O desassossego das imagens: políticas do sofrimento em redes digitais

Abstract

This thesis investigates the testimonial modes of suffering in contemporary times, based on the configuration of events in digital networks. It seeks to understand how suffering is produced and recognized, considering the testimonial and eventful character of this experience. The research privileges the analysis of images and adopts media processes as operators of intelligibility. A cartographic intuition guides the methodology, with the appropriation of notions found in the work of Walter Benjamin. The proposed cartography consists of three investigative sensibilities: flânerie, collection and constellation – respectively related to data collection, arrangement, and analysis. Cartography articulates four concepts: suffering, event, testimony/witness, and image. Suffering is understood in its social and embodied dimension, with attention to its forms of unequal distribution. The event is interpreted by its power of affectation, especially in the possibilities of emergence and reverberation in the context of digital networks. Testimony, as a means of elaboration and access to suffering, is considered in its media dimension, proposing an expansion of the notion of witness. The image is considered in its agentive aspect, that is, from what the image can do. In this case, the idea of a testimonial image is elaborated. In the conceptual relationship, there is the proposal to reflect on testimonial images of suffering whose operative capacity makes cyber-events emerge. From the collected material, three empirical cases were chosen for analysis: a video produced by a teenager who suffered cyberbullying and sexual extortion; a video of a torture session and transfemicide, produced by the aggressors and a video of lethal police violence broadcast live on Facebook. The research identifies the link between contemporary testimonial statutes and appropriations of media practices. In this scenario, witness acts are increasingly constituted as an image, revealing other sensitive conditions of relationship with suffering and violence. The existence of these testimonial images reveals ways found by actors to inhabit the worlds of digital networks, even if these are often hostile spaces. Although this aspect is fundamental to think about the constitution of emotional communities from the bonds of solidarity and support in a network, one cannot ignore the socio-technical and political mediations of digital platforms, whose norms guarantee the permanence or exclusion of content. These norms tend to affect bodies and subjectivities deprived of dignity policies and prohibited from moving in the world.