Death on Repeat: The Violent Image in the Age of Digital Reproduction

• In Event: Violence and Security Assemblages in Urban Environments

Abstract

This paper reexamines Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1937) to analyze the circulation of violent social media imagery created within marginalized communities. Benjamin argues that imitation, copying, and sharing cause a work of art to transcend the singularity of an event and an artist's original intentions. Activist in Brazilian favelas (shantytowns) follow similar rules of reproduction, where the sharing of violent images over digital platforms becomes socially transformative while what these images symbolize shifts over time and space. Violent images recorded by residents and shared online shape the meaning of life and death in the favela, foster new forms of social capital, and create a sense of solidarity within and between marginalized communities. To illustrate the way that digital reproduction influences social understandings in and of the favela, this paper provides an ethnographic account of the death of a moto-taxi driver and videos of the event that were reproduced hundreds of thousands of times over social media. The author tracks how meanings shift as the images of the moto-taxi driver’s death reached an international community of human right activists. Whereas favela residents saw the images as an indictment of local security policies and shifting social conditions in urban space, outside observers viewed the images as a symbol of more global forms of racial violence. Reflecting on Benjamin’s concept of mechanical reproduction, this paper interrogates a universalizing discourse of social media activism and argues for a more localized understanding of digital imagery.

Author

• Jason Scott, University of Colorado-Boulder