Aesthetic Surrealism?

I am struggling to understand how surrealism is an aesthetic movement. In looking at Breton's manifestos, I see him advocating awareness, a heightened awareness that flies above and beyond the immediate reality. He may not be writing theories, but he is suggesting a practice that is not so much aesthetic as, if not philosophical (though his encyclopedia definition in the manifesto of 1924 considers it such), psycho-developmental–I hesitate here to say psycho-analytical or psychological.

Automatic writing is not an aesthetic practice but rather a means of glimpsing a self that is truer than the social constructs permit one to see. By revealing the unconscious attitude, the 'real' person is made present, even if that 'reality' appears as a sur-reality. In addition, despite Breton's writings on art, and the general public memory now preferring surrealist art over the writings, Breton does not address the arts. That he addresses writing seems even, if I may, entirely selfish and only in response to his own interest in writing. He may mention writing but he does not mention painting, photography, film, collage, theatre, dance or any other conceivable art. Had he been interested in gardening, one can imagine he would have founded a method of spontaneous gardening. I am facetious here but only to make the point that I struggle to eliminate in my own mind: the writing manner he presents is not because he has an artistic revolution that he wishes to establish, but rather that it is the way he can discuss the personal revolution he is advocating.

In this, I can not help but see him politically active on behalf of the individual. That there can not be a political party is precisely because the cause is each one's. Later in 1934 when he writes Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme, he even says that surrealism is a response to the effects of war, the exhaustion of defeat coming out of war-whether the war is won or not. Liberty in the 1924 manifesto, a lack on interest in art or anti art, philosophy or anti-philosophy in the 1929 manifesto, both suggest that the quest is not aesthetic but personal, where the personal then becomes political.

Hence his manifesto with Trotsky, Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant, on how to maintain the independence of artists and thinkers. Breton seems to have classed anyone interested in the self as an artist, with the assumption that the workers have neither the time nor the disposition. That Breton, and the surrealism he promotes, is in conflict with communism is clear, but I don't understand it as conflict between aesthetics and politics, so much as between the individual and the group. (To the degree that as the years go by, in his writing on art, Breton produces aesthetic doctrines, they seem mostly to be responding to abstract expressionism and why surrealism must have identifiable forms placed in chance encounters.)

I am working on this and suspect to say more....