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TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements
7
Introduction SASCHA BRU
9
The Phantom League. The Centennial Debate on the Avant-Garde and Politics
The Politics of Community KIRSTEN STROM
35
“Sometimes I Spit for Pleasure on My Mother's Portrait”. On the Strategic Uses of Inflammatory Rhetoric in Surrealism GUNTHER MARTENS
49
Framing Literary Speech Acts of Political Modernity. Notes on Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus and Expressionism LAURA WINKIEL
65
The Rhetoric of Violence. Avant-Garde Manifestoes and the Myth of Racial Community STEVEN ENGELS
91
Uncanny Polemics and Ambivalent Reappraisals. The French Debate on Surrealism on the Eve of the Cold War
Citizens/Subjects MALYNNE STERNSTEIN
Ecstatic Subjects. Citizenship and Sex in Czech Surrealism
113
HUBERT F. VAN DEN BERG From a New Art to a New Life and a New Man. Avant-Garde Utopianism in dada
133
Parties/Groups GÜNTER BERGHAUS
153
The Futurist Political Party RAYMOND SPITERI
183
Surrealism and the Political. The Case of Nadja
Nations/States THOMAS HUNKELER
203
Cultural Hegemony and Avant-Garde Rivalry. The Ambivalent Reception of Futurism in France, England and Russia RENÉE M. SILVERMAN
217
A Europeanizing Geography. The First Spanish Avant-Garde’s Remapping of Castile (1914-1925) BENEDIKT HJARTARSON
235
Dragging Nordic Horses past the Sludge of Extremes. The Beginnings of the Icelandic Avant-Garde
Illustrations
265
Abstracts
275
Index
285
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Mapping an invention, like the act of inventing itself, does not happen overnight. It takes time to get acquainted with a field of expertise first in order to stumble upon the obvious. In this process a lot of friends and colleagues were involved. The idea for this book first arose in 2003, when at a Modernist Studies Association conference in Birmingham we organised a panel on the role of politics, performativity and performance in the modernist avant-garde. Our gratitude goes out to the people present in the panel's audience for their enthusiastic responses to the idea of a volume coming out of the panel. We would also like to thank Karlheinz (Carlo) Barck, whom we had invited to contribute to the panel, for his relentless support and critical input ever since 2003. In various ways, we owe a debt to many for the larger conceptions of politics discussed here. Special thanks, however, go to Koenraad Geldof. Our debt further goes to Klaus Beekman. His ongoing encouragement and confidence in this book proved vital to us. In the case of the introduction, special thanks go to Tania Ørum, Astradur Eysteinsson and various others present at a conference in Iceland, where a first draft was read and commented upon. We would further like to thank all those who held positions differing from ours. Without them this volume simply would not have been compiled. A note on translations is due. Use was made primarily of existing translations and transliterations. Where these were not available contributors provided their own. We should like to thank them for their efforts in this respect. Last but not least, we wish to extend our gratitude to Eva Pszeniczko and Goedele Nuyttens for helping us out in the final phase. S.B. & G.M.
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The Phantom League. The Centennial Debate on the Avant-Garde and Politics Sascha Bru
In 1906, for the first time in his life, the onrushing Futurist F.T. Marinetti connected the term “avant-garde” to the idea of the future (Lista 2001: 28). Marinetti later often toyed with images of a distant future, but he also located the future firmly in the present. As did many other representatives of the so-called “historical” or “modernist avant-garde”. 1 Experimenting with modes of perception, experience and representation in art, the modernist avant-garde held the promise of an alternative to the here and now. From the start it thereby also sounded political overtones. For as a familiar story runs, it was a society rooted in a new aesthetics, founded on other principles than those of official politics, which the historical avant-garde had in mind. And yet, on the eve of the Second World War, W.H. Auden concluded in Another Time (1940) that this project had made “nothing happen”. 2 For more than three decades, it seems, artists throughout Europe had conjured up designs of other worlds which had remained coterminous to the culture surrounding them without ever coinciding with it. Almost as if they had never been there. In a way, then, the modernist avant-garde is personified by the hero of Aldo Palazzeschi’s Il codice di perela (1911). One of few Futurist novels still read in Italian high schools today, this book describes how a man of smoke enters a city where he is appointed to write the law and save mankind only to get killed at the end of his venture. Palazzeschi’s tragicomic hero, as an allegorical figure, reiterates a conception of the historical avantgardist, which we are all too familiar with. The avant-gardist has indeed frequently been depicted as a somewhat naïve “new legislator”, re-articulating historical identities into alternative visions of
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communal life that attacked full-frontal hegemonic discourses, only to find that his logo- or imagomachist wager made “nothing happen”. Men of smoke or ghosts, their critical endeavour went up in smoke along with them. This book, far from aiming to be exhaustive, is about some traces this phantom league left us. The avant-garde’s politically loaded undertaking has been the subject of critical debate ever since 1906. With a century gone by, this introduction aims to take stock of the debate. What has been said? And what, if anything, is there left to say? Nothing general, at first sight. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the (re)discovery (particularly in the Anglo-American academia) of the avant-gardes in the “Other”, Central Europe, 3 the epithets “historical” or “modernist avant-garde” have come to denote nearly all European avant-garde movements from the first half of the twentieth century, taking up the North of Europe over Spain onto the Italian peninsula, and the West (Britain included) 4 over the centre of Europe into Russia. This considerable geographical span, and the cultural diversity it brings along, leaves little doubt about the synechdochal nature of any statement about the modernist avant-garde. It is a commonplace today that as a whole the modernist avant-garde is “essentially unprogrammatic” (Russel 1985: 25), in the sense that whatever theoretical model we may devise, we will always fall short in uniting all poetics and programmes it put forth in order to ground an alternative society in art. Wholesale claims on the ties between politics and the historical avant-garde, as a result, are most often received with suspicion today. But this is merely where our story ends. In order to determine how this suspicion came about and what kind of rationale underpins it, we need to retrace our steps.
The Work of Politics First, however, it is useful to enquire what kind of avant-garde works have been found eligible for political analysis in the course of the centennial debate. All contributions to this volume zoom in on one or any number of works as media producing political thought and experience. After all, it is from (a selection of) these works that the debate on the avant-garde and politics has always taken its cue. Our business, in brief, remains first and foremost with the avant-garde’s
Introduction
11
works. Overlooking the centennial debate, at least three partially overlapping types of avant-garde works can be discerned when it comes to matters political: 5 primo, works that have been said to gain a political edge through formal experimentation, secundo, works which deal either allegorically or thematically with political issues, and, tertio, works that overtly align themselves with given political programmes. A strict boundary between these three types cannot be upheld of course. At best they differ gradually. A note is due here on the very notion “work” as well. It is generally acknowledged that the avant-garde thoroughly redefined the boundaries of traditional “oeuvres” or “works of art”. Hence, when we say “avant-garde works” we intend not just the works that fall under this traditional category, but all other texts and objects which the avant-garde placed in the public space as well. Most scholars would agree that the avant-garde’s works can be said to be political in form, often regardless of authorial or artistic intentionality. Many Cubists, for instance, found politics as outmoded or alien to their work as the dominant aesthetic of their time. Yet this does not make their work itself apolitical per se. To this day it is difficult to counter Julia Kristeva’s La révolution du language poétique (1974), when it states that the subversion of (aesthetic) form always entails a political critique of some sort, since we speak, think and perceive in socially symbolic forms. Taking conventions in language and other sign systems as decorum for experimentation, the historical avant-garde bended and often violated codified forms, modes and genres, and for that reason it has been labelled political throughout the debate under scrutiny here. Ever so often, however, the avant-garde's aesthetic experimentalism is pitted against a rather vague understanding of “everyday” language, representation or experience. This vagueness leads to questions as to what formal experimentation criticises exactly. What is the “politic” – besides “negation” or “negativity” 6 – in cases where we come across no references to social events whatsoever? And for whom, for what audience did such works bring across a political message? Or, as Terry Eagleton once put it shamelessly: “How [could] a stoutly fashioned Constructivist rocking-chair act as critique?” (Eagleton 1999: 227) Similar questions have been posed with regard to the second type, that is, works which, regardless of the political opinions of their
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makers, discuss matters political either allegorically or thematically. As to works dealing with politics allegorically, we could think of early German Expressionism, for instance, which provides ample illustrations of dystopian works that hint at a crisis in the social fabric through an evocation of apocalyptic cityscapes, angst-ridden subjects, etc. Likewise, the avant-garde counts numerous examples of more positive or utopian allegorical renderings of the public space. Works dealing with politics thematically, for instance by referring to (oppositional or party-ideological) views within the political sphere, are not hard to find either, but only rarely do such works leave us with a clear understanding of how they align themselves with (historical) political opinions. Allusions to the Great War, the mentioning of key political events and personalities, all are legion in the modernist avantgarde, but such thematic inclusions do not mechanically add up to political propaganda. In recent decades, with the introduction of feminism and post-colonialism in avant-garde studies, thematisations of identity, the body and corporeality, too, have been treated as political. Works belonging to this second type as well, however, have raised questions of how exactly to articulate them with politics. This brings us to the third and final type of political art frequently circumscribed in avant-garde studies: works that make no secret about their political goals, by putting their experimental aesthetic at the service of pre-existing ideologies within the political sphere. Whether we read such works “against the grain” or not, it is always difficult to resist a political interpretation of them, especially when they are also linked to such an authorial or artistic intent. Still, if this third type is the only one taken into account as political, as is occasionally done, then in some cases, such as Marcel Duchamp’s, an entire life's work can be deprived of political analysis. As suggested, this threefold typology is idealtypical. The essays collected here each centre on a number of works. Constructing the social imaginaries they hand us down, and paying attention to how the modernist avant-garde performs various kinds of communities – that is, to how it employs (rhetorical, formal, thematic, allegorical and other) tactics that lure us into the (positive and constructive or negative and destructive) world they propose – the contributions to this volume exemplify that our understanding of the avant-garde’s works always depends on the context we inscribe them in. If anything, therefore, this threefold typology pointedly alludes to the most
Introduction
13
fundamental issue raised in the centennial debate: that of “politics” itself. A “basic banality” – as the Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem would have called it – we therefore have to address, is what is meant with “politics”? Not in the least because, as Jonathan Culler observes, we have now reached a stage in cultural criticism where “invocation of ‘the political’” simply involves the “claim that everything is political” (Culler 1988: 64). Few aspects of the modernist avant-garde have indeed not been termed political. And this with good reason, it appears. For as Mary Ann Frese Witt recently reminded us, the culture in which the modernist avant-garde was immersed was characterised by the “conflation of the literary, the religious, the theatrical, and the political” (Witt 2001: 8). Intellectual debate between 1906 and 1940 indeed often exemplifies the difficulty experienced in marking the boundaries between art and politics. This calls for critical distance, however, because as Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy would contend, there is a danger here of adopting “the ‘everything is political’ which near enough universally dominates today [and causes] the political [to become] unapparent (it has the obviousness of an ‘it goes without saying’) […]. Thus understood nowhere do even the least of specifically political questions (corresponding to transformations of the world) have the chance to emerge” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997: 126-127). Hence, at least some degree of terminological clarity is called for.
The Avant-Garde Police and its Discontents Not all avant-garde scholars have taken an interest in the avantgarde’s imbrications with politics. Some have made it their business in fact to point out that politics had little to do with the historical avantgarde’s aesthetic project, 7 traces of which can be found as far back as Romanticism. 8 When the avant-garde did glimpse at politics, so many claim, it is historical contingency that should be highlighted above all. It was all little more than a random side-effect of history – as if there were other effects. To be sure, if concrete or tangible interventions in the political sphere that led to changes in the public space are taken as a criterion, then the avant-garde did indeed prove anything but political. Whether we turn to the avant-garde’s efforts to bridge the gap with left-wing institutions, or to artists overtly aligning
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themselves with right-wing ideologies, it is the ineffectual nature of the avant-garde that appears to stand out time and again. And in the few cases where the avant-garde did manage to actualise its project of an alternative community rooted in aesthetics, such as the Futurist “colony” in Fiume between December 1919 and December 1920, 9 it did so under very specific circumstances that shielded it off from political issues elsewhere. The concept of politics at work here is that of practical politics, that is, politics as a legalistic and rationalistic affair, managing social facts so as to write up laws to the benefit of the common good. That politics may very well be as much about “spectacle” and discursive constructions covering up social facts, we will address further on. First, however, let us look into the ties between the modernist avantgarde and practical politics. For clearly there is more to say about these ties than that the modernist avant-garde consisted of inefficient politicians. As several inquiries have shown, for example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century there are still clear indications of radical political groups and experimental artists joining forces, both labelling themselves “avant-gardes” (Egbert 1968, Calinescu 1977). In the course of the nineteenth century these “two avant-gardes” drifted apart to become occasional and generally unsuccessful allies, however. It would thus appear that within the early twentieth-century realms of art and politics, different objects were produced: politics, to the benefit of the common good and informed by social facts and rational argument, produced laws in an attempt to regulate public and private affairs, and art produced, well yes, art. Politics is the art of the possible, art that of the impossible. As if siding with the Dadaist Hugo Ball, for whom politics and art were two separated matters, numerous critics have drawn on the here intended sociological notion of the “functional differentiation of labour” in order to discuss the avant-garde’s political ramifications. As is well known, first generation Critical Theorists and their sympathisers, such as Theodor W. Adorno or Walter Benjamin, already showed an awareness of that notion when they turned to the avant-garde. Much impressed by Georg Lukács’ remarks on Max Weber in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1922), they read the avant-garde against the backdrop of an ideologically (which to them meant: seemingly) disintegrating and fragmenting public space. Herbert Marcuse (1969), by advocating a marriage between
Introduction
15
Surrealism and Marxism in order to overcome social fragmentation and alienation, Peter Bürger (1974), by pointing to the bourgeois insulation of art as an “institution”, and Jürgen Habermas (1981), by suggesting that art, on the level of the public space’s practical or “systemic” organisation, had gained an irreversible, relative autonomy: all have, albeit in different ways, drawn attention to the fact that the avant-garde clearly operated within the specialised realm of art, driven by an immanent logic or language game and a series of practices of its own. Sitting on the fence between the nineteenth and twentieth century in Les règles de l'art (1992), Pierre Bourdieu, too, occasionally glimpsed at the avant-garde. Bringing out how throughout the nineteenth century the middle class managed to reproduce and keep its cultural or symbolic dominance over society, he depicted the avant-garde’s aesthetic experimentation and (political) engagement as an artistic posture adopted by writers with a bourgeois background. Out to position and distinguish themselves in an aesthetic “field” governed by a logic largely alien to other social fields in the public space, their revolutionary political claims signalled a witty yet snobbish means to discard mainstream values in art, underscoring the cumulative thirst for distinction in modern art and literature at large. Circumscribing the sphere of art – or as the scholars mentioned have called it: the artistic “field”, “institution”, or “system” – has allowed for a better understanding of the modernist avant-gardists as producers of cultural goods. Above all, it has made us aware of the fact that the avant-garde’s artistic production, in mediated and at times overdetermined ways, translated or filtered social events and material shifts elsewhere in the public space, where it found itself boxed in by various state apparatuses. Through these apparatuses, politics permeated art by taking practical decisions concerning state patronage, museum policy and aesthetic education. This illustrates how thoroughly politicised the avant-garde was, even in instances where it was explicitly or intentionally apolitical – a point Foucauldian, Gramscian and scholars of other casts still correctly make to this day. Marking the boundaries of the sphere of art has also made us more sensitive to the fact that the differences between canonised “modernists” and avant-gardists “proper” are often not so much to be sought on the level of texts or works (in the traditional sense), but more so on the level of their respective institutional selfpromotion. It has, moreover, made us appreciate how the avant-garde
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itself often reinforced its autonomy, for instance through its response to mass culture, which quantitatively multiplied and considerably diversified the production of cultural goods. This challenged the modernist avant-garde to mark a place of its own in the public space and to launch tactics and outlets within its financial reach (such as performances and specialised magazines) that made it visible. From all this, it has been induced that the avant-garde, in spite of its frequent anti-intellectualist self-portrayal and oft ambiguous championing of popular culture, formed part of a new class of intellectual labourers that gained body from the late nineteenth century onward. 10 As artists from time to time engaging in political debate, they produced ways to perceive and discuss social and other issues, yet without much practical political leverage. Needless to say, if we venture a reading of the avant-garde’s works from the political sphere, that is, if we focus on how political officials responded to it, we arrive at the same conclusion. Here, however, we also come to recognise how practical politics never proves “acultural” (Taylor 2001), that is, it clearly partook in the symbolic or cultural flow of ideas, feelings and moral values circulating in the public space over and across socially sedimented spheres. Still, official political rejection was nearly always what the modernist avant-garde met with here as well. Under attack was more often than not a conception of the modernist avant-garde as a band of insurgents bringing down beauty and the ethical as well as communicative value of art, in brief, the very rules of the language game marking the borders of the artistic sphere in Modern Times. It made little difference, it seems, that on closer inspection the avantgarde had anything but the destruction of art in mind, even in the “negative” or “negating” instance of Dadaism, as Hubert van den Berg illustrates here. For as Benedikt Hjartarson brings out in his essay on the little known Icelandic avant-garde, both left- and right-wing political officials who turned against the avant-garde were not so much talking about the avant-garde’s works per se. It would appear that the avant-garde’s attempts to make itself visible in the public space triggered either popular condemnation (at best: fascination), or the projection of the culturally dominant but oft latent fear of the rapid technological and industrial changes that marked its age – a fear which has, notably, been highlighted in the avant-garde as well, even in the Futurist champions of “machinism”. 11 Political officials thus
Introduction
17
primarily defied the idea of an art tearing down the accomplishments of national and (or) Western civilisation or culture, it seems – a concern which in turn was shared (albeit in dubio) by the avant-garde too, as Thomas Hunkeler and Laura Winkiel show here. Curiously, then, and much against the original impetus in Critical Theory, the practical political take on the avant-garde’s political ramifications ends in consensus with those wishing to depoliticise it. For the practical political approach mainly illustrates how the avantgarde was not political but politicised (if not policed), that is, it was complicit in official politics and hegemonic culture. Evidently, this leaves us the task of charting, in a doxographic fashion, the truly diverse and complex political opinions which the avant-garde took over from ideologies and discourses already in circulation within the political sphere. This is an important exercise as Günter Berghaus’ contribution on the Italian Futurist Political Party shows here. 12 Yet with few exceptions (as in the case of the Italian Futurists), this endeavour, too, primarily shows us how the avant-garde was not political, to the extent that it reduces the avant-garde to a “dupe”, a mirror held up to practical politics. In sum, locating the avant-garde within sedimented social practices and spheres allows for valuable insights into how the avant-garde was a “seismograph” of its time. But it goes without saying that this is only part of the story. For we know that most avant-gardists were aware of their situatedness in the public space and contemporary culture, and that their works frequently thematised this. Hence, if looking at the politicisation of the avantgarde is one way of entering the centennial debate, looking at how it criticised the “police” is another. It is not our aim here to provide an exhaustive catalogue of the ways in which the avant-garde has been said to be critical. A browse through this book should suffice to illustrate that the possibilities are manifold. As I have shown elsewhere in a historical survey of the centennial debate, discussion about the possibilities of critique is always informed as much by the historical context of the modernist avant-garde itself as by the historical and theoretical situatedness of its onlooker. 13 In broad terms, however, there is an agreement that, despite its marginalisation in political debate and culture, the avantgarde was not just constituted by official politics but also constitutive of it. For one thing, its works, intentionally or work-immanently, defined “the centre” of practical politics contingently. As an array of
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political philosophers in recent decades has argued, it is precisely in this moment that politics proper may reside. Jacques Rancière, for example, has it that politics should be understood neither as the exercise of governmental authority nor as the organisation of political power, but rather, in a narrower sense, as that moment upon which those who have no right to speak come together (Rancière 1995). It is indeed upon such moments that the rather ineffective nature of politics as a mere rational or legalistic affair comes to the fore. Here, political decision-making shows its inherently imperfect nature, if not impossibility. For political decisions always entail the exclusion of some group, and because of that the “common good” at work in the political sphere cannot be considered as a social given, but as a discursive construct, as an imaginary often covering up social facts. Evidently, the battery of strategies of representation and other enjeux at work in this process can also be encountered in the avant-garde, whose heightened awareness and knowledge of the media and technologies it used, remain instructive for a critical understanding of the politics of its time. The question remains, of course, whether the already mentioned cultural and regional differences informing such an understanding still allow for a certain reorientation of the centennial debate, for another, productive approach to the modernist avant-garde to emerge.
Two Moments One The centennial debate on the avant-garde and politics has ebbed and flowed, but its peaks can unequivocally be located in the 1930s and the decades following the mid-1970s. The encroachment of totalitarian states over the West and the East of Europe during the 1930s (the 1920s in Italy and Russia), has cast a vast shadow over the debate. Since the 1930s, the “aesthetics” of fascism have been related to the avant-garde unremittingly, and for obvious reasons. While Nazi propagandists lumped experimental art, regardless of its producers’ political orientation, together as “Kulturbolschewismus” in 1933, the Bolsheviks in Russia denounced about the same experimental art a year later. Whether we turn to Adorno’s aesthetic theory or Benjamin’s analysis of Ernst Jünger from 1930 and his classical “Kunstwerk” essay of 1935, it is clear that the “aestheticisation of politics” dominated fascism, to the point where the common good was
Introduction
19
simply discarded. Adorno’s advocacy of negation and hibernation, Benjamin’s plea for a more positive or articulate “politicisation of aesthetics”, these provided forceful strategies with which in their mind the avant-garde’s works and texts opposed the rise of fascism. Fascism, in an extreme manner, made it apparent that a legalistic or rationalist approach to politics was much less in tune with social facts than it had made out to be. As Benjamin observed, it unambiguously championed the imperfection entailed by political decision-making and representation by cutting the sphere of politics loose from real experiences and social issues, indulging itself instead in phantasmagorical spectacle. As the Surrealists in turn observed, the same had to be argued for the political climate in Russia as well. To this day the modernist avant-garde is often read through the lens of Europe’s totalitarian past. It would lead us too far to go into this fruitful branch of the centennial debate in depth, which brings into play the fictional and narrative, the sensual and experiential, and the ethical as well as rhetorical devices employed in politics. Of importance is to point out that the events of the 1930s by and large postdate the “heroic” hey-days of the modernist avant-garde in most parts of Europe. This does not preclude a study of convergences and divergences between the historical avant-garde and proto-fascism. Yet we are to keep in mind, as Raymond Williams observed, that the thorough politicisation and left- and right-wing polarisation of the entire modernist avant-garde coincided with the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe (Williams 1988). 14 That the avant-garde continued to thrive in the 1930s in France, for example, only seconds this point. Hence, we are to avoid the teleological “streaming” of European political history by limiting our scope to the interstices between totalitarian politics and the avant-garde – whether we hint at prefigurations of fascism in the avant-garde, or, the other way round even, at “fascism as a parody of the avant-garde” (Ferrall 2001). In fact, the main issue at stake may not so much be the interconnections between the avant-garde and totalitarian politics, as its ties to the spectacular crises in democracy throughout Europe before the 1930s. That democracy has been somewhat neglected as decorum of the historical avant-garde, is not only caused by the events of the 1930s, it would seem, but also by the fact that many avant-gardists displayed an anathema to modern representational democracy, which they saw as a ventriloquist of ideas and opinions launched by economically
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powerful groups and classes, incapable of endorsing truly revolutionary changes. This anathema, it appears, continues to colour an inquiry into the avant-garde’s place within democracy to this day. It somehow intuits and attaches negative connotations to the very notion “democracy” (or, the other way round, leads to uncritical optimism). 15 However, if it is “the centre” which the avant-garde helped define, then clearly that centre was situated in democracy. A more neutral approach to democracy may thus be warranted. Since the 1970s the debate on the avant-garde and politics has regained momentum. Naturally, the renewed interest related not just to Peter Bürger’s canonical theory, which led to the ubiquity of the term “historical avant-garde”, but also to discussions on postmodernism and postmodernity. With the postmodern condition, characterised by Jean-François Lyotard (1988: 130-1) as a fracturing of social discourses in an archipelago of language games, the immanent eclipse of master-narratives seemed near. Much like prior crises in modern representational democracy, this led to questions of how to address “true” social issues, and of how to legitimate authority in politics. Lyotard saw an important role for the avant-garde here. The true, ante-modern avant-garde, he argued, was a form of (“pagan”) experimentation wherein oppositions and conflicts in philosophical and political debate are played out rather than brought to closure in figures, tropes or discourse. He thus read in the avant-garde an endless play of “différance” that pushed social oppositions into the Kantian sublime, hinting at a conceivable yet unrepresentable alternative to concrete political debate (Lyotard 1984). At the same time, a renewed interest in self-conscious avant-garde constellations pre-dating the modernist avant-garde, such as the Jena Romantics as discussed in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s L’Absolu littéraire (1978), reinvigorated the view that alongside the “differantial” moment in the avant-garde at large, a far more thetic and metaphysical project geared at closure and synthesis had always existed. 16 In itself, highlighting the “positive” (constructive) and “negative” (destructive) moments in the avant-garde, as they have often been called, was arguably new. A notable shift in these inquiries, however, was that they no longer restricted their scope to Europe’s totalitarian politics, but now held the avant-garde against the backdrop of (totalitarian aspects of) democratic politics as well, letting in not only radical ideologies, but general problems in modern representational politics too.
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21
Avant-garde studies owe it to Renato Poggioli, of course, to have handed us down the insight that as a cultural phenomenon emerging with Romanticism, the avant-garde requires democracy as one of its conditions of possibility. A year before avant-garde studies saw the English translation of Poggioli’s now classical The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968), which focussed on the avant-garde as this broad cultural phenomenon, Poggioli stated that “the identification of artistic revolution with social revolution [had become] no more than purely rhetorical, an empty commonplace”. (Poggioli 1967: 182) In Poggioli’s view, 17 the political “failure” of the modernist avant-garde was caused by its dependence on the capitalist bourgeoisie and that class’ supporting political system: democracy. In terms reminiscent of the young Roland Barthes, who in the 1950s had already claimed that the modernist avant-garde failed to destroy bourgeois art because it was a bourgeois enterprise (Barthes 1993[1956]), Poggioli stressed that democracy is a conditio sine qua non for the avant-garde to “flower […], even if it often assumes an hostile pose toward […] democratic society” (Poggioli 1968: 95). Somewhat hastily, however, he thereby implied that no matter what alternative to concrete democratic or bourgeois politics the avant-garde had in mind, its eclipse under totalitarianism had shown that it was pre-destined to fail. Such wholesale and awkwardly tautological conclusions seem rather rash today, not just because they involve the claim that with the totalitarian and the democratic state the options have run out. They also create the historically erroneous impression that the avant-garde found no audience in the working class, 18 or that the latter was no more than a mouthpiece of the bourgeoisie, bereft of all agency. Still, as one of the first avant-garde scholars, Poggioli correctly showed how the avant-garde was democratically politicised above all. In a simple and yet powerful formula, Poggioli held that before political modernity – as a period generally said to begin with the French Revolution and the rise of modern representational democracy (Wagner 2001: 6ff) – there was no avant-garde. What he failed to take into account, however, was the potential and possibly specific role of the historical avant-garde in democracy.
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The Phantom Avant-Garde During the 1920s in the U.S., the (then) journalist Walter Lippmann noted that in democracy, questions of correct information about oft highly technical matters as well as issues of representation did not quite bother the public as long as problems were taken care of. “Government consists of a body of officials, some elected, some appointed, who handle professionally, and in the first instance, problems which come to public opinion spasmodically and on appeal. Where the parties directly responsible do not work out an adjustment, public officials intervene” (Lippmann, 2002 [1927]: 63). At the dawn of the twentieth century, Lippmann recognised, society simply had become too complex for every decision in politics to interest the public, let alone for each decision to be comprehended by the public. Putting forward his by now classic depiction of the body politic as the phantom public, Lippmann further observed that “in the hardest controversies […] the public is called in to judge. Where the facts are most obscure, where precedents are lacking, where novelty and confusion pervade everything, the public in all its unfitness is compelled to make its most important decisions. The hardest problems are problems which institutions cannot handle. They are the public’s problems” (Lippmann 2002 [1927]: 121). In brief, in (early) twentieth-century democracy, the public comes into being as a political entity only in response to very specific issues which practical politics, by itself, cannot cope with. From this perspective it thus does not suffice simply to mark the borders of the socially sedimented (and seemingly natural or naturalised) spheres of politics and art. In Lippmann’s reasoning, the public only becomes political when practical politics fail. Lippmann’s pragmatic stance obliges us to relate the avant-garde to very specific political issues that could not be dealt with in practical politics, and, conspicuously, thereby also circumvents the “everything is political” reproach. Importantly, Lippmann further stressed that the public is not a prefigured social community, but a phantom or ghost. It organises itself as a community, articulating itself across the borders of various spheres in the public space. Hence, when read through the lens of Lippmann’s observations, the avant-garde’s works and practices come to the fore as traces produced or performed alongside official politics, traces which we are to reassess with the aim of describing how they
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collectively articulated themselves to politics and other spheres in the public space. It is precisely this challenge which the contributions to the present volume take up. That in doing so it fails to arrive at general claims about the modernist avant-garde as a whole should not come as a surprise. The contributions to this volume share a general orientation, though, however dispersed its approaches may appear: to take the “phantom league” seriously as a political voice in its own right. To this aim, this book is cut up in a number of sections, each devoted to how the modernist avant-garde relates to certain facets of democratic politics between circa 1906 and 1940. Even the most basic practices in modern representational democracy always involve an “aesthetic” moment, which politicians are in a bad place to judge. Politics take place in parliamentary and governmental buildings, for example, whose very construction poses no other than aesthetic questions. How do we fit the “representatives of the people” in one building? Should they face one another or sit in circles? Should its building materials be transparent, translucent, etc.? These are questions left aside here, though. It is to the fashioning of “citizens”, “parties” and “nations/states” in particular that the contributions turn instead. As Etienne Balibar observes, modern politics in general is constituted by and constitutive of the “citizen subject”. “The citizen”, he writes, “can be simultaneously considered as the constitutive element of the State and the actor of a revolution. Not only the actor of a founding revolution, a tabula rasa whence a state emerges, but the actor of a permanent revolution” (Balibar 1991: 54). This ambivalence characterises much of identity and subjectivity politics furthered by the modernist avant-garde. On the one hand, nearly all avant-gardists, politically engaged or not, constantly were reminded or appealed to as “citizens-bourgeois”, both within the artistic sphere and in other social realms. Members of a state apparatus, which imposed upon them a juridical citizenship, however, they also devised modest as well as radical ways to reconsider identity and subjectivity, both of which have been the focus of numerous studies. The avant-garde's opposition to the “bourgeois” or “philister”, for example, has been recognised from the start. But how did the ideal “citizen” look like for a certain avant-gardist when read against the backdrop of historical democratic politics? What issues concerning citizenship could simply
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not be addressed by practical politics? Relating the work of the Czech Surrealist Toyen to the legalistic discourse of Czech politics, Malynne Sternstein brings out the relatively progressive gender-politics operative at the time. Rather than repeating a gender-oriented interpretation of Toyen’s work, Sternstein locates in her work what she sees as the core of Toyen’s political project: the invention of a genderless citizen. Likewise, Hubert van den Berg turns to a close reading of Zurich Dadaists, uncovering, as he has argued elsewhere (Berg 2005), that their work should not be viewed as an aesthetic variant of anarchist discourse, but as the run-up to a “New Man”, whose utopian politics have been subject to an astonishing misreading, if not to a re-invention, caused by political events after 1940. The historical avant-garde’s ties to political parties have been the subject of numerous volumes, as has its bohemian or subcultural group formation. Surrealism, here scrutinised by Raymond Spiteri, is perhaps the case in point. Whereas its group “structure” has often been compared to a party with a strong leadership, its connection to the French Communist Party (PCF) has nearly always been treated in a doxographic fashion, in an inquiry guided by questions about what elements and ideas the Surrealists took over from the PCF’s discourse. Spiteri turns this logic on its head, and reads André Breton’s Nadja (1928) as a positive response to the troubled liaison with the PCF. Drawing on Claude Lefort, Spiteri shows that Breton eventually ends up questioning “the political”, that is, the founding moment of modern representational democracy, which the PCF, as a “democratic” political party, was unable to bring out. Günter Berghaus, in turn, provides a well documented account of one of the most idiosyncratic episodes in the historical avant-garde: the erection of the first and (to our knowledge) only political party ever to be launched from the sphere of art by an artistic group, the Italian Futurist Political Party. The point to be made is perhaps not that this party failed to weigh on political debate in any lasting way, rather, that its political programme raised possibilities which were almost unthinkable within its historical and democratic constellation. In the section “Nations/States” Thomas Hunkeler focuses on how Italian Futurism was received in France, England and Russia, illustrating how a degree of nationalism operative in the political sphere gave rise to the articulation of an array of “futurisms” in these respective countries, which could in turn be examined as positive
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responses to local politics. If nations, as cultural constructions, can be regarded as social imaginaries in their own right, then their political counterpart, the state, also requires scrutiny. Renée Silverman, therefore, sheds light on how the Spanish avant-garde sought to redefine visual modes of nation and state-representation. Unlike the Surrealists in France, with their infamous “mappemonde” (in the Surrealism special of the Belgian journal Variétés), the Spanish aesthetic community takes off from a “Europeanised geography” that blurs perceived borders. Benedikt Hjartarson, finally, discusses the political fate of the Icelandic avant-garde. Bringing out how in quantitative terms such an avant-garde was (almost) inexistent, Hjartarson goes on to show how the idea of an aesthetic avant-garde was, rather curiously, a major enjeux in national(ist) political debate during the 1920s and 1930s. Or how, paradoxically, the avant-garde proved significant in the margins defining Europe, where (in this case) it (almost) did not exist. If the essays collected in this anthology thus depart from rather tested categories in the centennial debate (citizens, parties, nations), their close reading, in combination with a well-informed view of historical politics, lead to often surprising results. This is why we begin this book with a section on the “Politics of Community” at work in the historical avant-garde. Pivotal here is how the modernist avantgarde instituted a community through its works. What kind of (language) technologies did it use to further itself as a group and its alternative (or challenge) to modern democratic politics? Analysing the inflammatory rhetoric of Surrealism, Kirsten Strom proposes that we approach the avant-garde as partaking in a “political culture” wherein, as a group parodying political language to the extreme, it exposed the boundaries of the democratic political language game. Gunther Martens illustrates why rhetorical and narratological devices deserve our proper attention. He notes several connections between Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus and the Expressionists, and illustrates the startling answers the former two provided to the crises of democracy they had witnessed. Martens accentuates that it is essential not to delimit our attention to the way the avant-gardists “proper” often physically performed their texts and modernists “proper” opted for a more contemplative or private positioning in the public space. It is to the (rhetorical) performativity or production of alternatives that we should turn our attention as well, for in the end it is on this level that
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the modernist avant-garde still literally speaks to us today. Taking up Martens’ advice, Laura Winkiel subsequently scrutinises the genre of the manifesto, which this volume could of course not neglect. Retracing the genre’s depiction of race in political modernity, she brings out how the avant-garde, not shunning rhetorical violence, used the genre to forward several types of imaginary communities. The closing essay of this section, finally, brings us back to the centennial debate. Here, Steven Engels goes into the reception of the Surrealist community, just before the Cold War in France. Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Mauriac and Maurice Blanchot, each found it necessary to point out the shortcomings of the historical avant-garde in political terms, it seems. In doing so, they voiced a melancholic outlook on the historical avant-garde, which was to become somewhat of a commonplace after World War II, namely that the historical avantgarde was the final episode in modern cultural history to carry within itself the potential of changing life through art. This popular conception, no doubt, will guarantee the continuation of the centennial debate for some time to come. It could indeed appear as if the phantom league was never there, but its works still are. And that much of the problems it faced in politics might have a strangely familiar ring today only emphasises the need of keeping the centennial debate going. NOTES 1
On the “presentism” or co-temporaneity of the modernist avant-garde, consult Klinger and Müller-Funk (2004: 10-11), Ziarek (2001), and Osborne (1995). 2 1906 and 1940: the dates mentioned in this volume’s title were informed by contingent historical events, and do not claim to delimit a structure or a well-defined period of any sort. 3 See in this respect Benson (2002). 4 Peppis (2000: 1), for instance, begins his discussion of the British avant-garde between 1901 and 1918 under the heading “Nations, empires, and the historical avantgarde”. Strong (1997: 2), in turn, brings the work and groups around Auden, André Breton and even Jorge Luis Borges together under the umbrella term “historical avant-garde”. On the continent, similarly, it appears that the term “modernist avantgarde” is increasingly used interchangeably with “historical avant-garde”, mainly because strict boundaries between the avant-garde and “high” modernists always require qualification. On this issue, consult Nicholls (1995), and Eysteinsson (1990: 143ff). Qualification should not entail plain equation of the terms “avant-garde” and “modernism”, however. As Gunther Martens shows here, it requires above all a
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clearly stated and candid reflection on behalf of the onlooker about the specific aspects of artistic production that are of interest to him or her. 5 The here proposed typology loosely follows the general remarks on the interfaces between politics and art in Wolff (1983: 62-67). The typology has the advantage of moving beyond the rather narrow opposition between either intentionally or explicitly political art on the one hand, and an apolitical art on the other (as, for instance, in Gray 1971 or McCarthy 2002). It also avoids equating aesthetic revolution with progressive and established aesthetics with conservative political value (as in Benjamin 1973: 86). As to the latter: we do not claim of course that art functions within a moral void. Quite the reverse, but its morality is not pre-given. As the complex interrelation between Joseph Goebbels and the German avant-garde illustrates, for instance, we are always to avoid generalisations. Before 1934, Goebbels provided public and private support to various avant-garde initiatives (Barron 1991). Progressive aesthetics and poetics can thus always be coded in morally improper terms. 6 On the necessity of distinguishing these two notions, see Menke (2001). 7 Zima and Strutz, for instance, claim that the “morally neutral” aesthetic innovations of the avant-garde ultimately warrant the question “whether the social, the revolutionary engagement of the avant-garde was not a coincidence [Zufallserscheinung] of the twenties and thirties” (Zima and Strutz, 1987: 14). 8 It is a commonplace, indeed, that as a broad cultural phenomenon the notion of an aesthetic vanguard gains moment for the first time after the French Revolution. 9 Consult Ledeen (1977) for more information about the Futurists in Fiume. 10 For an analysis of the French avant-garde in this respect, see Datta (1999). A more general approach in this sense is put forward in Frow (1996). 11 See, amongst others, Blum (1996) and Foster (2004). 12 Scholars taking to the increasingly accessible (private) archives of writers and artists perform an important task in qualifying stubborn idées reçues. It is important to stress, for example, that before the 1930s not all avant-garde writers and artists who engaged in aesthetic experimentation took an interest in day-to-day politics. It so happens that many did not even regard themselves as avant-gardists (as, for example, Arp and Lissitzky 1925). Other avant-garde writers and artists before, during and after the Great War, saw the political role of the aesthetic as paramount, and quite frequently labelled themselves avant-gardists because of the perceived double-bind of aesthetics and politics. Still others displayed little interest in a politically engaged art, however. Duchamp seems apposite here. Thus, from the outset, and as far as authorial or artistic intention went, the historical avant-garde united both political and apolitical art. Furthermore, it is a truism that those politically engaged by no means adhered to the same cause. Clear-cut left- and right-wing taxonomies are to be avoided in this respect, because especially before the Great War and during the interbellum the crossfertilisations between divergent political orientations must be reckoned with. As is now widely recognised, avant-gardists opting for “protofascist”, “conservative” or “reactionary” political trajectories, such as elitism, racism or aggression, regularly displayed affinities with more “progressive” and “revolutionary” political tendencies as well. (On the liberal affinities of totalitarian leaders, consult Arendt 1951.) The other way round, the same applies. In addition, critical attention has tended to go mainly to the way in which radical politics permeated the historical avant-garde. Yet
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avant-garde artists and writers leaning towards the centre of the political arena were no exception. Thus, the modernist avant-garde cannot be termed politically radical or partisan as a whole, as far as practical politics go. 13 See the paper “Unlocking the Library. The Centennial Debate on the Avant-Garde and Politics” (presented at the conference “Avant-Garde: Emergence, History, Actuality”, University of Reykjavik, September 2005, and to appear in the journal Ritiÿ in 2006). 14 Compare Perloff’s succinct remark that we “often forget how short-lived the avantgarde phase” in the early twentieth century really was in most parts of Europe as well as in the U.S. (Perloff 2002: 3). 15 It has often been pointed out, for instance, that the historical avant-garde’s aesthetic endeavour inscribed within itself an attempt to democratise artistic production – almost as often, however, as the avant-garde has been blamed for its elitism and aloofness. 16 In recent years, this “positive” moment has especially been laid bare in German (Idealist) art. For a well-documented and subtle account that also scrutinises the modernist avant-garde, see Chytry (1989). Chytry galvanises the desire in modernity to return to the Greek (Hellenic) polis, that is, to a pre-representational democracy wherein art mirrored the grandeur of the polis. As his discussion of Walter Spies shows, this desire can also clearly be located in the modernist avant-garde. 17 Poggioli’s “sociology” was based on the views of Vilfredo Pareto, as he indicated himself a few years before the publication of his theory (Poggioli 1965, 291ff). It would be interesting to learn from future research how exactly Pareto’s views informed his analyses of the avant-garde’s politics. 18 Italian Futurism in particular found great support in the working class, as Antonio Gramsci observed in his infamous letter to Leon Trotsky.
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WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. Arp, Hans and El Lissitzky (eds.). 1925. Die Kunstismen, Les Ismes de l’art. The Isms of Art. Ehrlenbach/Munchen/Leipzig: Eugen Rentch Verlag. Auden, Wystan H. 1940. Another Time. London: Faber and Faber. Balibar, Etienne. 1991. “Citizen Subject” in Cadava et al. (1991): 33-57. Barron, Stéphanie. 1991. “1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany” in “Degenerate Art” : The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. New York: Harry N. Abrams and Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 9-31. Barthes, Roland. 1993 [1956]. “A l'avant-garde de quel théâtre?” in Œuvres complètes, Tome I. Paris : Seuil : 1224-1226. Benjamin, Walter. 1973. Understanding Brecht. London: New Left Books. Benson, Timothy O. 2002. Central European Avant-Gardes. Exchanges and Transformations, 1910-1930. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Berg, Hubert van den. 2005. “Anarchism and the Salvation of ‘the Last, Most Sacred Domain in Poetry’ in Hugo Ball’s Dadaist Poetics” in Bru et al. (2005): 1332. Blum, Cinzia Sartini. 1996. The Other Modernism. F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Les règles de l'art. Paris: Seuil. Bru, Sascha et al. 2005. The Historical Avant-Garde: Poetics and Politics (ALWCahier 25). Leuven: Peeters. Bürger, Peter. 1974. Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Cadava, Eduarda, et al. 1991. Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge. Calinescu, Matei. 1977. Faces of Modernity: Avant-garde, decadence, kitsch. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press Chytry, Joseph. 1989. The Aesthetic State. A Quest in Modern German Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1988. Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions. Oxford: Blackwell. Datta, Venita. 1999. Birth of a National Icon. The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Egbert, Donald D. 1970. Social Radicalism and the Arts, Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Eysteinsson, Astradur. 1990. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ferrall, Charles. 2001. Modernist Writing & Reactionary Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, Hal. 2004. Prosthetic Gods. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Frow, John. 1996. Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. London: Clarendon Press. Gray, Camilla. 1971. The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922. London: Thames and Hudson. Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. "Die Moderne - Ein unvollendetes Projekt" in Kleine politische Schriften I-IV. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp: 444-446.
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Klinger, Cornelia and Wolfgang Müller-Funk (eds.). 2004. Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarden. München: Wilhelm Fink. Kristeva, Julia. 1974. La révolution du language poétique. L'avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Seuil. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1997. Retreating The Political. (Simon Sparks, ed.) London: Routledge. ---. L’Absolu littéraire. Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand. Paris : Seuil. Ledeen, M. 1977. The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lippmann, Walter. 1997 [1922]. Public Opinion. New York : Simon and Schuster. ---. 2002 [1927]. The Phantom Public. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Lista, Giovanni. 2001. Futurism. (Susan Wise, tr.) Paris: Editions P. Terrail. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde" (Lisa Liebmann, tr.) Artforum, 22(8): 36-43. ---. The Differend - Phrases in Dispute (Georges Van Den Abbeele, tr.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. McCarthy, Patrick. 2002. Language, Politics and Writing. Stolentelling in Western Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Menke, Christoph. 1991. Die Souveränität der Kunst. Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Nicholls, Peter. 1995. Modernisms. A Literary Guide. Berkeley: University of California Press. Osborne, Peter. 1995. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London: Verso. Palazzeschi, Aldo. 1972 [1911]. Il codice di perela. Milan: Mondadori. Peppis, Paul. 2000. Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde. Nation and Empire, 1901-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perloff, Marjorie. 2002. 21st-Century Modernism. The “New” Poetics. Oxford: Blackwell. Poggioli, Renato. 1965. The Spirit of the Letter: Essays in European Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press ---. 1967. "The Avant-Garde and Politics" Yale French Studies 39: 180-187. ---. 1968. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. (Gerald Fitzgerald, tr.) Cambridge, Massachusets: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1995. La mésentente. Paris: Galilée. Russel, Charles. 1985. Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries. The Literary AvantGarde from Rimbaud to through Postmodernism. New York: Oxford University Press. Strong, Beret E. 1997. The Poetic Avant-Garde. The Groups of Borges, Auden, and Breton. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2001. “Two Theories of Modernity” The International Scope Review 3(5): 1-9. Vaneigem, Raoul. 2004 [1963]. Banalités de base. Paris: Verticales/Seuil. Wagner, Peter. 2001. Theorizing Modernity. London: Sage.
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Williams, Raymond. 1988. "Introduction: The Politics of the Avant-Garde" in Edward Timms and Peter Collier (eds.) Visions and Blueprints. Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1-17. Witt, Mary Ann Frese. 2001. The Search for Modern Tragedy. Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Wolff, Janet. 1983. Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art. London: George Allen & Unwin. Ziarek, Krzysztof. 2001. The Historicity of Experience. Modernity, the Avant-Garde and the Event. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Zima, Peter and Johann Strutz (eds.). 1987. Europäische Avantgarde. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
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The Politics of Community
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“Sometimes I Spit for Pleasure on My Mother’s Portrait”. On the Strategic Uses of Inflammatory Rhetoric in Surrealism Kirsten Strom
[T]he text fulfills its ethical function only when it pluralizes, pulverizes, “musicates” [truths about the process of the subject (its discourse, its sexuality),] which is to say, on the condition that it develops them to the point of laughter. (Julia Kristeva 1984: 233)
If we are to take the collected documents of the Surrealists literally, we can only conclude that the group consisted of a roving band of murderers, child molesters, and slashers of women’s eyeballs. Was it not André Breton himself who publicly advocated that the “purest Surrealist act” was to aim a loaded pistol into a crowd and begin shooting indiscriminately? (Breton 1969 [1929]: 125) 1 And yet, as we know, no Surrealist was ever guilty of such crimes. 2 A simple, yet highly significant premise follows: perhaps we are not to take these documents so literally. This essay will explore the role of inflammatory rhetoric within the project of Surrealism, specifically with the intent of arguing that such rhetorical gestures functioned both to define Surrealism’s proper (and improper) audiences, and to position Surrealism as a political culture capable of participating in broader political discourse by mastering techniques of hyperbolic language widely employed by radical and reactionary political parties in Europe between the wars. Furthermore, however, I will contend that the various means through which the Surrealists constituted their own subcultural speech
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community would alternately, if not simultaneously, serve as a performative critique of the processes of “meaning” in language, one which potentially threatened to undermine the authority of all political discourse by repeatedly hovering at the brink of “the very place where meaning itself evaporates” (Dick Hebdige 1979: 117). As if to avoid any miscommunication, “Surrealism” was quite literally defined within Breton’s first Manifesto by both dictionary and encyclopaedic entries. What is more, the Surrealists repeatedly articulated and revised their shared self-definition and its ensuing moral and political commitments in a highly prolific body of texts, which might well be classed as the didactic materials of Surrealism, those accumulated tracts, articles and manifestoes whose stated or implied purpose is to delimit the boundaries of the project in what appear to be no uncertain terms. An extract from the nine-point “Declaration” of 27 January 1925 stands as a perfect example: “Surrealism is not a new or an easier means of expression nor even a metaphysics of poetry. It is a means of total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it” (Breton 1979: 317). Generally, such texts employ a communicative language, appearing, in other words, to say precisely what they mean. The language of certain passages of Breton’s highly analytical manifestoes, for example, conveys an apparently sincere unequivocality, as in the statement, “Let us not mince words: the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful” (Breton 1969 [1929]: 14). In general, Surrealist practices would seem to uphold the “sincerity” of this remark. However, the communicative and even “didactic” language of the Surrealists is frequently punctuated by rhetorical posturings bordering on the absurd, found in passages expressed in extravagantly hyperbolic language. Irony and a very dark humour indeed mitigate the apparent earnestness of Surrealist sentiments. What I would like to illustrate is that this represents the introduction of “poetic language,” as Kristeva uses the term, into political discourse. One needs to look neither far nor wide to see that inflammatory gestures and rhetoric abound within the products of Surrealism. Beyond the “purest act” cited above, numerous tracts and declarations seem specially calculated to incite and provoke overheated responses, whether of sympathetic camaraderie or of absolute antipathy. Even the most casual perusal of Surrealist documents easily yields such finds as
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that of the anonymous “Address to the Pope”: “We don’t give a damn for your canons, index, sin, confessional, clergy, we are thinking of another war — war on you, Pope, dog” (Waldberg 1985: 58-59). 3 Other examples include the “Open Letter to Paul Claudel, Ambassador of France in Japan”: “We wish with all our might that revolutions, wars, and colonial insurrections would annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend even in the Orient, and we call for this destruction as the least unacceptable state of things for the mind” (Jean 1980: 141-42). Concluding with the passage, “I defecate on the French army in its totality forever”, the whole of Louis Aragon’s Treatise on Style (Aragon 1991: 117) seems appropriate here, as does Benjamin Péret’s Death to the Pigs, while one might also cite such texts as Max Ernst’s “Danger of Pollution”: “In our diocese, every self-respecting dog abstains rigorously from all carnal or spiritual intercourse with priests or nuns, not out of reverence for the sacred religion, but because reason tells him that after such defilement no bitch would have him, even loose bitches”. 4 Such incendiary passages were often anonymously published, as if to suggest that they represent the collective view of a group bound together in political solidarity. (Even many texts attributed to a single author were signed by many, as was the case with Breton’s Second Manifesto.) Obviously, one function of such language was to draw the battle lines in what would appear to be an effective means of forcing audiences to choose sides: “Avec la police ou avec nous”. 5 In another sense, however, these passages can additionally be said to augment the didactic materials of Surrealism with bold political broadsides that presumably existed in part to relieve the work of art from the kind of literalism and facile legibility to be found, for example, within Stalinist propaganda. The Surrealists’ famously ill fated relationship to the French Communist Party, for example, was due at least in part to their refusal to make flatly “communist” art — which is hardly to call the work apolitical, however. Indeed, many of the artistic products of Surrealism might also be productively considered in relation to the notion of inflammatory rhetoric, with rhetoric being understood here to refer not necessarily to verbal language per se, but rather to the notion of an expression which is to be taken hypothetically, rather than literally. The Poupée sculptures and photographs of Hans Bellmer, for example, evocatively suggest such criminal activities as mutilation and child sexual abuse. Such “crimes” exist and are
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confined by the hypothetical realm of art, even as their mere depiction seems to scandalously function as a form of endorsement. Bridging any possible gap between incendiary political language and the work of art is Salvador Dalí’s Sometimes I Spit for Pleasure on My Mother’s Portrait, also called The Sacred Heart, of 1929 (see illustration 1), in which the lovingly handscripted text of the former title is framed by a hollow outline of the Virgin Mary. The image and text combine both to violate the sanctity of “family values” widely espoused in the Catholic strongholds of both Spain and France, and to blasphemously suggest an analogy between Dalí and Christ by conflating Dalí’s own mother and the Virgin Mary. Though in their vituperate excesses such examples overstate their message to the point of distortion, both this and the preceding textual examples might still be considered to represent basically “literal” uses of inflammatory rhetoric as more or less “normally” coded exaggerations of the political sentiments genuinely shared by members of the group. It is well known, for example, that the Surrealists viewed the Catholic Church in France with great disdain as a political institution propagating conservative hierarchical forms of both political oppression and psychological regression. The authorized publication of the incendiary letter to the Pope cited above, therefore, appears to speak to a genuinely held political conviction, albeit one expressed in hyperbolic and overheated language. In the case of the Dalí work, whether or not the artist actually spit for pleasure on his dead mother’s portrait is quite irrelevant, given that the act itself would likely carry no more weight than its brazen public proclamation. Indeed, in either event, the work succeeds brilliantly in reiterating the Surrealists’ outspoken distaste for familial piety. (Dalí was unapologetically banished from his family following its exhibition). At this point, I would posit that one of the most significant aspects of the phenomenon of the Surrealist inflammatory gesture is not the uniqueness of their rhetorical strategies, but to the contrary the very fact that in one sense they were not unique at all in their employment of such strategies. More specifically, I would contend that the Surrealists adopted such techniques in order that their own might parallel — if not parody — existing political rhetoric in Europe of the time. This notion involves imagining that the Surrealist agenda might
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usefully be conceived within the terms of “political culture”, defined by Keith Michael Baker: 6 [Political culture] sees politics as about making claims; as the activity through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce the competing claims they make upon one another and upon the whole. Political culture is, in this sense, the set of discourses or symbolic practices by which these claims are made. It comprises the definitions of the relative subject-positions from which individuals and groups may (or may not) legitimately make claims upon one another, and therefore of the identity and boundaries of the community to which they belong. It constitutes the meanings of the terms in which these claims are framed, the nature of the contexts to which they pertain, and the authority of the principles according to which they are made binding. (Baker 1990: 4)
Claims, discourses, meaning: language here is obviously key to Baker’s definition. To participate in politics is to speak, to employ language and assert meaning, and vice versa. This is hardly a revelatory notion, but it is worth stating bluntly here, as it enables us to examine a particular manner in which language was widely employed within the political discourses of both Europe in general and France in particular. With regard to the latter, as Robert Gildea (1994) has argued, the stage for French political discourses was dramatically set by the Revolution, that is, one of the founding moments of modern European democracy, during which terms such as “loaded” and “charged” can only begin to describe the political rhetoric of the day. (The Surrealists would frequently employ terminology lifted directly from the imperatives of the revolutionaries, such as the caption on the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste demanding a “new declaration of the rights of man”.) More recently, the Dreyfus affair had both recalcified binaristic political divisions and revealed that French audiences had a hungry appetite for sensationalistically polemical journalism, with Emile Zola’s famed “J’Accuse” being only the best known example. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (1992) has documented the fever pitch of journalism on all sides during La Grande Guerre, while the ongoing “antics” of the extreme right, most notably manifested in L’Action Française, continued to garner publicity with both street violence and overheated declarations of xenophobia, antiSemitism, and even monarchism (see, for example, Nolte 1966). There is a strange sense then, in which the inflammatory rhetoric of
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the Surrealists scandalized the public, by insulting the honour of its most revered institutions, 7 while simultaneously giving it what it wanted, in what Janet Lyon has described as “an age of furious competition for cultural shelf-space among artistic movements” (Lyon 1999: 41). I would contend, however, that such rhetoric was furthermore employed precisely so that the Surrealists might be seen to participate in political discourses broader than those generally ascribed to “artistic movements”. (Point 1 of the 1925 Declaration cited above is adamant on this point: “We have nothing to do with literature”.) Indeed, the spectrum of Surrealist activities and publications might be described as amounting to a quasi-comprehensive platform, in which the Surrealist position on the issues was made known with full and adamant disclosure. (Such issues would include the Catholic Church, European colonialism, Marxism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, militarism, and “family values”, while the broader political implications of Freudian psychology, positivism, history, literature, art and sexuality were also widely discussed.) The exaggerated language of examples cited above not only paralleled the language already widely in circulation within political discourse, but it also, at least in theory, could serve the function of giving volume, if not weight, to the claims of the left, attempting to balance a discursive field in which the right was particularly vocal and incendiary, with its use of language becoming increasingly belligerent as fascism continued to gain ground in Europe throughout the twenties and thirties. This puts the Surrealists in an interesting place, however, where they are using the same “below-the-belt” tactics of the right without claiming the moral high ground of rising above the enemies’ low blows. (As an inflammatory exercise in rhetoric, reread Ernst’s passage cited above, replacing “priests and nuns” with “Jews”.) I would propose, however, that these texts hover knowingly in a space of recognizing both how high and how low the stakes were: clearly they knew that politics mattered and that a lack of political engagement was not an option; furthermore, as I have argued above, they knew that publicity (read: politics) was a competition. But unlike the Nazis, in particular, however, the Surrealists were never in a position to see the consequences of their own rhetoric enacted literally. Put bluntly, they never gained enough power to constitute an abuse of power, and thus their language was “safe” within the realm
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of rhetoric, while it furthermore took its pot shots primarily at institutions which did represent agents of power and massive influence. And as Kristeva has written, “if [poetic language] [...] sometimes falls in with [...] the instinctual determinism of fascism [...] poetic language is also there to forestall such translations into action” (Kristeva 1980: 140). How precisely this forestalling took place within Surrealism I shall attempt to argue below. For now, however, I would like to consider moments — few as they may be — when the “rhetorical” gestures of the Surrealists engendered “real world” political consequences in such a manner as to illustrate that an absolute distinction between the two represents too arbitrary a dichotomy. 1. After being passed by the Censorship Commission, who purportedly “laughed a lot at Luis Buñuel’s work and found no reason to censor such a joke”, L’Age d’or was “shown at Studio 28 in peace and quiet until, on 3 December, a remarkably well-organized provocation broke out” (Altman 1988: 71). Various accounts have attributed this riot to groups ranging from the League of Patriots, the Anti-Jewish League, the Jeunesse Patriotes, and the Camelots du roi. In any event the rightwing perpetrators ransacked the theatre, slashing Surrealist paintings on exhibition, and generating such a sympathetic outcry in the rightwing press that the film was eventually banned by the notoriously conservative Chief of Police Jean Chiappe. Buñuel has furthermore claimed that his patron, the Comte de Noailles, was nearly excommunicated by the Pope for sponsoring the film, which remained banned in France until 1974. 2. In 1929, Paul Abély published a report titled “Legitimate Defense” in the Annales medico-psychologiques journal de l’aliénation mentale et de la médecine légale des aliénés, which pleaded the following case (warranting citation at length): [T]he insane person and his family constitute a danger [to psychiatrists] which I shall describe as “endogenous”, it is part and parcel of our mission [...] The same does not hold true for a danger I shall this time describe as “exogenous,” which deserves our closest attention. It seems that it should give rise to more extraordinary reactions on our part. Here is a particularly significant example: one of our patients, and especially dangerous and demanding madman with a persecution complex, suggested to me with
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Kirsten Strom gentle irony that I read a book that is being freely passed from hand to hand among the inmates. This book, recently published by the Nouvelle Revue Française, commends itself to our attention by its origin and its proper and inoffensive presentation. The work in question was Nadja by André Breton. Surrealism flourished within its covers, with its deliberate incoherence, its cleverly disjointed chapters, that delicate art which consists of pulling the reader’s leg [...]. [One] chapter was devoted especially to us. The poor maligned psychiatrists were generously reviled and insulted, and one passage (underlined in blue pencil by the patient who had so kindly lent us this book) especially caught our attention. It contained the following sentences: “I know that if I were mad and confined for several days, I would take advantage of any momentary period of lucidity to murder in cold blood one of those, preferably the doctor, who happened to come my way. At least I would be put into a cell by myself, the way the violent patients are. Perhaps they would leave me alone”. If this is not tantamount to inciting to murder, then nothing is. We can only react to it with complete disdain.
The entire report, as well as the transcript of an ensuing roundtable discussion of the Sociéte Médico-Psychologique, was republished as the preface to Breton’s “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1930 (Breton 1969: 119-23). 3. In the fall of 1929, Georges Sadoul and Jean Caupenne wrote a “letter” promising a “public spanking” to the top-ranked students enrolled in the Saint-Cyr military academy. Caupenne was expelled from the Surrealists for publicly apologizing, while Sadoul eventually fled the country, joining Aragon, then in Moscow, to avoid the implementation of the three-month prison sentence, resulting solely from the letter. Clearly these responses to inflammatory Surrealist “works” indicate quite flagrantly that the intersection of the hypothetical and the real worlds is still a highly charged arena, and that rhetorical gestures can be difficult to isolate as such particularly when they are wilfully made public, as is the case with the preceding examples. To return to the question of the manner in which Surrealist inflammatory rhetoric forestalls the translation into brute action that sets it apart from fascism, it is first necessary to consider the degree to which it genuinely constitutes “poetic language” as Kristeva describes it. Kristeva has written that the “most radical aspects of twentiethcentury literature,” as emblematized in her argument by James Joyce and George Bataille, “[move] beyond madness and realism in a leap
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that maintains both ‘delirium’ and ‘logic’” (Kristeva 1984: 82). Put simply, a hegemony of “logic” would clearly speak to a repressed subject defined by positivism and a mythic world in which the relationship between signifiers and signifieds is facile. At the opposite pole is the supremacy of delirium, at which “psychosis [...] [threatens] the unstable subject of poetic language”. “As to psychosis”, she has written, “symbolic legality is wiped out in favour of arbitrariness of an instinctual drive without meaning and communication; panicking at the loss of all reference, the subject goes through fantasies of omnipotence or identification with a totalitarian leader” (Kristeva 1980: 139). I have proposed that the “didactic” materials of Surrealism in particular reveal a tendency to speak in two tongues, one of earnest communicativeness and the other of incendiary absurdity. The effect is that each reflects upon the other in such a manner that the latter is more easily discernable as such. Breton’s Second Manifesto provides a prime example of this phenomenon. It is a lengthy treatise, detailed, thorough and analytical, incorporating, for example, the measured and oft-cited passage stating that “everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions” (Breton 1969: 123). Within pages, however, Breton states that the Surrealists display an “unyielding need” to “laugh like savages in the presence of the French flag, to vomit their disgust in the face of every priest, and to level at the breed of ‘basic duties’ the longrange weapon of sexual cynicism” (Breton 1969: 129). Of course, this is not completely ironic, as the Surrealists are well known to have abhorred the institutions of Religion, Country, and Family, but the play of “logic” and “delirium” clearly helps to contextualize this language as a calculated agent of sarcasm and dark humour, rather than any sort of psychotic (i.e. dismissible) or totalitarian outburst. “Black humour” was indeed a professed love of the group, with Breton outlining its significance in his Anthology of Black Humour, which argued that black humour is the “mortal enemy of sentimentality” and moralizing (Breton 1997: xix). It must offend bourgeois sensibilities and be beyond redemption from the point of view of conventional social and political institutions. And yet, also implicit within his discussion is the idea that it must also be a
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cultivated, if not calculated, gesture. It must maintain, in other words, a kind of critical self-consciousness and lucidity, which, again, prevents its assimilation into total delirium. I have spoken thus far about what might be considered the integration of poetic language into political discourse. At this point, I would like to further consider Kristeva’s hypothesis on the inherently political nature of poetic language itself, for beyond the “didactic” materials of Surrealism, more radical experimentation occurs within the realm of “poetry”. Indeed, the examples of inflammatory rhetoric cited above represent only the most “literal” forms, those in which the Surrealists appear only to overstate the meaning of their sentiments. Another manner, generally less overtly inflammatory, involved denoting things that were not “meant” at all, not merely as a form of facile exaggeration, but rather as a gesture which would performatively relativize the usefulness of language, thereby challenging the presumption central to Western logic that language must be valued above all for its communicative immediacy. André Breton and Paul Eluard’s collectively authored Immaculate Conception, for example, in its contrived emulations of psychological and linguistic “disorders” is of interest in the degree to which it functions almost entirely as a gesture. Virtually none of its contents are intended to communicate literally at the level of “content”. It contains rather, in a segment titled “The Possessions”, parodies, or “Attempted Simulations” of various linguistic disorders, including “Mental Debility”, “Acute Mania”, “General Paralysis”, “Interpretative Delirium”, and “Dementia Praecox”. The latter, for example, opens with the passage: The woman here with an arm on her head pebbled with pralines which leave here without anyone having a clear idea because it is a bit more than noon here while leaving the laugh through the teeth which retreats across the palate of the Danaids which I caress with my tongue without thinking that the day of God has arrived music forward of the little girls weeping seeds whom one watches without seeing them weep by the hand of the Graces on the fourth floor window with the cat’s mignonette which the catapult took from behind on a holiday. (Breton/Eluard 1990: 69)
Distinctive in tone but equally rhetorical as a literary gesture is the passage opening the “Attempted Simulation of Acute Mania”:
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Good morning gentlemen, good evening ladies and the assembled Gas Company. Mr. President, I am at your disposal, I have a black Chinese lantern on my bicycle. The cat, the dog, my mother any my father, my children, the eagle in his little cart, all these poor specimens have been put into the wagon whose hinges turn and turn, and turn. From one bridge to the next the needles fall like so many sabre slashes. The cemetery is at the end of the village close to the stately cottage. None of which helps to re-forge family links in times of famine. (Breton/Eluard 1990: 55)
Both passages forcefully embody Surrealist “literary” techniques of conveying content/meaning at the level of process rather than at the level of product, the process in this case involving the simulation of abnormal states of mind. Obviously the texts themselves are purely rhetorical: the preceding text clearly does not “mean” that Breton and Eluard extend their greetings to the assembled Gas Company; rather it “means” that the two authors conceptualized language as a tool by which to undermine inherently political hierarchies of consciousness and to explore the “aesthetic” possibilities of alternative psychological states. Thus the usefulness of the text exceeds its signatory function. We can hypothetically identify with an “altered” subject for whom the text purports to communicate some sort of literal meaning, but this is a highly contrived and mediated process, which precludes direct access to “content”. The text then proscribes the kind of metaphysics of meaning of which Kristeva has written: Through the permanent contradiction between these two dispositions (semiotic/symbolic), of which the internal setting off of the sign (signifier/signified) is merely a witness, poetic language, in its most disruptive form (unreadable for meaning, dangerous to the subject), shows the constraints of a civilization dominated by transcendental rationality. Consequently, it is a means of overriding this constraint [...].This means that its poetic economy has always borne witness to rises and impossibilities of transcendental symbolics, in our time it is coupled with crises of social institutions (state, family, religion), and, more profoundly, a turning point in the relationship of man to meaning. Transcendental mastery over discourse is possible, but repressive. (Kristeva 1980: 140)
The notion of the transcendental is particularly key to her argument: “Meaning, identified either within the unity or the multiplicity of the subject, structure, or theory, necessarily guarantees a certain transcendence, if not a theology; this is precisely why all human knowledge, whether it be that of an individual subject or of a meaning
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structure, retains religion as its blind boundaries, or at least, as an internal limit” (Kristeva 1980: 124). In this sense, the various texts of Surrealism might be understood to be deeply godless, as they are performatively critical of an authoritative and “regressive” metaphysics of meaning. In conclusion, I wish to reiterate the strategic purposes that I believe inflammatory rhetoric to have served within the Surrealist project. Firstly, it defined the audience of Surrealism by dramatically forcing readers and viewers to take sides on provocatively authored and hotly contested claims. This process simultaneously contextualized Surrealism within the broader political climate of Europe, and France in particular, by revealing the degree to which the Surrealists were conscious and capable of utilizing the same tools of political discursivity employed by political parties and other groups more overtly involved in shaping policy. In other words, it suggested that the Surrealists ultimately did know that there was only one game in town — political discourse — and that they knew how to play it just like everyone else. The products of Surrealism, however, continually shifted positions in a dialogue between “logic” and “delirium,” enabling the inflammatory rhetoric of the group to both participate in the overheated political discourses of the period, and to critique them: in short, to parody itself. Yet they were also capable of using language more subversively than anyone else. The Surrealists knew that rhetorical posturing was not only a conventional weapon in the war for political attention, but that it could also be a tool to critique cultural presumptions about meaning and language, thereby undermining the authority of all political discourse. While on the one hand, I have clearly been invested in the notion that Surrealist inflammatory gestures generally remained “safe” within the realm of rhetoric (unlike those of the Nazis), there is indeed another sense in which they are dangerous. Once again, it is useful to cite Kristeva: “To penetrate the era, poetry had to disturb the logic that dominated the social order and do so through that logic itself, by assuming and unravelling its position, its syntheses, and hence the ideologies of control” (Kristeva 1984: 83).
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NOTES 1
The “purest act” described by Breton bears with it at least two notable precedents: the “gratuitous” acts of the anti-hero of André Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures, and the notorious “theatrical criticism” of Jacques Vaché who sported a British officer’s uniform to the 1917 premiere of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Breasts of Tiresius, at which he pulled out a loaded pistol and aimed at random members of the audience. Allegedly, it was Breton who calmed him down. 2 The Surrealists did publicly display their sympathy for women criminals in particular, notably Germaine Berton, Violette Nozières, and the Papin sisters. 3 Waldberg attributes this anonymously published text to Antonin Artaud. 4 Originally published in Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution no. 3, December 1931. Reprinted in Jean (1980, 264-65). 5 Buñuel (1984) attributed this remark to Breton. 6 I have further developed this concept in Strom (2002). 7 Though his discussion is framed predominantly in the nineteenth century, Nye (1993) has attested to the particularly French significance of the notion of honour.
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WORKS CITED Altman, Georges. 1988. “Censorship in France: L’Age d’or” in Richard Abel (ed.) French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939, vol. II. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Aragon, Louis. 1991. Treatise on Style. (Alyson Waters, tr.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane. 1992. Men At War 1914-1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Baker, Keith Michael. 1990. Inventing the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Breton, André. 1969. “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, tr.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ---. 1978. What Is Surrealism? (Franklin Rosemont, ed.). New York: Monad Press. ---. 1997. Anthology of Black Humor (Mark Polizzotti, trans.). San Francisco: City Lights Press. Breton, André and Paul Eluard. 1990. The Immaculate Conception (John Graham, tr.). London: Atlas Press. Buñuel, Luis. 1984. My Last Sigh (Abigail Israel, tr.). New York: Viking. Gildea, Robert. 1994. The Past in French History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge. Jean, Marcel. 1980. The Autobiography of Surrealism. New York: Viking Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Poetic Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. ---. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Lyon, Janet. 1999. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nolte, Ernst. 1966. Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Nye, Robert. 1993. Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press. Strom, Kirsten. 2002. Making History. Surrealism and the Invention of a Political Culture. New York: University Press of America.
Framing Literary Speech Acts of Political Modernity. Notes on Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus and Expressionism Gunther Martens
The present article sets out to insert some unlikely names (Hermann Broch and Karl Kraus) into the debate on the invention of politics in the modernist avant-garde. I do so in order to explore what it entails to reject a doxographic approach to the politics of literature in favour of a less referential and more performative look at how new forms of community are being negotiated in modernist (and) avant-garde practices. My analysis is inspired by a more rhetorical outlook and ties in with more general concerns about authority and authorship in discourse. My main interest is the way ideology and politics take shape through argumentative strategies. I will first situate Broch and Kraus into lesser known constellations, and I will then go on to elaborate some methodological concerns with respect to a rhetorical approach to performativity.
Hermann Broch’s Plea for a “Total Democracy” It is a truism that the threat and lure of political totalitarianism casts its shadow over the relationship between literature and politics during the interbellum and its immediate aftermath. But this shadow took a surprising shape in a very ardent defence of democracy that may be seen to backfire (or at least have unexpected effects) in rhetorical terms. The case in point is Hermann Broch, a Jewish-Austrian writer who went into exile in 1938 and died in the U.S. in 1951. Especially
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during his stay in America, Broch became active as a political thinker and a defendant of human rights. Paul Michael Lützeler, the editor of Broch’s works, summarizes Broch’s political activity as follows: “From 1939 onwards Broch was part of a group of American and emigrated European intellectuals who dedicated themselves to the intensification of democratic life and to propaganda for a democratic form of state” (B 11: 87). To this aim, Broch called for a “total democracy” (Broch 1981: 24), for a “dictatorship of humanity” (Broch 1981: 68), which sounds rather uncannily today. For Broch summarized his intentions in his curious plea for a “dictatorship of humanity in a total democracy” (Broch 1981: 68). Democracy belonged to the “open systems” (B 11: 78), but “democracy can also be represented in a totalitarian way” (Broch 1981: 78). To Broch, democracy could only protect itself from dictatorship if it copied its propaganda techniques, if it took over its “advantages” and got totalitarian itself: “democracy will have to apply the same psychological understanding to the treatment of popular masses as the totalitarian states have done to such great advantage” (Broch 1981: 79). Although actively engaged in the opposition to any kind of dictatorial regime or totalitarianism, Broch recognized the luring yet devastating impact of the absolute values propounded by totalitarian systems: he wrote that it could “not be admired enough in what way Hitler has transformed anti-Semitism into one of the most powerful instruments of international politics” (Broch 1981: 69). This is a rather peculiar thing to say, even more so because Broch was of Jewish descent himself. The following observations will fail to do justice to Broch’s complex psychological theory of totalitarianism, but aim to clarify this desire for manifest codification of democracy. To pre-empt the seductive lure of absolute and unreflected values, Broch took a quite pessimistic stance: the values of democracy should no longer be negotiated in the steady but risky process of criticalrational dialogue. On the contrary, they needed to be decreed or even “dictated” (Broch 1981: 30/68) once and for all. This qoute, taken from Broch’s contribution to the Declaration of Man, a document leading up to the declaration of human rights, is very crucial: it shows that he had lost his confidence in democracy’s ability to defend itself and aimed to strengthen its promise by means of universalizable principles of ethics and law. The wish for (legal) codification is a reaction to the trauma caused by the anarchy and violence of fascist
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dictatorship in Europe. (When going into exile, Broch himself left his mother in Vienna; she died in a concentration camp and this was a cause of guilt to him ever after). But this kind of essentialist democracy seems to some extent tainted by its totalitarian counterpart. 1 The proposed “total democracy” was “a democracy that does not handle its fundamental principles as object of rhetorical debate; it turns them into the living of everyday life and of all interpersonal relations. Applied to American legislation, this would imply that flouting of the democratic principles expressed in the constitution and the declaration of independence would become punishable” (Broch 1981: 78f). This understanding at the same time naturalized and codified democracy by legal means. The rigidity of this procedure foreshadowed the climate of McCarthyism and its witch-hunt for totalitarian sympathies. It is difficult to tell to what extent the newly arrived refugee was adapting to the American context, however. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, America was at its prime as a superpower, boasting an almost triumphalist self-consciousness, because it considered itself to be the leading model for the old world. The liberal values were affirmed in such a normative way that they led up to intolerance and repression (especially in the era of McCarthyism). Hannah Arendt pointed out the paradox in Broch’s political philosophy in their private correspondence. The latter pleaded for a new central “value” and its powerful embodiment governing a stable hierarchy. To legitimate that need, he retreated to a kind of negative definition of freedom that posited death as transcendental signifier, as paradigmatic non-value or “Unwert”. The metaphysical evasion of death became the new universal. Yet, Arendt pointed out that in the specific case of torture people may fear life more than death: “Your [definition of] human right is far removed from being the natural law you make of it” (Broch and Arendt 1996: 94). Bottom line: Arendt suggested that absolute values and universals tend to backfire and that a “consensus” (Berman 2001: 15) or a legally reinforced morality are tenuous if not undesirable. In his quest for an essential and substantial core of democracy, Broch sought to control the fundamental indeterminacy of democracy under the aegis of modernity. 2 Radical democracy as defined by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe considers society as a site of contestation and subversion of democratic values as much as their
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promotion. Laclau and Mouffe seem to oppose the kind of essentialist take on democracy Broch envisaged. In Broch’s view, modernity could only be cured by a return to the full embodiment of intentional speech acts in rigidly codified settings. Especially among German Critical theorists, this pessimistic stance was rather uncommon: Broch took the Realpolitik point of view that there no longer was a transparent outside position to the mediated condition of ideas and political ideologies. While Adorno and Horkheimer were still developing their call for a second Enlightenment and for a renewed education towards individual responsibility, Broch settled for mass propaganda as the only means to contain the malleability of the masses.
Karl Kraus: Verbal Collage Technique and Ready-Made Attempts to prevent political and moral debates are entirely alien to the discourse performed by Karl Kraus. From an institutional point of view, Kraus, like Broch, could seem only remotely related to avantgarde actionist practices. The Austrian publicist was renowned for his fierce opposition to Expressionism (Franz Werfel, most prominently). As a literary critic he blamed Expressionism for its philosophical idealism and blind humanism, the poetic “Oh Mensch”-pathos which was indeed in many cases easily infected by patriotism and nationalism at the beginning of World War I. 3 Moreover, he opposed the disintegration of syntax as a surrender to the speculative depths of psychology. Zohn points out that, in addition, Futurism, Cubism and Surrealism were being championed by the German literary critic Herwarth Walden and his review Der Sturm, suggesting that the growing rivalry was a further reason for Kraus to reject avant-garde authors. Similarly relentless was Kraus’ resistance to the ornamentalism of Klimt and the Vienna Secession. Especially the later Kraus seemed to give up entirely on modern art, cherishing a restricted sphere of “classical” artistic production, epitomized by Goethe, Nestroy, Offenbach and Shakespeare. Despite his well known anathema to the avant-garde, however, Kraus also published and helped individual writers such as Georg Trakl, Else Lasker-Schüler (at that time, Walden’s wife) and Frank Wedekind (as detailed in Zohn 1996).
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More importantly, once we move beyond this institutional perspective, Kraus’ activities performed a quest for controversy and parody that qualifies his works as a somewhat different perspective on the invention of politics through literary practices. Comparable to the majority of the avant-garde movements, the early Kraus criticized bourgeois art, society and mentality: “This bourgeois face, emblem of a confident, progressive, secular and commercial civilization, which is Kraus’s central target in the final years before 1914” (Timms 1986: 142). Kraus’ critique is motivated somewhat differently than the one voiced by the avant-garde movements, although it remains difficult to assess his position in terms of institutional politics and parties. He is often attributed “conservative leanings in the final years before 1914” (Timms 1986: 142). His early satires are held to testify to a “partiality”: they fiercely attack anything related to liberal media (to a large extend owned by Jews), whereas his critiques tended to be far less concerned with corrupt aristocrats. Kraus specialized in aphorisms that depicted women as creatures dominated by sexuality, erotic desire and irrationality. The description of women as destructive femmes fatales may seem very problematic from a feminist point of view, but in its context it was primarily meant to flout and contradict the sacrosanct mother role attributed to women by bourgeois conventions. Nike Wagner points out Kraus’ role as a “Bürgerschreck” (Wagner 1980: 164) and maintains that these provocative statements reveal more about (the fears besetting) the social construction of masculinity than about the nature of women. The provocative impact of Wedekind’s (early expressionist) plays resided in a similar foregrounding of youthful and female sexuality. Kraus helped Wedekind to get the controversial play Pandora’s Box (1904) staged in Vienna. Surely this does not (and is not meant to) turn Kraus into an Expressionist or an avant-garde author. Focussing on the direct expression of themes, 4 networks, parties and ethnic identities in his writings would contribute to the widespread tendency to credit ambiguous and shifting speech acts with a downright institutional-political and over-all heteronomic value. In this register, Kraus has been taken to task for his presumed “silence” about the rise of National Socialism, his support for the Austro-fascist Dollfuß as the lesser evil, and for the fact that he did not risk to publish a lengthy Sprachkritik of fascist ideology, epitomized in the catchy slogan “Zu Hitler fällt mir nichts ein [My mind is a blank on Hitler]”.
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Yet, beyond the schemata and categorisations that invite institutional attention, on the level of actual writing practices, Kraus has practiced forms and techniques that have become crucial for the understanding of the avant-garde, such as his written brand of collage and montage techniques, producing essays and “compiling” dramatic characters that consisted almost entirely out of ready-made quotations. 5 Here, it could be countered, of course, that the act of making these quotations perform differently relies heavily on a more classical institutional authority that Kraus had gained. It is indeed the case that the act of quoting and recontextualising itself leaves a stylistic mark, especially when framed by operations of satire and ironical distancing. When reading the satirical drama Literatur oder Man wird doch da sehn (Literature or we’ll see, 1921), which climaxed Kraus’ argument with Franz Werfel and with Expressionism in general, one gets the impression that literary texts are made to serve the distribution of sympathies, rumours, influence spheres – and even a competition for the favour of a female object of desire, Countess Sidonie Nádherny! (Leubner 1996: 236) Such redundantly argumentative texts, however, primarily add to the representation of authorship and authority in discourse. Parody and pastiche, as genres, are prone to serve institutional purposes: since the quoted utterances are clearly identifiable as belonging to another author, they strengthen the identity of the one appropriating utterances (in terms of property) rather than to actively embody a fluid dynamic of language. There is a double form of intentionalism and subjectification of meaning underlying the act of parody: somebody is actively making utterances mean something different than what somebody supposedly “meant to mean”. When reading Kraus’ parodies of Expressionism, one thus begins to understand what Roland Barthes meant by “the wall of voice”. Kraus writes texts that set out to frame ideologies as discursive procedures by means of meta-discourse. He reattaches the utterances constitutive of the (only ambiguously democratic) debates he witnesses to their speech act function, highlighting them as gestures of empty praise and adherence and as exchanges of social capital. It is doubtful whether this operation can afford plurivocity, since it sets out to reveal that which is excluded from the putative debate. 6 Although it has often been done, it seems somewhat reductive to interpret the
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quotational tendency of Kraus’ texts in terms of the heterogeneous and collective origin that Walter Benjamin advanced as hallmark of the avant-garde revolution in art. Kraus diverts and mediates the verbatim quotation through quite authorial procedures that turned out to be influential for modernist and postmodernist authors like Robert Musil and Elfriede Jelinek. To give a more specific example: The Fackeltext Die Orgie (1911) sets out to show that the newspaper Neue Freie Presse was blatantly supporting the election campaign of the liberal party. Kraus actively intervened in the “campaign” by sending a fake ‘letter to the editor’ that consisted out of the phrases and partialness amalgamated out of the editorials themselves. The editors resorted to legal means in order to contain Kraus’ guerrilla tactics by indicting him with “disturbing the serious business of politicians and editors”. Kraus continued to comment these institutional measures as rhetorical and stylistic exchanges. Interpreters have gone out of their way to balance the linguistic precision of the procedure with the doxic impurity it accumulates. 7 In ideological terms, Kraus can indeed be seen to mount the argumentative force of a very intuitive type of “current awareness” (widespread stereotypes about women, Hungarians and Jewish journalists) in ways that at first sight may lead (and have led) to consider the actual target of criticism, the lack of differentiation between propaganda and the press, as the lesser evil. Kraus’ style is at times so hermetic and long-winded that it seems to contradict its apparent aim to mobilize and rally support for its local causes. Especially attempts to label his writings with an aristocratic and reactionary political tendency are treated with a vertigo of overdeterminations that thwarts any attempt to translate its “operation” into party doctrine or other forms of institutional backup. Its contrived play with citation and comment simultaneously exposes and exploits intuitive argumentative procedures. It both exposes and exploits that, for example, heaping too much information (especially by way of appositions) on the thema-part of a sentence is an index of argumentation short-circuited into persuasion (Kraus 1989: 280). This creates a form of negativity which is not a simple variation of the blissful negation of politics through form (as developed by Adorno). On the contrary, Kraus keeps referring to the political and social problems of his time with an explicitness that is almost disturbingly detailed and that aims to render any gesture of silence verbose. One is thus forced to conclude that Kraus aimed to address debates and
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controversies deeply entrenched in existing ideological forefronts for the sake of revealing, through metadiscourse, the “pouvoir de denomination” (Bourdieu) in its production stages. In terms of performativity, Kraus’ monomaniacal quest is not just about the media giving in to politics or commerce, it shows that the struggle for metalanguage, as evidenced in incriminatory portraits and external attributions of intention, is at the core of the mediation of politics. 8
Performativity In order to clarify the constellations briefly laid out here, the concept of performativity, as it is often used in avant-garde and modernist studies, requires further explanation and specification. The concept continues to float between extrinsic-heteronomic approaches (as in performance studies relating to theatrical performance and happenings) and more intrinsic, philosophical and linguistic approaches (as in speech act theory), with various in-betweens. Especially in relation to the avant-garde, it is tempting to resort to the extrinsic meaning of performance (art as happening), because it strengthens the (stereotypical) distinction between the engaging, actionist and group-based avant-garde and the more reflexive and individualist position of modernists. As conceived by classical speech act theory, the performative utterance is held to institute and establish the action it renders in speech. This initial model became a rather easy prey for poststructuralism, since it entertained rather strong assumptions about the transparency of intention and the foreclosure of context, irony or fictionality. J. L. Austin, for example, was taken to task for borrowing his stock examples of performatives from social spheres (church, law, …) with “clear conventions, rules, and protocols to make performative utterances work” (Hillis Miller 2001: 57). Poststructuralists have theorized – and performed in their own writings – the suggestion “that the utterer of a performative is an anonymous horde” (Hillis Miller 2000: 88). Derrida pitched a conception of linguistic contingency against the “police state” view of language, in which the utterer is not an individual, but a collective process, “a little like the multitude of stockholders and managers in a company or corporation with limited liability, or in a limited, incorporated system” (Hillis Miller 88). In
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philosophical terms, the institutional view of performativity required a degree of goodwill and pragmatism that has been readily supplied for instance by Jürgen Habermas and others, but that tends to downplay the rhetorical aspects of language. 9 Relevant in this context is not so much the problematisation of intentionality, but the notion that privileged social roles and positions are held to precede the carrying out of language actions. In an interesting article, Birgit Wagner (1997) offers a description of performative utterances in avant-garde manifestoes that unfortunately updates the quasi-institutional understanding of performativity outlined above. In order to identify actionism as the real innovative “scandal” of the avant-garde, she resorts to a fairly traditional concept of performance that is marked by the theatrical “group presence”. Through their abundant use of performative utterances, avant-garde manifestoes are basically considered to usurp the institutional power to decree and institute. The utterances are said to usurp because they do not have the extra-linguistic institutionalized power to reinforce their actual intention (such as the destruction of traditional canons). According to Wagner, the performativity of the avant-garde manifesto as manifestation is said to be linked to the physical and oral “presence” of a group, a theatrical situation which is ready to be mythologized into a “mythical now”. Hence, Wagner considers the performativity of written manifestoes to be of a fundamentally different nature. Since the deictic markers of address are no longer referring to the “original” speech situation, they become fiction and literature, with added institutional precautions: writing is considered to be secondary (especially book print editions of manifestoes), because written statements tend to become works and books signed by authors once more. I think this notion of performativity is too narrow for two reasons. First, the preoccupation with the “original” manifestation sounds as another version of the many “death” theories of avant-garde; it shows a striking unwillingness to realize that active remembrance of invention (accounts of chance encounters and unlikely acts substituting the centre for the marginal) and anaphoric references contribute a great deal to the effort of establishing the new. Secondly, it at least suggests that it is hard for literature (avant-garde or “high” modernism) to acquire political meaning, since in Wagner’s view that would be already part of the renewed codification (Wagner 1997: 52).
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From a rhetorical (and narratological) point of view, the deictic elements of address are not the obsolete and empty referents or disembodied remnants of a lost community. On the contrary, they are typical of how discourse in general comes to be embodied or inhabited with positions and causalities. A concept of performativity more in tune with the active and communicative establishment of communities in texts reverses the logic of performative utterances by foregrounding that “institutions are no more than the temporary effects of speech act agreements” (Fish 1976: 997). Such a constructivist redefinition of performativity has been advanced by theorists such as Niklas Luhmann (for an application to literature, see Martens 2001). Admittedly, there is little agreement on how to shape the intrinsic performativity of literary speech acts. According to Genette, for instance, literature (as an institution) has moved beyond the stage where its (fictional) status had to be negotiated: there is no longer a need for a privileged speaker (a frame narrator or a fictional editor) that explicitly invites or urges selected audiences to accept the terms of address. This leads him to define literary utterances as declarations, and not as performatives (Genette 1991: 50). Elsewhere, Genette signals a predilection for modernist authors and a concomitant unease with works of communicative overtness. Genette’s approach tends to disregard more implicit variations of performativity. Although the performative is no longer visibly tied to the becoming explicit of an I as utterer, a more rhetorical and indirect brand of performativity continues to negotiate the way a text addresses its envisaged addressees. Ortwin De Graef describes this double-bind as “a communicative contract itself constitutive of community as such and an exchange fabricating the social fabric as constitutive exchange” (Graef 1999: 238). This is obviously not meant to imply that the field of deictic reference constitutes performativity as such. This model of performativity is evidently challenged by texts that undertake to thwart any attempt of reconstruction. Carl Einstein’s Bebuquin (1912) is such an experimental and Expressionist text flirting with nascent Primitivism and sheer nonsensical parataxis: “Sir, I just happen to pass by to fabricate a New Man. I only live by the word ‘otherwise’. I can’t use the equation” (Einstein, Bebuquin, 1998: 38). In the actual reception, however, the coherence lost on the syntagmatic level is frequently recuperated in a thoroughly philosophical reading. This approach
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reads the isolated sentences and the very fact of their isolation as aphorisms with a philosophical purport (Krämer 1991). It is not a coincidence that such readings have been challenged: Baßler (1994) argues quite passionately for the self-referential nature of avant-garde prose as a version of empty semiosis typical of a modernity termed emphatic. This alternative account of performativity can come to grips with the specific framing of the speech acts of asserting and addressing involved in manifests and position-taking. In this respect, it is tempting to distinguish between [1] the ideological frameworks (socialism, fascism, etc.) to which writers are willing or being forced to relate or respond, [2] the actual political institutions, milieus and people that enable (or facilitate) those ideologies and ideas to (e)merge and circulate, and [3] the thoroughly rhetorical discourse structures that in effect mediate and decide the distribution of sympathies, ties and alliances as ad-hoc argumentative exchanges in the field of communicative exchange. On this third level, ideas and ideologies easily get overdetermined and the struggle for “partial fixation of meanings” through meta-denomination shows the tendency “to dominate the field of discursivity” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112). This threefold distinction is a construction not visible as such. On the contrary, its integration is contrived for persuasive effect. Here, with a focus on (meta)discursivity, the distinction between politics as a performative moment harboured by either the avant-garde or modernism becomes less self-evident. The failure of the avant-garde is generally equated with its “failure” to mobilize and address the masses, to amass institutional stability. This institutional account is misleading, because it falls short of realizing that “real” political action itself is mediated, staged (and undercut) by strategies of argumentation and exclusion. Inversely, modernists have formulated very pessimistic poetological defences of their unwillingness to engage with the existing political institutions (parties). Writers such as Paul Valéry, Robert Musil and also Karl Kraus were often very sceptical about democracy. They were inspired by more technocratic, scientific-cognitive or even aristocratic views on the daily business of politics. 10 Their statements have mostly been read as an expression of their position as members of a (slowly disappearing) “leisure class”. Yet it is difficult to generalize the political impetus of such anti-democratic statements, since they are
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mostly focused on the institutional aspects in which the political can find an expression: Musil derogatively equated the hype surrounding Kraus with sectarianism, noting quite astutely that Kraus’ audience was applauding its own desecration (a feature and fate which Walter Benjamin ascribed to the avant-garde in The position of the French writer). Musil was overall pessimistic about the possibility of literature to gain direct political impact; writers steering in that direction (Maurice Barbusse, Ernst Jünger) are regarded “to lose nuance in the attempt to play on the party-political apparatus” (Musil 1978/13: 1515-1516). Still, in terms of the conception of performativity outlined above, it is not productive to cultivate the distinction between modernism said to be apolitical and formalist on the one hand, and an engaging (and thus non-literary) avant-garde on the other hand. 11 In their poetological writings, avant-garde writers opposed various forms of rhetorical patterning (which they saw as remnant traces of artistry and formalism). Nevertheless, part of their appeal to the audience is mediated through a lavish use of synaesthesia and especially extended metaphor. The cult of virility and masculinity in Mafarka le futuriste by Marinetti and to a lesser extent in Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris hinges on such (often unacknowledged) rhetoric. It is striking to see how even metadiscursive comments, despite claims to the contrary, tend to resort to this mode of description, for example, when Surrealism is considered “to open wide the gates of the Unconscious, permitting the flood waters of chance and desire to inundate reality” (Gershman 1974: 38f).
Conclusion I am aware that within the scope of this brief outline, I have not dealt with the peculiar historical circumstance that, especially in the Austrian context, the experimental literary avant-garde is to be situated in the second half of the twentieth century (Wiener Gruppe, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker and Elfriede Jelinek), a circumstance which a recent volume addresses as “The century of the avant-gardes” (Klinger/Müller-Funk 2004). This only helps to increase, however, the challenge for unreflected types of historicism in an interesting way. It is unproductive to restrict performativity to
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that which can be translated into (theatrical) terms of action or actionism. In addition to that dimension, a more communicative version of performativity can be seen to make the hidden attribution of speech visible and reflexive. This discursive self-fashioning of authorities (and their appeal) transgresses the institution of schools and movements. When seen from this rhetorical point of view, the act of mediating the symbolic capital involved in the argumentative exchange conveys few promises, recipes or solutions, but it can, nonetheless, contribute to an understanding of the literary versions of the political without an appeal to intuitions of “art” and “life”. 12 NOTES 1
Claude Lefort defines totalitarianism as the “longing for the illusion of a substantial identity, for embodied power” (Lefort 1992: 48). In several essays, Broch describes the return of a charismatic leader as a psychological necessity. 2 Modernity will be treated here as a claim related to a process of autonomisation and functional differentiation of spheres (voiced both with triumphant or apocalyptic overtones). From a rhetorical and discursive point of view, the autonomy and selfregulation “gained” in the broader “emancipation” process simultaneously increases the risk of being exposed to near-feudal practices and communicative situations, to anachronistic embodiments of near-absolute power, appropriation of signifiers etc. 3 On the ideological and totalitarian tendencies ascribed to Expressionism, see for example Stark (1998). Liska (2004) states correctly that Expressionism has not really been served by either philosophical “updates” or ritualized obituaries (Liska 2004: 134). She links the avant-gardist core of Expressionism with – I would say: more performative – concepts of trauma, fear and dream. 4 Similar vague claims (based on the theme of sexuality in Young Törleß, 1906) have temporarily made Robert Musil to function as an “ancestor” of Expressionism. Musil mockingly commented this “lineage” as the evolutionary proximity of “an orang outang to mankind” (Musil 1978, vol. 9: 1483). 5 Leo Lensing has even argued that Kraus’ early newspaper photo manipulations as “assisted ready-mades” are “photomontage[s] similar to the corrected masterworks of the Dadaists” (Lensing 1990: 221): they are both “satirical responses to the ideological distortions of the mass media” (Lensing 1990: 201). It seems a bit exaggerated, however, to call Kraus an ancestor of “Otto Grosz, Heartfield, Klaus Staeck, Hans Haacke and John Berger”. 6 For a more extensive development of this argument, see Martens (2006). 7 “The validity of Kraus’s critique of systems of communication is not impaired by that undercurrent of antisemitism” (Timms 1986: 146). 8 From a discourse analytical perspective, Silverstein and Urban define “[p]olitics” as “the struggle to entextualize authoritatively, and hence, in one relevant move, to fix certain metadiscursive perspectives on texts and discourse practices” (1996: 11). The
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struggle for meta-denomination and the “acceptance of a metadiscourse by a community” is a process “at the very centre of a community’s organizing social categories and their relationship, including political hierarchies” (1996: 12). 9 “Everyday language is ineradicably [!] rhetorical; but in the bundling of multiple speech functions these rhetorical elements fade into the background. They live on in shining metaphors, but the rhetorical elements – although never erased – are tamed and put to the service of special goals of problem solution” (Habermas 1985: 245). 10 “Surrounded by the desire to deploy characters, to smack life down on the paper with a brick trowel, to address problems with flesh and legs, in that imprecise, fluid, flickering fashion typical of reality, surrounded even by the desire not to write but to organize, to agitate, to found newspapers, to lead the Hanseatic league, I am completely imbued by the conviction to challenge the urge to do so, to leave all that to the others” (Musil, M 8: 1313). 11 Needless to say that the extrinsic distinction between “high” and “low” is repeated internally within “modernism”, which renders the distinction itself even more problematic as a descriptive or defining criterion. DiBattista (1996: 12) enumerates the differences between the allegedly “apolitical formalism” and “political actionism”, but clearly focuses on extrinsic aspects when she adds that “The high moderns, epitomized by Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf, are generally characterized as selfconscious formalists wrestling with newly perceived instabilities of language and meaning; they are deemed writers whose imputed moral as well as aesthetic ‘difficulty’ removed or elevated them from the prevailing low and middlebrow culture of their day. The more accessible (i.e. popular as well as easily readable), morally transparent, often socialist ‘low’ modernists – Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy, amongst others – are consequently treated as if they wrote to different audiences and moved through different worlds” (1996: 12, my emphasis). 12 The author is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Flemish Research Foundation.
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WORKS CITED Baßler, Moritz. 1994. Die Entdeckung der Textur. Unverständlichkeit in der Kurzprosa der emphatischen Moderne 1910–1916. Niemeyer: Tübingen. Berman, Jessica. 2001. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broch, Hermann and Hannah Arendt. 1996. Briefwechsel 1946 bis 1951. Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag. Broch, Hermann. 1981. Politische Schriften. Kommentierte Werkausgabe. Vol. 11. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bru, Sascha. 2002. “Nieuws dat nieuws blijft. Gramsci & Marinetti & Mussolini” Yang 38(1): 89-106. DiBattista, Maria and Lucy McDiarmid (eds.). 1996. High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939. New York: Oxford University Press. Einstein, Carl. 1998. Bebuquin oder die Dilettanten des Wunders. Stuttgart: Reclam. Fish, Stanley. 1976. “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism” Modern Language Notes 91: 983-1025. Genette, Gérard. 1991. Fiction et diction. Paris: Seuil. Gershman, Herbert S. 1974. The Surrealist Revolution in France. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. Graef, Ortwin de. 1999. “’Sweet Dreams, Monstered Nothings’: Catachresis in Kant and Coriolanus” in Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods (eds.) The Ethics in Literature. London: Macmillan: 231-47. Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hillis Miller, Joseph. 2001. Speech acts in literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Klinger, Cornelia and Wolfgang Müller-Funk (eds.). 2004. Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarden. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Krämer, Thomas. 1991. Carl Einsteins Bebuquin. Romantheorie und Textkonstitution. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Kraus, Karl. 1989. Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lefort, Claude. 1992. Het democratisch tekort. Over de noodzakelijke onbepaaldheid van de democratie. Meppel/Amsterdam: Boom. Lensing, Leo A. 1990. “In the Wiener Werkstätten of the mind”. The Not-So-Fine Arts in Karl Kraus’ Die Fackel” in Joseph P. Strelka (ed.) Karl Kraus. Diener der Sprache. Meister des Ethos. Tübingen: Francke. Leubner, Martin. 1996. Karl Kraus’ “Literatur oder Man wird doch da sehn”. Genetische Ausgabe und Kommentar. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Liska, Vivian. 2004. “Vorhut und Nachträglichkeit. Das Unzeitgemäße des deutschen Expressionismus” in Klinger and Müller-Funk (2004): 133-144. Martens, Gunther. 2001. “Literature and ethics in a polycontextural society: Niklas Luhmann’s Systems-theoretical perspective” in Bart Keunen and Bart Eeckhout (eds.) Literature and Society. The Function of Literary Sociology in Comparative Literature. Brussels: P.I.E-Peter Lang: 157-178.
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Martens, Gunther. 2006. Beobachtungen der Moderne in Hermann Brochs Die Schlafwandler und Robert Musils Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Rhetorische und narratologische Aspekte von Interdiskursivität (MusilStudien, Bd. 35). München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Mouffe, Chantal. 1996. “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy”, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Deconstruction and Pragmatism. London and New York: Routledge: 1-12. Musil, Robert. 1978. Gesammelte Werke in neun Bänden. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Silverstein, Michael and Greg Urban. 1996. “The natural history of discourse” in M. Silverstein and G. Urban (eds.) Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1-17. Stark, Michael. 1998. “Manifeste des ‘neuen Menschen’. Die Avantgarde und das Utopische” in Hubert van den Berg and Ralf Grüttemeier (eds.) Manifeste. Intentionalität. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi: 91-118. Timms, Edward. 1986. Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wagner, Birgit. 1997. “Auslöschen, vernichten, gründen, schaffen: zu den performativen Funktionen der Manifeste” in “Die ganze Welt ist eine Manifestation”. Die europäische Avantgarde und ihre Manifeste. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: 39-57. Wagner, Nike. 1982. Geist und Geschlecht, Karl Kraus und die Erotik der Wiener Moderne. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Zohn, Harry. 1994. “Karl Kraus und der Expressionismus” in Klaus Amann and Armin A. Wallas (eds.) Expressionismus in Osterreich: Die Literatur und die Künste. Wien: Bohlau: 515-25.
The Rhetoric of Violence. Avant-Garde Manifestoes and the Myths of Racial Community Laura Winkiel The new man stretches the wings of his soul, he orients his inner ear toward things to come, his knees find an altar before which to bend. He carries pandemonium within himself, the pandemonium naturae ignotae, for or against which no one can do anything. His neck is twisted and stiff, he gazes upward, staggering toward redemption like some fakir or stylite; a wretched martyr of all centuries, anointed and sainted, he begs to be crushed, one day to be consumed in the burning heart, racked and consumed – the new man, exalted, erring, ecstatic, born of ecstasy. Ahoy, ahoy, huzza, hosanna, whips, wars of the eons, and yet human, the new man rises from the ashes, cured of all toxins, and fantastic worlds, saturated, stuffed full to the point of disgust with the experience of all outcasts, the dehumanized beings of Europe, the Africans, the Polynesians, all kinds, feces smeared with devilish ingredients, the sated [sic?] of all genders: Ecce homo novus, here is the new man. (Huelsenbeck 1991: xxxv) Oh! Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse [...]. When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart! (Marinetti 2001:21)
The two epigraphs are from manifestoes of diametrically dissimilar avant-garde groups. The first, by a Dadaist whose avant-garde movement was dedicated to “an unconventional language, an unconventional art. Our search was for the deepest language, a language expressing man’s deepest concern, his doubt” (Huelsenbeck 1991: xxxvii). The second, by the leader of Futurism, F.T. Marinetti, whose avant-garde group effused the wonders of modernity and aspired to lead the masses “excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot” (Marinetti 2001: 22). Despite their differences, each manifesto makes
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its claims through figures of racial alterity: the first through an experiential identification with “all outcasts, the dehumanized beings of Europe, the Africans, the Polynesians, all kinds”; and the second through an incorporation of the other. As Marinetti “gulped down [the] nourishing sludge”, he compares it with conflated notions of the abject – maternal, muddy, filthy, stinking – figured racially as the black breast of his Sudanese nurse. It is well known that the historical avant-garde, in its war against bourgeois rationality and materialism, sought by means of the primitive, the childlike and the insane, to retrieve “primordial memory, in an unrecognizably repressed and buried world[,] which is liberated through the uninhibited enthusiasm of the artist” (Huelsenbeck 1991: xxxiii). This essay will suggest, however, that the use of racial difference in avant-garde manifestoes is not merely a shorthand reference to the irrationality of primordial memory or a racial unconscious. Rather, this essay will argue first of all that the history of the manifesto form transmits the racial contradictions of Enlightenment discourse to the avant-garde, despite their ostensible stance against Enlightenment rationality; secondly, its racial discourse animates new aestheticized forms of modern political communities, subjectivities and by extension also political citizenship; and, finally, that it continues through the rhetoric of violence to function as a regulatory force to discipline bodies into modernity and modern democratic politics.
The Manifesto The genealogy of the manifesto reveals its contradictory formation in both absolutist and democratic forms of government. In its earliest guise in the twelfth century, European heads of state, religious leaders and other public officials used the manifesto to make religious proofs, academic axioms, and state decisions such as executing political prisoners, going to war, and passing decrees clearly understood to its literate public. While the first definition of manifesto, as a printed declaration, explanation or justification of the policy of an individual or group of public relevance, carries with it an emphasis on rational communication, the root sense of manifest suggests otherwise. Manifest presents a literalness of meaning that seemingly does not require interpretation. It is a piece of evidence that is clearly revealed
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to the eye, an obvious fact. This obviousness is extended by manifesto writers to wield words as weapons – as polemic – in which the absolute certainty of its message contains the threat of violence. The manifesto’s refusal to accommodate differences of opinion and its war-like stance is suggested also by the possible etymology of “manus” and “festus” or “hostile hand”. Further repudiating compromise, the manifesto form offers Manichean rhetorical structures of audience and history: “we” versus “they” and “now” versus “then.” The manifesto’s announcement of a signal event of dissent proclaims the novelty and unfamiliarity of what it conveys. More than anything, manifestoes are documents of rupture. Whether geared towards political revolution, statist action or a new aesthetic, they aim to change the course of history. Claude Abastado asserts that the manifesto “undoes history and remakes time” (1980: 6). The manifesto’s language of rupture lifts its statements out of historical continuity and the weight of tradition, and, as such, the manifesto’s pronouncements become self-generative or performative. It remakes not only future possibility but the present moment in its severed relation to the past. As the manifesto announces a break from the past, it serves as a crucial tool in advancing the rhetoric of modernity. Its “iterable structure,” as Janet Lyon argues, “activat[es] the symbolic force of the form’s role in earlier political confrontations: to write a manifesto is to announce one’s participation, however discursive, in a history of struggle against oppressive forces” (1999: 10). That the genre’s form and rhetoric were established long before its use in popular revolutions and the bourgeois public sphere, Lyon adds, indicates its stability as a signifying form. The avant-garde manifesto takes its place among “a long-standing diachronic narrative of exclusion and oppression” (1999: 30). This history of manifesto interventions, Lyon claims, “serves as a rebuke to modernity’s narratives of progress” that promise liberty and equality for all. Indeed, many anti-colonial writers have argued that the occluded history of the colonial periphery allowed for the development of Western forms of political modernity and the overcoming of racial particularities for only certain subjects of modernity. As early as 1938, C. L. R. James’ The Black Jacobins drew attention to the economic basis of slavery and slave-trade in the political modernity of the French Revolution. James cites Jean Jaurès’ Histoire Socialiste de
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la Révolution Française (1922) which remarks on the “sad irony of human history [… that the] fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation” (James 1989: 47). But this emancipation did not extend to France’s colonies. When the slaves asked for their equality and freedom during the French Revolution, James writes, “the maritime bourgeois, frightened for their millions of investments and their trade, went red in the face and put the Rights of Man in their pocket whenever the colonial question came up” (1989: 68-69). James’ formulation emphasizes the exclusionary nature of political modernity based on Enlightenment theories of universalism. Analyzing the legacy of this philosophy through the lens of racism and racial science, Paul Gilroy warns that “modernity’s new political codes must be acknowledged as having been compromised by the raciological drives that partly formed them and wove a deadly, exclusionary force into their glittering universal promises” (2000: 62). He suggests that modernity’s universality was from its inception invalidated by its collusion with racial terror in the colonies. The contradictions between the ostensible universalism of Enlightenment discourse and the racial exclusions permitting colonization and trade to benefit nascent Anglo-European republics and monarchies extended fully into the twentieth century. These contradictions – between race and modernity – are inherited by the historical avant-garde despite their proclaimed break from the past and the wide spectrum of political positions they ostensibly hold. The contradictions between race and modernity, too, must be understood as what Gilroy terms “rational irrationalism”, the mythic assumptions of race that produce the very apex of Enlightenment rationalism (2000: 65). In examining these racial myths of modernity, he argues that racialization produces the philosophies of Enlightenment modernity themselves, that is, theories of racial difference made political modernity possible to think at all. In mitigating violence and differential treatment in regard to those peoples in the periphery (as exemplified in Kant’s notorious anthropological writings, marking them as not universal or rational), European national communities are differentially constituted as modern, rational, universal communities that are bounded within a clearly demarcated territory.
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Just as philosophies of modernity depended on racialized difference to construct the modern subjects and communities, the manifesto genre, too, has long depended upon racial myths to ground its creation of communities who break from the past in order to realize their liberties. As a document of modernity’s ruptures, the manifesto’s dual functions of “manifesting” self-evident truths and breaking from the past hold together in tense and often dissonant array the contradictions of modernity: between history and myth, and universality and particularity. They rely on “recognizing” community and its destiny often in racial terms. In periods of revolutionary activity, when the public sphere is expanded as pamphlets, manifestos, newsletters, journals, posters, broadsides increase exponentially, the rhetorics of race and liberty are conjoined. For instance, the English Revolution of 1640-1688 animated its protest of Norman legal and economic structures by invoking the myth of Anglo-Saxon liberty (Horsman 1981). Tracing Anglo-Saxon roots to Teutonic origins, Revolutionary pamphleteers cited Tacitus’s Germania which propounded the idea that Germans are a freedom-loving race, “untainted by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves” (Horsman 1981: 12). This “pure” race had, so the pamphleteers claimed, a high moral code and a profound love of freedom and individual rights. Radical thinkers in England eagerly extended these ideas to England’s pre-conquest past in order to argue for a return to its freedom-loving roots. These AngloSaxonist ideas travelled to the United States and appeared in the doctrine of manifest destiny, a myth carried forward into the modern future as a racial destiny to be free. The phrase “manifest destiny” suggests a kinship with the manifesto’s rupture from the past and embraces a new future, legitimizing its purpose through the creation of a mythic racial community. In “manifest destiny”, political modernity is delineated by theories of racial difference, especially in terms of those races capable of transcending local particularities by means of abstract ideas such as liberty. In particular, these mythologies of race serve to justify modernity’s reference to itself as a normative principle. 1 One’s newness is self-generational and therefore subject to a legitimation crisis. For that reason, the new aesthetic, political idea or movement must present itself as the solution to a present crisis that is constructed as urgent and threatening to citizenship and community. 2
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Aestheticized Politics Extending the idea of the political to incorporate a post-Foucauldian notion of power, this section will first examine Futurism’s and Vorticism’s fascination with modern forms of power as they deploy racial discourse to generate new forms of modern political communities and subjectivities. 3 It will conclude by comparing them to the racialized discourse of Dadaism to demonstrate how two very different political orientations – the ultranationalism of Futurism and Vorticism and the anarchic, “unworkable” impulse of Dadaism – depend on racial myths to constitute their communities. To show how myth animates avant-garde manifestos in their constitution of political communities and modern subjectivities, we shall begin with one of the chief sources of Futurism’s and Vorticism’s radical aesthetic practices: Georges Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism. Sorelian syndicalism, as articulated in the widely read Reflections on Violence (1908), advocated separatist vanguardist, working-class groups bound together in ardent solidarity and absolute confidence that modern society would soon face apocalyptic levels of conflict that would result in a regeneration, defined as a purge of bourgeois decadence, egoism, democratic parliamentarianism and hedonistic materialism. In his introductory letter to Daniel Halevy, Sorel defined the myth of the general strike as the motivating force behind the class-based revolution that he believed would clean up the decadent ills of bourgeois society. Sorel states, “A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical description” (1950: 50). Like the manifesto’s speech act of absolute certainty that refuses debate and analysis, the myth does something as it is uttered: it constitutes a group and its beliefs. And those beliefs are dynamic in nature, “the language of movement,” in which its actors “always picture their coming action in a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph” (1950: 39-40). The belief in an apocalyptic transformation accelerates activities as all deeds are thought to contribute to the impending overthrow of old forms of social organization. Moreover, this “kind of feeling” is “so closely related to those which are necessary to promote production in any very progressive state of
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industry” (1950: 51). Sorel imagines myth spontaneously infusing a group with the discipline, energy and self-sacrifice that he likens to “tribalism.” The “tribe” is defined as a kinship unit based on blood relations, though Sorel refuses any notion of barbarism or archaism. The modern “tribe” employs violence as a virtue, one that ensures group solidarity and sacrifice in the promise of apocalyptic social conflict and cleansing. This modern irrational or instinctual “feeling” is aligned with industrialism and, a bit later, national supremacy. (Sorel became a nationalist in 1909.) The revolutionary power of the Sorelian myth of violence was then enfolded in support of the state. Sorel eschewed the power of words in favour of primordial forces – violence – to transform modern democratic society completely. In his defence of violence, he argued that it carries forward into modern times the fervent morality of religious faith and authoritarianism of the tradition. (The historical avant-garde, however, would distance itself from this tenet, refusing tradition and academicism of any form.) In illustrating how violence produces stark and vigorous moral character in its social members, Sorel relates how in 1860, a Colorado mining town cleared itself of bandits by means of “lynch law”. Lynch law, he explains, “was frequently put into operation; a man accused of murder or of theft might be arrested, condemned and hanged in less than a quarter of an hour, if an energetic Vigilance Committee could get hold of him” (1950: 181). This social mechanism, he claims, produced an excellent habit in the American citizen: He does not allow himself to be crushed on the pretext that he is virtuous. A law-abiding man is not necessarily a craven, as is often the case with us. [...] Moreover, he possesses the necessary energy to resist, and the kind of life which he leads makes him capable of resisting effectively, even of taking the initiative and the responsibility of a serious step when circumstances demand it. (1950: 181)
Not only did violence render citizens virtuous, but those very acts produced rigid demarcations of ethnic and national solidarity. Lynch law, of course, not only cleared towns of bandits, but it also, by eliminating due process, imposed racial terror upon AfricanAmericans in order to prevent racial intermixing and to effect social, political and economic segregation. It was, chiefly, an American phenomenon, whereas, in Europe, such racial violence occurred mainly in the colonies.
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In a similar fashion, the colonies served for Marinetti as a threshold experience for the “conquest of modernity”. Marinetti’s ties to the colonies were extensive and crucial to his work and imagination. As is well known, he derived his publishing connections from the colonial fortune amassed by his father, a wealthy lawyer in Alexandria Egypt. In addition, he managed his publishing coup, the printing “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” on the front page of Le Figaro, through the aid of his father’s business friend, Mohammed El Rachi, an Egyptian Pasha who happened to be a shareholder of the newspaper and a friend of the director, Gaston Calmatte (Berghaus 1998: 45). Moreover, Marinetti served at the Libyan front in 1911 and as a war correspondent in the Balkans in 1912. His “great fire-brand novel” Mafarka le Futuriste: Roman africain (1909), moreover, imagines the heroics of imperial warfare, the conquest and pillage of African tribes and territories. Emilio Gentile explains that “the capacity and power to master the processes of modernization” entailed a consolidation of national coherency to enable its participation in world politics (1994: 58-60). This logic is circular: the nation depends on its colonies not only for economic resources but for its own consolidation as a nation defined against that which is foreign. In other words, its superior identity legitimates its economic dominance which then confirms its superiority. 4 The unification of Italy as a nation-state was accompanied by the development of Italian colonial aspirations in the early twentieth century, particularly in North Africa. This feat of colonization would prove to the world Italy’s pre-eminence as a civilizing force and economic power. Enacting this superiority meant disciplining national subjects as modern subjects. This interpellation occurred through a confrontation of the modern subject with the shocks, fragmentation and acceleration of modern life in order to appropriate and dispel their negative effects. This confrontation occurred through a rhetoric of violence aimed at effecting a cultural conquest of modernity and achieving national unity. Though Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” is international in its call for cosmopolitan artists and in its French language publication in Le Figaro, its celebration of national mobilization in war-time emergency anchors its cosmopolitan exuberance in nationalism. 5 The manifesto narrates the mythic transformation of the modern subject from a state of individual
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decadent passivity to one of collectivist modernist action. The manifesto’s narrative preface makes visible this infrastructure of group formation that subsequent avant-garde manifestos rely upon without needing to repeat the process explicitly. The manifesto begins in an Oriental interior setting, one that evokes the setting of decadent poetry. “Hanging mosque lamps” are artificial and confined, like the Futurist’s own spirits that shine “with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts” (2001: 19). Marinetti and his fellow writers trample “atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blacking many reams of paper with [their] frenzied scribbling” (2001: 19). Then, they begin walking in the silence of the old city where they hear the “feeble prayers” of the old canal and “the creaking bones of sickly palaces” (2001: 19). Subsequently, the tenor of the narrative shifts as they “suddenly hea[r] the famished roar of automobiles” (2001: 20). The hard metallic bodies and powerful engines of their automobiles supplement the mobility and impermeability of their bodies. They become modern mythic Centaurs. While the men become machines, the mechanical forms including trains, ships, and automobiles are anthropomorphized. This blurring of organic and nonorganic boundaries results in a fantasy of control over the forces of life and death: “Death, domesticated, passed me at every turn to hold out her paw gracefully, and once in a while laid down with a noise of strident jaws, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle” (2001: 20). Death, the ultimate symbol of material chaos and unintelligibility, is feminized, its flirtatious behaviour invites Futurist mastery. 6 And while Marinetti alone appears to have crashed his car – “I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air,” as he re-emerges from the ditch and revives his car, “alive again” – the narrative becomes collective (2001: 20-21). Group unity is achieved: “And so, faces smeared with good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot – we bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth” (2001: 21). Only then can the collectively uttered exhortations of the manifesto, its eleven points, begin. The violence of modernity – the automobile crash, in this case – generates group cohesion, heroism, and the enhancement, rather than annihilation, of bodies by modern technologies.
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This prosthetic performance of man and automobile – crashing and resurrecting – recasts the trauma of modernity as “ecstasy, accident as adventure, death drive as joy ride” (Schnapp 1999: 7). Whereas Jeffrey Schnapp argues that the accident itself recasts Marinetti’s stance towards modernity, I read the crash as effecting its transformation essentially through the figurative consumption and expulsion of the African nurse. An encounter with racial difference becomes the threshold experience for Marinetti’s transmogrification into a metallized man, the revolutionary subject of modernity. 7 The chaos of death hovers near as Marinetti’s car is overturned. Marinetti, lying prone, mingles intimately with a fusion of organic/industrial material, figured as a life-giving mother: “O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse” (2001: 21). The proximity to the maternal is at once assimilated and rejected. 8 Barbara Spackman has argued that the central question in Mafarka the Futurist, published just months after “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”, is that of proximity, not only of man to woman but “also the proximity of Futurist Europe to its once and future colonies” (1994: 91). Africa is figured in the novel not as a premodern past but as the future of a reinvigorated Italy (1994: 90). This proximity is negotiated and warded off by troping the black bodies in the novel either as consumable commodities to be exported to the metropolis – grapes, bananas, coffee, sugar, vanilla – or as pulverized bodies abjectly cast as putrefying cesspools. 9 Spurred on either from his virile, avid sexual consumption of commodified body parts or vile disgust at packs of “mangy, stinking curs!” (Marinetti 1998: 170), Mafarka performs his heroic feats of conquest. His followers, too, become extensions of Mafarka’s will, aligned with technological feats of military prowess and the conquest of Africa, both militarily and sexually. Mafarka announces: “I teach you to despise death, to feed on danger, and to gamble your life, as you are doing now, for an idea, a glance, a performance!” (Marinetti 1998: 145). The future is an open question for collective military, economic and racial expansion. Like Mafarka the Futurist, the “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” constructs its community in relation to the myth of the racial other. Marinetti mingles with the factory cesspool and emerges
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abjectly – torn, filthy, stinking – from the haunches of his car. His rebirth as man-machine is diametrically opposed to the consumable body of the Sudanese nurse metonymically related to the cesspool. The recollected nurse’s body allows for the fantasy of absolute cultural difference which, as Paul Gilroy notes, works “through appeals to the value of national or ethnic purity. Their biopolitical potency immediately raises questions of prophylaxis and hygiene, ‘as if the (social) body had to assure itself of its own identity by expelling waste matter’” (2000: 83, quoting Lefort 1986: 298). This fantasy of absolute difference – presented as self-evident – allows for the formation of the Futurist collective and their ecstatic manifesto declaration: “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness” (Marinetti 2001: 21). The violence of the accident, rather than being figured as traumatic shock, is cast as ecstasy that Schnapp reads as “sunder[ing] bonds to the past and in their place, forge[ing] new links between men, machines, and their environment” (1999: 7-8). These “metallicized” subjects – Marinetti and his cohorts – are immune to threats posed by “degeneration, fatigue, mortality and an overburdened historical consciousness” (1999: 8). They perform their superiority over passive, inert others, leading Italy through a “revolution of the mind” (Gentile 1994: 72) that will impose its will on other territories, and compete effectively with other modern imperial nations. Indeed, Marinetti’s Futurist “invasion” of England galvanized the formation of the British avant-garde group, the Vorticists, to order to compete with Futurism. Marinetti made four trips to England prior to the Great War to give lectures and concerts and to participate in art exhibits and a women’s suffrage demonstration. Aiming to stimulate a passé English culture in order to surpass Italian Futurism, the Vorticists declared a crisis of English culture: “BLAST years 1837 to 1900 / Curse abysmal inexcusable middle-class (also Aristocracy and Proletariat) [...] WRING THE NECK OF all sick inventions born in that progressive white wake. BLAST their weeping whiskers – hirsute RHETORIC of EUNUCH and STYLIST” (Lewis 1981: 18). 10 The Vorticists then mythologize an Anglo-Saxon past in order to promote its imperial supremacy and to regenerate England through avant-garde art. Given that Vorticism severed its ties to English institutions of art, it depended on racial myths to create new affective bonds. The first Vorticist manifesto announces that “the art instinct is permanently
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primitive” and that “We are Primitive Mercenaries of the Modern World” (Lewis 1981: 30). As mercenaries, they promote violence for its own sake rather than for sentimental patriotism. They praise “gladiatorial instincts, blood and asceticism” (Lewis 1981: 34). Their appeal to discipline, violence, and self-sacrifice purge their artist group from bourgeois materialism and hedonist self-indulgence. And they distinguish Vorticism’s greater atavism from Futurism’s more popularizing rhetoric: “the artist of the modern movement is a savage (in no sense an ‘advanced,’ perfected, democratic, Futurist individual of Mr. Marinetti’s limited imagination)” (Lewis 1981: 33). Given this national rivalry, Vorticism presents itself as having a more suitable aesthetic vision than Futurism’s more popular appeal – its accelerated modernolatry that was aligned with airplanes, motorcars and commodity culture. By contrast, the Vorticist manifesto declares that “The Modern World is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius, – its appearance and its spirit” (Lewis 1981: 39). Their aesthetic, they maintained, is appropriately universal, capable of “worlding” its colonial territories. Vorticism advocated an aesthetic of geometric precision and the myth of atavism as a motive force for a carefully moulded modernist revolution. This ordered will to art was believed to be capable of holding the masses under the sway of strong leadership and directing their great – but often dangerous – energies along the path outlined by vanguardist art. Potent political myths, then, deployed effectively, could animate the power and direction of the modern crowd and suggest what racial and national belonging would look like. For instance, the first Vorticist manifesto argues that the English people, more than any other people in Europe, have been the inventors of “this hardness and bareness” defined as “the Art that is an organism of this new Order and Will of Man” (Lewis 1981: 41). The artist should be inhuman, with a clarity of “clean clear cut emotions” that can order the world through art (Lewis 1981: 141). Like the Futurists, they align themselves with modern forms of power, seeking a conquest of modernity fully in line with its disciplinary aims of efficiency, effectiveness and economic domination. Vorticism’s relation with racial others remains completely detached. In “The New Egos,” Vorticist leader Wyndham Lewis declares that:
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[African sculpture] is monotonous. The one compact human form is his Tom-Tom. We have nothing whatever to do with this individual and his bullet. Our eyes sweep life horizontally. [...] The African we have referred to cannot allow his personality to venture forth or amplify itself, for it would dissolve in vagueness of space. It has to be swaddled up in a bullet-like lump. But the modern town-dweller of our civilization sees everywhere fraternal moulds for his spirit, and interstices of a human world. He also sees multitude, and infinite variety of means of life, a world and element he controls. (1981: 141)
While an African personality would “dissolve in vagueness of space” should he venture outside of his local particularity, the metropolitan subject “sees everywhere” kinship for his spirit. The world is literally at his disposal, “infinite variety of means of life,” and under his control. The geometrical and classical precision of Vorticism, as opposed to the exuberant, impressionist messiness of Futurist dynamism, maintains absolute boundaries against the named but dismissed African sculptor: “we have nothing whatever to do with this individual”. 11 Yet Vorticism freely appropriates the formalism of primitive sculpture for its own geometrical aesthetic. By contrast, dada, as formulated by Tristan Tzara in his manifestos, advocates a will to disorder, including the crossing of racial boundaries in an anarchic art that deconstructs axioms of logical thinking: the contradiction and unity of opposing poles at the same time may be true […]. Every man must shout: there is great destructive, negative work to be done. To sweep, to clean. The cleanliness of the individual materialises after we’ve gone through folly, the aggressive, complete folly of the world left in the hands of bandits who have demolished and destroyed the centuries. [...] Those who are strong in word or in strength will survive, because they are quick to defend themselves: the agility of their limbs and feelings flames on their faceted flanks. (Tzara 1992: 12)
The ability to engage in dada art rests with the strength and agility of the modern subject, waging war on conventionality and hypocritical rationality and moralism. The capacity of this citizen for liberty is signified by his refusal of socially normative categories: “Liberty: DADA DADA DADA; – the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks and irrelevances: LIFE” (Tzara 1992: 13). This guerrilla artist not only revolutionizes everyday modern life, he also reconstructs the binary of modern subject and
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primitive other by claiming a kinship with Africans that selfconsciously promotes (and produces) his domesticated alterity: “My other brother is good and naïve and laughs. He eats in Africa or along the South Sea Islands. [...] While working, new relationships organise themselves according to degree of necessity; this is how the expression of purity came into being” (1992: 57). European culture may be headed towards self-imposed destruction: it is presented by Tzara as abject, diseased, and under the throes of the liberty of anarchy, unworkable “freaks” and “irrelevancies,” but the African sculptor works under the purity of necessity, a stark and mythic, ritualized space of aesthetic production. The myth of true art remains elsewhere, prior to history, in Africa and Polynesia.
The Violence of Rhetoric The myth-making function of the avant-garde manifesto envisions a ritualized performance space. It eschews the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason in favour of primitive irrationality in order to create an ideal political community based on affective, spontaneous, courageous engagement with modernity. The pre-war Futurists faced the clearest – because most proximate – need to break from their decadent and symbolist precursors. As the first of the historical avantgarde, they needed to show their audiences how to read modern aesthetics. Futurist manifestos deployed aspects of popular entertainment culture to produce the decontextualized simultaneity of the disparate fragments of contemporary culture. In envisioning new forms of spectatorship and ritualized performances, Futurist manifestos often produce modern bodies and their regulation. 12 In particular, Futurism included racialized and sexualized bodies in the culture they drew upon by acting to exclude them from their myth of the masculine normativity of modern spectatorship. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” performs the pedagogical service of preparing the public to be open to and ready for the onslaught of modern art. 13 This gap in understanding is achieved through the manifesto’s hostile tone of address and rhetoric of violence. With the Futurists’ call to “Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!” (2001: 23), the urgency and intensity of exhortation creates in artists
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and their audiences a sensibility of themselves as potential instruments of change in the present moment. The manifesto’s insults create the immediate effect of stirring its audience to action. Linking performers with spectators in The Variety Theatre Manifesto 1913, Marinetti demolishes the fourth wall of dramatic performance. He imagines an audience provoked by sneezing powder or glue on their seats, becoming active and forcibly stirred into concrete action. He also suggests staging performances in which planted actors in the audience instigate general mayhem. He advocates “selling the same ticket to ten people: traffic jam, bickering, and wrangling” (2001: 130). Or worse still: “Offer free tickets to gentlemen or ladies who are notoriously unbalanced, irritable, or eccentric and likely to provoke uproars with obscene gestures, pinching women, or other freakishness” (2001: 130). The disturbing force of these activities accompanies Marinetti’s interest in language in its most concrete aspects – its visual and aural qualities. For Marinetti, words do not represent something else, but contain the possibility in themselves to injure, and, to bring home this point, he imagines his stirring Futurist performance to be accompanied by acts of real violence, especially against women. Bringing the subject into modernity through what Judith Butler has called a “life-imbuing reprimand” (Butler 1995: 203), the manifesto’s violent speech acts function as a regulatory force to discipline bodies into modernity. These injurious acts unsettle audience complacencies, locate chinks in the ego’s armor, and polarize responses that are either passive and passé or aggressive and modern. Marinetti announces in the “Variety Theatre Manifesto” that: “In its swift overpowering dance rhythms the Variety Theatre forcibly drags the slowest souls out of their torpor and forces them to run and jump” (Marinetti 2001: 127). The provocative, shocking and threatening language of the manifesto fosters a somatic tension in its readers, an imaginative readiness to take action in the face of violent confrontation. The exhortations in the Futurist manifestos function much like a drill sergeant in producing military men. As we have seen, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” proclaims its aims in a collective, self-consciously enunciative voice: “We, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth” (2001: 21). Bruised and beaten, the Futurists have become men: hardened, shielded, courageous, ready to take action in the
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coming apocalyptic battle. Further, the myth of violence in the manifesto attempts to make meaning manifest: it shows rather than explains. It renders things concretely and transposes meaning into the sensorial realm, especially the visual. Its exhibitionist strategy in this regard mimics the literal performances of Variety Theatre: jugglers who juggle, flying trapeze artists who literally fly, monstrous bodies who display themselves as they are. For instance, rather than instruct an audience, Marinetti’s “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” presents a slap-stick image of the museum: “Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with colour-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!” (2001: 22). Imagining the pounding blows, dissonant shapes and colors, the audience may be at first fearful of being harmed by the implied threat of Marinetti’s direct address. However, given an active process of reading, they are interpellated into the Futurists’ position; their modern stance arises from rising to the challenge of the confrontational performance of Futurist masculinities and their impenetrable, aggressive stance. They recover from their fear and, ideally, convert such energy into an embrace of the thrills and astonishment of the new aesthetic of modernism. By insulting its audience, manifesto writers attempt to change the lived experience of its audience by provoking it to participate in the chaotic conditions of modern life. They invoke the physical sensation of violence and produce hardened citizens through the technique of shock. 14 Marinetti similarly conditions his audience to repress the anxious fear of modernity by envisioning a simulacrum of that same violence and overcoming the accompanying fear by denying it: “The Variety Theatre is alone in seeking the audience’s collaboration. It doesn’t remain static like a stupid voyeur, but joins noisily in the action” (2001: 127). Marinetti proclaims the Variety Theatre to be the only school one can recommend to young men “because it explains, quickly and incisively, the most abstruse problems and most complicated political events” (2001: 128). His example of this “school” is a pantomimic dance performed at the Folies-Bergère: instead of two years of meandering discussions between Cambon and Kinderlen-Watcher on the question of Morocco and the Congo, they danced a revealing symbolic dance “that was equivalent to at least three years’ study of foreign affairs. Facing the audience, their arms entwined, glued together, they kept making mutual territorial
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concessions, jumping back and forth, to left and right, never separating, neither of them ever losing sight of his goal, which was to become more and more entangled” (2001: 128). Marinetti’s invocation of violence is aestheticized as brute force and the fantasy of dominance. It would break such a diplomatic deadlock through its rhetoric of imperial war. Such violent rhetoric enforces the myth-making of the manifesto. Marinetti attempts to inscribe violently the effects of his manifesto’s speech acts on the reader’s body, insisting on urgent, forceful action and transparent communication in which sign (as in Vorticism’s first manifesto, “Blast England!”) and referent (you the reader: “Curse those who hang over this Manifesto with SILLY CANINES exposed”) collide (Lewis 1981: 17). Such insult and injury subject the reader to an identity formation within the hostile conditions of modern life: either brutal and dominating like Futurists and Vorticists or effete, “silly,” and decadent and thereby excluded from its fiction of mastery. Their jeers aim to provoke a will to revolt and an embrace of a heroic sublime of violence aimed at abject others, those who cannot transcend their racial and gender particularities. As with Marinetti’s crash in “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” the audience is instructed to identify with a process of sensuously, porously mingling with the racially and sexually other, siphoning from it a primal, physical energy, and then triumphantly detaching from that permeable, chaotic body. Even further, Marinetti’s new poetics of “words in freedom”, detaches completely from the material laws of syntax and meaning and from the materiality of bodies themselves. “Words-in-freedom” obliterate syntax and logic to allow expressive force to expand “without strings” through a frenzied sequence of sensorial effects and imaginary associations. As Cinzia Blum notes, “the resulting explosion of imaginative energy stretches the boundaries of the subject to encompass a whole universe” (Blum 1996: 164). For instance, Marinetti announces in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” that “art, this extension of the forest of our veins […] pours out, beyond the body, over the infinity of space and time” (Flint 1971: 89). Schnapp has shown in detail how the 1911 Battle of Tripoli at which Marinetti served was an experimental ground for Futurist poetics: “It permitted words in freedom to be hatched as a literary analog both of the newly mechanized, transparent battlefield and of a
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montage-based aesthetic of reportage emerging from within the primitive documentary cinema” (1994: 169). These new technologies were available through the first use of airplanes in theatres of war. The rhetoric of transcendence, Schnapp argues, is “grafted onto the technology of flight,” just as “the related discourses of exploration and colonization have been fully projected onto what was referred to as the ‘aerial continent’” (1994: 169). Marinetti’s poetics support an international race for conquest of the air: modernity’s expansion and domination of others. “Words-in-Freedom” expresses an aerial detachment from – but steadfast participation in – the effects of modern violence. While Marinetti excludes racialized subjects from participation in modern citizenship, they are crucially objectified through representation in metropolitan entertainments and avant-garde aesthetic production. Marinetti invokes popular entertainments that objectify live bodies as non-representational, thereby reducing them to pure form. They provide a literal physicalization of performance: flying trapeze artists were literally flying, contortion artists used their bodies as their sculptural material, and freakish bodies were grotesque and often artificial. These bodies on display present an alogical performance that was believed to be a direct experience, unmediated by rational explanation. Their violent behaviour – whether performing magic tricks, incredible feats of physical prowess, erotic striptease, or transporting the spectator to far away cinematic scenes of exotic or bizarre locations (actualités), predicated on a “you are there” sensation of temporal and spatial proximity – collapsed time and space and fixed meaning onto bodies in a hieroglyph of signification. Bodies are composed as what Antonin Artaud would later call “symbols that are precise and immediately legible” (2001: 455). Sign and referent became one as their performances were unmediated by story narrative, imitation of other conventional (realist) forms or through editing or fourth wall artifice. The space for interpretation is unnecessary: meaning is immediately conveyed. For boxers, jugglers, trapeze artists, gymnasts and slap-stick actors, meaning resided in gestures believed to be essential expressions of the body, unmarked by history and conventional representation: “The Variety Theatre offers us all the records so far attained: the greatest speed and finest gymnastics and acrobatics of the Japanese, the greatest muscular frenzy of the Negroes, the greatest development of animal intelligence” (Marinetti
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2001: 129). More than anywhere else, Europeans looked to Africans for the original immediacy of physical sensation and movement, unmediated by language and history. 15 This strategy ensured that decadent fuzziness and the incoherence of matter are eliminated through the violence of signs inscribed onto bodies that have fixed meanings lifted out of the time and space of history. The final portion of Marinetti’s “The Variety Theatre 1913” breaks down signifying logic still further, turning words into nonsense and onomatopoeia and again changing black bodies into pure commodified signification: Immense black face (30 metres high + 150 metres height of the building = 180 metres) open close open close a golden eye 3 metres high SMOKE SMOKE MANOLI SMOKE MANOLI CIGARETTES woman in a blouse (50 metres high + 120 metres of building = 170 metres) stretch relax a violet rosy lilac blue bust froth of electric light in a champagne glass (30 metres) sizzle evaporate in a mouthful of darkness electric signs dim die under a dark stiff hand come to life again [...] zuu zuoeu here we are dazzle of the promenade solemnity of the panther-cocottes in their comic-opera tropics fat warm smell of music-hall gaiety = tireless ventilation of the worlds’ Futurist brain. (2001: 131)
The black face is reduced to commodified sign, mechanically batting an eye. As blackness and flirtatious femininity are blurred together in a string of signs, words begin to dissolve into nonsense. Decadent formlessness appears again, only in the form of modernity’s acceleration of which the Futurist is master. He sees and conquers the world.
Anti-Colonialism The avant-garde manifesto’s performativity opens a space for other subjects to speak and for other modernisms to enter from different historical moments and locations. The contradictions of race and modernity present in avant-garde manifestos are explicitly addressed in anti-colonial avant-garde manifestos. In response to racial objectification, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire’s Surrealist manifestoes combine history with myth to combat organicist theories of nationalism. They redeploy the literalism inscribed on their bodies through reference to world-wide historical colonial suffering. Political
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struggle is positively envisioned as an unleashing of heterogeneity rather than its suppression or exclusion. This unleashing is accomplished by turning colonial violence back upon itself and translating that experience to the West to effect a dialectical exchange. Suzanne Césaire promises in her manifesto “Surrealism and Us” that “our Surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the sordid antinomies of the present: whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages – at last rediscovering the magic power of the mahoulis, drawn directly from living sources” (2001: 492). The unifying power of myth is drawn from the African-inspired indigenous practices of the Caribbean in order to contest organic theories of nationalism. Magic reenchants and heals the world made violent and corrupt through the binaries of western racialist thinking. Such binaries linger at times in Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land from which his 1942 manifesto is drawn. In the Notebook, Négritude refers sometimes to a “unique race” that is solely of African origin. At other times, however, it is a Jew-man / a kaffir-man / a Hindu-from-Calcutta man / a man-fromHarlem-who-does-not-vote/ the starvation-man, the insult-man, the tortureman, one could grab him at any time, beat him up, kill him - yes, kill him too - without having to account to anyone, without having to apologize to anyone. (1995: 85)
Césaire rethinks Humanism by inserting what remains outside the scope of European history – its disavowed brutality and racial exclusions – in order to render its abstract categories into a species of transformative praxis. The list-making series of historically particular, discontinuous positions join together in a disparate but “universal thirst” for emancipation and dignity. Further adapting a paratactic strategy to explode abstract theories of racial science, Césaire’s “In the Guise of a Literary Manifesto” (1942), as its title suggests, reveals the lie – the guise – of literary manifestoes’ universalist presumptions. It challenges the history of racial myths that are presented as self-evident “facts” of racial difference. The manifesto asks: Who and what are we? What a fine question! / Haters. Builders. Traitors. Voodoo priests. Especially. For we want all the devils / Yesterday’s, today’s / The iron-collared, the ones with a hoe / Indicted, prohibited, escaped like
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slaves / not to forget the ones from the slave ship [...] / So we’re singing. (2001: 484-85)
Mimicking the role of science in investigating the question of race, Césaire compiles an overdetermined series of answers that renders the question suspect. With the words, “So we’re singing,” Césaire selfreflexively comments on his poetic that renders Caribbean and black diasporic experience plural, remembered, and in dialogue with metropolitan centres of modernity. In this poetic dialogue, Césaire uses quintessentially modernist devices such as Surrealist defamiliarization of objects and formulations of subjectivity as abject and grotesque. He recontextualizes and revitalises these techniques through the political and historical exigencies of the so-called periphery of modernity – its early proletarianization as plantation labour and import/export economies. The “essential truths” of the black diaspora become a vital process of remembering a lost history, the abyss of the Middle Passage. Occupying that middle space, Césaire’s Notebook articulates a gap between two incommensurable positions: the modern and the savage. The poem drags that savage other (back) into the modern frame: “I and only I / take tongue with the ultimate anguish” (1995: 101). This line articulates a Du Boisian double consciousness. It belatedly re-sutures that subject split as it returns to itself through the looking glass. In a double movement, it occupies Western metropolitan, colonial and plantation sites simultaneously and yet differently: “Take tongue” (prends langue) deforms and steals the French language. The phrase also insists on the speaker’s corporeality and the horrific history of that embodiment. It literally refers to the punishment of cutting out a slave’s tongue, and, as poetic utterance, it indicates the spatial disjunction and “time-lag” (Bhabha) that accompanies the act of speaking as a black man. In addition, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire’s Surrealist technique seeks to mobilize the national-popular in a way quite different from Futurism and Vorticism. Suzanne Césaire wrote soon after the publication of the Notebook that: “Our Surrealism will supply this rising people with a punch from its very depths” (2001: 492). And, as proclaimed in the Notebook, as a people, the black diaspora will “recover our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unprecedented communions” (1995: 115). From the periphery, then,
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the black avant-garde gains its cutting edge from the populace, whose very distance from the centres of modernity allow access to reenchantment, communal history, and the defamiliarizing practices and objects unique to their location. Black Surrealism reconfigures Eurocentric understandings of modernity and importantly gives voice to occluded histories of modernity experienced as trauma. Black Surrealism cannily deploys the racial contradictions of Enlightenment discourse against the aims of the imperial metropolis. It infuses colonial subjects with their dramatic history at the forefront, rather than the prehistory, of modernity as a crucial component of global production and trade. Colonized subjects in the Caribbean form what C. L. R. James calls in his 1962 appendix to The Black Jacobins a modern proletariat (see James 1989). In writing history from the perspective of colonial subjects, black Surrealism deconstructs the exclusionary presumptions of Enlightenment philosophy while preserving the communitarian ethos of (anticolonial) nation building. Finally, its rhetoric of violence is recast as the strength of a people to have survived the violence of modernity – they “recover [their] value as metal” – and it is reconceived as the political will to build an inclusive, pluralist political community, “our cutting edge of steel”.
NOTES 1 Invoking Hegel’s formulation of Spirit “at work giving itself new form”, Habermas defines modernity as self-generational and conscious of its own aims of giving birth to itself: it has to create its normativity out of itself (italics his). This self-reference creates an anxious need to “pin itself down” (1996: 7) by conveying principles and definitions in order to legitimize itself. Among these principles and definitions that work to “pin down” modernity’s self-legitimation is the idea of autonomous, rational subjects capable of making universal aesthetic and ethical judgments. The capacity to judge is based upon the ability to overcome (by bracketing) embodied and visibly manifest particularities such as racial and gender characteristics. 2 For more on the crisis of legitimation faced (and, in part, created by) the avantgarde, see Somigli (2003). 3 Ziarek (2002: 95-96) has recently argued that the historical avant-garde’s radical anti-institutional impulse should not be reduced to “resistance or revolutionary overthrow of particular forms of power”. Instead, Ziarek asserts that the avant-garde should be thought of as “constitut[ing] a forceful challenge to the very idea of power and power oriented modalities of being”. Italian Futurism, in particular, aligns itself with this modern mobilization of technology as power, whereas, Ziarek notes, “a different current in the avant-garde, whether in Dadaism or Gertrude Stein’s writings,
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[…] takes us toward another sense of intensity: incalculability, disarticulation, and release from power-oriented, technological toward freedom”. Tristan Tzara’s manifestoes with their non-sequiturs and contradictions are “unworkable” and incalculable “and, hence, disarticulate the very paradigm of production as the formative force of modernity”. 4 For a reading of Mafarka le Futuriste in terms of this structure of national consolidation and imperial ambition, see Spackman (1994). 5 Consult Peppis (2000: 6) for how avant-garde cosmopolitanism and nationalism during the Age of Empire worked hand in hand. 6 I am drawing on Blum’s discussion of this scene (1996: 48-49). 7 In Mafarka the Futurist the hero Mafarka conquers all of Africa and only then engenders a machine-son Gazourmah (an airplane). In his triumph of parthenogenesis – self-creation – he announces that he has killed love (of women) and plans to found “the religion of externalized Will and daily Heroism [...] The divinity and individual continuity of the willful, all-powerful mind must be externalized, in order to change the world! [...] that is the only religion!” (Marinetti 1998: 146-47). His mastery over women and the colonial world becomes self-legitimizing. 8 Blum (1996: 49) has argued that “the feminine is simultaneously eschewed and retained, becoming a symbol of recovered primal forces that acquire supernatural power when channeled into technological structures through poetry”. However, Blum neglects to locate these primal forces in the racial otherness of the manifesto’s “maternal nurse.” 9 This point is made in Spackman (1994: 100). Mbembe affirms the base materiality of the African colonial subject, its ontological void, within colonizing regimes: “For, simply being a “body-thing,” the colonized was neither the substratum nor the affirmation of any spirit. As for his/her death, it mattered little if this occured by suicide, resulted in murder, or was inflicted by power; it had no connection whatever to any work that he/she had performed for the universal. His or her corpse remained on the ground in unshakeable rigidity, a material mass and mere inert object, consigned to the role of that which is there for nothing” (2001: 27). 10 The first Vorticist journal-manifesto Blast was written by Wyndham Lewis and cofounded with Ezra Pound. I refer to the manifesto voice as “the Vorticists” given that the manifesto was signed by, presumably, the Vorticist group (though in actuality two of the eleven signers were not Vorticist artists). 11 Although in practice Vorticism’s racial dynamics are much more complex than what is stated in its essays and manifestoes, see Winkiel, “Cabaret Modernism.” 12 Puchner makes a particular point of how the historical avant-garde distinguished “live” theatricality from the manifesto’s speech act performance: “The reason for this neglect [to consider the theatricality of the manifesto] lies in the fact that the theatricality these manifestoes envision is different from the theatricality on which they subsist. While the Futurist Variety Theatre is invested in “body madness” and a circus-like atmosphere, the manifesto had no body or any other representational content that could be staged” (2000: 126). However, Lyon calls “The Futurist Program [...] no more than a virtual set of interactive aesthetic and social dicta, extrapolated and reconstituted in innumerable manifestoes” (2000: 100). It is this performance of the virtual that I am exposing in my reading of Futurist manifestoes.
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Kaplan has argued that the manifesto “opens a discursive space for understanding [...] where there never was one” (1983: 77). 14 Schivelbusch (1986) has traced the parallels between military conditioning to ward off shock and modern train travelers. Shock occurs when a sudden and powerful event of violence disrupts the continuity of a situation and it also indicates the subsequent psychic state of derangement. It originated with massed troops who attacked an enemy collectively to compound the terrifying effect of their violence. Schivelbusch demonstrates how the means developed to control the impact of shock on modern armies was to assume a general state of dominance over nature, both technically and physically: “The process by which human beings get accustomed to new technical means that initially evoke mistrust and fear can be characterized as a process of repression of fear”. 15 Kwinter observes that “For many anthropologists, “primitive” societies were physical cultures; “savages” were more likely to respond emotionally and physically than intellectually. Indeed, “savages” were barely speaking animals, and anthropologists therefore scrutinized them for clues to the original meanings of physical gestures” (1992: 81).
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WORKS CITED Abastado, Claude. 1980. “Introduction à l’Analyse des Manifestes” Littérature 39: 311. Anderson, Amanda. 1998. “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds.) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press: 265-89. Artaud, Antonin. 2001. “The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto” in Mary Ann Caws (ed.) Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press: 451-59. Berghaus, Günter. 1998. Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944. Oxford: Clarendon. Bhabha, Homi. K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Blum, Cinzia. 1996. The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Butler, Judith. 1995. “Burning Acts - Injurious Speech” in Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds.) Performativity and Performance. New York and London: Routledge: 197-227. Césaire, Aimé. 1995. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land / Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. London: Bloodaxe. ---. 2001. “In the Guise of a Literary Manifesto, 1942” in Mary Ann Caws (ed.) Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press: 484-487. Césaire, Suzanne. 2001. “Surrealism and Us” in Mary Ann Caws (ed.) Manifesto: A Century of Isms. op cit. 489-92. De Gennaro, Mara. 2003. “Fighting ‘Humanism’ on Its Own Terms” in differences 14(1): 53-73. Dussel, Enrique. 1995. “Eurocentrism and Modernity” in J. Beverley, J. Oviedo and M. Aronna (eds.) The Postmodern Debate in Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press: 65-76. Gentile, Emilio. 1994. “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism” Modernism/Modernity 1(3): 55-87. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Griffiths, Richard. 1991. The Use of Abuse: The Polemics of the Dreyfus Affair and Its Aftermath. New York: St. Martin’s. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Horsman, Reginald. 1981. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Huelsenbeck, Richard. 1991. Memoirs of a dada Drummer. Berkeley: University of California Press. James, C. L. R. 1989. The Black Jacobins. New York: Vintage. Kaplan, Alice Yaeger. 1983. “Recent Theoretical Work with Pamphlets and Manifestoes” L’Esprit Créateur 23(4): 74-82. Kwinter, Sandford. 1992. “Torque: Towards a New Kinesthetic” in Jonathan Crary and Sandford Kwinter (eds.) Incorporations. New York: Zone Books: 70127.
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Lefort, Claude. 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. New York: Polity Press. Lewis, Wyndham (ed.). 1981. Blast. 1 (1914). Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow. Lyon, Janet. 1999. Manifesto: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Marinetti, F.-T. 1971. Marinetti: Selected Writing (R. W. Flint, ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ---. 1998. Mafarka the Futurist (Carol Diethe and Steve Cox, tr.). London: Middlesex University Press. ---. 2001. Futurist Manifestos (Umbro Apollonio, ed.). Boston: MFA Publications. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peppis, Paul. 2000. Literature, Politics and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901-1918. New York: Cambridge University Press. Puchner, Martin. 2000. “Screeching Voices: Avant-Garde: Manifestoes in the Cabaret” in Dietrich Scheunemann (ed.) European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives. Atlanta and Amsterdam: Rodopi: 113-36. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey. Berkeley: California University Press. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. 1994. “Propeller Talk” Modernism/Modernity 1(3): 153-78. ---. 1999. “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)” Modernism/Modernity 6(1): 149. Somigli, Luca. 2003. Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885-1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sorel, Georges. 1950. Reflections on Violence. New York: Collier. Spackman, Barbara. 1994. “Mafarka and Son: Marinetti’s Homophobic Economics” Modernism/Modernity 1(3): 89-107. Tzara, Tristan. 1992. Seven dada Manifestoes and Lampisteries. New York: Riverrun Press. Winkiel, Laura (forthcoming). “Cabaret Modernism: Vorticism and Racial Spectacle.” To appear in Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel (eds.). Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ziarek, Krzysztof. 2002. “The Turn of Art: The Avant-Garde and Power” New Literary History 33(1): 89-1
Uncanny Polemics and Ambivalent Reappraisals. The French debate on Surrealism on the Eve of the Cold War Steven Engels
Surrealism and partisan politics have always been closely intertwined, not only because of the well-known fact that some of the most prominent figures of the movement affiliated to the French Communist Party (PCF) during the thirties and forties, but also – and this is less well-known – because the political potential of Surrealism was readily recognised by various French intellectuals outside the Surrealist movement and the PCF. In this contribution, I will examine the intellectual debate on Surrealism during the decade following the Second World War by means of a critical reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature?, Claude Mauriac’s André Breton and Maurice Blanchot’s “Reflections on Surrealism”. My focus will be on the way in which these three representatives of the post-war French intelligentsia try to come to terms with Surrealism and its significance as a broad cultural movement with political ambitions. As I will show, they do so in very different ways, each of them evaluating the Surrealist community’s artistic production and political activities in terms of their own aesthetic categories and ideological agendas. Despite their obvious differences in opinion, however, at least two of the critics involved in the debate on Surrealism share the same problematical assumptions about the function of literature in modern society. In the end, these reveal more about the polemical intellectual climate in France on the eve of the Cold War than about the meaning of Surrealism itself.
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Quietism and Inefficiency (Sartre’s Polemic against Surrealism) The year is 1947. Only thirty months after the notorious “saison des juges”, a new generation of critics conquers the Parisian literary scene to express their own views on the history and the future of literature and society. Within this new constellation of critics Sartre occupies a prominent role. The publication of What is Literature? 1 constitutes a landmark in the development of French literary criticism, not so much because of the originality of Sartre’s views on the history of literature, but because of the enormous influence it has exerted on the public debate about the role of the novelist in modern society. For more than a decade, the terms in which Sartre set the debate dominated both academic and non-academic discussions of literature, forcing partisans and adversaries alike to confront the notion of “literary engagement”. At first sight, Surrealism seems to play only a minor role in Sartre’s essay which deals with the entire history of French literature from the twelfth century up and until the 1940s. The tone of his remarks on the French avant-garde is indeed overtly dismissive. According to Sartre, the whole movement should be discarded as a mere extreme repetition of abstract symbolist formalism with no real political implications. When examined with reference to the entire essay however, the pages concerned with Surrealism reveal a striking blind spot in Sartre’s view on the function of literature in contemporary society. In order to uncover this blind spot, we must first examine some of the keyconcepts which support his peculiar recounting of the history of French literature.
Alienation, abstraction and negativity In What is Literature? the concept of “alienation” refers to every form of literature which takes on a serving role and considers itself to be “a means, instead of an unconditional goal” (Sartre 1999: 178). 2 According to Sartre, the entire literary production of the seventeenth century should in this respect be considered as an alienated form of literature. Authors like Pascal, Corneille and Mme de Sévigné were forced to serve the ideology of the social elite, since there was no other audience available (Sartre 1999: 126-135). During the second half of the eighteenth century however, French society quickly
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changed, as did the sociological composition of the reading public, which expanded rapidly and became more and more heterogeneous. As a result, a new generation of writers emerged which now confronted a profoundly divided audience consisting both of bourgeois readers who wanted to elevate themselves through literature and the declining aristocracy. Philosophers and writers like Rousseau and Diderot seized the occasion: refusing to serve the ideological interests of any particular social class or group they invoked the idea of a “Universal Reason” to legitimize their writing practices. By the time the revolution was at hand, French literature had entered its first “negative” phase. Although the literature of that crucial period took pride in its own autonomy, according to Sartre, it remained “abstract” since it refused to bind itself to a concrete target audience (Sartre 1999: 135-140). What applies to the Classical age and the age of Enlightenment, applies also to the more recent period in French literary history. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the French literary scene is monopolised by a new form of alienated literature which serves the class interests of the now dominant bourgeoisie. And when after the revolution of 1848, which again divided the country, the French writer rediscovers his autonomy, he once again falls prey to the seductive powers of negativity. Stripped of its concrete content, during the second half of the century, the French novel degenerates into a purely formal and abstract game that advocates the ideal of useless beauty only to hide its own sterility. Neither the realists nor the symbolists manage to really break away from their own class: like haughty parasites, they profit from the bourgeois’ interest in art while claiming to despise his pragmatic and anti-aesthetic world-view (Sartre 1999: 145-156). “Alienation”, “negativity”, “abstraction”; Sartre’s version of French literary history is a bleak one. At the end of chapter three, he thus summarizes the dialectical evolution just described: Concrete and alienated at first, [literature] liberates itself through negativity and evolves towards abstraction; more precisely, during the Age of Enlightenment, it becomes abstract negativity, before it changes into absolute negativity at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. (Sartre 1999: 179)
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Sartre and Surrealism According to Sartre, a certain continuity of intention links the formal experiments of the Surrealist group to the gratuitous poetry of the symbolists, despite their obvious differences in style and tone. Like their nineteenth century predecessors, the Surrealists commend an anti-pragmatic and anti-utilitarian attitude towards art and life in general. Unlike the symbolists however, they no longer consider pragmatism to be typical of the bourgeoisie alone. Profoundly marked by the absurd rationality of the First World War, they assume it to be an essential quality of human nature itself. Hence their “metaphysical” revolt that is intended not so much to transform modern capitalist society as to destroy the self-image of man as an entirely rational subject (Sartre 1999: 206). By means of psychoanalysis and automatic writing they try to demonstrate that the so-called self-presence of the rational subject is a fallacious illusion, and that, in reality, the human consciousness is inhabited by all sorts of “parasitic outgrowths” (Sartre 1999: 202) of an undefined origin. It is not the subject alone which is under attack, however, but also the objective reality it inhabits and which it thinks it can control. In Sartre’s view, the creation of different kinds of imaginary and paradoxical objects – like Duchamp’s famous marble sugar lumps – has no other goal than to question the eternal essence of the things by which the so-called rational subject likes to be surrounded (Sartre 1999: 202-203). While, at first sight, this double-sided critique of both the subjective and the objective world may seem to demonstrate the Surrealists’ creativity, according to Sartre, it is not effective in the least. In fact, the whole enterprise is marked by a profound ambiguity. On the one hand, Breton and his partners have always stressed the destructive nature of their undertakings. On the other hand, every Surrealist creation – whether it is a painting, a poem or an “objet trouvé” – can be interpreted as a contribution to the culture which they claim to want to destroy. The verbal and artistic violence which characterizes all undertakings by the Surrealist movement is only symbolically effective. In the words of Sartre himself: “[The Surrealist] makes a lot of paintings and blackens a lot of paper, but he never destroys something for real” (Sartre 1999: 205). On the political level as well, the Surrealist enterprise proves to be extremely naïve. In a highly paradoxical way, Breton’s radicalism goes hand in hand with
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a remarkable quietism. Since every human “project” is denounced in advance, a Surrealist “politics” is simply impossible. In Sartre’s view, the ambiguous alliance with the French Communist Party (PCF) should therefore be considered as a regrettable misunderstanding on both sides. While the Surrealist movement considers revolutionary violence not as a means to change society but as a goal in itself, for the French communists the bloody revolution constitutes only the first phase in the construction of a better world. It is hardly surprising therefore, that both parties quickly fell out with one another. Contrary to the communists, the Surrealists always preferred the absolute negativity of the metaphysical revolt. This is why, after a series of mutual disappointments, they eventually got closer to the Trotskyites who, as a result of their minority position in the political field, were still preaching “pure negativity” at the time when the PCF entered into a new “phase of constructive organisation” (Sartre 1999: 207-210).
The return of the repressed Even if the highly polemical tone of the essay may seem shocking at first, Sartre’s condemnation of Surrealism is hardly surprising in itself. After all, the philosopher’s aversion to the avant-garde was already clearly present in “Erostratus” and “The Childhood of a Leader”, his pre-war short stories collected in The Wall (Sartre 1972). 3 What is surprising, however, is the enunciative position from which the verdict is pronounced. Upon a closer look at the basic assumptions underlying Sartre’s conception of literature, the few dismissive pages on Surrealism seem to constitute a curious anomaly in his plea for committed literature. As is well-known, Sartre’s theory of literature is in fact a theory of the novel. The logic of the entire essay rests on the clear-cut distinction between poetry and prose which is introduced in the first chapter. According to the author, the prose writer considers words to be merely instruments that permit him to unveil the reality of his own historical situation. As instruments, they do not have any value in themselves and can easily be replaced by equivalent expressions. The poet, however, refuses to use words, but offers them his services (Sartre 1999: 61). From his perspective, language is much more than just a transparent medium; it is in itself “a structure of the outside
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world” (Sartre 1999: 62). In short, the prose writer considers language to be a simple tool, while for the poet it is an end in itself. Therefore, and this is the point Sartre is trying to make, one cannot expect the poet to commit himself politically or morally via the anti-utilitarian and autotelic mode of writing that is his own. Such a demand for poetic engagement would be plain “foolishness” (Sartre 1999: 66). In light of these few remarks on the poet’s attitude towards language, the attention Sartre devotes to the Surrealist movement is all the more surprising because, Duchamp’s sugar lumps set aside, it is only Surrealist poetry we are dealing with in What is Literature? In the few pages concerning Breton and his followers, the prose writings of the Surrealist group are never even mentioned. If, however, the Surrealists are to be considered as poets, one wonders why Sartre even bothers at all to take them into account. In the first chapter, he decided to ban the poet from his own reflections on literature so as to focus his attention exclusively on the novelist. Three chapters later, it almost seems as if the banned itself manages to sneak back into the discourse from which it has been excluded. It appears as though, by the power of his own voice, he succeeds to break the silence that was imposed on him by the advocate of committed literature. Apparently, Surrealism cannot be cast aside as easily as Sartre wishes it to be. As a poetic movement with revolutionary ambitions, it stubbornly refuses to be confined to any one of his two basic categories, thus undermining the theoretical foundations underlying the plea for “committed literature”. Could it be that this is why Sartre feels compelled to address the issue of Surrealism at length, because, as a theorist of “littérature engagée”, he feels threatened by what he wants us to believe are nothing more than childish and inoffensive experiments? Perhaps. Whatever reasons Sartre may have had it is striking to note that he (literally) goes out of his way to ridicule both the Surrealists’ politics and their artistic production, although, according to the text’s own logic, the polemic against Surrealism is totally uncalled for.
An Ambivalent Rehabilitation (Claude Mauriac on Breton) While he may have been the most influential, Sartre certainly was not the only post-war critic who felt compelled to re-evaluate the contribution of the Surrealist avant-garde to the history of French
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literature and society. Only two years after What is Literature?, Claude Mauriac communicated his own views on Surrealism in a book-length essay entitled André Breton. Although the tone of the text is definitely less polemical than Sartre’s, one should not underestimate the strategic significance of Mauriac’s intervention in the intellectual debate on the avant-garde. As we will show in the following, the essay should be understood as a profoundly ambiguous attempt to rehabilitate Surrealism after Sartre’s severe condemnation. Mauriac’s book on Breton and his followers opens with a fairly detailed account of some of the most notorious misdemeanours and public happenings in which the Surrealist group was involved during the twenties and thirties and which, at the time, were heavily publicized in the Parisian media. According to Mauriac, however, their importance should not be over-emphasized. Cheap scandal is not what Surrealism is about. In order to properly understand the historical significance of the movement, one should look beyond the “caricature of Surrealism” produced by the media and uncover its more “fundamental secrets” (Mauriac 1949: 22). Throughout the first twenty pages of the essay, Mauriac goes out of his way to tone down the most controversial aspects of the Surrealists’ first public performances. According to him, the group’s taste for scandal and provocation should be understood as a result of their juvenile inexperience and of the bad influence exerted on their impressionable minds by fiendish people like Tristan Tzara (Mauriac 1949: 13). Furthermore, he points out that in the highly polemical and extremely radicalized climate of the twenties, one simply had to provoke in order to draw attention. Nonetheless, Mauriac readily admits that he as well (like his intended reader?) prefers the “mature Surrealism” of the thirties to its more flamboyant first appearances on the public scene. Also, he reckons that the Surrealist experiment is only really interesting to the extent that it moves beyond traditional political activism towards “a much more extensive revolution which aims to transform spiritual life itself” (Mauriac 1949: 23). Even if this is so, the first chapter of his book is entirely devoted to the political action of the group, and that is by no means coincidental.
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A misunderstanding misunderstood “Inefficient” and “quietist”; those were the terms used by Sartre in order to denounce Surrealism as a typical error of the pre-war period. According to Mauriac, however, Sartre underestimates the “tragical” dimension of the Surrealist enterprise. In his view, the “quietism” of which the latter accuses Breton and his comrades should be understood in light of the extreme politicization of the intellectual debate during the interwar period. If there really was a “misunderstanding” between Surrealists and communists, it rested primarily on a difference of opinion concerning the relationship between politics and ethics. The reluctance of the Surrealists in the domain of “concrete action” does not indicate a lack of firmness, but illustrates the “moral integrity” of Breton and his followers who just could not bring themselves to accept the idea that the revolutionary goals, which they, at least in part, shared with the PCF, justified every means available. Hence, the “tragic” dimension of the Surrealist enterprise, for they were lucid enough to realize that “he who refuses the means, is forced if not to renounce, then at least to indefinitely postpone the realization of the goal” (Mauriac 1949: 16). This line of reasoning, which is developed throughout the whole first chapter, clearly indicates what is at stake in Mauriac’s essay. By stressing the inherently “moral” nature of Surrealism, he tries to rescue it from Sartre’s explicit condemnation. Furthermore, he underlines the fact that, contrary to the communist party, the Surrealist group advocated a “total” revolution and never lost sight of the inherent limitations of purely political action. A few notable exceptions notwithstanding, they were the only ones of their generation, to have any interest at all in questions of an apolitical or trans-political nature. These introductory remarks on the political commitment of the Surrealist group give way to a number of issues which Mauriac treats in more detail in the subsequent parts of his book. The second chapter is entirely devoted to the moral dimension of Surrealism. Quoting abundantly from primary and secondary sources, the author tries to illustrate the fact that, from the very beginning, André Breton has understood Surrealism as a primarily “ethical” undertaking. In the next chapter, Mauriac stresses the religious dimension of the group’s activities, a dimension which, in his view, underlies their most
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fundamental moral intuitions. The fourth part of the essay deals with the epistemological issues underlying the very idea of Surrealist literature and the fifth and last one with the contribution of the group to traditional love poetry. Given our focus on the aesthetic and political dimension of the post-war debate on Surrealism, in what follows, I shall concentrate mainly on the fourth part of the book.
Plea for an “enlarged realism” While the tone of the first three chapters is approving, in the fourth part of the essay, Mauriac clearly seems more sceptical. It is obvious that he does not really appreciate the more radical experiments of the Surrealist group. Discussing the issues of “automatic writing”, of the “cadavre exquis” experiments and of the Surrealist fascination for “objective coincidences”, he speaks of “gratuitous methods” that result in an “arbitrary” art (Mauriac 1949: 126-128). We must stress the fact, however, that it is not the works in themselves that are thus evaluated, but the poetical principles underlying Surrealist creativity: The problem we are confronted with is the following: is the most authentic Surrealist creation conceivable – whether it is plastic or literary in nature – not always already made inauthentic by the very principles underlying its conception? Are the Surrealist rules of the game organically justified, or do they only spring from the imagination, from the whimsical minds of their promoters? That is the question. (Mauriac 1949: 127)
Evidently, the question put forward is a purely rhetorical one. At first sight, the firmly negative answer is without appeal. In order to illustrate his own viewpoint on Surrealist art, Mauriac enters into a lengthy discussion with Paul Eluard, who, in his essays on poetry, stresses the creative nature of language. According to Eluard, the products of creative imagination are just as real as material objects. Hence his plea for a total liberation of language in order to maximize experiences and to create innumerable new worlds. Mauriac, on the other hand, argues for a totally different programme. According to him, “only the real is real”; the artist does not “create” new worlds but “unveils” the one we actually live in as it really is (Mauriac 1949: 220). It is his task to defamiliarize the perception of the reader, to free
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him from the ossified tradition of common sense in order to enlarge his view of the world (Mauriac 1949: 230). Like Sartre’s prose writer, Mauriac considers language to be a mere instrument which allows the human subject to describe the reality of the world by which he is surrounded. Besides their referential function, words do not have any value in themselves. Hence his plea for an entirely “conscious” art. Under no circumstances is the writer allowed to surrender to arbitrary coincidence: Words do not have any meaning in themselves and they are efficient only to the extent to which they are considered as signs of the reality to which they refer; they cannot be all, if they do not at first reflect something that exists outside of themselves. It is very unlikely that one gains some real insight by playing the game of coincidence advocated by Breton and which reminds us of the naive expectations of children who, without really thinking about what they are doing, write some figures under their sums, hoping – one never knows, does one? – that in the end, the result will be correct. (Mauriac 1949: 201)
Even though he firmly rejects the basic principles underlying Surrealist poetics, Mauriac refrains from condemning the whole of the group’s artistic production. According to him, Surrealist literature does not always separate itself as much from reality as the poets themselves were likely to believe. Whatever the manifestoes and the numerous other programmatic texts may say, in an important number of Surrealist works, Mauriac still recognizes an attachment to reality which remains close to his own aesthetic doctrine. Although the tone of the fourth chapter is rather sceptical, it closes with a paragraph which, at first sight, appears to be very laudatory: The most valuable form of Surrealism takes us towards an enlarged realism, which teaches us how to look at those aspects of reality we were unable to see for ourselves. (...) The secret of Surrealism at its best resides in its conviction that something is hidden behind everything we see. It thus understands Gérard de Nerval’s supernaturalism. It suffices that we learn how to look for things to change, like in a game of mirrors, imperceptibly but indubitably. (Mauriac 1949: 270)
“The most valuable form of Surrealism...”; “Surrealism at its best”; passages like the one above, clearly manifest the ambivalent nature of Mauriac’s rescue operation. While Surrealism has only just been redeemed from Sartre’s condemnation, it is readily submitted to an
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equally normative judgement. In André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement is praised for his “moral” sensitivity and for the stubbornness with which he has continuously questioned the a priori of common sense. At the same time, however, the basic principles of his aesthetic programme are denounced as “gratuitous” and “arbitrary”. It is indeed a very peculiar sort of praise that Mauriac bestows on the Surrealist group. Although he continuously underlines the great value of their artistic production, he condemns everything that makes it genuinely “Surrealist”: its glorification of the irrational, the counterfactual and the coincidental, the fact that a significant portion of it was produced by collective and/or automatic writing, etc.
“The united front of the minds” Malraux, Camus, Monnerot, Sartre, Bataille and even Proust and Benjamin Constant; the essay on André Breton refers to a great variety of perspectives on the question of literature, politics and morality. However, the abundant and often lengthy quotes upon which Mauriac bases his own theses need not surprise us too much since, in an essay published earlier, the author had already claimed to be rather proud of the “dialogical” nature of his literary criticism. Like Charles du Bos, Mauriac insists on quoting amply from primary and secondary sources in order to establish a critical debate between them. According to him, such a method allows the critic both to remain faithful to the texts commented upon and to generate new and unexpected insights by contrasting all kinds of different voices with one another (Mauriac 1946: 39-47). Although this line of reasoning seems promising, the question remains whether, in a essay like André Breton, the critical “dialogue” set up by the author really respects the inherent complexity of the intertextual network to which it refers. Upon a closer reading of the text, this seems not to be the case. Mauriac’s intertext is reorganized in a very Manichean fashion: a number of opinions are denounced as ideologically biased – and therefore false – while other insights are quoted with approval but only when they explicitly confirm the author’s own. In fact, the extremely selective “dialogue” built up in André Breton, is rather revealing as to the implicit objectives of Mauriac’s critical intervention in the post-war debate on the avant-garde. Therefore, it should be examined in more detail.
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In the essay on Breton, it is primarily the communist party that is under attack. Mauriac blames it not only for a lack of moral sensitivity, but also denounces its aesthetic principles, which he qualifies as propagandistic. Sartre’s plea for “committed literature” hardly seems more valuable. Considering that the existentialist philosopher only takes into account the political effects of literature, and given his constant insistence on its socio-historical rootedness, he fails to acknowledge the real function of literature in modern society which is “to cast a new light on the eternal problems of human happiness, responsibility and love” (Mauriac 1949: 347). According to Mauriac, it is hardly surprising that neither Sartre nor the communists have been able to appreciate Surrealism when we consider that this group’s most important contribution to western culture lies not so much in the field of politics but in that of human psychology and knowledge. In order to really understand its historical significance, we must regard Surrealism primarily as an “epistemological enterprise” (Mauriac 1949: 193). In fact, what applies to Surrealism, applies to all literature: it should not be evaluated exclusively in terms of its political efficiency, but ought to be considered as a cognitive undertaking which contributes to the formation of new worldviews. Hence the need for a clean break with the ideologically and politically inspired literary criticism of the pre-war period. In light of the ideologically biased nature of the post-war debate on literature, this plea for a depoliticization of criticism may seem reasonable at first. When looked at more closely, however, it appears to be highly ambiguous, not at all convincing and even slightly suspicious. As indicated above, Mauriac’s own perspective on literature is just as normative as the one adopted by Sartre or the communists: while his intentions may very well be noble, the moral imperative to which he subsumes all forms of artistic production equally undermines literature’s autonomy. Furthermore, it should be noted that Mauriac’s own way of dealing with the Surrealist heritage can be regarded as a politically inspired intervention in the public debate. In order to see this, one need only analyze the positive side of his intertextual frame of reference. At the level of the purely literary production, Mauriac refers above all to the works of André Malraux and Albert Camus as examples to be followed. In works like Man’s Fate and Jacob Wrestling, he recognizes a kind of intellectual engagement that,
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without ever fleeing from reality, succeeds in illuminating the human condition in a new way (Mauriac 1949: 52). Mauriac furthermore appreciates the works of Malraux as an art critic in which he distinguishes some fundamental principles close to his own and which he quotes approvingly and at length in a crucial passage of his book (Mauriac 1949: 225-227). Although he is less often referred to, Camus is also considered to be “one of the best minds of our time” (Mauriac 1949: 53-54). According to Mauriac, a novel like The Plague testifies to a rare moral rectitude and to an open mind that, contrary to the communist doctrine, refuses to limit the question of human happiness to its material dimension alone. When, further on, Mauriac sets out to uncover the religious dimensions of Surrealism, he refers mainly to Georges Bataille and Jules Monnerot, author of Modern Poetry and the Sacred (Mauriac 1949: 142-146). Contrary to Sartre and the communists who will not admit any reference to the transcendent, according to Mauriac, these two critics correctly understood the religious aspirations of the Surrealist undertaking as well as its inherently “tragic” nature. Malraux, Monnerot, Camus and Bataille; these four proper names refer to just as many complex intellectual itineraries which are impossible to subsume under a common denominator. What the authors praised by Mauriac do have in common, however, is their more or less explicitly expressed critique of the communist party. Like André Breton himself, they also share the same hesitant attitude towards Sartre’s attempts at uniting the non-Stalinist left in the years immediately following the Liberation. In the case of Malraux and Monnerot, these ideological convictions manifested themselves, very quickly after the war, in the form of a concrete political commitment in favour of the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (R.P.F.), the Gaullist party of which Mauriac himself, as chief editor of Liberté de l’esprit, 4 was an active supporter. Could it be, therefore, that Mauriac’s laudatory references are to be read as an attempt to associate the ideas of moral purity and authentic literary engagement with the political party that was the R.P.F? Such a reading indeed seems plausible, especially if we take into account that Mauriac only refers to those elements of Camus’ and Monnerot’s works that confirm his own opinions on the relationship between literature and society. It is rather remarkable, for instance, that The Stranger, which was without a doubt Camus’s most famous novel at the time, is never
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even mentioned in the essay on Breton. Is this because the author’s literary debut gives too central a place to the experience of absurdity, because it too radically criticizes the very idea of moral commitment? Perhaps. The manner in which Mauriac refers to Monnerot’s Modern Poetry and the Sacred is even more revealing. When closely examined, Mauriac’s own appreciation of Surrealism deviates significantly from Monnerot’s, but, apparently, the latter’s commitment in favour of the R.P.F. suffices in order for him to be praised and to conveniently “forget” their numerous differences of opinion. 5 In light of these remarks, Mauriac’s plea for a depoliticization of the literary debate takes on a very different meaning. As Sartre lucidly observes 6, the entire essay on Breton can indeed be read as an appeal to the intellectual community to join the ranks of what the author himself calls the “united front of the minds” (Mauriac 1949: 277), that is to say, of those “lucid” intellectuals like Malraux, Monnerot and Mauriac himself who all support the Gaullist party. More specifically, Mauriac’s invitation is addressed to authors like Bataille, Camus and those Surrealist authors who, like Breton, have recently sworn off Stalinism. It seems as though Mauriac suspects them to be of the same opinion when it comes to the relationship between politics and culture, even though they have not yet expressed themselves openly in favour of the R.P.F.’s cultural politics. Whatever hopes Mauriac may have had, his appeal to the French intellectual community does not appear to have been very successful. Neither Bataille, Camus nor the Surrealists ever joined or even got close to joining the R.P.F.
The Unbearable Lightness of Poetry (Blanchot’s “Reflections on Surrealism”) All things considered, the question of Surrealism does not appear to be a problematical one for either Sartre or Mauriac. From the perspective of both these critics, the movement in itself does not fundamentally differ from other literary movements, even though the Surrealists manifested, more than any of their predecessors, a keen interest in all sorts of political and ideological issues. The complex and even paradoxical relationship between the group’s aesthetic principles and its socio-political ideals goes unquestioned in What is Literature? as well as in André Breton. It constitutes the central topic of investigation,
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however, in Maurice Blanchot’s “Reflections on Surrealism”, a short but insightful essay which was first published in 1945 and which strikes an original tone in the post-war debate on the meaning of the French avant-garde. 7 From the very beginning of the essay, Blanchot focuses his attention on the highly ambivalent nature of what he considers to be “the most crucial discovery” of Surrealism, namely “automatic writing” (Blanchot 1949: 90). On the one hand, this spontaneous discursive practice should be considered as a “weapon in the war against reflection and language”. As such, it is destined to “humiliate human arrogance, especially in the form it was given by traditional culture”. On the other hand, however, automatic writing can also be understood as an “arrogant aspiration for a new mode of knowledge that bestows an unlimited credit on words” (Blanchot 1949: 91). Indeed, one should not be blinded by the frequent Surrealist attacks on the notion of literature as it is traditionally understood. Despite its notorious reputation, Surrealism “affirms more than it negates” (Blanchot 1949: 91). By attacking the very foundations of our modern culture, it expresses nothing other than its desire for a fresh start, a new foundational cogito that would be more immediately present to itself than Descartes’ thinking subject. In the search for this new cogito, language plays a crucial but very ambivalent role. In the eyes of the Surrealist poet, it is not so much an instrument as it is the subject itself of his writing practice. Through automatic writing, language and thought are merged to such a point that they cannot be distinguished from one another. In order to free human thought from the constraints of instrumental logic, it is therefore necessary to free language itself, something which, paradoxically enough, can only be done by a very conscious effort on behalf of the poet himself. The result of these efforts, however, is highly ambiguous, for the liberty that is given to language is of such a kind that it can no longer be claimed or controlled by any man, not even by the poet who looks for immediate self-knowledge. When words are liberated, they become “free for themselves”. Through automatic writing, “they start acting on their own account, they play, and, as says Breton, ‘they make love’” (Blanchot 1949: 93). According to Blanchot, it is Breton’s primary merit to have discovered and exploited the “transcendence of language”, even though he did not always grasp the paradoxical nature of his own
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discovery. As is clearly illustrated throughout the essay, the leader of the Surrealist group sometimes stressed the instrumental nature of language as a medium of immediate self-knowledge, while, on other occasions, he underlined the impenetrable opacity of words which makes it impossible for them to be instrumentalized in the service of political or cognitive purposes. It is this fundamental ambiguity of the Surrealist’s attitude towards language and literature which gave way to a series of well-known but often misunderstood contradictions: Starting from this double meaning, it is quite clear that Breton and his friends were forced to contradict themselves in the strangest and, perhaps, the most fortunate way. With automatic writing, it is my freedom that triumphs; it is the most immediate relationship, the only authentic one, of man to himself, which is found and manifested. (...) The result [however] is that words become centres of magical activity and, more than that, things as impenetrable and opaque as any human object withdrawn from utilitarian signification. We are far now from the category of the immediate. Language no longer has anything to do with the subject: it is an object that leads us and can lose us; it has a value beyond our value. (Blanchot 1949: 94)
Like their attitude towards language and poetry, the political ideals of the Surrealist group are not without paradoxes. In the second part of the essay, Blanchot explicitly distances himself from Monnerot, who, in Modern Poetry and the Sacred, describes the turbulent and shortlived alliance between communists and Surrealists in terms of “discipline” versus “license”. Even though the P.C.F. never took Surrealism seriously, the fact remains that the so-called communist phase is an essential one in the history of the Surrealist movement, one that “illustrates the kind of profound commitments that literature cannot prevent itself from taking on when it discovers its greatest freedom” (Blanchot 1949: 96). In order to understand the Surrealists’ fascination for the communist project, it has to be noted first of all that they considered poetry not as “any activity whatsoever, but [as] an activity that concerns man as a whole” (Blanchot 1949: 97). In the last instance, however, it makes us feel “uneasy” to assert that we write “not for amusement or for love of art but because the fate of man is engaged in this activity”. “Purely interior engagement”, so the Surrealists quickly discovered “often seems illusory” because “one is never sure of not ‘playing’ or ‘cheating’” (Blanchot 1949: 98). Precisely because it cannot be controlled by the conscious subject, even the most anti-utilitarian form of poetry is easily recuperated.
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Hence the Surrealists’ need to stress the seriousness of their undertaking. According to Blanchot, it seems as though they wanted to give more weight to the idea of a “total revolution of the mind” by taking concrete political action alongside the communist party. Thus, the “useless” art of automatic writing is associated with its contrary: an authoritarian political doctrine that leaves no space for individual freedom of expression. Perhaps it is a law that all art that disengages itself from the inner elements that enslave it (rejection of imitation, refusal of words as instruments of exchange, refusal of art considered as amusement), tends to be engaged in an exterior action that weighs it down. The more useless it becomes, the more it needs an end to make something useful out of this uselessness. It is its gratuitousness that makes its instrumentalizaton “in the service of the revolution” inevitable. (Blanchot 1949: 99)
In Conclusion: Is there a Moral to this Story? The time between 1945 and 1949 was one of violent polemics between the different fractions of the French intellectual community. The fear for a new world-wide conflict created an extremely tense atmosphere in which the debate on literature quickly became overdetermined by ideological and political issues. What is Literature? as well as André Breton testify to this rapid (re-)politicization of the literary field in the post-war era and to the kind of normative criticism it produced. As we have shown, both Sartre’s critique of Surrealism and Mauriac’s ambivalent rehabilitation rest on a purely instrumental conception of language which is rooted in their desire to use the medium of literature as a means to engage the public in their own ideological battles. Strangely enough, their views on the function of literature in contemporary society recall those of the vast majority of “engaged intellectuals” of the pre-war period. Blinded by the urgency to take a stand in the debate about the future of French democracy, they both seem to forget the risks involved in the demand that literature contributes to the construction of a better world. It is precisely those risks that are foregrounded in Blanchot’s own analysis of the Surrealist experiment. Although his essay pre-dates both Sartre’s and Mauriac’s, it can indeed be read as a proactive warning against the attempt to mobilize literature in the service of extra-literary goals, whether they
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are of a cognitive, moral or ideological nature. According to Blanchot, the fate of Surrealism teaches us that (literary) language cannot without hazard be subjugated to human purposes, for it leads a life of its own. At the same time, it demonstrates that the idea of entirely spontaneous artistic creation, free of all reference to the socially constructed world of meaning, is an untenable illusion which quickly transforms into its opposite. All things considered, literature must have an extraliterary efficacy and meaning, that is, it must not renounce its literary means, and it must be free, that is committed. Perhaps, considering the value of theses paradoxes, we will understand why Surrealism is always of our time. (Blanchot 1949: 102)
NOTES 1 What is Literature? first appeared as a series of articles in Les Temps modernes between February and June 1947. One year later, a slightly altered version was published in Situations, II. In what follows I refer to the most recent reissue of these collected essays (Sartre, 1999). 2 Although Sartre’s and Blanchot’s essays have been translated into English (cf. bibliography), the quality of these translations is often rather poor (especially in the case of Blanchot). Therefore, in what follows, I chose to translate myself all quotations from the French original texts. 3 On some of the more striking analogies between What is Literature? and these two short-stories, see my earlier analysis of the post-war Surrealism debate (Engels 2003: 318 n. 5). 4 Liberté de l’esprit was founded in February 1949 by request of André Malraux who, ever since its foundation three years earlier, was in charge of propaganda and press relations for the R.P.F. and came up with the title for this “Monthly review destined to the intellectual youth”. During the years preceding the outbreak of the Cold War, it was intended to be the voice of the Gaullist party in the cultural field which, at the time, was dominated by the Leftist intelligentsia. For more background information on Mauriac’s activities as editor-in-chief and on the history of his review, see Mauriac (1970) as well as Engels (2003: 327, n. 14); Mossuz-Lavau (1982: 74-78) and Ory & Sirinelli (1988: 172-173). 5 On (some of) the most fundamental differences between Monnerot’s appreciation of Surrealism and Mauriac’s own, see Engels (2003: 328 n. 15). 6 See the extensive endnote 6 of What is Literature?, that was added after the publication of Mauriac’s essay and in which Sartre responds to the many violent criticisms prompted by his own remarks on Surrealism. In defence of his own interpretation, he attacks Mauriac’s which, according to him, is nothing more than an ideologically biased attempt to assimilate Surrealism into the “bourgeois humanism” of the R.P.F. (Sartre, 1999: 297-306). 7 Blanchot’s essay first appeared in 1945 in the journal L’Arche and was later included in La Part du Feu. I refer to this last edition (Blanchot 1949: 90-102).
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WORKS CITED Blanchot, Maurice. 1949. La Part du feu. Paris: Gallimard/Nrf. (English translation by Mandel, Charlotte. 1995. The Work of Fire. Stanford: Stanford University Press.) Engels, Steven. 2003. “Réfléchissez avant de (re-)commencer. Le débat sur le surréalisme à l’aube de la guerre froide” in Jan Herman, Steven Engels & Alex Demeulenaere (eds.) Littératures en contact. Mélanges offerts à Vic Nachtergaele. Leuven: Presses Universitaires de Louvain: 313-334. Mauriac, Claude. 1946. Malraux ou le mal du héros. Paris: Bernard Grasset. ---. André Breton: essai. 1949. Paris: Éditions de Flore. ---. Un autre de Gaulle: journal (1944-1954). 1970. Paris: Hachette. Monnerot, Jules. 1949. La Poésie moderne et le sacré. Paris: Gallimard. Mossuz-Lavau, Jeanine. 1982. André Malraux et le gaullisme. Paris: Presses de la FNSP. Ory, Pascal and Jean-François Sirinelli. 1988. Les intellectuels en France, de l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours. Paris: Armand Colin. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1972. Le Mur. Paris: Gallimard/Folio. ---. 1999. Situations, II: Littérature et engagement. Paris: Gallimard/Nrf.. (English translation by Bernard Frechtman and David Caute. 1978. What is Literature? London: Methuen.)
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Ecstatic Subjects. Citizenship and Sex in Czech Surrealism Malynne Sternstein
Citizen Czech In 1923, at the age of twenty-one, the painter Marie ýermínová was reborn in a café in Prague. She left the building as Toyen. The theorist, sociologist, and artist Karel Teige, her colleague from the early days of the Czech leftist avant-garde movement known as DevČtsil to the Surrealist movement of the 1930s and beyond, wrote of the moment: “we christened her at a café table within a pseudonym as indeclinable as her art” (Srp 2000: 10). The mythologies around her very un-Czech name also point out its Francophone core. Citoyen, they say, is the full reference the partial Toyen invokes. In that anarchic moment of re-naming, the avant-garde created a Toyen; out of a subject identified as such by the grammars and politics of language was forged a citizen of the Real, just as it seethed irresistibly in her art. Does not such a de-gendering of the subject, such as it is represented by this linguistic remove in a language as marked for grammatical gender as Czech – that is, taking away its social identification as man or woman – rather than orphaning sexuality, leave us instead with a fully sexualized being where only a gendered one stood before? When Toyen left the café was she not now sexed, and when she entered gendered? It is by now a truism that gender domesticates sex. But what if the avant-garde had a project, one not fully realized until the flowering of Czech Surrealism, wherein gender might be eradicated forever so that suffrage, rights wars, constitutional parity and the like were rendered obsolete by the ecstasy of subjects
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who participated directly with the indeclinable chora of sex? It is this ambitious possibility I take as a keystone project of the Czech Surrealist movement here. The transformation of ýermínová to Toyen signals, I argue, an entirely new rule of being developed in Czech Surrealism, one rooted deeply in a dialectical 1 consciousness of being, beyond gender, and decisively within sexuality. This new “identity”, as Teige calls it, is “indeclinable” – masculine perhaps in modifiers, but, posing the incorrigible problem of a word referring conceptually (signatum) to a sexual female with a symbolically masculine mantel (signans), nominally immovable. The subject remaining after this christening – this shimmering Toyen – is hypersexualized. The ramifications of this renaming have not been given proper attention thus far. Instead, scholars such as Alfred Thomas (2005: 56), in his recent account of the “cult of masculinity” in the Czech avant-garde, have most often assumed (albeit implicitly) that the proponents of the avant-garde did not have access to the complexities of sexual knowledge, self-knowledge or even psychoanalytic selfreflexion that we do now, and thus that the avant-garde could not have contemplated sexual differance, or sexual difference, for that matter. However, a view to the dialectic of Czech Surrealist montages and photomontages (a view that also pays attention to concrete historical events) yields a much different reading. Czech Surrealism, in the dialectical version of the story of its politics, is neither interested in nor invested in a rejection or embrace of the female, or the male, or even concerned with their hybridization in montage as the hermaphrodite or the androgyne, as has been argued by many. For that matter, it can be argued further that Czech Surrealist art, discourse and life-practice actively cancel then retrieve then ironically recapitulate dialectically the feminine and the masculine. Czech Surrealist paintings and drawings expose legs in fishnets that support a packaged ham rather than a sexy woman (as in JindĜich Štyrský’s Collage from the cycle StČhovací kabinet (The Peripatetic Cabinet) of 1934), they whisper about floating corsets in primeval forests (as in illustration 8), or mechanize the sacred nude (as in Karel Teige’s Untitled collage of 1943). Prefiguring Jacques Lacan’s famous work on sexuality and Woman, Czech Surrealist art places veils in the desert, hiding the full social non-existence of woman and fully politicizing, in its own sense of the new horizon of citizenship beyond horizons, that Woman does not exist.
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In this fashion, the Czech Surrealists, in a commitment to socialist ideals and ideologies, engage a new (transnational) citizenship for a new society, one that reveals itself in the rejection of gender as a right and rite of full subjectivity. They look to forge new citizenship not by equating subjects sexually, or even in indulging in aesthetic sexual bliss, as the French Surrealists may be said to have done, but in degendering subjects to “christen” them as fully sexualized beings. We must therefore also eschew genetic approaches that cannot, by definition, admit the dialectical subject. Such a horizon shift, wherein the purview of avant-garde studies is enlarged and fruitfully adumbrated to admit a research into the power, desire, and strategies invested in Czech Surrealist forms of address, necessitates, I believe, a full disclosure of the historical avant-garde as a dialectical project. For as will be made apparent, if, for the Czech Surrealists, gender plays the institutional game, sexuality undoes it. Along with Toyen, artists, theorists and poets of the Czech Surrealist Group, JindĜich Štyrský, Karel Teige, VítČzslav Nezval and others, including the accomplished psychoanalyst Bohuslav Brouk, made much of sexuality as the force beyond, or behind, the radical centre of human being-ness and citizenship.
The Phenomenology of Czech Surrealism, or, The Hope of Truth It is the dialectic (as method and message) that infuses all of Teige’s poetic claims and political aims. Through the duration of the Czech historical avant-garde, from the 1920s to the 1930s, Teige was leading theorist and programmer. No serious theoretical contemplation was given to an avant-garde movement, no legitimate scholarly induction, until Teige attached his name to a cause. In the early 1930s, the leading Czech avant-gardists who were still vehemently attached to Marxism and to innovative, or non-traditional, artistic techniques, were associated nominally under the movement called DevČtsil. Upon Nezval’s return to Prague after an opportune visit to Paris in 1933, the association between DevČtsil and Breton’s Surrealism was made official with a declaration (a letter Nezval penned to Breton) of mutual interests published in the journal Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution (Surrealism in Service of the Revolution). When DevČtsil
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finally collapsed under its own weight, with its various members going in differently tinged ideological directions, Nezval had the opportunity this time to regroup unapologetically under a full-fledged Surrealist banner. The new group, unsurprisingly called the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia, was officially launched in 1934 and boasted eleven founding members from a spectrum of disciplines: the poets Nezval, Imre Forbath, Katy King (the pseudonym of Libuse Jichova), Josef Kunstdat, and Konstantin Biebl; plastic artists Štyrský, Toyen, Vincenc Makovsky; theatre director JindĜich Honzl; composer Jaroslav Jezek; psychoanalyst Bohuslav Brouk. Of notable absence at the founding of the group was Karel Teige. Teige was slow to take up Surrealism as an aegis for the postDevČtsil Czech avant-garde. Whereas the poet Nezval, invigorated by his visit to Paris and the open arms of the André Breton faction (Bydžosvká 2005: 1), was wholeheartedly sold on the affinities between the as yet unnamed Czech movement and the established Surrealism of Breton, Teige lacked confidence in the French-based movement. It was not until Teige could locate the dialectic within Surrealism’s political principles that Surrealism could be fully advocated. Without the dialectic, Surrealism would remain “a step backward from avant-garde development”, a return via the symbol to the “ideoplastic images of the past”, “the most extreme development of Romanticism” (Bydžosvká 1999: 53-54). But within the dialectic, or, as Karel Srp puts it, “by virtue of the ‘dialectic of opposites’”2 (Srp 1999b: 276), Teige could come to terms with Surrealism as the dialectical process par excellence. Shortly after the official formation of the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group, mending a persistent emotional rift with Štyrský, Teige joined the Surrealists ideologically unfettered. 3 Karel Srp has made Teige’s dialectical attitude the focus of his essay “Teige during the Thirties” (1996b: 257-291) and has laid the groundwork for a consideration of dialectical materialism as the frame for any responsible historical treatment of the Czech avant-garde. This essay owes a great debt to Srp’s cogent study, but seeks to go one (small) step further. By focusing on the dialectic to the admitted neglect of the “materialist” aspect, I wish to study Czech Surrealism, specifically phenomenologically, with the hopes of integrating even that aspect of the Czech Surrealists’ work which does not seem at first to be in the project of dialecticization, that is, ironic dialecticization. I
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hope to show this ironic dialecticization at work by studying Toyen’s painting from the 1930s and 1940s below. While Srp acknowledges Teige, Štyrský and, by extension, Toyen’s allegiance to dialectical materialism politically and philosophically, he is not so confident of their actualization of the process. Provoked, then, by this tacit acknowledgement of the avant-garde’s “failure” to put their practice where their discourse was, to (awkwardly) repeat the saying, I do wish to see the dialectic at work in the art itself. Of particular interest are Srp’s description of Štyrský’s painting Homage à Karl Marx (1937, see illustration 7): 4 Štyrský’s dialectical materialist orientation is most explicit in the painting Homage to Karl Marx in which he combined the bearded head of Karl Marx – transformed by the artist’s dreams to resemble a man of the wild, or perhaps a member of an ancient barbarian culture – with a loosely executed classical female torso. Here, two entirely different worlds come together in one painting. (1996b: 270)
and his characterization of Teige’s reading of Štyrský’s work in the following: Teige was perhaps too facile in characterizing Štyrský’s Surrealist paintings: “All his paintings are [...] a tribute to Marx, whose dialectical materialism is an unstoppable force to change the world and set the stage for the triumph of the prehistory of mankind and for the arrival of the realm of freedom”. (1996b: 271)
Srp does not account here for the nexus in the painting represented by 1) the twig-like coordinating of the female torso and swathed portion of the body below the “belt” to the Marx head; 2) the emptiness of the swathed body below the waist; 3) the spectral function of the twig-like lines to support the body and the head and at the same time to reinforce their separation. There are, of course, other moments in the painting that Srp does not examine, nor, to be fair, does he offer to examine Štyrský’s painting. But to overlook the details of this painting of a dream, a painting which is also a coordination of the realms of sleeping and waking life, is to lead one to the conclusion that Teige’s reflection on Štyrský’s work is “facile”. The twigs that run across the painting do indeed represent a dialectic operation connecting Marx’s head to classical antiquity and to Woman. More so, and even more importantly, the dialectic the painting executes by dint of its identity as painting connects the icon or imaginary of Marx to
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the icon, or imaginary, of classical antiquity to the icon, or imaginary, of Woman. The dream state of the painting is but its execution in “wakefulness” (and vice-versa); ironies of identity (gender, class, historical citizenship, even) are not merely captured but actively articulated and (re-)performed in painting as an always dialectical act. Teige was not “too facile” in characterizing Štyrský’s Surrealist paintings as a tribute to Marx’s dialectic. Toward our purposes, montage and collage are the methodological and substantive unfurling of the dialectic. Teige’s own Surrealist collages and photomontages went even further in the realm of dialectical procedure. Teige co-opted others’ artistic, usually photographic, images and transformed them, with very few changes, into a “new” expressive moment and with no detail or mention of the author of the original artefact. In doing so, he seems to be saying, dialectically once again, that these moments, his and the original moment, are merely points in a line of possible moments. For example, Teige tweaks Moholy-Nagy’s photomontage of a skiff being pulled by a larger boat or yacht, most remarkably to include an out-ofscale stretched female head inside the skiff (Untitled, 1942). This is only one of many examples of Teige’s collage output (usually untitled works) that he created in the 1930s to early 1950s. Even the sense of artistic “ownership”, or originality, over an image is damaged: that image is not the property of an artist but of an artistic community; it could even be ventured here that Teige’s borrowing of the work of others presupposes the communal ownership of cultural images and discourse generally, prefiguring post-modern quotation without citation or authorization and even peer-2-peer relationships; an artistic citizenship that answers, or does not, only to the fluid field of expression itself. And Teige’s sentiments on the inevitable (teleological) nature of change and art, expressed elsewhere, make this dialectical underpinning to art-as-value clear: If [a work of art] is not reworked, revised, adapted, or violated to a greater or lesser degree as a result of these reconstructions, it does, however, change in the course of time as a living cultural value. If the work itself does not change, its reader does; a new poem is created from a new synthesis, a new dialectic unity, and for a new reader. Old works survive their era so long as they are able to become a part of a new, forever changing, synthesis. (Srp 1999b: 283)
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Just how this synthesis looks when related to gender- and sex-politics will be discussed in the next paragraphs. It is important to note here that I am not so much interested in the particular syntheses achieved in defining citizenship, within the Czech avant-garde or more generally. Others, recently Wendy Brown (1995) and, most famously, David Evans (1993) have made motions toward definitions of a “sexual citizen”. I want to be clear that it is not my intention in this essay to take up their actual construction, but rather the dialectical base that enables and promotes these new synthetic moments.
Citizenship as Avant-Garde Dialectic With the long-won independence of the Czech and Slovak lands from the Habsburg Empire, made “official” in 1918 with the establishment of the democratic government of the First Czechoslovak Republic, came increased industrialization, in part as a response to Realpolitik demands, in part as proof of the autonomy and vitality of a new independent nation. The spike in production called for the recruitment of factory, textile and service workers and this meant an unprecedented enlargement of the female workforce. But the promises of T. G. Masaryk’s democratic government for increased “equity” between the sexes in the workplace, for a parity in rights that would come with parity in responsibilities, and for the active enforcement and insurance of rights for people and citizens alike was not enough to encourage the Leftist avant-garde. The declaration of independence drafted by Masaryk 5 takes pains to elucidate that a coalition with the archetypal democracies of the United States and France is one founded upon the essential nature of the Czech legacy of Humanism: We, the nation of Comenius, cannot but accept these principles expressed in the American Declaration of Independence, the principles of Lincoln, and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. For these principles our nation shed its blood in the memorable Hussite Wars five hundred years ago, for these same principles, beside her Allies in Russia, Italy and France, our nation is shedding its blood today. (Masaryk 1918: 54)
Gender equity – “Our democracy shall rest on universal suffrage; women shall be placed on equal footing with men, politically,
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socially, and culturally” – and citizenship rights – “The rights of the minority shall be safeguarded by proportional representation; national minorities shall enjoy equal rights” – were made the principle concerns of the new democracy. With a view to the inequities of the Habsburg system regarding rights based on “birth”, a term which is marked with the tincture of ethnicity (Slav-non-Slav), religious affiliation (Protestant (Czech)-Catholic (Habsburg) and rank or common-aristocracy, the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920 codified rights with the defense of the “minority” that the Czechs once were in mind: 1. All citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic shall be in all respects equal before the law and shall enjoy equal civic and political rights, whatever be their race, their language, or their religion. 2. Difference in religion, belief, confession or language shall within the limits of the common law constitute no obstacle to any citizen of the Czechoslovak Republic particularly in regard of entry into the public services and offices, of attainment to any promotion or dignity, or in regard to the exercise of any trade or calling. 3. Citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic may, within the limits of the common law, freely use any language they chose in private and business intercourse, in all matters pertaining to religion, in the press and in all publications whatsoever, or in public assemblies. (The Constitution of the Czechoslovak Republic: 45)
These provisions were no solace to the Left, and the Czech artistic vanguard of the 1920s and beyond (arguably still committed to the same aims today 6) responded to these assurances of “rights” for women as citizens with scepticism. In the rhetoric and programmes of the State, Women and the ethnic Other (for the most part the reference is to the German minority) were rhetorically united in terms of their marginalization, and thus, cannily, secured and codified in their resemblance to one another and their otherness in the Czechoslovak nation. Keeping such a backdrop in mind, it is possible to find in Teige’s manifesto Poetismus (Poetism) from 1924 the incipient kynical logic that would inform his magisterial sociological treatise Nejmensi byt (The Minimum Dwelling) of 1932, where in the latter is a robust reworking of a non-gendered citizenship. In the 1924 manifesto, Teige’s concern is with poetic ecstasy, underscored by constructivist principles. He is not decided as yet on the way to unite these, but the dialectic operation is already under way in his declarations:
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In our time we require a special frame of mind to be able to deal with the psychological contradictions taken to the point of paradoxical extremes. [...] “After six days of work and building of the world, beauty is the seventh day of the soul.” This line by the poet Otokar Brezina captures the relationship between poetism and constructivism. A man who has lived as a working citizen wants to live as a human being and a poet. (Teige 1924: 67)
Constructivism and Poetism are already in a productive tension here for Teige – they are not opposites only but “necessary complements” – and the manifesto, assembled climactically on negations, what Poetism is not (“Poetism is not literature”; “Poetism is not painting”; “poetism is not an -ism” (Teige 1924: 69), is formulated on the rudiments of a dialectical principle. Already perceptible though is that the skein holding these theses together is the cathectic ecstasy of being alive: Poetism is not art, that is, art in its current romantic sense of the word. It is ready to liquidate existing art categories, to establish the reign of pure poetry, exquisite in its multifarious forms, as multifaceted as fire and love [...] Not to understand Poetism is not to understand life! (Teige 1924: 70)
Sexuality and sensuality – the genitalia as haptic centre of human vitality – are indexed as the gist of the creative instinct. By the time, almost a decade later, of Teige’s essay on sociologically sound architecture for the masses (The Minimum Dwelling), Teige had engineered the dialectic to overcome the costs of gender: Women will only become truly emancipated when the single–family household– based economy is abandoned and households are transformed into a large industrial concern. Today’s hotels and, above all, various popular catering establishments, canteens crèches, and kindergartens represent the embryonic state for the development of this new [proletarian] lifestyle and are the only means toward women’s emancipation. Like all the other material preconditions for a new society (socialism), they have been brought about by capitalism but are still quite rare in our country (for example, boarding-houses are an exception among today’s urban residential buildings), representing in most cases either ineffective welfare establishments or commercial ventures with all the attendant deformations and negative aspects of speculation and profit-seeking. “Socialism and any total, lasting democracy are not possible without the independent participation of women in all public and political life in general, as well as permanent employment in the interest of the state in particular” (Lenin). It is
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therefore necessary to abolish the private family economy along with the traditional family household, where energy is wasted in laborious work for private consumption, and to return all the work energy consumed until now by the single-family household to the body politic, its production and culture. (Teige 1932: 203)
The envisioned (Czech) society is one unified by the creative potential of human sexuality and the productive individual, not one based on gendered chores. Such a social unification rests on the equality of men and women not as gendered subjects, along which lines they are definitively unequal, but as sexual ones. What preoccupies Teige and his contemporaries, it seems, is the quest for an open field of political transformation, in which past and present ideas and experiences of politics and particularly, citizenship, can be translated, dialectically negated, and consciously reformulated in anticipation of a different future. Construed this way, Teige’s mission is perhaps an attempt to politicize the “prepolitical” (Balibar 2004) subjectification of women and sex more generally. In his call to “abolish the traditional family economy”, Teige speaks beyond the practical economies of the home to the economies of value that constrain the political lives of women and men. Thus, the dialectic proceeds not as a simple assertion of the sexual identity of women, but by pitting the “sexual” itself against the established routines and roles of gender that produced the democratic deficit implied in Teige’s account.
Sexual (Ci)Toyen JindĜich Štyrský’s erotic photomontage series, Emilie pĜichází ke mnČ ve snu (Emily Comes to Me in a Dream, 1933), where not a Marxhead is to be found, gives credence to Teige’s claim (cited above) for Štyrský’s radical dialecticism. Even the book’s advertisement, that was meant partially to serve as anodyne to the public, signals the dialectic of sexual “polarity”, underscoring the photomontagist’s tools (his/her scissors) as the dialectical instrument par excellence: An unwitting smile, a sense of the comic, a shudder of horror – these are eroticism’s sisters. The sisters of pornography, however, are always shame and disgust. Some will look at these erotically charged photomontages with a smile on their lips, others in horror. The author has complemented this series, whose essence in the moment of supreme pleasure, with a story that was once told him
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and has long haunted his dreams. The only release left to him from this perturbation was this attempt at iconoclasm – with scissors one is able to sever any type of inseparable double: male from female; sun from sky; death from the living; dream from life. (Nezval and Štyrský 2004: 71)
At work in Štyrský’s erotic collection is, in the language of Etienne Balibar, the mode of “permanent reopening”: Surrealist scissors as the political action of the present tense. Note that it is not that collage that unites inseparable doubles, it is not within juxtaposition or the process of proximal pastiching that oppositions are reconciled. This is not a discourse of easy synthesis. Instead, what is always and already cleaved (male/female; sun/sky; death/living; dream/life) is severed by the photomontagist. What might this mean, that the photomontagist, that Štyrský, severs polarities? Are they not already twain? It is precisely that in symbolic reality they are not twain that mandates their severance in Surrealist art. Male and female, as symbolic oppositions, are united as mutually constitutive doubles. As sun is symbolically not discrete from sky, because it is sky’s double and vice versa (and so galvanized as a compound entity), male and female are actually united in symbolic discourse by gender normativity. Gender norms can then be iterated to parlay socially as “equal rights” or “equal opportunity” and so on. It is sexual difference that Štyrský’s scissors ecstatically (“with supreme pleasure”) cut in. And so “a cavalier history of Surrealism” is tempered by some knowledge of the Czech situation. In Czech Surrealism the dialectic of citizenship, which contains within it the core of the Realpolitik overhaul of the cultural domestication of sex in(to) gender is particularly visible and viable in Toyen’s work. In recent times, with the highly successful retrospective of Toyen’s art at Prague’s City Gallery, the life and work of Toyen has finally become more wellknown outside of highly Czech- or Surrealist-specific circles, though much has yet to be done to gain the world recognition Toyen’s art clearly deserves. The present essay looks particularly at her art from the 1930s and 1940s, though her earlier and later work could serve also to illustrate the dialectic tensions at play on the subject of sexual identity. Toyen was born Marie ýermínová in Prague in 1902. In her art and her politics, personal and suprapersonal, Toyen made herself a woman difficult to harness in Czech grammar and in social grammar.
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From the rejection of her gendered name to the rejection of marriage, from the rejection of her familial ties in favour of the ties of friendship, Toyen’s every move balked at the sclerosis of reigning bourgeois values. In her refusal to capitulate to the social and symbolic prospectus on woman, Toyen makes herself utterly impossible to decline. Nezval recalled in his memoirs: Toyen would say já byl [“I was” with the masculine ending of the verb in the first person singular as opposed to the feminine ending “já byla”] and she “hated the implication that there was any relationship between herself and Štyrský other than a normal friendship and would reject such implication in a surly tone. She had a strange sway to her walk and, although she lived with her older sister in Smíchov, she declared that she had no family, nor had she ever had”. (Srp 2000: 11)
Yet while commentators, a little too easily, agree that Toyen “[renounced] the female side of her personality” (Srp 2000: 11), they forget the permanent openings of sexuality and betray, in their dualistic language, their capitulation of sex and gender, a leveling I contend Toyen, above all of her colleagues, ever avoids. In the self-centered world of art, Toyen dialecticized her artistic individuality by committing herself to life-long artistic collaborations – her first, and arguably most important, with the poet, theorist, photographer and painter JindĜich Štyrský, who was two years her senior and whom she outlived by almost forty years. At the end of 1926, Toyen and Štyrský moved together from Prague to Paris. From there they announced their refusal to submit to any established art school, including Surrealism, which, far from being marginalized in the 1920s, was running gangbusters. They established an artistic vision of their own, a two-person movement which they dubbed “Artificializmus”. Artificialism surged against the severe and somewhat lifeless formalism of Cubism and Cubo-Futurist abstraction and braved against the re-emergence of figural art they saw exemplified in Surrealism. The Artificialists (an artificial name, they ceded) chose instead to concern themselves with what they determined to be the poetry of painting. To this end, the artificialist canvas befriended rope, pastes, feathers, netting, fibre, dirt, gauze, all manner of organic product, dabbling, dappling and mottling the canvas to create a poem by a painter. Their manifesto of 1927 engages
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in the discourse of the dialectic (note the conscious use of the term negation: neguje 7) and abounds in the logic of paradox: Artificialism is the identification of a painter with a poet. It negates painting as a mere formal game and entertainment for the eyes (subjectless painting). It negates formally historicizing painting (Surrealism). Artificialism has an abstract consciousness of reality. It does not deny the existence of reality, but it does not use it either. Its interest focuses on poetry that fills the gaps between real forms and that emanates from reality. […] The subject [in an Artificialist work] is identified with the painting and its forms become self-explanatory. (Štyrský et al. 1992: 48-49, my translation)
But while Toyen and Štyrský rejected the political affiliations with established art movements in Paris and Prague, this did not mean that they avoided the company of the artists affiliated with these movements. By the 1930s, with both back in Prague once again, relations with an international avant-garde were cemented. And the tables were turned in 1934 when Breton and Eluard, as ambassadors of French Surrealism, journeyed to Prague, legitimizing the Parisbased movement’s boasts of internationalism and finalizing the Czech movement’s character as one fully “Surrealist”, in name and matter. The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 sobered Czech Surrealism’s subject matter, but did not undo its commitment to Surrealism’s philosophy. Toyen continued working, though increasingly with pen and ink, and increasingly on thematizing the tension of the eros/thanatos drive in connection with the trauma of the ambient war. In the cycles Tir (The Shooting Gallery, 1939) and Schovej se, valko! (Hide, War! 1944) a stark pen line and forms evoking a sense of heavy hollowness – empty wigs, hulking bird heads, little girls lost – linger on aborted horizons. The death of Štyrský in 1942 likely helped determine Toyen’s final flight to Paris in 1945. She was never to return to her homeland. Toyen’s partnerships continued in Paris, where she was to live out her days. Working with JindĜich Heisler from the early years of emigration and then with Radovan Ivsic and Annie Le Brun in the 1960s and 1970s. She died in Paris in 1980, leaving behind her over a half century of socially poignant and voluptuously committed work. There is no real corpus of Toyen’s written work; her “voice” is present in her art above all. Scattered questionnaire responses, signatures on Surrealist declarations or admonishments over the years, and work in
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collaboration with poets like those cited above represent the bulk of her “written work”. But this lack of collectable writing is by no means detrimental to the thesis on dialectical citizenship. I would even contend that because Toyen did not elaborate an argument against the static citizenship of gender in writing, the dialectic of sexual citizenship in her art is all the more powerful. In spite of, or because of this “voicelessness”, Toyen depicts the impossible space of gender within a true dialectic. Let us return, therefore, to the Artificialist manifesto from 1926. For my purposes here, of special significance is the argument in the manifesto that Surrealism represented Historicism par excellence (“[Artificialism] negates formally historicizing painting (Surrealism)”), a movement in servitude not just to Romantic repertories in the institution or sphere of Art, but also, and more importantly, to the values of the artistic sphere; chief among these values the social construct of gender, and thus citizenship, and chief amongst these genderings, the nude.
Denuding the Naked “The nude”, John Berger tells us, “is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress” (1980: 54). If the nude is clothed, after all, then is not the greatest transgressive way of seeing the nude – woman or man as a crafted subject, the nude as it has come to be academicized in art 8 – found in the over-obedience to this law? That is, if nudity is a form of dress after all, then might the nude not best be depicted by the dress? It is this transgressive, ironic or over-obedient strategy I claim for Toyen’s radical dialectics of sexual citizenship. If conceived of this way, Toyen’s work is not merely a rebuff of sexist value systems, misogyny and gynophobia, nor is it only a slap in the face of the institution of Art; Toyen’s is not a cynical critique, that opposes a system, but relies on that system’s logic for its critique; Toyen’s is thus a kynical response. 9 She actively over-obeys the strictures of Art and of Social normativity (read: bourgeois values) to uncover, chip away at, and ultimately topple the edifice of Value as it stands. If woman does not matter, then she will not have matter. If the female form is perfected only by a corset, then the corset is perfected female form. And if the female nude is the perfectly furnished female
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form upon which to land one’s gaze, then furniture as such is the female form. That Toyen should adopt such a stance is no surprise, when we bring into scope the naked as well. As is well known, central to the mechanical bifurcation of nude from naked in European art is the force of shame. At the core of the European mythos is the shame engendered by knowledge. And knowledge is marked by the visibility of nakedness: they saw they were naked and hid from God in shame. Shame, and its interiorization, wields itself powerfully in culture, not to mention its vitality and robustness in the bourgeois culture the avant-garde so openly imagined and decried. Shame before infantile (but curious) nakedness must be remade, because the body is also the work of God and sex, shameful as it is, is commanded. And so was born nudity. Nudity re-dresses the shame of nakedness. Leslie Bostrom and Marlene Malik describe the appeasing affect of this turn: To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word “nude,” on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. (1999)
The body without clothes is clothed in the guise of Beauty and Form, Symmetry and Sublimity. Evident in this remove is the violent usurpation of “nudity” over the Real and excessive, but unpretentious, will-lessness of the naked. The naked is construed as beyond limits, wild, inscrutable, but without will, and so amoral. Nudity, on the other hand, in this discourse – the discourse that has dominated academic and popular circles on the lack of garb – is girdled but not altogether comfortable. It retains still some of the violence it commanded in order to re-dress the naked. Despite its being domesticated, nudity is yet suspicious because it is refined, possessing a violent will because it resents its domesticating force. The “polysemous” quality of the duo has moulded the debate about the human form in art. So how is it possible to wrench oneself from the noxious back and forth of naked and nude, of natural and manufactured, of real and symbolic, with their attendant semantic camps, and grow something new in the overused soil of art and art discourse? How could an artist awaken the real stakes of the indulgent dressy nude? This is not to say that no-one has contemplated Berger’s
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idea of “nudity as a form of dress” in any other way, but here I wish to take Berger’s “nude” as the representation of the unclothed body, and to focus on the violence involved in the expression, “The nude is condemned to never being naked”, and from there to wrestle the ensuing, and hopefully seductive, reflex into a “way of seeing” the embattled use of the nude and the naked in Surrealism generally and the Surrealism of Toyen specifically. Toyen’s male contemporaries attempted to subvert the nude nefariously, but these attacks on standards key on cynical irony, not the kynical optimism of over-obedience. Among these works, perhaps Magritte’s The Rape is most successful; though there are politicizing moments, these efforts engage in a nostalgia for the nude even as they declare its decay in the found object (Reichmann), Hatlák’s self-aware Iluze and the narcissistic gaze of the camera (bringing another dimension to the history of the nude), etc. Perhaps, in the sweetest of ironies, Toyen’s works supersede her male counterparts’ because she is subject to en-nuding herself. She over-obeys in the most acute way – she provokes the nude by exposing its real skin: clothing. What I mean to say is that Toyen’s Surrealist “nudes” – her representation of the stripped woman – are her pictures of clothing, specifically, of female clothing: the clothes that are the mask of the fact of the absence that is femininity, the clothes that signal woman, the clothes that a person wears to impersonate woman, with the knowledge that there is nothing but clothing to woman, with the sense, in other words, that there is no woman, there is only the female impersonator. The corset is Toyen’s stock in trade, evinced in her series Hlas lesa (Voice of the Forest, 1936) and collages for Ani labuĢ ani lĤna (Neither Swan Nor Moon, 1936). It is voraciously female, constricting and allocating; it deploys bone to structure breasts. Toyen supersaturates her canvases with the nude as it is radically: the veil itself. What is more nude than the veil that hides the naked body? What is more nude than clothing? The sacrosanct idea that the nude is a special position and state, crowned as such by Art, informs Toyen’s nudes. Toyen’s nudes, I insist, are her veils, the clothes themselves, bodiless, floating, pristine and tantalizing clothes, corsets floating in the mist, precariously poised on the surface of small lapping waves, struck dumb in the forest. Undergarments and sheaths, Toyen’s depictions of clothes are her études in the nude. Toyen’s woman is condemned to never being naked, to forever being nude. And so,
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forever stilled hyperbolically in her artfully actualized absence, her sexual citizenship is erected. NOTES 1
By “dialectical” I do mean to conjure the fundamental Hegelian concept that subjectivity holds as a dialectical “relationship” between subject and object wherein the subject is “a being-for-self which is for itself only through another” (Hegel 1977: 115). 2 Teige as quoted in full context: “By virtue of the dialectic of opposites,” Teige had to confront a very common situation that dated back to the twenties but became even more controversial during the thirties; the decision of “writers of proletarian origin [to] cross over to the bourgeois camp” and, conversely, of “avant-garde artists of a modernist bent [to] move to join the proletariat, not by virtue of the process of ‘proletarianization’ but by reason of their own art”. 3 A note of clarification is due here. It has been claimed by historians of the Czech avant-garde that Teige’s distaste for joining the Surrealist Group in the immediate moment of its declaration was not purely ideational. A falling out with Štýrský also had something to do with Teige’s reluctance to join the celebration of a Czech branch of Surrealism. But it is my contention that while this “private” squabble might have much to do with when Teige chose to become an official member of the Surrealist Group, it has little to do with when he chose to make a philosophical commitment to the Surrealist doctrine. This claim is supported by the fact that Teige was never willing to read Nezval’s work with the same dialectical eye. To this end, it could even be claimed that, for Teige, Nezval was never a true Surrealist because his work did not present with dialectical reasoning. 4 Homage to Karl Marx is also reproduced in the original context of Teige’s 1938 study of Czech Surrealism, Štýrský a Toyen. 5 For a full accounting of the First Republic’s induction of gender and citizenship rights, see Cozine (1996) and for a thorough and fascinating look at women’s rights and social conditions in interwar Czechoslovakia, see Feinberg (2000). 6 A look at Jan and Eva Svankmajer’s work with its commitment to Surrealist ambiguity is a good example of the legacy of the dialectic in the Czech milieu. See especially the film Konec Stalinismu v Cechach (The death of Stalinism in Bohemia, 1990). 7 From the Czech negovat. Verbs that end in –ovat in the infinitve are marked as loanwords. By no means am I saying that negovat is not a Czech verb, but Štýrský and Toyen had other verbs available to them that carried a clearer “Slavic” or “aboriginal” textuality and that would have sufficed to give the sense of “negation”. Their choice of negovat with its Hegelian-cum-Marxist connotations is, I believe, purposeful. 8 For further critical discussion of the institutional notion of the “nude”, see, among others, Clark (1959) and Jennifer Pangman’s A Historical Survey of the Semantic Field of Nakedness (2001, online at: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/ 6361Pangman.htm; consulted 29.07.2005). The latter gives linguistic credence to
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Clark’s intuition that the term “nude” participates in a political cronyism only a fourletter word could. 9 For the full rendering of the difference between cynicism and kynicism, see Sloterdijk (1987).
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WORKS CITED Balibar, Etienne. 2004 We, the people of Europe? Reflections on transnational citizenship. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Berger, John. 1980. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Bostrom, Leslie and Marlene Malik. 1999. “Re-Viewing the Nude” Art Journal 58(1): 42-8. Breton, André (ed.). 1933. Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution 5. Paris: José Corti/Éditions des Cahiers. Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bydžosvká, Lenka. 2005. “Against the Current. The Story of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia” in Papers of Surrealism 3. On line at: http://www. Surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal3 (consulted 29.07.2005). ---. 1999. “The Avant-garde ideal of poesis” in Srp (1999a): 53-54. Clark, Kenneth. 1959. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. The Constitution of the Czechoslovak Republic. 1920. Prague: Édition de la société l’effort de la Tchéchoslovaquie. Cozine, Alicia. 1996. A member of the state : citizenship law and its application in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1938. PhD thesis. University of Chicago. Evans, David T. 1993. Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities. NY: Routledge. Feinberg, Melissa. 2000. The rights problem : gender and democracy in the Czech lands, 1918-1945. 2 vols. PhD thesis. University of Chicago. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. The Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, tr.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Masarayk, Tomáš Garrigue, Milan Stefanik and Eduard Benes. 1918. “Declaration of Independence of the Czechoslovak Nation by Its Provisional Government”. In Kovtun, George. 1985. The Czechoslovak Declaration of Independence. A History of the Document. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. Nezval, VítČzslav and JindĜich Štyrský. 2004. Edition 69. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Srp, Karel. 1999a. Karel Teige. 1900-1951. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ---. 1999b. “Karel Teige During the Thirties” in Srp (1999a): 257-291. ---. 2000. Toyen (Karolina Vocadlo, tr.). Prague: City Gallery, Prague. Štyrský, JindĜich, et al. 1992. Štyrský, Toyen: artificialismus, 1926-1931. Exhibition Catalog. Seattle: Very Graphics. Teige, Karel. 1932. “The Minimum Dwelling and the Collective House” (Alexandra Büchler, tr.) in Srp (1999a): 194-215. ---. 1924. “Poetism” (Alexandra Büchler, tr.) in Srp (1999a): 64-71. ---. 1938. Štyrský a Toyen. Prague: Fr. Borový. Thomas, Alfred. 2005. “Between Paris and Moscow: Sexuality and Politics in Interwar Czech Poetry and Film” in Papers of Surrealism 3. On line at: http://www.Surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal3 (consulted 29.07.2005).
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From a New Art to a New Life and a New Man. Avant-Garde Utopianism in dada Hubert F. van den Berg
The following pages want to present an understanding of dada that differs from the prevailing image of dada as a basically destructive, nihilistic anti-movement. 1 Instead, a more positive understanding of dada will be accentuated. Dada, to be sure, was in many respects a destructive avant-garde project, but not more so than various other contemporary avant-garde movements such as Futurism in its iconoclastic campaign “against passatism” and – as far as the tradition of “realist” pictorial and sculptural representation in Western art since the Renaissance is concerned – Cubism and Constructivism. Like these other avant-garde isms, dada possessed an outspoken constructive, utopian stance. In order to further my understanding of dada, this paper will focus mainly on dada in Zurich, but observations will generally hold for other dada branches as well, be it in Berlin, Hanover, Paris or New York. There are good reasons to focus primarily on dada in Zurich, however. Not only did dada begin in Zurich in the Cabaret Voltaire, founded early 1916, but Zurich also remained the centre of the dada project for several years. Whereas in 1918 another branch, Club dada, was launched in Berlin, it was only in 1919-20, when the dada movement in Zurich (as well as in Berlin) dissolved, that other dada groups such as that in Paris emerged. From 1916 until 1920, Zurich can thus be regarded as the centre of the dada movement. Moreover, the programmatic writings of the Zurich Dadaists contain the constructive momentum of dada in its most elaborated form, which not only contained the vision of a “New Art”, but also of a “New Life” and a “New Man”.
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This constructive momentum in the programmatic of the historical dada movement leads to questioning the conventional image of dada in the historiography of European literary and artistic avantgarde of the first half of the twentieth century as a basically destructive endeavour. Dada is often regarded as the spearhead, as the most radical formation in the historical avant-garde. Most avant-garde historiographies tend to attribute to dada as such a special role. Unlike other isms in the so-called historical avant-garde, it is alleged to have excelled in a fundamental rejection of all art and literature, of aesthetics, of politics and much more. Along the same line, dada’s main objectives are considered to be complete negation, destruction and annihilation, leading to a provocative, nihilist anti-art and antiliterature. To quote from a Dutch handbook on the historical avantgarde: Among the historical avant-garde movements dada is doubtlessly the most radical: it opposes all existing forms of art as well as the cultural pattern of which they are part. In this context, no collective alternative is offered: dada makes a clean sweep, after which everyone has to find his or her own way. (Drijkoningen and Fontijn 1982: 159)
There is, however, a serious problem with this characterisation of dada. The historical manifestations and manifestoes of dada may give rise to the assumption that dada was all in all an anti-movement. But if one traces this image diachronically back through history, there can be no doubt that it does not originate primarily from the historical dada years, that is, the period 1916-1923. Instead, this exclusively destructive image turns out to be a later invention, from the 1950s and 1960s, when dada was rediscovered, as it were.
Dada – Anti-Art or New Art? Dada as a collective avant-garde project ended in Europe in summer 1923, when in Paris the so-called Soirée du Cœur à Barbe, organised by Tzara and other Parisian Dadaists ended in a fight with Breton and the Surrealists, which was lost by the Dadaists. Apart from the Nazi’s, who singled out dada in their campaign against so-called degenerate art, dada was almost completely forgotten in the cultural field in the 1930s and early 1940s. After the Second World War, due to the
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emergence of new avant-garde movements, like cobra and later pop art, and the privileged status of American Abstract Expressionism in the Cold War, but also due to the prominent role of pre-war avantgarde architects – from De Stijl and Bauhaus – in the reconstruction and rebuilding of Europe, the pre-war history of abstract art and avantgardism also gained more and more attention (and most certainly: more positive attention than in the first half of the twentieth century). In the context of the gradual canonisation of pre-war avant-garde art and literature, several former Dadaists who had been involved in completely different activities in the period in between saw new possibilities for the marketing of their youth sin. And it was in these years, in the 1950s and 1960s, when they started to raise the market value of dada (and discredit new, so-called “neo-dada” initiatives), that an image of dada was created as the most radical ism of the historical avant-garde, as an avant-garde formation exclusively excelling in the destruction and annihilation of all art. These (former) Dadaists could do so for two reasons. In the first place: whereas nowadays most of the original, authentic documents concerning dada have been retraced and made accessible, in part from the estates of the by now deceased Dadaists, in part from other private collections, in the 1950s and 1960s anyone who wanted to know more about dada, was still by and largely dependent on the memories of the former Dadaists and on the material released by them. This constellation allowed (former) Dadaists like Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann and Hans Richter to create a new image of dada. In the second place: dada had been a rather short lived avantgarde project. It began in 1916 in Zurich. In 1918 another branch emerged in Berlin. In 1919, and in particular 1920, dada made its appearance in many places – in Paris, New York, Cologne, Hanover, in Holland, in Italy, in Yugoslavia, and even in Japan, but rather as a series of sparks, which disappeared as quickly as they had emerged, nowhere releasing a real prairie fire. Whereas dada ended in Zurich in 1919 and in Berlin in 1920, only dada in Paris and dada in Holland, which was by and large dada in De Stijl, still survived until 1923, be it in the margins of Surrealism or Constructivism. In this brief period, the dada project underwent profound changes. Originally, in 1916, dada emerged as an agency for avant-garde art in all its diversity. Two years later it also turned into an agency for
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a new mentality, for a new state of mind, in which nothingness – Nothing with a capital N, le Néant – played a pivotal role (more on these two phases below). And finally, around 1920, dada turned into its final phase. Whereas originally dada had been the framework, in which the realisation of a new avant-garde art and literature as well as a new state of mind was envisaged, dada was then (circa 1920) outmoded and replaced by other isms, by new avant-garde projects and developments, be it Constructivism or Surrealism, the Bauhaus or – after the seemingly successful revolution in Russia and revolution attempts in Germany and Hungary – by a move of several artists and writers from the aesthetic avant-garde to the (competing) political avant-garde. Several Berlin Dadaists like Wieland Herzfelde, John Heartfield, George Grosz and Franz Jung joined the Communist Party. In this final phase, the role of dada was increasingly restricted to annihilation, to the destruction of then hegemonic art practices and aesthetic academia, without a positive programme of its own, since the alternative, from 1920 onwards, was to be realised within other frameworks, such as Constructivism, Surrealism or Communist proletarian art. When about four decades after the dissolution of the dada movement interest in the old Dadaism grew again and former Dadaists started to produce their memoirs as well as historical monographs and anthologies of the movement, most of them took this final version of dada as the essential form of Dadaism, as a kind of avant-garde executioner, eager to eliminate previous forms of art (thus suppressing or at least ignoring the previous historical versions of the dada programme). This image of dada as a hangman or executioner was actually used by I.K. Bonset, the Dadaist alter-ego or heteronym of Theo van Doesburg, the constructivist editor of De Stijl, in a review of Dutch literature. Bonset ended his critique with the formula “Then dada do your job” – a variation on the standing formula: “Hangman, do your job” (Bonset 1921: 12). In the course of the reinvention, rewriting, restyling and reshaping of the historical dada movement in the 1950s and 1960s, this image of dada as eliminator of all forms of existing art was blurred by the pivotal role of Nothing in the previous Dadaist state of mind. A Nothing, which is now, different from the Dadaist understanding of Nothing in the late 1910s and early 1920s (see below), interpreted as a simple negation, as a negative Nothing, which
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stressed the role (and raised the market value) of dada as the most radical ism of the historical avant-garde. It is interesting to note here that some former Dadaists involved in the renaissance of dada in the 1950s and 1960s even rewrote their own texts. A poignant example of this rewriting is offered in the case of the anthology dada. Eine literarische Dokumentation, edited by the former Zurich and Berlin Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and published in 1964 as one of the first post-war anthologies of Dadaist texts. Huelsenbeck’s anthology is still in print and used by many scholars. It contains quite prominently the text of a “dada lecture”, which was, according to the subtitle, read on 18 February 1918 in Berlin. This lecture starts as follows: Ladies and gentlemen, I have to disappoint you. I hope you won’t be angry with me. […] I’ve decided to devote my lecture to Dadaism. Dadaism is something you don’t know, but you don’t need to know anything about it. Dadaism was neither a movement in art nor a movement in poetry, nor had it anything to do with culture. (Huelsenbeck 1984: 34)
The past tense, in which this speech is written, should have raised already serious doubts right from the start, since dada was not yet over in February 1918, but was actually launched in Berlin by this speech. And dada was still alive and kicking in Zurich. Nevertheless, this dada speech has been taken and is still considered as an authentic document, facilitated by a bibliographic note claiming that the text stemmed from a typescript from 1918. References to this speech are frequent in dada studies and the text is often reprinted, probably not least since it confirms the exclusively negative, destructive image of dada as anti-art-movement. The text published in 1964 was, however, nothing more than a fraud, an act of conscious manipulation to adapt a historical document to the desired image of a restyled dada as anti-art project. For there is another version of the same speech, published in 1920 with a slightly different title, but, judging by the date in the subtitle, referring to the same speech and called “First dada speech in Germany”. The content of this 1920 version is almost the complete opposite of the second 1964 text. It starts as follows: Ladies and gentlemen! This evening is intended as a show of support for Dada, a new international “art movement” founded in Zurich two years ago. (Huelsenbeck 1992: 110)
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And Huelsenbeck concludes in 1920: And what is this Dadaism which I am advocating this evening? It wants to be the Fronde of the major international art movements. It is the bridge to a new pleasure in real things. (Huelsenbeck 1992: 113)
Certainly, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the Dadaists wanted to get rid of hegemonic bourgeois art. They even wanted to get rid of most Western art since the Renaissance as well as of most art from Roman and Greek antiquity. As the Zurich Dadaist Hans Arp wrote in 1925: The dadaïsm has assailed fine-arts. He declared art to be a magic purge, gave the clyster to Venus of Milo and allowed “Laocoon & Sons” to absent themselves at last after they had tortured themselves in the millennial fight with the rattlesnake. (Arp and Lissitzky 1925: x, sic!)
Likewise Hugo Ball defined dada in his diary (1992: 98) as a “play with the shabby remains”, “an execution of showy morality and content”. Yet, at the same time, one should observe that dada originally was, in Zurich in 1916, the name of an artist’s society in pursuit of “un art nouveau” (Tzara 1975: 556-558). This New Art was by no means intended as anti-art, but as true, authentic, real art with a capital A. Noteworthy is a remark by Hugo Ball in his reflections on Dadaist sound poetry, often regarded as an anarchist attack on language, a destruction of literature. As he indicates in his diary, this sound poetry was not intended to destroy, but, on the contrary, to save language and literature: One abstains with this kind of sound poetry completely from the language perverted by journalism. One has to return to the inner alchemy of the word and even abandon the word to save for poetry thus its last most sacred domain. (Ball 1992: 106)
What is more, the New Art was not envisaged as a rejection of the autonomous, institutionalised status of art. Contrary to the conventional image of dada as anti-art, the Zurich Dadaists (but the same holds true for dada elsewhere) did not reject art (as an institution). Instead, the Dadaists tried hard to be admitted to the institutions of art, to conquer a place in the cultural field of their own, pleased and delighted by any form of recognition, by any opportunity
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to establish themselves in the cultural field. A few examples of this tendency should suffice. 1. In the years 1918-19, a Swiss group called Neues Leben, including several Dadaists, organised a series of large exhibitions, one of which in the Zurich art museum, the Kunsthaus. These exhibitions were accompanied by lectures, among others by the then leading Zurich Dadaist Tristan Tzara who was not ashamed for this act of collaboration with the well established institute of the Kunsthaus. On the contrary, using the stationery of the museum, Tzara claimed to other Dadaists like Francis Picabia and André Breton the enormous success of these exhibitions, which were – according to Tzara – visited by tens of thousands of museum visitors (Sanouillet 1993: 458, 501). It should be noted as well that previously, in 1917, dada for some time had a gallery of its own in the Bahnhofstraße in Zurich, which to this day is one of the most respectable, expensive and exclusive streets in Zurich. 2. In 1918-19, when the First World War ended in the collapse of the German Empire, revolution broke out in many places all over Germany. In Munich, this revolution resulted in the so-called Bavarian Council Republic in 1919, which only existed for a few months before being crushed by reactionary, “white” troops acting on behalf of the new social-democrat Weimar as well as the Bavarian government. During its short reign, this Council Republic earned itself the title of writers’ and artists’ republic, due to the extensive involvement of writers and artists, among them Ernst Toller, Erich Mühsam, but also the Zurich Dadaist Hans Richter. Richter was a leading figure in the people’s commissariat for culture, as president of the so-called Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists. One of the few things this Action Committee actually did was to purge the Munich Art Academy. Most of the professors were thrown out. The Academy was, however, neither closed nor abolished. Richter, in fact, invited several Zurich Dadaists (Arp, Marcel Janco and Viking Eggeling) to become new professors in the post-revolutionary Academy (Hoffmann 1992: 22). Since the Council Republic existed only for a few weeks, these Dadaists were not even in the opportunity to accept Richter’s invitation. Yet there can be no doubt that Richter, who later coined the term “anti-art”, intended a Dadaist takeover, not a Dadaist annihilation of the Munich Art Academy.
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3. As these examples indicate, the Dadaist New Art was not against art (as an autonomous institution). The autonomous status of art can be found in dada, in particular in Zurich, in another way still. Although several Dadaists held strong political opinions and opposed the war, they rejected any form of political interference in their aesthetic activities, at least in the framework of dada, be it as an artistic principle or just because they had to be cautious as (illegal) immigrants to avoid deportation. As Huelsenbeck argued in an early dada chronicle from 1920, the Cabaret Voltaire rejected all politics and sociology, having, as he called it, “the closest connections to something called the youngest art” (cit. in Huelsenbeck/Tzara 1985:14). In Zurich, this Dadaist stand even led to a division in circles of German émigrés, with the Dadaists on the one hand, who rejected political subordination, and Expressionists like Ludwig Rubiner and Leonhard Frank on the other hand. The latter believed that the political and military situation in Germany and Europe necessitated a politically engaged art. When Rubiner demanded a clear-cut political art by the Dadaists in the course of this conflict between Dadaist Ästhetiker and Expressionist Moraliker, the Dadaist Hugo Ball reacted with the remark: Politics and art are two different things. One might ask artists as private persons, but one can and may not enforce them to paint posters instead of paintings, to paint propaganda art. (Ball 1992: 163)
Although one might argue that dada in Berlin differs here fundamentally from dada in Zurich, there is, in fact, no difference in principle. Several of the Zurich Dadaists were involved in politics too, in particular in left-wing revolutionary politics. Ball and Richter, for example, had contacts in the anarchist movement. Ball prepared a Bakunin anthology, and Tzara later claimed to have played chess with Lenin. Although Lenin lived in the same premises in the Zurich Spiegelgasse where the Cabaret Voltaire was located, this claim might be a later invention by Tzara when he became a member of the French Communist Party well after the dada period. Still, it is a fact that the review dada was produced in the printer’s shop of one of the founders of the Swiss Communist Party. The Zurich Dadaists rejected, however, a political interference in their aesthetic project. And this same situation could be found in Berlin too. If one differentiates
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Berlin (or Zurich) manifestations and manifestoes explicitly presented under the caption “dada” and other activities by the same artists and writers (Grosz, Heartfield, Hausmann) not presented as dada, but, for example, in the magazines Der blutige Ernst, one notices that here politics as well, or, more accurately, distinct or explicit political views, were articulated basically not in the framework of dada, but in other settings.
The Reunification of Art and Life in dada Dada did not reject art, but proposed a New Art, not as something separated from the rest of society, but integrated in human life as a whole. In other terms, dada pursued the reunification of art and life, of art and non-artistic reality. The notions “life” and “reality” may sound rather vague and ambiguous here, which, in fact, they were. An overview of Dadaist poetics and aesthetic writings shows that life and reality, real, authentic, non-alienated life and reality, were seen in different ways. Three descriptive options seemed to circulate in dada. First of all, some Dadaists, among whom Hugo Ball in his “First Dadaist manifesto” (1916) and Tristan Tzara in the “dada manifesto 1918”, situate life/reality in the individual artistic subject. A return of art (or in their case: of literature) to life, implied that art should follow the inner necessities of the artistic subject or writer. “True” art and literature should be an immediate expression of the inner self. Ball declared in the first dada manifesto in 1916: I don’t want words invented by others. All words have been invented by others. I want my own nonsense, my own rhythm and vowels and consonants fitting to this nonsense and representing myself. (Ball 1988: 40)
Tzara wrote two years later that he aimed at a literature, which never reaches the voracious masses. The work of creative writers, written out of the author’s real necessity, and for his own benefit. The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherein laws become insignificant. (Tzara 1963: 26, 1992: 7)
The proximity to Kandinsky’s considerations on “inner necessity” as an aesthetic norm in Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912) is apparent
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– and this is not accidental as a lecture on Kandinsky by Ball in the Galerie dada in 1917 indicates. Secondly, other Dadaists such as Huelsenbeck (in his Berlin period) situated authentic life and true reality in modern everyday experience, in the modern reality of metropolitan life. Typical here is the Berlin “Dadaist Manifesto” from 1918, signed collectively, yet conceived by Huelsenbeck: The word dada symbolises the most primitive [the most direct] relation to surrounding reality. With Dadaism a new reality is acknowledged. Life appears as a simultaneous jumble of sounds, colours and spiritual rhythms, which is reproduced in Dadaist art in an unwavering way with all sensational cries and fevers of its foolhardy everyday psyche and in its complete brutal reality. (Huelsenbeck 1980: 38)
Clearly, Huelsenbeck uses the same characterisation of dada here as in his original dada speech, written a few months earlier. Finally, some Dadaists, of whom Hans Arp is probably the best example, did neither regard the inner self nor some external and in their eyes superficial reality as the “real life”. They opted for a mystical reality somewhere in the middle, as evinced by some later texts by Arp: “We longed deeply for the absolute, for an undividedness of nature and spirit, of object and subject” (Arp 1995: 76). And: “Art […] should bring us to the spiritual, to reality. This reality is neither an objective […] reality, nor a subjective, mental […] ideality, but a mystical reality” (Arp 1948: 82). In the case of Arp, whose pursuit of a higher truth and deeper reality was kindred to Piet Mondrian’s, the artistic subject serves as a transmitter. True reality manifests itself in the subject through Zufall, normally translated as “chance”, “coincidence” or “accidence”, yet here with a peculiar interpretation: Zufall was not simply meant as chance, but as something that “zu-fällt” (Arp 1960:14), that is, somehow falls to or over the subject. As will be clear, the first understanding of life/reality is at odds with the second. If one departs from an inner reality or an outer reality, important differences for the artistic practice arise. These differences become apparent when one compares Huelsenbeck’s poetics and art in Zurich to his work in Berlin. Huelsenbeck explained (Dadaist) abstraction in Zurich in 1916 as follows:
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A tree is, for example, not a tree as it appears to us, but as it is. The real of the tree are not its branches, flowers and colours, but the transcendental value of the idea tree, as present in the soul of the artist. (quoted in Huelsenbeck/Tzara 1985: 24)
Yet two years later in Berlin, more or less simultaneously (and in line) with the Berlin “Dadaist Manifesto”, he explained his poem “Baum” (Tree), as follows: You see: many interjections. They are typical for Dadaist poetry. For a Dadaist, “ouch” means more then a whole pessimist philosophy. And what do you say about the seeming incoherence of the sentences, even of the individual words in one sentence? But how could one call the whole thing “tree”? Isn’t it lunatic? The Dadaist gives the following explanation: the tree is only the accidental centre of a whole moving world, which has already changed again, when he speaks and writes. [...] The Dadaist believes that nothing living and organic can be reduced to a formula. (quoted in Schrott 1992: 174)
One should be aware here, that dada in itself had no style or singular aesthetic principle of its own. Even though certain avant-garde typography of whirling letters and words, chaotic verses, like Huelsenbeck’s “Baum”, or some forms of collage and assemblage may be regarded nowadays by some as “typically Dadaist”, it is impossible to distinguish a specific Dadaist style. In fact, what can be found in dada, can be found almost without exception previously in pre-war Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism. Yet the specific nature of dada is concealed in its combination, in its heterogeneous synthesis of the divergent stylistic innovations of these previous isms. This synthetic character of dada is also addressed in the programmatic of dada, most notably in the Dadaist stand towards the art and literature of other isms. Setting aside the fierce polemics by Huelsenbeck against Expressionism and Futurism, intended to stress the unique character and importance of dada, it should be noted that the first dada publication, the anthology Cabaret Voltaire (1916) appeared with a wrapper mentioning: “Expressionisme, Cubisme, Futurisme”. This wrapper reflected quite adequately the contents of the anthology, which contained texts and images by Picasso, Apollinaire, Kandinsky, and Marinetti. Later, in 1919, Tzara wrote in a letter to Picabia, that the Zurich review dada was intended as a platform “where all new tendencies shall be represented (self-evidently and according to a
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criterion of which the composition is secret)” (quoted in Sanouillet 1993: 499). This secret criterion in Zurich was probably abstraction. At least in his “dada manifesto 1918” Tzara (1963: 26, 1992: 8) claimed: “DADA is the mark of abstraction.” One should observe here that Huelsenbeck in his dada speech of 1918 also described dada as the fronde of the main international art movements. Brought out here is a common aspect of all avant-garde isms before and after World War I, which is pivotal in the Dadaist avant-garde synthesis and can be found as a common objective in the three mentioned Dadaist options to reunite art and life: the fight for the abolition of so-called illusionist art, as is most evident in several statements by Hans Arp: The illusionist sculpture of the Greeks and the illusionist painting of the Renaissance caused man to overestimate his true nature and led to division and disagreement. (Arp 1992: 34) For the Dadaists, life is the sense of art. Art can misunderstand its means and apply instead of limited means endless means. Then life, nature is only faked. Academic painting describes, gives illusions instead of life and nature. Academic painting fakes nature and life. (Arp 1995: 50)
New Art, New Man, New Life As indicated above, dada started in 1916 as an artist’s society aiming for a New Art. Later, in 1917, it continued as an artist’s movement, as Mouvement dada. Both labels draw attention to an aspect of dada not discussed so far, that is, dada as a social phenomenon or group event. It should be noted here that the art and literature of dada can be considered and is sometimes described without leaning on the notion of avant-garde. One might discuss the Dadaist artistic and literary production also in terms of modern art, abstract, experimental literature and the like. Crucial to the notion avant-garde is not just the aesthetic-innovative aspect, being at the forefront of aesthetic renewal, but also a social dimension. Important here is the fact that most if not all avant-garde isms emerged from a subcultural context, which – in the Second German Empire – was often named the artist’s Bohemia. In this Bohemian anti-bourgeois subculture, a tendency can be observed to mingle artistic or literary activities on the one hand and social, subcultural life on the other. Many Bohemians tried in a way to
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live their art and literature and to reflect their life in their work. In many respects, dada can be regarded as a product of this Bohemian subculture as well. At least, this Bohemian subculture (or what remained of it after the beginning of World War I) was its social background in Zurich and Berlin (much like Greenwich Village was to dada in New York). This brings us to a fourth way in which art and life were combined in dada. As described above, the New Art of dada aimed at a return of art to life, at a reunification of art and reality by overcoming the illusionist aberrations of nineteenth-century Realism. Yet dada pretended to be a social agency as well, showing the way to social change and even to a new humanity. Initially, the New Art was combined with a vision of a New Man, a vision that can be found in Expressionism, but also in the socialist movement, both in its anarchist and its social-democrat and later communist branches (as well as in fascism). The New Man thus appeared in many disguises in the early twentieth century, yet in dada he had a special character, closely related to the Dadaist visions of a New Art. Already in the first entry of his “Chronique zurichoïse” in the Berlin dada-Almanach (Huelsenbeck 1980:10), Tzara described an exhibition of works by Arp and the Dutch couple Otto and Adya van Rees in late 1915 as the “great rumour of new men”. The Dadaist New Man was mainly characterised by a special mentality, a peculiar view on life marked by indifference; indifference not as a lack of interest, as something passive, but as an active and creative state of mind. This creative indifference should be understood in the first place as undividedness. Like art, which should not be divided from life, the Dadaist should not be divided (“in-dividuum”) from – following the three tendencies in relating the New Art with life/reality – either (a) his/her inner self, his/her own necessities, (b) outer, modern, metropolitan reality, or (c) a higher spiritual, mystical reality. At the same time, indifference was also defined as Nothing. This Dadaist Nothing can be found in many different versions. Two famous examples are the formula “dada ne signifie rien”, by Tzara in his “dada manifesto 1918” (1963: 21), and “dada is a clown’s game from nothing” by Hugo Ball (1992: 98). Such remarks may sound quite negative, and as pointed out above, since the 1950s and 1960s this Nothing is most often interpreted as total negation. The Nothing
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referred to by the historical Dadaists was, however, as Salomo Friedlaender, a German philosopher closely associated to Berlin dada, insisted, much more than a simple negation, denial or rejection. Nothing as indifference and undividedness was to be interpreted as a neutral nothing, as the absolute centre or equilibrium between all possible oppositions and polarities (be it plus – minus, man – woman, light – dark or war – peace). This understanding of Nothing had an obvious mystical, spiritual dimension. Indeed, many Dadaists were very much interested in mysticism and medieval as well as Eastern spirituality, in which Nothing with a capital N plays an important role. Early Christian mysticism such as Meister Eckhard’s, for example, frequently reflected on the divine creatio ex nihilo, and also in Taoism the road to spiritual enlightenment is defined as a Nothing in which all options are still open. It can be argued that the concept of creative indifference, of Nothing as a tabula rasa should be seen in the context of the socioeconomic and politico-military situation in the late 1910s and early 1920s. During World War I, with no end of the Armageddon in sight, creative indifference implied a radical yet personal turn away from the horrors of daily reality. After the war, when the hope of a revolution in Berlin was crushed, this creative indifference – not surprisingly – emerged again. Importantly, however, between the end of the war and the establishment of a new post-war order, the creative indifference of the Dadaist New Man was replaced by another concept: the New Life. Undoubtedly under the influence of revolutionary developments in Europe in the wake of the war, which gave the impression that real change was once again possible, one may also find in the dada movement, or rather in the immediate context of the dada movement, several pamphlets, manifestoes and groups, to which Dadaists contributed, arguing that a New Art not only led to a New Life, but also needed a New Life, a new social order. I will give two illustrations of this emergent New Life: 1. In 1918 a new art group was founded in Basel and Zurich, called Neues Leben (New Life). It was not an exclusively Dadaist enterprise, but several Dadaists were deeply involved, including Janco, Tzara, Richter, Eggeling, Arp and Sophie Täuber. In a lecture on abstract art accompanying the second exhibition of the group in the Zurich Kunsthaus (that is, the exhibition mentioned before), the German writer and critic Otto Flake, associated with dada in Zurich,
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described the New Art as a gateway to a New Life: “The new movement wants art to relate again with life and subordinate art in all its forms under the idea of the enrichment of life” (Flake 1920: 109). This art was, according to Flake, congenial to a new philosophy, which would give man a new place in the cosmos and bring omnipresent love, good and true peace. Flake’s assessment may sound quite religious and spiritual, but his intention to reform or even revolutionise life from an aesthetic starting point is evident. 2. This is even more obvious in the proclamations of the group Artistes Radicaux (Radical Artists), founded in 1919 by the Zurich Dadaists Eggeling, Arp, Janco and Richter as well as some local Swiss artists from Neues Leben. In May 1919, the Artistes Radicaux published a manifesto in several Swiss newspapers, rejecting materialism and capitalism, which had fostered the bestiality of the First World War, arguing instead that: We artists, as representatives of a substantial section of culture as a whole, want to position ourselves in the middle of things and share responsibility for the coming ideal development in society. That’s our right. We proclaim that the law of artistic movement of our age is already formulated to a considerable extent. The spirituality of an abstract art implies the enormous expansion of the human sense of freedom. Our belief aims at an art marked by solidarity: new mission of man in community. [...] Art should be the base of the new, should belong to anyone and not one class [...]. Our paramount perspective: the pursuit of a comprehensive foundation of a spiritual horizon. That’s our obligation. Such work guarantees the people the highest value of life and unexpected possibilities. The initiative to do so is ours. We will give expression to the gigantic currents and give the dispersed movement a concrete and tangible direction. (quoted in Heller/Windhöfel 1981:76)
The group did not exist very long, though. Its planned review Zürich 1919 was never published. Some sections of the review were included a few months later in Der Zeltweg, the last dada periodical published in Zürich. However, whereas dada in its attempt to synthesise other avantgarde isms can be regarded as a transmitter between the avant-garde before and after World War I, between Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism on the one hand and Surrealism and Constructivism on the other, the Artistes Radicaux can be regarded as a crucial link between dada and Constructivism, in which several of the participating artists became involved in the following years. Moreover, the conception of a
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New Art leading to a New Life, would become one of the main elements in the programme of the constructivist strata in the avant-garde as well. It is thus clear that dada, at least in Zurich, was anything but an exclusively negative, destructive enterprise. Dada was not against (autonomous) art, against art as an institution, but rather for a New Art, using radical new forms (as abstraction and sound poetry) in an attempt to unite or reunite Art and Life. This New Art further coincided with farther reaching notions of the New Man and the New Life. This conclusion might come as a surprise against the background of the common view of dada as anti-art. It should not surprise, however, if one keeps in mind that the place of dada in the historical avant-garde was right in the middle. Not only diachronically, that is, between the avant-garde before and after World War I. But also synchronically, as a synthesis of different approaches and schools, as the spearhead or avant-garde of the avant-garde and not as its odd man out. NOTE 1
This essay elaborates on reflections previously published in my thesis (Berg 1999) as well as in a series of occasional articles (notably Berg 1993, 1995, 1997a, 1997b, 1999, 2000a, 2000b and 2002). The following bibliographical notes contain only references to directly quoted literature.
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WORKS CITED Arp, Hans. 1948. On My Way. Poetry and Essays 1912 ... 1947. New York: Wittenborn. ---. 1960. "Die Musen und der Zufall" Du 236:14-17. ---. 1992. "Diese Arbeiten ..." in Alfons Backes-Haase. Kunst und Wirklichkeit. Zur Typologie des DADA-Manifests. Frankfurt am Main: Hain: 34-5. ---. 1995. Unsern täglichen Traum... Erinnerungen, Dichtungen und Betrachtungen aus den Jahren 1914-1954. Zürich: Arche. Arp, Hans and El Lissitzky. 1925. Die Kunstismen. Les Ismes de l’art. The Isms of Art. Erlenbach, München and Leipzig: Rentsch. Ball, Hugo. 1988. Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit. Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ---. 1992. Die Flucht aus der Zeit. Zürich: Limmat. Berg, Hubert van den. 1993. "L'utopie langagière dans l'oeuvre poétique de Hans/Jean Arp" in Henriette Ritter and Annelies Schulte Nordholt (eds.) La Révolution dans les lettres. Textes pour Fernand Drijkoningen. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi: 211-225. ---. 1995. "Tristan Tzaras "Manifeste dada 1918": Anti-Manifest oder manifestierte Indifferenz? Salomo Friedlaenders "schöpferische Indifferenz" und das Dadaistische Selbstverständnis" Neophilologus 79(3): 353-376. ---. 1996. "dada - mimesis en anti-mimesis. Voor een andere opvatting van het dadaïstische kunstwerk" Tijdschrift voor Literatuurwetenschap 1(3): 216-230. ---. 1997a. "Poetry as a reification of nature. On the role of nature in the avant-garde poetics and concrete poetry of Hans Arp" in Svend Erik Larsen, Morten Nøjgaard and Annelise Ballegaard Petersen (eds.) Nature: the Otherness of Literature/Nature: la littérature et son autre. Odense: Odense University Press: 124-141. ---. 1997b. "dada als Emanation des Nichts. Anmerkungen zum Dadaistischen Verhältnis zu Religion und Mystik" in Bettina Gruber (ed.) Erfahrung und System. Mystik und Esoterik in der Literatur der Moderne. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag: 82-101. ---. 1999. Avantgarde und Anarchismus. dada in Zürich und Berlin. Heidelberg: Winter. ---. 2000a. "‘Übernationalität’ der Avantgarde - (Inter-)Nationalität der Forschung. Hinweis auf den internationalen Konstruktivismus in der europäischen Literatur und die Problematik ihrer literaturwissenschaftlichen Erfassung" in Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders (eds.) Der Blick vom Wolkenkratzer. Avantgarde - Avantgardekritik - Avantgardeforschung. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi: 255-291. ---. 2000b. "‘... damit die Harmonie gewahrt bleibt’, oder: ‘Wie wunderschön ist die Natur’. Kurt Schwitters' MERZ-Projekt als avantgardistische Naturannäherung" in Ralf Grüttemeier and Klaus Beekman (eds.) Instrument Zitat. Über den literaturhistorischen und institutionellen Nutzen von Zitaten und Zitieren. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi: 37-70. ---. 2002. "‘Originalitätssucht’ en de noodzaak tot distinctie. dada en de Nederlandse avantgarde" in: Hubert van den Berg and Gillis Dorleijn (eds.) Avantgarde!
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Voorhoede? Literaire vernieuwingsbewegingen in Noord en Zuid opnieuw beschouwd. Nijmegen: Vantilt: 157-179. Bonset, I.K. 1921. "Rondblik" De Stijl 4(1): 10-12. Drijkoningen, Ferdinand, and Jan Fontijn (eds.). 1982. Historische avantgarde. Programmatische teksten van het Italiaans Futurisme, het Russisch Futurisme, dada, het Constructivisme, het Surrealisme en het Tsjechisch Poëtisme. Amsterdam: Huis aan de Drie Grachten. Flake, Otto. 1920. "Über abstrakte Kunst" in G. Biermann (ed.) Jahrbuch der jungen Kunst. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann: 96-109. Friedlaender, Salomo. 1915. "Waghalter der Welt" Die Weißen Blätter 2: 857-894. Heller, Martin, and Lutz Windhöfel. 1981. "Das Neue Leben" in Künstlergruppen in der Schweiz 1910-1936. Aarau: Kunstmuseum Aargau: 60-93. Hoffmann, Justin. 1992. "Hans Richter und die Münchener Räterepublik" in Marion von Hofacker (ed.) Hans Richter 1888-1976. Dadaist. Filmpionier. Maler. Theoretiker. Berlin, Zürich and München: Akademie der Künste: 21-25 Huelsenbeck, Richard (ed.). 1980. dada-Almanach. Im Auftrag des Zentralamts der deutschen dada-Bewegung. Hamburg: Nautilus. ---. 1984. Dada. Eine literarische Dokumentation. Reinbek: Rowohlt. ---. 1992. The Dada Almanach (Malcolm Green et al. tr.) London: Atlas Press. Huelsenbeck, Richard, and Tristan Tzara. 1985. dada siegt! Bilanz und Erinnerung. Hamburg: Nautilus. Kandinsky, Wassily. 1912. Über das Geistige in der Kunst. München: Piper. Sanouillet, Michel. 1993. dada à Paris. Paris: Flammarion. Schrott, Raoul (ed.). 1992. DADA 15/25. Post Scriptum oder Die Himmlischen Abenteuer des Hr.n. Tristan Tzara. Innsbruck: Haymon. Tzara, Tristan. 1963. Sept Manifestes DADA. Lampisteries. Paris: Pauvert. ---. 1975. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 1 (1912-1924). Paris: Flammarion. ---. 1992. Seven dada Manifestoes and Lampisteries. London, Paris and New York: Calder.
Parties/Groups
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The Futurist Political Party Günter Berghaus
Futurism was an art movement that pursued a total makeover of the social and political conditions prevailing in the modern world and attempted a permanent revolution in all spheres of human existence. The overturning of aesthetic traditions and conventions was part and parcel of a programme of political and social, intellectual and moral regeneration. Many of the ideas synthesized in the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) can already be detected, at least in nuce, in the decade preceding Futurism, when Marinetti gained influence on the cultural climate in Italy through his activities as a poet, journalist, critic and publisher. Marinetti’s studies of law (1895-1899) had provided him with a sound knowledge of modern political theories. He also took a lively interest in the practical politics of his country, particularly those pursued by radical and subversive groups. Therefore, his aesthetic programme of renewal was always complemented by a political engagement. Marinetti’s literary works and theoretical essays of the years 1900 to 1909 were a testament to his ideological development and prefigure many of the militant concepts expressed in his political manifestoes of 1909-18.
Marinetti as a Political Ideologue, 1900-1913 Marinetti’s early Weltanschauung was derived from a number of sources. He was an admirer of Nietzsche’s radical individualism and Bergson’s dynamic concept of the universe, but he also studied Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Georges Sorel’s theory of violence became a lasting influence on his political viewpoints, as did
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the concept of revolutionary actionism promoted by the Syndicalist theorist Fernand Pelloutier (Berghaus 1995: 8-29). But Marinetti’s development as a political thinker was not only determined by books and theories. He also formed his viewpoints by observing revolutionary actions on the streets and popular debates in workingmen’s clubs and political assemblies. In 1889, we find him at close quarters with the insurrection that shook Milan and condemning the carnage caused by General Bava Beccaris. In the early 1900s, he visited meetings held by the Socialist Party and the trade unions; he made the acquaintance of the socialist leaders Labriola, Turati and Kuliscioff and became friends with the Revolutionary Syndicalist Walter Mocchi, who involved him in the General Strike of September 1904, characterized by Giolitti as “the dress rehearsal of the revolution” (Valeri 1966: 283). Marinetti’s libertarian leanings came to the fore when he recited poems with Anarchist themes at literary soirées or in the meeting halls of Anarcho-Syndicalist associations. And when the death sentence was passed on the Catalan Anarchist and educationalist Francesco Ferrer for his supposed role in the violence during the Barcelona General Strike of 26-29 July 1909, he joined an international protest movement that tried to save his life (Marinetti 1969: 81). Marinetti was, so it seems, far more serious in his political engagement than most members of the late Lombard scapigliatura. 1 But his decision to become a poet rather than a lawyer meant that his contribution to the development of a new Italian society came through the medium of books rather than through a party-political engagement. In his pre-Futurist years, he remained, as he himself admitted, “an observer” (Marinetti 1969: 28), especially of “the psychology of the masses” (Marinetti 1900: 569) 2 and of the charismatic leaders of the period. He was attracted, so it seems, to all those movements that could be called “revolutionary”, whatever their colours might be. His main sympathies lay with the Anarchists and Revolutionary Syndicalists, but he was also an ardent nationalist and an admirer of Crispi, whom he proclaimed as his “preferred great Italian patriot” (Marinetti 1969: 18). His nationalist sentiments forbid him to lend his support to Labriola, and even less so to the Socialist leaders, Turati and Ferri. As he said: “My passion for Italy forbids me to savour any internationalisms” (Marinetti 1969: 28). Yet, at the same time, he
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would not give his backing to Enrico Corradini’s Italian Nationalist Association as it was, in his view, far too traditionalist. He therefore remained an engaged witness to the revolutionary upheavals of his time and did not adhere to any one political camp. When in 1909 he published his Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, he presented a far-reaching programme of renewal that linked aesthetic innovation with a radical transformation of the real world. However, Marinetti was fully aware that literary manifestoes and works of art were not a sufficient means to transform the somnolent and stultified cultural scene in Italy. Therefore, from the very beginning, politics played a significant role in the Futurist movement. In 1909, Marinetti extended the radius of his activities beyond the intellectual elites and sought to find allies on the political battlefield (see illustration 6). He undertook numerous attempts to gather the support of the Anarcho-Syndicalists of Northern Italy. He planned to stand in the local elections in Piedmont, with an AnarchoSyndicalist programme of a nationalistic bent. During the 1913 elections, he published a political manifesto and had it distributed in a hundred-thousand copies, thus giving rise to the suspicion that he intended to stand against the reformist Socialist Leonida Bissolati. Although this was not the case, in an interview with Giornale d'Italia, of 30 October 1913, Marinetti announced that in the near future he intended to enter the political arena on a list for a really important constituency. However, it took until 1919, before this idea came to fruition.
The Programme of the Futurist Political Party On 9 December 1917, an editorial in L’Italia Futurista announced the project of a Futurist Political Party, in which the best elements of the artistic life, through their contact with the masses, would shape a new type of Italian citizen and transform the moral spirit of the nation (Settimelli 1917). On 11 February 1918, the same paper published the Party’s political programme, written, presumably, during Marinetti’s army leave from 27 January to 8 February 1918. Its main points can be summarized thus: 1. Italy must be liberated from its servitude to past achievements, the tourist industry and parasitical clericalism.
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2. Italy must be sovereign, united and indivisible and be propelled by a revolutionary Nationalism intent on bringing freedom, well-being, physical and intellectual improvement to the whole population. 3. Education of the proletariat; fight against illiteracy; improvement of road networks; obligatory schooling; closure of ineffective universities and abolition of classical education; technical instruction in the workplace; obligatory sport and military education in the open air. 4. Transformation of parliament by giving industrialists, farmers, engineers and businessmen an active role in the government of the country; lowering the age-limit for deputies to twenty-two years. In a second stage, transformation of government by a group of twenty technocrats elected by universal suffrage; Senate to be replaced by a Supervisory Assembly made up of twenty young men under the age of thirty, elected by universal suffrage; equal vote for men and women in a broadly-based election system using proportional representation. 5. Substitution of the present rhetorical anti-clericalism by a resolute anticlericalism, so as to rid Italy of her reactionary and medieval theocracy. 6. Abolition of marital authorization; easy divorce; gradual devaluation of marriage, eventually to be replaced by free love and children reared in State institutions. 7. Maintenance of the army and the navy at full capacity until such time as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is dismantled. Subsequently, reduction of the number of personnel to a bare minimum. Abolition of ceremonial patriotism, of the obsession with monuments and of every kind of State interference in artistic matters. 8. Nationalization of land and creation of government-owned estates madeup from the property of religious organizations and local authorities, as well as from the expropriation of all uncultivated or badly-managed lands. High taxation of all inherited property, with limits set on the number of successive heirs. Freedom of strike action, of assembly, of association, and of the press. Reform of the police and abolition of the secret service. Interdiction of army intervention for the purpose of restoring public order. Cost-free recourse to the law and an elected judiciary. Minimum set wages automatically raised in relation to the cost of living. A legal maximum of eight consecutive hours of work. Parity of remuneration for men and women for equal work. Fair and impartial laws governing individual and collective labour agreements. Transformation of charity organizations into a social welfare and national insurance system. Workers’ pensions. Sequestration of two thirds of all assets gained through war contracts.
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9. Establishment of a stock of agricultural land for ex-combatants. 10. Industrialization and modernization of the moribund cities that are still living in the past. Development of the mercantile marine and of river traffic. Creation of canalized waterways and the draining of malaria-ridden lands. To put a stop to emigration. Nationalization and utilization of all water and all mines. Concession of their potential benefits to local public authorities. Easier finance for industry and cooperatives for agriculture. Consumers’ rights. 11. Radical overhaul of the bureaucracy which has become an end in itself and a State within the State; devolution of administrative responsibilities and control mechanisms to the regions, to make every administrative body swift-acting and efficient, to reduce the number of employees by two thirds and to cut out the dead wood from every administrative body, from the diplomatic service and from all areas of national life.
When Marinetti published this manifesto, the Party itself – which in the following I shall refer to as the FPP (in Italy it was also known as the Fasci Politici Futuristi) – had not yet been constituted. However, in a political speech of 17 March 1918 given in the council hall of Scandiano (Reggio Emilia), Marinetti indicated that his mind was already firmly focused on making it an important force in the post-war reconstruction of the country. For the time being, he was still doing service with the 112th Gruppo Bombardieri, and as of 26 June-23 September 1918, with the Squadriglie Automitragliatrici Blindate. From 29 June to 22 July 1918, he was on leave and travelled to Milan, Genova, Turin and Florence. Benito Mussolini, who had been an ally during the Interventionist demonstrations of 1915 and had prompted rumours of having joined the Futurist movement, 3 contacted Marinetti and set up a meeting to discuss joint political actions in the post-war period. Over the next days, they met three times, and this set a process in motion that determined a great deal of Marinetti’s political actions of 1919-20. Mussolini was in Liguria, where he was lobbying leading industrialists, especially the brothers Perrone from the Ansaldo group, and was trying to obtain finances for a new office of Il popolo d’Italia in Genoa. 4 Mussolini appeared keen to renew contacts with Marinetti, presumably to ascertain how useful the Futurist leader could be for his political career in post-war Italy. Marinetti was quite taken by their first encounter and on 19 July noted in his diary: “Mussolini, a
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handsome face, forceful, clear, strong, intelligent, healthy, but agitated by passionate grimaces, leans on the table and talks with me in a hushed, conspiratorial voice (…) He expresses his disdain for the bookish Italians. He is full of Futurist ideas” (Marinetti 1987: 285286). On the topic of their conversation we are informed: “We talk about the war, the weakness of the government, the disgust which inspires cowardice, the indecisiveness of Turati, Swiss and German espionage, etc. (…) Mussolini returns to our conversation about La stampa, the Turin newspaper, and its loathsome neutralist campaign”. Mussolini asked Marinetti for a longer meeting the following day. This time, their conversation revolved around the French counter offensive at the Marne, which had begun on 15 July; a recent strike at Sampierdarena, a harbour on the Ligurian coast, which Mussolini surmised to have been financed by German money; the intellectuals’ defeatist attitude towards the war, their tricks and feigned illnesses in order to get away from the front. Marinetti quoted the case of Rosso di San Secondo, and Mussolini complained about the lack of perseverance in Papini’s articles. On 20 July, they had lunch together, and this time the conversation focussed on the patriotism of the Italian soldiers. They discussed the formation of a War Veterans’ Association in Turin and their demand for a government of ex-combatants to rule Italy after the war (Marinetti 1987: 287). Neither Marinetti nor Mussolini knew at this point that it was exactly such a project which, a few months later, was going to bring the two men together again.
The Founding of the Futurist Political Party From 5 August to 1 September 1918, Marinetti was on summer vacation, first in Milan to prepare a new anthology of Futurist poems, 5 then in Rome to set up, with Mario Carli and Emilio Settimelli, a new national newspaper, Roma Futurista, intended to “bind the Futurists, the Arditi of the Nation, to the Arditi, the Futurists of the army.” 6 On 11 August, Marinetti called this paper Giornale per tutti gli arditi; but when the first number appeared (on 20 September 1918), the subtitle had changed to Giornale del Partito Politico Futurista 7 and carried on the front page its political programme, previously published in L’Italia Futurista. We must therefore assume that during Marinetti’s stay in
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Rome (11 to 17 August) the Party had actually been founded and that Marinetti, Carli, Settimelli and Balla counted amongst its first members. However, for the time being, no official registration of the Party took place. On 2 September, Marinetti returned to his garrison. He proselytized amongst the assault troops and prepared the way for an alliance between Arditi and Futurists, which he intended to play a major role in the post-war reconstruction of Italian public life. On 15 September 1918, he held a widely publicized speech in Riese, 8 in which he presented Futurism as a compact fusion of an artistic, political and military engagement. As such, it formed a perfect counterpart to the revolutionary spirit that animated the Arditi. This “aristocracy of the army” 9 resembled in each and every way the principal qualities of a Futurist: unbridled love of our Divine Italy; fierce love of liberty; love of innovation and the progressive spirit; revolutionary type of nationalism; passion for violence, war and heroic gestures; audacity, bravado and youthful cockiness; elastic discipline; flexible and practical thinking opposed to German pedantry and meticulousness. Just like the Futurists, the Arditi constitute “the new generation in Italy, reckless and ingenious, which prepares the ground for an exalted Italian future”. This speech, to all intents and purposes, comprised the first outline of the concept of ArditoFuturism, which determined much of the activities of the FPP in the following months. In the weeks leading up to the decisive battle of Vittorio Veneto (30 October 1918), Marinetti used every opportunity to propagate the aims of the Futurist movement amongst the combatants and civilian population. Whenever he was invited to a soirée in a salon of a local luminary, he recited Futurist poetry; whenever a group of officers met for lunch or dinner, he directed the conversation to Futurism and its role in post-war Italy. Marinetti’s diary shows that these meetings and discussions were extremely stimulating and gave him occasion to elaborate his political agenda. For example, on 6 October, he had a meeting with some thirty officers in Mombello, about which he reported in his diary: We’re all in a good mood. I talk about Russia, Futurism, politics, war. I explain that war is a Futurist event with a revitalizing, stimulating, exhilarating character that yields maximum efficiency of a human being. It
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On 13 October 1918, a regiment of American soldiers arrived near his garrison, which prompted Marinetti to reflect on US capitalism and its social order: Those who preach the validity and necessity of class struggle do not believe in democracy. They do not want to advance all human beings but tend to downgrade parts of them. They pursue a programme of destruction, not construction. They are reactionaries, not progressives. The problems of production and labour cannot be expressed with the formula of capital and labour. The problem of labour is a human one: the man who works with his brawn, the man who works with his brain, the man who works with his rightly acquired money are three different aspects of the same issue. They are closely related and often become one. (...) America’s superiority over Europe rests in the fact that they do not have determining economic classes and do not want to cultivate any.
Another critical issue to demand his attention was the low status of women in Italian society and their political backwardness. The discussions and meetings he had with various enlightened and emancipated women prompted him to amend or add to the FPP programme: Against the family. I explain that saying “my woman” is a medieval and barbarous absurdity. The woman is mine only while I am hers: today, in this moment, for an hour, a month, 10 or 20 years etc. Linking family with the word my produces a need for adultery and prostitution, as well as a masquerade of hypocrisy and regular betrayal. I believe instead that a woman loves, takes or is taken only for the time she desires it. She is her own boss, free and not tied down by any contract; she can be sure that her child will be looked after by the State; she can choose another man, another love. Initially, there will be promiscuity and a great deal of prostitution. Then, when sentimental love has been gradually devalued, coitus becomes an ordinary human act. Children will be reared by the State without any morbid and strangulating affection. Women will be free to devote themselves to remunerative work and be able to protect themselves and develop their talents. One teacher suffices to educate 100 children. She will do so by vigorously applying the standards of health, patriotism, physical
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and intellectual courage. Thus we shall have children well-prepared for all the challenges of life. 11 The women of Trieste and of the Trento province, which under Austrian law enjoyed complete personal freedom, must not have these rights mutilated now. The custom of marital authorization is a barbarous, cretinous and reactionary affair. 12 Supplement to the political manifesto, under the heading “Children reared in State institutions”: Marriage is a form of barbarity, which could not have endured without the safety valve of adultery. The absurd slavery which women take a delight in, together with the chains of a moronic jealousy, have as their only excuse the defence of children. 13
After the armistice and victory celebrations, Marinetti returned to Milan and was officially discharged on 5 December 1918. He visited old friends, discussed with Notari the setting up of a new monthly magazine dedicated to Italian and world-wide Futurism, 14 and recommenced his search for political allies. Only hours after his arrival in Milan, he met Mussolini in the office at the Popolo d’Italia. Judging by Marinetti’s diary entries, this time he was not too impressed with the man and his ideas: Mussolini is seated at his table, which has a dramatic backdrop, a great black flag covering the wall – the flag of the Arditi – with the skull and cross bones. He’s in quite a temper, with his bulging eyes flashing fire at every word spat out against the Yugoslavs. He’s ranting about the fleet that should have been handed over to us! He’s in the process of writing a provocative article. He leaps up on his chair, waves his arms about, fills the tiny room, and makes it burst at the seams. He tells one of his editors to go and get a Caproni plane because he absolutely must fly to Livorno, to deliver a lecture. He shows me a list with the names of many officers who have died in this offensive, which he’s going to publish, in response to foreign innuendoes seeking to devalue our victory. He talks to me about the Florentine branch of the Futurist Political Party. “However”, he says very forcefully, “I will oppose any calamitous move towards rebellion before peace is signed”. I agree with him. But I don’t open up to him. He says, “The republic is a sort of crowning ideal we all dream about. But I could well go beyond the republic to arrive at a monarchy”. I sense the reactionary in the making in this violent, agitated temperament, so full of Napoleonic authoritarianism and a nascent, aristocratic scorn for the masses.
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Günter Berghaus He comes from the people but no longer cares about them. He tends towards aristocratic thought and notions of the heroic will. He’s certainly no great intellect. He didn’t see the need for war. He was originally an antimilitaristic demagogue without a country. Out of this inevitable eruption of hostilities against the autocratic empires, he is now extracting a need for, and will towards, discipline at all costs. But it has a decidedly reactionary cast and smacks of militarism for its own sake. He doesn’t see things clearly. He is propelled by his predisposition towards heroic struggle and his Napoleonic ideal. He also aspires, I think, towards riches. He can’t take his big eyes off my expensive raincoat. He bids me goodbye in a very friendly manner and is insistent I come back to see him again. 15
It appears that the encounter changed Marinetti’s mind about Mussolini and made him doubt that he would be a suitable associate of the Futurist Political Party. Vice versa, Mussolini, who was searching for allies in his project of a Constitutional Assembly, will have found Marinetti a rather unsuitable partner. He only changed this view when he abandoned his call for a costituente and instead courted the excombatants as the “élite dell’aristocrazia nuova”. 16 Mussolini, the renegade socialist, no longer sought to revolutionize Italian society by means of the proletarian masses but through the soldiers returning from the trenches. A great number of them were hoping for a new beginning and were keen to follow up the victory over Austria with a victory over the old, corrupt elites in parliament. Mussolini rightly assumed that the Futurists and their allies, the Arditi, could ease his access to the militant avant-garde of war veterans and Left-wing interventionists, who after the “revolutionary war” were ready to launch a post-war political revolution.
The Evolution of the Futurist Political Party and Ardito-Futurism Following the FPP’s founding meeting sometime between 11 and 17 August 1918 and the propagation of its political programme, the Party slowly began to take shape. From the front, Marinetti gave his instructions to Carli and Settimelli and exhorted them to direct their attention to three potential recruitment groups: war veterans, women and youths (Marinetti 1989: 55-67). He made sure that copies of Roma
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Futurista, which printed the FPP’s Political Programme in each issue, was sent to influential Arditi leaders. In the number of 30 September 1918, Settimelli opened a debate on female suffrage and the role of women in post-war Italian society (Settimelli 1918a). 17 Consequently, a debate that had previously filled the pages of L’Italia Futurista now found a continuation in Roma Futurista and extended far beyond the issue of women’s vote. Judging by the readers’ letters that filled the rubrics, “Il partito Futurista”, “Discussioni sul Manifesto Politico” and “Adesioni”, the proposal and demands which the FPP made through the paper found a lively response in various sectors of society. Encouraged by such a feedback, Settimelli returned to his native Florence and enrolled friends and colleagues from the Futurist circle (e.g. Neri Nannetti, Giulio Spina, Ottone Rosai, Antonio Marasco, Gastone Gorrieri, Enzo Mainardi and Marcello Manni) into the Party. On 6 December 1918, they held their first official meeting at the Gambrinus Hall, under the chairmanship of Enrico Rocca. Altogether 27 members and sympathizers discussed Benito Mussolini’s proposals for a Constituent Assembly, Sonnino’s negotiations at the Paris Peace Congress over the Dalmatian islands, the Brenner Pass and Fiume, and the Futurist proposal of a technocratic government without parliament or senate, but with a Board of Initiatives made up of young and capable men under the age of thirty. 18 The second meeting, on 7 December 1918, chaired by Primo Conti, focused on the question of whether Italy should become a republic or stay a monarchy; on the formation of the new State of Yugoslavia (i.e. the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, proclaimed on 1 December 1918) and its claim on Dalmatia; 19 and on the contentious issue of Party discipline. 20 The next day, the Party introduced itself to the public at a convention of the Associazione Patriottica. In an overcrowded FIAT hall, Marinetti proposed a motion in the name of the FPP against the Yugoslav claim on Dalmatia and in support of Sonnino’s negotiation position at the Paris Peace Conference. Marinetti’s speech received a long applause and the motion was accepted. Afterwards, they held a demonstration in Piazza della Signoria, marched with the FPP flag through the streets of Florence and then adjourned to the cafés and bars of the city. 21 Content with the performance of the young Party at the Salone FIAT and during subsequent discussions with supporters at the Café Moderno, Hotel Baglioni and Cafè Concerto Paskowski,
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Marinetti noted in his diary: “I feel that we are rapidly overcoming and dismantling the hurdles of mockery, resistance and hostility that had been erected by the artistic soirées (serate) and paintings. The Futurist Political Party is now a reality” (Marinetti 1987: 395). 22 The next day, Marinetti travelled to Rome to set up, in an official and formal manner, a Roman branch of the FPP. As usual, he met his friends in the backroom of the Caffè Aragno, but this time they were joined by several Arditi who sympathized with the FPP. The official Party Assembly, which took place on 13 and 16 December 1918, resembled the one previously held in Florence. Again, Dalmatia and the Paris peace talks dominated the proceedings; but this time, Marinetti added a “fierce anti-papal” motion, which made the demand for “devaticanization” (svaticanamento) official Party policy. 23 Marinetti’s diary does not say how many people attended the meetings, but a later list, published in Marinetti e il Futurismo (1929), registered as members Giacomo Balla, Umberto Beer, Piero Bolzon, Giuseppe Bottai, Alberto Businelli, Riccardo Calcaprina, Guido Calderini, Mario Carli, Remo Chiti, Auro d’Alba, Sileno Fabbri, Nino Formoso, Crescenzio Fornari, Gino Galli, Silvio Galli, Francesco Giacobbe, Guido Marchesani, Nino Racchella, Enrico Rocca, Enrico Santamaria, Angelo Scambelluri, Mario Scaparro, Luigi Verderame (pseud. of Gino Sapio) and Volt (pseud. of Vincenzo Fani-Ciotti). In the following months, local branches of the FPP were established in about a dozen Italian cities. Membership was drawn predominantly from Futurist cells founded in pre-war years and from ex-combatant groups. The pages of Roma Futurista show that support was particularly strong from the Arditi, who were returning from the trenches and did not find a congenial home in the traditional veteran organizations. For example, on 30 October 1918, the soldiers of the 23 Assault Battalion declared: “Here in our Unit, some twenty colleagues and friends join with delight the Political-Artistic Futurist Movement”. Others from a more conventional cultural environment delighted in the fact that a political Party could be born from an artistic movement and that an intellectual elite would embark on the conquest of power and the construction of a new civilization. This caused people such as Massimo Bontempelli to announce on 10 November 1918: “For the first time in my life, I manage to enrol, without reserve and doubts in my mind, in a political Party, the
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Futurist Political Party”. From the amalgamation of such diverse personalities and the confluence of varied experiences (social, political, cultural, etc.) a new political trend arose: Ardito-Futurism. On 1 January 1919, Mario Carli founded a National Association of Arditi and, on 19 January 1919, Ferruccio Vecchi set up a first local branch in Milan, in the Futurist Headquarters (i.e. Marinetti’s apartment). The political programme of the organization was elaborated by Carli in four documents, 24 which reveal close resemblance to the ideas expressed in the manifesto of the FPP. The first was published as The First Appeal to the Flames (the “Flames” being the insignia of the Arditi) in Roma Futurista of 20 September 1918. It was addressed “to all Arditi of Italy, to all those who have the soul of a combatant, the pride of an Italian and the energy of a Futurist” and exhorted them to establish new values in Italian public life, politics and culture (Cordova 1969: 208-209). The Second Appeal to the Flames appeared in the same paper on 10 December 1918 and announced the foundation of the Associazione fra gli Arditi d'Italia, “which reports to the Futurist Political Party receiving, whenever necessary, their support and help. The newspaper Roma Futurista will be the organ of the Association” (Cordova 1969: 209-210). A formal Programme and Statute for the Post-War Period was published in May 1919. But more interesting was the Manifesto of the Futurist Ardito of November 1919, as it constituted the Arditi’s most comprehensive, most radical and most Futurist political statement. In the preamble, the Ardito-Futurist is described as a genial mind brimming with courage and intelligence, passion and sincerity. He hates pedantic logic, erudition and snobbism and is a man of an “intuitive and lyrical practice”, who “dedicates himself to the riskiest and most difficult undertakings”. His actions are propelled by the following principles: to modernize the whole political-bureaucraticjuridical machinery, and where it is found to be useless, to dismantle it; to fight against all forms of nepotism and protectionism; to attack the neutralists and slanderers of the “holy revolutionary war”; to boost the workers’ material and moral condition and prevent them from becoming putty in the hands of whichever political Party; to ferret out and distribute the wealth that has been unlawfully accumulated; to oppose any kind of dictatorship and never to submit to any authority; to embrace what is new, to love the unknown, to solve problems not
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by means of good sense, but by using fantasy and intellectual imagination; to throw oneself into adventures, to love speed and beautiful women, and to make art an element of life (Cordova 1969: 214-216). This programme was given wide circulation through a plethora of combatants’ papers and journals and, from 11 May 1919, through the weekly, L'ardito, edited by Vecchi, Carli, Barabandi and Marinetti. 25 The editorial of the first number explained “Why Arditism is Linked to Futurism” (Carli 1919) and repeated in a more prolix manner what, a few weeks earlier, Vecchi had captured in the apt formula “Futurist art and politics are the complement to Arditism” (Vecchi 1919). Indeed, the Futurists and Arditi’s joint actions of 1919 showed that both groups shared a common world view and ideology and pursued a similar cult of heroism, combat and action. Their mystical veneration of violence as a form of political battle fostered a symbiotic relationship which was directed against the existing social and political order and a value-system based on moderation, common sense and tradition. This explains the forceful anti-bourgeois phraseology in the manifestoes of both movements. But how did their anti-Socialist stance tally with their declaration of solidarity with the working class and with the Left-wing background of most of their followers? A possible explanation can be found in Carli’s essay, “Our Bolshevism” (Carli 1920), in which he makes a clear distinction between their Bolshevism on the one hand, the Russian Bolshevik movement on the other, and the “obtuse, obstinate, narrow-minded, stupid Church called the Official Italian Socialist Party”. 26 If the Russian Bolsheviks can be patriotic, why do the Italian Socialists have to be anti-nationalists? If the Russian proletariat espouses violence as a revolutionary means of change, why does the Italian proletariat have to be cowards and pacifists? If in the Soviet Union artists and workers can join forces and govern the country, why can’t the leaders of the PSI appreciate the invigorating force of beauty, elegance, luxury and art? It should be the endeavour of every Socialist to improve the material and spiritual condition of the masses. The Russians have demonstrated that through a revolutionary war and the “wise and most useful” institution of a soviet this aim can be achieved. But the PSI has no revolutionary drive; it supports conservative institutions and
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politicians such as Nitti. Does it not make you think that they have been bribed with foreign money? The FPP and the Arditi’s vacillating pronouncements of, on the one hand, support for the workers and, on the other hand, antiSocialist propaganda strained their relations with the political Left. However, for the Ardito-Futurists, “anti-Socialism” meant, in the first instance, to take a stance against the PSI. And when an alternative emerged in the political arena, the Italian Communist Party, some Futurists immediately sought to establish an alliance with them. Leftist Futurists were at pains to explain that Socialism ought not to be identified with the “Pussisti” who, in their eyes, had betrayed Italy in the First World War and were now failing to organize the class struggle effectively and lead the workers into the long overdue “Italian Revolution”. At the same time, they distanced themselves from the Right-wing Parties, the Nationalists, Republicans and the Popular Party who, in their view, were the pillar and mortar of the country’s corrupt and undemocratic political order. The FPP sought to recruit their followers from the Left-wing spectrum of political forces (Anarchists, Communists, Revolutionary Syndicalists) and from the masses of politicized ex-combatants, who experienced tremendous hardship in their attempts to reintegrate into civilian life. Therefore, the Ardito-Futurists aligned themselves, in March 1919, with the new political force that appeared on the scene: the Fasci di Combattimento.
The FPP’s Alliance with Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento Benito Mussolini spent the early part of his political career as a Socialist agitator. He became speaker of the revolutionary wing of the Socialist Party, then editor of the official Socialist newspaper, Avanti! He broke with the PSI over the question of Italy’s intervention in the First World War. After one-and-a-half years in the trenches he returned to his journalistic activities on the newspaper he had founded in 1914, Il popolo d'Italia, and used the publication to gain influence over the combatants returning from the trenches and to win support for the idea of a Constitutional Assembly. He broke with the democratic interventionists over the question of the peace treaty; the
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revolutionary wing saw in him too much of a traditionalist and refused to accept him as a potential partner. Mussolini’s attempt to build a new power base for himself in the combatants’ movement was not particularly successful in 1918. He remained an isolated figure and was in urgent need of political allies. This he could no longer get from the Socialists, nor from the moderate Nationalists. The only possibility left open to him was the radical wing of interventionist forces; but to penetrate this bastion required a thorough overhaul of his revolutionary credentials. This was the main reason why, in the summer of 1918, he sought the contact with the Futurists and Arditi. Marinetti’s diary leaves no doubt that it was Mussolini, who first approached the Futurists (Marinetti 1987: 284). In the same way he courted the Arditi through his journal, Il popolo d'Italia, publishing, amongst others, Carli’s Appeal to the Flames and the Statutes and Programme of the Association. Therefore, when the Fasci di Combattimento were founded in Piazza San Sepolcro (23 March 1919), many of their staunchest supporters came from the former assault troops (which may explain the violent streak in subsequent Blackshirt actions). Ferruccio Vecchi acted as chairman of the meeting and Mario Carli expressed the official greeting of the Association of Arditi. In the following months, several local cells collectively joined the Fasci di Combattimento. In recognition of their backing, several prominent Arditi were elected into the Fascist leadership on both regional and national level. Similarly, many Futurists were “Fascists of the First Hour”: Piero Bolzon, Alberto Businelli, Olao Gaggioli, Gastone Gorrieri, Marcello Manni, Armando Mazza, Neri Nannetti, Enrico Rocca, Ottone Rosai and Emilio Settimelli. Throughout 1919, there was a close cooperation between the revolutionary wing of the Fasci di Combattimento and the Fasci Politici Futuristi. In the early days of the Fascist movement, Marinetti met Mussolini “every evening”, as he stated in his diary (Marinetti 1987: 409), and was given ample opportunity to study the man, his ideas and political machinations. For a while, he believed that the overlap of their political goals could serve as a base for their cooperation (“The programme of the Fasci is in its substance identical with that of the Futurist Political Party. Maybe both institutions will end up becoming one. The spirit which animates both is one. It is the spirit of the New Italy: the Italy of the
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ex-combatants”, Volt 1919). Yet, at the same time, he observed Mussolini with a critical eye and arrived at some astute insights into the man and his political character. His diary notes reveal that behind a façade of mutual friendship a growing divergence of opinion was hidden. Marinetti’s often caustic remarks help to explain why a fusion between the Futurist and Fascist movements, which in spring 1919 looked like an imminent prospect, never came off the ground. Although Marinetti proudly noted in his diary how strong the Futurist influence was in the Fascist movement, and although in many articles he professed his belief that “Fascism has a political concept that is absolutely Futurist, that is: anti-traditional, practical, heroic, revolutionary” (Marinetti 1919c), he was nevertheless critical enough to perceive the lack of political sophistication and maturity in many of its followers. His experience of “the strange milieu of the socialist interventionist revolutionaries in Mussolini’s entourage” (Marinetti 1987: 409) made him realize that some of them were little more than a bunch of “bunglers”, 27 political cowboys, or simple-minded hooligans. Hence, during the assembly in Piazza San Sepolcro, he registered his concern over “the rather reactionary tendency of the rally to act against Socialism. It is necessary to prepare an Italian revolution against the vile government, the monarchical order, the Vatican, the parliament” (Marinetti 1987: 409). At an early stage, Marinetti realized that quite a number of Fascists did not at all resemble his own followers, whom he liked to describe as “mystics of action” (Marinetti 1968: 427, Marinetti 1983: 491). In his essay, “The Futurist Concept of Democracy” of April 1919, he saw the “New Italy” governed by “a most genial minority wholly formed by individuals who are superior to the human average because of their creative, innovative, improvisatory powers” (Marinetti 1919b). 28 This “proletariat of geniuses”, as he later called it, 29 was not on a par with the type of man the Fascist leadership was recruited from. Marinetti was fully aware of the reactionary element that was hidden underneath the Futurist or socialist gloss in Mussolini’s speeches. Marinetti was not a realist or pragmatic politician (Mussolini, the wily and ruthless tactician, would have been able to teach him a few lessons in this). Politics for him was an art form, not an opportunist wrangle between diplomats and Realpolitiker, the “so-called politicians who feed on commonplaces and bookish ideologies” (Marinetti 1919a). Although he admired
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Mussolini’s anti-intellectual predisposition, he had grave doubts about the revolutionary potential of the Duce. Mussolini, on the other hand, regarded Marinetti with suspicion, if not contempt, and saw in him little more than a temporarily useful contact to extend his sphere of influence among the intransigent forces of the patriotic Left. Cesare Rossi recorded an interesting anecdote of Mussolini calling Marinetti, after the latter’s anti-clerical speech at the Second Fascist Congress in Rome in 1920, “this extravagant buffoon who wants to make politics and whom nobody in Italy, not even I, take seriously” (Rossi 1958: 393). Marinetti was more careful when making public statements about his political ally; but in his diary he registered with sarcastic bite his impressions of the Fascist leader. For example, during the antiBissolati demonstrations in January 1919, Marinetti came to the realization: “He [i.e. Mussolini] is a megalomaniac who will bit by bit turn into a reactionary” (Marinetti 1987: 405). Yet, when he referred to the event in his speech in Piazza San Sepolcro, he elided the presence of Mussolini and spoke only of “Settimelli and some other Futurist friends who, like I, whistled like a train at the ridiculous apotheosis of cowardly pacifism at La Scala Theatre”. 30 Similarly, after a meeting of the central committee of the Fasci, he could satirize Mussolini’s strutting gait by comparing it to Petrolini’s spoof of the bullfighter Excamillo in Bizet’s Carmen: “He has his bowler hat pulled down over his eyes. He walks nervously, his collar turned up, like Petrolini playing the Toréador” (Marinetti 1987: 470). However, in the cleaned up version of his report on the San Sepolcro meeting this was turned into: “When the Duce’s frame appeared before me (wearing a dark overcoat with the collar turned up, a bowler hat pushed back on his head a little, a truncheon in his pocket, like a lightcavalryman’s sword on the march), I felt mixed sensations of joy, artistic admiration and hopeful confidence” (Marinetti 1968: 447; Marinetti 1983: 513). In a private note, written shortly after the Third Fascist Congress, Marinetti characterized Mussolini as “a coarse, uncivil proletarian, with the huge head of a Caesar, his heart brimful of a savoured revenge against his erstwhile socialist companions” (Marinetti 1987: 511). Yet, in the Manifesto to the Italian Government he could eulogize: “With Mussolini, Fascism has rejuvenated Italy. It
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is his task to help us bring new life to the world of art” (Marinetti 1968: 491; Marinetti 1983: 563). In private, Marinetti may have regarded Mussolini a reactionary, authoritarian, autocratic, fanatical blockhead with a penchant for discipline and militarism; but in official pronouncements Mussolini remained an embodiment of the “Man of the Future”, the virile, bellicose, energetic “Man of Steel”. And Mussolini tried his best to live up to this image. He fulfilled Futurist rhetorics of modernity with his ostensive love for aeroplanes, fast cars and technological achievement. By giving Fascism the stamp of an “anti-Party”, he presented it to the Futurists as an organization with an antiideological, libertarian, individualist streak. His militant fervour and indefatigable stamina in public debates, demonstrations and street actions earned him spontaneous sympathies amongst the Futurist followers and caused Marinetti to proclaim him “momentarily influenced by our triple Futurism” (Marinetti 1987: 419). For this reason, and despite the many misgivings, scepticism and open criticisms, Marinetti forged a close alliance between his Futurist Political Party and the Fasci di Combattimento. Both associations developed a high degree of conformity in political matters and operated in close co-operation on the political scene for nearly a year. One can therefore only speculate as to why a fusion of the two organizations never took place. One key reason certainly was Mussolini’s anti-Socialist stance, which was not only directed against the PSI, but most Left-wing organizations. Our understanding of the rift between the ArditoFuturist and the Mussolini faction in the Fasci di Combattimento is greatly helped by the spy reports preserved in the archive of the Ministry of Public Security. On 29 June, the Prefect of Rome reported on a meeting between Arditi, Fascists and ex-combatants and informed the minister that the Arditi proclaim a strongly Left-wing policy and declared their “solidarity with the working-class masses and their economic struggle”. 31 On 30 July 1919, the Office of Special Investigation sent a report “re: Socialist Propaganda Amongst Arditi” to the Ministry of Interior, informing them that a rift had arisen between Mussolini and the Futurists, and that “Carli, Vecchi and Ambrosini are orientating towards the socialist movement. The Executive of the Socialist Party expresses its satisfaction with the new
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attitude of the Arditi and hopes to gain profit from this in the next elections”. 32 However, negotiations with the Socialist Party and the trade unions did not progress as had been hoped for. 33 Although serious attempts were undertaken to join forces in an “action of distinctly revolutionary character”, the Ardito-Futurists’ concept of an “Italian Revolution” was too different from the “proletarian revolution” promoted by the PSI and made the proposed coalition a fruitless undertaking. Sometime in the late summer of 1919, it became apparent that the Futurists and Socialists were unable to agree on a concrete programme of action and negotiations were broken off. At about the same time, Mussolini’s attempt to win the support of a war-veterans’ “Committee of Agreement and Action” and to forge an alliance with the moderate forces of the Right came to a standstill. For a while, everybody’s attention was focused on d’Annunzio’s Fiume adventure, but then the November elections were drawing near and neither Marinetti nor Mussolini had won new coalition partners with whom to face this important political test.
The National Elections of November 1919 Throughout the autumn of 1919, Marinetti campaigned for the FPP and the Ardito-Futurist-Fascist alliance. He was supported in this undertaking by his colleagues in the editorial offices of Roma Futurista, whose weekly column, “Il Partito Futurista”, reported on many new recruits and the branches’ multifarious political activities. However, it is advisable to register some doubt about the “rapid growth” and “immense success” of the Party in 1919. A much more realistic assessment can be gleaned from the file on the Associazione Futurista preserved in the Central State Archives in Rome. 34 It transpires from these reports that the membership of the FPP was not very high and that many branches had just a handful of leaders and no members. Even in larger cities, the Party possessed only one or two dozen active members. For example, on 8 February 1919, the Quaestor of Rome reported on the local fascio of the FPP, stating that its political programme had been worked out and published “by the well known Filippo Tommaso Marinetti” and aimed at “demolishing everything that stands for tradition and custom in politics and ethics”.
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However, because of the “eccentricity of the ideas advocated by political Futurism” it only appeals to some young people and Arditi, who see themselves as “elements of the avant-garde in the political and economic struggle”. The Fascists were not faring much better in their recruitment drive in the veteran organizations dominated by the moderate ANMIG (National Association of War Invalids) and ANC (National Association of Ex-servicemen). Although within a few months some two dozen fasci were founded, most of them – like the fasci politici Futuristi in their early phase – only existed on paper or counted just a handful of members. Il popolo d’Italia claimed in August 1919 that some 70 fasci were in existence, but by the end of 1919 only 31 with 870 inscribed members had shown any sign of life (de Felice 1965: 510). During the summer and autumn of 1919, Marinetti developed his idea of an “Italian Revolution” and a “Futurist Democracy”. In countless speeches, articles, brochures and a volume of essays he outlined a liberated future, where political and artistic revolutionaries had joined forces to create a new life praxis and a government based on Futurist principles (Berghaus 1996 and Gentile 2000). It appears that these ideas had a significant influence on the Fasci di Combattimento. At their first congress in Florence, in October 1919, Marinetti managed to swing the majority of delegates behind his position. He described the atmosphere of the Assembly as “totally Futurist, everybody talks about Futurism and is possessed by Futurist ideas” (Marinetti 1987: 448). In the crucial meeting of the Central Committee in Milan on 16-18 October, the Futurist line triumphed over the conservative position. Even Mussolini declared himself a supporter of the Futurist wing. He and Marinetti prepared the ground for the election campaign and they spoke together at several election rallies (Marinetti 1968: 471-476; Marinetti 1983: 541-546). Later, after Mussolini’s rappel à l’ordre, the Futurists used to remember this period as il diciottovismo di Mussolini, i.e. the heroic days of 1919, when Mussolini was a revolutionary with Futurist tendencies. The Futur-fascisti, as they were often called, formed a distinct political community: Futurist in art, Arditi in war, Fascist in the political arena – everything seemed to merge. This feeling of forming the political avant-garde and being the aristocracy of the
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oppositional forces was able to cover up the dissimilarities which clearly existed between the three associations. These divergences came to the fore in summer 1919 and again after the abortive elections in November 1919. But it still took nearly a year before the final consequences were drawn and the coalition disbanded in 1920. Marinetti’s concept of the FPP as an anti-party clashed with Mussolini’s ambition to convert the Fasci di Combattimento into a more conventional Party. Nonetheless – and despite the fact that he saw in parliamentary democracy only a smokescreen to hide the machinations of a corrupt political elite – Marinetti agreed on an alliance of the Fasci Politici Futuristi, the Associazione fra gli Arditi, and the Fasci di Combattimento to form a list for the national elections of 16 November 1919. As it turned out, the elections were a disaster. The rallies intended to drum up support for the alliance were only attended by few, usually indifferent or hostile, members of the public. The Futurist-Fascist ticket failed abysmally, receiving only 2,427 preferential votes (i.e. 0.9 per cent) from the 270,000 electors registered in Milan (or 1.72 per cent if one adds the 1,987 voti aggiunti). Mussolini’s reaction is well known: he finally broke with his Left-wing past, rid himself of uncomfortable allies such as ArditoFuturists and revolutionary interventionists, and prepared his conquest of the conservative establishment. The Futurists realized how dangerous the pact with the Fascists had been and how it had marred their reputation amongst the working class and other Leftist sections of the population. In 1920, Mussolini began a new recruitment drive amongst agrarian workers, petty bourgeois town folk, middle-class officers etc., which led to a major restructuring of the Fasci di Combattimento. After the Fasci’s second congress in Milan (23-25 March 1920), nearly the whole leadership was replaced with Rightwing politicians, and, reflecting this shift from revolutionary to conservative organization, a revised political programme was issued. Consequently, a good ninety per cent of the original membership – and amongst them nearly all Socialist, Anarchist, Syndicalist and Republican members – retired from the association (de Felice 1965: 505-506 and 591-598). A new phase of Fascism had begun, but one that proved to be unacceptable to most Futurists. Marinetti summed up his feelings about the political development of the Fasci: “We have not come
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down as victors from the battlefield in order to march towards Reaction!” (Marinetti 1987: 487). 35 At the Milan congress, he accused the Fasci of having estranged themselves from the labouring masses and of offering insufficient support to the proletarian demands for social justice and economic improvement. Furthermore, he censured them for having developed a reactionary law-and-order mentality and for offering far too little opposition to the clerics and monarchists. He was also highly critical of Mussolini’s personality cult, of the way in which he ran the Fascist movement, and of the political views expressed in Il popolo d’Italia. If his diary entries are to be trusted, he still had one third of the Congress behind his views. But in the end, Mussolini won over the majority of the Assembly. Marinetti’s reaction to the situation was clear and unequivocal: on 29 May 1920 he handed in his resignation from the Central Committee and quit the Fasci di Combattimento.
The Demise of the FPP in 1920 After the disappointing results of the November elections, and 21 days spent in prison, Marinetti decided to withdraw from politics. Disappointment with his Fascist comrades pushed him into a frame of mind in which he wanted to “demolish, indeed annihilate politics, this pig-headed stubborn leprosy-cholera-syphilis that deadens everything” (Marinetti 1922). In a letter of 29 October 1920, he complained about “the feverish political and social upheavals which obstruct any publishing activities and artistic initiatives” (Marinetti 1989: 134135). Marinetti recovered from the election fatigue in the arms of his new girlfriend Beny, i.e. Benedetta Cappa, sister of his political companion, Alberto Cappa, and later to become his wife. Marinetti discussed with Balla the transformation of Roma Futurista into a purely artistic journal and developed with him a “Surprise Program for 1920”, published in Roma Futurista of 4 January 1920, in which they declared: “The Futurist artists, worn out after four years of war, have returned to their impassioned creative work”. Giuseppe Bottai, chief editor on the paper, was rather chafed about the new direction which Marinetti was proposing and wanted to have at least the front page dedicated to political news. He prepared a long article in the old
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manner for the next number and had to face Marinetti’s wrath: “Marinetti ranted for two hours: no politics, no politics! Politics, what a f ... up!” he reported in letter to Mario Carli of 2 February 1920 (Gentile 1988: 139). Understandably, many of Marinetti’s former colleagues were unable to understand and unwilling to support this volte face. The man who had made the integration of art and politics a cornerstone of his philosophy abandoned political life and focussed on his tactilism project, marriage, poetry, etc.?! One after the other left the Futurist movement: Settimelli, Carli, Volt, Dessy, Corra, Daquanno … Consequently, the FPP ceased its existence as a formal political organization. Some members joined the anti-Fascist struggle as members of the Arditi Rossi or Arditi del Popolo; others became members of the Fascist Party, or followed Marinetti’s path, renounced on politics and returned to their artistic métiers. After the March on Rome (28 October 1922) and Mussolini’s appointment to the post of Prime Minister (30 October 1922), a brand of Fascism that was very different from what Marinetti had supported in 1919 became a political reality. Mussolini’s regime bore no relation to Marinetti’s concepts of an Italian Revolution and a Futurist Democracy (Gentile 2000). Marinetti therefore feared that Futurism was going to be marginalized in an Italy governed by a Fascist dictator. He had to think about his own and his movement’s survival, and as he could not ignore or circumvent the new realities he had to seek an accommodation with the new regime. It was at this point that he officially reneged on his former goal of fusing art and politics into a compact union and declared: “Futurism is unequivocally an artistic and ideological movement. But it becomes involved in politics only in time of grave peril for the Nation” (Marinetti 1968: 490; Marinetti 1983: 562). A year later, he was even more emphatic: “Fascism operates politically, i.e. in the ambit of our divine peninsula which demands, imposes, limits, forbids; Futurism, on the other hand, operates in the boundless domains of pure imagination”. 36 In the early 1920s, Marinetti launched a hectic round of activities (exhibitions, theatre tours, concerts, publications, openings of nightclubs and cabarets) that was designed to re-launch Futurism with a new membership and a new artistic direction. And indeed, against all expectations, a “second wave” of Futurism rose, like a phoenix,
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from the ashes, attracted a whole phalanx of young artists, and set in motion a whole range of new cultural initiatives in Italy. The Futurist Congress of 1924 and the honours bestowed on Marinetti were a clear sign that the movement was ready to enter into a dialogue with the Fascist regime and to find a modus vivendi with the predominantly conservative artistic establishment. From now on, Futurism ceased to be an avant-garde movement. Its artistic programme incorporated elements from other modernist streams and tendencies, such as Expressionism, New Sobriety, or Surrealism. And it managed to occupy a significant, albeit small, position in the cultural landscape of the “new Italy”, as a kind of “semi-official” avant-garde of the regime, thus offering a breath of fresh air in an otherwise increasingly stale and stagnant environment.
NOTES 1
Although the high-period of these bohemian litterateurs was the 1860s and 1870s, their social-critical attitudes prevailed until the turn of the century and mixed well with the more recent trend of French symbolism. 2 The use of the term “la psychologie des foules” makes it very likely that he was familiar with the writings of Le Bon, Durkheim, Tarde and Adam on the topic. 3 In an interview with the newspaper L’avvenire, published on 23 February 1915, Marinetti was asked: “Has Mussolini been converted to Futurism?” and gave the reply: “His recent actions, his attitudes and his rebellion are clear demonstration of a Futurist consciousness. (…) He was always, like Corridoni, a warm supporter of ours. At all the serate we held in Milan, he defended us and enthusiastically championed our cause. But apart from this, Mussolini is a Futurist for a further variety of reasons (…) I am referring to his repeatedly expressed hatred for everything that is outmoded in Italy and which, in his view, should have been eclipsed a long time ago. The arguments he has lately adduced to demonstrate the uselessness, if not the harmfulness of a parliamentary institution such as lifelong membership of the Chamber, are largely our arguments which we have been proclaiming”. 4 These meetings took place on 21 April, 14-23 July and 1 August 1919 and ended with a 500,000 Lire advertising contract. It largely determined Mussolini’s antiSocialist turn, which had begun when, on 1 August 1917, he changed the subtitle of Il popolo d’Italia from “quotidiano socialista” to “quotidiano dei combattenti e produttori”. 5 This sequel to the volume I poeti Futuristi of 1912 never saw the light. 6 Marinetti in an unpublished letter to Pratella of 29 September 1918, preserved in the Primo Conti Archive in Fiesole, Fondo Pratella. The name Arditi (“The Daring Ones”) was a popular expression used for the Italian reparti d'assalto (assault units)
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during the First World War. They formed the spearhead of the Italian army and were generally regarded as a military elite. 7 However, at the top it still showed the insignia of the Arditi, a Roman dagger inscribed with the motto FERT and surrounded by a branch of oak and laurel. 8 The speech appeared in Roma Futurista of 30 September 1918, L’ardito of 3 August 1919, Fiamma of August 1919, and Democrazia Futurista of 1919. It has been reprinted in Marinetti (1968: 403-407; and 1983: 465-469), and Cardova (1989: 205208). 9 The term “aristocrazia dell’esercito” is not used in the printed version of the speech, which differs in several ways from the diary notes made shortly after the event of 15 September 1918. However, the title of the Roma Futurista version of the speech referred to these stormtroopers as “Arditi avanguardia della nazione”. 10 The poem, Treno di soldati ammalati, was one of Marinetti’s often performed show pieces, published in Zang Tumb Tuuuum (1914). 11 Note of 19 November 1918, following a recitation of Futurist poetry at the mess of the regiment “Roma” and a discussion of the Programme of the Futurist Political Party. 12 Note of 28 November-5 December 1918, under the heading “Per Roma Futurista”. Marinetti’s demand for the gradual abolition of marriage, through facilitating divorce, giving women the right to vote and fostering their participation in national life, found expression in the articles, “Against Marriage”, in Roma Futurista of 25 May 1919, “Against the Papacy and the Catholic Mentality, Repositories of Every Kind of Traditionalism”, in L’ardito of 8 June 1919, “Against Marriage”, in L’ardito of 21 September 1919, “Revolutionary Italian Pride and Free Love”, in Democrazia Futurista (1919). Translations of these can be found in Berghaus (2006). 13 Note of 10 December 1918, following a meeting with a group of Arditi, who sympathized with a political brand of Futurism. 14 The Futurist journal was supposed to be called PH: Rassegna mondiale del Futurismo, Direttore Marinetti, Editore Notari (PH stands for “Phosphor”) and finally appeared from 1922-25 under the heading Il Futurismo: Rivista sintetica bimensile. 15 Note of 4 December 1918 in Marinetti (1987: 392). 16 See Mussolini 1918. The project of a costituente has been discussed in de Felice (1965: 468-473). 17 The essay sought to clarify the use of the term, disprezzo della donna, which Marinetti had employed in some of his early manifestoes. I have discussed this controversial issue in Berghaus (1994). The Futurist debate on the New Woman in the years 1915-1920 has been summarized by Salaris (1986). 18 This Board was described in the Manifesto of the Futurist Political Party, § 4: “Instead of a Parliament full of incompetent orators and irrelevant academics, moderated by a Senate full of has-beens, we shall have a government of twenty technocrats stimulated (eccitato) by an assembly of under thirty-year-olds”. The idea was taken up again in the speech given at the Florence Congress of the Fasci di Combattimento, where Marinetti defined this Board as “a stimulating, simplifying and accelerating body, which in a race such as ours will be fired with youthful flair, and will provide the best defence for the young, will be the strongest guarantor of progress and vitality of spirit. For Italy, I dream of a government of technical experts, spurred on by a council of very young men, who will take the place of our present parliament
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with its incompetent prattlers and irrelevant pedants, which permits itself to be overruled by a Senate composed of men who already have one foot in the grave”. The speech was published in I nemici d’Italia (23 October 1919), L’ardito (26 October 1919), Roma Futurista, (2 November 1919) and Futurismo e fascismo (1924). 19 On 11 January 1919, Marinetti participated, together with Mussolini, in an irredentist action at La Scala, in protest against Bissolati’s willingness to cede Dalmatia to Yugoslavia. 20 Marinetti disliked conventional, or what he called “German style”, discipline; however, his war-time experience with the Arditi showed him that a flexible, or what he called “revolutionary style” of discipline was a necessity. 21 See the informative report in Settimelli (1918b). 22 Marinetti realized already in 1913 that the serate, which had given him and the movement such notoriety in Italy and abroad, had become counterproductive and needed to be supplanted with more constructive forms of artistic expression (see Berghaus 1998: 126-127, 144-145). 23 Marinetti expressed his anti-Catholic sentiments in the manifestoes, Against Spain (1910) and Against the Papacy and the Catholic Mentality, Repositories of Every Kind of Traditionalism (1919). He was fervently supported by Settimelli, whose brochure Svaticanamento: Dichiarazione agli italiani, attacked the Vatican in such strong terms that it was sequestered and its author taken to court. 24 They have been reprinted in the appendix of Cordova (1969). 25 The founding of the paper was first mooted on 18 December 1918. See Marinetti (1987: 397). 26 He uses the term pussismo, referring to the reformist political line taken by the official Socialist Party of Turati and Co. 27 Marinetti calls them “scagnozzi” in Marinetti (1987: 422). 28 In a diary note of 25 July 1919 he sketched out some principal “Directions of Futurism”, where we read under § 3: “We prepare the centuries governed by Art and the creative genius. Above the technical directorate (without parliament) a council of creative artists”. (Marinetti 1987: 428). 29 See Marinetti (1920). The term “proletariato dei geniali” is first used in a speech given in Genoa on 5 July 1919 (Marinetti 1987: 419). 30 The speech was published in Marinetti e il Futurismo (1929), reprinted in Marinetti (1968: 526-527; and 1983: 602-604). 31 See Ministero dell’Interno. Direzione Generale Pubblica Sicurezza. Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati, 1920, G 1, busta 140, fasc. 98, “Roma. Fascio di Combattimento”. 32 See Ministero dell’Interno. Direzione Generale Pubblica Sicurezza. Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati, 1920, G 1, busta 138, fasc. 1, “Associazione fra gli Arditi d’Italia”. 33 See “Nota informativa sul Fascio di Combattimento di Milano e sulla Associazione Arditi e loro rapporti con socialisti e anarchici” of 18 August 1919, in Ministero dell'Interno. Direzione Generale Pubblica Sicurezza. Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati, 1921, busta 81, fasc. 'Milano 1°'. 34 The information collected by the Office of Public Security is extremely revealing and was communicated in some length in Berghaus (1996).
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Literally translated he wrote: “We have not come down from the Karst ...” The Battle on the Karst (Carso) in July 1915 brought Italy a major victory. 36 Introduction to Futurismo e fascismo (1924), reprinted in Marinetti (1968: 432; and 1983: 496). The phrase was repeated verbatim in Marinetti e il Futurismo (1929), reprinted in Marinetti (1968: 537; and 1983: 616).
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WORKS CITED Berghaus, Günter (ed.). 2000. International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter. ---. 1994. “Fulvia Giuliani: Portrait of a Futurist Actress” New Theatre Quarterly 10: 117-121. ---. 1995. The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings, 18991909. Leeds: Society for Italian Studies. ---. 1996. Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909-1944. Oxford: Berghahn Books. ---. 1998. Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944, Oxford: Clarendon Press ---. 2006. F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Cardova, Ferdinando. 1989. Arditi e legionai dannunziani. Padua: Marsilio. Carli, Mario. 1919. “Perchè l’arditismo è legato al Futurismo” L’ardito (11 May 1919). ---. 1920. “Il nostro bolscevismo” in M. Carli. Con d’Annunzio a Fiume. Milan: Facchi: 103-110. De Felice, Renzo. 1965. Mussolini il rivoluzionario. Turin: Einaudi. Gentile, Emilio. 1988. “Il Futurismo e la politica” in Renzo de Felice (ed.) Futurismo, cultura e politica. Turin: Agnelli: 105-159 ---. 2000. “Political Futurism and the Myth of the Italian Revolution” in Berghaus (2000): 1-14. Mariani, Gaetano. 1967. Storia della scapigliatura. Caltanissetta: Sciascia. Marinetti, F. T. 1900. “Les Émeutes milanaises de mai 1898” La Revue blanche 22 (173): 561-70 ---. 1914. Zang Tumb Tuuuum. Adrianopoli ottobre 1912. Milano: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”. Reprinted in Marinetti (1968): 559-499; Marinetti (1983): 639779. ---. 1915. “Il valore Futurista della guerra” L’avvenire (23 February 1915). ---. 1919a. “Vecchie idee a braccetto, da separare” L’ardito (March 1919). Reprinted in Marinetti (1968): 308-313; Marinetti (1983): 357-363. ---. 1919b. “Concezione Futurista della democrazia” L’ardito (April 1919). Reprinted in Marinetti (1968): 328-331, Marinetti (1983): 379-382. ---. 1919c. “L’anti-partito fascista” Roma Futurista (12 December 1919). ---. 1920. Al di là del comunismo. Milan: Edizioni de “La Testa di Ferro”. Reprinted in Marinetti (1968): 409-424; Marinetti (1983): 471-488. ---. 1922. “Inegualismo e artecrazia” Il resto del Carlino (1 November 1922). Reprinted in Marinetti (1968): 478-482; Marinetti (1983): 549-553. ---. 1923. “I diritti artistici propugnati dai Futuristi italiani” Il Futurismo: Rivista sintetica illustrata mensile (1 March 1923). Reprinted in Marinetti (1968): 489-459; Marinetti (1983): 562-569. ---. 1924. Futurismo e fascismo. Foligno: Campitelli. Reprinted in Marinetti (1968): 425-498; Marinetti (1983): 489-672. ---. 1929. Marinetti e il Futurismo. Rome: Edizioni “Augustea”. Reprinted in Marinetti (1968): 499-555; Marinetti (1983): 573-636. ---. 1968. Teoria e invenzione Futurista. Milano: Mondadori. ---. 1969. La grande Milano tradizionale e Futurista, Milan: Mondadori
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---. 1983. Teoria e invenzione Futurista. Second edition Milano: Mondadori. ---. 1987. Taccuini, 1915-1921 (Alberto Bertoni, ed.). Bologna: Il Mulino. ---. 1989. Lettere Futuriste tra arte e politica (Claudia Salaris, ed.). Rome: Officina. Marinetti, F. T. and Francesco Cangiullo. 1989. Lettere, 1910-1943 (Ernestina Pellegrini, ed.). Florence: Vallecchi. Mussolini, Benito. 1918. “In rango! Commincia l’apello! Trincerarchi a noi!” Il popolo d’Italia (27 December 1918). Rossi, Cesare. 1958. Trentatre vicende mussoliniane, Milan: Ceschina Salaris, Claudia. 1986. “Le donne Futuriste nel periodo tra guerra e dopoguerra” in Diego Leoni and Camillo Zadra (eds.) La grande guerra: Eesperienza, memoria, immagini. Bologna: Il Mulino: 291-306. Settimelli, Emilio. 1917. “Duttilità Futurista” L’Italia Futurista (9 December 1917). ---. 1918a. “Il Futurismo e la donna. Il disprezzo della donna” Roma Futurista (30 September 1918). ---. 1918b. “Dimostrazione Futurista a Firenze” Roma Futurista (10 December 1918). ---. 1931. Svaticanamento: Dichiarazione agli italiani. Florence: Edizioni Fiorentine. Valeri, Nino. 1966. La lotta politica in Italia dall’Unità al 1925. Florence: Le Monnier. Vecchi, Ferrucio. 1919. “Arditismo” Roma Futurista (2 March 1919). Volt, Vincenzo Fani. 1919. “Costituente?” Roma Futurista (13-20 April 1919).
Surrealism and the Political. The Case of Nadja Raymond Spiteri
It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors. (André Breton 1924a: 37)
This essay discusses the implications of the convergence of Surrealism and communism on a reading of André Breton’s Nadja (1928). It locates the book in the context of Surrealism’s political position to explore how the construction of Nadja manifests Surrealism’s ongoing engagement with what Claude Lefort has called “the political”. In this context Nadja is not simply an account of Breton’s encounter with a young woman on the streets of Paris – although this is the principal thread of the narrative – but also an attempt to work through the political impasse that confronted Breton in the course of 1927. Breton met Nadja in October 1926 and began to write his account of their relationship in August 1927 (Bonnet 1988: 1502-04). These dates bracket a series of meetings of the Surrealists that eventually led to Breton joining the Parti communiste français (PCF) in January 1927. According to Breton’s Second manifeste du Surréalisme (1929: 142-43) and Entretiens (1952: 127), the party hierarchy subjected his revolutionary credentials to close examination. As a result of this incommodious welcome and continuing suspicion from his fellow comrades, Breton’s tenure as a militant was short-lived, and he soon withdrew from active participation in the PCF.
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As is well known, the Surrealists had been moving closer to the PCF since May 1925, when their opposition to French military intervention in Morocco led them to collaborate with intellectuals allied to Clarté. Relations between the Surrealists and the editors of Clarté had reached an impasse in March 1926 after the PCF vetoed the merger of La Révolution surréaliste and Clarté to form La Guerre civile (Lewis 1988: 51-52). Although individual Surrealists continued to contribute to the new series of Clarté, collectively they felt frustrated that the PCF viewed their efforts to establish common ground between Surrealism and communism with scepticism, merely offering to let them contribute to the literary column of l’Humanité. Events came to a head in June when Pierre Naville – a former Surrealist who had not participated in the movement since mid-1925 and was now one of the editors of Clarté – published La Révolution et les intellectuels: Que peuvent faire les surréalistes? (1926), a pamphlet discussing the Surrealists’ position vis-à-vis the PCF. Breton (1926) responded in September with his own pamphlet, Légitime défense, where he defended Surrealism against Naville’s charges, and criticized shortcomings in the editorial policy of l’Humanité. In particular, he rejected the stark opposition Naville posed between the “world of facts” and “inner reality of the mind”, arguing that Surrealism overcame this opposition through the “appeal to the marvellous” (Breton 1926: 34). However, Légitime défense did not settle the issue: after a series of meetings held in November and December 1926, Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Péret and Pierre Unik finally joined the PCF in January 1927. Despite their best intention, the Surrealists discovered that the PCF only accepted them with profound reservations, leading to the publication of Au Grand jour in May 1927, a series of open letters signed by the Surrealists who joined the PCF. As Au Grand jour reads, the PCF maintained “a serious confusion towards Surrealism,” regarding it as either “a political tendency” or “a ‘brand’ in the hands of some dexterous publicity agents”, and thus incompatible with communism (1927: 75). At this point it is worth considering the Surrealists’ own perception of their position in the social space. 1 Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the relation between the field of artistic production, the field of class relations, and the field of power is useful here (1993: 2973). The Surrealists, as members of an emergent avant-garde
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movement, considered their oppositional position in the field of artistic production as evidence of their solidarity with the proletariat. As Bourdieu notes: Such alliances […] are not exempt from misunderstandings and even bad faith. The structural affinity between the literary avant-garde and the political vanguard is the basis of rapprochements […] in which convergences are flaunted […] but distances prudently maintained. (1993: 44)
This is an apt description of the issues raised by the Breton-Naville polemic, since the decisive question it raised addressed the relation to be maintained between Surrealism and the PCF. The Surrealists could either simply maintain the homology between the avant-garde’s position in the artistic field and the proletariat’s position in the field of class relations, or it could attempt to defy the constitutive logic of the artistic field by transforming its relation to the fields of power and class relations. In the first instance the movement’s commitment to communism would be purely symbolic; in the second instance it would be forced to give substance to its stance through an encounter with social reality – an encounter that had the potential to profoundly transform Surrealism. This had been Naville’s goal in La Révolution et les intellectuels. However, the position the Surrealists finally adopted would be a compromise between the symbolic commitment and social engagement: rather than affirming communism in practice, the Surrealists attempted to neutralize the autonomy of the artistic field by situating itself in opposition to both bourgeois art and the modernist avant-garde (as defined, for instance, by Nouvelle Revue française and Cahiers d’Art). Similarly, although the Surrealists agreed in principal that it was necessary to join the PCF, they still granted creative endeavour a degree of autonomy from party dictates: rather than subordinating creative endeavour to pragmatic action, the Surrealists believed that it would supplement political praxis. It would be easy to dismiss Surrealism’s political position as “misunderstandings and even bad faith” produced by “homologies of position combined with profound difference in conditions” (Bourdieu 1993: 44), but this would overlook a unique facet of Surrealism’s originality. Although Bourdieu acknowledges artistic producers are able to advance a “critical definition of the social world” during periods of political crisis, he neutralizes the political value of artistic
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endeavour as an illusion at all other times. This analysis principally applies to a politically stable society, in which the fields of art and politics retain a high degree of autonomy; during periods of political crisis, however, the very structure of the social space is called into question. 2 Although Surrealism’s history coincided with a period of relative political stability, particularly during the 1920s, the movement’s political position, based on the relationship between creative endeavour and a radical experience of freedom (Benjamin 1929), was orientated towards future crisis. 3 At this point it would help to introduce Claude Lefort’s (1983: 9-20) distinction between “politics” (la politique) and “the political” (le politique). Here “politics” describes the particular institutional forms of political organization in a given society (political parties, legal institutions, etc.), whereas “the political” describes the original founding moment that constitutes the social space of that society. The polis is thus constituted through the repression of “the political” to create the structured, institutional space of “politics” – in the case of the Third Republic, the system of parliamentary democracy. Whereas the political hegemony of the Third Republic sought to pacify the transgressive “political” character of revolutionary action by articulating political antagonisms in symbolic form as public discourses and rituals, the Surrealists sought to constitute a new political space that would open up democratic polis to the revolutionary political possibilities foreclosed in the founding of the Third Republic. 4 The value of Lefort’s distinction between “politics” and “the political” is that it articulates the crucial difference between the failure of the “politics” of Surrealism and the role of Surrealism’s ongoing engagement with “the political” in the history of the movement – indeed, it is difficult to understand Surrealism’s history without an adequate account of its engagement with the political. The value of creative endeavour for the Surrealists was to articulate a moment of political possibility through the production of disruptive images – strategies already developed through the theory of the Surrealist image and technique of collage (Breton 1924: 37-38; Chénieux-Gendron 1990: 60-70). The image was not dependant on established canons of meaning but opened an interval between sense and meaning, allowing it to manifest an experience of freedom. In the case of Nadja, photographic illustrations play a crucial role as one manifestation of
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the political, introducing a counterpoint to the narrative that links the quotidian to the marvellous, the artistic to the political. 5
~ Although Breton’s brief tenure in the PCF did not quell his revolutionary ardour, the PCF’s continuing suspicion frustrated any immediate attempt to translate Surrealism into direct political action. His initial response was to retreat to familiar territory. After the publication of Au grand jour Breton reassessed his goals and entered a period of renewed creativity. In part this involved a reappraisal of previous achievements, resulting in the re-edition of Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité in June 1927 and Le Surréalisme et la peinture in February 1928. 6 He also returned to the capital event of the previous year: his encounter with Nadja (Bonnet 1988: 1502-05). Nadja appeared at a significant juncture in Breton’s life: he had just published Légitime défense, and was still hesitating on the threshold of the PCF. Their encounter initially occurred under the sign of revolutionary politics: after stopping at the Humanité bookshop and buying Trotsky’s latest book, Breton began walking towards the Opéra: The offices and workshops were beginning to empty out from top to bottom of the buildings, doors were closing, people on the sidewalk were shaking hands, and already there were more people in the street now. I unconsciously watched their faces, their clothes, their way of walking. No, it was not yet these who would be ready to create the Revolution. […] Suddenly, perhaps ten feet away, I saw a young poorly dressed woman walking towards me, she had noticed me too, or perhaps had been watching me for several moments. She carried her head high, unlike every one else on the sidewalk. […] Without a moment’s hesitation, I spoke to this unknown woman, though I must admit that I expected the worst. (Breton 1928: 63-64)
The contrast between Nadja, who “carried her head high”, and the crowd of office workers, who were not “ready to create the Revolution”, made Nadja appear as an alternative to both the workday routines of bourgeois society and the militancy of the PCF. She embodied the “appeal to the marvellous” that, as Breton argued in Légitime défense, reconciled inner reality with the world of facts. However, despite choosing her name because it was part of the
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Russian word for hope, Nadja did not possess any explicit revolutionary sympathies. 7 Breton’s initial encounter with Nadja only lasted ten days, from October 4 to October 13 – although they maintained contact until February 1927. An element of ambivalence characterized Breton’s attitude to Nadja, which increased in direct proportion to their intimacy. On the evening of October 12 he and Nadja left Paris for Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where they spent the night at a hotel. Yet physical intimacy did not bring Breton closer to Nadja; the next day he ended their relationship, ostensibly because Nadja recounted a sordid incident from her life. Breton’s image of Nadja oscillated between the imaginative possibility of the marvellous and sordid reality of her empirical existence. As an unemployed woman living in Paris, Nadja’s financial position was extremely precarious, with prostitution an unwelcome yet distinct possibility. Breton, despite his limited financial resources, forestalled this option by giving Nadja the money to pay her debts. These pragmatic concerns marooned the possibility of Nadja’s marvellous existence on the shoals of social reality, and although Breton perceived the marvellous in Nadja’s behaviour, in the eyes of society she was a wretched being, ready to be unscrupulously exploited (Breton 1928: 112-13). After October 13 they occasionally saw each other, until the final break occurred in February 1927. In early March Nadja was interned in a mental asylum, after she had committed several “eccentricities” in the hallway of her hotel. 8At this point Breton transformed Nadja from a living person into a revolutionary martyr, sacrificed at the altar of freedom: She was, finally, strong, and extremely weak, as one can be, in that idea she had always had but in which I had only too warmly encouraged her, which I had only too readily aided her in giving supremacy over all the rest: the idea that freedom, [which] must be enjoyed as unrestrictedly as it is granted, without pragmatic considerations of any sort, and this is because human emancipation […] remains the only cause worth serving. Nadja was born to serve it, if only by demonstrating that around himself each individual must foment a private conspiracy, which exists not only in his imagination – of which it would be best, from the standpoint of knowledge alone, to take account – but also – and much more dangerously – by thrusting one’s head, then an arm, out of the jail – thus shattered – of logic, that is, out of the most hateful of prisons. It is from this last enterprise, perhaps, that I should have
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restrained her, but first of all I should have had to become conscious of the danger she ran. (Breton 1928: 142-43)
This passage occurs at the point in the narrative when Breton acknowledges that Nadja has been interred in a mental asylum – inadvertently, perhaps, equating the experience of freedom with that of madness. While human emancipation may be the “only cause worth serving”, Nadja’s experience of freedom was not without real cost; her “private conspiracy” resulted in the loss of the modicum of freedom permitted citizens of the Third Republic. The conflict between Nadja’s marvellous possibility and the limitations of her actual existence emphasized the political ambivalence of Breton’s encounter. Breton half-heartedly accepted some responsibility for encouraging Nadja to disregard social norms, but he was ultimately unable to provide a supportive social network – such as the Surrealist group – to aid her in her emancipation. 9 To what degree was the failure of their encounter due to insufficiency of the marvellous to reconcile the world of facts and inner reality of the mind? This question would seem to cast doubt on Breton’s “appeal to the marvellous” in Légitime défense. For all her visionary power, intuition and freedom Nadja was still subject to the economic and social constraint of society, which made her life increasingly difficult, and ultimately impossible. Hence, at first sight, Breton’s encounter with Nadja simply re-evoked the political impasse he would face vis-à-vis the PCF. Nadja seemed to prove the PCF correct in suggesting that the world of facts came before or reined over imagination.
~ It is interesting to compare Breton’s reception by the PCF with his encounter with Fanny Beznos, a communist activist. Breton describes how he met Beznos at the Saint-Ouen marché aux puces in the first section of Nadja. A saleswoman, she informed Breton that a copy of Rimbaud’s Œuvres complètes lying in her market stall was not for sale, since it belonged to her. Breton then engaged her in conversation: Extremely cultivated, she had no objection to discussing her literary favourites which are Shelley, Nietzsche, and Rimbaud. Quite spontaneously she evens mentions the Surrealists and Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris,
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which she was unable to finish, the variations on the word Pessimism having thrown her off. All her remarks indicate a great revolutionary faith. Upon my request, she gives me her poem which I had found in the book and a few others as well, all of which are interesting. (Breton 1928: 54-55) 10
Although Breton does not discuss Beznos at length in Nadja, he published two of her poems in the October 1927 issue of La Révolution surréaliste. Beznos’ poems strike an odd note in the pages of La Révolution surréaliste, since they substitute a strident, declamatory tone for the lyricism more typical of Surrealist writing: AND YOU THE PROLETARIAT? / AND YOU THE SLAVES, THE STAVING! / AND YOU MY TORMENTS? AND YOU MY DOUBTS AND MY CERTAINTIES? / WE WILL PERISH YOU AND I! (1927: 23)
The significance of these poems becomes apparent when they are compared to the other poems published in the issue. For instance, a remarkable parallel emerges if the final stanza of the untitled poem by Jacques Baron: in the living world / and in the world to come / one single drop of dream brings the tempest / Beautiful eyed street-sweepers disperse the clouds (1927: 22)
and the final lines of “Opaque” by Pierre Unik: To the word the world’s mirage responds under suicide’s wing / and resting face to face / without memory’s armour and without dreams / the medium and the destiny (1927: 23)
are compared with the final lines of Beznos’s first poem: Misery, stand-up! / Defend yourself! Unite yourself! These drugs / of unwarranted happiness, we liberate them, / We the proletariat, revolution! revolution! (Beznos 1927: 23)
An image of transformation concludes each poem: road sweepers disperse clouds, suicide dispels the illusions of memory and dreams, and revolutionary uprising. Breton thus situated Beznos’ poems in the context of Surrealist writing to demonstrate the complementary character of Surrealism and the proletarian revolution: that an imagination emancipated by Surrealism aspired towards the same goal
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as the proletariat labouring under the yoke of capitalism. Moreover, the juxtaposition of these poems exposed the limitation of Surrealist writing. If Surrealism was to overcome the contemplative attitude and transform dream into reality, it was necessary to turn to the proletariat as the agent of social revolution. Significantly, in Baron’s poem it is the proletarian road sweepers who dispel the clouds of the dream tempest. Although Beznos does not appear to have played a significant role in the Surrealist movement, her inclusion in La Révolution surréaliste and Nadja does demonstrate an interest in establishing an ongoing relation with members of the proletariat. In Nadja Breton introduces Beznos in a discussion his discovery of an enigmatic object at the Saint Ouen Marché aux puce. This context suggests that Surrealism’s participation in the revolution is a question of elective affinity, of establishing fruitful working relationship among likeminded people rather than an issue of profound theoretical debate. Beznos also functions as an alternative to the hierarchical structure of the PCF bureaucracy, indicating a point of contact with the members of the proletariat who were sympathetic to Surrealism. As Breton notes in his account of their meeting, Beznos volunteered her interest in Surrealism, mentioning Aragon’s Paysan de Paris. This suggests that Surrealism was able to elicit a favourable response among members of the proletariat, provided of course that the PCF did not impose strictures hostile to Surrealism.
~ Breton also included a photograph of the Saint-Ouen marché aux puces in Nadja, which appears to restage his encounter with Fanny Beznos (see illustration 10). It depicts a woman and two men, surrounded by piles of clothes and other objects, with two boxes of books or papers in the foreground; to judge by their dress, one man is bourgeois, while the other is working-class. This photograph initially appears quite unremarkable; but considered in the context of the narrative, and the publication of Beznos’s poems in La Révolution surréaliste, its banality veils a complex matrix of associations between a chance encounter and Surrealism’s political position. Indeed, a distinctive feature of Nadja is the inclusion of forty-four photographic illustrations of places or objects mentioned in the
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narrative – ostensibly as a substitute for verbal description – which introduce a documentary counterpoint to the narrative, establishing a complex articulation between description and event, between Surrealist experience and the quotidian. 11 These illustrations introduce another dimension to the book. In contrast to photography employed as a Surrealist technique, where distortion and manipulation of the image estranged it from conventional appearances, the illustrations in Nadja were remarkably faithful to appearances. 12 They simply recorded people, objects or places mentioned in the text; their function was to bear witness to the verisimilitude of the text and ground it in the quotidian. Similarly, the first photograph in the section dealing directly with Nadja does not illustrate the place where Breton and Nadja meet, but the bookshop associated with l’Humanité, the daily newspaper of the PCF (see illustration 11). Significantly, this photo depicts the same branch of the PCF Breton joined in 1927: it is dominated by a sign proclaiming “On signe ici”; in the foreground, a man, wearing a working-class casquette, leaves his cart to enter the office, suggesting a worker joining the revolution. When this illustration is considered in relation to the events of 1926–1927, it appears curiously overdetermined. In the context of the narrative it precedes Breton’s initial encounter with Nadja, only emphasizing a marginal event – Breton’s purchase of Trotsky’s latest book. 13 However, it places their encounter under the sign of communist politics, and indeed anticipates Breton’s membership of the PCF by three months. In this way it establishes an ambivalent link between culture and politics: Breton initially hesitates on the threshold of the PCF, and it is only after the failure of his encounter with Nadja that he decides to enter the PCF. Yet Breton would fair no better in the PCF than with Nadja, and both encounters ultimately ended in disappointment. The photograph was executed in full knowledge of these two failed encounters, since it was taken a full year after the events it illustrates. This cleavage between the original event and its subsequent description delineates the “political” space of the text, producing an ambivalent link between culture and politics, communism and the marvellous. Breton’s approach to politics in Nadja is quite indirect, so it is perhaps not surprising that the political context of the narrative has rarely been discussed. 14 Yet, to recall the distinction between “politics” and “the political”, the originality of Surrealism was less in
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its engagement with organized politics, which repeatedly ended in failure or frustration, but in its deployment of images as a strategy to manifest the political. The image functions as a matrix that disarticulates elements of social reality to establish unforeseen configurations between these elements. Although in Surrealism this process of disarticulation usually occurs through estrangement from conventional reality, Nadja deploys photographic illustrations in counterpoint to the narrative, as a way of arresting narrative flow and anchoring it in the quotidian. And given that the quotidian is politically overdetermined, this relation suspends habitual patterns of thought to manifest the political. 15 An indication of the complex relation between image and the political can be glimpsed in the final section of Nadja, which functions as an uneasy epilogue, addressing the book’s uncertain fate and acting to resist any sense of closure. Breton planned to include photographic illustrations in the place of description, but found that the places in which the event unfolded resisted disclosing their allure to the camera: I have begun by going back to look at several of the places to which this narrative happens to lead; I wanted in fact – with some of the people and some of the objects – to provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself had looked at them. On this occasion, I realized that most of the places more or less resisted my venture, so that, as I see it, the illustrated part of Nadja is quite inadequate [...]. (Breton 1928: 151-52)
This passage appeared facing the illustration of L’affiche lumineuse de Mazda, which depicted a billboard advertising Mazda light bulbs (fig. 3). The billboard represented a symbolic portrait of Nadja, who associated herself with Melusina, ram’s horns, and the Mazda light bulb. As Breton had earlier stated: Nadja has also represented herself many times with the features of Melusina, who of all mythological personalities is the one she seems to have felt closest to herself. […] She enjoyed imagining herself as a butterfly whose body consisted of a Mazda (Nadja) bulb towards which rose a charmed snake (and now I am invariably disturbed when I pass the luminous Mazda sign on the main boulevards, covering almost the entire façade of the former Théâtre du Vaudeville where, in fact, two rams do confront one another in a rainbow light). (Breton 1928: 129-30)
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The position of this illustration was also noteworthy. It was the penultimate illustration in the book, appearing almost forty pages after the corresponding textual reference, and after four other illustrations. 16 In this context it represented a temporal horizon in the narrative, the symbolic effacement of Nadja’s empirical presence and her ascension into Surrealist mythology; it also prefigured the entrance of a new woman in Breton’s life. After commenting on his disappointment with the illustrations, a digression on the Sacco-Vanzetti riots suddenly interrupts his description of the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle: While the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, after having, unfortunately during my absence from Paris, in the course of the magnificent days of riot called “Sacco-Vanzetti” seemed to come up to my expectations, after even revealing itself as one of the major strategic points I am looking for in matters of chaos, points which I persist in believing obscurely provided for me, as for anyone who chooses to yield to inexplicable entreaties, provided the most absolute sense of love or revolution are at stake and that this, naturally, involved the negation of everything else; while the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, the façades of its movie-theatres repainted, has subsequently become immobilized for me, as if the Porte Saint-Denis had just closed […]. (Breton 1928: 152-54; trans. modified)
This is a revealing passage, embodying one of the major contradictions of Surrealism. In discussing the role of illustrations in Nadja Breton was addressing the cultural significance of the book, yet this significance was poised on the threshold of political agitation. Only a minimal distance separated culture from politics. The mere mention of the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle opened a convoluted parenthesis on the revolution; Breton’s measured prose only returned after he had stated his political philosophy. Breton accepted the SaccoVanzetti riots as an article of revolutionary faith, yet ironically these riots also indicate his distance from direct political action, since the reason he was absent from Paris was his preoccupation with writing Nadja. 17 On 23 August 1927, after a lengthy campaign to have their convictions overturned, Nicolas Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in the United States. Their case became an international cause for the proletariat, since the court appeared unduly influenced by the anarchist beliefs of the accused. International agitation against the sentence culminated in a series of riots that broke out in numerous
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cities after their execution. In Paris the execution provoked a major demonstration. L’Humanité reported the aftermath of the execution, celebrating the heroism of the Paris workers who took to the street. The headline of the August 24, 1927 edition indicated the PCF’s line on the previous night’s demonstration: Paris workers master the cobblestones! Montmartre and central Paris in state of siege. A mob of mourning workers imposes silence on the “clubs” of the entertainment district. Violent confrontations: the Montmartre, Rougemont and Poissonnière intersections, Porte St.-Denis and Porte St.-Martin, Place Blanche, Gare de l’Est, etc. The wounded, hundreds arrested. (L’Humanité, August 24, 1927)
The communist daily provided detailed coverage of the evening’s events, and underlined its role in the unfolding of the demonstration. The Sacco-Vanzetti execution represented an ideal issue to polarize the international class struggle. Indeed, the event’s importance was related to this struggle: the inextricable machination of bourgeois justice, the numerous appeals, stays of execution and the international protest against the verdict had transformed Sacco and Vanzetti into a symbol of proletarian opposition to capitalism. Although the riots represented a contingent event, Breton’s response to them in Nadja is telling: the juxtaposition of L’affiche lumineuse de Mazda (illustration 9) with his description of the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle and the Sacco-Vanzetti riots underlines the proximity of Nadja to the political, opening a place for the appearance of the political that operates in the interval between event, image and text. 18 In contrast to Breton’s failed encounters with Nadja and the PCF, L’affiche lumineuse de Mazda articulated his desire on a number of levels: his desire for Nadja, his desire for a woman to replace Nadja, and his desire for the total transformation of life. It suggested a mode of engagement with the spectacle of mass culture that had the potential to overcome the impasse reached in Breton’s attempt to align Surrealism with communism. Breton does not attempt to articulate an explicit political strategy in Nadja, since his efforts to align Surrealism with communism have already resulted in an impasse; rather he incorporates the encounter with politics as one coordinate in the construction of Nadja.
~
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As Walter Benjamin noted in 1929, the Surrealists were the only contemporary political or cultural group that still possessed a radical notion of freedom (1929: 215). Indeed, the Surrealists invariably measured their political ambitions against this understanding of freedom, frequently reiterated since it was first articulated in the Manifeste du surréalisme (Breton 1924a: 4-5). However, this experience of freedom is encountered at the point of madness – actual in the case of Nadja, figuratively in the case of revolution. To recall Breton’s description of Nadja as “battant comme une porte” (a door ajar, but literally “banging like a door”), the sound of this asylum’s door reverberates through the pages of the book. Yet this experience of freedom also grounds the narrative, giving rise to the indeterminate form of the book – what Blanchot has called désœuvrement [unworking] of the work (1967: 417). Modern democracy functions by curtailing the operation of a radical experience of freedom, giving rise to Lefort’s distinction between “politics” and “the political”. Surrealism, however, refuses this limit and seeks to reintroduce the political into politics. This strategy lies at the heart of the political vicissitudes of the Surrealist movement. The role of the Surrealist image was to intervene in the representation of the world, not merely by defying reason, but by rearticulating elements of reality. In the case of Nadja – particularly, the photographic illustrations – this included social elements, as in the case of Fanny Beznos, and the site of revolutionary transformation, as in the case of the L’affiche lumineuse de Mazda. Yet it was precisely this unpredictable aspect of the image that was viewed with suspicion by the PCF, which was unwilling to forgo a hierarchical understanding of the communicative function of language. Nadja thus exemplifies the role of the political in Surrealism. Breton’s achievement was to produce book that witnessed the recent travails of Surrealism. If the impasse reached in terms of relations with the PCF represented the limits of politics, then the articulation of images in Nadja fashioned a space for the appearance of the political. This has implication for understanding the role played by the cultural avant-garde in politics. The repeated failure of the Surrealists’ attempts to engage in sustained organized political action did not result in political sterility, far from it; rather, the limits of action acted as a spur to interrogate the very conditions of the political under modernity.
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I would like to thank Sascha Bru and Gunther Martens for their editorial input in revising this essay. This essay is part of my ongoing research into the role of the political in Surrealism, and it develops issues first broached in “Surrealism and the Political Physiognomy of the Marvellous” in Spiteri and LaCoss (2003: 52-72).
1
For discussions of Surrealism’s political position during this period see Nadeau (1944), Short (1966), Lewis (1988), Rose (1991: 209-69), and Reynaud-Paligot (1995). The transcript for the November 1926 meetings have been published as Adhérer au Parti communiste? (Bonnet 1992). 2 For a discussion that would conform to Bourdieu’s analysis, see the accounts in Clark (1999) of J.-L. David’s Death of Marat (1793) and El Lissitzky’s Untitled (Rosa Luxumberg) (1920), where the revolution calls the status of visual and verbal language into question. 3 I borrow the term “experience of freedom” from Nancy (1988). A recurring feature in Breton’s writings is his use of the future tense to describe Surrealism: “La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas”. 4 For a discussion of the relevance of Lefort’s work to an understanding of Surrealism see “Revolution by Night: Surrealism, Politics and Culture” in Spiteri and LaCoss (2003: 5-10). 5 Although beyond the scope of this essay, the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (1988) is suggestive in addressing the role of the political in surrealim. Indeed, Lefort presented the distinction between “politics” and “the political” in an 1981 seminar at the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur la politique, organized by Nancy and LacoueLabarthe (1983). Nancy also draws on the work of Blanchot, whose perspicuous writings have not only addressed but indeed form part of Surrealism’s legacy. On Blanchot, Nancy and Surrealism, see Stone-Richards (2003) 6 Breton wrote Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité between September 1924 and February 1925 and it was originally published in Commerce. It was republished as a limited edition in June 1927 by Éditions Gallimard. Le Surréalisme et la peinture, which had been published in four instalments in La Révolution surréaliste, was published as a book in February 1928 by Éditions Gallimard. 7 Breton (1928: 68) would chide her for describing employees as “good people” on the day of their first meeting. 8 For a discussion of the event between October 13, 1926 and Nadja’s internment on March 21, 1927 see Bonnet (1988: 1510-13). 9 Bonnet (1988: 1514-17) discusses the question of Breton’s responsibility for Nadja’s mental state. Polizzotti (1996: 284-85) suggests Breton may have attempted to have Nadja committed prior to her final breakdown in March, but the evidence is largely circumstantial. 10 According to Bonnet (1988: 1539) this encounter occurred during the Spring of 1927. Breton maintained occasional contact with Beznos until August 1928, when she was deported from France for her revolutionary activity.
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Breton revised Nadja in 1963, adding a preface, in which he described the “antilittéraire” character of the book’s illustrations as a substitute for description. See “Avant-dépêché” in Breton (1988: 645). 12 On the role of distortion and framing in Surrealist photography, see Krauss (1985). 13 According to Bonnet (1988; 1542, n. 2), Breton purchased either Europe et Amérique or Où va l’Angleterre? 14 Walter Benjamin (1929) was the first to note the political character of Nadja, an argument later developed by Cohen (1993). 15 See the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985): in this context the role of the image is to suspend hegemonic articulations to expose the political antagonims within the social. 16 The juxtaposition of image and text is based on the 1928 French edition; later editions, including the English translation, have not preserved this connection. 17 Breton had retreated to the Manoir d’Ango in Varengeville-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, where he slowly wrote the first two parts of Nadja. See Polizzotti (1996: 281-91). 18 This strategy goes to the heart of the constitutive role of silence, interval and failure in the construction of Nadja, in which silence acts as an unsurpassable limit around which the narrative unfolds. On this point see Blanchot (1967) and Stone-Richards (2001).
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199 WORKS CITED
Aragon, Louis et al. 1927. Au grand jour. Paris: Éditions surréalistes. Reprinted in José Pierre (ed.) Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectifs, 1922–1939, vol. 1. Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1980: 67-77. Baron, Jacques. 1927. “[untitled poem]” La Révolution surréaliste (9-10): 21-22. Benjamin, Walter. 1929. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2, 1927-1934 (Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, eds; Roger Livingstone and others, tr.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1999: 207-21. Beznos, Fanny. 1927. “[untitled poem]” in La Révolution surréaliste (9-10): 22-23. Blanchot, Maurice. 1967. “Le demain joueur” Nouvelle Revue française (172): 283308; in English as “Tomorrow at Stake” in The Infinite Conversation (Susan Hanson, tr.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 407-21. Bonnet, Marguerite. 1988. “Notice” in Breton (1988): 1502-50. ---. (ed.). 1992. Adhérer au Parti communiste? (Archives du surréalisme, vol. 3). Paris: Gallimard. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on art and Literature (Randal Johnson, ed.). Cambridge: Polity. Breton, André. 1924a. Manifeste du surréalisme. Paris: Éditions Kra. In English as “Manifesto of Surrealism” in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, tr.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972: 147. ---. 1926. Légitime defense. Paris: Éditions surréaliste. In English as “In Self-Defense” in Break of Day (Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws, tr.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999: 22-39. ---. 1927. Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité. Paris: Gallimard. In English as “Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality” in Break of Day (Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws, tr.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999: 3-20. ---. 1928. Nadja. Paris: Gallimard; in English translated by Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960). ---. 1929. “Second Manifeste du surréalisme” in La Révolution surréaliste (12), December 1929: 1-17; in English as “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Richard Seaver and Helen R Lane, tr.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972: 123-87. ---. 1952. Entretiens 1913-1952 avec André Parinaud. Paris: Gallimard. ---. 1988. Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Marguerite Bonnet et al, eds.) (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Paris: Gallimard. Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline. 1990. Surrealism (Vivian Folkenflik, tr.). New York: Columbia University Press. Clark, T. J. 1999. Farwell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cohen, Margaret. 1993. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Krauss, Rosalind. 1985. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press: 87-118. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lefort, Claude. 1983. “La question de la démocratie” in Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (1983): 71-88; in English as “The Question of Democracy” in Democracy and Political Theory (David Macey, tr.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988: 9-20. Lewis, Helena. 1988. The Politics of Surrealism. New York: Paragon House. L’Humanité. 1927. “Paris ouvrier maître du pavé” L’Humanité (August 24). Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1988. L’Experience de la liberté. Paris: Galilée; in English as The Experience of Freedom (Bridget McDonald, tr.). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (eds.). 1983. Le retrait du politique: travaux du Centre de recherches philosophiques sur la politique. Paris: Galilée. Naville, Pierre. 1926. La Révolution et les intellectuels: Que peuvent faire les surréalistes? Paris: s.n; revised edition: Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Polizzotti, Mark. 1996. Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. London: Bloomsbury. Reynaud-Paligot, Carole. 1995. Parcours politique des surréalistes (1919-1969) (CNRS Littérature). Paris: Éditions CNRS. Rose, Alan. 1991. Surrealism and Communism: The Early Years. New York: Peter Lang. Short, Robert. 1966. “The Politics of Surrealism 1920-36” Journal of Contemporary History 1(2): 3-25; reprinted in Spiteri and LaCoss (2003): 18-36. Spiteri, Raymond and Donald LaCoss (eds.). 2003. Surrealism, Politics and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate. Stone-Richards, M. 2001. “Encirclements: Silence in the Construction of Nadja” Modernism/Modernity 8(1): 127-57. ---. 2003. “Failure and Community: Preliminary Questions on the Political in the Culture of Surrealism” in Spiteri and LaCoss (2003): 300-36. Unik, Pierre. 1927. “Opaque” La Révolution surréaliste (9-10): 23.
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Cultural Hegemony and Avant-Gardist Rivalry. The Ambivalent Reception of Futurism in France, England and Russia Thomas Hunkeler On February 14th, 1887, two years before the opening of the 1889 World Fair in Paris, the newspaper Le Temps published a manifesto hostile to the construction of one of the main sites of the fair: the Eiffel Tower. The declaration, signed by numerous artists, writers and journalists, and addressed to one of three general directors of the fair, Jean-Charles Alphand, called for the immediate cancellation of the construction plans in order to preserve the beauty of the city. Rather predictable in its reasoning, the statement nevertheless gives an accurate idea of how French artists and intellectuals thought at the time about the place that France and its capital, Paris, had in the world. “Without falling into the exaltation of chauvinism, we have the right, the declaration said, to declare loud and clear that Paris is the city without rival in the world. […] Italy, Germany and the Flanders, rightly proud of their artistic heritage, do not possess anything comparable to ours, and Paris attracts curiosity and admiration from all over the world”. In the eyes of the signatories, the construction of what they thought of as a second Babel tower did indeed not only disfigure the city but put France’s international reputation at stake: “If foreigners come to visit our fair, they will shout out with astonishment: ‘What? The French have found this horrible thing to give us an idea about their famous taste?’ They will be right to make fun of us […]” (Sirinelli 1996: 31). Instead of being the sign of France’s power, as the organizers of the World Fair would have it, the signatories feared that the Eiffel Tower would be considered by the world as the unmistakable sign of the nation’s artistic decay: not even
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“the commercial America”, they wrote, would want this kind of tower on its soil. Of course, affirmations such as these do not come as a surprise in the age of imperialism. The sentiment of national pride that is apparent in the quoted lines is perfectly in phase with the nationalist rivalry that lurks behind the idea of a World Fair and forms an essential part of what Fredric Jameson (1990: 59) called “the new imperial world system” of the late nineteenth century. But we should also note that it is not only to French artists such as Bouguereau, Coppée or Maupassant (all signatories of the manifesto against the Eiffel Tower) that Paris seemed to be the cultural capital of the world. During a period that stretched from 1880 to well beyond the 1950s, Paris was indeed the place to be, or at least the unavoidable point of reference, for several generations of artists and intellectuals throughout the world. The fact that F.T. Marinetti succeeded to launch his Futurist manifesto in the Parisian Figaro, and not by way of its previous publication in several Italian newspapers, is not only the result of the author’s personal francophone history, but also of his perspicuous analysis of the functioning of the global artistic field in these years. It is my contention that we need to rethink the battle for artistic leadership that marks the rivalry between the various avantgardist movements, but also the emergence and the reception of Marinetti’s Futurism which will be at the centre of this study, in the light of a fierce fight for cultural hegemony, a fight that happened to a large extent in and on behalf of the city of Paris as the capital of the modern civilised world. Nowhere, to my knowledge, is the fact that Paris finds itself at the very heart of this symbolic battle more clearly stated than in the article “La nostra Parigi” (Our Paris), written by the Futurist author Giovanni Papini at the outbreak of World War I for the Florentine newspaper Il Giornale del Mattino. The imminent danger of German boots in the streets of Paris brought Papini to issue a vibrant call for arms in favour of a city which he considered to be less the French capital than simply the centre of the civilized world: “Paris indeed is not only the historical and administrative capital of France, but one of the meeting points and of the centres of the best spiritual aristocracy of the two worlds [i.e.: Europe and America]. It is not only French, but ours, even particularly ours.” In Papini’s view, then, Paris needed to be defended by all civilised nations not merely because it was the
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capital of an allied country, but because, in a certain sense, it was the world capital of the arts and ideas. If Paris had come to be identified as the “city of light” (la città-luce) or the “brain of the world” (il cervello del mondo), it was not, Papini insisted, because of the French, but rather because of all the foreigners who had been attracted to it: “It is noteworthy that the greatness of Paris is owed not only to the French, but to all the foreigners, who maybe surpass the French also in number, that have worked, suffered and triumphed in Paris, who from Paris and by means of Paris have spread their name and have imposed their soul and their work”. Even for the Germans, Papini added, thereby explaining what was in his view the true reason for the war, it was impossible not to long for Paris: “Even if the seizure of Paris had no military importance, they are attracted to it like moths to the flame. The hatred with which some of them take Paris for a modern Babylon and a vessel of corruption resembles terribly a love not reciprocated” (Papini 1963: 393-394). In the light of both the French artists’ manifesto against the Eiffel Tower and Giovanni Papini’s considerations on Paris, it seems possible to tell a story about the avant-garde which is slightly different from the narrative that still prevails in many accounts of this period. For while it is clear that the European avant-garde was from the very start a cosmopolitan affair, in which artists and manifestoes crossed borders between countries easily and quickly, at least until the outbreak of the war (and even, as in the case of dada, afterwards), the dimension of nationalist rivalry has been curiously obscured by most art historians and literary critics. Paths of mutual influence have been traced far more rapidly than patterns of resistance. What seminal readings like Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde or Terry Eagleton’s interpretation of these movements in The Ideology of the Aesthetic tend to underestimate is the socio-historical background of the period, given by the European system of national states and collective nationalism as analysed, for instance, by Eric Hobsbawm or Tom Nairn. The economic notion of “uneven development” among European national states may indeed be adapted to the cultural sphere to describe the relationship between France as the reigning hegemonic power and “underdeveloped” nations like Italy, Russia or even England (albeit only in the cultural realm) as its challengers. This is why nationalist motivations and internationalist aspirations should not be seen as opposed to each other, but rather as two sides of the same
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coin. The feeling of cultural inferiority, interpreted on a national level, is precisely one of the reasons that help explain the aspirations towards international fame which so clearly mark the avant-garde.
~ The first publication of Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto was initially planned in Marinetti’s review Poesia in December 1908 (Lista 2001: 33). Postponed after the terrible earthquake of Messina, the manifesto was eventually published in several Italian newspapers before its now famous “first” publication in the Figaro on the 20th of February 1909. The scandal it provoked immediately also stems from the fact that, as Lista rightly observes, it was France whose name was associated with modernism at that time, and not Italy, which was usually considered to be the “land of the dead” in the postromantic eyes of Northern Europe. The provocative character of Marinetti’s manifesto has often been stated, and its most scandalous passages, such as the idea that a racing car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, are quoted again and again. What has been overlooked is the fact that the prologue of the manifesto is in fact a rewriting of one of the founding texts of French modernism: of Rimbaud’s “Alchimie du verbe” as stated in his Saison en enfer. Whereas for Rimbaud, “old-fashioned poetry” (la vieillerie poétique) can be used as a source for the “magical sophisms” of his new writing thanks to what he calls “simple hallucination” – “I saw very clearly a mosque instead of a factory” (une mosquée à la place d’une usine), Rimbaud writes –, Marinetti turns this poetic procedure upside down in the narrative prologue of his manifesto. Having spent the night with his friends “under the lamps of a mosque” (sous des lampes de mosquée), talking “on the extreme borders of logic and filling the paper with insane writing”, he then suddenly decides to leave the house and go for a drive, only to find himself in a factory ditch after a car accident. It is there, in the industrial dirt, that his rebirth to Futurism takes place: “Oh! Maternal ditch, half filled with muddy water! Factory ditch (Fossé d’usine)!” Symbolically, Rimbaud’s move from life to poetry and from everyday landscapes to exotism is reversed in 1909 by a Marinetti who, born and raised in Egypt, now tries to cut himself loose from his exotic and decadent poetic past, as it appears in his early French writings such as La Momie sanglante (1904) or La ville charnelle (1908).
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At the time of the publication of his manifesto, Marinetti was considered by the editors of the Figaro, and probably by most of his French colleagues, as a “young Italian and French poet” (Lista 1973: 83). But Marinetti’s Futurist rebirth was about to change this appreciation and make him a proud Italian. Indeed, it is important to notice that what is being attacked in the manifesto is not so much the decadent Italian culture for which a figure like Gabriele D’Annunzio stood according to the Futurist leader. It is rather a certain image of Italy in the eyes of Northern Europe and, most of all, of France. If Marinetti launches his manifesto in Italy, as he says, its purpose is nevertheless directed in the first place against “professors, archaeologists, cicerones and antiquaries”: in other words, against the people who promote an image of Italy that is indebted to the past. The famous example of the Victory of Samothrace is in this regard quite significant: an antique work of art originating from southern Europe, exhibited to the eyes of the Parisian public in the Louvre, and which becomes the epitome of a “passeist” culture. In another famous Futurist manifesto, Contro Venezia passatista (1910), Marinetti will even more explicitly attack “the Venice of the foreigners” when he calls upon his fellow citizens not to “bend in front of all foreigners, whatever be their nationality”. But it is only in the wake of the exhibition of Futurist painters in the Parisian Galerie Bernheim Jeune (1912) and the very provocative catalogue, in which the Futurists claimed the first position in art – “Today, for us, it is Italy that is on the avant-garde of international painting” – that people like poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire reacted very strongly against what they rightly perceived as a challenge to French cultural hegemony. Apollinaire not only refused to endorse the Futurist claims, but counterattacked immediately in one of his art columns in the newspaper Le petit bleu (February 9th, 1912) by accusing Marinetti, this “francophone Italian” (Italien gallicisant), of plagiarism: “He wants to rouse Italy from its torpor. He has taken France as a model because it is at the head of the arts and letters, and without telling his fellow countrymen it is France that he presents as an example”. In Apollinaire’s view, it is out of sheer ignorance of the French tradition that the Futurist painters imitate the newest trends in painting, such as Picasso, Rouault or Renoir. The Futurist’s claims for artistic leadership, he concludes, thereby explicitly rejecting their aspiration to conquer Paris, are in fact written for the ignorant Italian
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public, not for the French connaisseurs: “As for Futurist art, it makes us smile in Paris; but it should not make the Italians smile, or else it would be unfortunate for them” (Apollinaire 1991: 408-412). Apollinaire was not the only influential person in France to react strongly to the Futurists, even if he decided in 1913 to accept something like a compromise by signing his Futurist manifesto, “L’antitradition Futuriste”. Another interesting example is Pierre Albert-Birot and his review SIC, which appeared from 1916 to 1919. Even if the influence of Futurism on SIC is obvious in his case – Albert-Birot met Gino Severini in January 1916 and published a reprint of one of his paintings, “Train arrivant à Paris”, in the second issue of his review – , several contributions to SIC hail France and not Italy as the most anti-traditional country. Not without irony, AlbertBirot urges his readers to follow the way of the good old French tradition, which is to deny tradition: “Donc la tradition française, c’est nier la tradition. Suivons la tradition” (SIC: 26). Confronted by Apollinaire’s patronizing remarks or, even worse, in danger of a tacit takeover by French artists or writers, the only possibility for the Futurist group around Marinetti to distinguish itself was precisely to insist on its nationality. It might well be that the Futurists’ exacerbated nationalism, as it appears for instance in the “Futurist Political Programme” of 1913 – where it is stated among other things that the word “Italy” has to triumph over the word “Liberty” –, is in fact less one of the constituents of the movement than a violent reaction caused by the feeling of being, once again, expropriated by France. Just how much the Futurists wanted to be taken seriously by their French “cousins” is demonstrated again in one of Papini’s post-war activities: in the semi-monthly francophone review La vraie Italie, which was published from 1919 to 1920. But in the last issue dated May 1920, Papini concedes that his ambition has failed. The review, whose aim was to “tell our friends the truth about this mysterious and slandered Italy”, in fact did not arouse any interest outside of Italy. Papini angrily admits that “three quarters of our readers and of our subscribers are Italian!” and then attacks the audience he did not have: The French are a wonderful people. But their strength is also their weakness. They cannot admit that there are reasons or passions which are not French. […] Other countries, most of all Italy, don’t have the right to have an opinion
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about their destiny which does not coincide with the infallible opinion of France. It is not a matter of insincerity. It is a matter of radical incapacity to admit the truths of other peoples, the rights of another nation. Frankreich über alles! (Papini 1963: 1233-35)
~ The circumstances of the English reception of Marinetti’s Futurism are now well established. Less analysed, on the other hand, is the fact that France also had a role to play in what appears to be quite a complex relationship involving not two, but at least three protagonists. It may thus be useful to recall the major elements of the story before focusing on France’s position in it. As was the case in France, Futurism reaches England mainly through several exhibits of the Futurist painters between 1912 and 1914, and not as a literary movement. More and more, London seems to become “a Futurist city”, as Marinetti proudly puts it. But in 1914, when Marinetti attempts to depict the so-called “Rebel Artists” around Wyndham Lewis as an English subsidiary of the Futurist movement with the active help of the painter Christopher Nevison – their manifesto “Vital English Art” is read on the occasion of the second Futurist exhibition in the Doré Gallery and published in the Observer on June 7th –, his patronizing gesture provokes an allergic reaction by the group around Wyndham Lewis. Their reply to the newspaper, published on June 14th, states unmistakably that “[t]here are certain artists in England who do not belong to the Royal Academy nor to any of the passéist groups, and who do not on that account agree with the Futurism of Sig. Marinetti” (Lewis 1963: 62). The small “accent aigu” on the word “passéist” is very significant in the context of the birth of Wyndham Lewis’ “Great English Vortex”. Indeed, Lewis’ group has not only one but two enemies against which it has to defend – and from whom it has to distinguish – itself: Italy and France. In an article already published at the end of May 1914, before the official break between the Rebel Artists and the Futurists, Lewis challenges the idea that Futurism should be identified with Italy and not with England: “‘Futurism’ is largely Anglo-Saxon civilisation. It should not rest with others to be the Artists of this revolution and new possibilities in life. As modern life is the invention of the English, they should have something profounder to say on it than anybody else” (Lewis 1989: 32). In his thorough study of the
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English avant-garde, Paul Peppis convincingly shows that the Rebel Artists “understood Marinetti’s attempt to co-opt them as an imperialistic act”, and that Lewis responded to this attempt by mocking Marinetti’s “automobilism” and what he considered the puerile Latin temperament of the Italians. This of course did not keep him from borrowing heavily from the Futurist’s artistic and political ideas. But if the Italians were, in spite of their undeniable influence on Vorticism, easy to keep at bay for Lewis and his followers, the French were not. Movements such as Cubism and post-impressionism had reached England only recently, but all the more strongly, and the French supremacy in the arts seemed clearly established. It was Roger Fry who in 1910 had introduced Manet, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne but also Rouault and Picasso to the English public by exhibiting their work in the Grafton Galleries, two years before he organised the first Futurist exhibition in the Sackville Gallery of London. While certain English artists and intellectuals were openly Francophile, others such as Lewis (who between 1902 and 1909 had spent several years in France) tried to downplay the importance of French culture for the development of English art by associating it in a very Futurist way with the past. In the opening pages of the first issue of Blast. Review of the Great English Vortex dated June 1914, Lewis first polemically associates the Futurists with the impressionists, thereby denying any significant difference to the Italian movement: “The Futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870”. He then goes on to claim the notion of revolution for the English as opposed to the French: “It may be said that great artists in England are always revolutionary, just as in France any really fine artist had a strong traditional vein”. The long manifesto which follows works much in the same way, even if its typographical presentation is now clearly marked by the Futurist aesthetics it pretends to reject. Under the two headings of “Blast” and “Bless”, Lewis tries to define, sometimes not without humour, the position of the Vorticists. What is significant in these pages is that England is systematically compared and opposed, not to Italy, but to France. After having condemned all that devirilises and weakens its inhabitants – its climate, the mild Gulf stream, the mountains keeping back the drastic winds –, Lewis then goes on to what really interests him: “Oh Blast France”. What he
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claims to hate most – judging by the size of the font – is its “sentimental gallic gush”, its “sensationalism” and “fussiness”, but also the “parisian parochialism” and the fact that Paris is “the Mecca of the American”. A little further on in the manifesto Lewis’ grievances are stated explicitly. I only quote three of them: “[T]here is violent boredom with that feeble Europeanism, abasement of the miserable ‘intellectual’ before anything coming from Paris, Cosmopolitan sentimentality, which prevails in so many quarters” (Lewis 1989: 34). And: “In dress, manners, mechanical inventions, LIFE, that is, ENGLAND, has influenced Europe in the same way that France has in Art” (Lewis 1989: 39). And finally: “The nearest thing in England to a great traditional French artist, is a great revolutionary English one” (Lewis 1989: 42). Since it is almost impossible to deny France’s artistic hegemony in Europe in the years preceding World War I, Lewis chooses, like Marinetti before him, to identify France with tradition and his own country with modernism. His famous definition of the vortex – “At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist” – can thus be understood as an attempt to avoid the Futurist cult of speed while at the same time appropriating its energy. Significantly, it also mirrors England’s insularity while trying to reinterpret its marginal situation with respect to Europe as a central position, the eye of the storm as it were. Lewis’ attitude towards France was of course highly ambivalent, as shown again in a 1961 painting by William Roberts, one of the founding members of the Vorticist group. The painting depicts a reunion of the group in 1915, with the first issue of Blast at its centre. It seems rather ironic that the meeting took place at the “Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel”, as a reproduction of the tower in the background clearly demonstrates. The Eiffel Tower, one of the icons of modernism in Delaunay’s paintings and in Apollinaire’s famous poem “Zone”, strongly contradicts Lewis’ attempt to identify France with tradition. But the true reason of the surprising proximity between British Vorticism and French modernism might well be the period depicted: Spring 1915. War rages in Europe; a war in which France and England fight side by side against a common enemy. The old antagonism is forgotten (and will only reappear after the end of the war); Germany has become the main target of the Vorticists. In the second and last issue of Blast dated July 1915, it is not France but
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Germany that is identified with traditionalism. Indeed, the editorial by Lewis boldly states that “Germany has stood for the old Poetry, for Romance, more stedfastly [sic] and profoundly than any other people in Europe” (Blast II: 5). For Lewis, as for Papini, the war is in fact cultural: its hidden source is the unreciprocated love the Germans have for the French and, above all, for Paris: The German’s love for the French is notoriously “un amour malheureux”, as it is by no means reciprocated. And the present war may be regarded in that sense as a strange wooing. The Essential German will get to Paris, to the Café de la Paix, at all costs; if he has to go there at the head of an army and destroy a million beings in the adventure. (Blast II: 6)
~ The relationship of the different branches of Russian Futurism towards Marinetti’s group is subject to innumerable and often contradictory narratives. What has been clearly established is the undeniable influence of Italian Futurism on the development of Russian art, even if this influence has sometimes been denied by way of predating certain documents or declarations. It is obvious that the Russians did not have to wait until Marinetti’s trip to Russia in 1914 to discover Futurism through its manifestoes, through photographs and publications. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the Russian avant-garde discovered Futurism essentially through the Parisian art circles. Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Gontcharova, two important figures of the reception of Futurism in Russia, lived and worked in Paris during these years and maintained frequent contacts with their Russian colleagues. When, in December 1913, the painter Larionov and the poet and art critic Ilia Zdanevitch – later known as Iliazd – published their Futurist manifesto “Why we cover us with paint” in the well-known review Argus, their declaration was followed by a notice in which the editors gave some “historical information” on Russian Futurism: “The Futurist movement is born in the Occident. The Parisian attics are its cradle. Its father is the Gallicised Italian Marinetti.” (Larionov 1995: 116) The source of this information is obviously Apollinaire’s already quoted art column of February 1912, in which he had depicted Futurist painting as a simple imitation of the latest developments in French art.
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Two elements are recurrent in the way in which the Russian Futurists position themselves in relation to Marinetti and his movement. If we limit our analysis to Larionov and Gontcharova, it appears that both accept to be influenced by the Italian Futurists while both simultaneously try to downplay this concrete influence by reducing Futurism to a mere province of French and thus Occidental art as opposed to Russian and Oriental art. In his manifesto of Rayonist painting dated “Moscow, June 1912” (but most probably written in 1913), Larionov thus criticises the Futurists for not having “a true pictorial tradition”, a lack which according to him is responsible for the fact that their theory has “simply become a part of French painting” (Larionov 1995: 21). To criticize the Futurists – whose openly displayed hatred for tradition was one of the best-known features of the movement – for not being part of a solid (Italian) tradition seems at first to be some kind of mockery or unintentional joke. But Larionov is in fact talking about a fundamental problem of Futurism, be it Italian or Russian. Without the inscription of a national or cultural identity which establishes some kind of tradition (even if this tradition is only a few years old), Futurism can be appropriated by almost everyone. The question of who came first is not a ridiculous detail in the quarrel of the avant-garde; it is crucial precisely to the extent that anteriority is the only thing which cannot be copied. The problem with which the Russian Futurists are thus confronted is that their Futurism seems to be a second-hand product, depending on its Italian counterpart. This apparent inferiority can only be reversed by rewriting history: either by claiming Russia’s total independence from the West, or by inventing a history of Russian Futurism as preceding, and not following, Marinetti’s movement. Yet, the third, most interesting solution used by the Russian Futurists is to promote primitivism as opposed to tradition. “Culture,” writes the Ego-Futurist Igor Severianine in early 1912, “is rotten like a roquefort. I am inseparable from the savages […]” (Lemaire 1995: 160) For if culture, like roquefort cheese, is associated with France and occidental civilisation, primitivism is not: in general terms, it is rather associated with the East. So it only takes one more step to make the East the source of inspiration of the West and to establish the anteriority of Russia over Italy or France. This is precisely what Gontcharova does when she formulates the following rhetorical question: “From where did all the
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occidental artists, whom we have studied for so long without learning the essential, taken their inspiration, if not from the Orient?” (Lista 1973: 41) Gontcharova’s point of view is of course a perfect example of what Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit termed “occidentalism”, and what Isaiah Berlin described as a typical reaction of “many a backward, exploited, or at any rate patronised society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to real or imaginary triumphs and glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural character” (Berlin 1997: 116). It is in the popular Russian art of icons and so-called loubki (a term used for all forms of popular art such as wooden statues, engravings or needlework) that Larionov and Gontcharova are looking for a counterbalance to Occidental art. In a long article published in the almanac “The Donkey’s Tail and the Target” (named after two art exhibits in 1912 and 1913) which was signed by a certain Varsonifi Parkine from Paris (probably a pseudonym for Larionov himself or Ilia Zdanevitch), the Russians are criticized for idealizing Occidental art instead of turning towards their own culture: “Alas, we Russians, while collecting entire galleries of Occidental art, don’t pay attention to our own things, which not only match its quality, but are maybe even better and more important than all the things coming from the Occident” (Larionov 1995: 57). According to Gontcharova and Larionov, the fundamental difference between Occidental and Oriental art is that the first is based on “civilisation”, while the second is rooted in “culture” interpreted as the only perpetual origin of art. Therefore, it may be true that Futurism comes from the Occident; but it doesn’t matter anymore, since art itself belongs to the Orient, as Gontcharova is purported to have stated: “Art comes from the Orient. If it has existed in Occidental Europe during the Stone Age, that very beautiful art has nothing to do with what has been done afterwards” (Larionov 1995: 71). The history of the reception of Futurism in France, England and Russia is an essential part of the origin and rise of what we now call the historical avant-garde, a movement we tend to identify a little too easily with anti-war politics, cosmopolitanism and anti-totalitarianism. It is a fact, though, that nationalism is one of the chief motivations not only of Futurism, but of the avant-garde in general. Only a thorough analysis of the intricate mix of the nationalist motivations and the cosmopolitan aspirations that mark the avant-garde might help to shed
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new light on the charge of totalitarianism that literary and art historians hold from time to time against the avant-garde. The most recent debate in France between Jean Clair and Régis Debray about the totalitarian aspects of the Surrealist movement again misses this aspect, since neither Clair, who tries to uncover what he considers the dark side of Surrealism – its propensity for violence, its voluntary concealment of reason – nor Debray, who accuses Clair of taking too seriously what he calls “a certain theoretical theatricality” (Debray 2003: 18) and of underestimating the fraternal impulse of Surrealism, seem ready to accept the idea that the avant-garde as such follows a pattern of imperialist behaviour. Debray’s remarks on the importance of Surrealism as “the last global poetry in French that helped to enlarge our hexagonal fraternity to overseas” (Debray 2003: 32) are meant to defend the movement against Clair’s criticism, but they unwittingly point towards the way in which internationalist aspirations may be determined by nationalist motivations. Instead of focusing on the more or less hidden tendencies towards totalitarianism in the Surrealist movement, it seems more promising to question this paradox.
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WORKS CITED Apollinaire, Guillaume. 1991. Œuvres en prose complètes II (P. Caizergues and M. Décaudin, eds.) (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Paris: Gallimard. Berlin, Isaiah. 1997. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (H. Hardy, ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bürger, Peter. 1974. Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp. Buruma, Ian, and Avishai Margalit. 2004. Occidentalism. The West in the Eyes of its Enemies. New York: Penguin Press. Clair, Jean. 2003. Du surréalisme considéré dans ses rapports au totalitarisme et aux tables tournantes. Paris: Mille et une nuits. Debray, Régis. 2003. L’honneur des funambules. Réponse à Jean Clair sur le surréalisme. Paris: L’échoppe. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, myth, reality. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1990. “Modernism and Imperialism” in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said (eds.) Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 43-66. Jannini, Pasquale A. (ed.). 1979. La fortuna del Futurismo in Francia. Roma: Bulzoni Editore. Larionov, Mikhaïl. 1995. Manifestes (R. Gayraud, tr.). Paris: Allia. Lemaire, Gérard-Georges. 1995. Futurisme. Paris: Editions du regard. Lewis, Wyndham. 1989. Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature and Society 1914-1956 (P. Edwards, ed.). Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow. Lista, Giovanni. 1973. Futurisme. Manifestes, documents, proclamations. Lausanne: L’âge d’homme. Lista, Giovanni. 2001. Le Futurisme. Création et avant-garde. Paris: Les éditions de l’amateur. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 1983. Scritti francesi (P. A. Jannini, ed.). Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori. Nairn, Tom. 1977. The break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: Verso. Papini, Giovanni. 1963. Politica e civiltà (Tutte le opere III). Milano: Mondadori. Peppis, Paul. 2000. Literature, Politics, and the English avant-garde. Nation and Empire, 1901-1918. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Rimbaud, Arthur. 1954. Œuvres complètes (R. de Renéville and J. Mouquet, eds.) (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Paris: Gallimard. SIC. 1993. (M.-L. Lentengre, ed.). Paris: Jean-Michel Place. Sirinelli, Jean-François. 1996. Intellectuels et passions françaises. Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle. (coll. folio/histoire 72). Paris: Gallimard.
A Europeanizing Geography. The First Spanish Avant-Garde’s Re-Mapping of Castile (1914-1925) Renée M. Silverman
The critical discourse surrounding modernity – the end of empire, the displacement of the self from the territory of the nation, Europeanization and its discontents – has tended towards the spatial and perceptual. From Foucault and Lefèbvre to Cultural Geography and Franco Moretti’s 1998 Atlas of the European Novel, the organization and representation of space have been attributed to the same ordering factors to which the nation is subject (cf. Foucault 1972; Foucault 1994; Lefèbvre 1984; Moretti, 1998; Rabinow 1984). Recent scholarship has changed course from the Foucauldian view of space as coextensive with the nation-state’s consolidation of power to focus on the perceptual mechanisms that inculcate the values of nationalism and the marketplace. New theories of apperception – consider work by Jonathan Crary, David Michael Levin, Martin Jay, Rosalind Krauss, and Hal Foster – raise the possibility of regarding the psychology and physiology of the specular as parallel to the production of political and social modernity. From this perspective, the mutual approximation between subjects (the human agents that create a mental picture) and the objects of vision becomes paradigmatic of intersubjective relations – the exchangeable views of self and other that develop concurrently with the organization of the social sphere (Crary 1990; Crary 2001; Foster 1988; Krauss 1994; Levin 1993). In light of the correlation between the history of perceptual and political discourses, the envisioning of space as national and the national as space in aesthetics of Spanish modernism has rich implications for how the development of our concept of national
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identity and the modern coincide. 1 Analysis of the first Spanish avantgarde’s heightened awareness of its peripheral position with respect to “European” modernity – reflected in a hyperbolic use of the language of visual perception to reflect on this distance – leads to deeper understanding of the reciprocity between space and the imagining of place. In particular, the avant-garde’s deconstruction of the textual and philosophical equivalent of national space created during Spain’s finde-siècle crisis – its psychic transition from the imperial to the postcolonial following the loss of Cuba to the United States in 1898 – was accomplished by transforming the perceptual mechanisms that were productive of its nationalist cultural geography. 2 As early as 1913, only a very few years before the advent of the predominant vanguard movement in poetry, Ultraísmo (1918-1925), principal philosopher of the preceding, inward-looking Generation of 1898 Miguel de Unamuno launched his famous diatribe against Europeanization. His words turned the metaphysics of national identity on its head, thereby transforming geography into a negative metaphor for the politics of internationalism: “Europe! This at once primitive and immediately geographical notion has become, magically, an almost metaphysical category” (Unamuno, 1913: 304). 3 Effectively closing all borders against the importation of all influences not indigenous to Spanish soil, the cordon separating Spain from Europe becomes the limit of Unamuno’s map. The roots of subjectivity – Spanish cultural identity – are thus circumscribed by national boundaries. Moreover, the scope of this territory was determined by regional hierarchies dating from the medieval period; from the time of the publication of Unamuno’s 1895 En torno al casticismo (On Casticismo), the philosophy of the Generation of 1898 contained national subjectivity in the geographically and politically central province of Castile, which was also the traditional locus of “historical” narratives of Spain’s national unification (Unamuno 1902). 4 Perspectivismo (Perspectivism), José Ortega y Gasset’s philosophical response to the isolationist attitudes prevalent in 1898, opened Spain’s borders by reversing the visual order that Unamuno’s generation used to plot the Castilian topography according to its concept of nationhood. In order to re-orient Spain politically and geographically towards Europe, Ortega substituted the objective spaces of avant-garde abstraction for the mythological histories
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embedded in Unamuno’s Castile. 5 In his aesthetic theory, the contemplation of abstraction serves the pedagogical function of training Spain’s vision away from the subjectivist perspective that he links to the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of casticismo. On the one hand, Ortega associates subjectivism with individualism and nationalist isolationism. On the other hand, subjectivism’s opposite, objectivism, becomes synonymous with the rationalist alienation from a particular (cultural) perspective that he finds detrimental to the positive conceptualization of a stable national identity. Therefore, the combination of the two attitudes, for Ortega, offers the maximum potential for reconciling self and other, both within and among nations. The focusing of “perspective” that serves as the methodological foundation of his political philosophy functions under three assumptions: one, the separation between viewing subject and envisioned object involved in the perception of a work of art can be mediated; two, the convergence of subject and object in the contemplation of abstraction is duplicated in the social sphere; and three, the optical synthesis of different perspectives is paradigmatic of intersubjective and international relations. In my view, the turn towards the perceptual in the aesthetics of the first Spanish avantgarde offers a theoretical and textual approximation of the solution to the problem of national space in cosmopolitan Europe. In Ultraísmo, perceptual language furthers the goal of Spanish integration into the topography of European culture. Guillermo de Torre, the movement’s self-proclaimed leader, uses the internationalist perspective that we associate with Ortega in order to cross the borders of national literature and cultural affiliation. In his poetry just as in Ortega’s philosophy, the heightening of perception becomes the best way of opposing the interior orientation of Unamuno’s casticismo; this is accomplished by triangulating the representation of perspective between the subject’s unique view, the separate existence of the objects observed, and the standpoint of subjects other than the primary observer. To approach the discussion of the avant-garde in this fashion is to focus on the ways in which the discursive strategies formulated by Ortega and de Torre re-map Spain’s borders according to a revised vision of nationhood which recognizes the particular conditions of post-World War I and post-imperial Europe. It is also, I argue, the starting point of a much needed exploration of the relationship of subjectivity to the imagined spaces of the nation, for this same link
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should also be examined in terms of the intersubjective. The Europeanizing geography of Ortega’s Perspectivism and de Torre’s Ultraísmo generates the productive exchange of subject positions and identities across borders because each distinct viewpoint is at once firmly rooted in the soil of cultural identity, yet permitted to shift with the terrain of an adjustable perception.
Focusing Perspective in Ortega y Gasset’s The Dehumanization of Art Integrated throughout the text of Ortega’s 1925 meditation on aesthetics, La deshumanización del arte (The Dehumanization of Art) are an astonishing number of tropes, metaphors, and anecdotes that turn on the concept of visual perspective. Perhaps the best known – or widely cited at least – describes the phenomenological experience of an observer contemplating a garden through a window. The apparent “cuestión de óptica sumamente sencilla” (extremely simple question of point of view) is actually one of the philosophical essay’s several key pedagogical anecdotes designed to teach the action of seeing, as if the ideal viewer were a camera equipped with endless and perfectible possibilities for focusing. Ortega’s persuasive rhetoric makes us believe that “in order to see an object we must adjust our ocular apparatus in a certain way”; the subtle suggestion that “our visual adjustment” might be inadequate gives Ortega the opportunity to perform his intervention, fixing our eyes as we imagine ourselves in the position of the observer at the window. The place in the visual continuum between optical apparatus, glass pane, and garden at which his focalizing activity stops is indicative of the overall thrust of his regulation of aesthetic enjoyment and contemplation (Ortega 1925: 357-58). 6 There are several issues at play here. In the context of the year 1925, The Dehumanization of Art was bound up with the retrospective of the first avant-garde during its final hour, and the justification of abstraction in Spanish arte joven (young art). It is important to note that the first half of the essay was published in early 1924 in the Madrid daily El Sol, although it did not appear in its entirety until 1925. The publication history of The Dehumanization of Art, in addition to the record of the numerous articles on aesthetics by Ortega
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printed in influential newspapers anterior to 1918, confirms that his ideas were in circulation among the leaders of Ultraísmo, including de Torre, long before the avant-garde’s departure from the cultural scene. It will also be necessary at this juncture to recognize the philosophical underpinnings of Ortega’s approach to apperception. Ortega blends the concepts of “subject” and “object” from art and aesthetics with the notion of a political “subject”, before associating both sets of terms with the “subjectivism” and “objectivism” peculiar to phenomenology. He relates the “objectivism” of Husserl’s distanced approach to sensory impressions with a more general political and philosophical objectivity. Ortega’s removed point of view comes to incorporate the subjective focus that Unamuno trained on postimperial Castile while tempering its self-reflexive inwardness since, in Perspectivism, subjectivism is actually the basis of an exchangeable national outlook. This strategic move permits him to perform the adjustment of perspectives crucial to the development of a renovated model of European intersubjective relations. Ortega’s phenomenological bent is also a way of getting at what it means to position the self and the nation in the shifting territory of belonging, and how the crossing of different visions breaks down the cultural limits of the geography of subjectivity. What political function do Ortega’s “gotas de fenomenología” (drops of phenomenology) serve? (Ortega 1925: 360) This question must be answered in two parts, before we move on to our situation of his aesthetic theory in the Europeanizing geography of the first Spanish avant-garde. In “Social Pedagogy as Political Programme” (La pedagogía social como programa politico) (1910), one of Ortega’s earliest texts on the subject of national identity, he proclaims Spain’s non-existence as a nation; his hyperbole effectively exposes Unamuno’s metaphysical Castile as a phantasm of the political imagination (Ortega 1910: 504). Given its post-imperial situation, Spain’s viability as a nation is utterly reliant on the type of focusing ability that he describes in his later The Dehumanization of Art. That is to say, the modern values that Ortega would like to institute in his transformation of political discourse depend on the transitive act of vision. According to him, the “window” of young art operates as a moral compass for resolving the “vital disorientation” of culture typical of the post-1898 period in Spain and the aftermath of World War I throughout Europe in general. The viewing “I”/eye calibrated
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by abstraction then makes “an effort similar to that which this ocular adjustment makes unavoidable in order to contemplate life”, by which Ortega refers to the establishment of a certain comfort level with the defamiliarization of perception (Ortega 1923: 118, 123). The perfect observer comes to perceive the fragmented spaces of abstract art, such as in the Cubist still lifes of Picasso and Braque, with the same ease as when encountering a mimetically represented object. The balance between subjectivism and objectivism in The Dehumanization of Art rehearses the interchange of viewpoints on the political and social level. To follow Ortega’s argument to its logical conclusion, when uncomplicated by the assimilation of the viewpoint of the other, we lose the ability to see – to relate – that he regards as the basis of modern nationhood. His criticism of Spain’s position, after 1898 and 1914, with respect to the cultural geography of Europe, now becomes easier to envision. As in the individual’s “spiritual location”, Spain’s moral re-orientation is made possible by its movement from the periphery of an inward-looking subjectivism to the centre of a truly exchangeable perspective (Ortega 1921-1922: 38).
Geography and the Nation: The Mapping of Castile from 1898 to the Avant-Garde The avant-garde accomplishes the de-territorialization of the “national” subject by interfering with the literary and rhetorical devices that produce it. Just as Ortega’s critique of the metaphysics of Unamuno’s landscape takes the form of the adjustment of perspective, de Torre disturbs the conventional lyric strategies that create a transcendental subject with the capacity to control, through apperception, its external surroundings. The perceptual transformation that this rather Cartesian subject occasions is implicated in the construction of the national landscape since, according to Foucault’s well-known argument, the optical is ordered along the same lines as the political and social. In the perceptual metamorphosis of Castile, in the poetry of Antonio Machado, the ethical relationship between people and place central to Unamuno’s philosophy of casticismo causes the landscape to be transformed according to the moral perspective of the subject, in other words, visual apperception performs the same work as the social codes that both Unamuno and
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Machado wish to impose and perpetuate. Qualifying the critical perspective originating with Foucault and Lefèbvre and elaborated especially by Jonathan Crary, David Michael Levin, and Martin Jay, the political structures that are re-duplicated in vision are not necessarily the product of a market economy. On the contrary, as Crary in particular has noted, there is no overarching optical organization in political modernity; rather, many competing perceptual economies exist side by side, including those that challenge the dominant order. It is also necessary to emphasize the fact that, although Unamuno and Machado employ optics in the re-inscription of the nation in space, their intention is actually to re-assert autochthonous ideas and traditions that go against the Foucauldian conception of political modernity. To examine Machado’s Campos de Castilla (Castilian Landscapes) is to expose the mechanisms that situate the subject in the space of the nation, thereby creating the conditions for analyzing its de-territorialization at the hands of de Torre. In the 1912 collection, the perceptual relationship between the observing “I” and the landscape produces a historical panorama of the Spanish empire. Visual apperception, setting in motion a mnemonic association between the space of the landscape, national character, and the social order, responds to the alternation between presence and absence. In the context of the poem “A orillas del Duero” (On the Banks of the Duero), in which the observer alternates between the perception of the degraded present and the recollection of a brighter past, the combined impressions of the poetic “I” provoke a negative comparison between the yesterday of empire and the now of Spain’s post-imperial decline. Accentuating the sense of loss relating to the end of the colonial age, Machado’s negative anaphoric constructions imply a territorial absence at the same time as his explicit references to the protagonists of the Catholic Re-conquest of Moorish Spain allude to the disaster of 1898. Conversely, the visual perceptions of the poetic “I” make the history of Spain’s national self-definition present by giving territorial specificity to its progression. The narrative begins with and returns at regular intervals to the refrain “Castilla miserable, ayer dominadora” (Miserable Castile, yesterday dominating), thus referring to the regional core of the Reconquest from the Moors, while at the same time branching out to sites of conflict via the gaze and the memory of the observer – symbolically represented by the flow of the river Duero (Machado 1912: 102).
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Machado’s mapping of the expansion of the medieval period – a substitution for the ex-colonies that, after 1898, cannot be named – also confirms the national boundaries that he, like Unamuno, views as indigenous. Re-inscribing these borders produces the national space that stands for a specific moral and philosophical orientation while subtly positing their authenticity and affirming them as somehow new. As a result, the modern political order is reduplicated in the representation of space – the Castilian landscape. In his 1923 Hélices (Propellers), de Torre reverses the poetic process of situating the subject in the space of the nation. “Dehiscencia” (Dehiscence), the first poem of the collection, represents the moment following World War I in terms of a broken landscape at the point of peaceful renewal: “And there is a final red crackling of burning stars,/ set on fire in the multi-phonic grove./ Meanwhile, shoots of peace bear fruit in lakes of blood./ The tragic excrescences – pyres of corpses, blood, and wails –/ disappear voicelessly before a/ great resurrected rainbow” (de Torre 2000: 11). 7 In contrast with “On the Banks of the Duero”, the subject is distanced from the landscape that it observes. Instead of emphasizing the subjective character of the perception of the poetic “I”, as in Machado’s poem, the battlefields described in “Dehiscence” are objectified, much like Ortega conceives of objectification: the assimilation of the subject’s perspective in the abstract representation of the object. Specifically, the irruption of the poetic “I” that occurs in the second line of “On the Banks of the Duero” does not take place in “Dehiscence” until the last strophe, although the subject becomes visible, just as in Castilian Landscapes, through the lyric device of apostrophe. 8 The representation of space also produces the objectivity of the poem. De Torre’s diction and enjambment of the lines of the strophe give the sensation that the observer is looking down at the war-ravaged landscape from above. The petals of the “iridescent whorls of the cosmic red rose” seem to be “truncated under the sun stroked breeze of the war”; similarly, from the “horizonte rasgado” (torn horizon) and the cosmic position of “the paroxysmal dance of the planets”, the poetic “I” perceives the “polarizing fragrance of milky sensuality” (de Torre 2000: 11). For de Torre, an elevated perspective stands metaphorically and metapoetically for the territorial reconstruction and cultural renovation that he values.
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In the final strophe of “Dehiscence”, the poetic “I” ascends the horizon “with an Icarian impetus”, thereby effecting “the unprecedented fertilization” of the renascent earth promised by the poem’s imagery (de Torre 2000: 11-12). Yet unlike in Castilian Landscapes, in Propellers, the desired renewal is not achieved through the performance of visual perception – the means by which Machado draws the borders of the historical Castilian landscape around the modern relationship between subject and nation. Machado’s Castile changes according to the sentiment of the subject, in what T.S. Eliot called a paysage d'âme; apperception is the vehicle for this approximation between subject and the landscape as object. Contrastingly, the detachment of perspective in “Dehiscence” estranges both the representation of the battleground and the poetic subject’s connection to space, thereby freeing the subject’s vision from implication in the ordering mechanism that permits the construction of Machado’s Castile (see “Itinerario noviespacial del paisaje”, de Torre 1920: 81-93). This spatial unmooring also deterritorializes the subject from the space of the collective past: And I have avidly contemplated, in a euphoric, visual spasm, a beautiful Futurist/ panorama,/ reflected in the conscious blade of your propeller,/ oh inaugural airplane!,/ which upon returning from your extraterrestrial flight, you landed, shaking and fluttering, in my soaring/ cranial hangar ... (de Torre 2000: 13)
De Torre’s “Al aterrizar” (Upon Landing) exemplifies the synthetic type of perspective that Ortega advocates in The Dehumanization of Art – the alternative to the philosophical subjectivism that he correctly attributes to the Generation of 1898, if not specifically to Machado. The personification of the cityscape takes the place of the attribution of the subject’s perceptions to the landscape that is characteristic of Castilian Landscapes. Furthermore, de Torre turns on its head the conventional approximation of subject to object performed by apostrophe. Reversing the movement normally associated with this rhetorical device, the address of the object by the subject in “Upon Landing” actually distances the observer from the urban landscape (Culler 1981: 135-53; 1975: 161-188). In the poem’s first strophe, the remove between the subject’s perspective, located high up in the “inaugural airplane”, and the “beautiful Futurist/ panorama” below
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only becomes greater, despite the rhetorical rapprochement generated by the apostrophe (de Torre 2000: 13). Although the poem’s emphasis on the divide between the poetic “I” and the cityscape through apostrophe goes against the grain, the synthesis between subject and object that de Torre’s use of this rhetorical device produces is, perhaps paradoxically, right in line with lyric convention. In the course of the apostrophe’s articulation, subject and object collide in “a euphoric visual spasm” (de Torre 2000: 13). The clear distinction, at the beginning of the strophe, between the poetic “I” and the ground beneath it is complicated by the representation of perspective. It is the act of visual perception that, once again, generates the shifts between the lyric “I”, “you”, and the object that are articulated rhetorically. What is ultimately created by the subject’s spatially distanced — objectified – perspective is the ludic spectacle of the cosmopolitan city: “And between the lines of the telegraph wires/ the libertarian lovers swing!/ In the blue roundabouts, dawn-rosy-cheeked children roll the wires of the domesticated airplanes/ around their fingers!/ Nubile androgens manipulate the switches of the evening stars!” (de Torre 2000: 13). The cultural heterogeneity of the scene is the exact opposite of Machado’s integration of the subject into the autochthonous and historically transcendent landscape. Sceptical of Machado’s production of an “authentic” Castile, de Torre’s representation of the modern city stands as a sharp rebuff of positing landscape as nation and a unification of the collective under its auspices.
The View From the “Torre Eiffel”: Guillermo de Torre’s Europeanizing Perspective De Torre’s spatial distancing of the subject, in “Dehiscence” and “Upon Landing”, is akin to the objectifying effects on perspective of contemplating the glass window in The Dehumanization of Art. In Ortega’s system, the observer ceases to conceive of the object – Castile, cityscape, or garden – solely in terms that proceed from the self. De Torre’s point of view on the issue is in perfect agreement with Ortega’s essay; in the posterior Literaturas europeas de vanguardia (European Avant-garde Literatures), de Torre argues that “all current schools are the heroines and victims of an exhausting and damaging
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subjectivism” (de Torre 2001: 231). 9 However, his statements are more rhetorical than anything else – just as Ortega’s occasional negation of the subjective principle really aims at tempering perspective with a dose of objectivism. Essentially, in what de Torre terms “subjetivización intraobjetiva” (intraobjective subjectification) the “I” and “non-I” of Fichte are resolved in the subject’s juxtaposition of different objects. The manipulation of space and spatial values in “Dehiscence” and “Upon Landing” are examples of “intraobjective subjectification” in action. Its significance is hinted at in the reference to Fichtian philosophy. The resolution of the “I” and “non-I” – the other – returns to the problem of intersubjectivity and the collective. Some striking things happen to the subject as a result of the adjustment of perspective in de Torre’s Propellers – particularly in connection with the space of culture and nationhood that I describe at an earlier point in this essay. The missing link, in de Torre, between perspective and intersubjectivity, lies hidden in his representation of international communication. Curiously, Propellers is rife with images of radiotelegraph wires and towers that just happen to be mounted on towers – the embodiment of the distanced perspective in “Dehiscence” and “Upon Landing”. In “Auriculares” (Headphones), de Torre alludes to the synthesis between subject and object in his theoretical explanation of “intraobjective subjectification”: “Spiritual interpenetration/ Above the towers airplanes ocean liners/ weave for themselves the spidery networks of the circuits” (de Torre 2000: 25). Likewise, in “Pleamar” (High Tide), these “erotic circuits” are productive of the “TSH / of pluri-souled ocean liners” (de Torre 2000: 75). 10 However, it is de Torre’s 1921 “Manifiesto vertical ultraísta” (Vertical Ultraist Manifesto) that gives focus to the confluence of aerial acrobatics and telegraphic pyrotechnics. In the manifesto, he literally sets his “radiotelegraphic antennae” atop a radiotelegraphic tower. The “actitud verticalista” (verticalist attitude) resulting from this convergence catalyses de Torre’s sudden recollection of the First World War: After the warlike European upheaval, in the ideological, artistic, and literary panorama of the resurrected Occident, a vertebral transmutation has begun: The great error, hung like an opaque night – pregnant with blood – between the years 1914-18, has aborted a youthful and innovative generation that polarizes its
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And its resolution – represented using the combined trope of telegraph communication and vertical perspective: In the new aesthetic surveying of an ultra-dimensional area and a hyperNortherly altitude, fructifies a vertically symbolic full-sunned meridian. The electrodes – anions and cations – of the voltaic solar globe provoke a luminous Futurist circuit, breaking the chaotic fog. Lyric electrolysis. (de Torre 1921)
A veritable phenomenon of fin-de-siècle Europe and of crucial military importance during World War I, the radio towers in Propellers situate communication between subjects in a landscape prepared to put such interactions into perspective. Not only do the towers and their wires have the same de-territorializing effect as the aerial perspective of “Upon Landing”, they have the effect of making subjectivity more fluid with regard to the boundaries of nations. After all, radio wires and telegraph signals transcend the topographical boundaries of national space. These perceptual and geographical borders, so carefully traced by Machado’s River Duero for the nationbuilding purposes served by his anamnesis of Spain’s collective history, are rendered obsolete in the international air space of de Torre’s tower. Since no such tower is as emblematic of modernity and the international cityscape as the Eiffel Tower of Paris, de Torre chooses the French monument, a radio emitter beginning from the year 1904, as the subject of one of the major poems of Propellers. “Torre Eiffel” does not limit itself to the juxtaposition of subjective impressions according to “intraobjective subjectification”. The poem also produces another form of synthesis – the crossing of different national and cultural subjectivities – that brings the social import of the balance between “I” and “non-I” into play. As in the previous examples from Propellers, “Eiffel Tower” manipulates the boundaries of the subject using the conventions of the lyric. The tendency to set up an “I” in opposition to a “non-I” – the objectified “you” of apostrophe – allows the possibility of envisioning the lyric object as another subject, thereby laying the groundwork for the representation of communicative exchange – as in de Torre’s “Vertical Ultraist Manifesto”. Even though the erection of towers would seem to be
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allied with the elite individualism and authoritarian aspirations critiqued in post-modern analyses of vanguardism, the first Spanish avant-garde regarded the imposing verticality of these monuments as symbolic of internationalism’s liberation of the subject from traditional constraints on identity. The architecture of Torre’s towers is designed to subvert the optical controls that produce the horizontal mapping of national difference in fin-de-siècle Spanish modernism. To begin with, de Torre creates a pun on his surname and the Eiffel Tower in the poem’s title; the T(t)orre may play the role of the “I” of the poet, the poetic “I”, or the object of address and personification: “Listen to the avionic rhythm/ of the motor of my Speech/ that sings and skates in the blue/ and circles around the Tower” (de Torre 2000: 33). The “Torre” or Tower – and the identity that the proper noun denotes – then becomes multiple during the signalling process that de/Torre performs. Through the “palabras sintéticas” (synthetic words) of international communication, an additional crossing of the space of identity and national belonging occurs. Following the path of literary export typical of the European avant-garde, de Torre re-locates the Eiffel Tower from Paris to Madrid – the site of Ultraísmo’s 1921 soirée and desired object of cultural appropriation: “I the Tower of Madrid/ above the bell tower of Santa Cruz” (de Torre 2000: 33). 11 His reference to the landmark church of Santa Cruz in the central Plaza Santa Cruz of Madrid in place of the Paris Champs de Mars occasions an exchange of national identities as well as a confusion of national borders: “Blooming of the simultaneous landscapes/ The bridges jump rope/ over the Seine” (de Torre 2000: 33). Through the Torre/de Torre pun, the dedication of Torre Eiffel to his French colleague and painter of the tower, Robert Delaunay, and the inclusion of citations from several French poets that were particularly influential in the European avant-garde, de Torre inscribes the cultural heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism of Paris upon the sign of his own subjectivity. 12 His “avidez nómada” (nomadic avidity) performs the re-territorialization of Machado’s Castile in the nationally fluid air space of the Eiffel Tower. “Beyond the borders”, the view from the Tower puts distinct national subjects into the international communicative code of tsh – “arranging dissimilar psychologies, customs and landscapes on the same plane, making it all familiar and accessible” (de Torre 2001: 411).
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The stretching of radiotelegraphic wires across the space of the text is at once de Torre’s response to Ortega’s call for cultural and political renovation, the next step in Spain’s national re-orientation after the passing of the Generation of 1898, and the re-mapping of Spain within the boundaries of the European avant-garde. It has also been an implicit part of my argument that poetry, in this case, Machado’s Castilian Landscapes and de Torre’s Propellers, performs some of the same functions as philosophical texts on aesthetics, namely, The Dehumanization of Art. All three texts invent a paradigm of visual perception that does not merely parallel but instead totally reinforces the political and social order that each seeks to impose or maintain. And although, for reasons of genre and discipline, Ortega would appear to have more direct access to the discourses of nationhood and Europeanization, the poets of Castilian Landscapes and Propellers have at their disposal the entire arsenal of poetic tradition to produce the transformation of subjectivity that political change demands. While de Torre in particular was predominantly a writer of essays — Propellers was his only verse collection — his lyric construction of “perspective” (with all the attendant philosophical and ethical meanings that are attached to this important concept) shows that national discourses can be impacted just as heavily — albeit indirectly — by the genre of poetry and the perceptual inversions that the lyric invariably occasions. What The Dehumanization of Art accomplishes discursively, both Machado and de Torre effect poetically by stretching the bounds of generic convention to fit with the spatial modes of representation in which the philosophical arguments between the Generation of 1898 and the avant-garde are rooted. The tendency to plot History in the textual and geographical topography of the landscape gives rise to the avant-garde’s re-location of Spain’s borders outside the national confines inscribed in Castilian Landscapes. After having been pressed into the service of casticismo, the landscape tradition provides a ready space for the establishment of lines of communication between subjects that transcend the boundaries of Castile – ultimately questioning their validity for the politically modernized Spain after World War I. The erection of radio towers in Propellers provides the height required for the re-evaluation of what national space really means – and how the signals that move across it can be made to signify in an international language. De
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Torre’s torre changes the view from the Castilian landscape by emitting, from its vertical perspective, an Esperanto that reaches beyond its borders, towards Europe.
NOTES 1
In the context of Spain, modernism as such is a difficult concept to pin down. It is best to describe the uniquely Spanish poetry of modernismo in terms of its close relationship to both French symbolism and the Latin American Rubén Darío. The modernity of other Spanish literatures, spanning the turn of the century to the dissolution of the avant-garde in the wake of the Civil War (1936-1939), is less an aesthetic than philosophical phenomenon. These existential concerns about modernity’s re-orientation of subjectivity form the core of what I term modernism for the purposes of this essay. 2 Although the loss of Cuba to the United States in 1898 took on epic status in narratives of Spain’s transition from imperial power to post-colonial nation, Spain actually retained its colonies in Africa well into the twentieth century. Cuba became the ultimate signifier, however removed from the reality of history, relative to the geographical and political shrinkage of Spain to the borders delimited by the “original” topography of the Iberian Peninsula and the modern, separate Portuguese nation. 3 All translations are mine. 4 Unamuno’s philosophy of the ethical relation between people and place, in which landscape plays a determinative role in the construction of a national identity or subject position. 5 Relevant texts to my consideration of Ortega’s Perspectivism are: Meditación del Quijote (1914); España invertebrada (1921); El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923); La deshumanización del arte (1925); and Kant (1924-1929). Also extremely important are the articles and essays published in Ortega’s journals El Espectador (eight volumes, 1916-1934) and Revista de Occidente (1923-1936). El Espectador translates, significantly, as The Spectator. 6 Ortega’s frame of reference in The Dehumanization of Art is, of course, Cubism. He valorizes Cubist art precisely because, for him, Cubism perfectly integrates perception (by definition “subjective”, since each subject’s viewpoint is unique) with its objectification by a scientific viewpoint. The object, considered from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology, recovers its independence from the subject when the subject’s impressions are considered as apart from the “I”. 7 The natural bursting open of anthers, fruits, capsules, etc., for the purpose of expelling their contents. Propellers (Hélices) was first published in Madrid by Mundo Latino in 1923. All references in this essay are to the 2000 facsimile edition. From the Centro Cultural de la Generación del 27. 8 The poetic subject’s rhetorical approximation of the object, or the address of the “you” by the “I” in the traditional lyric. 9 Caro Raggio published European Avant-garde Literatures for the first time in 1925. I refer to the 2001 edition coordinated by José María Barrera López.
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“Tsh” stands for “telegrafía sin hilos” (wireless telegraphy). De Torre’s account of the Paris velada (soirée) of 1921 can be found in De Torre (2001: 83). 12 The French avant-garde poets in question are, in order of their mention in the poem: Blaise Cendrars; Guillaume Apollinaire; Nicolas Beauduin; Ivan Goll; Philippe Soupault. Also included is the Chilean Creationist poet, Vicente Huidobro, who lived and worked in Paris during the period of the first Spanish avant-garde. 11
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WORKS CITED Crary, Jonathan. 1990. “Modernity and the Problem of the Observer” in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ---. 2001. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: MIT Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ---. 1981. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. De Torre, Guillermo. 1920. “Itinerario noviespacial del paisaje” Cervantes: 81-93. ---. 1921. “Manifiesto vertical ultraista” Grecia 3(50) : supplement. ---. 2000. Hélices (José María Barrera López, ed.). Málaga: Centro Cultural de la Generación del 27. (Facsimile edition). ---. 2001. Literaturas europeas de vanguardia (José María Barrera López, ed.). Seville: Renacimiento. Foster, Hal (ed.). 1988. Vision and Visuality. Seattle, Washington: Dia Art Foundation. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (A.M. Sheridan Smith, tr.). New York: Pantheon. ---. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House. Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” in Foster (1988): 3-23. Krauss, Rosalind. 1994. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: MIT. Lefèbvre, Henri. 1984. The Production of Space (Donald Nicholson-Smith, tr.). Oxford, England: Blackwell. Levin, David Michael. 1993. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Machado, Antonio. 1995 [1912]. Campos de Castilla (Geoffrey Ribbans, ed.). Madrid: Cátedra. Moretti, Franco. 1998. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. London and New York: Verso. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1910. “La pedagogía como programa politico” in Ortega (1983): Vol. 1. ---. 1921. “Prólogo a la segunda edición” España invertibrada in Ortega (1983): Vol. 3. ---. 1925. La deshumanización del arte in Ortega (1983): Vol. 3. ---. 1983. Obras completas. Madrid: Alianza. ---. 2003 [1923]. El tema de nuestro tiempo. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Rabinow, Paul (ed.). 1984. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon. Unamuno, Miguel de. 2003 [1913]. Del sentimiento trágico de la vida. Madrid: Alianza. ---. 1998 [1902]. En torno al casticismo. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
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Dragging Nordic Horses past the Sludge of Extremes. 1 The Beginnings of the Icelandic Avant-Garde Benedikt Hjartarson
When the literary scholar or art historian attempts to sketch out a historiography of the Icelandic avant-garde from the late 1910s into the early 1930s, he faces a series of problems. First of all, the early Icelandic avant-garde comprises the works of a couple of artists and writers who – mostly after having studied, lived or simply travelled abroad – picked up aesthetic ideas and concepts from contemporary European avant-garde movements and introduced them into the artistic and literary system in their home country. These individuals did not form aesthetic groups and never sketched out an individual avant-garde program either. The advent of the Icelandic avant-garde was thus marked by the absence of the radical cultural practices that characterized the project of the historical avant-garde. A second problem has to do with the fact that the reception of the historical avant-garde was not restricted to experimental aesthetic practices of Icelandic writers and artists. Quite the reverse, the beginning of the 1920s saw the emergence of a virulent critique of the avant-garde that preceded avant-garde experiments in Iceland. The idea of an Icelandic avant-garde emerged as an integral part of a nationalistic conception of aesthetic renewal. To a certain extent it could be argued that the Icelandic avant-garde was in fact a political construct. Thirdly, the historian faces the problem that the term avant-garde does not exist in Icelandic. The common term which came to be used as its equivalent, framúrstefna, seems to have appeared only in the 1950s. The absence of the term “avant-garde” in the early twentieth century is not a specific problem of the Icelandic context and may be said to be characteristic for the first half of the twentieth century, as it appears
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only sporadically in the writings of the historical avant-garde (see, for example, Berg 2005). Yet, an important difference should be noted, because in Icelandic one is not even dealing with a metaphor that appears rather incidentally: the term simply isn’t there. 2 The fact that the term framúrstefna came to be used only after World War II to describe the avant-garde has been highly consequential for its reception in Iceland. Framúrstefna designates a movement overhauling traditional aesthetic means of expression. It was originally a pejorative term that stressed the formal aspects of avantgarde aesthetics and veiled the political connotations of the French military term. When Halldór Laxness used the term framúrstefna in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, he referred not to an “avant-garde”, but used the word to translate the term “avant-gardism” (Laxness 1963: 61), which points out its origin in socialist ideas about decadent, bourgeois “formalism”, as expressed among others in Georg Lukács’ writings on “Avantgardismus”. The term framúrstefna was thus from the beginning related to a depoliticization of the project of the avantgarde. It belongs to an aesthetic discourse of the post-war era, in which the idea of an aesthetic vanguard and aesthetic experimentalism were already and definitely separated. The depoliticized notion of the avant-garde that is inherent to the term framúrstefna has led most literary scholars to focus primarily on formal and stylistic innovation and neglect the political implications of the early Icelandic avant-garde. The actual radicalism of early avant-garde experimentalism in Iceland, however, only becomes conceivable when it is analyzed in the context of cultural politics in the 1920s and early 1930s. The reception of the European avant-garde movements played an important role in generating new ideals of a genuinely modern or nationally authentic Icelandic culture. In this period, there even seems to have reigned a general consensus about the role of artists and writers as a vanguard in the formation of a new Icelandic culture. They were expected to serve as “pioneers” or “lighthouses” pointing the way for the nation into the future. As an important factor in the formation of a new national identity the historical avant-garde remained a highly controversial subject. Yet, whether it was hailed as part of a revolutionary world culture or denounced as the product of a degenerated industrial modernity, the avant-garde became a constitutive element of Icelandic cultural politics and national identity.
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The Early Avant-garde in Iceland: A Historical Survey Leaving aside the discussion of works by Icelandic artists and writers, whose purely formal and stylistic affinities with early avant-garde aesthetics have been pointed out by scholars, the following survey will concentrate on the early works of two writers and one visual artist. Finnur Jónsson, Þórbergur Þórðarson and Halldór Laxness were the only authors and artists to define their works explicitly in terms of the contemporary European isms and present themselves as their representatives in the public sphere. Jón Stefánsson’s painting also needs to be analyzed more closely in this context. Jónsson’s and Stefánsson’s activities and their reception in Iceland belong to the cultural debate of the 1920s and can be discussed most fruitfully in that context. Þórðarson’s and Laxness’ early writings are the two most interesting cases of a literary appropriation of European isms in the early twentieth century and a discussion of their aesthetic practices gives a significant insight into the context of the early Icelandic avantgarde. The first text which Laxness defined in terms of the new isms was “Unglingurinn í skóginum” (The Adolescent in the Forest), published in Eimreiðin in 1925. The poem was accompanied by a short introduction, in which Laxness stressed that such “Expressionist poetry” aimed at “creating impressions by means of sound and the intonation of words” and “simultaneously opening up the most unrelated perspectives” (1925: 70). He further maintained that “Expressionism”, which was based on a profound belief in the powers of the imagination, was “in fact as old as art itself, although the term itself only appeared in the last century” (1925: 70). The description may be seen to contain rather explicit references to the constitutive function of “simultaneity” in early avant-garde aesthetics, whether one refers to the “simultaneous poems” of dada, Blaise Cendrars’ and Robert Delaunay’s “simultaneist” manifestoes from the 1910s or French “simultaneism” and its theory of onomatopoeia, obscure imagery and sound experiments. Yet, Laxness’ discussion of the principle of simultaneity may also be read in the context of symbolist aesthetics and its synaesthetic theories. Laxness’ definition of “Expressionism” contained less an explicit reference to German Expressionism, than a general reference to symbolist and avant-garde notions of simultaneity and late romantic conceptions of the
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imagination, all of which the historical avant-garde intended to overthrow. Still, Laxness presented himself in the public sphere as a genuine spokesman of the European avant-garde. In an interview from 1926, he discussed his poem “Rhodymenia palmata” and claimed that it was “written in the spirit of a new poetic movement that emerged in 1922 and is called Surrealism” (Anonymous 1926: 3). He rejected that there was any connection between Surrealism and “Dadaism”, maintaining that “he knows practically everything about this movement” (Anonymous 1926: 3). Laxness continuously repeated such assertions in his writings and quoted different Surrealist writers to underline his authority, although most of these quotations seem to be taken from Breton’s “Manifeste du surréalisme” from 1924. In spite of these paradoxes Laxness came to be generally accepted as an authentic representative of the European isms in the 1920s and he shaped the reception of the historical avant-garde in Iceland more strongly than any other writer or artist in the early twentieth century. The first known case of an Icelandic author who defined his textual practices by referring to the European isms is Þórbergur Þórðarson. His poem “Futuriskar kveldstemningar” (Futuristic Evening Moods) was published in Spaks manns spjarir (Tatters of a Wise Man) in 1917 under the pseudonym Styr Stofuglamm, a most playful name that refers simultaneously to riots, battles, bird sounds, barking and cacophony. Þórðarson’s peculiarly ambivalent use of the term “Futurism” has been the subject of a controversial debate. In notes from 1941, Þórðarson maintained that its author was “the first and possibly only self-conscious Futurist in Icelandic literature and considers himself a pioneer in other fields of literary praxis” (1941: 104). He also claimed that by the time he wrote “Futuriskar kveldstemningar” he had only “heard that Futurism was the name of a new movement in poetry and arts in the foreign, artistic countries” (1941: 104). Accordingly, he declared that he sensed that this was “the way Futurism had to be” and that he was to a huge extent right, although the poems are in fact “pseudo-Futurism” (1941: 105). Finally, he described his “Futurism” as an attempt to “pump new, living air into ossified literary modes” and claimed that it was directed against “the automatic use of language and thought” practised by “romantic bleaters” at this time (1941: 106). For Þórðarson, Futurism represented “a certain kind of originality and a specific talent” which
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was “burdened by a heavy and gnawing boredom with stagnated modes of thought and outmoded linguistic conventions” (1941: 105). Þórðarson’s poetics and his vitalist conception of life opens up interesting intertextual links with the historical avant-garde’s utopian vision of a radical spiritual renewal. More explicitly, his programmatic aim of overcoming linguistic and syntactical conventions displays a striking proximity to the Italian Futurists’ notion of “parole in libertà” and the zaúm-language of Russian Futurism. The link between Þórðarson’s Futurist poetics and his own theosophical writings may also indicate a connection between his conception of “spiritual revolution” and occult ideas that have a constitutive function in early avant-garde aesthetics. It should be stressed, however, that Þórðarson undermined his own programmatic declarations by claiming that “it never occurred to the author of ‘Fútúriskar kveldstemningar’ that he was opening up new paths for other poets out of the impasse of language and the deathly atmosphere of conventional thought” (1941: 106). This formulation rather seems to indicate affinities with dada’s rhetoric of paradoxes, and in fact writers and scholars have pointed out similarities between Þórðarson’s early poetry and Dadaism. Despite certain stylistic and formal affinities with contemporary avant-garde poetry Þórðarson’s poem is based on rather traditional metric and lyrical forms and in many respect his writings lack the aggressive character of the historical avant-garde. Furthermore, no explicit references to works and programmatic texts of the avant-garde may be found in his writings, except rather obscure references to the names of European isms. Laxness and Þórðarson use the terms “Expressionism” and “Futurism” as watchwords that are meant to display the radical modernity of their texts. Their use of the terms is characteristic of a period in which labels such as “Expressionism”, “Futurism” and “Surrealism” stand in for what later would be called framúrstefna and even become easily interchangeable. Laxness called “Unglingurinn í skóginum” Expressionist in 1925, whereas he related it 24 years later to Surrealism (1949: 142). In an article published in 1928, a similar shift can be seen in Þórðarson’s definition of “Futurism”: “I was a totally modern poet. A Futurist, an Expressionist, a Surrealist and also a bit classical – I was all of this” (1928: 132-133). Both authors used the respective terms to define a transcendental principle of all innovative literature. For Laxness, Expressionism was “the centre of
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gravity of all modish art, everywhere in the world” (1925: 70) and James Joyce counted as the “strongest member” (1949: 142) and “leading poet” (1963: 60) of Surrealism. 3 In a letter from 1923, Þórðarson referred to a conversation with the artist Jóhannes Kjarval and underlined their common understanding of “Futurism”, according to which there were two kinds of Futurists: “Futurists by God’s grace”, and “artificial Futurists, men who try to be different” (Þórðarson 1987: 116). He defined himself as a “born Futurist”, using the term to refer to the originality of all true writers, from the 17th century “non-sensical” poet Æri-Tobbi, through the Romantic poet Jónas Hallgrímsson up to himself (1987: 116). From an analogous perspective, Laxness claimed that Surrealism “in its purest form was […] a kind of spiritus concentratus” which could not be consumed “unmixed” but had become “such an important element and vital condition of modern literature that those authors and poets of our generation, who did not learn from it everything it offered as it came forth, can be declared dead” (1949: 142). Laxness’ and Þórðarson’s “avant-gardism” embeds the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde into a more traditional aesthetic framework that seems to counteract its cultural and social strategies. In order to understand the radical nature of their “avant-garde” activities they must be located in the specific political climate in Iceland in the 1920s, in which the mere use of labels such as “Futurism”, “Expressionism” and “Surrealism” was seen as a dangerous threat to Icelandic culture. The use of such terms, which indicated an internationalist and revolutionary conception of modernity, was part of a political performance that expressed a deliberate will to break up existing social structures.
The Avant-Garde and the Cultural Discourse of Icelandic Nationalism As early as 1922 “Futuriskar kveldstemningar” were republished in a slightly altered version in Hvítir hrafnar (White Ravens; see illustration 4). In an introduction to the volume, Þórðarson maintained that by the time he wrote the poem, and another one which he labelled “Futurist”, he had “no idea about the ‘concept’ Futurism in the arts” (1922: 8), thus claiming that he himself had invented the term
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Futurismi, an assertion that contradicts his later remarks that he had at least heard about European “Futurism”. Accordingly, he stressed that the poems were not the imitation of a “foreign artistic taste” and maintained that they were meant “to reduce to absurdity, by means of an instinctive ‘inner nature’, the sentimental gruel of thoughts that had been dominant among many young men a couple of years ago” (1922: 8). These remarks were not written in a discursive vacuum. They represent at once Þórðarson’s attempt to distance himself from the European avant-garde and his defence against a growing critique of the avant-garde in Iceland by cultural traditionalists. With the publication of “Nýjar listastefnur” (The New Art Movements) Alexander Jóhannesson had opened the debate on the avant-garde as early as 1920. Jóhannesson had finished a magister-degree in German studies in Copenhagen in 1913 before moving to Germany, where he finished a doctoral degree from the university in Halle in 1915, and finally to Iceland, where he taught linguistics and German at the University from 1915 and became one of the most influential intellectuals in the country. In “Nýjar listastefnur”, Jóhannesson discussed the decadence of European culture that had become most obvious in avant-garde aesthetics, which he described as degenerate by referring to works by Danish and German authors such as Heinar Schilling, Otto Gelsted, Martin Minden and Hermann Bahr. The main impulse for Jóhannesson’s article, however, may be found in Carl Julius Salomonsen’s theory of dysmorphism – in fact Jóhannesson followed his line of argumentation rather precisely, often paraphrasing or even plagiarizing his texts in his diagnosis of the pathological symptoms of the avant-garde. Jóhannesson discussed such avant-garde periodicals as Der Sturm, dada, Anthologie dada and Klingen, as well as works by Picasso, Schmidt-Rottluff, Carl Mense and Picabia, describing them as vansköpuð or dysmorphic. Jóhannesson discussed the avant-garde under the umbrella term “Expressionism”, which he translated with the word innsýnislist (intuitive art) and claimed that it was characterized by the desire to “turn back to barbarism and shake off the burden of culture” (1920: 42). For Jóhannesson, “Expressionism” was the product of a revolutionary epoch in which “supermen” appear, “who want to overthrow everything and build the world anew” (1920: 46). Jóhannesson further depicted “Expressionism” as a “bolshevik art”
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(1920: 42), that is, as a nihilistic will to destruction. He claimed that the cultural Bolshevism of the avant-garde found its most characteristic expression in Marinetti’s Futurism and its appeals for the destruction of museums and libraries, and pointed out the communist sympathies of other representatives of the avant-garde such as Otto Freundlich, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Wassily Kandinsky in order to demonstrate the threat of aesthetic extremism to the idea of culture (1920: 42-43). Finally, Jóhannesson discussed avant-garde poetry, criticizing and showing examples of texts by Danish avant-garde poets such as Fredrik Nygaard and Emil Bønnelycke 4 as well as translating Picabia’s “Salive américaine” from 1918 (Jóhannesson 1920: 43), thus becoming – somewhat ironically – the first known translator of a Dadaist and in fact an avant-garde poem in Icelandic literary history. Jóhannesson’s 1920 article was an attempt to import a critical discourse on the avant-garde that had emerged in Denmark in 1919 and may be traced back to a lecture the Danish bacteriologist Carl Julius Salomonsen gave in Copenhagen in January 1919 (see Salomonsen 1919). As Hanne Abildgaard has pointed out, Salomonsen’s lecture was symptomatic of “a more general cultural shift” (2002: 186) in Denmark toward the end of the 1910s. It articulated the response of cultural conservatives to the rise of the avant-garde, which had found powerful expression in Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling in Copenhagen in 1918. While Salomonsen’s writings can be seen as a response to the period from 1916 to 1919, which has been described as a “cultural boom” (Aagesen 2002a: 11) in Danish art and literature, hardly any avant-garde activities can be seen in the Icelandic context prior to the publication of Jóhannesson’s article. His attacks rather seem to represent the intention to prevent the potential emergence of an Icelandic avant-garde. Jóhannesson explicitly discussed “Futuriskar kveldstemningar” by Styr Stofuglamm as “probably the only existing Futurist poem in Icelandic” (1920: 43) and underlined the mental derangement by comparing it with the poetry of Æri-Tobbi, thus actually anticipating Þórðarson’s comparison of his own writings to the 17th century “Futurist”. Not only is it most unlikely that Þórðarson did not know about Jóhannesson’s article when he published the remarks in Hvítir hrafnar in 1922. The link between Þórðarson’s and Jóhannesson’s writings may also have a more ironic twist to it. The question has
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remained unanswered where Þórðarson may have come in contact with the term Futurism prior to the publication of his poem in 1917. If one assumes that the radical critique of the European avant-garde that found its articulation in 1920 must have been moulding since the middle of the 1910s, it is most probable that Þórðarson “heard” the term as a student of Icelandic philology at the University in Reykjavik in the mid-1910s. Most likely the “devil of Futurism” who Þórðarson claimed had “knocked on his door” at this time (Einarsson 1939: 8) had possessed one of his teachers at the University, who in his vehement attempt to plough the national field of Icelandic art and literature may have inadvertently sowed the seed for the Icelandic avant-garde: Alexander Jóhannesson. 5 Jóhannesson’s text from 1920 opened up a lively polemic against the avant-garde. In 1922 he published “Um málaralist nútímans” (On Modern Painting) in Eimreiðin, in which he continued his attacks against “Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism” (1922: 15). He related the avant-garde to mysticism and drug consumption, comparing its works with “drawings of children and the so-called art of uncultivated peoples” (1922: 24). He also criticized “Expressionism” for having “degraded nature, deformed it, compressed it into cubes and disfigured it” (1922: 19). Finally, he stressed the revolutionary aims of “Expressionism”, comparing it “to attempts of a total revolution in literature and arts in earlier times” (1922: 24) which it surpassed in its absolute will to “build a new world of art on the ruins of the old one” (1922: 23). In the article from 1922, Jón Stefánsson’s works served as an example of the “boundless extremes” (1922: 22) of “Expressionism”. Jóhannesson criticized Stefánsson as a representative of the modern cult of intuition, for painting “still lifes” of his own mental state instead of painting nature (1922: 19). Stefánsson is one of the most interesting cases in the history of the early Icelandic avant-garde. He had studied painting at Teknisk Selskabs Skole and at Christian Zahrtmann’s school in Copenhagen before he met the Norwegian painter Jean Heiberg in Lillehammer in 1908 and went to Paris, together with Henrik Sørensen and Gösta Sandels, to study at Matisse’s private art school in 1908. Stefánsson thus began studying in Matisse’s school in Paris three years after the initial appearance of Les fauves at the Paris Autumn Exhibition in 1905, but little is known about his early period from 1908 to 1916. It is hardly surprising that
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Jóhannesson’s critique was aimed at Stefánsson’s painting in the article from 1922. Stefánsson was one of two Icelandic artists, together with Finnur Jónsson, who got their education outside of the Nordic countries in the first quarter of the twentieth century and brought impulses directly from the centres of the European avantgarde into Icelandic art. Moreover, Stefánsson moved back to Copenhagen from Paris in 1911 and became “closely associated with the group of writers and artists who collaborated on the review Klingen” (Kvaran 1989: 43), the “Expressionist” review which Jóhannesson had discussed in such negative terms in his earlier article (see illustration 3). Prominent figures of the Danish avant-garde such as Emil Bønnelycke, Otto Gelsted, Poul Henningsen and Poul Uttenreitter belonged to the circle around the review, which was founded by Axel Salto in 1917 and sought its inspiration in Der Sturm and the Swedish avant-garde review Flamman. 6 The rejection of political and aesthetic extremism was widely spread in the discourse of Icelandic intellectuals in the 1920s. In 1925 the editor of Eimreiðin, Sveinn Sigurðsson, discussed Laxness’ “Unglingurinn í skóginum” and justified the publication of this “sample of Expressionist poetry” by comparing it to “some of the modern movements in literature and art” (1925: 195). He correctly stressed that Laxness’ poem represented a rather moderate experimentalism that was qualitatively different from “many of those ‘isms’, which are like soap-bubbles that have risen with the tide of the war years and will suddenly sink again” (1925: 195). Moreover, he claimed that Futurism, Expressionism and Dadaism had not managed to “get a good hold of Icelandic art and poetry”, and he welcomed this state of affairs, because “Icelandic art will, without doubt, best be appreciated if it doesn’t end up in the extremes of the ‘isms’” (1925: 195). A similar tone may be heard in Magnús Á. Árnason’s “Um listir alment” (On the Arts in General) in Eimreiðin in 1921. Árnason’s critique was based on the distinction between “mimetic art”, which “has dominated […] ever since the beginning of art”, and the “imaginary art of modernity” (1921: 69). The visual artist and composer Árnason discussed the link between aesthetic experimentalism and revolutionary ideology more explicitly than Jóhannesson: “we live in revolutionary times” that have given birth to “two movements which are now fighting about the power in the world of arts […] the old school and the new school” (1921: 70). The avant-
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garde was depicted as the articulation of the “desire for revolution and change that is predominant in the world” (1921: 71), an art that articulated a will to return to a primitivism that resembled the drawings of children before they have learned how to draw and that “only an insane man” and a “specialist” could understand (1921: 19). Árnason further defined the avant-garde as a will to destruction that found its most characteristic expression in jazz and Futurism, which he defined as “a kind of total destruction (anarchism) in the world of art” (1921: 72). Somewhat paradoxically, Árnason’s rhetoric was marked by a firm belief in the role of artists as a vanguard in the formation of a new national culture. The overtly political tone of Árnason’s essay also found its expression in the total rejection of Danish colonial authority. He rejected the legitimacy of the “foreign king” but elevated “our poets, artists and scientists” to “kings of the spirit”, who “will grave the path for humanity and distance it from the animal, who will lead it into the divine world of beauty and wisdom and out of the inferno of ugliness and ignorance” (1921: 78). The target was both the European avant-garde and the “old school that until now has had an absolute power in all of the art schools in Northern Europe”, especially Danish academicism which has its origin in the pessimistic mentality of “a people from the flat lands” (1921: 73). Árnason’s text was intended to have a programmatic function that consisted in showing the path which would make “Iceland the future home of true art” and save it from the decadence of the avant-garde, the role of Icelandic artists being to lay the foundation for an Icelandic art by “trying to drag our horses past the sludge of extremes and lead us to the land of soundness” (1921: 75). The growing impact of nationalist ideology became apparent in a debate that was carried out in Morgunblaðið, the leading conservative newspaper, after an exhibition of Finnur Jónsson’s works in November 1925. It is hardly surprising that Jónsson’s exhibition of avant-garde paintings at Café Rosenberg provoked a heated debate in the young art scene in Reykjavík, where the first solo exhibition of an Icelandic artist had been organized in 1900. Jónsson had studied at Statens Museum for Kunst, Teknisk Selskabs Skole and Olaf Rude’s private art school in Copenhagen before he moved to Berlin in 1921, where he was taught by Carl Hofer and visited exhibitions of Der Sturm for the first time. Due to the initiative of Emil Thoroddsen, a
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student in musical history, Jónsson moved to Dresden, where he was tutored by Oskar Kokoschka at the Academie der Schönen Künste and later became a fellow student of Thoroddsen at Edmund Kesting’s Der Weg. Due to Kokoschka’s encouragement Jónsson sent his works to Herwarth Walden and participated for the first time in a Sturmexhibition in May 1925. The debate on Jónsson’s “Expressionism” broke loose shortly after his arrival in Iceland. On July 22nd 1925, there appeared an anonymous notice in Morgunblaðið, which most probably was written by its editor, Valtýr Stefánsson. The journalist reported that Jónsson had returned to Iceland after a long stay in Germany and that Der Sturm was an “art shop” that did not accept any works which were not in “the spirit of modern art movements” (Blaðagreinar: 48). The journalist also declared that there were “very different opinions about the artistic value of Sturm-paintings” and that Jónsson’s exhibition in the autumn would certainly “be very modern” (Blaðagreinar: 48). Jónsson answered four days later by pointing out that Der Sturm was not an “art shop” but an “association” that organized exhibitions of works by internationally renowned and “mature artists” such as Chagall, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Archipenko and Picasso. He stressed the international character of Der Sturm and explained its broad conception of “Expressionism” that was not based on any specific aesthetic doctrine. Stefánsson’s answer again underlined the dogmatism of Der Sturm by claiming that it “doesn’t accept any art except the one which lives in the spirit of Expressionism and under the protection of ‘Sturm’” (Blaðagreinar: 49). 7 The debate finally culminated in Stefánsson’s review of Jónsson’s exhibition in November, as he defined his works as the product of “German aping of French art” and pleaded that he be given a scholarship to study real art in Paris (see illustration 5). Stefánsson’s texts echoed debates about modern art in Denmark, where “prevalent pro-French and antiGerman attitudes” had become dominant in the mid-1910s (Aagesen 2002b: 159), as critics tended to regard German art as “crude, garish, and contrived” and looked at the works of Danish “Expressionists” as “poor imitations of German imitations” (Aagesen 2002b: 168). The reviews of Jónsson’s exhibition document a shift in the reception of the avant-garde. In the mid-1920s a radical form of nationalism had become so widely spread in Iceland, that all the reviews may be said to concentrate on the concept of Icelandic
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culture, the idea of a national art and the role of aesthetics in the formation of a national identity. Stefánsson’s uncompromising critique remained an isolated case. The other organ of the conservative party, Vísir, published a review by Björn Björnsson, in which Jónsson’s “Expressionism” was defended from a nationalist perspective. The critic stressed that “good innovations may not be driven away by prejudices bred by ignorance and narrow-mindedness” and maintained that even abstract painting became in Jónsson’s hands a genuine Icelandic art that “stems from Nordic roots” (Blaðagreinar: 50). The socialist organ, Alþýðublaðið, published two reviews: one by Ásgeir Bjarnþórsson who criticized Valtýr Stefánsson’s writings, another by Emil Thoroddsen, Jónsson’s former fellow-student at Der Weg. Thoroddsen praised Jónsson’s experimental “compositions”, but also used the opportunity to reject most of contemporary Icelandic art as a “bad imitation of bad Danish painters” (Blaðagreinar: 50), works created by people who have been “sucking skimmed milk from the baby bottle of the artist-clique in Copenhagen, which is nurtured by an outmoded ‘formalism’ and misunderstood French watchwords” (Blaðagreinar: 50). Picking up the rhetoric of youth that is constitutive for both the rhetoric of German Expressionism and the Jugendbewegung, he praised the artistic value of Jónsson’s art by claiming that it was “impregnated by the sound power of youth” and represented “a Germanic taste” (Blaðagreinar: 50). Despite the generally positive reviews, however, Jónsson’s exhibition in 1925 became an “event of little consequence” in Icelandic art history (Ponzi 1983: 55). After the exhibition Jónsson turned to more traditional modes of painting and was only to return to abstract painting in the 1960s. The Jónsson-debate shows that the idea of an Icelandic avantgarde had become a controversial subject in the mid 1920s. Multiple voices may be heard that point out different paths for Icelandic art, whether its future was seen in a “modernism” based on French art, an authentically Icelandic art rooted in Nordic culture or a new Germanic art breaking loose from Danish colonial hegemony. The documents also reveal a general political pattern: whereas the right-wing, conservative press denounced Jónsson’s “Expressionism” or discussed it more positively in nationalist terms, his works were praised in the socialist press because of their radical character, although these reviews were also marked by nationalist ideologemes.
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A tone similar to Björnsson’s definition of Finnur Jónsson’s “national art” and Thoroddsen’s depiction of the Germanic character of his works may be found in Georg Gretor’s Islands Kultur und seine junge Malerei from 1928. Gretor’s text was published by Diederichs Verlag, which played a key role in establishing the “cult of the Nordic” in Germany in the early twentieth century by publishing old Nordic literature and books shaped by a völkisch ideology, in which the Nordic middle ages served as an organic model for the regeneration of German society. Gretor pointed out that Jónsson’s works were “under the influence of the German Sturm-movement” (Gretor 1928: 25). Moreover, he claimed that in “his portraits and in his abstract painting he doesn’t distinguish himself in any way from similar experiments on the continent” (1928: 25) and that his works only became powerful when he painted the stormy sea at the Icelandic coast, in works which reproduced the Nordic landscape in a “naturalistic” manner that was “untouched by his art theories” (1928: 25). Jónsson’s works were thus elevated to a “characteristic expression of the national genius of Iceland: Chaos and creative will [Gestaltungswille], a combination of elemental force and originality [Unverbrauchtheit], spiritual and emotional passion and youthful naivety” (1928: 27). The influence of German nationalism and its negative view on modern culture found its most characteristic expression in the writings of Guðmundur Einarsson from Miðdalur. After studying for a brief period in Copenhagen he moved to Munich and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste from 1920 to 1925. His writings were symptomatic of the increasingly reactionary discourse on the avantgarde in the late 1920s. Einarsson’s texts are deeply rooted in the ideology of the Völkische Bewegung, which had one of its most important centres in Munich. They also show interesting similarities with related discursive currents such as the Wandervogel and the Jugendbewegung. Einarsson’s notion of a new classicism was a deliberate reaction against avant-garde aesthetics, the “groping, violent experiments of the so-called modern artists – the anarchist movement in art” (quoted in Guðnadóttir 1995: 9). Einarsson’s views were first articulated in “Listir og þjóðir” (Arts and peoples) in Iðunn in 1928. In this essay, which praises the “love of nature by the Nordic race” (1928: 267), Einarsson projected a pessimistic vision of the decline of Germanic culture. The European
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avant-garde was seen as the product of a degenerated societal and cultural modernity that was characterized by “materialism” and alienation. Einarsson rejected the view that the “new European movement [ný-evrópiska stefnan]” was the “presentiment of a new, magnificent age of art” and claimed that art found itself in an “impasse”, which became most obvious in the theory of l’art pour l’art (1928: 270). He discussed works by Picasso, Archipenko and Matisse, referred explicitly to Dadaism and described his visit to an exhibition in Berlin in 1925, where he had seen a work of art consisting of “old toothbrushes, two nails and some tatters of paper” (1928: 271). Einarsson’s writings on the avant-garde belonged to a general critique of cultural modernity and its “sick mode of thought” (1928: 272). The avant-garde was seen as the symptomatic expression of an age in which the artists had lost the contact with the life of the people and become “exiles” (1928: 276). The future of Icelandic art could only lie in a return to “Nordic nature”: a new and authentic “national art” must have its origin in the Icelandic wilderness, which was the key to the true nature of the Icelandic people (1928: 276). Einarsson explicitly connected the idea of “Nordic nature” to Germanic culture, claiming that the “artistic creation of the Romans and the Germans are opposites by nature” (1928: 273) and that a purification of Nordic art could only take place by a return to its Germanic roots: “if Cézanne and Matisse become saints in Iceland, a national art will become impossible” (1928: 276). Against this pessimistic view, he envisioned a glorious future in which Icelandic artists would regain their leading position in the life of a nation that “searches for art in form and spirit, that is bound to become a happy and finally a harmonic artistic totality” (1928: 275). In an article published three years later Einarsson discussed the marginalization of art in modern society in more detail and maintained that when “Cubism and the ‘future’-craze” finally subsided after the great exhibition of industrial art in Paris in 1925 they had “given a clear picture of the decadence” of European culture (1933: 91). He traced the origin of this process back to the separation of art from craft, discussing how “art” became a more narrow meaning and was monopolized by a “small and arrogant elite” (1933: 89), which led to a “civil war” in the artistic field as “art disgraced itself in an idiotic scribbling of cubes and da-da-ism (childishness)” (1933: 88). Finally,
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he projected the vision of a new era, in which “artists in the Nordic countries have given up their isolation” (1933: 92) and created a powerful “arts and crafts” movement. Einarsson’s polemic was thus aimed at the predominant ideology of both aestheticism and industrialism, the “specialization in the arts and in the industrial field […] that destroys no less than plagues and cannot be stopped any more than a torrent of lava, art becomes self-willed (partly neurotic) and the industry becomes un-artistic” (1933: 90). Einarsson’s texts did not represent an isolated voice in the late 1920s. In an introduction to Einarsson’s “Ferðasaga um Suðurlönd” (A Travel Report from the Southern Countries), Magnús Jónsson praised him as the perfect opposite of the avant-garde experimentalist, as a “versatile artist” who “has sailed his ship past all the extremist movements of modernity” (Einarsson 1926: 7). Einarsson’s writings were also symptomatic of an increasing chauvinism in the critical discourse on the avant-garde in Iceland in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which would culminate in an official exhibition of degenerate Icelandic art in 1942. His writings bear witness to the growing impulse of racial theories in the critique of the avant-garde, which may also be found for example in Jakob Jóh. Smári’s depiction of Laxness’ early novel Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír (The Great Weaver from Kashmir), as the product of a “bastard culture among the great nations, where countless ‘piteous races’ […] are mixed into nonsense” (Smári 1932: 235). In his vision of a purified Icelandic culture, Einarsson picked up the “watchword” íslenzk endurreisn or “Icelandic rebirth” (1928: 275) which had played an important role in eugenic theories in Iceland since the late 1910s and would later become the title of the organ of Icelandic national socialists.
Toward a Revolutionary Culture: Avant-Garde and Icelandic Socialism The late 1920s were not only marked by an increasingly chauvinist discourse on the avant-garde. Other, alternative models for the future of Icelandic culture were constructed, in which the project of the avant-garde was instrumentalized from the point of view of revolutionary politics. This new discourse found its exemplary
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expression in Einar Olgeirsson’s “Erlendir menningarstraumar og Íslendingar” (Foreign Culture and the Icelanders) in 1926. Olgeirsson had studied English and German literature in Berlin, where he became a member of the German communist party. In 1924 he became one of the leaders of the Union of Young Communists (Félag ungra kommúnista). He also had ties to the socialist union Sparta that was founded in Reykjavík in 1926 and became one of the leading members of the Icelandic Communist Party (Kommúnistaflokkur Íslands) in 1930. In 1926 radicals in the socialist movement bought the journal Réttur, which was meant to serve as a joint forum for writings in the spirit of revolutionary socialism. Olgeirsson became the editor of what he called in a letter to Bukharin in 1927 “the only political journal of the country” (Ólafsson 1999: 252). In the first issue there appeared a long article by the new editor, which began with an emphatic apology for the avant-garde. The text represented a response to the domination of cultural conservatism and reactionary ideology. Olgeirsson rejected nationalist ideas about the necessary defence of “national culture” and projected the vision of a modern Icelandic culture based on revolutionary politics, industrialization and avant-garde aesthetics. In the opening passage, Olgeirsson welcomed the growing urbanization in Iceland, claiming that the nation was being “drawn into the maelstrom of world trade and world culture” and that “we, who before only used to read psalms” were now getting the “newest foreign inventions” such as “Futurism, Expressionism and Surrealism” by post, “almost as soon as they are created” (1926: 9). The avantgarde belongs to a cultural modernity, together with fashionable clothes, the Bubikopf and revolutionary politics, that has “rooted up almost everything that until now has been firmly rooted in Icelandic soil” (1926: 10). Olgeirsson did not mention any specific works of Icelandic authors or artists. His article rather represented a general plea for a future Icelandic avant-garde. 8 Yet, it is also important that the text was written into a context which was loaded with discursive energy and it most obviously belonged to the debate on an emerging Icelandic avant-garde. Whereas the text referred explicitly to the notion of a “national culture” that was constitutive for the nationalist discourse on the avant-garde, it may also be read as a defence of the first avant-garde experiments of authors and artists such as Þórðarson, Laxness, Jónsson and Jón Stefánsson, although Olgeirsson seems to
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have regarded them as only the anticipation of a revolutionary avantgarde yet to come. Olgeirsson openly criticized the dominant concept of “national culture” that aimed at preserving outdated political structures and modes of thought. From his perspective, the dominant notion of a “national culture” represented a social stagnation and a reaction against a foreign culture which was denounced as decadent and degenerate. Olgeirsson rejected the distinction between national and modern culture and pleaded for the creation of a “national modern culture [þjóðleg nútímamenning]”. This concept was characterized by a sceptical view on modern culture. Olgeirsson envisioned an Icelandic culture that on the one hand rejected the products of the “international plague” of mass culture such as “thrillers” and “bad films”, but imported and appropriated foreign novelties on the other hand (1926: 20). Modern culture was meant to serve as a kind of “purgatory” for Icelandic culture: “The sound aspects of the national must indeed ripen in the fire of foreign influence, it must burn away the slag of the national alloy and leave the gold” (1926: 21). Olgeirsson discussed the necessity of changing the conditions in Icelandic society, so that foreign culture would no longer be “put into shackles of isolation and insipidity” (1926: 12). He described a powerful Icelandic culture created by a “broad-minded and brave youth” that he characterized as brautryðjendur or “pioneers” (1926: 13), thus projecting the vision of a new cultural vanguard. Olgeirsson’s definition of the role of “pioneers” was the first attempt to put forth a consistent theory of an aesthetic avant-garde in Iceland. He saw the European avant-garde movements as part of a youthful, revolutionary culture and discussed the role of political conservatives in historical terms, defining them as the self-willed guardians of tradition against the progressive currents of modernity. Olgeirsson also drew up an analogy between the contemporary avant-garde and the “modern breakthrough” in the late nineteenth century, pointing out how the latter was seen by cultural reactionaries as a foreign threat to Icelandic culture that would lead the youth into a “bottomless pit of depravity” (1926: 17). Accordingly, the polemic against socialist authors such as Gestur Pálsson and Þorsteinn Erlingsson and the realist organs Suðri and Verðandi in the nineteenth century was seen as symptomatic of a dangerous hostility towards progress. Olgeirsson underlined the key role that these “pioneers” played in renewing
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Icelandic culture and claimed that they were most powerful when “in the centre of foreign impulses” (1926: 18). Moreover, Olgeirsson stressed the importance of internationalism for his vision of a radical cultural renewal, by claiming that “the spirit and the pioneers of a new mode of thought are not bound by frontiers” (1926: 19). Toward the end of the article, Olgeirsson underlined its programmatic aim by claiming that the “pioneers of today’s generation” had the difficult task of becoming “guides of their nation at one of the stormiest times humanity has ever seen” and stressing that the Icelandic people “needs lighthouses in the crepuscule which has fallen over” it (1926: 23). The conclusion is interesting when it is read in the light of Olgeirsson’s discussion of Futurism, Expressionism and Surrealism: he seems to have envisioned a future Icelandic avant-garde that would become part of a socialist vanguard in the creative process of forming an aesthetic and modern national culture. Olgeirsson’s article became an isolated case in Icelandic cultural history. Neither was his call for a revolutionary avant-garde answered by Icelandic authors and artists, nor did he or any other communist leader repeat such demands. In an article published nine years later, Olgeirsson again picked up the metaphor of the “pioneers”. Symptomatically, it was neither the “modern breakthrough” nor the avant-garde that was now under discussion, but the “pioneers of Icelandic nationalist ideals” in the late nineteenth century (1935: 1). The growing impact of nationalism on the discourse of Icelandic socialists led to the marginalization of the avant-garde, whose international character no longer fitted the general line of its revolutionary politics. The introduction of socialist realism into the literary system in the mid 1930s also played an important role in this context. When Olgeirsson linked the works of young Icelandic writers with the works of the “pioneers” of Icelandic realism in 1932 the avant-garde no longer had a place in his apology (1932: 96). However, the metaphor of artists forming a vanguard in the construction of a new culture continued to play an important role in the rhetoric of socialist artists and writers. Its traces can be seen, for example, in an article by Sigurður Einarsson from 1932, in which he described the “troop of those whom life has chosen to become its harbingers of spring” (Einarsson 1932: 212), as well as in an essay by Jóhannes úr Kötlum from 1947, in which the author draws up a picture of “the revolutionary creator who breaks down the old and outmoded and
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points toward that which is to come”, defining the artist as a “pioneer [brautryðjandi]” (Kötlum 1947: 145) who gets “into contact with the people by taking position in the vanguard [brjóstfylking] fighting for its economic freedom” (Kötlum 1947: 147). In neither of these texts the metaphor of aesthetic pioneers is connected with avant-garde experimentalism. The shift in socialist discourse found its most radical expression with the foundation of Rauðir pennar in 1935. The literary review served as the organ of the Society of Revolutionary Authors (Félag byltingarsinnaðra rithöfunda) and offered a forum for the discussion of socialist realism as well as a platform for attacks against “formalism”. The most radical polemic against the avant-garde can be found in Björn Franzson’s “Listin og þjóðfélagið” (Literature and Society), in which modernism is denounced for having cut all links between art and “social reality” (1935: 288). The avant-garde was here regarded as “a sign of the spiritual impotence of the bourgeoisie, the rootlessness and the total lack of class consciousness by the petty bourgeois masses” (1935: 291). Franzson depicted avant-garde aesthetics as an “absurd game with meaningless form and inane imitations of art works of earlier times” and claimed that “Futurism in literature, Cubism in painting and atonalism in music” were its most characteristic “art movements”, which bore witness to a “sick taste” and a “flight into the realm of religion and mysticism” (1935: 291). Franzson’s article, which shows striking similarities with the rhetoric of cultural conservatives in the 1920s, was also the first text in Icelandic, in which Italian Futurism was discussed in some detail. He quoted the “Political Programme of Futurism” (Programma politico Futurista) from 1913 and called Futurism “Italian Blackshirts art” (1935: 292). Futurism came to stand in for the historical avant-garde in general, as a symbolic manifestation of the “declining bourgeois art of our times” (1935: 296) which socialist realism was meant to overcome. In the first issue of Rauðir pennar there also appeared a lengthy article on socialist realism by the head of the movement, Kristinn E. Andrésson, as well as two articles by Halldór Laxness, in which he criticized the modernist novel by maintaining that it told the story of “criticism, pessimism, grief, dizziness and desperation” (Laxness 1935: 268). In Laxness’ writings from the mid 1930s modernism had come to represent a refuge for the bourgeois writer who “withdraws himself from the life of the living and sits down in
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his grief in some ‘yacht’ […] staring at his own belly and cursing the fleetingness of all things as he waits for the boat to sink” (1935: 276). The late 1930s also saw the radicalization of the nationalist discourse on the avant-garde, which finally culminated in articles by the parliament member Jónas Jónsson in Tíminn, the organ of the rural Progressive Party (Framsóknarflokkurinn), in 1941. Jónsson discussed Expressionist, Cubist and Futurist aesthetics as characteristic of the “degeneration in artistic matters” (1941a: 501) and discussed the “decadence” of art in the twentieth century, when “so-called pioneers [brautryðjendur] among artists started searching for precedents that were ugly and imperfect, instead of worshipping beauty and nobility” (1941a: 500). He also pointed out the influence of Bolshevism and Jewish culture on modern art, which “spreads like an epidemic to different countries” (1941b: 512), and praised the works of the neoromantic “pioneers” of an Icelandic art based on “national foundations” (1941c: 520) against “the extremist movement of the degenerate period in world art” (1941c: 521). Jónsson’s neo-romantic aesthetics, which had been shaped during his formative years in Copenhagen in the late 1910s belonged to a conservative notion of culture that had been expressed in his writings as early as 1914, as he discussed the “ruling spirit of revolution” and “permanent change” characteristic of modernity, defining it as a “suicidal anarchy” that threatened civilisation (1914: 281). With the foundation of Tíminn in 1917 Jónsson had become one of the most influential politicians in Iceland. Due to his initiative, the Icelandic parliament established a foundation for the support of culture (Menningarsjóður) and an “educational committee” (Menntamálaráð) in 1928. As Jónsson became the president of the committee in 1934 he became the most powerful figure in the field of cultural politics. From 1939 the “educational committee” decided which artists and writers were to be supported financially by the state, which marked the beginning of Jónsson’s struggle against cultural Bolshevism. Financial support for writers with communist sympathies was cut down and paintings by “modernists” were only bought exceptionally. Jónsson’s activities took a drastic turn in April 1942, as he organized an exhibition of degenerate Icelandic art in the parliament building in Reykjavík, including works among others by Jón Engilberts, Gunnlaugur Scheving, Þorvaldur Skúlason and Jóhann Briem. The exhibition was later taken out into the public sphere, so
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that “visitors” could look at the paintings in a shop window in the centre of Reykjavík. In connection with the exhibition Jónsson published a series of articles in Tíminn, in which he declared that it was necessary to fight the “invasion of communists” who wanted to make “a revolution” and destroy “the sane and genial evolution of Icelandic art” (1942: 108). Jónsson described the exhibited works “as pure imitations of the most insipid and most miserable that can be found in French degenerate art [frönsk úrkynjunarlist] from the last years” (1942: 107), pointing out Jón Stefánsson’s early Expressionist paintings as the most obvious symptom of degeneration. (See illustration 2: “[This] painting is so grotesque, disgusting and untrue in all its nature that it can never be kept anywhere, neither in public space nor in private households” (Jónsson 1942: 107).) The exhibition was followed by a second one displaying “exemplary” art, which made the connection with the two Munich exhibitions of “degenerate” and “great German art” in the Third Reich in 1937 even more obvious. Icelandic artists responded to the exhibition of degenerate art with an open letter in the social-democratic newspaper Alþýðublaðið. Intellectuals from the whole political spectrum also joined in condemning the exhibition, which finally led to the “dethronement” of Jónsson in 1942 when he was replaced by Valtýr Stefánsson as the president of the “educational committee” and socialist intellectuals such as Kristinn E. Andrésson joined the committee. Leftist intellectuals who had played an important role in shaping the reception of the avant-garde in Iceland also came to the defence of modernism. The organ of the leftist literary movement from the beginning of the early 1940s, Tímarit Máls og menningar, served as a forum for artists to criticize Jónsson’s politics and express their ideas about modern art. Olgeirsson criticized Jónsson’s nationalism in 1943 for wanting to “cut the cultural ties with the European continent and make the island into a fortress against the liberating ideas that might come from it” (1943: 93). Kristinn E. Andrésson also criticized Jónsson’s cultural politics, describing it as a “persecution of Icelandic culture” that aims at “stifling every free and bold thought” (1940: 199). Yet, Andrésson’s essay was not an apology for avant-garde aesthetics. In the early 1940s he also published articles that were directed against the “formalism” of Þorvaldur Skúlason, Gunnlaugur Scheving and other “modish artists” (1943: 3). Skúlason had defended modernist aesthetics in 1942 by stressing the importance of aesthetic
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autonomy and claiming that those works of aesthetic “pioneers”, which contemporaries denounce as “extremism” are usually the most important ones for the future (1942: 152). Skúlason’s article, which was originally published in Tímarit Máls og menningar as a response to the reaction of Jónas Jónsson, thus also became – somewhat paradoxically – the subject of a critique by radical socialists. Andrésson’s discussion of “formalism” is characteristic of the hostile political climate of the 1930s and early 1940s, in which the idea of the avant-garde is categorically rejected by both radical socialists and cultural reactionaries. The debate on “degenerate” art in the early 1940s, after what may probably be called the dullest chapter in the history of the avant-garde, is a curious chapter in the history of modern Icelandic art and literature. During the whole 1930s no authors and artists appeared who picked up new aesthetic concepts and notions from European avant-garde movements and introduced them into the artistic and literary system in Iceland. Concepts such as “Expressionism”, “Dadaism”, “Surrealism”, “Futurism” and “Cubism” that had constantly appeared in different contexts during the 1920s were hardly mentioned. The avant-garde no longer belonged to the cultural agenda. Authors such as Laxness and Þórðarson, whose earlier works had introduced avant-garde techniques and concepts in Iceland, had turned toward a more conventional kind of writing and become active in the movement around Rauðir pennar. In the visual arts, Jón Stefánsson and Finnur Jónsson had turned away from their early experimentalism toward a more traditional mode of figurative painting. The battle against “formalism” and “degenerate” art was thus in fact aimed at a rather conventional form of modernism that came to represent the threat of aesthetic modernity for Icelandic culture. The most interesting figures of the Icelandic avant-garde in this period, who had close connections to avant-garde movements on the European continent, are hardly mentioned in the debate. The centre of the Icelandic avant-garde had moved to Copenhagen. Sigurjón Ólafsson and Svavar Guðnason both belonged to the circle around linien and had ties to avant-garde groups in Copenhagen from the late 1930s, and Guðnason was later to participate in the activities of Helhesten and Cobra. Both artists were to have an important impact on the re-emergence of the Icelandic avant-garde with abstract art in the late 1940s.
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Conclusion Whether one looks at Olgeirsson’s emphatic welcoming of revolutionary world culture, Guðmundur Einarsson’s racial fantasies or Alexander Jóhannesson’s conservative concept of a national culture, they all stressed the importance of importing the best from European culture and defending Icelandic society against the threat of a decadent modernity. The avant-garde was received in different terms, either as part of a degenerate civilization characterized by alienation, industrialism, specialization and political anarchy or as part of a revolutionary current which was to be welcomed in the battle against political stagnation as well as against the influence of mass culture. The first texts and works from the late 1910s and the 1920s, in which aesthetic concepts of the European avant-garde movements were introduced into Icelandic art and literature were generated by a discourse that aimed at a radical modernization of Icelandic culture and society. A text by Kristinn E. Andrésson from 1933 shows, that Icelandic culture was seen as an open field of discursive conflicts at least into the early 1930s. It also shows that the European avant-garde was still shaping the idea of an Icelandic culture. Andrésson likens “Icelandic national life in the twentieth century” to a “Futurist painting” characterized by “discrepancy and chaos” (1933: 119). The metaphor may also be used to describe the early Icelandic avantgarde. For a reconstruction of the reception of the avant-garde in the 1920s manifests a dynamic field governed by the principle of simultaneity of multiple political and aesthetic discourses. NOTES 1
Parts of this paper were originally presented as a lecture at a conference of the Nordic Network of Avant-garde Studies in Copenhagen on November 12th 2004. I would like to thank those who participated in the conference for a very fruitful discussion on the subject. I would also like to thank Ástráður Eysteinsson for reading the whole article through in manuscript. 2 The term appeared for the first time in Laxness´ writings in an article on the painter Kjarval from 1950, in which Laxness discussed the role of the “originators” of Icelandic painting, who got their education from “Scandinavian academicism” although their art came to represent a “genuine avant-garde [frammúrstefna]” in Iceland (Laxness 1950: 11). Laxness´ Skáldatími from 1963 is the first text, however, in which the term is used constantly and it played a key role in establishing
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framúrstefna as the common denominator for the historical avant-garde. A radio lecture by Kristín Jónsdóttir from 1954 also indicates that the term had become a commonplace among visual artists already in the early 1950s (Jónsdóttir 1987). 3 Laxness´ definition of Joyce as the “leading poet” of the European avant-garde seems to have had a lasting influence in Iceland. As late as 1980 Joyce is mentioned along with Breton, Eluard and (somewhat interestingly) Döblin as a representative Dadaist author (Pétursson 1980: 21). The echo of Laxness´ definition of Expressionism may also be heard in writings of visual artists at least into the 1950s. In “Nokkur orð um myndlist”, Kristín Jónsdóttir claims that “´Expressionism´ has always existed, has followed all new movement and always been behind every true art” (1954: 15). 4 There seems to have been a vivid interest for Bønnelycke´s writings in Iceland in the 1920s. On November 15th 1925 an article on Bønnelycke´s works was published in Morgunblaðið, in which they were compared to Laxness´ notorious poem in Eimreiðin” (Anonymous 1925: 7). In 1927 Sveinn Sigurðsson also discusses an article of Bønnelycke´s in Tidens Tanker from 1925 and publishes an extract from his book “Ny Ungdom” (New Youth) in Icelandic translation (Sigurðsson 1927). 5 One may take this ironic presentation of Alexander Jóhannesson as the initiator of the Icelandic avant-garde to its extremes, not only by pointing out his role in introducing the concept of Futurism into the literary system and his publication of the first genuine dada text in Icelandic, but also by pointing out that his “Futurist” aesthetics shifted from his cultural critique into his writings on flying. His emotive writings on flying from the 1920s express the fantasy of an omnipotent spirit gaining total control over the external world that is strangely reminiscent of Marinetti´s aearial fantasies. This ironic presentation of Jóhannesson´s “Futurism” may not be as farfetched as it seems. In the late 1920s he published one of the first prose poems in Icelandic literary history, an emotive but rather traditional poem on the art of flying that ends by representing the sound of the propeller in a Futurist onomatopoeia: “Akrafjall, Esja ahead – forward the last sprint / prrr – prrr – prrr – prrr – / Reykjavík!” (Jóhannesson 1929: 107). 6 In 1932 Stefánsson published an essay which may be seen as his belated response to Jóhannesson´s article and an attempt to defend the idea of an aesthetic avant-garde in a period in which it has become subject to an increasingly radical critique in Iceland. Although Stefánsson does not mention Jóhannesson´s or Salomonsen´s writings explicitly, his description of “men who think these new movements are incomprehensible and make fun of them, considering those who practice them halfinsane” (Stefánsson 1989: 84) contain rather clear references to such “disease theories” of the avant-garde. 7 In a later interview, Jónsson explained that Stefánsson´s critique may also have had a specific background. Prior to Jónsson´s participation in the Sturm-exhibition in 1925 the Icelandic painter Jón Þorleifsson, who was living in Copenhagen, had contacted the Sturm-gallery in order to get his paintings exhibited. Þorleifsson never got an answer and this may have created a rather sceptical attitude towards Der Sturm among Icelandic artists living in Copenhagen (see Gottskálksdóttir 1993: 93). 8 It was not until six years later that Olgeirsson would refer to writings of an Icelandic author and describe them in terms of the European avant-garde. In “Skáld á leið til sósíalismans” (Poets on the Way to Socialism) he linked ideas of a radical aesthetic
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renewal with the pathos of the socialist revolution and described the style of Halldór Stefánsson´s early prose as a combination of the “stylistic beauty of the Icelandic Sagas” and “Expressionism´s speed of the locomotive” (1932: 102). In a review published two years earlier, Árni Hallgrímsson had already maintained that the style of Stefánsson´s early prose was partly based on “expressionism” (1930: 414). The affinity between literary Expressionism and Stefánsson´s early short stories, which were written during his residence in Germany and published in Berlin in 1929 (Í fáum dráttum [In a Few Drafts], 1930), has been a controversial subject. Whereas some stylistic similarities may be seen, the “influence” of the European avant-garde remains superficial in these texts, its formal experiments being embedded into more traditional modes of representation.
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WORKS CITED Aagesen, Dorthe. 2002a. “Introduction” in Dorthe Aagesen (ed.) The Avant-Garde in Danish and European Art 1909-1919. Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst: 8-13. ---. 2002b. “The Avant-Garde Takes Copenhagen” in Dorthe Aagesen (ed.) The Avant-Garde in Danish and European Art 1909-1919. Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst: 152-171. Abildgaard, Hanne. 2002. “The Nordic Paris” in Dorthe Aagesen (ed.) The AvantGarde in Danish and European Art 1909-1919. Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst: 172-187. Andrésson, Kristinn E. 1933. ”Eins og nú horfir við. (Erindi flutt í Félagi róttækra stúdenta)” Iðunn 17: 119-131. ---. 1940. “Grasgarður forheimskunarinnar” Tímarit Máls og menningar 3: 199-215. ---. 1943. “Er málaralist aðeins blátt strik?” Þjóðviljinn (September 7th: 3-4). Anonymous. 1925. “Bönnelykke og Skaarup” Lesbók Morgunblaðsins (November 15th: 7-8). Anonymous. 1926. “Halldór Kiljan Laxness” Morgunblaðið (April 29th: 3). Árnason, Magnús Á. 1921. “Um listir alment” Eimreiðin 27: 67-78. Berg, Hubert van den. 2005. “Kortlægning af gamle spor af det nye. Bidrag til en historisk topografi over det 20. århundredes europæiske avantgarde(r)” (Claus Bratt Østergaard and Tania Ørum, tr.) in Charlotte Engberg, Marianne Ping Huang and Tania Ørum (eds.) En tradition af oprud. Avantgardernes tradition og politik. Hellerup: Spring. “Blaðagreinar 1921-1929” in Frank Ponzi (ed.) 1983. Finnur Jónsson. Íslenskur brautryðjandi. Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið: 48-51. Einarsson frá Miðdal, Guðmundur. 1926. “Ferðasaga um Suðurlönd” Iðunn 10: 6-25. ---. 1928. “Listir og þjóðir” Iðunn 12: 267-276 ---. 1929. “Á fjöllum” Eimreiðin 3: 304-318. ---. 1930. “Skíðaför í Alpafjöllum” Eimreiðin 2: 122-134. ---. 1933. “List, iðja, listiðnaður” Skírnir 107: 89-96. Einarsson, Sigurður. 1932. “Nesjamenska” Iðunn 16: 193-212. Einarsson, Stefán. 1939. Þórbergur Þórðarson. Fræðimaður – spámaður – skáld fimmtugur. Reykjavík: Heimskringla. Franzson, Björn. 1935. “Listin og þjóðfélagið. Nokkrar hugleiðingar frá sjónarmiði marxismans” Rauðir pennar 1: 278-297 Gottskálksdóttir, Júlíana. 1993. “Tilraunin ótímabæra. Um abstraktmyndir Finns Jónssonar og viðbrögð við þeim” in Árbók Listasafns Íslands 1990-1992. Reykjavík: Listasafn Íslands: 74-103. Gretor, Georg. 1928. Islands Kultur und seine junge Malerei. Jena: Diederichs. Guðnadóttir, Kristín G. 1995. “The Great Ascent. The Watercolours of Gudmundur Einarsson from Middalur 1950-1963” in Kristín G. Guðnadóttir (ed.) Guðmundur Einarsson frá Miðdal. Reykjavík: Kjarvalsstaðir, Listasafn Reykjavíkur: 8-12. Hallgrímsson, Árni. 1930. “Halldór Stefánsson. Í fáum dráttum” Iðunn 14: 414-416. Jóhannesson, Alexander. 1920. “Nýjar listastefnur (Alþýðufræðsla Stúdentfjelagsins 9. maí 1920)” Óðinn: 41-46.
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---. 1922. “Um málaralist nútímans” Eimreiðin 28: 14-24. ---. 1929. “Flugferð” Eimreiðin 2: 105-107. Jónsdóttir, Kristín. 1954. “Nokkur orð um myndlist” Helgafell 6: 13-20. ---. 1987. “Nokkur orð um myndlist” in Aðalsteinn Ingólfsson (ed.) Kristín Jónsdóttir. Listakona í gróandanum. Reykjavík: Þjóðsaga: 173-182. Jónsson, Jónas. 1914. “Íhald og framsókn” Skírnir 88: 269-282. ---. 1941a. “Hvíldartími í bókmenntum og listum”. Part 1 Tíminn (December 6th: 500501). ---. 1941b. “Hvíldartími í bókmenntum og listum”. Part 2 Tíminn (December 13th: 512-514). ---. 1941c. “Hvíldartími í bókmenntum og listum”. Part 3 Tíminn (December 18th: 520-522). ---. 1942. “Skáld og hagyrðingar”. Part 3 Tíminn (April 9th, : 106-108). Kvaran, Ólafur. 1989. “Jón Stefánsson. Sensations and Classical Harmony” in Karla Kristjánsdóttir (ed.) Jón Stefánsson 1881-1962. Reykjavík: Listasafn Íslands: 41-55. Kötlum, Jóhannes úr. 1947. “Hugleiðingar um líf og list” Réttur 2: 136-151. Laxness, Halldór Kiljan. 1924. “Úr circus menningarinnar” Morgunblaðið (December 14th: 1-4). ---. 1925. “Unglingurinn í skóginum” Eimreiðin 1: 70-72. ---. 1935. “Borgaralegar nútímabókmenntir. Nokkrir aðaldrættir” Rauðir pennar 1: 266-277. ---. 1949. Kvæðakver. Reykjavík: Vaka-Helgafell. ---. 1950. “Kjarval” in Jóhannes Sveinsson Kjarval. Reykjavík: Helgafell: 5-28. ---. 1963. Skáldatími. Reykjavík: Helgafell. Ólafsson, Jón. 1999. Kæru félagar. Íslenskir sósíalistar og Sovétríkin 1920-1960. Reykjavík: Mál og menning. Olgeirsson, Einar. 1926. “Erlendir menningarstraumar og Íslendingar” Réttur 1: 9-24. ---. 1932. “Skáld á leið til sósíalismans” Réttur 2: 95-116. ---. 1935. “Tvennir tímar íslenzkrar borgarastéttar” Réttur 1: 1-15. ---. 1943. “Baráttan um tilveru Íslendinga” Réttur 2: 77-98. Pétursson, Hannes. 1980. Bókmenntir. Reykjavík: Menningarsjóður. Ponzi, Frank. 1983. “Artist Before His Time” in Frank Ponzi (ed.) Finnur Jónsson. Íslenskur brautryðjandi. Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið: 53-60. Salomonsen, Carl Julius. 1919. De nyeste kunstretninger og smitsomme sindslidelser. Copenhagen: Levin & Munskgaards Forlag. Sigurðsson, Sveinn. 1925. “Við þjóðveginn” Eimreiðin 3: 193-201. ---. 1927. “Bókmentirnar og lífið” Eimreiðin: 292-294. Skúlason, Þorvaldur. 1942. “Málaralist nútímans”. Tímarit Máls og menningar 2: 152-164. Smári, Jakob Jóh. 1932. “Norræna hreyfingin og Halldór Kiljan Laxness”. Eimreiðin 2: 232-235. Stefánsson, Jón. 1989. “Nokkur orð um myndlist” in Karla Kristjánsdóttir (ed.) Jón Stefánsson 1881-1962. Reykjavík: Listasafn Íslands: 79-85. Þórðarson, Þórbergur. 1922. “Inngangur”. Hvítir hrafnar. Reykjavík: 5-9.
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---.1928. “Þrjú þúsund, þrjú hundruð og sjötíu og níu dagar úr lífi mínu”. Iðunn 12: 130-142. ---. 1941. Edda Þórbergs Þórðarsonar. Reykjavík: Heimskringla. ---. 1987. Mitt rómantíska æði. Úr dagbókum, bréfum og öðrum óprentuðum ritsmíðum frá árunum 1918-1929 (Helgi M. Sigurðsson, ed.). Reykjavík: Mál og menning.
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Illustrations
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(1) Salvador Dalí, Le Sacré-cœur (parfois je crache par plaisir sur le portrait de ma mère), 1929. Ink on canvas.
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(2) Jón Stefánsson, Þorgeirsboli (Þorgeir’s Bulls), 1929. Oil on canvas.
(3) Jón Stefánsson, Stilleben, 1919. Oil on canvas. First exhibited at Kunstnernes Efteraarsudstilling in Copenhagen in 1919.
(4) Þórbergur Þórðarson, Hvítir hrafnar (White Ravens) 1922. Cover illustration by Jóhannes Kjarval.
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(5) Finnur Jónsson, Fiðluleikari (Violinist), 1924. Ink drawing. First exhibited at Café Rosenberg in Reykjavík, 1925
(6) Luigi Bompardi, La lotta elettorale a Milano (The Battle of the Elections in Milan), 1909. Drawing from Illustrazione Italiana 36(11), 14 Marzo, p. 252.
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(7) JindĜich Štyrský, Homage à Karl Marx, 1937. Oil on canvas.
(8) Toyen, OpuštČnČ doupČ (Abandoned Burrow), 1937. Oil on canvas.
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(9) Jacques-André Boiffard, L'affiche lumineuse de "Mazda" sur les grands boulevards (The Illuminated Mazda Billboard on the Grands Boulevards), 1927. Photograph. Illustration for André Breton, Nadja, 1928.
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(10) Jacques-André Boiffard, Comme je m'étais rendu au "marché aux puces" de Saint-Ouen (When I Went One Sunday to the Saint-Ouen ‘Marché aux puces’), 1927. Photograph. Illustration for André Breton, Nadja, 1928.
(11) Jacques-André Boiffard, La librairie de L'Humanité (The Humanité Bookshop). Photograph, 1927. Illustration for André Breton, Nadja, 1928.
Abstracts and Index
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ABSTRACTS Sascha Bru (Ghent University) The Phantom Avant-Garde. The Centennial Debate on the Avant-Garde and Politics In 1906, F.T. Marinetti, for the first time in his life, used the term avant-garde in connection with the idea of the future, and in doing so he paved the way for what is now commonly called the modernist or historical avant-garde. Since 1906, the ties between the early twentieth-century European aesthetic vanguard and politics have been a matter of continual critical debate. With a century gone by and a vast archive of research on the matter filled, it may be a good idea to look back on the debate. What major currents and topics can we discern in it? Are there noticeable shifts in the way critics have approached the interconnection between the modernist avant-garde and politics in the course of the foregoing century? And what do critics actually mean when they talk about the “political” aesthetic vanguard? Finally, is there anything left to be added to the immense archive?
Kirsten Strom (Grand Valley State University) “Sometimes I Spit for Pleasure on My Mother's Portrait”. On the Strategic Uses of Inflammatory Rhetoric in French Surrealism If we are to take the collected documents of the French Surrealists literally, we can only conclude that the group consisted of nothing less than murderers, child molesters, and slashers of women's eyeballs. Was it not Breton himself who publicly advocated that the “purest Surrealist act” was to aim a loaded pistol into a crowd and begin shooting indiscriminately? And yet, as we know, there is no evidence to suggest that any Surrealist was ever guilty of such crimes. A
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simple, but highly significant premise follows: perhaps we are not to take these documents so literally. This paper explores the role of inflammatory rhetoric within the project of Surrealism, specifically with the intent of arguing that such rhetorical gestures functioned both to define Surrealism's proper and improper audiences, and to position Surrealism as a political culture capable of participating in broader political discourse by mastering techniques of hyperbolic language widely employed by radical and reactionary political parties in Europe between the wars. I additionally contend that this means through which the Surrealists constituted an alternative speech community would alternately (if not simultaneously) serve as a critique of the very process of signification, one which threatened to undermine the authority of all political discourse.
Gunther Martens (Fund Scientific Research, Flanders & Ghent University) Framing Literary Speech Acts of Political Modernity. Notes on Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus and Expressionism This contribution focuses on Hermann Broch and Karl Kraus, two writers normally associated with modernism, publishing their major works in the midst of a spectacular crisis of democracy. The aim of this essay is to highlight the relevance of reconsidering the historical avant-garde’s politics by looking at how modernists received them. Broch’s concern with totalitarian tendencies in the political realm led to a programme that raises some stringent questions concerning the programme of a “radical democracy” often encountered in the avantgarde. Karl Kraus, while vigorously defending and advancing the cause of some distinctly avant-garde authors of the time (Wedekind, Else Lasker-Schüler, …), was also renowned for his relentlessly satirical pastiches of German Expressionism (esp. of Franz Werfel) and his ultimate retreat to a timeless canon of classics (Shakespeare, Offenbach, Goethe, …). This ambivalent attitude towards the avantgarde is situated within Kraus’ satirical framing of Öffentlichkeit and citizenship in the context of the demise of Austro-Hungarian absolutism. It is argued that both authors presented solutions to the crisis of democracy that have to be made productive on the distinctly literary level of rhetoric and telling tactics itself. This paper therefore
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relates the issue of politics with the question of performativity from a narratological and rhetorical point of view.
Laura Winkiel (Iowa State University) The Rhetoric of Violence. Avant-garde Manifestoes and the Myths of Racial Community Race and racial mythology have always been constitutive of modern democratic citizenship. This essay examines how racial mythology is recast in avant-garde manifestoes and considers its effects on modern democratic principles. It discusses the manifesto’s history and use in modern political revolutions and, using Paul Gilroy, tracks the contradictions between the promise of universalism in Enlightenment and political modernity and the fact of its racial exclusions. It then investigates Futurist, Vorticist, dada and black Surrealist manifestoes in terms of how they use racial myths to anchor their aestheticized forms of modern political life. It also demonstrates how avant-garde manifestoes deploy primitive irrationality – the rhetoric of violence – to create new political communities. The essay concludes by arguing that black Surrealist manifestoes, Aimé Césaire’s “In the Guise of a Literary Manifesto” and Suzanne Césaire’s “Surrealism and Us”, combat myths of racial purity. In these writings, political struggle is positively envisioned as an unleashing of heterogeneity rather than its suppression. They do this by turning colonial violence back upon themselves and translating that experience to the colonizers to effect a dialogic exchange.
Steven Engels (Catholic University of Leuven) Uncanny Polemics and Ambivalent Reappraisals. The French debate on Surrealism on the eve of the Cold War Surrealism and partisan politics have always been closely intertwined, not only because of the well-known fact that some of the most prominent figures of the avant-garde movement affiliated to the French Communist Party (PCF) during the thirties and forties, but also – and this is less well-known – because the political potential of Surrealism was readily recognised by various French intellectuals
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outside the Surrealist collective and the PCF. In this contribution, I examine the intellectual debate on Surrealism during the decade following the Second World War, a debate in which the ties between literature, partisan political engagement and morality are re-examined by such different famous thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Blanchot and by lesser-known literary critics like Jules Monnerot and Claude Mauriac. My focus is on the way in which these representatives of the post-war French intelligentsia try to come to terms with Surrealism and its significance as a broad cultural movement with political ambitions. As I show, they do so in very different ways, each of them evaluating the Surrealist artistic production and political activities in terms of their own aesthetic categories and ideological agendas. Despite these obvious differences in opinion, however, almost all critics involved in the debate on Surrealism share the same set of implicit but extremely problematical assumptions about the function of literature in modern society. In the end, these reveal more about the highly polemical intellectual climate in France on the eve of the Cold War than about the meaning of Surrealism itself.
Malynne Sternstein (University of Chicago) Ecstatic Subjects. Citizenship and Sex in Czech Surrealism In 1923, at the age of twenty-one, the painter Marie ýermínová was reborn in a café in Prague. She left the building as Toyen. Karel Teige, who was her colleague from 1923 to the Surrealist days of the 1930s, wrote of the moment: “we christened her at a café table within a pseudonym as indeclinable as her art”. The mythologies around her very un-Czech name also point out its Francophone core. Citoyen, they say, is the full reference the partial Toyen invokes. In that anarchic moment of naming, the avant-garde created a Toyen – out of a subject inscribed in symbolic language, they forged a citizen of the real as it seethed irresistibly in her art. More than a protest against grammar and much more than a metaphorical serendipity, the transformation of ýermínová to Toyen created a new rule of identity beyond gender, but within sexuality. Scrutinising the genderless citizen’s relationship to the democratic government of the First Republic, this paper aims to show how the Czech Surrealists looked to
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forge new citizenship not by equating subjects sexually, or even in indulging in aesthetic sexual bliss, as the French Surrealists may be said to have done, but in de-gendering subjects to “christen” them as fully sexualized beings.
Hubert F. van den Berg (University of Groningen) From a New Art to a New Life and a New Man. Avant-Garde Utopianism in dada In the historiography of the historical avant-garde, the dada movement is often presented as the odd man out focusing exclusively on negation and destruction and rejecting even art as such. A closer look at the programmatic writings of the historical dada movement shows, however, that at least the Zurich Dadaists may well have rejected many artistic conventions of the period as well as most contemporary conventional art, but they simultaneously envisaged a “New Art”, which should have contributed to the emergence of a “New Life” and a “New Man”. Unveiling the “reinvention” of dada poetics during the 1950s and 1960s that gave rise to the mostly negative understanding of dada, this essay goes back to the historical dada project of artistic renewal. It highlights dada's marked disengagement from politics and political issues raised within the political sphere at the time, and brings out the alternative dada devised from within art itself. Dada, as a “New Art”, had in mind a reunification of Art and Life. To this aim, it did not turn against art, but geared at a thorough redefinition of art itself, conjuring up alternative ways of being, representing and living Life. Günter Berghaus (University of Bristol) The Futurist Political Party The aim of this paper is to better our understanding of the Futurist Political Party. In an interview with Giornale d'Italia, of 30 October 1913, Marinetti announced that in the near future he intended to enter the political battlefield on a list for a really important constituency. It took until 1918, however, before this aim could be fulfilled. On 11 February 1918, he issued a political programme for a Futurist Political Party, which was founded in the first weeks after the end of the war
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and within half a year had established local branches in about a dozen Italian cities. On 23 March 1919, they joined forces with Benito Mussolini and participated in the founding of the Fasci di Combattimento in Piazza San Sepolcro. Several prominent Futurists were elected into the Fascist leadership at both a regional and a national level. Throughout 1919, there was a close cooperation between the revolutionary wing of the Fasci di Combattimento and the Fasci Politici Futuristi. At the second Fascist Congress, Marinetti renounced Mussolini’s “march into Reaction” and on 29 May 1920 handed in his resignation from the Fasci di Combattimento. Through the paper La testa di ferro, Marinetti sought to spread his idea of an “Italian Revolution” and to rekindle the alliance between Futurists and revolutionary socialists and anarchists. In autumn 1920, with the occupation of the factories and mass strikes shaking the foundations of the country’s political system, it seemed as if his old dream of an Italian Revolution was at last coming true. For the next two years, members of the Futurist Political Party co-operated with young socialists and communists in joint initiatives that had much in common with the KOMFUTS (Communist Futurists) in Russia. But after Gramsci’s departure from Italy, in summer 1922, the hardliners around Bordiga clamped down on these initiatives and imposed a ban on any joint actions with the Futurists. The FPF ceased its existence as a formal political organization. Some members participated in the anti-Fascist struggle as members of the Arditi Rossi or Arditi del Popolo; others joined the Fascist Party, or renounced politics altogether.
Raymond Spiteri (Victoria University of Wellington) Surrealism and the Political. The Case of Nadja. This paper locates André Breton’s Nadja (1928) in the context of the culture and politics of Surrealism. It discusses the construction of Nadja — which Breton described as a book left ajar, “battant comme une porte” — as a response to two failed encounters: first, Breton’s encounter with Nadja in late 1926; and second, his unsuccessful attempt to join the Parti communiste français (PCF) in 1927. In many ways Nadja is an attempt to work through the recent personal and political failures of Surrealism. Yet Nadja also demonstrates the
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construction of a new political space through the culture of Surrealism, since one of the fascinating features of Nadja is precisely the imbrication of politics in the margins of the narrative, which demonstrates Breton’s continuing concern with the political position of Surrealism in the wake of his failed encounter with the PCF. Surrealist creative endeavour did in fact incorporate an experience of freedom that manifests what Claude Lefort has called “the political” (le politique). In Nadja, the political manifests itself in the interval between culture and politics, an interval sustained by the image and begging to be filled by a coming community.
Thomas Hunkeler (University of Fribourg) Cultural Hegemony and Avant-Gardist Rivalry. The Ambivalent Reception of Futurism in France, England and Russia Futurism can be seen not only as an attempt to empower Italian art by refusing the weight of the past, but also, and perhaps more interestingly, as an effort to disrupt the cultural hegemony France had in the beginning of the twentieth century. Apollinaire’s well known reactions to Marinetti’s movement are quite ambivalent: he acknowledges the important advances made by the Futurists, but he also tries to downplay the Italian element in favour of a French history of the avant-garde. His reactions towards Futurism are clearly marked by a nationalist ideology which is being challenged by Marinetti on its own ground: the city of Paris. This pattern of nationalist rivalry is very often obscured by the cosmopolitan aspects of the avant-garde. In French criticism, for instance, Futurism is today still largely seen as an impure and nationalist precursor of an essentially internationalist avant-garde, such as Dadaism and Surrealism (see Jean Clair 2003). But it is important to understand that the project of the avant-garde as such is inseparable from the nationalist rivalry for (cultural) hegemony. The difference in the reception of Futurism in France on the one hand and in England or Russia on the other makes this apparent. In both England and Russia, it is France more than Italy which is being attacked by the avant-garde artists. The example of the reception of Futurism thus helps us to deconstruct the binary opposition between a nationalist modernity (Jameson) and an internationalist avant-garde in order to reinterpret the avant-gardist
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movements in the light of a fierce fight against French cultural hegemony.
Renée M. Silverman (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) A Europeanizing Geography. The First Spanish Avant-garde’s Re-mapping of Castile (1914-1925) As Charles Taylor has recently argued, the existential orientation of the self in an ethical system is inherently spatial. I take up the spatiality of the avant-garde’s rhetoric in relation to the crisis of national identity resulting from political and social modernization. The language of space in the first Spanish avant-garde (1914-1925) is related not only to the problems of existence pointed out by Taylor but also to the position of post-imperial Spain and the cultural and economic awakening generated by its wartime neutrality. It is my argument that the avant-garde counters the preceding Generation of 1898’s representation of the nation in terms of landscape. Situating the isolated and isolationist Castilian landscape imagined by the Generation within the topography of Europe, the avant-garde inserts Spain into the international dialogue of Europeanization. I consider José Ortega y Gasset’s model of intersubjective communication between distinct European cultures to be paradigmatic with respect to the geographical and textual re-mapping of national borders in avantgarde aesthetics. Theorist and poet of the avant-garde movement Ultraísmo (1918-1925), Guillermo de Torre develops a poetics of space that closely resembles Ortega’s critique of the Generation of 1898’s metaphysical landscape. De Torre’s perceptual utopia produces a space for the articulation of an alternative Spanish identity and the liberated subjectivity of a cosmopolitan Europe.
Benedikt Hjartarson (University of Reykjavik) Dragging Nordic Horses past the Sludge of Extremes. The Beginnings of the Icelandic Avant-Garde The early Icelandic avant-garde represents an interesting case in the context of the European avant-garde. As a marginal topographical phenomenon it shows how the European avant-garde gave the impulse
Abstracts
283
for a lively debate on avant-garde art and literature in a national context which did not see the emergence of avant-garde activities in the strict sense of the term. No collective manifestoes were published, no traces of collective activities of a group of artists and writers are to be found, and not a single periodical is founded which served as a forum for avant-garde experiments. The “early Icelandic avant-garde” rather consists of a number of artists and writers (among them Á. Sveinsson, G. Scheving, Þ. Skúlason, H. Laxness, Þ. Þórðarson, J. Jónsson and J. Stefánsson) who picked up ideas and concepts from the contemporary avant-garde and appropriated them within a more traditional, aestheticist paradigm. The only notable exception to this rule are the works of Finnur Jónsson, who participated in SturmExhibitions before returning to Iceland and putting up a private exhibition of abstract paintings in 1925, which led to the first public debate on the European avant-garde in the largest newspaper in Iceland. The early “avant-garde” experiments are joined by a number of critical essays in journals and periodicals in the early 1920s. In these essays, which mainly originate in conservative right-wing politics, the European avant-garde is condemned as symptomatic of the international and “degenerated” spirit of modern art as opposed to popular or “völkisch” Icelandic art. Somewhat curiously, the essays mainly concentrate on European avant-garde movements such as Futurism, dada and Cubism but hardly mention Icelandic authors and artists. A question thus raised in this essay is whether or not the “avant-garde” in Iceland was a right-wing construct.
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INDEX A Abastado, Claude, 67, 89 Abstract Expressionism, 135 Adam, Paul, 177 Adorno, Theodor W., 14, 18, 19, 30, 52, 55 Alba, Auro d’, 164 Albert-Birot, Pierre, 208 Alphand, Jean-Charles, 203 Andrésson, Kristinn E., 254, 256, 257, 258, 261 Annunzio, Gabriele d’, 30, 172, 181, 207 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 47, 143, 207, 208, 211, 212, 216, 232, 281 Aragon, Louis, 37, 42, 48, 184, 189, 191, 199 Archipenko, Alexander, 246, 249 Arendt, Hannah, 27, 29, 51, 63 Árnason, Magnús Á., 244, 245, 261 Arp, Hans, 27, 29, 138, 139, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149 Artaud, Antonin, 47, 82, 89 Artistes Radicaux, 147 Auden, W. H., 9, 26, 29, 30 Austin, J. L., 56, 63
B Bahr, Hermann, 241 Baker, Keith Michael, 39, 48 Bakunin, Mikhail, 140, 153 Balibar, Etienne, 23, 29, 122, 123, 131 Ball, Hugo, 138, 140, 141, 142, 145, 149
Balla, Giacomo, 159, 164, 175 Barabandi, Y.V.N., 166 Barbusse, Maurice, 60 Baron, Jacques, 190, 191, 199 Barron, Stéphanie, 27, 29 Barthes, Roland, 21, 29, 54 Bataille, Georges, 42, 101, 103, 104 Bauhaus, 135, 136 Beauduin, Nicolas, 232 Beccaris, Bava, 154 Beer, Umberto, 164 Bellmer, Hans, 37 Benjamin, Walter, 14, 18, 19, 27, 29, 37, 55, 60, 101, 184, 186, 196, 198, 199 Benson, Timothy, 26, 29 Berger, John, 61, 126, 127, 128, 131 Bergson, Henri, 153 Berlin, Isaiah, 214, 216 Berton, Germaine, 47 Beznos, Fanny, 189, 190, 191, 196, 197, 199 Biebl, Konstantin, 116 Bissolati, Leonida, 155, 170, 179 Blanchot, Maurice, 26, 91, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 196, 197, 198, 199, 278 Blum, Cinzia, 27, 29, 81, 87, 89 Bolzon, Piero, 164, 168 Bønnelycke, Emil, 242, 244, 259 Bonnet, Marguerite, 183, 187, 197, 198, 199 Bonset, I.K., 136, 150 Bontempelli, Massimo, 164 Borges, Jorge Luis, 26, 30 Bos, Charles du, 101 Bottai, Giuseppe, 164, 175 Bouguereau, Adolphe William, 204
Index
286 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15, 29, 56, 184, 185, 197, 199 Braque, Georges, 222 Breton, André, 24, 26, 30, 35, 36, 37, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 91, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 115, 116, 125, 131, 134, 139, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 238, 259, 275, 280, 281 Brezina, Otokar, 121 Broch, Hermann, 5, 25, 49, 50, 51, 52, 61, 63, 276 Brouk, Bohuslav, 115, 116 Brown, Wendy, 119, 131 Buñuel, Luis, 41, 47, 48 Bürger, Peter, 2, 15, 20, 29, 205, 216 Buruma, Ian, 214, 216 Businelli, Alberto, 164, 168 Butler, Judith, 79, 89
C Calcaprina, Riccardo, 164 Calderini, Guido, 164 Calinescu, Matei, 14, 29 Camus, Albert, 101, 102, 103, 104, 278 Cappa, Benedetta, 175 Carli, Mario, 158, 159, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 171, 176, 181 Caupenne, Jean, 42 Cendrars, Blaise, 232, 237 Césaire, Aimé, 83, 84, 85, 89, 277; Suzanne, 83, 84, 85, 89, 277 Cézanne, Paul, 210, 249 Chagall, Marc, 246 Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline, 186, 199 Chiti, Remo, 164 Chytry, Joseph, 28, 29 Clair, Jean, 215, 216, 281 Clark, Kenneth, 129, 130, 131, 197, 199 Claudel, Paul, 37 Constant, Benjamin, 101
Conti, Primo, 163, 177 Coppée, François, 204 Corradini, Enrico, 155 Crary, Jonathan, 89, 217, 223, 233 Culler, Jonathan, 13, 29, 225, 233
D Dalí, Salvador, 38 Darío, Ruben, 231 Datta, Venita, 27, 29 David, J.-L., 119, 197, 200, 223 De Stijl, 135 Debray, Régis, 215, 216 Delaunay, Robert, 211, 229, 237 DevČtsil, 113, 115, 116 Doesburg, Theo van, 136 Duchamp, Marcel, 12, 27, 94, 96 Durkheim, Emil, 177
E Eagleton, Terry, 11, 29, 205, 216 Eckhard, Meister, 146 Egbert, Donald D., 14, 29 Eggeling, Viking, 139, 146, 147 Einarsson, Guðmundur, 243, 248, 249, 250, 258, 261 Einstein, Carl, 58, 63 Eliot, Thomas S., 225 Eluard, Paul, 44, 45, 48, 99, 125, 184, 259 Engels, Friedrich, 153 Ernst, Max, 37, 40, 141 Evans, David, 119, 131 Eysteinsson, Astradur, 7, 26, 29, 258
F Fabbri, Sileno, 164 Fani-Ciotti, Vincenzo, 164 Felice, Renzo de, 173, 174, 178, 181 Ferrer, Francisco, 154 Flake, Otto, 146, 147, 150 Forbath, Imre, 116 Formoso, Nino, 164 Fornari, Crescenzio, 164
Index
287
Foster, Hal, 29, 217, 233 Foucault, Michel, 15, 70, 217, 222, 223, 233 Frank, Leonhard, 140 Franzson, Björn, 254, 261 Freundlich, Otto, 242 Friedlaender, Salomo, 146, 150 Frow, John, 27, 29 Fry, Roger, 210
G Gaggioli, Olao, 168 Gauguin, Paul, 210 Gelsted, Otto, 241, 244 Gentile, Emilio, 72, 75, 89, 173, 176, 181 Giacobbe, Francesco, 164 Gide, André, 47 Gilroy, Paul, 68, 75, 89, 277 Goebbels, Joseph, 27 Gogh, Vincent van, 210 Goll, Ivan, 232 Gontcharova, Natalia, 212, 213, 214 Gorrieri, Gastone, 163, 168 Graef, Ortwin De, 58, 63 Gramsci, Antonio, 15, 28, 63, 280 Gray, Camilla, 27, 29 Gretor, Georg, 248, 261 Grosz, George, 136, 141 Guðnason, Svavar, 257
Hobsbawm, Eric, 205, 216 Hofer, Carl, 245 Honzl, JindĜich, 116 Horkheimer, Max, 52 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 65, 66, 89, 135, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 150 Huidobro, Vicente, 232 Husserl, Edmund, 221
I Ivsic, Radovan, 125
J James, C. L. R., 42, 67, 68, 86, 89 Jameson, Fredric, 204, 216, 281 Janco, Marcel, 139, 146, 147 Jandl, Ernst, 60 Jaurès, Jean, 67 Jay, Martin, 217, 223, 233 Jelinek, Elfriede, 55, 60 Jezek, Jaroslav, 116 Jóhannesson, Alexander, 241, 242, 243, 244, 258, 259, 261 Jónsson, Finnur, 237, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 251, 257, 259, 261, 262, 283; Jónas, 255, 256, 257, 283 Joyce, James, 42, 240, 259 Jung, Franz, 136 Jünger, Ernst, 18, 60
H Habermas, Jürgen, 15, 29, 57, 62, 63, 86, 89 Halevy, Daniel, 70 Hallgrímsson, Jónas, 240 Hausmann, Raoul, 135, 141 Heartfield, John, 136, 141 Hebdige, Dick, 36, 48 Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich, 86, 129, 131 Heiberg, Jean, 243 Heisler, JindĜich, 125 Henningsen, Poul, 244 Herzfelde, Wieland, 136
K Kandinsky, Wassily, 141, 142, 143, 150, 242, 246 Kant, Immanuel, 68, 231 Kaplan, Alice Yaeger, 88, 89 Kesting, Edmund, 246 King, Katy (Libuse Jichova), 116 Kjarval, Jóhannes, 240, 258, 262 Klimt, Gustav, 52 Klinger, Cornelia, 26, 30, 60, 63 Kokoschka, Oskar, 246 Kötlum, Jóhannes úr, 253, 254, 262
Index
288 Kraus, Karl, 5, 25, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 276 Krauss, Rosalind, 198, 200, 217, 233 Kristeva, Julia, 11, 30, 35, 36, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48 Kropotkin, Peter, 153 Kunstdat, Josef, 116 Kwinter, Sandford, 88, 89
L Lacan, Jacques, 114 Laclau, Ernesto, 51, 52, 59, 63, 198, 200 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 13, 20, 30, 197, 200 Larionov, Mikhaïl, 212, 213, 214, 216 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 52, 276 Laxness, Halldór, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 244, 250, 251, 254, 257, 258, 259, 261, 262, 283 Le Bon, Gustave, 177 Le Brun, Annie, 125 Ledeen, M., 27 Lefèbvre, Henri, 217, 223, 233 Lefort, Claude, 24, 61, 63, 75, 90, 183, 186, 196, 197, 200, 281 Lenin, Vladimir I., 121, 140 Levin, David Michael, 217, 223, 233, 262 Lewis, Wyndham, 75, 76, 81, 87, 90, 184, 197, 200, 209, 210, 211, 212, 216 Lippmann, Walter, 22, 30 Lissitzky, El, 27, 29, 138, 149, 197 Luhmann, Niklas, 58 Lukács, Georg, 14, 236 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 242 Lyon, Janet, 40, 48, 67, 87, 90 Lyotard, Jean-François, 20, 30
M Machado, Antonio, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 233 Magritte, René, 128 Mainardi, Enzo, 163
Makovsky, Vincenc, 116 Malraux, André, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 109 Manet, Edouard, 210 Manni, Marcello, 163, 168 Marasco, Antonio, 163 Marchesani, Guido, 164 Marcuse, Herbert, 14, 30 Margalit, Avishai, 214, 216 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 9, 29, 60, 63, 65, 66, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 89, 90, 143, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 216, 242, 259, 275, 279, 280, 281 Marx, Karl, 117, 118, 122, 129, 153 Masaryk, Tomáš Gannigue, 119 Matisse, Henri, 243, 249 Maupassant, Guy de, 204 Mauriac, Claude, 26, 91, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 278 Mayröcker, Friederike, 60 Mazza, Armando, 168 Mbembe, Achille, 87, 90 McCarthy, Patrick, 27, 30 Menke, Christoph, 27, 30 Mense, Carl, 241 Minden, Martin, 241 Mocchi, Walter, 154 Mondrian, Piet, 142 Monnerot, Jules, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 278 Moretti, Franco, 217, 233 Mouffe, Chantal, 51, 52, 59, 63, 64, 198, 200 Mühsam, Erich, 139 Müller-Funk, Wolfgang, 26, 30, 60, 63 Musil, Robert, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64 Mussolini, Benito, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171,
Index
289
172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 280
N Nairn, Tom, 205, 216 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 13, 20, 30, 197, 200 Nannetti, Neri, 163, 168 Naville, Pierre, 184, 185, 200 Nerval, Gérard de, 100 Neues Leben, 139, 146, 147 Nevison, Christopher, 209 Nezval, VítČzslav, 115, 116, 123, 124, 129, 131 Nicholls, Peter, 26, 30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 153, 189 Nozières, Violette, 47 Nygaard, Fredrik, 242
R Racchella, Nino, 164 Rancière, Jacques, 18, 30 Rees, Adya van, 145; Otto van, 145 Renoir, Auguste, 207 Richter, Hans, 135, 139, 140, 146, 147, 150 Rimbaud, Arthur, 189, 206, 216 Roberts, William, 211 Rocca, Enrico, 163, 164, 168 Rosai, Ottone, 163, 168 Rossi, Cesare, 170, 176, 182, 280 Rouault, Georges, 207, 210 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 93 Rubiner, Ludwig, 140 Rude, Olaf, 245 Russel, Charles, 10, 30
O
S
Ólafsson, Sigurjón, 251, 257, 262 Olgeirsson, Einar, 251, 252, 253, 256, 258, 262 Ortega y Gasset, José, 218, 220, 233, 282 Osborne, Peter, 26, 30
Sacco, Nicolas, 194, 195 Sadoul, Georges, 42 Salaris, Claudia, 178, 182 Salomonsen, Carl Julius, 241, 242, 259, 262 Salto, Axel, 244 Sandels, Gösta, 243 Sanouillet, Michel, 139, 144, 150 Santamaria, Enrico, 164 Sapio, Gino, 164 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 26, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 278 Scambelluri, Angelo, 164 Scaparro, Mario, 164 Scheving, Gunnlaugur, 255, 256, 283 Schilling, Heinar, 241 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 88, 90 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 241 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 74, 75, 81, 82, 90 Settimelli, Emilio, 155, 158, 159, 162, 163, 168, 170, 176, 179, 182 Severianine, Igor, 213 Severini, Gino, 208 Shelley, Percy B., 189
P Palazzeschi, Aldo, 9, 30 Papini, Giovanni, 158, 204, 205, 208, 209, 212, 216 Pareto, Vilfredo, 28 Pelloutier, Fernand, 154 Peppis, Paul, 26, 30, 87, 90, 210, 216 Péret, Benjamin, 37, 184 Perloff, Marjorie, 28, 30 Picabia, Francis, 139, 143, 241, 242 Picasso, Pablo, 143, 207, 210, 222, 241, 246, 249 Poggioli, Renato, 21, 28, 30 Polizzotti, Mark, 197, 198, 199, 200 Pound, Ezra, 87 Pratella, Francesco Balilla, 177 Proust, Marcel, 101 Puchner, Martin, 87, 90
Index
290 Sigurðsson, Sveinn, 244, 259, 262, 263 Skúlason, Þorvaldur, 255, 256, 257, 262, 283 Sloterdijk, Peter, 130, 131 Smári, Jakob Jóh, 250, 262 Sorel, Georges, 70, 71, 90, 153 Sørensen, Henrik, 243 Soupault, Philippe, 232 Spackman, Barbara, 74, 87, 90 Spina, Giulio, 163 Srp, Karel, 113, 116, 117, 118, 124, 131 Stefánsson, Jón, 237, 243, 244, 246, 247, 251, 256, 257, 259, 262, 283 Stein, Gertrude, 86 Strong, Beret, 26, 30 Strutz, Johann, 27, 31 Štyrský, JindĜich, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 122, 123, 124, 125, 131 Svankmajer, Eva, 129; Jan, 129
T Tarde, Gabriel, 177 Täuber, Sophie, 146 Taylor, Charles, 16, 30, 282 Teige, Karel, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 129, 131, 278
Þ Þórðarson, Þórbergur, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 251, 257, 261, 262, 283
T Thoroddsen, Emil, 245, 246, 247, 248 Tobbi, Æri, 240, 242 Toller, Ernst, 139 Torre, Guillermo de, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 282
Toyen, (Marie ýermínová), 24, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 278 Trakl, Georg, 52 Trotsky, Leon, 28, 187, 192 Tzara, Tristan, 77, 78, 87, 90, 97, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150
U Unamuno, Miguel de, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 231, 233 Unik, Pierre, 184, 190, 200 Uttenreitter, Paul, 244
V Vaché, Jacques, 47 Vaneigem, Raoul, 13, 30 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 194, 195 Vecchi, Ferruccio, 165, 166, 168, 171, 182 Verderame, Luigi (Gino Sapio), 164 Volt, (Vincenzo Fani-Ciotti), 164, 169, 176, 182
W Wagner, Birgit, 21, 30, 53, 57, 64 Walden, Herwarth, 52, 246 Wedekind, Frank, 52, 53, 276 Werfel, Franz, 52, 54, 276 Wiener Gruppe, 60 Williams, Raymond, 19, 31 Witt, Mary Ann Frese, 13, 31 Wolff, Janet, 27, 31
Z Zahrtmann, Christian, 243 Zdanevitch, Ilia (Iliazd), 212, 214 Ziarek, Krzysztof, 26, 31, 86, 90 Zima, Peter, 27, 31 Zola, Emile, 39
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Orientations: Space / Time / Image / Word. Word & Image Interactions 5. Textxet 48 Edited by Claus Clüver, Véronique Plesch, and Leo Hoek. With an Introduction by Charlotte Schoell-Glass. Amsterdam/New York, NY 2005. XVI, 360 pp. ISBN: 90-420-1966-2 € 76,-/US$95,-
Based on papers presented at the Fifth Triennial Conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AERTI) held in 2002 in Hamburg, the twenty-two essays in this volume cover a wide array of intermedial relations and a great variety of media, from medieval architecture to interactive digital art. They have been arranged in sections labeled “History and Identity,” “Cultural Memory,” “Texts and Photographs: Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Memory,” “Mixed-Media Texts: Cartography in Contemporary Art and Fiction,” “Mixed-Media Texts: ‘Yellow-Cover Books’, Artists' Books, and Comics,” “Intermedia Texts: Logotypes,” and “Space, Spatialization, Virtual Space.” Displaying a range of methods and interests, these contributions by scholars from Europe, the United States, and South America working in different disciplines confirm the impression voiced by IAWIS president Charlotte Schoell-Glass in her introduction that “the influence of Visual and Cultural Studies has changed the outlook of many who study the interactions of texts and images”.
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Space in America Theory History Culture
Edited by Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt. Amsterdam/New York, NY 2005. 588 + 55 color ill. pp. (Architecture – Technology – Culture (ATC) 1) ISBN: 90-420-1876-3
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America's sense of space has always been tied to what Hayden White called the "narrativization" of real events. If the awe-inspiring manifestations of nature in America (Niagara Falls, Virginia's Natural Bridge, the Grand Canyon, etc.) were often used as a foil for projecting utopian visions and idealizations of the nation's exceptional place among the nations of the world, the rapid technological progress and its concomitant appropriation of natural spaces served equally well, as David Nye argues, to promote the dominant cultural idiom of exploration and conquest. From the beginning, American attitudes towards space were thus utterly contradictory if not paradoxical; a paradox that scholars tried to capture in such hybrid concepts as the "middle landscape" (Leo Marx), an "engineered New Earth" (Cecelia Tichi), or the "technological sublime" (David Nye). Not only was America's concept of space paradoxical, it has always also been a contested terrain, a site of continuous social and cultural conflict. Many foundational issues in American history (the dislocation of Native and African Americans, the geo-political implications of nation-building, immigration and transmigration, the increasing division and "clustering" of contemporary American society, etc.) involve differing ideals and notions of space. Quite literally, space and its various ideological appropriations formed the arena where America's search for identity (national, political, cultural) has been staged. If American democracy, as Frederick Jackson Turner claimed, "is born of free land," then its history may well be defined as the history of the fierce struggles to gain and maintain power over both the geographical, social and political spaces of America and its concomitant narratives. The number and range of topics, interests, and critical approaches of the essays gathered here open up exciting new avenues of inquiry into the tangled, contentious relations of space in America.
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Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative. Edited by Colleen Jaurretche. Amsterdam/New York, NY 2005. 246 pp. (European Joyce Studies 16) ISBN: 90-420-1617-5
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This collection presents articles that examine Joyce and Beckett’s mutual interest in and use of the negative for artistic purposes. The essays range from philological to psychoanalytic approaches to the literature, and they examine writing from all stages of the authors’ careers. The essays do not seek a direct comparison of author to author; rather they lay out the intellectual and philosophical foundations of their work, and are of interest to the beginning student as well as to the specialist.
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Ford Madox Ford and the City. Edited by Sara Haslam. Amsterdam/New York, NY 2005. 249 pp. (International Ford Madox Ford Studies 4) ISBN: 90-420-1717-1
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The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. The book series, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, has been founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in Ford’s life and work. Each volume will normally be based upon a particular theme or issue. Each will relate aspects of Ford’s work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade’s End, which Anthony Burgess described as ‘the finest novel about the First World War’; and Samuel Hynes has called ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’. However, critics of Edwardian and Modernist literature have been increasingly turning to Ford’s brilliant 1905 experiment in Impressionism, The Soul of London, as an exemplary text. Ford Madox Ford and the City assembles fourteen pioneering essays, by new as well as established European and American scholars, exploring Ford’s representations of real and ideal cities, across the full range of his work, from his earliest verse, to his post-war prose and poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. The volume is divided into three sections. The first focuses on his changing views of London, with The Soul of London taking pride of place. The second concentrates on the other great cities Ford lived and worked in – Paris and New York – as well as considering the role of the virtual or fantasy city. Besides reflecting new developments in research on Ford, the collection represents a significant contribution to studies in Modernism, literature and the city, Englishness and nationality. It concludes with three masterly essays by Ford himself – two of them published here for the first time – on cities he visited during his travels through America in the 1930s: Boston, Denver and Nashville.
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