'Photography and the Literary Conditions of the Surrealist Image'

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE LITERARY CONDITIONS OF SURREALISM

DAVID CUNNINGHAM

I announce to the world this momentous news item: a new vice has just been born, man has acquired one more source of vertigo—Surrealism, offspring of frenzy and darkness. Walk up, walk up, this is the entrance to the realm of the instantaneous, the world of snapshot.

Louis Aragon1 If photography has come to be accorded an ever more significant place by recent art history and theory, within the twentieth-century development of the avant-garde as a whole, then it is, undoubtedly, a certain re-reading of surrealism that has played a particularly crucial part in this; a re-reading for which surrealism is indeed, in Aragon’s words from Paris Peasant, a privileged entrance into “the world of snapshot”. For following the work of Rosalind Krauss in particular, it has become something of a commonplace, since the early 1980s, to argue that the “key” to a general “aesthetic” of surrealist thought and practice is to be found in what Krauss calls its specifically “photographic conditions”.2 In part, this has to do with a gradual shift of scholarly focus toward the movement’s journals and periodicals, increasingly perceived as the true site of surrealist “trans-disciplinary” activity, as well as with the effects of a “rediscovery” of previously marginal figures such as Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun, whose photographic practices intersect conveniently with both the concerns of contemporary gender studies, and the discourses of bodily “transgression” associated with Georges Bataille’s supposedly proto-postmodernist notion of the informe.3 Yet, although it is true that most of Krauss’ own “readings” are indeed focused on the actual photographs produced by members of the group, her central claim is in fact, ultimately, less about the relative importance of photography or individual photographers to the movement’s development, than it is about a more general equation posited between the historical and ontological character of the “photographic” itself and the particular concept of the surrealist image as it is elaborated in the canonical writings of Breton and Aragon.

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The suggestion that photography, somehow in its very being, harbours an inherently “surreal” element is not a new one. André Bazin, in an essay from 1945, already argued that surrealism might be understood as an “artistic” generalisation of the distinctive “ontology” of the photographic image as a “reality of nature”, in which “the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear”.4 Similarly, Sontag proposes: “Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision”.5 Even Barthes’ famous Camera Lucida might, one critic has suggested, be read as “an implicitly surrealist theory of photography in terms related to the uncanny”.6 Nonetheless, Krauss’ intervention has, undoubtedly, served to redirect the focus of surrealist “scholarship” itself, to an extent that none of these previous accounts managed. That it has done so would seem to be a function of its simultaneous break with, and reiteration of, surrealism’s dominant reception within an Anglo-American context, as a moment primarily to be understood in terms of the history of the visual arts. That is to say, Krauss’ intervention takes place on the terrain of surrealism’s presentation and comprehension by art history as, first and foremost, a form of painting. On the one hand, then, the increasing prominence accorded to photography has allowed for a displacement of what have long been deeply unfashionable figures, such as Dalí, in favour of less familiar artists, such as Bellmer and Cahun. (This is a displacement reflected in, for example, the Tate Modern 2001 retrospective, Surrealism: Desire Unbound). On the other, it has assisted in the development of a much broader critique of Clement Greenberg’s canonical articulation of modernism in the visual arts; a critique which has become a defining feature of “postmodernist” art theory in general. The shift of focus to photography—which was, like surrealism, significantly regarded by Greenberg as essentially “literary” in its nature—certainly challenges the latter’s restriction of “true” modernist practice to the development of a medium specific identity centred around the “flatness” and “self-reflexivity” of painting. Yet, at the same time, and despite Krauss’ own emphasis on issues of “textuality” and “writing” which would undermine the Greenbergian immediacy of optical experience, it keeps surrealism largely within the remit of the history of the visual arts in a broader sense, at a moment in its history when that concept’s denotation had been massively extended by the impact of conceptualism and other post-1960s practices. Still, whatever Greenberg himself may have meant by it—essentially a problematic of reference and narrative—it is worth lingering for a moment, as I intend to do here, on this connection to the “literary”. For, of course,

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despite its dominant perception in the English-speaking world, surrealism was, before anything else, a movement of poets. In noting this, my intent is not, however, to somehow reclaim surrealism for literary studies, as against its art historical appropriation, nor to restore it to some “respectable” poetic tradition, as against its apprehension in relation to specifically modern technological forms. Surrealism was, after all, an inherently trans-disciplinary movement. Rather, it is, critically, to trace a series of complications in the relations that surrealist theory, as well as theories of surrealism, have established between the literary and the photographic, in which each is speculatively transformed. In this, not only the general character of surrealism, but also the historical ontology of the photographic itself, is at stake, insofar as it suggests the extent to which key theoretical comprehensions of the photographic have themselves been overdetermined by modern literary terminology and conceptuality (as well as by the tradition of painting). It is in these terms, I want to suggest, that the debate concerning the literary and the photographic, as theoretically mediating various notions of the surrealist image, has more general implications for contemporary debates concerning the trans-disciplinary character of modernism and the avant-garde.

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism Given that Krauss’ intervention gains its general interest less from its reassessment of the work of specific photographers, than from its wider claims concerning surrealism’s relations—across all its various media—to the ontology of the “photographic”, I do not intend to pay particularly close attention, in what follows, to surrealist photography itself, nor to the Bataillean conceptions of bodily “dissolution” and “defamiliarisation” that Krauss generally deploys in its interpretation.7 Rather, I want to engage what would seem to be the central question around which Krauss’ overall formulations turn:

Might not this work [of photography] be the very key to the dilemma of surrealist style, the catalyst for the solution, the magnet that attracts and thereby organises the particles in the field?8

“What is at stake” in such a question is “the relocation of photography from its eccentric position relative to surrealism to one that is absolutely central—definitive, one might say”.9 This notion that what Krauss calls the

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“photographic code” might provide the means by which a “kind of unity” could be derived from the “apparent diversity of surrealist production” is explicitly framed as a response to the efforts of William Rubin—curator of the mid-1960s surrealist exhibition at MoMA in New York—to construct an “intrinsic definition” of surrealist “style” based within the “pictorial code” of its painting. Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether such a unified definition of surrealist style is either possible or desirable,10 what is of immediate interest here is the point at which both Krauss and Rubin understand such a potential unification to be proffered: Breton’s articulation of the surrealist image, and of the forms of experience he understands it to “produce”. These are forms of experience denoted, from the early 1920s onwards, by a range of terms common to all the major surrealists—shock, the spark, the surprising, the explosive, the convulsive; experiences of the marvellous, the extraordinary, the unexpected, the surreal—concepts that, in the words of Blanchot, “would like to escape all conceptualisation”.11 It is the claim that such experiences are essentially photographic that continues to sustain the discourse of surrealism and photography that Krauss inaugurated. In effect, Krauss’ own argument, relative to this, offers a distinctively post-structuralist spin upon Bazin’s proposition that the photographic image is inherently surreal, as one in which “the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear”. Here, however, Krauss’ terms concern the specific “logical distinction” between the real and the represented. In a reading clearly indebted to Derrida, Krauss aims to show how, despite Breton’s apparent continuation of “the traditional Platonic dislike of representation” and of a “classical preference […] of immediacy to dissociation”—reflected in a dual affirmation of the “savage” primacy of the visual, and of automatism as “less a representation of something than […] a [direct] manifestation or recording”—surrealist experience, in general, can be understood as “an experience of reality transformed into representation”.12 The question of the photographic supervenes here precisely to the extent that it claims a privileged connection to the real. This is not, then, so much the assignment to surrealism of a simple “anti-realism”, nor a tendentious downgrading of the “indexical functioning of the photograph”,13 as it is the claim that, in the surrealist photographic, reality itself is presented as always already “configured or coded or written”; a process in which indexicality may function as an “imprint” of reality’s own constitutive “spacings and doublings”:

By preserving the body of the print intact, they could make it read photographically, that is to say, in direct contact with reality. But without


exception the surrealist photographers infiltrated the body of this print, this single page, with spacing. […] [I]t is doubling that produces the formal rhythm of spacing—the two-step that banishes the unitary condition of the moment, that creates within the moment an experience of fission. […] [I]n being seen in conjunction with the original, the double destroys the pure singularity of the first. Through duplication, it opens the original to the effect of difference, of deferral, of one-thing-after-another, or within another.14

This experience of the moment-in-difference, a doubling within the instant “captured” by the photograph, is what, for Krauss, precisely defines the surrealistic per se. Such a claim is developed through a reading of Breton’s conception of “convulsive beauty”, first set out in the “novel” Nadia (1928) and further elaborated in the mid-1930s in essays which became part of the book L’Amour Fou (Mad Love). Famously Breton in this later work identifies three types of convulsive beauty, each of which constitutes a specific mode of the surrealist image: “Convulsive Beauty will be veiled-erotic [erotique-voilée], fixed-explosive [explosante-fixé], magical-circumstantial [magique-circumstancielle] or will not be”.15 The first of these categories, the “veiled-erotic”, relates to a confusion in the “logical distinction” between the animate and the inanimate, or between nature and sign, as exemplified by natural mimicry, of which Breton gives examples from photographs by Man Ray, Brassaï, and Blossfeldt. The “fixed-explosive” is defined by an “expiration of movement”, a mobility rendered immobile but remaining somehow pregnant with motion. Breton offers two famous examples—Man Ray’s 1934 photograph of a tango dancer captured in movement, her dress a blur of twisting fabric, her head strangely dissolved into its flows, and, most iconically, an anonymous “photograph of a speeding locomotive abandoned for years to the delirium of a virgin forest” (fig. 5.1).16 (The “locomotive attacked by immense barometric roots / Complaining about its murdered boilers in the virgin forest”, is an image that also finds its way into Breton’s contemporaneous poem Le Facteur Cheval.)17 The third type, the “magical-circumstantial”, is, essentially, a version of what is otherwise known in surrealism as “objective chance”: the surprise encounter which is both “fortuitous” and “foreordained”, and in which the found object (or phrase, etc.) arrives as the object of the subject’s desire; as a “sign of that desire”, as Krauss puts it. In each of these cases, Krauss suggests, not implausibly, it is photography that offers a “special access” to the experience denoted, as reflected in the examples Breton gives. Moreover, each is, in some sense, photographic in its very character, through its production of the paradox of reality constituted as

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sign, nature as writing. As Hal Foster writes, this “violent arrest of the vital, this sudden suspension of the animate”, certainly speaks of a “photographic principle”: “Automatically as it were, photography produces both the veiled-erotic, nature configured as a sign, and the fixed-explosive, nature arrested in motion”.18 Such would be the photographic conditions of surrealism.

Benjamin, Montage and the Surrealist Image If surrealism’s “photographic principle” is constituted by its imagistic production of a moment-in-difference, a simultaneity of dissociation, it finds, as Krauss notes, an obvious precursor, within the history of photography itself, in the practice of photo-montage. Montage’s defining technique of juxtaposition—of image with image, drawing or text—“spaces”, as Krauss says, the elements of the image as a whole, stressing the discontinuous and interruptive, and destroying, in its multiperspectival forms, the “naturalistic” illusion of a self-identical and unified present. In doing so, it deprives the photograph of its “declaration of the seamless integrity of the real”, in what is

Fig. 5.1: Untitled, n.d., anonymous photograph cited in André Breton, L’Amour Fou.


generally conceived of as a politically transformative, and anti-positivist, gesture.19 Such a conception of montage became in the 1920s, as one writer on photography puts it, “part of a shared technological culture in which the aesthetic effects of simultaneity, superimposition and fragmentation were held to approximate or replicate the day-to-day experiences of modernity”, as well as to provide the source of modes of “cognitive transformation” which could help to interrupt and remake that modernity in revolutionary fashion.20 However, if it is this avant-garde “interventionist, cognitive model” that surrealism inherits, then one would have to say that, by comparison to dada or productivism, actual examples of photo-montage are relatively rare in surrealist practice from the mid-1920s. Yet, as John Roberts suggests, one should not in fact think of surrealist photographers’ own apparent preference for the seamless print so much as breaking with this preceding history, as harbouring a more radical “internalist model of photographic montage”; whether this is manifested in terms of Krauss’ “infiltration” of the seamless print with doubling and spacing, or in terms of what Roberts describes as “a revelation of the heterogeneity of reality […] to be found extant in photographic images themselves”.21 Insofar as this directs attention to the discontinuity of internal detail, Roberts compares it to the general surrealist fascination with found objects, phrases and images, but, more broadly, we might indeed relate such modes of juxtaposition and differentiation to the central surrealist conception of the image itself, across all its diverse media. It is this that perhaps allows us to make sense of Adorno’s otherwise enigmatic (and essentially negative) judgement that the history of montage, as a whole, “reached its acme” in surrealism; generalised to the point of becoming the essential productive principle for the movement in its entirety.22 Now, not insignificantly, Adorno’s intervention appears, as so often, in the context of an ongoing argument with the work of Benjamin; a key intertext for Krauss also, as, even more explicitly, for later discussions by the likes of Foster and Roberts. That montage might be regarded as the key to Benjamin’s own distinctive “philosophy of history” is hardly a new observation; it is one he himself suggested. At any rate, it is evident that the critique of the narrative forms of traditional historiography—that continuum of “empty, homogenous time” associated by Benjamin with both historicism and progressivism—in favour of the “explosive” image of Jetztzeit (now-time), bears a marked debt both to surrealism (as well as the earlier montage practices of German dada and Russian productivism) and to a certain conception of the photographic, and that it frequently conflates the two. What Benjamin calls—in his final text, the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”—the configuration of a specific cultural present with a specific

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historical past is explicitly construed as a form of montage, in which, he claims: “Politics attains primacy over history”.23 It is in this sense that “materialistic historiography” is defined as a “thinking” which “involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well”: “Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock […] In this structure he [the historical materialist] recognises the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening”. This “notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop”, and in which “the past can be seized only as an image”, very evidently speaks of a “photographic principle”, to borrow Foster’s phrase for surrealism; and in strikingly similar terms to the explosante-fixé that marks convulsive beauty.24 Indeed, although it has tended to be downplayed by most of his recent commentators, whatever Benjamin took from his study of photography, the experience of now-time is most explicitly prefigured, in the notes for the Arcades Project, by that “‘Now’ of recognisability in which things put on their true—surrealist—face”.25 Significantly, it is in the 1929 essay on surrealism, described as a “prolegomena” to the work on the arcades, that we first find expressed also the notion of a “substitution of a political for a historical [historicist] view of the past”, here (if not later) ascribed to the surrealists themselves.26 Benjamin’s early reading of surrealism, and of what he takes to be their discovery of “the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded”, is well-known. Less explored are the related links between the surrealist image and what Benjamin terms the dialectical image, where: “Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image”.27 In such an image, the “relation of the what-has-been to the now is […] not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich]”.28 Much rests here on a particular conception of shock, as a distinctively modern cultural form, which is associated with this “figural” nature of the dream image; an experience generated by that moment of cessation which Benjamin elsewhere, (like Barthes, Brassaï, and others), located as the essential characteristic of the photographic. Although Benjamin designates this as atemporal and spatial, it is, in a sense, precisely the suspended temporality of the photograph—as a moment of kairòs “pregnant with tensions”, and thus with the possibility of other futures—and its potential intersection with surrealism’s own distinctive “avant-garde” temporality, that provides the impetus for the conjunction between Benjamin’s dialectical image, Breton and Aragon’s determination of the surrealist image, and a discourse of the photographic more generally. A certain network of shared figures tends to confirm this: the arrest and the


instant, the explosive and the catastrophic, the spark and the lightning flash. It is to their role within the “definition” of the surrealist image that I now turn.

Surrealism and the Romantic Image In the history of European thought since the Middle Ages, there are few terms with as complex a history as that of “image”. As a translation of the Hebrew tselem, the Greek eikon, and the Latin imago, image’s most basic sense is that of “likeness” or “resemblance”. Yet, historically, such a conception has been divided in its interpretation between a concrete, “pictorial” likeness and an abstract, “spiritual” likeness, most clearly evidenced by disputes concerning the Biblical conception of man as created in the “image” of God. It is this division, perhaps, which lies at the root of the ongoing ambiguity apparent in definitions of linguistic images, understood, alternately, and even antithetically, as, on the one hand, a “literal” form of reference or description, and, on the other, as a question of figural, rhetorical or metaphorical expression. While in relation to the former understanding, the linguistic image can, ultimately, only ever appear as an analogy, relative to its direct visual manifestation—or as the material retrieval of a mental image, produced by physical perception, which takes the form of a “picture”—the latter interpretation allowed, around the end of the eighteenth century, for the development of a more powerful conception of the poetic image as in fact the privileged vehicle of “truth”. It is this secularised reworking of the theological image of “spiritual” likeness which, as is well known, becomes particularly key to a certain romantic conception of the “literary absolute”.29 Simplifying to the extreme, if late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century critics, such as Shaftesbury or Addison, had sought to break with the “superstition” of Gothic ornamentation, in favour of a rational perspicuity, the central romantic distinction between symbol and allegory responded, in turn, to neoclassical empiricism, and to a perceived crisis in Enlightenment reason, by adducing the latter as a “mere picture language”. As codified in the work of Coleridge, following the accounts of German romanticism and post-Kantian aesthetics, the symbol, by contrast, speaks of an imaginative formation that necessarily transcends what can be rendered in any straightforward pictorial form; the “lamp” rather than the “mirror”, in Abrams’ famous opposition.30 (This can be seen also in Burke’s privileging of poetry over painting as a vehicle of the sublime.) And it is no exaggeration to say that it is this particular romantic conception of the image, and the

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disputes around it, that opens up here the entire field of modern poetry and poetics, from the early nineteenth century onwards. As almost every contemporary commentator points out, this in fact includes the most supposedly virulent anti-romantic strains of modern poetics. For, even if it is set against the supposed vagueness and abstraction of romantic poetry—a supposition exemplified by Leavis’ reading of Shelley—to claim, as Hulme, Pound and Lewis each do, that the “image” is the poet’s “primary pigment” is, as Kermode detailed some fifty years ago, to make a fundamentally romantic “assumption”.31 At the extreme end of such a logic is, of course, the idea of the poem itself, in its entirety, as a single image: one complete synchronic, figural structure and meaningful whole. This is clearest in imagism, and in possibly the two most critically worked-over lines of poetry in the twentieth-century Anglo-American canon: Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”: The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough. Pound’s iconic lyric poem exemplifies, too, the primacy accorded to juxtaposition as the fundamental organising principle of the modern poetic image more generally. The use of the colon, (replaced in later versions by a semi-colon), emphasises the image as a point of relation, hesitating between contrast and equation; for Pound himself, famously, the presentation of “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”.32 Such modes of juxtaposition are themselves often compared to montage techniques. Yet they bear, more obviously, the marks of a far longer, specifically literary history stretching back, once again, to romanticism, and going via, for example, Pater’s anti-discursive conception of the image, as the construction of an “arrested moment” in the “momentary conjunction” of elements, as well as the symbolic associations which define the Baudelairean “correspondences” (so key, of course, to Benjamin). If Pound was to insist upon imagism’s “newness” as regards such nineteenth-century models, his own reference points in doing so were not the “modern” technological forms of photography or montage, but, most significantly, the “ancient” Eastern forms of Japanese hokku and, later, the Chinese ideogram. While the latter, in particular, was also considered by Pound, following Fenollosa, as entailing a form of juxtaposition, in which relation itself takes precedence over that which is related, its character is in fact construed in quite different terms than that which defined contemporaneous avant-gardiste accounts of montage. Here, the romantic image of “arrested motion” generates not a “fixed-


explosive”, but an effect of calmness or repose, a kind of orientalist stillness inviting aesthetic contemplation, in which any tension is resolved. Like Benjamin’s dialectical image, then, Pound’s early theorisations explicitly position the “event” of the image in opposition to narrative and the discursive. Yet, here at least, the modes of juxtaposition this involves function in a way quite different to Benjamin’s conception, belonging, as one critic puts it, to a particular modernist form in which “the space between elements” is posited as the “key to some mysterious plenitude”.33 The “timeless” moment of such symbolic “plenitude” is explicitly a form of recovery, against the cultural and social forms of modernity; a means of restoring the poet, via the conjunction of ancient and modern, to a relation with that “tradition” of unchanging values embodied by “the best writers of all time”.34 It is the search for such transcendence of “time”—and its more epic extension in The Waste Land and The Cantos—that is, of course, most famously critically mediated in Joseph Frank’s post-war notion of “spatial form”: “By this juxtaposition of past and present […] history becomes ahistorical […] Past and present are apprehended spatially, locked in a timeless unity that, while it may accentuate surface differences, eliminates any feeling of sequence by the very act of juxtaposition”.35 These terms are remarkably similar to Benjamin’s, but their essentially conservative, aestheticist motivation is entirely different. Pound or Eliot’s fragmentary forms may work against the continuity of narrative, and the “linearity” of modern irreversible time, but they do so, dominantly at least, in order to produce a symbolic image of the “eternal” rhythms of mythic extratemporality. By contrast, in surrealism, as its theoretical rhetoric makes clear, the interruption of “empty, homogenous time” does not seek a reconnection with the timelessness of the eternal, but marks, in its explosive dispersal, the emphatically modern “entrance to the realms of the instantaneous, the world of snapshot”. Now, like Pound’s image, and its morphing into the “radiant node or cluster” of the vortex’s paradoxically “immobile rhythm of swiftness”, the notion of the surrealist image receives a number of definitions from Breton’s first manifesto onwards. Nonetheless, and again like Pound’s image, its constant, abstract form is always presented as that of a juxtaposition. Of course, in this regard, imagism and surrealism have in common a certain specific antecedent in French symbolism, whose own conception of the image was, as Kermode says, “the Romantic Image writ large”. The symbolist image is precisely affirmed as “a means of tapping ‘l’inépuisable fonds de l’universelle analogie’”; a notion for which Baudelaire’s example was particularly key.36 Rimbaud’s precedent is crucial here too. But while

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Pound prized Rimbaud for the “cleanness” and “directness” of his “images”, a rather different Rimbaud emerges from surrealism—one whose images are valued, not for the implied symbolic plenitude of their analogies, nor for a pseudo-pictorial accuracy, but for their sheer unexpectedness. Above all, however, it is in Lautréamont’s phrase: “As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”, that the surrealist image found its most influential predecessor. Lautréamont’s spectacularly violent and complex forms of juxtaposition, encapsulated in his characteristic (and much copied) “beau comme…”, derived their convulsive beauty, for the surrealists, from their effective denial of any immediate unification of their disparate elements. Hence, as they saw it, their explosive and catastrophic quality, generated by the tension that such denial creates; a dissolving of the “symbol” into an imagistic moment-in-difference. In the formula that Breton adopted from Reverdy: The image “cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two or more distant realities”. Such a theory is quite different from Pound’s: the power of the image is not that of “accuracy”, nor does it result from any force of “equation” which would generate an aesthetic object of contemplation, but from a convulsively centrifugal force of immanently constructive dissociation and difference. Thus, in the first manifesto, Breton states: “The value of the image depends on the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors”.37 It is in this regard that the basis for the “prefiguring” of Benjamin’s dialectical image in the surrealist image can be seen clearly in the penultimate paragraph of the 1929 essay, in Benjamin’s enthusiastic endorsement of Aragon’s specific poetic distinction between metaphor and image. As Cohen writes: “In its dependence on pre-existing notions of resemblance […] the metaphor cannot help but reproduce the accepted order of things. When Aragon asserts the disruptive power of the image, he stresses its destructive force. ‘Poetry is in essence stormy, and each image should produce a cataclysm. It’s got to burn!’”.38 As such, Benjamin argues, “nowhere do these two—metaphor and image—collide so drastically and so irreconcilability as in politics”; a differentiation through which, he suggests, the image may be connected to “political action”, as against the “contemplative” “morality” of metaphor.39 It is such a morality that, all-too-clearly, continues to define the aestheticised calm of Pound’s imagist juxtapositions, confirming the extent to which his early theory of the image may be read in terms of a kind of “absolute metaphor”, despite certain claims to the contrary.40 Its result is a profound aestheticisation and dehistoricisation of the social modernity to which it seems to relate.


The Politics of the Image and the Time of the Avant-Garde All this may seem to take us some way from the initial subject of this chapter. Yet it is important to recognise that, in its basic form, Benjamin’s montage-like opposing of image to narrative, and its anti-historicist juxtaposition of past and present, is far from unique. Indeed, its pivotal figures of an “arrest” and “immobilisation” of time, far from being distinctively photographic, are, in many respects, standard in the European literary discourse surrounding poetry at the time, and derive predominantly from nineteenth-century romantic and symbolist motifs. What, nonetheless, does make Benjamin’s conception unique, and connects it to emergent avant-garde notions in surrealism and elsewhere, is the interruptive form that the image takes in this, redirecting it, from a culturally conservative (and often explicitly authoritarian) invocation of a mythical extratemporal order, towards a historically and materially variable figure of revolutionary upheaval. It is in this that politics, rather than myth, “attains primacy over history”. It is here, too, that as against Pound’s orientalist evocations of the hokku, a potential intersection with the modernity of the photographic, and with the social impacts of technological reproducibility, takes on an evident importance. Yet it would be entirely spurious to suggest that any politics of the image in either Benjamin or the surrealists, at this point, was somehow a directly determined product of the photograph’s historical emergence. Rather, in this instance, what needs to be thought are the ways in which the cultural and political struggles around the changing social function of images—for which the development of photography’s new technological means of image-production is one key element—are mediated by, and transform in turn, the existing historical development of literary debates. This is crucial because it is these debates around the romantic poetic image (among others) that provided one crucial historical interpretative framework for forms of cultural contestation concerning the ontology, and thus “value”, of the photographic itself. As regards Benjamin’s own “photographic” conception of the image, it is thus perhaps pertinent to recall that, for Benjamin himself, as for Breton and Aragon, the avant-garde was, first of all, a literary phenomenon. In his analysis of Benjamin’s account of the destruction of the aura, and its connection to new technologies of reproducibility, Peter Bürger suggests: “One cannot wholly resist the impression that Benjamin wanted to provide an ex post facto materialist foundation for a discovery he owed to his commerce with avant-gardiste art [including literature]”. Similarly, albeit moving in the reverse historical direction, it is in this sense that Bürger reads the earlier theorisation of allegory as, in fact, less an account of the baroque, than an

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implicit “theory of the avant-gardiste (nonorganic) work of art”.41 This seems to me too one-dimensional a reading, yet it does suggest the basis for thinking a more properly dialectical relation between the photographic and the literary at work in Benjamin’s understanding of the image, and its intersection with surrealism, than has hitherto been developed. The concept of allegory that Benjamin relates to the seventeenth-century baroque finds its essential characteristic in a discontinuity, of image and meaning, which disrupts the false appearance of “unity” located in the symbol. “Here”, Benjamin writes, “what is vital is the transposition of the originally temporal data into a figurative spatial simultaneity. This leads deep into the structure of the dramatic form”.42 It is hard not to read these words, written between 1924-25, as articulating a series of conceptual oppositions, revolving around the category of the romantic poetic image, which will come to mediate Benjamin’s accounts of both photography and surrealism. In his reading of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Charles Rosen relates the forms of “discrepancy” that Benjaminian allegory manifests to the “audacious” comparisons of Donne’s “A Valediction: forbidding mourning”, but it is precisely in the surrealist poetic image, and its “juxtaposition of two or more distant realities”, that we might find such “audaciousness” most fully revealed.43 If, however, baroque drama and poetry’s “arbitrary grouping of elements” in the image reflects a “desolate, sorrowful dispersal”, surrealism’s dispersal takes a fundamentally affirmative, and thus avant-garde, form. For Breton, the “strongest” image is that which is “arbitrary to the highest degree”. However, this has to be seen as qualified by the criteria that follows it: “the one that takes the longest time to translate into ordinary language”.44 In this sense, “arbitrariness” does not mean mere randomness, but is itself a form of judgement governed by the experience of difference. (Benjamin stresses, too, the long effort of “understanding” involved in “reading” the allegorical image). Such difference is, by virtue of the temporal condition of its situation of experience, radically historical. The “reading” of such images thus requires their relation to a particular “now of recognisability” in which the present appears in crisis. It is this that connects surrealism to the reading of Baudelaire in the Arcades Project, as drawing on the “genius of allegory” as a means to resist “the abyss of myth that gaped beneath his feet”. For Baudelaire, Benjamin writes:

[A]llegory has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all “given order”, whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or an organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seem endurable. And this is the progressive tendency of allegory.45


It is in this way that allegory works against the symbol’s attempt to arrest the moment as an image of eternity: “In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune […]. The false appearance of totality is extinguished”. It is “as something incomplete and imperfect that objects stare out of the allegorical structure”.46 If Benjamin perceived such an “allegorical intuition” in surrealism (as in montage more generally), his doubts, of course, revolved around what he saw as surrealism’s tendency to collapse the allegorical structure back into myth in new ways. Hence, the famous distancing of the Arcades Project from its “origins” in the first section of Aragon’s Paris Peasant as entailing a “question of the dissolution of ‘mythology’ into the space of history”.47 Yet such a claim is a little disingenuous, or at least has to be read carefully. For Aragon’s “myth” is not that of, say, Eliot or Wagner—the key temptation for Baudelaire, Benjamin claims—but is a fully temporalised “modern mythology”; that is, not something like a “myth for today”, which would provide a new stable source of “eternal” value, but “modern” in its very form: a “mythology in motion” which mirrors the allegorical imaging of the “transitory”, “shone over” by a “mortal star”.48 Aragon’s instantané is thus what Adorno calls “myth turned against itself”, where “the timelessness of myth becomes the catastrophic instant that destroys temporal continuity”. As he goes on to say: “Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image contains this element”.49 While Adorno himself worried that such discontinuous and imagistic “montage-like” structures, in both surrealism and Benjamin, were in fact “unable to explode the individual elements” from which they were constructed—thus risking, without “mediation”, a mere dream-like recapitulation of the “accepted order of things”—actually Benjamin’s own concerns might be understood to revolve, not around too little futurity, but rather too much.50 It is certainly the case that Breton’s articulations of the surrealist image still frequently tended to conceive of it in romantic aesthetic utopianist terms, as a directly speculative image of future unification. This is the “aim” of the surrealist image’s anti-positivist juxtapositions understood as figuring a “final resolution”, a futural reconciliation of oppositions.51 Although Breton often expresses this in quasi-Hegelian terms, such “reconciliation” is, of course, in fact the primary characteristic of the romantic symbolic image more generally, as Kermode among others has shown. As against this, one might argue, as I have done elsewhere, that Benjamin seeks to read the surrealist image in relation to an other romanticism; a

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romanticism of the allegory and of the fragment.52 It is in these terms, towards the end of the “Surrealism” essay, and immediately preceding the section on Aragon’s distinction between metaphor and image, that Benjamin talks of an essential “mistrust in reconciliation”.53 Such would be the context for Benjamin’s own “surrealistic” linkage of poetic image to action. Despite certain vague gestures, by Krauss, in such a direction, regarding photo-montage’s mobilisation of “signification as a political act”, it is precisely the politics of this conception of the image as a moment-in-difference—and its relation to the “spark of contingency” to be found in the photographic “Here and Now” in which “the future subsists”—that is almost entirely elided in her account.54 For if surrealism convulses the “logical distinction” between the real and the represented, it does so as part of an attempt to act upon reality, to interrupt, in the explosive moment of the surreal, the smooth progression of the everyday from within. Hence Aragon writes:

Surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image, or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation: for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe.55

“Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction”, Aragon states in the closing pages of Paris Peasant: “The marvellous is the eruption of contradiction within the real”.56 It is at this point, most clearly, that the surrealist image touches upon a certain politicised understanding of montage, and of the photographic more generally, as the “entrance to the world of snapshot”; one in which it “enacts the heterogenous as the critique of premature synthesis”.57 In this, as in the “progressive tendency” of the allegorical, incompletion is the very condition of a radical and “unpredictable” futurity; a figure of the “entire Universe” revised. Yet if this aligns it with a certain avant-garde photographic practice, it is in romanticism, above all, as Blanchot writes, that surrealism first recognises itself here, and “recognises what it rediscovers on its own: poetry, the force of absolute freedom”: “Literature will from now on bear in itself [the] question of discontinuity or difference as a question of form—a question and a task German romanticism not only sensed but already clearly proposed”.58 Without its mediation by such a question, the conjunction of surrealism and the photographic, and its place in Benjamin’s thought, makes little sense. Such a claim should not be misunderstood. In one sense, certainly, the photographic image was, as Sylviane Agacinski says, unimaginable, “unable to be anticipated by an autonomous imagination that claims not to be


dependent, for its own inventions, on technical inventions”.59 Hence, as Benjamin realised, more coherently than any other thinker of his time, photography did not simply constitute a (potential) new art form—as the aestheticised image of Anglo-American modernism might (just) allow—but irrevocably disrupted the history of the other arts, and of “art” in general. Nonetheless, this very disruption is itself only “imag(in)able” on the basis of the historically transformed categories of that which it disrupts. In a 1921 catalogue for the Paris exhibition of Max Ernst’s collages, Breton writes: “The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as poetry”.60 In terms both of the still dominant perception of surrealism, in an Anglo-American context, and of the standard theoretical treatment of photography, it might be wise to reverse Breton’s own order—revealing in itself—to remind ourselves that photography’s historical emergence had its profound impacts on poetry as well as painting. In this sense, it “belongs” as much to the history of literature as to that of the visual arts. If one can see this in some of the most famous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attacks on photography, by the likes of Baudelaire and Apollinaire—attacks we should not be too hasty to label as simply reactionary—we can also see it in surrealism’s relative enthusiasm for the photograph. For the possibility of this affirmation is itself dependent upon a disentangling of the ontology and historical “meaning” of the photographic from its association with the positivism that the surrealists attributed to the realism of the nineteenth-century novel. In recasting the photographic as poetic, on the model of their own development of the romantic literary image, the surrealists were able to conceive of the photographic image in “progressive” terms, not as a repetition of the “accepted order of things”, but as an explosive interruption of reality-as-it-is, a break with the “ever-same” of capitalist logic. This is thus, in large part, a question of time, as Benjamin saw. For while photographic realism was predicated on its “historical” recording of a self-identical present, surrealism stressed, above all, the “now-time” of the photographic—like the time of the avant-garde—as generated by an historical practice that could interrupt historicist narrativity, opening the present to a moment-in-difference. If surrealism has its “photographic conditions”, then it is, finally, as a new “model” of a “moment of interference”; one which would both extend and transform that “question of discontinuity” that the romantic discourse of the image bequeathed. Caught by “immense barometric roots”, the locomotive, engine of capital accumulation and the linearity of “railway time”, is immobilised for a moment, and, in its fixed-explosive image, a different future is glimpsed.

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NOTES

1 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson-Taylor, London: Picador, 1980, p. 78.

2 See Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism”, October, No. 19, Winter 1981; reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987, pp. 87-118. Material from this essay is also reworked in the catalogue essay “Photography in the Service of Surrealism”, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1986, pp. 15-54.

3 For some comments on the notion of informe, and the problematic opposition which is often posited between Breton and Bataille on its basis, see David Cunningham, “The Futures of Surrealism: Hegelianism, Romanticism and the Avant-Garde”, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, forthcoming 2005.

4 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, in What is Cinema? Volume One, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 15-6.

5 Susan Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin, 1977, p. 52. 6 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, p. 28. 7 See Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti”, in Krauss and Livingstone, pp. 57-112;

and The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 149-95. For a good recent survey of surrealist photographic practices, see David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, London & New York: I.B. Taurus, 2004.

8 Krauss “Photography in the Service of Surrealism”, p. 24. 9 Krauss, “Photographic Conditions”, p. 101. 10 Compare Peter Bürger: “Through the avant-garde movements, the historical

succession of techniques and styles has been transformed into a simultaneity of the radically disparate”. Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 63.

11 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 406.

12 Krauss, “Photographic Conditions”, pp. 94-5, 113. 13 This is John Roberts’ critical reading of Krauss’ argument, which seems to me

too hasty in this respect. See The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 101-2.

14 Krauss, “Photographic Conditions”, p. 109. 15 André Breton, Mad Love (1937), trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1987, p. 19. 16 Ibid., p. 10.


17 André Breton, “Postman Cheval”, trans. David Gascoyne, in Edward B. Germain, ed., English and American Surrealist Poetry, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978, p. 116.

18 Foster, pp. 27-8. 19 Krauss, “Photographic Conditions”, p. 107. 20 Roberts, p. 30. 21 Ibid., p. 107. 22 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 56. 23 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard

Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 388. “History” here of course refers to the empty historical time of historicism.

24 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1973, pp. 254, 247. For a reading of this experience as “photographic” in character, see Peter Osborne, “Sign and Image” in Philosophy in Cultural Theory, London & New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 45-6.

25 Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 464 [emphasis added]. 26 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism”, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans.

Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: New Left Books, 1979, p. 230. 27 Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 10. 28 Ibid., p. 463. 29 For a useful study of the image, to which I am indebted here, see W.J.T.

Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

30 See ibid., pp. 24-5, 165; and M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. One needs to be careful in such “simplifying to the extreme” of course. For romanticism also maintains its own strongly empirical bent, its own emphasis on objectivity and “observation”. For a particularly vigorous account of “Object-Dominance” in romantic poetry, see Geoffrey Thurley, The Romantic Precedent, London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983.

31`See Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957), London: Fontana, 1971. 32 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”, in Literary Essays, London: Faber & Faber, 1960,

p. 4 [emphasis added]. 33 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, London & Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1995, pp. 69, 285. 34 F.S. Flint, “Imagisme” (1913), in Peter Jones, ed., Imagist Poetry,

Harmondsworth: Pengion, 1972, p. 129. Although signed by Flint, the text was substantially written by Pound.

35 Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991, p. 63.

36 Kermode, pp. 17, 126. 37 André Breton, “First Manifesto of Surrealism”, in Manifestoes of Surrealism,

trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp. 20, 37 [emphasis added].

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38 Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 194.

39 Benjamin, “Surrealism”, p. 239. 40 Nicholls, p. 175. See also Edward Larrissy, Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry:

The Language of Gender and Objects, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, pp. 38-9. Hugh Kenner describes “In a Station of the Metro” as “a simile with the ‘like’ suppressed”. The Pound Era, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, p. 185.

41 Bürger, pp. 29, 68. 42 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne,

London: New Left Books, 1977, p. 81. 43 Charles Rosen, “The Ruins of Walter Benjamin”, in Gary Smith, ed., On Walter

Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 149.

44 Breton, “First Manifesto”, p. 38. 45 Benjamin, Arcades Project, pp. 268, 331. 46 Benjamin, Origin, pp. 176, 186. 47 Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 458. 48 Aragon, Paris Peasant, pp. 128-30. 49 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 23. 50 Ibid., p. 63. See also Adorno’s critique of Benjamin’s “surrealistic” descent to a

position “located at the crossroads of magic and positivism”, in “Letter to Benjamin, November 10th 1938”, in Ronald Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics, London: New Left Books, 1977, pp. 128-30.

51 See André Breton, “What is Surrealism?”, in What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont, New York: Monad, 1978, p. 116.

52 See Cunningham, “Futures of Surrealism”; and “A Question of Tomorrow: Blanchot, Surrealism and the Time of the Fragment”, Papers of Surrealism, No.1, Winter 2003: www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/journal1.htm.

53 Benjamin, “Surrealism”, p. 238 [emphasis added]. See also David Cunningham, “Architecture, Utopia and the Futures of the Avant-Garde”, Journal of Architecture, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer 2001, p. 182.

54 Krauss, “Photographic Conditions”, p. 104; Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography”, in One-Way Street, p. 243.

55 Aragon, Paris Peasant, pp. 78-9 [second emphasis added]. 56 Ibid., p. 217. 57 Roberts, p. 33. 58 Blanchot, pp. 351, 359. 59 Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. Jody

Gladding, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 88. 60 André Breton, Exposition dada Max Ernst (1921), cited in Dawn Ades,

“Photography and the Surrealist Text”, in Krauss and Livingstone, p. 160.

'Photography and the Literary Conditions of the Surrealist Image'

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