Manifesto for a Profane Historian — Montage, dialectic and the end of the past
Rescuing montage
If you go for a run through the backwaters of the internet you may stumble upon an organisation with a curious name, The Long Now Foundation. In our world of high-speed distraction, where five minutes can be an eternity, this institution wants us to refocus and think differently about humanity’s relationship with time and the future. They hope to encourage long term thinking far beyond today’s typical long view of processing time in decades, or at best a century. By writing dates using five digits, instead of the current four —02018 instead of 20181— they are trying to embed an awareness of the 10,000 year interval into our contemporary culture and blend our understanding of the present into the continuum of human civilisation. Good luck with that, at least in the short term …but that’s their point, they’re in no hurry at all; they have all the now in the world.
In his conclusion to Montage and the Metropolis (2018) the author, Martino Stierli, describes montage — one of the primary forces driving modernism and its architectural representation during the twentieth century — as having lost its power to describe our present condition meaningfully. It has essentially run out of now and will soon become part of our historical past. He argues that the digital revolution has made possible the creation of such faultless montages that audiences respond to this new perfection uncritically; eliminating the surprise of juxtaposition that was the key to the dialectic energy of the earlier hand-made montage2. Although I agree with Stierli’s thoughts regarding the disempowerment of the digital montage I disagree with his contention that montage has intrinsically lost its power. I believe we are on the cusp of a major shift in perception and I want to explore possible ways to retrieve montage and potentially reframe it as a new form of media. Montage may be evolving, or maybe resetting itself, to function effectively in this new digital world and I feel that examining our relationship to time may offer a way forward. This essay, essentially a series of elaborations, seeks a new way of experiencing history, architectural representation, and the built environment that builds on several loose ends within culture and hopes to entwine them into a new mode of expression.
Walter Benjamin’s pivotal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) begins with a long quote from Paul Valéry’s The Conquest of Ubiquity (1928). Within that quote there is a single line that reads, ‘For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial.’3 Benjamin foregrounded this quote knowing that a new temporal understanding had arrived with Einstein’s ideas of relativity and spacetime. A window had unexpectedly opened through which Benjamin could propose ‘a radically alternative conception of time and of historical experience.’4 He understood that for cultural criticism and historiography to be an effective voice in the new economies of the twentieth century the past would have to be perceptible to the masses in ways that would awaken them from the ‘collective dream’5 of consumerism. And Benjamin had no plans to let them sleep in. He wrote in The Arcades Project, ‘[t]he first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history.’6
Expanding the present
It’s been a short time coming, a moment over 100 years, but importantly our perception of time is ready to unfold again. Neurologists believe that the experience of the present exists in our mind for maybe a quarter of a second at best; a standing wave travelling through time, sensing the evanescence of reality before laying down information that is felt as memory. From the moment we are born to the moment we die we are recollecting machines. That fleeting sensation of present that somehow makes this all feel worthwhile only exists in the time between heartbeats. We are trapped in this short never ending moment by our physiology and the current limitations of our biology.
Take a deep breath now, and expand our experience of the present from a quarter second to an interval of 10,000 years. Imagine the intense channeling of information, live streaming into our minds, filling our consciousness with everything that our senses glean from reality. In actual fact we can’t imagine, we are not built for such a pan-millenial moment of mindfulness but our technology might well be soon. In our example the experience of a singular 10,000 year present moment is best understood from our current limited perceptual standpoint as a recollective moment and not a speculative moment; in that we can’t see into the future. We can only see the present and the past, now rolled into one – a temporal concomitance. In a flash this expanded view looks back and encapsulates all of human history and the Neolithic beyond, gathering almost all our architectural evidence for human civilisation in an arms-wide moment merging the past and the present into a wide now. The philosopher Max Pensky in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin writes that, ‘Benjamin was convinced that behind the facade of the present, these otherwise forgotten moments could be recovered from oblivion and reintroduced […] with devastating force’7. Montage will be the filter through which we will parse the vastness of time and reanimate this forgotten past; pieced together to create a new history in the present that will ‘develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks.’8 A seamless commentary over our collective existence, no less.
Montage is a tool for creating new meaning through juxtaposition, from meanings and images that may be old or forgotten or lost to the contemporary moment. It reminds us or enlightens us or challenges us through its manifold elaborations and imbrications. But as Stierli contends the digital production of montage has lost the power that Walter Benjamin required for awakening all us sleepyheads. Without confrontation montage loses it political power and wastes away.
We seem now to have reached a dead end in this attempt to resurrect montage. A cul-de-sac of pretty words and poetic ideas with no way to reify them into something tangible, something we can use, like a weapon, to reinvigorate history and culture. We need to reconceptualise our understanding of montage by broadening its meaning and reframing it for this new time so that it transforms from mere representation into an actualised part of our reality.
An elaboration
Printout a simple photomontage on an A4 sheet of 80 gsm paper. Pick it up and look at it. Now rotate it around the vertical dimension, so the paper’s edge faces you and the image vanishes behind this whisper of an edge. If you were broad-minded with your dimensionality you might accept a bas-relief image as a distant cousin of montage but you would be skating dangerously close to the world of collage and the three dimensional assembly of real objects. At best the three dimensionality of montage is non-existent. The representation of images mediated through photographs, drawings, films and computer games has no real depth. Any perception of the Z-axis is purely an illusion based upon different forms of projection. In our three dimensional world montage lives and dies in two dimensions.
In Christopher Nolan’s film, Interstellar (2014), the astronaut, Cooper, finds himself at the end of the film in a multi-dimensional architectural structure built by an unknown and powerful entity with access to the fourth dimension of time. The structure is a tesseract; a mathematically described four dimensional object that allows the astronaut access to our familiar three spatial dimensions (x,y,z) but adds time as a fourth dimension that can be traversed forwards and backwards as easily as a spatial dimension. In this way Cooper can visit and retrieve memories and information from all along the timestream as easily as one may visit different spaces within a house —a temporal and spatial montage.
What if our current limited understanding of representation and montage is bounded by our own physical imprisonment in this world of three dimensions? Scientists and engineers have developed ways of observing the world around us that have pushed into areas of reality beyond our physical limits; and in mathematics the idea of multiple dimensions of existence has been accepted for over a century and a half. It is more than likely that our collective sensorial experience of reality bears little resemblance to the underlying quantum nature of the universe. It could be argued that our perception of everything is already mediated through our biology and that what we experience is already just a representation of reality within the narrow bandwidth of our senses.
From this perspective the universe is filled with representations of everything. Until now collage has been the domain of the three dimensional because it has dealt with real elements as Stierli argues9 but as that underlying realness is unknowable to us at this time, collage, being made from the real vanishes from our senses. We are left in a world of representations of the real. If postmodern theory has taught us anything it is that the sign is not the thing. The world around us with all its unexpected conjunctions is a world of multiple combinations of representations; the built environment becomes montage.
A big idea
Even if this elaboration holds some truth, the smoothness of our reality and its continuous perfect nature creates the same predicament of digital perfection that Stierli alluded to before, thus nullifying any dialectic potential this reconceptualised three-dimensional montage may have to offer. To counter this and to remake montage anew we can look to Benjamin. He had a big idea that even today is difficult to define in theory, the ‘dialectical image’10 described by Pensky as ‘the notion of an image based historical sensibility as the genuine mode of historical interpretation.’11 Without giving it physical form Benjamin describes the workings of the ‘dialectical image’ in some detail, as an assembly of ‘large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components’12, these parts being fragments of the past that however tiny contain the truth of the ‘total event’13. It is neither a separate illumination of the past or the present but an image of the past that ‘comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.’14 It is clearly an allegorical moment of montage but what are we dealing with here? Benjamin’s description, written sometime in the 1930s, could be read as a literary metaphor or perhaps as theory written in a figurative mode. In contrast to many other writers I have decided to take him at his word; a literal reading of an imagined description of a speculative content based technological medium for transmitting history.
We have come to understand that Paul Valéry’s 1928 words, quoted by Benjamin, anticipated the internet, ‘[ j ]ust as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from afar […] we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand’15, In the same way Benjamin’s idea of the ‘dialectical image’ will eventually find ultimate expression as a projection of historical information over the built environment of the present; experienced as a new form of montage through Augmented Reality. In enabling this ability to travel through time and space and memory, the ‘dialectical image’ becomes a tesseract of sorts.
By rescuing montage from oblivion the ‘dialectical image’ moves from being a theoretical phantasm to a new mass medium and the abstract and philosophical concerns about how it fulfils Benjamin’s original ambitions become a problem of software, content and programming.
Is that your singularity?
Previously the ‘dialectical image’ had appeared to architectural historians and critics as a paradox, remarked on by Pensky who wrote,
‘Clearly, any attempt to wrestle with these questions begins with the curious construction “dialectical image” itself, which conjoins two otherwise opposed terms. “Dialectical” normally refers to the relationship of concepts or arguments to one another; “images” are, on the contrary, normally considered in terms of immediacy and singularity’.16
The overlay of the past onto the present through a system of Augmented Reality addresses this paradox by creating a montage between the overlay of visual information—Benjamin’s ‘constellation’ of fragments—and the architectural point of interaction being your exact location within the built environment, now recast as representation. The resulting duality of information (foreground and background) creates a dialectical moment experienced as a singularity.
Imagine an overlay of past meanings and relationships projection mapped over the built environment, filling vision in a ‘lightning flash…’17 and confronting the wearer —because the term viewer lacks the necessary intimacy for this new medium — with a different discourse to the reality they stand in front of. Animated content adjusting to the interplay of the city instantaneously. Time measured by machines in nanoseconds beneath our consciousness at speeds incomprehensible. Calculations arriving with answers that feel instantaneous. Video media recut and repurposed in realtime and broadcast live as overlay. Information delivered in the context of space and place but unbound by time; combining deep ideas and histories with the immediacy and tangibility of the tectonic. A new kind of concentration and re-engagement with architecture. Benjamin writes about concentration and distraction, noting that a work of art normally absorbs the spectator, except for architecture; ‘[a]rchitecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.’18 In this new medium architecture becomes an active participant in this unfolding dialectic. The audience is awake now and they are mobile. Wearers will engage with place and re-inhabit the past, seeing ideas and fragments long forgotten re-animated in an instant.
Augmented reality is a protean technology where the overlapping of historical information and data generates a networked collective of individual narratives. In time this augmentation will be seen as reality, in the same way that a person who wears optical spectacles to correct their vision is unaware of the mediation and refocusing of light that reconstructs their reality. The absence of the screen edges of other mass media returns us to the original framing mechanism of our eye without awareness of mediation, making it feel like we are watching images inside our head. The arrival of these immersive montage worlds will return us to an almost Paleolithic state of curiousity, resetting our journey though art and culture and creating vast new infinite worlds to explore in parallel to our own — access to the cultural multiverse. Everything is new again.
Looking further into the future, now that our lived present is being documented, quantified and recorded on mass, we will drag this present forward with us and end the past, as we now know it, creating an accessible and instantaneous long now. What will it mean for the historian to don their headset and see this palimpsest laid over the contemporary streets of Sydney? Imagine if the last 250 years of the city of Sydney had been captured in such a system with interactive animations and videos all hyperlinked to texts and sources, showing what life was like on any day between now and European first settlement. Or to be present at the meetings between the government architect and Jørn Utzon during the building of the Opera House, or to engage with history in a way that seeks to create a different path from others before you.
This will be the beginning of networked history. An unwinding of the umwelt into a collective yet highly individual experience of the built-environment. Discrete historical overlays, curated at the point of the individual, subdividing and synthesizing vernaculars into promiscuous dialectics. Everyone now a profane historian reliving a past unlike any other; assembling, remixing and exploring a multitude of histories at all hours of the day and night. We will all breathe history and contradict Hegel. The entire interconnected human consciousness suddenly woke.
As if. This utopian view or marketer’s info dump should be tempered by the great irony this development also creates. For Benjamin who sought to use this power to create an ongoing ‘point of rupture’19 in our existence to awaken us to the powers that control us (for him it was captitalism), this technology will become the ultimate consumer good, making the smart phone seem like a stone in comparison. But it will also become the window through which advertisers, now able to target us personally, will invade our worlds and take up residence inside our heads. Poor Walter Benjamin, how innocent those Parisian Arcades now seem.
We are not there yet and there may be time to build in safeguards. Current Augmented Reality wearables are ugly, ungainly and ill-supported. The subtleties and grammar of their user interfaces have yet to be resolved and the cloud-based curated content and ability to beam high data bandwidths at all times to any place on earth doesn’t yet exist. But it will.
The long now
Marshall McLuhan said, ‘… everything happens at once. There’s no continuity; There’s no connection; There’s no follow through; It’s just all now.’20
Montage is not going gently into the night, Stierli was mistaken. It may be resting, awaiting the alarum call that will wake us all from this slumber. And when it fully arrives it will become part of the human condition, for better or worse. This actualisation of Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ into a cultural artifact will graft montage permanently onto our visual cortex: first through a rapidly evolving piece of wearable technology and then at some point over the next 10,000 years as an invisible surgical intervention that communes directly with all recorded time.
The montage is the message.
1. The Long Now Foundation, Accessed September 24, 2018, http://longnow.org
2. Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 270.
3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 1. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
4. Max Pensky, “Method and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),179.
5. Ibid., 182.
6. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), Convolute [N2, 6], page 461.
7. Max Pensky, “Method and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),181.
8. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), [N1,10], page 458.
9. Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 18.
10. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), [N2a, 3], page 462.
11. Max Pensky, “Method and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),177.
12. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [N2 ,6], page 461.
13. Ibid.
14. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [N2a ,3], page 462.
15. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 3. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
16. Max Pensky, “Method and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),179.
17. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [N1 ,1], page 456.
18. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 18. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
19. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [N3a ,3], page 464
20. Marshall McLuhan, “What Television does best — interview,” The Tomorrow Show, Accessed October 1, 2018, http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_9_73KRmB5.pdf
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. PDF. Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/BenjaminWalterTheArcadesProject/page/n1
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry John, from the 1935 essay. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Accessed September 23, 2018. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
McLuhan, Marshall. “What Television does best —interview.” The Tomorrow Show. Accessed October 1, 2018. http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_9_73KRmB5.pdf
Stierli, Martino. Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
The Long Now Foundation. Accessed September 24, 2018. http://longnow.org
Pensky, Max. “Method and Time.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris, 177–98. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521793297.0.
