Notes on lifestream : a brief and inexhaustive account of the american habit of recording violence
Violence :
is not a mythical force from beyond nor a birth defect nor an absolutely immoral act nor the liberating tool of oppressed people always everywhere.
is simply a fact : the apposition of force and/or coercion to a set of bodies in order to prevent their continued existence in a manner conducive to their desires or needs.
No absolute claims to its moral, ethical and technical value can be set. To say violence exists within a context is to state the obvious but sometimes it's good to reassert the obvious. The slap given to a consenting masochistic partner is very different from the slap given to someone who's just tried to punch you for no reason which is very different from the slap given to a child who refuses to eat their plate. The moral character you attribute to each of these violent actions will let people know about your own moral stances moreso than any definite absolute quality embodied by "Violence" under all its forms. The reason why it is so is because "Violence" has no claim to the absolute : it is not a thing or a force but a pattern.
Violence is an interaction characterised by intensity.
(Forms of violence are discussed here, be warned)
Violence Mediascape and profitable eruptions
"Look around you. Everything is material." - Aleš Kot
The sense that IRL has become material to be mined for the reproduction of neatly packaged bits of online entertainment is not a new insight.
The recognition that violence has the potential to boost attendance levels is not alien to this either : 24 hour news showed us this, true crime literature before that, boxing matches before that, violent spectacle is an old product which comes under new garments with each new media lenscape.
It's still tempting to see phenomenons like worldstar hiphop, trash streamers and other content creation outlets as stirring attention away from journalism and fact-based reporting, even though they're not forerunners in the practice of circulating representations of violence and the sensational has always been used by some journalistic institutions starting from the Acta Diurna to tabloids right through the late 1890s New York World.
The Internet allowed for the sharing of information to emerge under a slightly different logic in certain areas of public life and with the advent of the ad-driven web in the same span of time as the web of aggregators and platform-monopolies what you had was a set of "public spaces", which were in fact privately-owned and semi-stitutional spaces, that ended up becoming the place where attention goes to die right at the same time the anglophonic web saw a turn from text-dominance to video and image dominance in terms of the "content" shared and the design of webpages themselves.
America (because it's a great exemple of those dynamics) is currently in a state of ongoing low intensity civil unrests (not quite conflicts but getting there) that are not being covered extensively by all channels, if you want to keep track you've got to look at local news and small collectives but those are not necessarily as visible as the big channels : it's important to note that the big channels are just as likely as the small ones to amplify bullshit though so the burden of parsing the information is on the audience, not the journalists. Especially when it comes to "politically relevant" or visibly polemic developments such as "company founder X said what ?!".
That continuous circulation of violent images doesn't tell you much besides the fact that people do fucked up shit and like to talk about it, right ? There's no self-stirring orientation for those "contents" and that's an important and acknowledged fact : representations of violence are not the cause of violence itself, a myth that has died down a bit but is still active in certain people's mind.
There's a non-linear relation between a representation and an act : the representation informs people about the possibility of the act but it doesn't necessarily make a case that the act should be done or reproduced by the spectators. And then the overall environment is what determines if an act is more attractive or not to the spectators and if they deem it desirable or not : their education, socialisation, the possibilities afforded to them by the social and legal environment they live in and reproduce, etc.
Lynching postcards in the american south were certainly "normalisers" of the practice of lynching but were not what made lynching possible or desirable to the white polity at that time. The people who made the postcards certainly made money off of people's blood and misery but they didn't create the push towards that horrifying practice. There were already existing incentive structures (which persist to this day under a slightly different shape) that brought people to think that capturing, torturing and killing Black people is fine, good, acceptable, moral and necessary.
A single representation can only reproduce the awareness of something, it doesn't advocate for it intrinsically : Propaganda without a context is a vignette from an unspoken fairy tale.
Addiction can't explain everything but it sure is a good analoguous behavior
"Combat is like crack cocaine. It's an enormous high, but it has enormous costs. Any sane person would never do crack. Combat is like that. You're scared, you're terrified, you're miserable, but then the fighting starts, and suddenly everything is at stake, your life, your friend's lives. It's almost transcendence because you're no longer a person. You lose that sense, you're just the platoon, and the platoon can't be beat. And not to mention there's a savage joy in overcoming your enemy, just a savage joy. And I think we make a big mistake if we say, 'oh war is hell'. We all know the 'war is hell' story—it is—but there's an enormously exhilarating part of it." - Karl Marlantes
A recurring pattern : People who have lived through intense group experiences, when isolated, seek to reproduce the feeling they had during these intense experiences one way or another.
This is, for some people, the draw of concerts, festivals, trance, yoga, street fights and other such intense group experiences.
Violence under certain circumstances corresponds to that intensity in group settings ; witnessing violence IRL overwhelm the body on a level that's impossible to describe except in retrospect : your nostrils widen, your ears shut, blood boils, legs shake, you have the urge to attack or run away and if you don't do either you'll freeze in place. This is a suggestible state of being where if the group you're a part of starts doing something you're more likely to follow the movement.
This is the so-called "hive-mind" or "herd mentality" disappointed people bring up to share with other people their misanthropic perspective on this or that subject : "Humanity" is bad, stupid, selfish, violent and countless other things because people are "sheep".
The smidgen of truth in those statements is that people in groups can be suggested to, but the accuracy stops there.
Some of those misanthropes generally push forward the idea that people are becoming dumber or number and therefore more attracted to violence and sensation, others that it's a trick of The Media pushing bad stuff into people's head and other theses of that kind that riff on the type of pop psychology i love to read and move around in my head until actually serious work on the subject debunks or complexifies those narratives.
I figure that with a lack of intense everyday experiences people turn to representations of it, there's no secret here. The mistake is to assume that real life violence is less appreciable to an audience than movie violence because it's not as well choreographed, the fact is that a fight is amazing because it shows you the awkward collision of human bodies trying to meet against one another. A clash not just of bodies and will but of countless potential accidents : when X's belt hasn't been fastened well enough and his pants drop in the middle of an uppercut or when Y trips on his shoelaces and accidentally knees his friend Z in the face instead of the person he was trying to punch.
The audience of the violent event will first experience it as intense and then as either positive or negative once it's been contextualized :
Was this a fight where someone got injured ? this is bad. was this a prank ? it could turn into a positive.
Is the person that got beat up a bad person ? this is good. Was this prank so intense and fucked-up you felt your heart sink in your chest and your blood boil ? this is bad.
The process of sorting the qualities of the violent event into either good or bad is dependent on the larger context in which the event occurs :
Getting a punch in the face in a mosh-pit only adds to the intensity of the hardcore punk concert if it's a really good show and there's proper aftercare. It'll become a crazy story to talk about later.
Violence can't be summed up as an absolutely good or bad pattern of interaction, only as an intense one. To its actors as well as to its spectators. It's only when brought under a context that the interaction can be categorized according to lived experience and the consequences of the interaction. And then and there you make the choice to pay attention to who you deem to be the person whose perspective counts in the description of the interaction : you choose your testimony of the violence or you pick up the testimony that's accessible to you :
A woman shoots her rapist : this is a violent act, whether you describe it as "ethical" or "unethical" or "justice" or "tragic" or "necessary", whichever way you decide to frame it is up to you (and the people who present you the facts through an article or a conversation) but it'll necessarily orient the way you act relative to acts of that sort.
On the capitol stuff
This is less about violence in general than about the intense collective experience of larping your way to a symbol of american power.
The continuous theater of american violence needs to pursue its course, no matter how ridiculous its airings.
A good hundred idiots running around with guns at one of the sites of american sovereign power is prone to generate more than its share of media coverage, self-inflicted coverage too.
The question of why someone would take a picture of themselves holding the podium they stole at the capitol begs the question of what games people are playing in their minds.
It's been said before that Qanon is like an ARG with conspiracy theories as the lore to the actual practice which is collaborative storytelling and coordination/communication, then the capitol event was very much a convention for those people, under the mental affect of the Myth : they really thought they were doing something, that having their colors fly closer to the boss' gate would trigger a quick time event in real life to get that cinematic sequence that tells you you got the good ending. Instead of that some people got shot and died, or tased themselves in the balls and got taken to the hospital.
An army of larping leeroy jenkins storming empty offices, stealing laptops, taking pictures, streaming.
Holding physical space as a protest tactic that thinks itself as more than material to be filmed : the ghost of Occupy Wall Street haunts the psyche but there's no single cause to this and i don't want to adam curtis you with an account of Qanon, american reactionary movements, the failures of the evangelical right to maintain common cause or other generational traumas, this is me writing about streaming, so what were the streams, when are they, why are they :
When are the stream : 6th of january is when the streams are started but they're captured and retransmitted long after, in living rooms, bathrooms and courtrooms. This is the power of streams, their continuity and replay value.
Why are the streams : intense collective experiences lead to the need and urge to document, to not be here in the moment as a person but as the operator of a recording device who'll make sure something of the event can be shared, it's the duty of memory applied to what feels like the apocalypse in its truest sense : the moment all is revealed, the ARG comes to an end for the most optimistic of the bunch, those who came with rifles and the expectation of a glorious death, Sorelian right wingers who think The Myth will carry them shiny and chrome to the valhalla of their choice, that Trump will appear to grant them all a medal like that scene at the end of star wars - a new hope.
What are the streams : [insert godspeed you! black emperor lyrics about the violence of empire and so on and also recording of people screaming at the sky about the blood of the lamb or something.]
From watching the streams and pictures and photos taken by all those who were there and will be there and have been there, all you get is excitement : the intensity of Jim Someone, 40ish years old holding his trump flag with whitened knuckles can't be translated through a stream ; You will never feel his high, chances are you don't wanna feel his high either : After all in the same way people who're horny look stupid from outside Desire, the people enthralled by Glory look like psychopaths or goofy motherfuckers to anyone who isn't sharing their intensity.