…That Point at Which…

Daniel Barbiero
April 2022

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard claimed that the house, with its intimate indoor spaces, provides shelter and occasion for daydreaming. And in many cases it does. But it may be outdoors, particularly the urban landscape, that’s conducive to the waking dream. It may be the public space, exposed to view and the anonymous use of strangers—the atopia in which one is not at home—that allows one to dream, albeit not in peace. Perhaps in a state of unsettled availability, in which the incongruous makes perfect sense and unlikely coincidences appear preordained. Certainly it was in the streets and squares of the city that the Surrealists, and others after them, sought a point at which dream and waking reality met.

Through their walks in Paris, André Breton, Louis Aragon and the other early Surrealists modeled a way of pursuing the uncanny coincidence and the chance meeting in an attempt to reach the point of reconciliation of opposites, of the convergence of the dream and the waking state—in short, to reveal the immanence of the marvelous in the mundane. In a famous passage of his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton described this convergence as that point at which “life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the uncommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.” For Breton, approaching if not actually attaining That Point At Which was nothing other than the aim of Surrealism. Thus the Surrealist project consisted in disclosing the world as the site of polyvalence, of multiple meanings arising from a reordering of the relationships between things on the basis of the unexpected correspondences between them that the perceiver, having reached a state of openness to seeing them, suddenly grasps.

This mutual permeation of the mundane and the marvelous was thought to show itself in the startling coincidence that seems preordained—in what Breton called objective chance (hasard objectif). Objective chance, which postulated the somehow necessary convergence of objects, people, and events following independent causal chains, was postulated as revealing the correspondences binding otherwise incommensurable phenomena. Fortuitously running across an object that seems to hold the solution to some problem preoccupying one, meeting a stranger one seems predestined to meet—these and events like them are examples of objective chance, which seems to suggest a hidden necessity in the otherwise apparently contingent.

***

Objective chance has to take place somewhere; one must be at a certain location in order to keep one’s appointment with the significant coincidence. Thus the Surrealist interest in what Aragon, in his novel Paris Peasant, termed the “métaphysique des lieux”—a metaphysics of place residing in the atmosphere certain places create.

The metaphysics of place is the deep ambience one finds in a place, the possibilities it offers, the dimension resident there that is more than the raw matter that composes it or the everyday uses we make of it. It consists in the meanings it holds beyond the superficial meanings it easily can be seen to have, in other words. To the metaphysics of place a location is like a cross-section of a geological formation. Just as a cut taken into the rock reveals the layered traces of different eras, now all present to each other, a place seen with the metaphysical eye reveals multiple significances, some superficial and growing out of the place’s designated function, but others less apparent and consequently more profound.

In Paris Peasant, Aragon pursued his metaphysics of place in the old arcades by the Paris Opera. Before they were razed to make way for a modernization of the Paris Opera neighborhood, the arcades embodied a certain local color, tinged with the melancholy of the semi-forgotten, holding over from the old Paris of the 19th century. At one time they may have been the kind of places the anthropologist Marc Augé termed non-places—commercial matrices and sites of transient, purely transactional relationships–but with time and their integration into the life of that section of Paris, they became rooted and particular, emblematic of that place and no other, and eventually pervaded by the enigmatically forlorn ambience of the bypassed. In our own times, the equivalent of the Paris Opera arcades might be found in similar non-places like malls or train stations, or in overlooked sections of the city—places that we tend to experience as atopias, that is, as places in which we feel estranged, out of place or dis-placed.

To that extent, the pursuit of the marvelous in the context of a metaphysics of place is the pursuit of an atopia—a place in which the ordinary becomes emotionally alien and takes on an unrecognizable aspect. An atopia is place as experienced rather than the brute physical site itself; an experience of dis-placement which may foster, among other things, a sense of the uncanny, of the ineffable rising up out of a sudden and unforeseen rupture in the everyday. For Aragon, the Paris Opera arcades were atopic to the extent that they were home to the uncanny; their strangeness was a function of their having the capacity to reveal the extraordinary within the everyday.

But they were just one historical instance of an atopia. More generally, atopias are anywhere we can find them, anywhere we find ourselves in a state of estrangement. But what is strange may in fact serve as the gateway to the marvelous.

***

By rendering the ordinary extraordinary, the estrangement that we experience in an atopia may tear open a gap in our psychological defenses and open us up to the possibility of the marvelous. In pursuing the marvelous, though, the experience of atopia in and of itself isn’t enough, although it may be a start. For, in order to reveal the world as a site rich in meaning and correspondences, one must be open to it; one must make oneself available. This state of availability, or disponibilité, as Breton termed it, is a way of disclosing the world and as such represents a way of being in the world that sees in the world the possibility of the marvelous. Disponibilité just is the availability or openness to the unexpected, a susceptibility to noticing the strange coincidence and chance meeting that turns out to be of unanticipated significance. To pursue the marvelous is thus to pursue possibility: the possibility of finding the tangent at which the real and the surreal touch. By being in the state of availability one makes possible the opening through which that tangent can be seen.

To use an awkward but nevertheless telling neologism, availability is a form of ek-stasis—of being projected outside of oneself. In a state of availability one loses one’s self to the extent that one dissolves into one’s surroundings. It is a form of anonymity in that regard, one in which the usual determinations one builds up over time are relaxed to the point where one suspends the skepticisms and habits of mind accumulated over the course of experience and instead consents to see connections and significances which one ordinarily would reject or simply overlook as being of no account.

Availability requires a kind of suspension of disbelief through which unlikely connections or correspondences are seen not as implausible, but rather as representing concrete possibilities for oneself. Such a suspension calls for thinking analogically rather than logically. And rather than drawing analogies on the basis of perceived similarities between otherwise different things, this kind of analogy instead draws its connections on the basis of the very dissimilarities between them, serving as what Pierre Reverdy in 1918 called “the bringing together of two remote realities.” It is an analogy based on disjunction, a way of creating a synthetic totality out of disparate, apparently contradictory elements.

This kind of analogy is more than a literary or otherwise aesthetic device; it is a metaphysical position, an assertion about the nature of the reality underlying the reality grasped by the senses—a deeper reality in which opposites are reconciled and revealed to be, at a certain level of encounter, different sides of the same thing: analogy as a forging of correspondences in which contradictory states lose themselves in identity, no matter how provisional that identity might be. It is a metaphysical position, in other words, of immanence. Breton explicitly acknowledged this when he defined Surrealism in 1928’s Surrealism and Painting as “a particular philosophy of immanence according to which surreality would be contained within reality itself (and neither superior nor exterior to it).” The definition was important enough that he repeated it in 1934’s “What Is Surrealism?” Breton’s stating the relationship between the mundane and the marvelous in terms of immanence may have reflected his adaptation of the Hegelian dialectic, as he understood it, to the Surrealist project.

***

Breton’s striving to approach that point at which contradictions are reconciled would appear to have been his way of opening a path toward solving two persistent problems of Western metaphysics, one local and one global. The local problem—local, that is, to French thought of the twentieth century—is the problem of the separation of consciousness, in the guise of the Cartesian cogito or something very much like it, from the world. It was a problem that eventually culminated in structuralist and post-structuralist solutions that attempted to remove individual subjectivity by dissolving it into structures of signification of one form or another. The global problem, which permeates Western thought since Plato, is the problem of the overvaluation of rationality as a way of engaging the world and consequently, of attempting to reduce the world to a logic imposed from the outside. In its most acute form it is the problem of the world’s perceived absurdity, which is to say the world’s propensity to overflow the strictures and categories that attempt to contain it, and in the process to appear as a meaningless opacity resistant to human comprehension and indifferent to human desires. Hence Breton set himself against what he called, in his statement “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism,” the “open rationalism” of the West’s dominant mode of encountering the world, and put forward Surrealism, with its reliance on automatism and the openness to recognizing the workings of objective chance, as the proper agent to effect the “ruin of the Cartesian-Kantian edifice” which rested upon it.

***

The Surrealist project in which opposites were to be reconciled was in one way a project of synthetic totalization, of resolving the contradiction between the real and the surreal and subsuming them into a higher state in which each is immanent in the other. From this higher state the Cartesian wall separating the inner and outer worlds, the subjective and the objective, is seen to have been broken down, or to have been illusory to begin with. In this regard, Lautréamont’s simile can be understood as the formula for the synthetic totalization of objects, events, or states of affairs that have no reason to belong together, this lack of a reason being precisely the reason why they are brought together into a whole derived from an entirely unlikely relationship of mutual illumination. It is a form of synthesis based on incongruity—a harmony of discord reaching across distant ontological regions.

The idea of such a harmony is a perennial one and predates Surrealism by centuries. Perhaps it was stated most succinctly by Heraclitus, the sixth century Ionian philosopher admired by the Surrealists, when he held that “a hidden [ἀφανὴς] harmony is preferable to an explicit [φανερῆς] one.” This implies that that harmony, which we could recast in Breton’s terms as the reconciliation of apparent opposites, is immanent in opposition itself. And given this assumption of immanence, for Heraclitus as for Breton and Surrealism, reconciliation would have to hang on a particular hermeneutic or interpretive stance taken toward the world, one in which oppositions are taken to be only a matter of appearance. Through the hermeneutic stance embodied in analogical reasoning, implicit in the state of availability, and cultivated through the habitation of our chosen atopias, perhaps that hidden harmony would be recognized and raised to an explicit harmony; perhaps one could then glimpse what it was that Breton ultimately was looking for: that hypothetical point at which contradictions cease to contradict.

***

The possibility that a latent or hidden harmony underpins an outward or manifest discord is the possibility that what seems unintelligible is in fact—given the right interpretation and hence the arrival at the right understanding—intelligible after all. The will to find intelligibility, the assent to the interpretive turn, may be the most fundamental, animating spirit behind Breton’s pursuit of That Point at Which the apparently unreconcilable is reconciled and the hidden harmony un-hidden. Interestingly, as early as in his 1920 essay on the painter Giorgio de Chirico, Breton shows his hand by declaring his “certainty that nothing is incomprehensible and that everything, if need be, can serve as a symbol.” This idea of the ultimate intelligibility of the world is one that Breton would restate in different terms over the years, but no matter what form it took, it was an idea he would consistently hold.

Surrealism’s ultimately intelligible world provides a kind of counterweight and anticipatory refutation of the absurd world that came to be identified with the Existentialism that both followed and displaced it in the popular imagination. The idea that the Surrealist world is the anti-absurd world is a topic for fuller exploration some other time; suffice to say here that through the interpretive stance epitomized in, say, the recognition of objective chance, the apparent absurdity manifested in the world’s defying or slipping past the human-scaled logic, based on reason, that we attempt to impose on it is seen as something else—a sign to be interpreted arationally, a premonition or veiled hint to be unveiled from the reverse side or underside of reason. To that extent, objective chance functions as a sign and is taken as evidence of the—perhaps necessarily—recondite intelligibility of the world, though to all appearances things are otherwise; the will to believe in objective chance is the will to believe in the intelligibility of the world and to refute its apparent absurdity.

I would suggest that, contrary to orthodox Surrealist belief, the interpretive stance through which objective chance can disclose itself isn’t dependent on a revelation of the unconscious, but rather arises from a particular mode of existence—specifically, a mode of being in the world that grasps the world as harboring certain possibilities of significance we can describe as oracular. Such a world is a book of secrets, a world of signs and omens, of which the significant coincidence is one. The instance of objective chance is just an update of the utterance from Delphi: something of significance that must be deciphered. As the world must be deciphered. To that extent the recognition of objective chance represents a choice: a choice of meaning specifically pertinent to oneself, chosen from among possible meanings.

***

Like Heraclitus’ Delphic oracle who “neither indicates clearly nor conceals but gives a sign,” the Surrealist world gives signs that signify something of significance to us, if we are able to divine it. This requires a willingness to enter into a divinatory mentality, to read events as oracular. That Breton exhibited this willingness explains, I think, his attraction to the writings of Heraclitus, even though he generally disdained the inheritance of Greco-Roman antiquity. For unlike the Classical rationalism that Plato developed from seeds planted by the so-called Presocratics, Heraclitus’ fragments themselves read as oracular utterances, which in fact they seem to have taken as their model. What Breton saw in the world around him he saw in Heraclitus and what he saw in Heraclitus he saw in the world around him—signs hinting at a latent sense of profound significance. He found them in Paris’ atopias, with their peculiar metaphysics of place, certainly, but in the world beyond them as well. Wherever it was found, however, it was found, reality, like an oracular utterance, was to be deciphered through a divinatory, hermeneutic stance. Breton never lost his faith in the notion that when we do succeed in deciphering the signs the world contains, such as in those moments when, through the suspension of the rational machinery of common sense and logic-borne skepticism, we recognize the world in its occult intelligibility, we catch a glimpse of That Point at Which: the ultimate objective of the Surrealist project.

Works referenced:

Louis Aragon: Paris Peasant, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994).
Marc Augé: Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (New York: Verso, 2008).
Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin, 2014).
André Breton: “Giorgio de Chirico,” in The Lost Steps, tr. Mark Polizzotti (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1996).
_____: “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver & Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1972).
_____: “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism”, in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier & Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1995).
_____: “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”, in Manifestoes of Surrealism
_____: Surrealism and Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row/Icon, 1972).
_____: “What Is Surrealism?” in What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Pathfinder, 1978).
Heraclitus: Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary by T.M. Robinson (Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1987).
Pierre Reverdy, quoted in Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism

◊

Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).

More by Daniel Barbiero on Arteidolia →