‘It will… become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality.’ Karl Marx, 1843

The project of their new journal, Marx wrote to his friend Arnold Ruge in 1843, should be to rediscover the unrealised ambitions of the past: to reveal to the world its own dreams about itself, in order to precipitate the actualisation of those dreams. Marx’s assertion that to move forwards we must first look backwards is a sentiment that is (or at least has become) something of a cliché. It is important, however, to factor in Marx’s emphasis on the dream-image in order to distinguish his gesture from, say, George Orwell’s over-quoted statement from 1984:

‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ George Orwell, 1949

The difference, I think, between Marx’s and Orwell’s hypotheses, is in the seeming irrationality of the dream-image as deciding factor. Orwell’s quote relates to hegemony, ideology, media, society’s self-image: sensible, understandable, logical things. Marx’s quote relates to a utopian impulse, and also to a curious form of historical determinism: the future is contained within the dreams of the past, and it is our task to unleash those dream-images. Marx’s utopianism is not one that advocates throwing ourselves into an unknown future, but one that bases our future-ima(gin)ings in already-existent impulses. ‘…it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work’. In the letter to Ruge, Marx doesn’t envision the problematics of this free movement between dream-image and real future; the notion of the dream remains more of a motivating principle than anything more substantial.

‘Every epoch dreams the one to follow.’ Jules Michelet, 1925

Michelet’s rather more succinct statement of the dream-image’s relationship to the future was itself quoted by Walter Benjamin in his Exposé of 1935. Benjamin took this notion as his starting point in his expansive project of a cultural-historical mapping of the Nineteenth-Century Parisian arcades, whereby the dream-image becomes coterminous with Benjamin’s own conception of the dialectical image. Benjamin attempted to discover precisely how the historical materialist could reveal and realise the dreams of the past. In his, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Benjamin recognised that the past is not simply free to be mined for such dream-images. The past is conquered territory; history is written by the victors. As such, ‘every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.’

‘The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking… Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. With the destabilisation of the market economy, we begin to recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.’ Walter Benjamin, 1935

The task of the historical materialist is thus to reclaim a history from the dominant order, ‘to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’. Then the historical materialist must constellate these dream-images into a dialectical-image, which we recognise in a flash of illumination and which blasts open the continuum of a history written by those who have suppressed and flattened historical time. The historical materialist is here endowed with a ‘weak Messianic power’, a sensitivity to the monadological nature of the historical dream-image, and a connection with what has otherwise been suppressed by the myths of capitalism.

‘I believe in the future realisation of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.’ André Breton, 1924

The realisation of the dream-image, of course, was also central to the Surrealist project. Benjamin distinguished his own project from the Surrealist one by affirming that he is working towards an actualisation into reality, ‘whereas Aragon persistently remains in the realm of dreams, here it is a question of finding the constellation of awakening’. Whilst Aragon eventually renounced Surrealism to facilitate his acceptance by the Third International – who from the beginning regarded Surrealism as too unserious and trifling, too concerned with dreams rather than their prescribed conception of historical materialism – Breton fought for Surrealism’s acceptance as a serious and weighty proposition to the political order. In doing so, despite his own warning that, ‘When it comes to revolt, none of us have any need of ancestors’, Breton situated his movement into various lineages. When addressing the Third International directly, Breton emphasised the Marxist origins of Surrealism (‘“Transform the world,” Marx said’), which were combined with a more poetic element drawn from Rimbaud (‘“Change life,” Rimbaud said’) in a dialectical relationship (‘These two watchwords are one for us’). Elsewhere, he looked to the dream images produced by the Marquis de Sade, Lautréamont, Edgar Allan Poe, Jonathan Swift and more. Indeed, the ‘Swift is Surrealist in Malice…’ list-section of the first Surrealist manifesto is itself something of a Benjaminian constellation, as an arrangement of historical objects placed together so as to reveal the dream-image that they harbour.

‘Anyone who combines consciousness of past renunciations with a historical consciousness of decomposition is ready to take up arms in the cause of the transformation of daily life and of the world. Nihilists, as de Sade would have said, one more effort if you want to be revolutionaries!’ Raoul Vaneigem, 1967

Now, we are told at every juncture that Utopianism is either exhausted or irresponsible, and that there is no alternative course of development than the one which currently propels us towards ecological disaster whilst reinforcing the power of the wealthy over the poor. So when these ideas have been revisited more recently, the focus has been slightly shifted, from the dream-images themselves to the moments of their having been dreamt. In other words, not looking so much for the dream-images themselves, as for the historical junctures and consciousness that have facilitated their articulation. The Situationist International spoke of its own conflicted relationship with the early Surrealist movement, whereby the latter had for a moment moved in the right direction but had too easily allowed their own recuperation. Dada, according at least to Vaneigem in his Revolution of Everyday Life, had come closer to realising its own revolutionary potential, but had descended into a state of ‘passive nihilism’, due to largely to its own unawareness of its revolutionary predecessors. To move from nihilism to revolution, Vaneigem argued, was a case of producing an active nihilism, which could harness the force of its own historical tradition.

To linger on these seemingly frivolous or fanciful ideas about dream-images and suppressed radical traditions may seem somewhat perverse when simultaneously asserting how staggeringly real are the threats that society now faces. Yet we are in a position whereby we must discover the histories and dreams which have been concealed by the capitalist present in order to contest its version of events and its own projections of the future. To choose our past is to choose our future; but when the past is not ours, we must find the dream-images which shame and contest the nightmare of the capitalist present. This is not to dwell on the past, or to advocate nostalgia, but to find a historical current that generates a productive friction against the stasis of the capitalist present. We can recognise that Fukuyama’s claims for the end of history were premature, but we cannot yet identify the emancipatory dynamics of the era we inhabit. If the end of history hypothesis was incorrect, so may have been the claim that Utopianism is exhausted and irrelevant. So, by choosing our own histories as, say, the radical refusals and dream-lives of the political avant-gardes, over the hegemonic accounts of the Twentieth Century, we can prophesy an alternative image of the future.

Jacques Rozier tourne Adieu Philippine, l’été 1960. Michel reçoit sa feuille de route. C’est en Algérie qu’il doit partir. Le mot n’est pas prononcé. Un personnage, qui fait une courte apparition au début du film, semble en revenir mais dit qu’il préfère ne pas en parler. Une allusion à la censure ? À l’occasion de la reprise du film, à la fin des années 70, Jacques Rozier décide d’ajouter, avant le générique, un carton sur lequel est indiqué “1960, sixième année de la guerre d’Algérie”. Un autre film, Les parapluies de Cherbourg, reprend le même thème :

Donc, nous y voilà, une caserne disparaît en 1962 et elle réapparait où?
Dans un endroit qui n’existe pas : Bécon-les-Bruyères.
Dois-je ajouter que, alors que je venais à peine de faire cette découverte, le téléphone se mit à sonner ? Une certaine Madame Charras m’appelait. C’était la première fois que je l’avais au bout du fil. Elle me proposait du boulot…

Les souvenirs vous habitent longtemps après les avoir remués.
Près de la gare d’Asnières, j’ai revu la rue Saint-Saëns, celle qu’habitait ma tante, celle où je passais mes vacances. On m’avait dit que la rue s’appelait ainsi car le musicien l’aurait habitée. Je n’en trouve nulle trace aujourd’hui. Pourtant je l’ai cru. La rue existe même si…
L’immeuble où habitait la tante qui m’accueillait n’a pas pris une ride (il les avait déjà prises quand j’étais enfant). À proximité, du côté de la gare d’Asnières, les bistros sont toujours là, la boulangerie la même (le pain y est-il meilleur ?). Dans sa rue, rien n’a changé ; le calme absolu, total, angoissant est toujours le même.
Je vis tout cela, et repartie chargée et cependant légère, d’avoir renoué, l’espace d’un instant avec un pan important de mon enfance.
Mes souvenirs ont continué de cheminer.
Dans les jours qui suivirent, je me souvins avoir joué à Philippine, avec ma tante de Courbevoie et n’avoir joué à ce jeu qu’avec elle.
Sur le blog de Laure Limongi, Gérard Genette définit ainsi ce jeu :

La guerre d’Algérie est derrière la légèreté apparente des trois personnages. Une façon de contourner la censure de l’époque.

Alors que les trois jeunes gens sont en Corse en vacances, Michel reçoit sa feuille de route pour partir en Algérie. Pour cela, il doit se rendre à la caserne Charras, à Courbevoie. Nous y voilà…
à suivre…

Si l’on veut faire référence à Breton, on parlerait de hasard objectif, d’autres parleraient plus simplement de coïncidences, quand, à partir d’un lieu, les signes s’enchaînent pour vous y ramener inexorablement par la pensée. C’est ce que j’ai pu observer avec un certain plaisir mêlé d’étonnement ces derniers jours.

Je décide donc de me rendre à Asnières, enfin à Courbevoie près de la gare d’Asnières …
Malgré le fait que les deux communes soient voisines, il est nécessaire de faire un changement (je préfère dire une escale) à la gare de Bécon-les -Bruyères. Ce nom de Bécon-les-Bruyères qu’enfant je transformais en Bécon-les-Gruyères (pas très subtil, je l’avoue), n’était qu’un nom étrange et mémorable, et n’existait pour moi qu’ainsi. En effet, sur la ligne Saint-Lazare/Versailles-rive-droite je n’étais jamais allée en aval d’Asnières.
Donc, ce jour-là, je découvrais que Bécon-les-Bruyères était un lieu qui existait bien. Quoique…
C’est une gare, certes, mais en fait, ce n’est pas une commune. Il s’agit d’un regroupement de quartiers de trois communes différentes : Courbevoie, Asnières, Bois-Colombe.
Bécon-les-Bruyères est un nom, qu’un nom et pas plus.
à suivre...

LOS CAMINOS DEL HOMBRE DE AZOGUE

CAPÍTULO X: INFANCIA ADOLESCENCIA JUVENTUD (*)

El Hombre de Azogue iba vestido con un traje gris perla, camisa blanca y corbata roja, le gustaba vestir de traje en las ocasiones más cotidianas. Para comprar el pan, para echar una carta al buzón, para arrancar los carteles que los acólitos de Franco habían pegado en las paredes para conmemorar los 25 años de pax, o simplemente para darse un paseo por el parque.

El Hombre llamado Jardín iba vestido con suaves pieles de frutas, hojas tiernas de hortalizas, cálidos pétalos de flores silvestres, y espinosas espigas, su cuerpo era un mosaico archimboldiano (**). Barba de lunas o de mariposas como un poema de Whitman (***).

El Hombre de Azogue tenía fuego en sus manos, el Hombre llamado Jardín tenía harina en sus manos. Ambos tenían recuerdos en sus manos.

Y caminos en sus pies.

Habían estado en la Piazza Campo dei Fiori, y tal vez habían sido quemados vivos por la Inquisición por defender que la poesía es un arma cargada de futuro. O que, como decía Bretón, el mayor acto surrealista sería salir a calle y disparar al azar. Disparar al Azar. Eso hacían ellos cada madrugada, al levantarse, salían a la calle y disparaban al Azar. Empezaban a caminar sin rumbo pero con ilusión. Empezaban a sentir sin objeto pero con pasión. Empezaban a creer sin dios pero con libertad. Disparaban sus sueños al azar de la vida que les conducía como un perro guía conduce aun ciego por un planeta desconocido. Un planeta por conocer. Como Bruno creían que había planetas habitados más allá de donde llegan las naves espaciales. Más allá de donde llegarán jamás.

El Hombre de Azogue había nacido en medio de una guerra y su abuela le había enseñado que a la vida había que dominarla con imaginación, con decisión, con descaro.  ¡Ay, su abuela! Recordaba como su abuela le pedía que se vistiera con el traje de marinerito de su primera comunión para ir a las casas de los ricos. Y les daban buenas propinas. Nada como explotar el timo de la religiosidad en provecho propio. Más cuando las beatas acababan de ganar la guerra.

El Hombre llamado Jardín había nacido en plena revolución social, pero nunca lo supo. Llegaron los primeros turistas a las playas, pero él vivía en el interior y nunca los vio.  Sus padres viajaban empleados en un teatro ambulante, pero él se quedaba en el pueblo. En la capital se hablaba de cambios políticos, de música estridente, de sexo sin fronteras. Pero él nunca lo oyó. Los primeros 20 años de la vida del Hombre llamado Jardín fueron grises. Infancia, adolescencia y juventud fueron grises. Era un hombre gris como los de la historia de Momo de Michael Ende.(****)

En cambio la infancia, adolescencia y juventud del Hombre de Azogue habían sido animadas, libres, llenas de historia, color y aventuras. Con amigos con los que corretear las calles de la ciudad, con quienes subirse en los topes de los tranvías y saltar sin temor cuando se acercaba el revisor. Con quienes descubrir el mundo.

El Hombre llamado Jardín no había tenido amigos. Ni aventuras. Ni familia. NI historia. Gris.

(*) El título está tomado de León Tolstoi

http://www.forumlibertas.com/frontend/forumlibertas/noticia.php?id_noticia=8780&id_seccion=13#

(**)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Vertumno

(***)

Walt Whitman

(****)

http://www.librerialuces.com/datoslibros.php?cod=69498

Hombre Gris. Ilustración de VONPRK

Nantes : peut-être avec Paris la seule ville de France où j’ai l’impression que peut m’arriver quelque chose qui en vaut la peine, où certains regards brûlent pour eux-mêmes de trop de feux […], où pour moi la cadence de la vie n’est pas la même qu’ailleurs, où un esprit d’aventure au-delà de toutes les aventures habite encore certains êtres, Nantes, d’où peuvent encore me venir des amis […].

Nadja (1928), André Breton

Citations tirée de son livre Najda :

“Nantes : Peut être avec Paris la seule ville ou j’ai l’impression que peut m’arriver quelque chose qui en vaut la peine, ou certains regards brûlent pour eux mêmes de trop de feux (…) où pour moi la cadence de la vie n’est pas la même qu’ailleurs, où un esprit d’aventure, au delà de toutes les aventures, habite encore certains êtres, Nantes d’où peuvent encore me venir des amis”

Portrait of André Breton by Victor Brauner, 1934.

WHAT IS SURREALISM?

by André Breton

This was first presented as a lecture in Brussels on June 1, 1934 at a public meeting organized by the Belgian Surrealists, and thereafter issued as a pamphlet.

Comrades:
The activity of our surrealist comrades in Belgium is closely allied with our own activity, and I am happy to be in their company this evening. Magritte, Mesens, Nougé, Scutenaire and Souris are among those whose revolutionary will—outside of all consideration of their agreement or disagreement with us on particular points—has been for us in Paris a constant reason for thinking that the surrealist project, beyond the limitations of space and time, can contribute to the efficacious reunification of all those who do not despair of the transformation of the world and who wish this transformation to be as radical as possible.

***

At the beginning of the war of 1870 (he was to die four months later, aged twenty-four), the author of the Chants de Maldoror and of Poésies, Isidore Ducasse, better known by the name of Comte de Lautréamont, whose thought has been of the very greatest help and encouragement to myself and my friends throughout the fifteen years during which we have succeeded in carrying a common activity, made the following remark, among many others which were to electrify us fifty years later: “At the hour in which I write, new tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them.”

1868-75: it is impossible, looking back upon the past, to perceive an epoch so poetically rich, so victorious, so revolutionary and so charged with distant meaning as that which stretches from the separate publication of the Premier Chant de Maldoror to the insertion in a letter to Ernest Delahaye of Rimbaud’s last poem, Rêve, which has not so far been included in his Complete Works. It is not an idle hope to wish to see the works of Lautréamont and Rimbaud restored to their correct historical background: the coming and the immediate results of the war of 1870. Other and analogous cataclysms could not have failed to rise out of that military and social cataclysm whose final episode was to be the atrocious crushing of the Paris Commune; the last in date caught many of us at the very age when Lautréamont and Rimbaud found themselves thrown into the preceding one, and by way of revenge has had as its consequence—and this is the new and important fact—the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution.

I should say that to people socially and politically uneducated as we then were—we who, on one hand, came for the most part from the petite-bourgeoisie, and on the other, were all by vocation possessed with the desire to intervene upon the artistic plane—the days of October, which only the passing of the years and the subsequent appearance of a large number of works within the reach of all were fully to illumine, could not there and then have appeared to turn so decisive a page in history. We were, I repeat, ill-prepared and ill-informed.

André Breton, René Hilsum, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard posing with a copy of Dada 3, 1919.

Above all, we were exclusively preoccupied with a campaign of systematic refusal, exasperated by the conditions under which, in such an age, we were forced to live. But our refusal did not stop there; it was insatiable and knew no bounds. Apart from the incredible stupidity of the arguments which attempted to legitimize our participation in an enterprise such as the war, whose issue left us completely indifferent, this refusal was directed—and having been brought up in such a school, we are not capable of changing so much that is no longer so directed—against the whole series of intellectual, moral and social obligations that continually and from all sides weigh down upon man and crush him. Intellectually, it was vulgar rationalism and chop logic that more than anything else formed the causes of our horror and our destructive impulse; morally, it was all duties: religious, civic and of the family; socially, it was work (did not Rimbaud say: “Jamais je ne travaillerai, ô flots de feu!” and also: “La main à plume vaut la main à charrue. Quel siècle à mains! Je n’aurai jamais ma main!” [Never will I work, O torrents of flame! The hand that writes is worth the hand that ploughs! What a century of hands! I will never lift my hand!]).

The more I think about it, the more certain I become that nothing was to our minds worth saving, unless it was… unless it was, at last “l’amour la poésie,” to take the bright and trembling title of one of Paul Eluard’s books, “l’amour la poésie,” considered as inseparable in their essence and as the sole good. Between the negation of this good, a negation brought to its climax by the war, and its full and total affirmation (“Poetry should be made by all, not one”), the field was not, to our minds, open to anything but a Revolution truly extended into all domains, improbably radical, to the highest degree impractical and tragically destroying within itself the whole time the feeling that it brought with it both of desirability and of absurdity.

Many of you, no doubt, would put this down to a certain youthful exaltation and to the general savagery of the time; I must, however, insist on this attitude, common to particular men and manifesting itself at periods nearly half a century distant from one another. I should affirm that in ignorance of this attitude one can form no idea of what surrealism really stands for. This attitude alone can account, and very sufficiently at that, for all the excesses that may be attributed to us but which cannot be deplored unless one gratuitously supposes that we could have started from any other point. The ill-sounding remarks, that are imputed to us, the so-called inconsiderate attacks, the insults, the quarrels, the scandals—all things that we are so much reproached with—turned up on the same road as the surrealist poems. From the very beginning, the surrealist attitude has had that in common with Lautréamont and Rimbaud which once and for all binds our lot to theirs, and that is wartime defeatism.

I am not afraid to say that this defeatism seems to be more relevant than ever. “New tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them.” They are, in fact, always running through the intellectual atmosphere: the problem of their propagation and interpretation remains the same and, as far as we are concerned, remains to be solved. But, paraphrasing Lautréamont, I cannot refrain from adding that at the hour in which I speak, old and mortal shivers are trying to substitute themselves for those which are the very shivers of knowledge and of life. They come to announce a frightful disease, a disease followed by the deprivation of all rights; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them also. This disease is called fascism.

André Breton photograph by Man Ray, c. 1930.

Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow has greatly advanced over Europe recently. Hitler, Dolfuss and Mussolini have either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal humiliation everything that formed the effort of generations straining towards a more tolerable and more worthy form of existence. The other day I noticed on the front page of a Paris newspaper a photograph of the surroundings of the Lambrechies mine on the day after the catastrophe. This photograph illustrated an article titled, in quotation marks, ‘Only Our Chagrin Remains’. On the same page was another photograph—this one of the unemployed of your country standing in front of a hovel in the Parisian ‘poor zone’—with the caption Poverty is not a crime. “How delightful!” I said to myself, glancing from one picture to the other. Thus the bourgeois public in France is able to console itself with the knowledge that the miners of your country were not necessarily criminals just because they got themselves killed for 35 francs a day. And doubtless the miners, our comrades, will be happy to learn that the committee of the Belgian Coal Association intends to postpone till the day after tomorrow the application of the wage cut set for 20 May. In capitalist society, hypocrisy and cynicism have now lost all sense of proportion and are becoming more outrageous every day. Without making exaggerated sacrifices to humanitarianism, which always involves impossible reconciliations and truces to the advantage of the stronger, I should say that in this atmosphere, thought cannot consider the exterior world without an immediate shudder. Everything we know about fascism shows that it is precisely the confirmation of this state of affairs, aggravated to its furthest point by the lasting resignation that it seeks to obtain from those who suffer. Is not the evident role of fascism to re-establish for the time being the tottering supremacy of finance-capital? Such a role is of itself sufficient to make it worthy of all our hatred; we continue to consider this feigned resignation as one of the greatest evils that can possibly be inflicted upon beings of our kind, and those who would inflict it deserve, in our opinion, to be beaten like dogs. Yet it is impossible to conceal the fact that this immense danger is there, lurking at our doors, that it has made its appearance within our walls, and that it would be pure byzantinism to dispute too long, as in Germany, over the choice of the barrier to be set up against it, when all the while, under several aspects, it is creeping nearer and nearer to us.

During the course of taking various steps with a view to contributing, in so far as I am capable, to the organization in Paris of the anti-fascist struggle, I have noticed that already a certain doubt has crept into the intellectual circles of the left as to the possibility of successfully combating fascism, a doubt which has unfortunately infected even those elements whom one might have thought it possible to rely on and who had come to the fore in this struggle. Some of them have even begun to make excuses for the loss of the battle already. Such dispositions seem to me to be so dismaying that I should not care to be speaking here without first having made clear my position in relation to them, or without anticipating a whole series of remarks that are to follow, affirming that today, more than ever before, the liberation of the mind, demands as primary condition, in the opinion of the surrealists, the express aim of surrealism, the liberation of man, which implies that we must struggle with our fetters with all the energy of despair; that today more than ever before the surrealists entirely rely for the bringing about of the liberation of man upon the proletarian Revolution.

An automatic writing session. Simone Collinet-Breton, Robert Desnos and Jacques Baron are in the foreground. Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, Jacques Boiffard, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Pierre Naville, Giorgio de Chirico and Phillipe Soupault are left to right. Photograph by Man Ray, c. 1923.

I now feel free to turn to the object of this pamphlet, which is to attempt to explain what surrealism is. A certain immediate ambiguity contained in the word surrealism, is, in fact, capable of leading one to suppose that it designates I know not what transcendental attitude, while, on the contrary it expresses—and always has expressed for us—a desire to deepen the foundations of the real, to bring about an even clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses. The whole evolution of surrealism, from its origins to the present day, which I am about to retrace, shows that our unceasing wish, growing more and more urgent from day to day, has been at all costs to avoid considering a system of thought as a refuge, to pursue our investigations with eyes wide open to their outside consequences, and to assure ourselves that the results of these investigations would be capable of facing the breath of the street. At the limits, for many years past—or more exactly, since the conclusion of what one may term the purely intuitive epoch of surrealism (1919-25)—at the limits, I say, we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, or finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), we have assigned to ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every possible occasion, of refusing to allow the preeminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the one and on the other both at once, for that would be to suppose that they are less apart from one another than they are (and I believe that those who pretend that they are acting on both simultaneously are either deceiving us or are a prey to a disquieting illusion); of acting on these two realities not both at once, then, but one after the other, in a systematic manner, allowing us to observe their reciprocal attraction and interpenetration and to give to this interplay of forces all the extension necessary for the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and the same thing.

As I have just mentioned in passing, I consider that one can distinguish two epochs in the surrealist movement, of equal duration, from its origins (1919, year of the publication of Champs  Magnétiques) until today; a purely intuitive epoch, and a reasoning epoch. The first can summarily be characterized by the belief expressed during this time in the all-powerfulness of thought, considered capable of freeing itself by means of its own resources. This belief witnesses to a prevailing view that I look upon today as being extremely mistaken, the view that thought is supreme over matter. The definition of surrealism that has passed into the dictionary, a definition taken from the Manifesto of 1924, takes account only of this entirely idealist disposition and (for voluntary reasons of simplification and amplification destined to influence in my mind the future of this definition) does so in terms that suggest that I deceived myself at the time in advocating the use of an automatic thought not only removed from all control exercised by the reason but also disengaged from “all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” It should at least have been said: conscious aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

During the period under review, in the absence, of course, of all seriously discouraging exterior events, surrealist activity remained strictly confined to its first theoretical premise, continuing all the while to be the vehicle of that total “non-conformism” which, as we have seen, was the binding feature in the coming together of those who took part in it, and the cause, during the first few years after the war, of an uninterrupted series of adhesions. No coherent political or social attitude, however, made its appearance until 1925, that is to say (and it is important to stress this), until the outbreak of the Moroccan war, which, re-arousing in us our particular hostility to the way armed conflicts affect man, abruptly placed before us the necessity of making a public protest. This protest, which, under the title La Révolution d’Abord et Toujours (October 1925 [Revolution Now and Forever]), joined the name of the surrealists proper to those of thirty other intellectuals, was undoubtedly rather confused ideologically; it none the less marked the breaking away from a whole way of thinking; it none the less created a precedent that was to determine the whole future direction of the movement. Surrealist activity, faced with a brutal, revolting, unthinkable fact, was forced to ask itself what were its proper resources and to determine their limits; it was forced to adopt a precise attitude, exterior to itself, in order to continue to face whatever exceeded these limits.

André Breton, Robert Desnos, Joseph Delteil, Simone Breton, Paul & Gala Eluard, Jaques Baron and Max Ernst.

Surrealist activity at this moment entered into its reasoning phase. It suddenly experienced the necessity of crossing over the gap that separates absolute idealism from dialectical materialism. This necessity made its appearance in so urgent a manner that we had to consider the problem in the clearest possible light, with the result that for some months we devoted our entire attention to the means of bringing about this change of front once and for all. If I do not today feel any retrospective embarrassment in explaining this change, that is because it seems to me quite natural that surrealist thought, before coming to rest in dialectical materialism and insisting, as today, on the supremacy of matter over mind, should have been condemned to pass, in a few years, through the whole historic development of modern thought. It came normally to Marx through Hegel, just as it came normally to Hegel through Berkeley and Hume. These latter influences offer a certain particularity in that, contrary to certain poetic influences undergone in the same way, and accommodated to those of the French materialists of the eighteenth century, they yielded a residuum of practical action. To try and hide these influences would be contrary to my desire to show that surrealism has not been drawn up as an abstract system, that is to say, safeguarded against all contradictions. It is also my desire to show how surrealist activity, driven, as I have said, to ask itself what were its proper resources, had in some way or another to reflect upon itself its realization, in 1925, of its relative insufficiency; how surrealist activity had to cease being content with the results (automatic texts, the recital of dreams, improvised speeches, spontaneous poems, drawings and actions) which it had originally planned; and how it came to consider these first results as being simply so much material, starting from which the problem of knowledge inevitably arose again under quite a new form.

As a living movement, that is to say a movement undergoing a constant process of becoming and, what is more, solidly relying on concrete facts, surrealism has brought together and is still bringing together diverse temperaments individually obeying or resisting a variety of bents.

The determinant of their enduring or short-lived adherence is not to be considered as a blind concession to an inert stock of ideas held in common, but as a continuous sequence of acts which, propelling the doer to more or less distant points, forces him for each fresh start to return to the same starting-line. These exercises not being without peril, one man may break a limb or—for which there is no precedent—his head, another may peaceably submerge himself in a quagmire or report himself dying of fatigue. Unable as yet to treat itself to an ambulance, surrealism simply leaves these individuals by the wayside. Those who continue in the ranks are aware of course of the casualties left behind them. But what of it? The essential is always to look ahead, to remain sure that one has not forfeited the burning desire for beauty, truth and justice, toilingly to go onwards towards the discovery, one by one, of fresh landscapes, and to continue doing so indefinitely and without coercion to the end, that others may afterwards travel the same spiritual road, unhindered and in all security. Penetration, to be sure, has not been as deep as one would have wished. Poetically speaking, a few wild, or shall we say charming, beasts whose cries fill the air and bar access to a domain as yet only surmised, are still far from being exorcized. But for all that, the piercing of the thicket would have proceeded less tortuously, and those who are doing the pioneering would have acquitted themselves with unabating tenacity in the service of the cause, if, between the beginning and the end of the spectacle which they provide for themselves and would be glad to provide for others, a change had not taken place.

Photo booth photograph of André Breton, c. 1929

In 1934, more than ever before, surrealism owes it to itself to defend the postulate of the necessity of change. It is amusing, indeed, to see how the more spiteful and silly of our adversaries affect to triumph whenever they stumble on some old statement we may have made and which now sounds more or less discordantly in the midst of others intended to render comprehensible our present conduct. This insidious manoeuvre, which is calculated to cast a doubt on our good faith, or at least on the genuineness of our principles, can easily be defeated.

The development of surrealism throughout the decade of its existence is, we take it, a function of the unrolling of historical realities as these may be speeded up between the period of relief which follows the conclusion of a peace and the fresh outbreak of war. It is also a function of the process of seeking after new values in order to confirm or invalidate existing ones. The fact that certain of the first participants in surrealist activity have thrown in the sponge and have been discarded has brought about the retiring from circulation of some ways of thinking and the putting into circulation of others in which there were implicit certain general dissents on the one hand and certain general assents on the other. Hence it is that this activity has been fashioned by the events. At the present moment, contrary to current biased rumour according to which surrealism itself is supposed, in its cruelty of disposition, to have sacrificed nearly all the blood first vivifying it, it is heartening to be able to point out that it has never ceased to avail itself of the perfect teamwork of René Crevel, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Benjamin Péret, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, and the present writer, all of whom can attest that from the inception of the movement—which is also the date of our enlistment in it—until now, the initial principle of their covenant has never been violated. If there have occurred differences on some points, it was essentially within the rhythmic scope of the integral whole, in itself a least disputable element of objective value.

The others, they whom we no longer meet, can they say as much? They cannot, for the simple reason that since they separated from us they have been incapable of achieving a single concerted action that had any definite form of its own, and they have confined themselves, instead, to a reaction against surrealism with the greatest wastage to themselves—a fate always overtaking those who go back on their past. The history of their apostasy and denials will ultimately be read into the great limbo of human failings, without profit to any observer—ideal yesterday, but real today—who, called upon to make a pronouncement, will decide whether they or ourselves have brought the more appreciable efforts to bear upon a rational solution of the many problems surrealism has propounded.

Although there can be no question here of going through the history of the surrealist movement—its history has been told many a time and sometimes told fairly well; moreover, I prefer to pass on as quickly as possible to the exposition of its present attitude—I think I ought briefly to recall, for the benefit of those of you who were unaware of the fact, that there is no doubt that before the surrealist movement properly so called, there existed among the promoters of the movement and others who later rallied round it, very active, not merely dissenting but also antagonistic dispositions which, between 1915 and 1920, were willing to align themselves under the signboard of Dada.

André Breton at a Dada festival in Paris, March 27, 1920, wearing a slogan “In order to love something you need to have seen and heard it for a long time bunch of idiots” by Francis Picabia.

Post-war disorder, a state of mind essentially anarchic that guided that cycle’s many manifestations, a deliberate refusal to judge—for lack, it was said, of criteria—the actual qualifications of individuals, and, perhaps, in the last analysis, a certain spirit of negation which was making itself conspicuous, had brought about a dissolution of the group as yet inchoate, one might say, by reason of its dispersed and heterogeneous character, a group whose germinating force has nevertheless been decisive and, by the general consent of present-day critics, has greatly influenced the course of ideas. It may be proper before passing rapidly—as I must—over this period, to apportion by far the handsomest share to Marcel Duchamp (canvases and glass objects still to be seen in New York), to Francis Picabia (reviews “291″ and “391″), Jacques Vaché (Lettres de Guerre) and Tristan Tzara (Twenty-five Poems, Dada Manifesto 1918).

Strangely enough, it was round a discovery of language that there was seeking to organize itself in 1920 what—as yet on a basis of confidential exchange—assumed the name of surrealism, a word fallen from the lips of Apollinaire, which we had diverted from the rather general and very confusing connotation he had given it. What was at first no more than a new method of poetic writing broke away after several years from the much too general theses which had come to be expounded in the Surrealist Manifesto—Soluble Fish, 1924, the Second Manifesto adding others to them, whereby the whole was raised to a vaster ideological plane; and so there had to be revision.

In an article, “Enter the Mediums,” published in Littérature, 1922, reprinted in Les Pas Perdus, 1924, and subsequently in the Surrealist Manifesto, I explained the circumstance that had originally put us, my friends and myself, on the track of the surrealist activity we still follow and for which we are hopeful of gaining ever more numerous new adherents in order to extend it further than we have so far succeeded in doing. It reads:

It was in 1919, in complete solitude and at the approach of sleep, that my attention was arrested by sentences more or less complete, which became perceptible to my mind without my being able to discover (even by very meticulous analysis) any possible previous volitional effort. One evening in particular, as I was about to fall asleep, I became aware of a sentence articulated clearly to a point excluding all possibility of alteration and stripped of all quality of vocal sound; a curious sort of sentence which came to me bearing—in sober truth—not a trace of any relation whatever to any incidents I may at that time have been involved in; an insistent sentence, it seemed to me, a sentence I might say, that knocked at the window.

I was prepared to pay no further attention to it when the organic character of the sentence detained me. I was really bewildered. Unfortunately, I am unable to remember the exact sentence at this distance, but it ran approximately like this: “A man is cut in half by the window.” What made it plainer was the fact that it was accompanied by a feeble visual representation of a man in the process of walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. Definitely, there was the form, re-erected against space, of a man leaning out of a window. But the window following the man’s locomotion, I understood that I was dealing with an image of great rarity. Instantly the idea came to me to use it as material for poetic construction. I had no sooner invested it with that quality, than it had given place to a succession of all but intermittent sentences which left me no less astonished, but in a state, I would say, of extreme detachment.

André Breton and Paul Eluard at a fair. Attributed to André Kertesz, c. 1930.

Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, and familiar with his methods of investigation, which I had practised occasionally upon the sick during the War, I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain from patients, namely a
monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject’s critical faculty has no control—the subject himself throwing reticence to the winds—and which as much as possible represents spoken thought. It seemed and still seems to me that the speed of thought is no greater than that of words, and hence does not exceed the flow of either tongue or pen.

It was in such circumstances that, together with Philippe Soupault, whom I had told about my first ideas on the subject, I began to cover sheets of paper with writing, feeling a praiseworthy contempt for whatever the literary result might be. Ease of achievement brought about the rest. By the end of the first day of the experiment we were able to read to one another about fifty pages obtained in this manner and to compare the results we had achieved. The likeness was on the whole striking. There were similar faults of construction, the same hesitant manner, and also, in both cases, an illusion of extraordinary verve, much emotion, a considerable  assortment of images of a quality such as we should never have been able to obtain in the normal way of writing, a very special sense of the picturesque, and, here and there, a few pieces of out and out buffoonery.

The only differences which our two texts presented appeared to me to be due essentially to our respective temperaments, Soupault’s being less static than mine, and, if he will allow me to make this slight criticism, to his having scattered about at the top of certain pages—doubtlessly in a spirit of mystification—various words under the guise of titles. I must give him credit, on the other hand, for having always forcibly opposed the least correction of any passage that did not seem to me to be quite the thing. In that he was most certainly right.

It is of course difficult in these cases to appreciate at their just value the various elements in the result obtained; one may even say that it is entirely impossible to appreciate them at a first reading. To you who may be writing them, these elements are, in appearance, as strange as to anyone else, and you are yourself naturally distrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are distinguished chiefly by a very high degree of immediate absurdity, the peculiar quality of that absurdity being, on close examination, their yielding to whatever is most admissible and legitimate in the world: divulgation of a given number of facts and properties on the whole not less objectionable than the others.

The word “surrealism” having thereupon become descriptive of the generalizable undertaking to which we had devoted ourselves, I thought indispensable, in 1924, to define this word once and for all:

SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitely to do away with all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the solution of the principal problems of life. Have professed absolute surrealism: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac.

These till now appear to be the only ones…. Were one to consider their output only superficially, a goodly number of poets might well have passed for surrealists, beginning with Dante and Shakespeare at his best. In the course of many attempts I have made towards an analysis of what, under false pretences, is called genius, I have found nothing that could in the end be attributed to any other process than this.

There followed an enumeration that will gain, I think, by being clearly set out thus:

Young’s Night Thoughts are surrealist from cover to cover. Unfortunately, it is a priest who speaks; a bad priest, to be sure, yet a priest.
Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic.
Lully is surrealist in definition.
Flamel is surrealist in the night of gold.
Swift is surrealist in malice.
Sade is surrealist in sadism.
Carrier is surrealist in drowning.
Monk Lewis is surrealist in the beauty of evil.
Achim von Arnim is surrealist absolutely, in space and time
Rabbe is surrealist in death.
Baudelaire is surrealist in morals.
Rimbaud is surrealist in life and elsewhere.
Hervey Saint-Denys is surrealist in the directed dream.
Carroll is surrealist in nonsense.
Huysmans is surrealist in pessimism.
Seurat is surrealist in design.
Picasso is surrealist in cubism.
Vaché is surrealist in me.
Roussel is surrealist in anecdote. Etc.

They were not always surrealists—on this I insist—in the sense that one can disentangle in each of them a number of preconceived notions to which—very naively!—they clung. And they clung to them so because they had not heard the surrealist voice, the voice that exhorts on the eve of death and in the roaring storm, and because they were unwilling to dedicate themselves to the task of no
more than orchestrating the score replete with marvellous things. They were proud instruments; hence the sounds they produced were not always harmonious sounds.

André Breton, Salvador Dali, René Crevel and Paul Eluard, 1930.

We, on the contrary, who have not given ourselves to processes of filtering, who through the medium of our work have been content to be the silent receptacles of so many echoes, modest registering machines that are not hypnotized by the pattern that they trace, we are perhaps serving a yet much nobler cause. So we honestly give back the talent lent to us. You may talk of the “talent” of this yard of platinum, of this mirror, of this door and of this sky, if you wish.

We have no talent…

The Manifesto also contained a certain number of practical recipes, entitled: “Secrets of the Magic Surrealist Art,” such as the following:

Written Surrealist Composition or First and Last Draft

Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the mind’s concentration upon itself, order writing material to be brought to you. Let your state of mind be as passive and receptive as possible. Forget your genius, talents, as well as the genius and talents of others. Repeat to yourself that literature is pretty well the sorriest road that leads to everywhere. Write quickly without any previously chosen subject, quickly enough not to dwell on, and not to be tempted to read over, what you have written. The first sentence will come of itself; and this is self-evidently true, because there is never a moment but some sentence alien to our conscious thought clamours for outward expression. It is rather difficult to speak of the sentence to follow, since it doubtless comes in for a share of our conscious activity and so the other sentences, if it is conceded that the writing of the first sentence must have involved even a minimum of consciousness. But that should in the long run matter little, because therein precisely lies the greatest interest in the surrealist exercise. Punctuation of course necessarily hinders the stream of absolute continuity which preoccupies us. But you should particularly distrust the prompting whisper. If through a fault ever so trifling there is a forewarning of silence to come, a fault let us say, of inattention, break off unhesitatingly the line that has become too lucid. After the word whose origin seems suspect you should place a letter, any letter, l for example, always the letter l, and restore the arbitrary flux by making that letter the initial of the word to follow.

I shall pass over the more or less correlated considerations which the Manifesto discussed in their bearing on the possibilities of plastic expression in surrealism. These considerations did not assume a relatively dogmatic turn with me till afterwards in Surrealism and Painting (1928).

I believe that the real interest of the Manifesto—there was no lack of people who were good enough to concede interest, for which no particular credit is due to me because I have no more than given expression to sentiments shared with friends, present and former—rests only subordinately on the formula above given. It is rather confirmatory of a turn of thought which, for good or ill, is peculiarly distinctive of our time. The defense originally attempted of that turn of thought still seems valid to me in what follows:

We still live under the reign of logic… But the methods of logic are applied nowadays only to the resolution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion does not permit consideration of any facts but those strictly relevant to our experience. Logical ends, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say that even experience has had limits assigned to it. It revolves in a cage from which it becomes more and more difficult to release it. Even experience is dependent on immediate utility, and common sense is its keeper. Under color of civilization, under pretext of progress, all that rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or superstition has been banished from the mind, all uncustomary searching after truth has been proscribed. It is only by what must seem sheer luck that there has recently been brought to light an aspect of mental life—to my belief by far the most important—with which it was supposed that we no longer had any concern. All credit for these discoveries must go to Freud. Based on these discoveries a current of opinion is forming that will enable the explorer of the human mind to continue his investigations, justified as he will be in taking into account more than mere summary realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our minds harbor strange forces capable of increasing those on the surface, or of successfully contending with them, then it is all in our interest to canalize them, to canalize them first in order to submit them later, if necessary, to the control of the reason. The analysts themselves have nothing to lose by such a proceeding. But it should be observed that there are no means designed a priori for the bringing about of such an enterprise, that until the coming of the new order it might just as well be considered the affair of poets and scientists, and that its success will not depend on the more or less capricious means that will be employed. I am resolved to deal severely with that hatred of the marvellous which is so rampant among certain people, that ridicule to which they are so eager to expose it. Let us speak plainly: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful; indeed,  nothing but the marvelous is beautiful.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer a fantastic; there is only the real.

Benjamin Péret, André Breton and two friends, 1935.

Interesting in a different way from the future of surrealist technics (theatrical, philosophical, scientific, critical) appears to me the application of surrealism to action. Whatever reservations I might be inclined to make with regard to responsibility in general, I should quite particularly like to know how the first misdemeanors whose surrealist character is indubitable will be judged. When   surrealist methods extend from writing to action, there will certainly arise the need of a new morality to take the place of the current one, the cause of all our woes.

The Manifesto of Surrealism has improved on the Rimbaud principle that the poet must turn seer. Man in general is going to be summoned to manifest through life those new sentiments which the gift of vision will so suddenly have placed within his reach:

Surrealism, as I envisage it, asserts our absolute nonconformism so clearly that there can be no question of claiming it as witness when the real world comes up for trial. On the contrary, it can but testify to the complete state of distraction which we hope to attain here below… Surrealism is the “invisible ray” that shall enable us one day to triumph over our enemies. “You tremble no more, carcass.” This summer the roses are blue; the wood is made of glass. The earth wrapped in its foliage has as little effect on me as a ghost. Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions. Existence lies elsewhere.

Surrealism then was securing expression in all its purity and force. The freedom it possesses is a perfect freedom in the sense that it recognizes no limitations exterior to itself. As it was said on the cover of the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, “it will be necessary to draw up a new declaration of the Rights of Man.” The concept of surreality, concerning which quarrels have been sought with us repeatedly and which it was attempted to turn into a metaphysical or mystic rope to be placed afterwards round our necks, lends itself no longer to misconstruction, nowhere does it declare itself opposed to the need of transforming the world which henceforth will more and more definitely yield to it.

As I said in the Manifesto I believe in the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak. I am looking forward to its consummation, certain that I shall never share in it, but death would matter little to me could I but taste the joy it will yield ultimately.

Aragon expressed himself in very much the same way in Une Vague de rêves (1924):

It should be understood that the real is a relation like any other; the essence of things is by no means linked to their reality, there are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream. These various groups are united and brought into harmony in one single order, surreality… This surreality—a relation in which all notions are merged together—is the common horizon of religions, magic, poetry, intoxications, and of all life that is lowly—that trembling honeysuckle you deem sufficient to populate the sky with for us.

And René Creval, in L’Esprit contre la raison (1928):

The poet does not put the wild animals to sleep in order to play the tamer, but, the cages wide open, the keys thrown to the winds, he journeys forth, a traveller who thinks not of himself but of the voyage, of dream beaches, forests of hands, soul-endowed animals, all undeniable surreality.

I was to sum up the idea in Surrealism and Painting (1928):

All that I love, all that I think and feel inclines me towards a particular philosophy of immanence according to which surreality will reside in reality itself and will be neither superior nor exterior to it. And conversely, because the container shall be also the  contained. One might almost say that it will be a communicating vessel placed between the container and the contained. That is to say, I resist with all my strength temptations which, in painting and literature, might have the immediate tendency to withdraw thought from life as well as place life under the aegis of thought.

After years of endeavor and perplexities, when a variety of opinions had disputed amongst themselves the direction of the craft in which a number of persons of unequal ability and varying powers of resistance had originally embarked together, the surrealist idea recovered in the Second Manifesto all the brilliancy of which events had vainly conspired to despoil it. It should be emphasized that the First Manifesto of 1924 did no more than sum up the conclusions we had drawn during what one may call the heroic epoch of surrealism, which stretches from 1919 to 1923. The concerted elaboration of the first automatic texts and our excited reading of them, the first results obtained by Max Ernst in the domain of “collage” and of painting, the practice of surrealist “speaking” during the hypnotic experiments introduced among us by René Crevel and repeated every evening for over a year, incontrovertibly mark the decisive stages of surrealist exploration during this first phase. After that, up till the taking into account of the social aspect of the problem round about 1925 (though not formally sanctioned until 1930), surrealism began to find itself a prey to characteristic wranglings. These wranglings account very clearly for the expulsion orders and tickets-of-leave which, as we went along, we had to deal out to certain of our companions of the first and second hour. Some people have quite gratuitously concluded from this that we are apt to overestimate personal questions. During the last ten years, surrealism has almost unceasingly been obliged to defend itself against deviations to the right and to the left. On the one hand we have had to struggle against the will of those who would maintain surrealism on a purely speculative level and treasonably transfer it on to an artistic and literary plane (Artaud, Desnos, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vitrac) at the cost of all the hope for subversion we have placed in it; on the other, against the will of those who would place it on a purely practical basis, available at any moment to be sacrificed to an ill-conceived political militancy (Naville, Aragon)—at the cost, this time, of what constitutes the originality and reality of its researches, at the cost of the autonomous risk that it has to run. Agitated though it was, the epoch that separates the two Manifestos was none the less a rich one, since it saw the publication of so many works in which the vital principles of surrealism were amply accounted for. It
suffices to recall particularly Le Paysan de Paris and Traité du style by Aragon, L’Esprit contre la raison and Etes-vous fous by René Creval, Deuil pour deuil by Desnos, Capitale de la douleur and L’Amour la poésie by Eluard, La Femme 100 têtes by Ernst, La Révolution et les intellectuels by Naville, Le Grand Jeu by Péret, and my own Nadja. The poetic activity of Tzara, although claiming until 1930 no
connection with surrealism, is in perfect accord with ours.

We were forced to agree with Pierre Naville when he wrote:

Surrealism is at the crossroads of several thought movements. We assume that it affirms the possibility of a certain steady downward readjustment of the mind’s rational (and not simply conscious) activity towards more absolutely coherent thought, irrespective of what direction that thought may take; that is to say, that it proposes, or would at least like to propose, a new solution of all problems but chiefly moral. In that sense, indeed, it is epoch-making. That is why one may express the essential characteristic of surrealism by saying that it seeks to calculate the quotient of the unconscious by the conscious.

Paul Eluard, André Breton and Robert Desnos at a fair in Montmartre.

It should be pointed out that in a number of declarations in La Révolution et les Intellectuals. Que peuvent faire les surréalistes? (1926), [Pierre Naville] demonstrated the utter vanity of intellectual bickerings in the face of the human exploitation which results from the wage-earning system. These declarations gave rise amongst us to considerable anxiety and, at tempting for the first time to justify surrealism’s social implications, I desired to put an end to it in Légitime Défense. This pamphlet set out to demonstrate that there is no fundamental antinomy in the basis of surrealist thought.

In reality, we are faced with two problems, one of which is the problem raised, at the beginning of the twentieth century, by the discovery of the relations between the conscious and the unconscious. That was how the problem chose to present itself to us. We were the first to apply to its resolution a particular method, which we have not ceased to consider both the most suitable and the most likely to be brought to perfection; there is no reason why we should renounce it. The other problem we are faced with is that of the social action we should pursue.

We consider that this action has its own method in dialectical materialism, and we can all the less afford to ignore this action since, I repeat, we hold the liberation of man to be the sine qua non condition of the liberation of the mind, and we can expect this liberation of man to result only from the proletarian revolution.

These two problems are essentially distinct and we deplore their becoming confused by not remaining so. There is good reason, then, to take up a stand against all attempts to weld them together and, more especially, against the urge to abandon all such researches as ours in order to devote ourselves to the poetry and art of propaganda. Surrealism, which has been the object of brutal and repeated summonses in this respect, now feels the need of making some kind of counter-attack. Let me recall the fact that its very definition holds that it must escape, in its written manifestations, or any others, from all control exercised by the reason. Apart from the puerility of wishing to bring a supposedly Marxist control to bear on the immediate aspect of such manifestations, this control cannot be envisaged in principle. And how ill-boding does this distrust seem, coming as it does from men who declare themselves Marxists, that is to say possessed not only of a strict line in revolutionary matters, but also of a marvelously open mind and an insatiable curiosity! This brings us to the eve of the Second Manifesto. These objections had to be put an end to, and for that purpose it was indispensable that we should proceed to liquidate certain individualist elements amongst us, more or less openly hostile to one another, whose intentions did not, in the final analysis, appear as irreproachable, nor their motives as disinterested, as might have been desired. An important part of the work was devoted to a statement of the reasons which moved surrealism to dispense for the future with certain collaborators. It was attempted, on the same occasion, to complete the specific method of creation proposed six years earlier, and, as thoroughly as possible, to set surrealist ideas in order.

In spite of the particular courses followed by former or present adherents of surrealism, everyone must admit that the drift of surrealism has always and chiefly been towards a general and emphatic crisis in consciousness and that only to the extent to which this is or is not accomplished can decide the historical success or failure of the movement. From the intellectual point of view, it was and still is a question of exposing by every available means, and to learn at all costs to identify, the facticious character of the old antinomies hypocritically calculated to hinder any unusual agitation on the part of man, were it only a faint understanding of the means at his dispocal and to inspire him to free himself somewhat from the universal fetters. The horror of death, the pantomime of the beyond, the shipwreck of the most beautiful reason in sleep, the overpowering curtain of the future, the towers of Babel, the mirrors of inconstancy, the insuperable silver wall splashed with brains, all these startling images of human catastrophe are perhaps, after all, no more than images.

Everything leads to the belief that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, are not perceived as contradictions. It would be vain to attribute to surrealism any other motive than the hope of determining this point. It is clear, moreover, that it would be absurd to ascribe to surrealism either a purely destructive or a purely constructive character—the point at issue being precisely this: that construction and destruction can no longer be brandished against each other. It becomes clear also that surrealism is not at all interested in taking into account what passes alongside it under the guise of art or even antiart; of philosophy or anti-philosophy; of anything, in a word, that has not for its ultimate end the conversion of being into a jewel, internal and unseeing, with a soul that is neither of ice nor of fire. What, indeed, could they expect of surrealism, who are still anxious about the position they may occupy? On this mental plane from which one may for oneself alone embark on the perilous, but, we think, supreme reconnaissance—on this plane the footsteps of those who come or go are no longer of any importance, because these steps occur in a region where, by definition, surrealism possesses no listening ear. It is not desirable that surrealism should be dependent on the whim of this or that group of persons. If it declares itself capable of uprooting thought from an increasingly cruel serfdom, of bringing it back to the path of total comprehension, of restoring to its original purity, it is indeed no more than right that it should be judged only by what it has done and by what it has still to do in the fulfillment of its promise…

From 1930 until today the history of surrealism is that of successful efforts to restore to it its proper becoming by gradually removing from it every trace both of political opportunism and of artistic opportunism. The review La Révolution Surréaliste, (12 issues) has been succeeded by another, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (6 issues). Owing particularly to influences brought to bear by new elements, surrealist experimenting. which had for too long been erratic, has been unreservedly resumed; its perspectives and its aims have been made perfectly clear; I may say that it has not ceased to be carried on in a continuous and enthusiastic manner. This experimenting has regained momentum under the master-impulse given to it by Salvador Dali, whose exceptional interior “boiling” has been for surrealism, during the whole of this period, an invaluable ferment. As Guy Mangeot has very rightly pointed out in his History of Surrealism, published recently by René Henriquez, Dali has endowed surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular the paranoiac-critical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being applied with equal success to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashions, to sculpture and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis.

Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera and André Breton, 1938. Photo by Fritz Bach.

He first announced his convictions to us in La Femme Visible (1930):

I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active advance of the mind, it will be possible (simultaneously with    automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit completely the world of reality.

In order to cut short all possible misunderstandings, it should perhaps be said: “immediate” reality.

Paranoia uses the external world in order to assert its dominating idea and has the disturbing characteristic of making others accept this idea’s reality. The reality of the external world is used for illustration and proof, and so comes to serve the reality of one’s mind.

In the special ‘Surrealist Intervention’ number of Documents 34, under the title ‘Philosophic Provocations’, Dali undertakes today to give his thought a didactic turn. All uncertainty as to his real intentions seems to me to be swept away by these definitions:

Paranoia: Delirium of interpretation bearing a systematic structure.
Paranoiac-critical activity: Spontaneous method of “irrational knowledge” based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations.
Painting: Handmade color “photography” of “concrete irrationality” and of the imaginative world in general.

Sculpture: Modeling by hand of “concrete irrationality” and of the imaginative world in general.

Etc…

In order to form a concise idea of Dali’s undertaking, one must take into account the property of uninterrupted becoming of any object of paranoiac activity, in other words of the ultra-confusing activity rising out of the obsessing idea. This uninterrupted becoming allows the paranoiac who is the witness to consider the images of the external world unstable and transitory, or suspect; and what is so disturbing is that he is able to make other people believe in the reality of his impressions. One aspect, for instance, of the multiple image occupying our
attention being a putrefied donkey, the ‘cruel’ putrefaction of the donkey can be considered as ‘the hard and blinding flash of new gems’. Here we find ourselves confronted by a new affirmation, accompanied by formal proofs, of the omnipotence of desire, which has remained, since the beginning, surrealism’s sole act of faith. At the point where surrealism has taken up the problem, its only guide has been Rimbaud’s sibylline pronouncement: “I say that one must be a seer, one must make oneself a seer”. As you know, this was Rimbaud’s only means of reaching the unknown. Surrealism can flatter itself today that it has discovered and rendered practicable many other ways leading to the unknown. The abandonment to verbal or graphic impulses and the resort to paranoiac-critical activity are not the only ones, and one may say that, during the last four years of surrealist activity, the many others that have made their appearance allow us to affirm that the automatism from which we started and to which we have unfailingly returned does in fact constitute the crossroads where these various paths meet. Among those we have partly explored, and on which we are only just beginning to see ahead, I should single out simulation of mental diseases (acute mania, general paralysis, dementia praecox), which Paul Eluard and I practiced in The Immaculate Conception (1930), undertaking to prove that the normal man can have access to the provisorily condemned places of the human mind; the manufacture of objects functioning symbolically, started in 1931 by the very particular and quite new emotion aroused by Giocometti’s object ‘The Hour of Traces’; the analysis of the interpenetration of the states of sleep and waking, tending to make them depend entirely on one another and even condition one another in certain affective states, which I undertook in The Communicating Vessels; and finally, the taking into consideration of the recent researches of the Marburg school (to which I drew attention in an article published in Minotaure, ‘The Automatic Message’) whose aim is to cultivate the remarkable sensorial dispositions of children, enabling them to change any object whatever, into no matter what, simply by looking at it fixedly.

Nothing could be more coherent, more systematic or more richly yielding of results, than this last phase of surrealist activity, which has seen the production of two films by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’or; the poems of René Char; L’Homme approximatif, où boivent les loups and L’Antitête by Tristan Tzara; Le Clavecin de Diderot and Les Pieds dans le plat by René Crevel; La
Vie immédiate by Eluard; the very precious visual commentaries by Valentine Hugo on the works of Arnim and Rimbaud; the most intense part of the work of Yves Tanguy; the inspired sculpture of Alberto Giocometti; the coming together of Georges Hugnet, Gui Rosey, Pierre Yoyotte, Roger Caillois, Victor Brauner and Balthus. Never has so precise a common will united us. I think I can most clearly express this will by saying that today it applies itself to “bring about the state where the distinction between the subjective and the objective loses its necessity and its value”.

Surrealism, starting fifteen years ago with a discovery that seemed only to involve poetic language, has spread like wildfire, on pursuing its course, not only in art but in life. It has provoked new states of consciousness and overthrown the walls beyond which it was immemorially supposed to be impossible to see; it has—as is being more and more generally recognized—modified the sensibility, and taken a decisive step towards the unification of the personality, which it found threatened by an ever more profound dissociation. Without attempting to judge what direction it will ultimately take, for the lands it fertilizes as it flows are those of surprise itself, I should like to draw your attention to the fact that its most recent advance is producing a fundamental crisis of the “object.” It is essentially upon the object that surrealism has thrown most light in recent years. Only the very close examination of the many recent speculations to which the object has publicly given rise (the oneiric object, the object functioning symbolically, the real and virtual object, the moving but silent object, the phantom object, the discovered object, etc.), can give one a proper grasp of the experiments that surrealism is engaged in now. In order to continue to understand the movement, it is indispensable to focus one’s attention on this point.

***

I must crave your indulgence for speaking so technically, from the inside. But there could be no question of concealing any aspect of the persuasions to which surrealism has been and is still exposed. I say that there exists a lyrical element that conditions for one part the psychological and moral structure of human society, that has conditioned it at all times and that will continue to condition it. This lyrical element has until now, even though in spite of them, remained the fact and the sole fact of specialists. In the state of extreme tension to which class antagonisms have led the society to which we belong and which we tend with all our strength to reject, it is natural and it is fated that this solicitation should continue, that it should assume for us a thousand faces, imploring, tempting and eager by turns. It is not within our power, it would be unworthy of our historic role to give way to this solicitation. By surrealism we intend to account for nothing less than the manner in which it is possible today to make use of the magnificent and overwhelming spiritual legacy that has been handed down to us. We have accepted this legacy from the past, and surrealism can well say that the use to which it has been put has been to turn it to the routing of capitalist society. I consider that for that purpose it was and is still necessary for us to stand where we are, to beware against breaking the thread of our researches and to continue these researches, not as literary men and artists, certainly, but rather as chemists and the various other kinds of technicians.

To pass on to the poetry and art called (doubtless in anticipation) proletarian: No. The forces we have been able to bring together and which for fifteen years we have never found lacking, have arrived at a particular point of application: the question is not to know whether this point of application is the best, but simply to point out that the application of our forces at this point has given us up to an activity that has proved itself valuable and fruitful on the plane on which it was undertaken and has also been of a kind to engage us more and more on the revolutionary plane. What it is essential to realize is that no other activity could have produced such rich results, nor could any other similar activity have been so effective in combating the present form of society. On that point we have history on our side.

A comrade, Claude Cahun, in a striking pamphlet published recently: Les Paris Sont Ouverts, a pamphlet that attempts to predict the future of poetry by taking account both of its own laws and of the social bases of its existence, takes Aragon to task for the lack of rigor in his present position (I do not think anyone can contest the fact that Aragon’s poetry has perceptibly weakened since he abandoned surrealism and undertook to place him self directly at the service of the proletarian cause, which leads one to suppose that such an undertaking has defeated him and is proportionately more or less unfavorable to the Revolution)…. It is of particular interest that the author of Les Paris Sont Ouverts has taken the opportunity of expressing himself from the “historic” point of view. His appreciation is as follows:

The most revolutionary experiment in poetry under the capitalist regime having been incontestably, for France and perhaps for Europe the Dadaist-surrealist experiment, in that it has tended to destroy all the myths about art that for centuries have permitted the ideologic as well as economic exploitation of painting, sculpture, literature, etc. (e.g. the frottages of Max Ernst, which, among other things, have been able to upset the scale of values of art-critics and experts, values based chiefly on technical perfection, personal touch and the lastingness of the materials employed), this experiment can and should serve the cause of the liberation of the proletariat. It is only when the proletariat has become aware of the myths on which capitalist culture depends, when they have become aware of what these myths and this culture mean for them and have destroyed them, that they will be able to pass on to their own proper development. The positive lesson of this negating experiment, that is to say its transfusion among the proletariat, constitutes the only valid revolutionary poetic propaganda.

André Breton photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Surrealism could not ask for anything better. Once the cause of the movement is understood, there is perhaps some hope that, on the plane of revolutionary militantism proper, our turbulence, our small capacity for adaptation, until now, to the necessary rules of a party (which certain people have thought proper to call our “blanquism”), may be excused us. It is only too certain that an activity such as ours, owing to its particularization, cannot be pursued within the limits of any one of the existing revolutionary organizations: it would be forced to come to a halt on the very threshold of that organization. If we are agreed that such an activity has above all tended to detach the intellectual creator from the illusions with which bourgeois society has sought to surround him, I for my part can only see in that tendency a further reason for continuing our activity.

None the less, the right that we demand and our desire to make use of it depend, as I said at the beginning, on our remaining able to continue our investigations without having to reckon, as for the last few months we have had to do, with a sudden attack from the forces of criminal imbecility. Let it be clearly understood that for us, surrealists, the interests of thought can not cease to go hand in hand with the interests of the working class, and that all attacks on liberty, all fetters on the emancipation of the working class and all armed attacks on it cannot fail to be considered by us as attacks on thought likewise.

I repeat, the danger is far from having been removed. The surrealists cannot be accused of having been slow to recognize the fact, since, on the very next day after the first fascist coup in France, it was they amongst the intellectual circles who had the honor of taking the initiative in sending out an Appel à la lutte [a call to struggle], which appeared on February 10th, 1934, furnished with twenty-four signatures. You may rest assured, comrades, that they will not confine themselves, that already they have not confined themselves, to this single act.

–André Breton

Not long ago I wrote about Andre Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja, which includes embedded photographs.  In 1937, Breton wrote another photographically-illustrated novel called L’Amour Fou, or Mad Love.  Oddly, it took half a century for an English translation to appear from the University of Nebraska Press (by Mary Ann Caws).  Mad Love begins as a meandering essay about love, lovers, beauty, crystals, symbols, and much more.  Breton’s agenda in these early pages is to redefine these terms within the context of Surrealism.  The greatest kind of beauty “would not come to us along ordinary logical paths,” but will come about “convulsively.”  He points to the pleasures of automatic writing: “what is delightful here is the dissimilarity itself which exists between the object wished for and the object found.”

“Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.”   And lest anyone try too hard to understand this kind of love or beauty, he warns that “interpretive delirium begins only when man, ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols.”

About a third of the way through the book, Breton explains what he is doing:

I had just some days earlier written the beginning text of this present book, a text which takes full account of the mental and emotional dispositions at that time: a need to reconcile the idea of unique love with its more or less sure denial in the present social framework, the need to prove that a solution, more than sufficient, indeed in excess of the vital problems, can always be expected when one deserts ordinary logical attitudes.

But at this moment, a woman appears who makes him desert “ordinary logical attitudes.”  She approaches him, probably in a cafe where he is writing.  It is a moment that a smitten Breton notes with unexpected precision.  “And I can certainly say that here, on the twenty-ninth of May 1934, this woman was scandalously beautiful.”

This young woman who just entered appeared to be swathed in mist – clothed in fire?  Everything seemed colorless and frozen next to this complexion imagined in perfect concord between rust and green…This color, taking on a deeper hue from her face to her hands, played on a fascinating tonal relation between the extraordinary pale sun of her hair like a bouquet of honeysuckle…

A few pages later, however, the unnamed woman disappears from the book for a long spell and Breton’s convoluted unfolding of Surrealism begins anew.  Mad Love concludes with an utterly remarkable letter addressed “Dear Hazel of Squirrelnut,” to be read in 1952 on the girl’s 16th birthday.  “Hazel” is the eight-month old daughter that resulted from this liaison.  On one level, Breton’s letter is a typical mix of fatherly advice, hyperbole about love and pain, and a wistfulness for a future he feels he’ll never witness.  But it is also a deeply moving document of Breton’s struggle.

I was thinking of all this, feverishly, in September 1936, alone with you in my famous unliveable house of rock salt.  I was thinking about it between reading newspapers telling, more or less hypocritically, the episodes of the Civil War in Spain, the newspapers behind which you thought I was disappearing just to play peek-a-boo with you.  And it was so true, because in such moments, the unconscious and the conscious, in you and in me, existed in complete duality near each other, keeping each other in total ignorance and yet communicating at will by a single all-powerful thread which was the exchanged glance between us.  To be sure, my life then hung only by the slightest thread.  Great was the temptation to go offer it to those who, without any possible error and any distinction of tendencies, wanted at any price to finish with the old “order” founded on the cult of that abject trinity: family, country, and religion.  And still you held me by that thread which is happiness, such as it pierces the web of unhappiness itself.  I loved in you all the little children of the Spanish militia, like those I had seen running naked in the outer district of Santa Cruz, on Tenerife.  May the sacrifice of so many human lives make of them one day happy beings!  And yet I did not feel in myself the courage to expose you with me to help that happen.

This section of the letter is followed by a cropped version showing the right half  of the now famous photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Children in Seville, Spain, 1933, one of twenty photographs in Mad Love by artists such as Man Ray, Dora Maar, and Brassaï.

The unnamed woman in Mad Love is a fictionalized version of Breton’s second wife Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993).  They had a daughter named Aube (Dawn).  Breton and Lamba divorced in 1943, and she later married the American artist David Hare.

El artista Oscar Dominguez pone en contacto al grupo de Gaceta de Arte con el circulo surrealista de París. Gracias a su mediación se celebra durante el mes de mayo de 1935 la II Exposición Internacional de Surrealismo en el Ateneo de Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Por este motivo viajan a Tenerife André Breton, su mujer Jacqueline Lamba y Benjamin Péret, que permanecen veinte días en la isla. André Breton escribe sobre el pintor tinerfeño: “… en estos últimos años nuestro amigo Oscar Dominguez ha hecho pasar por el arte surrealista, en el que la gracia de Picasso, de Miró, de Dalí, no ha cesado nunca de hacer circular la más bella sangre española, el silbo ardiente y perfumado de las Islas Canarias.

Gaceta de Arte, revista internacional de cultura, es un proyecto común de una generación de un critico que soñó tempranamente la

transformación de Canarias en un lugar de intercambio de ideas y de creación artística internacional

Un proyecto que me encanta y que podría ser aún actual…

Le passage du romantisme maudit au romantisme institutionnel de marché opère comme suit :

- Déchéance de la révolution française = apparition des “romantiques”, et d’une esthétique coupée de la réalité sociale immédiate (nostalgie, négation).

- Baudelaire (théorie de l’art pour l’art).

- Puis, diffusion de la culture de l’art pour l’art comme code commun d’un milieu social fait d’artistes (Kandinski), d’amateurs d’art (collectionneurs, critiques…), de marchands (Kahnweiler).

- Continuité de la culture artistique comme mode de vie (surréalisme) et culture collective du “milieu” (Montparnasse). Sculpture : Giacommetti, Brancusi. Peinture : Picasso, Paul Klee.

- Accession de l’artiste au statut d’artiste reconnu dans le groupe social, la classe sociale : Breton, Dali. L’artiste n’est plus nécessairement un maudit : il est un “rebelle”, mais dans le groupe social.

- Dépendance et fascination des artistes états-uniens pour l’art européen : le Pollock des débuts, Gorki. Arrivée de Rothko aux Etats-Unis.

- Après-guerre, extension des échanges entre les Etats-Unis et l’Europe de l’Ouest. Exportation du Pollock de la maturité, de Rothko, vers l’Europe de l’Ouest.

- Le galeriste Léo Castelli, l’institution (le MoMA à New York) subventionnent l’art pour l’art : minimal art, Richard Serra… Ces derniers sont donc issus du romantisme.

(Cette chronologie a été élaborée à l’Académie Royale des Beaux-arts de Liège, dans le cours de sculpture monumentale dans l’espace public, le 13 novembre 2009.)

Nelle lettere all’amatissima figlia Aube si scopre un padre affettuoso e convenzionale

.

………………………………………………………………….A Pierre Reverdy

.

La viajera que atravesó les Halles a la caída del verano
Caminaba sobre la punta de los pies
La desesperación hacía girar en el cielo sus grandes yaros tan bellos
Y en el bolso de mano se hallaba mi sueño ese frasco de sales
Que únicamente aspiró la madrina de Dios
Los entorpecimientos se desplegaban como el vaho
En el Perro que fuma
Donde acababan de entrar el pro y el contra
La muchacha sólo podía ser vista por ellos mal y al sesgo
Tenía yo que vérmelas con la embajadora del salitre
O con la curva blanca sobre fondo negro que llamamos pensamiento
El baile de los inocentes estaba en su apogeo
Los farolillos se encendían lentamente entre los castaños
La dama sin sombra se arrodilló en el Pont au Change
Calle Gît-le-Coeur los timbres ya no eran los mismos
Las promesas de las noches por fin se cumplían
Las palomas mensajeras los besos de socorro
Se unían a los pechos de la bella desconocida
Lanzados bajo el crespón de las significaciones perfectas
Una granja prosperaba en medio de París
Y sus ventanas daban sobre la vía láctea
Pero nadie la habitaba aún a causa de los aparecidos
De los aparecidos que como se sabe son más devotos
que los desaparecidos
Algunos como esta mujer aparentan nadar
Y en el amor penetra un poco de su substancia
Ella los interioriza
Yo no soy el juguete de ninguna potencia sensorial
Y sin embargo el grillo que cantaba en los cabellos de ceniza
Una tarde cerca de la estatua de Etienne Marcel
Me hizo un guiño de entendimiento
André Breton me dijo pasa

.
André Breton
Girasol
.

Levi Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss has died, aged 101.

Lévi-Strauss fled Vichy France in 1940, having been dismissed from his job due to Vichy racial laws. The New School for Social Research in New York, a reconstituted version of the Frankfurt school set up to rescue German refugee intellectuals, found a job for him, and the Rockefeller Foundation had a programme to rescue European scientists and thinkers. He made his way to Marseilles, and set sail for freedom in March 1941.

Other passengers on the boat, the Captain Paul-Lemerle, were Victor Serge, Andre Breton and Anna Seghers. The three of them were among the anti-fascists rescued by the great Varian Fry, a story told in his colleague Mary Jayne Gold’s Crossroads Marseilles 1940 (1980, now out of print) and more recently Rosemary Sullivan’s Villa Air-Bel (2006 HarperCollins).

Seghers was a German Communist writer. She had fled Nazi Germany for France, and was active in the exiled German writers union, which met at the Cafe Mephisto on Boulevarde St-Germain. Seghers had slipped across the line from German-occupied France to Vichy France the same month that Walter Benjamin took his life after being turned back from Spain in his bid to get to New York.

She had played a major role in the Congress for the Defence of Culture, held in Paris in 1935. At the Congress, Henri Poulaille, a French anarchist writer and editor, Magdelana Pa, a French Trotskyist, and Gaetano Salvemini, an Italian socialist, raised the question of Victor Serge’s incarceration in the Soviet gulag. (Serge was exiled in Orenberg at that time, the subject of his book Midnight in the Century.) Seghers, disgracefully, said this was a distraction: “When a house is burning, you can’t stop to help someone with a splinter in their finger.” It is not recorded, as far as I know, what conversation they had on the Captain Paul-Lemerle.

The Captain Paul-Lemerle, which had been built in 1921, landed in Martinique and then in Puerto Rico. At the latter, Lévi-Strauss had document trouble, and the Americans almost stopped him from proceeding. The fortunage intervention of another anthropologist, Jacques Soustelle, who happened to be PR in the service of De Gaulle’s Free French, rescued him. Levi Strauss went on to New York, where he was known as Claude L. Strauss, to avoid confusion with the popular jeans. Once the war was over, he worked as cultural counsellor of the French Embassy in Washington, before moving back to France in 1948. The first, very short, version of his wonderful memoir, Tristes Tropiques, was published in Encounter, the CIA-sponsored journal of the anti-Stalinist left.

Serge’s journey was not straightforward. He went to

Mexico (on a visa granted by President Cardenas hiniself), via Martinique (where he was detained in a camp for a month), Ciudad Trujillo and Havana. He reached Mexico in September 1941, and was immediately the object of violent articles, threats (to his life) from local and refugee Stalinists. (Jean Riére)

Seghors also went on to Mexico. Her anti-fascist novel, The Seventh Cross, which she had written in France, was published in English in New York and in German in Mexico. It has been serialised by a Soviet journal, International Literature, but the serialisation abrubtly halted with the Hitler-Stalin pact, when anti-fascism was no longer a Stalinist cause. Her Transit Visa, published in 1944, was a fictionalised account of the escape from France of the anti-fascist intellectuals, and the complex choreography of accidedents, lucky breaks and dishonesties by which they were able to obtain visas – “The Battle of the Visas” was Serge’s phrase for this.

Breton spent time in Martinique, then went on to New York.  He returned to France in 1946, and was active in radical politics until his death.

Added: Pierre Bourdieu on Levi-Strauss.

André Breton, (c) Atelier André Breton.

Hier matin, travail de préparation avec Anne-Laure Brisac, éditrice en charge du séminaire “Nouvelles formes d’éditorialisation et communautés virtuelles” à l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, auquel elle m’invite à participer jeudi 5 novembre à 18 heures (c’est aujourd’hui, 2 rue Vivienne à Paris). En voici le support de cours.

1. Rappel historique (20 mn)
1.1. De 00h00.com à AndreBreton.fr, le site
Mon expérience en matière d’édition électronique tient en peu de mots : zéro heure. Le site de 00h00 consistait à éditer en ligne des textes, qui ressemblaient beaucoup à des livres, sauf exception. Il n’y a pas d’archive 00h00, donc je ne peux rien vous montrer. Mais les fichiers proposés à la vente étaient des fichiers PDF, téléchargeables depuis une boîte aux lettres. Sur le site, les éditeurs rédigeaient biographie de l’auteur, notices et argumentaires de presse pour chaque ouvrage – outre le travail éditorial sur les textes, la mise en page et la mise en ligne, relation avec les auteurs et les éditeurs à diffuser ou diffusés. On éditait un ouvrage par jour, cinq ouvrages par semaine. Des classiques, des ouvrages diffusés et des ouvrages que nous avions choisi d’éditer en ligne. Ces trois catégories d’édition nous permettaient de publier rapidement beaucoup de livrels. La masse, en ligne, est essentielle. Elle permet de se démarquer.

Le site, conçu par l’équipe actuelle de GiantChair, recoupait plusieurs champs. Un salon, où les internautes pouvaient laisser des commentaires après inscription. Une page sur les auteurs avec des onglets pour chacun d’eux, une autre sur les textes avec des onglets pour chacun, un forum, un “chat”, etc. Voilà pour le front office. Dans le back office, on suivait les recommandations de l’équipe technique et de Pascale Lebel, la webmaster éditoriale. Il s’agissait d’écrire les notices en fonction des robots que sont les moteurs de recherche. Pour les argumentaires nous étions plus libres. Altavista et Yahoo pointaient sur les sites en fonction de l’ordre alphanumérique, d’où le nom de la maison d’édition – deux zéros viennent avant l’A. En outre, ils recensaient les livres selon l’url de chaque page, bien sûr, mais aussi en fonction des mots utilisés dans le texte de présentation, ce que j’appelle la notice. Aussi ce texte devait-il être concis, clair, c’est-à-dire sans ambigüité. C’était le chapô de l’argumentaire en quelque sorte, d’où tout jeu de mots était impossible. Une école d’écriture… (quand je vois les archives envoyées par cm, je pense que la mémoire arrange les choses.)

GiantChair est un développement d’une société de services éditoriaux numériques. C’est une société de services pour les éditeurs de revues universitaires, principalement. Andrebreton.fr, comme d’autres sites de la société sans doute, est un développement de 00h00. Le hasard des réseaux a conduit Aube et Oona Elléouët, fille et petite-fille d’André Breton, jusqu’à GiantChair pour la mise en forme du nouveau site consacré à la collection d’André Breton. Cory McCloud m’a demandé de rédiger les notices, de revoir les textes de chaque fiche lorsque c’est nécessaire, de jouer le rôle de webmaster éditorial – qui consiste en fait à écrire.

Si 00h00 était de l’édition numérique, le site AndreBreton.fr est bel et bien de l’édition en ligne. En 1998, on travaillait les textes des auteurs sous Word avant d’en faire un PDF; on écrivait notices et argus sous le même logiciel de traitement de texte avant de les envoyer par mail, en pièce jointe, à la webmaster qui les transcrivait en html pur jus. Vous vous souvenez peut-être : e;acute, e;agrave, etc. qu’il fallait saisir dans leur intégralité. (On relisait par-dessus l’épaule de la webmaster les moindres lettres qui devaient s’afficher une fois qu’elle avait tout envoyé au prestataire de service, qui vérifiait à nouveau, relisait à son tour, et mettait en ligne. À ce moment-là, bien sûr, on se rendait compte d’une erreur pas vue l’instant d’avant, et on recommençait. Rapidement, on a mis en ligne directement sans passer par le prestataire. Le référencement était fait par la webmaster également.)

Aujourd’hui le référencement se déroule par des mots corrélats (en bas de l’écran, voir le lien), par des partage de fil (voir le lien), par des notices écrites en fonction (voir le lien). Surtout, le site est une encyclopédie qui ne pourrait être imprimée. Elle est vouée à la vie, au mouvement perpétuel.
Le salon de 00h00 ne fonctionnait pas. À cela plusieurs raisons : l’inscription empêchait toute spontanéité, la fenêtre n’était reliée à aucun texte précis, et il y avait peu d’internautes. Désormais, les commentaires de blogs fonctionnent, les commentaires de textes aussi. Les wikis tout autant. Ils permettent de se lancer, sachant que quelqu’un de mieux qualifié corrigera. C’est ce qui se passe dans les blogs : combien de blogueurs corrigent leurs billets à la suite des remarques des lecteurs? Comme dans les wikis : les barcamps se construisent sous la forme de wikis; chacun des organisateurs et des invités y élaborent la journée d’étude à venir, on raye, on réécrit, on élabore; l’incertitude et le doute invitent au dialogue et font avancer. On travaille en partage, et à son rythme. Les textes, s’ils sont imprimés sur du papier, se montrent parfois rapidement obsolètes. L’édition imprimée, dans ce cas, n’a plus de sens. C’est ce que Marin Dacos et Pierre Mounier appellent de l’édition en ligne. Sans ambigüité.

Passer de la littérature générale à la littérature académique, savante, crée des contraintes. Les wikis et les commentaires ne sont pas mis en ligne sans approbation. La mauvaise réputation du web incite à plus de rigueur encore qu’avec l’édition imprimée. Le web ne cache rien, il ne perd pas grand-chose, quelques 404 de temps en temps, mais sinon… Tout demeure, à moins qu’on ait la main pour le modifier. De webmaster-rédacteur-modérateur, on passe à ce qu’on appelait autrefois chez Bordas directeur éditorial : on forme un comité scientifique, que les ayants droit dirigent. On monte une équipe qui vérifie ce qu’on lui envoie quand on n’est pas sûre – pour l’instant composée de Jean-Michel Goutier, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Gilles Mioni et Henri Béhar pour la littérature ; Gilles Bounoure pour les arts d’Océanie, Marie Mauzé pour les arts des Amériques ; Denis Montebello pressenti pour les arts populaires ; David Fleiss pour les photographies, Marcel Fleiss pour les arts graphiques et tableaux modernes. On relit, on met en forme, on édite, on met en ligne. (En anglais, “edit this title” signifie “modifiez ce titre”.) On fait l’interface avec l’équipe technique, avec les ayants droit, avec le comité scientifique et les amateurs qui donnent un coup de main. On est un entonnoir à plusieurs tuyaux de sortie. On coordonne.

1.2. La vente, son déroulé et son objet
Le site Breton est né de la vente de la collection. Celle-ci a eu lieu en avril 2003 après de nombreuses opérations, décrites par Jérôme Dupuis, dans l’Express. Pour ce qui est de la vente Breton, l’élément déclencheur fut la nécessité de « vider les lieux » assez rapidement même si Aube Elléouët s’était efforcée depuis plusieurs années de penser au devenir de la collection de son père. L’appartement rue Fontaine ne pouvait pas être transformé en musée et il s’agissait d’une location que voulait « récupérer » son propriétaire. Les pouvoirs publics se sont il faut bien le dire franchement désintéressés de ce problème malgré la visite de trois ministres de la culture qui avaient souligné la valeur patrimoniale inestimable de l’ensemble. On peut consulter Remue.net, revue littéraire associative qui, à peine constituée, a monté un comité de défense conduit par François Bon, Laurent Margantin, Mathieu Bénezet et quelques amis. Mais trop tard… Devant l’absence de solution, il a bien fallu se résigner à vendre. Et la vente était enclenchée. Tout est dispersé depuis.

Apparaît dans la personnalité de Breton le fait qu’il lui arrivait de vivre, en toute extrémité, de ventes de peinture et d’objets primitifs. D’ailleurs il vivait pour l’art. Il était découvreur (Max Ernst, Picasso, Dali ont été découverts par lui avant guerre). Je crois qu’on peut dire qu’il avait l’oeil, simplement. Lévi-Strauss évoque cela en parlant de leurs promenades aux puces de Saint-Ouen, lorsqu’ils échangeaient leurs avis sur ce qu’ils dénichaient. Les œuvres dont il se dépossédait n’avaient qu’un seul but, en acheter une autre ou faire face à des besoins matériels pressants. Il fonctionnait par coup de cœur, loin des logiques spéculatives. Une agate ramassée dans le Lot, un galet, pouvait avoir autant d’importance à ses yeux qu’une œuvre d’art bien établie. On le voit dans le texte de Gracq, l’atelier est le surréalisme, “Il y avait ici un refuge contre tout le machinal du monde.” La vente a été envisageable, du moins rendue acceptable, dès lors que la numérisation des objets était possible. En consolation, la succession Breton s’est dit que les objets allaient revivre dans d’autres collections, dans le site, ou retrouver leurs cultures d’origine.

1.3. L’esprit du site : interactif et ouvert à tous.
Et on organise tout cela en fonction de ce qu’on a non pas entre les mains, mais sous les yeux, avec la définition disponible, et un clavier sous les doigts.
“J’offre le surréalisme au monde”, nous a dit Aube en réunion. Tout l’atelier de la rue Fontaine et davantage. Les objets présents dans la maison de Saint-Circq, les tableaux, les oiseaux, papillons, les cailloux, les boîtes, les sculptures, les racines, les masques (restitués mais en ligne), les lettres dépliées lorsque le moment sera venu, en 2016 (sauf pour les lettres à Aube qui ont une clause d’exception), transcrites (mises à nue par les lecteurs même), les liens, les photos où l’on reconnaît un tel que personne n’avait jusqu’alors identifié. L’encyclopédie elle-même est surréaliste. Elle est merveilleuse. Elle est unique et multiple. Elle est mouvante – et à une seule adresse.

Visite du site. Et deuxième partie.

2. site (20 mn)
2.1. les vitrines, les fonds, un premier aperçu Logique de l’index, ou des rubriques : ces dernières reprennent dans ses grandes lignes la classification du catalogue de la vente. C’est une logique construite à partir des différents types de support. Les ayants droit veulent, par ce site, poursuivre le travail du surréalisme en faisant connaître les artistes moins connus du grand public (Wifredo Lam, Toyen), les formes d’art délaissées (publicité, photographie, art populaire). Dans un mode d’édition qui permette à tout le monde, en toute langue, de participer à l’élaboration du site. Pour l’instant on peut le faire en français et en anglais. On viendra vite aux autres langues écrites. Qui sait si nous n’aurons pas des nouvelles du masque restitué en Colombie britannique, dans la langue des Indiens – est-ce un rêve ?

2.2. Différences entre un catalogue de vente aux enchères et un site encyclopédique
Ordre des termes dans le catalogue, état de la pièce, pièce exposée ou non, c’est-à-dire avec ou sans image, mise à prix, etc. Surtout, ni l’un ni l’autre n’ont grand-chose à voir. On construit autre chose, une base relationnelle conçue pour le multi-support. Cela n’a rien à voir avec un livre, rien à voir avec un catalogue, ni avec une tablette de lecture.
Un méta-identifiant fixe est au-dessus des objets pour rendre le mouvement envisageable. C’est un mobile, en quelque sorte, à plusieurs axes, plusieurs index, qui sont autant de clés de voûte. C’est mouvant, sur une base statique de signifiants: Les classements se font donc par thèmes et catégories. Mais aussi par contributeur. Par personne citée. Par date. Par corrélats. Par titre.
Thèmes et contributeurs sont évidemment en rapport avec l’oeuvre, avec la chronologie (en cours) qui sera fondée sur la chronologie d’André Breton du catalogue avec un lien par date vers chacune des oeuvres auxquelles Breton s’est intéressé et des dates auxquelles elles ont été façonnées, publiées.

En plus de cette architecture à trois dimensions, qui n’est pas celle d’un catalogue raisonné, il existe des liens vers des interventions extérieures : Les commentaires, les wikis, les liens vers d’autres sites en relation, les icônes de partage. On retourne au merveilleux de la collection, sans indexation tarifaire, sans valeur annoncée. Chacun peut étudier un objet (loupe), l’accaparer, le diffuser pour partager son enthousiasme. C’est le web des réseaux sur le web des données. La hiérarchie correspond davantage aux modes de pensée, souvent aléatoires, qu’au mode de classement, savant. L’encyclopédie est, en ce sens, surréaliste.

2.3. L’avantage de l’édition en wiki et en commentaires
Des inconnus peuvent apporter des infos, ils peuvent élaborer leurs recherches et les compléter au même instant. Le surréalisme appartient à tout le monde, comme ce qui l’a provoqué. C’est un retour au merveilleux. On va s’y essayer. Chaque commentaire, chaque wiki est modéré. Je fais l’entonnoir, et les tuyaux dirigent vers tel ou tel spécialiste. Le premier qui répond a gagné. Et je valide, ou je refuse.

3. TP. les modifications d’une fiche et problèmes techniques divers (20 mn)
3.1. Front office
Comment répartir les lots? ici et là faut-il séparer ces photos-là ?
Image trop large qui chasse le texte (réparé depuis, je ne trouve plus d’exemple).
Absence de photos pour les objets jugés sans importance. Et pourtant, qu’on aimerait les voir, au moins, ces drôles de tampons.
Définition trop faible pour l’objet et pour la loupe. Les moules à hostie, photographiés tous ensemble alors que chacun est intéressant, en basse définition.

3.2. GiantChair travaille sur la publication de livres
Adaptation du site pour éditeurs à un site pour la collection André Breton. Une base relationnelle développée pour le surréalisme, mais sans métadonnées Dublin Core, dont le seul XML est la norme Onix. Ce n’est pas un catalogue raisonné. C’est un wiki. Moissonné suffisamment souvent pour ne rien perdre. Il reste quelques impondérables, en cours de réparation : champ biblio mais pas de champ exposition. Faut-il préciser les métiers des contributeurs par un champ : auteurs/artistes (photographe, peintre, dessinateur)? Pas sûr que ce soit très utile à la navigation du site.
Montrer “exports pro” et BNF, Onix, Amazon avec Lettres à Aube comme exemple.
Lien vers Google Edition avec Primitive Arts.

3.3. Le back office : TD sur une fiche
La huitième clé de Basile Valentin
ou
Remerciement au Christ pour avoir été sauvé d’une morsure de chien
ou
Plaque d’ardoise portant des signes en langue arabe gravés
Montrer les commentaires et les wikis.

Maintenant, il reste 6240 fiches à relire et à corriger, des traductions à rédiger, des images à retrouver pour les mettre en ligne, des lettres à publier (pas avant 2016), des enregistrements et des vidéos à diffuser (en fonction des droits qu’il faudra acquérir). Bref, une ambiance, un ton, un esprit et un souffle à offrir. “Lâchez tout!” Je réponds vite.

(je suis sûre que ça va prendre plus de 20 minutes par partie).

Constance Krebs, 5 novembre 2009.

Always for the first time

Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occuring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entierly with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It’s a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It’s a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absense in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time

By Andre Breton

The week goes by so fast – surviving Wednesday, the crux a steep ascent. The sudden incline, rapid succession of classes – film: Triumph of Will and Night and Fog. Stunned horror translating later into a dull roaring anger. Anger directed in all directions, at every object and subject, but focused more intensely on me – my every act and thought cause for contempt. Faded after dinner but echoes now as I write – anger at my writing.

To A: Have you seen Betty Blue? Perhaps Zorg is my inevitable fate. But if you haven’t seen that film perhaps you shouldn’t, maybe you should. Perhaps each moment is a rehearsal for that final act – perhaps I should and shouldn’t see the film again, re-read, re-live – no, this is not possible. Where then is my great work? I have started it here, in these pages a superimposed alligator snapping at the buttocks of my vision. But my vision, she is unattainable, the never tasted Eurydice, but when she is kissed on film I am kissing her. When the camera strips her bare for all to see I am her sole worshiper. Fuck the whore. Who needs her anyway. she who prostitutes the essence of all my hopes and dreams. She whose smile slays me, slaps me, killing prose, dead fish and bloated, molting eyelashes strung from hot wires. A descent. Away! Away! While I am cursing I might as well tell a lie.

To A: well, today I talked to that one girl and finally had enough nerve to ask her to coffee. She said that she didn’t really go for coffee.

“You don’t like coffee?”

“Not really.”

“What do you like then?”

“Well, since you asked, I like to have my cunt stretched by big, massively muscled, well-hung black men, so I really don’t have any use for a skinny white geek like you.”

Racist? No question. Sexist? See above. What else? No comment. Why? End of a nightmare.

I dreamt recently that I had AIDS.

I’ve managed to stay up until two am again. I wish to build a monument. One greater than the sour crevices between my toes. One better than André Breton’s bowler hat. Better, further, higher than an historical exegesis. Heavier than a dictionary but useful for taking trips in.

Fate’s poker face. E’s bluff. Trying to stare down the future, just like Davy Crockett taming a bear. Playing chicken with an oncoming train, riding a bicycle made from human teeth. Hear the wheels clatter across the railroad ties while your swollen, itching eye scratches on the screen door and begs for a crust of sex. Spare change spare change spare change. I’ve been anticipating – waiting, but on a train bound for nowhere I met up with a gambler, and in his final words I found an Ace that I could keep.

I fold.

Deal me in for another round.

.

In un contesto di apparente indistinzione, in cui i parametri di valutazione dell’arte e dell’architettura sembrano smarriti o per lo meno in difficoltà, diventa fondamentale affrontare il problema posto dall’opera. La stessa nozione di opera viene già da tempo contestata, secondo un’attitudine tipicamente romantica che ne vede il pieno compimento proprio nella sua assenza. Attitudine nata dalla consapevolezza della velleità delle cose che l’uomo, l’artista, il genio stesso crea, le quali, se è vero che proprio per la loro condizione finitainfinita possono rivelare una dimensione e quindi di verità, lo possono fare solo nell’hic et nunc, oltre il quale la verità differisce dalla cosa. Ma dietro il dramma romantico dell’impossibilità di fissare in un’opera alcunché, si cela un’ironia considerata da Friedrich Schlegel come la rinuncia del soggetto a prestare attenzione alla realtà materiale. Walter Benjamin sintetizza bene il paradosso dell’impossibilità della produzione dell’opera d’arte quando afferma che «uno dei compiti principali dell’arte è stato quello di generare esigenze che non è stata in grado di soddisfare attualmente». Benjamin dopotutto è stato un attento interprete del fenomeno delle avanguardie, le quali poetiche sono sempre state «attraversate, in modi più o meno espliciti, da una idea della morte dell’arte, o, meglio, della morte e trasfigurazione, si potrebbe dire, pensando appunto alla tematica dell’oltrepassamento dell’opera, dei suoi confini limitati, e del suo inveramento nella dimensione totale della vita quotidiana», come ci ricorda Filiberto Menna nel numero 12 della sua rivista Figure. Non a caso infatti, sono proprio le avanguardie che concretizzano, sotto diverse forme, l’idea di una vita come opera d’arte, filiazione diretta di quella Gesamtkunstwerk wagneriana che si pone proprio come un tentativo di superamento dell’arte stessa. Il dadaismo è senz’altro il movimento che più si è avvicinato all’idea di un’anti-arte e di un superamento del manufatto artistico. Per essi infatti «la disgregazione ad oltranza dell’opera può avvenire solo attraverso un’altra opera cui si attribuisce un carattere negativo», solitamente tramite la detronizzazione di un artefatto.

Il caso del para-dadaista Rigaut resta esemplare per descrivere l’essenza di questo tentativo di oltrepassamento dell’opera: avviato ormai da tempo un processo di sottrazione dalla cultura occidentale, egli procede, tramite la moltiplicazione della propria identità, verso l’abolizione della propria soggettività, disconoscendo così l’idea di autore e quindi di opera. Accortosi di essere giunto alla tanto declamata vita come opera d’arte, non può che esorcizzare questa condizione alla maniera dadaista progettando accuratamente il proprio suicido, come gesto di pare valore alla propria vita, ma con segno negativo.
Il noto riflusso dadaista, voluto da Bréton e da Tzara stesso, all’interno del neonato surrealismo, ha portato alla prosecuzione di alcune attività già perseguite dagli artisti dada, ossia le pratiche di visite-escursioni nei luoghi banali delle città. Se questo atto rappresentava nella mente dei dadaisti un rifiuto dei luoghi canonici delegati all’arte, verso una riconquista dello spazio urbano, nei surrealisti queste esperienze sono assimilabili ad «una sorta di scrittura automatica nello spazio reale, capace di rivelare zone inconsce ed il rimosso della città», come ci ricorda Francesco Careri nel suo Walkscape. Ma le sporadiche esperienze surrealiste e dadaiste del genere, arriveranno ad avere consistenza teorica soltanto trent’anni dopo, quando, in seno alla costellazioni di correnti e movimenti che finiranno per convogliare all’interno dell’Internazionale Situazionista, concetti come quello di deriva e psicogeografia arriveranno ad avere una propria indipendenza teorica ed ideologica, tanto da trasformare quello che sembrava essere un riappropriamento da parte dell’arte della città, in quello che conosciamo come il Maggio francese.

“A Queer Frame of Mind” (an introduction to Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism) by Peter Dubé  is an interesting essay about the convergences of queer sexuality, Gay liberationist theory, and the Surrealist Movement. The article addresses a particular strand of Gay liberationist theory that “represented for [him] the culture of desire gay men had begun to create, one that seemed related—somehow—to that proposed by the Surrealists, but unblinkered by Breton’s prejudices.” This movement was “committed to liberating desire and sexuality, sought to create new types of social networks, outside the norms of the family and rooted in fairly radical ideas about elective affection, community and friendship. It—daily—rediscovered the hidden spaces of the city and libidinously revivified them. It wanted to change overarching structures to conform more to the need for self-realization—self-creation even—than to an arbitrary idea of productivity. It was informed by the erotic and it was joyous.” Dubé exposes Breton’s anti-feminist and homophobic rhetoric but also explores “how the [Surrealist] movement was volatile and diverse. It hosted a wide variety of struggling viewpoints, saw a lot of schism and hurled accusations, and included queers of all kinds. To name just a few: Rene Crevel, Louis Aragon, Claude Cahun, Pierre Molinier. Moreover, in some ways it was very queer in its concerns.” He then underscores the ways in which Surrealism and Gay Liberation mirror each other in three ways, namely, both were movements “with desire at its very heart,” “were self-consciously interested in subjectivity and the way the mind operates,” and both “share an interest in the way these things—subjectivity and desire—affect the world.” Dubé ends his essay by meditating on the many ways Surrealism remains a living movement.

I am writing the first draft of the project proposal for tomorrow’s chat and will update the “latest draft” page, as well as in this post so a record of successive drafts is kept.

Two interesting research discoveries (need more research in books, as little about it online):

- the surrealist concept of “Métaphysique des lieux” (Metaphysics of places). Apparently originating from Louis Aragon’s novel “Le Paysan de Paris” (The Paris Peasant). It is the reinterpretation of space using imagination. From various critics, the novel highlights the Surrealists’ ambivalence towards the city, an attitude that distinguish them from other modernist movements such as Futurism or Constructivism who worshipped everything modern (cities and technology). It seems there are more complex things to be dug up than the “love for Paris” one usually reads about in introductions to Surrealism. It is definitely a concept I need to research as it relates to my interest in exploring backward and rural places. I only have second hand comments about the book, so cannot write much about it yet. “Paris Peasant” seems to be the key text about ambivalence towards cities, and possibly some bits from Breton’s “Nadja” in a lesser measure.

- In 1930, André Breton and Paul Eluard wrote a collaborative poem “L’immaculée Conception” (Immaculate Conception). They had studied various psychiatric textbooks and real writings from mentally ill people, and attempted to put themselves in a state of “simulated madness” before using automatic writing to produce texts similar to the ones written by real patients. They wrote a couple of texts simulating various mental conditions. The goal of the experiment was to prove the line was very thin between the “normal” and “insane” mind, and the possibility of madness was present in any mind. I feel this experiment relates to my two installation ideas: the “autistic box” simulating the experience of a self-sufficient inner world, and the installation simulating the feeling of being lost in order to create disquiet in the viewer.

************************************************************************

I was not yet able to write a proper proposal. I need to read more things in order to have a clearer idea. What I’ve done is reread everything I’ve written in this blog (and on random notes), isolate what I think are the most importance concepts, and sort them in order to fill the different sections of the project proposal. I did not try to write an organised text at this point. I was not able to find anything for paralell theory, and did not write anything for methodology. I think I am not sure what should be in methodology: it seemed like a mix of “generative theory” and outcome to me.

Working title

Outer space/inner worlds : borders, invasions, warfare tactics.

Aims (1 or 2) + objectives (6)

Research the way our subconscious reinvents reality and our surroundings. the various dynamics between the outer world and the individual’s inner worlds.
- the subjective perception of things around us. using photography and video, media ironically considered documentary and objective
- the surrealists said cinema was like dream made physical. explore the possibilities of video to make dreams/inner worlds (mine or from imagined characters) “real” and share them with others. Especially immersive video installations can create more “real” feelings than just video on a screen. explore than as way to engage in a deeper level of communication with the audience.
- how private space is a physical projection of the occupier’s inner world (both liberating and oppressing projections)
- the house and more generally private space and its importance for the intellectual freedom of individuals
- as a consequence, tactics of controlling individuals’minds by manipulating the private space available to them. madness/sanity border questioned from an “external” viewpoint: i.e. undesirable but “sane” people locked up to get rid of them (political illness)
- coping tactics developed by individuals in response to that. madness/sanity border question from a more internal viewpoint: i.e. alienation slowly becoming madness, where exactly is the border ? “mental escape” (fugues) to avoid unpleasant things.

Context

Historical

Above all Surrealism and its aim to reconcile the accepted reality with the individual’s imagination, in order to reach a superior reality, encompassing more levels of perception
especially: dreamscape paintings, wandering and metaphysics of space, simulation of madness.
19th century visionaries such as Blake
Dada and its critic of the absurdity of modern life
German expressionist cinema, and its interest in madness
“Antipsychiatry” philosophers
Urban exploration and psychogeography within situationnism and beyond
Cinema exploring consciousness (Lynch, Bergman, Polanski etc …)

Contemporary

Contemporary art aiming to reclaim public space, it is usually performance art. For example: it is forbidden to take photographs in malls, and some outdoor city centre streets are sold for private use because they mostly contain shops. Simon Pulter’s projections on the Houses of Parliaments and the white cube gallery.
Modern psychogeographers such as Iain Sinclair.
David Lynch

Critical theory

The surrealist concern of Art not being made exclusively for the cultural elite to discuss it between themselves, but open to everyone. This has nothing to do with paternalist attitude of making “simple” art (such as social realism) , but making Art that is open to be enjoyed on different levels. The key to that is that Art refers to “Life” (Ado Kyrou against the “Auteur” cinema) not just previously made art, so that a person without cultural reference can enjoy the piece relating to their life experience. Obviously, because previously made art is a very important part of an artist’s own life, the piece will be influenced by various art references. This is OK as long as it is just an innocent reflection of the artist’s love for previous art, not a way of “testing” the cultural knowledge of the audience.

The same way, politics are part of life, so most artworks will have some political connotations to them. If the artist is concerned with a political issue, they will naturally express it in their Art. But a piece should not be made solely to advertise a political idea. Art is not propaganda or advertising. Art should engage the audience into thinking for themselves, not tell them what to think.

Parallel theory
Maybe contemporary, much more moderate versions of antipsychiatry sush as the people who criticise the hegemony of cognitive behavioural therapy in contemporary mental health systems ?

Generative Theory

Automatism:
-unstaged compositions
-used of pictures seen in dreams/visions without attempting to find out what they “mean” and without modifying them artificially in order to make them fit a “model”.

Methodology

collect photographs and footage from derelict places, and more generally strange places (Freud’s the uncanny)
1) for some pieces, these collected images (after processing and editing) are the artwork in itself
2) for other pieces, they cause an idea association in me and I need to create “artificial images” (from scratch) to make a physical representation, and edit them in
3) for other pieces I have an inner vision (i.e. dream) and I’m aiming to make it real. so I either go out and find real things that fit it, ot if they don’t exist, I create images from scratch
maybe it is 1) the outside invading the inside 3) the inside invading the outside 2) the time/place where they clash, where the border is. I’m not sure about this yet

Outcome

Photographs
Videos
Immersive video installations.

Work plan

?

Since my mother was diagnosed with cancer I have not have much time or energy to go out and see many art exhibitions. In addition to that, there hasn’t been much time for even working in the studio. Other than the small drawings I have done I have been sort of out of the art loop.

In saying that, Monday I was able to make it over to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University. I also what to state that I like going there to see contemporary art than I like going to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. I think the exhibitions at the Kemper are more varied and I like that the museum is free and being in the situation I am in, free is great. I honestly have not been too interested in the recent exhibitions at CAMSTL.

The exhibitions I saw were Chance Aesthetics and Metabolic City. I will separate the two into separate posts. I was interested in Chance Aesthetics because in my own art I have used elements of chance to develop my work. I tend to use it as a starting point such as dumping ink or paint, using drip patterns and allowing “mistakes” to happen and worked with the unexpected things that come up when making art.

Historically, art has been a skill in which an artist demands exceptional control to achieve a great work. This means works were planned endeavors obsessive perfection. In the 20th century some artists decided to work in opposition to this. The exhibition starts with the Surrealists and Dada, which makes sense to me. What I think is so great about using chance as a basis for a work is that it becomes playful and fun instead of being an intellectual and dry assignment that a lot of art has become.

Some of the works are sloppy and dirty but some are totally obsessive, clean and systematic. The latter still retain an element of surprise and engagement.

Some notable artists and works. I like Ellsworth Kelly’s gridded, cut-up and reassembled drawings.

Ellsworth Kelly

There is Mimmo Rotella’s decollages of advertisements that you might see on the streets where posters are layered and ripped apart. Sort of like a defaced pop art.

Mimmo Rotella

Similar to Rotella’s is Jacques Villegle’s work. Something is very subversive and punk about these works. I like that.

Jacques Villegle

I did love the simplicity of Duchamp’s readymade, “hatrack”, that was hanging from the ceiling. I think most people would see the spider-like look of this work and I think most would enjoy this one cause of its playfullness and it is non-confrontational.

Marcel Duchamp

I enjoyed William Anastasi’s subway drawings. I was doing stuff like this when I was in London. I am not saying I did it first but I feel a connection to this cause of my own personal experience with this mindless exercise. Fun and surprising to make.

William Anastasi's Subway Drawings

There is the systematic digital looking Francois Morellet’s telephone directory works. By just looking at it, it looks like a non-objective minimalism. There is the white one that has the layer of varnish on some areas…white on white…so when you look at it at certain angles you see the differences. I think of Ryman’s white paintings. With the black one’s I think of Ad Reinhart’s black paintings. Those ones are definitely more quiet and subtile. Some of them use hot and sometimes competing color schemes that are more challenging. His work can seem like a combination of a Sol LeWit type of work and op-art. The grid seems to be a very important part of the structure of his work.

A telephone directory work by Francois Morellet

In addition to those works there is Arman’s work in which he collect Claes Oldenburg’s trash. Interesting in an invasion of privacy kind of way. There was a osmotic work by George Maciunas in which spills ink onto a canvas ans lets it spread a soak into the canvas. Marcel Jean and Andre Breton’s drawings were similar. There was Ray Johnson’s mail art and game-like works. There were some exquisite corpse drawings, John Cage compositions and a Nam June Paik’s blank films…well except dust scratches and whatever happened to interfere with the film. Plus there were Deiter Roth’s rotting works.

André Bretón. Surrealismo y Psiquiatría.
Zona Erógena. Nº 4. 1990.
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SURREALISMO Y PSIQUIATRÍA

ANDRÉ BRETÓN
André Breton (1913-1966): “médico de formación ” poeta y teórico, fundador, (animador) y líder indiscutido del movimiento surrealista.
En 1919 crea la revista “Litteratura”; órgano del dedaísmo em Paris; rompe con este movimiento para iniciar las experiencias sistemáticas sobre el automatismo psíquico por influencia de las concepciones de Freud En 1924 publica el “Primer Manifiesto Surrealista” y la revista “La Revolución Surrealista” órgano especifico del movimiento.
Desde 1925 se produce su acercamiento al movimiento marxista revolucionario, del cual formará parte de manera heterodoxa:”Transformar el mundo -dijo Marx-; Cambiar la vida -dijo Rimbaud-:estas dos consignas, para nosotros, son una sola”. Diez diarios: Les Nouvelles Littéraires, L’Oeuvre, Paris Midi, Le Soir, Le Canard enchainé, Le Progres médical, Vossische Zeitung, Le Rouge et le Noir, La Gazette de Bruxelles y Le Moniteur du Puy-de-Dôme, se hicieron eco, según tengo entendido, de la polémica suscitada por la Sociedad Médico Psicológica acerca de un pasaje de mi libro Nadja: “Sé que si estuviese loco, e internado desde hace algunos días, aprovecharía una remisión que me dejara mi delirio para asesinar con frialdad al primero, con preferencia el médico, que cayera entre mis manos. Con esto lograré, por lo menos, que me ubiquen como a los furiosos en un compartimento solo. Tal vez así me dejarían en paz”. La mayoría de estos diarios; preocupados antes que nada por sacar partido humorístico del incidente, se limitaron, por otra parte, a comentar la réplica ridícula de Pierre Janet: “Las obras de los surrealistas son confesiones de obsesivos y de maníacos de la duda”, y a reproducir las bromas que suelen hacerse cada vez que el alienista pretende tener quejas del alienado, el colonizador del colonizado, el policía del individuo que detuvo al azar o no.

Pero no hubo nadie que denunciara la pasmosa pretensión del Dr. de Clérambault, quien, no contento con solicitar en aquella oportunidad la protección de la “autoridad” contra los surrealistas, gente que según él sólo aspira a “ahorrarse el trabajo de pensar” (sic), no teme sostener que el alienista debe tener garantías ante el riesgo de ser jubilado prematuramente… en el supuesto caso de que se le ocurra matar a un enfermo fugado o liberado a quien considere como una amenaza personal. En semejante situación, tendría que mediar, se dice, una sólida recompensa económica. Es evidente que los psiquiatras, acostumbrados a tratar a sus pacientes como perros, se sorprenden de que no se les autorice, aun fuera del servicio clínico, a liquidarlos.
Se comprende, de acuerdo con sus declaraciones, que el Dr. Clérambault no haya encontrado mejor manera de ejercer sus brillantes facultades que en el marco de las prisiones, y también se explica que posea el título de médico-jefe en la enfermería especial de la cárcel de la Prefectura. Resultaría sorprendente que una conciencia de este temple, que un espíritu de esta calidad no hubiera encontrado el medio de colocarse enteramente a disposición de la policía y de la justicia burguesas.

¿Me será permitido decir, sin embargo, que según ciertas opiniones hay en esto un compromiso suficiente como para que se pueda, sin insultar a la ciencia, tomar por sabios a hombres que, lo mismo que el escandaloso señor Amy (del caso Almazain), tuvieron por primera función la de servir de instrumentos para la represión social? Sí, afirmo que es preciso haber perdido todo sentido de dignidad (de indignidad) humana para llegar a exponerse en la Corte Criminal en calidad de experto.

¿Quién no recuerda la controversia edificante entre expertos alienistas durante el juicio de la suegra criminal, la señora Lefevre, en Lille? Durante la guerra comprobé el poco caso que la justicia militar hacía de los informes médicos legales -quiero decir que los expertos alienistas toleraban que se despreciaran sus informes, cuando a sus escasas demandas de absolución, fundadas en el reconocimiento de la irresponsabilidad “total” del acusado, se dictaban a veces las peores condenas. ¿Puede pensarse que la justicia civil es más tolerante, que los expertos están normalmente en mejor posición desde entonces: 1º que el artículo 64 del Código Penal sólo reconoce la culpabilidad del acusado en el caso de ser admitido que se “encontraba en estado de demencia en el momento del hecho, o que se vio obligado a ello por una fuerza a la que no pudo “resistir” (texto filosóficamente incomprensible); 2º que la “objetividad” científica, -que se presenta como auxiliar de la “imparcialidad” ilusoria de la justicia, en el dominio que nos ocupa, es por sí misma una utopía; 3º que resulta claro -en realidad la sociedad no pretende castigar al culpable, sino al antisocial- que se trata, antes que nada, de satisfacer a la opinión pública, esa bestia inmunda incapaz de aceptar que no se reprima la infracción puesto que quien la cometió sólo estuvo enfermo durante dicha infracción, de modo que la reclusión médica, admitida hasta cierto punto como pena, ya no es defendible?
Afirmo que el médico que acepta, en condiciones semejantes, pronunciarse frente a los tribunales, si no lo hace sistemáticamente para proclamar la irresponsabilidad completa de los acusados, es un cretino o un canalla, que resulta lo mismo. Si se toma en cuenta, por otra parte, el desarrollo reciente de la medicina mental, y esto sólo desde el punto de vista psicológico, se comprueba que su gestión principal consiste en la denuncia cada vez más abusiva de aquello que, a partir de Bleuler, fue llamado autismo (egocentrismo), denuncia burguesa de las más cómodas, puesto que permite considerar como patológico todo lo que en el hombre no es lisa y llanamente adaptación a las condiciones exteriores de la vida, puesto que tiende secretamente a eliminar todos los casos de rechazo, de rebeldía, de deserción que aparecían o no hasta ahora dignos de acreditar consideraciones (poesía, arte amor pasión, acción revolucionaria, etc.).

Autistas hoy los surrealistas (para el Dr. Janet -y, no cabe duda, para el Dr. Claude). Autista ayer aquel joven profesor de física examinado en el hospital de Val-de-Grâce porque, al ser enrolado en un regimiento de aviación, “no tardó en manifestar su desinterés por el ejército y confesó a sus compañeros el horror que le inspiraba la guerra, a la que consideraba un asesinato organizado”. (Este individuo presentaba, según el profesor Fribourg-Blanc, que publica el resultado de sus observaciones en Annuales de médicine légale de febrero de 1930, “tendencias esquizoides evidentes” Así se expresaba: “Búsqueda de aislamiento, interiorización, desinterés hacia las actividades prácticas, individualismo mórbido, concepciones idealistas de fraternidad universal”). Autistas mañana, según el testimonio infame de esos señores, es decir repentinamente desviables de la dirección en la que sólo los orientan sus conciencias, es decir confiscables a voluntad, todos los que se obstinaban en no aclamar las consignas detrás de las cuales se oculta esta sociedad para tratar de hacernos partícipes, sin excepción posible, de sus fechorías.
Nos honra ser los primeros en señalar aquí este peligro y en oponernos al insoportable, al creciente abuso de poder por parte de personas a quienes no vemos tanto como médicos si no como carceleros, y sobre todo proveedores de presidios y cadalsos. Como médicos, los consideramos todavía menos excusables que a los otros, por asumir indirectamente estas bajas tareas de ejecución. Por más surrealistas o “litigantes” que seamos para estos señores, nunca les recomendaré lo suficiente tener la decencia de callar, aun si algunos de ellos caen por accidente bajo los golpes de aquellos a quienes intentan arbitrariamente reducir.

Fuente: http://brasil.indymedia.org/pt/blue/2007/05/383452.shtml

Vous voulez connaître la suite de l’histoire commencée hier ? Alors je continue.

À l’instant même Sylvestre, enjambant le cadavre, venait se jeter en pleurant dans mes bras; je lui rendis son accolade et nous restâmes longtemps embrassés, en proie à une bien douce émotion.

- Mon pauvre Sylvestre, dis-je enfin en remettant mon revolver à sa place, il était grandement temps que je vous vienne en aide !

Il écarta le côté gauche de son veston et sortit de la poche intérieure deux longues boucles de cheveux blonds qui tombaient en spirales; à l’extrémité initiale de chacun s’entortillait régulièrement en de nombreux tours un fil de soie résistant et serré.

- Ce sont elles qui m’ont protégé ! s’écria-t-il en les portant à ses lèvres ; c’est ce talisman qui vous a conduit jusqu’ici pour me prêter main-forte !

Pendant qu’il parlait mes regards étaient attirés vers ses oreilles par deux cercles d’or qui brillaient au soleil.

- Mais enfin, repris-je, comment diable pareille aventure vous est-elle arrivée ?

Il baisa encore les deux boucles avant de les remettre où il les avait trouvées; ensuite il alla ramasser un vieil instrument de musique, une sorte de grosse trompe étrangement recourbée qui traînait par terre à quelques pas de nous.

- J’étais sorti ce matin pour aller dans la campagne me livrer à mon passe-temps favori, me dit-il ; je m’apprêtais à jouer de vieux airs du pays dans ce lieu solitaire, quand j’ai été attaqué par le monstre. Mais vous-même, comment êtes-vous arrivés si à point pour me sauver la vie ?

- Justement je relisais, tout en me promenant, quelques-uns de vos poèmes, répondis-je ;  vos cris m’ont fait lever les yeux et je suis venu à votre secours… À propos, où donc ai-je jeté votre livre ?

Je regardai autour de moi et j’allai prendre sur une grosse pierre, où il était tombé tout ouvert, un volume de petit format sur la couverture duquel on lisait ce titre : Larmes de Sang, par Sylvestre Pennanhoat.
- Heureusement, il n’est pas abîmé dis-je en examinant les feuillets qui avaient été les plus exposés ; vous pensez si j’y tiens c’est l’exemplaire qui contient votre dédicace !
Sylvestre avait mis son instrument en bandouilière à l’aide d’un cordon fixé en deux endroits du gros tube ; il tira sa tabatière de son gilet, y puisa une forte pincée dont il bourra son nez, et nous reprîmes ensemble le chemin de la Pointe-à-Pitre.

fin de la première partie de Nanon …

• Cet homme, le narrateur, est aussi maniaque que moi en ce qui concerne les dédicaces sur les bouquins. Son premier réflexe après avoir abattu un crotale en lui tirant une balle dans la gueule, geste rendu nécessaire par le fait que l’animal était en train d’étouffer son ami, le poète, Sylvestre, son premier réflexe est de s’inquiéter pour son livre tombé dans la bataille car il est dédicacé. J’aurais fait pareil pour le livre (pour le crotale, c’est moins sûr, mes amis poètes sachez-le.).
• En fait, j’aurais dû transcrire la nouvelle en entier, car  son intérêt  réside justement là, à sa fin quand on a le début. Raymond Roussel explique Comment il a  écrit certains de ses livres :
  

  Ce procédé, il me semble qu’il est de mon devoir de le révéler, car j’ai l’impression que des écrivains de l’avenir pourraient peut-être l’exploiter avec fruit.

  Je choisissais deux mots presque semblables (faisant penser aux métagrammes). Par exemple billard et pillard. Puis, j’y ajoutais des mots pareils mais pris dans deux sens différents, et j’obtenais ainsi deux phrases presque identiques.

  1° Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard…
  2° Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard.

  On voyait quelqu’un écrire avec un blanc (cube de craie) des lettres (signes typographiques) sur des bandes (bordures) d’un billard.

  Dans le conte en question il y avait un blanc (un explorateur) qui avait publié sous forme de lettres (missives) un livre où il était parlé des bandes (hordes) d’un pillard (roi nègre)

  Alors, dans notre conte, Nanon Voyons comment il utilise son procédé. La première phrase est la suivante :

  Le repentir de la prise sur les anneaux du serpent à sonnettes s’empara de moi dès les premiers essais.

  La dernière :

  Le repentir de la prise sur les anneaux du serpent à sonnets.

  Ce qu’il y a entre les deux ? Alambiqué, tiré par les cheveux, ceux qui sont en boucles blondes que Sylvestre porte sur lui. Il est gentil Raymond Roussel de vouloir transmettre son procédé de fabrication, mais ce n’est pas vraiment convaincant. Son procédé peut faire penser à une écriture sous contrainte. Roussel était-il un Oulipien qui s’ignorait ?

• Plutôt un surréaliste ? Voici ce que dit Ginette Adamson :
  

  Les surréalistes ne pouvaient manifester que de l’admiration vis à vis de Roussel qui, avant eux, avait su exploiter les mots tant sur le plan phonique que sémantique. Et le résultat d’un tel travail fut d’ouvrir une nouvelle voix à la poésie. Leiris, Desnos, Duchamp, pour ne citer que ceux-là ont tous fait usage de cette technique roussellienne.

  Duchamp a pris connaissance de l’oeuvre de Roussel quand il est allé voir avec Picabia et Appolinaire la représentation des impressions d’Afrique au théâtre Fémina en 1911. Tout de suite il s’est rendu compte que les techniques de Roussel pourraient s’adapter à sa peinture. “Roussel showed me the way dit-il dans une interview avec James Johnson Sweeney.

Partie d’un crotale en furie pour en arriver à Marcel Duchamp, c’est ainsi que va mon esprit.

Fin