MOUNTING
THINK BY MOUNTINGS
Aby Warburg was a German art historian who always dialogued with other fields and sought out what was hidden or was discarded by other historians and, thus, resorted to montage as a “form of knowledge” and as an “image of thought”. His visual atlas was composed of heterogeneous images, of the most diverse, that could be interchanged, being assembled, disassembled and reassembled according to the progress of his studies and without following a deductive and linear argumentative style.
This montage thinking proposes an open form of procedural knowledge, constructed by the practice itself. It admits knowledge through relationships, associations, shocks or tensions between images, and unexpected relationships can emerge and cause a series of displacements, inversions, ruptures, discontinuities and anachronisms.
“Warburg’s focus would be less on each image itself and more on the interval between them, on the void between the images, on their possible relationships, not established a priori, but which emerge in the very exercise of montage.” [1]
Due to the hybrid and multiple character of every montage, a fixed final result is not important, it is the very renunciation of fixing. It is a way of thinking in movement and in permanent transformation, which refuses any conclusive synthesis, assuming incompleteness as a principle.
It is also a process of temporal mixing of different narratives, a critical procedure that acts through its multiplicity, through the juxtaposition of distinct fragments that compose a complex game of forces between past, present and also proposals for the future. This coexistence of different times is evident in the materiality of the city itself and can emerge in the present causing a shock.
“Thinking through montages, as Didi-Huberman says in the epigraph of this text, would be to make 'visible survivals, anachronisms, the encounters of contradictory temporalities that affect each object, each event, each person, each gesture'. Thinking through montages in the field of the history of urban thought would also be thinking about montages of heterogeneous times, 'in the counterdance of chronologies and anachronisms', stressing the different urban narratives of its most diverse narrators, builders and practitioners of cities, from different times. It would also be to use rags and residues, both narrative and urban fragments, as tensioners of homogeneities, totalities and hegemonic shares, learning from urban heterochronies, already and still present – survivors, materially or not, even if sometimes erased, silenced or forgotten. – in any city.” [1]
RHIZOME
Continuing the counterpoint to the linear and chronological thinking model, we have the rhizome , defined and discussed by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This, like montages, does not close in on itself, it is like a map that spreads out in all directions, opens and closes, builds and deconstructs, grows where there is space and possibilities. It could also be explained as assemblages , lines moving in various directions, escaping around corners, crossing and overtaking each other at different intensities. These lines can also be broken at any point and from this break open multiple paths and lines of action: circuits, conjunctions, passages, superpositions, etc.
“An assemblage is precisely this growth of dimensions in a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it increases its connections.” [two]
“Perhaps the Cartesian and arboreal method responds well to some problems, but it is enough to leave the room to notice the different life lines crossing each other incessantly, disrespecting all methods. We can no longer bet all our resources on compartmentalized thinking. Philosophy has never been a box of determined knowledge, on the contrary, it is a mixture of all of them. The connections multiply, so the intensity too. (...) If desire is an intensive line, then life is much better represented in the rhizome: a fabric made of multiple heterogeneous and disruptive encounters.” [3]
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES
JACQUES, PB Think by assemblies . In: JACQUES, PB, and PEREIRA, MS, comps. thought nebulae urban planning: volume I – modes in think [online]. Savior: EDUFBA, 2018, pp. 206-234. ISBN 978-85-232-2032-7. https://doi.org/10.7476/9788523220327.0009.
DELEUZE, Gilles and GUATTARI, Félix. 1995-1997. Thousand Plateaus . Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Rio de Janeiro: Publisher 34. 715 pp.
LAURO, Raphael. Deleuze and Guattari – Rhizome . Inadequate Reason, 2013. Available at: https://razaoinadequada.com/2013/09/21/deleuze-rizoma/. Accessed in: August. 2021.
PELBART, Peter Pal. Temporal Rhizome / Peter Pál Pelbart . – São Paulo: ECidade, 2020. 51 p.; Digital – (Other Words; v.5).