Means Available

To paraphrase Aristotle, rhetoric is the art of finding the available means for persuasion.

First, it is an art, suggesting that the practice and preparation of rhetoric cannot be reduced to scientific calculation and reproducibility.

Second, rhetoric concerns itself with seeking out 'available means' for persuasion, suggesting that, akin to kairos, persuasion is contingent upon the speaker, the audience, and the context.

All of these are moving targets, and the one that challenges maintaining a tidy framework for 'occasioning' rhetorical acts would be context.

To shorten and simplify the discussion, our current technologically mediated context provides routes to attain the means available for persuasion. Putting it simply, we live in a smart phone connected society. People spend a lot of their time in this society swiping at screens, checking feeds, and killing all of their interstitial time by perusing a scrolling display. This setting provides opportunities for clever and quick presentations of information, much of which is reduced to an image and maybe a caption.

Entering this context we have the display of state power, via police, through the dissemination of mugshots that are deemed by police and others' tastes to be remarkable and quite often laughable.

I offer these two pieces of evidence :

 Characterizations of these men aside, they got themselves in enough trouble to get arrested, booked, and have their likeness transformed into the legal evidence of a mugshot. Both men, to put it bluntly, have rather remarkable tattoos on their faces. Both men, without their consent, had their mugshots disseminated by online news agencies for entertainment purposes.

The purpose of this is twofold. First, it is entertaining. The more outrageous the person looks, the more interest and clicks it will generate. Second, as mugshots, the two men are representative of petty criminality. It is hard to take these two men seriously with their poorly chosen and executed tattoos. But also, and by comparison, having these men processed by the police offers up the cops as the adjudicators of judgment. In this case it is better judgment. It also offers a quiet and effective demonstration of police power. Policing is newsworthy; it always has been. This mundane procedural aspect of policing, the mugshot, provides an opportunity to publicly shame criminals and criminality. It creates an easy foil against which we can compare police conduct because what the police do is surely above the bar suggestively set by these two men and their facial tattoo decisions.

To conclude briefly, the ability of the police to disseminate mugshots for entertainment is made available by web technology and the native digital media production capabilities that most carry around at all times. As entertainment, these mugshots function as positive PR for the police. It also serves as a warning to us that we too can become the object of someone's entertainment while they're at lunch scrolling through headlines. In the world of smart phones it is all too easy to be snared by its media production apparatus to be offered up, in edited format, as objects of entertainment, curios of our modern world. And as long as the more remarkable mugshots get produced the dimmer view many of us will have of the people around us, and the stronger our allegiance with police power will be. Police power is offered as a ward against criminality, even the lighthearted variety such as this.

But just who are the police? They're mostly men, mostly white, and by and large, they represent majority interests. Perhaps, it is "majority" interest because we all know that the powerful are few, while the powerless are many. The powerless simply see the world as the few do because they have a privileged level of access to the means of reality production. If, for example, a few private banking interests at the Federal Reserve can print money and loan it to the United States at interest then we get a little sample of how our realities are administered through the decisions of a few powerful people.

The police are us or at least a subset. Most importantly, the self-selecting who become police have, among other things, a sense of justice and duty, and then some have an inflated sense of their power and responsibility. And somewhere between handing a man a gun and then giving him a badge of immunity we create organizational cultures like this:

According to the website that showed this picture, the man posing as 'game' that has been hunted is currently being detained at the jail. That he's black and the other men white demonstrates the uneven distribution of power. That he's playing along for the photo-op suggests that this black man has gotten accustomed to doing things like this, little acts of indignity for the entertainment of the powerful in order to get better treatment, hopefully.

Unlike the mugshots above, hunting photos like these are to be disseminated internally only. Shots like this harken back to the abuses at Abu Ghraib because shots like this are abuse. Mugshots are abuse. They force those of us who commit legal infractions to become incriminating public data. Mugshots erase the life of the person, and turn them into an artifact for the sake of the pose and the shot. Mugshots are data that the police hold to maintain a visual catalog of criminals, which can then be cross referenced with the memory of victims and witnesses for possible matches. The police know that criminals often repeat. When you're captured and processed by the police you begin to witness what lowly opinion they have of you. Do as they say, shut up, go here, hold this, sit here. You are a victim of their will because you have none. Our man posing as a deer, knows this better than me. Black men are 'practice dummies' for police procedures. The police learn how to stop, take down, cuff, and kill by practicing on black men. Where we draw the line between those who are deserving of police protocol and those who aren't happened well before a man has his likeness posted in an unfavorable way for the public or for other officers' entertainment. Dignity is so quickly crushed by the police. Citizenship is hemmed in by threats of violence and a semiotics of power administered upon the body and the mind through shaming, fear, and killing.

The means available for persuasion are many. In our time, in our place, the threat of shameful artifacts of one's self traveling around the web are but one. Enter the camera, the phone, the mobile web.

Welcome to the machine.