Max Ernst is the artist who investigates the intricate connection between the autonomous or machinic aspect of human mind, known as the unconscious, and the creativity of nature. While Dadaism focuses on the notion of automaticity or machinism, Surrealism on psychoanalytic operations of the unconscious, and the natural sciences on the marvel of nature itself, Ernst’s art orchestrates an intrinsic communication between all these realms. The main aim of this essay is to conclude from this that he is the genuine artist of the exteriority of the unconscious desire. In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari examine the notions of machinic unconscious, desiring machines, desiring production and war machines. In the following, I endeavor to trace these concepts throughout Ernst’s body of work and illustrate how his artistic endeavors aptly embody the themes pursued by Deleuze and Guattari in their collaboration.
In Ernst’s work, the unconscious is rendered petrified and stratified, yet this petrified unconscious leads to a de-objectification, clearing a space for the idea of natural deep history. In this way, Ernst makes everything a fossil. However, it is a living fossil that unravels itself throughout natural history. He utilizes the artistic technics in such a way that the consciousness of the artist becomes passive to the inventiveness of the unconscious. In Ernst’s work, from one painting to another, from sculpture to sculpture, the unconscious dons different masks repeatedly, never revealing its face. This involves a transformation of imagination, a transformation that is, in fact, an externalization. In Beyond Painting, Ernst famously states, “artistic expression is the visualization of the imagination, the transformation of the inner world into the outer world” (Ernst, 1948, pp. 8-9). Elsewhere, in a 1961 interview with the BBC, he elaborates on this idea, extending it beyond a one-directional transformation: “Seeing usually means that you open your eyes to the outside world. It is possible to see another way; you close your eyes and you look into your ‘inner world’ … If you can make a synthesis of these two important worlds you come to result in what can be considered as the synthesis of objective and subjective life”.1placeholder The inside doesn’t solely pertain to an individual’s mind; it can also encompass culture and technology, the intersubjective inside, whereas the outside denotes nature itself. This synthesis constitutes the center of Ernst’s art. His work endeavors to embrace the wild, incorporating it into the inner world and capturing the dreams and nightmares of the external nature. It can be described as a psychoanalysis of nature. But the term psychoanalysis, through Freud and Lacan, remains limited to the intersubjective realm of language, and falls short of dealing with the external nature and deep history. This is exactly what brings us to Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis and their invention of schizoanalysis. In their view, the former is structural while the latter is machinic, which is to say, at the level of the wild, the unconscious produces its objects.
Ralph Ubl, in Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and Return of Painting between the Wars, discusses the notion of “unconscious production” in Ernst’s work through references to Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, with a passing reference also to Jacques Lacan (Ubl, 6-11). He distinguishes unconscious production from the concept of “artwork as artifact”, which essentially involves conscious creation evident in graphic art, cubism, and the technique of collage. After studying Benjamin, Ubl concentrates on how Max Ernst’s work embodies a resurgence of painting and its spontaneity, contrasting with the perceived decline of painting in cubism and graphic art. Hence, Ernst, who was initially intrigued by the idea of the “death of painting” before the First World War, rediscovers the spontaneous vitality of painting after the war. Here, one can discern two perspectives on technicity or automaticity, each aligning with distinct views of the unconscious: Firstly, there is what corresponds to the empty and lifeless reproduction of forms, and secondly, what corresponds to the inventory and innate productivity of matter. In essence, we are dealing with two types of machines: artifact machines and natural machines. According to Ubl, Ernst’s work, particularly his rediscovery of painting, can be summarized as a dedication to natural machines or the autonomy of nature. The experience of war led Ernst to draw parallels between wild nature, human beings, and artifacts, viewing them all as monstrous machines.
The dichotomy between artificial and natural automaticity proposed by Ubl prompts us to reinterpret Ernst’s psychoanalytic art through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machinality of nature. Ernst was indeed influenced by Freud, yet his fascination with nature propels his art beyond the confines of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Before delving into Ernst’s art, let us briefly outline the principal features of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the unconscious, which forms the foundation of our interpretation of Ernst’s work.
Firstly, the unconscious is machinic, characterized by a fundamental automatism. This concept, as presented in Anti-Oedipus, serves as a rebuttal to Freud’s renowned analogy of the unconscious as a theater stage. Deleuze and Guattari contend that the unconscious is not like a theater that represents its objects; it is rather like a factory that produces its objects.2placeholder However, it’s crucial to pay close attention to the meaning of production, considering the Benjaminian critique of artistic production and the dichotomy between artifact machines and natural machines that has been highlighted. Deleuze and Guattari’s unconscious factory doesn’t churn out uniform and useful objects; rather, it operates as a natural factory, producing without adherence to quality control: “a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself – in myth, tragedy, dreams – has substituted for the productive unconscious” (AO, 24). This contrasts with Freud’s theatrical model of the psyche, which corresponds with his focus on myth and tragedy, particularly Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, to understand unconscious desire (See Holland 1999, 21).
Secondly, the unconscious is external; it doesn’t pertain to the unconscious mind but rather to nature itself.3placeholder The connection with nature lies in how schizophrenia becomes the principal manifestation of the operation of the unconscious. According to Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia, conceived as a model of the unconscious, extends beyond mere mental disorder to signify nature as a process of production. In their perspective, nature exhibits a schizophrenic quality, characterized by its wild and fantastical production: “What the schizophrenic experiences, both as an individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all any one specific aspect of nature, but nature as a process of production” (AO, 3).
Thirdly, the unconscious involves a particular sense of abstraction intertwined with the concept of the war machine, the political assertion that comprehending the unconscious requires a revolutionary action. This concept is primarily developed in the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, namely A Thousand Plateaus, where they contrast the war machine with the State apparatus (ATP, 388-389). While “the concern of the State is to conserve” (394), a war machine is essentially revolutionary because the war machine is “a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority” (390). Given the inherently non-peaceful nature of these movements, abstract machines can be regarded as war machines, functioning in accordance with the principles of “guerrilla logic” (19). This signifies a war not only against social domination, but also against the psychoanalytic domestication of desire – a rebellion not just for revolution, but also for revolt.4placeholder
Nature as a factory for generating non-utilizable entities, which stands in opposition to the economy of the State apparatus. Schizophrenia as a residue of nature within human bodies, inciting rebellion against societal norms – a veritable war machine. These are the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts that guide us in interpreting Max Ernst, the artist who bridged the Dadaist-Surrealist rebellion with the creative forces of nature. For Deleuze and Guattari, art does not exist to imitate nature (ATP, 5). It engages in natural production, a participation that is anything but peaceful.
Nature as Invention5placeholder
Art is not a human endeavor; it is inherent to nature itself. Max Ernst’s art strives to present nature as the fundamental source of all artistic activity. This applies to art in its diverse forms, encompassing industry and machinery. In his art, Ernst attempts to dissolve the figure of the artist into nature, presenting nature itself as the primordial artist. In Deleuze and Guattari’s term, Ernst’s art displays the “fantastic factory of Nature and Production” (AO, 49). In doing so, he establishes a connection between artistic creativity and natural creation, such a revolutionary act in art history that a German newspaper even accused him of “plagiarism” from nature (Warlick, 42). As André Breton asserts in reference to Ernst, the artist is not the master of his work, but functions as a medium (Breton, 61). This implies an identification between nature and the human psyche, claiming that our mind’s artistic creativity is a continuum of the marvelous creativity of nature itself. The artist invents along with nature. This is why Ernst is fascinated by the technique of frottage or decalcomania. In this manner, he generates textures regardless of how the artist perceives them. Only afterward can the artist intervene and behold the product of his art. He withdraws to reveal the creative force of nature as the true source of multiplicity. Similarly, Ernst observes that when the artist recognizes analogous forms across various aspects of nature, it’s because a singular force invents both the dead and the living, the sky and the earth, the microscopic and the macroscopic. It’s not merely about recognizing forms within a decalcomaniac chaos, but rather the actual emergence of forms from within that chaotic milieu. Ernst pioneered the non-analogical theory of art, echoing the thesis of the univocity of being in the history of philosophy. Imagination is the actual expression of nature. The contrast between Max Ernst and his Bonn friend, the expressionist painter, August Macke, can be likened to the distinction between Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. In this sense, Ernst is the artist depicting the univocity of nature.6placeholder The idea of univocity is apparent in the following statement of him, when describing a catalogue that he found in a print shop and then used in numerous collages:
“One rainy day in 1919, finding myself in a village on the Rhine, I was struck by the obsession which held under my gaze the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for anthropologic, microscopic, psychological, mineralogical and paleontological demonstration. I found there joined together elements of figuration so remote that the sheer absurdity of this assemblage provoked an acute intensification of my visionary faculties . . .” (Ernst 1948, 14).
This not only entails the exploration of collage as an anti-painting, anti-modernist trend but also carries a naturalistic philosophical connotation. The fusion of collage and Dadaist automaticity in Ernst’s oeuvre yields a conception of the unconscious that resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia: machinism rather than organicism, embracing a non-organic universalism. This assertion is applicable not solely to Ernst’s machines like “Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person” (1919-1920) but extends to the entirety of his artistic output and his approach to art. On this basis, I argue that, on the one hand, Ernst’s work is philosophical in nature, as it offers a universal perspective not only on artistic innovation but also on human invention, perception, psychoanalysis, history, and so forth. On the other hand, Ernst’s work embodies the experimental approach of a natural scientist, providing the inherent machinism of his art. As Turpin highlights in a comparison with the prominent Cubist painter, “Where Picasso claimed to find rather than to seek, Ernst’s oeuvre is characterized by an attitude of enquiry”, functioning “as a means of investigation” (Turpin, 3). In this manner, he embraces both philosophical unity and scientific diversity, a working-together of organs devoid of central organicity.
Jardin Peuple de Chimeres (1936) holds significant importance in the context of this notion of univocity. We recognize human or animal faces within botanical life. For Ernst, the crucial point is not that we tend to perceive familiar forms everywhere, in clouds and stars, and occasionally in flowers and gardens. This isn’t about our imagination or our subjective perspective; what’s at stake here is nature’s productive imagination. There are no analogies in nature, only multiplicities. Everywhere in nature, the presence of circles and spirals, the resemblance between suns and eyes, follows a simple principle: the Earth and the sun share a specific relationship. Gravity, atomic and subatomic electrical forces, as well as weak and strong forces, stand as the fundamental forces of nature, shaping the emergence of all forms, both living and non-living. This shift represents a departure from the conventional anthropological theory of art, which centers on the creativity of the artist, and instead embraces an ontological theory of art that focuses on the creative natural force responsible for generating forms and information. This aligns with the fact that Ernst is not only interested in nature and its diversity, but also in technics and machines. This includes fantastical and useless machines, as seen in Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (1920), as well as explorations of animal-machine hybrids, as exemplified in the famous work Elephant Celebes (1921). To Ernst, art, as the genuine work of nature, also encompasses technique, and his Natural History (1926) includes also the history of technology.
Ernst’s work can be seen then as a comprehensive exploration of natural history in a general sense. In fact, in historical terminology, Ernst aspires to be the painter of deep history, which is what lies beyond our known history. He paints the planet, this very planet, and its evolution, devoid of any human observers. This is why his art can be regarded as a phenomenological inquiry into the things themselves. What persists in the absence of human observers, categories, and objects? How does nature invent its objects? Ernst starts with a basic line that divides the earth from the sky. This marks the inception of his art, aligning with the very beginning of nature’s artistry. Naturally, this perspective is from Earth’s vantage point. Nevertheless, it is at least an objective perspective.7placeholder Next comes the sun, the perfect circle, and then, on the earth, the chaotic wild from which dark objects strive to reach the bright perfection. This is Ernst’s simple depiction of natural history. He aims to differentiate between how nature expresses itself and how human consciousness recognizes it, prioritizing the former over the latter. His paintings of this planet exist outside the confines of our measurable time scale. The works that belong to the Natural History collection (1926) particularly La Mer et la pluie, Un coup d’oeil, Le Châle à fleurs givre, and Le Tremblement de terre, indicate the deep natural history, the Urgeschichte. There are also a few of his works that indicate specific places but offer no clues about the time period, which holds significant importance. This is exemplified in works like Jerusalem (1962), which portrays a specific place but certainly not within the timeframe of known religious events. There’s a touch of humor here in the transformation of such a sacred place for human history into a geological reality. Even the painting titled The Twentieth Century (1955) can be interpreted equivocally; it alludes not only to the destructive aspect of our twentieth century but also to the concept of the twentieth century not in human terms but rather on a deep or absolute scale. Therefore, one could regard Jerusalem not as Celsius zero (in terms of the calendar) but rather as Kelvin zero (physicogeological). And the piece from 1955 is the Kelvin twentieth century. The same applies to Ernst’s flora and fauna. The emergence of what is commonly known as life, the organic life, isn’t a revolution in the planet’s evolutionary force. The eyes aren’t defined solely by their function or instrumental operation, but rather by their formation, their solar function, and their inherent natural technicity (Solar Currency-System, The Wheel of Light, The Figurative). Science has often exaggerated the distinction between the living and non-living, but art has the ability to transcend scientific dualisms and embrace ontological monism. Even the paintings of humans in the Natural History collection are dehumanized; they are completely dissolved into the faceless interplay of lights and shadows (Eve, The Only One Left to Us). Humans are transmuted into geological forces. The prominent motif here is the sun. Whether it’s an earthquake, the flora or fauna, birds in the wild, or a mother and child, everything occurs under the sun, on this planet. Long before the invention of cages, birds in the wild were trapped, living yet petrified (The Origin of the Clock, The Conjugal Diamonds). For Ernst, birds represent life itself, and their so-called petrification is merely the machinization of life, which is, its liberation from the living substance. It is not life that emerges out of soil, it is rather the primordial wild life that is petrified in its evolution, under the sun (Petrified Forest – Forêt pétrifiée 1927, The Great Forest – La grande forêt 1927, Petrified City – La ville pétrifiée 1933). With Ernst, the dead nature is animated, while the living is petrified, under the sun. The sun and the earth, everything gains its form and matter from them and their synthesis.
Ernst’s works do not represent nature, they don’t leave it intact, but rather apply a natural violence upon it. They disrupt its serene existence, employing a raw, natural violence where the inner beast clashes with the outer, and vice versa. While Francis Bacon, in Gilles Deleuze’s reading, depicts the body’s spasm, “the action of invisible forces on the body” (Deleuze 2003, 41), Ernst demonstrates well the spasm of nature, the action of invisible forces of nature on nature. This encapsulates the core essence and purpose of art, demonstrating how it is inherently intertwined with nature. The key point here is not that the bird captures a photo or image of the sun, but in the sun violently imprinting its mark upon the bird, leaving an indelible stigma (L’oiseau soleil, 1955). The sunflower is the stigmatized sun. In this context, Ernst’s artwork, especially Jardin Peuple de Chimeres, serves as both a homage to and an extension of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), most notably his masterpiece Forêt vierge au soleil couchant from 1910. While Rousseau maintains a separation between the sun, the wild, and the human within his synthesis, Ernst seamlessly amalgamates them into a colossal machine-nature. This signifies a shift from the tranquility of Rousseau towards Ernst’s portrayal of violence and intensity. The result is epitomized in Le roue du soleil (1926), where the sun transforms into a machinic component, and life on Earth manifests in its most tumultuous and obscure form. This destructive force is indistinguishable from the generative force, as Ernst portrays both the ruins and the emergence of civilization as interchangeable entities. In L‘oeil du silence (1943-44), it is impossible to determine whether they represent ancient origins of archaic civilizations which are emerging from natural chaos or the remnants of future cultures after devastating wars or natural catastrophes. Evidently, they epitomize the same essence, the same metabolic cycle.
Natural History and Deep History
Stratified Rocks, Nature’s Gift of Gneiss Lava Iceland Moss from 1920 establishes a connection between natural history, as portrayed through the layers of stratified rocks, and a disorganized or fossilized horse body, linked to manmade instruments of measurement. This suggests that the horse’s organs and surroundings are reorganized to create a new monstrous natural machine. Moreover, Ernst’s use of the overpainting embodies the stratification in both nature and artification. As Ubl mentions, “Stratified Rocks is not a collage – it’s an overpainting; and even when erroneously taken for a collage, it does not convey the impression of having been produced with freehand cuts. The rigidity of the space and the tension of the layers suggest not so much the agility of a knife or scissors, but instead directionless forces working against each other (sedimentation, glaciation, stratification)” (Ubl, 41-42).
Sedimentation, glaciation, and stratification not only characterize Ernst’s painting technique but also underscore the intrinsic relationship he establishes between natural history and artification. Appearing Deleuzo-Guattarian, these are geological concepts employed to depict living beings and technical instruments. This leads us to consider the concept of deep history, which pertains to a historical era beyond the reach of our conscious awareness. This concept would assist in emancipating Ernst’s idea of natural history from the confines of positivist natural sciences, imbuing it with the contingency and creativity inherent in artistic pursuits.
Daniel Smail and Dipesh Chakrabarti are two of the contemporary thinkers who have studied the implications of the notion of deep history. Contrary to the notion of prehistory, as utilized by Ubl for understanding Ernst’s work, the notion of deep history has more unconscious implications, implying a split between the deep past and the surface of the present. It refers to a past that affects the present only unconsciously. Smail focuses on the biological nature of this affection, while Chakrabarti emphasizes the geological aspect of deep history, two directions which are evident in Ernst’s work. This difference in focus makes Chakrabarti to criticize Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain for reducing the human geological force to a (neuro)biological framework.8placeholder In “The Brain of History, Or, the Mentality of the Anthropocene”, Catherine Malabou attempted to reconcile these two accounts of deep history by introducing a concept of the brain of history that should not be confined solely to the human or animal brain (Malabou, 49-53). Malabou’s reconciliation resonates with Ernst’s method of crafting collages from biological and geological forms, as seen in works like The Entire City (La ville entire, 1935), and emphasizes the concept of the external unconscious. In this context, natural history can be likened to a giant brain that generates diverse forms. In this manner, it encompasses both the remote past (devoid of any human traces) and the distant future (after the cessation of humanity). This concept serves as a foundation for unifying various phases of Ernst’s oeuvre, spanning from his natural history collection and fascination with biological and geological phenomena to the pervasive influence of industry and culture evident in his work. Ernst’s art encompasses everything, whether it’s the lifeless Earth, a bird in a natural cage, a human figure seen from behind, or a complex hybrid machine, all within the framework of natural deep history.
In this respect, Ernst’s work holds relevance in contemporary discussions surrounding the Anthropocene, notably through his exploration of the concept of war in a broader context – a destructive force that transcends mere human agency. Malabou’s notion of the brain of history as a notion that encompasses not only the deep past and deep future, but the entirety of history, including the period of human existence, implies a radical modification of the notion of human agency. It prompts us to perceive human life and civilization as petrified and fossilized. It surpasses human consciousness or limited biological agency and encompasses humans as geological forces. This can be accomplished by embracing Chakrabarti’s geological approach and incorporating Smail’s perspective on history as a functioning brain. Ultimately, Malabou’s primary objective was to provide a fresh perspective on history by bridging the longstanding gap that exists in our understanding of the relationship between history and nature. As Malabou asserts, “nature has a history, it is history”. Chakrabarti’s first thesis in his essay is straightforward and unambiguous. He boldly announces “the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (Chakrabarti, 201). An important conclusion of this would be the extension of the destructive forces of nature to human agency, as exemplified in the notion of Anthropocene. This sheds a light on Ernst’s depiction of war, in works such as Europe after the Rain II (1940-42), where the ruins of the war appear as geological structures. The petrified forest is indeed a ruined city. This can be precisely understood in terms of the collapse that Chakrabarti observes: the dissolution of the distinction between natural history and human history is what unites natural destructive forces (Tremblement de Terre, 1926) and human destructive forces, echoing the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion that all machines are war machines.
Machine-Monsters and War Machines
Machines have consistently held a central place in surrealism, forming a defining characteristic of the movement as seen in the works of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. The surrealist depiction of machines leads to the introduction of a concept of machine without utility and beyond human objectives, a concept that is perfectly compatible with Deleuze and Guattari’s view of machines in Anti-Oedipus, where they introduce nature as a huge industry that produces not for the sake of utilization:
“we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man” (AO, 4).
Non-utilizable machines lack teleology and hence lack organicity, as nature, operating as a giant machine, produces without purpose. Ernst shares this view of machines in his work. He created plenty of non-utilizable and non-organic machines. Nevertheless, what makes him particular among his surrealist colleagues is that he, as a prominent Dadaist, introduces the concept of war into this dynamic, proclaiming that all machines are inherently war machines, as Ernst in an interview in 1958 says “Dada was a bomb”.9placeholder In doing so, he imparts a profound political significance to the artistic movement. Similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective in A Thousand Plateaus, where the concept of a war machine implies invention and nomadic movements capable of dismantling the State apparatus and its laws, or being co-opted by the State and transformed into conventional warfare, Ernst also explores the intricate relationship between the political essence of art and the idea of war concerning both urban life and the wilderness. From this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative book projects can be viewed as Dadaist to a certain extent, reminiscent of the collective nature of Dada book projects, or the collaborative creations of Eluard and Ernst (Parish, 96).
Farewell My Beautiful Land of Marie Laurencin (1919) is one of Ernst’s first war machines. Similar to other pieces from the same period, like Portable Handbook or The Canalization of Refrigerated Gas, Ernst endeavors to craft complex machines deliberately disorganized and dismantled, rendering any practical utilization impossible. In this sense, they embody true war machines; rather than functioning correctly to achieve their aim of destroying external objects, they self-destruct through their malfunction. Let us refer to a complex non-utilizable machine that destructs itself incessantly as monstrous. These machine-monsters evolve throughout Ernst’s work in many facets. In them, we find a conversation between the destructive nature of war, in which Ernst had a traumatic involvement, and the technological development due to these war-related self-destructive (anti-)goals. This poses a paradox for Ernst that leads him to his general view about humanity and nature.
As a prominent figure in Dadaism, Ernst discerns a fundamental difference between revolt and revolution: “revolt and revolution are not the same thing. But if you have this strong feeling of the need of revolt, need of freedom, and you are born into a period where there are so many events that invite you to get revolted . . . it is absolutely natural that the work you could use is a revolutionary work”.10placeholder By employing the concept of synthesis between subjective and objective lives, revolt represents the subjective counterpart that objectifies itself into revolution. Revolt emerges from within, often within a group, while revolution occurs as an event that is entirely unforeseeable and external. Revolt not only characterizes the spirit of 20th-century French art but also embodies the subjective essence of French political thought – the very core of revolution. The so-called synthesis is, in fact, the fusion of the peculiar sensations within us and the absolute externality that abruptly occurs to us. Ernst, as the artist of this synthesis, depicts the revolt of things, of birds, woods, and cities, capturing the objective revolt as the essence of social revolution. He presents this political concept of revolt in juxtaposition with the technical nature of World War I, merging elements of surrealist painting and collage. He is obsessed to the figure of the cage and of the bird, symbolizing technics and life, as even in forest are the birds in most of the cases in the cage, as if the woods play the role of the cage. This can be interpreted to suggest that the machinization of life, the deployment of war machines, commenced long before the advent of human culture, long before the Celsius 20th century.
This obsession is evident not only in the subjects he painted but also in his shift from the technique of frottage to grattage, thus bridging the creative power of nature with its destructive force. Intriguingly, his technical machines are also war machines. And Ernst’s war machines exhibit a deep intertwining of both technical and biological elements. A striking illustration of this concept is Elephant Celebes (1921), which portrays an animal-machine, a true monstrous hybrid of an elephant and a war machine, as well as a celibate machine, a self-sexual non-oedipal desiring machine (referring to Duchamp’s “autoeroticism”, and the notion of “auto-eroticism” in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: Deleuze 2018, pp. 202-203). It also evokes submarine warfare, suggested by the presence of two fishes in the sky and the ominous disturbance on the right side above. And we know that submarine warfare is “a quintessential example of a war-machine” in A Thousand Plateaus (Holland 2013, 43). This synthesis between technics and war, invention and destruction, reflects the political climate of Ernst’s era: the destructive war in Germany and the constructive revolts in France. Ernst defines this synthesis not only as the core of art and a fundamental aspect of nature but also as the central focus of any exploration into the concept of freedom in the context of order and disorder. He reveals the inherent destructive forces within any constructive movement, and vice versa. In this context, the central question posed by Ernst’s art is: what kind of cage is it, where there is a bird? What kind of machine is it, where there is life?
Ernst’s fascination with collage signifies his ontological approach, bringing diverse domains into dialogue and connection. This encompasses not only the synthesis of subjective and objective lives but also the fusion of various realms within natural sciences, art, poetry, physics, molecular biology and bio-mechanics. However, in line with the essence of art and the nature of existence itself, these syntheses always manifest as something monstrous. Unlike philosophy, art doesn’t require synthesizing the heterogeneous into a homogeneous sphere. Compared to conceptual philosophy, art and literature are closer to the essence of existence, unless philosophy embraces the monstrous nature of existence. Philosophy must acknowledge that any notion of peaceful synthesis is merely illusory. In this context, there is no peaceful union in Ernst’s art; the war keeps going even in Europe after the rain (L’Europe après la pluie, 1940-42). Collage, in this regard, signifies the synthetic aspect of Ernst’s work, emphasizing a recurring tendency in his creations and within the artistic tradition to which he belongs. This tendency involves pushing art to its limits, transcending conventional artistic boundaries, erasing categorical distinctions between art, philosophy, politics, and sciences. Ernst merges all these realms within the act of creation, encompassing the human, animal, and botanic domains. In essence, Ernst unites art with political ontology.
In this context, we can endeavor to grasp Ernst’s monstrous machines. In Nature’s Gift of Gneiss Lava Iceland Moss (1920), we witness the coexistence of bio-machines and techno-machines, not merely juxtaposed but instead converging and giving rise to a novel category of machines: bio-technical. Veins and arteries entwine with pulleys and strings, crafting a monstrous collage. Another instance illustrating this concept is the painting with the whimsical title The Gramineous Bicycle Garnished with Bells the Dappled Fire Damps and the Echinoderms Bending the Spine to Look for Caresses (La Biciclette graminée garnie de grelots les grisous grivelés et les échinodermes courbants l’échine pour quêter des caresses; 1923). Here, microscopic machinery such as sprockets or pinwheels infiltrates cellular structures like plant cells or bacteria. Ernst merges organic cells and machinic structures to fashion astonishing microbiomachines. They embody molecular machines, revealing the productive and creative industrialization occurring at the microscopic level of nature. Ernst, already cognizant of nature’s inventive power, uncovers the molecular dimension of nature as its genuine machinality. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that these entities are not just technical machines but also war machines, underscoring the fact that every organism in nature, from bacteria to large animals, invents weapons as part of its natural history. Hence, at the core of his comprehension, Ernst establishes a connection between the concepts of natural history and war. He unveils the fundamental war at the heart of nature and links this war to the broad concept of technicity within nature. In his perspective, molecules are indeed war machines. Organisms’ metabolic functions should be interpreted as defense mechanisms, propelling them to arm themselves through the invention of technical warfare.
This fascination reaches its culmination in his later works, titled Microbes, which are miniature landscapes that can easily fit in one’s pocket. Are they also war machines? Or perhaps apparatuses of espionage? Evidently, in these works, he displays an interest in shifting between scales and domains, seamlessly transitioning from expansive landscapes to the microscopic world. Conversely, Maximiliana is the title of a collection of drawings that exemplify Ernst’s exploration of large-scale mega-machines, planetary machinery, and at the extreme, cosmic machines. He aptly embodies a concept present in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, where they assert that the earth itself can be seen as a “giant molecule” (ATP, 45). This implies a similar mechanism to what is evident in Ernst’s transitions between flora, fauna, human, and mineral lives, as well as between machines and organisms. As an intriguing example, Ernst’s depictions of flora are non-arborescent, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, they are rhizomatic. Ernst never draws trees, he always paints the forest. He says, “when I make something, it almost always becomes a forest”. In Ernst’s perspective, the forest transcends being a mere collection of trees (“you can’t see the forest for the trees”). In his work, the collective essence of the forest takes precedence over the individuality of a single tree. Furthermore, he portrays the forest as an intermediate realm, blurring the boundaries between the living and the dead. This concept extends to his depiction of the city as a forest, where buildings and streets diverge from arborescent forms (Forêt et colombe, 1927). The forest and the city, transcending the dichotomy between the living and the dead, are not organisms; forming striated spaces, they are machines, opposed to the sea as a smooth space (Holland 2013, 43). For both Ernst and Deleuze and Guattari, striation of a smooth space never ends up in an organism. This statement by Deleuze and Guattari encapsulates the essence of Ernst’s work: “The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else – with the wind, an animal, human being” (ATP, 12). This can be extended to the artistic deconstruction of everything in diverse fields: even when humans possess reason, art emerges to rescue them from dying of the truth (Nietzsche 1968, §822, p. 435).
Max Ernst’s Anti-Oedipus
Automatism is a fundamental aspect of Dadaism, wherein the writing-machine endeavors to break free from the constraints of the human psyche, asserting its independence. By employing the technique of decalcomania, pioneered by Óscar Domínguez, Ernst propelled Dadaism into the domain of natural automatism, infusing it with the machinic essence of nature. The automation of writing no longer relies solely on collages of newspaper pieces; it now expands to encompass the arche-writing of nature – a liberating interplay of textures, colors, and forces.
However, with Ernst, we witness a dialectic between Dadaism and Surrealism. In Surrealism, this automatism or machinism becomes inherent in the psyche itself. Now, the psyche, or the brain, functions as an autonomous machine, as a plastic entity that both forms and adopts forms (Malabou 2008, 5). But how can art approach the full autonomy of psyche? As Warlick in Max Ernst and Alchemy observes, Ernst, since his youth, “was amazed by paintings and bread-dough sculptures created by the [psychiatric] patients. He found these works strangely alive and disturbing, and he intended to write a book about the art of the mentally ill” (Warlick, 35). Similarly, Turpin mentions that “As a student of psychology Ernst had visited a local mental hospital, where paintings produced by the inmates had caught his imagination” (Turpin, 4). But none of these commentators mention the schizophrenic origins of Ernst’s art. In a manner similar to Deleuze and Guattari who build their Anti-Oedipus, among other things, on the artistic work of the psychotic Adolf Wölfli, Ernst finds psychiatry as an instrument to open up the unconscious mind to the exterior.
The idea of the exteriority of the unconscious is evident in Oedipus Rex from 1922. The nut, or the brain, is going to be opened outside, where the male and female birds are trapped. Ubl’s formula that “nature is the subject’s unconscious” (Ubl, 79), can be reversed, asserting that “the unconscious is nature’s subjectivity”. Therefore, the schizoanalysis of nature suggests a journey back from Surrealism to an absolutization of Dadaism, transitioning from the concept of the plastic brain to the idea of nature as a Giant Brain. Thus, Ernst applies the Dadaist machinism to all of nature, portraying it as a large writing-machine, a brain that generates dreams in an Endless Night (1940), the fantasies of nature as exemplified in Jardin peuplé de chimères (1936). The idea of the schizoanalysis of nature implies that the unconscious is fully externalized and materialized, while politically opposing the social structure of western culture. Ernst transforms Oedipus into a bronze sculpture, an animal figure, or even multiples of them – petrified Oedipus, signifying a metastable equilibrium between two archetypal figures: mommy and daddy. These dual aspects are embodied in Oedipus I and Oedipus II (1934), translating the machinic unconscious into the realm of the societal unconscious. Ernst’s performance here, as expected, is ironic, indicating the petrification of Oedipus’ journey at its very departure point. These dual figures of Oedipus are comparable with Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (1919-1920), a writing-machine (organs becoming letters) and oedipal machine (organs becoming genitals), revealing the synthetic and heterogeneous nature of both the machine and the unconscious. Ernst elevates the psychoanalytic dimension of surrealism to a non-human, natural, ontological plane, thereby de-oedipalizing the machinic unconscious. He relocates the psychoanalytic dimension of surrealism into the realm of nature, thus initiating an authentic schizoanalysis of nature. This suggests that the de-oedipalization of surrealism involves its transition toward the realm of molecular machinic nature. In this context, Ernst reconstructs the figures of Oedipus, diverting them from their Freudian psychoanalytic construction and, instead, aligning them with the archaic, primitive roots where social connections and lineages closely mirror natural molecular bonds. Therefore, symbolization in his work transcends the dichotomy of mind and nature, evolving into an embodiment of nature itself. In this context, objects symbolize each other in a material manner, where the bird’s head symbolizes the sun and the cage symbolizes the jungle. This is the essence of how mythologies function. Through Ernst’s work, surrealism retreats from Freudian psychoanalysis and reverts to its mythic origins, emancipating the Oedipus Complex from Freudianism and thereby laying the foundation for a schizoanalysis of nature.
Works Cited
Brassier, Ray. “Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines: Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus”. In: A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edited by Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey A. Bell and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Breton, André. The Lost Steps. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2008.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses”. Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009).
Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Translated by Constantin Boundas, Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Continuum, 2003.
Ernst, Max, Beyond Painting: And Other Writings by the Artist and his Friends, Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc. 1948.
Ernst, Max. Écritures. Gallimard, 1970.
Holland, Eugene. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. Routledge, 1999.
Holland, Eugene. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. Fordham University Press, 2008.
Malabou, Catherine. 2017. “The Brain of History, Or, the Mentality of the Anthropocene”. South Atlantic Quarterly 1, 116: 39–53.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
Parish, Nina. ‘“Pour faire un livre dadaïste”: Dada Experimentation with Book Form’, in Dada and Beyond, Volume I: Dada Discourses. Ed. Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson. Rodopi, 2011.
Turpin, Ian. Max Ernst. Phaidon Press Limited, 1979.
Warlick, M. E. Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
Ubl, Ralph. Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting between the Wars. Translated by Elisabeth Tucker. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
This stance also opposes Lacan’s structural interpretation of the unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari instead offer a dynamic and pragmatic understanding of the unconscious, one that is constantly engaged in action. Ian Buchanan, in his commentary on Anti-Oedipus, notes this structural inclination in Freud himself, particularly evident in his early works such as Interpretation of Dreams (see Buchanan, 32).
Ray Brassier in his chapter “Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines: Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus” in A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy recognizes this aspect by making a link between “the auto-construction of the real” and “the machinic unconscious” (Brassier, 267).
Commentators often seek Ernst’s rebellious attitude in his relationship with his father. For instance, Ian Turpin writes, “Looming large in his memory was the figure of his father who, both as a deeply religious man responsible for Ernst’s strict Catholic upbringing, and as a Sunday painter, provided a model against which he was to rebel” (Turpin, 3).
This title refers to “Max Ernst und Die Natur als Erfindung” [Max Ernst and Nature as Invention], an exhibition of Ernst’s works in Kunst Museum Bonn from 12 October 2022 to January 2023, which centers his Histoire naturelle for understanding the totality of his work.
Turpin explains the contrast between Ernst and Macke in terms of Dada’s attack on western culture, avant-guard versus bourgeoisie (Turpin, 4).
In contrast to Hegel and the longstanding tradition of Platonism in philosophy, Ernst perceives objectivity not through universality but rather by approaching the perspective of non-categorical objects. In this regard, Ernst’s conception of objectivity aligns more closely with Nietzsche’s perspectivism.
“But it is the history of human biology and not any recent theses about the newly acquired geological agency of humans that concerns Smail” (Chakrabarti, 206).
“Dada était une bombe” (Ernst 1970, 411).
Max Ernst, Interview 1, from Surrealism Reviewed. Link.