The Brooklyn Rail

“Free speech,” the Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman declared in the summer of ’68, “is the right to shout ‘THEATER’ in a crowded fire.”

His line hinges on an act of exchange—not a semantic transformation of (familiar) things, but their mere transposition. It also, of course, performs the freedom of speech to which it lays playful claim. If we can rearrange the world in language, we might succeed in reconfiguring its actual dimensions. Or at the very least, we might wrest some shared diversion from the proverbial fires of modern life.

Hoffman’s bon mot recalls one of Surrealism’s founding axioms: the “chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” imagined by the French-Uruguayan poet the Comte de Lautréamont (né Isidore Ducasse, 1846–1870). Lyrical dislodgements are hardly the exclusive province of the twentieth-century avant-garde, as Lautréamont’s Victorian-era verse makes plain. Yet no modernist movement assailed more consistently the encrustations of meaning—and the psychosocial habits they engrain and perpetuate—than that which formed around the poet André Breton a century ago in Paris (along with artists and authors who later broke with his imperious direction). For the Surrealists, bourgeois modernity belied all manner of repressed desires and drives. Liberated from the strictures of linguistic and social propriety, Surrealist writing, painting, photography, and other media sought to coax (or to scare) those desires into consciousness and collective use.

The movement did not spring forth ex nihilo. It emerged from the nihilism of Dada, rechanneled into more constructive experiments, from joint efforts in automatic writing, to the “exquisite corpse” parlor game, to communally composed paintings. Collage and montage visualized the processes of displacement and condensation articulated in Freud’s writings. It was just as often the city itself which formed the Surrealists’ dissecting table. Chance encounters between objects and bodies promised to lend waking life something of the texture—the disorienting freedom—of dreams.

Yet as Theodor Adorno noted in the 1960s, “reducing Surrealism to psychological dream theory subjects it to the ignominy of something official.”¹ The version of Surrealism that endures in the popular imagination travesties, or simply ignores, its political impetus. In doing so, it also lays bare the clockwork of the capitalist system against which the Surrealists pitched themselves—desperately, unsuccessfully, but (mostly) in good faith.

The movement’s political bite has long since been rendered toothless; its bark echoes chiefly in the realm of consumerist culture. Yet so too do its progressive intentions endure in other guises and afterlives. Surrealist influence on everything from Spanish Civil War protest, to the Négritude and Black Arts movements, to Situationism, queer theory, and other activist phenomena reveals its early antifascist agitation to be not simply the product of specific historical contingencies, but a means of reimagining radical politics more broadly. 

Indeed, a different line by Lautréamont—and another of Surrealism’s founding tenets—further illuminates Hoffman’s impish quip: “Poetry should be made by all.” By this the Surrealists understood not that all individuals should compose actual verse, but that daily life might be made over into something closer to poetry than to prose. Everyday acts of disorientation could belong, in their very simplicity, to everyone. As the titles of the group’s official journals attest—La Révolution Surréaliste and Surréalisme au service de la revolution—several members worked in close conjunction with the French Communist Party. Rapports with Communist officialdom proved fraught from the start. Party apparatchiks denounced Breton’s “inner model” of creativity as inimical to plain understanding and popular exhortation. Alongside Marxist dogma (that the worker under capitalism remains alienated from his own labor) the Surrealists insisted upon the estrangements of psyche, sex, and subjectivity—no less needful of sustenance than the belly (“I am,” wrote Antonin Artaud, one of the movement’s abidingly individualist thinkers, “separated from myself”).

Hoffmann and his Yippie peers were hardly ignorant of Surrealism’s politics. It was, after all, the momentous year of 1968—and specifically the Democratic National Convention in Chicago—during which they hurled words redolent of its legacy. Like the Situationist International and other leftist groups, they condemned that same legacy in turn. “Surrealism means revolution, not spectator sports,” they shouted outside MoMA on the eve of a Dada and Surrealist retrospective this same year. For a younger generation, the movement’s museumification meant its end.

Surrealism’s induction into the canons of official culture was hardly immediate. Interwar Paris saw the group attacked by both right-wing nationalists (one mob disrupted a screening of Luis Buñuel’s film L’Age d’Or [1930] and slashed paintings on display) and the left (the Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg sneered at the Surrealists’ ostensible hostility to actual labor and their dedication to “pederasty and dreams”). Some Surrealists left the movement for Stalin (Louis Aragon); others for Franco (Salvador Dalí). It was the movement’s gradual assimilation to entertainment which proved its real undoing, however. A group of “Surrealist Revolutionaries” lamented already in 1947 that “it looks at itself in advertising posters and haberdashers’ shop windows and doesn’t recognize itself … Surrealism has become that which its enemies wished it to be.”

Other leftist thinkers disagreed. The Situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem averred that the re-commodification of art (after Dada’s pitiless demolition) simply confirmed the Surrealists’ fetishization of individual expression and aesthetic objecthood—however hallucinatory the visions they adduced. “Dalí,” Vaneigem writes in his merciless Cavalier History of Surrealism (1977), “at least had the merit, in his shameless pursuit of money, contacts, and honors, of openly treating art works as commodities—something which the Ernsts, the Mirós, the Picassos and all the other Surrealist artists, whether they were talented or not, did only shamefacedly.”² That the movement’s imagery has been reduced to mostly fatuous pastiches of its own intentions is hardly arguable. Whether that process was baked in from the start—the inevitable upshot of a movement radical only by degrees—remains up for debate. The Surrealists may well have misunderstood the revolutionary application of Marxist dialectics to (an increasingly, consummately visual) capitalist culture, practiced in turning revolutionary gesture into spectacle.

This does not preclude our treating Surrealism itself dialectically. André Breton’s notorious homophobia and misogyny will never undo his movement’s prefiguration of aspects of queer theory, or the platform—erratic and embattled—it offered numerous women painters and poets. Likewise, his trade in African and Oceanic objects (like that of so many fellow white European avant-gardists) must be taken alongside Surrealism’s sustained commitment to artists and authors of color, including women like Suzanne Césaire and Simone Yoyotte.

Most crucially, Surrealism’s virulent opposition to colonialism and nationalism proved as foundational to its development as any interest in Freud. Authors like Pierre Yoyotte and Georges Bataille undertook to explain fascism’s psychological (rather than merely materialist) ramifications, including what the latter called the “affective flow” between leader and people. Surrealist theory was matched with action from the start. From public denunciations of French aggression in Morocco in 1925, to protests against Paris’s Colonialist Exhibition in 1931, to rallies against fascist violence in 1934, to support for Algeria’s war against French occupation in the 1960s, the Surrealists—for all their attendant shortcomings—fought on the right side of history. In light of revived far-right violence and attacks upon immigrants and refugees, in the wake of new ethnocides—to say nothing of the relentless technification of everyday culture—Surrealism’s antifascist and anticolonialist legacy remains worth holding on to.

As the authors gathered here attest, there perhaps remain others still.