The Ethnics of Surrealismedwards1998

Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University
The Ethnics of Surrealism

Formless: A User's Guide by Yve-Alain Bois; Rosalind Krauss; La ressemblance informe, ou le
Gai-Savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille by Georges Didi-Huberman; Refusal of the Shadow:
Surrealism and the Caribbean by Michael Richardson; Krzysztof Fijalkowski
Review by: Brent Hayes Edwards
Transition, No. 78 (1998), pp. 84-135
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the Hutchins Center for African and African
American Research at Harvard University
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(w Under Review
THE ETHNICS OF SURREALISM
Brent Hayes Edwards

Disctssed Jules Monnerot, one of the first black found resonance to the basic elements of
in this essay
intellectuals to collaborate with Andre modern ethnography."
Formless: A User's Breton's circle in the I930s, called the In Monnerot's view, the evocation of
Guide, Yve-Alain Bois
and Rosalilnd Krauss.
surrealistsrodeursdes confins-prowlers at the "primitive" in early ethnographic
New York:Zone Books the farthest reaches. He meant that sur- works like Lucien Levy-Bruhl's 1923 La
realism roamed the outermost bounds of MentalitePrimitivewas not at all a portrait
La ressemblance
informe, ou le the modern sensibility, constantly look- of real life in Togo or Melanesia. This
Gai-Savoir visuel selon
ing for ways to push them further, undo "primitive" was a hallucination, an "ab-
Georges Bataille,
Georges Didi-Hubermlan.
the limits. But the geographic meta- sence become a mirage,"an expression of
Paris: Editions Macula
phor was deliberate: Monnerot saw that everything lacking in the postwar Euro-
Refusal of the Shadow: the surrealists were also gnawing at the pean sensibility, conveniently projected
Surrealism and the
edges of Europe through their fascina- onto the peoples Europe had colonized;
Caribbean, Michael
tion with its others, its outcasts, and in you needed the primitive to define the
Richardsotn,editor,
Michael Richardsolnand particularits "primitives" in the colonies modern. But during the same period,
Krzysztof Fijalkotvski, of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. This insis- those colonial "mirages"were beginning
translators.London: Verso
tence on going beyond the frontier, this to talk back: when soldiers, artists, mi-
practice of turning to non-European grant laborers, and students settled in
cultures to understand the social func- the metropoleafterWorldWarI, their pres-
tion of myth, the sacred, and the irra- ence challenged easy assumptions about
tional, linked surrealism to another dis- the primitivism of "natives." Michel
Josephine Baker at course that began to coalesce in the Leiris introduces his 1967 history of
the Dakar-Djibouti
I920s in France. As Monnerot wrote in African sculpture,AfriqueNoire:La Crea-
exhibition, Musee
La Poesie Moderneet le Sacre(I945), "the tion Plastique(dedicated to another Mar-
de I'lloninre, Paris,
affective dispositions at play in the sur- tinican intellectual, Aime Cesaire), by
1933
realist appeal .. seem to be the same writing not of a vogue negrein the in-
Lipnitski
ones that give a strangely vast and pro- terwar years-the standard story-but
84 TRANSITION ISSUE 78

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more pointedly of a crisenegre-the cri- ... Injazz, too,camethefirst appearanceof
sis that black modernity came to repre- negroes, the manifestationand the myth of
sent for Europe. blackEdens whichwereto lead me to Africa
In France, this crisis transformed both and, beyondAfrica,to ethnography.
ethnography and surrealism. After a se-
ries of defections and forced departures, In this account, the Negro speaks first
the surrealist movement was reinvigo- through jazz-"a kind of possession"
rated in the early I930s by a group of that beckoned Leiris to Africa by way of
young Martinican students in Paris that the New World.
included Monnerot, Pierre and Simone The Dakar-Djibouti expedition itself
Yoyotte, and Etienne Lero. Leiris himself had an unusual relationship with the
Americas. The mission, organized by the
The surrealists were gnawing at the edges Institute of Ethnology at the University
of Paris and by the French Museum of
of Europe through their fascination with
Natural History, inaugurated the great
its others, its outcasts, and in particular its era of French government-supported
"primitives" in the colonies of Africa, Asia, anthropological fieldwork. But in 193 ,

one month before the voyage'sscheduled
and Oceania. departure,the planners remained short of
funding. Marcel Griaule and Georges
escaped Breton's suffocating influence, Henri Riviere devised a benefit event to
moving toward ethnography in the late supplement the government subvention:
I92os; he later joined the first state- they asked Al Brown, the popular black
sponsored field trip to Africa, Marcel bantamweight from Panama, to put on a
Griaule's 1931 Mission Dakar-Djibouti. boxing exhibition at the Cirque d'Hiver
But his journey toward ethnography, to- in Paris.
ward Africa, began with a detour. Leiris The boxing exhibition prefigured
found his way to Dakar and Djibouti Griaule's African museological proj-
only through jazz, only because he ect: guards from the French Museum of
was listening to phonographs of Louis Natural History stood in uniform at
Armstrong and Duke Ellington's "Jun- the four corners of the ring, as though
gle Band," only because he was haunt- Brown's pugilistic prowess were some
ing the nightclubs in Montmartre with savage ritual on display. But before the
Georges Bataille, and only because he bout, Brown did something that made it
was mesmerized by black singers like impossible for the audience to see him as
Adelaide Hall and Ada "Bricktop" Smith. an object in the museum, a primitive: he
Leiris writes: spoke. "I am boxing," he said, "to con-
tribute to the success of the expedition
In theperiodofgreatlicensethatfollowedthe and to increase the knowledge about and
hostilities,jazzwas a sign of allegiance,an or- understanding of Africa."His opponent,
giastic tributeto the colorsof the moment.It Roger Simende, a Parisian metro em-
functionedmagically,and its means of influ- ployee recruited for the occasion, was
encecan be comparedto a kind ofpossession. equally blunt: "I am boxing because I

Guitar of
the Upper Ubanghi
From Documents 1:5

(1929). Courtesy of
Musee de I'Homme,
Paris
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Es '
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L
r: k
THE ETHNICS OF SURREALISM 87

Publicity photo for
boxing match
featuring
"Panama" Al
Brown to benefit
the Dakar-Djibouti
Mission, 1931
Musee de I'Homme,
Paris

..:.,..
"Panama" Al
-s..:
Brown and the
,::i
A
:::6
I:: ethnographers
Museede I'Homme,
Paris
like the sportandalsoto earnmoney for outsiders. Black expression effects a cri-
my family."As Bennetta Jules-Rosette sis, then, by highlighting contradictions
has commented,"Once the ideological in the Western fascination with the prim-
termsof the matchwere announced,the itive: "Panama" Al Brown is simultane-
resultswere almost a foregone conclu- ously the other (the "primitive" object of
sion.""Panama"Al Brownwon easilyin study, surrounded by museum guards)
a third round knockout, and his exhi- and one of "us" (announcing his eager-
bition raised I 01,350 francs, four times ness to "contribute to the success of the
what the Institute of Ethnology had con- expedition").
tributed. But if this black modernity is some-
These are crisesnegres,crises of repre- how exorbitant, a challenge or crisis
sentation: the modernity of black per- for both ethnography and surrealism,
formance and expression clashes with then how should we describe the work
the mirage of a silent, distant, "ethnic" of Jules Monnerot or Duke Ellington,
primitive. Ethnicis a peculiar word. It de- Aime Cesaire or "Panama" Al Brown?
rives from the Greek ethnos,a term that How can we understand these juxtaposi-
originally designated any group or na- tions, which show how black modernity
tion but subsequently acquired the con- resists or dissolves its arranged marriage
notation of otherness. Ethnos came to to the primitive? In 1933, Georges Henri
refer to barbarians,heathens-in a word, Riviere arranged a photo-op with a re-

..
....
I
.I

splendentJosephine Baker holding some phy, non-Western and "primitive" art, Eli Lotar:From
Documents 1:6
of the musical instruments brought from the Parisian music hall and early Holly- (1929)
Africa by the Mission Dakar-Djibouti. wood film, comic strips, convicted mur-
How do we come to terms with such in- derers. Documents was a sort of "war
congruity? machine against received ideas," and
Bataille'spublicity announcement for the
first issue called for shock tactics:
Unfortunately we cannot turn to ethno-
graphy or surrealism for an answer, pre- The most irritatingworks of art, not yet
cisely because they both characterize classified,and certainheterocliteproductions
black modernity as a crisis. Similarly,we thathavebeenneglecteduntil not, will be the
might not expect these issues to engage objectof studies as rigorousand scientificas
a thinker like Georges Bataille-literary archaeology.. .. Here, in general, we are
pornographer, atheist theologian, radical thinking of the most unsettlingfacts, those
aesthete, banished surrealist,and heretic whose consequencesare not yet defined. In
ethnologue. And yet the crisis of black thesometimesab-
thesevariousinvestigations,
modernity may receive its richest ex- surd characterof results or methods,rather
pression in Documents,the journal-not than being dissimulatedas usual in confor-
quite surrealist, not quite ethno- mity with the rulesofpropriety,will be delib-
graphic-created by Bataille and his cir- eratelyemphasized,as muchout of a hatred
cle in 1929 and 1930. for platitudesas out of humor.
Documents was published by the art
dealer Georges Wildenstein, and edited As Denis Hollier has noted, the jour-
by Bataille, the museologist Georges nal's distinctive achievement is its obsti-
Henri Riviere, and the art critic Carl nate "resistance to the aesthetic point of
Einstein. Assembled around Bataille,who view," its refusal to be another journal of
represented (in Michel Leiris's phrase) the beaux-arts.This is apparent in the
the "pivot of dissidence" to Andre Bre- very title: Documents,objects "devoid of
ton's increasingly authoritarian concep-
tion of surrealism,Documentsbrought to- Guards from the French Museum of Natural
gether former surrealists like Leiris,
Robert Desnos, Raymond Queneau, and History stood in uniform at the four corners
Georges Limbour; ethnologists like Paul of the boxing ring, as though "Panama"
Rivet, Marcel Mauss, Alfred Metraux,
Al Brown's pugilistic prowess were some
Marcel Griaule, and Leo Frobenius; mu-
sicologists like Andre Schaeffner and savage ritual on display.
Jacques Fray;and a varied group of mod-
ernist luminaries that included Clive artistic value." The journal published
Bell, Alejo Carpentier, Jacques Prevert, ethnographic photos next to bourgeois
William Seabrook, and Sergei Eisenstein. family portraits,a slaughterhouse next to
This unlikely grouping turned its gaze to a Moulin Rouge chorus line, as though
an improbable list of topics: modernist shock and juxtaposition were its only
art criticism, archaeology and ethnogra- guiding values. But the undertaking that

Top: "Bessie Love
in Broadway
Melody, which was
shown nonstop
at the Madeleine-
Cinema"
Bottom:
"Schoolchildren
from Bacouya,
Bourail
[New Caledonia]"
FromDocuments 1:4
(1929). Bottom:Musee
de l'Homme,Paris

"The two last
pages from Races,
the final work of
Jean Brunhes."
Left: "Woman from
Tierra del Fuego
eating insects
from the head of a
child." Right:
"Official and
typical
representatives of
the white race in
Europe"
FromDocuments 2:6
(1930)
these seemingly haphazardjuxtapositions by grotesquely enlarged photos of hu-

inaugurated was extremely deliberate. man toes that are startlingabove all in the
Bataille's unlikely collective was en- way they don't look like anything. Con-
gineering an assault on all idealism, ceived after the violent break in the sur-
whether political or social, aesthetic or realist movement announced in Breton's
philosophical-an assault on ways of "Second Surrealist Manifesto," Docu-
"settling" the facts of the world into fa- ments expressly departs from the strate-
miliar, serviceable, disciplined "conse- gies of surrealism. Bataille and his as-
quences." sociates no longer focused on dream
James Clifford has suggestively termed research and automatic writing, on the
Documentsan impulse to "ethnographic "free" play of poetic signification that
surrealism,"but as critics like Hollier and was supposed to liberate the libido. Doc-
JeanJamin have pointed out, the effect of uments is devoted to the search for a
this brief alliance of social scientists and world beyond resemblance, an "impossi-
artists is neither ethnographic nor sur- ble" real that would be radically singular.
real. Documents is adamantly realist; it
* * a
seeks what Hollier describes as the "in-
exchangeable heterogeneity of a real, to In the summer of I996, the Centre
an irreducible kernel of resistance to any Georges Pompidou in Paris hosted a ma-
kind of transposition, of substitution, a jor exhibition that attempted to define
real which does not yield to a metaphor." some of the "consequences" of Bataille's
A real that can't be taken out of context. project in Documents.Curated by art his-
In one famous example, Bataille finds torians Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain
this resistance to exchange, this baseness, Bois, L'informe:mode d'emploiattempted
in the big toe; his article is accompanied nothing less than a reorganization or

...
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k:.:
... ....iirl
3f.iEii' .
Si
:il E .x

"unsettling" of the received taxonomy "Camel," "Cults,""Man," "Misfortune,"
of twentieth-century art in the West. In "Dust," "Reptiles," and "Talkie." The
a direct challenge to the overarching "Dictionary" nettled the very idea of a
legacy of the formalist critic Clement dictionary, eschewing alphabetization,
Greenberg, Krauss and Bois assembled ignoring repetitions and contradictions,
some two hundred works to illustrate
their provocative argument that the his- Documents published ethnographic photos
tory of modernist art could be under- next to bourgeois family portraits, a
stood better without the tired opposition
of formalism and figuration, and with- slaughterhouse next to a Moulin Rouge
out Greenberg's claim that artistic forms chorus line.
were "universal" and "trans-historical."
Instead, with its unprecedented and in- obliquely toying with words rather than
novativejuxtaposition of works from the defining them. In composing Formless:
1920s (Duchamp's Rotoreliefs, Picasso's A User'sGuide,Krauss and Bois were es-
trashcollages,JeanArp's torn papers,Gia- pecially influenced by Bataille's entry
cometti's horizontal sculptures) and the for the word "Informe" in the Decem-
I960s (Cy Twombly's graffiti, Robert ber 1929 Documents-a seemingly mod-
Morris's threadwaste,Warhol'sdance di- est passage that set the tone for the de-
agrams, Robert Smithson's glue pours), classifying task that the Dictionary
L'informe ignored traditional issues of performed:
style and chronology in order to look
for the "blind spots" of High Modern- A dictionarybeginswhen it no longergives
ism, for the ways in which artistic form the meaningof words,but their tasks.Thus
erodes itself from within, working against formless [informe] is not only an adjective
its own seeming integrity. havinga given meaning,buta termthatserves
The exhibition catalogue, "conceived to bringthings downZ in the world,generally
from the outset as a book with a co- requiringthat eachthinghave itsform.Wh/at
herent proposition to develop," was first it designateshas no rightsin any sense and
published in French, and it is now avail- gets itselfsquashedeverywhere,like a spider
able in a slightly revised English edition or an earthworm.Infact,for academicsto be
titled Formless:A User'sGuide.Polemical happy,the universewould have to take on a
and unabashedly theoretical, the written form. All of philosophyhas no othergoal: it
text delineates Bataille'sformative influ- is a matterofgiving afrock coat to what is, a
ence. Kraussand Bois have structured the mathematicalfrock coat.To affirmon the con-
book as a series of short, interconnected trarythat the universeresemblesnothingand
essaysbased on the "Critical Dictionary" is onlyformless amounts to saying that the
that was a fixture of Documents. universeis somethinglike a spideror a gob of
The "Critical Dictionary" was a series spittle.
of "entries" in each issue of the journal,
sometimes signed, sometimes anony- Informe does not mean "formless," ex- "Flies on flypaper"
mous, on a wide range of topics: for in- actly, and Krauss and Bois often ac- JA Boffard. From
stance, the October I929 issue featured knowledge this by leaving the word in Documents 1:6 (1929)

French, and by using a range of words to and represents the artist's"inner being,"
translate it: "formless," "formlessness," the Formlessexhibit allows us to see the
"bad form," "form-which-is-also-the- ways Pollock's work seeks liberation
transgression-of-form,""unformed." The from such concerns: yielding to gravity,
authors stress that informeis not the op- allowing trash and ephemera into the
painting, dripping and throwing paint
Georges Bataille's article on the big toe down onto a canvas rather than painting
with a brush.
was accompanied by grotesquely
The clearest example of the informeat
enlarged photos of human toes that are work, though, might be Giacometti's re-
markable 1930 sculpture SuspendedBall.
startling above all in the way they A round ball is suspended over a banana-
don't look like anything. like wedge: the eroticism is unmistak-
able, yet unsettling. Maurice Nadeau de-
posite of form-informe does not intro- scribed its reception in surrealist circles
duce a binary opposition that divides the in Paris: "Everyone who has seen this
world into neat pairs like form/matter, object function has felt a violent and
male/female, life/death, inside/outside, indefinable emotion doubtless having
vertical/horizontal. The formless is "a some relation with unconscious sexual
first principle that defines what is ex- desires. This emotion has nothing to do
cluded from Western metaphysics." It with satisfaction, but rather with irrita-
does not designate a category; rather, it tion, the kind provoked by the disturbing
indicates the way categories are undone. perception of a lack."In the entry called
Informeis a declassifying process, a ma- "Part Object," Krauss and Bois charac-
neuver "that serves to bring things down terize the sculpture'stask:its "pulse" (the
in the world." imagined swing of the ball over the
This principle, or anti-principle, be- wedge), though erotic, never settles into
comes an unexpectedly rich lens through a simple opposition of recognizably mas-
which Krauss and Bois revise the as- culine and feminine objects. Instead, it
sumptions of modernist art criticism. offers a "shifting identity of organs," as
They place Jackson Pollock's Full Fathom the ball and the wedge both seem al-
Five, for example, next to Claes Olden- ternately masculine and feminine. As
burg's Sculpturein the Formof a FriedEgg, the authors describe it, "the labial form
a juxtaposition that-because "a fried of the wedge is stridently phallic" while
egg lies flat in the pan," as Bois puts it- the ball, "the active, presumably mascu-
makes visible the particularities of Pol- line element of the work, in its cloven
lock's compositional process (the trash, roundness, is yieldingly vaginal." Krauss
"Big toe, male cigarette butts, and keys embedded in and Bois link this "migration" or "alter-
subject, 30 years the painting; its own flat origins on the ation" of a putative sexual opposition to
old" floor of Pollock's studio).While Green- the "round phallicism" of Lygia Clark's
From
J.A. Boiffard. berg's formalist reading of Pollock de- kinetic sculpture from the late I96os,
Documents 1:6
(1929). Collection
scribes his work in terms of a painterly Nostalgia of the Body. The function of
LucienTreillard,Paris "mirage" that accesses a "pure visuality" such art, they argue, is to defamiliarize

ok'ii\ .

"Big toe, male
subject, 30 years
old"
J.A. Boiffard.From
Documents 1:6
(1929). Musee National
d'Art Moderne, Paris

the senses, to undermine the affective ity of theAvant-Gardeand OtherModernist
value we would normally ascribe to the Myths and The Optical Unconscious,will
body, forcing us to look at the body "as find echoes in the present project. In ad-
though from outside." This art is informe, dition, some touchstones and exemplary
not because it is without form, but be- works are approached more than once,
cause form itself renders parts of the analyzed from different directions in dif-
body "impersonal but permutational." ferent sections of Formless.This doesn't
Formless:A User'sGuidelacks much of usually turn tedious, though: it affords
the visual force of the exhibition it was variant "uses" of the same object, and it
designed to accompany, but it offers a allows the catalogue itself to be "used"
bold elaboration of the argument of the in ways a sequentially organized text
project.The book is composed of twenty- cannot. Each entry closes with references
four alphabetized (and plentifully illus- to "synonym" entries elsewhere, and the
trated) entries organized into four sec- book envelops itself.
tions, each highlighting one aspect of the As in the "Critical Dictionary," the
informe.The sections are meant to be tone and strategy vary greatly from
polemical, not exhaustive: they confront essay to essay: some are in-depth cri-
what Kraussand Bois consider to be the tiques of single artists or works ("Hori-
primary myths of high modernism. In zontality" on Pollock; "Part Object" on
the place of modernist criticism's sepa- Giacometti; "Ray Guns" on Oldenburg;
ration between space and time, they es- "Threshole" on Robert Smithson and
pouse an uncertain "Pulse." Against the Gordon Matta-Clark; "No to .. Joseph
claim that all matter can be qualified, Beuys"); some are position-pieces on
they turn to "Base Materialism," Ba- theoretical topics ("Dialectic";"Gestalt";
taille's exploration of low matter, matter "Pulse"; "Uncanny"; "Yo-Yo"); some
beyond resemblance, irrecuperable into are explications that track the terms dear
any form. To combat the structuralorder to Documentsand to Bataille's project of
of systems, whether architectural, aes- "heterology" ("Base Materialism";"En-
thetic, or philosophical, they focus on tropy";"Sweats of the Hippo"); some are
"Entropy."Against the humanist tradi- more or less anecdotal revisionist art his-
tion of modern Western art, which pre- tory ("Cadaver";"Moteur"; "No to...
sumes the verticality of the viewing sub- the Informee"; "Olympia"). Krauss'sbril-
ject standing before a hung painting, they liant concluding essay, "The Destiny
look for instances of "horizontalization" of the Informe," distances the book's
when that axis tips, or collapses. project from the celebrated "Abject Art"
Bois's comment in the introduction of artists like Mike Kelley and Cindy
that the "Critical Dictionary" in Docu- Sherman. In a shrewd critique of Julia
ments "does not rule out redundancy" Kristeva and LauraMulvey, Kraussshows
can equally be applied to the entries in how theories of the abject (which often
Formless:A User's Guide. Any reader fa- claim a root in Bataille's work) usually
miliar with the work of Bois and Krauss, end only in an all-too-predictable return
especially Krauss'sessaysin The Original- of the repressed. In the work of these

Alberto Giacomietti, critics, Krauss argues, so-called disgust visual relationship that we can know in
Suspended Ball. 1930.
1999Artists Rights pictures drop the veil only to show yet everydaylife, as well as in our experienceof
Societ (ARS), New again "another veil, another signified: art. My hypothesiswill be that Documents
York/ADAGP, Paris
the wound as woman." Rather than seek allowed GeorgesBataille to put the notion
the "meaning" of abjection, Bataillelooks of resemblanceto a theoreticaland practical
for the waste or excess innate in any sys- test-an experiment,a work, a metamor-
tem of meaning: "the stuff that is no phosis of radicalalterationand redefinition.
longer recyclable by the great processes
of assimilation, whether intellectual (as The phrase "formless resemblance"
in science or philosophy) or social (as in seems oxymoronic and is perhaps poorly
the operations of the state)." This can't chosen: how can a resemblance be with-
be the Kristevan abject:as with Suspended out form? If the universe is informe,and
Ball, it is instead what "alters"(to use an- "resembles nothing," then how can it be
other of Bataille's favored terms), what described in terms of what it resembles?
swings undecided between binaries like Still, Didi-Huberman's patient investiga-
high and low, male and female, without tion of Documents is remarkable for its
ever coming to rest, without ever giving attention to montage in the pages of the
the solace of signification. journal. Photographs and illustrationsin-
teract and clash with the articles and
with each other to create "a stupefying
The year before the Informe:mode d'em- network of relations [mise-en-rapports],
ploi exhibit opened in Paris, the French implicit or explosive contacts, true and
art historian Georges Didi-Huberman false resemblances, false and true dissem-
a
published significantly different analy- blances."
sis of Documents,entitled La ressemblance By focusing on the limited domain of
informe,ou le Gai-SavoirvisuelselonGeorges iconography (the ways the journal "treats
Bataille. Didi-Huberman's study builds images like terms") rather than the con-
on his concern with the problem of re- ceptual processes sketched in Formless:A
semblance, which he has elaborated over User's Guide, Didi-Huberman offers a
the last decade in a well-respected series more complete account of the inner
of books. Closely attentive to the con- workings of Documentsthan Krauss and
struction of Documents, and in partic- Bois, but sacrifices their theoretical force
ular to its use of photography, Didi- and precision. For Didi-Huberman, the
Huberman reads the figural politics of word documents points not just to the flat-
the journal through what he calls its ness of facts or to objects devoid of artis-
dynamics of "formless resemblance."The tic value, but more precisely to the re-
"task" of the journal, he argues, is lationships between facts and objects. He
tracks the echoes and progressions of
to put into play (practically)and to put in images through the journal with sensi-
in a singlemovement, tivity and dexterity. Didi-Huberman's
question(theoretically),
the notionof resemblance-that is, the notion analysis suggests that the journal works
of boththe mostevidentand the mostbaffling form, undoing resemblance by subject-

f
A 6

ing juxtaposed images to a formal trans- alectics.The argument turns on a small
gression, or "tearing." Like Krauss and phrase at the end of that brief definition
Bois, Didi-Huberman argues that the of "Formless" in the December I929
Documents collaborators found a path Documents.It is hard not to notice some-
away from surrealism: thing strange in Bataille's last sentence:
"To affirm on the contrary that the uni-
The "document" is not a dreamvision:it is a verse resembles nothing and is onlyform-
real vision-a mouth too concreteto com- less amounts to saying that the universe
pose a "goodfigure,"a toe too little dreamed- is something like a spider or a gob of
about to provide a "high"seduction-that spittle."Ironically,Bataille proposes a rad-
searchesin a certainpresentation or visual ical alterity ("the universe resembles
constructionto producea "materialinsubor- nothing") by using a metaphor ("the
dination"in the image,a symptomcapableof universe is something like . ."). Is this
breakingthe screen(the apparatusof repres- just sloppy, a slip, or something more
sion) of representation. significant? Didi-Huberman claims that
it is an "operation" that installs a "dialec-
There are two main disagreementsbe- tic" of resemblance and nonresemblance
tween Didi-Huberman and Krauss and in the very workings of the informe.In
Bois. On the one hand, Krauss and Bois Documents, this process is worked out
reject Didi-Huberman's tendency to through montage: images are thrown
read the informesimply as deformation. into positions of similarity and then into
In the service of their taxonomic pro- juxtapositions of "cruel" or grotesque
ject, they stress the radical alterity that nonresemblance.
Bataille's definition of the formless en- The problem for Didi-Huberman is
tails.The stakesare obvious: if the informe that a dialectic implies a synthesis. As is
were only form bent out of shape, then well known, Bataille was averse to di-
it would preserve the binary oppositions alectics precisely because he was uncom-
of form and matter, male and female, fortable with the notion of synthesis.
high and low, that Krauss and Bois are Even in Documents,he uses the word on
trying to put into question. The formless only one occasion, in a 1930 essay called
would represent not a fundamental am- "Deviations of Nature." It is a rather un-
bivalence, but simply something shock- certain example: "If there can be a ques-
ing or unpleasant:it would be relegated tion of a dialectic of forms," Bataille
to the status of an exception, an ugly de- writes, "it is evident that it is necessary
viation-a bad hair day. For Krauss and to take such deviations of nature into ac-
Bois, this is hardly consonant with what count." He concludes the essay with a
Bataille would come to call "heterol- tangential reference to a "future film" of
ogy," which searches not just for the the great Russian director Sergei Eisen-
chinks in a system, but for its waste or stein (who was scheduled to lecture in
excess. Paris that year: two issues later, Docu-
At the same time, Krauss and Bois re- ments did indeed publish stills from The
J.A. Boiffard. From
Documents 2:5 ject Didi-Huberman's claim that Ba- General Line, with a short introduction
(1930) taille's work is, in the end, a kind of di- by Georges Henri Riviere).Working from

.. :., _ .:..
..:....
...'.

Top: "Trophy head, this rather skimpy foundation, Didi- lent pairs, than in any form of transcen-
Jivaro Indians Huberman concludes that there is a dence, synthesis, or upheaval (the
(Fcuador)" resonance between Bataille's work and Hegelian aufhebung).Bataille is fascinated
Bottom: "Trophy
Eisenstein's dialectical theory of film by the idea of "alteration," because it
head, Mundrucu
Indians (Brazil)"
montage, and proceeds to read the jux- suggests an operation that shuttles be-
tapositional "work" of images in the jour- tween two terms; Bataille imagines an
R. vor
R. von Koenigsw)ald.
Kcnigswald.
FromDocuments 2:6 nal through this connection. analysisthat would focus on hemorrhag-
(1930) Conceding that it would be far- ing or ulceration within a binary,instead
fetched to claim that Bataille was propos- of conjuring a resolution.
ing some kind of synthesis as the result * * *
of his "dialectic of resemblance," Didi-
Huberman still clings stubbornly to the Still, there may be one sense in which
idea, performing complex and unwieldy Didi-Huberman's excellent close reading
gymnastics to make it fit. Instead of of Documents complements Formless:A
thesis-antithesis-synthesis, he proposes a User'sGuide. Krauss and Bois have cho-
dialectic of "thesis-antithesis-symptom" sen to ignore what is almost always
or "form-antiform-symptom" to de- described as the most innovative and
scribe Documents.(The "symptom," one provocative part of the Documentsproj-
supposes, would be the result or trace of ect: the journal's linking of ethnography
the deformation of resemblance. But and Western artistic practice. Documents
was subtitled "Doctrines-Archeologie-
Bataille looks for the waste or excess Beaux Arts-Ethnographie,"and then (af-
innate in any system of meaning: "the stuff ter the fourth issue) "Archeologie-Beaux
Arts-Ethnographie-Varietes"; surely the
that is no longer recyclable by the great subtitle's most striking announcement is
the marriage of dissident surrealism and
process of assimilation."
high art with the burgeoning French dis-
given the term's psychoanalytic baggage, cipline of ethnography. One could easily
this is certainly another unfortunate argue that Documentswas crucial to the
choice of words.) The final third of La institutionalization of ethnography in
ressemblance informeoffers a series of "al- France. Many contributors had studied
ternate" dialectics in an attempt to sociology with Marcel Mauss in the
squirm out of the Hegelian model: an 1920s, and many would play central roles
"impossible" or "heretical" dialectic, an in the field in the next decade: Leiris,
Adorno derived "negative" dialectic, a Marcel Griaule, and Andre Shaeffner all
"regressive"dialectic, an "alterating" di- traveled to Africa on the Mission Dakar-
alectic, a "tangled [enchevetree]"dialectic, Djibouti.
the supposedly "concrete" dialectic of Denis Hollier has argued that the al-
Eisenstein-a series that only serves to liance of ethnographers and dissident
demonstrate Didi-Huberman's uneasi- surrealists was possible because of a
ness with the term itself. As Krauss and common "critique of the commodity,"
Bois point out, Bataille is more interested specifically of exchange value. Ethnog-
in what Bois calls "scission," in ambiva- raphers writing in Documentselaborated

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From Documents 2:6
(1930)
ELLINIOTON
orcheatre, un orchestre i Ia diable, il eat vrai,
recrutd chague fois qugiu jouait. 11 nteut vraiment
un orcheatre compoas de cing musiciena fixes
qu'en 1922. date i laguelle ii fit sea debuts is New
York chez Barons, oi ii passa l'6tr%II devait s'ins-
taller en fin d'ann&e au coin de Ia 49Wrue ct de
Broadway, au Kentucky Club oit ii passa cinq ans,
dirigeant six musiciens.
II se d6plaqait pendant l'ett, faisant des tournces
(dancetours)dans ie Massachussets. A cette dpoque,
iifaisait 6galement du vaudeville (cest en effet sous
ce nom qu'on deaigne aux Etata-Usiis le music-
hall d'attractiona, genre Empire ou Alhambra).
C'est de 1927 seulement gue date 1lentr& de
Duke Ellington au fameux Cotton Club de Harlem.
1I y entre avec l'orchestre qui devait consacrer
as rdputation mondiale :
Duke ELINGr-roN (pianiste et chef),
Sonny CHEER (singing drummer),
Arthur WETSEL(Ire trompette).
Charles WILLIAMS (2' trompette),
Fred JENKINS (3' trsmrpette).
Fred CGv (banjo),
Harry CAMNEY (ler saxophone).
Albany BIGARD (2e saxophone),
81 Edgecoinbe Avenue, Harlem. Un bolide John HODCES (31' saxophone),
gui reasemble ih un ascenseur m'emporte
Joe NAN-TON (Ier trombone),
bruaquement an dlixi&me itage. Je sonne. Juan TIZOL (2' trombone),
Une classiqjuc mamnwv noire m'ouvre ia
Weilman BRAND (contrehasse).
porte : c'est Mine Ellington in-re. is vaia voir
Bien gue Ia place prise par Duke Ellington au
si mon fils dort encore : ine dit-elle. je regarde Cotton Club repreaente la partie Ia plus importante
ma inontre iI eat 5 heures de I'aprCs-midi. de son activitC, 1I faut rgalement mentionner la
Au bout d'un quart d'heurc, Duke apparait, i
part qu"il a prise i diverses revues telles gue
derni ensomnmellr- Vous venez, [Ile dit-il, m'inter-
Show) Girl de Gershwin qui fiat jou6e au Ziegfield
viewer hbour Documents. ie sais gtle Georges Theatre (I). Dana one scene de cette revue intitulrEe:
Ilenri Rivcire airne la pr6cision. nous allons done
le Clud Caprice,if faisait one exhibition riorcheatre
pro6ider par urdre.
puis accomnpagnaitun nuinro de Clayton, Jackson
II mc dit avee Ia plus grande aimplicitd qguilest et Durante.
nC i Washinrgoin (D. C.) le 229 avril 1899. Henry
Plus rdemment, Duke Ellington a donn6 quinze
Grant li enacigna Ia in-usique. II apprit un peu
conritfrs avec Maurice Chevalier au Fulson Theatre.
d'harnionie inais pas le piano : Miss Klingale lui
Enfin la Socidte Radio vient de 1lengager pour
(irindigua seulement lea premiers rudiments. II
ni'en fit pas rnoins sea ddbuts coinme pianiate pen-
jouer dans ton film d'Amosan Andy.
riantla guerre :I trava'llait alors dans un orchestre (1) Conunie 'I serait souhaitablequ'un parel spectacle
dirig6 par IlT*homas. iAtdonntiaux Parisiens,gui n'ontrien eu i se rsettresours
Pru cdi ternps apr5s. ii dirigeait lui-mnme un Is dent depuis" Blackbirds'

a conception of the museum that would, ernism and primitivism. In her seminal
in Hollier's words, essay "No More Play," Krauss writes
that Documents'use of non-Western art
not automaticallyreduceexhibitedobjectsto was "hard,"not soft or aestheticized. The
theirformal,aestheticproperties,an exhibition journal deployed the primitive "in an
spacefromwhichuse-valuewould not be ex- expanded sense (although with close
cluded,but ratherone in which it would not attention to ethnographic detail), to
only be represented,but exhibited, demon- embed art in a network that, in its phil-
strated.They would like to undo the opposi- osophical dimension, is violently anti-
tion which dictatesthat one uses a tool and idealist and antihumanist." Comment-
looks at a painting. ing on Giacometti's early sculpture, she
writes categorically: "Only through this
Former surrealists like Bataille and expanded conception of the 'job' that
Leiris, in their search for an inexchange- primitivismperformed for the dissident
able real, were more fascinated by the surrealists can we think about the bril-
"ritual, cultic (rather than economic or liance of a sculpture like SuspendedBall
instrumental)" forms of use-value that or adjudicate among the claims about
they considered proper to "primitive" the 'source' of InvisibleObject."Yetin the
societies. From either perspective, the "Part Object" essay in Formless:A User's
work of Documentsis clearly two-fold, Guide, this argument has been com-
cohering precisely around the tension pletely excised.
between "Ethnographie" and "Beaux Bois has written less on the topic,
Arts"; the journal investigated the way although his Art in America review of
the two terms "rub" or "irritate" each William Rubin's 1984 MOMA exhibi-
other, as Didi-Huberman writes. He calls tion," 'Primitivism'in 20th Century Art:
the journal a "double critical interven- Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern,"
tion," designed at once "to divert the was one of the most interesting essays
aestheticism of artistic forms in general about that controversy. Arguing against
through an encounter with the'most un- the emphasis in the MOMA show on
settling'facts;but also to divert the posi- so-called affinities between primitive art
tivism of ethnographic facts through an and European modernist art, Bois sug-
encounter with, even aformaljuxtaposi- gested that, in place of the exhibit's def-
tion with, the 'most irritating' contem- erence to morphological similarities be-
porary works of art." tween individual pieces (a resemblance
Krauss and Bois also attempt to un- in shape or texture, a European imitation
dermine the dichotomy between "form" of the form of a "tribal" object), the
and "fact" through an account of the curators might have looked for concep-
"tasks" performed by art-a notion of tual connections.Why not consider the
conceptual "use-value." But the general places, Bois asked, where Western and
silence of Formless:AUser'sGuide on the non-Western art-through formal strat-
question of primitivism is clearly delib- egies, such as the twisting or tilting of
erate, since both Bois and Krauss have elements in a sculpture-produce the
written extensively elsewhere on mod- same effect:transformone body part into

Bambara sacred another,frustrateexpectationsof resem- that Didi-Huberman explicates so well.
animal, Mali blanceor form.Such an emphasison the Rather than "irritating" the Beaux Arts,
Musee de I'Homme, "tasks"or operations art can perform, using "ethnographic data to transgress
Paris
the waysit createsmeaning,has obvious the neat boundaries of the art world
resonancewith Documents.Yet thereis no with its categories based on form" (as
mention of this link in Formless:AUser's Krausswrites in "No More Play"), Form-
Guide. less:A User'sGuide reinstates by omission
Although it seems unfortunate to that old treacherous distinction between
relinquishthe ground of "primitivism" "high" and "primitive" art-and worse,
to previous grand statements like the it defers to some of those "neat bound-
MOMA show,the choice not to engage aries" between form and content. Its si-
in what might seem a peripheralargu- lence implies that "non-Western art" is
ment is perfectly understandable.But essentially exhausted by its content-
such a decision has consequences:the that the work of the informecannot be
omissionof ethnographyfrom Formless: traced there. Indeed, the gallery pam-
A User'sGuideleaves Kraussand Bois phlet given to visitors at the original
speechlessin the face of the antinomies Pompidou Center exhibit (unsigned,

though not written by Krauss and Bois) Krauss and Bois share with Didi-Hu-
takes this point even further, by reading berman an anxiety that this passage is
the project's argument against reduc- somehow contradictory, that Bataille
tionist art criticism as an implicit polemic slips and says the informelooks like some-
against themes of "otherness" in con- thing. This is perhaps due to a mistrans-
temporary art.Part of the importance of lation. Krauss and Bois translatethe cru-
Formless:A User's Guide, the pamphlet cial sentence as:
suggests, is to intervene in the "question
of the subject," for "it is in the name of Thusformlessis not only an adjectivehaving
a return to the subject that the formalist a given mieaning,but a term that serves to
and modernist account of modern art bringthingsdown in the world,generallyre-
is now contested. New generations of quiringthat each thing have itsform. [Ainsi
artistsclaim to be the expression of sex- informe n'est pas seulement un adjectif
ual or ethnic minorities." Krauss and ayant tel sense mais un terme servant a
Bois do not explicitly endorse this con- declasser, exigeant generalement que
clusion, but neither does Formless:A chaque chose ait sa forme.]
User's Guide close off such an "opera-
tion." Given Bataille'sincisive critique of Iain White's translation, offered in the
the pretensions of the Western museum EnyclopaediaAcephalica(which offers the
space and its social uses, Krauss and Bois entire "Critical Dictionary" in En-
give up a great deal in ignoring this "ir- glish), is better: "In this way formless is
ritating" area of Documents,inhabiting not only an adjective having such and
the Parisian museum as though form such a meaning, but a term serving to
were the only thing at stake. declassify,requiring in general that every
thing should have a form." It is not "the
world" that requires that -things have a
Let us return to the "Critical Dictio- form. Rather, this is the task of the word
nary" entry for "Formless" one last time. informeitself:the word insults what it des-
The pitfalls of Didi-Huberman's reading ignates, brings it down, by rudely assert-
are apparent,but it should be pointed out ing that everything has a form butyou. In
that Kraussand Bois misread the passage other words, the "operation" of this term
in significant ways as well. At one point is not exactly conceptual or aesthetic:
Krausstries to paraphraseBataille, claim- informeindicates an explicitly social de-
ing that "the world refuses to take on the classification. "What it designates has
unity of a set of gestalts, resembling in- no rights in any sense and gets itself
stead the inchoateness of the blob of spit squashed everywhere, like a spider or an
or the crushed spider." But there is no earthworm"; what is called informe is
crushedspider in the original definition; what is allowed no rightto form-what
on the contrary, the informeis "like a we call hideous or comic, like a spider
spider or an earthworm" not in its mor- or a hippo, as Bataille writes in another
phology (whether crushed or climbing Documentsessay.In this sense, it might be
up a wall) but because it "gets itself more helpful to compare the passage to
squashed everywhere." one like the following, a quote from a

French intellectual vehemently defend- Jacques Fray's exclusive interview with
ing the mission of colonialism in the Duke Ellington in the bandleader'shouse
same period: in Harlem; and even accounts of the lat-
est African American literary and politi-
I believe that the right of a people to self- cal journals, like Alain Locke's Opportu-
determinationis as chimericalandfrighten- nity andW. E. B. Du Bois's Crisis.
ing as the abstractandformless [informe] At the same time, Documentspartici-
rightinvokedby the conqueringanarchist. pated to some degree in the "primi-
tivism" of the vogue negre endemic in
Documentsis in part a "war machine" in Paris between the wars. As the work of
defense of what society chooses to ex- Tyler Stovall andJames Clifford has made
clude or oppress as "formless." clear, European modernists often re-
It is possible to argue, in fact, that the gardedjazz as a representation of a prim-
most intriguing part of the journal is its itive Africa, and some contributors to
attention to the growing movement of Documents were not exempt from this
black intellectuals who began to claim tendency. In a "Critical Dictionary" en-
some of those "rights to self-determi- try called "Civilization," Leiris writes
nation" in the interwar period. But crit- about the most successful African Amer-
ics working on Documentsvery seldom ican revue to visit Paris. Headlined by
note this attention, which was constant, Adelaide Hall, Elisabeth Welch, Aida
if peripheral. By the late 192os, Bataille, Ward, and the dancer U. S. Thompson,
Leiris,Riviere, and Shaeffnerwere all fre- the Blackbirdstouring show spent three
quenting jazz clubs like Le Grand Duc months in Paris in the summer of 1929.
and Bricktop's in Montmartre. Riviere, a Leiris waxes rhapsodic about the "prim-
moderately accomplished musician, had itive" and unspoiled nature of this so-
collaborated with black artists and intel- phisticated New York production, re-
lectuals like Josephine Baker and Kojo gretting that European life is "so dull and
Tovalou Houenou as early as 1924, and ugly in comparison with these creatures,
Schaeffner's 1926 Le Jazz was the first who are as touching as the trees." "Re-
book-length study of the music. This vues like the Black Birds,"he continues,
fascination with black modern expres- "take us to a point on the other side of
art, to a point of human development
What is called informe is what is allowed where that bastardson of the illegitimate
love of magic and free play has not yet
no right to form-what we call hideous or
been hypertrophied."
comic, like a spider or a hippo. Critics like Hollier, Krauss, and Bois
understandably shy away from such un-
sion is well represented in the journal: seemly moments, but they sometimes re-
there are reviews of the latest records by tain the same assumptions-Hollier, for
King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Ed- instance, writes about "the primitive arts
die South and his Alabamians; rave re- (to which jazz belongs)." Formless:A
views of films like Hallelujah and New User's Guide relegates all this to a foot-
York musical reviews like Hot Chocolates; note, mentioning that "as many critics

Top left: "The
angel Gabriel,
Spanish school,
twelfth century,
fragment from a
miniature
(Vigliano codex,
Escorial Library
[Spain])" Top right:
"The negro actor
Wesley Hill as the
angel Gabriel in
The Green
Pastures..."
Bottom: "Bessie
Love as an angel"
FromDocuments 2:6
(1930)
Following page
Top: "... a vile rite

of initiation
have remarked, a certain ethnological same issue. Bataille writes (the translation practiced by some
naivete dominates Bataille's texts at the is by Iain White): negroes... (Nandi

people, Tanganyika
time." But I wonder whether Bataille's
plains [Tanzania].
few and oblique discussions of black ex- Uselessto seek any longeran explanationfor
Colorado
pression like jazz indicate that his under- colouredpeople suddenly breaking,with an
Expedition, 1929)"
standing differed from Leiris's. Bataille incongruousextravagance,an absurdstutter- Bottom: ".. . space
himself wrote the "Critical Dictionary" ers'silence:we arerottingaway with neuras- can become
entry called "Black Birds" in the Sep- thenia underour roofs,a cemeteryand com- one fish eating
tember I929 issue of Documents,and it mongraveof so muchpatheticrubbish;while another"
is a bit perplexing next to the roman- the blackswho (inAmericaand elsewhere)are FromDocuments 2:1
ticism of Leiris's "Civilization" in the civilizedalongwith us and who, today,dance (1930)

I i~~~~~~~~~~~~
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fil~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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9'~~~~~~~~~~~~6
O A;
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....... .. ......~..'*
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b 3~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.......
. .. ......
.
. . . . . . . . .. .. .
f
. .... . ..
. .. .... .. .
....... . ..1
h~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .. . .. . . . .
. ....

andcryout,aremarshy emanations of thede-
who
composition are setaflame abovethisim-
mensecemetery:
so, in a vaguelylunar Negro
night,we arewitnessing an intoxicatingde-
mentiaof dubiousandcharming will-o'-the-
wisps,writhingand yelling like burstsof
Thisdefinition
laughter. willspareusanydis-
cussion.
Bataille'sfew statements on the topic re-

veal his understanding of jazz as a phe-
nomenon of modernity.He doesn't link
jazz to the primitive, as Leiris does, but
instead focuses on "the blacks who (in
America and elsewhere) are civilized
along with us ... ." For Bataille, black
expression does not represent a return
to primitive social organization. It is the
expression of people living in modern
society, people who are, in his words,
"comparativelydecomposed, amorphous,
and even violently expelled from every
form."
In his famous unpublished essay "The
Use-Value of D. A. F. de Sade," written
just after the Documentsperiod and the
break with Breton, Bataille goes so far as
to envision this "expelled" or formless
element of society as possessing a revo-
lutionary social potential: tion asfrom all oppression,representin rela- "Mask. Cote
tion to heterologynot only thepossibilitybut d'lvoire (Liberian
One must broadlytake into account,in such the necessityof an adequateorganization.All border)"
A. M. PierreLoeb.From
aforecast, the probableinterventionof com- formations that have ecstasyandfrenzy as Documents 2:6 (1930)
munitiesof color[elements de couleur] in theirgoal (the spectaculardeath of animals,
the generalculture.To the extent that blacks partialtortures,orgiasticdances,etc.)will have
participatein revolutionary emancipation,the no reasonto disappearwhen a heterological
attainmentof socialismwill bring them the conceptionof humanlife is substitutedforthe
possibilityof all kindsof exchangeswith white primitive conception.... It is only starting
people, but in conditionsradicallydifferent from this collusionof Europeanscientificthe-
from those currentlyexperiencedby the civi- ory with blackpractice[la pratique negre]
lized blacks [negres civilises] ofAmerica. that institutionscan developwhichwill serve
Now communitiesof color[les collectivites as outlets (with no other limitations than
de couleur], onceliberatedfromall supersti- thoseof humanstrength)forthe urgesrequired

B.,,^fa ................ ' ... ,.' S .......
m! ...... .. .
: :. ..... r... .
.... . ... .. .... ..

".../.
.s
"Carnival mask"
J.-A. Boiffard. Ftomr

Documents 2:2
(1930). Musee National
d'Art Moderne, Paris

"Carnival mask"
J.-A. Boiffard.From
Documents 2:2
(1930). Collection
LucienTreillard,Paris
todaybyworldwide andbloody that Bataille deliberately avoids primi-

society'sfiery
Revolution. tivist evocations in order to describe the
significance of those "civilized blacks"in
Kraussand Bois offer part of this passage places like NewYork and Paris. Bataille
in the footnote in Formless:A User's retains some of the nostalgia for ritual
Guide as evidence of Bataille'sproblem- ("ecstasy and frenzy") that the dissident
atic "primitivism." There is obviously a surrealistsin Documentsshared, but he is
bizarre quality to his evocations of "for- able to see a different "operation" in the
mations that have ecstasy and frenzy as "bursts of laughter" of a show like the
their goal (the spectacular death of ani- Blackbirdsrevue. The latter is not primi-
mals, partial tortures, orgiastic dances, tivism, but a modern critique of West-
etc.)," but this somewhat rootless "tribal" ern society. It is the sound of the "ex-
reference is in tension with the more cretion of unassimilable elements." As he
concrete allusions to "elements of color" writes earlier in the essay, "a burst of
in Western society, where Bataille seems laughter is the only imaginable and
to find a potential for revolution. Placing definitely terminal result-and not the
this passage next to the Documentspiece means-of philosophical speculation."
on Blackbirds,it seems possible to suggest In other words, for Bataille, jazz is

__ _
..--.. ._..1
e.S, .
rf :^ . ''.:I: 8
wf Es>1
I.
-
-.;
r -*.
s r
. l
I
*iSEEMil
"Peasants in a c-;.
- .: . I
L
.
Lo
countryside
procession, trying
to make it rain.
From The General
Line, 1929.
Directed by S.M.
Eisenstein and G.
Alexandrov.
Cameraman:
Edouard Tisse"
From.Documents 2:4
(1930)
neither an atavistic return to Africa or European, black expression is simul-

nor the swan song of a dying black folk taneously neither and both. "The blacks
culture. It is the particular informewhose who (in America and elsewhere) are
task is to undo the old binary of mod- civilized along with us and who, today,
ern and primitive. Heterology, in Ba- dance and cry out" in productions like
taille's conception, designates what ide- Blackbirds,are "marshy emanations of
alism (whether aesthetisicism, psycho- the decomposition who are set aflame
analysis, capitalism, or organized reli- above this immense cemetery"-that
gion) excludes. In the essay on Sade, song and dance, in other words, is the
Bataille suggests that black modern ex- "excretion" or waste produced by the
"Am6 Bourdon,
pression should be understood as het- system of Western civilization through
New Anatomical
erological. If the prevailing idealism of the process of assimilation.
Tables, 1675"
Western society between the world * * *
From Documents 2:6
wars relied on the myth of assimilation,
(1930)
black modern expression, for Bataille, Bataille did not extend this reading
identifies and pursues what this idealism of black modern expression in his work
rules out. Rather than being primitive in the I930s, when he turned away

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I

Josephine Baker in
her costume from
"La Folie du jour,"
at the Folies-
Bergere
CourtesyBryan
Hammond
from art and toward political activism between those intellectuals and Breton's
and then to the radicalsociology of the surrealist movement. Most of the selec-
College de Sociologie. Bataille seems tions come from two journals: Legitime
not to have known about the network Defense, the legendary, explosive man-
of blackintellectualsin Parisduringthe ifesto of surrealist, communist articles
sameperiod (despiteAntilleanacquain- and poems published by a small group of
tances like Monnerot). These intellec- Martinican students in Paris in June
tualswere beginning to negotiate with 1932; and Tropiques, the fascinatingjour-
the legaciesof the HarlemRenaissance, nal published in Martinique by Aime
the surrealistmovement, and interna- Cesaire,Suzanne Cesaire,and Rene Menil
tionalcommunism,in a streamof work (who had also participated in Legitime
that would lead indirectly to the for- Defense)from 1941 to I945. After docu-
mation of the Negritude movement by menting the 1941 meeting of Cesaire
Aime Cesaire and Leopold SedarSen- and Andre Breton in Fort-de-France,
Josephine Baker
and Georges Henri
ghor afterWorldWarII.With the pub- Richardson turns to a series of texts that
lication of Refusal of the Shadow: Sur- describe Breton's subsequent visit to
Riviere with
realism and the Caribbean, a promising Haiti in I945 and his encounter with
artifacts from the
Dakar-Djibouti
collection edited by translatorMichael radical young Haitian intellectuals there.
Mission Richardson,English-readingaudiences One strength of the collection is that
are now affordedcrucialtools for mak- it includes a number of ancillary essays
Lipnitzki.Museede
l'Homme,Paris ing such connections. that further our understanding of these
Refusalof the Shadowoffers documents materials,like Rene Menil's introduction
-many previouslyuntranslated-that to the 1978 reissue of LegitimeDefense,
allow us to rethinkthe ways Caribbean Jules Monnerot's "Of Certain Common
intellectuals began to reject the myth Characteristics of the Civilized Mental-
of assimilationand search for alterna- ity" (published in Le Surrealismeau Ser-
tives. Richardson has assembled texts vice de la Re'volutionjustafter the demise
relatingto what he callsthe "encounter" of LegitimeDefense),and Breton's intro-

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duction to the I947 edition of Aime roots of Negritude, Lilyan Kesteloot's
Cesaire's Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Na- 1961 Les ecrivainsnoirsde languefranfaise.
tal (which was initially published bilin- Many critics now feel that Kesteloot
gually by Brentano's in NewYork under overemphasized the importance of Legi-
the unfortunate title Memorandumon My time Defense at the expense of a wide
Martinique). range of black intellectual work in the
LegitimeDefense is a telling document I92os and I93 O (much of which was
of the time, not because it led directly unavailable to Kesteloot)-some more
to any lasting project-in fact, the reformist, and some more explicitly
planned Martinican Surrealist Group Marxist and anticolonial. In this broader
never came into being-but because of context, LegitimeDefenselooks much less
the violence of its break with traditions like a radical break and much more like
of reformist and assimilationist Carib- the loud, ratherhasty studentjournal that
bean intellectualism. The young stu- it was.
dents, including Etienne Lero, Rene
For Bataille, jazz is neither an atavistic
Menil, Jules Monnerot, and Pierre Yoy-
otte, announced a kind of class suicide, return to Africa nor the swan song of a dying
railing against the decrepitude of the
mulatto bourgeoisie in Martinique and black folk culture; its task is to undo the
the "misery" of Caribbean literature in old binary of modern and primitive.
French, and allying themselves explic-
itly with both communism and surre- Unfortunately Michael Richardson's
alism. As the opening "Declaration" pro- introduction accepts many of the ques-
claimed: tionable conclusions that emanated from
early work on Legitime Defense. This
We considerourselvestotallycommitted.We leads to a host of simple factual errors
are sure that otheryoung people like us are that make it difficult for the reader to
preparedto add theirsignaturesto ours and trace the origins of the journal. "There
. . refuseto becomepart of the surrounding seems little doubt," he claims, "that Le'-
ignominy.... Weriseup againstall thosewho gitime Defense was the first publication
don'tfeel suffocatedby this capitalist,Chris- in which colonized blacks collectively
tian, bourgeoisworld,to whichourprotesting sought to speak with their own authen-
bodies reluctantlybelong. ... We accept tic voices." Even in terms of French-
Marx's dialecticalmaterialism,freed of all language publications, this is far from ac-
misleadinginterpretation and victoriouslyput curate:Richardson ignores the wealth of
to the test of eventsby Lenin. In this respect, Francophone material that preceded the
we arereadyto acceptthe disciplinesuchcon- emergence of LegitimeDefense in jour-
viction demands. In the concreterealm of nals like Le MessagerDahomeen,Les Con-
means of human expression,we equallyun- tinents,La DepecheAfricaine,Le Paria,La
reservedlyacceptsurrealism,with which our Voixdes Negres, La Race Negre, and La Re- Le Tumulte Noir,
destiny in 1932 is linked. vue du Monde Noir. These journals, now 1927. 1999Artists
better known through the work of his- ts Soety ,

(ARA
New York/ADAGP,
The journal enjoys a prestige that was torians such as Philippe Dewitte, J. A. Paris
built up by the first major study of the Langley,Martin Steins, and J. S. Spiegler,

PabloPicasso,January
18, 1930. From
Documents 2:2
(1930). 1999 Estate
of PabloPicasso/Artists
RightsSociety(ARS),
I
New York I
all sought "authenticity," some with a Senegalese Lamine Senghor together

much more grounded radicalism than with their Vietnamese and North Afri-
the Legitime Defense group was ever to can counterparts, like Ho Chi Minh and
achieve. (Le Paria, for example, was the Hadj Ali.)
organ of the Union Intercoloniale-the Most distressing is Richardson's ne-
branch of the French Communist Party glect of La Revue du Monde Noir, the
that was founded in the early I920S bilingual journal edited by the Martini-
to foster anticolonial insurgency in the can Paulette Nardal and the Haitian Leo
French empire, and which brought Afri- Sajous.The Revue is simply indispensable
can radicals and labor organizers like the to an understanding of the genesis of

4oi. .
ks Wlor1^ 'p
. Of Top: Leonardo da
JBn4# -^ e Vinci, Homo ad

<^^i4-e
a_e..*i
* 5tj1 b'~~~dFfi
i, ,,ei~
2 t#kO
x)J.,*+-.ir,I
~ L*C
ta;-P
circulum, ca. 1487
Bottom left: Andre
Masson,
frontispiece from
the journal
Acephale, ca.
1936. "Man has
Pscaped his head
like the inmate
escaping prison."
Bottom right: S. M.
Eisenstein,
Exstasis. 1931
From La ressemblance
informe, ou le gai
savoir visuel selon
Georges Bataille by
Georges Didi-
Huberman (Paris:
Editions Macula)

Regnault,
Deviations of
Nature
From Documents 2:2
(1930)
Legitime Defense: the latter journal was predecessor.As critics like Regis Antoine
founded one month after the demise of have pointed out, however, in spite of its
the Revue by Etienne Lero (who, like virulent rhetoric, LegitimeDefense took
Monnerot and Menil, had contributed to some steps backward from the achieve-
it), and L6gitimeDefensewas explicitly de- ments of the Revue. Most significantly,
signed to combat what the young stu- Lgitime Defense relinquished the Revue's
dents considered to be the failings of its ambitious pan-Africanism, concentrating

only on Martinique-and even then, the a more profound influence on the de- "Attic:
younger journal failed to articulate a velopmentof Negritude than any other mannequins,
Martinican nationalism. These omissions text from the Harlem Renaissance(ex- debris, and dust"
From Documents 1:5
are not exceptional: Richardson neglects cept perhapsAlainLocke'sTheNew Ne- (1929)
to inform the reader that many articles gro).The section reproducedin Legitime
from both LegitimeDefenseand Tropiques Defensewas a passagefrom chapter16 in
(and all the poetry in both journals) have the novel, where the main character,
not been included in Refusal of the Ray,encountersa Martinicanstudent:
Shadow.(What Richardson does include,
he sometimes misplaces: the opening es- Ray had met a NegrostudentfromMar-
say in the section "Tropiques:Undermin- tinique,to whomthegreatestgloryof theis-
ing Vichy in Martinique" is Cesaire's landwasthattheEmpressJosephine wasborn
short essay "Panorama," which Refusal there.ThateventplacedMartinique aboveall
of the Shadow says appeared in Tropiques theotherislandsoftheAntillesin importance.
No. I in April 1941, but which was ac- "Idon'tseeanythingin thatforyou to be
tually published in TropiquesNo. IO in so proudabout,"saidRay.She wasnotcol-
February 1944.) ored."
Only one piece of fiction from Le'- "Oh no, but she was a Creole,and in
gitime Defensehas been omitted from Re- Martinique we areratherCreolethanNegro.
fusal of the Shadow,but that story was cru- Weareproudof theEmpressin Martinique.
cial to the formation of what has been Down therethe bestpeopleareverydistin-
termed the journal's "black surrealism." guishedandspeaka pureFrench,not any-
Legitime Defense originally included a thinglikethisvulgarMarseilles "
French.
passage translated from the Jamaican
writer Claude McKay's 1928 novel Banjo: Ray spendsthe next two pages putting
A Story withouta Plot-a book that had the alieneMartinicanstudentin his place,

Statuette with
wasJamaican,and his "American Negro"
raised arms,
Ray is-as is often forgotten-Haitian.
French Sudan
In LegitimeDefense,the passage seems to
FromMinotaure 2
(1933)
present the "etudiant antillais" learning
blackness socratically from the American
Negro, in an excerpt from an exemplary
text of the Harlem Renaissance: it is
a narrative of vanguardism and "influ-
ence" that is now taken for granted. But
when one thinks of this encounter as an
intra-Caribbeandialogue in the metropole,
when one considers what a Haitian per-
spective on Napoleon's Empress might
actually entail, this exchange takes on
different contours.
Banjo was translated by PaulVaillant-
Couturier, a Parisian deputy and Com-
munist Party official with close ties to
Communist-affiliated black pressure
groups in 1920s Paris like Lamine Seng-
hor's Comite de Defense de la Race Negre.
As the critic Martin Steins has pointed
out, the French version of Banjo played
a direct role in a subtle but crucial mis-
apprehension of the Harlem Renaissance
telling him that the only way to foster a in Lgitime Defense.Take the central pas-
"racial renaissance" is to "get down to sage of Ray's speech:
our racial roots to create it." In Legitime
Defense,then, the excerpt seems to serve We educatedNegroesare talkinga lot about
a clear didactic purpose, preaching re- a racialrenaissance.
And I wonderhow we're
spect for black folk culture, advocating to
going get it. On one side we'reup against
the models of the Irish cultural move- the world'sarrogance-a mighty cold hard
ment, Gandhi, and the Indian revolution, white stone thing. On the other the great
and praising the beauty of "native sweating army-our race.It's the common
African dialects." people,you know,whofurnish the bone and
The selection provides a number of sinew and salt of any raceor nation. (Em-
nuances that prove crucial to a full un- phasis added)
derstanding of the journals racialpolitics.
In Lgitime Defense, the passage culled The last two sentences are translatedinto
from Banjo receives the misleading title, French as:
"The Caribbean student seen by an
American Negro." [L'e'tudiantantillaisvu De l'autre,I'immensearmeedes travailleurs:
par un noir americain.]McKay, of course, notre race. C'est le proletariatqui fournit,

savez-vous,l'os,le muscleet le sel de toute Jacqueline Lenier: "Reinvented by the
raceou de toutenation.[On the other,the Other, the Black could no longer deny
greatarmy of workers:our race.It's the himself." It's as if the great and pure
proletariat,youknow,whofurnish thebone, accomplishments of surrealism single-
and
muscle, saltof anyrace
or nation.].(Em- handedly broke through the alienation of
phasisadded) Caribbean students. In any case, the char-
acterization of surrealism as a "Trojan
One can only conjecture about the Horse" is just as bizarre-Richardson
influence of this shift on the "fathers" seems to forget that these were scholar-
of Negritude,who were readingBanjoin ship students, children of the bourgeoisie
French. of Martinique, firmly in the channels of
There is no room for such subtleties establishment power before they con-
in Richardson'spresentationof Legitime ceived their revolt. If Legitime Defense
Defense.Indeed,the Caribbeanintellec- discovered anything in surrealism,it was
tualencounterwith the HarlemRenais- a way to break out of the prison house of
sancegoes unremarkedin thiscollection, assimilation. Indeed, this is the reason
which also neglects all such work in the journal was so controversial to the
Tropiques-includingAime Cesaire's July complacent bourgeoisie in Martinique,
1941 essay on the poetry of James Wel- which did not take the revolt of its scions
donJohnsonandJeanToomer.Insteadof lightly.
attemptingto give a balancedportrayal This initial bias in the construction of
of the elements that shapedthesejour- Refusal of the Shadow leads to a host of
nals,the essaystranslatedin Refusalof the problems. Because the collection is so
Shadoware chosen solely because they concerned with finding echoes of Bre-
reflect the influence of Breton's sur-
realism. The introduction emphasizes
Richardson'sagendaas well:
Surrealismwasinstrumental inproviding the

students[ofLegitimeDefense]withapoint
of departurefortheircritique
of colonialsoci-
etyfor,in breakingwith the ethicsof Euro-
peanculture,it oferedthema sortof Trojan
Horsein whichto enterthepreviouslyim-
pregnablewhitecitadel.In surrealism they
heardwhitemasterswith new voices,voices
thatrenounced thatmastery.
Bambara
The implicationthatBreton'ssurrealism sacrificial jug
is at the origin of all radicalCaribbean covered with
intellectualwork is strangeenough, but chicken blood.
the introduction reinforces it with a FromMinotaure 2

(1933)
wrong-minded quote from the critic

"French Sudan: ton's surrealism in Caribbean intellec- rapher,M. a M. Ngal, that he "found the
newly circumcised tual culture, the links between Legitime review [LegitimeDefense]to be quite pen-
children bringing etrated by assimilationism. These young
Defense,Cesaire's Tropiquesten years later,
offerings to a and the radical work in Haiti after the angry men were surrealists like the
phallic altar, which
war are taken for granted. There were French surrealists;communists like young
they have
decorated with certainly important moments of collab- French communists. They weren't black
oration in this period, including Bre- enough [assez negres]."For Cesaire, Le-
plants and
flowers." ton's essays on Cesaire orWifredo Lam, gitime Defense "knew how to critique"
From Documents 2:7
and Pierre Naville's French translation of but not how to "construct": Menil and
(1930) C. L. R.James's The BlackJacobins.But Lero castigated earlier generations of
Refusal of the Shadow ends up flattening Caribbean poets by waving the banner
out what is actually a complex field of of racial authenticity, but their own
influence and debate, in which surreal- poems are equally flaccid and even less
ism is only one term, and a hotly con- racially informed. Similarly,though they
tested one at that. offered grand pronouncements about
In fact, the debt of Cesaire's journal surrealism and communism, the authors
to LegitimeDefensehas long been in ques- had no idea how to negotiate the ten-
tion. In April 1967, Cesaire told his biog- sions between the two Internationals,

and no means to articulate their function allforms of imperialismand white banditry
in the environment of the Caribbean. . . . and secondly becauseof the profound
Refusal of the Shadow undertakes to affinities that exist betweensurrealismand
trace the "encounter" between French so-called'primitive"thought,both of which
surrealismand Caribbean intellectualism; seek the abolition of the consciousand the
accordingly, there are two sections, titled everyday,leadingto the conquestof revelatory
"An Encounter in Paris" and "An En- emotion.
counter from the Other Side." But the
first section is the material from lIgitime Richardson applauds Breton's admirable
Defense which expressly says that its caution about the "primitive,"and he in-
audience is "the children of the black sightfully notes that "what is at issue here
bourgeoisie" in Martinique (not French is not a one-way process of objecti-
surrealists).And the "other side" of the fication of the other, but the basis for a
encounter contains material Breton genuine recognition of the other's own
wrote while in Martinique, including the objectivity, albeit always framed by the
rhapsodic "Creole Dialogue" he com- aims of surrealist aspirations." But this
posed with Andre Masson. It seems that applause grows tiring when Richardson
Breton was more interested in tropical reads everything through the lens of
luxury than in sharing ideas with Ca- "surrealistaspirations,"defined dogmat-
ribbean writers: ically in the language of Breton's mani-
festos, without conceding that other as-
In the heart of theforest,how I love that ex- pirations might be equally interesting or
pression!Yes,our heartis at the centreof this politically worthwhile.
prodigious entanglement.What laddersfor The introduction proclaims, a bit ob-
dreamstheseimplacablelianasare!And these tusely,that it is "essential... to keep open
branches,what bows drawnfor the arrowsof the paths of communication while re-
our thoughts! specting questions of otherness and ex-
oticism." Perhaps the difficulty is Rich-
It seems that the "encounter" is mostly ardson'sadherence to the relativistnotion
anecdotal:we hear of Breton's fortuitous that the most one can achieve is to "ac-
discovery of an issue of Tropiquesin a
Fort-de-France bookstore, and his first By coining the term negritude, Cesaire
reading of Cesaire's Cahier.One searches
in vain for a sense of conceptualengage- claims the derogatory term negre without
ment between Andre Breton's work and ever overcoming its meaning: nigger.
the Caribbean journals'appropriation of
surrealism. One finds instead Breton's knowledge the differences between cul-
high-handed declarations of the impor- tures and, while refusing to elide them,
tance of nonwhite people to his own strive to establish routes of communica-
surrealistproject: tion between them." Again, there is an
odd insistence that these Caribbean intel-
Surrealismis alliedwithpeoplesof color,first lectuals,many of whom studied at the ex-
becauseit has alwaystaken theirside against clusive Ecole Normale Superieure in

Top left: "Small
black girl in New
York" Top right:
"Nanny in Noumea
[New Caledonia]"
Bottom left:
"Mademoiselle
Lovzeski" Bottom
right: "Sandouli,
chief of Kanala
[New Caledonia]"
From Documents 1:4
(1929)
. ... .. ..
.. :
...:.. * ;::
. ... '::..
::::

; : ..
Paris and were teasingly called "more pressiveculturalstrategies,on the other

French than the French," are essentially hand,it would be evident that Legitime
culturally different-when, especially Defense,even as it claims to follow the
with regard to Martinique, all the evi- rulesof the surrealistmovement,actually
dence points to thinkers who are more departssharplyfrom Breton'sposition.
syncreticthan anything, more concerned Tropiques would laterbecome interested
with mixture than with distinct bound- in the affinitiesbetween surrealismand
aries. But whatever the problem, Refusal "so-called 'primitive'thought" especially
of the Shadow often gives the impression through the work of the German ethno-
that Breton is the only one talking, and grapher Leo Frobenius (an old Documents
that the Caribbean's only role is to sup- contributor). But LegitimeDefenserejects
ply the admirably respected others. the association of Martinican existence
Richardson makes much of Breton's with the "primitive" or with "revelatory
1945 visit to Haiti, and he offers "Ap- emotion," thereby rejecting an ethno-
preciations" of the island by writers like graphic approach that might have al-
Hendrik Cramer, Pierre Mabille, and lowed insight into the syncretic mixture
Michel Leiris. Again, the purpose here of Roman Catholic and Dogon prac-
seems mainly to be hagiography: the tices in Afro-Caribbean religion, for
texts celebrate the lecture that Breton example.
gave in Port-au-Prince, claiming that it These issues are ultimately more sig-
was "partially responsible" for the rebel- nificant than that of Breton's influence
lion that toppled the government in in the Caribbean. Michael Richardson,
Haiti a few days later-although other like Breton himself, misses the signi-
accounts of the period, not mentioned ficance of work like Aime Cesaire's po-
here, downplay the importance of Bre- etry, quickly dismissing Negritude as an
ton's presence. (The book also ignores
the fact that Aime Cesaire spent seven ....
. .. } }
months in Haiti in 1944.) The collection :-...~ i .:{ :.
r,,.~ s.~:*
,;
..~~~~~~.. .. }s
does not offer an account of the con- W.e~~~ *. ;rE

.!*
'11sSgf *, !*r
, :: ;....
. Xs ....v.i
nected histories and cultures of Mar- _
*
a
i ia.i f .
Ai
........svs
~~~~~~~~~~~r
}@ii
tinique and Haiti; it focuses too narrowly . x.".

. ', ' % ~. 1',i_
on Breton's passage through each locale.
"Ouekoue, Cote
But why, for instance, did the Martini-
d'lvoire: Chief
can collaborators in LegitimeDefense re-
Mompo, whom
ject ethnography, whereas the influ- whites call 'the
ential Haitian writer Jean Price-Mars fireman's-helmet
embraced it? In turning aside from such chief.' While
questions, Refusalof the Shadowmisses an passing through

Cote d'lvoire, the
opportunity to investigate the structure
and aims of black diasporic intellectual Dakar-Djibouti
Mission visited
culture.
this chief."
If one were looking for conceptual
FromDocuments 2:7
contrast, for a conversation about ex-
(1930)

"esssentialism"that abuses or "cannibal- torical memory-a project not just of
izes" the unassailable postulates of sur- psychic dis-alienation but also of social
realism.But a number of commentators, rooting (enracinement).As a result, the
including A. James Arnold, Ngal, and preface, called "A Great Black Poet" (in-
Ronnie Scharfman, have shown how cluded in Refusal of the Shadow),is more
Cesairean Negritude contributed to the Breton's "debate with himself" than a
shaping of the surrealist movement, reading of Cesaire; it is the record of
rather than simply adopting it as a pre- Breton's reluctant admission that poetry
formed system. can be historical and surrealist-indeed,
Rene Menil's explication of Breton's that it is impossible to envision poetic
preface to the 1947 edition of Cesaire's form withoutcontent.
Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal makes Even this corrective does not fully
this point, as well. (Unfortunately this es- illustrate how radically Cesaire's work
say, too, is omitted from Refusal of the departs from surrealism-moving, as
Shadow.) Menil argues that Cesaire's Regis Antoine puts it, from the
poem forced Breton to revise the pro- "chthonian universal" to the "Martini-
nouncements of earlier manifestos like can autochthon." Breton, looking for
Misere de la Poesie, which had rejected confirmation in exile, is blind to the
all poetry a sujet, all poetry based on a specifics of this shift. His preface is so
topic or historical subject. Reading Ce- fascinated with the politics of skin color
saire,Breton had to come to terms with (he writes that Cesaire's "appearance,
the ways the Cahier is incontrovertibly colored by the countenance he has, as-
Caribbean, a clear resuscitation of his- sumed the value of a sign of the times")
that he misses the fact that Cesaire de-
liberately avoids the noun "Black" (Noir)
in the Cahier.As a result, Breton rather
absurdly misses the central work of the
poem: the coining of the term negritude.
Richardson misses the subtleties of this
development, too: in Refusalof the Shadow,
"noirs, "negres, and "hommesde couleur"
are translated indiscriminately as "Ne-
gro," "black," and "nigger."
It is often assumed that negritudeindi-
cates a certain kind of dialectic, aiming
to forge a synthesis of European sources
like surrealism with a specifically black
Caribbean imaginary. It is true that Ce-
saire'slanguage frequently suggests syn-
Aime Cesaire thesis: there are utopian words about the
Mellin.FromAime Hero, the Rebel, and the work of racial
Cesaireby Lilyan
Kesteloot(Paris:Pierre
consciousness "break[ing] through the
Seghers) opaque prostration with its upright pa-

Left: "'Last
drawings of J.-J.
Grandville: First
Dream-Crime and
Expiation.'
Picturesque
Magazine, 1847, p.
212" Right: "Janet
Flynn, who will
soon appear at the
Chatelet Theatre
in a French version
of New Moon"
FromDocuments 1:4
(1929)
tience." But it is equally true that this up- negre withoutever overcoming its
rightness is somewhat subverted,as in the meaning: nigger. A "refusal of the
section at the beginning of the poem shadow" is not necessarily a hallucina-
that describes the misery of Martinican tion of the sun, in other words. The
reality: Cahieris, at times, undeniably morose, as
in the famous stanza that cries, "Eia! for
This throng which does not know how to those who have never invented anything
throng,this throng,clearlyso perfectlyalone for those who never explored anything
under this sun, like a woman:one, though, for those who never conquered any-
completelyoccupiedwith her lyric cadence, thing." But even in these lines, it should
who abruptlychallengesa hypotheticalrain be possible to read the Cahier not as a
and enjoinsit not tofall; or like a rapidsign poem that falls into abjection, but as an
of the crosswithoutperceptiblemotive;or like elaborate rejection of one of the main
the suddengraveanimalityof a peasant, uri- tenets of surrealism: in Richardson's
natingstanding,her legsparted,stiff words in Refusal of the Shadow,the tenet
that "everything is capable of transfor-
It is a disturbing image, an unsettling mation, everything exists in a state of la-
uprightness that has more in common tent potentiality, capable of being real-
with the headless figure of the "Ace- ized or activated by desire."
phale" that so intrigued Bataille than Cesairian Negritude might be less an
with Leonardo da Vinci's Homo ad circu- essentialism than a refusal of that game
lum. Cesaire'smove to the real of history of perpetual transposition-a way of
is a move that claims the derogatory term saying that the Caribbean will not play

..'*% I;
* . .
-*:A..
i
.\\

The apartment of
any longer, will not serve as "bows unmoving abrasion? The Cahier envi-
drawn for the arrows" of European sions a communal identity, but not a the French poet
Guillaume
dreams. As a strategy, this refusal is rem- chromatic posse, united in skin color
Apollinaire
iniscent of Bataille's aim in Documents, (Breton's "great black poetry"). Instead,
that search for what Hollier calls "the Cesaire goes fishing for a corrosive Renie-Jacqlues.
Mlinistbe ede la
inexchangeable heterogeneity of a real." tongue. The poem offers a brotherhood Cilture, France
Even the supposedly transcendent con- that binds and strangles-it is ethnic
clusion of the Cahiersupports this read- in both senses of the word: a brother-
ing: hood that cleaves. Clings and cracks.
This stance marks a crisis for Europe,
bind, bind me bitterbrotherhood dispelling any mirage of the "primitive,"
then,stranglingme with your lasso of stars but it also articulates something new,
rise, something we might call the ethnics of
Dove surrealism.The poem ends up in defer-
rise ral, refusing to resolve a contradiction,
rise and grounding its invocation of com-
rise munity in that very refusal.A document
Ifollow you who are imprintedon my ances- of veerition, its stillness scrapes the sur-
tralwhitecornea. real of the imagination with the real of
risesky licker history.
and thegreat blackhole wherea moon ago I
wantedto drownit is thereI will nowfish
the malevolenttongue of the night in its
motionlessveerition!
Again, the formal stance proposed

here might be more akin to Bataille's"al-
teration" than to any dialectical tran-
scendence. The careful ambivalence of
the Cahier is worked out through what
James Clifford calls Cesaire's "poetics of
neologism," conjuring two-faced or split
words like negritude,marroner, and verrition
from the shadowy recesses of etymo-
logical dictionaries. Translators Clayton
Eshleman and Annette Smith tell us that
the last vibrating word, "veerition" (ver-
rition)was "coined on a Latin verb,'verri,'
meaning'to sweep,"to scrape a surface,'
and ultimately'to scan."' But what kind
of synthesis is this impossible action, this


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Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

The Ethnics of Surrealism

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THE ETHNICS OF SURREALISM

Brent Hayes Edwards

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"primitives" in the colonies of Africa, Asia, anthropological fieldwork. But in 193 ,

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From Documents 1:5

\' t"1.t "

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THE ETHNICS OF SURREALISM 91

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these seemingly haphazardjuxtapositions by grotesquely enlarged photos of hu-

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100 TRANSITION ISSUE 78

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106 TRANSITION ISSUE 78

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108 TRANSITION ISSUE 78

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110 TRANSITION ISSUE 78

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Top: "... a vile rite

naivete dominates Bataille's texts at the is by Iain White): negroes... (Nandi

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.. .... .... . ~~~ I

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Bataille'sfew statements on the topic re-

tion to heterologynot only thepossibilitybut d'lvoire (Liberian

THE ETHNICS OF SURREALISM 113