Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French culture explores the birth of the technologies which underpin our contemporary life, from audio-visual recording to industrial automation. This chapter proposes that there is a uniquely French mode of approaching what we would now recognize as artificial intelligence (AI): a mode that is distinct from the fragmentation of Anglo–American modernism or the fascist sex-and-speed machines of Italian futurism. The French touch lies in its meta-reflexive narrative play, which allows it to test out technological and political scenarios. This chapter teases out its specificity by turning to two critically overlooked late nineteenth-century narratives and suggests that looking back to these imaginings of the past can help us to navigate our technological present.
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.
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