Cunningham, The Futures of Surrealism Hegelianism, Romanticism, And the Avant-Garde

The Futures of Surrealism: Hegelianism, Romanticism, and the Avant-GardeAuthor(s): David CunninghamSource: SubStance, Vol. 34, No. 2, Issue 107 (2005), pp. 47-65Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685743 .

Accessed: 11/07/2014 11:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toSubStance.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.205.136.30 on Fri, 11 Jul 2014 11:59:03 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwisc

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685743?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


The Futures of Surrealism: Hegelianism, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde' David Cunningham

In the course of urging upon us a "re-reading of the history of the modernism of the 1920s," Colin MacCabe counterposes, in a recent work, the writings of Georges Bataille and those of a man he calls that "loathsome Leninist Breton" (MacCabe, 82). The comment is an aside-it appears in brackets and in a book devoted to the late 1960s cult film Performance-but is perhaps all the more significant for that. For it would seem to reflect, all-too-fashionably, an extreme version of a pervasive contemporary doxa concerning surrealism and the relationship between these two figures. It is not my intention to trace the genealogy of such a view-though it would probably go, in part, via the selective "translations" of French theory (and of the Tel Quel group in particular) into the terms of Anglo-American post-structuralism2 -but, clearly, a pivotal moment in the construction of this opposition is represented by the writings of those associated with the American art journal October. In the 1997 Formless: A User's Guide, for example, co-authored by two of the journal's editors, Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, the former feels able to assert that "there is no connection whatever between Bataille's sense of the Sacred [as what is "wholly other"] and Breton's contem- poraneous reappropriation of the marvellous" (53, my emphasis).

Now, it would not be hard to show that this hardly corresponds to Bataille's own conception. Indeed, Michael Richardson has demonstrated this very well in the detailed introduction to his superb collection of Bataille's writings on surrealism, and one could easily cite supporting statements, such as that in the 1946 essay "On the Subject of Slumbers": "I would now like to affirm [surrealism] from within as the demand to which I have submitted and as the dissatisfaction I exemplify" (Bataille 1994: 49). My intention in noting this is not, however, to elide the important differences between Breton and Bataille's positions. Rather, the initial aim of this paper is to ask, first, what might be revealed by the recent tendency straightforwardly to oppose the likes of Breton and Bataille, and second, to question some of the "philosophical" conceptions that

? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2005 47 SubStance #107, Vol..34, no.2, 2005



48 David Cunningham

would seem to underlie such an opposition-a questioning that may have certain more general implications for contemporary "theoretical" accounts of modernism and the avant-garde.

One term missing from Formless: A User's Guide (its sole mention is in rather negative terms) but far more central to the earlier work of Krauss in particular, is that of "postmodernism." Although rarely made explicit as such, Bataille (like Duchamp and a few others) clearly has a pivotal role within Krauss's work of the early 1980s, as representing a kind of proto-postmodernism that points forward to-and in part explains- contemporary practice. In this sense, we are encouraged to read the "philosophical" divide between Bataille and Breton as that which also divides postmodernism from modernism and the avant-garde, despite the historical complication this evidently involves. The nature of this division is made very clear by Krauss, in her essay "The Originality of the Avant-Garde":

...postmodernism establishes a schism between itself and the conceptual domain of the avant-garde, looking back at it from across a gulf that in turn establishes a historical divide. The historical period that the avant-garde shared with modernism is over. This seems an obvious fact. (170)

Krauss's rhetorical assertion of obviousness indicates, as always, the anxious force of a desire for the clarity of a limit that this very rhetoric signals as fragile. Moreover, it is this anxiety that is then transferred to the relation between Breton and Bataille on Krauss's reading.

While this is not the place to re-open the rather moribund debates surrounding the concept of postmodernism, suffice it to say that if this concept has come to seem increasingly implausible, no doubt (as I am not the first to note) it has to do with the restrictions implicit in its conception of modernism, and its tendency to reduce it to the limited terms of something like a generically-defined period style, as a means of establishing its own dubious claims to historical "uniqueness." As such, if there is a need to rethink "the history of modernism" and of the "avant- garde," this involves a rather more radical reassessment than, I think, MacCabe has in mind. Nonetheless, it is worth paying some attention to his precise description of Breton as a "loathsome Leninist," and taking it more seriously than I suspect MacCabe does himself. For it raises the question of whether Breton is "loathsome" for MacCabe, because he is a "Leninist," and if so, what he means by this term. I imagine MacCabe is perhaps thinking primarily of Breton's position within the surrealist group, and of what is often seen as his uniquely "dictatorial" persona. But the term "Leninist" might also be thought to have another important implication if we recall its historical connection to the discourse of an

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2005



The Futures of Surrealism 49

avant-garde. Indeed, it is this French term, taken originally from a military vocabulary, that Lenin himself adopts in his 1902 What is to be Done?, as a means of defining the role of the Communist Party as vanguard of the working class (Lenin, 1969).

As Susan Buck-Morss has recently noted, the terms "avant-garde" and "vanguard"--undifferentiated in Lenin's own writings - originated in primarily spatial concepts. The condition, however, of their familiar metaphorical functioning in political, cultural and artistic discourse from the mid-nineteenth century, was their transcription "onto the dimension of historical time" (Buck-Morss, 61; Cunningham 2001: 169-182). This is to say that before any apparent locatability of something called the avant- garde within the disputed limits of a socio-historical or art-historical periodization, the concept of an avant-garde inscribes a particular mode of temporalizing history in its own right. Thus, to define Breton as a "Leninist," ("loathsome" or otherwise), could well be read as ascribing to his thought a particular "politics of time" (in Peter Osborne's phrase), and thus a particular way of articulating the general (and essentially abstract) temporal modality of an avant-garde.

It is in these terms that I want to explore the relation between the time of the avant-garde and the time of surrealism. However, to re- emphasize the above, this is emphatically not referring to "the avant- garde" as a conventionally received art-historical category, but rather as a general concept through which particular movements or works articulate themselves or come to be articulated in a way that is inseparable from more general questions concerning the nature of historical time (including the time of art or literary history). As such, reconsidering the relation of surrealism to modernism or the avant-garde should not involve simply another re-jigging of curatorial categorizations derived (usually with considerable simplification) from the likes of Clement Greenberg or Peter Biirger, but should invite us to reconsider the nature of the very concepts of modernism and the avant-garde. As Blanchot writes, in an essay to which I will return in more detail in a moment: "[T]he history of surrealism is only of scholarly interest, particularly if the conception of history is not modified by its subject" (1993: 407). What, then, might such a modification entail, and what might it reveal about the forms and practices of surrealism, and of the avant- garde, in general?3

As famously cited by Walter Benjamin, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Breton states: "The work of art is valuable only insofar as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future" (qtd. in Benjamin, 242). This strikes me as exemplary, in its abstract temporal

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no.2, 2005



50 David Cunningham

form, of what might be reasonably termed an avant-garde conception of artistic "value," emerging from the mid-nineteenth-century intensification of modernity as a form of historical consciousness, with the "re-orientation to the future" that this entails (Berman, 135). Considering such a conception in its most fundamental and expansive sense then depends upon the way in which one understands the relation of the present-where the art work comes forth for judgement-to the future, whose reflexes must, for Breton, vibrate therein if the work is to be judged valuable. Nonetheless, if the avant-garde is to be thought in these terms, then far from presenting us with a univocal "category" or "project"-amenable to a fixed empirical or typological determination- this embraces a whole range of equivocal and contested understandings of how such an affirmation of the future is itself to be conceived and manifested in specific cultural forms and practices. Thus it is in terms of the resulting politics of conflicting temporalities that surrealism's (and Breton and Bataille's) particular place in the history of modernism and the avant-garde might be reconsidered, in such a way as to modify and enrich our conception of this history.

There are a number of related issues that I cannot consider here, such as the complex details of surrealism's tortured relationship to Marxism and to Leninism itself. Instead, I want to approach this from a slight angle, following up on Jean-Michel Rabate's useful suggestion that "a history of French Hegelianism" (largely lost in contemporary accounts) may shed "more light on the break-ups, splits, dissociations, and tensions between various modernist factions" than any received typological categorizations of modernism or the avant-garde (2002a: 17). What I will seek to add to Rabate's claim-through all-too-brief engagements with Benjamin and Blanchot's readings of surrealism-is the even more submerged role that the legacy of German Romanticism may play in this, since it constitutes the pre-history of the Hegelian dialectic.

Hegel: Time Dominated by the Future In many ways, Hegel is an obvious place to begin in considering the

kinds of questions I have set out, given that Jean-Michel Besnier (as well as Denis Hollier and others) opposes Bataille and Breton precisely in terms of the former's "refusal of Hegelianism" (Besnier, 170; Hollier, 1990). Of course Bataille's perceived anti-Hegelianism is precisely what is seen to connect him later to the likes of Deleuze and Foucault, and to pit all of them against Breton, who never tires of citing Hegel in his support. Yet, one of the problems with the customary opposition set up between Breton and Bataille, in these terms, is that it tends to rest almost exclusively on

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2005




the spectacularly bad-tempered exchanges that took place in 1929-1930 with the publication of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism and the collective pamphlet, Un Cadavre, which responded to it. As Michael Richardson comments, reading this polemic "one is surprised how seriously it has been treated, as though it has the quality of a debate" (7). More important, doing so ignores Bataille's far more affirmative texts written during the post-war period, at a time when surrealism's star seemed to be on the wane: "Who today," Bataille writes in 1945, "could deny the radiant power of surrealism... [as] what remains vibrant and genuinely compels recognition" (1994, 57). It is clear that Hegel had a role to play both in the early polemics and in the post-war (qualified) rapprochement. Unfortunately, it has only tended to be the first of these that has been noted. Yet, as Hollier concedes, Bataille in fact only began to study Hegel in any detail during the 1930s, after the exchanges around the Second Manifesto.

Now, famously, one figure explains Bataille's turn to Hegel's work. As Besnier puts it: "With Kojeve, Hegel arrived in France" (173). And Kojeve's seminars at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes didn't start until 1933. Moreover, while Besnier's statement is largely true, as regards Bataille and many of his generation, it is less accurate in general terms. For the first extensive translation of Hegel into French was carried out in the late nineteenth century by an ex-student of Hegel, Augusto Vera, and, as Rabat6 notes, it was almost certainly this that Breton worked with.4 Moreover, even after Vera, the likes of Jean Wahl (a friend of Breton's) and Alexander Koyre had already begun to introduce Hegel to a French audience, before Kojbve's seminars (Rabat6 2002b: 23-36). This is significant because Breton is already wielding Hegel against Bataille and the so-called "dissident surrealists" in the Second Manifesto - three or four years before Kojbve's seminars-albeit with considerable ambivalence, given his simultaneous judgement on what he calls the "colossal abortion" of the Hegelian system (Breton 1972: 140). And, of course, what is presented as Bataille's anti-Hegelian response to Breton is, given his own ignorance of Hegel at this point, simply a polemical attack on Breton himself. Or, in other words, "Hegelian" here is really just another word for a somewhat vaguely conceived "Idealism," which Bataille's materialism set out to exclude in its entirety- a point that gives some legitimacy to Breton's surprisingly astute observation that it is precisely in his search for such a materialism that "Hegel awaits" Bataille (Breton 1972: 181). If this is a "debate" around Hegel, it is one marked by a good deal of ignorance on both sides. One is tempted to cite Bataille's own later judgement on Nietzsche, that he "knew of Hegel only the usual vulgarization" (qtd. in Derrida 1978: 252).5




52 David Cunningham

Nonetheless, in some sense, it is the "vulgarization" that should concern us here; or at least what is at stake in this is not the accuracy of the various readings of Hegel circulating within French intellectual circles at this time, but their own self-understanding. The question to be asked is: Why Hegel? There are numerous possible answers to such a question- the relation to Marxism, the importance of negativity or of reconciliation, the myth of the end of history--but I would like to draw attention to one suggested by Rabate, who notes that Koyre (and indeed Kojeve after him) stressed, above all, "the originality of Hegel's conception of time, a time dominated by the future" (Rabate 2002b: 24).6 For it is in this sense that the interest in Hegel shared by many French intellectuals and artists of the period clearly intersects with the problematic of the avant-garde. Indeed, the particular moments in which Breton tends to employ (or believes he is employing) Hegelian formulations makes this clear. This is most evident in that aspect of Bretonian surrealism that presents itself as a "machine for integration" (Chinieux-Gendron, 4); a definition that could also serve as a description of the Hegelian dialectic itself (at least in its "official" version [Bennington, 218]). Thus Breton obviously sees a Hegelian resonance in the first manifesto's famous assertion: "I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality" (Breton 1972: 14). For Hal Foster, this "insistence on resolution, the Hegelian reconciliation of such dualisms as waking and dreaming, life and death...is the raison d'etre of Bretonian surrealism" (16)7 - an argument given further legitimacy by a 1934 lecture, "What is Surrealism?," which proclaims the "final resolution" of "interior reality and exterior reality" as "the supreme aim of surrealism" (Breton 1978: 116).

This may well, for Breton, have had Hegelian connotations. Yet, contra the customary assumptions of certain art historians and cultural theorists, such "insistence on resolution" is far from exclusively "Hegelian" -Hegel himself credits Schiller with "demanding and enunciating the principle of totality and reconciliation" (1993: 67)--and in fact opens itself up to some fairly damning objections precisely from a Hegelian perspective. For surrealism, as Breton defines it in the manifesto, clearly invites the same kind of critique that Hegel himself directs at his immediate predecessors and contemporaries in post-Kantian German philosophy (including Schiller), who, as he puts it in The Philosophy of Right, relapse, in their invocations of futurity, into a "never-ending ought- to-be... [that] wanders to and fro without being able to get beyond" (Hegel 1967: 90). It is the supposed inadequacies of such a "never-ending

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2005




ought-to-be," and of its inability to resolve the Kantian antinomy of "ought" and "is" characteristic of moralitlit, that constituted for Hegel the basis for a critique of all forms of utopianism, and of what he termed the merely "abstract and formal" character of its conception of freedom, whereby we are "forever in the domain of the unrealised ought, of Sollen" in which "all is looked upon as ambition" (Taylor, 530). Such a critique turns up again in Marx and Engels's arguments against both the Young Hegelians and nineteenth-century utopianism socialism (where the concept of an avant-garde first came to be deployed among followers of Saint-Simon and Fourier). As Lukacs, for example, summarizes, explicitly distancing himself from his own earlier "utopianism": The Hegelian- Marxist "category of mediation...is not something foisted on to the objects from outside, it is no value-judgement or 'ought' opposed to their 'is.' It is rather the manifestation of their authentic objective structure" (Lukhcs, 162).

The Legacy of German Romanticism In this light, it seems clear that while a futurally-projected

unification--of subjective and objective, abstract and concrete-is often explicitly presented by Breton in Hegelian terms, from an actual Hegelian perspective it would more obviously belong to that "Romantic" (or earlier German Idealist) pre-history of Hegelian thought-the Romantic vision of "wholeness" which, in Friedrich Schlegel's words, may be glimpsed in "the fragments of the future" (21).8 It is such a "vision" that is pre- empted in a long-forgotten 1796 text, the so-called "Oldest System Programme of Idealism," discovered among Hegel's notes, but which may have been written by Schelling or H61derlin--a text that Jacques Ranciere asserts "laid the basis for a new idea of revolution" (138). The role of aesthetics in this revolutionary "programme" -quite alien to Hegel himself--would tend to confirm the link here, recalling someone like Schelling's slightly later conception of the art work as "a sensuous image of freedom" (Critchley, 90). As Andrew Bowie has put it: "The aesthetic product becomes a utopian symbol of the realisation of freedom: in it we can see or hear an image of what the world would be like if freedom were realised" (57).9 Hence, also, Schlegel's speculative orientation of the Romantic project as regulated by the Idea of a future fusing of "the poetry of art and the poetry of nature" that would "make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical" (31). It is this that connects a Romantic desire for the 'self-suppression of art in life" (already articulated in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind) to "avant-garde radicalism" (Ranciere, 134). As such, if Bataille's early critique of Breton does hit the mark, at this stage it would not be so much as a critique of his




54 David Cunningham

Hegelianism but as a critique of the prehistory of Romantic (and more properly Idealist) aesthetic utopianism, still visible behind it and pervading the surrealist articulation of the avant-garde and its moment of futurity: "All of existence [is] conceived as purely literary by M. Breton," is Bataille's most damning criticism in the late 1920s (qtd. in Cohen, 9).10 Yet, despite Rabat6's claim that Breton's avant-gardiste "utopia of a life identical with art and thought is a condensed version of Hegel's synthesis of the concept with the Absolute and with its historical and empirical manifestations," such a view would, in fact, be anything but Hegelian (Rabate 2002a: 26). Indeed, for Hegel, such an "aesthetically" formulated "utopia" could only be a mere retreat into "the twilight zone of intuition and fantasy" (Taylor, 48).

There is little doubt that the "reflexes of the future," which should vibrate the present work of art, are often thought by Breton in this straightforwardly utopianist manner. Yet the tendency to read Hegel (knowingly or otherwise) back into Romanticism--by no means unique to Breton-might also be read in another way, and it is this, in the light of recent work on Romanticism, that I want to pursue below. At stake here would be the extent to which one reads Romanticism itself (as opposed to Idealism) as actually regarding it as "possible to restore unity to what the modern world increasingly separates" (Bowie, 63). Now, a counter- reading of Schlegel that stresses the self-consciousness of an essential "incompletion" or "failure" figured by irony and the fragment is one that runs through the readings of Benjamin and Blanchot - readings that have in recent times produced a large body of secondary commentary. It is not my intention to add to this here. Nonetheless, I do want to draw attention to the fact that both Benjamin and Blanchot also wrote (affirmatively) on surrealism, and, in doing so, implied a rather different way of thinking the Romantic inheritance of this movement (as well as of the avant- garde in general), which I want to explore in the latter part of this essay. Of primary importance here will be the possible forms of non-utopianist futurity that, against the grain of its conventional reception, both thinkers seek to uncover in Breton's surrealism.

Benjamin and Blanchot Benjamin's 1929 essay is far better known than Blanchot's two pieces

on surrealism, so I will only very briefly draw attention to some of its interesting features. The first point is the centrality that questions of time have in the essay. Although this relates to what are described as "the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded," this reworking of the past (as revolutionary) is itself directed toward the opening up of

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2005




another mode of futurity in the present, which is precisely irreducible to the projective futures of utopianism (Benjamin 1985: 129). For what gives the outmoded its "energy" is its embodiment of "latent, unrealized futures" that suggest a "different structure for modern experience" (Caygill, 133, 70). Moreover, it is this conception, and its accompanying critique of the modes of historical temporalization associated with both historicism and progress--as instituting a conception of "homogenous, empty time"'-that is taken forward to the later Benjamin's work-to the Arcades Project and to the notion of "now-time [Jetztzeit]" (Benjamin 1992: 252-3). Indeed, the "experience" of the "now" -a kind of "avant- garde experience," as Osborne suggests (1995: 150)-is explicitly presented as being prefigured by "the 'Now' of recognizability in which things put on their true- surrealist -face" (Benjamin 1999: 464).

Of key importance for my concerns is that such experience is also explicitly presented by Benjamin as non-utopianist, since in principle the connection to "the Absolute" that it insists upon "does not project fulfilment into another place or a later historical time," leaving open its "horizon of anticipation" (Osborne, 2000: 15). Following from this, the second point is that although Benjamin directly criticizes what he calls surrealism's "pernicious romantic prejudices" -seeing this as leading toward a potential aestheticization of the political and a dangerous fascination with myth-this should not, I think, be read as a dismissal of Romanticism, or of its relation to surrealism, per se (Benjamin 1985: 237).11 To do so would be to ignore the complexities of Benjamin's own reading of Romanticism; a reading which-as early as his 1919 doctoral dissertation "The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism"-- played a central role in his attempt to develop what Caygill describes as a principled non-Hegelianist conception of "speculative experience" (8). It is precisely this that motivates Benjamin's search, in Schlegel's writings, for a conception of a "fulfilled" infinitude of "connectedness" [Zusammenhang] as opposed to the "empty" Fichtean "bad infinity" of "continuous advance" [Fortgang], which is liable to the kind of Hegelian critique outlined above (see Phelan, 69-82). This is what Adorno has in mind when he writes of Benjamin's proximity to "the Romantic conception of the fragment as a construction that is not complete but rather progresses onward into the infinite... [and thus] champions [an] anti-idealist motive in the midst of idealism" (16). In other words, Benjamin sought in Romanticism some model for nothing less than a disruption of "the possibility of Hegelianism avant la lettre" (Critchley, 115); a model still implicitly at stake in the 1929 essay on surrealism, as it is in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940).12 I will return to




56 David Cunningham

this reading of Schlegel below, but suffice it to say that at issue for Benjamin here is the precise nature of surrealism's connection to what, in 1919, he cites as Schlegel's "Romantic messianism": "The revolutionary desire to realize the kingdom of God on earth" (qtd. in Benjamin, 1996: 185). In adopting surrealism as a basis for articulating the conception of now-time, Benjamin might be said to seek to read it against the utopianist side of Breton's thought and to link it instead to an "other Romanticism" of the fragment; a link that may go a good way toward displacing the opposition between the "modernism" of Breton and that of Bataille, with which I began, as well as complicating our conceptions of an "avant- garde" temporality more generally.

As with Benjamin, the legacies of German Romanticism, and of Schlegel in particular, also assume a very central role within Blanchot's theoretical project.13 And, once again, a certain understanding of the fragment is key here. The temporal implications of the fragmentary are made very clear in the elaboration of the idea of the "project" in one of the most famous of Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragments: "The feeling for projects -which one might call fragments of the future - is distinguishable from the feeling for fragments of the past only by its direction: progressive in the former, regressive in the latter" (1991: 21). Now, this can obviously be extended into a utopianist position in which the future is positioned as the site of a projected wholeness beyond present fragmentation; "an implied designation of something that has previously been or will subsequently be whole - the severed finger refers back to the hand" (Blanchot 1993: 307). This would then be, to borrow a phrase from Renato Poggioli, one "Romantic precedent" for Breton's surrealism (10).14 However, as with Benjamin, what Blanchot's writing on surrealism also suggests is the possibility of reading it in relation to another rather different Romantic precedent; one constituted around what he refers to as a "non-romantic essence of romanticism" (Blanchot 1993: 356). This, then, would be Blanchot's version of Adorno's "anti-idealist motive":

The demand, the extreme demand of the fragmentary...ruins the work because the work...is the unity which is satisfied with itself-this is what Schlegel sensed, but it is also what finally escaped him. (1986: 160)

If, then, as Blanchot concedes, Schlegel's dominant philosophical conception of the fragment entails a model of "history, which, become revolutionary, places at the forefront of its action work that is undertaken in view of the whole," there is also, in tension with this, a more counter- intuitive sense of "fragmentary writing" as an infinitely disruptive movement of unworking [ddsoeuvrement] that exposes and traces the impossibility of any final unification and that produces "new relations

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2005




that except themselves from unity, just as they exceed the whole" (Blanchot 1993: 359). In a recent introduction to Schlegel's work, J. M. Bernstein summarizes this argument (most familiar from the work of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy) well:

For a work to fully exemplify and reflectively articulate the Idea of poetry as infinite becoming, it would have to cancel itself as work, bracket itself as work for the sake of the indeterminate Idea, unwork its being as work, forfeit its status as material presence in favour of art's "not yet," be itself and always beyond itself. It would be a fragment without being part of a whole, and rehearse an ironic displacement of whatever immanent claim it would make. (xxxiii)

At the very least, Blanchot himself notes, with this opening of another Romanticism,

Literature will from now on bear in itself [the] question of discontinuity or difference as a question of form-a question and a task German Romanticism not only sensed but already clearly proposed-before consigning them to Nietzsche and, beyond Nietzsche, to the future. (1993: 359)

Surrealism Part of this future is surrealism, and perhaps particularly a certain

notion of the surrealist image, as that which bears "in itself the question of discontinuity or difference as a question of form." Breton's famous definition in the first manifesto is exemplary: "The value of the image depends on the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors" (1972: 37, my emphasis). As Blanchot observes, a range of terms are used to denote the experience thus "produced"--shock, the spark, the explosive, the convulsive; experiences of the extraordinary, the marvellous, the unexpected, the surreal - concepts that, as he puts it, "would like to escape all conceptualization" (1993: 406). The question that then emerges is: What kind of futurity does the "spark" of the surrealist image evoke?

Now, one of the crucial elements of Blanchot's most extensive reading of surrealism, in his essay from the late 1960s entitled "Tomorrow at Stake," is its emphasis upon the time of surrealist experience, as what he terms "a pure practice of existence...in a determinate temporal modality" (ibid., 407). And as Blanchot's title makes clear, essential to this is precisely the question of surrealism's futurity, of its "tomorrow." This is crucial because, just as Blanchot seeks to read Schlegel against that which in him leads into Hegel- the "rhythm of the Romantic fragment" that works, "anachronistically, against its 'dialectical Aufhebung'" (Critchley, 115)--so too he seeks to read Breton against his own Hegelian or utopianist conceptions of the "reflexes of the future." Indeed, this is the very basis




58 David Cunningham

set forth for Blanchot's own attempt to "interrogate" surrealism "no longer in relation to what comes to an end, but with the question of the future that designates itself in this end that is infinite" (Blanchot, 1993: 406). It is this, in turn, that lies behind Blanchot's insistence on a (rigorously non-Hegelian) reading of the surrealist image as "the surprising manifestation (a manifestation by surprise) of the un-unifiable" (ibid., 415). For despite Blanchot's own clearly-expressed doubts about the surrealists' conceptions of chance--doubts that center on what it would mean to "will" or "desire" the chance formation or encounter- what is important, above all, in surrealism's aleatory practices is, he argues, "the provocation" it produces, by which the future "can come into relation" with the present as "interruption, interval, arrest, or opening" (ibid., 412-3). It is precisely "what is at stake" in this "opening" that the Hegelian determination of chance is "insufficient to account for" (ibid., 414). As such, surrealism, in its most radical manifestation as a temporal modality of experience, calls forth neither an immanent end nor a utopianist projection, but an "exigency" that comes from the "unexpected" itself; the future as "unknown," "ever exterior to the horizon against which it seems to stand out" (ibid., 412):

From the unknown-what is neither the pure unknowable nor the not yet known- comes a relation that is indirect, a network of relations that never allows itself to be expressed unitarily...a non-simultaneous set of forces, a space of difference...[T]he future of surrealism is bound to this exigency of a plurality escaping unification and extending beyond the whole (while at the same time presupposing it, demanding its realisation). (ibid., 409)

It is in the light of this complex (Romantic) experience of the infinitely configured "plurality" of fragmentation- one akin to the "negativity" of the allegorical rather than the symbolic15 -that Blanchot quotes Breton: "surprise ought to be sought out for itself, unconditionally" (qtd. in Blanchot, 1993: 464).16 For it is in this most radical "exigency" that surrealism puts "everything in question (ejecting the whole from the order of the whole) not by a .. ...] purely capricious negation, but through this concerted, non-concerted seeking that remains without assurance and without guarantee" (ibid., 418-9).

Now, no doubt this is to read surrealism against the grain, against Breton's all-too-frequent utopianist projections of future "wholeness" and his questionable deployments of Hegelian language. Nonetheless, it doesn't come from nowhere, and attests, at the very least, to a diff rend within surrealism's articulation of the structure of avant-garde experience that complicates the relation between Breton and someone like Bataille. Perhaps most significantly, this seems to have been quite clear to Bataille himself--at least in his post-war writings-and serves,

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2005




(beyond the accounts offered by Krauss, Hollier, and others), to explain the complexities of his own self-defined position as surrealism's "old enemy from within" (Bataille, 1994: 49). The engagement with Hegel, and the difficulties of this engagement -traced in Derrida's famous essay on Bataille, with its warning concerning the "self-evidence" of Hegel-do not seem insignificant in this respect, though surrealism, typically, is barely referred to in Derrida's account.17

It is worth attending briefly to Bataille's own elaboration of a certain structure of temporal experience appropriate to surrealism in a 1945 review of Breton's Arcane 17. For, contra Besnier's or Hollier's insistence on opposition, Bataille makes quite clear here the proximity between his own conception of the "instant" and Breton's thought. Indeed, what surrealism liberates, Bataille suggests, is "nothing other than the instant," whether it recognizes this fact or not:

...we have never been able to distinguish between value and the end pursued. The dissociation requires the strange, passionate and reflective approach, lucid but evading its own lucidity, which distinguishes Andre Breton, who has always treated the future [or rather the projected future] with surprising contempt. "I never make plans," he writes. (Bataille, 1994: 65)

Bataille is not uncritical here, but, again, the criticism is very much positioned from within Breton's own questioning:

The morality to which Andre Breton is drawn is rather poorly defined, but it is- if such a thing is possible--a morality of the instant. What is essential about it is the demand imposed on whosoever expresses a will to choose between the instant...and a concern for results which immediately abolish the value and even, in a sense, the existence of the instant. The accent is placed not on the fact of choosing but on the content of the choice proposed. (ibid., 66)

While it is debatable that "morality" is quite the best term here, (rather than, say, "politics"), what is at stake in this is clearly something like what Kristeva-one of those Tel Quel "post-structuralists" customarily opposed to Breton18 - describes as an "irruption" which, like Blanchot's or Benjamin's romantic fragments, "will never be an Hegelian Aufhebung," evoking, as it does, a kind of "'future anterior' that will never take place, never come about as such, but only as an upheaval of present place and meaning" (Kristeva, 1980: 32).

The Politics of Time Kristeva is writing here of another pivotal moment in the history of

the avant-garde: Russian Futurism. And it is this that returns us, in a rather oblique way, to the issue of Leninism. The futurists, Kristeva argues, "heard and understood the Revolution only because its present was dependent on a future" (ibid., 32). One might well say the same of




60 David Cunningham

Breton's surrealists. Yet, at the same time, as Buck-Morss has most recently observed, the tension apparent from the very beginning in the historical conjoining of futurism or surrealism as the "cultural" avant- garde and the Communist Party as the "political" vanguard of revolutionary history, may also be understood, in schematic terms at least, as one concerning precisely what I have described as a politics of conflicting temporalities; most specifically, a conflict manifested in a diffrrend in their respective conceptions of this affirmative relation of present to future (Cunningham, 2001: 174-5).

The model of vanguardism, theorized by Lenin, conceptualizes historical time in terms of projective teleology, where the otherness of the future is always already foreclosed by the determination of "a 'plan' that locks in future meaning" (Buck-Morss, 67). As such, art or literature is simply a "cog and a screw" in the forward march of the "politically conscious avant-garde of the entire working class," as represented by the party (Calinescu, 114). Yet, for the cultural avant-garde, as Buck-Morss reads it in Benjaminian fashion, "what was to come remained an open category" (48). This future, as a condition of the present, is invoked- other to the time of either Leninist vanguardism or utopianist projection -not as the basis for a project that would "define the reason" for present practice, but as an attempt to interrupt "existing time and space as a non-functional utopian presence in the present" (ibid., 64-5). This is not to deny the utopianist (or indeed Leninist) dimensions of surrealism (or of the early Russian avant-gardes) but we also need to be aware of what unsettles them from within. And, at the very least, this suggests that we need to be wary of any attempt to resolve the diffirends apparent within the history of the avant-garde, and its various "futures," to reduce it to some univocal project or generic definition (which something like a "postmodernism" might simply overcome or leave behind).

Conclusion In his earliest essay on surrealism, from the late 1940s, Blanchot

poses the question- still our question today-of in what sense surrealism might be said to have "become historical" (1995: 85). This is not simply a question of surrealism's "pastness"--or of the way in which the contemporary "real" might itself appear to have "become surreal" (Foster, 209-11); "dominant but dead," to borrow Habermas's phrase (6)--but

is also a question of the relation between the time of surrealism and that of art or literary history; a question that has wider implications for attempts to historicize the work of the avant-garde in general. For, at the very

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2005




least, a genuine account of surrealism should take into account the challenge that it produces to the temporal modalities and categories of historicism itself. If, as Blanchot notes, surrealist questioning can always (unavoidably) "close itself" in "upon a new order, a tradition," there is always that which also escapes the temporalities of tradition, and thus of its closure (1993: 418). In Benjamin's famous terms, today the task, as regards surrealism, is to find that "inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it" (1985: 243). For it is by this means that, in the "Now of recognizability," we might recognize what remains of "tomorrow." And, noting this, I would like to end with Derrida, who scarcely ever mentions surrealism. Writing on recent architecture, he says, "Interruption remains perhaps the opening of the unanticipated and the signature of surprise. There is a future only under this condition" (1992: 30). Thus do echoes of surrealism subsist in some surprising places.

University ofWestminster, London

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. "The Essay as Form" in Notes to Literature, Volume One, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Aragon, Louis. "A Wave of Dreams," trans. Susan de Muth. Papers of Surrealism 1, Winter 2003: www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/journall.htm.

Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, trans. & intro. Michael Richardson. London & New York: Verso, 1994.

- -. "The "Old Mole" and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist" in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999.

- -. "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," trans. David Lachterman, Howard Eiland & Ian Balfour, in Selected Writings, Volume One: 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1996.

--. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992. - -. One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter.

London & New York: Verso, 1985. Bennington, Geoffrey. Interrupting Derrida. London & New York: Routledge, 2000. Berman, Art. Preface to Modernism. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Bernstein, J. M., ed. Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2003. Besnier, Jean-Michel. "Georges Bataille in the 1930s: A Politics of the Impossible." Yale

French Studies 78: On Bataille, 1990. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Howard. Minneapolis: Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press, 1993.




62 David Cunningham

- -. "Reflections on Surrealism" in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

- -. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press, 1986

Bois, Yves-Alain & Krauss, Rosalind. Formless: A User's Guide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

Bowie, Andrew. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd edition. Manches- ter: Manchester University Press, 2003.

Breton, Andr6. Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver & Helen Lane. Ann Ar- bor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.

--. What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont. New York: Monad, 1978.

Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Biirger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity, 2nd edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.

Caygill, Howard. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. London & New York: Routledge, 1998.

Ch6nieux-Gendron, Jacqueline. Surrealism, trans. Vivian Folkenflik. New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1990.

Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolu- tion. Berkeley & Los Angeles: California University Press, 1993.

Critchley, Simon. Very Little...Almost Nothing: Philosophy, Literature, Death. London & New York: Routledge, 1997.

Cunningham, David. "Architecture, Utopia and the Futures of the Avant-Garde." The Journal of Architecture 6.2, Summer, 2001.

- -. "A Question of Tomorrow: Blanchot, Surrealism and the Time of the Fragment." Papers of Surrealism 1, Winter 2003: www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/ journall.htm

Derrida, Jacques. "Faxitexture" in Davidson, Cynthia C., ed., Anywhere. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.

- --. "From Restricted to General Economy" in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

ffrench, Patrick & Lack, Roland-Francois, eds. The Tel Quel Reader. London & New York: Routledge, 1998.

Foster, Hal. Convulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Habermas, Jurgen. "Modernity - an Incomplete Project" in Foster, Hal, ed., The Anti-

Aesthetic. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. Hanssen, Beatrice & Benjamin, Andrew. Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. London &

New York: Continuum, 2002. Hegel, G. W. F. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet. London:

Penguin, 1993. - -. The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Krauss, Rosalind. "The Originality of the Avant-Garde" in The Originality of the Avant-

Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. "The Ethics of Linguistics" in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to

Literature, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2005




- -. "The Subject in Process," trans. Patrick ffrench, in ffrench & Lack, eds., 1998. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe & Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Litera-

ture in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard & Cheryl Lester. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998.

Lenin, V.I. What is to be Done? New York: International Publishers, 1969. Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London:

Merlin, 1971. MacCabe, Colin. Performance. London: BFI, 1998. Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London & New York:

Verso, 1995. ----. Philosophy in Cultural Theory. London & New York: Routledge, 2000. Phelan, Anthony. "Fortgang and Zusammenhang: Walter Benjamin and the Romantic

Novel" in Hanssen & Benjamin, 2002. Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge,

MA: Belknap Press, 1968.

Rabat6, Jean-Michel. (2002a) "Breton's Post-Hegelian Modernism" in Swearingen, James & Cutting-Gray, Joanne (eds), Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death. London & New York: Continuum, 2002.

- -. (2002b), The Future of Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Rancikre, Jacques. "The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Au-

tonomy and Heteronomy." New Left Review 14, March/April, 2002. Richardson, Michael. "Introduction" in Bataille, G., 1994. Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press, 1991. Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Notes 1. An early version of this paper was first delivered at "ARTiculations," the 29th Associa-

tion of Art Historians conference in London, 2003. My thanks to Simon Baker and Neil Cox for the invitation to speak, and to David Lomas, Gavin Parkinson, and Dawn

Adds--all far more expert in the history of surrealism than I-for comments on that

paper. 2. Tel Quel published an influential (and largely critical) special issue on surrealism in

1971, and the following year organized a conference on Bataille and Artaud, the proceedings of which were published in 1973. Despite Sollers's personal debt to Aragon, the writers associated with Tel Quel probably did more than anyone to establish a certain opposition between Bretonian surrealism and a "dissident" reaction identified with Bataille and Artaud (a pairing re-iterated by MacCabe and others). This conjuncture ignores Bataille's own more skeptical assessment of Artaud's work. See Bataille 1994: 42-6.

3. Such modification would be aimed at the extraordinary ongoing influence (in Anglo- American art history in particular) of Peter Biirger's seminal work, and of the specific role it accords to (early) surrealism. While such influence is clearly merited, as a theory of the avant-garde there remains something essentially arbitrary about Biirger's restriction of this term's referent to movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Most prob- lematically, Biirger almost entirely elides the term's own complex history (from the mid-nineteenth century onwards), and, in line with this, its particular temporal implications.

4. The differences between Vera's Hegel and Kojeve's Hegel are of importance here for a number of reasons, not least because Hegel's text that is almost the sole object of




64 David Cunningham

Kojbve's attention- The Phenomenology of Spirit-was the one major text that Vera never in fact translated.

5. One might also note that Bataille's early polemical engagements with Breton also involve an attack on Nietzsche that Bataille later disavowed. See Bataille 1985.

6. The nature of "Hegel's conception of time" involves rather more complexity than this may suggest. On another reading, it is quite possible to argue that its distinctiveness comes from its very negation of the future as future, through speculative determination-in-advance or a kind of eternalization of its own "philosophical" present. Indeed, the latter point is one already made by Feuerbach (and thus not without influence on Marx) in his 1839 essay "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy": "Hegelian philosophy must necessarily result in the immobility of time; for if time still moved sadly along as if nothing had happened, then the Hegelian philosophy would unavoidably forfeit its attribute of absoluteness" (qtd. in Osborne, 1995: 42).

7. As Foster observes, this inflects Breton's readings of surrealism's two modern "mas- ters," Freud and Marx. "Freud is Hegelian in me," writes Breton; although, to pre- empt certain arguments below, one might wonder to what extent this really has to do with Freud's own (partially) acknowledged debt to the Romantic concern with the imagination and the dreamworld, rather than to Hegel himself. (Freud himself largely dismisses the utopianist dimension of Romantic "exploration," just as he later dis- missed surrealism's own "liberatory" impulses with regard to repressed libidinal forces). See Foster, 16.

8. I am aware that here and in what follows I am in danger of running together aspects of German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling) and Romanticism (Schlegel, Novalis), which, in recent times, several scholars have made a concerted effort to differentiate, particularly in relation to their respective conceptions of subjectivity and reflection. See, for example, Bowie, 2003. That said, I'm not so sure that the latter can be so straightforwardly separated from the legacy of utopianism (and the positive desire for unity) bequeathed by the former as Bowie, among others, might seem to claim. Or rather, it seems to me, the question of how far one can project an actual unity beyond the present is the problem continually engaged in Schlegel's fragments, and one that is never resolved.

9. This could be read alongside, for example, Aragon's 1924 assertion: "Freedom, that wonderful word, at last has a meaning: Liberty begins where the marvellous is born" (7).

10. See also Bataille, 1994: 28-9. 11. Benjamin's essay might well be read as a concerted attempt to think surrealism as a

"revolutionary" appropriation of "aestheticization" as opposed to that "reactionary" appropriation mobilized by Fascism. As Benjamin continues, in an imaginary dia- logue in the 1929 surrealism essay: "'To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution'--in other words, poetic politics? 'We have tried that beverage. Any- thing, rather than that!"' (1985: 237).

12. As far as I know, Andrew Benjamin and Beatrice Hanssen are almost unique in having recognized the importance of this connection, in terms of a "dialectic between profane modes of reading and the encounter with the Absolute" that is carried over from Benjamin's 1919 dissertation to the "profane illumination" explored in the surrealism essay (Hanssen & Benjamin, 4).

13. For a more detailed reading of Blanchot's writings on surrealism, see Cunningham, 2003.

14. See also Calinescu, for whom the avant-garde originates in "romantic utopianism with its messianic fervors" (96).

15. Following, for example, Bowie's account, this would tend to associate surrealism with a "Romantic position." Of course, the potential distinction between symbol and

SubStance #107, Vol. 34, no. 2, 2005




allegory here, as a means to conceptualizing the character of the surrealist image, would also suggest links with Benjamin's work, particularly the later "affirmative" accounts of allegory in the readings of Baudelaire.

16. Blanchot's emphasis on the temporality of the "surprising" is also intended to differentiate-however "infinitesimally" -the conception of the infinite implicit in these formulations from the "bad infinity" of "endless striving" with which Hegel himself associates Romanticism, as following Fichte. As such, the legitimacy of Hegel's reading-too often accepted without a proper attention to those texts under attack- depends on the extent to which one believes the Romanticism of Schlegel or, say, Novalis, to have broken with Fichtean Idealism. For an argument that Hegel mis- judges "how far Schlegel had already moved away from his attachment to Fichte by 1796," see Bowie, 246. This would also connect back to Benjamin's elaboration of an infinitude of "connectedness" that he discovers in Schlegel, quite different from Fichte's "empty progress."

17. "Why today-even today-are the best readers of Bataille among those for whom Hegel's self-evidence is so lightly borne? So lightly borne that a murmured allusion to fundamental concepts-the pretext, sometimes, for avoiding the details-or a complacent conventionality, a blindness to the text, an invocation of Bataille's com- plicity with Nietzsche or Marx, suffice to undo the constraint of Hegel. Perhaps the self-evident would be too heavy to bear, and so a shrug of the shoulders is preferred to discipline. And, contrary to Bataille's experience, this puts one, without seeing it or knowing it, within the very self-evidence of Hegel one often thinks oneself unburdened of. Misconstrued, treated lightly, Hegelianism only extends its historical domination" (Derrida 1978: 251).

18. In a 1973 essay, first published in Tel Quel 52-3, Kristeva writes: "Artaud's violent reaction to surrealism...is a reaction against the mentalism and religiosity [in other words, the supposed "Idealism"] that surrealism draws on" (Kristeva 1998: 168).




Cunningham, The Futures of Surrealism Hegelianism, Romanticism, And the Avant-Garde

Documents

Transcript of Cunningham, The Futures of Surrealism Hegelianism, Romanticism, And the Avant-Garde