Y6a4 (preservation)

Here Benjamin's topic is photomontage, which clearly has everything to do with how he has constructed the Arcades Project. It relates both to the mechanical reproductive technique that is photography—that might be seen as informational and deeply opposed to the artisanal, or, that is, the thing that creates aura—and also to an advanced form of this technique, a move toward its truer nature of montage. This montage is birthed or incarnated exactly from an attempt (failed we presume) to maintain what is distinctive about photography's polar opposite, painting, and then not only painting but what is perhaps an advanced form of painting, the landscape, something that demands a highly developed continuity, one that mirrors basic natural characteristics of geography. What Benjamin is showing here is that the impulse to advance technology is one to preserve old technology. There is an impulse to use photography to make the world appear painterly. In any case, there is a "painterly character" to a few different things here: the painting itself; the world in the painting; the real world of actual appearance, which the painting in many ways constructs; the photographic image of the world; the image produced with photomontage. We also keep in mind here the relationship to the Arcades Project itself: how Benjamin's photomontage of text is used to create something "painterly," how that may well be its basic impulse. How the Arcades Project is bringing a certain falseness to the appearance of reality. Here the productivity of mechanical reproduction is defined by how well it can reproduce traditional values. Here too in this passage we can see Benjamin's idea of photomontage is not one of simple juxtaposition, but one of photo manipulation, where various elements of a single unified image might be brought forward or deemphasized separately. Photomontage as a type of deconstruction of the image, a behind the scenes and technological, as much as it is chemical, alteration and modulation of appearances, one that is not at all immediately noticeable, one whose every intent is in fact to remain unnoticeable, one that works to provide us with the comforting illusion of a world that specifically counteracts these perceived threats of technology.