Matti Klarwein

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Surrealism: A Golden Bomb

“The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me … Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.” ---- First Surrealist Manifesto ---- “All power to the imagination!” ---- Surrealist and Situationist slogan ---- It’s commonplace nowadays for anarchists to cite the Situationist International as important political forebears, and to use Situationist ideas in their political analyses. But there is far less understanding or appreciation of the movement that arguably gave birth to it: Surrealism, a genuinely international revolutionary movement which predated the Situationist International by several decades, has outlasted it by even longer, and continues with unabated fury today. The claim that anarchists are ignorant of the Surrealist movement might seem at first glance to be an odd one, given the enormous volume of books, exhibitions and TV documentaries on the history of Surrealism which cultural pundits continue to churn out – not to mention the extent to which the word “surreal” has entered everyday language as a synonym for “bizarre” or “zany”. The problem is that almost all of these representations of Surrealism, academic and popular alike, are gross misrepresentations of the movement’s principles and trajectory. So let’s start by listing a few of the things that Surrealism is not. It’s not a 20th-century art movement. It’s not an artistic or literary style. It is not a precursor of, or identical with, postmodernism. Salvador Dalí was not its greatest exponent (he was expelled from the movement in 1939 for his betrayal of its basic values), and André Breton was not acclaimed as its “Pope” (the epithet was coined as a vile insult by Breton’s enemies). It was and is not restricted to Paris, or to Europe, and it did not end in 1945, 1966, 1969, or any other date you may have read. In fact today there are active Surrealist groups in cities all over the world, including Athens, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Istanbul, Izmir, Leeds, London, Madrid, Montevideo, Paris, Prague, São Paolo, St Louis and Stockholm, as well as scores of individual Surrealists working alone or in collaboration with others.

Surrealism’s participants are passionate in their devotion to their cause, which aims to re-enchant and revolutionise everyday life. It’s a revolutionary movement not just in the sense of social revolution – much less artistic revolution – but total revolution, a transformation of reality at every level. For this reason it can perhaps best be characterised not as a cultural movement, or even as a philosophy, but as a quest for truth.

The poetic storm

The truth Surrealism is seeking is not the factual truth of “reality” as defined by the social or natural sciences, or indeed by most revolutionary political analysis. The utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch, a major influence on recent Surrealist thought, sums it up:

Is truth a justification of the world or is it hostile to the world? Isn’t the whole existing world devoid of truth? The world as it exists is not true. There exists a second concept of truth which is not positivistic, which is not founded on a declaration of facticity, on “verification through the facts,” but which is instead loaded with value – as, for example, in the concept “a true friend,” or in Juvenal’s expression Tempestas poetica – that is, the kind of storm one finds in a book, a poetic storm, the kind that reality has never witnessed, a storm carried to the extreme, a radical storm and therefore a true storm. And if that doesn’t correspond to the facts … in that case, too bad for the facts.


Surrealism is a quest for the true storm: the value-laden kind of truth which is truer than facts, logic or rationality because it tells us not merely what is, but what can be – the truth, in other words, of the imagination. The imagination is therefore both Surrealism’s research instrument and its field of investigation; and because it reveals to us what can be, the imagination is also the truest realm of freedom. Thus truth, freedom and imagination are indivisible, and their indivisibility is manifested in poetry – not poetry in the mundane sense of lines on a page, but in the deeper Surrealist sense of poetic truth, a kind of illumination which Surrealists also refer to as convulsive beauty, surreality or, more often, the Marvellous.

The annihilation of the distinction between apparently contradictory states, such as that between truth and poetry, has been the central principle of the Surrealist movement ever since the First Manifesto of 1924: in all the decades of activity since then, in all the different locations and historical, social and political contexts in which it has been conducted, this ongoing quest for the Marvellous has been what gives the movement its unity and purpose. As the Second Surrealist Manifesto (1930) famously puts it:

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point.


Dreams and play

The Marvellous, then, is the point where contradictions are transmuted, the rules of logic implode, and the unity of truth, imagination and freedom is manifested. The most important fault lines upon which Surrealism operates are therefore the contradictions not just between real and imagined, but also between conscious and unconscious, sleeping and waking, and subjective and objective. This is why Surrealists have always been preoccupied with dreams – not because they simply love “bizarre” images for their own sake, but because dreams occur, precisely, at the vanishing point between all those contradictions. Dreams therefore offer a privileged point of access to the Marvellous, and are both cherished (most Surrealists keep a dream diary as a matter of course) and interrogated (Surrealists often experiment with different forms of dreaming, including collective dreaming and lucid dreaming). Other such privileged points of access include practices of automatism, ranging from automatic drawing and writing to musical improvisation and even dance; encounters with “found objects”; and experiences of “objective chance”, where extraordinary and sometimes prophetic coincidences obliterate the dichotomy between objective, “external” events and subjective, “internal” significance and meaning.Surrealist investigations into these phenomena are rigorous and experimental, and usually take the form of play – sometimes in organised games, which can be more or less elaborately planned in advance, and sometimes in more spontaneous outbreaks of sheer playfulness. (Such playfulness is evident, for example, in the practices of détournement and the dérive, both of which were being explored by Surrealists before their adoption by the Situationists and continue to be developed and refined by Surrealists today.) Play is Surrealists’ favourite mode of research at least partly because serious play as such operates at that vanishing point between real and imaginary, conscious and unconscious. It also expresses Surrealists’ furious rejection of work, duty, usefulness and all those other “adult” values which represent compromise and defeat at the hands of a disenchanted and immiserated world. Play with others also revolves around the core Surrealist value of collectivity: Surrealism is often described as a “collective adventure”, and the practices of joint enquiry and shared experience have been essential throughout the movement’s history. Working collectively is not just a way of expressing solidarity and sparking ideas; opening up one’s own unconscious and putting it into direct communication with those of one’s comrades constitutes a radical experiment in breaking down the barriers between subjective and objective, and can be a transforming (and sometimes terrifying) adventure in its own right.

Surrealism and revolution

Facts are hostile to truth, and surreality is more real than reality; truth, imagination and freedom are indivisible, and the Marvellous is their manifestation. Clearly, Surrealism is a revolutionary movement in more than the usual sense of the word. But contrary to the widespread accusation that they are apolitical dreamers or, even worse, well-meaning political idealists, most Surrealists are acutely aware of the burning need for revolutionary action in the factual world here and now. Imagination may give us glimpses of what can be, but real-life revolutionary activity is required to get us there. In the words of Benjamin Péret: “This urgently-required, indispensable revolution is the key to the future … A poet these days must be either a revolutionary or not a poet.”

The Surrealist movement today is justly proud of its heritage of revolutionary consciousness and action. From Péret fighting with Durruti in Spain, to Claude Cahun’s Resistance activities on Occupied Jersey; from the courage and persistence of the Prague Surrealist Group under Stalinism, to that of Surrealists living under vicious dictatorships in southern Europe and Latin America; across a whole range of revolutionary commitment as anarchists, Marxists, Trotskyists, street-fighters and insurrectionists of every kind, Surrealists have played passionate roles in resistance and social action, and continue to do so today.

The current political composition of the international Surrealist movement is a mixture, broadly speaking, of Marxists (often, though not exclusively, Trotskyists) and anarchists (including communists, syndicalists, Wobblies, primitivists and anarcha-feminists). With such a mixture of revolutionary perspectives, it’s no surprise that internal political debates within the movement are frequent and often heated. Nonetheless it remains a matter of principle that the movement as a whole does not toe any party line or subordinate itself to any one political viewpoint or programme. This Surrealist rejection of dogma even extends to Surrealism itself. The commitment to poetic truth is an unshakeable fundamental principle, but all other practices and ideas, including those of Breton, are constantly tested and questioned. There is no such thing as orthodox Surrealism.

Surrealists recognise the urgent necessity of social revolution and the overthrow of capitalism, and many of them are active participants in revolutionary struggle. But they insist no less furiously on the urgent necessity of poetic truth, imagination, freedom, and the total transformation of reality. Indeed, for Surrealists the seeming dichotomy between poetry and political action is just as false as all the others: poetry is the practice of freedom, and vice versa. On the table in my parents’ house lies a golden bomb, with a live caterpillar for its detonator. Social revolution alone just isn’t going to be enough.

Suggested further reading:

André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1972.

Michael Löwy, Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia, University of Texas Press, 2009.

Michael Richardson & Krzysztof Fijalkowski (eds), Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, Pluto Press, 2001.

Penelope Rosemont (ed.), Surrealist Women: an International Anthology, Athlone Press, 1998.

Ron Sakolsky (ed.), Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States, Autonomedia, 2002.

Some Surrealist groups’ websites in English:

Chicago Surrealist Group –www.surrealistmovement-usa.org

Leeds Surrealist Group –leedssurrealistgroup.wordpress.com

London Surrealist Group –londonsurrealistgroup.wordpress.com

Surrealist London Action Group –robberbridegroom.blogspot.com

Stockholm Surrealist Group –www.surrealistgruppen.org andwww.icecrawler.blogspot.com