ES1204: Reflections on Autobiography

Montage

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Last updated 14.11.11.

Introduction

The following notes are intended as background reading for this week's topic, but also as an orientation for your first project. Samples developed here will be useful aids to the later assignment work. In relation to Part One, as an illustration here is a photomontage by Hannah Hoch.

PART ONE

Michel Leiris, at the start of a montaged autobiographical text, provides the following explanation of his method:

Looking on my enterprise as a sort of photomontage and choosing for my expression a tone as objective as possible, trying to gather my life into a single solid block ... I was imposing on myself a rule quite as severe as if I had intended to compose a classical work. ... To use materials of which I was not the master and which I had to take as I found them..., such was the risk I accepted and the law I had fixed for myself.’[1]

Leiris’ definition suggests that he was following a set of self-generated rules for assembling pre-fabricated material in a tangible and objective ‘block' - we might agree to call this a metaphor.  He was not alone in his textual experiments: Benjamin’s One Way Street, Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer are often cited, alongside Joyce’s Ullysses.  During the Twenties and Thirties montage techniques were used by writers, poets, artists, photographers, and film makers.  Sergei Eisenstein, excited by reading Ulysses, speculated on the possibility of developing a ‘cinema of the mind’[2].  The following quote illustrates his readiness to conceptualise montage as a universal principle involved in the construction of fresh imagery - imagery capable of wresting new truths from tired figurative devices - again, transpose this quote back to your understanding of metaphor and representational frames.

            ... whether on picture, in sound, or in picture-sound combinations, whether in the creation of an image, a situation, or in the ‘magical’ incarnation before our eyes of the images of the dramatis personae - whether in Milton or in Mayakovsky - everywhere we find similarly present this same method of montage.  ...  The conclusion is that there is no inconsistency between the method whereby the poet writes, the method whereby the actor forms his creation within himself, the method whereby the same actor acts his role within the frame of a single shot, and that method whereby his actions and whole performance, as well as the actions surrounding him, forming his environment (or the whole material of a film) are made to flash in the hands of the director through the agency of montage exposition and construction of the entire film.  At the base of all these methods lie in equal measure the same vitalizing human qualities and determining factors that are inherent in every human being and every vital art.[3]

For Eisenstein, then, montage was effectively synonymous with creativity itself, and it is important to recognise that the breadth of this claim extends to the practice of formulating jokes and riddles.  According to him, in all cases where we have to deal with the juxtaposition of ‘two facts, two phenomena, two objects’ the montage principle is involved.

We are accustomed to make, almost automatically, a definite and obvious deductive generalisation when any separate objects are placed before us side by side.  For example, take a grave, juxtaposed with a woman in mourning weeping beside it, and scarcely anybody will fail to jump to the conclusion: a widow.[4]

Eisenstein then cites the following example from Ambrose Bierce:

            A woman in widow’s weeds was weeping upon a grave.

            ‘Console yourself, madam,’ said a Sympathetic Stranger.  ‘Heaven’s mercies are infinite.  There is another man somewhere, besides your husband, with whom you can still be happy.’

            ‘There was,’ she sobbed - ‘there was, but this is his grave.’[5]

As Eisenstein explains,

The whole effect of this is built upon the circumstance that the grave and the woman in mourning beside it lead to the inference, from established convention, that she is a widow mourning for her husband, whereas in fact the man for whom she is weeping is her lover.[6]

Eisenstein also draws attention to a related impulse: a ‘tendency to bring together into a unity two or more independent objects or qualities.’[7]  As a textual illustration of this, he draws attention to Lewis Carroll’s explanation of the invention of the portemanteau word; the following is given in his introduction to The Hunting of the Snark:

For instance, take the two words ‘fuming’ and ‘furious’.  Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first.  Now open your mouth and speak.  If your thoughts incline ever so little towards ‘fuming’, you will say ‘fuming-furious’; if they turn, by even a hair’s breadth, towards ‘furious’, you will say, ‘furious-fuming’; but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say ‘frumious’.[8]

In Eisenstein’s view, the comic effect here is generated by our capacity to hold in the mind both the two sources and their fusion into the new form.  But he also wants to claim that there is a matter of degree to this effect.  In order to explain how the same principle operating within comedy may operate at a more profound level when one considers great works of art he cites the contemporary gestalt psychologist, Kurt Koffka:

It has been said: the whole is more than the sum of its parts.  It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.[9]

 Examples of Eisenstein film-stills:-

To sum up (!), the method of montage, whether constructed from visual images, textual fragments, musical phrases, or movement motifs appears to rely on simple juxtaposition.  At its simplest, two terms at either end of a range within a particular discourse system are placed side by side.  However, our previous discussion of metaphor should alert us to the fact that we may not find an equality of representational place or significance, and that the notion of a single 'range' may be misleading or unhelpful.  Instead, we would anticipate seeing one element acting as the tenor, and the other as the vehicle.  Consider the case of a humorous card from the Sixties.  The familiar Julie Andrews figure is seen running joyfully over the crest of a hill (The Sound of Music had just been released) - this figure of ecstatic happiness, and the 'world' associated with it, is contrasted by a dark cloud in the background, billowing in the emblematic shape of a mushroom cloud.

But what if there really is only one of the two elements presented?  Ed Ruscha's 'INFERNO' provides an intriguing example: if the two components are taken to be Heaven and Hell, his use of white and blue to present the word contrasts with our expectations of what should be associated with Hell - red, and fiery orange.  So although the one word associated with one context is represented, the manner of its presentation introduces the normal connotations of its opposite: Heaven and its pristine skies.  John Heartfield’s un-montaged photographs mentioned in Part Two further illustrate this situation.

Typically, however, montage employs/evokes more than one discourse system in the ways in which we have already discussed (and the same was true of Eisenstein); so, in understanding the media world in which we are immersed, we need to attend to instances where selected terms from separate discourses are placed alongside each other so as to produce a juxtaposition - sometimes characterised as a ‘short-circuit of meaning’.  In effective montage it is this short-circuiting that produces the new perception of what was previously thought to be well understood - and often within the whole of the Humanities, as well as in Science, this change to familiar perceptions is brought about for a critical purpose.  A relatively ineffective - and therefore more typical - example of this was a newspaper photograph of a scene inside an operating theatre in which the background had been removed - to be replaced by sections of newspaper reports detailing the failings of the Bristol Hospital trust in curbing the work of their paediatric surgeon; there had been an exceptionally high rate of infant deaths.  Not only was the scene within the operating theatre rather low-key by our contemporary standards (E. R., House, Silent Witness, and even Scrubs and The Green Wing) but the combination of fragmented text messages in the background tends to act as a succinct reminder of the case, rather than a directly critical commentary.  (Apart from Mary Midgley's book on The Myths we Live By, and also her Science and Poetry, you may find this link useful as an introduction to a theory of metaphor shift taking place in science, developed by Thomas Kuhn.)

To see a double discourse montage operating at a more powerful level, consider any of the Dr. Bernado’s advertisements from the last ten years.  Here the normal trajectory of human maturity - the 'tenor' used in a particularly notorious one was a baby of about 18 months - is juxtaposed to 'vehicles' - signifiers of adult human action - in this case the associated practices of drug injection.  It also worth noticing the additional 'charge' that has always been a feature of Bernado's advertising: the use of photography.  Although we suspect that the image is manufactured, its photographic nature conveys a guarantee of reality being represented: and it becomes as though a real situation is 'speaking' in evidence to support the claims of the Dr. Bernado Institute.

PART TWO

Photo-montage, or more correctly, photo-collage, featured in experiments by some of the earliest photographers.  Plagued by the uncertainties of early production, particularly the control of light and dark within the image, they often resorted to cutting out a component from one photograph, such as a cloudy sky or a mountain, and sticking it onto another so as to produce a new, and more balanced image.  Later, as development processes became more predictable, the use of photo-composites became common.  In these, multiple photographs were combined to produce complex images often carrying a moral message - see, for instance, Oskar Reijlander’s ‘Two Ways of Life’, a copy of which was owned by Queen Victoria.  By re-photographing the pasted image and working on the print during development, photographers could disguise the ‘joins’ and produce pictures that vied with the work of the society painters of the time.  A more widespread commercial application of this technique was in the production of humorous cartes de visite used by members of the middle-classes effecting a more raffish style.  Typically, a portrait photograph was used as a source for a cut-out head, and this was then either applied to a much smaller body drawn in cartoon style, or stuck onto another photograph (often not the same person, and sometimes not the same sex) in which the body was seen at a greater distance - achieving the same effect.  These photo-collages were then re-photographed so that multiple prints could be taken from the new negative.

A parallel development that should be noted in relation to the convention of montage was the widespread commercial and domestic use of the Magic Lantern (an early form of projector) that carried on in late Nineteenth Century domestic settings the entertainments that had featured in the much earlier phantasmagorias (son et lumiere, light shows, mobile dioramas, and specifically the presentation of ghosts and the vanishing of individuals) - public spectacles intended to both fascinate the educated and terrify the naive.  The dramatic qualities of these presentations were usually brought about by simple mechanics and manipulations of mirrors and semi-transparent surfaces and fabrics.  With the magic lantern, the use of a doubled lens system enabled fades and dissolves to be made from one image to another, and for the more striking effects a single image would be suddenly transformed by the sudden imposition or removal of a glass component, e.g. an image of the back of what appeared to be a young woman, her head partially covered by a shawl, would be transformed into a frontal view of a cadaverous hag.  (This was achieved simply by substituting this section of the slide by an equivalent portion painted upon the same rotating section of glass.)

During the Twenties and Thirties, while film producers such as Eisenstein experimented with the application of montage ideas within film, photographers developed the techniques in relation to the still image.  Photo-montage was widely employed by artists wanting to offer depictions of new and changing forms of perception.  In many cases these artistic images were what we have called photo-collages, making no attempt to disguise their fabricated nature and usually showing little interest at the time in re-photographing the image with a view to mass production.  (A fate which they have often been subjected to in the last thirty years as the commercialisation of the art market has gathered pace.)  However, alongside this ‘artistic’ use of photo-collage there was growing interest in using the technique for critical purposes, and here the photographic nature of the final images conferred the possibility of wide dissemination in magazines and public exhibitions.  (It will be found generally useful to restrict the use of the term photomontage to this form of  application i.e. photo-collages that are re-photographed with the intention of producing multiple prints.)  For those on the intellectual and political Left photomontage was particularly attractive because of its industrialised production - an act of manufacture, a transformation of basic materials (but see below).

In the USSR, photomontage became one of the war-horses of revolutionary art - an art placed firmly in the service of the Party - a form of propaganda through pictures.  Gustav Klucis, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and the Stenberg brothers were all prominent as ‘photomonteurs’ during the early Twenties.  Obeying the Party’s injunctions to make essential political messages easily accessible to even semi-literate workers, these artists found in the construction of these ‘machines for generating meaning’ a substitute for traditional drawing and painting that was more in tune with the times, a way in which they could convey the essential characteristics of Marxist-Leninist, later Stalinist, industrial culture.  In Germany as well, those on the political Left were concerned to achieve the enlightenment of a mass public[10].  Principal amongst the artists involved in this work was John Heartfield.  The historical record of the Twenties and Thirties makes it abundantly clear that his photomontages were experienced as extraordinary.  The form of reception for Heartfield’s photomontages was most typically as a reader of a mass-circulation magazine, principally AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung).  To a lesser extent, viewers of Heartfield’s photomontages would also be potential purchasers of left-wing books, principally those produced by Malik-Verlag - his dust-jackets being frequently singled out as major contributors to the success of the company’s publishing ventures.

(Google Images will be used to illustrate this section.)

Alfred Kemenyi, writing in 1932 from the perspective of a committed communist, provides a useful journalistic account of what he believed were the principal characteristics of Heartfield’s photomontages[11].  Starting with a description of photomontage that he considers bourgeois - he cites a ‘well-known art critic’:

            Montage means that the artist and the craftsman are replaced by the engineer.  Pieces of photographs are pasted together the way parts of machines are joined together with screws.’[12]

Kemenyi insists that this analogy is false and that what is produced is a work of art, not a machine; and because of this it offers various forms of purchase within ‘social reality’.

            ... A work of art that offers completely new opportunities - with regard to content, not just form - for uncovering relationships, oppositions, transitions, and intersections of social reality.  Only when the photomonteur makes use of these opportunities does his photomontage became a truly revolutionary weapon in the class struggle.[13]

Was Komenyi right?  Consider the following.  Heartfield carried out early work with Kurt Tucholsky on the photographic illustrations for Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, published in 1929[14].  The majority of these images are not montaged, occasionally they are presented with little or no accompanying text, and often they are employed in extended photo-narratives.  Surprisingly, what emerges is that the generic principle of montage – its capacity to ‘disrupt convention’  – survives.  Two examples will be considered here: a small photograph of an inverted crown appended at the end of the contents list, and a text and photographic combination entitled ‘Camouflage’.[15]

In the case of the photograph of the crown, all the familiar explanations of montage press in upon one immediately.  We are presented with a ‘shocking’ image of an inverted crown lying amongst rubbish.  Anyone looking at the image would be aware that this was neither the conventional context of a crown - understood as a metonym for royalty - nor its conventional location, the right way up on the head of a monarch.  For a German reader at the time, the recent abdication of the Kaiser would have been an easy additional contextualisation, and its placement in the text - at the end of a contents list full of items criticising the condition of the German state - would have made it doubly appropriate.  The image of the inverted crown, in association with its textual location, takes on the potential to act as a visual metaphor carrying the extended implication of a disorganised and ill-disposed body politic.

The second example is more complicated.  This is presented on a single page entitled ‘Camouflage’, and shows an illustration of two German soldiers manning a machine-gun covered by a camouflage net.  It appears from the picture that the soldiers are aiming at the reader.  Beneath the image is the following text and lay-out:

            The German army’s newest protective

            device makes machine-gun divisions almost

            invisible.

                        This net is not a net.  It’s an allegory.’[16]

As before, the image is not montaged and it appears on first sight to simply offer an effective illustration of the piece’s title.  It is only in the last line of text that the reader gets snagged by the unexpected nature of the message: ‘This net is not a net.’  A further difficulty follows; we are told that the net alone is an allegory, rather than the entire image.  Unlike the typical allegorical compositions that a reader might be familiar with there is nothing - apart from the net itself - from which to construct new meaning.  However, the general meaning of allegory - a description of a subject provided under the guise of some other subject that is literally represented - offers a way out.  The text encourages the reader to take the net as a pretext for starting a search for a second reading that will identify a new subject - and one does not have to look far.

Rather than serving as a familiar and cheap means to contain a living (or irregularly shaped) object, the net in the picture serves to disguise the existence of the soldiers and their machine-gun.  The text title now takes on reinforced meaning.  Instead of the net being an unexceptional and simple piece of military equipment, it now becomes a euphemism for disguised power itself.  Further reflection provides an extended reading of the picture in which all the features of the image take on a second, allegorical meaning.  The soldiers become emblematic of the army, the machine-gun of the armies destructive power.  The camouflage net now becomes emblematic of strategies of disguise in general, and the total allegory provides both a reminder that the state has learnt how to disguise its might, and a warning that it may operate unexpectedly and with violence.  In other words, we have been brought to view the relatively conventional as exceptional and, in this case, as threatening.

As a vindication of montage’s efficacy this seems a very useful example.  The decision to intrigue the reader through the unexpected nature of the image’s description makes it much more likely that he or she would become engaged in the active pursuit of new meaning and, through this investment of effort, reap a much greater reward in terms of increased understanding - once the second reading was obtained.  The text form therefore works so as to increase the likelihood that the reader will construct broad implications around the image.  Instead of it being merely an illustration of two soldiers under a camouflage net, it becomes a reminder of the state’s power to deploy force, and one that is the more memorable for having been constructed by the reader him/herself; a truly educational ideal for any would-be metaphor constructor.

We end this review of Heartfield’s work by considering an image that Kemenyi identifies, ‘The Tiger.’[17]  This presents a portrait picture of a bureaucrat – signified by suit, tie, and high formal collar, with a face darkened so that it merges with the background and is almost entirely obliterated by the superimposition of a tiger’s head with open jaws.  Additional details, such as the swastika on the tie knot, and paw-like prints on the tie that can also be read as skulls add to the overall impression, as does the dark background.  This works to both emphasise the whiteness of the shirt while also making the tiger appear to emerge from the surrounding gloom.  The title – in English, ‘The Crisis Party Congress of the SPD’ is supplemented beneath the image by fairly extensive text.  In a small font size, immediately beneath the picture, there is the quote: ‘Social democracy does not want the collapse of capitalism.  Like a doctor it wants to heal and improve it.’ Attributed to Fritz Tarnow, chairman of the Woodworkers Federation.  Beneath this, but in a larger font, there is, ‘The veterinarian of Leipzig: ‘Of course we shall draw the teeth of the tiger, but first we must feed him and nurse him back to health.’[18]

Some contextual information gives added pungency of what is already a striking image[19].  The erosion of bourgeois parliamentary democracy within Weimar Germany had already begun by 1930.  Following the Wall St. Crash of 1929, existing protectionist economic policies throughout the Western economies were strengthened and new ones introduced: Germany’s newly emergent economic growth faltered.  German exports dwindled and foreign loans were not renewed.  In the elections of 1930, the NSDAP (proto-Nazi) gained 6.4 million votes: prior to that, in 1928, they had only managed to gain 800,000 out of the 30.7 million votes cast.  In the intervening two years a world economic crisis had caused extensive destruction within the social fabric of Weimar - particularly amongst the working class.  In this situation, the NSDAP worked to present itself as a revolutionary organisation intent, above all else, on meeting the needs of the proletariat.  Eckhard Siepmann, in an article on Heartfield, quotes the following unemployment figures: 1928 - 10%, 1929 - 15%, 1930 - 23%, 1931 - the year of Heartfield’s photomontage, 35%, and 1932 - the year of Kemenyi’s article, 45% representing some seven million workers.  Siepmann concludes,

          If the number of workers on short time is added, we find that in 1932 only every third German worker was fully employed.  In 1932, only 14 out of a hundred unemployed still received unemployment benefits; the real wages of those in employment fell by more than a third during the crisis.[20] 

Returning, then, to Heartfield’s photomontage, the prominent placing of the swastika on the capitalist’s tie, together with the ambiguous suggestion of the Death’s Head motif on the tie itself, becomes a visual reminder of the alliance that had been forged between the NSDAP and the Nationalists, allowing the fascists to gain  increased credibility with representatives of Germany’s industrial and financial interests.  For the left-wing SPD party there could only be embarrassment: too great a move to the left would place it alongside the Communists and against capitalism and the state; too great a move to the right would lead it to contest the ground being taken up by the NSDAP.  The literal citation from Fritz Tarnow’s address gives symptomatic evidence of the painful ambiguities of this situation, while the second quote from his speech - now attributed to the ‘veterinarian of Leipzig’ and printed in bolder text - gives the pretext for the photomontage itself.  Far from this ‘tiger’ looking as though it is in need of nourishment, it appears instead to be already enjoying rude and robust health!  This is a capitalist for whom any amount of control will never suppress his true ‘nature’, one fully implicated in the economic and political functionings of the state and whose survival can only be on the terms of a predator-prey relationship.  Heartfield has effectively undermined the reasonableness of Tarnow’s claims on behalf of the embattled SPD.

It is worth stressing again how pertinent this image is, and also how effective it was in condensing out the essentials of what was a difficult political situation.  The political reality of the time was that only by uniting with the SPD could the KPD (the German communist party, actively supported by Heartfield) have any hope of stemming the political and economic tide flowing in Hitler’s favour.  For this to be a realistic proposition some common ground on how best to re-organise the economic consequences of Germany’s position had to be established.  For the SPD to seriously suggest that progress could be made by adopting policies favouring capitalistic organisations (and the individuals involved in their maintenance) was tantamount to saying that the consequences of capitalism itself could be controlled and that its agents could be brought to manipulate the system so as to reverse the consequences of all their previous work.  Both propositions were patently false.  Germany was at the mercy of global economics and its remaining capitalists seemed ever more inclined to run to Hitler for support so that they could continue to do what they knew best.

PART THREE 

(In this section, the work of the German inter-war critic, Walter Benjamin, is featured.  He is chosen because he exemplifies particularly clearly an explicit engagement with philosophy, education, and the montage principle.  And, with respect to the last, he introduces several new metaphors to describe the operation of metaphor.)

Looking at examples of montage from the Thirties in Germany, Russia, and France is instructive, but the political, industrial, and ideological context that made these images so pertinent at the time is not our own.  These forces continue to dominate our lives, but they have each been so transformed over the last seventy years that the medium itself requires some interrogation.  It is, for instance, far from certain that montage in its contemporary incarnation - digital image manipulation - is still the powerful political tool it once was.  However, for us working within the framework of an Education Studies course, this is not perhaps the most crucial question to ask.  Of more immediate interest is finding an answer to the following question: ‘Can montage be used to represent an experiential world in such a way that it also provides the coherence of vision necessary for philosophical and educational reflection?’

There is no easy answer to this, but the example of Walter Benjamin suggests that the answer should be in the affirmative.  In particular, we owe to Benjamin the identification of a constructive principle within montage practice, and this can be placed alongside the more familiar disruptive and critical one.  When Benjamin praised montage as progressive because it disrupted the context into which it was inserted, he was referring to its destructive, critical dimension - its capacity to disrupt familiar understandings.  But when he spoke of its constructive potential, he was drawing attention to his own hope of designing a modern philosophical structure of experience that could be entirely articulated by troubling and evocative fragments of Nineteenth Century culture, i.e., his contemporary world (Germany in the Thirties) was to be the tenor, and these fragments would be the vehicles by which he moved his readers to new vantage points from which they could re-view their own reality. 

Benjamin was interested in many things, but one recurring theme in his writing was the relationship of the past to the present. And, if all history writing is considered as a form of rhetoric, then Benjamin was advocating the use of the most advanced rhetorical techniques that were available at the time.  He eschewed most history writing because he considered it to be both a narrative of the victors (disguising the violence wrought upon the vanquished and effectively silencing them) and far too concerned with interpretation, justification, and 'explanation' of the past to realise the educational value of the fragmentary 'vehicles' that remained.  In opposition to this, he considered the method of montage as a technique that would allow him to employ fragments of the past in a way that, at least momentarily, allowed them to 'live again' in the present.  Essentially, the technique was to juxtapose these fragments against contemporary settings that were well understood and easily recognised, but this process of juxtaposition was far from a simple pasting of the old alongside the new - for Benjamin the fragments themselves required further treatment, and as you should anticipate by now, arriving at a judicious balance between the representation of the tenor, and that of his intended vehicle or vehicles (see below).  

Benjamin's Passagen-Werk - a major unfinished study - deals with the Paris arcades of the early Nineteenth Century as a site in which the beginnings of contemporary commodity culture can be examined and from which the ensuing century of capitalistic  'progress'  can be critiqued.  In this study, economic facts are not presented as abstract causal factors, but as originating phenomena (situations, events, relationships, and, principally, artefacts) that open up fields of possibility that are explored and expressed through later forms of manufacture, distribution, and consumption.  An analogy might be made with the evolution of the leaf design of all plants: once this had evolved, the ensuing variety of the plant world that we now see becomes a kind of natural exploration of the possibilities inherent in this biological form.  Benjamin's understanding of montage itself as a rhetorical form entailed that it too was already visible in the early arcades, in the kaleidoscopic, fortuitous juxtaposition of shop sign and window displays.  Only later, during the course of the century's involvement with technology, did it become a conscious principle of construction in architecture and in other media.  (The kaleidoscope was itself an invention of the Nineteenth century, but it was preceded by the Chinese Puzzle which, because its juxtaposed elements which were not randomly arranged but cohered around a central idea, was the true, originating phenomenon of the principle of montage as a constructive principle (according to Benjamin).)

The technical potential of this new principle of meaning construction came to fruition at the end of the century with the building of the Eiffel Tower, in Benjamin’s view the earliest architectural form of the montage principle; this example is very telling.  For Benjamin, the Eiffel Tower embodied an 'extraordinary tension of intellectual energy', created by the fusion of the inorganic material (steel) and extremely small, extremely effective forms (the typical triangles of its lattice construction).  Benjamin therefore draws attention to the fabrication of large constructions out of the smallest architectural segments that have been sharply and cunningly manufactured.  Note here that it is not so much the juxtaposition of dissimilar entities that confers a 'montage' quality.  Rather, it is the use of individually small but related 'fragments' (triangular forms) that is so suggestive to him.  Given Benjamin’s historical interest, his equivalent of this method would require some treatment of the historical fragments so that they too might be ‘sharply and cunningly manufactured.  But despite the uncertainties of this, his intent is clear: to discover what might serve as the 'crystal' of the total event in the analysis of the small, particular moments of the past.

The task of the Passagen-werk was to implement both the critical dimension of montage with which we are familiar, and the constructive project sketched above.  In Benjamin's view, this montage construction was the only form in which modern philosophy could be 'erected'.  ( His attitude to philosophy might be summed up by Henri Lefebvre’s aphorism: death to philosophy - long live philosophical thinking!)  Benjamin’s task was, in the first instance, to discover moments from the past, but since these were typically embedded within contemporary texts and practices, this inevitably involved a stripping out so that the ‘dead’ fragment could be removed from the matrix of interpretation and understanding within which it conventionally appeared.  Having rescued the fragment from its present 'wrapping', it now had to be prepared for taking on its role as a montage 'seed-crystal' that could be ‘dropped’ into the mind of the reader.  Benjamin’s interest in reader-response theory entailed that he was envisaging the mind of his readers as equivalent to the super-saturated chemical solutions that typically feature in any demonstration of the process of rapid crystallisation - but for chemical solution we should think instead of our 'saturation' in our own present experience that is both familiar and unfinished.  Benjamin's hope was that once the ‘seed-crystal’ was recognised, it would trigger the ‘crystallisation’ of the whole of the reader’s experience.  He or she would gain a new apprehension of their contemporary reality, now seen as limiting and even destructive of human possibility.  The reader would now live in a reality set ablaze by this ‘ember’ from the past (to introduce a further metaphor for metaphor's action).

Benjamin was well aware of the dangers of this process: that it could lead to the production of abstract, generalised ‘ideal symbols’ because of their disconnection from the details of the particular moments making up a life.  Indeed, his fear was that they might be simply classified as the 'sentimental'’ building blocks of his philosophical and educational project.  But in his view, the modern philosophical task was a very different one: to provide a conceptual framework that could be entirely expressed through an organisation of 'concrete' fragments - images - of the past.  Referring to the Eiffel Tower analogy, modern philosophy was to be equivalent to the plan of its structure.  Although our recognition of the tower might be dominated by the multiplicities of its lattice steel construction, it was philosophy (the plan/design) that provided the coherence of the structure as a whole and made its construction both possible and intelligible.

If Benjamin’s constructive interest in montage was that of a philosophical educator, how was this to operate?  His ideas changed over time, but uniting them all was a desire to make visible the jagged lines separating, on the one hand, technological progress and the necessities of life within commodity culture, and on the other, the possibilities of human meaning and experience.  Although Benjamin saw the development of capitalism as essentially destructive of the richness of experience in pre-industrial cultures, he did not conclude that a reconstructed society must be built on these traditional lines.  He recognised that there was no possibility of turning back.  Instead, the latest means of production  and communication were to be harnessed for revolutionary purposes - and revolution here was, first and foremost, a revolution in perception.  (Benjamin was very pessimistic about the ability of ‘physical’ revolutions to effect the changes he sought - he had been to post-Revolutionary Moscow and had left it deeply depressed.)

Benjamin’s ideas about the structure of his modern educational philosophy were particularly influenced by an early work on the German ‘mourning plays’ of the Sixteenth Century.  An essential characteristic of these baroque plays was their extended use of verbal and visual imagery.  Images were piled one upon another without regard for disparities of size and discontinuities in kind in order to construct allegorical meanings.  Natural images - a dog, a stone, a cypress tree - were deployed as emblematic representations of ideas: the dog of faithfulness, the stone of resistance, and the cypress tree as a symbol of mourning.  In Benjamin’s fragments for the Passagen-Werk, images of the city, of its commodities, and of its inhabitants such as the collector, the detective, and the fraudster were to function in similar ways.  (It is probably worth noting here that Benjamin wrote extensively on Baudelaire, was familiar with the Surrealist’s interest in the city as experience, e.g. Breton’s Nadja, and was influenced by Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris.)

An early experiment in this way of presenting philosophy can be seen in his montage book, One-Way Street.  Here a filling station depicts the practical role of the intellectual, the breakfast room becomes a symbol for the separation between dreaming and practical life, and gloves become the emblem for modern humanity’s relationship to its own animality.  The adoption of this allegorical mode allowed Benjamin to make visible - almost palpable - the experience of a world in fragments, in which the passing of time meant, not progress, but the stasis of the natural forces that could lead to expansion and coherence within human experience.  And, if this petrified nature (the unchanging nature of commodity culture) and its decaying objects (past commodity forms, such as the arcades) could provide an adequate source of imagery for his allegories, the imagery that could show matter in a redeeming light was organic nature itself, active and alive, and for that reason unalterably transient.

The following summary by Sigrid Weigel suggests both the uniqueness of Benjamin’s conception, and its significance for further methodological work.  It touches directly on an examination of Benjamin’s ‘thinking in images’ (Bilddenken).

            One of the central constellations he (Benjamin) refers to ... is that of awakening, which he calls the textbook example of dialectical thinking - the threshold between night and day, the transition between the dream and wakening consciousness.  It is a constellation organised in a highly complex manner - in topographical terms as a transition, in psychological terms as a threshold, in temporal terms as the ‘Now of cognizability’, and in historical terms as the superimposition of the has-been and the present moment - and one that seems pre-eminently suited to presenting a dialectical movement at a moment of standstill for contemplation and cognition, as a dialectical image.[21]

As Weigel goes on to indicate, it is clear that Benjamin regarded his dialectical images in terms of their property as writing, rather than as visual representations.  Rather than linking images to their material history, or to their capacity to feature as ‘mental images’ in a derivative or secondary manner, his concern was to go ‘back to a tradition of the image which precedes that of pictorial representation and which ‘sees the literal sense of the word image as a resolutely non- or even anti-pictorial notion.’’[22]  Benjamin’s writing on the need for the creation of a new public ‘image sphere’, his interest in the thinking of children – their ready access to fantasy and enactment – all indicate the seriousness that he attached to the notion of ‘thinking in images’.  However, this was not a call for a return to ‘primitive’ ways of thinking.  Instead we should understand that what was, at least in part, intended was regard for the way that certain images (however produced) had the capacity to emblematise actualities – material circumstances understood socially.

From this perspective, the example of ‘Camouflage’ in Part Two suggests a means by which new forms of imagery, generated initially as public ‘utterances’, may become available for incorporation as personal imagery.  The involvement of the reader/viewer in the process of generating meaning provides a mechanism by which the imagery has a greater likelihood of becoming ‘personalised’; and this is not the same thing as saying that it is ‘memorable’ or even ‘shocking’.  Only when the allegory is adjusted so as to emblematise aspects of self-representation can it be said to have reached the point at which Benjamin’s ‘third meaning’ can be articulated[23].  Assuming that a reader got this far, perhaps by reference to previous experience in the Great War, perhaps through direct experience of later forms of civil action and suppression during the initial Weimar years, it now became possible to ‘read’ these experiences ‘through’ the image[24].  In other words, past and current experience were illuminated: the image conferred significance and order on multifarious experience and in so doing generated for the reader/viewer a sense of insight into the real.

Consider also ‘The Tiger’ in Part Two.  To reduce the potential of the reader’s face to face encounter to a telling joke about the pretensions of the SPD certainly introduces the idea of it providing a succinct form of legibility for what was an extremely ambiguous political situation.  However, to see this joke as being at one’s own expense - introduced by use of the portrait format - is more disturbing - and a more interactive experience.  It is not simply that we are seeing the capitalist for what he really is; in seeing him we are also seeing ourselves and our familiar ways of seeing - perhaps equally savage to the degree that we accept identification with his aspirations and his concerns, perhaps more obviously a ‘hunted’ animal than we care to admit if we do not.  As before the image takes on the potential to act as a frame of organisation - in Benjamin’s terms it provides a new sheet of paper upon which the re-reading and re-writing of our experience can begin.  However, Benjamin’s descriptive term was the ‘dialectical image’ - what force should be given to this dialectic here?  At least part of the answer comes from his reference to awakening, which he calls the textbook example of dialectical thinking - the threshold between night and day, the transition between the dream and wakening consciousness.  In relation to the ‘Tiger’, the carnivalesque element (seeing someone typically identified by one set of associations wearing the head of an animal typically associated with others) ceases to be ‘just a joke’ and instead takes on an aspect of a waking dream.  The tiger, denizen of a dream jungle that is our present reality, suddenly appears caught in the harsh light of consciousness.  This mythic personification of capitalism imports a timeless quality to the representation - the future will be like the past - and therefore introduces a terrifying urgency to the process of ‘waking up’.  Heartfield’s photomontage offers extraordinarily precise educational material - for those who are prepared to look and think.

Arguably, then, Heartfield has in this photomontage achieved something approaching Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image.  But there are important qualifications to to be made here.  The dialectical component consists not so much in the figure of the tiger-capitalist, as in the combination of this with textual citation.  The indexical claims of the text serve to anchor the photomontage within a present reality, while the tiger-capitalist serves as an ironic visual commentary on the textual complacencies of the SPD speaker.  The figure gains intelligibility from its use of  commonly available signifiers - the tiger and the greedy capitalist - while the photomontage itself surprises through its capacity to turn the resulting visual metaphor into a literal illustration - by making concrete what the text states to be the case.  To describe this combination as satirical - implying that the image is principally constructed to mock these pretensions - pushes into the shade its educational impact: a critique of everyday political realities in Weimar.