AUTOMATIC THEOLOGIESthe truest understanding of Benjamin’sprofane illumination. The surrealists, by their own
admission, were explicitly engaged in the project of freeing the world from a system in
which an enchanted (or redeemed) experience of the world is postulated but ultimately
withheld, set apart from reality like a sacred object to be worshipped but never touched.
The surrealist world is a world ofthings, of everyday objects, each one of which might
contain within itself the potential to push experience to its limits, to explode the spheres
of art, religion, politics, and even time itself. Breton was the first, Benjamin argues, to
discover the ‘‘revolutionary energies’’ contained within ‘‘enslaved and enslaving objects,’’
which, however closely related to the present, still belonged to times past. He had in mind
things that appeared ‘‘outmoded,’’ ‘‘destitute,’’ like the first iron constructions, the Paris
arcades, factory buildings, and old photographs, the objects of technology and science, as
well as objects from the natural world.^18 In many ways, what surrealism really developed
was a way of interacting with the world, with everyday objects, that allowed the magical
forces contained within them to come to the fore. It was a way of treating the pastpoliti-
callyrather thanhistorically, not suggesting the irrelevance of history but instead demon-
strating the immense force that the past exerts on any present, no matter how future-
oriented it may be. Breton, Soupault, Aragon, and the others embraced the outmoded,
destitute objects of an increasingly industrialized and nationalist France and thus adopted
the intermingling of past and present, of dream and reality, as a methodological principle.
While remaining politically grounded in the present, the Paris surrealists railed against
Sartre’s positing of the engaged intellectual and invoked their own central concept:au-
tomatism, a radical form of spontaneous experience that was intended to bring the world
of intoxication into balance with the world of objects. Rather than move away from either
real or imagined objects, surrealist praxis aimed to bring the two together, by way of
something like a purely immanent, internal model: ‘‘a realinsulation, thanks to which the
mind, on finding itself ideally withdrawn from everything, can begin to occupy itself with
its own life, in which the attained [reality] and the desired [imaginary] no longer exclude
one another.’’^19
The surrealists saw these encounters with the lives of objects both as an engagement
with the world of created things—technological objects, buildings and structures, in short,
objects constructed by man—and, at the same time, as an engagement with the natural
world. According to Penelope Rosemont, ‘‘Meret Oppenheim identified the key method-
ological principle [of surrealism] when she pointed out in 1955 that works produced via
psychic automatism ‘will always remain alive and will always be revolutionary... because
they are in organic liaison with Nature.’ ’’^20 The surrealist appreciation of nature stems
not from a view of the natural world as fixed and immutable, as defined by a set of
transcendentally predetermined conditions, but rather springs forth as an irreverent, or-
ganic materialism. Instead of opposing an image of a fixed natural world to an image of
the constantly shifting world of human progress—a world indicated by the scores of
outmoded, forgotten objects left by the wayside—surrealism sought to bring the two
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