The currently accepted theory of Surrealism, which was set down in Breton’s manifestos but also dominates the secondary literature, links it with dreams, the unconscious, and perhaps Jungian archetypes, which are said to have found in collages and automatic writing an emancipated image-language uncontaminated by the conscious ego. Dreams, according to this theory, treat the elements of the real the way the method of Surrealism does. If, however, no art is required to understand itself—and one is tempted to consider art’s self-understanding and its success almost incompatible—then it is not necessary to fall in line with this programmatic view, which is repeated by those who expound Surrealism. What is deadly about the interpretation of art, moreover, even philosophically responsible interpretation, is that in the process of conceptualization it is forced to express what is strange and surprising in terms of what is already familiar and thereby to explain away the only thing that would need explanation. To the extent to which works of art insist on explanation, every one of them, even if against its own intentions, perpetrates a piece of betrayal to conformity. Were Surrealism in fact nothing but a collection of literary and graphic illustrations of Jung or even Freud, it would not only duplicate, superfluously, what the theory itself says rather than giving it a metaphorical garb, but it would also be so innocuous that it would hardly leave room for the scandal that is Surrealism’s intention and its lifeblood. Reducing Surrealism to psychological dream theory subjects it to the ignominy of something official. Companion piece to the well-versed “That is a father figure” is the self-satisfied “Yes, we know,” and, as Cocteau well knew, something that is supposed to be a mere dream always leaves reality untouched, whatever damage is done to its image.
But that theory does not do justice to the matter. That is not the way people dream; no one dreams that way. Surrealist constructions are merely analogous to dreams, not more. They suspend the customary logic and the rules of the game of empirical evidence but in doing so respect the individual objects that have been forcibly removed from their context and bring their contents, especially their human contents, closer to the form of the object. There is a shattering and a regrouping, but no dissolution. The dream, to be sure, does the same thing, but in the dream the object world appears in a form incomparably more disguised and is presented as reality less than it is in Surrealism, where art batters its own foundations. The subject, which is at work much more openly and uninhibitedly in Surrealism than in the dream, directs its energy toward its own self-annihilation, something that requires no energy in the dream; but because of that everything becomes more objective, so to speak, than in the dream, where the subject, absent from the start, colors and permeates everything that happens from the wings. In the meantime the Surrealists themselves have discovered that people do not free associate the way they, the Surrealists, write, even in psychoanalysis. Furthermore, even the spontaneity of psychoanalytic associations is by no means spontaneous. Every analyst knows how much trouble and exertion, how much effort of will is required to master the involuntary expression that occurs through these efforts, even in the psychoanalytic situation, to say nothing of the artistic situation of the Surrealists. It is not the unconscious in itself that comes to light in the world-rubble of Surrealism. Assessed in terms of their relationship to the unconscious, the symbols would prove much too rationalistic. This kind of decoding would force the luxuriant multiplicity of Surrealism into a few patterns and reduce it to a few meager categories like the Oedipus complex, without attaining the power that emanated from the idea of Surrealism if not from its works of art; Freud too seems to have responded to Dali this way.
After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force. It is as though they had saved Paris by preparing it for fear: the destruction of the city was their center. To conceptualize Surrealism along these lines, one must go back not to psychology but to Surrealism’s artistic techniques. Unquestionably, they are patterned on the montage. One could easily show that even genuine Surrealist painting works with its motifs and that the discontinuous juxtaposition of images in Surrealist lyric poetry is montage-like. But these images derive, as we know, in part literally and in part in spirit from the late nineteenth-century illustrations that belonged to the world of the parents of Max Ernst’s generation. There were collections in existence as early as the 1920s, outside the sphere of Surrealism, like Alan Bott’s Our Fathers, which partook—parasitically—of Surrealist shock and by doing so dispensed with the strain of alienation through montage as a kindness to the audience. Authentic Surrealist practice, however, replaced those elements with unfamiliar ones. It is precisely the latter which, through fright, gave that material the aspect of something familiar, the quality of “Where have I seen that before?” Hence one may assume that the affinity with psychoanalysis lies not in a symbolism of the unconscious but in the attempt to uncover childhood experiences by means of explosions. What Surrealism adds to illustrations of the world of objects is the element of childhood we lost; when we were children, those illustrated papers, already obsolete even then, must have leaped out at us the way Surrealist images do now. The subjective aspect in this lies in the action of the montage, which attempts—perhaps in vain, but the intention is unmistakable—to produce perceptions as they must have been then. The giant egg from which the monster of the Last Judgment can creep forth at any moment is so big because we were so small the first time we looked at an egg and shuddered.
Obsoleteness contributes to this effect. It seems paradoxical for something modern, already under the spell of the sameness of mass production, to have any history at all. This paradox estranges it, and in the “Children’s Pictures for the Modern Age” it becomes the expression of a subjectivity that has become estranged from itself as well as from the world. The tension in Surrealism that is discharged in shock is the tension between schizophrenia and reification; hence it is specifically not a tension of psychological inspiration. In the face of total reification, which throws it back upon itself and its protest, a subject that has become absolute, that has full control of itself and is free of all consideration of the empirical world, reveals itself to be inanimate, something virtually dead. The dialectical images of Surrealism are images of a dialectic of subjective freedom in a situation of objective unfreedom. In them, European Weltschmerz turns to stone, like the pain of Niobe, who lost her children; in them bourgeois society abandons its hopes of survival. One can hardly assume that any of the Surrealists were familiar with Hegel’s Phenomenology, but a sentence from it, which must be considered in conjunction with the more general thesis that history is progress in the consciousness of freedom, defines the substance of Surrealism: “The sole work and deed of universal freedom therefore is death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling.”1 Surrealism adopted this critique as its own; this explains its anti-anarchistic political impulses, which, however, were incompatible with its substance. It has been said that in Hegel’s thesis the Enlightenment abolishes itself by realizing itself; the cost of comprehending Surrealism is equally high—it must be understood not as a language of immediacy but as witness to abstract freedom’s reversion to the supremacy of objects and thus to mere nature. The montages of Surrealism are the true still lives. In making compositions out of what is out of date, they create nature morte.
These images are not images of something inward; rather, they are fetishes—commodity fetishes—on which something subjective, libido, was once fixated. It is through these fetishes, not through immersion in the self, that the images bring back childhood. Surrealism’s models would be pornography. The things that happen in the collages, the things that are convulsively suspended in them like the tense lines of lasciviousness around a mouth, are like the changes that occur in a pornographic image at the moment when the voyeur achieves gratification. Breasts that have been cut off, mannequin’s legs in silk stockings in the collages—these are mementos of the objects of the partial drives that once aroused the libido. Thinglike and dead, in them what has been forgotten reveals itself to be the true object of love, what love wants to make itself resemble, what we resemble. As a freezing of the moment of awakening, Surrealism is akin to photography. Surrealism’s booty is images, to be sure, but not the invariant, ahistorical images of the unconscious subject to which the conventional view would like to neutralize them; rather, they are historical images in which the subject’s innermost core becomes aware that it is something external, an imitation of something social and historical. “Come on Joe, imitate that old-time music.”*
In this respect, however, Surrealism forms the complement to the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, which came into being at the same time. The Neue Sachlichkeit’s horror of the crime of ornamentation, as Adolf Loos called it, is mobilized by Surrealist shocks. The house has a tumor, its bay window. Surrealism paints this tumor: an excrescence of flesh grows from the house. Childhood images of the modern era are the quintessence of what the Neue Sachlichkeit makes taboo because it reminds it of its own object-like nature and its inability to cope with the fact that its rationality remains irrational. Surrealism gathers up the things the Neue Sachlichkeit denies to human beings; the distortions attest to the violence that prohibition has done to the objects of desire. Through the distortions, Surrealism salvages what is out of date, an album of idiosyncrasies in which the claim to the happiness that human beings find denied them in their own technified world goes up in smoke. But if Surrealism itself now seems obsolete, it is because human beings are now denying themselves the consciousness of denial that was captured in the photographic negative that was Surrealism.