Looking Back on Surrealism
Content
87
LOOKING BACK ON SURREALISM
IIEIE
Looþing
B
øck on Surreol'i,srn
supposed to be a mere dream always leaves reality untouched, whatever damage is done to its image. But that theory does not do justice to the matter. That is not the way
people dream; no one dreams that way. Surrealist constructions are merely analogous to dreams, not more. They suspend the customary logic and the rules'of the game of empirical evidence but in doing so respect the individual objects that have been forcibly removed from their
context and bring their contents, especially their human contents, closer to the form of the object. There is a shatteringanda regrouping, but no
dissolution. The dream, to be sure, does the same thing, but
in the
trrtt currently accepted theory of l- Surrealism, which was set down
in Breton's manifestos but also dominates the secondary literature, links it with dreams, the unconscious, and perhaps Jungian archetyges, which are said to have found in collages and automatic writing an emancipated
image-language uncontaminated by the conscious ego- Dreams, according to this theory, treat the elements of the real the way the method of Surrealism does. If, however, no art is required to understand itself-
dream the object world appears in a form incomparably more disguised and is presented as reality less than it is in Surrealism, where art batters its own foundations. The subject, which is at work much more openly and uninhibitedly in Surrealism than in the dream, directs its energy toward its own self-annihilation, something that requires no energy in
the dream; but because of that everything becomes more objective, so to speak, than in the dream, where the subject, absent from the start, colors and permeates everything that happens from the wings. In the meantime the Surrealists themselves have discovered that people do not free associate the way they, the Surrealists, write, even in psychoanalysis. Furthermore, even the spontaneity of psychoanalytic associations is by no means spontaneous. Every analyst knows how much trouble and exertion, how much effort of will is required to master the involuntary expression that occurs through these efforts, even in the psychoanalytic situation, to say nothing ofthe artistic situation ofthe Surrealists. It is not the unconscious
and one is tempted to consider art's self-understanding and its success almost incompatible-1þ6¡1 it is not necessary to fall in line with this programmatic view, which is repeated by those who expound Surrealism. What is deadly about the interpretation of art, moreover, even philosophically responsible interpretation, is that in the process of conceptuahza' tion it is forced to express what is strange and surprising in terms of what is already familiar and thereby to explain away the only thing that would need explanation. To the extent to which works of art insist on explanation, every one of them, even if against its own intentions, 'Were Surrealism in fact perpetrates a piece of betrayal to conformity. nothing but a collection of literary and graphic illustrations of Jung or even Freud, it would not only duplicate, superfluously, what the theory itself says rather than giving it a metaphorical garb, but it would also be so innocuous that it would hardly Ieave room for the scandal that is Surrealism's intention and its lifeblood. Reducing Surrealism to psychological dream theory subjects it to the ignominy of something official. Companion piece to the well-versed "That is a father figure" is the selfsatisfied "Yes, we know," and, as Cocteau well knew, something that is
in itself that
light in the world-rubble of Surrealism. Assessed unconscious, the symbols would prove much too rationalistic. This kind of decoding would force the luxuriant multiplicity of Surrealism into a few patterns and reduce it to a few meager categories like the Oedipus complex, without attaining the power that emanated from the idea of Surrealism if not from its works of art; F'reud too seems to have responded to Dali this way. After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force. It is as though they had saved Paris by preparing it for fear: the destruction of the city was their center. To conceptualize Surrealism
comes to
in terms of their relationship to the
along these lines, one must go back not to psychology but to Surrealism's artistic techniques. IJnquestionably, they are patterned on the montage. One could easily show that even genuine Surrealist painting works with its motifs and that the discontinuous juxtaposition of images in Surrealist
88
NOTES TO LITERATURE
8s
I
LCOKING BACK ON SURREALISM
lyric poetry is montage-like. But these images derive, as we know, in part literally and in part in spirit from the late nineteenth-century illustrations that belonged to the world of the parents of Max Ernst's generation. There were collections in existence as early as the r9zOs, outside the sphere of Surrealism, like Alan Bott's Oør Fathers' which partookparasitically-of Surrealist shock and by doing so dispensed with the strain of alienation through montage as a kindness to the audience. Authentic Surrealist practice, however, replaced those elements with unfamiliar ones. It is precisely the latter which, through fright, gave that material the aspect of something familiar, the quality of "Where have I seen that beforel" Flence one may assume that the affinity with psychoanalysis lies not in a symbolism of the unconscious but in the attempt to uncover childhood experiences by means of explosions. What Surrealism adds to illustrations of the world of objects is the element of childhood we lost; when we were children, those illustrated papers' already obsolete even then, must have leaped out at us the way Surrealist images do now. The subjective aspect in this lies in the action of the montage, which attempts-perhaps in vain, but the intention is unmistakable-to produce perceptions as they must have been then. The giant egg from which the monster of the Last Judgment can creep forth at any moment is so big because we were so small the first time we looked at an
egg and shuddered.
Obsoleteness contributes to this effect.
in conjunction with the more general thesis that history is progress in the consciousness of freedom, defines the substance of Surrealism: "The sole work and deed ofuniversal freedom therefore is death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling."r Surrealism adopted this critique as its own; this explains its anti-anarchistic political impulses, which, however, were incompatible with its substance. It has been said that in Flegel's thesis the Enlightenment abolishes itself by realizíng itself; the cost of comprehending Surrealism is equally high-it must be understood not as a language of immediacy but as witness to abstract freedom's reversion to the supremacy of objects and thus to mere nature. The montages of Surrealism are the true still lives. In making compositions out of what is out of date, they create tta.tøre rnlrte. These images are not images of something inward; rather, they are fetishes-commodity fetishes-on which something subjective, libido, was once fixated. It is through these fetishes, not through immersion in the self, that the images bring back childhood. Surrealism's models would be pornography. The things that happen in the collages, the things that are convulsively suspended in them like the tense lines of lasciviousness around a mouth, are like the changes that occur in a pornographic image at the moment when the voyeur achieves gratification. Breasts that have been cut off, mannequin's legs in silk stockings in the collagesthese are mementos of the objects of the partial drives that once aroused
the libido. Thinglike and dead, in them what has been forgotten reveals
It
thing modern, already under the spell of tion, to have any history at all. This paradox estranges it, and in the "Children's Pictures for the Modern Age" it becomes the expression of a subjectivity that has become estranged from itself as well as from the world. The tension in Surrealism that is discharged in shock is the tension between schizophrenia and reification; hence it is specifically not a tension of psychological inspiration. In the face of total reification, which throws it back upon itself and its protest, a subject that has become absolute, that has full control of itself and is free of all consideration of the empirical world, reveals itself to be inanimate, something virtually dead. The dialectical images of Surrealism are images of a dialectic of subjective freedom in a situation of objective unfreedom. In them, European Weltschme¡z turns to stone, like the pain of Niobe, who lost her children; in them bourgeois society abandons its hopes of survival. One can hardly assume that any of the Surrealists were familiar with Flegel's Phenomenology, but a sentence from it, which must be considered
seems Paradoxical for somethe sameness of mass produc-
itself to be the true object of love, what love wants to make itself
resemble, what we resemble. As a freezing of the moment of awakening,
Súrrealism is akin to photography. Surrealism's booty is images, to be sure, but not the invariant, ahistorical images of the unconscious subject to which the conventional view would like to neutralize them; rather, they are historical images in which the subject's innermost core becomes aware that it is something external, an imitation of something social and historical. "Come onJoe, imitate that old-time music."* In this respect, however, Surrealism forms the complement to the Neue Sach.licltÈeit, or New Objectivity, which came into being at the same time. The Neae SachlichÈeit's horror of the crime of ornamentation, as Adolf Loos called it, is mobilized by Surrealist shocks. The house has a tumor) its bay window. Surrealism paints this tumor: an excrescence of rA line from the "Bilbao Song" in Brecht and Weill's Happl von damals nach."-Tmnslator's note. Eù:
"Geh Joe, mach die Musik
9o
NOTES TA LITERATURE
I
ETETI
flesh grows frorir the house. Childhood images of the modêrn era are the quintessence of what the Neøe Søchlichþeit makes taboo because it reminds it of its own object-Iike nature and its inability to coPe with the fact that
its rationality remains irrational. Surrealism gathers up the things the Neøe Søch.Iichkeit denies to human beings; the distortions attest. to the violence that prohibition has done to the objects of desire. Through the distortions, Surrealism salvages what is out of date, an album of idiosyncrasies in which the claim to the happiness that hurnan beings fi¡d denied them in their own technited world goes up in smoke. But if Surrealism itself now seems obsolete, it is because human beings arè now denying themselves the consciousness of denial that was captured in the photographic nEgative that was Surrealism.
Panctaøt'ion Mørþs
en
or
to expression and the more they names, fåe more each of them acquire¡ a definitive physiognomic status of its own, an expression of its own, which cannot be separated from its syatactic function but is by no meÍrns exhausted by it. \NTen the hero of Gotdried Kèller's novel Der grüne Heiørich was asked'about the Gerrnan capital letter P, he exclaimed, "ThaËs pumpernickel!" That experience is certainly true of the figures of puncnration. A¡ exclamation point looks
con
like an index finger raised in warning; a questign mark looks like a flashing light or the blink ofan eye. A cqlón, says Karl l(raus, opens its mouth wide: woe to the writer who does not fi.Il it with something
nourishing. Visually, the semicolon looks like a d-rooping moustacle; I am even more aware of its gamey taste. With self-satisfied peasarit cunning, German quotation marks [""] lick their !ips. AII of them are traffic signals; in the.læt analysis, traffic signals were modeled on tÏerr. Exclamation points are red, colons green, dashes call a halt- But the George Circle was wrong in mistaking them for marks of communication because of this. On the contrary, they are marks of oral delivery; instead of diligently serving the interplay between language and the reader; they serve, hieroglyphicily, * interplay th* t¿kes place in the interior of language, along its own pathways. Flence it is superfluous to omit tlem as being superfluous: then they simply hide. Every text, even the most denseþ woven) cites them of its own accord-friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes ttre bod-y of language .
ff[
LOOKING BACK ON SURREALISM
IIEIE
Looþing
B
øck on Surreol'i,srn
supposed to be a mere dream always leaves reality untouched, whatever damage is done to its image. But that theory does not do justice to the matter. That is not the way
people dream; no one dreams that way. Surrealist constructions are merely analogous to dreams, not more. They suspend the customary logic and the rules'of the game of empirical evidence but in doing so respect the individual objects that have been forcibly removed from their
context and bring their contents, especially their human contents, closer to the form of the object. There is a shatteringanda regrouping, but no
dissolution. The dream, to be sure, does the same thing, but
in the
trrtt currently accepted theory of l- Surrealism, which was set down
in Breton's manifestos but also dominates the secondary literature, links it with dreams, the unconscious, and perhaps Jungian archetyges, which are said to have found in collages and automatic writing an emancipated
image-language uncontaminated by the conscious ego- Dreams, according to this theory, treat the elements of the real the way the method of Surrealism does. If, however, no art is required to understand itself-
dream the object world appears in a form incomparably more disguised and is presented as reality less than it is in Surrealism, where art batters its own foundations. The subject, which is at work much more openly and uninhibitedly in Surrealism than in the dream, directs its energy toward its own self-annihilation, something that requires no energy in
the dream; but because of that everything becomes more objective, so to speak, than in the dream, where the subject, absent from the start, colors and permeates everything that happens from the wings. In the meantime the Surrealists themselves have discovered that people do not free associate the way they, the Surrealists, write, even in psychoanalysis. Furthermore, even the spontaneity of psychoanalytic associations is by no means spontaneous. Every analyst knows how much trouble and exertion, how much effort of will is required to master the involuntary expression that occurs through these efforts, even in the psychoanalytic situation, to say nothing ofthe artistic situation ofthe Surrealists. It is not the unconscious
and one is tempted to consider art's self-understanding and its success almost incompatible-1þ6¡1 it is not necessary to fall in line with this programmatic view, which is repeated by those who expound Surrealism. What is deadly about the interpretation of art, moreover, even philosophically responsible interpretation, is that in the process of conceptuahza' tion it is forced to express what is strange and surprising in terms of what is already familiar and thereby to explain away the only thing that would need explanation. To the extent to which works of art insist on explanation, every one of them, even if against its own intentions, 'Were Surrealism in fact perpetrates a piece of betrayal to conformity. nothing but a collection of literary and graphic illustrations of Jung or even Freud, it would not only duplicate, superfluously, what the theory itself says rather than giving it a metaphorical garb, but it would also be so innocuous that it would hardly Ieave room for the scandal that is Surrealism's intention and its lifeblood. Reducing Surrealism to psychological dream theory subjects it to the ignominy of something official. Companion piece to the well-versed "That is a father figure" is the selfsatisfied "Yes, we know," and, as Cocteau well knew, something that is
in itself that
light in the world-rubble of Surrealism. Assessed unconscious, the symbols would prove much too rationalistic. This kind of decoding would force the luxuriant multiplicity of Surrealism into a few patterns and reduce it to a few meager categories like the Oedipus complex, without attaining the power that emanated from the idea of Surrealism if not from its works of art; F'reud too seems to have responded to Dali this way. After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force. It is as though they had saved Paris by preparing it for fear: the destruction of the city was their center. To conceptualize Surrealism
comes to
in terms of their relationship to the
along these lines, one must go back not to psychology but to Surrealism's artistic techniques. IJnquestionably, they are patterned on the montage. One could easily show that even genuine Surrealist painting works with its motifs and that the discontinuous juxtaposition of images in Surrealist
88
NOTES TO LITERATURE
8s
I
LCOKING BACK ON SURREALISM
lyric poetry is montage-like. But these images derive, as we know, in part literally and in part in spirit from the late nineteenth-century illustrations that belonged to the world of the parents of Max Ernst's generation. There were collections in existence as early as the r9zOs, outside the sphere of Surrealism, like Alan Bott's Oør Fathers' which partookparasitically-of Surrealist shock and by doing so dispensed with the strain of alienation through montage as a kindness to the audience. Authentic Surrealist practice, however, replaced those elements with unfamiliar ones. It is precisely the latter which, through fright, gave that material the aspect of something familiar, the quality of "Where have I seen that beforel" Flence one may assume that the affinity with psychoanalysis lies not in a symbolism of the unconscious but in the attempt to uncover childhood experiences by means of explosions. What Surrealism adds to illustrations of the world of objects is the element of childhood we lost; when we were children, those illustrated papers' already obsolete even then, must have leaped out at us the way Surrealist images do now. The subjective aspect in this lies in the action of the montage, which attempts-perhaps in vain, but the intention is unmistakable-to produce perceptions as they must have been then. The giant egg from which the monster of the Last Judgment can creep forth at any moment is so big because we were so small the first time we looked at an
egg and shuddered.
Obsoleteness contributes to this effect.
in conjunction with the more general thesis that history is progress in the consciousness of freedom, defines the substance of Surrealism: "The sole work and deed ofuniversal freedom therefore is death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling."r Surrealism adopted this critique as its own; this explains its anti-anarchistic political impulses, which, however, were incompatible with its substance. It has been said that in Flegel's thesis the Enlightenment abolishes itself by realizíng itself; the cost of comprehending Surrealism is equally high-it must be understood not as a language of immediacy but as witness to abstract freedom's reversion to the supremacy of objects and thus to mere nature. The montages of Surrealism are the true still lives. In making compositions out of what is out of date, they create tta.tøre rnlrte. These images are not images of something inward; rather, they are fetishes-commodity fetishes-on which something subjective, libido, was once fixated. It is through these fetishes, not through immersion in the self, that the images bring back childhood. Surrealism's models would be pornography. The things that happen in the collages, the things that are convulsively suspended in them like the tense lines of lasciviousness around a mouth, are like the changes that occur in a pornographic image at the moment when the voyeur achieves gratification. Breasts that have been cut off, mannequin's legs in silk stockings in the collagesthese are mementos of the objects of the partial drives that once aroused
the libido. Thinglike and dead, in them what has been forgotten reveals
It
thing modern, already under the spell of tion, to have any history at all. This paradox estranges it, and in the "Children's Pictures for the Modern Age" it becomes the expression of a subjectivity that has become estranged from itself as well as from the world. The tension in Surrealism that is discharged in shock is the tension between schizophrenia and reification; hence it is specifically not a tension of psychological inspiration. In the face of total reification, which throws it back upon itself and its protest, a subject that has become absolute, that has full control of itself and is free of all consideration of the empirical world, reveals itself to be inanimate, something virtually dead. The dialectical images of Surrealism are images of a dialectic of subjective freedom in a situation of objective unfreedom. In them, European Weltschme¡z turns to stone, like the pain of Niobe, who lost her children; in them bourgeois society abandons its hopes of survival. One can hardly assume that any of the Surrealists were familiar with Flegel's Phenomenology, but a sentence from it, which must be considered
seems Paradoxical for somethe sameness of mass produc-
itself to be the true object of love, what love wants to make itself
resemble, what we resemble. As a freezing of the moment of awakening,
Súrrealism is akin to photography. Surrealism's booty is images, to be sure, but not the invariant, ahistorical images of the unconscious subject to which the conventional view would like to neutralize them; rather, they are historical images in which the subject's innermost core becomes aware that it is something external, an imitation of something social and historical. "Come onJoe, imitate that old-time music."* In this respect, however, Surrealism forms the complement to the Neue Sach.licltÈeit, or New Objectivity, which came into being at the same time. The Neae SachlichÈeit's horror of the crime of ornamentation, as Adolf Loos called it, is mobilized by Surrealist shocks. The house has a tumor) its bay window. Surrealism paints this tumor: an excrescence of rA line from the "Bilbao Song" in Brecht and Weill's Happl von damals nach."-Tmnslator's note. Eù:
"Geh Joe, mach die Musik
9o
NOTES TA LITERATURE
I
ETETI
flesh grows frorir the house. Childhood images of the modêrn era are the quintessence of what the Neøe Søchlichþeit makes taboo because it reminds it of its own object-Iike nature and its inability to coPe with the fact that
its rationality remains irrational. Surrealism gathers up the things the Neøe Søch.Iichkeit denies to human beings; the distortions attest. to the violence that prohibition has done to the objects of desire. Through the distortions, Surrealism salvages what is out of date, an album of idiosyncrasies in which the claim to the happiness that hurnan beings fi¡d denied them in their own technited world goes up in smoke. But if Surrealism itself now seems obsolete, it is because human beings arè now denying themselves the consciousness of denial that was captured in the photographic nEgative that was Surrealism.
Panctaøt'ion Mørþs
en
or
to expression and the more they names, fåe more each of them acquire¡ a definitive physiognomic status of its own, an expression of its own, which cannot be separated from its syatactic function but is by no meÍrns exhausted by it. \NTen the hero of Gotdried Kèller's novel Der grüne Heiørich was asked'about the Gerrnan capital letter P, he exclaimed, "ThaËs pumpernickel!" That experience is certainly true of the figures of puncnration. A¡ exclamation point looks
con
like an index finger raised in warning; a questign mark looks like a flashing light or the blink ofan eye. A cqlón, says Karl l(raus, opens its mouth wide: woe to the writer who does not fi.Il it with something
nourishing. Visually, the semicolon looks like a d-rooping moustacle; I am even more aware of its gamey taste. With self-satisfied peasarit cunning, German quotation marks [""] lick their !ips. AII of them are traffic signals; in the.læt analysis, traffic signals were modeled on tÏerr. Exclamation points are red, colons green, dashes call a halt- But the George Circle was wrong in mistaking them for marks of communication because of this. On the contrary, they are marks of oral delivery; instead of diligently serving the interplay between language and the reader; they serve, hieroglyphicily, * interplay th* t¿kes place in the interior of language, along its own pathways. Flence it is superfluous to omit tlem as being superfluous: then they simply hide. Every text, even the most denseþ woven) cites them of its own accord-friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes ttre bod-y of language .
ff[
