Rassmussen, Mikkel Bolt The Situationist International, Surrealism and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics

mikk

ssen

The Situationist International,

Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion

of Art and Politics

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the

Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

This article has two inter-related aims. Firstly, I want to contribute to the

growing debate about the politics and political theories of the Situationist

International and Surrealism. Through a presentation of an episode where the

later situationists distanced themselves from the surrealist favourite Chaplin, I

will attempt to account for the way the surrealists and the situationists

respectively engaged in politics, how they tried to locate themselves on the left

and tried to navigate in a environment dominated by the French Communist

Party. After a discussion of the complicated relationship between Surrealism

and the Communist Party and Trotskyism, I analyse how the situationists after

World War Two attempted to continue the project of the inter-war avant-

garde without repeating what they considered to be failures of Surrealism. I

present the situationists' repudiation of the unconscious and their conscious

effort to leave the art world in favour of ultra-left politics outside the con®nes

of the Communist Party. Secondly, I want to offer some hypotheses as to why

the Situationist International has been marginalised within theories of the

avant-garde. Through a discussion of Peter BuÈrger's important Theory of the

Avant-Garde, I look into the strange omission of the situationists within

accounts of the avant-garde and I unravel the roots of the situationists' and

BuÈrger's categorical critique of the neo-avant-garde.

On 29 October 1952, Charlie Chaplin held his ®nal press conference in Paris

after the successful French premier of his new ®lm Limelight.

The previous

week Chaplin had been in London, where he opened the European launching

of his new ®lm. In London, as in Paris and Rome, Chaplin was a sensation, and

at the gala premier, 200 policemen were called out to keep around 10,000

spectators at a distance. The BBC was present and recorded the entire scene,

where long rows of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys dropped off public ®gures such

as Princess Margaret, Lady Mountbatten, the Duke of Alba, Vivien Leigh, and

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It was as if everyone of importance in England had

gathered to celebrate the homecoming of the exiled king of ®lm.

Chaplin was in exile because he had been refused automatic entry to the

United States after his tour in Europe; he had paradoxically become a pawn in

and victim of a political game at a time when he had otherwise retracted his

former controversial political viewpoints and created a melancholic auto-

biographical love ®lm. While Chaplin had openly expressed sympathy for the

International and domestic communism in the 1940s, around 1950 he began to

resist making political comments and attempted to dissociate himself from his

former viewpoints. Throughout the 1940s, Chaplin had repeatedly aired his

support and admiration for the Soviet Union in interviews, and he had been

active in the left-wing environment in Hollywood that arose among exiled

Europeans like Hanns Eisler and Berthold Brecht. The ®lm Monsieur Verdoux

from 1947 thus presented a social critique of capitalistic society and, unlike

Chaplin's previous ®lms, contained few traditional comical elements. Rather,

1. For accounts of the events surrounding the

release of Chaplin's Limelight, see Charles

J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The

Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton University

Press: Princeton, 1989), pp. 221±313, and

Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and his Times

(Simon & Schuster: New York, 1997),

pp. 472±91.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

365±387

the comedy that it contained was macabre. The ®lm was also a ®nancial ®asco,

and shortly afterward Chaplin began pulling away from his former obvious

political commitment. However, at that time the FBI had already registered

him as a communist sympathiser, and two members of Congress had

demanded that he should be deported from the United States. Even though

Chaplin manifestly played down the political viewpoints he previously

advanced, and despite a major ad campaign focusing on his traditional

character ± the comical and loveable tramp± he became entangled in the

wide-ranging shift in public opinion that took place in the US from 1947 to

1951. Once the enthusiasm after the defeat of fascism in World War Two had

abated, there was a return to the anti-communist atmosphere of the 1930s,

and the Cold War became a reality. After a number of different events ± the

USSR detonates an atom bomb, the Maoists in China win in 1949, the Korean

War breaks out, Klaus Fuchs, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are revealed as spies

± a xenophobic anti-communist atmosphere achieved a hegemonic status in the

US. Joseph McCarthy, who headed a witch-hunt against assumed communists

from 1949 onward, incarnated an extreme form of anti-communism. It is in

this en¯amed climate Chaplin attempted to salvage his status as a star, as a

loveable, funny, and hard-working comedian. In interviews, he refrained from

expressing support for the Soviet Union, saying instead: `I am not political . . .

I am an individualist and believe in liberty. This is as far as my political

convictions go . . . In modern times where everything is being regimented the

artist must more than ever think of the internal life of the individual, of this

unique phenomenon which is a human being, the artist must create for him'.

But regardless of these measures, the US revoked his permission to return

after his tour in Europe.

In contrast to the treatment he received in the US, Chaplin was celebrated

like a king in Europe. According to Variety, at the premier in London he

received more applause than Princess Margaret, and a few days after the

premieÁre he was received in audience by Queen Elizabeth. Nor in Paris was

pomp in short supply. Chaplin was admitted as a member of the Legion of

Honour, received by various public of®cials including the Paris police chief,

and the newspapers were over¯owing with articles on him. Thus, on 29

October, Chaplin held his ®nal press conference in Paris at the Ritz Hotel. In

the middle of the session, four men suddenly started shouting and began

throwing ¯yers out over the entire gathering. The ¯yer, an A4 sheet written

on a typewriter, carried the heading `NO MORE FLAT FEET', and read:

Sub-Mack Sennett director, sub-Max Linder actor, Stravisky of the tears of unwed mothers and
the little orphans of Auteil, you are Chaplin, emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune
. . . Because you've identi®ed yourself with the weak and the oppressed, to attack you has been
to attack the weak and the oppressed ± but in the shadow of your rattan cane some could
already see the nightstick of a cop. You are `he-who-turns-the-other-cheek' ± the other cheek of
the buttocks ± but for us, the young and beautiful, the only answer to suffering is revolution . . .
Go to sleep, you fascist insect. Rake in the dough. Make it with high society (we loved it when
you crawled on your stomach in front of little Elisabeth). Have a quick death: we promise you a
®rst-class funeral. We pray that your latest ®lm will truly be your last . . . Go home, Mister
Chaplin.

At the bottom of the page were four signatures: Serge Berna, Guy-Ernest

Debord, Jean-L. Brau, and Gil Wolman. The four men had signed on the

behalf of the Lettrist International. The Lettrists argued that Chaplin and his

®lm practised a kind of emotional blackmail, merely compensating for a boring

life and not creating the possibility of a new one ®lled with excitement and

adventure. Chaplin belonged to the past and was an obstacle toward creating a

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

368

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

2. Cited in Maland, Chaplin and American

Culture, p. 281.
3. `Finis les pieds plats', reprinted in GeÂrard

BerreÂby (ed.), Documents relatifs aÁ la fondation de

l'internationale situationniste (EÂditions Allia: Paris,

1985), p. 262.

new life without alienation and suffering. He signalled passivity and weakness

and a lack of desire to change this situation. His lack of self-awareness was

naõÈve, making it possible to separate the human from the social and to pin

one's faith on a utopian salvation of mankind. The event did not manage to

create any major debate in the newspapers, and Chaplin did not comment on

the episode in his autobiography. Even so, the episode was signi®cant since it

was not only the birth of what later became the International Situationist, but

it also heralded a shift in the history of the artistic avant-garde.

On the face of it, the event con®rmed the break between Isidore Isou's

lettrist groupand the international lettrists who were behind the ¯yer and the

action against Chaplin. Lettrism arose when the Romanian artist Isodore Isou

arrived in Paris shortly after World War Two with a suitcase full of

manuscripts and a megalomaniacal artistic project comprising poetry, painting,

®lm, theatre, music, and so on. According to Isou, it was time to honour the

destruction of the artwork that had been undertaken by radical modern art. A

new life should now be constructed on the ruins of the old one. Isou had

developed a theory of history based on the idea that what drives history

forward is the will to create.

Creation makes the world possible, makes the

world exist. The sense of human action was to create oneself and the world.

Through the act of creation man became God, according to Isou, who thus

logically called himself the new Messiah. In other words, Isou and Lettrism

radicalised one of the most long-lasting myths in the history of modernity: the

narcissistic idea of autogenesis and complete (self-) mastery. Miraculously,

modern man generates himself out of nothing. Ex nihilo, homo autotelus

extrapolates himself. There was nevertheless a logic in the procedure of

creation: according to Isou, all forms thus went through a `phase amplique'

and a `phase ciselant'; that is, ®rst a period when the form developed, became

meaningful, created its stylistic vocabulary with which it became capable of

expressing more than just its immanent content, then a period when it

disintegrated, imploded, and thus began to concentrate on the forms and

techniques of the medium itself.

Isou applied this grandiose genesis to various art forms, so that, for instance,

within literature it was Victor Hugo who had completed `le phase amplique'

and Baudelaire who had initiated `le phase ciselant'. After Baudelaire,

Rimbaud, and Verlaine, then MallarmeÂ and ValeÂry and ®nally Tzara and

Breton had destroyed poetic language so that it ended up not meaning

anything: Dada. Now it was upto Isou to reconstruct an entirely new alphabet

consisting of new letters, new basic elements, hence the name of the

movement: lettre-ism. Isou succeeded in convincing the publishing house

Gallimard to publish several of his manuscripts; and with the help of staged

scandals, Isou succeeded in creating awareness of Lettrism in Paris in the 1940s

and 1950s. He gathered a small group of young people around him and

together they created lettrist poetry, music, ®lm, painting, dance, philosophy,

architecture, and so on and so forth. Basically, the groupput all media to use,

subjecting them to either a `phase amplique' or a `phase ciselant' according to

how far the individual medium had reached in its development.

It was this mixture of budding youth culture and avant-garde groupthat

Guy Debord, Gil Wolman, and the other international lettrists had challenged

by criticising Chaplin. Isou and the other lettrists criticised the attack on

Chaplin in a letter to the editor in Combat, characterising the four men's action

as `outrancier et confus', and writing that even though the celebration of

Chaplin was marked by hysteria, they in no way wanted to take issue with

Chaplin. `We are not in solidarity with our friends' tract and we join the

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

4. See Isidore Isou, Introduction aÁ une nouvelle

poeÂsie et aÁ une nouvelle musique (Gallimard: Paris,

1947), MeÂmoires sur les forces futures des arts

plastiques et sur leur mort (Cahiers del'ExterniteÂ:

Paris, 1998).

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

369

homage everyone has rendered to Chaplin.'

The international lettrists

responded: `We believe that the most urgent expression of freedom is the

destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom.'

Thus

Isou and the lettrists were, according to the international lettrists, no longer

abreast of the times and had themselves become reactionary. Like Chaplin and

all other idols, Isou should be destroyed in order to make room for a new

generation. But not a new generation of artists. As Debord wrote in a response

to Isou: `We have so little interest in the authors and their tactics that the

incident is almost forgotten; it is really for us as if Jean-Isidore Isou had never

existed; as if there never had been his lies and his renunciation.'

This was no

longer the time for literature and art. Isou was hanging on to the past while

Debord and the international lettrists had already forgotten everything about

Isou, Chaplin, and literature. That which had previously been the artistic

avant-garde was now impossible. The true revolutionaries had moved out of

and beyond art. The true revolutionaries no longer had anything to do with

art.

The idea of the failure of the avant-garde played a pivotal role in the theories

and the practice that ®rst the international lettrists and later the International

Situationist developed. According to the Situationists' genealogy of the avant-

garde, the period between 1910 and 1930 was the culmination of the 150-

year-long disintegration of art and the artwork. With Dada and Surrealism it

became obvious that the only true art was anti-art, that the authentic artwork

carried its own negation. Dada and Surrealism had each driven art beyond its

limits and carried out the self-transcendence of art. Since then nothing of

relevance had been produced as art. The period after 1930 had been

characterised by an expanding repetition of previous destructions and

experiments. In a report whose title was `Panorama intelligent de l'avant-

garde aÁ la ®n de 1955', a severe critique of contemporary art, politics, and

philosophy was made:

Poetry: The almost complete disappearance of this activity . . . Cinema: It has been years since
we have seen a ®lm of even minor novelty . . . Philosophy: IDIOTS, stop being. Read Marx . . .
Visual arts: All abstract painting since Malevitch have been forcing open doors. This activity is
off-course, uninteresting and perfectly mediocre . . . Politics: Nothing new . . . Literature: One is
never without substitutes that can preserve the publishing industry and consumption.

Since Dada and the surrealists, modern art had merely repeated itself and had

ended upas a mocking compensation for an alienated life. Modern art was

dead, a death that occurred around 1930. From then on no artistic

experiments had managed to live up to art's demands for a different life. They

had been satis®ed with merely re-presenting already accepted and circulating

forms without understanding the very historical situation and development

that had made it possible to transcend art and integrate it directly into

everyday life.

By criticising Chaplin, the situationists made it clear that the time had now

come to transgress Dada and Surrealism. They made it clear that they

perceived themselves as a post-Dadaist and post-surrealist movement. For the

surrealists had expressed great enthusiasm for Chaplin on several occasions,

culminating in 1927 when they delivered a grandiose defence of Chaplin in

their journal La ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste.

Under the title `Hands off Love', the

surrealists defended Chaplin's right to live as he pleased. Chaplin's wife at the

time, Lillita Grey, had applied for divorce and demanded $1 million in

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

370

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

5. `Les lettristes desavouent les insultes de

Chaplin', reprinted in BerreÂby, p. 147.
6. `Position de l'Internationale lettriste',

reprinted in BerreÂby, p. 151.
7. Guy Debord, `Mort d'un Commis

Voyageur', reprinted in BerreÂby, Documents,

p. 149.
8. `Panorama intelligent de l'avant-garde aÂ la

®n de 1955', Guy Debord preÂsente Potlach

(Gallimard: Paris, 1996), pp. 209±18.
9. The defence was originally written for the

journal Transition, `a monthly magazine

presenting the modern spirit of various

continents to the English-speaking world', which

presented the text as `a terri®c Document

defending Genius against Bourgeois Hypocrisy

and against Modern American Morality'. But the

surrealists were not satis®ed with the

presentation of the text and reprinted it in La

ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste. See JoseÂ Pierre (ed.), Tracts

surreÂalistes et deÂclarations collectives (1922/1969).

Tome I (1922/39) (Le terrain vague: Paris,

1980), pp. 414±6.

alimony. Her attorney and uncle, Edwin McMurray, made public a 40-page-

long indictment in which Chaplin was accused of having affairs, living a

perverted life, and neglecting his wife in favour of his ®lms. `Plaintiff alleges

with regard to sexual relations heretofore existing between said parties that the

defendant's attitude, conduct and manifestations of interest therein have been

abnormal, unnatural, perverted, degenerate and indecent.'

The public did not react in favour of Chaplin, and he came under heavy ®re

on account of the affair. The surrealists did not react too late and directed a

scathing attack on the bourgeois morality they wanted to get rid of. As Breton

wrote in Manifeste du surreÂalisme: `a new morality must be substituted for the

prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations.'

They wrote

that marriage was nothing but a prison designed to restrain true passions and

that bourgeois morality restricted the natural freedom of feelings and

suppressed the ability to create. Chaplin was an ideal because he followed his

desire wherever it took him. In the apology, which had even been made the

leading article of the issue, they recalled in admiration how in one of his ®lms

Chaplin had dropped everything in his hands to follow a woman passing by.

This scene made a considerable impression on the surrealists, to whom desire

was the greatest virtue. Spontaneous actions were an expression of unspoiled

creativity, while consciousness destroyed the fantastic and imprisoned it in the

sterile forms of art. Art and poetry were only relevant to the surrealists insofar

as they were manifestations of the fantastic. Considered formally and

stylistically, art and poetry were without value, but as an expression of the

fantastic they were indispensable. They therefore possessed no immanent

value, but were important as media in which the fantastic was awakened.

Transcending the self was pivotal. Man should allow himself to be subjected to

objective accidental occurrences and to be open to the singularity of

coincidences, where a corner of hidden meaning in life, a higher necessity, was

exposed. For the surrealists, mankind was a sensitive receiver of an already

existing poetic inspiration that it was a matter of setting free. This liberation

could take place on walks through city streets, where encounters with the

objects of yesteryear or strange characters constituted emotional shocks, or

through automatic writing, in which a discursive ¯ux was released.

The surrealists' operations were risky and Breton himself wrote that Champs

magneÂtiques was an attempt to `write a dangerous book' ± dangerous not only

to those who allowed themselves to be possessed by automatic writing, but

also linguistically dangerous, in that automatic writing questioned the

authenticity of all other means of communication.

Automatic writing was

an attempt to create transparent, total communication without ulterior

motives.

Behind the enunciation there was no subject to address a reader. It

took place without author and reader, all alone in the world, and was thus

innocent communication in the absence of intersubjective relations. In

automatic writing, all dialogue faded and turned into monologue. Authentic

communication took place when there was no longer an `I' addressing a `you',

but when polyphonic `speech' was exposed. Breton triumphantly wrote in

Manifeste du surreÂalisme:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express ±
verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner ± the actual function of thought.
Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any
aesthetic or moral concern.

With the collective monologue of automatic writing the surrealists attempted

to reveal a paradoxical community where communication takes place when no

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

10. Lita Grey's divorce complaint against

Chaplin, quoted in Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and his

Times, p. 310.
11. AndreÂ Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism,

trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (The

University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor,

1969), p. 44.
12. AndreÂ Breton, `En Marge des Champs

MagneÂtiques', Change, no. 7, 1970, p. 25.

13.

See Laurent Jenny, La parole singulieÁre

(EÂditions Belin: Paris, 1990), pp. 146±54;

Marguerite Bonnet, AndreÂ Breton: Naissance de

l'aventure surreÂaliste (JoseÂ Corti: Paris, 1975),

pp. 160±97.
14. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 26.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

371

one expresses himself. Automatic writing made it possible for the subject to

disintegrate in an authentic process of communication, to obliterate oneself in

order to allow a real community to appear beyond any social and psychological

alienation. Walks through the city were supra-textual versions of automatic

writing, a pure automatism exposed in life. Walking and automatic writing

were to the surrealists what the divan was to psychoanalysis: a place for

transference to take place, a place where the patient and the analyst constantly

switched places until an `it' appeared and was read by an `us.'

III

Like the other groups in the historical avant-garde, the surrealists were

sceptical about the institution of art and enthusiastic about the revolutions

taking place in Russia, Hungary, and Germany. The surrealists identi®ed

themselves with the revolutionary wave, seeing it as their task to bring about a

revolution in the people carrying out the revolution. In contrast to the Soviet-

Russian avant-garde, which strived to developan accessible, egalitarian, and

radical anti-aesthetic production art, where art and industry merged in the

service of the revolution, the surrealists concentrated on the unconscious

dimensions of the subject and on releasing as much creative power as possible.

Whereas production art turned art into technology and science, the surrealists

turned art into a means for the fantastic, wanting to re-mythologise life. The

surrealists were sceptical about the widely-held view that the rest of the world

should follow the model of American industrialisation.

Marxists like Antonio

Gramsci were convinced that American industrialisation was the way forward

for the proletariat, which should be streamlined and disciplined.

Not just the

bourgeois world, but the worker as well should be reformed according to the

predictable and effective methods of Fordism and Taylorism. The worker

should keephis animal drives in check and af®rm a new mechanised life

controlled by rationality and Puritanism. The surrealists were of the opinion

that industrialisation and functionalism created a sterile and dead world. The

surrealists were romantics in so far as they were drawn to the cultural forms of

a pre-capitalist past and rejected the cold and abstract rationality of modern

industrial civilisation. This interest in the outdated and the magical did not

mean however that the surrealists melancholically mourned the passing of time

and worshipped the paradise of the past. Instead they used their nostalgia as a

weapon with which the present world could be transformed.

Despite the opposition toward the contemporary technological and

economic utopia of development, the surrealists considered themselves as

Marxists. But their `Gothic Marxism' was different from the dominant

version, which had metaphysical materialistic tendencies and was contaminated

by an evolutionary ideology of development.

Their Marxism was a

materialism fascinated by the fantastic and interested in enchantment. The

magical dimensions of earlier cultures constituted a reservoir for the

revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and exposed

the fantastic. The marginalised objects of modern culture were not delusions

that had to be driven away but both potentialities to be mobilised in a

revolutionary battle and ingredients in a re-enchanted life. According to the

surrealists, it was a misunderstanding to believe that politicising and criticising

bourgeois society meant that the revolutionaries had to give upthe magical and

the libertine in favour of what they thought was a dilettantish con®dence in

progress. The trivial objects of modern life should be torn out of their usual

surroundings and rational use and be endowed with a life of their own.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

372

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

15. For an account of the impact the idea of

industrialisation as historical progress made in

the twentieth century, see Susan Buck-Morss,

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass

Utopia in East and West (MIT Press: Cambridge,

2000).
16. Antonio Gramsci, `Americanism and

Fordism', Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare

and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Lawrence &

Wishart: London, 1971).
17. The term `Gothic Marxism' has been

conceptualised by Margaret Cohen in Profane

Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of the

Surrealist Revolution (University of California

Press: Berkeley, 1993) and by Michael LoÈwy in

L'eÂtoile du matin: SurreÂalisme et marxisme (EÂditions

Syllepse: Paris, 2000).

According to the surrealists, the objects and techniques of the bourgeois world

dictated how man should live, thereby transforming the world into a prison.

Man was trapped in an alienating structure he was unable to escape from. By

drawing attention to the marginalised and irrational objects in rationalised

society, the surrealists tried to equipthe alienated human being with tools with

which he could break out of his prison and regain freedom.

The peculiar Gothic Marxism of the surrealists meant that they had a

complicated relationship with the established Marxism in France, in particular

the French Communist Party.

The Communist Party had come into

existence in 1920 as a fusion of different French militants who, inspired by the

events in Russia, wanted to transfer the Bolshevik experiment to France.

The

importation of Leninism from the economically underdeveloped Soviet Union

was mixed with elements from the long French tradition of popular uprisings

dating back to 1789. In the ®rst years of the existence of the party there was no

contradiction between the Leninist Bolshevism and the French revolutionary

heritage. The theory and practice of Leninism could be synthesised

unproblematically with the different currents of the French left such as

Jacobinism, Syndicalism, and Utopian Socialism. For the French Communists,

the revolution in Russia was just the latest example of the revolutionary spark

that had already exploded in 1789, 1848, and 1871 in the streets of Paris and

Lyon. During this ®rst period, the Communist Party was characterised by

great diversity and internal doctrinal confusion. This confusion or openness

slowly disappeared during the 1920s, as the party concentrated more and

more on defending the policy of the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1920s,

more or less all the `non-Bolshevik' elements had been excluded from the

party and the party was characterised by conformism and uniformity. The

surrealists experienced the increasing Stalinisation of the Communist Party at

close hand and it eventually made the connection between Surrealism and the

Communist Party untenable.

In the ®rst year of the group's existence it was only poetry ± by expressing a

transgression of that which already exists in the direction of the fantastic ± that

was considered liberating. After a very short time, the groupnevertheless

made a political turn and became aware that creating another life also implied

changes in the material basis of life. Events such as the revolution in Russia, the

war in Morocco, and the arrival of Fascism put pressure on the intuitive and

ethical idea of another life that characterised the group, supplementing it with

a need to express the revolutionary demand in political actions. Gradually the

surrealists became politically conscious and found out that most people that

were against nationalism, imperialism, and bourgeois morality were Marxists

of some sort.

The surrealists had become acquainted with the journal ClarteÂ in 1924, when

the journal, like the surrealists, distanced itself from the widespread national

mourning over the death of the Grand Old Man of French letters, Anatole

France. ClarteÂ originally started out in 1919 as a humanist and paci®st journal

run by the writer Henri Barbusse, but the journal turned leftward and was

oriented toward revolutionary action under the leadershipof a groupof young

Marxists like Jean Bernier, Eduard Berth, and Marcel Fourrier.

The journal

started publishing articles on topics like economy, war, and fascism and

worked with the Communist Party without however becoming an of®cial

organ for the party. Like the surrealists, ClarteÂ was an avid critic of war,

nationalism, and capitalism, and the two groups started collaborating in 1925

after the outbreak of a new colonial war in Morocco. The two groups issued a

joint manifesto, `La ReÂvolution d'abord et toujours', in which they criticised

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

18. For an account of the relationshipbetween

the surrealists and the French Communist Party,

see Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism

(Paragon House Publications: New York, 1988);

Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surreÂalisme (EÂditions

de Seuil: Paris, 1964); Robert S. Short, `The

Politics of Surrealism, 1920-1936', Journal of

Contemporary History, vol. 1, no. 2, 1966,

pp. 3±25; AndreÂ Thirion, ReÂvolutionnaires sans

reÂvolution (Robert Laffront: Paris, 1972).
19. See David Caute, Communism and the French

Intellectuals 1914±1960 (Macmillan: New York,

1964).
20. For a discussion of ClarteÂ, see Nicole

Racine, `The ClarteÂ Movement in France,

1919±21', Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 2,

no. 2, 1967, pp. 195±208.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

373

the French government for its imperialistic aggression and saluted Lenin for his

demand for a total disarmament. `We don't think your France will ever be

capable of following the magni®cent example of an immediate and complete

disarmament that Lenin gave the world in Brest-Litovsk a disarmament whose

revolutionary value is inde®nite.'

During a short period the two groups

focused on their common enemy ± bourgeois culture and the imperialist war

in Morocco ± and even planned the publication of a new joint journal called La

Guerre Civile that however never materialised, because the surrealists were not

ready to abandon the surrealist experiment.

The termination of the collaboration with ClarteÂ did result in the surrealists

abandoning politics. The question of political engagement remained central

within Surrealism, and the surrealist groupexperienced several rifts during the

next years on that very question. From 1925 to 1929 the groupwas marked by

controversies inwardly and outwardly with respect to the Communist Party

and to the different para-communist groups with which they cooperated for a

brief period. The political turn and the concrete collaboration with ClarteÂ

resulted in the formation of three fractions within the surrealist group: one

desired to dialectically sublate the division between idealism and materialism

(e.g. Breton, Aragon); the second refused to subordinate the spiritual

revolution of Surrealism to a political agenda (e.g. Artaud, Desnos); while the

third wished to privilege political activity (e.g. Naville, PeÂret). These fractions

were an expression of the heterogeneity characterising the practice of

Surrealism, and they demonstrated that Surrealism was not a coherent theory

and practice but rather a ®eld of overlapping, often con¯icting, tendencies at

that moment.

For a short while, Artaud was at the centre of surrealist activity. He was at

the head of Le Bureau central de Reserches surreÂalistes and wrote several

letters published in La ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste in which he mocked and provoked

traditional culture and every conceivable institution in the world. In `Adresse

au Pape' the Pope was ridiculed, in `Lettre aux meÂdecins-chefs des asiles de

fous' he demanded all mental patients be released, in `Adresse au Dalai Lama'

he asked the Dalai Lama to teach the surrealists the art of levitation, and in

`Ouvrez les prisons, licenciez l'ArmeÂe' he ordered the French government to

open the prisons and close down the army.

The utopian anarchism of Artaud only dominated the surrealist group for a

short while and, after Artaud had left the group, Aragon, Breton, and Eluard

entered the Communist Party in January 1927. At that time the surrealist

Pierre Naville had already been a member of the Communist Party for a year,

he had joined the editorial board of ClarteÂ, and had written the pamphlet La

ReÂvolution et les intellectuels. Que peuvent faire les surreÂalistes? Position de la question,

in which he tried to fuse Surrealism and Marxism. Surrealism and Marxism

converged naturally, Naville wrote in his pamphlet, because the surrealist goal

of realising freedom necessarily implied a critic of the bourgeoisie. According

to Naville, it was only the proletariat that was able to realise the revolution the

surrealists strove for. Therefore it was necessary for the surrealists to ally

themselves with the Communist Party who, for its part, needed the rebellious

attitude of the surrealists. If the surrealists were not to remain an ineffective

groupof intellectuals they had to join the communist movement and `realise

that the spiritual force . . . is intimately connected to a social reality.'

Naville's pamphlet raised some important questions concerning the political

engagement of Surrealism and Breton was obliged to respond to Naville's

challenge. In his text `LeÂgitime deÂfense' Breton thanked Naville for raising the

important question of the relationship between Surrealism and communism.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

374

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

21. `La ReÂvolution d'abord et toujours', La

ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste, no. 5, 1925, p. 32.
22. Antonin Artaud, `Ouvriez les prisons,

licenciez l'ArmeÂe', La ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste, no.

2, 1925, p. 18; `Adresse au Pape', La ReÂvolution

SurreÂaliste, no. 3, 1925, p. 16; `Adresse au

Dalai-Lama', La ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste, no. 3,

1925, p. 17; `Lettre aux EÂcoles du Bouddha',

La ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste, no. 3, 1925, p. 22;

`Lettre aux meÂdecins-chefs des asiles de fous',

La ReÂvolution SurreÂalistes, no. 3, 1925, p. 29.
23. Pierre Naville, La ReÂvolution et les

intellectuels. Que peuvent faire les surreÂalistes?

Position de la question [1926] (Gallimard: Paris,

1975), p. 92. For an account of Naville's

position, see also Pierre Naville, Le temps du

surreÂel. L'espeÂrance matheÂmatique. Vol 1 (GalileÂe:

Paris, 1977).

According to Breton, the surrealists supported the headlines of the communist

program with enthusiasm, but were unsatis®ed with the cultural policy of the

French Communist Party. The Communist Party was only concerned with the

socio-material aspect of the revolution and had left the question of art and

culture to the bourgeois forces in society. The party newspaper HumaniteÂ was

an example of this tendency and Breton characterised the newspaper as

`unreadable' and absolutely unsuitable to educate the working class.

Breton

was sceptical towards the tendency of the Communist party to focus only on

the material aspects of existence. The revolution was also to be a mental

revolution and this was what the surrealists strove to realise. `There is none of

us who do not wish for the transfer of power from the bourgeoisie to the

proletariat. In the meantime it is according to us necessary that the experiences

of inner life proceeds without outside control even Marxist.'

On behalf of

Surrealism, Breton stepped back from the explicit Communist engagement of

Naville and stressed the need for a certain autonomy in which the surrealists

could continue their experiments.

The question of the relationshipbetween Surrealism and communism

remained on the agenda during the fall of 1926 and Breton tried to mediate

between the more explicit political surrealists like Naville and the spiritual

surrealists like Philippe Soupault. Surrealism was for Breton precisely the

fusion of these two tendencies, the spiritual and material revolution. This view

was concretised when several surrealists led by Breton joined the Communist

Party in the beginning of 1927. At that time Naville had already left the party

and had joined a small Trotskyite group. However Breton and the others

stayed within the Communist Party and continued attempting to supplement

the theory of class struggle with the idea of a transcendental mental revolution.

The delicate balance between political action and surrealistic activity was

complicated, since the Communist Party was characterised by a rigid

materialistic idea of reality ± in which only the ownershipof the means of

production was important ± while the surrealists refused to accept politics as a

separate area. But the criticism of the Communist Party remained mild until

1935, inasmuch as the surrealists believed to have found a means of

revolutionising society with the Communist Party. However, the surrealists

had dif®culty coming to terms with the centralistic and dogmatic Stalinism of

the Communist Party, which meant that the party's most important activity

was to provide unquali®ed support to the Soviet Union and to support the

theory of `socialism in one country'. As the Soviet Union started to praise the

bourgeois ideas that the surrealists hated most of all ± family, nation, and the

political leaders ± they had more and more dif®culty uniting their desire for a

global existential revolution, which was to destroy the predominant forms of

representation, with the Communist Party's desire for a material

transformation. Surrealism's determined efforts toward the total freedom of

man did not correspond well with the Communist Party's praise of work,

productivity, and nation. Without leaving communism, the surrealists started

to take an interest in the rival communist movements, which were based on

Leninism but criticised Stalinism for opportunism and for betraying the

Leninist principles.

Leon Trotsky became the centre of attention for the surrealists early on,

and Breton wrote a laudatory review of Trotsky's book on Lenin as early as

1925 in La ReÂvolution surreÂaliste no. 5. `Long live Lenin! I salute Leon

Trotsky'.

Trotsky had played a leading role in the October Revolution of

1917, becoming the ®rst Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, and

as the organiser of the Red Army he played a crucial role in the victory in the

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

24. AndreÂ Breton, `LeÂgitime DeÂfense', La

ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste, no. 8, 1926, p. 30.
25. Breton, `LeÂgitime DeÂfense', p. 35.
26. AndreÂ Breton, `LeÂon Trotsky: Lenine', La

ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste, no. 5, 1925, p. 29.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

375

civil and interventionist war from 1918 to 1921.

In the battle carried out

against Stalin from 1923 to 1927, Trotsky was defeated, and after having been

deported to Kazakhstan, he was banished from the Soviet Union in 1929.

Before the Russian Revolution, Trotsky was critical of Lenin's military party

structure and fought to construct a democratic, uni®ed party that could

accommodate all the social-democratic tendencies, as he was afraid that the

party would establish its dictatorship over the proletariat, the party leadership

would establish its dictatorship over the party, and ®nally the head of the party

over the party leadership.

The main idea of Trotsky's theory, which appealed to the surrealists far

more than Stalin's `socialism in one country', was the idea of `the permanent

revolution', according to which a socialistic revolution could not be

thoroughly carried out in Russia alone and therefore had to `jumpover' to

the developed countries in order to be completed there.

Trotsky

nevertheless adopted Lenin's conception of the party in connection with the

October Revolution, and together they headed not only the conquest of

power, but also the many oppressive measures taken towards those who

thought differently, leading to the creation of the ®rst totalitarian state in

1921. Pursuing the idea of the permanent revolution, Trotsky severely

criticised Stalin for surrendering world revolution for `socialism in one

country'. It was impossible to carry out a socialistic revolution in the Soviet

Union if the rest of the world remained capitalistic. Left to itself the Soviet

Union would developin reactionary directions and the p

arty into a

bureaucratic dictatorshipthat would stand above the classes and take

advantage of these. Trotsky opposed these tendencies as well as the rapidly

growing economical inequality in Stalin's system, but maintained that thanks

to its `socialistic' property system and plan economy the Soviet Union needed

a political revolution rather than a social revolution. In other words, he

considered himself as a loyal opponent to the Soviet Union, which he still

regarded as a workers' state.

Trotsky's theories of the permanent revolution and the world revolution

were not the only aspects of Trotsky's writings that appealed to the surrealists.

Trotsky's considerations on art and art's function in the class war were more

useful for the surrealists than the bleak and rigid dogmas about socialist realism

that the Communist Party advanced at that time. According to Trotsky art

should not be submitted to external restrictions.

The freedom of art was a

precondition for creativity. Even if art did not have an explicit revolutionary

content it could serve the communist revolution, Trotsky wrote. If on the

other hand art were made subordinate to censorshipor external conditions it

would lose its vital freedom of expression and in the ®nal instance work against

the revolution. Art did follow the development of the economy but the

relationshipbetween art and economy was so complicated that is was not

possible to dictate an artistic norm or create a certain proletarian style. `[A]

class ®nds its style in extremely complex ways.'

Trotsky's writings on art and revolution made a strong impression on the

surrealists who, even after the expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet Union,

kept referring to his theories and never stopped paying homage to him.

Even

after Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union the surrealists continued to

refer to his theories and praise him as a true revolutionary. But in spite of

attempting to balance between Stalinism and left-wing dissidents (Breton

wrote in Second manifeste du surreÂalisme that Stalin and Trotsky represented two

equally valid revolutionary tactics), it became increasingly clear that the

surrealists could not be united with the Stalinism of the Communist Party,

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

376

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

27. For presentations of Trotsky's life and

theories, see Isac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed

(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1954) and

The Prophet Unarmed (Oxford University Press:

Oxford, 1959); Duncan Hallas, Trotsky's Marxism

(Pluto Press: London, 1979).
28. Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution,

trans. John G. Wright (Path®nder: New York,

1969).
29. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution,

trans. Rose Strunsky (The University of

Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1969).
30. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 206.
31. Besides recognising their revolutionary

aspirations in Trotsky, the surrealists were

fascinated by Trotsky, the revolutionary

dissident. `Without a doubt the new generations

does not fell the electri®cation in this name:

Trotsky, long charged with revolutionary

potential.' Entretiens, 1913±1952, avec AndreÂ

Parinaud (Gallimard: Paris, 1952), p. 190.

which insisted that art should realistically portray the life and struggle of the

proletariat according to party principles. In the eyes of the Communist Party,

Surrealism was just another modern art movement without connection to the

proletariat, the real agent of transformation. The exploration of dreams and

the unconscious did not go well with the Communist Party who was unable to

see any revolutionary potential in the suspension of one's self. The surrealists

nevertheless remained party members and in 1930 made a new attempt to be

af®rmative towards communism when they renamed their periodical Le

surreÂalisme au service de la ReÂvolution. During the following years several

incidents occurred in which the surrealists were critiqued by the party for their

suspect behaviour and writings. Louis Aragon left the group after great

disorder and Breton was several times forced to explain himself in front of

party tribunals.

In 1933 Breton, Eluard, and Crevel were ®nally thrown out of the

Communist Party and two years later, when the French Foreign Minister

Pierre Laval signed a military assistance pact with the Soviet Union, the break

was ®nal. According to the surrealists, the pact betrayed the international

aspirations of communism and turned the French Communists into traditional,

`Jacobian' nationalists. After the failed attempt to work with the Communist

Party, the surrealists formed the Contre-Attaque groupwith former surrealists

like Georges Bataille and Jacques-AndreÂ Boiffard.

Contre-Attaque critiqued

not just the fascist movements but also attacked the Communist Party and the

Popular Front. The end of the troublesome collaboration with the Communist

Party necessitated a new forum in which the surrealists could advance

revolutionary ideas; but following disagreements ± especially between Breton

and Bataille ± the groupfell apart. Cut off from other French allies, the

surrealists referred from then on to Trotsky's theories, culminating with

Breton visiting Trotsky in 1938 in Mexico, at which point they wrote the text

`Pour un art reÂvolutionnaire indeÂpendant' and formed FeÂderation Inter-

nationale de l'Art ReÂvolutionnaire IndeÂpendant.

It was the hope of Breton

and Trotsky that F. E. D. I. could become the platform of the anti-Stalinist left

and unite artists and intellectuals in a common ®ght for freedom and peace.

The periodical and the organisation would not, however, survive the outbreak

of the war.

As when the surrealists were active, the French Communist Party

predominated in the years following World War Two, when the situationists

established their critical practice.

Parti Communiste, the French Communist

Party, and their union, ConfeÂdeÂration GeÂneÂrale du Travail, played a dominant

role in French political culture after World War Two.

After the war, during

which many party members had been active in the resistance, the members of

the Communist Party came out of the war as martyrs and victors. The party

was tremendously popular in the last phase of the war where it was forbidden

and in the immediate phase after the end of the war. A Communist revolution

was a real possibility in 1944. Never had the party been in a better position to

seize power and never again would it be as popular as it was then. More than a

million people were members of the party in 1947 and about 26% of the

population voted Communist in the 1946 election. But a revolution never

materialised, as the leaders of the Communist Party opted for a national

regeneration that would let France regain its great-power status and thereby

limit the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon powers in the West. The Communist

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

32. Breton described these internal Communist

tribunals as `police interrogations. . . . Even

though my explications were judged satisfactory

pretty quickly there always arrived a moment

where one of the investigators showed an issue

of La ReÂvolution SurreÂaliste and everything was

put into question'. Breton, Entretiens, p. 130.
33. The complicated relationship between

Breton and Bataille has been dealt with in a

number of books and articles, see for instance

Briony Fer, `Surrealism, Myth and

Psychoanalysis', David Batchelor, Briony Fer,

and Paul Wood (eds), Realism, Rationalism,

Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (Yale University

Press: New Haven and London, 1993),

pp. 171±249; Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty

(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1993); Denis

Hollier, La Prise de la Concorde: Essais sur Georges

Bataille (Gallimard: Paris, 1974). In this

connection it is important that the surrealists

like the people around the journals La Critique

sociale and Documents were disillusioned with the

Communist Party and tried to put a lid on

former disagreements in the attempts to form

an alternative to fascism, communism, and

parliamentary democracy.
34. For discussions of the meeting between

Breton and Trotsky, see Alan Rose, `For an

Independent Revolutionary Art: AndreÂ Breton's

Manifest with Leon Trotsky', European Studies

Journal, no. 1, 1985, pp. 52±61; Otto Karl

Werckmeister, `The Summit Meeting of

Revolutionary Art: Trotsky, Breton and Rivera

at Coyocan 1938', Actes du XXVII CongreÁs

International d'Histoire d'Art, 1992, pp. 157±70.
35. See David Caute, Communism and the French

Intellectuals 1914 ± 1960; Jeanine VerdeÁs-

Leroux, Au service du party: Le Parti Communiste,

les intellectuels et la culture 1944±1956 (Fayard:

Paris, 1983) and Le reÂveil du somnambules: Le Parti

Communiste, les intellectuels et la culture

1956±1985 (Fayard: Paris, 1987).
36. Robert Gildea, France since 1945 (Oxford

University Press: Oxford, 1996). For a

fascinating study of postwar French culture, see

Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:

Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1995).

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

377

Party remained loyal to Stalin and agreed to work within the existing political

framework, taking a place in the provisional government. The reconstruction

of France was the main goal of the Communist Party, as was evident in the

new slogan of the party `unite, ®ght, work'. But as the Cold War slowly

replaced the anti-racist ®ght the presence of the Communist Party became a

hindrance for French politics and the Communist ministers were dismissed in

1947. The rejection of the revolution by the Communist Party left a bitter

taste among party rank and ®le and in the eyes of many militants Communism

had been sacri®ced to the Soviet desire to stabilise spheres of in¯uence. But

many stayed in the party and it remained one of the biggest parties in France,

even as it turned Stalinist.

The French Communist Party exercised its in¯uence by referring to its

support in the working class, and it had an enormous in¯uence on the para-

academic milieu in which students and intellectuals circulated. Prominent

intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre supported the Communist Party and the

party had a ®rm grip on Marxist theory and was ready to condemn any attempt

to propose an alternative reading of the Marxist classics or challenge the

Communist version of revolutionary politics.

If intellectuals tried to question

the role or conduct of the party they were immediately expelled from not only

the Communist Party but also its many journals, periodicals, and reunions.

There was no room for criticism or self-criticism in the French Communist

Party. If criticism did occur, the perpetrator was immediately isolated,

condemned, and stigmatised as an enemy of the working class. The threat of

exclusion was intense. As the apostate Edgar Morin wrote: `[T]o be outside of

the party was to renounce transforming the world, it was to renounce what

was best for oneself. It was to join the petit bourgeois swamp.'

Outside the

party there was no salvation and it was extremely dif®cult to balance between

the Communist Party supported by the Soviet Union and the pro-American

Social Democratic Party. Critical questions posed to the Communist Party

often forced intellectuals into the ranks of a bourgeois liberalism and resulted

in a harsh abandonment of former revolutionary positions. Although the

Communist Party remained of great importance, its power over French

intellectuals weakened somewhat during the 1950s following a series of

external political events. The Soviet invasion in Hungary and the public

denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 impaired the French

Communist Party, which nonetheless tried to keepits position at the centre of

attention for many French intellectuals.

The hegemony of the Communist Party was primarily established in

reference to history, to a story of the past and the Russian revolution.

Therefore, all those who deviated from the Communist Party had to create a

counter-history. The dominance of the Communist Party was so great in the

1950s and 1960s in France that most of the `heretical' groups created histories

that reproduced the Communist Party's self-referential logic and made Marx's

historical-materialistic categories transcendent. The situationists, however,

were one of the few exceptions. They found Trotsky's criticism of the

development in the Soviet Union too weak and compromised and instead

turned to the tradition of council communism that had brie¯y ¯ourished in

Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1917 to 1921, before state

capitalism and social-democratism wiped it out.

The situationists thus went

back all the way to a dispute that took place at the very beginning of the

October Revolution, thereby creating a strong counter-history of how

Bolshevism in Russia and the Social Democrats in Germany had started the

counter-revolution and betrayed the proletariat. The council communists were

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

378

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

37. For accounts of the role of the Communist

Party in the postwar years, see besides Caute

and VerdeÁs-Leroux Jean Baudrillard, Le P. C. ou

le paradis arti®ciels du politique (Cahiers d'Utopie:

Fontenay-sous-Bois, 1978); Suni Khilnani,

Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar

France (Yale University Press: New Haven and

London, 1993); Claude Lefort, La complication.

Retour sur le communisme (Fayard: Paris, 1999),

pp. 121±37; Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in

Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton

University Press: Princeton, 1975).
38. Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Julliard: Paris,

1959), p. 159.
39. The most explicit `effect' of the weakening

of the Communist Party on Marxist theory in

France was perhaps the creation of the very

in¯uential journal Arguments in 1956. The editors

Edgar Morin, Jean Duvignaud, Henri Lefebvre,

Pierre Fougeyrollas, and Kostas Axelos were all

former Communists who deeply moved by the

events in Hungary wanted to create a non-

dogmatic forum free from the constraints of the

Communist Party in which they could explore

fundamental question that was forbidden in the

party. The journal played a signi®cant role in

the revision of Marxism in France. The former

surrealist and now leading Trotskyite Pierre

Naville contributed to the journal. Arguments

published a number of texts from the Western

Marxist tradition like Georg LukaÂcs and Karl

Korsch. LukaÂcs' analysis of commodity fetishism

and Korsch's analysis of the counterrevolution

were very important for the situationists in the

elaboration of the theory of the society of the

spectacle. Anselm Jappe has analysed the

in¯uence of LukaÂcs on Debord in his Guy

Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith

(University of California Press: Berkeley, 1999).

For accounts of Arguments, see Gil Delannoi,

`Arguments, 1956±1962', Revue francaise de

science politique, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 127±45;

Richard Gombin, `Le reÂvisionnisme

philosophique', Les origines du gauchisme (Seuil:

Paris, 1972), pp. 49±71; Louise Soubise, Le

Marxisme apreÁs Marx (1956±1965). Quatre marxistes

dissidents francËaise (Aubier-Montaigne: Paris,

1967).
40. For presentations of the council communist

movement, see Dominique Bouchet, La gauche

communiste germano-hollandaise des origines aÁ 1968

(A. H. J. M. Ortmans: Rotterdam, 1998) and

Russell Jacoby, Dialectics of Defeat: Contours of

Western Marxism (Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 1981). For presentations of the

Situationist International within a political

context, see Richard Gombin, Les orgines du

gauchisme; Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, ```What is to

be done?'' Approaching the Task through

Debord and Negri', Infopool, no. 5, 2002,

pp. 1±48; Mark Shipway, `Situationism', in

Maximilien Rubel and John Crump(eds), Non-

Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth

Century (Macmillan Press: Basingstoke, 1987),

pp. 104±26.

sceptical about Bolshevism's privileging of the centrally constructed party as

the institution to carry out world revolution and establish a socialist economy.

Instead, they pinned their faith on the councils that arose spontaneously,

convinced that the councils made it possible to formally transform the

consciousness of capitalistic society and that they were the best framework for

abolishing paid work and money and introducing the voucher system. Society

should be organised in such a way that no one was oppressed. The seat of

power was to remain empty through a ¯exible, rule-discussing organisation in

which the participants' sense of responsibility and creative power were the

driving force. The council communists attempt at revolution suffered defeat.

As Debord wrote in La SocieÂteÂ du Spectacle: `Between the two world wars the

revolutionary worker's movement was destroyed by the action, on the one

hand, of the Stalinist bureaucracy and, on the other, of fascist totalitarianism,

the latter having borrowed its organisational form from the totalitarian party as

®rst tried out in Russia.'

The revolution in Russia had already been betrayed

in 1919, and according to the council communists and later the situationists,

Trotsky's defence of the repressions of, among other things, the sailors in

Kronstadt and Machno's anarchistic peasant partisans, was unforgivable. Due

to this politico-historical defeat, when the left-wing radical Marxist

communistic utopia succumbed, the realisation of communist society was

postponed and replaced by two kinds of capitalism or societies of spectacle:

diffuse capitalism in the West and concentrated capitalism in the Soviet Union.

`This same historical moment, when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia

and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world, also marks the

de®nitive inauguration of an order of things that lies at the core of the modern

spectacle's rule: this was the moment when an image of the working class arose in

radical opposition to the working class itself.'

The counter-revolution had destroyed the ®rst proletarian revolutionary

attempt thanks in particular to Stalinism and social democracy. These had

stripped socialism of utopian reality and rendered Marxism banal by means of

state capitalism, thereby making possible fascism and the society of spectacle.

Because of rapid developments in the forces of production in the years

following World War Two, an even greater discrepancy had arisen between

the self-valorising logic of capital and the possible use of these productive

forces. The productive forces were now so developed that mankind could

leave mere survival behind and start to live an authentic life. It merely

demanded destroying the social order. `Signs of a new and growing tendency

toward negation proliferate in the more economically advanced countries. The

spectacular system reacts to these signs with incomprehension or attempts to

misrepresent them, but they are suf®cient proof that a new period has begun.

After the failure of the working class's ®rst subversive assault on capitalism, we

are now witness to the failure of capitalist abundance.'

A recreated proletariat

was ready to take upthe ®ght against capital, which had in turn further

intensi®ed alienation by reducing all lived experience to representation. These

representations, making up a false totality, lived their own life beyond the

control of the individual. Mankind had been transformed into a spectator,

renouncing life and developing false needs. `For one to whom the real world

becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings ± tangible

®gments which are the ef®cient motor of trancelike behavior.'

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

41. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle,

trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books:

New York, 1994), p. 77.
42. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 69.
43. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 85.
44. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 17.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

379

One of the fundamental characteristics of the spectacular-market society or the

society of the spectacle was, according to the situationists, its recuperation of

art whereby formerly experimental and radical art was integrated and

instrumentalised by the established taste.

In the period between 1850 and

1930, the artistic avant-garde had been engaged in a critical project in which

traditional forms were destroyed or altered in the attempt to create new forms

worthy of modernity. From Baudelaire to Surrealism art refused to be the

®ctive language of a non-existent community. This destruction-process in

which the avant-garde challenged the dominant visions of man, society, and art

came to a halt around 1930 when the society of the spectacle came into being.

Since then the self-destruction of art didn't have revolutionary meaning. The

dissolution of forms and the impossibility of art were now regarded as a

positive thing detached from the revolutionary signi®cance it previously had.

The poverty of modern life had been portrayed in the art made since 1930 as

an unchanging fact of life instead of as a reason for revolt and destruction. The

tradition of modern art had been a useful and necessary lesson for the avant-

garde, but now art was nothing but a form of alienation. Henceforth art had to

be denied and realised in the radical critique of society. In the opinion of the

Situationist International theory had superseded art as the critical weapon of

the avant-garde.

According to the situationists, Surrealism had been the most important

artistic avant-garde and any future avant-garde had to work through the

surrealist inheritance.

Surrealism had played a positive role in the attack on

the bourgeois civilisation through its attempt to `change life'. Besides creating

a space for the active creation of another life, Surrealism had tried to ally itself

with dialectical materialism. Although Surrealism chose the compromised

Stalinist French Communist Party, they at least showed an understanding of

the need to transgress art. The demands Surrealism had advanced were a

minimum, however, and Surrealism now had to be surpassed by a truly

contemporary avant-garde uniting the critique of art with the critique of

politics. Not only Surrealism but also Dada had been of extreme importance

for the necessary destruction of art, but they had both failed. Dada was

characterised by critically revealing the compensatory status of art yet

remaining an abstract negation of art, whereas Surrealism was characterised by

wanting to transgress art but without being aware of the fact that Dada had

already negated it. The revolutionary potential present in the period from

1916 to 1930 had not been released, and with the rise of an Americanised

consumer society the conditions of possibility of the revolution had changed.

Now, Surrealism's realisation of art in life possessed no revolutionary meaning

at all. In fact, according to the situationists, Surrealism's enthusiasm for the

unconscious, the magical, and the wonderful had made it impossible for

Surrealism to ally itself with the contemporary revolutionary proletarian self-

consciousness as it was expressed in the revolutions from 1917 to 1921.

From a fortress open to every wind blowing in from the old world, it began ± after the fashion of
the Romantics reinventing an idyllic Middle Ages, complete with valiant knights, in the very
shadow of the stock exchanges, banks and factories ± to entertain the fantasy of a powerful
myth, stripped of any religious overtones, that would combat the poverty of the spectacle and
that would draw its strength from a reconsecration of human relationships modelled on the
reconsecration of art.

Surrealism's interest in the magical and the primitive was a regression with

respect to Dada's negation of the artwork, a regression that paved the way for

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

380

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

45. For accounts of the situationist theory of

art, see Mirella Bandini, L'estetico il politico da

Cobra all'Internazionale Situazionista (Of®cina

Edizioni: Roma, 1977); Mario Perniola, I

Situazionisti. Il movimento cha ha profetizzato la

`SocietaÁ dello spettacolo' (Castelvecchi: Roma,

1998).
46. The situationists discussed Surrealism

repeatedly in their texts and documents. One

example will suf®ce: At the founding meeting of

the Situationist International in 1957 Debord

presented the text `Rapport sur la construction

des situations et sur les conditions de

l'organisation et de l'action de la tendance

situationniste internationale' in which he

discussed the interwar avant-garde and the role

of Surrealism. In it he wrote that `[t]he reason

for the failure of the Surrealist ideology is the

belief that the unconscious was the great power

of life'. Debord, `Rapport', in GeÂrard Berreby

(ed.), Documents relatifs aÁ la fondation de

l'Internationale situationniste, p. 611.
47. Jules-FrancËois Dupuis (Raoul Vaneigem), A

Cavalier History of Surrealism, trans. Donald

Nicholson-Smith (AK Press: Edinburgh, 1999),

pp. 105±6.

the counter-revolution's use of myths and consumer society's visual forms of

dominance. Their loyalty to the unconscious had the consequence that

Surrealism was recuperated. The surrealists had remained too attached to

romantic ideas and conceptions and thereby involuntarily equipped capitalism

with new material. Capitalism had no problem accepting the irrational and

unusual objects of Surrealism. If only the objects of Surrealism could be

separated from their historical and social context they presented themselves as

a much-needed renewal of the commodity.

The proposition that `the eye exists in its savage state' was self-glorying in two equally
unjusti®ed ways. In the ®rst place, this was a time when advertising and news media (not to
mention the fascist `happenings' of the moment) already knew perfectly well how to manipulate
clashing images, how to milk `free' representations for all they were worth; it was therefore
quite predictable that the ruling system would co-opt the new way of looking that Surrealism was
so busily promoting. Secondly, it should have been plain ± to any avant-garde worth the name at
least ± that the organisation of social passivity, in its concern to minimise the recourse to
police and army, was bound to foster the consumption of increasingly lifelike and increasingly
personalised images, the aim being that the proletarians should move only to the extent
required for the contemplation of its own inert contentment, that it should be rendered so
passive as to be incapable of anything beyond infatuation with varied representations of its
dreams.

Surrealism had not been able to expand the self-destruction of art into a total

critique of capitalist society, the situationists argued. The surrealist failure was

caused by the suspect reliance on the liberating powers of the unconscious. In

the eyes of the situationists the unconscious was not really able to liberate

much imagination, and automatic writing was just plain monotone. The

conclusion was clear: the inter-war avant-garde experiments were outdated; it

was now time to realise the potential of art directly in life. Historical

developments had not merely made the anachronistic forms of art unsuitable

to the contemporary historical moment, it had also made the organisation and

channelling of human desire in art outmoded. New forms of desire had arisen

that could not be expressed in the old-fashioned art forms, but that required

art to be realised outside its institutions, i.e. in people's everyday lives. In the

jargon of the situationists, history had simply surpassed art as a separate

discursive sphere. It no longer made sense to create art except as an integrated

part of a total practice carried out in everyday life. `We are trapped, in the

cultural sphere also, by relations of production that stand opposed to the

necessary development of productive forces. We have to demolish these

traditional relationships, along with the arguments and behaviours that they

foster.'

Art now actually prevented people from relating creatively to life.

This is why the situationists constantly criticised all of those who still used

outdated identities like `artists', `politicians', and `philosophers'. These

identities blocked the way to the activity that they had formerly indicated.

That is why the situationists abandoned art. They negated and destroyed art to

liberate its original critique of the deterministic rationality of capitalistic

society. A liberation that should redeem all of the potential that art contained,

but that had so far only been virtual and had not had an effect in everyday life.

`Only the real negation of culture can inherit culture's meaning. Such negation

can no longer remain cultural. It is what remains, in some manner, at the level

of culture ± but it has a quite different sense.'

The situationists began their

practice after art became unable to express anything besides alienation. The

source of art had been poisoned, and it was no longer possible to drink its

water without spreading the poison.

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

48. Dupuis, A Cavalier History of Surrealism,

pp. 95±6.
49. Guy Debord, `Encore un effort si vous

voulez eÃtre situationnistes', Guy Debord preÂsente

Potlach, p. 274.
50. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 146.
51. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 136.
52. For an account of this theme within the

situationist theory, see Giorgio Agamben,

`Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of

the Spectacle', Means without End, trans. Vincenzo

Binetti and Cesare Casarino (University of

Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 73±89.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

381

Spectacular consumption preserves the old culture in congealed form, going so far as to
recuperate and rediffuse even its negative manifestations; in this way, the spectacle's cultural
sector gives overt expression to what the spectacle is implicitly in its totality ± the
communication of the incommunicable. Thoroughgoing attacks on language are liable to emerge
in this context coolly invested with positive value by the of®cial world, for the aim is to promote
reconciliation with a dominant state of things from which all communication has been
triumphantly declared absent.

Experimental art had not understood that its once revolutionary refusal to be a

®ctive language for a non-existing community was, after 1930, simply

welcomed by a social order that celebrated the impossibility of communication

and attempted to change this impossibility into a trans-historical principle.

The society of spectacle thus not only designated the expropriation of man's

productive activity, but the alienation of man's communicative skills and

language.

There was no longer any connection between occurrence and

truth, ascertainment and understanding. According to Debord, the negation of

the artwork carried out by radical art was in other words transferred into a

generally distributed substitution that pursued Dada and Surrealism's anti-art

as entertainment and sterile social behaviour. This artistic counter-revolution,

carried out by the society of spectacle, stemmed the tide of the historical

realisation of negated art. In other words, the situationists found themselves

confronted with a substitute revolution that preventatively recuperated the

potential that the situationists wished to realise in life. The various kinds of

formally experimenting art after 1930, such as `le nouveau roman', absurd

theatre, `la nouvelle vague', or happenings, prevented history from

disintegrating the social order. `The end of the history of culture manifests

itself under two antagonistic aspects: the project of culture's self-

transcendence as part of total history, and its management as a dead thing

to be contemplated in the spectacle. The ®rst tendency has cast its lot with the

critique of society, the second with the defence of class power.'

Anticipating the argument of Peter BuÈrger in his seminal study of the avant-

garde from 1974, the situationists argued that the artistic avant-garde was

dead, that it had not survived fascism, Stalinism, and the rise of the consumer

society.

The true avant-garde thus no longer consisted of artists, as these

merely registered the impossibility of authentic communication. It was no

longer suf®cient merely to create self-negating works that thematised the

impossibility of making art. `What is called the avant-garde of absence is

nothing but the absence of avant-garde.'

Now artistic alienation should be

overcome through the conscious intervention of social criticism in life. The

true avant-garde ± the avant-garde that was boosted forward by the invariable

logic of history ± took the negation of art as a prerequisite for a revolutionary

activity made up of equal parts transcended art and politics. The transcended

avant-garde was not `the avant-garde of pure absence, but always the staging of

the scandal of absence in favour of a desired presence'.

Art should, in

Debord's characteristic Hegelian jargon, be sublated, i.e. be negated and

preserved, in revolutionary theory and practice. The sublation was not the

result of disparate activists' expectations, but rather a demand from the

historical hic et nunc. The situationists were thus not just interpreters of

historical developments, but an essential part of them. They were the critical

consciousness of the recurring revolution. This was what remained of the

former avant-garde practice, the claim of comprising the most advanced part

of human progress. The situationists were the avant-garde distilled down to

the ultra-extreme claim of being the true movement, a movement abreast of

historical necessity.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

382

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

53. Debord, The Society of Spectacle, pp. 129±30.
54. Peter BuÈrger, Theory of the Avant-garde,

trans. Michael Shaw (The University of

Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1984).
55. `L'avant-garde de la preÂsence',

Internationale situationniste, no. 8, 1963, p. 15.
56. `L'avantgarde de la preÂsence', p. 19.

According to the situationists, historical necessity should take place in the

construction of the situation, where a revolutionary self-consciousness would

be created. Art and politics sublated in revolutionary practice. Since the

situation had the negation of art as its prerequisite, it was not merely art

realised in life. It was the abolition of art realised in a transformed life, which

made possible a life of play, freedom, and community here and now in this

world, not in the vague future of a utopia or in another world. The situation

was a means by which the new historical forms of desire, which the society of

spectacle attempted to freeze and compensate for with an unending ¯ow of

images, could express themselves and create a world adequate to their needs.

Rather than being a goal in itself, these moments of elated and conscious

behaviour were passages to a new life. As such, the constructed situation was

not an image of the future, but the demand of historical logic on contemporary

society. The channelling and strengthening of the new desire by the situation

undermined the social and economic structures that limited and froze the new

forms of desire. Political action, daily life, art, and theory were all

transformed in the situation.

We replace the existential passivity with the construction of moments of life, doubt with playful
af®rmation. So far philosophers and artists have only interpreted situations; the point now is to
transform them . . . Since the individual is de®ned by his situation, he wants the power to
create situations worthy of his desires.

Unfortunately the situationists were not able to transform the situation in the

radical manner in which they had envisioned. It was not possible to realise the

situationists' grand and abstract expectations. The appropriating event of the

situation abruptly removed from the spectacle never materialised. The clean

break never occurred and, as time progressed, fear of being recuperated

forced the situationists to abandon art and made it increasingly dif®cult to

locate the difference between critique and recuperation.

The situationists subjected the contemporary avant-garde ± which according

to the situationists merely repeated Dada's destruction of the artwork and

Surrealism's realisation of art ± to severe criticism, and tried to radicalise the

avant-garde's project by paradoxically equipping it with a subversive edifying

effect. `Dadaism sought to abolish art without realising it, and Surrealism

sought to realise art without abolishing it. The critical position since worked out

by the situationists demonstrates that the abolition and the realisation of art are

inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.'

It was not possible to

create something new as art. The artwork and even the anti-artwork were only

capable of re¯ecting life in the society of spectacle. Rather than criticising,

they could only consolidate the prevailing order with its impotent forms. This

was also the judgement of Peter BuÈrger when about ten years later he

formulated his Theorie der Avantgarde and concluded that the postwar-avant-

garde destroyed the project of the interwar-avant-garde by institutionalising

the avant-garde as art. The dismissal of visual art was widespread among leftist

intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, although it was rarely formulated as

authoritatively as the situationists did. But the distrust of art and of the image

was in the air. Following the take-over of mass communication by television

intellectuals like Daniel Boorstein critiqued the image and argued that the use

of images in politics led to manipulation.

The theory of the society of the

spectacle was a radicalisation of this critique of the image.

According to the situationists the only merit of art was demonstrating its

impotence and inertia, for then it revealed itself as part of a historical

movement that had made art impossible. On the other hand, it was possible to

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

57. `Le Questionnaire', Internationale

situationniste, no. 9, 1964, p. 24.
58. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 136.
59. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to the

Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage: Vintage,

1961). As the title suggests, Boorstin argued

that America was living in an age of

`contrivance', in which simulations and

fabricated images had become a dominant force

in society staging phoney political events.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

383

carry out a condensed avant-garde effect that was thus neither art nor politics

but rather an expression of the proletariat's self-consciousness. With this

historico-philosophical idea of the death of art and the subsequent historically

necessary realisation of art in life, the situationists clearly differentiated

themselves from most contemporary art. Practically all artistic groupings and

practices ± be they happenings, ¯uxus, the Independent Group, Nouveau

ReÂalisme, La Nouvelle Vague, or Le Nouveau Roman ± were characterised by

an ironic interest in the objects and images of the new mass culture.

These

artistic practices `did not see the late 1950s through the evils of consumerism

but through the opportunities it presented, rarely through the memory of the

Holocaust but more often through a joy at being alive'.

They identi®ed

themselves with the iconography of mass culture in order to liberate artistic

practice from the still active in¯uence from bourgeois high culture. They

embraced the escalating consumerist public and attempted to interfere with

the cultural logic of the circulation of products by creating semi-autonomous

universes of self-de®ning objects without authors. They thus alternated

between an anti- and pro-capitalistic rhetoric that was very different from the

situationists' authoritative condemnation of contemporary society.

The situationists' continued insistence on being a post-Dadaist and post-

surrealist organisation in a world where art could not serve as a tool for

revolution made them stand apart in a world where other artists experienced a

feeling of freedom from past kinds of social control. Interestingly it has not

been the situationists but these other artists and artistic groups ± who

collectively worked toward suppressing the terrible historical events in

connection with World War Two and af®rmed the rapid development of

consumer culture in the post-war era ± who have been assigned an almost

hegemonic status within art history of the post-war era. The activities that

mainstream art history has selected and privileged are, interestingly enough,

those that refrained from investigating the (im)possibility of historical

experience at a point in time characterised by the suppression of political

history and the rise of a consumer society.

The situationists differentiated

themselves from almost all other neo-avant-gardes through their radicalised

negation of art by declaring it dead. It was no longer possible to use the

artwork as an arena for critique, the situationists thundered. The model that

the former avant-garde had developed and used turned out to be insuf®cient in

a late-capitalistic consumer culture, and any attempt to follow this model

would result in the avant-garde enthusiastically acquiring the role of cultural

claqueur, expected to celebrate the new consumer society. In other words, the

situationists `politicised' themselves upon encountering the new conditions of

production of the image, reaching the conclusion that the visual sphere, the

`spectacular', was the arena in which the battle over the formulation of life

should take place. Both the political foundations and the art forms were

changing. This resulted in a `politicisation' of `art' turned toward the

predominant visual forms that colonised everyday life and performed a suture

on a society that, according to the situationists, was characterised by alienation

and boredom. The situationists desperately tried to refuse playing the role of

make-up or internal interference in a gigantic political project consisting of

equal parts social modernisation and amnesia.

Even though the International Situationist was without doubt the organisation

or groupthat not only most clearly addressed the activities of Dada and

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

384

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

60. For analyses of the relationshipbetween the

neo-avant-garde and the rise of consumer

society after World War Two, see Russell

Berman, `Consumer Society: The Legacy of the

Avant-Garde and the False Sublation of

Aesthetic Autonomy', Modern Culture and Critical

Theory: Art, Politics and the Legacy of the Frankfurt

School (University of Wisconsin Press: Madison,

1989), pp. 42±53; Thomas Crow, `Modernism

and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts', Modern Art

in the Common Culture (Yale University Press:

New Haven, 1996), pp. 3±37, Andreas

Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass

Culture, Postmodernism (Indiana University Press:

Bloomington, 1986).
61. MicheÁle C. Cone, `Pierre Restany and the

Nouveaux ReÂalistes', Yale French Studies, no. 98,

2000, p. 65. Cone is referring to Nouveaus

ReÂalisme but I think the characteristic can be

applied to more or less all the mentioned

groups.
62. See Benjamin Buchloh, `Plenty or Nothing:

From Yves Klein's Vide to Arman's Le Plein',

Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture,

and Design from France: 1958±1998 (Guggenheim

Museums Publications: New York, 1998),

pp. 86±99.

Surrealism after 1945 but developed a coherent theory of the avant-garde as

well, they have not been part of the reception and discussion of the avant-

garde and the neo-avant-garde.

In Peter BuÈrger's book Theorie der Avantgarde

from 1974, the International Situationist is not mentioned, while the neo-

avant-garde is generally characterised as a farcical repetition of the historical

avant-garde's heroic defeat.

According to BuÈrger, the historical avant-garde's

critique of the institutional status of art ± the fact that the critique made by art

of social phenomena like the deterministic rationality of capitalism merely has

a compensatory character due to its autonomy and does not break through to

everyday life ± was reduced to an empty repetition in the hands of the neo-

avant-garde, who thus transformed the critique of the institution to

institutionalised transgression without any link to life practice. `[T]he neo-

avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely

avant-gardiste intentions.'

The neo-avant-garde was structural self-

deception. As already indicated, this analysis was strikingly similar to the

one that the situationists advanced from the middle of the 1950s and forward.

But BuÈrger does not mention the situationists and their critique of the

contemporary artistic avant-garde.

As had been pointed out by later art historians like Benjamin Buchloh and

Hal Foster, BuÈrger's analysis of the avant-garde suffer from a number of

problematic assumptions.

BuÈrger's theory is based on a teleological

conception of history that fails to consider the fact that the auto-critical

moments of art are often only decipherable after a certain delay. He also

reduces the avant-garde to just one paradigm (the sublation of the false

autonomy of the institution of art). Buchloh criticises BuÈrger for not carrying

out a contextualised analysis of the neo-avant-garde. Only by investigating

different communities' uses and readings of the neo-avant-garde's works is it

possible to attribute meaning to them, writes Buchloh. However, like BuÈrger,

he highlights the close connection between reconstructed bourgeois society

and the neo-avant-garde. `This audience sought a reconstruction of the avant-

garde that would ful®l its own needs, and the demysti®cation of aesthetic

practice was certainly not among those needs. Neither was the integration of

art into social practice, but rather the opposite: the association of art with

spectacle.'

Here Buchloh agrees with BuÈrger, who precisely writes that it is

less a question of the neo-avant-garde consciously diluting the critique of the

institution of art than but rather one of escalating consumer society having

changed the conditions of the production and reception of (anti-)art. `This [the

use of anti-artistic intent for artistic ends] must not be judged a ``betrayal'' of

the aims of the avant-garde movements . . . but the result of a historical

process.'

For consumer society itself integrated aesthetics and daily life, thus

realising the project of the historical avant-garde, although in quite a different

way than the latter had intended. Interestingly enough, it was precisely this

conclusion that the situationists arrived at and argued for: art and capital had

merged in a higher synthesis: the spectacle. Buchloh also uses the term `the

spectacle', yet without referring to Debord and the situationists.

Thus both BuÈrger and Buchloh underline the appearance of the new forces

and relations of symbolic production in bourgeois society that dramatically

changed the conditions for critical art after World War Two. Most post-war

visual art was not engaged in a direct attack on the institution of art and did not

try to ally itself with a social revolution as the historical avant-garde did

between the World Wars. For the most part, artists worked within the

con®nes of the resurrected Ecole de Paris where abstract painting was covered

with political connotations and presented as the art of the free West. Neo-

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

63. One of the few exceptions was La

philosophie de l'histoire de la culture dans

l'avantgarde culturelle parisienne depuis 1945 (Guy

Leprat: Paris, 1962) written by the French artist

and cultural sociologist Robert Estivals. Debord

did not approve of the book as he explained in

a letter to Estivals where he proceeded to

present the `real' meaning of the avant-garde.

Debord, Correspondance. Vol. 2: Septembre

1960±DeÂcembre 1964, pp. 191±5. For an analysis

of the letter, see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen,

`Engageret, forceret, kropslùs. Hovedlùse

bemñrkninger om den forsvundne avantgardists

selvforstaÊelse', Passepartout. Skrifter for

Kunsthistorie, no. 22, 2003, pp. 126±148. It

should also be noted that strangely very few of

the analyses of the Situationist International has

attempted to locate the group within the

context of the avant-garde as theorised by

BuÈrger and onwards. To this day most of the

work done on the situationists has not been able

or willing to engage in a historicisation of the

groupbut have preferred to mythologise

Debord, Jorn, Constant, etc. Among the

exceptions that approach the material form a

historical perspective are Anselm Jappe, Guy

Debord, Mario Perniola, I Situazionisti. Il

movimento che ha pro®zzato la `SocietaÁ dello

Spettacolo', Simon Sadler, The Situationist City

(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998); Peter

Wollen, `Bitter Victory: The Art and Politics of

the Situationist International', in Elisabeth

Sussman (ed.), On the passage of a few people

through a rather brief moment in time: The

Situationist International 1957±1972 (MIT Press:

Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 20±61.
64. BuÈrger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, pp. 57±63.
65. BuÈrger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 58.
66. See Benjamin Buchloh, `The Primary Colors

for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of

the Neo-Avant-Garde', October, no. 37, 1986,

pp. 41±52; Hal Foster, `Who's Afraid of the

Neo-Avant-Garde', The Return of the Real: The

Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press:

Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 1±32.
67. Buchloh, `The Primary Colors for the

Second Time', p. 51.
68. BuÈrger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 57.
69. Buchloh seems unwilling to consider the

situationist rejection of art and he tries to

endorse an Adorno-inspired understanding of art

and in fact concludes that only by insisting on

its autonomy is art able to challenge society.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

385

avant-gardist groups like Nouveaux ReÂalisme and The Independent Group

acted somewhat critical towards the institution of art but in a much more

ambivalent manner than the historical avant-garde. The Situationist Inter-

national, on the other hand, explicitly referred to the avant-garde of the inter-

war period and the situationists engaged in politics to the point where they

abandoned art as a separate activity in favour of revolutionary actions and the

writing of a dismissive theory of capitalist society. Yet the Situationist

International is strangely absent in the theory of the avant-garde. Both BuÈrger

and Buchloh tend to repeat the analysis of the situationists in their account of

the possibilities for art after World War Two, but without analysing the

theories and practice of the Situationist International or referring to them even

though they would be the best example of the fact that avant-garde's role

changed radically with the false integration of aesthetics and daily life in

consumer society.

One of the reasons why BuÈrger does not include the Situationist

International in his theory is probably caused by the development of the

(anti-)political movements in the 1960s and 1970s. The exclusion of the

situationists' programmatic renunciation of an alternative artistic plasticity in

favour of developing a radical social critique seems to indicate the signi®cance

of the historical anchoring of the theories of the avant-garde. It is thus

interesting that BuÈrger directly links Surrealism ± his most important example

of the historical avant-garde ± together with May 1968 in his book on

Surrealism written in 1970. `At the latest with the events in May 1968 the

actuality of Surrealism is evident.'

The situationists played a prominent role

in and had considerable in¯uence on May 1968, which nevertheless did not

satisfy the hopes for a total revolution. The twelfth and ®nal issue of the

situationists' journal appeared in September 1969 and was rife with

expectations of victory: up and down Europe, especially France and Italy

where the revolt ¯ourished. But even though Italy in particular was the scene

of labour revolts and student unrest for a number of years to come, the protest

movement quickly died out most places in Europe.

Already in the beginning

of the 1970s the movement many thought was going to be a global revolution

had satis®ed itself with minor changes and higher wages. This historical

development is the background for BuÈrger's theory of the avant-garde and the

neo-avant-garde. BuÈrger thus wrote his book in 1974, a few years after the

German student movement began to disintegrate, among other things

degenerating into the Red Army Fraction.

At the time there were good

reasons for insisting on the necessity of formulating an elaborate theory of

capitalist society and the function of art within it. Without such a theory the

overcoming of art and politics was unlikely to occur and BuÈrger ends his book

by concluding that the integration of art and life could only happen in

connection with a social revolution and on the basis of a consistent theory of

the workings of capitalism.

When BuÈrger formulated his theory he was surrounded by the effects of

what he considered to be the problematic consequences of a political

engagement that had not been aware of the capacity of the capitalist society to

absorb critique. That is why he chose to locate the project of the avant-garde in

history and marginalised the Situationist International, preferring to put his

trust in theory. Paradoxically, he thereby repeats the situationists and equips

theory with the ability to denounce false consciousness and create worlds. The

replacement for the historical avant-garde was thus neither the neo-avant-

garde, which merely supplemented the institution of art with material, nor the

new social movements, which have degenerated into terrorism or emotionally

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

386

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

70. Peter BuÈrger, Der franzoÈsische Surrealismus:

Studien zur avantgardistischen Literatur (Um Neue

Studien erweiterte Ausgabe) (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt,

1996), p. 12.
71. See Paolo Persichetti and Oreste Scalzone's

La revolution et l'etat (Dagorno: Paris, 2000) for

an overview of the situation in Italy.
72. For an account of the political situation in

Germany in the Seventies, see Hartwig

BoÈgeholz, Die Deutschen nach dem Krieg: Eine

Chronik (Rowohlt: Reinbek, 1995). For analyses

of the new social movements, see George

Katsia®cas, The Subversion of Politics: European

Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization

of Everyday Life (Humanities Press: New Jersey,

1997); Gianni Statera, Death of a Utopia: The

Development and Decline of Student Movements in

Europe (Oxford University Press: Oxford,

1975).
73. BuÈrger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 54.

Another reason why the situationists did not

appear in either BuÈrger's or Buchloh's theories

of the avant-garde should probably be sought for

in the fact that in spite of their own analyses,

they desperately desire to maintain the

possibility of critical art and therefore do not

open up for the situationists' radical and

authoritative rejection of art. None of them

really wishes to leave art history and attempt to

write a story about the connections between

modernity, capitalism, critique of capitalism,

and art, a digression that in many ways clearly

pursues the idea of the historical avant-garde as

an attempt to destroy the distinction between

art and life. This broader historical perspective,

which was thus to include both artistic and

political critiques of capitalism or bourgeois

society, could be called `the history of the

anarchistic imagination'. It would pose critical

questions to the former separation of art and

politics as two separate discursive spheres and

would be forced to examine questions of

autonomisation, modernisation, and capitalism in

a historical view from German romanticism to

May 1968 and upto the civil disturbances in

Seattle, GoÈteborg, and Genoa. I shall prudently

refrain from attempting to establish this history

of the anarchistic imagination, as my aim here is

simply to examine the relationship between the

surrealists and the situationists and to ask why

the situationists do not appear in the various

avant-garde theories. Jochen Schulte-Sasse coins

the term `anarchic imagination' in his text

`Imagination and Modernity: Or the Taming of

the Human Mind', Cultural Critique, no. 5,

1987, pp. 23±48. He writes: `Cultural

movements such as Early Romanticism, the

historical avant-garde of the twenties, or the

student movement of the sixties and early

seventies have in common a project of leading

art back in life, or, at least in part, overcoming

the functional differentiation of social realms in

modernity.' (p. 24).

entrenched identities (as within the ecology movement), but rather the

scienti®c theorist. Rather than pinning his faith on art and politics, BuÈrger

following Debord and the situationists believed in the sustained class-conscious

critique of ideologically determined objects. Like the Situationist International,

BuÈrger abandoned art. After the defeat of the historical avant-garde modern

art had run idle, BuÈrger wrote, and thereby repeated the situationists'

authoritative dismissal of art.

There was an unbounded faith in theory as the key to the reading and

production of reality in Theorie der Avantgarde that was typical of the times and

that, a decade before BuÈrger wrote his book, had characterised the absolutist

claim of the situationists. The intention to avoid a dogmatic base/

superstructure model in which all experiments are held up against the

development in basis resulted in a forced belief in theory. The aim of BuÈrger's

distinction between theoretical and ideological practice, a distinction he

develops based on Althusser, was to justify the pure being of knowledge and

those possessing this knowledge.

For if theory constitutes an enclave of

freedom in a world characterised by ideological alienation, there is only one

way to criticise theory, and that is through theory. If everyone is buried in

ideology and illusion, only the muscular, lonely, and heroic theoretician is able

to penetrate false consciousness. Only the theorist (i.e. respectively BuÈrger or

the Situationist International) is able to advance real critique. Paradoxically,

BuÈrger took over one of the Situationist International's most problematic ideas

about the avant-garde; the theoretician as vanguard, as the head of society

leading the headless masses forward out of the miserable situation in which

they are stuck. Now the theoretician as the privileged representative of

Marxist revolutionary science was the avant-garde dismissing all contemporary

art movements as irrelevant.

The author wishes to extend his appreciation to Peter BuÈrger, Jason Smith, and Anders

Troelsen for their insights and comments on early drafts of this text.

The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Dif®cult Fusion of Art and Politics

74. For a critique of Althusser's distinction

between ideology and theory, see Jacques

RancieÁre, La lecËon d'Althusser (Gallimard: Paris,

1974). There was a big difference between the

theories of the situationists and the theories that

Althusser and his pupils developed in the 1960s.

The situationists referred to the young Marx and

the theory of alienation while Althusser referred

to the late Marx. In the introduction to the

French translation of Das Kapital Althusser

advised the readers to skipthe chapter on

commodity fetishism. This chapter was precisely

the one the situationists favoured. Althusser

wrote: `The theory of fetishism is the last trace

of the Hegelian in¯uence and this time it is

extremely visible and damageable (because here

all the theoreticians of rei®cation and alienation

has found a base for their idealist interpretations

of Marx's thought).' `Avertissement aux lecteurs

du Livre 1 du Capital', Le Capital, trans. Joseph

Roy (Garnier-Flammarion: Paris, 1969), p. 27.

Despite these differences both the situationists

and Althusser regarded theory as the

uncontaminated reservoir of Marxism in a world

characterised by bourgeois ideology. With

theory the theoretician was to destroy the false

world and create a new communist paradise.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004

387

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