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
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
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
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
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).
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).
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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,
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
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)
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.
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)
“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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
