montage construction

montage with its spatial origins in dublin (joyce, ulysses), paris (breton, surrealism), berlin (brecht, dada) and moscow (eisenstein, vertov), the increasingly fragmented city gives rise to the technique of fragment. benjamin sees the passagenwork as a lexicon of capitalist modernity, its content indicates a modernity of contradictory forces, of rampant technological development in which the spectre of war and destruction is counterposed with the images of utopic wish fulfillment. at this point technique makes its most significant advances in the artistic realm. art becomes the avant guarde of a non-instrumental technique and points our apperception to a world reconfigured by the human imaginary. the constructive principle of montage sees the city as built up of fragments not as a seamless whole and politically contested -it emphasizes the disjunctive nature of its parts, its contradictions, the disruptions, the gaps and silences; all of which explodes the received social meanings of things. this dialectic of contradictory elements prepares the imagination for social and artistic intervention.