Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations

Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations

Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations

Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations

Paperback(New Edition)

$40.00 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Thursday, April 4
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

Bringing together many Surrealist texts that have never previously been available in English, this collection is an essential guide for anyone who wishes to understand the Surrealist movement. It traces its development in the words of the Surrealists themselves, offering a definitive expression of Surrealism as a collective movement. It shows the extent of Surrealist positions and interests and shows how, having become a major cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century, the issues it has raised remain central to current debates. Covering the period 1922-91, these texts illuminate its philosophical, political and ethical positions and locate Surrealism in a broader social and cultural context. Comprising statements from Surrealist groups in Paris, Belgium, Romania, Sweden and Czechoslovakia, and signed by the major participants, it reveals the international dimension of Surrealism.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780745317786
Publisher: Pluto Press
Publication date: 11/20/2001
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 232
Product dimensions: 5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michael Richardson is a writer and translator.



Krzysztof Fijalowski is a senior lecturer in critical studies at the Norwich University of the Arts.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE HISTORICAL ORIENTATION OF SURREALISM

As the introduction suggests, a collection of surrealist tracts and collective declarations constitutes a kind of history of surrealism in itself, offering a graphic overview of both the wider and day-to-day concerns, positions and strategies of the groups involved. Taken as a whole, not only do they indicate the ambitious scope of surrealism's chosen areas of activity – from rationales for new magazines or introductions to exhibitions to proposals for artistic experiment (Dialectics of the Dialectic), from statements on dream and the unconscious (the introduction to La Révolution surréaliste) or moral exigencies and individual revolt (High Frequency) to those of a directly social and political engagement (Inaugural Rupture) – but they also begin to give the reader an idea of the sheer scale of its project and the large numbers of its participants: the texts in this section span a period of over six decades and represent only a fraction of the groups' output (José Pierre's anthology of French surrealist tracts alone contains over 250 texts).

The writings of this first section are intended to begin to give a sense of this historical project, bringing together some key surrealist statements of intent and definitions (or redefinitions) of its challenges. Perhaps surprisingly, the French Surrealist Group issued relatively few benchmark texts (of which The Platform of Prague, signed jointly in 1968 with surrealists in Prague, was perhaps the first with this explicit aim). This may be partly because the two Surrealist Manifestos (written by André Breton alone, but fully ratified by the entire group) largely satisfied the requirements for defining the French group's position, and partly because on the whole the group's comparatively secure access to publication and public activity favoured a series of successive appeals on specific issues rather than major restatements of the movement's philosophy. This contrasts with groups such as those in Bucharest or Prague, for example, which endured long periods of precarious and hostile circumstances; but it is interesting to note that not only could their texts such as Dialectics of the Dialectic and The Possible Against the Current represent defining statements of hard-won surrealist positions, but they were also not afraid, where necessary, to use these as a forum for a rigorous auto-critique of surrealism's aims and means. Texts from the Prague group appear here in extenso precisely because they count among surrealism's most sustained attempts to analyse and define its own ideology, and are especially important for any current assessment of surrealism, since they engage directly with its essential qualities.

The first issue of La Révolution surréaliste was introduced by this declaration which gives a clear and succinct initiation into the first principles of surrealism. With the exaltation of the creativity of dreams and its possibility of undermining the foundations of a realist interpretation of the nature of reality, it also suggests the collective foundation of the surrealist endeavour, since dreams are the locus for shared understanding in many societies. In this document, the major surrealist aim of redrafting a new 'declaration of the rights of humanity', in which a re-evaluation of the dream experience became its first article of incorporation.

INTRODUCTION TO LA RÉVOLUTION SURRÉALISTE

With the trial of knowledge having become irrelevant, with intelligence no longer being taken seriously, it is dream alone that allows mankind all its rights to liberty. Thanks to dream, death's meaning is no longer obscure and the meaning of life no longer touches us.

Each morning, in every family, men, women and children, IF THEY HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO, tell each other their dreams. We are all at the mercy of dream, and we owe it to ourselves to submit to its powers in our waking state. It is a terrible tyrant dressed in mirrors and lightning. What are pen and paper, what is writing, what is poetry, faced with this giant who bears the muscles of the clouds in its muscles? You stand there gibbering before the serpent, unaware of the dead leaves and glass traps, fearful for your fortune, your heart and your pleasures, and you seek all the mathematical signs which might make death more natural to you in the shadow of your dreams. Others, and these are the prophets, lead the forces of night blindly towards the future, dawn speaks through their mouths, and the delighted world takes fright or congratulates itself. Surrealism opens the doors of dream to all those for whom night is miserly. Surrealism is the crossroads of the enchantments of sleep, alcohol, tobacco, ether, opium, cocaine and morphine. But it is also the breaker of chains: we do not sleep, we do not drink, we do not smoke, we do not inhale, we do not inject ourselves but we dream, and the speed of the lamps' needles introduces into our brains the marvellous deflowered sponge of gold. Ah, if bones were inflated like airships, we would visit the hidden places of the Dead Sea! The path is a sentry standing tall against the wind, enlacing us and making us tremble before our fragile ruby appearance. You, glued to the echoes of our ears like the octopus-clock in the wall of time, you can invent wretched stories which make us smile nonchalantly. We are no longer troubled, say what you like: the idea of movement is above all an inert idea (Berkeley), and the tree of speed appears to us. The brain twists like an angel and our words are the pellets of lead which kill the bird. You to whom nature has given the power to turn on the electricity at noon and linger under the rain with the sun in your eyes, your acts are gratuitous, ours are dreamed. Everything is whisperings, coincidences, silence and sparks delight their own revelation. The tree laden with meat which thrusts between the paving slabs is only supernatural in our amazement, but in the time it takes to close your eyes it awaits inauguration.

Since every discovery changes nature, the destination of an object or a phenomenon constitutes a surrealist fact. Between Napoleon and the phrenological bust in his likeness are all the battles of the Empire. Far be it from us to exploit these images and alter them in a direction that might suggest a belief in progress. Whether the distillation of a liquid produces alcohol, milk or lamp gas, they are just so many satisfying images and worthless inventions. No transformation has taken place yet, an invisible ink, the writer will be counted among the missing. Solitude of love, the man lying on you commits a perpetual and fatal crime. Solitude of writing, you will no longer be known in vain, your victims, seized by a trap of violent stars, are revived in themselves.

We observe the surrealist exaltation of mystics, inventors and prophets and we move on.

Besides, you will find in this journal accounts of inventions, fashion, life, fine arts and magic. Fashion will be considered according to the gravitation of white letters on nocturnal flesh, life according to the partitions of day and of perfumes, invention according to players, the arts according to the puppet that says 'storm' to the bells of the century-old cedar, and magic according to the movement of the spheres in blind eyes.

Already the automata multiply and dream. In the cafés, they urgently request writing materials, the veins of marble are the charts of their escape and their cars go to the Bois without them.

Revolution ... Revolution ... Realism prunes trees, surrealism prunes life.

J. A. Boiffard, P. Éluard, R. Vitrac. December 1924

The meeting in Paris of 27 January 1925 sanctioned the shared nature of surrealism in what may be said to be its first authentically collective manifestation (that is, one in which a common perspective was developed in a collective way). Apparently written primarily by Antonin Artaud at the moment he assumed directorship of the Bureau of Surrealist Research, it may also be said to be the only document of early surrealism that seeks explicitly to clarify the nature of surrealism in its collective sense.

DECLARATION OF 27 JANUARY 1925

In view of a false interpretation of our endeavour that has stupidly been circulated among the public.

We insist on declaring to the whole of stumbling contemporary literary criticism, whether it be dramatic, philosophical, exegetical and even theological.

1. We have nothing to do with literature, But when necessary we are as capable as anyone else of making use of it.

2. SURREALISM is not a new or easier means of expression, nor even a metaphysics of poetry;

It is a total means of complete liberation of the mind and all that resembles it.

3. We are determined to make a Revolution.

4. We have joined the word SURREALISM with the word REVOLUTION merely to show the disinterested, detached and even completely desperate character of this revolution.

5. We do not claim to change anything about people's morals, but we aim to show the fragility of their thoughts, and on what shifting foundations, on what cellars, they have affixed their tottering houses.

6. We fling this solemn preliminary warning at society: Beware your deviations, we'll not miss any of the blunders made by your spirit.

7. Society will find us at each bend of its thought.

8. We are specialists in Revolt.

There is no means of action we are incapable, when necessary, of using.

9. We say to the Western world in particular:

SURREALISM exists

- But what is this new ism that is now attached to us?

- SURREALISM is not a poetic form.

It is a cry of the mind as it turns back towards itself and is determined to smash its fetters, if necessary with material hammers.

THE BUREAU OF SURREALIST RESEARCH, 15 rue de Grenelle Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Baron, Joë Bousquet, J. A. Boiffard, André Breton, Jean Carrive, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, T. Fraenkel, Francis Gérard, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Mathias Lübeck, Georges Malkine, André Masson, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Marcel Noll, Benjamin Péret, Raymond Queneau, Philippe Soupault, Dédé Sunbeam, Roland Tual.

For a while the Yugoslav Surrealist Group promised to be the most important group outside France as it developed a characteristic identity in its collective activities in the years from 1929 to 1938, publishing its own journal, Nadrealizam danas i ovde ^Surrealism Here and Nowl and generating an intense body of work between 1929 and 1933, when the arrest offour of its members for subversive activity severely circumscribed collective work. This activity remains very poorly documented even in French, and this is the group's major manifesto. Those who remained in Yugoslavia during the war became involved with Tito's resistance movement, Koca PopoviC becoming one of his most trusted lieutenants and for many years his designated successor. Marco RistiC was also associated with Tito's regime as the first Yugoslavian ambassador to France.

THE POSITION OF SURREALISM

One entire world against another.

The world of infinite dialectic and dynamic concretisation against the world of mortuary metaphysics and static and slurred abstraction. The world of mankind's liberation and the irreducibility of the spirit against the world of constraint, reduction, moral and other castration. The world of irresistible disinterest against the world of possession, comfort and conformism, pitiful personal happiness, mediocre egoism and every kind of compromise.

In spite of everything, this voracious conflict at the level of man and mankind morally summons each person today, without exception or mercy. This is more than a fact; it is a determining factor.

This conflict is not the abstract internal opposition of temporal and eternal man, it is not a dilemma or an antinomy in the area of purely theoretical speculation, by that very fact leading to the avoidance of concrete and virulent collisions, whose solution would leave everything in its place and demand of mankind only resignation and the acceptance of the supposed eternal limits of its nature. We do not believe in an a priori knowledge of these limits, their totally unjustified instigation is simply one form of repression directed against those who do not yet have available the means to allow them to strive, once and for all, for everything accessible to mankind. Neither do we believe in the possibility of human resignation faced with the success or failure of any kind of overthrow, in its capitulation, either before or afterwards. Those who believe in it only delude themselves, in the confines of this collapsing world, or else have really become insensible to all insubordination, blind to all mankind's pessimism, a mankind which wants at all costs to exist without being broken, or not to exist at all. Not for one moment could we dissociate the indissoluble unity of eternal and temporal man.

From this perspective, the problem of mankind and its life in society is not for us the antithesis of mankind in general and society in general – we know nothing about this – but the antithesis of a certain mankind, today's mankind, and of a certain society, today's society. We thus discover this conflict in a concrete collision, occurring in specific places, and we cannot ignore this observation. This problem plunges its roots into the ground of certain material events, where it is expressed at the current time in a way best and most decisively defined where it undeniably resolves itself and where it will be resolved. Its resolution inevitably leads to extreme decisions, that is to the transformation of the very conditions which provoked it. If, in deepening it, this conflict can still appear inextinguishable, it is only because mankind, this denominator of the universe, is incommensurable and irreducible.

And we do not consider this conflict as unfolding in a special domain, even an economic one, leaving untarnished and infallible the so-called transcendence and independence of the spirit and thought in relation to society. Neither do we believe in either immobile or isolated systems, no more than in the independent functioning of mankind's particular faculties, although we would consider the methodological determinism of its particular activities indispensable, since this alone allows us to avoid confusion, and any transformation and shift of the centre of gravity and the fulcrum would be immoral and unpardonable. At any moment, in any place, when it is a question of genuine transmutation and of mankind's authentic activity, we see the latter committed entirely, for the transformation of relations from top to bottom is the only moral measure of mankind's real achievement.

This moral criterion, which we highlight particularly and on which we will continue ceaselessly to insist as being most decisive, does not depend on any static establishment of good and bad, but is conditioned by processes of dialectical becoming, by the subversive development of mankind's achievement. Deriving from mankind's original, instinctive and fundamentally irreducible exigencies, this moral principle is drawn and draws us irresistibly, and with a increasingly clear consciousness of the integrality and indivisibility of a complex and contradictory reality, towards the absolute of an ultimate, forever renewed, idea of liberty. At least once it should be understood that we hold ourselves responsible only before this revolutionary moral determinism alone.

The common significance of the different aspects, expressions and perspectives of our activity, as well as the unity of our individual particularities, must not be sought in some static and theoretical system conceived in advance, nor in some preliminary and artificial concordance which might generalise and conciliate everything. Our action finds this common significance, this homogeneity, this unity, only in its dialectical development, through which it subordinates itself to the revolutionary processes of moral determinism. And, in consequence, defining the moral attitude of surrealism by this declaration, in this moment and in the given circumstances, we highlight the external differentiation and the internal unification of all our acts and manifestations which, if considered separately and from a static point of view, perhaps do not always reveal themselves in their true and complete sequence. Surrealism represents an active and effective confrontation, a flagrant co-ordination of certain subversive methods and doctrines and certain individual negations and particular wills, expressed totally and irrevocably. This co-ordination is not the conciliating summation of characteristics or the quest for a hackneyed equation for everyone and no one, but a dramatic mediation and, in this dialectical 'interpenetration' of the contraries 'Durchdrangung der Gegensätze', and in this calculation of all consequences, an incandescent draining and annihilation, calculation of all consequences, an incandescent draining and annihilation, remorseless and definitive, of everything that has no place in the mechanism of concrete and universal development.

(Continues…)



Excerpted from "Surrealism Against The Current"
by .
Copyright © 2001 Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Surrealism as a Collective Adventure Note on the selection of texts 1. Historical Orientation of Surrealism 2. Surrealism Vis-à-vis Revolutionary Politics 3. The Security of the Spirit 4. Declarations on Colonialism Appendices Bibliography Index
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews