Reading the Manifesto of Surrealism in 2024

Written in September 1924, not long before the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton wrote a text called “Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality” in which he raised what he called “an essential point—namely, the value which should be accorded reality.”1 It’s a beautiful text—containing the unforgettable dream image of the wooden gnome with the long white Assyrian-style beard—and, while somewhat more perambulatory than the manifesto, it chimes the same note concerning the basic Surrealist critical position regarding the rejection of a reductive view of reality and a utilitarian impoverishment of life. I’ve been reading Breton’s texts for over thirty years, and I’m always astonished how they keep giving; hinged as they are on that “eternally swinging door” (Soluble Fish) of his lyrical brilliance. He begins his “Introduction” with an amused riff on the expression “wireless”, which appears both quaintly atavistic and yet not: “They talk about wireless telegraphy, wireless telephony, wireless imagination.”. This might be comic if it were not still alarmingly the continued state of things. Although technology might have offered him the occasional metaphor, Breton was immensely skeptical of its benefits, especially regarding creative thinking. There was something very true in his observation about where “wireless” phenomena might lead, expressing a kind of careful-what-you-wish-for wisdom: “to have that which no one before us dreamed of—all this is likely to throw us into an immense perplexity.”2 We cannot but wonder what Breton would make of the world today if, through some long-dreamed of technology, we could bring him back. Using the concise wireless semiotics of our time, I can only imagine his response would resemble something like a face-palm emoji.

Today, reading Breton’s manifesto and his lament on the paucity of reality we might long for a time when the problems of reality were apparently that simple. Liberate language from its utilitarian straight-jacket, confront a seemingly objective reality with all the marvelous force of dream, desire and imagination and watch it falter. One hundred years on, when reality is the object of an immense techno-corporate power-grab, the status of reality, the reality of reality, seems so lost in a global fug of endless simulacra, misinformation, monetization, cynicism, etc., it’s hard to imagine how it was possible in 1924 for anyone to articulate a critique of reality with such clarity of objective. When reading Breton proclaim an immanent victory for the imagination, that “the end of the world, the external world, is expected momentarily,” we might today feel another kind of alarm to that of the early-twentieth century positivists whose dogmas of reality Breton was opposing.3 It’s not as if we are now free of those dogmas, not at all; they have just mutated. We might, however, feel as if we are clinging on by our fingernails—like Buster Keaton in one of those silent movies the surrealists so loved—to something we might recognise as a shared reality.

When challenging the lines between the imaginary and the real, Breton had a clear sense of what was generally understood as a supposedly immutable, concrete reality which, although tyrannically and dumbly imposed, we might now suppose held something together which seems to have fast slipped away. Breton writes in both the manifesto and the “Introduction” of waging a war on positivism through a liberation of language. Arguably, the ethic of this does not carry such force today: “What is to prevent me from throwing disorder into this order of words, to attack murderously this obvious aspect of things?”4 Today we might find ourselves yearning for words to inherently carry an unequivocal meaning, and that meaning to be accompanied by a gravitas that would turn the purveyor of fakery into a pillar of salt (live, on TV). When Breton laments in the manifesto that “forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices,” we might find ourselves yearning exactly for such conformance.5 In an era of conspiracy theory, when the political playbook seems to have been taken from a third-generation version of the X-Files, the banishing from the mind “of everything that might rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy” might not seem like such a bad idea.

Roger Caillois tended to criticise Breton for his fondness of the equivocal, for privileging mystery and, through poetic language, conjuring signs that carry no sharable signification. When a grumpy old man in the late 1970s, Caillois scorned new uses of language, the “profusion of new words, of invented words, turns of phrase, [. . .] continuous verbal escalation,” exclaiming: “I was gripped with panic and I thought that it had to stop, I needed a halt in the ocean of signs and to recover, urgently, a real world.”6 Caillois expressed a horror that we surely recognise today, complaining about “this daily heap of writing in which we get lost, this blind proliferation of thought”; a proliferation of verbiage which widens “the terrible gulf between man and the concrete.”7 This seems a very recognisable feeling in 2024. Employing the currency of immutable truth (economic metaphors being so suited to such times), Caillois described the mass externalising of thought as a kind of insane inflation: “For thought, the real is a kind of gold reserve, as the financiers say. If it’s not there, inflation threatens.”8 I cannot concede that the collective gold reserve of thought has been melted down and forged into toilets for the 1%, but it’s certainly been atomised.

Caillois’ horror at the modern licence to spew language and to abuse thought would, of course, have found accord with Breton, if not for the sheer vulgarity of it. To write primarily with the motive of self-interest was anathema to Breton. While Breton’s case in the manifesto, for liberating language from positivist reductiveness and for poeticising thought for everyone, still carries a huge significance, the sense of language as precious, as something rooted in a sacred hinterland of value, to be used with serious intent, certainly does seem to have been lost amidst the hubbub. But this is not to say that the spirit of Breton’s sense of the possibilities for language does not still carry force. It is still, and always will be, a question of the imagination. The plethora of TV channels streaming visions of imaginary worlds for our entertainment does not answer this question. Salvaging the sovereignty of the imagination is another matter, and—in an era when imagination seems to have been priced out of politics—it still represents, as it did for Breton, a most pressing political pursuit. The historical time in which the problem presents itself might require another method, another strategy, but it is still central to any genuine concern with freedom. This word, however—freedom—which Breton seemed to use so blithely, now carries an acute burden. Breton declared in the manifesto: “The mere word freedom is the only one that still excites me. I deem it capable of indefinitely sustaining the old human fanaticism.”9 There are clearly many people who still get excited by the word freedom who pursue it in a deeply fanatical way. A hundred years on, just like “reality,” “freedom” is a word that requires careful qualification.

Many Surrealists over the years addressed how the changes in the character of supposedly given reality necessitated a change in the strategies of articulating surreality. Vratislav Effenberger of the Czech Surrealist group, for example, sharply observed how the daily distortions exerted by Nazi and then Soviet oppression had so warped perception that Breton’s model of disrupting a supposedly consensual reality required some amending. In his 1969 essay “Variants, Constants, and Dominants of Surrealism,” Effenberger noted a shift in the complexion of given reality that we might identify with today. For Effenberger, the irrationality masquerading as rationality had become so absurd and so objectively evident that “all you had to do was place it in front of a camera or on a stage for its rationalist shell to crack open and a purifying sarcasm to leap out.”10 Effenberger described how the task of surreality had initially been “discrediting social reality, its apparent stability, and its seemingly firm values as an aggressive fiction.”11 However, once this illusion of a coherent, stable reality was dissolved and something even more shocking established in its place, the task of surreality changed. Alarmingly, although Effenberger was writing about a historical period of murderous dictatorships, his description of the general state of affairs seems dismally familiar: “during the last decades the presumption of such cohesion ceased to exist in torrents of the most real social absurdity, irrationality in its most concrete forms penetrated everyday life without the assistance of poets, and fear, together with indifference, became the basic sensation of life.”12 The Czech Surrealists have always had a strong sense that reality is the place we want to escape to and not from.

Effenberger’s acute analysis of the shift in the nature of the concrete irrational to that place in which we now dwell, rather than an urgent political practice of the imagination, acts as a kind of appendix to Breton’s manifesto. He outlines how the Surrealist employs the imagination to expose the ruse by which the irrational has stolen the garb of the rational. Similarly, rather than lamenting a paucity of reality, Annie Le Brun (who first participated in Surrealist activities in the early 1960s) has written of an alarming “overload” of reality in her publication from 2000, The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm. At the dawn of what we can call our current era, Le Brun defined a reality that is both overloaded and elusive, slipping from sight through an inability to connect events, ideas and forms to what and who produces them. She thus identified the problems that have come to be associated with the dense complexity of our age, one to which so many impresarios offer strong-armed solutions or technological innovations. Following the Surrealist critique that we can trace back to the manifesto, Le Brun argues for the continuing importance of dream, imagination and desire but is all too aware of how they have been co-opted into a system that disarms them in countless ways, most conspicuously by disembodying them. Implicitly referring to the hullabaloo of the 1990s over the appallingly confused notion of “virtual reality”, Le Brun wrote of how “in the last decade, the dream and subsequently the imagination as a dream of the body, along with the body as the shadow of the imaginary realm, have simply become obsolete.”13 What might once have been understood as an embodied imaginal reality, she asserts, has been “murdered” by a concatenation of delusions and the “internalization of the technical,”in which the imagination, like everything else, is now held hostage within a system that has succeeded in colonising every aspect of life.14 The reality overload, Le Brun states, has now spread “over the deepest reaches of our inner life.”15 It turns out after all that it didn’t require jackboots and murder to destroy the collective grounds of the imaginal realm, just some casually dressed dudes with eager-eyed promises of boundless (wireless) communication. Never has a Trojan horse seemed so harmless.

Writing of this “completely invasive” form of reality, Le Brun describes “a disproportionate reality in which the overabundance, accumulation, and saturation of information force events into the collision of an excess of time and an excess of space.”16 Le Brun’s image of disorientation of time and space recalls the symptom of psychasthenia of which Caillois wrote about in the 1930s, the term being coined by psychiatrist Pierre Janet and employed analytically by the Bergsonian psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski. Analysing experiences of both spatial and temporal disorientations in schizophrenics, Minkowksi wrote of the problems occurring from what he called “vital contact with reality” and “lived synchronism.”17 Such contact and synchronism, Minkowksi concluded, made it possible to “resonate with the world” in a way that enabled appropriate intersubjective behaviour. According to Minkowksi, losing this spatio-temporal attunement to a shared “ambient becoming” within a vital reality leads to a crisis in the “reality function” (again, Janet’s term). What Minkowski called the fundamental role of the “me-here-now” factor in attaining vital contact with reality might now, especially after the pandemic, be seen to have entered into the stage of a mass crisis of global psychasthenia. Now that the concrete irrational of disembodied time and space is our daily condition, what would constitute a surreality? In light of such spatio-temporal vertigo, the collective principle of the Surrealists carries an especially vital dimension: to meet physically and regularly, to claim a shared embodied ground for imagination and critical practice seems to have become very difficult to attain.

There are, then, many elements of Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism that require historical consideration and rethinking in terms of ongoing applicability. Its ethic, however, remains intact. Perhaps, in 2024, the most impressive fact of André Breton is his life lived in absolute, unwavering ethical conviction. Surely, the world has always been dominated by hucksters, perhaps today they are just more visible, more shameless, more immune. Relatively, Breton appears like some kind of folkloric hero, a martyr from a world in which the very worst thing you could do was to sell yourself out. It’s hard to argue, in the light of someone who lived through two world wars and had to flee what would have been certain death at the hands of the Nazis, that it’s different now, that we don’t have a choice, that we need to optimise ourselves according the reality of the market, etc. In 2024, facing the prospect of a second Trump presidency in the USA and without an end in sight to the Russian murder of Ukrainians, it seems that blurring the line between the rational and the outright mad is a prerequisite in public life. When reason and crazy, lies and truths are entirely interchangeable, it is hard to discern where the legacy of surreality might continue to find its target and its method. What is clear, however, is that now as in 1924, defining reality—the really real—is still a radical pursuit. Reality might not now have the same distinct shape as the positivist terra firma that Breton identified, perhaps, rather, it is a commons that needs to be reclaimed in all its complexity.

A hundred years on from the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism, we find ourselves in an era of algorithms, when even chance is rigged, and when possibility itself seems to have been circumscribed by binary coding; when what passes as erotic is the equivalent of the worst kind of ready-meal from the worst kind of supermarket; when children are encouraged in schools to create a marketing plan for their creative pursuits; when the only people who seem to talk about freedom are those who carry guns. In such times, the Manifesto of Surrealism might not be able to act as a handbook for resistance, but it can still speak to us from a place of passionate hope of the things that still constitute the most vital dimensions of human life.

Donna Roberts is a researcher with Project Science, Literature and Research: Avant-Garde Encounters with Biology and Ecology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is currently writing a monograph on surrealism, natural history, and evolutionary theories titled A Feeling for Nature: Surrealism, from Natural History to Ecology.