Montage

Montage in this corpus names two related but distinct theoretical operations, each mobilising the concept against naturalism and organic unity. In the first register (Kornbluh, anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019), montage is the cinematic-formal practice through which Eisenstein attempts to weaponise film as a dialectical-critical instrument: by juxtaposing heterogeneous images rather than suturing them into seamless narrative, montage formalises the contradictions that structure social reality under capitalism. The cut between shots does not resolve into a higher unity; it preserves and activates antagonism. Montage is thus a mode of inscription of contradiction into form — the artwork's internal technique becomes homologous to the logic of capital itself (appearance versus essence, phenomenal surface versus structural determination), and in doing so makes that logic visible rather than naturalising it.

In the second register (Lacan, jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1), montage migrates from film theory into the theory of the drive. Lacan recruits the surrealist inflection of montage — the collage-logic of heterogeneous, headless assemblage — to characterise the drive's structure as irreducibly non-teleological. The drive's components (Drang, source, object, aim) do not cohere into an organic whole governed by natural finality; they are assembled, combinable, reversible. This is precisely what distinguishes the drive from biological instinct: instinct has a telos, whereas the drive is a montage that can run in any direction. The surrealist collage image is strategic here: surrealist montage defies the unity of meaning and origin, producing an object that has "neither head nor tail," a figure Lacan explicitly invokes. Both usages share the same anti-naturalist, anti-teleological thrust: montage names a structure whose parts do not add up to a whole with a governing purpose.

In anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019, montage sits at the intersection of the cross-referenced concepts of Contradiction, Dialectics, Form, and Ideology. It is the specific aesthetic-formal technique through which cinema can refuse to paper over social contradictions and instead present them as the content of form itself. This aligns montage with the dialectical tradition as defined in this corpus: not a movement toward resolution but an intensification of antagonism. It functions as the cinematic analogue to the philosophical principle that contradiction is the motor of thought and history, and as a counter-weapon to Capitalist Phantasmagoria and Ideology, which conceal structural contradictions beneath seamless phenomenal appearance.

In jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1, montage appears as a borrowed metaphor that does significant theoretical work in specifying the drive's non-instinctual character. It is an extension and re-application of the aesthetic concept, now serving Lacanian metapsychology. It relates obliquely to Fetish and Form — the drive, like the fetish, assembles heterogeneous elements into a functioning object that substitutes for an impossible unity — but its primary function is to sever the drive from any naturalist or phenomenological reading. The two occurrences together suggest that montage operates in this corpus as a transversal figure: a structural logic of non-organic assemblage that links the critique of cinematic ideology to the theory of the subject's libidinal economy.

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.184)

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.

The phrase "neither head nor tail" is theoretically loaded because it directly negates teleology — a montage without head or tail has no origin and no destination, which is precisely how Lacan distinguishes the drive from instinct. The explicit reference to "surrealist collage" is equally strategic: it invokes an aesthetic practice defined by the violent juxtaposition of incompatible elements, lending the drive a structure of irreducible heterogeneity rather than organic unity.