Affective-Political Work with DocumentsSharon Hayes and Yael Bartana

The Formation of Subject and Collective

The current exploration of Queer Archive and Speculative Futures experiments with aesthetic processes and different media technologies. Examples include works by the media and performance artist Sharon Hayes and by the video artist Yael Bartana. Both artists work with and on the archive, and are extraordinarily sensitive to the media-technical conditionality of memory, tradition, and documentation. And both understand subjectivation in relation to politics, gender, and sexuality in a way that cannot be adequately described either with reference to identity politics, social ontology (Judith Butler), or biopolitical models. In the following, I describe these aesthetic processes as affective-political work with documents.

Doing affective-political work with documents participates in the contemporary transformation of media culture into a media culture of affect. However, it also reacts to this development: as I show, affective-political work with documents resists the current tendency to understand the term of affect from the perspective of the influential, measurement-oriented branches of psychology, such as affective computing.11See also Anna Tuschling, ‘The Age of Affect Computing’, in Timing of Affect: Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics, ed. by Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, and Michaela Ott (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013), pp. 179–90. Rather than understanding affect on a psychological level, these artists conceive of it aesthetically and link it to the question of politics, that is to the question of a public sphere and the possibility of non-representative ‘collective utterances’.22Gilles Deleuze, Cinema, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986–89), ii: The Time-Image (1989), p. 222. In his books on cinema, Gilles Deleuze brings the problem to a head, asking how collective statements are possible when the people is missing as a possible point of reference for the political because it is dispersed among many minorities.33Ibid., pp. 219–20. In addition, female directors move at the margins solely because of their gender: it is not given to them, unlike the poet in Friedrich Hölderlin’s late poems according to Walter Benjamin, to live ‘the center of all relations’.44Walter Benjamin, ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’, in Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings and others, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1996–2003), i: 1913–1926 (1996), pp. 18–36 (p. 34). Female directors can refer neither to the present nor to the past of a people. They are even more summoned to ‘fabulate’, to issue collective utterances that, as Deleuze puts it, ‘are like the seeds of the people to come, and whose political impact is immediate and inescapable’.55Deleuze, Cinema, ii, p. 221. Based on this aesthetic reading, doing affective-political work with documents can work to politicize the notion of affect.

As Sharon Hayes mentions in a conversation regarding her work with sound documents:

One of the things I was most compelled by when I started collecting spoken words was the power of a voice to transport emotional affect and the centrality of the affect to operations of historical memory.66Sharon Hayes in Julia Bryan-Wilson, email interview with Sharon Hayes for the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts 2013 <http://herbalpertawards.org/artist/influences-2> [accessed 20 February 2024].

The Israeli video artist Yael Bartana, who has gained international notoriety with the trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007–11) and is the founder of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), emphasizes her interest in the aesthetics of the Zionist propaganda films of the 1920s and 1930s. The imaginative, seductive power of this world of images is simultaneously strong (in the sense of creative), manipulative, and powerful.77See also Yael Bartana interviewed by Michael Juul Holm as part of the ‘Louisiana Talks’ series, 'Yael Bartana: Returning 3.3 Million Jews', Louisianna Channel (2011) <https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/yael-bartana-returning-33-million-jews> [accessed 25 February 2025]. She inscribes a queer aesthetic in her critical exploration of the longing for collective redemption as expressed in Zionism and other nationalist movements.

The works of both artists are characterized by a high form of accuracy in their application of different media techniques and aesthetics. They are historically situated and informed by media theory, that is to say they involve recent media, culture, gender, and queer theories in their aesthetic processes and experiments. Both investigate the question of how we are formed as subjects in relation to a collective, a nation, or a community. Sharon Hayes’s work was shaped by her experiences and artistic experiments as a member of the ACT UP movement in New York in the early 1990s. Yael Bartana’s work centres on the ambivalent and traumatic historical experiences of Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish diaspora. Gender and sexuality here are an important aspect that challenges politics — not through the assertion of an identity politics but rather by working as factors that further differentiate, open, and complicate the relationship between subject formation and collectivity. Bartana is interested in the situation of the post-national, while Hayes explores the singular insofar as it passes through the political, the public sphere, collectives, and nations. Both work with various documents — namely sound documents, film documents, protocols — that they confront and which they build into a political aesthetics of affect and documentary procedure.

Affect

But what does ‘affect’ mean in the context of doing affective-political work with documents? Since the affective turn was declared in 2007,88The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). there has been a multitude of different theories that have aimed to describe, criticize, promote, and discursively embed media cultures of affect. In the field of queer theory, the public feeling movement is most influential, including the works of Ann Cvetkovich and of Lauren Berlant, as well as of Sara Ahmed.99Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Lauren Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism’, differences, 17.5 (2006), pp. 21–36; Lauren Berlant, ‘Slow Death’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (2007), pp. 754–80; and Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Following on from and critically engaging with Brian Massumi's interpretation of affect,1010Marie-Luise Angerer has summarized this discussion in her book Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007), an expanded version of which appeared in English as Desire after Affect, trans. by Nicholas Grindell (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014), and she further critically reflects on it in the collected essays Timing of Affect: Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013), which she co-edited with Bernd Bösel and Michaela Ott. various studies in New Materialism have theorized affect in a number of influential ways. Key among these is Steven Shaviro’s study Post-Cinematic Affect, which has significantly shaped the discussion on post-cinema.1111Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010).

In contrast to these new materialist theories of affect, however, I do not relate the concept of affect to psychology, but exclusively to aesthetics and the history of philosophy. With this, I refer to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which conceptualizes the notion of affect in aesthetic terms as a phenomenon of expression. As I explain below, the connection I make between affect and post-cinema thus goes in a different direction than Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect. To be sure, Shaviro also refers to Deleuze and Guattari when, in the introduction to his book, he states that the book’s objective is to provide an answer to the question of ‘what it feels like to live in the early twenty-first century’, while describing videos and films in the post-cinematic age as ‘blocs of affect’.1212Ibid., p. 2. He does not, however, base himself on Deleuze and Guattari for any further characterization of the notion of affect, but rather on the interpretation that Brian Massumi has provided in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.1313Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). In contrast to Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi sets out from the attempts of empirical psychology to measure affect on the organic body as pre-subjective psychophysiological reactions.1414See also ibid., pp. 23–25. Massumi affirms that the temporal delay that accompanies each measurement of affect is an indication of the impossibility of measuring the body’s being-in-motion and its processuality. He thus claims that affect, as an ‘incorporeal dimension of the body’,1515Ibid., p. 5. is responsible for the body-in-motion. While he initially refers to the difference between body and body-in-motion as an ontological difference, Massumi subsequently compares it with the physical difference between mass and energy that Einstein translated into the famous equation E= mc².1616See ibid. This oscillation between physical and ontological difference is further developed in Massumi’s interpretation of matter and immanence. Based on the difference between ‘body in motion’ and ‘body’, Massumi distinguishes affect from emotion. While he defines affect as primary and closer to life, asubjective or presubjective, unqualified and intensive, emotions are construed as derivative, conscious, defined, qualified, and meaningful; unlike affections, emotions have a ‘content’ and can be attributed to a subject.1717See ibid., pp. 27–28. Shaviro adopts this distinction and takes it further by claiming that subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have, or possess, their own emotions.1818See also Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, p. 3. Hence Shaviro clearly does not consider affects as aesthetic phenomena, but as energies and forces that overwhelm the subject and that are ‘give[n] voice’1919Ibid., p. 2. by the films and videos that he analyses as examples of Post-Cinematic Affect. Shaviro shares with Massumi and Fredric Jameson the assessment that our present time is characterized by an increase in affect and a disappearance of the subject. In contrast to Massumi, however, Shaviro expresses concern about this development, as he identifies a parallel between the increase and intensification of affective flows and the increase and intensification of capital flows. He argues that both invest and constitute subjectivity while simultaneously eluding subjective grasp.2020See also ibid., p. 5. Consequently the post-cinematographic media regime is characterized by the fact that it colonializes and destabilizes affect flow in the accelerated pace of neoliberal and capital flows, which leads to us finding ourselves in a ‘chronic condition of crisis’, in a state of exception that has become the norm, in a nightmare in which the digital-media controlled circulation of affect is overwhelmed by the circulation of capital.2121Ibid., p. 131. It therefore seems logical that Shaviro sees the only way out of the condition of the post-cinematic affect as residing in the intensification of the conditions propagated by the programme of accelerationist aesthetics.2222See also ibid., pp. 138–39. Adrian Ivakhiv rightly objects to Shaviro’s bottleneck of intensifying affect flows and intensifying financial cycles that it obliterates the difference between post-cinema and capitalism. While Ivakhiv concedes that cinema and capitalism are historically and technically interlinked, he expresses reservations that reducing cinema to capitalism would also miss out on the possibility of change in the world.2323Adrian Ivakhiv, ‘The Art of Morphogenesis: Cinema In and Beyond the Capitalocene’, in Post-Cinema Theorizing 21st-Century Film, ed. by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: Reframe Books, 2016), pp. 724–49 (p. 730) <https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/> [accessed 24 May 2024].

Shaviro refers to the videos and films that he considers as exemplary for post-cinematic affect as blocs of affect.2424Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, p. 2. As aforementioned, he bases himself on Deleuze and Guattari; at the same time, he correctly specifies in an endnote that Deleuze and Guattari do not consider the work of art as a bloc of affect, but as a bloc of sensation, that is to say, as a compound of percepts and affects.2525Ibid. p. 152. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 164. Shaviro does not comment further on this difference, even though it is precisely here that it becomes clear what he fails to acknowledge in his reference to Deleuze and Guattari: namely, that the latter interpret affect not in physical but in aesthetic terms with reference to the creation of artifacts. Unlike Massumi and Shaviro, Deleuze and Guattari do not understand affects as psycho-physical energies and forces. They refer affect to a formation of the subject that, as the French film scholar Jacques Aumont puts it, creates ‘new possibilities’ in the subject rather than overwhelm it.2626Jacques Aumont, L’Image (Paris: Arman Colin, 2011): ‘The image affects the subject not only by drawing nearer its imaginary: it changes the subject and lets new possibilities arise in it’ (p. 76; my translation). This difference points to those moments that distinguish the aesthetic processes of the queer post-cinema works presented here from the conditions of the Post-Cinematic Affect. Hence the works of Sharon Hayes and Yael Bartana are not exemplary for the question of ‘what it feels like to live in the early twenty-first century’, but rather position themselves on the margins on crucial questions such as how collective statements are possible when the people is dispersed among minorities, and how sexuality and politics relate to each other in these new structures of desire. They don’t seek the apocalyptical culmination of a state of exception but analyse relational structures between subjects and collectives that multiply differences. Rather than simply applying media techniques and giving voice to affect flows, they experiment with techniques and documents, and thereby create new structures of desire. They examine the relationships between subjects and collectives that do not level out but that multiply differences. To paraphrase Nick Davis, they create images of desire that make viewers consider the expansive, incompatible relationships inherent in all desire, whether explicitly eroticized or linked to broader notions of intensity, power, and production. I agree also with the conclusion that Davis draws from his reading of Deleuze’s cinema books and from the connection that exists between the desiring image and queer cinema as to the task of a contemporary queer cinema:

The task of queer cinema, then, is not to express forms of sexuality that are readily classifiable as gay, nor to translate preexisting models of desire into corresponding visual images, nor to characterize only the most prosperous states of sexual morphology, activity, and identification.2727Davis, The Desiring-Image, p. 69.

Instead, as Davis goes on to explain, queer cinema deconstructs automatic, idealized relationships within or about sex, gender, and desire by using cinematic forms and structures as its central means.2828Ibid.

Potentiality of the Past

In accordance with the Latin past participle affectus, which denotes a condition or a state of passion, excitation or desire, Deleuze and Guattari define the notion of affect as a condition and distinguish it from affections. Hence, affect is not to be understood as an individual emotional reaction to images, films, literature, or music, but in its literal sense as an emotional state that, as they emphasize, is independent or dissociated from empirical and accidental emotions. Together with perceptions, our perceived impressions — affects as detached or deterritorialized emotional states — constitute blocs of sensation that find their way into the arts as literature, painting, music, film, sculpture, installation, or performance. Contrary to an aesthetics that conceives of works of art — images, sounds, texts, films — as representations, reflections, or symbols, Deleuze and Guattari interpret works of art as preserved sensations or, as they also term them, ‘beings of sensations’ (êtres de sensations).2929Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 164. Works of art are created, as they explain, when it is possible to give perceptions and affections a hold in a material, often only a fleeting one, so that they exist independently of empirical feelings as beings of sensation. The actual specificity of art consists in the preservation of these fleeting forces. However, the preservation of art does not end with the durability of its materials. Rather, the preservation of perceptions refers to the duration of a state — in philosophical terms, its quality — that is independent from the extension or the factual existence of a thing (res) in the sense of being. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the scholastic distinction quid juris (What is the law?) and quid facti (What are the facts?), which Kant applied to the difference between the transcendental and empirical realm, to show that the duration of the sensory blocs does not refer to the realm of the factual but to the realm of potentiality.3030See also ibid., p. 163. As Deleuze and Guattari formulate it:

By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of the perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affects as the transition from one state to another.3131Ibid., p. 167.

The formulation ‘transition from one state to another’ is meant literally. It refers to a crucial point for the understanding of the relationship between subject formation and collective in the process of doing affective-political work with documents.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, affects are processes of becoming. As processes of becoming, however, affects add new variants and new varieties. Affects are pure potentialities. If affects are transitions to another state, then these states are infinitely differentiated. They draw people into the process of this differentiation whilst opening a space of difference that is at the same time a space of wishes in which present wishes and present desires, long-gone wishes and long-gone desires, criss-cross with one another. Aesthetic experience thereby provides access not only to the variants of the present, but to the potentiality of the past as well. Deleuze and Guattari further explain the difference that affects make as processes of being with reference to the commemoration of revolution:

A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their re-created protestations, their constantly resumed struggle. Will this all be in vain because suffering is eternal and revolutions did not survive their victory? 3232Ibid., p. 177.

For aesthetic experience, Deleuze and Guattari write,

the success of a revolution resides only in itself, precisely in the vibrations, clinches, and openings it gave to men and women at the moment of its making and that composes in itself a monument that is always in the process of becoming […]. The victory of a revolution is immanent and consists in the new bonds it installs between people, even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution’s fused materials and quickly give way to division and betrayal.3333Ibid.

In the Near Future

It is precisely in this sense that Sharon Hayes, in conversation with the artist Laurence Weiner, once insisted that feminism as a political movement had an impact on the formation of her political subjectivity. This is despite the fact that, being born in the early 1970s, she had not personally experienced the Second Wave of feminism at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. What determines this impact are the innumerable, unfulfilled hopes that have shaped her as a political subject even though the historical moment of feminism and its hopes were not her own. Indeed, it was precisely because, she adds, she had the experience of being shaped by a historical moment that was not her moment in history that she thinks differently about the victories and the failures of second-wave feminism when looking at a documentary image of this political movement.3434See also Sharon Hayes and Laurence Weiner, ‘A Conversation’, BOMB live: In the Open: Art+Architecture in Public Spaces, Weiner Studio, Greenwich Village, 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bviC4bfSAQw> [accessed 20 February 2024]. In her artistic work, Hayes takes this experience as her starting point, simultaneously problematizing and intensifying it, as can be seen in the pictures of the performance-based artwork In the Near Future.

In the Near Future consists of two parts. The first is a series of performative actions,3535Hayes refers to the work In the Near Future as an ‘action’, see the artist's website <http://shaze.info/work/in-the-near-future/> [accessed 20 February 2024]. See also Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘We have a Future: An Interview with Sharon Hayes’, Grey Room, 37 (2009), pp. 79–93 (p. 85) <https://doi.org/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.78>. the second, an installation in which the photographic documents of the actions are projected from multiple slide projectors. For the actions, which took place between 2004 and 2008, Hayes stood in prominent public places in six different cities (Brussels, London, New York, Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw), where she held placards for one hour at a time. The slogans on her placards were characterized by the fact that they had the character of ‘collective utterances’ of past protest movements, such as the slogan ‘I am a Man’ or ‘Ratify E.R.A. Now’ (Fig. 1). Hayes refers to these performances as ‘Iterations of Actions’. She emphasizes that the actions are not constructed as reenactments, but that they function as a citation that simultaneously marks the memory of a past protest and the possibility of a future one. In this way, she invited an audience to take documentary photographs of the actions from different perspectives. In the installation In the Near Future, shown in the Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver in 2011, thirteen non-synchronized slide projectors projected slides of thirteen different actions from different perspectives onto the walls in rapid succession (Fig. 2).

With each click of the projector, we have a hundredfold view of the artist on her own in various public spaces with her anachronistic protest posters. Moreover, these spaces are not those where the political demonstrations had originally taken place. The sheer number of images and the different perspectives that indicate the presence of the audience captured by the images transforms the singular action into a collective one. However, as the fleeting nature of the changing projections shows, we are dealing here with a new, increasingly differentiated hybrid collective. The reflecting and ever more differentiating movement of the images, as we can see in the picture of the singular posters, continues at the level of the relationship of gender, sexuality, and political space. The discrepancy between the utterance ‘I Am a Man’, which refers to the Civil Rights movement during the Memphis Sanitation Strike in 1968, and the gendered body of the placard holder, who stands alone on a street in New York City, raises new questions about the relationship between gender, race, sexuality, and political space, not to mention the possibility of collective utterances and related desire.

To Wonder: To Marvel and To Think

In his philosophy of cinema, Deleuze describes the affection-image as the second metamorphosis of the movement-image. The affection-image supersedes the perception-image (the first transformation of the movement-image) by refocusing the movement of the object onto the subject so that subject and object coincide. In this state of oscillation, the affection-image represents, as Deleuze puts it, ‘the way in which the subject perceives itself, or rather experiences itself or feels itself “from the inside” (third material aspect of subjectivity)’.3636Gilles Deleuze, Cinema, i: The Movement-Image (1986), p. 65. Deleuze concludes from this that in affect the movement-image becomes an expressive movement. Formally, this expressive movement appears as a condition in which an immobile unit and miniscule perceived motions maintain a balance. As he argues at one point, ‘the affection-image […] is potentiality considered for itself as expressed’.3737Ibid., p. 98. Cinematographically, the expressive movement finds its exemplary representation in the close-up of the human face. The decisive factor here is the round shape of the face, which represents a unity in itself and at the same time unites an infinite number of small movements of the facial muscles. For this formal reason, a landscape can also become a face in a certain sense, that is to say a representation of the movement of expression. A landscape mutates into an expressive movement when it becomes a reflected and reflecting unit that unites both poles of the reflecting unit and the intensive micro-movements.

Just such an expressive movement characterizes the opening scene in Yael Bartana’s video True Finn — Tosi suomalainen (2014). Commissioned by the Pro Arte Foundation Finland to create a video project as a public work of art, Bartana invited eight Finnish residents of different ethnic origin, skin colour, age, gender, and religious affiliation (or lack thereof) to a conference venue in the Finnish forest and asked them to consider the question, ‘What does it means to be a true Finn?’ The title True Finn is based on the name of the Finnish right-wing populist party True Finns, which won some seats at the 2015 parliamentary elections, a year after the videos were completed. Realized in the style of a reality TV show, the film involved Bartana accompanying the group with a camera for the entire duration of their stay. One of the tasks set for the protagonists was to design a new Finnish national anthem and a national flag that would take into account all the participants’ different ideas and expectations of a community that excludes no one. Similar to Bartana’s earlier works, True Finn — Tosi suomalainen also addresses notions of belonging and the affective relation between subject and collective. As in the trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007–11), Summer Camp/Awodah (2007), and Freedom Border (2003), True Finn also includes documents and resembles a documentary. The film opens with a collage of filmic archival material and contemporary landscape photographs from the conference venue at which the eight participants met (see Figs. 3 and 4).

The superimposition of temporal and pictorial planes, and the accompanying film music, which remains after the collage has ended, connect the archival landscapes with the contemporary landscape photographs beyond time and space in one single landscape, which in turn becomes a continuing expressive movement. The faces reflect the light and thereby become part of the expressive and deterritorializing movement of the cinematographic image — yet they do not merge with one another. Deleuze describes the substance of the affection-image as a form of affect that is composed of ‘desire and astonishment’. The affect composed of desire and astonishment can be seen in the ‘turning aside of faces in the open, in the flesh’.3838Ibid., p. 101. There is, however, also a mode of appearance of affect that Deleuze locates at the margins of the affection-image and in which fear and the phantasmal take the upper hand. The phantasmal emerges — as Deleuze mentions almost in passing and with reference to Kafka — when there is a collapse of affect and technics:

There is no close-up of the face. The close-up is the face […] a nudity of the face much greater than that of the body, an inhumanity much greater than that of animals.3939Ibid., p. 99.

The face as close-up has nothing individual about it; it suspends individuality, as is the case in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), for example, and manifests itself in the merging of faces into one another. In order to avoid this phantasmal collapse, as Deleuze argues,

[t]he affects would need to form singular, ambiguous combinations which were always recreated, in such a way that the related faces are turned away from each other just enough not to be dissolved and effaced.4040Ibid., p. 101.

Only this process assigns life and substance to the affection-image, which instead of ending in the phantasmal now culminates in the provocation posed by the following two questions: ‘What are you thinking about’ and/or ‘What do you sense or feel?’ Deleuze here refers to Descartes and Lebrun, who define astonishment as that which represents a maximum degree of reflecting unity.4141Ibid., p. 88. He cites the English verb ‘to wonder’, in which the connection between wonder and thought has been preserved. In other words, the affection-image forms a subject that opens itself, that wonders, and that begins to think in an emphatic sense. This is precisely what Aumont is referring to when he claims that the affection-image changes the subject and allows new possibilities to emerge from it.

In the opening sequence of Bartana’s video piece True Finn — and this is the effect of affective political work with documents in this instance — the change does not solely refer to the subject, but it also encompasses, as I show further on, the documentary material itself. Affective-political work here leads the document back into the open space of potentiality.

What Is a Document?

But what is a document? What is its epistemic status and what function does it assume in relation to subjectivation, politics, gender, and sexuality? The history of ‘the document’ is interwoven with the history of media. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, the notion of the document, which derives from the Latin term docere, to teach, was thus closely linked to teaching. Here I follow Renate Wöhrer’s historical interpretation, according to which the term ‘document’ designated anything ‘that served the purpose of teaching’.4242Renate Wöhrer, ‘Die Kunst des Dokumentierens. Zur Genealogie der Kategorie “dokumentarisch”’, in Beyond Evidence. Das Dokument in den Künsten, ed. by Daniela Hahn (Paderborn: Fink, 2016), pp. 5–17 (p. 10). See also Renate Wöhrer, Dokumentation als emanzipatorische Praxis. Künstlerische Strategien zur Darstellung von Arbeit unter globalisierten Bedingungen (Munich: Fink, 2015). The terminological connection to teaching was preserved until the eighteenth century, when oral agreements were starting to be replaced by written records and a document was considered a written piece of evidence pertaining to a fact. Documents became written records and written records became pieces of evidence. At the same time, the function of information transfer persisted, as Wöhrer emphasizes. With the change of scientific culture in the nineteenth century and the broadening of evidence to the empirical sphere, the notion of what was considered a document also expanded further. Determining factors in this context were the invention and the implementation of a variety of recording techniques that acted as both storage media and reproductive techniques, including film, photography, and the gramophone. The novelty of these recording techniques was their indexicality, which has constituted a particular feature of the documentary record up to the present day. At the same time, new text forms such as patent specifications and statistics emerged, leading to a pluralization of material and written media. This meant that every form of materially fixed knowledge that could be used for study, consultation, or proof became a document. The large quantity of documented knowledge called into life a new field of study, namely documentation, the role of which involved the indexing of stored knowledge. In documentation centres, collected material, which also includes images, films, and sounds is divided into information units, selected, and re-sorted using the same technical media that were now used to store and reproduce the material. Wöhrer stresses that collected texts, sounds, and images only became documents when they had passed through the process of documentation.4343See also Wöhrer, ‘Die Kunst des Dokumentierens’, p. 11. Wöhrer argues convincingly, therefore, that the category of the documentary and its emergence ought to be seen in connection with contemporary techniques of information indexing and practices of document production.

What emerges in these processes of institutionalized selection and sorting is not only the document as such, but also the very creation of reality itself. For what is considered a document serves, in both a scientific and a legal context, at once to secure and to legitimize truth in the sense of factuality. If this affective-political work leads the document back into the open space of potentiality, it also implies the reconstitution, through media-induced processes of identification, of aesthetic experiences in which the potentiality, or capacity, of the present is connected with the capacity of the past.4444See also Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 157.[Deleuze, Gilles] The aesthetics of affective-political document work thus not only represent, as I explained at the beginning, a politicization of the concept of affect; they also reconstruct the processes of differentiation that disappear in the identificatory processes of documentation and information indexing, and thus give back to history its potentiality. In conclusion, I would like to concretize this argument using two moments, one from the work of Bartana and one from that of Hayes, through which I return to the question of what this affective-political document work means for the structure of subjectivation, politics, gender, and sexuality.

Playing Fields for Testing Collective Statements

The first example refers to a scene in True Finn and the creation of a new national anthem (Figs. 5 and 6). After the camera has accompanied all the participants into different situations and shown how they have drafted their individual texts for a new Finnish anthem, they appear sitting together at a table, trying to combine their texts into a joint anthem.

The question raised by the anthem here concerns who is included in the community. Is it all creatures? All humans? Women and men? Are bears included, insofar as the bear appears everywhere as a symbol of Finland, even in its saunas? What role does religion play? When the suggestion is made to include the sentence ‘In the community we can be free, gay, and weak’, one participant leaves the room: she does ‘not feel happy’ about this affirmation of homosexuality, which she deems incompatible with her Christian confession of faith.

Those who remain try to find a compromise. After a period of discussion, they agree on the following sentence: ‘In the community we can be free, equal, and weak.’ The participant who felt offended feels able to accept this statement and so rejoins the circle. But introducing sexuality and using ‘equal’ as a replacement for ‘gay’ directly concerns the possibility of collective utterances. This act of replacement works to conceal this difference in sexual orientation and masks the homophobia that had marred the community feeling of the small group. Is this how collective utterances are formed? Is there no community without exclusion? The film does not provide an answer, the conflict is not resolved, and a sense of discomfort remains. This is not the way to found a nation. The relation between subjectivation, politics, sexuality, and, gender starts to unfold as a process of differentiation.

The second example refers to the single-channel video piece Ricerche: Three, which Sharon Hayes exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2013.4545The work was also shown at the 2014 International Women’s Film Festival in Dortmund/Cologne where it was referred to as a documentary film <https://frauenfilmfest.com/movie/ricerche-three> [accessed 20 February 2024]. It is the first work of the on-going video series Ricerche that sets out from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 documentary Love Meetings (Comizi d’Amore) to stage a contemporary inquiry into the ‘sexual problem’ in the US today. Pasolini, who shaped the aesthetics of queer cinema even before the term came into being, offers some particularly complex reflections on the relationship between sexuality, religion, nation, political subjectivation, and collectivity. In Love Meetings, Pasolini, with his camera team in tow, quite literally mingles with people to discuss sexuality, a taboo subject in Italy at the time. Pasolini, however, deemed it necessary to talk about sexuality. So he travelled from the north to the south of Italy and spoke to people of all classes and walks of life about sex during and after marriage, about divorce, prostitution, homosexuality, religion, and the position of women; he also spoke with kids about the question of where children come from. What is special about this survey is Pasolini’s interview technique. He interviews people in groups, gets them to speak in turn, does not judge them, and allows a lot of space in the film for the listeners’ movements and the way in which they touch one another, as well as for their expressions of laughter, anger, and embarrassment. These are collective interviews. Julia Bryan-Wilson correctly writes that the film is less a sociological study than a lesson in the epistemological uncertainty of documentary film.4646Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘Sharon Hayes Sounds Off’, Afterall, 38 (Spring 2015), pp. 16–27 (p. 23) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1086/​681283>.

In the Ricerche series Hayes adopts the process of the collective interview and gives as much space to her subjects’ physical contact, non-verbal interaction, games, and attractions as to their singular, differentiating, and often contradictory statements. Pasolini divided his film into five chapters, and Hayes’s videos are loosely based on this structure. Of the five planned works, four have been carried out so far. The two-channel video Ricerche: One (2019), evokes the same question that Pasolini posed to children in the streets of Rome at the beginning of his film, asking how babies are born. Hayes, for her part, went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she visited an annual gathering for LTGBQ+ families and interviewed a group of children aged five to eight. At the same time, she invited another group of older kids, all born into LGBTQ+ families in the 1980s and 1990s, to do a collective interview. Ricerche: One presents the answers of both groups, beginning with the responses to Pasolini’s original question about how children are born. The reactions make visible the persistent pressure of heteronormativity and the complex issues of race and class that arise within queer participation in reproductive technologies. However, the children also provide impressive information about the changes that have taken place in recent years.

The 2020 two-channel video Ricerche: Two is an interview with twenty-three members of two women’s tackle football teams in Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas. The participants talk about their passion for the sport, family, sexuality, and gender. They also address the financial and social barriers to playing professional football, challenging precisely, insistently, and imaginatively the normative notions of gender and the category of ‘woman’. Ricerche: Four (2024), was exhibited as an installation in New York at the Whitney Biennal 2024. The installation consisted of an 80-minute two-channel 4k video, various chairs, and a bench. Visitors to the exhibition gathered on the seating and listened to LGBTQIA elders reflect on their lives, sexualities, and identities in response to Sharon Hayes’s questions.

For the first video of the Ricerche series, Ricerche: Three (2013), Hayes visited Mount Holyoke, a female student college in Massachusetts, and invited the students to the outdoor film recordings (Fig. 7). Women’s colleges in the US have developed from the institutions of yesteryear in which students receive a conservative education to the environments of today in which very open discussions about sexuality, gender identity, globalization, racism, and colonialism are facilitated. These colleges have become a sanctuary for progressive gender politics and for experiments with gender identity. The discussion shows that not all female students feel like women, and they show the extent to which this young, international generation considers gender binaries to be restrictive.

Similar to Pasolini’s Love Meetings, Hayes’s collective interviews do not aim to create a unitary, representative voice. Rather, as becomes clear in the course of the discussion, the community of Mount Holyoke College is polyphonic. The same is true of her subjects’ perspectives on feminism. There are as many positions as there are voices. However, and this is also shown by the film, the feminist movement remains intact in its potentiality as a point of reference. As Bryan-Wilson puts it, feminism exists simultaneously as a historical artifact and as a vital, contemporary arena for pluralistic debates. Just as Todd Haynes did in his early films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Poison, and Safe, the young women also make reference to this potentiality. In other words, feminism becomes the playing field for testing collective statements. It is precisely here, however, that the potentiality that links the past and the present while opening the future becomes effective. Opening up a space in which possible variants of the present and of political subjectivization can emerge: this is what political-affective work with documents is all about.