International Gramsci Society Online Article January 2005

Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avantgarde

E. San Juan, Jr.

Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because init I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language.It shook up absolutely everything. ...A process of disalienation, that’s how I interpreted surrealism. --AIMECESAIRE [1]

In the spring of 1919, Andre Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. Theyconverted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud’s urge for adventurein quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont’s conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeoismorality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in thepsyche, surrealism--Guillaume Appolinaire’s term [2]--was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundworkfor building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded theinnovative journal L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian soviets) as the germ of anemergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeoisculture, politics, and philosophy.

When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic andmarvellous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini’sfascist takeover. Two years after, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooksthat occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not--as far as I am aware--refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in hisscattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (inparticular, on Marinetti) and on Pirandello, we can extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealismand avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position shouldbe toward aesthetics within the field of cultural production especially in the postCold War epoch of realignments andreconfigurations.

All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism. Artisticvalues are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artisticforms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dancemovements, filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Croce’s emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramscivalorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced byintellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization andobjectification of vision.

Gramsci’s conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations withina social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development ofcapitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmaticparty line. "Man is "precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen,we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'makeourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies."[3] Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the pastwith the present in order to fashion the future.

While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by noting (in Prison Notebooks) that psychoanalysis is"a kind of criticism of the regulation of sexual instincts," he did entertain a tripartite organization of the psyche when hestates: "'One’s real nature' can be taken to be the sum of one’s animal impulses and instincts, and what one tries toappear as is the social-cultural 'model' of a certain historical epoch that one seeks to become..It seems to me that 'one’sreal nature' is determined by the struggle to become what one wants to become."[4] Cognizant of both the realms of the idand the ego, Gramsci stresses the will as the chief determining element of the human personality.

Gramsci reiterates the Marxist principle of the individual essence as equivalent to the "totality of social relations" in thefollowing remark: "Hence the artist does not write or paint--that is, he does not externalize his phantasms--just for his ownrecollection, to be able to relive the moment of creation. He is an artist only insofar as he externalizes, objectifies andhistoricizes his phantasms."[5] Unmistakably, Gramsci underscores the historicity of form: "'Content' and 'form' have an'historical' as well as an 'aesthetic meaning. 'Historical' form signifies a given language, as 'content' indicates a given wayof thinking which is not only historical, but ’sober,' expressive...."[6] The process of objectifying and historicizing the

impulses and drives thus shifts the focus from the finished expression, the "reflection and recollection of interior fullnessand perfection, to the materiality of the writing process," in short, to the "complex system of cultural relations."[7]

Surrealism parallels Gramsci’s radical return to the material process and its vicissitudes.[8] In Breton’s 1924 Manifesto,we encounter the concentration on process as surrealism is defined as:

pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the real function ofthought, in the absence of any control exercised by the reason and outside of all aesthetic and moralpreoccupations.

Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of associations neglected until now,in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the destruction of allother psychic mechanisms and substitutes itself for them in solving the principal problems of life.[9]

Maynard Solomon perceives the tragic flaw of surrealism in this theory of unconscious creativity, a pretext for quietism, butalso the motivating force for a perpetual and creative disequilibrium.[10] However, free association, to my mind, signifies amediation: the unconscious freely manifests its infinite possibilities when the censorship of the ego (the public self orpersona) is evaded and the instinctive libido mobilized to express itself in strange, marvellous or fantastic forms vis-a-visquotidian reality. This reality, one should note, is the reified and commodified reality of bourgeois everyday life, the domainof capitalism regulated and directed by the norms of the market and the iron law of exchange-value. The phantasmsGramsci refers to are Breton’s dreams, the play of thought via analogy and association, and all kinds of parapraxes--whatFreud calls "the psychopathology of everyday life," symptoms of repression.

In this light, we can understand why Breton condemned the routine language of decadent bourgeois society as distortingand obstructive: "the logical mechanism of the sentence appears more and more incapable of releasing the emotionalshock in man which actually gives some true value to his life." While stereotyped language blocks "true consciousness" or"the real functioning of thought," insofar as it can emancipate itself from conventional and received forms, it can also serveas "the medium of an idealized 'pure consciousness.'" Raymond Williams notes that from this perspective the purpose ofwriting becomes not communication but illumination, even self-illumination, with the emphasis on "the experience itselfrather than on any of the forms of embodying or communicating it."[11] But Breton qualifies this by asserting that the poeticprocess is empirical and dynamic; it did not "presuppose an invisible universe beyond the network of the visible world."

We need at the outset to retrospectively distinguish the surrealist transvaluation of modernity from Dadaism with which it isoften confused. Dada was born from the chaos of World War I. In a lecture in Zurich in 1922, Paul Valery spoke of theEuropean mind "cruelly wounded by war."[12] In the works of Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, and others, Dadaism aims torandomly destroy all existing standards of morality and taste in public exhibitions of anarchic frenzy, burlesque, andscandal pour epater le bourgeois. Sporting diving helmets and outlandish gear in public urinals, Dadaists thematizeddissolution, futility, meaningless and absurd routine, as a reaction to modern existence; in short, Dadaism exalted thephantasms in themselves as adequate antitheses to dehumanizing capitalist mandates and institutions. Whilesurrealism also may be conceived as a revolt against bourgeois conventions, it diverges from Dadaism in several ways.

Called the "prehensile tail of Romanticism,"[13] surrealism claims to be a total revolution of the world. With changes insociety being premised on changes in the character and consciousness of humans, surrealists criticized the "commonsense" rules and practices of everyday life. It is not correct to say that the surrealists desired the liberation of the spiritbefore the abolition of bourgeois class society, as Cesar Vallejo accused them of doing;[14] rather, they believed thatmaterial conditions and the means of expression/communication are inseparable. Radically questioning the acceptedmodes of representation, they sought to express a coherent answer to nihilistic cant and the facile "progressivism" ofbusiness society witnessed in the cult of patriotism, family, religion, and material acquisitions.

In challenging this status quo internalized in the psyche (the Freudian ego commanded by the reality principle), surrealistsregarded the unconscious glimpsed in dreams, fantasies, and irrational behavior as the repository of utopian possibilities.Such possibilities need to be articulated through a new grammar and syntax of art (one can cite bluffs, slogans, forgeries,gratuitous demonstrations, watchwords), new stylistic breakthroughs that would subvert the corrupting control of therational logocentric mind. The public self or ego needs to be dissolved by the operations of the subliminal drives,operations either governed by chance and or influenced by certain patterns of the unconscious (condensation,displacement, figures of dream-work). Automatic texts and paintings would express alogical dream visions and dissonantimages that violate monological, uniform, and mechanical standards in a way that would synthesize conscious andunconscious materials--a synthesis by negation. The contradictions between action and dream, reason and madness,sensation and representation, psychic trace and primal myth, would all be resolved in the surrealist experience. In theregion of the unconscious, Breton writes, there is not only "a total absence of contradiction" but also "a lack of temporality"and the absolute reign of the pleasure principle. The moments of creation and destruction coalesce in the surrealisttechnique of creating the marvellous and precipitating a new altered understanding of reality.

Like Gramsci, the surrealists then endeavored to transform the system of cultural relations and artistic practices by forginga new conception of the artist. To carry out the wide-ranging changes in personality and in the conduct of everyday life, thesurrealist needs self-discipline, a personal asepsie so as to preserve a condition of open accessibility or availability to thesolicitations of the unconscious. The constitution of the surrealist subject springs from the problematization of the authorityof the author and of the academies, the arbiters of Establishment taste. While profoundly libertarian in stressing the moralexigency of desire, the surrealist ethos instigates a phase of cosmic passivity--the "wise passiveness" of Wordsworthopen to pantheist visitations--but not permanently. Since its mission is to change life (Rimbaud) and transform the world(Marx), surrealism eventually demands an evangelical program of action (hence, many surrealists joined the CommunistParty of France, or the Trotskyist opposition in the thirties and forties).

With the activist stance ascendant in the period 1925-30, the mode of pure automatism--writing under hypnosis--evolvedand was assimilated into a "paranoiac method" in which "estrangement" (forms of insanity) was simulated in the poem orpainting. Two other strategies to objectify desire and its virtual metamorphosis were discovered: first, the notion of"objective hazard," a "a fortuitous conjunction in the world or mind the significance of which is greater than its apparent lackof causes would indicate."[15] Second, the foregrounding of "black bile," a form of ironic or grotesque humor whoseresonance recalls Dada but also the Rabelaisian comic satire on official monologic prejudices (as, for example, inThornton Wilder’s 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth ).

One may register the objection that surrealism, inspired by the examples of Novalis, Coleridge, Nerval and Baudelaire(apart from Rimbaud and Lautreamont already mentioned), favored moments of madness, trance, and hallucination morethan moments of control. This is true insofar as the marvellous can be released only in the gratuitous instants or privilegedmoments of rupture when rational awareness is suspended, neutralized, or cancelled altogether.

Ever suspicious of bourgeois rationality, Apollinaire speculated that the artist can reproduce these instants of rupturewithout esthetic arrangement or mediation. If so, apprehended objective reality is not the creation of beauty throughlanguage or other media but simply a manifestation of pure force, power, energy. It approximates Spinoza’s conception ofconatus as the virtue behind the unity of form and substance.[16] Surrealism, however, requires paradoxically a will orintention to effect defamiliarization and estrangement of reified circumstances, hence the need for organic artist-intellectuals (such as Gramsci envisaged) that would serve the subaltern classes by interpellating them as revolutionarysubjects. Surrealism claims to be one such ideological apparatus of interpellation in civil society.

In addition, one encounters also the surrealist method of cadavre exquis--the composition of poetry via word gamesrequiring collective participation. Such poems are fashioned anonymously by many authors (suggested by Comte deLautreamont who envisioned everyone as a potential poet). So "the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine"--onememorable line of this collective word-game--becomes a product of a communal seance, the direct route to theunconscious. Still, given the ineluctable sociality of language and its semantic parameter, communication of the surrealistvision transpires through material objectification. For example, in Breton’s Nadja, the framework of everyday life serves asthe point of entry for mapping the topography of Paris in a sequence of constant estrangement performed by the narratorthrough changes of perspective and unlikely but heuristic juxtapositions.[17]

Like the psychologist Pierre Janet, the surrealists regarded the products of the mind as sensory material or substance,evidenced in the recognizable referents juxtaposed in the famous signature logo of surrealism: "The chance meeting of asewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table." The fact that poetic analogy is a deliberate act of revealing theaffinities and identities (catalyzed by chance, automatism, erotic experience) between the mind and the exterior universetestifies to the intervention of a will that seeks to resolve the antinomies of the pleasure principle and the reality principle."One is like the other"--to say this is itself, for the surrealists, a revolutionary act.

Gramsci would, I am sure, appreciate this intervention of the synthesizing will of the surrealist imagination in the artist’sattempt to represent sociohistorical reality. But Gramsci is not just obsessed with mimetic reproduction or thephotographic capture of surfaces. He is more concerned with the cultural and ideological struggle centering on the keyconcept of hegemony, hegemony conceived as the moral-intellectual leadership of a historic bloc of forces that combinesconsent and force in instituting a whole ethico-political order in a given epoch. Gramsci is primarily engaged with thepolitical criticism of art, "the criticism of social life, involving the struggle to destroy and overcome certain feelings andbeliefs, certain attitudes toward life and the world."[18] This is evidenced in his judgment of the Italian futurist Marinetti, anevaluation which can be applied also to surrealism insofar as surrealism calls for new aesthetic forms and values as asymptom of the need to reorganize the whole society dominated by modern capitalism.

Echoing Anatoly Lunacharsky (then commissar of education of the Soviet Union), Gramsci praises futurism’s political-aesthetic attack on bourgeois norms and values. Futurism’s iconoclasm threatens bourgeois cultural hegemony and thuscoincides with the proletariat’s need for political power. Marinetti’s positive role within the framework of the socialistprogram to forge an alliance between the working masses and the radical bourgeois intelligentsia is similar to thesurrealist position of democratizing poetic expression and repudiating elite culture.

In the context of the rise of fascism as the cult of the irrational, Gramsci subsumed the libidinal within a collectiveorganizing intention. He outlines the hypothesis for this united front or coalition of forces to usher a "proletarian civilization"which can include heterogeneous and even contradictory tendencies: "To destroy bourgeois culture meant simplybreaking down bourgeois spiritual hierarchies, rejecting biases, idols and stultified traditions; it meant not fearinginnovation, nor thinking that the world will collapse if a worker makes grammatical mistakes, if a poem limps, if a pictureresembles a hoarding or if young men sneer at academic and feeble-minded senility."[19] The last gesture felicitouslyevokes the surrealist (and Dadaist) lambasting of reified academic art and commodified spectacles that now characterizethe transnational consumerist vogue of mainstream postmodernism.

Gramsci’s praise of futurism can be extended to surrealism and its experimental and systematic drive for innovations.Futurism’s demand for new forms of culture was, for Gramsci, "distinctively revolutionary" and "absolutely Marxist" and inthis field of culture "it is likely to be a long time before the working classes will manage to do anything more creative thanthe Futurists have done."[20] Written in January 1921, Gramsci’s appraisal of futurism is extraordinary and is the completeopposite of the sectarian dogmatism of the bureaucratic "socialist realism" code of Stalinism and its bureaucraticadherents. It springs from a cardinal tenet of his Marxism:

Once the principle has been established that all we are looking for in the work is its artistic character, this inno way prevents us from inquiring into what mass of feelings, what attitude towards life, circulates within thework itself.... What is not admissible is that a work should be beautiful because of its moral and politicalcontent to the exclusion of the form with which the abstract content has fused and become one."[21]

Despite the reminder of the desideratum of organic form, Gramsci does not subsume ideological/political critique into thedoctrine of orthodox formalist aestheticism. Rather, he maintains a flexible strategic option by insisting that the form isalways the form of a specific sociohistorical content, as I've shown above.

Historicizing cultural practice is fundamental for Gramsci. In a letter to Trotsky in September 1922, Gramsci recorded hisdisillusionment at the fate of Futurism after the war. The young intelligentsia of Futurism had turned reactionary, withMarinetti extolling the "aristocracy of the spirit": "The workers, who had seen in Futurism the elements of a struggle againstacademic culture, fossilized and remote from the popular masses, had to fight for their freedom with weapons in theirhands and had little interest in the old arguments."[22] Pursuing the principle of historicizing cultural practice, Gramsciarrives at a calculated judgment by inscribing aesthetics within the balance of contending lines of force in the overallstruggle for hegemony. Incidentally, in 1938 Breton collaborated with Trotsky in founding the Federation internationale del'art revolutionnaire independant (FIARI) whose manifesto ended with the slogans: "Our aims: the independence of art--forthe revolution. The revolution--for the complete liberation of art!"[23] .

Gramsci’s attitude to Pirandello’s relativist or perspectival theater can also be extended to the ultimately emancipatorypraxis of surrealism. For Gramsci, Pirandello’s plays were valuable for their cultural rather than purely aesthetic function.Like Futurism, they "deprovincialized" the Italians and stimulated a modern critical attitude that displaced the traditional"melodramatic" attitude.[24] While Gramsci measured Pirandello’s drama according to a cognitive, realistic criterion andcensured the allegorical cast of Pirandello’s characters, he did not ignore the cultural project informing the intellectualistepistemology of Pirandello’s experiments. He called Pirandello a "stormtrooper of the theater" throwing grenades thatdestroyed banalities and traditional schemes, in particular "the 'humanitarian' and positivistic conception of the bourgeoisand petty-bourgeois verismo.[25] The playwright’s relativist epistemology sent shock waves to the established hierarchiesof power/knowledge, undermining all forms of closure. In brief, Pirandello’s significance resided in the usefulness of his"bourgeois subversivism" for attaining proletarian hegemony--the final test of moral worth. What is imperative for Gramsciis the formation of a historic bloc of forces that would lead the masses in the socialist reconstruction of society.[26]

Surrealism exceeded the limits of "bourgeois subversivism" by predicating "the liberation of man upon the proletarianRevolution."[27] Deploying Marx’s "logic of totality" within a historical-materialist orientation, the surrealists sought thetransmutation of "two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a super-reality, so tospeak." While Gramsci posed the relative autonomy of the spheres of politics and ideology from economic determinants,he conceived also of a transmutation of the "base" and "superstructure" via a catharsis. By "catharsis," Gramsci means"the passage from the purely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethico-political moment," the decisive passage fromthe objective to the subjective, from necessity to freedom.[28] Objective structure then ceases to be an externalconstraining force and becomes an instrument of freedom and the source of new initiatives.

We have reached the dialectics of reason and the unconscious, of thought and the sublime object that resistsconceptualization. This central doctrine of "catharsis"--Gramsci’s linkage of what is traditionally thought of as the antithesisof the economic base and the ideological superstructure--is what Breton, I think, is trying to enunciate in formulating theparamount motivation of surrealism:

a desire to deepen the foundations of the real, to bring about an ever clearer and at the same time ever

more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses... We have attempted to presentinterior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, of finally becoming one. Thisfinal unification is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the presentform of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, butalso the source of his movement) we have assigned to ourselves the task of confronting these tworealities...[in] their reciprocal attraction and interpenetration.[29]

In Herbert Read’s paraphrase, for surrealism, "art is not merely irrationality; it is rather the interpenetration of reason andunreason, a dialectical counterplay, a logical progression whose end is a transformed world." [30] This is the thrust ofBreton’s "Second Surrealist Manifesto" (1930) and also Les Vases Communicants (1932) oriented to healing the splitbetween action and dream.

One can illustrate further the concrete translation of this theme in Breton’s novel Nadja, its articulation of the "principle oftotal subversion" which also underlies the poems of Eluard, Desnos, and Aragon.[31] But I would rather point to theCaribbean Marxist poet Aime Cesaire’s simultaneous appropriation and abrogation of surrealism in Notebook of a Returnto The Native Land and other poems. Meeting Breton in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in 1941, Cesaire acknowledgedBreton’s "boldness" and the solutions offered by surrealism to problems tackled by Cesaire’s Negritude movement.[32]Cesaire’s poetic themes and motifs encompassed the surrealist exploration of childhood, madness and neurosis,anticlericalism, eroticism, free association and the occult to expand the boundaries of consciousness, to attain wholenessof being. What Cesaire contributes is the uninhibited and calculated violence (reminiscent of Rimbaud’s "disordering of allsenses") inflicted on French syntax and prosody to create a hybrid but original intertextual rhythm that merges thekaleidoscopic milieus of the "Third World" and European civilization.

Surrealism remains a vital aesthetic-political project today. It is fully consistent with the Marxist project insofar as the"surreal" is an immanent beyond, its goal (in the words of Michel Beaujour) "a humanized nature and a naturalized man"conversing together in exalting clarity.[33] The leading American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson assesses surrealismwithin the postmodern regime: "The Utopian vocation of surrealism lies in its attempt to endow the object world of adamaged and broken industrial society with the mystery and depth, the 'magical' qualities (to speak like either Weber orthe Latin Americans), of an Unconscious that seems to speak and vibrate through those things."[34] Robert Shortcelebrates the surrealist sensibility of the here and now, consonant with Gramsci’s realism and the imperative ofcounterhegemonic praxis: "they have sponsored the revolutionary idea of the artist as everyman and of every man aspotentially and as of right un homme complet."[35]

Complementing the Gramscian accent on practical realism is the utopian dimension whose most acute observer isWalter Benjamin. In his essay "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," Benjamin locatedsurrealism’s enduring achievement in the method of "profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration" thatloosened the self and its "moralizing dilettantism" by intoxication. Such intoxication allowed the surrealists to transformurban social and architectonic "destitution" into "revolutionary experience, if not action."[36]

Surrealism exemplified the avantgarde view that wrestling with language generates the experience of illumination--thematrix of revolutionary art itself. According to Raymond Williams, the surrealist converts the function of language asdistorting public communication into a medium of "idealized 'pure consciousness'"[37] which captures the distancebetween what is imagined and what exists in culture and society. It was not, as Christopher Caudwell believed, an escapefrom the "social ego."[38] Here is a recent re-affirmation of the classic surrealist philosophy by the leading Americanexponent, Franklin Rosement, a re-statement of what Gramsci calls the hegemonic drive of emancipatory politics:

In our view, the surest way to find viable solutions [to the problems of capitalism today] is to pursue anapproach rooted in the free-wheeling utopia of universal analogy, absolute divergence, eroticism, potlatchand play, Happily liberated from work and the work-ethic, war and religion, production and profit, and otherrepressive values; an approach that fetishizes neither conscious nor unconscious, but seeks theirdialectical resolution; an approach that rejects the depreciation of reality and all varieties of cynicalaccomodation to misery, and demands instead freedom now, more reality, expanded awareness, and readyaccess to the Marvelous at all times.[39]

The surrealist experiments with language and the unconscious generated a dialectical apprehension in which "wepenetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic thatperceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday."[40] Surrealist political action mediated through thenegativity of critical experiments that incorporate the very dynamic of history may be said to induce the profane illuminationin which "all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge"[41] --exactly the "catharsis" thatGramsci considered the answer to the problem of hegemony and the socialist revolution.

Endnotes

[1] "An Interview with Aime Cesaire," in Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972),67-68.

[2] To register the physical misery of the landscape of war, Apollinaire’s term "surrealist" was actually invented for theprogram notes for the Diaghilev production of Parade in 1917, in which Stravinsky, Satie, Picasso, and Cocteaucollaborated. Cf. Scott Bates, Guillaume Apollinaire (New York: Twayne, 1967) and William Fleming, Arts and Ideas (NewYork: Holt Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1974). The most ingenious exploration of the historical contexts of surrealism in itsvarious permutations is Daniel Cottom, Abyss of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[3] Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, ed. Louis Marks (New York: International Publishers, 1957),76.

[4] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Cultural Writings, tr. William Boelhower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1985), 145. See also Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge,1992).

[5] Ibid., 112.

[6] Quoted in Galvano della Volpe, "The Semantic Dialectic," in Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne, ed., Marxist Literary Theory:A Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 175.

[7] Robert Dombroski, Antonio Gramsci (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 17.

[8] For samples of surrealist poetry by Aragon, Eluard, and others, see the collections Willis Barnstone, ed., ModernEuropean Poetry (New York: Bantam Books, 1966) and Alan Bold, ed., The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (Baltimore:Penguin Books, 1970).

[9] Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (New York: Paragon House, 1988), 21-22. On the debate concerning thepolitics of surrealism between Renato Poggioli and Peter Burger, see the enlightening commentary of Ann Gibson, "Avant-garde," in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1996), 156-69.

[10]Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973), 507-06.

[11]Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (New York: Verso, 1989), 73. For a negative critique, see Arnold Hauser,The Social History of Art, Volume 4 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 235-36. In contrast to Hauser, the philosopher ErnstBloch comments on the montage/collage methods of De Chirico and Max Ernst: "Montage-far from being merely arbitrarilyobjective-reflects the becoming-visible of experimental properties within the objects themselves," symbolizing therein theprinciple of emancipation; see Bloch, Literary Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 408-09.

[12]Quoted in James D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,1981), 9.

[13]C.W.E. Bigsby, "Surrealism," in Roger Fowler, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1973), 187.

[14]Jean Franco, Cesar Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 150.

[15]Joseph T. Shipley, Dictionary of World Literature (Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1962), 403.

[16]See Louis Althusser, "Part I:Spinoza," in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1997), 3-20 .

[17]The painters Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Jan Miro, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, and others, have explored theunconscious region of the psyche through erotic symbols, motifs from myths, chance associations, hallucinatory tropes,dream fantasies, memory images, automatic drawing, visual paradoxes and all kinds of incongruities. See EdmundSwinglehurst, The Art of the Surrealists (Bristol, UK: Parragon Book, 1995). For Pablo Picasso's surrealist phase, see MaxRaphael, Proudhon Marx Picasso, ed. John Tagg (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979; John Berger, The Success andFailure of Picasso (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965). We also find Renaissance illusionism mixed with abstractfigurations, as in Chirico's The Disquieting Muses (1917). One critic describes surrealism as a return to "content,"unfolding a reality saturated in dreams, reverie, and nightmarish aura; see Paul Zucker, Styles in Painting (New York:Dover, 1963), 328-329. Surrealism in music can be exemplified in Erik Satie's three piano pieces of 1913 entitledDessicated Embryos; Serge Prokofiev's Love of Three Oranges (1921) and Bela Bartok's opera The Child and theSorceries (1925).

[18]Gramsci, Cultural Writings, 93.

[19]Ibid., 50-51.

[20]Ibid., 51.

[21]Quoted in Della Volpe, "The Semantic Dialectic," 175.

[22]Gramsci, Cultural Writings, 54.

[23]Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism, 148.

[24]Gramsci, Cultural Writings, 139.

[25]Ibid., 141.

[26]To some extent, the surrealists may be guilty of ultraleftism when they (Breton, Eluart, Peret) criticized the united front ofintellectuals against fascism as a political strategy directly opposed to the pursuit of the class struggle. This united frontwas organized by Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland in 1932. Accusing the Communist Party of France of humanism indefense of bourgeois culture, they were expelled from the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers which includedtheir former colleague Louis Aragon (Franco 225). In this they diverge with the Gramscian notion that what is essential is toattack the hegemonic culture by mobilizing a broad coalition of forces in multiple fronts and sectors.

[27]See Andre Breton, "Surrealism and Historical Materialism," in Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art, 508-10.According to J.T. Fraser, Breton "mistakenly equated the manifest content of dreams with the content of the unconsciousand also mistakenly equated dreams with 'the disinterested play of thought," so that surrealism should aptly be called"subrealism"; in Time, Conflict, and Human Values (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 220.

[28]Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York:International Publishers, 1971), 366-67. See also Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci," Gramsci andMarxist Theory, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 168-204.

[29]Andre Breton, What is Surrealism? Tr. David Gascoyne (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). On the dialectic of chanceand necessity, the Marxist aesthetician Stefan Morawski provides a brilliant insight: "Automatic writing (much like actionpainting and jazz improvisation) is at bottom an expression of the stream of consciousness; it relies on accident, andpermits the untrammeled personality of an artist (more precisely, the immediate creative process) to issue forth; in short,we witness the "composition of structures whose basic materials are expressive qualities," in Inquiries into theFundamentals of Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1974), 111. On the syntax of intention and effect in artisticcreation, see Rudolf Arnheim, "Accident and the Necessity of Art," in Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism , ed. WylieSypher (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 410-28.

[30]Herbert Read, Art and Society (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 123. A contemporary re-statement of the surrealistcredo may be found in the 1970 introduction by the American poet Franklin Rosemont to his 1971 volume The Apple of theAutomatic Zebra's Eye (Chicago: Surrealist Research and Development Monograph Series, 1971) of which the following isan excerpt: "In thus stepping aside from the absurd notion of a conscious 'means of expression' chained to the past, infavor of revealing a certain activity of the mind rooted in desire and oriented toward the future, toward the realization ofman's greatest potentiality, it is our hope to assist in the elaboration of a general crisis of consciousness. It is precisely theprovocation of such a crisis, in fact, which seems to us, as surrealists, to offer not only on the specifically poetic plane buton the plane of thought in general the most dynamic, fertile and prehensile means of serving the cause of humanemancipation."

[31]Andre Breton, Nadja, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 152. Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 17.

[32]Michel Beaujour, "Flight out of time: Poetic Language and the Revolution," Yale French Studies 39 (1967): 48.

[33]Michel Beaujour, "Flight out of time: Poetic Language and the Revolution," Yale French Studies 39 (1967): 48.

[34]Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,1991), 173.

[35]Robert Short, "Dada and Surrealism," in Modernism 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London:Penguin Books, 1976), 308. On the affinities between surrealism and abstract expressionism, see John I.H. Baur,"Painting and Sculpture," in An Outline of Man's Knowledge of the Modern World, ed. Lyman Bryson (New York: Nelson

Doubleday Inc., 1960), 619-31.

[36]Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 182.

[37]Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (New York: Verso, 1989), 73.

[38]Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 285-86.

[39]Franklin Rosemont, Andre Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 62-63.

[40]Benjamin, Reflections, 190.

[41]Ibid., 192.

E. SAN JUAN is co-director of Philippine Forum, New York City, and heads the Philippine Cultural Studies Centerin Connecticut, USA. He is at present visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at the National Tsing HuaUniversity and Academia Sinica fellow in Taiwan. He was 2003 professor of American Studies at KatholiekeUniversiteit Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent books are Racism And Cultural Studies (Duke University Press)and Working Through The Contradictions (Bucknell University Press). Two books in Filipino were launched lastJuly: Himagsik (De La Salle University Press) and Tinik Sa Kaluluwa (Anvil). ̂return to top ^