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Abstract
This article seeks to critically examine the practical application of live streaming video at use in contemporary resistance movements, particularly the work of CUTV during the Quebec Student Strike of 2012. With a brief comparison to the use of social media—and even live streaming—in the Occupy movement, this article demonstrates the differences, and sophistication, of live streaming video in the Quebec Spring. Specifically, this article seeks to understand the ways in which political actors and digital technologies form unique assemblages (in the Deleuzian sense), which can both operate as mechanisms of power as surveillance technologies for police forces or, if used carefully and critically, can open up nodes of counter-power, disrupting state surveillance, surveilling the police themselves, and providing the space for the construction of subjectivity on the part of political actors in the streets.
Notes
[1] In fact, the assemblies that became emblematic of the varied struggles since 2011 are themselves assemblages that merge the human and machinic.
[2] The Arab Spring beginning with the Tunisian Revolution that soon spread to Egypt, with reverberations across the Arab world; the European Summer as emblemized by the Indignados movement in Spain beginning on 15 May 2011; and the American Autumn signifying the Occupy movement which began in September of 2011 in lower Manhattan, New York City, and by October has spread across the continent, through the US and Canada, and to the UK and Australia as well as other sites across the globe.
[3] Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Net, Square, Everywhere?” Radical Philosophy issue 171 (January/February 2012).
[4] In fact Rodrigo Nunes argues that the occupation and not the assembly was the key organisational form of the cascading struggles. Rodrigo Nunes, “The Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Organisation,” Mute Magazine, 7 June 2012, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/lessons-2011-three-theses-organisation (accessed 15 May 2013).
[5] For more on how social media served as a complement to the face-to-face interactions see Paul Mason, Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London: Verso Books, 2012).
[6] CLASSE is the Coalition Large de l'Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (Large Coalition of the Association for Student Union Solidarity). CLASSE grew out of l'ASSE, a militant student union representing several departments, faculties, and universities across Quebec. The Coalition brought together students represented by l'ASSE as well as those represented by competing student unions who wanted to create a coalition for the period of the strike. CLASSE operated in a directly democratic manner, making all strategic and tactical decisions through general assemblies held regularly throughout the province of Quebec. For more information on CLASSE, l'ASSE and the history of student struggles see Elise Thorburn, “Squarely in the Red: Dispatches from the 2012 Quebec Student Strike” Upping the Anti, issue 14 (2012).
[7] Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec and Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec.
[8] CEGEPs (College d'enseignement general et professional) or Professional and Vocational Colleges are post-secondary institutions in the province of Quebec that operate midway between highschool and university. Any Quebec student intending to enroll in university must first attend CEGEP. CEGEPs are funded by the province, and are thus free for students to attend. They also tend to be the most militant of the campuses and the site of much of the radical organizing that lead up to and maintained the 2012 strike.
[9] I do not use the term speed-walking lightly. In contrast to almost every other major rally and march I have ever been to, the night marches did not meander nor mosey. They were not mellow perambulations, but rather they moved briskly through the fresh night air, ascending hills with barely a pause, rapidly bisecting the city, moving from the downtown core to the closer boroughs and neighbourhoods barely losing numbers. At times this was just a predeliction of the nightly demonstrations, but at times it was of necessity. As the night demos carried on and as various laws were passed to outlaw spontaneous marches, riot police attacked demonstrators, forcing marchers to be fleet on their feet, to run and spring, and to walk quickly wherever and whenever the march went.
[10] Bill 78 was initially proposed and then passed on 18 May 2012 by the Quebec provincial government—the National Assembly of Quebec. It restricted any protests or pickets on or near university grounds—specifically, but not limited to, those that would prohibit students from being able to enter the university to attend classes. It also, and more contentiously, made illegal any gathering of more than 50 people in the province of Quebec unless the dates, times, starting points, and route of any marches as well as the duration of time at a set venue and means of transportation to be used by participants were all made available, in writing, to the Quebec police for their approval 24 hours prior to the gathering. The approval of any demonstration or gathering, then, was up to the discretion of the police. The City of Montreal passed a similar provision, Bylaw P-6. At no point, during the strike, did demonstrators, organisers, students, or student union leaders acquiesce to this law.
[11] Streaming media is visual and audio data sent through an encoder to digitise the content, transmitted through a content delivery network (the distributed systems of servers encompassing multiple data centres of the Internet), and uploaded to a media publisher or platform such as livestream.com. Technically speaking, live streaming refers to the “synchronised distribution of streaming media content to one or more clients.” Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Helen J. Wang, Philip A. Chou, and Kunwadee Sripanidkulchai. (2002) “Distributed Streaming Media Content Using Cooperative Networking” proceedings of 12th Interational Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV), 12–14 May. Miami, FL, USA (New York: ACM), 177–186 (©2002), http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=507670.507695 (accessed 12 September 2012).
[12] The transmission system takes video images, disassembles them, bonds them, and sends them over cellular networks to the Livestream platform where they are reassembled and uploaded. The backpack also contains its own modem and router, making it a mobile wi-fi hotspot, allowing again for constant connectivity but also permitting other mobile devices to connect to the Internet through the hotspot. The transmission system also simultaneously analyses conditions in the field and recommends the most suitable video settings for the prevailing conditions. Further information about the LiveU LU60 backpack can be found through the LiveU website at http://www.liveu.tv.
[13] In the spring and summer of 2012, I participated in the Quebec student movement, volunteering some of my time with CUTV's live stream team, walking the streets of Montreal as part of a human-machinic assemblage, a backpack filled with a wireless uplink system transmitting full HD video strapped to my back, and a thick black firewire connecting myself to a camera operator. This assemblage at times resembled an octopus with disconnecting-reconnecting tentacles, and at other times a cybernetic organism with human bodies and machinic addendum.
[14] For example, the live streaming of the Tahrir Square occupation was shot from a high angle, from a camera several hundred feet away and in the air. The same is true of the Greek riots, and the anniversary of the occupation in Egypt in 2012. CUTV, by contrast, placed itself in the very centre of the demonstrations.
[15] This image of demonstrators as spoiled children engaged in wanton property destruction was especially prevalent in mainstream English-langauge media in the rest of Canada. But, while the coverage and analysis was better in French, students were rarely able to see complex, well-rounded descriptions and debates about their struggle.
[16] The idea of social media as an organisational force was critiqued by Malcolm Gladwell in a 2012 New Yorker article. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” The New Yorker, 4 October 2010. For a rebuttal based in social movements, see Nunes, 2012.
[17] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 357.
[18] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 406.
[19] Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 23.
[20] Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 90.
[21] Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 531fn.
[22] William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33.
[23] Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology 51, issue 4 (December 2000): 609.
[24] Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 397.
[25] Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 397. In this Deleuze and Guattari define work in the capitalist sense, as Marx described wage-labour, as the assemblage of the tool, and Marx's “work” as in human activity not subsumed by capital as the free activity assemblage of the weapon.
[26] Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 397–8.
[27] Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig DePeuter, Games of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 70.
[28] Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 353.
[29] Elise Thorburn, “Counter-Hegemonic Surveillance Assemblages: Live Streaming Critiques of Capital and the State in the Quebec Spring” in Christian Fuchs and Daniel Trottier, eds. Social Media, Politics, and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime, and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (New York: Routledge, 2014).
[30] Delueze, Gilles, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 4.
[31] Delueze, Gilles, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 7.