The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of
conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order.
Breaking with the symbolic representation of society as an organic body –
characteristic of the holist mode of organization – a pluralist liberal
democratic society does not deny the existence of conflicts but provides
the institutions allowing them to be expressed in an adversarial form. … A
well functioning democracy calls for a clash of legitimate democratic
political positions. This is what the confrontation between left and right
needs to be about. (2005, p.30)
Mouffe has launched an insurrection into democratic theory in order to change the ways
scholars frame and analyze political actions in the public realm. Her work indeed
influences subsequent chapters in this inquiry, informing the project of threading
communication theoretical frameworks with democratic and political theory. It is an
engagement with alternative media practices as complicated, autonomous sites of
research for academics to address the problem space(s) around such work. It is the notion
of alternative media sites and practices as intervention that I now turn to for a brief
mention.
Documentary: Media as Intervention
A coterie of consummate docophiles have flooded bookstores, academic libraries and
magazine shops with words describing the genre in a myriad of textual-focused forays. At
the academic forefront are Michael Renov, Erik Barnouw, Stella Bruzzi, Jane M. Gaines,
and Bill Nichols. This list is not exhaustive, but meant to highlight some of the leading
researchers and writers in the field, who together, continue to dominate the literature with
an aesthetic/textual approach that is lacking in the type of context that political economy
and cultural studies discussions around d/e brings. From Barnouw’s Documentary: a
history of non-fiction film (1993) to Renov’s The Subject of Documentary (2004), these
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