demos-moving images of globalization

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Steve McQueen. Gravesend,2007. Frame enlargements.Courtesy the artist.

Grey Room 37, Fall 2009, pp. 6–29. © 2009 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7

Moving Images of Globalization*T.J. DEMOS

What would it mean to confront the ambivalent reality of glob-alization rather than live in denial of its savage effects? SteveMcQueen’s recent film Gravesend (2007) both poses and repre-sents one response to this question. The film opens with shotsin warm golden hues of the technoscientific refinement ofcolumbite-tantalite in a British laboratory where faceless tech-nicians melt down and purify the metallic ore and automatedmachines process the material in an antiseptic environment.Filmed with precision camerawork that mimics the efficientmovements of the lab’s pneumatic devices, this footage is soonintercut with recordings of manual labor in the Congo junglewhere men are seen prospecting for the valuable mineral, dig-ging deep holes in the earth and using their hands to hammer themineral from the rocks. Used commonly in consumer electron-ics products such as cell phones, DVD players, and computers,and found primarily in Sub-Saharan West Africa, coltan, ascolumbite-tantalite is more commonly called, has inspired aninternational demand that has fueled the violent conflict in theCongo, leaving more than five million dead over the last twentyyears.1 Assembling a geopolitical montage, Gravesend connectstechnology and war, glimpsing by metonymic reference theuneven geographies of Europe’s advanced state of economic andscientific development and the Congo’s lag in a lawless void ofpreindustrial toil.

As is well known, the term globalization calls up notoriousambiguity, representing an empty signifier nearly meaninglesstoday, much like the word freedom, if used without further qual-ification. Emerging in the late 1970s to describe the unificationof commercial markets worldwide, globalization has since beencelebrated with unalloyed optimism by the cheerleaders of cap-italism—from philosopher and Reaganite policy-maker FrancisFukuyama to New York Times columnist and free-market ideo-logue Thomas Friedman—as defining our present era of planetaryintegration achieved through sociocultural, political, technolog-ical, and economic forces.2 For these and other conservativecommentators, globalization holds the promise of postpoliticaldemocratic consensus, international economic equality, andpostnational freedom of mobility. Yet corporate globalizationmay well be the more apt term for recent developments, because

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it indicates the private sector’s profit-led motivation—supportingpolicies of denationalization, structural adjustment, and privati-zation—that stands behind the grand social claims of its propo-nents.3 Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and thesubsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, a contrary enthusi-asm regarding globalization—but enthusiasm nonetheless—hasmounted as well in left-wing circles. Consider postcolonialanthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s positive emphasis on the egal-itarian potential of “diasporic public spheres” achieved via newtechnologies and systems of “mass mobility and mass media-tion”; or that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s popular bookEmpire and its sanguine view toward the new purchase of globalresistance movements in the age of postnational sovereignty.4

Despite such hopes, however, the heightened visibility of today’sworldwide, post-9/11 and credit-crunch crises—including resus-citated state and military power and violent blowback to theimposition of Western political and economic policies, particu-larly in the Middle East where the rhetoric of “freedom” cloaksdomination and means merely free enterprise—has made global-ization’s darker nature undeniably evident. Whether theorized asa “new imperialism” by David Harvey or as “military neo-liber-alism” by the San Francisco–based collective Retort, globaliza-tion presents us with an image that is ambivalent at best andcataclysmic at worst.5

McQueen’s work gives powerful expression to this ambivalence,adding historical nuance to globalization’s complex culturalimaginary. By referring to and including images of the southeasternEnglish industrial port of Gravesend, the film traces the lopsidedrelations between current-day Europe and Africa back to nine-teenth-century colonialism, specifically via its representation inConrad’s Heart of Darkness: Conrad’s protagonist Marlow sits ina sailboat on the Thames estuary in Gravesend while he tells hisnotorious tale of journeying up the Congo River. McQueen’s filmcommemorates that literary moment through an extended pas-sage of the sun setting over the port’s factories and smoke stacks(mirroring the crepuscular time of Marlow’s narration), a sequencethat ever so slowly dissolves and gives way to images of Congoleselaborers. The resulting palimpsest of geographies joins the normallyseparated regions, a segregation that otherwise conveniently

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dissociates advanced technological procedures from the farawayexploitation of natural resources amid conditions of brutal lawlessness. Meditative and melancholy, the sunset’s elegiactones suggest not only the twilight of both industrialization andBritain’s imperial reign but also a funereal resignation in the faceof the continuation of their deathly effects under a differentname. In his novella, Conrad uses the old colonial slogan thatruns “the sun never sets on the British empire”—its global span,so goes the logic, insures perpetual daytime.6 Marlow’s tale ofhumanity’s “heart of darkness”—lying within Europe as revealedin its treatment of the Congolese—belies the trumpeted imperialconfidence, as does McQueen’s film. Relaying the violence of ivory extraction from the colony, abetted by Belgian KingLeopold II’s cruel policies, Marlow leaves readers with a “choiceof nightmares”: either honestly confront the savagery of thehuman condition or continue hypocritically to live beneath thebogus veneer of European civilization.7 In posing this dilemmaanew, McQueen makes the only ethical choice: to acknowledgethe price paid for the developed world’s technologically advancedway of life, rejecting the alternative of naively and falsely adher-ing to the delusion that globalization necessarily brings progress,democracy, and freedom.

Yet while Gravesend lays waste to the myths of corporateglobalization by revealing its dark underside, the film is remark-able for its oblique approach, obviously distant from the seem-ingly more immediate routes of political contestation embodied,say, in the street activism of the global justice movement’sdemonstrations.8 Similarly, the film disavows the clarity of thephotojournalistic exposure of the horror of the Congo’s conflict,as in Guy Tillim’s Leopold and Mobutu (2004), which shows,among other things, the horror of the conscription of children byCongolese militias.9 Instead of depicting the country’s violencedirectly, Gravesend alludes to it metaphorically, and thus tenta-tively, as in its recurring shots of a vice’s steel blade slowly cut-ting through a large hunk of rock with cringing aural effect,which translates the pressure of the Congo’s sociopolitical situ-ation into visceral distress. Here, geopoetics allegorizes geopol-itics.10 Breaking the spell of the viewer’s contemplative passivity,these jolting passages bring about an experiential displacementfrom the complacency of perceptual habit and visual pleasurethat might otherwise transform zones of conflict into objects ofaesthetic enjoyment. But even while the film traces commercialtechnology back to its roots in current-day primitive accumulation,which appears to be reengaged today by the forces of global cap-ital, no explanatory comment or contextual information supple-ments McQueen’s images.11 The film’s allusions thus remain everprecarious, its conclusions always uncertain. Like the quasi-

Steve McQueen. Gravesend,2007. Frame enlargement.Courtesy the artist.

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documentary approach to brutal mining conditions in South Africapresented in McQueen’s earlier tour de force, Western Deep(2002), Gravesend’s filmic construction blurs the referential andthe allegorical, the documentary and the fictional, in order toconvey savagery through phenomenological estrangement. Yet itdoes so without directing interpretation, neither includingauthoritative information nor voicing explicit condemnation.

As such, Gravesend builds on what has become a significantconvergence in the art of the moving image over the last decade,one that is remarkable for advancing political investment bymeans of subtle aesthetic construction, doing so by joining doc-umentary and fictional modes into uncertain relationship.McQueen’s film is surely not alone, and while the work of AnriSala, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Amar Kanwar, WalidRaad, and Pierre Huyghe also comes to mind, I will extend myanalysis here to the Otolith Group’s first film, Otolith (2003),an enchanting science fiction–cum-documentary, and HitoSteyerl’s November (2004), a video-essay that investigatesthe current political economy of the documentary imagevia a personal story at once subjective and political. LikeMcQueen’s Gravesend, these works also challenge the mythsof globalization by representing exceptions to its tri-umphalist narratives. And whereas the ethical-politicalexigencies of present crises would seem to demand eyewit-ness exposés—to show what mass media ignores, to correctthe mystifications of governmental falsehoods—their workmoves by other means. Like McQueen’s works, they are dis-tinguished by the intertwining of the real and the imaginary,which mobilizes a form of address—aesthetic, affective,visual—beyond the strictly information-based correctivesof familiar documentary modes of contestation. What arethe advantages and, equally, the risks of this approach, andhow can we define its political significance? Moreover,how might the moving image today critically engage glob-alization—inflecting its meanings, contesting its objection-able formulations, advancing its positive potential—fromwithin an artistic context, laying claim to an ambition oftendiscounted by those skeptical of art’s effectiveness and rel-evance to collective struggle and political opposition?12

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By depicting laboring bodies in the Congo, Gravesendmounts a political contestation by rendering visible thosetypically excluded from globalization’s imaginary. But the film’s “documentation” is far from traditional; rather,McQueen’s figures are unidentified, mere shadows and


fragmented shapes, which dismantles the epistemological pre-sumptions of traditional documentary modes of exposure andjournalistic reportage, just as the artist’s preference for a blackbox installation further distinguishes Gravesend’s phenomeno-logical sensitivity and its open-planned, embodied space ofreception from the conditions of the theater environment. How canwe define the political stakes at the heart of such an experimen-tal aesthetic construction? Jacques Rancière’s recent argumentsregarding the “politics of aesthetics” provide one provocativeapproach to the problem. Rather than functioning to mystify thepolitical realm—as in Walter Benjamin’s famous condemnationof fascist aestheticization—aesthetics, for Rancière, defines amode of appearance that constitutes the political by partitioningthe sensible, defining who can say and hear what, where, andwhen: “[Aesthetics] is a delimitation of spaces and times, of thevisible and the invisible, or speech and noise, that simultane-ously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form ofexperience.”13 The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics asmuch as it defines and (de)legitimates the discourses within it.And while, for Rancière, aesthetics signifies a mode of appear-ance that extends beyond artistic practice—in terms of its “dis-tribution of the sensible” within everyday life, regulated byinstitutionalized and policed systems of power—it also definesthe force of the political within art, which is capable of propos-ing alternatives to conventional politics from outside its system.One reservation this argument might incite concerns art’s limitedvisibility compared to the mass publics of governmental repre-sentation and media discourse, a limitation that would ostensi-bly mitigate the effectiveness of its opposition. But while thisconcern is undoubtedly credible, such political effectivenessmay also never have been the goal of artists in the first place (cer-tainly it isn’t placed above aesthetic priorities in McQueen’scase); nor does this acknowledgment mean that a politics is notstill at the core of aesthetics. The relation of contemporary art topolitical life may be uncertain, but this may be art’s irresolvablecondition at present, one that when taken to heart may generateits most compelling works. This is indeed the case for Rancière,who argues that in its negotiation of the simultaneous pullsbetween autonomy (art’s allegiance to its own laws of form) andheteronomy (its bearing on life), “art promises a political accom-plishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity.”14

That very ambiguity enters intriguingly into Gravesend’s for-mal condition, particularly in terms of the film’s provocativeinterweaving of its documentary mode and its imaginativeexpression when it comes to figuration. As if depicting weight-less beings made of shadows and movement, Gravesend portraysits miners as the ghostly absences of light, as voids in the visual

Guy Tillim. Leopold and Mobutu,Series 31 (Triptych), 2004.Courtesy Michael Stevenson,Cape Town.

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field. While fixing on the indexical marks characteristic of docu-mentary imagery, Gravesend paradoxically depletes their sub-stance, merely intimating the depiction of real bodies, deployinga strategy that recalls the artist’s similar approach to miners inWestern Deep.15 This precariousness of the image can be read—imaginatively—in two ways. First, the derealization of represen-tation translates into visual form the political conditions on theground; that is, it mirrors the zone of nonrepresentation that isthe disenfranchised status of Congolese laborers (although thismirroring—connecting image and referent via interpretation—must remain ever insecure). Second, the depiction of emergentfigures materializes the film’s political force. By refusing to por-tray its subjects as victimized objects, hopelessly stuck in theirrevocable reality of their situation and reaffirmed as such bytheir representation, Gravesend shows those people to be unde-termined and thus sites where the unknowable and the potentialcoincide.16 Whereas Conrad’s characters, as creatures of their time,may have been unable “to recognize that what they saw, disablinglyand disparagingly, as a non-European ‘darkness’ was in fact anon-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regainsovereignty and independence” as Said observes;17 McQueen’sfilm deploys darkness strategically to define a field of possibilityresistant to the very forms of representation that would keepthose figures in their traditional place of oppression.

By drawing out the representational ambiguity of sensibleexperience, Gravesend elicits the political force of appearance,which takes on added relevance in relation to Giorgio Agamben’snotion of the fraught status of bare life—that is, life stripped ofpolitical being. For Agamben, today’s “task and enigma” is pre-cisely to transform such seemingly powerless existence—thekind we glimpse in Gravesend’s imagery—into the horizon of acoming politics, one that exists beyond the system of sovereigntyand its oppressive states of exception from legal identity thattoday threaten to become the norm. “This biopolitical body thatis bare life,” writes Agamben, “must itself instead be transformedinto the site for the constitution and installation of a form of lifethat is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only itsown zoe.”18 In other words, bare life, deprived of political repre-sentation by the forces of sovereignty (defined as the complexauthority of executive power, not simply one man’s decision-making power), must be transformed into the site of its own polit-ical constitution outside conventional politics. But how can zoe(biological existence) and bios (the qualified life of politicalbeing) be made to converge, thus engendering a so-called form-of-life—a category that joins the biological and the political intoan irreducible existence? Elsewhere Agamben suggests the answerlies in what he terms “general intellect”—the creative power of


thought inherent in community, which resists the division ofbiological and political life: “In the face of state sovereignty,which can affirm itself only by separating in every context nakedlife from its form, [intellectuality and thought] are the power thatincessantly reunites life to its form or prevents it from being dis-sociated from its form.”19 Against that dissociation, Gravesendclearly reveals bare life as a political effect of globalization. Nearits end, the film introduces a short animated sequence that tracesa snaking black form against a white background, suggestingboth the Congo river’s profile and a tortuous fiber-optic cable.Presented alongside a soundtrack of voices speaking as if on athousand cell phones, the passage connects Congo’s geographyto the telecommunications industry that depends on the coun-try’s resources, joining a circuit of causality that refuses the sep-aration between political power and the zone of exclusion powerproduces. Yet importantly, that causal link is neither totalizednor uncontestable, for the film’s figures are invested with anundetermined excess precisely by the rejection of representa-tion’s realism, a resistance that the use of animation also exem-plifies as a visual field beyond the documentary. One risk in thisregard may be that the film’s impressions merely reaffirm its figures’ invisible status, reiterating their nonrepresentability inthe register of the image. However, Gravesend’s gambit is to drawout the very ambiguity of being so that life’s separation from pol-itics cannot disclose a simple ontological truth but rather mustbe viewed as a political effect.

Even if a single film cannot solve Agamben’s “task and enigma,”or redress the conditions of violence on the ground, McQueen’sdoes transform the visual field of politics—specifically its cur-rent distribution of life into zones of legality and exception—byextending visibility to those existing in globalization’s shadows.As such, the insistence on bare life’s political constitution (andthus contestable nature) may well be a move that artists—that is,those who creatively recalibrate representational conditions,challenging dominant orders—are uniquely equipped to make.As such, Gravesend opens up a space of contestation where aes-thetics may challenge the conventional organization of appear-ance—specifically, the unjust distribution of the sensible that isneoliberal globalization—that constitutes politics today.

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Also operating in the uncertain interval between aesthetic andpolitical commitments are the essay-films of the Otolith Group,a collaboration founded in 2002 by London-based artists, theo-rists, and curators Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Building itsfilms from disparate visual sources, including the film and

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photo archives of Sagar’s family in India, recordings of scriptedevents, and live-action documentary footage (such as shots of2003 antiwar protests in London, and of Mumbai’s mega-slum),the group also adds ambient sounds for atmospheric expressionand, most important, narrative voice-overs that are at once poeticand analytical, political and subjective. From this filmic assem-blage of material diversity, the group inquires into the disjunc-tions of temporality, investigations founded on the convictionthat the deepest engagement with reality necessarily verges onthe fictional. Proposing something of a temporal deconstructionthat counterpoints McQueen’s dereifying perception of the image,the Otolith Group opens a second route to challenge the currentunfolding of globalization. In their case, they dispute its outcomeas the result of historical inevitability.20

Otolith, 2003, the group’s first film, tells its story from theimagined perspective of Usha Adebaran-Sagar, off-world pale-oanthropologist, who, in the year 2103, images our conflictedpresent, a “time of ambient fear,” through the journal of herancestor Anjalika Sagar, focusing in particular on entries datingfrom the fraught spring of 2003. Appearing in the film as itsunseen narrator, Usha muses on the protests against the Americaninvasion of Iraq, mixing her own speculation with Anjalika’sobservations as she explains: it is as if “the unprecedented nature”of the massive global demonstration “could through its veryunlikeliness turn the inevitable into the possible long enough toalter our fate.” What would it mean to turn the inevitable into thepossible—that is, into the merely possible—as opposed to theforeordained? Rather than resignedly concede that America didin fact invade Iraq, with disastrous results, Otolith projects a sub-versive charge back into the past. Resuscitating the aspirations ofsocialist collectivism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and feministand postcolonial struggles during the 1960s and 1970s, the filmdeepens the significance of early twenty-first-century politicalengagement by establishing lines of continuity with—and, per-haps equally important, significant differences from—thoseinspiring but now often forgotten historical episodes. On the basisof the film’s destabilizing notion oftime, our present emerges as far lesscertain than it might seem.

In its conceptualization of theever-unfolding nature of the event,Otolith energizes what the group—ina creative appropriation of Agamben’snotion of “potentialities”—terms“past-potential futures,” a formula-tion that describes their seeking to reanimate bygone dreams of the

Below: The Otolith Group. Otolith, 2003. Frame enlarge-ment. Courtesy the artists.

Opposite, top and bottom: The Otolith Group. Otolith, 2003.Frame enlargement. Courtesy the artists.


future that may never yet have come to pass.21 For instance,while ranging over several remarkable intergenerational andcross-cultural convergences, Otolith’s central point of crystal-lization is a real-life meeting in 1973 in Moscow between theRussian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman totravel into outer space, and Sagar’s grandmother, who was pres-ident of the National Federation of Indian Women. Vintage 16mm footage of cheering women in assembly and of Tereshkovain parades and at official receptions is screened at differentspeeds, perceptually disrupting time’s seemingly irrevocablecontinuity. The meeting between Sagar’s grandmother andTereshkova occurred in the midst of euphoric excitement overspace travel, which mirrored burgeoning hopes for Indian social-ism and its new era of women’s rights. In bringing thesemoments back to life, Otolith questions the ostensible failures ofpast collective struggles by resparking their potential to inspireour political imaginary today. Consequently, history is shown tobe an open ontology, one that can never be fully written.22

History is revealed as infused with “potentiality,” which namesmore than the merely possible, as in its irreducibility to theactual. For Agamben, history also designates the capacity to notnot be.23 Here, in the space of the double negative, potentialitytouches actuality, but with a difference: its critical interval rep-resents a source of decisiveness and imagination, in distinctionfrom the robotic gestures of thoughtless habit or automatic reflex.In similar fashion, the ambition of Otolith is to coax the sleepingvitality of former political engagements into present realization,

refusing to let them simply fade away, to not not be.In taking up the essay-film, Otolith also reani-

mates the experimental filmmaking of predecessorssuch as Black Audio Film Collective, Harun Farocki,and Chris Marker. Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) is akey point of reference because it investigates “twoextreme poles of survival” in Japan and Africa’sGuinea Bissau, disparate geographical contexts jux-taposed by a collection of documentary shots ofeveryday life, and is presented under a politicallypoignant and subjective narration delivered by awoman who reads the letters from a friend and trav-

eling filmmaker, the fictitious Sandor Krasna.Also significant for Otolith’s development isBlack Audio Film Collective’s Last Angel ofHistory (1995), a quasi-documentary film aboutthe formation of futuristic Afro-funk music, sit-uated within its own sci-fi tale (in which Eshunappears as one of several commentators).24 Inaddition to the legacies of French New Wave

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film and New German cinema, both Marker’s and Black AudioFilm Collective’s films are crucial forerunners to Otolith’s poetic,epistolary framework, its use of a fictional storyteller, and thenarrative’s subjective rendering of historical and political judg-ments.25 Acknowledging these practices as further “past-poten-tial futures”—Marker’s in France following the events of May1968, and Black Audio’s in the years after the race riots inThatcher’s Britain—deepens the Otolith Group’s engagement bycasting their practice into the longue durée of transgenerationalaffiliations (challenging the posthistorical claims of the present),while endowing its own forbearers with new critical purchase.Such homages elucidate the group’s historiographical ethics,revealing the reverberating affinities of Otolith’s rhetorical strate-gies and recovering the living potentiality of still other dreamsthat would seem to have died decades ago, dreams that todaycontinue to defy the conservative narratives of globalization.

Throughout Otolith, space travel serves as a metaphor for tem-poral disequilibrium (here Marker’s postapocalyptic film mademostly of still images, La Jetée, is not too far away). The twenty-minute narrative segues enigmatically from those early shots ofantiwar marches in London in 2003 to documentation of Anjalika’ssubsequent journey to Tereshkova’s old training camp in StarCity, outside Moscow, now refitted for commercial tourism.Taking a parabolic flight aboard a repurposed Russian militaryaircraft—the kind once used to prepare cosmonauts for spacemissions—Anjalika is shown entering zero gravity. According tothe film, the disorienting, magical images of her sleeping bodyfloating in midair foreshadow a coming reality in which humanbeings will migrate to outer space. Over time, their otoliths—motion-sensing organs in the ears that orient the body to Earth’sgravitational field—will cease to function, effectively exilingHomo sapiens from their home planet. This fictional conceitreveals the film’s stakes in the potentiality of nonlinear time: theevolution of human beings into an expatriate species signifiesboth a release from the gravity of history—that is, from the notionthat time progresses implacably in only one direction—and a crit-ical detachment from the present.

To achieve such displacements,the group couches documentaryfootage in imaginary scenarios, acombination that approximates whatfor Rancière is film’s fundamentalstructure as a complex medium thatmerges mechanical recording andsubjective rendering.26 SituatingOtolith within that irreduciblehybridity renders the precise divi-


sion between the actual and the imaginary impossible—or, alter-nately, shows how truth is reinvented on the basis of fiction.27

For Rancière, fiction (as from the Latin, fingere) means to forge,rather than to feign, and therefore what he appropriately calls“documentary fiction” reconfigures the real as an effect to beproduced, rather than a fact to be understood.28 “Documentaryfiction,” Rancière contends, “invents new intrigues with histor-ical documents, and thus it touches hands with the film fablethat joins and disjoins—in the relationship between story andcharacter, shot and sequence—the powers of the visible, of speech,and of movement.”29 As a result “we cannot think of ‘documen-tary’ film as the polar opposite of ‘fiction’ film,” Rancièreexplains in his chapter dedicated to Marker.30 Far from beingopposed to fiction, documentary is actually one mode of it, join-ing—both in continuity and conflict—the “real” (the indexical,contingent elements of recorded footage) and the “fabulated”(the constructed, the edited, the narrative) in cinema. Theimagery that results—as in Otolith’s heterogeneous combina-tions of archival documents, live-action footage, fictional drama-tizations, voice-over narration, and diverse sound tracks—represents a radical transformation of the old Platonic opposi-tion between real and representation, between original modeland second-order copy. In this way, Rancière argues, “thoughtsand things, exterior and interior, are captured in the same texture, in which the sensible and the intelligible remain undis-tinguished.”31

What would it mean to treat the real as an effect to be pro-duced, rather than a fact to be understood? It would not bewrong to say that Otolith concerns the construction of memory“created against the overabundance of information as well asagainst its absence,” as Rancière writes; only the answer wouldbe incomplete. In defying “the reign of the informational-pre-sent”—that which “rejects as outside reality everything it cannotassimilate to the homogeneous and indifferent process of its self-presentation” (mass media comes to mind)—such depictionsalso must resist the stultifying representation of that reality as

merely reproduction.32 The openinglines of Otolith claim, “There is anexcess which neither image normemory can recover, but for whichboth stand in. That excess is theevent.” That “event” is not only acti-vated in Otolith but also sparked inits reception. There representationbecomes a generative force, a hetero-geneous assemblage of images andsounds that in disorienting the

Opposite: Black Audio FilmCollective. Last Angel of History,1995. Frame enlargement.Courtesy the artists.

Below: The Otolith Group. Otolith, 2003. Frame enlarge-ment. Courtesy the artists.

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viewer’s perceptions elicits active engagement and interpretiveagency. This is the politicizing effect of “documentary fiction,”which occurs when the potentiality of film meets the “emanci-pated spectator”—that is, the one, according to Rancière, whobecomes his or her own storyteller.33 To “frame the story of a newadventure in a new idiom,” he writes, “calls for spectators whoare active as interpreters, who try to invent their own translationin order to appropriate the story for themselves and make theirown story out of it.”34 To become a storyteller, however, does notentail a flight into subjective fancy. Rather, in the case of Otolithit represents an engagement with oppositional histories thatrefuses to accept the posthistorical, consensus-based politicsforced upon us by those who believe military force brings democ-racy, that corporate globalization represents equality, and thatthere is no alternative (to invoke Margaret Thatcher’s unforget-table words) to the unfolding of events today.

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Whereas the Otolith Group weaves documents into fictional sce-narios in order to bring out the potentiality of history against theineluctability of fate, the Berlin-based video artist Hito Steyerlreveals the creeping predominance of fiction in everyday life,which threatens the fragmentation of collective mobilization andthe depletion of political agency. If, as Retort argues, the mostdomineering global power today owes its potency to the histori-cally unprecedented conjunction of military force and spectacle—that is, an image economy at the service of capital, reinforcedwith military might—then what possible chance do artists standto oppose it? Of the three projects considered in the presentessay, Steyerl’s November (2004) is perhaps the most pessimisticbecause it confronts a debilitating image regime that appearscapable of neutralizing any and all opposition, whether in thegallery or on the street. November takes as its subject the assortedlives of the embattled German/Kurdish figure Andrea Wolf—or,rather, the errant lives of her image. One-time best friend ofSteyerl, Wolf also evinced an early interest in filmmaking beforegoing through a radical political transformation that saw her endup as a Kurdish freedom fighter, renamed Sehît Ronahî. TowardNovember’s end, a short but poignant passage demonstrates theunnerving fluidity between fact and fiction that is Wolf’s actualfate and November’s formal condition. A clip from a feministmartial arts movie that Steyerl made in the early 1980s featuresWolf as she plays the part of a tough, biker-jacketed heroine. Thisimage slowly morphs into one of Wolf in her later astonishinglydifferent guise as Ronahî. Wolf/Ronahî, we learn, was reportedlykilled during armed conflict with the Turkish army in 1998, and

Hito Steyerl. November, 2004.Frame enlargements. Courtesy the artist.


her image—an iconic portrait shown by Steyerl as it appeared onplacards carried by Kurdish protesters in Germany—became asymbol of martyrdom for the Kurdish resistance. Finally, Steyerldissolves this visage back into Wolf’s rebellious celluloid char-acter, but this time with added valences: The parodically butchfighter (who rides into the sunset on her motorbike) curiouslycomes to reflect the “truth” of Ronahî’s real-life heroism. Thefilm’s resurrection of her image also alludes to the Turkish government’s (disputed) contention that Ronahî is still alive,operating underground as a guerrilla. As Steyerl’s voice-over nar-ration observes, “Andrea became herself a traveling image, wan-dering over the globe, an image passed on from hand to hand,copied and reproduced by printing presses, video recorders, andthe Internet.”

Wolf thus slid into the unpredictable flow of “traveling images”that defines the historical context of November, which, accord-ing to Steyerl’s piercing video essay, comprises a broader sociallandscape of unaccountable government power (the kind thatallegedly killed Ronahî), fragmented oppositional struggles (inwhich Ronahî willingly participated), and representationalinstability (signaled by Wolf’s proliferating identities). ThatSteyerl works to uncover this situation in digital video—with all

it implies about the increased ease of reproducibility,postproduction processing, and instantaneous distribu-tion—only ups the ante, in that she uses the very mediumthat has come to be privileged by and definitional toNovember’s representational economy. To drive home thepolitical implications of this new image regime, Steyerl’svideo includes a short passage from Sergei Eisenstein’sOctober (1927)—to which the Steyerl’s title clearly refers—that focuses in part on the Kazakhs’ alliance with Russianproletarians during the Bolshevik seizure of power in1917. At the time of October, revolution could be univer-salized, a collective movement transcending boundariesof ethnicity and nationality. These visions of solidaritystand in marked contrast to November’s flux of signs,characterized by virtual drift and endless exchange, struc-turally matching the spread of interconnected markets butleaving political struggles disjointed and disempowered(Debordian spectacle and Deleuzian dispersal are todayfar more pertinent than yesterday’s conventional warfare).And if “in November, the former heroes become madmen,”as Steyerl’s narration intones, it is because now no truthis safe, no identity secure, and no protest incorruptible.

The challenge for Steyerl, then, is how to pursue a doc-umentary project that, on the one hand, avoids theextremes of postmodern relativism (where, if all subjective

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views possess a certain validity, falsehood is seemingly impossi-ble) and, on the other hand, refuses to ignore the opacity of theimage in the urgency to restore the right of nonsubjective truth.Writing elsewhere about the status of the historical documenttoday, Steyerl outlines “the paradox of truth” that one must todayconfront:

on the one side the ethically [and] absolutely necessaryinsisting on [and insistence of] a historical truth, whichwould still remain true, even if every evidence of it wereobliterated; [and] on the other side, the insight that the per-ception of it can only happen within a construction con-veyed through media (society, politics), which is thereforemanipulable and opaque.35

Although Steyerl’s account forms part of an examination ofGeorges Didi-Huberman’s reading of photographs of the Auschwitzconcentration camp considered in relation to Walter Benjamin’snotion of the “dialectical image,” her comments also provideinsight into her own practice as a video-maker. Against rela-tivism, yet in some ways sympathetic to the Otolith Group’snotion of history as an open ontology and to McQueen’s repre-sentational opacity, Steyerl concludes, “The ‘urgency’ of the doc-umentary is grounded in the ethical dilemma of having to givetestimony to an event that cannot be conveyed as such, butinstead contains necessary elements of truth as well as of ‘dark-ness.’”36 This dilemma is not only irresolvable but constitutes thepoint of departure for Steyerl’s practice: because the one contin-uous certainty about documentary film is the uncertainty of itstruth claims, the video-essay, she concludes, must be reinventedon that very basis.37

November consequently also discovers room for maneuveringwithin this state of uncertainty and its seemingly debilitatingterms. Lamenting the passing of October’s atmosphere of possi-bility, the video makes the most of the cinematic tools thatremain, deploying twenty-five minutes of narration alongside ahighly entertaining montage of imagery borrowed from popularculture—looking to media as a kind of humorous rallying cry forreal life. These include shots from Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat!Kill! Kill! (1965), depicting an aggressive female gang (one of theonly models, however campy, of powerful women fighters thatSteyerl and Wolf found for their early effort), and scenes fromBruce Lee’s last and unfinished film, Game of Death (releasedposthumously in 1978), in which the main character stages hisown death in order to regroup secretly—a fictive plot that unex-pectedly echoed the actor’s real death, an intermingling of realand fake (the film uses footage from Lee’s actual funeral) thatrelentlessly continues in the migrations and mutations of Ronahî’s

Hito Steyerl. November, 2004.Frame enlargement. Courtesy the artist.


image. November also proffers a mournful reflection on the co-optation of Steyerl’s own image. While documenting a Berlindemonstration against the Iraq war, Steyerl was spotted by a tele-vision director who knew of the artist’s video project. He quicklyplaced a Kurdish flag around her neck and a torch in her hands,told her to “look sad and meditative . . . as if you were thinkingabout Andrea,” and filmed the results. Steyerl soon found herselffeatured in a television documentary as “the Kurdish protester,”the very image of a “sensitive . . . and understanding filmmaker,who tells a personal story.” As her confession continues inNovember’s voice-over, such posturing is “more hypocriticalthan even the crudest propaganda.” Like Wolf, Steyerl’s imageentered November’s infinite regress, wherein “we are all part ofthe story, and not I am telling the story, but the story tells me.”38

As if to gain traction against such slipperiness, Novemberfrequently interrupts its quick-paced cutting and diegetic trajec-tory with self-reflexive tactics. For example, a series of shots inthe video focuses on the blinding light of a film projector (shownprecisely when a visually undocumented story—that of a recon-structed witness account of Ronahî’s death—is being told). Orwe see close-ups of a grainy TV screen replaying footage fromvideotapes (as when Ronahî is interviewed in Kurdistan). Onemight view these moments in the video as yet another return tocritical strategies of appropriation or even to a modernist “lay-ing bare of the device.” November’s montage also recalls prece-dents from her German context, such as Kluge’s benchmarkDeutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978), whichmixed documentary footage and fictional dramatization withina jigsaw-puzzle narrative. But although Steyerl’s own elegiacwork may share much with these previous efforts to come toterms with revolution’s seeming impossibility, November does

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not deploy quotation against a regime of “truth” in order merelyto reveal the constructedness of representation. And whereasEisenstein’s dialectical montage offered a generative combinationof shots meant to spark the spectator’s insight and action, orKluge activated the intervals and dark gaps between frames as aliberatory space for the viewer’s creative imagination, in Steyerl’svideo we now confront the dissolution of such distinct filmic ele-ments as they succumb to the endlessly fluctuating economy ofimages and flexible networks of power that constitute our newdigital milieu.

November makes clear that any attempted return to the revo-lutionary project of October would be an absurd proposition.When the film describes Ronahî’s use of martial arts in Kurdistan,for instance, Steyerl introduces shots from René Viénet’s hilari-ous Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973), which famously recast aB-grade Hong Kong martial arts flick as situationist critique. InViénet’s account, a group of samurai-bureaucrats terrorizes alocal village, the inhabitants of which are training to fight forfreedom with the aid of stultified Marxist rhetoric. Novemberincludes the point at which the lead antagonist loses his temperwith the proletarians’ endless talk of class struggle, warning themto stop: “If not I’ll send in my sociologists! And if necessary mypsychiatrists! My urban planners! My architects! My Foucaults!My Lacans! And if that’s not enough, I’ll even send my struc-turalists.” As critical theory becomes mere farce, the broaderimplication is that avant-garde methods of subversion—fromEisenstein’s dialectical montage to situationist détournement—have been exhausted. Under these conditions, documentarystrategies might seem futile or obsolete. What avenues remain ifone has no recourse to preexisting “truth,” if no fact cannot be


revealed as subjective viewpoint? Steyerl’s conclusion is innov-ative: If the one certainty about documentary film is the veryuncertainty of its claim to truth, as she suggests in a passage thatresonates with Rancière’s on “documentary fiction,” then “thisuncertainty is not some shameful lack, which has to be hidden,but instead constitutes the core quality of contemporary docu-mentary modes as such.”39

As a result, Steyerl consequently leaves us with a paradox:while November details German military support for Turkey’soppressive state, which has paradoxically led to Germany’s crisis of Kurdish immigrants and specifically to the death ofAndrea Wolf, it does so via a subjective perspective, narrated bySteyerl herself in a personal, idiosyncratic voice-over, deliveredwithout sourced authorities or other trappings of indubitableevidence, positioned in the midst of its montage’s gaps and fis-sures. Moreover, the poor quality of the video, owing to multiplegenerations of copies and to the recording of imagery directly offa TV screen, tends to derealize the video’s referents. While suchpirated imagery exemplifies Steyerl’s rebellious disregard forimage rights, it also reveals the intrinsic malleability of video’smeanings. In other words, although truth should determine politics rather than politics determining truth—as whenweapons of mass destruction are conjured out of thin air—Steyerl knows that whatever truth she can deliver will also bethe truth of mediation.40

This very mediation, plied by a particular formation of aesthetics (whether Steyerl’s slippery montage, McQueen’s rep-resentation-dissolving imagery, or the Otolith Group’s pastpotential futures) provides the key to this work and its politicalcontestation. These “documentary fictions” not only reorganizeour political image of globalization, revealing its crisis pointsand providing a more equitable division of appearance, bothconnective and critically comparative—as in Steyerl’s Germanyand Kurdistan, McQueen’s Britain and the Congo, and Otolith’sLondon and Mumbai. Their formal presentations also share therejection of the rhetoric of authority—whether of governmental

propaganda, media reportage, oractivist protest—that tends to situ-ate the viewer in the role of passiverecipient of ostensibly factualinformation. The power of Steyerl’svideo-essay, like the models ofMcQueen and the Otolith Group,lies in its capacity to motivate thecreative engagement of the specta-tor without stultifying direction.These essayistic documentaries do

Opposite: Hito Steyerl.November, 2004. Frame enlarge-ment. Courtesy the artist.

Below: René Viénet. CanDialectics Break Bricks? 1973. As seen in Hito Steyerl. November,2004. Courtesy the artist.

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not position their audience as passive recipients of unquestion-able information. Instead, they offer us a complex address: Webecome both engrossed in the storytelling and continually impli-cated in the multiplicity of representations.

| | | | |

What does it mean, finally, to address globalization critically—transvaluing its states of exception, challenging its historicalinevitability, defying its politics of truth—within an art context,whether commercial gallery, museum, or biennial? Answering arecent questionnaire about the relation between art and politicspublished in the journal October, art historian and critic DavidJoselit raises the seeming contradiction of discovering art that iscritical toward consumerism in the very site of the commercialart gallery, which for him engenders only political paralysis andexpanded profits.41 A similar objection could be made that thecontestation of global inequality from within the site of eco-nomic, political, and cultural privilege plays into the very versa-tility of the systems of appropriation and domination that definepredatory corporate globalization, which presents an image ofhumanitarian concern while perpetuating political and eco-nomic disparity. Yet while Joselit may be right in calling for thecritical infiltration of more widely trafficked networks in order toreach larger audiences (raid the multiplexes, he writes), thepotential of the gallery as a site of critical contemplation, imagi-native experimentation, and politicization cannot be dismissed,even as the paradox he correctly names must be recognized. Thatcontradiction is one we can only live with for now, though notnecessarily on its terms. Rather than flatly dismiss art’s gallery-bound political ambitions as a trap,42 we must instead interrogatethe very complexity of the situation, as well as its critical andpolitically generative possibilities, beginning with a reconsider-ation of the relation between aesthetics and politics (even if thatreconsideration is conducted with a view toward artistic formand its politics of representation). Against the caricature of theart institution as a mere commercial enterprise, we need to avoidthe economic determinism that positions art as a passive effect ofits patronage and reduces the meaning of aesthetics to an auto-matic function of its commercial context. While the gallery isdoubtlessly a compromised space, it is also one of multiple pres-sures and determinations that cannot be unified into a totalizingframework. To reject the kinds of reductive equivalences andoppositions often posited between, on the one hand, the artisticrealm’s apolitical autonomy, spectatorial passivity, and self-reflexive isolation, and on the other, the street’s political vitality,social immediacy, and real-world existence is imperative. Such


facile identifications and binaries suggest precisely the kind of“partition of the sensible” of which Rancière speaks, “a distrib-ution of the places and of the capacities or the incapacitiesattached to those places” that amount to so many “allegories of inequality.”43

If defending the politics at the core of aesthetics soundsromantic, then we should not be surprised that Rancière discov-ers the origins of the current “aesthetic regime” in the writingsof the German romantic poet, dramatist, and philosopherFriedrich Schiller, according to whom art’s placement of aes-thetics and politics in indeterminate relation necessitates thecreative reinvention of each.44 For Rancière, Schiller’s aestheticsproposes an autonomy of experience (and not of objects) thatdefines a space apart wherein ways of life might be reconceptu-alized outside the limitations of conventional modes of gover-nance. Such a view, far from being outdated, retains its profoundrelevance in today’s conflicted environment. Considering thework of Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl inlight of such a proposition need not amount to a naive or foolishprivileging of art’s political claims and engagements over otherforms—whether social movements, activism, governmental ornongovernmental politics—but it does resist those pressures tohierarchize and police the public sphere and that dismiss all tooquickly the political engagements of artistic practice; it alsoentails treating the reception of such work as ultimately radi-cally undetermined, proposing a space of potential and immea-surable effects that may yet carry material consequences. Tosuggest that globalization—as a sprawling and dispersed seriesof cultural, economic, and political formations—could be ade-quately addressed from any one site would be unacceptable.Although art may not possess the visibility or capacities of gov-ernmental politics, in the face of the perceived failure of suchpolitics people not surprisingly will turn to other forums foralternatives, to imagine new ways to reinvent the world.

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Notes* Sections of this essay have been published in earlier versions as “Openings:The Otolith Group,” Artforum, September 2006, 360–362; and “Traveling Images:Hito Steyerl,” Artforum, Summer 2008, 408–413, 473.

1. For further information about and political mobilization around the Congoconflict, see the websites of Friends of the Congo (http://www.friendsofthe-congo.org) and Congo Global Action (http://congoglobalaction.org). Thesegroups estimate 5.4 million dead from war-related causes since 1998, makingCongo’s the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II.

2. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmonds -worth, UK: Penguin, 1992); and Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A BriefHistory of the Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century (London: AllenLane, 2005). For a corrective to Friedman’s neoconservative position, see RonaldAronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo, The World Is Flat? A Critical Analysis of the NewYork Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman (Tampa: Meghan-Kiffer Press, 2006).

3. On the term corporate globalization, see David Graeber, “The NewAnarchists,” New Left Review 13 (January–February 2002). Graeber also notesthat “anti-globalization” is a misleading label coined by the conservative mediaand that many radical activists are in fact pro-globalization in the sense of sup-porting the “effacement of borders and the free movement of people, posses-sions and ideas” (63). The term alter-globalization is often used to distinguisha movement that resists both a regressive, localist “anti-globalization” and aneoliberal “corporate globalization.”

4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Michael Hardt andAntonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

5. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003); and Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War(London: Verso, 2005). For further theoretical consideration of the ambivalentand fraught nature of globalization, see Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalizationas a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jamesonand Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

6. I take my cue from Hamza Walker’s perceptive essay that introducedMcQueen’s recent show at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, September 16—October 28, 2007. Hamza Walker, “Steve McQueen: Gravesend” (2007),http://renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Essay.591.0.0.0.0.html.

7. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul O’Prey (1902; Harmondsworth,UK: Penguin, 1983), 105. Contesting the image of Conrad as a critic of colonial-ism, however, Edward Said points out, “Conrad was both anti-imperialist andimperialist, progressive when it came to rendering fearlessly and pessimisti-cally the self-confirming, self-deluding corruption of overseas domination,deeply reactionary when it came to conceding that Africa or South Americacould ever have had an independent history or culture.” Edward Said, Cultureand Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), xx. For further criticism, seeChinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,”in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday, Anchor,1989), 1–20.

8. See, for example, the politically activist documentation of the Seattleprotests in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Five Days That Shook theWorld: Seattle and Beyond (London: Verso, 2000), with photographs by AllanSekula.


9. Guy Tillim, Leopold and Mobutu (Trézélan, France: Filigranes, 2004).10. I borrow this phrasing from Emily Apter, “The Aesthetics of Critical

Habitats,” October 99 (Winter 2002): 21–45.11. Marx defined primitive accumulation in the following way: “The dis-

covery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entomb-ment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest andlooting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commer-cial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitiveaccumulation.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, ed.Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (London:Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), ch. 31. For Retort, “We believe the words ‘prim-itive accumulation’ are the right ones to describe what is happening [today],especially because the first word points to what is special (and for the RobertReichs and Thomas Friedmans of the world, scandalous) about the new situa-tion—the overtly ‘colonial’ character of the war in the Middle East, and thenakedness with which the unfreedom of the free wage contract is now placedback on the footing of sheer power, sheer forced dispossession.” Retort, 11(emphasis in original).

12. I use the hybrid and general term moving image to designate both videoand film, as well as the projected image and monitor-based presentations.These various categories are increasingly treated as indistinct in contemporaryart: for example, McQueen’s work is often shot on film (Gravesend on 35 mm)and then transferred to DVD for presentation; the Otolith Group works acrossboth film and video, showing their final pieces on video; and Hito Steyerlworks mainly in video, using projection and monitors for its presentation.

13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of theSensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 13.

14. Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” NewLeft Review 14 (March–April 2002): 151: Art’s unfulfilled political accom-plishment, Rancière continues, means that “those who want to isolate it frompolitics are somewhat beside the point” and that “those who want it to fulfillits political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy.” We must there-fore find a way to operate between these two extremes.

15. For more on this aspect of Western Deep, see my “The Art of Darkness:On Steve McQueen,” October 114 (Fall 2005): 61–89.

16. McQueen problematizes representation when it comes to depicting thepolitically exempted, which I examine further in relation to other of his worksin “Life Full of Holes,” Grey Room 24 (Fall 2006): 72–88.

17. Said, 33 (emphasis in original).18. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.

Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 188.19. Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” in Means without End: Notes on

Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11.20. There is a certain affinity here with the historiographic politics of Walter

Benjamin, who believed, in the midst of World War II, that “to bring about areal state of emergency” and “improve our position in the struggle againstFascism” it was necessary to obtain a new “conception of history.” “Theses onthe Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. HarryZohn (New York: Shocken, 1968), 257. The Otolith Group, in similar fashion,contests the progressivist and linear historical basis of globalization today.

21. The reference is to Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities: Collected Essays in

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Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1999). Also relevant here is Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the event: “Anevent can be turned around, repressed, co-opted, betrayed, but there still issomething there that cannot be outdated. Only renegades would say: it’s out-dated. But even if the event is ancient, it can never be outdated: it is an openingto the possible. It goes as much inside individuals as in the depths of society.”Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “May ‘68 Did Not Take Place,” in Two Regimesof Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. AmyHodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 233.

22. That such a formulation differs radically from earlier notions of photo-graphic representation is made clear when Otolith’s notion of the photographicevent is compared to André Bazin’s notion of the closed ontology of the photo-graphic image. Enacting a “transfer from the thing to its reproduction,” “cinemais objectivity in time,” Bazin explains; it “embalms” life. See André Bazin, “TheOntology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960):4–9. For a historical contextualization, see Michael Renov, “Introduction: TheTruth about Non-Fiction,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. M. Renov (NewYork: Routledge, 1993), 4, n. 9.

23. In his helpful introduction to Agamben’s Potentialities, Heller-Roazenexplains that although “what is potential can both be and not be,” it is also“capable of not not being and, in this way, of granting the existence of what isactual” (16, 18). And more: “This is why Agamben writes, in an important pas-sage in Homo Sacer, that ‘potentiality and actuality are simply the two faces ofthe sovereign self-grounding of Being,’ and that ‘at the limit, pure potentialityand pure actuality are indistinguishable’” (18).

24. The Otolith Group also organized the recent retrospective of Black AudioFilm Collective, which opened in 2007 at Foundation for Art and CreativeTechnology (FACT) in Liverpool. See also, The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Artof the Black Audio Film Collective, 1982–1998, ed. Kodwo Eshun and AnjalikaSagar (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).

25. Compare Nora Alter’s discussion of the history of the essay-film in ChrisMarker (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 17–20. I have traced theessay-film in relation to the video-essays of Ursula Biemann in “SaharaChronicle: Video’s Migrant Geography,” in Mission Reports: Artistic Practice inthe Field: The Video Works of Ursula Biemann, ed. Ursula Biemann and Jan-Erik Lundström (Umeå, Sweden: Bildmuseet; Bristol, UK: Arnolfini GalleryLimited, 2008), 178–190.

26. “Cinema is the combination of the gaze of the artist who decides and themechanical gaze that records, of constructed images and chance images.” JacquesRancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2006), 161.

27. This connects to what Gilles Deleuze calls “the powers of the false,”which describes not so much the abandonment of truth but its reinvention as anew post-Enlightenment paradigm of historical and cultural contingency. SeeGilles Deleuze “The Powers of the False,” in Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans.Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 126–155.Rancière dedicates a chapter of Film Fables to Deleuze’s Cinema books.

28. Rancière, Film Fables, 158.29. Rancière, Film Fables, 18.30. Rancière, Film Fables, 158.31. Rancière, Film Fables, 2–3.32. Rancière, Film Fables, 158.33. See Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum, March


2007: 272-280.34. Rancière, “Emancipated Spectator,” 280.35. Hito Steyerl, “Documentarism as Politics of Truth,” trans. Aileen Derieg

(European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2003), http://eipcp.net/transversal/1003/steyerl2/en. See also Hito Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,”A Prior 15 (2007), http://www.aprior.org/articles/28.

36. Steyerl, “Documentarism as Politics of Truth.”37. Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty.”38. In November, Steyerl also points out the way in which fictional film has

determined real-life actions, including the testimony of German radicals whoactually employed methods of kidnapping they learned from films such asGillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) and Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege(1972).

39. Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” 304. See also Hito Steyerl, DieFarbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 2008).

40. See Steyerl, “The Politics of Truth.”41. Joselit writes, “This situation leads to a truly intractable contradiction

in which a conceptual disavowal of markets is dependent for its enunciationand dissemination on the market system itself. . . . A certain paralysis withinpolitical art practice results while nonetheless allowing for enormous expansionand profits in the business of art.” David Joselit, Response to Questionnaire,October 123 (Winter 2008): 88.

42. As Brian Holmes writes about the art gallery, “everything about this spe-cialized aesthetic space is a trap, that it has been instituted as a form of enclo-sure.” Brian Holmes, “Extradisciplinary Investigations: Towards a New Critiqueof Institutions,” Continental Drift (blog), 26 February 2007, http://brian-holmes.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/. Or consider Gregory Sholette’s commentthat “It is simply no longer possible to disconnect the intention of an artist’swork, even when the content is deeply social or attempting an institutional cri-tique, from the marketplace in which even hedgefund investors now partake.”Gregory Sholette, Reponse to Questionnaire, October 123 (Winter 2008): 138.

43. Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” 277.44. See Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes.”

demos-moving images of globalization

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