Publicly outspoken on political issues, and actively
advocating a radicalization in the thought process of the people, surrealists
like the poet Andre Breton more readily identified Surrealism as a cultural
revolution, rather than as an artistic movement. In the first Surrealist
manifesto, written in 1924, he defined Surrealism as,

 "Psychic
automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by
means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of
thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by
reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."

thus somewhat cruelly severing any ties between the surrealist
movement and  aesthetic art. Instead,
Andre Breton explicitly aligned this ideology with expression through submission
to the impulses of the unconscious, in a way that avoided any association or
submission to predominantly accepted logic.  Of course,
the Surrealist movement, its development, and its progress, were primarily
portrayed, and best observed in the realm of the arts, spanning the genres of
Literature, music, and the visual arts, but Andre Breton, the leader of the
close-knit circle of surrealists in the post-World War I global society, as
well as those who gravitated towards him, advocated that surrealism should be
incorporated into every other facet of day to day living, with the idea that
rather than suppress the unconscious by means of a controlling, hindering
rationality, each man should give more precedence to  this oft undervalued component of the human
identity.