urinal, entitledFountain, which Marcel Duchamp sent to the New York Inde-pendents Exhibition in 1917, or the rst Dadaist collage-poemsmade from words clippedfrom newspapers and then randomlyassembled? Arthur Cravan conated artistic activity and shit-ting. Even Valry grasped what Joyce was demonstrating withFinnegans Wake: thefact that novelscouldno longerexist. ErikSatie supplied the nal ironic coda to the joke that was music.Yet even as Dada was denouncing cultural pollution and spec-tacular rot on every side, Surrealism was already on the scenewith its big plans for cleanup and regeneration.

When artistic production resumed, it did so against andwithout Dada, but against and with Surrealism. Surrealist re-formism would deviate from reformisms well-trodden pathsand follow its own new roads: Bolshevism, Trotskyism, Gue-varism, anarchism. Just as the economy in crisis, which did notdisappear but was instead transformed into a crisis economy,so likewise the crisis of culture outlived itself in the shape of aculture of crisis. Hence Surrealism became the spectaculariza-

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tion of everything in the cultural past that refused separations,sought transcendence, or struggled against ideologies and theorganization of the spectacle.

e Break from Dada

When exactly did Surrealism emancipate itself from Dada?e question is badly framed,because it suggests that theSurre-alists were reconstructed Dadaists, whichis farfrom certain. In-deed, if we look closely at the beginnings of the earliest propo-nents of Surrealism, we nd that their works are of a personalkind, hostile, certainly, to the dominant tradition, but bearingscant trace of Dadas corrosive spirit.

e good relations maintained by the early Surrealists withPierre Reverdy, editor of the literary reviewNord-Sud, or thepoems of Breton, Benjamin Pret, Paul luard or Philippe

Soupault, are quite adequate testimony to the adherence ofthese new voices to a certain conception of literature. Whatthe rst Surrealists knew of Dada was above all its adulteratedParisianversion,the antics of Tzara,and a fewclashes betweenindividuals. With Grosz, Huelsenbeck, Schwiers, Haussmann,

Jung or even Picabia they were still largely unacquainted.In 1917 theword surrealist appeared in thesubtitleto Apol-

linaires playLes Mamelles de Trsias[e Teats of Tiresias]. In1920 Paul Derme used the term in the review LEsprit Nou-veau, and in 1924 Yvan Goll chose it as the title of a periodicalthat lasted for only one issue.

As early as 1919, however, the concept had acquired lessvague connotations. In that year Aragon produced his rst au-tomatic texts. In Entree des mediums [Enter the Mediums],Breton sought to circumscribe the notion-a task that he wouldpursue further in the rstManifesto of Surrealism(1924). Fromthe outset surrealism signied a new quest; the word imme-diately became the label of a new cultural product, clearly re-ecting thewill to distinguish that productunequivocallyfrom

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without truly sharing this despair would soon berevealed as an enemy.

While it is true that extreme despair may arouse limitlesshopes, the real site of the struggle still has to be made clear.Once we have arrived at the sort of despair that impels us, fol-

lowing the logic of death that power imposes, to open re intothe crowd, there is only one way beyond this predicament, andthat is the liquidation of power in the name of a dialectic of lifeand of all the hope life embodies. Having reached that point, itbehoved Surrealism, as a mirror held up to the power of death,to inaugurate an anti-Surrealism capable of combining in a sin-gle practice thestruggle against all forms of oppression andthedefence of every positive spark thrown up by everyday life.

On such a project, which theSituationists clearlyformulatedin the early 1960s, the Surrealists possessed but a few scaered

insights, and the only cohesion they could achieve here was alyricism endowing these fragments with an illusory unity.Here is Breton on Violee Nozires:

In face of your sex winged like a ower ofthe Catacombs

Students old fogeys journalists roen bastardsfake revolutionaries priests judges

Wanking lawyers

Know full well that all hierarchy ends here

When all is said and done, however, poetry as incitement topractice,and in this instance as actiondirectedtowards theabo-lition of the bourgeois order, is far more apparent in Bretonsdiatribe against psychiatrists inNadja:

I knowthat if I were mad, aer severaldaysof con-nement I should take advantage of any lapses in

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and those which by contrast ow from a reex of the will tolive. It is thus surprising on the face of it that Breton shouldever have been embarrassed when reminded of his celebratedproposition in theSecond Manifesto:

e simplest Surrealist act consists in dashing

down into the street, pistol in hand, and ringblindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into thecrowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, hasnot dreamed of thus puing an end to the peysystem of debasement and cretinization in eecthas a well dened place in that crowd, with hisbelly at barrel level.

is was a quite adequate explanation, aer all, of why suchan act would simply be a way of making all the workings of

an economic and social system which kills human beings byreducing them to the state of objects clear and comprehensi-ble to everyone. For it is true not only that the criminal is notresponsible, but also that the hierarchical organization of soci-ety, with its baeries of unkeys its magistrates, cops, man-agers, bosses and priests is itself fully responsible for all theacts that it condemns. But this negative aspect escaped Bre-ton and consequently he was unable to grasp the positivityinvolved either. e point of transcendence here was, nonethe-less, obvious to him, and he immediately adds a rider:

e justication of such an act is, to my mind, inno way incompatible with the belief in that gleamof light that Surrealismseeks to detectdeep withinus. I simply wanted to bring in here the elementof human despair, on this side of which nothingwould be able to justify that belief. It is impossibleto give ones assent to one and not to the other.Anyone who should pretend to embrace this belief

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all others. e contradiction between a voluntaristic rigour andthe inclination to compromise that was objectively encouragedby Surrealisms fresh embrace of culture created a permanentpoint of stress and led to endless splits in the movement

e review Lirature, founded in 1919, was so named byantiphrasis, but from the beginning it retained not a few gen-

uinely literary aspects; even in appearance it resembled a tradi-tional literary magazine in many respects. iswas thestartingpoint for the Surrealist project of founding a new way of think-ing, feeling and living, of creating a new world; and here laythe seeds of the particular way in which this project would beworked out, as of the particular way in which it would fail. Inthe regressive conjuncture which followed the triple defeat ofSpartacus, of Dada and of the revolution of the Soviets in Rus-sia (co-opted by theBolsheviks), theSurrealistsmade a promisewhich they kept: to be the capricious consciousness of a time

without consciousness, a will-o-the-wisp in the night of Na-tional Socialism and National Bolshevism.e rst few issues of Lirature included contributions

from Valry, Gide, Leon-Paul Fargue, Blaise Cendrars, JulesRomains, Max Jacob, Georges Auric and Darius Milhaud. eyoung Breton admired Valry, Pierre Reverdy and Saint-Pol-Roux, and to the last of these he remained loyal his wholelife long; yet he also had a fascination for Arthur Cravan and

Jacques Vach, prime exemplars of Dada nihilism authenticallylived out. In a sense Bretons work and even Surrealism itselfwere the product of these two divergent orientations.

e implications of this double allegiance are clear from Bre-tons remarks in theSecond Manifesto of Surrealism(1930):

In spite of the various eorts peculiar to each ofthose who used to claim kinship with Surrealism,or who still do, one must ultimately admit that,more than anything else, Surrealism aempted toprovoke, from the intellectual and moral point of

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view, a crisis of consciousness of the most generaland serious kind, and that the extent to which thiswas or was not accomplished alone can determineits historical success or failure.

e restriction here to the intellectual and moral point of

view clearly indicates an aachment to culture as an indepen-dent sphere, while a crisis of consciousness of the most gen-eral and serious kind evokes what Surrealism would inherit,albeit supercially, of the Dada spirit.

In fact Dada precipitated the purging ofLirature: it wasunder Dadas inuence that quarrels between lirateurs meta-morphosed into a general hostility towards thehomme de let-tresperse that animositytowards a MaxJacob, an Andr Gideor a Jean Cocteau came to be justied in terms of contempt forwriting as a trade or cra.

In 1920Liratures thirteenth issue opened the doors widerthan ever before to the Dadaist inuence, publishing twenty-three of the movements manifestos. Simultaneously, however,the break between Andr Breton and Tristan Tzara was in themaking.

Bretons intelligence and discretion undoubtedly endowedSurrealism with a good part of its genius. For Dada, unfortu-nately, just the opposite occurred: already sorely lacking forrevolutionary theorists, it lost much of its rich potential whenit came under the thumb of Tzara, the poverty of whose ideasand the banality of whose imagination were only rivalled by

his lust for recognition, for celebrity.Tzara possessed nothing of the critical sense and clear-

minded combativeness needed to incite artists to despair of art,grasp hold of everyday life and transform themselves into thesubject of a collective work of revolution. And the said artists,indecisive and at boom more susceptible to the temptationof an artistic career than they cared to acknowledge, quicklydiscovered that repeating the familiar japes of Dadas anti-art

16

accused has published a book which is an outrageto public decency; several of his most respectableand honorable fellow citizens have lodged a com-plaint against him, and he is also charged withslander and libel; there are also all sorts of othercharges against him, such as insulting and defam-

ing the army, inciting to murder, rape, etc. e ac-cused, moreover, wastes no time in agreeing withthe accusers in stigmatizing most of the ideas ex-pressed. His only defence is claiming that he doesnot consider himself to be the author of his book,said book being no more and no less than a Sur-realist concoction, which precludes any questionof merit or lack of merit on the part of the personwho signs it; further, that all he has done is copya document without oering any opinion thereon,

and that he is at least as foreign to the accused textas is the presiding judge himself.

What is true for the publication will also hold truefor a whole host of other acts as soon as Surrealistmethods begin to enjoy widespread favour. Whenthat happens, a new morality must be substitutedfor the prevailing morality, the source of all ourtrials and tribulations.

is last paragraph is truly extraordinary in its implications.To describe every act condemned by law as Surrealist wouldserve in the rst instance to point up the universality of alien-ation, thefact that people arenever truly themselves butratherthat everyone acts for the most part in accordance with theinhuman tendencies instilled in them by social conditioning.It would then become a simple maer, when considering actsthat were reprehensible from the standpoint of the law, todistinguish clearly between those which indeed obey a logic ofdeath, the logic of inhumanity imposed by the powers in place,

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Rot Condamine de la Tour

Rot you spineless shit

- and Epitaphe sur un monument aux morts de la guerre[Epitaph on a Monument to the War Dead], which Pret en-tered in the literary contest of the Acadmie Franaise:

e general told us

with his nger up his bum

e enemy

is that way Move out

It was for the fatherland

So o we went

with our ngers up our bums

In Breton it is possible to nd the somewhat scaered mak-ings of a libertarian position. A footnote in the rst Manifestoof Surrealismis particularly suggestive in this regard:

Whatever reservations I may be allowed to makeconcerning responsibility in general and themedico-legal considerations which determine anindividuals degree of responsibility completeresponsibility, irresponsibility, limited responsibil-ity (sic) however dicult it may be for me toaccept the principle of any degree of responsibil-

ity, I would like to know how the rst punish-able oenses whose Surrealist character is clearlyapparent will be judged. Will the accused be ac-quied, or will he merely be given the benet ofthe doubt because of extenuating circumstances?It is a shame that the violation of the laws govern-ing the press is today scarcely punished, for oth-erwise we would soon see a trial of this sort: the

48

show, with Tzara as choreographer and star, oered a conve-nient way of surreptitiously resuming cultural activity withoutformally renouncing the Dadaist contempt for art: they merelyhad to pretend to believe that that contempt applied solely tothedominant forms of literature, thought or art. In a sense,Sur-realism itself resided in these shortcomings of Dada.

Liratures survey based on the question Why do youwrite? was not so radical as one might justiably have sup-posed at rst glance. True, it clearly exposed the general vul-garity of intent and lack of imagination of the makers of nov-els, the asininity of versiers and academic thinkers, yet at thesame time it laid the groundwork for the discovery of pro-founder justications for a new art of writing, feeling, or paint-ing and authorized a new form of expression with claims tobeing authentic and total.

Such a formof expression already existed experimentally. As

Breton recalls in Entretiens[Conversations (1952)], in 1919,I began paying aention to those more or less complete sen-tences which, when one was entirely alone, as sleep came on,would become perceptible to the mind without it being possi-ble to nd any pre-existing reason for them.

e practical results appeared in a joint work by Breton andSoupault,e Magnetic Fields(1920), supposedly wrien underthe direct dictates of the unconscious. e book foreshadowedthe later experimental sleeping by means of which RobertDesnos, Benjamin Pret and Ren Crevel sought to expressthemselves without any mediation by the conscious mind.

By the time Breton took over as editor of a new series ofLirature in March 1922, and even-handedly rejected bothDadaism and the literary brigade (Gide, Valry and Co.), healready had a clear agenda, in the form of a positive project.

e coming break with Dada was hastened in 1921 by a pub-lic event organized by Aragon and Breton: the indictment andtrial of Maurice Barrs. Barrs was a literary anarchist of thecult of the Ego variety who sang the praises of nationalism in

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dulcet tones. He was, in short, the perfect symbol of a n-de-siecle intelligentsia that now practised the poetry of the bugle-call, thus by their negative example justifying the proponentsof a culture free of intellectual bloodstains.

e trial was held on 13 May. e accused was representedby a carnival mannequin; Breton presided, Georges Ribemont-

Dessaignes took therole of publicprosecutor, andSoupault andAragon, who had every a priori reason to like Barrs, were hisdefenders.

No eort was spared in the aempt to ensure that the eventwould provoke legal action and spark a confrontation whichwould ratify Dadas seditiousness in the eyes of revolutionarygroups. Short of such an outcome, indeed, there was no hopeof saving Dada.

Benjamin Pret, whose entire life was informed by an un-wavering and intransigent radicalism, testied to great eect

at the Barrs trial, speaking in German and playing e Un-known Soldier. All the witnesses, moreover, waxed eloquentupon the excremental character of veterans, of Barrs and ofeverything having to do with the nation and its traits. VictorCrastre is right, however, when he insists in his book Le Dramedu surralisme[e Tragedy of Surrealism] that theBarrs trialwas a failure:

e absence of any reaction from the right, coupled with thesilence of the revolutionary parties, meant that the trial hadfailed. is failure was echoed by a regression to aestheticism,in the shape of the Salon Dada that opened at the Galerie Mon-

taigne on the 6th of June 1922, and its mediocre triumph. Inthis connection Breton wrote: It seems to me that the sponsor-ship of a series of uerly futile Dada actions is on the pointof very seriously compromising an undertaking to which I re-mainaached. is aachment would oblige Bretonto try andsave Dada from thesterility that was nowthreateningit. He de-cided to convene a congress in order to clear maers up: theParis Congress for the Orientation and Defence of the Modern

18

they got a stokers shovel

No more Mother Cognacq

No more babies coming aer eighteen others

every Easter or Christmas

to piss in the family cooking-pot

She has croaked Motber Cognacq

So lets dance lets dance in a ring

round her grave with a turd on the top

Pret was the most enthusiastic member of the group whenit came to pouring scorn on the fatherland-on France, on Gallicavariciousness, on the cops and the army. In this vein he pro-duced many eminently quotable lines, among them this one,from Briand crev [Briand Has Croaked]: Finally this par-

boiled sperm sprang forth from the maternal whorehouse withan olive branch stuck up his arse. Or these, from La Stabili-sation du franc:

If the pigs ears quiver

It is because La Marseillaise is being sung

Come on children of the shit bucket

Lets ll Poincars ear with our snot

And let us not forget two classics, La Mort heroque du lieu-tenant Condamine de la Tour

Rot Condamine de la Tour

With your eyes the Pope will make communionwafers

for your Moroccan sergeant

and your prick will become his brigadiers baton

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is worth citing one quite exemplary demonstration of the pop-ular character of anti-Christian feeling. e Communist paperLHumanithaving reported how a church in ames had beensaved thanks to the courage of a few young people, a readersenta leer of protest tothe editorsthat was published inNum-ber 2 ofLe Surralisme au Service de la Rvolution:

Dear Comrades, I cannot but deplore your re-porters praise for the courage of a group of youngpeople when the only result of that courage wasthepreservationof a building that shouldby rightshave been razed long ago.

Aer Christianity, and seing aside capitalism, with regardto which the Surrealists espoused Lenins arguments, the chieftarget of execration was the family. e trial of Violee Noz-ires, who had murdered her father, the engine-driver of the

presidential train, aer he tried to rape her, oered the Surre-alists the perfect opportunity to voice their views on this ques-tion. e young parricide inspired some of luards sincerestlines:

Violee dreamed of undoing

And did undo

e frightful vipers nest of blood ties

Another emblematic gure, gleefully pounced on by Pret,

was the prodigiously fertile Mother Cognacq:

Alas she has croaked Mother Cognacq

croaked just like France

From her belly green as a pasture

swarmed record-breaking broods

and for each new arrival

46

Spirit. is was an ambitious project,aimingas itdid to get po-etry and art back onto rmer ground than the shiing sands inwhich they had been caught. And it did not succeed. Writersand artists who had made small reputations for themselves inand through Dada saw lile reason to throw everything awayfor the sake of a venture which seemed to them to have no fu-

ture, for they had nothing but mistrust for the spirit in whosename the Congress was being called.

Aer this setback Breton and his friends scaled down theirambitions, being inclined to explore the depths while castingtheir netless widely. eyrefused all alliances.And, nowmuchreduced in numbers, the group withdrew into itself.

It is notable that Picabia, the most consistent nihilist of theDadaist group, lent his support to the projected Congress. Bycontrast Tzara opposed the idea, claiming that such a projectwas essentially constructive, whereas Dada was by denition

pure negation!

e Specicity of Surrealism

e break with Dada became uerly nal in 1923, when, at aperformance of Tzaras Coeur gaz[eGas Heart], theauthorcalled the police and sought to have luard, Breton and Pretthrown out as troublemakers.

Around a hard core made up initially of Breton, Aragon andSoupault, there now revolved an oen disparate group of per-

sonalities, among them luard, Pret, Robert Desnos, RogerVitrac, Max Morise, Georges Limbour, Joseph Delteil, JacquesBaron,Ren Crevel, ManRay,Marcel Duchamp, andMax Ernst.1924 and 1925 were to be the pivotal years of Surrealism: untilthen, the movement was detaching itself from a Dadaist spiritwhich it had always espoused only with reticence; aerwards,the Surrealists began to seek agreement with communists ofone kind or another, from the somewhat marginal Leninists

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of Clart to the hard-line Stalinists of the French CommunistParty.

is fruitful period saw the conception and publication ofBretonsManifesto of Surrealism, the appearance of a review,La Rvolution Surraliste, and the creation of a Bureau for Sur-realist Research. e Surrealists interest in dreams and auto-

matic writing, the aention they paid to Freud, their inventionof games, their cultivation of the drive and of chance encoun-ters, and their experiments with spiritualism-all these togetherconstituted a unied set of preoccupations capable of sheddingclear new light on human possibilities. Indeed the rst issue ofLa Rvolution Surralisteproclaimed the need for a new decla-ration of the rights of man.

e group was soon joined by Andr Masson, MathiasLbeck, Georges Malkine, Pierre Naville, Raymond Qeneau,Antonin Artaud, Jacques Prvert, Marcel Duhamel and Pierre

Brasseur, while in Yugoslavia a Surrealist movement emergedwhose prime mover was Marco Ristitch.

At this time, too, Surrealism created a piquant genealogy foritself which included gures whose work cried out for dialecti-cal supersession on the plane of real life (de Sade, Lautramont,Fourier, Marx, etc.), great dreamers (Nerval, Novalis, Achimvon Arnim), alchemists (Paracelsus, Basil Valentine), a mot-ley of impassioned, eccentric and fantastic forebears, poets ofblack humour, and so on-in short, a whole pantheon that wascontinually being added to (and occasionally reduced, as in the

case of Poe, who was inducted at rst, only to be expelled sub-sequently on account of his contribution to the science of po-lice work). Most important of all, the group appropriated theDadaist technique of scandal-making and turned it eectivelyagainst the representatives of ocial culture. Two scandals inparticular may be said to have thoroughly shaken up the con-ventional wisdom of the time. ese were the publication ofthe pamphlet A Corpse, hailing the burial of Anatole France,

20

also know that not one of the painters who haverepresented this meal in so many celebrated pic-tures has ever put on the table the lilesplit loavesthat commonly symbolize the sex of the woman).

Dressed in a most elegant white robe, bent underthe weight of his cross, Jesus oers his back to

whatever blows might be forthcoming. As soon asPontius Pilatehas washedhis hands of theaccused,the sexual symbolism becomes crystal-clear. Jesusfalls, then gets up again: in other words, he hascome, and is ready to come again under the whipsof the athletic types with their skimpy costumes.

And, just as the young newlywed wife calls for hermother, so frightened is she so of voluptuous plea-sure, so Jesus continually calls out for his fatheren comes the vinegar-soaked sponge, signallingthe contempt of the handsomest of Jesus ruanlyguards for this taerdemalion yearning to be hisprey boy. In other words, the legionary in ques-tion, who can hardly have failed to spot the prac-tised hips of Mary Magdalene among the whorescrowding around the foot of the cross, atly re-fuses to pay Jesus the homage of even the tini-est drop of seminal uid, and in eect pisses inhis mouth to underline the point. So no morethreesomes. Between the two felons all that re-

mains are two chestnuts - the former juicy divineoranges have shrivelled into a pair of pitiful dried-up conkers, and the Christ is just a pathetic emptyvessel.

Before leaving the subject of the critical avenues whichwere suitable for exploration by Surrealism in its revolutionaryspecicity, but which were barely entered upon in practice, it

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for a debate that ought by rights to have sparked action of thebroadest scope:

e Communists have always ocially evincedan extremely unintelligent suspicion with respectto the discoveries of psychoanalysis, discoveries

which would in fact have allowed them to combatthe emotional processes associated with family,religion and fatherland in a completely informedmanner.

ough hardly a response adequate to theseriousness of thisproject, Ren Crevels delicious psychoanalytical account of Je-sus in Le Clavecin de Diderot(family and neuroses/family ofneuroses/family neurosis) is well worth quoting:

As the masochistic lile chickabiddie of the Father

Eternal, much given to turning the other cheek, Je-sus was not the sort to be satised by some briskreturn visit to the mothers breast.

On the contrary, he had to go back up into themost private of the genital parts of the genitor, tobecome one of those parts himself the right testi-cle, say because the Trinity may be, indeed mustbe interpreted as the tripartite assemblage (in ap-pearance) of the male sexual apparatus: a bananaand two mandarin oranges, perhaps since the

Oriental style insists on fruit similes only.True,the apotheosisof masochismis preceded by anumber of smaller diversions, by what the Frenchcall diddlings at the door: baptismal badinage withSaint John the Baptist, intimate grooming withperfumed oils at the hands of saintly women, and,above all, the Last Supper with its loaves (longloaves, that is, whose meaning we all know; we

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and the events surrounding the Saint-Pol-Roux banquet. Ana-tole France, as Breton explains inEntretiens,

was the prototype of everything we held in con-tempt.In our eyes, if ever there was an undeservedreputation, it was his. e supposed transparency

of his style le us cold, and his muchvaunted scep-ticism wefound repugnant.It was hewho had saidthat Rimbauds sonnet Voyelles [Vowels] deescommon sense, even if its verses were amusing.On the human level, we found his aitude as sinis-ter and despicable as could be: he had done what-ever one had to do to garner the support of Rightand Le alike. He was so pued up with his hon-ours and his own self-importance that we felt nocompunction whatsoever.

is windbag has since been so thoroughly de-ated that it is hard today to imagine the rage thatthose four pages, containing texts by Aragon, Del-teil, Drieu la Rochelle and me, were capable of un-leashing. According to Camille Mauclair, Aragonand I were nothing but raving maniacs, and headded that ese are the manners not of upstartsand ruans but of jackals. Others went further,calling for legal sanctions against us.

In July 1925, a banquet in honour of Saint-Pol-Roux, whowas an idol to Breton and several other Surrealists, oered theperfect opportunity to get rid of the literary trash once and forall. e French ambassador, Paul Claudel, had declared to anItalian newspaper that Surrealism, just like Dadaism, had onemeaning only-a pederastic one. e Surrealists riposte camein theform of an Open Leerprinted on sang-de-boeuf paperandslipped under each plate at theCloseriedes Lilas,wherethe

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banquet took place. Bretons amused account of what ensuedis well known:

By the time a rather sad hake in white sauce wasbeing served, a number of us were standing on thetables. ings fell completely apart when three oftheguests went o andcame back soonaerwards

with the police in tow. But, as humour would haveit, itwas MmeRachilde,by this timeat a highpitchof agitation, who in the general chaos ended upgeing arrested.

On this occasion, too, Michel Leiris was nearly lynchedfor shouting seditious slogans from the restaurant window ata passing veterans parade: Long live Germany! Long liveChina! Long live Abd-el-Krim!

Anarcho-Dadaism was still a lively strand in the Surrealismof this period. For instance, the cover of the rst number ofLa Rvolution Surraliste showed a photograph of the anar-chist Germaine Berton amongst members of the group. Butthere was more provocation here than commitment, for nei-ther Bonnot nor Ravachol were members of the Surrealist pan-theon; what is worse, Mcislas Charrier would be guillotinedby Poincar without so much as a peep out of Breton and hisfriends. Allthesame, itwas the fermentof revolt that theykepton the boil, and the precision with which they continued to de-nounce the permanent outrageousness of the prevailing orga-nization of society (a precision still very much in evidence in

the intervention in favour of Violee Nozires) that would pre-vent the best Surrealists from reducing their dream of a globalrevolution, no maer how confused it was, to the mediocrelevel of Bolshevism. It was these, together with the cult of thepassions, and especially of love, that saved the movement fromany outright compromise with infamy. (Surrealisms passingalliance with Trotsky, the butcher of Kronstadt in 1921, maybe put down to ignorance.)

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will laugh like mountains

will force the priests to kill the last generals withtheir crosses

and then using the ag

will massacre the priests themselves by way of an

Amene bases of a practical approach to religion were laid down

in LAction immdiateby Ren Magrie, E.L.T Mesens, PaulNoug, Louis Scutenaire and Andr Souris:

We are convinced that what has been done to op-posereligion up to nowhas beenvirtuallywithouteect and that new means of action must be envis-aged.

At the present time the Surrealists are the people

best ed to undertake this task. So as not to loseany time, we must aim for the head: the outra-geous history of religions should be made knowntoall, the lives of young priestsshouldbe madeun-bearable, and all sects and organizations of the Sal-vation Army or of the Evangelical variety shouldbe discredited by means of every kind of mockeryour imagination can devise. ink how exhilarat-ing itwould be if wecould persuade the beer partof our youth to mount a well prepared and sys-

tematic campaign of disruption of church services,baptisms, communions, funerals and so on. Mean-while roadside crosses might usefully be replacedby images promoting erotic love or poetically eu-logizing the natural surroundings, particularly ifthese happen to be grim.

In an article published in Intervention surraliste (1934)which went scandalously unheeded,Pierre Yoyoe set thetone

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politics and that of a specialized reanimated art, to fuse intoone.

Surrealist activity had nonetheless never before reachedsuch heights. e spirit of the movement was spreading inter-nationally. In Belgium, Ren Magrie, Paul Noug and LouisScutenaire founded a Surrealist group whose inventiveness,

style and violence would carry it a very long way before much later on it collapsed into a sophomoric humour punc-tuated by Stalinist professions of faith.

e game of Exquisite Corpse, in which a poem or pictureis created collectively by players who are unaware, except forthe rst element, of what the others write or draw, was a suc-cessful revival, with increased emphasis on language, of thespirit of Dadaist collage, of the notion of a poetry made by all,of the idea of objective chance. is pastime supplied Surreal-ism with one of its best and most interesting ways of satisfyingits propensity for playfulness.

In 1927 Andr Breton joined the Communist Party. Assignedto the gas workers cell, he set out with a disarming willing-ness to do his bit, but he was exasperated by the Communistsbureaucratic tendencies (which for the time being were not somuch sinister as ridiculous), and before long he le the Partymilitants to their illusions.

On the Artaud side of things, meanwhile, though withoutany direct input from Artaud, a tendency emerged in Surreal-ism which would becomepreponderantaer theSecond WorldWar. e voice of this tendency was Ren Daumal and Roger-

Gilbert Lecomtes review Le Grand Jeu, whose rst issue ap-peared in 1928. e possibility of a convergence between thisgroup and Bretons was explored, but proved impossible. Dau-mal and Lecomte had lile taste for the kind of disciplineBreton imposed. Furthermore, they had a certain contemptfor politics, this at a time when the mainstream Surrealistswere hastily becoming politicized, and whenever they were re-proached on these grounds, which was oen, they would re-

24

ing of Stalinism cast a dark cloud over these aspirations in thehearts of Breton and his friends, Surrealism embraced Artaudsconclusion in an intellectual way, and resolved like him to livethe drama of every day alienation as a cosmic tragedy of themind.

In 1924, though, Surrealism was nowhere near that point. Its

survey of suicide also addressed the question of life. To the pos-sibility of death were quickly aached all the possibilities offreedom and all the freedoms of the possible. As Breton put it,

It is remarkable how these replies, be they subtle,literary or derisive, all seem so arid; why is it thatno human resonance is detectable in them? To killoneself has no one weighed the fury and expe-rience, the disgust and passion, that are containedin this phrase?

Surrealism thus recognized the mark of the old world and itsoppressive structures in the inhumanity of survival. ough itmay have displayed a singular lack of discernment with regardto the ramications of commodity fetishism, it must still begiven credit for having so very rarely failed to measure up (asBreton was wont to say) to the revolutionary ethic of freedom.e Surrealists denunciation of oppression was well-nigh con-tinual, and the violence of their tone cannot help but arouseour sympathy.

e fact remains that these young people, who ought by

rights to have turned themselves into theorists and practition-ers of the revolution of everyday life, were content to be mereartists thereof, waging a war of mere harassment against bour-geois society as though it fell to the Communist Party alone tomount the main oensive. It thus came about that targets ofgreat moment were chosen without any deep conviction thatthey ought to be designated as spheres of oppression towardswhich the proletariats anger should be directed; indeed many

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tory and moves it forward); for Surrealism, survival, suicideand death were the starting point which life was supposed tonegate, but which it could not transform without rst achiev-ing a state of absolute deviation. is was the metaphysicalconundrum from which the Surrealists were trying to escapewhen they mistakenly pinned their hopes on Bolshevism.

at is why the rst issue ofLa Rvolution Surralisteis re-plete with press clippings concerning suicide. In the surveyconductedin that issue on thequestionof whypeoplekill them-selves, Artauds response remains exemplary:

I suer frightfully from life. ere is no state I cannot aain.And without a doubt I have been dead for a long time already I have already commied suicide. I have, as it were, been sui-cided. But what would you think of a suicide before the fact a suicide that made you redirect your steps, but to somewherebeyond being, not towards death.

Artauds path was already quite clear. rough a nihilismthat Dada never aained, though it had sought it as a basison which to reconstruct the self, life, and social organization,Artaud chose a return to the dissolution of the self in a spiri-tual totality. e Surrealism of theyears aer theSecond WorldWar would adopt a comparable stance, returning in this way tothe movements starting point, and even transcending it, butit nevertheless avoided the lucidity and the drama lived outby Artaud. Very few Surrealists would ever apprehend theirown alienation with Artauds courage and awareness: I amunhappy like a man who has lost the best part of himself. Very

few would face up so directly to their own fragmented state: Ino longer want to be one of the deluded. Being dead, others arenot separated from themselves. ey continue to circle aroundtheir own corpses. As for me, I am not dead, but I am separatedfrom myself.

For Artaud, in 1924, the hope of a classless society, the hopeof a coming reign of freedom, so passionately entertained bySurrealism, had already been dashed. Later, when the unmask-

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spond by warning of the danger of Surrealisms co-optation.e two groups had a common interest in union, but neitherside felt passionately enough about its necessity for it to comeabout, and as soon as a pretext presented itself, they went theirseparate ways. at pretext was an apologia for the Prefect ofPolice, Chiappe, wrien for a newspaper by Roger Vailland, a

member of the Grand Jeu group. Daumal and Lecomte rebukedVailland for this in the weakest of terms; Breton was not accus-tomed to tolerating theabsence of a violent reaction to a failingof this kind. (Subsequently Daumal moved closer and closer toa Gurdjiean position, so much so that in 1933 he broke withLecomte.)

e Second Manifesto, published in 1930, became in eecta general seling of accounts. Among those expelled were

Jacques Baron, Georges Limbour, Andr Masson, Roger Vit-rac, Desnos, Prvert and Raymond Qeneau. It was Artaudabove all, however, who came under aack. Admiedly, hehad brought anathema upon himself by calling the police onhis friends when they tried to disrupt a performance at the Al-fred Jarry eatre; yet Tzara, aer all, had pointed Breton andluardout to thepolicein 1923, andBreton wasnow reconciledwith him.

Duringthis period theSurrealist group wasreinforced by thearrival of Luis Buuel, Salvador Dal and Ren Char. In Praguethe movement was riding high thanks to Vitezlav Nezval, Jin-drich Styrsky, Karel Teige and Toyen. In 1929 Jacques Rigaut,like Cravan and Vach a great living exemplar of Dadaist ni-

hilism, killed himself.On the scandal front, the psychiatrists got up in arms over

the calls to murder contained in Bretons Nadja, which wereindeed directed at them personally. A new periodical, Le Sur-ralisme au Servicede la Rvolution [Surrealism at theService ofthe Revolution], was launched with an appropriate aggressive-ness, though the title suggested a marked retreat as comparedwith that of the earlierLa Rvolution Surraliste. If Surrealism

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was to bein the train of a revolutionwhose only possible motorwas the Communist Party, the fate of poetry not to mentionthat of the revolutionaries was surely sealed. Happily, thecontent of the new periodical tended to belie its title. Crevel,summarizing the state of play in the third issue, was able towrite:

Surrealism: not a school but a movement; does nottherefore speak ex cathedrabut goes to see,goes insearch of knowledge, of knowledge applied to theRevolution (via a poeticroute). Lautramont hadsaid: poetry must be made by all, not by one. lu-ards comment on this: poetry will purify all men.All ivory towers will be demolished.

AndCrevel adds: Starting outfrom Hegel, like Marxand En-gelsbut following a dierent path, Surrealismends up at dialec-tical materialism. Truth to tell, Hegel was discovered very be-latedlyby theSurrealists,and, even more important,they madebarely any practical use of him-not even as a tool for discrim-inating between the dialectic and the thinking of a Mauriceorez. eir taste for life made a much greater contribution,and the best of Surrealist thought unquestionably arose fromtheir analyses of lived moments, which revealed the dialecticfar beer than quotations from Hegel and created poetry farmore eectively than any poem.

In response to Bretons diatribes in theSecond Manifesto, the

excludees issued a violent pamphlet which emulated the toneand borrowed the title of the compendium of insults earlierdirected at Anatole France: Un Cadavre[A Corpse]. e BarMaldoror a premature aempt at commercial co-optationwas sacked by Breton and his friends. Buuels lm Lge dorroused the ire of war veterans and of the Right. One partic-ularly ne expression of anger, an open leer to the top stu-dent applicant of the year admied to the Saint-Cyr Military

26

could evoke the paltry political activity that has occurred tothe East of us over the last few years. ough both these re-marks are accurate enough, the rst bespeaks someone whois still lacking in consciousness, the second someone who is al-ready an imbecile.e sequel was to demonstrate, in any event,that these were merely words without practical consequences.

e Dada spirit outlived itself as an empty verbal form; Surre-alism surreptitiously endowed that form with another content.All the same, the melancholy of everyday life was the stirrup

that enabled Surrealism to take its wild ride through the worldof dreams. Contrary to the prognostications of not a few Stal-inist thinkers, the movement was not destined to serve simplyas a trampoline for escapism and mysticism. On the contrary,it became that focus of despair whence all new hope drives,even if the road taken was the cultural one.

Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vach, two great witnesses tomal de vivre, were soon to die. e rst put out to sea onestormy evening on the Gulf of Mexico; the second, who hadwrien from the front that it was tiresome to die so young,killed himselfin Nantesno sooner than theWar was over.Soonaer there would be Jacques Rigaut and Raymond Roussel and,among the Surrealists, Ren Crevel. Like Artaud, Crevel hadbeen struck by the predominance of non-life in the totality ofhuman aairs,and itwas hewho, ina texton Paul Klee,-voiceda sentiment that the Surrealists would have done well to pur-sue further: We care neither for the asparagus of the poor norfor the leeks of the rich.

Dada held up a mirror to survival as an absence of real lifeand as a directly apprehended reality, thus making its shamemore shameful; suicide constituted a condemnation, by wayof the negative, of survivals logic of death.

Being an ideology, Surrealism was a strictly static visionwhose impression uponhistory could never surpassthe weightwhich history itself accorded it (as distinct from revolution-ary theory, which starts out from history, then returns to his-

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Yes, everything had gone well; yes, the objectiveswe had decided to set ourselves had been met,but ere was indeed a very large but. An houror two before their departure, they had been askedto sign a declaration that implied the abandon-ment, not to say the explicit rejection, of practi-

cally every position we had held up until then.ey were expected to renounce the Second Man-ifestoinasmuch I quote word for word - as itis contrary to dialectical materialism. ey weresupposed to denounce Freudianism as an idealistideology and Trotskyism as a social-democraticand counterrevolutionary ideology. Finally, theywould undertake to submit their literary activityto the discipline and control of the CommunistParty. And so?, I asked Sadoul brusquely. And,geing no reply, I take it you refused? No, hereplied, Aragon felt that we-that is, you as well asus-would have to go along if we wanted to workin the Partys cultural organizations. at was therst time in my life that I saw a chasm openingup before my very eyes, a chasm that has sincewidened dizzyingly, in proportion to the relentlessheadway made by the outrageous idea that truthshould bow down before ecacity, that neitherconscience nor individual personality are worthheeding in short,that theend justies themeans.

In 1932 Aragon rallied to the Communist Party. e sameyear saw the publication of Bretons Communicating Vesselsand one of Ren Crevels nest texts, Le Clavecin de Diderot[Diderots Harpsichord].

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it from passionate and multidimensional life, has been calledsurvival:

So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life -real life, I mean - that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that in-veterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his lot, has trou-ble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that

his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earnedthrough his own eorts, almost always through his own ef-forts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refusedto try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feelsextremely modest: he knows what women he has had, whatsilly aairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by hiswealth or poverty, in this respect he is a new-born babe and, asfor the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does verynicely without it.

e only thing absent from Bretons tableau of intolerablemediocrity is history. No doubt the nostalgia for the chateaulife which always haunted the Surrealist dream contained animplicit reference to the great myth of the unitary society ofold, where the individual trajectory of even the humblest ofmen was inextricablybound upwiththecosmicin a mass of c-tional realities and real ctions, an atmosphere in which everyevent was a sign and every word or gesture magically sparkedo mysterious currents of mental electricity. e collapse ofthis myth, and its subsequent co-optation as spectacle by thebourgeoisie, were never successfully analysed by Surrealism.In the end the Surrealist movement never did more than echo

the kind of furious foot-stamping which, from Romanticism toDada, had been the sole response of artists thwarted by the de-mobilizing combination (supplied courtesy of the commoditysystem) of a lifeless soul and a soulless life.

Romantic rebellion from Shelley to Karl Sand and PierreFranois Lacenaire had given way to the aggressive aestheti-c

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