Intellectual currents can generate
a sufficient head of water for the critic to install his power station on them.
The necessary gradient, in the case of Surrealism, is produced by the
difference in intellectual level between France and Germany. What sprang up in
1919 in France in a small circle of literati—we shall give the most important
names at once: Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos,
Paul Eluard—may have been a meagre stream, fed on the damp boredom of post-war
Europe and the last trickle of French decadence. The know-alls who even today
have not advanced beyond the “authentic origins” of the movement, and even now
have nothing to say about it except that yet another clique of literati is here
(mystifying) the honourable public, are a little like a gathering of experts at
a spring who, after lengthy deliberation, arrive at the conviction that this
paltry stream will never drive turbines. The German observer is not standing at
the head of the stream. That is his opportunity. He is in the valley. He can
gauge the energies of the movement. As a German he is long acquainted with the
crisis of the intelligentsia, or, more precisely, with that of the humanistic
concept of freedom; and he knows how frantic is the determination that has
awakened in the movement to go beyond the stage of eternal discussion and, at
any price, to reach a decision; he has had direct experience of its highly
exposed position between an anarchistic fronde and a revolutionary
discipline, and so has no excuse for taking the movement for the “artistic”, “poetic”
one it superficially appears. If it was such at the outset, it was, however,
precisely at the outset that Breton declared his intention of breaking with a
praxis that presents the public with the literary precipitate of a certain form
of existence while withholding that existence itself. Stated more briefly and dialectically,
this means that the sphere of poetry was here explored from within by a closely
knit circle of people pushing the “poetic life” to the utmost limits of
possibility. And they can be taken at their word when they assert that Rimbaud’s
Saison en enfer no longer had any secrets for them. For this book is
indeed the first document of the movement (in recent times; earlier precursors
will be discussed later). Can the point at issue be more definitively and
incisively presented than by Rimbaud himself in his personal copy of the book?
In the margin, beside the passage “on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers”,
he later wrote, “There’s no such thing.”
In just how inconspicuous and peripheral a substance the dialectical kernel
that later grew into Surrealism was originally embedded, was shown by Aragon in
1924—at a time when its development could not yet be foreseen—in his Vague de
reves. Today it can be foreseen. For there is no doubt that the heroic
phase, whose catalogue of heroes Aragon left us in that work, is over. There is
always, in such movements, a moment when the original tension of the secret society
must either explode in a matter-of-fact, profane struggle for power and
domination, or decay as a public demonstration and be transformed. Surrealism
is in this phase of transformation at present. But at the time when it broke
over its founders as an inspiring dream wave, it seemed the most integral,
conclusive, absolute of movements. Everything with which it came into contact
was integrated. Life only seemed worth living where the threshold between
waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous
images flooding back and forth, language only seemed itself where, sound and
image, image and sound interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity
that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called “meaning”. Image and
language take precedence. Saint-Pol Roux, retiring to bed about daybreak, fixes
a notice on his door: “Poet at work.” Breton notes: “Quietly. I want to
pass where no one yet has passed, quietly! — After you, dearest language.”
Language takes precedence. Not only before meaning. Also before the self. In
the world’s structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This I loosening
of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living
experience that allowed these people to step outside the domain of
intoxication. This is not the place to give an exact definition of Surrealist
experience. But anyone who has perceived that the writings of this circle are
not literature but something else—demonstrations, watchwords, documents, bluffs,
forgeries if you will, but at any rate not literature—will also know, for the
same reason, that the writings are concerned literally with experiences, not
with theories and still less with phantasms. And these experiences are by no
means limited to dreams, hours of hashish eating, or opium smoking. It is a
cardinal error to believe that, of “Surrealist experiences”, we know only the religious
ecstasies or the ecstasies of drugs. The opium of the people, Lenin called
religion, and brought the two things closer together than the Surrealists could
have liked. I shall refer later to the bitter, passionate revolt against
Catholicism in which Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and Apollinaire brought Surrealism
into the world. But the true creative overcoming of religious illumination
certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological
inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory
lesson. (But a dangerous one; and the religious lesson is stricter.) This
profane illumination did not always find the Surrealists equal to it, or to
themselves, and the very writings that proclaim it most powerfully, Aragon’s
incomparable Paysan de Paris and Breton’s Nadja, show very
disturbing symptoms of deficiency. For example, there is in Nadja an
excellent passage on the “delightful days spent looting Paris under the sign of
Sacco and Vanzetti”; Breton adds the assurance that in those days Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle
fulfilled the strategic promise of revolt ‘that had always been implicit in its
name. But Madame Sacco also appears, not the wife of Fuller’s victim but a voyante,
a fortune-teller who lives at 3 rue des Usines and tells Paul Eluard that he
can expect no good from Nadja. Now I concede that the breakneck career of
Surrealism over rooftops, lightning conductors, gutters, verandas, weathercocks,
stucco work—all ornaments are grist to the cat burglar’s mill-may have taken it
also into the humid backroom of spiritualism. But I am not pleased to hear it
cautiously tapping on the window-panes to inquire about its future. Who would
not wish to see these adoptive children of revolution most rigorously severed
from all the goings-on in the conventicles of down-at-heel dowagers, retired
majors, and emigre profiteers?
In other respects Breton’s book
illustrates well a number of the basic characteristics of this “profane
illumination”. He calls Nadja “a book with a banging door”. (In Moscow I
lived in a hotel in which almost all the rooms were occupied by Tibetan lamas
who had come to Moscow for a congress of Buddhist churches. I was struck by the
number of doors in the corridors that were always left ajar. What had at first
seemed accidental began to be disturbing. I found out that in these rooms lived
members of a sect who had sworn never to occupy closed rooms. The shock I had
then must be felt by the reader of Nadja.) To live in a glass house is a
revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral
exhibitionism, that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence,
once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of
petty-bourgeois parvenus. Nadja has achieved the true, creative
synthesis between the art novel and the roman-a-clef.
Moreover,
one need only take love seriously to recognize in it, too—as Nadja also
indicates—a “profane illumination”. “At just that time” (i.e., when he knew
Nadja), the author tells us, “I took a great interest in the epoch of Louis
VII, because it was the time of the ‘courts of love’, and I tried to picture
with great intensity how people saw life then.” We have from a recent author
quite exact information on Provencal love poetry, which comes surprisingly
close to the Surrealist conception of love. “All the poets of the ‘new style’,”
Erich Auerback points out in his excellent Dante: Poet of the Secular World,
“possess a mystical beloved, they all have approximately the same very curious
experience of love; to them all Amor bestows or withholds gifts that resemble
an illumination more than sensual pleasure; all arc subject to a kind of secret
bond that determines their inner and perhaps also their outer-lives”. The
dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious. Is not perhaps all ecstasy in
one world humiliating sobriety in that complementary to it? What is it that
courtly Minne seeks—and it, not love, binds Breton to the telepathic
girl—if not to make chastity, too, a transport? Into a world that borders not
only on tombs of the Sacred Heart or altars to the Virgin, but also on the
morning before a battle or after a victory.
The lady, in esoteric love, matters
least. So, too, for Breton. He is closer to the things that Nadja is close to
than to her. What are these things? Nothing could reveal more about Surrealism
than their canon. Where shall I begin? He can boast an extraordinary discovery.
He was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”,
in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest
photos, the objects .that have begun to
be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable
restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these
things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these
authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how
destitution—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors/enslaved
and enslaving objects- can be suddenly
transformed into revolutionary nihilism. Leaving aside Aragon’s Passage de I’Opera,
Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything that we have experienced
on mournful railway journeys
(railways are beginning to age), on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian
quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred
window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They
bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point
of explosion. What form do you suppose a life would’ take that was determined
at a decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone’s lips?
The trick by which this world of
things is mastered—it is more , proper to speak of a trick than a method-consists
in the substitution of a political for a historical view of the past. “0pen,
graves, you, the dead of the picture galleries, corpses behind screens, in
palaces, castles, and monasteries, here stands the fabulous keeper of keys
holding a bunch of the keys to all times, who knows where to press the most
artful lock and invites you to step into the midst of the world of today, to
mingle with the bearers of burdens, the mechanics whom money ennobles, to make
yourself at home in their automobiles, which are beautiful as armour from the
age of chivalry, to take your places in the international sleeping cars, and to
weld yourself to all the people who today are still proud of their privileges.
But civilization will give them short shrift.” This speech was attributed to Apollinaire
by his friend Henri Hertz. Apollinaire originated this technique. In his volume
of novellas, L’heresiarque, he used it with Machiavellian calculation to
blow Catholicism (to which he inwardly clung) to smithereens.
At the centre of this world of
things stands the most dreamed-of of their objects, the city of Paris itself.
But only revolt completely exposes its Surrealist face (deserted streets in
which whistles and shots dictate the outcome). And no face is surrealistic in
the same degree as the true face of a
city. No picture by de Chirico or Max Ernst can match the sharp elevations of
the city’s inner strong-holds, which one must overrun and occupy in order to
master their fate and, in their fate, in the fate of their masses, one’s own. Nadja is an exponent of these masses and of what
inspires them to revolution: “The great living, sonorous unconsciousness that
inspires my only convincing acts, in the sense that I always want to prove that
it commands forever everything that is mine.” Here, therefore, we find the
catalogue of these fortifications, from Place Maubert, where as nowhere else
dirt has retained all its symbolic power, to the “Theatre Moderne”, which I am
inconsolable not to have known. But in Breton’s description of her bar on the upper
floor—“it is quite dark, with arbours like impenetrable tunnels—a drawing room
on the bottom of a lake”—there is something that brings back to my memory that
most uncomprehended room in the old Princess Cafe. It was the back room on the
first floor, with couples in the blue light. We called it the “anatomy school”;
it was the last restaurant designed for love. In such passages in Breton,
photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates,
squares of the city into illustrations .of a trashy novel, draws off the banal
obviousness of this ancient ‘ architecture to inject it with the most pristine
intensity toward the events described, to which, as in old chambermaids’ books,
word-for-word quotations with page numbers refer. And all the parts of Paris
that appear here are places where what is between these people turns like a
revolving door.
The Surrealists’ Paris, too, is a “little
universe”. That is to say, in the larger one, the cosmos, things look no
different. There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the
traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the
order of the day. It is the region from which the lyric poetry of Surrealism
reports. And this must be noted if only to counter the obligatory misunderstanding
of l’art pour l’art. For art’s sake was scarcely ever to be taken literally;
it was almost always a flag under which sailed a cargo that could not be
declared because it still lacked a name. This is the moment to embark on a work
that would illuminate as has no other the crisis of the arts that we are
witnessing: a history of esoteric poetry. Nor is it by any means fortuitous
that no such work yet exists. For written as it demands to be written—that is,
not as a collection to which particular “specialists” all contribute “what is
most worth knowing” from their fields, but as the deeply grounded composition
of an individual who, from inner compulsion, portrays less a historical
evolution than a constantly renewed, primal upsurge of esoteric poetry— written
in such a way it would be one of those scholarly confessions that can be
counted in every century. The last page would have to show an X-ray picture of
Surrealism. Breton indicates in his Introduction au discours sur le peu de realite how the philosophical realism of the Middle Ages was the basis of
poetic experience. This realism, however—that is, the belief in a real,
separate existence of concepts whether outside or inside things—has always very
quickly crossed over from the logical realm of ideas to the magical realm of words.
And it is as magical experiments with words, not as artistic dabbling, that we
must understand the passionate phonetic and graphical transformational games
that have run through the whole literature of the avant-garde for the past
fifteen years, whether it is called Futurism, Dadaism, or Surrealism. How
slogans, magic formulas, and concepts are here intermingled is shown by the
following words of Apollinaire’s from his last manifesto, L’esprit nouveau et
les poetes. He says, in 1918: “For the speed and simplicity with which we
have all become used to referring by a single word to such complex entities as
a crowd, a nation, the universe, there is no modern equivalent in literature.
But todays writers fill this gap; their synthetic works create new realities
the plastic manifestations of which are just as complex as those referred to by
the words standing for collectives.”If, however, Apollinaire and Breton advance
even more energetically in the same direction and complete the linkage of
Surrealism to the outside world with the declaration: “The conquests of science
rest far more on a surrealistic than on a logical thinking”- if, in other
words, they make mystification, the culmination of which Breton sees in poetry
(which is defensible), the foundation of scientific and technical development,
too—then such integration is too impetuous. It is very instructive to compare
the movement’s over-precipitate embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of
machines —“the old fables have for the most part been realized, now it is the
turn of poets to create new ones that the inventors on their side can then make
real” (Apollinaire)—to compare these overheated fantasies with the
well-ventilated Utopias of a Scheerbart. “The thought of all human activity
makes me laugh.” This utterance of Aragon’s
shows very clearly the path Surrealism had to follow from its origins to its politicization.
In his excellent essay “La revolution et les intellectuels”, Pierre Naville,
who originally belonged to this group, rightly called this development
dialectical. In the transformation of a highly contemplative attitude into revolutionary
oppositior, the hostility of the bourgeoisie toward every manifestation of
radical intellectual freedom played a leading part. This hostility pushed
Surrealism to the left. Political events, above all the war in Morocco,
accelerated this development. With the manifesto “Intellectuals Against the
Moroccan War”, which appeared in L’Humanite, a fundamentally different
platform was gained from that which was characterized by, for example, the
famous scandal at the Saint-Pol-Roux banquet. At that time, shortly after the
war, when the Surrealists, who deemed the celebration for a poet they worshipped
compromised by the presence of nationalistic elements, burst out with the cry “Long
live Germany”, they remained within the boundaries of scandal, toward which, as
is known, the bourgeoisie is as thick-skinned as it is sensitive to all action.
There is remarkable agreement between the ways in which, under such political
auspices, Apollinaire and Aragon saw the future of the poet. The chapters “Persecution”
and “Murder” in Apollinaire’s Poete assassine contain the famous
description of a pogrom against poets. Publishing houses are stormed, books of
poems thrown on the fire, poets lynched. And the same scenes are taking place
at the same time all over the world. In Aragon, “Imagination”, in anticipation of
such horrors, calls its company to a last crusade.
To understand such prophecies, and
to assess strategically the line arrived at by Surrealism, one must investigate
the mode of thought widespread among the so-called well-meaning left-wing
bourgeois intelligentsia. It manifests itself clearly enough in the present
Russian orientation of these circles. We are not of course referring here to Beraud,
who pioneered the lie about Russia, or to Fabre-Luce, who trots behind him like
a devoted donkey, loaded with every kind of bourgeois ill-will. But how
problematic is even the typical mediating book by Duhamel. How difficult to
bear is the strained uprightness, the forced animation and sincerity of the
Protestant method, dictated by embarrassment and linguistic ignorance, of
placing things in some kind of symbolic illumination. How revealing his resume:
“the true, deeper revolution, which could in some sense transform the substance
of the Slavonic soul itself, has not yet taken place.” It is typical of these
left-wing French intellectuals—exactly as it is of their Russian counterparts,
too—that their positive function derives entirely from a feeling of obligation,
not to the Revolution, but to traditional culture. Their collective
achievement, as far as it is positive, approximates conservation. But
politically and economically they must always be considered a potential source
of sabotage. Characteristic of this whole left-wing bourgeois position is its
irremediable coupling of idealistic morality with political practice. Only in
contrast to the helpless compromises of “sentiment” arc certain central
features of Surrealism, indeed of the Surrealist tradition, to be understood.
Little has happened so far to promote this understanding. The seduction was too
great to regard the Satanism of a Rimbaud and a Lautreamont as a pendant to art
for art’s sake in an inventory of snobbery. If, however, one resolves to open
up this romantic dummy, one finds something usable inside. One finds the cult
of evil as a political device, however romantic, to disinfect and isolate against
all moralizing dilettantism. Convinced of this, and coming across the scenario
of a horror play by Breton that centres about a violation of children, one
might perhaps go back a few decades. Between 1865 and 1875 a number of great
anarchists, without knowing of one another, worked on their infernal machines.
And the astonishing thing is that independently of one another they set its
clock at exactly the same hour, and forty years later in Western Europe the
writings of Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, and Lautreamont exploded at the same time.
One might, to be more exact, select from Dostoyevsky’s entire work the one
episode that was actually not published until about 1915, “Stavrogin’s
Confession” from The Possessed. This chapter, which touches very closely
on the third canto of the Chants de Maldoror, contains a justification
of evil in which certain motifs of Surrealism are more powerfully expressed
than by any of its present spokesmen. For Stavrogin is a Surrealist avant la
lettre. No one else understood, as he did, how naive is the view of the
Philistines that goodness, for all the manly virtue of those who practise it,
is God-inspired; whereas evil stems entirely from our spontaneity, and in it we
are independent and self-sufficient beings.
No one else saw inspiration, as he
did, in even the most ignoble actions, and precisely in them. He considered vileness
itself as something preformed, both in the course of the world and also in
ourselves, to which we are disposed if not called, as the bourgeois idealist
sees virtue. Dostoyevsky’s God created not only heaven and earth and man and
beast, but also baseness, vengeance, cruelty. And here, too, he gave the devil
no opportunity to meddle in his handiwork. That is why all these vices have a
pristine vitality in his work; they are perhaps not “splendid”, but eternally
new, “as on the first day”, separated by an infinity from the cliches through
which sin is perceived by the Philistine.
The pitch of tension that enabled
the poets under discussion to achieve at a distance their astonishing effects
is documented quite scurrilously in the letter Isidore Ducasse addressed to his
publisher on October 23, 1869, in an attempt to make his poetry look acceptable.
He places himself in the line of descent from Mickiewicz, Milton, Southey,
Alfred de Musset, Baudelaire, and says: “Of course, I somewhat swelled the note
to bring something new into this literature that, after all, only sings of
despair in order to depress the reader and thus make him long all the more
intensely for goodness as a remedy. So that in the end one really sings only of
goodness, only the method is more philosophical and less naive than that of the
old school, of which only Victor Hugo and a few others are still alive.” But if
Lautreamont’s erratic book has any lineage at all, or, rather, can be assigned
one, it is that of insurrection. Soupault’s attempt, in his edition of the
complete works in 1927, to write a political curriculum vitae for Isidore
Ducasse was therefore a quite understandable and not unperceptive venture.
Unfortunately, there is no documentation for it, and that adduced by Soupault
rests on a confusion. On the other hand, and happily, a similar attempt in the
case of Rimbaud was successful, and it is the achievement of Marcel Coulon to
have defended the poet’s true image against the Catholic usurpation by Claudel
and Berrichon. Rimbaud is indeed a Catholic, but he is one, by his own account,
in the most wretched part of himself, which he does not tire of denouncing and
consigning to his own and everyone’s hatred, his own and everyone’s contempt:
the part that forces him to confess that he does not understand revolt. But
that is the concession of a communard dissatisfied with his own contribution
who, by the time he turned his back on poetry, had long since—in his earliest
work—taken leave of religion. “Hatred, to you I have entrusted my treasure”, he
writes in the Saison en enfer. This is another dictum around which a poetics
of Surrealism might grow like a climbing plant, to sink its roots deeper than
the theory of “surprised” creation originated by Apollinaire, to the depth of
the insights of Poe.
Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a
radical concept of freedom. The Surrealists have one. They are the first to
liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom, because they
are convinced that “freedom, which on this earth can only be bought with a
thousand of the hardest sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its
fullness without any kind of pragmatic calculation, as long as it lasts.” And
this proves to them that “mankind’s struggle for liberation in its simplest
revolutionary form (which, however, is liberation in every respect), remains
the only cause worth serving.” But are they successful in welding this
experience of freedom to the other revolutionary experience that we have to
acknowledge because it has been ours, the constructive, dictatorial side of
revolution? In short, have they bound revolt to revolution? How are we to
imagine an existence oriented solely toward Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, in rooms
by Le Corbusier and Oud?
To win the energies of intoxication
for the revolution—this is the project about which Surrealism circles in all
its books and enterprises. This it may call its most particular task. For them
it is not enough that, as we know, an ecstatic component lives in every
revolutionary act. This component is identical with the anarchic. But to place
the accent exclusively on it would be to subordinate the methodical and
disciplinary preparation for revolution entirely to a praxis oscillating
between fitness exercises and celebration in advance. Added to this is an
inadequate, undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication. The
aesthetic of the painter, the poet, en etat de surprise, of art as the
reaction of one surprised, is enmeshed in a number of pernicious romantic
prejudices. Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric
gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a
romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the
mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery
only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a
dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable
as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for
example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently
telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic
phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not
teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the
profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the
thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much
as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to
mention that most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.
To win the energies of intoxication
for the revolution”—in other words, poetic politics? “We have tried that
beverage. Anything, rather than that!” Well, it will interest you all the more
how much an excursion into poetry clarifies things. For what is the programme
of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with
metaphors. The socialist sees that “finer future of our children and
grandchildren” in a condition in which all act “as if they were angels”, and
everyone has as much “as if he were rich”, and everyone lives “as if he were
free”. Of angels, wealth, freedom, not a trace. These are mere images. And the
stock imagery of these poets of the social-democratic associations? Their gradus
ad parnassum? Optimism. A very different
air is breathed in the Naville essay that makes the “organization of pessimism”
the call of the hour. In the name of his literary friends he delivers an
ultimatum in face of which this unprincipled, dilettantish optimism must
unfailingly show its true colours: where are the conditions for revolution? In
the changing of attitudes or of external circumstances? That is the cardinal
question that determines the relation of politics to morality and cannot be
glossed over. Surrealism has come ever closer to the Communist answer. And that
means pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust in the fate of
literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European
humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between
nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in I. G. Farben and the
peaceful perfection of the air force. But what now, what next?
Here due weight must be given to
the insight that in the Traite du style, Aragon’s last book, required in
distinction between metaphor and image, a happy insight into questions of style
that needs extending. Extension: nowhere do these two—metaphor and image—collide
so drastically and so irreconcilably as in politics. For to organize pessimism
means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover
in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images. This
image sphere, however, can no longer be measured out by contemplation. If it is
the double task of the revolutionary intelligentsia to overthrow the
intellectual predominance of the bourgeoisie and to make contact with the
proletarian masses, the intelligentsia has failed almost entirely in the second
part of this task because it can no longer be performed contemplatively. And
yet this has hindered hardly anybody from approaching it again and again as if
it could, and calling for proletarian poets, thinkers, and artists. To counter
this, Trotsky had to point out—as early as Literature and Revolution—that
such artists would only emerge from a victorious revolution. In reality it is
far less a matter of making the artist of bourgeois origin into a master of “proletarian
art” than of deploying him, even at the expense of his artistic activity, at
important points in this sphere of imagery. Indeed, might not perhaps the
interruption of his “artistic career” be an essential part of his new function?
The jokes he tells are the better
for it. And he tells them better. For in the joke, too, in invective, in
misunderstanding, in all cases where an action puts forth its own image and
exists, absorbing and consuming it, where nearness looks with its own eyes, the
long-sought image sphere is opened, the world of universal and integral
actualities, where the “best room” is missing—the sphere, in a word, in which
political materialism and physical nature share the inner man, the psyche, the
individual, or whatever else we wish to throw to them, with dialectical
justice, so that no limb remains unrent. Nevertheless—indeed, precisely after
such dialectical annihilation—this will still be a sphere of images and, more
concretely, of bodies. For it must in the end be admitted: metaphysical
materialism, of the brand of Vogt and Bukharin, as is attested by the
experience of the Surrealists, and earlier of Hebel, Georg Buchner, Nietzsche,
and Rimbaud, cannot lead without rupture to anthropological materialism. There
is a residue. The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is
being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual
reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination
initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all
revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily
innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality
transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto.
For the moment, only the Surrealists have understood its present commands. They
exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock
that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.
W.
Benjamin. 1929