66

Photography and surrealism

67

The automatic image

Rhetoric of the UnconsciousAndré Breton’s own theorization of the automatic

image was elaborated in the Manifesto of Surrealism. First, he said, the surreal image must come without volition ‘spontaneously, despotically’.40 Second, the ‘value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors’.4

In Breton’s electrical metaphor he is looking for something else than a poetic ‘inspired’ signication. He seems to be grasping for a way to say that the image should be triggered, ‘sparked’, by something outside conventional discourse and beyond the parameters of the conscious mind, as an image that has ‘seized nothing consciously’:42

We are therefore obliged to admit that the two terms of the image are not deduced one from the other by the mind for the specic purpose of producing the spark, that they are the simultaneous products of the activity I call surrealist, reason’s role being limited to taking notes of, and appreciating, the luminous phenomenon.43

The psychical image is to be produced without inten-tion, it must come from ‘somewhere else’ while the conscious part of the subject’s mind passively watches its eruption as a spectacle. If this ‘spark’ is produced by the disparity of the elements in the image, Breton nevertheless rejects certain types of image in explicitly rhetorical terms. Referring to rhetorical gures based in difference he claims that, in the gure of antithesis the ‘spark is missing’, whereas in comparison the dif-ference is too slight, while the alternative ellipsis is a gure of subtraction that Breton ‘deplores’. Avoiding the classication of surrealist images in rhetorical terms, the author of the Manifesto nevertheless claims that the common denominator and greatest virtue is given in the type of image

that is arbitrary to the highest degree, the one that takes the longest time to translate into practical language, either because it contains an immense amount of seeming contradiction or because one of its terms is strangely concealed … or because it derives from itself

Breton, Manifesto of Sur-realism, p. .

Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid.