ABSTRACT
For Walter Benjamin Surrealism embodied the radical possibilities of modernism and in his famous 1929 essay, he locates the energies of Surrealist poetic practice within the rhetoric of civil rebellion at a point of historical crisis. In “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” Benjamin invokes the motif of “the snapshot,” that ubiquitous mode of recording everyday life, in order to dene the movement’s relationship to modernism. “[F]ed on the damp boredom of postwar Europe and the last trickle of French decadence” (1978: 177), Surrealism occupies a position, Benjamin argues, that is at once “anarchistic fronde” and “revolutionary discipline,” a position that attempts to push “poetic life to the utmost limits of possibility” (178). But here “anarchistic fronde” becomes as much a description of Benjamin’s own methodological approach and eclectic interests-as one who could never conform to the “revolutionary discipline” of the communist party, a movement he sympathized with but would never join-as it is of Surrealist aesthetic and political practice. Benjamin obliquely writes himself into this piece as the German observer who understands and is sympathetic to the intellectual crisis of modern Europe and the revolutionary spirit of Surrealism:
Benjamin’s insight into Surrealism is predicated upon his position as an outsider. As someone who shares the movement’s spirit of rebellion but can critically examine its effects from a distance, Benjamin tracks its impetuous rush through the valley of history without being caught up in the intoxication of its idealism. In his Surrealist inspired work, One Way Street, Benjamin turns away from the mysterious in itself, what he saw as the overly ecstatic and transcendent nature of Surrealist poetic imagery, instead creating aphoristic, prose snapshots that reveal the illuminating and extraordinary paradoxes of the everyday. Reading this work, Cohen suggests that Benjamin “consistently turns an ironic discourse valorizing askesis and reason against Breton’s capricious and elusive praise of unconscious inspiration” (1993: 178). In spite of his reservations about unconscious inspiration,
Benjamin’s fascination with Surrealism was indeed predicated on its expansion of the eld of experience into the domain of culture’s marginalia; by pushing the aesthetic to extreme limits Surrealism dissolved the conceptual parameters between art and the everyday, between dream and waking life, mapping out a psychic materialism that opened up the revolutionary effects of desire. If One Way Street and the Arcades Project establish the legacy of Surrealism in Benjamin’s work, these works nevertheless proceed through a productive ambivalence that establishes Benjamin’s dialogic relationship with Surrealism.
