The Emancipated Documentary? 'The politics of the interactive documentary' through Jacques Ranciere

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The Emancipated Documentary?

‘The politics of the interactive documentary’ through Jacques Rancière

University of Amsterdam

Research Master: Media Studies

MA Thesis

Student: dhr. N.G.E. Bakker

ID: 615015

Supervisor: mw. dr. E. L. Masson

Second reader: dhr. dr. C. J. Forceville

Third reader: dhr. dr. A. M. Geil

Date: Novermber 9, 2015

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1. INTRODUCTION

Speaking from a contemporary perspective, it is almost superfluous to note that digital and new media technologies have had a profound influence on film production, distribution, and

consumption. Apart from a number of productions, films are no longer shot on celluloid stock, but on a variety of digital formats. Editing, ever since the late 1980s, is no longer a linear process whereby pieces of film need to be physically glued together, but a non-linear process that involves digital software, therefore, as generally agreed upon, providing more room for artistic freedom. Post-production allows for an endless range of effects, thus helping to enhance, manipulate, alter, or create anew the image in countless ways. The cinema theatre is no longer the holy temple of film consumption since online platforms such as Netflix and piracy websites provide the most commonly used points of access to films. And even if a film is playing in the cinema theatre, the film is distributed and exhibited as a digital file.

While discussions about these developments often focus on mainstream, and fiction, cinema, the documentary genre has not remained unaffected either. In his introduction to a special issue of Studies in Documentary Film (2008), about the effects of digital technologies on documentary practices, documentary scholar Craig Hight points out that “the relationship between documentary and digital technologies (…) offers the potential for a far more extensive and permanent transformation of fundamental aspects of documentary culture” (2008: 3), compared to what was previously imaginable. In his view, there are two dynamics at play within the field of the digital documentary. On the one hand, there is “the integration of digital

technologies within conventional documentary practice” (4). Despite Hight’s failing to provide a definition of what he considers ‘conventional’ documentary practice, I would argue that this development can be observed in the ways that documentary professionals have adapted digital technologies in their workflows to produce documentaries that are still narratively ‘traditional’ (i.e. transmit linear stories). Think for example of a documentary film that would use CGI technology or digital animation to enhance the story, as is the case in the random example of Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013) where the narrative is infused with animation sequences to give shape to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s lively imagination. In a way, this is fairly similar to the ways in which digital practices influence mainstream cinema in their post-production techniques. On the other hand, Hight identifies a dynamic where digital platforms are being appropriated to refashion the documentary’s “discourse and aesthetics” (4). This means that he identifies an emerging trend of documentary projects that utilize the possibilities of digital platforms and technologies to modify traditional narratives and the way audiences generally interact with the documentary format. Seven years after publication of his article, we can conclude that it has been hard for such projects to reach a mainstream audience, but nevertheless the artistic and

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4 political possibilities of digital platforms for documentary practices are being explored in a variety of ways.1

Hight’s second claim could be taken to apply, among others, to what, in the years since the publication of his article, has been referred to as the ‘interactive documentary’.2_{This genre}

of documentary filmmaking will be the central focus of this thesis. While there are numerous angles from which this subject can be approached,3_{I will look at the political efficacy of this}

interactive documentary, which, in other words, I will call ‘the politics of the interactive documentary’. In order to do that, I will try to provide an alternative to the idea that the documentary is crucial for the functioning of the public sphere (Chanan 2007), the idea that interactivity is inherently subversive by creating active and highly engaged spectators, and the interactive documentary therefore necessarily fosters for a more democratic functioning of the public sphere. Instead, I will take seriously Hight’s claim that digital developments alter the aesthetics of the documentary. By outlining a political view where aesthetics and political potential are directly intertwined, following the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière, I will argue that an aesthetic understanding of the interactive documentary can open up room for a new and original take on the politics of the interactive documentary. The impetus for this approach came from the theory that Rancière puts forward in the introduction to The Emancipated Spectator (2009) where he argues that engaging audiences in order to release them from their (presupposed) state of passivity that is commonly associated with watching, to an active one, is, first of all, not necessary, because according to Rancière watching is always already an active activity, and, second of all, even stultifying, because it presupposes that there is a certain hierarchical order between artist and audience. Seeing that it is often said that

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There are a number of institutions that focus on new developments in the field of documentary. MIT’s OpenDocLab is a meeting ground scholars, filmmakers, and technologist where new forms and possibilities for documentary practice are explored and developed. Amsterdam’s documentary festival IDFA hosts a DocLab where, according to the website, “documentary storytelling is explored in the age of the interface”. This is done by presenting cutting edge documentary projects, hosting conferences, and training young professionals. i-Docs is a biennial symposium held in Bristol ever since 2011 that stimulates a lot of theoretical reflection on the field. Finally, TV broadcasters such as ARTE and France 5 have been financing and producing more mainstream interactive productions such as New York Minute (2010) and Prison Valley (2010).

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There are a number of different terms in circulation that describe different forms of new developments in the documentary world. Some of these – yet not all of them – include ‘transmedia documentary’, ‘web

documentary’, ‘participatory documentary’, and ‘database documentary’. The transmedia and web

documentary draw attention to the platform(s) they are hosted on; the participatory documentary highlights the fact that the production is a collaborative effort; and the database documentary is one where the story is structured as a database, rather than a linear narrative. I would contend that they are all sub-categories of the broader term, which is the ‘interactive documentary’. production is a collaborative effort; and the database documentary is one where the story is structured as a database, rather than a linear narrative. I would contend that they are all sub-categories of the broader term, which is the ‘interactive documentary’.

3_{A few interesting approaches to studying the interactive documentary are the interactive documentary as a}

form of new media journalism, it’s relationship to game theory and gamification, or its advantages for pedagogical aims.

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5 interactive media does exactly that (i.e. activating the audience), I felt that by using Rancière’s theory, I could both counteract the inherent progressiveness that is often associated the with interactive documentary, while simultaneously pointing out that there are different forms of interactivity which may or may not cater for a Rancièrean conception of politics.

There are a number of conceptual steps that need to be taken in order to reach the point of analyzing the politics of the interactive documentary by means of their aesthetic qualities. These steps will be taken over the course of this thesis, but in this introduction I will limit myself to delineating the field of my research and providing an overview of the chapters. By presenting a chapter outline, the line of argumentation in this thesis will be clarified and the case studies that will be employed in the final chapter will be justified.

1.1 the interactive documentary In order to delineate my object of research for the remainder of this thesis, I will take some time in the following section to briefly point out some different takes on what constitutes the

interactive documentary. I shall focus on two authors, Arnau Gifreu and Sandra Gaudenzi, who both have, coincidentally, finished a PhD dissertation about the interactive documentary in 2013. These two authors have contributed greatly to academic debates about the interactive documentary and will therefore form a solid starting point to discuss interactivity and the interactive documentary.

Talking about interactivity and media in general, one can argue that every screening of a film requires some degree of interactivity – whether it is simply clicking the play-button to get a movie started, or, in a more metaphorical sense, by mentally engaging with a particular story. However, Arnau Gifreu (2011) proposes that we should make a distinction between ‘reactive’ and ‘interactive’ forms of interactivity. The former only requires weak interaction, meaning that the interaction only pertains to one particular aspect of the system. If we stick to the example of the button that needs pressing, we can argue that the action is reactive because it only responds by doing the one thing it has to do (i.e. start the film). It does not have any implications for the way the story will unfold. ‘Interactive’ interactivity, according to Gifreu, means that the participation has consequences that influence the entire system, in our case a media text. This means that the action would have consequences within the media text itself. Sandra Gaudenzi (2013) employs the same terms, but provides a different interpretation of their meaning. She argues that reactive interaction only requires cognitive engagement (in the sense that mental activity is inherently necessary in order to understand a story), whereas interactivity also requires physical participation that results from decision-making (e.g. clicking the mouse, moving around in virtual space, or contributing your own text).

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6 I argue that both arguments need to be combined for a documentary project to qualify as an interactive documentary. Physical interaction of the spectator with the project is necessary (even if it is only pressing the button of a mouse every now and then) and the engagement of the audience should have an effect on the entire system, not just one particular element. For this reason, a ‘traditional’ film where one has to push a button to start the film does not count as an interactive documentary, since that form of interactivity is reactive.4_{Instead, the spectator has}

to be actively (i.e. physically) involved in the way the story that is presented by the documentary maker unfolds.

The way this can manifest itself is manifold, as showcased by a taxonomy, created by Gaudenzi (2013), which classifies the different modes of interactivity that can be found in the interactive documentary. By creating this taxonomy, she is able to classifying interactive documentaries on the basis of their forms of interactivity (rather than platform, topic, or message). In summary, she identifies four modes of the interactive documentary: the conversational, the participative, the hypertextual, and the experiential mode. The

‘conversational’ mode is one where users are placed within a digital, often 3D environment where hypothetical situations can be enacted. The user interacts with this world so in a certain sense is ‘in conversation’ with the computer. In the ‘hypertextual’ mode users are presented with a wide variety of ways to browse through a database of filmic material. Assets are linked “within a closed video archive and gives the user an exploratory role, normally enacted by clicking on pre-existing options” (Gaudenzi and Aston 2012: 127). The ‘participative’ mode allows users to actively participate in the creation of the documentary. This means that there is never a fixed final result, because every user that participates contributes to the databases that is the documentary. The job of the documentary maker in such a case is often simply to provide a platform where this type of interaction is made possible and frame and curate the different contributions. The ‘experiential’ mode is often not found on the internet, but works through apps with GPS. It is a way to enhance our experience of real life by creating a hybrid space where digital content is brought to the real world. This mode is what is commonly referred to as augmented reality. While this taxonomy is not a guiding principle for the rest of this thesis, it

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A film that presents itself as an interactive documentaries, but according to my definition displays a reactive form of interaction is I Love Your Work (2013, Harris). In this documentary, the author documents the lives of seven different lesbian porn actrices. He records their entire day, but presents this as a string of six second clips that are taken at five minute intervals. The interaction in this project limits itself to providing easy access to all of the different clips that constitute the film, rather than a form that makes an impact on the system as a whole. Additionally, in my experience, one always end up watching the film chronologically since the

individual, six second fragments hardly make sense on their own. I would thus contend that this presentation technique is not much more than an awkward editing technique. See: http://iloveyourwork.net/

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7 does provide a useful starting point for thinking about interactive documentaries and I will refer back to it throughout the thesis.5

1.2 thesis set-up

In this chapter I have, following Gaudenzi, looked at the interactive documentary according to its interactive, or technological, aspects. Contrary to this approach, chapter two will focus on discourses about interactivity, rather than interactivity itself. In fact, following the work of Dutch media theorist Eggo Müller, I will argue that discourses about interactivity in media often attribute a potential to the new medium that is technologically deterministic and therefore utopian – a phenomenon that Müller calls a ‘polemical ontology’. When it comes to interactive media, it is presumed that the interactivity brings us from a stage of passiveness to active participation. From a syringe model, we move to a conversation model. However, I will argue that there is not such a causal relationship between medium and effect, so the argument that interactive media will democratize politics by allowing more interaction among people within the public sphere is therefore not justifiable. As I will point out, this is nevertheless what academic debates about the social and political implications of the interactive documentary focus on. I shall argue that a different conception of the politics of the interactive documentary is necessary.

Chapter three is an exploration of Rancière’s work where I will provide a different conception of politics, one where there is an inherent link between aesthetics and politics. I will argue that politics and political action should not be equated with participation in the public sphere, but as a sensible presentation of the world that undermines our common perception of the world where hierarchical structures reign over equality. Since such an egalitarian

presentation of the world needs to be constructed, it is closely tied to art and aesthetics. While Rancière, as a true French postmodernist, never explicitly establishes how art can and should be political, I will extrapolate conclusions from different examples discussed in Rancière’s work in a way that they can be applied to my research about interactive documentaries.

In chapter four, I will relate the discussion of Rancière’s theories that I developed in chapter three to interactive documentaries and argue that (some) interactive technologies have

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Despite its usefulness, I see some minor flaws about this taxonomy. For one thing, Gaudenzi fails to make a distinction between interface design and modes of production (in other words, reception or usage and production). Whereas the participative part of the participative mode concerns the mode of production of the interactive documentary in question, the hypertext part of the hypertext mode concerns the way in which the user navigates through the clips that are presented. Documentary projects can be both participative in their mode of production and hypertextual in their interface design. Similarly, participative projects can also end up as linear documentaries as is for example the case in Life in a Day (2011), a crowd-sourced project compiled of approximately 80,000 YouTube clips combined together, thereby blurring the distinction between interactive and traditional documentary.

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8 aesthetic capacities with political potential. By providing three different case studies, I will show how the concept of fiction, not understood in its customary definition, can help us understand how interactive technology can provide a way of understanding the world that undermines the way we commonly perceive it. In my opinion, interactive documentary projects have the potential to provide a platform for what Rancière defines as politics.

The case studies that I have selected for this thesis are Prison Valley (2010), 17,000 Islands (2013), and Polar Sea 360 (2014). I have selected these particular projects because they all embody different forms of interactivity, so, while not covering the entire spectrum of

interactivity that Gaudenzi identifies, I can still cover a lot of ground. Prison Valley is a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ type of documentary where the audience has authority over how the story unfolds, albeit within a limited set of parameters. In Gaudenzi’s terms this would be a hypertextual mode of interaction. 17,000 Islands has a participative mode of interaction, since the audience is able to reassemble different components of the documentary in distinct parts. The audience therefore has a high degree of authority over the final outcome of the project. Concurrently, the project should also be considered a database documentary, because audience members that do not participate in fabricating (parts of) the documentary access the different elements as individual chunks of data that do not have any linear coherence. Polar Sea 360, finally, has a mode of interaction that is not fully covered by Gaudenzi’s taxonomy. The documentary provides the option to rotate the image during playback, therefore enabling the audience to control what is seen (the project is presented as a 360° documentary). I would contend that this type of interaction comes closest to an experiential mode, because by being able to rotate the image, the presented film receives new layers of complexity. However, since Gaudenzi’s definition of the experiential mode alludes more to GPS-infused projects that add extra layers to the real world, it cannot be fully equated with this mode. Additionally, by chopping up the documentary in different fragments that can be accessed randomly, it also becomes a database documentary. Another reason for picking these three interactive

documentary projects is that they provide me with the opportunity to look at different aspects of Rancière’s conception of politics. Juxtaposing these three documentary projects allows me to see what kind of aspects illustrate Rancière’s politics and which do not. Finally, the fact that all three documentary projects have an explicitly ‘political’ subject (the American prison system, Indonesian identity, and global warming, respectively) allows me to analyze how such overt political motives relate to Rancière’s politics which functions on another level, namely that of sensible presentation.

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2. INTERACTIVITY AS A ‘POLEMICAL ONTOLOGY’

In order to offer a new framework in which the politics of the interactive documentary can be discussed, it is necessary to begin by mapping out what this concept customarily entails. This chapter will therefore discuss some positions on the political efficacy of the interactive

documentary – positions I will oppose at a later stage in this thesis. The main argument of this chapter, following the work of Dutch media theorist Eggo Müller, is that academic discussions about the interactivity of media in general and the interactive documentary in particular are often informed by a technologically deterministic understanding of the effects of interactivity. Due to particular technological attributes that are considered inherent to interactive media, primarily the fact that more physical activity is required of audience members than in

‘traditional’ media forms (e.g. television, film, etc.), it is often supposed that interactive media will liberate audiences from their supposed state of passivity and transform them into active participants. According to some, this ultimately means that interactive media have the potential to alter hierarchical structures of communication and therefore have a particular democratic potential. Ultimately, following the work of British cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall, I will argue that this is not necessarily the case.

2.1 ‘the promise of interactivity’ In this chapter I will propose that academic discourse about interactive media is often informed by a somewhat technologically deterministic framework that finds its origin in the ideas

proposed by Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. In order to explain what this means we must first take a look at what McLuhan’s theories entail.

The aphorism that made McLuhan an indispensable inclusion for every textbook about media studies is that “the medium is the message” (1987: 7-21). With this phrase he implies that mediatized communication is determined by the medium itself, rather than by the content. Since in his view media are an “extension of man”, the ‘content’ of the medium – that which it

transmits – does not determine the impact of the consequences the medium has on human affairs, both psychological and physical, but it is the medium itself which does. To provide an example, when we are talking about electronic light or light bulbs6, it is often argued that it only

becomes a medium when it spells out something, for example in neon lettering above a store. However, according to McLuhan, we should not trouble ourselves with looking at these neon letters, but instead look at what it is that the medium enables. The light bulb illuminates a world that prior to this invention was shrouded in darkness and therefore greatly expands our

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It can be argued that this is not a medium, because it does not transmit anything. However, for McLuhan that is not of any importance. He would argue that it is a medium, because it is ‘an extension of man’.

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10 possibilities in all kinds of ways. Similarly, when it comes to electronic media, McLuhan argues that they have caused the advent of a ‘global village’, a concept that implies the abolishment (or at least decrease of relevance) of physical distances for communication. Everybody around the globe can communicate with one another as if they were all living in the same village. For McLuhan then, the medium “shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (9). In other words, media have a specific message that is inherent to the medium and thus independent of what is actually transmitted. New media inventions therefore ultimately determine social action (rather than the other way around) and should be analyzed as such.7

As Eggo Müller points out in ‘De Belofte van Interactiviteit’ (2008, translates to ‘The Promise of Interactivity’), such McLuhanite discourses about the impact of media always occur during the introduction of new media technologies. Müller calls these kinds of discourses ‘polemical ontologies’ and argues that they are characterized by simplifying the affordances of previous media forms while overstating the qualities of new ones. A similar polemical ontology can be identified for interactivity, or interactive media more specifically. While the polemical ontology of interactivity cannot be reduced to one particular statement, Müller points out that they often boil down to the idea that interactive media is based on a ‘conversation ideal’, a term coined by communication researcher Michael Schudson. This idea entails that interactive media communication is modeled after a conversation, meaning that interaction goes in two

directions, as opposed to traditional media where information is transmitted unidirectional. In interactive media, the traditional demarcation between the role of author and audience, as the author conferring information on the audience, is blurred. The abolishment of this traditional, hierarchical partitioning of roles is often seen as having far-reaching implications for society. As Müller argues: “the generally presumed norm of ideal conversation is the mythical source of the power and rhetorical force of utopian visions of a through interactive communication reunited society” (26; translated by the author). By saying this he argues that discourses about

interactive media often create a rhetoric that interactive media enable a more democratic society in which everyone is able to freely communicate with one another. Despite that fact that McLuhan did not got to writing about interactive media, we can put it in McLuhanite terms by saying that the message of interactive media does not lie in the content, but in the fact that, as an extension of man, it enables everyone to participate in mediatized communication.

In Müller’s article, a number of examples of this kind of rhetoric are provided. For example, in The Interactive Book (1997), researcher and designer of computer games Celia

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The clearest articulation of criticism on this theoretical position can be found in Raymond Williams’ critique on McLuhan. Williams is of the opinion that there is nothing in a particular medium that guarantees certain cultural or social outcomes. For Williams they can only take particular shapes through already present social structures and processes (Lister et al. 2003: 77-78).

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11 Pearce, argues that interactivity “[i]s not about technology, it’s about people. It’s about creating machines that extend our mental and creative faculties. (…) It is about using powerful tools to create our own educational and entertainment experiences rather than passively accepting that which is fed to us by so-called experts” (xvii). The statement that interactivity is “not about technology” is somewhat contradictory in this quote, because in the sentence following the statement she argues that interactivity is about machines that extend our mental and creative faculties. Enclosed in this quote is therefore an implication that there is a relationship between (interactive) technology and the extension of mental and creative faculties. She goes on to argue that interactivity has the potential to undermine hierarchical structures in society. No longer do we have to passively accept what is served to us, but now we are offered the tools to actively resist hierarchical power structures. As she finally concludes: “No matter which way you look at it, interactivity is inherently subversive” (244).

Very often, this kind of discourse also invites us to reason along the lines of ‘the more interactivity, the better’. Therefore, it is not surprising that people have indexed the degree of interactivity that we find in certain media forms. Müller brings up the example of Jonathan Steuer (1992) who has mapped out a large number of media forms according to the amount of vividness (i.e. the amount of transmittable information8_{) and interactivity they posses. In}

Steuer’s communication model, communication is not a direct transmission from A to B (and possibly from B to A), but as the shared presence in a separate space between A and B called virtual reality. The experience of virtual reality is called telepresence and, as the following graph points out, is determined by vividness and interactivity.

Figure 1 – Image taken from Steuer (1992: 81) 8

When we talk about digital images, for example, this could be measured in terms of amount of pixels. However, many of the media forms that Steuer brings up cannot be measured along the same standard (for example, it is silly to ask how much pixels a walkie-talkie transmits), therefore making the indexation slightly arbitrary. Steuer acknowledges this problem in footnote 15 (Steuer 1992: 91).

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12 As the graph shows, interactivity is defined as a technology and thus a property of a medium. Therefore, (along with vividness) it determines the amount of telepresence a medium can provide. While Steuer does not seem to make any grand claims about the effects of interactivity, the following quote does show that increasing telepresence has effects:

“Progressively more advanced media technologies will enhance the sense of telepresence in a wide variety of virtual realities. Rapid advances in both multimedia computer technologies and in high-speed data networks hasten the development of a truly global village, in which our ability to interact with friends, family, and others who share interests smiliar [sic] to our own will no longer be limited by physical proximity. Such “virtual communities” represent one of the most exciting aspects of these developing new media, as they offer individuals a method for participation in, rather than mere observation of, the mediated worlds that surround them.” (91)

Steuer’s use of the McLuhanite term ‘global village’ is noteworthy here. According to Steuer, the formation of such a village, a place where individuals can participate in “mediated worlds that surround them”, is the (utopian) result of increasing telepresence – which, as we can see in the graph, is a direct result of interactive technology and vividness. It is thus the technology that determines the amount of telepresence we will experience in the future.

The last example I will bring up is that of Australian media and communication theorist Rob Cover who, in his article ‘Audience Inter/Active’ (2006), offers a more nuanced notion of interactivity, but ultimately falls prey to technologically deterministic notions of interactivity and its effect. He starts off his article by acknowledging that interactivity, in line with Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘author’, is a historical construct that is not merely a material given, but a concept that has different meanings and manifestations throughout history. Like Steuer, he therefore does not claim that interactivity is a technological quality of a medium. However, he goes on to undermine this argument by arguing that interactivity is ultimately an innate desire of humankind to alter, re-narrate, and re-order media texts, which is made possible by new media technologies. Therefore, new media technologies are the culmination of this cultural desire that finally make ‘real’ interactivity possible. By making this argument he therefore asserts that technology determines the possibilities for interactivity.9

2.2 the promise of the interactive documentary As mentioned before, the subject of this thesis is what I like to refer to as ‘the politics of the interactive documentary’. Following the discussion of interactivity in media from the previous

9_{While not a necessary observation in the context of this thesis, it is nevertheless interesting to remark that he}

concludes his article by arguing that these new media developments, and the possibility for interactivity that follow from their advent, caused a cultural and juridical struggle between hackers, tinkerers, and fan cultures on the one hand, who would like to be able to have the possibility to alter and re-order media texts, and large enterprises who would like to keep control and possession over their media technologies and creative outputs on the other. Again, this shows how in his view technological developments precede social events.

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13 paragraph, the assertion that interactivity determines the social and political implications of a medium, combined with the common conception that the documentary is essential for the functioning of the public sphere (Chanan 2007) and has the potential to influence policy making and public opinion (Benson and Snee 2008), I argue that the ‘polemic ontology’ of the

interactive documentary is a proclamation of its potential to increase participation in the public sphere. In order to illustrate this argument, I shall present two academic articles that delve into the socio-political effects of the interactive documentary.

In ‘What is Interactivity For? The Social Dimension of Web-Documentary Participation’ (2014), Kate Nash considers the interactive documentary from, what she calls, a ‘social

perspective’. Her article presupposes that the intertwinement of the documentary with new media technologies and mobile devices necessitated a theoretical revision of the documentary genre, primarily focusing on the concept of ‘voice’. There are generally two modes by which a documentary can give voice to its spectators. One is the voice-in-documentary (voice as

authorship), which entails being able to participate to the construction of the documentary text by means of input or content. The other is voice-through-documentary (voice as social

participation) which draws attention to documentary’s social dimension outside the documentary story itself. In other words, the way that participants have the possibility to express themselves in a discursive space or the ability to get their social voice heard, for

example in discussions that have been engendered by the documentary. Describing change from what in traditional theory about documentary has been described as the social functions of the documentary, she argues that there are three functions that have altered in web- and interactive documentaries. The first function is to record, reveal, or preserve. We can see in the interactive documentary 18 Days in Egypt (2011) how digital platforms are used to create an alternative, non-official, document of the Arab Spring. The second function is to foster civic engagement which interactive documentaries such as 18 Days in Egypt and Goa Hippy Tribe (2011) achieve by addressing their audiences as members of a documentary community through forums and social media sites such as Facebook. The third function is persuasion. According to Nash, “interactive modes such as the web-documentary open up the possibility that audiences may seek to persuade through their engagement with documentary” (390), rather than limiting this possibility solely to the author of the text. In conclusion, she argues that “in the case of

interactive documentary there are opportunities for audiences to pursue their own goals where they can participate through documentary” (393). Their voice-through-documentary is

strengthened due to interactive tools.

Another explicit account of the way that interactive documentaries enable political action can be found in ‘Getting Our Hands Dirty (Again)’ (2013) by Paolo Favero. Although he states to be more concerned with the changing status of images in the digital age, he addresses

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14 this question through the case of interactive documentary. He argues that interactive

documentaries should be regarded in light of web 2.0 technologies, since the notion of participation lies at the heart of both web 2.0 and the interactive documentary. The web 2.0 technologies can result in new forms of content exploration, but when the interactive documentary engages with political or social issues, Favero argues that this participatory function of the interactive documentary generates “new, creative, non-linear forms of

engagement and interaction between viewers, authors and the material itself, thus opening up the terrain for a new politics of viewing and meaning-making” (260). What this implies for Favero is that interactive documentaries signal the “formation of a new political subject” (273). Rather than representing a form of detachment from material reality or of “autonomous individualism, these i-docs function as generators of new social relations and new forms of participation in the material, physical and social exigencies of everyday life” (272). In other words, because interactive documentaries cater for a stronger kind of participation with subject matter, they would forge communities and invite us to create a stronger sense of connection with relevant issues. Examples include the previously mentioned 18 Days in Egypt and The Thousandth Tower, a participatory documentary that is part of the Highrise (2009) project which brings together filmmakers, animators, and neighborhood citizens to re-imagine parts of their city.

In both of these texts it is argued that the interactive documentary has social effects. For Nash this mainly resides in transforming the traditional social roles of the documentary film while Favero argues that it is due to the fact that web 2.0 technologies cater for a stronger connection with the socio-political issues a documentary project present and therefore make it more likely that people will also make contributions that have an effect in real-life. Essentially though, both texts stress the changing role of audiences. They argue that the interactive documentary allows audiences to collaborate with the author, so due to web 2.0 technologies, audience members and subjects of the documentary project become part of a documentary community. On a political level this means that audience members have more to say in the public sphere and engage more deeply with offline issues (‘get your hands dirty’). We can conclude that both of the authors I have presented, albeit with a certain disclaimer,10_{fall prey to}

an argumentation that resembles the polemical ontology as defined by Müller. They argue that

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Nash and Favero are careful about making unsupportable claims about the impact of this interactive element of the interactive documentary. Favero (2013) warns us that “[m]uch more work ought to be conducted in order to better explore the extent to which new media pratices are not only signifiers of wider social and political transformations, but possibly also agents of change” (273). Nash (2014) ends her article by asking a number of questions that hint at the fact that the exact impact of the changes cannot yet be fully considered, such as: how are we to evaluate the relative importance of structural and content participation in documentary?” (393).

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15 the technological properties of interactivity have a certain socio-political implication, which in my opinion is not a necessary causal relationship.11

As Stuart Hall’s work on media reception in the 1980s has thought us, the medium does not necessarily determine the outcome of its effects. Instead, Hall argues, in opposition to McLuhan, that reception is not determined by technological qualities of the medium, but depends on both the encoding of the message and the context in which it is decoded. He substantiates this claim in his seminal article ‘Encoding/decoding’ (1980) where he, coming from a semiotic background (Laughey 2007: 61), argues that communication always consists of a message that is encoded by those with the means of production and consequently needs to be decoded by the audience. In his own words: “The so-called denotative level of the televisual sign is fixed by certain, very complex (but limited or ‘closed’) codes. But its connotative level, though also bounded, is more open, subject to more active transformations, which exploit its polysemic values” (Hall 1980: 134). He states that messages are encoded in different (albeit limited) ways, these signs can then be read in more than one manner, and this reading, finally, is an inherently problematic and inconsistent process. Therefore, since encoding and decoding are perceived as two distinct processes, they are therefore independent of each other and we cannot predict how a particular message will be perceived on the basis of the encoding.12_{Ultimately, this means that}

the medium does not determine how a message is perceived or the effect it will have on a person.

Transposing this claim to the reception of interactive documentaries, this implies that we cannot make any claims about the effects of the interactive aspect on the spectator or the political realm in general. I believe this claim can be illustrated by some more trivial

observations. For one thing, people who are participating in interactive documentary

communities nowadays would always, in an era where interactive technologies did not enter the realm of communication technologies yet, have found different ways to engage with the subject matter. In other words, it is not the interactivity that creates socio-politically engaged spectators, but if spectators express this engagement that is generally because they were

11

Another criticism I have about the texts of Nash and Favero is that the community-forming aspects that the authors recognize do not rely on the interactive aspects of the documentary texts itself, but on the fact that they are accompanied by social media strategies or other forms of online communication. In the case of Goa Hippy Tribe, for example, communication is exclusively done through Facebook. If the essence of the object in question is the social media strategy, rather than the documentary text itself, then addressing the issue of the political effects of these projects should not be done by addressing the interactive documentary, but by discussing the consequences of online communication strategies for political projects. It is beyond the scope of this thesis, however, to dive into this discussion.

12

Hall identifies three different reading positions: the dominant-hegemonic position, the negotiated position, and the oppositional position. I would read this merely as a grouping of the different positions one can take in response to a particular media text. In other words, everyone will respond differently, depending on

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16 already engaged with the subject matter beforehand. Similarly, the ‘1% rule’ teaches us that despite the fact that the world wide web provides countless opportunities to engage in debates about politics and social issues or more general forms of interaction, only a very small

percentage of the people on the web actually make use of these opportunities. This means that the technology does not determine the amount of interaction.

At the core of the arguments presented by Nash and Favero, I believe, resides a particular, almost Habermasian, conception of politics according to which political efficacy resides in democratic involvement in the public sphere. In other words, politics should be modeled in a way where true openness and conversation are vital – and interactivity is what makes this possible. In order for something to make a political impact, it should manifest itself in terms of increasing engagement with political issues. In order to oppose myself, on the one hand, to the deterministic idea that interactivity makes this possible, and on the other hands, this idea of politics as a democratic conversation, I shall present a conception of politics that is informed by the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Doing this hopefully allows me to cut the deterministic relationship between (interactive) technology and political efficiency, while simultaneously allowing me to focus more closely on the aesthetic qualities of the interactive documentary texts themselves, rather than merely the technological aspects.

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3. RANCIÈRE: AESTHETICS & POLITICS

In the previous chapter I proposed that the politics of interactivity is often associated with and informed by conversation, and as an extension, democratic participation in the public sphere (an idea that according to Müller is too utopian). While most contributions to the debate on the political aspect of the interactive documentary emphasize this point of view, the principal argument of this thesis is that the politics of the interactive documentary should be found within a different conception of politics. In the following chapter I will propose a different conception of politics, namely the emancipatory politics explained according to the work of political philosopher Jacques Rancière. The reason why this type of politics is relevant when discussing the interactive documentary is that it functions within the field of aesthetics and therefore highlights aspects of the interactive documentary that in most accounts of the politics of the interactive documentary are neglected. Rather than creating a causal, technologically deterministic link between interactive technology and socio-political participation in the public sphere it acknowledges the importance of aesthetics for politics, open-endedness, and the pedagogical importance of equality between subject and object. Additionally, my choice for this approach, with its emphasis on aesthetics, automatically implies that I treat the interactive documentary closer to an artwork than a platform for communication and interaction, as is often the case. I believe that is a more respectful approach to what is essentially an artistic endeavor. In this chapter I will provide an overview of Rancière’s conception of politics, its relation to aesthetics and what he calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’, and tentatively relate those ideas to interactive documentary practices, thereby paving the way for analyses of actual case studies in chapter four.

3.1 the presupposition of equality Jacques Rancière started his career as a student of French, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. After the student uprisings in Paris of May ’68, however, Rancière publicly broke off with Althusser since he was disillusioned by the hierarchical structure and particularly the

distribution of labor within the Marxist party and in the work of Althusser. As a result, he went on to look for a radical and egalitarian political philosophy that would allow for a truer

democratic emancipation than Marxist parties at the time could provide. According to political philosopher Todd May (2010), this is what laid the foundation for the central axiom that would form the basis of his later work, namely the radical presupposition of an equality of intelligence between people.

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) Rancière transforms this premise into a pedagogical claim. The book describes the professional career of eighteenth century

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18 educational philosopher Joseph Jacotot who was famous for his method of ‘intellectual

emancipation’. In the early 19th_{century, Jacotot found himself in Flanders where he had to teach}

French to a group of Flemish people even though he was not able to speak Dutch himself and his students were not able to speak French. In order to overcome the language barrier, he gave his students a bilingual piece of French literature and asked them to relate the French they did not know with Dutch that they did. Surprisingly enough, after a few months, the students were able to speak French, leading Jacotot to the idea that all human intelligence is equal. It implies that everyone has the same mental capacities to learn something they did not know before. The radical nature of this claim resides in the fact that this equality in intelligence is not an end, but a presupposition. Its consequence is that the task of the schoolmaster is not to explain to his students and make them understand; after all, they are already perfectly capable of

understanding themselves. In fact, Rancière claims that “explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On the contrary, that incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world” (Rancière 1991: 6). It is the idea that there are inferior and superior minds that keeps this “pedagogical myth” (7) of incapacity intact. For Jacotot, the principle of explication is what he calls “enforced stultification” (7). The student or child who is explained to, “will devote his intelligence to the work of grieving: to understanding, that is to say, to understand that he doesn’t understand unless he is explained to” (8). This tremendously limits the student’s capacity to think critically, venture out into the world, and learn his- or herself. In order to accomplish the opposite of stultification, emancipation, then, he argues that the ignorant schoolmaster “does not teach his pupils his knowledge, but orders them to venture into the forest of things and signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of what they have seen, to verify it and have it verified” (Rancière 2009: 11). In other words, in order to be emancipated the student should be stimulated to use his or her own intelligence.

3.2 politics, police, dissensus In ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, an essay from 2001 containing ten theses that postulate Rancière’s conception of politics, the central axiom of an equality of intelligence transpires without being explicitly mentioned. In order to advance his claims he starts by polemically engaging with political philosophy, specifically the branch that is based on the work of Plato where politics is defined as an allocation of roles where some have a capacity to rule and others of being ruled. In Book III of the Laws, for example, Plato creates an inventory of qualifications for ruling, along with a correlative for being ruled. Most of these are based on difference in birth (parents over children; old over young; masters over slaves; nobles over serves); another one is based on the rather indefinable quality of superior nature (strong over weak) and another on knowledge or lack thereof (those who know over those who do not). These principles naturalize the

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19 assumption that some should exercise power while others cannot do anything else than subject to it. Rancière argues that these divisive principles result in a partitioning off of subjected groups that supposedly do not possess the means to participate in society and acquire a political subjectivity – a voice that allows them to participate in the political process. These disenchanted groups that have no voice and are not accounted for in society are what Rancière calls ‘the count of the unaccounted for’ or ‘the part of those who have no part’. Not providing them – historically these groups often consisted of workers or women – with a voice, or more precisely not hearing their voice as actual political speech, is exactly what denies them their status as political beings. This hierarchical organization of society that presupposes natural dominance of some over others, along with its preconstituted roles, is what he calls the police order. In his own words: “There are two ways of counting the parts of the community: The first only counts empirical parts – actual groups defined by differences in birth, by different functions, locations, and interests that constitute the social body. The second counts ‘in addition’ a part of the no-part. We will call the first police and the second politics” (2001: n.p). This means that politics includes ‘the part that has no part’ as members of the political community at large, while they are

excluded in the police regime.

Politics exists as a deviation from this particular structuring of society (police regime), as any act that undermines the police order of things – acts that Rancière calls dissensus. Dissensual practices are operations that exactly oppose what the police order naturalizes, thus re-qualifying places as spaces of community where also ‘the part who have no part’ is able to have a stage where it can be heard as a speaking subject. Politics is about making the unseen visible and getting what was previously inaudible heard as speech. That is why politics proper, in Rancière’s sense of the word, only exists in certain acts. As professor of philosophy Brian Holmes argues, “equality (…) does not exist in the abstract. It only becomes universal every time it is proven, in a new language and on a newly visible stage” (Holmes 2001). Holmes’ use of the words ‘new language’ and ‘visible stage’ emphasize the fact that politics proper needs to be performed in order to effectuate itself. It also stresses that, as I will point out in the following paragraph, politics is inherently tied to aesthetics.

3.3 “distribution of the sensible” and the aesthetic regime As the previous section has shown, the issue of visibility and getting oneself heard is crucial for Rancière’s politics. In an interview with media scholar Sudeep Dasgupta, the philosopher argues that his idea of politics is not “about the relations of power, but (…) about the framing of the sensory world itself” (71). Politics, for Rancière, implies a particular organization of what can be seen, can be heard, and what places can be occupied by certain people, and consequently the communities based on equality, that follow from this ordering of society. For this idea, Rancière

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20 employs the term, “distribution of the sensible” (sensible should in this context be understood as what is apprehended by the senses). In The Politics of Aesthetics (2004) he argues that this phrase stands for “a system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously

discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (12). In other words, the distribution of the sensible regulates what is visible and what is invisible and therefore determines what is included and excluded in the political order. Political philosopherAnat Ascher explains Rancière’s quote in the following manner:

“The distribution of the sensible determines the way in which we interpret and understand our perceived reality; thus, it is that which enables the formation of a sphere of shared meaning. The structure of a given society, the social roles and functions within it, the accepted denotations of words, these are all parts of the distribution of the sensible. It is important to comprehend that the distribution of the sensible always performs a double task – that of including and that of excluding” (2011: n.p.).

Following this explanation I would argue that this distribution of the sensible pertains to our naturalized assumptions of what is right behavior and wrong behavior for particular groups. It is about who is allowed to say, see, and do certain things. Some people who have commented on the term interpret this concept as inherently wrong and governed by the anti-democratic police order and therefore argue that the distribution of the sensible should be overthrown in its entirety. My interpretation, however, is that the sensible is inherently distributed so political action requires an alteration or reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible that opposes the police order, rather than a complete eradication. This means that what is commonly sold as a natural order of denotations, spheres of visibility and social roles needs to be reorganized in a way that the unaccounted for have a right to claim their equality of intelligence and political subjectivation just like those who are accounted for in the police regime.

Since politics resides in those moments that contribute to a reorganization of the “distribution of the sensible” which relies for a large part on visibility and the sensible,

Rancière’s conception of politics is closely intertwined with aesthetics. He defines aesthetics in the Kantian sense, understood “as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and time, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience” (Rancière 2004: 13). There is a clear similarity between this description of aesthetics and the way I have been describing his idea of politics in that they both revolve around the way in which the sensible and the visible delineate what is possible and for whom. The a priori forms that he describes are both include and exclude the possibilities of sense experience. However, to get a better understanding of how Rancière envisions the political

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21 efficacy he attributes to art, it is necessary to take a step back and to look at his denouncement of reigning art historiographical narratives and his substitution of that with the idea of an aesthetic regime of art.

As American philosopher Joseph Tanke points out, Rancière dismisses the prevailing art-historical narrative that traces a teleological lineage from realism to modernism to post-modernism. By doing so he obliterates “the fatalism that has accrued many art-historical narratives” (2011a: 72), a fatalism which regards the postmodern era as one of pure capital (Baudrillard), as unoriginal, fake, inauthentic (Jameson), or simply the end of art (Danto) – views that are based on the presupposition that “art is led into a dead-end where its options are to satirize the arts of the past or to aestheticize the material of everyday life” (Tanke 2011a: 77). In such a view art would have no political punch left, but Rancière counterposes this particular, oft prevailing narrative of fatalism and historical necessity with one of different ‘regimes’ of art.13_{On multiple occasions he describes how, rather than as progression from realism, to}

modernism, to post-modernism, the history of art should be conceived of as an evolution from an ethical, to a representative and finally an aesthetic regime. He strongly insists that these regimes do not rely on historical necessity, but define forms of function (even though some rough temporal distinctions where regimes have shifted can be indicated) (Rancière 2004: 50). Nowadays it seems that all of the regimes can appear alongside each other.

In the first regime, the ethical regime, art is judged on the basis of its utility to society. Here, art is not dissociated from craft labor, meaning that the influence of art is still marginal. This is the idea we find in Plato’s conception of aesthetics. In the representative regime,

however, art is seen as something distinct that elevates above the crafts. At the same time, there are strict rules and hierarchies about what makes art art, or more specifically about what can be said within the sphere of art, what kinds of objects or people can be represented in art, how they can be represented, and ultimately what kinds of responses this is supposed to elicit. The

regime is called representative, because in this regime art was subservient to an idea of what it should be. Rancière argues that “Ut Pictura Poesis” (meaning, “as painting so is poetry”) is an apt aphorism that describes the relationship between words and image within this regime. Images are supposed to represent an idea that is expressible in words, therefore being subservient to the expressive power of the image itself. Since art was controllable, this ultimately meant that there were certain people who had authority over the arts and over what could be represented, whereas a large chunk was also excluded. At the end of the 18th_{century, Rancière argues an}

aesthetic revolution took place, exemplified by the writing of Gustave Flaubert in Madame

13

His use of the term ‘regime’ is not coincidental since it alludes to what is at stake in his analysis, namely politics.

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22 Bovary (1856) and other forms of literary realism. In Figures of History (2014), Rancière states about Flaubert’s writing in Bovary that,

“simply, in the vacuum of explanations, Flaubert has found a way of taking a room in a Normandy farmhouse and, in its place, deploying the great vacuum, the ‘great ennui’, of the Oriental desert he is in love with, that infinity of grains of sand that is itself just like the vacuum that tosses atoms around indiscriminately. And out of that particular vacuum, he creates the very place of Charles’s love for Emma. This is the romantic principle of indeterminate significance or determined insignificance” (19).

The book was often criticized for describing banal trivialities in a poetic language, but what this quote illustrates is that in this regime of art, fixed categorizations and prescribed meanings of signs disappear while everyday objects and regular people become the object of art.14_{No longer}

is there a fixed idea about what art should be and no longer are certain people, subjects, or forms of art excluded. This implies a blurring of the distinction between art and life, which we can also find in, for example, Dadaist collage paintings. Even abstract painting, something that according to the reigning narratives of art history is often seen as the prime example of the purification of the medium, impacts on the broader distribution of the sensible due to its resistance of simple interpretation, since it was no longer expressible in verbal form. At the same time, art in the aesthetic regime would also reappropriate, repurpose and reuse older forms of art and media forms in a different manner. According to the narrative of

postmodernism this is often seen as reducing art to everyday banalities or empty pastiche, but according to Rancière it implies attributing unexpected meanings that resist pre-allocated roles. No longer is the image supposed to represent an idea that is expressible in words. It is exactly due to this collapse of presupposed relationship between image and meaning, the collapse of predetermined subjects of art, and broadening of spectators of art, that art in the aesthetic regime was able to impact the distribution of the sensible.

3.4 art and political emancipation The framework that I have elaborated on in the previous section could be regarded as rather abstract and historical and is therefore at risk of not being able to explain how emancipation functions in concrete cases. Thus, in order to be able to conceptualize and eventually analyze the political efficacy of art, or more specifically the politics of the interactive documentary, there are a couple of questions that need answering. The most important issue that is at stake is to

discern the different ways in which art can be considered emancipatory and elaborate in more

14

We find similar tendencies for example in the fact that Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin’s (1699-1779) still-lives gained prominence over traditional history painting. No longer were historically significant events and

important people the exclusive subjects of art. Instead, ordinary objects entered the realm of subjects that could be deemed worthy of artistic treatment.

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23 detail how this effectuates itself nowadays. In order to be able to answer that question we must also discuss whether we can attribute the emancipatory quality of art to particular formal qualities, or not. Finally, it is important to discuss who Rancière envisions to be emancipated by art. Is it the subject that is depicted in an artwork or its audience?15

Throughout different books, interviews, and articles, Rancière provides a number of examples that point to the emancipatory quality of art. I will start by providing a number of examples in order to extrapolate some generalizations from there. First of all, in Figures of History (2014), Rancière discusses Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao, the Turtlelike (1995), a film in which the author rearranges archival footage of Dutch colonizers in Indonesia. However, he does not do this in a manner that would be typical for a critical reappropriation of archival footage, which is pointing out directly to the spectator the harshness of colonial oppression by means of a cunning montage or other forms of juxtaposition, but instead the images,

accompanied by accompanying a “poetic voice off” (Rancière 2014: 16; emphasis in original), give voice to the situation. Rancière explains:

“What [the poetic voice off] thereby accompanies on screen is a minute yet decisive change in the appearance of the faces and attitudes of the colonized, in the ‘happiness’ they express: they respond to the surprise of these imposed exercises with attention, with a certain pride in playing the game, as perfectly as possible, before the blackboard at school or the iron at the forge. They quietly assert their equal aptitude for all kinds of learning, for all the rules and every kind of contortion; they assert their equal intelligence.” (17)

In other words, Rancière argues in this passage that through artistic means, Monnikendam has transformed the interpretation of colonial archive footage from one that simply shows the grave tyranny of the oppressor and the passivity of the colonized this often implies, to an empowering interpretation of the colonized, asserting their equality of intelligence by quietly and pridefully showcasing their aptitude to play along with the games of the oppressor. Consciously or unconsciously, the camera that was originally wielded by the colonizer shows what Rancière (echoing Karl Marx) calls the “nobility of man” (17), the positive assertion of the colonized as a political subject. We can see this as a form of emancipation since, due to this aesthetic

construction, the colonized is no longer a suppressed subject in history, but transformed into a subject that is able to express their equality with colonizer.

15

The only account I have found of someone explicitly trying to put into words the political efficacy that can be found in art according to Rancière is Joseph Tanke’s (2011) attempt in his introduction to the work of Jacques Rancière. He proposes that aesthetic dissensus concerns three separate levels: fashioning and sustaining new subjects, creating new objects and new forms of perception, and finally offering experiences that are

fundamentally different from the everyday ordering of sense (103). Essentially, he argues that art should be a negation of the existing state of affairs and propose a counterworld where the three previously mentioned aspects are incorporated. However, I will not base the answers to the questions I am proposing on this work, because, in order to get more concrete, I want to base them on examples found in Rancière’s work. Tanke fails to provide such examples.

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24 A second example can be found in his discussion of 18th_{century German historian}

Johann Winckelmann’s commentary on the ancient Belvedere torso of Hercules (2009: 64-65). Winckelmann argued that the statue was a masterpiece of Greek antiquity and therefore

expressed the Greeks’ supreme liberty. However, he deduced this from the meditative quality of the statue that he found in the wavelike forms of the muscles and the lack of arms and head, despite their being no clear-cut connection between the two. Rancière argues that “the sole expression of that liberty was the wavelike folds of the stone which had no relation whatsoever with liberty and were unable to convey any lesson of courage or freedom” (2009: 65). What Winckelmann therefore does with his description is deduce meaning from the statue from formal qualities that usually do not represent this meaning. Therefore, he changes the meaning of the statue from a representational logic to an aesthetic one. This is an alteration that lies outside of the intention and even possibilities of the artist, because it was informed by the spirit of the times in which Winckelmann wrote his commentary. By doing this, Winckelmann

changes, at least at the time of his commentary, the way that people were able to look at this statue and therefore in a sense broadened the distribution of the sensible. This means that the artwork itself was not necessarily emancipatory when it was first crafted, but became a means to broaden the distribution of the sensible after Winckelmann commented on it. The political potential of the artwork was not an effect of the author’s intention and in fact only sprung up centuries after the statue was made. In line with this reasoning is Rancière’s claim that “people were not emancipated by revolutionary painting. But they could acquire a new kind of body, a new gaze out of this availability of any kind of painting” (Dasgupta 2008: 74). With this statement he implies that neither the artist nor the work of art can provide the emancipatory means necessary, because “what happens in the aesthetic regime of art is that artists create objects that escape their will” (idem).

The final example I would like to mention is an extension of the previous example, but does not involve any particular artwork. It is an anecdote that Rancière uses quite frequently that revolves around a 19th_{century floor-layer who is working in a room and takes time to}

enjoy, aesthetically, the elements surrounding him. According to Rancière this entails “the appropriation of the place of work and exploitation as the site of a free gaze” (2009: 71). He goes on to explain that:

“being a worker meant a certain form of correspondence between a sensory equipment and its destination. It meant a determinate body, a determinate coordination between the gaze and the arms. The divorce between the laboring arms and the distracted gaze introduces the body of a worker into a new configuration of the sensible; it overthrows the ‘right’ relationship between what a body ‘can’ do and what it cannot” (idem).

The Emancipated Documentary? 'The politics of the interactive documentary' through Jacques Ranciere