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Photography and surrealism

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The automatic image

by glass – something that ‘cannot be seen’). It is also the image of a gure halfway through one place to another (interior/exterior), like the mirror in Alice in Wonderland that signies the membrane between two worlds. In the image Breton is caught, trapped ‘between’ places in the position of a splitting.58 It was precisely a splitting of the subject (a chiasmus) that surrealism demanded the subject occupy, as a spectator to their own thoughts. An act that simultaneously reasserts and thwarts the cogito of Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’.59 The surrealists’ meditation on presence in the world tries to situate the subject where it is not thinking, within the productivity of the unconscious and its thing-presentations.

But with the automatic image produced in the mind, a means of concrete registration, of representation had to be found, deployed for its public signication. With the subject supposed to be the spectator (ex-centric) to their own thought production processes, the art was to ‘capture’ an image as it passed through the mind and nd a form (rhetoric/means of dramatization) for its signication.

For the concept of ‘psychic automatism’ Breton knew and drew on distinctions previously made in French psychiatry by Jean Charcot. Charcot had synthesized nineteenth-century studies on ‘endophasie’, the concept of ‘inner speech’, a ‘langage intérieur’. Charcot classied different categories of manifestation of interior images into verbo-auditif (heard voice), verbo-moteur (motor speech, body movements, hands etc.) and verbo-visuel (spoken images). Breton, aware of such categories, did not take for granted these denitions and borrowed from them for the idea of an automatic image in surrealism. These categories of inner speech were already in wider use, not only in discussions about psychology, but also about the status of these ‘inner voices’ in literature.60 Jean Cazaux in his short study Surréalisme et psychologie (Surrealism and Psychology) () catalogues the interest in interior speech in psychology and in relation to the simultaneous, but separate interest within literary circles. Cazaux notes the tendency of ‘modern’ literature to draw on the psychological domain of human activity and argued that the works of Marcel Proust, James Joyce and surrealists all show different types of interest in an

It might have been worth quoting Lacan here for a passage tailor-made to open up Breton’s example for analysis: ‘the interest the subject takes in his own split is bound up with that which determines it – namely, a privi-leged object, which has emerged from some primal separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real, whose name, in our algebra, is the objet a.’ Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, ), p. . This supports the thesis that uncanny images are derived from and rooted in the return of a primal/original fantasy.

Lacan famously plays with this formulation: ‘What one ought to say is: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think’ (Ecrits, p. ).

See Jean Cazaux, Surréal-isme et psychologie (Paris: Librarie José Corti, ), pp. –. Freud also refers to Charcot’s use of the inner speech categories in his essay ‘Childhood and Screen Memories’ (see Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life).