In/visibility, blackness and images of racial violence in the contemporary usContent and trigger warnings: Discussions of anti-Black violence, police and prison brutality, misogynoir and lynchings.
Whilst this essay explores images, videos and spectacles of anti-Black violence, I will not be showing any of these images, nor including links to view them. All triggering material will be contained within my writing.
Endless images of anti-Black violence are circulated through social media in our present. Widespread usage of phones and social media sites means that brutality, suffering and pain are made visible to anyone with technological access. Videos and photographs extend across time, not merely as documents of the past. Violence recycles an event between the past, present and future via its visibility, further producing and reproducing affective reactions and violent ideologies. Yet, anti-Black violence is still perceived as invisible, unseen, also continuing in a temporal cycle. In this essay, I will discuss this faultline of visibility surrounding images of spectacular racist violence in the US, analysing the ways in which anti-Black violence is perpetuated through its tangible relationship to visibility and invisibility. I examine the murders of George Floyd and Sandra Bland through their visuality and recorded videos, and the non-visible suffering of Black people who are incarcerated in prisons. Anti-Black violence falters with respect to vision, as spectacles of violence occur alongside its obscuring, functioning through its hypervisibilisation and invisibilisation. I particularly draw upon Black feminist scholars, especially Simone Browne, for writings on surveillance, prisons and visibility. Consequently, I identify the faultline of visibility in spectacular racialized violence in order to argue that race is formed through its relationship to vision and the digital in the contemporary US.
Firstly, I want to define the term ‘spectacular violence’. When considering the term ‘spectacle’, Guy Debord’s assertion that the ‘spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification’ comes to mind.[1] Most notably, Debord’s statement that the spectacle is not ‘a collection of images’ but ‘a social relationship between people that is mediated by images’ highlights what I mean by spectacle, and spectacular violence in this essay.[2] This ‘social relationship…mediated by images’ is key when discussing spectacles of racial violence that become the way in which violent racism is seared into the minds and social fabric of contemporary society in the US. When the society of spectacle comes into contact with violence, surely it is images that negotiate understandings of racial violence. Whilst Michel Foucault in his work, Discipline and Punish, suggests that the contemporary marks a ‘disappearance of torture as a public spectacle’ by the state, lynchings seem an outlier to this as vigilante justice that produces Black bodies as public spectacles of violence and torture.[3] Lynchings occurring within the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries create foundations for the spectacular racial violence I discuss within contemporary US society. As Jacqueline Denise Goldsby states in her analysis of lynching photographs: ‘photography transformed [lynching] into a spectacle that would prove impossible either to ignore or to see’.[4] Although lynching is by no means the first example of spectacular racial violence in the US, I identify the circulation of lynching photographs as the systemisation of camera-images depicting racial violence within a visual economy. For as Goldsby notes: ‘[lynching] images also inscribe how practices of racial violence were used to cultivate the experience and meaning of sight itself’.[5] Taking lynching photographs as foundational to the economy of images depicting racial violence, I define spectacular violence in this essay via the production, circulation and systemisation of images. I discuss prisons and policing through their visibility (or non-visibility), which have their roots in the plantation, slave ships, slave catchers, specifically examining images of police brutality that I consider modern-day lynchings. As a result, I use the term spectacular violence to explore the visual economy of racism negotiated through the ‘afterlives of slavery’.[6]
Before I explore visibility and racial violence however, I also touch upon the camera, specifically phone cameras due to their contemporary usage in capturing police brutality. Much writing has considered the camera as dispositif (apparatus) through Giorgio Agamben’s extension on Foucault’s dispositif.[7] Christian Quendler considers the ‘the relationship between dispositif and subjectivity by examining how figures of the camera eye align with regimes of visibility with discursive regimes’, implicating this relationship of the camera ‘eye’ as dispositif to political and visual discourse.[8] Camera as dispositif is further emphasised by Debord’s ‘society of spectacle’. Dana B. Polan, in her analysis of spectacle and images, states: ‘The world of spectacle is a world without background, a world in which things only exist or mean in the way they appear.’[9] Within a ‘world of spectacles’, the image is reified by the exclusion of everything outside the image. She suggests:
[the image] frames a world and banishes into non-existence everything beyond that frame. The will-to-spectacle is the assertion that a world of foreground is the only world that matters or is the only world that is.[10]
As the image can ‘banish…everything beyond that frame’, the image determines the discursive potential of all that is contained within and without. However, whilst Polan recognises that ‘seeing is not merely a capturing of the world, an imprinting of meaning within an image’,[11] she obscures the role of the camera itself in this production of meaning. Furthermore, the phone camera as dispositif considers the discursive potential in public filming of racial violence. With over five billion mobile phone users, the recording potential of the public is enormous.[12] Access to a personal camera has never been as extensive, thus elucidating the potential for resistance to racist surveillance and violence.[13] By highlighting the role of the phone camera as dispositif, I present how the reified image and camera apparatus can never be seen as simply documentary, but producing specific meanings and exclusions to the racial violence they depict.
The murder of George Floyd by police in 2020 became a global phenomenon as a result of its hypervisibility. The video taken by teenager, Darnella Frazier, lasting eight minutes and forty-two seconds, depicts the restraining of Floyd and subsequent murder by Derek Chauvin, and three other police officers. Floyd’s distress, crying for his mother, and four police officers attacking and killing a man by kneeling on his neck creates a horrifying and affective image for all viewers who saw it via social media. Elaine Scarry discusses pain as ‘that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed’, as the language of pain becomes emotionally untranslatable.[14] While spoken language struggles to translate the pain of a person, perhaps the image of one’s pain can “speak” in a more visceral way. The framing in the video of the murder of a Black man, taken by a Black teenager, indicates a necessity to show the world contemporary racist violence by making viewers aware of Floyd’s suffering and pain. Simone Browne coins the term, ‘dark sousveillance’ as a method that Black people may use to resist racial hegemonies:
Dark sousveillance is a site of critique, as it speaks to black epistemologies of contending with antiblack surveillance, where the tools of social control in plantation surveillance or lantern laws in city spaces and beyond were appropriated, co-opted, repurposed, and challenged in order to facilitate survival and escape.[15]
By repurposing anti-Black modes of surveillance, turning the phone camera onto police officers, Frazier undertakes a form of ‘dark sousveillance’ in order to bring to light the racist institute of policing in the US.
However, this need to make other people aware of police brutality suggests that there are people who are not privy to this knowledge. Frazier states her knowledge of police brutality as a common phenomenon: ‘Stuff like this happens in silence too many times’.[16] Police brutality and murders of Black people in the US and beyond is hardly a new phenomenon. Thus, the idea that the video of George Floyd’s murder is a “new” insight into racial violence is wilfully ignorant. In Dark Matters, Browne uses the titular term to think about race as the ‘invisible substance’ in modernity.[17] However as she emphasises, the term raises questions of visibility: ‘...invisible to whom? If it is often invisible, then how is it sensed, experienced, and lived? Is it really invisible, or is it rather unseen and unperceived by many?’[18] If Frazier’s video makes visible the murder of Floyd and synecdochally police brutality in the US, who was it previously invisible to? It is the framing, focus and aperture of whiteness to perceive spectacular racist violence as hidden from one’s view. The video of Chauvin and other officers murdering Floyd became vital evidence in the murder charges against Chauvin, leading to him being found guilty. However, as the vast number of Black people who have been murdered by police and never received justice shows, the hypervisibilisation of racist violence seems the only way to make white society pay attention to this racial hegemony. Videographic proof is positioned as the only way to make white society notice the violence that Black communities have no way of not seeing.
Furthermore, the video of Floyd’s murder is not the first of its kind. Images of police brutality towards Black people circulate continuously through social media. Wendy Sung asks: ‘If visual evidence is all that is required to make racial violence knowable, then why do images of anti-Black violence exist in such seemingly endless repetition?’[19] Sung problematizes the ‘utopian hopes of the technologically visible and a specific strand of techno-utopianism’ for the belief that popular use of cameras and social media will hold racist institutions responsible for violence.[20] If making racist violence visible via technological developments was enough to carry out the work of anti-racism and police abolition, anti-Black violence would not be the hegemony that it still is. Susan Sontag discusses the oversaturation of war photography, suggesting that
An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are by definition images of which, sooner or later, one tires.[21]
Sontag argues that the hypervisibility and frequent circulation of images depicting atrocities does not spur people into action, but rather desensitises the public into inertia. Similarly, Sung considers the techno-utopianism in making anti-Black violence visible as ‘anchored in logics of visibility and knowability that simultaneously obscure’.[22] Thus, the hypervisibility of racist violence does not necessarily animate us into action; instead it produces discourse about technologies of anti-racism that occlude the work of police abolition. Hypervisibility of racist violence is a double-edged sword that too often overemphasises the political power of spectacular violence.
Yet, when racialised violence is obscured via the prison system, this invisibilisation also produces further structural violences.[23] In Discipline and Punish, Foucault suggests:
The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. [...] From being an art of unbearable sensations, punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.[24]
Foucault considers the turn from punishment as public spectacle to ‘an economy of suspended rights’ that acts upon the body in non-corporeal ways. As a result, prisons function as a method of normalisation and correction. He suggests that sentencing people to incarceration ‘bears within it the body of the condemned an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization’.[25] This marks the origins of Foucault’s later work on biopolitics that he describes in The History of Sexuality.[26] The bodies of the incarcerated are allocated as non-normative; thus, state ideology depends on controlling and disciplining these non-normative bodies, separating them from the population. In the US, Black people are disproportionately represented within prisons, with the incarceration rate over five times that of white people.[27] Simultaneously, US prisons make up over 25% of the world’s incarcerated population despite the US only comprising 5% of the global population. Combining these high rates of incarceration with the so-called ‘prison industrial complex’,[28] prisons have become locations of neo-slave labour.[29] Returning to Foucault’s theorisation of biopolitics, he argues that ‘biopower’ was ‘indispensable to the development of capitalism’ and impossible ‘without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’.[30] Within biopolitics, people perceived as criminals are incarcerated due to their non-normativity, and utilised for their labour value that capitalistic economic processes depend on. Therefore, as Black people are disproportionately represented in incarcerated populations, biopolitical processes ensure that the US economy profits from the abjectification of Black bodies, where contemporary prisons become a reassertion of the plantation.
Additionally, prisons conceal their racial-capitalistic violences through an extreme lack of visibility. Whilst Jeremy Bentham’s ideal of the ‘Panopticon’ prison in the eighteenth century was supposed to turn outside surveillance onto the prison guards in the central tower via its semi-circular shape, the contemporary prison contains none of that public oversight.[31] Prisons are typically situated outside of population hubs, with looming outward appearances, making the location of the prison infrastructurally separated from the normative population. Imprisonment follows ideologies of the biopolitical, where incarcerated people are deemed biologically dangerous, thus prisons are specifically designed to isolate them from external society. David Schrag argues that the structural design of prisons such as razor-wire fences and gun-towers ‘serves a rhetorical purpose—producing a public image of a dangerous ‘other,’ a ghostly presence who necessitates such extreme security measures’.[32] The extremity of prison security architecture not only isolates those within; it also functions to produce an image in the public imagination of incarcerated people. In lieu of actual visibility into prisons–which also would not necessarily solve the violence of incarceration–the rest of the population forms a social image of incarcerated people as dangerous and non-normative, consolidating the state’s biopolitical categorisation. Via the spectacle of security architecture and the obscuring of prisoners’ humanisation, incarcerated Black people are hypervisible in the psyche as dangerous others, yet the racialised and economic violences they are vulnerable to are made invisible. This faultline of visibility furthers the project of racial violence, making Black people into objects of fear and abjectification.
This faultline of visibility and invisibility within anti-Black violence is most clear in the brutality enacted upon Sandra Bland. In 2015, video footage from police dashcams and a bystander circulated widely of Bland being arrested and attacked by police after a minor traffic infraction. In the video, she thanks the bystander for filming, believing that this videographic proof of police brutality would protect her.[33] Yet, three days later Bland was found dead in an unmonitored jail cell, which police claimed was a result of suicide. The suspiciousness of the circumstances around Bland’s death provoked a murder investigation, but no one was ever charged. Sung asserts that the ‘the hypervisibility of [Bland’s] arrest and her belief in the testimonial value of the recording of her arrest contrast with the obfuscation, hiddenness, and unknowability of her death’.[34] Whilst Bland’s arrest was made hypervisible through social media and news outlets’ circulation of video footage, the complete lack of images surrounding the circumstances of her death stands out via the differences in visibility.
Whilst there is a lack of CCTV footage of Bland’s three days in jail, Browne’s work on anti-Black surveillance is of great importance. Browne writes that ‘racializing surveillance is a technology of social control’ that ‘most often upholds negating strategies that first accompanied European colonial expansion and transatlantic slavery that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness’.[35] Although there is no existing footage of Bland’s death, this is itself a technology of racializing surveillance. It is highly spurious that the three days that Bland spent in a cell produced absolutely no video footage. Rather, it is the intersecting oppressions of gender and race that facilitated Bland’s visual disappearance. Under transatlantic slavery, Black women were frequently erased in archival documentation, as Saidiya Hartman interrogates in her writing.[36] Thus, it is not a failing of racializing surveillance that Bland’s death remains invisible but is in fact by design. Surveillance that privileges whiteness allowed the institution of the police and jail to obscure the image of Sandra Bland from the external public, protecting these racist entities from legal consequences. Sung calls Bland’s death a ‘glitchified death–a death subjected to redaction and to deliberate glitches, and regulated to a space of nonappearance’.[37] By indicating digital manipulation and redaction via the word ‘glitch’, Sung emphasises the role and space of technology to the invisibility of Bland’s death. In the introduction to Race After the Internet, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White suggest that ‘the digital is altering our understandings of what race is as well as nurturing new types of inequality along racial lines’.[38] Bland’s ‘glitchified death’ is an example of the digital ‘nurturing new types of inequality’ as edited video footage contradicts the ‘techno-utopianism’ of technology aiding anti-racist movements. If images of racialized violence can be altered through their relationship to the digital, visibility cannot fulfil any promise to document and resist spectacles of violence.
Surveillance, glitches, phone cameras, CCTV, body cameras: contemporary racialized violence is made visible and invisible through connections to technology. Yet, as both visibility and invisibility do not prevent racial violence, perhaps it is vision itself and its digital technologies of viewing that uphold the hegemony of race. Nicole R. Fleetwood discusses in her book, Troubling Vision, that ‘the field of vision is a formation that renders racial marking’ and further highlights the Austinian performativity of ‘the visual sphere…where seeing race is not a transparent act; it is itself a “doing.”’[39] If seeing race is indeed the “doing” or “making” of race, then the implication is that seeing images of racialized violence “does” the work of racialisation. Yet, it is not just the seeing-eye that produces racialisation. As I mentioned earlier, the phone camera is a dispositif that orients the social meanings it produces. Consequently, the digital framing in phones when taking and circulating images is ever-present in the racialised violence they depict. Nakamura and Chow-White emphasise this: ‘The visual turn and the technological turn are converging as images migrate and proliferate as well onto digital platforms’.[40] Furthermore, they propose: ‘Race has itself become a digital medium, a distinctive set of informatic codes, networked mediated narratives, maps, images, and visualizations that index identity’.[41] Race as codification precedes the digital; indeed it is the very origins of race itself. Phrenology, the one-drop rule and fears around miscegenation arise from codes of what constitutes Blackness under slavery. Images of racial violence further index Black identity through their visuality and mass circulation. Race is organised through the digital technologies that capture it; thus, race is simultaneously produced through its digital ontology. Browne writes:
Racializing surveillance is not static or only applied to particular human groupings, but it does rely on certain techniques in order to reify boundaries along racial lines, and, in so doing, it reifies race.[42]
Racializing surveillance ‘reifies’ race through its digital techniques. Consequently, the technologies used to surveil racialized violence reify these images of violence, creating a method of objectifying and reinforcing negative stereotypes of Blackness. This includes surveillance that disappears, is manipulated or not made public. Visibility, non-visibility: both modes of seeing produce race via spectacular anti-Black violence.
By exploring the faultline of visibility and invisibility of racialized violence within the policing and prison systems, I assert how vision formulates understandings and codes of race. Seeing and not-seeing anti-Black violence is purposeful, yet both can simultaneously perpetuate the hegemony of race and its subjugation. Techno-utopianism argues for transparency and making instances of anti-Black violence hypervisible, in order to pursue justice. Yet, as the scores of police officers, prison guards, immigration detention officers and other state officials who escape punishment for abuse show, simply making violence transparent and visible does not mean that justice is achieved. I do not however propose turning a blind eye to racialized violence. Instead, I turn to Édouard Glissant’s writing on opacity.[43] Glissant rejects ‘transparency’ in understanding other people, suggesting that this has historically followed a Western model of racial superiority and othering.[44] Instead, he argues for people to maintain ‘opacity’, and unknowability. He reiterates:
The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence.[45]
Glissant’s advocation for the opaque is not the same as calling for obscurity, which produced the death of Sandra Bland. Instead, opacity dictates that differences such as race are given value without decoding, which allows for people to exist, undetermined by subjugating vision that privileges whiteness. Glissant notes:
To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) nor to "make" him in my image.[46]
Solidarity and anti-racist movements do not need to rely on images of anti-Black violence to translate suffering and pain for those who are ignorant of police and prison brutality. In contrast, it is in honouring the opacities of every person that we can build communities and resistance to racialized violence.
[1] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1994) p.12.
[2] Debord, p.12.
[3] Michel Foucault, ‘The body of the condemned’, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan, (New York: Random House, 1995) p.7.
[4] Jacqueline Denise Goldsby, ‘Through a Different Lens: Lynching Photography at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) p.229.
[5] Goldsby, p.238.
[6] Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021; 2007) p.6.
[7] I follow Agamben’s assertion: ‘Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian dispositives, I shall call an dispositive literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings.’ from Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (trans.)
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p.17.
[8] Christian Quendler, ‘Rethinking the camera eye: dispositif and subjectivity’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, (2011) 9.4, 395-414, p.396, <DOI:10.1080/17400309.2011.606530>.
[9] Dana B., Polan, ‘“Above All Else to Make You See”: Cinema and the Ideology of Spectacle’, Boundary 2, 11.1/2 (1982): 129–44, p.135, <https://doi.org/10.2307/303021>.
[10] Polan, p.135.
[11] Polan, p.134.
[12] Trebor Scholz, ed. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, (New York: Routledge, 2012).
[13] Simone Browne uses the term ‘dark sousveillance’, extending Steve Mann’s definition of ‘sousveillance’ as ‘acts of “observing and recording by an entity not in a position of power or authority over the subject of the veillance,” often done through the use of handheld or wearable cameras’, in Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) pp.18-9.
[14] Elaine Scarry, The body in pain; the making and unmaking of the world, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) p.4.
[15] Browne, p.21.
[16] Paul Walsh, ‘Minneapolis Teen Receives Prestigious Award for Recording George Floyd Video’, TCA Regional News, Dec 10, 2020, <https://www.proquest.com/wire-feeds/minneapolis-teen-receives-prestigious-award/docview/2468800237/se-2>.
[17] Browne, p.9.
[18] Browne, p.9.
[19] Wendy Sung, ‘In the Wake of Visual Failure: Twitter, Sandra Bland, and an Anticipatory Nonspectatorship’, Social Text, 39.2, 2021, 1-23, p.7 <https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8903577>.
[20] Sung, p.3.
[21] Susan Sontag, Regarding the pain of others, (London: Penguin, 2004) p.94.
[22] Sung, p.7.
[23] ‘violence where there is no such actor [that commits violence against another] as structural or indirect’ in Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1969): 167–91, p.170, < http://www.jstor.org/stable/422690> .
[24] Foucault, Discipline, p.11. Emphasis mine.
[25] Foucault, Discipline, pp.20-21.
[26] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, (New York: Random House Inc., 1978).
[27] Anon., ‘Criminal Justice Fact Sheet’, NAACP, <https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet>.
[28] Angela Y. Davis, and Cassandra Shaylor, ‘Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex: California and Beyond’, Meridians, 2.1 (2001): 1–25, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338793> .
[29] 13th, dir. by Ava DuVernay, 2016.
[30] Foucault, History, p.140.
[31] David Schrag, ‘Visibility and Obscurity Within the Surveillance Regime of the U.S. Prison’, Iperstoria, 14, (2019): 68-76, p.70, <https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2019.i14.260>.
[32] Schrag, p.68.
[33] Sung, p.1.
[34] Sung, p.7.
[35] Browne, pp.16-7.
[36] Hartman interrogates the exclusion of Black women and girls in archives, engaging archival research and critical fabulation, in Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, 12.2 (2008): 1-14 and Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
[37] Sung, p.15.
[38] Lisa Nakamura, and Peter Chow-White, eds., Race after the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2012) p.2.
[39] Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) p.7.
[40] Nakamura and Chow-White, p.5.
[41] Nakamura and Chow-White, p.5. Emphasis mine.
[42] Browne, p.17.
[43] Édouard Glissant, ‘For Opacity’, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) 189-94.
[44] Glissant, p.189.
[45] Glissant, p.191.
[46] Glissant, p.193.