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