ON THE SURREALIST USE OF AUTOMATISM

Let us have no regrets, but let us look, and I am the last person to object to this, let us look gratefully and tenderly at the elemental surfaces in which the world to come has elected to try to make itself apparent. Coffee grounds, molten lead, breath on a mirror still provide those inscrutably clear veils dear to young woman. ABSTRACT From surrealism’s beginnings around a Parisian séance table, it os-cillated between the occult and the political. One of its key methods, automatism, provided access to both the esoteric and the exoteric: it took form in the mid-19 th century as a spiritualist technique for communicating with the other side while, simultanously, this other side could address political issues as equal rights, de-colonisation and a utopian future with an authority coming from beyond the individual. By tracing the development of automatism, the article shows how automatism in surrealism became a call for both a re-orienta-tion of life and an institutional re-organisation by becoming a divi-nation tool for a future community looking back to hermeticism to find a way forward. The article argues that not only can surrealism fruitfully be understood in the light of an occult revival in reaction to crises but, additionally, that it marks the return of and a reaction to a kind of magical thinking in the modern – due to waning religious and socio-economic orthodoxies – that echoes eerily into our own big data contemporary of social medias where we tend to substitute equations with associations.

André Breton, a young poet who soon is to become the main theoretician of French surrealism, sits down around his dinner table, joining hands with comrades René Crevel, Max Morise, Robert Desnos and Simone Breton. Inspired by Crevel's summer meeting with a spiritist medium, Madame M., they were about to experiment with the form of the spiritualist séance in order to call forth trance states, gnostic insights into how to liberate the unconscious. The aim was to receive "magic dictations" from "the echoes of universal consciousness," as Breton would write in his chronicle of the event, "The Mediums Enter." 2 This inwards turn towards the occult realms of the unconscious would be a gateway to a new real that was to be 'surreal;' a category which -according to Louis Aragon -would reconcile the experience of reality with those of chance, dreams and the fantastic. 3 In the wake of World War I, intense experiences at the edge of consciousness should be explored and mapped in order to discover and retrieve new feelings, adequate for tomorrow.
Two days later a second session was held. for an egress without returning to "literature" or "self-expression." Automatism seemed to offer this. Some of the works that grew out of the experiments include Breton's Soluble Fish (1924), Robert Desnos' Mourning for Mourning (1924) and Liberty or Love! (1927), as well as many of the texts collected in Benjamin Péret's Leg for Lamb (first published 1957).
What does this turn towards the occult signify? How can it be understood in relation to not only surrealist cultural production but also their accompanying political project? Surrealism had (and has) both an esoteric and an exoteric side. It called for a new marvellous myth that evolved from a loosely defined communism in the late 1920s where the Parisian group for a period aligned itself with Marxism and the Communist Party to the more occulted anarchist stand of the 1950s. All along, it was drawing on a wide range of sources and predecessors spanning the spectrum from political prophecy and poetic language to alchemy and voodoo. 5 In order to unfold some of these ambiguities, I will focus on one of surrealism's key methods: automatism. What constitutes the automatic message, what is its pre-history and what is its limits?
In order to come to terms with Breton's call in his second manifesto of 1930 for the "occultation" of surrealism, claiming that the movement shared goals with the alchemists of yore, and his referral to key esoteric figures such as Abramelin the Mage and Eliphas Levi in the same breath as to Hegel and Marx -the surrealist revolution was not to be only communist, it was to be magical and sexual -I follow the Scottish art historian Nadia Choucha's argument: surrealism is a twentieth-century development of a nineteenth-century tradition in art and poetry, and was heavily indebted to the occult revival of that period. 6 In its attempt to simultaneously re-orient life and reorganise society, surrealism combined both religious and political forces, since any revolution in human affairs must, as already Tocqueville observed, be both religious and political. It must be a project of world transformation that entails both a change in consciousness and a change in institutions. Historical precedents can be found among, for example, medieval heretical movements like the Anabaptists or the Brethren of the Free Spirit but the most important predecessor in this context may be found at the beginning of the modern occult revival with the American Spiritualist Movement, inaugurated by the Fox sisters, March 1848, in Hydesville, New York, from where it rapidly spread to France, Britain and beyond. 7 Spiritualism allied itself with emergent causes such as women's suffrage, the abolition of slavery as well as later de-colonisation, and, in Catalonia, for example, spiritist-anarchist groups proliferated from the 1860s to the 1930s, challenging traditional power structures and labour relations. 8 For this reason I will pay attention to the development of automatism in, especially, spiritualism and turn of the century occultism in order to understand its role in surrealism which, in this perspective, is linked more to the romantic/symbolist lineage and not as much to dada and the other modernist avant-garde movements.
Equally to many other new social and religious movements with a leaning towards the aesthetic, it can be argued that the new myth sought by surrealism -a myth to unite us all in the absence of myth -is a call for a kind of secular religion of the future, often immanent, acephalous, non-transcendent, and often inspired by the prisca theologia of Hermeticism and its "religion of the mind." 9 It is a call for social, political and cultural revolution that originates in the inner self of the individual and echoes across the 20 th century into our contemporary. After examining the prehistory of automatism, I will briefly turn to how the surrealist aims and methods are related to Hermeticism and alchemy, how they were looking back in order to go forward, before I will end on a brief discussion of some of the implications of the revival of magical thinking in both the arts and contemporary society at large.
Occultism reappears in times of crises and precarity -or, as the esoteric scholar Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke puts it: "It is notable that esoteric ideas often attend the breakdown of settled religious orthodoxies and socioeconomic orders" -just like spiritualism and mediumism usually flower in the wake of catastrophes, war, disease, when many grieve their lost ones. 10 It addresses certain questions related to modernism in general and can be viewed as a re-writing of the past in order to divinate an alternative future. 11 Just like Renaissance scholars such as Masilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola turned towards Hermeticism and the Greco-Roman past in order to rejuvenate their contemporary, the surrealists turned towards the alchemical revival of the Renaissance. The resurgence of the occult is thus linked to a new distribution of heterodox perspectives in response to the waning hold of orthodoxy.
Breton was careful to emphasise that surrealism was not "fideistic" in its use of esoteric material. Rather, it was a concern with esotericism's potential to provide a fuller form of knowledge based on analogies and correspondences that could restore a "key with which to decipher the world." 12 None of the artists and writers I am concerned with became devout followers of any kind of religiosity and their engagement with esoteric ideas was just as likely to veer off into playful satire as to explore esoteric themes as alternative forms of knowledge. It was an understanding of esotericism as a point where artistic, scientific and spiritual knowledge converge and where the engagement with occult ideas on the one hand was a form of thinking and, on the other, an experience of transmutation. Nadia Choucha argues that esoteric ideas always have held an attraction for the avant-garde in their opposition and challenge to the establishment and accepted values due to that it is considered alien to "mainstream" thought. 13 This is also why the occult was allied to revolutionary and subversive politics in France. Because it traditionally is veiled in a certain amount of obscurity and ambiguity -the literal meaning of the word "occult" is "hidden" -it becomes an attractive system to artists and poets due to that it can be interpreted and applied according to individual desires. In his first manifesto, Breton credited the birth of surrealism to a hypnagogic experience. This produced a fascination of the threshold between being awake and various altered states: dreams, trances, sleep, psychosis, hypnosis and so forth. The focus on sleep, dreams and the unconscious was seen as a portal to a dream realm, that other world in the mirror beyond the threshold of consciousness. In the aftermath of the first heroic period of surrealism, Breton (1932, 139) wrote that the connection between the two different states -the esoteric and the exoteric, inner and outer reality -requires the "constant interpenetration of the activity of waking and that of sleeping." 14 The surrealists wanted to mingle the conscious with the unconscious, the possible with the impossible. 15 In his first manifesto, Breton famously defined surrealism as "psychic automatism," an expression of the actual functioning of thought. 16 Aragon elaborated the meaning of the surreal: Having weighed up its experiences of Reality -in which it indiscriminately mixes everything that exists -the mind naturally juxtaposes what it knows of the Unreal. Only when the mind has gone beyond these two notions can it begin to envisage a wider experience, one where these other two experiences co-exist, and that is the Surreal. Surreality, the state where these concepts are fused by the mind, is the shared horizon of religion, magic, poetry, dreaming, madness, intoxication and this fluttering honeysuckle, puny little life, that you believe capable of colonizing the heavens for us. 17 Like many surrealist methods to circumvent consciousness autom- The term "automatic writing" is most often associated with the surrealists, but they did not invent it. The main root of automatism is to be found in spiritualism, which can be seen as the starting Interestingly, keeping in mind that Breton in the second manifesto states that the surrealists are seeking a supreme point that is able to unify all opposites, a veiled reference to the kether sephira from the Jewish Kabbala -the plane of pure spirit which many magical orders have as the ultimate goal for self-development -the French philosopher Georges Bataille wrote a short essay on surrealism for the journal Combat in 1948. In this he concluded that through this state of mind that reaches for unification "an existence beyond the self is experienced as a spiritual authority in whose name it is possible to speak." 25 To ground such a loaded term as the "spiritual" he emphasised that by "spiritual" he merely meant "beyond the individual." Contrary to Jewish mysticism and ceremonial magic, though, in reaching for that supreme point beyond the individual, the surrealists did not seek unification with God, but with the social.

THE SPIRITUALIST ROOTS OF AUTOMATISM
The main constituents of spiritualism were Mesmerism, a predecessor to hypnotism, and the branch of German Romanticism The impetus for automatic drawing is often a type of pareidolia, the tendency of the brain to create a pattern where no pattern exists. The technique is well-known from Leonardo da Vinci, Victor Hugo, and Alexander Cozens, as well as from psychoanalysis in the form of the Rorschach test. It is thought to evoke images from the unconscious, since there has been no intervention in the creation of the initial pattern.
In surrealism, the practical development of pareidolia into painting was later on credited to Oscar Dominguez who "pioneered" it in 1937 under the name of decalcomania where paint was pressed between layers of paper, leaving a random pattern then to be interpreted and worked into an image as in, for example, the landscape surrounding Loplop and the woman (supposedly representing Leonora Carrington) in Max Ernst's painting Europe After the Rain (1941). In general, Ernst deployed aleatory techniques such as grattage, frottage, and decalcomania in the paintings that did not rely on collage techniques as a sort of semi-automatism where the random produced patterns could be used for artistic elaboration. In essence, pareidolia is intimately connected to a sort of magical thinking: the brain handles complexity by pattern recognition.
Spare sought sexual and psychological liberation. Not only is it a depersonalisation of the author-subject, but it is also a collective form of writing as is the case with the oujia-board: a circle of people each place a finger on the planchette before it begins to communicate with the other side. Some of Breton's key automatic texts were collaborative efforts with Soupault and Élouard.
One of the most used techniques for producing collective, automatic writings were aleatory chain games like, for example, "the exquisite corpse" where each participant adds a word or a sentence either by following pre-established rules like that an adjective must be followed by a verb to be followed by a noun and so forth or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed. The marvellous is one of the central concepts of surrealism.

LOOKING BACK WHILE GOING FORWARD
The ways into the realms of the marvellous, due to the tension they produce, are magical ceremonies, ecstatic states, simulating morbid attitudes as well as "the freedom of mental automatism." 38 The rejection of deliberate control, the wish to let go of conventional ties and the systematic use of dreams and automatic writing have reopened the sources of the marvellous. The only thing it requires is "the revolutionary will to escape mediocrity, to assert the laws of desire over the laws of the universe" which comes quite close to the modern definition of magic and practical occultism as it has developed since Crowley. 39 In the introduction to his Magick in Theory and Practice, he famously defined what he called 'magick' -spelled with a k to differentiate it from illusionism -as "the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity to the will" with the addendum that it happens according to natural laws so that the change is something of which the object is "capable by nature." 40 While the marvellous is an example of the occultation of surrealism and signifies the surrealist conception of beauty as something shattering and convulsive, it also has broader implications since it describes the central surrealist experience of reality as something more than meets the eye. The marvellous, in other words, pertains to surrealism's attempts to dissolve the definite borders between reality and the imagination, and detect correspondences that are obscured by rationalist thinking. As Mabille writes, it finds it origins in the eternal conflict that pits our heart's desire against our means for satisfying them and grows out of uneasiness and the desire to The communicating vessels are indebted to the hermetic adage of "as above, so below," the belief that there are correspondences and a constant exchange between the exterior and interior world.
They are the alembic vessels of alchemy in which to produce the philosopher's stone, which is to say that they are ourselves.
As so often with the occult, the symbolism is multivalent, but the message is hard to miss.
This constant meeting and interaction between two states is re-occurring in surrealists texts as, for example, Leonora Carrington's journey through madness, Down Below, where she describes this fundamental surreal encounter in the following words: "[t]he egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm … the task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the micro-

THE RETURN OF MAGICAL THINKING
For the surrealists, revolutionary change became a project for the imagination, our capacity for generating new myths which would arguably enter the territory of searching for a more tolerant and non-dogmatic -as well as non-transcendent -religion based on Hermeticism and characterised by its will to find correspondences between a microcosm and a macrocosm, an inner and an outer state that will produce a third, synthetic state.
The search was thus centred on the meeting and communication between two different states, the communicating vessels, as well as going beyond the individual in a way that transforms the individual. It is a promise of an experience of transmutation where we will be changed, evolve to become more than what we are, become alien, post-human, and thereby overcome alienation. These ideas can fruitfully be compared to the concepts of the religious and the spiritual in the thinking of Bataille. 43 Already with spiritualism, theosophy and before, there was a dream that magic, Hermeticism, and the occult could become a religion -understood in its etymological sense of that which binds together -of the future. This idea reappeared not only with surrealism but also on a broader scale with the counter-cultures of the 1960s and has re-appeared in our current time of crises, that it might be necessary to go backwards in order to go forwards, that the past might rejuvenate a future fueled by imaginative myths. The imagination takes centre stage based on the presupposition that change is dependent on crisis since the mark of the imagination is that it is able to do the work of crises without crisis.

Any real change begins in dreams.
This ties in with the idea that we are on the brink of evolving and become something more than we already are and that in this lies the hidden stone to build a new type of community upon. Whether When Google, Facebook and our technocratic overlords are customising advertising or proposing possible destinations to us while we navigate the internet it is based upon that the algorithms recognises our digital behaviour based on similarity to a peer group instead of causality. If our friends like it, the algorithms believe that we might like it too. Due to the complexity of the algorithms and abstract mathematics, the black box of the laptop, we tend to internalise this way of navigating ourselves, in the process leaving Enlightenment thinking, based on rationality and causality, behind in order to navigate the easy exchange of images in a world of proliferating screens where the images circumvent linear logic by substituting associations for equations and collapsing difference into unity.
In a contemporary post-factual world of image politics, action has become magical interventions into reality in a realm of fantasy.
This constitutes a return to magical thinking since associations exists between seemingly unconnected subjects or object, or like Stephen Duncombe has pointed out: "You don't have to believe, as meteorologist Edward Lorenz first put it, that the flutter of a butterfly's wings in Beijing could create a tornado in Texas to acknowledge that we are wired into a complex ecological and social system with lines of connection and association that are not immediately apparent." 44 While the occult revival is linked to crises and catastrophe, the return of magical thinking is thus connected to that linear logic belongs to the age of the sentence while associative logic is in tune with the present visual era, or, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno puts it in his third thesis against occultism, by regressing to magic under late capitalism, thought is assimilating to late capitalist forms. 45 Where this for Adorno resembled totalitarian terror -which he saw as merged with the occult, dismissing the latter as "subjectivity mistaken for its object" -it might be possible today to see the occult as more than a case of narcissistic projection of one's own ego-ideal with which s/he then identifies. 46 On the contrary, as Larsen and Pasi argues, it might be that "the aesthetic, experiential and political ambiguities of the occult make it an apt vocabulary for questioning the categories through which we see the world." 47 To Larsen and Pasi, the occult describes a withdrawal from the regime of visual identification which, as we have seen above, forces us to navigate our big data environment by similarity instead of causality, along the way transforming knowledge to a matter of gnosis instead of episteme.
That the magical thinking of Breton and the surrealists and their attempts to guide invisible forces to set change in motion followed this latter line of argumentation is obvious in that Breton in both his first manifesto and in his essay on "Lautréamont" from The Lost Steps, argues in favour of language and causality, for "that which follow from one another" and against synchronicity and the image but with a kind of mental jiu-jitsu that uses the force of the latter against itself. 48 Creating the philosopher's stone was the equivalent to liberate the mind and let loose the imagination but not as escapism. The occult aesthetics becomes an egress from the image politics of power by carrying a utopian hope, that through the experience of transmutation there is another path to an unknown future created by correspondences between the micro and the macro, inner and outer, representation and reality, where wo/men still have a free will to choose their own destiny and become a new type of collective individual.
Reservoirs of darkness can never be dispersed.