Sparks of Discomfiture: On the Promise of Photomontage (or Back to Suture)

Abstract

Far from being ‘over’, photomontage has proliferated in our digital age, most commonly as meme. Although seemingly based on wit’s lowest common denominator, memes illustrate the mass reach and cohesive function of the medium but also tell us something about the mood of the moment. It is the untapped potential of the medium that interests me here. Drawing on the anticipatory history of Marxist practitioners in the 1920s and 1930s, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and John Heartfield, this article traces the coordinates of a potential radical practice that sparks discomfiture and cognitive reorientation. Rather than reproducing knowledge, photomontage can produce new forms of understanding; it can do so in complex and continually generative ways that remain underexplored in the digital age, in which an epistemology of suture predominates.