Fourier it’s all too depressing
to see them emerging from one
of the worst cess-pools in history
Infatuated with the maze that
leads back to it
Impatient to start all over
for a better jump
—André Breton,
Ode to Charles Fourier
The image to the left is what now exists of the monument to Charles Fourier, located at the end of the Boulevard de Clichy before its leftward turn toward the Place de Clichy with its restaurants and skin trade, under the imagined shadow of the Montmartre Cemetery, site of pitched battles in the Paris Commune. This was the object of a pilgrimage I made in the company of Carla Harryman and Françoise de Laroque at the end of a rainy afternoon in November in the year 2021. The statue itself preserves the original plinth of the monument raised in 1899 in homage to the utopian socialist by supporters of his imagined utopia at the site of its historical suppression. After many historical turns, from the melting down of the statue of Fourier in 1945 to its reconstruction by Situationists in 1968, the base now presents a ludic apple inscribed with outlines of the globe and reflecting lights of the boulevard at night. As an homage to the theorist of the gastrosophic state and phanerogamous morals, it is a fully realized work of surrealist art.
My first encounter with Fourier’s work came through the English translation of Breton’s Ode by Kenneth White, published in London by Cape Goliard Press (also publishers of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems IV V VI and Archaeologist of Morning) in 1969. White’s translation exists at the intersection of open form poetics and the moment of 1968, which White’s introduction theorizes along the lines of Fourier’s ludic and excessive vision in Marxist terms, much like Michael Löwy’s later liberationist assessment in Morning Star (2009). Breton’s work, likewise, addresses a decisive historical moment, the Zero Hour/Stunde Null of 1945, which I have been at work on for the past decade. Breton’s Ode unites the revolutionary dispersal of May 68 with the total destruction of May 1945, a relationship that should be thoroughly brought to view, even as Breton himself did not live to see it. The Ode is in every sense predictive, of what will be and is yet to come, as it reinscribes the utopian imaginary of Fourier in artistic form—as does the statue in its sequence of incarnations; as does Kenneth White’s translation; and as would my recent work on the poem. What could transpire in the form its realization is what concerns me here.
Earlier that month I took part in the virtual conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS), where over four days dozens of scholars and art historians presented work expanding on the surrealist project. The conference took place concurrently with the revisionist exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; the horizon of surrealism is increasingly understood as global, with its dispersion at the decolonial moment of 1945, and which the Surrealists, in their historical exile, both exemplified and supported. In 1986, by good fortune, I had the opportunity to view, with Carla and Françoise it turns out, La Planète affolèe: Surréalisme, dispersion et influences, 1938–1947 in Marseille, which documented the assembling of surrealist artists and writers—as antifascist intellectuals opposing the Occupation and Pétain regime—in the “free zone” of Marseilles on their way to Morocco, the Caribbean, Mexico, the United States. For artists in a state of dispossession and threat, the surrealists produced an amount of work unequalled in the annals of the historical avant-garde. The fantastist China Miéville has published a quirky but interesting novel on that moment titled The Last Days of New Paris, which I cautiously recommend. The moment of exile and dispersal of surrealism becomes a ludic complement to destruction at Zero Hour; toward that end I have pursued it as part of my project—as my proposal for the conference states:
This paper will read André Breton’s neglected Ode to Charles Fourier (1945) as one of a series of modernist long poems “including history” that pose the question of the universal in anticipation, retrospection, or present experience of the Zero Hour announced by the Liberation of Europe from fascism, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. In doing so, Breton makes his condition of exile from Europe into a precondition for a vatic address to the universal that transcends national boundaries and politics: the compromised politics of the National Front, its negotiations between the communist-dominated Comité nationale des écrivains and Gaullist nationalism, and its poetic figureheads in his former surrealist comrades Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. Taking a position outside the nation, and refusing to affirm national literary values per se, Breton identifies with the pan-African poetics of Aimé Césaire, the global Trotskyism of Benjamin Péret, the delirious compulsions of Reno slot machines, the snake dance of the Hopi, the site of atomic tests in New Mexico, and a mythic affirmation of the feminine. In this account of the Ode, I will also look for the political preconditions of his rejection of the national politics of Liberation, tending toward the universal dream logic that he locates in the work of Fourier. In Arcane 17 (1944), written the year previous in Canada at the moment of consolidation of Liberation in France, Breton reflects on the value of his distance from events and makes a figure of the enormous Rocher percé for a materialist ethics and aesthetics that goes beyond the historical materialism of contemporary politics. His invocation of a myth of the feminine, as well, attacks the masculinism of literary institutions. At the intersection of Breton’s rejection of political compromise and the nation state, Ode to Charles Fourier invokes a global scale of transformation that looks forward to May 68, otherwise known as “Breton’s tea party” that he did not live to see, in a move from a poetics of revolutionary sacrifice to impossible ideals, for which Fourier’s combination of social analysis and delirious projection led the way. Breton’s enlightenment after Fourier is Janus-faced, on the one hand facing destruction and on the other emanating a system of correspondences generated by recuperative fantasy. In his ode, Breton “solves” two challenges to surrealism that compelled him: first, the materialism of Bataille and Sade, which he is able to counter with Fourier’s socialist systematicity and eroticism; and his admiration of Césaire, whose revolutionary ode invokes a planetary scale of transformation that previously eluded him.
Accompanied by a raft of visual images, the presentation went well and found its company among many approaches to surrealism being pursued. On the one hand, a liberatory reading of surrealism—informed by its later incarnation among the Situationists—was strongly emerging; in it, the resistance to work and the right to dream are central propositions. Another mainstay of the conference was its greater focus on women artists in surrealism’s second wave, often coinciding with the moment of dispersal—Leonora Carrington, Remedios Vara, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Claude Cahun—so that the 80s redemption of surrealism’s gender politics by Lacanian art historians (Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster) is now extended by a full complement of women writers and artists. The global moment of surrealism, as with the show at the Met, and the relation of surrealism to Black and pan-African liberation joining the poets of Negritude with Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans, Askia Touré, and Bob Kaufman, leads to an oneiric “worldness” whose prophet was, in fact, Fourier. In that sense, surrealism has become a global archive, and the way lies forward to exploring its resonances as its morphs and combines with other cultural influences and forms. Who knows, perhaps even Language writing has a surrealist dimension, or will have in horizons to come.
