Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 12:46:47 -0500 (EST)
From: Alex Trotter <uburoi-AT-panix.com>
To: avant-garde-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
cc: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject: materialism & aesthetics



A rich mine of thoughts on this topic can be found in the book 
*Revolutionaries without Revolution*, the memoirs of Andre Thirion, who 
was a member of the Surrealist movement. Much of it concerns his personal 
struggles in the context of the Surrealists' evolving aesthetic concept 
based on the intersection (clash?) of two materialistic doctrines: 
marxism and psychoanalysis. It is well to remember that Hegel and Freud 
had both been very recently introduced into France at that time (1920s & 
'30s). Following is a passage that will give some of the flavor:

"I was beginning to question certain statements by Friedrich Engels (in 
purely formal terms), which is something neophytes detest. I felt that in 
his critique of Eugene Duehring, Engels isn't always sincere, even when 
he appears to be right. But I had stronger reservations about *The Origin 
of the Family, Private Property, and the State*, which some of us read in 
1931. For Sadoul [Georges Sadoul, Thirion's friend & fellow 
Surrealist],it was gospel. I was beginning to find its dialectics a bit 
simple. First of all,  the fact that a large part of the argumentation 
was based on Morgan's theories, which, as I learned the very same year I 
discovered Engels's book, had been surpassed and challenged by more 
recent works, obliged me to stop reading with a believer's eyes. My 
scientific education kept me aloof from any blind faith, whereas I sensed 
a sectarian intransigence developing in Sadoul, which did not augur well. 
I wasn't convinced. Engels seemed to disregard the constants that force 
one to think that man in capitalist society may not be as far from the 
caveman as we are led to believe by historians in thrall to the principle 
of economic necessity as the ultimate constant: for example, cannibalism 
cannot be explained by hunger alone. I was not yet familiar with the 
letters Engles wrote in the decline of his life: this great mind, without 
retracting what he calls the materialist conception of history, admits 
that a large number of determinants (not solely the economic factor) can 
intervene in the relations that cause the development of human societies 
to appear as more than pure effect of chance. For my part, I had qualms 
about the refusal to ascribe any value to the two great motivating forces 
that Freud isolated to explain human behavior: the sexual instinct and 
the death instinct. Since I couldn't integrate them in *The Origins of 
the Family* without quashing Engels's reasoning, I was extremely unhappy. 
I half reassured myself by subjecting the manifestation of instincts to 
economic laws, but, for all my good will, I had to admit that the problem 
remained untouched.
	" I had never assumed that the writings of Marx and Engels shed 
light on everything, but I saw them as fundamental. The thought that they 
might be vulnerable had never before crossed my mind. I needed to find my 
bearings in the "superstructures," and it was with the lamp of Marxism 
that ventured into them. Now not only was the light poor, but I saw other 
sources of illumination."



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