Monday, April 7, 2014

Drive as "Surrealist Montage"

Lacan writes, "if there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage [. . .] the montage of the drive is a montage which, first, is presented as having neither head nor tail--in the sense in which one speaks of montage in a surrealist collage [. . .] I think that the resulting image would show the working of a dynamo connected to a gas-tap, a peacock's feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman who is just lying there looking beautiful."

While the image to my left is not exactly the image Lacan imagines, it is the same kind of surrealist collage. Part-objects, ripped out of their context, clash and merge, attract and repulse, to give us a sense of something. It has no "head nor tail" in the sense that it is not teleologically headed toward a particular goal it hopes to achieve (or does achieve). Rather, the part objects endlessly circulate in our minds, as we try and merge these images together. They will never arrive at their "aim," but rather circulate around the rims.

Instruction: Create a surrealist montage from 'part objects' of our Mystory images. Perhaps rather than thinking the Felt as one popcycle section "expressing" another, we should merely think of them as part objects attracting and repulsing, endlessly circulating as our mind's tries to fix them into a meaning (but can't -- we will never arrive. The image is irreducible). 

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