benjamin: history as montage or the dialectical image

constructing dialectical images. the critical components in constructing dialectical images are, on the one hand a marxist inspired insight into the dialectical structure of the commodity and, on the other a the method of montage and its inherent re-valuation of a world that

montage-modernity-and the wild west

montage with its spatial origins in dublin (joyce), paris (surrealism), berlin (dada, brecht, hartmann)) and moscow (eisenstein vertov), the increasingly fragmented world gives rise to the the technique of fragment. benjamin sees the passagenwork as a lexicon of capitalist modernity, its

city montage – dublin. joyce.

in ulysses, joyce constructs a montaged life of the city over the course of 24 hours. this process of decomposition and reconstruction relates it the cinematic montage of eisenstein and vertov that embraces the city’s discontinuity, conflict and contradiction. but he further differentiates his