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ABSTRACT
Taking up Maurice Blanchot’s perceptive claim that “Surrealism remains always of our time”, the essay traces the importance of Surrealism for rethinking the methods of historiography (for Walter Benjamin) and ethnography (for James Clifford) in ways that allow us to appreciate the significance of Surrealism’s intellectual legacy. In his early essays on Surrealism and the monumental, unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Benjamin developed a new historical methodology, what I term surrealist historiography, that sought to uncover the latent dimensions of culture, obscured by the dazzling sheen of progress embedded within conventional historical narrative. If Benjamin found in Surrealism a way to overcome the limitations of a Rankean historicism, the point of departure for Clifford’s essay, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” is the crisis of ethnographic authority precipitated by a postcolonial critique of the discipline of anthropology. Clifford’s aim in this essay is thus to provide a provocative reassessment of Surrealism’s self-reflexive ethnographic spirit and what it might contribute to a refashioning of ethnographic practice as a polyvocal assemblage that holds in tension disparate material realities and aesthetic principles. Surrealism’s intellectual legacy thus lies, as Michel Foucault has claimed, in its path-breaking interdisciplinarity, which is why it continues to be, for Blancot and others, “a brilliant obsession”.
Notes on contributor
Natalya Lusty is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Asgate, 2007), Dreams and Modernity, a co-authored monograph with Helen Groth (Routledge, 2013) and the edited collection, Modernism and Masculinity (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She is currently co-editing with Donna Brett West an anthology of essays, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2018).
Notes
1 Blanchot, “Reflections on Surrealism,” 97.
2 Ibid., 97.
3 Breton, “What is Surrealism?” 115.
4 Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 184.
5 Cohen, Profane Illumination, 3.
6 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 132.
7 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 181.
8 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 133.
9 Benjamin's essay was written in 1925 and eventually published in January 1927 in Die neue Rundschau, with the subtitle “A Gloss on Surrealism”.
10 The Bureau operated between October 1925 and April 1925 at an abandoned hotel on the Rue de Grenelle. See Kelly, “The Bureau of Surrealist Research,” 79–101.
11 Aragon, “A Wave of Dreams,” 12.
12 Ibid., 3.
13 Ibid.
14 Breton, “The Surrealist Manifesto (1924),” 12. For an extended discussion of the agency of the dream, see Lusty, “Dream Kitsch,” 121–47.
15 Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch,” 4.
16 Ibid., 3.
17 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 181.
18 Cohen, Profane Illumination, 18.
19 Miller, “From City-Dreams to the Dreaming Collective,” 91.
20 Walter Benjamin cited in Tiedermann, “Dialectics at a Standstill,” 933.
21 Ibid., 3.
22 Highmore, “Benjamin's Trash Aesthetics” in Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 65.
23 See Calderbank, “Surreal Dreamscapes,” 1–13.
24 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 831.
25 Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch,” 4.
26 Quoted in Cohen, Profane Illumination, 6.
27 See Lusty, Chapter 6, Dreams and Modernity.
28 Cohen, “Benjamin's Phantasmagoria,” 200.
29 Schwartz, “Walter Benjamin for Historians,” 1723.
30 Ibid., 1723.
31 For a discussion of Benjamin's critique of Rankean historical practice, see Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 217–8.
32 Schwartz, “Walter Benjamin for Historians,” 1742.
33 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 131.
34 See for example, Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science.
35 Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” 539.
36 Ibid., 540.
37 Ibid., 542.
38 Ibid., 551.
39 Ades and Bradley, “Introduction,” 14.
40 Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” 540.
41 Ibid., 541.
42 Ibid., 542.
43 Leiris, “De Bataille,” 685. Cited in Ades and Bradley, “Introduction,” 11.
44 Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” 550.
45 Hollier, “The Question of Lay Ethnography,” 63.
46 Ibid., 63.
47 See for example, Richardson, “An Encounter of Wise Men and Cyclops Women,” and Roberts, “The Self in the Other”.
48 For critical discussions of a discreet surrealist primitivism see Taoua, “Of Natives and Rebels”; Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic; Stansell, “Surrealist Racial Politics at the Borders of ‘Reason’”. For a discussion of Clifford's dilution of the political import of Surrealism for his concept of “ethnographic surrealism”, see Roberts, “The Self in the Other”.
49 Stansell, “Surrealist Racial Politics,” 123.
50 Antle and Conley, “Introduction,” 3–4.
51 An expanded version of Clifford's essay was published in The Predicament of Culture. This quote comes from this later version, 117.
52 The Arcades Project, (N, 2, 6), 461. Benjamin also conceived of the material for The Arcades Project as visual rather than literary: “I will not describe but exhibit them”.
53 Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” 563–4.
54 Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch,” 3.
55 Foucault, “A Swimmer Between Two Worlds,” 174.