Surrealist sabotage and the war on work

Abigail Susik

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526155009
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Teoría y crítica del arte

In Surrealist sabotage and the war on work, art historian Abigail Susik uncovers the expansive parameters of the international surrealist movement's ongoing engagement with an aesthetics of sabotage between the 1920s and the 1970s, demonstrating how surrealists unceasingly sought to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work. In four case studies devoted to surrealism's transatlantic war on work, Susik analyses how artworks and texts by Man Ray, André Breton, Simone Breton, André Thirion, Óscar Domínguez, Konrad Klapheck, and the Chicago surrealists, among others, were pivotally impacted by the intransigent surrealist concepts of principled work refusal, permanent strike, and autonomous pleasure. Underscoring surrealism's profound relevance for readers engaged in ongoing debates about gendered labour and the wage gap, endemic over-work and exploitation, and the vicissitudes of knowledge work and the gig economy, Surrealist sabotage and the war on work reveals that surrealism's creative work refusal retains immense relevance in our wired world.

1 Genealogy of the surrealist work refusal

In the post-World War I period, the surrealists were not alone in their position of needing to work and yet promoting work avoidance – or, for that matter, in their intention to support a proletarian revolution while maintaining a stance antagonistic to the productivism of the Communist Party in France and the USSR. The human desire to find meaning and purpose in life within and beyond the sphere of work, especially waged work, was not necessarily a question of political or class affiliation in France during this era. In Michael Seidman’s account of ‘workplace utopianism’ in twentieth-century French working-class culture, he argued that since the nineteenth century, certain French workers had led the struggle against the dominance of the work ethic with a substantial if undocumented culture of workplace sabotage. Seidman has confirmed that this culture not only survived into the inter-war period but actually thrived, even within the ranks of communist adherents who were aware of the Party’s idealisation of the work ethic and promotion of industrial rationalisation.¹ The principled abdication of participation in the capitalist system of wage labour or the conscientious withdrawal into voluntary unemployment, therefore, could and sometimes did exist alongside the political causes of labour reform, workers’ rights, and even communist radicalism in this era.

The surrealists, too, recognised that although waged work was required for survival in a capitalist sphere even for members of the bourgeoisie like themselves, the work ethic could nevertheless be undermined from the inside. Rather than being seen as a paradox, given their simultaneous desire between 1925 and 1935 to rally alongside the cause of the French Communist Party, this recognition was understood by the surrealists to be an opportunity for continual revolt against passive conformity to the wage-labour imperative. This imperative existed due to the necessity of a life of gainful employment in a capitalist market.

At the same time, the surrealists were cognisant that their critique of the wage-labour system was inherently different in substance and purpose from that of the working class. Surrealism advocated the despecialisation and democratisation of art into an activity for all, even while for many years it supported the communist and proletarian cause of a workers’ revolution. The attempted alignment with proletarian resistance persisted in surrealism until the advent of World War II despite the class divide, the surrealist critique of proletarian literature, and the surrealist desire for the total reconstruction of work’s meaning and role in life.² The question of surrealism’s work refusal was thus intimately connected to its fundamental query about how waged labour relates to the role of the artist in society – and in turn how the artwork itself functioned when confronted with the material demands of everyday life and processes of reification. Communist agitator and surrealist André Thirion summarised the surrealist viewpoint in his 1972 memoir:

Nearly all material support was condemned: work was scorned, and journalistic or quasi-artistic activities amounted to treason. Everyone’s associations were closely examined, and troublemakers, spies, or pigs were found everywhere. Max Ernst and Miró were insulted for agreeing to do ballet sets. Artaud was reproached for being an actor, and Vitrac for writing and producing plays, a privilege accorded only to Raymond Roussel. Surrealism closed itself off in a world of poverty. The only commercial operations were the episodic dealings for artworks and for the publication of one’s own works. Buyers and publishers had to offer guarantees of morality.³

Rather than perpetuating the hierarchical division between manual and intellectual or creative labour (what some aestheticians summarise as the separation of autonomous art from life), the surrealists agitated for a society in which all work, including ‘art-work’, would be desirable and unalienated (the fusion of art and life, rather than art’s disappearance into life).

In this initial section, I establish the context and background – the genealogy, if you will – of the French surrealist declaration of the war on work in 1925 in relation to the inter-war writings of surrealist theorists such as André Thirion, André Breton, and others. I also evaluate surrealism’s efforts in the 1920s and 1930s towards synergy with the proletarian cause despite their commitment to voluntary unemployment. While the surrealist discourse of work refusal ultimately concerned questions of material existence during the post-World War I period, I primarily track aspects of this context and its genealogy as they appear across the span of the French Third Republic (1870–1940). My discussion contextualises the violation of the work ethic and its ramifications for the figure of the artist in relation to a range of references related to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century elected predecessors such as Karl Marx, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and Marcel Duchamp. Finally, this genealogy takes into account relevant aspects of present-day theoretical discourses of work critique and the ways in which these relate to and often overlook the historical example of surrealism’s anti-work stance. As a European movement inherently connected to the goal of societal revolution, surrealism’s political and social ideologies are inseparable from its aesthetic theories and artistic activities. Surrealism’s work refusal is therefore arguably most fully activated when its application is traced in the expansive arc of the movement’s multifaceted artistic production.

Those ‘who do not accept’: the development and significance of surrealism’s work refusal

In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton addressed the problem of the alienation of paid work and the cycle of consumption that results. For him, production and consumption are inherently tied to the oppressive malaise of modern life and the material world in industrial capitalism. Breton linked the ubiquitous disenchantment of existence to the stultification of the imagination’s freedom by forces of rationalisation, logic, positivism, utility, and ‘practical necessity’.⁴ Although the belief in the meaning and value of life is strong, Breton explained, humans are nevertheless alienated from the objects they have ‘been led to use’, even though they have ‘agreed to work’ and therefore earned these objects by their own ‘efforts’.⁵ The result of this consent is dissatisfaction with one’s fate and diminishment of the purpose of life and the reason for living it. According to Breton, to combat a general sentiment of meaninglessness, surrealism cultivates the liberty of the imagination and the experience of the marvellous in everyday life through automatism, ludic practices, and a stance of ‘complete nonconformism … at the trial of the real world’.⁶ In opposition to the acceptance of the existing state of society and its enforced order as given, surrealism stubbornly advances a vision of what ‘can be’.⁷

Breton’s Manifesto does not explicitly reference mid- to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Marxist, Weberian, or Durkheimian theories of Entfremdung (estrangement; sometimes translated as alienation), Entzauberung (disenchantment), or anomie. However, his surrealist viewpoint arguably resonates with such conceptualisations about the negative effects of the capitalist-industrialist mode of production and the bureaucratisation of daily life. The surrealist critique of practical necessity and rationalisation likewise primarily assigned human alienation to manufactured causes rather than ontological or existential ones. For the German sociologist Max Weber, for instance, in books such as Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) (1905) and the World War I-era texts that were later translated into the volume Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947), the institutionalisation of the work ethic and the enforcement of administrative authority in the division of labour fundamentally contributed to collective disenchantment with modern life. Although for Weber the bureaucratic apparatus was not an inherently negative societal force, its adamant reliance upon abstract rules and a hierarchy of legitimatised authority tended toward dominance and depersonalisation.⁸

French industry had been aggressively transformed during World War I in order to accommodate the need for mass production, and artisanal craft manufacturing was quickly replaced by unskilled or semi-skilled labour and by mechanised production infrastructure imported from the United States.⁹ A hyper-regulated work environment quickly took hold in France during and after World War I, with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time and motion studies subdividing workers’ movements into controlled ‘phasing’ and Henry Ford’s assembly line ensuring surplus production and minimising fatigue.¹⁰ As Jacques Rancière has explained, this mechanisation was not just a question of more work, but of working faster: ‘Mechanisation was not reducible to the substitution of skilled handiwork by machines: it reorganized the worker’s relationship to his labour by intervening in the performance of the labour process in the form of an absolute imperative of output.’¹¹

In France, Fordist-Taylorist approaches to work science were also paired with theories of organisational management and bureaucracy from business engineers such as Henri Fayol, whose ideas about centralised, top-down workplace administration became widely known and applied as Fayolism.¹² Fayol’s L’Administration industrielle et générale (General and Industrial Management) (1916) unabashedly extended the division of labour to the separation of superiors from workers, making it clear that the functions of control, command, and authority were essential for the efficient operation of the workplace to exact obedience and eliminate incompetency among personnel.¹³ The efficiency of production depended upon the unification of directives and information in the scalar chain of management hierarchy: it was the bureaucracy’s strategic consistency which supported the profusion of the worker’s esprit de corps, the crucial social force that ensured loyalty to the enterprise. During the interwar years, French workers and labour-movement theorists mounted significant resistance to the deskilling, surveillance, and discipline that rationalisation entailed. However, scholars such as Gary Cross have also shown that Taylorism was crucial to the French labour movement’s persuasive rhetoric on behalf of the reform movement for shorter work hours.¹⁴

Surrealism was born of a desire to subvert obedience to such authority and practical necessity through systematic nonconformism. Following the publication of Breton’s Manifesto, the initial issue of surrealism’s new journal La Révolution surréaliste in December 1924 prominently forwarded two possible ‘solutions’ to the dilemma of the modern human condition: (1) actively undermining the rationalist rule of waking existence in capitalism by replacing the ‘trial of knowledge’ with dreaming and surrealist automatism, for dreams make one ‘indifferent’ to the meaning of life, and (2) refusing complicity in a compromised life altogether by considering suicide as a viable solution to the problem of a demeaning reality.¹⁵ Oneiric sleep was thus rendered a replacement for a wage-earning existence (in the Manifesto, Breton’s example is the poet Saint-Pol-Roux, who hung a sign saying ‘The poet is working’ outside his bedroom door when he was sleeping). Self-inflicted death became an absolutist substitution for the endless toil of the conscription of waged labour. These extreme precepts of somnolent subterfuge, refusal of consciousness, and strike-by-death (suicide as strike) were a...