FOLLOWING MATERIALITY179The second took place in 1936, at the Charles Ratton Gallery. The gal-
lery specialized in primitive art—something that might have facilitated
the incorporation of the new pseudoethnographic aesthetics of the sur-
realists. Among the works were pieces by Duchamp, Picasso, Ballmer,
Magritte, and Dali.
But of the many challenges posed by surrealist objects, a prominent
one surely lay in the recurring positioning of the object as a crux where
discourses on the body are harnessed in commoditized, mass-produced
economies.^52 The body politics at play in the surrealist object thus pro-
pose a defining distinction between the productive opportunities of two
conceptions of fetishism: the psychoanalytical and the socioeconomic.^53
The Marxist notion of commodity fetishism that underlies these objects
enables a heightened fluidity of new discourses to emerge in a reconsid-
eration of the charge of surrealist objects.^54 In the surrealist object, com-
modity fetishism is the preponderant theoretical tool that enables us to
outline a genealogy grounded in forms and materials through the ac-
knowledgment of capitalist commodity society as the immanent base of
art production.^55 It is through the consideration of commodity fetishism
in relation to the surrealist object that the social and economic registers
involved in the conception of a truly revolutionary art-value in surreal-
ism can be grasped.^56
Among others, Walter Benjamin was particularly receptive to the
agency of material objects and their vibrancy in surrealist contexts. In
the “Convolute K” section of The Arcades Project, Benjamin describes
capitalism as “a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-sleep
came over Europe.”^57 And according to him, the surrealist interest in
commodities and their materialities represents an awakening from this
very sleep. This theory is exemplified by the concept of traumkollektiv, or
dream-collective, a type of collective unconscious that unlike Jung’s
version bears specific connotations to distinct historical milieus. The
collective unconscious is therefore defined by the utopian desires of the
nineteenth century—its promises of excessive material wealth along
with the utopianist ambition to de-class society. This collective uncon-
scious, Benjamin argues, produces “wish images” that inscribe the ves-
tiges of collective desires in capitalist registers. It is fair to propose that
surrealist objects indeed constitute “wish images” capable of inscribing
social and economic relations that have fallen into an unconscious