For a Critical Phenomenology of Montage: John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea —with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Karen Barad

Using Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh and Karen Barad’s theory of matter and meaning, Domietta Torlasco argues for an ongoing reorientation of the notion of flesh as a process of unending differentiation. Torlasco draws on John Akomfrah’s film installation Vertigo Sea to argue montage is both an action and an experience which reconfigures image-ings (as distinct from imaginings) of bodies, borders and belonging in film. By placing Merleau-Ponty’s critique of scientific thought in conversation with Barad’s questioning of the entrenched dichotomies of Western thought, Torlasco claims a rethinking of ‘flesh’ is possible. The possibility of becoming something other than subjects, embracing modes of being in excess of destructive oppositions, is not unrelated to a training of the sensorium that occurs in the “cuts” of our audio-visual entanglements.