Surrealists, Cannibals and the Other Barbarians: (On the Aesthetics of Simulacra)

SURREALISTS, CANNIBALS AND THE OTHER BARBARIANS (On the Aesthetics of Simulacra) EDUARDO SUBIRATS New York University Wir selber alle ... müssen Barbaren sein... (We ourselves have to become barbarians...) Hermann Bahr 1. The Révolution surréaliste encompassed a number of different intentions and projects. Breton conceived of it as an attack against functionalist aesthetics and as a subversion of the values of industrial rationalization. Surrealism was to rediscover the world of the unconscious, of dreams and madness , of ancient mythologies and remote cultures. According to Walter Bejamin the call for artistic freedom it raised had not been heard in Europe since Bakunin's time. Herbert Read, inspired by Nietzsche's cultural critique , called Surrealism a "revaluation of all aesthetic values." The new aesthetics embraced the revelatory experience of an unrepressed reality. But surrealism was meant to be something else. When Breton, in his Second Surrealist Manifesto, suggested going into the streets with a couple of pistols and shooting people as a supreme act of surrealistic subversion, he was proposing something that went quite beyond the limits of traditional artistic representation. Walter Benjamin tried to express this revolutionary dimension of surrealist aesthetics with the concept of "profane Erleuchtung," a "profane illumination" evocative of both religious experience and enlightenment critique. It was precisely this religious but anti-catholic and materialist character of the surrealist experience that attracted him so much. "Profane illumination" was an experience that verged on ecstasy or hallucination, not unlike the experiences produced by drugs or mystic visions. But this illumination was more than an aesthetic experience. A "profane illumination" could transform a boring suburban Sunday into a revelatory experience of the inner nature of things. "Sie bringen die gewaltigen Kräfte der 'Stimmung' zur Explosion...," wrote Benjamin: the profane ilumination prepares the explosion of the most intimate and secret voices of reality. Breton's Nadja is an example of erotic ecstasy. The transformation of the self through an unrepressed erotic experience was Bataille's aim. Lorca's tragic visions of the city of New York as an netherworld dominated by satanic powers ended in a prophetic vision, an apocalyptic epiphany of 01999 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XII No. 23/24, Enero a Diciembre 1999 170__________________________________________________EDUARDO SUBIRATS natural forces: "...veremos la resurrección de las mariposas disecadas ...y manar rosas de nuestra lengua" ("we will see the resurrection of desiccated butterflies ...and roses growing from our tongues..."). This revelatory aspect of surrealist poetics was also of central importance for Artaud. His rediscovery of ancient rituals and gods had exactly the same spiritual and almost prophetic dimension. After the Second World War, however, the reception of surrealism lost its libertarian and optimistic tone. The landscapes of fear, irrationality and destruction in the last years of European Fascism marked the turning point. Bataille's synthesis of the Nietzchean Übermensch and the Sadean libertin were too close to the Nazi heroics of industrialized mass killings and death camps. Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialektik der Aufldärung, published in 1947, demonstrated that irrationality and violence were the hidden face of industrial rationalization. Similarly Pasolini's disregarded film Saló presented Fascist torture, rape and mass killings as the counterpart of rational mass production and the logic of mass consumption. Mass ecstasies and hallucinations, political paranoia, wholesale destruction , the fragmentation of reality, nightmares and madness, these had been real daily life for many years in Europe. Everyone had already experienced first hand the meaning of "le besoin social du toxique", the pleasures of mass intoxication that Artaud called for in 1926. The surrealist dictum of a general mobilization of irrationality formulated by Dalí had become a commonplace of Fascist propaganda. Dalí had anticipated in 1929 that there would soon come a day when general and systematic confusion between reality and hallucination would be possible through so-called "active and paranoic" creation. In Dalfs own words: "(il) est proche le moment où... il sera possible de systématiser la confusion..." That day became a painful reality. In his 1950 essay "Looking Back on Surrealism" Adorno denounced the surrealist emancipation as an illusion. His critique aimed directly at surrealism's aesthetic principle of psychic automatism. No comparison is possible between dreams and automatic writing, Adorno...