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from Awakening Overtakelessness in Sousveillance Pageant
From 1997 into the early 2000s, contemporary photographer Steve Davis collaborated on a creative documentary enterprise with a group of young women at a juvenile detention center in Washington State. Legal restrictions dictated that the young women participating could never be identified by face in relation to Davis’s project, just as previously, upon their entry into the state system, legal restrictions had dictated that the women were absolutely required to be. These regulations concerning pictorial representation were, on the one hand, situationally responsive and, on the other hand, completely inflexible. Whatever their variable stipulations might be, they were always facility-determined. The institution was forever the site of origin in designating those moments wherein the women had to be obscured versus those wherein they were precluded from being so.
Working with self-made pinhole cameras, the women produced extremely long exposure prints in which the physical presence of all human figures was hazed by movement, while the penal environment itself, in its rigid inanimacy, remained razor sharp. Although these visual images effectively qualified as the only kind which the rules allowed to be taken, the women nonetheless made pictures which relayed something that the rules would have preferred to leave silent.
The women optically pried open the violence
embedded in such an unresponsive and immobile container.
They feigned adherence by over-performing the constraint
so blatantly that it became the agent of its own betrayal.
A camera, after all, is ultimately just a tool, a toy even.
And all tools/toys can be activated in more than one way.
As a small toddler, one of Sousveillance Pageant’s most treasured playtoys was a mass manufactured Fischer-Price medical kit complete with a day-glo plastic stethoscope, syringe, blood pressure monitor, and narrow-gauge hammer intended for striking the knees. One afternoon Sous’s mother came into her room to find the child furiously scripting across the air, producing large flourishing loops and figurative signatures, with her neon orange syringe in hand. “What are you doing?” her mother had asked. “I’m drawing blood,” Sousveillance had proudly replied. And the loud laughter that her mother’s mouth emitted in response caused Sousveillance to redden and cringe with embarrassment.
As Sousveillance Pageant grew into a toothy, panic-prone teenager with a penchant for collecting
foreign tourism brochures, she would often hear her mother and others speak about
“paper soldiers” “paper tigers” “paper citizens” “paper victims” “paper royalty.”
Recalling her earlier youthful error, Sousveillance would suppress any tendency to invest those verbal overtures of others with literalism, so as hopefully not to look the idiot.
But she could not suppress her confusion.
Only much later did Sous come to understand that people often said “paper”
by way of saying “fake,” by way of saying “in documentation only.”
And yet at the same time she also learned that documents, fake or otherwise, nearly always had real consequences.
They created their own material truths, material excuses, material abuse.
“The paper convict” “The paper bride” “The paper suicide”
During her final year of high school, Sousveillance Pageant read a history report that cited the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev replying to criticism from Mao Zedong during the era of the Sino-Soviet split with the pointed comment: "The paper tiger has nuclear teeth."
You best believe it.
Meaning, you best perceive that the gun for which it reaches
will be issued of steel and not carved of wood.
You best never underestimate the force of negation nor of hate.
And so, it was with great admiration and no small relief that Sousveillance began to read the first volume of Emma Goldman’s autobiography, wherein Goldman notes: “The mere fact that these forces are legalized by state statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power in no way justifies their continued existence.”
Damn, how Sousveillance had loved that “mere.”
Had loved its insistent adherence to everything from laws to religious norms to social codifications to the sanctioned violence of the entire nation state. But she couldn’t always occupy it. How to live there, she wondered, in that confident declaration of the smallness of all those brutal things. Especially when they loomed so huge.
The mere fact that the world’s 62 richest billionaires currently possessed as much
wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population, consisting of 3.5 billion people.
The mere fact of the Eastern Garbage Patch, a slowly rotating mass of trash-laden water
about twice the size of Texas, forming part of a system of currents referred to
as the North Pacific subtropical gyre.
The mere fact of multiple millennia of white supremacist misogyny persistently pressing
onto the lungs and tongues and ribcages of herself and far too many others.
“There is something that facts lack,” says the poet Anne Carson.
“Overtakelessness,” Carson adds, “is a word told me by a philosopher once:
das Unumgängliche – that which cannot be got around. Cannot be avoided
or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts –
it remains beyond them.”
As a reader, Sousveillance Pageant didn’t want to nitpick,
and yet she found engulfed in the question:
“But just what, dear Carson, is this it?”
A few facts which Sousveillance Pageant was personally and keenly aware of:
Most prison systems do not restrict hair length. Of those that do, most restrict hair length only for people incarcerated as men.
Most prison systems do not restrict the wearing of clean, regulation-issue, white boxers.
To the contrary, many prison systems require and enforce their use. Of those that do, most restrict the wearing of boxers only for people incarcerated as women.
Most prison systems do not restrict religious worship. Of those that do, most restrict religious worship only for people who identify as Muslim or Voodoo or who pursue traditional Afrikan spiritual practices.
Most prison systems do not restrict access to legal materials. Of those that do, most restrict access to legal materials only for people who are actively filing grievances or lawsuits directly against the state and/or the specific employees of the prison facility in which they are incarcerated.
Most prison systems do not restrict reading materials. But please, let’s be clear, this sentence is a pile of shit. Of course, they do, especially depending on who you, a person so confined, are.
A hair length restriction was imposed on Chelsea Manning. A reading materials restriction was imposed on Chelsea Manning. A legal access restriction was imposed on Chelsea Manning. Chelsea Manning was charged with violations on the basis of prohibited items that other prisoners in adjacent cells all retained without problem or reprimand.
In a letter to journalist Kevin Gosztola, Chelsea Manning writes:
What most disturbs me is the passive aggressive nature of the officials who do these things. They do them in a very specific way to make it difficult for us to defend against. For instance, instead of just confiscating the books because of their content, and admitting it, they find a broad rule that has nothing to do with anything and use that to justify their actions. It’s obvious but harder to fight back because they stack the deck. They had three investigators do my charges, three! I would have to hire a professional auditor to go through every item in my cell and learn every rule and interpretation of their rules to be able to defend against these kinds of charges. Unfortunately (fortunately for them), that would be against the rules.
Unfortunately (fortunately for them), that would be imprudent conduct
punishable by duct tape and every available means of reaming.
It would be unseemly to consider resisting.
In a different census tract of the northern east coast, a divisive $2 million bounty was imposed on Assata Shakur: $1 million of which was provided via the FBI, then amplified by another $1 million in “matching funds” from the state of New Jersey. A status of “America’s most wanted terrorist” was placed on Assata Shakur, some four decades after the occasion of any “criminal” event associated with her name. One of the main “criminal” events associated with Shakur’s name, and the one most viciously declaimed by the ruling state, is “escaping.”
Assata Shakur was designated subject to a rarely invoked 1904 Extradition Agreement between the U.S. and Cuba (the location to which she fled). Shakur was publicly denounced with the rejoinder that “no person is above the law,” pronounced by hundreds of political figures and police authorities whose systematic acts of retributive cruelty were alternately made possible only by their own status of being, for all intents and purposes, “above the law.”
In an interview with Meg Starr and Matt Meyers, Assata Shakur comments:
Can we deal with a reality where those who are victimized by the government are going to have to go to the government files to prove that the government victimized them? And when that same government, through the Freedom of Information Act, sends blank pages, half or three-quarters of all of the pages blank, now how can you prove – how can political prisoners be forced to prove their innocence?
We can all sense the problem, the conundrum, that resides in trying to drum up
“proper” evidence to countenance one’s dissent within such an environment.
How the sheer blankness of the state’s sanctioned pages exclude and chide
the viewer with their densely populated silences.
It is not after all an unusual phenomenon. A person’s body is intercepted, filtered, implicated, repo’ed. A person’s body is forcibly under-configured or over-exposed in order to service the larger political milieu and trans-institutional delusions of the given historical moment. A person’s body is no longer a person’s body, or it is certainly no longer only that. And what of that?
What of that for that person and what of that for that society?
To adopt the words of poet/theorist NS, just how often
is our experience of representation, of identity,
“what escapes us and from which we do not escape”?
For as people, we are each mobile and constantly changing.
However, the angle and framing of our public image all too frequently never ranges,
engaging in only the most unflattering and static of reprisals.
To ape the words of an overheard exchange whose contents Sousveillance Pageant had greedily ingested, but whose original location or source she can no longer recall:
SPEAKER A: Do you think it has come to save us?
SPEAKER B: Well, it is coming right at us.
The ubiquitous lens before which we bend in terror, deferring to the cynical but not unrealistic prediction that no pretenses for defense shall be allowed.
In 2011, a formidable number of Mugshot websites suddenly started popping up all over the internet. The images which the sites aggregated and then prominently redisplayed had ostensibly been available online for years, but it was only in the twelve months preceding that someone had pioneered how these materials could be engineered to generate substantial profits.
A spot-the-con-dot-com bonanza began
for vanguard company brands
like Busted Mugshots, Just Mugshots, and Criminal Pages.
Given the algorithmic nature of Google’s directive equations for web searches, these booking photos, when they existed, were among the very first items to be listed in relation to an individual’s name. They sailed to the top of every preferential scale, whether for relevance or popularity. And because of the overwhelming dominance of Google within the global search engines market, this became the de facto equivalent of first order knowledge.
The images themselves were simply artifacts from a single moment of apprehension.
They indicated an arrest but did not constitute proof of a conviction.
The “mere fact” of having learned that a person had been apprehended
could not be equated with an understanding of the overall events or circumstances.
To the contrary, it regularly obscured or prevented such an understanding.
The way that the majority of these websites commandeered their finances was actually not by posting the photos or from hosting ads in their near vicinity, but rather by charging a fee to have the images removed: a lien that could start at $30 and leap as high as $400 a pop. Pay up and the picture would be deleted, or at least recede from prominence on that single site.
Only to be electronically kited elsewhere,
where the prospects of blackmail would reassert themselves.
The traditional “paper offender” found him or herself upended,
in the contemporary wake of the “virtual felon”
the “virtual scofflaw”
the “virtual perpetrator”
An ethereal digital imprint of implied improprieties
that could nonetheless invite many tangible and painful material losses
of leases of government appeasements of student loan status
If you had asked the New York Times reporter David Segal, in 2013, about his newest batch of research gleanings, he would have testified that there were some 80 mugshot platforms sweeping up images from the sheriff’s websites of nearly every county in the country. Each one competing to multiply the proliferation and accessibility of “criminal portraits” ever higher, in order to better monetize their subsequent “disappearance.”
As questions about these businesses’ integrity mounted, several of them began to offer a “courtesy removal service” that granted “mercy deletions” in cases with extreme extenuating circumstances, provided the subject submitted both a written petition and voluminous testimonial evidence.
An additional booming cottage industry in the form of so-called “reputation management companies” emerged alongside, promising to minimize the online damage caused by others. Such purportedly “oppositional” companies frequently bore adversarial names (like RemoveSlander.com or RemoveMyMug.com) but often drew from the same entrepreneurial philosophies and, in some instances, shared a common executive officer.
In a newspaper article profiling the founder and director of JustMugshots (a site which at one point had some 17 million photos on file), Arthur D’Antonio III steadfastly refused to be photographed. “Better to keep a low profile,” the CEO said, adding that having his face duplicated online could “create problems.”
Extortion was one problem it might create.
Joblessness was another.
And social exile was a third.
As word spread, protests sprang up on the worldwide web and in offices across the nation demanding that Google change its algorithm. Various consumers pushed the major credit card companies to stop processing blackmail payments to dubious “innovators.” The advocates insisted that Google alone could do what no U.S. legislator could: demote the mugshot sites and thus reduce, if not eliminate, their power to stigmatize.
The public sided with this rising clamor for humanitarian deprioritizing,
petitioning for the relegation to irrelevancy to be seen as a measure of simple moral decency.
In October of 2013, the treasured Google algorithm was altered, and a new formula was introduced, dropping the abusive mugshot galleries way down the list of “hits” within your average web pitch. They weren’t eliminated, but the tendency of the everyday viewer to rarely look beyond the first page of “matches,” meant in practice that they may as well have been. It was a shift which cost Google nothing more than a little act of mathematical hijinks.
A wrinkle in the triggering of the mercy deletion
the mercy demotion
the mercy courtesy removal
the mercy swindle
Until the dwindling presence of the digital footprint became the internet equivalent to an act of pardon. And like all official pardons, it was dangled far more often than it was foundationally granted.
A candle bereft of its wick, if you will.
By the time the high-pitched trill that signaled midnight took flight from Nordie and Sous’s “Tree Frogs of the World” wall clock, the Pageant was overwhelmed by the urgent need to abandon any further contemplation of the Oracle’s earlier prophecy, and yet her mind kept circling back to it. Hers was a brain prone to protracted commitments, even when she intended or labored otherwise.
Sousveillance pried open the kitchen cabinet, sized up her tea collection, and turned on the kettle.
With a hot mint and nettle beverage freshly in hand, the Pageant reflected on the many things she had done in her own life that had resulted in demotion:
drinking on the job; talking out of turn; arriving repeatedly and inexcusably late to a day shift; selling or trading what wasn’t hers to sell or trade; sharing inappropriate materials with coworkers; demonstrating poor customer service skills; demonstrating poor personal hygiene skills; proving herself inattentive to critical, even vital, environmental details.
Sousveillance Pageant remembered a note she had been required to write home while in the 2nd grade:
Dear Mom,
Today during quiet time I laughed and played. And I disobeyed the teacher.
I got 16 warnings and I didn’t listen to the teacher when she pulled me aside.
I continued to giggle and play.
The Pageant recalled another occasion when she had been ordered to attend a mandatory work training on the operations of a new computer interface used to collect client data, held in a customized computer lab specially outfitted for group workshops. Sous had been horny and bored and frustrated at being there, all the more since her own occupational position scarcely included screen time, let alone data collection. The elderly trainer methodically demonstrated each step by projecting her own screen in huge dimensions onto a white board at the front of the room and encouraging people to follow her model by typing the appropriate data into their own portals.
Sousveillance Pageant had recently made a New Year’s goal of working to feel “young for her age” and thus she set about improving her experience by filling in each blank field with phrases like “Muffdiver” and “Punani Palace” and “Bad Bitches” and “Rug Munchers Expo,” gradually challenging herself to generate somewhat more esoteric terms like “Hirsute Queen” and “Home of the Steamy Whopper” and “Benevolent Top.” She found herself calling up a nascent cropping of bathroom graffiti terms that she hardly remembered reading, let alone memorizing.
However, what Sousveillance hadn’t realized was that the computer lab was designed so that a workshop leader could at any moment project the live screen not just of her own, but of any computer in the room to check for errors and to provide public examples of attendee’s efforts. As Sous’s handiwork was blown up, in massive proportions, before a broad audience of company stool pigeons with each formerly empty area filled in by a gradated minefield of crass to linguistically imaginative sexual innuendo, the Pageant knew she had fulfilled the “young for her age” criterion more completely than she had dared dream. She experienced a teetering and alienated sense of curiosity as to what would happen next.
The serif text of “Bearded Kitty” was discomfiting,
but also blissful in its newly unharnessed largeness.
What came barging into Sousveillance’s ever-spiraling mind now, as a loud accompaniment to all of these memories, was not nostalgia; it was the question of what it would mean to categorically deny each moment of shame and punishment both relevance and popularity.
Sousveillance Pageant didn’t come to her answer immediately.
To the contrary, she stewed on it for days and days.
But by the following Wednesday, she was ready. After everyone else had left the office, the Pageant stayed, laying the groundwork for a renegade test run of her freshest maneuver. The move’s optimal execution required not only a workplace environment, but a workplace outfit as well. Thus, upon ascertaining that all of the firm’s blinds were firmly closed, Sousveillance Pageant removed every stitch of her clothes and slowly constructed an “office bikini” for herself, assembled entirely from standard-issue, square, post-it notes printed in an array of highlighter tones. The result was a scanty, strapless number forged from roughly fourteen overlapping layers of the multi-colored adhesive paper. The rustling it produced in response to any movement of the shoulders or thighs was more than satisfactory.
Next, the Pageant set about detaching several of her workmate’s desk-chained pens, stringing them together in sequence via their baubled metal cords, crafting a surprisingly excellent chrome neck amulet that rested gently across her clavicle. And with this final decorative ornament, Sousveillance Pageant felt sartorially complete.
The practice that Sousveillance was preparing herself to engage in was something that she had decided to call “Algorithmic Bucking” or “AB” for short. To any viewer (of whom there were zero), AB could appear to be crude and anxious on the body, though for its practitioner it was very psychically soothing. In this regard, AB was less a single move or sequence and more a loosely choreographed dance consisting of an indefinite series of culturally prohibited or frowned upon gestures. Its opening gambit was a jubilant pantomime of imbibement, which required raising a line of fantasized bottles to one’s lips, to be quickly followed by the ecstatic pulsing of one’s pubic region at any visible cubicle divider in the nearby viewshed.
With a great deal of cinematic attention to her surrounding environs,
Sousveillance Pageant endeavored to rake her cuticles and insoles
against the gold-starred portion of the mounted hallway feltboard
that her workplace normally reserved only for acts of industry-caliber valor
or profit-calibrated obedience.
And it must be said that the way Sous raked was rather sensational.
For Sousveillance knew, as did every finely-attuned AB Manueverer, that this delicate art necessitated executing with passable aggression one action after another that society expected should be tender and understated. Further, it required that one sublimate the presentation of any forms of responsiveness that a person who is portrayed as socially courteous would almost certainly express.
At the close of her own algorithmic bucking episode, Sousveillance Pageant lay herself on the medium-plush, beige carpet of her manager’s office and jerked her cho-cho skyward while chanting the words “team player” and “corporate trust game” over and over and over.
The completely arrhythmic affect of Sousveillance Pageant’s pelvic thrusts was so far off kilter, so profoundly and iteratively unbalanced, that it demanded to be read as resistance rather than as defect. But it also effectively reveled in the realms of the unreadable. Indeed, Sousveillance Pageant’s performing body embraced humiliation so baldly and with such ferocity that the promise of shame’s removal could never be monetized. It was as if its practitioner, having surreptitiously sized up the prospects of demotion, had dismissively coaxed them into a randy unwashed cup, and could now be found slurping from said cup not only purposively, but with relish.
Throughout the majority of the Pageant’s algorithmic performance, she had been careful to ensure that every part of her person lay entirely outside of the visual lines of her workplace security cameras. But at the penultimate moment, for just one tiny second, she scooted her bottom across the carpeted floor and extended her left hip in such an exaggerated fashion that the fringed edges of her post-it note panties flicked deliciously within the leftmost edge of the camera’s frame.
She raised her ass high into the air
and then quickly and agilely curled her torso
away from the camera’s gaze.
“What is it,” the Pageant inquired with some amazement, “that I feel now?”
But her body was far too wired with post-gyration adrenals
to possibly deem to respond.
Endnotes
You can see some of the images that the women at Remann Hall produced with Steve Davis via their pinhole cameras at: https://prisonphotography.org/2009/06/03/pinhole-photography-of-incarcerated-girls-at-remann-hall-washington-state/
Emma Goldman’s observation that “The mere fact that these forces are legalized by state statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power in no way justifies their continued existence” is taken from her autobiography Living My Life, Volume 1, Dover Publications, 1970.
The statistic on global wealth distribution comes from “The 62 richest people have as much wealth as half the world” by Tami Luhby, CNN Money (New York). First published January 17, 2016: 7:02 PM ET. http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/17/news/economy/oxfam-wealth/
Anne Carson’s comments on the word/concept “overtakelessness” can be found in Nox, New Directions, 2010, unpaginated.
The contents of Chelsea Manning’s letter to journalist Kevin Gosztola were published online at Shadowproof, on Nov 3, 2015.
Assata Shakur’s response appears in “An Interview with Assata Shakur” conducted by Meg Starr and Matt Meyer, published in Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners, edited by Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Matt Meyer, PM Press, 2008.
Poet NS’s line “what escapes us and from which we do not escape” comes from Vigilous, Reel: Desire (a)s accusation by NS, Albion Books: San Francisco, 2010.
The fact that there were some 80 mugshot platforms sweeping up images from the sheriff’s websites of nearly every county in the country was reported by David Segal in “Mugged by a Mug Shot Online,” New York Times, October 5, 2013. Arthur D. Antonio III’s advice that it is “Better to keep a low profile” also comes from this same article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/mugged-by-a-mug-shot-online.html?_r=0
Emily Abendroth
Emily Abendroth is the author of the poetry collection ]Exclosures[ and The Instead, a book-length collaborative conversation with fiction writer Miranda Mellis. Her newest work Sousveillance Pageant – a hybrid text that coasts restlessly between the categories of poetry, novel, and nonfiction essay – will be published by Radiator Press in May 2021. She has also released chapbooks with Albion Press, Belladonna, Horseless Press, Little Red Leaves, and Zumbar. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, and was named a 2013 Pew Fellow in Poetry. She is a founding member of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration, as well as LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty.