Economy and Society Volume 32 Number 1 February 2003: 728

Primitiveness and the ight from modernity: sociology and the avant-garde in inter-war France
Fuyuki Kurasawa

Abstract
This paper examines the links between the French school of sociology and anthropology and the surrealist avant-garde in inter-war Paris by unearthing their common reliance on a cross-cultural critique of European modernity. Accordingly, the paper focuses on how both currents and notably the Collge de sociologie used representations of a mythical primitive condition to produce an outside of modern society and an alternative socio-cultural universe from which Europes pathologies could be diagnosed. This self-critique through a comparative lens aimed to radically situate, relativize and decentre the phenomena of rationalization, disenchantment and anomie characterizing modernity, which could be shown to be neither natural, eternal, universal nor inevitable, but rather the socio-historical products of developments in a particular culture during a specic period of its history. Keywords: French sociology; anthropology; avant-garde; modernity; critique; primitive.

Introduction Towards the end of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, considered by many to be his neglected magnum opus, Durkheim anxiously summed up the modern epochs legacy in Europe through the following remark: In short, the former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born. (1912: 429).
Fuyuki Kurasawa, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, York University, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada. E-mail: kurasawa@yorku.ca

Copyright 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online DOI: 10.1080/0308514032000045744

Economy and Society

Simultaneously evoking sociologys normative task of responding to modernitys moral crisis as well as its ethnological orientation towards other cultural horizons, Durkheims sentence was to reverberate to such an extent that it forms a thread running through two generations of the some of the French intellectual milieus most prominent gures. From Durkheim to Mauss and Lvy-Bruhl, and then to the Collge de sociologie as well as Breton and Artaud, this thread undeniably bound the French school of sociology and ethnology to surrealist circles during the inter-war period; in both movements, the exploration of primitiveness provided a cultural outside from which to effect a critique of European modernity. If other commentators have drawn attention to this connection (Aug 1999; Clifford 1988; Krauss 1985; Lvi-Strauss 1971; Mtraux 1963; Richman 1990, 1995), they have stopped short of examining what is to my mind a crucial question: how did the French schools representations of a mythical primitive condition, and subsequently the avant-gardes use of such portrayals, enable them to effect compelling critiques of modern European societies? This paper, then, proposes to address this question by tracing the ethnological thread linking the two currents and thereby attempting to unearth the neglected substance of their cross-cultural diagnoses of the pathologies of modern Europe.1 Today, the differentia specica of the sociological tradition in France is properly recognized: it did not seek to distinguish itself from its anthropological counterpart, in fact employing the latters ndings about non-Western cultures to produce critical interpretations of the existing mode of social organization at home. As Lvi-Strauss has commented, In France, from Montaigne on, social philosophy was nearly always linked to social criticism. The gathering of social data was to provide arguments against the social order. . . . In France, sociology will remain the offspring of these rst attempts at anthropological thinking (Lvi-Strauss 1971: 505). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Durkheim, Mauss and Lvy-Bruhl continued in the footsteps of their predecessors by developing a science of modern society which derived much of its critical substance from being juxtaposed to a primitive alter ego. Indications of the anthropological thrust of their critiques of modernity can be discovered in their deliberate shifting of sociologys traditional object of study from modern Europe to non-modern and non-European societies. Mauss explained of his collaboration with Hubert: Together we discovered the world of the prehistoric and the primitive and the exotic, the Semitic and Indian universes along with the Ancient and Christian worlds which we had previously known (Mauss 1983: 145). Inspired by the encounter with cultural otherness, this sense of wonderment constituted a radical decentring of European modernity. Ironically, this decentring was so pronounced that some of the French schools descendants claimed that it had neglected to confront the contemporary predicament of its society because excessively drawn to primitiveness.2 The above reasons explain, I believe, why the designation Collge de sociologie would appeal to an avant-garde group formed during the inter-war years in Paris. By situating themselves within the French sociological constellation, Bataille, Caillois, Leiris and their collaborators could thereby, in however unorthodox a manner, draw inspiration from its substantive intercultural

Fuyuki Kurasawa: Primitiveness and the ight from modernity

research to ee from modernitys grasp. During the 1930s, an explicit link between the two currents was to be found in the fact that Mausss lectures were attended by the same individuals who participated in surrealism, some of whom went on to form the Collge (Bataille 1994: 1045; Caillois 1939a: 14). More fundamentally, the French schools investigation of primitive societies was to be the determining inuence upon the entire project of the surrealist avantgarde. Bataille made just such a point: It seems very clear and very distinct to me that the quest for primitive culture represents the principal, most decisive and vital, aspect of the meaning of surrealism, if not its precise denition (Bataille 1994: 71). Jules Monnerot, co-founder and inventor of the name Collge de sociologie (Hollier 1979: 390), suggested an even more succinct formulation: le surraliste, primitif moderne (the surrealist, a modern primitive) (Monnerot 1945: 121). In essence, then, the inter-war surrealist avantgarde were heirs to the French sociological traditions anthropological legacy, radicalizing certain assessments of modern European society. Partially surpassing their progenitors ambivalent appreciation of modernity, the likes of Breton, Bataille, Caillois and Artaud founded a movement of aesthetic and philosophical revolt that embraced primitiveness as the negation of the European experience since the sixteenth century.3 Standing outside Europes socio-cultural and normative bounds, primitive peoples represented an unparalleled gure of subversion. If Durkheims, Mausss and Lvy-Bruhls writings can be situated in a n-desicle climate marked by malaise, those of the surrealist avant-garde must be understood as a product of the general sense of disillusionment and crisis which infected European social life between the two world wars (Monnerot 1945: 174; Nadeau 1964: 445).4 Compare, for instance, the following comments from representatives of the two streams of thought. Reecting in the aftermath of the First World War, through which he had lost both colleagues and friends, a devastated yet seemingly resigned Mauss declared: It could be said that it was a loss for this branch of French science; for me, everything had collapsed. Perhaps the best that I had been able to give of myself disappeared with them (1983: 141). Speaking in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, Breton was to adopt an altogether different tone in summing up the feelings of disgust which inspired the avant-garde. What! Humanity tears itself apart more efficiently than in its earlier stages, two successive generations see the sun of their twenty years approaching only to be rushed on to the battleelds and some would have us believe that this humanity knows how to rule itself; that it is sacrilege to object to the principles on which its psychic structure is founded! But what, I ask, what is that narrow reason which has been taught us if that reason must, from life to life, yield place to the unreason of wars? Must not that pretended reason be a lure? Must it not be usurping the rights of a true unyielding reason which we must substitute for it at all costs and towards which we can move only by making, at the outset, tabula rasa of conventional modes of thought? (Breton 1943: 237)

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Sociological anxiety gave way to outright refusal, a bubbling rage directed at the perceived effects of civilization. Before plunging into the detail of the argument, a caveat is in order. Although, to return to my opening metaphor, a thread is being chased and thus a tapestry woven by way of the commonalities between different authors, I do not intend to downplay the signicant divergences between them. While the French school shared an interest in primitiveness, the disagreements between the Durkheimians and Lvy-Bruhl on the subject grew larger as the years went by.5 Durkheim and Mauss admonished their colleague on two counts: rst, Lvy-Bruhls dichotomy between primitive and modern thinking was untenable, since the two societies and modes of thought were continuous and much more closely related to one another; second, the act of branding all societies by the label primitive falsely homogenizes them, erasing the diversity of non-European peoples (Durkheim 1912: 240, 1913: 147; Mauss 1923: 1268; 1939: 5634).6 For its part, the inter-war surrealist avant-garde was by no means a coherent school, though Bataille, Caillois and Artaud did at some point participate in Bretons project. Consequently, it is useful to keep in mind the distinction between orthodox and dissident branches of surrealism the rst coalescing around Breton, the second around the Collge de sociologie, the magazine Documents and the journal Acphale.7 Finally, not all members of the avant-garde were enamoured of their Durkheimian identication; in particular, the perceived epistemological positivism and normative scientism of Durkheims early work were sticking points for some.8 Despite these fractures, a common theme links all these authors to one another: the invocation of primitiveness as the key cultural motif of a critique of European modernity or, put differently, a ight from its connes through the exploration of primitive cultures. Modern society was thus believed to have been colonized by processes of rationalization, various modes of instrumental rationality having penetrated into most, if not all, the domains of social life. According to the French school and the avant-garde, this rationalist colonization had devastating consequences not least of which was (to use Schillers and Webers evocative phrase) the gradual disenchantment of the world as magic, myth and the supernatural were chased away in the name of scientic, Cartesian logic. Accordingly, it was believed that a state of anomie had appeared: collective consciousness and social solidarity had crumbled, giving way to a society fragmented to an unprecedented degree in which individuals were bereft of any sense of common moral guidance. Yet this scenario, largely subscribed to by the two currents that concern us here, could emerge only from its juxtaposition to an opposite socio-cultural reality. Primitiveness was thus imagined as a condition in which mystical and alogical thinking prevails over its rationalist brethren, and in which morality rather than calculation guides action. The primitive universe was thus portrayed as an enchanted one where, since natural or transcendental forces still rule, nothing seemed impossible. It was perceived as vibrant because well endowed in collective myths and sacred rituals. The primitive community was seen as the source of creativity and moral fervour, a

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possibility which modern Europes cult of the monadic individual had foreclosed. In the following pages, I propose to unearth the sources of this critical interpretation of European modernity by foregrounding the French schools inquiries about primitive societies and the subsequent surrealist avant-garde appropriation of their forebears ethnological reections. Being understood as an alternative socio-cultural universe, primitiveness allowed both currents of thought to broaden their perceptions of the range of human possibilities, and thereby to relativize the mode of social organization they had inherited as one among many others. As such, the two strands were a particularly salient example of part of what I have termed elsewhere the ethnological imagination (Kurasawa 2000, forthcoming), the self-critique of the here and now through cross-cultural thinking. Let us see how this self-critique unfolded, so as to point out that the experiences of rationalization, disenchantment and anomie were not natural, eternal or universal, but in fact circumscribed within Europe in the modern era.

The tyranny of rationalism Rationalization, the series of processes analysed with great insight by Weber, was considered to be the dening trait of European modernity by the French school and the avant-garde. And, like Weber, these thinkers shared a fundamental sense of unease vis--vis the relentless drive towards a fully rationalized society. By no means was purposive-instrumental action considered superior or more desirable than other forms of being in the world, although its advent is deemed both irreversible and inevitable (Durkheim and Mauss 1913: 4789; Karady 1968: xlvxlvi).9 Indeed, rationalization was believed to have been transformed into a movement with its own internal logic; initially designed to liberate human beings from the ravages of medieval superstition and ignorance, a form of Cartesian rationalism had become sovereign. Everything could be knowable and thus controlled through calculation. Instrumental reason held the key to a long-held dream, that of conquering all mysteries and thereby achieving complete human mastery over the world. According to these authors, then, emotional and ethical life was correspondingly being marginalized as the sphere of subjectivity and normativity was relegated to a subordinate position within modern society (Caillois 1939a: 134; Durkheim and Mauss 1903: 88; Lvy-Bruhl 1910: 456, 51). The French school and the surrealists highlighted a similar problem: at what cost the reign of rationalism? It had, they contended, dehumanized us to some extent: part of our capacity to cultivate feelings and values had been eroded. Though tremendously efficient, logical thinking was also portrayed as a cold beast, which should never totally seduce humankind. It could not nourish our souls or spirits, for it was incapable of addressing a more profound and timeless reality that is, our need to be integrated into, rather than standing aloof from, our natural surroundings as well as the moral community within which we were

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born (Lvy-Bruhl 1910: 3456). As Mauss stated in a striking passage from his Essay on the Gift: It is only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal. . . . Homo oeconomicus is not behind us, but before, like the moral man, the man of duty, the scientic man and the reasonable man. For a long time man was something quite different; and it is not so long now since he became a machine a calculating machine. (Mauss 19234: 74) Akin to Weber (19045) before him, Mauss was to identify capitalism as the incarnation of the principles of rationalism in modern European society. The metamorphosis of the human being into a calculating machine had elevated the ascetic, meticulous and relentless pursuit of prot into a new cultural ethos. Rationalized capitalism was, so Mauss argued, basically soulless because contagiously instrumental; in the end, it converted individuals themselves into commodities whose value could be measured like any other object (Mauss 19234: 3, 6670, 735). Implicit here, as we shall discuss later, is the belief that human beings had been and were viewed as more than logical animals in previous times and other places. The over-valorization of Cartesian logic elevated scientism to the status of the new, all-encompassing world-view of modernity. For the avant-garde in particular, the fact that predictability, efficiency, uniformity and control had been transformed into ends in themselves threatened to turn humanity into a veritable cog in the monstrous apparatus of modern society (Bataille 1938: 1315). Europe had the dubious distinction of launching an epoch during which individuals had lost considerable freedom to think and act. Lvy-Bruhls questioning of rationalisms hold was picked up by surrealism, which argued that the connes of the human mind had shrunk to such an extent that only that which was immediately visible and logically explained could be considered real or true. Everything else (e.g. dreams, poetry, the unconscious) had to be discarded into the realm of the false, the impossible or the ctional (Artaud 1971a: 1920; Breton 1924: 410; Lvy-Bruhl 1910: 117, 1935: 2567; Monnerot 1945: 1416). To use Bretons (1930: 187) evocative image, realism acted as a cancer of the mind, a force of oppression rather than erstwhile emancipation. Whether orthodox or dissident, surrealists portrayed modern Europe as an essentially mechanized civilization, in which order and normality are idealized. Spontaneity, creativity and, most of all, the possibility of transgression had been crushed by a stultifying socio-cultural environment (Bataille 1985: 17980, 1994: 756; Caillois 1939b: 2856). Seemingly echoing the closing passages from Webers Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (19045), Nadeau lyrically expressed the dialectic of rationalism: Man makes a beautiful cage to emprison the forces of nature; he succeeds in doing so, but does not realize that he is locking himself inside. No matter how much he screams and shakes the bars, the bars resist, for they are the fruit of

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a truly rational, truly perfect labour. Indeed the evil is not in his creations, it is in himself. Man has produced a terrible civilization because he has become a cerebral monster with hypertrophied rational faculties. (Nadeau 1964: 47) Rationalization had shackled human beings to what is rather than opening them up to what could or ought to be. Bereft of morality or spirituality, modern individuals had become resigned to living in an eternally recurring present. Spurred on by the catastrophic atmosphere between the two world wars, the avant-gardes reaction to such a perceived state of affairs was explosive. Modern European society, as well as the instrumental rationality to which it had given birth and for which it stood, was put on trial. Calls for the execution of both came in from all directions. One after the other, Bataille, Caillois, Artaud and Breton directed their rage at rationalism, unleashing a torrent of hatred for what it symbolized: the dogma of science, the conformity of culture and the enslavement of humankind. Having generated carnage and barbarism on an unprecedented scale, and running head-rst towards another slaughterhouse, how could European civilization be salvaged, let alone defended? It could not and should not, they responded. We profoundly hope that revolutions, wars, and colonial insurrections will annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend even in the Far East, and we call upon this destruction as the state of things least unacceptable to the mind declares open letter dating from 1925, signed by twenty-eight surrealists and directed to Paul Claudel, then French Ambassador to Japan (Nadeau 1964: 238). This revolt against logics pice de rsistance was provided by Artaud, who contended that the cult of rationalism had brought about Europes decay. Inverting evolutionist and developmentalist prejudices, he went so far as to claim that his own society was culturally backward, surpassed by primitive civilizations which had not naively fallen victim to the lure of rationalization (Artaud 1971a: 258, 88, 979). Socially and morally bankrupt, European culture was beyond redemption. Before its diseased corpse contaminated the rest of the world, it had to be eradicated. To quote Bataille, it is necessary to become completely different, or to cease being (1985: 179; see also Breton 1943: 237). Rupture or apocalypse: those were the stark choices posed by the avant-garde. It opted, of course, for the rst of these alternatives. Surrealist aesthetic experiments were designed to push the boundaries of the real and the rational to their limits and then to violate them, shattering the distinction between dream, myth and reality as well as between the conscious and the unconscious. Poetry, prose and painting were called upon to undermine instrumental rationality, in an effort to loosen its hold upon the mind of the modern subject. Automatic writing and the game of exquisite corpse, for instance, were devised as expressions of subversion of the rationalist tyranny (Breton 1924: 26, 1930: 162, 1745, 1934: 113, 1935b: 273). To recover its freedom, the human imagination must be unchained by means of guerrilla warfare. Yet, regardless of how mighty its efforts were, surrealism rapidly understood that its project of the putting into

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question of the cogito was bound to fail as long as it remained within Europes cultural boundaries. Rationalism could not simply implode, for it had become virtually indivisible from the modern life-world (Caillois 1938a: 1748). A turn towards an entirely other world was thus required. Lived through the lens of the French school, the encounter with primitiveness provided such an opportunity for the avant-garde. Nowhere were the origins of the ethnological subversion of rationalism more obvious than in Lvy-Bruhls writings, where the primitive acts as a nostalgic mirror image of the modern (Monnerot 1945: 989, 153). Between 1910 and 1938, he published no less than six works devoted to the primitive question, arguably contributing more than any other recent thinker to the widely shared belief in the absolute incommensurability between Cartesianism and other modes of thought. Initially advanced in How Natives Think (1910), Lvy-Bruhls principal claim consisted in establishing a chasm between the mainly alogical, mystical and emotional thinking adopted by primitive peoples and the predominantly abstract and logical mentality of modern society: whereas the former saw the world as an anarchic clash of invisible, supernatural forces, the latter perceived only objective theorems and scientic explanations (Lvy-Bruhl 1910: 34, 7, 223, 1922: 2930, 8990). If Lvy-Bruhls dichotomy created a divide between the two civilizations predominant forms of thinking, it was not intended to favour one over the other. Rather, they were portrayed as different ways of apprehending the world a point not lost on surrealism. His work thus aimed to demonstrate the validity of non-rationalist viewpoints, whether outside or within Europe itself. LvyBruhls oeuvre can be read as a warning regarding the dire consequences of rationalization as well as a plea about the need to preserve the mystical, the mythical and the magical in modernity: as long as human nature continues to have any respect for those tendencies within it which have been inherent from the very beginning, it will not even under modern conditions be seriously put off by the transparent impossibilities that can be recognized in the mythic world, and will never even dream of excluding from what it considers to be reality those special insights which come to it directly from mystical sources. (Lvy-Bruhl 1935: 2556) Strict adherence to logic had stripped reality of its richest layers, modern individuals sealing themselves off from (and arrogantly elevating themselves above) their natural surroundings. By contrast, Lvy-Bruhl believed, primitive societies are fully awake to the awe-inspiring potential of nature, living in harmony with it while respecting the existence of things beyond the minds command (Lvy-Bruhl 1935: 19, 23). Why was the primitive mentality in some ways richer than its rationalist brethren? According to Lvy-Bruhl, because it was not obsessed with causality, nding timeless and universal laws, or generating one-dimensional reasoning. Instead, it allowed for multiple explanations of a particular phenomenon,

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sometimes in contradiction or opposition to one another. Deemed to be expressions of wonderment at the beyond, powerful emotions were integrated into the fabric of everyday life. Further, Lvy-Bruhl claimed, primitive thought accepts the idea that something may simultaneously take form as an animate and inanimate being, that dream and waking, the visible and the invisible, the profane and the sacred live side-by-side (1910: 1415, 456, 51, 612, 1935: 910). Humanity cannot live by logic alone, nor should it strive to do so. In this respect, LvyBruhls vision of the primitive taught the surrealist avant-garde an important lesson: human liberty and happiness ultimately rely on the vitality of forces (the supernatural, the sacred, the mystical, etc.) superseding the cogito. In addition to countering the encroachment of rationalism, the French schools investigations of primitiveness can also be interpreted as a mapping out of the limitations of the Cartesian mentality. Far from being universally applicable that is, carrying the ability to demystify all that it touched by rendering comprehensible what was previously left unexplained through either superstition or ignorance rationalism was shown to be a parochial development of European modernity. When confronted with other systems of thought, this parochialism could be rapidly uncovered. Submerged by the incommensurability of primitiveness, the Western minds forward march to decipher and extract meaning out of everything ground to a halt. Lvy-Bruhl, for his part, tirelessly indicated the shortfalls of logic as a tool of cross-cultural decipherment. Despite the most noble intentions, any translation from the mystical to the rational is bound to constitute a betrayal (Lvy-Bruhl 1922: 433), a distortion of original meaning caused by the unbridgeable gap between modern and primitive: We may try, but anything we are likely to achieve will fall short of rendering the mythic world really intelligible. (Rather, the nearer we come to categorizing it rationally, the further we shall be from really knowing it!) (Lvy-Bruhl 1983: 50). Even Durkheim and Mauss, otherwise steadfast believers in the interpretative power of modern science, had to acknowledge its inadequacies after coming across primitive systems of classication. Throughout their jointly authored essay on this topic, they confess their struggle to make sense of complex yet unfamiliar mental patterns (Durkheim and Mauss 1903: 30, 57, 67). For the members of the French school, the concept of mana embodied the alterity of primitive thought, its externality vis--vis logic. Though notoriously ambiguous and wide-ranging, mana denoted the supernatural and sacred force creating all animate and inanimate beings in primitive society; it was the foundation of the universe, simultaneously the breath of life and the shadow of death (Durkheim 1912: 59, 26870, 327; Hubert and Mauss 1906: 29, 1005; LvyBruhl 1910: 11416). However, its inner meaning could never be captured by modern thinking, remaining ultimately indenable and incomprehensible. In a celebrated passage from his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, LviStrauss explained: I believe that notions of the mana type, however diverse they may be, and viewed in terms of their most general function (which, as we have seen, has

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Economy and Society not vanished from our mentality and our form of society) represent nothing more or less than that oating signier which is the disability of all nite thought (but also the surety of all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention), even though scientic knowledge is capable, if not of staunching it, at least of controlling it partially. (Lvi-Strauss 1950: 63)

Clearly, then, the French schools adoption of the idea of mana was designed to circumscribe rationalisms empire, to delimit areas that it could not conquer because inherently limited. In a similar vein, they insisted upon the magical content of the primitive world-view: not that of a neatly ordered and stable cosmos, but, on the contrary, of one dened by chaos, instability and occasional inscrutability. Mauss additionally focused upon the potlatch, which he colourfully termed the monster child of the gift system (19234: 41); the potlatch stood as the antithesis of rationalized capitalism, involving the frenzied giving and destruction of wealth rather than its careful accumulation and investment (Mauss 19234: 14, 35, 723). Surrealism was receptive to such ideas, which could be employed to proclaim the European minds atrophy. By contrast, primitiveness was viewed as a state in which creativity ourished because not brought into the orbit of rationalization, where imagination runs wild because not tamed by the constraints of logic (Caillois 1939b: 2857). Artauds writings on the Tarahumara indigenous people of Mexico even condemned Europe to decrepitude, since it was a civilization enthralled by the disease of the cogito as well as the creed of scientic progress. Europes rationalist culture has gone bankrupt and I have come onto Mexican land to look for the foundations of a magical culture which can still swell up from Indian soil (Artaud 1971b: 23).10 The Tarahumaras represented the only remaining pure and vibrant community, one that was still able to nurture magic, myth and the sacred within its bosom (Artaud 1971b: 223, 91, 1971a: 6870, 979). In more measured though no less admiring tones, Breton also expounded the virtues of the primitive condition. It kindled the aforementioned surrealist quest to confuse dream and waking states, myth and reality, as well as the unconscious and the conscious paths of thinking. In Bretons eyes, primitiveness blended these facets to one another by valuing them equally rather than favouring some at the expense of the others. Moreover, primitive cultures were cast as the guardians of the ancient wisdom, recognizing magic, myth and the sacred as the principal sources of humankinds acts of aesthetic creation. The greatest works of art owed from the magical imagination which primitive peoples upheld as their highest tenet. Collectively, the avant-garde thus extended the ndings of the French school to argue for the revival of Europes deadened soul. They attempted to reconnect it to a lost mystical spirit. By way of Durkheims, Mausss and Lvy-Bruhls research, the primitive could be reinjected into modern society in order to recover what rationalist culture had wiped away (Artaud 1971b: 1225; Breton 1991: 243, 24950; Caillois 1938b; Nadeau 1964: 22930; Monnerot 1945:

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10910). The various surrealist interventions aimed at nothing less than an escape from the cage of rationalization via primitiveness, a phenomenon about which no less astute a commentator than Bataille was well aware: Everything Breton has put forward whether it concerns the quest for the sacred, the concern with myths, or rediscovering rituals similar to those of primitives represents the exploration of the possibility we again discover, possibility in another sense; this time it is simply a question of exploring all that can be explored by man, it is a question of reconstituting all that was fundamental to man before human nature had been enslaved by the necessity for technical work. (Bataille 1994: 75) Bataille himself was seduced by the negation of rationalism presented in Mausss description of the potlatch ceremony. Thus, the primitive economic system could be shown to defy the imperatives of calculation and utility integral to European society. The primitive sense of the sacred, Bataille claimed, was generated through non-productive expenditure excess, waste, the part maudite (accursed shared), which could never be reconciled with modern capitalisms requirements of prudent accumulation and expense (Bataille 1985: 11619, 1289). Caillois was to make a related point, impressed by the primitive festivals capacity to conjure up a Dionysian atmosphere in which the violation of habitual rules and norms of conduct was encouraged.11 The ceremonies of primitive societies, as Caillois interpreted them, had the great merit of celebrating the irrational by unleashing excessive, odd and destructive ingredients of socio-cultural life (1938a: 267, 1334, 1939b: 3001).

The murder of the sacred When gazing upon the cultural landscape moulded by modernization, the French school and the avant-garde concurred: the rise and progressive diffusion of rationalism throughout society disenchanted the world. But myth, magic and the sacred had not simply died of their own accord; they had been killed by logic and its scientistic accomplices. In the name of historical progress and the advancement of knowledge, a war had been waged against the supernatural and the transcendental, yet the success of the offensive left the lasting impression of a fall rather than a victory contemplated from the peaks of enlightenment. Science had been substituted for myth as the privileged mode of interpretation of the world, stripping away the layers of mystery one by one until only a bare carcass remained: We feel that techniques are like seeds which bore fruit in the soil of magic. Later, magic was dispossessed. Techniques gradually discarded everything coloured by mysticism. Procedures which still remain have changed more and more in meaning. Mystical virtues were once attributed to them. They no longer possess anything but an automatic action (Mauss 1972: 1423). Suffering a worse fate than peripheralization, myth had

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been reduced to falsehood and superstition. A secularized Europe became engulfed in immanence, having destroyed the potential to stimulate creativity in the minds of those who inhabited it. Even more worrying for the thinkers who concern us is the fact that the beauty of the universe had all but disappeared for most individuals; depleted of its supernatural character, the cosmos was an anaemic world in which modern individuals were condemned to wander (Breton 1991: 5861, 185; Caillois 1938a: 223; Lvy-Bruhl 1910: 456, 51, 1935: 878, 1879, 255). Having drawn such conclusions, it occurred to these authors that, for the rst time anywhere, a completely and utterly profane culture was coming into being Durkheims moral vacuum between the death of old gods and the birth of new ones. In the writings of the French school and the avant-garde, the passages contemplating modern Europes likely fate were haunted by a gothic language of decay, atrophy and death. Starkly put: if and when society was to reach a point of total de-magication, which would stie the powers of the human imagination, it would inevitably wither away. [M]ystic elements have disappeared as far as we are concerned, and what we call a myth is but the inanimate corpse which remains after the vital spark has ed (Lvy-Bruhl 1910: 331). The death of the sacred was also the ruin, indeed the end, of society as such. Staring into this dark abyss of an eternal night without dawn, the avant-garde expressed sorrow at what had been left behind and rage towards the murdering parties (Bataille 1994: 48; Caillois 1938a: 150). In turn, Bataille, Artaud, Caillois and Breton declared that the afterglow from the extinction of the sacred dimension of life was suffocating. No longer counterposed to a transcendental realm, the sphere of everyday life became the sole arena within which the modern self believed himself or herself to be operating; he or she was caught in a sphere of spiritual barrenness, of the insipid and the commonplace. Without magic, moreover, the very idea of art became difficult to fathom as the organic ties bonding human beings to nature were severed (Artaud 1971a: 17, 30; Breton 1991: 94, 120; Caillois 1939a: 1922, 97). Hence, the surrealist concluded that the wisdom of the ages had been foolishly abandoned in the rush towards a rationalist ethos. Artaud summed up the convictions of many when he turned the common view of modernity on its head: The sixteenth-century Renaissance broke with a reality that had natural, though perhaps suprahuman, laws; and Renaissance humanism was not an ennoblement but a diminishing of human beings, since humanity brings nature back down to its own level rather than elevating itself toward the latter. The exclusive consideration of what is human has destroyed the natural. (Artaud 1971a: 80)12 What should not be forgotten is that the avant-gardes evocation of modern Europes plight of disenchantment was sparked by their sociological predecessors interest in the enchanted universe of primitive cultures. Indeed, Durkheim, Mauss and Lvy-Bruhl placed magic, myth and the sacred at the

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heart of primitiveness, the engine ensuring societys reproduction and tremendous vitality. Faith in a supernatural realm populated by gods and spirits enabled profane life to take on a signicance beyond the mundane and the visible. Both movements examined particular primitive rituals and creeds, such as magic and sacrice, which built bridges between the transcendental and the immanent realms. Supported by faith in mystical powers, magical phenomena were believed to reconcile human beings with the divine; magic summoned and temporarily harnessed natures sacred powers to assist inner-worldly designs (Hubert and Mauss 19023: 1516, 246, 85). Sacricial practices, for their part, were depicted as vehicles through which the primitive community enacted contact with the beyond. The offering of a victim to the gods marked an admission that life itself was outside human control. Only such an explicit acknowledgement, repeated at regular intervals, could quell supernatural wrath. Contrary to what occurred in modern society, ordinary individuals could thereby rise above their everyday status by eetingly touching the gods. Another contrasting feature of primitive existence that drew our authors attention was the unquestioned pre-eminence of the sacred over the profane. Giving meaning and determining the direction of daily life, the former innately reigned over the latter (Artaud 1971a: 25, 43, 77; Hubert and Mauss 1898: 12, 75, 97100; 1906: 1517; Lvy-Bruhl 1935: 279). Moreover, the enchanting consequences of primitive animism, originally denoted by the French school, were also highlighted by the avant-garde. As a result, the spiritual wealth of the primitive universe was viewed with envy; all locales and things, from stones to trees to animals, could be endowed with sacredness. In fact, the sacred saturated the communitys activities. Far from being restricted to one or two categories of beings, then, the domain of totemic religion extends to the farthest limits of the known universe. Like the religion of Greece, it places the divine everywhere. The well-known formula everything is full of gods13 can serve as its motto as well (Durkheim 1912: 155). Overall, then, primitive peoples were seen to have had access to a richer and more complex reality, precisely because their economic, social and cultural existence was predominantly geared towards the sacred, the magical and the mythical (Artaud 1971a: 1416, 49; Hubert and Mauss 1898: 81, 19023: 25, 96; LvyBruhl 1910: 2531, 1923: 323, 1927: 2636, 1949: 1023).

Anomie and the struggle against the dissolution of society Durkheims pioneering analysis of anomic suicide caused by a societal lapse in moral regulation (1897: 258) was to be generalized as a diagnosis of the modern predicament by those who followed in his tracks. The inter-war period was to be cast as the age of anomie, of individuals cut adrift from collective standards because living in a rationalized, disenchanted and consequently fragmented social environment. The murder of the sacred, magic and myth was perceived to threaten equally the collective consciousness of society, thereby plunging it

20

Economy and Society

into a state nearing dissolution. The Durkheimians claimed that the unrivalled domination of market relations in modern Europe was one of the major factors precipitating this anomic crisis. An excessive, even predatory, individualism bent on maximizing self-interest at all costs became modernitys moral code: As all other beliefs and practices assume less and less religious a character, the individual becomes the object of a sort of religion. We carry on the worship of the dignity of the human person, which, like all strong acts of worship, has already acquired its superstitions. If you like, therefore it is indeed a common faith. Yet rst of all it is only possible because of the collapse of other faiths and consequently it cannot engender the same results as that multiplicity of extinct beliefs. There is no compensation. (Durkheim 1893: 122) Society had been converted into a vast marketplace, the haphazard regrouping of monadic, pleasure-maximizing and self-serving homines oeconomici (Durkheim 1897: 2545, 1950: 1013; Mauss 19234: 735). At another level, the French school worried that the de-magication and de-sacralization of society endangered its traditions, that is to say, beliefs and practices transmitted generationally to maintain social cohesion. Thus, it was claimed that, from the moment individuals began to perceive themselves as ex nihilo, the survival of collective representations binding them to the social whole could no longer be ensured (Lvy-Bruhl 1910: 327; Mauss 1934: 3301, 335). Hostile to a generalized anomie, Durkheims, Mausss and Lvy-Bruhls pronounced sociocentric bias constituted a pivotal point of reference for surrealism. Interest in myths and the various religious activities of exotic peoples drew attention to the superiority of collective over individual creation, and thereby to sociology and ethnography, in particular the Durkheimian theory dening religious activities and myths as a manifestation of a collective being superior to the individual and named society (Bataille 1994: 104). The Collge de sociologie was particularly troubled by the anomic state of affairs pinpointed by its forebears. Nothing less than the foundations of society were at stake (Bataille 1985: 242; Caillois 1938a: 151, 1939a: 1334). The brave new world of secular logic had undermined the conditions for recreating communal experiences, making only banal and atomistic forms of expression available to humankind. Caillois was to capture the essence of this disaggregation of the social through his contrast between the primitive festival and the modern vacation. Is a society with no festivals not a society condemned to death? While suffering from the gnawing feeling of suffocation vaguely provoked in everyone by their absence, is not the ephemeral pleasure of vacation one of those false senses of well-being that mask death throes from the dying? (Caillois 1939b: 302) The vacation was but a bland, individualistic variation of everyday life hardly the kind of transgressive communal energy emanating from the primeval festival.14 More broadly, collective effervescence waned in a social context which was believed to be incapable of rejuvenating itself through cultural paroxysm or

Fuyuki Kurasawa: Primitiveness and the ight from modernity

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normative reinvention. Exhausted by its own lust for rationalism and disenchantment, modern European society would rot. The French school was vividly to oppose modern Europes anomic situation to what Durkheim identied as the strength of mechanical solidarity prevailing in primitive settings. There, cultural homogeneity supported by the lack of differentiation between individuals was said to create a vibrant collective consciousness as well as a powerful sense of social cohesion. In other words, the primacy of the community over the self was unchallenged (the latter notion being devoid of meaning). Individuals could not learn to view themselves as distinct entities nor could they conceive of their predominance over the common good; the group provided them with a sense of meaning and belonging (Durkheim 1893: 838; Lvy-Bruhl 1927: 1516, 678, 2012). According to the Durkheimians, the intensity of collective life in primitive cultures made itself apparent during sacred rituals. Hence, their detailed studies of magic and sacrice adopted a sociocentric framework designed to counter the prevailing individualistic interpretations of these phenomena. If supercially appearing to originate from the actions of a single charismatic personality (magician, sorcerer, shaman, etc.), magical and sacricial practices represented communal customs. They enacted a societys traditions and collective representations to enable its reproduction. Even the economic sphere, in primitive social life, was subordinated to the requirements of solidarity; the gift economy, as Mauss explained it, was an elaborate system of obligation and reciprocity whose ultimate purpose was the maintenance of socio-cultural ties between extended kin units. All in all, primitive existence was structured by participation in a series of common rites reaffirming societys shared moral norms and beliefs (Beuchat and Mauss 19045: 4447; Durkheim 1897: 170, 1912: 349, 150, 18993, 21621, 3514, 4025, 4101, 41517, 4247, 4478; Hubert and Mauss 1898: 1023, 1906: 1719, 256; Mauss 19234: 35, 10). In their more extreme variations, such as festivals, sacred rituals were believed to induce the individuals melting into the group. Bodies, minds and souls temporarily came together into an indistinguishable mass: The whole social body comes alive with the same movement. They all become, in a manner of speaking, parts of a machine or, better, spokes of a wheel. . . . The rhythmic movement, uniform and continuous, is the immediate expression of a mental state, in which the consciousness of each individual is overwhelmed by a single sentiment, a single hallucinatory idea, a common objective. Each body shares the same passion, each face wears the same mask, each voice utters the same cry . . . everyone is carried away, there is no possibility of resistance, by the conviction of the whole group. All the people are merged in the excitement of the dance. In their feverish agitation they become but one body, one soul. (Mauss 1972: 133)15 By comparison to such moments of collective effervescence, modern Europe could not but appear anomic, a society barely limping forward, crushed by the

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Economy and Society

combined weight of rationalization, de-magication and radical individualism. What, then, could be done? At a basic level, Lvy-Bruhl, Durkheim and Mauss recalled modernitys Janus-faced character. Magic, myth and the sacred necessarily inhabited European societies, which were still far from being the crystallization of a pure cogito transparent to itself. Pace Comte, modern science remained indebted to magical and religious thought, whereas the mythical worldview informed European fairy tales and legends (Durkheim 1912: 8, 24; Hubert and Mauss 19023: 137; Lvy-Bruhl 1910: 3434, 1949: 1001, 1935: 2527). Apart from this reminder, however, the Durkheimians sought to nurture civic forms of collective morality and social integration suited to the modern age. Solidarity was to be recreated by way of popular gatherings and assemblies, public education, as well as an institution-building process emerging from professional associations (Durkheim 1912: 20813, 21516, 3512, 4247, 42930, 1922: 6972, 1235, 133, 1950: 7, 1215, 289, 468; Mauss 19234: 667). These ideas were to inuence the avant-gardes own varied responses to modernitys anomic crisis. Communal aesthetic projects were one of surrealisms hallmarks, a concrete demonstration of the superiority of collective modes of expression over their isolated variants; as Breton explained, it was a method of creating a collective myth (1935a: 210).16 And, according to Artaud (1971a: 52, 1971b: 1225), modern civilizations only path to salvation from atomistic trends lay in returning to its communal origins so as to bond again with nature and others. The Collge de sociologie can itself be read as a Durkheimian institution bent on combating anomie. After all, its opening statement described the Collge as a moral community whose purpose was to re-enchant and re-sacralize modern society by way of a sacred sociology (Ambrosino et al. 1937: 5). The means through which it pursued this mission also matched the Durkheimian path, though its mimesis of primitive rituals went further than its predecessors had contemplated. The Collge thus modelled itself on primitive sacred societies, its meetings acting as catalysts for the release of communal energies. Bataille, Caillois and their colleagues were self-styled sorcerers apprentices, shamans who attempted to spread the virus of collective effervescence throughout the body social (Bataille 1937: 74; Caillois 1938c: 42, 1938d: 153).17

Coda: the dialectic of primitiveness During the inter-war period in Europe, the French sociological traditions critical interpretation of modern Europe through the lens of the primitive condition became one of the axes of the surrealist avant-gardes own questioning of some of the dominant socio-cultural tendencies set free by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Indeed, Lvy-Bruhls, Mausss and Durkheims investigations of primitiveness provided Bataille, Artaud, Caillois, Breton and other orthodox or dissident surrealists with alternative cultural horizons through which a certain distance vis--vis modernity could be achieved; being geographically situated as well as confronted with other possible modes of social

Fuyuki Kurasawa: Primitiveness and the ight from modernity

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order, the move towards rationalization, disenchantment and anomie could therefore not be falsely universalized or naturalized. For the avant-garde, these trends came out of a specic, awed combination of circumstances a combination which could be undone through social and aesthetic interventions created to re-enchant, re-mythologize and re-sacralize modern society. Taking its cue from the French schools observations although arriving at more radical conclusions than its sociological forebears had been willing to draw surrealism strove to reinsert primitiveness at the core of the modern experience; in some instances, this meant the virtual metamorphosis of modernity into the primitive condition. Was this feasible and, more importantly, should it have been considered so? It should be mentioned, if only in passing, that the notion of modern primitiveness was built upon a performative contradiction of the rst order. Since the advent of the modern epochs anthropocentric and rationalist tenets, selfconsciousness about myth and magics ctional character had gradually destroyed their very essence. Paradoxically, only by using rationality could the idea of operating outside its limits be contemplated. There was no escape from our fallen condition. Having eaten from the tree of knowledge, we could never return to the primeval garden of pre-logical innocence (Bataille 1994: 789; Hollier 1979: 1213). More worrying was the fact that Europes slipping into the darkness of the Second World War embodied the tragic spectacle which Horkheimer and Adorno were to identify in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944): the reversion of enlightenment into myth, the perversion of reason through the re-enchantment of the world. Under Nazisms cloak, the revival of mythical beliefs and collective rituals prospered within Europe like never before. Savagery was not an attribute to be searched for in distant lands, for it had always lived at the heart of modernity itself. The cunning of history had struck again. Belatedly realizing the extent to which the Durkheimians sociocentric vision had been corrupted, Mauss admitted as much as the beast of fascism awoke across the Rhine. In a letter dating from 1936 he confessed that [t]his return to the primitive had not been the object of our reections. Three years later, he was to write that I think all this is a tragedy for us, too forceful a conrmation of things we had pointed out and the proof that we should have expected this conrmation by evil rather than a conrmation by good (quoted in Aron 1983: 71).18 In 1942, even Breton, not known for the moderation of his statements, asked a question which had haunted avant-garde circles: What should one think of the postulate there is no society without a social myth? in what measure can we choose or adopt, and impose, a myth fostering the society that we judge to be desirable? (Breton 1942: 2878). Alas, the Hegelian owl of Minerva had once again spread its wings only with the falling of the dusk. Let me conclude by following up on Durkheims remark with which this paper opened. Recast in the shadow of Heideggers (1977) pronouncement that only a god can save us now, the sentence from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life takes on the appearance of an ominous forewarning; as we know,

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Economy and Society

for some a new god had been born in the person of the Fhrer. In hindsight, perhaps we can allow ourselves to put a slightly extravagant turn on Durkheims comment: the former gods are growing old or dying, and others should not be born. May they rest in peace or remain stillborn while our work amid the rubble begins anew: a lesson which avant-gardes of all sorts have learnt at their peril and which the rest of us may do well to heed as we contemplate the future of modern society by exploring other epochs and cultures. Acknowledgements Research and writing of this article were made possible by a Commonwealth Fellowship and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship (75620000316). I should like to thank Peter Beilharz, Mike Gane, Frank Pearce, as well as the anonymous referees for Economy and Society for their comments and suggestions.

Notes
1 Although accentuating different features, all the authors considered here coalesce in their basic understanding of modernity: a historical epoch which began with the sixteenth-century intellectual Renaissance of Western Europe. For them, it is characterized by anthropocentrism (the substitution of God by humanity at the centre of the universe), rationalism (the domination of the Cartesian cogito over other forms of thought and action), as well as individualism (the pre-eminence of the individual subject over the community). I use the term primitiveness to designate the French school and the avantgardes shared representations of the indigenous peoples of Latin America, Africa and Oceania. Of course, the notion of the primitive is extremely problematic given its evolutionist connotations. Throughout this paper, it is treated as a mythical construct that is, not as an accurate description of the cultures to which it refers, but as a creed created by European thinkers to make sense of their own societies past, present and future. 2 The opening statement of the Collge de sociologie formulated such a reproach: science has been too limited to the analysis of so-called primitive societies, while ignoring modern societies (Ambrosino et al. 1937: 5). More often than not, Durkheims, Mausss and Lvy-Bruhls investigations referred to the primitive condition as an alternative cultural horizon, a reminder of what had been lost through modernization. 3 Although surrealism was the most prominent artistic avant-garde present in Paris during the inter-war period, this is not to suggest that it was the only one or even the only one to produce a critique of modernity. Indeed, all modernist avant-gardes have been characterized by their ambivalence towards the modern epoch. 4 Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) is probably the most famous response to this prevailing European Zeitgeist during the inter-war period. 5 In 1925, Mauss, Lvy-Bruhl and Rivet founded the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris. However, by 1927, Lvy-Bruhl had broken with the Durkheimian school and left the Institute, where Mauss remained (Bunzel 1966: viii; Lvi-Strauss 1945: 510). Criticizing Lvy-Bruhls opposition of modern (scientic) and primitive (religious) thought, Durkheim writes: I, on the contrary, judge that these two forms of human mentality, as different as they may be, are far from arising from different sources; they are born one of the other and are two stages of a single evolution (Durkheim 1913: 147).

Fuyuki Kurasawa: Primitiveness and the ight from modernity

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6 Lvy-Bruhl addressed the rst point in his later writings, emphasizing the fact that mystical and logical forms of thinking are found in both primitive and civilized societies. Nonetheless, the second criticism was never tackled by him. 7 The squabbling among the surrealists the expulsions, vitriolic denunciations and vicious attacks is well known and documented; see, for instance, Nadeau (1964). 8 In 1939, as the Collge de sociologie was dissolving due to internal conicts, Michel Leiris wrote a letter to Bataille expressing his discomfort about the relationship between their own experiment and the Durkheimians: Far be it from me to want to make the College into a scholarly society where one would devote oneself to research in pure sociology. But, in the end, we have to choose, and if we take sociological science as it has been established by men like Durkheim, Mauss, and Robert Hertz as our reference, it is essential to stick to their methods. Otherwise, in order to clear up any ambiguity, we have to stop calling ourselves sociologists. (quoted in Hollier 1979: 355) 9 Of course, this is not to suggest that Weber focuses solely on Zweckrationalitt (purposive-instrumental rationality), since his typology also includes value-rational (wertrational), affectual and traditional forms of social action (Weber 1956: 245). For its part, however, the surrealist avant-garde principally focused on the rst type, believing that the others had become subordinated to it in Europe (as opposed to the situation in primitive societies). 10 The translation is my own. Artaud travelled to Mexico in 1936, both to deliver a series of lectures and to join the ceremonies of the Tarahumaras. 11 Cailloiss argument was clearly indebted to Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy (1872). 12 The translation is my own. 13 Durkheim (1912) wrote the saying in ancient Greek in the original text. 14 The second edition of Cailloiss LHomme et le sacr (published in 1950 and translated as Man and the Sacred [1959]) revised his original argument (found in the rst French edition of 1939): it was no longer the vacation, but war which had taken the place of the festival in modern society. No doubt the Second World War loomed large in his reassessment. 15 See also Durkheim (1912: 3867). 16 See also Bataille (1994: 77) and Monnerot (1945: 44, 1045). 17 In the late 1930s, mainly through the vehicle of Acphale (which acted as both a journal and a secret society), Bataille concocted elaborate plans to recreate sacred rituals in Paris. Among the strangest were a celebration of Louis XVIs beheading on the Place de la Concorde and a human sacrice. Neither one of these ideas came to fruition (see Hollier 1979; Richardson 1994). 18 The original reference is found in Hollier (1979: xxiiixxiv).

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