The Surreal, The Digital, The Primitively Instinctive – Revisiting Surrealism through ‘Digital Animism’

This paper explores the place of Surrealism in the contemporary context, especially in the age of advanced technologies that are radically reformulating the way we perceive and conceive the world. The point supreme, as André Breton imagined it, subverts the division between the real and the unreal, the conscious and the unconscious, the object and the subject, challenging the Cartesian dualism that has been persistently haunting the Western discourse since the Enlightenment. As virtual technologies become an integral part of our formation of psychic and physical life, the dualism between virtuality (as a ‘degraded’ simulation of reality) and ‘reality’ is further exacerbated and yet to be challenged, continuing the deconstructivism project. However, this dualism, which reinforces the hierarchical division between digital and physical, material life, can no longer hold as a way of narrating our reality of perception and experience. With the unprecedented scale and speed of intervention/integration of social media, digital technologies and Al into all aspects of our lives, the critical and philosophical validity of the Surrealist principle of the ‘point supreme’ becomes more important than ever. This paper aims to rearticulate its validity through the idea of ‘digital animism’ (Davis 1998, Aupers 2002, Marenko 2021, Krebs 2023) in reference to the Shinto-infused ‘techno-animism’ (Allison 2006, Bruun Jensen and Blok 2013) which pose an impending questions; how we approach the new materialism that embraces the intangible digital substance without antagonising material reality. This is possible if we rearticulate the virtual, not in terms of simulation, but in terms of the morphological potentiality inherent (or even primitively instinctive) in human perception, experience and thought in themselves.

Taking the idea of ‘animism’ out of ethnographical/anthropological detached gaze towards the ‘primitive’ mind of the ‘ancient people’, the discourse of digital animism explores the animistic remnants still deeply rooted in our psyche and imagination that work in tandem with the digital conceptualisation/materialisation of the world. Surrealism revisited through digital animism revitalise their project of deconstructing the persistently lingering Cartesian alienation from material reality in the Western discourses, and explore nature not as an object of domination and control, but of acceptance and appreciation of the unknown.