Lucas Almássy
What is Surrealism?An Essay Between Art and Architecture
Preface
Surrealism is not a style, it is a revolution. It began as an aesthetic-political tradition in 1924 Paris with publishing of The Surrealist Manifesto in the first issue of the magazine: La Révolution Surréaliste led by André Breton – seeking to structurally re-imagine society and our social relationship to others and ourselves.
Surrealists believe that the imagination is being attacked and suppressed and must be actively reasserted in everyday life. In essence, Surrealism seeks to collapse the distinction between dream and reality, producing a surreality. It also seeks to defend the superior nature of previously neglected associations, and to advocate the practice of automatism, revealing the actual functioning of thought. Surrealism insists on the production of irrational art, technology, everyday objects, and ornament. Moreover, Surrealism advocates the expression of irrational thoughts in any and all areas of life.
But a century after its inception, Surrealism has been forgotten and the social character of life today seems more in need of it than ever.
This book aspires for its resurgence today. This book sees enormous potential in Surrealism for helping designers and citizens in exacting a better future.
This book reveals examples of Surrealist design in the form of a four-part Exhibition. There are four avenues in which Surrealism and design authentically intersect: a surreal door, its prototypes, exquisite drawings, and ornamentation. This book begins with the apotheosis of the relation between surrealism and design: a surreal door.
Explanations, theory, and analysis of Surrealism and design have been placed in an Appendix to allow the reader to experience the work without unnecessary, pre-mature rhetoric.
Excerpts by Surrealists and its critics from a variety of sources are disclosed intermittently within the Exhibition to allow the reader to comprehend new relationships between surreal theory and design work. In the Selected Bibliography, one may find the proper resources from which the excerpts come – in the hopes of further studying this fascinating subject.
Quotes
“... the belief, as it were, in a real, separate existence of concepts, whether external to things or within them – has always migrated very quickly from the logical realm of concepts to the magical one of words. And magical word experiments, not artistic games, are at the heart of the play of passionate phonetic and graphic transformations that for fifteen years now have permeated the literature of the avant-garde, whether it goes by the name of futurism, Dadaism, or surrealism.... [Breton and others] link surrealism to the real world by declaring that the conquests of science owe much more to surrealistic than to logical thinking.”
Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, 1929.
“ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all, all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.”
André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924
“Surrealism can boast of an astonishing discovery. It was the first to stumble on the revolutionary energies that manifest in the ‘out of date,’ in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photographs, the objects that are beginning to die out, the salon pianos, the clothes that were fashionable five years ago, the trendy restaurants when their popularity has begun to wane. How these things relate to revolution – no one can have a more accurate concept of this than these authors. How poverty, not just the social kind, but also architectural impoverishment, the misery of interiors, the enslaved and enslaving things can suddenly turn into revolutionary nihilism...”
Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, 1929.
“SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”
André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924
“We combat, in whatever form they may appear, poetic indifference, the distraction of art, scholarly research, pure speculation; we want nothing whatever to do with those, either large or small, who use their minds as they would a savings bank.”
André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924
“...it is not such a bad thing for these images to upset the mind, for to upset the mind is to put it in the wrong... the mind which relishes them draws therefrom the conviction that it is on the right track; on its own, the mind is incapable of finding itself guilty of cavil; it has nothing to fear, since, moreover, it attempts to embrace everything.”
André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924
“Language has been given to man so he may make surrealist use of it... [expression] presents no real problem for him... he is not worried about the words that are going to come, nor about the sentences which will follow after the sentence he is just completing.... this unrestricted language... lends me to extraordinary lucidity... I have occasion to use surreally words whose meaning I have forgotten. I was subsequently able to verify that the way in which I had used them corresponded perfectly with their definition. This would lead one to believe that we do not ‘learn,’ that all we ever do is ‘relearn.’”
André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924
“...we cannot find words enough to stigmatize the baseness of Western thought, if we are not afraid to take up arms against logic, if we refuse to swear that some thing we do in dreams is less meaningful than something we do in a state of waking, if we are not even sure that we will not do away with time, that sinister old farce that train constantly jumping off the track, mad pulsation, inextricable conglomeration of breaking and broken beasts, how do you expect us to show any tenderness, even to be tolerant, toward any apparatus of social conservation, of whatever sort it may be.”
André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1929
“...the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory...”
André Breton, Second Manifeso of Surrealism, 1929
“...we cannot find words enough to stigmatize the baseness of Western thought, if we are not afraid to take up arms against logic, if we refuse to swear that some thing we do in dreams is less meaningful than something we do in a state of waking, if we are not even sure that we will not do away with time, that sinister old farce that train constantly jumping off the track, mad pulsation, inextricable conglomeration of breaking and broken beasts, how do you expect us to show any tenderness, even to be tolerant, toward any apparatus of social conservation, of whatever sort it may be?”
André Breton, Second Manifeso of Surrealism, 1929
“for [you the observer] there is no excuse for considering the movement, as it might appear at first blush, ‘artistic’ or ‘poetic’. While this may have been true initially, Breton also stated right at the outset that he wanted to break with a practice that presents the public with the literary condensates of a particular form of existence and withholds this form of existence itself. More succinctly and dialectically put, this means that here the realm of poetry was exploded from within, as a circle of close associates pushed ‘poetic life’ to the extreme limits of the possible.”
Walter Benjamin, Surrealism, 1929
“The tension in surrealism that discharges itself in the shock is the tension between schizophrenia and reification ...”
Theodor W. Adorno, Surrealism Reconsidered, 1956.
What is Surrealism?
Surrealism is often regarded as simply an art movement and style that advocates dream-like imagery and visual provocation. But counter to popular knowledge, Surrealism is far more rigorous and complex; it is an aesthetic-political tradition that seeks to structurally re-imagine society and our social relationship to others and ourselves. Surrealism recognizes that the human faculty of imagination is being increasingly repressed and must reassert itself into every corner of life. It also aspires to access the secrets of the Freudian unconscious. In short, Surrealism is a revolution.
André Breton was the founder of Surrealism in Paris. In 1924, Breton wrote The First Manifesto of Surrealism for the first publication of the magazine: La Révolution Surréaliste. Its definition is twofold, one practical, one philosophical. Let us get to know its philosophical aspect first:
ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all, all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
The key to understanding Surrealism philosophically is to recognize that we neglect associations. Every day, we run through the motions of our daily concerns and countless times, we fail to disclose potentially important associations.
A simple example might look like this: you are with your significant other in a retail store, and they try on a dress in the changing room. When they come out, they ask, “How do I look?” and you might say, “Yea, you look great!” But in your mind, you might think the opposite. For instance, you might actually be thinking about how you associate that dress with your mother. But you cannot bring yourself to say it out loud for whatever reason, and thus (in terms of Surrealism:) you neglect the association. You do not speak up, remaining silent and pretending as though nothing is wrong.
This phenomenon of association neglection is made countless times in all sorts of scenarios, from a business meeting, to a political rally, to a playground. One can begin to imagine the loss of potential we all subscribe to when we do not speak our minds in scenarios far more crucial than you and your significant other. This phenomenon is the enemy of the Surrealist and is precisely the what Surrealism hopes to counter in the realm of art, literature, and politics.
The ordinary solution to this problematic phenomenon is to speak up. But André Breton goes further, revealing to us the second, practical definition of surrealism:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Automatism is quite simply the remedy to the phenomenon of association neglection. Automatism is simply the continuous expression of yourself. Think to all the conversations you have had with coworkers, acquaintances, and friends: what you say is always warped and cut short. You might stop yourself from saying something too mean, too awkward, too weird to a coworker. Your friend might cut you short. Or the subject of conversation accidently digresses. Everyday situations cause you to express yourself in a fragmented, warped ways. Everyday expression of oneself is principally a problem for the Surrealist.
Automatism is a solution to that problem. Automatism displays the actual functioning of thought without censorship or repression. The practice of automatism is most easily visible in the practice of art. For example, André Breton and others engaged frequently in automatic writing, where the writer must continually write, non-stop for a certain amount of time, without lifting the pen off the paper. And if the writer did not know where to start, they would randomly write a letter and continue. The results were always extraordinary.
Automatism is the Surrealist method by which to trust every single thought you have. To express yourself automatically is to have full certainty in your ideas and in yourself. Here, you cease to inhibit yourself with shame, fear, anxiety, or self-consciousness and rather let your imagination run wild and free. An example of this today is in freestyle rap. Here the musician-rapper must continuously produce verses in real time – something very little people today can do.
Further, automatism is something the Surrealists sought to slowly adopt into everyday life – it was a sort of politics. This adoption into everyday life was something they always struggled in formulating. Dreams became an avenue from which to explain this further. In the first manifesto, André Breton states:
I believe in the future resolution 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. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate some slight degree the joys of its possession.
We sleep for a strikingly large amount of our total time on earth and much of that sleep is spent dreaming. In dreams, strange things always happen; not only do our dream environments impossibly appear out of nowhere and orientations continually warp and re-shape, but we also commit to acts we would never commit to in a waking state. Reality is filled with a sort of censorship, in which our desires and our associations are cut off from being expressed, while dreams flow with impossible events and radical action.
The rational character of reality and everyday social structures is principally at fault for the Surrealist. The structure of our social world is continually self-censoring in a Foucauldian panoptic sort of way. Kids are scared of expressing themselves for fear of becoming an outcast and remain tied to conventional sources of recognition such as schooling and family.
The spaces we live in have becomes easy, rational, and predictable. Ready for total efficiency and rationality. Surreal design seeks to change that. Designed objects can be surreal by virtue of any of the following methods: i. Surreal due to the implementation of dream-functions ii. Surreal due to a re-or dys-function of ordinary objects iii. Surreal due to a development via automatism iv. Surreal due to unexpected chance occurrences v. Surreal due to maintaining the omnipotence of previously neglected associations
These are the standards by which to develop surrealism and design further (see Appendix V for elaboration on surrealism and the design of technology).
In conclusion, Surrealism is a revolution against the bourgeois mind-set, which we all are guilty of subscribing to. Surrealism is against this mindset of sticking to steadfast, logical, rational modes of behavior in which expression censors itself. The Surrealists see these bourgeois values of hyper-moralization, rational modes of thought, and technical instrumentalism as inhibiting the proper progress of humanity, producing cultural stagnation.
Advocating surrealism does not necessitate the rejection of all rationality. For we need rationality to make sense of anything, to practice science, to communicate, and to be truly human. But rather, Surrealism recognizes the faults and pathologies of reason. Being reasonable turns quickly into ideology. Surrealism recognizes that reason can inhibit our cultural and individual progression into new places and new orientations towards life. More accurately, reason must dis-integrate into unreason and, with a Surrealist practice, be reformulated new forms of reason.
Surrealism saw modern Parisian bourgeois society suppressing the mental gift of creative imagination unbeknownst to itself. Their ideologies keep them stuck in conventional forms of behavior because they seek total rationality – escaping judgement. This phenomenon – akin to György Lukács’s Marxist concept of reifi cation is still apparent today. In which, political correctness forces us to silence and sterilize our ideas; and with the introduction of the internet and cameras seeking to record our every move, we shudder at the idea of acting out of the ordinary and from our imagination. We self-regulate under no other basis other than to remain within the status quo. “Being weird” feels like a crime. We fear being an outcast and remain fixed in our everydayness. The LGBTQ institutions and queer theories bring us into the right direction of fostering appreciation of difference and imagination. But it is not enough; Surrealists saw the only solution to be a revolution in which no human is left behind.
The Function of Ornament
Architectural ornamentation belongs to the arsenal of the Surrealist. Ornament is the re-presentation and combination of discrete things – from flowers to human figures to mythical stories – in liminal or transitional spaces of the objects ornament rests on. A classic example: a Corinthian column – in which the transition space between a column and a lintel is embellished with flora. In the following we will debunk the popular belief which regards ornament as extraneous and useless. Kent Bloomer in The Nature of Ornament defi nes the nature of ornament and introduces the concept of metamorphosis:
the realm of ornament is not just a place of gathering it is also a place in which dismemberment and combination are sanctioned. In order to mediate among things, the mechanisms of ornament must divide, transform, and reconventionalize the articles of mediation as well as the meanings implicit in the states in which they were born. This peculiar activity creates metamorphoses...
Ornament mirrors the values of surrealism because they both sanction such activities described above: from dismembering, to combining, to reconventionalizing. But metamorphosis inherent in the design of ornament has a deeper meaning and connection to surrealism; Kent Bloomer reveals a psychological, ethical dimension:
...in our coping with reality, the psychological function of what I am calling metamorphosis.... [is] an important part of our healthy engagement with the world... certain external realities of appearances must be dissolved into fragments only to be reformed and differently combined into emerging and future realities.... such moments [are] transitional spaces of gaps that occur in the course of our normal mental and cultural lives. In the psychological sense, they are periods after which we can gradually modify our orientations to reality. As such, they are mental places of growth, renewal, and re-creation.
Now, metamorphosis is not just a generic visual characteristic of ornament, but a general psychological function in all humans. This fact establishes the ethical basis for the production of ornament because ornament becomes the necessary recording and appreciation of mental processes – whether rational or not. This beneficial process of metamorphosis in ornamentation mirrors the philosophical values of Surrealism because the Surrealist is always in the process of metamorphosizing – whether mentally or physically in the realm of art or both.
To create ornament is to display metamorphoses of reality in new – seemingly illogical – ways. For example, a horse might have the head of a human or as Salvador Dali had done: a telephone receiver is replaced with a lobster. These metamorphoses, although initially irrational and nonsensical, prove to be beneficial for the Surrealist, because it maintains “the omnipotence of previously neglected associations” (quote from the philosophical definition of surrealism – see Appendix II). In fact, the act of ornamental metamorphosis is the Surrealist’s active recognition of
Even in its dilapidated resurgence in the postmodern era of American architecture, headed by the publication of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction and others, ornamentation has been repressed and constricted to the reproduction of past motifs and styles or the abstract play of blank forms. The Greeks had the courage to create their own ornament – producing meanings, myths, stories, and significance – and we had the audacity to copy them. Surrealism (as well as Bloomer’s concept of metamorphosis) establishes the ethical basis from which to authentically produce architectural ornamentation today. In light of these theories, we can see the value, usefulness, and function of ornamentation – it is a space of growth, renewal, and recreation.
“previously neglected associations”.
Louis Sullivan, the father of American skyscrapers, was also a master of ornamentation. The strength of his work lies in the ornamental metamorphoses that happen in every corner of his architecture. In the ornament one can see Sullivan acting like a Surrealist: everyday objects and flora are collaged and morph into irrational, composite ideas – like an Exquisite Corpse. The ideas for a new piece of technology or future life seem to be growing out of the building; perhaps Sullivan’s watchful lions with shields on the entrance of The Farmers and Merchants Union Bank was a Surrealist premonition of security cameras spreading over all corners of cities today.
Games
The Surrealists occupied much of their time playing games and making art because they saw a profound lack of originality, imagination, and experimentation in bourgeois social reality. Surrealist games allow for anyone to unshackle their imagination, engage with objective chance, and practice automatism.
Each game requires a certain minimum of people to play. Some require silent focus for long durations with a pen and paper, while others require quick verbal responses. All games run under the principle of automatism, Surrealism’s one true practical definition:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Surrealist games include: Automatic Writing, Exquisite Corpse, Conditionals, Illot-Mollo, Analogy Cards, Collage of Chance, and others (for in-depth instructions for each game, refer to The Book of Surrealist Games by Mel Gooding).
Not only were the game played for this book. But by using the rigorous philosophical and practical definitions of Surrealism, games were modified to foster a direct relationship with design. The games often cause eruptions of laughter at the ridiculous irrationality spoken aloud. This laughter is key. All the while everyone laughs at some kind of strange situation created, behind the laughter and behind the speechless mouths are serious thoughts – in which we can’t help but sink into: “What did they really mean by that? Wait, maybe that’s all really possible...”. Those moments of laughter are the trails Surrealism challenges us to walk through, delving into the consciousness of each and every person. Surrealism begs us to try to understand the mental worlds of our peers, prying them open with language games and artistic creativity.
These games were played during several Surrealist meetings during the spring 2020 semester. Meetings were set up by The Berkeley Surrealist Group just south of the UC Berkeley campus outside an apartment. The meetings consisted of playing these games and making art. The Exquisite Corpses and Exquisite Tools in Exhibit 3 of this book were products of these meetings. These Surrealist games are methods for social gathering to uproot the baseless, rational, These pamphlets were passed out at the beginning of each surrealist group meeting. Inside these pamphlets lied many games, such as Automatic Writing, Exquisite Corpse, Conditionals, Illot Mollo, Embellish Architecture, and others.
Surrealism and Schooling
A century after its inception, Surrealism has been forgotten – in this book we seek for its resurgence today. Its tenants and values as an aesthetic-political tradition offer a coherent cri-tique of contemporary western society (Part I) and a direction from which to exact a better world (Part II).
Part I – Surrealism’s Critique
Surrealism is an aesthetic political tradition that holds the philosophical rigor to provide a both a critique and a positive solution to the society which it critiques. Surrealism ought to be read as a continuation or mirroring of critical theory in general. Lowey Michael writes succinctly:
... [Breton’s] Marxism, like that of Jose Carlos Mariategui, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse, draws upon the subterranean current running through the twentieth century, beneath the immense blockades constructed by orthodoxy: Romantic Marxism. By this I mean a kind of thought which is fascinated by certain cultural forms of the precapitalist past and which rejects the cold, abstract rationality of modern industrial civilization – but which changes that nostalgia into a force in the battle for the revolutionary transformations of the present. All Romantic Marxists struggle against the capitalist disenchantment of the world (which is the logical and necessary result of quantification, commercialization, and reifi cation of social relations), but in André Breton and the Surrealists the Romantic/revolutionary urge to reenchant the world through imagination finds its most striking expression. [1]
So yes, Surrealism offers a critique of society. But what is it exactly? Understood from a fragmented collection of manifestos and lectures that Breton gave, the critique argues: the rational character of contemporary life is principally a problem. For them, reason itself has done the disservice of censoring and repressing the expression of our deepest feelings. We self-exterminate our own potential in the society we live in today. Ideology is perhaps thusly understood as unnecessary reason that is a barrier placed against total artistic, political expression.
Surrealism’s critique of society runs parallel to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of Enlightenment. In which the conventional concept of the enlightenment as a beneficial event in human history is stabbed in the back. If, as Adorno and Horkheimer state: “Enlightenment’s program was the dis-enchantment of the world” [2] then surrealists sought for its re-enchantment. How exactly did that seek to do this?
To answer this question of re-enchantment. The ordinary idea is: well, we must become religious; that we must all agree that the world is not reducible to our concepts of them; that there is always something transcendent to the given situation, that is, God himself. But this is not the route the Surrealists take. In fact, they were keen on openly and publicly shouting at priests. They did not trust the traditional value hierarchies of religious groups. Instead, the surrealists achieved reenchantment in the form of a profane epiphany (also translated by Margaret Cohen as “Profane Illumination” in her book by the same title). Walter Benjamin coined this phrase:
“...in the writings of the Surrealists, what is at stake is not literature but something else – demonstration, password document, bluff, even counterfeit, in any case precisely no literature – also knows that this discourse is literally about experiences, not theories, much less phantasms. And these experiences are by no means limited to dreams, to hours of hashish eating or opium smoking.... But the true, creative overcoming of religious epiphany is plainly not to be found in psychoactive drugs. It is to be found in a profane epiphany, a materialist, anthropological inspiration for which hashish, opium, or whatever else can provide preparatory training.” [3]
The Surrealist commits to their own thoughts, their own passions, and their own hopes. “Committing” is perhaps too simple of a word for this. Rather they are overcome by something – as if in a dream – they are controlled by something divine. This most clearly reveals Walter Benjamin’s understanding of a Surrealist practice – solving the problems that the surre-alist critique of society disclosed.
From this we can deduce that the surrealists in a sense al-ready implicitly or unconsciously know that “Myth is already Enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” [4] Think of the practices of Salvador Dali, in which put himself to sleep with his hand in a bowl of water, and when he woke, he painted what he saw. Dreams are in a sense, divine and transcendental due to the fact that we cannot control it. The best artists – like all surrealist – are overcome by something. The rational, enlightened, western world today can’t say the same, such a phenomenon would seem to be purely a hoax or superstition.
***
In assessing the character and consequences of Surrealism, Theodore Adorno writes in his short essay, Surrealism Re-considered:
“The tension in surrealism that discharges itself in the shock is the tension between schizophrenia and reification...” [5]
Schizophrenia is opposed to reification because it is perhaps the most a-rational characteristic someone can have. We see a schizophrenic walking down the street, they don’t ac-knowledge their selfhood. They switch moods in a split moment. They might yell like a child, call to an invisible captain as though they were a WWII sailor off the shores of Dunkirk, or cry over a lost dress. On the hand, a reified person is on the opposite spectrum in which all irrationality is suppressed in the name of reason. They commit to a perfectly rational, calculable world without acknowledgment of the deep uncan-niness of the organized world they live in.
Adorno is correct to see that, Surrealism is the shock and ten-sion of these two states of schizophrenia and reifi cation. And that shock as a critique of society turns into a dialectical transition into a better world. Surrealism aspires for the renunci-ation of these two terms and hopes to arise from the rubble as a new ideal person, who understands its deeply privileged position in the universe but acknowledges its deep mythical unfreedom.
Andre Breton writes: “If through Surrealism, we reject unhesitatingly the notion of the sole possibility of the things which ‘are,’ and if we ourselves declare that by a path which ‘is’ a path which we can show and help people to follow, one can arrive at what people claimed ‘was not’ if we cannot find words enough to stigmatize the baseness of Western thought, if we are not afraid to take up arms against logic, if we refuse to swear that something we do in dreams is less meaningful than something we do in a state of waking, if we are not even sure that we will not do away with time, that sinister old farce that train constantly jumping off the track, mad pulsation, inextricable conglomeration of breaking and broken beasts, how do you expect us to show any tenderness, even to be tolerant, toward any apparatus of social conservation, of whatever sort it may be?” [6]
To be more practical about this critique and what to do: Sur-realists recognize that society itself – in its very structure – assumes that people lack imagination. The American school system is perhaps the worst state institution today, ready for its own internal surrealist revolution. For instance, kids are placed into school to be taught. But this schooling gets in the way of their real education. They become cogs of a sys-tem all too easily under their own permission. Schooling, we could say splits into science and art. (Learning science today of course requires a sort of reifi ed mind, no?) The realm and discourse of art is reduced to interpretation in Art History and English classes. Imagination for creating a better new world is implicitly rejected and instead students are inundated into a system of sense-making in which they reuse the same symbols and signs to express the same things. A total homogenization replaces an active imagination. In schooling, the unknown is rejected before it can even speak itself into existence. Chil-dren are assumed to know nothing to provide to the world and instead are worn down by a grading system. Walter Ben-jamin reminds us elsewhere that “We must wake up from the dreams of our parents,” but schooling keeps us incarcerated – physically and mentally.
Breton tries to explain the surrealist’s hopes: “We submit that the Surrealist endeavor can only hope to be crowned with success if it is carried out under conditions of moral asepsis which very few people in this day and age are interested in hearing about. Without these conditions, it is, however, impossible to arrest the spread of this cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things ‘are,’ while others, which well might be, ‘are not.’ We have suggested that they must merge into each other, or very perceptibly impinge upon each other at their respective limits. It is a matter, not of remaining there at that point, but of not being able to do less than to strain desperately toward that limit.” [7]
Surrealist Solutions
The surrealists perhaps might regard the values of today’s so-cial structure of school as deeply problematic. More specifically, schooling today requires dual literacy in science and art. But in the realm of art, interpretation is far more import-ant than art practice. Reasoning is privileged in unnecessary ways – over other methods of sense-making.
“...the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory...” [8]
The American schooling system does not condone this “diz-zying descent” but instead it sponsors a dull relearning of outdated concept – resulting in daydreaming kids that get prescribed medication for their supposed attention defi cit disorders. But perhaps the United States is guilty of creating a schooling system with its own defi cit disorder: fi xated on beating china for better test scores.
Walter Benjamin recognizes another method of surrealist political action today to when he says:
“for [you the observer] there is no excuse for considering the movement, as it might appear at first blush, ‘artistic’ or ‘poetic’. While this may have been true initially, Breton also stated right at the outset that he wanted to break with practice that presents the public with the literary condensates of a particular form of existence and withholds this form of existence itself. More succinctly and dialectically put, this means that here the realm of poetry was exploded from within, as a circle of close associates pushed ‘poetic life’ to the extreme limits of the possible.” [9]
The Surrealist Group was a band of artists. But art was too contemplative for them. Art presents condensates of particular forms of existence, but, as Benjamin notes above, art had to be exploded from within. Surrealism today is a band of artists who are weary of using the term art in the first place. They recognize its frail quality in the marketplace and prefer a different condition, one far more political than ever before.
I will get more personal... For what do we live for? For others? For beauty? For the divine? For the elimination of oppression? Most who sit in their home in the suburbs do not know how to spend their lonely hours other than chasing some form these options. Most engage in art on way or another. All will be quick to realize what is necessary for good art: a life well lived. In other words, art is not just like an essay where you say the right words and make a coherent argument, rather good art is a vestige of a life well lived. In this way art bleeds into reality. The surrealist don’t care for bleeding. They want an explosion. Walter Benjamin saw into the future. He some-how knew that kids growing up a century (today) would be concerned primarily with the poetic life. And still, the poetic life is the life of those of the distant future.
When we think to a communist society or a socialist society where chasing the money is absent. We often think to our-selves, what will be left of life if we are not struggling to be economically successful? I would argue and beg of you to see that the artist of today, who post on twitter and Instagram and their own blogs are those who deserve to live in a soci-ety without a capitalist commodity structure. These kinds of youth today are proof that making a place where money is not an oppressive structure, is worth fighting for.
Think to a pianist kid who works on his art every day. He is lucky because he has parents who support him. Money is not an oppressive thing against him, until he grows up and needs to graduate from high school. His thrust towards beauty and imagination and the unknown is thwarted by the need to earn money. In capitalism, the dreamer’s life always ends in tragedy. The Surrealist revolution is a revolution to end this tragedy.
Benjamin offers a course of action and a value system to deflect ideology today. Essentially, by being rude. Politeness now is also an unnecessary form of ideology. Benjamin in the last pages of his essay, Surrealism:
“What is characteristic of this entire left-bourgeois position is its fatal linkage of idealist morality and political practice. Only by contrasting them with the hapless compromises of ‘moral values’ can certain key components of surrealism, indeed of the surrealist tradition, be comprehended. Little, until now, has been done to foster such comprehension.... We find the cult of evil as a tool – albeit a romantic one – for infecting and isolating politics from all moralizing dilettantism.” [10]
Benjamin here reveals a weak point in general leftist thought revealed by surrealism. Such a revealing is still valid today: I would argue that the political landscape is strangely empty today. All we do is defend against idle talk which pretends to be actual criticism. Twitter is filled to the brim with rightwing attacks against a political left that assumes a “higher moral ground.” Call-out culture, in which the left-wing twit-ter derails entire careers for one person’s mis-step (although some are more than a mere “mis-step” of course). And ideas and imagination for a better future are simply collectively pejoratively categorized as communist. The “cult of evil as a tool” is beginning to be (arguably) coopted by American conservatives.
But do not fear, a new band of people are growing today: a cult of artists – connected by the internet. But art today is constantly under the sway of the commodity structure. What is beautiful to one person might not be to another. This would naturally not be a problem. But in our present form of capital-ism and mass media, this dissonance (between two person’s idea of beauty) produces a problem. Let me explain how, when one person creates art they find beautiful and mean-ingful, it always gets warped under the process of production because the artist constantly thinks to themselves, “will the market like this?” if the answer is no, then that person must start over again. It is in this way that we deceive ourselves (enlightenment as mass deception). We are constantly re-cre-ating ourselves in order to keep up with the latest taste, opin-ions, etc.
Being an authentic artist is perhaps the most difficult job – far more difficult than any office job – because your own authenticity is on the line. I would argue that surrealists were searching for social structures that allows for art practice on a daily level. The future is one of artists. Here I am not thinking of simply painters and writers. But anything creative that is deeply concerned with divine beauty. The Surrealist endeavor is not over, rather has been disseminated into unrecognizable fragments, in the hands of every authentic artist today.