Living as we Dream: Automatism and Automation from Surrealism to Stiegler

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-383
Author(s):  
Madeleine Chalmers
Keyword(s):  
Andre Breton ◽  
Language Understanding ◽  
French Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
André Breton ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Bernard Stiegler

In his 2011 French Studies article ‘Leroi-Gourhan and the Limits of the Human’, Chris Johnson traced André Leroi-Gourhan's ethnography of the imbrication of the biological, cultural, and technological in Le Geste et la parole (1964). Johnson placed special emphasis on how Leroi-Gourhan's narrative culminates in a speculative vision of a homo post-sapiens: a limit-experience in which our species evolves beyond the human as we understand it in an increasingly automated world. This article takes up the conceptual genealogy surrounding Leroi-Gourhan to focus on the interaction between his work and that of his unruly predecessor André Breton, and heir, Bernard Stiegler. Taking as its starting point the linguistic contagion of automatism and automation, it will argue that Stiegler's contemporary reflections on our ‘automatic society’ are rooted in a Bretonian surrealist preoccupation with the automatic – not as a category of alienation, but as a wellspring of creativity, dreams, and subjectivity unfurling in language. Understanding how contemporary French technocritical thought has filtered down from avant-garde artistic movements through anthropology in an unruly technocritical genealogy offers an opportunity to reclaim the notion of the automatic, and to reconfigure our expectations and plans for our technological future.

scholarly journals As forças saturninas nas Fotomontagens do poeta Jorge de Lima / The Saturnine Forces in the Photomontages of Jorge de Lima

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Bárbara Bergamaschi Novaes
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Andre Breton ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
André Breton ◽  
Modern Project ◽  
Cartesian Cogito ◽  
Selective Analysis

Resumo: A partir de uma análise seletiva de oito fotomontagens do livro “Pintura em pânico” (1943) de Jorge de Lima traçamos correspondências entre as imagens do poeta alagoano, a iconografia barroca e alegórica estudada por Walter Benjamin, e as tópicas privilegiadas pelos artistas surrealistas europeus. Veremos como a praxis e os procedimentos criativos de Lima bebem das fontes dos artistas da vanguarda francesa do início do século XX, ecoando as investigações empreendidas pelo movimento encabeçado por André Breton e Georges Bataille – que, por sua vez, se configurou, nas palavras do crítico Ronaldo Brito, como: “uma tentativa heróica de atacar o cogito cartesiano” e “denunciar a falência do projeto moderno”. Para tal nos apoiaremos nas preposições, escritos e obras destes escritores supracitados, bem como nas trocas epistolares entre os poetas, Murilo Mendes e Jorge de Lima, bem como a relação de ambos com o pintor Ismael Nery.Palavras chave: Surrealismo no Brasil; artes visuais; vanguardas modernas; fotografia.Abstract: From a selective analysis approach of eight photomontages of Jorge de Lima’s book “Pintura em Pânico” (1943), we point to several correspondences between the photo-collage images of the Alagoan poet, and the baroque and allegorical iconography studied by Walter Benjamin, as well as the themes favored by surrealist’s french artists. We will regard how Lima’s creative praxis and procedures had nourished from the early-20th-century French avant-garde surrealist artists, echoing the investigations undertaken by the movement headed by André Breton and Georges Bataille – described by art critic Ronaldo Ronaldo Brito as: “a heroic attempt to attack the Cartesian Cogito” and “denounce the bankruptcy of the modern project”. For such can we will base our analysis on the writings and works of Surrealism movement members, as well as in the epistolary exchanges between poet Murilo Mendes, Jorge de Lima and the painter Ismael Nery.Keywords: Surrealism in Brazil; visual arts; modern avant-garde; photography.

scholarly journals Representing Bodies. Victor Brauner’s Hybrids, Fragments and Mechanisms

Nordlit ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 229
Author(s):  
Irina Cărăbaş
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Andre Breton ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
André Breton ◽  
French Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The Romanian avant-garde looked for inspiration in two principal places where artists from all-over Europe gathered, confronted and discussed their ideas of a new art. While Berlin nourished the constructivist orientation of the Romanian avantgarde, Paris stimulated its interest in surrealism. Although Berlin was by far more significant as a stimulus for the synthesis of all arts and all modern movements toward which the Romanian avant-garde strove, Paris had the advantage of anemotional attachment. The French culture had been set long ago as a model for the entire Romanian modern culture and institutions. Consequently it is not surprising that poets and artists, including Victor Brauner, chosed to live and work in Paris in order to feel closer to what was considered to be the origin.Victor Brauner is discussed both in the context of the Romanian avant-garde and in the history of the French surrealism, but one cannot detect any tension between center and periphery. One motivation can be found in the myth he creates for himself. Meanwhile it is obvious that he wanted to identify himself with the French surrealism. Once settled in France he paid great attention to the theories and to the artists André Breton promoted.I will discuss the myth of the artist as well as the threads which connect Brauner to other artistic strategies bringing forth the body problem. Almost always his paintings and drawings display the ineluctable presence of a metamorphic body within no narrative construction. This preoccupation informed every stage of his career as he dedicated it the greatest energies of his artistic inventiveness. Before going into the subject, one needs to frame Brauner in a larger picture.

‘fountains frozen o'er’: Samuel Beckett's Atavistic Translations

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-162
Author(s):  
Eva Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Andre Breton ◽  
Arrested Development ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
André Breton ◽  
Made In

Increasing importance has been placed on Samuel Beckett's work as a translator in recent years. Here I look at his translation of the French surrealists into English in the Surrealist Issue of the avant-garde journal This Quarter, and develop the argument made in Pascale Sardin and Karine Germoni's excellent 2011 study, ‘Scarcely Disfigured: Beckett's Surrealist Translations’, from which I take many cues. In what follows, I propose a theory of Beckett's translation: that literary atavism, models of arrested development and recursive strategies were central to the Irish writer's work, and that he developed these in his translations, in the ways that he preserved the past in his surreal translations, learning to become what André Breton called ‘the silent receptacle of many echoes’.

scholarly journals Textoplasma: la imagen como fantasma de la escritura en la obra de Mario Bellatin

2017 ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Mariano García
Keyword(s):  
Andre Breton ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
André Breton ◽  
Mario Bellatin

La relación que las imágenes establecen con la escritura en varias novelas de Mario Bellatin (Jacobo el mutante, Perros héroes, Biografía ilustrada de Mishima, Los fantasmas del masajista, entre otras) va algo más allá de la función que cumplían en una novela como Nadja de André Breton o los títulos de W. G. Sebald que en cierto modo volvieron a instalar el diálogo entre imagen y palabra en la literatura reciente. En el caso de Bellatin, más allá de su propia autofiguración performativa y de las complejas operaciones relativas al libro como soporte, las imágenes oscurecen y problematizan el texto que se supone ilustran ofreciéndose como un suplemento que enfatiza las cualidades perturbadoras o fantasmáticas de la narración, sin perder su intención irónica. A la luz de las teorías de Hans Belting, Reinaldo Laddaga o W. T. Mitchell, este trabajo pretende estudiar la relación entre palabra e imagen en este autor, cuya obra parece postular un modo muy contemporáneo de las prácticas vanguardistas. The relation of image and writing in many of Mario Bellatin’s novels (Jacobo el mutante, Perros héroes, Biografía ilustrada de Mishima, Los fantasmas del masajista, among others) goes further than the role they had in a novel such as André Breton’s Nadja or in W. G. Sebald’s production, which we can consider a renovated example of the dialogue between word and image. In Mario Bellatin, beyond his performative autofiguration and the complex operations around the book as medium, images darken and make problematic the text they supposedly illustrate offering themselves as a supplement that emphasizes the disquieting or phantasmatic qualities of narration, without losing their ironic intention. According to the theory of Hans Belting, Reinaldo Laddaga and W. T. Mitchell, this work pretends to study the relation between word and image in Bellatin, whose work seems to postulate in a very contemporary way the avant-garde praxis.

scholarly journals Dream-work: Surrealism and Revolutionary Subjectivity in André Breton and Georges Bataille

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rory Dufficy
Keyword(s):  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Dream Work ◽  
Andre Breton ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
André Breton

This paper explores a polemic between André Breton and Georges Bataille around the question of the politics of the avant-garde. Focussing on texts composed in the late 1920s, principally Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism and Bataille’s ‘The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist’, this paper argues that in examining this debate around matter and material, it is possible to extract two distinct conceptions of the places of subjectivity and revolution in avant-garde aesthetics. While Breton wishes to separately define the idealist aesthetic projects of Surrealism and the materialist project for revolution, Bataille argues that a commitment to that materialist project requires a similarly materialist aesthetics.

Slapstick Modernism: Charley Bowers and Industrial Modernity

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Mass Production ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Andre Breton ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
André Breton ◽  
Industrial Modernity ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Alternative Understanding

William Solomon (SUNY-Buffalo) asks us how vernacular and avant-garde comic practice might function as twinned responses to standardised mass-production and the rationalisation of the workplace. Returning us to the recently rediscovered comic films of Charley Bowers - a pioneer of animated silent film and a proto-surrealist bricoleur lionised by André Breton, Solomon demonstrates how Bowers' absurd machinic assemblages “generate laughter at the expense of the ethos of productive rationalism, in the process of opening up an alternative understanding of machinery as the locus of exuberantly unsettling bursts of joy”.

scholarly journals La couleur rouge et sa valeur pathétique dans l’expressionnisme abstrait et le surréalisme tardif

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Christophe Ippolito
Keyword(s):  
Andre Breton ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
André Breton ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Painting And Literature

This essay analyses the dialogue between automatism and late surrealism on the color red, with a focus on the intensity shared by painting and literature. The starting point is a collective prose poem by André Breton, Élisa Breton, and Benjamin Péret. This poem, « Riopelle », written for an exhibition of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s automatist paintings in 1949, is included in Breton’s <em>Le</em> <em>Surréalisme et la peinture</em>.<p><br /><em></em></p>

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