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Rethinking
Comparison in
Archaeology
Rethinking
Comparison in
Archaeology
Edited by

Ana Vale, Joana Alves-Ferreira

and Irene Garcia Rovira
Rethinking Comparison in Archaeology

Edited by Ana Vale, Joana Alves-Ferreira and Irene Garcia Rovira

This book first published 2017

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2017 by Ana Vale, Joana Alves-Ferreira, Irene Garcia Rovira

and contributors

Credits for the Front Cover Artwork:

Author/Copyright Holder: Joana Alves-Ferreira
Name of image: “Where is the Nymph”—Montage exercise on original
Polaroid’s taken at the archaeological site of Castanheiro do Vento
(Vila Nova de Foz Côa, Portugal) at the 2009 excavation season.

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7285-7

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7285-0
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE .................................................................................................... vii

CHAPTER I .................................................................................................... 1
Comparison as a Way to Travel in-between the Dis-Articulations
of the Past
Sérgio Gomes

CHAPTER II ................................................................................................ 13
The Art of “Endangering” Bodies: A First Movement on How to Read
What Was Never Written
Joana Alves-Ferreira

CHAPTER III ............................................................................................... 40

Looking Around Differently: Taking the Arts Seriously
Stephanie Koerner

CHAPTER IV ............................................................................................... 74
Comparing in Archaeology through a Quantitative Approach:
Dealing with Similarity and Dissimilarity Issues
Katia Francesca Achino, Stéphanie Duboscq, Berta Morell Rovira,
Joan Anton Barceló Álvarez and Juan Francisco Gibaja Bao

CHAPTER V ................................................................................................ 90
Comparing the Incomparable: The Chalcolithic Walled Enclosures
of the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond
Ana Vale

CHAPTER VI ............................................................................................. 108

Let’s Walk on the Wild Side! Comparing Sites in the Landscape
João C. Muralha Cardoso

CHAPTER VII............................................................................................ 129

Nothing Compares to You…. Comparison of Small Scale Sites
Andrew May
vi Table of Contents

CHAPTER VIII .......................................................................................... 138

Comparison as an Approach to Study Decontextualized Artefacts:
A Perspective about its Potentialities and Limits
Andreia Arezes

CHAPTER IX ............................................................................................. 157

Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Perception and Mediation
of Risk and the Collapse of Complex Societies
John Walden

CHAPTER X .............................................................................................. 179

Comparison
Vítor Oliveira Jorge

AFTERWORD............................................................................................. 191
Comparing Comparisons
Julian Thomas

CONTRIBUTORS ........................................................................................ 206

 PREFACE

This book is about comparison and comparative exercises within

archaeology. Archaeology compares objects, features, sites, landscapes,
general plans and drawings, and processes or concepts, in order to
interpret the material of the past. To question comparison is to question the
complex and perhaps paradoxical relationship between the singularity of
all archaeological material and the possibility of it being similar to
something that allows comparison. How can we deal with the differences
of what seems to be similar? Although comparative exercises are used or
applied implicitly in a large number of archaeological publications, they
are often uncritically taken for granted. This book intends to think about
the limits and potentialities of the comparative exercise itself.

To re-think comparison is also to question the production of

knowledge in archaeology. How can an archaeological object be defined?
Is it a static material or an emergent form? How can we compare the
processes of formation instead of finished forms? To question comparison
in archaeology is also to think about the nature of the archaeological
record itself, and the archaeological interpretative practice. How can we
compare fragmentary contexts or fragments of material relationships? Or
study an archaeological site with no immediate relationship to others?
How are we to approach an object without context? Do studies of
comparison exclude contextual approaches? And how does archaeology
deal with time? Are the units in comparison contemporaneous? How can
we work with other dimensions of time, like memory, when comparing
sites or objects? And what insights can the comparison between present
and past material contexts bring to the discipline? These and other
question will be discussed throughout the book, and new approaches and
methodologies will be addressed. Some papers will propose new ways of
looking at this, new correspondences and new ways of creating
relationships between materials and images. Also, new methodologies to
improve our analyses and comparisons are proposed.

This book started as a session held at the Theoretical Archaeology

Group (TAG) in Manchester (December 2014), the theme of which
provided the title for this book. We would like to thank the authors, who
although doing their research in different parts of the world, spent time to
viii Preface

contribute in such a generous and professional way to this book. We

specially want to thank Julian Thomas for taking on the role of discussant
and for his final comments; we would also express our deepest gratitude
for all his support to this project. In addition thanks must also go to Ian
Parker Heath, Julia Roberts and Andrew May for editing some of the
chapters here presented. Finally deepest thanks go to Cambridge Scholars
Publishing for their assistant and patient collaboration.

Ana Vale, Joana Alves-Ferreira & Irene Garcia Rovira

 CHAPTER I

COMPARISON AS A WAY TO TRAVEL

IN-BETWEEN THE DIS-ARTICULATIONS
OF THE PAST

SÉRGIO GOMES

Introduction
Fragments and links

Archaeologists focus their study on material evidence. Archaeological

inquiries allow the turning of material evidence into traces of the past, i.e.,
into material entities in which we can recognize a set of temporalities
dealing with past human practices. Each trace invokes the temporalities in
which it became part of a past world; came to be hidden, forgotten or
preserved between worlds; and, at last, gets re-enacted within the
archaeologist's worldly experience. In exploring such temporalities,
archaeologists create different frames for the evidence and explore how
they work in the construction of knowledge about the past. The frames act
as a junction of meaningful relationships which, once linked to the
evidence, assist in constructing its intelligibility.

In this process of framing the evidence we also discover that it holds a

“fragmented meaning”, in the sense that, no matter how many
formulations we try, there is an incompleteness asking for new frames. In
fact, by constructing the intelligibility of a past trace we also find its
incompleteness for tracking the past. An incompleteness which, in the
words of Laurent Olivier (2011: 186), makes us
“realize that history, understood as a process that generates meaning from
vestiges of the past, is not based on the reconstruction of a series of events
or of archaeological facts over time. History is memory creation. What is
to be deciphered is located between the fragments.” (OLIVIER 2011: 186).
2 Chapter I

The discovery of such incompleteness is the matter of archaeology

itself. The experience of this incompleteness is translated into a redrawing
of questions and methods toward the establishment of new articulations
between the fragments from the past and expands the possibilities to create
their memory. Through these articulations, in which we try to decipher the
space between the fragments, we play with frames and evidence to
produce some sort of “archipelagos of fragmented meanings”, whose
shape is a contingent answer to incompleteness. Within the strategies
required to produce these shapes, we may find comparison as a tool to
explore the articulations between fragments. Comparison is a way to put
things side by side, to look for the fissures within the “fragmented
meaning” of evidences, to assess how they relate to each other and
imagine ways to travel in between the dis-articulations.

Dis-articulations and Comparison

In the last paragraph, I used the term “dis-articulation” in order to

describe the sort of relationships we create by doing archaeology. I used
this term because I want to argue that archaeology is a practice created
from the experience of the articulability of entities. For example, by
studying the stratigraphy of a site we try to systematize the stratigraphic
relationships between evidence in order to produce a unified view, which
we might shape as a linear sequence or as a rhizomatic structure,
depending on the kind of articulations we create. In the same way, we may
develop different articulations while studying a site’s artifact collection:
we may study pottery in order to create a typology that will open the
possibility of comparing the collection we are studying with the
collections from other sites; or we may study the pottery and lithics in
order to recognize patterns of association within different kind of materials
and assay its articulation with a specific kind of structure. Archaeology is
then a practice of imagining possible articulations between material
evidences and discussing how those articulations can be used in the
process of knowing the past. The experiencing of the articulability of
evidence makes us cross different scales of analysis and, in so doing, we
are opening up the possibilities of understanding how those traces
circulated under the dynamics of “past worlds”. I will return to this
question by presenting how the sociologist Hugo Zemelman discusses
articulability as a method to analyze, engage and transform the evidence
we are studying and I will consider the role of comparison in this dynamic.

At the core of the practice of imagining possible articulations between

material evidence there is a constant use of comparison as a way to critically
 Comparison as a Way to Travel in-between the Dis-Articulations of the Past 3

address our imagination, not to block it, but to ask about its purpose. Thus,
the use of comparison may become a reflexive practice of exploring the
meaning of the relationships between evidence. Through comparison we
become aware of the similarities and differences of the evidence we are
studying. In crossing those similarities and differences we circumscribe
“points of comparison”, we create the points through which those
individual elements of evidence become a unit of study. For example, let
us imagine different individual pieces of evidence: a pot, a flint arrowhead
and a bronze sword. Through comparison and technological analysis, we
may say that they are made from different raw materials, giving emphasis
to their difference. Imagine that each one came from different fills of the
same pit, in this case comparison and stratigraphic analysis may also
emphasize the differences regarding their deposition. In each case, even if
comparison keeps the pot, the arrowhead and the sword as “different
entities”, it makes us aware of their singularity regarding “points of
comparison”: the raw material, in the first case; and stratigraphic position,
in the second case. However, the same “points of comparison” may allow
us to discover similarities: technological analysis may inform us that the
raw materials used in their production all come from the same region; and
stratigraphic analysis highlights that they all come from the same pit. So,
in this case, comparison informs us that we have “different entities sharing
similarities” which allow us to define a “new entity”. This “new entity”, or
the way evidence is articulated within it, allows us to circumscribe new
objects of study: the pit and the region or the architecture and the
landscape. In both cases, comparison acts as a way to transform the
articulations between entities into objects of study, whose circumscriptions
entail the redefinition of the starting inquiry by allowing new questions
and points of view of the entities we are studying. I will discuss the role of
comparison and articulation in the archaeological process by focusing on
two topics: the production of the archaeological record, after Gavin Lucas
(2012); and the use of analogy on the counter-modern archaeology
proposed by Julian Thomas (2004).

Articulability and the Practice of Comparison

The epistemological thought of Hugo Zemelman (2011; 2012a; 2012b)
tries to pick up the historical and political from the process of knowing,
showing how it creates the reality we are living in and how it allows us to
work on its limits and possibilities. Thus, his work is about the production
of knowledge as a political project, once we no longer produce knowledge
to accumulate it but to transform the world in which we are living
4 Chapter I

(Andrade & Bedacarratx 2013: 31). By taking reality as a construction

within which we participate, Zemelman (2012a: 9-10) highlights the
difference between fact and event: facts are limited to empirical aspects;
events transcend the contingency of a given situation, offering the
possibility of transforming the reality of facts. So, his purpose is to create
an epistemological position towards the apprehension and projection of
reality; in this case, the challenge of the process of knowing is no longer
an objectivist construction with a practical application, but a praxis (Ibid.:
12). In order to do so, Zemelman takes a particular reality (a fragment) as
a part of an historical horizon (the totality), whose apprehension, rather
than being something that could be refitted on such an horizon, is a matter
of experiencing the fragment as a unity which is liable to be converted into
a field of possible objects of study (Ibid.:13). This movement -
transforming the reality into objects of study - sets up the possibility to
look at the empiric (the facts) as the raw material of a project and,
therefore, as the material for the creation of events which will transform
reality (Ibid.: 13-14).

The process of apprehending reality is not like a puzzle, reality cannot

be reconstructed piece by piece. Instead, apprehension is about being
conscious of the way we engage with reality, with our limits and finitude,
and how we can disrupt such engagement in order to recognize it and
transform our conditions to act. Apprehension is about the work on the
dis-articulation with reality in order to look for a project about the
potential of facts. In this sense, the work on the articulability of particular
realities is a methodology which, as Zemelman (2003: 445) writes:
“[…] rests on the possibility to create an horizon of meaning full of
alternative options. Such a horizon emerges from the fragments and from
the particular, being constructed through the necessary links. In terms of
methodology, articulability is a way to study the identity of a phenomenon
by including it in a broader articulation, transgressing the limits of its
starting situation. This will be so on the condition that any phenomenon is
part of an articulation, historically constituted, which means that we must
consider what is not immediately connected with the phenomenon as a part
of its definition. This is a way to address the indeterminate as something
that exceeds the limits of a defined situation.” (ZEMELMAN 2003: 445)1.


1
Author’s translation. Zemelman’s text was published in Portuguese: “A
articulabilidade assenta na possibilidade de, a partir do fragmentário e do particular,
com base em relações necessárias, dar forma a um horizonte rico em alternativas
de construção pelos sujeitos. Poderia defender-se, no plano metodológico, que a
 Comparison as a Way to Travel in-between the Dis-Articulations of the Past 5

The study of a phenomenon’s articulability, rather than producing a

knowledge based on facts, allows us to grasp the conditions within which
it became part of reality, how it changed reality. By being aware of this
conditionality, rather than as a sequence of facts, we may find its potential
is as an event that might change reality. Articulability may turn facts into
events: by analyzing what is not only and directly connected to a
phenomenon, but all those elements which share the same historical
horizon, can suggest another way of thinking about the phenomenon. An
engagement that may disclose the process within which the phenomenon
become a set of frozen facts and, at the same time, may open up the
possibilities to re-shape it into a more inclusive phenomenon.

Zemelman (2012a: 197-216) suggests the use of “ordering concepts” to

define the frame of observation of a phenomenon. These concepts may
come from different disciplines or theories where their use entails an
explanation dimension that closes the study. However, Zemelman’s use is
different. He does not close the study with an explanation, rather, the use
of different “ordering concepts” is intended to make different orders
emerge within the same phenomenon and to explore points of articulation
between the orders. Through these points we might re-order the order
offered by each “ordering concept”, turning the phenomena into a new
framework within which we might create new theorizable objects and,
thus, new disciplinary objects. The suitability of a group of “ordering
concepts” to the study of a phenomenon is measured by its capacity to
create multiple points of articulation, allowing the re-shaping of its starting
circumscription into a more inclusive and comprehensive frame of
observation.

We may use different and contradictory “ordering concepts” at the

same time while bounding a phenomenon. This free employing of
“ordering concepts”, by allowing multiples ways of framing the object of
study, helps the construction of a reflexive bond between the subject and
study object. The use of “ordering concepts” aims to mediate the
relationship of subject-object study and convert it into a form of action to


articulabilidade define um modo de construir a identidade de um fenómeno através
da sua inclusão numa articulação mais ampla, transgredindo os limites da situação
inicial. Isto será assim com a condição de partirmos do pressuposto de que
qualquer fenómeno faz parte de uma articulação, constituída historicamente, o que
significa que qualquer fenómeno obriga a considerar como parte da sua
determinação o que, porém, lhe é alheio. Esta é uma forma de abordar o
indeterminado como o que excede os limites de uma situação definida.”
6 Chapter I

encompass the complexity of reality and to challenge the limits of the

historical horizon. It allows us to take such complexity and challenge as
the raw material to define a frame of questions, points of articulation and
objects of study. Moreover, it is through this mediation that the
relationship between the object and its project study is remade, so this
method is not a question of application but a challenge about how to
engage with an object; how to create a relationship subject-object-project
that does not attempt an appropriation of facts (and the causality between
it) but a dialogue towards the exploration of this encounter as a way to act
upon reality (Zemelman 2012b: 123-163). This is a way to discover the
potential of the object, to understand the reality of the subject and to
discuss the futurity of the project.

By looking at the dynamics of the production of knowledge proposed

by Zemelman and thinking about the way we use comparison in
archaeological practice, we may understand comparison as an “ordering
concept”. Comparison does not entail a specific theory or a disciplinary
framework, it is much more a strategy that may be used in order to
develop a certain theoretical explanation or disciplinary point of view.
Comparison is a practice of apprehension with which we play on the
relationship subject-object-project by looking for a way to grasp the points
of articulation whose research might produce a new understanding of the
evidences. However, this does not mean that comparison is a neutral
strategy of approach. On the contrary, it entails our worldly experience,
including our disciplinary training, and how this experience sets the
conditions in which we encounter and develop our studies of the object.
The orders and the points of articulation we create with comparison bring
together the prejudices and the expectations created by our worldly
experience (Gadamer 1975). Such understanding allows us to critically
experience the historicity and potential of our encounter with past
materials, it make us be aware of how such an encounter was produced
and the possible ways it may be developed. To summarize, comparison as
an “ordering concept” is about detaching the material evidence from its
frozen facticity and exploring comparison as the results and conditions of
events. In this sense, comparison is about the possibility to re-create our
apprehension of the horizon of meaning within which our encounter with
the material evidences was made possible. Through comparison, we may
work on the dynamics of the dialogues we create on such an encounter by
exploring the articulability of the evidences towards the projection of
articulations that might challenge the, sometimes, unbearable and torpid
experience of the incompleteness of the fragments from the past.
 Comparison as a Way to Travel in-between the Dis-Articulations of the Past 7

Comparison and the Production of the Archaeological

Record
We may use articulability as a way to understand our practice as
archaeologists: a way to look at how the different tasks we perform and
the skills we develop are related, to make their genealogy, to discuss the
prejudices and possibilities entailed in their use and to acknowledge the
challenges that might transform the conditions in which we do archaeology.
Gavin Lucas’ (2001; 2012) work addresses this understanding by looking for
the articulations between concepts coming from archaeological methodology
and theory and how such articulations may reshape archaeological practice.
In this section, I aim to discuss how comparison acts through these
articulations in the production of the archaeological record.

Lucas (2012) presents the archaeological record “as materiality, as

process and as an intervention” (Ibid.: 257). It is the result of a
materializing practice that puts together a set of requests made by the
intervenients that take part in the process of doing archaeology. By
understanding archaeological practice this way, he states that:
“We do not invent or create our data; it is not a fiction of our minds or a
social construction. However, neither is it just given. It is produced through
the material interaction of an assemblage of bodies and/or objects which
are mobilized by our interventions in or on the ground.” (Ibid.: 231).

In this sense, we may imagine doing archaeology as a game of

configured forces. The articulation of those configured forces allow the
emergence of fragments from the past which become another configured
force on the game, allowing new articulations in which other participants
will emerge, and so on. In this dynamic, Lucas recognizes the articulation
of two material processes: disaggregation and assembly (Ibid. 234). In
both cases, the process is about making boundaries based upon the reality
in investigation and through these boundaries producing meaningful
material-graphies about the past.

The boundaries we create during disaggregation and assembly have

different, but articulated, purposes. Disaggregation is about the
decomposition of unity, so the boundaries of the sub-unities coming from
this process record the place and the relationships they had while working
as a unity; in this way, disaggregation not only allows the separated study
of sub-unities it also ensures its analysis as part of a major unity. Lucas
presents the excavation as a process of continuous disaggregation made
8 Chapter I

through “acts of circumscription and separation” (Ibid.: 237) within which

the archaeological record (the data) is produced. Assembly is about the
composition of new-unities, so the boundaries coming from this process
have the purpose of explaining the operation behind the aggregation of
independent unities and, at the same time, explain the order of the archive
that is being produced during this procedure. For example, by combining
in the same box the bags of sherds coming from different deposits of the
same pit but, at the same time, setting them apart from the lithics coming
from the same context, we are creating a unity whose aggregation is
related to an hierarchy of factors, at the top of which are aspects related to
the preservation of the sherds. In this sense, assembly is also made through
“acts of circumscription and separation”, but in the process of
disaggregation those acts create boundaries invoking the configurations of
something ciphered by a set of processes that we aim to understand, while
in the case of assembly these same acts create a set of unities – or “archive”
– that we use in order to create the conditions to decipher the previous
configurations.

The archaeological process is made through “acts of circumscription

and separation” and the archive resulting from those acts, this means that
with “acts of circumscription and separation” and the archive we
continually shape and re-shape the archaeological record. These actions
and its archive are a way to work on the articulability of evidence, in the
sense that they are made by the definition of articulations. The
archaeological record is then a matter of reifying the order of materialities.
In this process it must be highlighted that the role of comparison, as an
“ordering concept”, allows:

a) To manage the de-composition entailed by the act of digging,

allowing the “solid unity” to be split into a set of articulated
sub-unities (stratigraphic unities, artifacts, samples and the
like);
b) To track the entities that compose the archaeological record of a
site and cross their orders to create articulations that were not
seen during the excavation;
c) To include the analysis of data coming from different sites; the
operability of this inter-site analysis rests on the points of
articulation we might create in the process of comparing the
archives of the different sites;
d) To look for the articulation between the archaeological entities
and entities coming from processes outside archaeology to
create a more inclusive perception of archaeological data.
 Comparison as a Way to Travel in-between the Dis-Articulations of the Past 9

Comparison opens up the field of observation of the evidence we are

studying, multiplying the ways in which we may engage with the
“archaeological economy”: the products resulting from the archaeological
interventions and the way they circulate (Lucas 2012: 231). We may say
that through comparison we grasp associations between evidence that was
not initially clear and create a dialogue with evidence that was not in the
archaeological process. So, comparison is about expanding the boundaries
of the archaeological process, the re-creation of the products resulting
from it, and the re-designing of the circulation of archaeological entities.
Comparison activates the articulability of the evidences we study and, by
doing this, it expands the articulations we may create with evidences and,
thus, form a continuous re-shaping of the archaeological record/process/
materiality and the growth of the “archaeological economy”.

Comparison and Ethnographic Analogy

In the last section I referred to how the practice of comparison can call
unfamiliar entities into the archaeological record and make them a part of
the process of doing archaeology. The use of ethnographic analogy is an
example of how comparison allows us to create a dialogue between
different disciplines and different empirical data, bringing new entities to
the investigation of past material evidence. In this section I will focus on
how Julian Thomas (2004) suggests the use of ethnographic analogy in the
process of understanding the difference of the past (Ibid.: 238-241), and
how comparison, as an “ordering concept”, may act on the production of
articulations that might help us to apprehend it.

The work of Thomas on archaeology and modernity discusses the

paradox under which we develop our study of the past:
“archaeology has been made possible by modernity, yet that it is our
position in the modern world that makes it difficult for us to comprehend
the distant past.” (Ibid.: 241).

Archaeology as a science of cultural difference is a matter of how we

can recognize, through past materials, the difference of the Past. In this
sense, when Thomas discusses the way we use ethnographic analogy in the
production of knowledge of the past, he points out that we are creating a
relationship between three participants (Ibid.: 241):

- the first one, the Past, is a temporal unity, which we make

present by the archaeological record;
10 Chapter I

- the second is an ethnographic entity, a spatial unity, that is

offered by another discipline;
- and finally, the third is the archaeologist itself, an historical,
finite and disciplinary agent facing two different realities whose
dialogue may allow a better comprehension of the distant past.

By placing the archaeologist as the third element of the process of

doing analogy, Thomas is taking into the process a reflexion that is needed
in order to explore all the potentiality of analogy. This reflexion looks
towards the order within studies of archaeological and ethnographic
evidence, allowing us to see under which articulations that evidence was
made and compared. This reflexion is about the nature of the data we are
studying and how it allows us to critically relate it to data coming from
other disciplines in order to make the difference of the Past emerge.

In explaining the potential of ethnographic analogy, Thomas writes:

“[The] most important role of ethnographic analogy lies not in filling in the
gaps in our knowledge of prehistoric societies but in troubling and
disrupting what we think we already know. This kind of analogical
argument is not aimed at establishing a testable hypothesis about what the
past was like. Instead, it takes a measure of presumed similarity between
two contexts as a starting point and asks: what if it was like this? In other
words, it sets up a kind of analysis in which we work through the
implications of an initial act of defamiliarisation.” (Thomas 2004: 241,
original emphasis).

The purpose of analogy is not to build bridges to the past, but to be

more aware of the gaps and to use it as a way to assess similarities that can
be found in ethnographic parallels. The recognition of affinities between
contexts produced by archaeology and ethnography is not an end, but a
starting point to ask about its singularities. A singularity experienced by
the encounter between the world that produced it and the world that
enables archaeology and ethnography to study cultural difference. In this
reflexion of how modernity allows thinking about difference, we play with
the main purpose of Zemelman’s articulability: thinking the same
phenomenon in different ways. It is at the crossroads of different ways to
think about evidences that we may find the “defamiliarisation” needed to
expand what can be said by a similarity. It is this “defamiliarisation” that
we expand to think differently about the Other we call Past and, in doing
that, experience its difference.
 Comparison as a Way to Travel in-between the Dis-Articulations of the Past 11

We may take “defamiliarisation” of similarities as an act towards

extending the limits in which we may think about the past through its
material traces. This is on the condition that we take difference not as a
substance, which can be identified and ordered amongst other substances,
but as an articulation. The shape of an articulation is made by the crossing
of different orders, so by studying the way those orders became articulated
we may apprehend the conditions we need to change and the
diversification of the mediums we might use in dialogue with the past.
Comparison, as an ordered concept, has a role to play in the use of
ethnographic analogy, in the sense that it allows us to create parallels
between archaeological and ethnographic data, to look for its dissemblance
and convergence, seek points of articulation, recreate fields of observation
and objects of study. Ethnographic analogy produces similarities, or facts
limited to its empiricity (Zemelman 2012a: 9) that need to be unfolded in
order become events and transcend its contingency (Ibid.). Comparison, as
an “ordering concept”, is a way to unfold the orders of the empirical, is a
way to disarticulate the similarity that allowed the creation of the
ethnographic parallel and to work on its “defamiliarisation”.

Final Note
At the beginning of this text I wrote that in doing archaeology we
produce “archipelagos of fragmented meanings”, whose shape are the
answers we give facing the incompleteness of the fragments from the past.
We study these fragments in order to trace their temporality, re-creating
the ways their memory can be experienced (Olivier 2011). This is a
process of creating the conditions to dialogue with the Past, aiming to
understand its difference (Thomas 2004). A process developed through
materialising practices producing the materials to shape such dialogue
(Lucas 2001; 2012). I tried to apprehend this dynamic through its
articulability (Zemelman 2003; 2012a; 2012b and 2011) aiming to discuss
the role of comparison. I argued that comparison may be understood as an
“ordering concept” (after Zemelmen (2012a: 197-216). A contingent,
precarious and expectant way to explore the articulability of
archaeological entities in order to re-create the ways we can think through
them. In this sense, comparison becomes a way to travel in between the
disarticulations of “archipelagos of fragmented meanings”. A journey
where the incompleteness of the fragments and the elusive difference of
the past haunt us with material whispers yet to dis-articulated.
12 Chapter I

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT
- Portugal) for funding my research and the Centro de Estudos em
Arqueologia, Artes e Ciências do Património (CEAACP) for all the
support. I would like to thank Ana Vale, Irene Garcia and Joana Alves-
Ferreira for the comments on previous versions of this text and Julia
Roberts for editing it.

Bibliography
ANDRADE, L. and BEDACARRATX, V. “La construcción del objeto de
estudio en la obra de Hugo Zemelman: apuntes introductorios.” Folios:
revista de la Facultad de Humanidades 38 (2013): 15-34.
GADAMER, H. G. Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward, 1975.
LUCAS, G. Critical Approaches to Fieldwork Contemporary and
Historical Archaeological Practice. London: Routledge, 2001.
—. Understanding the archaeological record. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012.
OLIVIER, L. The dark abyss of time. Archaeology and Memory. New York:
Altamira Press, 2012.
THOMAS, J. Archaeology and Modernity. London: Routledge, 2004.
ZEMELMAN, H., “Sujeito e Sentido: considerações sobre a vinculação do
sujeito ao conhecimento que constrói”, in Conhecimento Prudente
para uma Vida Decente. “Um discurso sobre as Ciências” revisitado,
(org.) Boaventura de Sousa Santos, (Porto: Edições Afrontamento,
2003): 435-446.
—. Los horizontes de la razón III. El orden del movimiento. Anthropos
Editorial: Barcelona, 2011.
—. Los horizontes de la razón I. Dialéctica y apropiación del presente.
Anthropos Editorial: Barcelona, 2012a [1992].
—. Los horizontes de la razón II. Historia y necesidad de utopía.
Anthropos Editorial: Barcelona, 2012b [2003].
 CHAPTER II

THE ART OF “ENDANGERING” BODIES:

A FIRST MOVEMENT ON HOW TO READ WHAT
WAS NEVER WRITTEN

JOANA ALVES-FERREIRA

The “Principle of Montage”

“Comparison of other people’s attempts to the undertaking of a sea

voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic North Pole.
Discover this North Pole. What for others are deviations are, for me, the
data which determine my course. – On the differentials of time (which, for
others, disturb the main line of inquiry), I base my reckoning.”
[N1, 2]
This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without
quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.”
[N1, 10]
Walter Benjamin ([1982] 1999: 456; 458; emphasis added)

“Through its images the Mnemosyne Atlas intends to illustrate this process,
which one could define as the attempt to absorb pre-coined expressive
values by means of the representation of life in motion.”
Aby Warburg ([c. 1926-9] 1999: 277; emphasis added)

This is an uncanny beginning. It begins with the ghost story of a never

ended Atlas and with a book that was never written. This is a beginning as
from the still nameless experience; from a still nameless writing. This
beginning is a ghost story for truly adult people1. It is the story of how to
gather and to collect history’s artefacts at the level of its concealed traces
of daily life, at the level of its refuse, taking form in its ghosts.


1
This enigmatic expression was once used by Aby Warburg to define his
BilderAtlas Mnemosyne, quoted in AGAMBEN [1983] 1999: 95.
14 Chapter II

The Image and the Readability of History, after Walter Benjamin and
Aby Warburg

From Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-

Werk, there is a whole analogous and concrete space to be unfolded. Since
both constitute tangible and similar spaces of confrontation, configure
themselves through the tensions found between monuments and
documents, mapping and animating anew the tension lines between image
and text. Between Warburg’s immensity and Benjamin’s epic patchwork,
there is a constellation of infinitesimal worlds in miniature. So that such
small worlds configure the experience of a whole cartography of strangeness
(Foucault [1967] 1984).

Atlas, as in the mythological metaphor of the Titan who carried the

weight of the world on his back, gave its name to a visual form of
knowledge. We all know what an Atlas is. We have all surely consulted
one at least once. But have we ever ‘read’ one? An Atlas is a device where
a whole multiplicity of things is gathered through elective affinities,
following Goethe’s own expression. It is hard to imagine anyone reading
an Atlas in a sequential order as if reading a novel or a scientific paper.
Page by page, from the beginning to end. Experience shows something
else, argues Didi-Huberman ([2011] 2013): that we often use the atlas in
two articulated ways. We begin by searching for some concrete
information but, once attained, it is easy to let ourselves wander its many
paths and possible directions 2 . In this sense, it may be said that the
experience of the Atlas is an erratic one. The Atlas performs a sort of
game – one about which Benjamin had already written3 – in which the
scattered pieces of the world are gathered, as a child or a ragpicker would
do. Thus, by entailing such a double gesture and, especially in its
condition as a visual form of knowledge – which implies, on the one hand,
an aesthetic paradigm of the visual form, and on the other, an epistemic
paradigm of knowledge – the Atlas bring together things outside of normal
classifications and, undermining de facto the paradigm’s canonical forms


2
See DIDI - HUBERMAN [2011] 2013: 11-21.
3
In this context, we are thinking specifically of some Benjamin’s writings such as:
“Toys and Play” and “Old Toys” [1928], “Excavation and Memory” [1932], “The
Storyteller” [1936], “On some motifs on Baudelaire” [1939], “Charles Baudelaire:
a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism” [c. 1937] and, finally, “The Arcades
Project”[1927- 940].
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 15

and even its conditions of existence, draws from those affinities a new
kind of knowledge (Ibid.:11).

There is an image that appears to perfectly suit the Atlas, it is

Benjamin’s image of the “reading case” [Lesenkasten], as the mediating
link for a new kind of writing and of reading, where the coherence of
words or sentences, and even of images, is the bearer through which, like
a flash, similarity appears (Benjamin [1933] 2015b: 56-59)4. From this, the
Atlas appears as an incessant work of re-composing the world, as a
resource for observing history, for undertaking its archaeology. Just as in
the image of the board or of the tableau (cf. Foucault [1966] 2005: 41-71),
it is meant to reconfigure space, to redistribute it or, following Didi-
Huberman’s impressions, to dismantle it where we thought it was
continuous; to reunite it where we thought there were boundaries (Didi-
Huberman [2011] 2013: 43-62)5. Indeed, to read what was never written.
On the tableau is the frame for those small segments of possible worlds in
miniature, for its multiplicity and heterogeneity and, finally, the possibility
for the readability of its underlying relations. Ultimately, on the tableau
images take position so that, therein, we can discover new analogies, new
images of thought. In short, new constellations to come.
“The problem that must be immediately posed to Warburg’s thought is a
genuinely philosophical one: the status of the image and, in particular, the
relation between image and speech, imagination and rule […].”
Giorgio Agamben [1983] 1999: 102 (emphasis added).

Aby Warburg began the last major project of his life in 1924,
immediately after his three-year stay in the Kreuzlingen psychiatric clinic
where he recovered from a psychotic breakdown following the events of
World War I. Left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929, the
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne was then, and still is, an essential source for
critical knowledge. The Atlas consists of sixty-three panels (wooden
boards, each of 150 x 200 cm and covered with black cloth), on which
Warburg, using metal clasps, added and removed, arranged and rearranged,
black and white photographic reproductions of art-historical or cosmographical
images, maps, reproductions of manuscript pages along with contemporary

4
See also, BENJAMIN [1933] 2015a: 50-55.
5
See also DIDI - HUBERMAN 2011b, Atlas. How to carry the world on one’s back?
Exhibition catalogue, 25 November 2010 – 28 March 2011, Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (Spain), last accessed December 16th, 2015,
http://www.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/exposiciones/folletos/brochure1_
atlas_en.pdf
16 Chapter II

images drawn from newspapers and magazines6. Warburg’s method consisted,

in the first instance, of a process of combinatory experiments where each
panel was photographed, before another montage was imagined and
designed. Each panel was then numbered and ordered most often after a
thematic sequence7.

At the heart of Warburg’s Mnemosyne lies a revolutionary and very

particular action of historical writing, where Warburg’s own formal
approaches to the image are crucial for apprehending the horizon of his
research concerning the understanding of visual imagery in the wake of
Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy and aesthetics. As Warburg himself writes in
his “Introduction” [Einleitung] to the Mnemosyne,
“The conscious creation of distance between oneself and the external world
can probably be designated as the founding act of human civilization. […]
Those seeking to understand the critical stages of this process have not yet
made fullest use of the way recognition of the polarities of artistic
production, of the formative oscillation between inward–looking fantasy
and outward–looking rationality, can assist possible interpretations of
documents of the formation of image. Between imagination’s act of
grasping and the conceptual act of observing, there is tactile encounter
with the object.” (Warburg [c. 1926- 9] 1999: 276).8


6
For further information see JOHNSON 2012: 8-20.
7
There are evidences for three versions of the Mnemosyne Atlas that together
comprise more than two thousand images. Warburg’s last version contains 971
images (published in the 2000 edition of Mnemosyne as part of Warburg’s
Gesammelte Schriften) and the plan would be to complete at least seventy-nine and
as many as two hundred panels (see JOHNSON 2012: 11-16); some of the images of
the Mnemosyne panels, as well as explanations for its thematic sequences, are
available at: http://warburg.library.cornell.edu.
8
“The conscious creation of distance between oneself and the external world can
probably be designated as the founding act of human civilization. […] The full
force of the passionate and fearful religious personality, in the grip of the mystery
of faith, intervenes in the formation of artistic style, just as, conversely, science,
with its practice of recording, preserves and passes on the rhythmical structure
whereby the monsters of imagination guide one’s life and determine the future.
Those seeking to understand the critical stages of this process have not yet made
fullest use of the way recognition of the polarities of artistic production, of the
formative oscillation between inward–looking fantasy and outward–looking
rationality, can assist possible interpretations of documents in the formation of
image. Between imagination’s act of grasping and the conceptual act of observing,
there is tactile encounter with the object […], which we term the artistic act. […]
On the basis of its images it [the Mnemosyne] is intended to be the first of all
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 17

In the Mnemosyne Introduction, Warburg summarizes his ideas for a

theory of social memory that takes shape through his pictorial experiences
in which he intended to trace the migration of classical symbols across
time and space, charting the changes in function and meaning they
underwent in the process, that is, to make the semantic variability of the
image visible and readable. Although Mnemosyne did not, in a
straightforward manner, document the history of Renaissance art, it
constitutes the imaginative experience that intends to make the process of
historical change comprehensible by attempting to understand the tradition
of images. As Agamben ([1983] 1999) notes, Warburg uses the image and
iconography from the perspective of the “diagnosis of Western man
through which he aims to configure a problem that is both historical and
ethical”9. In this context, Warburg’s work must be understood in light of
two main concepts, namely the concept of Pathosformel [pathos formula]
– which designates an indissoluble intertwining of an emotional charge
and an iconographic formula in which it is impossible to distinguish
between form and content – and particularly the concept of Nachleben [the
posthumous life] – which is the transmission, reception and survival of
things, ideas, style and formulas as memory potentialities. Mnemosyne is
then the body emerging from the joint articulation of these concepts as a
working tool, which allows the observation at the core of gestures, of
symptoms and of images (cf. Agamben 1983 [1999] and Didi-Huberman
[2011] 2013). Just as the good God, in Warburg’s famous phrase, hides in
the details, so the Atlas emerges as an interrogation device that, by
arranging things from a set of made possible relations, intends to recognize
the world by making it problematic. Consequently, Warburg saw the
stylistic and formal solutions adopted over time “as ethical decisions of
individuals and epochs regarding the inheritance of the past” (Agamben


inventory of pre- coined classical forms that impacted upon the stylistic
development of the representation of life in motion in the age of Renaissance.”
(WARBURG [c. 1926- 9] 1999: 276-278; emphasis added).
9
“In Warburg’s hands, iconography is never an end in itself (one can also say of
him what Karl Kraus said of the artist, namely, that he was able to transform a
solution into an enigma). Warburg’s use of iconography always transcends the
mere identification of a subject and its sources; from the perspective of what he
once defined as ‘a diagnosis of Western man’, he aims to configure a problem that
is both historical and ethical […]. The transfiguration of iconographic method in
Warburg’s hands thus closely recalls Leo Spitzer’s transformation of lexicography
method into ‘historical semantics’, in which the history of a word becomes both
the history of a culture and the configuration of its specific vital problem.”
(AGAMBEN [1983] 1999: 92).
18 Chapter II

[1983] 1999: 93)10. Such a perspective points towards a conception of the

Atlas as a “body of confrontation” – a very sensitive seismograph
responding to distant earthquakes. Warburg had already understood that
the image is the crossing of numerous migrations, which he displayed at
the same time and in the same surface, or plate, by piecing together the
order of things and places simultaneously with the order of time. Through
the work of montage, or the process of combined action between
knowledge and images, Warburg aimed, indeed, to formulate the inherent
tensions stored in the images as the invisible traces of their encounter with
a particular epoch and its needs, by constantly reacting to the experience
of its transfiguration (Ibid.: 94)11. Ultimately, Mnemosyne is the body of
experience that lies at the field of tension between imagination and the
work of reason. This tension is, in the end, the “now” of the image.
Therefore, in the montage of images, it is time that becomes visible.

Nowhere as elsewhere, Mnemosyne is the zero point of the world

where paths and spaces come to meet, and from which, as in Foucault’s
“Utopian Body”, we dream and speak as we proceed and imagine, we
perceive things in their place, and we negate them (Foucault [1966] 2006:
233). And by making such a visibility into a power to see the times, we
imagine.


10
“The theme of the ‘posthumous life’ of pagan culture that defines a main line of
Warburg’s thought makes sense only within this broader horizon, in which the
stylistic and formal solutions at times adopted by artists appear as ethical decisions
of individuals and epochs regarding the inheritance of the past. Only from this
perspective does the interpretation of a historical problem also show itself as a
‘diagnosis of Western man’ in his battle to overcome his own contradictions and to
find his vital dwelling place between the old and the new. […] From this
perspective, from which culture is always seen as process of Nachleben, that is,
transmission, reception, and polarization, it also becomes comprehensible why
Warburg ultimately concentrated all his attention on the problem of symbols and
their life in social memory.” (AGAMBEN [1983] 1999: 93).
11
“Warburg often speaks of symbols as ‘dynamograms’ that are transmitted to
artists in a state of great tension, but that are not polarized in their active or passive,
positive or negative energetic charge; their polarization, which occurs through an
encounter with a new epoch and its vital needs, can then bring about a complete
transformation of meaning. […] For Warburg, the attitude of artists toward
images inherited from tradition was therefore conceivable in terms neither of
aesthetic choice nor of neutral reception; rather, for him it is a matter of a
confrontation […].” (Ibid.: 94; emphasis added)
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 19

“The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of
montage into history. That is, to assemble large – scale constructions out
of the smallest and most precisely cut components […]. To grasp the
construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary. Refuse of
History.” [N2, 6]
Walter Benjamin ([1982] 1999: 461 (emphasis added).

To define Walter Benjamin’s unfinished and massive project known as

the Passagen-Werk 12 , we searched for an image that somehow could
illuminate it. Immediately what came to mind was the folded fan, which
Benjamin himself had imagined: its “extensiveness to contain its new and
compressed fullness” and which, as depicted by Benjamin, “only in
spreading draws breath and flourishes the beloved features within it”
(Benjamin 1979: 15). This fragmented discourse covered nineteenth
century industrial culture as it emerged in Paris, and more specifically the
Paris Passages as the origin of modern commercial arcade 13 , which he
linked with a number of phenomena characteristic of that century’s
concerns. Undertaken over thirteen years (1927-1940), it unfolds a
massive collection of research and conceptual notes, citations from a vast
array of historical sources accompanied by Benjamin’s commentary, as
well as two exposés (of 1935 and 1939) of the Passagen project (cf. Buck-
Morss 1989: 8- 43).

To approach Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk resembles muddling through

an often-labyrinthine cartography. Perhaps this is due to the fact that, in
itself, the Passagen-Werk entitles a phenomenon embodied in an
abundance of traces of a work in process. The collected vestiges, images,
liaisons, curiosities and phantasmagorias thus constitute its documents,
which in itself, however, do not comprise a totality (Ibid.: 48-52). Thereby,
their coherence is intrinsically related to the rest of Benjamin’s work as
well as to his own historical experiences. In this sense, considering Buck-
Morss’s idea that “the whole elaborate structure of the Passagen-Werk


12
First published in 1982 in Volume 5 of Walter Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt / M., Suhrkamp Verlag).
13
As Susan Buck-Morss (1989: 39) mentions “the covered shopping arcades of the
nineteenth century were Benjamin’s central image because they were the precise
material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconscious of the
dreaming collective. All of the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found
there (commodity fetishism, reification, the world as ‘inwardness’), as well as (in
fashion, prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams. Moreover, the arcades
were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of the lived
experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation.”
20 Chapter II

must be seen within the temporal axis that connects the nineteenth-century
to Benjamin’s present” (Ibid.: 215), and faced with Benjamin’s
accumulation, his discontinuous historical images in their multiple
configurations as well as his fragmentary pieces of data superimposition,
we should not intend to search for any chronological sequence but rather,
from within Benjamin’s overlay and the overlapping of material concerns
over time, to perform a whole archaeological exercise in order to
understand Benjamin’s philosophical and historical design as an entirely
new experience of writing, intrinsically and implicitly forged by an erratic
experience of exile (cf. Didi-Huberman 2009)14. Somehow, the Passagen-
Werk is a “double body”: it is the graphic space of the nineteenth-century
history, its world of industrial objects and modern commodities and
allegories, and additionally exposes Benjamin’s own body as the tenacious
collector (Benjamin [1982] 1999)15.

It was during the 1930’s that Benjamin initiated a fundamental change

to the project, which, as he wrote, ‘was now less a galvanization of the
past than anticipatory of a more human future’ 16 . This change had
involved a fundamental reorganization of Benjamin’s research notes,
culminating in the elaboration of a filling system wherein the early motifs
became key-words under which all historical documentation would then
be assembled. Each of these files – known as Konvoluts17 – set out the

14
“Ce mouvement est approche autant qu’écart: approche avec réserve, écart avec
désir. Il suppose un contact, mais il le suppose interrompu, si ce n’est brisé, perdu,
impossible jusqu’au bout.” (DIDI-HUBERMAN 2009: 12)
15
“Perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be
described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion. Right from the start,
the great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of
the world are found. […] The collector brings together what belongs together; by
keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually
furnish information about his objects. Nevertheless, in every collector hides an
allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector. As far as the collector is concerned,
his collection is never complete; for let him discover just a single piece missing,
and everything he’s collected remains a patchwork, which is what things are for
allegory from the beginning. On the other hand, the allegorist […] precisely the
allegorist can never have enough of things [H4a, 1].” (BENJAMIN ([1982] 1999:
211; emphasis added)
16
This statement can be found in a letter to Adorno of 18 March 1934 (quoted in
BUCK-MORSS 1989: 49).
17
In total there are 36 Konvoluts, arranged through an alphabetic and numeric code
(A1, 1; A1a, 1; A1, 2, etc.), each one entitled with a key word or phrase (A.
Arcades; D. Boredom, Eternal Recurrence; H. The Collector; N. Epistemology,
Theory of Progress; Q. Panorama; X. Marx; Z. Doll, Automaton). Subliminally
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 21

theatrical space for possible worlds of secret affinities, which, amongst

themselves, make possible a play of relations at various scales18.

This philosophical play, whereby Benjamin engages with distances,

transitions and intersections and through which he is constantly changing
and juxtaposing the contexts, had developed under the principle of
montage, a complex device particularly noticeable in Benjamin’s later
works19, such as One-Way Street ([1925-1926] 2004) or On the Concept of
History ([1940] 2006a). By putting into play the method of montage,
Benjamin is, in fact, creating a whole new method of representation by
imposing a critical examination of the object. This method consists in the
working of quotations, commentary, reading and research notes into the
framework of a minimal micrology that, by entailing the questioning about
that which is not in the sunlight 20 , causes different temporalities to
reverberate which, in turn, are to be unfolded through a discontinuous
presentation deliberately opposed to the traditional modes of argument.
Hence, in Benjamin’s method, the principle of montage points towards a
reflection on those not always visible traces of that problematic and
opaque constellation which is history and its movements (cf. Benjamin


implicit in their conception are three key concepts – ‘myth’, ‘nature’ and ‘history’
– intertwined with some key words such as fossil, fetish, archaic and new, wish
image or ruin. Still in this regard, we would like to highlight the Konvolut N,
where Benjamin sets out his critique of progress by outlining a counter-discourse
that exposes progress as the fetishization of modern temporality, which becomes
fundamental in order to understand the substance for Benjamin’s method. Cf.
BENJAMIN ([1982] 1999: 456-488 and BUCK-MORSS 1989: 58-201.
18
For further information, see BUCK-MORSS 1989: 50-57 and TIEDEMANN [1988]
1999: 930-931.
19
“Outline the story of The Arcades Project in terms of its development. Its
properly problematic component: the refusal to renounce anything that would
demonstrate the materialist presentation of history as imagistic [bildhaft] in a
higher sense than in the traditional presentation. [N3, 3].” (BENJAMIN ([1982]
1999: 463). In other words, and as Susan Buck-Morss underlines, “Benjamin was
at least convinced of one thing: what was needed was a visual, not linear logic: the
concepts were to be imagistically constructed, according to the cognitive principles
of montage. Nineteen–century objects were to be made visible as the origin of the
present, at the same time that every assumption of progress was to be scrupulously
rejected.” (BUCK-MORSS 1989: 218; emphasis added).
20
“[...] e o método é o mesmo: o de uma micrologia minimalista que arranca à
opacidade do in-significante os sentidos mais secretos dos grandes movimentos da
História e dos abismos da linguagem.” (BARRENTO 2005: 43).
22 Chapter II

[1982] 1999)21. Through the experimental method of montage, Benjamin

aims to unfold a world of particular secret affinities, a world in which
things enter into the most contradictory communication and in which,
once released from the fixations and encrustations of any classical
historical narrative, could display indeterminate affinities22.

Thus, at the heart of the principle of montage, lies what Benjamin

defined by pathos of nearness (Ibid.: 846) when he wrote that “the true
method of making things present is to represent them in our space and not
represent ourselves in their space”23. By wanting to “bring things near”
and to “allow them to step into our life” Benjamin was, indeed, aiming at
presenting what relates to us and what conditions us – that set of noises
that invades our dream24. In this way, the past objects and events would
not be fixed data unchangeably given but, rather, that which ‘is being no
more’25. As such, by bringing things near to us spatially and by making
use of them, the implications of the work of montage are those of the
historian’s own particular time and space, that is, ‘what is being’ and
‘what is to be’, i.e., legibility as the critical point of readability at a
particular time. In Benjamin’s own terms, it is the awakening of history, of
its empathic and continuous reconstructions, in the form of commentary on
a reality that is being and which, as in the image of the field notebook, can
only happen through the work of constant actualization26.


21
“Good formulation by Bloch apropos of The Arcades Project: history displays
its Scotland Yard badge. That was in the context of a conversation in which I was
describing how this work – comparable to the method of atomic fission, which
deliberates the enormous energies bound up within the atom – is supposed to
liberate the enormous energies of history that are slumbering in the ‘once upon a
time’ of classical historical narrative. The history that was bent to showing things
‘as they really and truly were’ was the strongest narcotic of the nineteenth century
[Oº, 71].” (BENJAMIN ([1982] 1999: 863).
22
Ibid.: 827 [Aº, 4 and Aº, 5].
23
Ibid.: 846 [Iº, 2].
24
Ibid.: 831 [Cº, 5].
25
Ibid.: 833 [Dº, 4].
26
Ibid.: 460 [N2, 2]; 462-463 [N3, 1]; 470 [N7, 6 and N7, 7]; 475 [N10, 3] and 476
[N11, 3].
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 23

“(…) une route au fur et à mesure qu’il se fraie un passage à travers des
espaces saisis dans leur étrangeté: cartographie des lignes de fruite comme
des lignes de forces, des cohérences, des carrefours, des repères, mais aussi
des obstacles et des chemins de traverse.”
Christian Jacob (2007: 13-16; emphasis added)27

At a Moment of Danger: Images in Motion

“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an
image which flashes up at the instant when it can recognized and is never
seen again (…) For every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably (…)
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it
really was’ (…)
It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of
danger (im Augenblick der Gefahr).”
Walter Benjamin ([1940] 1999: 247; emphasis added)

The ‘Principle of Montage’ in Alain Resnais’ “Nuit et Brouillard”

(1955)

Nuit et Brouillard is a 32-minute documentary on the Holocaust, and

was commissioned in May 1955 to Alain Resnais28. The making of the
film had involved a research trip to Poland in an attempt to gather further
documentation, including military archives, namely access to archive
materials of perpetrator imagery found by Polish and Soviet liberators29. In


27
Christian Jacob, Lieux de Savoir – Espaces et Communautés (Paris: Éditions
Albin Michel, 2007), quoted in DIDI - HUBERMAN [2011] 2013: 173.
28
In 1954, Henry Michael and Olga Wormser, of the Comité d’Histoire de la
Deuxième Guerre Mondial, published an edited collection of 190 texts, entitled
Tragédie de la déportation 1940-1945: Témoignages de survivants des camps de
concentration allemands, which was followed by an historical and pedagogical
exhibition of the same name in November 1954 at the Pedagogical Museum in
Paris. From this exhibition, the proposal to make a film about that history of the
deportees and the system they endured was conceived and taken up by Argos
Films and produced by Anatole Dauman (POLLOCK & SILVERMAN 2011: 32-37).
29
It is noteworthy that, because of his known left political position as a filmmaker,
Resnais appears to have experienced some difficulties in accessing official French
materials, and he had been denied access to materials collected by the British. Thus,
24 Chapter II

addition to Resnais’ silent footage, the film featured a script written by

Jean Cayrol, and Chris Marker had the challenge of matching Cayrol’s
autonomous poetic composition to Resnais’ montage, reconfiguring the
text “with Resnais’ carefully calibrated rhythms of editing and sequencing
of past and present images” (Pollock & Silverman 2011: 32). Because of
its radical techniques of montage and disorientation, camera movements
and counterpointed commentary, its producer Anatole Dauman considered
the film to be an “aesthetic achievement and not a straightforward
documentary history” (Ibid.: 2).

Released in 1956, the film was immediately involved in political scandal

as the French censors attempted to censor two scenes30 and to prevent its
exhibition at the Cannes Film Festival. As Andrew Hebard (2011: 214 -
215) pointed out, the initial complaints “were pressed by the German
foreign office claiming that the film would incite anti-German hatred”. These
complaints were augmented by the French government’s “own reservations
about the archival material in the film” 31 . And yet, as Pollock and
Silverman (2011: 2) underline, the whole controversy that has arisen
around the film, “ensured a much wider public engagement both with the
film itself as with its politics of the representation of history and the
production of cultural memory”32. In this sense, what we think should be

as a whole, Resnais’ film draws extensively on Polish/Soviet documents and even
fiction films made after 1945 (See, POLLOCK & SILVERMAN 2011: 32).
30
Namely, Plate 11 (shot 39: Internés du Camp de Pithiviers, Agence Fulgur) – in
which a képi clearly identifies a French policeman surveying a French
concentration camp for foreign-born Jewish men and women at Pithiviers, and
Plate 40 (shot 281: Bulldozer with corpses, Bergen Belsen, British newsreel) –
concerning Bergen-Belsen images of bulldozers pushing bodies into mass graves.
(See, POLLOCK & SILVERMAN 2011 “Night and Fog Film Stills”).
31
“A combination of these protests, Cold War anxiety, and the French
government’s own reservations about archival material in the film (showing
French policeman helping with the deportation of prisoners) all helped to get the
film removed from the festival […] A flurry of articles and editorials appearing in
the German newspapers put the film directly into the public light […] What was
the source of this scandal? […] Certainly the historical moment in which the film
was initially received had much to do with the heightened public discourse that
followed the film’s suppression. I would, however, also like to suggest that the film
itself, particularly its mode of representation, was also responsible for what
followed. The scandal resulted not so much from the images themselves, but rather
from the use of the images mediated through montage and commentary.” (HEBARD
2011: 214-215; emphasis added).
32
Following the notion of “concentrationary cinema”, Griselda Pollock and Max
Silverman, discuss, for a post-war context, a new way of making cinema, which
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 25

stressed is the fact that Nuit et Brouillard exposes the politics through its
critical aesthetic practice as a film. In this regard, and within the
framework of the present discussion, Nuit et Brouillard’s relevance is
intimately related with its politico-aesthetics particularities and
negotiations, and moreover, from the implications of such a position, with
the self-conscious gesture for outlining an aesthetic of resistance33.

As proposed by George Didi-Huberman in Images malgré tout ([2004]

2012: 112-113), there is an immense veil for those who want to know, and

with its radical techniques of montage, disrupts and confronts the normalized
documentary presentation that, with films such as Alain Resnais’ Nuit et
Brouillard (1955), Hiroshima mon amour (1959) or Muriel (1963) along with
Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), for example, “connects the living to the dead, past
to present, here to there in order to shock us out of comforting dichotomies that
keep the past ‘over there’, exposing us to contamination” (POLLOCK & SILVERMAN,
“Introduction: Concentrationary Cinema” 2011: 2). Thus, and outlining the
political and philosophical basis of the concentrationary system and its emergence,
the authors raise the need to define the politico-aesthetics roots of that same term
that informs their notion of ‘concentrationary cinema’. In this sense, they argue
that the “concentrationary is part of the politics of representation of thought,
memory and imagination” (Ibid.: 20), raising for this purpose some fundamental
issues such as: “What place might cinema as a visual technology and a mass
medium itself have had in creating and sustaining the concentrationary imagery
and massified aesthetics of Nazi totalitarianism? What treacherous and
compromised aspects of the cinematic might Night and Fog have had to, or failed
to, negotiate as a political and historical work that would have to use materials
created by the perpetrators – both perpetrator imagery as well as the spectacular
use of cinema as a means to document this universe? Where and how does an
attempt at a counter – concentrationary art practice become complicit with the
aesthetic technologies of that which is being resisted?” (Ibid.: 37; emphasis added).
Stressing the political reading of this particular way of making cinema, that the
authors shall refer to as “political poetics”, what is being underlined are the
possibilities for new readings to come, by placing these films “in the context of
this complex terrain of emerging and contested political and cultural narratives,
memorializations and political anxieties […] No longer placing Night and Fog at
the beginning of a history of a cinema and the genocide we know now as the
Holocaust, we are viewing it as a politics of representation, situated in, but not
confined to, the 1950’s, and as a representation of politics in relation to an event
we might consider the most politicized instance attempted eradication of the
political, the polis, the sphere of social action.” (Ibid.: 38; emphasis added).
33
As proposed by Giorgio Agamben, in a passage of his Remnants of Auschwitz,
“here Goebbels’s definition of politics – ‘the art of making what seems impossible
possible’ – acquires its full weight.” (AGAMBEN [1999] 2002: 148; emphasis
added).
26 Chapter II

indeed for those who want to know how, knowing offers neither miracle
nor respite. And yet, this veil lifts slightly every time a document is seen
and looked at for what emerges through its own gaps and silences 34 .
Images, he adds further on, become precious to historical knowledge from
the moment they are conceptualized into montages of intelligibility in all
their possible choices (Ibid.: 200). Returning to Alain Resnais’ film, what
seems relevant to think of is its very distinctive mode of representation:
not so much the images themselves, but rather the particular use of the
images mediated through the work of montage. Thereby, the film’s
decisive role on the opening of knowledge is defined by an ethical position,
which expresses itself through the ways Resnais chooses to use the
archival material juxtaposed with present-day footage; this consists of an
ethical moment of the gaze, and so of imagination itself 35 , as such
conditions “work to defamiliarize the archive and to complicate a facile
distinction between past and present” (Hebard 2011: 215).

Considering Alain Resnais’ own particular gesture of cinema, which

may be called the “cinema of the in-betweens”, and indeed, more
specifically from his self-conscious formal experiments, strategies and
interfaces, how should we read its relations between words and images, its


34
“For those who want to know, and indeed for those who want to know how,
knowing offers neither miracle nor respite. It is knowing without end: the
interminable approach of the event, and not its capture in a revealed certainty.
There is no ‘neither – nor’, no ‘yes or no’, ‘we know all or we deny’, revelation or
veil.” (DIDI-HUBERMAN [2004] 2012: 112-113; author’s translation).
35
In this regard, George Didi-Huberman ([2004] 2012: 116-117; author’s
translation) notes that “imagination is not identification or even less hallucination”,
and that “to approach does not mean to appropriate”. “These images”, he states,
“will never be reassuring images of oneself; they will always remain images of the
Other, harrowing, tearing images as such: but their very otherness demanded that
we approach them”. “Indeed” he adds further on, “no one has spoken better than
Proust of this necessary ‘disappropriating approach’ […] What happens then? On
the one hand, the familiar is distorted: the object looked at, however well known,
begins to appear as though ‘I had never known of it before’ (and this is quite the
opposite of designing one’s own tailor – made fetish). On the other hand, identity
is altered: for an instant, the looking subject, however firm he is in the exercise of
observation, loses all spatial and temporal certainty […] ‘that privilege which
does not last and in which, during the brief instant of return, we have the ability to
abruptly attend our own absence’ […] But to attend one’s own absence is not so
simple: it asks the gaze to perform a gnoseological, aesthetic, and ethical task,
which determines the readability – in the sense that Warburg and Benjamin gave
to this term – of the image.”
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 27

particular use of the shot and the gaze, but mostly the intercutting of
present and past and its imaging (cf. Pollock & Silverman 2011)?

Nuit et Brouillard results from the combination of documentary and

fiction-film footage, wherein the montage process – of still and moving
images in a dramatic juxtaposition, cutting between abandoned ruins
filmed in colour alongside archive images in black and white, together
with the poetic voice over commentary, and charged discordant music36 –
contribute towards not only the establishment of an iconic imagery, but
also towards the aesthetical and ethical encounter of a double moment
emerging from original documentation and retrospective reading 37 . By
using the montage process, Resnais’ work expresses plasticity, in its
brevity of proportions, in the different selected plans or even in the
different nature of the images chosen by him – black and white and colour
images; photography and motion image; archive material and present
imagery – which adds to the intensity of the effect, providing the
conditions for an entirely new kind of legibility and of reading (Didi-
Huberman 2011a: 86-87).

Nuit et Brouillard therefore defines a critical point for historical

knowledge, as it relates to Resnais’ formal strategies of research within the
montage process. The film clearly expresses the political concept of the
“now” of readability, that is, the experience of a political questioning on
and of the present from amongst an archive of images, texts and

36
These politico - aesthetic cinematic techniques and experiments - what Resnais
called his “recherches formelles” – were already patent in previous works such as
his 1953 Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also die), a 30-minute anti-colonial
film made in collaboration with Chris Marker. As noted by Pollock & Silverman,
“the film shows how the vitality and cultural foundations of African sculptural
imagination were being crushed by colonization […] music, a dramatic means of
filming the sculptures so as to animate their aesthetic force, and a voice-over that
underscored the tension between the liveliness of the works and their colonial fate,
identified Resnais and Chris Marker as filmmakers capable of finding a cinematic
form that itself could visually, aurally and critically indict colonial violence”
(POLLOCK & SILVERMAN 2011: 36); another example, similarly defined by the use
of montage, poetic voice-over and a dramatic juxtaposition, is Resnais’ 1950 film
Guernica, which denounces the fascist and violent, military assault of the Basque
town in the form of a visual poem through the use of Picasso’s images.
37
See POLLOCK & SILVERMAN 2011: 36 – “Resnais’ already formulated politicized
‘recherches formelles’ will generate a specifically cinematic mode of encounter – a
‘gesture of cinema’ – between past and present, the moment and history that
presents not a monument to the dead but a political questioning of the present and
an exploration of concentrationary memory”.
28 Chapter II

testimonies of the past. By using the “montage principle”, Resnais was,

indeed, questioning the conditions of possibility that enabled the existence
of those same images, while simultaneously thinking about their
singularities in terms of how they relate to each other. Indeed, how they
move38.

Since Nuit et Brouillard presents itself as a state of the experience’s

actuality from which the “principle of montage” folds between the
documentary and the fictional, it traverses historical documentation’s
problematic in creating a document that fundamentally “confounds the
notions of past, present, history and memory” (Hebard 2011: 219). Thus,
in order to understand what it means and what its implications are, we
should take a closer look into the film’s montage, specifically its rhetoric
of juxtaposing past and present footage.

Nuit et Brouillard begins with an uncanny perspective: the first shot of

the film is framed upon a colourful field – an ordinary landscape – and the
camera starts to crane down to reveal a barbed wire fence; – an ordinary
road – is shown, first as an open plan, and then through the wires of a
fence. Resnais mostly used the same pattern as this initial sequence:
camera movement in the space of the ruin – the site of the abandoned
concentration camp – alternating with the use of archival images and the
juxtaposition of past and present (Ibid.)39. Thereby, at a formal level, the
first difference between present footage and past archive is the opposition
between colour and black and white. Although this formal opposition
would seem to be the most difficult to break down, it points to an
important aspect of the film’s montage, which is the crossover between the
same factors. As suggested by Andrew Hebard, there appears to be a kind


38
“Benjamin specifies from the beginning that this principle is simply to favour
thinking about singularities in terms of how they relate to each other, how they
move and the intervals between them: in short, montage is ‘to assemble large-scale
constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components’ […]. We then
understand that the past becomes readable and therefore knowable when
singularities appear and are dynamically connected to one another, by means of
montage, writing, cinema – like images in motion.” (DIDI-HUBERMAN 2011a: 86;
emphasis added)
39
The use of the juxtaposition technique and the setting out of particular
oppositions (between past and present and between archival material and Resnais’
own footage), followed by its subsequent breakdown as a way of undermining
them, act, as Andrew Hebard (2011: 219) suggests, “to fundamentally confuse our
ideas about past and present.”
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 29

of intentional contamination of the colour footage that is shown by its

potential to fade into black and white40.

Another noticeable structural opposition between past and present

would be Resnais’ use of the camera movement, i.e. the oscillation
between fixed and moving points of view. Herein, the colour footage is
taken with a camera that pivots, tilts but, above all, tracks relentlessly
through the spaces of the abandoned site, whereas much of the archival
material appears in the form of black and white still photographs, while
noting that the archival film footage is shot by a stationary camera, that is,
it occasionally pivots and tilts, but it never moves (Ibid.: 221)41. Another
significance of the camera movement is its particular direction in relation
to the readability of the space. In Resnais’ own footage the camera
movement sets up a “reading frame” from right to left for both the space
and the objects, and this continuity of activity, in general, ensures a certain
clearness to the readability of that same space. In contrast, the archival
footage seems to depict a general confusion of movement, a kind of
chaotic motion of both dispersion and assembly, inducing in the viewer a
form of spatial awareness loss (Ibid.)42 . In fact, this sense of loss is a

40
“This view is suggested by the night scene about eight minutes into the film. The
expressive movement of the camera and the apparent emptiness of the buildings
clearly indicate that the shot is filmed in the present, but the night-time lighting
explicitly removes colour from the shot. A fading of colours also occurs as the
camera penetrates the interiors of the camp. Perhaps the most deliberate use of this
draining of colour comes in the two sequential shots that track along rows of bunks.
The first shot […] manages to reveal the textures and the colours of the wooden
bunks. The following shot looks at a different row of bunks from a similar angle
and matches the previous shot’s forward tracking movement. However, in the
second shot, the bunks are made of concrete, and the shot consists primarily of
monochromatic shades rather than colours.” (HEBARD 2011: 220)
41
Also, and similar to the use of colour, is the effect where, as Andrew Hebard
(2011: 221) points out, “formal aspects of archival material infect the camera of
the present: the camera’s movement often pauses on objects […] and the film even
ends with a stationary shot in which the camera itself begins to pause and take
what could be considered snapshots of the abandoned site”. For Hebard, “this
technique of pausing is formally linked to the archival photographs in that the
camera often pauses right before a cut to a photograph.”
42
“In contrast to the present-day footage where stationary objects move from right
to left in a kind of procession as the camera pans or tracks to the right, the
movement of prisoners within the stationary frame of the archival shot is marked
by a chaotic motion of both dispersion and assembly. In another sequence, the one
in which prisoners are being loaded onto the train, the editing of archival footage
actually serves to disorient the audience’s sense of space […]. In the case of some
30 Chapter II

crescendo between the film’s initial scenes and its last sequences:
throughout the film, the movements become increasingly intricate and
stationary thereby creating a sense of ambiguity in relation to what is
being seen. This movement suspension, particularly noticeable in the
film’s last shot, causes ourselves to question the very nature of what we
are looking at (Ibid.: 222)43.

Faced with Resnais’ juxtapositions and their subsequent

contaminations, it becomes crucial to reflect on their relation with the
historical reading, as they do not work within the film in order to facilitate
a historical narrative but rather to problematize narrative explanation
itself (Ibid.: 223-226). In this sense, the use of the juxtaposing technique
does not set up a progressive montage, but because it operates in a
corrupted way it collapses differences, making it even more relevant that
the sliding between past and present does not occur in the form of a
progression through the film, but rather it occurs as an interruption44. As
such, Resnais’ general use of camera movement, space and colour as well
as the archival material are all linked to the potential interruption
conditions within the film itself as the “experience in act” of thinking the
existence of the past within the present (Ibid.: 223-224)45.


of the grainier photographs, the poor quality of the images can even confuse our
sense of what an object is.” (HEBARD 2011: 221).
43
As suggested by Andrew Hebard (Ibid.: 222), “the first shots challenge our
notion of what we are seeing in the sense that they question whether the ‘ordinary
landscape’ and the ‘ordinary road’ are at all ordinary. What is not questioned is
whether we are looking at a field or a road […]. [In] the last shot the camera moves
across what is presumably a ruined building, but the movements are so intricate,
and the space so ambiguous that the viewer gets no sense of the layout of the
building. The shot combines panning, tilting and tracking movement, often all at
once. The shot even ends with a stationary camera and a predominance of greys,
blacks and whites, drawing distinctly upon the formal qualities of the archive and
imposing them on the present-day footage.”
44
“In contradistinction to Eisensteinian montage, the juxtaposition of images is a
corrupted and non-dialectical one. It collapses differences, but not in the service of
a new understanding of what we see.” (Ibid.: 223).
45
In this respect, Hebard argues that “the existence of a culturally repressed past
within the present is not one where they coexist within the same temporality, but
rather where the past interrupts the present, challenging ideas of both closure and
progress […]. The disjunctive and non-progressive disintegration of formalistic
differentiation that evokes the uncanny through its laying bare of the process of
repression, forces a reconsideration of the possibility that an event can be
contained within a ‘certain’ time or place. To question this possibility is also to
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 31

Thus, in view of the difficult materiality of the image overall, and of

the archive in particular, Nuit et Brouillard confronts us with the
fundamental and paradigmatic question on the “standard of evidence”, i.e.
of figuring archival material as evidence as if it had and, in its turn, given
some sort of fixed meaning, or set the image per se. Through his work of
montage – particularly the juxtaposition of heterogeneous and anachronistic
footage with archival material –, Resnais breaks with the ready-made
image as the immediate form of “enclosed evidence”46, exposing that, as
described by Didi-Huberman:
“[…] each discovery emerges from it like a breach in the history conceived,
a provisionally indescribable singularity that the researcher will attempt to
weave into the fabric of everything he or she already knows, in order to
produce, if possible, a rethought history of the event in question.” (Didi-
Huberman [2004] 2012: 130; author’s translation).

In this condition, and recalling Walter Benjamin’s approach in his essay

“Theses on the Philosophy of History” ([1940] 1999: 252-253) when he
writes of history as “time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]”,
what we can observe from Resnais’ example, is the politics of negotiation
in action from which the work of montage is assumed as an enunciative
practice47, whereby the past can be seized in the instant of the flashing
image recognized only at the present “as the time of now”. To understand
the work of montage as an enunciative practice is, then, to make the power
of linking happen, acknowledging, however, that this “cannot be generated
by the simple relationship between two visible elements” (Rancière [2003]
2009: 56-60). In this sense, it is through its condition as enunciative practice
that montage becomes the theatrical machine that both creates and exposes
analogy and, similar to Warburg’s design of Atlas, the experimental device
to see the time from which the analytical space for specific, intentional and


question the temporality of the event, a temporality no longer contained by a
historical telos […]. This unsettling and paradoxical temporality posed between
expectation and repetition works against the homogenous time of historical
narrative.” (Ibid.: 223-224; emphasis added).
46
“With history, wrote Michel de Certeau, you begin by putting aside, gathering,
thus transforming into ‘documents’ certain objects that have been distributed
differently. This new cultural distribution is the first task. In reality, it consists in
producing such documents by coping, transcribing, or photographing these objects
and, in doing so, changing their place and their status.” (DIDI-HUBERMAN [2004]
2012: 129; author’s translation).
47
Cf. HEBARD 2011: 230-231 and RANCIÈRE [2003] 2009, Chapter 2: “Sentence,
Image, History” (pp. 33-67).
32 Chapter II

difficult materialities act, can be unfolded and performed. Then, to enunciate

is always to negotiate, in and at a moment of danger: the moment at which
the lines of differentiation are constantly being reconfigured and
reconstituted. To embrace such a danger, implies never to posit such
differentiation as a prior given, nor as a future fact, as this would contradict
the negotiation action itself (cf. Hebard 2011: 231-232).

Walter Benjamin, in the Passagen–Werk, wrote that,

“The historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a
particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility [Lesbarkeit]
only at a particular time. […] Each ‘now’ is the now of a particular
recognisability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. […]
image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the
now to form a constellation. […] The image that is read – which is to say,
the image in the now of its recognisability – bears to the highest degree the
imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is found [N3,
1].” (Benjamin [1982] 1999: 462-463; emphasis added).

Thus, in the wake of Benjamin’s words and considering Resnais’ gesture

of cinema, how do visibility and legibility interface?

“To read what was never written”

[Image. Speech. Imagination. History. Fiction]
"If one looks upon history as a text, then one can say of it what a recent
author has said of literary texts – namely, that the past has left in them
images comparable to those registered by a light – sensitive plate. ‘The
future alone possesses developers strong enough to reveal the image in all
its details [...]. The historical method is a philological method based on the
book of life. ‘Read what was never written’, runs a line in Hofmannsthal.
The reader one should think of here is the true historian.”
Walter Benjamin ([1940] 2006b: 405; emphasis added)48

Baudelaire, in his New Notes on Edgar Poe ([1857] 1964: 127),

reflecting on Poe’s Short Stories, refers to a different type of reading
driven by the work of imagination by stating that,
“Imagination is the queen of faculties. […] Imagination is not fantasy; nor
is it sensibility, although it may be difficult to conceive of an imaginative

48
Walter Benjamin, The Dialectical Image. This fragment, selected from a larger
body of material published in the Gesammelte Schriften (GS 1.3 1238), was written
in 1940 in the course of composing “On the Concept of History”. See Benjamin’s
“Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’” ([1940] 2006b: 400-411).
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 33

man who would be lacking in sensibility. Imagination allows us to perceive

the inner and secret relations among things, the correspondences and
analogies.”

In accordance therewith, imagination is, then, presented as a powerful

tool: not of the logical exhaustion of the given possibilities, but on the
contrary, of that inexhaustible openness to the possibilities not yet given.
Or indeed, as Rancière ([2003] 2009: 58-59), in his observations on
montage, puts it, to that “what has never been begun, never been coupled,
and which can conquer everything in its ageless rhythm.”

Likewise Baudelaire, so too Goethe and Benjamin 49 underlined that

imagination, however bewildering it might be, grants us the possibility for
a transversal knowledge: drawing on the intrinsic power of montage, it
accepts and renews the multiple incessantly, in order to detect therein
“new inner and secret relations”, new “correspondences” and new
“analogies”, which will in turn be inexhaustible. Such an inexhaustible
consideration is any thought of the relations that an unprecedented
montage will always be likely to demonstrate (Didi-Huberman [2011]
2013: 13-14).

In Images malgré tout, George Didi-Huberman ([2004] 2012: 154)

claims that, an image without imagination is quite simply an image which
we have not yet put to work. Since imagination is work, that work would
be the time where they act on each other endlessly by collisions, mergers,
disruptions or metamorphoses. Once all of this acts directly on our own
way to know and to think, then, and still following Didi–Huberman’s
thinking, to know one must imagine (Ibid.: 154).

The “work of montage” opens the possibility to know, in spite of all,

what remains inaccessible as a whole and what is impossible to fully see.
In Nuit et Brouillard’s particular case, it is through the work of montage
that both differences and gaps are played and displayed: one needs to


49
We return once again to that Benjamin’s image of the folded fan: “In stories,
novels, and novellas he is encountered in endless metamorphoses. And from this it
follows that the faculty of imagination is the gift of interpolating into the
infinitesimally small, of inventing, for every intensity, an extensiveness to contain
its new, compressed fullness, in short, of receiving each image as if it were that of
the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes, in this new
expanse, the beloved features within it.” (See, BENJAMIN 1979: 75, “One-Way
Street”; emphasis added).
34 Chapter II

mount what we cannot see, in order to, if possible, give thought to the
differences. Of all that is intransmissible from its beginning.

Jean-Luc Godard, in Histoire(s) du cinéma, claims that ‘montage is the

art of producing a form that thinks’50. To which we can add “montage as a
form of writing” – image with syntax, imagination and ideology –
expressed through the systematic use of extracts and fragments with
heterogeneous and anachronistic natures, and which lacks any kind of
hierarchy. The formal experiments that result from the work of montage,
thus corresponds to a type of writing sliding between opposition and
juxtaposition, sequence and simultaneity. This process does not absorb
differences; rather it accuses them, distancing itself from any idea of
synthesis or fusion. In this sense, what is important to be stressed is the
fact that the image acquires a legibility that flows directly from the
montage choices (cf. Didi-Huberman [2004] 2012: 177). However, as
Didi-Huberman underlines, and given that to establish things is not to
assimilate them, it is important not to confuse archive with mere
appearance, work with manipulation, montage with lie, and resemblance
with assimilation (Ibid.: 191).

Since, as so powerfully stated by Didi-Huberman (2009: 11), to take

knowledge of, is to take position on 51 , we understand how, both
imagination and the principle of montage as ways to take knowledge, carve
out the techniques that forces both the creator and the viewer to take
position on whatever is being handled. Through them, the writing of
history can happen in another space, one that is worked inside out and
built to its positioning. This could be understood as the space of
confrontation from which any act of reading is requested to become the
constant creation of new links and texts. Thus, it is from within this frame
of possibilities that we are confronted with the fundamental ethical and
political question: what should we do at present? “To take position” places
us before the key question related to the present’s actuality and it

50
Quoted in DIDI-HUBERMAN [2004] 2012: 176
51
“Pour savoir il faut prendre position. Rien de simple dans un tel geste. Prendre
position, c’est se situer deux fois au moins, sur les deus fronts au moins que
comporte toute position puisque toute position est, fatalement relative. Il s’agit par
exemple d’affronter quelque chose ; mais, devant cette chose, il nous faut aussi
compter avec tout ce dont nous nous détournons, le hors-champ que existe derrière
nous, que nous refusons peut-être mais qui, en grand partie, conditionne notre
mouvemente même, donc notre position. Il s’agit également de se situer dans le
temps. Prendre position, c’est désirer, c’est exiger quelque chose, c’est se situer
dans le présent et viser un futur.” (DIDI-HUBERMAN 2009: 11; emphasis added).
 The Art of “Endangering” Bodies 35

necessarily sets us on to think between the intervals of the retrospective

and prospective movements of any historical interpretation. Thus, between
the whole of the archive and the almost nothing of what remains, how to
perform, then, a critical archaeology of the document?
“The history which he [the historian] lays before the reader comprises, as
it were, the citations occurring in this text, and it is only these citations that
occur in a manner legible to all. To write history thus means to cite history
[N11, 3].” (Benjamin [1982] 1999: 476).

If we return to the given examples discussed above – Warburg’s

Mnemosyne Atlas, Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk and Resnais’ Nuit et
Brouillard – we find that, in all of them, what is at play is a process of de-
vectorization which occurs through the presence of images with variable
status, with their possible combination within an appearance/disappearance
regimen, through its repetition with variation and, ultimately, through
dismantling the figurative continuum, reassembling the material in
unprecedented visual rhythms. Thereby, in their specific case, the process
of montage highlights the divergence of memory locations which, by
exposing its own gaps and by taking place at the image intervals, appears
as the place for questioning both history and memory, its reciprocal action
and interaction, actively searching for a poetic variable for the writing of
history.

It is in this context that montage, with all its formal experiments,

strategies and interfaces, appears to us as a fundamental response to the
problem related to the historicity construction. Because it escapes any
teleological orientation, it makes the remnants and its anachronisms visible,
evoking and triggering encounters between contradictory temporalities,
which will affect every object, every event, every person and, at the limit,
every gesture. The implications of making such an archaeology are those
of taking all the risks of placing side-by-side fragments of remnants, which
necessarily are heterogeneous and anachronistic. To take this risk is, then,
to embody the always-experimental gesture of creating memory as to
rehearse an approach to the skin of the world. In this regard, and towards
the impossibility of the past’s citation as a whole, the work of montage
makes possible the articulation and the design of an event’s singularity,
where each way of looking, assembling and disassembling, acts to
subjectify the documentation, designing it as a fictional body. Once any
documentary exercise is in itself a fiction, we must see in the images that
of which they are the remnants.
36 Chapter II

As Benjamin states, just because “to read the world is something too
important to be confined only to books”; because “to read the world is also
to link the things of the world” according to their inner and secret
relations (Benjamin [1933] 2000: 362-363), so the work of montage is the
art of reading the world as a text, whereby any contingent and
fragmentary material can be questioned and thus gain legibility. And, by
installing itself at the core of history’s own text, the work of montage
allows for reality to configure itself as an endless folding of fictions: as in
language, it puts history into act, renewing and actualizing it at each now
in which all the reading is found (cf. Barrento 2005: 30).

To read what was never written is, in the end, the difficult practice of
repeatedly rehearsing in order to see the time. From amongst the
incandescent material of history, to read what was never written is, then,
to enunciate history as creative writing.
“On the portal, the ‘Spes’ [Hope] by Andrea de Pisano. Sitting, she
helplessly stretches her arms for a fruit that remains beyond her reach. And
yet she is winged. Nothing is more true.”
Walter Benjamin ([1925-1926] 2004: 47; emphasis added)

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT -
Portugal) for funding my research and the Centro de Estudos em
Arqueologia, Artes e Ciências do Património (CEAACP) for all the
support. I would like to particular thank Ana Vale, Sérgio Gomes, Lesley
McFadyen and Andrew May for the comments and corrections on
previous versions of this text and, finally, a special thanks to Julia Roberts
for her editing work.

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 CHAPTER III

LOOKING AROUND DIFFERENTLY:

TAKING THE ARTS SERIOUSLY

STEPHANIE KOERNER

The broad aim of this chapter is to examine the special relevance for
rethinking comparison of symmetrical approaches to rethinking both
problematic images of science and of disenchantment models of art history.
To this aim it brings together explorations of questions about what is
meant: by rethinking the roots of dichotomising contextualisation versus
comparison; by symmetrical approaches to problematic generalisations
about the Scientific Revolution, the disenchantment of art and so-called
pre-modern and/or primitive "modes of thought"; by the notion of a
culturally particular situation; and by someone saying that they are
"looking at things differently"? The chapter concludes with suggestions
about implications for taking the arts, humanities and science equally
seriously.

Introduction
Questioning Comparison

According to Vale et al. (2014): “To question comparison is to

question the complex and perhaps paradoxical relationship between the
singularity of archaeological material and the possibility of it being similar
to another unit that allows comparison.” While envisaging the issues
raised as methodological questions about the unity and diversity of
archaeological materials might seem uncontroversial, their philosophical
and theoretical correlates are clearly not. Ever since antiquity, comparison
has been a focus of debate over metaphysical questions about the world,
the place of humans in it, and the extent to which humans can come to
know something of why there is a world (Van Inwagen and Zimmerman
2000). Throughout the twentieth century contextualisation and comparison
 Looking Around Differently: Taking the Arts Seriously 41

have been polarised around such questions as: What have been the most
significant factors or ‘prime movers’ (social, economic, ideological, etc.)
responsible for cultural unity and diversity, and/or social continuity and
change? Should the humanities and social sciences be modelled on
physical and life sciences? Should the histories of art, science and
modernity be interpreted as a triumph or tragedy? How important is ethics
for understanding human life ways and cultures?

For over a half century after World War II, disagreement over these
questions paralleled the splitting of the “goals [of] discipline after
discipline (...) along the axis of autonomy and dependence” (Galison 2008:
112) around such dichotomies as those of science versus art, nature versus
culture, truth versus contingency, the particular versus the universal, and
contexts versus comparison. Today many of the presuppositions involved,
are being critically examined in tandem with wider changes in disciplinary
relationships, and in universities' roles in society. Numerous questions that
once divided opposed paradigms for methodology and theory in the
humanities no longer preoccupy research and debate. For instance, in the
history of science and art history polemic conventionally centred on such
questions as: When did the Renaissance or the Scientific Revolution begin?
Were they continuations of, or did they break with earlier traditions? Do
art and science have universalisable common denominators or are they
mutually untranslatable “two cultures”? Parallel polemic in anthropology
centred on such themes as kinship systems and social organisation, culture
and environment and so called “pre-modern modes of thought” and
“modern world views”. In archaeology parallel polemic revolved around
such questions as: When did the Neolithic Age happen? Were external or
internal factors most responsible for the Bronze Age?
“Why was bronze adopted, especially in areas without copper and tin. Was
it primarily for social or economic reasons? And if some developments
really occurred with respect to social stratification and international
exchange, was this actually caused by bronze alone, or should it rather be
explained by internal demographic factors? Such an internal framework
has been given first priority as a precondition for the adoption and
development of metallurgy (...) in opposition to earlier scholars stressing
external factors as the driving force (...). We are thus dealing with the old
question of internal versus external influence / the primacy of the social
versus the economic.” (Kristiansen 1987: 30).

Today the humanities are experiencing far reaching changes in the very
nature of the questions that are being asked, with deep implications for
methodology and theory. Even philosophy (a field traditionally specialised
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