French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has enigmatically declared that "Montage is the art of producing this form that thinks." What does it mean for an image to think? The fundamental principles of montage, such as juxtaposition and shock are well known. Perhaps, however, there is another way to speak of montage, when it is deployed as a mode of knowledge. By claiming that images are capable of thinking, this essay argues that Didi-Huberman is taking up Gilles Deleuze’s proposal that cinema does not merely imitate or reflect philosophy, but produces its own philosophical project. For Deleuze, the challenge facing philosophy was to overcome the assumptions concerning what thinking is, a return to a ground zero of what representation can possibly be. Didi-Huberman’s arguments signal an alternative way of treating images beyond what Deleuze calls "representation," or thought based on resemblance, recognition and identity. To do this, Didi-Huberman retrieves montage from the historical avant-garde and explores its epistemological potential. By emphasising montage’s capacity to create new meaning and generate new lines of thought, images become theoretical objects, things that "think."
/ "As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture – above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things." /
Bill Brown, "Thing Theory", Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, Oct. 2001, pp. 1–22.
Thing theory, with which we’ll approach panels 15 through 17, concerns how people interact with objects. We will focus on how objects assert themselves as things: in the exceptions, by failing to work as expected, or by indicating something about their history and origin. Here, we see the nails, the sylladex, the fake arms, and the desk come to our notice.
For now, the failure of the nails, sylladex, and fake arms are the same: when placing the nails in the sylladex, the sylladex empties out the fake arms. There is a connection here, drawn between the cause (placing nails in the sylladex) and the effect (the sylladex ejecting the fake arms): circumstantial simultaneity, if you will. It is the sylladex shenanigans contained within Act 1 that define the system for the reader; it’s a satirical approach to the byzantine inventory management systems of some games, as well as to the unnecessarily confusing data structures of computer programming. At the same time, it suggests that John lives in a world of confusing systems he only really pretends to understand, and which reveal themselves to be unreliable when he tries to use them in intuitive ways. Whatever use John might expect to get out of the nails or the fake arms, he’s certainly not getting that use now; instead, he finds himself throwing up his arms in frustration.
[Image description: John stands in his bedroom with a frustrated look on his face- eyes closed, anime lines of frustration on his forehead. The captchalogue deck appears on the bottom of the screen; the hammer card is shown on top, but as the nail card is added, the fake arms spin out from the deck onto the floor. They land in front of the magic chest. John’s bed, with cake still atop it, sits in the background, as does the window, poster, and calendar.]
The desk, meanwhile, is an exception here. We see John motivated to use the desk- just not for its intended purpose. There will be more cases when John rejects the narrator’s commands. There was even one earlier where John rejected the suggested name, though that one was more ambiguous. Regardless, this marks a turning point. We see John struggle with the proper use of these things, and even with his own thoughts.
[Image description: A close-up of John’s head as he has his frustrated expression on- eyes closed, frustrated crease on his forehead- and his hands clutching the sides of his head. The animated image changes to show john staring out of the corner of his eyes at the desk, which has just appeared on the scene, sliding in from the right side of the screen.]
Finally, we watch as John combines the ‘hammer’ card and the ‘nails’ card into a ‘hammer/nails’ card; here, we the reader is alienated from the hammer and nails as things, as we see Homestuck applying video game logic to the use of these items. The objects have been de-familiarized to us, while John sees all this as normal. It’s not the only thing in his environment John sees as normal, that others might not. Again, the theme of alienation for John. We’ll revisit this one more quite a bit.
Things that remind of other things: Oil picture from walk yesterday
Cover of book about abalone, a large edible gastropod (shellfish with no legs, I think) that is becoming extinct, it’s illegal to farm them - new word (to me) in today’s crossword
Eric Bainbridge awesome collages - I’ve had a book of them from the library for ages now
