Tuesday 1 July 2025

The Remainder

article

INNERVATION. In 1924 – in an edition of the avant-garde journal Commerce – the French poet Louis Aragon wrote and published an article under the title Une vague de rêves (A Wave of Dreams). In this article he describes what has come to be known as the ‘period of trances’ through which the Surrealist group was formed (his close collaborator Andre Bretón publishing the Surrealist Manifesto in October of the same year). He begins Une vague with what would come to be known as the typical existentialist realisation or ‘crisis’:

“I happen, suddenly, to lose the whole thread of my life […] …the mind detaches itself a bit from the human mechanism; then, I am no longer the bicycle of my senses, the grindstone for sharpening memories and meetings.”

These are the inter-war years – between 1918 and 1939 – and the shock of the Great War, along with the enormous social and technological changes it brought about, were still being felt on the streets of Paris. Aragon continues:

“I was not allowed to withdraw from this mansion Society, and those who climbed its front steps made a frightful cloud of dust on the doormat. Patriotism, honor, religion, goodness – it was hard to recognize oneself amidst these countless words that they tossed out at random to the echoes…”

The ‘trance’ then, was a form of withdrawal, a rejection of the life which led from patriotism and patrimonial forms of ‘honor’ to war and influenza – and its content was the ‘dream’:

“At [surrealism’s] point of departure it found dream, whence it had issued… [...] 1924: under this number that has a dredge and drags behind it a haul of moonfish, under this number adorned with disasters, strange stars in its hair, the contagion of dream spreads though the neighborhoods and the countryside.”

This ‘contagion’ was first felt as a form of literary expression or ‘exploitation’, as Aragon writes, and soon became a lifestyle, a politics: “Every day they wanted to sleep more [...] intoxicated by their words…” such that the individual dreamer became a collective: “the era of collective illusions-and were these illusions after all?” And from these collective dreams – these questions – Breton formed the Surrealist Manifesto, a politics built on Freud, striving for a form of thought “[absent] of any control exercised by reason” – writing:

“We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. [...] Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. [...] Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices.”¹

Here Breton rallied against not only the established bourgeois order of the day, but also the socialist realism of the Marxists and communist organisations which were then taking form across Europe – radical groups which in turn viewed Breton’s project as itself bourgeois, concerned not with the practical work of rebuilding working-class institutions, but instead of ‘literary’ or purely aesthetic concerns. A year later, in 1925, Walter Benjamin would write – in a perhaps more even-handed manner – of a ‘dream kitsch’ at work in this nascent surrealism, a surrealism perhaps too-captured by bourgeois memories of a bygone c19th:

“What we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the body. But now, in kitsch, the world of things advances on the human being; it yields to his uncertain grasp and ultimately fashions its figures in his interior. The new man bears within himself the very quintessence of the old forms, and what evolves in the confrontation with a particular milieu from the second half of the nineteenth century-in the dreams, as well as the words and images, of certain artists-is a creature who deserves the name of ‘furnished man.’”²

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Throughout the 1920s and -30s Benjamin’s writing dealt with this reconciliation of Marx and Freud implied by the surrealist project (the Arcades Project was, in part, inspired by Aragon’s Une vague de rêves), but it did so – as Matthew Charles writes – as part of a ‘constellation’ which also included “Soviet biomechanics and reactionary anti-capitalist Lebensphilosophie.”³ As Charles (and Susan Buck-Morss) note, this wider range of thinking brought unusual ideas into Benjamin’s writing – terms which sat outside a purely Freudian view of the mind, and were perhaps more at home within the emerging fields of neuropsychology or ‘biomechanics’.

Etymologically, the term ‘innervation’ is quite straightforwardly derived from the term ‘nerve’ which today contains many of the same meanings as the original Latin ‘nervus’ – the idea of a physical nerve, or ‘sinew’, as well as the concept of ‘strength’, ‘vigour’ or ‘energy’. Innervation, which is first attested in English in the 1830s, describes the manner in which such physical and conceptual ‘nerve’ is distributed throughout the body – the oed articulates this as the “supply of nerve-force from a nerve-centre to some organ or part by means of nerves”; or, as John Thomson writes, in his 1832 Account of Life William Cullen, “the doctrine of Innervation or the Influence of the Nervous System” which Cullen (in the c18th) described as ‘Excitement Theory’⁴.

Freud’s initial writings on ‘innervation’ are remarkably similar to that of Cullen's, dealing with the idea of ‘excitations’ which may be productively or unproductively ‘discharged’; part of the continuity he had discovered through psychoanalysis between the ‘psychical’ and the physical. As Christopher Cauldwell articulates in his 1938 essay A Study in Bourgeois Psychology, for Freud: “Our life is built on the foundations of the somatic wisdom of unconscious innervations.” This is a view still fundamental to contemporary psychoanalysis, but which is articulated by a ‘paraneurological’ vocabulary which – in Freud’s later writings – would be replaced by metaphors of geology (sedimentation) and history (Greek mythology).

Walter Benjamin’s own concept of innervation was characterised not only by both aspects of Freud (the ‘neurologic’ and the ‘historic’), but also – as Charles and Buck-Morss have shown – by his understanding of ‘technological and urban experience’.⁵ In a footnote to the second version of his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, written in late 1935, he wrote:

“Revolutions are innervations of the collective-or, more precisely, efforts at innervation on the part of the new, historically unique collective which has its organs in the new technology. This second technology is a system in which the mastering of elementary social forces is a precondition for playing [das Spiel] with natural forces. Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach.”⁶

Innervation here is a mode of adaptation, but also of potential transformation: it names the process by which a collective learns to inhabit and extend its technological conditions, not merely in utilitarian terms, but sensuously, perhaps ‘surreally’ – as a kind of rehearsal for political action.

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In 1929 Benjamin returned to the subject of the surrealists to write Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia – bringing together the threads of Breton’s dream-politics with his own theories of historical materialism and revolutionary praxis. While still cautious, he had come to move beyond a critique of Surrealism as bourgeois nostalgia or ‘dream-kitsch’, toward an interest in how surrealist methods might actually prepare the body – and the collective – for revolutionary receptivity (and reciprocity). In this light, ‘innervation’ becomes a transitional term: not simply physiological or psychoanalytic, but a way of imagining how technological and historical conditions could become felt, somatic realities.

If, for Aragon, surrealism first identified the body as the site of crisis – disoriented, intoxicated, in search of meaning – Benjamin imagines it instead as the site of reactivation. The surrealists, while still bound to what Benjamin called “the irremediable coupling of idealistic morality with political practice,” nevertheless asked the right questions – intuiting, if not achieving, the ‘image-space’ in which revolution might first take root:

“The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. For the moment, only the Surrealists have understood its present commands.” ⁷

This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

Innervation

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Footnotes