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Rupture is true link
Towards a shift from surrealism
so surrealism may shift fo itself
I
For a few years now, new bubbles have been breaking the stagnant waters of the so-called return of surrealism; exhibitions in which surrealism looks like a dying duck in a thunder-storm of confusion, an excess of chroniclers who continue rehashing the same old vulgarization, a flock of proselytes who make periodic visits to holy Paris in the hope of receiving a surrealist benediction from this or that unexquisite corpse of the temple's old guard, and last but not least,this perpetual resurgence of groups who add no_thing,but keep on affirming, in the most trivial way, principles shorn of historical context, there by historeifying the dynamism of these principles. The more they reduce surrealism to sheer politics, the more they deprive it of the political substance that furnishes, immanently, a critique of the political discourse rooted in the revolutionary project.To think ideologically is to deepen the remorse of being born with sin.
In fact, most of these groups reveal themselves, from birth, as unprehensible tails of optimism from once-upon-a-time, and not, as they should be, inventive instances of surrealism, that is traces left by the individuals instinctively aware of the need for a continuos, visceral immolation of the habituation which prohibits man's association with the Cause: that of being free without remission .Things must break apart, Artaud said, if they are to start anew and begin fresh .One can't help being in agreement with what Alain Joubert once said: The habit of thinking ideologically has warped our spirit to the point that our nakedness and what is natural in us scare us. In other words, half the surrealist project , i. e. the millenarian aspect of it, is to be superseded. For the proletarian revolution, which, during the thirties, André Breton thought necessary in order to achieve the surrealist emancipation, was, is, and will be nothing but a mask for that real, everlasting conflict between intellectuals craving to rule and those already ruling. Deep inside, the proletariat itself knows this full well, and this is why it looks forward to improving its being as proletariat - the very image of alienation - rather than destroying it.
II
Unfortunately, Breton died a bit too soon, otherwise he would certainly have paraphrased Marx, that the only thing he knew was that he was not a surrealist ! And had he done so, he would have opened a new possibility for his followers to rescue, at least, the other half, which is " the actual function of thought" to be expressed more profoundly , so that it may attain a higher stage than remaining a reified object worshipped by neophytes who are only fit for poking about in the linen drawers of surrealism's obsolete inventions : collages, automatic writing, etc. I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that these should be completely abandoned. My argument is that, as we all know, every invention calls for a new one; that is, an appeal for outdistancing the repetitive. In other words, a means of surpassing what is lodged in the memory as well as a retrieval of what is retained in any invention. I believe that in recuperating them, the mass-media make more imaginative use of these goddam surrealist inventions.
III
The moment an invention becomes a matter of procedure, not only will it be prostituted by all sorts of uses and abuses, but will also blind one to the living element latent in the invention, thus breaking the continuity of the inventive, interpretive nature of the surrealist approach to given materials. Not to say that the living element itself, if still existant in surrealism, has long since burrowed underground. To bring it back out, it needs fresh youth freed from religious clinging to principles and ready to doubt even the ideals that our founding fathers have struggled for, i. e. a parricidal youth, whose eye is still in a raw state, more devouring than the cannibal's, to the point of being capable, in one glance, of recasting the whole history of surrealism in order to SEE what of noteworthy has been missed in that self-same history. A memoriless eye, able to liberate us from any Aura that surrounds old places and established texts: otherwise we are laced to the illusory beauty of the past, which is woven like a web from which we frequently throw an eye on a wandering tomorrow.Yet, tomorrow will continue to be the worst yesterday.This, however, will invariably demand a break with the language of subversion which, from having once been the language of free men, is nowadays valid as surety on the darkest branding-operations taking place on humankind , as Georges Henein so correctly put it.
IV
I am not against someone being too political nor against another being simply an artist. On the contrary, both of them are needed, but on the condition that each , in his own way, should push the mind to plunge, subobjectively, into surrealism in order to relive with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood , grasping the invisible ray (1) of its emancipatory power. I admit that there are as many pseudo-individuals who play at being inventive and "freed" from collective vulgarisation, while their feet run in vain to cultural institution, as there are those who think they have found the combination of these two separate acts of mind by participating in a demonstration, or signing a collective tract in the day time and, all night long, smearing canvases with surrealist shapes.There is nothing to do about it. Movements, like human beings , have the same destiny : the truer they are, the more crooks they generate.
V
At such a moment, when the surrealist fervour has turned into deluded manifestations and false promises, one is obliged to call surrealism itself into question and dessolve the categories which, out of necessity , it has created through its demystification of Reason, but which have been turned into obstacles, especially the ones ( such as recounting of dreams, imagery , automatic writings, ect.) reified at the hands of its epigones .
However, to retrace the itinerary of this abuse, we must first look back in the late sixties, sparked off by the tract of March 23rd1969 entitled as SAS which brought the attention of the public to the fact that " following the decision reached, by a certain number of them, not to participate in the surrealist activities of the Movement, the surrealists - for reasons that weren't necessarily identical - agreed to suspend their activities starting 8 February 1969." .. emphasizing that " in so far as these activities would not emanate from specific demands; in so far as the individual adventure would not be able to exalt the hazards of the collective activity, it should be understood that the public manifestation of this or that person could not be taken as representative of the Surrealist Movement's activity". A few months later this autodissolution was ignited by Jean Schuster's Le Quatriem Chant , published in Le Monde, on October 4th 1969, in which Schuster made a distinction between historical surrealism, which had reached its end, and an eternal one, which "will assist understanding and the enjoyment of all oneiric faculties and allow for the setting up of the dream as true organiser of human destinies in the practise of living". Still, many efforts were made to reflect upon doing something. But these efforts to produce a possible surrealist action were , in fact, futile , if not a veritable bundle of personal accounts to be settled. For, even if someone, sincerly , tried to organise a solid group coherent in its decisions and taking all the new forms of confrontation into account, thus hoping to become a reliable , critical reference-point for newcomers, IT COULD NOT WORK , for the simple reason that the given situation was such , as accurately phrased by Alain Joubert, that there was no more surrealist movement but many surrealists in movement .(2)
VI
In a letter of August 16th 1949 to Nicolas Calas, Georges Henein noticed that when he tried to suggest to Andrژ Breton , on his return from America, that a general consultation of surrealists throughout the world was more urgent than a show-off's exhibition, Breton evaded the issue , arguing that only confusion would arise from it .Yet in spite of this peculiar way of despairing about the future of the surrealist movement (3), the confusion which Breton wanted to avoid was not very far from prevailing. Peripheral surrealists ( Cobra, Revolututionary Surrealism, Lyrical Abstractionism, Bauhaus Imaginiste, letterism, etc.) had surfaced to show evidence of new necessities for intervention. Their experiments, which were the dernier cri of the Cold war's aesthetic sensibility, did, to an extent , succeed in breaking through the traditional imagery of surrealism , putting it at stake. The Duchampian water-mark of surrealism was called to account throughout the fifties.
New forms of expression ( such as psychogeography, dérive, détournement, etc.) had infiltrated the fifties' creative scene, outmoding certain surrealist procedures. For example , détournement , which Lautréamont was the first to practise and which was reinvested and popularized in the sixties by the situatuionists, was introduced as postwar negation of the value of the previous organisation of expression.. Which is to say , the Lautréamont of automatic writing adopted by the surrealists was contradicted by Lautréamont's original method : détournement the historically given capacity of devaluation according to which all the elements of cultural past must be reinvested or disappear (Asger Jorn).
Still , all these new flashes of subversion which emerged from under surrealism's unresolved past and which previously lived in confusion and doubt (Debord) had expected nothing but theoretical guidance from surrealism for radical action, in order to effect the vitality of the surrealist alternative and the deepening of its initial insights and intention (Breton). Surrealism, however , gave them short shrift. It has never elaborated a theory as it did a corpus of poetry. Theory, in the classical and modern sense of the word, was a vigorous dream that surrealism was unable to communicate, although it was intuitively scattered here and there. In addition , surrealism, by taking no notice of the alarm that these flashes were producing , had given ground to a deceptive dialectic of success inherent within the praxis of art, i. e. to gain an advantage by "dissolving" this praxis " into ordinary aesthetic commerce", thus bringing about a new dichotomy , this time in disguise, between art and politics; and the dealers of this deceptive dialectic " would like people to believe that surrealism was the most radical and disturbing movement possible" , only to prevent a new revolutionary growth of it , and thus cultivating a nostalgical surrealism,at the same time while discredit any new venture by automatically reducing it to a sort of a surrealist déjà vu.
At all events, if the fifties were, as Benjamin Péret beleived, considered simply as troubled waters of banalities brought to an overflow by those who, in creating the equivocal and confused, thought that they had brought something new(4), only to extinguish the true flame of surrealism which a small band of youthful souls were traditionally resolved to keep alive (5), then we may consider the fact that surrealism, in opening the door to the Situationist International ( the locus of all these subversive flashes) to fish a situation in these troubled waters , had certainly created a mole that thereafter would justifiably undermine the whole politics of surrealism.In other words, the growth of the Situationist Internationall's challenge to fulfill a historical need to change the archaic forms of constestation had pulled the carpet from under the surrealists' feet .For the situationists did not only expose,with a sneering tone, the contradictory politics of the surrealist dream and its lack of theoretical depth, but they also integrated and streamlined all that can distingush surrealism from art movements (its insults, interventions, insolent tracts, threatening behaviour, etc.) to the point that the surrealist use of language , which became an elemental part of the theoretical whole that surfaced after '68, bore the stamp of the situationists, and not that of the surrealists. One of the reasons was that, for the situationists, there was no longer " an ambiguity" which the surrealists were happy to discover in writing a poem,"between the language of 'truth' and the language of 'creation' , but a common purpose to be " carried out" as a " totally innovative collective action" on its way " to execute the judgment that contemporary leisure was pronouncing against itself" . For " our era no longer has to write out poetic orders; it has to carry them out", so believed the situationists (6).
VII
The destruction of the Halles was a straw in the wind : a new memory forum was erected on its ruins, marking the fact that a phase of nostalgic confrontation was declining. Yet a flood of revolutionary programmes, accusing the old ones of betrayal, had invaded the bookshops; La Joie de Lire bookshop was in vogue. Blacked-out desires, repressed within surrealist culture (such as Le Grand Jeu, Bataille, Artaud, Dadaists, etc.) , started to glitter. Reprints of their approaches to the surrealist narrative of change became the verbiosity of the day. There might have been useful, penetrating remarks in this retrieval of old revolutionary styles, but the way the old quarrels were exhumed and people received ideas born in a different epoch had blinded the young generation to any critical observation of what was really going on. I remember that when I arrived in Paris in mid-May 1972, I noticed that upon everyone I met in the Latin Quarter there prevailed a charm of fairies, as if the heartwaited leap from the kingdom of necessity to that of liberty would be achieved in a few days. Truth was lying in ambush for the slightest doubt ! That revolution, no one could believe that it had melted into thin air, forever throatling revolutionaries. Only a few plants which had skirted the boulevards for a century or more WEPT at that time. For Dutch elm disease had gnawed at the root of an era, and the government's decision to sell trees had already been taken.The dustbin of History is so loaded with the carriers of change, that surrealism yields to sublation.
VIII
I have brought back all these basic banalities, sporadically I know, neither to flaunt my concord with the situationists' critique of separation between the surrealist image and its results ( although I disagree with their political-minded calculations on poetic matters), nor to cast doubt on surrealism's good faith in beating all the historical separations or on the genuineness of its principles , but simply to underline the fact that there were other bloody reasons which played a great deal too in delegitimatizing the surrealist label here in France and, to a degree , throughout the world.For instance, the prerogative of surrealism to intervene in the social sphere was historically confiscated after '68. Go blame the situationists, if you like. But to retrieve it, without falling into mere phraseology so widely prevalent in the writings of all its contemporary epigones , means being sharply conscious not only of the everchanging kaleidoscope of its recurrence, but also of the trap brought about by radical confrontation with the status quo. If this prerogative has " to be manifested anew", it must be then " manifested under the angle of dynamism proper to surrealism" (Breton) itself , and not to an optimism which the social sphere invariably diffuses in order to integrate any hidden drive that could , owing to the force of being unable to express itself, become its foe.
Therefore , it seemed that only the neutral zone was left for the surrealist revolt to express itself, i. e., it had to be expressed in forms that were neither those of negation nor of affirmation; thus its perpetrators would inevitably be beyond reprobation or approbation, as André Breton thought towards the end of his life(7) . This neutral zone is none other than the long awaited whereabouts of L'Ecart Absolu, i.e. the 1956 exhibition title, whose material point has never since been practised or furthered by the self-labelled surrealists. On the contrary , some of them , namely those who were sullied by the dross of nostalgia, insisted on going on, as if no change of terrain had happened, thereby dropping the substance for the shadow. They inked thousands of sheets of paper with all the residues of the surrealist procedures, leaving nothing worthwhile reading , because in reality , they were then as now, squabbling amongst each other about who was going to be the head of a movement that not only had been stilled by history, but was also in the new generation's eyes , already a corpse. Each of them was trying, through his old card-membership, to gain the lion's share from it ( thinking , in this way, that he could use up in advance that which belongs to posterity) in the hope of proving that he alone is the true holder of the right to confer upon one proselyte or another the title of surrealist. Notwithstanding, they did not enjoy this sharing of the spoils , which was nothing but a miserable spectacle of the return of their repressed authoritarianism. For, to be a surrealist in such a hilarious time means becoming something like " a court-messenger who travels the world over, carrying messages which have no meaning, since royalty has long disappeared"( Lichtenberg).
IX
What a post-surrealist picture to have, today , one of the old guard, locked in his study, writing letter after letter , and doing nothing about the fact that , since the death of André Breton, his subconsciousness is burdened with ants . Could not a witch's broom do something in place of the giant anteater ? The snake's poison lies in its body and not in its fangs , as the arab proverb goes.
Surrealism today is a cause without rebels
Paris 1986
Notes
1- André Breton : Manifestoes of Surrealism , the University of Michigan Press, 1969,p.39.
2- Pour communication : Réponses ˆ l'enquête " Rien ou Quoi? ", a 162 page document issued privately in march of 1970.,Paris.p.50.
3- See Grid n، 2, p.7-8.
5-Péret commented on the situationists in these terms :...Une soi-disant Internationale Situationiste qui s'imagine apporter du nouveau en créant l'équivoque et la confusion. Mais n'est-ce pas dans ces eaux troubles qu'on pèche une situation ? BIEF,n، 1 (15 novembre 1958).
5- Gérard Legrand , Le Surréalisme, même, n،2.
6- Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, Berkeley, California, 1981,p. 117
7- See Octavio Paz's André Breton ou la recherche du commencement , in his Courant Alternatif, Gallimard, 1970,p. 73.
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