Bio-Work in the Blacking Factory: Police Videos and the Ethics of Seeing and Being Seen

Taking as its case, Ramsey Orta’s cell phone video of the chokehold killing of Eric Garner by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, on July 17, 2014, this article examines the exigencies of modes of contemporary cultural labor that enlist a vast cadre of raced workers to new assembly lines of media labor and production. Integrating self-expressive and “free” flows of DIY “play-labor” with emergent work ethics of seeing and being seen, Orta’s video exemplifies new fungible modes of cultural work devised precisely by the racialized surplus populations of late capital, and which turn on mercenary extractions of value within what Hazel Carby terms the “supermarket economy of difference.” Exploring the meanings and structures of contemporary cultural work and the self-crafting practices of workers conscripted to its performance, this paper explores the vexed relations of media labor that meets neoliberal demands for performative forms of “authentic difference,” disposable and always ready for exploitation by capital, and which distribute across the population keenly racial adjudications of who works and who does not, doing what kinds of labor, under what intensifications of degradation, alienation, and exploitation, and with what promise of life and freedom.