A Brief Introduction to Surrealism and Its Political Implications

Surrealism goes far beyond art, although art was its most famous manifestation. In fact, the early surrealists had little interest in art for anything but the purposes of research into reality. They believed that metaphor, the central element of most poetry and many visual images, could reveal hidden connections between things in the world. They sought to make metaphors that would reveal these connections. The fact that many of their attempts wound up in books and museums speaks to the interest in these experiments in terms of their aesthetic value. But producing things of aesthetic value was not the Surrealists’ primary motivation.

The Surrealists tried entering conventional politics in Europe at the time; Andre Breton, the group’s leader, attempted to form a Surrealist wing of the Communist Party. He failed miserably, both because the Communists wanted nothing to do with Surrealism, and because the internal logic of Surrealism was antithetical to communism and many of the Surrealists knew it (although one of the most famous Surrealists, and one of its greatest practitioners, Louis Aragon, became an ardent communist and moved to the Soviet Union).

Surrealism saw its politics as an alternative to the “modern” politics that arose in the 19th and 20th century. These were: communism, fascism, bourgeois democracies, and socialism. All of these political forms are grounded on the premise of an industrial society, and they share many features (for example, all are Taylorist and Fordist in their organization).

Fordism, based on the ideas of Henry Ford, was a “totalizing” approach to modern life. Ford set up workers’ cities, so that their “free” time could be regulated like their work time was. This idea caught on in much of Europe and Asia, but had somewhat limited success in the U.S. and Canada. Here, the leisure and entertainment industry had grown up around Ford very rapidly and had undercut him somewhat. Entertainment in particular offered a form of less regulated free time that left people with a wide range of choices to reflect various styles, tastes, lifestyles, etc. This was in contrast to Ford’s famous motto about the Model T, which was that you could get it in any color you liked as long as it was black. Still, you had to pay for it and someone else controlled the production and distribution of consumer commodities.

Entertainment is something of a paradox within a generally Taylorist society. It is produced by Taylorist methods, and is extremely rationalized at the point of production – MGM’s studio was run by managers who had studied Ford Factories closely. But the consumption side of the equation was a bit stranger. Here rational decisions – such as interest in a good story – could only account for a part of the cinema’s appeal. The other part of its appeal was clearly irrational, though the irrationality was identified as mainly having to do with people’s interest in “stars.” Hollywood’s offer of stars to people in America could be seen as calculated, and it certainly was. It was calculated to stimulate consumption (stars sold other products) and it was calculated to supply access to the sacred that had become increasingly scarce in modern society. Thorsten Veblem notes the paradox about this issue by describing entertainment and leisure as both irrational and rationalized.

The Nazis calculated to control daily life much more than Hollywood did, but they had Hollywood as an example to follow. An excellent documentary about Hitler, called The Architecture of Doom, demonstrates Hitler’s interests in creating a “mass sacred” through his design of insignia, uniforms, and all manner of arts and aspects of daily life. The attempt on Hitler’s part was to fuse the sacred and the everyday, but in a uniquely modern way, using mass media (radio, film, the press, mass rallies, etc.) to construct a modern primitive state.

Surrealism, by contrast to modern political movements, does not offer “policy solutions.” Rather, it suggests a different way of relating to modern life that is neither Taylorist nor Fordist. Many Surrealists, such as Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille, were anthropologists; they suggested new forms of social organization that would renew the “sacred in everyday life.” To some extend, this interest in the “sacred” was shared only by fascism (among all the political varieties I named above) and to a limited extent by bourgeois democracies, particularly within the entertainment industries.

Leiris and Bataille argued that fascists had developed a powerful weapon in their appropriation of the sacred, but that fascists were directing all of the energies unleashed by the sacred towards an irrational cult of the leader, and around such terms as “blood and soil.” Bataille and Leiris wanted to create a more egalitarian form of the sacred. To this end, they proposed that everyone articulate their own version of the “sacred” and use that personal sacred as a way to resist the influence of the mass state.

By using Surrealist methods, ordinary people would be able to draw critical connections between things in the world and their sacred life. Everything in the world would be stamped with the imprint of the personal sacred, and thus the world would take on a new caste. For Bataille and Leiris, production and consumption would no longer be limited to exchanges of profit and loss, but would include features seen only in “primitive” societies, including sacrifice as a form of “loss without return.” They proposed that the gift might replace the commercial exchange as a way to regulate economic interactions. They proposed that industrial society could be an opportunity for play and for the recreation of the self. These proposals were later enacted by people such as Andy Warhol, the Fluxus Group, the Situationists, and many others.

Surrealism, contrary to popular belief, is not anti-rational. Rather, many of the surrealists, including Breton, Leiris and Bataille, were scientists. Their point was that Comtean Positivism (pure rationality), and its offsprings, Taylorism and Fordism (pure efficiency), left a gaping hole in modern life that would be filled with irrationality one way or another. The Surrealists tried to take advantage of this opportunity by offering a way to satisfy the desire for irrationality (such as excess, sacrifice, and fetishism) and by bringing the fruits of these irrational activities back to the realm of the rational. In other words, they viewed “art” practices, such as metaphor (which produces an “excess” of meaning), as research practices.

Metaphor is rational in a sense, but it seems strange to most people. For example, many advertisements are made of metaphoric combinations. Take a hypothetical example: a car with a peacock on it. Cars and peacocks seem about as far apart as can be. Hardly any “rational” person would put them in the same category. Yet there is an almost magical transference of properties that happens, competing a circuit between the two when you put them together. Thus we would say that the car is bold, beautiful, showy, proud – like the peacock is.

Surrealism takes advantage of surprising juxtapositions, which are in fact metaphorical, to do serious research into the properties of daily life. Their goal was to steal from the Nazis their “ownership” of the irrational and make it available to everyone, but hopefully without the same negative outcomes. Of course, they admitted their project was a risk and that they couldn’t guarantee that there would be no negative outcomes, but that it was worse than doing nothing and just letting irrationality arise on its own, an especially dangerous potential in an age of massively destructive technologies. They believed that primitive societies had shown ways in which the group could regulate the irrational through things like ritual.

Salvador Dali, the most famous Surrealist, became a fascist and was “excommunicated” from the group after expressing an erotic fetishistic fascination with Hitler. The episode was particularly embarrassing for the Surrealists because they praised fetishism and absolute freedom. Dali was taking their logic to its conclusion, although one could argue that the “crime” Dali committed might have been, in another variation, a similar fascination with Stalin.

Dali was not particularly Surrealistic in his art (painting was not as interesting as photography was to the Surrealists) because painting required talent and the Surrealists believed that talent was often an impediment to learning. If you could learn without talent, they thought, that was better; for one thing, it would be open to more people, most of whom didn’t have talent. Still Dali was an important Surrealist for the non-artistic things he did, like his strange performances and his “theories” such as the “paranoid-critical” theory he invented.