I was asked to write a brief piece on the relationship of
surrealism to philosophy. For anybody trying to understand these links, the
most immediate problem is that the only book in English suitably titled
“Surrealism and Philosophy”, has not been in print for many years. Once,
however, you acquire a copy there is another problem, the author, Ferdinand
Alquie, ignores the actual theoretical preoccupations of the surrealists and
constructs a platonic model of surrealist theory instead! Admittedly it is
difficult to avoid Plato and his influence once one starts to deal with
philosophy in any way, but I have to suggest that in order to understand what
the early surrealists were thinking, and how this affects the movement today, it
is necessary to come to terms with what the surrealists actually thought and
read rather than to project upon them whatever fantasies or ideological
preconceptions one might have. I have decided, given the constraints of the
newsletter, to break down my account into 3 parts. The first of which will deal
briefly with the manifestos of Surrealism which must be the starting point for
any decent account of the subject.
The Manifestos are certainly a product of their time, but
nevertheless they do manage to articulate the principles of surrealism as it
emerges, grows and develops. So, in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André
Breton defines surrealism as: “Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic
automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or
by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in
the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and
moral preoccupation.” (Breton, André: Manifestoes of Surrealism)
This early preoccupation with automatism was indeed the focus of
surrealism in the early days, but its value has often been doubted and
questioned by some surrealists. It was partly inspired by Freudian
free-association, but should not be confused with it. This kind of automatism
emerged from experiments made by Breton and Phillipe Soupault when they created
a collaborative text which became the first surrealist book Le Champs
Magnetique, or Magnetic Fields (1919).
Over the next few years the surrealist vision developed rapidly,
even as the movement spread to several other countries, Belgium, Yugoslavia and
Romania among others. By 1929, during a major crisis in the movement, and with
a number of people leaving the movement and joining the circle around Georges
Bataille, Breton felt the necessity to restate the position of surrealism in
the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929): “Everything tends to make us believe
that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real
and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable,
high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may
one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the
Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point. From this it
becomes obvious how absurd it would be to define Surrealism solely as
constructive or destructive: the point to which we are referring is a fortiori
that point where construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one
against the other. It is also clear that Surrealism is not interested in giving
very serious consideration to anything that happens outside of itself, under
the guise of art, or even anti-art, of philosophy or anti-philosophy — in
short, at anything not aimed at the annihilation of the being into a diamond,
all blind and interior, which is no more the soul of ice than that of fire.”
This text shows Breton’s interest in the dialectics of Hegel.
There has been some argument as to how much he understood Hegel, at least at
this time, but I don’t think Breton is simply trying to reproduce Hegel’s
ideas, but use the notion of a dialectical overcoming in order to arrive at
this state beyond contradictions. Breton had already stated that “beauty shall
be convulsive or it shall not exist” and was later to develop this poetically
as “Beauty shall be convulsive-fixed, magic-circumstantial, erotic-veiled”.
Each phrase locks together antithetical and antagonistic images that become
something greater than the parts. The poetic and intellectual origin of this is
Lautréamont’s Le Chants de Maldoror, and the famous phrase “as beautiful as the
chance meeting upon an operating table between an umbrella and a sewing
machine”. Effectively, these “convulsive-fixed” images undo binary logic and allow
the mind access to new ways of thought. It is almost incidental that they
should be expressed as a painting, drawing or poem. It could equally be
expressed by action in the street.
In the next part want to go a bit further into the notion of
convulsive beauty and also the surrealist engagement with politics. In the
third part I shall focus on the principle of poetic analogy. Apologies for
dodgy citations, but this was written off the top of my head, without my usual
books to hand!
By Stuart Inman
