Dada, Surrealism and the Situationist International

Dada, Surrealism and the Situationist International

Consider the following:

1.Capital Part One Commodities and Money
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as” an immense accumulation of commodities”,its unit being a single commodity.Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

Society of the Spectacle Thesis one:

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail,all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

2.”Transform the world, Marx said; Change life Rimbaud said.These two watchwords are one for us.” Andre Breton: Speech to the congress of Writers ,Paris June 1935.

The reconstruction of life, the rebuilding of the world: one and the same desire. Vaneigen.Revolution of Everyday Life p 68

3.Lautreamont. Poems. (Lautreamont: Maldoror.Penguin Classic)

“Words expressing evil are destined to take on a more positive meaning. Ideas improve.The sense of words takes part in this process.
Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps an author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.
To be well wrought a maxim does not need to be corrected. It needs to be developed.

Society of the Spectacle.207.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

4. Second Manifesto of Surrealism. Breton. 1930.

How is it possible not to be extremely concerned about such a noticeable decline in the ideological level of a (French Communist) party which not long ago had sprung so brilliantly armed from two of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century! It is an all too familiar story: the little that I can glean on this point from my own personal experience is similar to the rest. I was asked to make a report on the Italian situation to this special committee of the “gas cell”, which made it clear to me that I was to stick strictly to the statistical facts (steel production,etc.) and above all not get involved with ideology. I couldn’t do it.

Revolution of Everyday Life. Page 14

What am I supposed to do in a group of militants who expect me to leave in the cloakroom - I won’t say a few ideas, for my ideas would have led me to join the group - but the dreams and desires which never leave me, the wish to live authentically and without restraint.

5.When it comes to revolt, none of us must have any need of ancestors. Breton. Second Manifesto of Surrealism.

Manifesto of Surrealism 1924

Swift is Surrealist in malice,
Sade is Surrealist in sadism.
Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism.
Constant is Surrealist in politics.
Hugo is Surrealist when he isn’t stupid.
Desbordes-Valmore is Surrealist in love.
Bertrand is Surrealist in the past.
Rabbe is Surrealist in death.
Poe is Surrealist in adventure.
Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality.
Rimbaud is Surrealist in the way he lived,and elsewhere.
Mallarme is Surrealist when he is confiding.
Jarry is Surrealist in absinthe.
Nouveau is Surrealist in the kiss.
Saint-Pol-Roux is Surrealist in his use of symbols.
Fargue is Surrealist in the atmosphere
Vache is Surrealist in me.
Reverdy is Surrealist at home.
Saint-Jean-Perse is Surrealist at a distance.
Roussel is Surrealist as a storyteller.
Etc.

Potlach No 2, 29 June 1954.

Exercise in Psycho-geography.

Piranesei is psycho-geographical in the stairway.
Claude Lorrain is psycho-geographical in the juxtaposition of a palace neighbourhood and the sea.
The postman Cheval is psycho-geographical in architecture
Arthur Cravan is psycho-geographical in the hurried- derive
Jacques Vache is psycho-geographical in dress
Louis II of Bavaria is psycho-geographical in royalty
Jack the Ripper is probably psycho-geographical in love
Saint-Just is mildly psycho-geographical in politics. (Terror is disorienting)
Andre Breton is naively psycho-geographical in chance encounters
Madeleine Reineri is psycho-geographical in suicide (See Howls in favour of de Sade)
Along with Pierre Mabille in gathering together marvels, Evariste Galois in mathematics, Edgar Poe in landscape, and Villiers de l, Isle-Adam in agony.

Facteur Cheval

Postman Cheval
Andre Breton

We the birds that you always charm from atop those
Lookouts
And who each night merge into a single flowering branch
from your shoulders to the arms of your beloved
wheelbarrow
Who tear ourselves away from your wrist more vividly than
Sparks
We are the sighs of the glass statue that raises itself on its
Elbow when man sleeps
And may glowing gaps open up in his bed
Gaps through which can be glimpsed stags with coral antlers
In a clearing
And naked women at the very bottom of a mine
You remember you would arise then you would step off the
Train
Without a glance at the locomotive preyed upon by immense
Barometric roots
That cries out dolefully in the virgin forest with all of it’s
Mauled boilers
Its stacks puffing hyacinths and propelled by blue serpents
We would then move ahead of you we the plants prone to
Metamorphoses
Who each night send signals to ourselves that man can
Pick up
While his house collapses and he wonders at the odd
Interconnections
That his bed seeks with the hallway and the staircase
The staircase branches out indefinitely
It leads to a millstone door it widens suddenly onto a public
Square
It is made of swan backs with one wing extended as a railing
It spins upon itself as if to bite itself
But no it is content as we advance to open all its steps like
Drawers
Bread drawers wine drawers soap drawers mirror drawers
Staircase drawers
Flesh drawers with handles of hair
At the moment when thousands of Vaucanson ducks preen
Their feathers
Without looking back you would grab the trowel that breasts
Are made of
We would smile at you you held us by the waist
And we would take on the configurations of your pleasure
Motionless beneath our eyelids forever as a woman loves to
See a man
After making love

From Le Revolver a Cheveux Blancs 1932
Trans:Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Ann Caws

(Note from Earthlight;Breton. Trans.Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow.

This poem pays homage to Joseph Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924), a mailman who collected stones and shells along his route and used them to build his “Ideal Palace” in his home town of Hauterives in France. The Palace is an ornate temple adorned with sculptures of animals and monsters, a true masterpiece of “naïve art” comparable to Simon Rodia’s hand-crafted towers in Los Angeles. Cheval had no artistic training..)

In The Automatic Message Breton observes:

……Just as we might admit that Postman Cheval, who remains the uncontested master of mediumistic architecture and sculpture, was haunted by the appearance of grotto floors and of the remains of petrified fountains in the area of the Drome, where for thirty-six years he made his daily rounds on foot.
From: Breton, Break of Day. Trans Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws.

Arthur Cravan

The following is from Andre Breton: Anthology of Black Humour. Trans Mark Polizzotti. City Light Books

Between April 1912 and April 1915 appeared and disappeared the five issues-now impossible to find -of the little magazine Maintenant, edited by Arthur Cravan. This magazine displayed an entirely new conception of literature and art, somewhat akin to the fairground wrestler or lion tamer vis-à-vis refined entertainments.Out of hatred for stifling bookstores in which everything is jumbled together and begins crumbling to dust even when new, Cravan hawked his copies of Maintenant from a greengrocer’s cart: twenty-five centimes apiece! This very short, very limited enterprise seems, in retrospect, to have possessed decongestive properties of the first order. It is impossible not to see in it the harbinger of Dada, although it sought its solution to the intellectual malaise from an entirely different angle. Cravan proposed to rehabilitate temperament, in almost the physical sense of the word (regression not toward individual childhood, but toward that of the world, toward prehistory, the love of the uncle-in this case Oscar Wilde, presented in his old age as a pachyderm;”I adored him because he resembled a huge beast”; and the poet adopts these lyrical accents to describe himself:” I had folded my six-foot frame into the car, where my knees jutted forward like two polished globes, and I noticed how the cobblestones reflected rainbows of garnet-red gristle criss-crossed with green beefsteaks”).Proclaiming that “every great artist has the sense of provocation,”he chose sarcastic confessions and insults as his favourite weapons. Whereas Rimbaud objects in tears:” II do not understand your laws. I have no moral sense.I am a brute ….I am a beast,a Negro savage,” Cravan moves it onto the level of an apologia, of total demand:” Anyone can understand that I’d take a big, stupid Saint Bernard over Miss Froufrou, who can dance all the steps of the gavotte,and,in any case,a yellow man over a white man,a Negro over a yellow man, and a Negro boxer over a Negro student.” Without seeking to rectify the erroneous judgements to which his predilection for boxers, swimmers,and other specialist of physical culture had led him in artistic matters,Cravan, in the fourth issue of Maintenant penned a review of the Salon des Independents that remains a masterpiece of humour as applied to art criticism: “How far all this is from train wreckshe exclaims.”Maurice Denis should paint in heaven,for he knows nothing about tuxedos or toe jam.Not that I find it especially daring to paint an acrobat or someone taking a shit, since on the contrary, I believe that a rose painted with some imagination is much more demonical….If I were as famous as Paul Bourget I’d appear every night in some cabaret review wearing a G-string, and you can bet I’d fill the
House.”
During the war, not content with having been a deserter from several countries, Cravan took pains to call upon his person the most tumultuous kinds of attention and disapproval. Invited to give a lecture on humour in New York, he climbed onstage completely drunk and began stripping off his clothes, until the room emptied and the police came to cart him off; in Spain, he challenged world champion boxer Jack Johnson and got himself knocked out in the first round. He is known to have been for a brief time, in 1919, a physical education instructor at the athletic academy in Mexico City; he was preparing a lecture on Egyptian art. We lose all trace of him shortly afterward in the Gulf of Mexico, where he cast off one night in the lightest of small craft.

Debord’s own tribute is also paid in Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici where Debord writes:

….But it really was with the letter of insults that he (Lebovici) first showed himself as a writer.The letter of insults is a kind of literary genre which has occupied an important position in our century, and not without reason.I believe that no one would doubt that I myself have learned a lot in this area from the surrealists,and especially from Arthur Cravan.The only difficulty of the letter of insults is not the style, but rather having the confidence that you yourself are in the right at that moment, and that the letters are aimed at precisely the right people.They must never be unfair.

Refusal to Inter

If, in his own lifetime, it was already too late to talk about Anatole France, let us confine ourselves to casting a glance of gratitude at the newspaper that sweeps him away, the nasty daily that had brought him in the first place. Loti, Barres, France, any year deserves a gold star that lays these three sinister gentlemen to rest: the idiot, the traitor and the policeman. And I should have no objection to wasting a word of special scorn on the third. With France, a bit of human servility leaves the world. Let the day be a holiday when we bury cunning, traditionalism, patriotism, opportunism, scepticism, realism, and lack of heart! Let us remember that the lowest actors of this period have had Anatole france as their accomplice, and let us never forgive him for adorning the colours of the Revolution with his smiling inertia. To bury his corpse, let someone on the quays empty out a box of those old books ' he loved so much ' and put him in it and throw the whole thing into the Seine. Now that he's dead, this man no longer needs to make any dust.
Andre Breton
A Corpse 1924

NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS
Never Work

Preliminary programme to the situationist movement.

This inscription, on a wall of the rue de Seine, can be traced back to the first months of 1953 ( an adjacent inscription, inspired by more traditional politics, allows one virtually one hundred per cent accuracy in dating the graffiti in question: calling for a demonstration against General Ridgway, it cannot be later than May 1952).The inscription seems to us to be one of the most important relics ever unearthed on the site of Saint-Germain-des Pres, as a testimonial of the particular way of life which tried to assert itself there.
Leaving the 20th century

Rimbaud? he lived the way you think men ought not to live: he got drunk, picked fights, slept under bridges, had lice.

But he loathed work:

I will never work...
It disgusts me to work...
We shall never work, O floods of fire!...
I loathe all jobs. Masters and workers, all peasants, ignoble.
The hand holding the pen is worth as much as the hand holding the plough. What a century for hands! I'll never have my hand.
With Your Permission
Surrealist Group 1927

And after this, let no one speak to me of work- I mean the moral value of work. I am forced to accept the notion of work as a material necessity, and in this regard I strongly favour its better, that is its fairer, division. I admit that life's grim obligations make it a necessity, but never that I should believe in its value, revere my own or that of other men. I prefer, once again, walking by night to believing myself a man who walks by daylight. There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning- that event which I may not yet of found, but on whose path I seek myself-IS NOT EARNED BY WORK.

Andre Breton Nadja. 1928

in 1913, all I knew of Rimbaud's work were a few poems in anthologies. I hadn't yet come across his famous declaration of refusal: " The writer,s hand is no better than the ploughman's. What a century of hands! I'll never have my hand!" but I felt repelled- no less than Rimbaud had- by the notion of a " career,including that of professional writer. " I loathe all trades," Rimbaud also said......
Radio Interview with Breton 1952

All these remarks on ideas and men lead me, gentlemen, to present Dada to you as the inevitable explosion resulting from that supercharged atmosphere. The rapid passage of Jacques Vache through the wartime sky, what he carried within him that was so estraordinarly urgent, the catastrophic haste that made him annihilate himself; the chariot-driving whiplashes of Arthur Cravan, himself buried as we speak in the Bay of Mexico: these, along with the marvelous instability of Picabia and Duchamp, were the harbingers of Dada- which perhaps led us to expectmore from it than it was able to give.
Breton. Characteristics of the Modern Evolution and What It Consists of
From The Lost Steps.

Voive 1: The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Reaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn. Thr rapid passage of Jacques Vache through the wartime sky, his overwhelming sense of urgency, the catastrophic haste that led himto destroy himself; the whipcracking spirit of Arthur Cravan, who vanished in the Gulf of Mexico around that same time...

Debord. Howls for Sade

" It would be a shame to die so young", wrote Jacques Vache two years before his suicide. If desperation at the prospect of surviving does not unite with a new grasp of reality to transform the years to come, only two ways out are leftfor the isolated man: the pisspot of political parties and pataphysico-religious sects, or immediate death with Umour.
Vaneigem. Revolution of Everyday Life p42

There is a kind of consciousness that is allowed by Power because it serves its purpose.To attain one's lucidity from the light of Power only unveils the darkness of despair, feeding one's truth on lies. Aesthetically, the choice is clear: either death against power, or death in power: Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vacheo on one side, the SS, the mercenary and the hired killer on the other.
Revolution of Everyday Life.p50