Susan Laxton - Surrealism at Play-Duke University Press (2019) PDF

surrealism at play
SURREALISM
AT P L A Y
susan laxton
duke university press
Durham and London
2019
© 2019 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Laxton, Susan, author.
Title: Surrealism at play/Susan Laxton.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. |
Series: Art history publication initiative
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2018031282 (print) | lccn 2018037287 (ebook)
isbn 9781478003434 (ebook)
isbn 9781478001966 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9781478003076 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Surrealism. | Painting—Psychological aspects. |
Psychoanalysis and art. | Play in art. | Games in art. |
Symbolism in art.
Classification: lcc nc95.5.s9 (ebook) | lcc nc95.5.s9 l39 2019
(print) | ddc 709.04/063—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031282
Frontispiece: Joan Miró, Collage, January 31, 1933, 1933, detail.

© 2018 Successió Miró /ars/ adagp. Digital image © moma/
Licensed by scala/ Art Resource.
Cover art: Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1922. MNAM. © Man Ray
2015 Trust /ARS, New York, 2018.
This book was made possible by

a collaborative grant from the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation.
Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the

University of California, Riverside, which provided
funds toward the publication of this book.
For Katherine and Jane,
festina lente.
CONTENTS
ix
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLE DGMENTS xv
INTRODUCTION A M O D E R N C R I T I CA L LU D I C 1
CHAPTER 1 B LU R 29
CHAPTER 2 D R I F T 72
CHAPTER 3 S Y S T E M 137
CHAPTER 4 P U N 185
CHAPTER 5 P O S T LU D E 246
NOTES 273
BIBLIOGRAPHY 331
INDEX 351
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Man Ray, Photographie intégrale et cent pour cent
automatique, 1930. 31
1.2 Hans Arp, Squares Arranged According to the Laws of
Chance, 1917. 37
1.3 Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vierge, 1920. 37
1.4 Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vierge II, c. 1920. 37
1.5 Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913–14. 38
1.6 Marcel Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bond, 1924. 39
1.7 Marcel Duchamp, inscribed disc from Anémic cinéma,
1926. 46
1.8 Cover, Littérature nouvelle série 7 (December 1922). 48
1.9 Interior page, Dadaphone (March 1920), depicting Christian

Schad, Arp et Val Serner dans le crocodarium royal. 52
1.10 Christian Schad, untitled (Schadograph no. 2), 1918. 56
1.11 Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1922. 60
1.12 Man Ray, esoRRose sel à vie, 1922, in The Little Review:
Quarterly Journal for Arts and Letters (Autumn 1922). 63
1.13 Man Ray, Man, 1918. 65
1.14 Man Ray, W oman, 1918. 65
1.19 Man Ray, Compass, 1920. 70
2.1 Cover, photo album, E. Atget coll. Man Ray 1926,
c. 1940. 73
2.2 Eugène Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, 1912. 76
2.3 Eugène Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, 1926. 76
2.4 Eugène Atget, Marchand de parapluies, 1899–1900. 79
2.5 Eugène Atget, Marchand d’abat-jour, rue Lepic,
1899–1900. 79
2.6 Eugène Atget, Poterne de peupliers—zoniers, 1913. 80
2.7 Eugène Atget, Porte d’Asnières—cité Trébert, 1913. 80
2.8 Eugène Atget, Rue du Petit-Thouars, 1910–11. 81
2.9 Eugène Atget, Rue Mouffetard, 1925. 81
2.10 Eugène Atget, Marchand de vin rue Boyer, 1910–11. 82
2.11 Eugène Atget, 47 Avenue de la Observatoire, 1926. 82
2.12 Eugène Atget, Fête du Trône, 1925. 87
2.13 Eugène Atget, L’éclipse, avril 1912, 1912. 88
2.14 Eugène Atget, Au Bon Marché, 1926–27. 90
2.15 Eugène Atget, Rue des Boulangers, 1923. 96
2.16 Eugène Atget, Maison du musette, 1923. 96
2.17 Eugène Atget, Cour du Dragon, 1913. 96
2.18 Eugène Atget, Hotel de Sens, rue du Figuier, 1901. 97
2.19 Le Corbusier, La Cité Radieuse—Plan Voisin, 1925. 98
2.20 Eugène Atget, Boutique aux halles, 1925. 100
2.21 Eugène Atget, Vannier, 1908. 105
2.22 Eugène Agtet, Porte de Montreuil, Zoniers, 1913. 105
2.23 Eugène Atget, Porte d’Asnières, cité Trébert, 1913. 107
2.24 Eugène Atget, Boulevard Masséna, 1912. 107
2.25 Eugène Atget, Femme, 1921. 111
2.26 Eugène Atget, Femme, n.d. 111
2.27 Eugène Atget, untitled (nude study), 1927. 111
2.28 Eugène Atget, Femme, 1925–26. 112
2.29 Eugène Atget, Maison close, 1921. 113
2.30 Eugène Atget, Versailles, 1921. 113
2.31 Eugène Atget, Rue Asselin, 1924–25. 114
2.32 Eugène Atget, Le 10 de la rue Mazet, 1925. 116
2.33 Eugène Atget, 226 boulevard de la Villette, 1921. 116
2.34 Eugène Atget, Fête de la Villette, 1926. 118
2.35 Eugène Atget, Rue du Cimitière Saint Benoît,
118
1925.
x List of Illustr ations

2.38 Eugène Atget, Fête de Vaugirard (Cirque Manfretta),
1913. 121
2.40 Eugène Atget, Fête des Invalides, Palais de la Femme,
1926. 122
2.41 Eugène Atget, Boutique jouets, 1910–11. 123
2.42 Eugène Atget, Coiffeur, bd de Strasbourg, 1912. 123
2.43 Eugène Atget, Avenue des Gobelins, 1925. 126
2.46 Minotaure 7 (1935): 57, with image by anonymous
photographer illustrating Salvador Dalí, “Psychologie
non-euclidienne d’une photographie.” 131
2.47 Eugène Atget, Coin, rue de Seine, 1924. 135
3.1 La Révolution surréaliste 1 (December 1924): 14,
with automatic drawing by André Masson. 143
3.2 Salvador Dalí, Valentine Hugo, Paul Éluard,
and Gala Éluard, Exquisite Corpse, c. 1930. 151
3.3 André Breton, Victor Brauner, Yves Tanguy, and Jacques
Hérold, Exquisite Corpse, c. 1934. 151
3.4 Remedios Varo and Esteban Francés, Exquisite Corpse,
1935. 151
3.5 André Breton, Max Morise, Jeanette Durocq Tanguy,
Pierre Naville, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy,
and Jacques Prévert, Exquisite Corpse, 1928. 157
3.6 X, Yves Tanguy, André Masson, and X, Exquisite Corpse,
1925. 159
3.7 Yves Tanguy, André Masson, X, and X, Exquisite Corpse,
1925. 159
3.8 Valentine Hugo, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, and Gala,
Exquisite Corpse, c. 1932. 164
3.9 Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, and André Breton,
Exquisite Corpse, 1928. 166
3.10 Camille Goemans, Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy,
and André Breton, Exquisite Corpse, 1927. 172
3.11 Frédéric Mégret, Suzanne C., Pierre Unik, and André
Breton, Exquisite Corpse, 1929. 175
3.12 Frédéric Mégret, Suzanne Muzard, and Georges Sadoul,
3.13 Greta Knutson, Tristan Tzara, and Valentine Hugo,
Exquisite Corpse, c. 1930. 176
List of Illustr ations xi

3.14 Valentine Hugo, André Breton, and Nusch Éluard,
3.15 Man Ray, Max Morise, André Breton, and Yves Tanguy,
3.16 Yves Tanguy, Georges Hugnet, Germaine Hugnet, Óscar
Domínguez, and Jeanette Tanguy, Exquisite Corpse, 1935. 181
4.1 Michel Leiris, frontispiece, Raymond Roussel notebook,
1933–86. 184
4.2 La Révolution surréaliste 3 (April 1925): 6, with Michel
Leiris, “Glossaire: J’y serre mes gloses.” 193
4.3 Joan Miró, Painting-Object, 1932. 196
4.4 André Masson, Terre érotique, 1955. 197
4.5 Gustave Courbet, Origin of the World, 1866. 197
4.6 Joan Miró, Musique, Seine, Michel, Bataille et moi,
1927. 199
4.7 Joan Miró, Un oiseau en poursuit d’une abeille et la baisse,
1927. 200
4.8 Joan Miró, preparatory drawing for Photo—Ceci est la
couleur de mes rêves, 1925. 202
4.9 Joan Miró, preparatory drawing for Painting (The Sum),
1925. 202
4.10 Joan Miró, Photo—Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, 1925. 203
4.11 Joan Miró, Painting (The Sum), 1925. 203
4.12 Joan Miró, Collage, February 11, 1933, 1933. 205
4.13 Joan Miró, Painting, June 13, 1933, 1933. 205
4.14 Joan Miró, Collage, January 31, 1933, 1933, detail. 206
4.15 Interior page, Minotaure 3–4 (1933), depicting postcards
from Max Ernst collection. 208
4.16 Table of contents page, Minotaure 7 (1935), with image
by Man Ray. 209
4.17 Salvador Dalí, Visage paranoiaque, in Le Surréalisme au
service de la révolution 3 (1931): n.p. 210
4.18 Joan Miró, Collage, February 10, 1933, 1933, detail. 211
4.19 Joan Miró, Painting, June 10, 1933, 1933, detail. 211
4.21 Joan Miró, Painting, March 13, 1933, 1933, detail. 212
4.23 Joan Miró, Painting, May 12, 1933, 1933, detail. 213
4.25 Joan Miró, Painting, June 13, 1933, 1933, detail. 214
xii List of Illustr ations

4.27 Joan Miró, Painting, March 13, 1933, 1933, detail. 215
4.28 Joan Miró, Queen Louise of Prussia, 1929. 216
4.29 Joan Miró, preparatory drawing for Queen Louise of Prussia
on advertisements from the April 14, 1929 edition of La veu
de Catalunya, n.d. 216
4.30 Joan Miró, preparatory drawing for Queen Louise of Prussia,
1929. 216
4.31–4.37 Joan Miró, preparatory drawings for Queen Louise of Prussia,
1929. 217
4.38–4.42 Joan Miró, preparatory drawings for Queen Louise of Prussia,
1929. 218
4.43 Joan Miró, Dutch Interior I, 1928. 221
4.44 Postcard reproduction of Martensz Sorgh, The Lute Player,
1661. 221
4.45–4.48 Joan Miró, preparatory drawings for Dutch Interior I,
1928. 222
4.49–4.52 Joan Miró, preparatory drawings for Dutch Interior I,
1928. 223
4.53 Adolphe Acker, Kurt Seligmann, André Breton, Esteban
Francés, Benjamin Péret, Arlette Seligmann, Thérèse Caen,
Flora Acker, and Jacqueline Lamba, L’oreille et l’étoile,
c. 1937. 225
4.54 Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball, 1930. 229
4.55 Interior page, Bifur 6 (1930), depicting Alberto Giacometti,
Jone. 231
4.56 Alberto Giacometti, Woman, Head, Tree, 1930. 231
4.57 Alberto Giacometti, Project for a Passageway, 1930. 232
4.58 Alberto Giacometti, Landscape—Reclining Head, 1932. 233
4.59 Alberto Giacometti, Point to the Eye, 1931–32. 234
4.60 Alberto Giacometti, Flower in Danger, 1933. 237
4.61 Alberto Giacometti, Man, Woman, and Child, 1931. 237
4.62 Alberto Giacometti, Circuit, 1931. 239
4.63 Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass, 1915–23. 239
4.64 Alberto Giacometti, Caught Hand, 1932. 241
4.65 Interior page, Documents 4 (1929), depicting a group of
Alberto Giacometti sculptures. 243
5.1 André Breton, Suzanne Muzard, Jeanette Tanguy,
Pierre Unik, Georges Sadoul, and Yves Tanguy,
Le jeu de l’oie, 1929. 247
List of Illustr ations xiii

5.2 Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 6 (1933): 42. 249
5.3 Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 3 (1931): 21. 251
5.4 La Révolution surréaliste 9–10 (October 1927): 44. 251
5.5 Man Ray, untitled, 1934. 252
5.6 Man Ray, untitled, 1934. 252
Plates
Plate 1 Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1922.

Plate 2 Hans Richter, Visionary Self-Portrait, 1917.
Plate 3 Christian Schad, typewritten picture, Dada Portrait of Walter
Serner, 1920.
Plate 4 Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy,
Exquisite Corpse, 1927.
Plate 5 Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, and Max Morise,
Plate 6 Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, and Man Ray,
Plate 7 Max Morise, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and Joan Miró,
Plate 8 Joan Miró, Collage, January 30, 1933, 1933.
Plate 9 Joan Miró, Painting, March 13, 1933, 1933.
Plate 10 Joan Miró, Collage, January 31, 1933, 1933.
Plate 11 Joan Miró, Painting, March 31, 1933, 1933.
Plate 12 Joan Miró, Collage, February 2, 1933, 1933.
Plate 13 Joan Miró, Painting, May 12, 1933, 1933.
Plate 14 Joan Miró, Collage, February 10, 1933, 1933.
Plate 15 Joan Miró, Painting, June 10, 1933, 1933.
Plate 16 Alberto Giacometti, No More Play, 1932.
xiv List of Illustr ations

ACKNOWLE DGMENTS
I have owed much to many over the long formation of this book, but I am
happy in my debts. First thanks go to Rosalind Krauss. All students of
critical thinking have a model; I was lucky enough to have mine as my
advisor, and to feel the thrill of her intellect shifting the patterns of
my thought. Thanks as well to the scholars who encouraged me in the early
stages of the project: Benjamin Buchloh, Simon Baker, and John Rajch-
man, and especially Rosalyn Deutsche, whose friendship and support
kept my head above w ater then, and continues to do so now, both in and
out of my intellectual life. A year at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton afforded me the time and space to rethink the dissertation
into a book, and I am grateful to fellows and faculty there for their gen-
erous comments on the work in progress, particularly Yve-Alain Bois
(for ludic counsel); and Lisa Florman (for measured insight). I hope the
ideas I’ve negotiated in t hese pages help to repay my intellectual debts
to them both. I am grateful as well to Anne McCauley, who chose me
for Princeton University’s Gould Fellowship in photography, providing
me with a year to develop my work on photograms, and to Hal Foster,
who offered me the opportunity to extend that year as a lecturer, taking
advantage of the Princeton community to deepen the project. A grant
from the Hellman Foundation provided funds for travel and research
assistance in the late stages of the project, and a very generous Mellon
Foundation–funded Art History Publication Initiative grant, made
available to me through Duke University Press, was indispensable for
acquiring the rights and reproductions for the images in these pages. My
thanks to Bonnie Perkel, Janet Martell, Sonja Sekely Rowland, Timothy
Lithgow, and Sara Greenberg for their assistance with acquiring rights
and reproductions, and thanks as well to the College of Humanities,
Arts and Social Sciences at uc Riverside for their support by means of
a generous publishing grant. I am deeply grateful as well to my editors
at Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker and Elizabeth Ault, with the
assistance of Mary Hoch, for their faith in the project and their stamina
in the face of its extensive program of illustrations; also at Duke, I’m in-
debted to Emma Jacobs and Susan Albury for their bracing final review
of the manuscript.
Many archives and institutions have opened their vaults for me.
Access to Man Ray’s Atget collections at George Eastman House was
graciously provided by Joe Struble, with assistance from Ross Knapper;
I am grateful as well to Agnès de la Beaumelle for making available the
collections of the Cabinet d’art graphique at the Musée national d’art
moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Elena Escolar Cunillé of the
Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona sat by for hours as I pored over Miró’s
sketchbooks and collages; as did Mme Véronique Wiesinger and Robert
McD. Parker at Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris, while
I examined Alberto Giacometti’s letters and sketches—their patience
and assistance are deeply appreciated. I wish to thank Virginia Heckert,
as well, for providing access to the Man Ray and Christian Schad hold-
ings at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The friends and colleagues who have given time and advice to this
project over the years deserve special thanks. Colleagues T. J. Demos,
Rachel Haidu, Michio Hayashi, Mary Jo Marks, and Margaret Sundell
provided early encouragement and critique; Ali Nematollahy, Kather-
ine Tandler, and Jane Tandler assisted with translations; and Deirdre
O’Dwyer delivered valuable manuscript advice as I neared the project’s
deadline. Other counsel has been less easily to define, and closer to the
heart, having to do with moving the book forward in tandem with a
life fully lived: compassion and perspective, from Michele Berdy, who
knew this project from its start; humor and tact, from Susan Katz, who
steered me firmly by the elbow when I lost faith. And I never could
have landed where I am, book in hand and life brimming over, without
the patience and encouragement of my daughters, Katherine and Jane,
from whom I have asked so much, and the unbridled example of Judith
Rodenbeck, who simply said, “Of course.”
xvi Acknowledgments
INTRODUCT ION
A M O D E R N C R I T I CA L L U D I C
If there is, in Surrealism, one form of activity whose
persistence has stirred the hostility of idiots, it is the
activity of play, which can be traced across the majority
of our publications of the last thirty-five years.
—André Breton
In philosophy, play is any pursuit undertaken for its own sake. Thus
when Kant claimed play for aesthetics, attributing aesthetic pleasure to
the “free play of the cognitive powers,” it was on the basis of play’s disin-
terest. Beauty, he maintained, whether in art or nature, was felt through
form alone, without regard to meaning or context. Play was yoked to art
in stark contrast to rational thought and action as a phenomenon f ree
from practical concerns: it was neither conceptual nor sensuous; it had
no stake in intellectual or material worlds; it didn’t m
atter.1
How, then, to understand play as a mode of avant-garde engage-
ment? How could disinterested, ineffectual actions, forms that are
definitively bracketed from normal life, possibly be a vehicle for the ex-
hortation to “change life” and “transform the world” that surrealism,
as an avant-garde movement, claimed as its goal?2 The answer lies in
that phrase “normal life,” and what it had become in the modern era: a
form of experience dominated by aims and functions, and relieved only
by the temporary respite of organized leisure. This was the quality of
the everyday the surrealists sought to reshape, demanding that modern
culture acknowledge the limits, rather than the unchallenged benefits,
of rational thought and useful action. Psychoanalysis, and the priority
it gave to unconscious motivations, fueled their efforts. But it was play
that gave them the ability to represent and disseminate their disdain
for instrumental communication and action, for what the ludic offered
was means without ends: gestures and actions and ways of relating that
didn’t know their aims and c ouldn’t predict their outcomes. Much in
the manner of the unconscious, surrealist play activated paradoxical
modes of thought and action that, while utterly without specific goals,
were nevertheless able to modify reality—just not usefully. Ludic ambiv-
alence and equivocation offered the surrealists a suspended, threshold
space for representation—a waking analogue to the liminal states of the
unconscious: dreams and half sleep, the restless figuring of the subject
in formation; the ephemeral, the unforeseeable, the as-yet-ungrasped.
Given that surrealism was bolstered by the nonconformist poetics of
the unconscious, it is unsurprising that the movement, like other uto-
pian avant-gardes of its time, militated against the disciplinary struc-
tures of industrial modernism. Freedom, understood as release from
morals and conventions, was a first condition of surrealism.3 What is
startling is that the surrealists never fully rejected the mechanisms of
industry—intriguingly, surrealism’s critique of practical function was
situated exactly at the unlikely intersection of chance and technology.
Finding an increasingly pragmatic world taking shape around them,
they played not merely against but with it, drawing mechanical systems
into their ludic circle. E very instance of surrealist play—their alea-
tory rambles and odd parlor games; their double entendres and visual
puns—is informed by industrial media (photography, newspaper clip-
pings, mass-produced objects) and imbricated with technological mo-
tifs (seriality, repetition, reproduction, and automation). This, I would
argue, is the way surrealist play strategies maintained contemporary
relevance: rather than deny the quickening pace of machinic innova-
tion, the surrealists harnessed and exaggerated it, constructing a series
of mechanisms that guaranteed chance outcomes. In doing so, they
parlayed the automatic, belief-independent dimensions of wordplay,
chance, and authorial effacement into a series of ludic gestures that, in
the words of Walter Benjamin, effectively freed things “from the drudg-
ery of being useful.”4 Surrealism at Play explores the terms by which
the surrealists reconceived these useless play practices as contraventions,
exploiting the systems of modern technology to form armatures for the
dynamic, collective, participatory, and chance-based processes that would
eventually reshape not merely the internal structures of art practice, but
2 Introduction
subjectivity itself, through a radical reorganization of experience away
from the useful and productive—but still deeply engaged with the most
pressing issues of modern life.
Focused on the years of surrealism’s greatest influence, 1922–39, what
follows is an attempt to identify and analyze surrealist play in its vari
ous and often contradictory guises: as regulated parlor games and alea-
tory gestures, as extreme artifice and primal impulse, as the destruction
of stability and the utopian construction of a new order. At stake for
the surrealists was the obliteration of the traditional concept of the arts
themselves as idealist and autonomous play forms, but equally trenchant
in an interwar context marked by technological functionalism and the
increased presence of standardization and control was their ludic ex-
pansion of the sheer possibilities for representation, activated through
new mechanisms of the techno-ludic. Those models have been key to
art practices from their time to the present.
Naturally, the surrealists’ dedication to play was not without its crit-
ics. As André Breton was aware, to open avant-garde practices to the
ludic was to risk accusations of frivolity. From the moment modern art
began to be reconceived as a b earer of meaning with the power to re-
configure social practice, play had been discredited as an unproductive,
even threatening mode of artistic pursuit—a rejection of play’s Kantian
pedigree that was supported by the historical avant-garde itself in its
aim to erode autonomy and restore art’s relevance to lived experience.
The position would be summarized by Theodor Adorno in his Aesthetic
Theory (1970): “In the concept of art, play is the element by which art
immediately raises itself above the immediacy of praxis and its pur-
poses.” In play, argued Adorno, art finds its “renunciation of functional
rationality,” but in d oing so it risks a reactionary return to primitive im-
pulses, one that turns its back on the possibility of “maturing” in its
address of historically shifting conditions. Adorno admitted that all art,
to some extent, “sublimates practical elements,” but play amounts to a
“neutralization of praxis” to the extent that it plays the trivial fool to
art’s earnest project of reshaping contemporary experience.5
Yet this position was challenged from within Adorno’s own intellec-
tual circle by Walter Benjamin, the very theorist of the historical avant-
garde who, in turning away from idealist aesthetics (Hegel’s “beautiful
semblance” as well as Kantian disinterest) to embrace an active, politi
cally engaged model for art practice, gathered surrealism into his project.6
Benjamin must have had Adorno’s opposition of play and praxis in mind
when, in his late notes on Baudelaire, he graphed the range of “play forms”
between labor and idleness within a matrix bounded by effort, rest, goals,
Introduction 3
and purposelessness.7 The graph makes a distinction between idleness and
other forms of leisure complicit with the bourgeois economy:
bodily performance
sport work
purposelessness purpose
idleness game (puzzle)
bodily rest
Certainly, in making the chart, Benjamin meant to sort out the un-
ruly ludic field; the very existence of the diagram seems to express a
deeply modernist faith in the idea that culture itself can be represented
mechanically. But ironically, what this chart ultimately illustrates is
the impossibility of containing the concept of play within an orderly
system, and it points to Benjamin’s own growing embrace of ludic in-
subordination: his sense that at some level irrationality—the play of
meaning—was essential to social change. On one hand, the chart gives
regulated ludic pursuits (games and puzzles) definite purpose—the
players find a solution or win the game. It’s easy to imagine that, in spite
of the triviality of games and puzzles, Benjamin was trying to account
for the idea of play as practice for life—a kind of goal-oriented train-
ing for modern labor. But that characterization of gaming-as-practice
should include sport, which is usually engaged within the context of a
game and, like puzzles, is rule bound, circumscribed by a definite begin-
ning and end, and avidly motivated by the goal of winning. Yet Benja-
min places sport on the side of actions without purpose, positioning it
as the polar opposite to games and puzzles. This blur of categories and
oppositions turns out to be the most compelling feature of the chart,
and invades one of the most sacrosanct oppositions of the ludic: that
between work and idleness. In his brief notes on the graph, Benjamin
gives “study” a special position as the point where “otium and idleness
tend to blend into one another.”8 That is to say, Benjamin understood
his own intellectual project as a play form (not so much writing as pure
research—for example, Benjamin’s definitively unfinished Arcades Proj
4 Introduction
ect [1927–40]), rather than the kind of work we now like to call knowl-
edge production. Otium, the classical concept of thought for its own
sake, would be located alongside idleness, then, in the most fully ludic
quadrant. And while Benjamin d oesn’t specify the position of art prac-
tices on the chart, elsewhere, in a section of his Arcades Project devoted
entirely to idleness, he makes it clear that for him, art, too, emerges from
the quadrant opposed to work: “Idleness is a precondition of artistic
production,” he notes, a retraction of purpose that “stamps that produc-
tion with the traits that make its relation to the economic production
process so drastic.”9 For Benjamin, then, it is precisely art’s ludic dimen-
sion that gives it critical power, through a pronounced refusal of func-
tionalism that, under the conditions of industrial capitalism, could only
be perceived as a threat to the dominant social order. This sets art (and
the idle condition of its making) apart from mere recreation, which, as
dedicated free time, is still defined as a break from drudgery ultimately
meant to increase productivity.10 At the same time, though, this char-
acterization recasts his own critical work as play and, in defiance of the
prevailing cult of labor, draws both it and art practices away from pur-
poseful production, including the production of change, generating a
confusion of categories that collapses clear oppositions.11 But this is the
genius of the chart: resisting all attempts to systematize it, play erodes
the tidy rational arrangement from within, performing the very ludic
condition it represents.
This play of categories is central to Benjamin’s critique of Kantian
aesthetics. His own ambitions included reorienting art away from ap-
prehensions of beauty and t oward an active mode that would turn out
objects and experiences that evaded commodification. Throwing the
Enlightenment’s aesthetic categories into disarray, he sought to recast
art in terms of modernism’s shifting economic patterns and technolo-
gies, making art relevant to the full complex of h uman relations in mod-
ern society—returning art to politics, in the broad sense. Play, no longer
an end in itself, as Kant would have it, was recast h ere as a means (it has
a role to play) without ends (it never reaches closure), and took on a
new, critical role in constant, mobile defiance of the functionalist status
quo.12
Benjamin’s scheme embeds surrealism’s own reinvention of play
within a set of broader cultural reassessments concerning the rapid and
extreme transformation of sensory experience in modernity, changes at-
tributed to the effects of urban-industrial technology. Any schema that
sought to isolate art from technology would, in Benjamin’s estimation,
Introduction 5
necessarily fail to retain its relevance—technology was the very under-
pinning of the modern, spinning all other actions and relations around
it. So it is unsurprising that this new ludic mode, expressed through
open-ended and polyvalent art forms, had its greatest relevance for
Benjamin when it embraced technical means and motifs. With pho-
tography and film in mind, and with one eye on surrealism, Benjamin
developed his own play theory centered around the concept of Spielraum,
a term alternately translated as “room-for-play” and “scope-for-action,”
or, in the words of Miriam Hansen, “an open-ended dynamics of ex-
ploration and transformation that enlists the viewer in its game, seeking
to turn the acceptance of things as they are into mobility and agency.”13
In her masterful reading of the concept, Hansen draws on Benjamin’s
critique of play in a number of its guises—as c hildren’s play, toys and
games, acting, and gambling—citing from the full span of his writings.
But the kernel of the concept and the elaboration of its ultimate signifi-
cance for art practice in the modern context is in the second version of
Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Techno-
logical Reproducibility” (1936), where, as Hansen demonstrates, Spiel-
raum is the “lost” master term around which Benjamin constructed the
better-known concepts of aura and the optical unconscious, drawing
repetition, mimesis, semblance—and the surrealist movement—into its
scope.14 In an effort to theorize the relation between art and technol-
ogy, thus restoring art’s relevance to modern social relations, Benjamin
privileged technologically based artworks as vehicles through which the
subject could form a healthy, rather than alienated, relationship to me-
chanical forms. When art practices activated Spielraum, technology’s
effects on the h uman sensorium (repetition, shock, and the spectacular-
ization of political life) turned t oward developing new, critical modes of
apperception. If technologically mediated art objects such as films and
photographs fall short of the “beautiful semblance” required by Hegelian
aesthetics, for Benjamin, “what is lost in the withering of semblance and
the decay of the aura in works of art is matched by a huge gain in the
scope for play [Spiel-R aum].”15 Hansen argues that Spielraum describes
the effect of an unprecedented form of modern aesthetics, conceived by
Benjamin as an expanded space of action and imagination made avail-
able by a specifically ludic—that is, nonutilitarian—techno-logic, and
only attainable “through a reconfiguration of boundaries that had tra-
ditionally divided—and hierarchized—subject and object, vision and
body, individual and collective, h uman and mechanical.”16 In this space
of experimentation, the modern subject tries out alternative adaptations
of technology, effectively retraining perceptual-aesthetic modes of action
6 Introduction
and apprehension for new forms of experience. Thus Spielraum “names
an intermediary zone not yet fully determined in which t hings oscillate
among different meanings, functions, and possible directions. As such
it harbors an open-ended, dynamic temporality, an interval for chance,
imagination, and agency.”17
“This space for play,” Benjamin claims, “is widest in film,” where the
apparatus determines the means of reception as well as creation.18 But as
Hansen has pointed out, when Spielraum’s active elements are conceived
broadly, the absolute boundary between film and other media, particu-
larly photography, dissolves.19 In fact, throughout the “Work of Art”
essay, Benjamin gives equal attention to both cinema and photography
as examples of what he calls second technologies: forms and processes de-
veloped not so much in order to “master nature” as to release humanity
from labor through an interplay between nature (implicating chance,
unpredictability, and mind independence) and technology (human will
in its most aggressively dominating form). “The primary social function
of art today,” he concludes, “is to rehearse that interplay.”20
This is an unprecedented frame for understanding the avant-garde’s re-
lation to technology as it surfaces, for example, in surrealism’s recourse to
repetition, an important hinge between psychoanalysis and mass produc-
tion, or in their relationship to the automaton, which, along with Dada’s
mechanized body, became a heroic anti-ideal of modern subjectivity.
Within Benjamin’s framework, play is understood as at once mechani-
cal and progressive, two terms that have been grasped in Dadaist and
surrealist artworks as an uneasy machine ambivalence.21 Considered as
avatars of Spielraum, automatic imagery and systematic processes reveal
a deeply considered commitment to rethinking the fundamental contra-
dictions of modern life—not in order to resolve them, but to embrace
their inconsistencies and paradoxes as b earers of unprecedented constel-
lations of meaning, and redirect them toward a rehabituation of modern
experience.
Certainly, we can see this commitment to erratic production in the
variety and seriality of surrealism’s modes of art making (photograms,
overpaintings, fumage, frottage, photomontage, decalcomania, solar-
ization, the game of exquisite corpse . . .), the “inexhaustible reservoir
of experimenting procedures” by which Benjamin characterized second
technologies. Likewise, Benjamin’s writings relate to the ambivalence
of juxtaposition, surrealism’s central formal principle, as a strategy ac-
cessed through new technological structures—montage, for example,
in cinema and photography.22 The surrealists’ exploration of the ways
in which society is spatially constructed, and their attempts to rear
Introduction 7
ticulate movement through city space according to a ludic model, as
expressed in Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926) and Breton’s Nadja
(1928), had also impressed the critic: he identified them as revolution-
ary interventions in his article “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the
European Intelligentsia.”23 In fact the aleatory relation to the cityscape
that these surrealist texts describe seems to have already been reverberat-
ing in Benjamin’s first thoughts on “room-for-play.” In a short essay on
the city of Naples (1925), cowritten with Asja Lācis, the term Spielraum
is used to describe a deregulated urban space, radically open to possibil-
ity and flux: “Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, ar-
cades and stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope [Spielraum]
to become a theater of new, unforeseen constellations. The stamp of the
definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure
asserts it ‘thus and not otherwise.’ ”24 Benjamin’s theory of play takes
shape here as a valorization of spatial and experiential “porosity” in gen-
eral, “the inexhaustible law of life in this city.” And in the Spielraum of
Naples’s “interpenetration of day and night, noise and peace, outer light
and inner darkness, street and home,” it is impossible to avoid recog-
nizing surrealism’s own attitude toward antinomies, their desire to seek
that point where “life and death, the real and the imagined, past and
future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease
to be perceived as contradictions.”25
Surrealism’s reconfiguration of boundaries extended to the relation
of subject and object, and it was in the movement’s playful “interpen-
etration of body and image space”—which Benjamin understood as
both commensurate with and enabled by photography’s interpenetra-
tion of reality with the apparatus—that he recognized surrealism’s revo-
lutionary potential. The alignment of the movement with Spielraum
depended on a phenomenon Benjamin called innervation, a mode of
assimilating external and alien things into the mind and body:
The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized
for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality,
be produced only in that image space to which profane illumina-
tion initiates us. Only when in technology body and image space
so interpenetrates that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily
collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective
become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the
extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. For the moment,
only the Surrealists have understood its present commands. They
exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an
alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.26
8 Introduction
What attracted Benjamin to the surrealists was their inclination to au-
thorize play, to open a space of experimentation that enabled a “profane il-
lumination”: a new, technologically amenable aesthetic meant to displace
idealist transcendence.27 The image of the automaton–cum–alarm clock
that concludes Benjamin’s essay on surrealism invokes the movement’s re-
peated return to systems and mechanisms as avatars of automatism, and
the ambivalence of the word automatic for the group, a word that oscil-
lates between its psychic and mechanical valences. The bistable image it
conjures, a pun on the “face” of a clock, produces the very image of inner-
vation, the human ability to mime the motifs and effects of technology
in order to successfully reorganize perception in alignment with modern
experience. In Benjamin’s estimation, the surrealist reinvention of play,
manifested in an imbrication of physiological and mechanical structures,
constituted a new aesthetic equal to modern, collective experience, and a
set of strategies that had the potential to deflect the destructive effects of
technology as they had played out in the trauma of the First World War.28
Benjamin’s understanding of Spiel as the mode through which the
modern subject could imagine and rehearse untested strategies for cop-
ing with new experiences reconsiders two intertwined aspects of play as a
signifier: autonomy and paradox. Kant used the term play to describe art’s
attractions for us because only a naturalized “play impulse” could explain
the allure of objects and images that didn’t satisfy biological needs and
desires. By the time the modern era was in full swing, the autonomy this
implied for art had been literalized as Art-for-Art’s-sake and modernist
self-referentiality: both art and play were understood as phenomena set
apart from the pressures of ordinary life.29 But perversely, it is just through
this restriction that play comes by its connotation as freedom. For while
play imagery and action can be inscrutable b ecause they have no foothold
in the material world, they are also free from the rational constraints of
that world—play permits forbidden actions and contradictory assertions,
relegating them, typically, to the status of representation. Play is riddled
with paradox: it thrives on chance; indulges irrationality; flouts the codes
of space, time, cause, and effect. Thus while most theorists who analyze
play maintain ludic integrity on the basis of its removal from the concerns
of practical life, it is unclear w
hether the circumscription of play in the
modern context is conceived to protect the free play of creative imagina-
tion from instrumental reason, or w hether its bracketing persists in order
to preserve the norms and conventions of an increasingly institutional-
ized material field against their contamination by play.
In grasping play as a revolutionary form with the potential to dismantle
prevailing norms Benjamin’s Spielraum offers a third possibility, one
Introduction 9
that insists on historicizing the ludic by placing it within a specifically
modern context and redefining it in response to new social and material
demands. Conceived as a counter-practice that turns its back on rea-
son, Benjamin’s ludic, with surrealism as its model, finds its relevance
(and, by extension, the relevance of art at large) in the porous flexibility
afforded by Spielraum; and in his conviction that the play element ap-
pears to be present, if latent or suppressed, in all cultural forms—it only
needs to be acknowledged to activate its disruptive force. For Benja-
min, as for the surrealists, rendering technology useless through play
opened it to infinite and unforeseen possibilities—and to new, critically
engaged paths for perception and consciousness. Refusing to be dis-
missed as mere “antic” or “whimsy,” surrealism’s ludic strategies not only
provided a counter-narrative to modernization’s increasingly pervasive
means–ends rationality, they also militated against the very notion of
stability as an ideal experience.
It is important to acknowledge that Benjamin’s—and surrealism’s—
desire to attribute revolutionary potential to ludic practices runs counter
to nearly all theorizations of play. Even t hose thinkers who have argued
for play’s presence in apparently pragmatic and objective cultural forms
(for example law and science) maintain its distinction from material
necessity—the same distinction that first led Kant to align play with
art. Johan Huizinga is only the best known of these; his famous 1938
study Homo Ludens offers this definition: “Play is a voluntary activity
or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, ac-
cording to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in
itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness
that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary’ life.”30
Huizinga goes on to give a purpose to play: ludic disinterest serves
as the civilizing element in culture, that which regulates necessity.31 By
assigning a role to disengagement itself, Huizinga can at once maintain
play as an uncorrupted totality and argue for its material relevance, de-
claring “all play means something,” an assertion that echoes Hegel’s sole
characterization of play as “the noblest and only true seriousness,” and
even nods toward the hidden motivations of the unconscious at work in
Freud’s characterization of play. Play in t hese post-Kantian discourses is
a regulating agent as well as a useful gauge of cultural productivity, and
is uniformly characterized as benign and constructive.32
Yet even a vernacular grasp of play gives the lie to these designations
of totality and reliable productivity. Ludic activity bears connotations
of caprice and waste exactly because of its disinterest: if play exists at a
remove from a reality driven by practical necessities, its processes can
10 Introduction
have no consequences in that reality. Accordingly, other oppositions
commonly held against play—work, seriousness, ordinary life—are ex-
trapolated from this master antinomy that sets play apart from reality,
a notion that aligns the satisfaction of practical needs with biological
naturalism and the stability and authenticity of empirically grounded
truths. Through this frame play is perceived as unstable, as in the play of
meaning; fragmented, as in the play of light; ephemeral, as in the play
of music; artificial or inauthentic, as in mimesis, “make-believe,” or illu-
sion (a term derived directly from in ludere, in play).33
These attributes characterize play as eccentric specifically in its lack
of limits, in direct contrast to the aesthetic grasp of play as a bounded
activity. The designation sets play against the normative, the rational,
and the ideal as well as, in its apparent unconcern with external condi-
tions, against political entities. This characterization, too, persisted up to
and through modernist discourse. Play at the threshold of the twentieth
century, when the surrealists took it up as their counterproductive idiom,
figures as internally riven. The contradictions inherent to the term are
reflected in the very range of philosophical approaches that make use
of ludic theories: play has been claimed as the underlying justification
for such radically opposed concepts as Schiller’s autonomous aesthetics
and Nietzsche’s Dionysian excesses. Historically, the ludic drives have
been regarded as natural phenomena to be contained, harnessed, or re-
leased, their significance radically determined by context.34 Even within
the relatively limited discipline of art, play’s variability rubs through,
for example when musical diachrony, dynamic and ephemeral, is inertly
framed as an abstract totality autonomous from material content.
In fact, the breadth and flexibility of play as a signifier threatens to
dissolve even these meanings in a proliferation of references. To play
is to engage, to put into play; yet to play is to disengage, from conse-
quence. Play is artificial, as in mimetic illusions, yet it is characterized
as a natural, primal impulse. It is useless and it produces nothing, yet is
understood psychologically as a form of practice, as trial action for life.
It is constructive, as when the smooth play of machine parts keeps up
production, and it is destructive, as when too much play in those parts
can bring the w hole to a catastrophic halt. Play claims to be f ree—it can-
not be coerced—yet it is valued for the restrictions that keep it circum-
scribed from life. Its only guarantee is that, as an active form, it will be in
constant flux: in spontaneous and unforeseeable relation to its context.
In spite of Huizinga’s insistence that play is bounded and regular, and cir-
cumscribes an ideal field, its overarching characteristic is indeterminacy.35
Play as a signifier performs the very condition it describes: it is a term
Introduction 11
that is definitively split and paradoxical, comprising a unified totality of
destructive incoherence impossible to gather into a single positive term.
Accordingly, play is consistently defined by what it is not—not work, not
serious, not part of normal life, unreal, inauthentic. Th
ere is nothing at its
center: what it signifies is the absence of essence. Play’s conundrum, then,
is also its power. As a signifier of excess beyond simple oppositions, play
complicates the very terrain on which it is practiced, ultimately e xposing
the arbitrariness and contextuality of meaning at large.36
These paradoxical terms made play irresistible to the surrealists.
Their willingness to risk meaning nothing was a radical departure from
modernist paradigms for representation that sought stability and order
through the immanent value of purified, abstract forms, or through ex-
treme commitments to progressivism that pursued serial abstraction as
a mode of honing spiritual perfection. Benjamin himself, with this sense
of purpose in mind, would compare modernism with a “one-way street.”
But with one eye trained on surrealism, he would ultimately insist on
looking back, calling on memory to reevaluate the material outcomes
of Enlightenment rationality.37 With a set of strategies that Benjamin
called “passionate phonetic and graphic transformational games,” surreal-
ism began to shift the cultural terrain, posing a mode of constant critical
testing against the modernist disciplining of space and time. Surrealism
set the irrational labyrinth against the performative one-way street, aim-
less drifting against organized purpose, play against production.38
Yet as Benjamin recognized, surrealism sought to revolutionize
more than art; the aim was to change experience itself, to explode art
into life. Surrealist play gathered into its scope all of the group’s revo-
lutionary potential, its promise of “profane illumination”: the valoriza-
tion of obsolescence; the faith in the city street; the fascination with
technology; the commitment to accessible and collective practices; the
delivery of language, body, and action to the irrational vagaries of the
unconscious.39 Paradoxically, play became a vehicle for the surrealists’
insistence on praxis. Their counterintuitive move—to wrest play from
art and inhabit it like a new medium—foregrounded play’s dynamic di-
mension, turning it out into material reality in the form of active experi-
ence. Put another way, in the hands of the avant-garde, play shifted in
the discourse of modern art from its role as a signifier of passive contem-
plation to one of active, even destructive process. By exposing the multi-
plicity and indeterminacy at the root of the ludic, the surrealists com-
promised play’s long-standing validity as the basis for understanding
art as a closed and definable category. Art from their moment became
wildly inclusive, embracing any form that had the potential to destabilize
12 Introduction
the status quo. Surrealism’s ludic practices are both the outgrowth and
the implementation of this shift, with lasting consequences for the criti-
cal role of art in modern, postwar, and contemporary contexts.
The Freudian Ludic: From Sublimation to Unpleasure
Surrealism’s ludic compromise of boundaries—between art and every-

day experience and particularly between subject and object—is incon-
ceivable without taking the group’s commitment to psychoanalysis into
account. If the surrealists alone seemed attuned to the potential for play
to revolutionize modern experience by opening up, as Max Ernst would
recall, the possibility for “a new and more vast realm of incomparable
experience where the frontiers between the interior world, as it were,
and the exterior world (according to the classical philosophical concep-
tion), efface themselves increasingly and apparently one day disappear
completely,” their insight was directly dependent on Sigmund Freud’s
characterization of unconscious processes in ludic terms.40 Freud’s ludic
model essentially sketched an avant-garde agenda for play as it related
to artistic forms reconceived as antiprogress and antipleasure. Surrealist
play, constantly checking itself against the psychoanalytic model, would
follow suit, wielding unpleasure as a critical device.
Nevertheless, Freud’s first understanding of art-as-play is fairly con-
ventional. His first attempt to implicate unconscious desire in artistic
practice, in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1907), character-
ized the ludic impulses at the root of creativity as constructive, ideal-
izing, and firmly circumscribed from ordinary life: “The creative writer
does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which
he takes very seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts
of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.”41 Art, Freud as-
serted, is merely an acceptable, sublimated form of play for adults; a set
of “wishful fantasies.” Play in this model is unconditionally utopian, “a
correction of unsatisfying reality” in which the child (and likewise the
dreamer and the artist) is the master, and “rearranges the t hings of his
world in a new way which pleases him.”42 Thus while play-as-art pro-
vides a space for acknowledging and defining imbalances in power rela-
tions, it cannot change t hose relations; it is powerless to “transform the
world” according to the dictates of desire.
This conservative view of play is consistent with Freud’s book-length
study of language play, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905),
published two years prior to “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,”
where Freud is more specific about the exact cause of dissatisfaction that
Introduction 13
prompts play: the child “uses games in order to withdraw from the pres-
sure of critical reason,” with critical reason described psychoanalytically
as a disguised “reality principle.”43 The reference to play as a release from
rationality and prohibitions is one of a number of provocative connec-
tions Freud makes to issues central to surrealism; unsurprisingly, the
book on jokes also draws in dreams, eroticism, paradox, automatism,
disinterest, and transgression. Ambivalence is a central motif: “multiple
use,” for Freud, is a sign for play.44 Likewise, juxtaposition is essential to
wit: laughter depends on the disruption of expectations, a violent colli-
sion of heterogeneous parts consistent with the discrete imagery of the
psyche. “The joke,” Freud writes, “is the contribution made to the comic
from the realm of the unconscious.”45
Moreover, wit is essentially ludic: “the pleasure in jokes exhibits a
core of original pleasure in play and a casing of pleasure in lifting inhi-
bitions.”46 Freud’s structure of the joke echoes his model for the mind,
where the id is sheathed in repressive prohibitions secured by the
ego, invoking what Samuel Weber has identified as the “hierarchical
opposition of play and inhibition,” although in the case of jokes the
corresponding spatial relation between surface and core is weirdly re-
versed, with the content of the joke—its “play with thoughts”—readily
apparent, and the purposeless “play with words,” or what Freud calls
form-play, at its core. In a paradoxical instance of the “sense in nonsense”
that characterizes both the logic of dreams and the chaotic imagery of
the id, there is a “smearing of oppositions that are seemingly clear-cut.”47
At their core, jokes share the syntax of primary processes, “giving free-
play to modes of thought which are usual in the unconscious.” They are
structured by condensation and displacement, they indulge in “faulty
reasoning” and “indirect representation,” as well as “representation by
nonsense and the opposite.” Jokes depend on unauthorized connections
between elements—they are involuntary and associative in their forma-
tion and emergence, indicating their origin from the unconscious.48
And here Freud sets up another hierarchy: between play and the joke,
with the joke as the mere tool by which consciousness can be averted
in order to access “original” play. Laughter, the sign for pleasure that
the joke elicits, “is in fact the product of an automatic process which is
made possible by our conscious attention’s being kept away from it.” The
“casing” provided by the joke is merely a ruse to distract consciousness
from a release of unconscious thought.49
With his theorization of jokes, Freud allowed a language game into
the range of automatic phenomena, a development that of course would
be of the greatest appeal to surrealism. With every surrealist word game,
14 Introduction
every inquiry or spontaneous revision of existing visual or linguistic
form, came the possibility that the outcome, the response, or the per-
verted product would bear the marks of primary processes so long as play
was the only motivation. Yet if surrealist play strategies followed Freud’s
model only up to this point, how far could the results be from the very
conventions of aesthetic play that they were attempting to overthrow?
Because concerning disinterest, Freud seems conflicted. On one
hand, he insists that in spite of their links to primary processes, jokes
and dreams are “far remote” from each other with regard to their en-
gagement with material life: dreams “retain their connection with the
major interests in life; they seek to fulfill needs,” while “a joke is devel-
oped play” that seeks to “gain a small yield of pleasure from the mere
activity, untrammeled by needs, of our m ental apparatus.”50 Jokes, that
is, are purposeless; they do nothing and mean nothing. The pleasure in
“innocent” or “abstract” jokes, Freud argues, is like the pleasure felt in
beauty. Like an aesthetic form, whose “enjoyment lies only in itself,
which has its aim only in itself and which fulfills none of the other aims
in life,” innocent joking is an “activity which aims at deriving pleasure
from mental processes, whether intellectual or otherwise,” for their own
sake, outside of meaning.51
But “innocent jokes” are not the only category Freud describes in the
book on wit. “Tendentious” or “purposeful” jokes, he claims, “have sources
of pleasure at their disposal to which innocent jokes have no access”;
that is, they direct themselves to the overcoming of an obstacle to libidinal
satisfaction. Here, the “rebellion against authority,” as Freud puts it, ap-
pears: “the object of the joke’s attack may equally well be institutions, . . .
dogmas of morality or religion,” in effect, wherever anything commands
“so much respect that objections to [it] can only be made under the mask
of a joke.”52 To illustrate, Freud uses smutty jokes. To tell a “dirty joke,” he
contends, is to direct a sexual proposition t oward a “second person” (who
is actually only present in the joker’s mind, as an anthropomorphization
of an internalized prohibition) who always refuses. Amusingly, once the
speaker encounters the obstacle and has redirected his libidinal energy
into the acceptable form of a joke, neither “player” enjoys it. Like slips of
the tongue, jokes are experienced by the teller, Freud claims, as a form of
“self-betrayal,” a temporary displacement of ego that is as unpleasant to
the joker as the sexual advance is for its object. Freud argues that jokes
are the most socially engaged form of language play, b ecause they re-
quire yet a third person to complete the joke, a figure for whom the joke
is pleasurable.53 The sexual “purpose” of the joke is satisfied only then,
through the displaced pleasure of a third party.
Introduction 15
Freud’s characterization of tendentious jokes as a useful way to chan-
nel and relieve the tensions produced by inhibitions seems to place
them at odds with “innocent” jokes, which engage language play for
its own sake.54 Indeed, Freud give tendentious jokes a pointedly criti-
cal capacity, claiming they surface b ecause of dissatisfactions with “self-
ish regulation laid down by the few who are rich and powerful.” They
address material needs, he argues, and sublimating dissatisfaction into
language games benefits regulating agents by suppressing dissent.55 This
is an astoundingly Marxian assertion for Freud to have made in such a
context (and a surprisingly direct revelation of his own political bias),
one that is rendered even more startling in this ostensibly innocuous
ludic context. Remarkably, his study of jokes brings together sexually
suggestive play (as an expression of prohibited action), material needs,
and language games into a representational critique of power relations
that attacks, as he puts it, “the certainty of knowledge itself.”56
This intervention against the status quo, however subconscious, is
not necessarily confined to tendentious jokes, for under these terms
even an “innocent” joke can be understood as a sign of resistance to in-
strumental language. As Samuel Weber has argued, the joke “arises out
of the conflict between play and meaning,” where the joke is a sign for
play’s “negation or inhibition, imposed by the demands of meaning and
of the critical intellect.”57 Here the emphasis is not on the opposition
between reality and utopian play, as in “Creative Writers and Day-
Dreaming,” but instead on the conflict between sense and nonsense,
drawing Freudian play (which in its guise as “multiple use” is the basis of
language games) even farther away from aesthetic harmony.58 As Weber
points out, this tension can only be understood in the context of the
game that jokes play with the listener’s desire for meaning, which is an
outgrowth of the ego’s effort “to unify, bind and synthesize” objects in
the world—to better distinguish them from itself.59 The joke dangles
the expectation of meaning before the listener and then refuses to pro-
vide it, repeatedly denying the ego not just the satisfaction of internal
unity, but also the gratifying distinction between subject and object by
which that unity could be achieved. In other words, Freud describes lan-
guage play as a breakdown between the self and the world comparable
with the indeterminate expansion of Spielraum in reference to the art-
work, and with “profane illumination” in reference to surrealism.
This ludic erosion of boundaries joins others that would become
central to surrealism. While Freud treated the oppositions “reality and
play” and “sense and nonsense” as homologous, based on their align-
ment with the categories “practical” and the “aesthetic” (substance and
16 Introduction
form), there is plenty of evidence from within the Freudian corpus that
the equation of nonsense and aesthetic disinterest cannot hold. Indeed,
psychoanalytic theory concerns itself precisely with teasing meaning
out of the apparent nonsense of dreams and irrational actions. That this
meaning is inevitably sexual, and that erotic desire lies at the core of the
joke—and the essence of Freudian play—puts a g reat deal of pressure on
play’s purported autonomy.
Jeffrey Mehlman is most convincing on this point when he argues
for an intertextual reading of the Joke book with the Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905), on the grounds that Freud wrote them simul
taneously. In the Three Essays Freud makes his famous assertion that all
pleasure is deeply erotic, if narcissistic. This onanistic cycle, Mehlman
points out, reappears in the Joke book as the system of repression that
results in wordplay, where natural sexual desire is “perverted into the
signs of ‘sexual excitement.’ ” Mehlman emphasizes that “these are then
not signs (symbolic) of the sexual, but a variety of signs which are con-
stituted as the sexual per se.” That is, it is the formal play of the words,
the sheer process of signs circulating outside of meaning, that accounts
for the sexual charge of the word games, as opposed to any titillating
imagery at the level of content.60 From this point of view, psychoana-
lytically inflected eroticism in surrealist games is located precisely not in
what could be called an “iconography of desire”—not in the breasts or
the buttocks of the exquisite corpse drawings, nor in the entwined part-
objects limned in automatic script, nor even in the details of sexually
explicit photographs. Rather, the erotic charge of surrealist games rises
from the displaced libidinal satisfactions of their play with meaning, an
excitement experienced through the unprecedented juxtapositions and
untenable paradoxes they produce: the “convulsive beauty” of signs.
Sex made over into text through wordplay and visual puns is perhaps the
most familiar motif of surrealist imagery, and its origin in psychoanalysis
has been well accounted for.61 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
was not translated into French until 1929 (although the English edition
was available in 1916), but the concordances between Freudian jokes and
surrealist wordplay w ere made explicit in surrealist practice as early as 1922.
Breton’s own account of the erotic power of words and images liberated
into play, the essay “Words without Wrinkles” (1922) opens with an exhor-
tation to “turn the word away from its duty to signify,” and ends by aligning
erotic pleasure with “words that work against the idea they are claiming
to express”: “And let it be understood that when we say ‘word games,’ it
is our surest reasons for living that are being put into play. Words, fur-
thermore, have finished playing games. Words are making love.”62
Introduction 17
We could, of course, leave the matter of surrealist play here, and
conclude (as Georges Bataille might have) that through psychoanalyti-
cally inflected play, the surrealists u nder Breton’s influence affirmed the
freedoms of eros, but within limits that kept aesthetic activity construc-
tive, keeping it clear from messier realities: the low, or the destructive.
But Freud’s examination of the ludic impulse (and the surrealists’ own)
didn’t end with the Joke book’s relatively uncomplicated theorization
of play as a manifestation of psychic pleasure. By 1920, as the first signs
of surrealism emerged from within a Dadaist milieu, Freud had shifted
his ludic model away from idealist aesthetics with the groundbreaking
book Beyond the Pleasure Principle.63 Here, Freud reconceived play as
mastery acquired through suppressed action; that is, the ludic impulse
was no longer advanced as an avatar of primeval pleasure in freedom,
but as a tool of civilization, power, and control. In Beyond the Pleasure
Principle Freud revised and expanded the notion of pleasure itself to ac-
count for self-destructive behaviors; and a model for play as unpleasure
found its place at the center of surrealism’s ludic program.
Freud’s break with idealism in Beyond the Pleasure Principle arrives
through play’s alliance with repetition. Drawing on play’s mimetic as-
pect, Freud characterizes the disagreeable fort-da game, in which a child
repeatedly throws his toy out of his crib as a masochistic reenactment
of his m other’s departure. For Freud, the satisfactions of self-torture
emerge through the repetitive and mimetic dimensions of the action,
uncoupling the game from the cult of originality associated with “free
play” since Kant. Novelty, Freud insists, “the condition of enjoyment,” is
nowhere present in this new formulation of pleasure in pain; rather, the
hermetic cycle of play beyond the pleasure principle produces sameness,
“the death of novelty,” in marked contrast to the neoteric demands of
modern economic self-perpetuation.64
Play in this scenario is regressive not because it signals a return to
infantile behavior—in fact the mastery achieved through this destruc-
tive play, Freud informs us, is a sign of dawning maturity—but because
of its mechanical redundancy, its dogged determination to reenact past
unpleasantness.65 Freud traces the game to a counter-erotic instinct, one
so opposed to the “life drive” that it is locked in a struggle with eros to
determine behavior. To account for this paradoxical pleasure taken in
unpleasure, Freud formulates a second paradox, that of life as “a task
of ceasing to live.”66 The “death drive” that play mediates in this new
counter-humanism is regressive in that it is “an urge inherent in organic
life to restore an earlier state of things.”67
18 Introduction
The return to a former, precivilized state is familiar within the canons
of modernism as a primitivist impulse running parallel to modernism’s
rhetoric of progress. Because the surrealist movement has long been
identified with both psychoanalysis and primitivism, it is particularly
surprising that Freudian play as it appears here, as an avatar of the death
drive, has not been more closely examined as a motivating force behind
the surrealist games. But then, Freud himself appears to have repressed
the implications for a world in which humanity pursues self-annihilation.
The sheer wastefulness implied by his own theory goes unremarked, but
it is a form of counterproductivity typical of play, and one that would rise
repeatedly across surrealism’s ludic practices, whether enacted under the
supervision of Breton or the dissident surrealist Bataille.
Likewise, the mechanical redundancy of a game intent on reducing
the subject to an inanimate state, and that scenario’s resemblance to the
paradigmatic scene of modernist production—the assembly line and
its dehumanizing automation—seems to have escaped Freud’s notice.68
But the surrealists appear to have seized on the improbable possibility
Freud held out: the means by which to graft play onto the technological
apparatus in order to mobilize a critique of that apparatus. For psycho-
analysis’s automatic game is the machine that produces nothing—not
mastery, not even meaning. And in the same spirit, surrealist play con-
sumes itself unproductively, leaving b ehind at most an ephemeral by-
product: “residue” in the form of a folded drawing or a depleted scrap
of nonsense, not unlike a joke that has lost its verve in the retelling.69
Surrealist games then, from a psychoanalytic perspective, can be
understood as a critique of the rhetoric of progress and production
commensurate with Bataille’s “nonproductive expenditure.”70 The sheer
wastefulness of surrealist play, the absurdity of its pursuit which, as Breton
recalled with delight, “never failed to incite the hostility of idiots,” places
its players in what Bataille would call the ranks of social dejecta: commit-
ted poets and artists. The rivalries that would rise among the surrealist
players, each struggling to best the other; the overbearing intensity of the
so-called sexual investigations; the tensions of excommunication hanging
on the “wrong” response during an interrogation—all evoke an agonistic
atmosphere that, in spite of Breton’s insistence on the games as benign
diversion, redoubles the sacrificial dimension of surrealist games.71 This
became particularly compelling when surrealism’s ludic strategies were
directed toward art practice, for as in psychoanalytic play, the games
ultimately rupture the field of representation. Along with the rhetoric
of progress, the tropes of freedom, agency, and originality—terms that
Introduction 19
had provided the link between play and aesthetics—are contested in
this destructive model of play. In the cycle of repetition compulsion,
the subject is played, manipulated in a scenario that requires a hapless
“master” caught up in play action beyond his control. By linking artistic
production with this kind of distressing game, the surrealists acknowl-
edged an art of unpleasure, turning away from beauty as an aesthetic
quality and opening art onto the disturbing, the perturbed, and the pro-
vocatively ugly.
Through their games and experimental techniques—the exquisite
corpse game, Max Ernst’s frottage technique, Wolfgang Paalen’s fum-
age, Óscar Domínguez’s decalcomania, the “telephone” drawing game,
or the appropriation of ambiguous images that Salvador Dalí claimed by
way of the paranoid-critical method—surrealism threw off images that,
formally speaking, veer away from unity and static predictability t oward
the chaotic incoherence associated with the id.72 But it is the systematic
and repetitive aspect of these alternative methods, and the structural
sameness and interchangeability of the images they produced, that tie
them specifically to psychoanalytic play. That link is made by the two
dark, antimodernist realizations at the heart of the formulation of the
death drive: the inability to begin freshly rather than repeat, and the
inevitability of regulation. Every round of surrealist play can be seen,
therefore, as a painful and regressive gesture (as opposed to an instance
of erotic renewal) in its attempt to return to some point prior to form—
an erotic desire that is never fulfilled.
War on Work
The rise of psychoanalysis, Walter Benjamin’s theorization of technologi-

cally assisted Spielraum, and the emergence of surrealist play strategies
would be unimaginable outside the historical context of modernism’s
disciplining of space-time and its reconfiguration of subjectivity in terms
of work. Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management had been
translated into French by 1914 and his systems had found purchase in
Europe during World War I for munitions production and reconstruc-
tion.73 By the mid-1920s France had become one of the most advanced
countries in Europe in its application of the methods of “scientific”
organization and management.74 Rationalization as a mode of thought
became synonymous with efficiency, labor discipline, standardization,
and optimal production, as French proponents of the new economy
of means declared that Taylor was simply extending the work of Des-
cartes.75 Chance was denigrated in this functionalist model in f avor of
20 Introduction
determinism, a philosophy that maintained that the world operated
according to discoverable (and exploitable) laws. Eliminating conflict
became an administrative priority, ensuring that centralized direction
would replace collaborative decision-making as a strategy for managing
complex systems: “A body with two heads,” wrote Henri Fayol, the main
theorist of industrial administration in France, “is, in the social world, as
in the animal world, a monster.”76 Thus the rising ideology of rational-
ized labor extended to the human body and in turn to social change, as
both were reconceived in machinic terms that measured their value by
way of efficiency and capacity for work.77
The surrealists’ resistance to mounting pressure to define their objects
and actions in terms of useful productivity is legendary, summarized by
Breton in his autobiographical novel Nadja: “There is no use being alive
if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect
the revelation of his own life’s meaning—that event which I may not yet
have found, but on whose path I seek myself—is not earned by work.”78
Certainly their cry, “War on Work,” printed on a 1925 cover of
La Révolution surréaliste, placed them at ideological odds with the French
Communist Party (pcf), with whom they struggled to make an alliance
in the years of fascism’s rise.79 In spite of Breton’s insistence that theirs
was a popular movement intended to open poetry to everyday expe-
rience, the surrealists’ stance against what Breton deemed the “quasi-
religious” ideology of work would provide the ultimate justification
for their expulsion from official communist circles.80 The “Surrealism in
1929” issue of the Belgian journal Variétés, jointly edited by Breton and
Aragon (the most ardent supporter of communism among the surreal-
ists), opened with Freud’s essay “Humor” (1927) which posited humor as
an expression of the subject’s “refusal to suffer” in spite of the hardships of
reality, and, indeed, of opportunity to “gain pleasure” from “the traumas
of the external world.”81 The surrealists’ defense of humor as a repudiation
of material hardship in service of an illusion alone would have been suf-
ficient to raise the ire of the pcf, but the group compounded the trans-
gression by following the essay with pages of word games and a full round
of collective exquisite corpse drawings, in addition to the usual mix of in-
scrutable essays, poems, and dream transcriptions interspersed with enig-
matic paintings, drawings, and objects. The penultimate essay was André
Thirion’s diatribe, “A bas le travail!” (Down with Work!), in which the
poet disparaged paid labor as a reactionary tool of capitalism in service
to bourgeois ideals—a form of “moral oppression” tantamount to slav-
ery: “Human idleness is continuously trampled by the necessity to work
with the sole end of maintaining its own existence.”82 The surrealists’ final
Introduction 21
break with the pcf came six years later, precipitated by a statement by
surrealist Ferdinand Alquié denigrating communist propaganda that pro-
moted work as life’s only worthwhile goal, a fter which the surrealists w
ere
excluded from the first International Congress of Writers, convened in
Paris by the Communist International to condemn fascism and solidify
support for socialist realism.83 The rationale for the rejection was cast by
writer Ilya Ehrenburg: “These young revolutionaries will have nothing
to do with work. They go in for Hegel and Marx and the Revolution,
but work is something to which they are not adapted.”84
Thus despite the surrealists’ repeated denunciation of bourgeois con-
ventions (including the tradition of individual authorship, which the
group routinely compromised through the anonymity, deskilling, and
collaboration required for surrealist games), their “revolution of the
mind,” an insurrection based on the belief that the realm of thought
was a reality as vivid as the material world, would prove irreconcilable
with communist standards. Standing out most starkly against commu-
nist praxis was the refusal of polemic clarity in favor of the multiple
meanings that characterized surrealist expression. Communication and
identity—the work of pictorial language—was routinely sacrificed in
surrealism in favor of a ludic freedom the surrealists espoused as the pre-
condition for liberating the proletariat.85 “We w ill maintain,” insisted
Breton, “over and above everything in the twentieth century in France,
that irreducible independence of thought which implies the greatest
revolutionary determination.”86
Again, it was Benjamin who recognized in surrealism’s ludic strat-
egies the potential for developing critical cultural forms that would
remain relevant to an increasingly technologically determined society.
Reasoning from his conviction that art emerged not from work but
from idleness, he expressed doubts about the modern cult of productiv-
ity and heroic exhaustion, concluding: “There must be a human element
in things which is not brought about by labor.”87 It was perhaps the
focused attention demanded by the assembly-line ethos that prompted
him to valorize ludic distraction (for example in gambling) as a mode
of apprehension, drawing a grim line between the “before” of early in-
dustrialization (when Baudelairean idleness was still a possibility) and
the projection of an industrially induced future in which human ap-
prehension was reshaped according to a working mode so focused and
disciplined that laboring subjects would fail to discern the larger po
litical programs driving their efforts.88 It was through this frame that
Benjamin read surrealism’s anti-instrumental principles: “My loveliest
mistress is idleness”; “A gold medal for the greatest boredom”—these
22 Introduction
are the surrealist aphorisms Benjamin cites in his 1927 “gloss on surre-
alism” (“Dream Kitsch”), along with admiration for the way the surre-
alists grasped the importance of ambiguous “picture puzzles” and, most
intriguingly, “dialogic misunderstanding,” the mode by which, in Ben-
jamin’s words, “the only true reality forces its way into conversation.”89
Conflict is indispensable to social relations in this model, and if Ben-
jamin appears to have overvalued incoherent play in its contrast with
useful work, it was almost certainly in the interest of cultivating a form
of experience that might help to critically negotiate techno-industrial
capitalism, rather than be abused by it. The room-for-play that he saw
surrealists clearing from within their automatic, ephemeral, and me-
chanically structured systems would resist the commodification that
seemed to accompany autonomous works of art, yet would avoid the
agitprop instrumentality that was becoming the hallmark of totalitar-
ian regimes on the right and the left. In place of the immutable time-
lessness of the traditional work of art, avant-garde play forms promised
constant flux, the ability to be critically responsive to rapidly shifting
historical and material contexts in service to a populace in need of ways
to progressively engage with the lived outcomes of their technologically
determined world. In welcoming chance into artistic practice, the sur-
realists s haped a kind of techno-ecology in which human beings could
be placed in a symbiotic rather than dominant relation to their world.90
The case studies of surrealism at play that I’ve analyzed h
ere give form
to this intersection of chance and technology. The chapters of this book
were not conceived as a global summary, but were directed by my de-
sire to recover mechanisms of the surrealist techno-ludic hidden in the
creases of history. Specifically, with Spielraum as my guide, I sought out
instances of surrealist play that drew equally on mechanism and aban-
don. You will not see René Magritte’s or Dalí’s bistable paintings here;
ludic as they are, their mode of facture veered too far from the structures
of technological mediation that Benjamin so admired. Likewise, my ac-
count may seem to brush too lightly against certain surrealist techniques
that exploit chance—decalcomania, fumage, and frottage, for example.
These techniques, too, struck me as too far removed from Spielraum,
and deserve their own full and separate analysis. Each of the examples
I have chosen focuses attention on a different modality of surrealist play:
“Blur,” on photographic indeterminacy; “Drift,” on the extension of the
automatic into lived space; “System,” on the role of regulation in surreal-
ist games; and “Pun,” on ambiguity and proliferating meanings among
the dissident surrealists. The chapters are arranged in loose chronologi-
cal order, as each affirms a signal shift in the movement’s attitude toward
Introduction 23
automatic technologies and the relative freedoms they afforded. It is
important to understand automatism’s promise of ludic flux as it was first
practiced by the group, in order to fully comprehend what was at stake
when the surrealists gave it up, sublimating automatic play in the form of
games; and it is essential to know how wordplay functioned in the early
days of the surrealist movement before fully grasping the frustrations of
the dissident surrealists in the 1930s. In this way, I have provided a scaf-
fold for an alternative history of surrealism, one that acknowledges the
centrality of play not only to the movement and its legacy, but to the
formation of a modern critical ludic.
The blur between repetition and unforeseeability—or discipline and
disruption—is the focus of chapter 1 of Surrealism at Play, which exam-
ines indeterminacy as an avatar of the avant-garde’s critical ludic during
the so-called époque floue, the threshold moment between Dada and sur-
realism. Man Ray’s rayographs, images that blur the boundary between
photographic realism and modernist abstraction, are emblematic of this
moment, and w ere embraced by the group in this transitional phase as re-
positories of found memory and trenchant reappraisals of technological
rationality. Understood serially, as records of unforeseeable assemblages,
the rayographs’ carnivalesque inversions of perceived reality provided
“room-for-play” through a perspective on what Breton called the “never
seen,” a visual conundrum that would became a recurrent motif in sur-
realism, a sign of the ludic element in latent psychic processes.
The threshold state explored pictorially in the rayographs and affirmed
in the early wordplay of the époque floue expanded to phenomeno-
logical scope in the fledgling years of the surrealist movement proper.
Chapter 2, “Drift,” examines the surrealists’ efforts to confront head-on
the problem of daily experience in a city being reshaped by functionalist
aspirations. This initial turn to praxis was expressed through their pen-
chant for errance, aimless wandering in the streets of Paris that turned
play out into the rationalized grid of the city.91 The surrealists’ effort to
restructure the cityscape itself according to Freud’s dualistic model of
the mind—the manifest and the latent—is traced in Man Ray’s album
of documentary photographs by Eugène Atget. This text, on par with
André Breton’s Nadja and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, renders the
urban landscape through a surrealist frame, reaching beyond the well-
documented importance of “found” surrealism, to suggest that Atget’s
utilitarian studio archive itself served as a photographic synecdoche of
the city available to the surrealist at play.
In spite of the surrealists’ early insistence on experience over represen
tation in the form of automatism and errance, Man Ray’s Atget a lbum was
24 Introduction
ultimately an attempt to render textual the game board that the surrealists
superimposed on Paris. The album heralds a return to representation in
the wake of disillusionments with a full break from the reality principle
that separated inner and outer landscapes. When a number of automatist
sessions resulted in life-threatening incidents, the group, brought up short
by the consequences of unleashing destructive ludic forces into material
reality, called for a qualified reassessment of surrealist notions of freedom
and liberation.92 The shift turned the group toward more regulated forms
of play, and a mechanized concept of “the automatic.”
Chapter 3, “System,” examines the tensions between discipline and
indeterminacy shaping surrealist games of the 1920s and 1930s, and
measures their effectiveness as avant-garde strategies aimed at disrupt-
ing the conventions of representation, communication, and subjectivity.
The chapter revolves around the pictorial version of the paradigmatic
exquisite corpse game, which has been repeatedly characterized as a pro-
ductive collective experience that functioned to solidify the surrealists
as a group. But coupling the surrealists’ critique of technological ratio-
nalization with their fresh understanding of the destructive dimension
of play exposes the game as an intersubjectively disorienting explora-
tion of incoherence with fatal implications for meaning and commu-
nication. Analysis of the play itself, traced back from the folds in the
drawings, reveals the game as an avatar of Freudian “unpleasure,” mani-
fested through seriality, repetition, fragmentation, and the amelioration
of agency through a self-subjection to chance. If this characterization
sounds manipulative, a case of the surrealists being “played” by their
games rather than mastering them, it is because the surrealists tested
the ludic in its full range of signification, not merely as a medium for
what they imagined as the f ree flow of eros, but in its systematic capac-
ity for activating disorientation and disintegration. The surrealist ludic
proceeds from play’s dynamic indeterminacy between the pleasure and
pain of liberation and destruction.93
Historically, this pleasure–pain dyad has been associated with the
renegade surrealists u nder the influence of Georges Bataille, who staked
a great part of his intellectual project on the revaluation of violence and
unreason. One of my aims here is to recover surrealism’s early pleasure
in volatility, exposing a through-line from early Dadaist punning all
the way to the circle of Bataille’s influence. Chapter 4, “Pun,” maps the
range of surrealist wordplay and visual puns from the perspective of the
surrealists of the so-called Rue Blomet group whose members drew on
the works of experimental writer Raymond Roussel to probe the fluid-
ity of meaning. Drawn together by ethnographer Michel Leiris, Alberto
Introduction 25
Giacometti and Joan Miró experienced their encounter with Roussel’s
ludic strategies as a moment of aberration: Giacometti set aside discrete,
sculptural form to make dysfunctional machines that produced noth-
ing and opened sculptural space to the infinite flux Benjamin identified
with architectural Spielraum; while Miró made his series of “antipaint-
ings” based on appropriated mass-media materials, identifying their
absurdist potential and turning it into a degenerative force through a
concatenation of distortions and transpositions common to visual lan-
guage itself. The chapter is at once climactic and recursive, in that it
probes the ludic at its most extreme in avant-garde practice (for example as
a shapeless and meaningless avatar of Bataille’s informe [formless]), yet
returns to the strategies of indeterminacy—punning and wordplay—
that initiated surrealism’s reinvention of play.
Surrealism at Play concludes by identifying the legacy of surrealism’s
modern critical ludic in postwar art practices, and assessing the ultimate
effect of surrealism’s experimental strategies in order to begin sorting
out the crowded contemporary ludic field. Initial evidence of this ac-
celerating interest in play paradigms in the second half of the twentieth
century appeared as early as the 1950s, with an extraordinary exchange
between the play theories of four figures: the historian Johan Huizinga,
the structural linguist Émile Benveniste, surrealist André Breton, and
ex-surrealist Roger Caillois. The conceptual grid formed by the crisscross-
ing perspectives of these four very diff erent thinkers places the surrealist
reinvention of play at the stepping-off point of the postmodern, when
the explosion of cross-disciplinary texts on, about, and engaging play
points to a new dominance of the ludic as an overarching postmodern
interpretive frame. Play has persisted in art production, in the form of
chance operations, the valorization of indeterminacy, and the displace-
ment of authorship, and also in appropriation, participation, and the
contemporary critique of artistic l abor. Thus while this book offers a
historical rubric through which surrealism might be grasped, it also
traces the ludic prehistory of the poststructuralist revision of meaning,
marking the inexhaustible heterodoxy of postwar artistic strategies as
the heritors of surrealist play.
Surrealism itself was in place too long and dispersed too widely for
any single paradigm or defining system to summarize it. Likewise, play
has been theorized extensively across numerous disciplines, with vary-
ing degrees of pertinence to art practices. Surrealism at Play cuts several
paths through this tangled field, and while the book places the shap-
ing of a modern critical ludic firmly in the hands of the interwar avant-
gardes, emphasis has been laid on those theories and practices that have
26 Introduction
proven formative of advanced art in the postwar years. Indeterminacy
and unforeseeability w ill figure prominently, along with the displace-
ment of authority they enact. Chance results will issue from within ex-
ceptionally rigid systems. Fugitive forms and polyvalent configurations
will dominate—Benjamin’s “dialectics at a standstill”—tracing surreal-
ism’s extrarational ways of navigating the world.94 In reinventing play,
the surrealists reconfigured existence itself into a constant questioning
of experience, and placed ludic strategies at the center of future arts
seeking to reorient us critically in relation to our world.
Introduction 27
CHAPTER 1
BLUR
MAN RAY, n. m. synon. de Joie jouer jouir
—Marcel Duchamp
Equivocation
“I saw Picasso h ere on his knees before a photogram,” Man Ray exulted
to Jean Vidal in an interview of 1930. The upstart American had just
opened a solo exhibition of recent oil paintings as well as the striking
photograms he called rayographs. “Painting is dead, finished,” he added.1
Yet Man Ray himself had not abandoned painting, would not abandon
painting, and continued in fact to regard himself as a painter long after
he became famous as a photographer. “And yet you still paint?” Vidal
countered. “Yes,” Man Ray quipped, “to persuade me of its inanity.” An
equivocating response, but as Duchamp observed, Man Ray was a playful
man. And perhaps his cagey retort was warranted: since the rayographs’
appearance in 1922, their critical reception had repeatedly appraised
them in the language of painting, confining their critical capacity to a
painterly lineage destined to displace cubism. “After Picasso I feared I
would be deprived of spectacles. I owe you one,” wrote Jean Cocteau in
an “open letter” to Man Ray addressing the rayographs just months a fter
their emergence: “You come anew to f ree painting. . . . The painter w ill
again be able, without regrets, to study the human face and you, my dear
Man Ray, w ill be able to nourish the scheming spirit by which a Picasso,
a Georges Braque w ill undoubtedly go off to join Raphael.”2 Four years
later, in “Surrealism and Painting” (1925), André Breton would claim
that the rayographs were ideal models of psychic automatism precisely
for their affinity with painting.3 But most decisively for subsequent his-
tories of the rayographs, Man Ray himself would look back on them
and see painting: “I was trying to do with photography what painters
were doing,“ he would write, “but with light and chemicals, instead of
pigment, and without the optical help of the camera.”4
Glossed with autobiographical authority, this statement has been
uncritically embraced as evidence that Man Ray wanted to elevate
photography to an art form commensurate with painting—a view that
overlooks the fact that any such paragone, in insisting that h ere was a kind
of photography that looked so much like modernist painting (that is to
say, abstraction) that it could be called art, inevitably would subordinate
photography to painting, at once dedicating rayograph production to
the renewal of painting and burdening the images with the denigration
of all other photographic models.5 Admittedly, this strategy of partition-
ing and categorization would explain the way Man Ray claimed to recon-
cile his parallel commercial and avant-garde practices—the experimental
rayographs on one hand, and the portrait commissions and fashion pho-
tography on the other: “I could not help thinking that since photography
had liberated the modern painter from the drudgery of faithful represen
tation, this field would become the exclusive one of photography, help-
ing it to become an art in its own right; hence [Alfred] Stieglitz’s interest
in the two means of expression. And so there was no conflict. Despite
my respect for Stieglitz’s efforts, and my aroused interest in photography,
painting remained my guiding passion . . . there was no competition in-
volved, rather the two mediums were engaged on different paths.”6
Given his intimacy with Marcel Duchamp’s rogue concept of art
production, Man Ray had to have understood by 1922 the need, in an
avant-garde context, for his “artistic” images to behave as something
outside of the reductive opposing categories of commerce and autonomy.
Yet he seems to have been unable to resist the draw of painting’s prestige.
In his public statements he routinely equated art with painting (without
acknowledging the conceptual advances of the readymade), and rel-
egated photography in general to the “drudgery” with which he associ-
ated his portrait and fashion commissions. He would never resolve his
equivocation of photography’s relation to art, or the rayograph’s relation
to painting: a rayograph from 1930, Photographie intégrale et cent pour
cent automatique (figure 1.1), would serve to illustrate his 1937 statement
“Photography is not Art,” but he would reverse his position l ater with the
written statement “Photography can be Art,” and then, dodging b ehind a
30 Chapter One

Man Ray, Photographie intégrale et cent pour cent
1.1
automatique, 1930. Private collection. © 2018 Man Ray
Trust /A
rtists Rights Society (ars), New York / Société des
auteurs dans les arts graphiques et plastiques (adagp), Paris.
playful Dada absurdity, assert “Art is not photography.”7 Given only these
two conservative paths—that of the document (objective, descriptive, and
commercial) and that of art (subjective, abstract, and disinterested)—one
senses that for Man Ray to acknowledge the rayographs as art objects at
all he would have to think of them as painting: “painting with light,” as his
patron Ferdinand Howald understood them in 1922.8
And the rayograph’s play of mediums goes even deeper. Art historians
have pointed out repeatedly that the rayographs followed almost directly
on Man Ray’s experiments with airbrush painting (his “aerographs”), and
the fact that they share that medium’s stencil-like deployment of ground
Blur 31
and particulate further eases the rayographs into place as something of a
marker in Man Ray’s trajectory as a painter.9 For the rayographs do side-
step two widely accepted traits of photography. First, as contact prints
produced by placing objects directly onto the treated paper, they are
unique images made without the technological mediation of the camera
lens. Thus they have excused themselves from the critical discourse that
grasps photography as a mechanical means of re-production. This is no
small thing, as the elimination of the mediating negative means that ray-
ographs are unique, “original” objects eligible to retain what Benjamin
would have called the “aura” of traditional works of art, stepping back
from the technological characteristics that, in his estimation, would af-
ford the greatest degree of Spielraum.10 The camera’s absence seems to
ensure that the artist’s hand is foregrounded in the production of the
image—along with all the attendant implications of signature, agency,
and direct access to expression. Mastery and authorship remain intact,
and the use value we associate with the best of mechanically produced
objects is deferred—traded, effectively, for the limited exhibition value
and privilege accorded to painting. Second, as images that present a pic-
torial field radically skewed from the natural, visible world, rayographs
appear to have evaded an essential restriction of analog photography: the
limits of physical reality itself. That is, the elements within the pictorial
frame have suffered internal interference—value reversal and morphic
distortion—that the referents themselves have survived. The overall im-
pression of the pictures is that they are abstract rather than descriptive,
and in turning away from denotation they approach a self-reflexive form
of abstraction that, at least in the first decades of the twentieth century,
was still closed to photography.
But painting with light? The notion of a photograph as a self-reflexive
critique of painting is absurd: autoanalysis is medium specific. Further-
more, regardless of Man Ray’s own artistic preconceptions, his newly
adoptive Dada circle was bashing the modernist painting of the day:
“The Cubists are pale succubae,” wrote Georges Ribemont-Dessaigne,
“The Dadaists are not sons of the Cubists . . . the bouillon cube is an
emetic.”11 And what the Dadaists saw in the rayographs was some-
thing intensely photographic. The forms that appear on the surface
of a rayograph have a causal relation to objects in the material world
and the composition of those forms is strictly limited to the physical
mise-en-scène of the moment of the image’s registration. Moreover, the
rayographs’ claim to originality is mitigated by their forms appearing
“automatically” in the darkroom tray—a process associated more with
the methods of industrial fabrication than the intentional gestures of
32 Chapter One

painting. In this sense, they are every bit as deskilled as an image regis-
tered through the camera’s lens. And while the mechanical apparatus of
the camera has been eliminated from the photogram process, the ma-
terial support is nevertheless technologically dependent, consisting of
chemicals, paper, and artificial light.
In fact, in spite of their abstract appearance, photograms are extremely
concrete, to the point that they literalize the indexical paradigm that has
been central to the theorization of photographic representation from
its inception.12 In this sense, it could be said that in the rayographs
p hotography itself appeared for the first time; photography in its very “dif-
ference from” the material world it represented: in its stark black-and-
whiteness, in its negative mediation, in its strictly technological origins.
Yet, as contact images, rayographs also have a special relation to tactility
and scale that specifically summons dimensionality and space—that is,
the physical object status of the forms in the pictorial field—and they
call on this palpable materiality not only to test the limits of modernist
painting and photography, but to bear down on sculptural qualities as
well. This cross wiring of codes and conventions, taken within the con-
text of the Dada commitment to revising the politics of representation,
indicates that rayographs might be best understood through a frame
of pictorial reformation that, insinuating itself into a painterly mode,
twists the codes of modernist painting against themselves, challenging,
in fact, the validity of medium-based codification itself. In light of this
project, Picasso, an artist whose work had already become emblematic
of modernist painting, was humbled before a form that invaded and
critically rewrote modern art production according to Dada tenets.
Those tenets are so familiar by now that it is startling to realize that
the rayographs have not been regarded through this critical frame. They
emerged at the climactic convergence of three major and distinctive
strains of the Dada movement: the Duchampian imperatives that Man
Ray had imported to Paris from New York, the discourse of liberatory
expansionism André Breton was already cultivating in France, and the
grab bag of Zurich precedents that had just descended on Paris in the per-
son of Tristan Tzara. Flowing from the pursuit of the antiretinal, the
psycho-perceptual, and the readymade, rayographs were embraced by
the Dadaists as both repositories of found memory and trenchant ap-
praisals of technological rationality: a scrambling of categories that ul-
timately opened room-for-play in painting, photography, and sculpture
as well as in received ideas about technological stability. The context in
which this happened was a set of practices best described as the Dada au-
tomatic, a ludic reorganization of the perceptual field that foregrounded
Blur 33
the m odern subject as the subject of technology and, in slight advance of
the full commitment of the surrealist movement to psychic automatism,
embraced the role of the unconscious in cultural production: in its irra-
tionality; in its dismissal of conscious w
ill and volition’s facilitator, useful
action; in its indifference to purpose; in its traffic with chance; and in its
manifestation in moments paradoxically circumscribed from normal life,
yet embedded within and determined by the ordinary and the everyday.
Extraordinarily overdetermined by a welter of conflicting motivations, ray-
ographs embody the general heterogeneity of the interwar avant-garde,
but they are particularly representative of Dada play as it was manifested
in the brilliant sputter of the movement’s demise in Paris in the years 1922
and 1923, the years of the so-called époque floue. And importantly, the
categorical evasions of rayographs and their alignment with automatist
practices would secure t hese images—along with the ludic structures they
articulated—a place at the center of the surrealist movement to follow.
Blur
The characterization flou, or “blur,” for this threshold moment that

was neither Dada nor surrealism, and yet both, is Louis Aragon’s: “We
imagined . . . that the Dada movement had been succeeded by an ab-
solutely new state of mind which we amused ourselves by calling the
mouvement flou. Illusory, and for me marvelous expression.”13 Indeed,
in France, the term flou is a photographic pejorative meaning “out of
focus,” and rayographs are in every way a visual manifestation of this
tendency t oward indeterminacy. Like shape-shifters they fluctuate be-
tween abstraction, description, imagination, and materiality; between
painting, photography, and sculpture; between art and its o thers (see
plate 1). Extraordinarily open to interpretation, they have appeared
in publications as disparate as London Vogue, in 1925, and the construc-
tivist journal G, in 1923 and 1926.14
In the mid-to late 1920s, when Breton and his followers embraced
rayographs as fully surrealist objects, they ensured that along with the
rest of the mouvement flou they would be analyzed in terms of the
surrealist movement to come, effectively eclipsing Dada’s role in their
formation. But Dada had long operated according to the principle of
instability, blurring distinctions between art and mass media (in photo-
montage), art and mass production (in the readymade), and intention
and reception (in public provocations and spectacles). In 1921, Roman
Jakobsen characterized the movement as “transrational”—an indul-
gence in sheer relativity that was “exceptionally supple and adaptable
34 Chapter One

(one can perform contradictory actions at the same time, in a single,
fresh breath)”—citing Tristan Tzara as support: “I am against all sys-
tems, the most acceptable system is to have no system at all.”15 Framed
by flou, Man Ray’s repudiations of photography—photography is not
art/ photography can be art/ art is not photography—strike one as a
form of discursive repurposing that recalls the readymade, or at the very
least a cultivation of irrationality commensurate with the associative
streams characteristic of automatic writing. What appears at first to be a
show of dogmatic inconsistency is in fact an instance of Dada’s distinc-
tive class of play: irrational blur and flux, activated by a form of criti-
cal recycling that Aragon would call (far in advance of the Situationist
International) détournement—not negation, precisely, but an interven-
tion or interleaving of new forms into old that is put in play to expose
conventional demarcations as redundant.16 “And yet you still paint?”
“Yes . . . to persuade me of its inanity.”
Meaning to Mean Nothing: Dada Play
Détournement as a critical structure had only been claimed as such by

Aragon in 1923, specifically in reference to Max Ernst’s Dada collages
of 1921. But the strategy had been in operation from Dada’s earliest ef-
forts, where its ludic quality was foregrounded by aligning it with play’s
consort, chance. The scope of Dada’s deployment of chance extended to
all of the movement’s international branches and was integral to Dada’s
general ethos of refusal: the rejection of social and artistic precedents,
and more specifically, if more subtly, the rejection of the unquestioned
value of work itself, understood as a defining feature of modern life. But
chance also had an important generative role in the group, as it was fun-
damental to the theorization of Dada subjectivity, radically destabiliz-
ing the very certainty of the avant-garde’s notion of self.
Not unexpectedly, given the priority Dada placed on disruption
and negation, the centrality of chance to the Dadaists (and the sur-
realists to come) as a critical strategy of détournement is grounded in
the way it functions pragmatically as an interruption of the “other” in
a unified field of perception, rendering a text, image, or experience
temporarily incoherent. The articulation of chance-as-intervention is
central to, for example, Freud’s account of the unconscious as utterly for-
eign to conscious expression, its impulses surfacing as aberrant symptoms
that disturb the smooth functioning of the effectively socialized subject.
As Jean Laplanche has pointed out, “that which comes from the un-
conscious intervenes as a reality (itself conflictual) in the midst of the
Blur 35
conscious ‘text,’ which therefore appears much less coherent.”17 In this
sense psychoanalytic theory builds on the philosophical terms by which
chance had already been fitted into the rational order of experience by
the time of Freud’s writing: Enlightenment laws of necessity demanded
that chance occurrences be understood as points of intersection be-
tween two or more independent causal chains, each with its own in-
ternal logic, but a logic unavailable to the other.18 It is this fundamental
inscrutability that reshapes the experience of chance for the postpsy-
choanalytic subject: even when an intersection of events is fortuitous,
as when two friends meet unexpectedly on the street, the continuity of
their respective agendas is thrown into disarray through the sheer het-
erogeneity revealed by their point of intersection, a moment in which
the point of view of the “other” is forced into the field of perception.
For avant-garde artists seeking unprecedented modes of experience, it
was this realization of “infinite exteriority,” that gave chance its power,
jolting the subject out of her hermetic and orderly course of action and
into a new mode of apprehension.19
To intentionally throw oneself—and one’s art—in the path of a “for-
eign” causal chain, as the Dadaists did, was to draw forms of “other de-
termination” (intersubjectivity or belief-independent production) into
the field of art practice, and in guaranteeing unforeseeable results, to
open the possibility of a transformative encounter with the unknown.
Notoriously, Hans Arp elicited this intersection of agency and automa-
tism in his Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1917;
figure 1.2) when he laid out the “rules” of the exercise in art making but
left the initial composition of the collage to gravity.20 Francis P icabia’s
La Sainte Vierge (1920; figures 1.3 and 1.4) would follow: a pair of
“accidental” ink splashes that, in their polymorphous variations, have
been theorized as punning emblems of the essential indeterminacy of
Dada identity.21 These explorations had been preceded by Marcel Du-
champ’s repertoire of ludic strategies, which layered wordplay, chance,
and games in a series of gestures beginning with Three Standard Stop-
pages in 1913–14 (figure 1.5), which adopted chance as both medium and
subject in order to probe, in the artist’s own words, “the self and what
is proper to it.”22 For Duchamp, this destabilization of subjectivity was
activated when chance blocked personal expression:
The idea of “chance,” which many people were thinking about at the
time, struck me too. The intention consisted above all in forget-
ting the hand, since, fundamentally, even your hand is chance. Pure
chance interested me as a way of going against logical reality . . . this
36 Chapter One

1.2 (right)
Hans Arp, Squares Arranged According to the
Laws of Chance, 1917. Museum of Modern Art (moma),
New York. Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2018 ars / vg
Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital image © moma / Licensed by
scala / Art Resource, New York.
(below left)
1.3 Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vierge,
1920. Musée national d’art moderne (mnam), Paris.
Francis Picabia. © 2018 ars / adagp. Photo by Georges
Meguerditchi © Centre national d’art contemporain
(cnac), Paris/ mnam/ Dist. rmn Grand-Palais, Paris/Art
Resource.
(below right)
1.4 Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vierge II,
c. 1920. Chancellerie des universités de Paris, Bibliothèque
littéraire Jacques Doucet. © 2018 ars/adagp.
1.5 Marcel Duchamp,
Three Standard
Stoppages, 1913–14.
moma. Katherine S.
Dreier Bequest. © 2018
Association Marcel
Duchamp/ adagp/
ars. Digital image
© moma / Licensed by
scala / Art Resource.
amused me. It’s always the idea of “amusement” which causes me to

do things. . . . My “Three Standard Stoppages” is produced by three
separate experiments, and the form of each one is slightly different.
I keep the line, and I have a deformed meter. It’s a “canned meter,” so
to speak, canned chance.23
The process by which Three Standard Stoppages was formed—dropping
three strings onto a surface to create arbitrary templates for a new standard
of measurement—is a startlingly early declaration of the potential for the
circumscribed space of play (analogous to the autonomous space of art
production) to provide an arena for the rehearsal of new codes not only
within art practices but in response to the increasingly codified conven-
tions of representation at large, as evidenced by the project’s critical ap-
propriation of the then newly official unit of measurement, the meter. The
name Duchamp gave to his system, canned chance, could equally apply to
Tristan Tzara’s instructions for making a Dada poem: cutting words from
a newspaper, mixing them up in a bag and then drawing them out one by
one, copying them in the order they emerged.24 The nonsense produced
made a critique of lyrical freedom from within the genre, as its raucous
exaggeration of poetic inscrutability parodied modern poetry’s refusal of
utilitarian language, won at the expense of communicative clarity.
These experiments join Duchamp’s strategy for winning at roulette
(actualized in his Monte Carlo Bond of 1924; figure 1.6) as elegant ex-
amples of chance defined as the absence of work, an affront to a tra-
dition that still understood composition and skill as the armature of
38 Chapter One

Marcel Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bond, 1924.
1.6
moma. Gift of the artist. © 2018 Association Marcel
Duchamp/adagp/ars. Digital image © moma /
Licensed by scala/Art Resource.
art, but a challenge that reached even farther, to strike at the heart of
modernism’s broader alliances with functionalism. Of Duchamp’s many
engagements with chance, the Monte Carlo Bond particularly calls play
strategies to the forefront in its conflation of gambling with finance:
the bonds (which Duchamp traded conscientiously, with 20 percent
interest) were issued to finance a nonproductive and ahistorical activity
that itself flew in the face of progress.25 Gambling, like all play, enjoys
a temporal suspension commensurate with its essential meaningless-
ness: each new game “forgets” the losses that came before it and plays
out independently of the next round, with no development. For critic
Walter Benjamin, writing under the influence of, successively, Dada
and surrealism, it was this refusal of history and its role as the engine
of progress—effectively, a refusal to learn—that set gambling outside
and against the modern concept of industry: “The basic principle . . . of
gambling . . . consists in this: . . . that each round is independent of the
one preceding . . . Gambling strenuously denies all acquired conditions,
all antecedents . . . pointing to previous actions; and that is what distin-
guishes it from work. Gambling rejects . . . this weighty past which is
the mainstay of work, and which makes for seriousness of purpose, for
attention to the long term, for right, and for power. . . . The idea of be-
ginning again . . . and of d oing better, . . . occurs often to one for whom
work is a struggle; but the idea is . . . useless, . . . and one must stumble
on with insufficient results.”26
The tone of opprobrium that clings to this passage effectively pathol-
ogizes games of chance, presenting them as obstacles to progressive
social models linked to work. But the passage appears in Benjamin’s
Arcades Project—the critic’s unfinished montage of notes on modern
urban life, a compendium that does not shrink from the critique of the
cult of labor under industrial capitalism—and in other contexts Benja-
min cites this very passage in order to demonstrate the ways that games
of chance can be understood as valid models of resistance in a function-
alist culture that has itself forgotten the lessons of history.
Miriam Hansen, in her account of Benjamin’s concept of Spielraum,
expands on Benjamin’s l ater refashioning of gambling as a new, salutary
mode of experience with the potential to retrain the subject to man-
age the techno-industrial shocks of modern life.27 As evidence, Hansen
points to Benjamin’s short essay “Notes on a Theory of Gambling”
(1930), in which the critic describes the gambler’s desire to place himself
in thrall to chance as a pleasure rooted in a phenomenon he calls motor
innervation, a process by which the gambler internalizes the shock-
ing extremes that inflect the rhythm of winning and losing in games
40 Chapter One

of chance—extremes that the subject endures on a daily basis as part
of the reorganization of sense perception in modern, industrial life—
tapping into a certain degree of freedom as he rides fate to its natural
outcome.28 Considered within the context of the critic’s overarching
theory of play, Hansen argues, Benjamin advances “proper gambling”
(purposeless gaming engaged for its own sake, as opposed to playing for
material gain) as a mode of “reinventing experience,” advancing play as
an “alternative mode of apperception, assimilation and agency which
would not only be equal to the technologically changed and changing
environment, but also open to chance and a different future.”29
From the perspective of Benjamin’s formulation of Spielraum,
Duchamp’s preoccupation with chance can be understood as a canny
grasp of the new critical role of art production in the modern context,
and of play’s crucial role in rendering a new form of counter-practice for
art that, in incorporating unprecedented modes of sensory experience
prophylactically, would be both reflective of and critically engaged with
modern experience (as opposed to collusive with it, as in an escapist
aestheticism and cult of artistic genius at a remove from the quotidian).
With the passage of chance into art practice, shock and fragmentation
could be incorporated and used to “seize the current of fate” rather than
to collude with the modes of useful production demanded by industrial
capitalism.30 Paradoxically, for Benjamin, the process of innervation
enabled by Spielraum deploys technological forms against themselves,
using the morcellization and recomposition of the subject-in-play to es-
tablish a healthy equilibrium between h uman beings and technology.31
But it is crucial that this dialectical relationship be carried out u nder
the auspices of the technology itself, and for that reason, Benjamin as-
serted, Spielraum was at its most pronounced in the technologically de-
termined modes of photography and film, whose imagery is dependent
on new forms of perception determined by “the apparatus.”32
Man Ray’s links to Duchamp are well known, and their collabora-
tions often took precisely the photographic form that would seem to
be the essential precondition for Spielraum.33 But the rayographs, as
images made without a camera, would appear closed to the concept
for exactly the reasons that had aligned them with the “auratic” modes
of painting. Yet there are ways of understanding the process by which
Man Ray produced his photograms in direct analogy to the actions of
Benjamin’s gambler, that is, as a series of abrupt, mechanized, and re-
petitive gestures (arranging the objects, snapping on the light, accepting
the chance-determined result) that share the tempo of the gaming t able
rather than the slow deliberation of painting.34 In rayograph production,
Blur 41
intuition and tactility, two modes that hold sway at the roulette wheel,
are favored over vision and agency, which in both cases are temporarily
remanded in favor of risk—for Man Ray, the chance that the resulting
image might fail to live up to Dada standards. In this scenario, “the man
is a photographic apparatus,” as Tzara would write of Man Ray in an in-
augural essay on the rayographs, calling up the very image of the subject
who had internalized the means of mechanical reproduction.35
Most compelling for placing Man Ray’s early artistic investments
within in the scope of Spielraum was the overall nature of his collab-
orative friendship with Duchamp: a meeting of minds emblematized
by the chessboard that so often joined the two figures in photographic
portraits. While chess in its deliberation and sustained analytical focus
would seem to call for an entirely diff erent register of attention than the
gambler’s scattered actions, the essence of the game lies in a form of ac-
tion comprising agency in dialectic with chance (in the form of the op-
ponent’s moves), played out in repetitive patterns on a multidirectional
spatial field in constant flux—a model not unlike Spielraum’s dialectic
of the mechanical and conceptual.36 Duchamp himself referred to the
game as at once “artistic” and “mechanistic,” a “mechanical sculpture”
produced mentally, without “the intervention of the hand” (Duchamp
regularly competed in “blindfold” tournaments, in which players nei-
ther see nor touch the pieces).37 The innervation of techno-industrial
effects the game provided would resurface in Man Ray’s darkroom, a
fact not lost on Tzara, who, in the last line of his catalogue essay on the
rayographs, called them “Man Ray’s game of chess with the sun.”38
This new critical field of action—marked out at the nexus of technol-
ogy and subjectivity and driven by flux and chance—would shape the
contours of Benjamin’s dawning conception of the revolutionary po-
tential of play. The critic had become acquainted with the rayographs
as Dada objects from at least 1924, when he translated Tzara’s essay on
the photograms for republication in the constructivist journal G.39 The
unprecedented embrace of chance that the rayographs represented,
paradoxically delivered from within a medium valued as a source of
documentary witness and truth, suggests precisely the dialectic between
mechanical devices and subjective imagination that would become the
foundation for Benjamin’s concept of Spielraum, as expanded scope of
action developed with the eclipse of aura in the work of art. The sheer
purposelessness that had drawn Duchamp to chess (“there is no social
purpose . . . that above all is important . . . you can’t make money from
chess”), and that reverberated in the inscrutable rayographs, is reiterated
42 Chapter One

as a salutary form once theorized as Spielraum, a ludic form with poten-
tial for critical resistance to the deleterious effects of modernization on
subjective experience.40
Play as Disservice
The radicalization of uselessness that Benjamin would have recognized

in the rayographs, definitive for Dada (and subsequently presented as a
model for surrealism), aligns chance-based and purposeless structures
with Dada’s public disruptions, placing the group’s play tactics in a lin-
eage of protest that art historian Gavin Grindon has characterized as the
“unruly and irrational ‘mob’ feared by bourgeois social critics.” Grindon
traces the avant-garde “refusal of work” to Schiller’s Romantic notion
of Spieltrieb, or play drive, as the essence of all aesthetic production and
contemplation, an a priori impulse that harmonizes the conflicting car-
nal and rational drives that beset human nature from within.41 Framed
in this way, Dada (and surrealist) play can be understood as the over-
pronouncement or literalization of the civilizing agent Spieltrieb, to the
point of mockery and mimicry, sending it up as an impulse that produces
not harmony but chaos. This, too, falls within the scope of Benjamin’s
concept of critical play, where mimesis has an apotropaic role, resisting
the straightforward repetition of codified forms through a process of
“controlled exhibition.”42 Thus these avant-gardes avoided affirming
the polarized separation of aesthetic f ree play and rationalized labor by
mocking them both: work was derided by the movement’s insistence on
play; and play’s autonomy from work was ridiculed through parody.43
For André Breton, occupied in the époque floue with sorting out
the fundamentals of Dada from those that would become the found-
ing tenets of surrealism, Duchamp’s ironic “work ethic” would have
resonated with the commitment to indifference embodied by Breton’s
wartime friend Jacques Vaché. Broadly disdainful and deeply cynical,
Vaché appeared to live in a perpetual state of insubordination, cultivat-
ing an attitude he called “umour,” which he defined (in 1917, at Breton’s
request) as “a sensation of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of
everything.”44 His “stance of utter indifference,” as Breton later phrased
it in his Anthology of Black Humor (1940), and particularly his “will not
to serve any purpose whatsoever,” lay ground for Breton’s ultimate deploy-
ment of play tactics as modes of constant critical “disservice.”45 In Vaché,
Breton saw a dandy for the twentieth century; a misfit twisted into a
state of unremitting iconoclasm by the trauma of war; and, crucially, a
Blur 43
provocateur committed to performing his irreverence publicly, in the
form of the reinvention of ordinary actions, as opposed to the more pas-
sive Baudelairean model of the dandy, who reinvested the ordinary with
lyrical value by merely seeing the world in a new, “poetic” way. With
Vaché, Breton recalled, ordinary pastimes like going to the cinema were
transformed into critical action, as the two men reeled arbitrarily from
theater to theater, bursting in while the film was in progress and moving
on whenever they became bored, a peripatetic experience that physi-
cally enacted the fragmented yet naturalized phenomenology of film
viewing, that is, the space/ time disjunctions of editing. The method re-
jected directorial and narrative authority, producing instead a collage-
like détournement of the viewing experience itself, with sheer ennui as
its glue.46 Vaché introduced Breton to a new form: art as a trace of ac-
tion, made significant by its refusal to signify.
Breton’s subsequent idealization of Marcel Duchamp as the para-
digm of a life lived in play, and his promotion of Duchamp as a model
for artistic practice in the époque floue, is ghosted by the afterimage
of Vaché, who died of an overdose of opium in 1919. Duchamp’s lan-
guage play in particular would have resonated with Vaché’s noncom-
municative ideals, as would the structure of juxtaposition characteristic
of wordplay, so like Vaché’s preferred mode of cinematic viewing. As
Duchamp made clear in a 1961 interview, this same pursuit of manifold
meanings at the expense of clarity lay at the heart of his own fascina-
tion with wordplay: “For me, words are not merely a means of com-
munication. You know, puns have always been considered a low form
of wit, but I find them a source of stimulation both because of their
actual sound and b ecause of the unexpected meanings attached to the
interrelationships of disparate words. For me, this is an infinite field of
joy—and it’s always right at hand. Sometimes four or five diff erent levels
of meaning come through.”47
The paradoxical obscuring of meaning through meaning’s overpro-
duction certainly drew Breton’s attention. In 1922, in the fifth number
of Littérature nouvelle série (an issue dedicated to Duchamp’s alter ego,
Rrose Sélavy, and peppered with her aphorisms), Breton remarked ad-
miringly on Duchamp’s “disdain of messages.”48 Unintelligibility, in fact,
structures the form: puns must be spoken (even if to oneself ) in order
to operate, and in this way they force the reader to participate in the
utterance—yet the minute the words are heard, their play becomes ap-
parent, and meaning, fatally split and multiplied, falters. As such, puns
invoke in turn collaboration and its frustration. But most compelling
for Breton, whose interest in Freudian psychoanalysis was quickening at
44 Chapter One

this time, w ere the moments when meaning stumbled over desire, and
he was clearly drawn to t hose of Duchamp’s punning rhymes that aligned
wordplay with eroticism. The Littérature nouvelle série issue on Sélavy
opened with this incestuous aphorism: “Rrose Sélavy trouve qu-un in-
cesticide doit coucher avec sa mere avant de la tuer; les punaises sont
de rigeur” (Rrose Sélavy thinks an insecticide should sleep with his
mother before killing her; bedbugs obligatory),49 and farther into the
issue, r unning like a banner over Breton’s essay “Marcel Duchamp,” was
Sélavy’s “Litanie des saints,” a homonymic chant on breasts:
Je crois qu’elle sent du bout des seins
Tais-toi, tu sens du bout des seins
Pourquoi sens-tu du bout des seins?
Je veux sentir du bout des seins.
[I think she feels the nipples
Shut up and feel the nipples
Why do you feel the nipples?
I want to feel the nipples.]50
In the essay itself, Breton singled out the sexually graphic spooner-
ism: “Conseil d’hygiène intime: Il faut mettre la moelle de l’épée dans
le poil de l’aimée” (Personal hygiene tip: You must bury the sword to
its hilt in the fur of the beloved), linking it to Duchamp’s openly erotic
“glass painting,” The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–
23).51 Th
ese rhythmic streams w ere preceded by other objects and images
that testify to Duchamp’s professed desire to use art to recover repressed
erotic impulses—to construct, in fact, a veritable “school” of eroticism
equivalent to symbolism or Romanticism.52 Think of the vulgar sexual-
ization of the Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), the identity-unraveling
play on “eros” in the name Rrose Sélavy, Rrose’s appearance on the bottle
of Belle haleine eau de voilette (1921), and of course The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, with its articulation of mechanized sexual-
ity.53 In 1926, Duchamp would directly express the erotics of wordplay
in Anémic cinéma (the name itself an anagrammatic near-palindrome),
a film featuring rotating discs printed with spiraling nonsense adages:
“Esquivons les ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots exquis” (Dodge the
bruises of Eskimos with exquisite words) and “On demande des mous-
tiques domestiques (demi-stock) pour la cure d’azote sur la cote d’azur,”
(Domestic mosquitoes [half-stock] are necessary for the nitrogen cure
on the cote d’azur) and “Avez-vous déjà mis la moëlle de l’épée dans le
poêle de l’aimée?” (“Have you already buried the sword to the hilt in
Blur 45
Marcel Duchamp, inscribed disc from Anémic cinéma,
1.7
1926. mnam. © 2018 Association Marcel Duchamp /
adagp/ars. Image © cnac/ mnam / Dist. rmn
Grand-Palais/ Art Resource.
the oven of your beloved?”) (see figure 1.7). These phrases sought their
effect directly in the body, bypassing titillating imagery in favor of a
throbbing poetic beat exacerbated by the visual pulse of the rotating
spirals in which they were arrayed for the viewer. Their erotic power
emerges performatively, as a physiological effect, thanks to this plastic
realization of the optical, aural, and cognitive instability already present
in Duchamp’s most compelling wordplay.54
Parsing the Ludic Erotic
But Breton, unlike Duchamp, would come relatively late to the theo-
rization of films and objects. In 1922, it was the sexual potential of
sheer linguistic drift activated by Rrose Sélavy’s dictums that electrified
Breton, the poet, and prompted the central essay of the seventh issue
of Littérature nouvelle série, “Words without Wrinkles”: “We were be-
ginning to distrust words . . . we had to free them.” Breton’s claim for
Duchamp’s wordplay was that it was calculated to throw off the fetters
of meaning and expose other, erotic, properties of words through new
combinations that rewrote “mediocre and utilitarian syntax.” In Du
champ’s ludic aphorisms, Breton contended, words w ere “living their
own life,” and w ere empowered to “command thought,” rather than
merely perform as thought’s conduit.55 Most important for Breton was
the multivalence of meaning born of linguistic couplings: the sense that
in Duchamp’s puns, words were “making love.”56
The sexual potential of linguistic form, activated by the ludic under-
mining of meaning, was announced on the cover of the number, which
appeared with the journal’s name skewered—along with literature’s
connotations of lasting merit—by the homonymic Lits et ratures: “beds
and erasures”; or phonetically, “read the erasures”; or, most pointedly,
Littré rature, “erased dictionary,” a chaotic unspooling of meaning that
answered Breton’s overarching call to f ree words from their dictionary
definitions. It was Duchamp who had devised this set of cognitive and
verbal gymnastics, illustrated by Francis Picabia with a bawdy drawing
of sex viewed from the foot of the bed (see figure 1.8).57 Here, the in-
tention to pun is obvious: the journal’s name is split by the interven-
ing image of suggestively positioned shoes. But elsewhere, Duchamp’s
wordplay would verge on accidents of spelling or bungled pronuncia-
tions, as in, for example, Rrose’s metagrammatic aphorism “A charge de
revanche et à verge de rechange,” where “returning the favor” turns into
“replacing a penis” with the transposition of a few letters. Duchamp also
invites the possibility of misunderstanding, as when “À couteaux tirés”
Blur 47
Cover, Littérature nouvelle
1.8
série 7 (December 1922).
Getty Research Institute,
Los Angeles (84-S151).
(To be at drawn daggers) can be heard as “A coup trop tiré” (To fuck
too often), or when the proximity of “saints” to “breasts” (seins) emerges
along with the compromising effects of “meaning” (sens) and “feeling”
(sent) in the “Litanie des saints.”58 And while the homonyms, meta-
grams, and alliterations Duchamp deployed in his jeux d’esprit had long
been codified by French experts as witty conversational devices, such
“accidental” wordplay and “mistaken” meaning had recently taken on
an unprecedented level of psychic significance at the hand of Sigmund
Freud: 1922 was the year his “Psychopathology of Everyday Life” (1901)
was translated into French.59
Freud’s volume is devoted to the interpretation of “parapraxes”: slips
of the tongue, bungled actions, errors, and instances of forgetting that
are normally treated as accidental and therefore insignificant. To qual-
ify, the statement has to be inadvertent—“we must be unaware in our-
selves of any motive for it”—and it must be mundane, “within the limits
of the normal . . . momentary and temporary,” that is, ordinary speech
made disruptive by its spontaneous occurrence out of context.60 As an
example, Freud offers two innocent clichés: “as long as he has his four
straight limbs,” and “as long as he has his five wits about him,” which
combine to form a third, composite statement, the sexually suggestive,
“as long as he has his five straight limbs.”61 The connection to jokes
formed through sheer incongruity is notable, and would become the
48 Chapter One

foundation for Freud’s subsequent study on that topic, Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious. But most important, whether the wordplay
is accidental or intentional, is the sexual innuendo that triggers the joke,
for Freud pathologized such parapraxes (which included mishearing
as well as misspeaking and slips of the pen) as linguistic disturbances
symptomatic of repressed desires. In his formulation, elements “which
are not intended to be uttered” involuntarily make themselves felt in
consciousness by bringing about “a distortion, composite figure or a
compromise- formation (contamination)” of intended meaning.62
Crucially for Breton and his colleagues, Freud traces the phenomenon
to the same operation that triggers condensation in dreams: “A similar-
ity of any sort between the things themselves or between their verbal
presentations is taken as an opportunity for creating a third, which
is a composite or compromise idea. . . . [ T]his third element represents
both its components; and it is as a consequence of its originating in this
way that it so frequently has various contradictory characteristics.”63
The formal structure of the composite, or juxtaposition of “distant
realities” described by Freud as a symptom of unconscious desire, was
destined to become a central motif of the surrealist movement.64 But at
this moment, two years before the draft of the first surrealist manifesto,
what was most important to Breton was blur—the sheer indeterminacy of
meaning articulated by these parapraxes—and the erotic potential Freud
ascribes to the “floating” or “wandering speech images” lurking beneath
the threshold of consciousness.65 For Freud, to transpose the “m” and the
“p” in “la moëlle de l’épée” (hilt of the sword) and say instead “le poil de
l’aimée” [my beloved’s fur] is to speak straight from the unconscious, with
the phallic image of the sword providing a conduit for the surfacing of
desire.
And speaking straight from the unconscious was already a goal for
Breton’s group in 1922, as evidenced by the so-called sleep sessions that
were driving the artistic production of the époque floue. These trance
episodes, which induced a state of m ental suspension that Louis Aragon
likened to the “threshold of sleep,” were intended to “remove the imped-
iment of self-censorship which so restrains the mind,” eliciting imagery
revelatory of repressed desires.66 Transcripts of the first sessions, domi-
nated by poet Robert Desnos, appeared in the November 22 issue of
Littérature nouvelle série, where they w ere embedded in the essay “Entrée
des médiums.” H ere, for the first time, Breton used the word surrealism
in order to swivel the group away from Dada’s “declared commitment
to indifference” and back toward the psychoanalytic preoccupations
that had generated the collaborative automatic text “Magnetic Fields”
Blur 49
in 1919.67 By the time the next issue of Littérature appeared, Desnos had
effectively fused Duchamp’s lusty wordplay with his own unconscious
utterances: performing in a hypnogogic session as Rrose Sélavy, he pro-
duced 138 punning aphorisms for Littérature nouvelle série, issue 7, that
evoked Duchampian play in imagery, structure, multivalence, and even
the displacement of authorship characteristic of the Freudian slip.68
Packed with repetitions, reversals, reflections, and resemblances,
Desnos’s efforts recall the structures of Duchamp’s word games, but
with subtle changes that manipulate alliterative rhythms to produce
poetic and somewhat more coherent effects. Where Duchamp’s Rrose
spooled out a suggestive, list-like stream of nonsense (“Rrose Sélavy
trouve qu-un incesticide doit coucher avec sa mere avant de la tuer;
les punaises sont de rigeur”) in which formal play dominated, Desnos’s
Rrose balanced her wordplay in structures that Katharine Conley has
described as functioning like “equations, with the verb occupying the
place of the equal sign.”69 These symmetrical word games produced
statements that skated much closer to the classic intelligibility of wit,
clever at the level of content as well as form; for example, “Apprenez que
la geste célèbre de Rrose Sélavy est inscrite dans l’algèbre céleste” (Learn
that the famous song cycle about Rrose Sélavy is inscribed in celestial
algebra) pleases the ear, the eye, and the mind, bracketed as it is with the
exchange of syllables between “la geste célèbre” and “l’algèbre céleste,”
and offers a self-reflexive reference to the “mathematical precision” with
which Duchamp’s spoonerisms were constructed.70 Likewise, “Rrose
Sélavy connait bien le marchand de sel” gives away the game to those able
to detect the anagrammatic origins of the “salt seller,” Marcel Duchamp.
Desnos’s sheer equivocation between the extremes of Duchampian
juxtaposition and the new attention to latent significance is perfectly
attuned to the threshold state of the époque floue, itself suspended
between Dada’s aleatory pursuits and the intriguing psychoanalytic
assertion that in h uman behavior there are no accidents—only dis-
avowed desires, erupting as symptoms in the coherent fabric of every-
day life.71 His automatic poems acknowledge the Freudian turn with
their repeated invocations of sexual imagery: “L’acte des sexes est l’axe
des sects” (The sex act is the axis of sects); “Au paradis des diamants les
carats sont des amants” (In the paradise of diamonds carats are lovers);
and the particularly telling “Les lois de nos désirs sont des dés sans loi-
sir” (The laws of our desires are dice without leisure).72 And of course
following Freud’s insistence that “the person concerned is unaware that
he’s doing anything of the kind,” Breton’s own claim for Desnos was that
“awake, Desnos has proved incapable—like the rest of us—of pursuing
50 Chapter One

this series of ‘word games,’ even after long effort.”73 The claim that these
erotic streams emerged unwilled conflated both chance and polysemic
play with the distorted utterances of the unconscious. It was in this
way, through automatism and its links to the disorientation of mean-
ing, that wordplay, in its ludic indeterminacy, became a sign for uncon-
scious desire, fusing the elements into a structure that would reverberate
throughout and beyond the artistic production of the époque floue.
The Dada Automatic
Breton’s dawning interest in the ludic-erotic structures of the uncon-

scious, expressed formally in a syntax of miscommunication, helps to
explain the ethos of irrational blur and flux that had to be in place for
the emergence and subsequent embrace of Man Ray’s rayographs u nder
surrealism. But equally important to the structure and significance of
these photograms as avatars of play was Paris Dada’s aggressive pursuit
of automatic practices as a critical strategy, a preoccupation dating back
to Zurich Dada and transmitted to André Breton and the Paris group
through the first Dada champion of the rayographs, Tristan Tzara.
“Automatic eduction,” a process appropriated from French dynamic
psychiatry, had been deployed since the mid-nineteenth century as a
method of recording “undirected thought” in order to produce imagery
independent of conscious will. In the course of the procedure, the sub-
ject, brought to a trance-like state of focus, begins to speak, write, or draw,
theoretically without conscious intervention.74 The texts produced seem
motivated, yet are incoherent, commensurate with the irrational state of
the unconscious. At the very least, they circumvent consciously applied
conventions of representation. In literary criticism and art history, the
process has been associated almost exclusively with the surrealist move-
ment, whose members took up automatism as a defining term in their first
manifesto, in 1924, five years after Breton and Paul Éluard collaborated
on their first automatic text, “Les champs magnétiques,” first published
in Littérature nouvelle série in October 1919. This was followed in later
Littérature issues by the transcripts of a number of the époque floue hypna-
gogic sessions of 1922–23, passages that were interspersed with automatic
drawings—scrawls, really, only barely legible—in the pages of Littérature
nouvelle série.75 But the Zurich Dadaists had long been using automatic
techniques in order to guarantee chance outcomes in writing as well as
in images, and Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia had already published a
collaborative automatic text in Picabia’s journal 391 in February of 1919,
predating Breton and Philippe Soupault’s efforts by five months.76
Blur 51
Interior page, Dadaphone (March 1920), depicting
1.9
Christian Schad, Arp et Val Serner dans le crocodarium royal.
Getty Research Institute (85-S55).
Furthermore—and of the greatest importance to the Dada reception
of the rayographs—the Zurich Dadaists turned almost immediately to
developing visual rather than merely linguistic forms of the practice.
Hans Arp claimed to have made automatic drawings as early as 1916
and by 1919 he was meeting Tzara and Walter Serner in cafés to spon-
taneously write a series of poems entitled “Hyperbola of the Crocodile
Hairdresser and the Walking Stick,” automatic texts that w ere then
joined by a visual counterpart, Christian Schad’s “Schadograph” of the
same year—a tiny photogram called Arp and Val Serner in the London
crocodarium (1919; figure 1.9). That “Schadograph,” like automatic writ-
ing, evaded the logic communicated through habitual arrangements of
semantic units, and seemed to exist outside of fixed categories (was it a
photograph? collage? cubist? expressionist?).77
Automatist séances had already been developed by mediums for
“spirit communication” when psychiatrists took up the technique in
the late nineteenth c entury, retheorizing the apparently spontaneous
utterances as the direct expression of ideas uninhibited by conscious
control. Freud was famously skeptical of the process (as he was of the
related technique, hypnosis) but Frederic Myers, Pierre Janet, and Wil-
liam James all developed systems for eliciting automatic responses as
a means of calling forth repressed traumatic narratives in treatment
for neurotic symptoms. Faith in the process was based on the belief
that without the repressive presence of learned conventions, anything
imagined would tend to be acted on spontaneously. Conscious thought
alone sublimates or represses these automatic responses, Janet argued,
through a specific m ental operation that he called the reality function.
The reality function synthesized unconscious images and impulses with
sensory input in such a way that the subject could successfully distin-
guish between memory and sense, between an inner repository of past
events and the immediate present of an outer “reality.”78 Once the real
ity function was circumvented, the subject was freed to speak and act
on deeply ingrained, hidden desires. Experiments in eliciting automatic
responses were intended as treatment for psychic disorders but the sec-
ond part of Janet’s L’automatisme psychologique (1889) focuses on partial
automatisms, in effect proposing that the reality function is breached
fairly regularly in normally functioning subjects—as, for example, in
absentmindedness, daydreaming, or idle chatter.79 One only needs a
distraction strong enough to concentrate the subject’s conscious atten-
tion away from the instrument of action—which is to say, in the case
of automatic writing or drawing, the hand. Otherwise preoccupied,
the writer marks the page with expressions that are normally inhibited.
Blur 53
Generally speaking, the writing is grammatically correct but without
sensible content—the words sound acceptable (as distinct from early
Dada sound poems), but in combination are unintelligible:
St. Elmo’s fire rushes around the beards of Anabaptists
From out of their warts they conjure drinking-lamps
Sticking their behinds in puddles
Who sang the nail-dumpling of the ice-floes
And whistled it well round the corner of decay
Till a castiron grid slid
4 eugens on a Scandinavian tour millovitsch’s blue box
a rampaging success
down in the haircream of a canal trotter
the lagladdest bird lays the bushbeaten ways
of a buttersack in the twin feathers . . .80
As Michael Riffaterre has pointed out, automatic writing “piggy-
backs” on grammatical tropes; it writes into them (performs a détourne-
ment), and makes deviant formal arrangements that are at once familiar
and utterly inscrutable, as though they appeared from a foreign source.
Importantly, the subjects do not feel themselves to be the authors; rather,
the writing is perceived as involuntary and “other.” Accordingly, the
1920 text “Manifesto of the Dada Crocodarium” was written by Tzara
but signed by Arp, and other automatic texts appeared u nder the pseud-
onym “Alexandre Partens.”81
Automatic texts had significant implications for an avant-garde seek-
ing to re-form sociocultural presuppositions. First, automatisms were
not theorized as aberrant pathologies but as normal phenomena latent
in even the healthiest individuals. Once cultivated, they would be
well placed to activate a widespread reformation of perceptual norms,
automatically and inevitably remaking the codes of representation,
moving it away from a paradigm of institutionally sanctioned mastery
and toward something much more widely accessible. Second, the clini-
cal language around automatic reflexes offered a satisfyingly polemical
rhetoric of freedom—freedom from the inhibitions that mask internal
conflict, and, ultimately, freedom from conflict itself. And automatic
writing emerged only as a byproduct of the curative process. Significant
within the context of treatment, it is absurd in the context of quotidian
language, which is, conversely, instrumental and transparent. Poetically
conceived, automatic texts free language from the bonds of utilitarian
meaning, directly answering Breton’s call in “Words without Wrinkles”
to liberate words from their dictionary definitions.82
54 Chapter One

In the process of inducing these automatic responses, the subject ex-
periences a psychic-motor disaggregation such that actions, split from
conscious intervention, carry on mechanically, and the body effectively
if temporarily becomes an automaton.83 Imagery emerges anonymously
and impersonally, as though from a mechanism self-calibrated to present
and confront past damage—arguably a suitable state for a traumatized
postwar subject immersed in a cultural context in need of sweeping
reform. Thus, in spite of the discourse of liberation attached to them,
psychological automatisms quixotically promise freedom while threat-
ening a voluntaristic, coherent individuality and the fully realized, con-
sciously accessible self long understood as central to creative expression.
In fact automatic practices were regarded in the psychoanalytic com-
munity as profoundly uncreative processes capable only of withdrawing
and repeating prior material.84 Automatic presentations, then, refuse
work in a double sense: as a rejection of purposeful activity, and as a
denial of the original work of art, twisting Dada’s radicalization of use-
lessness in yet another direction.
It was perhaps because of this writing’s uncultivated quality that Arp
called his automatic texts inventory poems, comparing automatic re-
sponses, “the entrails of poetry,” to “the cock-a-doodle-doo, the curse, the
moan, the stammer, the yodel . . . they make sense only insofar as nature
makes sense.”85 Arp refers here not to harmonious structures, but to
nature without imposed order, a formless spew of automatic responses
emitted without conscious direction. He compares the material of the
mind with the predigested contents of the bowels—traces of past experi-
ence available for recycling—the byproducts of useful action and instru-
mental language. H ere is a case of dynamic psychology turning art away
from idealist concepts of “spirit” as the motivating life force and toward a
model of reuse and recycling. Expression, when driven unconsciously, is
conceived not as a manifestation of fundamental individuality, but as ris-
ing reflexively from an inchoate heap of habits and useless, even destruc-
tive scraps of memory; these scraps are always mediated by language, but
in their aimless irrationality they function critically by erupting within a
sociocultural context dominated by the logic of production.
Significantly, these early Dada formulations of the idea of automa-
tism conflate the contingency of nature with machinic bodily responses
to call forth a special form of belief-independent antiproduction. Arp,
at least, directly linked his early automatic drawings and chance com-
positions to unconscious processes: “I pursued the development of the
papiers collés technique, banishing will from the composition, submit-
ting myself to automatic execution. I called this ‘to work according to
Blur 55
1.10 Christian Schad, untitled (Schadograph
no. 2), 1918. moma. © 2018 Christian Schad Stiftung
Aschaffenburg / ars / vg Bild-Kunst. Digital image
© moma / Licensed by scala / Art Resource.
the law of chance,’ the law that encompasses all o thers . . . and which
cannot be tested except through a total abandonment to the unconscious.”86
When he exposed his first photographic collage in 1918, Schad, an
expressionist painter at the time, probably had Arp’s carefully com-
posed collage work of 1915 in mind. Like Arp and Kurt Schwitters, with
whom he competes for the distinction of having first introduced trash
into Dada artwork, Schad’s tiny compositions invoked Picasso’s news-
print and wallpaper compositions, but as photogrammatic reformula-
tions of cubism for a postwar subject that had undergone massive and
irreversible changes at the hands of technology and mass media (see
figure 1.10).87 Unlike Arp and Schwitters, Schad subordinated composi-
tion to an evocation of the sheer disorder of the materials of modern
experience. In the same way that automatic writing recycles past lan-
guage into new configurations, the Schadographs shuffle fragments of
once coherent bodies—advertisements, newspaper articles, clothing—
into a barrage of conflicting forms and signs whose internal interference
throws up a haze of visual static.88 And unlike his fellow Dada collagists,
whose compositions had maintained the craft-like variation of hand-
work, Schad worked with trash made technological: scraps soaked in
chemicals and sunk into photographic emulsion.
It was Schad’s close companion Walter Serner who, steeped in au-
tomatism’s critical rewriting of repre sen
ta
tional codes, encouraged
Schad in his photogram production, and it was presumably Serner who
would have delivered the images to Tzara. Serner saw in them picto-
rial language reused—newspapers and trash picked up thoughtlessly on
the street, for example—or the pragmatic materialization of automatic
utterances, specifically politicized in their recycling of the detritus of
progress. “I had pushed open a gate,” Schad wrote to Serner, “it was the
breakdown of technology into art.”89 And the Schadographs specifically
refer to mass media in the most pervasive and ephemeral visual form of
the time: newsprint journalism. Through this reference particularly, they
are a visual counterpart to Dada’s specifically mechanical-technological
gloss on the automatic, co-opting mass-produced language and imag-
ery as the very substance of their critique. In Dada’s gestures, language
and imagery were not conceived as original utterances but were drawn
ready-made from a well of fragments structured to rhyme with the
disorder of the unconscious. Significantly, these were fragments con-
sisting of information technology, such that memory itself could be ad-
vanced as technologically determined. Drawn in an inchoate manner
through an automatic process, Tzara’s Dada poems—words cut from
newspapers and randomized to resonate with automatic dictation—did
Blur 57
not so much negate public discourse as reconceive, re-form, and write
into it. Drawing on this new visual language, Schadographs presented
as pictorial reconceptions of ready-made imagery: the reuse of refuse,
refusing forethought—dependent, that is, on what could be found on
any given day. Such a systematic approach to image making satisfied
Dada’s ambivalent fascination with technology, for while the imagery
was produced in response to preset conditions and systems, these were
regulations that seemed to “turn” on themselves: machinelike processes
with unpredictable, rather than uniform, results, evoking machines that
were, in a sense, thrown into reverse: made unproductive or nonsensical.
In turn, the Schadographs perform a détournement of pictorial genres
and structures through a process of reference and citation. As Tzara
strove to interleave the public language of the newspaper arbitrarily into
the structures of poetry, so did Schad write into preexisting structures of
visual representation—shattering, for example, the narrative coherence
of cubist collage: the bottle, the table, the folded newspaper. The pho-
tographic medium further underscores the references to mass media:
like the newspaper, it is itself a form of technological reproduction,
and like the news, it is valued for its immediacy. Instantly obsolescent,
all bear the double intimation of a frozen present, simultaneously past.
Likewise, photographs prove to be the perfect analog to the automatic
text in its relation to unconscious processes: inclusive of all that appears
in the camera’s viewfinder, they are mechanically made “memory records”
constituted by visual residue. Deserved or not, photography’s reputation
is still that of an unmediated print—a notion that is reinforced by the
relative directness of the photogram process, where the absent camera
has been replaced by mechanical actions: picking up trash at random on
the street, drawing newspaper fragments from a bag . . . or, in Man Ray’s
case, absentmindedly misplacing objects in a developing tray.
The Man Is the Kodak
Nearly forty years a fter making the first rayographs Man Ray described
the scene of their invention as one of careless ineptitude. Momentarily
distracted from the tedium of printing out some fashion shots, he mis
takenly slipped a sheet of unexposed paper into the developing tray and,
thrown off by the interruption, accidentally compounded the bungle:
As I waited in vain a couple of minutes for an image to appear,
regretting the waste of paper, I mechanically placed a small glass
funnel, the graduate, and the thermometer in the tray on the
58 Chapter One

etted paper. I turned on the light; before my eyes an image
w
began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a
straight photograph, but distorted and refracted by the glass more
or less in contact with the paper and standing out against a black
background, the part directly exposed to light. . . . Taking whatever
objects came to hand; my hotel room key, a handkerchief, some
pencils, a brush, a candle, a piece of twine—I made a few more
prints. . . . [ When] Tristan Tzara came in . . . he spotted my prints
on the wall at once, becoming very enthusiastic; they were pure
Dada creations, he said, and far superior to similar attempts—
simple flat textural prints in black and white—made a few years
ago by Christian Schad.90
Tzara was already primed to understand the rayographs as the resi-
due of an automatic gesture that day in Man Ray’s studio: he was, after
all, commandeering the Schadographs. He had named them (as he would
later claim to have named the rayographs); he had been charged with the
task of finding a Paris venue for them; and they would remain in his posses-
sion until he passed them on to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. That
he was h andling them at precisely the time and place that the rayographs
appeared suggests not only that he showed them to Man Ray—Tzara was
living upstairs from him at the time—but also that he had a hand in devel-
oping and sustaining Man Ray’s creation myth, with its evocations of ludic
absentmindedness: distraction, spontaneity, and automatic production.
Indeed, the 1922 catalogue essay Tzara wrote for Champs delicieux, Man
Ray’s first a lbum of photograms, indicates that the contemporary critical
reception of the rayographs as “painterly” was paralleled by a second, spe-
cifically Dada reception that understood the rayographs as utterly me-
chanical in their facture: “The mechanical, exact, unique and correct
distortion is fixed, smoothed and filtered like a mane of hair through a
comb of light . . . a product of physics and chemistry.”91
For Tzara, the registration of images in the photogram process was
automatic in e very sense of the word: not only in its alignment with
processes that lay outside of conscious control, but also, in spite of the
absence of the camera, in its mechanical dimension. In this reception of
the rayographs, the absence of the apparatus only means that, in Tzara’s
words, “the man is the camera”: an insentient automaton, making marks
that are proper to industry.92 The technological reception was under-
scored in Walter Benjamin’s translation of the essay for the constructiv-
ist journal G, which included a spatially evocative yet severely geometric
rayograph whose only concession to referentiality was a short length
Blur 59
Man Ray, untitled rayograph,
1.11
1922. From the album Champs délicieux.
Art Institute of Chicago, Julien Levy
Collection, Special Photography
Acquisition Fund, 1979. © 2018 Man
Ray Trust / ars / adagp. Photo credit:
Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource.
of linked chain at the bottom center of the image (figure 1.11). In the

techno-utopian context of the magazine, the photogram appears as the
incorporation of concrete industrial objects into the cultural frame. No-
tably, Benjamin’s translation reads “The man is the Kodak,” effectively
“branding” Man Ray and aligning the rayographs with a particularly
American form of commercial production.93
Furthermore, Tzara argued that the rayographs effectively desta-
bilized the terms not just of painting but also of photography: “Pho-
tography, inverted,” he called them, not negating the medium, but turn-
ing it upside down, rendering it carnivalesque.94 If Man Ray’s images
surpassed Schad’s in their Dada bouleversements, it was because they
challenged the camera eye on multiple counts, circumventing the
descriptive narrativity that had long been posited as inherent to the
medium. Photograms offered not only visually irrational “white shad-
ows,” but also other, spatial reversals that, true to the “threshold” spirit
of the époque floue, suspended their forms between abstraction and
60 Chapter One

figuration. For example, objects placed closest to the picture plane
of a photogram appear as flattened silhouettes, while those exposed
from a farther position register with depth and dimension, as the light
source falls across them, rendering their shadows in gradation. This is
the opposite of the way binocular vision functions, where depth is fully
perceived in the foreground, but only summarily indicated in distant
objects. Photograms also confound conventional modes of perception in
that objects placed at a distance from the plane of vision will appear larger
in the photogram than those that were laid flush against the treated paper,
in accordance with the size of their shadows at the time of exposure. Un-
like Schad, who used flat scraps in his compositions, Man Ray exacerbated
these effects by exposing dimensional objects, producing images that ex-
ploited photogrammatic distortions in order to force ordinary things to
slip in and out of recognizability, as if emerging from a blank void. Nei-
ther fully abstract nor fully figurative, they are the very image of Dada
absurdity; yet as material transcriptions that attest to latent forms beyond
perception, it is easy to recognize the psychoanalytic terms by which the
surrealists would embrace them. Rayographs disarticulated spatial pa
rameters by eliminating the photographic apparatus—and along with it,
the hierarchies of Cartesian perspective imposed by the camera lens. This
factor alone radically reorganized perception, but joined with the rever-
sals in value and underwritten by the photogram’s foothold in the realities
of the object-world, photograms were quickly recognized as paradoxical
images that challenged photography’s affirmation of vision itself: “The
photographer has invented a new method,” Tzara wrote, “he presents
to space an image that exceeds it. . . . Is it a spiral of water or the tragic
gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a
keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss or a turbine of algebraic formulas?”95
Notice the concatenation of imagery in Tzara’s text: he uses an “au-
tomatism effect” to cognitively evoke in the reader the same sort of dis-
aggregation that is visually activated by the pictures. Identity itself is at
stake in automatic texts, as familiar images and objects blur and conjoin,
interrogating representation. The effect of disorientation is heightened
in the rayographs by Man Ray’s use of neutral, everyday objects in a new,
deforming context—objects that signal yet another determining factor
of the images h ere. For the darkroom was a little crowded on the day
the first rayograph appeared. Along with Tristan Tzara and Christian
Schad, Marcel Duchamp was present, his concept of the readymade
hovering over the ordinary, mass-produced objects that landed in the de-
veloping tray.
Blur 61
Ludic Readymades
One of the first rayographs published, in 1922, went into The Little Re-
view, entitled esoRRose sel à vie (figure 1.12).96 The “Rose” in the title of
this rayograph was hand printed in mirror writing from left to right—a
demonstration of inversion that gathers automatic writing, Duchampian
language play, and value reversal into a single representation. Duchamp,
of course, had already given up painting, and would understand the rayo-
graphs not as the “retinal” art he despised, but as an intense demonstration
of photography’s capacity to record. He would delight in the photogram’s
extreme difference from the world-as-seen, as though it had been produced
by a technology that had no cognizance at all of the nature of human per-
ception: a technique that reliably and systematically produced images
incommensurate with painterly codes as well as the newly formulated
conventions of photographic excellence Stieglitz was establishing in New
York. “You know exactly how I feel about photography,” he would write
to Stieglitz in 1922, “I would like to see it make p eople despise painting
until something else will make photography unbearable.”97
Georges Ribemont-Dessaigne expanded on this reception of the
rayographs as an antiretinal critique of painting in his 1923 essay, “Dada
Painting, or the ‘Oil Eye,’ ” deliberately using the slippage of the phrase
huile oeil to edge Dada painting t oward play. The essay defines Dada’s
ludic approach to the canvas specifically as “blind painting,” denounc-
ing vision as irrelevant to art production. “Sight is the lowest sense,” he
wrote, “so low it should be simply worn u nder the sole of one’s boot. . . .
But the Dada painters have broken with sight. They paint or draw as if
they did not see.” Ribemont-Dessaigne named Arp as the paradigmatic
blind painter—“his hand paints by hearsay”—but he also called atten-
tion to Man Ray, arguing that in the revolutionary rayographs Man Ray
“invents a new world and photographs it to prove that it exists. But as
the camera also has an eye . . . he suppresses it. It is no longer a question
of preserving images in a box; but of making an astonishing destructive
projection of all formal art.”98
Ribemont-Dessaigne cited Duchamp and Ernst as well, oddly exclud-
ing Hans Richter’s “blind paintings” of five years earlier, gestural paint-
ings made very quickly, at twilight, in a state of “self-hypnosis” (plate 2).99
But Richter insisted that his paintings w ere “visionary portraits”: they
called on a transcendent inner model as opposed to one constructed
of mundane materials and processes. The difference between the two
can be measured in the difference between Richter’s figurative portraits
and Schad’s tiny typewritten picture, Dada Portrait of Walter Serner of
62 Chapter One

Man Ray, esoRRose sel à vie, 1922, in The Little Review:
1.12
Quarterly Journal for Arts and Letters (Autumn 1922). © 2018
Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp. Image courtesy University
Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia
University, New York.
1920 (plate 3), a linear confluence of typewritten symbols and a few
phrases in French (among them “Beware of Painting!!!!!!!”) that in no
way resembles human form. Stapled, folded, incoherent, the work is
paradigmatic of the preoccupation with techno-irrational means that
had become definitive of the Dada automatic, a mode of art production
that was affirmed by Man Ray himself when in 1921 he wrote to Kath-
erine Dreier of photography’s “strong penchant” for the “irrelevant,”
stating, “I am trying to make my photography automatic—to use my
camera as I would a typewriter.”100
And, indeed, the rayographs represent an unprecedented degree of
deskilling for Man Ray, surpassing both the depersonalized aerographs
and the reliance on the camera eye. Th ese images remove both the
hand and the eye, for the rayographs w ere composed blindly. This is
not to say that the room was completely dark—there would have been
red light—but rather that since Man Ray worked with dimensional in-
stead of flat objects, and b ecause he used objects of varying degrees of
transparency placed at some distance from the paper (so as to experi-
ment with the intensity and direction of multiple light sources), his re-
sults were radically unpredictable. Most importantly, b ecause Man Ray
worked with developing-out paper rather than printing-out paper (as
Schad had), the effect of the shadows cast onto the pristine field could
only be known after the objects had been disassembled and the blank
paper slipped into the developing tray. This is an extreme invitation
to chance felt as an absence of work, recalling the impersonality and
deskilling of machine processes, but also the occlusion of work implied
by the embrace of chance outcomes: the “visual noise” of the photo-
graphic image is foregrounded here, at the expense of volition. Thus
the rayographs come to be called Champs délicieux—to resonate with
Breton and Soupault’s first automatic text, “Les champs magnétiques.”
The graph in rayograph refers not to the graphic arts, but to sheer regis-
tration, in the manner of a seismograph or a telegraph.
Now, if we would identify the readymade as a banal, mass-produced
object or assemblage of objects, and most often preserved exclusively in
photographic form, then any rayograph is persuasively a record on a par
not only with Man Ray’s images of his 1918 assemblages Homme and
Femme (figures 1.13 and 1.14), but also with his deadpan photographs
of Duchamp’s readymades.101 B ecause of course a rayograph comprises
nothing less than the cast shadows of temporary Dada assemblages—
objects liberated from usefulness, caught within the logic of the ready-
made. Furthermore, the assemblages traced by the rayographs have a
link to mechanical production that is much stronger than that of Man
64 Chapter One

Man Ray, Man, 1918. Private collection.
1.13 Man Ray, Woman, 1918. Metropolitan Museum
1.14
© 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp / Telimage. of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of the Howard Gilman
Foundation, 2005. © 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp.
Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Image source: Art Resource.
Ray’s other Dada constructions, one that rises from the unprecedented
nature of the “event” that they transcribe. For rayographs are also s erial
images, and in this they depart radically from the photomechanical
precedents afforded by Schad or even Max Ernst, whose collage im-
ages had only just rocked Paris Dada the year before, in 1921. Unlike
photomontage, which is cut and pieced after printing, the rayographs
get their associative syntax ready-made, automatically transferred from
the bricolage piled on the surface of the paper. After exposure, these
objects are removed and reassembled on the next sheet, the lights go on
again, another print moves to the developing tray, and the objects are
yet again reconfigured in a flatbed process recalling a motley assembly
line (see figures 1.15–1.17).
Yet in spite of the seriality, automatic facture, and industrial support
that seem to lock the rayographs into the logic of mass production, theirs
is not the functional pragmatism of Taylorization. In the series there
is an insistence on instability, on the unforeseeable “glitch” inserted
into a model of technological rationality, skewing its production into a
Blur 65
Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1922. Tel Aviv
1.15 Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1922. moma.
1.16
Museum of Art. © 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp. © 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp. Digital image
Digital image courtesy Tel Aviv Museum of Art. © moma / Licensed by scala / Art Resource.
steady stream of deformations—as though the factory in question w ere

calibrated to produce seconds and irregulars without a prototype, or
as though too much play in the machine parts had thrown the con-
sistency of the assembly line into chaos.102 At the same time, the me-
thodical recombinations of the objects they depict seem not so much
the creation of new images, but the repeated return to things already
seen: not originals, but reproductions of arbitrarily grouped objects
commensurate with automatism’s recycling of language and memory.
Certainly this figuring of the vagaries of memory accounts for one way
the rayographs would remain significant for the surrealists to come. But
for the Dada automatic, focused on a mechanical displacement of ex-
pression and originality, their seriality serves not only to wear away at
their mythic singularity, but to make explicit the process by which they
were made: a repeated iteration of disassembly as well as assembly. This
kind of endless arrangement and rearrangement is deeply unproductive:
infinite permutations are possible, extending variation to the point of
meaninglessness. In fact, rayographs are copies of what could be called
ludic readymades: temporary installations of ordinary objects, with no
66 Chapter One

Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1922. mnam. © 2018
1.17
Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp. Image © cnac / mnam /
Dist. rmn Grand-Palais / Art Resource.
unifying theme or narrative to give them meaning—play in its irratio-

nal, unstable, and impermanent characterization. And one thing that
becomes clear once rayographs are understood in this context is that
the “original” assemblages depicted in the photograms no longer exist.
The evidence of this is demonstrated from within the series itself, as the
objects seem to gather, break, and regroup from rayograph to rayograph.
Seriality here points to a process—dismantling and reconstructing as
a string of events—and it ties each image to a specific time and place
within that sequence.
In this capacity, as records of unrecoverable moments, rayographs
behave with the same mnemonic intensity as Man Ray’s other photo-
graphic documents, particularly t hose he made of his own Dada assem-
blages, all of which are lost objects as well.103 In the spirit of flou, these
photographs can be understood, absurdly, as both utterly abstract and
extremely concrete—a form of testimony to the specific moment at
which they were made. Their instability constitutes a plastic unfixing
of identity: the objects are disengaged from their original functions and
then in turn disengaged from the medium-specific norms necessary to
Blur 67
Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1927. J. Paul Getty
1.18
Museum, Los Angeles. © 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp.
associate them with painting, photography, sculpture, or even collage.

The antiretinal mode of perception that t hese forms activate is particu-
larly emphatic in those images in which clearly recognizable objects are
mixed with indecipherable forms—where the viewer is invited into nei-
ther the ideal optical field of abstract forms nor the illusion of a fully
present “realism,” but rather is made painfully aware of the inability to
identify the partially present traces of objects (see figure 1.18). There is
a pronounced tension between figuration and abstraction in the rayo-
graphs that brazenly dramatizes photography’s failure to fulfill its prom-
ise of descriptive truth—demonstrating, instead, a refusal of the servile
reproduction of nature. In spite of their palpable materiality, meaning
is elusive in the rayographs, obscure rather than manifest, as though
68 Chapter One

comprehension of the logic of the space lies always just out of reach.
Thus, even if Man Ray had not printed in a hypnagogic state, and the
rayographs were not “genuinely” automatic, their effect on the viewer is
still the same as that of automatic texts, as the images flicker between
obscurity and identification, gripping even their maker in a scene of par-
tial recognition and latent meaning.
The Authority of the “Never-Seen”
Man Ray himself was acutely aware of this cleavage of recognizability

and certainty when, in an early experiment, he redocumented his already
photographed assemblage Compass (1920) as a rayograph (figures 1.19 and
1.20). In both the photograph and the rayograph, the object—a pistol sus-
pended from a large horseshoe-shaped magnet—is immediately identifi-
able; but perhaps because of this, what we attend to in the comparison
are not the likenesses, but the radical differences between the two photo-
graphic techniques, the very differences that pitch the rayograph against
the limits of photographic vision. Here is photography pulling away from
illustration, away from description and identification, away even from the
relentless frontality of the pictorial field. Just as automatic writing inhabits
standard grammar and syntax only to rob it of comprehensibility, so these
photograms set up the expectation of photographic verisimilitude—
through intermittent clarity as well as dramatic lighting that enhances
the illusion of dimensionality—only to frustrate the full articulation of
coherent space. Shapes blend and sunder. Hybrids form, and recognizable
objects defy physical logic or fade into distortion. Space is illuminated by
a number of sources so that volumes become hectic and irrational. For
the rayographs d on’t at all naturalize conditions of vision; rather, they de-
liver a “view from below,” a perspective on the “never-seen”—a record of
the space where the two-dimensional skin of the page meets the plastic
substance of the objects piled upon it, a view inaccessible even to the artist
under any condition except in the presence of a rayograph.
It is through the concept of the “never-seen” that rayographs began
to be reframed as surrealist images, following the pursuit of psychic rev-
elation that played so central a role in the group’s early formulation. In
1924, in the first manifesto of surrealism, Breton would offer the term to
describe his sensation of estrangement from his own actions performed
in an automatist trance: “I could depict a tree, a wave, a musical instru-
ment, all manner of things of which I am presently incapable of provid-
ing even the roughest sketch . . . and upon opening my eyes I would get
the very strong impression of something ‘never-seen.’ ”104
Blur 69
Man Ray, Compass, 1920. Metropolitan Museum
1.19 Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1922. mnam. © 2018
1.20
of Art. Ford Motor Company Collection. Gift Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp. Image © cnac / mnam / Dist.
of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, rmn Grand-Palais / Art Resource.
1987. © 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp. Image ©
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source:
Art Resource.
The “never-seen” in this context describes not so much the startling

generation of novel forms, but the sensation of deep unrecognizability
activated by forms “found” in one’s memory—objects and events, even
skills already known to the unconscious, but heretofore barred from self-
apprehension. Because these texts and images had emerged from the
subject’s own hand, they represented a disturbance of received notions
about authorship, a form of discourse that revised the very notion of “the
mind that writes” away from creativity and authorial mastery and t oward
a form of “other determination.” For of course what Breton meant to
evoke here was his encounter with the ultimate site of unknowability, a
place that reveals the subject as ungraspable, least of all to themself: the
unconscious. Automatic imagery in this early, “heroic” stage of surrealism
is cast not so much as a means of fully comprehending the self, but rather
of knowing that one doesn’t know. It is a way to acknowledge things that
consciousness cannot formulate, or that consciousness willfully forgets
and distorts in order to compose itself for the world.
70 Chapter One

And this is the same form of antiknowledge that a rayograph offers: the
blank, the never-seen, the Other within the self, grounded in derangement
of the senses, rather than self-knowledge. Rayographs betray any grasp of
photography as the locus of objective knowledge, communicating instead
a deep inscrutability that very effectively conveys the unforeseeabilty, irra-
tionality, and self-estrangement of the subject’s encounter with the uncon-
scious. “Photography, inverted,” Tzara had called them in 1924.105 It is for
this reason that rayographs can be called abstract, for they deliver not the
representation of forms recognizable from the object-world around us, but
the radical deformation of those forms at the hands of an automatic and
involuntary process. Rayographs play with identity as effectively as Des-
nos’s and Duchamp’s slippery aphorisms, their referents rendered unrecog-
nizable, just as language is rendered incomprehensible in wordplay, and as
the subject is estranged when confronted with unconscious utterances. If
rayographs sustained their appeal throughout the long history of surreal-
ism, it was because their structure was the visual equivalent to the linguistic
structure of wordplay: the very sign of the unconscious.
Arriving in Paris at the start of the transitional époque floue, Man Ray
would have immediately grasped ludic flux and blur as the dominant ar-
tistic modes—the very conditions of possibility for the emergence of the
rayographs. In these enigmatic photograms, the blur of the painterly and
the photographic, of description and abstraction, of truth and uncer-
tainty made photography over as an agent of simultaneous integration
and disintegration. But since the invention of photography, blur, in the
passage from clarity to illegibility it indicates, has also become a sign for
movement and dynamism, and this, too, overdetermines the rayographs,
for they are emblematic of a specific historical movement: the passage
from Dada to surrealism. As such, they trace André Breton’s reassign-
ment of central Dada motifs to perform with surrealist significance. For
while rayographs disabled the foundations of photographic value, turn-
ing the medium toward a Dadaist refusal of visual access, Breton sought
to spin that inscrutability further, toward the questioning of all aspects
of experience motivated by the revelations of the unconscious. Having
already described automatic writing as the “photography of thought,” by
1923 he had shifted that description to point directly to the disorienting
inversions of the rayographs: “the white curve on a black ground that we
call thought.”106 For what Breton recognized in the lenticular flash be-
tween figuration and abstraction was the potential for an erotics of form,
the au-delà of Desnos’s wordplay. Rayographs materialize the moment
when figures are coupled—when forms, like words, “are making love.”107
Blur 71
CHAP TER 2
DR I F T
Surrealist photography sets the scene for a salutary
estrangement between man and his surroundings.
It gives free play to the politically educated eye,
under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to
the illumination of detail.
—Walter Benjamin
We’ve seen how estrangement—from conventions of perceived real

ity, from a rational, instrumental relation to the world—operated at
the heart of Man Ray’s photography, where the polarities of juxtaposi-
tion dominated his mannered arrangements of models and objects.
But in this passage from the “Little History of Photography” (1931),
it isn’t Man Ray’s images that Benjamin is referring to. The “surrealist
photography” called out here is that of Eugène Atget, the very figure
who would soon be hailed as the “father” of street photography.1 These
three figures—the earnest Marxist, the cynical surrealist, and the elderly
maker of documents—themselves form an unlikely picture; a living
juxtaposition, if you will, of personality and purpose, and a triad only
partly explained by the fact that Atget’s images surfaced in the early
numbers of La Révolution surréaliste, where Benjamin would have seen
them. What is never fully explained in the history of surrealism is how
they got there. That is, we know that Man Ray drew them from his own
Cover, photo album, E. Atget coll. Man Ray 1926, c. 1940.
2.1
George Eastman Museum.
personal stockpile and delivered them to the surrealist circle, but the
greater riddle has persisted: what drew Man Ray to Atget? The appear-
ance of street photography in this particular surrealist’s studio—the set
of questions it raises and the problems it generates—remains one of the
great enigmas of the surrealist movement, a juxtaposition of motives and
means as strong and as inscrutable as Comte de Lautréamont’s umbrella
and sewing machine. Formally speaking, Atget’s photographs of Paris
should have held no interest for Man Ray: shot on axis in natural light
and content-driven to satisfy a range of regular customers, from builders
to artists to the Musée Carnavalet, they are straightforward in focus and
point of view. In stark contrast, Man Ray’s own photographs (at least
from the moment he produced the first rayographs) would consistently
focus on the dramatic effects achievable in darkroom manipulation. Yet
during his first years in Paris, breaking from a fresh spurt of rayograph
production, Man Ray purchased nearly fifty of the old Frenchman’s im-
ages, eventually assembling them into an album embossed not only with
the name Atget but also “coll. Man Ray” and a date, 1926 (figure 2.1)—
not the year that Atget shot the images, not even the date on which Man
Ray put them into the album, but the year that Man Ray rewrote them
as a surrealist text.2
Drift 73
Thematically, Man Ray’s Atgets range over the motley figures of the
urban expendable: the marginal sites and populace that Atget called
Paris pittoresque: figures on the brink of desuetude, p eople and places
suspended between the historical and the contemporary.3 For the most
part, these are pictures from the street—window displays, ragpickers,
prostitutes, architecture, and street fairs—framed with the air of deadpan
factuality that characterizes all of Atget’s documents. The original order
of the photographs is unknown, as are the precise dates that they were
acquired, and Man Ray only once—in an interview of 1974—made
specific reference to having purchased them.4 Considering the promi-
nence of both Atget and Man Ray in the history of photography and
the intensity of the debates that have circulated around their respec-
tive practices in relation to the artistic, commercial, and documentary
dimensions of the medium, it is remarkable that the collection has re-
ceived so little attention, particularly since the surrealists’ interest in
documentary photography and their appropriation of Atget’s work for
publication in their journals have long been known.5
The mystery around the a lbum deepens, given that in the mid-1920s,
when the elderly photographer caught Man Ray’s attention, Atget was
not at all “collectible” as an artistic figure. Rather, he was one of the
many producers of photographic documents “on speculation”; that is,
while he worked on commission when possible, his entire archive of
photographs was available for purchase by the general public for a few
francs each.6 His images would have struck Man Ray as primitive: his
approach was simple and direct; and the pictures were retrograde in their
mode of production (Atget insisted on using a box camera and tripod
long after the handheld camera was invented, and printed his images in
the sun rather than using a darkroom and developing solution). Man
Ray’s work, by contrast, reframes the photograph in such a way that it
loses its innocence: his unconventional cropping and selective lighting
throw the notion of photography as uncoded testimony into question.
His rayographs, his solarized images and superimposed negatives, force
an understanding of photography as a manipulation of the material
world rather than its direct transcription, and testify to the surrealist
grasp of photography as a privileged medium for presenting “the marvel-
ous”: reality distorted and displaced by subliminal processes. In fact, the
differences between Atget and Man Ray extend well beyond their respec-
tive approaches to photography: the two photographers emerged from
very different sets of loyalties, both professional and artistic, and from
profoundly different formulations around photography and its place
within the cultural system defined by the arts, science, and commerce. The
74 Chapter T wo
fundamental incongruity of the presence of Atget’s work in Man Ray’s
studio lies here, on the level of what it is to be a photograph—readily
communicated in the form of radically differing styles.
For Man Ray, these differences, between a photographic naturalism
that he regarded as naïve and his own experimental practices, which
foregrounded photography’s constructed aspect, corresponded to the
poles of “useful commercial document” and “disinterested art object.” His
aggressively ambiguous photographs demand the attention tradition-
ally reserved for art: they are unprecedented and difficult, vehicles for
the signature of the maker. For Atget, on the other hand, designations
of photography-as-art would come much later, and would be made on
the basis of content alone: whether he was shooting on commission or
for his own albums, the framing was standardized, and the author was
consistently made anonymous before the subject at hand. Working to
record a Paris disappearing before the inexorable press of gentrification,
Atget photographed the city in such a way that his archive reads effec-
tively as a systematic, prosaic topography of old Paris.
It is unsurprising, then, that Man Ray’s selection of Atget’s images
does not reflect the thorough pragmatism of Atget’s studio archive.
Neither does it cull from the archive a coherent and centered narrative
that a prospective book might promise. The collection appears nearly
arbitrary in its choice of its subjects—unnamed women in doorways,
window displays, anonymous architecture—and repetitive within those
categories (six ragpickers, two street vendors, ten display windows, six
fairgrounds . . .). The places that it documents range from a traveling
circus encamped at rue de Vaugirard in Montparnasse (the quartier
in which Man Ray and Atget both lived and worked) to a ragpickers’
settlement in the far reaches of the seventeenth arrondissement north-
east of the city, to a hairdresser’s shop on the boulevard de Strasbourg
just east of Les Halles. And the disparity of the collection extends to its
temporal logic: the images range in the dates of their production over
the first quarter of the twentieth c entury, in further resistance to closure
and unity—from 1900, when Atget made images of itinerant salesmen, to
1926, when he shot his headless mannequins. When ahistorical formal
affinities appear in this context, they read as riddles of significance, as
when, for example, fragmented mannequins from different shops on
the boulevard de Strasbourg feature in images photographed fourteen
years apart (figures 2.2 and 2.3). Yet t hese coincidences w ere themselves
made available to Man Ray (and to all of Atget’s customers) by the tem-
poral condensations of the commercial photographer’s thematically
organized albums. Likewise, the only single shared term for the sites is
Drift 75
Eugène Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, 1912.
2.2 Eugène Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, 1926.
2.3
George Eastman Museum. George Eastman Museum.
one already present throughout Atget’s archive: a conspicuous displace-

ment from the well-toured boulevards and monuments that grounded
the city in homogeneity and modern refinement, tracing instead an itin-
erary that delivers an image of Paris mildly repellent in its banality, a
Paris as threadbare and shabby as the box camera and tripod Atget had
used to make the images.
If surrealist mystery permeates Man Ray’s Atgets, it may be because
the act of collecting itself can be understood as a destabilizing operation.
Writing at the time of his closest critical examination of the surrealists
and their motives, Walter Benjamin described collecting in such terms: as
a form of expression that converts and revalues disparate objects u nder a
single rubric in such a way that the objects in question begin to oscillate
significantly between their former, historically grounded identifications
and their new, extremely arbitrary designations. “What is decisive in
collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions
in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the
same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls
into the peculiar category of completeness.”7 H ere Benjamin empha-
sizes the forced unity of collecting, and a collection as a kind of grab
bag that barely masks the disparity within. He compares the structure
76 Chapter T wo
of collections with the arbitrary structure of the dictionary, as well as to
bricolage and to the self-centeredness of the dream. But it was Adorno
who cut through the details of Benjamin’s characterization to summa-
rize the central effect of collecting: things become “liberated from the
curse of being useful.”8
Collecting itself, then, can be understood as a gesture that draws
disparate and unrelated objects together in such a way that they are
released into a play of meaning as strong as that of the puns that Des-
nos had already established as a sign of the unconscious in the years
of the époque floue. That is to say, if the riddle of Man Ray’s Atgets
has gone unsolved, it is because the collection of the photographs was,
from the start, an aleatory and indeterminate site of surrealist play. The
album stands alongside the rayographs as a pictorial register of a sur-
realist ludic that predates the introduction of regulated games like the
exquisite corpse into the group’s range of practices, and testifies to the
surrealists’ desire to extend their ludic experiments into urban space. By
culling and compiling these images, Man Ray effectively rewrote Atget’s
Paris as a game board, opening photographic vision onto the surreal-
ist register of psychic association and the infinite deferral of meaning.
In the process, Atget’s own images were uncoupled from their original
meanings—given Spielraum—and form a surrealist counter-narrative
to the modernist story of progress and functionalism.
And Spielraum, understood as an effect of cinematic dynamism, re-
verberates throughout the antistructure of the a lbum. Without stan-
dards of compositional unity to ease the logic of archival presentation
into the album, each thematic group within the collection, linked loosely
by subject, seems to have less a specific point to make than a duration to
express, a span of attention measured by the number of images per cat-
egory. This attention to seriality shifts the images away from designations
that might align them with museum-like repositories of unique objects
(the structure of institutional collecting) and into the category of event
records like film, in which meaning depends not on separate readings of
isolated images but on relations formed by their relative positions within
a system that is played out in time. Yet even in this context, meaning-
ful narrative sequences have been avoided. In its near-random juxtaposi-
tions and dramatic shifts in time and place, the cinematic mode that the
collection expresses owes more to montage than to narrative cinema.
This, too aligns with the priority surrealism gave to recovering latent
desire, and the jarring cadence common to montage can be traced to a
number of surrealist strategies performed precisely with this in mind.
As Michel Beaujour has pointed out in the context of surrealist film,
Drift 77
montage juxtaposition (a form with which Man Ray was experiment-
ing at the time) signifies through the “hiatus” between images: a spac-
ing that forms a syntax through which the images are “linked through
memory,” that is, through the perceptual operation of the afterimage.9
This spacing, at once separating and connecting, has been established
by Rosalind Krauss as a central preoccupation of Man Ray’s photog-
raphy: a “cleavage in reality” that allows for the “experience of the real
as a sign,” exploiting the truth claims of camera-based media in order
to generate juxtapositions that appear as ruptures within the fabric of
the material world.10 Through t hese devices, the association of photog-
raphy and film with memory is, in surrealism, expanded to perform
from within the Freudian model of the unconscious as the repository for
repressed memories. As Miriam Hansen has argued in the context of
Benjamin’s assessment of the revolutionary power of photography and
film, by breaking the naturalism of the optical field “devices like framing
and montage would . . . have a function similar to other procedures—
the planned rituals of extraordinary physical and mental states, like
drug experiments, flâneurist walking, surrealist seances or psychoana-
lytic sessions—procedures designed to activate layers of unconscious
memory buried in the reified structures of subjectivity.”11
Paris: The Obsolescent Object
From this perspective, the random, redundant, and apparently unmoti-

vated disorder of Man Ray’s Atgets suggests not so much a purposeful
selection based on surrealist iconography as an aimless drift through the
city of Paris that was for sale in Atget’s studio, marked by an inattentive-
ness commensurate with the associative states evoked in the surrealists’
sleep sessions, in daydreaming and automatic writing: wandering both
cognitive and physical. Viewed through the frame of objective chance,
Man Ray’s gesture of appropriation can be read as the result of a series of
these psychic projections activated by the surrealist leafing idly through
Atget’s albums of photographs, and Atget’s studio itself understood
as a space made foreign by obsolescence, a space as cluttered and rich
in arbitrary juxtaposition as the flea markets and arcades made famous
in surrealist literature. The reference to memory is present at the out-
set in the leather cover of Man Ray’s a lbum (figure 2.1). With its deco-
rative medallion and fusty gold script, it calls to mind a family photo
album—that ubiquitous bourgeois staple for rendering memory man-
ageable. By binding these images of Paris into such a book, Man Ray sig-
nals their status as souvenirs, rich mnemonics of past experiences. But
78 Chapter T wo
Eugène Atget, Marchand de parapluies, 1899–1900.
2.4 Eugène Atget, Marchand d’abat-jour, rue Lepic,
2.5
George Eastman Museum. 1899–1900. George Eastman Museum.
what experience, exactly, do they reference? Not only did Man Ray not
make these photographs himself, t here is no way he could have made the
better part of them. By 1921, when Man Ray arrived in Paris, the repre-
sentatives of the petits métiers (see figures 2.4 and 2.5), wandering street
merchants, were gone from the place Saint-Médard; the ragpickers and
their shacks (see figures 2.6 and 2.7) had been routed successfully well
beyond the outer limits of the city.12 Th ose images that depict more con
temporary sites, for example the shop windows and side-alley vendors
that record the “art” of commercial display (see figures 2.8–2.12, 2.14,
2.20, 2.41–2.45), are distinguished by their impermanence, each fresh-
ened with the shift in availability or style.
In fact, when Man Ray bought these photographs, the city of Paris
archived in Atget’s studio was available there, and only there, in the
form of 121 albums of images sorted according to subject: a repository
of history, memory barely fixed. Man Ray himself understood them
as unstable, disposable byproducts: “They were the kind of prints that
photographers made as proofs for their sitters so that they w ouldn’t be
kept as permanent t hings. . . . His prints all faded if you exposed them
to light.”13 If Man Ray’s Atgets w ere souvenirs, they w
ere spectral relics
Drift 79
Eugène Atget, Poterne de peupliers—zoniers, 1913.
2.6
Eugène Atget, Porte d’Asnières—cité Trébert, 1913.

2.7
Eugène Atget, Rue du Petit-Thouars, 1910–11.
2.8 Eugène Atget, Rue Mouffetard, 1925.
2.9
that had to do not with sentimental reminiscence but with memory of

a different, more evasive sort. The irregular temporal structure of the
project suggests that the a lbum traces not so much a nostalgic mythol
ogy of places and figures in Paris but the “event” of selecting the photo
graphs in Atget’s studio. The album itself, as an object, reminds us of
this through the durational (if interrupted) seriality of its contents.
And the historical context of its making establishes that structure as an
index of the process by which the book, as an array of images, was pro-
duced from an archive of the past: an event enabled and informed by
the aimless browsing of its author.
If Man Ray’s gesture of production-through-selection brings to mind
Dada’s readymade and its critique of the aesthetic object, it is important
to note that by 1926 the surrealists, too, had theorized a subject rela-
tion to the commodity, one rooted in the critical power of the recently
obsolete and its relation to repressed memories: the debris of modern
progress put forward as the commodity’s dialectic other. Ambitiously,
the surrealists had aimed their theory of object relations not only at
Drift 81
Eugène Atget,
2.10
Marchand de vin
rue Boyer, 1910–11.
George Eastman
Museum.
Eugène Atget, 47 Avenue de la Observatoire, 1926.

2.11
overturning preconceptions about art objects, but at the subjective ex-
perience of objects at large. As Benjamin observed, the surrealists were
“the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘out-
moded’—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the
earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, g rand pianos,
the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue
has begun to ebb from them.”14 For the surrealists, obsolescent objects
stood as refutations of unquestioned faith in progress, an eruption of
subjectivity from within the time and space of modernization itself. The
images from Man Ray’s Atget album bear witness to this privileging of
desuetude in the historical retrospection of their subject matter; in the
outmoded means of their production and display; and through their
persistent iconography of disuse, liminality, and obsolescence.
But it is not merely the object quality of the a lbum and images that
bring to mind the surrealist’s attention to the vagaries of memory. The er-
ratic antinarrative suggested by the image sequence also speaks directly to
the surrealist’s dynamic rewriting of the subject / object relation, which en-
tailed physically placing the surrealist subject in circumstances that would
encourage the projection of unconscious desires onto objects in the mate-
rial field. As Hal Foster has argued, summarizing the difference between
Dada and surrealist object choice: “If the subject selects the readymade,
the surrealist object selects the subject: he is always already marked by it.”15
Foster is here referring to the surrealist practice of le hasard objectif, or “ob-
jective chance,” in which the strolling surrealist experiences the projection
of his own psychic recollections as the shock of inexplicable attraction, an
unnamable recognition thought to be jolted directly out of the un-
conscious by an unexpected encounter with a figure, place, or object. The
procedure and the experiences generated by it occurred outside the usual
boundaries of causality and conscious motivation; indeed, they relied on
investing the aleatory and the coincidental with significance, and w ere
16
best effected in marginal places that bore the signs of disuse.
The antithesis to the orderly, functional city, the flea market particu-
larly was designated a privileged site rich with psychic potential for the
wandering surrealist, a constantly shifting environment whose very pas-
sageways were formed by the mounting dejecta of bourgeois life. Within
this shabby repository, browsing idly became a mode of psychic explora-
tion materialized through the very welter of outmoded objects. Man Ray
was clearly aware of the practice: he photographed two of t hese objects
for Breton’s L’amour fou (Mad Love; 1937), where the author describes
how he and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti were inexplicably drawn
to purchase them, only to discover later that they bodied forth libidinal
Drift 83
associations from their respective pasts.17 One of the richest and most
enduring of surrealist practices, objective chance perversely located the
power of objects in their lapsed utility, rather than in their usefulness, ex-
pressing open resistance to the dominant sociopolitical rhetoric of func-
tionalism and purpose. It constructed a resonance between subjective
memory as the mental record of the past and outmoded merchandise as
evidence of the past in the present, material world.
From the vantage point of objective chance, the appearance of the
anachronistic and banal Atget photographs in Man Ray’s studio sup-
ports the surrealist revaluation of photographs as emanations—in
one critic’s words, “less a representation of an object than the effect of
an event”—and the city they describe as a field of circulating images
structured by the psychic apparatus in its own likeness: fragmented,
intertextual, haunted by obsolete motifs.18 Photographic fungibility, in
conjunction with the sense that the images w ere fragments torn from
the continuum, was the basis for Breton’s early esteem for photographs.
Referring specifically to Man Ray’s work, Breton lauded the medium’s
capacity to disengage images from their referents in the phenomenal
world outside the frame, emphasizing not their mimetic qualities, but
their function as signs cut loose from their original contexts and freed to
be exchanged, or taken for, other t hings: visual counterparts to surrealist
texts that had “freed words” from their dictionary definitions through
automatism.19 Like the rayographs that continued to emerge from Man
Ray’s studio, these Atget images, at least in Man Ray’s hands, offered
new possibilities of inclusiveness and lability of meaning as against the
conventions that had thus far limited meaning in the arts. As signs for
subjective memory and for the power of displacement as a catalyst for
hypnogogic vision, Man Ray’s Atgets present at once a record of and
a site for a revaluative process central to surrealism: the “conversion”
of ordinary objects, in this case archival documents, to surrealist trou-
vailles invested with psychic resonance.
The fractured and aleatory structure of the a lbum, then, would indi-
cate a submerged “illogic” linking the images associatively across their
subject matter, much in the oblique manner of unconscious processes.
And while the theorization of objective chance as a method of exposing
the “marvelous” within the ordinary was only codified in the 1930s, well
after Man Ray had assembled the a lbum, it was rooted in a much earlier
ludic activity that was in place even before the group had written their
first manifesto, in 1924. This was a practice that writer Michael Sher-
ingham has described as errance, aimless wandering, or drifting within
rationalized urban space, an activity through which the surrealists opened
84 Chapter T wo
themselves to spontaneous actions meant to produce unforeseeable visual
“manifestations” motivated by unconscious desire.20 Unlike the method
of “objective chance,” which always had as its object a “lucky find” replete
with psychic resonance, errance was fundamentally purposeless: it gen-
erated no souvenirs of its trajectory, nor did it leave its trace in the city
streets. As a means without ends, a ludic structure, it produced nothing.
Its value lay instead in the mode of experience it gave shape to, a way of
being in city streets developed in resistance to the relentless utilitarianism
of the efficient modern subject. For the surrealist movement, it provided
an opportunity to extend the psychoanalytic armature that provided the
group with its most compelling precepts. The practice of automatism
from which errance had developed was by then synonymous with surreal-
ism; it was the first technique they deployed to turn away from conscious
invention to disclose the extraordinary latent in the commonplace.
“To a certain degree it is generally known what my friends and I mean
by surrealism,” wrote Breton in 1922, when he first began to consider the
term as a designation for the group’s activity. “We use this word, which
we did not coin and which we might easily have left to the most ill de-
fined critical vocabulary, in a precise sense. This is how we have agreed
to designate a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well
to the dream state, a state that is currently very hard to delimit.”21 In
Breton’s surrealist manifesto of 1924, the definition clearly prevails: sur-
realism is again identified as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by
which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word,
or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated
by thought, in the absence of any control by reason, exempt from any
aesthetic or moral concern.”22
As Breton described it, the method was s imple and accessible; one
needed no special training to put it into effect:
fter you have settled yourself into a place as favorable to the
A
concentration of your mind upon yourself, have writing materials
brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of
mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the
talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one
of the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without
any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remem-
ber what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have
written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling
is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence un-
known to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard.23
Drift 85
The process was officially established within the range of surrealist prac-
tices with Breton and Philippe Soupault’s publication in 1920 of Les
champs magnétiques (Magnetic Fields), a collaborative text advanced as
pure psychic utterances. Soupault wrote in the preface: “In the course
of our research, we did indeed observe that the mind, once freed of all
critical pressures and school-bound habits, offered images and not logi-
cal propositions; and that if we a dopted what the psychiatrist Pierre
Janet called a practice of automatic writing, we produced texts in which
we found ourselves describing a ‘universe’ as yet unexplored.”24
What is striking in this passage is Soupault’s description of the texts
in spatial terms: as a “universe” of experience. Automatist theory treats
the subconscious as a provisionally accessible part of the extant world,
emphasizing its simultaneity with what we normally experience as
reality. The implication is that the past, at the very least in the form of
subjective memory, is imbricated with the present; it is only by focusing
selectively that the subject does not experience it as such (thus Janet’s
L’automatisme psychologique included a full chapter on mediums and
spiritism, on the basis that mediums were figures especially able to ex-
pand their cognizance across the usual temporal barriers).
Janet maintained that it is only through conventions of perception
that we experience time as linear and the visible world as a continuous
field—in a synthesis of conscious and unconscious operations controlled
by the “reality function.” In normal human beings, he contended, the
editing processes of the reality function, like all subliminal activity, are
automatic—that is, they operate independently of free will, but they
could be momentarily suspended, allowing for a “confusion” of the
inner and outer—as in cases of so-called absentmindedness or, of course,
the “slips of the tongue” that the emerging surrealists had exploited in
the époque floue. Most importantly for the surrealists, Janet’s theory
acknowledged that reality as perceived is a construction, not an abso-
lute given. Without preconceptions, according to Janet, reality would
appear radically fragmented, as subjective, subconscious images became
indistinguishable from t hose of the consciously perceived world. Thus,
through the disengagement of will that marked automatism, André
Breton would seek to “deprive the distinction between subjective and
objective of both necessity and value” and to invest surrealist theory in
imagery that called into question “a valid dividing line between imagi-
nary objects and real objects, given that, as things stand, real objects
can easily disappear from the realm of consciousness, and imaginary
ones take their place, and that subjectively they are interchangeable.”25
Through this distinctive grasp of automatic operations, Breton identified
86 Chapter T wo
Eugène Atget, Fête du Trône, 1925. J. Paul Getty
2.12
Museum. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open
Content Program.
the surrealist project as an expansion of cognizance devoted to unveil-

ing associative responses that are normally undisclosed to vision.
Man Ray’s selection of Atgets was produced u nder the sign of this
disclosure. The disaggregate structure of the collection, its refusal to
synthesize either under a unified subject matter or through the will of
a linear narrative, expresses the construction of a reality expanded to
embrace the forms and processes of the unconscious. And the effect is
doubled—and made to seem immanent—by the presence en abîme of a
thematics of anomaly and disaggregation within the individual images
that constitute the album. In some of the images this effect is readily
available as disjunction in the visual field, for example in Fête du Trône
(figure 2.12), where a collage-like arrangement of ordinary furniture and
objects—shoes, chairs, and photographs propped on a dresser—floats
in extraordinary defiance of the parameters of rationalized space, failing
to “make sense” as a practical or aesthetic arrangement. A rhyming in-
compatibility of scale among the items in the assemblage—tiny chair/
Drift 87
2.13 Eugène Atget,
L’eclipse, avril 1912,
1912. George Eastman
Museum.
large chair, tiny boot/ large boot—generates a spatio-visual vertigo that

is repeated in the very pair of photographs, of a midget and a g iant,
that should render the display intelligible as an advertisement for a cir-
cus sideshow, a clarification that nevertheless maintains its disturbing
theme of polarized difference compromising the natural field.
In other images, the inadequacy of vision is restated in both obvious
and subtle ways. In L’eclipse (figure 2.13), an image of a crowd watching
the solar phenomenon in a public square, vision is revealed as both vul-
nerable and insufficient as the spectators gaze through special devices that
bring the eclipse into view. But the insufficiency of vision is also conveyed
obliquely, through a disaggregation of the figure through repetition,
where individuality has been displaced by the sheer multiplication of
people in the field. The anonymity of the crowd is made emphatic by the
identical gestures and positions of the p eople as, hands to eyes, they gaze
in unison through their bits of smoked glass. Inevitably, our eyes follow
theirs, caught in the arrested moment; but the eclipse itself is out of the
frame. What we see instead is the curved shadow at the top of the image,
an effect of the camera’s lens that brings us abruptly back to the surface of
the print and then even farther, out of the pictorial space to the peripheral
limits of our own vision, the circularity of which rhymes with that of the
camera’s eye. That curve activates a visual relay, from our eyes to the eyes
of the crowd, and then beyond, to the imagined solar sphere, in a demon-
88 Chapter T wo
stration of sheer mediation: we know the subject of the photograph only
indirectly, through the gaze of the crowd; we, through our lens, watch
them looking through theirs, viewing an absence, an anomaly, a black sun.
When this image appeared on the cover of the June 1926 issue of La Révo-
lution surréaliste, it was captioned “Les dernières conversions”: the crowd
won over to irrational perception, with a “revisioning” effected perversely,
through a black glass—all of them seeing at a remove from their physi-
cal environment, enabling the associative chain that Breton would call “a
disinterested play of thought.”26 Expanded surrealist vision, directed back
from the object onto the subject, seeks that which is eclipsed in positiv-
ist reality. And just as the visual prosthetic glass makes the “conversion”
possible for the crowd, so we are metonymically returned to photography
through the lens and the glass negative as the favored means for surrealist
revisions of representation.
The layering of “inner” m ental states with the “outer” visual field ac-
tivated in trancelike automatist states (whether they were experienced
in the parlor, in the flea market, or in the face of a solar eclipse) is fun-
damental to the effect we casually call surreal—the jarring juxtaposi-
tions characteristic of so-called dreamscapes—and it seems to explain
the inclusion in the album of a number of Man Ray’s Atgets where inner
irrationality has been grafted onto rational, Cartesian space. A striking
number of the images show reflected space interleaved with the inner
space of shop windows, creating the illusion of mannequins at once
within and without (see figures 2.14, 2.20, 2.42, 2.43, 2.45). The ensuing
near-hallucination describes a liminal space available to the surrealist
adrift in the city, and one that is commensurate with photography, a me-
dium that itself exists in a paradox state in tension between the incom-
plete attention of the photographer and the uniform attention of the
camera—between objective and subjective address, agency and autom-
atism, transcriptive authenticity and fraudulent copy. And this tran-
scription of automatic experience is particularly suited to the genre of
documentary photography, where the construction of the photograph
is effectively masked behind the apparent candor of heightened detail
and straightforward point of view—qualities that, in these images, only
reinforce the surrealists’ acknowledgment of the utter contingency of
vision and its regular subordination to convention, memory, and desire.
Necessarily, then, in the relay of mediation, vision, and absence put
into play by images like L’éclipse, Atget the photographer must dis
appear. For Breton’s “case against the realistic attitude” is made all the
more powerfully in these unmanipulated images that register the world
available to the camera, that “effect” reality so well.27 These Atgets
Drift 89
Eugène Atget, Au Bon Marché, 1926–27.
2.14
exploit the indexical quality of photography to authenticate the sur-

realist reassessment of reality as a hypnagogically structured “universe”
where, in Breton’s words, “images circulate freely in the immeasurable
area lying between consciousness and the unconscious.”28 It was to this
requirement of surrealism—which the photographs demonstrate as op-
posed to describe or metaphorize—that Atget’s images responded so
beautifully. His naturalized documents presented the city of Paris, “the
most dreamed-about of [surrealist] things,” de fait.29 If they bore the
signs of a cleavage in reality it was purely by accident, as the camera
chanced upon the surreal city breaking through the rationalized field.30
Grasping the city as a field of circulating images ideally experienced
“at a remove,” that is, from the vantage point of a “disinterested play of
thought,” was not unique to surrealism, for it had formed the basis of
Georg Simmel’s own formulation in the first decade of the twentieth
century of a kind of “critical disinterest” available to the modern subject
90 Chapter T wo
only through phenomena that he called “play forms.” Significantly, these
are outmoded forms of social interaction that have their roots in activi-
ties previously necessary for survival, but which, having been superseded
by modern forms, are pursued for pleasure rather than purpose. In this,
Simmel argues, they express not only the “pure” need for social interac-
tion divorced from material needs, but also a desire to maintain links to
history and memory: the hunt and the adventure have footholds in the
quest for food; sociability in the need for the mutual material support
and protection of the community.31 For Simmel, play as a distinct cat-
egory of experience is, in a sense, “invented” by the hypervaluation of the
rationalized technologies and forms of social interaction characteristic
of modernization, and is therefore in constant dialectic with functional-
ism. In his compelling essay “The Metropolis and M ental Life” (1903), he
argues that the constant condition of metropolitan life is one of conflict,
brought about by the accelerated “tempo and multiplicity of economic,
occupational and social life” and the concomitant “swift and continuous
shift of external and internal stimuli.”32 For Simmel, the diversity and
intensity of modern urban life was so extreme that it had given rise to
a corresponding pervasive rationalism in the attitudes of city dwellers,
deployed defensively as a way to organize the experiential field.
This “intellectualization” of life, Simmel theorized, was naturalized
and facilitated by its close relation to the mature money economy which,
in its concern only with the commonality of things—that is, “with the
exchange value which reduces all quality and individuality to a purely
quantitative level”—degrades individuality and “reduces the manifold-
ness of t hings . . . to a homogeneous, flat and gray color with no one of
them being worthy of being preferred to one another”:
To the extent that money, with its colorlessness and its indifferent
quality, can become a common denominator of all values it be-
comes the frightful leveler—it hollows out the core of things, their
peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incom-
parability in a way that is beyond repair. They all float with the same
specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money.33
Simmel finds the rise of a “blasé attitude,” which inevitably ends in
“dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own valueless-
ness,” symptomatic of this pervasive rationality, and concludes that the
only way to preserve individuality is through self-subjection to an at-
titude of “reserve”—an emotional state that circumscribes the subject
protectively, yet allows him or her “a type and degree of personal free-
dom.”34 It is in this theorization of the necessity for a sociopsychological
Drift 91
form of disinterest, the marking out of a field disengaged from material
exigencies, that Simmel’s roots in Kantian aesthetics become obvious,
for disinterest is also the term by which Kant linked play to aesthetics,
and Simmel, in turn, will invoke play—as it is manifested in sociabil-
ity, adventure, and the wanderings of “the stranger”—as the sole form
of social interaction through which both individuality and equality
could be preserved in a hostile modern context.35
If Simmel’s concern with the modes by which modern subjects man-
age the conflicts of urban life recalls Benjamin’s theory of gambling as
a form of play that calls on internalized movements developed to parry
the shocks of the assembly line, it is not by accident. Simmel was the only
sociologist cited in Benjamin’s notes for The Arcades Project, and Benja-
min’s notion of Spielraum as the salutary outcome of redemptive forms
such as film and photography, which fused technology with art prac-
tices, appears to have been read through Simmel’s play theories. If so, the
ludic model Benjamin proposes functions as something of a corrective,
not positing Simmel’s rigid binary conflict of play against technology,
but emphasizing the urgent need for an interdependent and mutually
enriching engagement of the two terms, communicated in the constant
flickering between the auratic critical distance of the work of art and the
democratic and collective model of technological reproduction.36
From the perspective of Simmel’s assessment of the dilemma of the
modern subject, automatism, particularly as practiced by the surrealists,
takes on the characteristics of a play form. Like automatic practices, play
forms disengage from an excessively rationalized reality, yet are para-
doxically of that reality, drawn out in contradistinction to dominant
sociocultural modes. They are utterly self-reflexive, concerned with in-
dividuality and therefore the “inner model” so esteemed by the surreal-
ist movement, and, as in automatism, play activity is subordinated to a
dynamic flux that values the immediacy of contingent and fugitive ex-
perience over the controlled pursuit of useful knowledge. While in both
cases this dynamism can be compared with the constant recirculation of
homogenized fragments made equivalent by the exchange economy—
particularly since automatic utterances tend t oward the “monotonous”
and “anonymous”—surrealist automatism, understood as an undirected
flow of raw mental material, is indigestible for the system of commod-
ity exchange: so long as it has no curative purpose or substance, auto-
matic experience cannot be assigned a quantitative value.37 Likewise
Simmel’s play forms are anathema to the cycle of exchange, as they are
obsolescent forms of interaction that have already been jettisoned by
the modernized economic system. Against the relentless absorption of
92 Chapter T wo
e very conceivable phenomenon into the economy of exchange, both
automatism and play pose the sheer difference of their structures and
values: uselessness, antiproduction, and the relinquishing of conscious
will. Therein lies their flexibility and their critical power.
The Urban Coordinates of the Purposeless
In surrealism’s campaign to revolutionize experience as a whole, automa-

tism would be its most effective tool. Through automatic practice, signs
for disaggregation and obsolescence could be understood not merely as
visual representations of the limits of conventional apprehension, but
as actual traces of unconscious activity in material reality—records, as
Benjamin would claim, of a “dialectical optic that perceives the every-
day as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.”38 The desire to ex-
pand the surrealist program beyond representation to experience the
topographic features of the city as “evident, external markers” of the
unconscious, figuring Paris itself as a ludic field of desire, emerged early
in the ambitions of the movement.39 In 1924 the surrealists’ automatist
experiments, which had always been collaborative, were made explicitly
phenomenological—recast as movement through public space—with
a “four-man stroll” undertaken by Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Morise,
and Roger Vitrac. The four set out on foot from Blois, a town chosen at
random from a map, and proceeded “haphazardly,” as Breton reported,
for several days, in “absence of any goal.” This initial excursion, interspersed
with sessions of automatic writing, cultivated a sense of dépaysement,
a deterritorialization marked by provocative encounters with “numer-
ous and disturbing phantoms.” As Breton recalled, “the exploration
was hardly disappointing . . . because it probed the boundaries between
waking life and dream life.”40
From this time on, the structure and operations of the psyche would
be understood to have their analogue in the Paris streets. The surreal-
ist expansion of reality would be sought through the regular practice of
errance, encouraging the breakdown of the “reality function” and the
resulting experience of disaggregation.41 Breton’s description was gran-
diose: “An uninterrupted quest was given free rein: its purpose was to
behold and disclose what lay hidden u nder appearances. Unexpected
encounters, which explicitly or not always tend to assume female traits,
marked the culmination of this quest.”42 Man Ray too participated in
these walks, offering a more prosaic assessment: a “slumming operation,”
he called it; “we roamed about the more shady sections of Paris with my
camera, shooting scenes haphazard and fraught with some hazard [sic].”43
Drift 93
Through the suspension of rationality prerequisite to the automatist
state, the surrealists sought to reveal “invisible Paris,” a “geographical un-
conscious” riddled with anachronisms,44 here described by the surrealist
Roger Caillois: “How could each reader fail to develop the intimate belief
(still manifest today) that the Paris he knows is not the only one? Is not
even the real one? That it is only a brilliantly lit décor albeit far too nor-
mal, whose mechanical operators w ill never reveal themselves? A setting
that conceals another Paris, the true Paris, a ghostly, nocturnal, intangible
Paris that is all the more powerful insofar as it is more secret; a Paris that
anywhere and at any time dangerously intrudes upon the other one?”45
Disaggregation of the visual field in errance would be understood
as perception opening transgressively onto the occluded city, in a wak-
ing, material instantiation of the dreamwork, where memory and desire
erupted within the built environment. Two surrealist “antinovels” con
temporary with the assembling of Man Ray’s Atget album (and the
beginning of Benjamin’s Arcades Project)—Louis Aragon’s Paysan de
Paris (Paris Peasant) and André Breton’s Nadja—adumbrate errance as
this new relation between the self and the world, a relation cognizant
of a reality structured by the psychic apparatus in its own likeness: a
“sur-reality.”46 In t hese books, the city acts as medium and magistrate:
a conduit between internal and external subjectivity, and a manipulat-
ing force for the subject who had, as Breton advocated, “put himself
in a state of grace with chance.”47 Nadja, for example, a diaristic novel
rigorously contemporaneous with the events it chronicles, traces the
steps of the enigmatic streetwalker Nadja, catalyst for strange and in-
explicable coincidences; it is a story whose final outcome was unknown
to the writer until it had actually occurred.48 Significantly, the text is il-
lustrated with documentary photographs so bland and so vague in their
relation to the incidents in the text that, like Man Ray’s set of Atget
images, they raise more questions than they answer.49
The revolutionary implications of the surrealists’ surrender to the city’s
“geographical unconscious” were strong enough that, nearly fifty years
after his break with the surrealists, the philosopher Henri Lefebvre still
considered this overdetermination of the urban field by the libidinal op-
erations of the unconscious to be central to a critical apprehension of the
city. In The Production of Space (1974) he writes: “Walls, enclosures and
façades serve to define both a scene (where something takes place) and an
obscene area to which everything that cannot or may not happen on the
scene is relegated: whatever is inadmissible, be it malefic or forbidden, thus
has its own hidden space on the near or far side of a frontier . . . an under-
ground and repressed life, and hence an ‘unconscious’ of its own.”50
94 Chapter T wo
The relation of the city to desire implied by Lefebvre’s occluded ob-
scene is manifested in moments when what is unseen in the built envi-
ronment comes into view. It is the traversal of this split and marginal
topography that both Nadja and Paris Peasant describe, an extraliter-
ary course that Michel Beaujour has characterized as an “ethnological
expedition into a singularly disturbing city” meant to deliver “the self
as Other.” Movement through t hese sites shuttles between levels of con-
sciousness, fragmented and destabilized, “like a dream,” Breton would
claim, except “here I am, moving around Paris.”51 Breton’s and Aragon’s
texts are delivered as accounts in the first person; the valence of any
encounter as “marvelous” is measured by its shocking resonance with
their respective unconscious memories. In this sense, the experience of
errance at the individual level is the experience of the wandering subject
producing his or her reality on the spot. Yet the operation of errance in
both narratives is performed in public space, in the passages, parks, and
streets that bear symptomatic marks of memory in the form of their
historical past. History, or collective memory, which Breton describes
as “what took place h ere,” is spatialized in the surrealist’s city, dwelling
latent beneath the surface, ready to shudder upward into the present.52
This potential is the effect described by Walter Benjamin when, in
“Little History of Photography,” he likens Atget’s photographs to the
scene of a crime: the sense, not quite manifest, of something “having
happened” there.53 Signs for indeterminacy and uncertainty, transgres-
sion and mystery, in the sense of a site disturbingly evacuated, a subject
unexplained, or a place too emphatically ordinary for representation,
mark the blank façades in Rue des Boulangers (figure 2.15), and the
shabby music hall in Maison du musette (figure 2.16). The vertiginous
bulge and dip of the evacuated Cour du Dragon (figure 2.17), its walls
bowing as though the portal had sucked them clean, and the deeply
shadowed staircase in Hôtel de Sens, rue du Figuier (figure 2.18), present
as enigmatic thresholds mediating between interior and exterior, private
and public, inner and outer space, figuring forth spaces of transition and
impermanence: courtyards, staircases, doorways passed but not entered,
places that, as Aragon claimed of the “sunless corridors” of the arcades,
“no one had the right to linger in for more than an instant.”54
This sense of constant drift and equivocation, of being always in
“movement between” without destination, has been identified by
Michel de Certeau as critical to the political valence of movement
through the city.55 In a recasting of walking as a “pedestrian enuncia-
tion,” in which the subject “appropriates the topographical system” and
the walker is an object of uniform contingency, always relative to “a
Drift 95
2.15 (above) Eugène
Atget, Rue des
Boulangers, 1923.
George Eastman
Museum.
(above right)
2.16
Eugène Atget, Maison
du musette, 1923.
George Eastman
Museum.
2.17 (right) Eugène
Atget, Cour du Dragon,
Museum.
Eugène Atget,
2.18
otel de Sens, rue
H
du Figuier, 1901.
George Eastman
Museum.
h ere and a there,” walking through the city is established as a series of

articulations so diverse that they “cannot be reduced to their graphic
trail.”56 De Certeau characterizes pedestrian enunciations in terms that
resonate with the record of errance as it appears in Man Ray’s a lbum,
that is, as a series of explicitly photographic references in tension with
their own illogical content: “Through these swellings, shrinkings, and
fragmentations . . . a spatial phrasing of an analogical (composed of
juxtaposed citations) and elliptical (made of gaps, lapses and allusions)
type is created . . . an allusive and fragmentary story whose gaps mesh
with the social practices it symbolizes.”57 A new topography emerges,
drafted from within the urban network and scripted in the language of
photography, its interventions based in the field of instrumental reason
through an apprehension of the city marked by the unconscious: “Their
rhetorical transplantation carries away and displaces the analytical, co-
herent, proper meanings of urbanism; it constitutes a ‘wandering of the
semantic’ produced by the masses that make some parts of the city dis
appear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting
it from its immobile order [into a] symbolic order of the unconscious.”58
Surrealism is nowhere explicitly named in de Certeau’s text, but it
is everywhere implied. When he describes the explicitly political effect
Drift 97
Le Corbusier, La Cité Radieuse—Plan Voisin, 1925.
2.19
© ars. Photo: Banque d’Images, adagp / Art Resource.
of what he calls pedestrian enunciations, he could easily be describing

the surrealists in errance. Drifting through the city operates in excess of
utilization, as “deambulations” produce “ambiguous dispositions” that
“displace meaning in the direction of equivocalness,” opening a space for
play within the city’s rigid system.59 When walking is unmotivated, de
Certeau writes (deliberately evoking Walter Benjamin), “it ‘authorizes’
the production of an area of free play (Spielraum) on a checkerboard
that analyzes and classifies identities,” imposing “a local authority” as
against “functionalist totalitarianism.”60
Official Paris of course—the gracious boulevards of the nineteenth-
century flâneur—was in the late 1920s the focus not of the surrealists but
of preservationists and urban planners. The last stage of Baron Hauss-
mann’s reconstruction of the city entailed the demolition in 1929 of the
Passage de l’Opera (the shabby nineteenth-century arcade that inspired
Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant), and along with it, the Café Certà, the
regular meeting place of the surrealists.61 Already in 1925, just one year
before Man Ray browsed Atget’s studio, arch-modernist Le Corbusier
had proposed a program for the direction that the city’s center should
take g oing forward. His Plan Voisin for the radical reconstruction of
Paris (figure 2.19), first laid out in the book-length polemic Urbanisme
(1924), went on public display at the Pavillion de l’espirit nouveau for the
98 Chapter T wo
xposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels.62 Based on
E
order, progress, and functionalism—three terms that w ere to become
watchwords of modernist production—it reads as a direct challenge to
the aimless drift of surrealist errance. Chapter 1, line 1 of Urbanisme as-
serts: “Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where
he is g oing; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he
goes straight to it.”63 Le Corbusier’s was a Cartesian utopia, based in rea-
son, and his alignment of order, authority, and surveillance with rectilinear
structures expressed a dogmatic faith in pure geometry: absolute power
guaranteed by the right angle. Urbanisme reads as a manifesto against the
unplanned and unforeseen: “We struggle against chance, against disorder,
against a policy of drift and against the idleness which brings death; we
strive for order, which can be achieved only by appealing to what is the fun-
damental basis on which our minds can work: geometry”; and “The wind-
ing road is the result of happy-go-lucky heedlessness, of looseness, lack of
concentration, and animality. The straight road is a reaction, an action, a
positive deed, the result of self-mastery. It is sane and noble.”64
As geographer David Pinder has pointed out, the threat posed by
“uncoded and unregulated movement is registered through the negative
scripting of the nomadic, as Le Corbusier describes Paris as a ‘gypsy
encampment’ and sets his vision against free wandering and drift.”65 For
Le Corbusier, the surrealists’ fascination with itinerant laborers such as
the ragpickers camped on the outskirts of the city (which, at six images,
represents a substantial thematic grouping in Man Ray’s collection of At-
gets), would have been anathema. And the regulation of l abor is central to
Le Corbusier’s vision of Paris. In the foreword to Urbanisme he repeatedly
ties passage through the city to work: “A town is a tool,” he asserts at the
outset, and “man governs his feelings by his reason . . . his experience is
born of work.”66 His plan for Paris entailed further demolishing vast areas
of what he considered the most diseased sections of the city, primarily on
the right bank, in precisely the neighborhood the surrealists w ere simulta
neously claiming as their own in Nadja and Paris Peasant. The Plan Voisin
specified that these areas were to become the “Business General Head-
quarters” of Paris, delivered, that is, via a gridiron of limited access speed-
ways and cruciform skyscrapers, to the very bourgeois figures derided in
Man Ray’s Atget images: the mute and inanimate mannequins turned out
in uniform style (see figures 2.2, 2.14, 2.20, 2.42–2.45).67
Le Corbusier’s desire to make Paris over into a uniform site of dis-
cipline, pathologizing unproductivity, idleness, and chance, can be un-
derstood within the context of his previous alignment with purism, and
that movement’s role in constructing a cultural “return to order” after
Drift 99
Eugène Atget, Boutique aux halles, 1925. moma.
2.20
Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden.
Digital Image © moma / Licensed by scala / Art Resource.
the trauma of World War I.68 Indeed, for critic Zygmunt Bauman, the
entire modern project could be summarized as a “particularly bitter and
relentless war against ambivalence,” with the imposition of order and re-
pression of polysemy and contingency as its central task—a project that,
given surrealism’s ludic commitments, obviously would be repellent to
the group.69 Accordingly, the exhortation to clean up, reorder, and pu-
rify that ran through Le Corbusier’s writings of the 1920s, advocating for
spaces purged of m ental disturbances, was received as a direct affront to
André Breton, whose own critique of urban space could be understood
as exactly converse to Le Corbusier’s: an exhortation to seek out and
expose modernism’s repressed and unpresentable underlife. For Breton,
modernist functionalism was “the most unhappy dream of the collective
unconscious,” a “solidification of desire in a most violent and cruel automa-
tism.”70 He targeted Le Corbusier directly in 1935, specifically citing the
Swiss pavilion of the Cité universitaire in Paris (1930–32), a building
that, he contended, “outwardly answers all the conditions of rationality
and coldness that anyone would want in recent years.”71 Breton’s opposi-
tion to modernist dreams of homogenization effected by the cleansing
repression of the recent past is consistent with the embrace of obsoles-
cence that informs Man Ray’s Atget collection; and with Le Corbusier
100 Chapter T wo
coming out strongly against the preservationist impulse, Man Ray’s ap-
propriation of Atget, a photographer whose work figured prominently
in preservationist archives, amounted to a declaration on the part of the
surrealists of allegiance to an adamant “antimodern.”72
Given that Le Corbusier claimed to seek change in urban space as a
means of instituting wider social change, the surrealists’ own grasp of
the city, which embraced obsolescent forms, could be understood as an
essentially conservative gesture: not the revolution they espoused, but a
reactionary regression into the past. But for Le Corbusier, architectural
reform was the alternative to revolution: his closing remark in T owards
a New Architecture (1923) was “Revolution can be avoided.” With this
73
in mind, the launch of the first surrealist journal, La Révolution sur-

réaliste (1924), in the following year can be read as a direct response to
Le Corbusier’s call to vitiate the power of public uprising. If rational
architecture and planning, in Le Corbusier’s formulation, were to be
set in place in order to prevent the radical changes in social relations
mandated by revolution, surrealism countered with a vision of the city
as an obsolete, twisting, and spontaneous labyrinth, a topography of
false starts and backtracking riddled with obstacles to productivity and
closure: Paris reconceived in the spirit of Spielraum. In his evocation
of Paris for The Arcades Project, Benjamin would write: “To encompass
both Breton and Le Corbusier, that would mean drawing the spirit of
contemporary France like a bow, with which knowledge shoots the mo-
ment in the heart.”74 Following Benjamin’s venatic metaphor, Man Ray’s
Atget collection is the arrow that pierces the heart of modernism.
The associative seriality of the photographs in Man Ray’s Atget
album, their inscrutability and intertextual contingency, all point to
play as the structural condition of the album. But it is as a trace of er-
rance, a form of movement undertaken without foreseeable goals, that
we understand its significance in a material context of political inter-
vention, as it operates within the city rather than treating it as an ob-
ject, effectively rewriting the urban landscape in every instance that it
is practiced: “A migrational . . . city,” de Certeau writes, “thus slips into
the clear text of the planned and readable city.”75 The city experienced
as play is “no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations,”
for “without rational transparency [these operations] are impossible to
administer.”76 In its grafting of psychic processes onto the “horizontal”
or “geographic experience of human life,” the play of errance operates
to level hierarchies through collaboration, appropriation, and circula-
tion.77 In Atget’s images, in which the automatic process of photogra-
phy is shown to have produced “impossible” images, Paris as a regulatory
Drift 101
grid—with streets and structures designed for function and utility—
has been displaced by the improbabilities of chance. To move without
purpose within the technologically determined grid is not only to give
modern subjects Spielraum within modernist structures, but to declare
those structures arbitrary and available to change.
Novelty and Obsolescence in the Urban Unconscious:

The Ludic City
As such, the a lbum makes its critical strike by drawing on surrealism’s psy-
choanalytically informed threat to the stability of meaning. Even as the
images range erratically over Paris as a field, submerged anarchic themes
simultaneously link them and justify their heterogeneity and bland pre
sentation. Spatial contradictions recur in the photographs, resisting the
false unity of sublimation; transience and obsolescence are repeatedly
presented in the form of temporal incongruities; and city streets are char-
acterized as catalysts for the involuntary eruption of repressed memories.
The images work together as a system to produce the city of Paris from a
critical vantage point that refashions commodities (in the form of both
Atget’s commercial documents and the subjects they depict) as analogous
to irrational phenomena, calling to mind a text written u nder the influ-
ence of Nadja and Paris Peasant: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.78
The Arcades Project, begun one year after the date on Man Ray’s
album cover, and ended by Benjamin’s premature death in 1940, is a so-
cial and historical account of nineteenth-century Paris, limned through
the metaphor of the eclipsed novelty of its arcades: iron-and glass-
covered passages lined with luxury shops, gambling houses, restaurants,
and brothels. A fragmented record closer in structure to an archive than
a book, it comprises discrete notes gathered into sections of varying
lengths that Benjamin called convolutes, with topic headings such as
“The Streets of Paris,” “Prostitution,” “Gambling,” “Mirrors,” “Fashion,”
“The Flâneur,” “Idleness,” “Photography”—the same thematic threads
that run through the imagery in Man Ray’s a lbum. Here Benjamin
presents modern Paris as a “dreamworld of commodities,” through “im-
ages that had the psychic force of memory traces in the unconscious.”79
Benjamin considered Aragon’s Paris Peasant—the novel in which the
author’s wandering in the Passage de l’Opéra induces the hypnagogic state
characteristic of automatism—“the best book on Paris.” “Evenings in bed,”
he recalled to Adorno in 1935, “I could not read more than a few words of
it before my heartbeat got g oing so strong I had to put the book down. . . .
And in fact the first notes of the Passagen come from this time.”80
102 Chapter T wo
For Benjamin, the surrealists’ recuperation of the redundant had
even greater strength in that it took place among the residue of com-
modity production: theirs was an “extraordinary discovery” of “the
revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded.’ ” “No one be-
fore these visionaries and augurs,” Benjamin claimed, “perceived how
destitution—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors,
enslaved and enslaving objects—can be suddenly transformed into rev-
olutionary nihilism.”81 For Benjamin, recently outmoded commodities
in the urban landscape w ere symptomatic of the repressed underside of
modernism’s cult of novelty, surfacing like memory fragments as evi-
dence of a hoax inherent in the rhetoric of progress. Benjamin called
this surrealist projection of the unconscious onto the material of the city
itself profane illumination—the work of memory against the impover-
ishment of experience in the commodity-dominated urban landscape.82
Zoniers
The commercial spaces that appear in nearly all of the photographs in

Man Ray’s Atget collection document Paris as layered with significances
that range from the readily available to the liminal to the inaccessible,
advanced from within the terms and forms that were then, as now, de-
finitive of the urban quotidian: the physiognomy of commerce. And
while the lineaments of consumption and production are overtly drawn
in the images of window displays and storefronts that make up the larg-
est subject group in the a lbum, the photographs closest to representing
a specifically Benjaminian activation of memory are the six images de-
voted to the “Zone,” the ragpickers’ derelict territory at the city limits.
Benjamin does not devote a full convolute to the ragpicker in The
Arcades Project, but his section devoted to Baudelaire is littered with notes
on the chiffonier, a figure the poet compared with the artist, the collec-
tor, and the flâneur. For Baudelaire, the ragpicker was a subject eclipsed
by the commodity, a living signifier of modernity: “Here we have a man
whose job it is to pick up the day’s rubbish in the capital. He collects and
catalogues everything the great city has cast off, everything it has lost,
discarded, and broken. He goes through the archives of debauchery, and
the jumbled array of refuse. He makes a selection, an intelligent choice;
like a miser hoarding treasure, he collects garbage that will become ob-
jects of utility or pleasure when refurbished by Industrial magic.”83
In his parsing of Baudelaire’s “Du vin et du haschisch” (1851), Benjamin
identifies the ragpicker as the true modern hero, his valor based not
in industry and production but in the specific nature of his poverty, in the
Drift 103
way he “borrows bits and pieces” from “an intricate and richly articulated
system for the satisfaction of needs, fragments isolated from all context.”84
This characterization classes the ragpicker with Benjamin’s equally heroic
collector, who, in opposition to the consumer, appropriates once useful
objects, lifting them out of the system of exchange and stripping them of
their former functions. Like the collector, the chiffonier also collects objects
that have lost their exchange value, freeing them into a system ordered by
an “incomprehensible connection,” the “productive disorder [that] is the
canon of the mémoire involuntaire.”85 Refuse stands as testimony against
the selective omissions of ratiocination: “Collecting is a form of practical
memory, and of all the profane manifestations of ‘nearness’ it is the most
binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection
makes for an epoch in the antiques business. We construct here an alarm
clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous c entury to ‘assembly.’ ”86
In a relation that reiterates the symptomatic appearance of Atget’s
work in Man Ray’s studio, the six photographs from the album that de-
scribe “the Zone,” revolve around the anomaly among them: an image
that shows no signs of the heroic subversions of instrumental reason
that Benjamin recognized as surrealism’s critical potential.87 Like the
other images in the a lbum, Vannier (figure 2.21) presents an uncontrived
composition: a tentlike hut and hoop-framed wagon balance frontally
against the figure-as-axis, pinned into place by a chimney pipe rising at
the exact center of the image. The shallow foreground is bare, with the
materials of small industry placed neatly at the basket maker’s feet;
the subject is framed for simplicity and clarity. A classic documentary
image, Vannier renders transparent the formal devices available to the
photographic medium, meshing them seamlessly with their subject to
produce an unambiguous example of image-as-evidence. The resulting
picture naturalizes a classicizing composition and produces a reading
based in myth: the pathos of the upturned cart, the whiteness of the shirt,
the persistent effort against poverty signified by the basketry all serve to
romanticize what by all contemporary accounts was the miserable life of
the ragpickers and itinerants who inhabited the Paris banlieue.88
At the core of this reading is the figure itself. The sagging hut and the
homely cart serve to center and support their subject, the noble poor, as
essentially proud, productive, and self-sufficient. Yet, once the image is
considered together with the o thers in the series, it becomes clear that
this humanist figure has been established specifically in order to compro-
mise it, as the ragpickers in the other photographs are repeatedly subjected
to a kind of disappearance through displacement or eclipse. In Porte de
Montreuil, Zoniers (figure 2.22), the light that had cut out the basket
104 Chapter T wo
2.21 (above) Eugène Atget, Vannier,
1908. George Eastman Museum.
(right) Eugène Agtet, Porte
2.22
de Montreuil, Zoniers, 1913. George
Eastman Museum.
maker’s shack and wagon in simple geometric forms throws itself onto a
sprawl of used vessels, bathing the disorder at the center of the photograph
in the kind of attentive luminosity reserved for still life. Backlighting sears
the upper edges of the background clutter (window frames, old furniture,
the inevitable cart), throwing the canopied flank of a makeshift hovel
into deep shadow. From the recesses of this shadow the upper portion of
a ragpicker’s face emerges, blurred, severed, and thrown to the margins
of the image, displaced by the bricolage of his trade.
This advance of detritus onto the subject is the dominant theme of the
remaining images, as the figures and the architecture that would other
wise serve to demarcate spatial registers are subjected to a visual degrada-
tion, one that effectively destabilizes the boundaries between subject and
object. The image amounts to a pictorial expression of the capitulation
of the figure before the commodity, a submission made grotesquely dra-
matic when the merchandise is refuse. The breakdown is emphatic in Porte
d’Asnières, cité Trébert (figure 2.23), where two ragpickers are absorbed
into the cascade of loose papers that dominates the middle ground of the
image. Clarity and distinction are sacrificed as light and focus evenly treat
the tattered papers, the rough plaster wall, and the white-shirted figures as
so many reflective scraps in the field. The assault on the human figure and
its built environment is completed in Boulevard Masséna (figure 2.24),
where an evanescent spill from the overexposed sky burns the deep space
of the photograph into an unintelligible tangle of baskets, rags, and
boards. The vague outlines of two buildings are here suggested by little
more than the habit of viewing in perspectival recession; the distinct dif-
ferentiation between horizontals and verticals that forms the ground for
architecture has collapsed; the fall into inchoate litter is complete.
Architecture in the Zone was made over into ruins, not through
subtraction, so that the paucity of objects might take on the austere
elegance of Le Corbusian order, but oddly, paradoxically, through ex-
cess, recalling the operation of the multivalent pun or the obscurantist
identity slippage in rayographs. The ragpickers’ huts, assembled from
the street findings that constituted the very livelihood of their inhab-
itants, flout the conventions of functionalist architecture, eroding the
demarcations between living and commercial space, useful and ruined,
permanent and detachable. In their contamination of the elements of
architecture, and in the sense that the huts take commodity detritus as
their material condition, they enact a parody not just of architectural
stability but of the vanity of architecture itself, when valued outside of
its most basic function, shelter. The refusal of stable categories, the oneiric
chain of substitutions that rush forward in the images—figure, refuse,
106 Chapter T wo
2.23 (left) Eugène Atget,
Porte d’Asnières, cité
Trébert, 1913. George
Eastman Museum.
2.24 (below) Eugène
Atget, Boulevard Masséna,
Museum.
wall, merchandise—culminates, in Boulevard Masséna, in the recov-
ery of the displaced figure from the margins: in the right foreground
of the image, clean-focused against the blurred disorder, a tiny woman
emerges, reified in the form of a dancing white statuette.
The Prostitute as Rebus
“Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at

a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore,
dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity fetish per se:
as fetish. Such an image is presented by the arcades, which are houses
no less than street. Such an image is the prostitute—seller and sold in
one.”89 In this passage from The Arcades Project, Benjamin reels from one
term to another in an associative list that itself serves as a linguistic dem-
onstration of ambiguity-as-dialectic. The terms he invokes—utopia/
dream/commodity/house/street/prostitute—resonate with the images and
encounters experienced by the surrealist in errance, particularly as they
are pictured in Man Ray’s Atgets. But it is in the figure of the prostitute
that the split and contingent nature of surrealist desire, l’amour fou, is
most richly manifested in the urban street.
In Breton’s own account of wandering through Paris in the footsteps
of the streetwalker Nadja, she responds to his asking who she is with the
statement “I am the wandering soul.”90 Breton is fascinated by her utter
submission to chance: she “enjoyed being nowhere but in the streets, the
only region of valid experience for her, in the street, accessible to inter-
rogation from any human being launched upon some g reat chimera.”91
Nadja eschewed bourgeois morality not only through her prostitution
but through her rejection of logic, for Breton “the most hateful of
prisons.”92 Midway through their time together, she plays a game with
Breton in which she closes her eyes and spontaneously says a word that
launches her on a rambling narrative. But unlike most games, this one
has no boundaries—“actually,” she says, “I live this way altogether.”93
She is mad, Breton admits, but he is drawn to what he understands
as the utterly unrepressed apprehension of the world afforded by her
mental state, which drives her to a life in constant errance.
Breton revels vicariously in Nadja’s access to the ongoing processes of
unconscious desire, even as he admits to the danger of such a position.
His description of her is itself split—she is “inspired and inspiring” and
yet “the most wretched of women”; his break with her occurs over his
disgust at a bloody altercation she has had with a refused customer.94
For Benjamin, too, the prostitute is an ambiguous figure, but he casts
108 Chapter T wo
his ambivalence in economic terms: “the whore is . . . the incarnation of
a nature suffused with commodity appearance.” Like the ragpicker, and
like the two representatives of wandering street merchants in Man Ray’s
a lbum (figures 2.4 and 2.5), the prostitute moves through the streets
merged with her wares. Effectively, for Benjamin, she is a wandering
display that is a cipher of production, desire, and commodity.95
For Georg Simmel, this conflation of “seller and sold” marks prosti-
tution as homologous with the operations of the monetary system. His
extremely disinterested description of the vocation, offensive in its objec-
tification of its subject, entails a “purely momentary” transaction “which
leaves no traces.”96 Simmel maintains that b ecause prostitution is a univer-
sal and depersonalizing act (anyone can engage in it, regardless of skill),
both the prostitute and her customer are reduced to the status of tokens
in an exchange that is “pure means” as well as “purely sensual.”97 The level
ing effect of this reduction of persons to means, Simmel asserts, presents
the “nadir of human dignity.”98 But for the surrealist seeking a state of
erotically charged immediacy, an encounter with a prostitute would pre
sent as the opportunity for a fugitive experience without practical ends; in
this sense, the encounter represents a transaction that mimics the system
of economic exchange, but emphatically does not enter it. Through
unproductive labor mediated by chance, the prostitute disrupts the circu-
lation of goods that is essential to the chain of production and consump-
tion, and to this extent she militates against the work of the instrumental
urban, a resistance that for Benjamin is at least equal to that of gambling.
He makes the relation between the play of the gambler and the street-
walker’s sex without love explicit in convolute O of his Arcades Project, on
prostitution and gambling, where the two activities are coupled on the
basis of their mutual resistance to history, memory, and purpose.99 Here,
the play in gambling is treated as a kind of forgetting, a binding off of ex-
perience like that of the streetwalker when she leaves one customer for the
next. From this perspective, the prostitute f rees herself repeatedly through
her self-subjection to chance, indulging in what Benjamin calls a “hand-
to-hand encounter with Fate . . . the mingling of terror and delight that
intoxicates. It gives and it takes away; its logic is not our logic.”100
It is the streetwalker’s exposure to chance that identifies her as an avatar
of automatism. For if errance is grounded in libidinal desire—“ Whoever
wishes to know how much at home we are in entrails must allow himself
to be swept along in delirium through streets whose darkness greatly re-
sembles the lap of a whore”—it is equally punctuated by the illogic of the
fortuitous encounter, the merging of “phenomena that the human mind
perceives as only belonging to separate causal series” into a “fusion so
Drift 109
bright, albeit so ephemeral.”101 Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out that as
a dialectical image the prostitute reveals the “secret” of production rela-
tions “like a rebus,” a series of incongruous images that mask a coherent
meaning.102 Within the logic of this game, the motivation for including
the images is hidden, inaccessible to vision alone. To discover the hidden
message, the reader makes a relay from the visual to the verbal to the
conceptual, and is made pleasurably aware, in the process, of the contin-
gency of signification. Meaning in a rebus is both deferred and labile:
the meaning of the picture-image is derived from the very ambiguity of
the images’ homonymic play. Read as a rebus, the prostitute’s “masking,”
her “always fictive pleasure,” is perversely analogous to the repression of
the libidinal drives of the unconscious, which also results in incongruous
images: riddles of condensation and displacement.103
That “fictive pleasure” is clearest in the simply titled Femme (figure 2.25),
one of three nude figure studies in Man Ray’s album that Atget copied
from unknown photographers (figures 2.25–2.27).104 The woman is shot
from behind, squatting before a slumping decorative backdrop, masking
the “production relations” of her role with a coy smile over her shoul-
der. But this is not the only mask operating in this image; for while the
nude woman’s form is unmistakable in this image, the remaining space
is strangely unreadable, made ambiguous by an abrupt blank cutting
away the right side of the image, and a wide black scrape at the lower
center, below the nude’s right buttock. Only close examination reveals
the image as pornographic: the scrape blots out the knee of a second
nude, the straddled, anonymous man this woman seems to have been
hired to pleasure. Mimicry, play as pretending, is doubled h ere: the
naked woman performs for the camera as a prostitute performing.
These copied nudes erupt within the a lbum as anomalies, aberrations
that break with the naturalism that holds the album together formally,
a brash, erotic rencontre out of step with the nuanced expressions of
surrealist desire that characterize the rest of the a lbum. Yet their anom-
alous appearance most openly bears witness to Man Ray’s a lbum as a
surrealist appropriation, rather than the insightful recognition of one
“master” photographer for another.105 Along with a fourth nude, also
entitled Femme (the only nude Atget is known to have posed himself;
figure 2.28), they constitute the single direct thematic hinge connecting
Man Ray’s own photographs to Atget’s: Man Ray would become some-
thing of a specialist in nudes.106
The other images of prostitutes, like the rest of the a lbum, stick to the
streets. Maison close (figure 2.29) mimics the sly operations of the rebus
in its juxtaposition of the naturalism of the prostitute in the door-
110 Chapter T wo
(above left) Eugène Atget, Femme, 1921.
2.25
(above right) Eugène Atget, Femme, n.d.
2.26
2.27 (right) Eugène Atget, untitled (nude study),
Eugène Atget, Femme, 1925–26. George Eastman
2.28
Museum.
way of her bordello with the scattered proliferation of oversized and

utterly abstract numeral fives scattered across the façade of the building.
The space represented becomes a field of incongruous operations, as a
flickering and inconsistent lighting picks out the woman on the thresh-
old and simultaneously occludes her colleague in the window directly
above; gives one shuttered window an abysmal depth and renders its
twin utterly opaque with light; and clearly limns the oversized five as
a focal point even as it suppresses the other four number fives through
overexposure, underexposure, or glare. Atget’s naturalism here is de-
ployed in tension with the building’s façade as a semiotic field, where
the prostitute-as-sign is simultaneously the subject that defines the ar-
chitecture as a brothel and the object identified by the gros numéro over
the door, the only means of advertisement allowable by law.
The inconstancy that this shuttling and substitution establishes—a
state of in between that characterizes both the prostitute’s “walk of life”
and errance—is reiterated in t hese photographs by the streetwalker’s re-
peated appearance on the bordello’s threshold, the architectural point that
is at once inner and outer. In Versailles (figure 2.30), the prostitute poses in
the shadow of a doorway marked by the large 2 over her head; and in Rue
Asselin (figure 2.31) the metonymic relation between the whore and the
112 Chapter T wo
2.29 (above) Eugène Atget, Maison
close, 1921. George Eastman Museum.
2.30 (left) Eugène Atget, Versailles,
Eugène Atget, Rue Asselin, 1924–25.
2.31
architecturally transitional is made literal—not only through the photo

graph’s having “caught” the three figures emerging from the interior into
the street but through the disappearance of the legs of two of the women,
which in spite of the close proximity of the camera are sheathed in shad-
ows too dark to register on the photographic plate.
The anxiety provoked by the figure of the prostitute, as registered in
Breton’s revulsion over the sordid details of Nadja’s streetwalking and
as triggered by the discomfiting absence below the hems of the women
in Rue Asselin, plays provocatively off the geniality of Atget’s subjects:
the “keep smiling” of the “love market” as described by Benjamin.107 Yet
114 Chapter T wo
in spite of her habit of “masking,” the prostitute is cast by Benjamin as
a redemptive figure through her salutary association with the liminal:
In modern life . . . we have grown very poor in threshold experiences.
Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that remains to us.
(But together with this, there is also waking up.) And, finally, there
is the ebb and flow of conversation and the sexual permutations
of love—experience that surges over thresholds like the changing
figures of the dream. . . . It is not only from the thresholds of these
gates of imagination that lovers and friends like to draw their ener-
gies; it is from thresholds in general. Prostitutes, however, love the
thresholds of these gates of dream. The threshold must be carefully
distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle [threshold] is a zone.
Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen,
swell, and etymology ought not to overlook the senses.108
Benjamin’s relay of signification between the erotic, the ambiguous,
the oneiric, and the architectural posits the métier of the prostitute
as a play zone exempt from (yet still contained within) the exigencies
of modern life. In the remaining two brothel images, Le 10 de la rue
Mazet (figure 2.32) and 226 boulevard de la Villette (figure 2.33), this split
between yet within material reality is articulated as utter inscrutability.
The streetwalkers have been absorbed into the mute and numbered fa-
çades that both mask and attest to the activity within; and the conflation
of terms suggested by Benjamin’s concatenation—utopia/dream/house/
street/commodity/prostitute—is complete.
Automatic Architecture
On his first night in Paris, Man Ray was introduced to surrealism’s appre-
ciation of architecture as conduit and emblem of automatism when the
surrealists whom he had just met at the Café Certà brought him to a street
fair in Montmartre. “Elaborate merry-go-rounds, scenic railways, steam
swings, midget autos bumping each other, candy booths and sideshows
outdid each other in the general cacophony,” Man Ray would recall in his
autobiography. “My friends rushed from one attraction to the other like
children. . . . I wondered fleetingly w
hether they sought a physical exten-
sion into the realm of strong sensations.”109 Physical, yes: through sheer sub-
jective embodiment, the sensations associated with opening perception to
the associative disorder of the unconscious would be evoked from “vertigo-
inducing contraptions—machines for rotation, oscillation, suspension,
and falling, constructed for the purpose of provoking visceral panic.”110
Drift 115
2.32 Eugène Atget,
Le 10 de la rue Mazet,
1925. moma.
Eugène Atget, 226 boulevard de la Villette, 1921. George

2.33
Eastman Museum.
If, as Roger Caillois noted, the overpowering of reason put into
play by amusement park machines was meant to give psychic impulses
“room-for-play” in the material world, the sensory excess thus pro-
duced inevitably bore certain destructive disadvantages. In Man, Play
and Games (1961), Caillois linked the pursuit of vertigo with an indul-
gence in the forbidden that is both voluptuous and violent, a “diffuse
and insidious anguish and delight, that of seeking a sexual liaison. . . .
This vertigo is readily linked to a desire for disorder and destruction, a
drive which is normally repressed.” While the apperception of vertigo
achieves a kind of freedom, combined with the somatic excess produced
by the action of the “pleasure machine,” it also reduces the subject to
the carnal, and places the automatic architecture of the street fair well
within the Freudian sphere of the death drive: the turn to “unpleasure,”
in order to fulfill the ultimately destructive desire of “ceasing to live.”111
Erected provisionally within the urban matrix, the amusement rides
and false fronts of the Fêtes de la Villete, Trône, Vaugirard, and Invalides
(figures 2.34, 2.36–2.41) appear in Man Ray’s album as architectural gro-
tesques meant to simultaneously thrill and terrify, “paroxysms” within
“the monotonous routine of everyday life.”112 The subject in the milieu
of this automatic architecture is deracinated, simultaneously detached
from yet contained within the urban quotidian. The critical potential
of these ludic machines—machines that, in producing nothing, seem
to surmount the rational systems necessary to have constructed them
in the first place—is tempered somewhat by the similarity of their ef-
fects on the body to the repetition and depersonalization of industrial
processes. “The fun fair achieves with its dodgem cars and other similar
amusements,” observed Benjamin, “nothing but the taste of the drill to
which the unskilled laborer is subjected in the factory—a sample which
at times was for him the entire menu.”113
Nevertheless, the thrill rides, as industrial machines turned against
work, present a powerful metaphor for the agency of play enacted
through mechanical means, the very intersection in which Benjamin
envisioned Spielraum at its most powerful. The disengagement of pur-
pose that the surrealists sought in liminal neighborhoods would find
its architectural counterpart here, in the alternative city proposed by the
traveling fair. As “vagabond architecture” characterized by recirculation and
instability, pleasure machines represent a form of counter-monumentality
not only spatially, in terms of their temporary location, but through the
mobility of their internal mechanisms: they are machines designed to
move, and not stabilize, bodies in space.114 On the amusement ride,
both the subject and the built environment are always “constitution-
Drift 117
2.34 (above) Eugène Atget,
Fête de la Villette, 1926. George
Eastman Museum.
(right) Eugène Atget, Rue
2.35
du Cimitière Saint Benoît, 1925.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
ally between,” or dislocated in transit. Thus the street fair is built on
the same premise of disintegration that defines the chaotic dispersal of
the ragpickers’ shacks, or the permeability and destruction caught in the
image of the ruined buildings in Atget’s Rue du Cimitière Saint Ben-
oit (figure 2.35). Here the surrealist attack on conventions was enacted
through automatic architecture, aimed specifically at the tectonic sta-
bility that marks architecture as the foundation of Western culture.115
If at night, the fairground woke to offer an alternative city, then the
six photographs of street-fair attractions in Man Ray’s a lbum present
the ghost-town obverse of the frenetic playscape: daybreak’s dream-
world of the automaton. The depopulation of the fairground images,
made emphatic by Atget’s compositional use of empty streets to enhance
the illusion of depth within the frame, lucidly expresses the machine
ambivalence articulated by both Benjamin and Caillois (see figure 2.36).
Like L’eclipse (figure 2.13), the images speak of absence, of the stilled
animation of the irrational masses. The humanist subject is h ere reified
into the multiplied legs of mock bulls, flung out in catalepsy on the
platform of a ride in Fête du Trône (figure 2.37); in the swans frozen in
mid-circulation around the carousel in Fête de la Villette (figure 2.34);
in the rearing h orses of the Cirque Manfretta (figure 2.38), paralyzed in
simulated ferocity. Atget’s photographs here look particularly “cleared
out,” imbricated with the quality of “estrangement” that made Benjamin
categorize them as “surrealist.” To the “politically educated eye,” they
offer anomic pleasure machines as a critique of the built environment.116
The sense of foreboding in the suddenly inanimate spectacle, the un-
canny sense of an unwitnessed disaster, culminates in the image of a side-
show attraction, “Le feu dans la jungle” (figure 2.39), where the tumult
of animals is so wild that their body parts have become morcellated and
exchangeable, most obviously in the prominent but disengaged tail near
the head of the stampeding pack.
The mimetic artifice of the mural, made convincing in the photo
graph by tight framing from side to side, is at the same time unraveled
by the camera, since the armature of the mural has been included in the
lower part of the image. The camera’s betrayal is also apparent in Palais
de la Femme (figure 2.40), where it depicts an attraction whose entryway
is marked by a false front that announces, with a tangle of flying limbs
and floating drapery, the libidinal frenzy and thrill promised by the sex
show within. The dancers are depicted in the mural on a trompe l’oeil
portico made convincing at the left side of the mural, where the portico
“attaches” to an anonymous blank space that reads as an adjoining wall.
But the a ngle of the camera has also included the deep recession of the
Drift 119
2.36 (above) Eugène
Atget, Fête du Trône,
Museum.
2.37 (right) Eugène
Museum.
2.38 (left) Eugène
Atget, Fête de Vaugirard
(Cirque Manfretta),
Museum.
Museum.
2.40 Eugène Atget, Fête des Invalides, Palais de la Femme,
space at the right side of the mural, and thus the façade is revealed as
an illusion: the sensational rendered impotent. The instability inherent
in machines is in this way subtly reiterated in the fickle framing of the
camera, as the oscillation between levels of mimesis and simulacrum is
rehearsed through the construction and destruction of illusion.
Mannequins: Play Forms of Animation
The tension between animation and simulation as a sign of the surreal-

ist “marvelous” in the machine is also present in Man Ray’s album in
the recurrent figure of the mannequin, poised in the mediating space
of commercial display—the point of interface between the street and
the merchant. Dummies appear in mock animation, for example in the
soignée females in the windows of the Bon Marché (figure 2.14) and
in the gesturing c hildren and fervid models in the avenue des Gobe-
lins (figures 2.43 and 2.45); utterly disarticulated in the shop displays
of the boulevard de Strasbourg (figures 2.2, 2.3, and 2.42); miniaturized
and multiplied as dolls (figure 2.41); often headless (figures 2.20 and
2.44) or disembodied (figure 2.42); at once egregiously fake and dispro-
portionately lifelike. As the embodiment of paradox, “the double that
122 Chapter T wo
(left) Eugène Atget,
2.41
Boutique jouets, 1910–11.
Atget, Coiffeur, bd de
Strasbourg, 1912. J. Paul
Getty Museum. Digital
image courtesy of the
Getty’s Open Content
Program.
stands at the border between life and death,”117 the mannequin would
take on an iconic status within surrealism, beginning in 1924 with its
designation as “marvelous” in the first manifesto and finally finding its
most reified form in the International Surrealist Exposition of 1938, in
a room devoted entirely to female mannequins fantastically dressed by
various members of the group.118
The anomaly inherent to the mannequin, which blurs the distinc-
tion between animate and inanimate, is certainly apparent in the man-
nequins pictured in Man Ray’s Atgets and is taken to an extreme in two
images of windows on the boulevard de Strasbourg (figures 2.2 and 2.3).
Here, the living body not only disappears into the corsets and medical
undergarments that subordinate it; but through them, the body is disar-
ticulated and multiplied to a morbid extent. For Hal Foster, the context
of the outmoded and the transient in which the mannequins appear
evokes the terms of commodity fetishism. Following Benjamin, and
acknowledging the surrealists’ attempt to “redeem” outmoded capital
ist forms as a critical gesture against the relentless commodification of
modern life, he argues that the representation of the mannequins as au-
tomatons can be seen as a mockery of the mechanical-commodified.119
It is a characterization that rises from The Arcades Project, where Benja-
min conflates sex and death in the figure of the mannequin, portraying
the shop clerk as the figure of death:
ere fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between
H
woman and ware—between carnal pleasure and the corpse. The clerk,
death, tall and loutish, measures the century by the yard, serves as
mannequin himself to save costs, and manages single-handedly the
liquidation that in France is called révolution. For fashion was never
anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of
death through the woman, and bitter colloquy with decay whispered
between shrill bursts of mechanical laughter. That is fashion. And
that is why she changes so quickly; she titillates death and is already
something different, something new, as he casts about to crush her.120
In Benjamin’s characterization, the wheedling salesclerk, cloaked
in the novelty of his wares, is a mannequin whose smile conceals the
deathly call of false desire. The critic aligned his attitude with surreal-
ism’s own in at least one description of The Arcades Project, which he
described as a “critique not of [the nineteenth century’s] mechanism
and cult of machinery, but of its narcotic historicism, its passion for
masks, in which nevertheless lurks a signal of true historical existence,
one which the surrealists were the first to pick up.”121
124 Chapter T wo
Benjamin had already noted the surrealists’ interest in the wax figures
in the Musée Grévin, particularly one that André Breton describes in
Nadja as an ordinary woman with “the eyes of provocation.” “No immor-
talizing so unsettling as that of the ephemera and the fashionable forms
preserved for us in the wax museum,” Benjamin asserted. “And whoever
has once seen her must, like André Breton, lose his heart to the female fig-
ure in the Musée Grévin who adjusts her garter in the corner of a loge.”122
Elsewhere in The Arcades Project the wax figure is linked to mannequins
and further theorized by Benjamin as central to the dream effect that
mediates experience in the collective spaces of the modern city: “On the
Musée Grévin,” he notes, “ ‘Cabinet des Mirages’ and therefore likened to
the railroad station, the arcade, temple, market halls, opera, catacombs.”123
This same insistence on dream-spaces within the very field of ratio-
nalized commercial space is strikingly prevalent among Man Ray’s At-
gets. The photographs of shop and window displays present not merely
an iconography of the breakdown between inner and outer, as when
“Parisians make the street an interior” with street vendors and open
market displays, but an exploration of the liminal space of the display
window itself, recast in Freudian terms as a “world of secret affinities”
where “palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo,
prostheses and letter-writing manuals” lie side by side in the “productive
disorder” of an inscrutable picture-riddle: “The odalisque lies in wait
next to the inkwell, and priestesses raise high the vessels into which we
drop cigarette butts as incense offerings. These items on display are a
rebus: how one ought to read here the bird seed in the fixative pan, the
flower seeds beside the binoculars, the broken screw atop the musical
score, and the revolver above the goldfish bowl—is right on the tip of
one’s tongue . . . the casting of a dream.”124
As with his characterization of the prostitute, Benjamin invokes the
rebus as a metaphor for latent meaning masked by juxtapositions of ap-
parently unrelated imagery. The meaning of rebus images is completely
displaced—it has little to do with the iconographic signifiers that com-
pose the riddle—and bears obvious affinities to the apparently sense-
less juxtapositions of dream imagery as characterized by Freud.125 The
shop display here serves as the ultimate sublimation of, in Benjamin’s
words, “the repressed economic contents of a collective” in analogy to
the “sexual contents of an individual consciousness,” a comparison made
possible in part by the spatial incongruities inherent to display windows
as a form: a surface/ depth confusion that is complicated further by the
phenomenon of reflection, particularly as delivered within the frame of
the photographic image.126
Drift 125
Eugène Atget, Avenue
2.43
des Gobelins, 1925. George
Eastman Museum.
Display windows present logical conundrums that offer the illu-

sion of naturalism and its simultaneous perversion. In order to offer
the consumer the exhaustive illusion of availability, they are driven by
maximum exposure to vision rather than the illusion of depth, that is,
with larger figures to the back and smaller in the front, as in Avenue
des Gobelins (figure 2.43). The logic of perspectival recession, which
one associates with the trope of painting-as-window in conventional
representation, is here exactly reversed, as though we were seeing an image
from behind. The peculiarity of the space is intensified by the play of
light presented in the band of sky reflected in the glass, which recedes
oddly to a register behind the figures and makes the brightest area of
the photograph appear as though it is farthest from the viewer’s eye,
when it should read as closest,, even as the dark mass of the reflected
building seeps forward to claim the left foreground of the display—
again a reversal of the “rules” for depiction of natural space, and for
this reason alone it is easy to see how the photographs would have
reached out to “choose” Man Ray, whose pictorial logic was already
126 Chapter T wo
informed by rayograph inversions. But t hese commercially driven dis-
tortions are countered in the images by the presence of other codes for
naturalism—the animation of the figures, for example. Much in the
manner of a surrealist photograph, the display window frames itself as
an event drawn from material reality and then frustrates the very pos-
sibility of recovering a stable referent.
In an important opening passage of Paris Peasant, Louis Aragon
described this effect of disorientation as a breakdown between the
conscious and the unconscious. At an idle moment in the Passage de
l’Opéra, he claims to have had a hallucination that was the direct result
of the disruption of spatial continuity within the interior of a cane and
umbrella shop display:
I was astonished to see that its window was bathed in a greenish,
almost submarine light, the source of which remained invisible. It
was the same kind of phosphorescence that, I remember, emanated
from the fish I watched, as a child, from the jetty of Port Bail on
the Cotentin Peninsula; but still, I had to admit to myself that
even though the canes might conceivably possess the illuminating
properties of creatures of the deep, a physical explanation would
still scarcely account for this supernatural gleam and, above all, the
noise whose low throbbing echoed back from the arched roof. . . .
The whole ocean in the Passage de l’Opéra. The canes floated gently
like seaweed. I had still not recovered from my enchantment when
I noticed a human form was swimming among the various levels of
the window display. Although not quite as tall as an average woman,
she did not in the least give the impression of being a dwarf. Her
smallness seemed, rather, to derive from distance, and yet the
apparition was moving about just behind the windowpane.127
Aragon’s pleasure in the vision turns to confusion as he recognizes
the w oman as a prostitute from his war days in Germany. The display
has induced a kind of dream state in which latent memories emerge
and mingle with the visual plenum of the shop display. At this mo-
ment of recognition, as the memory is made manifest with a cry from
Aragon, “the window display was seized by a general convulsion. The
canes turned ninety degrees forward, so that the upper halves of their
X-shapes were now opening their Vs against the glass, in front of the
apparition and forming a top fringe for the curtain made by the lower
fans. It was as though a row of pikestaffs had suddenly blocked the view
of a battle. The brightness died away with the sound of the sea.”128
Drift 127
Eugène Atget, Avenue des Gobelins, 1926.
2.44 Eugène Atget, Avenue des Gobelins, 1925.
2.45
The division between dreaming and wakefulness, subject and object,

was briefly eroded in the confrontation with the shop display, in a liter-
ary expression of Janet’s breakdown of the reality function: conscious
acknowledgement of the memory ended the hallucination, bringing the
subject back to conventional perception.
The mesmeric effect of display windows—their operation as fields
for the associative play of imagery, but also their commercial effect (the
triggering of desire)—depends on their framing. The window’s hermetic
space constructs a world bounded from the street, a visual field that is not
governed by the natural laws of material reality, and one that is scaled to fill
the viewer’s visual field. This difference between the space of the window
and the space of the street is made clear in the comparison of two other
views of the avenue des Gobelins, where the difference in the treatment
of space is a function of the point of view of the camera / eye. The clear
receding lines of the shop façades in the image from 1926 (figure 2.44)
place the subject firmly within the dimensional model of Albertian per-
spective; the mannequins are easily integrated into the spatial logic of the
street. But the image from 1925 (figure 2.45), framed to exclude the linear
128 Chapter T wo
cues that signify the context of the avenue itself, conflates the paneling
of the walls inside the display window with the reflected architecture of
the Gobelins tapestry factory, only recently restored after the violence of
the 1870 Commune. Past and present mingle in an image that alternately
renders the looming factory and the mannequins themselves ghostly and
semitransparent. B ecause we are familiar with the reflective properties of
glass, we understand that the simultaneous presentation of what was in
front of the camera and what was behind the camera is made possible by
the glazed display window. But the play of temporal and spatial percep-
tion, which embeds not only the past within the present but the outer
within the inner space of the window, is made available by the photograph
itself, as framing and point of view inscribe an alternative visual register,
a register that refutes the alliance with linear perspective with which the
camera was invented, a register that sinks its fingers into the presupposi-
tions of photography itself and scrambles them.
In the 1926 image of the avenue des Gobelins (figure 2.44), where re-
flected leaves present an impenetrable pattern that reads unambiguously
as surface, the logic of the scene, of the street, is preserved. But in the
photograph that focuses exclusively on the window display (figure 2.45)
there is inconsistency of form, light, and distance even within the re-
flected images themselves. Some of the reflections mark the surface of
the glass as foreground, for example, the sheer band of glare that cuts
across the mannequins at their waists. But others, like the domed build-
ing, recede to the farthest boundary of the space, even as we understand
that the image must be located nearest the eye on the surface of the
window glass. Glass itself is figured h ere as a paradox medium, simulta
neously surface and depth.
In his account of Paris, Benjamin characterized the city as riven by
anomalies such as these, opened by reflective surfaces: “The way mir-
rors bring the open expanse, the streets, into the café—this, too belongs
to the interweaving of spaces. . . . [ W]here doors and walls are made of
mirrors, there is no telling outside from in, with all the equivocal illumi-
nation. . . . Paris is the city of mirrors.”129 This is the porosity Benjamin
described as Spielraum in his earliest use of the word, in an account,
cowritten with Asja Lācis, of the permeability of the city of Naples, a
site where architecture and social relations were set in a dialectic charac-
terized by an extreme lack of boundaries.130 Like a mirror—like Atget’s
glass negatives—the display windows trap and reverse images that would
normally be excluded by the conscious editing of motivated vision, pre-
senting the paradox of what is usually occluded (the view on the other side
of the street) as floating on the surface. The phenomenon of reflection, as
Drift 129
a conversion of the plastic into the virtual, constitutes a re-presentation
commensurate with photography. As such this is a “doubled” photo
graph, where the clear order of reproduction that is normally associ-
ated with photographic transcription has been sacrificed to exhaustive
vision: a proliferation of images made possible through the dimensional
leveling of the photographic process, as the coordinates of space and
time oscillate in perceptual play. Insofar as the resulting spatial valua-
tion subverts visual mastery, it behaves as a sign of the automatic: the
elimination of conscious control.
Play Units
Already in 1921, André Breton had made the connection between psy-
chic automatism and photographic processes on the basis of their shar-
ing in the production of a mechanical, disinterested record: “automatic
writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is the true
photography of thought,” he declared.131 By 1936 Benjamin had inte-
grated this concept into his theory of photography as affording a scope
of perception that exceeded the limits of embodied perception, expand-
ing camera vision specifically in the direction of memory traces and the
unconscious: “Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera
as compared with the eye. ‘Other,’ above all in the sense that a space
informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the
unconscious. . . . It is through the camera that we first discover the opti-
cal unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through
psychoanalysis.”132
Like many of the ideas Benjamin formulated around photography,
his omniscient “optical unconscious” had already been established as a
specifically surrealist operation; it was raised by Salvador Dalí in a 1935
article in the journal Minotaure entitled “The Non-Euclidean Psychol
ogy of a Photograph.”133 Referring to the skull-like face of a man star-
ing out of the shadows of a banal and anonymous photograph of two
women on a threshold (figure 2.46), Dalí wrote: “Do not believe, dear
reader, that I draw your attention to this striking photograph because of
its obvious pathetic and disconcerting quality.” Rather, “you might ob-
serve with amazement—completely naked, completely pale, completely
peeled, immensely unconscious . . . a threadless spool.” In perhaps the
only antispectacular moment of his c areer, Dalí displaced the “surreal-
ity” of the image to its margins—to the area of the picture least likely
to have been within the control of the photographer, and the place least
likely to be noticed by a viewer distracted by the semblance of a death’s
130 Chapter T wo
Minotaure 7 (1935): 57, with image by anonymous
2.46
photographer illustrating Salvador Dalí, “Psychologie non-
euclidienne d’une photographie.” Getty Research Institute
(85-S173).
head in the doorway. Dalí’s gesture could be dismissed as a characteris-
tic show of perversity if his friend, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, h adn’t
subsequently formulated a theory of the tuché, as just such a chance
irruption of the “real” into the fabric of representation, a theory that
Roland Barthes would then carry forward as the basis for his famous
punctum, that small thing in a photograph, included by chance, that in-
explicably, irrationally, fascinates the viewer.134
Construed this way, as a comprehensive and impartial recording
instrument, prone to presenting imagery normally edited by a “reality
function” concerned with rationalizing the visual field, photography
would present surrealism with an ideal medium to record the break-
down between the psychological and the physical as experienced in the
urban context through errance. The inclusiveness of the photographs,
an effect of the even attention of Atget’s lens, afforded the scope of vi-
sion that met Benjamin’s criteria for an “optical unconscious,” setting
a random and putatively unbounded visual range against the selective
naturalism of written narratives. At the same time, the arbitrariness of
the medium, the camera’s “automatism,” would result in a radical frag-
mentation in the conceptual and visual field, as the photographic process
unavoidably tore each image from its spatial and temporal context, re-
leasing it into an open system of exchange that could be experienced
as at once liberating and alienating. “The city in these pictures looks
cleared out,” Benjamin wrote of Atget’s images, “like a lodging that has
not yet found a new tenant. It is in t hese achievements that surrealist
photography set the scene for a salutary estrangement between man and
his surroundings. It gives free play [Spielraum] to the politically edu-
cated eye, u nder whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to the illumi-
nation of detail.”135 Thinking through surrealism’s ludic-psychoanalytic
frame, Benjamin theorized the decontextualizing work of the camera
as a spatiotemporal displacement comparable to the operations of psy-
chic mechanisms: the surfacing of memory images released from the
strictures of conscious w ill. Theorized as a paradoxical object at once
transcriptive and unnatural, the photographic fragment is commensu-
rate in its freedom and mobility to the play of free association, where
sheer polysemy operates to recover links and associations lost through
repressive structures. Photographic images, set into circulation, were
rendered open-ended for meaning, embodying Breton’s “disinterested
play of thought.”136
Man Ray had arrived in Paris in 1921 predisposed by his association
with the New York Dadaists to this characterization of photography.
Earlier that year he had written to Katherine Dreier, “I am trying to
132 Chapter T wo
make my photography automatic—to use my camera as I would a type-
writer.”137 This making over of the subject into an automaton is of course
the prerequisite to the production of all automatic texts, the body in
automatism being the necessary conduit for the emergence of psychic
utterances. Accordingly, the body in errance, in extending automatism
into urban space, would seek release from conscious control, remand-
ing agency to the anonymity of a recording device like the camera. In
the surrealist novel this transcriptive effect would be accomplished
through the conceit of the autobiographical account, which lent a tone
of historical veracity to the series of linked events described there. In Man
Ray’s collection of Atgets, the effect is even more powerful in its apparent
immutability, not only because the Atgets so utterly inhabit the myth of
the photograph’s claim to historical truth but because Man Ray himself,
through his selection process, inscribed the a lbum with the machine arbi-
trariness of the automaton. His status among the surrealists—man-as-
camera—guaranteed that they would regard his album not as a description
of errance but rather as a direct record of the process itself: an unparsed
index of Man Ray’s purposeless browse through Atget’s archive.
As a gesture that replicates the original automatic facture of the
photographs, the removal of the Atget images from his archive and their
reorganization as a surrealist object constitute a form of antiauthorship
that is echoed in the fundamental duplicity of the photograph: regarded
as both privileged witness and false copy, the photograph is the ideal
avatar of surrealist paradox. In the nominative shift from Atget to Man
Ray, the album’s photographs became less a description of the city than
a record of how the surrealists used the city. But this conceptualization
of Paris in surrealist terms was only made possible through Atget’s initial
abstraction of the city into photographic images, units that w ere then
subject to circulation, manipulation, and exchange. Divorced from con-
text, referential meaning floats free of the images, and they become play
units, meaningless u ntil reanchored elsewhere.138 Read through photo-
graphic processes, then, automatism can be seen as a technical structure
that guarantees Spielraum, pitching fortuitous incongruity and the pro-
liferation of meanings against any possibility of agency, unity, and clo-
sure. Meaning in the site—the meaning of the document—is evacuated
by visual and cognitive play.
In turn, acknowledging automatism’s role in schemes of appropria-
tion revises our understanding of surrealism’s critique of authorship as
constituted in collage and montage, procedures that in their material
and signifying heterogeneity refuse the notions of unity and originality
that are identified with the authored work of art. Refracted through
Drift 133
automatism, appropriation operated far outside conventional under-
standings of creativity to recast art production as a radically mediated
form of expression. As Michel Beaujour has pointed out, the attitude
amounted to a refusal of “the work” to a ludic extreme: “No more work:
the only revolutionary break away from tradition in surrealist thought
was extra-literary, and it precluded sustained and cogent thinking about
the very texts that were being produced. The surrealists cast away the
last vestiges of rhetorical theory along with the old belief that poetic
texts result from an elaboration of raw material, the enactment of some
set of strategies known as ‘art’ or ‘craft’ in order to shape the finished
product.”139
If to appropriate is to demonstrate the sheer contingency of things, to
unmask the transcendence of myth through semiotic instability and the
redirection of meaning, the appropriative gesture accomplishes this by
overwriting meaning with the subjectivity of the usurper (in this case,
the overwriting of the “positivist” Atget by the surrealist Man Ray). The
new meaning advanced, in the form of a new and naturalized mythol
ogy, is immediately inscribed.
Yet here is the critical difference that automatism makes to the sur-
realist project: if in the selection of the Atget photographs Man Ray
attempted to act outside of personal agency by applying the ludic strat-
egy errance, then he effected what Beaujour has called automatism’s cri-
tique of the “conscious expression of individual subjectivities”: “At least
theoretically, in automatism, the product is alien to the ego of the writer
(speaker ‘artist’). Automatism taps language rather than the individual-
ized discourse of a conscious mind. The very monotony of automatic
texts, their high commonplace content, their copious amplifications
and their stereotyped syntactic structures display the functioning of a
linguistic-rhetorical machine turned as anonymous and collective as
any operating in pre-literate cultures.”140 Man Ray’s reinscription, that
is, enacts a critical shift from the archival and the rational to the arbitrary
and radically open ended. This shift is made from within the medium
of photography itself when, by redesignating the Atgets as surrealist ob-
jects, Man Ray pushed the paradoxes and anomalies within them into
visibility. The appropriative move, enacted with the drifting irrational-
ity of errance, shifts the images from Atget’s categorically bound archive
to play-as-paradigm; and the meaning of surrealist photographs is re-
vealed to be, precisely, that they mean anything, and therefore nothing,
unless they are the sign for latent meaning itself.141
If this instability of signification is apparent within the individual
photographs themselves—for example, in the ragpicker images, where
134 Chapter T wo
Eugène Atget,
2.47
Coin, rue de Seine,
Museum.
the signified slides without priority from figure to refuse to commod-

ity to architecture—it is also manifested in a cross-categorical thematic
spooling among the images, as time, space, and causality are realigned
into a surrealist system for an experience of reality based in play. The
thematic threads of temporal obsolescence and spatial disaggregation
link the images in a weblike formation: the automatic architecture of
the street fairs, as a sign for vertiginous instability and the corporeal
machine of desire, calls on the “modern ruins” of the ragpicker’s hut,
which bore a sign for reified desire in the form of a dancing statuette.
The animation of this figure-become-object, made emphatic by contrast
with the occluding desolation of the shack, occurs again in the man-
nequins of the avenue des Gobelins, where the female body is conflated
with both desire and commodity—like the prostitute in Versailles,
“commodity and seller in one,” who roams the streets like the lampshade
seller covered in his wares, or like the ragpicker who melts away into the
objects of his industry. The chains move outward through a thematics
of transience: in the obsolescent castings of production manipulated by
the ragpicker; in the figure of fashion, fleeting in its novelty, haunting the
Drift 135
windows of the Bon Marché; in the mediating space between seller and
customer, inner and outer, a threshold occupied also by the prostitutes
on the rue Asselin, whose legs melt away into the mysterious shadows of
the brothel. The sign h ere for the mystery implied by transitional sites—
spaces that, as conduits, defer—emerges from the shadows of the stair-
case on the rue du Figuier (figure 2.18), from the steeply receding abysm
of the converging streets at the corner of the rue de Seine ( figure 2.47),
from the smoked glass that shields vision against the gradual eclipse of
the sun.
And so on, according to the polysemic network formed between
images, the signified of each photograph advancing, receding, changing
according to its relative relation to other images, in an infinite circula-
tion of signs whose reading at any given time is determined by chance.
Bearing in mind that Man Ray left his Atget images loose within their
album, the halting rhythm that results replaces the continuity of logic
with an open structure very much like a game of cards, in which col-
laborative play proceeds in turns, where no single card means anything
alone, where sets form on a provisional and shifting basis, and where the
value of any set is determined only on the basis of all the other sets pro-
duced during the game. The key to the riddles that arise in the course of
this perpetual game will always lie just out of reach—unless of course
the key is play itself.
136 Chapter T wo
CH APTER 3
SYSTEM
L’enigme est de ne pas savoir si l’on abat si l’on bâtit.
—André Breton
Picasso played. So did Otto Dix, Raoul Hausmann, Tristan Tzara, and
Sophie Taeuber-Arp; Man Ray, of course, along with nearly all the sur-
realists in Breton’s shifting cabal; even the contentious activists of Le
g rand jeu played. Hans Bellmer played with Georges Hugnet, Marcel
Jean, and Óscar Domínguez in the 1930s; Robert Motherwell with
Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Roberto Matta, and William Baziotes in
the 1940s; Joseph Beuys with Gerhard Richter in the 1960s.1
So far as art games go, there is in fact an air of exhaustion around
the exquisite corpse. Certainly it is the best-known surrealist game,
and its images the most widely shown and reproduced of all the move-
ment’s play strategies. Most often, it is advanced as the paradigm of
the “ludic spirit” in surrealism, aligned with the popular grasp of play
as an outlet for a primal desire for pleasure and freedom, along with a
reductive characterization of surrealism as the pursuit of the same.2 That
is, these odd folded drawings have been understood as transparent signs
for sheer diversion and e ither dismissed or celebrated in terms of their
fundamental inconsequentiality. Members of the surrealist movement
have aided this interpretation: their recollections of the frequent gath-
erings at which the game was played in the 1920s and 1930s emphasize
the cheery collegiality of the sessions, and their manifestoes and official
declarations establish surrealism’s mission as grounded in delivering pri-
mal psychic impulses into the light of the represented world.3
Accordingly, the game’s cross-historical appeal has been attributed to
its consistent capacity for “renewal,” and an uncritical assumption that
the game actually could “unleash” desire, “liberating the unconscious
from rational restrictions.”4 The exquisite corpse has been called a “reju-
venating force beyond itself,” essential to the “life that it intensifies.” It is
said to have fed a transhistorical “desire for the marvelous,” facilitating
a “revelation of artistic imagination” that is ultimately grounded in a
shared human desire for freedom: “Freedom,” writes one critic, “as con-
strued in this game and all that it entails, is essential; the moral does not
enter into the poetic.”5
But in its focus on the affirmative concerns of creativity, this smooth
arc from pleasure to freedom misses not only surrealism’s persistent
antihumanism but also the specific way the exquisite corpse operates.
Each of the images produced by the game of cadavre exquis is as much
cadavre as exquisse—as much about mortification as about drawing—
and it treats both of these terms in a way that affirms neither mastery
nor regeneration. Reframing the game with a ludic account of surrealism,
particularly one that acknowledges the reverberation of the Freudian
death drive throughout the surrealist movement, reveals the movement’s
concern with the game’s process over its product, and grounds fascina-
tion with the exquisite corpse in altogether darker implications than
have formerly been thought.6 And taking into account Benjamin’s as-
sessment of surrealists as the sole avant-garde group with the insight
to exploit the mechanization of expression in order to open Spielraum
from within the rigid templates of modern experience, the game sud-
denly emerges as a central expression of surrealism at its most critical.
The dynamic and repetitive operations that the exquisite corpse put in
play certainly targeted the very tenets of drawing, and with them, the
naturalized expectations and values of art practice at large. But more
broadly, the game challenged Enlightenment notions of coherent indi-
viduality, corrupting the image of the unified body along with the ideas
of authorship and self-possession that were meant to deliver it. It is this
chance-driven, destructive effect of the exquisite corpse game that ac-
counts for its sustained appeal to artists and writers.
And there is a second aspect of the game that has kept it relevant
into the twenty-first century. For an image-making process to produce
such consistent effects across shifting contexts requires a mechanism as
reliable and flexible as capital: a system for production that is at once
structured and geographically and temporally open, with openness
138 Chapter Three

understood as availability to transportation and repetition. Tensed be-
tween regulation, volition, and chance, the game of exquisite corpse
is best understood as an automatic mechanism meant to guarantee an
unforeseeable outcome—one that, in its triple threat to the body, the
subject, and the creative process, is neither benign nor productive. E
very
drawing emerging from the game bears the signs of this ludic process,
and reproduces its vexed structure. In this way, drawing, game, body, and
subject are continuously reconceived at the intersection of chance and
technology: as dark avatars of Spielraum that open up art production to
a new set of unprecedented forms and processes, and experience itself to
a somewhat menacing critical ludic.
This Is Not a Drawing
The exquisite corpse, then, is a drawing—a work on paper occupying

the lowest rung of visual representation—and it is also the trace of a
game: a phenomenon that is simultaneously both free and regulated.
But it is also an articulated body, a counter-figurative representation
turned out by a process that can only be called generative to the extent
that a grotesque affirms an ideal human form. Every round of the game
makes a novel freak: structurally the images are all the same; in their
details they’re all different. If there is any goal the surrealists set for the
game, it was this serial inscription of the uniquely disarticulate, u nder
the aegis of the ludic: drawing monsters.7
Three circular forms punctuate a bald and ruddy profile: a tufted
dot for a nose, a wildly dilated and improbably frontal pupil, a blank
aural hole (plate 4). Their graphic frankness is bounded by arcs of ink
that have marked out an aggressive chin, a distended ear, and a smirk in
just a handful of swift lines—a graceful economy that does not extend
below the neck. Th ere, the torso balloons into a huge breast in left pro-
file, sketched hesitantly, its rigid nipple pocked by the pen. A winged
insect has been added to the figure’s coarsely drawn back, behind a
vestigial arm (a flipper, really) whose schematic fingers extend directly
down toward the navel—no, that’s the hip, for at the waist the monster
swivels, becomes incoherent, goes ass backward. Its buttocks rise under
its breast—the stomach becomes an arching back, and the girdle that
hides the sex appears on the right. Here the line of the drawing goes very
fine; the clumsy strokes that form the monster’s back taper and smooth
to pick out the bulge of the g-string with delicate parallel hatching—the
same technique that shades a slender tail emerging from the buttocks.
This tail is anchored at its base by a silver flare of glued-on foil, and
System 139
supports at its tip the pop-eyed head of a snake, which curls upward to
lick the improbable breast. The controlled hatching that shaded the tail
at its base gives way h ere to the same rapid ink specks that stipple the
breast: reptile is coupled to bosom through a trick of style.
At the knees the creature rights itself. Its carefully drawn feet, one
booted, one tattooed, align themselves with the breast and chin, but this
compliance with human form is partial. While it is clear that the feet are
walking—they are firmly situated below a horizon line whose distance
is indicated by tiny figures running—the head and feet are markedly out
of alignment. No h uman walks or stands this way: from the knees alone,
radically unbalanced, buttocks forward. Separated into parts—head,
torso, legs, feet—the elements of the drawing are idiosyncratic: hyper-
sexed, mildly repellent perhaps, but certainly gesturing toward plastic
resemblance. But regarded as a w hole, the image is a disaster. Peculiari-
ties of figuration acceptable within limited sections of the drawing are
suddenly insupportable in combination.
Indeed, in the exquisite corpse the threat to the codes of visual
representation lies neither with a disturbing iconography of aberration,
nor with the articulation of a hideous, “impossible” being (Hieronymus
Bosch, Francisco Goya, and Odilon Redon have all been there). In
this exquisite corpse of 1927 (attributed to Joan Miró, Max Morise,
Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy), what is unprecedented and shocking—
marvelous, as the surrealists would say—is the miscarriage of the con-
ventions and received objectives of drawing itself. Each iteration attests
to the act of putting pencil to paper in a manner intended to produce
sheer inconsistency of signature, style, and skill—a miscegenation of
mimesis and abstraction, a mindless conglomerate of the painstakingly
modeled and the utterly flat, the casual violation of tone as the draw-
ing shifts from all the lyricism of which a line is capable to willful and
unrepentant scrawl.
By the time surrealism turned its attention to the visual image, mod-
ernism’s confrontation with the tenets of academic drawing—drawing’s
function as the armature of painting; the necessary underpinning of
spatial coherence in realistic depiction—was well under way. Released
from its subordination to mimesis with the advent of abstraction, draw-
ing had gained a degree of autonomy as a sign for the spontaneous
expression of an inner essence or, alternately, the valorization of diagram-
matic rationality on a technical par with photography. But from the ad-
vent of the First World War, European avant-garde practices that had
valued self-referentiality over naturalism had begun to cede to a revival
of traditional values for representation, a return to figuration vigorous
140 Chapter Three

enough that by 1925, when Breton began to direct La Révolution sur-
réaliste toward the theorization of the surrealist image, three options
seemed available to drawing, all of them addressing the medium’s con-
ventions in different ways: the recent regressive turn taken by Picasso,
which involved the explicit quotation of earlier works of art; the still
active expressionist challenge to rational space, advanced as a primally
motivated deskilling; or the schismatic mechanical model exemplified
on one hand by purism and on the other by Duchamp and Picabia, par-
adigms which appeared to have superseded cubism as viable avant-garde
interventions in the wake of that movement’s institutionalization.8
For Breton, there was no question of a return to bourgeois traditions
of figuration. In spite of his professed admiration for Picasso, his dismay
at the postwar condition of passive obeisance to authority was central to
his own avant-garde commitment.9 But neither could he bring himself
to fully endorse the abandonment of referentiality that characterized
abstraction at its most extreme—a pictorial mode to which he attrib-
uted the “failure” of symbolism and cubism.10 Stepping off from the
fundamentally Romantic notion of the artwork’s direct wire into the
expressive core of the artist, surrealism u nder Breton’s direction pursued
its revision of the pictorial through practices specifically intended to de-
tach representation from the limits of conscious designation, and thus
from those conventions that had been sublimated into the notions of
“agency” and “intention.” The paradigm for surrealist imagery was to
follow that of the movement’s critique of literature and have its roots in
automatism, advanced by the surrealists as an antinomian suspension
of reason allowing for the release of unconscious imagery: the direct
expression of “the actual functioning of thought.”11
Robert Desnos, who along with René Crevel was the most practiced
of the automatic scriptors among the surrealists, had already made the
easy slide from writing to drawing in the trance sessions of the early
1920s. Breton gave these images prestige equal to automatic writing in
his 1922 essay “Les mots sans rides”: “I have seen from his hand (he who,
in his normal state, does not know how to draw) a series of sketches,
including one called The City with Nameless Streets of the Cerebral
Circus, about which I will simply say for the moment that they move
me more than anything else.”12 By 1924, when Breton again drew at-
tention to the sketches in a footnote to the first surrealist manifesto, it
was clear that he intended to parlay automatic drawing into the theo-
rization of a genre of painting commensurate with the commitments
of the group—a project that would take another three years to justify
completely and which would cost surrealism not only a brace of early
System 141
members, banished in a first round of excommunication, but arguably
its definitive involvement with automatism itself.13
For Max Morise, writing in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste
(1924), the difficulty of assimilating painting into a surrealist practice
based in automatism had to do with painting’s spatial stability. Whereas
surrealism, characterized by “the succession of images, the flight of ideas,”
accords with the diachrony of thought, paintings, Morise observed, seek
a spatial simultaneity foreign not only to “raw” cognitive processes but also
to writing. Paintings, in part because of the slow pace of their facture,
can be no more than mere descriptions of the functioning of thought, no
matter how fragmented, or how dreamlike: “the images are surrealist, but
their expression is not.”14 Mediation would therefore always rule paint-
ing, whereas language (in both its spoken and written forms), as estab-
lished by Breton in the first surrealist manifesto, maintains a one-to-one
correspondence with thought: “the speed of thought is no greater than
the speed of speech . . . thought does not necessarily defy language, nor
even the fast-moving pen.”15 Morise concludes his essay with the asser-
tion that for the dynamic and unpremeditated notation of images as they
appear to consciousness, “a rapid and rudimentary drawing can only be
suitable.”16 Just as the surrealists understood the spoken word as the me-
dium through which “actual thought” had to be expressed, so they char-
acterized drawing as the baseline of the pictorial: the minimum formal
unit necessary for visual representation, or line as origin.
Accordingly, the first issues of La Révolution surréaliste are thick with
automatic drawings by André Masson (see figure 3.1), who described his
method as bipartite:
Materially: a little paper, a little ink.
Psychically: make a void within yourself; the automatic drawing,
having its source in the unconscious, must appear like an unpre-
dictable birth. The first graphic apparitions on the paper are pure
gesture, rhythm, incantation, and as a result: pure doodles. That is
the first phase.
In the second phase, the image (which was latent) reclaims its
rights. Once the image has appeared, one should stop. This image
is merely a vestige, a trace, a bit of debris. It follows that any break
between the two phases must be avoided. If there was a pause, the
first result would be total abstraction, and persisting too long in the
second phase, something that was academic surrealistically!17
Masson’s first phase characterizes automatic drawing as a primal
utterance: “an unpredictable birth” that precedes figuration. He spe-
142 Chapter Three

La Révolution surréaliste 1 (December 1924): 14, with
3.1
automatic drawing by André Masson. Getty Research
Institute (86-S83).
cifically cites those linear conventions that are associated with “naïve”
and “transcendent” marks identified with c hildren, madmen, and rit-
ual: “pure gesture, rhythm, incantation.” The underlying assumption
is that drawing has special access to fundamental mental processes,
that it has gained passage beyond rational thought—passage denied
to the less spontaneous mediums of painting and sculpture. The sec-
ond stage, in which Masson revised his inchoate calligraphy, reflects his
misprision of the psychic manipulations of secondary revision, where
figuration (specified as “latent”) is recovered—although there is no
acknowledgement on Masson’s part that the iconography he coaxed
out of his automatic scribble would have been distorted by the psy-
chic apparatus.18 In Masson’s process, recognizable forms are reclaimed
whole from an inchoate mass devoid of any descriptive function, much
in the same way that Max Ernst, refracting Leonardo’s spotted wall
through Freud, would summon dramatic motifs from the bumps and
whorls that pressed through his frottage drawings.19 In his 1921 tribute
to Ernst, Breton naturalized automatic production’s “imitation of ap-
pearances” as an inevitable limit of the human imagination: “Unfortu-
nately, h uman effort, which always varies the arrangement of existing
elements, cannot be applied toward producing a single new element.
A landscape in which nothing terrestrial figures is beyond the scope of
our imagination.”20
From this statement it is clear that Breton did not understand even
the most fantastic of surrealist images to be “original,” but rather ready-
made (and you w ill recall Morise on this m
atter, who claimed that the
writer finds elements of thought “already made in his memory”), poised
in the psychic apparatus to be registered by a “blind instrument,” as op-
posed to generated by an inventive subject.21 If the image had a visual
affinity with a referent in the material world, it would merely be because
it had already taken that form as a mental image.
In the first surrealist manifesto, Breton himself maintained that in a
trance state he was able to “trace” from his unconscious “all manner of
things of which I am presently incapable of providing even the rough-
est sketch. I would plunge into it, convinced that I would find my way
again, in a maze of lines which at first glance seemed to be going no-
where.”22 At this early stage of the movement, the first claim of the surre-
alist image, no m atter how figurative, would be that it was re-produced
by direct transmission from the psyche. That is what made it valid as the
register of “the actual functioning of thought.”
By 1924, the indexical imperative of the surrealist image had become
central to the movement’s discourse on visual representation. The hand,
144 Chapter Three

privileged in disegno as the bodily extension of intellectual creativity, was
relegated in automatism to the status of a mechanical device to register the
readymade. In automatic drawing the hand is an element of the recording
apparatus no more important than the paper, the pen, and the limits of
the method. “It is not a m atter of drawing, but simply of tracing,” Breton
insisted in the first manifesto.23 Automatism as practiced in surrealism
mechanized the body, and automatic drawings were privileged as a form
of mechanical reproduction that had a paradoxical claim to authenticity.
In its texts and in its images, surrealism repeatedly laid claim to the
neutrality of mechanical modes as the best means for bypassing con-
sciousness in order to register psychic material. The first manifesto des-
ignated the author as “a modest recording instrument” and referred to
“wireless telegraphy, wireless telephony, wireless imagination” as the
“modern measures of our mind.” Breton entitled his self-portrait-with-
microscope L’écriture automatique (1938); he recommended “absurd
automata . . . perfected to do nothing like anybody else and . . . assigned
to give us an accurate idea of action”; and huddled with his acolytes
around a typewriter in a 1924 group portrait.24 But the most emphatic
and lasting evidence of surrealist commitment to mechanical devices
as avatars of automatic processes was their commitment to photography.
“The invention of photography dealt a mortal blow to old means of
expression, as much in painting as in poetry, where automatic writing,
which appeared at the end of the nineteenth c entury, is a veritable pho-
tography of thought.”25 With this statement, made in the context of a
laudatory essay on Max Ernst’s overpaintings, Breton affirmed the link
between the automatic image and the analogical photographic image,
in turn establishing them as the measure of all surrealist production,
a “paradigm for the idea of mechanical seeing.”26 Even as surrealism
promised unmediated access to an ungovernable “internal model,” it
was coupling that drive with a commitment to technology that grasped
the machine as the central conduit for libidinal desire. This virtual syn-
onymy of automatism with automation placed surrealist mechanical
devices, with their necessarily high level of regulation, in the peculiar
position of functioning as guarantors of chance and chance’s repetition.
Thus, while e very automatic drawing testifies indexically to the event of
its making, each repetition of the process (inasmuch as machines guar-
antee repetition) yields a different result.27 The paradox is structural,
and persisted as a visual paradigm long a fter automatism itself ceased to
be central to the movement.
In their machinic elimination of authorship and their insistence
on the unpremeditated mark, automatic images disable the twinned
System 145
authority of unique signature and compositional exigency that had de-
fined drawing since the sixteenth century. As traces of ready-made mental
images, they conspire against volition, originality, and foreknowledge of
the completed image. Indeed, what they seem to insist on is the absence
of drawing, where drawing is defined as the armature of the fine arts.
And this presentation of an impossible image, a drawing that is not a
drawing, art that refuses art, was enclosed in Morise’s initial formula-
tions for the surrealist image—assertions still confident enough in the
revolutionary power of automatism that they could afford to foreclose
painting—where “the forms and the colors appointed to an object or
ganize themselves according to a law that escapes all premeditation, that
make and unmake themselves at the same time they are manifested.”28
Technically, the period in which surrealism unequivocally under-
stood its practices as incompatible with the fine arts was extremely
short. Only one year a fter Morise’s polemic, Pierre Naville spat out his
own invective against painting, in the April 1925 issue of La Révolution
surréaliste: “I have no tastes except distaste. Masters, master crooks,
smear your canvases. Everyone knows there is no surrealist painting.
Neither the marks of a pencil abandoned to the accident of gesture, nor
the image retracing the forms of the dream, nor imaginative fantasies, of
course, can be described.”29
Immediately, Breton took over the editorship of La Révolution surréal-
iste, and in the July 15 issue, the first issue u nder his direction, his counter-
polemic “Surrealism and Painting” appeared in its initial installment.30
The shift could be understood as an arbitrary power play on Breton’s part,
as one of a number of assertions of authority that were to follow; but read
at some remove from the event, it appears that the move was part of a
gradual process that signaled a realization the group as a whole had gained
from the regular practice of automatism: a cognizance of the constructed
nature of the “primal” utterances comprised by automatic texts.
The cover of La Révolution surréaliste from October 1927—the year
in which the surrealists gave up the attempt to transcribe psychic mate-
rial directly in automatist sessions—featured a photograph of a child-
automaton tracing onto a page, but Masson’s automatic production was
otherwise represented in the issue by a single sand painting, signaling
a shift away from the process-based “immediacy” of automatic draw-
ing toward the production of objects in accordance with the tenets of
Breton’s “Surrealism and Painting” (its last installment appeared in this
same issue).31 The open embrace of an “automatism effect” starts here
with Max Ernst’s essay “Visions de demi-soleil,” which would become
the first part of his treatise “Au delà de la peinture” (Beyond Painting),
146 Chapter Three

a classification of collage and frottage as instruments of the psyche,
and would be followed in the next number of the journal by Aragon’s
“Traité du style“ (Treatise on Style), which effectively completed the
codification of “juxtaposition” as a sign for automatism.32 The com-
bined statements amount to the acknowledgment of the heretofore
tacit understanding of automatic production as re-production, but with
a significant difference: Masson’s “first phase” of automatic transcrip-
tion, where inchoate graphic traces precede iconicity, was eliminated.
As Roger Caillois would recall, the surrealists had conceded by then that
automatism could never be “revealed outside of all constraint”—that
what one saw in automatic texts was not so much the “real functioning
of thought” but the “residues and waste” of this functioning. Automa-
tism came to represent a kind of “inaccessible ideal of poetry,” and its
spoken, written, and visual expressions w ere debased as worthless.33
This degraded status only increased the value of automatist by-
products for the surrealists. Validating formal strategies to signify un-
conscious processes rather than presenting them directly—effectively
simulating “pure thought” through images—opened surrealist pro
cesses to a wide range of visual practices. At the same time, however, in
subjecting quasi-automatic utterances to description and codification,
the move also made the movement’s terms available to be rendered as a
superficial “style.” From 1929, the psychoanalytical theorization of surreal-
ist images and objects would be dominated by Salvador Dalí’s paranoid-
critical method, and surrealist painting would begin to be characterized
by an oneiric realism that turned the movement back t oward delib-
eration, control, and mastery—terms utterly dependent on drawing’s
traditional role as the basis of painting.34 But if it would seem that by
decade’s end the founding notion of surrealism as essentially dynamic
and representable only through an index of process had disappeared,
there are indications that it was not abandoned but only submerged,
slipped in as the mechanical structure underlying other, ludic pastimes,
activities that had been relegated to the margins of surrealism’s visual
production, but which ultimately provided surrealism with its pictorial
archetype. Ernst described surrealist games as having performed in this
way—as an inexhaustible source of unprecedented imagery:
“The chance encounter on a dissection table of a sewing machine
and an umbrella” (Lautréamont) is today a reknown example and has
become a classic phenomenon discovered by the surrealists, toward
the knowledge that the rapprochement of two or more apparently
naturally opposed elements on a naturally opposing plane obtain
System 147
t here the most violent poetic explosions. Innumerable individual
and collective experiences (for example t hose that are known by the
name “Cadavre exquis”) had demonstrated the advantages thrown
off from this procedure . . . [toward] discover[ing] a new and more
vast realm of incomparable experience where the frontiers between
the interior world, as it w
ere, and the exterior world (according to the
classical philosophical conception), efface themselves increasingly and
apparently one day disappear completely in accordance with the most
precise methods that automatic writing had discovered.35
In the October 1927 La Révolution surréaliste, automatic drawings
gave way not only to painting but to the first examples of startling and
fragmented exquisite corpse images, traces of “infantile procedures”
that, unlike painting, do satisfy Morise’s cast-off criteria for the unpre-
meditated surrealist image: “All the difficulty is not in beginning, but
also in forgetting that which comes to be made or better, ignoring it.
To close the eyes, to make use of a mask, to force oneself not to fix more
than a portion of the canvas—all the ways of turning the habitual ori-
entation of the gaze upside down—are infantile procedures that have
fallen to the side. It is not a question of mutilating a technique but of
rendering it, as much as possible, inefficient.”36
“With the cadavre exquis,” Breton would later recall, “we had at our
disposal—finally—an infallible means for sending judgment on holiday
and for completely liberating the metaphorical activity of the mind.”37
Here is the rhetoric of freedom Benjamin found so compelling in his
formulation of the concept of Spielraum, cast specifically as a form of
antiproduction: technology harnessed to the infantile, the degraded,
the carnivalesque, and the deeply inefficient. A freedom, in some sense,
to allow the machine to idle.
Drawing Monsters: The Game as Process
The play is firmly regulated. The players seat themselves around a t able,
facing each other, as in a séance. Each of them has something to write
with, preferably pencils (for the sake of spontaneity), and a piece of
paper that has been pleated like a fan with the number of folds one
fewer than the number of players, so that on each sheet t here is marked
out one wide rectangular field for e very player. The game begins with
each player drawing a “head” at the top of his or her sheet. It can be in
profile or it can be frontal; the features can be displaced or hidden; it
can be two heads, a snail, four sticks of dynamite—but the player must
148 Chapter Three

be careful to extend the drawing ever so slightly below the fold, to note
where the next player’s drawing will begin, for the completed sections
are then folded back and hidden before the players pass their sheets (and
pencils, if they are colored) along. Now, each player must draw on the
next blank section, using the overhanging ends of the previous draw-
ing. Thus, a certain degree of autonomy is preserved for the “head,” but
this does not hold for the “body,” which becomes increasingly variously
determined as play continues. Arms and hands appear in any number;
hearts and breasts; wings, snakes, and machines, too; there’s a foot, an
envelope, some calligrammatic thought bubbles, paired birds. Again, the
drawings reach just below the fold, the upper body is doubled back on
its secrets, and a new, clean section is exposed, passed and marked with
buttocks and tails and whatnot. On the final leg of the game, the figure
is bunched behind the last (nearly) blank field, and the end of play is
acknowledged by keeping the lower part of the image—the “feet”—well
away from the edge. The hooves, roots—even a prostrate body—close
the play with the finality of the earthbound: horizons and land masses,
the sea and cast shadows dominate in this section; the feet are inevita-
bly grounded horizontally, as if the license taken early in the game must
be brought to heel, or perhaps to frame the figure within the bounds
of illusion, or to finalize an assertion with an emphatic stroke, as under
a signature. When everyone has put down their pencils, the sheets are
unfolded and “one judges the viability of the monster thus produced.”38
The drawings, Breton asserted, w ere endowed “to the highest degree
with the power of dérive,” that is, the subjection of the self and its repre
sentations to the vagaries of pure circumstance, as against predetermina-
tion.39 Yet where exactly is chance in this game? The rules that govern
the exquisite corpse clearly structure and dominate the associative range
of iconography registered in the course of play, effecting a reassuring
rhythm, predictable and consistent. Its assertion of stability would seem
to be incompatible with the aleatory dynamism associated with f ree play
(and the improvisations of automatism), revealing an alliance with con-
vention that would run counter to the discourse of liberation informing
surrealist practices.
The dominance of regulation has the effect of producing a surprising
sameness from drawing to drawing—there’s an air of exchangeability
about them, of aura cheapened by proliferation to the point of dis-
posability. Certainly, in drawings generated from a single round there
is a g reat deal of visual consistency: the same game that produced the
buxom cyclops (plate 4) also delivered a hydra (plate 5) in four parts: a
double-headed creature that, like its companion, rests believably on an
System 149
eroticized torso, with a lower body dominated by a penile extension.
The consistency of materials in a round of play—“it is imperative to pass
only the colors you use,” specifies Tzara in his “recipe” for the game—is
in part responsible for the similarities, as is, of course, the uniform num-
ber and order of the players.40 But the game has also produced strikingly
similar figures in sessions played long and far from each other and with
completely different participants. An exquisite corpse of 1930, made by
the intriguing ménage of Salvador Dalí, Valentine Hugo, and Paul and
Gala Éluard in Cadaqués (figure 3.2), shares its formal structure with
an example from 1934, by Breton, Victor Brauner, Yves Tanguy, and
Jacques Hérold (figure 3.3), which in turn seems to be in conversation
with a Catalonian example (figure 3.4) made in Barcelona one year l ater,
by Remedios Varo and Esteban Francés: all are figures centered and on
axis, symmetrically balanced and evenly apportioned, and subject to a
somewhat standardized application of pencil to paper.
This, too, speaks to the technological aspects of the game. As with all
mechanically produced series, mandates to consistency w ere built right
into the system of the exquisite corpse. In this respect, the exquisite corpse
operates very much in the manner of photographic reproduction, partic-
ularly as analyzed by Walter Benjamin: a form of replication that works
against the hypervaluation of the unique art object; frees the hand into
an emphatically deskilled operation; challenges the standards of original-
ity, authority, and authenticity; and provides indexical evidence of that
process in the form of a “plurality of copies.”41 Just as photographic repro-
ductions seem to give the viewer unprecedented access to the unmediated
reality of their referents, so the structure of the exquisite corpse invokes
for the viewer the repetitive ritual that produced it. And in both cases, the
mechanism has so penetrated the process as to have subjected reality—in
the form of subjectivity and experience—to a reconstruction according
to its own standards. For Benjamin, this was the positive outcome of the
“second technologies” (chiefly, photography and film) that he associated
with Spielraum: a creative, nonhierarchical engagement with technologi-
cal forms and structures that would provide an antidote to the dominance
and alienation brought on by the industrial age.42
This autocratic aspect of the exquisite corpse is typical of regulated
play. While all play forms claim chance as a definitive component,
games form a singular category within play for the specific way that they
treat chance: they subject it to rules that guarantee the game’s consis-
tency in repetition. Th ese rules are constitutive of the game—it is not
merely that games enclose aleatory phenomena within rigid parameters,
but that the game itself would not exist without t hose regulations; they
150 Chapter Three

(above left) Salvador Dalí, Valentine Hugo, Paul
3.2
Éluard, and Gala Éluard, Exquisite Corpse, c. 1930.
Private collection. © 2018 Salvador Dalí / Fundació
Gala-Salvador Dalí / Artists Rights Society / Valentine
Hugo. © ars / adagp.
(above right) André Breton, Victor Brauner, Yves
3.3
Tanguy, and Jacques Hérold, Exquisite Corpse, c. 1934.
Private collection. André Breton, Victor Brauner, Estate
of Yves Tanguy, Jacques Hérold. © 2018 ars / adagp.
(left) Remedios Varo and Esteban Francés, Exquisite
3.4
Corpse, 1935. Private collection.
“create the very possibility of playing.”43 Spielraum, it could be said,
opens only from this juxtaposition, from a situation in which function-
alist mechanisms conjure their opposites. Chance, h ere, depends on the
rules simply to show itself—it is pronounced against the regulations by
its extreme difference from them.
As a result of this constitution-through-convention, games are self-
referential and self-contextualizing to a degree that seems to set them
apart from a deregulated “play impulse.” This latter is a more general
mode of thought and behavior that can be traced to a characterization
of play as potentially destructive—actively at work against conventions
and restrictions of all kinds. This volatile state is cast as altogether more
daring in its openly rebellious character than the extremely circum-
scribed game, having at its theoretical extreme absolutely no limits, as
in primal characterizations of the Freudian id, the Lacanian Imaginary,
Nietzsche’s Dionysian “will,” or a more generalized romantic licentious-
ness ascribed to creativity.44 Yet this ludic impulse, charged with altering
existing behaviors (rather than constructing a separate and rule-bound
“world,” as in a game) is theorized as unable to enter conscious behav
ior with ease; it can only make its appearance tempered by the sheer
cognitive limits that enclose it (witness the difficulties encountered in
“capturing” pure psychic utterances through automatism, as repeatedly
language, and not “pure” thought, was tapped).
Games, then, have no pretensions to unbridled and atavistic ori-
gins. What they do have is the power to generate and establish new
conventions, a license to freedom purchased by their spatial and tem-
poral boundaries—by their open existence “outside” the discourse of
naturalism that encloses material reality.45 Any condition lived inside
a game is provisional; for the duration of the game behaviors not so-
cially permissible elsewhere can have f ree rein—so long as this is writ-
ten into the rules. In a sense, then, the extreme regulation of games is
moot, for arbitrariness underlies the initial constitution of the rules—
as arbitrary, they have the power to open up unprecedented courses
of action and modes of representation from within the bounds of the
system they articulate, phenomena that can l ater be exported from the
game in the form of newly rehearsed actions and representations.46
And paradoxically, it is precisely out of the regulations that consti-
tute the game that the exquisite corpse emerges as disaggregate and
transgressive. The surrealists found the rules for their game ready-made,
in the French parlor game petits-papiers, but altered them to write in
an extra dose of chance. As Simone Collinet (then Simone Breton) re-
called, “We played the traditional game of ‘petits-papiers,’ Mister meets
152 Chapter Three

Madam; he speaks to her and so forth. That didn’t last long. The game
quickly broadened. ‘Just put down whatever comes to your mind—it
doesn’t matter what,’ said [ Jacques] Prévert. On the following turn the
cadavre exquis was born. . . . Once the imagination of these men was set
loose, nothing could stop it. André shrieked with joy, seeing immedi-
ately one of t hose wellsprings or natural cascades of inspiration he loved
to find.”47 The surrealists upped the ante on the element of chance that
is written into all games by inviting participants to an array of possibili-
ties for signification as opposed to restricting them to a single technical
or iconographic course. The exquisite corpse could claim to be liberat-
ing from within its regulations (in the manner of all realizable—as op-
posed to purely utopian or imaginary—liberations).
The demand in the game for a measure of unpredictability explains
why, in spite of the rigor of its regulations, the dominant impression of
any exquisite corpse is figurative chaos. Breton’s own collection of draw-
ings included an example from 1927 (plate 7) that illustrates the spatial
and temporal anomalies characteristic of the genre.48 The figure it de-
scribes must be a w oman; it has a w
oman’s head recognizable as such, a
lovely head delicately drawn with a ship sailing in her elaborate hairdo.
She is an eighteenth-century woman from the prerevolutionary court.
Her beauty mark confirms this. But she is also a butterfly, with her blue
wings spread against the wall she leans on; and she is an inscrutable pyr-
amidical chart that ranks letters by degrees; and a horse—a male horse,
a pinto, running, but with a giant human foot and an appendage that
leads to a snake on a leash heading the opposite direction.
The multiple incarnations of this figure are described with gratuitous
detail, producing within the unified space of the frame the clear and
unambiguous recognition of equally plausible yet mutually exclusive
referents in the object-world. The exquisite corpse transgresses the tem-
poral (to be at once abstract graph, insect, human and equine, female
and male), logical (to lean and to run, in two directions), and referen-
tial (constituting a figure that does not correspond to “local represen
tation”) coordinates of material reality; it is an avatar of what Michael
Riffaterre has called, referring to surrealist literature, the automatism
effect, where a manipulation of the referential field (in this case, from
within the paradigm of verisimilitude) disrupts a “topos” (here, the
figure) while maintaining a certain degree of descriptive conformity.
Remaining partially within logical referential paths seems to prove au-
thorial “control” over the text, so that departures from those paths seem
to indicate “the elimination of that control by subconscious impulses,”
represented by the stock motifs of unconscious processes: displacement,
System 153
condensation, compulsive repetition.49 The iconography thus extends to
the viewer the possibility of coherent figuration, of meaning, yet at the
same time—and through the same descriptive icons—it distracts the viewer
from focusing on a reliable structure that might fix its ultimate significa-
tion in place. The exquisite corpse, wrote Breton, with its “inexplicable
factor of irrefutability,” was called on to testify as “one of the most
extraordinary meeting grounds” of abstruse signification. Automatism
had been reified as a machine game, and its effects would circulate—and
operate—with all of the reliability of a mechanical device.
This machine paradox cultivated in the exquisite corpse was pro-
nounced enough for Hal Foster to have suggested that the game and its
antidrawings may amount to a parody of functionalism: exquisite corpse
collaborations “evaded the conscious control of the individualized artist,
but do they not also mock the rationalized order of mass production?
Are these witty grotesques not also critical perversions of the assembly
line—a form of automatism that parodies the world of automatiza-
tion?”50 That is to say, if the game was machinelike in its regulation, then
it was one of Breton’s “ingeniously constructed machines of no possi
ble use”—it operated, but its product was a mockery of the well-limned
figure. The drawings that emerged replaced the high finish of machined
commodities with the remaindered aspect of a by-product, unsuitable, at
times, even for aesthetic function within surrealism. “Certain [of them]
had an aggressively subversive nature,” recalled Collinet. “Others fell to
excessive absurdity. One tends to forget that the wastebasket played its
role.”51 The game of exquisite corpse is a machine that interferes with the
circumscription of its drafted object, laying waste to techne, answering
Morise’s call for artistic processes that would not “mutilate a technique”
but render it “inefficient.” Drawing is not destroyed in the game, but dis-
armed, made redundant—which is to say, loosened from its descriptive
function. If the exquisite corpse performs as a sign, then it does so not
iconically but indexically—as the trace of a process.
For every exquisite corpse reveals the means of its making—certainly
through internal breaks in style and substance so obvious that the reg-
isters have been subsequently isolated and attributed to the individual
surrealists who drew them—but most importantly by the indelible
horizontal creases that traverse the body of the drawing, indicating the
number of the draftsmen and the time and space coordinates of their play.
The folds indicate a rigid spatial grid underlying the erratic play of form,
and they attest to an orderly succession of graphic contributions—a tem-
poral dimension placed in tension with the synchronic cohesion of the
image field. They identify the exquisite corpse as not so much a d rawing
154 Chapter Three

as the trace of an operation, and, in d oing so, establish the game that
produced it as a machine meant not so much to simulate the surrealist
ideals of creative process (the transcription of “pure thought,” the wildly
associative id) but to attempt to articulate that process itself. By codify-
ing visual art into repeatability, the surrealists exposed its operations as a
function of a gamelike signifying system on par with written language.
Ultimately, by rendering chaos systematic, the exquisite corpse freed
drawing from originality and authorship, agency and intention, more ef-
fectively than the prior experiments with automatic writing: through the
sheer dispersal of authorship among numerous contributors; through
the evocation of the reproductive qualities of a machine ethos; and by
making drawings with the openly artificial conventions of a game, that
is, by using a device that automatically eliminates the question of natu-
ralism from consideration and guarantees a chance outcome. As the
index of an operation, the exquisite corpse pointed to regulations as the
causal parameters of even the most irrational iconographic patterns in
the images. Effectively, the surrealist games acknowledge the impossi-
bility of writing the id, and install, in place of the psychic automatic,
the mechanical automatic: a regulated ludic system for the infinite
rearrangement of preexisting signs. The revelation echoes in Roland
Barthes’s acute assessment of surrealism’s legacy:
I don’t like the notion of automatic writing at all. . . . [A]utomatism . . .
is not rooted at all in the “spontaneous,” the “savage,” the “pure,” the
“profound,” the “subversive,” but originates on the contrary from
the “strictly coded”: what is mechanical can make only the Other
speak, and the Other is always consistent. If we were to imagine that
the Good Fairy Automatism were to touch the speaking or writing
subject with her wand, the toads and vipers that would spring from
his mouth would just be stereotypes. The idea of automatic writing
implies an idealist view of man as divided into a speaking subject
and a profound inner subject. As for the text, it can only be a braid,
woven in an extremely twisted and devious fashion between the
symbolic and the image-repertoire. One cannot write without the
image-repertoire.52
Collaboration against Itself
Sometime in 1927 Yves Tanguy sat down next to Joan Miró. On his
other side was Man Ray; across the table, that early theorist of the sur-
realist image, Max Morise. Th
ere was ink and colored pencils, and some
System 155
glue for collage. They passed some sheets of cheap writing paper, folded
it, and began to play.53 In the drawings that resulted it is easy to attri-
bute the separate sections (clearly marked by the creases that rip across
the figures) to their respective draftsmen. The distinctive abstractions
of Miró are first to stand out, in the whirlpool-chested figure produced
that evening, for example (plate 6), and we recognize Tanguy’s model-
ing in the head of that same figure. Man Ray would have contributed
the cleanly geometric feet in this round of the game—he was the tennis
player. That leaves the writer Morise, the only player without a visual image
repertoire through which to develop a recognizable “style,” to have con-
tributed the legs in this image—and their confident hatching combined
with the steeply receding perspective of the ranked numbers next to them
betray his knowledge of the pictorial. Likewise, in the other cadavres ex-
quis from this round, Miró appears consistently as Miró, presenting the
ciphers familiar from his paintings, and Tanguy reliably delivers his pecu-
liar tease of illusionist reference and contextual refusal. Man Ray remains
the mechanic of graphic design, contributing the inscrutable chart on
the Rococo figure and the stylized features on the hydra. Morise, true to
his dictum against painting, develops as the dramatic cartoonist of the
academy, dashing off a prostrate male nude at the foot of one figure, the
caricature of a Raphaelite breast in another (see plates 4–7).
From the point of view of pictorial institutions, this round of exquisite
corpse succinctly demonstrates the traditional art-historical alignment of
style with artistic identity, an effect made emphatic h ere as it is activated
through drawing, the medium that in itself serves as a sign in the visual arts
for expressive immediacy to the subject. But the gears that should mesh to
produce an aura of originality fail to engage. Th ere are four of t hese draw-
ings, all figures, all with the same date and the same name by the same four
artists in an identical admixture of styles. The images comprise a series of
authorial citations, set in place by the cycles of the game: each image is
different, yet they are all virtually the same. The game has generated a suc-
cession of objects whose artistic identity is in conflict with the d emands
of the unique artwork. And the surrealists addressed this problem by ex-
acerbating it—they refused to attach the images to their makers (proper
names w ere added to the drawings only in retrospect, if they could be
recalled).54 As for a title that might limit their subject matter (what is
their subject matter?), the surrealists conceded only to identify them with
their material support: they are all les cadavres exquisses, made with the
materials of drawing. But these images stubbornly resist designation as
drawing; in spite of the consistency of their material support they refuse
to be bound by the other norms of the medium: originality, singularity, or
156 Chapter Three

André Breton, Max
3.5
Morise, Jeanette Durocq
Tanguy, Pierre Naville,
Benjamin Péret, Yves
Tanguy, and Jacques
Prévert, Exquisite
Corpse, 1928. moma.
Van Gogh Purchase
Fund. André Breton,
Estate of Yves Tanguy
© 2018 ars / adagp.
Digital image ©
moma / Licensed by
descriptive verism. They were not, at their inception, intended to answer

the requirements of pictorial categories.55
As if to attest to this, historically (following their entry into art in-
stitutions) the visual versions of the exquisite corpse have been identified
with the full range of surrealist language-based experiments, games, and
inquiries as well as with a wide variety of other indexical techniques devel-
oped by the group for image making. Max Ernst, for example, rooted all
of t hese in automatism, as methods through which the surrealist subject is
meant to “pick out and project that which sees itself in him.”56 While pro
cesses such as collage (including collage versions of the exquisite corpse;
see figure 3.5), frottage, decalcomania, and fumage are difficult to assign
to an overarching category of facture, the exquisite corpse images seem at
least as contiguous with these other works as they are with the precedents
set by the genres of drawing. They also have a relation to poetry through
their written version; and they have the same collated structure as the sur-
realist “inquiries” and questionnaires. The exquisite corpse shares in the
ambitions of automatic practices; it is chance-determined in the manner
of fumage, a technique in which images are made with candle smoke; it
System 157
cites as cleanly as the elements of a collage; and it develops figuration in
the manner of frottage (images derived from rubbings) and decalcomania
(a Rorschach-like process in which ink pressed between pages is reworked
into recognizable images).57 The intermedia samplings (including refer-
ences to language that trace to the syntactic game they derive from) that
determine these “drawings” combine with an exaggerated displacement of
authorship to gain for drawing a degree of categorical lability. Through
sheer excess, exquisite corpse images transgress the rigidity of classifica-
tions and authoritative identity in art production, and play persists in
the images long after the game is over.
Historically these images have been characterized as collaborative
or collective drawings, inviting an image of surrealist play as altruistic
cooperation—the subordination of individual desire to a transcendent
and harmonious outcome. “The subject slips into a fluid collective,” in
the words of Jean-Jacques Lebel, a “collective order of enunciation.”58
This reaffirmation of a group ethos u nder Lautréamont’s participatory
mandate—“Poetry will be made by all. Not one”—is not entirely with-
out political grounding: the period in which the exquisite corpse was
invented coincides with the moment of the surrealist group’s direct en-
gagement with Marxism.59
Indeed, Marcel Duhamel’s house at 54 rue du Château, which would
become the informal center for the Marxist activities of the group, had in
1925 been the very site of the surrealist reinvention of the exquisite corpse,
and many of the first examples from that time seem more concerned with
egalitarianism than artistic skill.60 Likewise their stylistic affinities em-
phasize group effort over jarring juxtaposition; unlike the more polished
examples to come, the players of t hese early games are indistinguishable
and anonymous (without the help of retrospectively added signatures;
see figures 3.6 and 3.7). In fact, in their retrospective assessments of the
game the surrealists seem to have superimposed the “organic unity” that
Breton claimed for the group at this time onto their evaluations of the
game, finding in the images evidence of m ental affinities between the
players that extended beyond mere coincidence or the pressures of shared
ideology. “Never had surrealism shown such an organic unity, nor known
greater effervescence than during that time, when our evening meetings
were most often held in the old h ouse . . . at 54 Rue du Château,” recalled
Breton. “From the outset [the playing of games] proved to strengthen
the bonds that united us, in making us aware of our shared desires.”61 “It
was a m atter of who could find more charm, more unity, more audacity
in this collectively created poetry,” wrote Éluard in the 1930s. “No more
worry, no more memories of misery, of boredom, of routine. We played
158 Chapter Three

X, Yves Tanguy, André Masson, and X, Exquisite
3.6 Yves Tanguy, André Masson, X, and X, Exquisite
3.7
Corpse, 1925. Private collection. Estate of Yves Tanguy, Corpse, 1925. Private collection. Estate of Yves Tanguy,
André Masson. © 2018 ars / adagp. André Masson. © 2018 ars / adagp.
with images and there were no losers. Everyone wanted everyone to win
and to win always more, in order to pass the take on to their neighbor.”62
“In the hope of increasing the fortuitous character of elements utilizable
in the composing of a drawing and so increasing their abruptness of as-
sociation, surrealists have resorted to the process called ‘The Exquisite
Corpse,’ ” wrote Max Ernst, identifying the game as central to pictorial
surrealism. “The large share chance has in this is limited only by the role
played for the first time by m ental contagion.”63 Breton corroborates: “In
Surrealist texts obtained simultaneously by several people . . . we think we
have brought out into the open a strange possibility of thought, which is
pooling. The fact remains that very striking relationships are established
in this manner, that remarkable analogies appear.”64
In the sense that t here is a tacit understanding at the start of the game
that all the players w ill subject themselves to the rules, t here is always
collaboration in play. Yet the rhetoric of idyllic concordance that the
surrealists have spun around the game runs counter to the group’s self-
professed ideology of intransigence and moral defiance, and is particu-
larly jarring considering the constantly shifting loyalties and internecine
System 159
conflicts that marked the group from its inception. Furthermore, surre-
alism’s commitment to heterodoxy—grounded in Lautréamont’s credo
of juxtaposition—structured its written texts and would remain char-
acteristic of its visual production. This holds not only for the degree of
formal illogic typical of individual surrealist works, but is also apparent
in the pronounced inconsistency of style across the artworks claimed
by the group—a formal diversity that crowds the picture plane of e very
exquisite corpse. The most telling refutation of an ethos of cooperation
surrounding the exquisite corpse lies in the images themselves, whose
overall visual impression is one of exaggerated disparity and uncom-
promising discord.65 And as it turns out, for e very claim for concor-
dance and unity, there’s an equally effusive statement that lauds—or
disparages—the exquisite corpse for its juxtaposition effect.
Even as they raise the matter of “tacit communication” and “mental
contagion,” Breton and Ernst must acknowledge “the nervous play of
extreme discordances” and “abruptness of association” in the composite
images. The agonistic quality of the games was not lost on Roger Caillois
when he stopped participating: “It was not the collection of significant
responses that agitated me visibly in the sessions, but an outbidding, a
competition of delirious and ornate definitions, where the brilliant was
the best—and where one waited for none other than the dazzling to
come to pass.”66 Breton himself admitted that some of the games took
“a dissociating turn”—an effect that André Thirion claims was actively
cultivated by Breton, who “set up tests and combats to distinguish the
better from the worse.”67
Simone Collinet directly cites the assault of difference—traced to
the impact of radically dissimilar subjects—as the paradoxical source of
the image’s pull: “Violent surprises prompted admiration and laughter,
and set off an unquenchable desire for fresh images—images inconceiv-
able by one brain alone—born from the involuntary, unconscious and
unpredictable mixing of three or four heterogeneous minds. . . . [ T]he
power of those arbitrary connections of words—power so amazing,
so dazzling—verified surrealist theories so clearly that that the game
became a system, a method of research, a mode of exaltation and stimu-
lation, a trove of lucky finds; finally, perhaps a drug.”68
Breton, too, linked the pronounced disintegrating effect of the ex-
quisite corpse drawings to their intersubjective construction, stressing
the way the internal elements of the image incite an associative drift out
of the picture, away from a fixed frame of reference: “they had the mark
of that which cannot be generated by only one brain.”69 This sense of
image-fragments indicating something outside the frame, as opposed
160 Chapter Three

to directing meaning inward, is a transitive strategy that informs col-
lage. Philippe Audoin, in his assessment of the surrealist games, calls the
exquisite corpse “unpremeditated collage,” identifying an aleatory compo-
nent necessary for their particular “effect of disorientation” (depaysment,
a change of scenery); their “ability to startle . . . more pronounced as the
choice of collage elements imply [sic] a minimum of preconceived repre
sentation for the result sought.”70 Chance is the magistrate of juxtaposi-
tion in the exquisite corpse, administering the unpredictable marks that
slam and lurch through an approximation of a figure. And if the game
functioned for the surrealists as the compulsory, controlled, and repeat-
able production and iteration of chance—chance summoned to perform,
subordinated to the temporal and spatial boundaries of the game-as-
structure—then in turn chance called on the plurality of the players
around the table to produce the shock of relations based on difference,
and not likeness, within the drawing.
Now, ascribing a function—the harnessing of chance—to the exquisite
corpse would appear to throw into question one of the founding premises
of games, namely that they be f ree from means–ends constraints, so that
their rules remain arbitrary. Proscribing the actions of the players (how-
ever temporary or voluntary) in order to produce a desired result implies
an exertion of will and power on the part of the scriptor of the rules.
Breton’s domination of the proceedings is easily i magined: poetry will be
made by all not through the sheer largesse of the movement, but b ecause
“all” will be subjected to these surrealist conventions of art production.
In a dramatic description of an evening of surrealist play, Salvador
Dalí gave voice to the air of oppression around the “dream-like and al-
most overwhelming . . . experiments,” fabulating physical restraints onto
the players: “All night long a few surrealists would gather round the
big table used for experiments, their eyes protected and masked by
thin though opaque mechanical slats, . . . their bodies being bound to
their chairs by an ingenious system of straps, so they could only move
a hand in a certain way and the sinuous line was allowed to inscribe
the appropriate white cylinders. Meanwhile their friends, holding their
breath and biting their lower lips in concentrated attention, would lean
over the recording apparatus and with dilated pupils await the expected
but unknown movement, sentence or image.”71 Controlled bodies, ten-
sion, and sensory restriction are the dominant motifs of Dalí’s account
of surrealist play. His is a scenario in which the rules of the game force
the players against their w ill to draw on the arbitrary, an instance of sub-
jection felt as an aggression against individuality. Play here is not benign
and liberatory, but agonistic and coercive.
System 161
The negative gloss on the play process that Dalí articulates in 1932—
his extreme discomfort with being played—is echoed by a radical disori-
entation at the level of the reception of the image, where confusion rises
from a perceived disaggregation that reaches back to the first efforts of
automatism and the collaborative model provided by Les champs magné-
tiques (1920), where Phillipe Soupault and Breton depended upon one
another to deepen the quality of juxtaposition in the text—the “extreme
degree of immediate absurdity.” In the case of Les champs magnétiques,
difference is articulated not so much at the level of the production of
the text—in the marked dissimilarity between the contributions of the
two writers—but rather, as Breton emphasized, through estrangement
at the level of the reception of the work: an alienation that derives not so
much from an encounter with the foreign utterances of other authors,
but from the unrecognizability of one’s own contribution. “To you who
write,” he stressed, “these elements are, on the surface, as strange to you
as they are to anyone e lse and naturally you are wary of them.”72 For
Breton, the chance encounter, the “spark” of “two distinct realities,” oc-
curs when the image is able, “by removing our systems of reference, to
disorient us within our own memories.”73 That is, in the ideal surrealist
encounter, the subject is confronted with a recontextualization of his or
her utterance so radical as to render it alien. “Upon opening my eyes,”
Breton writes, describing the first sight of his own automatic drawings,
“I would get the very strong impression of something ‘never seen.’ ”74
Likewise, when he rereads his transcriptions of dream images, they “sur-
prise” him, and he claims that they “left me with the impression of their
being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself
seemed to me illusory.”75 In this light, the perceived likeness within
the works, their undertone of “pooling” or “telepathy”—which at first
would seem to be at odds with the tenets of juxtaposition—emerges
as yet another point from which the principle of contradiction is in-
scribed. Surrealism’s desire to collapse the boundaries between subject
and object, as it is played out in the game of exquisite corpse, opens
unexpectedly onto the revelation that this collapse can only ever be an
illusion, as the surrealist subject is itself presented, upon the unfolding
of the image, as an exoteric object.
But in the exquisite corpse, might this be due to the sheer inscrutabil-
ity of the figures, as they have been compromised by the chance-driven
rules of the game? When the rules are written specifically to ensure
opacity as against transparency of meaning, as is the case in the exquisite
corpse, sense—meaning—proves impossible to fix, even for one well-
rehearsed in the rules. Chance has provided a loophole for meaning in the
162 Chapter Three

exquisite corpse. Because it is an amalgam of drawings, there is no single
player/ receiver of the unfolded image who w ill ever “make sense” of every
thing in it. While its opacity to its very makers is what gives it its effect
of psychographic utterance—unstable, unpredictable, and emphatically
unshared—the exquisite corpse comes to this loss of identity precisely
through the contingency of any individual sketch in the image to all of the
o thers.76
“There they were stricken with oblivion,” observed Dalí of the autom-
atist experiments, “and, owing to the threat of unintended cataclysms,
became highly developed automatic puppets.”77 Dalí was particularly
sensitive to the immanent loss of identity at the hands of the surrealists;
he recalled that his resolve to retain his artistic singularity asserted itself
almost immediately after joining the group: “All that is collective signi-
fies your burial,” he wrote. “Use the collective as experience and then
hit it, hit it hard! And remain alone.”78 This self-estrangement resonates
with Dalí’s description of the objects of automatic production, in which
he seems to have doubled the threat to his identity posed by the other
members of the group onto the recurrent anthropomorphism of the ex-
quisite corpse:
In the early experiments with poetic solicitation, automatic writ-
ing and accounts of dreams, real or imaginary articles appeared to
be endowed with a real life of their own. Every object was regarded
as a disturbing and arbitrary “being” and was credited with h aving
an existence entirely independent of the experimenter’s activity.
Thanks to the images obtained at “The Exquisite Corpse,” this
anthropomorphic stage confirmed the haunting notion of the
metamorphoses—inanimate life, continuous presence of human
images, etc.—while also displaying the regressive characters deter-
mining infantile stages. According to Feuerbach, “primitively the
concept of the object is no other than the concept of a second self;
thus in childhood every object is conceived as a being acting freely
and arbitrarily.”79
Dalí did not wait for posterity to identify him as an author of the
exquisite corpse, and he refused to be relegated to the back of the sheet—
he would sign his contributions as boldly as his paintings, as if to under-
line the locus of anxiety in the game, as if to reclaim his very self along
with his works. Rebelliously, he would refuse to subordinate his draw-
ings to the adjacent sections (see figure 3.8), ignoring the marks that
had been dropped as guidelines from the previous player, and ending
his own composition precisely at the lower limit of his section—right
System 163
Valentine Hugo, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, and Gala,
3.8
Exquisite Corpse, c. 1932. Private collection. © 2018 Salvador
Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí / ars; Valentine Hugo,
André Breton © 2018 ars /a dagp.
on the fold, emphatically separating it from the next sketch. The per-
spectivally receding landscape he inserts in this exquisite corpse of 1932
strains against the conceit of the figure, however uselessly (its symmetry
is ultimately absorbed by the inexorable anthropomorphism of the pro
cessed sheet).
Dalí’s obdurate gesture of withholding isolates the focal points for
loss of identity in the exquisite corpse: those places in the drawing where
the separate sketches of the players meet articulate not only a site of col-
lision between the respective participants but of collusion. From Dalí’s
point of view, this is exactly where one player’s drawing is oppressively
determined by the previous player. Arbitrariness-as-origin is thus ensured
for each player, who must improvise on the spot, with the determining
factors of the drawing registering as a restriction of choice. In this way, the
game forces each player to depend on and cite the player who preceded
them, and they in turn determine the origin points of the section of the
drawing to follow, cumulatively proceeding down the length of the figure
to construct an intertextual image that is progressively plural from top to
bottom. Who could claim any single contribution to the exquisite corpse
as his own, with drawing-as-identity so compromised by the imperatives
of the other players? While the Boschian head of the 1928 exquisite corpse
(figure 3.9) could be said to be entirely Tanguy’s, the figure’s mechanico-
organic torso is traced to both Tanguy and Man Ray, its upper legs cite
Tanguy and Man Ray as well as Max Morise, and the pedestal and feet
must be attributed not only to Breton but to all t hose surrealists who have
had a hand in the drawing. The plurality of determining f actors in the ex-
quisite corpse produces an enigma, or, in the parlance of psychoanalysis,
an overdetermined, symptomatic image. That is to say, the consonance
of the game with automatism is maintained here not on the level of the
substance of the separate sections—not a case of collated fragments of
multiple repressed desires bursting through to consciousness—but on a
structural level, where the process of producing symptomatic utterances
is signified through the overdetermination of every entry.
Through overdetermination, at least by Freud’s explanation, the
psyche processes opposing wishes into a juxtaposition that presents it-
self in the dream image as a compromise between conflicting desires.
These images need not limit themselves to a single manifestation—their
elements may emerge organized in different meaningful sequences, as
do the segments of a full round of the exquisite corpse, which, although
they have the same causal motivations (identical authors subject to the
same regulations), signify in a variety of ways depending on their con-
text.80 In its role as the structural simulacrum of the psychic apparatus
System 165
Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, and André
3.9
Breton, Exquisite Corpse, 1928. Art Institute of Chicago,
Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection. © 2018 Man Ray
Trust / ars /a dagp; © 2018 Estate of Yves Tanguy /a rs;
André Breton © 2018 ars /a dagp. Photo credit: Art
Institute of Chicago / Art Resource.
(however partial), the exquisite corpse process can be understood as
sharing in this mode of juxtaposition-as-compromise, a “pooled” image,
but comprising an immiscible mixture that still retains the possibility
of “tracing back” its separate elements. In a sense, each exquisite corpse
presents a strange group portrait: a funhouse mirror that throws back
an image of the surrealist group itself in all its heterogeneity. Conden-
sation, the form of overdetermination which, by Freud’s definition, re-
sults from the compression of closely associated dream-thoughts, shows
itself here, when the exquisite corpse images are unfolded and viewed
as a compromised “whole.”81 The effect is a radical desubjectification,
with the surrealist group itself presented as a surrogate for the cluttered
diversity of the unconscious—a “marvelous,” Éluard wrote, “disfigured
by passion,” whose composite effect was “infinitely more beautiful than
anything that it might say to us when we were alone.”82
In the game of chess, the skill lies in choosing one’s move in response
to the opponent’s move; the context of the play undergoes a radical
change with every move. Likewise, in surrealist games, one’s own moves
are externally and contextually determined, doubly detached from the
stability not only of a predictable outcome but also of a knowable ori-
gin. This estrangement is the effect of games that caused Walter Ben-
jamin to claim that play had no memory—that in play, experience in
vented itself anew at the beginning of e very round.83 The gambler, for
instance, returns to the game compulsively in spite of the fact that he
has sustained grave losses in previous games; for Benjamin, play’s am-
nesia (an effect of its provisional status within material reality) made
it somewhat complicit with the mesmerizing dream-effect of commodi-
fied pleasure. Pleasure in the exquisite corpse, as well, is bound in a ma-
trix of memory, repetition, and the return to a scene of trauma: the loss
of the orthodoxies of drawing, certainly, but also the historical loss, for
the surrealists, of automatism as the verifiable “royal road” to the uncon-
scious. Most important, for a group that so valued eccentricity and high
individualism, was the traumatic forfeiture of identity they endured at
the hands of the game. Repetition is the catalyst of this loss, as during
the game, each section of the figure in the exquisite corpse is succes-
sively loosened from its prior state, only to be repeatedly anchored and
refreed, in a cycle that the surrealists would play to exhaustion.
In fact, there is something deleterious about the way that repetition
shows itself in the internal circularity of the game as well as in the group’s
tireless pursuit of it, some shading of pleasure away from the unequivo-
cally positive “life force” that the surrealists attributed to it and toward
the dark side of play—its compulsion and its memory lapse. If the
System 167
pseudo-psychographic images produced by the exquisite corpse de-
vise the “inner model” as, counterintuitively, one that evades individual
mastery—that is, if t hese images establish the self as “other-determined,”
or impelled—then Dalí’s anxiety over the amelioration of his own self is
not merely vindicated, but is bound to be replicated in the apprehen-
sions of the other players. Put another way, Breton’s cry upon the un-
folding of the first exquisite corpse was perhaps not a shriek of e ither
delight or horror, but a shriek of the delight in horror, at the utter un-
knowability of his own mind.84 That this scene of traumatic unfolding is
installed as a leitmotif of surrealism, and that Breton and his fellow sur-
realists return to the game repeatedly to play out an identical scenario, is
symptomatic: these repetitions resonate with the increasing complexity
of psychoanalytic theory as it was being disseminated in France. The
year 1927, when the exquisite corpse gained emblematic status for surre-
alism, was the very year that Freud’s own propositions about the matrix
of compulsive repetition, trauma, mastery, and play, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, appeared in its French translation.85
From Freud we learn that repetition is a “metapsychological” instinct,
but one that serves the pleasure principle only indirectly. Where there is
repetition, one finds not the fundamentally unifying force of eros but
its countervailing instinct, the death drive, a compulsion of the organ-
ism to return to a former, inanimate state.86 By elaborating the theory of
the death drive through the tedious cheer of children’s play—the painful
repetitions of an invented game he calls “fort-da,” in which the child,
substituting a toy for his mother, repeatedly subjects himself to the un-
pleasant sensations around her absence87—Freud provocatively inserted
distress and aversion in precisely the place one would least expect to find
it. In his recounting, Freud is careful to point out that this is not merely a
question of the child’s making pleasure out of displeasure: play is neither
a masking over of pain nor a creative transformation of it into something
aesthetically pleasing. Rather, the repetition of something remembered as
unpleasant is motivated by an instinct that appeals to the deeper agonis-
tic pleasure of revenge, a pleasure that, being repressed, is unavailable to
memory and can only be satisfied through repetition: through the mimed
replication of the experience. At the core of his theory of the significance
of the “death drive” Freud not only established a paradoxical complica-
tion of pleasure with pain, but made indistinguishable two terms generally
accepted as antithetical. Through his rejection of memory as unreliable in
its vulnerability to revision, he also effectively established memory’s
iteration—a repetition, a copy—as the sole site of authenticity.
168 Chapter Three

The perversity of the move must have delighted the surrealists. It
would have ratified their game of exquisite corpse as a staging of the
ultimately paradoxical motivations of desire: a pursuit of frivolity driven
by deeply urgent, if unidentifiable, intentions. The structural sameness of
the exquisite corpse images, their affront to technical skill and the uni-
fied pictorial field as the raison d’être for drawing, thus attain the vaunted
status of signs pointing to a psychoanalytical turn in representation.
But the implications of this repudiation of authenticity, particularly
as it is expounded through play, would be even greater for Breton’s surre-
alism. Freud’s most important claim, for Breton, would be that repetition
in play is in the interest of mastery. In playing the game of substitutions
and mimicry, the child moves from a passive state into an active one in
relation to their distress. Like an infant repeatedly reenacting their initial
scene of trauma, the surrealist at play revisits this traumatic loss of self
again and again, a scene now made perverse since the “mastery” in ques-
tion entailed giving up all claim to individuality. Yet even in the face of
such self-abnegation, the game was worth playing for the surrealists. For
Freud theorizes that in doing so, the child not only masters his situation
of loss, but enters the cultural realm, a passage signified by his successful
deferment of desire. The act of replication leads to the child’s acknowl-
edgement of, in effect, the unavoidability of sublimation.88
Understanding the exquisite corpse as an enactment of this scene of
“delivery” affirms its role in a key transitional moment for surrealism—
the movement from the passive state typical of automatism, in which
the subject is posited as a mere receptor of an inner voice, to the active
solicitation of any utterances that can be perceived as having evaded
conscious will. Through the exquisite corpse the surrealists may have
taken their revenge on drawing and the visual arts, but it was at the cost
of having to enter the very realm they had critiqued: when they “gained
language” through the practice of exquisite corpse, they also facilitated
the move of psychographic images into the institutions of art.89 The
surrealists’ desire to project a graphic resonance between representa
tion and psychoanalysis was made explicit in 1927: the exquisite corpse
drawings appeared in La Révolution surréaliste 9–10, embedded in a
translation of Freud’s “The Question of Lay Analysis.”90
The title of the essay is misleading in this context, for the excerpt
published by the surrealists does not address lay analysis at all, but
rather is a reprint of the section of the work that, in Freud’s words, seeks
to convey “what pictures we have formed of the structure of the mental
apparatus.”91 That is, it is a pocket summary of the psychoanalytic model
System 169
of the mind, and its description of the id reads as a surrealist utopia of
disharmony: “There was a time,” Freud writes, “when ‘outside,’ ‘strange’
and ‘hostile’ were identical concepts. [But] in the id, t here are no con-
flicts; contradictions and antitheses persist side by side in it unconcern-
edly.” The ego, on the other hand, “is characterized by a very remarkable
trend towards unification, towards synthesis. This character is lacking
in the id; it is, as we might say, ‘all to pieces’; its different urges pursue
their own purposes independently and regardless of one another.”92 That
is, “pure thought,” pictured, looks like the exquisite corpse—an array of
antithetical terms held in place by the minimum structure necessary to
present them as a figure, as form. But Freud takes the surrealists even
further with their game; the excerpt moves on in its characterization of
the roles of the ego and the id to establish a psychoanalytically inflected
model for the interface between inner and external worlds—between the
“play world” of intersubjective relations set up by the surrealists through
the game and the “reality” of the material world outside it: “Later, the
ego learns that there is yet another way of securing satisfaction besides
the adaptation to the external world. . . . It is also possible to intervene in
the external world by changing it, and to establish in it intentionally the
conditions which make satisfaction possible. This activity then becomes
the ego’s highest function; decisions as to when it is more important to
control one’s passions and bow before reality, and when it is more expe-
dient to side with them and to take arms against the external world—
such decisions make up the whole essence of worldly wisdom.”93
The essay as it appeared in La Révolution surréaliste that October
makes it clear that there is no need to circumvent the ego in order to
effect an intervention in material reality; the ego, in its conscious and
unconscious capacities, is able to bridge the behaviors rehearsed in play
and then turned out into material reality in the form of convulsions
in the field of representation. That very month, exquisite corpse draw-
ings went up on the walls of the Galerie surréaliste. The surrealists had
assimilated the concepts laid out in “The Question of Lay Analysis” as
final permission to let go of automatism as the only valid method for
surrealist revolution. Henceforth, they would openly pursue ludic strat-
egies designed to outwit strategy: rational thought turned against itself.
The Fold: Materiality and Index in the Pictorial Field
Already by 1923, t hese systems were beginning to take hold. As Jacques

Baron recalled, early on the surrealists had experimented with the
simple, recombinative operations of folding in the café game of pleating
170 Chapter Three

newspapers into amusing revisions of the headlines: “L’usine de liqué-
faction prend le controle de tous les services fédéraux” (The Liquefac-
tion Plant Takes Control of All Federal Services), for example.94 The
game revealed hidden meanings latent in the printed page, subversive
variations of ready-made facts coaxed from the headlines through the
successive couplings and suppressions of the refolded newsprint. Per-
haps it forced a revelation about the structuring paradox of syntax, or
disclosed the fragile threads by which meaning attaches to language,
or manifested the potential links of anything with everything. At the
very least the newspaper game brought the fold into the repertoire of
formally subversive surrealist strategies. As an operation commensurate
with the “cut” of collage and montage as well as the formal occlusions
of Max Ernst’s overpaintings of the early 1920s, its embrace served as
the ultimate condition of possibility for the exquisite corpse.95 The fold
points—not only to the dialectic structure of the game and to the juxta-
position effect it creates, but to the process of the game and its formal
consequences: chance and its paradoxical repetition, sameness and dif-
ference, the mechanical, the manual, the material. The formal opera-
tions of the fold are key to the critical capacity of the visual version of
the exquisite corpse.
Most obviously, the fold lines in the exquisite corpse function as the
break points of juxtaposition in the completed drawings, marking the
difference between successive contributions much in the same way that
spacing identifies collage as a construction. Yet the incongruities in-
scribed by cutting in other strategies of fragmentation are significantly
altered in the mechanisms of folding. In collage and montage, where solid
fields of image join edge to edge, the transition from one to the other
is consistently abrupt along both sides of the divide—the distance be-
tween the adjacent elements is fully pronounced, and formally, the frag-
ments signify as unambivalent “difference.” The surrealist enigma here
lies in the “impossibility” of a context outside of the imagination that
could bring together such disparate fragments. The effect of the opposi-
tion is that the elements could at any moment repel violently, like polar-
ized magnets. But in the exquisite corpse, the tension of juxtaposition
is ameliorated by the way that drawing is regulated in the game, spe-
cifically by requiring each player to take up the contours of the image
exactly where another player left off, effectively extending the previous
contribution long enough to smooth the transition.
A particularly reduced example from 1927 (figure 3.10) illustrates
the limits of drawing as a medium for complementary juxtaposition in
the game. A single, monochromatic, and closed line cleanly demarcates
System 171
3.10 Camille
Goemans, Jacques
Prévert, Yves Tanguy,
and André Breton,
Exquisite Corpse,
1927. mnam. André
Breton; Estate of
Yves Tanguy © 2018
ars / adagp. Photo
by Jacques Faujour ©
cnac /m nam /D
ist.
rmn-Grand Palais / Art
Resource.
the body of an animal-like figure from its ground; the simplicity of line
depersonalizes the graphic marks to the point that it is entirely conceiv-
able that one hand, rather than four, might have made the drawing.96
What holds it together as a unified image is the smooth transition of
line from one section to the next, marked only by minor gaps and over-
drawings as diff erent players take up the line. Yet the drawing’s peculiar-
ity is still pronounced. It has what could be the head of a turtle, the torso
of a jigsaw puzzle piece, a human foot, and a party-hat tail. Separately,
the sections refer to an amphibian and a mammal, flanked by passages
of utterly non-referential forms. The juxtaposition effect is achieved
not through sheer formal difference, but through an elusive incompat-
ibility of form with meaning, like a syntactically correct sentence made
nonsensical because of a conflict between its signifieds: “The disguised
shrimp hardly enlightens double kisses,” or, indeed, the original “The ex-
quisite corpse drinks the new wine”—where an internal inconsistency
unravels the meaning of the statement.97
In this lean exquisite corpse the sense that the image should be
regarded as something other than a drawing made in a traditional man-
ner is marked only by the presence of the three transparent—yet pro-
nounced and indelible—lines that rigidly cut across the freehand sweep
of the outlined figure. Th ese fold lines break the image down into sec-
tions and, formally speaking, each fold functions as an edge, that dis-
tinctive category of line that belongs to neither and yet to both of the
172 Chapter Three

spaces it separates. The fold lines are independent from the image and
yet essential to its surrealism, its juxtaposition effect. At the fold, form
meets content in the drawing and they cancel each other out.
At the same time, the fold remains the site of a yoking of disparity that
is necessary to the surrealist aesthetic. It is precisely at the fold line that
the join of independent elements is forced—the turtle becomes a jigsaw
becomes the loin of a beast—and the graphic marks link to deliver the
qualified gestalt that set the exquisite corpse apart from other artistic
operations deployed to produce sheer unlimited sprawl.98 Yet the labile
double function of the fold assures that the elements of the exquisite
corpse don’t exactly synthesize either: they join and separate, couple and
divide.99 All of the tension and paradox necessary to the d ynamics of jux-
taposition are put in play by the fold, which strikes against the unity of
the gestalt that it itself generates. Paradox and ambivalence work from
within the frame of the organic artwork—in fact they precede, underlie,
and produce the work. This is because, like a guarantee of intervention,
the paper is folded before the drawing begins.
If the traditional conception of drawing proceeds from the assumption
that the graphic line is privileged over the blank field that it marks, then
the notion of drawing-as-origin depends on suppressing the materiality
of the blank page, the paper support that precedes the image.100 Accord-
ingly, the fold is indispensable to the exquisite corpse in its capacity to
rupture the field of representation. For the folds “insist” on the presence
of the paper; by pushing it forward in their wrinkled breaks they index
its materiality, measure its thickness and its flexibility, break its invisible
surface and invade the projective field of pure idea, pure thought. The
creases are of the paper yet physically set apart from the paper.
But this assertion of ground against figure is not simply a reversal
of hierarchy—a shift from the privileging of graphic signs to the estab-
lishment of material-as-foundation and -origin. Rather, it is an affirma-
tion of support as violable, buckled onto itself: the fold simultaneously
vaunts and reduces the ground. The ghosted grid it imposes is the
“underfigure” of the exquisite corpse, pointing away from the figure
that it structures toward a process, with all of its traits of action and
tactility, that preempts the illusion of unmediated conceptual expres-
sion that has traditionally linked drawing with originality. And b ecause
the process is traced to the same register break that actually produces
the figure it works against—that is, it is an ambivalent process that in-
ternally fights the coherent image it is making—the hierarchy of figure
over ground that is implied in conventional drawing is not so much re-
versed as made redundant: the course of the game as well as its temporal
System 173
trace are recorded as prior to and indispensable for the object. The fold
introduces an alternative line, one that reveals the dissembling nature
of the graphic line—that makes a humbug out of the ideal drawing.101
The folds that crease the figure and the field of the exquisite corpse
indicate a play of productive and destructive processes, and the ludic
characterization is particularly appropriate h ere, because the fold is
exactly the site of manipulation through which chance enters this
particular instance of drawing. Effectively, the fold administers the un-
foreseen in the exquisite corpse by assuring the secrecy of each contri-
bution. Attribution of meaning to the whole (unfolded) drawing will
proceed purely on the basis of happenstance, as Breton insists when he
introduces the chance-based exchange of the exquisite corpse process
as the paradigm for a revision of the cause–effect relay of communica-
tion in “Dialogue in 1928,” a game where answers are coupled arbitrarily
to questions: “Question? Answer. A simple labor of adequation that
implies all the optimism of conversation. The thoughts of two inter-
locutors pursue themselves separately. The momentary rapport of t hese
thoughts is imposed between them by coincidence as well as contradic-
tion. Very comforting, all in all, because we like nothing more than to
question or to respond, the ‘cadavre exquis’ is intended to execute some
questions and responses whose dependence, carefully unforeseen, is also
guaranteed.”102
The format of question and response seems to identify an agenda for
the surrealist game as reaching beyond sheer shock and contention. This
is not the Dada model for chance—drawing words at random from a
bag to make poetry. It is instead a perturbed dialectic of the arbitrary, an
exploration of the causal paths of chance as the defining parameters of
surreality. So while the fold marks the point in the game where the draw-
ings separate, keeping the other compositions hidden beyond the edge
of the field, it forces the players to acknowledge the presence of these
others—to place their pencils on the tail ends of the unknown. Only a
few small marks indicate the existence of a hidden image: the minimum
“cause” allowable to generate the “effect” of the next image-fragment.
The fold separates and links—any shift in one section of the structure
results in a change in the ensuing parts. Like a graphic game of domi-
noes, the folded exquisite corpse is assembled from a chain of insignifi-
cant consonances that nevertheless construct a system of associations,
causes, and effects parallel to, but outside of, the parameters that are
conceived to control meaning in corporeal space.
In contrast, a series of exquisite corpse images produced in 1929–31
(see figures 3.11–3.14), when folding was eliminated from the game,
174 Chapter Three

Frédéric Mégret, Suzanne C., Pierre Unik, and
3.11 Frédéric Mégret, Suzanne Muzard, and Georges
3.12
André Breton, Exquisite Corpse, 1929. Private collection. Sadoul, Exquisite Corpse, 1929. Private collection.
André Breton © 2018 ars / adagp.
e ffect a transition from by-product to end-product. The shift begins

with a series of painted drawings on black ground that seem to be con-
sciously experimenting with the rules of the game, at times replacing
some of the folds with lightly penciled lines (figure 3.11), and identi-
fying the players with their contributions on the front of the page—
not with signatures but in a single anonymous hand. At other times
the folds and signatures disappear altogether, producing an image that
coheres in a way that seems to have completely effaced the collective
nature of its production (figure 3.12). In t hese images, the black ground
competes for space with the figure, pitching the prismatic absence of all
color against the vivid and opaque gouache. Color takes on an impor
tant role, but it is not a juxtapositional one. Rather, it serves to distract
the viewer from the dynamism and immediacy of sheer difference that
dominated the earlier drawings, in which the drawing seemed much
more spontaneous—part of the general surrender to chance.
System 175
3.13 (right) Greta Knutson, Tristan
Tzara, and Valentine Hugo, Exquisite
Corpse, c. 1930. mnam, Paris. Valentine
Hugo © 2018 ars /a dagp. Photo by
Philippe Migeat © cnac / mnam / Dist.
rmn-Grand Palais / Art Resource.
(below) Valentine Hugo, André
3.14
Breton, and Nusch Éluard, Exquisite
Corpse, 1931. mnam. Valentine Hugo,
André Breton © 2018 ars /a dagp.
By 1930, even this tension between figure and ground would be
eliminated, replaced by a more insidious challenge to the visual shock
of disparity. Early in the decade, an extended revision of the rules of
the game, instigated by Valentine Hugo, resulted in a large number of
colorful and highly finished cadavres exquis, again on black ground, but
this time drawn with colored pencils (see figures 3.13 and 3.14).103 Un-
like gouache, the soft transparency of lead soaks up the black field on
which it is posed, producing a mark that is fused and reconciled with its
ground. While the images are never monochromatic, the range and in-
tensity of color is diluted by their common black base. Color, rather than
performing as a sign for the abrupt transition from one contribution to
another, here becomes a factor in reconciling differences, naturalizing the
juxtapositions that have been drawn into the images and assisting the ap-
pearance of the exquisite corpse as an organic w hole. This unifying effect
occurs in spite of the resistance posed by the iconographic content of the
figures, which remains preposterous in combination—as, for example, in
a faceless drawing of 1930 that incorporates a brick wall with booted legs
and a vulva-like medallion that reads alternately as an opening and a
flame (figure 3.13).
But the decisive difference between the majority of the black-ground
drawings and their predecessors, the shift that delivers the exquisite
corpse to the sublimating imperatives of the work of art, is the elimi-
nation of the folds. The variation that Hugo worked up for the game
stipulated not only a calculated selection of materials but the guaran-
tee that that dramatic black field remained pristine. As a substitute for
pleating the papers before the game, a series of faint marks were made
at equal intervals in the margin of the sheet (visible even in reproduc-
tion; see figures 3.13 and 3.14) to indicate the stopping points of every
contribution, and a blank sheet of paper was slid over the finished por-
tions of the drawing to mask them from the other players. The secrecy
of the successive drawings remained, and the character of the image as
intertextual and intersubjective was preserved, but the fold as the overt
sign of that structure and process and its revelation of chance and ma-
teriality is gone.
The resulting images hold together as organic works of art in a man-
ner so antithetical to the founding tenets of the exquisite corpse—to
expose through play the sublimating conventions at work in art—that
to actually call them exquisite corpse images amounts to a betrayal of
surrealism itself. Rather, in these drawings it seems as though the exqui-
site corpse has been revised “upward” according to the standards of au-
tonomous art. A typical composite from 1931 (figure 3.14), by Valentine
System 177
Hugo, André Breton, and Paul Éluard, demonstrates the extent of this
return to the rationale of figure drawing. The image unambiguously sig-
nifies as a female nude: a wheel-like head tops two high breasts, which
taper to a slim waist; the arms, remarkably human for a game-figure,
are clasped b ehind the back. A fringed, table-like skirt is centered over
thighs that turn briefly equine before they disappear into mismatched
but compatible high-topped shoes. Careful attention has been given to
the modeling of the skin, to the consistency of the tabletop perspective
of the w oman’s skirt, as well as to the proportions, volumes, and perspec-
tive of the figure as a whole, betraying a desire on the part of all of the
players to make marks that fall well within the demands of “good draw-
ing”: mimesis improved by moderation and harmony.
Most tellingly, though, those points at which the players handed off
the drawing to their companions, so apparent in the earlier images, are
not at all obvious in these examples. Shouldn’t there be an indication
within the figure—just below the breasts, somewhere around mid-
thigh—of a break between the sections? All signs of the figure as a com-
posite have been completely effaced: t here is no jog in the flow of the
line, no blunt shift in color or style to signal the rotation of draftsmen.
In fact, all the points of juncture have been smoothed out, g ently traced
over in the same white pencil that was used to pick out highlights across
the figure, falsifying a consistency in light between the separate regis-
ters. The turn to conventionality is iterated at multiple levels of form:
in the return of skill, in pentimento, and in a naturalization of the
invented image.
It is only through incongruous iconography that this demure nude
approaches surrealism, most notably in her wheel-like head and the two
nails that tip her breasts. But even surrealist iconography is housebroken
in the black-ground drawings, with none of the graphic violence of ear-
lier versions. Hugo’s skillfully rendered wheel, highlighted to deliver the
illusion of movement, fails to deliver the slicing mechanical effect of the
machine pleurer of 1927 (figure 3.15); her nail-studded breasts don’t tear
and bleed like those of the monsters that came before.
Still, even the most polite iconography can render an improbable
result when miscombined, and this one does. But the incongruity of
the fragments is not due to shifts between subjects and texts—that is,
formal breaks that would foreground differences in subjectivity—but
rather to the creative imaginations of the individual players. The irra-
tional yoking of h uman to h orse is accomplished by Éluard’s w ill alone;
the wheel is mounted strangely on two breasts by Hugo, and it is Breton
who places a table around the waist he has just finished shading. Absur-
178 Chapter Three

3.15 Man Ray, Max
Morise, André Breton,
and Yves Tanguy, Exquisite
Corpse, 1927. Private
collection. © 2018 Man Ray
Trust /a rs / adagp; André
Breton, Estate of Yves Tanguy
© 2018 ars/ a dagp.
dity is generated within the sections of the drawing, not between them;
it is the result of an “automatism effect” applied by the surrealists playing
the game—of certain assumptions on their part of what should constitute
a surrealist image—and not structural juxtaposition generated by the
game itself. The point of register shift, once a paradoxical cleaving, is in
these drawings all juncture, a sublimated reconciliation of parts.
But perhaps most important for what was to become of the sur-
realist movement in the 1930s, certain of the psychic coordinates for
drawing established through the associative illogic of the fragmented
exquisite corpse have been eliminated. Along with the recuperation of
the organic work of art at the levels of materiality, chance, and process,
the removal of the fold entailed another loss: the shock of unfolding.
While the secrecy of the successive contributions to any one exquisite
corpse is essential to preserve the startling effect of the players’ differ-
ences, it is the fold that makes them pronounced—against each other
and against the unified figure. The ghostly familiarity of each fragment,
System 179
made unrecognizable through the condensations and displacements
enacted by the folds, designates the scene of unfolding as an uncanny
encounter with an estranged self. Furthermore, the event of unfolding
triggers not only a psychic-based refutation of the subject-as-agent, but
a traumatic encounter at the level of representation. The fold asserts the
temporal against the synchronicity or gestalt of the traditional work
of art, indelibly marking the drawing not as the projection of an idea
sprung whole from its creator but as a process developing over time.
If in the exquisite corpse the fold sets the dynamic axis of psychic as-
sociation against the rationalized field of referential mimesis, then the
unfolding of the recursive page is the event that effectively delivers the
jarring figuration of these two incompatibles. For the last act of the ex-
quisite corpse game is to return the paper to its first orientation—to the
spatial parameters of the blank sheet. As the page is reopened, the ex-
quisite corpse reassumes the soma of the pristine field, yet fails to fulfill
its promise of completion and significance. Posed against the restored
frame of the page qua page t here is now a broken and inane surface. Like
a joke, whose punch line depends on a surprise deviation from an ex-
pected outcome, the exquisite corpse crushes the anticipation of unity
promised by its own bounded edges. It is only in this shock of unfolding
this degraded sheet that the ghost of drawing appears; drawing itself is
the exquisite corpse in question.
The folds w ill return to the game, very beautifully—to apply this
designation critically—in a series of collage versions from 1938, and
then more prosaically in crude pencil drawings from the late 1930s that
seem to be an attempt to recover the initial spirit of careless degrada-
tion inflecting the exquisite corpse (see, for example, figure 3.16, where
one player has gone so far as to burn the paper).104 But the reaction-
ary changes to the rules of the game early in the decade, made u nder
the pretense of experimentation, signal an irrevocable shift in the am-
bitions of the surrealist group under André Breton’s direction. It is no
coincidence that the elimination of the marring fold from the exquisite
corpse occurred at the very moment of Georges Bataille’s break with
Breton over Breton’s embrace of traditional forms and institutions of
art. Bataille never played this game, although ironically the very “inven-
tors” of the exquisite corpse game, Jacques Prévert and the other surre-
alists of the so-called rue du Château group, would align with Bataille
against Breton, signing the mutinous broadside Un cadavre in 1930. For
Bataille, the naming of any phenomenon as “marvelous,” particularly
one so mundane as a parlor game, amounted to sublimation. Bataillean
play would only be articulated in the form of an Aristotelian concept
180 Chapter Three

3.16 Yves Tanguy, Georges
Hugnet, Germaine Hugnet,
Óscar Domínguez, and
Jeanette Tanguy, Exquisite
Corpse, 1935. © 2018 Estate
of Yves Tanguy / ars;
Óscar Domínguez © 2018
ars / adagp.
of chance, where, as Rosalind Krauss has put it, “a structure rules abso-
lutely over any apparent play of happenstance, a structure of recurrence
and compulsion that ‘automates’ and programs that field in relation to
death.”105 Yet oddly, the exquisite corpse meets that description. The
polarization of these two surrealists along the differences between the
Freudian drives misses the link between the development of Bataille’s
surrealism and the early play practices deployed by Breton. Th ere is the
historical link, parlayed through the shared polemic that resulted in
the defection to the Bataillean camp of the “inventors” of the exquisite
corpse, but t here is also a common desire for the excoriation of existing
conventions and hierarchies. If Bataillean play would eventually be re-
cast in terms of its “transgressive relationship to non-meaning,” there is
ample evidence of this same deconstructive impulse operating in the
repetitions and unveilings of the early exquisite corpse.106 At its best, the
game repealed the hierarchy between figure and ground, ideal and
System 181
material, and did so through the application of the lowering devices
of the fold. It is the buckled page that transgresses drawing, releasing
monolithic denotation into the proliferations of meaningless play.
Yet despite t hese images’ uselessness in terms of communication and
artistic identity, they did have a certain strategic value—as very effec-
tive disruptions of existing assumptions about the generation of art
and meaning. The sense that the exquisite corpse images functioned as
a kind of testimony to collective avant-garde action, evoking the very
means by which they were made, was as important to the players as the
havoc they wreaked on the unified picture. These are figure drawings
that openly bear the traces of the game’s process—indices of action, ex-
perience, and intersubjective relations that had played out in lived space
and time. Regardless of w hether the graphic marks that yield the exqui-
site corpse refer to unconscious utterances or to fragments of empirical
reality, their folds refer to the sequence, duration, and participants of
the play. This indexical quality of the drawings is the images’ “ace in the
hole” against mastery, as each drawing reveals its means of production
as mechanical and arbitrary, the very opposite of the organic and natu-
rally motivated. The flicker of subject and object delivered by the ex-
quisite corpse images, doubled by the dynamism of an appearance that
shifts between whole and part, is reiterated at the level of signification,
as the drawings declare themselves as both the iconic representation of
a figure and the index of the process of the game, a game that subverts
figuration and undermines reference.107
Traced back from the exquisite corpse drawings, the course of the
game is established as the site of social engagement; through play, sur-
realist art is advanced as having been constructed from active social rela-
tions. And because this reinscription of art production in social praxis
is made under the rubric of play, motivated by a chance-driven practice
that stands definitively against means–ends rationality, it extends the
possibility of a critical art production taking place outside of a system of
commercially driven exchange value. The exquisite corpse asserted the
“useless” value of play against a modern context dominated by utilitar-
ian rationality. Deployed as an immediate experience rather than as a
philosophical term made to serve as a metaphor for aesthetic practice,
play as pursued in the exquisite corpse presented a positive interven-
tion in the avant-garde attempt to destabilize the existing oppositions
and hierarchies on which rational thought (and, with it, modern so-
ciety) had been founded. Most significantly, this intervention was not
an opposition but an internal displacement: the game performed from
182 Chapter Three

within the very machinelike parameters that were perceived as automat-
ing every aspect of life.
Surrealist games ultimately derive their power from their produc-
tion of non sequiturs from within the very structures from which one
expects the logical unfolding of meaning. Accordingly, the exquisite
corpse made its critique of the status quo without validating those his-
torical pressures that had forced art away from social relations by super-
imposing mechanization and the artistic practices in a manner designed
to disclose a potential for the aleatory within even the most regulated
processes. As in automatism, where a phenomenal world produced on
the spot by the unconscious is disclosed to the surrealist in a “state of
grace” with chance, the exquisite corpse gives the surrealist at play privi-
leged access to a ludic Nietzschean reality comprising illusion and il-
lusion’s unravelling. The folds themselves are evidence of an incessant
and successive production and subversion of the recognizable image: a
“riddle,” Breton wrote, that “lies in not knowing w hether you’re break-
108
ing down or building up.”
System 183
Michel Leiris, frontispiece, Raymond Roussel notebook,
4.1
1933–86. Chancellerie des universités de Paris, Bibliothèque
littéraire Jacques Doucet. By permission of Jean Jamin. Photo
courtesy Suzanne Nagy.
CH APT ER 4
PUN
Roussel’s Tomb
In the spirit of wordplay let’s begin not with an epigraph, but an

epitaph—an epitaph for the surrealist eidolon Raymond Roussel.
This won’t be the pretentious inscription he would have liked (“Beau-
frere au Prince de Moscou”), nor w ill it be the curt one he actually
got (“Famille R. Roussel”).1 The epitaph I have in mind is the hom-
age roughed out by ethnographer and ex-surrealist Michel Leiris over
more than fifty years of preoccupation with the writer: his Tombeau de
Raymond Roussel, a phantom monument that exists as a set of observa-
tions in a notebook with an odd frontispiece and the label “Raymond
Roussel, 1877–1933” (figure 4.1).2 Intended as an ethnographic study
of Roussel as an “eccentric figure,” the Raymond Roussel notebook
anticipates the model for autobiography that Leiris would perfect as
The Rules of the Game, hewing to the conventions of fieldwork to re
cord the fragments and primary observations shaping a set of habits—a
“psychopathology of everyday life” in Roussel’s case, a life of peculiari-
ties and extravagances, all supported with testimony from family and
friends, barbers and tailors.3 Over the long course of notation, the note-
book was the source of Leiris’s essays on Roussel’s work, but it also ap-
pears to have served as a frame through which Leiris was able to perceive
a distinctive ludic vein penetrating surrealist practice, a fault line that
crossed the political and temporal loyalties erected by Dada, surrealism,
and its dissidents, traversing the barriers that had been constructed
between absurdity and avant-gardism, the modern and antimodern, au-
tomatism, psychoanalysis, and informe. Indeed, Leiris reached wide for
Roussel’s “literary tomb,” sweeping in Marcel Proust, Paul Éluard, Erik
Satie, and Arnold Schoenberg in addition to Picasso, Duchamp, Mas-
son, Giacometti, and Miró.4 Through a Roussellian prism of distortion,
repetition, and systematic polysemy, Leiris identified in the work of
these artists and writers a common dismantling of medium and mean-
ing, motivated by a ludic impulse so violent that it would ultimately
“push its consumers to self-destruction.”5 For these artists the pursuit
of self-estrangement—the moment when they and their work became
unrecognizable to themselves—had become an obsession that exceeded
the automatist experiments of Breton’s surrealism. Seeking an extreme
fluidity of identity, they constructed a range of mechanistic systems for
ludic ungrounding, based with absurd simplicity on the capacity to say
two or more conceptually disparate things with a single word or form:
structured, that is to say, according to the logic of the pun.
Unlike the surrealists, who long sought to trace unconscious im-
pulses in order to arrive at the point of incomprehension, Roussel
probed language itself, using wordplay to systematically undermine the
utilitarian order, “a richer means,” observed Leiris, “to the same extent
that it is riskier.”6 Certainly, for the visual artists Leiris singled out, the
risk factor showed as a moment of aberration or rupture: Duchamp saw
Roussel’s play Impressions of Africa (1910) in 1912 and finalized his break
with “retinal painting”; Picasso, in a surrealist interregnum, played ex-
quisite corpse, stopped painting, and indulged in poetic writing; André
Masson took up sand as a medium, temporarily displacing both the au-
tomatic drawing that made his work central to Breton and the atavistic
paintings that attracted Georges Bataille; Alberto Giacometti set aside
unified sculptural form to make dysfunctional machines that produced
nothing; and Joan Miró, perhaps Roussel’s most attentive student, made
his series of “antipaintings” based on appropriated mass media materi-
als, images that imbued meaning with degenerative force through a se-
ries of distortions and transpositions common to visual language itself.7
These last two figures, Giacometti and Miró, provided the spine for
Leiris’s unachieved tribute to Roussel. Singled out from the moment
of Leiris’s 1929 break with Breton in back-to-back issues of the rene-
gade journal Documents, and cited thereafter in e very proposal for the
Tombeau de Raymond Roussel, Miró and Giacometti seem to have given
pictorial and tactile form to Roussel’s poetic legacy. Their work of this
period testifies to the power of ludic techniques to materialize the latent
crisis of certainty that modernism sought to suppress with its mandates
186 Chapter Four

to instrumentality and functionalism.8 It was their great accomplish-
ment to have fully inhabited (however briefly) what one critic has called
a “structure of undecideability” characteristic of this critical moment,
and to have tested the abdication of mastery it implies.9 And because
the ambiguity of their work, its insistence on opening the boundaries
of visual language to reinterpretation and change, was enabled by sys-
tematic and mechanical means, their critique straddles the utopian jux-
taposition of instrumentality and liberation. Locating this instance of
Spielraum—an improbable freedom, mechanically achieved—within
the heart of the Documents group links surrealism’s earliest ludic strate-
gies to the violent and destructive play of its renegade branch, with par
ticular relevance to shaping Roger Caillois’s ethnographically inflected
critique of play as it emerged in the years just following World War II.
In opening surrealism’s buried Roussellian vein, I don’t mean to sug-
gest that before his death Roussel had confided the key to his metagram-
matic technique to Leiris, who in turn communicated it to his cohort
(Leiris stated openly that this was not the case).10 Rather, I am suggest-
ing that the work of t hese artists shows significant common ground be-
yond their association with the renegade surrealists: they emerge from
a set of conditions that called for drastic revisions of artistic practices in
response to forms of modern experience increasingly inflected by me-
chanical production. Long before Roussel posthumously revealed the
procedure by which he produced his irrational narratives, writers like
Robert Desnos, Jean Ferry, and Roger Vitrac had noted the antipro-
ductive mechanical structures and iconography that shaped Roussellian
polysemy and were championing it as a strategy for opening language
to a new range of expressive, sabotaging possibilities.11 Vitrac particu-
larly identified “how poetry destroys itself ” in Roussel’s work through
phrases taking off in two directions at once, singling out two paranoma-
sic phrases from the poem “Chiquenaude” (1900): “les vers de la dou-
blure dans la pièce du fort pantalon rouge” (the worms of the lining of
the patch of the heavy red trousers) and “les vers de la doublure dans
la pièce (de théâtre) du Forban talon rouge” (the lines of verse of the
understudy in the play of Red-Heel the Buccaneer).12 “His work is a
factory,” Vitrac exclaimed, a machine built “with the rarest motors of
such unfailing accuracy that the vocabulary is forced to give way before
the charge of barbarism.” He went on: “In the modern factory Raymond
Roussel organizes a sort of ‘work to rule.’ He applies all the regulations
with implacable and cruel punctiliousness. Nothing is left to accident or
to chance, everything is limited, assembled, but without the least play,
without oil at the joints, with no safety valves, and he congratulates
Pun 187
himself when the wheels jam, the bars break like glass or the boilers
explode.”13
This is the exploration of ludic dismantling that Roussel’s legatees
within the surrealist movement extended, shattering traditional forms
with an apparatus that could be described as a repetition machine: a
rationalized system for disorder that finds and exploits the potential
for ludic havoc within the most automatic and instrumental of modern
structures.14 Using repetition as the hinge between mechanistic opera-
tions and the rhythms of play, Giacometti and Miró followed Leiris and
Roussel in opening the infinite possibilities of meaning offered in ar-
tistic form: restoring to art its room-for-play.15 And in recognizing the
power of ludic imagery to systematically undermine the purely commu-
nicative function of visual language, they revealed how that language
works: the hierarchies it imposes and the subject it constructs.
Radical Repetition
Raymond Roussel was a marginal, even reviled writer in his own time,
who exacerbated his notoriety after his 1933 suicide when he posthu-
mously revealed the key to his bizarre plays and novels in the form of
the exposé How I Wrote Certain of My Books (1935).16 In it, he described
what he called his procédé, a methodical system by which narratives are
simultaneously produced and unraveled by exploiting the inherent mul-
tivalence of language through wordplay: homophones, metatheses, and
the minimal graphic substitutions commonly known as puns.
How I Wrote Certain of My Books discloses nesting variations of the
procédé, beginning with the careful construction of two nearly identi-
cal sentences with radically differing meanings:
I chose two almost identical words (reminiscent of metagrams).
For example, billiard and pillard. Then I added to it words similar
but taken in two different directions, thus obtaining two almost
identical phrases . . .
1. Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard . . .
[The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table . . .]
and
2. Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard . . .
[The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer . . .]
The two sentences found, it was a case of writing a story which
could begin with the first and finish with the second. . . . Expanding
188 Chapter Four

this method, I began to search for new words relating to billiard, always
taking them in a different direction other than that which first came
to mind, and each time this provided me with a further creation.17
Roussel’s procédé (which in this case produced the novel Impres-
sions of Africa) achieves its mechanical aspect from a motif central to
mass production: repetition.18 This commitment to potentially infinite
expansion-through-reiteration is a form of recursive reproduction that
effectively empties its objects of significance—the sentences behave
like two mirrors reflecting each other into an infinite and meaning-
less abyme. For Michel Foucault, the ultimate significance of Roussel’s
work lies h ere, in having devised a mechanism for producing a semantic
void through the juxtaposition of two sentences that are “marvelously
identical, diametrical opposites.”19 This was, by Foucault’s estimation, a
form of “radical repetition,” a mode of representation that, in delivering
difference from within repetition, creates a vacancy, an open space.20
“Hence in a word a vacuum opens up,” agrees Gilles Deleuze, “the rep-
etition of a word leaves the difference of its meanings gaping.”21 Yet
by Deleuze’s own admission, this is not a desperate chasm into which
representation disappears, but a kind of inventive “breathing room”—
room to maneuver, room to play. Roussel’s ludic mechanisms activate
“liberating repetitions”: in prying words and phrases apart from their
most obvious definitions, meaning opens onto myriad possibilities.
The freedom this implies is borne out in Roussel’s narrative works,
where his repetition-based system allows his characters to live experiences
that are simultaneously the same as their most prosaic descriptions, yet
radically diff erent.22 The “vacuum” Deleuze describes is crammed
with extraordinary exploits and characters assisted by assemblage-like
machines, narratives that in turn had been produced with other lan-
guage games, resulting in a succession of one improbable scenario after
another—a “chain of enigmas” that only halted when an episode ap-
peared that could accommodate the situation suggested by the second
sentence of the initial metagrammatic set.23 For example one of Rous-
sel’s text-generating games exploited semantically related words joined
by the preposition with, so that a common phrase like roue à caoutchouc
(rubber tire) suggested the scene in which the pillard Talou “swagger-
ingly [roue] planted his foot on his e nemy’s corpse” in the shade of a rub-
ber tree (caoutchouc).24 With another, “evolutionary” method, Roussel
distorted found texts “a little as though it were a m
atter of deriving them
from the drawings of a rebus,” revealing latent sets of imagery: a quote
from Victor Hugo, “eut reçu pour hochet la couronne de Rome” (had
Pun 189
received for a teething ring the crown of Rome), devolved into the hom-
onymic constellation “Ursule, brochet, lac Huronne, drome” (Ursula,
pike, Lake Huron, [hippo]drome). Roussel’s shoemaker’s address, “Hell-
stern, 5 Place Vendome,” exploded into “Hélice, tourne, zinc, plat, se
rend, dome” (propeller, turn, zinc, flat, goes [becomes], dome)—elements
Roussel then reassembled into a fantastic machine. An advertisement
for an apparatus called “Phonotypia” became the phonetic misprision
“fausse note tibia” (wrong note tibia), one character’s macabre musical
instrument, constructed from his own amputated leg.25
In each of these cases, the engine of the story is arbitrary: things and
beings “follow language” rather than a meaningful purpose set by the
author.26 The detailed fiction Roussel erects, then, is something of a red
herring, for the significance of Roussel’s procédé lies not in the content
of the original sentences but in the verisimilitude of their forms: the
fact that by the alteration of just two letters—the “b” and the “i” that
take billiard to pillard—nearly e very other word in the sentence has been
transformed to mean something completely different.27 Roussel’s pro
cess is ultimately a demonstration of the mobility and potential insta-
bility of all language. His ingenuity lies not so much in crafting and
burying puns within the text, but in developing a system of composition
itself based on the structures of dysfunction inherent within the signi-
fying machinations of language: punning pushed to the level of a new
form of artistic practice. “Dada used the pun as an end,” Leiris would
point out, “but Roussel used the pun as a beginning.”28
In its mechanical and rule-based precision, Roussel’s procédé can be
understood as a mechanism for sustaining an automatic creative mode,
much in the manner of surrealist parlor games. This alone might have
accounted for the surrealists’ attraction to his work, and the 1933 rev-
elation that Roussel had used “found” language and imagery as starting
points for generating his elaborate texts would have been particularly
compelling for André Breton, who at that time was codifying the meth-
ods of hasard objectif as a paradigm for ideal, that is to say, psychically
motivated subject/ object relations.29 But Roussel’s revelation would have
reverberated somewhat differently for the renegade surrealists in Leiris’s
orbit. For the artists and writers close to the journal Documents, working
under the influence of Georges Bataille’s mandate to dismantle repressive
formal structures, it was not the content of Roussel’s imagery that would
be important, but the way the procédé materialized language, dissolv-
ing meaning in the fluidity of boundaries between alternating seman-
tic forms. For w hether Roussel’s original sentence was appropriated or
created in the more conventional sense (that is, from the imagination)
190 Chapter Four

the meaning of the words was of no real importance. The original sen-
tences only barely make sense—like an exquisite corpse, the individual
elements obey the rules of grammar and syntax, yet in combination they
verge on absurdity. B ecause Roussel’s word choices w ere made on the
basis of graphic similarity or phonetic equivalence alone, chosen, that
is, at random with regard to content, they sacrifice the rational transmis-
sion of meaning. It was this assault on the transparent channels of liter
ature, and the implied attack on the communication necessary for social
discourse, that so alienated Roussel’s audiences in his own time. And it
was the fact that the affront was made at the most fundamental levels of
representation that so endeared him to an avant-garde committed to the
destabilization of instrumental language. As one critic disparaged: “The
major obstacle for us, readers, is that this is not literature.”30
Antiliterature, then: identifying the absurdist potential of language
and turning it into a degenerative force, through a series of distor-
tions and transpositions common to language itself.31 “Antiliterature”
had of course been present in surrealism from its nascent days, when André
Breton’s interest in freeing words was spelled out in the pages of the ironi-
cally named journal Littérature—a play on the word rature, or erasure:
the erasure of literature. In t hese early days of surrealist revolution, when
language was being interrogated at its foundations, Breton could still as-
sert: “with wordplay our surest reasons for being are at stake.”32 And while
Breton would shift his focus away from wordplay in the late 1920s and
’30s, surrealism’s original commitments to aporia in language remained
strong for a number of figures banished to the margins of the movement,
concentrating within the so-called rue Blomet group, an anti-cénacle that
met in André Masson’s studio comprising Antonin Artaud, Roland Tual,
Georges Limbour, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, Joan Miró, and Mi-
chel Leiris. As Masson would remember, Roussel was already present in
conversation t here as early as 1924, and in 1925 the wealthy writer would
visit to purchase paintings from Masson and Miró at Leiris’s behest.33 But
as is evident from Leiris’s recollections, Roussel’s mode of techno-ludic
liberation was present in the general spirit of the place, where a desire
“to break with current reality or—at minimum to transfigure it” held
sway, fueled by “the pleasure to be had in flinging off . . . the yoke of
rules and moral restrictions society was imposing on us.”34
Importantly, this did not entail a complete rejection of constraints.
Even as they maintained their disdain for conventions, by Leiris’s account
there was always within the group a certain tempering of automatist ex-
cess by a common concern for composition. Like Roussel, the rue Blomet
artists seemed to understand that a “merveille, a clearly irrational thing,
Pun 191
emanating from strange associations” was only valuable if elicited, ab-
surdly, from within the rigid grasp of regulation. The procédé, “inexact
but precise,” provided a model for stripping the thin wrapper of ratio-
nality from irrational and chaotic forces within even the most instru-
mentalized forms.35 Certainly it was this attention to “rules in their pure
state . . . exempt from any actual intention”36 that drew Leiris, particu-
larly, to Roussel’s work: “What directly influenced me in Biffures and
Fourbis was the Roussel device, the one he revealed in Comment j’ai ecrit
certains de mes livres. It wasn’t so much the plays on words that I retained.
Plays on words, as you know, have always prodigiously interested me.
What I retained was what Roussel says concerning his plays on words or
sentence transformations: that they led him to ‘equations of facts’: the
facts or materials that his word games had provided him with. His task
then consisted of inventing a story that would connect these facts.”37
The “Double Figure of Words”
Leiris’s interest in linguistic slippage had first showed itself in his

“Glossaire: J’y serre mes gloses,” a ludic dictionary published in three
installments in La Révolution surréaliste (1925–36; figure 4.2) that ad-
vised ignoring “accepted meanings” in order to discover “hidden quali-
ties” and “secret ramifications . . . channeled by associations of sounds,
forms, and ideas.”38 Like Roussel, Leiris based his language play on
associative reassignments of sound and image: the glossary definitions
read as homophonic variants of the words in question, with little or no
meaningful relation: nombre (number) is transformed into l’ombre niée
(the disavowed spectre); ingénu (ingenuous) is transposed as le genie nu
(naked genius); etincelle (spark) spools out into éteinte et célée sitôt ailée
(extinct and concealed once on the wing).39
Leiris’s paranomastic glossary operates on words in a number of
ways—including displacement, distortion, creation (of neologisms), and
juxtaposition—but all of t hese strategies follow the logic of a mechanism
that Leiris called the bifur, itself a divided or equivocal agent that per-
forms the very condition that it designates: Leiris mated it with the nearly
interchangeable biffure, a crossing out or erasure. Named for the act of
bifurcating, “the way a train does when it obeys the switches and changes
direction,” the bifur activates a breathless flow of thought, “taken by the
rails of language toward something dizzying or blinding, . . . carried along
in a kind of movement that could just as well be called a biffure, b ecause
we see an equivocation here, a miscalculation that we go back over, as hap-
pens in the case of a lapse of speaking (no sooner blurted out than
192 Chapter Four

La Révolution surréaliste 3 (April 1925): 6, with Michel
4.2
Leiris, “Glossaire: J’y serre mes gloses.” Getty Research
Institute (86-S83).
corrected) when we say to ourselves ‘I’ve made a slip of the tongue,’ when
one’s tongue has gone off the track, at a fork in the road or a crossroads.”40
The bifur/ biffure dyad “exploits the explosive value of words, dissect-
ing them surgically.”41 It expresses not merely the splitting or “multiple
semantic condition” of words, but the “blinding” that occurs at the
crossing point of two or more meanings—an explosion that, flaring in
many directions at once, arrays words in constellations linked by path-
ways into seemingly infinite networks of meaning. Meaning is dispersed,
everywhere at once, and the reader (or viewer) is in turn both propelled
and stymied, blown along in the flying spray of so many ungraspable
choices. “Labored language, in short shreds,” Leiris specified. This was
the path of decomposition the “Glossaire” equated with puns.42
Moreover, in the priority they give to unfixing meaning, Leiris and
Roussel also share a disregard for the pragmatics of communication:
“A monstrous aberration c auses people to believe that language came
into being to facilitate their relations with one another,” Leiris wrote in
the note accompanying the “Glossaire.” “It is with this in mind, of use-
fulness, that they make dictionaries in which words are catalogued and
given a well-defined meaning. . . . As for usage, it is superfluous to say
that that is the lowest criterion to which one could refer.”43 In place of
the transparency of useful information, the “Glossaire” opens words into
other, conflicting words, sparking a mechanically driven force that un-
dermines the communicative stability of language. Aleatory, successive,
and repetitive, its concatenations mimic the incoherence of automatic
utterances, but without even unconscious motivations.44 Like Roussel’s
procédé, Leiris’s bifur mobilizes a contagion of forms suppressed by the
simple equations of the dictionary, radically compromising identity in
favor of a nonhierarchical and reversible flux such that, in Leiris’s words,
“A man is a moving tree, just as much as a tree is a rooted man, . . . the sky
is a rarefied earth, the earth a denser sky. And if I see a dog r unning, it is
just as much the run that is dogging.”45
Like Roussel’s own decompositional method, the derailment of
thought mobilized by the bifur was not unsystematic. In fact what Leiris
admired about the dictionary was its mechanistic and arbitrary structure,
which o rders its inventory according to graphic similarity rather than
sense—a stochastic flaw buried within an apparently immutable system.46
The tension between regulation and anarchy expressed by this paradox
provided Leiris with a model for evoking a new kind of meaning, one
born from the gap opened between sonority (language, embodied as an
utterance, or the material substance of words), and reference (the vari
ous meanings that could be assigned to those words). Acknowledging the
194 Chapter Four

“hallucinatory power contained in language,” and releasing it with the aid
of an instrumental structure (a catalog of words or a text-generating mech-
anism), was the Roussellian legacy that would eventually allow Leiris to
break with the valorization of “abandon, pure and simple” that Breton
had insisted upon in automatic writing.47 Rather, like the wordplay that
Duchamp and Desnos w ere introducing to the surrealist milieu at around
the same time, Leiris’s own approach was utterly enmeshed with mechani-
cal processes—the “Glossaire” gives priority to the seriality, repetition,
and displacement of authorship common to technological structures.
By the 1930s, Leiris would refuse to allow that the mechanisms he was
deploying were anything other than conscious representations of uncon-
scious processes: revelatory mistakes, like slips of the tongue and pen.48
That is to say that Leiris’s wordplay mimes unconscious processes by
mechanically reproducing the linguistic chaos that underpins conscious
conceptual work. His “Glossaire,” as evidence of a techno-ludic process,
takes on the problem of instrumental language directly, performing its
opposition to work in every instance of its output. It leads readers to an
understanding of the mobility of language through a forced vacillation
that brings them to the point of indecision, over and over. In the pro
cess words are transformed from transparent vehicles for a message to
materializations of language: multiple, reversible, mirrored, and split. The
Spielraum opened through this method of critical dismantling would be-
come Leiris’s signature motif, appearing most often in the form of the bifur.
Miró’s Wit
With the surrealists of the rue Blomet in close and constant contact, it
was inevitable that Leiris’s ludic priorities would begin to show them-
selves in the work of the visual artists in the group. We see it take tan-
gible form, for instance, in Joan Miró’s 1932 assemblage Painting-Object
(figure 4.3), which appears at first glance to offer the viewer nothing
more than a satisfying example of surrealist juxtaposition: the meeting
(to paraphrase Lautréamont) of a painted rock, a seashell, some wood,
and a mirror on a scrappy board. But for the French viewer familiar with
the slang that compares a mussel with female genitalia, the pebble sud-
denly reads as a skirt, the wooden cylinders as legs, and the painted fig-
ure on the rock as a torso. The composition reveals itself as a dirty joke,
a joke made emphatic by the now very vulgar role of the mirror, angled
for the viewer’s pleasure.49 The shifting identity of the piece, from in-
scrutable assemblage to a surprise construction of sexual display, traces
surrealism’s own trajectory into the 1930s; specifically, its steady move-
Pun 195
Joan Miró, Painting-Object, 1932. Philadelphia Museum
4.3
of Art. © 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp.
ment away from the pursuit of unconscious eduction to the conscious

exploration of the “automatism effects” that could be achieved through
play strategies, and, eventually, to the fully destructive implications of
Freud’s theories for visual representation.
Painting-Object fascinates on a number of levels, gesturing both back-
ward, to Miró’s previous exploration of the fluidity of signs, and forward, to
the Freudian revival to come at the hands of Jacques Lacan. It is impossible
not to recall, for example, the artist’s extended exploration of polysemy in
his paintings of the previous decade, in which a single, lozenge-shaped form
serves to signify a variety of sexually charged orifices, fluctuating between
the ocular, the oral, and the vulval.50 Like a mussel shell, this sign is typi-
cally rimmed with wiry hair (or flames, or rays), drawing Painting-Object
into its erotic metaphorical chain. At the same time, the strategic position
of the mirror sets off an additional relay of references familiar from Lacan’s
seminars: the specular ruse that defeated Medusa (herself an ambiguous
figure for Freud, at once phallus and castration); the primacy of the phal-
lus, founded on the basis of lack (the mussel shell is empty); the role of the
mirror in the understanding of the divided self; and the founding of an
entire symbolic order on this fractured basis.51 The viewer is reminded that
Masson, whose studio was adjacent to Miró’s in the rue Blomet, was close
to Lacan, and that the painter’s relationship with the psychoanalyst would
also produce a relay between hidden meaning, revelation, and genitalia in
the form of the painting Terre érotique (1955; figure 4.4), a quasi-abstract
landscape painted by Masson to screen the lewd painting Lacan had just
hung in his study: Courbet’s Origin of the World (1866; figure 4.5).52
196 Chapter Four

(above) André Masson, Terre érotique, 1955. Whereabouts
4.4
unknown. © 2018 ars / adagp.
(below) Gustave Courbet, Origin of the World, 1866. Musée
4.5
d’Orsay, Paris. Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource.
As with Miró’s Painting-Object, the joke Masson’s landscape makes is
sly and selective, available only to the elect few: the panneau-masque
reveals itself as a nude only a fter one has had a glimpse of the Courbet it
mimes. After that, Terre érotique flickers unstably between—one could
say it bifurcates (Masson was close to Leiris as well, who claimed him
as his mentor)—into heterogeneous genres: landscape/nude, screen/
painting, pastoral/ carnal, permitted/ forbidden.53
For one critic steeped in surrealism, the u nion of heterogeneous
elements forced in works like Painting-Object is the very definition of
Freudian wit. Jean-Luc Nancy describes wit’s appearance in the arts as
a crisis in form, a structural “undecidability,” that ultimately dissolves
meaning, as imagery flashes between, for example, abstraction and figu-
ration, raw material and representation.54 Read in this way, the principle
of juxtaposition grounding all of surrealist practice operates as a ludic
critique of stability and order, and signals a lapse in choice—a failure or
inability to follow rational judgment with decisive action. Miró’s wit in
particular points to the paradoxical nature of puns: the separate elements
of Painting-Object were carefully chosen to confound choice. Instead
they insist on the simultaneous representation of referents so incompat-
ible, yet so equally present, that identity and its correlate, meaning, are
rendered indeterminate. Painting-Object’s mirror (a homophone for
Miró) performs this oscillation particularly well at the level of repre
sentation, flattening and abstracting the object itself. Is the “painting”
of the object’s title the painted torso on the stone? Or is it the reflected
image of the object, set easel-like into its base? This play of forms is the
locus of e very pun: affinity, as Nancy would say, set in witty dialectical
friction with difference.55
For Nancy, the crisis in meaning represented by the sudden ubiquity
of play in the arts is the defining motif of the modern era, and its most
radical aspect. Certainly, with regard to punning in the visual arts, Miró
had an immediate precedent in Marcel Duchamp. But more decisively,
through his close association with Leiris, Miró had direct access to
Duchamp’s own model, the figure to whom Duchamp owed his turn
away from cubism: the experimental writer Raymond Roussel.56
In 1927, two years prior to the official schism in surrealism’s ranks, and
five years before the appearance of Painting-Object, Miró commemo-
rated his alliance with Leiris in his “painting poem,” Musique, Seine,
Michel, Bataille et moi (figure 4.6), one of a number of works from this
time in which Miró v iolated the static space of painting with the dia-
chrony of writing. But Miró’s very system of artistic production had
already been resonating with Leiris’s for several years—had, it seems,
198 Chapter Four

Joan Miró, Musique, Seine, Michel, Bataille et moi,
4.6
1927. Volkart Foundation, Switzerland. © 2018 Successió
Miró / ars /a dagp.
been consciously modeled on the dislocating and bifurcating scheme

that Leiris had identified as the basis for Roussel’s procédé: heteroge-
neous elements joined by “fortuitous formal aspects.”57 Referring in his
notebook to the extraordinarily complex structure of Roussel’s New
Impressions of Africa (1932), Leiris singled out the author’s systematic
use of a “material point of departure”—in this case, a miniature sou-
venir lorgnette bearing two different views of Egypt—for developing
the “quasi-cryptographic” structure of the book, in which phrases are
presented in telescoping sets of parentheses. Just as the bifurcation of
vision suggested by the two different photographs confounded vision,
reversing the instrument’s usual prosthetic function and rendering the
lorgnette useless, so the excess of symbolic marks in New Impressions of
Africa generated what Leiris would identify as “prismatic subdivisions
of the Idea,” culminating in a “disintegration of language” that rendered
no idea at all.58
The model must have circulated in the rue Blomet group long before
Leiris finally published his first essay on Roussel. As early as 1924, Miró
wrote to his friend specifically about applying Leiris’s text-generating
processes to image production: “I am thinking about our conversation,
when you told me how you started with a word and watched to see
Pun 199
Joan Miró, Un oiseau en poursuit d’une abeille et la baisse,
4.7
1927. Private collection. © 2018 Successió Miró /a rs / adagp.
where it would take you. I have done a series of small things on wood, in
which I take off from some form in the wood. Using an artificial t hing as
a point of departure like this, I feel, is parallel to what writers can obtain
by starting with an arbitrary sound; the R.R. [Raymond Roussel] from
the song of a cricket, for example . . . even when you use the sound of
vowels and consonants that have no meaning at all.”59 As Margit Rowell
has pointed out, this is Miró’s first reference to his use of something
given as the point of departure for what he called his “pictorial process,”
the “mathematical rhythm” that would structure his works for more
than a decade to come—and conceived specifically with Roussel in
mind.60 By 1925, Miró was incorporating the chance marks made by the
stretcher bars of his canvas into the pictorial schemes of their painted
surfaces—here as a horizon, there as a schematic scaffold for a body.61 If
his creative process had become rhythmic, it had a cadence that oper-
ated with the ludic mutability of a visual pun.
By 1927, Miró’s experiments with the bifurcation of meaning had
begun to show in his “painting-poems,” canvases that “step off ” from a
text fragment to spool out into an enigmatic constellation of forms. Un
oiseau en poursuit d’une abeille et la baisse (1927; figure 4.7) is one of these,
a painting whose graffiti-like text conflates two readings when spoken
200 Chapter Four

aloud: “A bird pursues a bee and debases it” (et l’abaisse) and “A bird
pursues a bee and copulates with it” (et la baise).62 The thrill of using the
double sense of baiser is inseparable from this coupling’s sublimation
of the sexual act—as with Painting-Object, witty wordplay barely masks
the evocation of sexual debasement in what Freud would call a tenden-
tious joke, a ludic form that permits the release of repressed sexual drives
in the “polite company” of oil painting.63 As Leiris observed, with t hese
paintings Miró had come to an understanding of the emptiness, or bif-
fure (erasure) of the bifur, generated by the paradox of bistable forms:
“not the negative notion of nothingness, but the positive understanding
of a term at once identical and contrary to nothingness.”64
Mechanisms of the Techno-Ludic
Importantly, Miró’s adaptation of wordplay to painting reached beyond

its literalization as text-in-painting to allow ludic strategies to inform the
basic structures of his artistic process. The system he developed seems to
have begun with a set of parameters in the form of a ready-made start-
ing point, and ended, as Miró himself observed, with a “final stage of
degeneration.”65 Two drawings from consecutive pages of a 1925 sketch-
book demonstrate the germ of this strategy, as the impression made by
the preparatory drawing for the 1925 painting Photo—Ceci est la couleur
de mes rêves serves as a point of departure for the drawing on the next
page, a sketch that was eventually used as the basis for a second painting,
entitled Painting (The Sum) (1925; figures 4.8–4.11). In the derivative
drawing (figure 4.9), the large dot at the top of the image was retained,
but the phrase below it, “ceci est la couleur de mes rêves,” scatters into a
column of apparently unrelated numbers, and the word photo becomes a
schematic, ithyphallic figure with only a formal relation to its origins.66
This is precisely the automated scheme of Roussel’s procédé: changing
one or two simple elements to make an entirely new image. And the fact
that Miró had conjured Painting (The Sum) from the traces that Photo
had impressed on the thin pages of his sketchbook suggests a second
antiauthorial possibility offered by Roussel’s example, one that would
allow Miró to turn the lessons of the readymade against the conventions
of painting: the transformational logic of the palimpsest, a staple of par-
ody and caricature. Formed through a mimetic, effectively ludic gesture,
the palimpsest derives its power from another, preexisting image—it is
a form unable, in fact, to exist without its model, however thoroughly
and unrecognizably it may have transformed it.67 As such, the painted
palimpsest reaches beyond allowable artistic conventions such as influence
Pun 201
(above) Joan Miró, preparatory
4.8
drawing for Photo—Ceci est la
couleur de mes rêves, 1925. Fundació
Miró, Barcelona. © 2018 Successió
Miró / ars / adagp.
(left) Joan Miró, preparatory
4.9
drawing for Painting (The Sum),
1925. Fundació Miró. © 2018
Successió Miró /a rs /a dagp.
4.10 (above) Joan Miró, Photo—Ceci est la couleur
de mes rêves, 1925. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection,
2002. Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Image source: Art Resource. © 2018 Successió
Miró /a rs /a dagp.
(right) Joan Miró, Painting (The Sum), 1925.
4.11
mnam. © 2018 Successió Miró /a rs /a dagp.
or even thematic variation to embrace a condition in which the very
possibility of creative genesis is denied, in favor of an irreducible inter-
dependence of one image on another. Miró’s sketchbook of 1924–25
is soaked through with this systematic process: the drawing for Photo
ultimately generated three more drawings, each in turn producing a
precisely corresponding painting, and the drawing for his painting The
Birth of the World (1925) was the starting point for five further succes-
sive drawings. By this method, Miró was able to sustain a nearly indus-
trial rate of production: eighty paintings in ten months between 1925
and 1926; then an additional seventy paintings in the first six months
of 1927.68 Not merely production, but reproduction describes the terms
of Miró’s systematic explorations of this moment: Miró had automated
painting. The logic of the palimpsest casts his work from this time not
toward the biomorphic forms for which he would become famous, but
in the direction of nonorganic technical mimesis, and modes of produc-
tion approaching Benjamin’s “second technologies,” photography and
film. “This is hardly painting,” Miró wrote to Leiris with satisfaction,
“but I don’t give a damn.”69
“I was painting with an absolute contempt for painting,” Miró would
recall in 1928, and indeed, his work of this time bears striking parallels
to the “antiliterature” models on which Leiris was patterning his own
work.70 These appear most legibly as “antipainting” in Miró’s collage-based
series of 1933: a suite of eighteen collages prepared between January and
February of that year, followed by eighteen paintings modeled on them,
completed systematically between March and June (see plates 8–15 and
figures 4.12 and 4.13). Just as Leiris, building on Roussel’s language
games, set about to erase “literature” through its own means, so Miró
was determined to paint his way free of, as he put it, “everything that ex-
ists in painting,” beginning with the myths of interiority associated with
artistic mastery. Miró’s recourse to technological means to gain this free-
dom from skill and convention is striking. Uniformity and repetition
characterize every aspect of the series: the paintings were made in the
same order that the collages w ere originally produced; all of the collages
and canvases were consistent in style and color; each was impersonally
named and systematically dated. But most importantly, ready-made im-
ages culled from mass media sources displace preparatory drawing as
the origin points of the paintings, iconographically and pictorially reaf-
firming the mechanistic process by which Miró (and Leiris and Roussel
before him) set about his task.71
As with Roussel, Miró’s choices w ere arbitrary with regard to mean-
ing: the collage fragments were selected for their formal qualities rather
204 Chapter Four

Joan Miró, Collage, February 11, 1933, 1933. moma. Gift of the artist. © 2018
4.12
Successió Miró /a rs /a
dagp. Digital image © moma / Licensed by scala / Art Resource.
Joan Miró, Painting, June 13, 1933, 1933. moma. Loula D. Lasker Bequest
4.13
(by exchange). © 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp. Digital image © moma / Licensed
by scala / Art Resource.
4.14 Joan Miró, Collage,
January 31, 1933, 1933,
detail. © 2018 Successió
Miró / ars / adagp. Digital
image © moma / L icensed by
than for the meanings attached to their specific referents, confounding

any expectations of legibility that might be set up by the clear refer-
entiality of the images. In a few cases, for example when a hot w ater
bottle and glove evoke a torso and hand (figure 4.14), the fragments
cohere into witty figurative assemblages reminiscent of Object of just
a few months before. But for the most part, the collaged elements are
scattered across the pictorial field in an unrelated way, raising questions
about the tension between agency and chance in the construction of the
preparatory images. In an interview of 1931 Miró had this to say about
the cryptic origins of his work: “I paint the way I walk along the street.
I pick up a pearl or a crust of bread and that’s what I give back, what I
collect. When I stand in front of a canvas I never know what I’m g oing
to do—and nobody is more surprised than I at what comes out.”72
This statement has been received as evidence of Miró’s commitment
to the spontaneity of psychic automatism, and is strikingly close to the
way Christian Schad described his automatic approach to making his
206 Chapter Four

photograms of fourteen years before. There is also the surrealist commit-
ment to “objective chance” to consider; Breton only fully theorized the
concept in the 1930s. But taken within the context of his alignment with
Roussel’s ludic structures, the assertion seems to refer to the automatic
in its other, mechanical sense, and to Miró’s highly organized system for
rendering his own creative actions “automatic”—actions enacted, that is,
with minimum spontaneous invention on the part of the artist. When
Miró speaks of his work at this time as having been “born in a state of
hallucination,” he is referring to Leiris’s own deference to the “halluci-
natory power of language”: the potential for proliferating meanings in
all imagery.73 This is neither automatism’s inchoate delirium (as practiced
by Miró’s neighbor Masson), nor the “hallucination effect” prompted by
the decalcomania process (an aleatory painting technique that would
tear through the surrealist group in the late 1930s), but the carefully con-
trolled (il)logic of the visual pun, a derailed train of thought that, open-
ing onto the possibility of the other within visual language, mirrors back
a subject that is itself irretrievably sundered and derivative.
This kind of ambiguity is an effect in which late surrealism revelled.
With startling contemporaneity to Miró’s exploration of the palimpsest,
Paul Éluard had reproduced a number of erotic bistable postcard images
in issue 3–4 (1933) of the journal Minotaure (figure 4.15); and in 1935
Man Ray’s ambiguous untitled photograph, shifting between torso and
bull’s head, would appear as that magazine’s frontispiece ( figure 4.16).74
Most famously, Salvador Dalí would base an entire methodology on the
image of a face he perceived in a photograph of an African village turned
on its side (figure 4.17).75 But while each of t hese surrealists located the
origins of their visual punning in mechanical sources (from postcard
reproductions to photography), none would go so far as Miró in the
pursuit of a technically reliable system by which to produce paintings.
The “machine” Miró developed bloats and distorts the original images,
doubling their identities according to a strict rule of formal resemblance
and referential difference. Just as each collage has its corresponding
painting, within the individual paintings, Miró systematically accounts
for every fragment of its generative collage, in an extremely disciplined
exercise of twinning and differing.
Some of these transformations entail a shift from one recognizable
figure to another very different one, and seem to refer directly to Leiris’s
critique of the hierarchies of metaphor: a collaged vacuum cleaner is
just as much a painted reclining nude as the nude is a fallen vacuum
cleaner (figures 4.18 and 4.19). O thers reproduce figures generated by a
principle of punning metonymy, as when, for example, a milking machine
Pun 207
Interior page, Minotaure 3–4 (1933), depicting postcards
4.15
from Max Ernst collection. Getty Research Institute (85-S173).
Table of contents page, Minotaure 7 (1935), with image
4.16
by Man Ray. Getty Research Institute (85-S173).
Salvador Dalí, Visage paranoiaque, in Le Surréalisme au
4.17
service de la révolution 3 (1931): n.p. Getty Research Institute
(84-S151).
(above) Joan Miró, Collage, February 10, 1933, 1933,
4.18
detail. Fundació Miró. © 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp.
(below) Joan Miró, Painting, June 10, 1933, 1933, detail.
4.19
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. © 2018 Successió
Miró / ars / adagp. Image courtesy Allen Phillips / Wadsworth
Atheneum.
is rendered as a set of udders (figures 4.20 and 4.21). But most of the

transmutations extend Leiris’s Rousselian formula even further, to their
logical extremes for modernist practices. A wheelbarrow becomes noth-
ing more than an arrangement of geometrical forms (figures 4.22 and
4.23); likewise, an elaborately detailed image of a machine is rendered
so schematically as to be unrecognizable (figures 4.24 and 4.25); and
a numeral six topped with a wheat sheaf labeled “aurora” gives up all
meaningful relation to its tufted and hole-punched twin (figures 4.26
and 4.27). Identity is disabled in a pictorial indulgence of polysemy,
as context and detail fall away from the uniformly “realist” drawings
Pun 211
4.20 (above) Joan Miró, Collage, January 30,
1933, 1933, detail. Fundació Miró. © 2018
Successió Miró / ars / adagp.
4.21 (right) Joan Miró, Painting, March 13,
1933, 1933, detail. Eli and Edythe L. Broad
Collection, Los Angeles. © 2018 Successió
Miró / ars / adagp. Photo credit: Douglas M.
Parker Studio, Los Angeles.
and they are recast as labile forms extraordinarily open to interpreta-

tion. With Roussel’s procédé as his model, Miró found a way to harness
technological structures—repetition, seriality, and the cool indifference
of the mechanical apparatus—to open art practices to new modes of
making; to give painting “room-for-play.” In an unprecedented move,
abstraction itself is reconceived here as a ludic process, with that process
in turn opening up the possibility of a specifically surrealist mode of
abstraction, one initiated by the extrapolation of the multiple and con-
flicting definitions of automatism itself, and grounded in an abdication
of the role of the artist as a figure privileged to fix meaning.
Miró himself dated his exploration of this antimodern mode of
abstraction—abstraction explicitly engaged to refuse fixed meaning—
to the time of his alliance with the rue Blomet surrealists, when he began,
212 Chapter Four

4.22 (above) Joan Miró, Collage, February 2,
1933, 1933, detail. Fundació Miró. © 2018
4.23 (right) Joan Miró, Painting, May 12, 1933,
1933, detail. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum,
Washington University in St. Louis. © 2018
in his words, “eliminating, eliminating until I got to the point where I

was completely anti-Cubist and then I even eliminated Cubism from
my work.”76 And Leiris as well seems to have understood Miró’s pro
cess as a gesture of negation when he characterized Miró’s process as a
rhythmic “series of successive destructions and reconstructions” accom-
plished by “traveling the same route in the opposite direction,” echoing
Roussel’s own description of the oddly recursive bifurcation activated
by his procédé.77 In his 1929 essay on the artist, Leiris directly linked the
technique to Miró’s 1929 Queen Louise of Prussia (figure 4.28), a paint-
ing formed when two detailed illustrations in adjacent newspaper adver-
tisements were deformed, reformed, conjoined, and sundered in a series
of fourteen drawings before the associative chain was stopped, gridded,
and transferred to the canvas (see figures 4.29–4.42).78 Following Rous-
sel’s example, Miró seems to have found a device by which to imagine
formal links between two conceptually unrelated images. Here, as in
the collage-based paintings, the reference to systems of mass production
is pronounced: Miró used mechanically reproduced motifs—cheap,
mass-produced newspaper advertisements—as a starting point. The
Pun 213
4.24 (above) Joan Miró, Collage, February 11, 1933,
1933, detail. moma. Gift of the artist. © 2018 Successió
Miró / ars / adagp. Digital image © moma / Licensed by
4.25 (below) Joan Miró, Painting, June 13, 1933, 1933, detail.
moma. © 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp. Digital image ©
moma / Licensed by scala / Art Resource.
(left) Joan Miró, Collage,
4.26
January 30, 1933, 1933, detail.
Fundació Miró. © 2018 Successió
4.27 (below) Joan Miró,
Painting, March 13, 1933, 1933,
detail. Eli and Edythe L. Broad
Collection. © 2018 Successió
Miró / ars / adagp. Photo
credit: Douglas M. Parker
Studio.
4.28 Joan Miró,
Queen Louise of
Prussia, 1929. Meadows
Museum, smu, Dallas.
© 2018 Successió
Joan Miró, preparatory drawing for

4.29
Queen Louise of Prussia on advertisements
from the April 14, 1929 edition of La veu
Joan Miró, preparatory drawing
4.30
de Catalunya, n.d. Fundació Miró. © 2018
for Queen Louise of Prussia, 1929.
Fundació Miró. © 2018 Successió
4.31–4.37 Joan Miró,
preparatory drawings
for Queen Louise of
Prussia, 1929. Fundació
Miró. © 2018 Successió
4.38–4.42 Joan Miró,
preparatory drawings
for Queen Louise of
Prussia, 1929. Fundació
Miró. © 2018 Successió
illustrated objects that would eventually form the arms and body of
Queen Louise of Prussia w ere, in turn, a ready-made shirt collar and a
German diesel engine built by the Junkers company. But most strik-
ing is the pun on which Miró based the otherwise arbitrary relation
of machine and queen: “Junkers,” the name of the firm that made the
engine (and the major producer of arms for the Luftwaffe), is also the
name given to the landed aristocracy of Prussia.79 Following Roussel’s
procédé, once Miró had found the two terms shifting within the pun, all
that was needed to construct the pictorial equivalent was to move from
machine to queen over a series of intervening drawings. But the draw-
ings, rather than forming a smooth, logical progression from one image
to another, each seem to move off in a different direction, suggesting the
wide scope for play that opened up once the artist had fully commit-
ted to his system.80 With Queen Louise of Prussia, Miró’s circular system,
motivated by “marvelously identical, diametrical opposites,” appears to
have become fully automated but, like Roussel’s, is anything but rational.
Surely it was the restless movement of transmutation underpinning
his work at this time that Miró was referring to when in 1931 he des
cribed his working method in terms of an interminable process ap-
proaching unproduction: “When I’ve finished something I discover
that it’s just a basis for what I’ve got to do next. It’s never anything more
than a point of departure, and I’ve got to take off from there, in the
opposite direction. For me it’s outdated, passé, no more than a point
of departure, I’d paint it over again, right on top of it. Far from being a
finished work, to me it’s just a beginning, a hotbed for the idea that just
sprouted, just emerged.”81
The references to bifurcation; to movement in the opposite direction;
and to the palimpsestous gesture of obliteration are striking. Working
under the pressure of constant flux and reiteration explains the need for
Miró to work in predetermined series—to pose artificial constraints (to
lay out the rules of the game, as it were) beforehand so that his constant
stream of activity would be interrupted in order to withdraw the requi-
site paintings. Just as Roussel claimed to use his procédé as a brake on
his overflowing imagination, Miró controlled the limitless play of trans-
figurations by sending advance notice to his dealers, Pierre Loeb and
Pierre Matisse, respectively, of the numbers, themes, and canvas sizes
he would be painting in the coming months, effectively locking himself
into an inflexible production schedule.82
Miró directly confronted the specter of unproductive inertia haunt-
ing his process in two series of paintings thus planned and promised:
the Dutch Interiors I, II, and III of 1928, and the so-called imaginary
Pun 219
portraits, Portrait of Mistress Mills, Portrait of a Lady in 1820, Fornarina,
and Queen Louise of Prussia of 1929.83 Here again the momentum of
successive versions is channeled into drawing, but with painting—
although not necessarily Miró’s painting—at both start and end points.
For example, Dutch Interior I (1928; figure 4.43) began as a postcard
reproduction of Martensz Sorgh’s The Lute Player (1661; figure 4.44).
Miró systematically disarticulated and rearticulated Sorgh’s forms, pro-
ducing eight very different drawings—any of which could have been
chosen as the basis for a final painting—before settling on the most de-
tailed drawing as the model for a painting that at once corresponds to
and radically departs from the original (see figures 4.45–4.52). Like the
drawings for Queen Louise of Prussia, the series is circular rather than
linear, with Miró’s final, punning version close enough to the original to
be considered a parodic version of the Sorgh.
Briony Fer has read Miró’s work of this time as committed to the
Bataillean idea of altération: “the change from one state to another, but
also a succession of changes, each destroying the preceding state.”84 In-
deed, in a Documents essay illustrated with Dutch Interior I and three of
the “imaginary” portraits, Leiris drew attention to Miró’s privileged un-
derstanding of emptiness—abstraction as “liquefaction”—a characteriza-
tion which approaches Bataille’s privileging of decomposition, a radical
reconception of artistic practice that located the artistic impulse in de-
struction rather than creation, beginning with the original violation of the
pristine cave wall.85 Within altération’s frame of violence, the drawings
through which Miró refracted Sorgh’s Lute Player share in a process of
repetition-as-assault, and seem to lay the ground for an ethos of “unwork-
ing” that would govern his work for the greater part of the next decade. Yet
the drawings don’t seem to successively liquefy the original paintings; they
are more like versions or variations that could form the basis of completely
different works—particularly in light of Miró’s former “palimpsest” series.
Furthermore, these paintings stop short of complete deliquescence: all pre-
serve, to some extent, the integrity of the original—even if only (as with
Dutch Interior I ) in the distribution of the color. The technique is perhaps
akin to translation, but a mode of translation in which the imperfections
of misaligned languages are foregrounded rather than suppressed, and the
differences between “foreign” utterances, rather than their affinities, are
pronounced, offering a repetition verging on the absurd. In their invo-
cation of the original, these paintings approach parody, a “mockery,”
Gérard Genette tells us, “obtained by separating the letter of a work . . .
from its spirit,” or the emptying out of meaning through the mimicry of
form.86 Their overall quality is ludic, if on the violent side of that term.
220 Chapter Four

Joan Miró,
4.43
Dutch Interior I, 1928.
moma. Mrs. Simon
Guggenheim Fund.
© 2018 Successió
Digital image ©
moma / Licensed by
4.44 Postcard reproduction of
Martensz Sorgh, The Lute Player,
1661. moma. Gift of Joan Miró.
Digital image © moma / Licensed
by scala / Art Resource.
4.45–4.48 Joan Miró, preparatory drawings
for Dutch Interior I, 1928. moma. Gift of the
artist. © 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp.
Digital image © moma / Licensed by scala / Art
Resource.
4.49–4.52 Joan Miró, preparatory drawings for
Dutch Interior I, 1928. moma. Gift of the artist.
© 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp. Digital
image © moma / Licensed by scala / Art
Resource.
While Miró’s work would shortly move much closer to the anti-ideal
of base materialism at the heart of Bataille’s intellectual project, at this
moment these serially produced paintings are closer to Leiris than to
Bataille, closer to the ambivalent quasi-structure of wordplay than to
the a-structure of the utterly formless.
But regardless of their patchwork compliance with the extremes of
renegade surrealism, the Dutch Interiors, like the other paintings Miró
based on mass-produced imagery, compromise identity as well as au-
thorship. For citation operates reciprocally, like a dialectic: it is not
merely a matter of Miró absorbing Sorgh, mastering him, but of Miró’s
own refashioning, as he turned out one series after another, each final
painting bearing the traces of its model. When Miró painted “in other
words” (or, more accurately, in other forms), he performed a nonhier-
archical exchange, a repetition that, like a pun, offers an alternative se-
mantic track “in the opposite direction,” an expansion of possibilities
for seeing Sorgh as well as for interpreting Miró. That this is a ludic pro
cess grounded in technological reproduction and approached through a
mechanical system that automated art production places it well within
the compass of Benjamin’s notion of Spielraum.
Likewise, remanding art production to belief-independent pro
cesses places ludic strategies at the center of the renegade surrealists’
project: the entropy of coherence and meaning performed through the
machinic tropes of serial production.87 The destructive impulse played
out here is a reminder of the terms of the 1929 split in the ranks of the
surrealist movement, and Bataille’s accusation that Breton’s surrealism
was an idealizing project that ultimately sublimated art production,
lifting it above the carnal realities of the quotidian. But by 1937, when
Miró made the last of his “antipaintings,” that rift had healed, and, true
to the spirit of mutual re-formation invoked by the dialectics of op-
posites, certain degenerative motifs had begun to show even in the
ludic practices in Breton’s circle. When the surrealists finally took up
the ethos of transmutation that had so long marked the work of Miró,
Leiris, and Roussel, they fit it into their ludic repertoire in the form of
“the telephone game,” a collaborative parlor game based on the princi
ple that the repetition of any form, image, or text w ill degrade mean-
ing and unfix identity. In the original, aural version of the game, one
player whispers a sentence to another, who then passes it to the next
player, and so on, until everyone has had a turn and the final sentence
is set against the first for comparison. The inevitable estrangement of
the last utterance from the first measures the radical skew of subjective
reception (and militates against the myth of a fully homogenous col-
224 Chapter Four

4.53 Adolphe Acker, Kurt Seligmann, André Breton,
Esteban Francés, Benjamin Péret, Arlette Seligmann, Thérèse
Caen, Flora Acker, and Jacqueline Lamba, L’oreille et l’étoile,
c. 1937. Private collection. © 2018 ars / adagp.
lective) but here, specifically, Spielraum is achieved through reference

to a subjectivity mediated by the technological distortions of the tele-
phone, a device meant to expand rather than contract the possibilities
of communication. In the drawn version of the game devised by the
surrealists, visual memory is the agent of entropic miscommunication,
as repetition and seriality evoke mechanical misfires. In one example
from 1937, over the course of nine successive graphic transmissions a
box-enclosed ear sprouted a star and then mutated into a comet-tailed
heart (see fi
gure 4.53). With an economy of restatement directly evok-
ing the nesting wordplay of Roussel’s procédé, the players gave the series
an anagrammatic title: oreille-etoile, or “ear-star.” Like the words ear and
star the final image of the series is both estranged from and evocative of
the first. And just as the written version of the telephone game—which
threw off sentences like “Is it love? Is it life? Is it life-line? Or demise?”—
obeyed the “rhyme over reason” mandate of Leiris’s “Glossaire,” so the
Pun 225
drawn version of the telephone game automatically turned out vari-
ants akin to Miró’s nesting series: drawings and paintings generated
from ludic misprision.88 All managed the entropy of meaning from
within the rule-bound, serial structure of a game, with permutational
effects systematically undermining the clear and univocal transmission
of meaning. In the manner of Roussel’s doubled sentences and Leiris’s
polysemic glossary, the game activated the fall into nonsense that is the
signal motif of the pun. And as in puns, it is the gap between description
and understanding that is emphasized, undermining the very certainty
of knowledge and memory.
Skepticism, then, is the engine of Miró’s mechanized game. For if
systems are instruments of organization, then games are schemes for
disorganization: elaborate machines designed to systematically achieve
unforeseeable, useless results. And while we tend to think the best of
our culture in terms of productivity—artists “produce” good work; the-
ories frame t hose works “productively”; we leave our desks with freshly
blackened pages a fter a “productive” day; and to deem our arguments
“unproductive” amounts to their complete dismissal—it is important
to bear in mind that “production” is a historically determined value,
aggrandized within a context of modernization that established serial
production (encompassing labor and mass production) as both signifier
and measure of industry, eventually extending its reach to encompass
all activity. Within this context of the dawning conflation of work with
productivity, playing emerges as industry’s evil twin: its forms mimic
the very structures of mechanization, but it produces nothing. These
would be the terms by which Giacometti would take up Roussel’s chal-
lenge, with a series of inscrutable objects that materialize surrealism’s
ludic strategies in dimensional space.
The Play of Things
“ ‘Jeux des choses’ équivalant à jeux des mots.”89 This was the key, Leiris
decided in the pages of his Raymond Roussel notebook, to the riddle
governing Roussel’s last g reat work, New Impressions of Africa (1932), a
novel distinguished by an arcane system of nesting parentheses and illus-
trated with a set of gnomic drawings apparently unrelated to the narrative
and commissioned anonymously, through a private detective.90 Intent on
uncovering a ludic structure in this late text that would correspond in im-
portance with the early procédé, Leiris sketched a “perverse” system of
analogy at work in the use of p arentheses, which set in motion an “accu-
mulation of digressions,” a system of infinite substitutions of one t hing for
226 Chapter Four

another that had the effect of destabilizing and decentering the narrative,
pulling it away from meaning. W ater, for example, appears repeatedly, but
in a variety of forms—as baptism, as painting, as enema—articulating an
unspooling diversity of sense that Leiris called “the pun taken to the nth
power.”91 Like Miró’s serial declensions of form, Roussel’s parenthetical
strategy dislocated language so consistently that Leiris declared the pro
cess a source of “liberating distraction” more extreme than surrealism’s
automatic writing, for the elements brought into confrontation through
Roussel’s impersonal procedures w ere completely fortuitous—free even
of unconscious motivations.92
This relentless mobility, expressed, in Leiris’s words, as a new “play
of things,” is one of the central elements tying Alberto Giacometti’s
work to Roussel’s. Leiris makes the alignment explicit in the last pages
of his Raymond Roussel notebook, where New Impressions of Africa
is singled out for analysis in conjunction with profiles of only two art-
ists, Giacometti and Duchamp, to form his book, Roussel and Co.93
The constellation of the three almost certainly was grounded in their
respective articulations of riddles so impenetrable that they could not
be solved: all produced work that confounded explanation in their own
time, or generated so many credible—and mutually exclusive—routes
for analysis that they demonstrated the ultimate futility of asserting a
definitive interpretation. Duchamp and Roussel both acknowledged
the inscrutability of their works by providing “keys”: The Green Box
(1934) of notes for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, and
How I Wrote Certain of My Works, respectively. But for the ludic sculp-
tures of the 1930s that would come to be identified with surrealism,
Giacometti left no notes and made few statements, beyond identifying
a number of them as “mobile” and “mute,” opening wide the interpre-
tive room-for-play.94 From their first appearance the works threw out
divergent lines of meaning, emerging in journals as diff erent as Bataille’s
Documents (1929), Breton’s Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution
(1931), the lush Cahiers d’art (1932), the experimental Transition (1932),
and the luxe Minotaure (1933).
As Rosalind Krauss has demonstrated, Giacometti was already align-
ing his work with the priorities of the renegade surrealists gathered around
Bataille and Leiris by the time he constructed the sexually ambiguous
Suspended Ball (1930; figure 4.54), the sculpture that, in André Breton’s
estimation, had single-handedly triggered a “crisis of the object,” an at-
tack on the unity of sculptural form driven by the enigma of its assembled
parts, and abetted by the violent eroticism communicated by those parts
as they rocked destructively against one another: mobile, like a pulsating
Pun 227
echanism; mute, like a riddle.95 Following Krauss, Giacometti’s explo-
m
ration of semantic multiplicity—between male and female, pleasure and
pain—puts into effect an oscillation between opposing poles so insistent
as to constitute an entire reconsideration of the nature and function of
sculpture, away from formal stability and toward full participation in the
base and carnal that Bataille had characterized as “formless.” At the same
time, Giacometti’s experiments with ludic slippage would take his work
in two directions aligned with Leiris’s own Roussellian preoccupations:
toward the indifferent operations of the machine and the bifurcating
imagery of the visual pun. Suspended Ball was unprecedented in the
scaffold-like porosity of its armature (like a wire-based maquette turned
inside out) and the machinic mobility of its parts, but most decisive for
the reorganization of modern sculpture that it initiated was the deep am-
biguity of its sphere and wedge, which seemed at once figurative—mimetic,
even—and referentially unstable, oscillating between buttock and testicle
and female cleft, between penis and blade, the homoerotic and the hetero-
sexual, a tender caress and a violent slash.96 Even the nuanced connotations
of the word suspended, indicating the tectonics of scaffold and piano wire as
well as the frustrating experience of being held at the edge of satisfaction—
whether that be sexual or semantic—speaks to the high value placed on
ambivalence among these artists working at the margins of surrealism. Dalí
remarked upon the object’s equivocation immediately in his early assess-
ment of the work, perhaps because Giacometti’s insistence on inscrutability
ran counter to his own desire for the viewer to discover the alternate forms
so cleverly hidden in his paranoiac paintings. “A wooden ball marked with
a female recess is suspended by a thin violin string, above a crescent with a
ridge that touches the cavity,” he wrote. “Instinctively the viewer is forced
to drag the ball on the edge, but the length of the rope allows him only par-
tially to achieve that.”97 The tale of frustrated resolve is a reminder that the
word object also means purpose. But h ere, the more object-like the actual
work (the work that doesn’t work), the stronger the oxymoron, conjuring
at once purpose and its lack. “An erotic machine, Suspended Ball is, then,”
Krauss writes, “like Duchamp’s Large Glass, an apparatus for the discon-
nection of the sexes, the nonfulfillment of desire.”98 The “play of t hings”
that t hese machines activate materializes malfunction, evoking the same
quality of dislocation and disintegration that Leiris identified at the heart
of New Impressions of Africa: “A kind of philosophical-moralist medita-
tion on the relativity and instability of t hings.”99
Writing of Roussel, John Ashbery also notes a peculiar experience of
dislocation activated by the disjunction between similar words and di-
vergent meanings in Roussel’s prose, a sensation he calls a “stereo” effect:
228 Chapter Four

4.54 Alberto Giacometti,
Suspended Ball, 1930. Alberto
Giacometti-Stiftung. Art
© Alberto Giacometti
Estate / Licensed by vaga
and ars.
“we are following him on one level and almost but not entirely missing
him on another, a place where secrets remain secret.”100 This two-stage
configuration evokes for the reader a riddle whose key is withheld, and
it is of course the metastructure of Roussel’s intellectual project, the
“radical repetition” that remained a puzzle u ntil the posthumous publi-
cation of How I Wrote Certain of My Works. But as Michel Foucault has
pointed out, the riddle–key scheme operates from within the individual
works as well, for example in Locus Solus (1914), whose main feature is
an immense transparent architectural structure comprising a series of
rooms, each containing an elaborate, puzzling tableau vivante. Roussel
follows each puzzling description of t hese installations with a “logical”
explanation that fits into an overall narrative of psychologically healing
reenactment activated by injecting corpses with a fluid called resurrec-
tine. One is reminded of Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932), an
enigmatic, scaffold-like construction resembling a building in which the
rooms frame a collection of tiny sculptures: a bird’s skeleton, the figure
Pun 229
of a woman, a finely worked spinal column, and a vertical, tongue-like
construction set with a sphere. One year a fter this object first appeared
in Cahiers d’art, Giacometti provided the key to its odd juxtaposition of
figures in an essay published in Minotaure: a dreamlike exposition that,
like Roussel’s vignettes of resurrection, recounted an episode of trau-
matic break from Giacometti’s past. Years l ater, yet another explanation
followed, when the artist revealed that this work and others had been
directly inspired by Locus Solus.101
Playing, Praying, Preying
In turn, the cryptogrammatic priorities set out by Roussel’s radical

repetition are echoed and affirmed in Leiris’s own deployment of the
bifur / biffure dyad, a punning pair that, in its combined sense of split-
ting, connection, and erasure points to the void in meaning opened
between riddle and solution. Leiris himself yoked his bistable imag-
ery to Roussel, a man, he claimed, “haunted by the idea of the double
sense.”102 His essay “Conception and Reality in the Work of Raymond
Roussel” describes the operation of the procédé as a kind of “disloca-
tion” of phrases in which the meaning of an already existing statement
is redirected so far from the original that both end up estranged and
deracinated, stripped of purchase in the “given world.”103
Perhaps it was Leiris’s pursuit of this bipartite void, a cleavage that at
once splits and joins, that led Giacometti to name and rename a number
of his first surrealist objects.104 Jone (1930; figure 4.55), a lost tristable
plaster that shifts between a tree, a face, and the silhouette of a woman’s
body, directly embodying the “play of things” Leiris associated with
Roussel, was published in the short-lived journal Bifur, only to reappear
in a Marc Vaux photograph entitled Woman, Head, Tree (figure 4.56).
The shape-shifting nature of the sculpture must have been emphasized
to the photographer, who mirrored the object, doubling the already
proliferating referents into an image that alternates without resolving
into either a figure, a head, or a tree.105 Project for a Passageway (1930),
a sinuous plaster that has been repeatedly likened to a woman’s prone
body, was first called The Labyrinth (figure 4.57); and a second bistable
object, the work now known as Landscape—Reclining Head (1932),
was initially named Fall of a Body onto a Diagram (figure 4.58). Rela-
tions désagrégeantes (1931–32) became Point to the Eye (figure 4.59);
Taut Thread (1933) was the object we now know as Flower in Danger
(figure 4.60); the nonsensical Courrounou U-Animal (1932) shifted to
the prosaic Caught Hand (figure 4.64); and similarly, the disquieting
230 Chapter Four

4.55 (left) Interior page, Bifur
6 (1930), depicting Alberto
Giacometti, Jone. Getty
Research Institute (86–681).
4.56 (below) Alberto
Giacometti, Woman, Head,
Tree, 1930. Whereabouts
unknown. Art © Alberto
Giacometti Estate /L
icensed
by vaga and ars.
Alberto Giacometti, Project for a Passageway, 1930.
4.57
Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung. Art © Alberto Giacometti
Estate / Licensed by vaga and ars.
Malgré les mains (1932) was benignly renamed Caress.106 In each of these
cases, a cryptic first title was l ater followed by a descriptive “key,” repeat-
ing the rhythm of the Locus Solus model, and reinforcing the sense that
ludic Roussellian doubling permeates Giacometti’s work of this time.
Evocative as it is, Giacometti’s nominal doubling only points to the
more fundamental plastic doubling at work in t hese “undecidable ob-
jects.”107 At times, this is available as a more or less identifiable insta-
bility within discrete elements within the assemblage, in for example
the slide between buttock and testicle in Suspended Ball, or between
figure and branch in Woman, Tree, Head. In other works, the entire ob-
ject oscillates: Project for a Passageway moves between the architectural
and the bodily; and Landscape—Reclining Head shifts between both
genres and referents: displayed vertically, it is a masklike portrait relief;
photographed horizontally, a stark geometrical landscape. The figure’s
“fall” from verticality onto the horizontal plane of the terrain—a fall
that, as Krauss has pointed out, brought down with it the idealism of
Western sculpture—is a kind of inverted performance of Dalí’s anamor-
phic Paranoiac visage (1931), a double image in which a face rose up from
out of a postcard of a landscape (to eventually become a painting; see
figure 4.17).108 And unlike Dalí, who packed the explanatory discourse of
his “paranoiac-critical method” around the many painted double-images
that would follow Paranoiac visage, Giacometti deepened the riddle with
a third demonstration of ambivalence, this time in the form of a double
inscription on the face/ base of the sculpture, which first read “La vie
232 Chapter Four

Alberto Giacometti, Landscape—Reclining Head,
4.58
1932. mnam. Art © Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by
vaga and ars.
continue” (Life goes on) but was later partially effaced and overwritten
by a second: “Mais les ponts sont pourris” (But the bridges are fetid)—
apparently inspired by a Piranesi print of the Cloaca Maxima.109
The object Point to the Eye (figure 4.59) affords yet another form of
duality, one made available to the viewer through photography, as Man
Ray’s dramatically lit image of the sculpture doubles the two major fig-
ures of the object, a swinging, compass-like lance and the death’s head
at its apex, in the form of a shadow cast onto the “playing field” of this
game board. Yet this repetition serves not to reinforce the original dyad,
the point and the eye; rather, it has fused and transformed the figures
into the silhouette resembling a praying mantis, an insect that had be-
come, for the surrealists around Breton and Bataille, an emblem of vio-
lent, irrational eroticism (see figure 4.59).110 The ambivalence expressed
by the bifurcation between object and its shadow in the photograph is
consistent with the polysemic figure of the mantis itself, which Roger
Caillois theorized as an ideogram overdetermined by three concepts:
anthropomorphism (it prays); coital cannibalism (it preys); and mime-
sis (it plays). These three ideas, in turn, mesh with the elements central
to Leiris’s Roussellian ideas around the bifur—the belief-independent
operations of a mechanized system and the concomitant breakdown
of identity entailed in the visual pun. For Caillois characterized the
Pun 233
Alberto Giacometti, Point to the Eye, 1931–32. mnam.
4.59
Art © Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by vaga and ars.
mantis as a particularly mechanical variant of anthropomorphism: “an

automaton . . . an artificial, mechanical, inanimate and unconscious
machine-woman” who, during the mating ritual, beheads her partner,
reducing his movements to purely instinctive impulses in order to
“obtain a better and longer performance of the spasmodic coital move-
ments.”111 This automatism is conjoined in the insect with an impulse
to mimicry so strong as to ultimately dissolve the barriers between life
and death—permitting the mantis to continue to perform sexually even
when dead—but also to dissolve the barriers between inside and outside
when camouflaging itself, “whereby,” Caillois claimed, “the insect loses
its identity and returns to the plant kingdom.” The impulse to surrender
identity is so strong as to extend beyond merely “playing dead” when
alive; the most difficult thing for the observer to grasp, Caillois points
out, is that “the mantis, when dead, should be capable of simulating
death.”112 Bifurcated in ludic mimicry, that is, the mantis is derealized,
erased into its background as completely as the shadow of Point to the
Eye w ill dissolve once the light is switched off. Caillois would deepen
this theorization of the drive to reconceive spatial relations between ob-
ject and subject in his essay “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”
(1935), where he would invoke Pierre Janet’s theory of schizophrenia to
equate the erosion of the boundaries between mind and space with a
radical loss of the sense of self, a “depersonalization through assimila-
tion into space” such that the organism, “quite literally, no longer knows
234 Chapter Four

what to do with itself.”113 Mimicry, Caillois would ultimately conclude,
points not to a rationalized impulse to camouflage and survival, but to
an antiutilitarian “luxury,” a ludic “instinct of abandon,” dangerous and
automatic, underpinning the universe. The characterization approaches
Benjamin’s own ideal for the technologically reproducible arts as a
point of mediation between nature and the mechanical, but it expresses
the Spielraum opened there in a negative and violent variant.114
And yet the form of mimicry usually associated with shadows is
inverted here into something closer to the “reveal” of a riddle. For the
mimetic shadow in Point to the Eye casts a silhouette that discloses its sec-
ond, hidden identity only under certain conditions. In this light, the “dis-
integrating relations” of the original title point not to the agonistic bond
between attacker and victim figured on the playing field of the sculpture,
but to an ontological rift within the object itself: the literal disintegration
of meaning, split by a repetition that, with scarcely the slightest altera-
tion, transforms javelin and figure into anthropomorphic insect. What
remains of this bifur is biffure, an erasure in which “the sliding of one
image into another does not allow any object to definitively subsist.”115
What this doubled object menaces, then, is the putative clarity of
visual perception itself: in its betrayal of the object’s dimensional form,
the mimetic shadow performs the violence represented iconographically
by the lance to the eye, a violence repeated yet again by the pun enclosed
in the object’s second title, Point to the Eye. For in French slang “poke in
the eye” is a colorful way of describing a mistake—here, a case of mistaken
identity abetted by a “slip of the eye” that allows a shadow world of un-
conscious motivations—sex, death, play—to emerge into the light.116
The slippage in Giacometti’s objects of multiple figurations echoes
Roussel’s sliding puns: “dual, ambiguous, Minotaur-like;” each blocking
semantic function by revealing form as a composite challenge to iden-
tity, rather than the clearly defined communication of meaning.117
Giacometti’s works of this period behave as purposeful objects that
function to confound function, in the manner of Duchamp’s “bachelor
machine,” The Large Glass (figure 4.63). If, as Krauss has pointed out,
Giacometti’s mobile objects of this period puncture the borders that
circumscribe identity, making them machines for the collapse of differ-
ence, then they perform a critique not only of the work of art but of
functionalist mechanics as well. For the ambivalence that Krauss has
identified in Giacometti’s work as alter(n)ation is a “double-condition”
that, in sweeping the object in two different directions at once, sunders
the plenum of meaning, activating so much play in the object’s interpre-
tation that meaning itself breaks down. The phenomenon that Leiris
Pun 235
e xplored as bifur/ biffure, that is, is a condition that Bataille, along with
Freud, identified as the primal impulse of representation, “an irremedi-
able doubleness at the root of things.”118 This is the governing antistruc-
ture of Giacometti’s surrealist sculptures: the irrational play of forms as
one image slips into another: buttocks, breasts, and testicles; a portrait,
a mask, a landscape; a w oman, a head, a tree. They participate in the
critique of utilitarian meaning that had s haped Leiris’s own intellectual
biases since the 1920s, and that can be traced in turn to Roussel’s own
obsession with the play of multiple figurations.
Most of these ludic objects fall into the category of sculptures from
this period commonly called Giacometti’s tables de jeux, a play on the cat-
egory table sculpture, the name given to that small, approachable genre of
sculpture enjoyed not on a plinth but on a tabletop.119 H ere, the “table-
top” is literalized as a primary element—at times the very body—of the
sculpture, a materialization of the pun that draws attention to the lowly
status of this antimonumental form. The designation “game board” points
as well to a destabilizing scheme that is consistent across the works, as
they infect the static forms of sculpture with a ludic dynamism usually
associated with performance: Giacometti had specified that these objects
would be mobile as well as mute. Flower in Danger (1933; figure 4.60),
for example, evokes the moment of tension before violent action: a figure
stands transfixed on a board marked out like a playing field before the
taut arc of a pole stretched backward to its tensile limit and kept in check
by no more than a fine filament. The theatrical assemblage whittles ago-
nistic confrontation down to its essential elements, evoking early combat
technology (the catapult, the bow), yet by its scale and its very nature as a
representation—the pole is stable; it only appears to be tensed—it main-
tains the ambivalence of competitive games, where physical violence is
sublimated into a culturally acceptable form with lowered stakes. In other
objects, this staged confrontation is made even more ambivalent with the
inclusion of moving parts and the corresponding invitation to manipula-
tion. Man, W oman, and Child (1931; figure 4.61), for example, marks out
a space of confrontation in which the field of alliance and attack shifts
subtly as the schematic figures of the nuclear f amily are made to slide and
rotate in relation to one another within the limited confines of their base.
Here, unsecured parts encourage an unprecedented level of physical in-
tervention from the viewer, leaving the objects open to reconfiguration
on whim and keeping the meaning of the work in constant flux long after
Giacometti “finished” it. Like the game of exquisite corpse, or Roussel’s
mechanical procédé, the play never ends: the capacity for infinite varia-
tion is built into the system defining the work.
236 Chapter Four

(above) Alberto Giacometti, Flower in Danger, 1933.
4.60
Kunsthaus Zurich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung. Art ©
Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by vaga and ars.
(below) Alberto Giacometti, Man, Woman, and Child,
4.61
1931. Kunsthaus Zurich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung.
Art © Alberto Giacometti Estate /L icensed by vaga and ars.
By its very title, No More Play (1932; plate 16) would seem to imply the
very opposite of this impulse to infinite variation. As Rosalind Krauss
first pointed out, the object’s carefully carved topography, a slab pocked
with shallow indentations and three grave-like openings complete with
removable lids, recalls at once an African game board and a necropolis,
with three pawn-like figures that suggest they might move from one po-
sition to another until, as the title suggests, the game is over.120 Yet this
sculpture, too, reveals an essential incompletion. Two of the pawns bal-
ance precariously on opposite sides of the game board, while a third lies
in one of the grave-like boxes: the deathly game is perpetually suspended
in mid-play, an effect deepened by the scale of the upright figures, which
are too long to fit into their corresponding boxes. But more important
than the confusion of game board and necropolis, or the sense that the
play itself is poised on the threshold of resolution, is the radical bifurca-
tion implied by the cursive text carved into its surface. Like Giacomet-
ti’s other bistable landscape, Landscape—Reclining Head, No More Play
is inscribed—this time with the phrase from which it takes its title, “On
ne joue plus.” But instead of rubbing out and revising the inscription,
here Giacometti doubled and erased it through inference: the phrase
is carved in mirror writing on the surface of the playing field, activating
the concept of “reversed meaning” at the very site of meaning’s inscrip-
tion. In fact the inscription—indeed the sculpture itself—is incomplete
until doubled in a mirror reflecting its negative image.121 And since Gia-
cometti, who did not hesitate to include heterogeneous materials like
glass, wire, or ready-made gears into these early objects, elected not to
include a mirror to make the mysterious title legible, the completion is
again offered to the viewer, who in order to “end the game,” as the title
suggests, must imagine a space bifurcated and doubled by the mirror,
a space in which two nearly identical images are made radically differ
ent with a single, s imple gesture; haptic sculpture mimed in the virtual
space of representation that it needs to make itself legible. This is the site
of Leiris’s bifur/biffure, of Roussel’s procédé, of the pun: a repetition
that opens a chasm between its inseparable halves, inviting representa
tion to its own destruction—the destruction of a single fixed meaning.
Circuit (1931; figure 4.62), another of Giacometti’s game boards,
evokes this same tautological structure from within another topo-
graphical site of limited action. In this deceptively s imple object, a ball
is made to roll continuously in a shallow track carved in the surface of
a horizontal slab. Since the nearly circular track has no starting or end
points, the ball can be kept constantly mobile, in a state of incessant
repetition, or pure, unproductive process. Circuit completes its task, in a
238 Chapter Four

(above) Alberto Giacometti, Cir
4.62
cuit, 1931. mnam, Paris. Art © Alberto
Giacometti Estate / Licensed by vaga
and ars.
4.63 (right) Marcel Duchamp, The
Large Glass, 1915–23. Philadelphia
Museum of Art. © 2018 Association
Marcel Duchamp / adagp / ars.
sense, by never completing its task. The closed circuit it inscribes echoes
the structure of Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23; figure 4.63), where the
interaction described between the upper and the lower registers of the
object sets into motion a self-perpetuating contraption, automatic and
erotic, that generates nothing.
Duchamp, you’ll recall, was another of the three major figures Leiris
counted as the heritors of Roussel’s approach. Leiris had specified in
his notes that this had to do specifically with the revelations of Duch-
amp’s Green Box (1934), a collection of notes explaining, à la Roussel,
how he had built his double-named The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).122 The infamous construction, a dia-
gram laid out on glass panes, describes a bipartite system in which a “de-
siring” machine is set into motion, only to be endlessly turned back on
itself in frustration with the rejection of the erotic advances it puts into
play. As a mechanism of tautological repetition The Large Glass betrays
its debt to the Roussellian techno-imaginative: it bears an iconography
of invention for its own sake—rotors and gears and vapor that produce
nothing—but the object also maintains a structural consonance with
the tautological procédé: both describe closed systems that make a
mockery of knowledge production.
“It is true I am indebted to Raymond Roussel,” Duchamp wrote in
1950, “for having enabled me, from 1912 on, to think of something else
instead of retinal painting.”123 The link between the two iconoclasts had
been teased out by Michel Carrouges in the context of his 1954 theori-
zation of bachelor machines (the name Duchamp gave to the mechanical
apparatus in The Large Glass), an analysis that bound together Duch-
amp, Leiris, and Roussel through the antiproductive mechanisms struc-
turing their work.124 By Carrouges’s estimation, bachelor machines,
“impossible, useless, incomprehensible [and] delirious,” combine the
human and the mechanical into irrational and ultimately terrifying
apparatuses “ungoverned by the social laws of utility.”125 Most interest
ing for our account of Giacometti’s Roussellian games is the relation of
Roussel’s bachelor machines to the modes and motifs of artistic produc-
tion. Each of the four contrivances Carrouges singles out from Roussel’s
novels are machines for art making: Locus Solus features a jackhammer
that composes a mosaic and a diamond-shaped aquarium in which a
dancer performs to mechanically produced tunes; from Impressions of
Africa he noted a spotlit plant that makes photographic projections,
and a set of mechanized statues that deliver automatic m usic. Each of
these mechanisms presents a mode by which technology stakes out
an unprecedented room-for-play in artistic production, broadening
240 Chapter Four

Alberto
4.64 Giacometti, Caught Hand, 1932. Kunsthaus
Zurich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung. Art © Alberto
Giacometti Estate / Licensed by vaga and ars.
the possibilities—and the definitions—of art itself. If an artist wanted

to materialize such a Roussellian expansion of the visual language of
sculpture, engaging in a play of the contradictory that would render a
machine productively redundant, he would produce an “impossible,
useless” machine-object that looked like Giacometti’s Courrounou U-
Animal/Caught Hand (1932; figure 4.64).
With this object, the enigmatic effect of its first title is deepened by its
absolute indifference to the object it names, and the nonsensical quality
of the phrase, which hovers on the threshold of a pun, managing at once
to signify raw, collective anger (courroux-nous/courroux-nu) and to
be conjoined through negation (U or ou) with the bestial, animal. The
object comprises a cage-like metal scaffold supporting crank-operated
gears, and a wooden hand and forearm suspended by the thumb to ap-
pear caught in the mechanism, as the second, descriptive title implies.
The image is violent, although it shouldn’t be—close inspection reveals
that the fingers only approach the gears, but are not engaged. Rather,
as in Point to the Eye, the hand pauses at the threshold of mutilation,
but it isn’t clear whether this deferral constitutes the sinister threat of
pain or the sadomasochistic extension of anticipatory pleasure. Driven
by the ambivalent hand, the work hovers on the threshold of meaning,
conjuring a scenario that flashes between a hand chewed by a working
machine and a machine disabled by an intervening hand. The suspen-
sion of outcome renders this apparatus, too, a bachelor machine—like
Pun 241
a child’s toy the crank turns gears that power nothing more than their
own revolution. And if, like Roussel’s fantasmatic inventions, Caught
Hand offers the viewer an allegory of art production—the specter of
deskilling presented by technologies that chew/eschew the practiced
hand—then it is an allegory that is itself negated by the ultimately anti-
industrial model of a machine r unning for its own sake, r unning just
ahead of the hand that should be its master.
Leiris was already familiar with Duchamp’s and Roussel’s ambiva-
lent constructions when he befriended Giacometti in 1929, and had
long welcomed semantic instability into his own work. Recognizing in
Giacometti a fellow divaguer, he had immediately begun writing about
his objects for Documents.126 And Giacometti’s work, in turn, began to
change, moving away from the stark abstract slabs that Leiris had identi-
fied as “true fetishes” to embark on a critique of sculptural closure. For
his essay in the fourth issue of the journal, Leiris arranged four sculp-
tures from that year—Man, Reclining Woman Who Dreams, Man and
W
oman, and Three Figures Outdoors—into a photographic assemblage
that emphasized his characterization of them in the accompanying article
as “mobile latticework between inside and outside, sieves gnawed by the
wind” (see figure 4.65).127 Riddle-objects, he called them, already identify-
ing the first signs of ambiguity and resistance to closure in Giacometti’s
work, a rising inscrutability that would only increase in the coming years
as Giacometti worked further and further toward ludic instability.128
Years l ater, in the essay “Stones for a Possible Giacometti” (1951), Leiris
would look back to the 1930s from a perspective beyond Giacometti’s
famous figurative work, again singling out the early “openwork con-
structions” as paradigmatic and joining them to the sculptures of the
1930s that immediately followed, which he called “games that refused to
close off space.”129 Th ese surrealist works, he argued, w ere sculptures that
aggressively challenged the viewer: “objects presented in the manner of
experimental apparatuses or reduced models of funfairs. . . . [I]f the
person looking at it should happen to fall into it, his adventure would
unfold through the different parts of it.”130 The reference to adventure
once again draws Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa into the range of
interpretation, conjuring Roussel’s signature narrative structure: a series
of enigmatic but vividly i magined encounters that draw the viewer into
a sequence of unprecedented confrontations. But in the same essay, Leiris
insists that Giacometti’s great accomplishment was to have treated sculp-
ture like an object or a piece of furniture, ensuring that “the viewer is on
an equal footing” with the work, effectively collapsing the difference be-
tween inside and outside, between the ordinary and the exotic, the self
242 Chapter Four

4.65 Interior page, Documents 4 (1929), depicting a group
of Alberto Giacometti sculptures. Getty Research Institute
(84-S596).
and the other. It’s a particularly interactive reading of the work, one that
Leiris positions somewhere between critique and diversion, emphasiz-
ing the role of the viewer in generating the meaning of the sculpture. In
these objects, Leiris contended, Giacometti sought to materialize expe-
rience itself, “to give lasting substance to the elusive fleeting quality of
an event.”131
Thus what Leiris describes as distinctive to the experience of Giacom-
etti’s objects is a quality not so much locatable in the object itself, but in
its radical rewriting of the subject–object relation, an effect inseparable
from the sculptor’s revision of the space in which that relation was en-
acted. For from the moment of his first associations with the renegade
surrealists, Giacometti had engaged not merely in the making of ob-
jects that flouted the conventions of sculpture, but in an explicit recon-
Pun 243
sideration of their spaces of containment, refashioning the language of
plastic form toward maintaining sculptural space as coextensive with
the space of the viewer, repeatedly articulating a transparency or fluidity
between the space internal to the sculpture and the space external to it.
If Giacometti’s sculptures of the early 1930s strike the viewer as playing
fields, it is because, like game boards, they close the distance between
subject and object upon which the auratic work of art depends, even
as they maintain their status as utterly foreign from the world of in-
strumental objects. The world of t hings, they seem to assert, cannot be
sorted out cleanly into useful or artistic objects, but must acknowledge
the threshold that both joins and separates the two, a bleeding edge that
blurs the boundary between the passivity of aesthetic appreciation and
the activity of material experience.
This perforated boundary, which allows for the compromise of
identity through categorical slippage, has long been understood as the
central motif of “the formless” that motivated the work of the renegade
surrealists in Georges Bataille’s circle, a circle into which Giacometti had
certainly been welcomed. But it is also precisely the way Walter Benja-
min and Asja Lācis described the radical opening of spatial experience
that characterizes Spielraum. In their early, collaborative essay on the city
of Naples, Benjamin and Lācis describe the city as a utopian site of de-
regulation, where “porosity is the inexhaustible law of life”: “Building and
action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades and stairways. In every
thing, they preserve the room-for-play to become a theater of new, unfore-
seen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation
appears intended forever, no figure asserts it thus and not otherwise.”132
In the city of Naples Benjamin and Lācis had discovered what
amounts to an extraordinarily liberating revision of the modern con-
cept of space, one in which inside and outside, action and structure,
work and play so interpenetrated as to constitute an alternate model for
life—a model, not incidentally, commensurate with surrealism’s own
early pursuit of unstructured experience. The space is one of infinite pro-
visionality and flux, in which “nothing is concluded,” an anarchic site
determined by a “passion for improvisation” and a “stretching of fron-
tiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought.” The politics of
Spielraum, then, entails a salutary elimination of borders that translates
bodily experience into a liberation of the mind not unlike the aleatory
euphoria of the funfair, where pleasure and pain, subject and object
move beyond the shock of surrealist juxtaposition to become indistin-
guishable. It is in exactly this spirit of Spielraum that the invitation to
play extended by Giacometti’s game boards—whether through tactile
244 Chapter Four

engagement or conceptual flux—can be understood as an interven-
tion reaching beyond the revision of artistic categories (the “fall” of the
monumental into bassesse) to model new modes of experience, ways to
rehearse the free flow of thought and action activated by deliquescing
boundaries between artist, object, spectator, and mass culture.
“The world can not become so closed that t here no longer remains
a place for play,” Leiris wrote in his preface to the 1939 edition of the
“Glossaire,” a sentiment echoed by Walter Benjamin in a letter to The-
odor Adorno in the following year, as he expressed his doubts about
the modern cult of productivity and heroic exhaustion: “There must be
a human element in things which is not brought about by labor.”133 The
challenge, for Benjamin, was to locate the point of intersection that joined
the pleasures of play to the rising dominance of technology, articulat-
ing a modern critical ludic that expanded, rather than contracted, the
possibilities for art practice and experience at large. This is the Spiel-
raum he recognized in surrealist practices, an expansion that tapped the
quotidian materials with a freewheeling mobility and flux that at once
dismantled the auratic and the instrumental. While Marcel Duchamp
has long been understood as the central agent for this reimagining of
art practices away from autonomy, reading Leiris, Miró, and Giacometti
through Roussel’s mechanistic systems demonstrates the extent, the
complexity, and the power of ludic strategies within the avant-garde,
a displacement of agency and identity initiated by the pun’s “dissolving
union of heterogeneous elements,” so strong that it can be considered
among modernism’s most radical political statements.134 Through play,
surrealism challenged and exposed the latent crisis of certainty that
modernism sought to smother with its mandates to instrumentality. “It
is obvious that the utilitarian role of an object never completely justifies
its form,” Roger Caillois wrote in 1933. “So it is possible to discover in
every object an irrational residue,” an element that “a rigorous indus-
trial civilization discredits out of its own self interests.”135 Exposing this
remainder is the antijob of the modern critical ludic, which expands
the scope of the real with a breakdown of divisions between inner and
outer, functional and useless, mechanical and irrational.
Pun 245
C HA PTER 5
POSTLUDE
If the ludic pursuits of surrealism amounted to more than just an at-

titude, it must be added that surrealism’s pursuit of the ludic was less
than a steady state. To characterize surrealism’s preoccupation with play
merely as an overarching antic sensibility would be to trivialize their
motives and to neutralize their specific targets: rational agency and
functionalism. But the period in which the surrealists effectively played
against conventions was extremely short: complete commitment to the
immediacy of process is as utopian as the fantasy of full technological
liberation that Benjamin theorized as Spielraum.
Already with the materiality of Giacometti’s surrealist objects we begin
to see the turn away from art “disfigured” as a trace of process; and in
1934 Giacometti would end his ludic experiments with a return to figura-
tion, perhaps because he understood that complete commitment to the
philosophy of dematerialization and ephemerality might mean the end of
sculpture itself as a valid practice. Among the surrealists gathered around
André Breton, the surrender of agency to contingency seems to have lost
its grip even sooner. The surrealist Le jeu de l’oie (1929; figure 5.1), a col-
orful board game decorated by Jeanette and Yves Tanguy, Pierre Unik,
Georges Sadoul, Suzanne Muzard, and André Breton, emblematizes the
conversion from actual to symbolic experience: in Le jeu de l’oie it is to-
kens, and not bodies, that move through space, following a single track
stamped with appropriately “surrealist” imagery.1 Chance is curtailed, and
form and action are predetermined, rather than disfigured, by the play
process. Over the 1930s, under André Breton’s watchful eye, the notion of
André Breton, Suzanne Muzard, Jeanette Tanguy, Pierre
5.1
Unik, Georges Sadoul, and Yves Tanguy, Le jeu de l’oie, 1929.
Courtesy Galerie 1900–2000, Paris. André Breton; Estate of
Yves Tanguy © 2018 ars / adagp.
surrealist play as “means without ends” had been enlarged to include tech-
niques engaged specifically to produce ambiguous images: fumage,
frottage, and collage all incorporated chance, but increasingly they w ere
valued as techniques directed t oward constructing disaggregate represen
tations, rather than for the sheer experience of the ludic processes that had
generated them. From this time on, Breton’s play would have meaningful
plastic goals. This change in attitude is particularly pronounced in its dis-
tance from the mindset that had reconceived Paris as a game board—in
ludic terms, it entailed a shift away from the uncodified peripatetics of
Spielraum t oward the motivated perambulations of objective chance.
Postlude 247
The book-length essay in which objective chance is theorized is
ommunicating Vessels (1932). Here Breton codifies the means by which
C
reconciliations of subject and object are to be effected: “It has seemed
to me . . . it is possible to bring forth to the light of day a capillary tissue
without which it would be useless to try to imagine any m ental circula-
tion. The role of this tissue is, as we have seen, to guarantee the constant
exchange in thought that must exist between the exterior and interior
worlds, an exchange that requires the continuous interpenetration of
the activity of waking and that of sleeping. My entire ambition in t hese
pages has been to offer some glimpse of its structure.”2
This “constant exchange” was meant to be experienced in ordinary life
as encounters with objects that inexplicably resonated with the subject,
and whose significance to the subject becomes apparent only l ater. It is a
variation, then, of the rencontre familiar from Nadja, but an expansion
of that form of happenstance, one that would direct surrealist appre-
hension away from the register of person and place and onto the field of
objects in general. The procedure itself, Breton would recall, aimed to
isolate the phenomenon of “coincidence” as a rare moment when “natu
ral necessity” (the fixed realities of the phenomenal world) and “human
necessity” (subjective desire) are united: when “phenomena that the
human mind perceives only as belonging to separate causal series come
so close together that they actually merge into one another.”3 Objec-
tive chance developed directly out of Breton’s new interest in Hegelian
reconciliation and synthesis, rather than from the magnetized tensions
of juxtaposition already present in surrealist practice.4 And as Michel
Murat has pointed out, merely theorizing the process amounts to a
regularization of the surrealist rencontre and trouvaille: “Play stops at
objective chance—where chance becomes objective, when it produces.”5
But codifying surrealist play as a form of objective chance and re
ifying desire in plastic terms are inseparable from a larger project that
preoccupied Breton’s group at this time: affirming the surrealist object
in deliberate contradistinction to Bataille’s concept of the formless. The
publication of Communicating Vessels had been preceded by issue 3 of
the journal Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (lsasdlr), dedi-
cated to Hegel and entirely devoted to the object, featuring excerpts
from the forthcoming Communicating Vessels as well as essays by the
major figures in Breton’s circle. The issue amounts to a kind of taxon-
omy of surrealist objects: “objects with symbolic function,” “transub-
stantiated objects,” “projected objects,” “enveloped objects,” “machine
objects,” “cast objects”; it is illustrated with drawings of Giacometti’s
“mobile and mute objects” and with photographs of the first surrealist
248 Chapter Five

Le Surréalisme au service
5.2
de la révolution 6 (1933): 42.
Getty Research Institute
(84-S151).
assemblages, by Miró, Breton, Dalí, Gala Éluard, and Valentine Hugo.6

Dalí followed on this commentary with “The Object as Revealed in
Surrealist Experiment,” published in 1932 in This Quarter,7 and in the
next issue of lsasdlr he contributed an illustrated essay on “psycho-
atmospheric-anamorphic objects.”8 This was followed in issue 6 of
lsasdlr by Arthur Harfaux and Maurice Henry’s “The Irrational Un-
derstanding of Objects,” and Yves Tanguy’s “The Life of the Object,” a
drawing in which a text takes on plastic form as a landscape-cum-object
(figure 5.2). This issue also includes photographs of surrealist objects and
assemblages by Giacometti, Magritte, and Ernst, and culminates with
Breton’s own theorization of the object, formalized in a 1935 lecture,
“Surrealist Situation of the Object; Situation of the Surrealist Object.”9
Unlike Bataille’s formless, which had been conceptualized as an op-
eration, rather than an entity, surrealist objects took palpable and fungi-
ble shape. They appeared in galleries: first in the surrealist exhibition of
1933, at Galerie Pierre Colle, and three years later in a show entirely devoted
to them: Surrealist Exhibition of Objects at the Galerie Charles R atton.10
Surrealist play was moving away from its original characterization as a
Postlude 249
spontaneous field of action where ludic activity generated experiences
on the spot, and toward revaluation as a site to be mined for the produc-
tion of surrealist t hings, objects that putatively retained their surrealist
qualities regardless of their context—and readied them for the institu-
tional contexts of gallery and museum spaces.
In this period the surrealists under Breton’s direction oversaw a new
isolation of the object that not only wrenched the spontaneity out of
Spielraum, but forced itself on the body of the exquisite corpse. The
objectification of the game began when the players started smoothing
the composite images into unified figure drawings, and was effectively
completed with a recension of the surrealists’ commitment to collective
practice, when Breton excised one of his own contributions from an ex-
quisite corpse image; revised, renamed, and reproduced it in the issue of
lsasdlr devoted to the surrealist object; and then, in Communicating
Vessels, wrote a personal history for it as an object utterly severed from
the context of the game.11
This is Breton’s “phantom object” (figure 5.3) a drawing (which, he
claimed, he “never ceased to think of since as constructible”) that came
from a 1927 round of exquisite corpse (see figure 5.4). Breton named
it “Silence,” since it is a drawing of an envelope with edges bordered
by eyelashes (cils) and a sideways handle (anse): “A rather poor pun,”
he admits, “which had nevertheless permitted the constitution of the
object.”12 Through this isolating operation, engaged to show how im-
ages actually travel between “exterior and interior” (he claimed that
the “Silence” image had first appeared to him in a dream), Breton ap-
proaches an understanding of phenomenal reality as generated entirely
by language, and as this would become a fundamental philosophical
position for a w hole range of subsequent poststructural theories, his
gesture seems prescient. Yet in doing so, Breton destroyed the image’s
critical potential, namely, its resistance to the harmonious and unified
image. In moving the pun-image away from the game, a reactionary
sensibility was imposed onto the montage-like avant-garde image: first,
because in this case play was retheorized as an operation with a useful
aim (to materialize the dream images of secondary revision); and sec-
ond, because the “phantom object” the game produced was then “traced
back” to the psyche of an individual player, establishing itself as an inde
pendent entity, the reflection of a coherent and unified subject: Breton
himself.13 The “crisis of the object” that Breton first declared upon see-
ing Giacometti’s suspended ball had become a crisis within the surrealist
movement itself, as it sold out the critical promise of surrealist play to
the institutions of art and the agency of the master artist.
250 Chapter Five

Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 3 (1931): 21.
5.3 La Révolution surréaliste 9–10 (October 1927): 44.
5.4
Getty Research Institute (84-S151). Getty Research Institute (86-S83).
If Communicating Vessels is the conceptual justification for the syn-

thesizing operations of objective chance, then Breton’s Mad Love is its
mythic validation. Like Nadja, Mad Love traverses the city, and likewise
it reports on a series of encounters, among them the chance discovery of
certain flea market trouvailles, a spoon and a mask, that found their way
into two artists’ studios: the mask, to Giacometti’s, where it would fig-
ure in the completion of his sculpture Invisible Object (1934), and then
both objects to Man Ray’s studio, where they would be photographed
(and validated) as surrealist objects (figures 5.5 and 5.6).14 These two im-
ages appear in Mad Love as support for Breton’s narrative, just as Jacques-
André Boiffard’s photographs of Paris were slipped between the pages of
Nadja, but Man Ray’s images have none of Boiffard’s gray banality. This
time Breton chose images with visual verve—the photographs are fas-
cinating in their own right, without the support of the narrative. The
mask, cut out against a stark, light ground, is lit from behind in such
a way that the eye slits glow with fiendish clarity; the spoon is framed
Postlude 251
(above) Man Ray, untitled, 1934.
5.5
© 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp.
(below) Man Ray, untitled, 1934.
5.6
© 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp.
against a white backdrop that emphasizes its sculptural, as opposed to
utilitarian, aspect. Man Ray’s dramatic lighting casts shadows that give
the objects a certain palpability, yet both float in the kind of timeless
focus we associate with art objects, isolated from any heuristic context,
rendered fully auratic. It is as though Breton is no longer interested in
photography as a document of fugitive experience, but rather as a mode
of transportable object making, a site where the mystery of an object
can be generated and then preserved, frozen in its surreality whether
the image appears in a book, in a gallery, or framed on a wall. The ob-
jects achieve, as Breton finally said of the slipper spoon, “perfect organic
unity”—as opposed to the resistance to aura that Benjamin had identi-
fied as technologically enabled—Spielraum’s critical advantage.15
Man Ray’s skill at isolating surrealist qualities in ordinary objects is
hard at work in the development of a plastic surrealism: his other photo
graphs for Mad Love—a mandrake root, a sunflower, an hourglass, and
a tarot layout—effectively materialize things Breton can only describe
in the text. Folded into the book, the photographs literally incorporate
these found objects into the discourse of surrealism. Similarly, Man
Ray’s photographs annexed Giacometti’s objects to Breton’s project,
in spite of the fact that Giacometti’s work of this time had developed in
response to the ludic discourse circulating among the “dissident” surre-
alists who w ere holding themselves separate from surrealism proper. In
addition to embedding Giacometti’s work in the issues of lsasdlr de-
voted to the surrealist object, Breton would seek to claim Giacometti’s
future work for his cause, by writing the sculptor into the pages of Mad
Love as a central figure in the dramatic unfolding of objective chance,
arguing that it was the “catalyzing” power of the mysterious “found”
mask that enabled Giacometti to finally complete the sculpture Invisible
Object.16
Yet a particular group of Giacometti’s objects do not appear in Bret-
on’s publications: Circuit; Man, Woman, and Child; and No More Play—
the objects that are commonly referred to as his “game boards.” Th ere is
something indigestible about them to Breton, something that I would
suggest lies in their combined mutability and invitation to physical en-
gagement. For it is exactly this combination that marked Breton’s early
ludic practices—the turning outward of automatism into the register of
spatial experience, reconfiguring Paris as a game board—practices that
Breton was now moving away from in order to produce objects with an
intrinsically surrealist identity. Giacometti’s objects of this time are per-
meated with an instability so pronounced that they amount to a kind of
violence done to notions of synthesis and singularity, two characteristics
Postlude 253
Breton was busy developing for the ideal surrealist object. This effect of
violation is particularly pronounced in On ne joue plus (No More Play),
where the repetitively indented surface measures the potential advance
and retreat of figure-like tokens placed in the sculptural field, bring-
ing to mind that other game in which a semblance of control is won
through repeated action: the unpleasant fort-da of Freud’s Beyond the
Pleasure Principle. The three coffin-shaped pits in the game board, one
open to reveal a carcass-like fragment, exacerbate the morbid tone, but
it is the title of the piece, No More Play, that makes the deathly refer-
ence explicit—in the negative content of its message, of course, but also
formally, through the inversion of its scripted message.
Inversion is perhaps the most common motif of deregulated play. As
a ludic strategy, it has a long history in the rituals of carnival, an inter-
ruption of the everyday that, in the ecstatic violence of its physical and
emotional release, represents a kind of zenith of the ludic-morbid. In
carnival one plays, in Roger Caillois’s words, “to the point of exhaus-
tion, to the point of sickness. . . . [ W]aste and destruction . . . are the
festival’s essence.”17 Carnival circumscribes a time and space in which
dislocation and disorder rule, overturning familiar hierarchies and social
conventions. It brings down the high with the low, dislocates perception
through an overwhelming barrage of mixed sensory modes, and blurs
distinctions between spectators and performers—much as No More
Play inverts conventions of artistic form by infecting the vertical field
of sculpture with the horizontality of bassesse, by adding the tactile to
the visual, and by inviting a shape-shifting physical engagement into the
discrete and stable field of passive visual delectation. Inversion, in the
form of the mirror-written “On ne joue plus,” introduces the ghostly
double of legibility to No More Play, making a mockery of the trans-
parency of meaning we attach to the written message: Does play end
when life picks up again, a fter the excesses of carnival, or does the end of
play mean the end of life itself, the final achievement of the exhausting
repetitive play of the death drive, the return to primordial formlessness?
Form and content themselves play in the inscription on the surface of
No More Play: if you read for content, play is over. If you read for form,
play is activated, through inversion. No More Play introduces a schism,
and not a synthesis, through an oscillation of meaning and structural
instability that devolves meaning itself into inanity. While Giacometti’s
game boards are, as Anne Umland has pointed out, ontological divagu-
ers, and thus can be understood as linked to early surrealist errance,
ultimately their meaninglessness has more to say about the Spielraum
activated in the rue Blomet than Breton’s automatist play.18
254 Chapter Five

Indeed, divaguer was the term Michel Leiris had assigned to Giaco
metti’s output of this period, setting their temporality and contingency
against the stasis of sculpture as conventionally conceived; and it was
Leiris who had first drawn Giacometti into the dissident surrealist circle
in 1929, publishing his motile tabletop works in Documents 4.19 The ini-
tial appearance of Giacometti’s work in the very journal dedicated to
repudiating Breton’s erotic idealism placed Giacometti’s objects at the
nexus of the schism in surrealism, investing his work with flickering and
unstable ideological importance. For the future of surrealist play, those
objects Breton would officially exclude from the second decade of the
surrealist movement would be more significant than those he would
embrace: his ultimate rejection of Giacometti’s game boards clarifies the
extent to which he shrank from the destructive and violent side of play,
which could not be absorbed into his formulation of purely libidinal,
productive desire. In a sense, the struggle within the surrealist movement
was a struggle over the Janus face of the ludic, and the contest over Gia-
cometti’s game boards presents something like a Bataillean end point for
surrealist play.
Ludic Legacies
In the introduction to this book I suggested that surrealist play provoked

a kind of productive disorder in the postwar field of representation. The
contested ludic field that would emerge on the heels of surrealism first
took shape in an extraordinary postwar exchange between four distinctive
figures competing to define the ludic: the historian Johan Huizinga,
the structural linguist Émile Benveniste, surrealist André Breton, and
ex-surrealist Roger Caillois. Huizinga had published Homo Ludens:
A Study of the Play-Element in Culture in 1938, but the book had not
yet achieved wide circulation, having only been translated into German
from Dutch in 1944, with the French translation following seven years
later, in 1951.20 Caillois would eventually produce a full-length counter-
position on the ludic with his 1958 publication of Les jeux et les hommes
(Man, Play and Games) but this text had been in formulation since at
least 1946, when he wrote of the relation between play and the sacred
in an appendix to the second edition of his L’homme et le sacré (Man
and the Sacred).21 In 1947, in the short and little-known essay entitled
“Le jeu comme structure,” Benveniste elaborated on the inadequacies of
these other two texts from the point of view of the emerging structur-
alist movement. Finally, André Breton, inspired by the appearance of
Huizinga’s book in France, would publicly reassert the surrealists’ prior
Postlude 255
claim on the ludic in his 1954 article “L’un dans l’autre.”22 All four texts
address a term new to play discourse: the sacred, attesting to the rise
of the anthropological model in cultural analysis, but also bringing to
mind the “materialistic, anthropological” turn that the avant-garde had
itself taken decades before, the phenomenon that Walter Benjamin had
called surrealism’s “profane illumination.”23 The interchange between
the four texts places surrealist play near the origin point of the struc-
turalist movement, with Caillois’s and Breton’s ludic theories refract-
ing Benveniste’s analysis and providing a discursive springboard for the
critical role of play in poststructuralist thought.24
The sacred enters the complex of play, art, and culture as that collection
of beliefs held in highest common esteem in any given social group, and
therefore acts as the bond that holds the society together. This anthro-
pological sacred expands beyond its strictly theological definition into a
more general, materialist one: secular societies are regarded as administer-
ing a set of defining “sacred” myths that regulate social relations. As such
the sacred becomes important in these critical essays in two ways: first, as
law, and therefore an authority to be obeyed or resisted, and second, as the
bearer of rituals, social forms that, in their regulatory structures, resemble
games, and by which subjects actively reproduce and reaffirm the cultural
myths that cohere in the sacred. By invoking the sacred, all four of these
essays implicated play and art with ideology and institutions (although
sometimes unwittingly), and drew radically different conclusions about
the strategic position of the ludic in relation to cultural practices.
Huizinga’s influential contribution, Homo Ludens, was that of a hu-
manist struggling to absorb materialist tenets that grasp play forms as
meaningful, rather than gratuitous. His attempt to synthesize the ma-
terial and the ideal make his book a contradictory account that finally
claims both autonomy and engagement for the ludic, as well as both
purpose and gratuity. It is worthwhile repeating his definition in its full-
est version:
Summing up the formal characteristics of play, we might call it
a free activity, standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life
as being “not serious,” but at the same time absorbing the player
intensely and utterly. It is connected with no material interest, and
no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper
boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an
orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings
which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their
difference from the common world by disguise or other means.25
256 Chapter Five

As Jacques Ehrmann has pointed out, Huizinga was the first to sys-
tematically expose play as a common presence in apparently unrelated
and pragmatic activities, opening the possibility that play might not be
bounded off into an autonomous sphere—in spite of Huizinga’s own as-
sertion that play is circumscribed in time and place, and firmly situated
outside of everyday life.26 Huizinga dedicates a chapter each to play’s
presence in law, war, poetry, myth, knowledge, art, and philosophy—
culture itself, he contends, “arises in the form of play.” As civilization
advances, the play element hides b ehind not only the sacred, but
all cultural forms: it “crystallizes as knowledge: folklore, poetry, phi-
losophy, or in the various forms of judicial and social life.”27 Huizinga
understands play as preceding the sacred (which, in his assessment, is
merely a refinement of a “primitive” play impulse), yet coextensive with
it: for Huizinga, sacred rituals are an outgrowth of play’s general “civi-
lizing function.” Play in this model has an ennobling capacity—it is “a
transposition of . . . reality to a higher plane.”28
In spite of the fact that Huizinga rejects the notion that fully devel-
oped artistic form is the sole outcome of the play instinct, Homo Ludens
is essentially derived from Schiller’s theory of Spieltrieb, the natural
human drive t oward unity and reconciliation, the civilizing force that
brings about order through art.29 Like Schiller, Huizinga sees play as
the “impulse to create orderly form . . . saturated with rhythm and har-
mony”—an impulse that will draw unruly reality into a harmonious
totality.30 Thus when Huizinga calls play “a significant function” and
asserts that “all play means something,” he fashions play as an idealist
representation that performs a didactic role.31
But in doing so, he contradicts his own assertion of gratuity in the
ludic, for he has essentially assigned a purpose to play—its role is to civi-
lize and tame natural reality. Despite the Kantian distinctions Huizinga
makes between homo ludens, homo faber, and homo sapiens, he has given
play a definite “culture function” that “creates order, is order,” a concept
that is ultimately inconsistent with “freedom.”32 His notion of the ludic
as a “sacred activity” is conceived as resolutely productive and institu-
tionally determined, an affirmative rather than critical sociopolitical
model. Civilized play and the artistic forms it begets are conceived apart
from a material reality that precedes it, and it is representation’s role to
sublimate that reality.33
Caillois—and this is surprising for a thinker so closely allied with
the dissident surrealists—agrees with Huizinga that the ludic has a civi-
lizing role, although importantly, his texts account for certain types of
play that run to the destructive and aimless. Since Caillois insists that
Postlude 257
everyday reality must be protected from play for this reason, his own
opposition of play to reality holds even more firmly than that in Homo
Ludens; his work on play shows none of the early surrealists’ desire for
breaking boundaries. Yet because he refuses to choose between a ludic
that is e ither ontologically constructive or destructive of culture, his
analysis is contradictory to the point of incoherence, and that, at least,
is consistent with the surrealist project. His interpretation expands on
Huizinga’s, defining play as an activity that is:
1. Free: in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at
once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion;
2. Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined
and fixed in advance;
3. Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the
result attained beforehand, and some latitude for innovations
being left to the player’s initiative;
4. Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new ele
ments of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property
among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevail-
ing at the beginning of the game;
5. Governed by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws,
and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts;
6. Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second
reality or of a free unreality, as against real life.34
Caillois’s typology of play includes agôn (competition), and mimicry
(simulation), as well as alea (chance), and ilinx (vertigo), two forms that
are “regarded as destructive to the mores.”35 Within those categories,
Caillois ranges play along a continuum from paidia (spontaneity) to
ludus (regulation), a qualification that locks play down into a totaliz-
ing scheme that accounts for counterproductive play modalities such
as chance and vertigo but never allows that those terms might be posi-
tively liberating elements.36 Nevertheless, a deeply dual ludic emerges
from Caillois’s summary of play as an activity which is free, separate,
uncertain, unproductive, regulated, and unreal, with the ensuing con-
tradiction of the pervasiveness of regulation in a sphere of freedom and
uncertainty.37
For Caillois, play marks out a social space that permits paradox and
irrationality. While this is a sphere that is usually reserved for the sa-
cred, Caillois rejects Huizinga’s alignment of the two, claiming that
“play is pure form, activity that is an end in itself,” while the sacred, on
the contrary, is “pure content—an indivisible, equivocal, fugitive, and
258 Chapter Five

efficacious force.”38 The two are similar only in that they both maintain
protected spheres in which otherwise socially inappropriate actions can
safely play out.39 Any potentially transgressive aspects of the ludic (or
the sacred) are neutralized within this bounded sphere. In play, all is
control and order: the players determine the rules and limit their expo-
sure to chance and vertigo; Caillois calls it “a kind of haven in which one
is master of destiny.”40 The sacred, on the other hand, is separated from
“profane life” in order to protect life from “its terrible onslaughts”—the
sacred “transcends” ordinary life with a show of overwhelming power.41
Thus while Caillois outwardly rejects biopsychological theories that
“presume a utilitarian goal” for play, he, like Huizinga, does give play a
civilizing purpose: “There is no civilization without play and rules of
fair play, without conventions consciously established and freely re-
spected.”42 The orthodoxies that play establishes are not understood
here as repressive, but as “the source of the fertile conventions that
permit the evolution of culture.”43 As Man, Play and Games unfolds,
a disturbingly simplistic ludic hierarchy emerges as well, with the most
“civilized” cultures characterized by a predominance of ludus and the
least “civilized” indulging in the relatively deregulated paidia.
Caillois’s analysis of play is in fact framed by an intellectual and ideo-
logical “conversion to civilization” he made during the Second World
War—that is to say, a conversion away from the radical avant-garde
represented by Georges Bataille and the transgressive imperatives of
the Collège de sociologie.44 No longer concerned with d oing away with
established cultural forms like literature, he advocated the reconcilia-
tion of form and content into a cohesive whole: his cultural ideal is of a
balanced totality that necessarily includes both play and the sacred. As
Claudine Frank has observed, “Caillois imagined not only juxtaposing
but integrating lucidity and emotion, science and myth with a ‘militant
orthodoxy’ poised somewhere between Marx and Durkheim, that is,
between ideological superstructure and collective representation.”45 So
while Caillois had already identified play as the b earer of ideology and
institutional consistency, by the time he finished Man, Play and Games
he newly understood this as a positive role:
If the principles of play in effect correspond to powerful instincts
(competition, chance, simulation, vertigo), it is readily understood
that they can be positively and creatively gratified only under ideal
and circumscribed conditions, which in every case prevail in the
rules of play. Left to themselves, destructive and frantic as are all
instincts, these basic impulses can hardly lead to any but disastrous
Postlude 259
consequences. Games discipline instincts and institutionalize
them. For the time that they can afford formal and limited satisfac-
tion, they educate, enrich, and immunize the mind against their
virulence. At the same time, they are made fit to contribute usefully to
the enrichment and the establishment of various patterns of culture.46
In this model play may weigh in against utility through its wasteful-
ness (“it expends,” Caillois wrote in his introduction, invoking Bataille)
but this is not sufficient to distance it from the dominant tradition of
affirmative cultural forms. Caillois’s play is “unexpected, irregular, fan-
tastic,” but these attributes inhabit and “enrich” discursive norms, rather
than dismantle them.47
Clearly Caillois was distanced from the extremes of surrealism at
this point. His belief in objective language, already present in the late
1930s at the Collège de sociologie, had become exacerbated in the post-
war context. In Man and the Sacred he sneers, for instance, at the early
Freudian assessment of play as a “discharge of excess energy” (although
his bemused account of the pleasure taken in generating obstacles in
ludus—“a taste for gratuitous difficulty”—unwittingly echoes the sce-
nario of play and repetition compulsion laid out in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle).48 And his break with Bataille is explicit. While there is no
doubt that Caillois’s characterization of the sacred as pure, uncontrol-
lable power is indebted to Bataillean surrealism (and in turn to Nietz
sche’s concept of Rausch), and that the powers he attributes to chance
and vertiginous play are commensurate with the operations of Bataille’s
formless, Caillois is very clear that t hese destructive forces must be care-
fully separated from “profane life.” The “corruption” of ordinary life by
play, its “free expansion without check or convention,” results in “ir-
reparable harm”: madness, intoxication, alienation. Caillois’s insistence
on maintaining the “sharp dividing line” between play and reality—to
prevent consequences in material reality—runs exactly counter to the
surrealist pledge to eliminate those very distinctions in their effort to
transform reality.49 His play theory unravels when he first characterizes
play as a civilizing agent and then must deem it corrupting in order to
justify binding it off from reality.
Apparently, Émile Benveniste’s “Le jeu comme structure” of 1947
was conceived independently of Homo Ludens, but its focus on the issue
of the sacred betrays Benveniste’s knowledge of Caillois’s critique of
Huizinga, as well as Caillois’s forthcoming project examining the links
between play and the sacred.50 Benveniste is clear at the outset that he
is concerned with analyzing play’s structure and function (which he
260 Chapter Five

d istinguishes from assigning it a purpose) as opposed to locating its
origins or specific manifestations. His pithy definition of play, as “all regu-
lated activity which has an end in itself and does not aim to usefully mod-
ify reality,” at first glance appears to be utterly anodyne, but unlike the
humanist and surrealist definitions of play circling this essay, Benveniste’s
account homes in on the aspect of play that so confounded Caillois: the
split at the root of the ludic, the paradox of play as an activity without
ends that is nevertheless able to modify reality—just not usefully.51
In its “fictive” quality, in its articulation of a reality based solely on
internal codes, as well as in its deployment within a closed social group
(“the tie between members of the game,” Benveniste claims, “is perhaps
stronger than that of parental blood relations”), Benveniste’s play is very
like the sacred. But like Caillois, he is at pains to keep the two distinct,
basing their differences not on Caillois’s Bataillean-derived separation
of form and content, but on their respective relations to utility: “The
sacred assumes a reality: that of the divine. For the rite, the faithful
are introduced to a distinct world, more real than the true world. The
game, on the contrary, is deliberately separated from reality. One could
say that the sacred is of the sur-réel, the game, of the extra-réel.—In
other words, the operation of the sacred has a practical end, which is
to render the terrestrial world habitable, to put down its hostile forces,
to organize society, to procure subsistence or victory. Play has no real
practical destination; its essence is its very gratuitousness.”52
Holding aside for a moment the provocative alignment of the sa-
cred, the surreal, and the orderly as opposed to the elaboration of play
as a supplement to the real, the most striking observation Benveniste
makes is that law and convention are located within the realm of the sa-
cred, and that while play is distinct from them, it is also part of culture.
Benveniste never claims extracultural, primal origins for play, and thus
avoids Caillois’s predicament, that is, the strange characterization of play
as an original, savage, and chaotic force whose purpose is to civilize.53
For Benveniste, the sacred is a synthesis of content (the shared myths
of a social group) and form (the rituals that structure and activate t hose
myths and make them useful). Play on the other hand, offers only one
of these elements or the other—its nature is that of the fragment, not
the w hole: “It has its origin in the sacred to which it offers an inverted
and splintered relationship. If the sacred is able to define itself by the
consubstantial unity of myth and rite, one could say that play exists
when one does not accomplish more than half of the sacred operation
in the translation of myth alone into speech [ jocus] or rite alone into
acts [ludus].”54
Postlude 261
Unlike Caillois, who finds himself in a logical quandary when he
tries to limit play to its civilizing essence, Benveniste allows for a signifi-
cant duality at the root of play: it can be e ither form or content, and
it can have e ither the dynamism of action or the stability of accepted
truths, but it can never have the practical usefulness of the two to-
gether.55 When Benveniste argues for the dialectical interdependence
of the sacred and play—“ They have, in effect, a symmetric but opposed
structure”—he gives play-as-fragment the power to disable sacred con-
ventions: “This homology defines play and the sacred by their common
traits and a contrary orientation. So while the sacred elevates man to
divinity that is ‘given’ and that is the source of all of reality, the game re-
duces the divine without danger to the level of man and by an ensemble
of conventions, renders him immediately accessible. Play is therefore at
base nothing more than a desacralizing operation. Play is the inverse of
the sacred and the rules of the game serve nothing more than to assure
this inversion.”56
In Benveniste’s account of play we recognize a primary strategy of
the surrealists—inversion—but also present here is a grasp of play as the
subversive conduit of Freudian desire. Benveniste asserts that “play is lo-
cated predominantly in subconscious life,” yet it is the medium through
which the subconscious impulses can be manifested as lived experience:
“Here is where play intervenes: it embodies one of the most revelatory
modalities of the derealization to which the subconscious aspires, and it
is b ecause of this that play signifies free expansion. Play is not the only
testimony to this: imagination, the dream, and art are o thers. But play,
in itself, permits consciousness to live its derealization in a world it has
accorded and in which derealization is the law.”57
Yet in spite of what amounts to a validation of surrealist ludic prac-
tices as modes superior to conventional artistic means (since play allows
the surrealist to live his or her revision of reality) it seems that Benveniste
is intent on refuting a number of Bataillean tenets. While certainly in this
immediate postwar context the surrealist movement would have been
identified with Breton (who was guiding it toward an uncritical mysti-
cism), Benveniste’s characterization of the sacred as sur-réel—still on or
about the real—would seem to refer to the renegade surrealists, who, with
the formation of the Collège de sociologie, had distanced themselves
from the putative frivolity of surrealist games and whose engagement
with sacred ritual was meant to have explicitly material consequences.58
For Bataille, the sacred was the realm of sacrifice and expenditure, the
only point of resistance to the dominant culture of exchange, but Ben-
veniste’s analysis (like Caillois’s) gives efficacy, and not waste, to the sacred
262 Chapter Five

sphere—the sacred regulates pragmatic matters to an extent that aligns it
with institutions and conventions. Play is cast as the operation that drives
a wedge between form (ritual) and content (myth); it has the power to
expose ideology by prying myth away from the basic structures of social
relations.59 Play as the extra-réel has the advantage of distance from the
efficiently regulated real—to activate it is to render the sacred useless.60
But this dialectic between play and the sacred is merely a specific
instance of the attitude of play toward the naturalized order of institu-
tions—it is a relation that is motivated by yet another bond, one that
Benveniste has established almost offhandedly: the “splintered” rela-
tion between play and reality. In “Le jeu comme structure” Benveniste
characterizes play as something extra-réel, or supplementary to reality:
it mimics “real life” in its capacity as “make believe,” yet in its utopian di-
mension it substitutes for that which material reality lacks. Alternately
void of content or form, play critiques reality by attaching itself as a
supplement—by contending that something is missing from reality’s
rationally defined totality. Benveniste suggests then, nearly twenty years
before Jacques Derrida would speak of “structure, sign and play” and
the logic of the supplement, that play is not merely deployed in a s imple
opposition in which an originally replete reality must always have the
upper hand. Rather, play activates that breathless dynamic of the signi-
fier that will become a given of the poststructuralist critique of represen
tation and truth.61
The fourth link in this chain of play texts is André Breton’s “L’un dans
l’autre” (The One in the Other, 1954).62 A fter its initial automatist pe-
riod, surrealism under Breton’s direction had endured a period of game
co-optation, during which the critical ludic strategies Benjamin had re-
conceived as activations of Spielraum were absorbed into conventional
artistic forms: the exquisite corpse was synthesized into figure drawing;
the ephemeral practices of errance and the initial, undirected impulses of
objective chance fell away in f avor of object construction; and surrealism
began to reify its practices into a set of symbols used to decorate, rather
than radically adapt traditional play forms—in, for example, the surreal-
ist Jeu de l’oie gameboard or the Jeu de Marseille playing cards of 1940.63
But the game Breton introduces here as “the one in the other,” even at the
late date of 1954, marks a resurgence of the early tenets of surrealism—a
kind of rupture of lucidity (or in the case of surrealism, incoherence) be-
fore the final death of the movement. “The one in the other” calls on
the simplest form of surrealist intervention—the systematic inversion of
conventions—and is a return to surrealist play as an automatically de-
rived absence of work without purpose or meaning, where players are
Postlude 263
“played” by chance, a game which, b ecause it is consumed by its process,
produces nothing useful beyond a trace of its operations.
Advanced as a guaranteed method for producing chance images, “the
one in the other” game also offered, according to Breton, proof of his
theory that “any arbitrary object is . . . contained in any other arbitrary
atter how apparently estranged.64 In the course of the game,
object,” no m
a player leaves the room and privately decides on an object (for example
a lock of hair), while all the other players independently choose another
object (in this case an evening dress). The first player’s task on returning
to the group is to describe his secret object in terms of the object offered
by the group: “I am an evening dress that . . .” If the players cannot guess
“a lock of hair” from the ensuing monologue, they pose questions—but
Breton claims that the secret object, the enigma, is always revealed, with
the transcribed descriptive sequence providing a kind of “portrait” of
a juxtaposition, following Pierre Reverdy’s 1918 dictum that the poetic
image “cannot be born from a comparison but only from a juxtaposition
of two more or less distant realities.” H ere is the text that revealed the
lock of hair in the evening dress: “I am an evening dress of cloth so light
that I weigh no more than the finest handkerchief resting in your hand. I
converse with the crescent moon about our mutually narrow forms. The
person who possesses me can, when she wears me, keep me in a closed
place from which she takes me when she is alone, for specific purposes.
Sometimes fragrant, I have a choice of no more than two or at the most
three colors that may present all the variations in their range.”65
The game effectively produces riddles, and from this Breton con-
cludes, reading through the Homo Ludens frame that equates play with
sacred enigmas, that this game is “a fortuitous way to return poetry to
the sacred path that it originally called its own and from which every
thing since has conspired to separate it.”66 This is a relation between play
and the sacred that diverges markedly from Caillois’s characterization,
which holds that play demystifies the sacred—a fact that Caillois makes
clear in an impatient critique of Breton’s text. True enigmas, or riddles
(which, Caillois agrees, are undoubtedly a motif of the sacred), can never
be “solved” by the deductive interrogation that marks Breton’s game, but
only through the possession of a key—specialized information that can
be had through initiation into or betrayal of the sacred society: “The
nature of the enigma,” Caillois claims, “is not that of the play on words
or—even less—of the poetic image; it is that of the password.”67
Since even at this late date, Breton still aimed, through surrealism, to
“finish with the old antinomies of action and dream, past and f uture,
reason and madness, high and low, . . . seriousness and nonseriousness,
264 Chapter Five

work and leisure, wisdom and stupidity,” he would naturally want to
distance himself from Caillois’s model of play, with its discrete catego-
ries.68 Less understandable is why Breton would ignore Benveniste’s
model, which amounts to a codification of early surrealism’s own strat-
egies for inversions against the sacred-as-law, and affirms a critical po-
tential for the ludic that even Caillois acknowledged as a “demystify-
ing” capacity.69 Breton, distracted by the supernatural and undoubtedly
drawn to Huizinga’s conflation of ritual with sacred “mystery,” as much
as to Huizinga’s exposure of the ludic within institutional forms, failed
to recognize the potential for doing violence to conventional forms in-
herent in his own game. Caillois as well, intent on absolutely separat-
ing the ludic and the poetic on the basis of an artistic intention that he
finds essential to poetics and absent from play, missed the significance of
Breton’s game to the cycle of artistic production and co-optation—or
willfully ignored it here. For him “the one in the other” would have
again proven that play has no part in poetics: “Play is an occasion for
pure expenditure, it is in fact characteristic of play to create no wealth,
no works. It differentiates itself thereby from work and from art.”70 Of
course, t hese are precisely the grounds on which both Breton and Ba-
taille would say that play must necessarily have its role in art.
Returning to Benveniste’s model, which allows for play as a contra-
vention, helps to make this clear. For Benveniste, you’ll remember, play
is identified when myth alone (content) is translated into speech (“play
in words”), or when rite (form) alone is translated into acts (“physical
play”). On the basis of the “juxtaposition portraits” alone, “the one in
the other” game would seem to fall into the first category as a form of
wordplay: myth, or form alone. The passages “speak,” but without a per-
formative structure they mean nothing. They are deliberately fictive,
and do not attempt to naturalize themselves.
Yet the finished texts w ere not published alone, as autonomous feats
of literature: Breton claims precedence for play over poetry in his ar-
ticle by explaining the game. That is, he prevents the passages from being
read as pure imaginative content when he includes the rules at the outset,
which articulate the sequence of play, its intersubjective mode, its infinite
repeatability. Effectively, he demystifies the creative process by revealing
all aspects of its apparatus. What Caillois misread as a deductive logic
inhering in the passages of Breton’s game was actually evidence of the
method by which the riddles w ere constructed, specifically, through
the transcribed actions of the players. An automatic system operates
in “the one in the other” in which the rules of the game manipulate
the players, and any words appearing on the page are merely residue of
Postlude 265
that mechanical process. In this sense, the texts thrown off by the game
have been motivated by the second, physical kind of play described by
Benveniste: ludus, or rite alone.
And Benveniste is clear: ludus activates its demystifying operation
exactly by removing sacred myth from its structure. Play in this form is
lawless ritual, profane action. By finding its “use value” in demystified
process, rather than product, what Benveniste calls ludus approximates
surrealism’s own profane illumination, the restoration of ritual to art
practices that, for Walter Benjamin, had given surrealism “revolution-
ary” potential two decades before.71 Any one of Breton’s “juxtaposition
portraits” openly declares itself as an index of the play experience, a
mnemonic trace of a particular time and place in which particular sur-
realists w ere “played” by the game, opening up experience, destroying
poetic aura, giving it Spielraum.
According to Benveniste’s model, Breton’s surrealist play, even at this
late date, has the potential to contravene against “sacred” law. It is this
disabling capacity of the structuralist ludic, refracted by the surrealist
grasp of play as key to a revision of the boundaries of reality, that will
arrive at an approximation of poststructuralist play. This relation is ap-
parent with regard to Caillois’s as well as Breton’s ludic theory, for Cail-
lois, following Benveniste, does posit games like “the one in the other” as
demystifying devices, precisely b ecause they, like Benveniste’s stripped
ritual, expend without producing.72 This acknowledgment, combined
with Caillois’s claim that “the one in the other” addresses the traditional
poetic convention of metaphor, links Breton’s game to subsequent criti-
cal positions that w ill identify play with processes of reciprocal motion,
rather than the stasis of fixed ideas.
Caillois’s critique of “the one in the other” proceeds from the fact that,
far from satisfying Pierre Reverdy’s revolutionary formula for juxtaposi-
tion (“As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an
umbrella on an operating table”), Breton is merely drawing analogies—
constructing metaphors whose “portraits” are in fact stripped of juxta-
positional shock, since they guide the reader through a chain of formal
similarities that link “the one thing” to “the other.” Breton’s game, he
complains, is an entirely arbitrary process of association, one that un-
critically claims that “everything, absolutely everything in the domain
may be ratified by imagination.”73 Caillois shrinks, that is, before the
specter of sheer indifferentiation—the threat of destruction posed by
the unlimited scope of a chain of images entirely disengaged from em-
pirical reference. On one hand, his insistence on maintaining the limits
between representation and reality runs counter to the eroding opera-
266 Chapter Five

tions of Bataille’s formless, a concept he had already rejected. On the
other hand, he perceives a more urgent threat: that along with mean-
ing, reality itself w
ill entirely disappear behind the endless virtual play
of imagination—an opposite (but equally objectionable, for Caillois)
abstraction to Bataille’s devolution of meaning to sheer base material
(matter being the very stuff of reality). In either scenario, the comfort
of a controlled presentation of reality through meaningful words and
acts would be lost. In his desire to expose Breton’s texts as lucid, Caillois
has inadvertently—and certainly illogically, considering his civilizing
claims for play—recognized Breton’s game as a desublimating play op-
eration with the potential to reveal the codes by which metaphor oper-
ates.74 The model for this demonstration undoubtedly was familiar to
Caillois from the homologous chain of images that Bataille himself had
threaded through The History of the Eye (1928), a novel that would find
its key poststructural interpretation in Roland Barthes’s “The Metaphor
of the Eye” (1972).75 But importantly for understanding the complexity
of surrealism’s position on the threshold of poststructuralist thought,
the acknowledgment of play’s transgressive power at this moment pre
sents an instance of alignment between Breton’s and Bataille’s surrealist
camps, separated by the admittedly crucial difference of whether ludic
elements should be released into (Bataille), exposed within (Breton), or
closed off from (Caillois) material reality.
Breton’s “the one in the other” game also works to complicate Ben-
veniste’s model, as it presents his “play-as-structure” with a third option
that cannot be entirely assimilated into the scheme. Breton’s “juxtaposition
portraits” are both “myth” and “rite,” being at once transcriptions of the
game and assemblages of speech. As such Benveniste would categorize
them as “sacred.” Yet they fall entirely outside the realm of the sacred
as Benveniste describes it: the sphere of law, efficiency, and organizing
purpose. “The one in the other” game is above all a gratuitous practice,
an absence of work that offers an absurd result. If this game functions, it
is only in a destructive, not productive, way; or better—since the game
does not seek to do away with the categories of play, sacred, myth, and
rite, but rather “impossibly” inhabits all of them at once—we should say
it subverts the structure from within, or deconstructs it.
Significantly, none of these postwar thinkers finds play’s operations
exhausted by its relation to art. When art is aligned with play, as in
Huizinga, it is only the most obvious of a number of ludic manifes-
tations, rather than the single cultural phenomenon to which play is
relegated. Caillois’s account eliminates artistic practices from any ludic
consideration, since they are productive,76 and while Benveniste’s text
Postlude 267
briefly associates art with dreaming and the ludic through the subcon-
scious, what he describes applies to the whole system of representation,
and not to art alone. Taken together, these texts signal play’s final break
with aesthetics in the postwar period: from the 1950s forward the dis-
cursive field would grasp play as a signifier of sociological, psychologi-
cal, and representational indeterminacy rather than as a metaphor for
autonomy, originality, authenticity, and mastery.
Art’s definitive turn away from auratic autonomy, facilitated by a new
grasp of the ludic brought on by surrealist play, was accompanied by a
cross-disciplinary explosion of texts on and about play in the decades
after World War II. The 1950s saw the translation of Huizinga’s Homo
Ludens and Caillois’s Man, Play and Games as well as the appearance
of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), with its theory of
reality constituted by language games. The journal Deucalion came out
with a special issue, “L’art et le jeu” (1957); Gregory Bateson published
his “Theory of Play and Fantasy” (1955); and Jean Piaget opened the
discourse on the role of play in clinical psychology, followed shortly
by Herbert Marcuse’s ludic critique of Freud in Eros and Civilization
(1955). In the 1960s, in addition to Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” René Alleau’s Dictionnaire
des jeux (1964) appeared, in which Philippe Audoin addressed surreal-
ist games at length; and Jacques Ehrmann edited a special issue of Yale
French Studies, “Games, Play and Literature” (1968), which included es-
says by Kostas Axelos, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Eugen Fink, all of whom
had just published full-length literary and philosophical studies based
in the ludic. Th
ese were followed in the 1970s by Hans-Georg Gadam-
er’s Truth and Method (1960), with its reconsideration of play and art;
Bernard Suits’s anti-Wittgensteinian The Grasshopper: Games, Life and
Utopia (1978); as well as a number of important psychological texts on
play, among them Eric Erikson’s Toys and Reasons (1977), Susanna Mil-
lar’s The Psychology of Play (1973), and D. W. Winnicott’s Playing and
Reality (1971).
By the 1980s play discourse had become pervasive enough to warrant
an annotated bibliography, published in the Canadian Review of
Comparative Literature’s special issue Game and Theories of Game, and
comprising 208 entries.77 Ludic theories riddled the fields of philoso-
phy and literary criticism, as they had become central to the poststruc-
turalist critique of the foundations of metaphysics. Poststructuralism
stripped the limits from the neatly closed system proposed in Émile
Benveniste’s “Le jeu comme structure,” opening signification into an
infinite play of meaning. Jacques Lacan’s elucidation of a subject split
268 Chapter Five

by the multiplicity of language, Jacques Derrida’s location of ambiguity
in apparently stable structures of signification, Roland Barthes’s valida-
tion of multiple meanings generated by active readers, and Michel Fou-
cault’s self-reflexive genealogical method, in their dissociation of texts
from natural truths, all founded their methodologies in the groundless
ambivalence of the ludic. Play permeates Jean Baudrillard’s and Gilles
Deleuze’s cultural critiques at the level of simulacrum and decentered net-
works, and Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern heterogeneity is a condi-
tion in which contingency and discontinuity are the only standards.78
These poststructuralist approaches, in which meaning, truth, and sta-
bility can never be located outside of or prior to the play of difference,
can themselves be traced to Martin Heidegger’s use of ludic concepts to
wrest Being from truth—to develop instead a notion of, as one author
has put it, “Being as play.”79 Heidegger’s Being and Time would ulti-
mately place play at the forefront of cultural critique; the fact that it is
dated 1927, a mere year a fter Man Ray appropriated Atget, and only two
years after the surrealist appropriation of the game of exquisite corpse,
suggests that the alignment of postmodernism’s displacement of pres-
ence with ludic dynamism rose alongside surrealism’s own question-
ing of reality through play.80 A number of historical links support this
connection, particularly between Lacan, Masson, Dalí, and Bataille;
and Michel Foucault’s well-known reception of Magritte, in its focus
on semantic slippage, can be read as an outgrowth of his less famous
essay on Roussel.81 But the links are apparent in surrealist play itself:
in the privileging of chance over necessity; in the commitment to the
dynamic production of a contingent reality by the subject in errance;
in the construction, through games like exquisite corpse, of a reality
formed entirely by intertextual and intersubjective representation; in
the implications of the endlessly bifurcating politics of puns.
Surrealism’s impact on cultural practices was not, of course, lim-
ited to psychoanalysis, postmetaphysical philosophy, and literature;
both branches of surrealism have an expanded legacy in the dynam-
ics of postwar abstraction and its privileging of the unconscious, and
B ataille’s informe has risen within numerous postwar works, operating
as the “other” within modernist and postmodernist practice to resist as-
similation within the dominant culture.82 Likewise, surrealism’s desire
to erode boundaries has been identified as the impetus driving certain
postwar collage practices, specifically Robert Rauschenberg’s desire to
work “in the gap between life and art,” bringing so-called low elements
into the frame.83 But the specifically ludic strategies that surrealism de-
ployed against prevailing conceptions of authenticity and stable unity
Postlude 269
have their heritors as well in a range of postwar art practices, where they
emerge as manifestations of dematerialization, flux, immediacy, and
indexicality. Through play-as-process rather than -production surrealism
is linked to later movements whose art practices have been difficult to
grasp in their ephemerality and apparent inconsistency.
The grafting of aleatory or psychic-driven processes onto the geo-
graphic register of experience resonates most obviously with the situ-
ationist dérive, the “technique of locomotion without a goal,”84 or with
its contemporary, New Babylon (1967), Constant’s ludic Utopia, whose
inhabitants could spontaneously change the configurations of the city.85
But drift is also active in poststudio practices such as Vito Acconci’s
Following Piece (1969), in which Acconci allowed the movements of an
arbitrarily chosen passerby to determine his own passage through the
city, or Robert Smithson’s photo-essay Monuments of Passaic (1967),
an antitour through a degraded industrial landscape in New Jersey.
The critical potential of revealing what is normally unacknowledged in
the urban field would eventually emerge in the public interventions of
Adrian Piper, whose Catalysis series (1970) sought to derail the isolated
complacency of the city dweller. Likewise, Janet Cardiff ’s performative
audio tours, in which participants are subjected to an intimate experi-
ence of place that is emphatically not their own, explores the potential
in play for unpleasure through the loss of agency.
Games, as well, would resurface in postwar art production, literally,
in numerous Fluxus projects like Georges Brecht’s Water Yam (1963),
in which cards with brief instructions directed the play, or in Öyvind
Fahlström’s Planetarium (1963), an interactive tableau which generated
an infinite variety of combinations from only two perspectives—words
determining images or images determining words. Both were preceded
by the curtly scripted “Happenings,” which, like Cardiff ’s and P iper’s
subsequent projects, depended on the active engagement of the audience
to produce an unpredictable and often unpleasant mingling of action
and reception—as in, for instance, Alan Kaprow’s A Spring Happening
(1961), during which uninitiated participants w ere herded into a nar-
row, pitch-black container and terrorized with loud and violent noises.
Even Sol Lewitt’s directives for wall drawings, most often identified with
Duchamp’s conceptualism, can be understood in terms of play: like the
exquisite corpse, they can be executed by p eople with little or no skill,
and share in regulation’s self-effacement and technomechanical reproduc-
tion: “ideas,” Lewitt said, “that are machines to make art.”86 And out of the
full range of process art that showed itself in the 1960s and 1970s—art
that, like the early surrealist games, exists as a trace of its own making—
270 Chapter Five

play’s direct representatives might be Simon Hantaï’s randomly crushed
and folded canvases, or the found and shredded murals of décollagistes
Georges Mathieu and Jacques de la Villeglé, or William Anastasi’s
Unsighted Drawing (1968), a precisely folded page repeatedly marked by
a pencil jiggling in the draftsman’s pocket: a prescribed but indeterminate
outcome.87
It cannot be accidental that the rise of ludic strategies in advanced art
and cultural critique occurred at precisely the historical moment when an
ethos of high consumerism, professional functionalism, and instrumen-
tality of form and language had come to dominate e very aspect of life. The
acknowledgment that nothing was to be left to chance in the completed
shift from use value to exchange value—that persons, things, and experi-
ences could all be reduced to interchangeable economic units of value—
could only have emerged from the strategic exploration of chance itself in
critical practice.88 Surrealist play strategies may have been marginalized in
the history of the movement, but play as action and experience was not
marginal within the movement itself, and in their own time, ludic activi-
ties had never been bracketed from the other, larger concerns of the sur-
realists; in fact they shaped those concerns in ways that I hope I have now
made obvious. Surrealism at play was avant-garde in the full sense of the
term: a fully politicized praxis. The modern critical ludic they developed,
located at the unlikely intersection of chance and technology, mim-
icked the very system of exchange that structures the all-encompassing
economic cycle of production and consumption—occupying it, twist-
ing it, infecting it with heterogeneity and irrationality. Surrealism’s ludic
revolution reinvented play—for art, for politics, for experience.
Postlude 271
Plate 1 Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1922. mnam. © 2018
Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp. Image © cnac / mnam / Dist.
rmn-Grand Palais / Art Resource.
Plate 2 Hans Richter, Visionary Self-Portrait, 1917. mnam.
Photo by Philippe Migeat © cnac / mnam / Dist. rmn Grand-Palais / Art Resource.
Plate 3 Christian Schad, typewritten picture, Dada Portrait of Walter Serner, 1920.
Chancellerie des universités de Paris, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet. © 2018
Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg / ars / vg Bild-Kunst.
Plate 4 Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy, Exquisite corpse,
1927. mnam. Joan Miró © 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp; Man Ray © 2018
Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp; Yves Tanguy © 2018 Estate of Yves Tanguy / ars.
Image © cnac / mnam / Dist. rmn Grand-Palais / Art Resource.
Plate 5 Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise. Exquisite corpse, 1927. Art
Institute of Chicago, Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection. Man Ray © 2018 Man Ray
Trust / ars / adagp; Yves Tanguy © 2018 Estate of Yves Tanguy / ars; Joan Miró © 2018
Successió Miró / ars / adagp. Photo credit: Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource.
Plate 6 Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray. Exquisite corpse, 1927.
moma. Yves Tanguy © 2018 Estate of Yves Tanguy / ars; Joan Miró © 2018 Successió
Miró / ars / adagp; Man Ray © 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp. Digital image ©
moma / Licensed by scala / Art Resource.
Plate 7 Max Morise, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró. Exquisite corpse,
1927. Private collection. Man Ray © 2018 Man Ray Trust / ars / adagp; Yves
Tanguy © 2018 Estate of Yves Tanguy / ars; Joan Miró © 2018 Successió
Plate 8 Joan Miró, Collage, January 30, 1933, 1933. Fundació Miró.
© 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp.
Plate 9 Joan Miró, Painting, March 13, 1933, 1933. Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection.
© 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp. Photo credit: Douglas M. Parker Studio.
Plate 10 Joan Miró, Collage, January 31, 1933, 1933. Fundació Miró.
Plate 11 Joan Miró, Painting, March 31, 1933, 1933. Kunstmuseum Bern.
© 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp. Image courtesy Kunstmuseum Bern.
Plate 12 Joan Miró, Collage, February 2, 1933, 1933. Fundació Miró.
Plate 13 Joan Miró, Painting, May 12, 1933, 1933. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum,
Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase, Kende Sale Fund, 1945.
Plate 14 Joan Miró, Collage, February 10, 1933, 1933. Fundació Miró.
Plate 15 Joan Miró, Painting, June 10, 1933, 1933. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
© 2018 Successió Miró / ars / adagp. Image courtesy Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum.
Plate 16 Alberto Giacometti, No More Play, 1932. National Gallery of Art, Washington,
DC. Gift of the Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas, in Honor
of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. © Alberto Giacometti
Estate / Licensed by vaga and ars. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art.
NOTES
Introduction. A Modern Critical Ludic
Epigraph: André Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” in Perspective cavalière, ed.

Marguerite Bonner (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970), 50.
1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987), §9, 62. I have made a more detailed account of Kantian play
and its role in the development of the idea of modernist autonomy (includ-
ing the extensive poststructuralist critique of that concept) in Susan Laxton,
“From Judgment to Process,” in From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and
Twentieth-Century Art, ed. David J. Getsy (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2011), 3–24.
2 “ ‘ Transform the world,’ Marx said, ‘change life,’ Rimbaud said. Th ese two
watchwords are one for us.” André Breton, “Speech to the Congress of Writers,”
in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1972), 241.
3 See André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 4.
4 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Selected Writ-
ings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund
Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002), 39. The concept was singled out for admiration by Theodor Adorno; see
Adorno, “Exchange with Theodor Adorno on ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth
Century,’ ” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson (London: nlb, 1977), 54.
5 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 317. See also the argument
against the alignment of play and art on the basis of disinterest summarized by
M. C. Nahm, “Some Aspects of the Play-Theory of Art,” Journal of Philosophy 39,
no. 6 (1942): 148–60.
6 For play as Benjamin’s “aesthetic alternative” to semblance, see Miriam Hansen,
“Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (summer
2004): 14.
7 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman
Schweppenhaüser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–89), 1177.
8 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1177.
9 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and
Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 806.
10 While idleness has a “use,” Benjamin writes, it “seeks to avoid any sort of tie
to the idler’s line of work, and ultimately to the labor process in general. That
distinguishes it from leisure.” Benjamin, Arcades Project, 803.
11 For Benjamin’s assessment of the role of artists and intellectuals in worker-
oriented society, see Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Selected Writings,
Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary
Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 768–82.
12 This is how Giorgio Agamben, one contemporary theorist of the ludic,
characterizes human gesture—as an action that “makes means visible,” com-
municating the h uman capacity for politics. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on
Gesture,” in Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 48–59.
13 Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and
Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 200. My
understanding of the term in relation to Benjamin’s overall attitude toward
play is indebted to Hansen’s account.
14 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
(Second Version),” in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland
and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 127n22. Benjamin’s play concept
was lost in both translation and transposition: Spielraum is elaborated in the
second or (at least in Hansen’s estimation) “Ur” version of the “Work of Art”
essay, but Benjamin cut it from the third version after Adorno’s critique of the
essay, and it was this third version that was subsequently translated into French
and English. See Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 83. When the term does sur-
face it has been translated variously, as “scope or field of action,” “running room,”
“leeway,” “margin,” “room to move or maneuver,” “scope for play,” and “space for
play.” Hansen weighs Adorno’s objections to the invocation of play in the essay
against the possibility that Benjamin himself had lost faith in the capacity of
Spielraum to establish equilibrium between human beings and technology in
time to avert the impending disaster of World War II. See Hansen, Cinema and
Experience, 162.
15 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 127n22.
16 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 93.
17 Hansen Cinema and Experience, 192.
18 “In film, the element of semblance has been entirely displaced by the element
of play.” Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 127n22.
274 Notes to Introduction

19 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 112.
20 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 107–8. Second technology itself emerges from
the ludic. Benjamin writes: “Its origin is to be sought at the point where, by
an unconscious ruse, human beings first began to distance themselves from
nature. It lies, in other words, in play” (107).
21 See, for example, Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: mit Press,
1993), particularly chapter 5, “Exquisite Corpses,” 125–56. Foster reads the
surrealists’ uncanny “mechanical-commodified” imagery as a form of parody
rather than rehabituation.
22 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 127.
23 Benjamin claimed that these two texts “most powerfully” expressed the idea of
profane illumination, Benjamin’s term for surrealism’s revolutionary expansion
of apprehension. See Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part
1, 1927–1930, ed. Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, and Gary Smith, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 209.
24 Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis, “Naples,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1,
1919–1926, ed. Michael Jennings and Marcus Bullock, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 414–21.
25 Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 122.
26 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 217–18. Miriam Hansen expands on innervation’s
mediation between “internal and external, psychic and motoric, human and
machine registers,” linking innervation directly to surrealist revolution. She
also points out that innervation appears in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
(1899) when Freud compares the “psychical apparatus” with a “composite
instrument” like the various systems of lenses used in optical devices. Hansen,
Cinema and Experience, 133, 145, 136.
27 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 209.
28 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 182; Hansen, “Room-for-Play,” 24.
29 For a full account of the role of play in theorizing art from Romanticism
through the Art-for-Art’s-sake movement to modernist self-referentiality,
see Laxton, “From Judgment to Process,” 3–24.
30 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 28.
31 Huizinga’s ultimate rejection of play’s purposelessness may indicate the grow-
ing influence of sociology and anthropology on history and philosophy in the
first half of the twentieth century: in the sciences play always serves a purpose.
For a Darwinian theory that maintains that animal as well as h uman play is
“preparatory practice” for life and therefore explicitly “interested,” a perspec-
tive that actually keys with the Aristotelian assessment of play as learning, see
Karl Groos, The Play of Man, trans. Elizabeth L. Baldwin (London: William
Heinemann, 1901). Prominent among those who have formulated an “applied”
play are the clinical psychologists following Jean Piaget. For an overview, see
Susanna Millar, The Psychology of Play (New York: Jason Aronson, 1974),
and Eric Erikson, Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualization of Experi-
ence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). Of these psychologists only D. W.
Winnicott has approached the surrealists’ own position, by theorizing play and
art as elements of a threshold category bridging psychic and social worlds.
Notes to Introduction 275

See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). These
are all theorists who accept play’s purpose as given, rather than imposed; com-
pare with Roland Barthes, who understands play’s “usefulness” as ideologically
imposed, especially in Roland Barthes, “Toys,” in Mythologies (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1972), 53–55.
32 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1.
33 See also Roger Caillois: “Illusion . . . means nothing less than beginning a
game: in-lusio.” Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash
(New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 19.
34 For a structuralist genealogy of play theories in science and philosophy, see Mihai
Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philo-
sophical and Scientific Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
35 Jacques Henriot accepts this incompossible range as the general condition of
meaning and reality, asserting that “play is above all the thought of play”: the
ludic only exists when we have designated it as such. Jacques Henriot, Sous
couleur de jouer: La métaphor ludique (Paris: José Corti, 1989), 12.
36 Play as a signifier of excess beyond binary opposition would make it a central
reference point for poststructural thought. The initiating text was Jacques
Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,”
in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–93,
which was subsequently elaborated upon in his Of Grammatology (1967). D errida
puts the question (How can art be at once bounded and “without ends”?)
directly to Kant in The Truth in Painting (1987). Contrast this approach with
that of the phenomenologists of play following Heidegger, namely Eugen Fink,
Hans-Georg Gadamer, and James Hans, who seek a stable ontology for play as
the basis of all human activity and experience. See Kostas Axelos, “Planetary
Interlude,” in Game, Play, Literature, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1968), 6–18; Eugen Fink, “The Oasis of Happiness,” in Ehrmann, Game,
Play, Literature, 19–30; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad,
1989); James Hans, The Play of the World (Amherst: University of Massachu
setts Press, 1981). For Jean-Paul Sartre’s grasp of play, yet another alternative
to that of Dada and surrealism, see Ralph Netzky, “Playful Freedom: Sartre’s
Ontology Re-Appraised,” Philosophy Today (summer 1974): 125–36.
37 Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 444–88.
39 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 209–10.
40 Max Ernst, “Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme?,” in Écritures de Max Ernst (Paris:
Éditions Gallimard, 1970), 228. As late as the 1950s, Breton was still invoking play
as a means to seek “the true functioning of thought.” Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,”
in Perspective cavalière, ed. Marguerite Bonner (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970),
50–79.
41 Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 9, ed. and
trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), 144. In 1932 Breton
would complain of the strict boundaries Freud evoked here and elsewhere,

p articularly in his insistence on separating “psychic reality” and “material
reality.” See Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and
Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 13.
42 Freud, “Creative Writers,” 143–44.
43 Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 6
(New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 126. Freud meant Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious to be “the first example of an application of the analytic mode of
thought to the problems of aesthetics.” Freud, The History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 15 (New York: Penguin Books, 1993),
63–127; cited in Richard Wollheim, “Freud and the Understanding of Art,” in
Modern Critical Views: Sigmund Freud, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea
House, 1985), 92.
44 Freud, Jokes, 36.
45 Freud, Jokes, 208. The French translation of Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum
Unbewussten (1905) came out in 1930, one year after Freud’s essay on humor
was included in the special issue of Variétés, “Le surréalisme en 1929.” The two
are said to have been the inspiration for Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir
(Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1966).
46 Freud, Jokes, 138n1.
47 Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982), 112, 106.
48 Freud, Jokes, 253, 94, 197, 225.
49 Freud, Jokes, 188. In the economic scheme Freud lays out for the joke,
laughter is a sign of repression—the saving up of libidinal energy. That is,
we laugh as a replacement for the sexual discharge we actually desire. Play as
expenditure makes a first appearance here in the modern context, anticipat-
ing Caillois’s attribution (by way of Georges Bataille) of play to sheer excess.
But with characteristic perversity, Freud maintains that jokes are ultimately
instances of saving, not spending, as they economize on the energy that
would have otherwise been used for inhibition. This permits him to primly
describe jokes as efficient and not transgressive. Laughter, for Freud, is a
paradoxical sign of repression (of energy) and release (from conscious rea-
son); a sign for the primary processes at their roots, but also the sign for
a fundamentally unsatisfied desire.
52 Freud, Jokes, 108–9.
53 Freud, Jokes, 96–102, 106n1. Freud’s system accounts for the “multiple uses” of
wordplay itself, “multiple use” in Freud being a sign for play. See Freud, Jokes, 70.
Freud devotes an entire chapter of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious to
their social aspect (140–58), which, as Samuel Weber points out, depends on the
hinge between meaning and expectation: “It is this expectation of a meaning
that thus becomes one of the negative preconditions of the joke,” establishing
jokes as “socially determined, involving generally held ‘inhibitions’ or taboos as
opposed to purely individual ones.” The joke is a “collective if temporary trans-
gression of shared prohibitions.” Furthermore, through the inclusion of a “third

term” (the third person), Weber argues, Freud has posited jokes as homologous
to the illogic of the unconscious, as the dialectical rules of logic always exclude
a third term. Weber, Legend of Freud, 110, 103.
54 Freud fashions the wish fulfillment of innocent jokes as radically different
from the material needs met by transgressive jokes: “Unconscious sexuality
is generated not in continuity with biological nature (instinct, function) but
in opposition to it: the Freudian wish is far removed from natural need.” Jean
Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 122.
57 Weber, Legend of Freud, 93.
58 Freud, Jokes, 35–36.
59 Weber, Legend of Freud, 113–14.
60 Jeffrey Mehlman, “How to Read Freud on Jokes: The Critic as Schadchen,”
New Literary History 6, no. 2 (winter 1975): 443, 447, 446.
61 Mehlman, “How to Read Freud on Jokes,” 453.
62 Breton, “Words without Wrinkles,” The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 100–102.
63 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious has been relatively neglected in
Freudian studies, a dismissal justified by the fact that Freud himself seemed
to have lost interest in the topic, making virtually no revisions to the essay.
If the book is approached from the point of view of play and representa
tion, however, it becomes clear that Freud did extend and reformulate the
economy of ludic pleasure set out in the Joke book: that revision is Beyond
the Pleasure Principle.
64 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, ed. and trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 14–17, 35.
65 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 15–16.
66 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 57.
67 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 106. The emphasis is Freud’s.
68 See Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 124–54.
69 Residue is Bataille’s term for poetry at its best, that is to say, its most wasteful.
Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings, ed. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985),
116–29.
70 Bataille, “Notion of Expenditure,” 117.
71 Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” in Perspective cavalière, 51. Here, in the midst of his
characterization of the games as “above all . . . diversion,” Breton symptomati-
cally cites two exceptions: the early séances, which ended in a spectacular
display of violence just short of death, and the “truth game,” which Claude
Lévi-Strauss is said to have likened to an “initiation rite.” See Phillippe Audoin,
“Surréalistes,” in Dictionnaire des jeux: Realités de l’imaginaire, ed. René Al-
leau (Paris: Tchou, 1966), 481. For the deterioration of the séances, see Mark

Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1995), 183–88. Importantly, Breton gathers automatist
experiments as well as surrealism’s investigations and alternative visual practices
under the rubric “play.” His desire to characterize surrealist games as uncompli-
cated pleasure is belied in his letters from the 1920s; from the very start there
were instances of errance gone sour and accounts of the tedium and “indiffer-
ence” of “countless games.” Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 201–2, 282, 297.
72 For the psychoanalytically inflected potential of Max Ernst’s frottage, see
Rosalind Krauss, “The Master’s Bedroom,” Representations 28 (fall 1989):
67–70. David Lomas has examined the Lacanian resonances in Dalí’s
paranoid-critical method, although not as they relate to the illusion-images
I am referring to h ere, which were published in Le Surréalisme au service
de la révolution 3 (December 1931). See David Lomas, The Haunted Self:
Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2000). Paalen’s fumage images remain unexplored in this context, as
do the telephone drawings of the late 1930s; many of them are reproduced
in Pietro Bellasi, Alberto Fiz, and Tulliola Sparagni, L’arte del Gioco: De
Klee a Boetti (Milan: Mazzotta, 2002).
73 Mary McLeod, “ ‘Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy and
Social Change,” Art Journal 43, no. 2 (summer 1983): 133–34. By 1925 Taylorism
was joined by Fordism and Fayolisme, the French equivalent in efficient
management and administration.
74 Jackie Clarke, France in the Age of Organization: Factory, Home and Nation
from the 1920s to Vichy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 21.
75 Henri Le Chatelier, Le Taylorisme (Paris: Dunod, 1928), 7; cited in Clarke,
France in the Age of Organization, 21.
76 Clarke, France in the Age of Organization, 41. For Henri Le Chatelier the start-
ing point for any science was a belief in determinism: “Chance does not exist,”
he claimed. Rather, the world was governed by laws that could be ascertained
through observation and experimentation.
77 Mary McLeod has pointed out that this new ideology of industrial rational-
ization linked technology and social change in a number of positive ways, for
example in Le Corbusier’s program for social renewal. McLeod, “ ‘Architecture
or Revolution,’ ” 132–47.
78 Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 60. Breton excoriated those
surrealists who “succumbed” to the seduction of professional careers. See Jack
J. Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing: The Gold of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 75.
79 La Révolution surréaliste 4 (1925) was the first issue under Breton’s editorship.
For the full story of surrealism’s testy relation with the pcf, see Helena Lewis,
The Politics of Surrealism (New York: Paragon House, 1988), 55–139.
80 Breton, “La Dernière Grève,” La Révolution surréaliste 2 ( January 15, 1924): 1.
Breton recounts his experience trying to explain surrealism to pcf officials in
Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti
(New York: Paragon House, 1993), 126–27.

81 Freud, “Humor,” in “Le surréalisme en 1929,” ed. André Breton and Louis
Aragon, special issue, Variétés ( June 1929): 3–6. For the English translation, see
Freud, “Humor,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press,
1961), 159–72.
82 André Thirion, “A bas le travail!,” Variétés, special issue ( June 1929), 45, 46.
83 Ferdinand Alquié, “À André Breton,” Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution
5 (May 1933): 43.
84 Ilya Ehrenburg, “The Surrealists,” Partisan Review 2, no. 9 (October–November
1935): 11–13; cited in Lewis, Politics of Surrealism, 122. Breton cites Ehrenburg
directly in his response to the exclusion from the International Congress of
Writers. See Breton, “On the Time When the Surrealists Were Right,” in
Manifestoes of Surrealism, 244.
85 Breton, “What Is Surrealism?,” in What Is Surrealism?, ed. Franklin Rosemont
(New York: Pathfinder, 1978), 115.
86 Breton, “La force d’attendre,” Clarté 79 (December 1925): 380–81; cited in
Lewis, Politics of Surrealism, 51. The article was written in response to early
accusations that the surrealists were insufficiently committed to the ideals of
the Communist Party.
87 Benjamin, letter to Theodor Adorno, May 7, 1940; cited in Gyorgy Markus,
“Walter Benjamin, or The Commodity as Phantasmagoria,” New German
Critique 83 (spring–summer 2001): 33. Benjamin literally read Paul Lafargue
through Breton, citing the surrealist citing the Marxist critic (and author of
The Right to Be Lazy [1880]): “I cannot insist too strongly on the fact that,
for an enlightened materialist like Lafargue, economic determinism is not the
‘absolutely perfect instrument’ which ‘can provide the key to all the problems
of history.’ ” Benjamin, Arcades Project, 468.
88 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 119–20.
89 Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 4.
90 Margaret Cohen has pinpointed this intersection between industry and libera-
tion as the surrealist notion of “perpetual unchaining” (désenchaînement)—a
play on the polysemy of chaîne, which in French swivels between its meanings
as “series,” “chain,” and “assembly line,” evoking at once exploitation and Marx’s
classic exhortations to liberation, even as it rhymes with (claiming both affinity
and deviation from) disenchantment. See Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumina-
tion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 108.
91 I’ve borrowed the term errance from Michael Sheringham, who defines it as
“access to the occult pathways of experience . . . propitiated by an attitude of
openness and availability.” Michael Sheringham, “City Space, M ental Space,
Poetic Space,” in Parisian Fields, ed. Michael Sheringham (London: Reaktion
Books, 1996), 92–93.
92 See Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 182–88.
93 See also Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, “Mentalité surréaliste et attitude
ludique,” in Jeu surréaliste et humor noir, ed. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron and
Marie-Claire Dumas (Paris: Lachenal and Ritter, 1993), 311–29.
94 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 10.

Chapter 1. Blur
Epigraph: Marcel Duchamp, in Man Ray, Self Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown,
1963), title page.
1 Jean Vidal, “En photographiant les photographes: Kertesz, Man Ray,” in Emmanu-
elle de l’Ecotais, Man Ray: Rayographies (Paris: Editions Léo Scheer, 2002), 187–88.
2 Jean Cocteau, “Lettre ouverte à Man Ray, photographe américain,” Les feuilles li-
bres (April–May 1922): 134–35. Georges Ribemont-Dessaigne had also described
the rayographs as painterly: his book Man Ray was part of the “Modern Paint
ers” series published by the Nouvelle Revue Française. While the slim volume
contained images of paintings as well as rayographs, objects, and film strips,
Ribemont-Dessaigne’s essay (dated 1924) and the six press clippings included
with the images addressed only the rayographs and their abstract qualities, and
aligned them, as “non-objective work,” with painting; whereas photography was
addressed as “mechanical copying.” Georges Ribemont-Dessaigne, Man Ray
(Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1930), 3–15.
3 André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Bos-
ton: Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), 32–33. Following Breton’s attribution, the
rayographs were characterized as a form of surrealist painting in the 1936
Museum of Modern Art (moma) exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,
where a rayograph appeared on the catalogue cover. Only Louis Aragon would
understand the rayographs as an unpredictable form of collage that, answering
Duchamp’s long-standing appeal, displaced both painting and photography.
See Louis Aragon, “The Challenge to Painting,” in The Surrealists Look at Art,
ed. Pontus Hulten (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1990), 67.
4 Ray, Self Portrait, 109.
5 Most recently Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais has characterized the rayographs as
paintings-cum-photographs, and states, “At the time, Man Ray earned his living
as a portrait photographer. But the discovery of the rayograph would change his
status: once a photographer, he became an artist.” The implication, startling in
the contemporary context, is that only painterly qualities can “elevate” the status
of photographs to art. See de l’Ecotais, Man Ray, 15. We disagree on this point,
but as a catalog of more than three hundred reproductions of rayographs and a
thorough compilation of documents and essays relating to them, her monograph
has been an invaluable resource, as evidenced by its frequent citation here.
6 Ray, Self Portrait, 26, 54. It is worth considering that the photographic distortions
characteristic of rayographs v iolated the code for photographic excellence on
which Man Ray had cut his teeth back in New York at Stieglitz’s 291, where, at least
in the years 1910–15 when Man Ray frequented the gallery, photographs stood for
descriptive “truth,” stable and straightforward, while abstract paintings presented
modernist ideals and expression. See Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton, eds.,
Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings (Washington, DC: National Gallery of
Art, 1983), 11–32. Indeed, the rayographs earned Man Ray the charge of fraudu-
lence from Stieglitz’s mouthpiece Marius de Zayas, as they failed to “represent the
object without the interference of man.” See Marius de Zayas, letter to Stieglitz,
Notes to Chapter One 281

August 3, 1922, in How, When and Why Modern Art Came to New York, ed.
Francis Naumann (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1996), 208.
7 All three statements are translated and reprinted in Jean-Hubert Martin, Man
Ray (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 30–33, 34, 36.
8 Ferdinand Howald, letter to Man Ray, May 16, 1922; cited in Elizabeth Hutton
Turner, “Transatlantic,” in Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray, ed. Merry
Foresta (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 148. Howald was
paraphrasing Man Ray’s own characterization of the process as relayed in a let-
ter of April 1922, in which Man Ray describes leaving behind painting’s physi-
cal support, but not its conventions: “In my new work I feel I have reached the
climax of the things [for which] I have been searching [for] the last 10 years,—I
have never worked as I did this winter—you may regret to hear it, but I have
finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and I am working directly
with light itself. I have found a way of recording it. The subjects w ere never so
near to life itself as in my new work, and never so completely translated to the
medium.” Ferdinand Howald archive, Ohio State University; cited in Francis
Naumann, Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 213–15.
9 The two most recent iterations of this chestnut are in Naumann, Conversion to
Modernism, 191, 199; and de l’Ecotais, Man Ray, 18.
10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro
ducibility (Second Version),” in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard
Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 127n22. For the full impli-
cations for “aura” at the hands of technologically enabled “room-for-play,” see
Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin,
and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 104–31.
11 Georges Ribemont-Dessaigne, “Dada Painting, or the ‘Oil-Eye,’ ” Little Review
(autumn–winter 1923–24): 10.
12 The links between photography and Charles Sanders Peirce’s indexical sign are
slippery, and a point of ongoing debate, constantly shifting along with the hori-
zon of digital photographic practices. The best summary to date is Kris Paulsen,
“The Index and the Interface,” Representations 22 (spring 2013): 83–109.
13 Aragon, Le libertinage (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 25; cited in Dawn Ades,
“Between Dada and Surrealism,” in In the Mind’s Eye: Dada and Surrealism,
ed. Terry Neff (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 24. The period
has subsequently been called the époque floue and époque des sommeils, indicat-
ing the characteristic interest in quasi-hypnotic trances. The indeterminacy
of the period is further reflected in the scholarship, with historians variously
subordinating the influence of the Dadaists to the surrealists or vice versa. For
a historiography up to 1985, see Ades, “Between Dada and Surrealism,” 24. For
the most recent affirmation of this instability, see Leah Dickerman, ed., Dada:
Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington, DC:
National Gallery of Art, 2005), where Dickerman’s introduction to the catalog
emphasizes the radical differences between the two movements, while in a
separate essay on Paris Dada in the same catalog, Janine Mileaf and Matthew
282 Notes to Chapter One

Witkovsky emphasize the continuities between the two. Janine Mileaf and
Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Paris,” in Dickerman, ed., Dada, 347–72.
14 For the full range of publications in which the rayographs almost immediately
began to appear, see de l’Ecotais, Man Ray, 165–90, 200–75.
15 Roman Jakobsen, “Dada,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska
and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987), 39, 36.
16 Aragon, “Max Ernst, peintre des illusions,” in Les collages (Paris: Hermann,
1965), 26.
17 Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999), 88.
18 See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 11–15.
19 Maurice Blanchot, “Tomorrow at Stake,” in The Infinite Conversation (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 414–15. The essay was drafted in
memoriam to André Breton, and places the rencontre, or “chance encounter,” at
the center of surrealist practice.
20 See Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1970),
51; and Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (New York:
Viking Press, 1974), 98.
21 See George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in
Paris (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2007), 30–93. Here I have confined my ac-
count to Dada strategies that bear most directly on surrealist play, but Dada is
soaked through with play in the form of parody, farce, nonsense, wordplay, illu-
sion, and the exploitation of chance, and deserves a book of its own. U ntil that
is written, see Nike Bätzner et al., Faites vos jeux! Kunst und Spiel zeit Dada
(Lichtenstein, Germany: Museum Lichtenstein, 2005); Mary Ann Caws, ed.,
“The Poetics of Chance,” special issue, Dada/Surrealism 7 (1977); Décimo,
“Jeu,” in Dada, ed. Laurent Le Bon (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2005),
548–49; Hal Foster, “Dada Mime,” October 105 (summer 2003): 166–76; André
Gervais, La raie alitée d’effets: Apropos of Marcel Duchamp (Ville La Salle,
Québec: Editions Hurtubise, 1984); David J. Getsy, From Diversion to Subver-
sion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2011); Bernhard Holeczek and Lida von Mengten, eds.,
Zufall als Prinzip: Spielwelt, Methode und System in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhun-
derts (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1992); Christian Janecke, Kunst und Zufall:
Analyse und Bedeutung (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg,
1995); Martin, “Funny Guys,” in Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, ed. Jennifer
Mundy (London: Tate, 2008), 116–23; Herbert Molderings, Duchamp and the
Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010); Naumann, Bradley Bailey, and Jennifer Shahade, Marcel Duchamp: The
Art of Chess (New York: Readymade Press, 2009); Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics
of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1983); and Harriet Watts, Chance: A Perspective on Dada (Ann Arbor,
MI: umi Research Press, 1980).
22 Artist’s files, Department of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art,
New York; cited in Naumann, The Mary and William Sisler Collection (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 170–71.

23 Artist’s files, Department of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art,
New York; cited in Naumann, Mary and William Sisler Collection, 170–71.
24 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett ( London:
Thames and Hudson, 1971), 46–47.
25 For a related analysis of Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond as a critique of iden-
tity under capitalism, see David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp,
1910–1941 (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1998), 99–106.
26 Benjamin is citing Alain Émile-Auguste Chartier, Les idées et les ages, Vol. 1
(Paris: Gallimard, 1927), 183–84. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 1999), 512. The ellipses are Benjamin’s own.
27 Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109
(summer 2004): 3–45. By the end of the 1930s, Hansen argues, Benjamin’s
attitude toward gambling will descend into pessimism under the imminent
threat of fascism, and he will align gambling with the decline of Erfahrung, or
sustained and sustaining experience, describing it as a straightforward example
of Erlebnis, or perception governed by shock. See Benjamin, “On Some Motifs
in Baudelaire,” Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and
Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 313–32; cited in Hansen, “Room-for-
Play,” 8. Benjamin uses the term Spielraum in a footnote of the second version
of his famous “Work of Art” essay; see Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 124n10.
28 Hansen, “Room-for-Play,” 9–10.
29 Hansen, “Room-for-Play,” 8.
33 See especially Jean Clair, Duchamp et la photographie: Essai d’analyse d’un pri-
mat technique sur le développement d’une œuvre (Paris: Chêne, 1977). Duchamp
was particularly interested in stereo and anaglyphic images, which, like film,
depend on an apparatus for both production and viewing.
34 See Margaret Sundell, “From Fine Art to Fashion: Man Ray’s Ambivalent
Avant-Garde” (unpublished diss., Columbia University, 2009), 42. Sundell
finds in the gambling analogy Man Ray’s consistent desire to redeem rather than
repudiate the etiolated forms of experience under modern capitalism. Her point
is well argued, given Man Ray’s professional trajectory into commercial pho-
tography, but following Hansen, I would argue for a more complex understand-
ing of the role of play in rayograph production and reception, one that would
take into account Benjamin’s insistence, in his formulation of the concept of
Spielraum with which his notes on gambling are aligned, that critical play in the
work of art must always be in dialectic with aura (beautiful semblance), or risk
strengthening it through polarization. See Hansen, “Room-for-Play,” 5, 36.
35 Tristan Tzara, “Photography Upside Down,” in Photography in the Modern
Era, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aper-
ture, 1989), 5, translation altered. The essay was the preface to Man Ray’s first
catalog of rayographs, Les champs délicieux (1922), reprinted in de l’Ecotais,

Man Ray, 166–68. Tzara’s analogy is apt: Man Ray had already experimented
with chance-based modes of production in his Dada paintings (for example,
The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows [1916], a painting
derived from paper cutouts tossed on the floor) and had provided portraits of
Duchamp in several variations for the Monte Carlo Bond.
36 Certainly Michel de Certeau has regarded it as such. See de Certeau, The
Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 106.
37 See Bradley Bailey, “Passionate Pastimes,” in Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess,
ed. Francis Naumann, Bradley Bailey, and Jennifer Shahade (New York: Ready-
made Press, 2009), 52, 64.
38 Tzara, “Photography Upside Down,” 6.
39 Tzara, “Die Photographie von der Kehrseite,” trans. Walter Benjamin, G:
Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung 3 (1924): 39–40.
40 Duchamp, “Precision Play: An Aspect of the Beauty of Precision,” in The
Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Arturo Schwartz (New York: Harry
Abrams, 1969), 73; cited in Larry List, “Chess as Art,” in Duchamp, Man Ray,
Picabia, ed. Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate, 2008), 134.
41 See Gavin Grindon, “Surrealism, Dada, and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy,
Activism, and Social Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde,” Oxford Art
Journal 34:1 (2011): 90, 82–83. For an analysis of Schiller’s position on play and
art in the modern context, see my essay, “From Judgment to Process,” in From
Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art, ed. David J.
Getsy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 6–10.
43 For the implications of Dada parody in Zurich and Cologne, see Foster, “Dada
Mime,” 166–76.
44 Jacques Vaché, letter to André Breton, April 29, 1917, in Franklin Rosemont,
Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 2008), 343.
Accounts of Paris Dada that acknowledge Vaché’s importance to Breton point to
“umour” as a proto-Dada gesture of negation, yet the similarities between Breton’s
characterizations of Vaché and Duchamp as champions of ludic instability have
gone unremarked. Note as well the proximity of “umour” to “amour.” See Rose-
mont, Jacques Vaché, 222–31; Mark Polizzoti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of
André Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 39; and Michel Sanouil-
let, Dada in Paris, trans. Sharmila Ganguy (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2009), 61.
45 Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzoti (San Francisco: City
Lights, 1997), 293–94.
46 Breton, “As in a Wood,” in Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline
d’Amboise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 236.
47 Duchamp, interview with Katharine Kuh; cited in Gervais, La raie alitée d’effets,
6. Gervais’s extraordinary book, itself a forest of puns, performs Duchamp’s
commitment to multiple meanings even as it analyzes it. See also Molly Nesbit,
Their Common Sense (London: Black Dog, 2000), especially 188–219, where she
links Duchamp’s wordplay to Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset, and French
pedagogical exercises. Michel Sanouillet also addresses Duchamp’s wordplay in
“Marcel Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition,” in Marcel Duchamp,

ed. Anne d’Harnancourt and Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Mod-
ern Art, 1973), 48–55; see also in the same catalog David Antin, “Duchamp and
Language,” 100–115.
48 Breton, “Marcel Duchamp,” Littérature nouvelle série 5 (1922): 10. For the plea
sure surrealism would take in incommunicability, see Denis Hollier, “Surrealist
Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,” October 69 (1994): 113. In her essay
“Dada’s Solipsism,” Documents 19 (fall 2000): 16–19, Leah Dickerman calls this
blockage a crisis in the public sphere. I would take the next step and attribute
the crisis to an open refusal of work—and to work.
49 Duchamp, “Untitled,” Littérature nouvelle série 5 (1922): 1; for translation see
Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 165.
50 Duchamp, “Untitled,” Littérature nouvelle série 5 (1922): 7.
51 Breton, “Marcel Duchamp,” Littérature nouvelle série 5 (1922): 7–11. George
Baker links this pun to Picabia’s own riff on saint, sein, and dessin in Baker,
Artwork Caught by the Tail, 32.
52 See Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 88.
53 See Joselit, Infinite Regress.
54 For more on the carnal register of Duchamp’s work, see Rosalind Krauss, The
Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1993), 135–42; and Yve-Alain
Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books,
1997), 32. The most extensive treatment of Duchamp’s puns is found in Ger-
vais, La raie alitée d’effets; see especially 129–300, a catalog of Rrose Sélavy’s
aphorisms. Molly Nesbit treats Duchamp and language extensively, and has
argued convincingly for links between Duchamp’s erotic wordplay and the ideas
of the nineteenth-century French grammarian Jean-Pierre Brisset, who, intrigu-
ingly, deployed the word dada to describe the relationship between the French
language and animal sounds. See Nesbit, Their Common Sense, 51–102, 188–219.
55 Breton, “Les mots sans rides,” in The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 100–102.
56 Breton, “Les mots sans rides,” 102.
57 Gervais, La raie alitée d’effets, 173.
58 Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet
and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 108–19.
59 Among the texts on French wit published prior to Freud’s translation are
J. Micoud, Traité élémentaire des jeux d’espirit (Aurillac: Imprimerie moderne,
1914); L. Harquevaux and L. Pelletier, Récréations intellectuels: Jeux d’espirit à la
portée de tous, théorie et application (Paris: Hennuyer, 1901); and the extraor-
dinary work of Jean-Pierre Brisset, who, in insisting that the French language
originated from the mating calls of frogs, was grounded in a particularly carnal
eroticism. See Brisset, Oeuvres completes (Dijon: Presses du réel, 2001).
60 Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 301. In addition, to qualify as a parapraxis the
action or utterance had to be explained by “inattentiveness” or “chance.”
61 Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 103. Freud describes the complete
joke as a fusion “uttered with fervor and under the pressure of a host of secret

impulses: ‘Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please men. A man is much
better off; as long as he has his five straight [ fünf gerade] limbs he needs noth-
ing more!’ ” He goes on to make the obvious reference to jokes: “The connec-
tion between jokes and slips of the tongue is also shown in the fact that in
many cases a slip of the tongue is nothing other than an abbreviation” (105).
62 Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 78.
64 Breton cites poet Pierre Reverdy in the first surrealist manifesto: “The image
is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from
a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship
between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image
will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.” Breton, Manifestoes
of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1972), 20. This is remarkably close to Freud’s assertion that
the most striking of parapraxes “mean their opposite.” Freud, Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, 135.
66 The automatist “sleep sessions” of the époque floue began in September 1922.
Louis Aragon’s manifesto of 1924, Une vague de rêves, which gathers Dada
play, automatism, the sleep sessions, and the rayographs into its “dreamscope,”
provides the best primary account of the hypnagogic trances and their tran-
sitional position between Dada and surrealism. For a synthetic history of the
sessions, see Ades, “Between Dada and Surrealism,” 23–41.
67 Breton, “Entrée des médiums,” Littérature, nouvelle série 6 (November 1, 1922):
1–16. This account has invited dismissal of surrealist automatism b ecause of
the group’s apparent willingness to include spiritism in its range of practices,
but Breton’s ingenuous attitude can be explained by Pierre Janet’s position on
the phenomenon: his L’automatisme psychologique contained an entire chapter
rationalizing spiritism as a form of dissociation. Pierre Janet, L’automatisme
psychologique (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1998), 409–89. Further interest in
the links between automatic or involuntary speech and action would have been
stirred in 1922 by the appearance of Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Charles
Richet’s Traité de métapsychique, with its focus on the somatic origins of spiritism.
Katharine Conley describes Desnos’s attraction to the trance state in
terms of blurred identity in Robert Desnos, Surrealism and the Marvelous in
Everyday Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 16–23. Breton’s
disparagement of Dada indifference is in Breton, Conversations: The Auto-
biography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House,
1993), 53.
68 Robert Desnos, “Rrose Sélavy,” Littérature nouvelle série 7 (December 1922):
14–22. The long list directly followed Breton’s essay “Les mots sans rides” in the
same issue. The first of these utterances was apparently prompted by Picabia’s
demand, while Desnos was in a trance state, that he should make a “Rrose
Sélavy-type poem.” See Conley, Robert Desnos, 31. Many were subsequently
reproduced in Desnos’s book Corps et biens (where the number of aphorisms
swells to 150), whose original title, Désordre formal, was itself a pun evoking

both “clear disorder” and “formal disorder.” The shift from the anarchy of
Dadaist language to a more orderly form of wordplay is affirmed in Aragon,
Chronique de la luie et du beau temps: Précédé de chroniques du bel canto (Paris:
Français réunis, 1979), 170.
69 Conley, Robert Desnos, 34. Mary Ann Caws has characterized this symmetry
as “horizontal mirror-imaging,” in Caws, The Surrealist Voice of Robert Desnos
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 58. The image suggests,
even at this early stage, the surrealist strategy of doubling as described by
Rosalind Krauss in “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19
(winter 1981): 26–29. But Conley’s claim is that they evoke a quintessentially
surrealist “in-between” state in which meaning and incoherence touch, a
description that describes very well the suspended state of the époque floue.
I am much indebted to Conley’s interpretations and translations of Desnos’s
work, as it was through her analyses that I began to recognize the structural
similarities to the rayographs’ pictorial form.
70 Desnos, “Rrose Sélavy,” 18; translations in Conley, Robert Desnos, 32. The
phrase mathematical precision is Breton’s, from “Les mots sans rides,” in Lost
Steps, 101. This may well be a reference to Jean-Pierre Brisset, a magister-ludus
of language whose Grammaire logique (1970) proposed mathematical solutions
to difficult grammatical problems. See Nesbit, Their Common Sense, 213–15.
71 See Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 87.
72 Desnos, “Rrose Sélavy,” 21, 18, 22; translations in, respectively, Conley, Robert
Desnos, 32; and Caws, Surrealist Voice of Robert Desnos, 148.
73 Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 251; Breton, “Words without
Wrinkles,” in Lost Steps, 102.
74 Pierre Janet’s dynamic psychiatry is so-named because it was the first psychiat-
ric model to describe the unconscious in terms of forces with the potential for
conflict. See Jennifer Gibson, “Surrealism before Freud: Dynamic Psychiatry’s
‘Simple Recording Instrument,’ ” Art Journal (1987): 56–60. The classic text
(and the one Breton would have been familiar with from his own psychiatric
studies) is Janet’s L’automatisme psychologique. For a history of the emergence
of dynamic psychiatry, see Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Uncon-
scious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic
Books, 1970). For more on the importance of Janet’s theories for Breton as
they pertain to the early texts of the époque floue, see Balakian, André Breton,
Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 27–44; Foster,
Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1993), 220–22; and Gibson,
“Surrealism’s Early Maps of the Unconscious” (unpublished diss., University of
Virginia, 1985).
75 André Breton and Philippe Soupault, “Les champs magnétiques,” Littérature 8
(October 1919): 4–10. For transcripts of automatic sessions, see Breton, “Entrée
des médiums,” 1–16. The question-and-answer format of the transcripts exactly
matches Pierre Janet’s favored technique of eliciting automatic responses. See
Janet, The M
ental State of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata and Mental
Accidents, trans. Caroline Rollin Corson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901),
42–43.

76 Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara, “Untitled (Automatic Text),” 391 8 (Febru-
ary 1919): 5. Tzara’s contribution was published upside down to point back to
the scene of inscription: two facing subjects, opposed as in a game. For evidence
for this text as the model for “Les champs magnétiques,” see Sanouillet, Francis
Picabia et “391,” Vol. 2 (Paris: Le terrain vague, 1966), 90. Breton’s and Tzara’s
letters of 1919, with references to Jung, Tzara’s poetry, and the drafting of “Les
champs magnétiques,” are in Sanouillet, Dada à Paris, édition nouvelle (Paris:
cnrs Éditions, 2005), 402–11. Marcel Janco corroborated the Dada precedent
in retrospect: “At first they invited me [to join Dada Paris] but then I had a
fight with the surrealists because they wanted to take the ideas that Dada had
developed—automatism, the subconscious, etc—and put them in their pockets
like so much surrealism. That’s what caused their brawl with us. They couldn’t
understand that the orientation of art could come from someone that wasn’t
French.” Marc Dachy, Archives dada: Chronique (Paris: Hazan, 2005), 36.
Sanouillet has stated that Picabia engaged in automatic writing during a
stay in New York as part of an “unconscious psychoanalytic self-treatment”
for depression, but it’s unclear whether anything beyond the poems’ structural
similarity to automatic writing indicates that the process was actually deployed.
In passing, Sanouillet also remarks that the poem “Partie d’échecs entre Picabia
et Roché” by Conrad Arensberg shares that structure as well, placing automatic
writing in New York Dada circles at least as early as 1917—an intriguing but
undocumented assertion. Sanouillet, Dada à Paris, 105, 105n6.
77 Arp describes the cycle of automatic poems in “Dadaland,” Arp on Arp, 234.
Arp et Val Serner dans le crocodarium royal de Londres was the single Schado-
graph Tzara published in Dadaphone (March 1920).
78 Janet, Les obsessions et la psychasthenie, Vol. 1 (Paris: Alcan, 1903), 431–39.
For secondary accounts of automatic phenomena, see Ellenberger, Discovery of
the Unconscious, 331–417, 835–37; and Wilma Koutstaal, “Skirting the Abyss:
A History of Experimental Explorations of Automatic Writing in Psychology,”
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 28 ( January 1992): 5–27. Janet
himself recounts a history of automatisms that reaches back to cures derived
from “magnetism”—yet another link to Breton’s version of automatism—in
his Principles of Psychotherapy, trans. H. M. and E. R. Guthrie (New York:
Macmillan, 1924), 3–91.
79 The proximity of the theory of “partial automatisms” to Freud’s explication
of parapraxes is striking, a major difference being that Freud stopped short
of claiming that parapraxes could be elicited under special circumstances,
although he did concede that parapraxes (like automatic responses) tended
to appear at moments when “attention is to some extent diverted.” See Freud,
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 109.
80 Société anonyme pour l’exploitation du vocabulaire dadaiste (Arp, Tzara, and
Serner), “Hyperbola of the Crocodile Hairdresser and the Walking Stick,” in
The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2006), 53.
81 Michael Riffaterre, “Semantic Incompatibilities in Automatic Writing,” in About
French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and Theory, ed. Mary Ann Caws

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), 223–41. Riffaterre means this
piggybacking literally, and demonstrates it by directly linking the automatic text
“Poisson soluble” to Victor Hugo’s supremely realist novel Les misérables. Janet
affirms the amnesiac quality associated with automatic practices in L’automatisme
psychologique, 109–20. For texts by “Alexandre Partens” and the “Société
anonyme pour l’exploitation du vocabulaire dadaiste” (Arp, Tzara, and Serner),
see Huelsenbeck, Dada almanach (Hamburg: Édition Nautilus, 1987), 91–96.
82 Breton, “Words without Wrinkles,” 100–102.
83 Désagrégation is the name Janet gave to the psychological state of a subject
controlled by automatisms, a state characterized by perceptual fragmentation
so extreme that the synthesis of inner thoughts and sensory input that is nec-
essary to perceive reality never occurs. See Janet, L’automatisme psychologique,
347–56.
84 Marguerite Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste (Paris:
Corti, 1975), 107; cited in Ades, “Between Dada and Surrealism,” 36. Roland
Barthes concurs: “Automatism . . . is not rooted at all in the ‘spontaneous,’ the
‘savage,’ the ‘pure,’ the ‘profound,’ the ‘subversive,’ but originates on the contrary
from the ‘strictly coded’: what is mechanical can only make the Other speak,
and the Other is always consistent. If we w ere to imagine that the Good Fairy
Automatism w ere to touch the speaking or writing subject with her wand, the
toads and vipers that would spring from his mouth would just be stereotypes.”
Roland Barthes, “The Surrealists Overlooked the Body,” in The Grain of the Voice:
Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1981), 244.
85 Arp, Arp on Arp, 234–35. For a description of the poème-recension, which Arp
claimed would later come to be called automatic poetry by the surrealists, see
Dachy, Archives dada, 50.
86 Arp, Arp on Arp, 246, emphasis added.
87 Arp’s first collages, dated 1915, are of course earliest, but the decorative quality
of the papers he used plus the precise rationalization of the colors and forms
into unified and balanced compositions brings to mind the polished exacti-
tude of modernist design rather than the deliberate incorporation of detri-
tus. Schwitters first used trash in 1918, making his and Schad’s work exactly con
temporary. My thanks to Leah Dickerman for pointing out Schad’s initiative;
and thanks to Rachel Churner for her assistance with dating the Schwitters.
88 It is as though the photograms attempt to distill Siegfried Kracauer’s
“garbage”—those parts of the photograph that get in by chance—from the
medium itself, throwing out intended effects and the coherences they impose on
the image. See Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament, trans.
and ed. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 51.
89 L. Fitz Gruber, introduction to Schadographien: Die Kraft des Lichts, ed.
Nikolaus Schad and Anna Auer (Passau: Dietmar Klinger Verlag, 1999), 7. It
was Serner who interested Schad in the Dada movement and, in Schad’s own
words, “It was Serner who recognized at once the interest and novelty of the
photographic images and who begged me not to take them lightly.” In a 1978
interview with Irmeline Lebeer, Schad recalled his predilection for “little aban-

doned objects” he found on the street; he was “fascinated by their patina and
by the useless charm that emanated from them.” In casting them, “en jeu,” onto
sensitive paper, he claimed to have made them “print themselves directly under
the influence of daylight, thus making an altogether new reality.” See Dachy,
Archives dada, 75.
90 Man Ray, Self Portrait, 106–7. Most recent scholarship on the rayographs
concedes that Man Ray must have seen the Schadographs Tzara was holding in
Paris. See de l’Ecotais, Man Ray, 16.
91 Tzara, “Photography Upside Down,” 5–6, translation altered. The original
reads: “La peinture à queue, à cheveux frisés, dans des cadres dorés. Voilà leur
marbre, voilà notre pissat de femme de chambre. . . . La deformation méca-
nique, precise, unique et correcte est fixée, lisse et filtrée comme une chev-
elure à travers un peigne de lumière. . . . Comme la glace rejette l’image sans
effort, et l’echo la voix sans nous demander pourquoi, la beauté de la matière
n’appartient à personne, car elle est désormais un produit physico-chimique.”
Tzara, “La photographie à l’envers,” Champs délicieux 11–12 (1975): n.p.
92 “Je connais un monsieur qui fait d’excellents portraits. Le monsieur est un
appareil photographique.” Tzara, “La photographie à l’envers,” n.p.
93 Tzara, “Die Photographie von der Kehrseite,” 39–40. For the “G group”
characterization, see Michael Jennings, “Walter Benjamin and the European
Avant-Garde,” in Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David
Ferris (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18–34. Jennings
characterizes G as a vehicle for an emerging avant-g arde inspired specifically
by American technological modernism, a predilection that would have made
the editors (among them Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Hans Richter)
particularly open to Man Ray’s streamlined photograms. It is through this
frame, rather than that of Dada or surrealism, that Lázsló Moholy-Nagy
would receive the rayographs and embark on his own investigations of the
photogram, and this is also the context, as Jennings points out, in which
Walter Benjamin would begin to focus on photography as a cultural form,
placing rayographs well within the arena of Benjamin’s theorization of the
destruction of “aura” in the work of art—and further distancing them from
their characterization as “painting with light.” See Jennings, “Walter Benja-
min and the European Avant-Garde,” 21–23.
94 Tzara, “Die Photographie von der Kehrseite,” 39. Tzara was not alone in this
characterization; on first seeing the rayographs El Lissitzky noted the “perver-
sity” (from the Latin pervertere, “to overturn”) of their space. See El Lissitzky,
letter to Sophie Küppers, September 15, 1925, in El Lissitzky and Sophie
Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (Greenwich, CT: New York
Graphic Society, 1968), 66.
95 Tzara, “Photography Upside Down,” 4, 6.
96 The image, the original of which is now lost, appeared in The Little Review:
Quarterly Journal for Arts and Letters 9 (autumn 1922): 60.
97 Duchamp, letter to Alfred Stieglitz, May 17, 1922, in Francis Naumann and
Hector Obalk, eds., Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Mar-
cel Duchamp (Ghent, Belgium: Ludion Press, 2000), 109.

98 Ribemont-Dessaigne, “Dada Painting,” 11, emphasis added.
99 Dickerman, Dada, 39.
100 Man Ray, letter to Katherine Dreier, February 20, 1921, in Katherine
Dreier correspondence, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University, New Haven, CT. The letter is dated before Man Ray’s arrival in
Paris.
101 For Rosalind Krauss, “all of Man Ray’s photographs bear on the condition of
the readymade” in that, like them, photographs are objects of “pure exchange-
value.” But she argues that Man Ray’s consistent preoccupation with shad-
ows—at work most intensively in the rayographs—has the effect of anchoring
these readymades in time and place as the “residue of an event,” mitigating the
critical impact of deracination. See Krauss, “The Object Caught by the Heel,”
in Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, ed. Francis Naumann (New York:
Whitney Museum of Art, 1996), 249.
102 For an account of Dada mimicry as a form of adaptation in critical dialectic
with modern modes of production and consumption, one that tails with
Benjamin’s understanding of the role of “mimesis” in critical play, see Foster,
“Dada Mime,” 166–76. In the context of surrealism, Foster has related linked
play to the assembly line, again as a form of parodic mimesis offered by the
process by which the “exquisite corpse” drawings were produced. See Foster,
Compulsive Beauty, 152.
103 See Krauss, “The Object Caught by the Heel,” 249. For an assessment of
Man Ray’s assemblages that relates them to the ludic through wordplay and
simulacrum, particularly when, as in the rayographs, all that remains of the
original is a photographic copy, see Krauss, “Objets de réflexion critique,” in
Jean-Hubert Martin, Man Ray: Objets de mon affection (Paris: Phillippe Sers,
1983), 10–13.
104 Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 21.
105 Tzara, “Die Photographie von der Kehrseite,” 39–40.
106 Breton, “Max Ernst,” in Lost Steps, 60; cited in Krauss, “Photographic Condi-
tions of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modern-
ist Myths (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1989), 103. Krauss goes on to relate
the surrealist attribution of an expanded photographic vision to a broader
European endorsement of the camera as a prosthetic to vision. For an account
of automatism as partaking in a contemporary machine utopianism and the
recording machine as vehicle for the freeing of language, see Lawrence Rainey,
“Taking Dictation: Collage Poetics, Pathology and Politics,” modernism/
modernity 5, no. 2 (1998): 123–53. “La courbe blanche sur fond noir que nous
appelons pensée” is from Breton’s automatic poem “Tournesol” [Sunflower],
a title more evocative in French than in its English translation, expressing
the sunflower’s automatic movement in search of light. Breton, Clair de terre
(Paris: Presses du Montparnasse, 1923), 85–86.
107 Breton, “Words without Wrinkles,” 102.

Chapter 2. Drift
Epigraph: Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings,

Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith,
trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), 519.
1 For a history of Atget’s twentieth-century reception and an analysis of the links
between Atget, Benjamin, and the surrealists that differs somewhat from mine,
see Dana MacFarlane, “Photography at the Threshold: Atget, Benjamin and
Surrealism,” History of Photography 34, no. 1 (2010): 17–28.
2 While Man Ray’s Atget album enclosed the images, it seems they were never
fixed inside—they came to George Eastman House only interleaved in the album
pages, with no evidence of having been fastened down. Organizing photographs
into albums for ease of purchase was a common practice for “on spec” photog
raphers like Atget, but Man Ray worked exclusively on commission when he
made commercial work, and never catalogued his own prints in this way. His
Atget album, in its reiteration of the practice, seems to refer at once to Atget’s
commercial status as well as to Man Ray’s memory of the way they were selected.
My characterization of Man Ray’s Atget album in the following pages as a
ludic text open to expansion, contraction, and rearrangement echoes in the
historical indeterminacy surrounding the purchase of the images. There is no
record of precisely when Man Ray bought the photographs, whether they were
acquired separately over time or in one visit, or even of the number originally
included in the album itself. Casual estimates of the number of Atgets origi-
nally in the a lbum have ranged as high as fifty, but at the time of the a lbum’s
sale to George Eastman House in 1976, the number of images was recorded at
forty-seven (one image, Uniformes aux halles/Boutique aux halles (1925–26), is
currently missing from Eastman’s inventory). Avenue des Gobelins, magasin de
vêtements pour hommes; Quais de la Seine, matin brumeaux; and La Rotonde, tout
près de la rue Campagne-Première have all been attributed to the collection, but
Eastman House could not verify that they had been part of the a lbum, so they
have been excluded from my account. See Michael Thomas Gunther, “Man Ray
and Co.—La fabrication d’un buste,” Photographies: Colloque Atget (1986): 71,
73. My thanks to Joe Struble, head archivist at the George Eastman Museum, for
the history of the acquisition. One last note: Four of the Atgets from the a lbum
have faded badly over time, and in the interest of presenting the collection to the
viewer much as Man Ray would have seen it, those four photographs have been
replaced here by more legible versions from other museum collections. They are
figures 2.12, 2.32, 2.35, and 2.42.
3 The categories into which Atget organized his images form the four volumes
of John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg, The Work of Atget, Vols. 1–4
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981–82).
4 See Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 18. The collection is housed at George Eastman
Museum, in Rochester, NY, where archivist Joe Struble has determined that the
album into which the photographs were bound is American made, from the
Notes to Chapter T wo 293

1940s. For an analysis of the album that argues for stylistic affinities between
Man Ray and Atget, rather than the differences I emphasize, see John Fuller,
“Atget and Man Ray in the Context of Surrealism,” Art Journal (1976): 130–38.
5 See Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1992), 2–9; and Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002). It was through Man Ray’s intervention
that Atget’s work appeared, uncredited—that is to say, as documents rather
than authored images—in the June and December 1926 issues of the journal
La Révolution surréaliste. As Man Ray recalled years later, when Atget discov-
ered that the photographs were to be published in La Révolution surréaliste, he
said, “Don’t put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.” Hill and
Cooper, Dialogue with Photography, 18. The photographs that appeared in La
Révolution surréaliste 7 ( June 15, 1926) were: L’eclipse, avril 1912, on the cover;
Boulevard de Strasbourg (1912), page 6; Versailles (1921), page 28. An Atget
image of a staircase, 81 rue Turenne, that appeared on page 20 of La Révolution
surréaliste 8 (December 1, 1926), is not in the Eastman Museum inventory of
Man Ray’s collection, but it is likely to have also belonged to him. See John
Szarkowski, Atget (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000), 205.
6 See Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” in The Originality
of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: mit Press,
1985), 131–50; and Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums.
7 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 9,
207; and Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part
2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans.
Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),
486–93.
8 Adorno, letter to Benjamin, August 2, 1935, in Fredric Jameson, ed., Aesthetics
and Politics (London: nlb, 1977), 110.
9 Michel Beaujour, “Qu’est-ce que ‘Nadja’?,” La nouvelle revue française 172
(April 1967): 783. Man Ray finished filming Emak Bakia in the same year that
the album was assembled, 1926.
10 Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” 108–9.
11 Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the
Land of Technology,’ ” New German Critique 40 (1987): 211.
12 See Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 98n46.
13 Hill and Cooper, Dialogue with Photography, 17–18. Man Ray mistakenly
thought that the Atgets were washed with saltwater and therefore fugitive.
14 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, ed. Howard
Eiland, Michael Jennings, and Gary Smith, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 210.
15 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1993), 236n43,
emphasis added.
16 The classic text of le hasard objectif is André Breton’s Mad Love (1937).
294 Notes to Chapter T wo

17 Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1987), 25–38. The objects in question were photographed by Man Ray and
appear on pages 29 and 31. In chapter 4 Breton describes a predestined itinerary
of movement through a number of occult urban spaces on the night that he
was to meet his future wife, Jacqueline Lamba. The chapter is illustrated with
photographs of market displays by Brassaï that bear a startling resemblance to
the compositional conventions and subject matter in Man Ray’s Atgets.
18 Denis Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,” October
69 (1994): 114.
19 Breton, “Words without Wrinkles,” in The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 100.
20 Michael Sheringham, “City Space, Mental Space, Poetic Space,” in Parisian
Fields, ed. Michael Sheringham (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), 85–114.
21 Breton, “The Mediums Enter,” in Lost Steps, 90.
22 Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans.
Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1972), 26.
23 Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924,” 29–30.
24 Cited in Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psycho-
analysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990), 12; the text was originally published as Les champs mag-
nétiques. From the point of view of psychoanalytic practice, with regard to the
very possibility of directly accessing the unconscious, J. B. Pontalis has objected
to the notion of “un inconscient déjà figurable et déjà mis en mots” in his essay
“Les vases non-communicants,” La nouvelle revue française 302 (March 1, 1978):
32. Foster’s account of surrealism as imbricated with the uncanny, on the other
hand, follows from his premise that the surrealists succeeded “all too well” in
tapping the unconscious, and attributes the group’s abandonment of automa-
tism by 1930 to the fact that the unconscious was found to be terrifyingly
inchoate. See Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 4–5. See also Polizzotti, Revolution
of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1995), 184, for an account of an evening of hypnagogic experiments that nearly
ended in death, after which Breton called off automatist séances.
25 André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault, The Automatic Message,
trans. David Gascoyne, Antony Melville, and Jon Graham (London: Atlas
Press, 1997), 32, 30. Rosalind Krauss has characterized this porosity in terms
of the Freudian uncanny in “Corpus Delicti,” in L’amour fou: Photography and
Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 85.
26 Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924,” 26.
28 Breton, Éluard, and Soupault, Automatic Message, 28.
30 Extending the structures of automatism to encompass surrealist manifestations
of the uncanny, Rosalind Krauss has characterized this effect of “cleavage” as a
“double that stands at the border between life and death not as a barrier, marker

of difference, but as the most porous of membranes, allowing the one side to
contaminate the other.” Among her examples are robots and dolls, figures that
appear repeatedly in the hybrid form of the mannequin in Man Ray’s Atgets.
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1993), 171.
31 Georg Simmel, “Sociability,” 127–40; “The Adventurer,” 143–49; and “The
Stranger,” 187–98, in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, ed.
Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
32 Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Georg Simmel, 325.
33 Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 326, 330.
34 Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 330, 332.
35 For an extended analysis of Simmel’s play forms, see Laxton, “From Judgment
to Process,” in From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-
Century Art, ed. David J. Getsy (University Park: Pennsylvania State Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 19–24. The threat posed by “the stranger” to modernist
order and classification has been analyzed by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity
and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); see especially
53–102.
36 For a synthetic reading of Benjamin’s notion of Spielraum and its relation to
gambling, among other forms of play across Benjamin’s writings, see Hansen,
“Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (summer
2004): 3–45.
37 Beaujour, “Afterword,” in About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and
Theory, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), n.p.
39 Rosalind Krauss, in her essay “Nightwalkers,” Art Journal (spring 1981):
33–38, initiated the exploration of the relation between the topography of
Paris, the surrealist practice of objective chance, and surrealist photography
as evidenced in the work of Brassaï. What follows builds on her intertextual
analysis, extending and recasting these practices as automatist play. For an-
other examination of Paris as a “field of desire,” see Sheringham, “City Space,”
85–114.
40 Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti
(New York: Paragon House, 1993), 59–60. The excursion was initiated during a
period marked by a resurgence of automatic writing, just prior to the publica-
tion of the first manifesto in 1924.
41 In most accounts of the surrealist movement, errance is either collapsed into
or eclipsed by objective chance. I make a distinction between them, following
Michel Beaujour, in order to stress the early surrealist emphasis on experience,
performance, and manifestations as opposed to later preoccupations with
objects and representations. See Beaujour, “From Text to Performance,” in
A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994), 866–71.
42 Breton, Conversations, 106.
43 Man Ray, Self Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 230. Man Ray had also
taken photographs of the sites explored in Nadja, but they were rejected as
insufficiently banal. See Dawn Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist Text,”

in L’amour fou: Photography and Surrealism, ed. Rosalind Krauss and Jane
Livingston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 189n11. This raises the question
of whether Man Ray’s Atgets were selected as illustrations for Nadja, offering
a more dispassionate perspective than Man Ray’s own. The timing is right, and
the number (approximately forty-seven) is close to the number of photographs
finally included in the text (forty-four).
44 Tom Conley uses the term geographic al unconscious in “ ‘Le cinéaste de la vie
moderne’: Paris as Map in Film, 1924–34,” in Sheringham, Parisian Fields, 83.
45 Roger Caillois, “Paris, a Modern Myth,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger
Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003), 180.
46 Breton’s first book of essays, entitled Les pas perdus (The Lost Steps; 1924) as if
to underscore the emergence of surrealism from errance, is the book he hands
to Nadja herself in the eponymous text. I use the term apparatus advisedly here,
to indicate the receiving point of mental activity—its point of engagement with
the sensory world. In “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), Freud compares
the psychic apparatus with “optical apparatuses,” a further reference point for
the surrealist characterization of photography as automatic in the psychoanalyt-
ical sense. See Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 358–59.
48 Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates,” 129.
49 For an overview of the scholarship on the photographic illustrations in Nadja,
see Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 48–67.
50 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), 36. Lefebvre’s alliance with the surrealists
is contemporary with the assembling of Man Ray’s Atget album, dating to his
codrafting of the 1925 manifesto La Révolution d’abord et toujours. See Michel
Trebitsch, preface to Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1, trans. John
Moore (London: Verso, 1991), xx. Lefebvre is also the hinge figure between sur-
realist errance and the situationist dérive of the 1950s and 1960s. See Lefebvre,
“Definitions,” Internationale situationniste 1 ( June 1958): 13. For Lefebvre the
“inadmissable” is present in the everyday: the banal is theorized as the “uncon-
scious” of the monumental city, and is revealed only on the occasion of festival,
that is, through play.
51 Beaujour, “Qu’est-ce que ‘Nadja’?,” 796. Breton’s comment on hypnagogic
traversal of Paris is in Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and
Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 102–3.
52 Sheringham, “City Space,” 89. See also Margaret Cohen’s account of Nadja,
which focuses on the operations of places “haunted” by Breton, in Cohen, Profane
Illumination, 77–119. Years later Breton would return to the theme: “No doubt a
highly significant map should be drawn for each individual which would indicate
in white the places he is prone to haunt, and in black t hose he avoids, the rest
being divided into shades of grey according to the greater or lesser degree of attrac-
tion or repulsion exerted.” Breton, La clé des champs (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire,
1953), 283.

53 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part
2, 527. If the crime Atget traced was the death of bourgeois ideals, then his
images are avatars of a politicized uncanny in their presentation of the lifeless
detritus left in the wake of capital. This evidence of the death of the bourgeoi-
sie would certainly be something the surrealists would want to annex to their
own project, and would account for Benjamin’s substantive identification of
Atget with surrealism, beyond merely seeing his photographs in La Révolution
surréaliste. Benjamin pursues the materialization of history in the urban matrix
in “convolute P” of The Arcades Project, 516–26, where he “reads” the past of
the city through the significance of its street names. His comments on the
incongruity of the joined names at corners and on streets named for functions
and residents no longer in place are of particular interest for their similarity to
the imagery of condensation and displacement; for juxtaposition as the site of
historical memory and obsolescent “play forms” as its vehicle; and for the argu-
ment that the marginal, overlooked “everyday” delivers symptoms of the city’s
geographical unconscious.
54 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact
Change, 1996), 25.
55 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 91–110.
56 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 97–98.
57 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 102. This would also serve as an accurate
description of the quasi-autobiographical texts Nadja and Paris Peasant.
58 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 102.
60 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 106. As I pointed out in chapter 1 of this
volume, Man Ray is intimate with the operations of the game board, particularly
the checkerboarded game of chess, in which play proceeds within a system of
relations so tightly contingent that the entire game changes with every move. In
1933, Roger Caillois directly related the play of chess to “automatic thinking” by
describing it as an “associative chain”: “No element remains that could not be
related to [sic] multipolar ways to all of the others. . . . Not only does it main-
tain, with each element, the episodic and contingent relation used in the series
of associations, but hidden links bind it to the secondary themes.” Caillois, The
Necessity of the Mind, trans. Michael Syrotinski (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1990),
26, 42. From the vantage point of errance Man Ray himself can be understood
as a ludic figure, specifically, Simmel’s “stranger,” a figure with special access to
commerce and who is able to “piggyback” onto commercial systems of circula-
tion, which they ride into a variety of contexts “strange” to them. The character-
ization is particularly apt in the case of Man Ray, an expatriate who was at once
part of and apart from the French surrealists, and who simultaneously engaged
in a wide variety of commercial and avant-garde practices. See Simmel, “The
Stranger,” 187–98.
61 Aragon makes special note of this in Paris Peasant, 25.
62 Aragon reviewed the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels
modernes, which opened in Paris on April 28, 1925, for La Révolution surréali-

ste. See Aragon, “Au bout du quay, les arts décoratifs,” La Révolution surréaliste
5 (October 15, 1925): 633–35. The article, which appeared just after the publica-
tion of part 2 of Paris Peasant, considers the perverse possibilities of decoration
as a fine art and, conversely, the utility of decorative objects. While Aragon
doesn’t mention the Plan Voisin specifically, he does reveal his “distaste for
functionalist orientation” and the “pragmatic and minimal attitude of utilitarian
design.” His lamentation of the destruction of the Paris arcades by “cutting the
map of Paris into straight lines” is in Paris Peasant, 21.
63 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: Éditions G. Crès, 1924), 3.
64 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 93, 12.
65 David Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power, and Politics in Twentieth-
Century Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 103. Le Corbusier’s dispar-
agement of gypsies is in Urbanisme, 25, 95.
66 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, xxi.
67 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 283.
68 On the “return to order,” see Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia:
French Art and Politics between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1995); and Anthony Vidler, “Bodies in Space/Subjects in the City:
Psychopathologies of Modern Urbanism,” in “The City,” special issue, Differ-
ences 5, no. 3 (fall 1993): 31–51.
69 Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 3, 4, 7–9.
70 Breton, “The Crisis of the Object,” in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon
Watson Taylor (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2002); cited in Vidler, “Fantasy,
the Uncanny and Surrealist Theories of Architecture,” Papers of Surrealism
1 (winter 2003): 3, 4, accessed January 7, 2013, www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk
/papersofSurrealism/ journa11/acrobat_files/Vidler.pdf.
71 Breton, “The Surrealist Situation of the Object,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism,
261–62.
72 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 254.
73 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New
York: Praeger, 1970), 268–69.
77 Kristen Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 3.
78 Benjamin, Arcades Project. The surrealists’ influence on Benjamin is widely
acknowledged, as are the points at which he departed from them. The best
concise account of the genesis of The Arcades Project in surrealism is in Rolf
Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill,” in Benjamin, Arcades Project, 932–35.
See also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: mit
Press, 1989), especially chapter 8; and Cohen, Profane Illumination.
79 Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 33, 5.
80 Benjamin, letter to Adorno, May 31, 1935, cited in Buck-Morss, Dialectics of See-
ing, 388n48. The Passage de l’Opéra was the site of the Café Certà, the meeting

place for the surrealist group at the time that Man Ray arrived in Paris. It was
demolished shortly after the publication of Paris Peasant to make way for the
boulevard Haussmann.
81 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 403; Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 210.
82 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 209–10.
83 Charles Baudelaire, “Du vin et du hashisch,” Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1961), 249–50; cited in Benjamin, Arcades Project, 349.
84 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 373; see Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmos, Vol. 3
(Leipzig: S. Hirzel Verlag, 1864), 272–73.
87 Atget himself named the ragpickers Zoniers in an album devoted entirely to
them. See Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 397–412.
88 See Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 165–75.
90 Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 69. I am citing the French edi-
tion here, which reads “Je suis l’âme errante,” rather than the Grove edition of
1960, where Richard Howard translates the sentence: “I am the lost soul.”
91 Breton, Nadja, 113.
94 Breton, Nadja, 113. Susan Suleiman has called attention to Breton’s uncritical
objectification of Nadja in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-
Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 109.
95 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 361. Hal Foster has assigned this multiple role to
the ragpicker as well as the prostitute: “two related ciphers of the mechanical-
commodified, which, decoded by Benjamin in the milieu of Surrealism, are
still active in its imaginary (particularly in texts and images concerning urban
dérives and derelict spaces).” Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 134.
96 Simmel, “Prostitution,” in Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 121. As a neo-Kantian, Simmel’s
analyses tended t oward the abstract; for today’s reader, his attention to form as
opposed to social justice can read as fey, if not, as in this case, misogynist.
97 Simmel, “Prostitution,” 122, 124.
98 Simmel, “Prostitution,” 122.
101 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 519; Breton, Conversations, 107.
102 Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 184.
103 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 346, 348, 361.
104 These images were part of a commissioned series of nudes, brothels, and prosti-
tutes made for artist André Dignimont. See Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 28–29.
Of these three copied nudes, one is pornographic but the other two are posed
classically, as models for painting or sculpture. All bear Atget’s studio stamp on the
reverse, but none bears Atget’s negative numbers, which were typically scratched
into the surface of the negative to appear in the lower corners of the prints.

105 Man Ray was equivocal about Atget and his subsequent canonization: “I
discovered him!” he exclaimed to an interviewer, “But I don’t consider that
to my credit.” Hill and Cooper, Dialogue with Photography, 17. In fact Man
Ray lived down the street from Atget and so probably “stumbled” on him; rue
Campagne Première was the site of a number of photographic studios.
106 Man Ray would also make at least one graphically pornographic suite: his
“Four Seasons” (1929). See Arturo Schwartz, Man Ray: The Rigour of the
Imagination (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 260.
108 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 494. See also Lefebvre, Production of Space, 209–10,
where the threshold is identified (along with the window, the door, and the
mirror) as a space that in its function as a “transitional object,” or “nonobject,” is
particularly conducive to a rewriting of subject and object relations. Simmel too
gives special significance to threshold spaces as unique sites of experience. See
Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” Theory, Culture, Society 11 (February 1994): 5–10.
109 Ray, Self Portrait, 93.
110 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press of
Glencoe, 1961), 133.
111 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 133, 24. Hal Foster has explicitly located the
death drive in the surrealist fascination with machines: “Often in surreal-
ism the mechanizing/commodifying of body and psyche are expressed in
terms of each other” as “the unconscious as autonomous machine, the sexual
as mechanistic act, the commodification of sexuality as the sexualization
of the commodity, the difference between male and female as the differ-
ence between the human and the mechanical, an ambivalence concerning
women as an ambivalence regarding the mechanical commodified, and so
on.” Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 136. The body in its carnal state would only
be fully explored by the renegade surrealists around Georges Bataille. See,
for example, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide
(New York: Zone Books, 1997). For the death drive as unpleasure, see Freud,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, ed. and trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 314, 334n1.
112 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 133.
113 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), 133.
114 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1992), 208.
115 See Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge,
MA: mit Press, 1989), 14–56.
116 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 519.
117 Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 172.
118 For a description of the exhibition and reproductions of the mannequins see
Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, trans. Alison Anderson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 341–45. Man Ray returned
to the mannequin motif repeatedly throughout his career, from Coat Stand
(1920) to the 1945 images of “Mr. and Mrs. Woodman,” small wooden artist’s

dummies manipulated into a variety of pornographic poses. Contemporary
with his engagement with the Atget photographs, he also regularly photo-
graphed dressmaker’s mannequins for the fashion house of Poiret, one of
which appeared on the cover of La Révolution surréaliste 4 ( July 15, 1925).
119 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 125–56.
122 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 125, 69.
124 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 420, 540, 867.
125 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 4 (New
York: Penguin Books, 1991), 277.
127 Aragon, Paris Peasant, 22. The hairdresser’s shop, which is represented three
times in Man Ray’s album, also figures memorably in Paris Peasant as a site of
sensual, if dangerous pleasure (“the pure lazy coils of a python of blondness”)
that provokes a variety of associations (“electric storms, breath on metal”).
Aragon, Paris Peasant, 52–53, 57–58.
128 Aragon, Paris Peasant, 23.
129 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 537. Henri Lefebvre identifies windows and mirrors
as “non-object[s]” that serve as transitory spaces in the visual field, constantly
referring elsewhere. In this they make apparent the “splits,” inconstancy, and
“play” in space that are normally suppressed in the ideologies that structure
the built environment. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 209–10.
130 Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis, “Naples,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings,
Vol. 1, 1919–1926, ed. Michael Jennings and Marcus Bullock, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 414–21.
131 Breton, Exposition Dada Max Ernst (Paris: Au sans pareil, 1921); cited in
Krauss, “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” 103. Krauss goes on to
relate the surrealist faith in expanded photographic perception to a broader
European endorsement of the camera as a prosthetic to vision. For an account
of automatism as partaking in a contemporary machine utopianism and the
recording machine as vehicle for the freeing of language, see Lawrence Rainey,
“Taking Dictation: Collage Poetics, Pathology and Politics,” modernism/
modernity 5, no. 2 (1998): 123–53.
132 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc-
ibility, (Second Version),” in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 117. Benjamin draws on
historical precedent for the concept in the form of an unattributed citation on
photography: “Humanity has also invented, in its evening peregrinations—
that is to say, in the nineteenth century—the symbol of memory; it has inven
ted what had seemed impossible; it has invented a mirror that remembers. It
has invented photography.” Benjamin, Arcades Project, 688.
133 Salvador Dalí, “Psychologie non-euclidienne d’une photographie,” Minotaure
7 (1935): 302.

134 For analysis of the links between these terms, see Margaret Iversen, Beyond
Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 113–29.
135 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 519.
137 Man Ray, letter to Katherine Dreier, February 20, 1921, in Katherine Dreier
Archives, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New
Haven, CT.
138 Historically, this has been particularly true for Atget’s images. See Krauss,
“Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” in Originality of the Avant-Garde, 131–50;
and Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums.
139 Beaujour, “Afterword,” in About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text
and Theory, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1974), n.p. He continues, “This denial of the productive process, although it
was inseparable from a rejection of the dominant ideology, which they rightly
diagnosed as mainly geared to production and social exploitation, was an
idealist illusion: it had deplorable ideological consequences since it opened
the door to occultism and mysticism.” Beaujour contends that the surrealists
would finally fail to separate automatism from “medianimic possession and
magic trance . . . a crude form of neoplatonic poetics.”
140 Beaujour, “Afterword,” n.p.
141 The year 1926 is also when Georges Bataille published Histoire de l’oeil, a novel
that has been described as “a structure set up to generate ‘mis-play,’ or ‘system-
atic transgression’ enacted through a succession of metaphors and metonymy
around an object, in this case, the eye, a chain which ultimately has no signi-
fied.” See Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 167–68.
Chapter 3. System
Epigraph: André Breton, cited in Jacques Baron, L’an un du surréalisme: Suivi

de l’an dernier (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1969), 12.
1 The description of Motherwell’s weekly exquisite corpse sessions with Ba-
ziotes, Krasner, and Pollock is in Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen
(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 317, 325. Jean-Jacques Lebel reports
the production of cadavres exquis among members of Le grand jeu (Roger
Gilbert-Lecompte, René Daumal, and Roger Vailland) in Juegos surrealistas:
100 cadaveros exquisitos (Madrid: Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza,
1996), 25; examples by the Dadaists also appear in this text on pages 19, 26, and
27. The reference to Beuys and Richter is in Ingrid Schaffner, “In Advance of
the Return of the Cadavre Exquis,” in The Return of the Cadavre Exquis, ed.
Ingrid Schaffner (New York: Drawing Center, 1993), 21. See this volume also
for numerous examples of specially commissioned “corpses” from the 1990s.
Among the surrealists who are known to have played are: Louis Aragon, Hans
Bellmer, Victor Brauner, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Robert Desnos, Óscar
Domínguez, Gala Éluard Dalí, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Jacques Hérold,
Notes to Chapter Three 303

Georges Hugnet, Marcel Jean, Wifredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, Dora Maar,
René Magritte, André Masson, Frédéric Mégret, Joan Miró, Max Morise,
Pierre Naville, Marcel Noll, Paul Nougé, Meret Oppenheim, Benjamin Péret,
Jacques Prévert, Man Ray, Georges Sadoul, Yves Tanguy, Tristan Tzara, Raoul
Ubac, and Pierre Unik. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the play-
ers; sympathizers, spouses, and one-night stands were as likely as poets and
artists to play at a surrealist gathering. Michel Leiris’s participation has been
referred to in Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, trans.
Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 122; and
Lévi-Strauss’s participation while the surrealists were “exiled” in the United
States is alluded to in Philippe Audoin, “Surréalistes,” in Dictionnaire des jeux:
Realités de l’imaginaire, ed. René Alleau (Paris: Tchou, 1966), 481. Additional
postwar and contemporary examples of the game are examined in Kanta
Kocchar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger, eds., The Exqui-
site Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2009). A quick search of the internet confirms
continuous interest in the game, executed at all levels of artistic skill.
2 Lebel, “La erupción de la vida,” in Juegos surréalistas, 38.
3 For example, André Breton recounted: “It was perhaps in these games that our
receptivity was constantly regenerated; at least they sustained the happy feeling
of dependence we had on each other. You’d have to look back as far as the Saint-
Simonians to find the equivalent.” Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of
Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 57.
4 Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (Cambridge,
MA: mit Press, 1997), 239, 223, 231.
5 Caws, Surrealist Look, 239, 231. See also Anne M. Kern, “From One Exquisite
Corpse (in)to Another,” in Kocchar-Lindgren, Schneiderman, and Denlinger,
eds., Exquisite Corpse, 3–28.
6 For the dark model of surrealism introduced by Hal Foster, where the game is
linked through its mechanical aspects to the automaton and takes on a political
dimension through its critique of social mechanization, see Hal Foster, Com-
pulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1993), 125–54.
7 Breton himself called the figures monsters. Breton, “Le cadavre exquis, son
exaltation,” in Le cadavre exquis, son exaltation, ed. Arturo Schwarz (Milan:
Galleria Schwarz, 1975), 8.
8 The crisis in drawing mobilized by modernism has been examined from the
perspective of its consequences for postwar art and architectural practices,
respectively, in Benjamin Buchloh, “Raymond Pettibon: Return to Disorder
and Disfiguration,” October 92 (spring 2000): 37–51; and Mark Wigley, “Paper,
Scissors, Blur,” in The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from
Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond, ed. Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley
(New York: Drawing Center, 2001), 27–56.
9 It has become commonplace in the literature on surrealism to maintain that
the movement rose out of dissatisfaction with the bourgeois values that
brought on World War I’s violence, death, and destruction. But in his inter-
views with Andre Parinaud, Breton has qualified this to indicate that it was
304 Notes to Chapter Three

not violence specifically that generated surrealism’s ethos of negation, but the
postwar extension of obedience—a kind of internalized martial law—among
the populace, which Breton found abhorrent. Breton, Conversations, 38.
10 Breton, “Max Ernst,” in The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1996), 60. In 1925 Breton would adjust this interdic-
tion against abstraction somewhat in order to embrace Picasso.
11 Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Rich-
ard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 26.
Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron has culled the many surrealist statements on au-
tomatism between 1919 and 1933 as they pertain to automatic writing (although
she does not address drawing) in Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, trans. Vivian
Folkenflik (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 47–60.
12 Breton, “Words without Wrinkles,” in Lost Steps, 102. In a note to the first
manifesto Breton refers the reader to issue 36 of Feuilles libres for several
examples of the drawings. See Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924,” 21.
13 Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924,” 21. La Révolution surréaliste 4
( July 1925) includes the first installment of Breton’s “Surrealism and Painting”;
the fourth and final installment appeared in La Révolution surréaliste 9–10
(October 1927), along with five reproductions of exquisite corpse drawings
and a number of examples of the written version. Surrealism discredited paint-
ing in its early years, in the third issue of La Révolution surréaliste (and later
redeemed it, with its main detractor, Pierre Naville, as the casualty). See Pierre
Naville, “Beaux-Arts,” La Révolution surréaliste 3 (1925): 27.
14 Max Morise, “Les yeux enchantées,” La Révolution surréaliste 1 (1924): 26. His
target is Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, recently acclaimed by Breton.
16 Morise, “Les yeux enchantées,” 26; emphasis added. Aragon as well shows a
striking prescience with regard to the linguistic model for the mind: “as for the
mental material I was talking about, it seemed to us to be the vocabulary itself:
there is no thought outside words.” Louis Aragon, Une vague de reves (Paris: Édi-
tions Seghers, 1990), 15.
17 André Masson, Le rebelle du surréalisme: Écrits (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 37;
cited in David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectiv-
ity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 33. Lomas treats Masson’s
work extensively in chapter 1, “Traces of the Unconscious,” 9–52, where he also
addresses automatic drawings by Miró. My understanding of automatism as it
applies to the visual arts is indebted to him.
18 Samuel Weber cites Freud on the nature of the “picture puzzle” presented
by the unconscious, asserting that the interpretation of the manifest image
proceeds away from iconographic meaning and toward the semiotic system: “If
we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead
of according to their semiotic relations, we should clearly be led into error.”
Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982), 28.
19 See Max Ernst, “Beyond Painting,” in Beyond Painting and Other Writings by
the Artist and His Friends, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: Wittenborn,

Schultz, 1948), 7. Breton has confirmed that surrealist automatic writing had
always sustained a measure of editing not admitted by Masson and Ernst. See
Breton, Conversations, 65. As early as 1922 Breton had admitted that in the
conversion of mental utterances to writing, the images were vulnerable to
“incursions of conscious elements,” which he attributed to the constant pres-
sure of the ego to dominate. See Breton, “The Mediums Enter,” in Lost Steps,
91–92; and “Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924,” 24. For an overview of automatic
writing and the development of the sessions, see André Breton, Paul Éluard,
and Philippe Soupault, The Automatic Message, trans. David Gascoyne, Antony
Melville, and Jon Graham (London: Atlas Press, 1997), 39–54.
20 Breton, “Max Ernst,” 60.
21 Breton, “Max Ernst,” 60. Denis Hollier has affirmed this impulse to the indexi-
cal as a kind of unmediated representation: “Breton’s conception of automatic
writing as a precipitate . . . gives it the same properties of a cast shadow:
automatic writing is to invisible objects what photography is to visible ones.”
Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,” October 69
(1994): 124.
23 Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924,” 21. The emblematic automatic text Les
champs magnétiques was nearly named Les précipités, pointing to the texts as
concentrated deposits of mental activity. See David Gascoyne, introduction to
Breton, Éluard, and Soupault, Automatic Message, 42; and Hollier, “Surrealist
Precipitates,” 111–32.
24 Breton, “Francis Picabia,” in Lost Steps, 97; Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism
1924,” 28; Breton, “Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality,”
in What Is Surrealism?, ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Pathfinder, 1978),
133; Péret, “Au paradis des fantômes,” Minotaure 3 (October 1933): 38–44; and
Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 125–54.
26 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1993), 53.
27 For David Lomas, automatism presented a purely oppositional practice to the
Taylorization apparent in purist works of Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, and
therefore to the mechanical. Lomas, Haunted Self, 28–30.
28 Morise, “Les yeux enchantées,” 27; emphasis added.
29 Naville, “Beaux-Arts,” 27.
30 Breton, “Surrealism and Painting,” 26–30.
31 Laurent Jenny, “The Adventures of Automatism,” October 51 (1989): 105–14.
The problem, as Jenny describes it, is that this “pure expression” that resists “all
tradition, all heritage, . . . all language” must be expressed in received forms of
language: “The words of automatism are therefore called upon to account for an
aspect of the mind that denies them.” Jenny cites the juxtaposition of two distant
realities as one of these methods the surrealists settle on to represent the unrep-
resentable. See Jenny, “Adventures of Automatism,” 107. David Lomas also marks
1927 as the “turning point” away from automatism. Lomas, Haunted Self, 10.
32 Ernst, “Visions de demi-soleil,” La Révolution surréaliste 9–10 (1927): 7;
Aragon, “Traité du style,” La Révolution surréaliste 11 (1928): 3–6. For Louis

Aragon’s full address of collage and juxtaposition, see Aragon, La peinture au
defí (Paris: Librairie J. Corti, 1930).
33 Caillois, “Divergences et complicités,” in “André Breton et le movement sur-
réaliste,” special issue, La nouvelle revue française 172 (April 1967): 692–93.
34 For automatism’s dead end and the rise of the paranoid-critical method, see
Jenny, “Adventures of Automatism,” 105–14.
35 Ernst, “Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme?” [1934], Écritures: Max Ernst (Paris:
Éditions Gallimard, 1970), 138. See also Ernst’s earlier statement: “In the hope
of increasing the fortuitous character of elements utilizable in the composing
of a drawing and so increasing their abruptness of association, surrealists have
resorted to the process called ‘the exquisite corpse.’ ” Ernst, “Inspiration to
Order,” in Beyond Painting, 22–23.
36 Morise, “Les yeux enchantées,” 27.
37 Breton, “Le cadavre exquis,” 12.
38 The rules of the game are set out in a number of documents and recollections;
the most often cited is from the abridged dictionary of surrealism: “Game of
pleated paper that consists of a number of players composing a phrase or draw-
ing, without any of them able to render the whole collaboration or to know the
nature of the preceding collaborative contributions. The classic example, which
gives the game its name, is ‘The—exquisite—corpse—will—drink—the—
new—wine.’ ” Aragon, ed., Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (Paris: Galerie
des Beaux Arts, 1938), 6. Tristan Tzara’s more specific “recipes” for the game,
separate versions for the written and the drawn forms, can be found in Breton,
“Le cadavre exquis,” 18, 24. Philippe Audoin makes the comment about viability
and judgment in “Surréalistes,” 484. The iconography I have described in this
passage was drawn from a number of exquisite corpse drawings executed in the
years 1925–28, the period that frames the theorization of the surrealist image.
40 Tzara, “Recipe for the Drawn Exquisite Corpse,” in Schwarz, Le cadavre
exquis, 24.
41 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro
ducibility (Second Version),” in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 106.
43 John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 33.
44 This is the binary that characterizes structuralist accounts of play, grounded
in the classical opposition between Apollo and Dionysus. See Mihai Spariosu,
Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical
and Scientific Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Freud,
too, uses the oppositions heuristically, to characterize his binary model of the
mind: “The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in
contrast to the id, which contains the passions.” Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in
On Metapsychology, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 11 (New York: Penguin Books,
1991), 364.

45 Searle, Speech Acts, 35.
46 Searle, Speech Acts, 35–36.
47 Simone Collinet, “Les cadavres exquis,” in Schwarz, Le cadavre exquis, 30.
48 André Breton and Louis Aragon, eds., “Le surréalisme en 1929,” special issue,
Variétés ( June 1929): 36, 37.
49 Michael Riffaterre, “Semantic Incompatibilities in Automatic Writing,” in
About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and Theory, ed. Mary Ann
Caws (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), 224.
50 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 152.
51 Collinet, “Les cadavres exquis,” 65.
52 Roland Barthes, “The Surrealists Overlooked the Body,” in The Grain of the
Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1981), 244.
53 Much of this can be deduced from the drawings themselves and is corrobo-
rated by notes on their backs, some confirmed in the hand of André Breton,
who at one time owned all four of the images. Although consistency in the
order of the artists’ contributions, size and type of paper, and the materials
used confirms that these four exquisite corpse images represent a complete
“round” of the game, there is some confusion in the dating of the images. The
two Paris drawings—figure 3.1, at Musée national d’art moderne; and figure 3.2,
from the Pouderoux collection—are dated c. 1927. Figure 3.3, at the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, is dated “1926 ou 1927” on its back. The fourth
drawing, figure 3.4, is at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it has been dated
on the back “1928.” The early exquisite corpse images have been particularly
vulnerable to lapses in memory, as most were dated and attributed only when
they were slated for exhibition, long after they were made.
54 André Masson had retrospectively dated some images to 1925, identify-
ing his and Tanguy’s contributions on the faces of the drawings (see fig-
ures 3.6 and 3.7), although he could not recall the other players. This com-
mitment to anonymity would change, if gradually; the four exquisite corpse
images that appeared in Variétés identified their authors—Morise, Tanguy,
Miró, and Man Ray—but did not pin the names to separate sections of the
figures. This would only be accomplished as the drawings entered institutional
circulation, that is, as they effectively gave up their ephemerality and became
valuable works of art.
55 There is, however, one way in which the exquisite corpse fills the role of draw-
ing as classically conceived: as a preparatory sketch. This is not to say that
those painters who participated in the game then literally turned the images
into paintings, but that the aleatory sketches were instrumental in Breton’s
codification of surrealist painting—the most intense period of exquisite corpse
production coincides with the period in which Breton prepared “Surrealism
and Painting” (1928) for publication. However, this directive for painting
would be a mandate purely at the level of style, and not compositional process;
surrealist painting delivers an “aleatory effect” of juxtaposition from within the
traditional frame of painting, foregoing the indexicality, mechanical facture,
and composite authorship distinctive of the exquisite corpse. Nevertheless,

a fter the invention of the game, drawings began to emerge that simulated their
effect—Victor Brauner’s figure sketches would be an example.
56 Ernst, Beyond Painting, 8. In the next sentence he includes Dalí’s “critical para-
noia” method u nder the automatist rubric. Later, Breton will link decalcomania
to another game, l’un dans l’autre, which as a “chain game” is in turn linked to the
exquisite corpse. See Kern, “From One Exquisite Corpse (in)to Another,” 21–23.
57 For examples of these techniques, see Leslie Jones, Drawing Surrealism, exhibi-
tion catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Munich: Prestel, 2012).
58 Lebel, Juegos surrealistas, 22, 18. Lebel’s Deleuzean account preserves plurality,
but his characterization of the game as a fluid sharing of a collective uncon-
scious misses the jarring sense of difference and transgression within the images
that orients them historically within the modern perceptual modes of shock
and fragmentation. Whole dimensions of the game are lost: its displacement
of drawing as a medium, the complexity of its psychoanalytic dimension, its
forced encounter with the Other, the possibility of trauma. Lebel’s collective is
a utopia based in intersubjective affinity rather than the ambivalent, regi-
mented dystopia of surrealism’s most autocratic moments.
59 Surrealism’s borrowed maxim is from Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldorer
(1868–69) and is cited by Masson in his recollection of the exquisite
corpse. See Masson, “D’ou viens-tu, cadavre exquis?,” in Schwarz, Le cadavre
exquis, 28. See Breton, Conversations, 91–100, for Breton’s recollection of the
period, including his encounter with Henri Lefebvre and their coauthorship
of the tract “Revolution Now and Forever” (1925), and Breton’s defense of
his break with the Communist Party. See also André Thirion, Revolutionaries
without Revolution, trans. J. Neugroschel (New York: Macmillan, 1975).
61 Breton, Conversations, 112; Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” in Perspective cavalière,
ed. Marguerite Bonner (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970), 50.
62 Paul Éluard, “Prémieres vues anciennes,” in Donner à voir (Paris: Gallimard,
1935); cited in Lebel, Juegos surrealistas, 75.
63 Ernst, “Inspiration to Order,” 22.
64 Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 178–79.
Jacques Hérold also confirms what he understood as “a telepathic aspect in
the game, and therefore a rapport with the other.” Hérold, “Un entretien avec
Jacques Hérold: Les jeux surrealists,” XXeme siecle 42 (1974): 152.
65 In spite of all the talk about collaboration and telepathy, not a single surrealist
has offered a concrete example in the visual work. Among art historians, only
Dawn Ades has strained to find an “inexplicable symmetry” in several cadavres
exquis. See Ades, Surrealist Art: The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection at
the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1997), 21.
66 Caillois, “Divergences et complicités,” 690.
67 Thirion, Revolutionaries without Revolution, 91. The “truth game,” in
which players were asked sensitive questions, was the one most objected to:
Lévi-Strauss is said to have likened it to an “initiation rite.” Audoin, “Surréali-
stes,” 481. Even Breton admitted that the truth game took a toll on its players.
Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” in Perspective cavalière, 50n1.

68 Collinet, “Les cadavres exquis,” 30.
70 Audoin, “Surréalistes,” 484. For an account that absorbs the game into the
broader category of collage, see Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and
Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).
71 Dalí, “The Object Revealed in Surrealist Experiment,” 199; emphasis added.
76 The differences between individual contributions are much less pronounced
in the collage versions produced by the game (see figure 3.5). As Catherine
Vasseur has pointed out, signature style is already effaced somewhat in the im-
personality of the monochromatic clippings that make up the figures. It could
be counter-argued, however, that since these clippings were already deper-
sonalized, the game was redundant: the same juxtaposition effect would have
been achieved regardless of whether it was made by an individual or a group.
In fact the earliest collaged versions resist attribution: Vasseur has attributed
this exquisite corpse of 1928 to Ernst alone, but Mary Ann Caws attributes it to
Breton and Yves Tanguy, while the Museum of Modern Art claims it was made
by no fewer than seven surrealists—Breton, Max Morise, Jeanette Tanguy,
Pierre Naville, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, and Jacques Prévert (even though
there are not seven folds in the page). Vasseur, “L’image sans mémoire: A
propos de la cadavre exquis,” Les cahiers du Musee national de l’art moderne 55
(spring 1996): 78; Caws, Surrealist Look, 225.
77 Dalí, “The Object Revealed in Surrealist Experiment,” 198.
78 Dalí, La vie secrète de Salvador Dalí (Paris: Éditions de la table ronde, 1952),
248; cited in Lebel, Juegos surrealistas, 35–36.
79 Inasmuch as the exquisite corpse is here posited as both independent and self-
generated, Dalí invests the game with a degree of menace based on doubling-
as-absence, a “second self,” “a being acting freely and arbitrarily”—the group
ethos is mirrored as a threatening dystopia.
80 Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 292–93. Freud
addresses the concept of overdetermination in two texts familiar to the surreal-
ists: The Interpretation of Dreams and the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanaly-
sis. As André Masson has recalled, the Introductory Lectures was on display in
the Bureau central de recherches surréalistes. See Jennifer Mundy, Surrealism:
Desire Unbound (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 58.
81 Following Freud, I am using the terms overdetermination and condensation in-
terchangeably. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Penguin Freud Library,
Vol. 4 (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 279–304.
82 Éluard is referring specifically to the surrealist language game “conditionals,”
whose “if-then” construction of secret assertions and corresponding responses

is in the same category as the exquisite corpse. Éluard, “Prémieres vues anci-
ennes”; cited in Lebel, Juegos surrealistas, 75.
83 Benjamin quotes Alain Émile-Auguste Chartier, Les idées et les ages, Vol. 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1927), 183–84: “The basic principle . . . of gambling . . . consists in
this: that each round is independent of the one preceding. Gambling strenu-
ously denies all acquired conditions, all antecedents . . . pointing to previous
actions; and this is what distinguishes it from work. Gambling rejects . . . this
weighty past which is the mainstay of work, and which makes for seriousness
of purpose, for attention to the long term, for right, and for power. . . . The idea
of beginning again . . . and of doing better . . . occurs often to one for whom
work is a struggle; but the idea is . . . useless . . . and one must stumble on with
insufficient results.” Cited in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiede-
mann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 1999), 512.
84 This is precisely the reason Sartre rejected automatism. “Automatic writing is
above all else the destruction of subjectivity. When we attempt it, spasmodic
clots rip through us, their origin unknown to us; we are not conscious of them
until they have taken their place in the world of objects and we have to look on
them with the eyes of a stranger. It is not a matter, as has too often been said,
of substituting their unconscious subjectivity for consciousness, but of show-
ing the subject to be like an inconsistent illusion in the midst of an objective
universe.” Sartre, “Situation de l’ecrivain en 1947,” in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?
(Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 215–16.
85 It is certain that Breton read the essay; he cites “Le moi et le soi,” another text
from the volume Essais de psychanalyse, in his lecture “Position politique de
l’art d’aujourd’hui” (1935). La science des rêves had appeared in 1926, Totem
et tabou in 1924, Trois essais sur la theorie de la sexualité in 1923, La psychopa-
thologie de la vie quotidienne in 1922. Introduction à la psychanalyse, which was
displayed at the Bureau central de recherches surréalistes, had also come out in
1922.
86 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 275. The “dichotomy” between eros and
the death instincts finds its full elaboration in “The Ego and the Id,” which
came out in France the same year. Freud’s conclusion in Beyond the Plea
sure Principle is “the aim of all life is death” (310–11). While up until now it
has never been viewed from the perspective of play, the link of repetition-
compulsion to surrealism has been well established. Both Rosalind Krauss
and Hal Foster have addressed it through the phenomena of the uncanny and
the death drive, Krauss in “Corpus Delicti,” in L’amour fou: Photography and
Surrealism, ed. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1985), 55–111; and Optical Unconscious; Foster in Convulsive Beauty. See
also Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge, MA: mit
Press, 2000), which treats Bellmer’s disarticulated dolls as “uncanny automata”;
and Lomas, Haunted Self, where Julia Kristeva’s interpretation of the uncanny
becomes a frame for Picasso’s surrealist production.
87 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 284.

88 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 285. Play-as-mastery is an idea that reaches
back to the Platonic rationale for play—as practice for adult life, a “rational
and mimetic use of play.” Spariosu, Literature, Mimesis, and Play: Essays in
Literary Theory (Tubingen: Narr, 1982), 22.
89 The move parallels the synthesizing of a fragmented “Real” (and inaccessible,
incommunicable) self into what Jacques Lacan would call the Imaginary and
the Symbolic, effected in “the mirror stage” of infancy. Lacan himself refers to
the surrealists in his essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of
the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 3–4. This theorization of
“the mirror stage” had developed from a footnote in Freud’s Beyond the Plea
sure Principle, 284, through which Freud expanded the fort-da game into the
child’s game of making their own image disappear from a mirror. Inasmuch as
play lies in relation to mimesis, and in psychoanalysis, both play and mimesis
are manifested through the vehicle of repetition, play is positioned as essential
to entry into the Symbolic: “Repetition demands the new. It is turned toward
the ludic, which finds its dimension in this new.” Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton,
1981), 61.
90 Freud, “La question de l’analyse par les non-médecins,” La Révolution surréaliste
9–10 (1927): 25–32. I have used the Penguin translation in what follows, and
the citations below refer to this edition: Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,”
in Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library,
Vol. 15 (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 283–353.
91 Freud, “Question of Lay Analysis,” 294.
94 Baron, L’an un du surréalisme, 80.
95 The theorization of Ernst’s overpaintings in terms of screen memory and the
uncanny is in Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 32–93.
96 The players were Camille Goemans, Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy, and André
Breton.
97 Breton cites this example of the written version of exquisite corpse in “Le cadavre
exquis, son exaltation,” 8; translation modified to accommodate English syntax.
98 By sprawl I am referring to Bataille’s notion of the informe (formless). While
informe is an operation set against the figure, as Yve-Alain Bois has pointed out,
a “fragmentation of the body (itself temporally folded and unfolded) disturbs
the surrealists’ ‘exquisite corpses’ ”; Bois himself also warns against treating the
informe as sheer deformation, which would imply that even “the slightest altera-
tion to the human anatomy, in a painting, for example, would be said to partici-
pate in the formless—which comes down to saying that modern figurative art, in
its quasi-totality, would be swept up into such a definition.” Yve-Alain Bois and
Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 34, 15.
99 The double function of the fold in the exquisite corpse invites comparison with
Gilles Deleuze’s operation of baroque intelligibility as he theorizes it in The
Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1993). Play is repeatedly invoked in Deleuze’s essay to
describe the “operative function” of the fold (66, 3); and like the surrealist
paradigm, the baroque fold has been linked to postmodern forms and systems.
The surrealist fold shares Deleuze’s baroque critique of Cartesian space, a
contestation that is enacted through dynamic seriality and the production of a
unique variable; both systems foreground process and propose a new link be-
tween the “spontaneity of the inside” and the “determinism of the outside”
(29). Deleuze even compares Leibnitz’s labyrinthine thought with “a sheet
of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements”
(6). But the likeness between the folds of the exquisite corpse and those of
the baroque model ends with the term infinite. Deleuze’s fold is a crease that
multiplies into endless curves and twisting surfaces, a “double operation”
of simultaneous folding and unfolding in opposite directions, a fold that is
not opposed to unfolding, that is neither “tension-release” nor “contraction-
dilation” (7). Yet the exquisite corpse finds its significance as much in its
pleated field of reception as in the culminating delivery of misrecognition
accomplished at its unfolding—two operations that are linked, interac-
tive, dependent, but discrete. While there is repetition and the possibility
of inexhaustible seriality across its production, the exquisite corpse makes
its specific critique of form in its individual instances—and each of these
instances produces a framed and discrete image. Deleuze theorized the ba-
roque fold as an anti-Hegelian infinite—“A process without spatial develop-
ment . . . plier, déplier, replier” (xvi)—but the model for the exquisite corpse
is a dialectic that culminates in a single irresolvable image. Call it an arrested
vector or a failed potential for the articulation of pure open-endedness, but
once open, the exquisite corpse is never refolded.
100 See Wigley, “Paper, Scissors, Blur,” 29. Because the paper ground is ignored in
the reception of drawing, Wigley argues, t here is a kind of immateriality to
drawing, “as if it occupies a liminal space between material and immaterial. This
allows it to act as a bridge across the classical divide between material and idea.”
101 Blurring the line between drawing and sculpture, here, is inevitable with the
introduction of the tactile into the visual field. The exquisite corpse rejects
the immateriality of flat representation and insists on being experienced as an
object. This is consistent with Breton’s conception of the ease with which the
images on the page could be “constructed”—they are already understood as
objects in the object-world. Breton insures against an utterly optic apprehen-
sion of the exquisite corpse by offering, as an example of a commensurate
“surreal” found object, a Hopi doll, published alongside the exquisite corpse in
La Révolution surréaliste 9–10 (October 1, 1927): 34.
102 Breton et al., “Le dialogue en 1928,” La Révolution surréaliste 11 (March 1928):
7. The introduction ends: “We are not opposed to the fact that anxious spirits
track t here nothing more than a more or less perceptible amelioration of the
rules of the game ‘petits papiers.’ ” The statement is a reminder of surrealism’s
embrace of popular culture through the games. What follows in the article
are not examples of the poetic exquisite corpse but of the “dialogue” game, in
which questions and answers are formulated separately: “Qu’est-ce que la peur?”

(“What is fear?”), “Jouer son va-tout sur une place déserte.” (“To go for broke in
a deserted place.”)
103 See Lebel, “La erupción de la vida,” 30. Twenty-eight of these were published
in Juegos surrealistas, 112–39.
104 The exquisite corpse collages are folded, but they hold together unambigu-
ously, with none of the tension attributed to the game as a process. Whereas
the deployment of the folded line against the graphic line in the exquisite
corpse has the effect of an intervention in drawing practices, when it is set
against the already transgressive spacing of collage the syntax of the folded
page becomes all structure. It operates like a double negative to undercut the
juxtapositions the collage has already activated; in turn, collage as a medium
has the effect of disarming the operations of the fold.
105 Lebel, “La erupción de la vida,” 64. Foster, too, demonstrates that Breton
focuses on eros, striving always for unity and reconciliation in his representa
tional practices, yet all the while is subject to the death drive. Foster, Compul-
sive Beauty, 15–17.
106 Bois and Krauss, Formless, 113. For example, proliferation to the point at which
meaning is annihilated, the vitiation of mastery, the expansion of the possibili-
ties of drawing from within drawing itself are leitmotifs that point to “the play
outside meaning” of the exquisite corpse. It was perhaps the potential for this
kind of destructive play that first attracted Bataille to Breton’s surrealism.
107 For an alternative interpretation that presents the game as the illusory “deus ex
machina” of its own appearance, see Vasseur, “L’image sans mémoire,” 78–79.
108 Breton, “Les États généreaux,” Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard,
1999), 27–34; cited in Baron, L’an un du surréalisme, 12. The original French
of this chapter’s epigraph preserves ambiguity in the statement through the
polysemous word si, as well as the alliterative wordplay abat-bâtit, all lost in
the English translation.
Chapter 4. Pun
1 Mark Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2001), 212–14.
2 Leiris kept his “cahier Raymond Roussel” from the year of the subject’s death,
1933, until 1986. It has been published, along with pertinent essays, correspon-
dence, and journal entries, as Jean Jamin, ed., Michel Leiris: Roussel and Co.
(Paris: Fayard, 1998).
3 Jean-Jacques Thomas, “A One-Dimensional Poetics: Michel Leiris,” SubStance
4, nos. 11–12 (1975): 18. In his journal entry of July 13, 1964, among the notes
for the preface to the Tombeau de Raymond Roussel, Leiris compares his own
ethnological method with the mode by which Roussel’s fictitious scientist
from Locus Solus, Martial Canterel, gathered information from his clients in
order to re-create tableaux that “revived the most important scenes from their
lives,” coupling imaginative narrative with factual account that can only be
described as quintessentially surrealist. See Jamin, Michel Leiris, 311–12. For
the short form that the biographical project ultimately took, see Leiris,

“Conception and Reality in the Work of Raymond Roussel,” in Raymond
Roussel: Life, Death and Works, ed. John Ashbery, 73–85 (London: Atlas, 1987).
4 Jamin, Michel Leiris, 186–87, 305, 311. The artists to be included as Roussel’s
legacy are recorded several times in Leiris’s journals, and shifted over time;
likewise the title changed, from Tombeau de Raymond Roussel to Roussel et
quelques. Eventually Leiris did publish his articles on Roussel, expanded with
material from the notebook, as Roussel l’ingenu (1987).
5 Jamin, Michel Leiris, 305.
7 See Octavio Paz, Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare (New York: Arcade,
1990), 11; Marie-Laure Bernadac and Christine Piot, Picasso: Collected Writings
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), xxvii; Anne Umland, Joan Miró: Painting
and Anti-Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 2.
8 Leiris, “Alberto Giacometti,” Documents 4 (September 1929): 209–14; Leiris,
“Joan Miró,” Documents 5 (1929): 263–69. For a brief account of Miró’s ludic
gestures that links play to Catalan myth and ethnographic rites among the
Documents group, see Rémi Labrusse, Miró: Un feu dans les ruines (Paris:
Hazan, 2004), 153–61.
9 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1993), 262.
11 See Robert Desnos, “Raymond Roussel, coincidences et circonstances de la
destinée,” Nouvelles Hébrides (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 191; Desnos, “Une vie
excentrique: RR le mysterieux,” L’intransigeant (August 7, 1933): n.p.; Roger
Vitrac, “Raymond Roussel,” in Raymond Roussel: Life, Death and Works, ed.
John Ashbery (London: Atlas Press, 1987), 43–53; and Jamin, Michel Leiris, 70.
Desnos particularly earned Roussel’s admiration for his punning retort to one
of Roussel’s detractors: “Nous sommes la claque et vous etes la joue.” See Jamin,
Michel Leiris, 205.
12 Vitrac, “Raymond Roussel,” 50. These are the phrases Leiris himself would repeat
to explain the effects of the procédé in his l ater essay, “Conception and Reality in
the Work of Raymond Roussel,” in Raymond Roussel: Life, Death and Works, ed.
John Ashbery (London: Atlas, 1987), 73–85, where he claimed that Vitrac was
on the verge of discovering the wordplay at the root of the procédé (78). See also
Leiris, “Entretien sur Raymond Roussel,” in Jamin, Michel Leiris, 267.
13 Vitrac, “Raymond Roussel,” 51. Roussel himself characterized his own creative
spirit as a “strange factory” in which workers draw rhymes from the depths of
his soul, in his early poem “Mon Ame” (1897). See Roussel, Nouvelles impres-
sions d’Afrique et l’ame de Victor Hugo (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963),
124–25.
14 This is Michel Foucault’s characterization, in Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth:
The World of Raymond Roussel (London: Continuum, 2004), 70.
15 For Benjamin, it was essential “to explore the great law that presides over
the rules, and rhythms of the entire world of play: the law of repetition.” See
Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin,
and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 194.
Notes to Chapter Four 315

16 Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Other Writings by Raymond
Roussel, ed. and trans. Trevor Winkfield (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change,
1995), 3–28.
17 Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, 3–5.
18 Actually these sentences bracket an early short story of Roussel’s, and Impres-
sions of Africa merely borrows the details of this first narrative, expanding the
tale. See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass (La Salle,
IL: Open Court, 1985), 18.
19 Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, 33.
20 Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, 48; cited in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands
and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002), 73.
21 Deleuze, Desert Islands, 72.
22 The skew between the apparent and the actual resonates with psychoanalytical
models, another point of attraction for surrealism. Roussel’s commitment to
the inscrutable significance of random association may be traced to his treat-
ment under Pierre Janet, the figure who most thoroughly theorized automa-
tism. See Janet’s account of Roussel’s treatment in Pierre Janet, De l’angoisse a
l’extase, Vol. 1 (Paris: Société Pierre Janet, 1926), 115–18.
23 Leiris lays out the three stages of Roussel’s text-producing mechanism in his
notebook: “1. Au depart, aspect formel fortuity (calembour) suscitant les ele
ments à confronter et mettre en oeuvre. 2. Élaboration d’un reseau de rapports
logiques entre ces elements. 3. Formulation de ces rapports en une histoire,
de sorte qu’on trouve à l’arrivée un mythe substitué au jeu de mots. C’est un
equivalent littéraire du mécanisme mis en oeuvre dans certains jeux de société,
par example, les charades, sous leur forme théatrale.” Jamin, Michel Leiris, 101.
24 Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, 12.
26 Deleuze, Desert Islands, 73. Against authorship, language itself becomes, as
Leiris pointed out, “the creative agent.” Leiris, “Conception and Reality,” 79.
28 Jamin, Michel Leiris, 98. Rosalind Krauss has stated this succinctly in the
context of Roussel’s relation to Duchamp: “Roussel thought of writing, then,
as a kind of a game for which he had established an elaborate and binding set
of rules. And this game, based on a ritualistic exercise of punning, became
the obscure and hidden machine by which he constructed his work.” Krauss,
Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1981), 75.
29 See Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1987); and Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann
Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
30 Pierre Schneider, “La fenêtre, ou piège à Roussel,” Cahiers du sud (1951):
290; cited in Charles M. Cooney, “Intellectualist Poetry in Eccentric Form,”
Contemporary Literature 48 (2007): 71. For the pun as anticommunicative,
see Attridge, “Unpacking the Portmanteau,” in On Puns, ed. Jonathan Culler
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 140.
31 “Raymond Roussel has nothing to say and he says it badly,” Alain Robbe-
Grillet crows, in Robbe-Grillet, “Riddles and Transparencies in Raymond
316 Notes to Chapter Four

Roussel,” in Atlas Anthology 4, Raymond Roussel: Life, Death and Works, ed.
Alastair Brotchie, Malcolm Green, and Antony Melville (London: Atlas Press,
192), 100.
32 Breton, “Les mots sans rides,” in The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 12.
33 Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism and the Rue Blomet (New York: Eckyn Maclean,
2013), 44–45.
34 Leiris, “45, Rue Blomet,” in Caws, Surrealism and the Rue Blomet, 15–21.
35 Leiris, “45, Rue Blomet,” 39. See also Pierre Kleiber, “Glossaire: J’y serre mes
gloses” de Michel Leiris et la question du langage (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 144,
135–37.
36 Leiris, “Conception and Reality,” 75.
37 Michel Leiris, Madeleine Gobeil, and Carl R. Lovitt, “Interview with Michel
Leiris,” SubStance 4, nos. 11–12 (1975): 48. “This is in part what gave me the
idea of using index cards; these cards being for me what the terms of the ‘equa-
tions of facts’ were for Roussel, in other words, the materials which I had to
interrelate.”
38 Leiris, “Glossaire: J’y serre mes gloses,” La Révolution surréaliste 3 (April 15,
1925): 6–7; 4 ( July 15, 1925): 20–21; 6 (March 1, 1926): 20–21. In 1939 Leiris
expanded the “Glossaire” into a short book illustrated by André Masson, and
this version was reprinted (with a dedication to Robert Desnos, “the inventor
of lyrical wordplay”) in Leiris, Mots sans mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1969),
71–116. Leiris would revisit wordplay yet again near the end of his life in
Langage Tangage (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
39 For additional translations and an extended analysis of the lexical operations
Leiris used in the “Glossaire,” see Gérard Genette, “Signe/ Singe,” in Mimolog-
ics, trans. Thaïs Morgan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 277–96.
40 Leiris, Scratches: Rules of the Game, Vol. 1, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Para-
gon House, 1990), 239.
41 Leiris, Journal (1922–1939) (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 218.
42 Kleiber, “Glossaire,” 173. Leiris’s own text-generating method involved scraps or
tatters as well: he worked with index cards, jotting resonant words and thoughts,
shuffling facts and memories like a deck of cards as if to induce a prerequisite
of disorder. See Denis Hollier, “Notes (on the Index Card),” October 112 (spring
2005): 35–44.
43 Leiris, “Glossaire,” La Révolution surréaliste 3 (1925): 7. In his autobiography,
Biffures (1948), Leiris again laments the moment when “language was almost
lost to me, reduced to the purely human role of the instrument.” Leiris,
Scratches, 48.
44 “The alternative grammar of the Glossaire is full of conflicting demands and
chance combinations,” writes Kleiber in his monograph on the work, “the text
appears to have fixed by instantaneous successions the essential mobility of
verbal substance.” Kleiber, “Glossaire,” 189.
45 Leiris, “Metaphor,” in Brisées: Broken Branches, trans. Lydia Davis (San Fran-
cisco: North Point Press, 1989), 18.
46 Kleiber, “Glossaire,” 11.

47 Leiris, “Conception and Reality,” 80; Leiris, “How I Wrote Certain of My
Books,” in Brisées, 51.
48 Leiris, Journal, 137–38.
49 See Robert Lubar, “Miró’s Defiance of Painting,” Art in America 82, no. 9
(September 1994): 90–91.
50 Krauss, “Michel, Bataille et moi,” October 68 (spring 1994): 6.
51 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory
and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 164. The Medusa metaphor originates with
Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip
Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1993), 212–13.
52 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in
France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990), 294.
53 Leiris, Gobeil, and Lovitt, “Interview with Michel Leiris,” 45. For the im-
portance of the pun to Lacan, see Francoise Meltzer, “Eat Your Dasein,” in
Jonathan Culler, ed., On Puns (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 156–63.
54 Nancy, Birth to Presence, 255–56.
55 Nancy, Birth to Presence, 259.
56 See Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1977),
70–76. Miró would recall his admiration for Duchamp’s Large Glass: “I see it
through word games. I loved his puns.” Georges Raillard, Joan Miró, Ceci est la
couleur de mes rêves: Entretiens avec Georges Raillard (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 107.
Miró not only read Roussel, but attended the premiere of Roussel’s L’étoile au
front (1924) with Leiris on Leiris’s wedding day. This was the performance at
which Desnos shouted out his punning retort to a heckler: “We are the slap and
you are the cheek!” thus endearing himself to the playwright. Raillard, Joan Miró,
23.
59 Miró, letter to Leiris, August 10, 1924, in Margit Rowell, ed., Joan Miró:
Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 86. These
early “small things in wood” are lost, but the description fits the much later
Object (1931), a wood and wire mesh construction in which the elongated
neck and torso of a nude precisely follows the wood grain in the image. This
is another technique based on visual punning, originating in a bistable image,
namely, the nude that Miró “saw” in the wood grain of the panel. The Roussel
work Miró is referring to is Impressions of Africa.
60 Miró, letter to Leiris, August 10, 1924; Miró, letter to Pierre Matisse, Novem-
ber 16, 1936, in Rowell, Joan Miró, 130.
61 See Carolyn Lanchner, Joan Miró (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1993),
42–45.
62 À baiser (to kiss) is French slang for “copulation,” and oiseau is slang for “penis.”
See Margit Rowell and Rosalind Krauss, Joan Miró: Magnetic Fields (New
York: Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, 1972), 58–60. Rowell links Miró’s

puns to those of his close friend (and intimate of the rue Blomet), Robert
Desnos, deepening the association of the Bataillean group with the earliest
interests of the surrealist époque floue.
63 Leiris, “Joan Miró,” in Brisées, 26; first published as “Joan Miró,” in Documents
5 (1929): 263–69. Rosalind Krauss has in turn linked this transitive devolution
to Bataille’s erotic novel, History of the Eye, in Krauss, “Michel, Bataille et moi,”
16–17.
64 Leiris, “Joan Miró,” in Brisées, 26.
65 Miró, letter to Leiris, August 10, 1924.
66 Lanchner, Joan Miró, 38–40.
67 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa
Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1997), 5. The alignment with photographic reproduction is unmistakable.
68 Lanchner, Joan Miró, 41. On page 40, Lanchner goes so far as to compare the
1924–25 “Charbo” sketchbook to an “image bank.”
69 Miró, letter to Leiris, August 10, 1924.
70 Francesc Trabal and Joan Miró, “A Conversation with Joan Miró,” in Rowell,
Joan Miró, 95.
71 Anne Umland draws attention to Miró’s mimicry of “factory work” in
Umland, Joan Miró, 118. For the sources of the mass media images in the col-
lages, see Fèlix Fanés, Pintura, collage, cultura de masas: Joan Miró, 1919–1934
(Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2007).
72 Francisco Melgar, “Spanish Artists in Paris: Juan [sic] Miró,” in Rowell, Joan
Miró, 117.
73 “It is difficult for me to talk about my painting, since it is always born in a state
of hallucination, brought on by some jolt or another—whether objective or
subjective—which I am not in the least responsible for.” Miró, “Statement,” in
Rowell, Joan Miró, 122.
74 Éluard, “Les plus belles cartes postales,” Minotaure 3–4 (1933): 85–100. Man
Ray’s untitled photograph appears above the table of contents in Minotaure 7
(1935); Miró contributed the cover of this issue.
75 Dalí, “Communication: visage paranoïaque,” Le Surréalisme au service de la
révolution 3 (December 1931), n.p.
76 Trabal and Miró, “Conversation with Joan Miró,” 95.
77 Leiris, “Joan Miró,” in Brisées, 27.
78 Leiris, “Joan Miró,” in Brisées, 25–29.
79 Alan J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development
of German History since 1815 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 20. My thanks to
Betty Schlothan for pointing out this key pun.
80 The differences in the individual drawings and their resistance to being under-
stood as a logical progression has made the order in which they w ere produced
impossible to determine with certainty. The drawings are numbered according
to the order in which the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona received them.
Later scholarship at the archive there regrouped them iconographically, and
this second sequence is the one I have reproduced here.

81 Trabal and Miró, “Conversation with Joan Miró,” 98.
82 For excessiveness and constraint in Roussel’s work, see Annie Le Brun, Vingt
milles lieues sous les mots, Raymond Roussel (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1994),
101–5. For Miró’s advance planning and descriptions of promised work, see
Lanchner, Joan Miró, 41; and Umland, Joan Miró, 70.
83 The series picked up the title “imaginary” in 1962, an ironic misnomer given
that all were based on mass media reproductions of previous paintings. Jacques
Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work (New York: Harry Abrams, 1962), 192.
84 Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997),
79. Fer groups the Dutch Interiors and portraits together with Miró’s more
violently figured collages, rather than separating them from Miró’s subsequent
“crisis” work, bolstering her argument with this 1929 publication of the work.
See Documents 5 (October 1929): 263–69.
85 Leiris, “Joan Miró,” in Brisées, 26, 28.
86 Genette, Palimpsests, 12.
87 If it is the seriality of the drawings that manages to hold together the “liquefac-
tion” Leiris identified at work in Miró’s portraits, it must also be remembered
that the violence of repetition has been harnessed to Bataille’s formless as well.
See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York:
Zone Books, 1997), 163, 181.
88 Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding, Surrealist Games (Boston: Shambala
Redstone Editions, 1993), 32.
89 Jamin, Michel Leiris, 151. Leiris’s observation is on page 46 of his Cahier Ray-
mond Roussel.
90 Roussel, New Impressions of Africa/Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
91 Jamin, Michel Leiris, 151. Leiris cites particularly pages 53 and 57–65 of the
French edition, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique.
94 Alberto Giacometti, “Objets mobiles et muets,” Le Surréalisme au service de la
révolution 4 (December 1931): 18–19.
95 Krauss, “No More Play,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1985), 42–85. For Breton’s new
interest in surrealist objects, see Haim Finkelstein, Surrealism and the Crisis of
the Object (Ann Arbor, MI: umi Research Press, 1979).
96 In his early essay, “Words without Wrinkles,” Breton called this slippage “words
making love,” the au-delà of wordplay, and by 1931 René Crevel had linked the
strategy directly to Suspended Ball by observing that its parts “slip into one an-
other,” sharing their frantic eroticism with the viewer, but always, by the action
of the wire, keeping the ball in a state of tension: “by no means permitting it to
fall into the nirvana of satiation.” Breton, Lost Steps, 102; René Crevel, “Dalí
ou l’anti-obscurantisme,” in L’espirit contre la raison, et autres écrits surréalistes
(Paris: Société nouvelle des éditions Pauvert, 1986), 114–30.
97 Dalí, “Objets à foncionnement symbolique,” Le Surréalisme au service de la
révolution 3 (1931): 10. For Dalí’s own preoccupation with visual puns, see

Dawn Ades, Dalí’s Optical Illusions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2000).
98 Krauss, “No More Play,” 57–58.
100 John Ashbery, Raymond Roussel: Selections from Certain of His Books, Atlas
Anthology 7 (London: Atlas Press, 1991), 16.
101 Christian Zervos, “Quelques notes sur les sculptures d’Alberto Giacometti,”
Cahiers d’art 8–10 (1932): 337–42; Giacometti, “[Notes on The Palace at 4:00
am],” Minotaure 3–4 (1933): 46; Ashbery, “Postscript on Raymond Roussel,”
199. Ashbery points specifically to Roussel’s fictitious invention resurrectine,
a serum through which figures can be brought back to life in order to repeat
life-altering traumas, as an important concept to Giacometti.
103 Leiris, “Conception and Reality,” 73–85.
104 For an analysis of “the void” in relation to Giacometti’s later works, see
Christian Klemm, “Maintenant le vide (Now, the Void),” in Klemm, Alberto
Giacometti (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 110–11. Note that the
title of the Giacometti sculpture from which Klemm’s essay takes its name,
“Mains tenant le vide,” itself has a double meaning: when spoken, it translates
as both “Hands Holding the Void” and “Now the Void.”
105 Bifur 6 ( July 1930): n.p.
106 Zervos, “Quelques notes sur les sculptures de Giacometti,” 337–42; and
Zervos, Die Sammlung der Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung (Zurich: Kunsthaus
Zurich, 1971), 94. According to Zervos, Giacometti was concerned to create a
“caractère d’enigme.” See Giacometti, Écrits, ed. Mary Lisa Palmer and Fran-
çois Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990), 12.
107 Thierry Dufrêne, “Dalí-Giacometti: Images paranoïaques et objets indécid-
ables,” Revue de l’art 137 (2002–3): 33.
109 Dufrêne, “La pointe à l’oeil d’Alberto Giacometti,” Cahiers du Musée National
d’Art Moderne 11 (1983): 155. Piranesi’s prints had been circulating in the Docu-
ments group; five from the “Prison” series appear with Henri-Charles Puech’s
article “Les ‘prisons’ de Jean-Baptiste Piranèse,” Documents, deuxième année 4
(1930): 198–204.
111 Caillois, “La mante religieuse,” Minotaure 5 (1934): 78. Caillois’s essay ap-
peared in Minotaure two years after Giacometti made Point to the Eye, and
one year after Man Ray photographed the object for Cahiers d’art. But by his
own admission, Caillois was only committing to paper ideas that had long
circulated between Breton, Éluard, and Dalí. Caillois’s first, autobiographical
book, The Necessity of the Mind (unpublished until 1981), of which “La mante
religieuse” formed the fifth chapter, is haunted by the “systematic overdeter-
mination of the universe,” a universe that presented itself, emblem-like, as a
series of unstable images. This book is the germ of his later, deep study of the
ludic impulse, Man, Play and Games, where mimesis would be theorized as
one of the four major variants of play (see chapter 5 of this volume). Caillois,

The Necessity of the Mind, trans. Michael Syrotinski (Venice, CA: Lapis Press,
1990), 76.
112 Caillois, “The Praying Mantis,” in Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism, 79.
113 Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” in The Edge of Surrealism:
A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), 100, 99. According to Pierre Klossowski, Benjamin “assidu-
ously” attended talks at the Collège de sociologie, an intellectual colloquium
founded by Bataille and Caillois, but he generally disagreed with their views.
See Hollier, The College of Sociology (1937–39), trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 389.
114 Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 102.
115 Dufrêne, “Dalí-Giacometti,” 33.
116 If Point to the Eye performs a destructive l ittle game, played out by an apparatus
aimed to destroy vision—not a “seeing machine” (like the camera) but a blinding
machine—it is an apparatus as deliberately anticreative as the strange jackham-
mer of Locus Solus, and as unfulfilling as the Large Glass. Not by coincidence,
Duchamp was the first owner of Point to the Eye. See Angel Gonzalez, Alberto
Giacometti: Works, Writings, Interviews (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2007), 52.
117 Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, 16.
118 Krauss, “No More Play,” 54–55. The alignment of “alter(n)ation” with play calls
for a revision toward irony of Bataille’s characterization of formless as a “job.”
See Bois, “The Use Value of ‘Formless,’ ” in Bois and Krauss, Formless, 13–40.
119 Agnès de la Beaumelle, Alberto Giacometti: La collection du Centre Georges
Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompi-
dou, 1999), 84–86.
121 One wonders what Marc Vaux, who photographed the lost sculpture Woman,
Tree, Head doubled in a mirror, would have made of No More Play. Mirror
writing appears elsewhere in the surrealist ludic, as the Duchampian title of
the rayograph esoRRose Selavy, and as palindromes in Desnos’s wordplay and
Leiris’s “Glossaire” (see chapter 1 of this volume).
122 See Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel
Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box) appeared in
1934, one year after Roussel’s death and the revelation that he had left a manu-
script explaining the key to his famous procédé.
123 Duchamp, letter to Michel Carrouges, February 6, 1950, in Le macchine celebi/
The Bachelor Machines, ed. Harald Szeeman (New York: Rizzoli, 1975), 48–49.
124 Michel Carrouges, Les machines célibataires (Paris: Arcanes, 1954).
125 Carrouges, “Directions for Use,” in Szeeman, Le macchine celebi, 21.
126 Leiris, “Alberto Giacometti,” 209–14.
127 Leiris, “Alberto Giacometti,” 214.
128 These riddles in turn activated a mind-bending string of mnemic associations
for Leiris: “the saltiness of waves and stars since they too have their tides, and
then the salt of tears, tears of laughter, despair or madness, gentle and vaguely
malicious tears, grotesque tears, or heavy tears full of the salt of bones and

frozen carcasses, always drops of water, falling silently . . .” Leiris, “Alberto
Giacometti,” 210.
129 Leiris, “Stones for a Possible Giacometti,” in Brisées, 139.
130 Leiris, “Stones for a Possible Giacometti,” 135.
131 Leiris, “Stones for a Possible Giacometti,” 139.
132 Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis, “Naples,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings,
Vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Michael Jennings and Marcus Bullock, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 414–21, 416.
Translation modified from scope to room-for-play to reflect the use of the word
Spielraum in the original text.
133 Benjamin, letter to Theodor Adorno, May 7, 1940, in Briefe 2 (1966): 849;
cited in Gyorgy Markus, “Walter Benjamin, or The Commodity as Phantas-
magoria,” New German Critique 83 (spring–summer 2001): 5. Caillois, who
was beginning to formulate his ludic typology, had given his last talk, on
festival, at the Collège de sociologie on May 2, 1939. Benjamin attended, as he
did all the lectures. See Hollier, College of Sociology, xxi.
134 Nancy, Birth to Presence, 255–56.
135 Caillois, “Spécification de la poésie,” Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 5
(May 15, 1933): 30.
Chapter 5. Postlude
1 Le jeu de l’oie is a version of a traditional French board game with surrealist-

inspired iconography. For a full-scale reproduction, see Alastair Brotchie and
Mel Gooding, Surrealist Games (Boston: Shambala Redstone Editions, 1993).
2 André Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey
T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 139.
4 For the Hegelian origins of objective chance, see Margaret Cohen, Profane Illu-
mination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 120–53. A turn to Hegel
would necessarily entail a turn away from the irrational ludic: for Hegel play was
“the only true seriousness.” Hegel, Erste Druckschriften, 128; cited in Mihai Spari-
osu, Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical
and Scientific Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 33.
5 Michel Murat, “André Breton: La part du jeu,” in Jeu surréaliste et humor noir,
ed. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron and Marie-Claire Dumas (Paris: Lachenal
and Ritter, 1993), 32, 34.
6 Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 3 (1931): 38–42. In Communicat-
ing Vessels Breton claims that the assemblages were made according to Dalí’s
paranoid-critical method—“the fabrication of animated objects with an erotic
meaning”—although he admits that “such objects too particularly conceived,
too personal, will always lack the astonishingly suggestive power that certain
almost everyday objects are able to acquire by chance.” Breton, Communicating
Vessels, 54, 55.
7 Salvador Dalí, “The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment,” This Quarter
5, no. 1 (1932): 197–207.
Notes to Chapter Five 323

8 Dalí, “Objets psycho-atmosphériques—anamorphiques,” Le Surréalisme au
service de la révolution 5 (May 1933): 45–46.
9 Arthur Harfaux and Maurice Henry, “The Irrational Understanding of
Objects,” Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 6 (May 1933): 10–24.
These are transcripts of survey-like games initiated to “determine the ir-
rational characteristics of objects.” The Tanguy drawing is on page 42 of this
issue. Breton, “Surrealist Situation of the Object; Situation of the Surreal-
ist Object,” in Oeuvres completes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard,
1988), 472–96.
10 The 1936 installation was photographed by Man Ray, and the range of found,
assembled, and annexed objects is commensurate with the taxonomy laid out
in lsasdlr. See Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, trans.
Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 324.
11 The image is reproduced embedded in the text of Breton’s “L’objet fantôme,”
Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 3 (December 1931): 20–23.
12 Breton, Communicating Vessels, 52.
13 Breton would symbolically cut himself off from the game board with the
diatribe “Profanation” (1944), in which he defends card playing as preferable to
the intellectual refinements of chess. Breton, “Profanation,” in Free Rein, trans.
Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1995), 75–76. The statement follows his 1940 production of a deck of
surrealist playing cards, Le jeu de Marseille.
14 See Rosalind Krauss, “No More Play,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde
and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1985), 42–85. The
account of the flea market trip, along with reproductions of the Man Ray
photographs, is in Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1987), 25–34.
15 Breton, Mad Love, 34.
16 Breton, Mad Love, 32.
17 Roger Caillois, “Festival,” in The College of Sociology, ed. Denis Hollier
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 281. The group of crit-
ics who, along with Bataille, would form the “College of Sociology” w ere
particularly interested in carnival in relation to the sacred and ritual; that
is, they were concerned with making a distinction between the dynamics of
festival and the passive consumption of enjoyment we call leisure. Caillois’s
insistence on the salutary distinction between the sacred and the profane is
in stark contrast to Breton’s call for the integration of those two spheres in
surrealism.
18 Anne Umland, “Giacometti and Surrealism,” in Alberto Giacometti, ed. Chris-
tian Klemm (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 17.
19 Michel Leiris, “Alberto Giacometti,” Documents 4 (September 1929): 209–14.
20 Homo Ludens would become a key text for the Situationist International in the
1950s and 1960s.
21 Sections of appendix 2 of “Play and the Sacred” had already been published in
1945 as a review of Homo Ludens in the journal Confluences, as cited in Émile
Benveniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” Deucalion 2 (1947): 164n1.
324 Notes to Chapter Five

22 Benveniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” 159–67; Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” in
Perspective cavalière, ed. Marguerite Bonner (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970),
50–79.
23 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 1927–1930,
ed. Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, and Gary Smith, trans. Edmund Jeph-
cott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 209. The unstated
subtext to this debate is undoubtedly the appearance of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
“The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” which he defended as his dissertation
in 1948 before a jury that included Benveniste. The publication of the text in
1949 is widely regarded as having inaugurated the structuralist movement.
See François Dosse, History of Structuralism, Vol. 1, trans. Deborah Glassman
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 18. Benveniste was a col-
league of Marcel Griaule’s at the Collège de France, where certainly Griaule’s
Jeux dogons (Paris: Institut d’ethnologie, 1938)—published the same year as
Homo Ludens—would have been available to him as well. The tension between
Caillois’s and Benveniste’s texts is surely inflected by Caillois’s animosity
toward Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology; see the “heated exchange” cited
in Claudine Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 364n15.
24 See Dosse, History of Structuralism, Vol. 1.
25 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 13.
26 Jacques Ehrmann, “Homo Ludens Revisited,” in Game, Play, Literature, ed.
Ehrmann (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 31–32. Ehrmann’s deconstruction of
both Caillois and Huizinga is based on their underlying assumption of “real
ity”—a reality opposed to play—as given. The ensuing hierarchy will always
subordinate play to a reality outside it, an intolerable assertion for Ehrmann,
who maintains that culture (and therefore play) produces reality.
29 See Susan Laxton, “From Judgment to Process,” in From Diversion to Subver-
sion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art, ed. David J. Getsy (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 6–9. Huizinga rejects Schiller’s
Spieltrieb on page 168 of Homo Ludens, on the grounds of its “primitivism.” But
his reading is narrow; he never attends to Spieltrieb’s operation as a civilizing
agent, which matches his own attribution. Huizinga’s alignment with Schiller
throws the situationists’ admiration for Homo Ludens into a perverse light—
the Situationist International apparently received the book’s message about the
imbrications of play in culture as subversive without noting the overarching
conservative tone of the work regarding play’s civilizing, rather than transgres-
sive, power. See Libero Andreotti, “Play-Tactics of the Internationale Situation-
niste,” October 91 (winter 2000): 37–58; Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture:
Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Stirling, UK: ak Press, 1991),
35; and Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 149. On the other hand, Homo Ludens
does demonstrate play’s cultural pervasiveness to the extent that the ludic might
well have been received by the Situationist International as the single force able

to erode the strict demarcations that Schiller had imposed between “exteriority
and interiority, heteronomy and autonomy, technology and nature, violence and
self-determination, coercion and voluntary consent.” See Constantin Behler,
Nostalgic Teleology: Friedrich Schiller and the Schemata of Aesthetic Humanism
(New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 70.
32 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 7, 10. Huizinga goes on to claim that in spite of the
fact that play is a necessity, it remains disinterested because “the purposes it
serves are external to immediate material interests,” a position consistent with a
strict Kantian nature/culture division.
33 Given that this text was drafted on the brink of World War II, it is easy to see
why Huizinga might find the question of civilization and its founding tenets of
some urgency.
34 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press of
Glencoe, 1961), 9–10.
35 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 170. Elsewhere, Caillois includes mimesis in
this category: “vertigo and simulation are in principle and by nature in rebel-
lion against every type of code, rule, and organization” (157). Nevertheless, as
we shall see below, Caillois will claim that the rebellion is always contained.
36 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 11–36. The categories are organized into a table
on page 36.
37 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 9–10; and on page 162: “The facts studied in
the name of play are so heterogeneous that one is led to speculate that the word
‘play’ is perhaps merely a trap, encouraging by its seeming generality tenacious
illusions as to the supposed kinship between disparate forms of behavior.”
38 Caillois, Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,
1959), 157.
39 The historical role of carnival, with its inversions of “normal life,” its proxim-
ity to religious institutions, as well as its character as a form of temporary,
administered revolution is an example of this sort of neutralization of political
critique. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: mit
Press, 1968); and Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes’ Shadow: Explorations in Play,
Game, and Narrative Theory (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990),
25–73.
40 Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 159.
41 Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 160. Freedom in Caillois’s ludic model is to a
great extent freedom from worry about the consequences of one’s actions, and
he sets up a hierarchy of anxiety: sacred-profane-play, with the uncontrollable
and distressing sacred at the top and orderly play at the bottom.
42 Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 162. Caillois’s approbation of “civilization” is
clear—morality as well is attributed to the ludic, which fosters “mutual confi-
dence” and “respect for others.”
44 See Frank, Edge of Surrealism, 33.

45 Frank, Edge of Surrealism, 16. Frank points out that in 1945 Meyer Schapiro
called this reactionary avant-gardism.
46 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 55. See as well on page 167: “In a general way,
play is like education of the body, character, or mind, without the goals being
predetermined. From this viewpoint, the further removed play is from reality,
the greater is its educational value.”
47 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 159. In this opinion I differ from Frank, who
commends Caillois for his acknowledgment of cultural systems like play that
are paradoxical or open ended. She concludes that Caillois rejected Bataille’s
sacred transgression, substituting “a civilized manner of integrating order and
disorder, system and rupture,” whereas it is my feeling that Caillois’s insistence
on curtailing play within institutional parameters necessarily renders those
ruptures ineffectual, and in direct conflict with an avant-garde politics of
representation. Frank, Edge of Surrealism, 5.
48 Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 152; Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 27.
49 While Caillois’s theories of play and the mimetic loosening of difference w ere
formed in the crucible of surrealism, they were radically reshaped by the horrify-
ing excesses of World War II, to the extent that Caillois would ultimately claim
that the play impulse had not disappeared at all in modern life (as Huizinga
claimed it had); it had been desublimated into war. Caillois, Man, Play and
Games, 53, 49. Conversely, Bataille most admires the game when it has material
consequences, which explains his interest in the ancient Mexican ballgame,
whose play entailed injury and sometimes death. See Krauss, “No More Play,” 59.
For an overview of Nietzschean play, see Laxton, “From Judgment to Process,”
10–14.
50 Benveniste was aware of Caillois’s 1945 review of Homo Ludens, which had
appeared in the journal Confluences in 1945 (he cites it in “Le jeu comme
structure”), and Caillois had read Benveniste’s essay in manuscript form, and
presumably offered a critique that would be reflected in “Play and the Sacred,”
the chapter appended to Man and the Sacred in its 1950 edition. See Ben-
veniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” 164n1. Both Benveniste and Caillois (as well
as Bataille) were also aware of Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert’s “Essai sur la
nature et la function du sacrifice,” L’année sociologique 2 (1899): 29–138, where
sacrifice is discussed as an inherently ambivalent phenomenon. My thanks to
Lisa Florman for pointing out this pathway between play and ritual.
51 Benveniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” 161.
52 Benveniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” 164.
53 Benveniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” 163–64; cited in Ehrmann, “Homo
Ludens Revisited,” 51.
54 Benveniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” 165. Benveniste uses the word brisée,
which I have translated as “splintered” in order to convey the paradoxical
sense of something that is broken from another thing yet joined to that thing
through the break, but it is notable that this is the term Michel Leiris used
to characterize (and entitle) his nonfiction essays. See Leiris, Brisées: Broken
Branches, trans. Lydia Davis (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).

55 Ludus is the sphere of pure form and regulated action; jocus is deregulated
speech or content typical of puns. Benveniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” 165.
56 Benveniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” 164–65.
57 Benveniste, “Le jeu comme structure,” 166–67.
58 Benveniste’s characterization inverts Bataille’s 1929 characterization of the
prefix sur—“above” the real—as the sign of Breton’s idealism. See Bataille,
“The Old Mole and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist,” in
Visions of Excess, ed. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1985), 32–44.
59 Benveniste’s schema implies that play, as pure structure, is free of myth, an
easily refuted characterization. This insistence on binary oppositions would
become the structuralist movement’s most vulnerable point. See Ehrmann,
“Homo Ludens Revisited,” 31–32.
60 It is worth mentioning that the context of Benveniste’s essay includes the
exhibition Le surrealisme en 1947, Breton’s first postwar attempt to reconstitute
the surrealist group. The theme of the show was “myth,” and the exhibition
catalogue included Bataille’s essay “The Absence of Myth,” where myth is pro-
nounced the glue that holds together social groups. See Bataille, The Absence
of Myth, trans. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994), 13. The “desacraliz-
ing” function of play becomes very clear in the context of surrealism when one
considers that for Bataille the sacred meant “communication.” Play, meaning
nothing, blocks communication.
61 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 141–64. Derrida directly
addresses play as instability working against the “metaphysics of presence” on
page 50. His 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, “Structure, Sign and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” is considered a key moment in
the history of poststructural thought. See Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–93.
62 Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” 50–79.
63 Le jeu de Marseille is a conventional deck of playing cards with surrealist motifs
replacing the suits, and figures important to the movement depicted on the
face cards. Drawn by Victor Brauner, André Breton, Óscar Domínguez, Max
Ernst, Jacques Hérold, Wifredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, and André Masson, it
was reproduced by André Dimanche, the Marseille card maker, in 1983.
64 Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” 53. Later, this claim would be extended to include all
actions and people. For an account that draws decalcomania into the range of
the game, see Kern, “From One Exquisite Corpse (in)to Another,” in Kocchar-
Lindgren, Schneiderman, and Denlinger, eds., The Exquisite Corpse, 3–28.
65 Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” 54–55. The essay goes on to cite numerous examples
that find, for example, a terrier in a flower pot, a butterfly in a sorcerer’s wand,
Madame Sabatier in an elephant’s tusk, and so forth (58–61). Reverdy is cited
by Breton in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 20.
66 Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” 55. He cites Huizinga on page 51.

67 Caillois, “L’enigme et l’image,” in L’art poetique (Paris: Gallimard, 1958),
175–87. It was first published as “Actualité des Kenningar,” in La nouvelle revue
française 30 ( June 1955). See Frank, Edge of Surrealism, 46.
68 Breton, “L’un dans l’autre,” 50.
69 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 4. For an analysis of the ways surrealism
pitched poetry against law, see Michel Beaujour, “The Game of Poetics,” 58–67.
70 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 115, 36.
71 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 207–21. The nexus of use value, immediacy, index, and
commitment in surrealism, as framed by Walter Benjamin, is in Hollier, “Sur-
realist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,” October 69 (1994): 111–32.
73 Caillois, “Riddles and Images,” in Game, Play, Literature, ed. Jacques Ehrmann,
trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 156.
74 Caillois, “Riddles and Images,” 150. For an alternative reading of “L’un dans
l’autre” that sees this demystification as the articulation of a heuristic device
against which to measure the “surrealism” of past poetic production, see Murat,
“André Breton,” 19–37.
75 Bataille, The Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City
Lights, 1928); Roland Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye,” in Critical Essays, trans.
Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 239–47.
77 James A. G. Marino, “An Annotated Bibliography of Play and Literature,”
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature ( June 1985): 307–58.
78 See Tilman Küchler, Postmodern Gaming: Heidegger, Duchamp, Derrida
(New York: Peter Lang, 1994). For the role of the ludic in the work of Hei-
degger, Deleuze, and Derrida, see Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, 99–124, 143–63.
79 Küchler, Postmodern Gaming, 23.
80 In his commemoration of André Breton, Maurice Blanchot directly attributes
poststructuralist play to surrealism. See Blanchot, “Le demain joueur,” La
nouvelle revue francais 172 (April 1967): 863–88.
81 Lacan published along with the surrealists in the journal Minotaure; he cited
Salvador Dalí and Roger Caillois in his seminars; he owned work by André
Masson. See Lacan, “Motifs du crime paranoïque,” Minotaure 3–4 (Octo-
ber 1933): 35–37; Lacan, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 87–88, 73, 99–100, 109; and
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 3. See also Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James
Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
82 See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York:
Zone Books, 1997).
83 See Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1983), x, xi. Foster links surrealism and postmodernism through their
parallel historical dilemmas, claiming that the autonomy of culture itself in
the first decades of the twentieth century “provoked, at least in art, a coun-
terproject in the form of an anarchic avant-garde.” He continues: “Although

repressed in late modernism, this ‘surrealist revolt’ is returned in postmodern-
ist art (or rather, its critique of representation is affirmed), for the mandate
of postmodernism is also: ‘change the object itself.’ ” Both the historical
avant-garde and its postwar neo-avant-garde counterpart engaged the task of
bodying forth the “death of the subject,” the loss of “master narratives,” and the
difficulty of opposition in “consumer society.”
84 Jacques Fillon, “New Games,” in Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programmes and Mani-
festoes on 20th Century Architecture, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Lund
Humphries, 1970), 155. See also Andreotti, “Play-Tactics of the Internationale
Situationniste,” 37–58.
85 See Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley, eds., The Activist Drawing: Retrac-
ing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (New
York: Drawing Center, 2001).
86 Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 834.
87 See Benjamin Buchloh, “Hantaï, Villeglé, and the Dialectics of Painting’s
Dispersal,” October 91 (winter 2000): 24–35.
88 Already by 1944 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern had published
their game theory (Theory of Games and Economic Behavior [Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1944]), codifying chance as statistical probability
and reactivating a validation of control and institutional order that had argu-
ably been in formation since the nineteenth century. For the historical prelude
to this, see Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).

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INDEX
Page numbers followed by f indicate illustrations.
abstraction, 12, 24, 60, 71, 133, 140–41, architecture: automatic, 115–22, 135;
156, 212, 220, 269 rational, 101; in Spielraum, 26;
Acconci, Vito, 270 vagabond, 117; in the Zone, 103–7,
Acker, Adolphe, 225f 105f, 119
Acker, Flora, 225f Aristotle, 180–81
Adorno, Theodor W., 3, 102 Arp, Hans, 36–37, 37f, 53, 54, 56, 57
aesthetics and play, 1, 5, 6, 9–10, 13, Arp et Val Serner dans le crocodarium
15, 19–20, 26–27, 43, 92, 137, royal (Schad), 52f, 53
267–68 Artaud, Antonin, 191
Alleau, René, 268 “art et le jeu, L’ ” (Deucalion), 268
Alquié, Ferdinand, 22 Ashbery, John, 228–29
altération/alteration, 190, 220, 235 Atget, Eugène, 76f, 79–82f, 87–88f,
Anastasi, William, 270–71 90f, 96–98f, 100f, 105f, 107f, 111–14f,
Anémic cinéma (Duchamp), 46f 116f, 118f, 120–23f, 126f, 128f, 135f;
anthropomorphism, 163, 165, 233–34 as father of street photography, 72;
antiliterature, 191, 204 inclusiveness of photographs, 132;
Aragon, Louis, 21; on automatism, 147; Man Ray collections of photography,
on blur, 34; on détournement, 35; 24–25, 72–84, 73f, 89, 94, 97–104,
époque floue and, 49; four-man stroll 108–10, 119, 122, 124–25, 133–34, 136,
experiment, 93; on Paris cityscape, 269; on Paris pittoresque figures, 74;
7–8, 24, 94–95, 98–99, 102, 127; on photographs as mirrors, 129; urban
shop display mannequins, 127 landscapes of, 24–25. See also specific
Arcades Project (Benjamin), 4–5, 92, 94, works
101–3, 108, 109, 124–25 Au Bon Marché (Atget), 90f
Audoin, Philippe, 161, 268 to technology, 7; self in, 35. See also
aura, 6, 32, 42, 149, 253, 266, 284n34 surrealism
authorship, 22, 26, 32, 50, 70, 133, Avenue des Gobelins (Atget), 126, 126f,
145–46, 155, 158, 195 128, 128f
automatic architecture, 115–22, 135 Axelos, Kostas, 268
automatic drawing, 7, 51, 53–57, 141–44,
143f, 147–48 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 268
automatic eduction, 51 Baron, Jacques, 170–71
automatic writing, 35, 49–51, 53–55, Barthes, Roland, 132, 155, 267, 269
57, 62, 64, 69, 78, 148, 195; auto- Bataille, Georges, 191, 224–25, 227–28;
matic drawing and, 141; critique of, on altération, 220; on atavistic paint-
155; early experiments with, 163; as ings, 186; on bifur, 235–36; break
photography of thought, 71, 130, 145; with Breton, 180–81; on eroticism,
practice of, 86, 93, 289n76 233; exquisite corpse game participa-
automatism, 14; abstraction and, 212; tion, 180; on informe (formless),
agency and, 36–37; in architecture, 26, 244, 248–49, 269; on play, 18,
115–22; critical power of, 93; Dada- 19, 180–81, 255, 259–62, 265–67; on
ism and, 33–34, 50, 51–58, 64, 66; pleasure–pain dyad, 25; in radical
drift and, 23, 25; early experiments avant-garde, 259; as renegade sur-
with, 162–63, 186, 253; effect, 61, 153, realist, 25, 244; on repressive formal
178–79, 196; errance and, 85; flexibi structure, 190; as rue Blomet group
lity of, 93; as hypnagogic state, 102; member, 191; on violence and unrea-
as inaccessible ideal of poetry, 147; son, 25
ludic flux and, 24; as mechanical, Bateson, Gregory, 268
154–55; modernism and, 100; paint- Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 22, 44, 103
ing and, 146–47; as passive state, 169; Baudrillard, Jean, 269
photographic processes and, 130; Bauman, Zygmunt, 100
photography and, 84, 130, 132–34; Baziotes, William, 137
play and, 92–93, 254; rayographs Beaujour, Michel, 77–78, 95, 134
and, 30; séances, 25, 53–54, 146; as Bellmer, Hans, 137
state of grace, 183; subconscious and, Benjamin, Walter: on amusement
86; as surreal, 89; surrealism on, 9, parks, 117, 119; on architecture, 26;
51, 93–102, 141–42, 144–47, 157, 167, on Atget, 95, 132; on avant-garde and
170, 183, 263; wordplay and, 51 surrealism, 3, 138; on collecting, 76–77,
autonomy: art’s turn away from, 245, 103–4; on critical cultural forms
268; commerce and, 30; of culture, relevant to increasingly technologi-
329n83; in drawing, 140; in play, 3, cally determined society, 22–23; on
9, 17, 43, 256–57; in exquisite corpse dialectics at a standstill, 27; on
game, 149 gambling, 40–41, 92, 109; on history
avant-garde practices, 25–26, 271; an- and progress, 40; on innervation, 8,
thropological turn in, 256; automa- 40; on ludic practices, 2, 4, 9–10, 22;
tisms and, 54; commercial practices on mannequins, 124–25; on modern
and, 30; exquisite corpse images and, cult of productivity and heroic ex-
182; figuration in, 140–41; ludic in, haustion, 245; on motor innervation,
1, 3, 12–13, 23–24, 43, 245; relation 40; on Paris, 129; on photography
352 index
and film, 7, 72, 78, 95, 130, 132, 150, Brecht, Georges, 270
204; on play, 3–13, 20, 23, 27, 40–42, Breton, André, 83, 94–95, 137, 225f,
98, 129, 148, 150, 167, 235, 244–45, 246; on antiliterature, 191; on
246, 263; on play forms, 3–4; on automatic drawing/writing, 47, 51,
profane illumination, 103, 256, 266; 54, 64, 86, 141–42, 144–45, 148, 153,
on prostitutes, 108–9, 114–15, 125; 162, 195; on automatism, 69–71, 86,
on rayographs, 43, 59–60; on rebus, 130, 186; on avant-garde, 3, 141; on
125; as renegade surrealist, 244; on blur, 49; on board games, 246–47,
revolutionary energies, 12, 83, 266; 247f; on cityscape, 7–8, 24, 94, 100;
on revolutionary nihilism, 103; on Dadaism and, 71; on disinterested
ritual in art practices, 266; on second play of thought, 89; époque floue and,
technologies, 7, 150, 204; on sex and 43; on erotic, 51, 71, 227, 233, 255;
death, 124; on surrealist aphorisms, exquisite corpse game participation,
22–23; on surrealist games, 167; on 137, 148–50, 153, 154, 157–61, 164f,
surrealist photography, 72, 150; on 164–66, 166f, 168, 172f, 174–80,
technological mediation, 20, 23, 59, 175f, 176f, 183; on female figure, 125;
235; as theorist of historical avant- figure drawings, 177–78; four-man
garde, 3; on urban landscapes, 4–5, stroll experiment, 93; on Giacometti
92, 94, 101–3, 108, 109, 124. See also sculpture, 227; on le hasard objectif,
Spielraum 190; on jokes, 49; on language, 142,
Benveniste, Émile, 26, 255–56, 260–63, 191; on liberatory expansionism, 33;
265–68 on ludic practices, 3, 26, 253–54, 255;
Beuys, Joseph, 137 on objective chance, 207, 247–48; on
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), objects, 248–50, 253–54; on paint-
18, 168, 254, 260 ing, 29–30, 146; on photography, 84,
bifurcation, 194, 233–38 145; on play, 1, 3, 17, 19, 26, 137, 169,
Birth of the World, The (Miró), 204 180–81, 246–49, 255–56, 262–67;
blur (flou), 34–43; Breton on, 49; play texts and, 263; on prostitutes,
Dadaism on, 30–31, 32–43, 49, 108, 114; on psychic automatism
51–58; defined, 34–35; époque floue, and photographic processes, 130; on
24, 43–44, 49–51, 60–61, 71, 77; rayographs, 29–30, 34, 71; on ready-
equivocation and, 29–34; ludic erotic made, 144; on realistic attitude, 89;
and, 47–51; never-seen and, 69–71; on surrealism, 1, 49, 85–86, 141, 246;
photographic indeterminacy and, 23, on surrealism as psychic automatism,
29–71; play as disservice and, 43–47; 85–86; on urban space, 100, 251;
between repetition and unforesee- Vaché and, 43–44; walks in Paris, 93,
ability, 24. See also rayographs 108; on wordplay, 44–45, 47, 191; on
board games, 24–25, 77, 233, 236, 238, work, 21, 22. See also specific works
244–47, 247f, 253–55 Breton, Simone, 152–53
Boiffard, André, 251 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Bosch, Hieronymus, 140 Even, The (Duchamp), 45, 227, 240
Boulevard Masséna (Atget), 106–8, 107f Buck-Morss, Susan, 110
Boutique aux halles (Atget), 100f
Boutique jouets (Atget), 123f cadavre exquis. See exquisite corpse game
Brauner, Victor, 150, 151f Cahiers d’art, 230
index 353
Caillois, Roger: on amusement park Cloaca Maxima (Piranesi), 233
machines, 117, 119; on automatism, Cohen, Margaret, 280n90
147; exquisite corpse game participa- Coiffeur, bd. de Strasbourg (Atget), 123f
tion, 160; ludic legacy of, 26, 255; Coin, rue de Seine (Atget), 135f
on mantis as ideogram, 233–34; on coital cannibalism, 233
mimicry, 234–35; on Paris, 94; on Collage (Miró), 205f
play, 26, 187, 245, 254–68; typology Collinet, Simone, 152–54, 160
of play, 258; on utilitarian roles of Communicating Vessels, 248, 251
objects, 245 Communist International, 22
capitalism, 21 Compass (Man Ray), 69, 70f
Cardiff, Janet, 270 competition, 258, 259
carnival, 24, 60, 148, 254, 324n17, Courbet, Gustave, 196, 197f
326n39 Crevel, René, 141
Carrouges, Michel, 240 Cubism, 32, 141, 213
Catalysis series (Piper), 270
Caught Hand (Giacometti), 241f, Dadaism, 71; automatism and, 33–34,
241–42 50–58, 64, 66; on blur, 30–31, 32–43,
Certeau, Michel de, 95, 97–98, 101 49, 51–58; bouleversements, 60;
Champs délicieux (Man Ray), 59, 60f, chance in, 35–43, 174; play in, 7, 30–31,
64 35–43; on punning, 25, 36, 190; on
“Champs magnétiques, Les.” See “Mag- rayographs, 32–33, 59–62, 64–67,
netic Fields” (automatic text) 71; readymades, 81; sound poems, 53;
chance, 2; agency and, 206; Aristote- surrealism and, 18, 40, 49, 83; as trans
lian concept of, 180–81; in Dada rational, 34–35. See also specific artists
play, 35–43; vs. determinism, 20–21, “Dada Painting, or the ‘Oil Eye’ ”
279n76; encounter (rencontre), (Ribemont-Dessaigne), 62
94, 109, 147–48, 266, 283n19; in Dadaphone, 52f
exquisite corpse game, 25, 138–39, Dada Portrait of Walter Serner (Schad),
153, 155, 157–59, 161–63, 171, 174–75, 62
180–83; objective (le hasard objectif ), Dalí, Gala, 164f
78, 83–85, 190, 207, 246–48, 251, 253, Dalí, Salvador, 131f, 207, 210f, 269;
263, 296n41; in Spielraum, 40–43, appropriation of ambiguous images,
150–52, 263–64; struggle against, 20, 147; on automatic drawing/
99–101; technology and, 2–3, 23, 51, production, 143f, 163, 165; exquisite
64, 139, 145, 271; unconscious in, corpse game participation, 150, 151f,
55–57 161–62, 164f, 168; ludic surrealism of,
“Chiquenaude” (Roussel), 187 23; paranoid critical method of, 20,
Circuit (Giacometti), 238–40, 239f, 253 147, 232; on photography, 130, 132; on
Cirque Manfretta (Atget), 119, 121f surrealist play, 161–62, 248–49
Cité Radieuse—Plan Voisin, La (Le decalcomania, 20, 23, 157–58
Corbusier), 98f Deleuze, Gilles, 189, 269
cityscapes. See urban landscapes Derrida, Jacques, 263, 268–69
City with Nameless Streets of the Cere Descartes, René, 20
bral Circus, The (automatic drawing), Desnos, Robert, 49–51, 71, 77, 141, 187,
141 191, 195
354 index
determinism, 20–21, 279n76, 312–13n99 Éluard, Paul, 51, 143f, 151f, 158, 167,
détournement, 35 177–78, 186, 207
“Dialogue in 1928” (game), 174 Enlightenment, 5, 12, 36, 138
Dictionnaire des jeux (Alleau), 268 époque floue, 24, 43–44, 49–51, 60–61,
discipline, 24, 25, 99–100, 260 71, 77, 287n66
disinterest, 1, 3, 10–11, 15, 89–92, 132, equivocation, 2, 30, 50, 95, 192–93, 228
326n32 Erikson, Eric, 268
divaguer, 242, 255 Ernst, Max, 62, 65; on automatism,
Dix, Otto, 137 146–47, 157–58; Dada collages of,
Documents (journal), 186, 187, 190, 220, 35, 65; on exquisite corpse game, 20,
227, 242, 243f, 255 159–60; frottage technique, 20, 144,
Domínguez, Óscar, 20, 137, 181f 146–47, 157–58; overpaintings, 145,
“Dream Kitsch” (Benjamin), 22–23 171; photographs of surrealist objects
Dreier, Katherine, 64, 132–33 and assemblages, 249; postcards,
drift, 23, 25, 134; linguistic, 47; in post- 208f; on potential for play, 13; on
studio practices, 270; in surrealist surrealist games, 147–48
iconography, 78; in urban landscapes, eros, 18, 25, 45, 168, 311n86, 314n105
24, 78, 84–85, 95–99. See also errance Eros and Civilization (Freud), 268
Duchamp, Marcel, 29, 38f, 39f, 46f, 228, errance, 24, 84–85, 93–95, 97–99, 101,
239f, 240; alter ego, 44–45, 47, 50; 108–9, 112, 132–34, 254, 263, 269
on art production, 30; avant-garde esoRRose sel à vie (Man Ray), 62, 63f
and, 141; bachelor machine of, 235; Exposition internationale des arts décora-
Breton on, 44–45, 47; on chance, tifs et industriels, 98–99
38, 41; chess and, 42–43; conceptual- Exquisite Corpse (artworks), 151f, 157f,
ism of, 270; exquisite corpse game 159f, 164f, 166f, 172f, 175–76f, 179f,
participation, 158; ludic strategies of, 181f
36; Man Ray and, 29, 30, 33, 41, 42; exquisite corpse game, 7, 20, 25, 151f,
Marxism and, 158; Miró and, 198; on 179–80, 236; anthropomorphism of,
rayographs, 61; readymades, 64; on 163; attributions, 310n76; autocratic
roulette, 38–40; Roussel and, 186, aspect of, 150, 152; chance in, 161,
227, 240, 242, 245; on subjectivity, 162–63, 174, 180–81; as collabora-
36, 38; wordplay of, 36, 45, 47, 50–51, tion, 155–70; as drawing/game,
62, 71, 195; on work ethic, 43 139–40; fold in, 25, 137, 148–49,
Durkheim, Émile, 259 154, 170–82, 312–13n99, 314n104;
Dutch Interior I (Miró), 219–20, freedom in, 138; ludic spirit of, 137;
221–23f, 224 Marxism and, 158; as parody of func-
tionalism, 154; participation in, 137,
E. Atget coll. Man Ray, 73f 140, 148, 150, 153–62, 154–66, 168,
Eclipse, L’ (Atget), 88f, 88–89, 119 172, 174, 176, 179–81, 183; as process,
Ecotais, Emmanuelle de l’, 281n5 148–55; rules, 307n38; subject/object
écriture automatique, L’ (Breton), 145 boundaries in, 162
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 22
Ehrmann, Jacques, 257, 268 Fahlström, Öyvind, 270
Éluard, Gala, 143f, 151f, 164, 248–49 fascism, rise of, 21
Éluard, Nusch, 176f Fayol, Henri, 21
index 355
Femme (Atget), 110, 111–12f G (journal), 34, 42, 59
Ferry, Jean, 187 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 268
Fête de la Villette (Atget), 118f, 119 Gala. See Dalí, Gala
Fête des Invalides, Palais de la Femme Galerie Charles Ratton, 249
(Atget), 117, 122f Galerie Pierre Colle, 249
Fête de Vaugirard (Atget), 117, 121f gambling, 6, 38, 40–42, 92, 102, 109,
Fête du Trône (Atget), 87f, 87–88, 119, 167
120–21f games: art, 137; board games, 24–25,
Fink, Eugen, 268 77, 233, 236, 238, 244–47, 247f,
flou. See blur ( flou) 253–55; of chance, 40–41; chess, 167;
Flower in Danger (Giacometti), 236, 237f fort-da, 18; language, 268; in postwar
Fluxus, 270 art production, 270; as practice, 4;
fold, in exquisite corpse, 25, 137, 148–49, regulation of, 152; surrealist, 17–25,
154, 170–82, 312–13n99, 314n104 147–48, 155, 161, 167, 170–71, 183,
Following Piece (Acconci), 270 262, 268, 270–71; theory on, 330n88.
Foster, Hal, 83, 124, 154, 301n111 See also exquisite corpse game; ludic
Foucault, Michel, 189, 229, 269 practices; play
Francés, Esteban, 150, 151f, 225f Genette, Gérard, 220
Frank, Claudine, 259 Giacometti, Alberto, 83; drawings, 248;
freedom: of eros, 18; in exquisite corpse dysfunctional machines made by,
game, 138; vs. order, 257; personal, 186; Leiris on, 242–44, 255; photo
91; in play, 1, 9, 11, 18, 20, 22, 43, 72, graphs of surrealist objects, 249; on
98, 132, 137, 149, 244; rhetoric of, play, 188; as renegade surrealist, 244;
54, 148; surrealism on, 2, 25. See also on Roussel, 25–26, 186, 188, 227, 232,
Spielraum 240, 242, 245; sculptures by, 227–44,
French Communist Party (pcf), 21–22 229f, 231–34f, 237f, 239f, 241f, 243f,
Freud, Sigmund, 50, 144, 254, 260, 268; 246, 250–51, 253–55; sculptures
on art-as-play, 13; on automatism, 53; renamed, 230, 232; tables de jeux
on dream imagery, 125; on dualistic period, 236
model of the mind, 24; on form-play, “Glossaire” (Leiris), 192–95, 193f,
14; on games, 18; on humor, 21; on 225–26, 245
hypnosis, 53; on id and ego, 170; Goemans, Camille, 172f
intertextual reading of, 17; on jokes, Goya, Francisco, 140
13–17, 48–49; ludic model of, 13–20; Grand jeu, Le, 137
on overdetermination, 165; on play, Grasshopper, The (Suits), 268
10, 18, 169; on repetition as metapsy- Green Box, The (Duchamp), 227, 240
chological instinct, 168; theory of Grindon, Gavin, 43
sexuality of, 17; on unconscious, 10,
35–36, 78; on visual representation, Hansen, Miriam, 6, 7, 40–41, 78
196; on wordplay, 48–49 Hantaï, Simon, 270–71
frottage, 20, 23, 144, 146–47, 157–58 Harfaux, Arthur, 249
fumage, 20, 23, 157–58 hasard objectif, le. See objective chance
functionalism, 20; in city spaces, 24; Hausmann, Raoul, 137
exquisite corpse game as parody of, Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 6, 10, 22, 248
154; instrumentality and, 186–87 Heidegger, Martin, 269
356 index
Henry, Maurice, 249 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 18, 92, 257
Hérold, Jacques, 150, 151f Kaprow, Alan, 270
History of the Eye, The (Bataille), 267 knowledge production, 4–5
Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 10, 255–60, Knutson, Greta, 176f
264, 268 Kracauer, Siegfried, 290n8
Howald, Ferdinand, 31 Krasner, Lee, 137
How I Wrote Certain of My Books Krauss, Rosalind, 78, 180–81, 227–28,
(Roussel), 188–89, 227, 229 232, 235, 238
Hugnet, Georges, 137, 150, 176, 181f
Hugnet, Germaine, 181f Lacan, Jacques, 132, 196, 268–69
Hugo, Valentine, 143f, 151f, 164f, 176f, Lācis, Asja, 8, 129, 244
177–78, 248–49 Lamba, Jacqueline, 225f
Huizinga, Johan, 10, 11, 26, 255–60, 264, Landscape—Reclining Head (Giacom-
265, 267–68 etti), 232, 233f, 238
“Humor” (Freud), 21 Laplanche, Jean, 35–36
“Hyperbola of the Crocodile Hair- Large Glass, The (Duchamp), 228, 235,
dresser and the Walking Stick” 239f, 240
(automatic poems), 53 laughter, 14, 277n49
Lautréamont, Comte de, 158, 160
idleness, 3–5, 21–23, 99 Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 158
immateriality, 313n101 Le Corbusier, 98–101, 106
Impressions of Africa (Roussel), 186, 189, Lefebvre, Henri, 94–95
240, 242 Leiris, Michel, 184f, 224; on antilite
indeterminacy, 11, 12, 23, 24, 25, 26–27, rature, 204; on bifur/biffure, 193,
34, 36, 51, 268 238; on critique of hierarchies of
innervation, 8–9, 40–41, 42 metaphor, 207; on divaguer, 242, 255;
International Congress of Writers, 22 on double figure of words, 192–95;
inversions, 24, 60–62, 71, 126–27, 262, on Giacometti, 242–44, 255; on hal-
263–64, 265, 326n39 lucinatory power of language, 207;
Invisible Object (Giacometti), 251, 253 on linguistic slippage, 192–95; on
“Irrational Understanding of Objects, Miró, 213; on punning and wordplay,
The” (Harfaux/Henry), 249 25–26, 192–95, 227; on Roussel,
25–26, 185–88, 190–94, 198–99, 204,
Jakobsen, Roman, 34–35 211, 225–28, 230, 233, 238, 240, 245; in
James, William, 53 rue Blomet group, 191
Janet, Pierre, 53, 86, 128, 234 Leonardo da Vinci, 144
Jean, Marcel, 137 Lewitt, Sol, 270
Jenny, Laurent, 306n31 L.H.O.O.Q. (Duchamp), 45
jeu de l’oie, Le (board game), 246–47, “Life of the Object, The” (Tanguy),
247f, 263 249
jeu de Marseille, Le (playing cards), 263 Limbour, Georges, 191
jokes and sexuality, 15–17, 48–49, 201 liquefaction, 220, 230n7
Jokes and Their Relation to the Uncon- Littérature (journal), 191
scious (Freud), 13–18, 48–49 Littérature nouvelle série 7 (journal),
Jone (Giacometti), 230, 231f 44–45, 47–51, 48f
index 357
“Little History of Photography” (Ben- 72–74, 77–78; exquisite corpse game
jamin), 72, 95 participation, 137, 140, 155–56, 165–66,
Little Review, The (journal), 62, 63 179f; photograms, 41–42, 58–59;
Locus Solus (Roussel), 229–30, 232, 240, photographs, 72, 78, 207, 209f, 233,
242 251–53; on photography, 35, 58, 132;
Loeb, Pierre, 219 as playful, 29; production-through-
London Vogue (magazine), 34 selection, 81; rayographs, 24–25,
lsasdlr. See Surréalisme au service de 29–35, 41–43, 51, 53, 58–71, 66–68f,
la révolution, Le (journal) 70f, 71, 77, 106, 126–27; sculptures,
ludic practices: in avant-garde, 1–3, 252f; walks in Paris, 93–94. See also
12–13, 23–24, 43, 245; Benjamin specific works
on, 2, 4, 9–10, 22; Breton on, 3, 26, Marcuse, Herbert, 268
253–54, 255; erotic, 47–51; of Freud, Marx, Karl, 16, 22, 72, 158, 259
13–20; legacies of, 255–71; purpose Masson, André, 191, 196, 197f, 269;
in, 4; in Spielraum, 9–10, 224–25, automatic drawings by, 142–44, 143f,
244–47, 263, 266; in surrealism, 146, 147, 207; exquisite corpse game
9–13, 16, 22, 25, 26, 137, 246–55, 271; participation, 159; sand as medium,
for systems, 135, 155, 161, 186, 188, 245, 186
265–66; in urban landscapes, 102–3. materiality, 33, 68–69, 173, 177, 179, 246
See also play Mathieu, Georges, 270–71
Lute Player, The (Sorgh), 220, 221f Matisse, Pierre, 219
Lyotard, Jean-François, 269 Matta, Roberto, 137
Mégret, Frédéric, 175f
Mad Love (Breton), 83–84, 251, 253 Mehlman, Jeffrey, 17
“Magnetic Fields” (automatic text), “Metaphor of the Eye, The” (Barthes),
49–50, 51, 64, 86, 161 267
Magritte, René, 249, 269 “Metropolis and Mental Life, The”
Maison close (Atget), 110, 112, 113f (Simmel), 91
Man, Play and Games (Caillois), 117, Millar, Susanna, 268
255, 259, 268 mimesis, 6, 11, 43, 122, 140, 178, 233–35,
Man, Woman, and Child (Giacometti), 258, 312n89
236, 237f, 253 “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthe-
Man and the Sacred (Caillois), 255, 260 nia” (Caillois), 234–35
Man/Homme (Man Ray), 64, 65f Minotaure (journal), 130, 131f, 207,
“Manifesto of the Dada Crocodarium” 208–9f, 230
(automatic text), 54 Miró, Joan, 26, 186, 196f, 199–200f,
mannequins, 122–29 202–3f, 205–6f, 207, 211–18f,
Man Ray, 60f, 63f, 65–68f; aerographs 221–23f; on Duchamp, 198; exqui-
by, 31–32; ambiguity and, 207; on site corpse game participation, 140,
architecture, 115, 117; Atget photo 155–56; Leiris on, 213; nesting series,
graphy albums, 24–25, 72–84, 73f, 226; painting system, 201–4, 207,
87, 89, 94, 97–104, 108–10, 119, 122, 213–18, 224, 226; and palimpsest,
124–25, 133–34, 136, 269; collabora- 207, 219; on play, 188; and Roussel,
tions, 155–56; Duchamp and, 30, 33, 25–26, 186, 188, 191, 195–201, 204,
41, 42; estrangement in photographs, 206–7, 212–13, 245; serial declen-
358 index
sions of form, 227; and surrealist play, Oiseau en poursuit d’une abeille et la
248–49; transmutation in works, baisse, Un (Miró), 200f
219; wit of, 25–26, 195–201, 224, 227. optical unconscious, 6, 130, 132
See also specific works Oreille et l’étoile, L’, 225f
modernism, 2, 5, 12, 19, 20, 100, 103, Origin of the World (Courbet), 196, 197f
140, 186–87, 245 otium, 4–5
Monte Carlo Bond (Duchamp), 38–40,
39f Paalen, Wolfgang, 20
Monuments of Passaic (Smithson), 270 Painting (The Sum) (Miró), 201, 202f,
Morise, Max, 93; on automatism and 203f
painting, 142, 146; exquisite corpse Painting-Object (Miró), 195–98, 196f,
game participation, 140, 148, 154, 206
155–57, 165–66, 179f; four-man stroll Palace at 4 a.m., The (Giacometti),
experiment, 93; on readymade, 144 229–30
Motherwell, Robert, 137 Palais de la femme (Atget), 119, 122f
motor innervation, 40–41 palimpsest, 207, 219
“Mots sans rides, Les” (Breton), 141 paragone, 30
Musique, Seine, Michel, Bataille et moi Paranoiac Face (Dalí), 232
(Miró), 198–99, 199f parapraxes, 48–49
Muzard, Suzanne, 175f, 246–47, 247f Paris, France: as geographical uncon-
Myers, Frederic, 53 scious, 94, 97; as ludic city, 102–3;
obsolescent object in, 78–93; in
Nadja (Breton), 7–8, 21, 24, 94–95, 99, urban photography, 7–8, 24–25, 71,
102, 108, 114, 125, 248, 251 74–76, 78–95, 90, 93–102, 104, 115,
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 198 127, 129, 133, 251
Naples, Italy, 8, 129, 244 Paris Peasant (Aragon), 7–8, 24, 94–95,
Naville, Pierre, 146, 157f 98–99, 102, 127
New Babylon (Nieuwenhuys), 270 Paris pittoresque figures, 74
New Impressions of Africa (Roussel), Partens, Alexandre (pseudonym), 54
199, 226–28 pcf. See French Communist Party
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 183, 260 Péret, Benjamin, 157f, 225f
Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 270 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgen-
No More Play (Giacometti), 238, 253, stein), 268
254 Photo—Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves
“Non-Euclidean Psychology of a Photo (Miró), 201, 202–3f, 204
graph, The” (Dali), 130 photograms, 29, 33, 42, 51, 57–61,
normal life, 1, 12, 34, 326n39 206–7. See also rayographs
“Notes on a Theory of Gambling” Photographie intégrale et cent pour cent
(Benjamin), 40 automatique (Man Ray), 30–31, 31f
photography: as art form, 30–31, 35,
“Object as Revealed in Surrealist Ex- 75; automatism and, 84, 130, 132–34;
periment, The” (Dalí), 249 documentary, 74, 89; vs. illustration,
objective chance (le hasard objectif ), 78, 69; as inverted, 60–61, 71; as paint-
83–85, 190, 207, 246–47, 248, 251, ing with light, 30, 32; as play units,
253, 263, 296n41 133; sculptural qualities of, 32; as
index 359
photography (cont.) painting-poem, 198, 200; participa-
second technology, 7, 150, 204; Spiel- tory, 158, 161; public language in, 58
raum and, 6–7, 41; street, 72–78, Point to the Eye (Giacometti), 233–35,
95–97, 101–2; surrealist, 72–73, 234f, 241
89–90, 132, 145; as unmediated print, Pollock, Jackson, 137
58. See also Atget, Eugène; Man Ray; polysemy, 51, 100, 136, 186–87, 196, 211,
photograms; rayographs 226, 233
photomontage, 34, 65 Porte d’Asnières, cité Trébert (Atget),
Piaget, Jean, 268 106, 107f
Picabia, Francis, 36–37, 37f, 47–48, 51, Porte de Montreuil, Zoniers (Atget),
52f, 141 104–6, 105f
Picasso, Pablo, 29, 33, 57, 137, 141, 186 postmetaphysical philosophy, 269
Piper, Adrian, 270 postmodernism, 269
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 233 poststructuralism, 263, 268, 269
Planetarium (Fahlström), 270 Prévert, Jacques, 153, 157, 172f, 180
Plan Voisin (Le Corbusier), 98–101 primitivism, 19, 325n29
play: aesthetics and, 1, 5, 6, 9–10, Principles of Scientific Management
13, 15, 19–20, 26–27, 43, 92, 137, (Taylor), 20–21
267–68; automatism and, 92–93, Production of Space, The (Lefebvre),
254; as avant-garde engagement, 1; 94–95
being as, 269; critical power of, 93; Project for a Passageway (Giacometti),
cross-disciplinary texts on, 268; as 232f
disservice, 43–47; erotic desire and, prostitutes, 108–15
20; flexibility of, 93; free, 1, 9, 11, Proust, Marcel, 186
18, 20, 43, 72, 98, 132, 137, 149, 244; psychoanalysis: on desire, 50; mass pro-
inversion in, 254; modality of, 23; duction and, 7; representation and,
paradox of, 9, 11–12; play forms, 3–4, 169; rise of, 20; surrealism and, 2, 13,
150; as practice for life, 4; process vs. 19, 147, 269; surrealist games and,
production in, 270; as regressive, 18, 19–20, 168; unconscious in, 2, 35–36,
20; reinvention of, 26; as signifier, 11; 130; wordplay and, 17
surrealist, 2–3, 9, 12–13, 15, 18–20, 23, “Psychologie non-euclidienne d’une
26–27, 77, 137, 158, 161–62, 247–50, photographie,” 131f
255–56, 263–64, 266, 268–69, 271; “Psychopathology of Everyday Life”
surrealist strategies, 2–3, 12–13, 15, (Freud), 48
18–19, 20, 23, 26, 77, 158, 161–62, punctum, 132
247–50, 255–56, 263–64, 266, puns and punning, 23, 25–26, 44–45,
268–69, 271; of things, 226–30; of 50, 226; bifur/biffure in, 230, 238,
thought, 89–90, 132; typology of, 269; Dadaist, 25, 36, 190, 198, 200,
258; units, 130–36; vs. work, 20–27. 207–8, 219–20, 228; logic of, 186;
See also ludic practices; Spielraum unconscious in, 77. See also wordplay
Playing and Reality (Winnicott), 268
pleasure–pain dyad, 25 Queen Louise of Prussia (Miró), 213,
poems and poetry: artistic strategies 216–18f, 219–20
for, 134; automatic, 50, 145, 147, “Question of Lay Analysis, The”
163; Dada, 38, 57–58; inventory, 55; (Freud), 169–70
360 index
ragpickers (zoniers), 75, 79, 99, 103–7, writer, 25, 198; Foucault on, 189,
105f, 119, 134–35, 300n87 229, 269; Giacometti and, 25–26,
rationalization, 20 186, 188, 227, 232, 240, 242; Leiris
Rausch, 260 on, 25–26, 185–88, 190–94, 198–99,
Rauschenberg, Robert, 269 204, 211, 225–28, 230, 233, 238, 240,
rayographs, 24–25, 29–35, 41–43, 51, 245; ludic mechanisms and repeti-
53, 58–71, 66–68f, 70f, 71, 77, 106, tion, 189; Miró and, 25–26, 186, 188,
126–27. See also photograms 191, 195–201, 204, 206–7, 212–13,
readymade, 34, 144, 201 245; notebook, 184f, 185, 227; play
rebellion, 15, 326n35 of multiple figurations, 236; poetic
Redon, Odilon, 140 legacy, 186; polysemy and, 186, 187;
rencontre. See under chance on procédé, 219, 225, 230, 236, 238;
repetition, 6, 7, 88, 204, 220; as assault, punning and wordplay by, 25–26,
224; compulsive, 20, 153–54, 260, 185–94, 200, 227, 230, 235, 238; use of
311n86; in exquisite corpse game, radical repetition, 188–94, 229–30;
150–52, 167–69, 312–13n99; of indus- on work to rule, 187–88. See also
trial processes, 117, 145; in play, 18, 43, specific works
238–40, 312n89, 312–13n99; radical, Roussel and Co. (Leiris), 227
188–92, 229, 230; tautological, 240; Rue Asselin (Atget), 112, 114, 114f
unforseeability and, 24 rue Blomet group, 25, 191–92, 195, 196,
representation, 2, 3, 12, 14, 19, 24–25; 199, 212–13, 254
bifur/biffure and, 235–36; codes of, Rue du Cimitière St. Benoit (Atget),
54, 57; collective, 259; conscious/ 118f, 119
unconscious in, 141, 170, 195; critique Rules of the Game, The (Leiris), 185
of, 263; deformation and, 71; fold
and, 173, 180; preconceived, 161; Sadoul, Georges, 175f, 246–47, 247f
psychoanalysis and, 169; radical Sainte Vierge, La (Picabia), 36–37, 37f
repetition and, 189; reality and, 257, Sainte Vierge II, La (Picabia), 36–37,
266–67; visual, 58, 93, 139, 140, 142, 37f
144, 196 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 311n84
Reverdy, Pierre, 264, 266 Satie, Erik, 186
Révolution surréaliste, La (journal), 21, Schad, Christian, 52f, 52–53, 56f, 57,
72, 89, 101, 140–42, 143f, 146, 148, 59–62, 64, 65, 206–7
169–70, 192, 193f, 251f Schadographs, 53, 57–59
Ribemont-Dessaigne, Georges, 32, 62 Schiller, Friedrich, 11, 43, 257
Richter, Gerhard, 137 Schoenberg, Arnold, 186
Richter, Hans, 62 Schwitters, Kurt, 57
Riffaterre, Michael, 54, 153 second technologies, use of term, 7, 150,
Romanticism, 43, 45 204
room-for-play. See Spielraum Sélavy, Rrose (Duchamp alter ego),
Roussel, Raymond, 199, 226–28; 44–45, 47, 50
Ashbery on, 228–29; cryptogram- Seligmann, Arlette, 225f
matic priorities, 230; double figure of Seligmann, Kurt, 225f
words, 192–94; Duchamp and, 186, semblance, 3, 6, 284n34
227, 240, 242, 245; as experimental Serner, Walter, 53, 57
index 361
sexuality: artforms of, 196, 201; death 9–13, 16, 22, 25, 26, 137, 246–55, 271;
and, 124; forbidden, 117; in jokes, ludic practices of, 9–13, 16, 22, 25, 26,
15–17, 48–49, 201; in surrealist imag- 137, 246–55, 271; modes of art in, 7;
ery, 17; in wordplay, 44–45, 47, 50 on play, 2–3, 9, 12–13, 15, 18–20, 23,
Sheringham, Michael, 84–85 26–27, 77, 137, 158, 161–62, 247–50,
Simmel, Georg, 90–93, 109 255–56, 263–64, 266, 268–69, 271;
simulation, 122, 258, 259. See also play strategies, 2–3, 12–13, 15, 18–19,
mimesis 20, 23, 26, 77, 158, 161–62, 247–50,
Situationist International, 35, 255–56, 263–64, 266, 268–69, 271;
325–26n29 postmodernism and, 269; postwar
Smithson, Robert, 270 art practices, 26–27, 255, 262, 267–68,
Sorgh, Martensz, 220, 221f, 224 269–70; primal psychic impulses
Soupault, Philippe, 51, 64, 86, 162 in, 137–38; as psychic automatism,
Spielraum, 6–10, 23, 187, 235; as anti- 85–86; psychoanalysis and, 2, 13, 19,
production, 148; architectural, 26, 147, 168, 269; on subject/object, 8, 13,
244; as bifur, 195; chance in, 40–43, 162; on unconscious, 2, 49. See also
150–52; in exquisite corpse game, Dadaism
138–39, 250; freedom in, 148; ludic “Surrealism and Painting” (Breton),
practices in, 9–10, 224–25, 244–47, 29–30, 146
263, 266; in photography/film, 6–7, Surréalisme au service de la révolution,
41, 77, 92, 132, 133, 150; politics of, Le (journal), 210f, 227, 248–49, 249f,
244–45; technologically assisted, 20, 251f
32; in urban walking, 98, 101–2; use “Surrealism in 1929,” 21
of term, 8, 129. See also play Surrealist Exhibition of Objects, 249
Spieltrieb, 43, 257 “Surrealist Situation of the Object”
Spring Happening, A (Kaprow), 270 (Breton), 249
Squares Arranged According to the Laws Suspended Ball (Giacometti), 227–29,
of Chance (Arp), 36–37, 37f 229f, 232, 250
Stieglitz, Alfred, 30, 62 systems, 2, 9, 20; complex, management
“Stones for a Possible Giacometti” of, 21; critique of, 35; of exquisite
(Leiris), 242 corpse, 150, 160, 170–71, 174, 182; in
“Structure, Sign and Play in the image-making, 58, 62, 137–39; ludic,
Discourse of the Human Sciences” 135, 155, 161, 186, 188, 245, 265–66;
(Derrida), 268 for painting, 201–4, 207, 213–18, 224,
subjectivity, 2–3, 7, 25; destabilization 226; regulation and, 23, 25; topo-
of, 35, 36–38, 311n84; effects of mod- graphical, 95–96; for writing, 188–91
ernization on, 42–43, 83; incongruity
and, 178; work and, 20 Taeuber-Arp, Sophie, 137
surrealism: ambiguity in, 207; avant- Tanguy, Jeanette Durocq, 157f, 181f,
garde, 2, 271; break with com- 246–47, 247f
munism, 21–22; commitment to Tanguy, Yves: on board games, 246–47,
heterodoxy, 160; exhibitions, 249; 247f; drawing by, 249; exquisite
vs. fine arts, 146; found, 24; on corpse game participation, 140, 150,
freedom, 2, 25; impact on cultural 151f, 155–57, 157f, 159, 165–66, 166f,
processes, 269; ludic practices in, 172f, 179f, 181f
362 index
Taylor, Frederick, 20–21, 65 city as, 102–3; zoniers (ragpickers) in,
techno-ludic process, 3, 23, 191, 195, 75, 79, 99, 103–7, 105f, 119, 134–35,
201–26 300n87. See also Atget, Eugène;
Terre érotique (Masson), 196, 197f Naples, Italy; Paris, France
Thirion, André, 21–22, 160
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Vaché, Jacques, 43–44
(Freud), 17 Vannier (Atget), 104, 105f
391 (journal), 51 Variétés (journal), 21
Three Standard Stoppages (Duchamp), Varo, Remedios, 150, 151f
36, 38, 38f Vaux, Marc, 230, 231f
Tombeau de Raymond Roussel (Leiris), vertigo, 115, 117, 258–60
185, 186 Vidal, Jean, 29
Towards a New Architecture (Le Cor- Villeglé, Jacques de la, 270–71
busier), 101 Visage paranoiaque (Dalí), 210f
Toys and Reasons (Erikson), 268 “Visions de demi-soleil” (Ernst), 146
“Treatise on Style” (Aragon), 147 Vitrac, Roger, 93, 187
Truth and Method (Gadamer), 268
Tual, Roland, 191 “War on Work,” 20–27
tuché, theory of, 132 Water Yam (Brecht), 270
Tzara, Tristan, 33; automatic texts by, 51, Weber, Samuel, 14, 16, 305n18
53, 54, 57; on Dada poem, 38; exqui- Winnicott, D. W., 268
site corpse game participation, 137, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 268
150, 176f; on photograms/rayographs, Woman, Head, Tree (Giacometti), 230,
42, 51, 57, 59–61; on systems, 35 231f
Woman/Femme (Man Ray), 64, 65f
Urbanisme (Le Corbusier), 98–99 wordplay, 2, 24–26, 191; accidental,
Umland, Anne, 254 48–49; adaptation to painting, 201;
unconscious, 130; in automatic draw- automatism and, 51; erotic/sexual in,
ing, 53–57, 142–44, 143f, 147–48; 17, 44–45, 47, 50, 51, 71; psychoanaly-
collective, 100; conscious and, 35–36, sis and, 17, 50; risk in, 186; uncon-
86, 90, 127, 170, 195; expression and, scious in, 49–51, 71. See also puns and
55–58, 84–85, 93; imagery of, 141; in punning
ludic model, 13–14, 33–34; memories “Words without Wrinkles” (Breton),
in, 78, 95, 130; motifs of, 153–54; opti- 17, 47, 54
cal, 6, 130, 132; in play, 10, 12–14; po- “Work of Art in the Age of Its Tech-
etics of, 2; in psychoanalysis, 2, 35–36, nological Reproducibility, The”
130; recognition in, 83; repression of, (Benjamin), 6–7
110; in surrealism, 49–50; surrealism work vs. play, 20–27
on, 2, 49; as unknowable, 70; urban, World War I (1914–1918), 20, 99–100,
102–3; in wordplay, 49–50 304n9
Unik, Pierre, 175f, 246–47, 247f World War II (1939–1945), 187, 268,
unpleasure, 13, 18, 20, 25, 117 274n14, 327n49
Unsighted Drawing (Anastasi), 270–71
urban landscapes, 4–5, 7–8, 92, 94, zoniers (ragpickers), 75, 79, 99, 103–7,
98–103; functionalism of, 24; ludic 105f, 119, 134–35, 300n87
index 363

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surrealism at play

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Frontispiece: Joan Miró, Collage, January 31, 1933, 1933, detail.

This book was made pos­si­ble by

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the

1.9 Interior page, Dadaphone (March 1920), depicting Christian

x List of Illustr ations

List of Illustr ations xi

xii List of Illustr ations

List of Illustr ations xiii

Plate 1 Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1922.

xiv List of Illustr ations

If ­there is, in Surrealism, one form of activity whose

per­sis­tence has stirred the hostility of ­idiots, it is the

activity of play, which can be traced across the majority

of our publications of the last thirty-­five years.

idleness game (puzzle)

The Freudian Ludic: From Sublimation to Unplea­sure

Surrealism’s ludic compromise of bound­aries—­between art and every-

The rise of psychoanalysis, Walter Benjamin’s theorization of technologi-

MAN RAY, n. m. synon. de Joie jouer jouir

30 Chapter One

32 Chapter One

The characterization flou, or “blur,” for this threshold moment that

34 Chapter One

Meaning to Mean Nothing: Dada Play

Détournement as a critical structure had only been claimed as such by

36 Chapter One

amused me. It’s always the idea of “amusement” which ­causes me to

38 Chapter One

40 Chapter One

42 Chapter One

The radicalization of uselessness that Benjamin would have recognized

44 Chapter One

Parsing the Ludic Erotic

48 Chapter One

50 Chapter One

The Dada Automatic

Breton’s dawning interest in the ludic-­erotic structures of the uncon-

54 Chapter One

The Man Is the Kodak

58 Chapter One

of linked chain at the bottom center of the image (figure 1.11). In the

60 Chapter One

62 Chapter One

64 Chapter One

steady stream of deformations—as though the factory in question w ­ ere

66 Chapter One

unifying theme or narrative to give them meaning—­play in its irratio-

associate them with painting, photography, sculpture, or even collage.

68 Chapter One

The Authority of the “Never-­Seen”

Man Ray himself was acutely aware of this cleavage of recognizability

The “never-­seen” in this context describes not so much the startling

70 Chapter One

Surrealist photography sets the scene for a ­salutary

estrangement between man and his surroundings.

It gives ­free play to the po­liti­cally educated eye,

­under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to

the illumination of detail.

We’ve seen how estrangement—­from conventions of perceived real­

one already pres­ent throughout Atget’s archive: a con­spic­u­ous displace-

Paris: The Obsolescent Object

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This book was made possible by

If there is, in Surrealism, one form of activity whose

persistence has stirred the hostility of idiots, it is the

of our publications of the last thirty-five years.

The Freudian Ludic: From Sublimation to Unpleasure

Surrealism’s ludic compromise of boundaries—between art and every-

amused me. It’s always the idea of “amusement” which causes me to

Breton’s dawning interest in the ludic-erotic structures of the uncon-

steady stream of deformations—as though the factory in question w ere

unifying theme or narrative to give them meaning—play in its irratio-

The Authority of the “Never-Seen”

The “never-seen” in this context describes not so much the startling

Surrealist photography sets the scene for a salutary

It gives free play to the politically educated eye,

under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to

We’ve seen how estrangement—from conventions of perceived real

one already present throughout Atget’s archive: a conspicuous displace-

Eugène Atget, Porte d’Asnières—cité Trébert, 1913.

Eugène Atget, 47 Avenue de la Observatoire, 1926.

the surrealist project as an expansion of cognizance devoted to unveil-

large chair, tiny boot/ large boot—generates a spatio-visual vertigo that

In surrealism’s campaign to revolutionize experience as a whole, automa-

h ere and a there,” walking through the city is established as a series of

The commercial spaces that appear in nearly all of the photographs in

architecturally transitional is made literal—not only through the photo

Display windows present logical conundrums that offer the illu-

The exquisite corpse, then, is a drawing—a work on paper occupying

Drawing Monsters: The Game as Process

descriptive verism. They were not, at their inception, intended to answer

Already by 1923, t hese systems were beginning to take hold. As Jacques

e ffect a transition from by-product to end-product. The shift begins

Mechanisms of the Techno-Ludic