[-empyre-] 'On Racial Violence, Love and Information, Brexit and Dramaturgy of Data’ - Rebecca Prichard

[Rebecca Prichard]

 'On Racial Violence, Love and Information, Brexit and Dramaturgy of Data’ - Rebecca Prichard

Katherine Behar’s brilliant provocations about the circulation of images of police killings in the U.S remind me of Saidiya Hartman’s reflections in ’Scenes of Subjection’ when Hartman writes “I have chosen not to reproduce [Douglass’s] account of the beating… in order to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated and the consequences of this routine display of the slave’s ravaged body. Rather than inciting indignation too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity…they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering’ Behar’s comments brought this quote to mind, especially in relation to Haraway’s ideas about situated knowledges and  the  ‘God Trick’ (the disembodied view from nowhere) discussed earlier via this list.  Behar’s comments ask questions about the violence of our scopic (colonising) culture and the ways scopic violence is reinforced by the medium of the internet, multiplying ‘the spectacular character of black suffering’ by an infinite order of magnitude. How can artist’s address this? I’m coming at this as a theatre practitioner….

In some ways,  thinking about Caryl Churchill's 'Love and Information’ is useful, since it is a play which explores the social role of data in the 'Information Age', or more broadly put, how human relationships and our relationship to the world are constituted/qualified/quantified by the circulation of data in the ‘anthropocene'. The play's scope is as voraciously wide as this would suggest. One of the most vivid images of violence in the play is of a chick whose head is snipped off by a scientist after s/he has measured the neurological effect of the chick's cognisance of a particular event. The structure of the play (a series of apparently random brief exchanges, each involving a dynamic around the reduction of living systems to information) suggests that these processes of reduction and their violence is culturally prevalent, even a cultural necessity. In Churchill's play the urge to kill in order to measure drives a much broader cultural obsession with secrets and with exposure - the act of knowing is part of the act of consuming, which in turn is the only mode of relating; human relationships are constituted as data at the same time that data drives the constitution of human relationships. The very brevity of Churchill's scenes and the structure of the play also describes the way that 'instruments of data' are shaping our cognition in society; there's a kind of cultural ADHD implicit in the plays brevity and scope as well as an invisible wreckage which floats just under the surface of the play's 'Flash 'n' Dash' dramatic focus,  resonating in my mind with Katherine Behar’s unease with the circulation of film of police killings. 

These themes perhaps also speak to the current crisis in Britain. There could be no better way to characterise the appalling dramaturgy of the Brexit 'vote' than Flash 'n' Dash. Witnessing the aftermath of Brexit the racism (and wilful self-destruction??) unleashed by a (supposedly) democratic process reminds me there is no neutral way to collect or perform data. The action itself expresses, generates and disseminates 'values', and emotions - holding certain people, things, beings or entities to account (yet not others). Witnessing the shameful violence unleashed by this process is painful, as is understanding the way such an experiment - offering people a binary choice as a language for their despair in the face of complex dynamics of globalisation and fragile agency - will now distort the future of the United Kingdom and its history indefinitely. ? Where are the votes of those whose lives may be touched for generations by the racism unleashed by Brexit, or more specifically, the racism unleashed by the cynical, short term opportunism of politicians. Where are the votes of the yet-to-be born, who will be most effected by this decision? What are the temporalities of violence at stake here? 

I think the notion of temporalities of violence can be useful in considering Katherine Behar’s observations about data collapse and the circulation of violence in raw data; if posting raw footage of police shootings  BOTH creates visibility AND satisfies a prurient, voyeuristic and consumerist hunger for violence and sacrifice (and therefore is useful in the way it creates visibility - counterproductive in the way it supports systemic violence) how can we assess what data generates and whether it (de)serves us? Perhaps the decision is made each time a police officer walks free in spite of the existence of raw data of police killings. (One resistance strategy to this can be found in the Guardian’s ‘Counted’ grassroots data collection on numbers of citizens killed and injured by police fire) But perhaps the concept of temporalities of violence is useful because as artists we can revisit and re-digest and shape the cognition and affect of a society. Data does not have to operate only in a  ‘viral’ way, like a disease,  as artists we can transform the disease of data into some kind of inoculation, set in motion counter-circulations. counter-images, alternative modes of ‘consuming’ data which slow the process of consumption, introducing different temporalities of circulation, cognition etc.

Agency, visibility and performativity within big data reminds me of the work of Evelyn Wan. I have just been to the Performance Studies international conference at Melbourne University where I saw Evelyn talk (as part of a panel about Data and Posthuman sexualities). Her paper was entitled 'Performing tracking: Counting Quantified Selves and Uncounted bodies in Data Environments' and discussed the material effects of technology and its disproportionate distribution among populations. She looked at the proliferation of 'health apps' (like Fitbit) and the collection of complex personal data through such apps -(the traces of ourselves left on the Internet) - and the (as yet unknown) applications of this data beyond the field of personal health (such as health insurance, surveillance etc) and she also spoke about the different temporalities of violence in relation to these data environments - the 'fast, faster Faster' timeframe of digital exchange, the violence in micro-measurements of time at the factories where these devices are produced and the slow violence of accumulated waste and toxins, a byproduct of the manufacture of smartphones - the over counted bodies of people using health apps and the under counted bodies of workers in developing countries and the health risks of working in apple/Samsung factories (the incidence of cancer among Chinese workers at Apple factories for instance

It could  be helpful to reference the work of John Edmonds here. John Edmonds is a photographer and writer who explores the construction of black identity in our visual culture. In a series of works related to his photograph  ‘All Eyes On Me’ Edmonds photographs a stack of images of a young black man in a ski mask;  his face caught between ‘projecting fear and invoking it. The extension of the stripes on his tracksuit, created by the stacking of multiple images in a pile, invokes a military uniform, suggesting a kind of scopic cultural warfare fought through proliferation, repetition and  the circulation of ‘black masks'.  Frustratingly, I can’t now also find Edmonds’ work entitled ‘Jordan raising his hand’ anywhere online, at least not in the form in which I originally encountered it. I hope it’s ok to cite this work in this context, as Edmonds once posted a link to it. It was a kind of ‘online installation’ and in this installation, when the viewer clicked on an image of ‘Jordan’ (a young black man, raising his hand) a series of photographs appeared, documenting the actions leading up to the raising of the hand, each image brought 'Jordan’ into being as the ‘owner' of diverse and conflicting identities. At one moment Jordan appeared to be reaching for a phone, at another a gun, or yet another for some identification, or an offering of one half of the ‘hands up don’t shoot’ gesture of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally Jordan simply hails us while averting his eyes, bringing the viewer to a reflexive awareness of the prejudices embedded in their own perceptions.  I may not be doing justice to the subtlety of Edmonds work here but I find it helpful to re-cite this image in this context because it looks at ways in which artists can resist, counter and riff off the scopic wars and viral nature of communication on the internet and perhaps responds to some of the important questions Katherine Behar raises here? 

Discussing some of this with my partner, Molly McPhee, this morning led me to think in more detail about how Churchill and Edmonds disturb ideas about representation. As Molly pointed out, Caryl Churchill neither prescribes the social identities of her cast of characters nor schematically identifies 'who' is speaking at any point in her play - we are left to distinguish the singular voice from the collective ourselves (and to visualise/materialise it). When the play is staged choices concerning the gender, ability, ethnicity and age of the characters are forced - we act almost as Althusser's policeman; the seemingly uninflected act of the playwright refusing to privilege one voice over another begins, in production, to enact the more sinister dimensions of census-taking (all this of course throwing into relief issues of representation which occur every time a play is cast). What is asking for embodiment? Molly thought that taking a cue from Churchill, feminist dramaturgy of data might insist that the macguffin of neutrality be once again dismantled; to dramatise the intersubjective, infradata…  Edmonds work also demands intersubjectivity, the re-embodiment of the viewer and their positionally, reflexively reinserting the ‘agency’ of the viewer into apparently ‘raw’ ‘unmediated’ texts, acknowledging co-creation and forcing the view from somewhere?