Media, Surveillance and Affect

Narrating Feeling-States

Nicole Falkenhayner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138609433
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429880773
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Surveillance has become a part of everyday life: we are surrounded by surveillance technologies in news media, when we go down the street, in the movies, and even carry them in our own pockets in the form of smartphones. How are we constructing imaginaries of our realities and of ourselves as living in structures of control? What affects, emotions and feelings do we develop in societies of control, and how do we narrate them?

Media, Surveillance and Affect represents a big step in revealing the depth of the entanglement of surveillance technology not only with our everyday lives, but with our imaginaries and affective experiences. Combining insights from affect studies with narratological and visual cultural studies approaches, the case studies in this book focus on how surveillance cameras and surveillance camera images have been used to narrate affective stories of Great Britain. Cases discussed include the memory work surrounding the murder of James Bulger in 1993 and of Lee Rigby in 2011, but also novels and artworks.

With a multidisciplinary approach Media, Surveillance and Affect will appeal to students, scholars and specialists interested in fields such as media and cultural studies, literary studies, cultural sociology and surveillance studies.

1 Affecting frames

Factual narrative in the ‘zone of mutual mass surveillance’

The news values of CCTV narrations

How does the employment of surveillance images in multimodal news stories create public meaning? This question is connected to the question of news value – which incidents become events, which stories ‘make it’ to the news. While news value research has a long tradition concerning the question of what becomes news, a discourse analytical approach using a social semiotic methodology has recently been proposed by Bednarek and Caple.¹ They discuss how certain represented incidents become news. The innovative point of their argument is that the visual and verbal elements of news stories combine to construct news value and, accordingly, have to be analysed in conjunction, leading to a stronger focus on the visual properties of news stories than is usually applied in discourse analyses of news stories. I wish to add that emotionality and affect evocation are important components of the discursive construction of news value and are closely connected to the conjunction of verbal and visual properties of news stories. CCTV images are connected to these aspects in specific ways, as the analysis below will show, because they entail certain narrative conventions both in content and in their representation in image-form. As Caple and Bednarek observe:

News values can be seen as discursively constructed, and newsworthiness becomes a quality of texts.… By ‘discourse’ we mean the semiotic resources (language, image, typography, layout, sound, etc.) that are deployed in the construction of texts. By ‘texts’, we mean any text that plays a role in the news process, such as verbal and visual input material, newsroom discussions, interviews, press releases and so on.²

The connection between a set of news values and the specific technical aspects of images that Caple and Bednarek have established can serve as an entry point to the dynamic construction of narratives out of or in close connection to images. The authors identify and define ten news values, several of which, I argue, afford affect and emotionality. This is especially true of the following news values:

Negativity (the negative aspect of an event or issue)

Proximity (the geographical or cultural nearness of an event or issue)

Superlativeness (the large scope or scale of an event or issue)

Impact (the high significance of an event or issue in terms of its effects/ consequences)

Novelty (the new and/or unexpected aspects of an event or issue)

Personalisation (the personal or ‘human’ face of an event or issue, including eyewitness reports)

Consonance (the stereotypical aspects of an event or issue; adherence to expectations)³

All of these news values, I argue, through their construction afford emotional reactions in the decoding process.

Caple and Bednarek connect a specific combination of image content and camera technique to each of their news value categories. For example, one feature that contributes to the construction of Personalization is a close-up shot of an individual’s face. This can also be connected with a certain emotionality or affect evocation that the image performs: the observer is put into a closer relationship with the image’s subject, which might evoke stronger feelings of sympathy or revulsion than a non-close-up shot. Caple and Bednarek’s ‘toolbox’ for reading the news value of multimodal news texts can thus usefully be employed to point to the affective framing of CCTV images in news texts. The two news values that CCTV images, as stills (and disregarding for now accompanying verbal text) are most often connected with, if we follow the sociological literature on the topic, are Negativity and Consonance. The ‘discursive footprint’ of surveillance camera images is located in the social field of policing and, therefore, crime. Negative news in the sense of the reporting of crime is what one commonly expects from a story illustrated with CCTV images because they are used for the visualization of crimes and the singling out of perpetrators who have features that conform to commonly held notions of the stereotypical criminal.

Discourse linguists associate the following possible technical visual aspects with the news value of Negativity: ‘High camera angle, putting viewer in dominant position (often used with photographs of minors or offenders/prisoners of war)’.⁴ In the same paragraph, Caple and Bednarek also connect the blurring of an image with expressing an unstable situation. The CCTV images that are shown in public media, even though their resolution is steadily improving, are often blurry, either because they have been taken by older cameras or because the image had to be greatly enlarged to show the newsworthy event or person. Thus, CCTV images are conducive to expressing an unstable situation or evoking instability. CCTV cameras are commonly installed rather high above the ground. In open spaces we find them mounted on poles or on the walls of buildings, while indoors we find them as orb cameras on ceilings or high up in the corners of rooms. Thus, CCTV images nearly always represent their content from a high angle, making the person(s) in the image look small and putting the viewer in a dominant position. As the subjects of the images are often alleged perpetrators, this formal aspect of the image engenders the impulse to distance oneself from people and make them ‘other’ people seen on CCTV and evokes an associated desire to see the perpetrators punished.

The CCTV image may increase the emotion of contempt in a receiver reading the accompanying text of the news story if he or she learns that here we see a murderer or molester. On the other hand, when victims are shown on the CCTV image in the news, especially children who have become victims of crimes, the high angle may provoke an impulse of caring and feelings of frustration at being unable to help, leading to an experience of grief and pity when processing the story. The strong emotional charge of Negativity in CCTV news texts can also contribute to raising the Impact that is constructed around a story. The news value of Consonance can be connected with CCTV images, as they have become stereotypical image material in news stories that deal with street crime, robbery, youth deviance, and other kinds of violence connected with public and commercial spaces.

Emotionally charged images enhance the dynamics of the different news values of a news item to increase its news ‘capital’ in public discourse. We can infer a couple of typical affective affordances of CCTV images in public media that echo, on a visual level, the sociopolitical content for which they are most often employed. Again, the specificity of the image-form is co-constitutive of the kind of narrative that we are presented with. CCTV images can carry both evidential and social meaning in remediations of CCTV footage after an event. Still shots depict moments frozen in time, while video footage has a more temporal depth and reveals the thorough saturation of certain public spaces with camera systems simply through the technical possibility of constructing a silent narrative of incidents using the footage stitched together from the number of existing monitoring devices. Nevertheless, even via the temporal cut induced by the use of single frames only, CCTV images can evoke narrations of the events with which they are connected and for which they may even become iconic. They become embedded in narrative texts and carry their own generic conventions into the genre of news narratives, ultimately becoming part of public discourse.

An event requires narration to reach the level of communicability that enables it and its mediations to enter into the economy of social representations.⁵ When this occurs, the narration is tantamount to an interpretation of the event in question as well as a construction of the event as a part of social reality. Factual narrations, of which television news stories can be seen as a prime example, often work according to a post hoc, ergo propter hoc principle and are supposed to create plausibility.⁶ These narrations work to help us construct a collective sense of a middle range, as they make it possible for us to integrate new events into our lifeworlds. Factual narratives construct a locatability in time and space and connect incidents with what happened before or alongside them, thus creating a ‘false’ causality. Even if they are grounded on a logical fallacy, in cultural practice they help us construct identity and history. CCTV frames of actors taken prior to a newsworthy incident make possible a narrative reconstruction of an event in hindsight by displaying and creating a ‘before’ of the event in question. They can also visually ‘present’ the event itself or the actors connected to it. The impact they can create is due to the convention of accepting surveillance footage as a prime medium of evidence.

In the realm of factual narration, the CCTV frame acts first and foremost as an evidential medium, as a marker of factuality concerning an event. The creation of an event out of an occurrence entails the will and power to amass meaning around such an occurrence. In late capitalist societies, this means an accumulation of meaning that is constituted through the channels and genres of various forms of mass media. As Marie-Laure Ryan has argued, this question of media genres entails the idea that the information passed through various channels of meaning-making does not reach us independently of the genre in which it is first encoded and then, by the audience, decoded.⁷ The form in which a story reaches us triggers the habitual expectations we connect with the conventions of the given genre:

This amounts to saying that different media filter different aspects of narrative meaning. Far from being completely undone at the end of the journey, … the shape imposed on the message by the configuration affects in a crucial way the construction of the receiver’s mental image.⁸

In this communicative network, where a ‘message’ is shaped, or even comes into being, via the properties of the ‘pipeline’, meaning the channel through which the encoded message is received, the CCTV frame has brought forward a special kind of sub-genre of the news genre. The following example illustrates that the modes of presentation of surveillance camera footage are still largely connected to how these conventions developed in the 1990s. While the video surveillance aesthetic has gradually lost its novelty as we have become accustomed to it and its use has become conventional, it nevertheless continues to inform our expectations of events and stories when their representation involves surveillance video footage.

The following case study is concerned with how the surveillance image is employed in British news texts and, in the process, becomes a co-constructing element of public emotions. As Amy Siciliano has suggested, when we regard surveillance camera images as ‘agents of mediation’, new interpretations of their cultural import become visible:

CCTV systems, as we know, are a means of surveillance. But they are also agents of mediation. Rather than a neutral recording device designed to enhance ‘community safety’, they have the capacity to reify human relations so that they appear as relationships between things. In doing so they produce representations of ‘events’ to be viewed, interpreted, acted upon.⁹

But maybe even more than bringing about an observation of events to be acted upon, CCTV images present us with events that should have been acted upon but were not. The visualization of crimes transmits the illusion of agency while, simultaneously, confronting the recipient with her helplessness in the face of such events. The possible shock value of these images needs to be toned down in hindsight, when the images are recuperated by the mainstream communication media and enveloped in the calming narrative of a news commentator explaining to us the apparently random scene of violence and assuring us that the perpetrator has been captured or is under investigation. Potentially shocking footage that co-constructs an interpretation of events as ‘immoral’ and ‘senseless’ violence needs to be tamed by the narrative the news commentary provides. The Negativity value of a surveillance camera news story – a crime, for example – is thus connected to the news value of Consonance, which imbues the image-form with a certain stereotype of groups of people and actions that are expected from the order-keeping institutions.

As Winfried Pauleit remarked, the technology of the surveillance camera image is located in a context of crime, in which the images take on a distinctive connection to temporality:

Their power remains limited, and only comes into play when actual images of offenders are stored in the cultural memory. For this reason, the second function is needed: that of technical recording that leads to the detection and conviction of criminals. This function only takes effect in the future. The gaze of the surveillance camera does not belong to the present; it builds on a future in which it already belongs to the past.¹⁰

This specific temporality of the CCTV image connects it deeply with what Richard Grusin has called the age of ‘premediation’.¹¹ It is an image-form that premediates its own future as past – because only in this premediated past of the image does it become relevant. In this specific temporality of the surveillanc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: feeling-states under surveillance
• 1 Affecting frames: factual narrative in the ‘zone of mutual mass surveillance’
• 2 Foreshadows: CCTV and social memory
• 3 Being captured: tools of surveillance as tools of fictional becoming
• 4 CCTV art: playing with surveillance actor-networks
• Conclusion: surveillance as an ‘affective arrangement’ of contemporary lifeworlds
• Index