Surrealism and selfhood

In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years in her new book The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject, the inaugural volume in the University of Minnesota Press’s Surrealisms series. By broadening the scope of ethnographic surrealism, Cheng offers new insights that challenge longstanding beliefs about this multifaceted movement in poetry, the arts, and culture. Here, Cheng is joined in conversation with Surrealisms series editor Jonathan Eburne.

Joyce Cheng is associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon and author of The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject.

Jonathan Eburne is J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He is author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas and Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry.    

REFERENCES:

Michael Stone-Richards

James Clifford / The Predicament of Culture

Natalya Lusty

Effie Rentzou

James Leo Cahill / Zoological Surrealism

Georges Bataille / Documents

Vincent Debaene / Far Afield

Severed hand collages

Marcel Mauss

Hannah Arendt

Johannes Fabian / Time and the Other

Malkam Ayyahou

The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject by Joyce Suechun Cheng is available from University of Minnesota Press and is the first book in its Surrealisms series. The University of Minnesota Press is also publisher of the International Journal of Surrealism.

Episode Transcript

Jonathan Eburne (00:06):
To think about humanism in this regard as a
persona, as a kind of maybesystem of masking, you're saying
something very important todayin an era when many disciplines
are being shut down.

Joyce Cheng (00:19):
You know, in a way, what I'm saying is the self is
overrated. Right? Maybe the massis a more important paradigm
that we need to be able torecuperate.

Jonathan Eburne (00:32):
Hello, my name is Jonathan Ebern, and I'm the
series editor of the newUniversity of Minnesota Press
book series called Surrealisms,The International Society for
the Study of Surrealism bookseries. And I'm delighted today
to be speaking to you, Joyce,Joyce Chang, whose forthcoming
book, The Persistence of Masks,is the inaugural book in the

(00:52):
series.

Joyce Cheng (00:53):
Thank you very much, Jonathan. I'm Joyce Chang,
Associate Professor of ArtHistory at the University of
Oregon and author of ThePersistence of Surrealism and
the Ethnography of the Subject.It's an honor to speak to you,
Jonathan, about this book towhich you have so generously
lent your interest and support.

Jonathan Eburne (01:12):
That's very kind of you to say, Joyce, and
it's been an absolute pleasureworking with you on this. I'd
just like to say a little bitabout the series itself before
launching into conversation withits first author. So as the
series title suggests, theSurrealisms book series
represents the mission of theInternational Society for the
Study of Surrealism, or ISSS,which is a nonprofit

(01:36):
organization founded in 2018 tofoster the exchange of ideas
between and among practicingartists and writers and the
scholarly community for whomsurrealism, the movement, past
and present, is a field ofongoing inquiry. Surrealism's a
I think everybody who listens tothis will probably know, but

(01:57):
Surrealism's a movement inpoetry, literature, art,
political thought, and otherforms of cultural expression
that technically, I guess youcould say, began in Paris in the
early 1920s, but which quicklybecame transnational in scope,
fostering movements andreactions on a global scale. I'm
a University of Minnesota press,author myself.

(02:19):
And when the organizers of theISSS group were looking for a
publisher to feature inventivescholarship across disciplinary
boundaries, UMP was ourimmediate first choice. And so
now, just moving back to you,Joyce, for now. Your book, The
Persistence of Masks, is in somany ways the perfect book for

(02:40):
launching this series on accountof the way it addresses both
aesthetics and anthropology,experimental encounters with
otherness, and emerging clinicalunderstandings of selfhood. I'd
So love to begin by asking you,Joyce, to say a little bit about
the history of the project. Sohow did this project come about
and what sparked it?

Joyce Cheng (02:59):
Thanks, Jonathan. So I'm going to try to avoid
those apologies of authors whofeel embarrassed about how long
the book took to write. But Ican say that one reason for the
long dura of its development andwriting has to do with a kind of

(03:20):
disciplinary shift. So I amstill in my home discipline of
art history. I've always beenone of the art historians who
had strong affinities withpeople in literature departments
and also in philosophy.
I was particularly interested inaesthetics. I will just briefly
say I did grow up in East Asia.I think the interest in the ways

(03:42):
in which modernism with itsinception in the global North
felt that it was impossible tonot give space or engage with
cultures and traditions and evenlanguages outside of that
cultural sphere. So I becamevery interested in the problem
and phenomenon of primitivism asa kind of phenomenon that's very

(04:05):
well documented in art and alsoin literature as well. But I
felt some dissatisfaction withthe predominant art historical
accounts of what is calledmodernist primitivism, because
most of those conversations hadhistorically revolved around the
questions of attribution andinfluences, and then also

(04:28):
critique of collecting andexhibition practices.
So ways in which non Westerncultural objects were displayed
in and collected in Westernmetropolitan museums. So all of
that work is very important andinformative to me. It was sort
of a large amount of literaturethat I consumed as a graduate

(04:50):
student, but I was just notfully satisfied with this
account. I was seeking a morephilosophical account of the
phenomenon. Ultimately, Ieventually accepted that I
needed to shift to somethingthat is beyond my discipline.
Maybe intellectual problems aremuch larger than what had been

(05:11):
undertaken And by art I shiftedtowards something like a theory
of the subject my way ofaccounting for this phenomenon
of primitivism. And eventually Ididn't even need the word
primitivism anymore. I becamevery interested in the, what I'm
calling now, the ethnographicimpulse in modernism and avant
garde. And in this book, I dealspecifically with surrealism and

(05:33):
that particular impulse. And soin a way, you could say the book
actually got me out ofprimitivism.

Jonathan Eburne (05:40):
So many interesting things that you've
just said there, and I'd love topick out a couple of them.
First, I love the idea that abook project comes out of a
sense of dissatisfaction. It'snot just like looking on towards
some beautiful horizon ofpossibility, but really thinking
about a kind of splinter in yourtoe. With that in mind, I'd like

(06:02):
to move toward the way youapproach these questions of a
kind of surrealist ethnography,moving away from the kind of
primitivism conversation thatoften, what goes around people
like Picasso and that sense ofjust a kind of cultural
appropriation, thinking about,you know, the mask, the African

(06:24):
mask as both the kind ofsingular type and as kind of
placeless and personless. So Itrust that's what you mean by,
you know, getting overprimitivism.
So with that in mind andthinking about all these little
elements that you've brought upthat I think are really
wonderful, the sort of kind ofwrestling with material, could

(06:45):
you say a little bit aboutsurrealism, not just as the
immediate topic of your book,let's say a group of artists,
intellectuals, poets who aregetting involved in cultural
study, including reflexivecultural study of their own, you
know, European, often Europeanbasis, but also as a kind of

(07:09):
imperative, as a kind of, youknow, way of approaching
problems, a way of approachingthe world. Is there something
about surrealism as anexperimental movement that
animates your project and theway that you're working with the
material that you work with?Again, I'm thinking about this
idea of being like deeplydissatisfied and looking for
some kind of way out of a vexedand old and let's say

(07:34):
structurally reproductiveproject. So yeah, is there a way
that surrealism speaks to theway you approach the project and
not just forming its object ofstudy alone?

Joyce Cheng (07:44):
Yeah, I think that's a really good question.
One of the ways I thought that Icould get out of kind of a
predominant way of thinkingabout primitivism in our history
was actually surrealism. So Ishould say in my
acknowledgements, I madereference to my first mentor,
the philosopher art historian,Michael Stone Richards. And as

(08:06):
an undergraduate, I was alreadyintroduced to Surrealism, simply
as an art movement, but as, amatrix for aesthetics, for
critical practice and what someEuropean thinkers have called
philosophical anthropology. Sofor me, I thought, okay, if you
wanna get out of thinking aboutprimitivism simply as a mode of

(08:29):
attribution, a form ofinfluence, and maybe
museological practices that needto be critiqued, then actually
surrealism in a way you couldthink it's the obvious way out.
But I think for all the reasonsthat you have also given for the
importance of surrealism, justwhen you were introducing the
series, you talked about thebasically full participation of

(08:53):
poets, visual artists, criticalthinkers, writers, and then
filmmakers. So it is that kindof movement, isn't it? It
necessitates all kinds ofhumanists because of the
richness, the different ways inwhich it manifests. It actually
necessitates all types ofhumanists to be on deck, right,
for studying this in, this isnot a project for one

(09:16):
discipline. So in a way for me,this was ideal.
It validated my owninterdisciplinary,
transdisciplinary impulse, Andit really made clear that some
intellectual problems justcannot be addressed by one
discipline alone. I think you,as well as I, were both scholars
of the 1930s, worked extensivelyin 1930s kind of Paris

(09:40):
intelligentsia. And if I broadenyour question to not just
surrealism, but that wholeperiod, like the intellectual
life of Paris in the 1930s, Imean, excites us, I'm assuming
both you and me, the fact thatthe multiple disciplines were
absolutely in dialogue. Theywere in a very intense dialogue
with one another, right?Philosophers were talking to

(10:02):
anthropologists.
And I think not just surrealism,but that whole period, how
people operated is probably verysatisfying for people with our
kind of intellectual impulses.

Jonathan Eburne (10:15):
That's lovely. I couldn't agree more. What does
it mean to think through or tostudy even something as
relatively specific as 1930sParis? Well, suddenly you can't
think about that withoutconsidering the history of
colonialism, of Frenchcolonialism, right? So France is
already, you know, theCaribbean, it's Mauritius in the

(10:39):
Indian Ocean, it's Andochin,it's Vietnam, right?
So all of those other questionsare imposing themselves. They're
part of any particular topic. Sonot only do you have the
example, the model, let's say,of certain kinds of
intellectuals who are engaged inexchanges without worrying about

(11:00):
who's, you know, where the linesare between disciplines. But
also there's a very real exigentsense of what does it mean to
even think of oneself as insideof any culture, Right? And the
way in which cultures are being,you know, obliterated, the way
they're being formed andterritorialized, especially with

(11:24):
the onset of national socialismin Germany.
I mean, right? So all of asudden you have a kind of topic
that is no longer a singularitybut kind of blossoms into
everything. And I think that'sboth lovely and important and
mildly terrifying. One of thethings I love about your book is

(11:45):
the little preface where youdeal with that interdisciplinary
abyss in some ways, right? Thatsort of sense of looking into
the vastness of the kinds ofquestions that begin to unravel
when you really study these hotpoints.
To bring this back to the bookand the question of the way in

(12:05):
which, you know, we're trainedto do things as scholars. I, for
example, am a literary scholarby training, although I don't
like to live in that one houseonly. For that reason, your book
really speaks to me. I get thesense, obviously, from knowing
you and knowing the project thatit's very important to you that
this book speak to otherdisciplines than art history or
literature alone. Maybe aslightly off kilter way to ask a

(12:26):
question about that would be, isthere such a thing as an ideal
reader of this book or is itmore like an ideal readers in
the plural?

Joyce Cheng (12:34):
Yeah, well, I will assume that people who are
interested in, let's say, a newsomewhat original account of the
formative period of surrealismon the level of content would be
interested in this book. But Iwill say because of how long the
book took to write, some momentsin that process, I did say to

(12:54):
myself, perhaps I would justwrite the book and then let the
book find me, my realintellectual friends. And now
I'm actually getting readershipfrom literary scholars, and that
is very encouraging, right?Because I am an art historian
who is being read by colleaguesin those fields. I would say

(13:17):
probably the ideal reader beyondthose interested in surrealism
would be humanists who areinterested in methods and
particularly the ways in whichno single discipline owns a
method.
I would say our history does alot of iconography and stylistic
analysis, but we would be foolsto think that we're the only

(13:38):
ones who do that. Others can dothat as well. So ethnography
would be one that isparticularly done very
frequently, commonly done byanthropologists, but in no way
does anthropology as adiscipline own ethnography as a
method, right? So sociologistsalso do this, journalists also
do this. So I'm showing in thisbook that to some extent

(14:04):
artists, poets also have doneethnography.
So I think humanists wereinterested and I guess not
afraid of the non monopoly,their own non monopoly of
particular methods would findthis somewhat interesting. But
going back to why people withour intellectual temperament are

(14:26):
attracted to movements likesurrealism and 1930s Paris or
global intellectual life, I havethis idea of the whole humanist,
the multifaceted whole humanistwho cares about intellectual
philosophical problems that arebeyond disciplinary boundary.

(14:46):
And I know this can sound alittle cliche because we talk a
lot about interinterdisciplinary, but just to
give a few examples of what thatlooks like, if you ask the
question, what is or what countsas a subject? I don't think this
kind of question can be answeredby just philosophy or literary

(15:07):
theory or psychoanalysis. Maybethey all have something to say
about that, right?
How can poetry, the arts andspeculative thinking contribute
to a theory of power? Like whocan answer that? No single
discipline can answer that.That's a big intellectual
problem. Everyone needs to worktogether.
They have something to say aboutthis. How do the arts, right?

(15:30):
Like the poetry and thinking,speculative thinking, right?
Help us refuse the choicebetween anthropocentrism and
dehumanization, right? These areconcepts I actually came up with
toward the end of writing mybook.
I realized this is likeblackmail, right? The idea that
on the one hand we haveanthropocentrism, human as the

(15:54):
measure of all things, thisEuropean Renaissance idea, that
we have to choose between thatand dehumanization, which is
reification of human subjects asinstruments that we can just use
them as replaceable tools, aresuperfluous in some ways. How do
the arts give us poetry, visualarts, creative practices? How do
the music, how do they give us away between those two? How does

(16:17):
surrealism give us a way that wedon't have to choose between
anthropocentrism anddehumanization?
These are huge problems. I'mhoping to reach out and speak to
the people who care about thoseproblems and in some ways who
can say, I'm just interested inwhat other disciplines have to
say about this as well, inaddition to what I can
contribute as a specialist of,you know, as an anthropologist,

(16:40):
as an art historian, you know,as a literary scholar.

Jonathan Eburne (16:43):
Oh, thanks so much. I love the image of a kind
of a society of friends of thebook, which is a kind of
nonprofit like idea or asyndicalist idea that seems to
really speak to the kind ofassociative nature of this
interdisciplinary work. Itactually emerges in a kind of
conversation and set of mutualinterests or mutual maybe

(17:07):
frustrations as you started off.

Joyce Cheng (17:09):
So originally I had those type of answers about who
the ideal reader is in terms ofcrossing disciplinary boundary.
And I forgot to say the mostobvious thing. I guess the most
obvious thing is the idealreader for this kind of book is
actually someone who understandsthat somehow we are not whole if

(17:30):
we are just ourselves. So Idon't know if that makes any
sense. But in other words, youcan't think wholly if you stick
to one ethnic national identity,even if that is your own

(17:52):
identity, right?
So the surrealists themselveswere people who actually, at
some point, you can tell me ifI'm wrong, they in a way refused
Frenchness, right? They got introuble for declaring their
support for German romanticism.They were very interested in
cultures that were not French,right? So I think I'm hoping

(18:17):
that the impulse of that to gobeyond oneself, that somehow
being myself is actually not mebeing whole, right? I need to be
whole by not being just myself.
That impulse, I think, is reallyimportant. And I hope that my
ideal reader is someone who'slike this.

Jonathan Eburne (18:40):
Oh, thank you for adding that. That's really
wonderful. And it makes me thinkof so many ways in which
countering the imperialism ofthe subject, like the whole
subject, this is I am what I amand nothing else. I mean,
thinking about dismantling thatas a kind of surrealist, and not
only surrealist, but largely asurrealist project over the

(19:01):
decades, really just extends tothinking about all kinds of
fluidities, right? Genderfluidity, sexual fluidity, in
spite of the fact that that'soften an imperfect evolution
that not every, you know, memberof the surrealist movement in
Paris in the 20s is exactly, youknow, against their own

(19:22):
wholeness.
But certainly there are in fitsand starts these developments of
forms of disengagement from thatsense of kind of imperial
subject. Thank you, I love that.With that in mind, a book that
really struck me when I wasgetting started in what, in the
profession, I guess you couldsay, and which I think has been
a really, as you know, been areally influential book, is

(19:45):
James Clifford's nineteen eightyeight study, The Predicament of
Culture, which has its famouschapter on ethnographic
surrealism. This is a book thatstrikes me as turning around
turning around ethnography andthe history of ethnography and
turning it away from a discoursethat largely, what, rewards the
imperialism of the subject inthe sense that it's the

(20:07):
scientific Europeanistcodification of others, and
really starts to rethink thepractice of cultural study in
the way that you're talkingabout, right? That, that, in a
way that, that, that rethinkswholeness, that looks to
combinations.
And, and that idea ofethnographic surrealism that

(20:29):
comes out of that book as a kindof description of the figures in
the 1930s who are coming out ofor in the surrealist movement
and then doing this ethnographicwork is really a bridge to your
project. And so I'm wondering ifyou could address, let's say,

(20:52):
that kind of fluidity in termsof your book as a kind of
response maybe to that muchearlier book and the resonance
that it's had within the kind ofinterdisciplinary thinking that
you're talking about?

Joyce Cheng (21:11):
Thank you. This is really the crux of the methods
question in the book. So JamesClifford's ethnographic
surrealism was hugely important.And I actually am grateful to my
manuscript readers for havingactually identified how
important that book is. So theyinvited me to have a much more

(21:33):
direct engagement with it.
So it's hugely important. It'shugely insightful. It is also
correct. Yet I would say it'salso a bit misleading. So I knew
that book very well also asalready starting in grad school,
but I've always known as wellbecause I, you know, I wrote the

(21:54):
dissertation while I was livingin Paris.
I also knew that Frenchanthropologists and historians
have had trouble with thatconcept of ethnographic
surrealism. And I couldn'texactly pinpoint where the
malaise was coming from, whythey were uncomfortable with
this concept for a long time. SoI say the more helpful book that

(22:17):
helped me understand this wasactually Vincent de Bein's kind
of more recent book on theliterary dimension of French
anthropology. So this was veryhelpful for me because what he
showed in this book was actuallythat historically anthropology,
French anthropology came out ofliterature. So in that sense,

(22:41):
the literary turn of Frenchanthropology should not be a
surprise, right?
It's always within reach. DeBein's book was about the
literary book of many Frenchanthropologists. So in a sense,
this literary turn, while it isa kind of postmodern writing

(23:03):
culture turn was alsoanthropology's return to its
origins, right? So I just thismorning, when preparing for this
talk, I was thinking, could wethink about that as
anthropology's own primitivismin the way that they went back
to their own intellectualorigins? So the fact that had

(23:27):
anthropologists who started toquestion that there is a kind of
textual element, we areproducing texts and all this, in
a way it fits in with thehistory of anthropology itself.
So I would say CLIFR's conceptis both all of those things.
It's very important, but I alsounderstand there are other ways
of thinking about this thatdon't require calling it

(23:49):
ethnographic surrealism. Theother part that I found not so
much dissatisfying, but rather Iwas looking for to expand this a
little bit more. I would sayClifford's ethnographic
surrealism could potentially bemisleading if it means, if it's
taken to mean that oneparticular branch of surrealism

(24:13):
was ethnographic, if that's howpeople interpret ethnographic
surrealism to designate aparticular section of
surrealism. For instance, theDokhyu Meng group that revolved
around Georges Bataille and someof the professional ethnologists
at the Institute of Ethnologiethat he was friends with.
So if it meant that ethnographicsurrealism referred to that,

(24:35):
then I said, you know, it couldbe a little bit too narrow
because what if we think ofethnographic surrealism as
actually all of the movement? Iwas actually happy to know that
I don't think I'm the only onewho thinks that. There are
people who already otherscholars that I think you're
familiar, you and I bothfamiliar with, are doing that. I
find traces of this way ofthinking in the work of Natalia

(24:58):
Dusty. I find it in Efi Renzu.
I found it in James Cahill'sbook on zoological surrealism,
right? The Jean Panavers filmsof marine life as a kind of
ethnographic film, right? So weactually have a lot of
surrealism scholars who areinching toward this idea of what
if all of surrealism waslatently ethnographic in that

(25:21):
way, right? Thinking about itsanalysis of dreams. So then I
became more emboldened, right,with being informed by this kind
of work.
What if we think of all ofsurrealism as a kind of
ethnography? And then we canthink about what is the real
subject of that ethnography? Isit particular cultures that kind
of colonial mindset willconsider exotic and needing to

(25:44):
be reorganized and dominated? Oris the subject of this
ethnography something much moreuniversal? So I'm calling it the
ethnography of the subject.
It's a kind of double meaning ofthe subject, right? The
ethnographic subject, but alsothe moral subject that has its
positionality with subjectivity.That's how I would say I'm using

(26:06):
or being supported by theconcept of ethnographic
surrealism.

Jonathan Eburne (26:10):
The ethnography of the subject is a really
important turn of phrase insofaras it accommodates, I would say,
the other aspects of what youwere just describing, which is
life, like life itself, that asubject like a culture isn't

(26:30):
just isn't a category or type.Right? The the point is not to
kind of ascribe taxonomies,genres, categories to things,
but rather to account for andtransform, by the way, right,
the ways in which subjects existin the world and in life. And I

(26:53):
think that's really afundamental aspect of the work
that you're doing in this book.With that in mind, I'd like to
pivot to the other half of yourtitle.
So from the ethnography of thesubject to the first part, the
persistence of masks. Andsomething that really appeals to

(27:14):
me about this title goes back tothe one of the very first things
you said today, which has to dowith its the relationship to
long standing discourses andpractices of of so called
primitivism, right? This sort oflooking at and problematizing or

(27:35):
appropriating a people that isfar away. So when you talk about
masks and their persistence, onone hand you're talking about
very material, real, physicalartifacts, ceremonial objects,
made items that are traffickedand real and can be put on the
face or put on the wall orwhatever. On the other hand, at

(28:00):
the same time, there's somethingelse you're doing than simply
identifying ceremonial objectsused both in indigenous contexts
and in European contexts, butrather like a practice of
masking.
What does it mean to use a maskor to supplement the self in a

(28:25):
way that masking suggests, bothto hide and to supplement. Also,
unmasking becomes part of thatdynamic. So there's something
performance based there. So notjust a material artifact, but a
kind of performance, even, asyou say in the book, a kind of
possession, you know, by themask. Could you address that in

(28:48):
terms of what you've been sayingabout these, you know, broad and
kind of churning underlyingquestions?

Joyce Cheng (28:54):
Yeah, thank you for that. So The Mask, if I were to
stay in our history exclusivelyand to deal with the question of
modernist primitivism, and stillvery interesting book is still
coming out of that whole topic.I really don't want to be taken
as dismissing the importance orthe generative potential of that

(29:14):
concept. It's just that I, as Isaid before, was interested in a
philosophical account of thiswhole phenomenon. So I finally
settled on masks because Irealized they were important,
but not only because thesurrealism and other kinds of
chic Parisians, right, in thekind of Beaumont actually

(29:36):
collected African and Oceanicmasks.
It's not because of that. So themasks in surrealism are not
simply those things. It's amuch, much bigger iconography.
Now I'm using our historicalterm. It's a much, much bigger
iconography.
And I include in that, and Ithink this might be something
worth saying if I end upsurprising my readers, the masks

(30:00):
don't have to be even visiblesometimes. Visible masks include
things like veils, wonderfuliconography in Surrealist art
and poetry, heads very prominentin the document circle with
Batai and Lerise when he wasactually under Batai's
influence, you know, the skullsand death masks, right? The

(30:22):
leather mask that suffocates thewomen in a kind of sadomasochist
practice. But masks are alsogloves. There are also hats.
There are also hands. And Ithink those are all interesting.
Hats are more symbolic. We evenuse that in English as
interchangeable with functions,right? I'm wearing my hat as a,

(30:46):
I don't know, a teacher, I'mwearing my hat as so on and so
forth.
Hands also can be masked. Thinkthat would be something quite
surprising maybe to some,because we think of hands as
actually belonging to ourbodies. And so that how can they
be mass? Well, actually it's apart of the body that actually
can be in a way separated. Soit's a very cookie idea, I know,

(31:08):
but I tried to show that that'smy chapter two, in the sense
that it can be separated andrepossessed, right?
It's often, it has beentheorized not only by the
surrealists as something that itcan be automatic. So that's why
you have this iconography of thesevered hands in surrealist art,
right? In the twenties,especially, this is very, very
common. The severed hand, thehand that has its own life. If

(31:30):
you look at Max Ends' collages,why?
Because the hand is conceived assomething that kind of is
attached to itself, but it hasits own life out there. So the
last chapter talks aboutmasquerade, where there are
actually no physical masksinvolved. The women of Northern

(31:53):
Ethiopia, who were practitionersof the czar cults that Lerise
studied, actually had a verypowerful access to a foreign
masquerade that didn't requirehaving possession of material
objects, sculpted masks, whichLerise has very carefully with
the whole team of Mision DagajiButi have very carefully

(32:16):
documented to be virtually allin the hands of men, right? So
all the West African masssocieties were in the hands of
men because they had possessionof these objects. But you don't
even need to have those objectsin order to have access to a
masquerade.
So I really try to show that,you know, the mass is a figure.

(32:36):
It's not simply an object. Itcan be. Ornaments can be masks
too. So I talked about that inchapter three.
So it's a figure and what I'mtrying to reach for is something
like the mask as a new, but alsoactually quite old paradigm for
the subject. And I think that'swhat the surrealists were

(32:59):
reaching for. So, you know, inthe introduction, I gave a very
brief kind of historicalanthropology of how the figure
of the mass had been basicallyvilified and basically
marginalized by a Westernhumanist kind of It's actually
Christianity first, Christianityand then a kind of more humanist

(33:21):
West, right? So the mass becamesomething that's vilified and
the self became something muchmore authentic. That became the
more important paradigm for thesubject.
But anthropologists like MarcelMose, all speaking in the 30s,
all said, well actually we had amuch, much older concept with a
person that is not person butpersona, right? And then, you

(33:43):
know, I think it's very, veryinteresting that Hannah Arendt,
the political philosopher, alsorepeatedly used this concept of
mass, which I talk about in myepilogue, as something that
maybe is a more constructive,less tyrannical figure that can
be used to think about thesubject. You know, in a way,
what I'm saying is the self isoverrated, right? Maybe the mass

(34:06):
is a more important paradigmthat we need to be able to
recuperate. So it's also asubject.
What's important is the subject.It's not the self.

Jonathan Eburne (34:16):
That's lovely. And it makes me wonder earlier
when you're talking abouthumanism and the kind of the
ideal reader and the way inwhich your work strives toward
and practices a kind oftransdisciplinary form of

(34:36):
inquiry. I mean, seems like oneof your insistences here is this
isn't just like the best kindof, you know, the best kind of
thinker is thistransdisciplinary one that has
more to it than those tinylittle disciplines that are all
insufficient, but rather tothink about humanism in this
regard as a kind of persona, asa kind of maybe system of

(35:00):
masking. And so I'm wondering ifyou could come back to some of
the things that you were sayingabout the transdisciplinary
work. And it strikes me thatyou're saying something very
important today in an era whenmany disciplines are being shut
down at the university level, atthe state level.
The idea that knowledges arebeing, let's say, disarticulated

(35:22):
rather than connected. There'sso much being policed, shut
down, categorized. Is there away in which this insistence
upon masking and persona as akind of ethical challenge to the
singularity of the imperialsubject that really resonates
today?

Joyce Cheng (35:41):
Yeah, that's a really fascinating way of
reframing the question ofinterdisciplinarity in terms of
masks. Why are there masks,Right? And why are monotheistic
religions afraid of masks? I'mthinking especially of
Christianity and Islam. I talkedabout how in Christianity, the

(36:03):
masks, like the medieval way ofthinking about masks is like,
you know, these are incarnationsof the devil.
And if you go to chapter fourwhere I talk about the surviving
practice of czar in multiconfessional Ethiopia in the
'30s, both the Christians andthe Muslims sort of were

(36:26):
skeptical. Now, themselves, andMuslims participated in tsar in
Ethiopia, so I think that's veryinteresting, even though
officially uncomfortable withit. Well, if I think in those
terms, the masks are never one.Right? That's the problem.
In fact, we came up with masksbecause we couldn't, in a way,

(36:47):
organize certain features,characteristics into one
character. That's why we came upwith so many masks. That's why
mass societies, it didn't matterif you found them in the South
Pacific or in West Africa, theynever just have one mask. They
always have multiple mass.Right?

(37:08):
And, you know, I'm I'm I'mplaying with your idea of
thinking about humanisticdisciplines in those terms.
Like, why do we come up with,you know, gender studies and,
you know, new new types of waysof organizing knowledge, right?
In a way, yeah. I think that's avery fun idea that you just put
forth there. I think about themas new characters, right?
New personas and new ways oforganizing issues and problems

(37:33):
and methods, right? Using thesenew studies, or we can find
different departments orprograms or something like that.
I think that's a reallyinteresting idea. But I would
say, I think we talked aboutthis when we were preparing for
this conversation. I think itwould be really dangerous,

(37:54):
especially in the currentclimate that you're talking
about, if we use the idea oftrans disciplinarity as a kind
of opportunistic way ofjustifying the superfluousness
of certain departments andprograms, right?
So in other words, here's thedystopian scenario, we'll just
consolidate anthropology andEnglish because of writing

(38:19):
cultures so that one facultymember can teach courses in
both, right? So I think thatwould be a terrible dystopian
way of using the notion ofinterdisciplinarity. Now, think
to go back to the issue ofotherness and difference,
meaningful interdisciplinarydialogues actually depend on the

(38:40):
difference and distinction ofindividual disciplines.
Otherwise, what would we betalking about? It would be the
same, right?
Anthropology and literature cantalk to each other in a
productive way precisely becausethey are different. They have
different histories, right? Andthey have different strengths.
And so one of the things that wedidn't talk about, but I do like

(39:01):
to at least mention is in 1930ssurrealism for historical
reasons, the surrealist actuallyconceived of what I'm calling
masks very much along the termsof the feminine, right? I would
say the psychoanalytic feminine,not the femininity as kind of
exterior signs of femininity ornot an anatomical issue.

(39:25):
It's not today what we callassigned females. Le femininence
cycle analytically is a type ofsubjectivity that includes
otherness, right? So to put itvery simply. And so like that
kind of, you know, the ethics ofdifference, I guess, would be
impossible if all thedisciplines become the same. So

(39:47):
we can do interdisciplinarywork, strong, intensely
productive interdisciplinarywork precisely if the
disciplines are distinct andvery aware of their own
strengths and also shortcomings,right?
So I just give one shortexample. Anthropology and
history has historically beenmeeting for very productive

(40:12):
reasons because history,historians, conscious historians
want to in a way repair oralleviate its own local
centrism, right? So alwaysrelying on written records,
assuming that cultures that haveno written records are basically
not worthy of study or basicallyinaccessible, right? That's the

(40:33):
kind of local centrism thatconscious historians are very
interested in trying tomitigate. So they then engage
with anthropology.
That's the reason for it,because they're aware of their
own shortness. Same time,anthropology is very aware of
its own allochronism, right?This is Johannes Fabian here who
says, What can we do? We need totake more into account

(40:55):
historical time. The question oftemporality that we assume it's
a non problem anthropology,cultures are fixed in time,
they're almost like frozen.
That's not okay, right? So thenthey engage with history. But in
order for that kind of healthy,strong, interesting
interdisciplinary dialogue tohappen, the two disciplines have

(41:15):
to remain different, right? Andso I would say, I would hate to
see you know,interdisciplinarity as a way
like, we don't need departments.We don't need disciplines.
I think that would be horriblefor all of us.

Jonathan Eburne (41:29):
It makes me think of the real extreme, as
you say, even religious orecclesiastical difference
between an idea about masking asdissimulation. So there is but
one woman with a thousand faces,or the hero with a thousand
faces, right? We can talk aboutevery mask, you take off the
mask to reveal the truth that'sbeneath it. All truths are

(41:50):
fundamentally the same. Themasks are what create this
illusion, illusory difference,as opposed to, let's say, the
ethics of masquerade, where whatmanifests itself is the
specificity.
I mean, I'm thinking about evenNigerian masquerade. Like it's
the god shows up, right? Thespirit is present in the

(42:10):
masquerade. It's not like if yourip off the disguise, you see
it's, you know, it's the sameold thing. Like, and there's,
there isn't, there is aspecificity to each spirit, each
God that manifests throughmasquerade.

Joyce Cheng (42:22):
Absolutely. And that's such a, I mean, I'm so
happy that you came to thatbecause I had completely
underestimated myself. I camefrom a non monotheistic culture,
right? I grew up in East Asia. Ihad completely underestimated
how deep seated is thevilification of the mask, even
in the kind of secular West,right?
And in some ways, what Irealized is it got even worse in

(42:44):
the secular West with a kind ofsecular modernity. So this
simulation is absolutely howmask is conceived of in the kind
of post enlightenment world. Soit's inauthentic, right? But the
moment when you start to thinkevery mask, this simulates and

(43:07):
also makes appear something,don't It also, you know, it also
shows something. Then we're nowin the interesting dynamic.
And I think this is the thingthat Hannah Arendt actually
tried to, in her critique ofenlightenment, is trying to say.

(43:29):
We lost this concept thepersona. It's actually very,
very important for everybody'ssafety. And that's also a
realization that virtually everyanthropological study of masks
in, because we've lost thistradition in the West, in the
secular West, a lot of the workthat's being done elsewhere all

(43:51):
show that. Like, they don'tthink of the mask as simply
dissimulation, right?
It's actually about makingmanifest other things that
without the mass would not havea mode of appearance. I would
say, going back to your lovelyidea of thinking about
humanistic disciplines orbranches of studies in terms of

(44:14):
masquerade, we form these newdisciplines or programs or
fields because we think we canmake manifest something. It's
not like we're trying to hidesomething, right? To simulate
something. We're trying toreorganize our knowledge so that
something new can appear, right?

(44:34):
And so going back to your ideaof what happens to that in an
age of financial austerity whereevery university is prioritizing
cutting costs, I would say I'mhoping that there are going to
be conscientious people up therewho understand that we need to
maintain a healthy number ofdifferent disciplines in order

(44:59):
for any important humanisticwork to be done. You can't just
consolidate everything. I'm notsaying no cutting. I'm saying,
please let disciplines alsomaintain their integrity so that
we can actually enable better,more productive dialogues. So

(45:19):
Jonathan, this is a point wherewe talked about we would pivot
the conversation toward theseries.
I'm very honored to inauguratethe ISSS series. And I would
love to hear about your visionof how my book fits into your
conception of the future of thisseries of books. And I wanted to

(45:44):
hear especially about somepersistent issues that you think
maybe future Surrealism scholarswould benefit from paying more
attention to. One persistentissue I have kind of wrestled
with while writing my book, andI also see it in the work of my
colleagues, Surrealism scholarsof our generation, is the
tension between a history ofSurrealism and a theory of

(46:06):
Surrealism. This has been kindof stressful, actually, as a
scholar to kind of navigate.
Historians of Surrealism areoften not very happy with the
theoretical use of Surrealism.And then sometimes I do have
trouble placing myself eitherside of that fence.

Jonathan Eburne (46:24):
It's almost a consequence of the success of
surrealism as a museologicaltopic, especially as we've now
reached the centenary of the '19twenty four manifesto of
Surrealism, that there have beenso many exhibitions around the
world, just, I mean, almosthundreds of countries, hundreds

(46:47):
of exhibitions. And the ideathat the highlighting of the
visual component of surrealismmight be said also to highlight
a kind of divide in art history,perhaps, between art history,
the historiography of art, andart criticism and other kind of

(47:07):
factors of a kind of analyticcomponent of art history, which
is not named in the title, butwhich also participates in that
discourse. The very fact thatsurrealism as a cultural
phenomenon, as you've alreadysaid throughout, does not obey a
single place or medium, butrather exists in kind of poetic

(47:32):
registers, but also in, youknow, active political speech
forms and tracts and publishingand so forth, means that it is
always crossing registers andlooking to implicitly or
explicitly translate what it'sdoing into different, you know,
any, at any one moment, whethera group or a person wrestling

(47:56):
with certain kinds of practicesand ideas that are linked to
surrealism in some fashion,there's always a kind of phase
change or, you know, translationeffect at work, I would say.
And what that means is that forme at least, and in the vision
of the series, I think that it'svery possible to study all of

(48:16):
the kinds of things that arehappening under the large
umbrella of surrealism inspecific times, spaces, and
circumstances with, you know,named people who are doing the
work, named texts, and to bevery rigorously historiographic
about documenting that, doingarchival work, you know,
whatever is involved in thatkind of history side. And in

(48:40):
doing so, to attend to theconcepts and, let's say, broader
tensions that are at work inthat period and in producing
that work at that time andspace. I would say that
surrealism as a movement isalways heavily conceptually
loaded. There is greatintentionality behind it.

(49:02):
Whether people are breaking fromthe group at a certain given
time, or whether, let's say inthe sense of the Cairo
Surrealist group, Ari Liberte,they're debating how much does
one import of an experimentalavant garde movement and how
much does one nationalize ortoctonize a movement.

(49:26):
What does it mean to think in arevolutionary form? What does it
mean to collectivize? These arereally big and fundamental and
difficult questions, but they'revery conceptual ones,
philosophical ones, but alsopractical ones. And so I myself
don't think there needs to besome kind of rift between

(49:47):
certain, you know, tenors ofwork, although I think that that
has, that happens, I think in alot of scholarship, maybe just
in the way storytelling happensor in the way that people
assemble their object of study,their archive of material. But
one of the things that excitesme most about the study of
surrealism, and which the ISSS'smission and the University of

(50:09):
Minnesota Press's mission reallyspeak to, is the value of paying
deep attention to a kind ofempirical specificity and
precisely through that thinkingabout the conceptual work, the
conceptual resonance of thatspecificity, and especially in

(50:31):
turn of how that speaks to us inthe present.

Joyce Cheng (50:33):
Yeah, I think when we talked before, we talked
about my preface where I talkedabout how I struggle with this,
the multiple disciplines thatare possible as ways of studying
approaching Surrealism, and thenthe realization that history and
philosophy, we more commonlycall it theory, are actually the

(50:54):
main two disciplines from whichall of our humanistic
disciplines kind of descend. AndI think to go back to this
question of difference andotherness, one of the things
that actually helped me, and Ithink it was so exciting about
the series, right? Can we do akind of work in surrealism that

(51:15):
makes productive use of thedifference between history and
theory? And that actuallyrequires us to say, at least I
finally made this realizationmyself, history and theory are
different practices. So themoment I accepted that they're

(51:36):
not gonna be the same, when Itheorize I will be at risk of
losing some particularities,right?
Because I have to generalize.When I historicize, I am at risk
of losing certain conceptsbecause the facts may not fit

(51:56):
those concepts. So once I acceptthat these two are actually
fundamentally different, then Ican actually do both, then I can
actually play with this.

Jonathan Eburne (52:06):
Absolutely. And I would add to that also with
your point about a kind ofethics of difference in mind, if
you're studying how a historicalperson, a historical artist or
poet or thinker may have beentheorizing in a certain times

(52:27):
and place. To study thathistorically means one has to be
mindful that it's not, you know,my theory, it's that person's
theory, Right? Studied, youknow, studied through the lens
of distance and difference fromit. I can't just aggregate it to
my own schemata, right,schematic for how I think about

(52:49):
it.
Rather, I have to recognize itas not mine. And I find that's
another kind of differentiationthat I consider to be both,
let's say, empirical in someways, but also very beautiful.
And, you know, something that Ithink your work really attends

(53:10):
to. It's also a quality that theforthcoming, I believe, second
book in the series, KatherineHansen's book on the Bucharest
surrealist movement, the InfantNoir Group. It's called The
Powers of Know, and looking atthe historical specificity of a
kind of dialectical thinkingemerging in this particular

(53:32):
space and time by theseparticular people under these
particular deep politicalpressures, and yet how that also
evolves and has continuitieswith contemporary dialectical
thinking.
I think all of these things arepossible in the way that you've
described. And being mindful,let's say being methodologically
attentive to the way thosedifferences between history and

(53:55):
philosophy, between differentlinguistic and site specific
traditions and knowledges aremanifesting themselves in one's
own scholarship, I think is bothvery important and I think what
this series is really allowingand hoping for.

Joyce Cheng (54:10):
Speaking of dialectical thinking, if we have
time for one more kind ofgenerative question that I would
pose here. So the dialecticsbetween myth and truth, think is
a very interesting one. I don'tknow if you think this is

(54:30):
something that in a way thefuture of Surrealism studies
might engage with more. You arethe author yourself of a book
called Outsider Theory that hassome Surrealism in it, at least
is adjacent to surrealism.

Jonathan Eburne (54:48):
Surrealish?

Joyce Cheng (54:49):
Surrealish ish. The Bataille group is quite present.
And I thought about therhetorical use of ethnography as
well in the surrealist movement.Obviously they're saying
ethnographic documentary, whichis documentary is a word that
often is used by many, many ofour colleagues to talk about
this aspect of surrealism. Imean, is a claim at least,

(55:13):
right, to a certain kind ofveracity of truth, which is why
we document this is not justart.
Walter Benjamin said this aboutsurrealism. He already
recognized it in the 20s.Surrealism is not about art.
It's about other things, right?At the same time, let's say the
afterlife of this, you know,latent ethnography of

(55:35):
Surrealism, which we might sayis James Clifford's ethnographic
Surrealism or Surrealistethnography, The point of
departure of this kind ofpostmodern anthropology is
actually about questioning thescientific objectivity of
traditional anthropology.
I am wondering, what do youthink surrealism has something

(55:56):
to say about that objectivitythat questions itself? People
engage in creative speculativepractices suddenly laying claim
to the veracity of what they areattending to, right? These are
actual crimes. You are theauthor of one of my favorite
books in surrealism studies onart of crime. That's a very good

(56:18):
example too, right?
This is real. We're looking atmurder cases and we're analyzing
the psychic drama that producedthem. You know, it seems to me
that in surrealism, we actuallyhave these two movements going
on, both in surrealism and theafterlife of surrealism. It's
about myths that try to becometruths and truths that are

(56:39):
suddenly not so confident abouttheir own veracity.

Jonathan Eburne (56:44):
Yeah, that's one little last question, and
it's a doozy. Tupa, thank you.There's something on the one
hand tricky about these termsbecause myth can mean anything
from traditional stories,traditional knowledges, right,
the basis of a kind oftraditional cultures, to all of

(57:05):
the kinds of discrepancies anddishonesties ascribed to
tradition, which is to saycommonly held beliefs, folk
beliefs, mere folk beliefs, andthe dismissal. Superstitions.
Right, superstitions.
Right, so it really runs thegamut between things that are
beyond truth, that are truerthan true, that are deeper than

(57:29):
true, to like absolutefalsehood. Right? So that's a
terminology that's troublesome.And likewise, truth is a word
that on one hand is thetranscendental basis of all
knowledge and we only know. Butalso it's a kind of imperial
concept as well under which allkinds of terrible things have
been done, in the name of truth.

(57:49):
Know, genocides, let's say, canhappen. So rather than thinking
of these as stable entities, theidea that to really consider
what is at stake in callingsomething, naming something a
myth, like what are we talkingabout, what's being dealt with,
and when we call somethingtruth, what

Joyce Cheng (58:07):
is

Jonathan Eburne (58:07):
being ascribed to it, that sense of gaining a
broader nuanced picture, so tospeak, of the stakes and
authorities according to whichthese terms are being generated.
That's, in my mind, the kind ofwork we were just describing, in

(58:30):
thinking about a kind ofinterdisciplinary work that puts
together theory, philosophy, andhistory. The history part is,
you know, who's saying it, whatauthority is behind it, is there
a military power backing it,who's being erased, whose voices
are being taken away. Right? Andif the word myth is being used

(58:54):
to demonize, then, you know,that's important to know.
And that's part of that becomespart of the equation. So really
rendering those two termssomething other than absolute, I
think is a fundamental work.

Joyce Cheng (59:09):
This is a really great response because in a way,
I think maybe it's not aboutmyth and truth, it's about myth
and myth, right? So in the1930s, one could actually say,
who wasn't interested in myth,right? So the Nazis were very
interested in myths,mythologies, and recuperating

(59:30):
elements of Germanic folklorefor political goals. And on the
other hand, you have the Leftintelligentsia that was also
very interested in myth. Andthen we have Minotaur, the
surrealist review that usesmyth, a mythic creature, a pagan

(59:51):
chimera as its figurehead.
And that was all about myth,right? So I think you're
absolutely right. It's actuallyabout what kind of myth and what
is myth? Is myth or mythology?Are we looking at a kind of
epistemological system fromwhich we can generate that is
actually capable of generatingnew ideas that meet the

(01:00:14):
urgencies of the time?
Or are we talking aboutrecuperation of supposedly
timeless narratives that thencan be refabricated to suit
ideologies as opposed to help uscome to terms with crisis,
right? I think that's thedifference between myth and
myth.

Jonathan Eburne (01:00:35):
No, that's really well put. And another way
I'd just add to layer onto thatis these aren't quantifiable
distinctions, like aboutmeasuring the absolute value of
something in some kind ofabsolutist terms. Rather, the
kind of distinctions andevaluations you're talking about

(01:00:56):
are qualitative and have to dowith the narratives set in
motion by upholding, right, acertain order of myth, whether
that's the order of truth,justice, and the American way or
whatever else, right? So, yeah,what narratives are set in play
by this epistemologicalinvestment? So I know we've now

(01:01:23):
had a goodly amount of time totalk to one another, and I
really appreciate, you know, youhaving given your time to have
this conversation.
Do you have any final words foryour readers out there that are
listening to this?

Joyce Cheng (01:01:42):
Final words. I'm hoping to not have to ever have
final words so that it would begenerative of further dialogues.
You know, I think I thought thatthe book might help me find my
friends. And now it's thatmoment where I am interested in

(01:02:03):
the reviews and what people findproductive and less productive?
Did I get anything wrong?
Those type of things. And I hopethere are no final words so we
can keep talking.

Jonathan Eburne (01:02:22):
Fantastic. That's great. Thank you so much.

Joyce Cheng (01:02:24):
Thank you, Jonathan.

Narrator (01:02:27):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book, ThePersistence of Surrealism and
the Ethnography of the Subjectby Joyce Chang is available from
University of Minnesota Press.Thank you for listening.