| Often representations of real life serve as sites for ethical revaluation, social responsibility, or popular intensity: Rodney King, the World Trade Center, the Survivor television craze. Choosing documentary moments and mapping their multiple connections to institutions, values, texts, practices, events, trends, discourses, and identities, I show how twentieth-century American culture is shaped by the sensational experience of documentary visual and print texts in informing our laws, our civic life, our fears, our desires, and our capacity to see ourselves.; Through contemporary materialist and visual theory, I argue that the experience of documentary texts is often a sensational one. With Walter Benjamin's sense of “tactile vision” and Deleuze and Guattari's logic of sensation and affective production, my method not only follows paths sensation, but also allows itself to be distracted from such traditional unities as the individual, the mind, and the word. In examining documentary less for what it means and more for what it does, I argue that the documentary experience is embodied and social. I show, for example, its relational force, in shaping citizenry, in documenting and contributing to murder, or in pedagogies of shock. Each chapter examines a different site with similar attention to sensation, embodiment, and affective connection to larger assemblages: (1) Introduction: Between Sense and Sensation: Introducing the Boy Without a Brain. (2) Viewing Bodies, Binding Morals: Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies Revisited. (3) Sensational Reading: The Affective Literature of James Agee and Other Agitators. (4) Clean Cut: Production and Reproduction in American Sex Hygiene Films. (5) Consuming Disaster: The Pedagogy of Drivers Education Films. (6) Brandon Teena's Body: Spectacle and Political Force in True Crime. (7) Conclusion: Hundreds of Kodaks. |
