Making Black Lives Matter: On the Circulation of Images of Black Death on Social Media

Victor Bramble ______

Adviser: Ariella Azoulay, Ph.D., Modern Culture and Media, Comparative Literature

Second Reader: Barrymore A. Bogues, Ph.D., Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Africana Studies, Humanities and Critical Theory

______

April 2017

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Modern Culture and Media.

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Contents Acknowledgements ...... 4 Introduction ...... 8 Chapter 1: Making Sense of Racialized Violence...... 18 Meaning, Mediation, and Technology ...... 30 Modernity, Death, and Spectacle ...... 33 (De)Mythology and (De)Mystification ...... 40 Chapter 2: Networks of Feeling, Platforms of Death ...... 44 Tumblr as Platform, Tumblr as Nexus ...... 47 “This Is Why Black People Are Pissed Off” ...... 54 "Truly How Innocent Can a Dead Man Be?" ...... 69 Chapter 3: Networked (A)Liveness ...... 82 Coming Together to Build a More Open and Connected World ...... 87 Bring it Near, Inspect it Closely...... 94 In Media Res ...... 101 Conclusion: Absolute Dereliction and the Imaging of Death ...... 110 Bibliography ...... 124

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Acknowledgements

This is the longest project I have ever attempted to write and I think the final product you are now reading reflects this fact in every way. That I was applying to and subsequently visiting potential Ph.D. programs at the time of writing has certainly not helped make this process any easier, and much of my writing had to be delayed even while I continued to read, research, and take notes. This work would not have been possible without the support of my family, my friends, and my partner, all of whom helped me continue working on this project and see its importance even when I wanted to abandon it. I especially want to thank Paige Morris for always challenging me to work harder and think more about what I wanted to say. You’ve been my rock and you have affected my life more deeply than you can know. I want to thank my two best friends Alex Karim and Myacah Sampson for all the work you put in to entertaining my nonsense over the years. You have been essential to the formation of my ideas, and I can say I wouldn’t be the person I am without having met you and grown alongside you. The same is true of all my wonderful friends both here at Brown and across the country, including Jieyi Cai, Phoebe Young, Jackie

Gu, Justice Gaines, Jessica Brown, Sana Teramoto, Kristina Lee, Matt Dang, Mimi Gordor, Brian Acosta, and Yanexy Cardona. In a broader sense, I also want to thank all the people who I have had the pleasure to work alongside as they produced their own theses and capstones this year and in past years. Each of you has influenced how I think about this work and how it ultimately came to be written, and I cherish the conversations and mutual support we have shared. Further, I would like to thank you, the reader for picking this up and taking some of your time on it. Who knows where this project will end up by the time you read this, but that doesn’t change what it means to me that you would engage with me and this work, to whatever extent you are able. Thank you.

Academically and technically this work wouldn’t have been possible without the support of all the faculty, staff, and graduate students who have listened to me, given me feedback, and overall shaped

4 my academic career and interests here at Brown. This project was first developed through funding provided by the Karen T. Romer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award. I’ve continued to be able to work on it as my Honor’s Thesis with support from the department of Modern Culture and Media and the department’s wonderful faculty and staff. I have received further support from the Moore

Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program, the Swearer Center for Public Service Royce Fellowship, and the Cogut Center for the Humanities Undergraduate Fellowship. I credit Dr. Brandy Monk-Payton with acting as my first possibility model for what Black people in the academy could do and do for students, and I thank you for setting me on this path. During my sophomore year, Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong

Chun opened space for me to begin exploring digital media and I credit her with showing me how I could integrate study of digital media with a critical focus on race, identity, and governance, both through giving me the opportunity to serve as her research assistant and through the advising she provided for my first independent research project, the basis for this thesis’s second chapter. I continue to reflect on all the things you’ve taught me and I hope one day to mentor my students similarly. My time has also been indelibly shaped by the two professors I have taken classes with the most in my time at Brown, Dr.

Ariella Azoulay, and Professor John Cayley. You will see Dr. Azoulay’s effect on my thinking throughout these pages as she has been a prime influence for how I think about media, technology, and colonialism. Professor Cayley has similarly challenged me in ways I never expected, giving me expansive creative spaces to differently understand and apply the insights of the theoretical work I am still only just beginning to embark on. Additionally, I would credit Dr. Elizabeth Dickinson with fundamentally changing how I engage in academic writing. This thesis is far from perfect but all three of you played a critical role in how I ended up approaching the research and writing of this thesis, including the questions

I ended up finding worth asking.

Other professors and advisers I would like to acknowledge include Dr. Barrymore A. Bogues,

Francisco Monar, Dean Peggy Chang, Lydia Kelow-Bennet, Dr. Rijuta Mehta, Lakshmi Padmanabhan,

Dr. Alexandrina Agloro, Dr. Carey Hardin, Professor Elmo Terry-Morgan, Dr. Roquinaldo Ferreira, Dr.

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Monica Martinez, Dr. Elizabeth Hoover, Shane Lloyd, Anne Marie Ponte, Joshua Segui, Anthony Mam,

Dean Besenia Rodriguez, Dean Maitrayee Bhattacharyya, Dr. Kerrissa Heffernan, and Dr. Christopher

Hill. You have all shaped my time here at Brown and I have no doubt this project would look vastly different (and far worse) without your influence, guidance, and reminders of what is truly important in doing this sort of work in the academy.

None of this would exist without the hands of all these people and so many more pushing me forward. As I embark on a Ph.D. program in American studies at the University of Maryland, College

Park in the Fall I know I will continue to feel the influence of all of these people in my work, even as I embark on projects and ideas far beyond what I have been able to imagine and accomplish so far. This is dedicated to all of you and the love and support you have shown me throughout my undergraduate career.

I hope to bring that love with me into the research, teaching, and mentoring I do throughout my career in the academy. Thank you.

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Introduction

All of my niggas is casket pretty Ain't no one safe in this happy city I hope you make it home I hope to God that my tele' don't ring

Noname1

In a recent case, a man was charged with murder after prosecutors obtained a warrant to receive data from his Amazon Echo, a voice activated device that, in order to function, must always be listening and sometimes records what it hears so that it may retrieve requested information from the Internet.2 In late 2013, the Tumblr Blog Selfies at Funerals, received increasing attention, with many commentators labelling the images of people, as the name implies, photographing themselves at funerals, as superficial, inappropriate, and disrespectful.3

Alongside the documentation of death itself, an industry has already sprung up around the social media users who have and who expect to die, services ranging from deleting all of one’s accounts upon notice of death to even the algorithmic reproduction of a user’s social media activity posthumously.4 What all these have in common is their place in the unspoken underside of the Internet and digital media’s “massification.”5 As Steven Shaviro notes, “The Internet and

1 Noname. Casket Pretty, 2016.

2 “Privacy Advocates Warn of Potential Surveillance Through Listening Devices Like Amazon Echo, Google Home.” Democracy Now! Democracy Now!, January 4, 2017. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/4/privacy_advocates_warn_of_potential_surveillance.

3 Meese, James, Martin Gibbs, Marcus Carter, Michael Arnold, Bjorn Nansen, and Tamara Kohn. “Selfies at Funerals: Mourning and Presencing on Social Media Platforms.” International Journal of Communication 9, no. 0 (May 15, 2015): 14.

4 Leaver, Tama. “The Social Media Contradiction: Data Mining and Digital Death.” M/C Journal 16, no. 2 (March 8, 2013). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/625.

5 Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race : Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis, US: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=10215803. 2.

8 the World Wide Web are no longer places for pioneers to explore and stake their claims; they have been absorbed into the texture of our everyday life. . . . virtual reality is no longer an exception; today, it is everywhere and everything.”6 But, as these examples demonstrate, the

Internet cannot integrate into the texture of our everyday life without also becoming intimately tied to the moment which inevitably defines each life, death itself.7

André Bazin gestured to the implications of such a reality in his reflection on the ability to record death on film, the ability to have a death reoccur “every afternoon.”8 For Bazin, the representation of death on film is a metaphysical rather than a simply moral obscenity,

Before cinema there was only the profanation of corpses and the desecration of tombs. Thanks to film, nowadays we can desecrate and show at will the only one of our possessions that is temporally inalienable: dead without a requiem, the eternal dead-again of the cinema!9 He takes care to note the distinction between film and photography as the latter can only represent the dying or a corpse, while the former can capture the elusive passage from one stage to another.10 By providing an avenue to represent this inalienable moment of transition, film is unique in its ability to profane not only the dead or dying, but the process of death. But below this distinction, perhaps all media can facilitate a deeper kind of obscenity.

6 As quoted in Ibid. It isn’t my focus here, but do note the language of “pioneers” in the description of the internet and how we might extend his metaphor to an understanding of the continuity between settler colonialism and globalized capitalism today.

7 Leaver, Tama. “Researching the Ends of Identity: Birth and Death on Social Media.” Social Media + Society 1, no. 1 (April 1, 2015): 2056305115578877. doi:10.1177/2056305115578877.

8 Bazin, André. “Death Every Afternoon.” In Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, edited by Ivone Margulies, 27–31, 2003. 31

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid. 30

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Photography, film, digital media, and, indeed, whatever mediums we can think of, can access a deeper kind of obscenity, not through a specific relationship to time, but through their relationship to space and, more particularly, the affective connections which permeate that space.

As Gibbs et al note,

While the dying are typically removed from daily life and placed in hospitals and hospices, the dead are removed to funeral parlours and cemeteries, and institutional commemoration occurs in demarcated places and at times structured for that purpose (places of worship, cemeteries, funerals, and so on), social media memorializations, like roadside memorials, repositions the dead back within the flow of everyday life.11 Within the flow of everyday life there already exists not only a temporal location of death but also, and perhaps more widely relevant, a spatial one. Further, while the metaphysical moment of death occurs within this space, it is not the mere mediation of death which creates obscenity. It is the networks of feeling and living which make death meaningful at all—death is far more obscene to the people forced to reckon with death and its excesses than to the corpse. Walter et al confirm,

Death is irreducibly physical, but it is also social. Getting frail or terminally ill and then dying disrupts social networks; bereavement entails a restructuring of social engagement, with both the living and the dead. The internet is also, and increasingly, social, so much so that the term “social networks” is nowadays as likely taken to include online as well as offline networks. So it is reasonable to ask whether, and if so how, the internet changes the experience of dying, and of grieving.12 Death’s mediation is relevant precisely because of the social elements which surround any given death, things which have inevitably changed in the era of the internet. The internet, more so than

11 Gibbs, Martin, James Meese, Michael Arnold, Bjorn Nansen, and Marcus Carter. “#Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media, and Platform Vernacular.” Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 3 (March 4, 2015): 255–68. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2014.987152. 256-257.

12 Walter, Tony, Rachid Hourizi, Wendy Moncur, and Stacey Pitsillides. “Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn? Overview and Analysis.” OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying 64, no. 4 (June 1, 2012): 275–302. doi:10.2190/OM.64.4.a. 276

10 any media before it, has drastically changed our ability to mediate our social lives and with that to maintain and contest that social fabric in which death arises.

We could ask any number of questions about how digital media has changed our experience of death through changing the social fabric of our lives and much of this research has already begun to be conducted. Some of this has tried to understand the disruption of some of the more traditionally constructed social spaces for the mediation of death like funerals and memorials, as in the research and critical commentary on Selfies at Funerals.13 Other work has engaged with the memorialization of friends and relatives online on both social networking sites like Facebook and more ‘grief-specific’ sites, like cyber-cemeteries. Related research has explored topics ranging from documentation of online-support groups for those facing life- threatening illnesses, the public, to shared mourning of natural disasters and the deaths of celebrities, to research on digital inheritance of both hardware and information.14

Yet beyond all of these, the question which has yet to be asked in much of the literature is, itself, implicit in the basis on which these other studies are conducted. Looking back at Walter et al’s explanation of the social relevance of death we can see this lack more clearly,

Death is irreducibly physical, but it is also social. Getting frail or terminally ill and then dying disrupts social networks; bereavement entails a restructuring of social engagement, with both the living and the dead.15

13 Meese, James, Martin Gibbs, Marcus Carter, Michael Arnold, Bjorn Nansen, and Tamara Kohn. “Selfies at Funerals: Mourning and Presencing on Social Media Platforms.” International Journal of Communication 9, no. 0 (May 15, 2015): 14. See also Gibbs et al “#Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media, and Platform Vernacular”

14 For an overview of much of the existing research on digital media and death see Walter et al, “Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn?”

15 Ibid. 276

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We should ask, why is death here associated, primarily with the avenues of fate? That is, why is death, in its relationship to a reformation of the social fabric of our lives, assumed to be something we simply experience as an objective phenomenon, isolated to the framework of the individual body and resonating outward into the social fabric? The research discussed above contains this same lack in its focus on the waves which a death might create in the social field and not on the context which might itself produce death as an effect.

Such a reframing would allow us to see not only the social elements of death and how the internet might change experiencing and reacting to death, but, more deeply, how digital media might change the production of death and its place in the social fabric in which we live. More concretely this allows us to understand the mechanisms by which death is not merely a thing which exists in all lives, but something which is actively produced, exploited, and negotiated by organizations and individuals. This is the context in which we might be able to open questions about the relationship of digital media to the changed experience of war for both combatants and civilians, questions which have a much different basis than those asked by much of the existing literature.16

Supporting both the Black Panther Party’s and the Movement for Black Lives’ claims that a War on Black people is occurring and must be put to an end, Frank Wilderson, III observes that Black death is fundamental to, rather than an incidental part of America’s functioning,

“capital/white supremacy’s dream did not envision [Black people] as being incorporated or

16 As an example, it means something entirely different to engage with the social media presence of a 35-year-old white American middle-class man dealing with cancer alongside his extended family through social media in comparison to the digital video surveillance presence of a Yemeni teenager in the months before he was killed by a U.S. drone-strike and marked to be an enemy combatant on the basis of his dying in the ‘wrong’ part of the social fabric. Both are examples of the way digital media technologies have wholly changed the social fabric in which we live, but it takes a reframing of the basis of our questions to also understand how digital media technologies have wholly changed the social fabric in which we die.

12 incorporative. From the very beginning, we were meant to be accumulated and die.”17 We can expand this to a broader understanding of not only the nature, but the function of race since, as

Ruth Wilson Gilmore insists, racism “is the state-sanctioned extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” 18 Moreover, as the

Combahee River Collective, a Boston-based, Black feminist activist organization, reminds us, though these deaths may be racial, they also cannot be separated from an analysis of other axes of identity. The same was true when they launched a campaign engaging with the successive deaths of 6 Black women in Boston and the connection of these deaths to the other women who experience violence across the country and around the world,

In the Black community the murders have often been talked about as solely racial or racist crimes. It’s true that the police and media response has been typically racist. It’s true that the victims were all Black and that Black people have always been targets of racist violence in this society, but they were also all women. Our sisters died because they were women just as surely as they died because they were Black. If the murders were only racial, young teen-age boys and older Black men might also have been the unfortunate victims. They might now be petrified to walk the streets as women have always been.19 With this, the Combahee River Collective reminds us of the same conclusion reached by Grace

Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson in their extrapolation of the lessons Queer of Color critique and Women of Color feminism should have for our scholarship on race today, “the

17 Wilderson III, Frank. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 1, 2003): 225–40. doi:10.1080/1350463032000101579. 238 For a complete version of the updated Black Panther Party Platform see Sreenivasan, Jyotsna. “Black Panther Party.” Poverty and the Government in America: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2009. 134 For the Movement for Black Lives Statement on the War on Black People see Herzig, Rachel, Andrea Ritchie, Rachel Gilmer, and Crystal Peters. “End the War on Black People.” The Movement for Black Lives. Accessed August 21, 2016. https://policy.m4bl.org/end-war-on-black-people/.

18 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, US: University of California Press, 2006. 28

19 Combahee River Collective. “Why Did They Die?” In Radical America, Vol. 13. 6, 1979. 44

13 dividing line between valued and devalued, can cut within, as well as across racial groupings.”20

Thus, there is no way to understand the relationship of death to the social fabric, except by foregrounding death’s place as an intentionally and institutionally produced part of social life. In our current world of globalization and neoliberal capitalism there can then be no way to separate the technologies which help shape our social world from the other mechanisms which define, limit, and exploit that social world and its limit-propellant, death.

The immediate implication of this is clear when, as we might will other researchers in the field to do, we shift our attention to the immediate political, social and economic environment, the stage on which Gilmore’s production and exploitation of death occurs. The Black Lives

Matter movement, started by three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal

Tometi comes to mind as an immediate example through which one could study the production of life and death in America in the last 10 years, but any number of movements and moments could come to mind including, say, Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement or White

Supremacist Richard Spencer’s Alt-Right. Garza, Khan-Cullors, and Tometi began the

#BlackLivesMatter campaign as a response to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman for Martin’s death, and, with this, sparked a moment that moved through both the online and offline social worlds.21 With this action they changed the social field in which the deaths of others like Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and Mya Hall would end up being made meaningful as well as the social world in which we all live, including and especially for those of us who are Black. Such was the case for Sandra Bland who, herself was affected by

20 Hong, Grace Kyungwon, and Roderick A. Ferguson. “Introduction.” In Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, edited by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson. Durham NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011. 11

21 Garza, Alicia. “Herstory.” Black Lives Matter. Accessed March 29, 2017. http://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/.

14 the development of Black Lives Matter in a way which cannot be separated from either the Bland we see in her videos posted on Facebook prior to her death or in the dash-camera video of her arrest by Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia, just prior to her death in the Waller County, Texas jail.22 The technology cannot be separated from the social context it exists within and vice versa—we cannot come to understand a death like Bland’s without understanding the role of digital media technologies in changing the experience of dying and of mourning. This is the much more powerful implication of Walter et al’s arguments and this is the work that must be done in the media studies, digital culture studies, communications, and race scholarship if we are to seriously approach from either angle what death, any death, means today.23

It is with this context that I attempt to approach here one of the current blind spots of the literature, the circulation of images of Black death online, and in particular, on social media. In the shortest terms, unlike Bazin’s matador whose death is captured on film, Black death does reoccur not only every afternoon, but, in some cases, thousands of times a minute. As a quick study, one can look to the YouTube search results for “Alton Sterling shooting video,” where the first page will return multiple copies of the same footage, four of these having over a million views and two of these around two million views, all garnered within the last few months since

Sterling was shot and killed by Baton Rouge Police Department Officers on July 5, 2016. In the span of the last four years it has become almost entirely routine to find images and videos of

22 Nathan, Debbie. “What Happened to Sandra Bland?” The Nation, April 21, 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happened-to-sandra-bland/.

23 There is a line of argument which would disagree with my framing of this issue as applying to all scholarship on death since my focus is on the racialized production of death, but such an alternative framing would require a concession that somehow racialized violence only affects those who are not racialized as white. That certain populations are subject to the extralegal production and exploitation is, necessarily, a boon to the populations which are not since, it is those populations who are perpetuating and benefiting from that production and exploitation.

15 dead Black people on one’s social media feed, especially right after someone was killed or there is a new development in legal proceedings about that killing. This is especially true when people are killed by law enforcement officers in this country, a phenomenon which cannot be separated from the statistics which seem to demonstrate a disproportionate amount of those killed are

Black, Latinx, or Native American.24

In this context, to make sense of the circulation of these images and ask why they are circulating and what work they do to shape the social fabric, we must try to understand the context of these images, the platforms on which they are posted and shared, and the ways users mobilize them. I begin this work in Chapter 1 where I establish a theoretical framework based in

Antonio Gramsci’s conception of common sense and the expansion of Gramsci’s concepts by

Stuart Hall and Kara Keeling. I develop this framework through a brief exploration of the history of viewing and circulating images of Black death before the advent of digital media technologies, and in particular, the spectacle lynching of Black people in the late 19th and early

20th centuries. In Chapter 2, I expand this framework for understanding the relationship between circulation of imagery of Black death and the lived reality of Blackness through the case study of

Michael Brown’s death. After Ferguson Police Department Officer Brian Wilson killed Brown in

August 2014, images of his body laying bleeding in the street began to circulate on the micro- blogging website Tumblr. Through an examination of the platform’s history, the image, and its mobilization by users I attempt to understand the connection between the circulation of images and the shaping of the social fabric in which we live. I ask how these mobilizations are related to the negotiation of hegemonic common sense and how this presents the opportunity for resistance

24 Swaine, Jon, Oliver Laughland, Jamiles Lartey, and Ciara McCarthy. “Young Black Men Killed by US Police at Highest Rate in Year of 1,134 Deaths.” The Guardian, December 31, 2015, sec. US news. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/31/the-counted-police-killings-2015-young-black-men.

16 to racialized violence. In Chapter 3 I continue this work by turning my attention to Diamond

Reynolds and Philando Castile. Just after St. Anthony Police Department officer Jeronimo Yanez shot Castile after pulling over his car, Castile’s passenger and girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds used the social media website Facebook to live-broadcast the scene from inside the car. Through an analysis of the video I work to understand how digital media technologies might compress time and space in ways that augment their ability to change the lived realities of Blackness. This ability is made present in the interplay between Reynolds’s phone and the officer’s gun within the frame of the video and the space of the car. I ultimately ask how this interplay might be mobilized to directly intervene against the production and exploitation of racialized violence.

Finally, I conclude by asking of the work these images of death can do in creating conditions for resistance against racialized violence, and how we might connect these conditions to the work of decolonization.

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Chapter 1: Making Sense of Racialized Violence

. . . I love - I'm neutral, I love every - I love people of color. I'm not like they're making me out to be. We've got to quit - we've got to quit; I mean after-all, I could understand the first - upset for the first two hours after the verdict, but to go on, to keep going on like this and to see the security guard shot on the ground - it's just not right; it's just not right, because those people will never go home to their families again. And uh, I mean please, we can, we can get along here. We all can get along - we just gotta, we gotta. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while, let's, you know let's try to work it out, let's try to beat it, you know, let's try to work it out. Rodney King

in response to the 1992 L.A. riots25

If our goal is to understand the present circulation of images of Black death on social media, we need to be able to understand how media technologies help construct the social field and historicize this understanding within the political, economic, and social contexts in which

Black death has been produced and exploited. We must develop both a theoretical framework and a genealogy—a history in which to apply this framework, giving it not only a concreteness, but a weight as it links more systematically the moments which do and do not come to mind when we bear witness to the images of Black death we find on social media today.

To take one step back we can slow down this moment (the scene of the crime?), in which we see an image of Black death circulating on social media. What do we know about this moment? In a rush, of course, is our feelings, as we sense the image and what it means. In doing so we draw not only on what is within the frame, but what is outside of it in both time and space,

25 Rodney King Press Conference. CNN, 1992. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sONfxPCTU0.

18 something we can do because we understand, even at this base, unconscious level, that images have frames and that the frame implies not an isolated moment, but a world which has been bracketed. It is this logic which allows us to understand our televised sitcoms as existing within a world—to make something believable one does not have to film within an actual home, but simply enough of the home for the audience to fill in the rest of the world outside the frame. And so, within that small moment we come to understand the image as being not only what is depicted but as being part of a world, the world, in which we live, a process which drags further pieces of information along with it.

We come to understand each of the elements within the frame in their relation to larger concepts and histories, each element triggering, simultaneously, the present moment and all the relevant past moments in a dizzying array. Because our minds do this with the image we can tell what we are looking at in the same moment we understand what we think it means. A flat, grainy swathe of color becomes recognizable as a person choking another person as they struggle on the ground. A jumble of frequencies and pitches becomes recognizable as words whose urgency may ring out to us as we make sense of them, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” As such, in this brief moment in front of a screen, we are able to understand what we see to be not simply pixels or flashes of light and sound, but the footage of New York Police Department Officer putting Eric

Garner in a chokehold and pressing his body into the sidewalk as he pleaded with them before losing consciousness, images which we are then able to connect to the larger coverage of the story and the knowledge that Garner was pronounced dead at the Richmond University Medical

Center only an hour later.26

26 See Goodman, Al Baker, J. David, and Benjamin Mueller. “Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death.” The New York Times, June 13, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/nyregion/eric-garner-police- chokehold-staten-island.html.

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We go through this process for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that human cognition has its limits, ones which may be more or less pronounced, but through which we engage the entirety of our world. This all begins in a process of recognition, a simultaneously quick and slow process through which we take an undifferentiated mass of sensory information and parse it into discrete pieces. We then are able to relate these discrete pieces both to each other within the frame and to that which we believe exists outside of that frame. Such is the case with all of our senses and our cognition more generally as we, in the split moment before we even consciously think about it, recognize a friend walking up the street toward us as they come better into view. What is essential here is not only that we do this, but how and, more importantly, why.

The split moment in which recognition occurs is, in one sense, instinctual and base. We often react to things we see, touch, smell, or hear before we even consciously consider it, and this is a fundamental part of our life as mortal, fallible beings. The moments which surprise us are easy examples of this, as something drastically interrupts our world of passive perception, something which we make sense of and react to even before we consider what it “actually is.”

Jump-scares in film and television are based on this principle, but in our everyday life you might encounter this same reaction when you touch something unexpectedly hot, cold, slimy, wet, etc.

Yet, at the same time it feels instinctual, this process of recognition is nonetheless a fundamental part, not only of our cognition, but of the social field in which we live. To say it in reverse, our social field is only navigable through the basic process by which we recognize and make sense of the world around us. This insight is itself obvious when considering the deaths of both Freddie

Gray and Rekia Boyd. On March 21, 2012 Chicago Police Department Officer Dante Servin shot and killed Rekia Boyd, allegedly, because he thought someone in the group she was standing

20 with was holding a gun that later turned out to be a cell phone.27 In parallel, on April 12, 2015,

Freddie Gray was deemed suspicious, was arrested, and eventually died in police custody primarily because he abruptly turned to run away from a pair of police officers immediately upon making eye contact with them. Gray recognized something to run from and the police recognized his behavior as suspicious.28 In both cases and many more instances of police killings, it is the mechanisms of perception and recognition which fundamentally shape the context of these deaths.

It is in this context which we can refer to Antonio Gramsci’s conception of common sense, his framework for linking perception and the larger social, political, and economic environment in which we live. For Gramsci, common sense is, in its simplest sense, the spontaneous and unconscious conception of the world through which people experience their lives.29 As Stuart Hall elaborates,

What passes for 'common sense' in our society—the residue of absolutely basic and commonly-agreed, consensual wisdoms—helps us to classify out the world in simple but meaningful terms. It feels, indeed, as if it has always been there, the sedimented, bedrock wisdom of 'the race', as a form of 'natural' wisdom, the content of which has changed hardly at all with time. However, common sense does have a content, and a history.30 Fundamental to common sense is its intangibility and its quick, almost automatic character, this automatic obviousness covering up its history and content, the things which make our common

27 Editorial Board. “Rekia Boyd Shooting Was ‘beyond Reckless,’ so Cop Got a Pass.” Chicagotribune.com, April 22, 2015. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-cop-verdict-servin-edit-0423-20150422- story.html.

28 “Freddie Gray’s Death in Police Custody - What We Know.” BBC News, May 23, 2016, sec. US & Canada. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32400497.

29 Hall, Stuart. “Culture, the Media and the ‘Ideological Effect.’” In Mass Communication and Society, edited by James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979. 325-326.

30 Ibid. Emphasis mine.

21 sense both common and ours. If you are driving and you see a flash of red, white, and blue light in your rear-view mirror, accompanied by a short siren, you may immediately recognize this as a police car who is in some way signaling you. The history and content of this immediate application of common sense would become most apparent if you were to then find out that this other driver was in fact simply an enthusiastic person on their way to the Dominican pride parade downtown. Your process of perception is least transparent and most obvious in those moments where it is simply wrong. This is the sense in which Hall observes, “You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things.”31 The further implications of this are only apparent when we consider the history and content of “the existing frame of things” within which our common sense perception integrates objects of our perception.

As Kara Keeling says, “There is not just one common sense, but various common senses—as many as there are groups of living beings with brains.”32 This is apparent in the simple observation that, despite the common-ness of many reactions to stimuli which interrupt our passive perception, we do not all perceive them in precisely the same way. These differentiations take place along group lines precisely because our common sense becomes common only through the process of historical becoming, that is, the historical process by which individual people become a group with a history.33 Common sense must be understood to have a content and a history because it originates in the formation of a group’s historical existence. This

31 Ibid.

32 Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Perverse Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007. 21

33 Ibid. 22

22 explains how the negotiation of a group’s survival as a cluster of individuals and an individual’s survival as part of a cluster of overlapping groups is tied not only to concrete actions, but the process by which those actions involve a circuit of memory, recognition, and re-memory—each new attempt at perception linking back to what is already known, and, in fact, what is perceptible is a document of that history.34

Concretely, this contextualizes the previous anecdotes of police violence against Black people and provides a theoretical grounding for an observation like Martinot and Sexton’s, “To the police, a wallet in the hand of black man is a gun whereas that same wallet in the hand of a white man is just a wallet. A cell phone in the hands of a black woman is a gun; that same phone in a white woman’s hand is a cell phone.”35 To add to this equation, the super-position of cell- phone gun is fundamentally subjective by virtue of the subjectivity involved in the process of perception. This subjectivity is tied to the historical becoming of the social groups with which one exists as part of a collective. Thus, there is something terminal about being part of the police which makes the combination of Black skin and the glean of plastic or a faint dark outline into the sort of threat which justifies their use of deadly force. That terminal quality is not simply attributable to psychology or politics of the individual, but of the role of the police as part of an institution of civil society, a role which makes them fundamentally antagonistic to those groupings for whom civil society is, itself, antagonistic, simply, Black and Indigenous people among other colonized populations.36

34 Ibid.

35 Martinot, Steve, and Jared Sexton. “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 169. 170.

36 Ibid. 178. See also Wilderson III, Frank B. “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal.” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (92) (2003): 18–27. We should also remember of course the intervention of Combahee River Collective and

23

It may be obvious, but it is nonetheless important then to ask again of Freddie Gray and his flight from the police upon seeing them, this flight leading to his arrest, injuries, and death. It is true that there are as many forms of common sense as there are social groupings who have developed together as part of their history. At the same time, it is also true that one will find no shortage of fear, apprehension, anger, and critique of police within the communities who are the most policed, particularly low-income Black, Latinx, and Native American people. In that sense, and without relying on a problematic psychologizing, the reaction of Freddie Gray to the police officers is something I have no doubt many other people could relate to, even without ever knowing the exact subjectivity behind that action. Yet, and this is key, it is Freddie Gray who is dead today and all the Baltimore Police Department Officers involved in his death have had all charges against them dropped.37 On the flip side of this we can also observe the fact that Assata

Shakur remains on the FBI’s most wanted list decades after she was arrested because she is alleged to have been involved in the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper.38 The simple truth is that common sense has a content and a history, that content and history tied not only to historical groups, but to the exchanges of power and domination of these groups.

From here we arrive to Gramsci’s conception of hegemony and, with it, a contextualization of perception in the production of the social field as an active field of repression, violence, and resistance, rather than a neutral field in which we simply live and

Hong and Ferguson given in the introduction, that it is not only race that is important within racial capitalism, but it does serve as a particularly powerful term.

37 Owens, Donna. “Baltimore Rising: Two Years After Freddie Gray’s Death, Shaken City Mends.” NBC News, April 19, 2017. http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/baltimore-unrest/city-divided-baltimore-mending-two-years- after-freddie-grays-death-n748101.

38 “Hands Off Assata Shakur: Angela Davis Calls for Radical Activism to Protect Activist Exiled in Cuba.” Democracy Now! Democracy Now!, March 28, 2016. http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/28/hands_off_assata_shakur_angela_davis.

24 interact. Hegemony is the term Gramsci utilizes to describe this process of subordination of parts of society, making clear that this occurs at the level of culture (which refracts and reverberates back through the material relations which we live) through a negotiation of spontaneous consent to the rule of the dominant social group.39 In “The German Ideology” Marx states directly, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” 40 He continues that the ruling ideas are the ideal expression of “the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.”41 In short, the ideas which predominate in their rule are the ideas which make their rule possible. What Marx implies is explained by Hall’s explanation of Gramsci,

'Hegemony' is in operation when the dominant class fractions not only dominate but direct—lead: when they not only possess the power to coerce but actively organize so as to command and win the consent of the subordinated classes to their continuing sway. 'Hegemony' thus depends on a combination of force and consent.42 It is no surprise to argue the dominance of white capitalists is produced and defended through force; this fundamental coercion is the very nature of Columbus’ first interactions with

Indigenous peoples in America, violence which extends to the present interactions between the

Morton County Police Department and Water Protectors in North Dakota.43 Gramsci’s point is

39 Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. 8. pr. New York: International Publ, 1992. 12.

40 Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 2nd Revised & Enlarged edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. 172-173

41 Ibid.

42 Hall. “Culture, the Media and the ‘Ideological Effect.’” 332-333

43 Sainato, Michael. “Police Continue Harassing, Smearing Standing Rock Water Protectors.” Observer, February 7, 2017. http://observer.com/2017/02/police-continue-harass-arrest-standing-rock-protectors/.

25 that this dominance is won also on the field of culture and ideology, the elements which

“cement” society through the production of consent to the rule of the dominant social group. The dominant group fractions rule by virtue not only of their accumulated force (as in the power of the police and the military), but also due to their ability to contain the contradictions which arise from the various segments of society and frame these within their range. 44 The new ideological unity which is formed are the ruling ideas identified by Marx above, this unity enabling itself.

Fundamental to this self-realizing character is the combination of force, enacted, in part, through the terror which Martinot and Sexton describe as endemic to policing, and the production and negotiation of consent.45

It is in this sense that we can then come to understand Omi and Winant’s insistence that race, rather than being biological or simply neutral, is fundamentally ideological; race is a way of

“comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world,” which is integral to the culture of the

United States.46 Race functions through the negotiation of both terror and consent, both fundamentally linked to the historical becoming of groups in ways which fundamentally exceed the individual. Keeling explains this insight in terms of Frantz Fanon’s passage on the nausea which results from being bombarded with the historical connotations of Blackness within the dominant culture, “For Fanon, the black marks an interminable present characterized by an affect that results from the black’s encounter with images of the past, an encounter that is repeated indefinitely”47 Freddie Gray’s run and the police’s suspicions are both intimately connected to

44 Ibid.

45 Martinot. and Sexton. “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” 171.

46 Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. “Racial Formations.” In Rethinking the Color Line: Readings in Race and Ethnicity. McGraw-Hill Education, 2011. 20.

47 Keeling. The Witch’s Flight. 70.

26 each other and this longer history of the image of Blackness, associations of danger, fear, nausea blossoming together into a spiral of death, Gray’s death specifically because the police serve the dominant institutions of society while Gray exists among the detritus they are tasked with clearing from the social field.

But we stress again, as Keeling does, that this situation is not only accepted gracefully or fought to the death, but negotiated, and, with this, disparate forms of common sense are themselves negotiated to come within the rubric of the hegemonic. Keeling demonstrates this sort of negotiation with the enslaved Africans who bore witness to the violence and terror of enslavement and lived to not only to reproduce, but to pass on those stories in the form of fugitive knowledges, “a slave common sense.”48 This is to further imply, the ideological form of race identified by Omi and Winant has a content and a history which does not precede the historical struggle of colonialism and the development of racial capitalism. Blackness and its meaning is developed through the negotiation of terror and consent between whites and Black people. This is what it means for common sense to be a product of one’s historical becoming, a historical becoming of not simply heroic resistance or weak capitulation, but negotiation and survival.49

This negotiation can only occur if we add an essential amendment to our characterization of Fanon above. At the same time Fanon notes the ever-present return of the past hegemonic images which bind him, “I am overdetermined from without. I am a slave not to the ‘idea’ others

48 Ibid. 57-58, 63 This observation is made in contrast to the sort of masculinism found in a film like Sankofa, where the privileged term is the slave who fights to the death for their freedom. She notes that the ancestors of many Black people is not only those who fought at every moment, but also those who negotiated their circumstances with other forms of resistance and modes of capitulation.

49 Ibid. 61-63

27 have of me, but to my appearance,”50 he nonetheless emphasized the potential for liberation in the emergence of the new, “I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”51 Hegemony is less a smooth field, homogeneity, or peace than it is many sets of clenched and grinding teeth, muscle straining against muscle as we are drawn to both the smoothness of the surface of the enamel and the blood which pours from the gums to lubricate the surface and its underlying tension. Terror and coercion go hand in hand but they are not the end. They are a negotiation which will inevitably change.52 Such is the only way to make sense either of Fanon’s continuation of the quote above, “I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it,”53 or Omi and Winant’s foregrounding of the historical determinacy of the ideology of race, “Racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded.”54

The historical determinacy of all ideological concepts relates to the historical determinacy of common sense and the negotiation of power and domination in society, material forces which affect the basest level of our perception. The moments which spark these changes are contestations and clashes between the competing senses of social groups and the negotiation

50 Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. 87.

51 Ibid. 179.

52 See Johnson, Richard. “Post-Hegemony?: I Don’t Think So.” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (May 1, 2007): 95–110. doi:10.1177/0263276407075958.

53 Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. 179.

54 Omi and Winant. “Racial Formations.” 19

28 of their terms through the terror and consent. This helps explain both the genesis of the L.A. riots in the aftermath of the lack of indictment for the Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King rather than the beating itself.55 It also helps explain the genesis of

#BlackLivesMatter in the contradiction between the co-constituted trials of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin and the lack of indictment for Zimmerman in Martin’s death.56 The basic issue in each was not only the “facts,” but the interpretation of evidence, particularly visual evidence, in the constitution of those facts. The fact that the hegemonic discourse propagated the demonization of Black people is only surprising in a world where hegemony is neither a force of domination nor fought in the cultural and legal realms, this obfuscation itself being part of the same hegemonic common sense which characterizes the hegemonic understanding of American democracy.

In summary, our established link is that our base perception draws upon our common sense, a negotiated field where domination is played out and crystallized through both terror and consent. Hegemony functions in the production and maintenance of that domination whereby all elements, material or ideological, which attempt to exceed the hegemonic common sense are brought within its realm. Yet, as is presaged by the reactive function of hegemony, new formations always have the potential of bursting from this formation, their disconnection from hegemonic common sense rendering them unrecognizable and unthinkable. Through the negotiation of these bursts of the new, the content and history of hegemony shifts in new and different ways. It is at this point then that we require further clarification on the mechanisms by

55 See Watts, Jerry G. “Reflections on the Rodney King Verdict and the Paradoxes of the Black Response.” In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 1 edition. New York: Routledge, 1993.

56 Garza. “Herstory.”

29 which meaning is formed and negotiated such that the field of hegemonic common sense is contested and shifted in a different direction. Through this we can then come to understand the potential for liberation without recapitulation Fanon dreams of, the formation of counter- hegemony.

Meaning, Mediation, and Technology

So far, we have discussed the relationship between the cognitive process of perception and recognition and tried to de-naturalize this process by reading it in relation to the broader historical context which forms and shapes how we come to recognize things at this base level.

Yet, we have so far glossed over one distinction, that between signs and the reality which we experience as “natural,” particularly the distinction between iconic signs and reality. The key point is to make clear that signifiers such as the word “cow” and a picture of a cow are distinct from actual cows which we might encounter “out in the real world,” even though these signifiers are commonly understood to represent real actual cows. Iconic signs like the picture of the cow make it easier for us to elide this distinction and treat our perception of them as just as natural as our perception of the world around us primarily because, while the linguistic sign, “cow,” is somewhat arbitrary, the iconic sign seems to possess at least some of the relevant properties of a real actual cow. This seems a simple or obvious distinction to make, yet it is precisely what we elided in our example of the footage of Eric Garner’s loss of consciousness referenced at the beginning of this chapter. We made the easy connection between perceiving the event on our screens and perceiving the event in person. To foreground this distinction, we must then pay attention not only to what an image or video might represent, but also the material instruments

30 and social relations which facilitate the process of mediation—the process by which we encounter the video on our computer screens and come to understand it as a representation of a historical event.57

The material instruments which facilitate this interaction include both the camera-phone, the technical infrastructure of the internet including its servers, signals, and cables, and our computer, as well as all the software and code which facilitates this circulation. The social relations which facilitate this mediation are the larger cultural, political, and economic factors which enable the production of both the software and hardware objects and the event itself. The combined implication is that there are many complex and intertwined historical processes which shape the social field in which we live and with this what, how, and why we are able to make sense of that social field, including both the events within our direct lives and those whose perception is facilitated by various media technologies including photography, television, radio, film, and new media.

It is far outside my scope here to attempt to distinguish all the social and material relations which surround each of these media technologies, but it will help us to denaturalize the functioning of digital media today if we can develop a more general theory to relate these technologies both to our base perception and to the larger historical context in which we live. To do this requires us to shift attention away from the particularities of technology and toward a concept advanced by Keeling in her reckoning with Gramsci and Marcia Landy, affectivity.

57 Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Wiley, 2005. 163-167. See also Flanagin, Andrew J., Craig Flanagin, and Jon Flanagin. “Technical Code and the Social Construction of the Internet.” New Media & Society 12, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 179– 96. doi:10.1177/1461444809341391.

31

Affectivity helps avoid an approach to understanding media that focuses only on the high level social relations, divorced from “the mental operations required to make sense of the world.”58 If we can conceptualize labor as being an essential part of the social relations which allow us to have camera-phones and computers with which to circulate images of Black death today, we must also conceptualize labor at the micro-level, the labor invested by the “consumer” in making sense of the world through the application of common sense. This labor extends both through the process of making sense of mediated images and of reality itself, the link which was made, but quickly glossed over, in our initial explanation of the process of cognition.59 We should add to our initial understanding then, that just as the higher level work of producing goods is augmented by the technology which mediates the connection between the laborer and the product, so is the labor of affectivity, the labor of making sense of a sign, augmented by the technology which mediates this relation, that is, media technologies such as film, television, new media, etc. What

Keeling takes care to note, and what we must be careful of in our analysis are the various ways in which capitalism’s relentless march across the globe today should be understood as fundamentally related to the forms which the labor of affectivity takes today. The labor of affectivity is not merely for itself, but has been integrated into the system of capitalism at the deepest level of our perception through the ideological form of common sense, that is, this labor serves the reproduction of the social world through the exact process by which the is made perceptible in the terms of past perception. Yet, at the same time this labor also enables the advancement of the new through its short-circuits and contradictions.60

58 Keeling. The Witch’s Flight. 24.

59 Ibid. 25

60 Ibid. 24-26

32

Gramsci’s insistence that there is no such thing as a non-intellectual then takes on a larger function within this framework,

each man . . . outside of his professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he . . . participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought.61 This contribution, the labor of affectivity, is augmented through the mechanisms of its mediation, the media technologies which facilitate the production and circulation of signs, in our case particularly, visual signs. To understand the circulation of images of Black death on social media then, we must be able to take account of this labor through which the conception of the world is both sustained and modified, as well as the augmentation of this labor through media technologies. We can develop our more general theory by shifting attention away from our present technologies and back onto a parallel moment in the long history of the circulation of images of Black death, the period of spectacle lynchings between the 1890s and the mid-20th century.

Modernity, Death, and Spectacle

After the abolition of slavery, the rise of Jim Crow segregation was characterized by lynchings which served to symbolically and materially maintain both white dominance and separation of Black people from whites.62 These lynchings involved the capture and brutal

61 Gramsci. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. 9.

62 “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, Report Summary.” Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015. 8-10

33 murder, torture, and mutilation of the victim who had been accused by some white person or another of some violation of rule, law, manners, or anything at all. As Ida B. Wells describes in an 1893 speech,

Whenever a malicious law is violated in any of its parts, any farmer, any railroad conductor, or merchant can call together a posse of his neighbors and punish even with death the black man who resists and the legal authorities sanction what is done by failing to prosecute and punish the murders. . .. The rule of the mob is absolute.63 Throughout the period between the civil war and the mid-20th century, most lynchings were rather private in their execution, involving smaller groups of white people who might capture and murder a Black person over this or that personal grievance or slight, the body then sometimes displayed to a larger audience to send a message of terror. Yet, as lynchings overall decreased in number, a greater proportion began to follow the model laid out by the lynching of a

Black man, Henry Smith, in Paris, Texas, just two weeks before Wells delivered the speech quoted above.

Smith’s lynching was one of the first of those which would become known as spectacle lynchings, “carnival-like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim's body parts collected as souvenirs.”64 While these lynchings ultimately killed less people overall, their symbolic impact on people across the country was far larger.65 In parallel with our own time, these dynamics were

63 Wells, Ida B. “Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Baptist Tremont Temple. Boston, MA, February 13, 1893. We should note here that Wells focuses on the figure of the lynched Black man, ignoring the forms of racialized violence invited on Black women and children. See “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, Report Summary.”

64 “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, Report Summary.” 12

65 Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Vintage, 1999. 201

34 possible because of the proliferation of industrialization and consumer capitalism throughout the southern states,

In the decades following 1890, many lynchings no longer occurred in places untouched by the technological advances of the larger world. Lynchers drove cars, spectators used cameras, out-of-town visitors arrived on specifically chartered excursion trains, and the towns and counties in which these horrifying events happened had newspapers, telegraph offices, and even radio stations that announced times and locations of these upcoming violent spectacles. Although after the peak decades of the 1890s the number of lynchings decreased even in the South, the cultural impact of the practice became more powerful. More people participated in, read about, saw pictures of, and collected souvenirs from lynchings even as fewer mob murders occurred. In the twentieth century white southerners transformed a deadly and often quiet form of vigilante “justice” into a modern spectacle of enduring power.66 Grace Elizabeth Hale observes that these lynchings were not just the residue of an older, “more barbaric” time in Southern history. They were not relics of a time gone by. Rather, they were precisely modern, a mediation, through some of the latest technologies, of a segregated society and a mechanism for resolving the contradictions of modernization and racial boundaries.67

A prime contradiction of the rapidly shifting social relations of this segregated society was the meaning and gravity of race as an ideological form, as a part of negotiated common sense. The form of the spectacle lynching, through its brutal enacting of the logic of racial difference allowed for a consolidation of both whiteness and Blackness, the terms separated quite clearly in the photographs which circulated. To make sense of the spectacle lynching as an

“amusement,” thus required not simply reference to a pre-existing model of whiteness, but the consolidation of whiteness through the act itself and the labor involved in its perception as an amusement. In perception, this requires recognition of the scene of the event as death and

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid. 203

35 mutilation alongside a recognition of the object of the lynching as Black, in fundamental distinction to the recognition of one’s own self as white like the lynchers in the photograph.

Key is to recognize that this labor required and brought into being a new negotiation of racial common sense which brought together the identification of Southern and Northern whites into an essential and unified whiteness, this whiteness rhetorically and materially counterpoised to the Black and their categorical susceptibility to being the object of lynching. 68 The color-line was not only maintained, but produced in the c rculation of these images and their decoding by whites in the North and South as relating to them only as potential perpetrators and bystanders, never as targets. This confirms Martinot and Sexton’s conclusion regarding white supremacy’s banality, “White supremacy is nothing more than what we perceive of it; there is nothing beyond it to give it legitimacy, nothing beneath it nor outside it to give it justification. The structure of its banality is the surface on which it operates.”69 As such, its apparent depth is only an effect of its repetition, a repetition which is at its heart fundamentally empty, “In other words, its truth lies in the rituals that sustain its circuitous, contentless logic; it is, in fact, nothing but its very practices.”70 These practices involving the terror of the lynching itself, alongside the negotiation

68 Ibid. 205-207, 226. One can think of how this works in terms of the distinction established through the phrase “the negro problem.” Speaking such a phrase, one necessarily takes a relationship to it, identifying or not with “the negro problem.” This is what is meant by asking how it feels to be a problem, a question which makes no sense to ask whites, and even of white activists since of course they are not problems no matter their affinity for them. Of course one could argue that in fact many whites were lynched, some of those precisely because of their activism for and with Black communities. Just like there were some whites who were lynched during this period, it is also quite obvious to point out that there were many, the vast majority of Black people, who were not lynched. The distinction drawn by these commercialized spectacles is not one of absolute type, but something more fundamental, an ontological distinction. These images made clear the general principle that all Black people could, at any moment, be killed and any white could at any time, initiate this death. The examples of white victims of lynchings are exceptions to a general principle of race was made meaningful at the time, as the line not only of color, but of power and humanity.

69 Martinot and Sexton “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” 175

70 Ibid.

36 of ideology through the various mediums in which the images of these lynchings were circulated including the commemorative postcard and the Newspaper.

Yet we should again draw attention to the apparatus to pay attention not only to the labor performed in the death and its witnessing, but the augmentation of that labor through the technologies which enabled its circulation. As Elizabeth Alexander points out in her analysis of

Pat Ward Williams’ engagement with lynching photography, the photograph tells the story not only of a lynching, “but the far more troubling story of the complicity of the photographer, who watches but does not witness, who perpetuates, who is then in effect part of the lynch mob.”71

We should ask, alongside Williams and Alexander, “How can this photograph exist?” which is to say, how do you look at the scene of a lynching and how do you photograph it?72 I won’t be reproducing any of these images here, but the same sort of question is true of any photograph, no matter what we, as viewers, are able to make sense of within the photograph’s frame, we must also understand that this frame is not transparent, automatic, or divine intervention. It is the frame of a hand which stood by and watched the event take place, a watching which implies not only a presence but an additional layer of affectivity, the labor put in by the photographer to make sense of the scene, the photographed event, and interact with it through the apparatus of the camera, producing the event of photography. And as Ariella Azoulay concludes, the multiply unfolding temporality of the photograph opens a fundamentally inalienable position, one which cannot be strictly occupied by a single position except through a negotiated, but impermeant, violence.73 To ask how this photograph can exist is then also to ask how its existence opens room

71 Alexander, Elizabeth. “‘ Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video (S).” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 77–94. 93-94.

72 Ibid.

73 Azoulay, Ariella. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. Reprint edition. Verso, 2015. 26-27.

37 for new layers of negotiation of the meaning of the event photographed, this position fundamentally linked to, but nonetheless never reducible to the perception of the photographer.

Is the phenomenon of photo-bombing and the possibility of ‘accidentally’ capturing something within the frame not a representation of this disconnect of the photographer’s position from the position of the camera, a disconnect of the user from the apparatus? To go further and relate this back to the phenomena of spectacle lynching, is it not this disconnect which allows for the infinite and variable negotiation of the meaning of the image and with this, an infinite and variable negotiation of the meaning of race, death, and violence as terms with analogues within the range of various forms of common sense?

To return to the most concrete terms, the negotiation of the hegemonic common sense within which this unification of whiteness occurred and was worked through, is something then made possible by the fundamental process of perception which allows signs to be made sense of.

The possibility of negotiation, and thus of changes in this hegemonic form, are the result precisely of subjectivity and varying views of the event, something which is infinitely multiplied by the crystallization of the event into a sign which represents it, the photograph of the lynching, the image of Black death. This is the relationship by which media technology augments affectivity, the labor of perception and recognition, to allow not only for the reproduction of reality as it exists, but the potential for the emergence of new forces, the image of the spectacle lynching being productive of a new sense of racial difference based around the vulnerability to extralegal death and a new sense of whiteness based in the lack of this risk. This is how we can

38 understand more deeply what is meant when Matthew Frye Jacobsen concludes, “Caucasians are not born, . . . they are somehow made.”74

And while they enabled the making of a unified Caucasian in distinction to Black death, the mechanisms of were also made evident in the anti-lynching campaign advanced by the

NAACP, utilizing the same images and their inalienable point of view. As Hale explains,

Though Neal was lynched in an isolated backwoods area of northern Florida instead of in broad daylight in the center of a southern city, the NAACP made the torture and murder of Claude Neal into a spectacle. It uncovered the details, constructed the story, and provided the meaning, telling the nation a tale of white southern injustice rather than of the still-persuasive black beast rapist. 75 In response to the lynching of Neal and scores of others, the NAACP and a number of Black owned newspapers made the effort to make sense of an alternative vision of the event. Of course, what remains obvious is that despite the NAACP’s activism, lynchings continued and the disposability of Black life remained hegemonic. However, it is vital to also recognize that it is not that these efforts were simply in vain or a failure. They represent the work that was and has always been done to negotiate and challenge the forces of terror and consent which maintain the hegemonic racial ideology. The same work articulated in Keeling’s surviving slave who is able to articulate an alternative common sense through the mechanisms of their survival, mechanisms tied to their own ability to not only watch, but bear witness to the violence of slavery and make sense of it as violence, as intolerable. Their success or failure in yoking the hegemonic interpretation of these images in a different direction is less the point than that they tried and, indeed, that they could try. Within a purely linear scheme for communication such differentials

74 Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 3.

75 Hale. Making Whiteness. 222-223.

39 would be categorically impossible or at least, based on some simple form of misunderstanding i.e. the NAACP is simply wrong for saying the image of the spectacle lynching represents anything but Black inhumanity. A model based on an understanding of the labor of interpretation is the only one able to account not only for the micro-level of perception through which we individually make sense of the world around us, but the mechanisms by which the social field is itself constituted and reconstituted.76

(De)Mythology and (De)Mystification

As Judith Butler has argued in relation to the interpretive work performed in the decoding of the video of the Los Angeles Police Department’s beating Rodney King, “The visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful.”77 Yet, the hegemony which holds this field can never fully determine, but only limit the interpretations which are able to be made of the world around us as we enact the process of recognition.78 These limitations become multiply complex and augmented through the media technologies which mediate our process of perception, providing new and expanding avenues through which to create meaning and thus contest the limits and power of this hegemonic common sense. It is within this context that we come then to Robert Gooding-Williams’

76 Hall. “Encoding/Decoding.”

77 Butler, Judith. “Endangered/Endangering.” In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 1 edition. New York: Routledge, 1993. 17.

78 Hall. “Encoding/Decoding.” 170-171.

40 invocation that we not simply deconstruct or identify the source of racial ideology.79 Indeed, as

Martinot and Sexton note above, it is fruitless to search for a true source, as the heart of white supremacy is fundamentally hollow. Its power is confirmed only by its repeated demonstration, not in the decontextualized and slowed frames of the Rodney King video, but in the swings of the officers on King’s crumpled form and the screams of the witnesses on the scene.80 Gooding-

Williams argues for the need to go beyond this search for the source and instead explore the place of the hegemonic vision of Blackness within the larger social field,

The point of such an investigation would not be to demystify black bodies (that is, the point would not be to identify the social causes of their actions and attributes), but to demythify them, that is, to subject to critical scrutiny the allegories of American social and political life intimated in characterizing them.81 This is to ask us to understand the function of the mythification of the Black body within the larger context in which we live, and thus, to ask us to squarely situate our analysis not only around the labor of perception but the function of this labor in creating the very conditions which it decodes.

In the following chapters, we will attempt to pursue this work by moving our focus from this more generalized theory of perception and technology to the specificities of new media and social media. First we will get a feel for these processes by attempting to understand the power

79 Gooding-Williams, Robert. “’Look, a Negro.’” In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 1 edition. New York: Routledge, 1993.

80 Martinot and Sexton. “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” 175. For further confirmation look to the comments of avowed white supremacists such as Richard Spencer, “To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build. We produce. We go upward. And we recognize the central lie of American race relations. We don’t exploit other groups. We—we don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around. America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us,” as quoted in “‘Heil Victory!’ Alt-Right Groups Emboldened by Trump’s Election & Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.” Democracy Now! Democracy Now!, November 22, 2016. https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/22/heil_victory_alt_right_groups_emboldened.

81 Gooding-Williams. “’Look, a Negro.’” 158.

41 of the images of Michael Brown’s body circulating on the micro-blogging website, Tumblr, asking how we relate the complex dynamics of the platform to user interactions and the overall process by which hegemonic common sense is challenged and negotiated. We will then move into the even more complex case of the Facebook live video-stream of the final moments of

Philando Castile’s life and how the compressed temporality of the live might further augment not only the capacity of new media to allow for the negotiation of hegemonic common sense, but the active production of counter-hegemony through an active utilization of the unoccupiable nexus of the event of photography.

42

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Chapter 2: Networks of Feeling, Platforms of Death

I didn't like looking at these pictures, but once I looked, the events documented in them occurred in my mind over and over again, . . . I looked at these pictures, and what I saw in them, in addition to the obvious, was the way in which I'm regarded, by any number of people: as a nigger. And it is as one that I felt my neck snap and my heart break while looking at these pictures. Hilton Als82

on looking at lynching photographs

On August 9, 2014, St. Louis Police Department officer Darren Wilson shot and killed

Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His body lay in the street for nearly four hours before it was cleared by the medical examiner to be removed and taken to the morgue, and for at least 10 minutes of that time, his body lay completely uncovered.83 Local community members and commentators across the country widely criticized the slow response of the police in handling

Brown’s body, with a piece in Esquire a couple weeks later proclaiming,

I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed. They left the body in the street. Dictators leave bodies in the street. Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street. Warlords leave bodies in the street. A police officer shot Michael Brown to death. And they left his

82 Als, Hilton. “GWTW.” In Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, edited by James Allen, Tenth edition. Santa Fe, N.M: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000. 38.

83 Hunn, David, and Kim Bell. “Why Was Michael Brown’s Body Left There for Hours?” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 14, 2014. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/why-was-michael-brown-s-body-left- there-for-hours/article_0b73ec58-c6a1-516e-882f-74d18a4246e0.html. See also Mosendz, Polly. “Medical Examiner Took No Measurements, Photos of Brown.” Newsweek, November 25, 2014. http://www.newsweek.com/crime-scene-medical-examiner-took-no-measurements-photos-brown-287074.

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body in the street. For four hours. Bodies do not lie in the street for four hours. Not in an advanced society.84 Preaching at Brown’s Funeral, Reverend Al Sharpton situated his own involvement in the situation in relation to this same image,

I watched as it went back and forward. I got a call from the grandfather, Reverend Tomb. Called me and said there’s a man, Mr. McSpadden on the phone. Said his grandson was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. I said, ‘Where is Ferguson, Missouri?’ He says, Right outside of St. Louis. He said, ‘You have your iPad with you? ‘He told me what to punch in. And when I saw Michael lying there, I thought about how many of us were just considered nothing. How we were just so marginalized and ignored. Whatever the circumstance an investigation leads to, to have that boy lying there, like nobody cared about him. Like he didn’t have any loved ones, like his life value didn’t matter . . . I told his grandfather, I don’t care what happened, but whatever we can do I’ll be there to do it.85 As both these quotes make clear, it was the image of Brown’s body left dead in the Ferguson sun that characterized their perception of the event overall. More broadly, the social and material relations which enabled Brown’s body to be seen outside the bounds of the local community— the police negligence, the existence of networked camera-phones, and the willingness of the witnesses to take and circulate the image—came to intimately affect how Brown and his death would and could be made sense of after the fact. This is perhaps a simple observation but one which we cannot separate from either the conditions of visibility that lead both to Wilson’s decision to kill Brown as well as the St. Louis county grand jury’s decision to not indict Wilson for any wrong-doing.

84 Pierce, Charles P. “The Body in the Street.” Esquire, August 22, 2014. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Body_In_The_Street.

85 Coscarelli, Joe. “Watch Al Sharpton Bring the House Down at Michael Brown’s Funeral: ‘This Is Not About You! This Is About Justice!’” Daily Intelligencer, August 25, 2014. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/08/al-sharpton-eulogy-michael-brown-funeral.html.

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While this gives new insight into the comments of those like Ferguson resident Alexis

Torregrossa, “They shot a black man, and they left his body in the street to let you all know this could be you. . .To set an example, that’s how I see it,” the motivations, actions, and response of the police force is not my interest here.86 This and many other factors of the case have been discussed by journalists, commentators, and researchers from many different angles. What is more troubling and, yet, so much more mundane is this image and its presence, what it does and for whom. How did we end up with Brown’s family having to publicly comment in a local newspaper less than 24 hours after his death on the same images which led Rev. Sharpton to understand the urgency of their case in the first place:

[Brown's family] would like anyone who is sharing photos of Brown's lifeless body laying in the middle of Canfield Drive to take them down. Right now they're everywhere -- on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, hashtagged with Brown's name. Celebrities like Souljaboy are sharing photos of the body. “We don't want that out there,” said Eric Davis, Brown's cousin. “His body was in the street for hours.”87 The focus of this chapter is this image and the contexts and readings which made it meaningful. I ask how this image has been made sense of and how this labor of perception has contested and negotiated the same hegemonic common sense which characterized the circumstances of his death. To do this I will focus on the circulation of the image on the micro-blogging website

Tumblr, a platform particularly suited to understanding the processes by which images circulate and are made meaningful.

86 Hunn Bell. “Why Was Michael Brown’s Body Left There for Hours?”

87 Lussenhop, Jessica. “Family of Michael Brown, Teenager Shot to Death By Ferguson Police, Talks About His Life.” Riverfront Times. Accessed April 3, 2017. http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2014/08/10/family-of- michael-brown-teenager-shot-to-death-by-ferguson-police-talks-about-his-life.

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Tumblr as Platform, Tumblr as Nexus

“This blogging thing is really hard. Isn't it too hard?”88 remarked David Karp, and so in

February 2007 he launched Tumblr based on his own interest in tumblelogging, also known as micro-blogging.89 Within two weeks the site had 75,000 registered users and by Karp’s 24th birthday three years later, the site was adding 10 times that many users each month.90 As Karp proudly pronounced on his company’s Wordpress blog post announcing Tumblr to the world,

A tumblelog isn’t better than a blog. It’s not a replacement. But we’re certain it will be a fabulous alternative to the 90% of web users who don’t care to maintain a blog. . .Yeah, it’s still a blog. But it’s a new philosophy. It’s free of noise, requirements, and commitments. And it’s finally here.91 From the beginning, Tumblr’s concept focused on the keyword “freedom:” free from noise, requirements, commitments, and, most of all, work, the editing, writing, and management work required to run a “good blog,” that is, a blog with regular content, editing standards, and an audience.92

Paradoxically, Tumblr would remain free (to its users) over ten years later precisely because of the nexus of labor and capital that it could conjure with all the entrepreneurial wizardry it takes to make the “next big thing.” Its freedom was not an unrestricted liberty, but the freedom of Marx’s laborer, free of ownership of the means of production and free to labor. It was

88 As quoted in Bercovici, Jeff. “Tumblr: David Karp’s $800 Million Art Project.” Forbes, January 21, 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/02/tumblr-david-karps-800-million-art-project/.

89 Karp, David. “Tumblr — Something We’ve Always Wanted.” Davidville, February 19, 2007. https://davidville.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/tumblr/.

90 Ingram, Mathew. “Google VC, Tumblr CEO Among the Top Innovators Under 35.” Gigaom, August 25, 2010. https://gigaom.com/2010/08/25/google-vc-tumblr-ceo-among-the-top-innovators-under-35/.

91 Karp. “Tumblr — Something We’ve Always Wanted.”

92 Ibid.

47 this very nexus which led his mentor Fred Seibert to first attempt to convince Karp to make

Tumblr into a business93 and which would, 5 years later, lead Tumblr to venture into initial attempts to monetize user activity, including its first major advertising partnerships.94

Only a year later, its seemingly endless userbase, and thus, potentially endless ad impressions, led web giant Yahoo to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Justifying the move that pushed the 27-year-old Karp’s net worth to $200 million, Yahoo Inc.’s CEO Marissa Mayer explained,

Growth in the consumer tech industry always starts with traffic,” [Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Marissa Mayer] said in an interview Monday after Yahoo’s deal to acquire Tumblr was announced. She added that buying Tumblr instantly boosts Yahoo’s user base by 50% to 1 billion, and Web traffic by 20%, “which is really heartening.”95 Just a month before this deal was finalized, in April of 2013, native ads were added to the

Tumblr platform and just after the acquisition they were added to the web browser interface as well. These native ads provided a new way to insert advertisements directly into the experience of users of the site, the ads appearing exactly as any other post would except for a small dollar sign in the corner. As Tarleton Gillespie notes, the online platform not only regularly performs, but necessitates a negotiation between an image of freedom and creativity for its users and the monetization of that freedom for its investors and advertisers.96 Tumblr’s rhetoric of being “your

93 Bercovici. “Tumblr: David Karp’s $800 Million Art Project.”

94 Delo, Cotton. “Tumblr Announces First Foray Into Paid Advertising.” Ad Age, April 18, 2012. http://adage.com/article/special-report-digital-conference/social-media-tumblr-announces-foray-paid-ads/234214/. See also Delo, Cotton. “Tumblr Unveils First Major Brand Campaign for Adidas.” Ad Age, June 8, 2012. http://adage.com/article/digital/tumblr-unveils-major-brand-campaign-adidas/235262/.

95 Ante, Spencer E., Amir Efrati, and Joann S. Lublin. “Yahoo’s Tumblr Deal Brings Challenges, Opportunities.” Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2013, sec. Tech. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324102604578495071529930876.

96 Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Politics of ‘platforms.’” New Media & Society 12, no. 3 (May 1, 2010): 347–64. doi:10.1177/1461444809342738.

48 friendly and free tool for creating tumblogs,”97 serves as a fitting confirmation of Keeling’s observation of globalization’s “ability reach into those processes whereby one comes to be oneself and even to make that violation feel good.”98 What is key is that Tumblr is widely successful and valuable enough to buy because it works, as all “Web 2.0” giants do, to negotiate two, seemingly disparate elements of the social relations which contextualize their website as a product, the users on one side and advertisers and investors on the other. Moreover, it works so well precisely because this seeming contradiction is, in fact, mostly conjoined as the sites structure channels the things users enjoy about it into exactly what the advertisers are paying for, affectivity, the labor of perception.99

At a technical level, it does this through a reliance on four major forms of user interaction, posting, scrolling, liking, and reblogging. As David Karp waxes in his daydream of the potentials of the tumblog, “A tumblelog isn’t better than a blog. It’s not a replacement. But we’re certain it will be a fabulous alternative to the 90% of web users who don’t care to maintain a blog.” This, 90% of people uninterested in more traditional blogging form the first fundamental basis of the site by doing just what bloggers have been known to do, produce content and share it. Any user can produce posts of several different types, though as Chang et al noted in their

2014 statistical overview of Tumblr, photo and text posts absolutely dominate the distribution of all posts created, accounting for more than 92% of the posts captured (though we should note an

97 Screenshot of 2007 Tumblr registration screen embedded in Karp, David. “Tumblr — Something We’ve Always Wanted.”

98 Keeling. The Witch’s Flight. 25

99 See also Xu, Jiejun, Tsai-Ching Lu, Ryan Compton, and David Allen. “Civil Unrest Prediction: A Tumblr-Based Exploration.” In International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction, 403–411. Springer, 2014. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_49. They argue Tumblr is a particularly promising site for government surveillance for just the same reason, its youthful and rapidly growing user base.

49 overwhelming 78% of these were photo posts and only 14% of these text posts).100 But, the individual collection of original posts is not Tumblr’s primary form, and, indeed, what is a blog without an audience?

As though one were falling down an endless blue well, Tumblr’s most recognizable form, its dashboard, is as an endless, chronological wall of posts which the user navigates by travelling down its surface, new posts loaded in, potentially, until one reached the sites founding (though the website’s poor optimization combined with user inattention makes it more likely the computer or user will give up long before they make it there). This wall is populated by funneling the contents of all the blogs an individual user chooses to follow, and because one can follow someone who does not follow them, this creates, primarily, uni-directional flows of content from authors to their audiences, with the users with the highest numbers of followers producing most the sites contents.101 Thus, with each new follow, users customize their travel through this field of content at the same time they drastically increase the number of potential posts waiting just below the surface of the screen. About these first two forms of interaction, we could then say Tumblr is a website of primarily uni-directional production and consumption, with the various ads tucked into the nooks and crannies of this interface banking precisely on this relationship.

Alongside this passive form of interaction are the two more active forms of interaction, likes, and reblogs. The like function, activated by clicking on the heart icon on any given post, indexes the post within a user’s likes, a category that is personally viewable, but accessible to

100 Chang, Yi, Lei Tang, Yoshiyuki Inagaki, and Yan Liu. “What Is Tumblr: A Statistical Overview and Comparison.” ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 16, no. 1 (2014): 21–29.

101 Ibid.

50 other users if they know how to find it and it hasn’t been marked as private. Reblogs analogous to Twitter’s retweet and Facebook’s sharing, enables users to share any post they encounter on the site onto their own blog, this copy then funneled into their followers’ dashboards alongside original posts made by the user. Chang et al demonstrate that the same bloggers who contribute most of the sites content, also reblog more frequently than many other users making them the primary forces filling up other users’ dashboards and thus the primary drivers behind the sites content circulation. This influence is more pronounced considering that users with a lot of followers are far more likely to generate the more subsequent reblogs than for one post to travel through a larger chain of users. When combined then with the very strong bias toward recency in determining what posts will be reblogged, it is clear there are several structural factors limiting and shaping the circulation of content.102 In this sense, though all users can interact with all others, the site is heavily reliant on a smaller subset of its users, the ones who put in the relatively larger share of labor on and through which the rest of the users are then able to labor.103 Effectively, it is Karp’s dream of freedom from constraints and ease of use which structurally drives the site’s profits.104

Further, as Anders Olof Larsson notes, while it is the reblog which has the potential to create the ever interesting ‘viral sensation,’ we should work to understand the importance of both these forms of interaction not only in their direct use, but in their ability to convey feedback to

102 Ibid.

103 See Lampinen, Airi. “Deceptively Simple: Unpacking the Notion of ‘Sharing.’” Social Media + Society 1, no. 1 (April 1, 2015): 2056305115578135. doi:10.1177/2056305115578135.

104 For more on Yahoo’s lofty goals for Tumblr’s monetization see Goel, Vindu. “Yahoo Wants You to Linger (on the Ads, Too).” The New York Times, June 21, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/technology/yahoo-wants- you-to-linger-on-the-ads-too.html.

51 both the reblogger and the original content creator.105 Both these forms of interaction are tracked through notes, a list of all likes and reblogs of a post indicating username, type of interaction, and, if a reblog, the name of the blog it was reblogged from, forming, as Pedro Henrique Baptista

Reis argues, a “chained narrative.”106 Yet, Reis also stresses we should understand that this chained narrative does not, as some network theorists might claim, represent something simply about the connections between people. Instead we should understand that,

bonds are built, voluntary associations to many kinds of different contents (from rock bands to gay rights movements and more) are perpetrated through the reproduction of available contents and are made in contrast to other contents that are deemed oppositional or contrary. There isn’t necessarily interaction, but iteration. A tautism in circuit that builds a network between users and contents: a user reblogs a certain content, but the endgame of this action is not a relation with the original creator of that content, but is, instead, a relation of the user to a certain content and what it represents to [them].107 Far from simply a social network, we may then turn back to Karp’s initial understanding of the purpose of the site as, in his words, “the perfect way to share myself on the web,” after having abandoned several other blogs and blogging websites.108 This is to say, if Tumblr can be understood to be a social network, which it no doubt is, it is social through and because it is focused on the individual and their identity construction through their blog and its contents,

“Little or no commentary was needed. The only context was the author. How absolutely beautiful.”109

105 Larsson, Anders Olof. “Comparing to Prepare: Suggesting Ways to Study Social Media Today—and Tomorrow.” Social Media + Society 1, no. 1 (April 1, 2015): 2056305115578680. doi:10.1177/2056305115578680.

106 Reis, Pedro Henrique Baptista. “TUMBLR: Homogeneity and Heterogeneity, Production and Reproduction of Expenditure.” Revista FAMECOS 23, no. 1 (2016): 1–16.

107 Ibid.

108 Karp, David. “Uh, Why’s the Official Tumblr Blog on WordPress?” Davidville, February 23, 2007. https://davidville.wordpress.com/2007/02/23/why-wordpress/.

109 Karp. “Tumblr — Something We’ve Always Wanted.”

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This beauty, attributable to the interplay between the site’s unique and less restrained structure and the desires of its users to create their blogs as an extension of themselves is, however, influenced not only by self-centeredness, but by a complex form of identity construction through blog contents.110 This is a simple observation in light of our discussion of

Tumblr’s functionality above since, if people only shared things which relate most closely to their deepest desires, how would they get the social feedback and popularity provided by followers interested in that content. In that sense, we can then say it is the uni-directional following system which enables the energy of self-generation to then be transferred outward as people not only generate a sense of themselves, but also share that which they feel their followers will be interested in engaging with.111 Returning to Reis then, if Tumblr can be said to be a social network and micro-blogging website, it is only able to do this by virtue of its unique combination of these mechanisms—networks are formed through the production and circulation of content, in content, through content, and against other content. This is only more true when considering the situation of all those who make accounts and never or very rarely interact with other posts or create their own content, a position occupied by a substantial portion of the user base. For these people are not simply lurkers, witnessing from the sidelines, but a major force driving the profitability of the site directly through their affectivity. In the end, Yahoo is wholly uninterested in your desire to curate Sonic-x-Mario fanart except in your ability to get other

110 See Oakley, Abigail. “Disturbing Hegemonic Discourse: Nonbinary Gender and Sexual Orientation Labeling on Tumblr.” Social Media + Society 2, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 2056305116664217. doi:10.1177/2056305116664217.

111 Kümpel, Anna Sophie, Veronika Karnowski, and Till Keyling. “News Sharing in Social Media: A Review of Current Research on News Sharing Users, Content, and Networks.” Social Media + Society 1, no. 2 (July 1, 2015): 2056305115610141. doi:10.1177/2056305115610141.

53 people to look (engaging the labor of affectivity) and to continue scrolling down their dashboards.112

This extended exploration of Tumblr’s media environment is important so that we can understand this website as not simply a neutral space through which users shared and interacted with the image of Michael Brown’s body. Tumblr is a platform that not only enables certain kinds of affectivity, but augments that labor through its structure. As a material, media artifact, the website inevitably shapes the social relations which congeal around and through it, and thus, if we are to understand the role it plays in shaping how people can negotiate the hegemonic common sense which extends across the larger social field, we must contextualize these interactions in the localized social field prevalent on the website.113 Only then can we ask alongside Williams, Alexander, and Azoulay, how does the image of Michael Brown’s body exist? What position for negotiation does this image enable?

“This Is Why Black People Are Pissed Off”114

To speak of the circulation of the image of Michael Brown’s death, to ask how this image can exist, we should move forward by cataloguing how the image was mobilized by Tumblr users. Considering the recency bias determining which posts are most likely to get reblogged and

112 Flanagin, Andrew J., Craig Flanagin, and Jon Flanagin. “Technical Code and the Social Construction of the Internet.” New Media & Society 12, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 179–96. doi:10.1177/1461444809341391. 185. See also Lomborg, Stine. “‘Meaning’ in Social Media.” Social Media + Society 1, no. 1 (April 1, 2015): 2056305115578673. doi:10.1177/2056305115578673.

113 Ibid.

114 Boykin, Keith. “This Is Why Black People Are Pissed Off.” Keith Boykin, August 17, 2014. http://keithboykin.com/post/95002178186/this-is-why-black-people-are-pissed-off.

54 the fact that most content is produced by and spread through a smaller subset of users with many followers, it makes most sense to focus on the first few days following the shooting of Mike

Brown.115 These are the posts most likely to directly engage with the event in the moment it was happening and not in retrospect, a dynamic we could explore but which is distinct from what we intend to find out here. However, such a desire is complicated by Tumblr’s structural focus on the recent past—any searches within a given tag are sorted chronologically, and so, unless a tag is unpopular, it will be difficult to navigate through a tag to find posts from a specified time, especially if it was over a couple of months before one searches. For these reasons, I utilized

Bernhard Rieder’s research tool, Tumblrtool to more easily curate all available posts made between August 9 and August 17 within the queried tags (Mike Brown, Michael Brown, and

Ferguson), and then find all the posts which had embedded versions of an image of Michael

Brown’s body.116

To provide an overview of the types of posts found, and because photo posts with extensive captions and text posts with embedded photos are very similar, we can divide the posts into major categories based on the central content in which the image of Michael Brown’s body was situated. Of posts centered on an embedded image of Michael Brown’s body, these can be subdivided further into posts with an unedited image, posts with edited versions of the image

(including art and memes of the image), and screenshots of other websites, often other social

115 Chang, Yi, Lei Tang, Yoshiyuki Inagaki, and Yan Liu. “What Is Tumblr: A Statistical Overview and Comparison.”

116 Rieder, Bernhard. “TumblrTool.” The Politics of Systems. Accessed April 6, 2017. http://labs.polsys.net/tools/tumblr/. It should be apparent that it would be impossible for several reasons for me to claim to have captured all the posts made in this tag or on Tumblr about this topic. Some posts are not tagged. Some posts have since been deleted. And Tumblr’s tag system does not accurately pull all posts tagged with a given keyword. All I claim to do here is go through trends in the available posts.

55 media websites, featuring the image or edits of the image. The other major subset of posts were those centered on a video which featured the image, the majority of these being embedded

Youtube or Instagram videos. The smallest subset of posts centered on a link to an outside website, often a news article or blog post.

However, far more interesting than the form these images were embedded in is the way they were mobilized by users of the site. In the end, it is the relationship of users to others through content that itself defines Tumblr’s functioning and its greatest resource for monetization. One of the major ways the image was mobilized was in juxtaposition with security camera stills released by the Ferguson Police Department on Friday August 15, 2014. These security camera stills were included with a police report identifying Michael Brown and his friend and witness to Brown’s death, Dorian Johnson, as the primary suspects in a strong-arm robbery of a convenience store. This robbery was marked to have taken place just minutes before

Officer Darren Wilson stopped Brown and Johnson for walking in the middle of Canfield

Drive.117 While the juxtaposition with at least one still from the security camera was the most popular among the posts I collected, at the same time, it also engendered the most widely divergent interpretations. Some, like user sjw-tearss118 and afeedfromcloudmountain, posting the same day the stills were made available to the public, rhetorically framed the security camera stills as evidence of Brown’s wrongdoing, and thus, a partial justification for the circumstances

117 Chappell, Bill. “Ferguson Police Release Name Of Officer Who Shot Michael Brown.” NPR.org, August 15, 2014. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/08/15/340594634/ferguson-police-release-name-of-officer- who-shot-michael-brown. See also Hennessy-Fiske, Molly, Matt Pearce, and Tina Susman. “Officer Who Shot Michael Brown Didn’t Know He Was a Robbery Suspect.” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2014. http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-fergsuon-shooting-police-name-20140815-story.html. And Lavender, Paige. “Read The Documents Released By The Ferguson Police About The Michael Brown Shooting.” Huffington Post, August 15, 2014, sec. Black Voices. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/15/michael-brown- police-report_n_5682033.html.

118 SJW is an abbreviation of Social Justice Warrior, a term used dismissively online in reference to people who care about politics and social justice issues.

56 of his death. Yet, we should note the rhetorical differences in working toward that same ideological conclusion. Whereas user afeedfromcloudmountain’s post is captioned only “’Gentle

Giant’” …ok,”119 sjw-tearss’s post is more extensive, explaining,

This is worth taking note of. These pictures are from security camera footage of the store from which Michael Brown stole. As you can see, he gets violent with the store owner that tries to stop him. This in no way justifies the officer’s actions. But, it is important to note that Brown is clearly no saint and that the officer who shot him is no demon. They’re both just people who made mistakes. Of course, the cop should and probably will be held accountable for his actions, but as far as presenting this as a case of black and white (ethically, not racially) situation is simply dishonest. Calm down.120 Afeedfromcloudmoutain utilizes the caption to intervene directly in and cast doubt on the discourse around Brown’s death, especially that produced by Brown’s high school teachers, describing him as a “’gentle giant,’ a student who loomed large and didn’t cause trouble.”121

Sjw-tearss expands a more nuanced, but ideologically similar point arguing against an ethically black and white view of the situation, implying perhaps that a racially Black and white view of the situation is simply obvious or undebateable. This may appear more balanced, but the identification of a view of Brown as a saint and Wilson as a demon is the view the user targets as being ethically Black and white, and thus, “simply dishonest.” In this frame, the insistence that

“They’re both just people who made mistakes,” is not a simple call for nuance, but a directed statement against those that are arguing that the officer’s actions are absolutely not justified

(SJW’s perhaps?). The order, “calm down” then functions similarly to

119 “Cloud Mountain - ‘gentle Giant’…ok.” Cloud Mountain. Accessed April 6, 2017. http://afeedfromcloudmountain.tumblr.com/post/94830236308/gentle-giantok.

120 “SJW Tears — This Is Worth Taking Note Of. These Pictures Are...” SJW Tears, August 15, 2014. https://sjw- tearss.tumblr.com/post/94849662776/this-is-worth-taking-note-of-these-pictures-are.

121 Crouch, Elisa. “Michael Brown Remembered as a ‘Gentle Giant.’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 11, 2014. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/michael-brown-remembered-as-a-gentle- giant/article_cbafa12e-7305-5fd7-8e0e-3139f472d130.html.

57 afeedfromcloudmountain’s ‘…’, setting up a passive, rather than active critique of the rhetoric they find to be particularly distasteful, those voices defending Brown. In that sense this move cannot help but align them, at least to some extent, with those who would justify the officer’s actions since, in this antagonism, it was Brown who was killed while Wilson simply left his job as a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. In a situation where Darren Wilson did not have access to the police information identifying Brown as a suspect in an armed-robbery, to set up the equivalence of the theft and killing is to argue that the two have some relation to each other, the former somehow helping explain the latter as though, even if Michael Brown did just commit a robbery, that would show why Darren Wilson was not a demon for shooting him.122 Some users identified precisely this sort of conservative ideological work in their captions critiquing screenshots of other social media users who had posted the juxtaposition.

In addition to these direct ideological critiques were users who disputed the connection between the two images entirely such as users 407movement, “That bull shit not fooling me.

They try to throw some dirt on it to make it seem ok,”123 and kudipeaches,

The Ferguson Police Department are LIARS. DO NOT BE FOOLED. ALSO WHY VIDEO STILLS AND NOT ACTUAL FOOTAGE IN THE FIRST PLACE? WHY WAIT 6 DAYS TO REVEAL THE MURDER OF MIKE BROWN? HMMMM IT’S ALMOST AS THOUGH THEY TOOK TIME TO COME UP WITH A COVER STORY.124

122 Hennessy-Fiske, Molly, Matt Pearce, and Tina Susman. “Officer Who Shot Michael Brown Didn’t Know He Was a Robbery Suspect.” See also Chappell, Bill. “Ferguson Police Release Name Of Officer Who Shot Michael Brown.”

123 “That Bull Shit Not Fooling Me ...” 407movement, August 15, 2014. http://407movement- deactivated20160819.tumblr.com/post/94846194223/that-bull-shit-not-fooling-me-they-try-to-throw.

124 “The Ferguson Police Department Are LIARS. . .” Kudipeaches, August 15, 2014.

58

Echoing responses from both Brown’s family and the local community, “That was no robbery; it was murder,” these users work to contest the schema on which the connection is based at its deepest level, questioning both why the image stills were released so long after Brown’s killing and in what sense the images of Brown’s body and the person in the security camera footage were connected.125 What is crucial here is not only the connection, but how it demonstrates something taken for granted in the more ideologically conservative posts above, that the image of Michael Brown’s dead body is being used as visual evidence. While quite unlike the video of the Los Angeles Police Department beating Rodney King and the video of the New York Police department harassing and choking Eric Garner in the sense that the photo is not, at surface, thought to present visual evidence, the photograph is still utilized for this purpose exactly in the moment (contingency?) where the security camera stills existed and were released. In other words, while the photo is not itself taken as visual evidence of anything but, perhaps, the leaving of Brown’s body uncovered long enough for photos to be taken by bystanders, it can function as evidence of the process by which Brown came to be killed in its temporal contextualization with an image which is supposed to come prior to it. This functioned through direct visual comparison of the image of Brown’s dead body and the body of the person in the security camera stills. The logical connection advanced by the police department in their press conference that Friday is what is being directly contested by the social media users whose commentary is included in the screenshots posted by 407movement and kudipeaches, not either image in itself since, on their own, they can be said to represent little for sure, “ [4 “eyes” emojis] Oh? Yall help me out, I been avoiding glasses for years.”126

125 Chappell. “Ferguson Police Release Name Of Officer Who Shot Michael Brown.”

126 Gopanda27 as quoted in “That Bull Shit Not Fooling Me ...” 407movement

59

Alongside comparisons of the image of the body with the security camera footage were several image edits and posts making the comparison between the public, particularly the Black public, response to the deaths of Mike Brown and Robin Williams. Actor and comedian Robin

Williams committed suicide and died on August 11, 2014, just two days after Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. While the events have little to do with each other besides their proximity in time, many people nonetheless made the connection, pointing directly to the comparison in public coverage of both deaths and how relatively important they were treated. One image edit features a highly prominent photo of Williams with a quote from then-President Barrack Obama talking about how important Williams was to American culture, these elements juxtaposed with much smaller images of Michael Brown’s body lying in the street and an image of protesters standing off against police officers. The text at the very bottom of this image criticizes Obama, asking if he has anything to say about the racialized violence faced by the people in Ferguson.

User westsidebias added in their caption to this composition,

I loved Robin Williams, RIP to one of the best comedians out there. Thank you for helping make my childhood great. But let’s put things in perspective here, quite the distraction. The police responded to Mike Brown’s protests with a hyper militarized response, per usual especially in a majority black neighborhood and the corporate controlled mainstream M.E.D.I.A. (multi ethnic destruction in amerikkka) was silent about it. Every single social media outlet is now bombarded with the late Robin Williams’ “suspected” suicide. Not calling his death a false flag by any means, but I don’t believe in coincidences. Remember, death comes in 3’s. RIP to both Mike Brown and Robin Williams127 In this response, there is a combination of an interest in comparing the relative treatment of both deaths in the mainstream media and social media and a deeper skepticism about the reality of

Williams’ death in the first place. While it would be relatively easy to simply claim this disbelief

127 “#WESTSIDEBIAS, I Loved Robin Williams, RIP to One of the Best...” #WESTSIDEBIAS, August 12, 2014. http://westsidebias.tumblr.com/post/94516052142/i-loved-robin-williams-rip-to-one-of-the-best.

60 in coincidences was simply irrational, perhaps, given Martinot and Sexton’s own account of the internal irrationality of white supremacy, we can be more generous with this suspicion and where else it might lead.128 User juboktimusprime makes a similar point in the established meme format of image overwritten by top text and bottom text reading, “I’ve seen more Black people saying

‘R.I.P Robin Williams’ than ‘Justice for Mike Brown’ … but that’s none of my business.”129 At one layer this indirectly references the Kermit the Frog meme where “but that’s none of my business” is used to indirectly comment on the perceived foolishness or hypocrisy of what is identified in the earlier part of the text. Beyond an identification of the relative coverage given in the mainstream media and on social media, this post identifies this relative difference in attention as a personal or moral failing, the hypocrisy of Black people who don’t seem to care about Mike

Brown’s death, an event Black people ought to care about because they are Black, more than they care about the suicide of a white wealthy man.

In this context, then, the skepticism comes to a rhetorical base, identity ought to shape how one makes sense of these different events in a more deterministic way, and as such, Black people who are correctly Black, should care about Mike Brown’s death in a particular way. This understanding of the way group identification shapes the production and negotiation of common sense is moving in the right direction, but errs by putting too much faith in these alternative formations of sense and their negotiation with the hegemonic sense of American culture. Simply, the fact that an alternative sense exists does not guarantee its oppositional relation to all parts of hegemonic sense, only particular points which are not themselves distributed evenly because, as

Keeling reminds, “There is not just one common sense, but various common senses—as many as

128 See Martinot and Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.”

129 “Shabazz.” Shabazz, August 12, 2014. http://juboktimusprime.tumblr.com/post/94538837353.

61 there are groups of living beings with brains.”130 Insofar as, “the dividing line between valued and devalued, can cut within, as well as across racial groupings,” we should understand that the forms of sense produced even within a group may be heterogenous based on the participation of its members in various other social groupings who also assist in the historical becoming of that individual as a member of multiple intersecting historical categories.131 Though well-intentioned, such an approach to understanding the value of Brown’s death is both homogenizing of Black people, their values, and what they ought to be, as though both deaths cannot be understood as important within the same frame of common sense.

Coinciding with the rhetorical complexity of these contextualizations of the images of

Brown’s body is, by far, the most popular mobilization of the image of Brown’s body, in terms of notes and individual posts, the video released by the hacker-group Anonymous on the day after Brown’s death in support of the Ferguson protests.132 The video begins with a slow zoom-in on the still image of Brown’s body, overlaid with audio from a news broadcast about the killing,

“The 18-year-old, male victim had no weapon on him and he had his hands up in the air, but was still shot by police multiple times.”133 This combination sets the tone for the rest of the video, the trademark text-to-speech voice narrating both the events surrounding Brown’s death and providing dire warning to the Ferguson Police Department as footage from the protests and the

130 Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. 21

131 Hong and Ferguson. “Introduction.” 11

132 For more information on Anonymous and a contextualization of their existence as and not-as a group see Potter, Garry. 2015. “Anonymous: A Political Ontology of Hope.” Theory in Action; Fair Lawn 8 (1): 1–22. Putting aside Potter’s investment in the radical potential of Anonymous, here I will refer to Anonymous as a group with the ‘they’ pronoun since, though it has been denied that Anonymous is or functions as a group, operations like Operation Ferguson do have planning and organization that constitutes them as a group of actors working toward a particular goal under the assumed name, Anonymous.

133 AnonInsiders. Anonymous - #OpFerguson, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOSRQ-c1XW0.

62 scene of Brown’s death are played in the background. Their statements ring with their reliance on self-evidence, with the fact of Brown’s body lying in the street, as visualized by the beginning of the short video, and the police department’s actions to fortify the city against protesters, together serving to represent that, “the police has clearly crossed a line in the sand.” This crossing of boundary, in the apparent severity of the police actions in this particular case, are what they argue leads them to not only seek justice for the family of the victim, Mike Brown, as they say they have done in the past, but to pressure congressional representatives from Missouri to introduce legislation, “that will set strict national standards for police conduct and misbehavior in the U.S.A.,” titled Mike Brown’s Law. They continue by turning attention to the people of

Ferguson,

To the good people of Ferguson, take heart - and take your streets. You are not alone, we will support you in every way possible. Occupy every square inch of your city. Demand Justice. Staying silent today could result in the death of your kid tomorrow.134 From there they move into a specific threat to the Ferguson police department and any other police departments who have been deployed to Ferguson; if they abuse, harass, or harm in any way the protesters, Anonymous vows to take all web-based asset of their departments and governments offline, release personal information on every single member of these police departments, and publish the departments’ databases and emails online. They conclude,

The time has come for more than simple justice for these atrocities. The time has come to draw a line in the sand. The time has come to bring those to justice, who served to protect us, not kill us. Until justice prevails, hack and protest will replace it. Operation Ferguson engaged. We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Ferguson, expect us.135

134 Ibid.

135 Ibid.

63

If this message is ambiguous or confusing upon close inspection, it is that ambiguity which should contextualize the mobilization of the video, since it is users’ mobilizations of the video which speak most directly to what they gained from it. As Reis reminds there is no guarantee of the content’s meaning on Tumblr except in how it is mobilized actively by users, users who may likely, unlike social media researchers, engage with content in casual, limited, or otherwise non- deterministic ways.136 This is especially true when considering the hyperbole usually surrounding actions by actors claiming affiliation with Anonymous, often propagated by journalists, it is in the mobilization of that hyperbole that we find what is meaningful to the users about the video and the image of Brown’s body.137

What we can see in the responses to the video is a recurring sense of Anonymous as a kind of anti-hero in the context of Brown’s death and the police response to the protesters. For example, one user compares Anonymous’s presence to the re-appearance of the Tyrannosaurus

Rex near the end of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park138—the dinosaur which had previously almost killed them now saving their life from Velociraptors that had cornered them—and another user comments in a different posting of the video, “sometimes the bad guys make the best good guys, thanks Anonymous.”139 This sentiment can be read, then, as a kind of reluctant admiration combined with praise for intervening to save the people of Ferguson from the police who would

136 Reis, “TUMBLR.”

137 Potter, “Anonymous.”

138 “Anonymous Just Released This Powerful Video Statement on the Michael Brown Shooting.” The Tarot Sybarite, August 12, 2014. http://tarot-sybarite.tumblr.com/post/94595219377/anonymous-just-released-this- powerful-video.

139 “Pls Include 1g of Ur Soul into What U Say — Sometimes the Bad Guys Make the Best Good Guys,...” Pls Include 1g of Ur Soul into What U Say, August 14, 2014. http://leftboogerarbiter.tumblr.com/post/94709277368/sometimes-the-bad-guys-make-the-best-good-guys.

64 abuse them, “If you don’t think that anonymous is the tightest shit you better reevaluate yourself big time.”140 This idea is reflected in the video’s proclamation directed toward both the police and the people of Ferguson framing themselves as protectors working to enable the ability of people to protest, occupy, and demand justice. This goes further into a kind of stewardship in their insistence on, “the good people of Ferguson,” making their voices known and demanding justice lest their own child be killed, a strange and perhaps patronizing threat to the people they seem interested in supporting, “in every way possible.”141 Thus, the “us” of, “The time has come to bring those to justice, who served to protect us, not kill us,” is then, at least in the readings of a number of users, subordinated to the capital-W “We” of, “We are Anonymous. We are legion.

We do not forgive. We do not forget,” this subordination integrated into, “Ferguson, expect us.”142

While many users took this to be heartening or something to celebrate, several other users expressed a kind of fear and reticence that Anonymous’ actions, specifically the releasing of police officer’s personal information, might endanger those officers and their families. Without claiming that those who supported the videos either necessarily condoned or were naïve about this potential for enabling violence, we can make sense of their awe of anonymous precisely in the potential that they really might do something impactful and produce not simply violence but a sense of justice. Within this ambiguous phrase includes many different elements, not least of which being Anonymous’ stated goal, the introduction of Mike Brown’s law and comprehensive

140 “bVIsIV.” bVIsIV, August 11, 2014. http://bvisiv.tumblr.com/post/94460584923/if-you-dont-think-that- anonymous-is-the-tightest.

141 AnonInsiders, Anonymous - #OpFerguson.

142 Ibid.

65 police accountability and reform. What this video has meant for many of the users on all the sides of its interpretation is then the linking of apprehension, awe, and hope, an affective response toward the future which Anonymous and its actions might engender, perhaps the same as “the secret admiration of the public,” engendered by “the figure of the ‘great criminal, however repellent his ends may have been,”143 in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence:

there is inherent in all [military] violence a lawmaking character. . .. It explains the abovementioned tendency of modern law to divest the individual, at least as a legal subject, of all violence, even that directed only to natural ends. In the great criminal this violence confronts the law with the threat of declaring a new law, a threat that even today, despite its impotence, in important instances horrifies the public as it did in primeval times. The state, however, fears this violence simply for its lawmaking character . . .144 As user pussyofthelavish appends to brown-likeme’s post of the video, “this low key scared me.”145 What else serves to explain the recurring use of the word “chilling” by several different users to describe the video and its effects?

To return to the image at the beginning of the video is then to think not only of the awe which Anonymous engenders through their threat to the state, a threat which can be “both heartening and terrifying,”146 but also to ask how the image is utilized to produce this awe, how this image is made sense of in relation to this horrifying, yet amazing threat of violence, as part

143 Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Selected Writings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 281.

144 Ibid.

145 “Life Keeps Going. — Brown-Likeme: The International Hacker Group...” Life Keeps Going., August 11, 2014. http://pussyofthelavish.tumblr.com/post/94484001107/brown-likeme-the-international-hacker-group.

146 “Black Out Loud.” Black Out Loud, August 10, 2014. http://blackoutloud.tumblr.com/post/94395803278/brown- likeme-the-international-hacker-group.

66 of that threat. To do this we might look to the first moments of explanation given by the robotic voice of Anonymous after the image of Brown’s body is shown:

On August 9th in Ferguson, Missouri the 17-year-old and unarmed Mike Brown was shot several times and killed by an officer of the Ferguson Police Department. His body was left to lie in a pool of blood in the sweltering heat for hours while 15 police departments militarized the area against protesters, sealed the roads leading to Ferguson in a vain attempt to prevent protesters from reaching the city. The police has clearly crossed a line in the sand.147 Adding to the fact of his death in this description is the imagery which conjures purposeful connotations into the framework through which viewers are asked to make sense of the image.

This rhetorical flourish asks us to understand that Michael Brown not only died, but was killed in a particularly egregious way based on the combination of his age, his being unarmed, the excessive number of times he was shot, the imagery invoked of his body lying in the street, his body lying in a pool of blood, and the body lying in in the sweltering heat. By invoking the scene of Brown’s death with rhetorical flourishes that go beyond the visual information of the circulating photograph, all while having already moved on from the actual image, viewers are asked not only to see the image but see into it, to feel it and feel it as they describe it. The heat, the pool of blood, the bullets, his being unarmed, his age, these symbols all function alongside the counter-explanation of what the police department(s) were doing instead of attending to

Brown’s body, not only taking measures against protests, but militarizing the area and sealing the roads to stop the flow of protesters. With the police treatment of Brown and response to the protesters coded as justified we then are able to understand how they come to say that the police have crossed the line, meaning, that Brown’s death has been exceptional among all police killings, including ones they have responded to in the past. Brown’s death emerges as exceptional and thus particularly important (where was Trayvon Martin’s Law or Rekia Boyd’s

147 Anonvideo

67 law) through the utilization of the scene of death itself, the excessiveness of the violence explaining the exceptionality of the response. The brutality of Brown’s death is evidence of its wrongness and exceptionality.

In this sense, we can understand that many of the posts we have spoken about so far are then caught within a particular rhetorical cycle, the use of the image of Brown’s dead body as evidence of whatever it is the user reads as relevant in the image, whether evidence of Brown’s non-correspondence with the security camera footage, evidence of Brown’s lack of innocence because of his correspondence with this security camera footage, or evidence of the excessiveness and thus badness of Brown’s death. The use of the body as evidence is replayed more actively in posts like that of user Auntieimperial. In Auntieimperial’s post the photo is utilized on its own to produce an argument for its non-connection to the event of the robbery and in response to a subsequent request to take the image down because Brown’s family didn’t want the image out there, they argued, “No. PERIOD! No blood No indication of any tragedy. This is

NEWS AND I WILL NOT SELF-CENSOR.” The user continued that they supported the

Associated Press’s decision to publish the image of a wounded U.S. soldier, “against the wishes of warmongering media pundits who would like us to think war, like the repression of Colonized

People of Color in AmeriKKKa, is sterile, and bloodless.”148 Here again, as in the Anonymous video, the brutality of Brown’s death is itself evidence of something broader, an icon representing a larger system of violence and injustice in “AmeriKKKa.” User sancophaleague utilizes a similar rhetorical pattern through an edit of the image of Brown’s body with text reading, “Since the police have not felt any form of retaliation from Blacks they do not think

148 “Hey Mike Brown’s Family Has Requested That No One...” Anarchic Tendencies, August 16, 2014. http://auntieimperial.tumblr.com/post/94919918444.

68 twice before killing us.”149 The retaliation is described in the user’s commentary on the image as not marching and holding signs, as these things do not stop Black people from being killed, but uniting Black people to “make an economical stand against America and white corporations.”150

It would seem that, in order to mobilize the image to argue for something in particular, it must, in fact, be mobilized, made sense of through and as part of a framework of common sense which is then able to rhetorically naturalize that interpretation and make its history transparent as though one looked directly through the frame not only at the real scene of Brown’s death but at the “true meaning of that death—what could the image represent besides the functioning of

“AmeriKKKa?”

"Truly How Innocent Can a Dead Man Be?"151

We return to Alexander and Williams’ question, “How can this photograph exist?” What

I have noted above, in confirmation of Reis’ observation of the content-oriented nature of

Tumblr, is that perhaps this question glances off the surface of the image. To ask how the photograph can exist is for us to ask not only of the photographer but of the multiply unfolding moments that the photograph opens itself up to us, the people who were and were not there at the event photographed. For us the event of photography unfolds through and is augmented by the

149 “SanCopha League #LiberNation • It’s Time Black People Unite and Find a Way To...” SanCopha League #LiberNation, August 14, 2014. http://sancophaleague.tumblr.com/post/94785398040/its-time-black-people-unite- and-find-a-way-to.

150 Ibid.

151 “Truly How Innocent Can a Dead Man Be?” Saluto, August 15, 2014. http://the-domain-of- silence.tumblr.com/post/94826544075.

69 technological apparatus that determines the production and circulation of images, an apparatus which, depending on its social and material organization, produces a marked difference in the experience of the event of photography. This is to make the obvious point that it meant something different in 1893 to see a photograph of Henry Smith’s dead body hanging amongst a crowd of white perpetrators than it means in 2014 to see a digital image of Michael Brown’s dead body lying in the street amongst a crowd of witnesses, Ferguson residents, and police.

What may lay continuous between these, however, is the fact of the relationship between the event photographed and the event of photography which unfolds multiply for all of us to encounter the image before, during, and after its production. What may be consistent is that the photograph unfolds for each of us because of the inalienable position of the camera, a position which demands the insertion of subjectivity as we engage it by looking at the photograph, yet perpetually denies us the ability to make any absolute sense of the image. As Azoulay explains,

The event of photography is never over. It can only be suspended, caught in the anticipation of the next encounter that will allow for its actualization: an encounter that might allow a certain spectator to remark on the excess or lack inscribed in the photograph so as to re-articulate every detail including those that some believe to be fixed in place by the glossy emulsion of the photograph.152 To ask of the photograph’s existence is then alongside asking of the conditions of the photographer, to ask of these encounters with the event of photography, temporary suspensions of even the most naturalized elements of perception which these images may draw upon.

On Tumblr, this understanding is crucially important precisely because the image is so multiply oriented within and without, toward the user and outside the user such that no image can be said to mean any one thing. Thus, the image is inherently unpredictable and unstable. In

152 Azoulay, Civil Imagination. 25.

70 that sense, Karp’s dream of a platform of “free of noise, requirements, and commitments”153 is one that would almost naturally lead to a website where 78% of the posts created and circulating through the site are photo posts, an even larger percentage when including texts posts centered on embedded images.154 The unfolding event of photography is one that lends itself to this sort of freedom from requirements and commitments, perhaps precisely because it is not free of noise.

Tumblr’s monetization relies on its noise, the jostling interactions of its users and the multiply unfolding forms of sense utilized to make sense of the sites content and, in the process the endless parade of ads. Tumblr’s market value relies on this dynamic as it unfolds in the aftermath of an event like the killing Michael Brown, the platform’s structure lending itself to widely varying interpretations of the meaning of the event and what should be done in response. Indeed it might be an asset that most of the posts I have collected within these tags have had between 0 and 5 notes, even fewer if we consider reblogging to be the most meaningful interaction one can have on the website. To speak one’s interpretation, agreement, or thoughts into a void with very little chance of any quantification that one’s message was ever seen, much less read, and understood in similar terms that it was encoded is the freedom—a different inflection of Karp’s and Marx’s freedoms—afforded by the event of photography, the dynamics which cause a question like why the photograph exists to glance off the surface of the photograph and turn back toward those of us who might ask it, a double-edged sword. Perhaps this implies less, “How can this photograph exist?” and more, “How have we become able to make sense of this photograph?” implying both the material and social relations which condition the multiply unfolding event of photography.

153 Karp. “Tumblr — Something We’ve Always Wanted.”

154 Chang et al., “What Is Tumblr.”

71

But what is the further implication of all of this? Afterall, the purpose of the first question, “How can this photograph exist?” is to not only ask of the dynamics which allowed the photographer to take the photograph but to interrogate those conditions, to ask how a person could see a lynching in progress, the murder of a Black person and make sense of the scene in such a way that it led them to take a photograph. It is to ask how one becomes a spectator to

Black death rather than the person who intervened to save a Black life. To attempt to answer I turn us once more to the photograph and how users have mobilized it.

If we continue to navigate the archive of images I’ve been able to pull out of Tumblr’s depths, one thing we may notice is the repetition of the dynamic previously mentioned in the other mobilizations of the image, the utilization of the image as evidence of what it is supposed to already and definitively represent. We can see read this in one sense in all the images which work to create, not only edits, but purposely artistic renderings of the image, inviting our gaze even as we may want to look away. One notable example of this is artist Sandra Khalifa’s colorized re-renderings of the scene of Michael Brown’s death, the vibrant colors over the blurred scene of the original photo serving as a kind of painting at the surface of the image, bringing attention to the blood and to the body, a yellow crown hovering over Brown’s head.

Above and below the cropped image lies a white frame, on top reading, “R.I.P. Mike Brown” and on the bottom, underlined in red, “Can I Live?”155 On the other end of this artistic production is the album art for J. Cole’s single “Be Free,” released on Soundcloud as a response to Michael Brown’s death. Working with a notably grainy version of the image, the colors retain a similar tone and vibrancy to many of the other unedited versions of the image, the major

155 Newsome, Bree. “WHO WILL SURVIVE IN AMERICA? CAN I LIVE?” Genius Child, August 14, 2014. http://breenewsome.tumblr.com/post/94740519555/who-will-survive-in-america-can-i-live.

72 additions instead being text, the word “FREE” in all capital letters edited to appear to hang behind Brown’s body in the 3-dimensional space the photograph is meant to represent while a statement by Cole appears in small text in the bottom right corner, “Rest in Peace to Michael

Brown and to every young black man murdered in America, whether by the hands of white or black. I pray that one day the world will be filled with peace and rid of injustice. Only then will we all Be Free.”156

Like the use of the image by Anonymous or by those making claims about whether

Brown was or wasn’t the one in the security camera footage, the image is being used by both artists to make a point; the image is not merely re-presented but utilized toward that point as an iconic sign, a symbol of some assigned meaning. Yet, in these more purposeful re-presentations of the image, changing its qualities to move complimentarily to the encoded meaning, we see an example of a deeper form of how meaning is made in relation to the image, the process through which any encounter with the image is able to “re-articulate every detail including those that some believe to be fixed in place by the glossy emulsion of the photograph.”157 And it is this point exactly which might present us with the difficulty of facing the question, “How can this photograph exist?” particularly now with the current social and material relations of digital photography and online image circulation.

This point is made in a less obvious way in the two posts I have quoted in the headings for this and the last section of this chapter. On August 17, 2014, already more than a week after

156 “New Music Inspired from Mike Brown’s Death.” Soulflowermusic, August 15, 2014. https://soulflowermusic- blog.tumblr.com/post/94820341412/new-music-inspired-from-mike-browns-death. J. Cole noticeably abstracts the phenomena of police killings as though it only affects Black men, a factual misinterpretation of the event of Brown’s death.

157 Azoulay, Civil Imagination. 25.

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Wilson killed Brown, user Keith Boykin posted a Youtube video of the immediate scene of

Brown’s death produced by an eye-witness on the scene. He titles this post “This Is Why Black

People Are Pissed Off,” the caption below the video only providing a brief content warning to his followers that if they view the video they will see Michael Brown’s dead body.158 Parallel to this example is a post by user the-domain-of-silence of the edited image described above that compares side-by-side the stills from the surveillance camera, the image of Brown’s body, an image of Brown smiling into the camera, and an image of Brown’s hat lying on the ground at the site of his death. The only comment on this image is one sentence, “Truly how innocent can a dead man be?”159 If this latter statement feels vague, know that I puzzled with its intended meaning for some time after I first encountered it, the key moment of understanding coming when I was faced by the rather obvious lesson which I had already been working with, that the ambiguity of its meaning is precisely the freedom the photograph affords us. In fact, it is this freedom that should lead us to destabilize the frame of reference for a statement like Boykin’s which we might be able to guess at, that the “This” of “This is why” refers to Brown’s dead body. But, we should move further to genuinely ask, what about it Boykin means to make sense of as the cause of Black people’s anger. With this destabilizing move we can reach even further back through the posts I have described and analyzed here, as well as all the ones I didn’t explicitly reference, to ask what about them guarantees even a semblance of stabilization in their meaning. What about my encounter with the image should even give me an initial idea that I could have any sense of some stable thing which the image might mean? As the artistic examples above show more subtly, the event of photography unfolds in a way which prevents all attempts

158 Boykin, “This Is Why Black People Are Pissed Off.”

159 “Truly How Innocent Can a Dead Man Be?”

74 to substitute a definite perspective into the position of the camera, there can only be temporary substitutions of meaning at even the deepest levels. The image of Brown’s body, perhaps in affirmation of the wish we may have to not have to look at it, disappears, dissolving into the sea of visual information in which we first encounter it prior to our application of our frame of common sense.

Or does it avoid dissolving, for the same reason, that despite the fact we cannot say for sure what it means, we nonetheless always encounter it, if we are perceiving it at all, as meaning something, something which has a necessary relationship to our historical becoming as part of a collective.160 The image then appears back into our view, resisting any attempt at stabilization in the same moment it appears the most solid, natural, and obvious, “This is why Black people are pissed off.” With this understanding we may then come to understand the conditions of the image’s existence and how it is able to exist, as a photograph which Al Sharpton might view on his iPad, the same image which I might engage with analytically yet refuse to show you here.

The answer we find might lead us in a direction we expect, but have nonetheless left unconsidered explicitly until this point. As Azoulay argues, the inalienable point of view of the camera can never be fully assimilated or dominated, the power relations which attempt to dominate that position may reverberate through the image as we are able to perceive it, but they cannot produce any absolute control because of the autonomy of the spectator to form and reform their meanings in relation to the image. This is to say, the event of photography, as we have noted before, is multiple and indominable.161 But we should ask, in the spirit of Alexander,

160 Keeling. The Witch’s Flight. 22

161 Azoulay, Civil Imagination. 25-27

75 what the real effects of this indominable position of the camera, as augmented by technology like digital photography and the Internet.

Our answer may lie in the same register as the social and material conditions which incited Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi to begin the Black Lives Matter movement. In his grand jury testimony, Darren Wilson, though he is 6 foot 4 and over 200 pounds, describes Michael Brown at many points to be demonic, monstrous, and even magically threatening. After first firing at Brown, Wilson notes “[Brown] had the most intense, aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”162 At another point he describes his physical confrontation with Brown and his perception of the difference between them as being “like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan”163 Wilson's tone then changes dramatically when interviewed for the New Yorker nearly a year later, “Do I think about who he was as a person? Not really, because it doesn’t matter at this point. Do I think he had the best upbringing? No. Not at all.”164 Our deeper implication is clear when we compare this to an interview done by Al Jazeera in response to the New Yorker article. In it, Lezley

McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, calls Wilson evil and remarks that “his acts were devilish.” In direct response to the quote above, McSpadden argues that, in fact, it is Wilson who did not have the best upbringing because it was he who could not admit that what he had done

162 Cave, Damien. “Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury Testimony in Ferguson, Mo., Shooting.” The New York Times, November 25, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/25/us/darren-wilson-testimony-ferguson- shooting.html. See also Davidson, Amy. “Darren Wilson’s Demon.” The New Yorker, November 26, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/demon-ferguson-darren-wilson-fear-black-man.

163 Ibid.

164 Halpern, Jake. “The Cop.” The New Yorker, August 10, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-cop.

76 was wrong or that Brown’s death had been unnecessary and avoidable.165 The inalienable position of the camera, and thus the infinite negotiability of our sense perception as augmented by technology like the camera, should be understood then, not as a remedy to the deadlock of perception recognizable in the conflict between McSpadden and Wilson, but as its cause. That

McSpadden can call Wilson evil and devilish and make sense of the image of her son as evidence of Wilson’s moral bankruptcy is somewhat obvious. Equally obvious should be that it is only Darren Wilson’s sense which can create and legally, morally, and politically justify

Brown’s death, while McSpadden’s judgement remains purely moral.

More directly, while the event of photography is necessarily open to widely divergent applications of sense through which we come to perceive the photograph’s content and context, hegemony still reigns and limits the potential of this photographic equality to negotiate different or changed conditions. The simple fact of diverging interpretations and, indeed, the potential presence of the camera, did not change the most crucial part of the event in question, that Darren

Wilson killed Michael Brown that day. In this way, the fundamental quality of the photograph may be precisely its Achilles Heel—if the hegemonic common sense which justified and produced Brown’s death continues to create conditions of Black death through its fundamental antagonism to Blackness, how could our negotiation of the image possibly change those conditions if all interpretations mediated through the technology of photography are necessarily temporary and limited. Moreover, as Lisa Marie Cacho argues, selective valuations of people based on some characteristic about them or their death—such as them being men, or the brutality of their death, or that they were nice, or that they were loved, or that they were going to go to

165 Harris, Tony, and Philip J. Victor. “One Year after Michael Brown’s Killing, His Mother Vows to ‘never Forgive.’” Al Jazeera America, August 5, 2015. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/8/5/michael-browns- mother-vows-to-never-forgive.html.

77 college—will always end up reproducing the conditions which lead to their death since they still rely on a category of the devalued—such as women, the neatly or painlessly killed, the mean and unlikeable, those without strong family or community ties, and those who don’t or can’t have aspirations for higher education.166 Despite the potential which might be seen by users like auntieimperial in the sharing of the image167 to draw upon the indeterminate “this” of Boykin’s declaration,168 this potential is always circumscribed by the same forces which make it possible, leaving negotiations of hegemony fundamentally unable to overturn the hegemonic relation which determines the value of Black life in a larger sense.

As Lezley McSpadden observed in reflecting on the deaths of Alton Sterling and

Philando Castile, two years after the death of her son, “Sometimes it seems like the only thing we can do in response to the police brutality that my son and so many other black boys and men have suffered is to pray for black lives. Yes, they mater, but is that changing anything? What is going to be different this time?”169 Debating the meaning of the death isn’t enough; instead what is needed is to intervene directly into the event of racialized violence. Only this intervention can disrupt or actively work against white supremacy in lived reality, since, as Martinot and Sexton

166 Cacho, Lisa Marie. “Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead.” In Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, edited by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson. Durham NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011. See also Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris. “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.” New York, New York: African American Policy Forum, July 2015. http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/55a810d7e4b058f342f55873/1437077719984/A APF_SMN_Brief_full_singles.compressed.pdf.

167 “Hey Mike Brown’s Family Has Requested That No One...”

168 Boykin, “This Is Why Black People Are Pissed Off.”

169 McSpadden, Lezley. “Michael Brown’s Mom, on Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.” The New York Times, July 7, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/opinion/michael-browns-mom-on-alton-sterling-and-philando- castile.html.

78 observe, white supremacy has no central logic, its repetition and its surface are its fundamental content.170 As Lezley McSpadden continues,

When their children are killed, mothers are expected to say something. To help keep the peace. To help make change. But what can I possibly say? I just know we need to do something. We are taught to be peaceful, but we aren’t at peace. I have to wake up and go to sleep with this pain everyday. Ain’t no peace. If we mothers can’t change where this is heading for these families—to public hearings, protests, un-asked-for-martyrdom, or worse, to nothing at all—what can we do?171 We can expand this with reference to Sylvia Wynter’s engagement with the interplay of cultural negotiation and material change,

In sum, the governing cultural categories of the social orders in both center and periphery became the governing categories of their systems of knowledge and of aesthetics. Further, both knowledge and aesthetics systems constituted the sociocultural environment as an environment which encoded its conceptions in the very structure of social relations. These structural encodings of cultural conceptions are made possible by the fact the structure serves as the abduction system for the thought-systems and vice-versa. Consequently, for fundamental change to take place, it must take place both in the conception and in the pattern of relations. Such changes must therefore call into question both the structure of social reality and the structure of its analogical epistemology; they must involve “shifting our whole system of abductions. [To do this] we must pass through the threat of that chaos where thought becomes impossible.”172 To intervene in these conditions, we thus must envision a technology which is capable not only of changing how we understand life in the moments unfolding after a photographed event, but in the moments which precede the constitution of a photographed event, the before-life of the photograph rather than its afterlife as we engaged with it in the case of Mike Brown. This intervention would then be able to change both the conception and pattern of relations simultaneously. The closest we may get to such an engagement with the threat of chaos through

170 Martinot and Sexton. “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” 175

171 McSpadden. “Michael Brown’s Mom, on Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.” 172 Wynter, Sylvia. “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis.” In C.L.R. James’s Caribbean, edited by Paget Henry and Paul Buhle. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. 67.

79 the image in the realm of our contemporary technology may be in the social and material conditions which characterize Facebook and it’s recently introduced live-video streaming technology, Facebook Live. In the next chapter I will examine this possibility through focusing on Diamond Reynold’s Facebook Live video of the immediate aftermath of St. Anthony,

Minnesota Police Department officer Jeronimo Yanez, fatally shooting Philando Castile.

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Chapter 3: Networked (A)Liveness

When I look upon slavery as a distant thing, and inflicted upon an indifferent race of beings, it seems to wear a tolerable aspect; but when I bring it near, inspect it closely, and find that it is inflicted on men and women who possess the same nature and feelings with myself, my sensibility is immediately roused—but when I, who sustain the relations of husband and father, see a husband and father whipped severely in the presence of his wife and children, and that perhaps merely to gratify the caprice of an ill-natured master, my feelings become indignant; and when I see the mother most cruelly scourged in the presence of her husband and children, my feelings grow intolerable—my soul sickens at the sight, and my indignation almost prompts me to unlawful deeds of vengeance. John Rankin173

On July 6, 2016, St. Anthony, Minnesota Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed

Philando Castile. In the seconds after these shots, Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend, began a livestream to the social media website Facebook from the passenger seat of the car. Through her video, showing the dying Castile with Officer Yanez’s gun still trained on him, Reynolds provides an explanation to viewers of the circumstances of the shooting until she is taken from the car and the livestream continues as the phone falls to the ground. Within a day, the video had been viewed nearly 2.5 million times and has since been referred to in most every available article on Philando Castile’s killing as an essential piece of evidence and testimony about the circumstances of Castile’s death.174 As noted by Matt Furber and Richard Pérez-peña at the New

173 Rankin, John. Letters on American Slavery, Addressed to Mr. Thomas Rankin, Merchant at Middlebrook, Augusta Co., Va. Boston, I. Knapp, 1838. http://archive.org/details/lettersonamerica1838rank. 51-52.

174 Peterson, Andrea. “Why the Philando Castile Police-Shooting Video Disappeared from Facebook — Then Came Back.” Washington Post, July 7, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/07/07/why- facebook-took-down-the-philando-castile-shooting-video-then-put-it-back-up/. See also Furber, Matt, and Richard Pérez-peña. “After Philando Castile’s Killing, Obama Calls Police Shootings ‘an American Issue.’” The New York Times, July 7, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/philando-castile-falcon-heights-shooting.html.

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York Times, in the recent aftermath of the shooting, the video became popular, in part, because, in the immediate aftermath of Castile’s death, while officials were refusing to provide more definite details, it remained the only public account of the event.175

At one level, we could, as we did in the last chapter, ask how this image can exist, and attempt to answer this by working through the mobilizations of this video and its circulation through Facebook and other parts of the Internet. With this we could ask again, what this video meant to people and how they have made sense of this image, those dynamics pointing to larger dynamics of common sense and hegemony and what the image and its mobilization might say about how that hegemony is able to be shifted through mobilizing such an image. But, data from

Phil Stinson’s database tracking the arrests and prosecutions of police officers should lead us to a certain pause. His information shows that from 2005-2016 only 77 police officers in the United

States have been charged with murder or manslaughter and of those 77, only 27 have been convicted. Commenting on video evidence in these cases specifically, Stinson observes,

We see in some of these cases even with video evidence, it does not ultimately result in an officer being convicted, especially in jury trial situations, . . . Juries are very reluctant to find a police officer guilty of murder or manslaughter. They want to believe that police officers are the good guys.176 As with the varied responses to the photograph of Brown’s death, the inalienable position of the camera always allows for reinterpretation and reframing of the image such that, it is quite possible for people to, though the video has been so popular, widely disagree about what exactly

175 Furber and Pérez-peña. “After Philando Castile’s Killing, Obama Calls Police Shootings ‘an American Issue.’”

176 As quoted in Collins, Jon, Riham Feshir, and Tim Nelson. “Officer Charged in Castile Shooting.” MPR News, November 16, 2016. http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/11/16/officer-charged-in-castile-shooting. For more on prosecution of police officers see King, Shaun. “KING: Murder Convictions Rare for Police, White Lynchers.” NY Daily News, November 17, 2015. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-murder-convictions-rare-police- white-lynchers-article-1.2437827.

83 it depicts and the meaning of those contents. Thus, though the image of Castile’s death, like the image of Brown’s death, may be able to facilitate negotiations of hegemonic interpretation, we should not necessarily expect that this negotiation will change the legal and political elements which characterize the overall material environment of racialized violence in this country. We should not necessarily expect that recourse to visual evidence will provide “justice,” as defined by the charging, conviction, and punishment of the involved police officers, any more than it will lead to the complete validation of their actions, an outcome that both Stiller’s comments and

Butler’s explanation of the racialized grounding of the visual field should foreground, “to the extent that there is a racist organization and disposition of the visible, it will work to circumscribe what qualifies as visual evidence, such that it is in some cases impossible to establish the ‘truth’ of racist brutality through recourse to visual evidence.”177

This situation may then lead us to bypass the question of the perception of the image as an area for, at least directly, influencing the organization of racialized violence. If we take seriously Martinot and Sexton’s insistence that, “White supremacy is nothing more than what we perceive of it; there is nothing beyond it to give it legitimacy, nothing beneath it nor outside it to give it justification,” that the truth of white supremacy is entirely in its surface and the repetition of its rituals rather than in some deep dark corner, then we may, instead wish to conceptualize our approach around a different sort of question.178 Reframing our insistence to figure out how the image can exist, we may then ask, not just of its appearance before us as mediated by the material and social relationships which we are entangled with, but of how the image exists in the framework of the photographer. In effect, we might ask how the image can exist by asking the

177 Butler. “Endangered/Endangering.” 17.

178 Martinot and Sexton “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” 175

84 opposite question, why doesn’t the image not exist? In what other worlds might Castile’s death have not existed as a livestreamed video, and thus, what conditions might have characterized a world where Castile’s death and the repetition of white supremacy would have been avoided, or, more strongly than this, made impossible.

To ask this other sort of question, we should then pay attention not only to the eruption of the aftermath of the video, but the conditions which structured its production. For the livestreamed video produced and transmitted by a networked mobile phone and broadcast through the social networking site Facebook we should then ask both of the conditions of the image’s circulation and those which characterize the event of photography itself, a move which

Azoulay argues, “allows us to see the photograph as merely one possible outcome among others of the event of photography.”179 This is to presuppose photography as not simply the sovereign action of a particular actor and a mechanical apparatus, Diamond Reynolds and her phone, but as a collaboration, one which not only relies on, but inscribes the relations between the various protagonists who form and shape it as an event, with the image, the image we take as supremely important in the aftermath, only hypothetical in the exact moment of its production.180 To pay attention to the beforelife of the image is then to center the flexibility of this encounter that constitutes the event of photography in its first phase, and with this to ask how the event, which happened to actually produce an image which we are able to now read, could have produced anything else but this image. And with all this in mind, our task here returns us right back to the image which we first turned away from, since, of course, the very conditions which produced

179 Azoulay. Civil Imagination. 24.

180 Azoulay, Ariella. “Photography Consists of Collaboration: Susan Meiselas, Wendy Ewald, and Ariella Azoulay.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31, no. 1 91 (January 1, 2016): 187–201. doi:10.1215/02705346-3454496. 189.

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Castile’s death as a contingent, but unnecessary historical event are the ones which are crystallized within the surface of the video. In the end our goal is then a simple, yet, underexplored one, to find the potential for the image’s nonexistence within its frame.

In this chapter I will ask these questions of Reynolds’s video and the encounter of photography which engenders it through the reverse form of that recurring question asked by

Williams and Alexander, “How can this image not not exist?”, or “Why doesn’t this image not exist?”. To do this I will first provide background on Facebook and the live video streaming feature introduced on the platform to ask, beyond how these technologies shape the perception of the photograph after the fact, how the production of the image itself through the mobile phone augments the event of photography. I will then move into an analysis of the video and the circumstances surrounding its production to ask more deeply how the image might show us not only the historical event which it has been used as evidence of, no matter how disparate those interpretations might be, but also the contingency of that same historical event. I ask how the image might show us the conditions of its own unmaking and, with that, how the material and social relations of perception enabled by the technology of live-streaming video through a platform as big as Facebook might be able to directly intervene in the production and exploitation of death rather than only negotiating the terms of that death in its aftermath. I conclude by recentering our discussion of the video on this potential for intervention, linking it, beyond hegemony and negotiation, to Wilderson’s desire for a program of complete disorder engendered through a dance with death, a dream of the destruction rather than renegotiation of civil society.

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Coming Together to Build a More Open and Connected World

Introduced as a new and exciting way for public figures and their fans to interact with each other, Facebook Live launched on August 5, 2015, as a new feature of the endlessly growing social media giant Facebook.181 While a few other platforms already existed at the time for sharing of live video content, what set Facebook Live apart was its integration in a social network based on the production and sharing of stable content. The Facebook Live video, unlike videos on platforms like Meerkat or Periscope, don’t disappear automatically and thus, can be mobilized as content alongside all other forms of content on the site.182 This ability, while worthwhile for regular users of the site, was particularly marketed to celebrities as providing the opportunity to expand their brand through the live video format, giving fans a much-sought-after ability to interact directly with those public figures most directly out of touch.183

The event of photography thus initially envisioned for Facebook Live is one which can merge the two scenes or phases of the event of photography into one, bringing the average

Facebook user into a collaboration of the event of photography. Thus, the image produced, stabilized on the platform as a replayable video, inscribes this collaboration of actors, relying directly on the unique quality of the photographic image and its circulation. As Azoulay writes,

“photographs teach us not merely about the world represented in them but also, and often

181 Lavrusik, Vadim. “Connect with Public Figures Through Live.” Facebook Newsroom, August 5, 2015. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/08/connect-with-public-figures-through-live/. See also Lavrusik, Vadim. “Introducing Live for Facebook Mentions.” Facebook Media, August 5, 2015. https://media.fb.com/2015/08/05/introducing-live-for-facebook-mentions/.

182 Constine, Josh. “Facebook Launches ‘Live’ Streaming Video Feature, But Only For Celebrities.” TechCrunch, August 5, 2015. http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/08/05/facescope/. See also Constine, Josh. “Facebook Takes On Periscope By Giving Live Streaming To All U.S. iPhoners.” TechCrunch, January 28, 2016. http://social.techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/comfortable-ephemerality-vs-reach/.

183 Lavrusik. “Introducing Live for Facebook Mentions.”

87 primarily, about the ways in which photography is practiced and shared with others and about the complex web of relations that are sustained by photographic practice.”184 The Facebook Live video is, and was originally envisioned as, a form by which the complex web of relations congealed around public figures and celebrities might be utilized and inscribed into the production of a photographic image through moments as mundane as an actor directly answering a fan’s posted comment on the livestreamed video as it occurs.

The next move in Facebook’s exploitation of the collaboration involved in the photograph was the opening of Facebook Live successively to journalists, public figures, public pages, and then finally to all U.S. based iPhone users on January 28, 2016, a move which would put them in direct competition with other live-sharing platforms, primarily, Twitter’s

Periscope.185 Key to its ability to compete, alongside the stability of the video content produced through the live stream, is Facebook’s reliance on algorithmic sorting to determine the layout of an individual user’s newsfeed, rather than simply by chronology. This move may more quickly bury unpopular streams or streams from those users the site’s algorithms take to be less close to, and thus less interesting to, the given user. At the same time, it also boosts the reach of those streams which are generating a lot of quantifiable interest through views and interactions, automatically pushing those into more user’s faces.186 The collaborative photographic event envisioned by Facebook, is then one with explicit relations of power—what users, including

184 Azoulay. “Photography consists of collaboration.” 190-191.

185 Constine. “Facebook Takes on Periscope.” See also Lavrusik, Vadim. “Expanding Live Video to More People.” Facebook Newsroom, January 28, 2016. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/01/expanding-live-video/.

186 Kant, Vibhi. “News Feed FYI: Taking into Account Live Video When Ranking Feed.” Facebook Newsroom, March 1, 2016. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/03/news-feed-fyi-taking-into-account-live-video-when- ranking-feed/.

88 celebrities, are actually being incentivized by is not merely the ability to connect with others, but the potential to connect with new others through being more interesting to watch and interact with than other available content, their audience expanding precisely through the mechanisms of the platform which prefer particular kinds of content. In Gillespie’s terms, “platforms intervene,” which is to observe, “our information [is] only raw material from which platforms assemble an information product for us: a feed for which some content is chosen, some is given prominence, some is discarded, and some is expelled.”187 At the same time Facebook Live inscribes the dynamics of the social relations of a streamer and those already interacting with the content—for example, those currently commenting or reacting to an ongoing stream—it, more subtly, additionally inscribes a relationship between the person and those others not currently watching but who could potentially watch that content. The video then inscribes not simply a direct interactive relationship, but one’s whole social network, and, indeed, it is this inscription of the social network which the live streamer courts.

Yet, the intrusion of the platform’s curatorial mechanisms into its role as an egalitarian space for the sharing of content is complicated by more than the profit motive attending to the selection of the popular and the interesting. Equally necessary is not only the process of selection, but the process of discarding and deleting posts, something which only becomes more technically difficult with the introduction of live video streaming, their content only potential until the same moment they are relayed. This dynamic is made clear in the Facebook community standards where the stated mission to, “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” is directly tied, and, indeed, enabled by, the set of universal community

187 Gillespie, Tarleton. “Platforms Intervene.” Social Media + Society 1, no. 1 (April 1, 2015): 2056305115580479. doi:10.1177/2056305115580479.

89 standards which set guidelines for “what type of content may be reported to [Facebook] and removed.”188 In their section on “Encouraging respectful behavior,” Facebook outlines its interest in maintaining a diverse community by balancing the needs, safety, and interests of that community—effectively becoming the arbiter of content because this labor is the only way to maintain the social network as a network of (appropriate) sociality.189 Would you really prefer a world where you might accidentally have to see horrible and grotesque images wedged between pictures of your family and a video of a dog cooking?

Within this section, one of the grounds for reporting and removal of content from the site is titled, “Violence and Graphic Content,” and their policy seems almost immediately to contradict its own interest in setting strict standards on what content falls within the rubric of

“respectful behavior.” They note that, while Facebook, as a social network, is particularly useful for sharing information about important issues, which may sometimes “involve violence and graphic images of public interest or concern, such as human rights abuses or acts of terrorism,” this sort of content is only tolerable in those instances that one is “condemning it or raising awareness about it.”190 Facebook thus makes the distinction between content based not necessarily on its contents but on the intentions of those who share and engage with that content, that is, around the collaboration inherent in the unfolding event of photography.

Turning to the material work of enforcing and enacting these policies, we see that the negotiation of what is in the interests of the social network Facebook is committed to cultivating

188 “Community Standards.” Facebook, 2017. https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards.

189 Ibid.

190 Ibid.

90 is, itself, intensive labor. As Adrian Chen writes in their exploration of the content moderation industry, “Social media’s growth into a multibillion-dollar industry, and its lasting mainstream appeal, has depended in large part on companies’ ability to police the borders of their user- generated content.”191 The former chief security officer of MySpace, Hemanshu Nigam, is quoted by Chen as estimating that the number of content moderators, workers who enact community standards like Facebook’s, runs “‘well over 100,000.’—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.”192 These laborers, increasingly located in the Philippines, work to make Facebook’s community real through performing the micro-level labor of affectivity, making sense of images, videos, text, and other content as or not as violating the community standards, thus creating the potency of these standards through the repetitive nature of their work.193 Therefore, while it may be seemingly more obvious that pornography and videos depicting the torture of animals violate the framework of the community standards, the description above gives a certain flexibility to our understanding of when a particular piece of content may be understood as on one side of the line or the other, this judgement based on and enacting the collaborative nature of the photographic event, the deletion or approval of the posts another layer inscribing the negotiation of the event of photography onto the surface of the image.

Facebook Live presents particularly new challenges to this harnessing of affectivity which enables the sociality of users on the site because, almost immediately after Facebook Live was released for public use, people began to stream content which engaged directly with the

191 Chen, Adrian. “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.” WIRED, October 23, 2014. https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/.

192 Ibid.

193 Ibid.

91 ambiguity of the policy around graphic violence. After moderators removed a video of a person who was shot after killing their partner and a police officer, while leaving up a video of a

Chicagoan who was fatally shot while livestreaming, Facebook decided that relying on people to report posts before they would be moderated wouldn’t do enough to protect the network it was trying to build.194 Facebook said in a statement to the Washington post that they had, in response, increased the number of workers on their moderation team as well as made more use of automatic tools to determine which videos should be moderated first based on user reports, as well as on factors such as views and popularity, the same factors which users are structurally encouraged to mobilize in their use of Facebook Live.195 The video of Philando Castile’s death presented similar problems to the site because of the combination of graphic content, Castile’s dying body, and its potential value for “condemning or raising awareness about” the event depicted in the video. In this way, then, Facebook’s power is specifically inscribed on the image, as is made clear when the video came down due to a technical glitch and went back up appended with a warning to users about its graphic contents. This warning served as the marker precisely of the hidden and naturalized work of the content moderator and with it a certain power relation which makes the existence of the image at all, a representation of its “appropriateness” and, therefore, its rightness.

We should then come to think of Diamond Reynolds’s video as an image resulting from a complex network of power relations, a collaboration between several actors that coexist together, all sedimented into the surface of the image as we receive it. That we are able to interact with the image at all is a result of this complex negotiation and, in that sense, the image is quite incidental

194 Peterson. “Why the Philando Castile Police-Shooting Video Disappeared from Facebook.”

195 Ibid.

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(or accidental) to the event of photography and the relationships which come together through the, even hypothetical, presence of the camera. Another inscription onto the image is this active effort to enable the sociality of the event of photography by ensuring the presence of the image and with it, the potential of interactivity, the thing they are selling as the purpose of Facebook

Live. As much is directly admitted in Facebook’s Co-founder, CEO, and Chairman, Mark

Zuckerberg’s, post about Diamond Reynolds’s video,

The images we've seen this week are graphic and heartbreaking, and they shine a light on the fear that millions of members of our community live with every day. While I hope we never have to see another video like Diamond's, it reminds us why coming together to build a more open and connected world is so important -- and how far we still have to go.196 Though he does not want to see another video like Diamond’s he is nonetheless fully committed to creating a system of reliable video sharing, “a more open and connected world,” such that if another event like this were to happen we would no doubt be able to, and indeed be encouraged, to see it through Facebook’s contracted labor of selection and automatic sorting and popularity algorithms.

That we see the image at all is an orchestrated accident, an intensely managed chaos. So, then to ask how this image can exist is to, in one reading, push ourselves to understand this accident, and with it, the contingency of the historical event it is supposed to represent. That is done, not to trivialize the world we live in, but to ask of and for the world we don’t live in because we understand the weight and the consequences of this one. The dream of the possibility of intervention is the dream of a different world, enabled only by denaturalizing history, the

196 Zuckerberg, Mark. Facebook, July 7, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102948714100101. It’s interesting the way Zuckerberg references race but only in the most implicit way as “millions of members of our community” maintains a color-blind neutrality that completely misses the distinction of racialized violence. Police killings are simply a “heartbreaking” thing which happens to many of “us,” rather than something particular and institutional enacted on populations antagonistic to civil society.

93 same dream conjured when we look at the photograph of Henry Smith’s lynching or Michael

Brown’s body and envision the impossibility of the image, and with it, the possibility for Black life.

Bring it Near, Inspect it Closely

On the night of July 6, 2016, St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, initiated a traffic stop in the Falcon Heights suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. Philando Castile was driving, while his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds sat on the passenger side and her 4-year-old child sat in the back of the car. Less than 2 minutes later, Diamond Reynolds begins a Facebook

Live stream. As she narrates, informing viewers of what just transpired, she pans between her face and the scene next to her, Philando Castile laying back in his seat, bloodied and moaning, while Officer Yanez continues to point his gun at Castile. Yanez’s face does not appear in the frame, but he seems to interject at multiple points in Reynolds’s narration to shout, “Fuck!”, to narrate his own version of what happened, and give Reynolds orders. Reynolds’s narration turns directly to speak to the officer as the camera remains on Castile’s seemingly unconscious or dead body. As more police officers can be heard in the background, Yanez orders for Reynolds to be removed from the car and another officer orders her to get out with her hands up and walk backwards toward them. The camera, though she is apparently walking backwards, remains trained on this officer who has their gun out. As she approaches the officer holsters their gun and reaches for her, telling her to get on her knees. As they put handcuffs on Reynolds, the phone falls to the ground and continues broadcasting the sky and electrical poles above them. At the same time, a child can be heard screaming out off camera, but there is no way to know if this is

94

Reynolds’s child or someone else, as the shot with the police officer ordering Reynolds to walk backwards also contained several other cars lined up behind the nearest police car. When

Reynolds asks why she is being arrested, an officer informs her that she is merely being detained until the situation is sorted out. Reynolds begins to narrate to the camera again before speaking more broadly in a prayer and cry out, as the police officer handcuffing her moves her away from her phone. As the phone continues streaming we hear another shout, “Fuck!” from off-camera, presumably from Yanez again, and amidst the hard to distinguish chatter and background noise, one can hear again Reynolds’s testimony as she tells it, presumably to the police officers who have arrived to the scene. Someone can be heard exclaim, “Fucking hell!”, before someone, presumably Yanez again, shouts a third and fourth time, “Fuck!” Another voice then begins to shout again but besides beginning with fuck, it is unclear what is said, and around 3 and a half minutes into the video, a police officer comes to pick up Reynolds’s phone off the ground and the camera shows only darkness. A shout of “Fuck!” is again heard as the phone presumably moves closer to Reynolds. We hear her again giving her testimony directed in the second person at Yanez as she moves into an imploring cry, asking why this had to happen to Castile since he just works at a school and has never been involved in anything criminal that might justify this sort of response. She begins to pray, asking that Castile not be taken from her and imploring that they are innocent people who don’t deserve this sort of treatment. Reynolds’s daughter is heard and the officer discusses uncuffing Reynolds before asking another officer to search her before they do. The video then cuts out just as Reynolds’s daughter moves into frame and the officer asks her if it is her phone. As the video resumes we look up at Reynolds’s face as she sits in the back of the police car, still handcuffed. As she looks around she states her testimony while asking for any of her viewers to come to the scene of the shooting and give her and her daughter

95 a ride home. She repeats this information multiple times throughout the rest of the video, a notable addition being a description of Yanez, referring to him as Chinese (Yanez is Mexican-

American). Reynolds is able to reorient the camera to look out the window of the police car and she identifies that one of the people is Yanez, but it is difficult when viewing the video to see which police officer she means. She then reorients the camera back and notes that she can’t do anything because she is still handcuffed, at which point her daughter tells her it’s ok. Reynolds then remarks in disbelief that she can’t believe they just shot Castile and lets out a loud cry to which her daughter responds and begins to comfort her. Reynolds implores her viewers to pray for them and for her sister to come pick her and her daughter up. It is then, we can assume, her phone either dies or she intentionally ends the stream, but it is these moments which make up the roughly 10-minute video on the scene of Philando Castile’s death.197

I represent them to you here so that we can bring them closer and inspect them. We should inspect them not, as Rankin does above, to rouse our senses and provoke intolerable feelings, but so that we might denaturalize this image as an image, foregrounding the workings of power inscribed on its surface. The move described by Azoulay in her approach to the event of photography parallels the one presented by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in her text, “On

‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish.” There Chun notes the effect of liveness and the notion of real time which make our computers and digital media devices feel particularly transparent, as though they were, primarily, windows to an else-where beyond the screen, a conduit for actions on either end. Our intervention, alongside Azoulay and Chun is to denaturalize this transparency into the event photographed and instead historicize our approach to the image as a representation or

197 By time of my writing the original Facebook video posted by Reynolds is no longer available to view, so this and any other descriptions of the video are about a version posted to Youtube. See Reynolds, Diamond. PHILANDO CASTILE Full Video, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBgDs4n2Vco.

96 inscription of the multiply unfolding event of photography. The apparatus of the digitally mediated live-streamed video becomes understood then, as not merely a window into some elsewhere, but as a medium which defines the image as it mediates our relationship to the event photographed.198 That is, we should understand this video as not merely a representation of, but as forming an essential part of the event of photography, the event of Philando Castile’s death.

Our analysis of this image must focus, beyond what is (supposed to be) represented, as my description of the video above covers, on how that representation is created in the same moment it represents. Only with that framing can we then ask, “How can this image exist?”, reframed in its opposite, “How can this image not not exist?”

The first way of denaturalizing our approach to the image might be to focus on one of the video’s most apparent features, Diamond Reynolds’s narration, commentary, and testimony throughout the video. We see at multiple points the combination of her direct description of

Yanez shooting Philando Castile, prayers directed elsewhere, comforting to her daughter, direct responses back to the police officers who surround her, and direct addresses to the audience of her livestream. Within her testimony is the affective resonance of her words. Throughout, she slides between a direct testimonial form describing what she has seen or giving clear instructions, and the stifled cries and prayers directed, perhaps, everywhere at once. These two, seemingly disparate, registers of her testimony captured, purposely or not, on video, are punctuated by something which should give us pause as strongly as it neutralizes itself as appropriate. How, in the moment after seeing her boyfriend shot several times and lying bloodied

198 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish.” Configurations 16, no. 3 (February 24, 2010): 299–324. doi:10.1353/con.0.0064. 317-318.

97 next to her, with a gun still pointing into the car where she and her child still sat, could she engage with Yanez show calmly?199

The obvious answer which should be noted precisely because it may feel obvious, is that this element of her tone, in interacting with the police officers, can be read as an inscription of the power relations, at least perceived, as existing between Black people and police officers in this country. As Don Lemon, despite his other questionable analysis of race relations in America, admitted after seeing Reynold’s video, no Black person should have to “yes sir,” anybody, yet the fact that people, including himself, continue to do so is based primarily on the desire to stay alive and unharmed.200 And as Reynolds herself admitted, it was her daughter that she credits with allowing her to stay composed and calm through the situation.201 One point of our denaturalization of the image would then be to point out simply, how different this image would be if Reynolds did not act so politely to the police officers and how her negotiation of this moment allowed her and her daughter to be alive today to seek justice for Castile in the court of law, using the image as it does exist.202

Further inscribing this power dynamic of her and the police in this moment is the direct responses of the officers, particularly Yanez, to her narration and testimony of the event. In the

199 I make this point not, primarily, to inform readers that are unaware, but to denaturalize this behavior for Black people and other people of color for whom this sort of politeness to police officers has been normalized as though it were not induced.

200 Callahan, Yesha. “Don Lemon on Police Brutality: I Call Cops ‘Sir’ ‘Because I Want to Stay Alive.’” The Grapevine, July 8, 2016. http://thegrapevine.theroot.com/don-lemon-on-police-brutality-i-call-cops-sir-becau- 1790888737.

201 Justice for Phil, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/100002471166595/videos/1057539947671701/.

202 For the most recent developments in the trial see Good, Dan. “Minnesota Police Officer Pleads Not Guilty in Philando Castile’s Shooting Death, Case Heads to Trial.” NY Daily News, February 27, 2017. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/philando-castile-shooting-death-case-heads-trial-article-1.2983570.

98 very beginning of the video, as Reynolds describes what happened to her Facebook Live audience, Yanez interjects with his version of the story, justifying his action, while he continues to point his gun at the immobile Castile. In contrast to Reynolds’s composure in these moments,

Yanez’s emotions seem far looser, his breathing audibly heavy as he cried, still holding the gun.

His intermittent shouts of “Fuck!” reverberated through the short video several times.203 The stakes of this disagreement over the facts is represented clearly by the first recorded words spoken by Yanez, where he orders Reynolds to keep her hands where they are, and Reynolds responds with a flat, “I will sir, no worries, I will.” As with the divergent interpretations proposed by Darren Wilson and Lezley McSpadden, Mike Brown’s mother, about who was wrong and what happened, in the end, it was Wilson, and in this case, Yanez, who decide who lives and who dies.204 That Yanez initially reported that he was stopping them because Castile, looked like a robbery suspect, “just because of the wide-set note,” a racialized facial feature associated with Black people, is more evidence of the power dynamic of this situation. All it takes is to share a racialized facial trait with another suspected person to then become a suspect and get shot, even though, as the Castile family’s attorney pointed out, the method of arrest was incongruent with the police force’s own procedures for stopping people they suspect have committed a felony.205 Though Yanez, like Reynolds, is only human, he nonetheless holds the power in this situation and as such, the collaborative event of photography is incapable of not representing that power dynamic as it not only captures the scene, but captures a scene it also plays a role in. As much as Yanez is responding directly to Reynolds’s speaking, he is also

203 For Reynolds’s further description of Yanez’s composure see, Justice for Phil

204 Harris and Victor. “One Year after Michael Brown’s Killing, His Mother Vows to ‘never Forgive.’”

205 Mannix, Andy. “Police Audio: Officer Stopped Philando Castile on Robbery Suspicion.” Star Tribune, July 12, 2016. http://www.startribune.com/police-audio-officer-stopped-philando-castile-on-robbery-suspicion/386344001/.

99 directly responding to the video’s audience, and participating directly in the event of photography where he, though he holds the power, nonetheless only takes a partial and limited role in the construction of the image.

Yet, despite his limited role, can Yanez’s direct intervention not also be read as representing his recognition of the potentialities of the event of photography? As represented by the American Civil Liberties Union’s guide to the rights of photographers, though it is perfectly legal in many places across the United States to photograph or film police officers, police have been known to harass, detain, and arrest people for attempting to record them and have even deleted video and photographic evidence from people’s phones after the fact.206 Yanez’s intervention works on and directly against the ability of the event of photography to enable the spectator, “to remark on the excess or lack inscribed in the photograph so as to re-articulate every detail including those that some believe to be fixed in place by the glossy emulsion of the photograph.”207 This direct suspicion and intervention by officers is then also a necessary part of the collaboration inherent to the event of photography since what they respond to is not, primarily the image itself, but the potentiality that the event of photography opens up. Whether an image is being validly or actually produced or not, Yanez still feels the need to explain himself and, with this, also recognize the inscription of Reynolds’s power, in this moment, to gather spectators and reframe the event away from the interpretation which favors him. And while this may not ultimately lead to any sort of legal justice for Castile, Yanez is nonetheless

206 “Know Your Rights: Photographers - What to Do If You Are Stopped or Detained for Taking Photographs.” American Civil Liberties Union. Accessed April 14, 2017. https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/photographers- rights. See also Fuller, Griffith. “How Much Weight Does a Black Man’s Word Carry in America?” Mobile Justice California, April 30, 2015. https://www.mobilejusticeca.org/black-mans-word/.

207 Azoulay, Civil Imagination. 25.

100 seemingly interested in maintaining that his actions were justified.208 The additional evidence for this point is found in Yanez and his defense team’s utilization of the same video to anchor their

‘not guilty’ claim, repeating the same lines presented much more emotionally within the video, that Castile brought his death upon himself by moving incorrectly and dangerously.209

In Media Res

Yet, we should also ask, if Castile was killed for moving incorrectly and police are afraid of phones and cameras such that, quite often, “A cell phone in the hands of a black woman is a gun; that same phone in a white woman’s hand is a cell phone,” how is it that Reynolds could capture this video?210 While the event of photography may have no essential relation to the production of an image, the image nonetheless suggests that the event of photography did in fact happen. In testimony delivered the next day, outside Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton’s mansion, Reynolds says, “I wanted to put it on Facebook and go viral so that the people could see, I wanted the people to determine who was right and who was wrong. I want the people to be the testimonies here. All of us saw with our eyes. Only thing you guys didn’t see was when he shot, and if I would have moved while that gun was out, he would have shot me too.”211 One way

208 For more on the potentials of legal justice and an overview of the conviction of police officers see Collins et al. “Officer Charged in Castile Shooting.”

209 Ortiz, Erik, and Associated Press. “Manslaughter Charges Filed against Minnesota Officer Who Fatally Shot Philando Castile.” NBC News, November 17, 2016. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/philando-castile- shooting-manslaughter-charge-filed-against-officer-black-driver-n684771. See also Silverstein, Jason. “Minnesota Police Officer Who Killed Philando Castile Wants Charges Dropped, Says Castile Was High on Marijuana.” NY Daily News, December 15, 2016. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/philando-castile-high-memo-charges- dropped-article-1.2911866.

210 Martinot and Sexton. “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” 170.

211 Justice for Phil.

101 of understanding this might be to think about how the event of the shooting itself uniquely opened the possibility for photography in this moment, allowing Reynolds’s phone and its potentiality, that of the event of photography and the photographic image, to directly engage with the potentiality coagulated within Yanez’s gun, that of the event of shooting and the bullet. More than this, it is to think about the collaborative event of photography in an embodied rather than abstract way, how Reynolds’s body engages with Castile’s body and Yanez’s body and how this space between them is augmented by technology, devices which have the possibility to open up particular kinds of events. Like Reynolds’s phone and the photographic image, guns have no essential relationship to bullets or death, but they nonetheless hold the potential for producing bullets which can injure and kill and it is this potentiality that effects how we engage with them, more so than their material existence as pieces of metal or plastic. In that sense, the embodied interaction between Castile’s body and potential gun—Yanez first said he didn’t see the gun but has since argued that he did see it and it made him fear for his life212—and Yanez’s body and actual drawn gun opens the space for Reynolds’s and her daughter’s bodies to be augmented by the potentiality of her phone to produce the image.

That she is able to continue filming without her phone being read as a gun might be read as a result of this augmentation to the embodied space of the vehicle introduced by the phone’s camera. In this framework, if photography is thought of as a form of writing with light,213 then we might understand Reynolds’s actions along the lines of Alice Walker’s explanation of the urgency of writing, “It is, in the end the saving of lies that we writers are about. . . . It is simply

212 Silverstein. “Cop Who Killed Philando Castile Saw His Gun, Defense Claims.”

213 Azoulay. Civil Imagination. 11.

102 in our power to do this. We do it because we care. . . We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.”214 Without stretching this analogy we might place it in the valence of Simone

Browne’s conception of dark sousveillaince, “the tactics employed to make one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight.”215 In this sense we might come to understand Reynolds’s actions along the lines mobilized by Black people throughout history to contend with an almost all-encompassing anti-

Black surveillance, “where the tools of social control . . . were appropriated, co-opted, repurposed, and challenged in order to facilitate survival and escape.”216 Her invocation of the event of photography, alongside her measured politeness to the officers, were mechanisms for enabling the survival of herself and her child, the video opening the space for critiquing the anti-

Black visual common sense through which Castile, Reynolds, and Reynolds’s daughter were made sense of as dangerous. As Reynolds says in her testimony at the governor’s mansion the next day, “So I chose to allow the video to go live 10 seconds before my phone died, because I wanted everybody in the world to see what the police do and how they roll. And it’s not right.

It’s not acceptable. I didn’t do it for pity. I didn’t do it for fame. I did it so that the world knows that these police are not here to protect and serve us. They are here to assassinate us.”217

Alongside the Combahee River Collective’s pamphlet on the murders of Black women218 and the

214 Walker, Alice. “Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Open Road Media, 2011. 14.

215 Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 21.

216 Ibid.

217 Justice for Phil. See also “‘They Are Here to Kill Us Because We Are Black’: Girlfriend of Philando Castile on Police Shootings.” Democracy Now!, July 8, 2016. http://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/8/they_are_here_to_kill_us.

218 Combahee River Collective. “Why Did They Die?”

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African American Policy Forum’s Say Her Name report,219 we should take special attention to note how important it really is for Black women to be able to resist the conditions which make their deaths not only justifiable, but possible because of their devaluation. How important it is for the life Reynolds saved to be her own and her daughter’s.

Yet, we should also pause to ask more closely, how exactly the phone as camera is able to produce this effect, without in any way doubting the potential for her to have produced this effect. As noted above, within the video we see moments where Yanez directly engages with the event of photography through his engagement with Reynolds’s narration of the event. This interplay is furthered by the moments where Reynolds moves from addressing her audience to directly addressing Yanez, questioning why he shot Castile, especially after creating an impossible situation where Yanez has asked him to both move and be stationary at once.220 With this understanding, it is then quite plausible to say that Yanez was very aware that Reynolds was taking the video and directly contesting the construction of the event in a way he could only participate in, after the fact, through his statements to (other) authorities and his lawyers.

Without psychologically analyzing Yanez in this moment, it might still be possible to ask, not what exactly it was that caused him to not kill Reynolds, but instead, what exactly the power of the photographic event might have been if it was the fact of being videotaped that influenced his decision.

Returning to Chun, to move away from an understanding of the phone as simply a window, we must recenter the locus of our focus away from the agency of the user, the

219 Crenshaw et al., “Say Her Name.” 22.

220 See also Justice for Phil.

104 exceptional, and instead onto the apparatus itself.221 In our case this moves us to refocusing our study away from the interface and interactivity, to the automatic processes which function outside of user input or control, and in that sense, we can add to the work of algorithms and sub- routines, the work performed by the object in the world associated in Azoulay with the potentiality of the event of photography. 222 This means being willing to refocus our understanding of the image away from the interface, Facebook Live, to the other processes going on around the image. This refocusing is necessitated when we are explicit in recognizing, especially due to Facebook Live’s newness, there is no guarantee that Yanez knew what

Facebook Live was, nor that Reynolds was utilizing it to stream a live, sharable video of the scene.

Instead, we only have some evidence that Yanez knew she had her phone and of the phone’s general potential to capture and share images. Though Yanez does contradict himself over whether he did or did not see Castile’s gun, we do see on the video him ordering Reynolds to keep her hands in view while she was using the phone to already begin recording and narrating the event. That he interjected is possible evidence that he might have been aware she was taking a video of the scene, and even of him, but it is not necessarily evidence that he or the other officers understood her to be taking a live video of the event. The actions of the officers after detaining Reynolds can be read as further evidence that they did not understand how the image was captured and shared. As Marc Lamont Hill, several news outlets, and Diamond

Reynolds herself noted, the fact that the police, while detaining Reynolds, took her phone and potentially tried to take the video off of her Facebook page, may have been an attempt to tamper

221 Chun. “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish.” 320-324.

222 Azoulay, Civil Imagination. 11

105 with evidence, an effort that was only unsuccessful because of contingent historical circumstances, “if [Reynolds] doesn’t live-stream that, there is no reason to believe the police officers wouldn’t have destroyed that footage, because that is something that happens quite often.” 223 The simple conclusion is that the fact we are able to see the image at all is historically contingent on the fact that she chose to use Facebook Live.

The essential addition to this is, if we remember that the core part of the event of photography is the embodied affect produced by the potential presence of the camera, not the photograph itself,224 that the photographic even is about collaboration more than it is about the image which inscribes that collaboration, then we must rethink what exactly was relevant about

Facebook Live in this context.225 The thing that changes the embodied situation of the space is not Facebook Live, but in fact, just the phone, for the simple reason that the phone is understood to be able to function as a camera and as a distributor of the images it captures. Perhaps at some point in the future it would be reasonable to assume many people would know about and act in relation to phones as though they have the potential to be live-broadcasting at any time, this event seems to indicate that the officers weren’t acting with this sort of understanding at all.

If Reynolds can be said to have saved the life that was her own and her daughters it is then, not necessarily through writing, enacting writing with light as photography, but in the potentiality of writing with the continued existence and widespread circulation of the image almost a year later, more of an accident than the point. The real point is that, independent of the

223 Marc Lamont Hill as quoted in “‘They Are Here to Kill Us Because We Are Black’: Girlfriend of Philando Castile on Police Shootings.” See also McGoogan, Cara. “Did Police Remove the Facebook Live Video of Philando Castile Being Shot?” The Telegraph, 11:42, sec. 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/07/08/did- police-remove-the-facebook-live-video-of-philando-castile-be/.

224 Azoulay, Civil Imagination. 11

225 Azoulay “Photography Consists of Collaboration.”

106 image’s potential ineffectiveness, photography still holds the potential to do something the image itself can’t do, to directly intervene in a situation and save a life. Another answer to how this image can exist, is then, perhaps, simply because Diamond Reynolds took out her phone. Within the obviousness of this conclusion is the deeper recognition that the phone itself may have been what enabled her to be alive today to testify against Yanez when the trial begins in May 2017 and that this is more than a theoretical or abstract political point.

The image exists because a Black woman acted to save her own life, an extension of

Lorna Rhodes’ observations about the controlling visibility of solitary confinement. At the same time the prisoner’s body is the very ground of surveillance—the combination of Yanez’s vision and the sense he mobilized to make sense of Castile and Reynolds as big-nosed,226 marijuana addled,227 uncontrollable,228 and deadly,229 — “it is also its potential undoing; [the prisoner] has within himself the makings of a perverse opacity.”230 In the frame of Browne’s dark sousveillance this means understanding how the same embodied experience which makes

226 Mannix, “Police Audio.” “’The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery,’ [Yanez] said casually, according to police audio obtained by the Star Tribune. ‘The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just because of the wide-set nose. I couldn’t get a good look at the passenger.’”

227 Silverstein, “Minnesota Police Officer Who Killed Philando Castile Wants Charges Dropped, Says Castile Was High on Marijuana.” “The memo says autopsy results indicate Castile died with “high levels” in THC in his system, though it does not give a number.”

228 Ibid. “According to the memo, Yanez smelled marijuana in Castile’s car after pulling him over, and Castile appeared unable to focus or follow commands. Castile ignored the officer’s repeated demands not to reach for the .40 caliber semi-automatic handgun in his pocket.”

229 Good, Dan. “Minnesota Police Officer Pleads Not Guilty in Philando Castile’s Shooting Death, Case Heads to Trial.” NY Daily News, February 27, 2017. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/philando-castile-shooting- death-case-heads-trial-article-1.2983570. “Yanez's attorneys claim that the officer feared for his life after seeing Castile's gun, and that Castile was high on marijuana during the traffic stop. In a memo filed in December, Yanez's attorneys argued that Castile was ‘culpably negligent and was the substantial cause of his own demise.’”

230 Rhodes, Lorna A. “Panoptical Intimacies.” Public Culture : Bulletin of the Project for Transnational Cultural Studies. 10, no. 2 (1998): 285. 287.

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Reynolds and her daughter susceptible to death can also be mobilized against itself through a negotiation of the terms of visibility itself invoked by the simple potential of her phone to act as a camera.231 As the Combahee River Collective argue,

The last idea we want to respond to is that it’s men’s job to protect women. At first glance this may seem to make sense, but look at the assumptions behind it. Needing to be protected assumes that we are weak, helpless and dependent, that we are victims who need men to protect us from other men. As women in this society we are definitely at risk as far as violence is concerned but WE HAVE TO LEARN TO PROTECT OURSELVES. There are many ways to do this: learning and following common sense safety measures, learning self-defense, setting up phone chains and neighborhood safehouses, joining and working in groups that are organizing against violence against women are all ways to do this.232 If we take away anything from this incident it is that Black women, and all those who are subject to the production and exploitation of extralegal death, now, in the short, contingent, flexible historical moment in which we currently live, have the potential ability to protect ourselves using the camera, something which currently has less to do with the image produced, and more to do with the collaboration inherent in the event of photography. In our conversations around images of Black death we would do well to recognize this ability even while maintaining the potentially destructive nature of the images thus produced. How can this image exist? Because Reynolds needed to try, for herself and for her daughter because their lives were and are important to her.

231 Browne. Dark Matters. 40-41.

232 Combahee River Collective, “Why Did They Die?” 46.

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109

Conclusion: Absolute Dereliction and the Imaging of Death

This bitter earth Well, what a fruit it bears What good is love Mmm, that no one shares

And if my life is like the dust Ooh, that hides the glow of a rose What good am I Heaven only knows

Lord, this bitter earth Yes, can be so cold Today you're young Too soon, you're old

But while a voice within me cries I'm sure someone may answer my call And this bitter earth Ooh, may not, oh, be so bitter after all

Dinah Washington233

In 1971 Black musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron wrote, “The Revolution Will Not Be

Televised.” In this song, he stages the opposition between the commodification and commercialization of Black revolutionary aesthetic and actual real Black liberation. He makes clear the role of television and the impossibility of some images of Blackness and Black people in an actualized revolution,

There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mays Pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run Or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance

233 Washington, Dinah. This Bitter Earth. Mercury Records, 1960.

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NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32 Or report from 29 districts The revolution will not be televised There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down Brothers in the instant replay There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down Brothers in the instant replay234 Scott-Heron isn’t remarking on the impossibility of video cameras or television broadcasts, but instead on the impossibility of receiving these images, “You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out,” precisely because “You will not be able to stay home,” because “Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day.” Recalling Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” Scott-

Heron’s point is not actually that there will be no pictures, but that they won’t matter even if they did exist, because revolutionary action happens in the streets, not in front of a television.235 In effect, being a consumer of these images is exactly what separates you from the real fight, the fight against the same system that enabled the creation of these images.

Putting aside whether he is right, this observation is more interesting when we contextualize it in the history of image making and circulation. Only four years before “The

Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Sony introduced the first portable video camera and this marked the first-time videographers, artists, and activists could really begin exploring the concept of hand-held mobile videography, perspective no longer held down to a fixed stand. It wasn’t until 5 years after “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” that JVC introduced color into the realm of portable video capture, and not until 11 years after that JVC and Sony first

234 Scott-Heron, Gil. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. BGP Records, 1971.

235 Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” 170.

111 announced the Camera/Recorder, or camcorder, a technology which we now take to be far removed from our current practices of image capture and circulation.236 Yet, it was with his

Sony Handycam, a commercial camcorder, that George Holliday first stepped onto his balcony and filmed the Los Angeles Police Department beating Rodney King on the street outside his home, a moment which is often, in retrospect, linked to our contemporary phenomena of sharing images of police violence on social media.237

Of course, perhaps this example only proves Gil Scott-Heron was right. After all, all the courtroom and newscasters did with the image was to endlessly dissect it and, in the end, all the police officers were exonerated by the Simi Valley jury of any wrongdoing, the only one punished was Rodney King himself, his scars literalizing the meaning ascribed to his Blackness in the courtroom. As Hortense Spillers argues,

these lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh create the distance between what I would designate a cultural vestibularity and the culture, whose state apparatus, including judges, attorneys, "owners," "soul drivers," "overseers," and "men of God," apparently colludes with a protocol of "search and destroy." This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside. The flesh is the concentration of "ethnicity" that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away.238 It was only when this state apparatus made clear that King’s beaten, bruised, and bloodied flesh meant Black that people poured into “the streets.” Jerry G. Watts asserts that this gap between the playing of the video and the 1992 L.A. riots shows that it was not the video that precipitated

236 Shapiro, Mark. “The History of Camcorders.” Product Design and Development, August 28, 2014. https://www.pddnet.com/blog/2014/08/history-camcorders.

237 Troy, Gil. “Filming Rodney King’s Beating Ruined His Life.” The Daily Beast, March 3, 2016. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/03/filming-rodney-king-s-beating-ruined-his-life.html.

238 Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. doi:10.2307/464747. 67.

112 them, of course no one was really surprised by what they had seen. What they were, for some reason, surprised by was that the video, in its apparent obviousness, still resulted in nothing but a clear affirmation of hegemonic Black inhumanity.239 What had television done for us beside make Black hope for legal justice and equality seem foolish and naïve?

The critical difference, left unconsidered by Scott-Heron, no doubt due to the time he lived in, is what we have spent our time considering here, the effects made by the change in technology we have experienced since George Holliday took that video. The distinction is apparent when we, today, ask what it actually took for the television news to run George

Holliday’s video over and over again, and how his mailing in of a video tape he took from inside the bounds of his home, differs significantly from, say, Ramsey Orta’s filming of New York

Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo choking Eric Garner just before he died. As Danielle

Jackson argued it truly is groundbreaking for us to now have the ability to capture and disseminate images from the same device.240 Further, this ability is enabled not only by our device, but also by the increasing power and coverage of powerful mobile networks capable of transmitting more data than ever before, higher definition cameras, smaller computing technology, multiple layers of software and interfaces, and the technical infrastructure of the websites the images and videos are shared to, among a whole host of other things. In that sense, then, is “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” not a statement focused almost entirely on the historical context of its creation? It seems obvious that our circumstances today are different considering it took significantly less time for the video footage of, say, the Baltimore Police

239 Watts. “Reflections on the Rodney King Verdict and the Paradoxes of the Black Response.” 241-242.

240 Jackson, Danielle. “New Documents.” presented at the Imperial origins of racialized lives: from enslavement to Black Lives Matter, Brown University, April 7, 2017.

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Department’s arrest of Freddie Gray to circulate simultaneously through television networks and the Internet, than it did for Holliday’s tape to even make it to the television studio.

Within this obviousness is a different, and more subtle point, that we should, as Chun implores, work to understand the effects of the medium, refocusing our attention not only to the events at either side of a device but the processes occurring within that device. These processes produce a remainder (which appears as a reminder only as an effect of its place at the center of the process)241 which, in the case of photography, emerges as the inalienable point of view of the camera.242 What Gil Scott-Heron points out about network television and the circulation of images, simply doesn’t apply today, since it is quite apparent that Black people can “be in the street looking for a brighter day,” while taking and receiving images and videos, opening new opportunities for sociality and sense making in the process.

This brings us directly to Chapter 1, where we attempted to understand how exactly technology changed our ability to contest the hegemonic systems of sense which play a crucial role in the construction of the material relations in which we live at the same time they falsely reflect those relations. This is where we came to link the ideological character of race to the technology of the camera, and the ability of the event of photography to open new opportunities for contesting the hegemonic understandings of race and racialized violence. These opportunities for contestation are moments where the hegemonic ideology can be negotiated and thus changed through the conflict between the sense of dominated groups and the hegemonic sense, something

241 Chun. “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish.” See also Shah, Nishant. “When Machines Speak to Each Other: Unpacking the ‘Social’ in ‘Social Media.’” Social Media + Society 1, no. 1 (April 1, 2015): 2056305115580338. doi:10.1177/2056305115580338.

242 Azoulay. Civil Imagination.

114 done by the NAACP in their use of lynching photography in their anti-lynching campaign.243

Here we posed the question asked by Williams and Alexander in relation to the lynching photograph, “How can this image exist?”244

To understand how these dynamics of negotiation and hegemony occur today and how we come to encounter the image, we turned in Chapter 2 to the circulation of images of Michael

Brown’s body on the micro-blogging website Tumblr. Contextualizing the mobilizations of

Brown’s body in the speculative value and material functioning of the website, I presented the major contexts in which the image occurs. Working through these mobilizations in type we came to see how they each served as spaces for negotiation through the unfolding of the event of photography, a process which allows for the spectator’s perception to function independently from the photographer and the event photographed, enabling reconceptualization of every detail of the image. Yet, we were also forced to ask, if they always leave space open for renegotiation, are they capable of anything more than negotiation of the meaning of a death after the fact?

With this we turned to the Diamond Reynolds’s Facebook Live video stream of the immediate aftermath following St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shooting

Philando Castile. Reformulating our question of how the image of Black death can exist we ask, not how it comes to exist for us as spectators through circulation, but how it comes to exist through the historically contingent event of photography. Though I conceptualized this process of image making with the interface and functioning of Facebook Live and the Facebook platform through which the image comes to be taken and circulated, I concluded that, in fact, it was the

243 Hale. Making Whiteness. 222-223.

244 Alexander. “‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’”. 93-94.

115 phone and its camera that opened the event of photography, not, primarily, Facebook Live or the interface through which Diamond Reynolds shared the video. Further, we can continue to read the traces of power on the surface of the image to point to the potential of the phone as camera to not only record, but directly intervene in the event of photography so opened. It is with this intervention that we can present an explanation for how Reynolds was actually able to produce this image: through opening the potentiality of the event of photography, she altered the embodied space of that car in the moments after Castile was shot, enabling the survival of her and her daughter. In this sense, even though the photograph may only be able to accommodate negotiation, the apparatus itself and how that is made sense of may in fact open the potential for far more.

What we see in the case of Reynolds’s phone is a moment where the phone is made sense of in a way that changes the affective environment of the space in parallel to the way the gun, the police officer, and their bodies as Black people all contributed to the space and how it was made sense of in the moment. Here, negotiation of the event concerns not only the way the event is remembered or prosecuted after the fact, but how it unfolds at its most basic level. All the parts of the event of photography are historically contingent, but nonetheless enable, in this case, the production of an image which we can later read and re-read. What this example should make clear is the way the unfolding of the event of photography within the circumstances we currently live is able to mediate a particular negotiation that can be powerful enough to save lives, even the lives of those deemed most disposable, Black women. This ability, even if it is just as unreliable as the ability of the image to enable legal justice for Castile’s family, is nonetheless important, and indeed, more important, precisely because of the larger conditions which mark people of color, and Black women, in particular, as susceptible to racialized violence and death.

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It is with this stronger form of negotiation that we may be able to engage with

Wilderson’s invocation of Fanon, “Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the

Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent.”245 This is to make the point that it may not actually be possible for counter- hegemony, the negotiation that allows for a production of a society in the interests of the working class as in Gramsci, to truly address white supremacy and the production and exploitation of Black death. The fundamental antagonism between the Black and civil society is rooted in the founding violence of civil society, and as such, the roots that create conditions of legitimate death, destruction, and crisis within the Black community, is essential to, rather than incidental to civil society as we know it.246 Though Wilderson denies this extension, if we seriously consider the situation of white supremacy and its relation to other racialized communities as well as the partial integration of Black people into the system of civil society, we may also see the way other racialized populations, through the founding violence of European colonialism, have been made fundamentally antagonistic to civil society, principally through the category of Indigeneity (a la chants like “No Justice on Stolen Land”). But it is not my goal here to lay out this whole extension of antagonism to civil society. It suffices to say that civil society and peaceful negotiation at the level of common sense and ideology alone won’t be able to meet the desire for liberation found among those populations who have and continue to deal with the

245 Wilderson. “The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal.” 25.

246 Ibid. 23. See also Wilderson. “Gramsci’s Black Marx.”

117 consequences of European colonialism as it has evolved into globalized state capitalism and white supremacy.

Thus, as Fanon argues, “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.”247 To produce this disorder and de-situate civil society, to embrace as valuable those whose deaths are produced, exploited, and necessitated by civil society, is then, to work against the powers which mark differentials of value endemic to civil society. In Lisa Marie Cacho’s terms this means working to be able to embrace people in their fundamental illegibility, to embrace them as disorderly and thus fundamentally unassimilable into the system of civil society.248 This is to turn toward, rather than away from, the fundamental disorder of the antagonism between the colonized and the colonizer; it is to embrace that antagonism. As Fanon continues, while decolonization is an agenda for total disorder,

it cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman’s agreement. Decolonization, we know, is an historical process: In other words, it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance.249 In Fanon, the form and substance of this decolonization is found primarily within violence, but if we take Keeling’s nuanced understanding of other forms of resistance which enabled and facilitated survival, we may be able to expand this relation of decolonization and disorder.250

247 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. Reprint edition. New York: Grove Press, 2005. 2.

248 Cacho. “Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead.” 47-49.

249 Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. 2.

250 Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight. 70.

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The locus for this expansion may be found, then, in Browne and her conception of dark sousveillance, making use of the body as a site for a “perverse opacity,”251 through “black epistemologies of contending with antiblack surveillance, where the tools of social control . . . were appropriated, co-opted, repurposed, and challenged in order to facilitate survival and escape.”252 What our study has shown is that the technical apparatus of media can be mobilized for this purpose by playing off of the dirt, detritus, and excess of hegemonic systems of control.

Reynolds’s phone does exactly this through the potentiality that the police might be made visible as culpable for an unjustifiable form of violence. Working with police fear and anxiety, she can render herself and her daughter illegible as legitimate targets of death and violence. With this position of incoherence, historically contingent as it is, she is able to move toward a different system of value and the destruction of the hegemonic “conception and pattern of relations.”253

She does this through asserting her value and denying her place as “collateral damage,”254 a move which is precisely in line with the work that has historically been done to facilitate the survival of colonized people, and Black people in particular.

The caveat to this approach might be to point out the obvious, that these forms of historical resistance which are referenced by the term dark sousveillaince and justified by

Keeling are not really related to Fanon’s conception of a program of total disorder. That would be to make the distinction that an individualized act of resistance and the survival it may

251 Rhodes. “Panoptical Intimacies.” 27.

252 Browne. Dark Matters. 20-21.

253 Wynter. “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception” 67.

254 Crenshaw et al. “Say Her Name.” 22.

119 facilitate for an individual is different from the sort of revolutionary movement which fundamentally destroys the subject positions of both the colonized and colonizer. Fanon writes,

Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History. It infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power: The “thing” colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation. Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation. Its definition can, if we want to describe it accurately, be summed up in the well-known words: “The last shall be first.” Decolonization is verification of this.255 If decolonization becomes a program of disorder through its destruction of civil society as it is known, then what can be understood as part of this program except the work mobilized toward this end? As Fanon continues, “You do not disorganize a society, . . . with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered.”256

As with white supremacy, we could then say to this caveat that decolonization is most fundamental not in its spectacularity, but in its banality,

White supremacy is nothing more than what we perceive of it; there is nothing beyond it to give it legitimacy, nothing beneath it nor outside it to give it justification. The structure of its banality is the surface on which it operates. Whatever mythic content it pretends to claim is a priori empty. Its secret is that it has no depth. There is no dark corner that, once brought to the light of reason, will unravel its system. In each instance of repetition, ‘what is repeated is the emptiness of repetition’, an articulation that ‘does not speak and yet has always been said.’ In other words, its truth lies in the rituals that sustain its circuitous, contentless logic; it is, in fact, nothing but its very practices.257

255 Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. 2. It should be noted that Fanon uses man in the universal western modernist sense, a move we can disagree with without ignoring his essential point. A new subjectivity for the colonized is not possible except through the work which must be done to produce that different form of subjectivity.

256 Ibid. 3.

257 Martinot and Sexton. “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” 175.

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To “smash every obstacle encountered”258 is to enact, rather than only theorize, the change to the

“conception and pattern of relations.”259 It is through the repetition of this logic that decolonization as a mode of social and material relations could be realized, the same repetition which “cannot be attributed to a supernatural power: The “thing” colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation.”260

The truth then, is that though we may wish to hold back on claims to the revolutionary nature of individual acts performed in isolation, we should also take care to not underestimate the real quality of what was enacted by Reynolds on that day. In our zeal to defend “true” revolutionary action we should not get so caught up that we miss what Reynolds did and how we might read that action. The life she saved was her own and her daughter’s, a power she enacted through the power of her writing, a narrative potential even the police might fear.261 Whether this is a bluff or a temporary and limited form of resistance is beside the point considering our discussion of Fanon above; nowhere have we declared the production of decolonization as the sole domain of a single tactic, metric, or form except that it be a confirmation of itself. The confirmation of decolonization is its own production, simply, that every obstacle be smashed, that “The last shall be first.”262

Decolonization is then the answer to Dinah Washington’s call for a world that isn’t so bitter after all. Her dream of a world where her life is not like the dust on the rose, is exactly

258 Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. 2

259 Wynter. “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception” 67.

260 Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. 2. Emphasis mine.

261 Walker. “Saving the Life That Is Your Own.” 14.

262 Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. 2

121 what is enacted by Reynolds in her active resistance to the devaluation of her and her daughter’s lives, especially within the historical conditions which produce and exploit Black women’s deaths as their excess. And like Washington, we can have hope that this decolonizing impulse will be repeated and thus realized, that someone, an open subject position, may answer her/our call and with this, the world may not be so bitter after all. Our other answer may also be that this answer is not necessary to demonstrate or prove and to, again, refuse to simply let go of this individual move of resistance. Must a moment spark a traditionally understood revolutionary moment to be important? If we agree with Reynolds, Crenshaw et al, and the Combahee River

Collective that the lives of Black women are valuable, then our answer may have to be: the hard work of saving the life that is her own is itself important and beyond all our abstractions, it is the most cherished product the current social and material relations of communication might facilitate.

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