I’ve been reading and enjoying a bit of Paul Feyerabend lately, so I was interested to hear that there was a recent controversy involving this anarchic thinker and our peculiar current pope Ratzinger, or Benedict, or whatever. How could this be? Well, it’s not difficult to see where the difficulty might arise. Although Feyerabend is no creationist, he certainly makes some claims that might be attractive to those of a religious mindset. Owing to his polemical style, sometimes he’ll come up with an absurd-sounding idea, such as when he suggests that a hypothetical scientist ‘without method’ might one day “discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis” (Against Method, 21). This sort of stuff would be gold to the pious thinker or advocate of intelligent design looking to mine quotes from pseudo-noteworthy intellectual figures. Especially so-called ‘post-modernist’ ones – but when one takes quotes completely out of context one makes a fool of oneself. Let’s bury the ID issue for the moment. How did the Pope get embroiled in a controversy by way of Feyerabend? Although there is a very interesting story here, we’re going to have to sift through a couple pretty questionable stories in order to actually get at some kind of ‘truth.’ Let’s start with this confusing piece from CNN.

“Pope Benedict XVI has canceled a planned visit to a prestigious Italian university after a protest by academics and students attacked his views on Galileo, the Vatican confirmed Tuesday… academics — pointing to a speech the pope gave at the same university as a cardinal in 1990 — claimed he condones the 1633 trial and conviction of the scientist Galileo for heresy.

The astronomer had argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun, in contradiction to church teachings at the time, and he was forced to renounce his findings publicly.

In comments made 15 years ago when he was still a cardinal, Pope Benedict is reported to have called the trial ‘reasonable and just.’

During his speech, the pope — then Cardinal Ratzinger — quoted an Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend, saying, “At the time of Galileo, the church remained more loyal (or faithful) to reason than Galileo himself.

Andreas Srova, a physics professor at the university, said it would have been inappropriate for the pope to appear for the inauguration.”

Oh, Professor Srovna. You physics professors have so little time for hermeneutics. It seems as though you were working from – in this case, literally or even archetypally – ‘a CNN-level’ understanding of these issues. There’s a lot more going on here. Ironically enough, in order to get some more information, we need to go to that bastion of non-partisan journalism, the National Catholic Register. It took me a really long time to figure out the basis of the controversy (as it turns out, nothing) and how it developed (as it turns out, foolishness). Let’s note, for the sake of spite as much as anything, that the arbitrary application of this awful term ‘post-modernism’ in the NCR article is in many ways even more stomach-churning for me than the sound-bite inadequacy CNN’s piece. But at least this offers some context! Look:

“The source of the protests was a 1990 statement about Galileo made by then Cardinal Ratzinger that was extracted — out of context — from a speech entitled ‘The Crisis of Faith in Science.’ The statement read:

‘The Church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just.’

The irony is that this statement was not made by Cardinal Ratzinger at all. The cardinal was quoting someone else. And when you read the entire speech, it’s not only clear that the cardinal didn’t say it, he disagreed with it.

Far from using these ideas to exonerate the Church for persecuting Galileo, Cardinal Ratzinger rejected the temptation to do so, and concluded by saying:

‘It would be absurd, on the basis of these affirmations, to construct a hurried apologetics. The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality.’

But there’s more. The greatest irony is that the words mistakenly attributed to the Pope were uttered by one of the most subversive and controversial postmodern thinkers of the late 20th century, the deceased Austrian philosopher, Paul Feyerabend.”

This passage shines through the editorialization that twists the overall impact of the piece: finally, we can make sense of what actually happened. Ratzinger quoted a passage from Against Method (I’m pretty sure at least, I might have to look that up). And, credit is definitely due to this guy: he knows his shit, and he interpreted it correctly. Above is another polemical statement of Feyerabend’s. Ratzinger’s hermeneutical chops are obvious here: you can’t take a passage like this at face value. We can certainly not construct a ‘hurried apologetics’ in this or any case. What Feyerabend’s quote actually implies is that the so-called ideals of ‘reason,’ ‘truth,’ or ‘justice’ are always social constructs, and that their discipline, with all its methodological tyranny is never really worth its cost: as evident in the persecution of Galileo. Revolutionary thinkers always challenge the images of truth and reason in themselves: like Galileo, and like Feyerabend. It seems that neither Feyerabend nor Ratzinger are encroaching on the precious territory of this tenuous discipline called modern physics as much as it thinks.

So the cause of the controversy amounts to nothing. Ratzinger cites Feyerabend in an address, interprets him correctly and takes into account the context of the citation. We can’t take F.’s assertion at face value, nor can the Church simply pretend that in its history, has not committed a number of decisive errors in the name of its God and His ideals: faith, reason, truth, and justice. (Values which, not incidentally, are only infrequently compatible.) Ratzinger is in fact arguing in a roundabout way that we can’t simply construct a hasty apologetics for the Church because we recognized that it was serving what it knew at the time to be ‘truth’ and ‘justice.’ He clearly says, “The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality.” Faith, rather, needs to engage with rationality productively, in order to recognize the rightful place which is to be accorded to each. It’s an excellent, and extremely nuanced argument, founded on a clear understanding of Feyerabend’s arguments. He doesn’t even ‘disagree’ with Feyerabend: he uses the polemical statement to condense an argument that’s in a sense present throughout the text. (Feyerabend himself, it seems, responded approvingly to the quotation.) But then something remarkable happens. A bunch of ideologically-motivated scientists (or scientifically-motivated ideologues, take your pick) take a citation within a citation and distort the entire structure so far out of its context that it loses all its original meaning and gains a new one. Science in a nutshell: science certainly does love its nutshells. It might be beyond the hermeneutic capacities of a pure physicist to grasp the nuances of Ratzinger’s argument, but he certainly doesn’t attempt to justify the persecution of Galileo! A quotation taken out of context thereby forces the Pope to miss out on a potentially rather fruitful engagement with the university, by way of a manufactured protest. Idiocy!
The quality of these news stories is pretty upsetting. Which gives us the moral of the first level of stories: we shouldn’t make very many strong claims from a CNN-level understanding of anything, because it’s pretty much founded on a heap of bullshit wrenched from its context by lazy writers, slapped together into something that’s twice as dramatic as it is useful. Nevertheless, if we, ourselves, take some time to investigate these issues a bit, we can at least figure out what’s going on – and luckily, we can write that down and ‘publish’ it rather cheaply, to make sense of the world for ourselves and others.

What of the ‘real story?’ If there’s a moral to the story beneath these stories, it’s this. I’m as atheist and naturally ‘materialist’ in every sense as the very hypothetical ‘next guy.’ I ‘believe’ in this ambiguous notion ’science’ in the same way I ‘believe’ in logic: remarkably consistent, useful, and fascinating, but essentially incomplete. Thus in this regard, at least, one thing is clear when I take a step back from the ever-present polemicization of scientists and religionists. Science is not done learning from religion, however perennially it may hope to be.

“Republicans basically accept Mr. Bush’s vision of himself as a latter-day Harry S. Truman who has reorganized U.S. policy to meet this all-encompassing global threat. Like Mr. Bush, they see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the larger conflict with Islamic extremism, and Iran and its clients in the Middle East as yet another front. Democrats disaggregate these problems and balance them against challenges that have received too little attention from the Bush administration: the rise of China; the return of an autocratic and relatively hostile Russia; the danger of unsecured nuclear materials in unstable parts of the world; and global warming, among others. Ms. Clinton’s definition of the world the next president will inherit in a recent Foreign Affairs magazine essay fills a fat, 140-word paragraph and speaks of ‘an unprecedented array of challenges.’ In contrast, Mr. Giuliani begins with a single sentence: ‘We are all members of the 9/11 generation.’

Ms. Clinton’s view strikes us as more realistic. Al-Qaeda remains a grave threat, and the United States has a vital interest in supporting moderate Muslims against the extremist minority. But threats such as Shiite Iran should be understood and addressed differently than Sunni jihadist movements; and the rest of the world does not fit neatly into a bipolar struggle between two camps. The next president needs to be prepared to check aggression from China or Russia, or combat a pandemic.”

Read the rest of the article here.

“Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out:: with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. . . With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.” – Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

If we were to follow the method of Komar and Melamid’s “Most Wanted Paintings,” and survey Canadians to determine what their ‘most wanted’ painting might be — not that the Canadian art market would ever merit such close and particular scrutiny — we might come up with something fairly similar to the Bruegel reproduced above. After all, we are so little different from the United States in terms of our ‘masses,’ we might even be able to use the American ‘most wanted’ painting. As Komar & Melamid state of the general public in the United States: “To a surprising extent, the public tends to agree on what it like to see in a work of art. Americans generally tend to prefer, for instance, traditional styles over more modern designs; they also express a strong preference for paintings that depict landscapes or similar outdoor scenes. In addition, most Americans tend to favor artists known for a realistic style over those whose artworks are more abstract or modernistic.” None of the paintings that they develop on the basis of their survey data are really particularly unique, varying only in size, season, and ambiguous ‘national’ signifiers; thus, Denmark’s painting features a Danish flag and is the size of a ‘refrigerator door,’ while Kenya’s is identical but for its size (’small filing cabinet’) and the inclusion of a hippopotamus. Thus the natural setting of the Bruegel, with the addition of snow, to suit our masochistic Canadian taste for winter, is made ‘national’ by the inclusion of some skaters, perhaps playing hockey, that great national Canadian game, incidentally invented by the Dutch. The ravens add just the necessary touch of allegorical morbidity, representing our conflicted relationship to the landscape and its harshness, while the traditional ‘realist’ style ensures that the painting induces no problematic thoughts in those who live their lives in avoidance of such.
And so, we have another bland work of traditionalist art, differentiated from the others on a purely surface level. Why is this the ‘art we want?’ Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction gives us, as always, the tools to comprehend the forces implicated in this grand homogenization of the world. As he states, in the age of mechanical reproducibility, the artwork is no longer premised on its use value for ritual, but on its exhibition value to the greatest number of people. No longer was the function of the artwork to communicate with the Divine or to regulate social conduct, but instead the artwork became an ‘object’ of looking, and insofar as that object was looked at by the greatest number of people, it was ’successful.’ This is the ‘qualitative transformation’ of the nature of the artwork described in the quote above: for Benjamin, ‘art’ was a certain historically specific notion of cultural production, with a balance between these two poles of signification, the ‘cult value’ and the ‘exhibition value.’ For the earliest artists, the work of art was purely an instrument of magic, and thus was not a ‘work of art’ as such, but rather a ritual object par excellence; today, the ritual value has been almost entirely excluded from the function of art, and thus the art is a commodity, or more specifically a public spectacle like any other. The artistic function, the equivalence between the poles of ritual value and exhibition, is discarded, in favour of the primacy of the commodity function.

This is of course problematic, and most of us would instinctively agree. However, we ought to unpack more carefully exactly that which is problematic about this absolute emphasis on the exhibition value of the artwork. Komar & Melamid’s piece is incredibly significant for just this reason; it implicitly deconstructs some of the central assumptions of modern corporate-administered capitalism, namely, the primacy of ‘public opinion,’ the homogenization of the world through polls, and the depredation of individuality in favour of the supposedly omniscient body politic. ‘Opinion polls’ have to some extent taken the place of truth in the contemporary discourse: as Michael Govan states in the introduction to Komar & Melamid’s project, “we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It’s absolutely true data. It doesn’t say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That’s really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number.” Govan’s own orientation toward the ‘truth’ of numbers is ambiguous, but he does recognize that this faith in numbers is not solely a contemporary phenomenon: “In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato’s idea of a world which is based on numbers. In ancient Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and then made an average measurement, and that’s how they described the ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created.” Yet Plato’s mode of relating to the world is not our own. Numbers have always been the primary mode of relating to ‘the masses,’ and as such essential in a democratic society ostensibly governed by those ‘masses.’ However, we have a contemporary faith in numbers which I think seems fundamentally different from that of Plato.

There were a vast array of characteristics which separated Athenian democracy from our own. The ownership of slaves, for instance, made the leisurely existence of the intellectual class possible, and made the engagement of the citizenry with the political system practical. The size of the city-state and the homogeneous ethnic and gender group that was the ‘polis‘ ensured that the citizens could remain involved with the life of the state, and the state with the lives of the citizens. The ‘public interest’ was simply taken to be the interest of a small group of Greek landowning men, and the issue of ‘public opinion’ was thereby bracketed, worked out in public discourse: agourein. In our contemporary technologically-mediated democracy, we have taken the enlightened steps of including previously-marginalized groupings in our polis, and extending the geographical boundaries of the democratic state across the entire widths of continents. No longer could the question of ‘public interest’ in fact be discursively determined by all the individual members of the public, but instead, the public would have to be allegorized: allos agourein, an ‘other’ discourse, a discourse which speaks for the ‘other,’ in this case being the idealized ‘public.’ And so this ideological necessity, of knowing the ‘public opinion,’ begat our contemporary obsession with the cataloguing and quantification of the ‘masses,’ that takes its most egregious form in the guise of the opinion poll.

There is certainly a great deal to be said for the opinion poll, and for the extension of the franchise, and for democracy. These are all things which are said constantly, at great volume, across the various media systems that constitute our simulated public discourse, and they are not ‘incorrect’ per se. Rather, they are merely a veiling the true nature of democracy, which, like art, should ideally balance the interests of the individual and the polis. Athenian democracy, in spite of its self-evident flaws, balanced the interests of rational individuals in public discourse, and then determined the general course of society according to this aggregated interest of individuals. Contemporary democracy produces ‘opinion polls’ which demand only the most reactionary, simplistic responses, and then passes those off as indicative of the ‘public opinion.’ These opinion polls have an evident function, as a gauge of the public’s opinion. This is unproblematic. The issue arises when opinion polls are taken to be normative, and the data presented in polls is presented as truth. When the actual opinion of the public, and the course of society as a whole, is informed only by the mediated ‘public opinion,’ there is no means by which the individual or the society can develop. As Benjamin states, in this society founded on mechanical reproduction, “the conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.” The end result is a lack of anything new.

Opinion polls are, it must be said, a privileging of the opinions of the wise and the stupid alike. The opinion poll gives equal weight to truth and fallacy, to true belief and blind faith, to mass conformity as to individual genius. This is something which always ought to be recognized: the public opinion is not ‘the truth,’ but is rather a syncretic blend of the truth and lies. They can be taken as a guide to the opinion of the masses, but never as a guide to action. Komar and Melamid’s project, were it instigated by a government for the purpose of determining what art was positive and what was ‘degenerate,’ might seem like a fascistic or communistic endeavour, and yet when we truly consider the matter, it would be the pinnacle of ‘true democracy.’ And thus we ought to be led to question the nature of ‘true democracy.’ After all, ‘rule’ by the demos is nothing more than mob rule: the nature of contemporary democracy stems from the constitutional strictures we apply to the will of the masses. This is something which should be recognized in culture as in politics: ‘the public’ as a quantified and egalitarian mass should never make any real ‘decisions.’ This is why we don’t live in a society governed directly by mobs, but one governed by representatives. The ‘public interest’ should be determined as the aggregate interest of individuals: and so, the ‘public,’ that bizarre construction of opinion polls and administrative research should have no say in determining ‘what is art.’ Art is a question for individuals. The beauty of the market system — itself of course not without its own problems — is that it offers a niche for the public and a niche for the individual. Those individuals whose tastes have been so thoroughly monotonized by a relentless stream of mass culture and public opinion that they crave the sort of sappy medium represented by Komar & Melamid’s paintings have a ‘public’ forum in which they can indulge their specious tastes, in the guise of those Holiday-Inn art sales; those who have constructed for themselves an identity so oppositional that they crave pure individuality can spend millions at Sotheby’s on a work of the Abstract Expressionists. The rest of us will go on, as always, balancing our appreciation of ‘pop’ universality with individual genius and carving out our own artistic convictions, bearing little resemblance to the opinions of this mathematic fiction of “the public.” And some of us can thereby continue to adore the pure abstraction, the almost Lettrist brilliance of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, which I think we can indisputably state represents the Canadian public’s “least wanted” painting. The power and beauty of Lettrist hyper-abstraction is almost wholly lost on the general public, and yet no less valid for it. 100 million people, as the aphorism goes, can and often have been woefully, unbelievably wrong, especially about art., for artistic genius is the mark of the individual, not of the ‘public.’ This cultivation of the balance between individual taste and shared cultural practice is thereby of utmost importance in the realm of art, wherein homogenization and governance by opinion poll could only mark the end of art altogether. Art is the expression of the individual genius par excellence; though it functions in a communitarian system of signification, the individual spirit must always be of prime importance to the work of art, else our culture will ultimately be left with nothing but one infinitely-reproduceable lithograph of a cat hanging from a tree, and a 50 Cent CD.

The simple answer to Martha Rosler’s question of “which political battles have been fought and won by someone for someone else” (307) is every one. That is to say, in the political sphere, there is no individual action. This is a structural necessity, insofar as the ‘political sphere’ is the realm of the polis, not of the individual subject. And so, every political movement is necessarily one driven by a committed vanguard, behind whom the masses can rally, but without whom the movement would cease to exist.

And so, dramatic though Martin Luther King’s quarter-million-strong March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom may have been, it represented only a minuscule fraction of the African-American population of the United States. Simply because the 30 million black Americans who didn’t march that day shared a skin colour with those who did does not imply that they were fighting ‘their own’ political battle. Instead, the civil rights won for American blacks by Dr. King’s movement were ‘won’ by a small vanguard of intellectuals and revolutionaries, for the entire black polis.

Those political movements which we the bourgeois and enfranchised often idolize as indicative of an organic push for self-determination nearly always have an externally-determined character. Indeed, we live in a society founded upon the delegation of one’s political battling. The system of democratic representation is nothing more than a complicated arrangement whereby the privileged can get someone else to fight their political battles for them.

Which, of course, raises the question: who fights the political battles of those without privilege? This is the central issue of Rosler’s piece, in which she bemoans that “the exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting – and careerism” (306). This lament comes even as she recognizes that the lost ‘meliorism’ (304) of a Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine meant that their photographs were taken within the explicit framework of a certain ideal of ‘social-work propagandizing,’ which according to Rosler, “presented an argument within a class about the need to give a little in order to mollify the dangerous classes below” (304).

The central problem of Rosler’s text is the issue of agency. To put it bluntly: Is it ‘Okay’ for a bunch of wealthy Caucasian progressives to congratulate themselves for having taken pictures of the poor, beige masses of the world? Rosler seems to be arguing, on the whole, that it is not. Though her piece maintains the veneer of objectivity, the latent vitriol in places is self-evident. She implicitly decries Edward Murrow’s House of Shame, for instance, noting with a disgusted tone that Murrow exhorted his viewers to “write to their congressmen to help the migrant farm workers, whose pathetic, helpless, dispirited victimhood has been amply demonstrated for an hour… because these people can do nothing to help themselves” (306-307).

This is certainly a troubling undertone in any instance of documentary production by the privileged. It is often difficult even to analytically separate the noble impulse – that those with power should be using it to help those without – from the vicarious, ‘trophy-hunting’ element derided by Rosler. The issue of agency is still more problematic, however, in that it seems almost implicit within the documentary form – produced by and for privileged whites – to deny the agency of those being photographed. After all, if they were able to help themselves, then the documentarian’s function would be considerably diminished. Particularly in our digital context, however it becomes difficult to understand why we need a privileged white man like James Nachtwey to ‘bring back’ photographs of global poverty. When the instruments of photography and dissemination have become widespread and cheap enough that indigenous documentary production is possible, the attitudes of documentary photographers toward the significance of their own products seems vastly overinflated. In the most egregious examples raised by Rosler (the VISA ad and the version with the Guadeloupian boy, for instance – 312), documentary photography even seems to have been at times inhabited by the spirit of colonialism.

This is the problem that Rosler describes when she states that “documentary, as we know it, carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful” (306). This claim is at once more troublesome and less troublesome than it may seem. It is first less troublesome, because this seems like the only conceivable way by which the politically powerless could ever obtain political power. The political sphere functions as a system of inclusion and exclusion; there are those actors within the polis who determine its politics, where there are those outside who are subject to the political authority without having any say in its governance. The extent of the polis is historically variable, of course, and contingent upon social norms. And yet, without delving too deeply into its structure, it should be immediately apparent that the system of politics offers no way for the powerless to obtain power. Those outside the polis are powerless: the only ones with power are those within the polis. Therefore, the only means by which the powerless will ever obtain power is if the powerful can be convinced of the necessity of granting it them. This is the traditional function of documentary: to induce the powerful to sympathize with the powerless, to the point of perhaps granting them (some limited form of) power. This is also an impulse clear in the work of Riis; though ostensibly included within the polis, the homeless are perhaps the most politically disenfranchised individuals within the modern system.

The implications of Rosler’s statement are also more troublesome than it may first appear, however. This is because by perpetuating this particular mode of documentary production, documentarians are in some sense also perpetuating the status quo with regard to the nature and distribution of power. Rosler herself even seems to be tied to a certain understanding of power which is to some extent archaic and reductive, in that neither her piece, nor the instances of documentary production she cites, ever questions the equivalence of power and political power. I mentioned at the beginning of my piece that every political battle was fought and won by ‘someone else.’ This stems from the nature of political power as described in the previous system: without political rights, one has no voice within the polis to demand such rights (and the power which accompanies them). Consequently, the system of political power seems like a universal absolutism – which is certainly what all systems of power hope to become. But the example of César Chavez, which Rosler lauds as an example of an organic effort toward self determination (in contrast to the Murrow example, 306), gives the lie to this reductive understanding of ‘power.’

César Chavez’ Farm Workers’ Organizing Committee was not successful because its members realized they were powerless, and decided to use documentary production to demand the power they lacked. Rather, they obtained political power by using the power of documentary production to emphasize the power they already had. The same is true of any mass movement for self-determination. The only way to obtain political power without the voluntary intervention of those who already have such power, is to leverage another form of power against the political establishment and demand such power. Before AFL-CIO, farm workers were politically powerless; to claim, like Murrow’s documentary, that they themselves were powerless, is nevertheless a distortion. Agriculture feeds nations; farm labourers are thereby an exceedingly powerful group when mobilized appropriately. Power exists in manifold configurations, and functions within a discursive system of exchange. Perhaps the only group that is after all, truly ‘powerless’ are the homeless, since they have neither labour, reputation, nor property to leverage as power.

In sum, then, the problem with traditional ‘social-work propagandizing’ is that in seeking to aid the powerless by informing the powerful, it replicates the very same categories of power that are responsible for the seeming ‘powerlessness’ of marginalized groups. In closing, however, it is intriguing to note that the ‘problems’ described by Rosler with regard to contemporary ‘trophy-hunting’ documentary work can perhaps be traced to the same issues of discursive power. Insofar as the ‘social-work’ style of documentary is intended to provide information about the powerless to the powerful, it seems as though the decline in that style of documentary is traceable to the fact that postmodern subjects no longer consider themselves ‘powerful.’ Where a certain modernist, neo-Enlightenment notion of power could accept that we bourgeois whites were ‘powerful’ simply by virtue of our participation in a political system, the subject in postmodernity sees itself only as a functionary, a prisoner of that very same system of power. And so, instead of presenting images of poverty and decay according to the trope of ‘informing the powerful,’ postmodern documentary simply asks its powerless viewer to identify with its powerless subject.