ANALYSIS

COVID19 AND FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS

The legitimacy of lockdown, according to Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas recently argued that the pandemic measures of the German government hadn’t gone far enough. To weigh the state’s duty to protect life against other rights and freedoms was unconstitutional, he warned. In the ensuing controversy, critics accused him of authoritarianism. Were they right?

Published on 26 March 2022 
Peter J. Verovšek - Eurozine (Vienna)
 

Hajo | Cartoon Movement

LONG READ

Jürgen Habermas’s article in the September 2021 issue of German political monthly Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik is the latest example of what his first editor described as the philosopher’s ability to create "a huge brouhaha" (einen gewaltigen Wirbel) in the German public sphere. (1)

In the piece, Covid-19 and the protection of life, Habermas not only defended the legitimacy of restrictions on civil rights – including free movement and assembly – designed to reduce infections by SARS-CoV-2, but also argued that the German government was not going far enough to protect the population. By taking as its baseline the availability of intensive care beds, rather than the risk of infection per se, the government was, he argued, failing to observe its constitutional duty to "exclude all courses of action that risk the probable endangerment of the life and physical integrity of a foreseeable number of innocent citizens."

On Habermas’s reading, the prohibition on the subordination of individual human life to any other goal is the supreme value not only of Germany’s post-war democratic political culture, but of the Basic Law itself. To argue – as some German jurists recently have – that risk to human life could be weighed against other basic rights was therefore not merely unethical, it was also legally false.

Although Habermas initially frames his argument broadly in terms of the democratic constitutional state, his citations and later discussion reveals that it is primarily addressed to the legal-ethical discourse in Germany (as so many of his public interventions are).
More : Instrumentalising the health crisis. On herd democracy and human dignity

Even in Germany, the reaction was somewhat muted compared to previous occasions. This probably says something about not only the public appetite – or lack thereof – for serious discussion about the measures to fight the pandemic, but also the polarisation of these debates when they do occur. Rather than engaging objectively with Habermas’s arguments, the response descended into the kind of polemic with which, after two years of pandemic, we are all-too familiar.

In a response entitled The Habermas dictatorship, published in the conservative German daily Die Welt on 11 October, features editor Andreas Rosenfelder accused him of creating a 'biopolitical Leviathan that can restrict any freedom for the purpose of infection control, always and everywhere, without condition and without measure'. Rosenfelder objected to Habermas’s framing of the critics of the lockdown policy as 'libertarians' opposed to state authority by definition. This, he argued, implied that the government and those who supported its 'strict' lockdown policy were simply 'defending' a legal norm, rather than 'a practice hastily borrowed from China'.

Rosenfelder’s diatribe – and the resonance it received on social media – reflect the discontent within parts of German society with what is seen as the 'media technocracy' over the course of the pandemic. Wild assertions such as that lockdowns are 'borrowed from China' (if anything they are rooted in the development of quarantines and cordons sanitaires to restrict the freedom of movement during the bubonic plagues) are par for the course in this discourse. Hyperbole aside, however, Rosenfelder was right that Habermas allows the government significant authority to restrict fundamental rights.

But while Habermas’s prioritisation of the protection of life might be extreme in certain respects, his proposals were neither particularly radical nor potentially authoritarian. Moreover, despite championing 'the unforced force of the better argument', Habermas is aware that philosophy does not have a privileged position in modern life.(2) Whereas professional thinkers may highlight certain problems, it is the public that serves as the ultimate arbiter.

As I shall argue, this fallibilistic commitment to the public sphere as the essence of modern democratic life has important implications both for Habermas’s argument itself, and for the power of governments to restrict the fundamental rights of their citizens in the face of SARS-CoV-2 while respecting the strictures of democratic legitimacy.

Origins

Starting with his attack on Martin Heidegger in 1953 for failing to apologize for his collaboration with the Nazis, to his role in the Historians’ Debate in the mid-1980s and his interventions in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, Habermas has intervened in almost every important controversy in post-war Germany. More recently, he has expanded his focus to debates on the future of the EU and the emerging European public sphere.

While Habermas argues that the public intellectual plays a crucial role in a liberal political culture as a 'guardian of rationality', he does not consider them to be neutral figures.(3) On the contrary, while public intellectuals help to ensure that the public exchange of ideas proceeds thoughtfully and on the basis of good information, they can take strong positions and make ‘arguments sharpened by rhetoric’.(4) Habermas has therefore never shied from controversy in his quest to improve the quality of public debate about the key issues of the day.
More : The virus as metaphor

In this case, Habermas’s argument had been rehearsed in a number of shorter public comments, both in Germany and abroad. In an interview in Le Monde in April 2020, Habermas noted that while emergency measures posed a number of problems for democratic legitimacy, pandemic states of exception were required in order to protect ‘the fundamental right to life and to physical integrity’. Despite the understandable pull of the ‘utilitarian temptation’, politicians must not, he argued, trade lives against economic considerations.

This is not to say that Habermas disregards such considerations entirely. On the contrary: in a plea published in both Die Zeit and Le Monde two weeks earlier, he and his co-signatories – including German former Foreign minister Joschka Fisher, French-German former Green MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit and German academic Axel Honneth – called on the European Commission to set up an EU-based 'corona fund' by borrowing on international financial markets at low interest rates. This, they argued, would enable the EU’s members to 'shoulder the huge financial burdens of the crisis together'. Such a step would not only allow poorer states to care for the economic wellbeing of their citizens without having to lift lockdowns prematurely; it would also take advantage of a new social atmosphere in which it was 'popular to show helpfulness, empathy and hope'.

While the pandemic created a tension in the generally “complementary relationship” between democratic self-empowerment of citizens to act collectively and the individual rights protected by the constitution, states of exception demanded that such conflicts be resolved in favour of the former

These earlier interventions highlight two aspects of Habermas’s thought that his critics overlooked. The first regards the role of solidarity in democratic politics, especially within a state of emergency. In his Blätter article, Habermas argued that democracy was incompatible with an individualistic conception of citizenship and instead required citizens to conceive of themselves as part of a collective able to act for the common good. Especially under crisis conditions – such as those brought about by Covid-19 – 'the state is dependent on unusually high cooperation from the population'. While the pandemic created a tension in the generally 'complementary relationship' between democratic self-empowerment of citizens to act collectively and the individual rights protected by the constitution, states of exception demanded that such conflicts be resolved in favour of the former.

In contrast to proponents of a looser approach, Habermas rejected the idea of a 'trade-off between the right to life and those competing basic rights that public health measures do indeed seriously impinge upon'. In situations such as the Coronavirus pandemic, precedence had to be given to the protection of life as the prerequisite for all other rights. The state could still 'offset' the priority given to the protection of life 'against secondary effects that threaten lives elsewhere and in other ways, but not against claims from competing basic rights'.

This conclusion follows from Habermas’s philosophical thought. His social and political theory is rooted in the fact that human interactions can be interpreted from two different and incompatible viewpoints: the internal perspective of a participant in a 'lifeworld' and the external, 'system'-based perspective of an observer. While the latter has certain advantages, most notably in governing efficient and materially productive market relations, Habermas worries about the ability of such functional, system-thinking to 'colonize' the lifeworlds of individuals by encroaching too far onto their daily lives and everyday interactions with others.(5)

For Habermas, prioritizing economic considerations (by privileging individual private rights) over the protection of life is precisely such a form of colonisation. In his interview with Le Monde, he noted that the 'language of “value”, borrowed from the sphere of economics, encourages quantification. But a person’s autonomy cannot be treated in this way … there is no “choosing” one human life over another.’ During short states of exception, therefore, politics 'as the means to achieve collective goals” demands priority over the law as ‘medium for guaranteeing subjective freedoms'.
Implications

A powerful statement of the danger of creeping authoritarianism has come from another public intellectual and philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. At the beginning of the pandemic, Agamben noted 'the increasing tendency to use the state of exception as the normal paradigm of government'. Habermas’s Italian counterpart therefore warned of the deleterious consequences of normalizing the kind of public monitoring, surveillance and restrictions on movement deemed necessary to fight the Coronavirus.Habermas is sensitive to concerns about the overuse of emergency politics. However, he noted that 'only Covid deniers could vilify measures justified solely for the duration of the pandemic as an excrescence of biopolitics'. In his public comments, Habermas has repeatedly emphasized that exceptional measures to protect life can be democratically legitimate only when supported by a majority of the population. He therefore stressed that when the political perspective of the participant is allowed to infringe upon basic rights, citizens must be able to trust ‘that the government will not allow the regime of legally mandated common-interest behaviours introduced on health-policy grounds to persist beyond the current hazardous situation’.

Understanding the basis for such trust and what prevents democratic states from imposing or extending states of exception indefinitely requires a deeper dive into Habermas’s philosophical system. Habermas defines democracy not in terms of majorities – as with republican supporters of popular sovereignty – nor in terms of unfettered respect for individual rights – as with liberals. Rather, democracy requires that ‘all decisions of consequence will depend on the practical discourse of the participants’.(6)

This does not mean that all such decisions must be made by referendum or that citizens have to actively consent to every government policy. Instead, the democratic process is legitimized by the ability of citizens to voice their disapproval through opposition, protest and debate. Not only that: the government must remain sensitive to the public’s discursive veto power by changing course in response to mass repudiations of government policy.(7)

As the foundation of modern democratic life, what Habermas refers to as the ‘anarchic, unfettered communicative freedom’ of public debate must be open to all topics and to everyone affected. This ‘wild’ process of opinion-formation, ‘in which equal rights of citizenship become socially effective’, must be matched by the sensitivity of the government and the institutions of law to public opinion.(8) Such an approach ensures the defence of civil liberties – both through the legal system and the prerequisites of the public sphere itself – and allows citizens to see themselves as co-authors of the laws that bind them. Even the compulsory restrictions imposed by state during the pandemic retain their ‘unique character as a voluntary contribution of the individual towards the collective accomplishment of a universally approved political task’.

If an open, functional and politically influential public sphere is the prerequisite for democratic legitimacy, then the presence of such an institution is the origin of citizens’ trust that the state will not abuse its powers. Even if governments were to overstep these boundaries, Habermas believes that the public could make use of vibrant national political spheres and the sensitivity of political institutions to public opinion to force a change. Because the modern, digitized public sphere enables both opinion-formation and the mobilisation of the people without physical contact, restrictions on mobility and measures to ensure physical distancing no longer impede its functioning.(9)
Even the compulsory restrictions imposed by state during the pandemic retain their "unique character as a voluntary contribution of the individual towards the collective accomplishment of a universally approved political task"

The situation is very different in illiberal or authoritarian regimes, where the ability of citizens to express themselves is restricted by surveillance, media concentration and other measures designed to tame the ‘wildness’ of the public sphere. ‘Illiberal democracies’ like Poland and Hungary still hold elections and protect constitutional rights at a theoretical level; however, since citizens are no longer empowered to act in a politically autonomous way that would allow them to see themselves as co-authors of the law, these regimes can no longer claim democratic legitimacy. In this regard measures to fight the pandemic are no different than any other political decision.
Conclusions

In appealing for the legitimacy of public health measures designed to prevent predictable and avoidable increase in infections and deaths, Habermas is fulfilling his role as a public intellectual ‘who seeks out on important issues, proposes fruitful hypotheses, and broadens the spectrum of relevant arguments in an attempt to improve the lamentable level of public debates’.(10) He is speaking in response to the growth in Corona-denialism in Germany and around the world, which is not just disrupting civil order, but also prolonging the pandemic and facilitating the mutation of the virus and the potential creation of vaccine-resistant variants of SARS-CoV-2.

This task is very different from that of epidemiologists who advise governments. Habermas argues that it is not the place of philosophers to give their opinions on the gravity of the threat of the virus itself, as Agamben did in calling Covid-19 ‘a normal influenza’. Instead of undermining public faith in medicine, intellectuals can help to ensure that societies engage in processes of opinion-formation to ensure that both expert advice and the will of the people are taken into account and balanced in a politically acceptable manner.

In this way, public intellectuals help to create and maintain the democratic solidarity necessary for individuals to act collectively as citizens. This is necessary, because – as Habermas noted in his Blätter article – ‘without civic common interest to back up mandatory law, the democratic state under the rule of law cannot have a political existence’. Aiding in the creation of such a collective ‘we-perspective’ is a crucial contribution, especially during crises such as the present, which demand sacrifices from everyone and can only be overcome concertedly. The pandemic should be seen as a chance to show solidarity and the ability to act collectively, not an opportunity to stubbornly assert one’s individual rights in a way that endangers others and further prolongs a pandemic that everyone wishes was already over.


👉 Original article on Eurozine. 

References

(1) Karl Korn quoted in Lorenz Jäger, ‘Heimsuchung von Heidegger’, Zeitschrift Für Ideengeschichte 15, no. 3 (2021), 12.

(2) Peter J. Verovšek, ‘The Philosopher as Engaged Citizen: Habermas on the Role of the Public Intellectual in the Modern Democratic Public Sphere’, European Journal of Social Theory 24, no. 4 (2021).

(3) Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Introductions: Five Approaches to Communicative Reason, Cambridge: Polity 2018, 152.

(4) Jürgen Habermas, ‘Heinrich Heine and the Role of the Intellectual in Germany’, in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, Cambridge: MIT Press 1989, 73.

(5) See Peter J. Verovšek, ‘Taking Back Control Over Markets: Jürgen Habermas on the Colonization of Politics by Economics’, Political Studies (2021).

(6) Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, Boston: Beacon Press 1974, 34.

(7) Stephen K. White and Evan Robert Farr, ‘“No-Saying” in Habermas’, Political Theory 40, no. 1 (2012).

(8) Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge: MIT Press 1996, 186, 307–8.

(9) Katharine Dommett and Peter J. Verovšek, ‘Promoting Democracy in the Digital Public Sphere: Applying Theoretical Ideals to Online Political Communication’, Javnost – the Public 28, 4 (2021).

(10) Jürgen Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project, Cambridge: Polity Press 2009, 52, 55.

Jürgen Habermas turns down UAE award over human rights concerns

Prominent German sociologist Jürgen Habermas had previously decided to accept the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, but now says it was the "wrong" decision.

FORMALLY OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL OF MARXIST HEGELIANS


Habermas is seen as one of the most important German thinkers of the 20th century

Prominent German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas turned down a book award from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Sunday over concerns about human rights in the Gulf nation. The 91-year-old intellectual had previously accepted the award.

"I declared my willingness to accept this year's Sheikh Zayed Book Award. That was a wrong decision, which I correct hereby," Habermas said in a statement shared with the German Spiegel Online news website.

"I didn't sufficiently make clear to myself the very close connection of the institution, which awards these prizes in Abu Dhabi, with the existing political system there," he added.

What exactly is the award?

The award is named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who ruled Abu Dhabi for over 30 years. Zayed, who died in 2004 at 86 years old, was the first president of the UAE.

The award is given annually to individuals and publishers "whose writing and translation in the humanities objectively enriches Arab intellectual, culture, literary and social life." Habermas was given the distinction of "Cultural Personality of the Year."

Winners of the cultural personality award receive not only a medal but also a lucrative cash prize of 1 million UAE dirhams (€226,498/ $272,249)

Habermas, widely considered to be the most important German philosopher in the second half of the 20th century, is associated with the Frankfurt School of social theory. Many of his writings on philosophical issues have been translated into Arabic.
What's the human rights situation in the UAE?

The UAE has been frequently chastised for its poor human rights situation. The country's rulers tightly control the media and wield broad discretion to punish individuals if they criticize the government.

Washington think tank Freedom House characterizes the UAE as "not free," due to the significant restrictions on civil liberties.

Other human rights concerns include the UAE's exploitation of migrants from India and other countries under its kafala system. The joint Saudi-UAE offensive against Houthi rebels in Yemen has also drawn scrutiny due to the reported indiscriminate killing of civilians in one of the world's poorest countries.

wd/sms (AP, dpa)

See all

Habermas defined the public sphere as a virtual or imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any identifiable space. In its ideal form, the public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state" (176).

Jürgen Habermas and the Public Sphere - Media-Studies

Habermas

Some Notes on Habermas and the Public Sphere of Politics.

Habermas draws a distinction between two types of action: communicative action, where the agents base their actions on (and coordinate their interactions by) their mutual recognition of validity-claims; and instrumental/strategic action, where the coordination of actions is linked to the their successful completion. Habermas argues that instrumental and strategic actions are (conceptually and in reality) always parasitic on communicative action. Hence instrumental and strategic actions alone cannot form a stable system of social action.

Habermas’s conceptual distinction between communicative action and instrumental action is paralleled by his distinction between lifeworld and system in his social ontology: his description of the nature of social being. The lifeworld concerns the lived experience of the context of everyday life in which interactions between individuals are coordinated through speech and validity-claims. Systems are real patterns of instrumental action instantiated by money (the capitalist economy) and power (the administrative state).

In his later work, Habermas made a distinction between "lifeworld" and "system." The public sphere is part of the lifeworld; "system" refers to the market economy and the state apparatus. The lifeworld is the immediate milieu of the individual social actor, and Habermas opposed any analysis which uncoupled the interdependence of the lifeworld and the system in the negotiation of political power-it is thus a mistake to see that the system dominates the whole of society. The goal of democratic societies is to "erect a democratic dam against the colonizing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld" (Further Reflections).


Habermas argues that the self-intepretation of the public sphere took shape in the concept of "public opinion", which he considers in the light of the work of Kant, Marx, Hegel, Mill and Tocqueville. The bourgeois public sphere eventually eroded because of economic and structural changes. The boundaries between state and society blurred, leading to what Habermas calls the refeudalization of society. State and society became involved in each other's spheres; the private sphere collapsed into itself. The key feature of the public sphere - rational-critical debate - was replaced by leisure, and private people no longer existed as a public of property owners. Habermas argues that the world of the mass media is cheap and powerful. He says that it attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists, and to manufacture consensus. This is particularly evident in modern politics, with the rise of new disciplines such as advertising and public relations. These, and large non- governmental organizations, replace the old institutions of the public sphere. The public sphere takes on a feudal aspect again, as politicians and organizations represent themselves before the voters. Public opinion is now manipulative, and, more rarely, still critical. We still need a strong public sphere to check domination by the state and non-governmental organizations. Habermas holds out some hope that power and domination may not be permanent features.

Enlightenment Democracy, Relativism, and the Threat of Authoritarian Politics

A central issue in Habermas's effort to sustain the Enlightenment project is the problem of relativism. This problem underlies several postmodern critiques of modernity, the Enlightenment, and Habermas, and is thus a useful first path into Habermas's thought.

The Enlightenment project of justifying democratic polity (and thus justifying emancipation from non-democratic polities - e.g., the prevailing monarchies of the time) rests on these key conceptions:

1) however diverse cultures and individuals may vary from one another in terms of religious convictions, traditions, sentiments, etc. - reason (at least in potential - a potential that must be developed by education) stands as a universally shared capacity of humanity;

2) such reason is characterized first of all as an autonomy or freedom - a freedom which, for such central figures as Locke and Kant, is capable of giving itself its own law;

3) just as this reason seems capable of discerning universal laws in the domain of mathematics and the natural sciences (witness the success of the Copernican Revolution and Newton) - so reason, it is hoped, is capable of discerning universal laws and norms in the moral and political domains.

As an example of such a universal norm: if I am to exercise my freedom by choosing my own goals and projects - this freedom requires that others respect these choices by not attempting to override them and make use of me for their own purposes. (In Kantian terms, others must never treat me simply as a means, but always as an end.)

But if I logically require others to respect my freedom as an autonomous rationality, then insofar as I acknowledge others as autonomous rationalities - reciprocity demands that I respect others' freedom as well.

This norm of respect then issues in the political demand for democracy: only democracies, as resting on the [free and rational] consent of the governed, thereby respect and preserve the fundamental humanity of its citizens ( i.e., precisely their central character as rational freedoms). [This argument, initially launched by John Locke, finds its way into Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and from there into the arguments for women's emancipation in writers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the arguments for civil rights as articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail.]

On The Living Wage/Guaranteed Income

To give this idea a more radical twist, we could endorse a general, state-guaranteed citizen income, as originally proposed by Andre Gorz and now backed by Claus Offe, among others. Severing the link between income and employment would place the current "economic society"--now centered on the traditional role of full-time wage labor-on a new footing and create an equivalent for the disintegrating welfare system. This "basic income" would absorb the capitalist world market's destructive impact on those who slide into the increasingly "superfluous" population. Such a radical redistribution program requires, however, a change in deep-rooted values that will be difficult to orchestrate. Also, under present conditions of global competition, we might wonder how the program could be financed within the budgetary limits of individual nation states, since the target income would have to be above the lowest level of welfare support.

The globalization of the economy ends the history of the welfare-state compromise. While it by no means ideally solved capitalism's inherent problems, this compromise had at least succeeded in keeping social costs within accepted limits. Despite the bureaucratization and "normalization" so convincingly criticized by Michel Foucault, the scale of social disparities under this compromise was limited sufficiently to avoid the manifest repudiation of the normative promises of the democratic and liberal tradition.

Religion in the Public Sphere

What is most surprising in this context is the political revitalization of religion at the heart of
Western society. Though there is statistical evidence for a wave of secularization in almost
all European countries since the end of World War II, in the United States all data show
that the comparatively large proportion of the population made up of devout and religiously
active citizens has remained the same over the last six decades.5 Here, a carefully
planned coalition between the Evangelical and born-again Christians on one side, the
American Catholics on the other side siphons off a political surplus value from the religious
renewal at the heart of Western civilization.6 And it tends to intensify, at the cultural level,
the political division of the West that was prompted by the Iraq War.7 With the abolition of
the death penalty, with liberal regulations on abortion, with setting homosexual
partnerships on a par with heterosexual marriages, with an unconditional rejection of
torture, and generally with the privileging of individual rights versus collective goods, e.g.,
national security, the European states seem now to be moving forward alone down the
path they had trodden side by side with the United States.

Against the background of the rise of religion across the globe, the division of the West is
now perceived as if Europe were isolating itself from the rest of the world. Seen in terms of
world history, Max Weber’s Occidental Rationalism appears to be the actual deviation. The
Occident’s own image of modernity seems, as in a psychological experiment, to undergo a
switchover: what has been the supposedly “normal” model for the future of all other
cultures suddenly changes into a special-case scenario. Even if this suggestive Gestaltswitch
does not quite bear up to sociological scrutiny, and if the contrasting evidence of
what appears as a sweeping desecularization can be brought into line with more
conventional explanations,8 there is no doubting the evidence itself and above all the
symptomatic fact of divisive political moods crystallizing around it. Irrespective of how one
evaluates the facts, there is now a Kulturkampf raging in the United States which forms the
background for an academic debate on the role of religion in the political public sphere.

Faith and Knowledge

First of all, the word "secularization" has a juridical meaning that refers
to the forcible appropriation of church property by the secular state.  This
meaning has since been extended to the emergence of cultural and societal
modernism in general.  Since then, the word "secularization" has been
associated with both of these opposed judgments, whether it is the
successful taming of ecclesiastical authority by worldly power that is being
emphasized or rather the act of unlawful appropriation.

According to the first interpretation, religious ways of thinking and living
have been replaced by reason-based and consequently superior equivalents.
According to the second, modern modes of thinking and living are to be
regarded as the illegitimate spoils of conquest.  The "replacement" model
lends a progressive-optimistic meaning to the act of deconsecration, whereas
the "expropriation" model connotes theoretically-conceived corruption of a
rootless modernity.

But I think both interpretations make the same mistake.  They both consider
secularization as a kind of zero-sum game between, on one hand, the
productive powers of science and technology harnessed by capitalism and, on
the other, the tenacious powers of religion and the church.  This image no
longer fits a post-secular society that posits the continued existence of
religious communities within a continually secularizing society.  And most
of all, this too-narrow view overlooks the civilizing role of democratically
enlightened common sense, which proceeds along its own track as an equal
third partner amid the murmurs of cultural conflict between science and
religion.

>From the standpoint of the liberal state, of course, religious communities
are entitled to be called "reasonable" only if they renounce the use of
violence as a means of propagating the truths of their faith.  This
understanding stems from a threefold reflection on the role of the faithful
within a pluralistic society.  First of all, the religious conscience must
handle the encounter with other confessions and other religions cognitively.
Second, it must accede to the authority of science, which holds a social
monopoly on knowledge.  Finally, it must participate in the premises of a
constitutional state, which is based on a non-sacred concept of morality.
Without this reflective "thrust," monotheisms within ruthlessly modernizing
societies develop a destructive potential.  The phrase "reflective thrust,"
of course, can give the false impression of being something that is
one-sided and close-ended.  The reality, however, is that this work of
reflection in the face of any newly emerging conflict is a process that runs
its course through the public spaces of democracy.

As soon as an existentially relevant question, such as biotechnology,
becomes part of the political agenda, the citizens, both believers and
non-believers, will press upon each other their ideologically impregnated
world-views and so will stumble upon the harsh reality of ideological
pluralism.  If they learn to deal with this reality without violence and
with an acceptance of their own fallibility, they will come to understand
what the secular principles of decision-making written into the Constitution
mean in a post-secular society.  In other words, the ideologically neutral
state does not prejudice its political decisions in any way toward either
side of the conflict between the rival claims of science and religious
faith.  The political reason of the citizenry follows a dynamic of
secularization only insofar as it maintains in the end product an equal
distance from vital traditions and ideological content.  But such a state
retains a capacity to learn only to the extent that it remains osmotically
open, without relinquishing its independence, to both science and religion.

Of course, common sense itself is also full of illusions about the world and
must let itself be enlightened without reservation by the sciences.  But the
scientific theories that impinge on the world of life leave the framework of
our everyday knowledge essentially untouched.  If we learn something new
about the world and about ourselves as beings in the world, the content of
our self-understanding changes.  Copernicus and Darwin revolutionized the
geocentric and anthropocentric worldviews.  But the destruction of the
astronomical illusion that the stars revolve around the earth had less
effect on our lives than did the biological disillusionment over the place
of mankind in the natural order.  It appears that the closer scientific
knowledge gets to our body, the more it disturbs our self-understanding.
Research on the brain is teaching us about the physiology of our
consciousness.  But does this change that intuitive sense of responsibility
and accountability that accompanies all of our actions?

Pluralist Societies

The expanded concept of tolerance does not remain restricted to the sphere of religion but can be generally extended to tolerance of others who think differently in any way. Within today’s pluralist societies where the traditions of various linguistic and cultural communities come together, tolerance is always necessary "where ways of life challenge judgements in terms of both existential relevance and claims to truth and rightness" (J. Habermas)

Multiculturalism and the Liberal State

 My  article, n1 which provides the basis for our discussion, is a response
  to my friend Charles Taylor's The Politics of Recognition. n2 The
  controversial issue is briefly this: Should citizens' identities as
  members of ethnic, cultural, or religious groups publicly matter,
  and if so, how can collective identities make a difference within
  the frame of a constitutional democracy? Are collective identities
  and cultural memberships politically relevant, and if so, how can
  they legitimately affect the distribution of rights and the recognition
  of legal claims? There are many aspects to multiculturalism, but the
  present debate focuses narrowly on normative questions of political
  and legal theory. Without any attempt to summarize the arguments of
  the book, I would like to remind you of the two opposed answers to
  the question at hand - the liberal and the communitarian positions
  - and of my own response, which is critical of both. n3
           I cannot go into the details of the argumentation here, but it might
  help just to mention both the philosophical and the political contexts
  in which my response to Taylor was embedded. 

As to philosophical themes, those familiar with discussions in political theory will have discovered two controversial issues at stake. First, I am defending liberals against the communitarian critique with regard to the concept of the "self." The individualistic approach to a theory of rights does not necessarily imply an atomistic, disembodied, and desocialized concept of the person. The legal person is, of course, an artificial construct. Modern legal orders presuppose abstract subjects as carriers of those rights of which they are composed. These artificial persons are not identical with natural persons, who are individuated by their unique life histories. But legal persons, too, should and can be constructed as socialized individuals. They are members of a community of legal consociates who are supposed to recognize each other as free and equal. The equal respect required from legal persons pertains, however, also to the context of those intersubjective relationships which are constitutive for their identities as natural persons.

Together with the communitarians I am, on the other hand, critical of the liberal assumption that human rights are prior to popular sovereignty. The addressees of law must be in a position to see themselves at the same time as authors of those laws to which they are subject. Human rights may not just be imposed on popular sovereignty as an external constraint. Of course, popular sovereignty must not be able to arbitrarily dispose of human rights either. The two mutually presuppose each other. The solution to this seeming paradox is that human rights must be conceived in such a way that they are enabling rather than constraining conditions for democratic self-legislation.

Turning to political themes: The idea of a "struggle for recognition" stems from Hegel's Phenomenology. n8 From this perspective, we can discover similarities among different but related phenomena: feminism, nationalism, conflict of cultures, besides the particular issue of multiculturalism. All these phenomena have in common the political struggle for the recognition of suppressed collective identities. This good is different from other collective goods. It cannot be substituted for by generalized social rewards (income, leisure time, working conditions, etc.) which are the objects of the usual distribution conflicts in the welfare state. But those struggles for recognition, fought in various forms of identity politics, are also different in many other respects. One such aspect is law: Since of these groups only women and ethnic minorities have been recognized as objects of constitutional protection, only feminist and mul- [*853] ticulturalist claims can be, at least in principle, settled within the frame of the constitutional state.

Finally, an example. The immediate political context in Germany at the time of my article was the debate on "asylum," which in fact was about immigration. Applying the principles above, one can arrive at the following conclusions: First, there are good legal reasons for defending a right to political asylum. n9 On the other hand, there are only moral reasons, albeit rather strong ones, for establishing a liberal immigration policy. The claim to immigration and citizenship in the receiving country is a moral claim but, unlike political asylum, not a legal right.

Second, immigrants should be obliged to assent to the principles of the constitution as interpreted within the scope of the political culture: that is, the ethical-political self-understanding of the citizenry of the receiving country. Once they become citizens themselves, they in turn get a voice in public debates, which may then shift the established inerpretation of the constitutional principles. The obligation to accept the political culture may not, however, extend to assimilation to the way of life of the majority culture. A legally required political socialization may not have an impact on other aspects of the collective identity of the immigrants' culture of origin.

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German Journeys Part 24: Enlightenment, Habermas, and the European Union

Last in the series! German Journeys is based on a true story. Featuring as persona Alec in this series, the author writes about their cultural exploration of Germany as a narrative based on true events

by Peter Morris
03-03-2024 13:00
in Short story Sunday

Image credit: hyotographics/Shutterstock.com

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 Part 23

Berlin December 1784

“Enlightenment,” wrote the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in that month’s edition of the Berlin Monthly “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.

“This immaturity,” he continued, “is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore ‘Sapere aude!’ Have the courage to use your own understanding!”

Alec, of course, was not in Berlin to read Kant’s famous essay when it appeared. The dateline at the top of this final Part in the German Journeys series is not a mistake but the date of publication of Kant’s winning entry in a competition in the magazine to define enlightenment. Runner up was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of Felix.

It was in the summer of 2018 that Alec studied Kant’s essay at Berlin Free University as part of a course on “German Philosophy: Kant to Habermas,” already discussed in Part 22 in relation to the philosopher Hegel.

The more Alec reads and re-reads Kant’s essay, the more relevant it becomes to modern life. Laziness and cowardice, says the philosopher, are the reasons why so many people remain immature for life and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians, guiding their thoughts and actions. People in authority like government ministers, military officers and priests train ordinary citizens as if they were domestic animals, afraid to act or think on their own initiative.

Today’s guardians still include ministers and politicians, but now include mass and social media, celebrities, and so-called influencers as well. It’s so much easier, Kant argued, to be lulled into conforming to the views of such people than to think independently. The only way out of this immature dependence on others, he says, is for people to make public use of their reason.

While he conceded that people must follow lawful instructions at work, and pay their taxes, he argued that as private citizens they should challenge rather than conform. It is clear from his essay that he would have been in favour of peaceful protests.

Ultimately, Kant was an optimist: “Once the germ on which nature has lavished most care – man’s inclination and vocation to think freely – has developed within this hard shell [the discipline necessary for a secure society] it gradually reacts upon the mentality of the people, who thus gradually become increasingly able to act for themselves. Eventually it even influences the principles of governments, which find that they can themselves profit by treating man, who is more than a machine, in a manner appropriate to his dignity.”

Alec found himself in sympathy with Kant’s definition of enlightenment as the courage to think for oneself and encouraged that in western countries at least there are many people who are willing to protest and campaign.

But looking around Britain and the world he was far from certain that in more than 200 years since Kant’s famous essay humanity at large had freed itself from those who set themselves up as its guardians, particularly in the mainstream and social media, and especially doubtful that governments in many nations had advanced much, if at all towards treating their people with dignity.

Habermas and the European Union

2010

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas brings this series of 24 reminiscences of travels and studies in Germany full circle with a discussion of the subject with which it started: the European Union (EU). The series started as a contribution to efforts to persuade the British Government to make it easier for school exchanges with Europe to take place. Such exchanges can have lifelong educational, cultural, and horizon-broadening benefits, as Alec hopes his own experiences have demonstrated. But exchanges have fallen off drastically since Brexit.

Habermas (born 1929) is perhaps Europe’s foremost public intellectual, applying philosophy to public policy. He is an opponent of populism and nationalism and a critical friend of the EU. But as he explained in a book published in at the time of the world financial crisis 2010, “The Crisis of the European Union: A Response” *, he wants to go much further than a more closely integrated and more democratic EU. He wants world government, but of a specific and limited type.

The United Nations, he believes, should be reorganised as a politically constituted community of states and (original emphasis) citizens, restricted to the core tasks of peacekeeping and the global implementation of human rights, with the necessary institutional means to fulfil these two tasks effectively and even-handedly.

For what he calls the pressing problems of a future global domestic (author’s emphasis) politics – the environment and climate change, the worldwide risks of large-scale technology, regulating financial market-driven capitalism, and especially the distributional problems that arise in the trade, labour, health, and transportation regimes of a highly stratified world society – there is the need for a negotiation system normatively integrated into the world community.

The EU, he believes, could fit seamlessly into such a world society. The EU must realise its democratic potential, according to the book cover, by evolving from an international into a cosmopolitan community. Under the right conditions, the chain of legitimacy could extend without interruption from national states via regional regimes such as the EU to the world organisation.

“These are fateful times,” wrote Habermas (in 2010, don’t forget, at the time of the euro crisis and before Brexit was heard of). “Our lame political elites, who prefer to read the tabloid headlines, must not use as an excuse that their populations are the obstacle to a deeper European unification. With a little political backbone, the crisis of the single currency can bring about what some once hoped for from a common European foreign policy, namely a cross border awareness of a shared European destiny.”
Conclusion

Looking back on Habermas’s ambitions for Europe and the world back in 2010, and all that has happened since, not least Brexit, Alec’s first thought was that they were Utopian. In particular, he thought, the UN could never be reformed in the way Habermas wanted. Russia and China, with their vetoes on the Security Council, would never allow it. And the EU, under the increasing influence of right-wing, populist, and nationalist parties, is struggling to co-operate in tackling problems like the influx of refugees.

But then again, Alec thought, change had to start somewhere, and why not at the next UK general election. Could Keir Starmer’s Labour Party not be persuaded to be a little bolder, a little less lame, and put flesh on the bones of its vague aspirations for a closer relationship with the EU. That at least would be a step, if a tiny one, that the UK could take on the road to the peaceful, human-rights-based, cosmopolitan world that Habermas has argued for.

On a personal level, Alec hoped that his own experiences of one EU country, Germany, recounted in this series, would make people appreciate that there are educational and cultural pleasures and benefits to be gained from continental travel if they can. Travel, he was taught as a child growing up in Sunderland, broadens the mind.

Meanwhile, there is something all readers can do as well, if they wish: Sign the Parliamentary petition calling on the Government to make it easier for schools to organise European trips.

*Translated by Ciarin Cronin. Published by Polity.



Peter Morris
I am a semi-retired journalist with experience in North East newspapers dating back to 1964. I have worked on Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside, specialising in regional politics and local government before moving into newsdesk management. I have also worked in media relations for the government. Since retiring I have studied at university, gaining successively a BA (humanities with art history, MA (European Union studies) and PhD (economic geography).

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