Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Gravesend,
2007. Frame enlargements.
Courtesy the artist.
6
Moving Images
of Globalization*
T.J. DEMOS
Grey Room 37, Fall 2009, pp. 6–29. © 2009 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7
it indicates the private sector’s profit-led motivation—supporting
policies 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 the
subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, a contrary enthusi-
asm regarding globalization—but enthusiasm nonetheless—has
mounted as well in left-wing circles. Consider postcolonial
anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s positive emphasis on the egal-
itarian potential of “diasporic public spheres” achieved via new
technologies and systems of “mass mobility and mass media-
tion”; or that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s popular book
Empire and its sanguine view toward the new purchase of global
resistance movements in the age of postnational sovereignty.4
Despite such hopes, however, the heightened visibility of today’s
worldwide, post-9/11 and credit-crunch crises—including resus-
citated state and military power and violent blowback to the
imposition of Western political and economic policies, particu-
larly in the Middle East where the rhetoric of “freedom” cloaks
domination and means merely free enterprise—has made global-
ization’s darker nature undeniably evident. Whether theorized as
a “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 and
cataclysmic at worst.5
McQueen’s work gives powerful expression to this ambivalence,
adding historical nuance to globalization’s complex cultural
imaginary. By referring to and including images of the southeastern
English industrial port of Gravesend, the film traces the lopsided
relations between current-day Europe and Africa back to nine-
teenth-century colonialism, specifically via its representation in
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Conrad’s protagonist Marlow sits in
a sailboat on the Thames estuary in Gravesend while he tells his
notorious tale of journeying up the Congo River. McQueen’s film
commemorates 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 sequence
that ever so slowly dissolves and gives way to images of Congolese
laborers. The resulting palimpsest of geographies joins the normally
separated regions, a segregation that otherwise conveniently
8 Grey Room 37
dissociates advanced technological procedures from the faraway
exploitation of natural resources amid conditions of brutal
lawlessness. Meditative and melancholy, the sunset’s elegiac
tones suggest not only the twilight of both industrialization and
Britain’s imperial reign but also a funereal resignation in the face
of the continuation of their deathly effects under a different
name. In his novella, Conrad uses the old colonial slogan that
runs “the sun never sets on the British empire”—its global span,
so goes the logic, insures perpetual daytime.6 Marlow’s tale of
humanity’s “heart of darkness”—lying within Europe as revealed
in its treatment of the Congolese—belies the trumpeted imperial
confidence, as does McQueen’s film. Relaying the violence
of ivory extraction from the colony, abetted by Belgian King
Leopold II’s cruel policies, Marlow leaves readers with a “choice
of nightmares”: either honestly confront the savagery of the
human condition or continue hypocritically to live beneath the
bogus veneer of European civilization.7 In posing this dilemma
anew, McQueen makes the only ethical choice: to acknowledge
the price paid for the developed world’s technologically advanced
way 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 corporate
globalization 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’s
demonstrations.8 Similarly, the film disavows the clarity of the
photojournalistic 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 by
Congolese militias.9 Instead of depicting the country’s violence
directly, 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 displacement
from the complacency of perceptual habit and visual pleasure
that might otherwise transform zones of conflict into objects of
aesthetic enjoyment. But even while the film traces commercial
technology 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 ever
precarious, its conclusions always uncertain. Like the quasi-
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10 Grey Room 37
fragmented shapes, which dismantles the epistemological pre-
sumptions of traditional documentary modes of exposure and
journalistic reportage, just as the artist’s preference for a black
box installation further distinguishes Gravesend’s phenomeno-
logical sensitivity and its open-planned, embodied space of
reception from the conditions of the theater environment. How can
we define the political stakes at the heart of such an experimen-
tal aesthetic construction? Jacques Rancière’s recent arguments
regarding the “politics of aesthetics” provide one provocative
approach to the problem. Rather than functioning to mystify the
political realm—as in Walter Benjamin’s famous condemnation
of fascist aestheticization—aesthetics, for Rancière, defines a
mode of appearance that constitutes the political by partitioning
the sensible, defining who can say and hear what, where, and
when: “[Aesthetics] is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the
visible and the invisible, or speech and noise, that simultane-
ously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of
experience.”13 The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics as
much 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 by
institutionalized and policed systems of power—it also defines
the 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 limited
visibility 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 this
concern is undoubtedly credible, such political effectiveness
may also never have been the goal of artists in the first place (cer-
tainly it isn’t placed above aesthetic priorities in McQueen’s
case); nor does this acknowledgment mean that a politics is not
still at the core of aesthetics. The relation of contemporary art to
political life may be uncertain, but this may be art’s irresolvable
condition at present, one that when taken to heart may generate
its most compelling works. This is indeed the case for Rancière,
who argues that in its negotiation of the simultaneous pulls
between autonomy (art’s allegiance to its own laws of form) and
heteronomy (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 provocative
interweaving of its documentary mode and its imaginative
expression when it comes to figuration. As if depicting weight-
less beings made of shadows and movement, Gravesend portrays
its miners as the ghostly absences of light, as voids in the visual
12 Grey Room 37
thought inherent in community, which resists the division of
biological and political life: “In the face of state sovereignty,
which can affirm itself only by separating in every context naked
life from its form, [intellectuality and thought] are the power that
incessantly reunites life to its form or prevents it from being dis-
sociated from its form.”19 Against that dissociation, Gravesend
clearly reveals bare life as a political effect of globalization. Near
its end, the film introduces a short animated sequence that traces
a snaking black form against a white background, suggesting
both the Congo river’s profile and a tortuous fiber-optic cable.
Presented alongside a soundtrack of voices speaking as if on a
thousand cell phones, the passage connects Congo’s geography
to 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 power
produces. Yet importantly, that causal link is neither totalized
nor uncontestable, for the film’s figures are invested with an
undetermined 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 this
regard may be that the film’s impressions merely reaffirm its
figures’ invisible status, reiterating their nonrepresentability in
the register of the image. However, Gravesend’s gambit is to draw
out the very ambiguity of being so that life’s separation from pol-
itics cannot disclose a simple ontological truth but rather must
be 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’s
does transform the visual field of politics—specifically its cur-
rent distribution of life into zones of legality and exception—by
extending visibility to those existing in globalization’s shadows.
As such, the insistence on bare life’s political constitution (and
thus 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 is
neoliberal globalization—that constitutes politics today.
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14 Grey Room 37
future that may never yet have come to pass.21 For instance,
while ranging over several remarkable intergenerational and
cross-cultural convergences, Otolith’s central point of crystal-
lization is a real-life meeting in 1973 in Moscow between the
Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to
travel into outer space, and Sagar’s grandmother, who was pres-
ident of the National Federation of Indian Women. Vintage 16
mm footage of cheering women in assembly and of Tereshkova
in parades and at official receptions is screened at different
speeds, perceptually disrupting time’s seemingly irrevocable
continuity. The meeting between Sagar’s grandmother and
Tereshkova occurred in the midst of euphoric excitement over
space travel, which mirrored burgeoning hopes for Indian social-
ism and its new era of women’s rights. In bringing these
moments back to life, Otolith questions the ostensible failures of
past collective struggles by resparking their potential to inspire
our political imaginary today. Consequently, history is shown to
be an open ontology, one that can never be fully written.22
History is revealed as infused with “potentiality,” which names
more than the merely possible, as in its irreducibility to the
actual. For Agamben, history also designates the capacity to not
not be.23 Here, in the space of the double negative, potentiality
touches actuality, but with a difference: its critical interval rep-
resents a source of decisiveness and imagination, in distinction
from the robotic gestures of thoughtless habit or automatic reflex.
In similar fashion, the ambition of Otolith is to coax the sleeping
vitality 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 predecessors
such as Black Audio Film Collective, Harun Farocki,
and Chris Marker. Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) is a
key point of reference because it investigates “two
extreme poles of survival” in Japan and Africa’s
Guinea Bissau, disparate geographical contexts jux-
taposed by a collection of documentary shots of
everyday life, and is presented under a politically
poignant and subjective narration delivered by a
woman who reads the letters from a friend and trav-
eling filmmaker, the fictitious Sandor Krasna.
Also significant for Otolith’s development is
Black Audio Film Collective’s Last Angel of
History (1995), a quasi-documentary film about
the formation of futuristic Afro-funk music, sit-
uated within its own sci-fi tale (in which Eshun
appears as one of several commentators).24 In
addition to the legacies of French New Wave
16 Grey Room 37
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 be
produced, rather than a fact to be understood.28 “Documentary
fiction,” Rancière contends, “invents new intrigues with histor-
ical documents, and thus it touches hands with the film fable
that joins and disjoins—in the relationship between story and
character, 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,” Rancière
explains in his chapter dedicated to Marker.30 Far from being
opposed 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. The
imagery 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 model
and second-order copy. In this way, Rancière argues, “thoughts
and 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 be
wrong to say that Otolith concerns the construction of memory
“created against the overabundance of information as well as
Opposite: Black Audio Film against its absence,” as Rancière writes; only the answer would
Collective. Last Angel of History, be incomplete. In defying “the reign of the informational-pre-
1995. Frame enlargement.
sent”—that which “rejects as outside reality everything it cannot
Courtesy the artists.
assimilate to the homogeneous and indifferent process of its self-
Below: The Otolith Group.
Otolith, 2003. Frame enlarge-
presentation” (mass media comes to mind)—such depictions
ment. Courtesy the artists. also must resist the stultifying representation of that reality as
merely reproduction.32 The opening
lines of Otolith claim, “There is an
excess which neither image nor
memory can recover, but for which
both stand in. That excess is the
event.” That “event” is not only acti-
vated in Otolith but also sparked in
its reception. There representation
becomes a generative force, a hetero-
geneous assemblage of images and
sounds that in disorienting the
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18 Grey Room 37
her image—an iconic portrait shown by Steyerl as it appeared on
placards carried by Kurdish protesters in Germany—became a
symbol of martyrdom for the Kurdish resistance. Finally, Steyerl
dissolves this visage back into Wolf’s rebellious celluloid char-
acter, but this time with added valences: The parodically butch
fighter (who rides into the sunset on her motorbike) curiously
comes to reflect the “truth” of Ronahî’s real-life heroism. The
film’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, and
the 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 social
landscape of unaccountable government power (the kind that
allegedly killed Ronahî), fragmented oppositional struggles (in
which Ronahî willingly participated), and representational
instability (signaled by Wolf’s proliferating identities). That
Steyerl 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 medium
that has come to be privileged by and definitional to
November’s representational economy. To drive home the
political implications of this new image regime, Steyerl’s
video includes a short passage from Sergei Eisenstein’s
October (1927)—to which the Steyerl’s title clearly refers—
that focuses in part on the Kazakhs’ alliance with Russian
proletarians during the Bolshevik seizure of power in
1917. At the time of October, revolution could be univer-
salized, a collective movement transcending boundaries
of ethnicity and nationality. These visions of solidarity
stand in marked contrast to November’s flux of signs,
characterized by virtual drift and endless exchange, struc-
turally matching the spread of interconnected markets but
leaving political struggles disjointed and disempowered
(Debordian spectacle and Deleuzian dispersal are today
far 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 truth
is 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 the
extremes of postmodern relativism (where, if all subjective
20 Grey Room 37
image. November also proffers a mournful reflection on the co-
optation of Steyerl’s own image. While documenting a Berlin
demonstration against the Iraq war, Steyerl was spotted by a tele-
vision director who knew of the artist’s video project. He quickly
placed a Kurdish flag around her neck and a torch in her hands,
told her to “look sad and meditative . . . as if you were thinking
about Andrea,” and filmed the results. Steyerl soon found herself
featured 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 in
November’s voice-over, such posturing is “more hypocritical
than even the crudest propaganda.” Like Wolf, Steyerl’s image
entered November’s infinite regress, wherein “we are all part of
the story, and not I am telling the story, but the story tells me.”38
As if to gain traction against such slipperiness, November
frequently interrupts its quick-paced cutting and diegetic trajec-
tory with self-reflexive tactics. For example, a series of shots in
the video focuses on the blinding light of a film projector (shown
precisely when a visually undocumented story—that of a recon-
structed witness account of Ronahî’s death—is being told). Or
we see close-ups of a grainy TV screen replaying footage from
videotapes (as when Ronahî is interviewed in Kurdistan). One
might view these moments in the video as yet another return to
critical 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 benchmark
Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978), which
mixed documentary footage and fictional dramatization within
a jigsaw-puzzle narrative. But although Steyerl’s own elegiac
work may share much with these previous efforts to come to
terms with revolution’s seeming impossibility, November does
22 Grey Room 37
revealed as subjective viewpoint? Steyerl’s conclusion is innov-
ative: If the one certainty about documentary film is the very
uncertainty of its claim to truth, as she suggests in a passage that
resonates with Rancière’s on “documentary fiction,” then “this
uncertainty 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’s
oppressive state, which has paradoxically led to Germany’s
crisis of Kurdish immigrants and specifically to the death of
Andrea Wolf, it does so via a subjective perspective, narrated by
Steyerl herself in a personal, idiosyncratic voice-over, delivered
without sourced authorities or other trappings of indubitable
evidence, positioned in the midst of its montage’s gaps and fis-
sures. Moreover, the poor quality of the video, owing to multiple
generations of copies and to the recording of imagery directly off
a TV screen, tends to derealize the video’s referents. While such
pirated imagery exemplifies Steyerl’s rebellious disregard for
image rights, it also reveals the intrinsic malleability of video’s
meanings. In other words, although truth should determine
politics rather than politics determining truth—as when
weapons of mass destruction are conjured out of thin air—
Steyerl knows that whatever truth she can deliver will also be
the 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 past
potential futures) provides the key to this work and its political
contestation. These “documentary fictions” not only reorganize
Opposite: Hito Steyerl. our political image of globalization, revealing its crisis points
November, 2004. Frame enlarge- and providing a more equitable division of appearance, both
ment. Courtesy the artist.
connective and critically comparative—as in Steyerl’s Germany
Below: René Viénet. Can and Kurdistan, McQueen’s Britain and the Congo, and Otolith’s
Dialectics Break Bricks? 1973.
As seen in Hito Steyerl. November, London and Mumbai. Their formal presentations also share the
2004. Courtesy the artist. rejection of the rhetoric of authority—whether of governmental
propaganda, media reportage, or
activist protest—that tends to situ-
ate the viewer in the role of passive
recipient of ostensibly factual
information. The power of Steyerl’s
video-essay, like the models of
McQueen and the Otolith Group,
lies in its capacity to motivate the
creative engagement of the specta-
tor without stultifying direction.
These essayistic documentaries do
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24 Grey Room 37
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 incapacities
attached to those places” that amount to so many “allegories
of inequality.”43
If defending the politics at the core of aesthetics sounds
romantic, then we should not be surprised that Rancière discov-
ers the origins of the current “aesthetic regime” in the writings
of the German romantic poet, dramatist, and philosopher
Friedrich Schiller, according to whom art’s placement of aes-
thetics and politics in indeterminate relation necessitates the
creative reinvention of each.44 For Rancière, Schiller’s aesthetics
proposes an autonomy of experience (and not of objects) that
defines 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 profound
relevance in today’s conflicted environment. Considering the
work of Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl in
light of such a proposition need not amount to a naive or foolish
privileging of art’s political claims and engagements over other
forms—whether social movements, activism, governmental or
nongovernmental politics—but it does resist those pressures to
hierarchize and police the public sphere and that dismiss all too
quickly the political engagements of artistic practice; it also
entails 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. To
suggest that globalization—as a sprawling and dispersed series
of 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 such
politics people not surprisingly will turn to other forums for
alternatives, to imagine new ways to reinvent the world.
1. For further information about and political mobilization around the Congo
conflict, see the websites of Friends of the Congo (http://www.friendsofthe-
congo.org) and Congo Global Action (http://congoglobalaction.org). These
groups estimate 5.4 million dead from war-related causes since 1998, making
Congo’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 Brief
History of the Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century (London: Allen
Lane, 2005). For a corrective to Friedman’s neoconservative position, see Ronald
Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo, The World Is Flat? A Critical Analysis of the New
York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman (Tampa: Meghan-Kiffer Press, 2006).
3. On the term corporate globalization, see David Graeber, “The New
Anarchists,” New Left Review 13 (January–February 2002). Graeber also notes
that “anti-globalization” is a misleading label coined by the conservative media
and 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 distinguish
a movement that resists both a regressive, localist “anti-globalization” and a
neoliberal “corporate globalization.”
4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Michael Hardt and
Antonio 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 ambivalent
and fraught nature of globalization, see Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization
as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson
and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
6. I take my cue from Hamza Walker’s perceptive essay that introduced
McQueen’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 and
imperialist, 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 America
could ever have had an independent history or culture.” Edward Said, Culture
and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), xx. For further criticism, see
Chinua 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 Seattle
protests in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Five Days That Shook the
World: Seattle and Beyond (London: Verso, 2000), with photographs by Allan
Sekula.
26 Grey Room 37
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 and
looting 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 primitive
accumulation.” 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 Robert
Reichs and Thomas Friedmans of the world, scandalous) about the new situa-
tion—the overtly ‘colonial’ character of the war in the Middle East, and the
nakedness with which the unfreedom of the free wage contract is now placed
back 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 video
and film, as well as the projected image and monitor-based presentations.
These various categories are increasingly treated as indistinct in contemporary
art: 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 across
both film and video, showing their final pieces on video; and Hito Steyerl
works mainly in video, using projection and monitors for its presentation.
13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the
Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 13.
14. Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New
Left Review 14 (March–April 2002): 151: Art’s unfulfilled political accom-
plishment, Rancière continues, means that “those who want to isolate it from
politics are somewhat beside the point” and that “those who want it to fulfill
its 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 the
politically exempted, which I examine further in relation to other of his works
in “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 a
real state of emergency” and “improve our position in the struggle against
Fascism” it was necessary to obtain a new “conception of history.” “Theses on
the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (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
28 Grey Room 37
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 who
actually employed methods of kidnapping they learned from films such as
Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) and Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege
(1972).
39. Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” 304. See also Hito Steyerl, Die
Farbe 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 enunciation
and dissemination on the market system itself. . . . A certain paralysis within
political art practice results while nonetheless allowing for enormous expansion
and 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 Critique
of Institutions,” Continental Drift (blog), 26 February 2007, http://brian-
holmes.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/. Or consider Gregory Sholette’s comment
that “It is simply no longer possible to disconnect the intention of an artist’s
work, 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.”