Disjecta Membra: Claude Lévi-Strauss & André Breton
On March 24, 1941, Claude Lévi-Strauss manages to board a ship heading to Martinique, in a desperate attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France and to reach New York, where he had been invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to take up a temporary position at the New School. During his frequent ethnographic trips to Brazil in the 1930s, he had become a regular client of the company that chartered the boat, which afforded him the possibility of sleeping in one of only two cabins — sharing it with a Dutch metal trader, a wealthy Creole Martiniquais, and Tunisian businessman Henri Smadja, who was carrying a Degas in his luggage. The other passengers, over 350, were sleeping in the cargo holds, deprived of air and light. Bolshevik and member of the Left Opposition Victor Serge, who made the trip in those holds, would later describe it as “a floating concentration camp.” [1] Also in those holds, treated like riff-raff, were German novelist Anna Seghers (a founder of the [Stalinist] Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors), historian of Impressionism John Rewald, as well as André Breton — walking around in a plush coat that, Lévi-Strauss writes in Tristes Tropiques, “made him look like a blue bear.” [2]
Lévi-Strauss would later credit his lengthy conversations about the nature of the work of art with Breton during the three months that it took to get to Martinique, as well as their subsequent friendship, for opening up his aesthetic horizons. It started with a “note on the relations between the work of art and the document” that the former wrote and to which the latter responded, both texts having since been published in one of Lévi-Strauss's last works, Look, Listen, Read (1993, translated to English in 1997). The note revolves around what it means for Breton in the Manifeste du surréalisme to define “artistic creation in terms of the absolutely spontaneous activity of the mind; such activity may well result from systematic training and the methodical application of a certain number of prescripts; nevertheless the work of art is defined — and defined exclusively — by its total liberty.” [3] For Lévi-Strauss, this risks reducing works of art to documents of liberty qua spontaneity, thereby undermining any notion of talent or taste, or rather abandoning them to the irrationality of a mystery.
The only interpretation that would avoid such irrationality would distinguish between “the document, the raw product of mental activity, and the work of art, which always involves an element of secondary elaboration,” with the proviso that this secondary elaboration be itself also spontaneous and irrational, a form of “irrational intellection.” [4] Behind this concept lies a conception of art as a specific, if curious, historical achievement: “But it can be supposed that, under certain conditions and among certain people, spontaneous irrational thought may well become conscious of itself and become truly reflective — its being understood that such reflection is carried out in accordance with its own norms, and that these norms are as impermeable to rational analysis as the matter to which they are applied.” [5] We can recognise here the basis for Lévi-Strauss's further elaboration of art as a reflexive form of savage thought, participating in it while also overcoming it, or more specifically his definition of primitive art and what he calls academic art as inverse of each other: where academic art interiorizes both execution and destination and exteriorizes the occasion as part of the signified, primitive art interiorizes the occasion and exteriorizes execution and destination as signifiers. [6]
Breton recognizes this “irrational intellection” as the necessary secondary elaboration of spontaneously produced material to turn it into art, as well as the centrality and intractability of the contradiction between the work of art as aesthetic object and as document of spontaneity:
Indeed, I find myself pulled in two very different directions . . . The first leads me to search for the pleasure the work of art gives (the word ‘pleasure,’ which you used, is the only really appropriate word, for when I consider my own reactions, they appear to me as para-erotic). The second, which may or may not manifest itself independently of the first, leads me to interpret the work of art as a function of the general need for knowledge. [7]
If these two “very different directions” manifest largely together in the appreciation of the work of art, in its production they become indistinguishable, as both primary and secondary elaboration remain “in the preconscious.” [8]
The real distinction between mediocre texts and poems produced by automatic writing “is that many people find it impossible to place themselves in the conditions necessary for the experience. They are satisfied with a rambling, disconnected discourse which, with its absurdities and sudden shifts in subject-matter, gives them the illusion of success; but the signs are easily detected which suggest that they haven't really “gotten their feet wet,” and that their supposed authenticity is a bit of a sham.” [9] Mediocre art for Breton does not primarily reside in kitsch, but in the union of avant-garde and kitsch, a mimicry of spontaneity that never abandons the clichés and automatism of everyday speech. If Lévi-Strauss would describe later the two-fold danger for art of becoming either “a kind of childish game on the theme of language” or of becoming “entirely a language,” [10] the mediocre artist does both at once.
The ship where their conversations took place transported both the political vanguard and the artistic avant-garde of its time, and both Breton and Lévi-Strauss embodied something of their misadventures and tragic (mis)alliances in the first half of the twentieth century. Lévi-Strauss had first wanted to make a career in politics, specifically with the revisionist SFIO. For instance, his first text on Picasso published in George Bataille's journal Documents in 1930 was ghostwritten for politician Georges Monnet. He was also a member of the Révolution Constructive group which hoped to remedy the barbarism of the World War with a technocratic planned economy that would make high culture accessible to all. Members of Révolution Constructive were as likely to enthusiastically become the left wing of the fascist Vichy government as to join the Resistance. Neither one nor the other, a disenchanted Lévi-Strauss would later find in UNESCO a more appropriate home for his liberal-technocratic cultural politics. Breton was himself closer to the Left Opposition, became close to Trotsky, and had co-written with him the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art in 1938 that demanded “The independence of art — for the revolution. The revolution — for the complete liberation of art!” against the subordination of art to the fascist and sovietic authoritarian states.
This difference manifests in their brief written exchange around the figure of Dalí. Lévi-Strauss had concluded that “there must be the dialectical means to account for. . . the possibility that Picasso is a greater painter than Braque, that Apollinaire is a great poet and Roussel is not, or that Salvador Dalí is a great painter but an appalling writer. Judgments of this type, though they may differ from or be contrary to my own — and the judgments given here are only examples — constitute the absolutely necessary conclusion to the dialectic between the poet and the theorist.” [11] Breton responds:
I do not consider Dalí a great ‘painter,’ for the excellent reason that his technique is manifestly regressive. With Dalí, it is truly the man that interests me, and his poetic interpretation of the world. Again, I cannot associate myself with your conclusion (but you already knew this). I have other, more pressing reasons for not accepting it. These reasons, I insist, are of a practical nature (adhesion to the mater. histor.).
“Mater. histor.,” that is, historical materialism, demands for Breton that “If a loosening of psychological responsibility is necessary to obtain the initial state on which everything depends, so be it, but afterwards, responsibility, both psychological and moral.” [12] Dalí's true artwork was his life, but his reckless fascination for Hitler (and later Franco) meant that it failed precisely where it succeeded the most.
Lévi-Strauss would then spend almost a decade in London hanging out with the Surrealists. In a footnote to his appreciation of Picasso over Braque and Apollinaire over Roussel, Lévi-Strauss in 1993 remarks that he owed the Surrealists a broadening of his previously limited and naïve aesthetic horizons, although this was certainly mutual. Parts of this broadening manifested around their common fascination for the art of the Salish, the Kwakiutl, the Tlingit, the Haida and the Tsimshian, all peoples who live around Vancouver Island and whose works, collected notably under the direction of Franz Boas, were exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He would dedicate one of his last major works, The Way of Masks, to an elucidation not just of some of these works, specifically Salish and Kwakiutl masks and myths, but through them, of the fascination they held over him in that period. The text itself, like the seven volumes of the Mythologiques more generally, is written like a Surrealist collage and reads like a series of nightmares marked with strangely obsessive motifs and bizarre inversions. Yet Lévi-Strauss never abandoned the desire to find a logic to the apparent madness, and in this text in particular, a number of social and political logics characteristic of a kinship system on its way to taking the feudal form of inheritable houses.
During that same decade, another Marxist exile, Arnold Hauser, was writing in London a diagnostic of Surrealism that echoes and clarifies that of Lévi-Strauss. For Hauser, Surrealism, like all post-Impressionist art, was at root anti-naturalist, but instead of taking refuge in formalism, devoted itself to the destruction of all forms in the name of spontaneity. Yet the cost of that cult of spontaneity was a dogmatic reliance on a specific method, automatic writing, whose products ended up even more monotonous than the bourgeois, Romantic art against which the Surrealists had rebelled. [13] It was at root what Hauser identifies as their Romantic Rousseauism that also led them to look for the salvation of European art in a so-called primitive art they imagined spontaneous — one to whose exquisite formal sophistication and complex historicity Lévi-Strauss devoted most of his life, precisely in an attempt to produce “a kaleidoscopic picture of a disintegrated world,” Hauser's characterization of the modernism of Kafka and Joyce in the barbaric world of the 1920s and 1930s, but which may just as well refer to the barbarism and disintegration of the indigenous societies of North and South America after the conquest, the violent integration in the capitalist world market, and the epidemics that followed them.
What passes for art today collapses immediately — and more often than not, enthusiastically — into socially-useful documentation and marketing, or narcissistic musings. When anthropologists look at indigenous art today, it is far too often through the prism of the identity politics rackets indigenous people are forced into, including their supposed magical abilities to solve climate change, rather than as art, a much more difficult endeavor. Artistic education has similarly devolved into an exploration of how the art makes one feel and the moral and political message the audience should experience; museums sell art as beneficial for mental health, as well as Instagram-worthy. Few are those who continue, as the modernists did, to look in art for that “‘second reality’ which, although it is inseparably fused with ordinary, empirical reality, is nevertheless so different from it that we are only able to make negative statements about it and to point to the gaps and cavities in our experience as evidence for its existence.” David Lynch, perhaps one of the last artists to do so, has replaced automatic writing with transcendental meditation. Breton took inspiration from Freud and hoped to serve the revolution; Lynch is the head of a cult that aims to “heal traumatic stress and raise performance.” In the absence of a world proletarian movement for socialism, and faced with the extreme disintegration of psychic life in the administered society, this might appear plausible — but is it desirable? In spite of the failures of both Trotskyism and Surrealism, Breton and Trotsky's slogan remains valid: “The independence of art — for the revolution. The revolution — for the complete liberation of art!”
—Victor Cova
I have spoken elsewhere of how I first came to know Andre Breton. It was on a long boat ride to Martinique, during which, in order to relieve our boredom and discomfort, we discussed the nature of the work of art, first in writing, then in conversation. I began by submitting a long note to Andre Breton. He responded, and I have treasured his letter ever since. Chance had it that, much later, I found my own note while classifying old papers. Breton had probably returned it to me. Here it is, followed by Andre Breton's unpublished text (which I wish to thank Madame Elisa Breton and Madame Aube Elléouët for giving me permission to publish).
*
A commentary on the relation between works of art and documents, written and delivered to Andre Breton on board the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle in March 1941
In the Manifeste du surrealisme, A.B. defined artistic creation in terms of the absolutely spontaneous activity of the mind; such activity may well result from systematic training and the methodical application of a certain number of prescripts; nevertheless the work of art is defined-and defined exclusively by its total liberty. It seems that on this point, A.B. has modified his position appreciably (in La Situation surréaliste de l'objet). However, the relation that, according to him, exists between the work of art and the document is not perfectly clear. If it is obvious that every work of art is a document, does this imply, as suggested by a radical interpretation of his thesis, that every document is therefore a work of art? Starting from the position of the Manifesto, three interpretations are, in truth, possible:
The artwork's aesthetic value depends exclusively on the degree of its spontaneity: the most valuable work (as a work of art) is defined by the absolute liberty of its production. As everyone, once suitably trained, is capable of attaining this complete liberty of expression, poetic production is open to all. The work's documentary value merges with its aesthetic value; the best document (as judged by its degree of creative spontaneity) is also the best poem. In principle, if not in fact, the best poem can not only be understood, but produced by anybody. One could then conceive of a humanity in which everyone, being trained in a sort of cathartic method, would be a poet.
Such an interpretation would abolish all the ascriptive privileges implied until now by the term talent. And if this interpretation does not deny the role of work and effort in artistic creation, it relegates them, at the very least, to the stage prior to creation proper-that of the difficult search for and application of the methods required to sustain free thought.
One can maintain the preceding interpretation but nevertheless note, a posteriori, that if all the works obtained from a large number of individuals are equivalent from a documentary point of view (that is, they all result from equally authentic and spontaneous mental activity), they are not at all equivalent from an artistic point of view, as some of them give pleasure, whereas others do not. As long as the work of art is defined as a document (that is, as any product of the mind's activity), one can admit the distinction without attempting to explain it (and without having the dialectics to do so). One will simply note that some individuals are poets and others are not, despite the fact that the conditions underlying their productions are exactly the same. Every work of art will still be a document, but there is room to distinguish between those that are also works of art and those that are just documents. As both are still defined as products of the mind, the distinction, being established only a posteriori, will have to be considered a primitive given, which, by definition, escapes all interpretation. The specificity of the work of art will be recognized without being able to be explained. It will become a "mystery."
Finally, the third interpretation, while still maintaining the fundamental principle of the irreducibly irrational and spontaneous character of artistic creation, distinguishes between the document, the raw product of mental activity, and the work of art, which always involves an element of secondary elaboration. It is obvious, however, that such elaboration cannot be the work of rational and critical thought; the very possibility must be radically excluded. But it can be supposed that, under certain conditions and among certain people, spontaneous irrational thought may well become conscious of itself and become truly reflective — its being understood that such reflection is carried out in accordance with its own norms, and that these norms are as impermeable to rational analysis as the matter to which they are applied. This "irrational intellection" leads to a certain elaboration of the raw material as expressed in the choices, omissions, and arrangement, themselves a function of mandatory structures. If every work of art remains a document, as a work of art it transcends the documentary level, not just in terms of the quality of its raw expressiveness, but in terms of the value of its secondary elaboration. The latter, moreover, is "secondary" only in relation to the mind's basic automatic functioning; relative to rational, critical thought, it presents the same irreducible, primitive character as the automatisms themselves.
The first interpretation does not accord with the facts; the second removes the problem of artistic creation from theoretical analysis. The third alone seems capable of avoiding a certain confusion (from which surrealism does not always appear to have escaped) between what is or is not, or is more or less, aesthetically valuable. All documents are not necessarily works of art, and all that constitutes a break may be equally valuable to the psychologist or militant, but not to the poet, even if the poet is also a militant. The work of someone mentally deficient has a documentary interest equal to the work of Lautreamont; it may even have greater polemical value. But the one is a work of art and the other is not, and there must be the dialectical means to account for their difference, just as one must also be able to account for the possibility that Picasso is a greater painter than Braque, that Apollinaire is a great poet and Roussel is not, or that Salvador Dali is a great painter but an appalling writer. Judgments of this type, though they may differ from or be contrary to my own — and the judgments given here are only examples— constitute the absolutely necessary conclusion to the dialectic between the poet and the theorist.
Since we have recognized that the fundamental conditions of the production of the document and the work of art are identical, these essential distinctions can only be acquired by displacing the analysis from the production to the product, and from the artist to his or her work.
*
On rereading this handwritten commentary today, I am troubled by the awkwardness of its thought, as well as the heavy handedness of its expression. It is a weak excuse, but clearly it was written in a single sitting (there are only two words crossed out). I would have preferred it had been forgotten. But that would do an injustice to the important text that Breton wrote in response. Without my piece, one would not understand what his was about.
In Breton's manuscript, there are around ten words or phrases that, having been carefully crossed out, cannot be deciphered; they have been replaced by new wording in the space between the lines, which also contains several additions. The large number of corrections made to the last lines does not permit one to judge whether Breton, if less pressed for time, would have opted for a more grammatically correct construction, or whether he rejected the latter deliberately.
Claude Lévi-Strauss with his little monkey Lucinda during his trip to Brazil (1935-1939). Le Monde.
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Andre Breton’s response
The fundamental contradiction that you are pointing to has not escaped my attention: it remains despite my efforts, and those of several others, to reduce it (but this doesn't really worry me because I realize that it contains the secret to that forward movement on which surrealism's survival depends). Yes, naturally, my positions have varied considerably since the first manifesto. One should understand that in such programmatic texts, which do not tolerate the expression of any doubt or reservation, and whose essentially aggressive character excludes all nuance, my thought tends to take on an extremely brutal, that is, simplistic character foreign to its real nature.
The contradiction that you find so striking is the same one, I believe, that Caillois reacted so strongly to (I told you about this). I have tried to respond in a text entitled “La Beauté sera convulsive” [Beauty will be Convulsive] (Minotaure, no. 5) and reprinted at the beginning of L'Amour Fou. Indeed, I find myself pulled in two very different directions — and after all, why not? for I am not alone in this respect. The first leads me to search for the pleasure the work of art gives (the word “pleasure”, which you used, is the only really appropriate word, for when I consider my own reactions, they appear to me as para-erotic). The second, which may or may not manifest itself independently of the first, leads me to interpret the work of art as a function of the general need for knowledge. These two impulses, which I am distinguishing on paper, cannot always be easily separated (they tend, for example, to merge in many passages of Une Saison en enfer).
It goes without saying that, if every work of art can be considered from a documentary perspective, the converse is by no means true. On examining your three interpretations one after the other, I have no difficulty in telling you that I feel close only to the last one. A few words, however, regarding the first two:
Victor Serge, with Dadaist poet Benjamin Péret and his lover, the artist Remedios Varo, and André Breton, France, circa January–March 1941. Finnegans.
I am not certain that a work's aesthetic value depends on its degree of spontaneity. I was much more concerned with its authenticity than its beauty and the definition of 1924 testifies to this: “A dictate of thought... beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” It cannot have escaped your notice that, had I omitted this last part of the sentence, I would have deprived the authors of automatic texts of a part of their liberty. It was imperative that, from the beginning, they be sheltered from all such judgments, if one hoped to prevent them from being subjected to any a priori constraint, and acting accordingly. This, unfortunately, has not always been the case (in my letter to Rolland de Reneville, published in Point du jour, I deplored the minimal alterations required to turn an automatic text into a poem — but it is easy to proclaim one's concerns while abstracting them from the work under consideration)
I am not so sure as you that large qualitative differences exist between the various texts obtained by entirely spontaneous means. It has always appeared to me that the main reason why so many of these texts are so mediocre is that many people find it impossible to place themselves in the conditions necessary for the experience. They are satisfied with a rambling, disconnected discourse which, with its absurdities and sudden shifts in subject-matter, gives them the illusion of success; but the signs are easily detected which suggest that they haven't really “gotten their feet wet,” and that their supposed authenticity is a bit of a sham. If I say that I am not so sure as you, it is largely because I do not understand how the self (which is common to all) is distributed among different individuals (whether equally or, if unequally, to what degree?). Only a systematic investigation, and one that provisionally leaves artists aside, can teach us anything about this matter. But I am hardly interested in establishing a hierarchy of surrealist works (contrary to Aragon who once said: “If you write dreadful rubbish in an authentically surrealistic manner, it is still rubbish”) — nor, as I have made clear, a hierarchy of romantic or symbolist works. It is not just that my classification of the latter would be fundamentally different from those now current; my major reason for objecting to these classifications is that they cause us to lose sight of these movements’ profound historical significance.
Does the work of art always require secondary elaboration? Yes, undoubtedly, but only in the very broad sense you give it when speaking of “irrational intellection” — though one wonders at what level of consciousness this elaboration occurs? We, at any rate, would still be in the pre-conscious. Shouldn't the productions of Helene Smith, when in a trance state, be considered works of art? And if someone demonstrated that certain of Rimbaud's poems were simply daydreams, would you enjoy them less? Or would you relegate them to the drawer labeled “documents”? I still find the distinction arbitrary. And it becomes positively specious in my eyes when you oppose the poet Apollinaire to the “non-poet” Roussel, or the painter Dali to the writer Dali. Are you sure that the first of these judgments is not too traditional, that it is not indebted to an antiquated conception of poetry? I do not consider Dali a great “painter,” for the excellent reason that his technique is manifestly regressive. With Dali, it is truly the man that interests me, and his poetic interpretation of the world. Again, I cannot associate myself with your conclusion (but you already knew this). I have other, more pressing reasons for not accepting it. These reasons, I insist, are of a practical nature (adhesion to the mater. histor.). If a loosening of psychological responsibility is necessary to obtain the initial state on which everything depends, so be it, but afterwards, responsibility, both psychological and moral. The progressive identification of the conscious “me” with the totality of its concretions (this is badly put), understood as the theater within which the self is called on to produce and reproduce itself. A tendency to synthesize the pleasure principle with the reality principle (I must be excused for still remaining at the limits of my thinking on this matter); the agreement at any price between the art work and the extra-artistic behaviour. Antivaléryism.
NOTES
[1] Victor Serge, Mémoires d'un Révolutionnaire (1951), 401; cited in Lévi-Strauss, Œuvres, (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 1736.
[2] Lévi-Strauss, Œuvres, 12.
[3] Lévi-Strauss, Look, Listen, Read (Basic Books, 1997), 144.
[4] Ibid., Look, Listen, Read, 146.
[5] Ibid., 146.
[6] Lévi-Strauss, Œuvres, 582-593.
[7] Lévi-Strauss, Look, Listen, Read, 149.
[8] Ibid., 151.
[9] Ibid., 150.
[10] Roberto Calasso, “Adorno, Surrealism, and ‘Mana,’” trans. Juliette Neil, Caesura 1 (Fall 2021): 51.
[11] Lévi-Strauss, Look, Listen, Read, 147.
[12] Ibid., 151.
[13] Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 4, 1999.
