Surrealism + Sociology (Goldsmiths Methods Lab Lecture 2015)

This paper will engage with the significance of the trial in Surrealist literature. It will begin by describing how the surrealist group constituted itself through the Dada trial of Maurice Barrès in 1922 – which negated Dada’s ‘absolute’ negation and differentiated the proto-surrealists from the rest of the Dada movement. The rest of the paper will look at how the surrealists redeployed the concept of the trial as method of critiquing perceived reality. From the outset surrealist literature is littered with references to trials. For instance in the early 1920’s they wrote about holding assizes to establish who was guilty of betraying the avant-garde principles of Dada and Surrealism, in 1934 they tried Dali for crimes against surrealism and throughout the 1920’s and ‘30’s they simulated madness in order to try reality. They believed that through their critique, their constant trial of reality, they could overcome the common- sense perception of the world and create the conditions for a radical new form of consciousness.

2008

This introduction constitutes a review of and commentary on the various feature articles in the "Surrealism and Ethnography" special issue.

Long feted as the acceptable 'radical' face of the surrealist avant-garde and recently celebrated with an exhibition devoted exclusively to it, the magazine Documents (1929-30) is perhaps most closely associated in Anglo-American scholarship with James Clifford's famous definition of 'ethnographic surrealism.' 1 A heterogeneous mixture of cultures and concepts held at a point of irreconcilability, patched together with a collage of photographic materials, represents the principle of cultural relativism and a fundamentally anthropological impulse, in this reading. The difficulties with this concept have been outlined in responses by Jean Jamin and Michael Richardson among others, and I do not intend to repeat these here. 2 It is clear, however, that the afterlife of Clifford's term as a convenient summation of a wide range of ideas and historical circumstances has not helped its cause; that 'ethnography' and 'surrealism' by definition do not belong together was a crucial, if slippery, strategic feature of Clifford's analysis. Moreover, both surrealism and ethnography arguably only feature in Documents in modified forms: there are still those today who would question the presence of either surrealism 'proper' or indeed ethnography in the periodical. 'Surrealism' can have many meanings, as a term for a loose grouping of writers, for a body of texts and theories, for a 'way of life' and conceptual approach, all of which are arguably unconstrained by 'official' institutional boundaries. 'Ethnography,' on the other hand, was still fighting, in the late 1920s, for wide institutional recognition, and so much more was at stake in playing with its meanings and definitions. This was just one of the ways in which the two domains did not share the same point of departure in their notorious coming together in Documents. For a former surrealist poet like Michel Leiris, Documents offered a means to extend his intellectual activity into new areas and ultimately laid the basis for his subsequent career as a professional anthropologist. For the young anthropologist Marcel Griaule, the periodical was a site of experimental thinking, whose implications arguably needed to be tempered in his ethnographic practice in the 1930s and beyond.

The chapter (draft) examines the work of Melanie Gilligan and Johan Grimonprez as responses to aspects of capitalist globalisation, arguing for expanding the paradigm of Gothic Marxism in its connection to a surrealist unconscious, contending that the film work examined is symptomatic of a 'totality turn, or a surrealism after 'surrealism without the unconscious' [Fredric Jameson]'. The argument is indebted to Margaret Cohen's approach to Walter Benjamin in her book Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (1993) as well as to discussions with the artists.

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, no. 11, 2020

The article argues that the transgressive strategies of VVV, a New York-based surrealist journal published in the early 1940s, are designed as a means to create a space of surrealist resistance against the totalitarian forces dominating its time. The periodical’s medial transgressions imply the transformation of its pages by cut-outs, paper embossing or inserted objects. Works like Marcel Duchamp’s Genre Allegory and Frederick Kiesler’s Twin Touch Test and Design Correlation thus involve readers in an interactive play and at the same time radically challenge their perception. VVV’s readers are also bewildered by the illogical confusion of language choice and a performative play with translation. This concerns especially the Latin American participation of the Chilean Mandrágora group and the surrealist poets from Peru. The multilingualism of their contributions, varying from English to Spanish and French, makes clear that the aleatory play with languages across nations and cultures is part of VVV’s surrealist strategies meant to refuse assimilation to any hegemonic cultural context. That the journal emphatically exposes its transculturality is also analyzed with regard to Aimé Césaire’s, Wifredo Lam’s and Maria Martins’s contributions in VVV that evoke the Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian spirituality of Candomblé and Santería as a form of resistance against colonialism. Altogether, the transgressive strategies illustrate the surrealist periodical’s revolutionary endeavor to develop a “total view”, as stated in its manifesto. In contrast to the totalizing and repressive world visions of colonialism and fascism, the total view of Surrealism unfolds ever new realities underneath the surface of appearances.

2012

Although Surrealist writing has literary merit, Surrealist texts were written as revolutionary tracts meant to undermine the social order. Yet the politically radical aspects of the movement are no longer taken very seriously. At least one contributing factor to the current impotence of Surrealism is the approach taken in the translation of Surrealist texts. Many translators have presented Surrealist texts as they would traditionally present any literary document. However, Walter Benjamin's writings on translation, in particular his essay "The Task of the Translator," provide a novel conception of translation, one which can produce linguistically radical texts. I will argue that the Benjaminian approach to translating Surrealism promises to reinvigorate Surrealism for modern readers.

Surprisingly, this reader is the first single volume collection of Roger Caillois' writings to be published not only in English but in any language. Although this is a crucial addition to the very few existent translations of Caillois' work, its publication serves to underscore how neglected this writer is in the English-speaking world. One of the reasons for this neglect perhaps is that Caillois' writings resist categorisation. Like his colleagues at the College of Sociology, Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, Caillois writings were diverse. Spanning the domains of literature, ethnography, mythography, social theory, and science, Caillois' writings could be said to outshine even Bataille and Leiris as examples of the multidisciplinary achievements in the evolution of surrealist thought. The Edge of Surrealism selectively represents the diversity of Caillois' writings whilst providing the reader with an astonishing