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AUTOMATIC THEOLOGIES

its goal being not so much a greater understanding of the self (this would be, for example,
the goal of something like stream of consciousness), but rather a ‘‘profane illumination,’’
by which we are to understand an inspiration that comes from within, that is drawn
from deep within the memories generated by lived experiences, called forth when human
intentionality gives way to the logic of chance. Unlike automatism’s historical predeces-
sors—prophets, psychics, and psychoanalysts—this automatically emerging revelatory
moment draws nothing from outside everyday reality as it is experienced by the human
psyche; there is no ‘‘beyond,’’ no higher power from whom a divine, prophetic word is
communicated, filtered down through a human medium.^35 Rather, surrealism furnishes
its own concept of the sacred in the form of the Marvelous and locates it in the workings
of the mind itself, looking toward everyday language as the privileged site from which to
access ‘‘a moment in which... antinomies no longer have any meaning, in which knowl-
edge completely takes hold of things, in which language is not speech, but reality itself,
yet without ceasing to be the proper reality of language.’’^36
That automatic writing has, over time, become the primary expression of surrealist
automatism is no coincidence, then. Language had been the site of the surrealists’ first
discovery of the ‘‘magical aspect of things’’ that would so entrance Benjamin, as it would
entrance all of surrealism’s fellow travelers. ‘‘Surrealists became well aware,’’ Maurice
Blanchot writes in his 1949 reflections on the movement, ‘‘of the strange nature of words:
they saw that words have their own spontaneity... [they] understand, moreover, that
language is not an inert thing: it has a life of its own, and a latent power that escapes
us.’’^37 Automatism is a way of harnessing a latent, productive power of language that
continually eludes the grasp of the mind in the disenchanted world. It is, perhaps, no
great surprise that Benjamin would become so inspired by the surrealist project: he saw
this sort of experimentation with language as a way of closing the gap between words and
concepts, between the disassociated graphical marks upon a page and the real and con-
crete objects to which they referred. ‘‘Language seemed itself only where sound and image,
image and sound, interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink
was left for the penny-in-the-slot called ‘meaning,’ ’’ he writes in ‘‘Surrealism.’’^38 In Benja-
min’s interpretation of surrealist praxis, language as a way of achieving an absolute (sur-
real) experience—a way of getting at the essence of things—rather than a tool to aid in
the communication of meanings or theories.
Of course, Benjamin’s interpretation of surrealist praxis is just that: an interpretation.
Though it remains one of the most salient, most intuitive investigations of surrealism to
date, it falls short of the mark in its understanding of the central goal of automatic prac-
tice. True, surrealist automatism did aim to abolish the line that separates the real from
the imaginary; Breton’s philosophy of immanence, defined by the image of the communi-
cating vessels, could hardly have had anything less as its object. But the surrealists would
not have been likely to agree that their approach to language was in any way intended to
abolish meaning—the total destruction of all meaning is more dadaist in character than

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