The critical possibilities of montage in post-dictatorial and platformized culture

Approaches to the imaginary in times of scrolling

Abstract

This article formulates epistemological, conjunctural and theoretical-methodological questions arising from a concrete research practice, and is structured in three sections that take up these questions. The first offers a conceptualization of the imaginary situated in its specific materiality and in its links with the ideological, based on contributions from philosophy and psychoanalysis. It proposes a work with images that takes them as a privileged material for the capture of affective elements in which the subjective and the social are intertwined. The second section offers a diagnosis of the transformations in the imaginary relationship of subjects with their material conditions of existence, read from the platforming and post-dictatorial turn of culture. In particular, the implications of a historical transformation of the massive forms of perception, starting from the practice of scrolling, are studied. Finally, the third section develops the conjecture that we are witnessing a dispute in the forms of montage, between what we call algorithmic montage and critical montage, understood as a practice of knowledge production. Throughout the article, suggestions are made for a concrete approach to the imaginary and for the realization of critical assemblages based on the question of how to produce images that dislocate the presentist temporality of the permanent and confirmatory flow of the scrolling. It is concluded that from the social sciences it is possible to carry out a critical montage that destabilizes the dominant forms of looking and of what we are given to see. It is a question of investigating in the plane of combinatorics, selections and relations between elements that foreshadow new forms of imagination of the social.