Chapter 2 Performative Black Protest and the Discursive Place of Photography

The images' work in activist and political efforts is founded on their constitution as discursive places of photography. The picture inherits the political character of the space of protest and aides the visual activism of the Movement for Black Lives. Imagine holding a freshly developed Polaroid picture of the protests in your hand. Say, it depicts a scene comparable to Lam's image of the burning street (see figure 1), or something of the like. Since it is a Polaroid - the image of which has just materialized - it is safe to assume that you are present in the protest, now seeing two versions of the scene in front of you: one in real life, the fire's heat still perceptible on your skin; the other one as the material image in your hand. The taking of the photograph has turned the scene into an object, whose significance, depiction, and political potential is open for debate. Given the camera's work and the photographer's eye, it is likely that you discern details in the image that you were not aware of in the scene itself. In the photograph of the man in front of the flames, for example, you might now identify the wooden structure he is sitting on as a transport pallet, the reflective surface leaning on this structure as a metal sheet, when your gaze was caught on the man's expression beforehand. Depending on what the image shows, the original setting might have already changed, rendering the photograph a real-time document of a specific moment in time. The image is a material, haptic, and localized rendition of the events that compiles the things happening in front of you onto its surface. In its affective depiction of the scene, the space of protest is rendered tangible in relation to other positions and images.

Within the photograph, the significance of individual elements might shift. The meaning of an object you had seen before might become apparent or insignificant. You might, for instance, reexamine the connection between the two written statements in Lam's image - "kill cops" and "Black Lives Matter" - as more or less important than imagined, as revealing more or less of the movement's background than anticipated. Not least, the picture has become something you can take away from the protests, show to others, and use as a discussion starter to engage in conversations about the matter of Black lives, the legitimacy of protests, or the frames of recognition addressed in the movement's photographs and protests. It transports the political scene to different locations of debate, changing both the representation of the protests and the political fields of appearance and recognition. In its political constitution, the image becomes an agent of protest.

I have chosen to start the second chapter with this odd imaginary Polaroid to contemplate the theoretical position of photographs in protests. In a sense, (be)holding this image becomes a political act that discloses our own position as well as the political dimensions of the photograph's visual aesthetic presentation. Something has changed in the discursive constitution of the scene the moment the image has been taken. The metaphorical Polaroid, at this very moment, simultaneously presents us with both the scene on the street and its photographic rendition. It reveals the difference in the two locations, transposing the discursive space of the street, whose political composition is established in the "space of appearance" as well as in the performative dimensions of protest (Arendt; Butler, resp.), into the discursive place of the photograph that, like the visual activism addressed later, operates in changing the sensible distribution of the perceptible, read as a supposedly common experienced and perceived order of things (Rancière). The representation of the scene in the photographic image, whether as Polaroid, printout, or digital copy on a screen, forms a discursive place that articulates its specific place identity. It signifies in relation to other places - local, photographic, or discursive. The discourse formed in and between the photographs thus contemplates the political connections and civil ties of the images and, in attending to their excesses, addresses those sociopolitical ties debated within the larger movement for Black liberation. This is, I argue in this chapter, the political aesthetic function of the protest photograph on which its visual activist work rests. In taking the image it is no longer the protest alone that matters but the photograph's signification and capacity to disseminate information and unsettle the seen. The people seen in the images similarly change their behavior, posing in the awareness of being photographed.

The work of assuming this discursive place encompasses attending to the excess of the image and the social and political ties that bind us to others. It revolves around paying attention to the civil and political connections between those portrayed and portraying (Azoulay), the vulnerability in life that creates precarity for some and security for others (Butler) as well as, here, the ontological negation (Sharpe) and fictional creation (Mbembe) of Blackness as bases for activist action. All of these dimensions speak through the images of the Black Lives Matter Movement and their visual actions. In advocating for the discursive place of the image, I return to Ariella Azoulay's concept of the event of photography. It apprehends photographic images according to their political functions and the civil engagement within an inherently political space. A photograph signifies in these discourses, as the interactions within the photographic event constitute a political field that enables the recognition of civil obligation (2012: 18; 51). The image thus, I contend, emerges as discursive place within the scene that organizes these spaces of political appearance into mobile loci of signification and sites of intention. Especially in regard to Hannah Arendt's "space of appearance" (1958: 199), this reading of civil action in photography links to an embodied and plural performativity in anti-precarity protests, theorized by Judith Butler in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. The performative act - the agency and action in appearance - , according to Butler, institutes acting bodies as a political field within the public sphere (2015: 70)1; political spaces such as these, I argue, are rendered apprehensible in the site of the image or, in the example here, the frame of the Polaroid. They reveal the ontological organization of times and spaces, visualize the dissensus between differing perceptions of the world, and present attempts at shifting frames that delineate the understandings of the matter of life. Employing the politics of aesthetics in carefully choreographed forms of visual activism, the movement's actions reflect the aesthetic breaks inherent in the (secondary) politics of aesthetics and a fundamental component of the Black aesthetics in the Black Radical Tradition.

By connecting these approaches to the politics of primary aesthetics and the inherently political "distribution of the sensible," postulated by philosopher Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004: 7), I intend to address those larger methodological questions of shifting frames and visualizing structures that are at stake in the Black Lives Matter Movement, its activist efforts, and the photographs' work within them. Toward this end, this chapter establishes a theory of visual activism that is connected to debates on Blackness and theorizes the Black Lives Matter protests as distinctly visual, aesthetic, and performative demonstrations, advocating for antiracism and anti-precarity. It will examine how these dimensions of visual actions on the street feed into the discursive place of photography, establishing the image as virtual place of debate. In sum, it addresses the questions of what happens when people gather on the street to protest their exclusion from public spheres and social benefits? What happens when they use different modes and alternative visual displays to articulate their demands? And what in turn happens, when those scenes are turned into photographs, distributed and recognized as agents in the movement?

Starting by addressing the ontological topography of photography which differentiates between the political space of interaction and the relational and socially constitutive place of the image, this chapter contemplates the primary aesthetic politics of the discursive symbolism of street protest. By looking at images in terms of their connections to the relational matters of place and the political modes of aesthetics, it considers their political role, rendering them both tangible and viable in the discourses of the movement. The chapter concludes by linking the forms of visual activism thus established to traditions of Black aesthetics. This activism engages critically with and within the black representational space (English), the troubling stance of Blackness (Fleetwood), and the activism of the movement. Thus, this chapter will delineate the image's relation to place and define what I call the discursive place of the photograph. It describes the theories of primary aesthetics and dissensus as first instance of an aesthetic shift that is in itself becoming an intricate component of the movement's street activism. In combination with the politics of appearance and performativity, these institute the photographed scene as a political space that is arrested in the photographic site of protest....