Frames from the Life and Death of Jean Charles de Menezes

Abstract

This article is a theoretical enquiry about the death of the Brazilian citizen Jean Charles de Menezes, shot in London at
Stockwell tube station on 22 July 2005 by unknown specialist firearms’ officers. The previous day some stations of the Tube
were struck by failed bombing attacks. The police were chasing four suspects. Some hours after the murder, de Menezes was
discovered to be innocent and not involved in the terrorist act.

Full text

Frames from the life and death of Jean Charles de Menezes
Amos Bianchi, Denis J. Roio
2010
This article is a theoretical enquiry about the death of the Brazilian
citizen Jean Charles de Menezes, shot in London at Stockwell tube
station on 22 July 2005 by unknown specialist firearms’ officers. The
previous day some stations of the Tube were struck by failed bombing
attacks. The police were chasing four suspects. Some hours after the
murder, de Menezes was discovered to be innocent and not involved
in the terrorist act.
Keywords: apparatus, subjectivation, space, body, image, media,
false positive.
Contents
1 Premise 1
2 Apparatus 1
3 Desubjectivation 2
4 Space 2
5 Body 2
6 Imago 3
7 Media 3
8 False Positives (Addendum) 4
9 References 6
10 Contributors details 6
1 Premise
The process of subjectivation/desubjectivation is a very effective
method of analysis for the contemporary world, which we’ll adopt in
this paper.
This method enables one to put the processes of intentional subjec-
tivation/desubjectivation in a system of semantic apparatuses in order
to investigate – retrospectively – if there are entirely new processes of
subjectivity at work. Or, in other words: how, on 22 July 2005, were
the contemporary, hyper- mediatic and hyper-technologic governmen-
tal control apparatuses able to reduce de Menezes’ identity to his bare
life? Seven keywords will suggest a partial, not-exhaustive answer.
2 Apparatus
This research is underpinned by the concept of apparatus, outlined by
Michel Foucault as follows
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[it] is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consist-
ing of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regula-
tory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific state-
ments, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions –
in short, the said as much as the unsaid. . . . Secondly, what I
am trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature
of the connection that can exist between these heterogenous
elements. . . Thirdly, I understand by the term ‘apparatus’
a sort of – shall we say – formation which has as its major
function at a given historical moment that of responding to
an urgent need. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic
function. (Foucault 2001, 299-300)
Foucault’s concern was to understand how the subject and object
position themselves and give shape to experience by the process of
subjectivation: ‘C’est . . . le sujet, qui constitue le thème général
de mes recherces’. (Foucault 2001, 1042). The history of humanity
concerns the ways in which the human race has thus created the fields
of objectification, and, in this way, has created itself as subject.
3 Desubjectivation
From a perusal of Foucault, Agamben derives a further strand: the
division of everything into two macro-categories: living beings and
the apparatus (the historical element). In the following passage the
two macro-categories are merged together to create the concept of
subjectivity: ‘The apparatus is, above all, a machine that produces
subjectivity because it is also a machine of government’. (Agamben
2006: 29). But, in another step, the Italian writer allies government
apparatus with the most powerful catalyst of apparatuses of the con-
temporary era, capitalism: ‘In the present phase of capitalism, an
apparatus does not operate through the construction of a subject, but
through the processes of desubjectivation’. (Agamben 2006: 30) And
later:
What is happening now is that the processes of subjectivation
and the processes of desubjectivation seem to have become
reciprocally indifferent and do not give rise to the reconstruc-
tion of a new subject, if not in a phantom form and, so to
speak, spectral. In the non-truth of the subject, there is no
truth in any form. (Agamben 2006: 30-31)
In order to identify processes of desubjectivation, and what they
consist of, it is necessary to verify in what ways capitalism reveals its
apparatus.
Figure 1: A CCTV still showing Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube
station - Photo: PNS
4 Space
From Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, paragraph 169:
The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has evolved
its own special technique for molding the very territory that
constitutes the material underpinning for all the facets of
this project. Urbanism – ‘city planning’ – is capitalism’s
method for taking over the natural and human environment.
Following its logical development toward total domination,
capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space
into its own particular décor. (Debord 2002, 45)
The city is the proper place for the murder of de Menezes, and a
key concept to understand it. Urbanism, city planning, urban space
management: by this element of total domination, capitalism takes
possession of the space to build its own scenario. City becomes the
ideal stage on which capitalism displays its power. But if the city has
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become the stage of capitalism, the question is: what is performed on
it? And what instruments are working?
5 Body
In this scenario of a city the body itself is subjected to a radical trans-
formation, as Agamben states in another writing
the process of technologization, instead of materially invest-
ing the body, was aimed at the construction of a separate
sphere that had practically no point of contact with it: What
was technologized was not the body, but its image.. . To ap-
propriate the historic transformations of human nature that
capitalism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link together
image and body in a space where they can no longer be
separated, and thus to forge the whatever body, whose ´
is resemblance – this is the good that humanity must learn
now to wrest from commodities in their decline. Advertising
and pornography, which escort the commodity to the grave
like hired mourners, are the unknowing midwives of this new
body of humanity. (Agamben 1993: 50)
The world suggested by Agamben is a divided world, in which the
apparatus of subjectivation (including capitalism) works on the iden-
tity of humans until, according to Debord, they become pure image
and, ultimately, their bodies conceived as residual. If the liberal gover-
namentality, theorized by Foucault, still requires the physical existence
of the human beings, do the contemporary dataflows and databases
open the possibility to the emergence of a new kind of governamental-
ity, by which the relations of power can leave aside the material bodies,
the flesh? Or could the present ‘whatever singularity’ be linked to the
double-binded practice of the ‘just do it’, whose fake and faible dis-
embodied communities are global-scale figures, compulsively clicking
the button “Add to the basket” in order to buy the spectral image of
themselves?
If the body is residual and reduced to pure spectacle, then the ex-
terior image of the human being is the one that survives during the
formation of the identity of the individual; and what happens within
the space of the city is that the spectacle forges new human identities,
reduced to exterior images by its technological apparatus.
Figure 2: The surveillance officer codenamed Ivor is filmed on CCTV fol-
lowing Jean Charles de Menezes (’JC’) towards the Tube platform
6 Imago
Imago is the Latin word for image (italian: “immagine”; french: “im-
age”). It has the common meaning of image, but its etymology is
interesting: ‘imago’ was the mortuary mask, made with wax, that was
fixed on the face of dead men to reproduce human shapes during an-
cient pagan rites. Therefore image is, ab origine, related to death; it
should be said that image returns to presence after death: it is the
representation of an absence. As Agamben outlines
the absurdity of individual existence, inherited from the sub-
base of nihilism, has become in the meantime so senseless
that it has lost all pathos and been transformed, brought
out into the open, into an everyday exhibition: Nothing re-
sembles the life of this new humanity more than advertising
footage from which every trace of the advertised product has
been wiped out. . . The fact is that the senselessness of their
existence runs up against a final absurdity, against which all
advertising runs around: death itself. In death the petty
bourgeois confront the ultimate expropriation, the ultimate
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frustration of individuality: life in all its nakedness, the pure
incommunicable, where their shame can finally rest in peace.
Thus they use death to cover the secret that they must resign
themselves to acknowledging: that even life in its nakedness
is, in truth, improper and purely exterior to them, that for
them there is no shelter on earth. (Agamben 1993: 64-65)
The footage of de Menezes is advertising footage from which every
trace of the advertised product has been wiped out. The division of
his individuality into two poles, pure image (subjected to the CCTV
control) and bare life, ultimately cancels out his life.
Figure 3: the face shown on the ID of de Menezes is aired on media cut
in half, besides that of a known terrorist, to demonstrate their
resemblance
7 Media
In Medienkultur (Flusser 1997), Vilèm Flusser theorizes that writing
has been the act detaching man from magic and opening doors to sci-
ence. In a further step, he underlines that the modern era is living
through a new transition in which contemporary techno-codes move
humanity away from texts, because they transform concepts into im-
ages. Flusser’s discourse is about photography, which, in this sense,
is not the representation of a situation, but the representation of a
series of concepts elaborated by the photographer in relation to a situ-
ation. The imagination of the photographer is mediated by a series of
texts, by which it can exist as techno-image. The conversion of texts
in techno-images generates a crisis, because the text has to mediate
the techno-image without being a programme anymore.
CCTV technology mainly exasperates this condition of absence of
control. The apparatus generating techno-images supplies the text,
allowing them to be used. CCTV itself is a powerful apparatus of
control.
We might ask: if photography is the image of a series of concepts
owned by the photographer in relation to a situation, what is the role
of a ‘CCTV photographer’ if the scene shown is the whole world, a
singular situation is all the situations, and a single concept is all the
concepts? In this context the human being, both at the beginning
and at the end of each apparatus, who tries to live in a condition of
homeostasis, cannot do anything to control his creation.
Figure 4: The murder scene July 22, 2005
The apparatus of control becomes apparatus out of control. The
text that gives birth to the apparatus remains in the background, as
ideology, and the will to panopticon becomes absence of vision.
It follows that the image of human being, transformed into techno-
image, is incommunicable, and what remains is just his bare life, for
which there is no shelter on earth, as Debord stated:
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a
common stream in which the unity of life can no longer be
recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves
into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be
looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves
into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers
are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an
autonomous movement of the nonliving. (Debord 2002: 6)
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8 False Positives (Addendum)
In 2008 the Guardian UK reports plans of MI5, The Security Service
of Great Britain, to datamine information out of public transporta-
tion: all the information about private traffic flow in England is made
available for computational analysis conducted by law enforcement
agencies in order to find out hints about terrorist activities.
This might seem just a quantitative change in terms of information
processed, but what really happens in this case is that the power of the
apparatus increases qualitatively: from a situation where, in obtaining
private data about a specific citizen, is necessary a legal mandate is-
sued by a judge (or by extraordinary anti-terrorism regulations), to a
situation where the whole data about every citizen moving with pub-
lic transport across a city is automatically examined by national law
enforcement apparata. Such a large pool of generic information is not
only available for immediate consultation when needed, but constitutes
a flow of real life samples which can be constantly analysed in search
for deviance patterns and relationships to suspicious individuals.
Figure 5: Brucker-Cohen, POLICESTATE (2003)
The scenario opened by this qualitative change transforms the ap-
paratus in a high speed mechanism that, consequently, also leads to a
quantitative change in the order of several magnitudes. At the origin
of the new inquiries conducted by the security devices investigating
reality are not humans anymore, but computer algorithms synthesis-
ing vast amounts of information on human behaviours whose results
are eventually reviewed by humans.
In mathematics the errors grow exponentially when we increase the
number of dimensions. The standard mean error formula resumes this
concept:
SEx=s
√n(1)
While contemporary security research emphasizes on automatic pat-
tern recognition in human behaviour, in a close future mass-analysis
can be exercised on the totality of data available; relational networks
around suspicious nodes will then be traced through evaluations that
will multiply suspicion at a speed that was never seen before.
Illustrative analogies are offered by analysts of the socio-economic
meltdown, a contemporary condition that offers vast case scenarios
on the total commodification operated by financial algorithms: its
causes are popularly ascribed to the financialization (Marazzi 2010) of
global economies, while phenomenons described as computationalism
(Golumbia 2009) and informationalism start to acquire importance,
helping further comprehension. As Hakken recently stated:
Notions like “the wisdom of crowds” (Suroweicki 2004) are
virtually pure statements of informationalism. In its naive
presumption that, as more information is added to the model
– that is, the more computable it becomes – its accuracy
tends to increase, informationalism becomes an aspect of
computationalism. In short, reliance on prestigious, informa-
tion filled, but systematicity presuming and therefore blind
to systemic crisis, and thus deeply flawed, computationalist
computing also caused the crisis. In this way, the models
contained too much information, on the one hand, while ig-
noring crucial information (i.e., regarding systemic risk) on
the other, because it was not easily quantified. (Hakken 2010)
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Algorithmic models fail to incorporate the risks of systemic failure:
they presume systematicity, being generally incapable of incorporating
“black swan/long tail” risks, like that of general failure.
Let us conclude with what Richard Stallman, a popular developer
and independent thinker on civil liberties, responded to our article: he
provided this quote of Chögyam Trungpa from Tibet (with foreword
by Marco Pallis):
It is not only such obvious means of intimidation as machine
guns and concentration camps that count; such a petty prod-
uct of the printing press as an identity card, by making it easy
for the authorities to keep constant watch on everybody’s
movements, represents in the long run a more effective curb
on liberty. In Tibet, for instance, the introduction of such
a system by the Chinese Communists, following the abortive
rising of 1959, and its application to food rationing has been
one of the principal means of keeping the whole population
in subjection and compelling them to do the work decreed by
their foreign overlords.
9 References
•Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Theory Out
of Bounds, Volume 1. University of Minnesota Press
•Agamben, Giorgio. 2006. Che cos’è un dispositivo? /. not-
tetempo + Debord, Guy. 2002. /The Society of the Spectacle.
Treason Press
•Flusser, Vilèm. 1997. Medienkultur. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag
•Hakken, David. 2010. Computing and the Current Crisis.
TripleC
•Guardian UK. 16 March 2008. MI5 seeks powers to trawl records
in new terror hunt.
•http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes
•http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7038430.stm
•http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7073125.stm
•http://www.stockwellinquest.org.uk/
•http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article556227.ece
•http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/menezes
•http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/16/uksecurity.terrorism
10 Contributors details
Amos Bianchi (1975) is coordinator of postgraduate programmes at
NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano, www.naba.it). At
the same institution, he has been Assistant Professor of Theory and
Method of Mass Media, and he is currently Lecturer of Research Meth-
ods. He is a Ph.D. researcher of the University of Plymouth, Planetary
Collegium, at the M-Node, based in Milan.
Denis Roio aka Jaromil (1977) operates in research and development
activities at NIMk in Amsterdam (Nederlands Instituut voor Medi-
akunst, www.nimk.nl). He is a software developer and artist, board
member of Dyne.org and of the Free Culture Forum, Ph.D. candidate
of the University of Plymouth (Planetary Collegium, M-Node), in 2009
and together with researcher Brian Holmes he was honoured with the
Vilém Flusser Award.
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