Thinking Things: Images of Thought and Thoughtful Images

Abstract

Soviet director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein famously asserted the possibilities of montage could theoretically extend well beyond film to encompass all art forms (36). French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has taken Eisenstein’s claim seriously, enigmatically proposing “[m]ontage is the art of producing this form that thinks” (Images 138). Didi-Huberman’s comments were in relation to a series of World War II archival photographs, but have evolved over the past decade to form an important cornerstone in his ongoing investigation into images. What, then, does it mean for an inanimate thing, an image, to think? My hypothesis here is that Didi-Huberman is entering into direct dialogue with Gilles Deleuze’s critique of the philosophical assumptions of what thinking is. This article will proceed in two sections. The first will examine Didi-Huberman’s claims in relation to recent shifts across the humanities that have sought to restore agency to images. The second section will examine Didi-Huberman’s response, arguing that he turns to some of the great experimental projects of the early twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin’s literary montage The Arcades Project (1927–1940) and Aby Warburg’s photographic collection Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929). The governing principles of montage, such as juxtaposition, the assemblage of heterogeneous parts, and emphasis on the spectator’s participation are well known. Perhaps, however, there is another way to speak of montage, when it is employed as a mode of knowledge. Didi-Huberman identifies the epistemological capacity of montage as a mechanism to free the image from the dogma of art-historical discourse. What is at stake here is a model of representation that is no longer imitative, but capable of generating its own theoretical and intellectual undertaking. By emphasising montage’s capacity to create new meaning and generate new lines of thought, the image becomes a theoretical object, a thing that “thinks.”