0001 (1) – Title sequence

Choterina Freer, 2012.

The laissez-faire attitude towards British politics in the previous two decades is over; the global recession, and its aftershocks have politicised the nation. Our primary engagement with the various forms of protest has been through the images, video footage, and social networks of the digital realm. Our world is no longer materially organised. The digital has become a formidable opponent to material culture as the way that we experience the world. The increasing prevalence of the digital has paralleled our re-politicisation; for the first time we are able to watch realism unmediated by news, TV and film networks.

Fredric Jameson (1991) extended his analysis that postmodernism was the “cultural logic of late capitalism” into video production. He concluded that postmodern video’s central aim was “to short-circuit traditional interpretive temptations” (92). In this post-cinematic age we are still being bombarded by a “total flow” of images (Jameson, 1991, 76). So in video production, what’s later than late capitalism?

Mark Fisher’s re-evaluation of Jameson’s theories in Capitalist Realism (2009) claims that “some of the processes which Jameson described and analysed have now become so aggravated and chronic that they have gone through a change in kind” (Fisher, 2009, 7). This development seems to have come about through a firmer belief in capitalism and our post-internet state which has allowed easier access to images and ideas. In this essay I will analyse this state of ‘capitalist realism’ through the personas of internet ‘beauty gurus’ and the images of looters during the 2011 UK riots. As older modes of social realism focused on the physical communities of working class life, I will examine how online networks form our new communities.

The essay is formed of a series of blog posts numbered in binary code. Daniel Miller (2012) conceives that binary can be considered as having a similar value structure to money. I will be considering this value system in relation to the availability of technology, quality of images, hierarchies in systems of distribution, and the veneration of authenticity in rap music. In the same way that Bourdieu (1984) or Veblen (1899) analysed our interaction with material culture, I will argue that our increased engagement with the digital as object(s) has brought about ways of interpreting the content and quality of video as class signifier. I will look at the ways in which production companies have manipulated the appeal of grainy, low-resolution imagery for marketing purposes. Finally, I will examine the potential consequences of our viewing these social realist images.

I’m interested in how artists could use internet networking and society’s understanding of the digital image as a class signifier to create cracks in the shiny surface of the spectacle. My argument is that post-cinema needs to move beyond a description of our current state to a more directed political position.

The main focus of this essay will be on video and distribution processes outside of contemporary art. In order to consider ideas for new ways of working I feel that the discussion needs to engage with real socio-political situations. Web 2.0 has created an exciting global space with the correlative that major global events, such as the Arab Spring, are mediated directly through the internet. However, because my investigation relates to class constitution and older ideas of British social realism, I am going to focus on videos from Britain only. My emphasis towards moving, and not still images, relates to my concerns with video art and our increasing relationship with online video.  

0010 (2) – From postmodernism to post-cinema

In the introduction I made brief mention of how Jameson defined postmodernist video as a “structure or sign flow” of images which “resists meaning”. The essential logic of these works is to prevent thematic interpretations (Jameson, 1991, 91).

In the same way that Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism (2009) can be seen as an advancement of Jameson’s ideas, so can Shaviro’s study of Post- Cinematic Affect (2010). Shaviro reviews films such as Southland Tales (2006) to discuss how the language of capitalism and neo-liberal finance relates to contemporary editing techniques. These techniques, which involve fast cuts, windows within windows, and post-continuity editing, are the language of post-cinema today (Shaviro, 2010, 77). Shaviro is a proponent of accelerationism. When discussing Southland Tales he claims that director Richard Kelly’s hope is that “sheer hypermediated excess can push the logic of excess to breakdown.”  (Shaviro, 2010, 135)

Post-cinematic videos, such as the work of Ryan Trecartin and the flashing images displayed on the Head Gallery website, function under the assumption that the way to represent capitalist space is through accelerated versions of our current digital experiences. Their contention might be that we are so subsumed by the bombardment of the spectacle that the only way out is to push the logic of late capitalism to its extremities (Shaviro, 2010, 136). This way of working is a digital version of what Benjamin Noys has termed accelerationism: “an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better” (Noys, 2008). Noys expounds the belief that capitalism needs to expand by revolutionising itself, and in this way accelerationism has an “impeccable pedigree” (ibid.) founded in Marx and Engels’ idea that “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels, 1848). By utilising “the structures of capitalism against the state”, accelerationism aims “to exacerbate capitalism to the point of collapse” (Noys in Shaviro 2010, 136). The accelerationist assertion is that capitalism needs to enter a point of real crisis instead of being saved by the state that prevents “its most destructive potentials from being actualised” (Williams, 2008).

I feel uncomfortable with this hypothesis. It seems to me that value in film, video, and digital media is often created through intensity (Shaviro, 2010, 138). We can map a steady increase in intensity over the years from silent films, through the golden age of Hollywood and postmodern works, to the post-cinema of today. My concern therefore, is that while we think that we are exhibiting a capitalist-breaking “hypermediated excess”, works such as Southland Tales and Trecartin’s videos may appear normal in a few years.

In my research I have been surprised by British social realist filmmaker’s predilection for non-naturalistic styles of filmmaking including soviet montage, the French New Wave, and what is described as Ken Loach’s “social surrealism” (Lay, 2002, 118-119). More recently, the garishness of class aesthetics and the use of American film motifs such as the Western format (Dead Man’s Shoes, 2004) has been seen in Shane Meadow’s films. These precedent’s support my theory that social realism can persist through the continuing reinvention of new modes of working.  My argument therefore, is not for a “hauntological” (Derrida, 2006) ideology of old social realist modes; but for a more directed reading of post-cinematic images through the political use of social realism. 

0011 (3) – Towards a new social realism

Throughout its history, social realist filmmaking has adapted to characterise both technical and social changes. Bazin described this tendency by saying that “there are not one but several realisms. Each era looks for its own, that is to say the technique and aesthetic that can best capture it” (Bazin in Lay, 2002, 7). In response to social changes, Samantha Lay identifies two specific trends in the development of social realism during the Twentieth Century. These are:

• “a movement away from the public and the social (the working class at work, struggles connected to the wider society or community) to the private and the personal (the focus on family life and problems with little reference to social, political and economic conditions).
• the demise of the traditional working class and their definition in terms of what they consume rather than what they produce or do, and the subsequent increased attention on […] the ‘underclass’.” (Lay, 2002, 118)

Regarding the first point, when Lay was writing in 2002 she was considering the private space of the home in films such as Nil by Mouth (1997). Social spaces have since moved onto internet networks and this relates to Lay’s second point as the notion of an ‘underclass’ has dominated contemporary social realism.

Hostility towards the working class can be traced through Thatcher’s demolition of industry to Blair’s claim that “class war is over” (Toynbee 2011). Before the global recession there was a general assumption that “we’re all middle class now” (Webb, 2011). Class denial became a political expedient for successive governments, allowing them to perpetuate ideas an underclass of dehumanized people who, through their own fault, were separated from the old, respectable working class and the large new middle class.            

Television, once an important medium for social realism (Lay, 2002, 21), has increasingly represented the working class as illiterate, lazy schemers both in comedy (Harry Enfield and Chums, The Catherine Tate Show, Little Britain) and drama (Shameless). Even Coronation Street, which was once seen as an exemplar of Northern Social Realism, has evolved into caricaturing the working class for light entertainment (see Jones, 2012, 132).  The UK riots of 2011 exemplified the trickle-down effect of such stereotyping as shop owners and journalists freely called the rioters “feral rats” (Riotupdates, 2011) and “wild beasts” (Hastings, 2011).        

Much has been said about the causes of the riots and the varied demographic who took part (see The Riots: in Their Own Words and My Child the Rioter). For Lacan, “the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress” (Lacan in Fisher, 2009, 18). Reality here is understood as the ‘big Other’, described by Fisher as “the collective fiction, the symbolic structure, presupposed by any social field.” (Fisher, 2009, 44). The “collective fiction” that “we are all middle class now” was shattered by the riots and two things were revealed in my view: firstly, the strength of capitalist realism, evidenced by people seeing looting as sufficiently desirable to risk prison for; secondly, the “crisis ordinary” (Berlant, 2011, 230), where the struggle to survive was emphasised by the banality of many of the objects looted. 

This is the state of the postspectacular, when ‘capitalist realism’ is so mixed up with images of survival that cracks in the spectacle’s shiny surface begin to emerge. I consider these fissures as the sources of the new social realism. The proliferation of camera technology and its use on the web constituted the unmediated narrative of the riots.

0100 (4) – Digital as material

The age of digitisation means that the moving image, for the first time, has no physical presence. While proponents of the “New Aesthetic” bring 8-bit style design into the physical world through sculpture, there seems to be an inverse process taking place in digital media in what I consider to be a new structural/materialist movement in the UK.

These artists include Rachel Reupke, who, due to her replication of advertising tropes, has described her practice as being centred around an “interest in surfaces” (Reupke, 2012); Ed Atkins, who tries to create a literal embodiment of digital video through loud noise and obvious cuts (Atkins, 2011); Mark Leckey, whose work examines the possibility for a more intimate relationship with objects through digital media; and Laure Prouvost, who uses structural techniques in her videos to create physicality.

The “total flow” of digital moving images that surrounds us in the urban environment works not in a logical way that we can distance ourselves from but in an affective way. Deleuze describes this affect as “tactile space” which has left behind “its own co-ordinates and metric relations” (Deleuze, 2005, 112). This space is experienced through our emotional and physical responses to the images. Shaviro defines the expressive qualities of contemporary film and video as creating an “ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates our society today” (Shaviro, 2010, 2).  The “affection-image” (Deleuze, 2005, 105) is heavily used by advertisers and Hollywood filmmakers to draw us into the tactile space.

In his theory of object-oriented ontology, Harman uses the term “object” in the widest sense to “designate anything with some sort of unitary reality”  (Harman, 2009,147). An object can thereby be considered as anything from an “atom” to a “skyscraper “ (147), an “electron” to a “piano” (148), a “mountain to a “hallucinated mountain”(148). As with Harman’s analysis of the internet, I believe that digital video could be defined as a “quasi-object”: “Once it is created, the internet simply exists: just like a snowflake, just like a jungle. These objects are not simple real objects in the naive sense, but quasi-objects.” (Harman, 2009, 81). Furthermore, Harman argues that “anything that relates must perceive. Only by becoming a piece of a larger object, only by entering the interior of a larger one, does an entity have anything like a psyche.”  (Harman, 2009, 206).  His focus on the surface of objects relates to material theory. While material culture theory is human-centred, both studies argue for considerations of the surface of objects over their psyche.

In Daniel Miller’s essay Clothing is Not Superficial (2010) he argues against the contemporary Western way of viewing materialism as a surface layer, which is unimportant compared to our true selves within. He questions what it is that we consider our “true selves” to be, and why this is seen as something internal and hidden. Miller cites the importance of dress in Trinidad and the hierarchical implications of the various ways Indian women wear Saris to show the essential relationship between clothing and character in other cultures.

In the same way, I would argue that the surface of the image is not superficial. We are used to viewing the image as its content. However, it is my view that digital imagery can be discussed as a format of material culture in itself. The image quality, the screen format, the pixel ratio, the editing techniques, and the sound – all of these things are as powerful sociological indicators as style of dress. 

0101 (5) – Digital materialism as class indicator

When Hito Steyerl (2009) called the “poor image” a “lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution” she used the language of class as an analogy for a low-quality, heavily-distributed image. The sudden mass of information in the postmodern era probably led to some loss of semiology as Jameson feared (1991, 91), but now, I think, we have adapted; we have entered a more advanced state, manifest in the urbanites’ skill of processing and reading images. Moreover, I believe that we relate to, or repudiate certain images on grounds of their class signifiers, in much the same way as we would with clothes, newspapers, cars, hairdressers, and food.

Sociologists and anthropologists from Veblen (1899) to Bourdieu (1984) and Miller (2010) have consistently shown that our class and culture determine how we select and identify with objects. Now material culture researchers are beginning to consider how this understanding relates to our digital experience. Daniel Miller sent me his introduction to his forthcoming book Digital Anthropology (2012). In this he considers how the reduction of the digital into binary numbers could be characteristic of how we organise our world numerically through currency. As with money, binary code can be reduced to “the same common element” (4). Therefore a value system can be created in the consideration of the digital. As Miller elucidates: “the more we reduce to the same the more we can thereby create difference.” (4).

The common notion that video production has become democratised is similar to the idea that “we are all middle class now”. Just because camera technology is more affordable, and online distribution is free, doesn’t mean that hierarchical systems aren’t in place. The haul video is paradigmatic of how digital culture creates new value systems. Haul videos are the unembarrassed face of conspicuous consumption; this is where people (typically teenage girls) systematically display their recent purchases to a camera in their bedroom. The haul community exists on specific and generic sites including haultv.com, girlhaul.com and YouTube.

The most extravagant haul videos come from the USA. Here the HD videos, shot in expensively decorated bedrooms, include title and end sequences, comedy out-take videos, on-screen logos featuring their usernames, and pop-up links to blogs where the viewer can see how the haul girl has styled the outfit. In these videos the lighting is good, the image is clear, and the audio is high-quality; the vloggers often have upbeat, well-rehearsed presentation skills and their viewing figures can exceed one million, with the same amount of subscribers to their channels. These haul girls are online celebrities, reaching out beyond video sites to Facebook, Twitter, blog sites, TV, and their own online shops. allthatgliiters21 and juicystar07 are sister celebrity haul girls who have featured on Good Morning America:

The same phenomenon can be seen in the UK. zoella280390 and Dollybowbow have similarly slick videos and online presences. Although their purchases are not always from the most expensive stores, the abundance of items bought and video quality signify wealth. Below is an example of this with Dollybowbow’s “Primark Haul”:

At the lower end of this value system are teenage girls from a different social bracket who, in trying to replicate the celebrity haul girls, reveal their place in the hierarchy. As with binary code, this value system can be measured through view count, which in these cases often reaches a few hundred views at most. These girls often show items attained in pound shops, such as candles and lip gloss. Of most interest to me is that the image quality corresponds to what they are buying. The screen resolution of these videos is often 4:3 or smartphone format, displaying black bars around the edges. The image is often dark and heavily pixelated, and the audio varies from bad to indecipherable. These videos are often filmed in stairwells or kitchens, and often interrupted by family members entering the frame. The videos with the lower view counts rarely contain title sequences or style tips. Haul girls Num1Bieber and MizzSoph789 have made videos exemplary of the lower end of the haul vlogging hierarchy:

0110 (6) – Networking

The two-fold employment changes of the increase in white-collar jobs in the 1960s and the deindustrialisation of Britain in the 80s, led to the breakdown of the traditional working class community.  The demographic changed from producers to consumers (Lay, 2002, 17).  While some people moved towards a more individualised lifestyle in the suburbs, others became locked in the private space of the home due to unemployment. As discussed in blog 3, social realist film responded with a narrative shift from the public to the private sphere (see Nil by Mouth, The Full Monty, Secrets and Lies).

I believe that new communities have been founded in the internet realm. From a social realist perspective, these could include the myriad social and political networks and members-only forums which are used to arrange collective actions; or the algorithms that link individuals on blogging platforms and social networks. I think that these networks have become significant through the existence of those both sympathetic to, and reacting against the “demonization of the working class” (Jones, 2012). 

In An Anthropological Guide to YouTube (2008), anthropologist Michael Wesch describes how his video essay (which in itself was about networks) went viral. To do this the video had to go through stages. Firstly, it had to be made as user-generated content; then it was taken from YouTube and put onto sites like dig.com which employ user-generated filtering; the video then ended up on del.icio.us.com where people were tagging it with phrases like “web 2.0”, making it more visible  (user-generated organisation); through the tags, this was being distributed onto the front pages of other sites (user-generated distribution); and finally it was blogged about (user-generated commentary).  From this stage, it ended up on a site called Technocrati which ranks videos according to how many people have blogged about it. On the day after Super Bowl Sunday, this video (which had cost nothing to make) had risen to the number one position above all of the Super Bowl adverts, some of which had cost $3.6 million to produce (mwesch, 2008).

This example shows how traditional positions of power can be reworked through user-generated activity. Latour describes a network as having no hierarchy: “A network notion implies a deeply different social theory: it has no a priori order relation; it is not tied to the axiological myth of a top and of a bottom of society…” (Latour, 1998). Although Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) is not designed to represent an idea of a computer or social network (ibid), I have found this ontology useful to consider how networks work. ANT describes actors (who could be any human or non-human object as long it is “granted the source of action” (ibid)) and networks which “have as many dimensions as they do connections”. Or to put it in another way: “ANT makes use of some of the simplest properties of nets and then adds to it an actor that does some work.” (ibid). The explosion of Wesch’s video illustrates how online networks grow through a mixture of non-human and human actors.

From art’s perspective, this new space could be seen to parallel the public art of the 1970s. Since 2002 and Seth Price’s essay Dispersion, in which he bemoans the inherent conservatism of public art, much has changed. The internet has allowed for a type of public art that does not need to “unambiguously announce its own art status” (Price, 2002). As such, many of the works are experimental, disseminating through networks of artists. Luckypdf  (2009 – present), Ed Fornieles’ Facebook sitcom Dorm Daze (2012),and Ryan Trecartin’s Tumblr project riverofthe.net (2010 – present) are examples.

riverofthe.net is an ever-increasing, user-generated flow of one-minute videos linked together by random tags. This project epitomises what Mark Fisher (2011) described as the “insomniac, cyberspace drift” of the over-worked and over-stimulated individual, who wastes time on “useless” internet browsing.  Again, Trecartin’s work merely re-enacts our current state. My argument is that artists need to adopt more of the auteur’s position, directing the ways in which we consume post-cinematic images.

 

0111 (7) – How the smartphone enabled a new type of social realism

Hey – Snotty & Skint[1]

 

12,970 views  

336 likes, 3 dislikes

Uploaded by UGLKYTV on Apr 16, 2011

 

Hope you like it J

 

Jessie J Concert- Price Tag Y   

 

13,474 views  

170 likes, 9 dislikes

Uploaded by UGLKYTV on May 8, 2011

 

Taken with my camera but it had a battery problem L

Heartbeats Tour- Amazing! J

 

GCSE’s – Rantin when I should really be revising…

 

19,580   views

553 likes, 30 dislikes

Published on May 10, 2012 by UGLKYTV

 

Lol x

 

My RANDOM life- the strange truth!

 

28,580   views

453 likes, 17 dislikes

Uploaded by UGLKYTV on May 19, 2011

 

Follow me on twitter @siobhanashleigh

 

Styyletipps: 3 Denim shirts

  

84,859   views

2,018 likes, 477 dislikes

Uploaded by UGLKYTV on Jun 12, 2011

 

*******Please Read Me*******

Hey! LOTS of ways to style denim shirts, I could have done 10000s of styles. I’m keeping it simple and doing one outfit per shirt.  Hope it inspires you, enjoy.x

 

Oufit Details:

 

#1

Maison Scotch Denim Shirt

Asos hat

Primark leggings

Office pink heels

Jem’s Jewels (jemsjewels.com) peacock earrings

 

#2

Asos Denim Boyfriend Shirt (shadow pockets)

H&M playsuit

Forever 21 blue tights

Gold casio (gift from bf)

Primark Ballet Pumps

 

#3

Primark Dip Dyed Denim Shirt

Asos aztec skater dress

New Look triangle earrings

Ebay neon clutch

Aldo gold heels

 

Nobody’s Perfect- How I stopped worrying about being perfect!

 

80,533 views

6,154 likes, 86 dislikes

Published on Jun 23, 2012 by UGLKYTV

Artist: Hannah Montana

Buy “Nobody’s Perfect” on: iTunes

 

I did this video because I think it’s time to tell my story. I was in a bad place, but I’ve come out the other side now. I thought this might help some of you to be happier. xx

 

Day In MY Life: Snog&chips

 

30,051   views

398 likes, 41 dislikes

Uploaded by UGLKYTV on Jul 11, 2012

 

Some of my favourite things! Hope you like it J

 

The Accent Tag!!  

 

79,765 views   

2,429 likes, 81 dislikes

Uploaded by UGLKYTV on Aug 2, 2011

Twitter: @siobhanashleigh

Blogspot: http://www.siobhanisUGLKYTV.blogspot.com

Artist: Drake

Buy “Take Care (feat. Rihanna)” on: iTunes

 

Wanted to do this tag for aGGGES, just got round to it! Enjoyx

 

Tottenham Riots-16 Year Old Girl Beaten By Police

 

tomleeson204

 69,339   views

93 likes, 83 dislikes

Uploaded by tomleeson204 on Aug 7, 2011

Full Story: http://blog.tomleeson204.com/2011/08/07/16-girl-police-brutality-repo…

Caught on Camera: This is the moment that sparked the violent riots after police attacked a 16-year-old girl.

 

Daily Mail Report on Girl Being Beaten:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023254/Tottenham-riot-Mark-Duggan-sh…

 

London Riots: Clapham Looters Caught On Camera

11,455  views

16 likes, 13 dislikes

Uploaded by skynews on Aug 9, 2011

http://news.sky.com/home/video

Sky’s Mark Stone shoots rioters in Clapham on a mobile phone, as they vandalise and loot shops on Lavender Hill – with no police there to stop them.

 

LONDON RIOTS- The Truth

103,670  

202 likes, 57 dislikes

Uploaded by lionsofwar6 on Aug 7, 2011

Sky news has been broadcasting their own views of events without interviewing any local residents. HERE IS THE TRUTH- unedited, no PR or media training, from straight from the mouths of local people.

UPDATE: Please be respectful to people who lost their homes and businesses after the destruction caused by the rioters. PLEASE THINK BEFORE LEAVING COMMENTS – Thank you.

 

UK RIOTS…BotherNation

 

345 views 

11 likes, 0 dislikes

 

 Uploaded by MCLDN on Aug 13, 2011

Freestyle over footage from UK riots 2011

 

 

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[1]              In 2002, Samantha Lay posited that the use of CCTV in Pawel Pawlowski’s film Last Resort (2001) could indicate a way forward for social realist filmmaking. Since this time, the found-footage genre previously mainly used in Horror films (e.g. Blair Witch Project, 1999), has been taken up by mainstream and social realist filmmakers through the mimicking of amateur smartphone footage (see Chronicle, 2012 and Ill Manors, 2012).

The increase in the availability of smartphones has led to a new vertical image format which is too slim for either 16:9 or 4:3 screens. It has become normal on the internet, and even the news to see the grainy image and to hear the poor audio of smartphone footage.

When trying to write this blog post, I found an academic style inappropriate for such a formalist subject. I have therefore written a fictionalised teenage girl’s vlog posts leading up to her part in the UK riots and subsequent videos relating to these events. Except for the Sky News video and link to The Daily Mail article, all the words are my own. However, I have tried to use language that reflects the voices of the different people who upload videos onto YouTube.

 

1000 (8) – Rap realism

As the onslaught of images in the urban environment escalates, so does the importance of sound. Although I believe that the contemporary condition is one of post-lexia [1], audio has become a significant ordering tool for these images. Audio dominance was noted even in the time of television. The narrative of early sound film followed the style of silent cinema in being image-led, but television was what Chion (1994) called “illustrated radio” (157). The archetype of sound-ordered imagery is the music video. In this format, the audio doesn’t impede upon the visuals, permitting a “joyous rhetoric of images” (166). Due to audio’s growing significance and the ability to watch music videos for free, I have considered the potential for a new type of protest song and its imagery.

The protest song has been challenged. Not only has our society become re-politicised, calling for instant responses, but Pussy Riot have shown us the potency of real protest music, making early-90s riot grrrl look like “radical chic” (Harris, 2012). While commentators search the festivals for the new Billy Bragg, protest music, at its most visceral, has resurfaced online in the form of rap (Harris, 2010). The notion that rap is all about cars, girls, and bling is seriously outmoded; it’s now much more likely to hear an MC rap about what she/he hasn’t got than what she/he has.
The challenge was met during the 2011 riots, when unsigned MCs uploaded impromptu raps hours after the initial event had taken place. These songs protested for and against the rioters, and ranged from groups who used found footage of the riots for their music videos:

to the single person alone in his room [2]:

The necessity for spontaneity has meant that the lyrics in many of these videos are simplistic and politically contradictory. However, because of the ‘poor image’, these MCs are highly valued. Antithetical to the hierarchy of haul videos, rap MCs value low-quality over high. This is because the ‘poor image’ signifies the real, which is one of the highest attainments of this genre. In the amateur rap videos which followed the riots, use of the ‘poor image’ was dictated by the cameraphone technology and low-resolution home video.

For the music industry, this ‘realness’ is gold dust. This has led them to try reproducing it in a more spectacular way. Plan B’s music video for Ill Manors (2012) shows this attempt:

The video features some recognisable actors who are also characters in his feature film of the same name. In this way the video is a cross between a trailer for the movie and a comment on the UK riots. The quality of the image flits between the HD visuals of the professional music video directed by Ronan Bennett and found footage of the riots and past political events. These images are segued by animation which is a cross between the punk style of Joel Veitch and constructivist collage. [3] The actors stand behind Plan B as he raps – a trope of underground rap videos, where the MC is surrounded by other local youths. [4] Both the music video and feature film record the screen of the cameraphone as it records. This allows for the authenticity that the smartphone footage brings without any loss of image quality.

Ill Manors is a protest song. Many MCs have been called a “sell-out” when they become commercially viable. However, Plan B uses the platform of fame to question ideas about the representation of the working class in the media, and lack of hope that many young people feel towards their future (Planbuk. 2012(b)). Because of his political message and the way he has represented himself through the re-enactment of rap realism, he has won back some respect from hip-hop fans (ibid).

It is easy to tell where Plan B has mimicked amateur hip-hop videos because he had access to funding, and therefore expediency wasn’t his main issue. The amateur MCs may also be replicating the tropes of other rap artists, but it’s harder to tell where authenticity ends and impersonation begins. This is a fundamental problem that artists who use social realism today face. In the past, endorsed social realist filmmaking provided the only platform for working class representation, now social realism is prolific online. Therefore, I wonder if it is relevant as a constructed practice anymore; and even if it is, how is it possible to be more real than the realism that can be viewed online?

1. Post-lexia is a modern ability to read images more easily than text, particularly noted in urban youths (Fisher, 2009, 25).
2. Both videos featured in Hancox, 2010.
3. E.g.: Rathergoodstuff. 2011. The Parsley Expansion Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSPjpLcSi5k&list=UU5c0DefLjv1VStIbA84yiUQ&index=15&feature=plcp [Accessed 26 August 2012].
4. E.g.: Swifturk.2008. Giggs – Talkin Da Ardest – Spare No1 – Swifturk Visionz http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JrJSVR_1Uc [Accessed 26 August 2012].

1001 (9) – Digital social realism: what are the consequences?

An obvious consequence of the increasing prevalence of cameras is that the resultant social realist images have appeared as evidence in court. From CCTV recordings used to identify rioters, to the use of amateur footage in the recent trial of PC Simon Harward[1] it is apparent that the technology is used to the benefit of both police and protestors. The images which lead to trials are often shocking, and may have the propensity to trigger further political action. I believe that earlier images of police brutality from the G20 and student protests of 2009-11 increased the anger that was directed towards the police during the 2011 riots.[2]

 The images of Ian Tomlinson, of crowds being charged by mounted horses (MASSIF101, 2010), and of a young man being dragged from his wheelchair by the police (Surffadude. 2010.) could be considered “intolerable images” (Rancière, 2009, 83).  Rancière believes that problems arising from the use of “intolerable images” are “at the heart of the tensions affecting political art” (84).  He puts forward work by Martha Rosler (1967-72) and Josephine Meckseper (2004) as examples of how the juxtaposition of the intolerable and advertising image “aims to have a dual effect: an awareness of the hidden reality and a feeling of guilt about the denied reality.”(27)      

   For Rancière however, such juxtapositions become another spectacle to be subsumed by the capitalist tendency to normalise the shocking –images of dissent become yet another example of radical chic. Jameson also voiced this theory, describing how realism, damaged by postmodernism’s collapsing of the sign from the referent, has a “feeble existence on the horizon like a shrunken star or red dwarf.” (Jameson, 1991, 96) Rancière and Jameson’s theories challenge my idea of using social realism to cause a crack in the shiny surface of the spectacle. I would, however, contend that their theories are rendered somewhat anachronistic by the dawn of our post-lexical age.

Steven Shaviro terms post-cinematic video as “expressive” in both the  “symptomatic” and “productive” sense that it not only expresses to the viewer an embodiment of the current state of neo-liberal capitalism, but also that the social is formed through the viewing of these images (Shaviro, 2010, 2). We are what we watch. Beller calls the spectator of the early-Twenty-First Century a “connoisseur”:

“The cinema is in dialectical relation to the social; in learning the codes of commercial cinema, spectators also learn the rules of dominant social structure, indeed they become experts.” (Beller, 2006, 2)        

Affectcan be damaging. One aspect of our current social realism is ‘capitalist realism’. This production of consciousness through viewing is identifiable in the haul videos on YouTube: girls are clearly mimicking each other in their actions, fashions, and presentation techniques. So if affect can be used to accelerate consumerism it may also be possible to use it to stimulate political ideas and actions. From evidence collected after the riots last summer, it seems that images of looting spurred others on to join in:

 

 “People could either see it from their house or saw it on TV. It was easy to find out what was happening. Sky had a live update.” (Young person, Peckham)

 

“People are coming from other parts of London to join in with this, so this suggests this actually escalating”. (Reporter BBC)

 

(Both quotes taken from The Riots: In Their Own Words, BBC, 2012)

 

It seems that the question of social realist image’s potency comes down to quantity, or critical mass. A single social realist image is subsumed into the spectacle of contemporary capitalism, imagery en masse has the heft to push political action.

 

 

 

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[1] PC Simon Harward was accused of manslaughter after pushing over Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protest, 2009.

[2] The anger towards the police also arose from the killing of Mark Duggan and an increase in stop-and-searches (Townsend, 2012).

1010 (10) – End credits

This series of blog posts has operated as a survey of many theories. By drawing a line of enquiry through them I have been able to consider how digital imagery can engage the viewer with social and political realism(s). The creation of a new type of social realism through online networks has become significant because of the “demonization of the working class” (Jones, 2012, 248). Due to media representations of a subhuman “underclass”, a section of society feel that they have lost their voice (ibid.) The 2011 UK riots, shattered the myth that “we are all middle class now”, and revealed the anger felt towards the police, business owners, as well as the rioters. This momentary slip of the veneer of the “big Other” created myriad examples of social realism that circulated on the internet and changed the collective fiction that we understand as reality (Fisher, 2009, 44). A teenage girl , explained how this reality-space changed:

“I was scared, like, I was like – No, I don’t want to do it Becky, I don’t wanna do it… But after it all kicked off… after it all kicked off, yeah it was like everyone was doing it, you just joined in. It felt fine, it just felt natural, like you was naturally shopping, like it was just a normal day.”
(The Riots: In Their Own Words, BBC, 2012).

The riots weren’t a perfect archetype for political action. However, they were interesting in that they revealed the fragility of our collective realism, and signalled how new modes of social realism could be established.

Research into social realist filmmaking revealed a history of non-naturalistic techniques. This has encouraged my investigation into what the new modes of this genre could be. New social realism would have to operate with the awareness of the menace of radical chic, and capitalism’s propensity to subsume images of dissent. In order to endure, social realism needs to evolve and adapt to changing class signifiers in both the content, and material qualities of the format. The bombardment of “affection-images” (Deleuze, 2005, 114) demands an intervention that is robustly directive. The post-lexic dexterity of contemporary artists would be essential to this project. Online artist networks have the potential for vigorous and imaginative formats, which could lead to an outbreak of public art incomparable to anything preceding it.

Themes of the public and private have reoccurred throughout this study. The old communal ways of making and viewing film has been condensed to a single person with a laptop. Perhaps due to this, our post-internet state can be characterised through its intimacies. This closeness is experienced through the materiality of the image, the breaking down of geographical and hierarchical boundaries through online networks, and the emotional, political, and sentimental views shared. Postmodern culture was definitively cynical, and it was this hard-edged irony that capitalism so easily subsumed. However, the powerful intimacy that social realism produces may have the potential to dismantle the shiny surface of the spectacle.