Profane illuminations and the everyday

Abstract

The historical movement of surrealism continues to influence contemporary theories of everyday life even if its project of bourgeois self-transformation proved to be an epochal failure. The melancholic subjectivity associated with surrealist experiments is often regarded as a form of resistance against objective conditions of capitalist domination. This essay looks at Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s arguments about surrealism’s radical attempts to transform the everyday. It reflects on the similarities and differences between the views of these two Frankfurt School thinkers, showing how Benjamin found surrealism to be ultimately inadequate to the purpose of social critique, while Adorno still located in its vision a source of possibility for overcoming the alienation of subject and object. Both Benjamin and Adorno took surrealism to be the site of an epistemological and political crisis, but they had differing interpretations of its critique of commodity culture. Benjamin emphasized surrealism’s ‘montage-like’ strategies of estranging the familiarity of the everyday world but concluded that the ‘profane illuminations’ of surrealism never managed to transcend the realm of the imagination, or to serve as a call to action. Adorno, by contrast, saw in surrealism the potential to mobilize subjective aesthetic experience against the rationalizing imperatives of daily life, although he did not think the lessons of surrealism could be duplicated or reduced to a dogma about the efficacy of the unconscious. For Benjamin, particularly, the limitations of surrealism as a political and aesthetic movement revealed the ongoing necessity of organized political struggle, even as he understood its ‘intoxicating’ appeal. In this, he remains distant from contemporary modes of criticism that celebrate the ineffability of cultural margins and the oppositionality of subjective modes of being.