The Windmills of Humanity: On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World 9780882861272

Table of contents :
Human, All Too Human? (Introduction and Homage to Ivan Svitak) by Joseph Grim Feinberg
Essay I: The Human Being and Utopia
anti-essay 1: the monologue of Alexander's sword
Essay II: Interpreting a Work of Art
anti-essay 2: introduction to dialectical materialism
Essay III: Conscience of the Nation? The Literature of Consumer Society
anti-essay 3: little base and little superstructure
Essay IV: The Art of the Epoch
anti-essay 4: the story of a sword
Essay V: The Civilization of the Eye
anti-essay 5: feeling
Essay VI: Evolutions in the Structure of Film Language
anti-essay 6: the monologue of a human shadow
Essay VII: Prolegomena to Love
anti-essay 7: a private mythology
Essay VIII: The Historical Limits of Surrealism
anti-essay 8: the law of ketman
Essay IX: The Surrealist Image of Humankind
anti-essay 9: labyrinth
Essay X: Surrealism and Art
anti-essay 10: the dialectics of wisdom
Essay XI: Questions of Surrealism by Vratislav Effenberger and Ivan Svitak
anti-essay 11: separation
Editorial Notes
Books by Ivan Svitak

Citation preview

Ivan Svitak

"Gh@ Uli1td1t1Ills o� H um e111i��

On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World Edited by Joseph Grim Feinberg Illustrations by Andy Lass

ebarlea H. Kerr

@

Established 188tl

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY

Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. 1726 West Jarvis Avenue

Chicago, Illinois 60626

Original texts (c) Ivan Svitak

Introduction and new translations (c) Joseph Grim Feinberg 2014 Illustrations (c) Andy Lass 2014 Cover image (c) Jan Svankrnajer 1973, reproduced with the artist's permission Graphic design and typesetting (c) Vladimir Nejezchleb, 2014 Despite our best efforts, the editor and publisher have been unable to make contact with Ivan Svitak's heirs. If they see this note, we hope that they will write to the publisher at the address provided. Thanks to Andy Lass for permission to publish several pieces and fragments of pieces that Ivan Svitak entrusted to him. ISBN 978-0-88286-127-2

Ivan Svitak

The Windmills of Humanity On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World Edited by Joseph Grim Feinberg

Illustrations by Andy Lass

Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago 2014

Let us imagine D on Quixote at the moment of his departure for his encounter with the windmills, and let us ask the question: WHY D OES HE FIGHT AGAINST AN ILLUSION? Because illusions are more real than reality. . . Values are born only in the utopian fight. . .

- Ivan Svitak, "Don Quixote: The Windmills of the Mind" (The Un iversity journal, California State University, Chico, no. 2, Fall, 1974, pp. 1-2. Czech version, "Diamant na dne;' Literarni noviny vol. XV, no. 17, 23 April, 1966, p. 8)

Dedicated to Ivan Svitak and Franklin Rosemont, who never gave up on fighting against and for illusions-or reality.

Thanks to the many people who helped me uncover the details of Svitak's biogra­ phy. Thanks to June Farris for help in digging up copies of Svitak's articles, an ocean and a generation away from their source. Thanks to Andy Lass, who took this book as a belated opportunity to collaborate with his closefriend, Ivan Svitak. His illustra­ tions (along with a cover image provided by fellow surrealist ]an Svankmajer) have greatly enriched the book. And thanks above all to Tereza, for help and patience with these laborious translations and re-translations.

Contents Human, All Too Human? (Introduction and Homage to Ivan Svitak), by Joseph Grim Feinberg

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anti-essay1 : the monologue o f Alexander's sword Essay II: Interpreting a Work of Art

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Essay XI: Questions of Surrealism (with Vratislav Effenberger) anti-essay11: separation Editorial Notes

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138 14 5

Human, All Too Human?

Human, All Too Human?

(Introduction and Homage to Ivan Svitak)

I have never understood why people believe that their existence is com­ plicated. Life, after all, is simple. It is made of a first and last name and four-digit numbers separated by a dash. -Svitak, ''Monologue of a Grave Stone"'

We are rich only in time, which we can either fill... or squander. -Svitak, "Philosophy for Ishka"2

This Book This book has risen out of two untimely deaths. First came Ivan Svitak's own passing-or perhaps we should say the last of many deaths experienced by a writer who entitled his memoirs "Nine Lives:' That was in 1 994. But in some sense the book you are holding first died in 1 989, at the moment of Svitak's last rebirth, and for happy reasons: political conditions changed in Svitak's native Czechoslovakia, allowing the author to return home after an exile of 2 1 years. Finally able to engage the Czech-speaking world, Svitak set aside his long-standing project of translating and publishing his works in English. One of the most important social critics of the late Soviet system left piles of unedited manuscripts and half-edited self-publications that remained virtually unread. Next came the passing of Franklin Rosemont, whose idea it was to revive Svitak's project in this book, and who would have been a co-editor of the book if life had turned out the way it should. One afternoon Franklin and I, along with Franklin's wife and collaborator Penelope, were walking under the trees and brick townhouse walls of a Northside Chicago street, when Franklin asked, "Do you know anything about Ivan Svitak?" I did. I knew of him as an important Marxist humanist philosopher and socialist opponent of the erstwhile pseudo-socialist Czechoslovak regime. At the time, I didn't know that Svitak was also a theorist and defender of the surrealist movement, and that during his time in Californian

2

Nevedecka antropologie, p. 1 36. The Bohemian Being, pp. 1 50 - 1 . Czech original in Kniha prezence, pp. 1 7 1 -2. (For full biblio­ graphic information for Svitak's full-length books, see "Books by Ivan Svitak;' pp. 145)

7

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY exile he had corresponded with Franklin, suggesting that Franklin and Penelope's Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company bring out his English-language writings. Franklin and Penelope, in the end, had only published two of Svitak's essays, 3 in issues they edited of Cultural Correspondence. They could no longer remember why the Kerr Co. hadn't published more, but I would guess that the reasons had to do with the rough quality of existing English translations, in addition to the articles' frequent and un-footnoted references to Czech social and literary his­ tory, and maybe also to Svitak's penchant for skirting boundaries of genre, leaving readers easily befuddled. Nevertheless, Franklin was convinced that the texts still had something important to say, and I agreed. I accepted Franklin's offer to col­ laborate. Our collaboration was short-lived. In April 2009, only a couple of months after we began seriously discussing the project, Franklin died. His death was so unex­ pected that I still have difficulty believing it and expressing my sadness. This book, though it would have been a better book with Franklin's help, may serve as some small tribute to everything I learned from him while he was alive. It may also serve as an apology to Penelope, for whom the burden of coordinating this and other projects has fallen. And as homage, of course, to Ivan Svitak, as proof that even his ninth and perhaps final death could not make him silent. But that's enough about this book's editor. For the readers, the purpose of the book is twofold. First, it aims to reintroduce them to a radical writer whose re­ nown has unfairly faded from both mainstream and leftist political thought. In 1968, at the height of a movement for democratic socialism in Czechoslovakia, Svitak's name became known around the world. He gave voice to the movement's most revolutionary demands, and he was labeled by conservative forces in the country as public enemy number one. They drove him out of the country when they took control, and for the first couple of years of his exile, Svitak became one of the most sought-after speakers for the crushed movement's unrealized dreams. That moment in history has passed, but what brought Svitak to prominence then has not lost importance today: an instinct to retrieve Marxism from every attempt to ossify it as dogma; a defense of humanistic values as a means as well as end of revolution; a consistent critique of oppression, including oppression that mas­ querides as freedom; and a fearless belief in the value of rebellion, no matter how ; personally dangerous (as in Communist-led Czechoslovakia) or unfashionable (as in capitalist-led Czechoslovakia after 1 989).

Svitak, ''An Ideal Television;' in issue 10-11 (Fall 1 979), mankind"; in issue 12-13-14, pp. 81-5 (Summer 1 981).

8

p . 38;

"The Surrealist Image of Hu­

Human, All Too Human? This book, however, has a further, more specific purpose. It will introduce readers, even those familiar with Svitak, to a side of Svitak's work which has never been well known in the English-speaking world, though it was always central to the writer's thought. English-language publications have introduced Svitak as an abstract philosopher (Man and His World, New York: Dell, 1970) and a biting po­ litical commentator (The Czechoslovak Experiment, New York: Columbia U. Press, 1 97 1 ). But English readers have seen little of Svitak as a cultural critic-a defender of experimental literature, an analyst of mass media, a philosopher of love, a theo­ rist and poet of surrealism. Such work represents the largest part of Svitak's output in the crucial 1 960s, and after his exile Svitak put enormous effort into revising and preparing this work for publication-publication which, properly speaking, never came to pass. It is this side of Svitak's work that, I think, best reveals the broad relevance and originality of his approach.

Svitak's Road from Nowhere to Nowhere Svitak's work is, most certainly, dated. He wrote nothing that was not a pas­ sionate reaction to his moment. His work's enduring relevance must be appreciated in that light, as a document of daring protest that sought generalizable models of socio-cultural engagement, a reaching for theory through practice. It is true that Svitak wrote against a reality that we do not entirely share with him. But as he always insisted, the Communist-led states of Eastern Europe were not so differ­ ent from the equally alienating, miserable, consumerist capitalisms of the West; together they formed an increasingly homogeneous "manipulated world:' Svitak did not alter this view when he was forced to emigrate to the West, nor when he returned to a newly Westernized Czechoslovakia after 1 989. He wrote for his mo­ ment, but his moment bleeds into ours. Nevertheless, soon after attaining international renown in 1 968, Svitak's fame faded. It tells as much about the barren and highly compartmentalized intellec­ tual climate of the United States as it does about the repression in East- Central Europe, that one of the latter region's most influential writers, once banished to America, would become lonely and nearly unknown beyond his new uni­ versity's walls. "I do not think I am flourishing wildly in Chico [California] ;' he wrote to Franklin Rosemont in 1 979, ". . .after ten years of practiced absurdity and hysteria."4 (Later, after the Czechoslovak Communist Party fell from power in 1 989, Svitak wrote that "I want.. .to return to Prague in February, because there,

4

Letter, 20 April, 1 979.

9

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY philosophy is still politics and ideas are needed, not just tolerated;' as they are among scholars in the United States. 5 ) In 1 968, Svitak had been dubbed "chief instigator of counterrevolution" by a radio station founded by the Soviet invaders of Czechoslovakia. 6 During the lib­ eralizing days of the Prague Spring, which ended a month before that broadcast, he had ceaselessly criticized the Party's top-down attempts at reform, reminding a society anxious for change that a workers' democracy can only be the work of workers themselves. He had helped to organize a "Club of Engaged Non-Party­ Members;' but he refused to adhere to any one organization himself, earning the reputation of a "lonely sniper" who, fearless or reckless, would not hesitate to say what he thought to those in power. This was merely the culmination of a long rebellion. Born in 1 925, Svitak was mostly a bystander when he came of age during World War II. But soon after the war he joined the Social Democratic Party, a decision which in retrospect he de­ scribed as a small protest against the more popular Communist Party, whose cult 7 of Stalin repulsed him (while he eagerly read Koestler and Trotsky). When the Communist Party took over the government in 1 948, the Social Democrats were more or less forcibly merged into it, and Svitak for a time became an acceptable, and at times even enthusiastic, Communist. But apparently he never got over his non-conformist past, because he soon ran afoul of the new regime, at which point the authorities duly recalled his "Social Democratic deviationism:' (Svitak later offered his own term for this, writing that he interprets Marxism "sexual­ 8 democratically:' ) Svitak's first serious trouble came in 1 956, when the government clamped down on "revisionism" within the Party, hoping to avoid a repetition of Hungary's abortive revolution earlier that year. Still, in light of later events, the punishment Svitak received for his criticism of orthodox Marxism seems mild: he was tempo­ rarily suspended from his work at the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and was sent to rural Moravia, not far from his hometown, in order to "strengthen his class consciousness" and research (and positively influence) "the social consciousness of the masses:' He later reflected: " There followed one of the most beautiful years of my life, filled with the amusing experiences of a small town 5

6

7

8

Letter to Zbigniew Brzezinski, December 22, 1 989, in box 9 of Svitak's archives at the Czech National Archives. Radio Vltava, 1 8 Sept. 1968 (one month after the invasion), quoted in Svitak's Nevedecka anthropologie, unnumbered page. Here and in what follows I draw heavily on Svitak's autobiographical Devet iivotu: kontretn{ dialektika. (The book has allegedly been translated into English as Dialectic of a Concrete, but I have been unable to obtain a copy of the English version.) Letter to a certain Mr. Kubelka, 14 September, 1 965, in box 6 of Svitak's archives.

10

Human, All Too Human? where I was mistakenly regarded as an influential person sent by the Central Com­ 9 mittee of the Communist Party." Svitak was soon brought back to his old j ob. He deepened his engagement with humanist philosophy, but he did not hesitate to draw explicit political conclusions from his philosophizing. He also devoted much of this time to less prosaic work, which he gradually developed into a genre of its own, mixing free-wheeling philo­ sophical reflection with poetic contemplations of concrete, everyday experience. In 1 964 his still (mostly) unpublished Unscientific Anthropology (Nevedecka antropol­ ogie) was allegedly being prepared for dramatization by Vaclav Havel at the avant­ garde Theater on the B alustrade (Divadlo na zabradli) when the manuscript for the play was confiscated 10 and Svitak was sent away from the Philosophy Institute for a second time. This time, he was also expelled from the Communist Party. This second exile was apparently less pleasant than the first. During his first ex­ ile Svitak had been a black sheep. Now, even among his former colleagues (many of 11 whom were still supportive of him), he felt like a pariah. Definitively cut off from the country's intellectual elite and all its privileges, for the first time in his life Svitak 12 felt truly outcast and materially poor. (Among other things, he claims to have 3 worked for some time as a film extra. 1 ) He became radicalized. He no longer hoped to "revise" Soviet Communism. He began to look toward a complete re-foundation of Marxism and socialist democracy. He also expanded the scope of his critical work, seeing a need to bring pure philosophy into closer engagement with art, po­ etry, and film, 1 4 and with practical, prosaic politics. In this project he now enjoyed the perverse advantage that he could observe the system as an outsider with few al­ legiances and little to lose. With little hope of official publication, he wrote whatever he chose-and he turned these years into some of the most productive of his life. D uring the liberalizing 1 960s, however, it was not long before Svitak was allowed b ack to intellectual employment, this time as a cinema scholar. After his reintegration into official intellectual life, and especially after censorship was abolished in March 1 968, Svitak was able to put out years of unpublished articles almost all at once, some of which had already been censored multiple times. Not satisfied with "reform;' "democratization:' and "socialism with a hu9 10

11

12 13 14

Ibid., p. 1 1 7. Svitak, Kniha prezence, p . 1 73. According to documents i n box 6 o f Svitak's archives, Svitak did end up having a play of his, co-authored with Havel, performed in late 1 967 or early 1 968. The play, entitled "Dvefe na pudu" ("Door to the Attic"), may or may not be the same one that was prepared in 1 964. Devet iivotu, p. 134. ibid., p. 1 33-4. Svitak, Devcatko s cervenou maSli, un-numbered page. Devet iivotu, p. 1 34.

11

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY man face;' Svitak demanded revolution, complete democracy, and thoroughly humanistic socialism. He saw half-measures as "squaring the circle" 15 and bound to fail. (Well before the end of the Prague Spring, Svitak predicted its end, writ­ ing for example on May 2, 1 968 that "We must make use of this historic interlude quickly, because later the reaction will throw us down even farther than we were 16 before." ) Svitak did not hesitate to attack reformers who would become known as heroes of 1 968, like novelist Milan Kundera, philosopher Karel Kosik, and the legal theorist and politician Zdenek Mlynaf, whom Svitak accused of addressing the problems of the Party rather than the problems of the people, in the process repressing more radical voices. In this intellectual scene, Svitak preferred to take the side of the Czech and Slovak surrealists, who remained much more thor­ 17 oughly outside the political establishment. Svitak himself became one the most outspoken of these radical voices in the Czechoslovak public sphere, speaking before packed lecture halls. When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August 1 968, Svitak happened to be attending a conference in Austria. He learned from friends that he was a priority target of the KGB (according to one source, he was actually no. 37 on the Soviet Army's arrest list when it invaded 18 ) , and he decided to delay his return home. The delay lasted over twenty years. He stepped up his critical volleys against the Czechoslovak regime, but now from afar. Yet his stature in the minds of occupying powers was even greater than the reality of his rebellious writing and organiz­ ing. In his memoirs, Svitak remarked ironically that the pro-Soviet, collaboration­ ist press painted him as a kind of super-spy, a larger-than-life anti-hero heading a mass network of counter-revolution, requiring a 500,000-strong invading army 19 to stop him. The ridiculousness of this picture did not stop the occupied state from rescinding his citizenship in 1 970 or from sentencing him in absentia, in 1 97 1 , to eight years in prison. His hopes for a quick return home dimmed, and he began to look for long-term work in the West. By his own account, Svitak's third exile was both easier and more frustrating than his first two. In the beginning, he was eagerly sought out for speaking engage­ ments. He was given a temporary research position under Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski at Columbia University, and his account of "The Czechoslovak Experi-

15 16 17 18

19

A s h e entitled a book about the period: Kulaty Ctverec (lit. " A Squared Circle"). Letter to Kvetoslav Chvatik, in box 6 of Svitak's archives. Devet zivotu, p. 133. Alan Levy, "Ivan Svitak: A Leninist Lunch with a Lonely Sniper;' Prague Post, October 20, 1993. Levy himself provides no source for the information, which might have been offered by Svitak during the interview on which the article is based. Ibid., p. 174.

12

Human, All Too Human? ment'' was published by Columbia University Press. He could have had a success­ ful career ahead of him in Sovietology or as a propagandist at Radio Free Europe, following the path of many other exiles. Instead, he chose to remain an independ­ ent critic. This choice brought with it consequences. Svitak soon realized that "In 1 968 in the United States an intellectual from Prague had the value that a talking fish would have for an ichthyologist....As soon as the conditions of occupation sta­ 2 bilized, the ichthyologists had no more need to listen to the fish:' 0 After some initial trouble finding stable work, Svitak took a position in the Department of Philosophy at Cal State Chico. He found a local audience for his teaching, but he had less success bringing his work to a wider public. The Czech exile community suddenly showed little interest in an author who, in August 1968, had just pub­ lished two books and had had seven more in press, before the Warsaw Pact inva­ 21 sion halted their publication. Political and literary fashions had changed. When Svitak turned to translating and revising his works in English, he had to rely on his university, which allowed him to create what was effectively his own self-published imprint, which he called the "Chicoslovak Academy of Science:' It is somewhat understandable that publishers hesitated before Svitak's manu­ scripts. They had been written for a time that had already passed and a place that was elsewhere. Moreover, he never fully mastered English, and apparently neither did most of his assistants in translation. This "lonely sniper" was now much more alone than he had been as a pariah in Czechoslovakia, where people knew him and gov­ ernments tried to tame or silence him. He entered an intellectual world where he had no public. In the United States, the most successful scholars are not engaged intel­ lectuals but experts with their nose in research. And even if a writer knows his pub­ lic, he must send off manuscripts to unknown (and non-public) offices, where the manuscripts compete with thousands of anonymous others and are usually ignored. Samizdat, too, was different-in Communist Party-led Europe, it lent cachet; in the United States, it is typically grouped with vanity publishing and considered pathetic. In 1 989 things changed. The Communist Party fell from power, and Svitak rushed back to Prague. Unlike many dissidents and exiles, Svitak remained true to his belief in democratic socialism, and for five years he attacked the new free market tyrants with the same vehemence he had brought against the bureaucrats of old. He was elected to the Federal Assembly in 1 992 as a representative of the Left Bloc (Levy blok), and his tireless criticisms of the free market promptly made him the fifth most unpopular politician in a Czechoslovakia whose elites still dictated

20 21

Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 169.

13

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY optimism about the future of the new regime. 22 He published at least seven books and numerous articles decrying the new regime (while many of his old books fi­ nally made their way to press now for the first time). Unfortunately, the new bar­ barism outlasted Svitak, who died of cancer on October 20, 1 994. One of Svitak's last books bore the title, The Road from Nowhere to Nowhere. H is society was making its way from a worthless old regime to a worthless new one. His own life passed through them both, with a detour through the nowhere of exurban North America. But along the way he tirelessly reminded those who would listen (and many who refused to listen) that the road could take other turns. "I never had money or power;' he wrote in his memoirs. "Only thoughts and a be­ lief in the strength of defiance. Somehow, in all of those brief interludes of Czech history when an individual could be of some use .. . I managed to come out with the ,, . necessary questions. 23

Human, All Too Human? As a pure philosopher of humanism, Svitak did not pretend to be an excep­ tional innovator. He synthesized and forcefully reiterated the points of classic writ­ ers like Montaigne, Voltaire, and Holbach, and he shared the general perspective of the wave of young Marxists who, during years following Stalin's death in 1 953, made socialist humanism into one of the most vigorous intellectual movements in the world. What may be most remarkable in Svitak's work is his determination to bring the insights of revolutionary humanism to an ever-expanding range of human activity. Though he wrote his share of abstract philosophy and intellectual history, Svitak's critical work ranged from the history of utopianism to the future of love, through social analyses of television and sports, polemics on contemporary poli­ tics, and reflections on "automobilology" (a "philosophy of the automobile"), with critical forays into modernist poetry, nouveau roman, variety theater, and new wave film. He wrote a brief history of early Christianity,24 a sociological study of atheism in Moravia,25 and a biographical series on two renaissance alchemists and one of 7 their daughters, who was a noted poet.26 He edited an anthology of love poetry.2 According to his personal correspondence, he also prepared at least one cxperi22 23 24

25 26

27

Levy, "Ivan Svitak:' Ibid., p. 136. Vznik a vyvoj raneho kfes(anstv{; see also his anthology Zakladatele marxismu o puvodu kfes(anstvi. Otazky soui'asneho ateismu. Kouzelnfk z Londyna; and Hledan[ kamene mudrcu; Malostranska Sapfo; Opoidena recenze di/a Elisabethy Westonove. The three-part series, in one of its published versions, is entitled Rudolfinska trilogie. Sta tvaff lcisky.

14

Human, All Too Human? mental film, and worked on more than one piece of experimental theater.28 In all these fields, Svitak's fundamental approach was the same: to unearth the social and existential philosophies contained in ever-changing genres of human expression, to laud the "human potentiality" realized therein, and to condemn structures of alienation that inhibit this realization. The result: few writers have done so much to investigate the consequences of an unfailing orientation toward the integrity, free­ dom, and inherent value of the human being in human society-that is to say, to envision the cultural implications of socialism for humanity. At the heart of this mission lies art-albeit an art that rejects itself and revolu­ tionizes itself, merging with life, according to the now-classic program of surreal­ ism. Art, or perhaps more precisely the poetic and the marvelous, is what sets hu­ man subjects apart from the dull objects of an otherwise-meaningless world; and within the human world, it is what sets human potentiality apart from alienated miserabilism; it founds human hope in the ability to create. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to express faith in a humanity which seems so unworthy from the perspective of today's fashionable cynicism. After the revolu­ tionary failures of 1 968 (both East and West), humanism generally lost the atten­ tion of popular consciousness. In the Soviet sphere, dissidents turned gradually away from humanism 's collective search for realization and toward an inward­ looking phenomenology of personal ethics. In the market-capitalist world, vari­ ous post-modernisms rejected humanism ' s optimism of modernity and progress, which now appeared as a cover for domination, as a tool for subjecting the world to a universalizing logic, standardizing and controlling those to whom it has granted a phantom feeling of subjectivity, forcing an originally fragmented and variegated existence into a single modern, Western, bourgeois model of "man:' On the one hand, it would be rather unfair to blame Marxist humanists for these evils, since precisely these problems of standardization, false freedom, and misplaced optimism were also at the center of their own attacks on over-proud "modern" society, while they (and especially Svitak) criticized purely abstract con­ ceptions of a human being divorced from concrete conditions and action. Con­ temporary humanism may well be a product of bourgeois modernity (despite its broader and deeper historical roots); the question is whether its revolutionary germ can be cultivated, so that it may grow and break through its bourgeois shell. On the other hand, certain elements in the postmodern picture of humanism ring true. There is something universalizing in the basic logic of humanism. Human­ ism involves a grasping for the whole. It posits that the fragmented peoples of the

28

See various letters from 1963, with individuals like Vaclav Havel, Milan Kundera, Milos For­ man, and vera Chytilova, in Svitak's archives, box 5.

15

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY world can participate in a united humanity, that the fragmented individual is capable of becoming whole, unifying the experiences oflife into a coherent narrative, allow­ ing for the mutually reinforcing development of body and mind, entertainment and art, sex and love. The humanist perspective also enables one to see instances of domi­ nation as interrelated, as parts of a structured totality, which revolution can restruc­ ture as a whole. It should be obvious that the question here is not whether we should seek to achieve totality (or "totalitarianism'') at the expense partiality-an attempt which some dissidents and post-modernists have seen as inherent in the grand nar­ ratives of humanism and Marxism. The question, rather, is whether we recognize our domination as part of a totalizing system, which should be totally transformed. Still, it is worth taking s�riously the observation that the concept of a universal human race can smooth over or distract from valuable differences among human groups. After all, when one looks at philosophers' ideal notion of "humanity;' it tends to look suspiciously like an idealized self-portrait of the (Western, European) bourgeoisie. A person appears human insofar as that person appears bourgeois. Is humanity's supposed universality merely the false claim of one small class? Is one small but powerful part claiming to represent the whole? For Marx, this was a matter that could be resolved historically. At a certain mo­ ment, the bourgeoisie did represent the universal human interest in dismantling feudal bonds; but soon the falsehood of bourgeois universality was revealed in the separation of the spheres of exploitative, autocratic production from the sphere of civic freedom. The bourgeoisie could only represent humanity on the condition that it excluded the working class. The working class, in turn, would take its place as the universal class whose historic mission was to overcome class society and, for once, realize a genuine, integral humanity. Humanism may be a product of those globalizing forces that grant all citizens the same right and need to be exploited, and which make all societies look increasingly the same. But humanism also of­ fers the possibility of an international socialism, and of a species-wide solidarity among the otherwise-disparate peoples who can achieve it. Hidden within the bourgeois humanist ideal is the fact that individual (bour­ geois, civic) freedom (derived from the freedom to sell one's labor power on the market) serves as a mask for domination (the autocracy of the productive process). But this mode of limited freedom really did help to free humankind from the bru­ tality of feudal bonds, and Marxist humanists could see in it the beginnings of a so­ cialist freedom which could be expanded and developed through generalized self­ management. As production becomes a freely chosen activity, the creative powers of the human being can be unleashed, and the distinction between work and art dis­ solves. This conception provided grounds for re-directing Marxism away from the deterministic orthodoxy which had driven socialists to develop productive forces as

16

Human, All Too Human? their first priority, on the promise that human freedom would naturally follow. For the humanists, the socialist project must begin with and never forget the free and shared realization of human creativity. Any development of productive forces with­ out a concomitant development of creative forces is only a growth of domination. From the standpoint of the human being as a creator of culture, Svitak's human­ ism sought a new, revolutionary significance to the old bourgeois search for mean­ ing and value. As alienated society destroys old values, we are faced with a choice: we can cling to what is outmoded; we can accept the rising nihilism with hip irony; or we can tackle the task of cultural re-creation. Svitak chose the last, thus respond­ ing to the romantics' and surrealists' outstanding call for "new myth:' The challenge remained, however, to understand what kind of culture could be adequate to a new and changing social world. In this way Svitak's defense of culture went beyond tradi­ tional humanism that merely holds up great works of the past as everlasting human patrimony. Svitak's humanism was also a theory of transformations in media and society. On the one hand, Svitak decried the use of technological innovations to "ma­ nipulate" masses oflisteners and viewers. On the other hand, he was sensitive to the progressive potential of these innovations, which opened up new modes of expres­ sion, representation, and communication-new artistic "languages:' even "civiliza­ tions:' The mass media can foment and celebrate alienation; but they can also truth­ fully present it, analyze it, and criticize it in ways not open to older media. The mass media can filter and control information, but they can also integrate our fragmented society, offering common points of reference and new common human values. Within this framework of manipulated and mass-mediated culture, what is the position of art, of aesthetic creation, typically seen by humanists as the highest mode of human activity? A more orthodox materialist might have seen art as just another technology, wholly subsumed by the prevailing economy. A more orthodox hu­ manist might have seen it as a total revolt against technology, an autonomous realm that must be defended against "progress" for the sake of humanity. Svitak accepted neither of these positions as definitive. In his essay "Art in Industrial Society" he suggested a third approach, in which the human being serves as a middle term: The contemporary structuring of the problem of the arts does not manifest itself as a mere expression of the transformation of the social structure, but more profoundly as an expression of the variations of the structure of human individuality. 29

29

"Art in Industrial Society;' Mosaic: A Journal of Comparative Literature and Ideas, 1970, p. 108; my emphasis.

17

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY Art does reflect society, but it reflects society as refracted through concrete people. The task, then, is to understand the transformations undergone by the human be­ ing, in order to understand how art can and should change, and how artists (or the artistic element in every human creator) can use technology to humanize a world where technology is spinning out of human control. In this sense, Svitak's theory is not really a theory of media as ordinarily understood, as structures through which human communications flow; it is a theory of the human being as an always­ changing medium through which flows the world. This approach clearly conflicts with the denigration of individual creation that has been on the rise in the postmodern age. "The death of the author" has been 0 heralded, 3 and generations ofliterature students have been admonished for caring about the intentions of the authors of the works they study. The meaning of a work of art is now supposed to be contained in the relationship between the text and its readers/viewers/recipients. The creative act has become dispersed and has gradu­ ally disappeared within a web of interpretations, citations, unconscious influences, and reinterpretations. For Svitak, however, it is precisely this creative act that mat­ ters most. It is here that we can understand the human being's engagement with and transformation of the world. The work of art may not mean exactly what its author wants. The authors may be fragmented human beings, struggling to over­ come themselves and to communicate with others. Their works may be unfinished projects re-worked by many, many authors. But these authors are not dead-they live by the act of authoring. In the mutual creation of authors, characters, readers, and communicative sen­ sibilities, Svitak sees emerging "models of the human being�' This concept serves as a central node in Svitak's work, enabling him to synthesize the radical historiciza­ tion of Marxian political economy with the equally radical universalism of classi­ cal humanism, connecting humanistic cultural evaluation with social critique. The human being is always changing, and it is the socialist humanist's task to under­ stand those changes, to track the concrete expressions of humans' existence, to call for social and cultural forms adequate to contemporary humanity, and if neces­ sary to call for further transformations in the human being itself. But throughout this constant change, there remains some fundamental core, linking all individual humans in a grand humanity, a single species, whose collective potentiality can be recognized and realized, whose being ("species being") can be alienated but can also become, finally, whole. No two human beings, and no two human ages, are the same . But they are part of the same humanity. This postulate of shared

30

E.g. in the well-known essay by Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author;' in Jmage-Music­ Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1 978).

18

Human, All Too Human? humanity is, perhaps, the one a priori in Svitak's work. It is an idea which has been culturally and historically constructed, certainly, but it is one whose validity must be affirmed. Belief in it is the wager upon which shared value-and the possibility of solidarity-lies. "A human being;' Svitak wrote early in his career, "needs some firm point, because otherwise he is only a system of relations. This point is an ir­ , 1 rational act: 3 By studying "models of the human being;' Svitak is able to uncover, in every ar­ tistic representation, a philosophy of humanity. Every hero, every figure painted or poetized, is a model human being, an artist's image of how humans are or should be. Every narrative action is a model of human action; every drama is a model for the world performed. Even the attempt to reject such models, as in the high modernist representation of concrete, fragmented human experience, is a negative model of humanness in the contemporary age. From this vantage point, we can see both the social situatedness and the social engagement of the artist, who de­ picts human experience as it presently is, but also as it might be. Art does not sim­ ply mimic the world; it provides "an outline of the world as the sphere of human possibilities:'32 It is here that surrealism takes its central place in Svitak's thought­ as a revolutionary model for human experience and action, a practical (creative, expressive) realization of Svitak's normative cultural theory.

Toward a Surrealist Humanism Svitak's direct involvement in the surrealist movement was limited. As a student during World War II, surrealism "infatuated [his] early intellectual awakening:'33 According to surrealist Ludvik Svab, the surrealists liked him too, "not only for his character, but also for his imaginative and mordant wit;' and also for his apparently "legendary" escapades, which included an unrealized plan in the late 1 950s to pub­ lish translations of Andre Breton and Robert Desnos in the guise of unknown Sile­ sian bards named Ondtej Breton and Robert Desnos (the later name would mean, in Czech, "bringer of dread") . 34 One of his early poems was received well enough by other Czech surrealists to be included in the movement's anthology of its work 5 and the work of its collaborators between 1 938 and 1 968.3 But in his college years Svitak became interested in the humanism of the young Marx and in the project of 31 32 33 34 35

"Philosophy for Ishka;' p. 1 13 . "Interpreting a Work. of Art;' this book, p. 40. Letter to Franklin Rosemont, April 20, 1979. Ludvik Svab, "Za Ivanem Svitakem" ("For Ivan Svitak"), Analogon 1 3 ( 1 995), p. 1 07. "Separation" ("Rozchod"), in Surrealisticke vychodisko (The Surrealist Point of Departure) (1938-1 968), ed. Stanislav Dvorskf (Prague: Ceskoslovenskf spisovatel, 1 969), pp. 57-9. Also included in this collection were two fragments from Svitak's then-still-unpublished Unscien­ tific Anthropology. In the present book, "Separation" is printed as "anti-essay 1 1 :'

19

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY rejuvenating Marxism from its Stalinist decrepitude. He began to frame his battles in the terms of contemporary M arxism rather than classic surrealism, addressing questions of alienation rather than repression, consciousness rather than the un­ conscious, subjectivity rather than objective chance. He gave himself over to writ­ ing critical essays modeled more on M arx's than on Breton's, and his poetic output became more prosaic and direct, less magical and (as the examples in this book show) more didactic. His mature approach, he later reflected, was "less pleasing" than his earlier attention to poetic magic, but he felt it was necessary to address his political concerns. 36 Nevertheless surrealism remained a constant point of refer­ ence in Svitak's work, and it may be this surrealist connection, more than anything else, that sets Svitak apart from other M.arxist humanists. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Svitak maintained contact with the group of surrealists active in Prague. One of his poems was printed in the first issue of the Czech surrealists' journal Analogon, which was published in 1969 before the re­ 7 imposition ofcensorship halted the journal's publication for another twenty years. 3 As a scholar, Svitak organized and participated in conferences about surrealism, his contributions to which are published in this book as essays VIII-X. In 1 967 he collaborated with Vratislav Effenberger, then the leading theorist of Czech sur­ realism (and, as it happens, a colleague of Svitak's at the Czech F ilm Institute), on a co-written article that is printed here in abridged form as essay XI. In this piece, Svitak and Effenberger defended surrealism against its then-numerous detractors and laid out a broad program for the movement's way forward under the changed conditions of the postwar period. In the early moments of his exile, Svitak worked with the Paris Surrealist Group to organize a series of discussions on surrealism and art, in conjunction with the group's exhibition on "The Pleasure Principle;' co­ organized with the Prague Surrealist Group ( March-April 1 969). Svitak's last major involvement with the surrealist movement came in April of the same year, when he signed his name to the "Prague Platform;' an international surrealist manifesto written by the surrealists in Prague. As Svitak became a leading object of the neo-Stalinist state's wrath, unfor­ tunately, it grew difficult for him to maintain connections with surrealists in his home country. As he would explain later to Franklin Rosemont, he cut off cor­ respondence with them, since any letter received from him might incriminate its

36 37

Letter to Franklin Rosemont, April 20, 1 979. "A Crisis of Consciousness" ("Krise vedomi") Analogon 1 ( 1969), pp. 4 1 -44. When Analogon resumed publication in the 1990s, it printed two more pieces by Svitak: an untitled interview in Analogon 5 ( 1 991), pp. 42-3, and "Separation;' which had earlier been included in Surreali­ sticke vychodisko (see note 35), in Analogon 13 ( 1995), p. 1 07.

20

Human, All Too Human? recipient.38 He connected with the Chicago surrealists, but only from a distance. Though he was still engaged in Czechoslovak issues, in addition to local Califor­ nian politics, he fought other battles than theirs. He looked upon surrealism then as one might look on "an old love you do not sleep with anymore" 39 -but whom you love no less. Surrealism did not provide the central theme or overt framework for most of Svitak's writing, but it underlies nearly all that he wrote. Surrealists were his favorite sources of quotes and comparisons in his aesthetic theorizing. His poems and sto­ ries are driven by surrealist themes (magic and alchemy; love and desire). His hu­ manist concepts are tinged with and re-signified by surrealist terms. And the fact that surrealism was under attack by artistic fashion as well as state repression made Svitak all the more eager to jump to its defense. The movement's determined sur­ vival showed that it had principles which it refused to abandon, in an age when "it is generally considered a scandal for anyone to have any principles at aU:'40 For all its iconoclasm, surrealism represented the hope that humans could create shared and lasting values in an increasingly worthless world. Values springing from the one great value-love. Love spreading through its one great medium-poetry. Po­ etry triumphing in the one great human act-revolution. This, according to Svitak, was surrealism's model of humanity: "a triad of love, poetry, and revolution:'41 Love. The binding force of human society. The energy of poetry; the poetics of revolution. " [T] o love is to live, and it is precisely in love that [the modern human being] seeks an escape from mechanisms of alienation under which it is buried. The modern age leaves, perhaps, only love as a field of adventure and mysterY:'42 Not the commodification of sex, of course, nor the patriarchy of old pseudo-loves, but the "meeting of unique personalities:'4 3 This is the perspective of an individualist, but of an individualist who understands and revolts against his being alone. Love makes possible humanity, as a connection of otherwise isolated and alienated humans, who before the modern age were separated in various communities, and who in and after modernity are separated into their lonely or lost selves. Love makes possible human values which cannot be scientifically justified, but which come from within and are, therefore, more human than old values derived from a distant God-mad love, beyond proof and reason, against the age's cynical remove. Love makes it pos­ sible to redeem what modernity has given us and alienation has taken away.

38 39 40 41 42 43

Letter, Jan. 8, 1 976. Ibid. "The Surrealist Image of Humankind;' this book, p. 125. "Surrealism and Art;' this book, p. 97. "Clovek a laska" ("The Human Being and Love"), in Dejiny a soueasnost, 1 968, no. 2, p. 30. "Prolegomena to Love;' this book, p. 84.

21

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY

Poetry. A cipher for the humanistic-the valuable, magical, beautiful-against the scientific, which is neutral and can only gain value from outside itself. Science cannot care about humanity. Humanity-poetry-can give value to science. The human being is a part of nature and can be studied objectively and abstractly, by science. But human experience can only be adequately analyzed (said Svitak) by understanding the subjective freedom of human creativity. The interpretation of poetry (art, the humanities) must be as subjective and concrete as is the experience of the poet (the human creator, artist) . ... art is a definite form of expression of the world .. .it is sovereign in its immanence. It does not need to be justified to other forms of knowl­ edge, neither to science nor philosophy, neither to metaphysics nor ideologies. Art is a self-sufficient component of culture and there is no higher criterion for its appreciation.44 Art is "self-sufficient"; its sphere is distinct from other spheres; but this does not make it art for art's sake only. Art must simultaneously develop according to its own laws and respond to the world around it. Art responds to the world, but "in its own specific way." 45 Poetry is not a retreat from society, but a unique mode of engagement. Poetry brings marvel to an immiserated world. "Life consists of ordinary moments. If you want to make them extraordinary, you must make the most of them. Then they become marvelous. This is precisely where man's entire fate lies."46 The task before us: to poeticize the world, to make our everyday life marvelous, day after day. Poetic practice is the materialist base of magic. Revolution. Love as the driving force, poetry as the driving form, of transfor­ mation. The human being understood as creative action, which transforms the world and in turn the human being, individual and species. Svitak, inveterate critic of modernity, was-it must be understood-a modernist. His surrealism, while decrying civilization, was also the vanguard of a movement toward a more advanced society. He sought artistic forms that could oppose and transform their world while being adequate to their age. He skewered those avant-gardes that would merely present and affirm the alienation of their world; but he commended the new waves that could master new techniques of registering alienation on the way toward overcoming it. He looked for art that was "of the epoch" while reaching beyond its epoch-art that was truly of its age, and never just in fashion. He sought

44 45 46

"Art in Industrial Society;' p. 1 05. Ibid., p. 1 14. "Philosophy for Ishka;' p. 1 1 6.

22

Human, All Too Human? a social revolution that could realize and enact the creative potential adumbrated by the epoch's art.

Master of Paradox Svitak's work, nevertheless, was not without its contradictions. He would at 4 some moments describe the human being as fundamentally rational, 7 while at another moment he would describe human meaning as founded on "an irrational act;'48 and he would look to the surrealist unconscious for salvation from abstract, rationalized domination; he would call love impossible to define,49 and he himself would analyze it and offer definitions; 5 0 he would defend philosophy against its positivist detractors, 51 and he would attack philosophy as meaningless next to con­ 52 crete art and science; he would praise consumer society for liberating cultural and political expression from the exclusive sphere of elites,53 and he would decry that same society for plunging its consumers into idiocy. 54 We might criticize Svitak for not reconciling these opposing claims-but we can hardly blame him for reflecting the contradictory character of modern society itself. "Thinking;' he wrote "gener­ ates p aradoxes:' 55 Thinking about these paradoxes generates questions. In Svitak's ambivalent approach to modernity, does he sometimes err too far on both sides-too quickly rejecting certain innovations, while too readily latch­ ing onto others? Does he underestimate the emancipatory potential of computers and the legitimacy of sexual liberation? Does he overestimate the greatness of free verse, nouveau roman, and New Wave film, even suggesting that there might be a single "art of the epoch;' alone adequate to its moment in history? 56 Might it be, rather, that it is the nature of contemporary society (both market-capitalist and statist) to create such ambivalent, two-sided innovations? Just as it is the nature of this society to generate such temporality, in which each epoch replaces another epoch, each claiming universal validity and enacting formal hegemony, excluding other potential forms? Might it be a goal of socialism to overcome this endless sue-

47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

E.g. in his monographs on Montaigne, Voltaire, and Holbach, contained in The Dialectic of Common Sense. Bohemian Being, pp. 150- 1 . "Definition of Love;' in Songs for the Queen of Sheba. "Clovek a laska;' ibid.; "Prolegomena to Love;' ibid. E.g. "Philosophy for Ishka;' p . 1 22. "Conscience of the Nation?" this book, essay III. Ibid. Ibid. "Master of Paradox;' in Art in the Manipulated World, p. 35. "The Art of the Epoch;' this book, essay IV.

23

THE WINDivI ILLS OF HUMANITY cession of epochal fashions, to create a new freedom of forms and a new solidarity of the present with the future and past? Does Svitik, likewise, sometimes overrate the value of unique individuals and at other times the value of universal, shared humanity? Does h is valuing of con­ crete individuality lead him occasionally to overlook the challenge of community? (How else could he have written an essay claiming that such an alienating, indi­ 57 vidualizing machine as the automobile "liberates man"? ) In his love for "unique personalities:' does Svitik pass over the common love for everyday acquaintances, for the singular but non-unique-the love of the common? May it be that mod­ ern society is made of a certain relationship between universality and uniqueness, between humanity and individuality, and that revolution calls not simply for lib­ erating one or the other, but rather for transforming both poles and changing the relationship between them? And finally, is "humanity" still the best available idea for conceiving and re­ creating a human-valued world? Do we need the universal in order to h ave the collective and the global? The essential in order to have the valuable? The indi­ vidual in order to love poetically and rebel against totality? Do we h ave to be humanists in order to be socialists? Do we need the human, when we h ave the so cial? This book should open these questions, not close them.

This Book, Again Svitik was not a great editor of his own work. Even aside from the imperfec­ tions of his English and the crudeness of his skills in graphic design, his self-edited writings can be difficult to read. Often the same piece would appear in two differ­ ent collections under different titles; at other times the same title would appear in different collections above completely different pieces. Sometimes there is no table of contents, or there is one that does not correspond to the pieces contained. Svitak tended to favor quantity over quality, anthologizing mediocre or repetitious pieces alongside those more clever and original. And while his essays (which make up the bulk of this book) were rather straightforward examples of an established genre, much of his work straddles the fields of narrative, poetry, and philosophi­ cal reflection, challenging the reader to figure out what the author is trying to do. All the more so since many of the pieces were originally written as samizdat in a context where their satirical targets and underhanded references were im­ mediately understood by their limited audience; once the pieces are pulled out of this context, they can be difficult to follow without additional explanatory mate57

"Man and the Automobile," in Art i11 the Ma11ip11/ated World, p. 95.

24

Human, All Too Human? rial-which I have attempted to provide here in footnotes, all of which are my own unless otherwise indicated. For the ordinary essays contained in this book (numbered with Roman nu­ merals), sufficient context should be provided by this introduction and by notes clarifying specific references in the texts. 58 The pieces that come in between them (numbered with Arabic numerals) call for a few more words. Some of these pieces are fairly conventional short stories and poems. Others appear more like didactic and philosophical treatises in verse, while others, like the Svitak's "monologues of things;' are enigmatic prose poems (or, as he put it, "playful combinations of ap­ pearances and words" 59 ), which at one point he envisioned as part of an astrologi­ 60 cal calendar with a different message for each day. Elsewhere he described these monologues as a "form of communication with the self, a re-ligio, a tying back to­ gether for those who have no religion . . . the isolation of the speaker intermingles ,, 1 . . wit h t he genera1 structure o f h uman existence. . . . 6 Even at the height of his popularity, Svitak never received the same recognition for these writings as he received for his critical essays. But for him these writ­ ings seem to have been at least as important. He translated and had them printed them in numerous self-published volumes, and he repeatedly encouraged Franklin Rosemont to publish them or help him find another publisher. 62 Here I've tried to select the best of those pieces, placing them together with essays whose themes they share or (sometimes obliquely) engage. I hope that when the reader sees the essays and anti-essays (as I call them) side by side, the work of re-ligio, of recon­ nection, may be taken forward. Some pieces appear here in English for the first time for the first time, in my translation. Other pieces had already been translated and self-published by Svitak and his collaborators,63 and my work has been to revise them, consulting the Czech sources wherever possible, in order to return to them some of the clarity, verve, and 58

59 60 61

62

63

I apologize beforehand, however, for the incompleteness of these notes. Svitak provided little or no information surrounding most of his references. Countless hours of searching was not always enough to fill in what Svitak left out. "Monologue of a book called The Philosopher's Stone," in The Philosopher's Stone, p. 123. Letter to Franklin Rosemont, February 1 7, 1 982. "Muza a autor," ("The Muse and the Author"), in Kamen mudcu, unnumbered final page of book. Letters, February 1 7, 1 982; November 29, 1 984; December 22, 1 985; letter to Nancy Joyce Peters (copied to Franklin Rosemont), December 16, 1 983. In certain cases Svitak credited others with his translations, usually without clarifying exactly who translated which pieces and what his own role was in the process. It seems likely that Svi­ tak actively participated in most of the translations, since they contain similar idiosyncrasies and errors. In any case, he seems to have approved the final English versions, and so I refer to these as "his" translations.

25

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY grammatical correctness that was lost in the earlier translations. Wherever appro­ priate, I have accepted the author's translations ofwords and phrases, even when the translation alters the meaning of the earlier Czech text. In other cases, where Svitak's translation is unclear, is obviously incorrect, or lacks the rhetorical force of the source text, I have done my best to improve it. This has sometimes meant re-introducing language that Svitak had cut from the translation, but which I think contains significant meaning that should be preserved. At other times, when Czech sources have not been available to me, I have been forced to give my best guess at the intended meaning of unclear passages and to render this meaning in the clear­ est possible English. These tasks were complicated by the fact that Svitak repeat­ edly revised his writing, such that there sometimes exist more than one text in the same language, in addition to significant differences between translations and their sources. I have been forced to make editorial decisions, not all of which I am able to indicate in the notes to each text. Translation purists might regard the result as something of a mongrel, and I beg their forgiveness. One translation decision deserves further comment. The Czech language has two root words relating to the human: "Clovek" and "lid-". In traditional human­ istic discourse, the former is translated as "man;' and the latter as "human" (lid­ sky) or "man-" (as in "mankind;' lidstvi!lidstvo). Svitak followed these conventions when translating his own work. However: nothing in the Czech roots discloses the gender of the human in question. I have attempted to preserve this fine Slavic­ language trait, translating Clovek variously as "a person" or "the human being" and lidstvi!lidstvo as "humanity" or "humankind:' The result is not always elegant. But sometimes the good must take its place before the beautiful while we work our slow linguistic revolutions.

Joseph Grim Feinberg

26

Essay I: The Human Being and Utopia

Essay I : Th e Human Being and Utopia An ancient myth relates how the Titan Prometheus, son ofJapeta, stole fire from the Olympian gods in order to help a suffering humankind, and how he was made to suffer for what he had done. Zeus shackled him to a rock in the Caucasus, where every day there came an eagle to pluck out his liver, until at last he was freed by the hero Heracles. Aeschylus's rendition of the story of Prometheus, 1 describing a con­ flict among divine powers, is also a celebration of revolt against the rule of gods. Marx considered Prometheus the greatest figure of the philosophical pantheon. The Myth of Prometheus, of course, goes on. After people had taken fire for themselves, Zeus determined to punish them, ordering Hephaestus to create Pan­ dora ("all giving"2). Each of the gods bestowed her with attractive features, and Zeus sent her to Prometheus's younger brother Epimetheus. When, in Epimeth­ eus's house, Pandora opened an enchanted box, out of it flew all the plagues of humankind. Pandora quickly closed the box, and only hope remained inside. That fabled hope that dies last. Pandora's box went on to play so great a role in the spir­ itual development of European humanity that, in the successive waves of thought that have flowed over three millennia since the origins of the ancient myth, the tides of time have shaped and polished human hope into ever clearer and more distinct forms. Great philosophical systems have appeared and been forgotten; the ideologies of social strata, nations, and classes have come and gone; and hope, at the bottom of Pandora's box, has outlived it all, the human being's unstillable hope for the future, for Prometheus's fire, as if it meant to confirm the inexhaustibility of the human- urge for happiness. People cannot live without hope, for hope is both their motive for action and their future, their goal. A world without hope is a world without a future, without vistas, a dead or dying world. As long people live, they have hope, they believe in hope. But the need for hope is felt not only by individu­ als; whole groups share this need-social classes, nations, groups of nations. And it could be observed that the worse historical conditions have been, the higher human hope for change has risen. That is why history, which appears as an almost uninterrupted tale of hunger, misery, war, plunder, and exploitation, is also a his­ tory of human hope. Not only economic law, but also hope makes history. Aeschylus's rendition of the story of Prometheus A trilogy of three plays about Prometheus is typically attributed to Aeschylus. Only the first, Prometheus Bound, has survived to the present. The presumed second and third plays are Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer. ''.All-giving" A traditional interpretation of the etymology of Pan-dora. -

2

-

27

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY The human belief in a better future has, in the course of history, taken on three forms. TI1e oldest, the mythological form, finds expression in those varied stories that emerged independently among almost all peoples, telling of a golden age. In the oldest literary relics of the historical age there lies preserved, in the ruins of thought, a memory of that age when people lived without state organization, with­ out war, and in peaceful work. "Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae vindice nullo. . . " 3 The myth of the golden age is a real and in-part faithful reflection of the fact that class society, into which the most developed parts of the world stepped some four to six millennia ago, rightly appeared to people as a cruel iron age, in comparison with those primordial societies which were perhaps simple and poor but were also without exploitation. TI1e myth of the golden age is thus one of the earliest testi­ monies to the hopes of people in class society who kept their lost freedom alive, at least as a memory, because from that memory has been drawn that indispensible elixir of human existence-hope, the spark of Prometheus's torch. The second variant of faith in the future was the more complex and demanding solution provided by the maj or world religions. In the iron chains of slave rela­ tions, hope assumed its only possible expression-faith in a future life after death. From the memory of a time long past, hope became an escape from reality, an illusion and opiate of working people in the havenless conditions of slave states. Yet even in this religiously determined historical form, hope left lasting marks, as seen in the visions of Biblical prophets who foresaw an age when "they of the city will flourish like grass of the earth;'4 a time without war or violence. Though dis­ torted, the great idea of equality among people, along with the primeval practice of religious communism of consumption, provided feudal revolutionary movements5 with a source of revived hope. The prophets' visions were the "Marseillaise of the 1 6th century;'6 leading to attempts to realize equality, communism of consump­ tion, and the creation of a golden age on earth.

'fiurea prima sata est aetas, quae vindice nu/lo .." - "Golden was that first age, which without coercion .. :' (Ovid, Metamorphoses, line 89.) The next line continues: "sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colcbat'': "spontaneously, without laws, nurtured the true and good:' "They of the city will flo urish like grass of the earth" - Psalms 72: 16. Since Svitak quotes from an archaic Czech translation, I've used the King James translation here. Feudal revolutionary movements - A reference to movements like that of the radical Hussites based in Tabor, Bohemia, who called for a society of equals, without private property, as the apostles were said to have lived. At the height of their revolutionary movement in the early 1420s, new arrivals to Tabor were reputedly required to leave their possessions in the town square so that they might be shared by all. The "Marseillaise of the 1 61' century" In 1 524-5, for example, German peasants marched to battle under the banner of Thomas Muntzer's prophetic sermons, which called on the poor to rise and bring about a Christian communism. .

4

6

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28

Essay I: Tlze Human Being and Utopia Hopes with social significance-utopias-cannot be separated from the social relationships of class societies, from the fact that in the past the hope for better conditions, for a freer life, could take no other form than that of unreal fantasy. Utopias offered compensation for existing living conditions, but they could not turn into a real program of liberation. This was not caused by insufficiencies in people's powers of thought but by the given circumstances of slavery, feudalism, and, in part, capitalism, whose social relations, which in their social relations, in the reality of political struggle and historical possibility, did not allow the reali­ zation of the great human desire for happiness. People were not utopian because they so chose, but because they had to be utopian in order to express the hopes slumbering in their minds. Just as prisoners' do not improve their situation by the consciousness that they are in jail, but rather by their view through the bars, which enables them to stand living in their cells, so too powerless people, condemned to live under the economic laws of societies with minimal productive powers, could ease their minds with utopian imaginings of a future society. 7 Utopias as programs for the future have always appeared in revolutionary periods of history, in periods of rupture and transition. It becomes timely to think of the society of the future when new horizons become visible and when the dis­ cussion of such questions takes on practical meaning. At the birth of Greek culture, which marked a departure from millennia of primitive simplicity, there appeared the myth of the Golden Age. With the discovery of a new world and a new cosmos, the Renaissance posed new questions about social development, resulting in the 8 classic literary utopias. The utopian socialists reacted similarly to the Industrial Revolution. And today's epoch also creates a need for new answers, new programs, and new hopes. Utopianism is a manner of thinking about reality that reflects, above all, peo­ ple's wishes and hopes, their vision of a future, their striving after an ideal social order, and only then reflects reality itself. Utopia thus has certain traits in common with ideologies which mix insight and experience with wish and illusion. Every ideology contains a great deal of utopianism-something that the ideologies' pro­ ponents need not be aware of, for they may take the utopian elements of their ideologies as established facts, indisputable experiences, or revealed truths. One can even say that ideology has a stronger influence on people the more it dispenses 7

Utopias as programs for the future This would seem to be the third of the "three forms" of human hope which Svitak mentions at the beginning of this section, but which he never ex­ plicitly enumerates. 7he classic literary utopias e.g. Thomas More's Utopia ( 1 5 16), Thomas Campanella's City of the Sun ( 1 602), and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis ( 1624). -

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29

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY with rational analysis of facts and openly appeals to a utopianism that is irrational, un-demonstrable, and hence not prone to be refuted by reality. Central to this way of thinking is the purity of the utopian urge, which does not regard mistakes and misdeeds as such, but regards them merely as regrettable events. Utopias can be categorized by their content-by the ideals they propagate-or by whether their creators and supporters are conscious or unconscious of their utopias' utopian quality. Some utopias, such as Thomas More's, were consciously created as models that transgressed the limits of their contemporary reality. The authors of other utopias, however, such as Rousseau, developed their thoughts un­ der the assumption that their opinions were verifiable knowledge and were the necessary result of a chain of causes. In science and politics this distinction is sig­ nificant, because it makes a practical difference for social development if we are able to determine whether slogans like "back to nature" and "perpetual peace" or "classless society" are utopian or are real prognoses. Utopias do not emerge in history by chance, nor are they the capricious fan­ tasies that they may seem. Under closer examination it appears that utopia as an expressive form of human hope in the future, or more precisely as the human rela­ tionship to the future, is called up in life by concrete social relations and conflicts; and even the content of utopia, in all its richness of fantasy, is not arbitrary. Utopias in different historical epochs differ greatly from one another-classic from mod­ ern, bourgeois from socialist. Even in the frees� play of their imagination, authors do not completely leave the ground of social relations, which are reflected in their intellectual projects. Though it may be paradoxical, utopian imaginings of the hu­ man future have a real influence on social development, on the concrete present. As manifestations of the human desire for happiness, they are also the first step toward it, because they formulate the goal of hope, the target of desire. History does not do away with the insights of earlier generations. It stores them, passes them on, and deepens them. Scientific perception thus takes over the positive, objective, valid aspects of the traditional stock of ideas, while criticizing its errors and illusions, such that the utopian tradition becomes, in the Hegelian sense, aufgehoben: both superseded and preserved. The social utopias of former times are thus contained in today's scientific analyses of humanity's future. Mod­ ern socialist humanism joins scientific and "utopian" aspects in a qualitatively new synthesis, in which "utopianism" loses its former character. In this sense today's socialist humanism is not a pure utopianism, for it does not represent a way of thinking unconnected with reality. The principles of socialist humanism derive from the historical development of modern society. They represent probable lines

30

Essay I: T11e Human Being and Utopia of development of existing trends, projected into the future. They contain human­ ity's dreams, the same way a dream is contained in the head of a waking person. In this sense socialist humanism is the heritage of Promethean daring, of the hope at the bottom of Pandora's box. [ . . . ] If people want to realize their dreams, they must not sleep; if they want to make hope into certainty, they must make it happen; if they want to turn the utopians' boldest thoughts into action, they must approach these thoughts scientifically, not utopistically. We approach the universe today with rocket motors, not with the wings of Icarus. The future of humanity and of freedom does not lie in any utopian theory, but in the practical activity of living people. And in this sense we are all not only passive witnesses to the realization of old utopias; we are conscious actors on the stage of history, co-authors of the dramatic transformation of illusion into reality. For the most part the old utopians never asked how we were to arrive at their ideal societies. They pictured the utopian society as something already attained; they depicted its founder as a humane monarch or statesman; and they expect­ ed the social transformation to come from some automatic moral and spiritual perfecting of humankind. None of them could imagine that precisely this, the most difficult task, combining humane theory with inhumane practice, the task of bringing about this kind of society, would be the work of a class, a class whose great historical mission still awaited fulfillment, a class which was only beginning to form in the utopians' age. None of them formulated the conviction of modern socialist humanism that the great social change, the liberation of humanity, would not be given to them as a gift, but that people must free themselves. The dialectic of utopia and science, hope and actuality, dream and reality, is continuously unfolding in the history of human thought. The human being over­ comes hope by realizing it, kills the dream in order to think awake, takes scientific control over the future in order to conquer space for new utopias. Hope transfor­ med into the reality of socialism provides an impulse toward still more certain hopes for a new personality of communist society, stepping out of the horizon of our longings like Aphrodite from the waves of the Aegean Sea. The human being, that tenacious and stubborn dreamer, who at the dawn of civilization had nothing but the hope at the bottom of Pandora's box, has created from that hope conditions which were once accorded only to the Olympian gods. Prometheus's daring, once the quality of a Titan, now speaks to us from the pages of a program for the future with precise scientific language. Utopia, for millennia beyond the reach of human practice, joins with the activity of groups, classes, na­ tions, and states, against the dark background of past histories of war, misery, and exploitation, to make communism shine on the people of the future.

31

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY

And here lies the meaning of socialism as a humanistic challenge. Socialism is not a cybernetically run society; its production is not automatically controlled; its meaning lies in humanism, in the drive toward the development of all sides of the human personality, in liberation from the pressures of ignorance, poverty, and fear. Socialist society was imagined, by older utopians and by more recent scientific thinkers, as a society in which the human being freely develops its capacities and its mind, cultivates its feelings, and enjoys the beauty of the world. The young Karl Marx, when he first formulated his conception of communism in the spring of 9 1 845, identified the future society with true humanism, with the liberation of hu­ mankind. Either socialism will realize those ideas from which it sprang, the ideas of socialist humanism, or else the program of Marx, the program of human free­ dom, will remain unfulfilled. 1 0 The guarantee that this program will not remain unfulfilled is contained not in the concept of communism but in the people themselves who create communist society. Or more precisely, it is or is not contained in them, according to how they act. But people will, most likely, not allow this dark outlook to become reality. Above all because, unlike in millennia past, when people were dragged along by history as victims of their needs, when they were passively tossed about by social forces and were unable to control history, when they were prey to incessant wars, hunger, and exploitation-in the twentieth century people are attempting for the first time, after a hundred thousand years, to take control of history; in our century for the first time people have learned that the world can be changed. And they are changing it. For just that reason they will not act against their own deepest inter­ ests; they will not, on their own, lead themselves to a society of mechanized robots and prefabricated mannequins. They will strive to develop themselves; they will strive for the human content of communism. That is why it is not only the distant future that matters but also the current activity of people; it matters that people know there exists no communism without humanism. If people insist otherwise, either they lie or they are not defending the communism of Karl Marx, but rather something different. Communism is not only technologically advanced society; the United States, West Germany, and 9

IO

Karl Marx, when hefirstformulated his conception ofcommunism in the spring of 1 845, identified thefuture society with true humanism -In the spring of 1 845 Marx wrote his "Theses on Feuer­ bach:' The "Theses" do discuss the liberation of"human society;' although they do not explicitly lay out a conception of communism. Marx discussed communism at greater length beginning in the spring of 1844, in his so-called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and then again beginning in the fall of 1 845, in the manuscript known today as The German Ideology. ...will remain unfulfilled. This is the last line of "The Human Being and Utopia" that Svitak incorporated into his English article "Marxism and Humanism:' -

32

Essay I: The Human Being and Utopia Sweden are also technologically advanced. Technology is very important, but no technology in the world can, in itself, ensure communism, because it is a question of human relations, of the character of the human being. And that is the origi­ nal heart of the matter: technology without a transformation of human relations amounts to a dark future. Communism without humanism would be the inhu­ man technocracy of contemporary pessimistic utopias. 1 1 People themselves are responsible for communism, and no one can relieve them of that duty-neither a strong individual, nor weapons, nor institutions, nor technological perfection. People themselves are the guarantee of communism when they act humanely; otherwise there is no such guarantee. That which is not humanism cannot be com­

munism either.

11

Contemporary pessimistic utopias I.e. the dystopias of the twentieth century, such as Huxley's Brave New World ( 1 932) and Orwell's 1 984 ( 1 948), both of which were discussed in a section of the Czech version of Svitak's article that has not been translated here. -

33

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY

anti-essay 1 : the monologue of Alexander's sword The metaphysical conception of humans' moral freedom is abstract nonsense, founded on the preposterous assumption that freedom is a part of humans' be­ ing, a privilege of being human. This arrogant notion that people have about themselves is not, of course, j ustified by any historical, concrete evidence, such that the only way to untie this Gordian Knot of human moral responsibility is to refuse to think about humanity's lot in these terms, that is, in terms of whether or not the human being is free. The metaphysical cobweb from which the Gord­ ian Knot is spun can only be cut through; it is as much of a waste of time to try untangling a speculative knot as it is to untangle a Gordian Knot. The first precondition for solving the mystery of the Gordian Knot is to understand that all wisdom is always also knowledge of how to get something done, that wis­ dom is a verifiable, practical skill, such that true freedom is always the freedom to act, not only the freedom to think. For that reason we must always ask not only whether or not we are free but also "For what have we been freed?" "What have we been freed from?" "Are we free to act?" "Are we capable of making our thoughts into reality?" The second precondition for mastering the Gordian Knot is to reach the dialectical understanding that it is never a question of the abstract freedom to think-this can never be taken from you-but always is a question of the concrete freedom to satisfy specific needs. Since the age of Baruch Spinoza, human needs have been identified as freedoms grasped and freedoms have been understood as grasped necessity, such that it is not possible to separate them. People are always only free within a cage whose bars are made of needs, and even the roomiest cage does not cease to be a cage. The human species gains abstract freedoms only when an individual has no needs and is, therefore, dead. To ar­ gue that the human being is free because he or she has moral choice obscures the problem and confuses the individual. The freedom of the concrete person is doubtful if the person's action depends on the moral norms of abstract freedom, derived from abstract humanity, and not from the situation of the acting individ­ ual. Then indeed the human being appears as a being free by definition and not determined by those natural needs, social institutions, and concrete situations which limit or make impossible "free" choice. The complexity of these situations can exceed the entanglements of the legendary knot itself, which Alexander of Macedonia split with his sword. The Gordian Knot of human freedom cannot be untangled; it must be cut apart with action.

34

Essay II: Interpreting a Work ofArt

Essay I I : Interpreting a Work of Art Who Is the Human B eing?

In the forest of contradictions that is life, 1 we constantly interpret the mean­ ing of the world, and it is precisely this that distinguishes us from all other living creatures. We share with animals the world of biological determinism, but we also have the cruel and beautiful freedom to step beyond that determinism and inject our own meaning into the world, to stamp the world with our human behavior. Human beings must either be able to interpret the world as a human world, as a system of relations between Me and You, or else they do not reach the level of their own humanity; they remain animals, and they waste the gift of becoming something more. They are afraid of being human, and in order to escape their human fate, they interpret the world as a system of emotive reactions to outside stimuli-like animals. This pushes them to inhuman behavior and to their own misfortune. The meaning of the world evades them, and the more they are aware of this, the greater is their need to bring humanity back into their lives by artificial means-through art, or more precisely, through the consumption of art. The interpretation of a work of art does not depend on aesthetic-philosophical assumptions; it is a question of human existence and human behavior. To ask how we interpret a work of art is to ask who the interpreter is (who is the human be­ ing?), what is being interpreted (what is art?), and how this interpretation is pos­ sible at all. Long before Andre Breton wrote those introductory words to Nadja, "Who am I?"2 the same question was posed by Rimbaud and Gauguin, Montaigne and Pascal, Socrates and Aurelius Augustinus. 3 Modern science poses it too. Truly great artists care little about art but take up the burden of being fully human. Their works are a cry for human freedom, a roar of the human being on its mission in the cosmos. A work of art is a document of human freedom, an awareness of human­ ity's exposure to the world, an expression of horror and surprise at the human be­ ing itself, an attempt at salvation from death, a struggle ofJob against the darkness. The laws of the day and the passion of the night stretch the artist out like on a bow, and its shots-which the aesthete does not even see-fly into the void, into the sky, "In theforest of contradictions that is life" In the Czech version of this article, Svitak attributes these words to Viteslav Nezval, a founding figure of Czech surrealism. Nadja, Andre Breton ( 1 928). These words, as Svitak writes, form the first sentence of Breton's book. Aurelius Augustinus Augustine of Hippo, or St. Augustine. -

2

3

=

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THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY and back to the artist, unseen like the ''.Arrow in the Blue:'4 The viewer of a work of art is left with the external expression of a human being's struggle with the void, as the work of art is a scar left by the artist in the struggle with her- or himself. A scar of which artists are so ashamed that they have a desire to destroy either their work or their own selves, because in their work the artists see the objectified horror of their human lot, a testimony to their betrayal of the happiness of being with other people, a monument to their alienation from the essentials of human existence, which cannot be expressed through art, but only through silence and action. The greatest works of art are those that were never recorded, because they were lived­ but in such a way that they could not be expressed. The works that have come clos­ est to this goal, the greatest works of human despair that take the form of artistic creation, have had to be destroyed. The greatest artistic creations are those that we do not know, which were burned or which faded away at that moment when the inimitable song of a human being about him- or herself was sacrificed for the sake of his or her own or another person's happiness. Happy people do not create works of art-they live. And as, according to Hegel, periods of happiness are empty pages of history, so in the time of concretely existing individuals, moments of happiness are empty and not written on the pages of their lives.5 In modern cybernetics the human being is regarded as an information chan­ nel, as live communication with the world. The human being is a receiver of stim­ uli, which it then passes on. It is a transformer of stimuli, but it differs from a com­ mon transformer or telephone in one fundamental way. Unlike all communication systems where transmission causes degradation of information-noise (negative information or entropy)-the human being is probably the only being to which the law of entropy, that is, the degradation of information, does not apply. Only the human, in communicating with the world and other people, is capable of aug­ menting information. It is an anti-entropic factor. Perhaps that is so because "the human heart, beautiful as a seismograph;'6 surpasses all the limits that are applied to the mere mechanisms of communication systems. The human being is either a transformer of its age, in which case it achieves its own authenticity, or else it is only a transformer of alternating personalities and then is completely ineffective. If it does not control its own flow of experiences, then it is manipulated by chance just as it tries to manipulate chance. Unaware that it is free, it is the victim of its own and others' manipulation, including the manipulation of love. This occurs 4 5

6

'l\.rrow in the Blue" - Presumably a reference to Arthur Koestler's book by the same name. Long before Andre Breton... the pages of their lives. - In this paragraph I have included a num­ ber of phrases from the original that Svitak had deleted in his first English translation. "the human heart, beautiful as a seismograph" - Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1960), p. 160.

36

Essay II: Interpreting a Work ofArt

������

in direct proportion to the human being's effort to make its time meaningful by manipulating situations instead of existing. The human being is a natural detection system composed of senses, emotions, and rational thoughts; and recently it has added the artificial equipment of science, technology, and art; the human being is a system of impulses which it transforms as they flow through. In the phylogenesis of the human species one speaks of three epochs of evolu­ tion: first, the formation of the human body-that is the evolution of the highest mammals, or hominization; next, the formation of reason in the so-called sapien­ tizing epoch; and finally the phase of human culturization-that is, the maturation of personality. This evolution of the human being's position in the cosmos over the last million or so years is perhaps reproduced in the development of an indi­ vidual as the maturation of the body, reason, and personality-that is, human life is a temporal repetition of the evolutionary phases of the species, hurrying toward an unfolding of personality. To the extent that the human being is even ready at all to embark upon the final phase of the creation of the self, which is the most difficult phase. The freedom to create ourselves, to make ourselves, is the most difficult hu­ man program that we can take on as people. We can continually run away from it, reproducing constantly, as punishment, the feeling of alienation, the inauthenticity of all that is lived, in a vain attempt to attain repose. The law of human life is just as unbreakable as the law of nature, and the human being cannot escape itself and its human mission in the cosmos no matter how much it submerges itself in the magic of nature that it carries within. Because precisely then, when for a moment the person has escaped the self in ecstasy, a still more intense awareness comes of debt toward the self as a being that transcends simple nature in its very species­ conditions. 7 The human being is not only a natural detection system; it also a creature of action which intervenes in the world. The meaning of the world appears to it in the form of codes or symbols which it interprets, while its activity is unambigu­ ous and does not need interpretation. The irreversibility of time makes human ac­ tion unique, and this, through humans' actions-not through what humans think about those actions-makes the human being the author of the meaning of the world and the creator of values. The human being's praxis is stronger than its rea­ son; praxis continually changes the human being, and only praxis has importance for what the human being really is and how it exists. The balsam of compassion or the caustic of jealousy, the search for motive or the analysis of meaning cannot

7

Jn the phylogenesis.. . its ve1y species-conditions. English translation.

37

-

This paragraph was cut from Svitak's first

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY alter what has been done. Time is a cruel child, rigorously moral. Nothing forgives, everything remunerates and punishes according some law of good and evil, which is the stamp of the cosmos in us. 8 To be free, to create oneself, means to be responsible for oneself, not in the narrow, moral sense of some convention, but in a more essential manner. We must have the courage to be what we are because only that courage gives us the strength not to be what we are. The human being creates its destiny in a lived spasm of exist­ ence, as an antinomy of desire and reason, a dialectical ambivalence, a permanent rebel conscious of the value of her or his protest, a splintered ego in revolt against what I am, a perpetual uprising of the self against itself To paraphrase Breton, hu­ 9 man beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all. The interpretation of life is this convulsion comprehended. Only when one has achieved authentic being can one enact an essential, im portant, and truthful interpretation of the world-and of art and people. Only our own existence enables us to understand a work of art, and that understanding is purely subjective. At the same time, it frees us from being consumers of art. The consumer's attitude, which sees art as a substitute for life, devalues art in relation to life; yet at the same time it opens the way to something far more substantial than the consumption of works of art: their creation. Then the human being becomes a creator of works of art, only to discover that the process of artistic creation is just another mask of self-alienation. Then the human being matures to the next phase-silence and action.

What Is Art? We cannot understand art if we do not understand the human being, because art is an expression of the human being. Only then can art also be other things, beauty, mimesis, catharsis, an image of reality, myth, magic. Art is an actual doc­ ument of the existence of the human being, actual because it exists, not because of what the artist says about him- or herself (the artist can lie). Art bears the elementary marks of humanity: spontaneity, experience, and uniqueness. Every art-and especially poetry, art's highest form-is a communication of feeling and an attempt to express the meaning of experience. Art does not therefore attain "truth" of the same order as science, because the poetry of science is truth, where8

Time is a cruel child ... the stamp of the cosmos in us. These two sentences were cut from Svi­ tak's first English translation. Perhaps Svitak, having later been so unjustly punished by time, doubted whether time really operates by so strict a moral code. human beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all. From Nadja, p. 1 60. The follow­ ing sentence in Svitak's essay, commenting on Breton, was deleted in the essay's first English translation. -

9

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Essay II: Interpreting a Work ofArt as scientific precision in art is poetry. Art is a more human form of awareness than science because it springs from immediate, practical experience; it perceives the colorful concreteness of a materially poetic world; it perceives an essential and private revelation of a miraculous dimension, which science has no way of expressing. In a triad of the constantly unfolding time oflife, of the valuable time of conscious experience, understanding, and developing essences, and finally of 0 the ecstatic time of creation, 1 through the empiricism of fact, the analysis of motifs, and the interpretation of motifs, facts, and the self, the artist approaches knowledge and expresses the mystery of existence. Thus art records human ex­ istence more essentially than does science; it records salvation in the face of the confusion of the world; it vitalizes action; it creates the myth ofliving experience. Art is a myth about life whose language is understood not only as a set of symbols but also as an indication of a deeper reality, as an apparition of secret, mysterious contents. In the causal but illogical world of concrete events, art gives sacred significance to human experience precisely because it embodies that di­ mension of mystery that is inaccessible to science. Art is a portrait of human ac­ tion; it is an image of human experience-not the empirical experience of mere external action, but the experience of the human being's self-realization within the possibilities of its existence. And this is the crux of modern art. Its imitation of experience is an imitation of the human being's alienation from itself; it is an expression of new experiences. In the novel, this is achieved by incorporating multiple measurements of time; in cubism the artist introduces a simultaneity of impressions; in surrealism, a coincidence of perspectives. Art is the same magic that it always was; only, through experimentation it creates new means of express­ ing myth and the tragedy of the human being. Revolutions in art are therefore responses to the transformation of the human being, to changes in the forms of human existence. Through the painful interpretation of self and world, through shifts in styles of thinking, and through an upheaval of traditional values, humanity is engaged in a magnificent cremation of the erstwhile human type. Art expresses this an­ thropological transformation by altering human sensibility, interpreting it more or less authentically and subjectivizing that objective world of scientific knowledge as much as can be done by a self-creating subject. 1 1 If these changes elude the inter­ pretation of a work of art, whether by the critic, the creator, or the consumer, then

10 11

Jn a triad... the ecstatic time of creation This grammatically cumbersome phrase was cut from the essay's first English translation. interpreting it... a self-creating subject. This half-sentence was cut from the first English trans­ lation. -

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39

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY 12 aesthetic interpretation is merely a disease of language, "as stupid as Esperanto:' Modern art reproduces the chaotic, primeval state of the world at the birth of a new type of human being, which enters as a newborn child, with clenched fist, from the safety of the mother's womb into the uncertainties of the self as a person. We come historically and personally out of the darkness; we touch the light and pull back into the darkness again, like a bird that in the night flies astray through a window and into a room. It injures itself against the walls and flies back into that same darkness from which it came. 13 Art encompasses not only the aesthetic, secondary aspects of life but also the question of the foundation of the human being, its philosophical and existential meaning. Art is more than a mirror of reality; it is an outline of the world as the sphere of human possibilities. 14 Art is born not from knowledge of the world but from a tension between the human and the world, in a certain poetic enthusiasm. Creators must set aside their own consciousnesses and egos, because creators are more than that: they are what they create. In order to interpret art properly, we must understand the changes in the hu­ man being's way of looking at the world, because every work bears witness to a concept of the world. The history of art is, in essence, a series of the mythologies that have ruled over artists. After Greek, Christian, Stoic, Renaissance-philosoph­ ical, and modern-dialectical interpretations, modern art offers us a new myth of the human being amidst specialization, fragmentation, alienation, functionali­ zation, and personality manipulation. Art thll3 appeals to contemporary human sensibility, because art is a contact with uniqueness, an appeal to subjectivity. In this respect an artistic experience resembles true love, the merging of human per­ sonalities which blaze toward each other through all the things they are, burning their own time in a catharsis that is like an authentic artistic experience that leads through deeper levels of life toward the deepest abyss of death.

Interpreting a Work of Art If an interpretation of a work of art is to be authentic, the act must be carried out by the interpreter's whole personality. If the interpreter is also the creator, the interpretation is both of the self and of the world. But the consumption of

12 13 14

'as stupid as Esperanto." Svitak attributes this phrase to Blaise Cendrars, but I have not lo­ cated the precise source of the quote. which enters as a newborn child. . .from which i t came. - This passage was cut from the first English translation. An outline of the world as the sphere of human possibilities In the Czech version, Svitak att­ ribu�es this last phrase to Ernesto Grassi, whom he quotes in German, without indicating the preose source of the words: "ein Weltentwurf menschlicher Moglichkeiten:' -

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40

Essay II: Interpreting a Work ofArt art is also an act of self-interpretation. We become interpreters already in the questions we pose and in our human situation as a whole. Only this sort of artis­ tic consumption is important, since only personal interpretation does not drag art down to the level of entertainment and distraction. In living we constantly interpret the world; we form relations and perceive the world as a network of relations. Reality as a whole does not enter conscious experience; only fragments do. The world appears fractured, relative, and chaotic, not subject to order, idea, or purpose. But this is only an appearance. The fragments are integrated by the individual, by the individual's existence, which makes a unified shape out of the world. The artist and the work are a homogeneous union of lived and imagined reality, an expression of that interpretative model according to which the artist understands the world. Artists understand the world through what they know, but also through what they do not know, because their social, personal, and oth­ , is er determinations are what Erich Fromm called a "socially conditioned filter; which makes certain processes and situations unconscious, uncommunicated, 1 and incommunicable. 6 The artist gives expression to the repressed aspects of human existence (with­ out always being conscious of this fact), creating, more by silence than by artistic language, a complete picture of the world. However unambiguous the artist's lan­ guage, in the work's lacunae there is boundless space for interpretive variation. This suggests that authentic interpretation is, if not impossible, highly problematic, because the most essential thing, the personality of the creator, is so unstable and complex. The uncertainty of interpretation is further increased because essential aspects of the repressed reality of existence, sexual life in particular, are taboo, even though the rhythm of the creator's sexual life is undoubtedly a decisive factor in the content of the creator's work. If the heart of the creator's artistic communica­ tion cannot be grasped, then the only authentic interpretation would be the work itself. But the uniqueness of the creator's personality makes it impossible to get to the essence of the work, because whatever meaning the viewer injects into it will always be influenced by the viewer's subjectivity, not by the experience that gave life to the artist's work. The concept of authenticity is relative because, if we accept it literally, we have to confess that an authentic interpretation is unattainable for the same reason that

15

16

''socially conditioned filter" This phrase appears, for example, i n Erich Fromm's Beyond the Chains ofIllusion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1 962), p. 1 1 5. "Because their social... incommunicable." This passage was cut from the first English transla­ tion. -

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41

LOVE, SURREALISM, AND REVOLUTION ,i "elliptical integrals cannot be played on a violin: 7 In the end, we always inject ourselves and our meaning into the objective structure of aesthetic suggestions; we filter the work through ourselves. Every art critic who is not aware of this suffers from the illusion of objectivity. Critics tell their own stories through the works they critique. Even the best aesthetician is merely a kibitzer, an interpreter of something that 8 needs no interpretation. 1 Art, as a living creative process, does not need the crutch of objective interpretation. Objective interpretation is alien to its essence and to a deeper understanding of the world. At its base, art is communication between the naked personalities of a creator and an audience. This is why true artists have always been fascinated by the human being's concreteness and by the human being in love, to which everything, art included, can be sacrificed. What kind of inter­ pretation, then, is authentic? None. Any. The meaning of art is simply that it speaks to us. What it tells us is not objective because what we perceive may be exactly the opposite of the author's objective meaning. And what remains in us is only what we are capable of grasping. The concrete human being was, is, and will remain the sovereign interpreter of its own authenticity, of its life, and of its art.

/,/,,

_.-

l11r -

fl�,

tr' '0i1 ______ ! --

17

"elliptical integrals cannot be played on a violin." Svitak attributes the quote to Norbert Wie­ ner, without providing further information. Wiener is known for having studied the math­ ematics of vibrating strings. Even the best aesthetician. .. needs no interpretation. In the earlier English translation, this sentence was embedded in a lengthy passage making the same point about the needlessness of interpretation. Perhaps Svitak convinced himself of the needlessness of belaboring the point. -

lS

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42

anti-essay 2: introduction to dialectical materialism

anti-essay 2: introduction to dialectical materialism The Fundamental Question of Philosophy It is semantically redundant to ask whether I love or whether I do not love, because if I love, I do not know that I love, and if I do know, I do not love If I knew that I loved, I would not love, because if I loved, I would love, and I would not know anything, not even that I love On the other hand, if I know that I do not love, I am free, open to the world and to others, and love emerges in spite of my knowledge that I do not love Meanwhile if I do not know whether I love or not, I live in an illusion, and I suffer, because to be uncertain about love means already to be at love's end Yet if I do not know that I love, I love, because I love without knowing, I love and love and know nothing and love I do not know if I love or not, but I know that I yearn for l ove, before which all interrogation becomes irrelevant

The Primacy of Matter The seducer seduces the seduced but by being seduced, the seduced becomes a se­ ducer, seducing the seducer and succeeding If the seducer succeeds in seducing the seduced, was he successfully seduced by seduction or was it the seducer that seduced him? And was the seduced successfully seduced by the seducer, or did she in turn seduce the seducer, since his seduction was not sufficiently seductive? Who was seduced? The seducer by the seduced or the seduced by the seducer? But the seducer did not seduce the seduced, so he was not the seducer. What, then, se­ duced the seduced seducer and the seductive seduced? The seductiveness of being seduced B ecoming seduced

43

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY

The Law of Contradiction As usual you are where you shouldn't be and you aren't where you are Where are you when you aren't where you are? As usual you are where you are not and you aren't where you should be Where are you when you are where you are not? As usual you are where you should be so as not to be what you are But if you aren't what are you? As usual you aren't what you are because when you aren't You are nowhere you are not And the eagle of time circles over our heads, as usual

The Transformation of Quantity into Quality If I sleep with You I don't sleep If I don't sleep with You I sleep But I'd like not to sleep in order to sleep with You But I can't sleep if I can't sleep with you I sleep when I am not sleeping and when I'm not sleeping I'm asleep When I sleep with You I don't sleep because I am sleeping with You but if I don't sleep with You I'm not sleeping because I am sleeping alone I want to sleep but I neither sleep nor sleep with you.

44

anti-essay 2: introduction to dialectical materialism Because I am tryi ng to decide logically according to Carnap 1 whether I should sleep alone or with you but if I don't sleep with You, I can't sleep precisely because I am not sleeping with You With which it is proven that sleep and you are incommensurate values, while you doze off in my arms proving so nicely the truth of the dialectical law of the transformation of quantities into new quality

/ Rudolf Carnap

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Leading advocate of logical positivism in philosophy.

45

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY

Essay III: Conscience of the Nation? The Literature of Consumer Society People and Paper Just like an individual person, Western culture stands and falls by its under­ standing of who it is that creates culture-that is to say, by its self-consciousness, its consciousness of itself. Twenty-five centuries of the European tradition of classical, Christian, and liberal humanism means the continuity of a certain concept of the human being, or in specialized terminology, a certain philosophical anthropology. Today this is reflected in people's consciousness in at least three ways: 1 . as a scientific concept of distinct aspects of the human being which are exam­ ined by individual disciplines; 2. as a generalizing, speculative, and philosophically or theologically determined foundation of the human being; and 3. as an artistic image of concrete people, who are always in one way or another influenced by scientific knowledge or by the moral postulates of religion, even while the writer need not be conscious of this fact. At the bottom of every work of art is hidden a certain understanding of hu­ man fate, such that the literary work is always a message about the meaning of life, whether written well or poorly. In my opinion science and art are capable of saying everything fundamental about the human being in verifiable language, and of expressing the objectivity of experiential data and the subjectivity of feelings, far better than all philosophies put together. One of the most fundamental thoughts of the twentieth century is the conviction that the scientific concept of the human being, together with the artistic images which reflect the self-understanding and feelings of contemporary people, are a sufficient basis for resolving old questions about where1 the human being really is. The abstraction of the human being has disappeared. People and paper remain. [ . . . ] In every culture, in the very foundations of its literature and in the attitudes of its writers, there have been constructed certain assumptions about people, a cer­ tain conception of the human being. In European tradition, of which Czech writ­ ing is also a part, it is easy to identify at least four main philosophical models, while where This may have been a misprint in Svitak's Czech text. Kde ((who:' -

46

=

"where': while kdo

=

Essay III: Conscience of the Nation? in the Soviet bureaucratic dictatorship only one is visible, and in America's open society it is difficult to distinguish different models from one another, because there are many. The society of the open horizon-a field of new human practice in consumer society-does not bother to link any body of literature or artistic form a priori to European tradition or to abstract concepts. The various philosophies of the human being are European discoveries. The Christian and existentialist conception has deep roots in the past, while the Marxist and analytic (positivist) approach is relatively new and is the fruit of last century's faith in science over philosophy. Both Comte and Marx would be very surprised that their extremely anti-speculative stances, disdaining any philosophy that was not identical to sci­ ence, could be charmed into speculation, presented as a philosophy of the human being and hybridized with Heidegger, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, Mao Zedong, and Frarn;:oise Sagan. [ . . . ] If we reject the philosophical blackmaii2 that encrypts concrete personalities into general categories of being, and if we deny to the phi­ losophy of the human being the right to fetter human individuality with a priori postulates of whatever character, then we must also accept the conclusion that the philosophy of the human being is an pointless game. In reality there are only peo­ ple and paper, human individuality and its images on paper. [ . . .] What consequences does this have for literature? A new self-consciousness of the human being in consumer society manifests itself above all as the end of typification in the novel, as the disintegration or transformation of the classic ap­ proach to describing human fate. After Joyce, Proust, and Kafka, protagonists of subjectivism, the conservative archaism of novelistic typification lost its justifica­ tion. [ . . .] The writer dramatizes lived experience itself; the novel is no longer a fresco of society. Only, as the surrealists asked with good reason a half century ago, why do we need novels, or any art at all, when writers produce for a market, manufacture reading material for consumerist idiots, and dedicate themselves to the lucrative forms of exhibitionism which earn money on the art market? Lit­ erature has become an article of consumption like everything else, and in the de­ aestheticized world of consumption it is nonsense to pretend that the writer is the measure of humanity, the way the poet or the philosopher was in the Enlighten­ ment. Poetry is an exception precisely because it so unsellable. A second conse­ quence of literature's position in consumer society is still more significant, because it changes the very mission of the writer. A higher level of understanding of human fate was always the privilege of the educated-prophets and priests, writers and scientists-who towered over the illiterate masses. They have lost this privilege in

2

Blackmail - ".fontaft:' Svitak might have intended something different, like charlatanry, ".forla­ tanstvf'

47

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY consumer society, where there is no more illiteracy and the media of communica­ tion make ordinary people into "educated" people of a sort, while the elites become so specialized that they lose the ability to see the whole of society, life, and history. The new civilization is also a civilization of leisure, in which people can devote themselves to their hobbies, cultivate their own artistic forms, and become ama­ teur producers to a much greater degree than in the past. To be sure, only those who publish the very best works can be truly called writers, only those who are in a sense the Olympians of this athletic mental discipline-but they are certainly not speakers for the people. Their function has fundamentally changed. While their popularity and income, fame and prestige grew, they ceased to embody the peak of society's scale of values. They now speak for themselves; they do not speak in the name of God as prophets or in the name of truth as scientists. The only societies which maintain this savior myth about literature are bureaucratic dictatorships. And this is the third consequence of the change of function ofliterature and writ­ ers. In Sovietized society the writer must still play the deeply conservative role of a speaker for the people, of course with institutional prompting. But where the making of history (or politics) is a public affair-a res publica-the writer ceases to be a substitute for the politician. Art is art and not an allegory; literature is not a political metaphor; and the conscience of the nation is not sought or found in literary manifestoes. A free people does not borrow its conscience from the world of letters, because it has its own.

The Literary Image of the Human Being Modern consumer society does not call for the creation of philosophical conceptions of the typified human being, because it multiplies artistic images of modern concrete personalities. It is true that the various and varied literary works of contemporary consumer societies do not offer any unified model, but in their understanding of today's human being certain dominant ideas appear, reflecting the new lived reality. The first dominant feature is the conviction, which grows organically out of contemporary science, that the human being is not free, or that its freedom has very narrow limits. This idea manifests itself as behaviorism in the analytic tradition, where the freedom of the individual is limited by biology, and as social limitedness in the Marxist tradition, where the human being is co-created by history. How does personal freedom enter into this determinism? It does not enter as long as we conceive the problem as one of mutually exclusive alternatives and if we presuppose, in the tradition of classical philosophy, that we are either free to choose or are programmed, that we are either predestined or are the creators of our unique individuality. Then we remain in a situation with no way out. But if we

48

Essay III: Conscience of the Nation? accept precisely this contradiction as the way out, then strangely enough it is con­ sistent with the paradoxical fact that we are and are not free, that we always are and are not determined by the situations of history. [ . . . ] Consciousness of this is the foundation for revisions of notions of free will and responsibility; it is a fundamen­ tal change in European humanism, called forth by the development of consumer societies. The modification of older notions about the human being manifests it-. self as a Sovietization of Marxism and as an Americanization of positivism, that is, as a de-Europeanization of twentieth-century thought in new intellectual and social conditions, as a de-philosophization of the theme of the human being, as a replacement of speculation about human essence by science and art, exactitude and imagination, which I regard as progress, not regression. Where is the human being's freedom? It disappears in the coexistence of freedom and necessity, because if we recognize historical limitations, within which the concrete individual acts, making decisions in unique situations of personal relations, then the undeniable freedom of the will is only one among many elements of action, and not the key to understanding the human being. The second dominant idea of the literary image of the human being is the fact that the hero has lost its moral quality, or more precisely, has ceased to be a model for action, a type embodying some kind of super-personal values. This has hap­ pened simply because the hero has become a unique personality that transgresses external measures-all the more as psychological analysis reveals the composition of this personality. The human is singular; the sphere of humanness is a sphere of individualities. Writers have always known this, but philosophers and scientists only recently recognized that the concrete person is not a Xerox copy of some orig­ inal but is itself unconditionally original and not a manifestation of some essence of humanness that exists independently of it. Hand in hand with this discovery of the uniqueness of humans' being, which took place nearly simultaneously in literature and in philosophy, there comes the consciousness that we do not live in an objective world of science, but that we live in a concrete, subjective world, in the specific set of situations, places, and times which Jan Patocka called osveti, or "surrounding-world:' 3 This Czech translation of the German anthropological term Umwelt (Merkwelt, Wirkwelt, Ideenwelt, Machtwelt) first appeared in excel3

Jan Patocka Influential Czech phenomenological philosopher, who ap­ pears to have escaped Svitak's earlier condemnation of speculative philosophy. Osveti As explained in the next sentence, the term comes from biology, specifically from what was later called "biosemiotics;' used to conceptualize animals' perception of the world. The German terms, Umwelt (literally "surounding-world;' but also the ordinary German word for "environment"), "Merkwelt (roughly, the "remarked-world"), Wirkwelt ("seeming­ world" or "functioning-world"), Ideenwelt ("idea-world"), and Machtwelt ("power-world") refer to various asp'ects of the individual's experience of the environment. -

49

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY

lent studies of the surrounding-world of animals. By analogy with these studies it can be said that the world as an objective entity is a rather unreliable abstraction, because de facto there exist four billion human surrounding-worlds, rather than an objective world. Moreover, these surrounding-worlds are constantly changing, as the individual surrounding-world of a child, boy, adult, and aging person change. A concrete surrounding-world is, first, a sensory field for meaningful impulses; then it becomes a set of affective reactions; then a rational structure of concepts; an erotic and sexual locus; a background of concepts; a sphere of power; a currency market; a force-field of influences; a scene of conflict between truth and illusion; a set of values; a change of existential meaning. These dimensions of human sur­ rounding-world continually overlap, moving one layer after another to the center of existence and forever changing the composition of layers of our being, layers which are latently omnipresent in the young and the old. As long as the human being reflects in its consciousness the uniqueness of its surrounding-world, then it will not act directly and its thought about itself is not an imprint of its lived reality but is some kind of distorted reflection, many times deformed precisely by the fact that the mirror is the human being itself. The birth of ideology, so pre­ cisely depicted by Marx almost one hundred fifty years ago as a phenomenon of social consciousness, here has an individual parallel. A lived surrounding-world and a person's consciousness of it become a personal ideology, a false conscious­ ness about one's own subjectivity, a collection of truth and illusion, a mechanics of mistakes, which however are not understood as mistakes but as the truth of the individual about itself. The paradoxical character of this true illusion, this illusive truth of the individual, which furthermore finds itself in temporal and situational dependency, makes out of conscious life a kind of personal myth, a collection of conscious and unconscious lies and self-delusions, which however have for us the quality of truth, inexplicable to those who have not lived it. The third idea that dominates modern literary representation as well as philo­ sophical reflections about the human being is by far the most radical: the depend­ ence of the human being on time, on the limitations of human existence. Humans' being in time is the basis of every dialectics which hopes to reach the core of real people; and yet scientific knowledge of the state of development of contemporary literature expresses this being more precisely than the greatest philosophical work 4 of our century, Being and Time. Writers apply the dialectic of life to the individual more adequately than scientists and philosophers, because the theme of literature is the individual, the image of the person, which is not verifiable as truth or lie-it

4

Being and Time By Martin Heidegger, first published 1 927. -

so

Essay III: Conscience of the Nation? is only its own, but that is enough. The literary work bears witness to the trans­ formation of the human being in time, to the changing personality, such that life manifests itself as a cycle of developmental phases, as a construction and destruc­ tion of lived experiences, as an oscillation between the subjectivity of feeling and the objectivity of "fact;' that is, as existence in permanent revolution of the self, in which we reproduce ever new appearances of humanity. In this way the modern literary work is very close to the true reality of the human being, which disappears as a type, as an anonymous essence, precisely because it flows like the time in Dali's painting5 and reincarnates itself in the endless forms of Buddha. It is impossible to capture this uniqueness of existence, this unscientific anthropology, with exact concepts or philosophical reflections, because this is a priori the inaccessible ter­ rain of literature and art. People have always known of themselves that they are hostages to time, that is to say, that they are mortal; but consciousness of time as a disintegrating element of all philosophy is a relatively new discovery. If human essence changes, what is essential in it? If it is as variable as people are, where is the norm of variability, and if the theme of existence sways between the cry of birth and silence of death, what can still be its meaning? People in consumer society and their images in contemporary literature are no longer motivated by values but rather by needs. The development of personality is understood as a succession of farmings and satisfyings of needs, which the per­ sonality manages in its specific way, such that the personality is only a succession 6 of changing structures, which vary their composition (pattern ) , responding to external impulses. The driving forces of development are needs, physical, biologi­ cal, social, spiritual-and it is the change of the pattern of these needs which leads to personal revolution against earlier forms of identity in the name of a new project of being, a new "I." Developmental crises are like clashes of new needs with old structures of satisfying them, while love and death, suffering and freedom, work and play, money and beauty create a changing thematics of the human approach to death. Literature expresses this reality of thought of the human in the consumer era without moral judgment, without value constraint, and without the confusing speculations of philosophy; for this reason it is literature that has inherited the erstwhile role of myths and philosophies-to represent wisdom.

s 6

Dali's painting - The Persistence ofMemory, painted in 1931. "pattern" In English in the original. -

51

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY

Writing as Lived Wisdom Writing did not originate as a collection of poems, plays, and novels, but as a collection of words which have been preserved from the times when there were not yet specialized fields of philosophy and literature as they are known in the modern age, and when these words were spoken by prophets. Three thousand years ago there existed no boundaries between literature, philosophy, and religion; there existed only myths, which unified what appears today divided by disciplinary boundaries and by the artificial barriers of forms of consciousness. The Greek term "mythos" originally meant nothing other than "word;'7 hence a collection of words or of tellings about gods and heroes, commentary on the beginning and end of the world, stories about seeking the sacred-about the mystery of being. Myth is there­ fore rudimentary philosophy; it is a struggle with the question of life's meaning, and at the same time it is the most ancient poetry and wisdom in nuce. Modern literature has become such a myth again, on a higher level, unifying that search for the meaning of human existence outside of specialized categories and outside the dogmas religious faith. Today's writers have absorbed scientific concepts and philosophical conceptions of the human being. They construct their images out oftheir own experiences about people, and they struggle with the meaning of the individual's existence the way earlier prophets sought binding moral norms for the nation and the people. We could say literature has philosophized itself, but let us say rather that it has become wiser. As writers become thinkers-tellers of individual fates-their influence has changed; they no longer offer examples and embodied values, types calling to be followed, but only unique cases which en­ tail absolutely no moral consequences for the reader. In the chaos of the modern world we are simultaneously in the middle of the action and irretrievably on the sidelines, because there is no center; there are only centers of the self, without any signposts pointing the way of values. In this way, then, in open societies the writer has also ceased to be a conscience of the nation or a speaker for the peo­ ple, because people's consciousness is constructed and transformed without the aid of privileged prompters. Only in Soviet-type societies does the government still assert pressure on the writer to produce models of the values of the governing ideology, which leads oppositional writers to be-against their will!-placed in the position of speakers for the people or the conscience of the nation. Maybe they really are speakers for the people or the conscience of the nation, but it is impos­ sible to affirm or deny it. That is why it seems problematic to me when we ascribe

7

"mythos" originally meant nothing other than "word" In fact, mythos meant something more like "story" or "plot;' but the conclusion Svitak draws still holds true. -

52

Essay III: Conscience of the Nation? to Czech writers, at home or abroad, such a role, which they do not even ascribe to themselves; democratic consciousness cannot be made from above, through the medium of any kind of intellectual elite, even if the elite is completely comprised of geniuses. The consciousness of national interests, that is, the work of history, can­ not be bypassed through denunciations of "power;' through literary gems, cultural 8 postulates, and "apolitical politics;' which bring writers' views to bear on some­ thing as un-wise as global politics.

Writers and Power Writers and other intellectuals have been at odds with power since time imme­ morial. Since the days of Ovid they have been silenced with exile; since Socrates, with violence; since Thomas More, with public execution; and since Stalin, with mass purges-whenever their conscience becomes a nuisance to politicians. The antagonistic relationship of intellectuals to politics is, however, only a marginal note to history, which again and again reconfirms the incompatibility of moral cri­ teria with that flow of blood, violence, and brutality, that rolls over human events like Niagara Falls-whatever intellectuals may think about it, whether they speak 9 out or keep quiet-because the Muse Clio cares little for art. This discord does not, therefore, mark a new tragedy of Central Europe or some peculiarity of the 10 fate of Czech writers under the government of Gustav Husak. It is built into the relations between power mechanisms and those intellectual activities which run up against the barriers of churches, party apparatuses, and state powers. It has always been like this, but only in this century have intellectuals-especially scien­ tists, ideologues, and writers-gained unprecedented influence, because after mil­ lennia of the illiteracy of the masses and the exclusivity of culture, the power of the 8

9

IO

apolitical politics (nepoliticka politika) A favorite concept of Central European dissidents, who in the 1 980s sought to emphasize their rejection of state-oriented politics while engaging in oppositional cultural activity. Clio The Muse of history. tragedy of Central Europe A reference t o Milan Kundera's "The Tragedy o f Central Eu­ rope;' published in the New York Review of Books on April 26, 1 984 (vol. 3 1 , no. 7), in which Kundera argued that countries like Czechoslovakia, located historically within the Austrian and German spheres of influence, belonged to Europe, from which they had been "kidnapped" by Russian Communism. The article, which elicited a great deal of sympathy from Western observers and provoked a great deal of controversy among Central Euro­ pean oppositional writers, was apparently one of Svitak's motivations for writing this essay (another section of the essay, not translated here, deals extensively with Kundera's text). Gustav Husak Leader of Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1 968, responsible for curbing earlier liberal reforms. -

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53

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY word has taken on directly political meaning. Writers and other intellectuals have begun to play a disproportionate political role and have become convinced that whoever controls the word controls also the masses-that is, controls the means of social control. In an age of revolutionary upheaval it may be true that the masters of the word, writers and journalists, rule over politicians themselves-but that is a very temporary phenomenon, because as soon as conditions stabilize and new rulers are compelled to paralyze their own revolutionary movement, these same intellectuals become tremendously suspect and can end up before the firing squads precisely because they still believe their words and programs more than they be­ lieve in the reality ofthe new elite. In open societies intellectual are not speakers for political movements: the strength of journalists is great, but it is not decisive, and it is therefore not at all possible to compare the incomparable-that is, the role of intellectuals in a bureaucratic society and in a democratic system. In dictatorships intellectuals, writers, scientists, and philosophers, must believe in the power of words, meanings, images, because it is their mission and their bread; but precisely this exaggerated faith in the strength of the fruits of their intellect makes them vulnerable and clumsy in their own politics. The Prague Spring was a classic exam­ ple of how literature as a substitute for politics cannot, at a critical moment, offer any alternative to professional politics. Intellectuals can have temporary success in situations when power is failing or is disabled, and when they can infect the masses with their occupational illness-that is, with faith in the power of words, faith in the triumph of ideas or moral principles-all of which turns tragic if the prophets of ideas do not arm themselves beforehand. Intellectuals do not understand power, perhaps because if the monstrosity of history chilled their enthusiasm for ideas they would lose their faith in the value of thoughts, images, and meanings. I do not therefore assert in what follows that Havel, Vaculik, Kundera, and Kohout, 11 those outstanding representatives of Czech culture, are "politically wrong"; I only affirm that all writers, almost without exception, take toward politics positions which fail ipso facto in confrontation with apparatuses of power. We must therefore look upon the relation between politics and conscience with other eyes than those of the writers themselves, because their field of vision is a priori partial. In Bohemia certain structural ties of intellectuals to power take on especially tense form. In our modern history literature has played an outstanding role, be­ cause for centuries it was the only outpost of national culture, a consolation after politicians' defeat in their struggles for an independent state, for the federalization

II

Vaclav Havel, Ludvik Vaculik, Milan Kundera, Pavel Kohout Prominent Czech writers who, in the years following 1 968, were actively opposed to the Communist-led regime. Details of their work and political activity are discussed in a section of this essay not translated here. -

54

Essay III: Conscience of the Nation? of the monarchy, for Czech schooling, and for personal freedom. The two decades 12 of the First Republic were a bright exception, but that is all. Up to the present this well-known reality exalts writers as mouthpieces of national consciousness, which in fact they are, but only because "Czech" mechanisms of proper power have been for centuries paralyzed by the Austrian regime, Nazism, and Soviet imperial­ ism. This unnatural state of affairs, unknown in open societies, but here shared throughout the Soviet Bloc, raises the self-consciousness of writers in the same measure as it distances them from having real influence on day-to-day politics. The downside of this phenomenon is the general conviction that power in itself is a negative phenomenon-which is not true-and that politics is a matter from which upstanding people must stay away-which is a familiar objection raised by philistines against democracy-while superficial appearances in contemporary B ohemia make precisely this kind of reasoning uncontentious and even turn it into obdurate faith. Not only the average person in Prague, but also the foremost Czech writers see the existing powers as an amoral phenomenon, as an abstrac­ tion, and not as a specific power of a certain stratum, group, elite, and apparatus. In undemocratic societies every power must appear as alien, because it is represented either by foreigners or by native emissaries of foreign interests. So it is understand­ able that anonymized and demoralized power makes itself felt only as an antithesis to personal conscience or national interest, which in fact in this specific case it is; but power is not so always and everywhere. Power in itself is a priori neither immoral nor moral-it is and has always been dependent on the set of political relations around it, which we cannot just abso­ lutely reject on the conceptual plane of moral reflection. The writer in a totalitarian dictatorship must become depoliticized and escape the dictatorship's power, if she or he does not want to die intellectually or physically. But this is a Gordian Knot, because it is impossible to avoid politics. Our contemporary national problems arose in history, or more precisely in the history of the Cold War, and not in the personal conscience of intellectuals, and they are resolvable in history, not in the lonely consciousness of the writer. Understanding past, future, and present history, and understanding politics, are one and the same: what appears as past is only yes­ terday's politics; the present is a transformation of politics into history; and a po­ litical program is an outline of the history of tomorrow. The situation of the writer and artist who is caught up in the concreteness of actual fates, ipso facto eludes the impersonal mechanisms of political power or the hidden motive forces of history.

12

the First Republic The first independent Czechoslovak state, existing from 1 9 18, when Austria-Hungary was broken up after World War I, until the Munich Agreement broke up Czechoslovakia in 1 938. -

55

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY So the strength of the writer as a mirror of concrete people becomes a weakness when the malicious dialectic does not allow the writer to understand those hidden causes, whose results the artist so masterfully depicts. Politicians deal with the interests of groups in history, not the existential-phenomenological conscience of personalities; they aspire to change the relations of groups, not the integrity of the individual, and it is therefore not appropriate to measure their accomplishments in moral categories, whatever those categories may be. Morality has always existed alongside politics, literature alongside power, and the reform of consciousness or conscience has always been the privileged realm of the Church. The individual's conscience, however, has not always been understood as a compensation for or antithesis to power. To see a solution in this direction means to give in to those same mechanisms of power which in the abstract we condemn. The personal in­ tegrity of one's own conscience may shine like a great star upon the dark backdrop of politics, but it does not concern the powerful.

Consciousness and Conscience in the Subconscious [ . . ] We must begin to raise historical, social, political, and global questions, because we cannot go on compensating our offended national consciousness with literature. The belief that we can survive with mere words is a curse on the Czech nation. There was a poet who knew this to be true, who did not claim for writers the role of the conscience of the nation, perhaps precisely because he himself was the embodiment of that conscience when he said, .

if only we, writers, really were the conscience of the nation, if only we were the conscience of our people. Because, believe me, I am afraid that we have not been this conscience for many years, that we have not been the conscience of the multitudes, the conscience of the millions-no, we have not even been the conscience of ourselves. If anyone else si­ lences the truth, that can be a tactical maneuver. If writers silence the 13 truth, they lie. (Jaroslav Seifert)

13

Jaros/av Seifert A prominent poet, who in 1984 would become the first and thus-far only Czech recipient of a Nobel Prize in literature. The source of the quote, which Svitak lists sim­ ply as " 1956;' is an address Seifert gave that year to the Second Congress of Czechoslovak Writers, in which he sharply criticized the prevailing politics of literature. The proceedings of the congress have been recently published as II. sjezd ceskoslovenskych spisovatelu: 22. 29.4. 1 956, vol. l, ed. Michal Bauer. The quoted passage appears on pp. 464-5. -

56

anti-essay 3: little base and little superstructure

anti-essay 3 : little base and little superstructure Once upon a time there was a Little Base, and he had a brother named Little Superstructure. One day they went for a walk together, but Little Superstructure did not behave well at all. He always either hurried ahead of Little Base or lagged behind. "Hey, Little Superstructure! You'll break away from me if you keep passing me like that;' warned Little Base. But Little Superstructure did not care at all. He answered, "Even if I became a Superstructure who falls behind, I wouldn't jump around beside you, not for anything in the world. I am Little Superstructure. I do as I like, and I don't have to have anyone take me by the hand. Haven't you read the classical authors, you stupid Base?" And, plop, he landed in a ditch. "You wait. I'll tell comrade chairman on you;' threatened Little Base, in tears. But they went on, Little Base straight along the road, and Little Superstructure­ sometimes in the ditch, sometimes out in front, sometimes behind, then again right in the middle of the road. You would not have believed it, dear Children. And then what do you think happened? Little Superstructure stopped suddenly, refus­ ing to go on at any price. "Well, then, I'll go on by myself;' said Little Base. "You won't get very far;' said Little Superstructure, for he knew that Little Base did not know the way and was helpless without him. "Now quit bothering me and go to hell:' So Little Base went to hell, still shouting from far away the he would tell everything to the comrade chairman when he got there. In the meantime Little Superstructure sat down in the grass, feeling quite well. He did as he wished, picking flowers and throwing them away, eating unripe sour cherries, throwing stones at the chickens, getting himself very dirty, wading in the creek, and sticking beans into his ears so that he would not have to listen to anybody. That was a lot of fun, let me tell you! It was getting rather late, and he was enjoying himself far too much to worry. But evening came. Little Superstructure was alone, dirty, hungry, and cold, and the beans in his ears had expanded so much that he could not get them out anymore. He started crying and did not know what to do. "If only my dear brother Base were here!" He ran to look for his brother­ who knew of course that Little Superstructure would come running as soon as he got hungry. When the brothers at last found each other they were very happy, and they set off as before. Little Base knew that his brother would not get lost any more, and Little Superstructure knew that he would get something to eat. But they did not know what to do about the beans in Little Superstructure's ears. So they went

57

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY to the comrade chairman, who proceeded to cure the problem. He smacked Little Superstructure's left ear with his right hand so hard that the bean fell out, and then he repeated the process with the right ear. On this occasion the comrade chairman told the two of them that it was precisely in the handling of such matters that his leading role manifested itself. Crying, little Superstructure thanked him for his help and swore never again to be late or to torment Little Base. "Well, dear chil­ dren:' the comrade chairman said, "be good now, and go out for a another walk." So Little Base and Little Superstructure took each other by the hand, promising to stay on the straight road and never again to go astray. But after awhile little Base began to limp, first a little, then more, until finally he could barely walk at all. He cried and cried and asked little Superstructure for help. "Superstructure, my dear brother, help me, please. I can't walk any farther. I'm limping on both legs, and my feet no longer carry me:' But little Superstructure had not yet forgotten the smack on the ears that he had received from the comrade chairman, and therefore he had little inclination to think about helping his brother. Nevertheless, his good heart eventually prevailed, primarily because he told him­ self that he might get something out of it. "Do you swear never again to tell me what I may and may not do?" he asked. "Yes;' answered Little Base, "you may put beans in your ears, throw stones at stupid chickens, and go away from me as far as you like;' promised little Base. "You may do anything. Just help me, please, or I will perish:' So Little Superstructure examined his brother's feet and determined that Little Base had only sprained an ankle. He stopped a passing car, put Little Base inside, took him home, and soon Little Base was again as sound as a fish in water. Little Superstructure also sought out the opinion of the comrade chairman. The com­ rade said that he would have to cut off little Base's legs, because disobedient legs must be punished, not cured. Little Superstructure, therefore, furtively set a trap for the comrade. He placed dried beans on the stairs, which caused the chairman to fall down and sprain his ankle. The chairman applied his principles to himself, cut off his own legs, and died soon after. What lessons, you ask, may be learned from this story? Little Superstructure, do not put beans in your ears or else you will get them smacked. Little Base, do not limp. And chairmen-watch your step!

58

Essay IV: The Art ofthe Epoch

Essay IV: The Art of the Epoch The novel became epochal art only in the last century. In the first half of the twentieth century the modern novel turned into the anti-novel, because it out­ grew its former form. To put it more precisely, story-telling by literary means has changed because closed form has become open: the apparent rejection of conven­ tional novelistic language is not the end of the novel; the anti-novel is the manifest future of the literary species, the metamorphosis of which is closely connected to general gnoseological questions and to the novel's own change of theme and form of expression. The modern anti-novel is characterized by certain basic, general qualities, each of which influences a specific aspect of the transformation of the novel type. Above all the discovery of the psychological depths and sub-personal layers of the personality has made it possible to literarily record streams of con sciousness, minimally stylized in their authenticity; while the upsurge of scien­ tific specialization affords an ever broader picture of the whole of nature and the cosmos. The world appears in action, in motion, in relativity; the naively realistic belief in the world's objectivity is collapsing, and the whole concept of reality is en­ riched by the subjectivity of the observing subject. Social changes and the unique dynamics of modern history create a new sensibility of life and, at the same time, new forms of subjective existence. Finally, fantastic technological successes gener­ ate a new mode of artistic imagination, which has difficulty competing with tech­ nology that surpasses every form of art and literature. These qualities of the modern novel found their classic form in the works of 1 Proust, Joyce, and Kafka forty years ago and have since developed into many currents, at least two of which are of particular importance. In the first of these, 2 represented by the "novel of existence;' the objective description of reality re­ mains an important component, but here it is seen in an entirely new manner. The traditional narrator vanishes and is replaced by an account of the lived situation; the observer of the plot no longer stands above its characters. The novel's theme or hero becomes amorphous, without contours, illuminated instead by the particu­ lar state of the author's feelings. Things are not anthropomorphized, but people are set outside human sense. The novel takes place in the inner space of the narra­ tor's consciousness; it is a microscopic dissection of the soul, not a description of

forty years ago I.e. in the 1 920s. "novel of existence" I.e. a loosely defined genre of novels exploring existence, influenced by or broadly associated with existentialism. -

2

-

59

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY the human being. So the decisive factor is a-human, purposely caricaturing things or individuals as soon as they are taken out of their traditional context of mean­ ing. This offers the possibility of endless play for the imagination, which is not unlike an abstract canvas: the world becomes a chaotic, chilly medium in which there appear mythological rather than really perceived things, external objects and mechanisms of being in modern civilization rather than the human dimen­ sions of life. The second important type of literary experiment, the surrealist novel, has been occupied above all by an effort to depict life directly, in all its magical lyri­ cism and awesome poetry. Here, the novel becomes a transcript of lived time; a protest against the mechanism of modern civilization; a discovering of enchant­ ment, mythical ideas, and dreams; a flash of consciousness; evidence of the birth and death of feelings; a record of the multiplicity of perspectives and situations between being and nothingness. This current/tendency/line, represented by Mar­ cel Proust, Andre Breton, Michel Butor, and Nathalie Sarraute, ends with Sam­ uel Beckett's lyrical burlesque, in which the blithe emotionality of surrealism is changed into a fear of existence, which is inlaid in the foundations oflife. Beckett's work is a sort of myth about the agony of values, about human powerlessness; it is the human's wandering through a void, where heroes ceaselessly and des­ perately question their own meaning, destroyed partly by the abstract problem of human meaning and partly by time, which transforms their goals whenever they attain them. The armless torso in Beckett's The Unnamable is an a-brachia! monster through which time still flows, but which renounces thought; thus it is a sort of absurdly exact parable of the modern human's destiny, a voice of human desolation and tragedy in which all play ceases because it is the end of play, the end of humanity, the end. Language rebels against words, language is shattered in utterance; it is manifestly self-destructive testimony, the suicide of the novel. This radical negation of art as an article of consumption, as a means of entertain­ ment, as an educational medium-this is also the "destruction of art" that was once proclaimed by the avant-garde in a somewhat different sense. An important aspect of this development is the author's renunciation of the meaning of his or her own statements, of any purpose of communicating. What is born of the au thor's creativity is the concrete irrationality of aimless thought, the fixation of the emotive state and the free flow of ideas, something believed to be superior to logical operations. The outcome of both these major tendencies, Joyce's and Proust's, and of those tendencies connected to the work of Kafka, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf, and others, has amounted to a total transformation of the novel's theme, which has become, in various forms, the writing subject itself, the author as an individual

60

Essay IV: The Art of the Epoch portrayed in the context of the banality of modern life, or as an ultimately philoso­ phized existence. The story, if there is any, tells of the emotionality of the subject, through objective description of dreams, imagination, external stimuli, yet with no intention to communicate. If, in the positivist view, the world was reduced to objectivity with no affinity for the knowing subject, the world here becomes the boundless subjectivity of observation, deprived of the possibility of communicat­ ing, because the a priori needlessness and senselessness of communication are the starting points of the author's worldview and inspiration. This trend, however, runs into the same blind alley as all themeless work; with the renunciation of the value of communication and human contact, the scope of the author's freedom does not expand-it shrinks. This trend destroys art as communication and as art. As long as authors are doing this consciously, we must welcome their work as an instrument of purposeful pyrotechnics aimed against literary falsification, and we should thank them for unsheathing the absurdity of their vision against the gigantic mechanism of modern alienation. If, however, they create their works with no artistic purpose, as literary pieces that simply draw on a new convention, then they miss the point of the absurdity of their work. Hence, when there is no meaning, when awareness of the senselessness, a-logicality, and a-causality of events is purposely stimulated, then the product of human thought acquires significance precisely as a negative matrix of meaning. Absurdity bears witness to human value even in a vacuum; absurdity is proof of missing value, of its regrettable absence. A clash between sense and nonsense, nothingness and exist­ ence, empiricism and experience, is only ever possible within the human being. So artistic work always has meaning, whatever its creator's intention. It has objective, 3 definite, and definable meaning. The basic features of the modern novel may be summarized as follows: • skepticism about the meaning of life, a human world without values, the hu­ man being de-ideologized and externally controlled; •

precise description of a world of phenomena, isolated predicaments and ac­ tions, which appear outside the context of meaning as accidental coincidences with no inner consequentiality;

... and definable meaning. In both of Svitak's versions of the essay, the following paragraph begins with the lines, "The transformation of the modern novel is expressed most clearly in the nouveau roman. The new ideology of technocrats-scientism-frankly considers litera­ ture as the consumption of reading matter, as the consumption of entertainment commodi­ ties:' I cannot see how these two sentences fit either with each other or with the thematic flow of the paragraph, and so I have deleted them. -

61

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY •

•

attempts at objectivity in observing reality-as though the authors were striv­ ing for an exact analysis of facts but in vain, because the reality is inside them, not outside; analysis of forms of alienation, but no protest against them, because this would

require holding convictions about the meaning of human actions; • the subject is dominant and is seen (according to Robbe-Grillet) as an unrelat­ ed series of facts with partial and contradictory meaning, or more accurately, with many meanings; • just as the author is an apparatus of observation, the ultimate depersonalized "video camera of ideas;' so the reader is reduced to an apparatus for reading. The authors of the new novel offer the world their misapprehension of reality as a program. Disregarding the human perspective, asserting the priority of ob­ jects over people, things over sense, serves as a parallel to consumer society. The heroicization of the world of things is an inability to protest against new forms of human alienation. The manipulated person, heroicizing his or her boredom, is a triumph of technocracy in literature. The most skeptical Parisian intellectuals, who wished not to be subject to any ideology, have fallen under the newest form of ideology, which is all the worse because it does not know that it is an ideol­ ogy. The new novel seemingly avoids all ideological assumptions-religious, hu­ manistic, or philosophical-but de facto it espouses the ideology of descriptive, analytic natural science with its rejection of all value judgments. The view of the world as a set of facts and objects is completely justifiable in science and is an indispensable condition for scientific analysis, but transposed into the world of humans and words, it fails utterly, b ecause the human world is the territory of values, meaning, subjectivities. It seems that literature has devoted itself to these descriptions, to a new form of naturalism, and that artists resign their role as appraisers and judges. If the writer has been turned into a witness, into a video camera operating with words, then the people behind real cameras have done just the opposite. They step into the territory of values, symbols, meaning, pre­ cisely because technique teaches them that objectivity in art is a fiction and that the world of facts depends on what we wish to see through the camera. Film's most substantial influence on literature is to have subjected the latter to consumer considerations. Reading and literary creation are not looked upon as the communication of values but as something qualitatively different, as a cultivation of perception independent of content, as a school of seeing. What matters is thus not what is communicated but the process itself, writing and reading, which can put an end to both the writer's and the reader's boredom. (Can it?) The age-old meaning ofliterature, its role in solving human predicaments by example, is slowly fading away. What is left is an empty, functionalized form incorporated into the

62

Essay IV: The Art ofthe Epoch technocratic world by emphasis on the techniques of producing literary commodi­ ties. What matters is not the meaning of words but words themselves; what mat­ ters is not the meaning of described events but the language. In this spirit a Czech author has written, "I become myself when I become speech. I am speech:' (Vera Linhartova)4 Preoccupation with literary technique that does not serve to orient opinion has also had its parallel in the East, where other, but similar, lines of thinking have been followed. In both East and West, literature reflects the resignation and abdi­ cation of European intellectuals since the war: the division of the world between military blocs produced a sense of resignation and skepticism about the possibil­ ity of incorporating artistic creation and intellectual effort into serious ideological and political contexts. What could artists do when the Cold War threatened to b ecome hot? What could they do when they grasped their real impotence in the face of huge mechanisms of power, and when they did not wish to serve any of the false ideologies that drew a veil over preparations for mutual genocide? This atmosphere has now changed considerably, because new problems have arisen, worse than atomic war: the industrialization of new societies, menacing famine, an uncontrolled population explosion, and new political issues raised by China. Thus formal interest in the technique of artistic craft-so evident in the nouveau roman -may now be overtaken by an orientation of the artist toward the world of people, values, and meaning, so that literature may become the "philosophy" of our age. Academic philosophy is dead, soulless and esoteric regardless of its aims, and it has been so for decades. The problems which have traditionally belonged to it, however, surrounding the metaphysical meaning of human existence, are just as burning as ever. The new novel is before us.

(Thus ends the Czech version of the article. In the English version, Svitak conclud­ ed on a different note, replacing the textfollowing ''. .. people, values, and meaning.") [ . . . ] If not literature, then film will become the philosophy of our era-the art of the epoch, as Hegel would say. Academic art is dead, soulless and esoteric re­ gardless of its aims, and it has been so for decades. The problems which have tradi­ tionally b elonged to it, however, surrounding the metaphysical meaning of human existence, are just as burning as ever. If the novel seems to be dead or exhausted, the philosophical film has an open horizon before it. Why couldn't wisdom be communicated by the camera?

4

Vera Linhartova, "Pikareskni prumet na pozadi;' in Mezipruzkum nejblii uplynuleho ( C eske Budejovice: Krajske nakladatelstvi, 1 964), p. 1 57.

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THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY

anti-essay 4: the story of a sword Permit me to tell you a story which might mean something to you Some fifty years ago, a certain eccentric bought me in an antique shop and had an inscription engraved on my hilt: "My raison d'etre is your raison d'etre Seek my raison d'etre, and you will find your own" The same day, I was given to a girl named Irena who had just passed her graduation exams and who must have liked me, because she hung me on the wall in her room I was useless except for my inscription but the girl didn't consider that important Until at her graduation party when her friends were considering the inscription on my hilt one friend, a girl with glasses, said maliciously that Irena had received the sword so that she might stab someone and a lovesick youth considered it a weapon against lustful men Only the class valedictorian who did not love the girl and thus was capable of precise thinking stated that the meaning shared by the girl and the sword was beauty because the girl was really lovely beyond reason In the end I too could agree because it was a special day for me: one ofthose students present was a fencer and, after many decades, I was happy again for the several sudden lunges, feints, thrusts, ripostes he made with me even though, unfortunately, they didn't wound anyone And so this company thought my raison d'etre was beauty although the class valedictorian had just very effectively lied because he knew the girl would respond to the elegance of his flattery and he wanted to take advantage of her vanity While the others were dancing he took her to the bathroom and forgive me, I cannot give precise testimony to what they did I lay deserted atop the wardrobe, indifferent to her beauty but glad that she discovered then my first raison d'etre along with her own

Still, beauty is not my true meaning

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anti-essay 4: the story ofa sword After the party I moved, along with Irena, to another flat and I remember vividly that sad day some years later when she was deserted by a lover who had aroused her passion he deserted her because she was unbearable in her beauty, her devotion, her tenderness and above all because he feared that he would lose her He left her, then, to prove his freedom, proving only his fear That night Irena wept in her room, she stroked me as a memory of her youth (how unpleasant! ) and asked me again about her raison detre because it seemed to her that the end of passion is also the end of her own life's meaning ' I answered her in a dream that "each man kills the thing he loves" (as I do) so that she might understand the meaning of her lover's departure and realize that neither my nor her raison detre is in passion but is rather in the freedom to leave I revealed to her the sad and brutally human truth that she would be happy without men if she could kill whatever limits her and deprives her of her freedom to be herself That day she understood me as a tool of freedom and she gained her freedom through the pain of being alone

Butfreedom is not my true meaning From then on, it appeared to Irena that she knew the purpose of her life and whenever anyone noticed the inscription on my hilt she would say that my raison detre is neither beauty nor passion but freedom because now freedom was her main value in life as indisputable as my blade But soon thereafter, her new husband divorced her and she was left alone with two children without a chance of being free She flailed on her bed in spasmodic weeping (I took pleasure in her red and bloodshot eyes) but since she was no longer beautiful she had to pull herself together to stand up to her fate It was the rebellion of a mother who could not desert her children

''each man kills the thing he loves" written 1 897.

-

Oscar Wilde ( 1 854-1 900), "The Ballad Of Reading Gaol;'

65

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY (she thought she couldn't, so she couldn't) a rebellion agqinst her freedom to leave She tucked in her sleeping kids and fell asleep exhausted

But my true meaning is not in rebellion Irena grew old, and her children left her without comprehending the meaning of her sacrifice without knowing that she had raised them in a rebellion against her own happiness once she was recalling the old days with her former lover and again she read the barely legible inscription With a bit of irony the aging woman contemplated her unfulfilled desires Realizing that her life had had more than one raison d'etre And that none of them made sense I recall the grimace of horror on her face at this realization I've often seen that grimace in a battle, just before I strike it is the terror of facing the end that gives a person so authentic an expression such that I never had the heart not to strike, and to disappoint the yearning for death that I read in the eyes of my enemies Surprised by the logic of her own absurdity, Irena thought that irrespective of the variations of sense she herself was always the creator of the senses of her life Sense is what humans make sense is the senselessness of being born with consciousness of the absurdity in life I was pleased by her discovery that people are dominated by the same uselessness for which I was once hung on the wall of her room Admitting the senselessness of one's own existence seemed to be the definitive truth of the inscription "Seek my raison d'etre, and you will find your own!" But I am afraid that even then she didn't fully understand Because I have my meaning, which does not change Several years later, Irena lay dying in a hospital room and as she approached the far bank of her self her understanding of her life changed too because she perceived everything from the perspective of the end Flowing toward her non-existence she returned to the idea of life's meaning and it seemed to her that there was no such thing as raison d'etre that this concept only prevented her from thinking truthfully about life and that the meaning oflife is neither beauty, passion, freedom, nor revolt

66

anti-essay 4: the story ofa sword But that there is no meaning to life at all there is no reason for being there is only our dogged existence and time, patient as a hospital bed That was the great thought of the dying woman whom I had become accustomed to over that brief period of a human existence And that, finally, was the thought with which I had been presented to the girl:

There is no meaning in life but death I think that Irena was very human She kept searching for her own meaning she understood that humans create their own raisons d'etre she had been beautiful, had known passion, had tasted freedom, and had resolved to rebel she had experienced everything she could and finally had looked nothingness in the face She had suffered because life is crueler than I am Now she lies dead on her bed, no longer seeking her sense; she is a thing like me, a sword alienated from the raison d'etre of human beings-she is gone But I remain, because my raison d'etre is being, and nothing more whereas humans disappear while seeking their own raisons d'etre I still hang on the wall I am a useless, absurd, beautiful sword I am a dead thing, but I am while you, you vanish every second senselessly seeking your own sense

In this lies the advantage of things overpeople: our insensibility toward human meaning

67

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY

Essay V: The Civilization of the Eye The relation between pictures and words has three levels: technical, aesthetic, and anthropological (or philosophical). On all three levels, however, only two pos­ sible solutions exist: either one means of expression is superior to the other or there is an organic synthesis of both. The problem is not how to conjoin word and picture into a new aesthetic quality, but how to adjust the artistic synthesis of both compo­ nents to the need for a more free and cultured world. Sound and its union with pic­ tures are thus dependent on the ideas that are communicated by sound and pictures. Recently, the relation between the logosphere and the iconosphere in film has been considered a central aspect of film language by the Italian director Pier Pao­ 1 2 lo Pasolini and by the film theorist Christian Metz. Pasolini, the practitioner, holds film to be a new pictorial language that has an endless lexicon. He stresses the picture's multiplicity of meanings. He views the artistic picture as a symbol and film-making as a system of neologisms that make conventional, unitary interpreta­ tion impossible. True, film is an instrument for analyzing human experience, but the interpretation differs according to the group, nation, or class in question. Metz, the theoretician, does not consider film an instrument for analysis and denies it a special language status. Film, he maintains, is merely the speech of our visualized 3 world, a world of pictures and a "civilization of the eye:' The theoretician does not accept the hypothesis that the pictures of cinematic language are a kind of unit (cinemes) analogous in their significance to speech sounds (phonemes), capable of forming an independent language. This productive confrontation is not over, since the semantic principles of film have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The solution lies in the negation of both opinions, which derive solely from semantic concepts. If we take account of essential changes in the expression of human experience in words, then we find that spoken language is only one of three possible forms of expressing the human being's reaction to its surroundings. Next are emotional reac­ tions which have formed the onomatopoetic foundation oflanguages-chimpanzee language has some seventy "words:' Finally, the most recent of scientific metalan­ guages-artificial logical structures of terms-avoid the redundancies and errors Pier Paolo Paso/ini In Svitak's text he appears as "R. Pasolini;' which I can only assume is a mistake. Svitak does not indicate any specific writing of Pasolini's. Christian Metz As with Pasolini, Svitak does not cite any specific work by Metz, who dis­ cussed these issues in a series of influential books and articles. "civilization of the eye." Below, Svitak attributes this phrase to Edgar Morin (see note 4). -

2

-

-

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Essay V: The Civilization of the Eye of spoken language. Thus, by means of words as well as by artificially created ab­ straction, film may be classified as a parallel phenomenon on the order of a meta­ language. In this approach, film is a metalanguage of artistic symbols (cinemes) that differs from its forerunners, the creative arts and photography. What was the actual process of creating a film language? The history of film is the history of pictures in which words played a secondary role, because the language of the film related to the visual aspects of the world. As cinema developed, it first created pictures literarily analogous to those of dramatic genres. Only recently did it make efforts at film specificity, which is a search for its own independent genres. As we follow the development of literary forms, we can ascertain that the flourishing of epics, dramas, and novels was connected to certain social conditions existing outside literature and art, e.g., the Elizabethan drama or the nineteenth-century novel had a specific cultural function in its age. The film is still very young, and more expressive distinctions, as well as new genres, lie ahead. In the process of the differentiation and specialization of film and television genres, new solutions to the relations between pictures and sound will arise and new social functions of the cinema will develop. Several decades from now, people will look back with surprise to the time when humanity used the unique invention of the cinema to produce, nine-tenths of the time, rubbish for mass consumption by the bored and weary. The development of cinema in the future, the evolution from bad entertainment into great art and into a means of educating and transmitting scien­ tific knowledge, will lead once more to words becoming dominant in cinema, and ul­ timately will lead to the motion picture becoming subordinate to ideas and thought. The civilization of the eye (Edgar Morin4 ) will become the civilization of thought. A rapprochement between words and thoughts can be observed in cinema-verite 5 and in free cinema all over the world. These trends have not been called into life only because of the aesthetic needs and development of cinema, but also because of far more essential phenomena of philosophical character. These trends strive for the formulation of thoughts and are an expression of a definite intellectual movement in Western culture, an expression of the "mutation of consciousness;' an evident ef­ fort to find a new orientation. The most important changes expressed in the film experiments of the avant-garde are changes in social attitude and in philosophical 4

Edgar Morin - French philosopher. Svitak does not cite a specific work, but the phrase "civili­ zation of the eye" appears in Morin's Le cinema ou l'homme imaginaire. Essai d'anthropologie (Paris: Minuit, 1 956), p. 2 1 5. Cinema verite and free cinema - The former is a specific (though variously interpreted) style of documentary filmmaking that came to prominence in the 1 960s. The latter may refer to the Free Cinema documentary film movement founded in England in the 1 950s (in the Czech version of the essay, the term appears in English), but Svitak's invocation of "free cinema all over the world" leaves this ambiguous.

69

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY intentions. These trends, of course, still pertain predominantly to pictures. The world is depicted as a visual world, as a set of information which is presented as far as possi­ ble without evaluation, as a survey of apparently objective facts. Such a conception of the world roughly corresponds to modem science and to a definite effort to de-ideol­ ogize thought. What is good for science, however, may not be a suitable path for art. The notion that objective reality lies outside the artist and can be observed di­ rectly leads to an illusory effort to express some kind of higher objectivity from which the most important element of all-the human being-disappears. This "re­ ality" is colored, however, because the cinematic pictures that make up the reality are not free of value; they include the observer's position and are never completely objective. Each picture is a reproduction or segment of reality, not reality itself. The world is a structure of meaning, even if it appears absurd. The world makes sense, but it makes sense only for people; it makes human sense because the qualification of sense is itselflinked to the human being. To see objectively-without considering the human being-does not reveal a new dimension of reality; it simply invokes unsuit­ able scientific methodology. The pure facticity of the civilization of the eye, taking account only of pictures and not of words and ideas, reveals not a more authentic reality, but only the surface of the world, or the surface of the surface. Words are more meaningful than pictures because they are the bearers of sense and meaning. If the world is the sum of facts present without evaluation, then it is a "senseless" world. Only the world of values is the world of the human being. The world presented as a visual world is stripped of values. Today's human being urgently needs a value orientation. Traditional standards are being questioned. This challenge has created a situation conducive to words, which media could make good use of But so far they have done so only to a minor degree, because past experience holds that these media should only be used for consumption, information, and enter­ tainment. Programs of an educational, scientific, or ideological nature are seen only as uninteresting supplements, presented with little quality. The civilization of the eye is not an advance of civilization ifit does not include reason and thought. If we realize how little space is given to problems of science in the mass media and how distorted is the scale of values that these media offer, then we must stress that the task of film and television is not to observe and record, but to communicate. Human communication will employ various forms of joining words and pictures, but this must be done with

ideas. The Western humanistic tradition is connected with the Greek logos, not with the cryptic intuitions of Zen monks. In the beginning was not the image but the word. To scrutinize is important but to learn to think is more important still. We must not watch in silence as civilization is threatened not only with the loss of vision but also with the loss of values. Without values, only emptiness and nonsense remain visible!

70

anti-essay 5: thefeeling

anti-essay 5 : feeling Once there was a very well-educated girl. She loved flowers, poetry, dance, and music. When one day a man brought her his heart, she said to him, "Why isn't it wrapped up? The heart should always be wrapped in cellophane, like sweets, or soap, or bread. Otherwise, it's unsanitary. But it was very kind of you to have brought me your heart:' And she smiled at him, because she was so polite. "Forgive me;' he said, blushing. "Next time I'll bring you the heart in cello­ phane:' "Yes, like this it certainly is quite red, but it's too rough. In cellophane every­ thing is smooth, and I like smooth things. But give me the heart. After all, you brought it for me:' "Yes, I brought it for you, and I searched for it for such a long time;' he said. And he laid the heart in her hand. "Oh, it's warm;' said the girl. She touched it with her finger and said, "Look how it's beating in my hand, as if it were afraid of me. That is so nice:' And he was happy that she had praised his heart and had looked at it with as much interest as one would look at blooming gladioli. "But I don't know what I should do with your heart;' she said. "Do you think it can be eaten?" "I would deem it an honor;' he said, because he truly loved her. "What does it taste like? I have never eaten a heart. Is it as good as a peach?" And, because she wanted to know what it was like, she bit into the red peach until the blood splashed all around. "Oh;' she said, "something squirted into my eye. And look here, I've stained my dress. You are ugly to have brought me something spraying blood. It's not even sweet. I don't want if' The girl stamped her foot, threw away the ugly heart, and left. From then on she accepted only hearts wrapped in cellophane. She liked them cut into thin slices, and she rigorously demanded that the bitter liquid be squeezed out, that liquid which is not sweet and which stains clothes. Then she knew how to eat hearts. She was a well-educated girl.

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THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY

Essay VI: Evolutions in the Structure of Film Language Authenticity in Film The avant-garde movement, which destroyed and recreated methods of artis­ tic communication, was a revolution in the means of expression, in the subj ect matter, and in the social influence of all types of modern art. The movement was represented by Apollinaire in poetry, Joyce, Kafka, and Proust in the novel, Brecht in drama, Picasso in the fine arts, le Corbusier in architecture, and Stravinsky in music. This movement has no parallel in cinema, however, probably because cinema was born as a part of this innovative wave, and its birth alone was a revo­ lutionary milestone in artistic communication. By the 1 960s, however, cinema found itself in a situation similar to that which the other arts had passed through long before. It faced a struggle against the conventions of standard expression, a structural transformation of its language, the "end" of one line of development and the search of another. Although experiments to push film forward have var­ ied, they are linked by one elementary idea, which is the most essential problem of contemporary film art: film authenticity, that specific quality which makes a film a film. In the modern novel the narrator is not an impersonalized observer or de­ scriber of reality; the narrator has been absorbed into the work, as creators of paintings or sculptures have been for centuries. Modern art is not new only be­ cause it changes the function of the narrator; it is revolutionary because it chang­ es the fundamental parameters and the social function of that which is called art. It encroaches upon the basic categories of aesthetics. For film art this road still lies ahead. In its basic rituals of communication, film is still bound to alien forms, and the authenticity which so fascinates the readers of modern novels has so far been rarely expressed in film. The transformation in the function of films and in the structure of film language, carried out in the name of more authentic expression, is nevertheless a productive and indispensable field of experimentation and will eventually become a requirement for standard production. Unmitigated truth, acute subjectivity, and the impression of authenticity, such as is evoked in the novels of Joyce, Proust, or Kafka, have only occasionally found their counterparts in film, such as those devastatingly truthful documentaries by Lionel Rogosin,

72

�--

Essay VJ: Evol11tio11s in the Structure ofFilm Language 1

Jean Rouch, or the creators of The Savage Eye. Authenticity is the proper subject of films and is the solution to the problems of cinematic creation. In the beginning, cinema took up traditional theater's rules of composition and modified them for its own ends, just as theater was starting to dismantle them. The mechanism of the movie industry and the bureaucratization of production gave rise to solid conventions of film of expression and thus burdened the untraditional art of film with the historical problems of theater. Many screenwriters, film directors, and theoreticians made attempts to get rid of the theater, but they still worked within the fallacious limits of imaginary "laws of film direction:' Film art cannot move forward if the model of cinematic thinking and expression is unsuitable, if the method for one form of art (film) is derived from another (poetry, theater, literature). We can­ not explain a higher form of art by means of a lower one, just as we cannot use the laws of physics and biology to explain human psychology or social movements. New art always violates conventional structures or "laws of aesthetics" and is regarded as a defect in artistic form, a degenerate phenomenon without aesthetic value. In much the same way, at the turn of the century photographers regarded modern portrait photography as worthless if the photograph did not resemble a painting, contain a plush chair and a stiff-backed subject, and exude an air of exceptional solemnity. 2 Genuine authenticity in film cannot exist under such an aesthetic standard, espe­ cially when television technique acts as a catalyst for changes in cinematic language and regenerates those methods that in the early days of cinema were relegated to the sidelines of development, to documentary or experimental works.

Paths of Film Experimentation Sixty-five years of the development of cinema, and some fifty years of the de­ velopment of the artistic side of film, offer certain possibilities for generalizing about trends in the development of cinematic art. The film, as a synthesis of earlier art forms, combining the most varied means of expression in color, form, lan­ guage, sound, and motion, will always be some combination of the possibilities af­ forded by this simultaneity. In the development of a cinematic language, however, the synthesis of elements of acting, symbolic camera shots, color composition, and

2

Lionel Rogosin, Jean Rouch, or the creators of The Savage Eye - Rogosin was an independent American filmmaker. Rouch was a founder cinema verite. The Savage Eye was a 1 959 film combining dramatization with documentary footage. Its creators were Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick. . film cannot exist under such an aesthetic standard Svitak's English version reads, "... under an aesthetic standard;' as if authenticity were incompatible with any aesthetic standard. The Czech original, however, suggests a more limited claim about this aesthetic standard. -

73

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY plot design have been overshadowed by previous art forms to such an extent that worthy artistic creation and the transformation of film expression still lie before us. Unfortunately, their development is impeded by the commercial and ideologizing nature of film production. If film is going to enhance its artistic function, it must put technical innovation in its place and turn to analytic abbreviation and to an intentional transformation of reality, which is the foundation of every art. The mechanized Muse will have to give up the rehearsed and stereotyped movements of a lovely model if it wishes to become human. , Of course, film will not leave the traditional paths of stylization for reasons of logic and theory, but simply because if it wishes to develop it must express ideas on a more sophisticated level. A rt reaches its peak only when it serves as a means for expressing ideas. The transformation of cinematic language as the central theme of film experimentation requires philosophical consideration be­ cause it can provoke an audience to think. This is essential. Unlike the film author, 3 the spectator is always and unconditionally a "philosopher;' a consumer of ideas, a thinking, human being. Endless variations in film language, a search for new lines in communicating these elements, as well as for new aesthetic structures, are evident in every film that is of any significance. In this respect, since almost any film is an experiment, film experimentation must be defined more precisely. Experimentation with film lan­ guage is an attempt to change the meaning of reality by heretofore unused means, a synthesis that avoids stereotyped methods, emphasizes the artistic components of the film, and tries to limit its function as an industrial commodity. Film ex­ perimentation includes only what touches the problem of cinematic language and what affects the structure of the film as a work of art. Films have not yet completely destroyed the conventional language of art as other modern artistic forms have. At the turn of the century, when the fine arts and literary genres were suffering from conventionality, this problem of parting from a burdensome tradition did not exist for the film. Today, however, the film is beginning to feel the constraints of convention, routine, and craftsmanship in­ herent in the industrial mass production of many films. Amateur or independent film groups, which do not accept these rigid rituals, however, are introducing non­ conventional methods of film production. In most experiments, films have broken away from the models of the other arts and are moving toward a cinematic specificity. The common feature of these ex­ periments is an attempt to give reality new meaning, to analyze it from a particular

always and unconditionally Svitak's English translation.

-

These words appear in the Czech version but were left out of

74

Essay VI: Evolutions in the Structure ofFilm Language point of view. Progress is evident in the selection of subjects for films and the way they are being shot. A camera never takes an objective picture of reality; it subjects reality to abstraction, thus analyzing the subject on which it is focused. Experi­ mentation seeks to capture an artistic excitement that is ignored in ordinary film production. This, for instance, is the basis for the success achieved by "storyless" lyrical films which work with the aesthetic values of light and image composition. These films set aside the theme or "story" so that other artistic components can be brought out. The experiment violates everyday comprehension of the world, frees the human being from rational perception, and destroys deep-rooted relationships toward reality. Film experiments programmatically change the structure of cinematic lan­ guage. Experimental elements in regular production may be new and explora­ tory within conventional limits, but they lack the character necessary to break through those limits. In comparison with the development of painting, it must be said that film experimenters are not interested in those concepts of creative work (such as method and style) that separate Picasso from Leger or Matisse, Degas from Manet or Renoir. They are interested rather in changes in the type of artistic language that separate analytical, cubistic art from a classical, realistic tradition. The type of representation of reality is more important than the indi­ vidual style. Of course, film experimentation includes elements of the aesthetic and so­ cial transformation of film production, too. Film experiments have followed this historical sequence: films as a fairground attraction, one-reel comedies, ar­ tistic feature films, panoramic films in color, film poetry, candid camera, multi­ 4 screen films, Laterna Magica. Important experimentation in the development of cinematic language most often takes place on the border between these different phases. Successful experiments in film are not a repetition of discoveries with mere changes in content, even though aesthetically, socially, and thematically this may be more significant than the experiment itself. This must be said, not to dispar­ age productions that make use of conventional film language, but simply to de­ fine experimentation, which involves the risk of disappointment and failure. As in science, an "unsuccessful" experiment in film contributes to later success. This conception of cinematic experimentation has nothing to do with the relative value of experimental and non-experimental work. The concept of experiment contains

4

Laterna Magica A.k.a. "Lanterna magika;' a form of experimental theater integrating film and live performance. It was developed as part of the Czech contribution to the Brussels World's Fair in 1 958 by Alfred Radok and Josef Svoboda. -

75

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY nothing a priori positive within it; it should be defined such that it can be what it 5 really is: an experiment.

The Outlook for Experimentation Productive film experimentation has always been carried out in an attempt to address the human being's problems and ideas. In this sense, the film experi­ ments of the surrealist school comment on psychoanalytic discoveries. In these experiments the camera reveals a dream world, as well as a world conceived as "a mass of things magnificently disarranged;' to use Heraclitus's words. 6 Similarly, the second major tendency of experimental film, attempting to render an abstract, non-figurative realm in cinematic language, and working only with color and with pictures stripped of their meaningful sides, has been an attempt to apply new prin ciples to the act of communication. The commercial character of cinema has put many obstacles in the way of ex­ perimentation. In film, unlike in other arts where artistic expression is the work of an individual, it has been financially impossible to support many valuable ex­ periments, which have instead been restricted either to amateur enthusiasts or to independent groups. Film has not yet gone through its revolution of breaking away from traditional methods, as have the other arts. The language of commercial film production is still bound up with the theater. Since Rimbaud, the basic language 7 of poetry has been freed of "the insufferable ceremoniousness of all old poetry;' and since Cezanne, the language of painting has similarly destroyed convention. In film, there have been only a few attempts at comparable experiments. Cinema has yet to tear down and rebuild its language. Andre Breton called commercial 8 film "a treasury of rubbish:' Film as the treasury of intelligence is still awaiting its discoverer. The rebirth of cinema lies in the destruction of the mass media. This is not the expression of an anarchistic fancy. It is an aesthetic necessity. Experimentation exposes problems that are associated with all modern phi­ losophy. Experimentation demands, aside from stressing the central significance of the human being, an emphasis on the complexity of mirroring the world. The hero of philosophy, the most negative and most positive hero of all drama, is time.

6

7

8

This conception ... an experiment. - These lines, which I translate from the Czech version of the essay, were not included in Svitak's English version. '.4. mass of things magnificently disarranged." - Svitak may be referring to Heraclitus's fragment DK 22 B 124, which refers to the "magnificent universe" as a haphazard pile of trash. "the insufferable ceremoniousness of all old poetry" - Svitak attributes this quote to Viteslav Nezval, but he does not indicate its precise source. ''a treasury of rubbish" - Apart from attributing this quote to Breton, Svitak offers no further information as to the source. '

76

Essay VI: Evolutions in the Structure ofFilm Language The simultaneity of events in time creates those bizarre, beautiful conjunctions of things that the human being has learned to see in aesthetically fascinating truthful­ ness. The need for experimentation is essential. As the many-sidedness of analytic cubism can only be expressed at the cost of destroying perspective, as reality can only be understood through the free play of associations, as the essential drama of the novel can only be expressed through an inner monologue, that is, through the injection of unliterary, anti-conventional means into the author's language, so the complexity of relations in our time can only be pictured in film by the creation of an adequate language. The tendency of all forms of new art is to shift the emphasis away from the exceptional and toward the commonplace. This tendency reveals a deeply human trait of real modernity, which does not place ideals outside the sphere of the hu­ man being. New art also attempts to arouse the human being's aesthetic receptive­ ness in a different way: it does not show an extraordinary beauty as compensation 9 for ordinary ugliness ; it awakens in us a receptiveness to beauty which we might retain even without the crutches of artistic expression. The commonplace viewed uncommonly is the principle for making reality extraordinary and artistic. Art does not only create aesthetic reality; it also gives us the possibility of understand­ ing human reality. Finally, in social context, experimentation has an important role with regard to sociologically significant documentation. This documentation, which is frequently denied artistic value, has great historical value. Thus, films made of old newsreels or using candid camera technique have a strong impact on the audience as convey­ ors of reality. A candid camera is so rich in possibilities for making real revelations that these films will show how contemporary conventional film language impov­ erishes itself when it stylizes reality into standard fictitious forms. Since this tech­ nique will be a controversial one, this type of film art will not have mass success. Instead it will cause the same uproar as that which greeted Wagner's music, Rim baud's verses, Picasso's cubism, and Freud's psychoanalysis. But just such films will have enormous documentary, sociological, and scientific value as a direct record of social events. Commonplace, naked reality, so often stylized, re-clothed, and masked to falsi­ fy the real relation between people, things, and events-everyday life in its monu­ mental and grandiose dimensions-common events as tangible magic await their film discoverer. But film experimenters stand before a closed door, which has to be

9

a holiday beauty... everyday ugliness Here Svitak contrasts two words which do not have precise English translations: nedelnf (literally "Sunday;' here "extraordinary") and vsednf ("or­ dinary;' but also, literally, "everyday"). -

77

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY opened in order to prove that the theory of experimentation, for all its importance, is only a shadow of reality, and that experimental steps of practical film work are more important than the best film theory.

. //� I

78

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anti-essay 6: the monologue ofa human shadow

anti-essay 6: the monologue of a human shadow It is amusing to watch my double, the human, always imitating me it is also a little offensive because my illusions of independence melt away I do not like having to depend on a human (on such a clown! ) Lately I've begun t o imitate him, t o give him the illusion of independence and he has forgotten that he is my double, and unoriginal But my freedom only begins when I enter darkness There I am myself again a perfect shadow, absolute like my source-the dark but even here I cannot shake the idea that the human being also is a brother of the dark The human being resembles me and even he is not his own master He emerges from the darkness and to the dark returns He is the producer of gestures that are prescribed for him by light and the laws of optics He is my slave the slave of a shadow and the slave oflight reaching for his personal freedom like a child reaching for the moon He only grasps the shadow of his shadow It would be better for him to extinguish the last light and return to the night into which he himself will vanish a perfect shadow in the certainty of darkness-a shadow of a shadow­ my brother

79

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY

Essay VII: Prolegomena to Love Love as an Anthropological Problem The human being manifests itself as a loving creature both through objec­ tively ascertainable conduct and through the subjective motivations and meanings which it ascribes to its actions. Every one of these manifestations combines these subjective and objective components, or, to put it more precisely, can be analyzed in three dimensions: as bare fact; as motivation underlying the fact; and, finally, as the meaning of the fact. From the objectivity of facts or action and the subjectivity of motivations comes the meaning of actions and facts, which originate precisely in conflicts between the subjectivity and objectivity of the human being acting as the creator of the meaning of facts and of its own actions, including love. In the dialectics of life, the motives, enactment, and meaning of human actions do not constitute separate phases but exist in a permanent unity, in which motivation, behavior, and meaning continually change places. And in this eternally disharmo­ nious pas de trois there dances a beautiful cacophony of life. If we want to reflect on people's behavior and, thus, also on love, there is nothing for us to do but to free ourselves from the immediacy of manifestations of objective and subjective components, leaving room in their conflict for the mystery of the meaning of life, born of human practice. Across the millennia, the human being's biological capacity to procreate has not changed; nor have humans' sexual instinct, anatomy, the physiology of the orgasm, or the sexual act itself. Sexuality does not have history; only eroticism has undergone change-the human component of love, the manner in which the hu­ man being humanizes sexual love. Only the human being refines sexuality through culture and emphasizes the specifically human component, that aspect which dis­ tinguishes the human being from an animal. From this capacity, given to the hu­ man species but not to the animal, comes the crisis character of love, that conflict between sexuality and eroticism, nature and culture, instinct and personality. Love as a crisis phenomenon does not therefore result from a crisis situation of historic nature, but from the general human condition, from the anthropological-biologi­ cal foundations of human sexuality, which fundamentally differ from those of the animal. Human sexuality is, above all, permanently actual and limitlessly multifarious. In contrast to the animal, the human being is permanently sexualized. Further­ more, only the human being can separate out enjoyment and deprive the original

80

Essay VII: Prolegomena to Love reproductive instinct of its purely biological significance, making it a means for imparting a person's personality to another person. Finally, the human component of sexuality depends upon the culture and social relations which mold the human being, upon the accepted or rejected, conscious or unconscious norms which con­ ventionalize our conduct regardless of whether we are aware of it or not. Love, by its very nature, is communication between people-and the more profound it is, the more it assumes the nature of human transformation, of decisive change. Love is not only what people do in bed, but above all that which transforms them, what affects the very structure of their personality, what changes the core of the human being. Love in human life is of central importance, as philosophical and religious sys­ tems assert. Sexual love, however, is only one form oflove, and not the highest one. Love of one's fellow, motherly love, or love of god (the absolute, the cosmos, the world), plays no less important a role, because all forms of love have in common that they represent a definite relationship of one person to another, even in the case of the love of god. The superficial, purely sexual view oflove results in a confusion of values when the fascinating and splendid experience of human understanding, of the contact of personalities, and of harmonious relations is substituted for one of its external forms-sexual intercourse. Sexuality then assumes the phenome­ nological form of the central problem of human existence. The more its human component is reduced, the more its emptiness is emphasized. What, on the con­ trary, is permanently valuable in a human relationship, however, is precisely that human component which transcends sexuality. This is precisely what makes one's first love, usually so chaste, an unforgettable experience of meeting between two people, a genuine instance of human communication. On the other hand, in sex conceived as consumption, this essential communication is lacking. Love is the ex­ pression of the entire human being. It is one of the human's central roles in life; but it remains only one of them-alongside human attempts to be free, to know, and to create, which constitute the fundamental purpose of our existence. A free person is always at the same time a loving, learning, and creative being, which is reflected in all aspects of the person's personality. A person cannot achieve happiness in love if she or he succumbs to unfreedom and accepts those isolated human roles which would destroy both the capacity to love and the capacity to create and to learn. The significance of love changes, moreover, not only with regard to the type of love, but also with regard to the individual's age and role in life. In the brieflife span of a concrete person, the significance oflove changes with the transformation of the human relationships in which the person lives, and over time the sexual form of love makes room for other forms of amorous devotion, as in the process of humanization the capacity to love gradually prevails over mere biological po-

81

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY tency. It seems that the most serious crisis in the life of a human being arises in the transformation of roles and forms of love. That is, during those critical periods in human life like puberty and the transition from maturity to old age, when changed biological functions necessitate changes in the nature of love (love as a relation­ ship to other people). The dialectic of these roles and forms of love enables us to understand that there cannot exist only one sexual morality which would indis­ criminately apply to all age categories, and that on the contrary people adapt their behavior and morality to the biological phase in which they find themselves. Time, this most demonic among the categories of philosophy, changes the human being's views, attitudes, and behavior. We can only argue about whether shifts in behav­ ior over a lifetime represent steps toward the humanization or dehumanization of love. The history of culture demonstrably is also the history of cultivation of love; the history of the humanization of practical love-making is a progression from promiscuity to monogamy. The human being is a free creature and can in its pri­ vate history duplicate or reverse this process, or can adopt one of these behavioral forms as an individual and permanent solution to the eternal problem. Whatever the person chooses, time will change the manner of amorous conduct, because it changes the person's personality itself.

A Typ olo gy of Love If we adopt an objective attitude toward love, if we state in strictly scientific terms the facts and views of love-making, then we completely fail to comprehend the phenomenon of love. The human being, both the subject and object of amo­ rous practice, can never be interpreted in this way. The objective methods of sci­ ence can only tell us how the human being behaves in large groups; these methods operate with the notion of some "average person" which has been devised on the basis of an examination of social groups, as a "representative" type. Human sub­ jectivity, the sphere of personality and human freedom, can never be exhaustively described in this way; it can only be generally stated. Of course, this objective sci­ entific investigation of love from a specific point of view is not without value, if we realize its necessarily limited nature. Although we learn nothing or very little about the essence oflove in this way, scientific typologies are nevertheless relatively accurate and useful. If we observe the human being from outside, then we can dis­ tinguish three principal types, 1 which cover the objective side of love. The actual form which love and sexual behavior take on in concrete personalities, however, is as varied as life itself. Individual typologies can, of course, assume a great variety of somewhat paradoxical combinations. A person who regards love as passion and three principal types Svitak neglects to clarify what these three types are. Presumably they overlap with the "seven categories" he lists below. -

82

Essay VII: Prolegomena to Love is in favor of monogamy can discard his or her own theory in the course of actual behavior, in the same way that an extreme philosophical libertine may be mo­ nogamous in amorous practice. Typologies overlook these distinctions-precisely because they are nothing more than typologies. If we begin to classify the views of love as they are represented in cultures of the past, in classical works of literature and philosophy, it is possible to distinguish roughly seven principal categories of stereotyped views, which reflect the cultural 2 epochs of European humanity:

1.

Certainly the oldest is the view of love as the highest concrete sensuous happi­ ness-a conviction mirroring the "golden age" of childhood. This attitude, in

various modifications, has also been reproduced in all subsequent hedonisti­ cally oriented cultural periods, insofar as it involves a conception of love as a contact of bodies, as a gallant game without any binding commitment or, in recent times, as a form of sport. 2. The second typical view also comes from human prehistory but must neverthe­ less be of more recent date. In this view, love appears as a kind of sacred magic, yet at the same time as sin and a source of suffering. In other words, it inverts the idea of love as sensuous happiness. It has been conspicuously elaborated in world religions and has been alive up to the present in all aesthetically oriented philosophies of life which link sensuous enjoyment to suffering. 3. The third typical view can be attributed to secular and earthly-oriented antique culture-love as fate, as the domain of secrecy and the axis of human existence. This is reflected in the classical tragedies in which human choice is interfered with by fate, with the result that love does not appear only as a free vital choice, but also as the fulfillment of a predestined decision of the gods. 4. Another typical attitude of the Christian Middle Ages, which were dominated by the already-mentioned traditional idea oflove as sin, is love as a Platonic ad­ oration of another person, making the other an absolutized Thou, as classically developed in the poetry of troubadours. The generally negative idea of human sexuality as the source of sin and of woman as the gate to Hell was sublimated here to such an extent that it laid the basis for individual sexual love between two personalities. 5. Another stereotyped view appears in the Renaissance: love as passion and ad­ venture, as the manifestation of unrestrained emotions and instinct; in other words, as that attitude which has shown itself again and again in Romantic

2

seven principal categories... - I have re-formatted Svitak's text here for the sake of readability, creating an enumerated list from what was originally an unbroken paragraph.

83

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY movements. This view is usually associated with the concept of love as an il­

lusion, based on a deception about the other and the self; that is, based on a special kind of self-deception which results in our relationship to the person we love becoming a fictitious relationship within our own imagination. This conflicting nature of the human attitude toward love as both passion and il­ lusion roughly constitutes that intellectual atmosphere in which-against the background of the Christian feeling of sin-the classic novels and plays of the bourgeois age take place. They almost invariably lead to the idea of love as property of the other. 6. Upon entering the era of twentieth-century industrial societies, we find two more, equally conflicted tendencies. The first reduces love to the consumption of enjoyment and suborclinates it to the routine and necessary satisfaction of needs-ultimately based on ideas of supply and demand7. While the second tendency sees in love a committed choice not motivated by mere instinct or effort to possess another person. This historical spectrum of views contains all the fundamental aspects of love, though in somewhat isolated forms, in which they are never really experienced. Love, of course, is never only one of these aspects; it contains all of them. Love is: a sensuous happiness; a source of suffering; fate; adoration of another person's personality; a passionate adventure; a self-deceptive illusion; consumption of en­ joyment; and a committed choice. It has always been this and will remain so. How­ ever, thanks to a better knowledge of the human being and an actual growth of human freedom, only our century has realized that love is a free expression and gift of one self to another, a meeting of unique personalities, a taking-possession of the other person's personality outside of prefabricated norms. Only modern sci­ ence has made it possible to understand human love as an expression of the entire personality and as a shaping of one's own destiny, as a relationship between con­ crete individualities and human communication by means of minds, bodies, and hearts, as the establishment of human contact and of personal style, as a human relationship without any analogy in nature. Personal love is thus interpreted as the "anthropinon"3 of the human being, as a symbol of humanization and a specific quality of the species. Despite the differences between the subjective views of love outlined above, they have common features. Love is almost always seen as a unique experience, as a seizure of one person by another. Perhaps the best definition of love is the statement that "love is what happens between two people who love each other:'

''anthropinon" Greek, meaning "human" (as an adjective), i.e. "the human element" or "that which is human:' The term was used by various ancient Greek authors. -

84

Essay VII: Prolegomena to Love In antiquity as in modern times, love almost always appears as the true and irresolvable problem faced by the human being. We find the idea of the illusory nature of love, of deception and self-deception, of the mythopoeic obsession of one person with another. In this sense we could regard love-to use a modern term-as the human being's private ideology (mythology); that is, as the human's own false consciousness of itself and the world around, as the myth of its own salvation. After all, love always in some form represents the active establishment of a human relationship which affects another person and transforms one's own ego as well. It is thus a form of the transcendence of the human being conceived in worldly terms, the dynamics of the human being's structural metamorphoses, the magic of its time. These general attitudes mutually reinforce one another and at the same time cancel each other out in each concrete human personal relationship, in the actual establishment of human contact which defies classifying objectivity precisely because it represents the most subjective expression of an individuality 4 searching for itself and for another person. "Love is man unfinished:'

A Typ ology of B ehavior

5 Classifying schemes have their limits. But when we ignore the most fun damental feature of love, namely the concrete individuated choice which makes love incomparable, unclassifiable, and unique, making it escape the cool objectiv­ ity of science, then we can rather safely compile valid models and forms of love which, without identifying a concrete person, nevertheless accurately describe the behavior of entire groups. No matter how infinitely inventive the human being is in its individual actions and in its forms of experiencing love, the human being's relationships can be accounted for by certain models of behavior. According to the measure of importance which the personality of the other partner has in amorous practice, potential relationship models can be arranged in a series: at one end the uniqueness of the loved person is completely irreplaceable; at the other end it does not exist at all.

4

5

"Love is man unfinished." - Paul Eluard, from "A perte de vue clans le sens de mon corps;' in La Vie immediate ( 1 932). It has been published together with an English translation by Samuel Beckett ("Out of Sight in the Direction of my Body") in Beckett's Collected Poems in English and French (London: Calder, 1 977), pp. 68-9. Classifying schemes... But. . . - I have altered the phrasing of these two sentences, which even in the Czech created a logical non sequitur. Svitak wrote, "Classifying schemes, however, have their limits;' but the rest of this section, rather than shifting to discuss these limits and present an alternative, as the "however" suggested it would, instead justifies further use of classifica­ tion schemes in spite of their limits. I have deleted the "however" and added the following ((But ..."

85

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY In Platonic love, respect for the other person makes sexual activity impossible; the unique individuality is absolutely irreplaceable. This applies with some modi­ fication to absolute monogamy, in which individuality becomes the irreplaceable component of sexual activity. We find another similar form also in successive monogamy, with the difference only that a shift from one partner to another is possible. These three types of relationship involve only one person with another and are acceptable from the standpoint of even the most orthodox systems of morality. The following three models necessarily are of a lower order, because they involve more than two people. The most frequent instance is a parallel exist­ ence oflovers and conjugal relations; or to put it more precisely, of a stable and an unstable relationship. Let us call it somewhat imprecisely "bigamY:' In "bigamy;' one does not presuppose the irreplaceability of a specific person in sexual activity, but one still appreciates the individuality of the specific other, perhaps because of the variety offered by this partner in comparison with the familiar form of love. In these relationships, the interest in another person's individuality can be very strong, but it is only natural that the contact of personalities gradually breaks down and becomes more and more superficial-all the more quickly as the stable and unstable partners come and go, one after another. This form necessarily tends toward the polygamous model, in which the personality component of love is further undermined, culminating in the anarchy of promiscuity. Here the human being is reduced to an object of pleasure which eventually needs not be identified as human at all. From there the road can lead only to true perversions in which separate aspects of sexual behavior become independent, in which the object of pleasure needs not be human at all, and where the degenerative line of depersonalized sexuality ends in variations of sadism. The relative weight of the human component in sexual behavior becomes a reliable indicator of a person's character and value, which is betrayed as much by one's choice of behavior as it is by one's choice of partners. This series of models may reflect individual layers of sexual experience, depos­ ited in the human being from the immemorial time of animal prehistory; and the choice of models may depend on the age and personal make-up of the individual. Be that as it may, sociological research conclusively shows that the extreme models of Platonic love on the one hand and perversion on the other are rare, while the successively monogamous and "bigamous" models of relationships are the most frequent. So far, we have emphasized those traits which are inherent in the human being, those forms which are rooted in the human being's biology and are of timeless, suprahistorical nature. Now, however, we ask one final question:

86

Essay VII: Prolegornena to Love

What Is the Contemporary Nature of Love? The changes in human relations and the transformation of the human being which have taken place in the twentieth century also affect the relations between men and women-and very deeply. Several completely new circumstances exist which determine the nature of love today. The weakening or breakdown of eco­ nomic ties between husband and wife (or lovers) eliminates or suppresses the ele­ ment of immediate dependence of one upon the other. Closely related to this is the relaxation of formerly rigorous moral norms and the elimination of sexual taboos, as well as the expansion of freedom to select partners according to personal choice. A natural consequence is the considerable sexual freedom which people of the twentieth century practice in comparison with people of their grandparents' gen­ eration (kissing a girl in Victorian England led to marriage, if the man or woman in question was not to be condemned as immoral). These changes correspond to changes in society, and they mirror the transformations to which the human being is subjected as a result of given social relations. There exist, however, even more profound changes which not only affect the social surface of love, eroticism, and sex but also concern the biological foundations of love making. The most impor­ tant innovation is the effective and widespread use of birth control which, together with sex education, offers the potential prevention of unwanted consequences of love. This fundamentally changes the character of love as a fateful bond between people; the vital risk vanishes, and love turns into enjoyment separable an d sepa­ rated from the biological function. This is a substantial change which leads to a de­ cline in the human component oflove, to an infantilization of sex, to a disappear­ ance of tragedy but also to a superficiality in the choice oflovers. Finally, modern times inject a new feature into eroticism and sexuality, as the mass media create certain conventional stereotypes of an erotic-sexual nature; the media force upon people a standardization of prefabricated models, making them fashionable, creating fictitious needs, and, so to speak, eroticizing the human be­ ing from the outside. The stereotyping of relationships brings about a convention­ al nonconformism which is as shallow as that against which the nonconformist rebels. In sum, the change in scale and the crisis character of contemporary values in general affect love also, changing it into enjoyment isolated from its biologi­ cal mission and depriving it of the irreplaceable nature of a personal relationship. This has a number of ambivalent consequences. It is futile to protest against these changes, to condemn them or to worship them as manifestations of heroism. It will be enough if we expect that greater human freedom will not in the end lead to a depreciation of the human component of love making but on the contrary will lead the human being to realize the true values produced by the contact of personalities.

87

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY Contemporary sexuality is usually characterized as consumption, in which the sexual act appears as a noncommittal using-up of commodities for entertainment. This model oflove is dominated by the law of supply and demand, which is applied to the intimate needs of the human being and assumes that the human being simply satisfies this need in the same way that it satisfies its hunger or thirst. This reduction of love to the satisfaction of corporeal needs is so naive and stupid that it can be, in the most convenient way, offered to the masses and practiced as the enlightened and free attitude of those sexual revolutionaries from Playboy magazine. People who advocate such attitudes overlook the fact that as a result of such attitudes they become victims of bureaucratic forms of production and of the administration of industrial corporations, that they reify human relations and convert themselves and their partners into shameful, manipulated and manipulating puppets, into reified objects. The alienation of labor and of administration is carried over into the hu­ man being's private life, with the result that what in the end "satisfies" is not the human personality but a love-object, a human being reduced to a thing. Although the modern human wants precisely to escape, in love, from the mechanisms of con­ sumption and manipulation, wants precisely to satisfy, through love, the need of finding a more profound meaning in existence, even in love she or he succumbs to the consumer mode of behavior. Love, which was meant to compensate for the world of labor and manipulation, which was meant to make up for the absence of a concrete meaning oflife, takes on the consumption function of the mass being of mass culture. Love in this form becomes perhaps the last personal adventure, a dis­ play of personal initiative in a life which is organized through and through, a way out of the apathy of rationality, of the monotony of life, of disciplined dependence. It has, of course, lost its character as a lifelong commitment; it has become a rapid and passing event; it has ceased to represent a threat to and a risk of the entire hu­ man existence, losing its fateful nature. (The contemporary nature of sexuality as consumption is described in detail in Helmuth Schelsky's Soziologie der Sexualitiit, 6 from which the fundamental characteristics here analyzed have been taken.) The significance of love for the overall fate of the human being has undergone a profound change. Sexual relations have been degraded as a means of fun and di­ version; they have lost their permanent nature, and the continuity of personal rela­ tionships takes on a lower value than the new enjoyment. Sexual relations lose the nature of intimate relations between personalities and become a rapid interchange of vulgar, sharp, and shallow impressions, accompanied by an indiscriminate at­ titude toward partners, by the tendency to enhance fleeting enjoyment and fleeting,

6

Soziologie der Sexualitiit: uber die Beziehungen zwischen Geschlecht, Moral und Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rewohlt, 1957).

88

Essay VII: Prolegomena to Love superficial feelings. Instead of erotic refinement, there prevails mass interest in the sexual act. The liberation of love from responsibility and consequences transforms sexuality into a noncommittal consumption of consumer goods for entertainment, into a form of playfulness of millions of people. The new rules of the game prohibit value judgment, moralizing speculation, and larger investments of emotional capi­ tal, because these do not turn a profit. Whether we like it or not, there exists a struc­ tural connection between typical mass sexuality and the society of bureaucrats and consumers. The nature of industrial society determines the contemporary nature of eroticism. Is there a way out? Certainly-there are two: either to accept the concept oflove as consumption, putting aside all requirements associating love with individualized expression, and to interpret life as an ever-spinning merry-go-round of impressions and replaceable partners; or to reject this model as a deflation of the human being, as nicely packaged trash, and to realize, in the flood of pseudo-values, false informa­ tion, and counterfeit personalities, that if we reject love as consumption and defend love as the meeting of unique personalities, we defend a higher set of values, for which we must pay. If necessary, even by our solitude.

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,...

Ltk

--

89

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY

anti-essay 7: a private mythology Dancing Goddess [ 1he Zwii believe that] the dancing gods are happy and comradely super­ naturals who live at the bottom of a lake far off in the empty desert south ofZuni. There they are always dancing. But they like best to return to Zuni to dance. To impersonate them, therefore, is to give them the pleasure they most desire. . . . [In a ritual of boys' initiation] the punitive masked gods come for the initiation, and they whip the children with theiryucca whips.... Later, traditionally when the boy is aboutfourteen and old enough to be responsi­ ble, he is whipped again by even stronger masked gods. It is at this initiation that the kachina mask is put upon his head, and it is revealed to him that the dancers, instead of being the supernaturals from the Sacred Lake, are in reality his neighbors and his relatives. After the final whipping, the four tallest boys are made to standface toface with the scare kachinas who have whipped them. the priests lift the masks from their heads and place them upon the heads of the boys. It is the great revelation. The boys are terrified. --Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

A boy sees a dancing goddess and, full of terror before the mask of the unknown feels that he understands the full dimension of the mystery: that he is ceasing to be a child and is ripe for the immense metaphysics of life -for the dancing goddess who deals him symbolic blows to raise him to manhood But the mystery in which he believed is bitter as truth and the blows prove unbearable for the very reason that they are only symbolic The goddess stops dancing, lays aside the mask, and the mystery vanishes Instead of a supernatural being there appears the tenacious commonness of existence the horror that there is no such thing as a dancing goddess, only masks Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1934), pp. 68-9.

90

1

anti-essay 7: a private mythology which one must repay for their blows Seeing a goddess and feeling fear is beautiful Striking people who feign the perfection of gods is ludicrous The discovery that the greatest mystery is the knowledge that there is no mystery is a terrible discovery We are terrified of it again and again because the great revelation comes too soon: instead of boys growing old with their beliefs in personal beautiful illusions they receive the truth, unbearable at any age Sure, they had been afraid of the dancing illusion but they lived for it as for an initiation miracle for the ceremony of manhood in which they discover that truth is a lie As soon as they have they understood it they can no longer dance before the goddess as before but can always put on masks and, at future ceremonies, deal blows to little frightened children who are ridiculous if unable to perceive the mask as a demonic forgery, unable to see that the gods are their kinsfolk Only a boy who grasped the mystery of the ceremony by refusing to grasp it preserved the truth: he puts on the mask and dances with the certainty that if there is in fact no dancing goddess its existence must be feigned in order that the world not lose its meaning It is cruel but it is so: We fortify the mystery by comprehending the truth that there are no mysteries

And we create our dancing goddesses even if we don't believe in them A small frightened boy in the middle of a life bereft of the dimension of mystery that is you in this century Put on a mask, deal blows, and dance Be a dancing pseudo-god, be yourself, but don't set aside the mask you would lose the respect of children who admire you as an authentic deity but who would not be able to bear the sight of a familiar person

91

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY touched by the commonness of every day What counts is not you but what you are able to arouse in others it is the dimension of horror that you inspire like a dancing god The illusion of truthfulness must not be broken so deal your blows hard and draw blood blood of the boys without masks, who believe guilelessly-with the tenacity of their big souls-in the very maximum of cynical lies However, by doing so, you yourself will become the beaten boy: when faced with the horrible truth of reality masked goddesses beat trusting lads and vice versa the two in each other, joined like forms of algolagnia Slave and master, torturer and victim, sadist and masochist that is the modern human being playing the same roles over and over inside itself We alternate positions, from the frightened boy to the dancing goddess but we have lost the secret that creates the myth We are no longer capable of believing that there are goddesses -not to speak of their dancing

Goddess on Saturday Evening The Satyr2 loves Echo Echo loves Narcissus Narcissus loves himself -from Greek mythology Theoretically speaking a man (Satyr) seeks the reflection (Echo) of himself in a woman He loves her for what he makes of her and so he is indifferent to emotion unless it is aroused by himself He is indifferent also to women's desires to love him he doesn't want sex but the echo of himself in a woman Narcissus also seeks an echo

2

The Satyr In fact, according to ancient Greek tradition it was not a satyr but Pan who fell in love with Echo. The satyrs, who are often depicted as physically similar to Pan, were Pan's companions. -

92

anti-essay 7: a private mythology but he seeks it in the mirror image of himself so that he is incapable of love for his indifference to all that is not he himself No sooner is the ideal nymph transformed into a real woman than he is wounded in his self-love and ceases to nourish the illusions that were born as a result of the nymph's inaccessibility Finally, Echo rebels against her mission of being a man's echo she wants to be herself and to gain the apathetic beauty of contempt which she herself admires in the face of Narcissus submerged in the certainty of himself So the Satyr strives in vain for the inaccessible nymph Echo strives in vain for the inaccessibility of the self And all is good because love is the inaccessibility of the object of desire Practically speaking, on a Saturday night everything is otherwise because the Satyr is indifferently drinking beer in a tavern while the nymph departs, mildly disappointed using Narcissus as a chauffeur to rendezvous with the Capricorns of the local army post On a Saturday night, the figures of Greek mythology are switched Narcissus is the echo of his nymphs the nymphs love no one but themselves 3 and the Satyr phlegmatically drinks his seventh Budweiser submerged in the bubbles of his beer stein And yet each keeps its place within the Greek scheme: the Satyr is the echo of the world and therefore he is sought by the world Echo is the echo of men and therefore they resound in her And Narcissus is the echo of death4 therefore he is silent and transports his nymphs to strange men's kisses with unconditional respect for other people's values be they ideas, kisses, or beer Life is never without content, but a world without values lacks authenticity 3

4

Budweiser That is to say, the original Budweiser beer from the city of Budweis, or Ceske Budejovice, in Bohemia; not the St. Louis brand that copied this beer's name. the echo of death In the Czech version, this line reads "the echo of depth:' not "death:' Either intentionally or by m istake, Svitak changed the line in his English translation. -

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93

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY it is full of misfortune and pseudo-problems If the world lacks authenticity of values we must create them in order to live and we can do that, because values are neither in ideas, nor in sex, nor in beer values are in our yearning for them The only invulnerable, inalienable values of your personality are in your subjectivity: your yearning is always only your own That doesn't mean that others have value if we yearn for them but it means that yearning itself is of value 5 like your smile in Stromovka Park where the dying leaves scream to me of the past

Goddess in Stromovka Park When at night I hear the whistle of a train passing near the old tree-lined prom­ enade 6 I recall the poet who said: "Aimez ce que jamais on ne verra deux fois" Your night-time face full of bliss and desire, appears to me along with the distant roar of the train All the dimensions of time-present, past, and future are fused like lovers at the moment when we are naked before ourselves when we sing the crazy song of ourselves though we are silent under all those stars I hear the whistle of a train passing near the promenade leaving for nowhere and returning from nowhere like us eternally returning in an eternal progress toward the indifference of the stars to the endless path of time and to the laughing faces of the final night I hear the whistle of the train passing near the old promenade I see your face just when you smile in the dark and I feel like weeping

5 6

Stromovka Park A park in Prague, near where Svitak: during much of his time in the city. "Aimez ... deux fois" "Love what you will never see two times:' From "La maison du berger (III)" ("The Shepherd's House [III]"), by Alfred de Vigny, 1 844, published in Les destinees (Destinies). -

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94

Essay VIII: The Historical Limits ofSurrealism

Essay VIII: The Historical Limits of Surrealism The Illusion of World Revolution True anarchy is an element of creation. From the destruction of all that is positive it raises its victorious head as a new founder of the world. -Mikhail Bakunin

1

The human being is a creator of illusions. It cannot exist without them, because they materialize the human's dream and place it seemingly within reach. Precisely this fictitious accessibility of the dream is what constitutes the substance of illusion, which is a link between dream and reality, but which, however, possesses neither the tempo­ rality and magical transitoriness of a dream nor the harsh certainty of reality. There­ fore, people who waver between dreams and reality have the most illusions, be they neurotics or dreamers. Realists have the strength to destroy illusions, while fools, on the other hand, never wake up from them. Thus, in the majority of insecure people, the mechanism of illusion functions as the substance of humanity. Illusion and disil­ lusion form a vicious cycle which repeats itself at ever higher levels, because people are never willing to give up dreams and illusions but will only transform them, under the pressure of circumstances, in that remarkable manner whereby in memory even last night's dreams are deformed. Then, since something as fictitious as an illusion cannot be abandoned, a past illusion is hated just as intensely as it was once loved. An illusion can only be destroyed by transforming it into reality or by relegating it to the realm of dream by identifying it as a lie. Illusions are lies not seen as such, be it in the case of people, social institutions, or ideas. It is difficult to determine that one's own illusion is a lie, but it is also a sign of strength, since giving up an illusion requires a deeper understanding of the reality of one's self in the world. On the other hand, depriving someone else of his or her illusion means becoming an object of resistance, and if in the end the illusion is an illusion the human being has about itself, then whoever deprives another of such an illusion can only be hated. If one wants to infuriate people, it is enough to tell them the truth. Science is misanthropic. If the mechanism of illusions can play such a role

Bakunin I have been unable to find the source of this quote. Similar formulations are articu­ lated in Bakunin's 1 842 article "The Reaction in Germany;' but the concept of "anarchy" does not appear there. -

95

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY in the life of an individual, then mass illusions or, more precisely, ideologies or mass myths, must play an especially important role, and all the more so according to the importance of the ideas they support and elicit. By contrast, efforts to destroy modern mythologies must provoke spells of persecution, vengeance, and fury, setting the de­ mystifiers of ideologies in the pillory; these reactions to de-mystification will be all the stronger the greater the faith is in the reality of the illusion, the greater the faith in the possibility of realizing utopia, and of course the greater the institutionalized power of the illusion in question. Such is, roughly put, the basic social-psychological mechanism which can explain the twenties and thirties in Europe, that remarkable era between two wars, in which two entire generations were permanently marked by gravitation toward socialism and communism, by the belief in the world revolution of the proletariat. Disillusion with the character and historical course of this world revolution which, contrary to 2 the democratic ideas of its inception, was actualized as a totalitarian mechanism, leading to a pole of crystallization around the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1 939, which gener­ ated universal opposition much as the revolution of 1 9 17 had generated universal fas­ cination. Between these two dates took place the dramatic artistic development of the European avant-garde. Its leaders were the surrealists, both poets and artists: Eluard, Aragon, Prevert, Desnos, Peret, Artaud, Duchamp, Ernst, Dali, Miro, Tanguy, Pica­ bia, Toyen, Arp, Ray, Bufiuel, Picasso. Today these names belong to the history of art, and they have no successors of equal stature. Does that mean that surrealism is dead? The answer to this question depends first on the historical limits of surrealism and the era which it expressed. We are faced with the problem of constants and vari­ ables in the surrealist movement, a problem first raised by Jean-Louis Bedouin (in Vingt ans de surrealisme, 1 939-1 9593 ) in an apparent effort to characterize specific ally the two decades of the "decline" of surrealism since the outbreak of World War II, and 4 to show the homogeneity of opinions of the movement. As constants of surrealist 2

4

contrary to the democratic ideas of its inception I have placed this phrase in the first clause of this sentence rather than in the second, where Svitak had it, presumably by mistake, since it would be semantically inconsistent there (opposition to the Soviet-Nazi pact was not contrary to democratic ideas; nor did it generate universal opposition, as Svitak elsewhere acknowl­ edged). Vingt ans de surrealisme, 1 939-1 959 (Paris: Denoel, 1 961). the two decades of the "decline"... opinions of the movement. I have had to address several inconsistencies in Svitak's rendering of this passage. 1 ) Svitak wrote of"two postwar decades" from 1939 to 1 959, although the first years in that period are only p ost- the start of the war, not its end. 2) Instead of"decline:' Svitak wrote "decadence:' but since the term "decadent art" is more typically applied to a high point of the interwar avant-garde, I've rendered the word here as "decline." 3) His phrasing "homogeneity of opinions of the movement" leaves it am­ biguous whether it is a question of opinions held by others about the movement, or opinions held by participants in the movement. I have let the ambiguity remain. -

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96

Essay VIII: The Historical Limits ofSurrealism thinking, Bedouin lists Hegelian dialectics, hermetic philosophy, Leninist Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, psychic automatism, and a fundamentally antagonistic atti­ tude toward art. This specification may be superfluous and could be briefly expressed 5 by the following nan1es: Hegel, Marx, Freud, Trotsky, Breton ; after all, Breton himself defined the energy sources of surrealism as the "transposition of impressions;' "objec­ tive chance;' and black humor,6 although the entire meaning of Breton's work is based rather on another triad of basic concepts: the unity oflove, poetry, and revolutionary 7 freedom. These three constants can also be understood in extenso as a certain anti-artistic conception of art (or more exactly, of the revolutionary meaning of art), as an attempt to develop a new concept of life in modern civilization (as concretized poetry) and, finally, as a new concept of the human being in its adventure through reality and imagination. These constants, however, have gone through at least three basic phases in their fifty years of evolution: The first twenty years (the twenties and thirties) repre­ sented the formation of an opposition movement which stood in the center of artistic activity and whose interests coincided with the interests of the labor movement and the proletarian revolution. The second basic phase, begun in the forties and continu­ ing into the fifties, represented a loss of this central position in European culture and a defection of some of the movement's members into the opposing camps of socialist realism or existentialism. Surrealism appeared as a doctrine antiquated by the results of World War II, while socialist realism and existentialism were accepted as contem­ porary expressions of the epoch. The nucleus that remained true to Breton main­ tained a stubborn and incorruptible loyalty to the principles of an isolated movement. Finally, in the third period, beginning in the sixties, a regeneration of the surrealist heritage is connected to surrealism by a continuation of formal processes rather than by a programmatic unity of revolutionary idea and form, which had been typical for the leading members of the avant-garde. It is only natural that a movement whose de­ velopment has taken such dramatic form should experience enormous fluctuations in interest and lack of interest, in success and failure, in faithfulness and betrayal, and

5

6

7

Hegel, Marx, Freud, Trotsky, Breton Interestingly, "hermetic philosophy" is left out of this attempt to represent surrealist principles by great names. the "transposition of impressions," "objective chance," and black humor Svitak provides the parenthetical citation "( 1 942):' Later Svitak draws a different quote from Breton's lecture at Yale in 1 942, which was published as "The Situation of Surrealism Between the Two Wars:' ("Situation du surrealisme entre les deux guerres'') in Free Rein (La cle des champs) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1 995). freedom in revolution Svitak rendered this term awkwardly as "revolting freedom" (in Art in the Manipulated World) and "freedom (revolution)" (in the manuscript sent to Franklin and Penelope Rosemont). -

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97

THE WINDMILLS OF HUMANITY in the elements ofthe movement that could be considered historically specific versus those elements that represent surrealism's permanent, humanly valid face. As is always the case with significant movements, the central ideas of surreal­ ism were not artistic but political, since the members of the movement wanted to influence not only people's tastes but also the masses' style of life. The surrealists understood already in the twenties (and the Dadaists still earlier) that the World War meant an end to European civilization, or more accurately, an end to the bourgeois democracy of the prosperous prewar years. They therefore refused to patch up the cracks in old ideologies and unconditionally rejected the old soci­ ety with its mediocrity, since "il n'y a pas de modele pour qui cherche ce qu'il n'a .

.

;amats vu.

,,s

In the thirties the revolt of the artists against bourgeois culture was already so far advanced that it was being connected with the political efforts of communist and leftist parties. This inclusion of perspectives of world revolution, however, took place exactly at the moment when Stalin was superimposing the interests of the ap­ paratus on the international labor movement and was beginning to methodically liquidate not only Trotsky's opposition but also the foundations of Lenin's Party. The critical situation of the revolutionary movement, as intensified by the Mos­ cow trials,9 meant a rift in the Paris surrealist movement (with Aragon in 1933) and later in the movement in Prague (in 1938).1 0 The nucleus of the movement embraced Breton and Trotsky's far-sighted policy of defense of the Soviet State against Stalin; but many members preferred the Stalinist parties and their policies of "socialist realism:' After the war a completely different situation arose, taking the wind from the surrealist movement's sails. The surrealists continued stubbornly to defend the truth about the U.S.S.R. and were excommunicated from the leftist movement. At the same time a deep political morality prevented them from deserting the strug­ gle against bourgeois society. In critical moments they were forced to tell truths which were as outrageous as they were exact. They had to defend the principle of revolution and, at the same time, to say in the critical year of 1956 that "[es fascistes

8

9

IO

"ii ny a pas de modele pour qui cherche ce qu'il na jamais vu." "There is no model for one who seeks what he has never seen:' Paul Eluard, Donner a voir, in CEuvres completes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1 968), p. 983. the Moscow trials I.e. the show trials of the late 1930s. a rift in the Paris surrealist movement... and later in the movement in Prague.. . - In 1933 Breton was expelled from the Communist Party. Louis Aragon chose to remain in the Party and broke with the surrealists. In 1 938 several Prague surrealists including Karel Teige, the lead­ ing theorist of Czech surrealism, were criticized by the Communist Party. Vitezslav Nezval, the most prominent writer and organizer of the Czech movement, sided with the Communist Party and gave up his erstwhile surrealism. -

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Essay VIII: Tlze Historical Limits ofSurrealism sont ceux qui tirent sur le peuple." 11 Politically, the surrealist manifestoes are a clear example of precision in adherence to principles of political thinking. The surrealists were also isolated, however, in their literary-artistic activity. The elements of irrationality, non-consciousness, and the absurd were inherited by fashionable existentialism, while the surrealists' optimistic traits were claimed by socialist realism. Once more the surrealists stood against both trends: against the fashion of hopelessness and against political myths-an unsteady cart to which literature was hitched. Finally, we cannot overlook the fact that Paris ceased to be the "capital of Europe;' that the world power centers moved to the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A., and that the atom bomb forced cooperation between antagonistic regimes and destroyed the original perspective of a world revolution led by advanced Eu­ ropean countries. This threefold isolation of the surrealists did not occur either because of their will, their lack of tactics, or their personal characteristics, but rather because they were too far-sighted to give up the values of freedom, love, and poetry-as the meaning of human activity. In this threefold isolation-political, artistic, and international-surrealism had to disintegrate, both through desertion to Stalinism and through its own stag­ nation. Aragon, Eluard, Sadoul, and Tzara turned against the "anarchism-prone Trotskyist Breton;' who opposed them by reviving the youthful illusions of the prewar movement by which they themselves had long before sworn. Breton forced them to be faithful to ideals from a period 12 when art stopped being the expression of political slogans and tried to liberate itself from ideological bondage. The surre­ alists themselves were shaped by the decisive "illusion of the epoch;' that is, by the myth of world revolution. They were incapable of understanding the social process which transformed the face of European societies into consumer societies with all 13 the repulsive traits of a working class turned bourgeois en masse. The surrealists were unable to participate in the many perversions of dialectics and falsifications of the meaning of Marxism. They found them indigestible, since they committed themselves to a deep understanding of the Marxian dialectic, which simply does not allow any desertion from the truth.

11

12

13

"/es fascistes sont ceux qui tirent sur le peuple:' "Fascists are those who fire on the people:' From Hongrie, Soleil levant, a French surrealist manifesto, 1956. from a period Svitak's English text says "in a period" rather than "from a period:' That would suggest, however, that the p ostwar period saw a decline in sloganeering, which seems con­ trary to Svitak's argument here. a working class turned bourgeois en masse - I n the unpublished English manuscript, this line continues: "-under the slogans of communism:' Svitak presumably deleted the phrase in .Art in the Manipulated World in order to make the point more general, not applying only to consumer societies led by Communist Parties. -

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THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY A human being who once understands the principles of reading cannot un­ learn how to read. Should someone attempt to force an intelligent person to forget how to read, the reader would have to be blinded. Beria's police apparatus was able to perform these pedagogical lessons on a large scale in the U.S.S.R. and on 1 a smaller scale in Mexico and elsewhere. 4 It was unable to do so in Paris. Thus the aging Breton and several of his most faithful followers remained in Paris as an enormous rock of world culture and politics, similar to boulders on a moraine after the glacier has melted away. This rock of intellect represented furthermore a protest against the crisis of civilization, a striving for human totality, and an at­ tempt to include the existence of modern humanity in a more complex unity of reality and dream. The surrealists waited in vain for a movement which would bring more artistic or spiritual freedom than the movement which they them­ selves represented; they awaited such a movement in order to join it . 15 They waited in vain, because the surrealist conception of the world, of the human being, and of art has not yet been surpassed. In surrealist orthodoxy, the human being is the creator of its basic experience of the world. The source of miracle is the human being itself. The human is the future of its own contradictions: it is neither a fallen angel nor a superman but a being that has a chance "se faire voyant" as Rimbaud has done, to make itself perceiving, 16 that is, to make itself understand beyond the limits imposed by reason. This human being is much more important to surrealism than art and literature. The exploration of deeper spheres of consciousness, revolt against so­ cial taboos, freedom of creativity, and an independent revolutionary art, all that is more important than the aesthetic-decorative function of art, pure poetry, l'art pour l'art-ism, mannerism, and the metaphysics which accompany them. The world appears as a territory of the mystique of dream, magic, imagination, fan­ tasy, and poetry, as a world with belief in the value of love, poetry, and freedom, with the political belief in a future without the State. But the emancipation of the human being is impossible without the emancipation of thought and society. The

14

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16

Beria's police apparatus... in Mexico and elsewhere. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria led Stalin's se­ cret police. Mexico was the site of Trotsky's murder by a Stalinist agent and of the Stalinization of such surrealist sympathizers as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The surrealists waited in vain... in order to join it. To support this assertion, Svitak cites Bret­ on's 1942 Yale lecture, "The Situation of Surrealism Between the Two Wars;' published in Free Rein (La cle des champs). This assertion by Breton comes in the fifth paragraph of the printed lecture. "se faire voyant"... - Literally "to make oneself seeing:' From Rimbaud's "Lettre du voyant" ("Letter of the Seer"), addressed to Paul Demeny, May 1 5, 1 87 1 . -

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Essay VIII: The Historical Limits ofSurrealism surrealists rightly believed that Marx's call to change the world and Rimbaud's

"changer la vie" 17 were identical.

The door remains open to new sensibility, but there are few people who would enter this open door of life's poetry to find a home in surrealism, which repre­ sents the adventure of humanity and reality ("Le surrealisme est... une aventure de l'homme et du reel lances l'un sur l'autre par le meme mouvement" 18 ). The key ques­ tion remains: Can these principles, born in the times of the illusion of world revo­ lution and of a messianic utopia of the working class-can they find real support in the future consumer society? Or have they already become antiquated through a historical process that has given precedence to slippers and television sets over 1 the poetry oflife? 9 The retreat of nonconformism in both the West and the East, into both Stalin­ 0 ism and existentialism,2 is of course accompanied by the defeat of humanistic ori­ entations. After the two bloody wars, with their concentration camps and cremat­ ing furnaces, yesterday's optimism of historical progress, tied to the illusive faith in world revolution, appeared as a dangerous illusion. In the face of the atom bomb, 1 optimistic faith in technology changed into fear of an atomic sword of Damocles. 2 Finally, the belief that the human being can be improved, as recognized by an un­ interrupted line of thinkers from renaissance humanists through the enlightened French and the liberal English and Germans, was confronted with the traditional Christian notions about original sin and the evil inherent in humans.

17

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19

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21

"Changer la vie" "Change life:' The phrase appears i n "Delires I: Vierge folle" ("Delirium I: Foolish [or Insane] Virgin''), in Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell): "II a peut-etre des se­ crets pour changer la vie ?" ("Perhaps he has secrets for changing life?"). In Gallimard's "Folio classique" edition, the phrase is found on p. 1 989. "Le surrealisme est... le meme mouvement" - "Surrealism is . . . an adventure of man and of the real thrown against each other in the same movement:' Theis quote come from the Parisian Manifesto Hautefrequence, 1 9 5 1 . the poetry of life? - In the manuscript version, this line ends the "Illusion of World Revolution" section of this essay. In the Art in the Manipulated World version, as in the version printed here, two more paragraphs are included in the section, which in the manuscript are part of a section entitled "The Actuality of Surrealism;' most of which is not included in Art in the Manipulated World or in the version of the essay printed here. into both Stalinism and existentialism - Svitak's text read "in" rather than "into;' leaving it ambiguous whether he meant that conformists retreat to Stalinism and existentialism (as I have interpreted it) or that the retreat takes place within the general context of Stalinism and existentialism, the one representing the East, the other the West. sword dfDamocles - In his Tusculanae Disputationes ( V. 61-2), Cicero wrote o f a man named Damocles who was given the chance to change places with his king, sitting in luxury on the throne, but with a large sword hanging over his head, held up only by a single hair of a horse's tail. -

101

THE WINDMILLS O F H UMANITY Thus, during the Second World War the belief in world revolution collapsed along with faith in progress and along with humanist illusions about the human be­ ing. East and West, the new generations found themselves in the world of manipulat­ ing organizations. They saw the formation of technocratic-bureaucratic elites and of totalitarian States striving to increase consumption. The surrealists saw through this game, but they were unable either to stop it or to face it. The ideological camouflage used by the Eastern bureaucratic technocracy in order to usurp power was almost as perfect as the tactics of the new Western technocrats. 22 Slice by slice they deprived the old liberal democrats of prestige in the eyes of the masses, gradually limiting their power, then preparing the fundamental political transition, and finally forcing those who did not agree to partially or fully collaborate. The destruction of demo­ cratic principles in Eastern Europe was perfect. Thus the conglomeration of an apa­ thetic working class, a collaborating intelligentsia, and a technological-bureaucratic elite rolls toward atomic war, patiently and indifferently. Mechanisms created by the great Genghis Khan play so perfectly with human interests and police power that they function undisturbed, without regard for the quality of people who administer them. Instead of revolutionary masses, flawless bureaucratic rule, East and West.

The Reality of Consumer Society Who says pop art comes from America?... It's a derivation from the art experimentation of60 years ago. 2 Giorgio de Chirico 3 2 How does the surrealist concept of art fit into this bureaucratic world ? 4 It does not. The old tenet of Marxism connects the form of material production with ideal, spiritual production. The ties between spiritual and material production mean that there is a connection between the imaginative plane and social relations. The re­ production of ideas must necessarily reflect the reality of the circumstances under which the thought originated. Social crises and shocks are thus also shocks of so22

23 24

the new Western technocrats The specification "Western" does not appear in Svitak's text, but the sentence does not make sense unless the implied contrast between terms is spelled out. Alternatively, it is also possible that Svitak meant to emphasize the contrast between the Eastern technocrats' ideological camouflage and the same Eastern technocrats' everyday (non-ideological) tactics of power. Chirico Svitak does not indicate the specific source of Chirico's quote. How does the surrealist concept of art fit...? In the manuscript version, the first two para­ graphs of this section do not appear here, but rather in the section entitled "The Actuality of Socialism:' -

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1 02

Essay VIII: The Historical Limits ofSurrealism cial consciousness, which might or might not find their expression in ideological phenomena like art. Factors which are unfavorable from the standpoint of the rul­ ing class and which are consequently kept secret might be hidden and obscured in order to prevent their penetration into the consciousness of wider circles of people; this is accomplished through censorship and through the planned dissemination of half-truths in the mass media. It is impossible to prevent changed reality, how­ ever, from influencing human knowledge, imagination, and sensibility. Thus we obtain the bizarre effect that in totalitarian dictatorship art plays a political role, since by interpreting reality subconsciously and imaginatively, even a mediocre work perceives more truth about reality than does officially channeled conscious­ ness. The surrealist position continues to lead toward changing the world, toward the sphere of consciousness and revolt. But today its "concrete irrationality" differs from the delirious associations of the original concept of Dali, mainly because re­ ality overwhelmed Dali's delirious associations, and irrationality became domesti­ cated in everyday life, such that it lost its stunning quality of shock against ration­ alistic convention. Concrete irrationality has, furthermore, lost its basic critical function. Revolutionary romanticism gave way to the imaginative aggressiveness of irony, sarcasm, and black humor. It manifests itself in the effort to equalize the planes of the fictitious and the real, the irrationality of a poem or a dream and the irrationality of social reality. Face to face with the tradition of surrealist ideas, people faithful to the basic substance of the surrealist appeal for freedom of creativity, for the centrality of love, and for the poeticization of life must again emphasize that they are not con­ cerned with art but with the basic problems of society-that is, with the measure of civic rights, human values, and the humanistic meaning of socialism and of the great revolutionary idea of transforming the world. With a stubborn obstinacy that so grates against the manipulative flexibility and functionality of principles of the official culture, we must point out the present culture's lack of perspective for the future; we must openly declare the Byzantine character of present social conditions, of power elites, East and West. The solution lies in political change of a fundamental character, in change which must basically fulfill the earlier goals of political revolution. This perspective is just as surrealistic and unimaginable as the Polish October or the Hungarian uprising25 would have been for a Stalinist in 1 952. However, since there is a polarity of dialectical principles, the rational policy must be strengthened through a strengthening of surrealist principles in

25

the Polish October or the Hungarian uprising Two rebellions against Communist Party dic­ tatorship in 1 956. -

1 03

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY poetry. When poems again become "calamities of the intellect" 26 rather than its feasts, the political event will again be the feast of the intellect rather than its ca­ lamity. The emotionality of poets and the thoughts of politicians must therefore be presented with that aggressiveness of ideas which wins in both politics and poetry, 7 because... "Ideas quite naked are as strong as naked women:'2 With the horizon of its future open, surrealism enters the third phase of its evolution-not as an organized movement but as a spiritual and artistic tradi­ tion. A considerable revival of interest in surrealism is taking place. It is not only happening because changes in fashion demand ever new fetishes to worship (just as idols change everywhere when there are no gods), but also because the sixties begin to establish an utterly different economic-political-ideological scene. Ten­ sions increase; the U.S.A. - U.S.S.R. bi-polar world becomes more complicated and divided; a new decomposition of forces changes the ideological foundations of the last twenty years of "peaceful coexistence:' The beginning of the sixties brings a series of drastic occurrences: rockets landing on the moon, the first peo­ ple appearing in interplanetary space, French and Chinese atom bombs explod­ 8 ing and earning the label of "paper tigers:'2 The wall was built in Berlin, and the 29 Paris Summit ended in debacle. War became imminent after ballistic missiles with atomic warheads undertook remarkable voyages across the ocean, start­ ing the Cuban Missile Crisis. Finally, Kennedy was assassinated and Khrushchev fell, making it evident through symbolic liquidation of both representatives of "peaceful coexistence" that the world was entering a new phase of history, in which the "third world" and entire continents would begin to play an independ­ ent role. An immediate expression of the new trend is the sudden profusion of aes­ thetic processes and thoughts that had appeared in the surrealist movement forty

26

27 28

29

''calamities of the intellect" Svitak cites no source for this quote, but later he cites what is presumably the same line: "a debacle of the intellect;' from Paul Eluard and Andre Breton's Notes sur la poesie (Paris: G.L.M., 1936). This appears in the book's fifth "note;' on its third page (unnumbered). "Ideas quite naked are as strong as naked women." Eluard and Breton, Notes sur la poesie. This line comes from the book's second "note;' on its first page (unnumbered). ''paper tigers" Svitak's usage here seems atypical. The term "paper tiger" was popularized by Mao, who used it to refer to imperialist countries, apparently powerful but ultimately weak. the Paris Summit An attempt in 1 960 to resolve the international crisis surrounding postwar sovereignty over Berlin. One result of the summit's failure to produce an agreement was the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1 96 1 . -

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Essay VIII: The Historical Limits ofS11rrealism 0 years before. Fluxus, pop art, op art, neo-surrealism,3 to a certain extent Anti­ 31 Theater and the New Wave in film took up approaches developed in the period between the wars. They manifest mainly the revulsion against art of any sort or, at least, against given artistic conventions. They organize purposeful and pro­ vocative attacks against a given culture, they proclaim themselves heirs to the avant-garde, the third surrealist-D adaist-futurist wave. If we study more closely these artificially created fashions we discover that, in spite of the outward simi­ larity of this flashy phraseology, these trends completely lack that philosophical foundation from which surrealism drew its rare poetic purity. They lack the po­ litical meaning of artistic provocations, which became a game in the hands of the bored moneyed elite; the uniqueness, novelty, and unrepeatable character of an experimental endeavor is completely absent. Moreover, "the destruction of art" is finished, and it is assumed that all these trends are artistic trends. The price of pop art on the art market is more than remarkable. Happenings, compared with activities of the avant-garde, cannot be considered anything but embarrass­ ing copies and misunderstandings sanctioned by the consumer society because they are harmless. Happenings channel the need for excitement into an innocent method of fighting boredom, by organizing that which cannot be organized­ namely, coincidence. The naive elements in happenings and pop art-their primitiveness, their emp­ ty provocations, their artistic aspirations, however, must not overshadow at least three basic positive elements, in which these trends progress further than the old surrealism. First is the nonconformist protest itself, which has a certain value per se, since it is aimed against the commercialization of creativity and consumer cul­ ture in general. Second, it seems that isolated artistic provocations are beginning to be connected with a certain view of the world-that is, with a specific conceptual standpoint. The world is understood as chaos, as a permanent confusion where the aleatory principle (or objective chance) ascertains itself as a valid order. Third, the dialectics of the plan and chance, the discoveries of certain evolving structures­ irreplaceable, lived, and unique-these are important and artistically productive tendencies. They approach, on a higher level, the central idea of all romanticism and surrealism, the union of the experiences of love and life, always the goal of all leading artists. In the twenties, leftist European artists followed the intellec-

30

31

neo-surrealism Later in the essay Svitak refers in a similar list to "neo-realism:' It is possible that one of these instances is a misprint. But in "Surrealism and Art;' Svitak more clearly uses "neo-surrealism" to refer to various attempts to separate surrealist methods from the surreal­ ist project of changing life and revolutionizing the world. Anti-Theater It is unclear whether Svitak here refers to the general anti-theatrical tendencies of modernist theater, or to a specific project such as Munich's Anti-Theater, so named in 1 967. -

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THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY tual lead of Freud's psychoanalysis, Hegel's dialectics, and the political foresight of Trotsky. The art of the sixties begins to show similar symptoms. The radically desecrated human world is divided into the partial observation fields of the indi­ vidual sciences. The human being is defined as a living, situated temporality-that is, as a being captive in its own time and space and in the unique structure of an individual's personality. The new artistic creativity consciously incorporates these specific philosophical notions and ideological standpoints into artistic expression. And in any case it is problematic to measure these contemporary manifestations by 2 the values of imaginative surrealist art, by psychoanalytic caption3 or revolution­ ary impact, since the standards of Freud-Marx-Trotsky are not capable of measur­ ing the dimensions of the sixties. It is important, however, to discern the most valuable elements of "surreal­ ist methodology" in happenings, Fluxus, pop art, neo-realism, and other similar trends: an attempt to develop the concrete sensibility of people in life itself, to combine real events and experiences as the surrogate of art. "The new art" strives to discover "natural aesthetics;' to gain the capacity to perceive the world as a field of aesthetic perception. But natural aesthetics are no longer connected only with nature; they are also connected with the coincidental structures of walls, with the configurations of objects, and hence with objects that are not created as art or as stimuli for aesthetic perception. This effort is very valuable. It corresponds to the authentic meaning of surrealist activity. However, it is impossible to avoid the impression that it is so formalized-see the instructions to happenings! -that a group with loaves of bread on their heads fishing for impressions is not consid­ erably different from tourists hunting for pictures of monuments. Allan Kaprow, the initiator of American happenings, Wolf Vostell, the initiator of German hap­ penings, and Otto Muehl of Vienna attempt to bridge the gap between actor and spectator, producers and consumers of art, enforced by the market. This task is as impressive and correct as the chosen media are disproportionate, such that we are forced to form the same opinion about happenings as we would about an attempt to fly by means of a steam engine. It is possible, though impractical and na·ive; and in this mod naivete lies the same audacity that actually installed a steam engine in the first plane ever built. The idea of combining real actions as a surrogate for art, or of substituting artificial creative expression by a real object, begins with the Dadaistic program of exhibiting the "readymades" of Marcel Duchamp. Mere functional objects of everyday life, through the so-called "depaysement de sensations" (that is, the trans­ position of sensations) were elevated to pseudo-artistic status as soon as a bottle 32

psychoanalytic caption It is unclear exactly what Svitak means here by "caption:' -

1 06

Essay VIII: Tiie Historical Limits ofSurrealism holder or a toilet seat33 appeared on a museum pedestal. Reality replacing art in­ vades the exhibition hall with the same lack of etiquette that photography showed toward portrait painting. The invasion of reality into the sphere of aesthetics be­ came a permanent component of the tendency for art to discover reality as aes­ thetically valuable rather than merely serving as a medium for the aesthetic enjoy­ ment of the consumer. The readymades of Duchamp and the Dadaistic collages in which photography found such wide use removed the two-dimensional character from the picture and gave it the third dimension. The next step forward was taken forty years after the first D adaist manifesto by the followers of happenings and pop art ( and pop art is only a frozen happening, according to a witty statement by Vostell34 ) . Furthermore, the 'new art' accords reality to its aesthetic functions and thus performs a radical persiflage of art's objects. Happening in creative arts is a combination of objects. It is a certain manipulation of objects, action, and mate­ rial, "material action" (a term of Otto Muehl which aims to transcend the picture of the surface of the picture or the space of the stage- "Die Materialaktion ist iiber die Bildflache hinausgewachsene Malerei."35 ). Happenings are experiments with ar­ ranging coincidences, and therein lies their charm as well as their organic weak­ ness, since arrangement destroys the authenticity of the coincidence.36 The surrealist conception openly and with vigorous concreteness manifested its adherence to the genealogical line of authentic Marxist thinking-that is, to real, active humanism. The avant-garde conceived of human existence and art on a higher order than any movement has before or after. The avant-garde created a higher aesthetic life style-both in ideas and practices-and it offered not only concrete criticism of the problems of human existence, but also their solutions through human practice. And precisely because this movement arose from the in­ vigorating dialectics of the Marxist conception of humanity, surrealist art shunned

33 34 35

36

a toilet seat - Duchamp's most famous readymade, entitled "Fountain;' was not in fact a toilet seat but a urinal. pop art is only a frozen happening... - Svitak does not indicate this quote's specific source. "Die Materialaktion ist uber die Bildfliiche hinausgewachsene Malerei." - "Material action is painting that has outgrown the image area:' In the manuscript Svitak cites "p. u ;' but he provides no title of the cited book. I have found the same words on p. 362 of Muehl's "Die Materialaktion;' in Happenings. Fluxus Pop Art Nouveau Realisme, ed. Jurgen Becker and Rolf Vostell (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1 965). ... arrangement destroys the authenticity of the coincidence. In the manuscript version, this sentence is the last of the "Reality of Consumer Society" section, after which begins "The Actuality of Surrealism;' focusing on the specific history of Czech surrealism, most of which Svitak chose to omit from the version published for an English reading audience in Art in the Manipulated World. -

1 07

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY 7 the heavy shadows of pessimism, absurdity, 3 and sheer reflection that linked the existentialists to the conservative trend of Kierkegaard's tradition. The dramatic fusion of dream and reality, the amplitude of the poetic offered to us by mere ob­ jective chance, the magic of love and hope, and the tangible irrationality of our own existence-these are the values that make surrealism superior to the variants of existentialist art. Surrealism is not an artistic direction whose aesthetic doctrine long ago evanesced, nor is it a method of unpremeditated texts; it is a vision of hu­ man plight and an artistic image of humankind. The totality of human existence enfolds the dialectics of human relations, the lyricism of life, and the practical ac­ tions of the human being-face-to-face with alienation. The surrealist movement was born under the immediate influence of revolu­ tionary thought as a protest against existing civilization, as a revolution in both thinking and art. Primarily the complete liberation of humankind, and not art, was sought. By this radical bid for an all-out change of human conditions, surreal­ ism took the position of militant Marxism-that is, leftist humanism. It developed a new conception of the world and humanity. Wanting to be simultaneously the reflection and the action, it tried to dispose of the most sacred fetishes, including the fetish of art. It represented a new worldview, and its practice was based on a new sensibility and on the immediacy of human experience; we can regard it as an open revolt. The artistic techniques of generating a hallucinatory state, wheth­ er from an unpremeditated text or from the sheer provocation of stupidity, were dominated by the effort to disintegrate everyday empirical consciousness. It was the reintegration of this consciousness through the help of dreams that rendered the poetic spell so prominent in surrealist works. This magic is due to the surreal­ ists' profound understanding of modern life and also to their comprehension of the significance of accidents, which enabled them to grasp and feel experienced situations as recurrent joyous encounters with the marvel of their existence, with the material mystery of their being. Life itself was conceived of as the succession of revelations of reality and as the concrete mystery in which many, filled with loving affection, roam among dreams, reality, mystery, and chance. The objective chance which indisputably has its place in human life became a path into the realm of marvels, a path where reason does not count and where art, especially in poetry, Js serves as a disorienting road sign-"the debacle of the intellect:. As an antithesis to the mystical atheism of the Nietzschean type, the surrealists integrated a live mysticism of existence into the dialectical conception of the hu37

38

absurdity - Earlier in this same essay (p. 99) Svitak listed "the absurd" as an element of surreal­ ism. Evidently he saw a difference between the surrealists' discovery of chance and irrationality in the human unconscious and the existentialists' exaltation of the absurd meaningless of life. "the debacle of the intellect." Eluard and Breton, Notes sur la poesie, no page number cited. -

1 08

Essay VIII: The Historicnl Limits ofSurrealism man condition. Their method of revolt is, objectively, richer in ideas and practices and more original than existentialism. Surrealism is an unacknowledged predeces­ sor of the artistic doctrine of existentialism. At least we can say that their solutions are very comparable. The surrealist project for the understanding of humanity deals with the expression of the existentialist experience. But this experience is not associated with existentialist metaphysics. It is rather the expression of each human being's experience concerning its own existence. This experience is associated with positive life values-above all, with hope, love, and dreams-and it is expressed with the cheerful optimism of which only a victorious revolution is capable. The philosophy of collapse, nausea, and anxiety was preceded by a philosophy of the beauty of life, the magic of imagination, and the poetry of reality. The sur­ realist experience is not systematized-it is open to chance. The image of a bro­ ken door swung back and forth by the wind is the nearest poetic equivalent to the surrealists' efforts to offer humanity the poetized, reality-and-dream-combing world as humanity's real home. The existentialist experience of being took on the qualities of gloom and anxiety in a period when intellectuals were isolated from progressive social movements, whereas for the avant-garde the idea of revolution­ ary action had nurtured a "life feeling" of optimism. The disintegration of this op­ timistic life feeling and of independent, revolutionary art was a consequence of Stalinist changes in the Soviet Union, which Breton called "le vent de la cretinisa.

,

.

tton systematzque.,,39

The surrealist refutation of reality in the name of dreams was a result of the influence of Marxist and Freudian points of view. Human reality itself was being artistically un-realized, just as social reality was being transformed by the revo­ lutionary movement. When surrealism did revolt, it permanently and inexorably raised the idea of an unceasing revolution of humankind-that is, the idea of hu­ man existence as perpetual change. This change transcends the status quo because perpetual progress is actually the single constant element in life. The historical merit of surrealism lies in its depiction of the human being as a temporalized, situated, and practical being-that is, as an active creature anchored in time and caught in a series of chances and changes.

39

"le vent de la cretinisation systematique:' "The wind of systematic cretinization:' The source of this quote is not, in fact, Breton, but rather a text by Ferdinand Alquie ( 1 906- 1 985), which Breton was partially responsible for publishing in Le Surrealisme au service de la Revolution 5 (May 1 933), p. 43. This publication led to Breton's (and Paul Eluard's) expulsion from the Communist Party (Eluard later returned). -

1 09

THE WINDMILLS OF H UMANITY

anti-essay 8: the law of ketman A hunter wanted to shoot down a flying bird and aimed his gun directly at it But the bird kept flying and only a void remained A man wanted to love a girl and kept saying to her I live for you But the girl went away and only a void remained If you want to hit a flying bird you have to aim several steps before the girl who is going away She will come and say I live for you Aim into the sky You will hit the girl She will flap her wings But the void will remain

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