"Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois"
About this Quote
Sontag lands the knife with a cool, prosecutorial twist: surrealism presents itself as revolt, but its rebellion is shaped by the very class comfort it pretends to escape. Calling it "bourgeois disaffection" reframes surrealism not as a universal psychic eruption but as a stylish malaise - a particular kind of boredom, restlessness, and spiritual indigestion that tends to flourish where basic material stakes are cushioned. The jab isn’t that surrealists were insincere; it’s that their radical aesthetics were enabled by a social position that could afford to treat reality as something to be liquefied.
The sentence turns on "universal". Sontag is suspicious of movements that universalize their own interior weather. When surrealism’s "militants" (a word that mocks the martial posturing of artistic vanguards) imagine their sensibility applies to everyone, she reads that as a tell: the bourgeois habit of mistaking its own experience for the human condition. This is class critique as epistemology. The scandal isn’t only political; it’s interpretive. Surrealism’s dream logic, erotic shock, and anti-rational theatrics are not neutral tools - they are social artifacts with an address label.
Context matters: Sontag is writing in the postwar moment when avant-garde gestures risk hardening into cultural capital, safely curated by museums and magazines. Her point is less "surrealism is bad" than "watch how rebellion gets domesticated". The bourgeoisie doesn’t just consume dissent; it produces a version of dissent that flatters its self-image as daring, alienated, and deep.
The sentence turns on "universal". Sontag is suspicious of movements that universalize their own interior weather. When surrealism’s "militants" (a word that mocks the martial posturing of artistic vanguards) imagine their sensibility applies to everyone, she reads that as a tell: the bourgeois habit of mistaking its own experience for the human condition. This is class critique as epistemology. The scandal isn’t only political; it’s interpretive. Surrealism’s dream logic, erotic shock, and anti-rational theatrics are not neutral tools - they are social artifacts with an address label.
Context matters: Sontag is writing in the postwar moment when avant-garde gestures risk hardening into cultural capital, safely curated by museums and magazines. Her point is less "surrealism is bad" than "watch how rebellion gets domesticated". The bourgeoisie doesn’t just consume dissent; it produces a version of dissent that flatters its self-image as daring, alienated, and deep.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Susan
Add to List
