Surrealism, Freud and Trotsky
Louis Proyect
(http://makeashorterlink.com/?U1B8240F) without any preconceptions, I
found myself troubled by the artwork in a way that I had not
anticipated. While I had previously seen many of the individual
paintings, massed together they conveyed a very troubling image of
women often erupting into open misogyny. Since I was aware that
Surrealist leader and poet André Breton was a life-long Trotskyist, I
wondered how a generally progressive social outlook could co-exist so
comfortably with such a degraded view of women. Now that I have had a
couple of weeks to review some background literature, including the
show's informative but one-sided catalogue, I understand that the
bastardized Freudian origins of Surrealism offer a partial
explanation. When you factor in the boy's club milieu of Surrealist
art, with its decadent Romanticist notions of Ideal Woman, it all
begins to make sense.
Surrealism emerged in the aftermath of WWI. Along with the Dadaism
that prepared the way for it, it was a rejection of bourgeois values,
especially the rationalism that supposedly accounted for the wholesale
destruction of life and property just concluded. It attacked the
pretensions of high art, while retaining many of the painterly
flourishes of earlier generations. When Marcel Duchamp painted a
moustache on the Mona Lisa in the Dadaist "L.H.O.O.Q" in 1919, he
captured the spirit of this movement. In many ways, it was to the
radicalization of the 1920s as people like Abby Hoffman and the Fugs
were to the 1960s radicalization.
While Surrealist painting tended to avoid any obvious engagement with
the class struggle, the writers were deeply involved with radical
politics. Breton and Louis Aragon were prominent CP intellectuals. As
the Stalin-Trotsky fight divided poets as well as activists, Aragon
became an apologist for Stalin, while Breton chose Trotskyism.
Trotsky, who saw proletarian art and socialist realism as inimical to
the goals of the 1917 revolution, found a natural ally in Breton and
wrote a manifesto for artistic freedom that Breton circulated under
his own name. Even if Surrealist fiction and poetry had the same
cloistered and solipsistic quality as the paintings, Breton and others
issued thousands of proclamations taking positions on the Spanish
Civil War and other burning questions.
Reflecting the multifaceted character of the 1960s radicalization, and
long before it "corrected" itself with the turn toward industry, the
American Trotskyist movement published Franklin Rosemont's Breton
collection titled "What is Surrealism: Selected Writings". Along with
books like Frank Kofsky's "Black Nationalism and the Revolution in
Jazz," it was a short-lived bid by a sectarian group to show that it
was hip. No such pretensions exist nowadays.
Breton's 1935 interview with Indice, a socialist journal published in
the Canary Islands, contains a succinct statement of Breton's beliefs,
that were widely accepted by the Surrealist intellectuals and artists.
Asked "What is the attitude of surrealism towards the most important
theses of dialectical materialism and of contemporary psychology,"
Breton replies:
"We have long asserted our adherence to dialectical materialism, of
which we embrace all the theses: primacy of matter over thought;
adoption of the Hegelian dialectic as the science of the general laws
of movement of the external world as well as of human thought; the
materialist conception of history ('All social and political
relations, all religious and legal systems, all theoretical
conceptions which appear in history, can be explained only by
conditions of material existence of the epoch in question'); necessity
of social revolution as the resolution of the antagonism which arises,
at a certain stage of their development, between the material
productive forces of society and the relations of existing production
(class struggle).
"Of contemporary psychology, surrealism retains that which tends to
give a scientific basis to research into the origin and mutation of
ideological images. In this sense it has attached a particular
importance to Freud's investigations into the processes of dreaming
and, more generally, to all of Freud's work which is the clinically
based exploration of unconscious life."
While the Marxist elements of surrealism remained underdeveloped,
Freud's "insights" informed nearly everything that both the writers
and painters produced. It is important to understand that surrealism
did not take a literal-minded and clinical approach to Freud's
theories. For the most part, it did not look at psychoanalysis as a
means to achieving mental health, something largely unattainable in
bourgeois society in any case. Instead, they saw it as a way of
tapping into the deep psychic reservoirs that can produce memorable
art. More to the point, mental illness--and hysteria in
particular--was a normal response to the insanity of capitalist
society. Their notions on this relationship anticipated not only R.D.
Laing but the postmodernism of Deleuze-Guattari and Lacan. Indeed, it
was probably the postmodernist angle with its focus on 'subject' and
'desire' that probably motivated the curators of the Metropolitan
Museum to organize such a show.
Edited by Jennifer Mundy and titled "Surrealism: Desire Unbound," the
catalog dwells at length on the Freudian elements of surrealism. It
reveals that postmodernist icon and psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan was
close to surrealist circles himself. Reviewed in the April 13, 1997 NY
Times, Elisabeth Roudinesco's biography of Jacques Lacan provides some
additional details:
"Born in Paris in 1901 to a prosperous Roman Catholic family of
vinegar merchants, Lacan had a temperament and demeanor that reflected
the source of his ancestors' rise to position. The missing limbs and
dazed faces of World War I veterans that he saw as a schoolboy made
him want to be a doctor, but he had, as a teen-ager, also begun to
despise his family, and, as Ms. Roudinesco puts it, dress 'like a
dandy.' As a young psychiatrist, Lacan fell under the sway of Salvador
Dali and by 1931 began to synthesize psychiatry, psychoanalysis and
Surrealism."
For Mundy, such connections are paramount. Her index has 13 pages of
references to Lacan and only two for Leon Trotsky. She writes:
"The surrealists' exploration of desire was influenced by
psychoanalysis but not subservient to it. Freud was regarded, with but
a few reservations, as a pioneering figure of incalculable importance,
but the surrealists rejected the notion of 'cure' and the standards of
'normalcy' implicit in psychoanalysis. They also ultimately - and in
their poetic texts quite insistently - preferred a vision of desire as
an active, ever-creative force, to a concept of desire founded on the
notion of lack. Nonetheless, the two principal images used within
Freudian psychoanalysis to conjure desire and its effects - 'unbound'
energy within the unconscious, on the one hand, and a compulsive,
fetishistic process, on the other - find strong echoes in the
surrealists' explorations of desire. Through the techniques of
automatic writing and automatic drawing, for example, the surrealists
tapped into, or came close to, the energies and half-formed thoughts
and impulses of the lower levels of the consciousness. Breton once
described automatism as leading to the psychophysical region
characterised by the 'absence of contradiction' and 'the relaxation of
emotional tension', that, he said, alluding openly to Freud, was ruled
by the pleasure principle alone. The fetishistic model of desire
corresponded to the surrealists' trompe d'oeil visual images
remembered from dreams and fantasies, and to their specifically
constructed 'objects with a symbolic function'. In these works the
image or object stood in the place of veiled or sublimated impulses
and desires, as a recompense for, or an intervention in, what the
surrealists saw as the inadequacies of reality."
Keeping in mind that the surrealists had no intention of "healing"
sexual obsessions but rather tended to nurture them in order to make
artwork out of them like an oyster makes a pearl from a grain of sand,
it should come as no surprise that some of their most famous paintings
objectify and degrade women--all in the name of tapping into "the
lower levels of the consciousness" as Mundy puts it. Unfortunately,
the lower levels of consciousness often amount to carriage trade
versions of what you might find in Larry Flynt's "Hustler".
René Magritte's aptly named "The Rape"
(http://metmuseum.org/special/surrealism_desire_unbound/5.r.htm)
superimposes the midsection of a naked woman's body on her face. Her
eyes are the breasts and the vagina is the mouth. The catalog states,
"In transforming the face into a body, Magritte makes it a fetish." It
also states that although Breton did not write about Magritte's work
until the 1960s, he regarded "The Rape" as a key surrealist image.
Turning to a highly regarded, but lesser-known work, André Masson's
"Gradiva"
(http://www.creative-freelance.org.uk/reviews/surrealism.html) depicts
a woman whose stomach and pelvis has been transformed into a raw
steak, and her vagina into a rather menacing looking clam equipped
with what looks like a set of fangs. Her half-rotting body has
attracted a swarm of bees. Behind the supine woman is an erupting
volcano, no doubt symbolizing the menace of female sexuality. Based on
a character in a 1903 novella that Freud had analyzed, the figure
represents unconscious desire and all the other psychoanalytic
boilerplate. The catalog solemnly declares that Masson's grotesque
figure represented "male longing and displaced desire."
Finally, when we turn to the German sculptor Hans Bellmer, we see
graphic images of cruelty toward women that no artist could represent
today, at least in the name of social and political emancipation.
During the 1930s, Bellmer constructed life-sized dolls out of wood,
metal, plaster and ball joints that were then twisted out of shape.
(http://www.angelfire.com/in2/belmer/) He published photos of his work
in surrealist journals to produce, as he put it, a mixture of "joy,
exaltation and fear." The knotted-up sex dolls were supposed to help
the viewer recover the "enchanted garden" of childhood. They also were
meant as protests against Nazism, because they rejected the Ideal Form
of the Aryan body. If this was his goal, one can only wonder why they
only assaulted women.
Not only does Bellmer's work draw from Freud, it also hearkens back to
Marquis de Sade, who was a patron saint of the Surrealist movement.
The catalog explains, "Apart from these photographic records of
imaginary misdeeds, Bellmer writes openly of a drive to master
'victims', and to this end he poses all his poupées very
voyeuristically. With the first doll he goes far as to design an
internal mechanism filled with miniature panoramas as a means to
'pluck away the secret thoughts of the little girls'."
When the surrealist artists were not twisting women apart or turning
their vaginas into man-eating clams, they were putting them on
pedestals. To a large extent, this reflected the disenchantment with
Futurism and other forms of modern art that celebrated technology and
progress. In some ways, surrealism represented a kind of Late
Romanticism that rejected modernity in the same way that earlier
versions did. So, for many surrealists, courtly love is a natural
outcome for a psyche that refuses to conform to a bourgeois society
that has enshrined science and logic. If bourgeois society promoted
Enlightenment values, the surrealists would have none of it. If so
much of modern culture stressed progressive values, surrealism for its
part would champion dreams, fetishes, hysteria, mystery and nostalgia
for the past.
This being the case, it is something of a mystery why there would be
such a powerful affinity between Leon Trotsky and André Breton, its
leading theoretician.
(Picture of Breton, Diego Rivera and Trotsky:
http://www.marxmail.org/breton.jpg)
At the outset, Breton's enthusiasm for psychoanalysis would not
present any sort of obstacle since he had expressed a friendly
interest in Freudian theory in the 1920s, long before both he and
Freud had become personae non grata in the USSR. Trotsky looked to
those elements in Freud that were of least interest to the
surrealists, namely the almost mechanistic relationship between the
material environment and the mind. It should come as no surprise that
Trotsky looked favorably on both Freud and Pavlov in his "Culture and
Socialism," since both figures resonated with his own biological
reductionist tendencies. Trotsky writes:
"The school of the Viennese psychoanalyst Freud proceeds in a
different way. It assumes in advance that the driving force of the
most complex and delicate of psychic processes is a physiological
need. In this general sense it is materialistic, if you leave aside
the question whether it does not assign too big a place to the sexual
factor at the expense of others, for this is already a dispute within
the frontiers of materialism. But the psychoanalyst approaches the
problems of consciousness not experimentally, going from the lowest
phenomena to the highest, from the simple reflex to the complex
reflex, but attempts to take all these intermediate stages in one
jump, from above downwards, from the religious myth, the lyrical poem,
or the dream straight to the physiological basis of the psyche."
Obviously, Breton and his colleagues theorized Freud in a completely
different manner, but at least both sides saw something good.
Furthermore, when Trotsky was in exile, and when Soviet art was
becoming ever more pedestrian and didactic, it is understandable that
he would reach out to a major figure in the French intelligentsia.
According to Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky "accepted the Surrealists'
quasi-Freudian concentration on dream and subconscious experience, but
shook his head over a 'strand of mysticism' in the work of Breton and
his friends."
You can find an altogether touching description of how the two engaged
with each other in Breton's account of his visit with Trotsky in
Rosemont's book. They are discussing "objective chance," a key element
of surrealist ideology. It is not easy to capture in words, but it
deals with serendipitous and unpredictable moments when incongruous
elements encountered in everyday life combine together to produce a
kind of mystical insight, like in a waking dream. Here is Breton's
account of their discussion:
---
At other times he took up this or that concept which he considered
worthy of putting before me, submitting it to a sharp critique. He
thus said one day: 'Comrade Breton, your interest in phenomena of
objective chance does not appear clear to me. Yes, I know well that
Engels referred to this notion, but I ask myself if, in your case, it
isn't something else. I am not sure you aren't interested in keeping
open [his hands described a little space in the air] a little window
on the beyond.'
"I hadn't finished defending my position when he reproved me: 'I'm not
convinced. Elsewhere, you have written something - oh yes, that these
phenomena present characteristics disturbing to you.'
'Pardon me,' I replied, 'I wrote "disturbing in the present state of
knowledge". Would you like to look it up?'
He looked up a little nervously, took a few steps, and turned back to
me. 'If you said "in the present state of knowledge", I see nothing
more to argue about. I withdraw my objection.'
---
Surrealism remained a powerful element in bohemian art and culture
long after it had lost its novelty. It always remained an attractive
option for leftist artists and writers who were not comfortable with
the Stalinist cultural model. Among them is the Martinique poet and
playwright Aimé Césaire who served on the editorial board of VVV, a
surrealist journal based in the USA. Breton was an avid admirer of
Césaire, whose 1955 "Discourse on Colonialism" was republished
recently by Monthly Review. Along with CLR James, Césaire served as a
revolutionary alternative to Stalinism for an entire generation of
Caribbean intellectuals.
Another editorial board member at VVV was Philip Lamantia, who was to
become best known as a leading figure of the new poetry of the 1940s
and 50s that included the beats and the San Francisco Renaissance
writers. It would not be much of a stretch to argue that Lamantia
represents a link in the chain between the counter-culture of the
1930s and that of the 1960s. Surrealist poetry and culture were
definitely read by young people in the 1950s and 60s, who were
searching for an alternative to the Rationalism of their time, which
amounted to Cadillac tailfins, the H-Bomb, conformity and Madison
Avenue for all practical purposes.
As surrealist poetry and writing lived on in this fashion, so did
surrealist art even if it went through permutations. One of the other
editors at VVV was Robert Motherwell, who became a leading figure in
the Abstract Expressionist movement. Not surprisingly, the transition
between surrealism and abstract expressionism was relatively seamless.
Although the latter school eschewed figurative elements, even in the
off-kilter manner of a Magritte or a Dali, it retained the obsession
with psychoanalysis. Where a surrealist painting might tend toward an
open representation of Oedipal themes, for example, the abstract
expressionist would dispense with the symbols and concentrate more on
the raw energy generated by an inescapable neurosis. Robert Hughes
describes their relationship as follows:
---
Some of their tracks were obviously parallel. Many of the American
painters had read Freud and Jung; Jackson Pollock spent two years
(1939-41) in Jungian analysis, and they all lived in a city whose
cultural circles accepted going to the shrink as a normal feature of
the social landscape, as Paris did not. The deep interest that early
Abstract Expressionism showed in preconscious and unconscious images
as the very root of art was not, therefore, simply a mimicking of
Surrealist procedures. Nevertheless the example, and presence, of
André Masson mattered a good deal to the younger American painters,
for he - more than any other member of the Surrealist group -had tried
to close the cultural gap between the fantasies of urban, modern man
and the old dark imagery of prehistoric cultures, the recurrent
content of myth from the caves of France to the labyrinth of Minos.
When Mark Rothko in 1943 declared his belief that "the subject is
crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and
timeless," he was appealing to the kind of archetypal imagery that
Masson's paintings of massacres, labyrinths, and totems had invoked
for the past fifteen years. This was D. H. Lawrence's "knowledge of
the blood" given pictorial form.
---
Oddly enough, for all its hostility to bourgeois civilization, the
very hand it would bite has adopted surrealism in a way it probably
never would have anticipated. One cannot watch more than a few
television commercials or look through the pages of a fashion magazine
without seeing some element of surrealism.
In a profile on fashion photographer David LaChapelle in the November
29, 1994 NY Times titled "Mixing Dada, Cher, Middle America", we learn
that LaChappelle distinguishes himself by breeding contempt. A
shooting seems to owe more to Hans Bellmer than Richard Avedon, as the
Times reports:
---
A model posed between two steely generators that were props but were
just as officious as the meat-locker-looking chamber itself,
especially with signs attached warning "Danger Electrical Equipment.
Authorized Personnel Only." Then there was the figure dressed as a
laboratory worker, who kept darting in front of the camera, wielding
an elongated ray gun and poking Ms. Claussen at intervals.
"It's a very contemporary surrealism," said James Truman, the
editorial director of Conde Nast, who published some of Mr.
LaChapelle's first work for Details magazine. "He's perhaps just
working from a different set of traditions than Peter Lindbergh. It's
not about Belle Epoque remembered. It's sort of Dadaism, Surrealism,
50's kitsch to 70's bad taste, and 90's cyberculture."
---
On October 2, 1998, the Times reported on "A new spot for Chanel No. 5
dabs on some sex and surrealism." The Chanel No 5 ads always featured
the work of leading-edge photographers, who would go into filmmaking
like Ridley Scott. That year Chanel hired Luc Besson, the director of
the rather superficial but visually arresting "La Femme Nikita", to
create a new ad based on Little Red Riding Hood.
---
The spot starts with music from the film "Edward Scissorhands" and a
shot of Ms. Warren treading a footbridge to an armored door marked
with the "5" from the No. 5 logo. She gains entry with an access code
-- yes, 5. Taking a bottle from the wall, she proceeds to the exit.
The Eiffel Tower amid cinematic snow reveals the setting to be Paris.
"We looked at not having a French element," Mr. Kopelman said, "but
it's key to remind people that this product, the first designer
fragrance, is after all French."
Suddenly a black wolf emerges, ready to pounce. But beauty prevails
over the beast, defusing the attack with a tender shush. As Ms. Warren
departs, the wolf howls and the camera pulls back to show an oversized
"5" on the floor, which then becomes a bottle of Chanel No. 5.
---
Sounds a little like "Objective Chance", doesn't it?
In hailing Breton's heroic attempt to strike a blow for freedom
through a highly personalized art based on fetishes and dreams,
Trotsky could not have anticipated the final outcome of this aesthetic
in glitzy TV and magazine ads. Neither could the Trotskyists of the
1940s around Partisan Review have anticipated the evolution of
abstract expressionism into a kind of official art of US imperialism.
In retrospect, we can see that Trotsky bent the stick too far. In
identifying himself with art and literature that avoided "messages"
like the plague, he wound up with a current that ultimately had little
to offer the world except an artist's private obsessions.
In contrast, the CP put pressure on the artist to strive for exactly
such messages. The difference between a Ben Shahn and a Max Ernst
could not have been greater. In reality, as with so much of the
Stalin-Trotsky divide, positions were taken not necessarily on the
merit of the questions under debate but on the need to distinguish
oneself in the marketplace of ideas broadly speaking. Now that this
divide no longer exists, it is up to artists of the current generation
to begin to develop brand-new approaches. As in the case of
revolutionary politics in general, the issues that divided the left in
the 1930s are no longer germane. Revolutionary politics and
revolutionary art has to move forward or die.
Sources:
Robert Hughes, "Shock of the New"
Franklin Rosemont, "What is Surrealism"
Jennifer Mundy, "Surrealism: Desire Unbound"
Leon Trotsky, "Culture and Socialism" (in Deutscher's collection "Age
of Permanent Revolution")
Louis Proyect
Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org