'Modest recording instruments': Science, surrealism and visuality

Art History

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 627-650

  Lomas, David ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

^b AHRB Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and Its Legacies

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249354439     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.00441.x     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane, Ann Arbor, 1972, 27-8.
2. Barbara Maria Stafford, 'Presuming images and consuming words: the visualization of knowledge from the Enlightenment to post-modernism', in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter, London and New York, 1992, 462-77.
3. See also James Elkins, Visual Studies. A Skeptical Introduction, New York and London, 2003. Elkins provides a useful, up-to-date snapshot of the current state of visual studies - or, as I would prefer to call it, art history (on the premise that established disciplines can evolve).
4. The actual content of the image as a representation of the split subject - of Breton himself at the moment of this abrupt incursion into the field of his consciousness - is analysed in David Lomas, The Haunted Self. Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, New Haven and London, 2000.
5. Louis-Ferdinand-Alfred Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves, Paris, 1873, chap. 4, 'Des Hallucinations Hypnagogiques'.
6. Bernard-Paul Robert, Le Surréalisme désocculté, Ottawa, 1975.
7. Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves, 59 and 71-72.
8. Victor Egger, La Parole intérieure. Essai de psychologie descriptive, Paris, 1881. A meticulous and convincing study by Bernard-Paul Robert long ago revealed the extent of Breton's reliance on this source.
9. See Bernard-Paul Robert, 'André Breton et la parole intérieure', Revue de l'université d'Ottawa, 44, 1974, 281-301.
10. Kant states that 'inner sense' - the awareness of ourselves and of our inner mental states - has only the form of time; whereas 'outer sense' - by which means we apprehend the object world - has the form of geometric space. It is known from a letter addressed to the bibliophile and collector Jacques Doucet that Breton regarded Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, specifically the two chapters of the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' that set out the argument concerning intuitions of space and time, as a key document for, as he and Aragon put it, 'the formation of the poetic mentality of our generation.' André Breton, Oeuvres complètes, Paris, 1988, vol. 1, 631.
11. See Hippolyte Taine, On Intelligence, trans. T.D. Haye, London, 1871, 364.
12. Sigmund Freud, 'Charcot', Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Harmondsworth, 1966, vol. 3, 12.
13. The psychiatrist Gilbert Ballet, Le Langage intérieur et les diverses formes de l'aphasie, Paris, 1886, posited a strict parallelism between inner language and the forms of aphasia.
14. See also Georges Saint-Paul, Le Langage intérieur et les paraphasies, Paris, 1902.
15. André Breton, "The Automatic Message', in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemount, New York, 1978, 108.
16. Max Morise, 'Les Yeux enchantés', La Révolution surréaliste, 1,1 December 1924, 26-7.
17. Still unsurpassed as an exploration of this background is Françoise Will-Levaillant, 'L'analyse des dessins d'aliénés et de médiums en France avant le Surréalisme. Contribution à l'étude des sources "de l'automatisme" dans l'esthétique du xxe siècle', Revue de l'art, 1980, 24-38.
18. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry [1766], trans. Edward Allen McCormick, Baltimore and London, 1984.
19. Lessing, Laocoön, 76.
20. For a vivid account of how such imagery infiltrated the Victorian literary imagination, see Gillian Beer, '"Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things": Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century', in Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, Vision in Context, New York and London, 1996, 83-98.
21. Etienne-Jules Marey, La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine, Paris, 1875.
22. Bruno Latour, 'Drawing Things Together', in Representation in Scientific Practice, eds Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, 19-68.
23. Robert Michael Brain, 'The Graphic Method: Inscription, Visualization, and Measurement in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture', PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996.
24. See François Dagognet, Etienne-Jules Marey. La passion de la trace, Paris, 1987.
25. Marey, La Méthode graphique, iii.
26. Brain, 'The Graphic Method', 20.
27. Peter Galison, 'Judgment against Objectivity', in Caroline Jones and Peter Galison, Picturing Science, Producing Art, New York and London, 1998, 327-59.
28. See also Lorraine Dalston and Peter Galison, 'The Image of Objectivity', Representations, 40, Fall 1992, 81-128.
29. See Stanley Joel Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology, Cambridge, 1978.
30. Freud, 'Charcot', 19.
31. J. Babinski and J. Froment, Hysteria or Pithiatism, and Reflex Nervous Disorders in the Neurology of War, trans. J.D. Rolleston, London, 1918, 84ff: 'The complete syndrome presents: muscular atrophy, exaggeration of the tendon jerks, changes in the cutaneous reflexes, which may amount to actual loss, hypotonus, mechanical hyperexcitability of the muscles with slowness of the muscular con-traction, quantitative changes in the electrical excitability of the muscles (increase or diminution in excitability without R.D.), mechanical and occasionally electrical increase in excitability of the nerves; disturbance of objective and subjective sensibility (anaesthesia and pain); disturbances of thermotaxis (especially hypothermia) and vaso-motor control (cyanosis, salmon-pink tint, diminution of the amplitude of the oscillations at the periphery of a limb when the atmospheric temperature is low); secretory disorders, and, lastly, trophic disorders of the bones, skin, hair and nails.' (84-5).
32. Alfred Binet, 'The Graphic Method and the Doubling of Consciousness', in On Double Consciousness. Experimental Psychological Studies, Chicago, 1890, 48-59.
33. See also Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research, Cambridge, 1990. One can only agree with Danziger that 'an inquiry into the origins of psychological experimentation must be concerned with the specific historical forms of experimentation that played a role in the constitution of the new field.' (24)
34. André Breton, Entretiens (1913-1952), Paris, 1969, 83. Though, in terms of any possible period-ization, I am inclined to see the experimentalist paradigm as typifying the early phase of surrealism, in 1941 Breton gave an interview in which, once more, he placed surrealist investigation on a par with laboratory research.
35. Breton, Entretiens, 233.
36. 'Le Bureau de Recherches surréalistes,' La Révolution surréaliste, 2, 15 January 1925, 31.
37. Documents pertaining to the surréaliste centrale are collected in Archives du surréalisme 1. Bureau de recherches surréalistes, ed. Paule Thévenin, Paris, 1988.
38. On the table, he adds, sat 'a few scientific instruments employed in a system of physics now forgotten or still to be elaborated.' Salvador Dalí, 'The object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment', This Quarter, September 1932, 197-207.
39. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, Cambridge, 1975.
40. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 47.
41. Carlo Ginzburg, 'Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method', History Workshop, 1980, 5-36.
42. Breton, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 645.
43. André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln & London, 1987 [1937], 39. The strength of Breton's attachment to the authentic document can be measured from an otherwise surprising hostility to fiction that he notoriously gives vent to in the 'Introduction to a Discourse on the Paucity of Reality.'
44. See E. Régis, Précis de psychiatrie, 5th edn, Paris, 1914.
45. Jennifer Gibson long ago established that Breton took the phrase from Régis, who uses it in the context of a passage outlining the psycho-analytic technique of free association. See Jennifer Gibson, 'Surrealism before Freud: Dynamic Psychiatry's "Simple Recording Instrument"', Art Journal, Spring 1987, 56-60.
46. The locus classicus for a discussion of surrealism and the index is Denis Hollier, 'Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don't Cast Shadows', October, 69, Summer 1994, 111-32.
47. The correspondence with Fraenkel is quoted at length in Marguerite Bonnet, 'La rencontre d'André Breton avec la folie: Saint-Dizier, août-novembre 1916', in Fabienne Hulak, ed., Folie et psychanalyse dans l'expérience surréaliste, Nice, 1992.
48. This is the French edition of the text by Babinski and Froment cited at note 31 above. See the editor's commentary in Breton, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 1729, n. 1.
49. This distinction is foregrounded by Joel Snyder in 'Visualisation and Visibility', in Jones and Galison, Picturing Science, Producing Art, 379-97.
50. Linda Dalrymple Hendersen, Duchamp in Context. Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, Princeton, New Jersey, 1998.
51. On precision and standardization in science, see M. Morton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision, Princeton, N.J., 1995.
52. Molly Nesbitt, 'Ready-made Originals: The Duchamp Model', October, 37, Summer 1986, 53-64.
53. Ernst's training in psychology is surveyed by Klemens Diekhöfer in Max Ernst in Köln, Cologne, 1980, 69-72.
54. See Bruno Béguet, ed., La Science pour tous: Sur la vulgarisation scientifique en France de 1850 à 1914, Paris, 1990.
55. See Charlotte Stokes, 'The Scientific Methods of Max Ernst: His Use of Scientific Subjects from La Nature', Art Bulletin, 62:3, September 1980, 453-65.
56. Anne Harrington, 'Hysteria, Hypnosis, and the Lure of the Invisible: The Rise of Neo-Mesmerism in fin-de-siècle French Psychiatry,' in vol. 3 of W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, eds, The Anatomy of Madness, London, 1989.
57. 'La courbe blanche sur fond noir que nous appelons pensée', André Breton, 'Tournesol [Sunflower]', Claire de terre, Paris, 1924, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 187. My thanks to Jeremy Stubbs for bringing this quote to my attention.
58. Sigmund Freud, 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (1894), Standard Edition, vol. 3, 60-1.
59. André Masson, Le Rebelle du surréalisme. Écrits, ed. Françoise Will-Levaillant, Paris, 1976, 21.
60. Jean-Paul Sartre, in André Masson, 22 dessins sur le thème du désir, Paris, 1962;
61. reprinted as 'Masson' in Situations IV, Paris, 1964, 387-407. The importance of Paul Klee as a source of inspiration for early Masson should obviously not be forgotten.
62. It was standard practice for Pierre Janet to distract the subject by occupying them with an activity involving one hand, in order to elicit subconscious ideas through automatic writing or drawing carried out with the opposite hand. See Pierre Janet, L' État mental des hystériques, Paris, 1911, 88-9.