The avant-garde and the politics of revolution: From Dada into Surrealism, 1919--1931

This project investigates two prominent avant-garde journals of Paris between 1919 and 1930, Litterature and La Revolution Surrealiste. The history of avant-garde, especially the moment of transition from Dada to Surrealism in Paris as expressed in these journals, exhibits the general question that shaped the discussion on avant-garde aesthetics: When does art become socially critical and how long can this criticism be sustained? In their serious struggle to define artistic innovation, the future of aesthetics, and social change in bourgeois society these avant-garde artists cut right through the discussions of modernity, arts, and politics. Through deploying the contradictions embedded in the concept of avant-garde as it developed in these journals, this project aims to override the idea that avant-garde is an exhausted concept. A materialist claim to judge the Surrealist avant-garde attempt is broached against the early praise of Surrealism by the Anglo-Saxon academy as well as recent Marxist approaches that promote a romantic idea of revolution. This project posits whether the modern material experience provided Surrealists with a progressive and radical revolutionary goal. It is argued that in their biggest endeavor to reconcile the subject of modernity with its objective reality, the Surrealists fail on several accounts. Firstly the artist retains a master position in all its roles. Second, the definition of the new subject of Surrealism falls short of the movement's revolutionary premises: female subjectivity, sexuality, and madness are extremely problematic areas through which subject attains its limited definition, recuperating many modernist assumptions. Additionally, the Surrealist experimentation culminates in the power of vision and the image. Nevertheless, the Surrealist attempts to reconcile Lenin and Lautreamont, to write a non-orthodox dialectical materialism, and underline the revolutionary potential of the individual psyche are worthwhile projects that can inform the contemporary debates on arts and politics.