Breton's Surrealism

  

 For convenience, my quotations from Breton use the translation by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, readily available at https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Breton_Andre_Manifestoes_of_Surrealism.pdf.   References in parentheses are to this text; those in brackets are endnotes.

 

       Surrealism is one of the chief artistic movements of the twentieth century.  Its practices are now not only familiar in countless works of art, but in advertisements and popular culture as well.  Song lyrics (and band names) that would have seemed radically revolutionary in the 1920s had, by the 1960s, become commonplace on popular radio stations.  In spite of earlier precedents for writing that seems Surrealist as well as prior uses of the term by Apollinaire and Yvan Goll, the Surrealists, as an organized cultural formation, are generally traced to André Breton’s 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto.”  For decades Breton defined the movement, notoriously exerting a tyrannical authority over the group, admitting new acolytes and expelling the insubordinate, while maintaining tight control of the brand during his entire life.

     Intended as a revolutionary call to action, Breton’s manifesto might well be read as a look backwards, a belated document of Romanticism.  It is quite natural that he makes an extended example of a passage from the 1796 novel The Monk.  The Surrealist valorization of irrationality and the marvelous would have been familiar to Lewis’s readers over a hundred years earlier.  For Breton “in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest.” (9)

     While Breton’s Surrealist program is wandering and self-indulgent, its general drift is unmistakable.  He seeks to question the value of received ideas and everyday experience, rejecting the limitation of imagination by “the laws of an arbitrary utility”  which confine most peoples’ imagination to “a state of slavery.” (4)  “The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined,” he insists, since “the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism . . . clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit.” (6)  In reaction against Realism, he quotes a passage from Crime and Punishment, the “purely informative style” of which he declares to be an “unworthy” “school-boy description.” (8)

     In place of a straightforward imitation of ordinary (or dramatic) lived experience, Breton offers new perspectives available in such sources as dreams, madness, chance operations, and the minds of children.  The first of these suggestions flies in the face of the cliché that nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams, a notion seconded by most readers of Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac.  In literature all readers are aware that anything presented as a dream, a vision, a fantasy, or hallucination is likely to be of critical importance in  understanding the narrative in which it is embedded, but these are carefully composed elements of a work of art, not simple transcriptions of real dreams.   Deluded perhaps by such precedents, Breton and others (Gide even) published what purported to be their dreams, but these have attracted little attention, particularly when compared to the concept on which their presentation to the public is founded.  The Surrealist fetishization of dreams is  a modern twist on the ancient idea that at night the gods speak to the sleeper, only in its twentieth century iteration the source of wisdom is not the divine but rather the unconscious.

     In fact the most dreams can do is to suggest possibilities that would not otherwise occur to the writer and to widen the scope of what is permissible in narrative.  The artist must, however, process the raw material presented by this richer inventory of possibilities, selecting those which taste admits whether the decisions be conscious or intuitive.  Fruits of this new freedom are apparent in the devices of magic realism and in metafiction.  Breton had rejected the therapeutic value of dreams claimed by Freudian analysis, but maintained their aesthetic value, a claim which has proven largely fruitless in practice.  His story about Saint-Pol-Roux posting a sign outside his bedchamber declaring “the poet is working” (14) is delightful, but implies nothing about the poet’s actual writing routine.  Far from recognizing the craftsmanship and care that produces worthwhile art, Breton provocatively (and simplistically) claims that the waking state is “a phenomenon of interference” and calls for “sleeping logicians” and “sleeping philosophers.” (12)

     According to Breton what limits the artist, in his terms what keeps “the flag of imagination furled,” is an unjustified “fear of madness.” (6)  Since Breton’s manifesto, the art world has cultivated an appreciation for “outsider art,” what Dubuffet called art brut, many of the most celebrated works of which were made by people diagnosed with major mental illness.  The reader may wonder whether Breton learned anything from contact with people suffering from major mental illness.  To him mad people “derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination,” indeed “they enjoy their madness,” (5) generalizations which would scarcely be consistent with what psychiatric workers and the families of the afflicted observe.  While the art of people like Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger is indeed impressive and beautiful, that is simply because they are outstanding artists, not because of their illness.   On the other hand, Breton notes with satisfaction that Robert Desnos’ drawings were taken to be the work of an insane person, though the artist was not, in fact, mad. (23) 

     Breton names “psychic automatism” as the very heart of Surrealism (26), and “automatism” in English or French can only mean production without conscious control.   The most important element of his free-writing with Soupault is that they make no revisions. (24)  He emphasizes “the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (26)  Surrealism thus, by only a slight elaboration, became associated with altogether chance operations, the sort called “aleatory” by Werner Meyer-Eppler in 1955.  The notion that a discerning judgment is an obstacle can be entertained only by those who have never devoted prolonged attention to works produced without conscious craftsmanship.. 

     Finally, Breton fancies that wisdom resides in the insights of small children, another Romantic notion straight from Wordsworth.  According to him to find inspiration, one need only “tum back toward his childhood.” (3)  Yet this enlightened early stage is undone by education.  “At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales.” (15)  Some writers, such as Chatterton and Rimbaud, are the more celebrated for writing done in their teens, and parents are fond of quoting their clever sayings of their offspring, but no art whatever by young children is preserved and enjoyed. 

     The barrenness of all these resources – dreams, insanity, suspension of judgement, and the mind of early childhood --  is transformed to luxuriant fruitfulness, however, when Breton’s ideas are read as metaphorical gestures, as figures of speech.  In this rhetorical way, he is recommending writing as weighted with significance as dreams, as daring and innovative as the moves of a schizophrenic’s mind, as unpredictable as randomness, and as fresh and attractive as a child’s imagination.  Reading the manifesto in this way produces ideas far less provocative and dramatic but far more defensible.

     While Breton’s condemnation  of rational cognitive processes pervades the manifesto throughout, providing a polemical froth that he never cares to justify, the real innovation of Surrealism, the acceptance of underdetermined metaphors had more lasting influence.   Many critics and readers are, like Breton, susceptible to “the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations.” (26)  In support he offers the testimony of Apollinaire (who recommended figures of speech with an “extreme degree of immediate absurdity” which “upon closer scrutiny” which may “give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world.” (24) 

     Even more explicit is the prescription he quotes from Reverdy.

 

     It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.

     The more the relationship between the two Juxtaposed realities is distant and true) the stronger the image will be-the greater its emotional power and poetic reality. (20)

 

While clearly going too far in advocating such “modern” images by claiming that there is a direct correspondence between “distance” and value, this formulation states the principle unmistakably.

     Breton proceeds then to provide an example of his own, saying that the apparently meaningless phrase "There is a man cut in two by the window," occurred to him quite clearly but without any cause in prior thought or experience, straight from the unconscious he would have his readers believe. (21)   This verbal “apparition” then stimulates “a whole series of phrases” coming into his consciousness without reflection or intention.  The reader has nothing but Breton’s enthusiasm to indicate that the image has any meaning or that this concatenation of words has the slightest value.

     Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” is less a statement of aesthetic theory or a handbook for practice than a pose, a work of art on its own, regardless of its “truth” or “usefulness.”  As a statement of what might by now perhaps be labeled the “classic avant-garde,” it is bracing in its cheekiness and provocative in its iconoclasm.  In visual art and in literature, Surrealism’s primary contribution was in fact the admittance of novel and “readerly” metaphors, to an extent far beyond what the Symbolists had dared.  Today art-lovers have become accustomed to the use of such figures of speech, finding them far less puzzling than they had seemed a few generations ago.  When “exquisite corpses” are a recommended elementary school exercise and dream imagery fills music videos the time has perhaps come to define what was new and what is lasting about Breton’s Surrealism.

Visions of Vorticism: Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound

 

Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915 (1961-62) by William Roberts. Representing Cuthbert Hamilton, Ezra Pound, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchels, and Edwatd Wadsworth.

  

     Like other self-conscious schools of twentieth century modernism, Vorticism was imprecisely defined by its inventors, inevitably then producing work of considerable variety.   Though the concept of the vortex had been first used by Ezra Pound to refer to some contemporary art and poetry, suggesting the site of the greatest concentration of energy, the idea of a Vorticist movement emerged publicly with Wyndham Lewis’s Blast in 1915 and the show at the Doré Galleries in London the same year. [1]  With an eye on being the most avant-garde of the avant-gardes, Lewis had sought to distinguish himself from recognized schools, maintaining the superiority of his own version of the geometric designs of Cubism, encouraging abstraction energized by a certain modern dynamic sometimes labeled “hard-edged,” resembling Futurism with an interest in industry and violence.   Lewis’s own art and that of others who exhibited as Vorticists – the original show included Lewis, Jessica Dismorr, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Frederick Etchells, and Edward Wadsworth [2] -- combined Cubist fragmentation of reality with imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment.  The idea of Vorticism itself adds little to understanding of the works from that show or of Pound’s poetry of the time.  Lifting the banner of a militant movement, however, l did provide an arena for avant-garde posturing by both Lewis and Pound, entertaining in itself, but shedding limited light on their art.   

      The investigation into the question of to what extent, if any, these artists constituted a coherent group would seem to depend primarily on their adherence to the principles of Vorticism.  As it happens, the same year of the Vorticist exhibition, Lewis published a manifesto in his journal Blast. [3]  The reader might be baffled to find virtually no reference to visual art in this document.  Its attention-getting typography reinforces the notion of volume implied by the publication’s title, but the shouting does not seem to add up to much of a program.  The emphasis is rather on playing the bohemian viva voce, satirizing the priggish and the sentimental, the conventional and the bourgeois, while claiming for England (and in that way for himself) the leadership of modern art.  Lewis here constructs a persona by taking center stage to enact the role of the modern artist.

     There are artistic references, all polemical, in the series of declarations opening the inaugural and penultimate issue of Blast titled “Long Live the Vortex!”  Bearing the banner of the avant-garde holds for Lewis a critical significance.  Due to the value he places in novelty, he declares that “education (art education and general education) tends to destroy the creative instinct,” though his own theory remains obscure, apart from a commitment “to destroy politeness, standardization, and academic, that is civilized, vision” and to express “vivid and violent ideas.”  He arbitrarily claims that “great artists in England are always revolutionary, just as in France any really fine artist have [sic] a strong traditional vein.”  Precisely what this might mean is unexpressed, except that Vorticist art must engage “the Reality of the Present,” shaped by the artist acting as an individual.

     With a self-conscious deprecation of realism, he maintains that Vorticism means to appeal to “every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL” in spite of the fact that he is well aware that the overwhelming majority of the populace will never hear the word.  He emphasizes this vague universality, concluding with the summary statement: “Blast presents an art of individuals,” a proposition acceptable to most Romantic and post-Romantic critics.  In an equally ill-defined clue to the identity of Vorticism, he anticipates Surrealism, saying “WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY – their stupidity, animalism, and dreams.” [4] 

     Whatever this may mean, he fears that his movement might be confused with Futurism which he repeatedly condemns as “sensational and sentimental,” no advance at all, but merely “the latest form of Impressionism.”  His own predilections for fascism made him no more sympathetic to Mussolini’s cheerleader.  He ridicules the Italian’s interest in industrial and mechanical imagery, saying “Marinetteism” [sic] amounts to nothing but “Automobilism.”  His rivals, though somewhat similar to Lewis to outsiders, are not to him even second-rate; they are contemptible

     Lewis compensates for the fact that Vorticism may seem to some a splinter of a faction by jauntily speculating on the pillars of society becoming Vorticists: Lloyd George, shortly to become prime minister, Lady Mond, Baroness Melchett, and perhaps even the king.  The effect of the suggestion, of course, is to emphasize its unlikeliness and thus to highlight Lewis’s counter-cultural credentials.

     “Long Live the Vortex!” is followed by a lengthy manifesto, or series of manifestoes.  The first eighteen pages are a compilation of blessings and curses of things English and French, an amusing and typographically spectacular definition, I suppose, of Lewis’s specific individuality.  Much of this content is satirical or otherwise humorous, though certain significant patterns emerge.  English wet weather and politeness are both rather predictably condemned, but so are England’s “socialist-playwright” and “tonks.”  Considering France he curses “gallic gush,” the Arc de Triomphe, and France’s status as a “Mecca for Americans” and for many an “amative German professor.”  The years 1837 to 1900, the period of “bourgeois Victorian vistas” are denounced as a whole, though he blesses Britain’s “seafarers” expressing particular fondness for their “restless machines.”  Having blasted “humour” in one section, he returns to bless it a few pages later.  In England the “art-pimp” is blasted though with no description by which he might be identified, while in France a similarly mysterious “bad music” is condemned.  The reader is clearly dealing with a self-identified enfant terrible, more eager to provoke than to present a new view of artistic practice.  The address of Blast is, after all, the Rebel Art Centre, implying that the most important element in Lewis’s Vorticist program is rebellion.

     A seven-part document titled “Manifesto” follows.  Part I sheds little new light on artistic practice, but rather aims to evoke and destroy dualities in the same pronouncements.  This principle is restated in several forms.  The first item says “Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves.”  Next, starting from “opposite statements of a chosen world,” the Vorticist wishes to set up a “violent structure” between the extremes.  Thus “we discharge ourselves on both sides.”  Etc.  What this might mean in terms of practice or connoisseurship remains obscure.

     Perhaps in illustration of this dialectic, Lewis proceeds, after establishing England’s reputation as “anti-artistic,” to assert that this is the very reason “why England produces such good artists.”   Hints of appropriate subject matter emerge as “the Art-instinct is permanently primitive,” finding “stimulus” in a chaos of imperfection, discord, etc.,” a “savage” wholly unlike any “Futurist individual of Mr. Marinetti’s limited imagination.”  The modern artist will derive material from “this enormous, jangling, journalistic fairy desert of modern life” as artists of the past had been inspired by nature.   In spite of the world’s being “a fairy desert,” Lewis laments the passing of fairies and offers a somewhat premature elegy for the Spanish bullfight.  Fruitful imaginative resources, “springs of creation,” remain, however, characterized by “mysticism,” “gladiatorial instincts,” and “blood and asceticism.” 

     Shakespeare embodies a certain British “mysticism, madness, and delicacy” uniting comedy and tragedy.  Lewis indulges in his peculiar version of chauvinism by claiming that the “Modern World” as a whole is due to “Anglo-Saxon genius,” making the English the natural practitioners of the imagery of “machinery, trains, steamships” “buildings, bridges, and works.”  They are “the inventors” of modern “bareness and hardness,” and the enemies of “Romanticism,” while the similar modernism of the Futurists is to him spurious, “romantic and sentimental,” nothing but “gush.”  The tone of the journal is clear from the next feature, poetry from Ezra Pound, beginning with his “Salutation the Third” which opens, “Let us deride the smugness of ‘the Times’:/ GUFFAW!”

     Apart from his considerable brio in presenting an individualistic catalogue of preferences somewhat resembling the lists of the hip and the non-hip Norman Mailer compiled for the Village Voice and his generalized bad boy persona the reader may yet wonder just what a Vorticist work of art looks like.  The show at the Doré Gallery perforce answered that question and, in Lewis’s “Note for Catalogue” [7] of the exhibition, he let the cat peek just a bit out of the bag.  He opens with an adroit faux naïf use of passive voice, referring to “painters, to whom the name Vorticist has been given” (as though he and Pound had not concocted the movement).  He has not dropped his rivalry with Marinetti, referring to the “fuss and hysterics of the Futurists,” but he is now at pains to distinguish himself from another rival as well, Picasso in whose work he finds “passivity” (Lewis used all capitals) in contrast to Vorticist “activity.”  To him Picasso is a “dressmaker” who simply “matches little bits of stuff he finds lying about. He puts no life into the pieces of cloth or paper he sticks side by side, but rather contemplates their beauty.”

      The heart of Lewis’s remarks in this introduction to the exhibition, however, stresses abstraction rather than dynamism.

The impression received on a hot afternoon on the quays of some port, made up of the smell of tar and fish, the heat of the sun, the history of the place, cannot be conveyed by any imitation of a corner of it. The influences weld themselves into an hallucination or dream (which all the highest art has always been) with a mathematic of its own.   

He criticizes naturalistic or academic painting the goal of which is what was later called photorealism, concluding that abstraction is the only adequate method of conveying his vision.  His whimsy has not altogether departed.  He suggests that if advertisements were abstract “the effect architecturally would be much better, and the Public taste could thus be educated in a popular way to appreciate the essentials of design better than picture-galleries have ever done.”  As a final caprice, he implies that Vorticism is a contribution to the British war effort in contending against German Kultur.  In terms of actual Vorticist characteristics, gallery-goers are offered only in fact abstraction as a kind of higher symbolism and the idea of energy.

     While Blast had been primarily a counter-cultural entertainment, an irreverent eruption making considerable noise while shedding little light, the exhibit allowed Lewis to define the “movement” with bit more specificity.  Today descriptions of Vorticist art generally limit themselves to prescribing “hard-edged abstraction” allied on the one hand with Cubist forms and on the other with Futurist themes. 

     The movement’s other parent, however, was Ezra Pound whose primary concern was literary.  Pound argues in his essay “Vortex” [8] for a sort of abstraction in literature as well as visual art, quoting with approval Pater’s line that “all arts approach the conditions of music.” He elaborates.

It is no more ridiculous that a person should receive or convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours, than that they should receive or convey such emotion by an arrangement of musical notes.

 For him consciousness is “the primary pigment,” and the artist is reproducing a state of mind, not an observed external scene.  Just as poetry tends toward the pleasures of music, music answers and, to him, “music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech.”  Everything is symbolic.  “The vorticist relies not upon similarity or analogy, not upon likeness or mimicry.”  Realism is a “secondary application”

     In Pound’s Vorticist poetry prettiness, too, is not the focus. 

Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.

In accordance with Pound’s admiration for craft, the primary aim for him is formal, a value highlighted by his claim (which he immediately moderates) that “Lewis is Bach.” 

Music was vorticist in the Bach-Mozart period, before it went off into romance and sentiment and description. A new vorticist music would come from a new computation of the mathematics of harmony, not from a mimetic representation of dead cats in a fog-horn, alias noise-tuners.

     Far from dropping Imagisme for Vorticism, he built on its foundation.  Far from being left behind, the image generates the vortex.  For him “THE IMAGE IS NOT an idea,” and presumably not mere decoration either. He characterizes it using formal terms, beginning with the word vortex itself.  To Pound the vortex is “a radiant node or cluster.”  His images are meant neither to be symbols requiring decoding nor decorative elements, but rather vortices, formal patterns “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”  Even the sort of images he admired in East Asian poetry become, through this lens, vorticist nodes of activity in spite of their apparent stillness.   Rhythms alone are, like music, capable of communicating anything.  “I believe that every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm-phrase to express it.”

     Physicists in the early twentieth century found, upon close examination of material reality, that its apparent solidity conceals teeming activity and extraordinary potential energy on the subatomic level.  At the time of Vorticism scientists were beginning to dig deeper yet, uncovering first the mysteries of relativity and then those of quantum mechanics.   By analogy the Vorticist claimed to be likewise looking into the very essence of things. 

     Pound, then, argues for the formal values of abstraction while maintaining a practice of imagism, asserting what to him  are essentially artistic values against thematics.  He republishes his principles of Imagism which have now become principles of Vorticism as well. [9] He aspires to pass beyond the mild beauty of the picturesque, beyond the appeal of the concrete specific, to reach a glimpse of the tumultuous, sometimes awe-inspiring energy of the vortex.   He repeats at the same time Lewis’s conviction that Vorticism must be altogether au courant, in the very forefront of innovation.  “Vortex is the present, the moment of the creation of the future.”

     To visualize Vorticism as the central modern art movement he situates it among others, Marinetti, Picasso, and Kandinsky in particular.  He declares defiantly that Marinetti “did not set on the egg that hatched me,” he disparages Marinetti’s Futurism as merely “a sort of accelerated  impressionism.”  For him all non-Vorticist work, “every work that is not poised in this whirlpool” [i.e., the vortex) “is a corpse”.

     On the other hand he admires the artists most associated with abstraction and Cubism, Kandinsky and Picasso, and is willing to accept descent in their lineage.  “Picasso, Kandinski, father and mother, classicism and romanticism of the of the [Vorticist] movement.”  In associating Picasso with a sort of “classicism,” he may have been recognizing the tendency toward poised serenity in composition of many of Picasso’s Cubist work during the World War I period even before what art historians often label his ”classical” phase. 

     To Kandinsky he attributed the principle that content is quite irrelevant.  “An artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us.”  This insistence on abstraction is shared by Lewis and Pound and is perhaps the chief discernable principle of Vorticism. 

     The documents here analyzed preserve the idea of the movement, though Lewis’s visual works might well be subsumed under other labels.  Vorticism is ever elusive since it “never presented a coherent point of view.” [11]  A critical article wonders “on what basis we can call any work of art ‘Vorticist,’” adding  “It is difficult to imagine any sentence as an example of the Vorticist style, or any visual style in painting.”  A description of Vorticist work might be equally applied to paintings by Kandinsky or Picasso or, indeed, to “most of the paintings created between 1907 and 1915 by the avant-garde.”   Vorticist poetry seems to be in an even worse case.  Even when looking at Pound’s own work, the Vorticist character “remains elusive.” [10]  another investigator says that, in general, Vorticism “failed miserably,” and “left no permanent traces on  Western styles of art.”   “If few understood it then,” the writer concludes, “it is even more obscure now.” [12]

     Vorticism, though occasioned perhaps more by Lewis’s break with Roger Fry’s Omega group and Pound’s rambunctious free-lance troublemaking than by theoretical considerations, enjoyed a brief efflorescence.  At its crest, though, the movement had little to distinguish it from the longer-lived trends of Imagism and Cubism.  Vorticism’s founders, much as they looked down upon Marinetti, shared with him a noxious politics that has discouraged discipleship.  Yet for a time Vorticism seized the spotlight of the art world, though this most often meant attracting scorn.  The Daily Mail commented that “Almost any child between the ages of eight months and three years can be a first rate Vorticist if it is given some lightly coloured paints, bottle of blacking and mama’s new white tablecloth.” [13]  Such philistinism is by no means entailed by a critique of Vorticism.  Lewis’s pictures and Pound’s poems retain a lasting value and Blast will remain a marvel, a pyrotechnic display that energizes and amuses still after more than a hundred years, a reminder of a time when the Bohemian avant-garde still possessed the power to shock and, with that sometimes, to stimulate thinking.    

 

 

1.  This was followed by a New York show at the Penguin Club the same year1915.  The group then lost coherence, though elements recoalesced as Group X (which exhibited in 1920).  Since then, major shows focusing on Vorticism as a historic phenomenon, first at the Tate in 1956, and since at the Estorick Collection in 2004, and again at the Tate in 2011. 

2.  Others of the circle included Lawrence Atkinson, Cuthbert Hamilton, and Sir Jacob Epstein.

3.  Though the manifesto bears eleven signatures, it is thought to have been written by Lewis.

4.  Capitals in the original.  Following this statement, however, Lewis’s capitalization seems impressionistic and improvisatory, guided by design more than content.  To avoid an unpleasantly busy page, I shall silently return other cited phrases to conventional capitalization. 

5.  Reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, p. 364-6 where the reader learns that “Schrodinger’s model of the atom,” “differential calculus,” and Catholic things are hip, while  “Bohr’s model of the atom,” “analytic geometry,” and what is Protestant are square. 

6.  Whether another critic might deem “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” passive may seem dubious, though many of the artists’ Cubist works are serenely composed and he was shortly to enter what art historians call his neo-classical period.

7.  Available online at https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/exhibition/724.

8.  “Vorticism,”  The Fortnightly Review, September 1914.  Available at https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/.

9.  “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist,” Poetry Magazine,z March 1913. 

10.  William C. Lipke and Bernard W. Rozran, “Ezra Pound and Vorticism: A Polite Blast,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1966).

11.  Arthur J. Sabatini, “Vorticism Revitalized,” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer 2015).

12.  Herbert N. Schneidau, “Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound.”  Modern Philology, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Feb., 1968).

13.  Quoted in  Andrew Thacker “Blasting Beyond Britain,” Fortnightly Review, August 24, 2011.

Situationism Remembered

 

 

     The nostalgia I feel thinking about Situationism from the perspective of this twenty-first century is unfortunately a function of how these United States and France and much of the world has backslid since the movement’s glory days in 1968.  In America we have just eluded a fascist takeover by an utterly self-interested would-be tyrant.  In the sixties we told each other that Republicans were passé, that big business had learned how to work in concert with government, making the principal danger corporate liberalism.  Many spoke of ‘the post-industrial society,” and believed (as I do yet) that technology has produced a state of affairs in which all reasonable needs could be satisfied with very little work.  Much of the motive of the New Left was not material want as it had been when “Solidarity Forever” described labor as “outcast and starving,”  The Port Huron Statement founding SDS said American youth were “bred in at least modest comfort” and “housed now in universities,” but nonetheless felt alienated.  Yet at the same time Utopia seemed possible.  We little imagined that over fifty years later the ugly specters of overt racism, Nazism, unashamed sexism, and predatory capitalism would re-emerge as strong as ever and that the old working-class anxieties could once more be directed against scapegoats instead of bosses. 

     History has kept grinding on at the usual inexorable pace, but at a moment when all dreams were allowed, many, and among them the Situationists, imagined a modern Abbey of Thélème with its single rule: “Do as thou wouldst.”  The role of Situationists who in the uprisings of May of 1968, in particular their influence in the Atelier Populaire, which produced hundreds of posters and leaflets and gave Situationism very likely the greatest visibility of any artistic movement in social upheaval since the origin of capitalism. 

     Situationism was always a minute coterie, a splinter of a splinter.  The group was sparked by the encounter between avant-garde artistic formations and left-wing politics. [1]  In spite of the writers’ intentions, tendentiously radical literature has had negligible discernable influence on social change [2], yet the Dadaists and Surrealists, for example, felt a warmth (not always returned) toward revolutionary socialism.  In 1946 a Romanian émigré, Isidore Isou, made his place in the Modernist lineage clear when, in Lettrisme’s first public manifestation, he disrupted a performance of Tristan Tzara’s La Fuit, shouting "Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!"  Guy Debord, the central figure of Situationism, joined in 1951, espousing a more radical Marxist position. 

     Through street art the Lettrists spread slogans such as “Never work!”  Debord led demonstrators who in October 1952 interrupted Charlie Chaplin’s press conference for his new film Limelight, and published a leaflet defending their action “Finis les pieds plats” (“No More Flat Feet!”) [3], causing a break with Isou.  In 1957 Debord and others announced the Situationist International.

     A few years later the “Situationist Manifesto” appeared [4] noting “the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of its possible uses in our senseless social life. “a lack of satisfaction in our senseless social lives” and calling for a “new human force,” totally rejecting “alienation and oppression” in “the current multiform crisis.”  The Situationist alternative is “a society which authentically ‘reorganizes production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers’" in which everyone would be freed from work, assuring the “complete liberty to the individual.”  The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.”  “Everyone will become an artist.”

    This utopian economic perspective is the true heart of Situationism, the intoxicating lure of total freedom, yet it manifests symbolically, its own art challenging the rituals of late capitalism, “the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation” and proposing “a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence.”

     What such a liberating art would look like is not clear.  From Lettrisme the Situationists inherited a fondness for the abstract, but the left-wing elements of the formation staged a celebrated event when, on Easter Sunday of 1950, during a televised High Mass in Notre Dame Michel Mourre mounted the pulpit in Dominican robes and preached a sermon maintaining that God was dead and that the church was a “running sore on the decomposed body of the West.” [7]  Debord made several films with differing content.  His first film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952) includes no images whatsoever.  His second Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) (1959) juxtaposes images of Debord and his associates with scenes from mass culture. 

     Much of Situationist statements focus on social relations more than aesthetics, insisting that pre-revolutionary art must be subversive to be genuine.  Whereas the ruling class seeks to pacify the masses with “spectacle,” which signifies an altogether passive experience which displaces the individuals’ real lived experience.  Though posters and graffiti were surely their most influential media, the specific techniques most identified with Situationism are détournement (diversion) and dérive (drift).

     Détournement seeks to expose and overturn the ruling class’s mind control through, "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself."  Though the device is an old one – the I. W. W. parodies of revival songs is just one example – the most familiar example associated with Situationism is the use of hyper-conventional images from old advertisements and comic strip panels, often from romance titles, with new text. [6]  One might view Abbie Hoffman as a master of the improvisatory détournement, applaud Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (the Yes Men), and ask whether Sacha Baron Cohen is the form’s genius or its commodifier.      

     Debord defined the dérive as the art of wandering through urban space.  “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” [8]  The dérive was an effort to experience one’s environment freshly without the blinders imposed by capitalist culture.

     The Situationist International was always very small, and their concepts would linger in obscure footnotes were it not for the energetic French movement of workers as well as intellectuals in 1968, during which what had been an obscure clique became widely influential.  Debord was perhaps exaggerating, but he had reason to boast that “the disorder that overtook the world in 1968 had its source at a few café tables, where, in 1952, a handful of somewhat strayed young people calling themselves the Letterist International used to drink too much and plan systematic rambles they called dérives.” [9]

    In 1966 the Strasbourg chapter of the French student union, the U. N. E. F., published a manifesto explicitly employing Situationist analysis “On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy.”  In politics, the students condemned the “licensed and impotent” left; in art they declared “art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac.”   They point toward the possibility of liberation.  “The only poetry . . . is the creativity released in the making of history, the free invention of each moment and each event: Lautréamont's poésie faite par tous -- the beginning of the revolutionary celebration. For proletarian revolt is a festival or it is nothing; in revolution the road of excess leads once and for all to the palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one rationality: the game. The rules are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering death, and to indulge untrammelled desire.”

     Similar ideas swept through French campuses and in the spring of 1968 Situationists dominated the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne and went on to establish The Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations (CMDO) which sought to bring workers into the movement for total liberation.  This group lasted only a very short time.  In 1972, reduced to two members, the Situationiste International dissolved itself.  [10]

     The “Situationist Manifesto” sounds something like a Bodhisattva when it says, “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of humanity."  The Situationists remind us that artists can influence history and that no demand is excessive.  Ask for everything.  We deserve it. 

 

 

1.      1. Even the exceptions tend to be not apolitical or centrist, but rather, like Pound, Marinetti, and Céline, to adopt extreme fascist views.

 2.  Reformist writing has sometimes attracted considerable readership.  The best American example is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

3. The leaflet called for “the destruction of idols” and accused Chaplin’s admirers of “a unanimous, servile enthusiasm" while calling the actor himself an "emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune.”

4.      In Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).  The French text is available at https://www.ubu.com/media/text/si/Internationale_situationniste_4.pdf and the English translation I have used by Fabian Thompsett at https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html. 

 5.      See Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

 6.      Now that one commonly sees such “turned” images in merchandise like tee shirts and coffee cups, one must ponder whether critics such as Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek may be correct in arguing that such play with images might reinforce rather than reveal oppression.  It is doubtless significant that the comic panels of Roy Lichtenstein never alter the original text as the Situationists did.

 7.      Mourre, who had, when younger, been a Dominican, in this way recalled the intrusions of the young Blanquistes who interrupted mass in Notre Dame March 22, 1892, shouting “Long live the Republic!  Long live the Commune!  Down with the Church,” as well as when on November 17, 1918, Oberdada Johannes Baader declared that “Christ is a sausage” from the pulpit of the Berlin Cathedral.   The tradition continues with the performance by Pussy Riot inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012.

8.      Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 1958.  Despite the language of “psychogeography,” the procedure sounds rather similar to the recreational strolls people have taken for many  years after using cannabis.

 9.      Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord.

 10.   The work of Situationist artists did not end.  In 1975 Gianfranco Sanguinetti working with Debord published a pamphlet titled Rapporto veridico sulle ultime opportunità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy) [57].  Claiming to be written by a major capitalist, the pamphlet made outlandish and satirical claims, such as that the ruling class was in fact responsible for ultra-left violence as part of a strategy to prevent communism.  The text was taken to be genuine, and, when the deception was revealed, Sanguinetti was obliged to flee Italy.

 

 

 

Situationist and situationist-influenced slogans of Paris in May of 1968

 

The collection below is available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm. 

These graffiti are drawn primarily from Julien Besançon’s Les murs ont la parole (Tchou, 1968), Walter Lewino’s L’imagination au pouvoir (Losfeld, 1968), Marc Rohan’s Paris ’68 (Impact, 1968), René Viénet’s Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Gallimard, 1968), Maurice Brinton’s Paris: May 1968 (Solidarity, 1968), and Gérard Lambert’s Mai 1968: brûlante nostalgie (Pied de nez, 1988).

     This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

B U R E A U   O F   P U B L I C   S E C R E T S

 MAY 1968 GRAFFITI

  

In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.

Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .

Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”

And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.

Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

 

We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.

 

We want to live.

 

Don’t beg for the right to live — take it.

 

In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.

 

The liberation of humanity is all or nothing.

 

Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.

 

No replastering, the structure is rotten.

 

Masochism today takes the form of reformism.

 

Reform my ass.

 

The revolution is incredible because it’s really happening.

 

I came, I saw, I was won over.

 

Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!

 

Quick!

 

If we only have enough time . . .

 

In any case, no regrets!

 

Already ten days of happiness.

 

At every moment something is happening.

 

Live in the moment.

 

Comrades, if everyone did like us . . .

 

We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.

 

Down with the state.

 

When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois theaters should be turned into national assemblies.  [Written above the entrance of the occupied Odéon Theater]

 

Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.

 

It’s painful to submit to our bosses; it’s even more stupid to choose them.

 

Let’s not change bosses, let’s change life.

 

Don’t liberate me — I’ll take care of that.

 

I’m not a servant of the people (much less of their self-appointed leaders).  Let the people serve themselves.

 

Abolish class society.

 

Nature created neither servants nor masters. I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.

 

We will have good masters as soon as everyone is their own.

 

“In revolution there are two types of people: those who make it and those who profit from it.” (Napoleon)

 

Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives.”

 

Don’t be taken in by the politicos and their filthy demagogy. We must rely on ourselves.

Socialism without freedom is a barracks.

 

All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.

 

The revolution doesn’t belong to the committees, it’s yours.

 

Politics is in the streets.

 

Barricades close the streets but open the way.

 

Our hope can come only from the hopeless.

 

A proletarian is someone who has no power over his life and knows it.

 

Never work.

 

People who work get bored when they don’t work.  People who don’t work never get bored.

 

Workers of all countries, enjoy!

 

Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases.  My father before me fought for wage increases.  Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen.  Yet my whole life has been a drag.  Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.

 

The boss needs you, you don’t need the boss.

 

By stopping our machines together we will demonstrate their weakness.

 

Occupy the factories.

 

Power to the workers councils. (an enragé)

 

Power to the enragés councils. (a worker)

 

Worker: You may be only 25 years old, but your union dates from the last century.

 

Labor unions are whorehouses.

 

Comrades, let’s lynch Séguy!  [Georges Séguy: head bureaucrat of the Communist Party-dominated labor union]

 

Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.

 

Stalinists, your children are with us!

 

Man is neither Rousseau’s noble savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner.  He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free.

 

Conflict is the origin of everything.

(Heraclitus)

 

If we have to resort to force, don’t sit on the fence.

 

Be cruel.

 

Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat.

 

When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have “problems”?

 

The passion of destruction is a creative joy. (Bakunin)

 

A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.

 

The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.

 

This concerns everyone.

 

We are all German Jews.

 

We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed, inventoried, registered, indoctrinated, suburbanized, sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.

 

We are all “undesirables.”

 

We must remain “unadapted.”

 

The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.

 

Under the paving stones, the beach.

 

Concrete breeds apathy.

 

Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.

 

Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.

 

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.” (Unamuno)

 

Conservatism is a synonym for rottenness and ugliness.

 

You are hollow.

 

You will end up dying of comfort.

 

Hide yourself, object!

 

No to coat-and-tie revolution.

 

A revolution that requires us to sacrifice ourselves for it is Papa’s revolution.

 

Revolution ceases to be the moment it calls for self-sacrifice.

 

The prospect of finding pleasure tomorrow will never compensate for today’s boredom.

 

When people notice they are bored, they stop being bored.

 

Happiness is a new idea.

 

Live without dead time.

 

Those who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring

to everyday reality have a corpse in their mouth.

 

Culture is an inversion of life.

 

Poetry is in the streets.

 

The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop’s head.

 

Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.

 

Art is dead, let’s liberate our everyday life.

 

Art is dead, Godard can’t change that.

 

Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist jerk.

 

Permanent cultural vibration.

 

We want a wild and ephemeral music. We propose a fundamental regeneration: concert strikes, sound gatherings with collective investigation. Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone.

 

Anarchy is me.

 

Revolution, I love you.

 

Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral. (Marxist-Pessimist Youth)

 

Don’t consume Marx, live him.

 

I’m a Groucho Marxist.

 

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.

 

Desiring reality is great! Realizing your desires is even better!

 

Practice wishful thinking.

 

I declare a permanent state of happiness.

 

Be realistic, demand the impossible.

 

Power to the imagination.

 

Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.

 

Imagination is not a gift, it must be conquered.

(Breton)

 

Action must not be a reaction, but a creation.

 

Action enables us to overcome divisions and find solutions.

 

Exaggeration is the beginning of invention.

 

The enemy of movement is skepticism. Everything that has been realized comes from dynamism, which comes from spontaneity.

 

Here, we spontane.

 

“You must bear a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.”  (Nietzsche)

 

Chance must be systematically explored.

 

Alcohol kills. Take LSD.

 

Unbutton your mind as often as your fly.

 

“Every view of things that is not strange is false.”  (Valéry)

 

Life is elsewhere.

 

Forget everything you’ve been taught. Start by dreaming.

 

Form dream committees.

 

Revolution is the active passage from dream to reality.

 

Dare! This word contains all the politics of the present moment.  (Saint-Just)

 

Arise, ye wretched of the university.

 

Students are jerks.

 

The student’s susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for any cause is a sufficient demonstration of his real impotence.  (enragé women)

 

Professors, you make us grow old.

 

Terminate the university.

 

Rape your Alma Mater.

 

What if we burned the Sorbonne?

 

Professors, you are as senile as your culture, your modernism is nothing but the modernization of the police.

 

We refuse the role assigned to us: we will not be trained as police dogs.

 

We don’t want to be the watchdogs or servants of capitalism.

 

Exams = servility, social promotion, hierarchical society.

 

When examined, answer with questions.

 

Insolence is the new revolutionary weapon.

 

Every teacher is taught, everyone taught teaches.

 

The Old Mole of history seems to be splendidly undermining the Sorbonne.  (telegram from Marx, 13 May 1968)

 

Thought that stagnates rots.

 

To call in question the society you “live” in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.

 

Take revolution seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.

 

The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.

 

Making revolution also means breaking our internal chains.

 

A cop sleeps inside each one of us. We must kill him.

 

Drive the cop out of your head.

 

Religion is the ultimate con.

 

Neither God nor master.

 

If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.

 

Can you believe that some people are still Christians?

 

Down with the toad of Nazareth.

 

How can you think freely in the shadow of a chapel?

 

We want a place to piss, not a place to pray.

 

I suspect God of being a leftist intellectual.

 

The bourgeoisie has no other pleasure than to degrade all pleasures.

 

Going through the motions kills the emotions.

 

Struggle against the emotional fixations that paralyze our potentials.  (Committee of Women on the Path of Liberation)

 

Constraints imposed on pleasure incite the pleasure of living without constraints.

 

The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution.  The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.

 

SEX: It’s okay, says Mao, as long as you don’t do it too often.

 

Comrades, 5 hours of sleep a day is indispensable: we need you for the revolution.

 

Embrace your love without dropping your guard.

 

I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!

 

I’m coming in the paving stones.

 

Total orgasm.

 

Comrades, people are making love in the Poli Sci classrooms, not only in the fields.

 

Revolutionary women are more beautiful.

 

Gilda, I love you! Down with work!

 

The young make love, the old make obscene gestures.

 

Make love, not war.

 

Whoever speaks of love destroys love.

 

Down with consumer society.

 

The more you consume, the less you live.

 

Commodities are the opium of the people.

 

Burn commodities.

 

You can’t buy happiness. Steal it.

 

See Nanterre and live. Die in Naples with Club Med.

 

Are you a consumer or a participant?

 

To be free in 1968 means to participate.

 

I participate.

You participate.

He participates.

We participate.

They profit.

 

The golden age was the age when gold didn’t reign.

 

“The cause of all wars, riots and injustices is the existence of property.”  (St. Augustine)

 

Happiness is hanging your landlord.

 

Millionaires of the world unite. The wind is turning.

 

The economy is wounded — I hope it dies!

 

How sad to love money.

 

You too can steal.

 

“Amnesty: An act in which the rulers pardon the injustices they have committed.”  (Ambrose Bierce)

[The definition in Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is actually: “Amnesty: The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.”]

 

Abolish alienation.

 

Obedience begins with consciousness; consciousness begins with disobedience.

 

First, disobey; then write on the walls. 

(Law of 10 May 1968) 

I don’t like to write on walls.

 

Write everywhere.

 

Before writing, learn to think.

 

I don’t know how to write but I would like to say beautiful things and I don’t know how.

 

I don’t have time to write!!!

 

I have something to say but I don’t know what.

 

Freedom is the right to silence.

 

Long live communication, down with telecommunication.

 

You, my comrade, you whom I was unaware of amid the tumult, you who are throttled, afraid, suffocated — come, talk to us.

 

Talk to your neighbors.

 

Yell.

 

Create.

 

Look in front of you!!!

 

Help with cleanup, there are no maids here.

 

Revolution is an INITIATIVE.

 

Speechmaking is counterrevolutionary.

 

Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.

 

Don’t get caught up in the spectacle of opposition. Oppose the spectacle.

 

Down with spectacle-commodity society.

 

Down with journalists and those who cater to them.

 

Only the truth is revolutionary.

 

No forbidding allowed.

 

Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon.

 

The freedom of others extends mine infinitely.

 

No freedom for the enemies of freedom.

 

Free our comrades.

 

Open the gates of the asylums, prisons and other faculties.

 

Open the windows of your heart.

 

To hell with boundaries.

 

You can no longer sleep quietly once you’ve suddenly opened your eyes.

 

The future will only contain what we put into it now.