Over the next few posts I’ll be developing my work on bande dessinée (BD) and démontage into a book length project. The aim is to suggest that ideas taken from the form of BD can be applied much more widely and that the concept of démontage can be of interest for metaphysics.
The general idea of démontage is of undoing or unmaking or taking apart. Something is disassembled and at the same time put together again in a different way, such as a disordered reading of a bande dessinée where a new path through words, images and panels is constructed. It isn’t simply to undo, but rather to redo something that arrives undone. Any reader can do this, or put more powerfully, any reader must do this.
The metaphysical concept is even stronger. It is that the reception of anything depends on an unmaking: a démontage, as opposed to montage or the editing of a series of images together to construct a film (and other artworks). It might not always seem so, but every experience and act disassembles before it makes things partly whole again. The breaking comes first and is a condition for the making.
Shedding doubt on these definitions, the title of this post invites an objection by adding the idea of arrival to reception. Isn’t it the case that everything arrives with at least a minimum of cohesion, whether in perception, or sense, or understanding? Haven’t I got things upside down, because there has to be something to unmake: an object, a sensation, a meaning, a tale, an idea, a being?
It’s not only that there had to be a watch before it was broken, in the above photograph by Col Adamson. It’s also that we have to pick up the parts in perception and have an idea of a watch as well as a sense of the meaning of broken. The starting doctrine ‘Everything arrives unmade’ should perhaps be replaced by its opposite ‘Everything arrives made’.
The first step in responding to this criticism is to introduce a metaphysical claim: it is a mistake to approach metaphysical definitions in terms of all or nothing, either/or. Instead and paradoxically, all things are in degrees. Life is entanglement and overlaps, rather than perfections and separation. If taken as total opposites, both claims about making are mistaken. There is something more at work in their relation, in the way they play off each other, like the different frames of a BD by Cyril Pedrosa (in this case Equinoxes) constituting a puzzle, rather than a finished final story.
Once absolutes are abandoned, metaphysics becomes a matter of practice and observation, of experimentation with principles and definitions based on experiences and speculation, rather than building on secure and immutable laws.
This turn to flexible principles and essays is always partly political, because it combines effects with uncertain choices, thereby setting up clashing positions. Certainties discarded, principles are open to change, variation, conflict and conciliation, dependent on how things are observed and how they turn out.
Close observation of bande dessinée suggests answers to the problems of arrival and reception, when opposites such as perfect arrival or total chaos are abandoned. Unmade does not mean completely chaotic. It means that any arrival involves gaps and disjunctions, tensions and contradictions, different potential paths and ambiguities, as our eyes scan the images, for instance, when reconstructing the scene of a camera shot in an art gallery, suggested but not completed by Pedrosa. Who was learning without the desire? Is there really no desire here?
If we pay closer attention to scanning, two further aspects of arrival stand out. First, when we scan a page like the one above there is both active and passive scanning. Sometimes we are drawn to things unconsciously and involuntarily; for example, when we are unexpectedly attracted to a minor part of the page.
At other times we consciously and wilfully search the page; when we decide to compare two faces, for instance. Activity and passivity cannot be detached from one another, because each action takes place against a background of unconscious pulls, and because each involuntary impulse is subject to conscious assessment and accompaniment. I must resist the pull of those eyes.
Each active movement has at least minor involuntary attractions stemming from the page, from our unconscious and from our bodies; when we look to compare faces but are drawn to the shape of lips first and beyond mere study.
Yet each passive draw is open to an active pursuit and examination: we can spurn an unconscious impulse, or dismiss an attraction to colour as an irrelevance, or try to control a bodily facet such as a natural distance taken from the image due to focus, habit, social expectations and physical constraints.
This combination of unconscious effects and demands for novel activity creates a disjunction in the reception of any work or event, thereby interrupting norms and social organisation. Démontage, as an active and passive necessary condition, makes it possible – in fact inevitable – to live differently, despite the apparent overdetermination and obviousness of existence.
Contemporary science of vision demonstrates an unconscious and useful processing of movement as our eyes move with a changing scene:
Recent insights demonstrate that the alternating cycle of fixations and eye movements modifies the spectral content of visual input in a way that appears highly adaptive in our natural environment (6, 7). The new results of Schweitzer and Rolfs now show that the brain adapts even specific parts of the spectral content of the retinal motion streak generated by an eye movement. Together, these data demonstrate that eye movements are a fundamental component in the human visual system—not a nuisance, but useful. (Fabius JH, Van der Stigchel S. Vision while the eyes move: Getting the full picture. Sci Adv. 2021 Jul 23;7(30):eabk0043. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abk0043. PMID: 34301609; PMCID: PMC8302122.)
In an experiment similar to a kinetic visual field test performed by an optician, where we click a button each time we pick up on a movement in an image, the eye fixes and moves in response to changes in the field of vision. Against the assumption that visual input to the brain is more accurate with a fixed eye, the movement of the eye adapts unconsciously to a moving field and thereby constitutes a more accurate perception of a moving environment.
Given the role of unconscious scanning in BD and more widely, it is worth noting how these senses of useful and nuisance involve presuppositions about the purpose of visual inputs (accurate representation) and how it works (input of data to the brain).
If eye movements are also making much wider unconscious inputs and if those inputs are interactions with ongoing processes, such as attractions, repulsions, desires and dislikes, then we shall at the very least have to expand what we mean by useful and nuisance, or even abandon concepts such as usefulness for more neutral observation of effects, followed by attempts to make sense of problems. Where did my attraction to yellow come from? What might it imply?
Due to the essential strictures of repeatable experiments and of demonstration, the scientific study of the visual system does not go far enough. It tests for movement of the eye in response to and in anticipation of movement in a specially designed moving image, analysed for only those features taken as parameters in the experiment. For instance, contrasts with the viewers’ prior visual experience and history are not taken into account in the eye-motion experiment.
On the basis of the BD experience, I’ll speculate that any image is moving, even when it seems fixed or blank. This movement could be due to variations in the field constituted by interactions between seeing and what is seen or, more radically, it could be that any field is always varying ‘in itself’. I’ll leave any decision on this metaphysical question to later. Either way, the working hypothesis is that there is movement as soon as there is a field and hence to-and-fro between the seen field and a seer.
Blank fields and their reception are important for the theory of démontage. I’ll also return to them in a later post about BD, démontage and the distinction between speculation and observation in metaphysical construction. In the meantime, here is a helpful and inventive article on the topic by Steven Surdiacourt, with an interesting critical take on the influential BD theorist Thierry Groensteen.
There are simple experiments we can perform on a BD mock-up page of blanks, ready for a new story. If we consider the frames with a planned sketch or narrative, then do our eyes scan from frame to frame according to a pre-set pattern or do they scan more unpredictably?
If we choose a particular blank frame, do our eyes scan within it considering positioning and content according to a prior image and text – a plan – or is that plan subject to attraction coming from the panel? Does the scanning vary depending on which frame we choose? Does it vary depending on the lines, colours, words and stories we are thinking of?
For my hypothesis, the answers to all these questions favour a passive, contingent and undetermined element to scanning, where the frames, blanks and interactions with them constitute a type of dismantling alongside planned projects: démontage.
According to this hypothesis, every visual system is moving and responding to motion, even when they seem fixed and motionless. All movement is an unbreakable combination of eye, brain, body, seen image and the unconscious. It’s this alloy that makes the BD page a field of attractions and vectoral directions: arrows indicating directions and speeds with different aims and intensities leading across the field.
Far from motionless, Pedrosa’s frames are dancing or fighting with us. We can experiment with these effects for ourselves by meditating with the page, moving around it, with different focus points and ideas, unmaking earlier certainties, then building up layers of unstable perceptions and interpretations, many of which will be unconscious.
The question ‘Why so angry?’ in the last panel raises another objection. If we are reading with a view to follow the story and seek an answer, then narrative seems to take precedence over any démontage. By aiming towards an explanation of the anger, from frame to frame, and relevant content to relevant content, the vectoral direction of narrative would inhibit any reverie.
My reply to the objection is that démontage and daydreaming remain in the background, as part of the unconscious and physical inputs of image, colour and words: an ineliminable presupposition for any narrative. Even when following a story closely, there are conscious, unconscious, and bodily prompts and imprints on us. That shiver on turning the page.
Often hidden and on a slow burn, these effects go far beyond the storyline and can have much stronger later effects; for instance, when a character remains with us, or when we can’t shake off a mood, style and tone; or when an image keeps returning as a haunting; or when words and images trigger waves of desire; or when unexpected new questions and storylines emerge from behind more prominent ones; or when subsequent events instigate conscious and unconscious reviews of an earlier reading.
But doesn’t any story at least impose a dominant initial direction to the reading: a preliminary guide through the work? I’ll return to this challenge posed to the theory of démontage by narrative dominance (in relation to the works of Jeff Lemire). It is enough, here, to observe that we do not have to scan in any given direction and that later memories and experiences often reveal very different patterns of reception of panels and frames to the ones we thought were operating at the time.
The same multi-directional and vectoral patterns hold for movement around any single frame. Moreil and Pedrosa’s The Golden Age (L’age d’or) uses this to extraordinary effect, going beyond the technique of letting a series of events unfold in a single frame (borrowed from painting) to a sensual overload designed to convey a troubling sublime occurrence, where readers are forced to calm and then reignite pages, in their own ways, and with long-lasting transformative and creative sequels (also found in sublime painting, without confusing the sublime with awesome grandeur or any restricted value-set).
The publishers haven’t provided the most powerful frames and pages in their previews for The Golden Age; these come at the immersively strange and aesthetically exhilarating end of the second volume of this great BD series. In these late pages, Moreil and Pedrosa exploit démontage as artists, shedding mystery and magic back through their series, and inviting readers to return and reimagine.
The following image conveys some of the effects, in its depth and the play between image, text, colour, detail, styles, types of subject and lines. The story unfolds in this panel thanks partly to the speech bubbles and through the sense conveyed by the picture, yet both are complemented and overtaken by the image proper, with its multiple interacting layers and contrasting intensities.
The entanglement of activity and passivity through the medium of the image explains the necessity of démontage. We aren’t given a closed and perfect image, but rather many different passive attractions and active searches requiring further ordering and remaking. Every arrival is ambiguous, not only in the effect of the words and images, but also in the play of those effects with our conscious and unconscious impulses.
There is a second point to add to the conclusions about active and passive reception coming from the observation of scanning. Reception has no necessary scales, frames or limits. On the contrary, scanning demonstrates a freedom to invent and play things out differently beyond established measures and borders.
We can go into great detail, or take an overview, or read fast or slow, or make wild connections, or slow down to an obsessive stasis, or deploy a destructive unpicking. All of these can be active, but they are also passive, unfolding beyond awareness.
We are not limited by the structure or boundaries of the page, since we carry other images, sensations and ideas into it and since we can transfer its words and images beyond any assigned boundary – simply by looking away or turning back or reminiscing or imagining. The frame and the scale of its contents are set by custom and habits. These can be undone and countered.
In a review of Equinoxes, for comics web-magazine Broken Frontier, Jason Wilkins draws attention to the multiple form of Pedrosa’s BD with its ‘… transitioning from dynamic, full-coloured pages to textured, impressionistic, black and white sketches to full prose without breaking stride.’ For Wilkins, this ‘startling array of storytelling techniques’ also holds for each frame where Pedrosa uses ‘layering’, ‘vague outlines’, ‘stencilled depth’ and colour ’emphasizing emotional states’ to make complex images.
Abstracting from the particular style and content of BD, Wilkins’ analysis of Pedrosa can be distilled into formal points about multiplicity and démontage. BD reveals and invites démontage partly thanks to the following:
- transitions between different media (text, styles of drawing and painting, photographs in full page/strips/prose)
- contrasts in style (sketching and detailed images across the full stylistic range of contemporary image-making)
- differences in clarity (impressions, vagueness, extreme detail)
- contrasts of colour and feel (textures and hues, as associated with multiple emotions and sensations)
- layers that cannot be reduced (over-layering of images and texts, collage and disruptive framing)
- depths and surfaces (the importance of outlines and backgrounds in BD)
- differences in relations and connections (relations across a full range of ideas, sensations and unconscious effects through single works, along series and beyond any limit of the BD)
These points can be summed up as differences in distances, directions and speeds. An arrival is a multiplicity of vectors with changing directions, speeds and positions underlying any recognised thing (image, word, meaning, colour, texture). The relation between thing and vectoral multiplicity is not fixed prior to a reception that undoes things together with their vectoral background. How the mysteries of Pedrosa’s panels and pages are then rewritten is up to each one of us, though always connecting through them. Démontage is freedom to create (with Pedrosa).
