Surrealists, who aspire to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have
often been under the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should
be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be
compatible with the twentieth century’s most seductive form of moralism. Marx
reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world rather than trying
to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist
sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and
instead propose that we collect it.
