Documentary poetics rose out of Modernist approaches to poetry and the act of “making it new,” but the form didn’t fully manifest itself until the 1990s-2000s, where the emergence of new technological advancements changed our society’s relationship to the nature of a rapidly expanding news cycle (Leong 5). The turnover of current events into archived historical events increased in an unprecedented manner, and the impact of these moments was felt by more people than ever before, as the emergence of new technology provided extensive additions to the ways in which media, news, and societally impacting moments were consumed. But, understanding documentation processes also includes how these moments are narrated by the bureaucracies and institutions who hold control over the news cycle itself. As a result of the new state of technological advancements, the social circles of those impacted simultaneously expanded to include more people, but became shallower in their meaning within people’s lives.
Modernism theorist Zygmunt Bauman writes that this “disintegration of the social network,” or the expansion and devaluation of the news cycle, is a symptom of what he coins as “liquid modernity” (Bauman 14). Bauman defines liquid modernity as “the falling apart, the friability, the brittleness, the transience, the until-further-noticeness of human bonds and networks” (14), where the value of the human, social moment is lost to the constant march of the “next new thing” the present moment is made to engage with.
The relationship between cultural memory and the news cycle then lies in the lasting representations of people’s lives. Documentary scholar Maurizio Ferraris signifies the social aspect of documentary work as its primary driver of meaning-making in a text, regardless of the text being intrinsically artistic, strictly archival, or existing in the liminal plane between the two. Ferraris augments Jacques Derrida’s claim of “nothing existing outside of the text” by claiming that, rather, nothing social exists outside of the text (Leong 4). Poetry scholar Michael Leong corroborates Ferraris’ claim, stating “Social life, according to this view, depends upon – and is mediated by – documentation” (Leong 4). Thus, in the ever-evolving news cycle that values the next great upset over lasting advocacy and change, documenting marginalized lives has become an act of resistance to their “social deaths,” (Leong 4) or public erasure. Leong then understands documentary poetry as an extension or critique of history as an engagement with “the texture of social reality” (7). Documents that support, or undermine, cultural memory can then be reordered and redefined by documentary poetry, as the form relies on both individual and collective identities to frame a given event’s place in its historical moment. Activated through the understanding that bureaucratic documentation alters the cultural memory of an event, documentary poetics functions as a counter-hegemonic practice that validates the experiences of marginalized groups within the social network.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000.
Leong, Michael. Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2020.
I have no prior basis of understanding on documentary poetics, but what a compelling description you have formed here. Considering the current political climate and the Judith Butler we read for our recent class, thinking about factual documentation of marginalized lives as a counter-hegemonic practice is an incredibly moving ideology — that is a creative process is emotionally moving as well. The context of what you describe also seems to situate documentary poetics as acts of intentional rebellion. This makes me wonder at the process of uncovering those facts — is this investigative work? Is there a uniform process? I want to know more about the behind the scenes of this! And then I wonder what examples there are of this type of creative protest that have existed in historical moments but gone unnamed or unnoticed.