TY - JOUR
AU - Bruce, Caitlin, Frances
AB - Abstract This article considers Renzo Martens's controversial 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty). Martens's film is a conceptual film that satirizes documentaries about poverty in Africa by exposing the ways in which consumers of poverty images enjoy such images. It argues that the film, which creates troubling identifications and disidentifications for a Western spectator, offers a politically productive lesson on the power of discomfort to disrupt unethical image practices. Communication studies scholars have engaged in these conversations via studies about identification and disidentification and the documentary genre; affect in cinematic media; and more directly, through work that investigates the perils of cookie-cutter frames for representing (racialized) poverty. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.” Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977) Susan Sontag's opening salvo in her landmark essay, On Photography, encapsulates a longstanding anxiety about photographic practice. To picture the world is to have (or believe one has) power over it. Moreover, the passage implies that belief in such knowledge feels powerful, yet, such agentive inflation involves an act of unsanctioned capture. Thus, in Sontag's view, photography occupies a slippery ethical location and, at best, a questionable epistemological one. From the muckraker journalism of Jacob Riis and fellows photography has played a key role as political and documentary technology, relied upon heavily to promote humanitarian aid projects (Chouliaraki, 2010; Manzo, 2008), using images as forms of evidence with the implied belief that seeing can be tied to action. Lamentably, such well-intentioned practices frequently serve to bolster or foster disidentification on the part of a socially distant spectator with respect to the marginalized photographic subject. By disidentification I mean the reinforced perception of social distance and difference. Such disidentification, T. J. Demos and Hilde Van Gelder (2013) and Reginald Twigg (2008) have argued, produces an experience of pleasure or enjoyment in spectators. Such pleasure can be derived from the self-righteous feelings of pity that such images may evoke, as well as from gratification insofar as such images reinforce the privilege and distance from suffering on the part of the viewer. The documentary film, in particular, about Africa as a scene of suffering (Klotman & Cutler, 1999; Murphy, 2000; Ukadike, 2009), offers an exemplary genre where technologies of representation, sentimentality, identification, and disidentification come into play, and this genre has received substantial scholarly attention (Bruzzi, 2006; Colleyn, 2009; Ruby, 2000; Spence & Navarro, 2010). In this article, I investigate a film that inhabits the documentary impulse in order to transform it (Minh-ha, 1990). Renzo Martens's 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty), is a conceptual film that satirizes documentaries about poverty in Africa by exposing the ways in which consumers of poverty images enjoy such spectatorship. Communication studies scholars have obliquely engaged in conversations about the politics, affect, and ethics of witnessing the suffering of another via studies about Burkean identification and disidentification (Biesecker, 1997); affect in cinematic media (Irwin, 2013; Ott, 2010); and more directly, through work that investigates the perils and possibilities of representing suffering (Bell, 2008; Chouliaraki, 2010; Shome, 1996) or representing (racialized) poverty (Parameswaran, 2009; Twigg, 2008). This film in particular is a compelling object for communication studies because it not only criticizes humanitarian and documentary forms, but it also literally enacts those very regimes that it criticizes to generate discomfort. The film triggers an effect of disgust in audiences and critics—evident in Paul O'Kane's observation that the film “gets under one's skin,” Demos's claim that it “haunts,” and blogger Koen's complaint that it is “uncomfortable,”—disgust that propels its ongoing circulation in blogs, journals, and art magazines. From its opening scene, Enjoy Poverty is a study in discomfort. Interviews are carried out with painful transparency; self-important monologs trail off into silence and wandering camera shots; images of fragile and broken African bodies are displayed to pornographic effect; while vulture-like media agents, as well as humanitarians, are displayed at their most Machiavellian. The film yields an alienating palimpsest of disaster pornography, documentary realism, and surrealist high art. But for whom does the film incite discomfort? Lest the viewer be unsure, Martens insists at key junctures that the final product will be in English and shown in Europe for a White and affluent audience that is socially and spatially distant from the manifold scenes of suffering in which Congolese subjects of the film are situated. Following the reflexive practice of cineastes such as Jean Rouch and Trinh Minh-hà, Martens refuses the feel-good approach that he believes infuse aid and documentary photo regimes by exposing the self-interest that underwrites sentimental approaches to representing poverty, no matter how well intentioned. In the film, we follow Martens to villages, refugee camps, plantations, gold and oil prospecting ventures, an art gallery, and a World Bank meeting, each illuminating different facets of structural poverty in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Through this cinematographic collage, Martens explores the Congolese individuals' subjective experience of poverty as well as the different responses to poverty that range from bald indifference, to well-intentioned aid, to depoliticizing pity. However, the process of creating such a spectacle for Western eyes is not simple documentation, but rather involves reproducing feelings of chronic disappointment to be experienced by Congolese subjects. Enjoy Poverty exposes the ethical quandaries that arise in visual encounters with poverty on the part of a privileged, often Western subject. In viewing poverty, one often experiences a pleasurable sense of disidentification—the recognition that the subject on display is economically and socially other, but also a sense of identification with the anticipated subject position of spectator and potential humanitarian donor. This communicative function of identification and disidentification has been explored in rhetorical studies where scholars have challenged common-sense understandings of identification as simple audience acceptance or agreement. For instance, Barbara Biesecker explores Kenneth Burke's influential identity-division dyad, arguing that “Identification does not, however, produce a unity in the proper sense of the word,” evident in Burke's own argument that to think about identification is “to confront the implications of Division” (Biesecker, 1997, p. 48–49). Instead of promoting a restored sensus communis, identification is part of the work of the social that is a continually unfolding chain of differences, a “catachresis [misnaming].” In this reading of Martens's film, disidentification is more ambivalent than pleasurable, and identification shifts from being a guarantee of cathartic communion to an indication of culpability. Instead of trying to reduce distance, or inspire identification, Martens turns the process of disidentification into an uneasy experience by highlighting the pleasure in such viewing transactions, a phenomenon that is frequently effaced. The film renders the distance between poor and privileged subject even more unbridgeable by calling into question the spectator's capacity for agentive and reparative action, forcing them to reidentify with several unsavory characters in the film, such as donor, plantation owner, opportunistic photojournalist, self-interested aid worker, and cynical prospector. In this article, I suggest that the film, a scandalous work of artistic egoism, offers a tentative political strategy of discomfort that has potential political and even ethical purchase. The film offers an aesthetic and political critique that works as an affective virus that is not easily satisfied or expunged. To develop this argument, the essay unfolds in four parts. First, I situate this study among discussions in documentary theory and communication studies about reflexive documentary and humanitarian representations of suffering. Second, I discuss the narrative arc of the film in which Martens illuminates but also participates in perpetuating misery. Third, by investigating critical receptions of the film, I suggest that the pattern of responses (mostly negative and angry) indicates that the film works along an infection model as a kind of aesthetic virus. Fourth, I conclude with a discussion of the political potential that the film germinates as an enactment (and critique) of what Lauren Berlant (2011) describes as cruel optimism, an alternative that allows for the possibility of more equitable relationships with photographic subjects as subjects (and not objects) of aid, but only insofar as such practices are taken with a substantial grain of discomfort. Reflexive documentary and humanitarian representation From its beginnings, documentary has been a difficult to define genre. Often defined in the negative, as a “non-fiction film” (Bruzzi, 2006, p. 6), documentary can range from impersonal narrations of human and natural landscapes, to intensely subjective engagements with an individual or individuals' lives. In the space afforded here, it is not possible to fully account for the range of practices in documentary from 1926 to the present, nor the critical discourse that has surrounded it. For the purposes of this essay, documentary refers to a nonfiction film that is “predicated upon a dialectical relationship between aspiration and potential…between the documentary pursuit of the most authentic mode of factual representation and the impossibility of this aim” (Bruzzi, 2006, pp. 6–7). Martens's film is a kind of art-documentary, an increasing trend in the art world that evinces yet another key element of the documentary impulse, the potential for documentary to be a means of political worldmaking. In this model, documentary filmmaking is a public sphere activity where those on the margins can articulate new or different interpretations of reality, “one of the forms through which new attitudes enter wider circulation, through…the articulation of the social actors who participate as subjects” (Chanan, 2007, p. 7). Martens's film critiques this political aspiration of some documentary practice, and my analysis of Enjoy Poverty contributes to conversations about how one can imagine the documentary's role as a social and political resource (Bell, 2008; Chanan, 2007; Hermansen, 2014; Irwin, 2013; Lancioni, 1996; Nisbet & Aufderheide, 2009). Enjoy Poverty elicits affects of discomfort in audiences and challenges their agency as members of a public sphere. In so doing, it exhibits Bruzzi's characterization of documentary as a “performative” practice of aspiration coming up against limitations of the apparatus. Martens's film can be characterized as a “reflexive” documentary (Nichols, 2001) because it makes explicit the performative and constructive character of the film itself, spotlighting the role of the filmmaker as author who produces a particularized model of truth. This reflexive mode shares a critical perspective with another scholarly tendency that provides an implicit frame for Martens's work, critiques of shock approaches to humanitarian witnessing as well as skepticism about rosy representations of suffering populations. Lille Chouliaraki (2010) charts these dual tendencies in communication studies approaches to humanitarian representation, pointing to the move from “shock politics” to a more contemporary approach that can be characterized as a “post humanitarian” style of appeal that “privilege[s] low-intensity emotions and short term forms of agency” (p. 108). The two approaches, grand emotional appeal and more modest suggestions (liking a page on Facebook, for instance) also evince two understandings of the political. The former, based on Enlightenment, Universalist morality approach links “justice with pity,” while the latter, in avoiding pity, also avoids questions of justice. The language of “grand suffering” in the shock politics model, however, paradoxically undermines justice, claims Chouliaraki, by collapsing the political into the social, avoiding long-term assessments in favor of short-term crisis management. Communication studies of humanitarian discourses and representations (Aradau, 2004, p. 277), Chouliaraki clarifies, can be understood as “a history of the critique of its aesthetics of suffering,” which criticizes both the “emotions of guilt and indignation” that align with “‘shock’ aesthetics” as well as “the emotions of empathy and gratitude associated with the ‘positive image’ campaigns” (2010, p. 110). Both approaches, shock and positive image, rely on a “documentary mode.” In shock approaches, however, the content is largely of suffering, characterized by starving children, damaged bodies, with a “lack of eye contact” that incites a voyeuristic gaze (Chouliaraki, 2010, p. 110). This representative mode reinforces distance between the spectator and the suffering body (Chouliaraki, 2010, pp. 110–111). Positive image appeals, on the other hand, “focus on the sufferer's agency and dignity,” individualizing suffering and emphasizing sufferers as “participants in development projects” as well as personalizing the relationship between donor and recipient through practices like child sponsorship (Chouliaraki, 2010, p. 112). Both approaches can have perverse effects. Shock approaches can mire the spectator into inaction from guilt and shame, and the latter, in avoiding these affects, can ignore spectator complicity that perpetuates practices that drive suffering (Chouliaraki, 2010, p. 114). The “post-humanitarian” move, then, is when some NGOs use branding campaigns that focus less on those who suffer and more on the feelings of donors. It is, Chouliaraki cautions, a “political culture of communitarian narcissism…that renders the emotions of the self the measure of our understanding of the sufferings of the world at large,” or a sort of simple identification model that ignores how the “public circulation of emotion and action” is “inscribed in systematic patterns of global inequality…hierarchies that divide the world into zones of Western comfort and safety and non-Western need and vulnerability” (pp. 120–121). It is precisely this unequal economy of emotion that Enjoy Poverty activates through repertoires of reflexive documentary, photographic realism, and the repetition of such “shock” and “positive image” approaches within a larger frame of satirical narcissism. Enjoy Poverty: Moving from photographic promise to photographic cruelty in the imaging of poverty Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, directed and produced by Martens, is the product of 2 years of filming across the DRC. It opens with an image of a plantation field over the diegetic sounds of a worker cutting foliage. Laboring under a blindingly bright sun, he explains to the camera how 3 days of work amounts to little more than half a dollar. This first scene is cut to another, in a refugee camp, covered with UN logos, where smiling aid workers both distribute blankets and gleefully take photographs of their colleagues' efforts. The grinning Caucasian aid workers offer a sharp contrast to the malnourished and grim African bodies that serve as objects of aid and photography. The camera zooms in on the lower body of a UN soldier, blue helmet held in the same hand that rests lightly on a machine gun. Thus, in the first 5 minutes of Enjoy Poverty, through a series of “contrasts and contradictions” (Spence & Navarro, 2010, p. 175), we see that plantation labor, unequal processes of image making, aid apparatuses, and military institutions are linked together as integrated components of a system that is fuelled by poverty, producing kinds of enjoyment. The third scene features Martens as protagonist and primary object. The spectator is transported to a boat, the scene captured by a shaky, handheld camera. Disembarking from the vessel a second hand-held camera zooms in on Martens's face, sweaty, pale, and covered in a straw hat. Behind him the Congolese fishing village becomes mere background (Figure 1). Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Martens in Fishing Village. Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2008 (Film Still). Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Fons Welters Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Martens in Fishing Village. Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2008 (Film Still). Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Fons Welters Martens blinks sweat out of his eyes, and is followed by three Congolese pack-bearers, who carry heavy metal boxes atop their heads. Martens states, to the camera, or to himself, underscoring the reflexive character of the film: “You cannot give them anything they do not already have. You have to empower them…the world has changed…[there are] new markets, new opportunities.” In this scene, Martens is revealed to be a sort of avatar for Western, neoliberal savior figures who attempt to teach locals to escape from misery, a cinematic trope with a long history (Shome, 1996). He also parrots an “empowerment” discourse that mimics NGO proclamations (Chandler, 2001). The film is readable as a documentary, in large part, because of the key role that interviews play as forms of evidence (Spence & Navarro, 2010). After visiting a site with international photographers who photograph militia members' corpses, Martens interviews an Italian photographer for Agency France Presse (AFP). This conversation later serves as an evidentiary frame for Martens's “lessons” for local photographers. The photographer explains to Martens that he receives 50 euros per image and 300 euros per story, an image market driven by “supply and demand” for negative imagery of death and dying, underscoring the film's critique of the “shock” approach to humanitarian documentation. As the photographer edits images of corpses on his computer, Martens asks. “Who is the owner…Whose property are the pictures…And the people that you have photographed…are they the owners too?” “No, because I took the pictures,” the photographer retorts, matter of factly. Martens presses: “But they make the situations that create the picture.” The responder reflects, “But I make of that situation a picture…there are thousands of situations, to make of a situation a picture makes that picture mine.” This central scene underscores the unequal relations that structure nearly every photojournalistic or humanitarian encounter in the film and we have come to the crux of the film's critique: The situations that provide the raw material for photographs and images of suffering, that justify the massive flows of development aid that amount to a greater percent of the DRC's Gross Domestic Product than gold, coltan, and oil, are not considered the property of those represented. The moment of photographic decision, elected by the photographer, figures as sovereign. In the AFP photographer's arguments a picture of the common-sense approach of the media regime emerges, one that privileges photographers and not subjects. Instead of a civil contract of photography, what philosopher Ariella Azoulay (2008) describes as the triangular relationship between photographer, subject, and spectator, where each party takes part in an ongoing negotiation over meaning, the subject is cut out, and the image becomes a space of exchange for only the photographer and the spectator. This situation also is a metaphor for the unequal power relations involved in constructing a documentary, where, even though the genre implies a robust relationship between filmmaker, social actors, and audience, we instead see at every juncture of Enjoy Poverty the agency of the social actor being mitigated. Martens uses this information to formulate the lesson he delivers to a group of local photographers in a schoolhouse, taking on the role of messianic Western figure. Dramatically written on a whiteboard is the question: “A qui appartient la pauvreté/i?” Martens expounds, The fundamental question is: to whom does poverty belong? If it can be sold, it is important to know who the owner is…Since it brings in money, donors, and even individuals…You are not only the beneficiaries of the good will of others, of NGO's and agencies that come to help you, [to whom] you should be endlessly grateful. No. You are also actors, important actors in this world. If poverty is like a gift that creates deeper understanding, you also give it back to the world. People come to visit you. It is something that makes us happy…There will always be people visiting you, taking pictures, supposedly funding projects…Let's say they will have freely captured your poverty while you don't benefit too much. It's a resource. In this lesson, Martens exhorts local photographers to take hold of their agency as “important actors in the world” who are partners, not just beneficiaries, a performance of the “positive image” approach to humanitarian representation. In plain terms, he describes the experience of viewing poverty by a Western subject as an experience of being made happy. We are reminded of the aid workers in early moments of the film who gleefully take photos of refugees as they hand out blankets, their enjoyment visceral and visible. The local photographers, who own a photo shop that specializes in celebrations (birthdays, weddings, etc.), are accustomed to a photographic economy that privileges moments of happiness. However, in light of the conversation with the AFP photographer, we the viewers know that positive press does not sell, and, thus, Martens endeavors to persuade the local photographers to shift from positive to negative subject matter, a performance that brutally caricatures the “shock” or disaster pornography approach to journalistic and humanitarian image making (Chandler, 2001). Again, at the Whiteboard, Martens highlights profit over positive content and posits that the two photographic genres that one can partake in are of celebrations and war. He explains that were they to act “rationally” local photographers would be photographing suffering, explaining that photographers make one dollar a month photographing parties, but 1,000 a month photographing “the option of raped woman, cadavers and malnourished children.” Martens brings his students into the field, visiting a plantation and a clinic. In the clinic, two malnourished children sit on a cot crying (Figure 2). Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Kanyabayonga Photographers in Hospital. Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2008 (Film Still). Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Fons Welters Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Kanyabayonga Photographers in Hospital. Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2008 (Film Still). Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Fons Welters “You must choose the worst cases,” he urges, pantomiming photojournalistic economic imperatives. The doctor takes the children's clothing off in order to showcase their protruding ribs, scapula, and distended bellies. After the lesson Martens unpacks (for a second time) the metal boxes with which he has travelled. Inside are fluorescent lights in the shape of letters that, when mounted on a sign made out of crosshatched sticks, and powered by a mobile generator, reads “Enjoy Poverty” with “please” blinking in a smaller font between “Enjoy” and “Poverty” (Figure 3). Figure 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Enjoy Poverty Celebration. Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2008 (film still). Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Fons Welters Figure 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Enjoy Poverty Celebration. Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2008 (film still). Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Fons Welters It is dusk, and villagers have gathered around Martens. He announces: “You are…the people that aid the rest of the world… Africans are taking charge of their own resources.” The villagers clap and he turns on the sign and a celebration begins. Here, this paradoxical injunction to represent the photographers as agents, a kind of “positive image approach” is sustained through the repetition of shock images by the Congolese themselves. In this first movement of Martens-as-savior, we are offered an optimistic vision of what can take place when the Congolese take hold of their own situation. Yet, this feeling of elation is soon disrupted. In the following scene, Martens brings the local photographers to meet with a Mr. Fred of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to try to get press passes for MSF hospitals. Seated around a low table, Martens explains to Mr. Fred that the photographers of Kanyabayonga have learned that there is more money in poverty than parties, and they would like press passes in order to take photographs in MSF hospitals. Unsurpisingly Mr. Fred is taken aback, angrily responding that the MSF is not there to “make an exhibit of…misery,” clearly troubled by the idea that the photographic economy of misery might infect discourses of good will and MSF ideologies of “humanitarian witnessing” (Givoni, 2011). Martens retorts that international photographers do the same thing, selling their photographs of suffering. Mr. Fred shifts tactics, first arguing that international photographers “make news, not money,” and then criticizes the aesthetic flaws in the local photographers' sample images, conveying the hypocrisy at work in Western media-aid apparatuses. In trying to enable the Kanyabayonga photographers to benefit from their own media representations, and failing in the face of unequal power relationships, Martens illuminates, painfully, how a just civil contract of photography is structurally undone through self-serving humanitarian aid regimes that largely benefit Western denizens. At the end of the meeting, walking along a dusty road, Martens turns to the local photographers and flatly states: “I think it will fail. You do not have a press card, you do not have internet access…I have the impression there are many obstacles.” The local photographers are crestfallen, mouths open, shoulders hunched, they stare off into the distance and then walk away aimlessly in different directions. Did Martens ever think his endeavor would succeed? Before coming to Kanyabayonga he reveals multiples scenes of structural inequality, all pointing to the fact that the poverty of the Congolese is enjoyed specifically when they are positioned as victims and objects of aid, not subjects of their own future. Martens could have predicted such an outcome from the beginning. So why the cruel, and narcissistic, demonstration? The lesson for the photographers is yet another form of demonstration for the film's viewers, one that works based on the cruel experience of disappointment by the Congolese photographers. This demonstration of disappointment happens at other junctures in the film. During a third celebration around the “Enjoy Poverty” sign, Martens tells the plantation worker shown at the opening of the film that he will never escape poverty. The hurtfulness of such a statement is evident, as the man's features slacken, his eyes widen, and he is rendered speechless. Martens explains: Martens: “If you are going to wait for your salary to increase so you can be happy, you'll be unhappy your whole lives.” Man 1: “We'll gladly accept whatever you can do for us when you get back.” Martens: “There is nothing prepared.” Man 1: “There is nothing prepared?” Martens: “There is nothing prepared.” Man 1: “Once you go back, you can't deliver reports?” Man 2: “Why did you come here?” Martens: “To tell you [that] you better enjoy poverty, rather than fight it and be unhappy. Do you want to remain unhappy all of your life, because of poverty? You need to accept things the way they are. Be happy despite poverty…If you accept what you cannot change you can have a bit of peace in your hearts and minds.” Man 3: “Will you project the film here?” Martens: “The film will be shown in Europe, not here.” Man 1: “We accept poverty…and will be happy despite it.” Martens: “Experiencing your suffering makes me a better person. You really help me. Thank you.” This scene takes place in the glow of the “Enjoy Poverty” sign at night on a beach. In this third scene, Martens performs a reversal of the meaning of the sign: The Congolese must enjoy their poverty as destiny rather than profitable resource. The usual procedures of humanitarian aid, which involve collecting data, creating reports, all of which Martens has done, are rendered meaningless. “There is nothing prepared,” he emphasizes. The “nothing” is not a lack of a material, but absence of belief in the promise of data collection and reparative action. The film too is “nothing” in this second sense, it is ineffective, purely a vehicle for enjoyment. Moreover, the tacit (but, per Martens, erroneous) belief that the contract of taking pictures or images of the poor in some way benefits them is disrupted. The film will never be shown to those who create the situation that enables Martens to make an image. In a final blow, Martens expresses that he benefits from the vicarious experience of suffering, an asymmetrical enjoyment from which the Congolese can never fully benefit. The scene is profoundly discomforting, revealing that it is not quite “nothing,” because we witness not only optimism being shattered, but also the persistence of an unequal power relationship even after its promise of rescue has been revoked: the infectious nature of humanitarianism, repeated and mutated by Martens. Martens, standing in for exploitative aid and image regimes, demonstrates the perversity of a system where those who are the most subjugated must enjoy their position of subordination and affectively buy into it. The three men quickly adopt his proposition: “We accept poverty…and will be happy despite it.” Uncomfortable viewers: Disidentification, reidentification, and disgust Paul O'Kane observes that Martens's film “gets under everyone's skin” (2009, p. 813). Indeed, in the blogosphere following the release of the film, viewers describe their experience as one of shock, offense, and discomfort. On May 11, 2009, Nikolaj Nielson posted a review of the film on the blog “Human Rights: A World Affairs Blog Network,” a subsidiary of a network of global-issues-blogs made up of contributors from “journalism, academia, business, non-profits and think tanks.” Established in 2007 as part of the Foreign Policy Association, itself founded in 1918 “by concerned journalists and citizens,” Human Rights is populated by the very agents that Martens's film satirizes: aid workers, foreign policy experts, NGO members, and journalists. Nielsen glosses the film, noting Martens's criticisms of humanitarian organizations and their consumption of poverty and concludes noting that “decontextualization” of agencies such as MSF “will surely offend” (2009). What is notable is the limited range of comments in response to Nielson's piece, such relative silence on the message boards evidence that the film renders viewers ill, or mute. First, Felani Manu (2009) notes that Martens sparks “offense” because he is challenging “conventions.” Second, Yaco8 (2010) laments that the structural nature of poverty is so entrenched that little will change until reductions in Western consumption and collective commitments to “sustainability principles” can take place. Yaco8 continues: “In the meantime, Renzo Martens is right, Congolese may as well get used to poverty and enjoy it,” a cinematic proposition presented in a manner that is “shockingly excellent” (2010). The first post, which notes the sense of offense or scandal Martens's film elicits, gestures to the perverse identification that it can induce. As we see in the second post, viewers can no longer see themselves as benevolent donors. Instead of a safe, protected distance, such distance is rooted in misunderstanding and incomprehension that is responded to not by dialogic engagement on the basis of equality, but instead interventions that perpetuate injustice. Such difference and disidentification with the poor makes viewers complicit in a structure of exploitation, forcing them to assume a troubling reidentification with their position as potential donor. The film's infectious nature is evident in two other posts marking the sense of powerlessness that it elicits. Koen (2009) states: “Hate it or love it…just watch it. And then, well, go do something meaningless like writing a post on some internet site.” The film produces the proliferation of yet more empty gestures, an uncontrollable repetition. Ernie responds (2009): “I came across this movie on TV but the scene it just showed was the little boy discovered dead. I couldn't bear it…So here I go, Koen, doing something meaningless—shedding my tears and postin [sic] this one. Peace.” Repeating a sense of political impotence, Ernie's gesture seems to be one of the primary effects of the film. It generates a sense of stuckness and deflation. The “shocking” nature of Martens's film lies in its “scandalousness and exploitation [that] perfectly mirrors the scandalousness of exploitative relations of power between the Congo and the West” (Downey, 2009, pp. 599–600). It is telling that a film that performatively repeats humanitarian documentary conventions also inspires repetitive lamentation. Martens elaborates: Episode III doesn't critique by showing something that is bad, it critiques by duplicating what may be bad…So, the critique in the film is…the film as a whole…the copy in a way of existing power relationships…Most documentary films critique, or reveal, or show some kind of outside phenomena, like oh this is bad, or this is good, or this is tragic…In this film, it is not the subject that is tragic, like poverty in Africa, it is the very way that the film deals with the subject that is tragic. (Penney, 2013) Martens's definition of documentary as “oh this is good…this is bad…this is tragic” is oversimplified and ignores over 50 years of reflexive documentary practice. Perhaps this is a deliberate omission, meant to magnify the outrage the film creates. We are left wondering if this comment is made by Martens the filmmaker or Martens the narcissistic antihero of Enjoy Poverty. Martens's claim that the critique of the film is its “duplication” and “copy” of unequal forms of power relations along with its queasy reception on message boards, suggests that the film circulates virally in both senses of the word: as a kind of virus that is infectious, but also viral in how it proliferates, replicating itself through media apparatuses (Lukes, 2012). Sampson observes that virality implies contagion, rapid transportation, and vulnerability. But it is also a nonrepresentational or prelinguistic force that works affectively, proliferating felt states that shape subjectivities (2012, pp. 2–6). Reduplication requires an operation of repetition, and Enjoy Poverty repeats and marks rather than escapes the forms and practices that Martens believes constitutes humanitarian documentary filmmaking. However, in repeating conventions it also brings into being a monstrosity that inhabits a genre rendering it strange, showing the very ugliness of the convention itself and perhaps having the effect of infecting (with skepticism) other documentary films. We can see how this affective virality works on other films, such as Silverlake Life (1993), or Nuit et Brouillard (1955), where watching the films is to endure emotional suffering. However, in both films painful watching is linked to an explicit endorsement of a kind of witnessing done on behalf of the social actor. Resnais and Joplin ascribe ethical import to witnessing qua watching, while Enjoy Poverty frames watching as exploitative. It is not surprising then that Enjoy Poverty inspired anger and outrage. Referred to as “condescending,” one blogger notes that the film's approach “generally isn't something I enjoy” (Kenzie, 2009). Such reactive statements attest to the viewers' expectations about documentary being violated. Although the film's title demands enjoyment, in the imperative tense, the viewer's experience is the opposite. Another comment reinforces this claim, noting: “That made me feel very uncomfortable” (Afro-Europe International, 2010). Enjoy Poverty incites discomfort, anger, and refusal, disidentification instead of cathartic identification. However, these noncathartic affects, “ugly feelings” (Ngai, 2009), function as important element of politics, affective indexes of the uneven distribution of emotion that is masked by sentimentality. Martens characterizes such discomfort as an effect of demystification. Following Susan Sontag, he is skeptical of the “potential of showing the suffering and pain of others in images” because, Sontag argues, it creates a fantasy of a “a link between the faraway sufferers—seen close-up on the television screen—and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue.” Sympathy, per Sontag, also masks the viewers' role in the role of causing suffering, putting off a reflection on “how our privileges are located on the same maps as their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a taste for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark” (Roelandt, 2008, p. 6, quoting Sontag). By inciting outrage, anger, and frustration, and other forms of disidentification, the film disrupts economies of sympathy, and perhaps dangerously excludes considerations of justice, which, contra Sontag and Martens, theorists like Luc Boltanski (1999) link to particular experiences of pity. The film's challenge to the usual normative rubrics of identification and disidentification operative in disaster imagery invites us to challenge the prioritization of (comfortable) identification over disidentification in communication studies more broadly. It raises the question of what it would mean to craft a visual rhetoric of suffering through nonfictional documentary that grapples with the inevitable production as well as representation of suffering victims. By changing identification from a space of resolution, to a space of ambiguity, Enjoy Poverty elicits moments of disidentification and identification for viewers that are described as condescending, insulting, paralyzing, or scandalous. The “condescending” tone of the film and its gross oversimplifications of both humanitarian practice and documentary genre are rooted in its form. Martens locates himself in a tradition of satirical critique, following Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (Roelandt, 2008). The viewers are also objects for critique, and are brought into the frame through the visible body of the filmmaker, and ire at the character of Renzo is gradually revealed to the viewer to be “the quintessential symptom of our own refusal—witting or unwitting—to acknowledge complicity in the reality of poverty” (Ersoy, 2011, p. 398). This circuit of rage, disidentification, and then gradual identification by viewers with Martens's character may cause a suspension in the easy operation of liberal identification and sympathy, in itself a political act. The Congolese photographic subject is not constructed as a knowing coparticipant in the imagistic scene. Instead, power rests on the side of the photographer and the spectator. Nevertheless, the film constructs, as if it were a photographic negative, a spectral image of what a more just civil contract of photography may be. T. J. Demos enthusiastically explains that Martens literally and metaphorically trains the camera on himself, the “key target of the film… a kind of reverse photojournalism, or reverse documentarism, one that centers on the documentarian-artist-photojournalist, who is normally hidden in such projects” (Demos, 2013, p. 8). Even so, other models of documentary, notably, indigenous cinema and reflexive documentary, engage social actors as authors without necessarily reducing them to victims. Martens's film appears pessimistic about such a possibility. Indeed, Enjoy Poverty argues that the investments that structure humanitarianism and its normative discourses and practices of avaricious resource extraction, crisis-based aid regimes, donor-biased aid systems are coconstitutive. Thus, instead of a progress narrative, the film creates moments in which aspirations fall apart, affective scenes that have been described by theorist Lauren Berlant (2011) as cruel optimism. Constructing an uncomfortable alternative: Discomfort as political and ethical strategy Lauren Berlant has argued that “an optimistic attachment is cruel when the object [or] scene of desire itself is an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it: but its life-organizing status can trump interfering with the damage it provokes” (2011, pp. 227–228). Berlant's diagnosis particularly targets liberal democratic enactments in which those on the fringes of the bourgeois public sphere continually reinvest in practices that continue their disenfranchisement. However, cruel optimism also may include other pernicious attachments, including narratives of upward mobility while in a situation of structural poverty. In the first two celebration scenes in which Martens's sign is lit, we witness moments when both Martens and the Congolese subjects in the film participate in a ritual of recommitment to the normative tenets of aid regimes, regimes that ostensibly perpetuate exploitation. The film produces and implicates the spectator as a guilty member of a regime of cruel optimism, mirroring such a system by reproducing disappointment. Given the politically depressing morass that the film witnesses and induces, what alternatives are offered esthetically, ethically, or politically by Martens's project? Thomas Keenan suggests that the film demands more than “response and non response,” but rather, “asks us to make [a] much more subtle distinction about the possible ways of responding to a situation that calls to us” (Keenan et al., 2013, p. 22). Keenan's commentary casts the film as a metalesson in response and responsibility. In a Derridean tenor, one's response is both inevitable, and impossible (Derrida, 2007). The film leaves the spectator guilty, anxious, and with a sense of powerlessness, yet, in its very virality and the difficulty of exorcizing the images and affects that the film induces it guarantees a more durational disruption in the circuit between humanitarian/documentary discourses and positive feeling, challenging the short-term nature of shock and positive image regimes. The viral nature of the film helps guarantee its effectiveness as a demand for critique. Demos elaborates: [Images in Enjoy Poverty haunt]…precisely because we as viewers can do nothing about the tragedies; we can only confront the impotency of the empathetic response… it's not enough that these images should be stoically embraced…we need to critically address the larger economic and political causes of such suffering, and thereby exorcize the ineffective strategies and break the spell of the haunting. (2013, p. 118) As Demos articulates, the film troubles empathetic response. It forces the viewer to challenge sentimental approaches to international aid and image making, acknowledging limits to understanding and the need for openness to a greater variety of images. The film does not just offer lessons of hopelessness to the Congolese, it offers a lesson about being a critic and analyst of normative discourses that perpetuate cruel optimism. Martens's work is an exegesis of the critic's role as an analyst of international idioms, images, and affects that impact distributions of voice and agency. It is a call to be attentive, and to recognize oneself as implicated in the constructions of situations that make up the violent photographs to which we are too often more than accustomed. An aesthetic of misery that is infectious and impossible to shake, “haunting,” per Demos, “under your skin,” for O'Kane, destabilizing and affectively distancing per Luntumbue (2013), and “uncomfortable” for Koen. Enjoy Poverty, produces a politically productive sour taste in the mouth of spectators that may make them pause and reflect more critically when confronting feel-good frameworks for international image-reception, and aid regimes. As an infectious supplement to the lessons of Cruel Optimism (Berlant, 2011), Enjoy Poverty draws a geopolitical as well as an affective map of the relationships between humanitarian discourses and investments in upward mobility, implicating the Western viewer and aid worker in perpetuating cruel optimism for the Congolese. By constructing a geneaology of where such optimism is derived, how spectators are also producers of the very narratives that inevitably disappoint, the film offers a vehicle for rewriting such narratives, and an aesthetic method for infecting them. As a complement to Berlant's theorizations, it suggests rhetorics of painful identification, uneasy disidentification, affective distancing, and even mendacity as reparative means to create space for other narratives. And yet, despite its discomfort, watching Enjoy Poverty feels like knowledge that feels like it might mobilize a different kind of power, or, to put it another way, despite Martens's qualms about humanitarian documentary and imagery the film itself feels toward a new relation to power and knowledge. More humble, more durational, more caustic, and yet, a negativity that imagines the image being otherwise. A sentinel, a phantom, a reminder, a ghost—it is not a nothing that is prepared but a something of potentiality. Conclusion In this article, I have attempted to map, through audience reception and critical analysis of the film's affective structure, how Enjoy Poverty offers a political strategy of discomfort that is a corrective to representations of suffering that elide structures of inequality and mask the affects of enjoyment that spectators may experience. Limits of this study include the impossibility of following all of Enjoy Poverty's antecedents, notably, the multiple documentaries and humanitarian visibility campaigns that the film mimics or critiques, due to the breadth of the documentary genre. There are many films that both occupy and stretch the limits of the genre. I focus on Enjoy Poverty because it performs elements of shock as well as positive image promotion and yet rests comfortably in neither mode of nonfiction filmmaking. Moreover, due to the film's subject matter and its relative recency, audience response is limited, although I suggest that this can function as evidence of the film's impact—it temporarily takes words away. Like many esthetics that use satire or irony, Enjoy Poverty runs the risk of being read literally, or taken as yet another instance of disaster pornography (Moeller, 1999). To follow these potential reactions, drawing on how the film circulates—where it has been shown, how it has been transmitted to place-based audiences as well as virtually, and its life in academia—will also provide fruitful areas of future research. It also gestures to growing scholarly interest in scrutinizing the blogosphere as a space for public communication, a virtual space that audiences negotiate and make meaning of documentary. This piece contributes to such a trajectory by focusing on audience reception, “how people actually argue, construct, and contest the media worlds in which they live and why they do or do not matter” (Putnam Hughes, 2011, p. 211 [emphasis in original]), serving as a contribution to scholarship in communication and cultural studies on documentary, the reflexive mode, and humanitarian representations of suffering. Finally, this piece provides a means to link rhetorical studies with communication and cultural studies in general by attending how affective practices of identification and disidentification are induced by filmic practice. The film, despite its clear ethical and political pitfalls, notably how it dismisses the ethical power in humanitarian witnessing, illuminates how documentary can activate more ambivalent and sometimes negative affects. These affects of distancing, anxiety, and discomfort that induce reflexivity in audiences can force to them to confront the impulse to respond to images of suffering with a knee-jerk reaction and put it out of mind. Instead, by mixing shock, positive images, and outright cruelty with regard to the expectations Martens the character generates for the social actors in the film, it induces longer-term possessions, or even infections in audiences, and raises the question of justice rather than mere sympathy. It redistributes affective agency away from the powerful without neatly relocating it to those bearing the brunt of poverty. Instead it rests somewhere more veiled. This incomplete redistribution, a politics of cruel optimism and practice of affective virality, illuminates how reflexive documentary may productively question documentary's role as a public art that functions in the public sphere. Against Chanan's optimism about the power of documentary, Martens's Enjoy Poverty is a cruel demonstration of the limits of such aspirations, a meditation on the promise and perils of documentary itself, not necessarily always resting in the public sphere, but sometimes occupying a juxtapolitical idiom (Berlant, 2008), a difficult meditation that may be a precursor to more effective practices. The imperative to “enjoy poverty” mutates into the queasy after effects of overenjoyment: a lingering unease and persistent drum of recollection. Acknowledgments C.F.B.'s work focuses on questions of affect, esthetics, and public space. She would like to thank Anjali Vats, Robert Hariman, Michael Mario Albrecht, Sarah Mann O'Donnell, and Hannah Feldman for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. References Aradau , C. ( 2004 ). The perverse politics of four-letter words: Risk and pity in the securitization of human trafficking . 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TI - Episode III: Enjoy Poverty: An Aesthetic Virus of Political Discomfort
JF - Communication Culture and Critique
DO - 10.1111/cccr.12109
DA - 2016-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/episode-iii-enjoy-poverty-an-aesthetic-virus-of-political-discomfort-0Al51Cz96F
SP - 284
VL - 9
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -