A Documentary about the 2019 Uprising in Chile, from the CrimethInc. collective (21/10/2024).
Five years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.
This is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.
Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed.
In March 2020, when the virus raged across the globe but before we in the UK realised how serious and tragically lethal it would become or how much of a long-term problem it would be, Freedom Press published its first Covid-related update on its news site. Titled *Covid Mutual Aid Groups: A List,* the text came out ten days before the first UK lockdown and stated:
“As the global Covid-19 pandemic is upon us, a number of mutual aid groups have started forming across the country. (…) It is estimated that 2-3 people out of a hundred [infected by Covid] will die. We must do everything we can to prevent this from happening. (…) The Tory government is apparently more concerned with making sure the economy won’t collapse than with saving people’s lives. (…) Remember: that old lady you see on your grocery shopping and that comrade you know who is suffering from a long-term illness: it is your job to protect them as much as you can.”
This was followed by a listing, initially very short, of mutual aid groups formed in the previous few days by anarchists who wanted to mitigate the potential hit of the pandemic in their communities rather than rely on the state to do it for them.
A fresco depicting a scene from the Book of Esther: From the synagogue at Dura-Europos, c. 244 CE.
One cannot understand the meaning of what is taking place in Israel today if one does not understand that Zionism constitutes a double negation of the historical reality of Judaism. Not only does it in fact transfer to the Jews the nation-state of Christians, but Zionism represents the culmination of that process of assimilation which, since the late 18th century, has been gradually canceling Jewish identity. Decisively, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has shown in an exemplary study, at the foundation of Zionist consciousness lies another negation, the negation of Galut, that is, of exile as a principle common to all historical forms of Judaism as we know it. The premises of this conception of exile predate the destruction of the Second Temple and are already present in biblical literature. Exile is the very form of Jewish existence on Earth, and the entire Jewish tradition — from the Mishnah to the Talmud, from the architecture of the synagogue to the memory of biblical events — was conceived and lived from the perspective of exile. For an Orthodox Jew, Jews living in the state of Israel are also in exile. And the state according to the Torah, which Jews await upon the coming of the Messiah, has nothing to do with a modern nation-state, so much so that at its core lie precisely the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of sacrifices, which the state of Israel does not even want to hear about.
… the worst thing would be for surrealism, turned on its head, would be to make us forget the extent to which “the flora and fauna of surrealism are unmentionable”, but also that the quality of the air we breathe depends absolutely on their luxuriance coming from our night. In other words, the most important thing when, in order to survive, the world has to be “re-passioned”.
Annie Le Brun, Qui Vive (2024)
We “close” our celebration of Surrealism and the 100th anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism with a recent interview with the remarkable surrealist poet and essayist, Annie Le Brun, for the French Marianne magazine.
Annie Le Brun‘s own recent death (29/07/2024) is sadly another reason for us to share this interview.
Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom. The Surrealists have one. They are the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom, because they are convinced that ‘freedom, which on this earth can only be bought with a thousand of the hardest sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its fullness without any kind of pragmatic calculation, as long as it lasts.’ And this proves to them that ‘mankind’s struggle for liberation in its simplest revolutionary form (which, however, is liberation in every respect), remains the only cause worth serving.’
Walter Benjamin
The literature on Surrealism is vast and we cannot obviously cover it all ourselves in this modest exercise of celebrating the movement on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism.
Among the many excellent, critical reflections on Surrealism, we have chosen to share Walter Benjamin’s essay of 1929, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia; an essay that retains all of its force and significance today.
In the hands of a free spirit the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon. . . . The creative handling of film images is such that, among all means of human expression, its way of functioning is most reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep. A film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream. . . . on the screen, as with the human being, the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious begins. The device of fading allows images to appear and disappear as in a dream; time and space are flexible, shrinking and expanding at will; chronological order and the relative values of time duration no longer correspond to reality, cyclical action can last a few minutes or several centuries; shifts from slow motion to accelerated motion heighten the impact of each.
As quoted in Luis Buñuel by Ado Kyrou, 1963 (Source: Toby Mussman, “The Surrealist Film”, in Artforum, September 1966.)
As with all of the members of the group, I was attracted to a certain idea of revolution. The surrealists did not consider themselves terrorists or armed militants; they struggled against a society that they detested using scandal as their principal weapon. … the true goal of surrealism was not to create a new literary or pictorial movement, nor even philosophical, but to smash society, to transform life.
Luis Buñuel, Mon Dernier Soupir, 1982
From the first experiments of dada cinema to the temptations of cinema by the surrealists, we share a collection of early experiments in “automatic filmmaking”.
I’m an asocial rebel and a revolutionary dreamer,” she writes, “and do not fit any political party; my religion is paganism, including inspired figures such as Socrates, Buddha, and Kropotkin; and my (dialectical) method of thinking is taken from Heraclitus, Hegel, and Marx. We, poets, do not admit the divine right of force; we love to challenge natural and political forces. Without this love of revolution, which has no sex or fatherland, I would have died of hatred or greed.
Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun (born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, 1894-1954) – french surrealist poet, sculptor, photographer, essayist and militant anti-fascist – is one of the most striking figures in the history of the surrealist movement, for having embraced as few others the conviction that surrealism was above all a revolutionary form of life. And she would pursue this throughout her life with the artist and her partner, Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Alberte Malherbe, 1892 – 1972).
Cahun’s political engagements did not however limit themselves to “traditional” forms of leftist-radical political organisation, for her “art” sought to give expression to a politics of “intimacy” or “affect” that addressed, for example, sexuality and gender identity. And if we read her “politics” within the context of André Breton’s essaySurrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object, we may take Cahun’s art-life as the conscious endeavour to create her-self surreally.
To continue our celebration of Surrealism, on this the one hundredth anniversary of André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism, we share below Michael Löwy’s excellent essay on Claude Cahun, an essay published in his collection of essays, Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia (University of Texas Press, 2009).
In poetry and in painting, Surrealism has done everything it can and more to increase these short circuits. It believes, and it will never believe in anything more wholeheartedly, in reproducing artificially this ideal moment when man, in the grips of a particular emotion, is suddenly seized by this something “stronger than himself” which projects him, in self-defense, into immortality.
André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)
I posit that mimetic art (depicting places, impressions and external objects) is obsolescent and that the task of today’s art is to present an increasingly accurate depiction of mental notions, this by concerted exercise of imagination and memory. (Clearly, the matter used by these mental notions can be inadvertently accumulated by external stimuli and perceptions.) The biggest success of surrealism so far has been to reconcile dialectically two notions which, for an adult person, are implacable opposites—perception and representation—and to build a bridge over the abyss that separated them. Surrealist painting and constructions of surrealist objects enable us already to organise objective tendencies around the subjective features of perceptions. These perceptions, by their very tendency to assert themselves as objective, are of an epochal character and revolutionary in the sense of calling for something to correspond to them in outer reality. It can be surmised that, by and large, this something will be.
André Breton, Surrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object (1935)
It was André Breton’s contention that Surrealism was an endeavour or practice of “going back to the sources of poetic imagination and, what is more, of remaining there.” (Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924) Or, as he also says, “the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory, and that there is no real danger of its activities coming to an end so long as man still manages to distinguish an animal from a flame or a stone … .” (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930) For many, this would translate into a particular kind of art; inevitably, into some kind of aesthetic object, whether a poem, a painting, a sculpture, and the like. The movement could then be catalogued by the kind of art that it created, in different media, with their different qualities, marking it off thereby specifically as surrealist art.
Yet nothing could be further from the aims of the Surrealists, even if the sort of judgement mentioned above was and is very often made regarding Surrealism as a movement.
Breton stated repeatedly and categorically that he “did not believe in the establishment of a conventional Surrealist pattern any time in the near future.” (Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924) Indeed, how could he have believed otherwise given that the sources of the imagination in the human psyche and the world could potentially express themselves in an infinite variety of ways.
“Surrealism set out to deal with the [general] problem of human expression in all its forms“, whether in the domain of the “arts”, or in that of “social action”. (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930) But in whatever the domain, some kind of “object” results, some-thing or some-way is expressed by someone, an “object” that is “the possibility of a very obscure reconciliation between what he knew he had to say [do, make, create] with what, on the same subject, he didn’t know he had to say [do, make, create] and nonetheless said [did, made, created]. The most controlled thought is incapable of doing without this aid, which, from the viewpoint of rigor, is undesirable.” (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)
We are forcing the argument, perhaps – or not -, but the idea is beautifully simple: the Surrealists understood the limitations of the realistic or positivistic attitude as both fetishistic and mutilating; fetishistic, because it reifies an essentially calculating and instrumentalising vision-intervention in the world, with all of its accompanying categorical divisions and hierarchies of reality, and mutilating, because it congeals these categorical distinctions in a false objectivity (including the “objectivity” of an isolated, translucent, “subjectivity” or “self”), rendering them immune to criticism and fatal to the human imagination, the source of both “objectivity” and “subjectivity”. The plane of the surreal is the overcoming of the maddening dualisms that are our prison and the surrealist object is that which is expressed-created consciously upon the grounds of what is not conscious.
The extraordinary challenge or invitation that the surrealists make to all of us is that of finding forms of expression, creation, in all of the spheres of life, that are both consciously understood as creations and recognised as beyond full conscious or rational control. It is precisely in this “obscure reconciliation” that the imagination can freely play among its marvelous creations.
Breton will state this thesis with great rigour in the essay that we share below of 1935, Surrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object. At one point in the text, comparing painting to poetry, he says of the former something that can be extended in turn to all surreal expression.
“Painting, freed from its duty to represent substances and shapes derived from the outside world, profits from the only exterior element no art can fully do without, i.e. interior representation (la représentation intérieure), from an image residing in spirit. It confronts this interior representation with the representation of concrete forms of the real world, striving—just as Picasso’s painting has done—to capture the object in its generality. Once that has been attained, it attempts the sublime procedure which lies at the heart of poetics: it seeks to exclude the (relatively) exterior object as such and to view nature solely in its relation to the inner world of consciousness.”
Let us again translate this into a more general language (with all of the risks involved): to express or create surreally is to confront representations/images of the concrete forms of the world with interior representations/images, generating thereby a representation/image of those concrete forms in their generality, a generality which can only exist in relationship to the “inner world of consciousness”. And all of this creative, sublimating or transubstantiating, activity is the work of the free imagination, conscious and unconscious.
In other words, it is we who generalise. We do so however through images, metaphors, representations, that defy any logical strictures or conscious transparency, and which are the children of our own minds. There is nothing solid in our surreal makings; nor do we fully know why we have made things as they are. But make them we do and what distinguishes the surrealist from everyone else is that s/he creates worlds knowing them to be created and knowing them to have been born and to exist beyond anything that s/he can completely control, rooted as our creations are in the passions and the imagination.
Can one then think of anarchism, or the creations of anarchists, in the same manner?
Louise Michel (1833-1905) waving a black flag inscribed “bread or death”, during the looting of a bakery during the workers’ demonstration of the 9th of March of 1883 in Paris. Artist unknown.
Man proposes and disposes. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy.Poetry teaches him to. It bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries we endure. It can also be an organizer, if ever, as the result of a less intimate disappointment, we contemplate taking it seriously. The time is coming when it decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread of heaven for the earth! There will still be gatherings on the public squares, and movements you never dared hope participate in. Farewell to absurd choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the prolonged patience, the flight of the seasons, the artificial order of ideas, the ramp of danger, time for everything! May you only take the trouble to practice poetry.
André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
Tower of Light [La Claire Tour]
Le Libertaire (1952)
André Breton
It is in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism, long before it achieved self-definition, first recognized its own reflection. This was shortly after World War I and we were still nothing more than a free association of individuals united by our spontaneous rejection of all the social and moral constraints of our times. Among the shrines on which we converged and that could not fail to bring us together there was this conclusion of Ballade Solness by Laurent Tailhade:
Stab our tattered hearts! Anarchy! Bearer of flaming torches! Dispel the night! Stamp out the vermin! And build, sky-high, with our tombstones even, The Tower of Light that dominates the sea!
Yves Tanguy, A quatre heures d’été, l’espoir …, 1929
… make no mistake about it, those responsible for putting this philtre of the absolute into circulation are the enemies of order. They pass it round secretly, under the eyes of the police, in the guise of books and poems. The anodyne pretext of literature allows them to offer you at a rock-bottom bargain price this deadly ferment which it is high time to make generally available for consumption. It is the genie in the bottle; it is the gold of poetry in a solid bar. Buy, buy the damnation of your soul, at last you are going to lose your way, here is the machine guaranteed to capsize the mind. I announce to the world this momentous news item: a new vice has just been born, man has acquired one more source of vertigo — Surrealism, offspring of frenzy and darkness. Walk up, walk up, this is the entrance to the realms of the instantaneous …
Louis Aragon, The Paris Peasant (1924)
Preface for a Reprint of the Manifesto (1929)
It was to be expected that this book would change, and to the extent that it questioned our terrestrial existence by charging it nonetheless with everything that it comprises on this or that side of the limits we are in the habit of assigning to it, that its fate would be closely bound up with my own, which is, for example, to have written and not to have written books. Those attributed to me do not seem to me to exercise any greater influence on me than many others, and no doubt I am no longer as fully familiar with them as it is possible to be. Regardless of whatever controversy that may have arisen concerning the “Manifesto of Surrealism” between 1924 and 1929 – without arguing the pros and cons of its validity – it is obvious that, independent of this controversy, the human adventure continued to take place with the minimum of risks, on almost all sides at once, according to the whims of the imagination which alone causes real things. To allow a work one has written to be republished, a work not all that different from one you might more or less have read by someone else, is tantamount to “recognizing” I would not even go so far as to say a child whose features one had already ascertained were reasonably friendly, whose constitution is healthy enough, but rather something which, no matter how bravely it may have been, can no longer be. There is nothing I can do about it, except to blame myself for not always and in every respect having been a prophet. Still very much apropos is the famous question Arthur Craven, “in a very tired, very weary tone,” asked Andre Gide: “Monsieur Gide, where are we with respect to time?” To which Gide, with no malice intended, replied: “Fifteen minutes before six.” Ah!, it must indeed be admitted, we’re in bad, we’re in terrible shape when it comes to time.
Here as elsewhere admission and denial are tightly interwoven. I do not understand why, or how, how I am still living, or, for all the more reason, what I am living. If, from a system in which I believe, to which I slowly adapt myself, like Surrealism, there remains, if there will always remain, enough for me to immerse myself in, there will nonetheless never be enough to make me what I would like to be, no matter how indulgent I am about myself. A relative indulgence compared to that others have shown me (or non-me, I don’t know). And yet I am living, I have even discovered that I care about life. The more I have sometimes found reasons for putting an end to it the more I have caught myself admiring some random square of parquet floor: it was really like silk, like the silk that would have been as beautiful as water. I liked this lucid pain, as though the entire universal drama of it had then passed through me and I was suddenly worth the trouble. But I liked it in the light of, how shall I say, of new things that I had never seen glow before. It was from this that I understood that, in spite of everything, life was given, that a force independent of that of expressing and making oneself heard spiritually presided – insofar as a living man is concerned – over reactions of invaluable interest, the secret of which will disappear with him. This secret has not been revealed to me, and as far as I am concerned its recognition in no way invalidates my confessed inaptitude for religious meditation. I simply believe that between my thought, such as it appears in what material people have been able to read that has my signature affixed to it, and me, which the true nature of my thought involves in something but precisely what I do not yet know, there is a world, an imperceptible world of phantasms, of hypothetical realizations, of wagers lost, and of lies, a cursory examination of which convinces me not to correct this work in the slightest. This book demands all the vanity of the scientific mind, all the puerility of this need for perspective which the bitter vicissitudes of history provide. This time again, faithful to the tendency that I have always had to ignore any kind of sentimental obstacle, I shall waste no time passing judgment on those among my initial companions who have become frightened and turned back, I shall not yield to the temptation to substitute names by means of which this book might be able to lay claim to being up-to-date. Fully mindful, however, that the most precious gifts of the mind cannot survive the smallest particle of honor, I shall simply reaffirm my unshakable confidence in the principle of an activity which has never deceived me, which seems to me more deserving than ever of our unstinting, absolute, insane devotion, for the simple reason that it alone is the dispenser, albeit at intervals well spaced out one from the other, of transfiguring rays of a grace I persist in comparing in all respects to divine grace.
Fell in Love with Fire
A Documentary about the 2019 Uprising in Chile, from the CrimethInc. collective (21/10/2024).
Five years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.
This is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.
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