Dream-work: Surrealism and Revolutionary Subjectivity in André Breton and Georges Bataille
https://cesaa.org.au/_content/uploads/2018/06/Rory-Dufficy_Dream-Work.pdf
Rory Dufficy
Ormond College, University of Melbourne
Abstract
This paper explores a polemic between André Breton and Georges Bataille around the question of the politics of the avant-garde. Focusing on texts composed in the late 1920s, principally Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism and Bataille’s ‘The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist’, this paper argues that in examining this debate around matter and material, it is possible to extract two distinct conceptions of the places of subjectivity and revolution in avant-garde aesthetics. While Breton wishes to separately define the idealist aesthetic projects of Surrealism and the materialist project for revolution, Bataille argues that a commitment to that materialist project requires a similarly materialist aesthetics.
Keywords: André Breton; Georges Bataille; Surrealism; Avant-Garde; Revolution
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Tuesday, April 07, 2020
Friday, May 28, 2021
"Revolutionary Romanticism: Henri Lefebvre's Revolution-as-Festival", Third Text, 27:2, 2013, pp.208-220.
Gavin Grindon
13 Pages
1 File ▾
https://www.academia.edu/10706390/_Revolutionary_Romanticism_Henri_Lefebvres_Revolution_as_Festival_Third_Text_27_2_2013_pp_208_220
This article examines Henri Lefebvre's concept of revolution-as-festival, its textual sources and its relationship to contemporary notions developed by Georges Bataille and the Situationist International. It is a companion-piece to the examination of Bataille's revolution-as-festival in Third Text 104, vol 24, no 3, May 2010. The author argues that Lefebvre's revolution-as-festival embodies the multiple methodological ambiguities of his ‘open’ dialectical approach, and his attempt to transplant Surrealist and Dadaist concerns into a Marxian framework. It is, paradoxically, these ambiguities that allow his revolution-as-festival to become a useful concept: firstly as a discursive making-visible and valorization of the art and culture of social movements; and secondly as a term through which to critically re-imagine this art and culture's limits and possibilities. This potential is borne out, not least, in the influence of Lefebvre's essay ‘Revolutionary Romanticism’ on the founding debates of the Situationist International.
“Alchemist of the Revolution: The Affective Materialism of Georges Bataille.” Third Text 24:3, 2010. pp.305-17.
Gavin Grindon
13 Pages
1 File ▾
This article examines Georges Bataille’s notion of revolution‐as‐festival and his attempt, in his writing of the 1930s, to place theories of affect within the framework of Marxist philosophy. Against the various negative characterisations of this project, it looks at Bataille’s ideas in this period in context, in order to understand their vivid contradictions as an attempt to assert a positive project of affect’s utility to the Left, within and against negative categories in early twentieth‐century cultural and critical thought.
"Surrealism, Dada and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism and Social Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde," The Oxford Art Journal, 34:1, 2011, pp.79-96.
18 Pages
Friday, June 19, 2026
Human Origins Destroys Core Fascist Mythology – OpEd
Against Hobbes
In this sense, Bataille’s reading of prehistory amounted to a direct challenge to one of the founding myths of modern political thought. In Leviathan(1651), Thomas Hobbes famously described life before political authority as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Human beings, he argued, originally lived in a condition of universal conflict—a “war of all against all”—from which only a sovereign power could rescue them.
This image has shaped centuries of political theory. It continues to influence assumptions about human nature and social order. If conflict is primordial, hierarchy appears necessary. If competition is humanity’s defining characteristic, strong authority becomes easier to justify.
Yet few anthropologists, archaeologists, or evolutionary researchers today would recognize early human societies that were part of Hobbes’s description. Over the past century, discoveries from prehistory have gradually eroded the picture of humanity emerging from a primordial war of all against all. Instead, these findings have shed light on how the social bond preceded sovereignty.
Cooperation and Human Success
Research in the 21st century has begun to explain the reasoning behind this. Far from being a secondary achievement of civilization, cooperation was one of the conditions that made civilization possible. Human infants require years of care, and this knowledge needs to be transmitted across generations. Food sharing, communication, and reciprocity were not late cultural inventions. They were essential to survival.
Increasingly, researchers describe Homo sapiens as a uniquely hyper-cooperative species. In a landmark study published in the journal Nature in 2014, the authors argued that cooperative breeding and exceptional levels of social cooperation played a decisive role in the evolution of human cognition and culture. Shared childcare, collective learning, and social transmission enabled forms of cumulative culture unmatched elsewhere in the animal world.
Human beings did not become cooperative because civilization imposed cooperation upon them: civilization became possible because humans were already cooperative. American anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes a similar point in Mothers and Others, stating that networks of care extending far beyond biological parents helped shape human evolution. Humans survived because they learned to depend upon one another.
Developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello reaches a similar conclusion. In A Natural History of Human Morality, he argues that what distinguishes human cognition is not superior individual intelligence but the capacity for shared intentionality—the ability to coordinate attention, goals, and actions with others. Human intelligence, in this view, is fundamentally social.
A similar intuition reappears today in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI). Blaise Agüera y Arcas, an AI researcher, has argued that intelligence is not simply an individual property but something that emerges through communication, learning, and exchange. Language may be less of an instrument of individual advantage than a technology of collective intelligence.
While Hobbes saw society emerging from conflict, many contemporary scholars suggest that society was shaped by cooperation.
The Archaeology of Possibility
The same shift has transformed our understanding of political development. In The Dawn of Everything, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge the familiar narrative of how human societies progressed through a fixed sequence—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states—becoming more hierarchical at every stage.
Drawing on decades of archaeological research, they describe societies that repeatedly experimented with different political arrangements. Some adopted hierarchical structures only temporarily before abandoning them. Others alternated between centralized and decentralized forms of organization according to seasonal rhythms. Large populations sometimes existed without kings, standing armies, or centralized bureaucracies. These accounts make human history look less like a march toward the state and more like a field of political experimentation.
The implications of this outlook extend well beyond archaeology. If hierarchy is not inevitable, authoritarianism can no longer present itself as the culmination of human development. If human beings repeatedly invented different ways of organizing collective life, then political alternatives are not utopian fantasies. They are historical realities. The past does not reveal our destiny, but another possibility of how to exist.
Deep History Against Race
The anti-fascist implications of prehistory became especially visible during the 20th century.
As Nazi scholars attempted to transform archaeology into a science of racial origins, other researchers moved in the opposite direction. In Man Makes Himself, archaeologist V. Gordon Childe emphasized that human progress is a result of innovation, exchange, and collective invention, instead of a biological destiny. Anthropologist Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Mandismantled theories of racial hierarchy and demonstrated that cultural differences were historical rather than biological. Ethnologist Paul Rivet’s studies of migration and the peopling of the Americas highlighted human circulation, encounter, and mixture over purity and permanence in the region. Working in different disciplines, these researchers arrived at a similar conclusion: the deeper one investigates human history, the less sustainable are the ideas of fixed origins and permanent identities.
Advances in the 21st century in genetics have further strengthened this conclusion. Ancient DNA research has transformed our understanding of the past as dramatically as the discovery of cave art transformed our understanding of prehistoric culture a century ago. Across Eurasia and beyond, genetic studies have revealed repeated episodes of migration, admixture, and exchange that challenge older narratives of stable and isolated populations.
Far from revealing isolated groups preserving fixed identities over millennia, genetics shows continuous movement and transformation. Even Homo sapiens bear the marks of encounters with other human groups, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The further we travel into the past, the harder it becomes to sustain fantasies of racial purity.
Why Bataille’s Thinking Remains Important
Prehistory does not provide a political program. It does not tell us how contemporary societies should be organized, nor does it reveal a lost golden age. The important point is not that prehistoric humanity was peaceful, egalitarian, or morally superior. Human violence is ancient. So are domination and conflict.
The lesson is something else.
Deep history undermines some of the stories authoritarian ideologies tell us about humanity. Against the myths of racial purity, it reveals a mixture of races. Against myths of primordial hierarchy, it reveals experimentation with political structure. Against myths of sovereign necessity, it reveals human cooperation. Against myths of fixed identity, it reveals transformation.
Bataille understood that prehistory was not simply about origins. It was also about what happens when origin stories lose their authority. Now, with nationalism and authoritarian politics again looking for acknowledgment in ancestry, identity, and destiny, deep history offers a different perspective. The further back we go, the harder it is for fascism to find validity in historical narratives. Instead, what comes into view is a history of movement and exchange, cooperation and shared invention.
Prehistory doesn’t excuse domination. It doesn’t erase it, either. It places domination in perspective. And at a moment when authoritarianism is once again on the rise, the deep past reveals something both humbling and reassuring: our greatest strength has never been purity or domination, but our capacity to cooperate, connect, and depend on one another.
June 19, 2026
By Yann Perreau
How deep history challenges fascist myths of purity, hierarchy, and identity.
The deeper we explore humanity’s past, the harder it becomes to sustain some of the most powerful political myths of the modern world.
For more than a century, authoritarian ideologies have sought legitimacy in origin stories: pure people, ancestral homelands, primordial hierarchies, and civilizational destinies. Fascism, in particular, has always been obsessed with beginnings. Whether in Nazi fantasies of Aryan ancestry, myths of ethnic continuity, or contemporary narratives of demographic replacement and civilizational decline, the past is transformed into a source of authority. History becomes destiny. Origins become a source of legitimacy.
Yet archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and evolutionary science increasingly tell a different story. Research across these fields has challenged older assumptions about purity, hierarchy, and human nature. Deep history reveals migration rather than isolation, cooperation rather than perpetual conflict, and experimentation rather than inevitability.
Few 20th-century thinkers saw this more clearly than Georges Bataille, who observed that competing visions of the past often conceal varying perspectives of humanity.
Better known today for his writings on eroticism, sacrifice, and transgression, French philosopher Bataille was also one of the first major European intellectuals to recognize that prehistory could serve as an antidote to fascist mythology. During the 1930s and 1940s, when fascist movements were mobilizing myths of origin on an unprecedented scale, he turned to cave art, ritual, and the earliest traces of human life, immersing himself in the latest archaeological, anthropological, paleontological, and sociological research.
His writings on prehistory drew extensively on the discoveries and debates of his time, delving into philosophical, anthropological, and political interests at once. What distinguishes humans from other animals? How did symbolic thought emerge? What forms of community existed before states, nations, and organized religions? These questions acquired a particular urgency during the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany, when competing visions of humanity became a matter of life and death.
Studying cave art and the discoveries emerging from sites such as the Lascaux Cave in France, Bataille became fascinated by a simple fact. The artists who painted the walls left no names. They founded no dynasties. They erected no monuments to rulers or conquerors. But they created some of the most extraordinary images in human history.
For Bataille, the lack of names was not a footnote; it was the point.
The caves revealed forms of collective creation that preceded authorship, ownership, and sovereignty. Art appeared not as an expression of individual genius or political authority but as a shared symbolic activity through which a community understood itself and its place in the world.
Instead of fascism’s cult of leadership, Bataille discovered a humanity whose earliest masterpieces emerged from participation rather than domination, anonymity rather than glory, and collective creation rather than the cult of personality.
The political implications of these observations became increasingly difficult to ignore during the rise of the totalitarian regimes that would engulf much of Europe and Asia. In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Bataille analyzed the attraction to sovereignty, authority, and charismatic leadership. In 1936, he founded Acéphale, an anti-fascist intellectual group whose symbol was a headless human figure.
The image was deliberately provocative. Against the Führer, Il Duce, Stalin, and every cult of leadership, Bataille proposed a humanity without a head. The figure was less of a political statement than a symbolic reversal of the principles celebrated by totalitarian movements. Against sovereignty, he imagined forms of collective existence that could not be reduced to a single authority. Against hierarchy, he emphasized participation, reciprocity, and shared experiences.
Prehistory became important not because it provided an alternative mythology, but because it revealed a past that resisted mythological simplification. Bataille turned to caves such as Lascaux as they seemed to preserve traces of human existence before nations, before states, and before centralized authority. What he found there was not an original people or an ancestral race, but forms of collective life that escaped the categories through which modern politics often tends to understand itself.
By Yann Perreau
How deep history challenges fascist myths of purity, hierarchy, and identity.
The deeper we explore humanity’s past, the harder it becomes to sustain some of the most powerful political myths of the modern world.
For more than a century, authoritarian ideologies have sought legitimacy in origin stories: pure people, ancestral homelands, primordial hierarchies, and civilizational destinies. Fascism, in particular, has always been obsessed with beginnings. Whether in Nazi fantasies of Aryan ancestry, myths of ethnic continuity, or contemporary narratives of demographic replacement and civilizational decline, the past is transformed into a source of authority. History becomes destiny. Origins become a source of legitimacy.
Yet archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and evolutionary science increasingly tell a different story. Research across these fields has challenged older assumptions about purity, hierarchy, and human nature. Deep history reveals migration rather than isolation, cooperation rather than perpetual conflict, and experimentation rather than inevitability.
Few 20th-century thinkers saw this more clearly than Georges Bataille, who observed that competing visions of the past often conceal varying perspectives of humanity.
Better known today for his writings on eroticism, sacrifice, and transgression, French philosopher Bataille was also one of the first major European intellectuals to recognize that prehistory could serve as an antidote to fascist mythology. During the 1930s and 1940s, when fascist movements were mobilizing myths of origin on an unprecedented scale, he turned to cave art, ritual, and the earliest traces of human life, immersing himself in the latest archaeological, anthropological, paleontological, and sociological research.
His writings on prehistory drew extensively on the discoveries and debates of his time, delving into philosophical, anthropological, and political interests at once. What distinguishes humans from other animals? How did symbolic thought emerge? What forms of community existed before states, nations, and organized religions? These questions acquired a particular urgency during the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany, when competing visions of humanity became a matter of life and death.
Studying cave art and the discoveries emerging from sites such as the Lascaux Cave in France, Bataille became fascinated by a simple fact. The artists who painted the walls left no names. They founded no dynasties. They erected no monuments to rulers or conquerors. But they created some of the most extraordinary images in human history.
For Bataille, the lack of names was not a footnote; it was the point.
The caves revealed forms of collective creation that preceded authorship, ownership, and sovereignty. Art appeared not as an expression of individual genius or political authority but as a shared symbolic activity through which a community understood itself and its place in the world.
Instead of fascism’s cult of leadership, Bataille discovered a humanity whose earliest masterpieces emerged from participation rather than domination, anonymity rather than glory, and collective creation rather than the cult of personality.
The political implications of these observations became increasingly difficult to ignore during the rise of the totalitarian regimes that would engulf much of Europe and Asia. In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Bataille analyzed the attraction to sovereignty, authority, and charismatic leadership. In 1936, he founded Acéphale, an anti-fascist intellectual group whose symbol was a headless human figure.
The image was deliberately provocative. Against the Führer, Il Duce, Stalin, and every cult of leadership, Bataille proposed a humanity without a head. The figure was less of a political statement than a symbolic reversal of the principles celebrated by totalitarian movements. Against sovereignty, he imagined forms of collective existence that could not be reduced to a single authority. Against hierarchy, he emphasized participation, reciprocity, and shared experiences.
Prehistory became important not because it provided an alternative mythology, but because it revealed a past that resisted mythological simplification. Bataille turned to caves such as Lascaux as they seemed to preserve traces of human existence before nations, before states, and before centralized authority. What he found there was not an original people or an ancestral race, but forms of collective life that escaped the categories through which modern politics often tends to understand itself.
Against Hobbes
In this sense, Bataille’s reading of prehistory amounted to a direct challenge to one of the founding myths of modern political thought. In Leviathan(1651), Thomas Hobbes famously described life before political authority as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Human beings, he argued, originally lived in a condition of universal conflict—a “war of all against all”—from which only a sovereign power could rescue them.
This image has shaped centuries of political theory. It continues to influence assumptions about human nature and social order. If conflict is primordial, hierarchy appears necessary. If competition is humanity’s defining characteristic, strong authority becomes easier to justify.
Yet few anthropologists, archaeologists, or evolutionary researchers today would recognize early human societies that were part of Hobbes’s description. Over the past century, discoveries from prehistory have gradually eroded the picture of humanity emerging from a primordial war of all against all. Instead, these findings have shed light on how the social bond preceded sovereignty.
Cooperation and Human Success
Research in the 21st century has begun to explain the reasoning behind this. Far from being a secondary achievement of civilization, cooperation was one of the conditions that made civilization possible. Human infants require years of care, and this knowledge needs to be transmitted across generations. Food sharing, communication, and reciprocity were not late cultural inventions. They were essential to survival.
Increasingly, researchers describe Homo sapiens as a uniquely hyper-cooperative species. In a landmark study published in the journal Nature in 2014, the authors argued that cooperative breeding and exceptional levels of social cooperation played a decisive role in the evolution of human cognition and culture. Shared childcare, collective learning, and social transmission enabled forms of cumulative culture unmatched elsewhere in the animal world.
Human beings did not become cooperative because civilization imposed cooperation upon them: civilization became possible because humans were already cooperative. American anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes a similar point in Mothers and Others, stating that networks of care extending far beyond biological parents helped shape human evolution. Humans survived because they learned to depend upon one another.
Developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello reaches a similar conclusion. In A Natural History of Human Morality, he argues that what distinguishes human cognition is not superior individual intelligence but the capacity for shared intentionality—the ability to coordinate attention, goals, and actions with others. Human intelligence, in this view, is fundamentally social.
A similar intuition reappears today in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI). Blaise Agüera y Arcas, an AI researcher, has argued that intelligence is not simply an individual property but something that emerges through communication, learning, and exchange. Language may be less of an instrument of individual advantage than a technology of collective intelligence.
While Hobbes saw society emerging from conflict, many contemporary scholars suggest that society was shaped by cooperation.
The Archaeology of Possibility
The same shift has transformed our understanding of political development. In The Dawn of Everything, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge the familiar narrative of how human societies progressed through a fixed sequence—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states—becoming more hierarchical at every stage.
Drawing on decades of archaeological research, they describe societies that repeatedly experimented with different political arrangements. Some adopted hierarchical structures only temporarily before abandoning them. Others alternated between centralized and decentralized forms of organization according to seasonal rhythms. Large populations sometimes existed without kings, standing armies, or centralized bureaucracies. These accounts make human history look less like a march toward the state and more like a field of political experimentation.
The implications of this outlook extend well beyond archaeology. If hierarchy is not inevitable, authoritarianism can no longer present itself as the culmination of human development. If human beings repeatedly invented different ways of organizing collective life, then political alternatives are not utopian fantasies. They are historical realities. The past does not reveal our destiny, but another possibility of how to exist.
Deep History Against Race
The anti-fascist implications of prehistory became especially visible during the 20th century.
As Nazi scholars attempted to transform archaeology into a science of racial origins, other researchers moved in the opposite direction. In Man Makes Himself, archaeologist V. Gordon Childe emphasized that human progress is a result of innovation, exchange, and collective invention, instead of a biological destiny. Anthropologist Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Mandismantled theories of racial hierarchy and demonstrated that cultural differences were historical rather than biological. Ethnologist Paul Rivet’s studies of migration and the peopling of the Americas highlighted human circulation, encounter, and mixture over purity and permanence in the region. Working in different disciplines, these researchers arrived at a similar conclusion: the deeper one investigates human history, the less sustainable are the ideas of fixed origins and permanent identities.
Advances in the 21st century in genetics have further strengthened this conclusion. Ancient DNA research has transformed our understanding of the past as dramatically as the discovery of cave art transformed our understanding of prehistoric culture a century ago. Across Eurasia and beyond, genetic studies have revealed repeated episodes of migration, admixture, and exchange that challenge older narratives of stable and isolated populations.
Far from revealing isolated groups preserving fixed identities over millennia, genetics shows continuous movement and transformation. Even Homo sapiens bear the marks of encounters with other human groups, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The further we travel into the past, the harder it becomes to sustain fantasies of racial purity.
Why Bataille’s Thinking Remains Important
Prehistory does not provide a political program. It does not tell us how contemporary societies should be organized, nor does it reveal a lost golden age. The important point is not that prehistoric humanity was peaceful, egalitarian, or morally superior. Human violence is ancient. So are domination and conflict.
The lesson is something else.
Deep history undermines some of the stories authoritarian ideologies tell us about humanity. Against the myths of racial purity, it reveals a mixture of races. Against myths of primordial hierarchy, it reveals experimentation with political structure. Against myths of sovereign necessity, it reveals human cooperation. Against myths of fixed identity, it reveals transformation.
Bataille understood that prehistory was not simply about origins. It was also about what happens when origin stories lose their authority. Now, with nationalism and authoritarian politics again looking for acknowledgment in ancestry, identity, and destiny, deep history offers a different perspective. The further back we go, the harder it is for fascism to find validity in historical narratives. Instead, what comes into view is a history of movement and exchange, cooperation and shared invention.
Prehistory doesn’t excuse domination. It doesn’t erase it, either. It places domination in perspective. And at a moment when authoritarianism is once again on the rise, the deep past reveals something both humbling and reassuring: our greatest strength has never been purity or domination, but our capacity to cooperate, connect, and depend on one another.
Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.
About Yann Perreau
Yann Perreau is a writer, educator, contemporary art curator, and writing fellow for the Human Bridges project of the Independent Media Institute. He has published several books with French publishers on climate, anonymity, and more. His articles have appeared in many publications, including Le Monde, the London Review of Books, and Art Press. He has served as a cultural attaché for both the French Embassy in London and the French Consulate in Los Angeles. He holds an MPhil in art history from Paris's EHESS.
View all posts by Yann Perreau →
About Yann Perreau
Yann Perreau is a writer, educator, contemporary art curator, and writing fellow for the Human Bridges project of the Independent Media Institute. He has published several books with French publishers on climate, anonymity, and more. His articles have appeared in many publications, including Le Monde, the London Review of Books, and Art Press. He has served as a cultural attaché for both the French Embassy in London and the French Consulate in Los Angeles. He holds an MPhil in art history from Paris's EHESS.
View all posts by Yann Perreau →
Ritual, Power, And The Weekend Arena – OpEd
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President Donald J. Trump and UFC CEO Dana White arrive at UFC Freedom 250, the mixed martial arts event produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Sunday, June 14, 2026, on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
June 18, 2026
By Gary M. Feinman
In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40 case observations, which were part of our study, was between the nature of rituals and the concentration of power.
For this global sample, autocratically organized societies were characterized by spectacles that foment fear and awe, while participatory rituals predominated in more democratically organized contexts. For example, in the region where I study (Oaxaca, Mexico), when governance was typified by distributed power relations, the pre-Hispanic rubber ball game was played in a large court adjacent to a broad, flat open plaza, the Main Plaza at Monte Albán, a space that could accommodate many of the settlement’s inhabitants. Later, however, as political power became more concentrated, the size of ball courts was reduced, access to them became more restricted, and some were even built immediately adjacent to the houses or palaces of ruling families.
Social scientists have long recognized that communal rituals are a universal human experience that binds people together in various ways. Spectacles, often rich in disorienting noise, shock, and awe, tend to captivate observers through the powerful figures at the center of the spectacle, who inspire fear and wonderment, reinforcing authoritarian cults of personality. In contrast, participatory rituals like communal dancing, singing, or chanting tend to instill camaraderie among participants, solidarity, and trust among those involved. As a student of history and a sports fan, the mirrored reflections of the past provide an analytical perspective about the final Knicks game on June 13, a sports agenda that cannot be ignored.
During the 2026 National Basketball Association playoff between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, Madison Square Garden, the storied home of the Knicks, once again became like a civic commons after a 53-year championship drought. The competitiveness of the Knicks during the playoffs elevated the space from merely being a site of entertainment to a participatory ritual arena. The crowd did not passively observe; it chanted, rose, groaned, anticipated, and collectively willed momentum into existence. One needed to only look at the faces in the stands—season ticket holders and first-timers, celebrities and subway riders alike—to notice that the sight was closer to what might be considered an integrative ritual: one in which meaning is not imposed from above but generated, often with spontaneity, among participants.
Basketball, by definition, is a team sport, but this is typified by the game that the Knicks currently play. It is not about consistent domination by a central figure. Even the most celebrated player, Jalen Brunson, depends on coordination, timing, and trust in his teammates. The drama unfolds collectively, and its outcome remains contingent on who makes a foul shot and who grabs a rebound. Participation matters—not just symbolically but materially. The arena amplifies the idea, however imperfectly enacted, that communal engagement shapes outcomes. And these outcomes transcended the arenas where the Knicks games were played, stimulating joy and collective actions, and bringing people together in the desire for a common outcome.
By contrast, the spectacle of an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, staged in a garish steel cage, on the grounds of the White House on June 14 operated on a fundamentally different ritual logic. It was not designed for mutual participation but for spectacle: with the concentration of attention onto a staged center, where one-on-one conflict and mayhem are distilled into physical dominance and symbolic submission. The audience’s role is not to join but to witness—to be awed, to see blood and hear pain, be unsettled, and ultimately to orient themselves toward the figures who command the stage and oversee the event.
The choice of venue was not incidental. The White House has long functioned as a site of state ritual. But traditionally, those rituals—press briefings, public ceremonies, even contentious protests beyond its gates—are tethered, at least aspirationally, to norms of decorum, accountability, and public engagement. Introducing a choreographed combat spectacle into that space shifts its symbolic significance. It recasts a locus of governance into an arena of performance, where the aesthetic of dominance and self-promotion, by a small network of cronies, overshadows any ethical prospect of leading to wider participation.
This is precisely the distinction our comparative work on governance and ritual helps illuminate. When power is broadly distributed, rituals tend to be inclusive, iterative, and co-constructed. They require participants to see one another as collaborators in a shared process, even when competition is involved. In contrast, when power is tightly concentrated, rituals often become spectacles—staged experiences that reinforce hierarchy, channel emotions toward a focal point, and reduce the audience to spectators instead of actors. The Knicks, for all the commercialism of modern sports, still lean toward the former model. Their playoff games invited identification not with an owner but with a collective—however abstract—called a team, a city, a fan base. Victory was widely shared across an entire metropolitan area, communally. The ritual binds laterally, person-to-person.
A UFC spectacle staged in the orbit of political power points in the other direction. It binds vertically. The emotional energy of the crowd is drawn upward and inward, toward a center that is insulated from participation. The unpredictability of sport is replaced by an orchestrated spectacle; even the violence, ostensibly raw, is framed and contained to produce maximum symbolic effect. None of this is to suggest that one form of ritual is wholly virtuous and the other entirely malign. Spectacle has always been part of human societies, and participatory rituals can exclude to the same extent as they can include. Madison Square Garden is not immune to hierarchy, nor is fandom evenly accessible. But the contrast remains as glaring as instructive because it reveals not just different entertainments, but different models of how people relate to power—and to one another.
At stake is more than this season’s recreational programming. Rituals, whether ancient ball games in Mesoamerica or modern sporting events in New York, are not peripheral to political life; they are constitutive of it. They shape how individuals experience belonging, authority, and agency. They encode assumptions about who acts and who is meant to watch. The event at the White House reinforces values such as “might makes right” and life is a “zero-sum game.”
Alternatively, in an era when democratic practices often feel attenuated, the spaces where participation is still enacted—even imperfectly—carry heightened significance, thereby fostering shared aims and emphasizing the potential win-win-win outcomes that interdependence and collaborative action can generate. The roar of a crowd that believes its collective voice matters stands in quiet contrast to spectacles that ask only for attention, passivity, and allegiance.
We would do well to recognize the difference.
Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
About Gary M. Feinman
Gary M. Feinman is the MacArthur curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian anthropology, at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center.
View all posts by Gary M. Feinman →
June 18, 2026
By Gary M. Feinman
In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40 case observations, which were part of our study, was between the nature of rituals and the concentration of power.
For this global sample, autocratically organized societies were characterized by spectacles that foment fear and awe, while participatory rituals predominated in more democratically organized contexts. For example, in the region where I study (Oaxaca, Mexico), when governance was typified by distributed power relations, the pre-Hispanic rubber ball game was played in a large court adjacent to a broad, flat open plaza, the Main Plaza at Monte Albán, a space that could accommodate many of the settlement’s inhabitants. Later, however, as political power became more concentrated, the size of ball courts was reduced, access to them became more restricted, and some were even built immediately adjacent to the houses or palaces of ruling families.
Social scientists have long recognized that communal rituals are a universal human experience that binds people together in various ways. Spectacles, often rich in disorienting noise, shock, and awe, tend to captivate observers through the powerful figures at the center of the spectacle, who inspire fear and wonderment, reinforcing authoritarian cults of personality. In contrast, participatory rituals like communal dancing, singing, or chanting tend to instill camaraderie among participants, solidarity, and trust among those involved. As a student of history and a sports fan, the mirrored reflections of the past provide an analytical perspective about the final Knicks game on June 13, a sports agenda that cannot be ignored.
During the 2026 National Basketball Association playoff between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, Madison Square Garden, the storied home of the Knicks, once again became like a civic commons after a 53-year championship drought. The competitiveness of the Knicks during the playoffs elevated the space from merely being a site of entertainment to a participatory ritual arena. The crowd did not passively observe; it chanted, rose, groaned, anticipated, and collectively willed momentum into existence. One needed to only look at the faces in the stands—season ticket holders and first-timers, celebrities and subway riders alike—to notice that the sight was closer to what might be considered an integrative ritual: one in which meaning is not imposed from above but generated, often with spontaneity, among participants.
Basketball, by definition, is a team sport, but this is typified by the game that the Knicks currently play. It is not about consistent domination by a central figure. Even the most celebrated player, Jalen Brunson, depends on coordination, timing, and trust in his teammates. The drama unfolds collectively, and its outcome remains contingent on who makes a foul shot and who grabs a rebound. Participation matters—not just symbolically but materially. The arena amplifies the idea, however imperfectly enacted, that communal engagement shapes outcomes. And these outcomes transcended the arenas where the Knicks games were played, stimulating joy and collective actions, and bringing people together in the desire for a common outcome.
By contrast, the spectacle of an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, staged in a garish steel cage, on the grounds of the White House on June 14 operated on a fundamentally different ritual logic. It was not designed for mutual participation but for spectacle: with the concentration of attention onto a staged center, where one-on-one conflict and mayhem are distilled into physical dominance and symbolic submission. The audience’s role is not to join but to witness—to be awed, to see blood and hear pain, be unsettled, and ultimately to orient themselves toward the figures who command the stage and oversee the event.
The choice of venue was not incidental. The White House has long functioned as a site of state ritual. But traditionally, those rituals—press briefings, public ceremonies, even contentious protests beyond its gates—are tethered, at least aspirationally, to norms of decorum, accountability, and public engagement. Introducing a choreographed combat spectacle into that space shifts its symbolic significance. It recasts a locus of governance into an arena of performance, where the aesthetic of dominance and self-promotion, by a small network of cronies, overshadows any ethical prospect of leading to wider participation.
This is precisely the distinction our comparative work on governance and ritual helps illuminate. When power is broadly distributed, rituals tend to be inclusive, iterative, and co-constructed. They require participants to see one another as collaborators in a shared process, even when competition is involved. In contrast, when power is tightly concentrated, rituals often become spectacles—staged experiences that reinforce hierarchy, channel emotions toward a focal point, and reduce the audience to spectators instead of actors. The Knicks, for all the commercialism of modern sports, still lean toward the former model. Their playoff games invited identification not with an owner but with a collective—however abstract—called a team, a city, a fan base. Victory was widely shared across an entire metropolitan area, communally. The ritual binds laterally, person-to-person.
A UFC spectacle staged in the orbit of political power points in the other direction. It binds vertically. The emotional energy of the crowd is drawn upward and inward, toward a center that is insulated from participation. The unpredictability of sport is replaced by an orchestrated spectacle; even the violence, ostensibly raw, is framed and contained to produce maximum symbolic effect. None of this is to suggest that one form of ritual is wholly virtuous and the other entirely malign. Spectacle has always been part of human societies, and participatory rituals can exclude to the same extent as they can include. Madison Square Garden is not immune to hierarchy, nor is fandom evenly accessible. But the contrast remains as glaring as instructive because it reveals not just different entertainments, but different models of how people relate to power—and to one another.
At stake is more than this season’s recreational programming. Rituals, whether ancient ball games in Mesoamerica or modern sporting events in New York, are not peripheral to political life; they are constitutive of it. They shape how individuals experience belonging, authority, and agency. They encode assumptions about who acts and who is meant to watch. The event at the White House reinforces values such as “might makes right” and life is a “zero-sum game.”
Alternatively, in an era when democratic practices often feel attenuated, the spaces where participation is still enacted—even imperfectly—carry heightened significance, thereby fostering shared aims and emphasizing the potential win-win-win outcomes that interdependence and collaborative action can generate. The roar of a crowd that believes its collective voice matters stands in quiet contrast to spectacles that ask only for attention, passivity, and allegiance.
We would do well to recognize the difference.
Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
About Gary M. Feinman
Gary M. Feinman is the MacArthur curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian anthropology, at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center.
View all posts by Gary M. Feinman →
Friday, February 14, 2020
Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s Art, Politics, and the Psyche
A LOCAL TEXT FROM EDMONTON WHERE THE U OF A IS LOCATED
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
"It makes a significant contribution to the understanding of how and why surrealism changed in the 1930's."
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)
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.
Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo
Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s
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 HarrisPatricia Allmer 28 Jun 2004
"A strong, well-illustrated analysis and a highly complex picture of Surrealism in the 1930s." Pop MattersThe 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.
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
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
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