Comments on Manovich - 10/12/10

Montage v. the aesthetics of continuity.  I am interested in Manovich’s description of the transition from montage to the “aesthetics of continuity.”  He writes, “Montage aims to create visual, stylistic, semantic, and emotional dissonance between different elements.  In contrast, compositing aims to blend them into a seamless whole, a single gestalt.” (144)  He describes Vertov as “the pioneer of the ideological montage,” and mentions how the Russian montage school “pushes such discontinuities to the extreme.” (144)  I enjoy Vertov’s bold and obvious cinematic experiments and his strange juxtapositions.  He makes no effort to hide his combinations, but rather glories in them.   I also like the visible “choppiness” and rough edges of the montages of Hoch, Lissitzky, Heartfield, artists cited by Manovich.  I like seeing the “tracks” artists leave when they’re combining disparate artistic media.  On the other hand, it makes sense that a natural progression from these motifs would be to “erase the lines” and rough edges arising from such combinations.  It is arguably more aesthetically pleasing to present a “seamless” whole.    

Distance and Aura and Two-Way Communication.  Manovich also writes of how electronic telecommunication functions as two-way communication, enabling users to be “present” and to “teleact” in remote locations.  (174) It seems to me that Manovich is ambivalent about the costs and benefits of this ability to “touch objects over distance.”  He writes of how Walter Benjamin, a painter writing in the 1930’s, worried that the new technologies of his time, particularly photography and film, would result in a lack of respect for “distance”  and lead to a lack of appreciation for the scale and unique locations of objects, i.e., their “aura.”  (172)  Manovich also describes how Paul Virilio, writing in 1992, viewed with alarm the ability of telecommunication and telepresence to collapse distance.  He writes that Virilio “mourns the destruction of distance, geographic grandeur, the vastness of natural space, the vastness that guaranteed time delay between events and our reactions, giving us time for critical reflection necessary to arrive at a correct decision.” (173)

I think I would have expected Manovich to aggressively counter Virilio, but Manovich’s response, at least as I understand it, is more nuanced.  Rather than voicing unqualified support for the new technologies’ new teleactive powers, he launches into a discussion of how, in Western thought, vision has always been understood and discussed in opposition to touch and that therefore “the denigration of vision” inevitably leads to the elevation of touch.  (175) He writes that “real-time image instruments literally allow us to touch objects over distance, thus making possible their easy destruction as well.”  (175)  Earlier, he cites both positive and negative uses of this power, including the power to “repair a space station, do an underwater excavation, operate on a patient, or kill – all from a distance.”  (169) His inclusion in both cases of the destructive powers inherent in this technology indicate that he harbors at least some concern about its capabilities.