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     "For Walter Benjamin, the modus operandi of the baroque was one of invention, of accumulating fragments ‘without any strict idea of a goal’ and hoping for a ‘miracle’ to occur in their arrangement.  Haphazardly collecting, the allegorist acts in faith as she or he arranges the pieces.  Accumulation and arrangement are the two key processes of baroque allegory pointed out for Benjamin, [where] the allegorist functions somewhat as an ‘editor’ rather than an author...(p.68).

     "The way to invent is to accumulate and arrange, or, to put it in already rehearsed terms, to select and arrange the actions of metaphor and metonymy, respectively....  In Benjamin's writings, allegory becomes a precursor to artistic practices with which he would later engage, practices such as surrealism, Brechtian theatre, Proust's memory writings, and Eisenstein's filmic montage (p.68).

     "The melancholic gaze for Benjamin, however, does not wish for the whole structure again but productively rummages through the ruins, lighting upon lost objects that the unifying narratives of history have forgotten....(p.68).   By creating a new lamentation, the allegorist, who is also finally the poet, the inventor, or possibly the editor, attempts to open a space for redemption, even if it is unclear whether such a once-and-for-all redemption will come (p.70).

     "So Benjamin never throws anything away, never clears forests and leaves it without remainder.  He is a collector after all and he takes objects and ideas from the past, such as myth or allegory, and shines new light on them in the present.  Thus, ultimately, by striking a difference, he can then turn around and create a montage between the ideas, lighting up previously unknown, concealed secrets about the ways rationality is mythical and myth rational (p.79).

     "The mythographer, for Benjamin, is an allegorist who reads culture, but instead of looking for symbols with their conventional meanings, as many anthropologists do, the allegorist looks for cultural allegories, those mutated symbols that unravel the presumed unity of religions and culture.  The difference between the cultural observer who reads symbols and the one who reads allegories is brought forth in the classic Marxian analysis, according to which philosophers have only interpreted the world, whereas the point is to change it (p.79).  [Hence] it is not the masterpieces we should be looking for, but the mundane, the overlooked (p.80)."

        from:  S. Brent Plate,  Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics  2005 

     Our mesmerizing screens (cathode ray Adderall?) are but our most recent devices in the ancient lineage of allegorical divination.  Upon the watery black surfaces of our screens, fragmented images are accumulated and arranged into soothing siren songs of trance-like code, reflecting our desire to redeem and embody every seductive apparition of us.  For our digital realities are but quotidian computational inventions of mutated perfection, conjured real through induced conscious-dreaming expressed in Kabbalistic zeros and ones.  And when our crystal-ball (smoke) screens begin to mirror all we super-naturally request, who can resist ‘seeing’ these magical illuminations as profane auras to our own narcissism?

     Walter Benjamin, as with fellow surrealists, similarly employed narcotizing methods of spiritual meditation equal to today’s screens --for instance scrying and hashish-- to induce secret states of melancholic reflection and mystical allegory:

       "What, then, is the aura?  A strange tissue of space and time:

     the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.

     To follow with the eye - while resting on a summer afternoon -

     a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its

     shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those

     mountains, of that branch.”                          

   

     ...As with Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, Brecht’s Epic Thaetre, Eisenstein’s Film Theory, McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride, the surrealists’ agenda, and the entire critical media ethnography project -- the modus operandi for PeepTV.ca also converges through auratic fragmentation, from fragmentation, within methodologies of montage.  It is to invent from chance-like observation, not merely towards interpretation but to elicit change in the world. 

     Indeed, our computer technologies today are the precise holders, interpreters, creators and editors of most every contemporary myth.  But to what affect?  I cannot tell in ‘truth’, but I can show in ‘difference’ through an imprecise montage of their mutated symbolic ruins.  These PeepTV videos are “the theatre," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas.”   So, who knows? ....maybe something can be divined after all.

                          “Relax... Deeper... Deeper”