By Max Cafard | July 05, 2011

SURREALPOLITIK

What is Surrealpolitik? Some assumed that the answer had emerged in 2003 when a historian reported a shocking episode. According to the report, anarcho-surrealists set up surrealist torture cells during the Spanish Civil War¹ . French artist Alphonse Laurencic, put on trial after the war by the Fascists, confessed that he had invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture. Fascists were imprisoned in small cells in which everything sloped at weird angles, walls were covered with bizarre colors and geometric forms, and the floor was littered with geometrical blocks. The inmates were forced to watch the eyeball-slicing scene from “Un Chien Andalou.” Finally, the meaning of le surréalisme au pouvoir.

Not quite. The episode, though almost universally reported as fact, was an obvious fraud. Think about it. What would an anarcho-surrealist artist on trial tell his Fascist inquisitors? The truth? Hardly. More probably, he would turn the tables and tell the Fascists what their penalty would be if handed down by an anarcho-surrealist court. Twenty years of very hard cinema! A strong hint that the whole thing was a mocking fantasy is the fact that the dimensions of the cell, though crowded with surrealist paraphernalia, was all of 3 by 6 feet. The Fascists of Laurencic’s fantasy-world must have been evil little Liliputians.

So this promising case of Surrealpolitik turned out to be a hoax. Fortunately, however, there are several works that go a long way in exploring the momentous topic of surrealism and the political. Much of what follows are comments and reflections inspired--or provoked--by Michael Löwy’s recent work, Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia² , though several other important works that confront the question of surrealism and politics will also be discussed³ . The primary rationale for this reflection on surrealpolitik is to recognize the depth of the surrealist roots of anarcho-surre(gion)alism. As will become obvious, the focus here is also on defending the anarchistic basis of surrealistic politics and sometimes with demolishing Löwy’s case for collapsing together anarcho-surrealism and Troskyism.

The Black Mirror of Anarchism

Any discussion of surrealist politics will focus on the inescapable presence of André Breton, and this is true of Lowy’s book. The question of the nature of Breton’s politics is therefore a central one. In answering this question, he quotes Breton’s radically libertarian statement that “freedom is the only cause worth serving.”⁴ As Löwy formulates it, “an irreducibly libertarian position right at the heart of Breton’s evolution” was combined with his “Communism” and Marxism⁵ . This is certainly true of Breton, though more precisely, his evolution led him increasingly closer to the heart of his libertarian position, and away from views that compromised that outlook.

The “Morning Star” is an image taken from Breton’s 1944 work Arcanum 17. The star represents “revolt itself,” which Breton calls “the only creator of light.”⁶ This light, he says, is discovered through the three paths of “poetry, freedom, and love.”⁷ The “Morning Star” is thus a heroic, inspirational image, though in a way a strangely traditional one. For it has been “light” that illuminated everything of value throughout the history of Western civilization from Plato’s Cave, through the Siècle des Lumières, all the way to King George the First’s “Thousand Points of Light” and beyond.

The radicality inherent in Breton’s image finally shines through in the fullness of its radiant darkness when in 1952 he can finally say that "it was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself."⁸ Surreality is not revealed when bathed in the beneficently cruel and harsh light of civilized rationality. It can only be found when one peers into the infinite abyss of darkness, negativity, and creative nothingness. It appears when one “tarries with the negative,” or better, when one is violently tossed on the turbulent seas of negativity, battered by the waves of negativity, and thrown upon the dark shore, finally reaching the side of the other, awake to the fact that there is no “one.” The “Morning Star” is, in fact, as we already knew, the Evening Star that plunges us into the Dark Night of the Solar.

The reference to “the black mirror of anarchism” comes from Breton’s brief but absolutely crucial text “La Claire Tour,” which is, in effect, his final political testament. It is a work that, unlike the vast majority of Breton’s writings, is very difficult to locate in either French or in English translation. Löwy quotes most of the opening line, but passes over the rest of this enormously revealing text in silence. It’s understandable that many would turn away from this dazzlingly dark truth. Breton asks, “Black mirror, black mirror on the wall, who’s the most revolutionary of them all?” Breton is quite clear about what the answer is, and what it is not. And it is an answer that is suitably dialectical and paradoxical. One looks into the dark depths of the “black mirror” to find a revolutionary path illuminated by the “bright tower” of anarchism.

Breton concludes that when “a human ideal has reached the depths of corruption” (and we shall see shortly what led it into those depths), the only solution is “to return to the principles which allowed it to take form.” When we do so in this case we “encounter anarchism, and it alone.”⁹ Thus, one must give up ones political illusions, one by one (as Breton himself did) until one finally “hits bottom” politically. And au fond, one reaches the foundationless foundation. “Anarchism, and it alone.” Anarchism for Breton is “socialism itself,” it is “the demand for dignity of humans,” including “their freedom as well as their well-being.”¹⁰ It is an expression of the desire for a classless, stateless society in which “all human values and aspirations can be realized.”¹¹ And as we shall see, it is infinitely more than this. He concludes that this conception of anarchism is one that “the surrealists make their own, without reservation, today.”¹²

The Land of Innocence

In Zen (the practice of being radically awake), one of the most stinging indictments is to observe that someone’s actions or reactions “stink of Zen.” That means “it’s getting old.” In Zen, the idea is to have “beginner’s mind,” which is the child’s mind, for which all activity is discovery, and everything is new. Surrealism, which in many ways shares this Zen sensibility, is subject to the same malady. Some surrealist games seem too much like surrealist games. Some automatism seems too automatic, in the mechanistic sense of the term. If we seek surreality, it’s important that we never forget Heraclitus’s warning always to expect the unexpected lest when it occurs we won’t notice it. He probably mentioned in some lost fragment that we need also to practice “unexpecting the expected.” Expecting the unexpected and unexpecting the expected are eminently surrealist exercises.

Psychical automatism, which emerged out of free association, means precisely being nothing like an automaton. It means finding that automatique and autrematique are one and the same (though at the same time many and different). It means following the way of the Ten Thousand Things, of the wild world around us and the wild mind within us, and finding that these paths break down the barriers between these two interpenetrating realms. It means dissolving the rigidities of civilized character structure to allow the world to reveal itself around us and within us. It means replacing the positive quest for domination and domestication with the negative capability to allow the wild to flow through us. It means practicing wu wei, doing without doing. Surrealpolitik is Macht(nichts)politik. It is the anarchic and surrealist politics of everyday life.

This is why Franklin Rosemont’s An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers is so enormously significant. It is certainly free of any lingering odor of stale surrealism. It’s no corpse warmed over. It’s a product of the New World of Surrealism. This doesn’t just mean “New World” Chicago as opposed to “Old World” Paris. It means, above all, the New World that is perpetually discovered by every child. It is a world of joy, spontaneity, affection, openness. Some might have difficulty deciphering the politics of the book. It seems like fun and games, child’s play. Which is the whole point of the book. The child is the great sage. As Laozi said in his absolutely conclusive argument, “the child can cry all day without getting hoarse, and thus must truly be in accord with the dao.”¹³ And Rosemont quotes Breton’s judgment in the Surrealist Manifesto that “it is perhaps childhood that comes closest to ‘real life.’”¹⁴ The quotes are presumably needed because he doesn’t mean the unreal life that’s usually called “real life,” (the kind that “schools that work better” prepare you for), but the surreal life that is usually called “unreal.” Rosemont’s politics is the politics of eros versus thanatos. The true “Party of Eros” is perhaps a kind of Children’s Crusade.

The title of the book is overflowing with implications. The “Open Entrance” question, the problem of “opening the door” is the most crucial one possible. And the “numbers” at stake are considerable. William Blake pointed this out some time ago. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear as it is, infinite.”¹⁵ Infinity is a very high number. Rosemont makes it clear that the entrance is to a path to shared perception and shared infinitude; it leads in the direction of the enchanted community. It is an expression of our “desire for a new and deliciously different society–a community without borders or boredom, and with equal rights for the unexpected.”¹⁶ A noble cause that cries out for a movement worthy to take it up. Defend the Rights of the Unexpected!

Radical psychoanalysis has told much the same story, as surrealists from Breton on have realized. Surrealism is the practice of free association, and surrealist groups are free associations of those practicing free association, whether in works of art, of in the art of living everyday life. Norman Brown pointed out that radical psychoanalytic politics is really all about eros versus thanatos, but surrealism realized or rather surrealized this long before word of it spread in the 1960’s. Löwy mentions the importance of love to surrealist politics a number of times, but to be honest it always sounds rather abstract. Rosemont in his little section called “Love Above All” goes a long way toward making it concrete.¹⁷ He gives actual examples of the meaning of the “land of innocence” to which lovers “escape” and one gets a strong feeling of what the marvelous or wondrous that emerges in the midst of the ordinary is actually about. We get a hint of what it might mean for whole communities to escape to the land of enchantment and begin practicing the Rites of the Unexpected.

Dishegeling the Dialectic

Considering the parody of dialectic that nearly everyone--ranging from analytical philosophers to postmodernists and post-ists in general--has turned into the conventional wisdom, it must seem shocking that surrealists would want to claim the legacy of dialectical thought. We’re all supposed to know by now that Hegel foists a contrived, deterministic, rationalistic, logocentric, etc. “master narrative” on us. But how can so many who go on endlessly about otherness, multiplicity, polysemy and the death of the author not notice that there is more than one Hegel (and less than one Hegel)? The delicate work of dialectic is a “Wages of Fear” kind of job. No matter how carefully you try to get where you think you’re going, you’re almost certain to blow yourself up along the way. Any “master narrative” you might have in your possession at the time is simultaneously exploded. At one point, Hegel discusses a certain stage of Spirit’s development that he calls “the Night of the World.” It’s a stage in which an image of Being is “stored in the Spirit’s treasury, in its Night. The image is unconscious. . . . The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity – a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night, the interior of [human] nature, existing here – pure Self – [and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying.”¹⁸ This is no armored Prussian marching to the monotonous beat of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. These are the words of an inspired philosophical poet of radical imagination and surreality.

This is the dialectical heritage of surrealism. The situationists said “l’imagination au pouvoir” but the surrealists knew that the imagination is always in power and this could be either the most wondrous of things or the most terrifying. All revolution is a war of the imagination, and it always takes place on imaginary grounds. Dialectical thought and imagination do not aim at synthesis, but are thoroughly pervaded by ongoing contradiction and opposition. As surrealists perceive acutely, things are often just the opposite of the way they seem--and the way that they seem has the most astounding implications if we begin to think intently and deeply about this very seeming.

The craziness of dialectic is manifested in the very word that Hegel uses to describe what happens to things in a dialectical process: “aufheben.” Aufheben is translated as to “negate,” “preserve,” “transcend,” “cancel,” “overrule,” “raise up,” “abolish,” “elevate,” “annul,” “lift up,” “break,” “merge,” “override,” “reverse,” the ever-popular but incomprehensible “sublate,” and finally, “suspend,” which is a fascinating word in itself, since it means both to stop something and to continue it. It’s easy to understand why surrealists find inspiration in Hegel. Contrary to the slanders of plodding post-modernists, the dialectic has nothing to do with the ideology of Hegel (or Marx), any more than psychoanalysis has anything to do with the dogmas of Freud. The dialectic demolishes all ideology and all dogma. It really is the ruthless critique of everything existing (though the ruthlessness is really dialectical tough love).

The reality of surreality is radical reversal--things turn into their opposites or transform into things that defy all our categories of opposition. Once again, as dialectics theorizes and surrealism demonstrates, everything always is what it is not and is not what it is (though as the ancient negative dialectican Nagarjuna theorized and Zen demonstrates, it also neither is nor is not what it is). Hegel pointed out that the truth is the whole, but he also showed, sometimes in spite of himself, in his most conceptually dishegeled moments, that there really is no whole, and even when there is a whole, there’s always a hole in the whole. The (w)hole is an empty whole.

Radical dialectic is the anarchic movement of mind and reflects the anarchic movement of things themselves, the circulatory movement of material things, living things, dream things, magical things, imaginary things, unimaginable things, fragmented things, hybrid things, mutating things, impossible things. Surrealism is radical dialectic in creative practice.

The Amourfous Community

Löwy cites Peret’s admirable description of surrealism as being in the tradition of Schlegel’s dream of “a borderless mythopoetic universe” that was “under the transfiguration of imagination and love”¹⁹ For surrealism there is an intimate connection between passion and politics, between amour fou and revolution. For Breton the greatest poetic, creative, transformative, revolutionary myth is mad love, love that “encompasses all one’s passion” and possesses “the power to regenerate the world.”²⁰ Here, Breton touches on an enormously crucial truth. We must “regenerate the world!” The great irony and absurdity of ideology lies first in that it not only distorts reality but that it turns reality into its precise opposite, and secondly that it assures that the one thing that we ignore with the greatest determination is that which is most important. So that one thing we can’t think about is that the entire web of life on earth (zoe) is disintegrating, that we are living in the Sixth Great Mass Extinction of Life on Earth and facing a global ecological collapse, while at the same time the entire web of communal life (bios) has been disintegrating throughout the history of civilization and is entering into its death throes. Minor details!

Thus, surrealpolitik must be a biozöopolitics. In fact, a problematic of social and ecological regeneration is the only sane basis for any politics today (which is why politics in general is thoroughly insane). It is not entirely surprising that the impasse of the dominant Left for almost a century has been its vision of Revolution without Regeneration. “Revolution” may describe the physics of the matter, but “regeneration” describes its natural and social ecology. So we need to draw out the full meaning of Breton’s statement, more meaning than he perhaps consciously intended, when he said that surrealism proclaims such “mad love” with “the power to regenerate the world.” And at the same time with the power to regenerate each other. In a deadening world of domination and alienation, our surrealism and anarchism can become primarily reactive, other modes of remaining asleep, new modes of militantism, in short, isms. The amourfous community must know how to seduce the susceptible and awaken them: “Into the ear of every anarchist that sleeps but doesn't dream/We must sing, we must sing, we must sing.”²¹

The surrealist problematic is one of regeneration through reenchantment. Löwy describes surrealism as “a movement of the human spirit of revolt and an eminently subversive attempt to re-enchant the world.”²² True, but the other essential part of the story is that the surrealist forces of enchantment do not encounter a merely disenchanted world. For one thing, we are originally born into an enchanted world and that world always remains somewhere within us, a reservoir for the reemergence of enchanted surreality. Secondly, as Marx pointed out regarding the fetishism of commodities, the inhabitant of the imaginary world of capitalism is surrounded by and pervaded by enchanted objects, those mysterious subject-objects called commodities. So surrealism is not only about generating processes of reenchantment but also about waging war on the imaginary battlefield on which contending enchantments clash. It is about launching the forces of liberatory reenchantment and disenchantment all at once. Casting the spell of the surreal requires breaking the spell of spectacle, the enchanting consumptionist sublime.

Liberatory enchantment can really only succeed through the force collective of the enchanted community. Löwy very pertinently mentions Peret’s appeal to the maroon community, the quilombo, as the model of the anti-authoritarian community of solidarity.²³ In one sense, the post-modern or late modern condition is precisely a condition of universal being-marooned. Unfortunately it’s in the involuntary sense of being stranded in limbo by a run-away (“hot,” overheated, running-out-of-control) society. What is needed is a revival of the intense desire for marooning in the voluntary sense of running a way to quilombo, on order to create the liberated community, to escape that same over-controlling out-of-control society. A famous May ’68 slogan was “Cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi.” Today you need to run twice as fast, because post-modernity is chasing after you at twice the speed, not just snapping at your ass, but trying to swallow you whole. You need some place to which you can escape. You need some magic phone booth you can run into and dial the right wrong number that sweeps you away to surreality.

It’s important to see surrealism as part of the great tradition of utopian communalism. Surrealism adds to the idea of the intentional community the even more important idea of the absolutely unintentional community, which is a challenge to the Prometheanism, the misguided rationalism, and the obsessive programaticism of the traditional Left. The unintentional community is the utopian, imaginary community that reaches out to you from the realm of impossibility and grabs you! And all those like you. It tears you out of the chains of deadening everydayness and pulls you into the creative unknown, just as it at the same time pulls itself into the midst of life itself, in all its density of being. In doing so, it incarnates utopia in thick, topian materiality. Utopia finds itself in the topos, in the richness of place, in the profusion of particularity, in the wonders of the ordinary, in the magic of things themselves. But, of course, it only does it if we do it.

Löwy touches on this radical, anarchistic surrealist utopianism. He points out that the Romanticist dimension of surrealism is a very expansive sensibility that encompasses revolt against the destruction and degradation wrought by industrial society, a nostalgia for “a lost paradise,” a movement of hope, a war on capitalist and technocratic quantifying values, and a rebellion against the disenchantment of the world.²⁴ He recalls the fact that primitive magical practices, alchemy and various esoteric arts have been admired by surrealists for their “charge of poetic electricity.”²⁵ So true! Living in surreality means being continuously shocked into recognition and being occasionally (and often, if possible) literally struck by bolts of non-literal lightning. Contrary to Lenin:

“Communism” is not “Soviet power plus electrification.” Rather, Anarcho-Communism (the only kind possible) is “poetic power plus, above all, “poetic electrification!”

The Indelible Stain

And speaking of Communism . . . . While Löwy invokes Breton on behalf of the compatibility between surrealism, anarchism, and Trotskyism, Breton himself eventually saw Trotskyism as an obstacle to the surrealist project in general, and to its alliance with anarchism in particular. In his considered view, he saw that anarchism and surrealism were from the beginning inseparable. Yet, he notes, they were separated. He asks: “Why was an organic fusion unable to come about at this time [in early surrealism] between anarchist elements proper and surrealist elements?” And he finds three reasons. The answer, he says, is first that “it was undoubtedly the idea of efficiency, which was the delusion of that period, that decided otherwise.” This is the delusion that the precondition for aesthetic and political progress is the further unleashing of industrialism and the vastly greater consumption of material goods. This is a form of the economistic delusion that has captured the imagination of the modern age, including that of the most ostensibly oppositional movements, so that the latter become what the early (more radical and critical) Baudrillard called “the Mirror of Production.”

The second obstacle was that “what we took to be the ‘triumph’ of the Russian Revolution and the advent of a ‘worker's State’ led to a great change in our perspective.” A classic story: the lure of triumphant power and capitulation to Realpolitik. The Revolution is declared a success to be emulated everywhere just as reactionary elements gain control and the system of domination is reinstituted in a new guise. Breton remarks that “the only dark spot in the picture--a spot which was to become an indelible stain--consisted of the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion on March 18th, 1921. The surrealists never quite managed to get beyond it.” Löwy does not, however, even get to it. He does not mention this dark spot, this dark mirroring stain that stares back into the innermost depths of the political observer. Who is it that “crushed” the Kronstadt Rebellion? The commander of the Red Army, the high official who ordered the Kronstadt sailors to surrender or be crushed, was one Leon Trotsky.

Third, Breton mentions that “around 1925 only the [Trotskyite] Third International seemed to possess the means required to transform the world.” In the sequel, we discover that this International didn’t make much a dent on the real world or any part of it, but rather sank into the murky abyss of sectarianism. In short, highly unrealistic (not to mention highly un-surrealistic) illusions about Trotskyism got in the way. Breton adds that “We are well enough aware of the ruthless pillaging to which these illusions [i.e., those concerning: 1) the technocratic hell of economistic efficiency; 2) the grotesque horror of authoritarian revolutions; and 3) the deadening mire of Trotskyite sectarianism] were subjected during the second quarter of the century.”

Perhaps we should look more deeply into this fascinating question of the intersection of Trotsky, anarchy, and surreality.

“Anarchists Must Be Shotsky”--Leon Trotsky (1921)

One could argue the surrealists who fell for Stalinism might be more easily forgiven than those who went Trotskyist, on grounds that if a surrealist sins, he or she should sin as boldly as possible. Why not go for the genocidal sublime rather than some second-rate authoritarianism? This is actually an awful argument, but one must still wonder where the attraction of the rigid, unimaginative Trotsky comes from. Stalin was a wholesale mass murderer, while Trotsky merely did it retail, as indicated by his nickname, the “Butcher of Kronstadt” (which comes from the days when he was advising his Red Army to “shoot” the anti-authoritarian Kronstadt sailors “like partridges”). Stalin owned the slaughterhouse while Trotsky was a mere shopkeeper, a petit-bourgeois boucher.

“Just Kidding.”--Leon Shpasky (1938)

However, as everyone knows, Trotsky was forced to lay down his meat cleaver and go into involuntary retirement. Strange things happened. Löwy quotes Trotsky as writing, during his days of exile in Mexico and in collaboration with André Breton, the text For an Independent Revolutionary Art. In it they write that “Marxists must march hand in hand with anarchists” in support of “an anarchist ideal of individual freedom for cultural creation.”²⁶ It’s amazing what a good surrealist friend and a condition of complete political powerlessness can do to someone suffering from an acute military-industrial complex. If only Breton had gotten through to him a bit earlier! Imagine, for example, that instead of slaughtering the Kronstadt rebels, Trotsky would have given an order for his troops to break through the lines and not let up until they were holding hands with every revolutionary sailor and doing something culturally creative. What a vast improvement over the Revolution, Bolshevik style!

It’s hard to believe that Trotsky was serious about trotting over to surrealism, much less allying himself with the anarchists (apart from the fact that he was always deadly serious about everything). As Nick Heath comments about the “contradictory and bizarre document” he coauthored with Breton, “it is not clear when Trotsky helped write [it] what he thought he was doing, as it went against everything he had ever done or said.”²⁷

Pacify Nature!

Löwy makes a heroic effort to find libertarian and visionary impulses in an intellect that was authoritarian and rigid on the one hand, and plodding and pedestrian on the other. Take, for example, Trotsky’s “vision of humanity.” In his view, “man is a fairly lazy animal.”²⁸ Don’t think that this was a radical defense of the “right to be lazy” and the immediate utopian dépassement of the division between work and play. Quite to the contrary, Trotsky uses the human laziness premise to justify a reductionis