In part I of these articles I suggested
that there were several problems in understanding the links between surrealism
and philosophy, certainly one problem is that of terminology. I made the claim
that to an extent surrealism’s philosophical basis was Hegelian; this seems to
need to be clarified, but also modified. Many surrealists, and especially André
Breton, were interested in the notion of dialectics. Here is another of those
problems as dialectics seems to be either widely misunderstood or very
differently understood by different people. Hegel does not help as his writing
style is often fantastically obscure, sometimes to the point where one could
doubt if the text one is reading had actually been translated into English!
The process of dialectics is often explained rather diagrammatically thus: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Basically this means that every idea, proposition or thesis contained within it a contradiction, the antithesis. One worked at resolving this contradiction until a synthesis was achieved. However, this is not as Hegel himself explained it, and indeed he condemned this sort of formula. For him the dialectic had to move from abstraction towards becoming concrete. He certainly did think that arguments tended to contain a contradiction and unless this was resolved they would be one-sided and false. However, they would not necessarily be entirely false, the lie would contain a moment of truth, and hence it was necessary to look at the precise terms in which the argument was couched. Hegel is somewhat out of favour at present, his ideas are disputed by most postmodernists, not surprisingly in some ways, he saw a logic of history in which fundamental ideas would reach a point of synthesis at which history would end. All of human existence after that point would no longer be “history”! Clearly this is a very specific notion of what constitutes history that many would disagree with.
The process of dialectics is often explained rather diagrammatically thus: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Basically this means that every idea, proposition or thesis contained within it a contradiction, the antithesis. One worked at resolving this contradiction until a synthesis was achieved. However, this is not as Hegel himself explained it, and indeed he condemned this sort of formula. For him the dialectic had to move from abstraction towards becoming concrete. He certainly did think that arguments tended to contain a contradiction and unless this was resolved they would be one-sided and false. However, they would not necessarily be entirely false, the lie would contain a moment of truth, and hence it was necessary to look at the precise terms in which the argument was couched. Hegel is somewhat out of favour at present, his ideas are disputed by most postmodernists, not surprisingly in some ways, he saw a logic of history in which fundamental ideas would reach a point of synthesis at which history would end. All of human existence after that point would no longer be “history”! Clearly this is a very specific notion of what constitutes history that many would disagree with.
So, getting back to surrealism and the idea of convulsive beauty, the images of convulsive beauty (exploding-fixed, erotic-veiled, magic-circumstantial) are effectively those of a deliberately posed contradiction that cannot be resolved logically. There are many sources for this, but one immediate predecessor needs to be mentioned, Lautréamont. Lautréamont was the author of the phrase “as beautiful as the chance meeting upon an operating table between a sewing machine and an umbrella”. For Breton this was effectively the first real example of “convulsive beauty”, two objects that have no apparent relationship upon a surface that is foreign to both of them. This is difficult, if not impossible to describe entirely rationally, but clearly the idea is that there is a level of shock at seeing this juxtaposition, a sort of estrangement of sensibility. I would suggest that, rather than there being a simple lack of relationship between such objects there is something like an unfinished dialectic going on in which the different terms/objects/etc, in this case the umbrella and sewing machine will neither cancel each other out nor resolve themselves into a logical system, they create a sort of mental friction that refuses to be resolved.
Let’s go back to the passage from the Second Manifesto of Surrealism I quoted in the first part of this series: “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.”
So this seems to indicate that Breton wants surrealism to, not abandon logic, but to surpass it in some way so that the rational and irrational can be seen as two elements in a kind of “surrationalism” and even if, as some people claim, he did not properly understand Hegel, he made a very creative use of his dialectics, possibly undoing the process that Hegel envisaged! This overcoming of contradictions is to be in every part of our experience, not just within logic. The convulsive image is an embodiment of the overcoming of contradiction in one sense, but at the same time embodies the contradiction itself.
If we look at Victor Brauner’s
Wolf-Table for instance, Brauner has created something that is both wolf and
table, but is neither. It partakes of both natures, but they are locked into an
endlessly antagonistic relationship. One aspect seems about to cancel the other
out, they confront each other, struggle, but neither can win. This leads to the question:
how can there possibly be a resolution to this battle? The answer is in human
consciousness, in the realm of imagination. But it is important to understand
that by imagination the surrealists do not mean unreality, for as Breton wrote,
the imagination is that which tends to become real.
The next part will start to examine the surrealist imagination in more detail, just as soon as I write it!
Stuart Inman
