Rasmussen - The SI Surrealism and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics

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mikssen

The Situationist International,

Surrealism, and the Difcult Fusionof Art and Politics

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

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The Situationist International, Surrealism, and theDifcult Fusion of Art and Politics

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

This article has two inter-related aims. Firstly, I want to contribute to thegrowing debate about the politics and political theories of the SituationisInternational and Surrealism. Through a presentation of an episode where thlater situationists distanced themselves from the surrealist favourite Chaplin, will attempt to account for the way the surrealists and the situationistrespectively engaged in politics, how they tried to locate themselves on the lefand tried to navigate in a environment dominated by the French CommunisParty. After a discussion of the complicated relationship between Surrealismand the Communist Party and Trotskyism, I analyse how the situationists afteWorld War Two attempted to continue the project of the inter-war avantgarde without repeating what they considered to be failures of Surrealism.

present the situationists' repudiation of the unconscious and their conscioueffort to leave the art world in favour of ultra-left politics outside the conneof the Communist Party. Secondly, I want to offer some hypotheses as to whthe Situationist International has been marginalised within theories of thavant-garde. Through a discussion of Peter Burger's important Theory of th

Avant-Garde, I look into the strange omission of the situationists withiaccounts of the avant-garde and I unravel the roots of the situationists' anBurger's categorical critique of the neo-avant-garde.

I

On 29 October 1952, Charlie Chaplin held his nal press conference in Pariafter the successful French premier of his new lm Limelight.1 The previou

week Chaplin had been in London, where he opened the European launchinof his new lm. In London, as in Paris and Rome, Chaplin was a sensation, andat the gala premier, 200 policemen were called out to keep around 10,000spectators at a distance. The BBC was present and recorded the entire scenewhere long rows of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys dropped off public gures suchas Princess Margaret, Lady Mountbatten, the Duke of Alba, Vivien Leigh, anDouglas Fairbanks Jr. It was as if everyone of importance in England hagathered to celebrate the homecoming of the exiled king of lm.

Chaplin was in exile because he had been refused automatic entry to theUnited States after his tour in Europe; he had paradoxically become a pawn inand victim of a political game at a time when he had otherwise retracted hiformer controversial political viewpoints and created a melancholic auto

biographical love lm. While Chaplin had openly expressed sympathy for thInternational and domestic communism in the 1940s, around 1950 he began tresist making political comments and attempted to dissociate himself from hiformer viewpoints. Throughout the 1940s, Chaplin had repeatedly aired hisupport and admiration for the Soviet Union in interviews, and he had beenactive in the left-wing environment in Hollywood that arose among exiledEuropeans like Hanns Eisler and Berthold Brecht. The lm Monsieur Verdoufrom 1947 thus presented a social critique of capitalistic society and, unlikChaplin's previous lms, contained few traditional comical elements. Rather

1. For accounts of the events surrounding therelease of Chaplin's Limelight, see Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: TheEvolution of a Star Image (Princeton UniversityPress: Princeton, 1989), pp. 221313, andKenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and his Times(Simon & Schuster: New York, 1997),pp. 47291.

Oxford Art Journal 27.3 # Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004 36538

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the comedy that it contained was macabre. The lm was also a nancial asco,and shortly afterward Chaplin began pulling away from his former obviouspolitical commitment. However, at that time the FBI had already registeredhim as a communist sympathiser, and two members of Congress haddemanded that he should be deported from the United States. Even thoughChaplin manifestly played down the political viewpoints he previouslyadvanced, and despite a major ad campaign focusing on his traditional

character the comical and loveable tramp he became entangled in thewide-ranging shift in public opinion that took place in the US from 1947 to1951. Once the enthusiasm after the defeat of fascism in World War Two hadabated, there was a return to the anti-communist atmosphere of the 1930s,and the Cold War became a reality. After a number of different events theUSSR detonates an atom bomb, the Maoists in China win in 1949, the KoreanWar breaks out, Klaus Fuchs, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are revealed as spies

a xenophobic anti-communist atmosphere achieved a hegemonic status in theUS. Joseph McCarthy, who headed a witch-hunt against assumed communistsfrom 1949 onward, incarnated an extreme form of anti-communism. It is inthis enamed climate Chaplin attempted to salvage his status as a star, as aloveable, funny, and hard-working comedian. In interviews, he refrained fromexpressing support for the Soviet Union, saying instead: `I am not political . . .I am an individualist and believe in liberty. This is as far as my politicalconvictions go . . . In modern times where everything is being regimented theartist must more than ever think of the internal life of the individual, of thisunique phenomenon which is a human being, the artist must create for him'.2

But regardless of these measures, the US revoked his permission to returnafter his tour in Europe.

In contrast to the treatment he received in the US, Chaplin was celebratedlike a king in Europe. According to Variety, at the premier in London hereceived more applause than Princess Margaret, and a few days after thepremiere he was received in audience by Queen Elizabeth. Nor in Paris waspomp in short supply. Chaplin was admitted as a member of the Legion ofHonour, received by various public ofcials including the Paris police chief,

and the newspapers were overowing with articles on him. Thus, on 29October, Chaplin held his nal press conference in Paris at the Ritz Hotel. Inthe middle of the session, four men suddenly started shouting and beganthrowing yers out over the entire gathering. The yer, an A4 sheet writtenon a typewriter, carried the heading `NO MORE FLAT FEET', and read:

Sub-Mack Sennett director, sub-Max Linder actor, Stravisky of the tears of unwed mothers and

the little orphans of Auteil, you are Chaplin, emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune

. . . Because you've identied yourself with the weak and the oppressed, to attack you has been

to attack the weak and the oppressed but in the shadow of your rattan cane some could

already see the nightstick of a cop. You are `he-who-turns-the-other-cheek' the other cheek of

the buttocks but for us, the young and beautiful, the only answer to suffering is revolution . . .

Go to sleep, you fascist insect. Rake in the dough. Make it with high society (we loved it when

you crawled on your stomach in front of little Elisabeth). Have a quick death: we promise you a

rst-class funeral. We pray that your latest lm will truly be your last . . . Go home, MisterChaplin.3

At the bottom of the page were four signatures: Serge Berna, Guy-ErnestDebord, Jean-L. Brau, and Gil Wolman. The four men had signed on thebehalf of the Lettrist International. The Lettrists argued that Chaplin and hislm practised a kind of emotional blackmail, merely compensating for a boringlife and not creating the possibility of a new one lled with excitement andadventure. Chaplin belonged to the past and was an obstacle toward creating a

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2. Cited in Maland, Chaplin and AmericanCulture, p. 281.

3. `Finis les pieds plats', reprinted in GerardBerreby (ed.), Documents relatifs a la fondation del'internationale situationniste (Editions Allia: Paris,1985), p. 262.

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new life without alienation and suffering. He signalled passivity and weaknesand a lack of desire to change this situation. His lack of self-awareness wanave, making it possible to separate the human from the social and to pinone's faith on a utopian salvation of mankind. The event did not manage tcreate any major debate in the newspapers, and Chaplin did not comment onthe episode in his autobiography. Even so, the episode was signicant since iwas not only the birth of what later became the International Situationist, bu

it also heralded a shift in the history of the artistic avant-garde.On the face of it, the event conrmed the break between Isidore Isou'lettrist group and the international lettrists who were behind the yer and thaction against Chaplin. Lettrism arose when the Romanian artist Isodore Isouarrived in Paris shortly after World War Two with a suitcase full omanuscripts and a megalomaniacal artistic project comprising poetry, paintinglm, theatre, music, and so on. According to Isou, it was time to honour thedestruction of the artwork that had been undertaken by radical modern art. Anew life should now be constructed on the ruins of the old one. Isou hadeveloped a theory of history based on the idea that what drives historforward is the will to create.4 Creation makes the world possible, makes thworld exist. The sense of human action was to create oneself and the worldThrough the act of creation man became God, according to Isou, who thulogically called himself the new Messiah. In other words, Isou and Lettrismradicalised one of the most long-lasting myths in the history of modernity: thnarcissistic idea of autogenesis and complete (self-) mastery. Miraculouslymodern man generates himself out of nothing. Ex nihilo, homo autoteluextrapolates himself. There was nevertheless a logic in the procedure ocreation: according to Isou, all forms thus went through a `phase ampliqueand a `phase ciselant'; that is, rst a period when the form developed, becammeaningful, created its stylistic vocabulary with which it became capable oexpressing more than just its immanent content, then a period when idisintegrated, imploded, and thus began to concentrate on the forms antechniques of the medium itself.

Isou applied this grandiose genesis to various art forms, so that, for instance

within literature it was Victor Hugo who had completed `le phase ampliqueand Baudelaire who had initiated `le phase ciselant'. After BaudelaireRimbaud, and Verlaine, then Mallarme and Valery and nally Tzara anBreton had destroyed poetic language so that it ended up not meaninanything: Dada. Now it was up to Isou to reconstruct an entirely new alphabeconsisting of new letters, new basic elements, hence the name of thmovement: lettre-ism. Isou succeeded in convincing the publishing housGallimard to publish several of his manuscripts; and with the help of stagescandals, Isou succeeded in creating awareness of Lettrism in Paris in the 1940and 1950s. He gathered a small group of young people around him andtogether they created lettrist poetry, music, lm, painting, dance, philosophyarchitecture, and so on and so forth. Basically, the group put all media to use

subjecting them to either a `phase amplique' or a `phase ciselant' according thow far the individual medium had reached in its development.It was this mixture of budding youth culture and avant-garde group tha

Guy Debord, Gil Wolman, and the other international lettrists had challengedby criticising Chaplin. Isou and the other lettrists criticised the attack oChaplin in a letter to the editor in Combat, characterising the four men's actioas `outrancier et confus', and writing that even though the celebration oChaplin was marked by hysteria, they in no way wanted to take issue witChaplin. `We are not in solidarity with our friends' tract and we join th

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difcult Fusion of Art and Politic

4. See Isidore Isou, Introduction a une nouvellepoesie et a une nouvelle musique (Gallimard: Paris,1947), Memoires sur les forces futures des arts

plastiques et sur leur mort (Cahiers del'Externite:Paris, 1998).

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homage everyone has rendered to Chaplin.'5 The international lettristsresponded: `We believe that the most urgent expression of freedom is thedestruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom.'6 ThusIsou and the lettrists were, according to the international lettrists, no longerabreast of the times and had themselves become reactionary. Like Chaplin andall other idols, Isou should be destroyed in order to make room for a newgeneration. But not a new generation of artists. As Debord wrote in a response

to Isou: `We have so little interest in the authors and their tactics that theincident is almost forgotten; it is really for us as if Jean-Isidore Isou had neverexisted; as if there never had been his lies and his renunciation.'7 This was nolonger the time for literature and art. Isou was hanging on to the past whileDebord and the international lettrists had already forgotten everything aboutIsou, Chaplin, and literature. That which had previously been the artisticavant-garde was now impossible. The true revolutionaries had moved out ofand beyond art. The true revolutionaries no longer had anything to do withart.

II

The idea of the failure of the avant-garde played a pivotal role in the theories

and the practice that rst the international lettrists and later the InternationalSituationist developed. According to the Situationists' genealogy of the avant-garde, the period between 1910 and 1930 was the culmination of the 150-year-long disintegration of art and the artwork. With Dada and Surrealism itbecame obvious that the only true art was anti-art, that the authentic artworkcarried its own negation. Dada and Surrealism had each driven art beyond itslimits and carried out the self-transcendence of art. Since then nothing ofrelevance had been produced as art. The period after 1930 had beencharacterised by an expanding repetition of previous destructions andexperiments. In a report whose title was `Panorama intelligent de l'avant-garde a la n de 1955', a severe critique of contemporary art, politics, andphilosophy was made:

Poetry: The almost complete disappearance of this activity . . . Cinema: It has been years sincewe have seen a lm of even minor novelty . . . Philosophy: IDIOTS, stop being. Read Marx . . .

Visual arts: All abstract painting since Malevitch have been forcing open doors. This activity is

off-course, uninteresting and perfectly mediocre . . . Politics: Nothing new . . . Literature: One is

never without substitutes that can preserve the publishing industry and consumption.8

Since Dada and the surrealists, modern art had merely repeated itself and hadended up as a mocking compensation for an alienated life. Modern art wasdead, a death that occurred around 1930. From then on no artisticexperiments had managed to live up to art's demands for a different life. Theyhad been satised with merely re-presenting already accepted and circulatingforms without understanding the very historical situation and developmentthat had made it possible to transcend art and integrate it directly into

everyday life.By criticising Chaplin, the situationists made it clear that the time had nowcome to transgress Dada and Surrealism. They made it clear that theyperceived themselves as a post-Dadaist and post-surrealist movement. For thesurrealists had expressed great enthusiasm for Chaplin on several occasions,culminating in 1927 when they delivered a grandiose defence of Chaplin intheir journal La Revolution Surrealiste.9 Under the title `Hands off Love', thesurrealists defended Chaplin's right to live as he pleased. Chaplin's wife at thetime, Lillita Grey, had applied for divorce and demanded $1 million in

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5. `Les lettristes desavouent les insultes deChaplin', reprinted in Berreby, p. 147.

6. `Position de l'Internationale lettriste',reprinted in Berreby, p. 151.

7. Guy Debord, `Mort d'un CommisVoyageur', reprinted in Berreby, Documents,

p. 149.

8. `Panorama intelligent de l'avant-garde a lan de 1955', Guy Debord presente Potlach(Gallimard: Paris, 1996), pp. 20918.

9. The defence was originally written for thejournal Transition, `a monthly magazinepresenting the modern spirit of variouscontinents to the English-speaking world', whichpresented the text as `a terric Documentdefending Genius against Bourgeois Hypocrisyand against Modern American Morality'. But thesurrealists were not satised with thepresentation of the text and reprinted it in LaRevolution Surrealiste. See Jose Pierre (ed.), Tractssurrealistes et declarations collectives (1922/1969).

Tome I (1922/39) (Le terrain vague: Paris,1980), pp. 4146.

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alimony. Her attorney and uncle, Edwin McMurray, made public a 40-pagelong indictment in which Chaplin was accused of having affairs, living perverted life, and neglecting his wife in favour of his lms. `Plaintiff allegewith regard to sexual relations heretofore existing between said parties that thdefendant's attitude, conduct and manifestations of interest therein have beeabnormal, unnatural, perverted, degenerate and indecent.'10

The public did not react in favour of Chaplin, and he came under heavy r

on account of the affair. The surrealists did not react too late and directed scathing attack on the bourgeois morality they wanted to get rid of. As Bretowrote in Manifeste du surrealisme: `a new morality must be substituted for thprevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations.'11 They wrotthat marriage was nothing but a prison designed to restrain true passions andthat bourgeois morality restricted the natural freedom of feelings ansuppressed the ability to create. Chaplin was an ideal because he followed hidesire wherever it took him. In the apology, which had even been made theleading article of the issue, they recalled in admiration how in one of his lmChaplin had dropped everything in his hands to follow a woman passing byThis scene made a considerable impression on the surrealists, to whom desirwas the greatest virtue. Spontaneous actions were an expression of unspoilecreativity, while consciousness destroyed the fantastic and imprisoned it in thsterile forms of art. Art and poetry were only relevant to the surrealists insofaas they were manifestations of the fantastic. Considered formally anstylistically, art and poetry were without value, but as an expression of thfantastic they were indispensable. They therefore possessed no immanenvalue, but were important as media in which the fantastic was awakenedTranscending the self was pivotal. Man should allow himself to be subjected toobjective accidental occurrences and to be open to the singularity ocoincidences, where a corner of hidden meaning in life, a higher necessity, waexposed. For the surrealists, mankind was a sensitive receiver of an alreadyexisting poetic inspiration that it was a matter of setting free. This liberationcould take place on walks through city streets, where encounters with thobjects of yesteryear or strange characters constituted emotional shocks, o

through automatic writing, in which a discursive ux was released.The surrealists' operations were risky and Breton himself wrote that Champ

magnetiques was an attempt to `write a dangerous book' dangerous not onlto those who allowed themselves to be possessed by automatic writing, bualso linguistically dangerous, in that automatic writing questioned thauthenticity of all other means of communication.12 Automatic writing waan attempt to create transparent, total communication without ulteriomotives.13 Behind the enunciation there was no subject to address a reader. Itook place without author and reader, all alone in the world, and was thuinnocent communication in the absence of intersubjective relations. Iautomatic writing, all dialogue faded and turned into monologue. Authenticommunication took place when there was no longer an `I' addressing a `you'

but when polyphonic `speech' was exposed. Breton triumphantly wrote iManifeste du surrealisme:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express

verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner the actual function of thought.

Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any

aesthetic or moral concern.14

With the collective monologue of automatic writing the surrealists attempteto reveal a paradoxical community where communication takes place when n

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difcult Fusion of Art and Politic

10. Lita Grey's divorce complaint againstChaplin, quoted in Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and hisTimes, p. 310.

11. Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism,trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (TheUniversity of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor,

1969), p. 44.12. Andre Breton, `En Marge des ChampsMagnetiques', Change, no. 7, 1970, p. 25.

13. See Laurent Jenny, La parole singuliere(Editions Belin: Paris, 1990), pp. 14654;Marguerite Bonnet, Andre Breton: Naissance del'aventure surrealiste (Jose Corti: Paris, 1975),pp. 16097.

14. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 26.

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one expresses himself. Automatic writing made it possible for the subject todisintegrate in an authentic process of communication, to obliterate oneself inorder to allow a real community to appear beyond any social and psychologicalalienation. Walks through the city were supra-textual versions of automaticwriting, a pure automatism exposed in life. Walking and automatic writingwere to the surrealists what the divan was to psychoanalysis: a place fortransference to take place, a place where the patient and the analyst constantly

switched places until an `it' appeared and was read by an `us.'

III

Like the other groups in the historical avant-garde, the surrealists weresceptical about the institution of art and enthusiastic about the revolutionstaking place in Russia, Hungary, and Germany. The surrealists identiedthemselves with the revolutionary wave, seeing it as their task to bring about arevolution in the people carrying out the revolution. In contrast to the Soviet-Russian avant-garde, which strived to develop an accessible, egalitarian, andradical anti-aesthetic production art, where art and industry merged in theservice of the revolution, the surrealists concentrated on the unconsciousdimensions of the subject and on releasing as much creative power as possible.Whereas production art turned art into technology and science, the surrealiststurned art into a means for the fantastic, wanting to re-mythologise life. Thesurrealists were sceptical about the widely-held view that the rest of the worldshould follow the model of American industrialisation.15 Marxists like AntonioGramsci were convinced that American industrialisation was the way forwardfor the proletariat, which should be streamlined and disciplined.16 Not just thebourgeois world, but the worker as well should be reformed according to thepredictable and effective methods of Fordism and Taylorism. The workershould keep his animal drives in check and afrm a new mechanised lifecontrolled by rationality and Puritanism. The surrealists were of the opinionthat industrialisation and functionalism created a sterile and dead world. Thesurrealists were romantics in so far as they were drawn to the cultural forms of

a pre-capitalist past and rejected the cold and abstract rationality of modernindustrial civilisation. This interest in the outdated and the magical did notmean however that the surrealists melancholically mourned the passing of timeand worshipped the paradise of the past. Instead they used their nostalgia as aweapon with which the present world could be transformed.

Despite the opposition toward the contemporary technological andeconomic utopia of development, the surrealists considered themselves asMarxists. But their `Gothic Marxism' was different from the dominantversion, which had metaphysical materialistic tendencies and was contaminatedby an evolutionary ideology of development.17 Their Marxism was amaterialism fascinated by the fantastic and interested in enchantment. Themagical dimensions of earlier cultures constituted a reservoir for the

revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and exposedthe fantastic. The marginalised objects of modern culture were not delusionsthat had to be driven away but both potentialities to be mobilised in arevolutionary battle and ingredients in a re-enchanted life. According to thesurrealists, it was a misunderstanding to believe that politicising and criticisingbourgeois society meant that the revolutionaries had to give up the magical andthe libertine in favour of what they thought was a dilettantish condence inprogress. The trivial objects of modern life should be torn out of their usualsurroundings and rational use and be endowed with a life of their own.

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15. For an account of the impact the idea ofindustrialisation as historical progress made inthe twentieth century, see Susan Buck-Morss,Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of MassUtopia in East and West (MIT Press: Cambridge,2000).

16. Antonio Gramsci, `Americanism andFordism', Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoareand Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Lawrence &Wishart: London, 1971).

17. The term `Gothic Marxism' has beenconceptualised by Margaret Cohen in ProfaneIllumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of theSurrealist Revolution (University of CaliforniaPress: Berkeley, 1993) and by Michael Lowy inL'etoile du matin: Surrealisme et marxisme (EditionsSyllepse: Paris, 2000).

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According to the surrealists, the objects and techniques of the bourgeois worlddictated how man should live, thereby transforming the world into a prisonMan was trapped in an alienating structure he was unable to escape from. Bydrawing attention to the marginalised and irrational objects in rationalisesociety, the surrealists tried to equip the alienated human being with tools withwhich he could break out of his prison and regain freedom.

The peculiar Gothic Marxism of the surrealists meant that they had

complicated relationship with the established Marxism in France, in particulathe French Communist Party.18 The Communist Party had come intexistence in 1920 as a fusion of different French militants who, inspired by thevents in Russia, wanted to transfer the Bolshevik experiment to France.19 Thimportation of Leninism from the economically underdeveloped Soviet Unionwas mixed with elements from the long French tradition of popular uprisingdating back to 1789. In the rst years of the existence of the party there was nocontradiction between the Leninist Bolshevism and the French revolutionarheritage. The theory and practice of Leninism could be synthesiseunproblematically with the different currents of the French left such a

Jacobinism, Syndicalism, and Utopian Socialism. For the French Communiststhe revolution in Russia was just the latest example of the revolutionary sparthat had already exploded in 1789, 1848, and 1871 in the streets of Paris andLyon. During this rst period, the Communist Party was characterised bgreat diversity and internal doctrinal confusion. This confusion or opennesslowly disappeared during the 1920s, as the party concentrated more andmore on defending the policy of the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1920smore or less all the `non-Bolshevik' elements had been excluded from thparty and the party was characterised by conformism and uniformity. Thsurrealists experienced the increasing Stalinisation of the Communist Party aclose hand and it eventually made the connection between Surrealism and theCommunist Party untenable.

In the rst year of the group's existence it was only poetry by expressing transgression of that which already exists in the direction of the fantastic thawas considered liberating. After a very short time, the group nevertheles

made a political turn and became aware that creating another life also impliechanges in the material basis of life. Events such as the revolution in Russia, thewar in Morocco, and the arrival of Fascism put pressure on the intuitive anethical idea of another life that characterised the group, supplementing it witha need to express the revolutionary demand in political actions. Gradually thsurrealists became politically conscious and found out that most people thawere against nationalism, imperialism, and bourgeois morality were Marxistof some sort.

The surrealists had become acquainted with the journal Clarte in 1924, whethe journal, like the surrealists, distanced itself from the widespread nationamourning over the death of the Grand Old Man of French letters, AnatoleFrance. Clarte originally started out in 1919 as a humanist and pacist journa

run by the writer Henri Barbusse, but the journal turned leftward and waoriented toward revolutionary action under the leadership of a group of younMarxists like Jean Bernier, Eduard Berth, and Marcel Fourrier.20 The journastarted publishing articles on topics like economy, war, and fascism anworked with the Communist Party without however becoming an ofciaorgan for the party. Like the surrealists, Clarte was an avid critic of warnationalism, and capitalism, and the two groups started collaborating in 192after the outbreak of a new colonial war in Morocco. The two groups issued

joint manifesto, `La Revolution d'abord et toujours', in which they criticise

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difcult Fusion of Art and Politic

18. For an account of the relationship betweenthe surrealists and the French Communist Party,see Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism(Paragon House Publications: New York, 1988);Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surrealisme (Editionsde Seuil: Paris, 1964); Robert S. Short, `ThePolitics of Surrealism, 1920-1936', Journal ofContemporary History, vol. 1, no. 2, 1966,pp. 325; Andre Thirion, Revolutionnaires sansrevolution (Robert Laffront: Paris, 1972).

19. See David Caute, Communism and the FrenchIntellectuals 19141960 (Macmillan: New York,1964).

20. For a discussion ofClarte, see NicoleRacine, `The Clarte Movement in France,191921', Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 2,no. 2, 1967, pp. 195208.

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the French government for its imperialistic aggression and saluted Lenin for hisdemand for a total disarmament. `We don't think your France will ever becapable of following the magnicent example of an immediate and completedisarmament that Lenin gave the world in Brest-Litovsk a disarmament whoserevolutionary value is indenite.'21 During a short period the two groupsfocused on their common enemy bourgeois culture and the imperialist warin Morocco and even planned the publication of a new joint journal called La

Guerre Civile that however never materialised, because the surrealists were notready to abandon the surrealist experiment.The termination of the collaboration with Clarte did result in the surrealists

abandoning politics. The question of political engagement remained centralwithin Surrealism, and the surrealist group experienced several rifts during thenext years on that very question. From 1925 to 1929 the group was marked bycontroversies inwardly and outwardly with respect to the Communist Partyand to the different para-communist groups with which they cooperated for abrief period. The political turn and the concrete collaboration with Clarteresulted in the formation of three fractions within the surrealist group: onedesired to dialectically sublate the division between idealism and materialism(e.g. Breton, Aragon); the second refused to subordinate the spiritualrevolution of Surrealism to a political agenda (e.g. Artaud, Desnos); while thethird wished to privilege political activity (e.g. Naville, Peret). These fractionswere an expression of the heterogeneity characterising the practice ofSurrealism, and they demonstrated that Surrealism was not a coherent theoryand practice but rather a eld of overlapping, often conicting, tendencies atthat moment.

For a short while, Artaud was at the centre of surrealist activity. He was atthe head of Le Bureau central de Reserches surrealistes and wrote severalletters published in La Revolution Surrealiste in which he mocked and provokedtraditional culture and every conceivable institution in the world. In `Adresseau Pape' the Pope was ridiculed, in `Lettre aux medecins-chefs des asiles defous' he demanded all mental patients be released, in `Adresse au Dalai Lama'he asked the Dalai Lama to teach the surrealists the art of levitation, and in

`Ouvrez les prisons, licenciez l'Armee' he ordered the French government toopen the prisons and close down the army.22

The utopian anarchism of Artaud only dominated the surrealist group for ashort while and, after Artaud had left the group, Aragon, Breton, and Eluardentered the Communist Party in January 1927. At that time the surrealistPierre Naville had already been a member of the Communist Party for a year,he had joined the editorial board of Clarte, and had written the pamphlet LaRevolution et les intellectuels. Que peuvent faire les surrealistes? Position de la question,in which he tried to fuse Surrealism and Marxism. Surrealism and Marxismconverged naturally, Naville wrote in his pamphlet, because the surrealist goalof realising freedom necessarily implied a critic of the bourgeoisie. Accordingto Naville, it was only the proletariat that was able to realise the revolution the

surrealists strove for. Therefore it was necessary for the surrealists to allythemselves with the Communist Party who, for its part, needed the rebelliousattitude of the surrealists. If the surrealists were not to remain an ineffectivegroup of intellectuals they had to join the communist movement and `realisethat the spiritual force . . . is intimately connected to a social reality.'23

Naville's pamphlet raised some important questions concerning the politicalengagement of Surrealism and Breton was obliged to respond to Naville'schallenge. In his text `Legitime defense' Breton thanked Naville for raising theimportant question of the relationship between Surrealism and communism.

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21. `La Revolution d'abord et toujours', LaRevolution Surrealiste, no. 5, 1925, p. 32.

22. Antonin Artaud, `Ouvriez les prisons,licenciez l'Armee', La Revolution Surrealiste, no.2, 1925, p. 18; `Adresse au Pape', La RevolutionSurrealiste, no. 3, 1925, p. 16; `Adresse au

Dalai-Lama', La Revolution Surrealiste, no. 3,1925, p. 17; `Lettre aux Ecoles du Bouddha',La Revolution Surrealiste, no. 3, 1925, p. 22;`Lettre aux medecins-chefs des asiles de fous',La Revolution Surrealistes, no. 3, 1925, p. 29.

23. Pierre Naville, La Revolution et lesintellectuels. Que peuvent faire les surrealistes?Position de la question [1926] (Gallimard: Paris,1975), p. 92. For an account of Naville'sposition, see also Pierre Naville, Le temps dusurreel. L'esperance mathematique. Vol 1 (Galilee:Paris, 1977).

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According to Breton, the surrealists supported the headlines of the communisprogram with enthusiasm, but were unsatised with the cultural policy of thFrench Communist Party. The Communist Party was only concerned with thsocio-material aspect of the revolution and had left the question of art andculture to the bourgeois forces in society. The party newspaper Humanite waan example of this tendency and Breton characterised the newspaper a`unreadable' and absolutely unsuitable to educate the working class.24 Breto

was sceptical towards the tendency of the Communist party to focus only othe material aspects of existence. The revolution was also to be a mentarevolution and this was what the surrealists strove to realise. `There is none ous who do not wish for the transfer of power from the bourgeoisie to theproletariat. In the meantime it is according to us necessary that the experienceof inner life proceeds without outside control even Marxist.'25 On behalf oSurrealism, Breton stepped back from the explicit Communist engagement oNaville and stressed the need for a certain autonomy in which the surrealistcould continue their experiments.

The question of the relationship between Surrealism and communismremained on the agenda during the fall of 1926 and Breton tried to mediatebetween the more explicit political surrealists like Naville and the spirituasurrealists like Philippe Soupault. Surrealism was for Breton precisely thfusion of these two tendencies, the spiritual and material revolution. This viewwas concretised when several surrealists led by Breton joined the CommunisParty in the beginning of 1927. At that time Naville had already left the partand had joined a small Trotskyite group. However Breton and the otherstayed within the Communist Party and continued attempting to supplementhe theory of class struggle with the idea of a transcendental mental revolution

The delicate balance between political action and surrealistic activity wacomplicated, since the Communist Party was characterised by a rigimaterialistic idea of reality in which only the ownership of the means oproduction was important while the surrealists refused to accept politics as separate area. But the criticism of the Communist Party remained mild unti1935, inasmuch as the surrealists believed to have found a means o

revolutionising society with the Communist Party. However, the surrealisthad difculty coming to terms with the centralistic and dogmatic Stalinism othe Communist Party, which meant that the party's most important activitwas to provide unqualied support to the Soviet Union and to support thetheory of `socialism in one country'. As the Soviet Union started to praise thbourgeois ideas that the surrealists hated most of all family, nation, and thepolitical leaders they had more and more difculty uniting their desire for global existential revolution, which was to destroy the predominant forms orepresentation, with the Communist Party's desire for a materiatransformation. Surrealism's determined efforts toward the total freedom oman did not correspond well with the Communist Party's praise of workproductivity, and nation. Without leaving communism, the surrealists started

to take an interest in the rival communist movements, which were based onLeninism but criticised Stalinism for opportunism and for betraying thLeninist principles.

Leon Trotsky became the centre of attention for the surrealists early onand Breton wrote a laudatory review of Trotsky's book on Lenin as early a1925 in La Revolution surrealiste no. 5. `Long live Lenin! I salute LeoTrotsky'.26 Trotsky had played a leading role in the October Revolution o1917, becoming the rst Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, andas the organiser of the Red Army he played a crucial role in the victory in the

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difcult Fusion of Art and Politic

24. Andre Breton, `Legitime Defense', LaRevolution Surrealiste, no. 8, 1926, p. 30.

25. Breton, `Legitime Defense', p. 35.

26. Andre Breton, `Leon Trotsky: Lenine', LaRevolution Surrealiste, no. 5, 1925, p. 29.

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civil and interventionist war from 1918 to 1921.27 In the battle carried outagainst Stalin from 1923 to 1927, Trotsky was defeated, and after having beendeported to Kazakhstan, he was banished from the Soviet Union in 1929.Before the Russian Revolution, Trotsky was critical of Lenin's military partystructure and fought to construct a democratic, unied party that couldaccommodate all the social-democratic tendencies, as he was afraid that theparty would establish its dictatorship over the proletariat, the party leadership

would establish its dictatorship over the party, and nally the head of the partyover the party leadership.The main idea of Trotsky's theory, which appealed to the surrealists far

more than Stalin's `socialism in one country', was the idea of `the permanentrevolution', according to which a socialistic revolution could not bethoroughly carried out in Russia alone and therefore had to `jump over' tothe developed countries in order to be completed there.28 Trotskynevertheless adopted Lenin's conception of the party in connection with theOctober Revolution, and together they headed not only the conquest ofpower, but also the many oppressive measures taken towards those whothought differently, leading to the creation of the rst totalitarian state in1921. Pursuing the idea of the permanent revolution, Trotsky severelycriticised Stalin for surrendering world revolution for `socialism in onecountry'. It was impossible to carry out a socialistic revolution in the SovietUnion if the rest of the world remained capitalistic. Left to itself the SovietUnion would develop in reactionary directions and the party into abureaucratic dictatorship that would stand above the classes and takeadvantage of these. Trotsky opposed these tendencies as well as the rapidlygrowing economical inequality in Stalin's system, but maintained that thanksto its `socialistic' property system and plan economy the Soviet Union neededa political revolution rather than a social revolution. In other words, heconsidered himself as a loyal opponent to the Soviet Union, which he stillregarded as a workers' state.

Trotsky's theories of the permanent revolution and the world revolutionwere not the only aspects of Trotsky's writings that appealed to the surrealists.

Trotsky's considerations on art and art's function in the class war were moreuseful for the surrealists than the bleak and rigid dogmas about socialist realismthat the Communist Party advanced at that time. According to Trotsky artshould not be submitted to external restrictions.29 The freedom of art was aprecondition for creativity. Even if art did not have an explicit revolutionarycontent it could serve the communist revolution, Trotsky wrote. If on theother hand art were made subordinate to censorship or external conditions itwould lose its vital freedom of expression and in the nal instance work againstthe revolution. Art did follow the development of the economy but therelationship between art and economy was so complicated that is was notpossible to dictate an artistic norm or create a certain proletarian style. `[A]class nds its style in extremely complex ways.'30

Trotsky's writings on art and revolution made a strong impression on thesurrealists who, even after the expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet Union,kept referring to his theories and never stopped paying homage to him.31 Evenafter Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union the surrealists continued torefer to his theories and praise him as a true revolutionary. But in spite ofattempting to balance between Stalinism and left-wing dissidents (Bretonwrote in Second manifeste du surrealisme that Stalin and Trotsky represented twoequally valid revolutionary tactics), it became increasingly clear that thesurrealists could not be united with the Stalinism of the Communist Party,

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27. For presentations of Trotsky's life andtheories, see Isac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1954) andThe Prophet Unarmed (Oxford University Press:Oxford, 1959); Duncan Hallas, Trotsky's Marxism(Pluto Press: London, 1979).

28. Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution,trans. John G. Wright (Pathnder: New York,1969).

29. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution,trans. Rose Strunsky (The University ofMichigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1969).

30. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 206.

31. Besides recognising their revolutionaryaspirations in Trotsky, the surrealists werefascinated by Trotsky, the revolutionarydissident. `Without a doubt the new generationsdoes not fell the electrication in this name:Trotsky, long charged with revolutionarypotential.' Entretiens, 19131952, avec AndreParinaud (Gallimard: Paris, 1952), p. 190.

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which insisted that art should realistically portray the life and struggle of thproletariat according to party principles. In the eyes of the Communist PartySurrealism was just another modern art movement without connection to thproletariat, the real agent of transformation. The exploration of dreams anthe unconscious did not go well with the Communist Party who was unable tosee any revolutionary potential in the suspension of one's self. The surrealistnevertheless remained party members and in 1930 made a new attempt to b

afrmative towards communism when they renamed their periodical Lsurrealisme au service de la Revolution. During the following years severaincidents occurred in which the surrealists were critiqued by the party for theisuspect behaviour and writings. Louis Aragon left the group after greadisorder and Breton was several times forced to explain himself in front oparty tribunals.32

In 1933 Breton, Eluard, and Crevel were nally thrown out of thCommunist Party and two years later, when the French Foreign MinistePierre Laval signed a military assistance pact with the Soviet Union, the breawas nal. According to the surrealists, the pact betrayed the internationaaspirations of communism and turned the French Communists into traditional`Jacobian' nationalists. After the failed attempt to work with the CommunisParty, the surrealists formed the Contre-Attaque group with former surrealistlike Georges Bataille and Jacques-Andre Boiffard.33 Contre-Attaque critiquenot just the fascist movements but also attacked the Communist Party and thPopular Front. The end of the troublesome collaboration with the CommunisParty necessitated a new forum in which the surrealists could advancrevolutionary ideas; but following disagreements especially between Bretonand Bataille the group fell apart. Cut off from other French allies, thsurrealists referred from then on to Trotsky's theories, culminating witBreton visiting Trotsky in 1938 in Mexico, at which point they wrote the tex`Pour un art revolutionnaire independant' and formed Federation Internationale de l'Art Revolutionnaire Independant.34 It was the hope of Bretoand Trotsky that F. E. D. I. could become the platform of the anti-Stalinist lefand unite artists and intellectuals in a common ght for freedom and peace

The periodical and the organisation would not, however, survive the outbreakof the war.

IV

As when the surrealists were active, the French Communist Partpredominated in the years following World War Two, when the situationistestablished their critical practice.35 Parti Communiste, the French CommunisParty, and their union, Confederation Generale du Travail, played a dominanrole in French political culture after World War Two.36 After the war, durinwhich many party members had been active in the resistance, the members othe Communist Party came out of the war as martyrs and victors. The part

was tremendously popular in the last phase of the war where it was forbiddeand in the immediate phase after the end of the war. A Communist revolutiowas a real possibility in 1944. Never had the party been in a better position tseize power and never again would it be as popular as it was then. More than amillion people were members of the party in 1947 and about 26% of thpopulation voted Communist in the 1946 election. But a revolution nevematerialised, as the leaders of the Communist Party opted for a nationaregeneration that would let France regain its great-power status and thereblimit the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon powers in the West. The Communis

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difcult Fusion of Art and Politic

32. Breton described these internal Communisttribunals as `police interrogations. . . . Eventhough my explications were judged satisfactorypretty quickly there always arrived a momentwhere one of the investigators showed an issueof La Revolution Surrealiste and everything wasput into question'. Breton, Entretiens, p. 130.

33. The complicated relationship betweenBreton and Bataille has been dealt with in anumber of books and articles, see for instanceBriony Fer, `Surrealism, Myth andPsychoanalysis', David Batchelor, Briony Fer,and Paul Wood (eds), Realism, Rationalism,Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (Yale UniversityPress: New Haven and London, 1993),pp. 171249; Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1993); DenisHollier, La Prise de la Concorde: Essais sur GeorgesBataille (Gallimard: Paris, 1974). In thisconnection it is important that the surrealistslike the people around the journals La Critiquesociale and Documents were disillusioned with theCommunist Party and tried to put a lid onformer disagreements in the attempts to forman alternative to fascism, communism, andparliamentary democracy.

34. For discussions of the meeting betweenBreton and Trotsky, see Alan Rose, `For anIndependent Revolutionary Art: Andre Breton'sManifest with Leon Trotsky', European Studies

Journal, no. 1, 1985, pp. 5261; Otto KarlWerckmeister, `The Summit Meeting ofRevolutionary Art: Trotsky, Breton and Riveraat Coyocan 1938', Actes du XXVII CongresInternational d'Histoire d'Art, 1992, pp. 15770.

35. See David Caute, Communism and the FrenchIntellectuals 1914 1960; Jeanine Verdes-Leroux, Au service du party: Le Parti Communiste,

les intellectuels et la culture 19441956 (Fayard:Paris, 1983) and Le reveil du somnambules: Le PartiCommuniste, les intellectuels et la culture19561985 (Fayard: Paris, 1987).

36. Robert Gildea, France since 1945 (OxfordUniversity Press: Oxford, 1996). For afascinating study of postwar French culture, seeKristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1995).

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Party remained loyal to Stalin and agreed to work within the existing politicalframework, taking a place in the provisional government. The reconstructionof France was the main goal of the Communist Party, as was evident in thenew slogan of the party