The Surreal Technics of Andre Breton and Gilbert Simondon

French Studies, Vol. LXXV, No.
2, 205–220
doi:10.1093/fs/knab028
THE SURREAL TECHNICS OF ANDRÉ BRETON AND GILBERT

SIMONDON
MADELEINE CHALMERS
TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/75/2/205/6146050 by guest on 27 January 2022

madeleine.chalmers@trinity.ox.ac.uk
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Le point de chant vers quoi les arbres se font la courte échelle
— André Breton1
‘L’objet surréaliste tend vers un surréel positif, et une des voies de ce surréel est
celle de l’être technique’: deep in Gilbert Simondon’s 1958 doctoral thesis
‘L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information’, this sentence
offers the opportunity for a radical rereading of a philosopher of the moment.2 At
first glance, Simondon the ‘original and cutting-edge’ thinker of technics and
André Breton, the ‘grand indésirable’, appear to have little in common.3 While the
dogmatic pope of surrealism has fallen from critical fashion, ‘[t]he conditions are
right today for Simondon to have a major impact’, as the mid-twentieth-century
philosopher of ontology and technology enjoys a significant revival among
Deleuzians, affect theorists, object-oriented ontologists, and media theorists.4 The
two thinkers have never been explored together, yet Simondon’s observation
draws an unambiguous link between his work on technics and surrealism. This
connection remains wholly unexploited, even though from the 1920s through to
the 1950s in France, surrealism was an inescapable cultural influence. Indeed, in a
Warmest thanks to the reviewers and editorial team, for their invaluable assistance in bringing this article to
fruition.
1
André Breton, Poème-Objet, collage of objects (and inscribed poem) on card on wood, 16.3 20.7 cm, 1935,
National Galleries of Scotland, <https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/28925/po%C3%A8me-objet-
poem-object> [accessed 1 January 2021].
2
Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, rev. edn (Grenoble: Millon,
2013), p. 344. I will be using this full edition. The text has had several incarnations, first as ‘L’Individuation à la
lumière des notions de forme et d’information’ (main doctoral thesis, Université de Paris, 1958). It was then pub-
lished in two separate volumes, as L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique: l’individuation à la lumière de notions de forme et
d’information (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964) and L’Individuation psychique et collective: a la lumiere des
notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1989).
3
Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, ‘Glossary: Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon’, in Gilbert Simondon:
Being and Technology, ed. by Arne De Boever and others, trans. by Arne De Boever (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2012), pp. 203–31 (p. 219); Henri Béhar, André Breton: le grand indésirable (Paris: Fayard, 2005).
4
Brian Massumi, ‘Technical Mentality Revisited’, in Gilbert Simondon, ed. by De Boever and others, pp. 19–36
(p. 22).
# The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
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reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
206 MADELEINE CHALMERS
1951 lecture, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to whom Simondon dedicated his thesis, cel-
ebrated Breton’s surrealism as ‘une des constantes de notre temps’.5 Breton and
Simondon draw on shared references, from Sigmund Freud to Henri Bergson and
Gestalttheorie, yet Simondon withdrew statements about surrealism in the version
of his thesis presented for examination in 1958 — and reinstated them in subse-
quent publications of the work, including the complete edition with which I am
working.6
The editorial and critical omission of Bretonian surrealism from Simondon’s

trajectory may lie in a long-term and widespread scepticism about surrealism’s po-
litical affiliations — and efficacy. Breton’s bathetic entanglements with the Parti
communiste français, which failed to recognize what he considered to be surreal-
ism’s status as a legitimate political project, have been well documented.7 How can
the bric-a-brac ontology of surrealist objects — chance assemblages of the broken
and useless, the scatological and erotic — possibly relate to an ontology about
how things work? I want to argue that Breton is an unruly but persistent thinker of
ontology, and that Simondon pursues his line of thought to frame technology as
an aesthetic, socially transformative form of being.
These are not the terms we usually apply to these writers: Breton is, conven-
tionally, an aesthetic polemicist with aspirations to politics; Simondon an academic
philosopher. However, this presupposes a disciplinarity which is of our making,
not theirs. In 1901, Émile Durkheim was explicit: ‘[l]es instruments divers dont se
servent les hommes [. . .] sont des produits de l’activité collective’.8 In the 1930s,
Ernst Cassirer and Lewis Mumford produced, respectively, ‘Form and
Technology’ and Technics and Civilization (1934), while the futurists and Fernand
Léger were at work. At the latter end of Breton’s career, Jacques Ellul’s La
Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle (1954), Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Question Concerning
Technology’ (1954), and the pioneering work of the anthropologist and theorist of
technology André Leroi-Gourhan restated the imbrication of technology into so-
cial life. Technology, aesthetics, and socio-political thought have always been
connected. Breton has always been an ontologist; we just never took him seriously
as such. He put his name to statements such as ‘[n]ous n’avons rien à voir avec la
littérature’ because, for him, surrealism was a total project embedded in the mate-
rial conditions of the world.9 That same synthetic drive is clear in Simondon:
aesthetics, politics, and ontology cannot be thought in isolation from one another.
My first section sets out Breton’s reflections on the relationship between the in-
dividual subject and the social collective. I then trace how Simondon pushes
Breton’s intuitions about the status of the surrealist object in order to embrace
5
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘L’Homme et l’adversité’, in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 284–308 (p. 297).
6
Simondon, L’Individuation, p. 331n.
7
See Carole Reynaud Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes, 1919–1969 (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 1995).
8
Émile Durkheim, ‘Technologie’, in Marcel Mauss, Techniques, technologie et civilisation, ed. by Nathan Schlanger
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2012), pp. 137–38 (p. 137).
9
Bureau des recherches surréalistes, ‘Déclaration du 27 janvier 1925’, <https://www.andrebreton.fr/en/work/
56600100114080> [accessed 1 January 2021].
BRETON AND GILBERT SIMONDON
THE SURREAL TECHNICS OF ANDRE 207
technology as a mode of relation to the world, crucial to the formation and cohe-
sion of societies. This culminates in a parallel reading of a surrealist and a
technical object. Breton emerges as Simondon’s ‘courte échelle’ and the twenty-
first century’s pope emeritus.
Breton’s objects, from metaphor to matter

Surrealist objects are the crux of Simondon’s relationship to Breton. In Breton’s
own writing, they represent the boldest attempt to make surrealism not only a visi-

ble presence, but a tangible one — one which invites us to ‘please touch’.10
Understanding Simondon’s technical object therefore requires an understanding
of the Bretonian surrealist object, a broad term encompassing trouvailles, poèmes-ob-
jets, readymades, and other forms of assemblage.
However, an exploration of the Bretonian surrealist object must begin, not with
stuff, but with the stuff of dreams. Breton’s first surrealist objects are the morph-
ing images with which he feels his way towards his theories, and nowhere is this
clearer than in his extended reflection on the connection between self, society, and
surrealism. Les Vases communicants attempts to synthesize Freud’s analysis of the in-
dividual mind and Marxist analysis of collective social functioning. Drawing on
Freud’s thesis that the dream state condenses and displaces our unconscious
desires and our conscious experiences, Breton suggests that interpreting dreams
can facilitate ‘la conversion [. . .] de l’imaginé au vécu’.11 Interpretation of the indi-
vidual (and thereby the collective) through the analysis of dreams leads to
transformation of the individual (and thereby the collective) to bring about the
end of capitalist society.12 Dreams destroy capitalism, and the populace only needs
to be shown the path to initiate their own liberation, as individuals and as
societies.
Why does Breton see these elements (individual, collective, dreams, post-
capitalism) as inextricably linked? Les Vases communicants is the theoretical working-
through of an intuition expressed more obliquely in the Second manifeste, published
three years earlier. This manifesto captures the urgent welter of a historical mo-
ment in which society and politics were up for grabs, amid rising extremism at
both ends of the political spectrum within France. The first manifesto had focused
on a personal quest, a deep and individual psychic liberation. But in 1929, Breton
argues that surrealism must think bigger: ‘l’action sociale n’est [. . .] qu’une des
formes d’un problème plus général que le surréalisme s’est mis en devoir de soule-
ver et qui est celui de l’expression humaine’.13 This is not incompatible with
10
Janine A. Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College
Press; University Press of New England, 2010).
11
Breton, Les Vases communicants, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Marguerite Bonnet, Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain
Hubert, and José Pierre, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1988–2008), II (1992), 101–216 (p. 193); see Sigmund Freud,
Interpreting Dreams, ed. by J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2006).
12
Breton, Les Vases communicants, p. 187.
13
Breton, Second manifeste du surréalisme, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bonnet and others, I (1988), 775–837 (p. 802).
surrealism’s roots in personal experiment; it is its logical conclusion, and it is out-

ward-facing.
Breton’s thinking can be inscribed within the French sociological tradition
which evolved in parallel with surrealism. In 1924 — the same year as the publica-
tion of the first Manifeste du surréalisme — Marcel Mauss delivered a lecture in
which he emphasized the urgency of exploring the ‘homme complet’; whether we
engage at the level of the individual or of society, we are always dealing with an or-
ganic whole: ‘[d]ans la société même, quand nous étudions un fait spécial, c’est au

complexus psycho-physiologique total que nous avons affaire’.14 In the Second
manifeste, then, we find the embryonic logic of Les Vases communicants.
At the core of Les Vases communicants lies the notion that the human subject
must be understood as always and already inextricably bound up with the collec-
tive, such that the liberation of one becomes the liberation of all: ‘[i]l faut que l’un
[. . .] s’abolisse au profit des autres pour se reconstituer dans leur unité avec lui’.15
This dense formulation proposes that the subject destroy itself qua subject in a
loving sacrifice beneficial to the collective, in order to rebuild itself as one with
that collective. We crystallize from the collective: our own individual desires are
configurations of a ‘subjectivité universelle’.16 Breton is not necessarily denying
personal uniqueness, but rather placing fresh emphasis on the fact that it is always
already constituted of and by collective experience. That experience is rooted in
love. Breton quotes Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and
the State (1884), in which the latter describes how real love can only happen in a
non-capitalist society, without the forms of exchange and constraint created by
capitalist economies and the societies they produce.
Within this framework, the Bretonian poet-artist plays a crucial role, articulated
through the image of the eponymous communicating vessels. Breton suggests
that dreams expose a ‘tissu capillaire’ between the inner and outer realms of expe-
rience.17 His communicating vessels seem to extend — and deform — Freud’s
concept of the ‘mental apparatus’ into an image of hydrostatic pressure and auto-
mated industrial processes.18 As a communicating vessel, the poet must institute a
new relationship between dream and action in waking life, between ‘la conscience
objective des réalités et leur développement interne en ce que, par la vertu du sen-
timent individuel d’une part, universel d’autre part, il a [. . .] de magique’.19 Our
internal churning-over of the external world becomes magical when it pushes
back outwards in ‘l’action inconsciente, immédiate, de l’interne sur l’externe’.20 In
an essay recommended to Breton by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Henri Hubert and
14
Marcel Mauss, ‘Rapports réels et pratiques de la psychologie et de la sociologie’, Journal de psychologie normale et
pathologique, 21 (1924), 892–927 (p. 913).
15
16
Ibid., p. 206.
17
18
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial Listener’, in Wild Analysis,
trans. by Alan Bance (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 93–159 (p. 104).
19
20
Ibid.
21
Mauss suggest that magic and technology share an ‘identité de fonction’. Both
do things in the world, give the human being control over other elements and
forces.
In communicating vessels, hydrostatic pressure maintains a homogeneous level
of liquid in each of the connected, but differently shaped, vessels. The poet
thereby becomes an instrument which facilitates relationships between subjects,
and between subjects and society (the ‘rapport humain’). However, it is difficult to
map the poet’s relationship with inner and outer worlds, and his relationship with

the individual and society onto the image of communicating vessels. The perme-
ability of the ‘tissu capillaire’ remains in play, challenging the stability and
enclosure that the vessels imply. In a connected image, Breton imagines the poet
not as an unconscious vessel — a technological object with no agency — respon-
sible for the equal distribution of one liquid due to hydrostatic pressure, but as
instituting a chemical reaction between two different liquids:
[P]ar le mélange, plus ou moins involontairement dosé, de ces deux substances incolores que
sont l’existence soumise à la connexion objective des êtres et l’existence échappant concrète-
ment à cette connexion, ils auront réussi à obtenir un précipité d’une belle couleur durable.22
In this vision, the poet’s intervention actively produces something tangible and
solid: a precipitate that is ‘durable’, suggesting a lasting form of social change —
or perhaps an object. Indeed, in his 1935 lecture ‘Position politique de l’art
aujourd’hui’, Breton describes the surrealist as excavating ‘l’immense réservoir
duquel les symboles sortent tout armés pour se répandre [. . .] dans la vie collec-
tive’.23 Symbols are armed, dangerous, abroad in the world as active forces: what
the poet unleashes through his work goes on to effect change. Breton’s shift from
considering early surrealist practices such as automatic writing as expressions of a
pure and hidden subjectivity — a ‘mythe personnel’ — to the starting point for
the deliberate crafting of a ‘mythe collectif ’,24 capable of being weaponized, is a
response to the times in which Breton found himself: the political climate of the
1930s and the rise of fascism. However, it is important to note a subtle caveat:
‘plus ou moins involontairement’. The surrealist poet-magician-mythmaker’s
agency only carries him so far, but there remains an element of indeterminacy,
which tantalizingly (and in ways undeveloped by Breton at this point) leaves the
door open to other, more hybrid forms of action. The material that he is mediat-
ing may have a will of its own.
We could say the same about Breton’s images. When reading Breton’s work, we
are always reading him thinking aloud. He identifies intuitions, testing them out
with different images and different names in search of the perfect fit. Here, we
have glided — with no excuses or justifications — from the intertwining of love
21
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, ‘Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie’, L’Année sociologique, 7 (1903),
1–146 (p. 143). See Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Informations bibliographiques’, p. 5, <http://www.andrebreton.fr/work/
56600100428030> [accessed 1 January 2021].
22
23
Breton, ‘Position politique de l’art aujourd’hui’, in Œuvres complètes, II, 409–500 (p. 438).
24
Ibid., p. 439.
and rebellion (Second manifeste), to images of vessel and liquid (Vases communicants),
catalyst and precipitate (Vases communicants), and ultimately reservoir and excava-
tion (‘Position politique’). Within the images, the dance of agency and passivity,
love, sacrifice, and production is constantly shifting. Our aim should not be to pin
Breton’s ideas to one convenient image, but rather to see his metaphorical objects
as enacting what they describe, and as the forerunners of his theorizations of the
material, externally existing object.
Breton develops this openness to the material world of the object in his 1936 es-

say ‘Crise de l’objet’. As Gavin Parkinson has highlighted, Breton is responding
enthusiastically to Gaston Bachelard’s Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (1934).25 In this
text, Bachelard argues that a true philosophy of science must situate itself fluidly
between an empirical experience of the real and the abstraction of theory.
Following Bachelard, Breton proposes to open up the object: ‘le réel [. . .] s’étoile
dans toutes les directions du possible et tend à ne faire qu’un avec lui’26 — a
phrase of becoming rather than being. Anne Sauvagnargues describes Simondon’s
ontology in almost identical terms.27 In Breton’s model, reality is potentiality; the
object forms the core of a perpetual expansive movement of unending reconfigu-
ration. At the heart of this mode of thought lies a ‘volonté d’objectivation’: the
rendering concrete and material of the idea in surrealist objects.28 Paradoxically,
Breton presents these as ‘véritables désirs solidifiés’, implying a notion of un-
changeability.29 However, Bachelard also asserts that ‘il n’y a [. . .] pas de méthode
d’observation sans action des procédés de la méthode sur l’objet observé’, thereby
opening up the possibility of a dynamic subject–object relationship.30 Indeed, in
the brochure for the 1936 Ratton Surrealist Exhibition of Objects, Breton would
undo the objects’ solidity, describing them as ‘des êtres-objets (ou objets-êtres?)’
which express ‘la lutte entre les puissances agrégeantes et désagrégeantes qui se
disputent la véritable réalité de la vie’.31 The surrealist object becomes an ‘être’
produced in processes of coalescence and dissolution, yet even as Breton liberates
the object, he also suggests a desire to restrain it, to tether it to a subject in his
writings. His texts enact the push and pull he highlights here.
That push and pull could be seen in the context of hasard objectif, that ‘hasard à
travers quoi se manifeste [. . .] pour l’homme une nécessité qui lui échappe bien
qu’il l’éprouve vitalement comme nécessité’.32 It is a form of subject–object rec-
onciliation that suggests a correspondence between a subject’s inner life and the
universe in the magic relation hinted at in Les Vases communicants. But that
25
Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2008), p. 62.
26
Breton, ‘Crise de l’objet’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bonnet and others, IV: Écrits sur l’art et autres textes (2008),
pp. 681–89 (p. 682).
27
Anne Sauvagnargues, ‘Crystals and Membranes: Individuation and Temporality’, in Gilbert Simondon, ed. by
De Boever and others, pp. 57–70 (p. 58).
28
Breton, ‘Crise de l’objet’, p. 684.
29
Ibid.
30
Gaston Bachelard, Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), p. 122.
31
Breton, ‘Crise de l’objet’, pp. 690–92.
32
Breton, ‘Position politique de l’art aujourd’hui’, p. 485.
reconciliation is animated by desire. Desire gives an affective tenor to what is oth-
erwise a nebulous force; it puts a name to the experience. Breton’s most famous
desire-objects are the trouvailles of L’Amour fou (1937), revealed to him through the
workings of objective chance. This form of surrealist object is the ‘merveilleux
précipité du désir’,33 the solid material produced from the reaction of chemicals in
a ‘solution’ in the literal and metaphorical senses of the term: the answer to a
problem, and the durable precipitate of Les Vases communicants. Breton’s anecdote,
in which the discovery of an unusual mask and spoon in the flea market at Saint-

Ouen have a ‘rôle catalyseur’ for himself and Alberto Giacometti,34 suggesting sol-
utions to their respective artistic aporias, is well worn. Breton states explicitly that
he aims to ‘montrer quelles précautions et quelles ruses le désir, à la recherche de
son objet, apporte à louvoyer dans les eaux pré-conscientes et, cet objet découvert,
de quels moyens [. . .] il dispose pour le faire connaı̂tre par la conscience’.35 Here,
desire is granted its own agency, independent of the conscious subject, but ema-
nating from it. However, shortly before this anecdote, Breton describes a statue as
being ‘l’émanation même du désir d’aimer et d’être aimé en quête de son véritable ob-
jet humain’.36 In other words, desire emanates from an unknown source,
crystallizes, and then seeks its object, rendering the human the trouvaille of the
statue. Breton acknowledges the extremity of this position, and the scepticism it
may cause his readers: ‘[p]as plus qu’eux je n’échappe au besoin de tenir le dér-
oulement de la vie extérieure pour indépendant de ce qui constitue spirituellement
mon individualité’.37 Breton highlights a deep-rooted desire to believe in human
exceptionality, while suggesting a far closer imbrication into and reciprocity with
the universe.
Hal Foster and Johanna Malt have offered arresting Freudian readings of desire
in Breton, and Freud is an important component of Breton’s self-characteriza-
tion.38 Yet, responding to Les Vases communicants, Freud struggled to see its
relationship to his own ideas.39 Breton himself manifests an uncertainty in these
texts of the late 1930s, which depart from the strong affiliations to Freud and to
Marx claimed in Les Vases communicants. Relationships are not held in balance by
communicating vessels: they are fluid, the liquid is in motion between different
bodies. Extremes give way to the middle. In the examples I have quoted, desire
coalesces around specific individuals or things, but it is not tethered to them. It is
not the sole property of the human subject. Rather, it is at work in the world, rov-
ing, suffusing the environment and beings. It is a non-hierarchical force that
brings into relation, that generates encounters, but which also withdraws from
analysis.
33
Breton, L’Amour fou, in Œuvres complètes, II, 673–786 (p. 682).
34
Ibid., p. 701; original emphasis.
35
Ibid., p. 696.
36
Ibid., p. 698; original emphasis.
37
Ibid., p. 711.
38
Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire:
Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
39
In Les Vases communicants, Breton saw a new society founded on true, post-
capitalist love. In L’Amour fou, we see a hint of it in the spoon that Breton finds at
Saint-Ouen. When he returns home, an object that seemed concrete, finite, sud-
denly begins to morph with the logic of a dream:
Cendrillon revenait bien du bal! [. . .]. Le bois d’abord ingrat acquérait par là la transparence du
verre. Dès lors la pantoufle au talon-soulier qui se multipliait prenait sur l’étagère un vague air
de se déplacer par ses propres moyens. Ce déplacement devenait synchrone de celui de la citrouille-carrosse
du conte. Plus loin encore la cuiller de bois [. . .] prenait la valeur ardente d’un des ustensiles de

cuisine qu’avait dû manipuler Cendrillon avant sa métamorphose.40
Breton is no fairy godmother, imagining or speaking metaphorically; the trans-

formation here is presented as real and driven by the object itself. The object
exists in real life and in fairy tale, simultaneously, and slips loose of any temporal
moorings, so that it is simultaneously pre- and post-magical transformation: the
glass slipper and the servant’s spoon. It becomes for Breton a symbol of perfect
sexual compatibility, of ‘l’unité-limite’ of love’s object.41 In this Cinderella story,
the spoon is vessel and agent, excavator and reservoir. Dreams really do come
true, and the perfect fit of object to person to name — true love, in other words
— is possible.
Simondon’s objects: individuation, affect, transindividuality

In summary, Breton’s theory of the object is embedded in everyday social and af-
fective life. The object is the subject of its own autonomous life, but interacts with
our lives in patterns of desire and mediation. In the following section, I explore
how Simondon extends this line of thought.
Simondon is typically seen as a precursor to a generation of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century thinkers concerned with formulating new ontologies which
break with humanistic tradition to propose new modes of being and of doing poli-
tics. He is crucial, for example, to the formulation of the machinic phylum by
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille plateaux (1980). They focus on his atten-
tiveness to the affective charge of ‘une matérialité énergétique en mouvement’, but
build a very different view of society and politics.42 Bruno Latour lays his empha-
sis on the socio-political dimension of Simondon’s work, yet Simondon’s yearning
for a return to totalizing unity is one of Latour’s critiques.43 Neither Deleuze and
Guattari nor Latour find a convincing hinge between the two halves of
Simondon’s project: the ontological and the socio-political. Bernard Stiegler articu-
lates this particularly clearly, when he questions why, ‘[s]’il développe sa théorie de
l’individuation psychique comme étant toujours déjà aussi une individuation col-
lective, il ne parle jamais du rôle qu’y jouerait l’individuation technique [. . .], et
plus précisément dans ce qui relie le psychique et le collectif ’.44 My reading comes
40
Breton, L’Amour fou, pp. 703–05; original emphases.
41
Breton, L’Amour fou, p. 705.
42
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, II: Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 2013), pp. 508–09.
43
Bruno Latour, ‘Prendre le pli des techniques’, Réseaux, 163.5 (2010), 11–31 (p. 16).
44
Bernard Stiegler, ‘Chute et élévation: l’apolitique de Simondon’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger,
closest to Stiegler’s, in that it sees ontology, aesthetics, and politics as interwoven
in Simondon, but I believe that Stiegler has been guilty of another oversight: he
does not pay attention to Simondon’s surrealism, despite his own deployment of
surrealism when thinking about technology.45 When we work with these later
thinkers, then, we have to think back further than Simondon. After all, Deleuze
was supervised by one of Breton’s closest friends, Ferdinand Alquié, and glowingly
reviewed the latter’s Philosophie du surréalisme in 1955.46 When we read Simondon as
building on Bretonian surrealism, Stiegler’s claim that Simondon does not invest

sufficient time in exploring the role of technics in shaping society, or its mediation
between the individual and the collective, begins to seem reductive. To explain
why this is the case, this section works through three Simondonian concepts: indi-
viduation; affect; and the technical object in society.
In Simondon’s post-war ontological innovations, we find Breton’s turn — from
the subject considered on its own terms to the subject considered as imbricated
— extended to its limit, in the process Simondon terms individuation: an ever-
unfolding becoming which extends across all modes of being. The starting point
for Simondonian individuation is a cluster of pre-individual potentialities, and an
environment, a milieu. The individual is folded around this core of pre-individual
potentiality, sensitive to fluctuations in its milieu.47 This ‘individu-milieu’ contains
at its core ‘une certaine incompatibilité par rapport à lui-même’ — a permanent
tension which drives the unfolding process of individuation, suffusing the individ-
ual with change.48 The individual is a component of the Simondonian subject.
The subject contains a pre-individual aporia, which leaves room for the working
of chance — it thereby incorporates the pre-individual, the individuating, and the
individuated.49 The subject’s control over its own development is ‘plus ou moins
involontairement dosé’ as Breton might have put it — there is a core of unknow-
ing at the heart of being. In Simondon’s schema of temporary balance and
continuous change, thought and action interact in ‘une profonde trialité de l’être
vivant par laquelle on trouverait en lui deux activités complémentaires et une troi-
sième qui réalise l’intégration des précédentes en même temps que leur
différenciation’.50 This mediating activity allows us to express a coherent identity
as we move through time, without negating the underlying polarities which moti-
vate our continuous individuation. Simondon gives it a name: affect, ‘principe
[. . .] de toute communication’.51 Communication here is deployed in the context
131.3 (2006), 325–41 (p. 326); original emphasis.

45
See my article, ‘Living as We Dream: Automatism and Automation from Surrealism to Stiegler’, in Science,
Technology and Culture in Modern and Contemporary France: Essays in Memory of Chris Johnson, ed. by John Marks (¼ spe-
cial issue, Nottingham French Studies, 59.3 (2020)), pp. 368–83.
46
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Ferdinand Alquié, Philosophie du surréalisme’, in Lettres et autres textes, ed. by David Lapoujade
(Paris: Minuit, 2015), pp. 113–16.
47
Simondon, L’Individuation, p. 25.
48
Ibid.
49
Ibid., pp. 300–01.
50
Ibid., p. 162.
51
Ibid.
of Simondon’s interest in cybernetics as ‘the flow of information’, understood in

its broadest sense as ‘a difference that makes a difference’.52
This brief overview requires unpacking. Simondon’s way of understanding the
individual — human, technical, or other — is one that is based upon continuous
change in relation to environment. It places the constant appearance, resolution,
and renewal of problems at the heart of that process of being, and balances the
individual’s agency with an element of chance. An individual’s inner life is inextri-
cable from its external surroundings. Holding together this bundle of processes

and change is affect, which allows us to hang together as coherent individuals, and
to hang together with one another as a society. Affect is like the wire through
which currents of information can run, thus acting as a vector for the communica-
tion described above.
Simondon inherits his notion of affect from Bergson, who described how ‘ces
affections [. . .] viennent toujours s’intercaler entre des ébranlements que je reçois
du dehors et des mouvements que je vais exécuter’.53 Going further than Breton
in rendering interior–exterior distinctions porous, Simondonian affect facilitates
the integration and differentiation of internal, subjective thought, and external ob-
jective reality: ‘la relation entre la pensée et le réel devient relation entre deux réels
organisés qui peuvent être analogiquement liés par leur structure interne’.54 As
with Breton’s communicating vessels, what goes on in our minds — memory,
dream, and imaginative abstract thought — is given the same status as the external
world, and again their internal structures, like the liquid in the communicating ves-
sels, are kept in equilibrium. Instead of a mediating poet, we have mediating
affect. Simondonian individuation occurs at the level of the individual human be-
ing and the collective, joined in what Simondon terms a transindividual
relationship: a relationship that does not exist between entities, but instead moves
through them in waves of ‘affectivité’.55 This transindividual realm is what allows
individuals to be present to one another, to intervene in the world, to communi-
cate. Simondon’s transindividual affect imparts some degree of agency, and offers
a foundation on which we can build societies, but it is not the gift of total agency.
It contains the same element of chance and autonomy as Breton’s surrealist
objects.
In recent years, critics have observed a turn to affect, that ‘palimpsest of force-
encounters traversing the ebbs and swells of intensities that pass between
“bodies”’.56 The contemporary affective turn shares an affinity with politics and
52
Andrew Iliadis, ‘Informational Ontology: The Meaning of Gilbert Simondon’s Concept of Individuation’,
communicationþ1, 2.1 (2013), 1–19 (p. 6); Gregory Bateson, ‘The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism’, in
Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 309–37 (p. 315).
53
Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire: essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit, ed. by Paul-Antoine Miquel (Paris:
Garnier-Flammarion, 2012), p. 57.
54
55
Ibid., p. 160.
56
Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. by
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–26 (p. 2).
57
technics. In their seminal study of Silvan Tomkins’s theory of affects, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank explored its roots in cybernetics.58 Indeed,
in L’Individuation, affect plays the role that technics plays in Simondon’s other 1958
work, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, in which ‘les objets techniques’ are
‘médiateurs entre la nature et l’homme’.59 Both affect and technical objects medi-
ate between human beings and the world.
Why does Simondon see affect as fundamental to art and communication be-
tween individuals? Freud speculated that affects coalesce around the repetition of

‘a very early impression of a very general nature, placed in the prehistory not of
the individual but of the species’, in ways that bring together the individual and
the collective.60 Echoing Freud, but also Breton’s ‘subjectivité universelle’,
Simondon suggests that the dream of flight shared by human beings across centu-
ries and continents has its roots in the ‘mouvements libres de l’enfant flottant,
avant la naissance, dans le liquide amniotique, qui le libère des effets contraignants
de la pesanteur par l’effet de la poussée hydrostatique’.61 As Simondon puts it, ‘un
tel schème moteur pourrait animer des images allant jusqu’à l’intuition du vol or-
bital’.62 In Simondon’s model, the hydrostatic pressure of the amniotic fluid
within the womb counters the effects of gravity. The material conditions of free
movement which it creates for the individuating child in the womb nourish the
imaginative constructs which will go on to underpin its dreams of flight in later
life. An object like a space rocket is a process which starts in the womb: mediated
by the affect which enables creation and communication, the child’s intuitive at-
traction to zero-gravity flight evolves and crystallizes into an object which
mediates between us and the universe.
This example is crucial. While Breton’s writing is rich in proliferating images,
Simondon’s concrete examples, images, and thought experiments are few and far
between. His writing is elliptical and allusive. But here, even before birth, in the in-
timacy of the womb, individuals are woven, affectively and intuitively, into the
dreams of strangers who lived and died before them. In affect, cause and effect
do not succeed one another; they are a simultaneous relation to self and other. I
am shaped in my shaping of the world. Affect and choice are transindividual, and
the foundation of society, because they are what allow us to co-exist alongside one
another, to share.
It is no coincidence that affect and the technical object are tied in this image.
The technical object’s internal tensions, potentialities, and milieu — of which the
human is but one component — drive its transformation. With self-organizing
57
See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Brian Massumi, Politics of
Affect (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).
58
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins’, in Shame
and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1995), pp. 1–28.
59
Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 2012), p. 9.
60
Sigmund Freud, ‘Anxiety’, in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. by James Strachey and Angela Richards,
trans. by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 440–60 (pp. 443–44).
61
Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et invention (1965–1966) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2014), p. 39.
62
Ibid.
autonomy, it evolves according to its own internal logic, while remaining open to
reconfiguration. Encoding the gestures which produced it, Simondon’s technical
object is nevertheless ‘participable, [. . .] ouvert à tout geste humain pour l’utiliser
ou le recréer’.63 He describes ‘le véritable technicien’ as ‘un médiateur entre la
communauté et l’objet caché ou inaccessible’.64 We might say that the technical
object is the trouvaille par excellence — but unlike the hesitant Breton, Simondon
gives his object a life before its discovery. Technical objects capture and express
something of the human, crystallize gestures and ideas; they formulate our condi-

tions of possibility: what has been done, can be done, and what could be done in
future. They give our society its shape. Yet at the same time, Simondon’s technical
object is autonomous, free, ‘inaccessible’. Its freedom lies in the fact that while we
might make it, or use it, its mode of existence is always outside our perception.
The free object will evolve, self-regulate, and engage in relations with other
objects, in ways that are independent of us.
This might seem reminiscent of the seemingly autonomous circulation of
objects in commodity fetishism.65 However, just as Breton drifts from orthodox
Marxism towards desire, the emphasis in Simondon’s free object and its role in so-
ciety lies less in a particular form of economic relation than it does in an affective
relationship. We saw above that affect and choice are transindividual dynamics, fa-
cilitating a form of sharing between individuals. They are joined in this by the
technical object, which institutes ‘une relation transindividuelle, allant de l’individu
à l’individu sans passer par l’intégration communautaire garantie par une mytholo-
gie collective’.66 To extend Simondon’s example, we might all share an innate
dream of flight, an attraction towards the freedom of motion and escape from the
laws of physics which it represents — but that intuition is deeper and older than
any account of human flight that might cast the Wright brothers or Charles
Lindbergh as heroes. For Simondon, the technical object escapes our attempts to
control it, breaking through the totalizing, homogenizing impulse of the commu-
nity. It transmits the knowledge and practices it encodes in ways which circumvent
traditional authorities. Thus (if we extend Simondon’s example again) the space
rocket — so easily converted into a vessel of Cold War supremacy in the Space
Race — always remains unpredictable, out of reach, an outward-facing vector for
dreaming. This is a form of amateurism, in its etymological sense: a passionate
meeting of minds.
Surreal technics in an eggshell

So much for theory; what about practice? At first glance, Breton’s own surrealist
objects appear far removed from technical objects. One Poème-objet, shown as part
of the Ratton exhibition, comprises four humble — in one case broken —
63
64
Ibid.
65
See Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 127, and Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire, pp. 127–38, for explorations of this in
relation to Breton.
66
components, attached and bisected by string: a plaster egg, inscribed with the
words ‘je vois’ and ‘j’imagine’, a pane of shattered coloured glass, a pair of porce-
lain angelic wings, and the poem quoted in my epigraph.
The surrealist object exists in relation to Breton, as he exists in the particular
place, moment, texture of mind, and experience of its making. We could say that it
exists in relation to Breton as an individu-milieu. However, it also taps into a shared
symbolic reservoir. With the two words on the egg, we have a sense of actuality (je
vois) and potentiality (j’imagine), related to the egg’s status as containing an embry-

onic being, waiting to deploy its wings by breaking open its own shell, cracking it
like the broken glass to emerge into the external word. The cracked glass echoes
the patterning of the feathers on the wings — and the conjunction of the lines of
force mentioned in the poem. The ‘lignes de force’ are synonymous with magnetic
fields — or Breton’s first experiments in automatic writing, published as Les
Champs magnétiques (1920).67 While appearing heterogeneous, the objects are
bounded by the ‘lignes de force’ evoked in the poem — literally, in the form of
string — forming a ‘point d’intersection’ from which the surrealist object as a
whole emerges.
This embryonic form is reborn thirty years later. In a 1968–69 lecture series on
technics, Simondon argues that technical forms,
en voûte ou en coque correspondent soit à la relative individualisation d’un nouvel être vivant
(sac amniotique dans la gestation chez les Mammifères [. . .]) à partir de l’être-parent, soit à sa
protection (œufs des Oiseaux), et généralement aux deux aspects fonctionnels pris ensemble.68
The amniotic sac and the egg are ‘machines passives’ — a technical mode of
engagement with a being’s milieu, shielding and protecting it while it individuates
and develops, but also laying the foundational structure for its future develop-
ment, its structures woven into the bone: ‘une forme de résistance et d’isolement
[. . .] qui peut être conservée comme plan d’organisation [. . .] pour tout l’être vi-
vant’.69 Breton’s poem-object and Simondon’s poetic technical imagination are
part of the same force-field. The surrealist object crystallizes from encounters in
which the human subject is a participant not a master: whether between heteroge-
neous parts combined in novel ways, or between a man and a strangely shaped
spoon in a flea market. It crystallizes from that mysterious ambient desire — or
affect — that expands and contracts between beings in the world. It brings indi-
vidual subjects into relation with their environment, and with what lies outside
conscious perception: the micro-shifts and changes occurring just beneath the
skin of reality. In all its eclecticism, the surrealist object is transindividual. This is
why Simondon, a ‘philosophe [. . .] bricoleur’,70 can proclaim that ‘l’objet
67
Breton and Philippe Soupault, ‘Les Champs magnétiques’, in Breton, Œuvres complètes, I, 51–106.
68
Gilbert Simondon, ‘L’Objet technique individualisé et les réseaux (deuxième semestre 1968–1969)’, in
L’Invention dans les techniques: cours et conférences, ed. by Jean-Yves Chateau (Paris: Seuil, 2005), pp. 169–225 (pp. 191–
92).
69
Simondon, ‘L’Objet technique individualisé et les réseaux’, p. 192.
70
Élie During and Anne Sauvagnargues, ‘Anne Sauvagnargues: portrait du philosophe en bricoleur (entretien)’,
Critique, 816.5 (2015), 401–12 (pp. 401–02).
71
technique est un surréel’. His non-anthropocentric vision embraces the object to
produce a philosophy of technology whose roots — unacknowledged by critical
scholarship — are firmly planted in surrealism. The surrealism of the technical
object lies in its status as an autonomous creation, in which multiple hidden but
effective realities coexist, fuelled by affective currents — currents which also
change our perceptions, as we participate in the object.
This is where Simondon extends Breton. Breton’s sense of affect and desire
emerges from an understanding of relationships between objects and human

beings; and his sense of technical objects is sharpened by the reflections on desire.
They are part of that striving for the reconciliation or reunification of the homme
complet. The hydrostatic pressure and contenant-contenu dimension of Breton’s com-
municating vessels, and the tissu capillaire between dream and reality are reimagined
in Simondon’s image of the capillary action of the placenta. We must allow the
images of the two thinkers to change and interact: Simondon’s embryonic human
is not the container, but container and contained, working to produce something
new; the vessel and fluid potential within combine to yield a new precipitate. It is
the endpoint of Breton’s shifting images. Two images of hydrostatic pressure, two
images of the real and the dream interacting in a two-way process to produce a
solid object, two models of a self nurtured by a third force: the poet, for Breton,
and affect, for Simondon. Simondon’s image captures the unsteady ‘plus ou moins
involontairement’ of Breton’s communicating vessels, and makes of it not an un-
certainty but a principle of individuation — in all senses of the term, he embraces
the milieu which Breton rejected in the Second manifeste and attempts to control in
Les Vases communicants. In his emphasis on the capacity of any individual to be a
technicien, not through a specific skill set but through a specific disposition,
Simondon takes the surreal-technical object out of the hands of the poets and
engineers alike.
It is here that Breton’s ‘mythe collectif ’ as a mode of knowledge is surpassed as
technology becomes its own transindividual mode of knowledge, shaping society
in ways which we tune into, but over which we have limited control. The connec-
tion between Breton and Simondon is made explicit by the latter when he boldly
connects the surrealist object to the technical object. The gap between choice and
chance narrows as the choices, desires, and attractions of objective chance resolve
in a society-building project, in which ‘l’objet technique est un surréel’.72
There could be no more perfect surrealist object than Simondon’s embryonic
space rocket, dreamt up in the directionless flow of the womb. When he writes
about the surrealist object in L’Individuation, Simondon liberates it from even those
limits Breton attempts to impose on it: ‘les voies libératrices du surréalisme con-
duisent à la construction d’un objet stable, auto-organisé comme un automate,
indépendant de son créateur et indifférent à celui qui le rencontre’.73 Simondon’s
surrealist object is one of radical freedom, ‘absurde parce qu’il n’est pas asservi à
71
72
73
l’obligation de signifier dans une réalité autre que la sienne’ — not even the reality
of the one who discovers it.74 Simondon’s surrealism does not even require recog-
nition; it works with affect, ‘principe [. . .] de toute communication’, participates in
our dynamics of desire, while giving nothing away about itself and retaining its ab-
solute freedom to be itself.
Taking Simondon’s ontology of emergence and crystallization seriously means
acknowledging that his own thinking emerges, crystallizes, and individuates in rela-
tion to its intellectual and cultural milieu; that, en bon technicien, latent influences can

be brought out into the light. Between the 1935 poem-object and the 1968–69 lec-
ture, we find that magnetic force-field in which phenomena are simultaneously
causes and effects; in which ideas generate and change one another, autonomous,
unseen, and unheard. In the best possible way, there is nothing ‘original’ in
Simondon’s ontology.
Breton’s final work L’Art magique (1957) was published the year before
Simondon’s L’Individuation. Here, Breton returns to the magic hinted at in Les
Vases communicants, to declare that surrealism forms a ‘pacte avec l’inconnu’:75 the
‘objet caché’ which the Simondonian technician seeks to expose. He suggests that
there is something about the forms which our creative shaping of matter in art
takes, something which precedes us, transcends us, and surpasses us: ‘[c]e que
nous créons, est-ce à nous?’.76 No longer party political, Breton is keenly aware of
the subject as situated not only within a social framework, but within a network of
resonances on the scale of the universe. We are ourselves dominated, with ‘le sen-
timent d’être mû [. . .] par des forces qui excèdent les nôtres’.77 For Simondon
too, technics emerges from a primal magic unity. Rather than Breton’s pure sub-
jectivity, Simondon’s magic universe predates all subject–object distinctions.
Instead, its contours are defined by a web of privileged places and times: nodes of
agentic power, the ‘point de chant’ evoked in Breton’s poem-object. Aesthetic —
and techno-aesthetic — experiences allow us to recover something of that ancient
primal unity by their relationality: ‘[c]e n’est pas seulement la ligne de pylônes qui
est belle, c’est le couplage de la ligne, des rochers et de la vallée’.78 It is tempting to
hear echoes of Lautréamont’s image of the encounter of a sewing machine and an
umbrella on an operating table, claimed as the ultimate surrealist image by
Breton.79 For Breton, the magic technology that is art must be the trigger for a
‘libération sans conditions de l’esprit dans le sens du mieux’:80 a vision of betterment of
self, other, world. Simondon’s magic, too, orientates the world towards political
change: ‘[n]és l’un et l’autre du devenir, [. . .] la pensée technique des ensembles et
la pensée politico-sociale sont couplées par leurs conditions d’origine et leurs
74
Ibid.
75
Breton, L’Art magique, in Œuvres complètes, IV, 47–289 (p. 285).
76
Ibid., p. 76.
77
Ibid.
78
Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, p. 255.
79
André Breton, ‘L’Objet fantôme’, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, 3 (December 1931), pp. 20–22 (p. 21).
80
Breton, L’Art magique, p. 289; original emphasis.
points d’insertion dans le monde’.81 While Stiegler has argued that Simondon is
fundamentally apolitical — for while he gives technology a political orientation, he
does not offer a political programme, Brian Massumi has gestured towards a poli-
tics of affect, framed as ‘a caring for the relating of things as such — a politics of
belonging instead of a politics of identity’.82 Affect’s conceptual wooliness has
been criticized, for ‘ethics, politics, aesthetics — indeed, lives — must be enacted
in the definite particular’.83 In the re-surrealization of our technical objects, how-
ever ubiquitous they may seem, we perhaps find an answer.

When we understand Simondon’s magical politics as emerging from Breton’s
world of surrealist objects, it acquires a political programme. If technical objects
are indeed surrealist objects, few would deny that in our contemporary era they
have wrought concrete socio-political change, with a strong affective charge.
Cambridge Analytica, cyberwarfare, surveillance states, artificial intelligence, ma-
chine learning, wearable technologies, social media — the list of desire- and
affect-driven technologies which have changed the way we do life and conceive of
community is endless. Surreal technics has its place in this very real world because
it offers a radical way to know our world, by integrating technics into ontology,
placing it alongside affect as a motor of our interactions and development, and
highlighting the complex relationship between choice and chance. Extending,
transforming, and radicalizing Breton like the trees of my epigraph, Simondon
offers us a new way of apprehending technics and the affect that shapes our rela-
tion to it: one which highlights the beauty and possibility — not the bitterness —
of knowledge’s deficiency.
81
Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, p. 314.
82
Stiegler, ‘Chute et élévation’; Massumi, Politics of Affect, pp. 17–18.
83
Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. xv.

The Surreal Technics of Andre Breton and Gilbert Simondon

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French Studies, Vol. LXXV, No.

THE SURREAL TECHNICS OF ANDRÉ BRETON AND GILBERT

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À l’intersection des lignes de force invisibles

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Breton’s objects, from metaphor to matter

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surrealism’s roots in personal experiment; it is its logical conclusion, and it is out-

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Breton is no fairy godmother, imagining or speaking metaphorically; the trans-

Simondon’s objects: individuation, affect, transindividuality

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131.3 (2006), 325–41 (p. 326); original emphasis.

of Simondon’s interest in cybernetics as ‘the ﬂow of information’, understood in

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Surreal technics in an eggshell

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