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its status as something fait (‘done’/‘fact-ed’). The pictures were prompted by the fact of the conflict, but their status as historical data remains uncertain, since they depict nothing – destroyed tanks or dead bodies – that would allow the viewer to establish an affective relationship to the event’s material consequences. As Jacques Rancière has written, Ristelhueber ‘effects a displacement of the exhausted affect of indignation to a more discreet affect, an affect of indeterminate effect’. 11 What we see is that we do not see what we expect, and perhaps even
an intersubjective relation where previously there was none, confronting existing systems with what lies behind their boundaries, and in so doing providing them with three possible responses. First, to ignore the interruptive noise and hope it goes away of its own accord; second, to forcibly exclude the noise in the hope of achieving or maintaining a nominally spotless purity; or third, to transform in such a way as to incorporate the noise within itself. 10 It is for this reason that Jacques Rancière argues that ‘politics comes about solely through