Beyond ‘Riot Porn’: Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Subjects

ABSTRACT

From the globalization protests of the previous decade to the more recent Occupy Movement, activists have embraced the use of digital video. Many appropriations of the technology, including those by human rights advocates, rest on the theory that ‘seeing is believing’ and understand video to be uniquely suited to forms of truth telling such as witnessing, documenting and reporting. While I encountered such realist uses of video during fieldwork with direct action movements in the former Yugoslavia, activists are also preoccupied with videos depicting the most physical confrontations with the police, videos they sometimes referred to as ‘riot porn’. They engage these videos for the sensory, affective and bodily experiences they facilitate. Indeed, activist practices around and claims for video indicate that they understand video as a technology of the self, using it to forge emotional relationships with activists elsewhere, steel themselves for physical confrontation and cultivate new political desires.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• activism
• subjectivity
• globalization
• video

Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this article was made possible by support from the International Research and Exchange Board, Colby College's Faculty Research Grants, and the Stockholm University's International Research Collaboration Fellowship. Earlier versions of this material were presented at colloquia at Cornell University; Ethnografeast, Leiden University; and Stockholm University. I benefited greatly from the comments of Diana Allan, Catherine Besteman, Barbara Beznec, Chandra Bhimull, Luhuna Carvalho, Benjamina Dolinšek Razsa, Ghassan Hage, Ulf Hannerz, Michael Hardt, Michael Herzfeld, Andrej Kurnik, Johan Lindquist, Gillian Mason, Mary Beth Mills, Jessica Mulligan, Ruby Rich, Mary Steedly and Lucien Taylor. I also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. Finally, students in my Media, Culture and the Political Imagination course at Colby College read and provided helpful feedback on early versions of this argument.

Notes

1. My initial understanding of activists' appropriation of video, informed by scholarship on transnational movements and new communications technologies (Escobar 1994; Lins Ribeiro 1998; Stubbs 1998; Cunningham 1999), did not account for the visceral character of the re-enactment. Video, in this literature, like listservs, websites, text messaging and email, seemed to allow activists in the former Yugoslavia to imagine that they were part of a simultaneous if transnational social movement, just as print capitalism, and especially the broadsheet, allowed ‘creole pioneers’ to imagine the first national communities (Anderson 1991).

2. My informants’ close echoing of Hardt and Negri's ideas created a significant ethnographic predicament in the form of a ‘double hermeneutic’ in which the theoretical ideas I use to make sense of this movement were, in fact, already inspiring some of the actions of my informants. Furthermore, because these activist-scholars were also translating Hardt and Negri's Empire (2001) at the time of the Noborder camp, and would subsequently translate Multitude (2005) and Commonwealth (2009), I was in the humbling position of consulting these informants not only to better understand their political practice, which one expects as an anthropologist, but also for their critical feedback on the appropriate application of these theoretical ideas in my analysis, including this article.

3. For a more formal use of this method see Cowan (1990: 137–8) and Herzfeld (2004: 92–3). Herzfeld developed a visual questionnaire, which he used to elicit the interpretation of recorded interactions from a wide range of people. In my own experience the editing process – I would often work with activists to edit material I shot – can be a time when many issues that are otherwise implicit are made explicit. Questions arise and are debated about how the movement should be represented, who should be included, what should be concealed from non-participants, what are the most important political messages to convey and how to imagine broader public reactions to these images.

4. Given this article's engagement with porn, at least metaphorically, and ethnographic film it seems necessary to acknowledge the parallelisms that film scholar Bill Nichols identified between the licit knowledge produced by classic ethnographic films and illicit knowledge produced by heterosexual pornography (1991b: 36–8). Ironically, given how I outline the effects of video practice on my own subjectivity as an ethnographer, Nichols posits that we overcome these problematic parallels not by reinforcing the objectivist scientism of ethnographic film but by exploring the body, ‘with its truth that exceeds all regimes of truth,’ and dispersing ‘experience and knowledge far beyond the binary, realist, canonic narratives of the classic ethnographer's tale’ (1991b: 37).

5. As important as this physical link to reality are the conventions of documentary realism, some of which serve to remind the viewer of indexicality and make her aware of the camera having ‘been there’ (Nichols 1991a). Such conventions elicit a particular orientation in viewers, prefiguring a specific, learned style of responding to realist documentary film. Such an understanding resonates with the critique of ethnographic realism within anthropology (Clifford & Marcus 1986), with the idea that ethnographic authority does not derive from transparent representational writing but it is produced through a set of literary devices that mark a text as belonging to a particular genre—ethnographic realism—and therefore encourage a particular kind of reading.

6. This was the case when hundreds were arrested demonstrating against the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004. The more recent Occupy Wall Street protests began to garner much broader media coverage when a protester videotaped a senior officer physically assaulting demonstrators. It came to light that this same officer was still facing civil suits for allegations of unlawful arrest in the 2004 protests.

7. This is especially clear in This is What Democracy Looks Like (2000). At the Boston premier, director Rick Rowley spoke of movement video surpassing the mainstream media because while CNN deployed two camera crews at the Seattle WTO demonstrations, Democracy was able to draw on the footage of over 120 video activists from throughout the protests. At this premiere, which was launched with presentations by activist groups such as the Direct Action Network, the potential for political mimesis was manifest. During the now infamous scenes of masked protesters destroying a Starbucks coffee shop – one of Seattle's signature corporations, alongside Microsoft and Boeing – members of the audience, at least half in jest, began to shout out the addresses of the five Starbucks in the environs of the Harvard Square cinema along with specific times for coordinated action.

8. It is important that viewers do not only naively identify with the camera, they also reflect on its relationship to the historical world and the subjects therein, making video footage always necessarily intrinsically reflexive, always a record not only of the historic world but of the actual social encounter between a cameraperson and that world that made the image we watch possible (MacDougall 2006).

9. This is quite different from the moving image production of say anticolonial period Third Cinema (Solanas & Getino 1976) or the Newsreel of the 1960s New Left, which required specialized 16mm film skills and great expense for production equipment, film processing and editing (Nichols 1980).

10. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for these observations about the stylistic similarities between riot porn and pornography ‘proper.’

11. Alternately, other activist critics of ‘riot porn’ have seen the genre as potentially masturbatory rather than action oriented. As one online description (Anonymous 2011) of riot porn asserted:

The most vital thing to recognize about pornography, of course, is that it is the opposite of sex. It exists to serve its own ends […] As with any porn, it's clear what is going to happen: you're going to sit down, watch it, and fantasize, trying to relate yourself to the far away action taking place on the screen. Just don't let your desires to live out those fantasies end when you turn your computer off. You can live your own dramas, making the adventure movies and political documentaries you once watched with such fascination and envy irrelevant to you except as points of reference for your own experiences … and further plans.

12. The critical discussion of riot porn did not include all the positions developed in the protracted scholarly and feminist debates surrounding pornography, such as sex-positive positions that recuperate pornography. The notion of porn remained one of opprobrium. Thus, we find Warcry (2006), a prominent activist commentator, making a feminist critique of riot porn as a concept that inappropriately conjoins porn, which is problematic, with riots, which are anything but:

Riots are not like porno because sexual pornography is the Capitalist commodification of human sexual desire. Sexuality like everything else under Capitalism is to be exploited and profited from. Most advertising pimps the female form everywhere you look. It would make sense that porno is an extension of that trend. It's also true that most porno is made by men for men, and have (sic) a predictable and dominating view of women. Porno is a fitting representation of the intersection between Capitalism and Patriarchy. Porno may be so popular because it is a sexual outlet in the repressed and alienating modern civilization where technology ‘satisfies our desires.’ Riots on the other hand are the liberation of desire, and not a Capitalist product.

13. In this sense they are involved in producing dissent, not only as it is usually grasped, as alternative political thought set apart from the mainstream, but instead with an emphasis on the affective etymology of the French verb ’sentire’, to feel, with its strong sense of embodiment (Thompson 2010: 3).

14. Subsequent organizing in the region, especially with migrants, organizing which can be traced to the Noborder activism of the early 2000s, only extended this tendency, becoming increasingly self-conscious about such encounters as ways to ‘become-other-than-one-now-is’ (Razsa & Kurnik 2012).

15. By organizing transformative encounters with others – seen more recently in the mimetic practice of the ‘human mic’ of Occupy protests, in which participants collectively repeat the words of others – activists would seem to be the practical embodiment of what Hardt and Negri describe as properly political love (2009: 179–88). ‘What counts as love’, they write, ‘is the production of subjectivity and the encounter of singularities, which compose new assemblages and constitute new forms of the common’ (Hardt & Negri 2009: 186).