The Four Types of Play of Roger Caillois

From Competition to Chance, From Mimicry to Vertigo

by Bruce Lerro / March 29th, 2023

Orientation

What is play? What are its types and its psychological impacts?

In what way is play different from other human activities? In what ways is play different across the life cycle, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood?  Do people ever stop playing? How many kinds of play are there? What is the difference in the psychological states between playing in a baseball game, playing with crossword puzzles, entering the lottery, watching a puppet show, or rolling down a hill? A child riding on a carousel in not in the same state as one who is in a state of suspenseful anticipation after betting, then watching the roulette wheel. We will find out what these differences are.

What is the relationship between society and play?

Authors such as Johan Huizinga go so far as to say that all social organization – from economics to politics to law and technology – are derived from play. Others say that the forms of play are driven by changes in human societies. For example, games of chance are primary in hunting and gathering societies because the hunt itself is a very unpredictable activity. As the food supply becomes more stable, games where the outcome is more controlled will grow greater as humans feel more stable in their economic life. So the question is – what is primary and what is secondary? The basic themes of sociology of play are that social institutions such as economics, politics and family institutions as derivable from play, just as play can be explained by economics, politics and family structures. Evolutionary biologists don’t buy the value of play. They claim that play is a useless activity in terms of Darwinian natural selection.

Why write about a book that is 90 years old?

Over 20 years ago, I became interested in environmental psychology and discovered there was a whole field in sociology called “leisure studies”. One of the main topics covered was theories of play. Besides the famous book by Johan Huizinga, I came across the work of Roger Caillois and his extremely original theory of play. I was riveted! I found his book Man, Play and Games and devoured it in about a week. However, I had no immediate use for the book either in books I was writing or classes I was teaching. I wrote a five-page summary of the book and left it at that. But I never forgot the book. I remembered it for its interdisciplinary intellectual orientation and its range in writing about every type of play. Caillois’ book was written over 90 years ago, so you are not going to find anything here about the positive and negative impact of Dungeons and Dragons on people’s psychology. Neither will you find the impact of video games on people’s level of happiness. However, despite its age, I believe it still has an enormous amount to teach us. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Roger Caillois’ book is broader and deeper than Huizinga’s famous book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture.

Roger Caillois was an interdisciplinary French sociologist whose range of interests besides play include sacred studies(Man and the Sacred), cults, literature, mythology, poetry, and psychoanalysis. He hovered on the edge of the surrealist movement according to the book The Edge of Surrealism, edited by Claudine Frank, and he corresponded with Andre Breton, considered by some as the father of surrealism.

Theories of Play: Huizinga vs Caillois

Roger Caillois begins his insightful and imaginative book Man, Play and Games by challenging John Huizinga’s theory of play. Huizinga’s theory of play contains six components. Play is:

• Free – that is not serious
• It is absorbing
• It is non-material—that is not for profit
• It is separated from everyday life (done in its own place and time)
• According to fixed rules and an orderly procedure
• Done in secret

Caillois takes exception to some of these points. For example, he pointed out that some games are part of everyday life and are not done in secret as in sports or games of chance. Huizinga is not sensitive to the wide range in the spectrum of play. George Herbert Mead makes a distinction between structured forms of play, which he calls “the game”, and what Mead calls “pretend play”. Huizinga’s claim that play occurs according to fixed rules ignores pretend play which is far more imaginative. If rules exist in pretend play they are made up along the way as in “Calvinball” from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Lastly, modern games are played for profit as in sports stadiums and gambling houses. In short, Caillois claims Huizinga ignores or minimized the diverse form of play. Caillois’ book sets out to correct this.

Why do People Play?

Caillois claims that play has a natural propensity for good or evil. In both cases the same qualities can be identified:

• The need to prove one’s superiority
• The desire to challenge, make a record or merely overcome an obstacle
• The hope and the pursuit of finding out one’s destiny
• The pleasure in secrecy, make-believe or disguise
• Creating fear or inspiring fear
• The search for repetition and symmetry
• The joy of improvising, inventing or infinitely varying solutions
• Solving a mystery or riddle
• The satisfaction deriving from the arts involving contrivance
• The desire to test one’s strength, skill speed, endurance, equilibrium or ingenuity
• The temptation to circumvent rules, laws or conventions
• Intoxication, longing for ecstasy and a desire for voluptuous panic

Examples of How Play Evolved in History

Here are some examples of what play evolved from:

• The cup-and-ball and top were once magical devices
• Roundelays and counting-out rhymes were once ancient incantations
• Stagecraft, liturgy, military tactics and debate also became rules of play
• The greasy pole is related to the myths of heavenly conquest
• Football emerged from to the conflict over the solar globe of two opposing phratries
• String games had once been used to inaugurate the changing seasons
• The kite, before becoming a toy toward the end of the 18th century, in the Far East symbolized the soul of its owner
• In Korea, the kite served as a scapegoat to liberate a sinful community from evil
• Hopscotch once symbolized labyrinth through which the magical initiate must first wander
• The game of tag was once recognized as a terrifying choice of a propitiatory victim
• Games of chance were once associated with divination
• Villages, parishes and cities once had gigantic tops that special confraternities caused to spin during certain festivals
• Slingshots and peashooters have survived as toys where they were once the more lethal weapons

Naming the Four Types of Play and Their Two Fundamental Structures

Caillois divides play into four categories:

• Agon, which involves competition
• Alea which involve games of chance
• Mimicry which involves simulation
• Ilinx which involves the experience of vertigo

These four kinds of play can be grouped into two categories:

1. Paidia play is active, tumultuous, exuberant and spontaneous. This corresponds to mimicry and Ilinx and goes with Mead’s pretend play.
2. Ludus play is more restrained. It involves calculating, contrivances and requires patience and subordination to rules. Ludus play is translatable to Mead’s category of “games” and includes agon and alea.

Caillois’ hypothesis is that the basic themes of society should be traceable from the proportionate use of these four types of play. Read Table A with the four types of play together with Caillois’ and Mead’s structures of play.

Table A

Types of play	Agon Competition	Alea Chance	Mimicry Stimulation	Ilinx Vertigo
Caillois’ structures of play	Ludus	Ludus	Paidia	Paidia
Mead’s Structure of play	Game	Game	Pretend play	Pretend play

Details of the Four Kinds of Play        

Let us look in more detail into examples of each of the types of play along with the psychological states induced. Agon amusement involves competition. Agon play involves skills such as speed, endurance, physical strength, ingenuity and improvisation. The paidia example of play under agon would be wrestling or racing. This kind of play is unique to humans. The more organized type of agon, ludus play at the individual level would be doing cross-word puzzles, playing solitaire or flying a kite. Social expressions of more organized play would include sports such as boxing, football, chess, billiards, duels and tournaments. Competition involves skill. In chance games skills are minimized. In sports competition is based primarily on skill, if the outcome of a game was determined by chance, spectators would complain that the victor’s success was cheap.

The alea kind of play is the opposite of agon. It abolishes natural or acquired differences between people and leaves as much as possible to chance. Paidia forms of chance are counting out rhymes or playing heads or tails. Ludus types of chance games include playing the lottery or gambling at casinos. These activities are uniquely human and not found in the rest of the animal kingdom.

The third type of play, mimicry, involves simulation. In this a person forgets, disguises or temporarily sheds their personality into order to play a role. At the paidia level of mimicry we have masks, costumes, impersonation and games of illusion taking place. The ludus type of mimicry includes puppet shows, theatre, religious rituals, circuses, carnivals and movies. Masks spill over into non-playful situations as in the use of uniforms and in ceremonial etiquette or sympathetic magic. This type of play is also uniquely human.

The fourth type of play is called Ilinx. This type  of play is  primarily physiological. It destroys the stability of perception and imposes a kind of playful panic on the person. At the paidia level of Ilinx is where we find children whirling, swinging on monkey bars, sleigh riding and later on, horseback riding. These states often create a feeling of ecstasy. In the more ilinx forms of play are skiing, mountain climbing, tightrope walking and going on the rides at amusement parks or fair grounds. Mammals will also engage in experiencing vertigo, as anyone who has watched monkeys swing on ropes at the zoo can attest.  Table B at the end of this article summarizes the manifestation of play and their psychological effects.

However, are people constrained to keep these four types of play separate? Perhaps you might feel it is too simplistic to group the types of play into four separate categories. Maybe you think of play as involving more than one category. If so, which ones might work together and which combinations don’t work? We shall see.

Fundamental Types of Relationships Between Types of Play

Agon and ilinx

While a baseball game involves competition, the exuberance over a great catch to end a game or a homerun to win the game involves vertigo or Ilinx on the part of both players and fans. In fact, Caillois argues that certain forms of play constitute fundamental relationships with similar underlying principles. For example, games of chance and games of competition both presuppose absolute equality from the start. The pleasure derived from these games comes from one having done as well as possible in a situation not of their creation. There is satisfaction in overcoming voluntarily accepted obstacles. In this case, it is quite easy to see that playing this game prepares a person for real life.

Mimicry and ilinx

Another kind of fundamental relationship is between mimicry and vertigo or ilinx. Here there is equality but with less roles. There is constant improvisation and trusting in a guiding fantasy. A conjunction of a mask or an illusion is that perception is distorted and leading into a trance. The magic in tribal societies results from a combination of mimicry and ilinx to real social life.

Contingent Relationships Between Types of Play

Alea and vertigo

The second set of relationships as called contingent. Games producing vertigo and chance are contingent as games of chance have a special kind of vertigo which seizes both the lucky and unlikely.  However, this does not allow the suspension of the rules of the game.

Mimicry and agon

Mimicry and agon are also contingent in that every competition also involves playing a role, not only among the players but also by the audience. An audience in a competition act must make believe they are no longer in real life. They are in a theater suspending the rules of everyday life in order to enjoy the competition. Their make-believe is also an act of mimicry.

Forbidden Relationships Between Types of Play

Ilinx and agon

The last set of relationships are forbidden. I think Caillois overstates what this relationship means when it is called “forbidden”. All this means is that the types of play work at cross-purposes and undermine each other. I would say they “clash”. The first set is between ilinx and agon. The regulated rivalry of competition would be undermined if players abandoned themselves to vertigo in the middle of the competition. It would negate the controlled effort and undermine skill, power, calculation and respect for rules. So too, the thrill of vertigo would be ruined if the revelers were expected to come back from their revelry and focus on playing a specific role with specific rules of a game.

Mimicry and alea

The second set of forbidden relationships is between mimicry and chance. In order for a game of chance to maintain its coherence, there must be no ruses. To engage in this is to cease to be playing and to be engaging in sympathetic magic, the object of which is to compel the future. On the other hand, magic would be undermined by admitting that the results of mimicry were subject to chance. Magic is based on the notion that if you do the ritual right, nature will be compelled to respond to the ritual.

To summarize:

Fundamental relationships:

• Mimicry and ilinx
• Alea and agon

Contingent relationships:

• Ilinx and alea
• Mimicry and agon

Forbidden relationships:

• Ilinx and agon
• Mimicry and alea

Play and the Sacred

According to Caillois, many games have their roots in sacred traditions. For example,

masks were once sacred objects that were used in initiation ceremonies. Later they became accessories to ceremonies – as in dance and theater. Now they are playthings at parties for children and erotic balls for adults. With Christianity the design became elongated and simplified reproducing the layout of a basilica. In sacred situations, ilinx type of play is induced by fasting, vision quests, hypnosis, and monotonous or strident music. Games of chance were once associated with divination, as in the case of tarot cards.

In tribal societies, ilinx and mimicry were primary in both games and in sacred traditions inducing magical states of consciousness. With the rise of state civilizations, ilinx and mimicry become forbidden for the lower classes to practice. To the extent it was still used, it was the domain of the priestesses and priests. It was in forms of play that ilinx and mimicry continued for the lower classes.

Corruptions of Play

There is a distortion of play which Caillois calls corruption. All play is based upon the ability of the participants to separate play from reality and be clear where one ends and the other begins. Where play is corrupted, it blurs the relationship between play and reality. This is the realm where the habits of play become obsessions and compulsions. Each of the four types of play has its own form of corruption.

Corruption of agon and alea

Distortions of agon (competition) are wars and unbridled economic competition which becomes lethal or detrimental to most members of society. A corruption of the game of chance is the stock market, where life savings can be wiped out instantaneously with no one able to predict anything. In the spiritual dimension, card playing games of chance can be twisted into actually foretelling the future with the use of tarot cards.

Corruption of mimicry and ilinx

A distortion of mimicry and simulation are through psychological disorders such as multiple personality disorder. In multiple personality disorder, the roles of a game are not dissolved at the end of the game, but become permanent without a central personality to reign them in. In the case of schizophrenia, the masks of people are believed to be real and not temporary. Lastly, the corruptions of Ilinx are alcoholism and drug abuse such as speed which substitutes chemical power for physical effects as a way of life rather than a temporary state. 

Reification

I’ve added a category that I think fits but is not part of Caillois book. Play gets out of control not only through the corruption of fusing play with reality but when play becomes reified and takes on a life if its own. From an evolutionary point of view the purpose of play is to test the waters of a new situation under safe circumstances. Play is subordinated to reality. Reification occurs when the process of testing becomes a thing which takes on a life of its own. An example of the reification of agon is when fans get so caught up in rooting for the home team that they get into fights with opposing fans or when they lose sleep or become depressed over a team’s losses. The reification of alea is when games of chance cause the working class to lose most of their paychecks at the lottery. The reification of mimicry or simulation is the extent to which an actor or an actress becomes so caught up in the role that the role becomes their entire identity and they can’t function outside the role. Lastly, the reification of ilinx is when a person repeatedly puts themselves in dangerous situations through seeking sensations like race-car driving, skydiving or mountain climbing. You might review Table B again for an overview with examples from the entire article.

Table B

Play Classifications, Their Psychological Affects

Corruption, Reification

Types of Play	Agon Competition Hinges on skill—speed endurance, strength, memory, ingenuity	Alea Chance Abolishes natural or acquired differences	Mimicry/ Simulation Forgets, disguises or temporarily sheds personality in order to trick another	Ilinx Vertigo, thrills Destroys the stability of perception and inflicts a kind of playful panic
Range of species application	Uniquely human	Uniquely human	Uniquely human	Human and animal
Examples of Play	Wrestling/racing (not regulated)	Counting out rhymes; heads or tails	Masks, costumes, impersonation, games of illusion	Children whirling, horseback riding, swinging, racing downhill, sleigh riding ecstasy
Examples of Play- individual	Crossword puzzles, solitaire, kite flying
Examples of play- social	Sports Boxing, football chess, billiards, duels tournaments	Lotteries, casinos	Puppet shows, theatre, religious rituals, circuses, carnivals, movies	Skiing, mountain climbing, tightrope walking, amusement rides, amusement parks fairgrounds
Structures of play	Ludus Mead’s game	Ludus Mead’s game	Paidia Mead’s pretend play	Paidia Mead’s pretend play
Corruption (Clash) Blurring the boundaries between play and reality Habits become obsessions or compulsions Applies the rules of play to real life	Wars, unbridled economic competition	Playing the stock market   Cardplaying turned into Tarot	Multiple personality disorder Schizophrenia: believes the mask is real	Alcoholism, drug abuse (speed) Substituting chemical power for physical effects as a way of life
Reification	Sports fans who get carried away with team losses by fighting or depression	Losing a great deal of money at the lottery   being obsessed with “lucky” numbers	An actor or actress whose roles seems more real than their identity in everyday life	Putting oneself in needless danger with constant race-car driving, skydiving, mountain climbing

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Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.

IMPERIALI$M HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALI$M
EU warns of 'unfair' Chinese subsidies in Green Deal plan - draft

Mon, 30 January 2023 

European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels


BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Europe and its partners must do more to combat the effect of Chinese subsidies for the manufacture of clean technology products, the European Commission is set to say on Wednesday in its "Green Deal Industrial Plan".

The plan is designed to outline how Europe can keep its place as a manufacturing hub for green products such as electrical vehicles and respond to multi-billion dollar subsidy programs of China and the United States.

The EU draft document seen by Reuters will insist that trade and competition on net-zero industry be fair and say that some partners' initiatives can have undesired effects.

Chinese subsidies, it says, have long been twice as high as those in the EU, relative to gross domestic product, with a pipeline of $280 billion of investments, distorting the market and ensuring China's lead in a number of technologies.

"Europe and its partners must do more to combat the effect of these unfair subsidies and prolonged market distortion," said the draft, which could still be changed before it is due to be published on Wednesday, a week from an EU leaders' meeting.

The European Commission said trade openness was an essential part of the EU strategy to ensure the bloc is a leader in net-zero technologies.

The Commission will seek to increase the EU's network of free trade agreements, build a global critical raw materials partnership and also deploy trade defence measures.

The Commission will make use of a foreign subsidies regulation that entered force this month to investigate if subsidies granted by third countries impact the EU's internal market, according to the document.

"The EU will also work with partners to identify and address distortive subsidies or unfair trading practices relating to IP theft or forced technology transfer in non-market economies, such as China," it says.

(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; editing by Grant McCool)

EU crafts response to US green tech subsidies

Daniel Aronssohn
Mon, 30 January 2023


The EU will present long-awaited proposals on Wednesday to counter sweeping US subsidies on green tech that threaten Europe's industry, already struggling with soaring energy prices and unfair competition from China.

Faced with member states divided between free market supporters and state aid advocates, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is under pressure to urgently respond to the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

- Why must the EU respond? -

The United States adopted the IRA last year, lavishing subsidies and tax cuts worth $370 billion for US buyers of electric vehicles -- if they "Buy American" -- and leaving European car manufacturers aghast.

European industry has sounded the alarm over the IRA's impact on the continent, as high energy costs and US subsidies could push companies to leave.

Unlike their American counterparts, European businesses already face massive energy bills, unable to turn to cheap Russian gas after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

Gas prices imposed on European manufacturers have tripled compared with the average for the past decade, while gas bills have remained stable in Asia and North America.

The EU has already committed to invest hundreds of billions of euros in green tech including solar panels, batteries and hydrogen.

The bloc, however, risks becoming dependent on Chinese companies that benefit from both massive subsidies and fewer environmental constraints.

"Many companies already relocate partially or totally their production outside Europe," said BusinessEurope, the EU's main business lobby.

Thousands of jobs are at stake in the chemicals, steel and other sectors.

- What are the available options? -

Mandated in December by EU member states to develop a European response, von der Leyen seeks to ease regulatory constraints weighing on green industries.

She has already announced plans for a new law that will make it possible to support strategic European projects, by speeding up and simplifying permits and financing.

Draft proposals by the commission seen by AFP include temporary relief from state aid rules, targeted at priority sectors, as well as support for investments in factories via tax benefits.

But relaxing state aid rules is controversial. It would help the bloc's richest countries, especially France and Germany, since they could pour money into their businesses at the expense of EU competitors.

Germany and France represent respectively 53 and 24 percent of state aid notified to Brussels since March 2022 when the rules were relaxed following the war in Ukraine. Italy came in third, representing seven percent.

In a letter signed by seven countries including Austria, Denmark and Finland, they stressed that the bloc's "competitiveness and better investment environment... cannot be built on permanent or excessive non-targeted subsidies".

Some EU members including France and Italy are calling for new common funds. Von der Leyen promised to work on a new European sovereignty fund paid for by an increase in the bloc's budget.

But such a mechanism will only be possible with the support of Germany and other "frugal" northern EU members, which oppose joint borrowing or any increase to their budgetary contributions.

The EU's single market commissioner, Thierry Breton, has suggested other ways to finance the response including the mobilisation of the 800-billion-euro European recovery plan's remaining funds and loans from the European Investment Bank.

- When will the EU decide? -

EU leaders are expected to decide on von der Leyen's proposals at a summit in Brussels next week.

While there is consensus on the need to act fast, an idea for a sovereignty fund will be pushed back to later this year, according to the draft proposals, as countries including Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden oppose it.

The extent of Wednesday's package beyond easing regulatory pressures and relaxing state aid rules is uncertain.

There are real fears in Europe of a trade war with the United States, while many remain concerned about a response that violates free market principles.

The EU and the United States "have so much more to gain when we work with each other", the commission's three executive vice presidents wrote in the Financial Times on Thursday.

Valdis Dombrovskis, Frans Timmermans and Margrethe Vestager also called for "an open, thriving transatlantic marketplace" and warned of the risk to the single market of a "massive surge" in state subsidies.

EU recovers appetite for trade in green industry push

European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels


Mon, 30 January 2023 
By Philip Blenkinsop

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union is aiming to enact up to five trade deals in record time to ensure its future as a clean tech leader, by securing supplies of key raw materials, increasing markets for green exports and reducing its reliance on China.

A big EU trade push is a key part of its "Green Deal Industrial Plan" to ensure the bloc remains a manufacturing hub able to compete with the likes of the United States, whose new green subsidies law has concerned many in Europe.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will present the plan on Wednesday.

Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said multiple economic shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and increased protectionist tendencies, had sparked an EU-wide debate about competitiveness.

"This debate has evolved into a wider reflection on whether the EU should remain outward-looking or turn further inward," he told lawmakers, adding he believed the bloc drew its strength from being a "trading superpower".

A year ago, EU diplomats said France, which then held the six-month rotating presidency of the EU, halted moves to progress trade deals lest concerns about globalisation disturb its presidential and legislative elections.

Open trade advocates Sweden and Spain, the current and next EU presidency holders, both hope to revive the trade push.

Together, the five deals being targeted could be worth about 10 billion euros ($10.9 billion) to the EU and help cement its market share and influence in the Americas and Asia-Pacific region, according to Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of trade think tank ECIPE.

Andre Sapir, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank, said the EU's free trade agreements often came in waves, with more protectionist periods in between.

"Geopolitical developments and access to raw materials are providing the extra impetus now," he said.

LITHIUM LEADERS CHILE, AUSTRALIA

Von der Leyen has said Europe needs to build up its own refining of raw materials and work with partners including the United States to strengthen supply chains and reduce dependence on China, which dominates rare earth and lithium processing.

The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, which seeks to make the United States a leader in green technology, possibly at Europe's expense, has intensified this need.

The Commission, which negotiates trade agreements on behalf of the 27 EU members, highlights that an updated deal with Chile it agreed in December could give Europe better access to lithium, a key component of vehicle batteries.

Chile is the world's second-largest lithium producer.

The EU sees similar promise from another trade agreement with Australia, the largest lithium producer, which both sides believe could be concluded mid-year.

LATIN AMERICA OPENINGS

The EU executive has negotiated a number of trade deals, but the process of approving them has been painfully slow.

The bloc's most recently implemented trade agreements, with Singapore and Vietnam, took four to five years to clear the European Parliament and EU governments, although the fast-tracked EU-Japan accord took 18 months.

Agreements with Mexico from 2018 and with the Mercosur bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay from 2019 are on hold.

Now, the European Parliament and EU governments may approve as early as mid-year a deal struck only in June 2022 with New Zealand and follow that up with a green light for the Chile agreement, EU officials say.

Consent could follow for the 2018 agreement with Mexico, assuming Mexico accepts splitting the deal in two, part of which could be fast-tracked in Brussels. The planned Australia deal could also be pushed through if it is agreed by mid-2023.

"Finalising the free trade agreements, broadening our network of free trade agreements is going to be high on our agenda this year and next," Dombrovskis told a briefing earlier this month.

The Commission, which negotiates trade agreements for the 27 EU members, said Luiz Inacio Lula's defeat of Jose Bolsanaro in October's Brazilian presidential election had created a window of opportunity to revisit the Mercosur agreement.

"We cannot miss the chance with Lula," a senior Spanish diplomat said.

The deal has been on hold due to EU concerns about Amazon deforestation and demands for sustainability commitments. Lula has vowed to tackle rainforest deforestation, but trade analysts say reviving the EU-Mercosur deal will still require tough negotiations.

"It was certainly impossible for the EU with Bolsanaro, but it's also complicated now for the Mercosur side," Sapir said.

($1 = 0.9184 euros)

(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Germany's Thyssenkrupp says Europe must match U.S. climate package

Mon, 30 January 2023 

A logo of Thyssenkrupp AG is pictured at the company's headquarters in Essen

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German conglomerate Thyssenkrupp on Monday joined peers in saying that European industry was under threat should the continent fail to come up with a scheme similar to the U.S. climate package to boost local companies.

"The common task of policymakers, business and society must ... be to ensure that the green transformation succeeds without deindustrialization," Chief Executive Martina Merz said in a prepared speech published ahead of the group's annual general meeting on Friday.

She said that was particularly the case for Germany with its industrial base, including steel, cement and chemicals makers, that have all suffered from higher energy costs, driving inflation at a time when they need to decarbonise production.

That has stoked fears of European companies shutting or moving production to regions where costs are lower, compounded by the $430 billion U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to support clean technologies via tax credits.

The European Union responded this month saying it will prepare a law to make life easier for its green industry and back it up with state aid and a sovereignty fund to keep firms from moving to the United States.

"That's good, because tomorrow's markets are being carved up now," Merz said, adding that a planned spin-off of Thyssenkrupp's steel division still required more clarity in terms of subsidies as well as energy and raw materials prices.

(Reporting by Christoph Steitz, Editing by Miranda Murray and Christina Fincher)

Slagging Surrealism

Money for arts 

"Surrealism itself was divided on the issue of what relation, if any, it should have to commerce. It was all very well to say, as some did, that the movement was born of a marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist critiques of capitalism; certainly there had been a long flirtation with [Leon] Trotsky on the part of some surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s. ... 

 "But artists have to earn a living. In 1926, both Max Ernst and Joan Miro did backdrop designs for a production of 'Romeo and Juliet,' by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. ... 

Most of the surrealists, including [Andre] Breton, made their living by dealing, 'art advising,' involvement in photography, advertising and the fashion industry. Indeed, without the patronage of fashion, it is hard to see how surrealism would have made its way in Paris at all. "[Salvador] Dali, in particular, received a lot of flak for his relations with the rich. But he never made any pretense about this, unlike [Pablo] Picasso, whose communist sympathies were mostly wind. 'Picasso is a genius!' Dali would later exclaim. 'Me too! Picasso is a Spaniard! Me too! Picasso is a communist! Me neither!' " 

 — Robert Hughes, writing on "L'Amour Fou," in the Guardian

What Can We Learn from Dystopian Fiction About Climate Change?
If you haven’t heard of cli-fi yet, you are not alone; however, you have probably either read or watched some already.

by Murat Cem Mengüç

June 30, 2017
Support Hyperallergic’s independent arts journalism. 

Philippe Squarzoni, Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science, copyright Harry N. Abrams (cover image courtesy of Abrams ComicArts)

Recently, a friend asked on social media, “What do you people read to wind down?” He was referring to the distress we all suffer from the endless negative news coming from the Trump administration. I first suggested sci-fi, but upon remembering that he is a lobbyist for international corporations’ divestiture from the fossil fuel industry, I decided to do some research on sci-fi novels which focus on climate change. That’s when I discovered the so called cli-fi (climate change fiction) genre.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, you are not alone; most of the people I mentioned it to were unaware of it too. However, you have probably either read or watched some cli-fi already. IMBd’s cli-fi page has more than a dozen titles. The Goodreads list of cli-fi novels is over 130 titles long. During the recent months, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, Zachary Mason’s Void Star, Jane Harper’s The Dry, Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, and Sally Abbot’s Closing Down have all hit the shelves described as cli-fi. And, since February of this year, the Chicago Review of Books has published a monthly column on its web site exclusively dedicated to the genre.


Steven Amsterdam,The Things We Didn’t See Coming, copyright Anchor (image courtesy Steven Amsterdam)

Still, there is strong skepticism about the genre’s originality. When I mentioned it to my sci-fi and graphic novel enthusiast friends, they mostly rolled their eyes. Nothing was new about stories focusing on a man-made ecological disasters; they just showed up in other literary categories. For example, Alan Moore’s graphic novel The Swamp Thing, a story based on the consequences of mismanaged nuclear waste was published in 1971. This was also the year in which Dr. Seuss wrote his infamous Lorax, a children’s classic about deforestation and environmental irresponsibility. Even older is Alexander Bogdanov’s communist sci-fi novel, The Red Star – now almost 110 years old – which refers to an ecological crisis very much like ours. Older yet are the ancient religious and mythological Mesopotamian, Hindu, Chinese, and Abrahamic narratives, all of which refer to eco-disasters caused by human mischief.

Octavia Butler,, copyright Grand Central Publishing (photo courtesy of Hachette Book Group)

Yet, it is also true that there has been a growing emphasis on ecology during the last two decades in almost every field. In history, there is the so called spatial turn, which refers to a growing interest in geography and ecology. In philosophy, Glenn Albrecht has coined the term solastalgia to describe “a form of psychological or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change.” In the field of geology, there is widespread acknowledgment of the anthropocene, re-popularized in reference to a new epoch defined by the “significant human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystem” according to Wikipedia. So, cli-fi can be understood as modern literature’s response to our anxieties about the current consequences of climate change.

In her book, Antonia Mehnert defines cli-fi as:

literature dealing explicitly with anthropogenic climate change,” which “gives insight into the ethical and social ramifications of this unparalleled environmental crisis, reflects on current political conditions that impede action on climate change, explores how risk materializes and effect society, and finally plays an active part in shaping our conception of climate change.

In Wikipedia, cli-fi means the “literature that deals with climate change and global warming. Not necessarily speculative in nature, works of cli-fi may take place in the world as we know it or in the near future.” Hence, cli-fi is not any eco-conscious or eco-apocalyptic literature. It focuses specifically on the current climate change, which we are experiencing. (One place to build your familiarity with cli-fi is to read a recent interview with Dan Bloom, the man who originally coined the term.)


Area X, The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, copyright FSG (image courtesy of Jeff VanderMeer)

Most commonly cited examples of the genre are Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Kim Stanley Robinson’s the Science in The Capital trilogy, Margaret Atwood’s The Maddaddam trilogy, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. However, Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower tops my list, since it predates (in 1993) those novels mentioned above, and it seems to have inspired Atwood’s The Maddaddam trilogy and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which are considered pillars of the genre. It also reads like a masterpiece, along the lines of Jean Rhys’s Wide Saragossa Sea. The Parable of the Sower is the coming-of-age story of a an African-American minister’s daughter who lives in a racially mixed and charged community, which gated itself due to an ongoing ecological crisis. A less acknowledged, but excellent novel is Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming, which is experimental and enchanting till the very last page. There are large gaps in the story-line, that make it read like Andre Breton’s surreal novel Nadya, but these gaps also mimic how we deal with moments of disaster and stress by taking refuge in collective amnesia. By far the best cli-fi out there must be Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach trilogy. This is indeed a story about our changing climate: how a territory called Southern Reach becomes a self conscious ecology, starts to remember, thinking, and communicate with human beings. VanderMeer also shifts between genres; the first volume is a horror story that gave me serious nightmares three nights in a row. The second volume is a detective story, and the third one is a mystery.

As for graphic novels, Philippe Squarzoni’s award winning Climate Changed, a graphic documentary about his personal struggle to understand climate change is a remarkable artistic feat. Brian Wood’s, The Massive, series relates the story of an eco-activist gang who roam the international seas in the near future, trying to save the planet from further harm. The fifth volume of Paul Chadwick’s Concrete: Think Like a Mountain is also a personal favorite of mine, and the last issue of World War 3 from AK Press is entirely dedicated to climate change chaos.


The Massive, written by Brian Wood and Illustrated by Kristian Donaldson and Garry Brown, copyright Dark Horse Comics (courtesy of Dark Horse Comics)

Last but not the least, I have to mention The Dark Mountain Project, which is active since 2009. It is best known for its Dark Mountain Manifesto, which opens with the statement: “Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.” They have so far published 10 volumes of collected short fiction, poetry, critical essays, graphic fiction, and visual art, all of which explore climate change, and how we write or tell stories about it. Its past editorial boards have included authors like the famous feminist sci-fi writer Ursula La Guin and late cultural critic John Berger. Each volume delivers a serious punch and could generate more debate about cli-fi.


Uncivilised Poetics, Dark Mountain #10, October 2016, copyright The Dark Mountain Project (courtesy of The Dark Mountain Project)

We all know the news about the future of our planet is not good. At the current rate, we have only 60 more harvests left. Marine life is in dramatic decline, and Antarctica has joined the North Pole in melting, which has far more disastrous implications. Weather temperatures are regularly record breaking, sea and river levels are rising, the salinity of our oceans is quickly changing, and the behavior of our atmosphere is evermore unpredictable. Climate refugees are no longer a thing of fiction; parts of Africa and the Middle East will become uninhabitable in the near future, and the World Bank has already advised a number of countries to revise their immigration policies, because they will be hit by a tsunami of migrants. Meanwhile, in the US, we are governed by those who prefer to erase the climate-change data, withdraw from the Paris climate accords, sell our natural reserves to the developers, and eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. Pathetic as it may sound, cli-fi offers a type of relief from this bigotry. It imagines that one day such idiocies will be washed off clean, and the earth will continue its adventure — probably without us. And even if anyone is left to survive, they would most likely strike a far better covenant with this planet than the one we have at present.
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Murat Cem Mengüç is a freelance writer, artist and a historian who holds a PhD in history of MENA. He is the founder of Studio Teleocene, and currently based outside of Washington, DC. More by Murat Cem Mengüç

Auction of contested African artifacts going ahead in Paris

PARIS (AP) — A Nigerian commission has called for the cancellation of Monday’s auction in Paris of sacred Nigerian statues that it alleges were stolen.

Christie’s auction house has defended the sale, saying the artworks were legitimately acquired and the sale will go ahead.

In recent years, French courts have consistently ruled in favor of auction houses whose sales of sacred objects, such as Hopi tribal masks, were contested by rights groups and representatives of the tribes.

A Princeton scholar, professor Chika Okeke-Agulu, alongside Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, raised alarm earlier this month that the objects were looted during the Biafran war in the late 1960s.

Christie’s wrote earlier this month to the Nigerian commission, saying the sale would go ahead.

Okeke-Agulu, who is a member of the Igbo tribe, said the objects were taken through “an act of violence” from his home state of Anambra and that they should not be sold. An online petition with over 2,000 signatures is demanding that the auction be halted.

The petition said “as the world awakens to the reality of systemic racial injustice and inequality, thanks to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, we must not forget that it is not just the Black body, but also Black culture, identity and especially art that is being misappropriated.”

It claims that between 1967 and 1970, as Nigeria’s Biafran civil war raged and while more than 3 million civilians were dying, a renowned European treasure hunter was in Biafra “on a hunting spree for our cultural heritage.”

In a statement to AP Monday, Christie’s said “these objects are being lawfully sold having been publicly exhibited and previously sold over the last decades prior to Christie’s involvement.”

While the auction house said it recognized the “nuanced and complex debates around cultural property,” it said that public sales should go ahead of objects like these to stop the black market flourishing.

Paris has a long history of collecting and selling tribal artifacts, tied to its colonial past in Africa, and to Paris-based groups in the 1960s, such as the “Indianist” movement that celebrated indigenous tribal cultures.

Interest in tribal art in Paris was revived in the early 2000s following two high-profile — and highly lucrative — sales in Paris of tribal art owned by late collectors Andre Breton(FOUNDER OF SURREALISM) and Robert Lebel.

Controversy over sales can be a double-edged sword for an auction house. In the past, such contested sales have served to raise the ultimate selling price of the objects going under the hammer because of media interest, but there has also been instances where buyers have been deterred from purchasing artifacts over fears of a backlash.

The Pope of Surrealism himself—an informative, intelligent, readable study



https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/30/archives/andre-breton-magus-of-surrealism-by-anna-balakian-illustrated-289.html

By Leo Bersani
May 30, 1971

Our favorite intellectual game is to announce revolutions of consciousness. From Charles Reich's parlor game theory of consciousness‐on‐the move to the cataclysmic view of history implied in Michel Foucault's brilliant “Words and Things,” con temporary thinkers have been generously satisfying the appetite for conclusive endings and wholly fresh beginnings which, as Frank Kermode has argued, characterizes Western attempts to impose design and purpose on experience. As it becomes more and more difficult to imagine solutions—for the self and for society—which are not merely repeti tions of the problems they are meant to solve, modes of magical thought help to smother our painful sense of historical entrapment. Apocalyptic thinking provides a glamorous fiction of escape from inescapable history.

To return to surrealism now is a little like looking at ourselves from a distance. Surrealism was the most spectacular announcement in our century of a revolution both psychic and social, and it is no accident that the slogans and manifestoes of May, 1968, in Paris were more reminiscent of surrealist verbal fireworks than of the more austere dialectical re flections on revolution and rebellion of either Sartre or Camus. Contem porary recipes for revolution often blend attacks against capitalism and nationalism, psychic trips designed to expand consciousness, the deter mination to free women from their economic and psychological enslave ment to the “bourgeois rationalism” of a male‐dominated society, and an interest in the occult, in mysterious, correspondences between personal destiny and objective forces or laws. These ingredients, so familiar to us today, were also the principal ele ments of a surrealist program in which the exploration of dreams, the reading of Tarot cards and a battle against economic oppression often seemed to have equal dignity in an enterprise of total human liberation.

For all its “relevance,” surrealism has been rather neglected in Amer ica. Anna Balekian's new book is therefore particularly welcome. Miss Balakian, professor of French and comparative literature at New York University, has written an informative, intelligent and commendably readable study about the Pope of Surrealism himself— its uncompro mising, often tyrannical director and most articulate spokesman, André Breton. Miss Balakian surveys both the life and the work, with a strong emphasis on the exposition of Bre ton's thought. Her point of view is almost unreservedly sympathetic, and while I would myself have been in clined totake a more critical per spective on both Breton's personality and his achievements, Miss Balak ian's judicious book bath documents her own admiration and gives us the evidence for a somewhat less sym pathetic appraisal.

Surrealism as a movement had its ups and dawns, but from 1919—the year of “Les Champs Magnétiques,” the experiment in automatic writing which Breton called the first surreal ist text—to Breton's death in 1966, the continuity of surrealism was guaranteed by the leader's active faith. Through all the defections and the heresies, the Church was always alive in his person. Even after World War II, when the fortunes of sur realism were particularly low, Bret on's apartment in Paris once again became the central office for surreal ist research. And among the recent recruits or admirers were some of the major figures in contemporary French writing: Yves Bonnefoy, Julien Gracq, Malcolm de Chazal, and André Pievre de Mandiargues. Breton could add these names to the extraordinarily impressive list of writers and painters who had already been attracted, however briefly, to surrealism. To mention just a few of these artists—Paul Eluard, René Char, René Magritte, Giorgio di Chirico, Max Ernst—is to recognize at once the unique importance of surrealism in twentieth‐century cul tural life. It was the most powerful magnet for artistic genius in our century. And the magnetizing power of surrealism—its ability to draw so much original talent into its field— is, as Miss Balakian rightly suggests, inseparable from the intellectual and moral authority of its charismatic leader.

Breton had always emphasized the collective nature of the surrealist adventure. Indeed, the originality of surrealism as an artistic movement lies partly in its effort to erase the traditional hierarchy of individual talents which helps us to give a ebherent shape to literary history. Nevertheless, it is of course difficult to avoid a certain violation of the surrealist spirit and to refrain from any assessment of Breton's own literary achievement. Miss Balakian proposes a useful division of Breton's writings into what she calls three distinct structures: “free verse...; logical prose, which is the structure under which can be classified all his critical writings, philosophical essays, and manifestoes and addresses; and finally — perhaps his most original farm—analogical prase, which unlike the prose poem takes on vast propor tions, and often the dimensions of a short novel.”

I have never felt comfortable with the heavy, frequently pompous elo quence of Breton's “logical prose” (especially in the manifestoes). On the other hand, I think Miss Balakian is right to suggest that Breton has been underestimated as a poet. She argues convincingly for his verse, while recognizing its difficulties. We may be put off by the longwinded and harsh‐sounding lines of Breton's poetry, the archaic verb structures, the scientific terminology and occult ist imagery; but at its best his verse has a startlingly fresh shock quality. Still, Breton's particular literary gifts are perhaps most evident in the “analogical prose,” especially in “Nadja” (published in 1928 and avail able in an English translation by Richard Howard) and in “Arcane 17” (written in 1944 and 1947). The dif ferences between these two texts are considerable. If, as Michel Beau jour has written, all of Breton's other works can be thought of as “only fragments” of the triumphant syn thesis of his thought achieved in “Arcane 17,” “Nadja” is perhaps the more appealingly tentative quest of the younger Breton — through his meetings in Paris with the mysterious Nadja—for signs and signals of his own identity. But in spite of differ ences, both “Nadja” and “Arcane 17” illustrate Breton's talent for narra tives in which richly criss crossing networks of anal ogy provide a unified structure saved from rigidity by the unpredictable, open‐ended na ture of the mental processes of association.

Breton was, then, a signifi cant literary figure in his own right, as well as the leader of a movement which func tioned as a major source of inspiration for twentieth ‐ cen tury poetry and painting. Even Sartre, in his famous attack in 1947 on surrealism's view of itself as a revolutionary move ment, conceded that it was “the only poetic movement of the first half of the twentieth century.” But to take Breton and surrealism seriously, we must dismiss—or at least sus pend—our appreciation of its importance in the arts, and consider the surrealist art prod uct as an almost negligible by product in a collective experi ment designed to transform radically the self and society. Surrealism in the libraries and in the museums is the defeat of its revolutionary ambitions — another victory, as we would say, for “repressive tolerance.”

What did surrealism propose in the way of psychic and so cial transformations? Breton wished, as Miss Balakian puts it, “to see how far objective necessity could be made to coincide with the desires of the human will.” The im portance of this lies in an attempted revision of Freudian ideas about the relation be tween desires, dreams or fan tasies and a reality apparently distinct from those fantasies. Breton was interested not in how we adjust our desires to a reality incompatible with them, but rather in the as yet unexplored ways in which the desires expressed in dreams, for example, seek to be satis fied in our waking life. De sire, as he writes in “Les Vases Communicants,” pursues in the external world the objects nec essary for its own fulfillment. The surrealist's availability to chance is not simply a passive stance. The discovery of our techniques for coercing people and things into a conformity with desires we may not even be consciously aware of re quires that state of mind which the surrealists brought to their tireless walks through Paris: a leisurely but attentive observa tion of those movements by which we attempt to make physical space coincide with psychic space. The surrealist stroll is part of a scientific investigation into the mind's power to change the world.

But the “marvelous” coin cidences which Breton records in “Les Vases Communicants” and in “Nadja” leave the larger social world intact. The com plex and at times stormy his tory of surrealism's relation with Communism expresses the group's understandable but no less telling failure to imagine specific ways in which the psychic and the social revolu tions might be coordinated. Aragon abandoned the psychic laboratory for the party. Breton, after a brief period in the party, resolutely returned to more pri vate revolutionary programs.

In discussing this aspect of surrealism, Miss Balakian al lows her sympathy for Breton to silence her critical intelli gence. She assures us that Breton refused to write a paper for the party on the conditions of Italian workers “not due to any dislike of Italian workers but because it jarred with the basic principles of autonomy he maintained in politics as in private life.” The fact that “Breton had not taken orders from anybody since the day he left his father's house” may make us think of him as a very lucky man, but it is hardly an argument for his refusing to take orders. Also, it's clear enough that the assignment “jarred” with Breton's “basic principles of autonomy,” but this intransigent commitment to his own autonomy led to decisions (not to fight with his friends on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, not to join the Resistance in France but to spend the war years in America) which make revolu tionary personal freedom look suspiciously dike social quietism (as Sartre called it) if not po litical conservatism. The sur realists were for a time after World War I the bad boys of French cultural life, but to shock the bourgeoisie is not to destroy the structures of bour geois society.

Finally, there was a certain authoritarianism and even in tolerance in Breton's personal ity. His psychological and moral openness had definite limits. I'm thinking of Breton's pen chant for excommunicating “fal len” members of the group, of his exclusion of homosexuals from the surrealist coterie, of his dismissal of Artaud large ly because of the latter's use of drugs, and of the curious discrepancy in Breton's writ ing between the stated desire to explode the traditional bound aries of consciousness and a style that imprisons thought in a tightly disciplined rhetorical art reminiscent of Chateaubri and.

As I have suggested, the vi sion of revolutionary transfor mations of consciousness is per haps a fantasy of escape from history rather than a viable in spiration for programs of his torical change. In Breton's case, that fantasy expressed, in part, an admirably generous view of human possibilities. But —and the example is an in structive one for us—the lan guage of intransigence also helped to protect his somewhat self‐limiting freedom, his re luctance to take the psycho logical and moral risks of a possibly more authentic rebel lion. ■

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s Art, Politics, and the Psyche

A LOCAL TEXT FROM EDMONTON WHERE THE U OF A IS LOCATED

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s

Art, Politics, and the Psyche

AUTHOR: Steven Harris, University of Alberta

DATE PUBLISHED: January 2004

AVAILABILITY: Available

FORMAT: Hardback

ISBN: 9780521823876

This volume examines the intersection of Hegelian aesthetics, experimental art and poetry, Marxism and psychoanalysis in the development of the theory and practice of the Surrealist movement. Steven Harris analyzes the consequences of the Surrealists' efforts to synthesize their diverse concerns through the invention, in 1931, of the "object" and the redefining of their activities as a type of revolutionary science. He also analyzes the debate on proletarian literature, the Surrealists' reaction to the Popular Front, and their eventual defense of an experimental modern art

Review

"Excellent...an example of how good art history can be. Thorough research of primary sources and intelligent grounding in social history is accompanied by genuinely illuminating interpretations of specific works." CAA Reviews

"A strong, well-illustrated analysis and a highly complex picture of Surrealism in the 1930s." Pop Matters

"It makes a significant contribution to the understanding of how and why surrealism changed in the 1930's."

Linda Steer


Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche

GOOGLE BOOKS

Steven Harris
Cambridge University Press, Jan. 26, 2004 - Art - 342 pages
This volume examines the intersection of Hegelian aesthetics, experimental art and poetry, Marxism and psychoanalysis in the development of the theory and practice of the Surrealist movement. Steven Harris analyzes the consequences of the Surrealists' efforts to synthesize their diverse concerns through the invention, in 1931, of the "object" and the redefining of their activities as a type of revolutionary science. He also analyzes the debate on proletarian literature, the Surrealists' reaction to the Popular Front, and their eventual defense of an experimental modern art.

CAA BOOK REVIEW 

June 11, 2004

Steven Harris Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the PsycheNew York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 340 pp.; 35 b/w ills. Cloth $108.00 (0521823870)

Robert Linsley

CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2004.45

Steven Harris’s new book on Surrealism is excellent. It is refreshing to see the politics of Surrealism properly acknowledged, and, at the same time and as part of the same argument, to see the aesthetics that underwrote those politics correctly assessed. In Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche, Harris tracks an extremely rich and nuanced discourse between Surrealism and the French Left, a series of debates virtually unknown in Anglophone culture; he also nicely lays out his arguments in clear and readable prose. But the real issues at stake in this discourse are difficult to convey to a contemporary audience bred on the simplistic and misleading accounts of Surrealism found in much of the literature. Virtually all histories of Surrealism on this side of the Atlantic persist in viewing it as an art movement, and in looking at Surrealist works as if they were only art. Though Surrealist research often resulted in art, it did not start that way. For any understanding of the potentials of modern art, of modernism’s past dreams and future possibilities, it is crucial to consider fully what the Surrealists were trying to do.

As an avant-garde movement, Surrealism aimed to surmount the anodyne role of art as a provider of “spiritual” experiences that make a false life bearable, and to overcome the specialist function of the artist. These goals were frequently and plainly stated in manifestos and articles in Surrealist publications, but mainly expressed in the Surrealist artworks themselves. The most critical social position was presented in sensuous form, in an appeal to the imagination and the poetic faculty, not in the dry and all-too-literal polemics that we are familiar with today. A failure to realize this might be one of the reasons why Surrealism is not entirely understood today. Harris performs the task of elucidation that we evidently need, makes very concrete and illuminating readings of enigmatic and ambiguous works, and traces a chronology of Surrealist activity that allows all the points and sharpened edges in its polemic to emerge to the touch once more.

The Surrealists wanted to understand the relation between subjectivity and the world, between the inner and outer realms of experience. On the surface, their quest seems too general, too vague to generate useful answers; yet the importance of line of research is that it has political and aesthetic and psychological ramifications. It can reduce to matters of artistic technique (an artwork might be constructed according to an objective system or be the product of a series of decisions by the artist), or to problems in interpretation (such as the question of how much weight to give to intention), but for the Surrealists the fundamental issue was the role of the intellectual in modern society. This issue also set the music for the Surrealists’ complicated dances with the French Communist Party. 

The great merit of Harris’s book is that it brings forward the philosophical researches of André Breton and the others, most profoundly their speculation on the connection between mind and matter. The question was left unsolved—perhaps it is unsolvable—but for the Surrealists it was capable of generating concrete outcomes. Harris argues that the Surrealists based their investigations most importantly on Hegel, particularly his notion that, in both the romantic and modern eras, art must become knowledge. This notion so contradicts the popular, widely disseminated view of Surrealism that it deserves a double take. The Surrealists saw their activity as research into the operations of the mind, in order to understand how the imagination works; they did not want to traffic in obscurities. Judging from Harris’s bibliography (of studies published mostly in French), some work has been done on Hegelianism in Surrealist thought, and therefore the subject is not Harris’s main focus. Yet, as the author suggests in his introduction, the recent interest in Georges Bataille, fostered partly by the editors of October, has brought with it a one-sided derogation of Breton and an obscured appreciation of his critical and dialectical appropriation of Hegel. The Surrealists were not in any way idealist; their Hegelianism was materialist, Marxist, and, one might even say, negative. In other words, there may be more similarities between Breton and Theodor Adorno than first meets the eye. The Surrealists were not looking for false resolutions, but for openings toward the future.

Harris does not pursue the Hegelian strand as far as I, for one, might wish. Among other things, I came to the book to gain a better understanding of where the Surrealists thought the boundaries of consciousness lay. That topic, however, might belong more to the 1920s and the theoretical context of Breton’s novel Nadja. As the book’s title indicates, Harris’s period is the 1930s, and so inevitably must entail a close study of the political discourse of the movement. But if his study manages to put the Bretonian core of Surrealism back on the table in an unfamiliar way, namely through its politics, it also opens up an extremely rich body of aesthetic and political thought virtually unknown in the English-speaking art world. For myself, I knew that Salvador Dalí was an important thinker, but I did not realize how rigorous, how polemical, and how taken up with the political agenda of the group, at least in his early period, he was. Likewise, I have some familiarity with Roger Callois from reprints of his writings in October, but also without an inkling of the real nature of his importance at the time. But the real surprises were Claude Cahun and Tristan Tzara.

Tzara, the former Dadaist who famously declared that “thought begins in the mouth,” turns out to be a committed Marxist who broke with Surrealism because he felt that automatism had degenerated into mystification. According to Harris, “The waking dream is for Tzara … consciously Hegelian in its attempt to synthesize and incorporate the rational and the irrational in a new mode of thought” (128). Cahun is even more surprising. Her photos are now well known and she is generally seen as a Cindy Sherman avant-la-lettre, but as Harris demonstrates, she was one of the sharpest, most passionate and literate of leftists, as well as a strong presence at the center of the Surrealist group. Her writing must now be essential in any history of twentieth-century art and theory.

Cahun appears here not as a photographer, but as a writer and maker of objects. Harris’s book is built around the Surrealist object, whether assemblage, found, or readymade. He focuses on two important occasions: objects published and discussed in the December 1931 issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, and in the Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets, held in May of 1936 at the Galerie Charles Ratton (the latter perhaps the central moment in his history). Harris tracks changes in the conceptualization of the object in Surrealist literature, but he also shows how the objects themselves constitute interventions in an ongoing debate. Furthermore, he has evidently studied the works closely and consequently has a lot of very interesting things to say about how they are made and what they mean.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s is an example of how good art history can be, and it reaches this level because thorough research of primary sources and intelligent grounding in social history is accompanied by genuinely illuminating interpretations of specific works. It is rare that an art historian today can marshal the whole orchestra so that all the sections play together and in tune. It is the tuning that is crucial, by which I mean an ear for the note that matters, in a text or a work. If I have one criticism of Harris’s book, it is that his prose is not perfect music—but that is excusable considering the constraints and pressures of a graduate dissertation. In comparison to any other example of that genre that I have read, Harris’s book is superior. It covers a lot of material without losing focus; it does justice to the specificity of the artwork without losing sight of the politics that surround it; the writing is polemical and participates in current debates while maintaining a scholarly posture defended by rigorous historical argument. This book deserves to be noticed, and read.

Robert Linsley

Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo

From edition 2005 Issue 3

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s

Published: SEPTEMBER 14, 2005

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche. By Steven Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 328 pages. 35 b+w illustrations.

Whether due to a sense of convenience or to partisan docility, too many intellectuals regard and represent the social revolution as either completed or unrealizable. It is time to rise up against such a misunderstanding of the realities that surrounds us, and of the determinism that governs them. (225)

Cited in the journal Clé

November or December 1938.

In his new book, adapted from his doctoral dissertation from the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta art historian Steven Harris analyzes one of the most complex and fraught moments in the history of the avant-garde and of twentieth century art in general. Harris’s primary intent “is to understand the development of surrealist thought and activity at a moment when, in its second period from 1929-1939, it was able to catch a glimpse of what the implications of its radical aesthetic project might be, at the time of its most active and searching attempt to synthesize Hegelian aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism.”(2) What is notable about Harris’s approach to surrealism is that, unlike other writers on the subject, he attempts, largely successfully, to weave together the Hegelian, psychoanalytic, and Marxian themes in his own methodology, thus illuminating the cultural and political significance of surrealism, especially for the members of the group allied with André Breton. Harris’s analysis diverges not only from the Kantian-inflected interpretations of surrealism found in such diverse writers as Jürgen Habermas, Jean-François Lyotard, and Clement Greenberg but also from the more heavily psychoanalytic approach found within the writers around the journal October. While the secondary literature on surrealism has been rapidly expanding in the past two decades, Harris’s book is such a welcome addition to the literature thanks to his desire to focus, not just on the formal aspects of the objects produced by surrealists or on the politics of the surrealists, but rather on the twin poles of art and politics in a constant productive tension with one another. While bearing a superficial similarity to certain transgressive and hybridizing strategies in postmodernist and post-colonialist critiques Harris’s foregrounding of the Hegelian element in both his analysis and methodology declares his distancing from the theoretical models of the recent past.

An example of both the similarities and differences within the modernist-postmodernist debates on the question of the avant-garde and surrealism is captured in the work of Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard. In perhaps his most widely read essay dealing with questions of aesthetics and the avant-garde, entitled “Modernity – An Incomplete Project” Habermas summarized the diverse approaches within surrealism to overcome and level the barriers between art and life, fiction and praxis, appearance and reality to one plane or “the attempts to declare everything to be art and everyone to be an artist, to retrace all criteria and to equate aesthetic judgement with the expression of subjective experiences – all these undertakings have proved themselves to be sort of nonsense experiments.”   Surrealism makes two strategic errors from Habermas’s perspective: first, failure of the surrealist revolt arises when the attempt to integrate the autonomous cultural sphere into life disperses its contents but there is no resultant emancipatory effect. Secondly, Habermas argues that the focus of the surrealists on dissolving the sphere of the aesthetic-expressive merely replaces one abstraction with another precisely because “a reified everyday praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements. Reification cannot be overcome by forcing just one of those highly stylized cultural spheres to open up and become more accessible.”   Harris, by foregrounding the Hegelian aspect of the surrealists, demonstrates that Breton is emphasizing the imagination over the rational but not merely advocating “nonsense experiments”. In the combination of psychoanalysis and Hegel, the surrealist objects of the mid-1930s reveal that “the use of Hegel becomes the occasion for the end of art anticipated in his own aesthetics (as art becomes reflection), but this occurs through a reinvestment of desire in the object, rather than through a more conscious, rational approach. Art does not become pure Idea as it approaches philosophy; rather, it retains a sensual dimension through the poetic imagination, to which it returns with the aid of Freud, in a contestation of the purity and autonomy of modern art.”   In his analysis Harris, reveals the inadequacy of Habermas’s formulation of surrealism, in particular, and by broader implication the limitations of his understanding of the role of art and the avant-garde within modernity.

By contrast, in the work of the postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard the work of the avant-garde art practices are valued for their ability to explore the sublime but sideline the Hegelian impetus of the surrealist avant-garde to hold onto the tension between the artistic and political realms. Lyotard argues, “Burke’s elaboration of the aesthetics of the Sublime, and to a lesser degree Kant’s, outlined a world of possibilities for artistic experiments in which the avant-gardes would later trace out their paths.”   In opposition to Habermas advocacy of the communicative role outlined for the aesthetic-expressive sphere, Lyotard advocates for the avant-garde to abandon “the role of identification that the work previously played in relation to the community of addressees.”   The avant-garde becomes wedded to an investigation of the `unrepresentable’ within the Kantian notion of the sublime or, as Lyotard himself argues, “our business is not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be represented”.   Lyotard attacks both Hegel and Habermas at the end of his essay on “What is the Postmodern” by arguing that “it is not to be expected that this task will effect the last reconciliation between language-games (which, under the name of faculties, Kant knew to be separated by a chasm), and that only the transcendental illusion (that of Hegel) can hope to totalize them into a real unity.”   Hegel and Habermas are pilloried for their willingness to embrace the terror of such totalizing errors. I would argue that Harris’s investigations into the surrealist object reveal a more nuanced understanding of surrealism and the avant-garde than that of either Habermas or Lyotard in re-establishing the legitimacy of the Hegelian dimension in the surrealist object as neither a “nonsense experiment” or as merely an exploration of the sublime.

Given the intensity of the debates over the legacy of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts over the last three in recent decades on the relationship between art and politics, Harris adroitly balances the nuances of politics, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. In his analysis, Harris places his emphasis on an immanent engagement with his subject, thus enabling him to see in surrealism an important exploration in the attempt to found another culture. In other words he notes, in the 1930s, “[surrealist] art was no longer simply art, the production of rarefied commodities for connossieurs,” but actually, “reconceptualized as a kind of science – that other autonomous sphere of human endeavour – as a form of experimental research contributing to a greater knowledge of human thought.” “Art would no longer be,” in Harris’s words,” what it had been hitherto, a separate art belonging to a dying culture, but would realize itself in becoming something that would make a real contribution to the present and the future, both in re

alizing its true nature as unconscious thought – the source of imagination, in this psychoanalytic understanding – and in the interpretation of such works in the interests of knowledge.”(3)   Harris places the emphasis on an imminent critique of surrealism while yet maintaining the dynamic inter-action between art and politics. This is an indication, perhaps, of Harris’s greatest departure from one of the most significant schools of thought on surrealism; that of the October group of critics and historians. While he acknowledges the important work of Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Denis Hollier,   Harris is very careful to emphasize his own perspective, residing more on the side of the historical and dialectical as opposed to the more `theoretical’ and psychoanalytical approach of the New York critics. For example, from Harris’s perspective, Foster’s symptomatic reading of Surrealism leaves out “the movement’s inter-textual relation to art and literature of its time, and its valorization of science as a supersession of these categories.” (117) Harris especially challenges the work of Krauss and Hollier for its uncritical acceptance of Georges Bataille’s description of the surrealists as `Icarian idealists’ in relation to his own `base materialism.'(9) Thus on the important questions of surrealism’s relation to modernism, the role of sublimation or desublimation, or its use of poetry, Harris’s analysis is an important and valuable departure from the October group’s analysis and procedures.

Harris has composed the book in five chapters beginning with a key investigation of the prototypical surrealist objects in 1931 which embody, as Harris notes, “the first moment of the object’s invention in relation to the imperative to go `beyond painting.'”(6). However, Harris reminds us that it is vital to remember that “the object still bore a critical relation to cubist assemblage; the claim to be an avant-garde position was manifested precisely in this `au-dela’.” Therefore Harris rightly asserts, “It is the objects’ critical relation to the dominant categories of art making that is important here, rather than their mere rejection; there is an attempt to sublate what are understood to be the progressive aspects of modern art – in particular, the principle of collage and the experimental nature of prewar modernism – into the object, which is understood at the same time to be antiformal and antiaesthetic in its rejection of the claims for autonomy made by the partisans and practioners of modern art.”(6) However, by seeking to go beyond painting and traditional aesthetics surrealism required an alliance with a potentially revolutionary political avant-garde to effect a reconciliation between art and life. Harris documents in his second chapter the difficult task of the surrealists in the 1930s to achieve recognition as an avant-garde in the cultural sphere by the leaders of the revolutionary avant-garde in the Communist Party of France. Without this recognition the surrealists pretensions to being a new revolutionary avant-garde would dissolve. Harris highlights in chapter three the effort to reframe the surrealist object as scientific research, as opposed to aesthetic experimentation, which challenged the unity of the movement and even the definition of what surrealism was meant to represent. Chapter four focuses upon the break with the Communist Part in 1935 and the relationship between surrealism and the Popular Front.   Finally, a key moment for the expression of the surrealist approach to the tension between art and politics, the exhibition of surrealist objects in the Exposition surréaliste d’objects, is the focus of the fifth chapter entitled “Beware of Domestic Objects: Vocation and Equivocation in 1936”. Lacking access to the revolutionary avant-garde but desiring to remain critical, the interrelationship of art and dream so essential to surrealist aspirations remains, especially in key objects like Jacqueline Lamba’s and Andre Breton’s Le Petit Mimétique, “but it no longer promises the reconciliation of rational and irrational, nor the overcoming of art in a generalized creativity for which the object would furnish a model.” Criticality is salvaged but at a tremendous price; “its preservation as a separate activity somewhat paradoxically represents a delay in the reconciliation of art and life.”   However, as Harris notes, shortly thereafter, “once surrealism resituates itself within the field of modern art,” the surrealist project becomes “unviable in the present.”(218)   

The emphasis of Harris’s self-declared dialectical and immanent critique of surrealism is on weaving the two poles of art and politics into a more sophisticated relationship with one another than has hitherto been attempted by art historians. He foregrounds the productive tension between art and politics in a manner that has important ramifications for the future study of surrealism but also for contemporary art production that wishes to explore the range of questions concerning the relationship of art to the political raised in such an intelligent manner by the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Harris targets exactly the crucial moment within the history of surrealism that signals the shift, “from a confidence in the self-sufficiency and superiority of an autonomous, unconscious thought process (such as is expressed in automatic writing and other surrealist techniques), to an acknowledgement of the interdependence of thought and the phenomenal world. This was in keeping with an imperative shared by many revolutionary intellectuals in the 1930s to make thought active, to relate the hitherto separate spheres of thought and action, action and dream, a separation that had been understood to be the hallmark of a separate, modernist art and literature since the time of Baudelaire.”(2) However, I believe that, in the aftermath of decades of intellectual combat between modernists and postmodernists, and especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the invasion of Iraq, what is most welcome in Harris’s analysis of surrealism are the questions concerning the fraught relationship between culture and politics that he raises in a new and provocative way. These questions have been ignored for too long by too many art and cultural historians as well as producers of contemporary art because of the antipathy of many modernists, postmodernists, and poststructuralists towards Hegel and what they regard as the authoritarian and homogenizing meta-narratives of his approach. Perhaps this book signals, at last, an awakening to the critical efficacy and non-totalitarian potential of a combined Marxist, Hegelian, and psychoanalytic approach to culture and politics that momentarily bloomed in the 1930s. Is the surrealist object, as outlined by Harris, any more viable today than it was in the cataclysm of the 1930s? This question has yet to be resolved.      

David Howard is an Associate Professor of Art History at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

This entry was posted in Miscellaneous and edition 2005 Issue 3 . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics and the Psyche by Steven Harris
Patricia Allmer  28 Jun 2004

"A strong, well-illustrated analysis and a highly complex picture of Surrealism in the 1930s." Pop Matters

The co-option of the movement into modern mass culture is overwhelming, a testament to its genuinely threatening force.




SURREALIST ART AND THOUGHT IN THE 1930S

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Length: 340
Subtitle: Art, Politics and the Psyche
Price: $90 (US)
Author: Steven Harris
UK PUBLICATION DATE: 2004-02
AMAZON

The art object lies between the sensible and the rational. It is something spiritual that appears as material.

Hegel's Poetics and the beginning of Breton's 1935 lecture 'Situation Surréaliste de l'Objet'

Surrealism was arguably the only truly revolutionary art movement of the 20th century. Contemporary culture, from advertising to pop videos to film to political spin to t-shirts, repeatedly uses Surrealist devices, methods, and iconography. The co-option of the movement into modern mass culture is overwhelming, a testament to its genuinely threatening force. Steven Harris, assistant professor of Art History at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, tries in Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s to reposition the movement in some of its original contexts.

The book researches Surrealism in its second period, from 1929-1939, and offers long and detailed scholarly engagement, attempting to capture thirties Surrealism as a collaborative movement, as well as shedding light on Surrealist attempts and failures at bringing together and synthesising Hegelian aesthetics, psychoanalysis and Marxism. As this might suggest, this is a demanding but rewarding work, shedding new light on a perennially popular area of art history.

Recent writings on Surrealism have, to a large extent, focused on Surrealism's preoccupation with psychoanalysis, as well as the analysis of Surrealism's own "unconscious." The leading figures and, perhaps, initiators of this trend are the group of art theorists linked to the journal October. Formed in 1976, October members such as Rosalind E. Krauss, Hal Foster and Denis Hollier have revolutionised the art historical world by introducing post-structuralist theories into modern thinking on art.

Part of Harris's project is to argue with October's psychoanalysis of Surrealism (specifically their reliance on the controversial theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan), some of which, he suggests, "runs counter to some of the movement's own claims." Harris argues that Surrealism is a dynamic field in which theoretical constituents (psychoanalysis, Marxism, Hegelianism) battle, causing friction between each other as well as interacting in centrifugal and centripetal ways through "Hegelianising psychoanalysis" and "Freudianising Marxism."

Another argument with the October group is their positioning of French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille as a Surrealist. Instead, Harris argues that Bataille becomes, in the 1930s, "materialist in antithesis to Surrealism's projected idealism, realist in antithesis to its Surrealism, and antidialectical in opposition to its dialectics," whilst his 1930 essay on Surrealism "is too often accepted uncritically as an adequate description of Surrealism."

The Surrealist object -- things found or recovered from flea-markets, junk shops, even from the gutter, and reinvested with aesthetic importance -- lies for Harris at the heart of Surrealism in the 1930s, and embodies "many of the aspirations of the group in this period." The Surrealist object, the first of which was Alberto Giacometti's highly erotic Boule Suspendue in 1931, and which attained its most significant moment in the Exposition surréaliste d'objets in 1936, becomes in Harris's book a fragment encapsulating and telling the story of Surrealism's second period.

It is the evidence of an attempt to move beyond painting: "The Surrealist object is … situated beyond the traditional artistic categories of painting or sculpture, and it participates in the logic of a scientific activity that would also be disruptive and revolutionary, as an activist intervention allied to (but not identical to) the activities of the political avant-garde." Following this, his theoretical elaborations never lose sight of the Surrealist object, as object of investigation and revelation. His arguments are underlined by detailed interpretations of objects offered by a wide range of artists such as Claude Cahun, Valentine Hugo, Man Ray, Juan Miró, Oscar Dominguez, Méret Oppenheim and André Breton.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s is concerned with the Surrealist attempt to integrate or synthesise art into life. Harris explores the movement from an original "overcoming of the separation of art and life in a 'poetry made by all, not by one'" to the end of this aspiration by 1938, where the "overcoming of art is exchanged for the persistence of art." Here the Surrealist object is seen as the "object of the object," as the "leading example offered by the Surrealists of this art that would no-longer-be-art... since in their understanding it was a realization and an articulation of the relation between subject and object, action and dream."

One criticism of Harris's book is its lack of geographical range. For example, he remains very focussed on Surrealism in France, and manages to go 321 pages without mentioning Belgian Surrealism and its relation to and conceptualisation of the Surrealist object as understood by French Surrealist artists. So, for example, René Magritte produced numerous objects from 1931 onwards, such as his painted plaster cast Les Menottes de Cuivre (1931), his painted casts of Napoleon death masks L'Avenir des Statues (c. 1932) or his painted bottles like Femme-Bouteille (1940). Questions such as how these objects differ from, relate to, enrich or challenge the specifically French conceptions of the Surrealist object are never addressed.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s is a rigorously written and highly academic book, which redirects attention from a principally psychoanalytical approach to understanding Surrealism, positing instead an evolving, dynamic movement caused by the interaction of often contradictory theoretical forces. Harris relentlessly returns to the different arguments he sets out in the book, and through this he links them together into a strong, well-illustrated analysis and a highly complex picture of Surrealism in the 1930s.
SURREALIST ART AND THOUGHT IN THE 1930S STEVEN HARRIS