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In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton defines the word, in his words, “once and for all”:

surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

encyclopedia. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the supe-rior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the

PETER STOCKWELL

omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

(Breton 1969: 27) This is unlike anything in Dada, though it can be regarded as sharing something of its mischievous irony: what appears in the form and register of a definitive dictionary def-inition, and is even introduced as such, occurs not at the beginning of the manifesto but almost exactly in the middle, framed on both sides by a rambling discussion and freewheeling musings that are the exact opposite in tone of the quotation extracted here.

Nevertheless, the emphasis on “belief” and the commitment to objectives and prin-ciples are characteristic of surrealism in its mature, post-Dada phase. There is a clear objective: one of rising above any mere aesthetic or moral concern in order to arrive at the truth of things. There is a strong commitment to the actual, to the material reality of the world, but it is a sense of the real that does not set psychic and perceptive aspects of life apart from the tangible objects in the world. Instead, pure psychic experience is the most real and actual raw truth, upon which the material circumstances, cultures and politics of history subsequently begin to work and distort.

The emphatic insistence on this reversal of the Cartesian mind–body distinction is the inevitable consequence of attempting to reconcile Marxist materialism with the primacy of the psychic (we would now say, psychological or cognitive) domain. For Breton, clarifying this message required not so much definitive statements like the one above as multiple different articulations of the notion: his 1924 Manifesto was reprinted with a revised preface in 1929, followed by a Second Manifesto in 1930, and a new edition of that in 1946, and also an essay towards a prospective but unpublished Third Manifesto in 1942 (all collected in Breton 1969).

The project was revolutionary in every sense. The re-evaluation of Enlightenment rationalism, and of the grand narratives of science and civilised culture, set the scene for later, post-modernist theorising of language and history. The belief in a radical re-evaluation of society through the medium of an artistic movement is a precursor to the idealistic phases of the political and social revolutions of the twentieth century, from the 1920s soviets, to the uprisings against them in the 1950s, to the hippy idealism of the 1960s, and the liberating and virtually uncontrollable popular diversity of the multimodal internet. The emphasis on psychological reality is a precursor to the intel-lectual revolutions in mind that characterise the cognitive turn in philosophy, arts, humanities and linguistics as we enter the twenty-first century.

In the 1920s, however, there was already a tension between the artisanal concerns of the proletariat and what might appear to be the indulgent activities of poets and art-ists: it was a tension that led to several breakaways, expulsions and arguments between the surrealist group in Paris and the communist party. The evasion of the realm of the purely aesthetic was a key principle for surrealism, aimed at avoiding this dilettante and patronising image:

THE SURREALIST EXPERIMENTS WITH LANGUAGE

Surrealism, as an organised movement, was born of a far-reaching operation having to do with language. In this regard it cannot be repeated too often that in the minds of their authors the products of free association or automatic writing that Surrealism brought forth in the beginning had nothing to do with any aesthetic criterion.

(Breton 1969: 297) Breton goes on here (in his 1953 retrospective On Surrealism and its Living Works) to point out the difference between surrealist experimental writing and that of, for example, James Joyce, e.e. cummings and Henri Michaux: their techniques aimed at the imitation of life, and thus remained within the framework of “art,” which Breton scornfully derides as the domain of “lettrism.” By contrast, the surrealists had freed themselves from such constraints because “we had got our hands on the ‘prime matter’

(in the alchemical sense) of language” (Breton 1969: 299).

The experimental nature of surrealism for the surrealists can be seen in the estab-lishment in 1924 of the “Bureau of Surrealist Research” in Paris, from where the first of twelve issues of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste was published in December of that year. Both the experimental and the revolutionary ethos were captured in the content of the magazine, and also after factional splits in 1929 by the title of Breton’s succes-sor journal, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution. The first journal, in particular, adopted a pseudo-scientific register similar to that found in Breton’s dictionary and the encyclopedia-styled definitions quoted above, with content that was immediately scandalously anti-government and anti-clerical.

What is also significant not only in the definitions of surrealism above, but also in his statements and manifestoes which appeared in the journals, is the primary impor-tance Breton places not so much on the consequential revolution but on the technique of surrealism. To recall his definition, Breton (1969: 27) foregrounds the process “by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought.” Here is the primacy in surrealism of writ-ing, even though it is swiftly followed by the recognition that there are other means of realising the surreal moment. In fact, although in principle the “surreal image” was the main theoretical object which could be expressed in sculpture, painting, cinema, performance, music or architecture, in practice it was in writing that the surreal image first and foremost was rendered.

Breton’s defining passage is followed by a list of precursors who can be seen as proto-surrealists: Shakespeare “in his finer moments,” Swift when he is being malicious, Poe in his adventurousness, Baudelaire in his morality, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Reverdy and others. For Breton, it is clear that literature and writing are in practice the key mode of surrealism, even though the surrealists in general rejected the identification of surrealism with any single means or mode of expression. Dada began as a literary evening, and surrealism too progressed especially in its early years as an articulation of a revolution in writing.

PETER STOCKWELL