Walter Benjamin and the surrealismo

In Onirokitsch , that is published for the first time in Castilian (Publishing Spring), the German philosopher preappears his mature thought. The author of this note summarizes next the critical analysis that wrote for that edition.

IN 1928, Walter Benjamin declares his ambition "to gather the inheritance yet of the surrealismo the power of control of a Fortinbrás of the philosophy". After one he cuts estadía in Paris, he has begun to reunite to notes and materials for an article provisorily titled "Parisian Passages. A dialectic encantamiento ". The surrealistas vagabundeos of Louis Aragon by the Passage of l´Opéra, referred in the farmer of Paris (1926), are in the origin of this test that, one decade later, will end at the work of the passages , the most important project of Youngest child in their years of maturity. "In his beginning it is Aragon - Him Paysan de Paris -" will recognize Youngest child in 1935, "of which never I could read in my bed by the nights more than two or three pages, because the rate of my heart accelerated so much that had to separate the book from my hands".

Since they have shown acabadamente to Josef Fürnkäs and John McCole, the interest of Youngest child by the surrealismo goes back to 1925, a year after the official announcement of the creation of the movement in the pages of the Littérature magazine. "Onirokitsch" [ Traumkitsch ] is the title of a brief one glosses, unpublished in Spanish, in whom the German philosopher reflects on three productions of the group: Répétitions (1922), poem book of Paul Éluard with drawings of Max Ernst, the Manifesto of the surrealismo (1924) of André Breton and Une vague of rêves (1924) of Aragon, true catalogue of the activities of the surrealistas during the previous years. The ideas formulated for the first time in this text are the germ, not only of their test "the surrealismo: the last snapshot of European intelligence "(1929), but also of the amplest elaborations of the work of the passages , book that at a first moment Youngest child conceives, in an attempt to associate the marxism with the psychoanalytic theory, like a luck of" mythical archaeology of modernity ".

The declared liking of the surrealistas to the dreams is the departure point of "Onirokitsch", text that finally is published, under the title "Glosses on the surrealismo", in the magazine Die Literarische Welt at the beginning of 1927. "the history of the dreams still is about to to be written", says Youngest child, "and to open a perspective in her means to strike a blow to the superstition of its rooting in the nature through the historical illumination." The dreams are immersed in history; their form, content and function differ according to the time to which they belong. The romantic fascination by the dream, in as much incitación to the search of sublime ideals, provides the resistance. "No longer it is dreamed about the blue flower. Who today wakes up as Enrique de Ofterdingen must have been slept." The dreams no longer open "a blue distance", like the glimpsed one sometimes by the personage of Novalis; they are now a gray and dusty surface, a direct way to the triviality, whose quintessence is kitsch.

This term (of they kitschen , "to chapucear", "to mumble", and of kitsch , "trinket", "imitation", "cursilería") badly designates all manifestation of "taste", cultivated or not: daily art, cinema, publicity, fashion, furniture, objects. Historically, its irruption in Europe takes place towards 1870, with which Youngest child calls the "time of the technical reproductibilidad" of the art work, that assures its massive diffusion in a more and more ample market, causing the decline of its "dawn". Kitsch totally satisfies the aspiration of the masses "to appropriate itself the objects in next of the neighborhoods". The masses seize of the art work, no longer with the perceptiva distance that is opened to the contemplation, but through the "first plane" of the copy and the reproduction, "where the fugacidad and the repetition are overlapping of as narrow way as in the art work the singularity and the perduración".

Kitsch of the surrealistas dreams cannot think more than through the fecund relation that, from its origins, the movement has established with the psychoanalysis. Youngest child recognizes Freud the teorización to him of "the anamorfosis [ Vexierbild ] like esquematismo of the onírico work": the images of the ambiguous, similar dreams are pictogramas deformed and to riddles and puzzle, whose manifest content must be deciphered like a hieroglyphic. But while the psychoanalysis, in last instance, considers the manifest content of the dreams like the secondary elaboration of an underlying psychic material, Youngest child prefers one of the surrealistas variations on the theory of the dreams. The surrealistas, observe in "Onirokitsch", are "less on the track of the soul that on the one of the things". Exposing the latent presence of the mythical forces of the "scrub of prehistory" in the culture of masses, the surrealistas have discovered "the totémico tree of the objects".

Youngest child conceives the surrealismo like an allegorical, similar art to the postulate in the origin of the German baroque drama. The allegorical art [ allegorische Kunst ], that expresses the experience of the sufriente, the pressed thing, of the irreconciliado thing, the experience of the negative, is against to the symbolic art [ symbolische Kunst ], that represents the happiness positively, the freedom, the reconciliation. The "dialectic images" of the surrealismo, to which Youngest child defines as "new allegorical art of the flânerie ", replace the "Metaphysical images" of the Trauerspiel to offer to the observer the " facies hipocrática of history like petrified original landscape". Utopia of the pain, pictograma in which desire is immobilized like in a died nature, the canon of old fashioned objects, fallen in disuse, that redeems the surrealismo, is the melancholic scene of modernity, the decorated magician where the collective dreams of a time are crystallized.

Against the idea of modernity like demystification and desencantamiento, inspired by the arguments of Max Weber, the central thesis of the work of the passages is that, with the development of Capitalism, "a thick dream a reactivation of the mythical forces hurried on Europe and with him". Since it has indicated Susan Buck-Morss, whereas Weber postulates the triumph of the abstract and formal reason, in centuries XVIII and XIX, like organizing principle of the structures of the production, the market, the state bureaucracy and all the cultural forms, "Youngest child maintain that, below the surface of an increasing rationalization, articulated in an unconscious onírico level, the social world has been totally reencantado." In the metropolis modern, that flâneur surrealista crosses like a sleepwalker, the "threatening face" of the myth leaves everywhere to the encounter. It shows in the street posters that announce "dentífrica paste for giants" and exposes their presence in the urban diagrams more rationalist than, "with his uniform streets and infinite rows of buildings, have made the architectonic dream of the antiquity: the labyrinth ".

In the farmer of Paris (1926), Aragon has shown how the myth arises prototípicamente in the passages. There the merchandise, observe Youngest child, "they are suspended and accumulated to each other in so narrow confusion that seem images removed from the most incoherent dreams". The glance that, by work of this reencantamiento, transforms the merchandise into "dialectic images", is fantasmagoría of flâneur surrealista on the "original landscape of the consumption". New urban Odiseo, paysan of Aragon penetrates with their glance the showcases of the stores "idealizando the value of change" of the things and leaving their value of use in background. Of analogous way, the Marxist concept of the fetichismo of the merchandise is amalgamated in the surrealistas productions to the psychoanalytic theory through the procedure of the assembly. Prevailed of its value of use, the surrealista object is an object dépaysé , taken of its familiar context [ heimlich ] and transferred to nonhabitual and sinister other [ unheimlich ].

Towards 1929, Youngest child will compare the surrealista assembly with a magic trick and will indicate the necessity to transform this hair-splitting into "dialectic method": if the surrealismo transports the objects to the sphere of the dreams, now it is to reach the threshold of waking up through which in "Onirokitsch" it is defined as "historical illumination". Identifying this moment with "now of the cognoscibilidad", the assembly must be to the service of the historian, whom it will not look for to interpret the dreams of a time, but to only show them, "to dissolve Ômitología´ in the space of history". Perhaps no other text explains better the reach of this "copernicano turn" in the thought of Youngest child that the following fragment of the work of the Passages: "the policy has in ahead primacía on history. The facts happen something that only finishes happening to us and to establish them is the own thing of the memory. In effect, waking up is the paradigm of the memory: the instance in which we managed to remember next, most banal, most manifest ".