Paranoia-criticism as a surrealist variant of artistic thinking

Abstract

While in the 1920s surrealism was dominated by the notion of mental automatism and hysteria, in the 1930s surrealist experimentation was mainly concentrated on the notion of paranoia. Introduced by Salvador Dalí in his L'Âne pourri ("Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution", 1930 No. 1), it was intended to expose normative understanding of perception inadequate to experience. The primary tool used by Dalí was an optically ambiguous image which could be interpreted in different ways. André Breton wrote about critical paranoia in L'Amour fou (1937), referring to Freud's text on Leonardo da Vinci. In Anthologie de l'humour noir, he defined it as "the détournement of the logical function in its usual modes of operation". The notion of paranoiacriticism helps to accentuate a crucial role of such perceptual states and concepts describing cognition as inconclusiveness and polysemy. To a large extent, they mark the boundaries between linguistic and visual articulation. Paranoia seems to be a concept very far from the twentieth-century model of scientific thinking, but if we refer to Wittgenstein's Logical--Philosophical Treatise, we can see that his concept of aspectperception is not far from a surrealist definition of paranoiacriticism.