Anarchy and Culture PDF
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Page i Anarchy & Culture Page ii A volume in the series Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture Edited by David Gross and William M. Johnston Page iii Anarchy & Culture The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism David Weir University of Massachusetts Press Amherst Page iv Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 88591 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 88591 list will be represented without their diacritical marks. Copyright © 1997 by David Weir All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 9650314 ISBN 1558490833 (cloth); 0841 (pbk.) Designed by Dennis Anderson Set in New Baskerville Printed and bound by BraunBrumfield, Inc. Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Weir, David, 1947 Apr. 20– Anarchy and culture : the aesthetic politics of modernism / David Weir. p. cm.—(Critical perspectives on modern culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1558490833 (cloth : alk. paper).—ISBN 1558490841 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Politics and literature. 2. Literature, Modern—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature) 4. Anarchism. 5. Literature and society. I. Title. II. Series. PN51.W345 1997 809'.933358—dc21 9650314 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available. Page v Alles funktioniert, nur der Mensch selber nicht mehr. —Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit In memory of David Geoffrey Weir (1973–1991) Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 11 Definitions The Ideologies of Anarchism 2 42 Reactions Anarchism as Cultural Threat 3 87 Responses Culture in the Anarchist Camp 4 116 Affinities Anarchism and Cultural Promotion 5 158 Aesthetics From Politics to Culture 6 201 Artists Anarchism and Cultural Production Afterword 259 Notes 269 Index 297 Page ix Acknowledgments This book is mainly the product of my own autonomous impulses. Had I subjected those impulses more to the mutualist considerations of my academic comrades a better book might have been the result. Those comrades and colleagues who have tried to direct my egoistic endeavors toward more meaningful social and scholarly contexts include Dore Ashton, Peter Buckley, James Rubin, Maren Stange, and Brian Swann at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. I must also thank my students, whose ability to somehow extract a portion of their integral education out of me is truly remarkable. To Sven Zbinden, Brian Booth, Goon Koch, and Elizabeth Murray I say: "You've had the course, now read the book." If they do, they should be grateful, as I am, for the labor of Liselot Van der Heijden, Fernanda Perrone, Betty Waterhouse, and Pam Wilkinson, who assured that my own ideas and those suggested by the Colorado Kopfarbeiter David Gross would take material form. The final synthesis of material and intellectual culture was overseen by Clark Dougan (better known as the Dialectical Anarchist of Amherst), to whom I am most grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Camille Norvell, who has caused me to question Benjamin Tucker's and Friedrich Engel's critique of the institution of marriage. Permission to quote from material in the Benjamin Tucker Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, is gratefully acknowledged. Page 1 Introduction The surrealist poet André Breton was also a socialist. A surrealist, also a socialist: Breton himself never ceased to grapple with the problems this formulation posed for his poetry and for art in general 1 The alchemy of the adverb also led to any number of proclamations and positions, manifestoes and clarifications, appeals and denials. In the long lecture tided "Political Position of Today's Art," the poet's most extensive treatment of the problem, Breton forces himself to accept what is, for him, an unfortunate but poignant paradox: that innovative, progressive art is no guarantee of social progress. The artist who rebels against aesthetic tradition may nonetheless be politically conservative. By the same token, the most reactionary political figures may also be the most receptive to avantgarde art. The adjective "revolutionary" carries with it ''a most regrettable ambiguity": it refers at once to the nonconformist innovator who breaks with artistic tradition and to the activist ideologue who "tends to define a systematic action aiming at the transformation of the world.''2 All too often, the revolutionary artist is not revolutionary in the second sense of the word; nonconformity, in fact, implies a paradoxical acceptance of social conditions and abrogates the need to transform them. The bohemian artist, for example, may separate from society without so much as commenting on the condition of alienation caused by the very society from which he separates. Breton cites a number of examples to strengthen the point that revolutionary art and reactionary politics do not exclude one another. Paul Claudel's technical innovations in poetry do not make him any less of a militarist. The royalist Léon Daudet edits the rightist journal L'Action française but praises the avantgarde Picasso as the Page 2 greatest painter alive. Breton also repeats the corollary "commonplace" that "leftist political circles appreciate in art only timehonored, or even outworn forms": one specialty of the progressive journal L'Humanité is the rendering of Mayakovsky's poems into doggerel (214–15). This problem of overtly political art and lifeless technique has its greatest exemplar in the neoclassicist painter David: an active observer of the French Revolution who recorded some of its most powerful scenes, but did so in the stiff, academic style of Poussin. Strangely, David was an artist who was simultaneously a thoroughly contemporary witness to history and ''very much behind his own times." The contrary case is illustrated by Gustave Courbet: like David, he witnessed a great social upheaval; unlike David, he was aesthetically innovative. But Courbet, a hero of the Paris Commune, nonetheless chose not to register that political experience in his art. Breton describes himself leating through an album of Courbet's paintings—"here are forests, here are women, here is the sea"—but failing to discover in them any ''clear trace ... of his social preoccupations" (218). Even in Breton's model and precursor Rimbaud, another witness to the Commune, "social preoccupations" are secondary in the extreme to artistic innovations. Such is the case even with those poems that grew directly out of Rimbaud's Commune experience. Breton concludes that "Chant de guerre parisienne," for instance, is "no less hermetic" than Rimbaud's later "verbal experiments" (220). Again and again, Breton wonders how it might be possible for avant garde, leftist artists to give "our work the meaning we would like our acts to have" (218). At one point he imagines a wall dividing the revolutionary spirit in half: one group on one side of the wall is engaged in the destruction of the old social order, while on the other side another group is involved in the creative work of organizing life anew; neither group is in communication with the other (224). A quotation from Malraux seems to sum up the dilemma: "Marxism is the consciousness of the social; culture is the consciousness of the psychological" (229). Breton's remarks were made in 1935, in Prague, at a meeting of an organization known as the Leftist Front. It is striking how difficult it was for Breton to formulate a concept of ideologically motivated art at a time when ideology was everything. Breton was speaking at a great historical moment when it truly meant something to be a Marxist in Central Europe, a Republican in Spain, a Communist in
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