Profane illumination

Profane illumination is a term used by critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin to describe the central component of Surrealist experience, perception, and art in his 1929 essay “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” It describes the process by which, sometimes but not always aided by dreams or hashish, a person perceives the most ordinary, overlooked objects of everyday reality – from obsolete train stations to out of place arcades – as uncanny, supernatural, and irrational. According to Benjamin, Surrealism’s ability to disorient and estrange through profane illumination made it a potentially explosive catalyst for social revolution.

urrealism and Marxian Revolution

Surrealism, a term first used by art critic Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, was an art movement beginning shortly after World War I that focused on the irrational and the unconscious. Beyond simply an artistic style, however, Surrealism encompassed a philosophy and a way of viewing reality, an expression of pure thought, unmediated by either rationality or moral codes. French writer André Breton was one of the chief explicators of the movement’s philosophical implications. In his Surrealist Manifesto, written in 1924, he praised Freudian free association and the uninhibited expression of desire, advocating freedom from all restraint, whether it be religious, societal, or rational.

Breton’s novel "Nadja" is one of the Surrealist works that Benjamin particularly praises in his 1929 essay "Surrealism." He describes the importance and audacity of the Surrealist movement by way of its relation to Marxian revolution. Surrealist artists and writers can serve as the vanguard of revolution by estranging and disorienting their audience, by showing them the irrational of the everyday and forcing them to call into question the normal, accepted conventions of bourgeois existence. This disorienting effect of Surrealism is compared to intoxication, a loosening of the bonds of normal consciousness that makes the world uncanny and dreamlike. Benjamin writes, "To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution – this is the project on which Surrealism focuses all its books and enterprises. This it may call its most particular task."

This process of disorientation by art rather than alcohol Benjamin calls "profane illumination." He describes the central task of Surrealist art as residing "in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson." It is materialistic in that it is thoroughly rooted in experience rather than abstraction, taking an everyday object, "draw [ing] off the banal obviousness" and "inject [ing] it with the most pristine intensity." The everyday is made strange, the normal shown to be extraordinary, and the rational made irrational. By heightening and estranging experience, by making the accepted bizarre, profane illumination prepares the way for the abandonment of current realities and thus heightens experience to a revolutionary pitch. Profane illumination for Benjamin is an explosive process that augurs explosive change.

Melding of Freud and Marx in Benjamin’s Thought

In its focus on the irrational and the unconscious, Surrealism as a movement owed profound debts deal to the psychoanalysis of Freud. Benjamin himself, hailing from Germany, was also influenced by Freudian psychology, and the concept of profane illumination united this Freudian bent with his more pronounced, explicit Marxian thought. Benjamin saw Surrealism as harnessing Freud’s psychic energies for the historical, social ends of Marx. His essay “Surrealism” was the first intimation of the melding of these two poles of Benjamin’s thought, a fusion that would take on even more prevalence in his later, unfinished labor of love, "The Arcades Project". This work, a dizzying, wild, and complex montage of quotations and fragments, sought to critique the bourgeois development of Paris in the 19th century by analyzing the neglected, seemingly obsolete aspects of Parisian life. Once again channeling both Freud and Marx, he collected scraps of the irrational and neglected and brought them to bear on social realities, examining obsolete architecture, wild mob behavior, and the dark underbelly of prostitution existing in Paris at the time to reveal the processes by which commodification occurred in the emerging capitalist city.

Bibliography

Books and Articles

*Benjamin, Andrew. "Walter Benajmin and Art". New York: Continuum, 2005.
*Coen, Margaret. "Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution". Berkley: University of California Press, 1993.
*Gascoyne, David. "A Short Survey of Surrealism". London: Enitharmon Press, 2000.
*Koepnick, Lutz. "Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power". Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
*Polizzotti, Mark. "Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton". New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
*Roberts, Julian. "Walter Benjamin". Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983.
*Smith, Gary. "Walter Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics". Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
*Wolin, "From Messianism to Materialism: The Later Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin." "New German Critique, no. 22", (Winter, 1981), pp. 81-108.

Websites

* [http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism.htm The essay "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" by Walter Benjamin]