Research Master Media Studies Thesis Universiteit van Amsterdam
Uncertain Images Toward an affective reading of contemporary documentary forms
Matthias Nothnagel
Date of Completion 28 June 2018 Word Count 20100 Words
Supervisor Dr. Abe Geil Second Reader Dr. Patricia Pisters
Abstract Recent developments in media-theory and contemporary art have pointed to the largely uncharted affective registers emerging in the context of the usage of cell phones for documentary culture, simultaneously as a tool for documentation and for the access to news. These affective fabrics permeate both these images’ aesthetics and the conditions of their online dissemination and reception. Echoing the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Hito Steyerl, my thesis proposes an affective reading of these ambiguous contemporary documentary forms. I first suggest a conceptual merging of affect and form, unveiling the various affects constituting online Platforms and the poor aesthetics of cell phone images. Subsequently, I conceptualise our current screen culture as a Deleuzian assemblage that dynamically assembles the meaning of the poor cell phone footage. Ultimately, in a discussion of three case studies of documentary artworks, I will show how recent developments in contemporary art speculate about the affective nature of cell phone footage and inform the becoming of new epistemological frameworks.
Keywords Documentary, Cell phones, Affect, Contemporary Art, Hito Steyerl
Cover Illustration Rabih Mroué. The Pixelated Revolution, 2012. Production Still. Copyright: Rabih Mroué.
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Table of Contents
1. seeing, feeling, knowing: introducing the affects of cell phone documentarism 3 Chapter Description 8
2. Affective Documents 2.1 Affect / Form: A Central Opposition 11 2.2 Turning toward Affect 12 2.3 Becoming Affect: Spinoza & Deleuze 13 2.4 Autonomous Affects 15 2.5 A Phenomenology of New Media 16 2.6 Affected Forms / Formal Affects / Affective Forms 18 2.7 Closing Remarks: Affective Documents 23
3. Cell phone Documentarism as an Affective Assemblage 24 3.1 The cell phone as Assemblage 24 3.2 Before and after the Documentary Image 27 3.3 Leaving the Cinematic Apparatus 28 3.4 From Viewer to User: Contemporary Spectatorship 30 3.5 Collective Affects 32 3.6 Closing Remarks: Documentary Culture as Assemblage 35
4. Poetics of Uncertainty: Contemporary Art and the Documentary 37 4.1 The ‘Documentary Turn’ in Contemporary Art 37 4.2 Poetics of Historiography: The Atlas Group 40 4.3 Affective Tautologies: Thomson & Craighead’s A short film about war 42 4.4 Clear as Mud: Rabih Mroué’s Pixelated Revolution 45 4.5 Politics of Speculative Documentary Art 48
5. Conclusion 51
Acknowledgements 53
Works Cited 53 Images 59
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1. seeing, feeling, knowing: introducing the affects of cell phone documentarism
An abstract field of moving pixels. Blurred images of a classroom. Distant banging – I vividly recall gazing into my phone’s screen, earphones plugged in, looking at distorted footage of people screaming, and teenagers sitting on the ground. For some minutes, I entered a stranger’s point of view, absorbing their agitation and panic. And although I was not certain of what the images exactly showed, I was physiologically triggered by them: my heart started racing, my pulse increased and I felt disoriented. Moments later, a CBS-news-anchor cautiously explained that the footage depicted “what was obviously a graphic scene” (CBS New York). The clip –a student’s Snapchat-video recorded during the mass-shooting in a high-school in Parkland, Florida on the 14th of February, 2018– was broadcast via CBS New York’s YouTube channel, where some viewers expressed their distress in the comment-section: “Disgusting. Keep that out of the news. No one needs to see that” (Ethan Pond). Further, in accordance with the platform’s community guidelines, the video’s content was classified as age-restricted. However, the age restriction, in conjunction with the usage of the terms disgusting and graphic, considering the video’s poor quality and lack of clarity, was striking. After all, the footage did not convey any evidentiary information or show explicit, “particularly graphic or disturbing” content (as per YouTube’s Violent or graphic content policies). If anything, it referred to its absence. Sifting through the video’s comment section, it became apparent that a vast majority of the users questioned the videos authenticity, contributing to wild speculations about the alleged shooting noise and the used rifle. It seemed as if, in that very moment, a strange emotional intensity came into force, operating beyond the images’ content, set off in the interplay between their form, the material conditions of their reception and the viewer’s body.
In today’s “global village” (McLuhan), new media imaging technologies such as CCTV, Webcams and cell phones are fundamentally reshaping the ways pictures of the world are being produced, circulated and perceived. The cell phone in particular, attached with a camera and live- broadcasting function, has not only become an important medium for accessing news, but also a “tool of documentation, political activism and creative expression” (Elias 18). Used for these purposes, the so-called “mobile-mentary” material (Baker, Schleser and Kasia 102)1 plays an integral part in how we form our opinions and judgements and negotiate politics, ethics and aesthetics. In recent years, the usage of smartphone cameras as a documentary tool has been foregrounded in various jurisdictional, political and environmental contexts, for example the “Arab spring manifestations, the 15-M movement, the student protest in Chile or the recent civil manifestations in Brazil” (Pereira and Harcha 324). In the first months of the Syrian revolts in 2011, cell phone videos accounted for the
1 For a comprehensive characterisation of the mobile-mentary as an “original aesthetic signified by pixelated video images”(102), see Baker, Schleser and Kasia. 4 only visual material coming out of the country, radically subverting the state’s media apparatus’ attempts to convey a transparent image of its geopolitical stability.
Instead of offering us a distanced, objective viewpoint on the real, these uncertain images are recorded on-site, from a point-of-view perspective via handheld cameras, and, thus, are marked by a position of immediate embeddedness. As they are uploaded, these ambiguous documentations are circulating across a broad variety of decentralised media channels, ranging from publicly established TV-news-outlets to algorithmically structured Facebook-timelines, Twitter-feeds and the vernacular communities of the blogosphere.2 Presented on these online distribution channels, the documentary images of our time are thus “demotic, promiscuous, amateur, fluid and haptically convenient” (Dovey and Rose 366) forms that, via their affordances, reconfigure traditional epistemics. Noticeably however, the blurred cell phone images are publicly treated as “strictly evidentiary forms, documents that unproblematically chronicle the political field” (Kuntsman and Stein 1). But this seems like a paradoxical idea: although we do not clearly comprehend what these uncertain, shaky images show and tell us, we’re affected by them and, based on their context of presentation, believe in their authenticity. Because of this strange contradiction, these new images challenge established epistemological principles such as objectivity, testimony and truth. While traditional and realist understandings of documentary forms are based on an indexical relationship between image and world (Peirce), the emergence of mobile, digital image-capturing technologies has brought about the need for a new set of conceptual configurations. This new framework needs to approach contemporary documentary forms as complex affective entanglements between bodies, imaging devices and the world. In that respect, the contemporary artist and theoretician Hito Steyerl tells us that “the documentary form, which is supposed to transmit knowledge in a clear and transparent way, has to be investigated using conceptual tools, which are neither clear nor transparent themselves” (par. 3). But, in terms of artistic and theoretical tools, where do we go from here?
Reflecting on the poor aesthetics of analogue documentaries, André Bazin offers a way out of this dilemma. For him, the imperfect documentary footage “does not falsify the conditions of the experience it recounts” (261). He tells us that the footage “is not made up only of what we see— its faults are equally witness to its authenticity” (261). Thus, for him, the poor documentary image manifests its authenticity in a dismissal of verisimilitude.3 As a negative episteme however, it begs
2 My thesis specifically focuses on videos circulating online. However, according to Stefano Savona, a big number of the cell phone videos recorded for example during the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, are not circulating online, but remain “offline”, on the activists’ phones, and are rather exchanged and discussed in private meetings (77). 3 In his reflections on the film Kon Tiki (1950), Bazin argues that the quality of the footage is directly connected to the affordances of the camera: “Because the making of it is so totally identified with the action that it so imperfectly unfolds; because it is itself an aspect of the adventure” (260).
5 the question of how specific audiovisual forms provoke a viewer’s belief in their truth. For Judith Butler, the evidentiary value of poor audiovisual material is not a question of its form and the camera’s affordances, but essentially contextual and socially produced (16). For her, the alleged truth of a document lies not in its potential to capture the semantically fixed world “out there”, but is, on the contrary, discursively manufactured in the context of a politically saturated field of visibility.4 With Bazin and Butler, we come to understand that low-quality documentary images need to be considered alongside both their framework of interpretation and the conditions of their recording. As they refer to analogue cinematic technologies, the contemporary cell phone dispositif evokes updating their considerations for the age of interfaces. After all, these cell phone documentations and their integrations into multifarious online environments, create new contexts for traditional epistemologies with their public and political purposes.
Since the replacement of analogue imaging technologies by new media, both film theorists and contemporary artists have put into question the stable referentiality of digital images. Simultaneously, they have pointed to the largely uncharted affective registers informing our engagement with cell phone devices. William Mitchell writes that, “images in the post-photographic era can no longer be guaranteed as visual truth—or even as signifiers with stable meaning and value” (qtd. in Hansen xiii). Further, it has been argued that, in the context of the proliferation of portable cameras, the affective power of images has replaced their referential potential. For Hito Steyerl, the blurred aesthetics of the poor documentary image constitute the viewer’s belief in its authenticity (“Documentary Uncertainty” par. 3). Echoing Steyerl, Keenan argues that contemporary documentary practices have replaced established conventions of clarity and coherence and are rather “overtaken by a new formation of affectively and politically located insistence” (qtd. in Elias 18). Although portable digital cameras have made new approaches toward the “real” possible, these forms are “haunted by a spectre of manipulation, prompting a crisis of faith in its authenticity” (Balsom and Peleg 16). Conclusively, we come to understand that in documentary culture, the digital poses promise and risk at the same time.
The digital images’ indexical ambiguity is furthermore destabilised by the decentralised platforms that afford their online dissemination, as we have seen in the recent emergence of notions such as “post-truth” and “alternative facts”. Linking the images’ visual instability to the user’s doubt, Kuntsman and Stein conceptualise the digital space as “a site for making and remaking ‘evidence,’ biographies, and testimonials” and as “material-semiotic relations where bodies and data bleed into
4 Butler claims that, in the case of the Rodney King trial, what was perceived as authentic had to do with the racial schematisation of the visual field: „The visual representation of the black male body being beaten on the street by the policemen and their batons was taken up by that racist interpretive framework to construe King as the agent of violence“ (16). 6 each other; a discursive field in which politics is often conducted in other terms – via the language of technology” (10). In a similar vein, Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose write that, “[where] twentieth century documentary depended for its functionality on an idea of the observer fixing the world with his [sic] camera, this new epistemology is entirely relational” (367). For them, the user-generated documents of the 21st century accept the notion “that all knowledge is situated in particular embodied perspectives, the ‘actualities’ of online are the symbolic expression of this multi-perspectival, relational knowledge” (367). It seems that, although the cell phone affords us direct, embedded and immediate access to the real –whatever that might be– its epistemic politics appear to be a rather messy business, structured by thick “affective fabrics” (Kuntsman 1). It is true that, as Hito Steyerl has so aptly observed: “the closer to reality we get, the less intelligible it becomes” (“Documentary Uncertainty” par. 1).
Collectively, these contemporary thinkers and artists describe a general withering of indexical certainty in the digital documentary image. After all, as shown, these ambiguous documents rather offer us a somatic experience than an evidentiary one. Simultaneously, the notion of newly mediated affect comes into view.5 Roughly, affect, in this context, is to be understood as a physiologically experienced intensity, something that is “born in in-between-ness and resides as accumulative beside- ness” (Gregg and Seigworth 2). Having grown into its own field of study in the past two decades, affect theory approaches culture and politics alongside the question of these non-linguistic forces, constantly bearing in mind that “affects make us what we are, but they are neither under our ‘conscious’ control nor even necessarily within the register of our awareness” (Schaefer par. 1). Taking this into consideration, the central issue becomes: how can affect –as defined in regards to its in-between-ness and resistance to form– be indeed thought alongside processes of mediation? With it, a new set of questions has emerged: How are epistemic processes reshaped in light of our contemporary screen culture? What are the complex entanglements of visual uncertainty, cell phones and affect? Moreover, how can art help create a more attuned understanding of these new forms and contexts of documentary? What if, instead of merely addressing the referential function of these shaky and uncertain images, we explore how cell phone documentary culture reconfigures the mediation of affect, and thus rather constitutes an embodied, affective spectatorship?
On these grounds, we might reconsider prescribed notions of documentary and move beyond questions of representation. Rather than merely asking what these images precisely show –or fail to show– we can approach this new phenomenon through a hybrid framework. Drawing on the fields of
5 Although recent academic and artistic work has addressed the affective potential of ubiquitous CCTV- systems in regards to artistic research and the entanglement between affect and discourses around security and surveillance (Albuquerque, Pisters 2012), not much theoretical attention has been paid to the dimensions of affect operating in the usage of handheld cell phones. 7 affect theory and contemporary art, I thus aim to answer “the need to think about feelings, technologies and politics together, through each other” (Kuntsman 2). In the context of the production and reception of these uncertain images, this affective-structural coupling between subject and device is involved in three different states: the filming subject, the filmed subject and ultimately, the viewer. In thinking technology, politics and feelings as complex material-semiotic entanglements, I wish to contribute to current debates on documentary forms, and ask how we can increase our understanding of cell phone footage and the affects populating its dissemination and reception. My thesis addresses the vast number of cell phone videos of emergency sites circulating the internet which are being treated as evidentiary documents. Following a Foucauldian understanding of a document, I will not approach the latter with regards to the statements it allegedly makes, but, more importantly, I draw out my hybrid theoretical framework via an “archeology of knowledge”, which takes into consideration the “exact specificity of [a document’s] occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes” (Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge 30). In this light, a document “is not used to reconstitute monuments of the past; it is a monument that expresses the mechanism of its own arrangement” (Hongisto 22). This conceptualisation invites us to not only think about these ambiguous images themselves, but rather approach them in an ecological and “machinic” understanding, considering a subjective, emotional and affective engagement with them and the countless technological milieus affording their production, circulation and reception. In order words: I consider it crucial to think structurally about affect, and affectively about structure. After all, as Adi Kuntsman writes, “the affective regime of disbelief is structured by technological possibilities as well as by digital realities of endless copies and circulation of texts, images and videos” (3).
As shown above, attempts to represent reality are essentially informed by affective registers. However, this concept holds for both contemporary documentary practices and their theory. Since the emergence of the so-called “affective turn” in cultural studies, theorists have increasingly been concerned with the varied ways of how affects reconfigure epistemological processes. Following Coleman and Ringrose in the shift from “knowing” to “relating to” (6) the world around us, I acknowledge the affective potential of my own research. By doing so, I approach both the objects of my study and the processes of “thinking and writing” as affective encounters that do not only passively describe the material world, but are intrinsically intertwined and, hence, perform it. Influenced by Deleuze’s notion of theory-as-practice, this project furthermore considers itself simultaneously a theoretical and methodological intervention. As such, it does not merely create “an image of the world”, but rather “forms a rhizome with the world” (Deleuze & Guattari 11). As technologies continue to pervade our bodies, and realities are assembled rather than represented, we 8 need to approach cell phone documentary forms beyond questions of clarity, rationality and evidence. This means exposing the messy extra-textual layers and emotional registers involved in their production, dissemination and reception.
Chapter Description In the following chapters, I set out to approach these uncertain images not as purely representational forms but rather in light of a reconfigured documentary dispositif and the largely uncharted affective registers structuring contemporary documentary culture. After having introduced and positioned the central phenomenon in light of contemporary media- and art-theory, I will outline the affect-theoretical framework in the second chapter, ‘Affective Documents’. As argued above, these uncertain images call for a refined understanding of the relationship between affect and form, particularly in light of new media. The conceptual opposition between affect and form, however, functions as a structuring principle in the discourse on affect. Although a Deleuzian or Massumian conceptualisation of affect understand the latter as a raw intensity that resists any form, I will argue that, in this line of thought, there indeed exists an openness towards a coupling of affect and form. Brinkema’s study of the forms of affect will further help develop a reading of affect as having form. Via Brinkema’s conception of cinematic affect, I will ultimately establish a link between the blurry aesthetics of cell phone videos, and how their quality directly relates to the circumstances of their production and circulation, and, therefore, constitutes affective forms. Next to that, via Mark Hansen’s New Philosophy for New Media, I will show how our engagement with digital media and their images, by default, constitutes an affectively charged encounter.
Subsequently, the third chapter, ‘Cell phone Documentarism as an Affective Assemblage’, looks at the affective regimes informing cell phone footage from a ‘media-archeological’ perspective. Delving into a myriad of (im)material milieus structuring our contemporary documentary culture, I hope to show that the affective perception of the cell phone footage is not only bound to the shaky images themselves but, more importantly, is deeply entangled in a set of online-specific affordances. These new media milieus position the subject at “the nexus of the intimate self, public spaces, locative technology, and online networks” (Hess 1630). In light of these ontologically heterogeneous, yet inextricably intertwined spheres, I will envision these technological milieus as elements of an assemblage, which constitutes the mediation of affects and forms a central component in contemporary epistemic processes. I hope to show that this more “machinic”, ontological framework functions as an apt model to conceptualise the documentary culture of our time because it allows us to analyse its heterogeneous elements in regards to their effects: “the relationship of device, its
9 connected networks, and the material spaces it documents and the user’s relationship with each of them” (Hess 1631). This conceptualisation furthermore paves the way to better understanding the vernacular, affective nature of our engagement with the affectively charged cell phone footage.
Whereas the second and third chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for my argumentation line, the fourth chapter, “Poetics of Uncertainty: Contemporary Art and the Documentary”, will conclude my thesis with a discussion of selected contemporary artworks, which, as I hope to show, poetically bring to light the affective fabrics of contemporary documentary culture. However, my reading aims to treat these works not as mere examples that support my argument but as “actual seeds of thought” that create new “new perceptions, new feelings, new thoughts” (Pisters, 18) and thus creatively connect to and cultivate my theoretical framework. In their respective methodologies, the works of Walid Raad, Rabih Mroué and Thomson & Craighead, occupy an “Archimedean Point” (Elsaesser) from which they poetically examine and perform the affective fabrics of the documentary culture of our time. Taking into consideration the affective dimensions of this type of footage I have discussed in the two chapters before, I will explore how, these artists have corresponded to the dubious epistemological politics of contemporary documentary forms and, hence, inform the becoming of future political-affective constellations.
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2. Affective Documents The introduction of my thesis illustrated how the phenomenon of these uncertain images demands its own analytics. As image- and media-theorists have argued recently, these new impoverished and ambiguous digital videos have become “a major player within contemporary affective economies“ that furthermore “express the uncertainty, which governs not only contemporary documentary image production, but also the contemporary world as such.”(Steyerl, par. 19) Even as such, the question remains of how the documents' ontological and aesthetic ambiguity, in conjunction with the very material conditions of their recording and the devices that produce it, relates to the realm of emotions and affects that play such a crucial role in contemporary epistemics. In light of this issue, we are urged to move beyond questions of representation and evidence -what truths does the poor digital footage convey- and look at the emotional and affective registers at play. Thus, in this second chapter, I aim to draw out an understanding of affect as having form and, subsequently, look at how the recording, dissemination and reception of cell phone images can be seen as an affectively charged mode of embodied witnessing.
2.1 Affect vs. Form: A Central Opposition Venturing onto this terrain, though, turns out to be a risky thing. The illustration of my physical and emotional reaction at the student’s Snapchat footage posed a conceptual problem haunting the theorisation of affect: How can one develop a generalisable theory of an essentially non- representational, subjectively experienced force, beyond a mere solipsistic account of personal affectedness? Touching on this, how can affect be conceptualised in regards to form, both in how it becomes form, and how affective forms operate, specifically with a view to the usage of new media? The latter question in particular refers to a structuring principle in affect studies: the antagonism between affect and form. In a Deleuzian line of thought, affects are established as “not ownable and recognisable” (Massumi, “Autonomy“ 88) forces that, as such, withstand any semantic or semiotic approaches. Accordingly, Simon O’Sullivan writes that “you cannot read affects, you can only experience them” (“Aesthetics of Affect” 126). Meanwhile, the notion of form, as opposed to affect, can be seen as anything relating to the realm of the tangible and discernible or anything that can be made an object of a hermeneutical reading. Depending on different theoretical frameworks, forms are understood as feelings, texts, language, or, as in this case, audio-visual material. As the following pages show, the critical discourse around affect has continuously forced a choice between form and affect - a concept notoriously acclaimed for its resistance to structure and, hence, critique. Only recently, scholars have invested in the conceptual merging of these once rigidly antagonistic fields.
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Particularly in light of new media theory one one hand, and contemporary art approaches on the other, the conceptual oppositions of system/interface and experience/structure have been poised.
2.2 Turning toward Affect Contemporaneously to the proliferation of digital devices, the study of affectivity has increased tremendously in the past two decades. With the turn to affect, its theory has entered a broad variety of academic fields, from anthropology, ethnography and geography to art history, queer theory and nightlife studies (Karatzogianni and Kuntsman; Knudsen and Stage). These academic inquiries and their focus on affect then can thus be seen alongside a general development in the humanities insisting that, with affect, “play, the unexpected, and the unthought can always be brought back into the field” (Brinkema, xiii). Varying broadly in understandings, affect has evoked its own manifold definitions, particularly with a view to its relation to concepts such as emotion or thought. Summing up various understandings of the relationship between affect and form/language, Britta Knudsen and Carsten Stage make a distinction between two camps in the broadening field of affect studies: on one hand, “contemporary affect theorists such as Massumi, Thrift, Brennan and Clough, focus more on affect as an outside stimulation, somehow hitting first the body and then reaching the cognitive apparatus” (4). On the other hand, scholars such as “[Sarah] Ahmed, Ruth Leys, Margaret Wetherell, Judith Butler and Lisa Blackman, criticise the inherent dichotomies of mind and matter, body and cognition, biology and culture, the physical and psychological” (4). While the first group considers affects as essentially disconnected from textual forms, as something that escapes representation, theorists of the second group understand language and form as “capable of expressing affects, as there would be no inherent contradiction between the categories of language and the categories taking part in the social shaping of bodies” (4).
Most notably, Sarah Ahmed’s work on “affective economies” has made an important contribution to contemporary affect studies, specifically for the study of digital cultures. In her work, Ahmed argues that affect can be linked to particular materials, structures, commodities or signs, which actively construct feelings of belonging and take part in the shaping of social communities. For her, commodities or signs, or in this case, images, increase their affective and emotional potential in their online circulation (45-46). Informed by Ahmed’s writings, Adi Kunstman’s ethnographic work has uncovered the affective potential of specific words and emojis being used in online hate- speech. Kuntsman furthermore puts forward the notion of “cybertouch of war”, which,
refers to the emotional and informational intersections between on- and offline military violence, the mediation of wars and conflicts, and the affective regimes that emerge in cyberspace at the time of imperial invasions, ‘wars on terror’, and globalized mediascapes. 12
The cybertouch of war, violence and death refers to ways in which past and current events can touch us through our computer and mobile phone screens. (3) Although the concept of the “cybertouch of war” does not focus so much on cell phone footage of conflict zones and rather emphasis the sociality of online communities on a broader scale, it crucially “points to the material-semiotic character of digital cultures and searches for a way to account for the intertwinedness of technology, feelings, war and politics” (3). In line with Ahmed and Kuntsman, I argue that contemporary regimes of affects and emotions are indeed best understood when thought in conjunction with specific technological milieus and in the context of epistemic politics. However, not much academic attention has been brought towards the affective potential of the specific forms of cell phone footage of emergency sites. This being the case, I now will turn towards an understanding of new media affects on two levels: First, I will develop a general sense of the role of affects in the engagement with digital media. Second, I will show how affect and form can be thought together in the context of the low-quality cell phone footage.
2.3 Becoming Affect: Spinoza & Deleuze Before we move on, however, a look into the past. Baruch de Spinoza has been highly influential to the theorisation of affect. For him, affect is understood as the effect a body –be it a human body or a material object– has on another subject’s body in regards to its duration (Spinoza). For both Deleuze and Spinoza, bodies, things and, broadly, the material world, exist not in a fixed and stable state, but rather in a mode of perpetually shifting relations. The notions of duration, temporality and, essentially, change, lay the groundwork for theories on affect, as it is generally understood in regards to transitory aspects. Drawing from Spinoza’s conceptualisation of affect, Gilles Deleuze writes:
from one state to another, from one image or idea to another, there are transitions, passages that are experienced, durations through which we pass to a greater or a lesser perfection. Furthermore, these states, these affections, images or ideas are not separable from the duration that attaches them to the preceding state and makes them tend toward the next state. These continual durations or variations of perfection are called ‘affects,’ or feelings (affectus). (48- 49) Here, Deleuze’s process-philosophy rests on the transitory nature of affects. In Spinoza and the Three Ethics, Deleuze further argues that affects address the temporal dimension of a body. For him, affects become “passages, becomings, rises and falls, continuous variations of power (puissance) that pass from one state to another.[…] They are signs of increase and decrease, signs that are vectorial (of the joy–sadness type) and no longer scalar like the affections, sensations or perceptions” (139). In other words, for Deleuze, a human’s body is never temporarily fixed but rather exists in a perpetually open
13 encounter with its environment. Notably, he foregrounds affects as vectorial which, as ephemeral intensities, are essentially non-scalar and thus, non-transferable.
Together with Felìx Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze further developed the notion, writing that “affect goes beyond affections no less than the percept goes beyond perceptions. The affect is not the passage from one lived state to another but man’s nonhuman becoming” (173). The authors’ theorisation of affect is thus generally understood as a theory of processes, becomings and, essentially, non-belongings. Here, a “man’s non-human becoming” refers to the realm of raw potentiality, virtuality and, thus, anything that is not-yet-actualised. They reinforce the driving opposition between affect as non-human-becoming on the one hand and form, as a static, “lived state”, on the other. Although the author’s conceptions essentially consider affect as a movement between our bodies’ lived states –and therefore capable of escaping any confinement or hermeneutics– their writing entails an openness towards a coupling of affect and form. This coupling may be unlocked in looking at Deleuze-Guattarian understanding of art and aesthetics.
Crucially, Deleuze and Guattari render art as a “bloc of sensation” (164). In their understanding, the realm of arts is less defined in institutional, historical or canonical terms, alongside the aesthetic/non-aesthetic dichotomy, but rather as any cultural practice that creatively produces new ensembles of affects. In regards to paintings, Ronald Bogue reads their definition of arts as a “harnessing of forces” (qtd. in O’Sullivan “Aesthetics of Affect” 134). Accordingly, O’Sullivan writes that, “Art, we might say, is made of those becomings mentioned above frozen in time and space, waiting to be reactivated, waiting to be unleashed. It is an artist’s style that coheres this assemblage together into a particular composition” (“Aesthetics to Abstract Machine“ 199). He further argues that, in this light, art –as an affective ensemble– ceases to be a mere stable object and instead becomes what Alain Badiou called “event sites”: “a point of exile where it is possible that something, finally, might happen” (qtd. in O’Sullivan “Aesthetics of Affect” 127).
The political power of art, according to this line of thought, lies in its potential to capture and showcase the traces of an affect’s movement. What is important in this context is the relationship between the affect-capturing body and the affect-receiving body, as it is precisely the artist’s body which –in harnessing affects– enters a coupling with affect. This specific coupling of affect/form is re-activated in another's bodily encounter with the “art”-object. Particularly via O’Sullivan’s reading of Deleuze-Guattarian aesthetics, we are able to unveil the conceptual coupling of affect and form. Here, it is precisely the realms of style and form –as the grounds for the materialisation, harnessing or freezing of affects– that offer themselves for a reading or hermeneutics of affect. What this hermeneutics of affective forms, specifically in light of low-quality cell phone imagery might look like, will be discussed in the last section of this chapter. 14
2.4 Autonomous Affects Brian Massumi’s writing on affect and its politics mark a key reference for my conceptual undertaking. In his influential essay “Autonomy of the Affect”, the political theorist prominently recognises that, at this time in the course of cultural sciences, “the problem is that there is no cultural- theoretical vocabulary specific to affect”(88). Foregrounding the now crucial distinction between affects and feelings, he argues that these two spheres occur in a particular temporal order: shortly summarised, affect is experienced as a primary intensity that, subsequently is translated into the structured realm of feelings. Grounding his argumentation on neuro-scientific studies focussing on the complex ways and temporal orders recipients experience and perceive visual information and physiological impulses, Massumi asserts that feelings have to be understood as a separate, identifiable and structured realm, which is being informed by affective intensities. Massumi’s reading of the studies’ findings suggests that, apart from the image’s emotional and cognitive impact on the viewer, there exists a fleeting intensity in its reception, escaping any attempt to describe it: affect. Although generally, the notions of affect and feeling are used interchangeably, Massumi notably distinguishes them. Because affect is “marked by a gap between content and effect” (84), he foregrounds its autonomy and primacy. Within the temporal order of visual perception, affect marks an immediate and autonomous intensity, an experience that is translated into a feeling in a subsequent step and thus, brought into an organised structure. Overall, according to Massumi we have to understand affect as a non-descriptive, unqualified and raw force, while emotions can be seen as derivative and cognitively-semantically processed realms, charged with meaning.6 He points out that,
Approaches to the image in its relation to language are incomplete if they operate only on the semantic or semiotic level, however that level is defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combination, as a Symbolic). What they lose, precisely, is the expression event- in favor of structure. (87) In foregrounding affect as autonomous from structure, he charges it with a resistance to systematicity. Importantly, he develops the relationship between affect and structure as oppositional, arguing that the former, as an intensity, always informs the latter. However, in light of this thesis’ introductory scenario, the question emerges whether we can indeed see affect as autonomous of any structure, system or medium. As I hope to illustrate, it can be a more productive inquiry to approach affect not as a purely autonomous, but rather in a reciprocal interplay with form.
6 Parts of this chapter are based on a report I have written for the Media Theory Core Course 1 (UvA) in 2017, titled “Uncertain Images. Affect and Information in Amateur Documentarism.” 15
2.5 A Phenomenology of New Media How can we envision an affective ontology of the digital? If affect is understood as a body’s engagement with its material world, how do these encounters take shape when using digital devices such as cell phones? And, conversely, how do new media reconfigure the generation, circulation and experience of affects?
Brian Massumi’s essay “The Superiority of the Analog” asserts the underlying claim that, from a phenomenological perspective, we always encounter the digital and new media on an analogue level. In short: if I can hear or see it, it has to be analog. Massumi’s polemic offers a corrective to the idea that the notions of digital and virtual can be understood as interchangeable. For him, both the digital and the virtual are essentially un-accessible to our bodily senses- however, and here lies the crucial distinction, the digital -as understood computational processes- can be rendered accessible via analogous means. The virtual meanwhile, is seen rather in a Deleuzian understanding as the realm of the “possible”, which furthermore hosts affective potentials. However, this thesis argues towards a digital technological conditions of affectivity, similar to that of how new media scholar Jamie “Skye” Bianco sees an affective potential in digital environments. For her, “force operates through energy, matter, and time as materialising affect. And such affect can be programmed, designed, and modulated by control parameters and thresholds, as well as culturally interfaced with new media” (50).
In proposing a New Philosophy for New Media, Mark Hansen conducts a theorisation of the relation between new media and embodiment. He argues that, in the context of digitalisation, human perception is not merely based on visual registers. Hansen’s phenomenology emphasises the premise that, due to its processual nature, the digital image has “become irreducibly bound up with the activity of the body” (9). In doing so, he rejects post-humanist polemic that, with digitalisation, information is essentially disembodied, which ultimately, renders the human user obsolete. 7 Rather, Hansen updates a Bergsonian approach and repositions the human body via the notion of embodied experience: “the [digital] image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience” (9). He illustrates this conception via a discussion of new media artworks, concluding with the idea that, although our bodies interface with new media on a visual level (precisely: the digital image), there exists also an engagement with these digital technologies taking place on the level of affects. In order to illustrate his argument, he discusses artworks that explicitly
7 See, for example: Kittler, Winthrop-Young and Wutz.
16 stress the technicity and medium-specificity of digital images. 8 Therefore, Hansen conducts an “emphasis on ‘affectivity’ that is, in a way, isomorphic with information processing” (Thacker 267). Similar to Benjamin Bratton’s definition of an interface as “any point of contact between two complex systems that governs the conditions of exchange between those systems” (220), I understand Hansen’s digital image as a process of making-perceptible of any machine territory. Here, he challenges the primacy of our optic senses and argues that the visual realm becomes rather an activator for corporeal affect.
At the same time, Hansen situates the human sensory apparatus on the same plane as technological systems. Hansen shows us how sense and embodiment -the grounds of affectivity- are indeed entangled with the specific technologies and media and evolve in perpetual interplay with the latter. In other words: with Hansen, the digital image becomes a vernacular voice, a mediator between the human and an increasingly technical world, an interface between flesh and algorithm. Ultimately, New Philosophy for New Media is essential to the study of affectivity in the context of digital media as it emphasises the human body and embodied experience and argues that sense and embodiment are not static and universal, but rather entangled in a body’s material surroundings. At its core, Hansen’s New Philosophy tells us “how technical mediation can extend the affective register of the present” (Belisle 47). And this mode of expansion of affective registers via new media marks a crucial consideration in light of the present conceptual problem. Ultimately, with Hansen, we come to understand that the digital image, by default, already constitutes a highly auto-affective sphere, due to our bodies’ radical inability to access the material specificity of the digital technology without reducing it to language. In line with him, I claim that our bodily senses and the affects they produce and receive, are not only static and pre-defined. In conjunction with discursive, material and technological forms, they are in a perpetual state of co-evolution.
Although Hansen’s phenomenology has made a crucial contribution to the study of new media affects, it has been met with reservations. In his critique of New Philosophy, Cecchetto writes, that “Hansen’s perspective is ultimately haunted by the representational logic that it moves against” (5). He further contests that “Hansen’s putting-into-discourse of technesis is, paradoxically, a re-staging of the constitutive ambivalence of deconstruction that shows the latter to be a promising premise for specifying the relation between humans and technology” (6). His critique precisely addresses Hansen’s linguistically constructed concept of the limits of embodiment. However, I want to argue
8 See Hansen, chapter 6. Hansen agues that Robert Lazzarini’s work Skulls, a sculptural installation of several digitally distorted human skulls, “effectuates a disjunction between the universal flux of information and the per- ceptual center of indetermination.”(221) Further, the work “offers us analog ‘moulds’ of a digital process or modulation with which we can have no systemic—that is, reality-conferring—relation.”(221)
17 here that a reading of affect for form makes possible a more productive analysis with the latter. In fact, I argue that, instead of moving against the representation of affect, we have to turn this dichotomy on its head and analyse the forms of affects.
2.6 Affected Forms / Formal Affects / Affective Forms After having established the link between digital technologies and affect, I will now discuss the specific filmic forms that address us affectively. Post-colonial, feminist and queer propositions offer insightful considerations regarding the affective potential of specific excessive forms.9 Although these excess-theoretical accounts emphasise the addressing of the body in the context of film perception, they rarely engage with the notion of affect. Eugenie Brinkema, who’s writing on the forms of affects are discussed in this section, acknowledges that excess-theory of the 1970s and 80s can be seen as “a precursor to the idea of a formal affect” (41). However, she argues that this theoretical movement has failed to “generate inventive questions after the heyday of screen theory” (41).
Although the role of excessive forms in the reception of classical Genre-cinema has produced a comprehensive body of literature, the theoretical engagement with the role of affects in regards to the documentary film practice has been rather scarce. In light of the present issue however, it is important to draw out the relationship between documentary films and affect-theory. Essentially, in moving the question of affective forms into the realm of the documentary, we end up with a refined understanding of the relationship between embodiment, evidence, objectivity and epistemology. In her analysis of Trịnh Thị Minh Hà’s experimental 1982 ethnographic film Re-Assemblages, Andie E. Shabbar argues that the film’s crude and “disruptive” aesthetics, such as disordered montages, repetitive voice-overs and intervals of silence “serve to interrupt the spectator’s passive gaze” (1). Operating against the by-then established ethnographic film paradigms such as clarity and stability, the film hence employs a radical distortion. In Re-Assemblages, the cinematic forms move the viewer “from a comfortable place of passivity to an acute awareness of how otherness is constructed” (3). In an unlikely move, Shabbar engages with the Kantian dualist notion of “interest” and “disinterest” and argues that the film’s affective power rests precisely on its cinematic forms, which position the viewer in a constant oscillation between moments of being drawn into the film and being put off by it. For
9 See: Barthes, Williams, Dyer. In their work, theorists such as Roland Barthes, Richard Dyer and Linda Williams have demonstrated how specific filmic techniques and visual forms -specifically in the context of fictional film- transcend narrative structures and excessively target the viewer’s body. According to these excess-theoretical propositions, there exist forces that escape filmic texts and the realm of representation. This formal excess operates against narrative and aesthetic homogeneity and escapes the logic attributed to the cinematic apparatus. 18 her, this movement between different modes of engagement constitutes affect. Although Shabbar’s reading of Re-Assemblages suggests an analytical turn towards the forms of affects, it rather situates them on the grounds of montage than on the images themselves and their indexical function. However, I claim that affects emerge precisely in this indexical ambiguity, in an interplay between the interiority and exteriority of an image. These specific affective forms referred to here have recently been comprehensively theorised by Eugenie Brinkema.
Whereas Brian Massumi conceptualises affect as a non-descriptive, raw intensity, Eugenie Brinkema conducts of critique of his specific understanding. In her 2014 book The Forms of the Affects, she writes that a Massumian understanding of affect as a subjectively experienced, formless force “risks turning every theorist into a phenomenologist, each critic a mere omphaloskeptic” (32). Intervening in established conceptions of affect, she points to the risk of film theorists solely making claims based on solipsistic, personally affected perceptions. For her, these assertions neglect a generalisable and formal encounter with affect. Consequently, in order to avoid the risks inherent to a discussion of affect as a mere subjective encounter, she proposes a conceptual fusion of structure and affect. Brinkema proposes that, in order to establish affect as “the right and productive site for radically redefining what reading for form might look like in the theoretical humanities today” (37), one needs to conduct a close reading of affect as having form. Ironically, Brinkema thus follows Massumi’s call for creating a “vocabulary of affect” in guiding film theory towards the idea of a close reading of texts:
Reading affects as having forms involves de-privileging models of expressivity and interiority in favor of treating affects as structures that work through formal means, as consisting in their formal dimensions (as line, light, color, rhythm, and so on) of passionate structures. (37) Furthermore, Brinkema indicates a certain problematic in the history of film theory, as, according to her, the theoretical interest in questions of spectatorship was rather concerned with effects than affects. The Forms of the Affects’ methodological approach of close reading thus points to the author’s central criticism of affect theory: its lack of attentiveness towards particularity. Brinkema draws out her argumentation in regards to the cinematic mise-en-scene, which, according to her, is based on a metaphysical logic of presence. As a conceptual tool, Brinkema introduces the notion of “mise-n’en-scene” (46), as a negative inversion of mise-en-scene. Introducing the term, she writes that,
[in] addition to reading for what is put into the scene, one must also read for all of its permutations: what is not put into the scene; what is put into the non-scene; and what is not enough put into the scene. Formal affects, affects with and in forms, affects after interiority and after spectatorship. (46)
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“Mise-n’en-scene” becomes a formal affect, an affective form: it is precisely the notion of the after (after-interiority, after-spectatorship) that puts to question the conceptual dualism of “presence and absence, interiority and exteriority, self and other, excretion and reception” (47). This in-between- ness –uncertainty– then structures the passings of becomings and non-belongings. Brinkema is interested in affect’s potential to take apart cinematic structures and grids. Because her notion of “mise-n’en-scene” suggests “an approach to form that reads for its impersonal impresence and structural destructurings” (46), it dismisses the constitutional holistic logic of cinematic images, constructed of semantically connected unities. Hence, for her, an image’s semantics also correspond to the individual parts of the scenery that are either not or not enough put into the scene. I want to argue here that Brinkema’s “mise-n’en-scene” can be conceptualised as a becoming of affect: the forms of affects explored here are rather understood as forms of force, as opposed to forms of text. These “structural destructurings and impersonal impresences” can be accessed through a close reading of affect for form and thus offer a productive conceptual lense to approach the theorisation of low-quality cell phone footage.
With the question of the pixelated aesthetics arising here, I accordingly turn to Hito Steyerl’s concept of “Documentary Uncertainty”. In regards to the low quality live-footage, broadcast by a CNN journalist via a handheld camera during the onset of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Steyerl puts to question the evidentiary value of the abstract, glitchy images. For the contemporary artist and theoretician, the poor, “post-representational” images can be understood as true and factual because they accurately express the affective ambiguity governing both the documentary image and our contemporary world (par. 18). The paradox constituting Steyerl’s argument is the following: the more impoverished the image is, the more it is regarded as authentic. However, her argumentation neglects the myriad affective registers operating in these aesthetic configurations.
I want to argue here that Steyerl’s notion of “Documentary Uncertainty” directly corresponds to Brinkema’s concept of “mise-n’en-scene”, as the latter suggests to glimpse beyond the semantic interiority of images and to rather put emphasis on the after-cinematic structures. A formal reading of affect in the low quality cell phone footage thus foregrounds the idea that its lack of evidentiary value, in fact, constitutes its affective power. I claim that everything not (yet) brought into the picture – as seen in the blurred images and crude narratives of contemporary documentary forms – can be conceptualised as formal affect. Indeed, the shaky cell phone images beg us to nervously scan them
20 for any evidentiary value, and thus position us in an anxious oscillation between seeing and not- seeing, knowing and not-knowing.10
This observation falls in line with a number of contemporary media theorists focussing on the so-called YouTube-aesthetic of documentary videos, best understood as amateurish, user-generated content (Müller, Cubitt). In her study of cell phone video aesthetic, Miriam Ross specifically foregrounds the oftentimes vertical framing of cell phone-images. For her, the verticality of the image,
gestures powerfully to a subjective human observer behind the camera. It suggests a person who has a mobile phone, close to hand, and has initiated the camera without changing their normal bodily hold upon that technological device. (par. 3) Here we again come to understand that the cell phone video – as an affective-formal coupling – directly refers to the material condition of its recording: the relationship between cell phone device and the camera operator’s body and her movement. When watching a cell phone image on one’s phone, the vertical format of the footage furthermore overlaps with one’s own screen, further increasing the image’s affective potentials. Here, both the history and, in Elizabeth Grosz’s words, the “corporeality of the subject leave their traces or the marks on the texts produced, just as […] the processes of textual production also leave their trace or residue on the body of the writer (and readers)” (21). I claim that the same can be said about today’s affectively embedded documentary forms.
For Chad Elias, this novel type of spectatorship constitutes what the author terms “embodied witnessing”. For him, this form of witnessing calls “into question prevailing models of visual and political representation” (19) and rather considers the perceiving body as the center of action. In a similar vein, Jane M. Gaines has urged to conceive of contemporary documentary as a body genre11, as part of “the commonalities of works that make us want to do something” (49). She stresses the haptic intersection of body and image, arguing that the “conditions in the world of the audience are the very conditions of the world of the moving image” (49). Although both Elias and Gaines fail to include the notion of affect in their conceptualisations, I argue that their notions of “embodied witness” and “body genre” are essentially constituted via affect. Implementing the notion of affect
10 Further, it has to be noted that a specific genre of fictional films has utilized the grainy, precarious and affective aesthetics explored here. Films of the so-called “found-footage” Horror subgenre, purport to be real and raw documentations of oftentimes strange and supernatural events and are attributed to deceased or missing characters. Because of the usage of the specific blurry and shaky aesthetics, films like Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield have offered “radical ways of decentering our gaze and expanding the frame” (Sayad 64). 11 See: Linda Williams. For Williams, body genres designate a set of filmic genres that formally and narratively center the (female) body and its fluids, for example the blood in horror movies or the orgasmic fluids in porn. For her, each of these genres is based on a particular imagination (Porn: sadism, Horror film: sado-masochism). Crucially, the aesthetic effects of these genres do not operate on a cognitive or semantic level, but directly address the viewer’s body. 21 into the conceptualisation of these documentary forms thus allows for an attuned understanding of how these forms constitute not so much a representational, visual form, but rather something that goes deeper, and affectively touches us on a physiological level.
2.7 Closing Remarks: Affective Documents To return here to the introductory example of the Snapchat footage of the Parkland shooting: its blurred images and vertical framing; the pixelated aesthetics of the classroom; the shaky cinematography; the distorted sound permeating from the outside of the footage, distant screams and everything not-yet-captured by the camera’s operator can then be seen as structurally frozen affects. I argue that my reading of these images in regards to their “mise-n’en-scene” pushes affect from a non-descriptive force into the sphere of its representational aspects. Naturally, this move corresponds to both the conditions of the footage’s production –it being immediately recorded on site– and its reception –the viewer’s speculation and uncertainty. The shaky, pixelated images of contemporary documentarism can be understood as affective forms because they rather document the condition of their own production than transparently mediate the reality they claim to reference.
I contest that the low quality documentary footage populating our Facebook-timelines and algorithmically personalised news-feeds is such a epistemologically complex phenomenon because it addresses us on the level of affects. As the work of Kuntsman and Ahmed has shown, the digital sphere itself constitutes a highly affective space, permeated by an abundance of affective fabrics, such as user comments, likes and recommended content. As these ambiguous cell phone videos are uploaded, they circulate online and dynamically change their meaning, according to the assembled and vernacular context of their presentation. Thus, the footage becomes an object of fluctuating feelings, moving between our collective affects of fear, joy, excitement or speculation. Ultimately, it seems as if these uncertain documents do not merely represent the indexically stable world ‘out there’, the Snapchat clip referred to in my introduction does not contain much evidentiary value after all. As an affective-formal coupling, it rather freezes the nervousness on site, which subsequently is mediated onto the viewer. The numerous comments and likes on the video’s Youtube channel enable it to take on more meaning, and, depending on its algorithmically assembled context, either transform it into a subversive outcry or a ‘fake’ statement. I therefore argue that these contemporary affective cell phone
22 images need to be approached not on the level of their evidentiary value, but with respect to both their affective power and the assemblage of their online presentation. We need to implement the questions of formal affect and the contexts of production, dissemination and reception into the study of these new images in order to adequately grasp their messy epistemics. That is why, after having established the formal-theoretical grounds of affectivity, I will now turn toward the technological and material assemblages affording contemporary documentary cultures.
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3. Cell phone Documentarism as an Affective Assemblage The introduction of my project has shown how critical engagement with Uncertain Documents demands not only looking at what these ambiguous videos show us at the level of their internal properties. The pixelated and grainy aesthetics, as the grounds of formal affect, must be thought of in terms of their entanglement with the very technological, material conditions of their production, circulation and reception. That is why we have to approach this footage in regards to both its affective power and the material structures of its presentation, or, in Thomas Elsaesser’s words, the “strange organisms, pulsing, moving and mutating, depending on the tags one enters or encounters” (“Tales of epiphany” 169). By this, I emphasise what Sarah Ahmed has called the “affective economies” of our time, namely the myriad of digital layers and vernacular online cultures that furthermore charge these cell phone videos with affects and meaning. In considering these collective affective fabrics, we are in a better position to understand how the affective speculative mode of spectatorship is not situated within the spectating subject, as essentialists would have it, but, contrarily, is externally- materially constituted.
Indeed, my physiologically intense reception of the Snapchat clip introduced in the first chapter was not solely evoked on the level of its blurry images and distorted sounds, but linked to the fact that the clip caught me ‘off guard’, and was intimately accessed on my own phone. The comments section on YouTube, where the footage was presented as news, with its vivid speculations about the video’s alleged authenticity, further destabilised the idea that what I was seeing was, indeed, real. These comments and likes, generated by other users, have been described by Elsaesser as the image’s “para-narrative worlds” (“Tales of epiphany” 150). I argue that these “worlds” and environments are not a fixed and stable, but, with every new comment, share or like, make up an extremely complex and dynamically shifting context for the spectatorship of the footage. But how can we approach these highly fragile and dynamic worlds, that play such an integral part in creating the meaning of the cell phone footages’ material?
3.1 The cell phone as Assemblage For the present concern of my thesis, I will envision the cell phone documentary form as an enunciation of a media assemblage in order to draw out its complex entanglement of digital technicity, haptic participation and impoverished, affective aesthetics. Here, I am drawing from the notion of the assemblage in order to look at how the complex constellation of subjects, immaterial and material “things” constitutes a our affective, embodied spectatorship. In doing so, I follow Hess, who conceptualises the contemporary phenomenon of the Selfie as a “representational form within locative
24 media” (1629). He argues that, through our entanglement with cell phone devices, we simultaneously inhabit different milieus, moving at “the nexus of the intimate self, public spaces, locative technology, and digital social networks” (1630). The cell phone thus positions us within multiple technological environments of different scales at the same time. For Hess, these locative media draw together different materially disconnected spheres –the physical space, the digital device, social media networks, the hyperlinks and personalised content– and thus, rather accidentally, form an assemblage. The selfie presents a visual expression of this contemporary media assemblage. Drawing from Hess’ understanding of the selfie, I approach low quality cell phone footage as an enunciation of this assemblage of heterogeneous technological environments.
Developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, an assemblage is understood as a meeting or arrangement of things – objects, bodies, tools, images, people, institutions – that creates specific effects (3,4). Although the notion operates as a guiding concept in their philosophy, the authors never offer a precise explanation- or rather, they offer “half a dozen different definitions”(DeLanda 1). Deleuze and Guattari write that, “assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organised molar machines; molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman” (146). In What is an Assemblage, Nail clarifies Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical claims, arguing that “all assemblages are composed of a basic structure including a condition (abstract machine), elements (concrete assemblage), and agents (personae)” (36-37). Moreover, he notes that the notion of assemblage does not ask for the static description of its singular, heterogenous parts, but rather stresses the idea that the perpetually shifting relations between these parts and the arising effects thereof constitute the assemblage. Accordingly, J-D Dewsbury writes, that “[t]he assemblage is less about what it is then, and more about what it can do, what it can affect and bring about” (150).
In light of the present concern, I conceive the usage of a cell phone for documentary means as an enunciation of an assemblage. This assemblage, as I will show in the following pages, dynamically encompasses the witnessing subject, the affective aesthetics, the material device, and the participatory online environments. In their meeting, these networked milieus actively and affectively constitute our spectatorship of these ambiguous documents. Most importantly, the notion of assemblage provides such a fruitful theoretical model for the present concern due to its ontological openness and dynamic relationality which renders the epistemological and visual fields in perpetual movement. Approaching contemporary cell phone footage alongside the notion of assemblage allows me to move the epistemological question away from surface level of affective aesthetics, to a more ‘machinic’ and material understanding of documentary media. After all, the documentary images of our time are so powerful not solely because of their affective ambiguity, but obtain their political
25 power in their multiplicity and the many inconspicuous ways they are circulated and streamed, and for this reason, slip into our daily lives. Steyerl and Lind, in delineating the contested nature of the documentary form in our times, note that “Documentary media images also pervade the most intimate of spheres through mobile phones, YouTube, and other interfaces; they have not only entered collective imagination but have also profoundly transformed it” (11). For them, cell phone images do not exist autonomously, but are entangled, to borrow a term from Matthew Fuller, in a media ecology of multiple screens and are thus intrinsically bound to a multiplicity of planetary-scale platforms.
I contest that these rhizomatic digital structures do not only constitute an apolitical network, but rather make up the politically saturated framing of their interpretation. For example, Adi Kuntsman puts emphasis on the extensive use of image and video editing tools, which allow for the endless copying and the circulation of texts, images and videos. For her, these digital technologies structure our contemporary “affective regime of disbelief” (3). Because of the political saturation of these networks, I argue that the affective potential of contemporary documentary media indeed is, next to the generally poor quality of the footage, discursively produced within this assemblage.
Following Foucault's notion of archeology, which envisions statements and documents in a rather ‘machinic’ understanding, I theorise the phenomenon of cell phone documentary alongside the question of contemporary media dispositif, in which, as it will be shown, the realms of the political and technological have so innocuously merged. After having established a relation between affect and the poor images and the digital circulation networks, I will shift here from phenomenology to structure and delve into the complex (im)materialities constituting contemporary cell phone documentarism as a media object. Shot on locative cell phones and presented on personalised timelines; uploaded, downloaded; circulated, globalised, endlessly copied and deleted again - these low quality images absorb and project not only the affects of their recording, but, in their assembling in the digital sphere, constitute a politically dispersed context of presentation.
3.2 Before and after the Documentary Image First of all, let us look at how the conceptualisation of impoverished documentary images has identified two distinct characteristics which have to be considered in the study of these forms: on one hand, André Bazin has shown how these affective, precarious images have to be thought of in relation to the material environment of their production. On the other, Judith Butler has stressed the notion
26 that, particularly in politically urgent cases, the precarious aesthetics of documentary images need to be considered with regards to their interpretative context.
In What is Cinema?, Bazin has argued that the precarious documentary images –their lack of evidentiary value, their shakiness, and trembling nature– of Thor Heyerdahl’s film Kon Tiki from 1950 directly refer to the very material affordances of the analogue film camera. In his analysis of the film, which was entirely shot on a 16mm camera, he tells us that “when an exciting moment arrives, say a whale hurling itself at the raft, the footage is so short that you have to process it ten times over in the optical printer before you can even spot what is happening” (260). Bazin further notes that “those fluid and trembling images are as it were the objectivized memory of the actors in the drama” (260). For him, what we see – or what do not see– is defined by the material conditions of the cinematic technology and what the camera affords the documentarist:
A cinematographic witness to an event is what a man can seize of it on film while at the same time being part of it. How much more moving is this flotsam, snatched from the tempest, than would have been the faultless and complete report offered by an organized film, for it remains true that this film is not made up only of what we see—its faults are equally witness to its authenticity. (261) In this light, the poor aesthetics of a film exist in direct conjunction with the technological affordances of the filmic technology. For Bazin, then, the question of whether we believe in the authenticity of Kon Tiki’s trembling images necessarily relates to the question of what we see. After all, the instruments of documentation directly affect what’s being documented.
For Judith Butler, the perceived truth of the highly publicised low-quality amateur footage depicting the police beating of Rodney King in 1991 rests on the interpretive framework of its presentation. During King’s trial, the video was presented to the jury, while the defence attorney commented, resulting in an alleged convergence between image and word. Although the video showed no evidence of King posing any danger to the police offers, members of the jury argued that they saw him threatening the police: “The visual representation of the black male body being beaten on the street by the policemen and their batons was taken up by that racist interpretive framework to construe King as the agent of violence“ (16). She argues that there exists a “contest within the visual field, a crisis of certainty of what is visible, one that is produced through the saturation and schematisation of that field with the inverted projections of white paranoia” (16).
In this light, the interpretive context of an image’s reception seems to further play a crucial role in our engagement with documentary material: the myriad of texts, statements, questions and concerns accompanying the images. Then, it becomes apparent that, as W.J.T Mitchell has aptly noted, words and imagery continuously permeate one another (51). With a view to the present focus
27 of this thesis, I base my argumentation on both Butler’s and Bazin’s claims and argue that the meaning of documentary images rests not only on their internal properties. Rather, we need to approach these images alongside the concrete material-semiotic relations of both their production and reception, considering the before and after of the image. In regards to contemporary documentary images, this means considering both the cell phone device as a locative medium that is situated in a concrete geopolitical reality and the algorithmically personalised context of the platforms of its presentation, including the numerous affects, fabricated by user comments, likes and the recommended content.
3.3 Leaving the Cinematic Apparatus The idea that the spectacle constitutes the spectator, and not the other way around, is not a new concept. With the advent of apparatus theory in the early 1970s, a line of theorists has shifted film philosophy’s focus away from the narrative world of a film itself and, instead, has emphasised the relationality of a screen to its surrounding elements. In light of Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, Jean-Louis Baudry has argued that the ideological effects of film are not based on the film itself, as a hermetically closed, visual world, but rather come into force in the meeting of the material conditions of film perception. As an ensemble, these individual material components of the cinematic technology and space –the projector, the screen, the darkness of the cinema– constitute the psychological impact on its individual viewer. In this light, the Cinematic Apparatus is rendered as a “psychic apparatus of substitution, corresponding to the model defined by the dominant ideology” (Baudry and Williams 46). Most importantly, it is to be understood as an ideology operating on the basis of its material cinematic technologies. But how do these technologies operate?
According to Baudry, the intrinsic ideological goal of this filmic machinery is enabled via operational means: drawing the spectating subject into the unfolding film by deliberately concealing its very mechanisms. In regards to the cinematic image, Baudry notes that “to the extent that it is cut off from the raw material (“objective reality”) of this product does not allow us to see the transformation which has taken place” (40). Accordingly, this body of theory “gestures toward the material and aesthetic ways in which spectators identify mainly with the camera’s omniscient eye as a transcendental subject that envisions a closed, predetermined world” (Robé, Wolfson and Funke 58). We come to understand that, within the cinematic apparatus, the analogue film is considered as a closed and ontologically stable unit which hides, in Baudry’s words, its raw material. Although attempts have been made to introduce screen theory to the culturally dominant media forms of the 21st century12, the constitution of the spectating subject, in terms of its agency, from passive viewer
12 See, for example, Robé, Wolfson & Funke; Fairfax. 28 to active user, and the political consequences thereof, have been largely disregarded by this school of thought. Indeed, in today’s spatially and temporarily open terrain of the control societies, the cinematic apparatus comes to be rather disassembled, in a “universal system of deformation” (Deleuze, „Societies of Control“ 5). I contest here that, with our engagement with cell phone footage, we do not envision a closed, predetermined world, as apparatus theory has argued. These nervous images are not only shot from a position of direct embeddedness, but are also embedded in concrete material-semiotic social media networks, which are highly personalised, vernacular and in a state of perpetual change.
I argue that with the shift from analogue to digital cinematic media, it becomes a more productive endeavour to conceptualise today’s screen culture rather as an open, shifting and rhizomatic assemblage, rather than the materially closed and semantically fixed space of the cinematic apparatus. This assemblage is marked by a complete shift in agency: where the cinematic apparatus renders the spectator as a passive viewer, as a subject to the film’s ideological rationale, I argue that assemblage-thinking allows for a rather reciprocal relationship between screen and viewer. Moreover, the assemblage stresses the corporeal (as opposed to the cognitive-semantic-ideological) addressing of the viewer. This shift corresponds with the emergence of post-cinematic, digital media. For Steven Shaviro, the post-cinematic is located in the context of a vast variety of technological, social and political developments that have fundamentally impacted and democratised our engagement with cinematic media. For him,
[…] new digital technologies have made the production, editing, distribution, sampling, and remixing of audiovisual material easier and more widespread than it has ever been before; and we know that this material is now accessible in a wider range of contexts than ever before, in multiple locations and on screens ranging in size from the tiny (mobile phones) to the gigantic (IMAX). We also know that this new media environment is instrumental to, and deeply embedded within, a complex of social, economic, and political developments: globalization, financialization, post-Fordist just-in-time production and “flexible accumulation”[…] the precarization of labor, and widespread micro-surveillance. (par. 4) Here we come to understand that cinematic media have undergone a fundamental change: in lieu of the singular spectator, post-cinematic media are rather marked by a collectively networked understanding of subjectivity, with an abundance of of human and non-human user affectively governing its (post-) cinematic materiality. In the same vein as Shaviro, Åkervall defines the post- cinematic as “material that is shot digitally and circulates outside classical exhibition spaces: on multiple platforms and in digital networks of relay and association that travel along social and mobile media” (38). For her, post-cinematic media are temporally and spatially dislocated, and designate a multiplicity of reception modes. Most importantly, both authors point not only to the post-cinematic images and their internal properties, but rather show that the post-cinematic, as an aesthetic category,
29 needs to be approached in direct entanglement with the material context of its circulation and reception. Thus, Åkervall’s and Shaviro’s conceptualisations are marked by a rather ecological and ‘machinic’ understanding of these media forms. Indeed, in line with these authors, I argue that, as post-cinematic media, cell phone images have left the cinematic apparatus and have entered the spatially and temporally open terrain of an assemblage. At the same time, these images have established new modalities of interaction between screen and viewer.
3.4 From Viewer to User: Contemporary Spectatorship As argued above, when documenting or watching footage on a cell phone, we do not merely engage with the materiality of the device itself. Rather, the emergence of cell phones attached with cameras and live-streaming functions, together with image- and video-sharing platforms has assembled a multiplicity of technological environments. These uncertain documentary images thus do not occur within the closed milieu of the cinematic apparatus, but, as post-cinematic forms, enter a dynamic, and open field within new media platforms. In her essay A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl conceptualises digital images as things that transcend their representational mode by participating in, and not only representing, reality. She argues that the digital image’s “immortality originates from its ability to be xeroxed, recycled, and reincarnated” (49). Steyerl's argument is based on her concept of fluid images, which she uses to describe digital images that undergo a great amount of circulation in social networks, such as YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. Liquifying, in this context, means the constant medial alterations and modifications such as recoding and re- contextualisation of digital images. Indeed, the introductory case of the snapchat-footage of the school shooting in Parkland has shown how one video file has been circulated across a vast variety of platforms, such as CNN, The Guardian or the blogosphere. In addition to each of these respective framings, some of the platforms even uploaded altered versions of the footage, with some content, such as screaming, edited out.13 It becomes clear that post-cinematic media such as cell phone documentaries afford us new modes of engagement. In describing the shifting subject-screen relation constituted by post-cinematic technologies, Lev Manovich, as one of the most cited authors on this topic, notes that cell phones, as new media,
change our concept of what an image is—because they turn a viewer into an active user. As a result, an illusionistic image is no longer something a subject simply looks at, comparing it with memories of represented reality to judge its reality effect. The new media image is
13 Whereas some unedited versions of the video can be found on YouTube, CNN only offers a version with some faces and words blurred out. See: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2018/02/15/florida-school-shooting- inside-the-school-von.cnn/video/playlists/florida-stoneman-douglas-high-school-shooting/ 30
something the user actively goes into, zooming in or clicking on individual parts with the assumption that they contain hyperlinks. (qtd. in Hansen 10) Thus, digital, post-cinematic media, because of their new assembled contexts of presentation, allow for a reconfigured relationship between image and viewer. Moving between the notions of consumer and producer, today’s prosumers actively and affectively take part in the online creation and circulation of images or texts. Crucially, new media afford users an increased haptic engagement with images: instead of merely watching photos, clips and movies, post-cinematic images allow their users to enter a direct and active dialogue with the latter, resulting in a myriad of new ways of recording, processing, forging and seeing them. With Manovich, we come to understand that our speculative, affective mode of viewership rests on the image’s affordances as a clickable and operable object. As users, we are able to actively engage with an image as part of the cell phone assemblage, in copying, downloading, sharing and editing it. Therefore, another crucial aspect of the contemporary documentary assemblage is its collective participation.
This shift in agency, from passive spectator to haptic user, has political implications. Whereas Manovich’s considerations address new media first and foremost as an aesthetic object14, my project considers them in light of a politically saturated media dispositif. It should be noted that Manovich’s ideas have to do with the fundamental changes in internet culture since The Language of New Media was originally published in 2001, a time when the internet was considered a rather subversive medium than the elemental structure it has become today. As a contemporary media theorist, Bratton argues that the haptic engagement with cell phones, as a medium to both record and access these documents, allows a specific mode of engagement, which is locative, haptical and embedded (225). Åkervall furthermore shows how, within the cell phone assemblage, subjects are “singular and mobile, often navigating multiple dispersed screens” (38). She further argues that social media networks and platforms “create profiles ‘on-the-fly’ that anticipate and produce social norms” (38). As users, we access online content through highly personalised profiles, which are perfectly tailored to our “algorithmic identities” (Cheney-Lippold 165). Web 2.0 technologies therefore algorithmically assemble a video’s meaning with regards to our online behaviour, which is sophistically tracked across different platforms. The current media assemblage does not render its users as uniformed subjects. Rather, as prosumers, we are as embedded in material-semiotic structures as the cell phone images themselves. And from this position of digital, algorithmic “embeddedness”, we actively and affectively take part in the social and discursive shaping of the videos’ interpretive frameworks.
14 Alexander R. Galloway, in his 2011 discussion of Manovich’s Language of New Media, has noted that, „In Manovich, a medium is never a dispositif“ (382)- This has to do with the fact that Manovich develops his concept of new media in aesthetical-historical terms which omit their political potential. 31
3.5 Collective Affects We come to understand that the shift from user to viewer in documentary culture marks one of its most crucial aspects. As these post-cinematic documentary forms enter the open field of the assemblage, they are furthermore subject to numerous other user comments. The collective participation in documentarism has been explored by Julio García Espinosa. In the 1960’s, the Cuban director and writer demanded an imperfect cinema. For him, only amateurish, impoverished images contain the virtue of inverting the rigid divisions between manufacturer and consumer. The Third- Cinema manifesto envisioned a radically democratised use of cinematic technologies, as only a popular form of cinema posses the subversive potential to poetically undermine the commercial monopolies of image production and circulation. Although the term “imperfect cinema” suggests an understanding of low-quality imagery as a form of art, Espinosa declares that, “imperfect cinema can make use of the documentary or the fictional mode, or both. It can use whatever genre, or all genres” (Espinosa, 229).
Undoubtedly, digital imaging technologies such as mobile phones equipped with cameras and broadcasting functions give rise to what Espinosa conceived as an “imperfect cinema” of the masses: video footage can be recorded and circulated individually at almost any time, from almost everywhere across the globe. This development is thus leading to a radical increase of the amount of documentary material. Yet, this popular democratisation of image technologies comes at a price. Mark Hansen has noted that cell phone footage, as a digital image, –already by default, on its very ontological grounds– does not offer us a stable referential point on the world ‘out there’, but has to be rather approached with regards to its ambiguous representational politics: “Following its digitisation, the image can no longer be understood as a fixed and objective viewpoint on reality […] since it is now defined precisely through its almost complete flexibility and addressability, its numerical basis, and its constitutive virtuality” (8). Indeed, as the digital documentary image populates our social media circuits, it offers itself to millions of users, who, in commenting and liking it, furthermore charge it with affects and meaning. Hito Steyerl, in this regard, tells us that “contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had anticipated.” Thus, these “images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction” (“In Defense” 41). For Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose, this affective user-intervention marks a crucial aspect of contemporary documentary forms. They foreground “the recruitment of increasingly interactive audiences co-producing meaning in new modes of participatory documentary production” (366). In line with them, I argue that, in light of the emergence of new media platforms as new sites for documentary culture, the meaning and truth value 32 of these uncertain documents increasingly rests on their vernacular framing within personalised Platform-feeds. Indeed, the embedding of these low quality cell phone videos in politically saturated frameworks co-produces their meaning. Thus, any new user comment on the blurry, pixelated videos essentially informs their framework of interpretation.
This has to do with the fact that, when we are talking about today’s online publics, we are not envisioning a homogenous, globalised public sphere, but rather a fragmented field of diverse identities and political subjects. In lieu of one global public arena where citizens are continually exposed to diverse opinions and experiences, the current “filter bubble” regulates and filters the content users want to be exposed to, which results in selected exposure (Kim 972). Indeed, these new forms of online collaboration “can be seen in the growth of vernacular media cultures, leading to the recruitment of increasingly interactive audiences co-producing meaning in new modes of participatory documentary production” (Dovey and Rose 366).
Given these new fragile and vernacular territories of documentary culture, Brucato, in his case study of videos depicting police brutality in the U.S., has put to question the idea of universal transparency afforded by cell phone documentaries. In light of the contested reactions to videos depicting anti-black police brutality, he critically examines the notions of transparency and its positive connotations with Enlightenment. “The new transparency”, he argues, “is grounded in the mistaken idea that documentations are self-evident, and that this divided population would make the same sense of videos documenting police violence” (52). Here, Judith Butler’s argument comes to mind again that the visual is, in itself, a politically contested field. Particularly in regards to the typically low-resolution and affective ambiguity of these uncertain images, the specific interpretive framing of these documents provides not so much a “a transparent lens into reality, but a mirror reflecting back on its viewers” (51). Indeed, this meta-data of documentary videos affectively co- produces their meaning. Kuntsman and Stein put forward the notion of “digital suspicion” guiding contemporary online witnessing cultures. In their work, the authors discuss the role of cell phone footage produced during the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011. They argue that it is not only the footage itself that invites analysis, rather, the cell phone documents need to be approached in conjunction with “the highly mediated nature of the digital sphere itself – mediation which belied the prevailing notion of the evidentiary” (1). Notably, the digital space constitutes not an objective global imagery, but rather a vernacular lens, formed by a myriad of affective statements, comments and likes, which come together to structure our regimes of belief or disbelief:
The same digitalized account of events, the same image can become an object of shifting feelings: it appears once as truthful and heartbreaking evidence, and once as a skilful and evil deception; once as an outcry, and once as entertainment. (4)
33
Indeed, I consider these relational collective affects, constituting the footage’s interpretative framing on a streaming-Platform, as an inherent part of what I have envisioned as the assemblage. Together, these elements, in conjunction with the affective aesthetics of the footage, constitute a highly relational notion of truth. The image’s evidentiary value is thus constituted rather in the assembled relationship with its para-narrative worlds. Here, we come to understand the “dangerous naivete” of the assumption that these images are able to “speak for themselves” (Elsaesser, „Digital Cinema“ 207). Indeed, the interplay between the affective image and its meta-data, dynamically re- territorialized its evidentiary meanings and constitutes what Adi Kuntsman has termed the ‘affective fabrics of digital cultures’(3). In conceptualising the the cell phone footage alongside the notion of the assemblage, we are in a better position to understand the dynamically shifting contexts of its circulation and presentation.
3.6 Closing Remarks: Documentary Culture as Assemblage In light of the present problem, I claim that the notion of assemblage provides a useful conceptual tool to discuss the affective ensemble of subjects, cell phones, platforms and ambiguous images involved in the engagement with cell phone footage. In rendering our current engagement with these documents as an assemblage, I aim to bypass a mere analysis on a cell phone’s affordances or a digital video’s aesthetics. Assemblage-thinking rather suggests that in a rhizomatic meeting of environments, images, bodies and devices, our affective mode of spectatorship is constituted. The notion of assemblage, in a Deleuze-Guattarian sense, challenges essentialist logics of experience and subjectivity and instead allows us to approach our contemporary mediated experience of the world as a fragile, dynamic and materially constituted encounter. The assemblage functions as an apt model for discussing the heterogeneous nature of the contemporary media dispositif because its openness to the interchangeability of its individual elements centralises its effect, namely our our affective spectatorship. Differently put, assemblage-thinking welcomes considerations of different types of spectatorship within contemporary screen culture: whether the footage is accessed on a phone, tablet, smartwatch or desktop computer – its affectively charged spectatorship may not differ substantially.
In conclusion, I claim that the contemporary cell phone documentary mode marks an affectively thick phenomenon. These uncertain and blurry images, on the level of their aesthetics, address us affectively and, via their assemblage of presentation, afford us a multiplicity of relational, collectively produced notions of truth. I have argued that our spectatorship of these uncertain images is as embedded in vernacular frameworks as the images themselves. Therefore, this phenomenon has put to question established verification processes. Our a priori affective speculation about the
34 authenticity of these ambiguous cell phone documentations rests on the images’ ambiguous forms and their dissemination in the digital sphere. However, the act of approaching these shaky videos with constant relativism and speculation about their authenticity carries with it political implications, particularly when considering the use of cell phones for subversive means. For example, let us consider the usage of cell phones for documentary means during the Syrian revolution in 2011. Recorded under mostly dangerous conditions, these blurry videos accounted for the only visual material from Syria during the first months of protests. The subversive goal of the so-called Syrian ‘cinema of resistance’ has become the spreading of “information that counters official discourses and encourages further action on the streets” (Valderrama 2). Because of this, we come to understand the political danger of merely suggesting a perpetual distrust or fragile meaning in these uncertain documents, as put forward by critical thinkers like Hito Steyerl, Adi Kuntsman or Rebecca Stein.
Although these authors have made crucial contributions to the theorisation of post-cinematic documentary forms, their postulated “state of hyperbolic doubt and interpretative relativism“ belittles the often brave acts of these media activists. Indeed, with regards to the concept of visual representation, we find ourselves in an ethical predicament: to ask of those uncertain, blurry documents to tell us the ‘whole truth’ presents an epistemic dilemma, given the generally low quality and ontological flexibility of these images. Contrarily, moving them into the realm of what has polemically been coined the “Simulacrum” does away with their representational power (Baudrillard). Respectively, Chad Elias, in his analysis of footage recorded by Syrian video activists, warns us that “to greet their recordings with automatic or blanket skepticism performs a grave disservice to these heroic acts of testimony” (19). For him, these videos rather “constitute new forms of embodied witnessing” that demand a right to a “dignified image” (19). 15 Indeed, as I have attempted to show in the past two chapters, cell phone footage offers us an embodied, affective type of spectatorship which is afforded by both the pixelated aesthetics and vertical framing of these videos and their assembled online presentation. Elias thus suggests shifting the focus – away from the notions of disbelief and doubt, towards the ‘communities of witnessing’ these uncertain images bring about. For him, the sphere of contemporary art provides a useful aesthetic lens for critical reflections on the notions of cinematic truth, epistemic politics and our contemporary mediated experience of war, conflict, and emergency situations.
15 Here, come to mind Georges Didi-Huberman’s renowned reflections on four images, recorded under great risk by prisoners of Auschwitz in 1944. For Didi-Huberman, these images, snatched from hell, pose materialised acts of memory –however rudimentary– which have to be approach as dignified images. Thus, he argues for images, in spite of all: “we must contemplate them, take them on, and try to comprehend them” (3). 35
4. Poetics of Uncertainty: Contemporary Art and the Documentary I wish to now turn to an analysis of artists appropriating and contextualising these shaky images and ask: What role do artists play in making perceptible the digitally mediated affects populating contemporary documentary forms? In light of my research, this conceptual move requires poetically emphasising the formal affects and material assemblages informing contemporary documentary forms which I have attempted to carve out in the previous chapters. As I will show, these artworks do not deny the many ways that digital technologies have destabilised established verification mechanisms – they rather share an open acknowledgement of it. However, they move beyond our “digital suspicion”, and rather ask how, in light of digital indexical ambiguity, there remains possible a right to a dignified image and its communities of witnessing. Emphasising the communities and mechanisms of our affective witnessing paves the way for a distanced point of view and nuanced reflections on the state of cell phone photography as a means of documentation. Consequently, in this chapter, I set out to discuss key examples within the field of contemporary art which critically reflect on the powerful, yet fragile state of documentary images in today’s mediasphere, specifically with regards to those recorded on cell phones.
4.1 The ‘Documentary Turn’ in Contemporary Art In recent times, several theorists and curators have recognised an increasing engagement of contemporary artists with documentary practices. Outlining the broad field of global contemporary art, Julian Stallabras has identified two opposite developments, namely “a commercial world of investment and spectacular display, catering to the global elite, and the circulation of art on the biennial scene, dominated by documentary work, particularly in photography and video” (12). For him, as with the divergence of social spheres in the age of late capitalism, the field of contemporary art has similarly been subject to fragmentation. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl situate these topical shifts in the context of the neoliberal globalisation of information technologies, arguing that “due to the increasing privatisation of media and cuts in public funding, experimental documentary production has again been increasingly pushed into the art field” (14). Thus, contemporary documentary art practice situates its own political potential within the autonomy of aesthetic experience. This aesthetic development is reflected in the growing number of both exhibitions16 and published anthologies on this field, addressing the documentary form as a topic of political, aesthetic, philosophical, and historical concern. The reassessment of the documentary by artists has taken up various approaches,
16 Seminal exhibitions include: Documenta11. 8 June-15 September 2002. Multiple venues, Kassel; Image Counter Image. 10 June-16 September 2012. Haus der Kunst, Munich; Art in the Age of Asymmetrical Warfare. 11 September 2015- 3 January 2016. Witte de With- Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Age of Terror. Art since 9/11. 26 October 2017- 28 May 2018. Imperial War Museum, London. 36 and has significantly increased since the 1990’s. Questions concerning the documentary have become a vibrant force, whether in the form of projects dealing with found documentary material or artworks in which artists approach the documentary as a theme. In doing so, contemporary artists have extended “the traditions of documentary cinema in a new institutional context and an expanded field of aesthetic possibilities” (Balsom and Peleg 16).
As a key figure in this tradition, the German artist Harun Farocki, in his 1992 film Videograms of a Revolution, has reflected on the role of low-quality amateur footage in the 1989 mass protests in Bucharest. His film does solely consist of found-footage material, thus the artist’s engagement with these documents takes place in the editing. Videograms brings together amateur footage from VHS- cameras and news reports from the state’s network to tell about the Romanian Revolution of December 1989, where demonstrators occupied a public TV-station and, thus, radically established it as a novel site for historiography. For Thomas Elsaesser, Farocki shows “that there is no outside to the inside of the image-media world” (“Harun Farocki” 62). Central to Elsaesser’s reflections on Farocki’s work is the way he positions the filmmaker, namely around an “Archimedean Point.” For him, Farocki’s filmic and theoretical work is so remarkable because it is well aware of the “the double-edged sword that the media represents in democracies as well as dictatorships” (62). Given this awareness, the Archimedean Point, for Elsaesser, delineates a highly relational space: “its very point remains hidden, its causes lie in its effects” (62). Marked by a “poetic sense of metamorphosis” (62), this conceptual space is highly self-aware and actively foregrounds its own position and relationality: instead of occupying an ethically fixed point of view, Farocki’s work is rather marked by its own flexibility and relationality to its context.
Yet, as history progresses, both the nature of image media and conflict zones transform drastically.Within contemporary political territories, media do not only represent “a double edged sword”. In our contemporary culture, this sword comes to encompass multiple edges, as “the same image can become an object of shifting feelings” (Kuntsman 4).
In this regard, Jeffrey Skoller writes that,
With each war, the development of documentary image and sound technologies, coupled with the specific problems that filmmakers encounter as they document a particular war […] has produced its own modes of recording and documenting the changing practices of warfare and its effects. (373) Here, we come to understand that there exists a direct correlation between aesthetics and historical records, as each conflict, war and emergency site conceives its own forms of representation. How have artistic approaches been reshaped in the age of interfaces? After all, our contemporary global
37 digital culture, as shown in the previous chapter, has radically deformed and re-assembled political realities in new and complex arrangements.
The increasing employment of new media technologies for documentary purposes, such as cell phones or CCTV systems, has posed both new challenges and possibilities for artists working in the field. Documentary artistic practice, in light of these new imaging technologies, has shifted its emphasis away from the creation of original documentary works to the appropriation of and interference into found amateur footage. Paula Albuquerque foregrounds the act of appropriation in the context of artists working with CCTV footage, arguing that “appropriating webcam footage echoes the position of the artist in contemporary society in relation to the archives produced by surveillance” (193).17 Similar to Albuquerque’s emphasis on artistic appropriation, Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose have envisioned the role of the artist in the context of digital documentary practice as interfering agents: “The intervention of the artist/producer in making something meaningful remains central, while the post-human contribution of the computer injects a dimension which is truly new for documentary” (374). And it is precisely this shift into the digital sphere that I wish to emphasise in this context: how artists reflect on these new, post-cinematic documentary forms and allow for a refined sensitivity toward their affectively charged representational politics: Where can we locate this “Archimedean Point” in light of the present scenario? In the following discussion of three documentary artworks, I wish to show how artistic practice indeed corresponds to the complex entanglements between the affective cell-phone videos and the elements of their assemblage. I aim to not only read these artworks in light of my theoretical framework of assemblage- and affect-theory, but wish to provide a critical commentary on how these artworks have been discussed by other authors. Although these documentary art projects greatly differ in their nature, spanning from multi- channel film installations, to video essay, to activist interventions, they have in common a strong research focus and are concerned with the conventions of media representations of warfare and conflict in the past two decades.
4.2 Poetics of Historiography: The Atlas Group Walid Raad’s work as representative of The Atlas Group “comment[s] on the documentary and archival urges, the paucity of actual documents, and the general inadequacies of visual
17 Similar to Farocki’s work mentioned above, Nin Bruderman’s 1998 four-channel film installation Warten auf Krieg (Waiting for War) compiles the ‘uneventful’ footage recorded by CCTV cameras during the Operation Fox in Baghdad: CCTV-footage, documenting the nothingness, the hours of time spent waiting on the attack of military units from the US and Great Britain. The meaning of Bruderman’s work emerges not out of the images’ internal properties, but rather in the new relationships between them, established by the artist.
38 documents” (Stallabras 17) in the context of historical and present-day Lebanon. As part of a growing archival vein in contemporary art, the group specifically focuses on the years between 1975 and 1991, which marked the Lebanese civil war.18 Since its forming in the late 1990’s, the work of Raad’s fictional foundation19 has made it its task to “research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon” (The Atlas Group Archive). Through a conceptual approach, The Atlas Group has collected, fictionalised and produced a vast number of films, photographs and text-files which are preserved in a digital archive on the group’s website.20 The archive comprises three different sections: documents provided by imaginary people (‘authored files’), by anonymous people(‘found files’) and by the group members themselves (‘Atlas Group Productions’). The digitally edited images, doctored videos, forged papers and fake files address both the infrastructural and emotional effects of the civil wars and violent conflicts. Generally, these documents, amongst them written autobiographical accounts and amateur footage, evoke an ostensibly private character.
The Atlas Group’s mode of nuanced, fictionalised historical preservation is meant to both critically evaluate the authority of documents and allow the emergence of alternative narratives of Lebanese history. Thus, the archive “provokes a direct encounter with an intimately known reality” (Albuquerque 216). I Only Wish That I Could Weep, a video listed under the category of ‘found files’, is of particular interest in light of my main concern. Shot on a video-camera in the late 1990’s, the video is attributed to an anonymous Lebanese army intelligence officer, who was tasked with monitoring West Beirut’s seaside walkway called Corniche, a spot widely known to be occupied by spies and double agents. The video’s accompanying text on the archive tells us that, instead of documenting the assigned people, the camera operator one day decided to shift the camera’s focus away from his assigned targets and repeatedly filmed the setting sun. This act of defiance lead to their dismissal in 1996. However, the agent was allowed to keep the footage and ultimately donated it to the The Atlas Group’s archive in 2004.
Although I Only Wish That I Could Weep is born out of a time before the emergence of cell phones, it poses a fruitful contribution to my conceptual framework due to its low quality, the handheld, affective aesthetics (Figure 1) and its presentation within the digital archive. Most importantly, the video’s specific context of the website moves it away from a politically charged framework of a platform such as YouTube and rather situates it in the more nuanced framework of the group’s website. Its presentation within the digital archive poetically emphasises the mechanism
18 It has to be noted here that the historiography of the Lebanese conflict in particular has been described as a problematic and challenging undertaking, as it faces a multiplicity of oftentimes conflicting and antagonistic historical accounts. See: Sune. 19 On multiple occasions, Walid Raad, as the representative of the initiative, has stressed the fictional nature of the project in naming conflicting facts about it. See: Gilbert. 20 The Group’s Website: www.theatlasgroup.org 39 and conditions of its own arrangement. Instead of affectively spatializing the Corniche as a site of conspiracy and threat, the distinct context of its presentation in the archive paves the way to the latter’s experience as an intimate embodiment of Beirut’s urban space. In it, the poetics of historiography are revealed: the camera operator’s personal desires are reflected in the specific cinematography, defined by what is visible and what not.
Figure 1: Still from: The Atlas Group, I Only Wish That I Could Weep
Here, we come to understand a crucial aspect of the group’s artistic methodology, namely its presentation as a digital archive. As viewers navigating through the archive, we are repeatedly reminded of the archive’s purpose. Although the archive does not specifically comprise cell phone footage, the digital sphere presents an important part for both its operationalisation and presentation. Thus, it becomes an important example in light of my main concern. Indeed, Raad’s digital intervention marks a crucial aspect of the work, as the artist “processes and outputs all of his work digitally, thereby adding another layer of documentary intervention to his overarching fictional conceit ”(Gilbert). In not only stressing the use of digital graphic editing tools for the production of the files but also employing a website as its main point of access, The Atlas Group puts at the forefront the technological, namely digital, nature of contemporary epistemological politics. In other words: the project actively and poetically emphasises what I have envisioned as the media assemblage. The archive does not so much narrate a conclusive and authentic account on Lebanon’s contested history, but rather sheds light on the oftentimes hidden epistemological mechanisms that claim to do so. Accordingly, we come to understand that “Raad’s goal is not a counter-memory, but an investigation of the ways in which memory is produced; not a counter-archive per se, but an interrogation of discursive formations constituting any archive as a compendium of present knowledge” (Gilbert).
Although Gilbert, in his discussion of the archive, adequately pays attention to the discursive nature of the Atlas Group’s social-fictitious art practice, he fails to include the phenomenological
40 dimension of the user, which I have foregrounded in the previous two chapters. Thus, I want to add another dimension to the author’s readings of the project, namely the question of how the user actively experiences the archive. Ultimately, the Atlas Group’s project is of great interest to my project because it does not only reflect on the relationship between documents and the world they are ostensibly describing. Rather, in its self-reflexive presentation as an archive, which users can navigate independently, the project shows us that epistemology is not only a structural process but operates on a phenomenological level. Working as an interactive, speculative documentary, the Atlas Group’s poetics of the assemblage indeed makes visible the material and discursive elements which come together to form the representational politics of historiography. When navigating the archive, we are constantly reminded of its semi-fictional nature and thus rather shift our attention to how the digital archive is assembled. In a way, the archive thus comes to work “not for history but against it” (Choi). Conclusively, The Atlas Group’s project, in its fictionalised mode, poetically foregrounds the operating of what I have envisioned as an assemblage: in offering itself as a website one can freely navigate and explore, we are made aware of the “machinic” and affective workings of historiography.
4.3 Affective Tautologies: Thomson & Craighead’s A short film about war Similar to The Atlas Group’s social-fictional archive, the London-based artist duo Thomson & Craighead investigate the role of narration in the context of blogger documentaries. Made entirely from footage found on the image-sharing platform Flickr, their narrative documentary A short film about war from 2009/10 depicts several conflict zones across the globe, such as Iraq, Sudan, or Palestine. 21 The desktop documentary 22 consists of two screens: while one screen depicts a continuing stream of the documentary images, a second display functions as a protocol, providing additional meta-data about the images (Figure 2). This information includes the images’ GPS- location, URL-links and the user-name of the files’ creator. The images, recorded by both military and civilian bloggers, do not only show violent disputes but also depict everyday scenarios of public life and document infrastructural elements such as public life on the streets or in airports. Both screens are linked through the soundtrack, for which the artists integrated an ongoing stream of spoken word, attributed to the online bloggers. These voices, speaking in French, English or Arabic, cite Blog- entries and do not only describe the harrowing reality of life in, for example,. a UN-campside in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but also tell about the bloggers’ personal lives, moving between
21 The film can be screened on: www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/slide/warfilm.html 22 This term describes a recently emerged sub-genre of documentary films which are not traditionally made with a camera, but are entirely made on a computer. 41 dentist appointments or flight delays. Therefore, the video installation strikingly shows how online platforms interweave both the private and political aspects of contemporary conflict zones.
Figure 2: Screenshot from: Thomson & Craighead- A short film about war
Crucially, the amateur documentary images employed by the artists, due to their trembling nature and low quality, can be described as formal affects which trigger our mode of embodied witnessing. Yet, A short film about war is not so much concerned with pictorial questions and the politics of representation– this is made obvious by the artists’ arbitrary choice of locations. Contrarily, in offering us both the image itself and its meta-data, the artists employ a tautology, which, similar to the cinematic montage, derives the meaning of the artwork from the relation between the two screens. This is furthermore reflected in the ways the artists themselves have positioned their work. Introducing A short film about war on their website, the artist duo writes that it is “attempting to explore and reveal the way in which information changes as it is gathered, edited and then mediated through networked communications technologies or broadcast media, and how that changes and distorts meaning” (Thomson & Craighead). Essentially, the artists, in not only showing the affective images but positioning them in the rhizomatic entanglement with the (im)material networks of their circulation, offer a “machinic” view on what I have described as an assemblage: they bring forward the online context of the images’ dissemination and reception. In including the URL-links to the origin of the used images, the viewer is furthermore able to trace their provenience online, inviting direct engagement with the images.
Overall, the essayist documentary is characterised by its fleeting pace. Rather than offering stable and easily decipherable statements on the everyday reality of conflict zones, A short film about war operates as an ongoing stream of somewhat arbitrary images and geographic contexts. The conflict zones depicted are, after all, just a few selected from seemingly hundreds across the globe, without any obvious reference to each other. In this regard, the film’s “aesthetic meaning emerges as relationships are set up between images, rather than based on one image’s internal properties” (Barker 185). Through its hasty montage, the film furthermore exposes its “power to alter memory and construct meaning, to distort or clarify the anodyne conviction of a momentary photographic trace”
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(Snow 11). The artists emphasise not so much the images themselves, but rather the multiple technological milieus in which they are so inextricably entangled. In foregrounding these digital assemblages as a means of image circulation, they emphasise the “affective economies” of contemporary digital cultures. These rhizomatic networks of online circulation radically contribute to an image’s or text’s affective potential, as “the power of emotions accumulates through circulation of texts” (Kuntsman 2). Indeed, the fast pace of the editing creates a cognitive disruption, as the “viewer isn’t given enough time to digest each snapshot before they disappear” (Coomasaru). Thus, A Short film about war compellingly replicates a user’s browsing experience, frantically flipping through a vast multiplicity of platforms, browser tabs and screens. In doing so, it offers an affective simulation on the online mediation of contemporary warfare and conflict zones.
What makes this work so fascinating in light of my theoretical framework is the way it juxtaposes the political reality and personal lives of its protagonists, laying bare the online channels that the bloggers and journalists use for their images’ circulation. For Timothy Scott Barker, the work is thus “about the ability to form connections amid the complex of circulating stories and images that combine to create our contemporary experience of the world” (185). And crucially, as I have argued throughout my thesis, this experience is affectively constituted. Thomson and Craighead’s film re- assembles the affective registers and exposes their material connections and rhizomatic entanglements that inform contemporary epistemics. Similar to The Atlas Group’s semi-fictional archive, A short film about war occupies a space in the relation between the affective images and the assemblages of their circulation. Ultimately, Thomson and Craigheads’ film offers a corrective to the notion that there exists an omniscient objective view on reality. It compellingly illustrates that there are a myriad of individual, affectively charged impressions of the real that, in their assembling, constitute the narration that the mass media construct out of it: a mediated reality, difficult for the viewer to assess.
4.4 Clear as Mud: Rabih Mroué’s Pixelated Revolution Whereas Walid Raad’s artistic work and research emphasise the evidentiary fragility of documents on the material level of the archive, his compatriot, the visual artist and performer Rabih Mroué, follows a contrary approach. Rather than shifting the focus to the discursive nature of documentary practice and the role of archives in historiographical practice, Mrouè remediates and contextualises the low-quality cell phone footage found on the internet in a series of lecture- performances. As a continuing research project, the “non-academic” lectures titled The Pixelated Revolution offer a close reading of cell phone documentaries recorded during the ongoing Syrian
43 conflict. Casually entering the stage and sitting down behind a Macbook, with the videos projected on a screen behind him, Mroué, like a news-anchor, shows and comments on the cell phone footage dating back to the start of the violent conflict in 2011 (figure 4). Most importantly, as an actor and performance artist, Mroué, through changing his posture, gestures and voice, constantly moves between the role of subjective artist and anchorman, and thus “speaks with a myriad of voices that interrupt each other” (Valderrama 7).
His lecture performance brings together a specific type of cell phone documents, namely videos shot by Syrian activists in the moment of their death. The footage depicts the camera operator’s nervous scanning of residential apartment blocks, rooftops, and different buildings. In his performance, Mroué describes the oftentimes blurry and pixelated images, giving further information about what he and the audience see – be it an injured civilian or an armed soldier aiming at the camera operator. In most of these instances, the camera operator registers a sniper aiming and shooting at them– thus, a double shooting takes place: “One shoots for his life and the life of his citizens – and the other shoots for his life and the life of his regime” (Mroué). In a way, Mroué’s performative reading of the cell phone videos pushes them beyond their representational politics, to the level of their own militarisation: the artist shows that, within specific geopolitical contexts, the cell phones become as powerful weapons as the rifles aiming at them. The cell phones, as they are used by the Syrian activists, hence pose not only tools of documentation, but as means of civic visibility –however poor– that was not granted by the state’s apparatus. This political urgency is furthermore directly translated into the videos themselves, as the artist tells us that “the protesters’ images are as anxious as their own anxiety; as tired as their own tiredness; as painful as their own pain; and as enthusiastic as their own enthusiasm” (qtd. in Della Ratta 115). This quote furthermore points to the affectively
44 charged nature of the videos, and how their poor, anxious aesthetics symbolise the emotional intensity attributed to their recording.
Figure 3: Rabih Mroué (in front) performing The Pixelated Revolution
The Pixelated Revolution emphasises the poor, blurry aesthetics of videos by the Syrian media activists, which do not employ the categories of quality established by the globalised professional documentary filmmaking. Because of this, Chad Elias, in his reading of Mroué’s performance, argues that the low quality of these videos adequately present their subversive potential on a symbolic level. He notes that The Pixelated Revolution “draws a fascinating comparison between the regime’s use of tripods to construct the illusion of a stable, unshakable political order and the heavily pixelated, trembling images that are captured in amateur cell phone videos” (20) In this regard, he claims that, “in Mroué’s terms, the video becomes paradigmatic of the loss of certainty associated with post- indexical media” (29).
Yet, despite the ontological ambiguity of the videos and the proclaimed “loss of certainty”, Elias identifies a physical immediacy in the footage found and discussed by Mroué. Interestingly, for him, this immediacy “complicates the prevailing tendency to view digital images as disembodied and disconnected from any referent” (29). Similarly, Della Ratta, in her analysis of Mroué’s performance, argues that the artist shows how, through the videos’ cinematography, the camera merges with the operator’s body– a gesture which directly mediates the operator’s feelings onto the viewer. For Della Ratta, the cell phone camera has thus become an organic extension of the body (115). I want to argue here that this physical immediacy and mediated anxiety described by these two authors, is triggered in what Brinkema termed the “misé n’en scene” of the video. The vertical framing of these videos and their jumpy cinematography thus constitutes their formal affect. Here, we come to understand
45 that, despite –or, rather, because of– its indexical uncertainty, the footage contain a highly affective potential which triggers their intimate and embodied spectatorship.
What is of particular interest in light of my thesis is the particular way Mroué’s lecture- performance engages with the affective video footage of the Syrian activists. That is why I want to draw the attention here to Mroué’s role as a performer, who, in his distinct acting style, occupies a point in the relationship between the affective documents and their context of presentation, or what I have conceptualised as an assemblage. “Through his performance as both a professional actor, trained to modulate emotions and affect, and a social actor, a member of society”, Carol Martin argues, “Mroué looks at the politics of what is happening in Syria by means of aesthetic analysis” (21). In his lecture-performance, the artist-as-user, sitting behind a computer, modulates the images: he stops and rewinds the footage, nervously zooming in and out in order to extract further visual information of the pixelated fields. The acts of clicking, marking and extracting pose a performative intervention into the affective aesthetics. For Kabra, this interfering gesture “creates another layer of abstraction, further troubling the knowledge one can extract from the chaos of media and the chaos depicted in the images themselves”. In doing so, the artist appropriates, or in Deleuze’s words, re-territorializes, the affects frozen in the images’ aesthetics.
I argue that, in actively engaging with the digital materiality of the videos, the artist obfuscates their evidentiary value even more and lays bare the images’ affective ambiguity on the level of their forms. Mroué, both literally and figuratively, extracts and performs the affects of these uncertain images. He demonstrates how the videos’ aesthetics affectively mediate the camera operator’s feelings and thus, constitute what Elias has termed “embodied witnessing” (19). Most crucially, however, is the way Mroué corresponds to the ways the embodied and affective spectatorship is constituted in the aesthetics of the videos. Similar to The Atlas Group’s artistic methodology of inventing documents, Mroué blurs the thin line between authenticity and fiction, accentuating the dramaturgical nature of the video’s assembled presentation. For Martin, the artist “straddles fiction and nonfiction, performance and documentation, and entertainment and edification” (24). According to her, Mroué offers a “a performance in which acting, video, photographs, stage design, and text all operate together as equal partners in the creation of meaning” (24). Indeed, the lecture-performance captivatingly highlights the ‘machinic’ workings of documentary culture and makes clear that an image’s meaning –regardless of its quality– is derived less from its interiority, but rather produced in the assemblage of its presentation. Thus, ultimately, Rabih Mroué’s Pixelated Revolution, as a performative reading of cell phone videos, occupies a point in the relationship between these affective cell phone videos and their context of presentation within the digital sphere.
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4.5 Politics of Speculative Documentary Art As I have shown in the previous pages, artists have, in different ways, offered us nuanced ways to critically address the affects and assemblages that render contemporary cell phone documentaries such a politically powerful phenomenon. In not only approaching these uncertain documents as a subject matter, but also by appropriating them by their very own materiality, these artists have occupied, to borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s term, an “Archimedean Point”, and thus offered us the “possibility of mobilising both resistance and an alternative strategy in a political or ethical situation where what is known is not what is seen, and what is seen is not all there is to be known” (62). This means that the artistic interventions present an alternative perspective on the images. The work of these contemporary artists shows us that we should approach these uncertain documents not merely alongside their internal pictorial properties, but as an affectively located politics of truth. Instead of notoriously reminding us to fear or doubt the power expressed by images, as we have seen in the apocalyptic fundamentalism of Jean Baudrillard23, they rather expose the affective mechanisms shaping contemporary digital documentary forms. My project does not seek to put the spheres of affect and truth into an antagonist relation, perpetuating the idea the production of truth through visual documents is by default disrupted by affective registers: such an argument would completely undermine any subversive potential of these images. Contrarily, I hope to pave the way for a refined understanding of contemporary cell phone documentarism and the affective, embodied witnessing it affords us.
In this respect, I argue that the field of art can offer critical and nuanced contemplations on the “machinic” and affective workings of these indexically ambiguous documentary forms. In order to draw out this conceptual trompe l’oeil, it needs to both locate the affective power and political context of these cell phone documentary forms. The artists discussed above do so, because they treat the images not only on their interiority, but as enunciations of material assemblages. It is furthermore worth recalling the words of Lucien Taylor-Casting, who argues against widespread Iconophobia as the fear of documentary images and emphasises the subversive potential of the filmic documentary, no matter how fragmented its form: “What if film does not just describe, but depict? What then, if it offers not only ‘thin descriptions, but thick depictions?” (86) For him, critical engagement should not address the images on their interior properties, but rather in view of the assembled context of their dissemination. In this light, I hope to have shown different strategies employed by artistic and
23 See: Baudrillard. Baudrillard has famously envisioned our Western mediasphere as a „Simulakrum“ in which media systems work as imitations and replacements of the „real“. In this context, documentary media constitute a paradoxical idea by default. 47 theoretical critique to deal with cell phone videos and the affectively ‘thick’ visual field these visual testaments occupy.
The common theme of the artworks discussed above is their treatise of documentary images as enunciations of an assemblage, at “the nexus of the intimate self, public spaces, locative technology, and online networks” (Hess 1630). In order to do so, these artists poetically employ elements of fiction and narration in their work, creating their own forms of speculative documentaries. Firstly, The Atlas Group’s social-imaginary online database acknowledges its own fabrication of truth, openly communicating its use of poetic speculation to the user browsing the website. Secondly, A short film about war poetically interweaves its affective documentary images, snatched from various war-zones, into a narrative structure which paradoxically does not form a coherent whole, but is rather marked by the gaping voids between each respective account. Finally, Rabih Mroué does so in his performative oscillation between several voices and roles, re-positioning his audience in different modes of belief and disbelief. In translating these affective documentary images into narration and fiction, the artists conduct a politicisation of the personal, unveiling how subjectivity always emerges out of a concrete set of material-political relations and historical formations. As they blur the line between what is perceived as true and fake, the artists direct our gaze away from the documentary images themselves, onto the media assemblages’ material elements.
Yet, the act of narrating, fictionalising, and forging documents, of course, presents some risks, when considering the phenomenon of historical revisionism, or, in its most extreme form, negationism.24 These practices oftentimes utilise illegitimate historiographic techniques, such as the intentional misinterpretation of texts and images or the forging of documents, in order to revise the past. Because the problematics associated with revisionist distortions of past events pose a highly controversial historiographical method, the question emerges of what distinguishes them from the artworks discussed above. Interestingly, the art historian TJ Demos, in discussing the increasing employment of fiction in documentary and archival art, has argued that “fiction does not immobilise politics; rather it is politics’ condition of possibility” (197). For Demos, fiction does, in fact, allow for a refined approach towards epistemic practices because it lays bare its own mechanisms. Correspondingly, documentary art, according to him, must reflect on its own employment of fictional aspects. And that is, ultimately, the distinctive characteristic that distinguishes art practice from the historiographic risks attributed to revisionism. He tells us that,
what separates art from fanaticism is its awareness of its own fictions. That does not mean that such artistic engagements that dissolve the boundary between fact and fiction are
24 See: Drobnicki, Goldman and Knight. Examples of negationism are numerous, spanning from the denial of the Armenian Genocide or the Holocaust during the second World War. 48
necessarily nonpolitical, untruthful, or unengaged—far from it. Rather, they exist as performative acts that reconstruct the terms of politics. (200) Indeed, the artists and works discussed in light of the present problem lay bare the mechanisms of their own arrangement. Instead of concealing their employment of fiction and narration, they share an open awareness for its political potential. This exposed self-reflexivity furthermore corresponds to Elsaesser’s conceptualisation of the “Archimedean Point”, as defined by its ability for “recto/verso thinking” and a “poetic sense of metamorphosis” (62). Thus, the artworks discussed above do not only offer deep reflections on the very technological grounds of the contemporary documentary mode, but also poetically reflect on the ways our spectatorship is algorithmically embedded in material-semiotic platforms.
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5. Conclusion
The only possible critical documentary today is the presentation of an affective and political constellation which does not even exist, and which is yet to come. Hito Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty”, par. 18
In this thesis, I have explored the largely uncharted “affective fabrics” permeating contemporary documentary images and the technologies of their production, dissemination and reception. In our highly mediated world, these images prove to be powerful not only because of their ideological effect, but because of their affective potential. Instead of approaching the ambiguous cell phone footage alongside the question of its representational politics, I have set up an analytical framework that looks beyond the internal properties of the image. By drawing on affect studies, documentary theory and contemporary art, I have brought into focus the significance of affect-related questions in relation to these images, rather than their traditional locus in questions of “evidentiary value”. I have argued that, from a phenomenological perspective, this visual and sonic digital noise constitutes the images’ formal affectivity. Moreover, I have proposed a “machinic” understanding of these ambiguous, affective forms. As I have shown, these precarious digital testaments, snatched from conflict zones and emergency sites across the globe, do not only offer us a mode of “embodied witnessing”, but, depending on their assembled presentation in social media, present a highly relational and vernacular politics of truth.
In addition to my theoretical framework, I have turned to the field of contemporary art. I contest that the artworks discussed above are politically potent because they do not only offer us nuanced investigations of the relationships between the document and world, but, each in their own way, located an “Archimedean Point” in regards to these affective images as enunciations of an assemblage. The Atlas Group, Thomson & Craighead and Rabih Mroué situate the ambiguous cell phone footage in concrete semantic and material relations and therefore re-territorialize the viewer’s affective gaze. This effect is achieved by their overt employment of speculative and fictitious elements, which furthermore corresponds to the images’ indexical ambiguity on a conceptual level. Ultimately, I have argued that these speculative narratives direct our attention away from indexical ambiguity, towards the ways the images are assembled within a complex arrangement of heterogeneous technological-semiotic environments.
Looking beyond the scope of my thesis, future research could explore, for example, the affective soundscapes of cell phone footage. Similar to Steve Goodman’s studies on the intersection of Sonic Warfare and affect as an “ecology of fear”, I suggest to put emphasis on the innocuous ways in which the sonic distortion of cell phone footage touches us affectively. Next to that, ongoing critical
50 engagement with this contemporary documentary form needs to embrace questions of temporality. For example, Paula Albuquerque’s theoretical and artistic work, in which the artist studies CCTV technologies as an emerging cinematic medium, has pointed to the reconfigured relationship between space and time, particularly because these technologies allow for “realtime”, a networked sense of simultaneity (146). Similar questions can be attributed to cell phone footage, specifically as it is live- streamed: In what ways does the live-streaming of the footage constitute new forms of affective, embodied witnessing?
As it turns out, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a critical position with respect to these uncertain cell phone images. In a way though, they become a perfectly accurate “representation of the world we occupy” (Nichols, 20). Characterised by a complete lack of indexical stability, they aestheticise the fragility of our current moment: their affective aesthetics of embeddedness radically refer to the complete absence of an objective observer – someone who has omniscient knowledge of the political and ethical situation and is capable of passing a normatively correct judgment. Hito Steyerl notes that these poor images thus “reflect the precarious nature of contemporary lives as well as the uneasiness of any representation” (“Documentary Uncertainty” par. 18). According to her, finding a critical form of engagement requires “replacing the set of affects which is connected to this uncertainty –namely stress, exposure, threat and a general sense of loss and confusion– with another one” (par. 18). I have followed her urge in opening up new horizons of thinking about affect, documentary forms and the political together, through each other. How can we, at this moment, find a critical and reflexive documentary mode, which paradoxically “does not even exist, and which is yet to come”? My suggestion would be to precisely yield to the affective ambiguity of these images, and continue to approach them in ways that are as speculative, experimental and uncertain as they are themselves.
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Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my supervisor Abe Geil for his kind support and insights and for always allowing me to let this be my own work. Although they might not have fully grasped what it was all about, I am eternally grateful to my parents for their financial, emotional and moral support along the way. I would also like to thank my wonderful grandparents and my little brother Markus, for their humour and down-to-earth attitude. A special gratitude goes out to my friends and colleagues from Witte de With- Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for sharing their artistic and curatorial insights, specifically Rosa de Graf and Samuel Saelemakers. I would also like to thank the curators Anne Faucheret and Juliane Bischoff from Kunsthalle Wien for pointing me in the right direction with my research. I am especially grateful to my friends from my programme, for always providing me with a sympathetic ear, inspiration and affection: Cat, Emilija, Georgina, Jacob, Nadica, Rianne, Sal, Stefanie and Toni. Thanks for your encouragement!
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Images
Fig. 1: Raad, Walid, director. Screenshot from I only wish that I could weep. www.theatlasgroup.org. Web. Accessed on 12 April 2018. http://www.theatlasgroup.org/data/TypeFD.html
Fig. 2: Thomson & Craighead, directors. Screenshot from A short film about war. www.ucl.ak.uc. Web. Accessed on 7 March 2018. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/slide/warfilm.html.
Fig. 3: Pixilated Photo Credit: Sfeir-Semler Gallery. Digital Image. Arab Stages. arabstages.org. Web. Accessed on 10 April 2018.
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