Surrealism is possibly the most "passive" of the avant-garde aesthetics. Its characteristic practice being "automatic writing," wherein the writer attempts as much as possible to set aside her self-conscious mind and simply allow the unconscious "murmur" to come out onto the page. Creation is not a matter of active production, of the adherence to certain principles, or of imaginative "vision," but the copying down of images that emerge from the unconscious, the marvellous which, according to Breton, is the only thing that is beautiful. Breton explicitly refers to Freud as justification for all of this: surrealism as a term was used to describe an "absolute" reality in which the two states of human mental life, "dream and [conscious] reality" are resolved. In this sense, Breton is explicitly modern, not mystical. Even tho he attacks positivism as dull and destructive, the "discovery" of new, powerful mental territory provided the opportunity for the liberation of the imagination.
What is interesting here is that there is an explicit turning inward in Breton's theory. While the artist is not an active producer of texts, the images spring forth from within the unconscious. There is nothing about the "vivid imagination" in Breton, simply the ability to listen to what is going on inside the mind, a mind shaped by language, culture, desire, etc. In the truest automatic writing, the surrealist doesn't know what she's writing. She is simply an amanuensis of sorts, what Breton calls a "tracer."
The emphasis on interiority, the force within, is a strange descendent of Romanticism, and, indeed, the many theories of aesthetic creation which refer to inspiration or "trance states." Indeed, Breton explicitly claoms that "judging superficially by their results," "a good number of poets could pass for Surrealists": "In the course of the various attempts I have made to reduce what is, by breach of trust, called genius, I have found nothing which in the final analysis can be attributed to any other method than that" (26, emphasis in the orginal). While there is an obvious rhetorical move being made ("see, even Shakespeare practiced automatic writing"), it makes theoretical sense to link Surrealism and a Romantic theory like that of genius. Both are indebted to the force within the self, from which new things emerge.
A crucial difference, however, between genius and surrealism (and where surrealism is more like "inspiration") is that in the latter the force exists prior to the subject, even tho it is a force that produces language. In other words, automatic writing is language before the subject. This makes it very philosophically interesting, since 20th century thought has tended toward arguing that the subject is the product of language. Breton seems to be arguing that before the subject, there is language, and in an act of anti-subjectivity, one can bring that subconscious language forth. Surrealism is thus anti-genius even as it relies on similar categories.
It is no surprise that Lacan was affiliated with surrealism. Breton's interest in the linguistic images that come from these unconscious realms smacks of structuralism and the symbolic order.
Posted by pjaussen at April 12, 2007 12:44 PM | TrackBack