Marxism, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, admitted that in capitalist societies mankind had not reached its full possibilities for development and self-realization. . . . [What] model did Marxism use to conceive, project, and eventually realize that human nature? It was, in fact, the bourgeois model: sexuality of a bourgeois type, family of bourgeois type, aesthetic of bourgeois type. —Michel Foucault, “Human Nature: The Chomsky-Foucault Debate” (1971)
The Waiting Room
I am in a medical waiting room in Novi, Michigan, reading the politics of dream in Les Vases communicants. On a large screen unfold tedious details of home improvement projects, finding new spatial arrangements, knocking out windows, sanding floors. Three older women are facing the screen, representative of Novi and its majority suburban demographics. They are possibly X voters, I imagine. Interrupting the quotidian program are three election ads, two paid for by Y and one by X. The space of the waiting room becomes a scene of unfolding dreams. In the first, X brags that he only hires the best in the business. We next meet a series of former subordinates, from A to B. All are white male counter authorities, having once believed in but turned from X. The message is impactful and distressing, a diremption in the structure of legitimacy. It provokes displeasure and crisis that cannot be revealed among the three women, who rigidly stare straight ahead. The next features a sympathetic woman they might identify with: an older white woman in an ordinary scene. Social security will be at risk under X, she explains. She finishes her argument with a risqué turn of speech: he will give the middle finger to the middle class. The three women’s basic livelihood appears at risk, after the legitimacy crisis. The third ad feature a younger women who claims the federal government, under Y, will pay for gender reassignment care. She is a mother and there is an imagined threat to her obligation to care for her child in the way she believes. The first two messages attack certainty in order to draw out and question a core belief. The last preserves a core belief by promoting an untenable fantasy. At the bottom of the dream is a nonexistent object that the three messages attempt to disclose. How much of the disclosure itself—seeing the ad content as analogous to a dream on waking—can be retained on waking; what does the erosion of memory mean for the core belief? In two cases the core belief is unsettled; in the latter, it is preserved as inaccessible fantasy, what people may think but will not admit to, the basis for a turn to fascism in a democracy. My reading of Les Vases communicants extends, of necessity, from 1932 to this scene.
“The Best People,” Harris campaign ad: view here
“Kamala Is for They/Them. I am for you” ad: view here
Discrepant Analogies: Introduction
My preparation for this talk was intensive. It began with a return to Les Vases communicants (1932; The Communicating Vessels by André Breton; English trans. 1990) in precisely a manner proposed by the text: as if the work itself were a waking dream, extended through the long duration of its emergence as a transmission of the surrealist movement; the conditions of its writing and publishing, then reception; its theoretical centrality for Breton’s work in its widest horizon; its delayed influence in English due to late translation; and my experience and recall of the text itself. In each case, Les Vases communicants proceeds by means of its effectivity (Wirklichkeit) toward an “end” that is not one, described by Foucault: “to reach [our] full possibilities for development and self-realization,” in a manner not yet disclosed. The scene I witnessed in the Novi waiting room gives a measure for twin components of human becoming: the material world (the development of new home construction or surgical reassignment) and the dreaming subject (politics as a nightmare of dissociated legitimacy; the desire to reconnect displaced subjectivity). The scene unfolds in real time and space: the three women are paralyzed before the screen as the content unfolds; my relative freedom is to write it down; the question is what anyone takes away from it.
“We shall be forced to admit, in fact, that everything creates and that the least object, to which no particular symbolic role is assigned, is able to represent anything” (CV, 108–9). From the moment of Les Vases to this scene of writing unfolds a discontinuous politics of dream and waking that its reading anticipates. As oriented toward the future Les Vases puts in motion a demonstration of the relation of dreaming and material reality which is determining. Just so, “Desire, if it is truly vital, refuses itself nothing. . . . Whether in reality or in the dream, it is constrained, in fact, to make the elements pass through the same network: condensation, displace-ment, substitution, alterations” (109). Reading across the faultline between dream and real world, as across discontinuous moments of literary and cultural history—e.g., surrealism and Language writing or the waiting room and this essay—opens to a combined project of “becoming” that merges material processes with their indeter-minate determination. What unites them is at once life force, desire, primary process, “the will to change.” For Breton, in his suspended manifesto, the dream is the exemplary process that both suspends material determination and finally restores it in reconfigured form—a process that extends to the work of art, visual or verbal, conferring its necessity.
As formal dominant of these politics, “dream” is a metahistorical concept that involves, itself, a set of defining elements. It creates, to begin with, a time and space of subjective freedom that can never be entirely pure, in that “the residues of the day,” after Freud, are its partial elements, however transformed. Its form, driven by primary process, is essentially nonnarrative, never more than episodically narrative, deferring closure, relying on the formal device of the “vital leap” to connect elements, as them-selves in a constant tension of mutual definition and deflection. A major question for Breton is what, precisely, lies at the core of dream as knowable in any sense? In order to preserve a relation to material residues that have been separated and recombined, he is bound to reject any claim (even Freud’s) that the dream is “unknowable”; this would be a form of idealism analogous to Kant’s unknowability of the material world.
In taking up Lenin’s attack on neo-Kantianism (in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, just translated), Breton imports Lenin’s objective determination of material reality without categorical finality as support for the “materiality” of dream elements. These elements may be the disjunct radical particulars of the dream, in their separation and combination, but they also include the “exteriority” of the moment of waking and the “interiority” of dreaming about the dream itself. “World,” in other words, can never be separated entirely from “dream”; just so, “dream” becomes the privileged locus of how elements of “world” are held together in lived experience. In confronting materialists, Breton is bound to concede the final reality of the material world, but this does not require him to ignore the processes that structure the dream or its worldly analogy as any less material. “The world is structured on its own displacement”; the dream is heuristic in demonstrating how its elements are motivated, arranged, and transformed. One enters into experience as one descends into dream as a space of desire; Les Vases shows how this may be lived as a politics. [. . .]
Note and links
The above is the opening of my presentation at the International Society for the Study of Surrealism conference in Paris. In my previous note, I described the co-presence of disparate strata of life and history in the city at that moment. Though the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) was widely publicized, the most visible concern was the conflict between bicycle and auto traffic after a series of well-intentioned reforms that led to unexpected consequences. Often in transit between Montmartre and the American University (the conference site), we would pass the ludic statue of Charles Fourier in the form of a giant apple at the end of the Boulevard de Clichy, straining for a glimpse as every conceivable vehicle surged by. The event of the conference itself was a kind of “waiting room” of dream and history: thus my reading of Les Vases communicants, Breton’s neglected and most theoretical “novella,” with the “disjunct analogy” of a waiting room I was recently in. The characteristics of the waiting room that lends it to surrealist usage are deep anxiety and suspended time. The formal metaphor arrives at the period we are in, since November 5. Putting together this fractal presentation, I was pleased to find that “surrealist waiting room,” when searched for on Google Advanced Images, is already a known and populated genre: two examples are given above.
Links: “Entry 64: Communicating Vessels I” [here]
“Document 104: Discrepant Analogy” [here]
“Entry 46: Invocation of Fourier” [here]
“Entry 54: The Transmission of Poetry” [here]Images: George Tooker, The Waiting Room (1959)
anonymous image of surrealist waiting room (n.d.)
