The Chicago Surrealist Franklin Rosemont tapped the subversive energy of popular culture

~ Ryan Bunnell ~

Since its inception, Surrealism has been attractive to anarchists. Its methods and principles speak to us. In surrealism, many anarchists recognise our own hatred of boredom, disdain for the tyranny of positivist rationalism, and our desire to merge art and everyday life, work and play, reason and madness, our dreams with reality. Though surrealism was never an explicitly anarchist movement – a fact made obvious by the alliances of some of its leaders, albeit short-lived and contentious, with various authoritarian communist organisations – its spirit of radical imagination has made it a natural ally. It’s no surprise, then, that the Chicago Surrealist Group, founded in 1966, was born from the efforts of anarchists active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka the Wobblies).

The group’s co-founder, Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009), in what seems to be a challenge he oriented his life around, took André Breton at his word regarding the relationship between art and liberation. In this collection, he engages heavily in the surrealist tradition of self-electing predecessors and fellow travellers – unwitting surrealists throughout history as well as in his own time. Rosemont is impressively well read, and he gives the surrealist treatment, in ways I found engaging and fascinating, to an incredibly broad range of works. For Rosemont, the primary locus of art’s liberatory potential was not to be discovered in the vaunted literary canon, some bourgeois museum, or university lecture hall, but in comic strips, dime-store novels, record stores, television shows, and the silver screen. In other words: popular art – which for him meant proletarian art.

When Rosemont talks about popular art, he very much does not mean Pop Art, which he calls a misunderstanding and mistranslation of surrealist ideas. From the introduction: “Pop, as well as these other art trends subscribed to a reactionary ‘High Culture’ elitism, as opposed to surrealism’s durational homage to popular culture against the grain of dominant culture itself”. It’s this willingness to distinguish between popular culture and dominant culture that sustains Rosemont’s belief in the subversive and revolutionary potential of not just overtly radical art like Wobbly cartoons, but of mainstream, mass-produced consumer media like television, music, and Hollywood movies. This enthusiastic optimism is what I found most charming and compelling about his work. Rosemont’s synthesis of Old Left and New Left ideas gave him a means of engaging with mass media in a way far less bleak than his contemporaries in the Situationist International.

The Chicago group collaborated with the Situationist International on publishing projects, and Rosemont was well aware of, and interested in, their notions of détournement (the appropriation and repurposing of images from dominant culture turned against it). But the SI’s inverse notion of récupération (the idea that once something is incorporated into the Spectacle, it becomes complicit in its nefarious project of commodification, fetishisation, and the reification of power structures, or at least becomes neutralized and rendered inert) was clearly not a view Rosemont shared. In fact, it appears he believed this process could actually work against the interests of the dominant power structure.

In the introduction, Abigail Susik says that for Rosemont the premise of détournement, the “rerouting of mass culture by everyday individuals”, implied the inevitability of “…the infiltration of mainstream culture by subversive currents”. In the essay A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired Wild-Eyed Fiend: The Image of the Anarchist in Popular Culture, Rosemont offers a fascinating illustration of this process. Through an exhaustive survey of the appearances of this stereotype in various media from the late 19th through the early/mid 20th century, he shows how it morphed from a reviled figure used as a foil to valorise the state, into a quasi-heroic one, employed by humorists to mock police and other authority figures—an embodiment of “humor in the service of revolution!”

More so than this figure, however, Rosemont saw the greatest possible manifestation of humor in the service of revolution in none other than Bugs Bunny. And it is presumably through this same cultural mechanism of infiltration that a monkey wrench like Bugs Bunny found itself tossed into the gears of capital.

Rosemont declares that for him, a single Bugs Bunny comic book (The Magic Sneeze) will always be “worth more – in terms of freedom and human dignity – than all the novels of Proust, Sartre, Faulkner, Hemingway”. To understand the degree to which he valorises this outlaw trickster who is “categorically opposed to wage slavery in all its forms”, one must understand Rosemont’s conception of Bugs’ nemesis, Elmer Fudd. Fudd is the “perfect characterization of a specifically modern type: the petty bureaucrat, the authoritarian mediocrity, nephew or grandson of Pa Ubu. If the Ubus (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin) dominated the period between the two wars, for the last thirty years it has been the Fudds who have directed our misery”. (He even ridicules disgraced former surrealist-turned-fascist Salvador Dalí for having once been an anti-Fudd before becoming the worst kind of Fudd.) And as everyone familiar with the cartoons knows, Bugs’ favourite activities revolve around robbing and humiliating Fudd. Rosemont boldly claims: “The very appearance on the stage of history of a character such as Bugs Bunny is proof that someday the Fudds will be vanquished, that someday all the carrots of the world will be ours”.

A cynical reader could dismiss such a claim as naïveté or rhetorical excess—and I’m often a cynical reader. How could some commercial artefact of mass culture, whose main purpose is getting kids to watch advertisements, be in service of anything but the status quo? However, if I allow for a version of my own personal history in which, long before I encountered Emma Goldman or Mikhail Bakunin, it was actually Bart Simpson who made me an anarchist, I can sympathise with and thoroughly enjoy this idea – even find it inspirational.

For Rosemont, surrealism represented a means of rejecting the world as it was given: a world shaped by institutions in the service of capital, where life is reduced to production and consumption, and imagination is dominated by rationalism. Throughout the collection, he explores a diverse array of art in which he finds articulations of this same impulse: Gothic literature, IWW art, blues music, rock ‘n’ roll, 19th-century utopian sci-fi, even the writings of early Puritans in colonial America. In much of this work—where I might have seen something compelling, repellent, or simply entertaining—Rosemont saw subversive energy and revolutionary potential.

Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture by Franklin Rosemont, edited by Paul Buhle and Abigail Susik. PM Press, 2025, 348pp.