NECROPOLITICS AND NON-MOURNING LIVES: THE ENEMY’S MEDIA (RE)PRODUCTION

ABSTRACT.

This article discusses the production of the character ‘involved’ by the media narrative and its effects on the legitimation of the Brazilian necropolitics. To this end, we used the theoretical contributions by Cecília Coimbra, Achille Mbembe and Judith Butler to analyze the repercussions of fake news on social media directed against the young boy Marcos Vinícius da Silva, who was killed in the favela of Maré in Rio de Janeiro while on his way to school. The way this murder was addressed on social networks offers elements for understanding the production and ratification of the character ‘involved’ in justifying the deaths of people who participated or not in illicit situations, placing them as killable subjects in the current death management policy. The final considerations of the work point to the urgency of a critical approach by the media and a theoretical-practical engagement that denaturalizes necropolitics and the power relations increasingly intensified by the current political situation in Brazil.

Keywords:
Social psychology; racism;social media

RESUMO.

Este artigo visa discutir a produção da personagem ‘envolvido’ pela narrativa midiática e seus efeitos na legitimação da necropolítica brasileira. Para tanto, faz uso das contribuições teóricas de Cecília Coimbra, Achille Mbembe e Judith Butler para analisar as repercussões das fake News nas redes sociais direcionadas ao jovem Marcos Vinícius da Silva, morto na favela da Maré, no Rio de Janeiro, quando ia para a escola. A maneira como esse assassinato foi tratado nas redes sociais oferece elementos para a compreensão da produção e ratificação da personagem ‘envolvido’ na justificação de mortes de pessoas que participaram (ou não) de situações ilícitas, colocando-os como sujeitos matáveis na atual política de gestão da morte. As considerações finais do trabalho assinalam a urgência de uma postura crítica por parte da mídia e um engajamento teórico-prático que desnaturalize a necropolítica e as relações de poder cada vez mais recrudescidas pela atual conjuntura política no Brasil.

Palavras-chave:
Psicologia social; racismo; redes sociais

RESUMEN.

Este artículo analiza la producción del personaje ‘involucrado’ en la narrativa de los medios y sus efectos sobre la legitimación de la necropolítica brasileña. Para ello, utilizo las contribuciones teóricas de Cecilia Coimbra, Achille Mbembe y Judith Butler para analizar las repercusiones de las noticias falsas en las redes sociales dirigidas al joven Marcos Vinícius da Silva, quien murió en la favela Maré en Río de Janeiro mientras se dirigía a la escuela. La forma en que se trató este asesinato en las redes sociales, ofrece elementos para comprender la producción y la ratificación del personaje ‘involucrado’ en la justificación de la muerte de personas que participaron (o no) en situaciones ilícitas, ubicándolas como sujetos matables en la política actual de manejo de la muerte. Las consideraciones finales del trabajo apuntan a la urgencia de una actitud crítica por parte de los medios y un compromiso teórico-práctico que desnaturalice las relaciones cada vez más necropolíticas y de poder en Brasil.

Palabras clave:
Psicología social; racismo;redes sociales

Introduction

La justicia es como las serpientes: sólo muerde a los descalzos (Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero. Archbishop of San Salvador, murdered in 1980).

Walter Benjamin, in a 1936 paper, wrote that the manifesto of the ideologue Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was exemplary in its description of the efforts of fascism to transform the aesthetics of the unbearable experiences of war into something acceptable and even desirable. In the manifesto, which praised the beauty of the colonial war in Ethiopia, Marinetti pointed out that “[...] war is beautiful, because thanks to gas masks, frightening megaphones, flamethrowers and small tanks, it founds the domain of man on the subdued machine. War is beautiful, because it inaugurates the dreamed-up metallization of the body” (Benjamin, 1936-2012a, p. 119). For Benjamin, this aesthetics, which fostered destruction and legitimized violence, was a means used to communicate and produce a “damaged experience”, which would hinder reflection and understanding of the processes that produced barbarism itself.

We no longer need manifestos like Marinetti's. Currently, police programs, denunciation reports and morning, afternoon and evening TV News are responsible for the (re)production of an aesthetic of violence that naturalizes our permanent state of exception (Benjamin, 1942-2012b; Agamben, 2004), which has become the norm in our society and represents more as a technique of government than an exceptional measure. It is a suspension of the current law to guarantee its existence. With regard to the lives of the oppressed, as pointed out by Ruiz (apud Junges, 2010) when appropriating Benjamin’s propositions, the exception still applies in a very specific and paradoxical way:

[The] life [of the oppressed] is deprived of basic rights, but there is no legal act that decrees such suspension, on the contrary: their rights are guaranteed by the Constitution. The ironic thing about this paradox is that the exception operates on them as a fact without an act of law that decrees it. In this condition, the oppressed cannot rise up against a sovereign will that subjects them to such a condition. For the right, they have all legal guarantees, they do not exist as excluded from rights. Its exception escapes the political act of the sovereign will to dilute itself in the web of market structures that decrees its condition of excluded life. The condition of excluded life suffers another development from the withdrawal of fundamental rights, from the exception, in which the sovereign is hidden in the anonymity of power devices to deliberate with greater efficiency and less accountability (Ruiz apud Junges, 2010).

When we consider the implementation of the state of exception in Brazil, we cannot fail to emphasize that this is one of the most unequal countries in the world, even though it has presented one of the most expressive economic growth rates in the last two decades. In it, the form of inclusion through exclusion - which reached the most impoverished layers and, in these crisis times, democracy through consumption - produced effects that strengthened conservative, reactionary and fascist spirits, gradually contributing to the justification of a return to politics for a few, to discourses against the development of current social policies, towards underdevelopment.

The wealthiest, who have been privileged since the first invader proclaimed himself the owner of this land and people during the period of genocide we call colonization, aimed at retaking hegemony, seeking to perpetuate inequalities and authoritarian forms of government that they themselves produce and only benefit the elite of which they are part of, boasted of the victory of the far-right in the election for the presidency in 2018. In the land of lies, false racial democracy, false liberalism, false representative democracy, fake News, where all barbarism was always publicized as justifiable violence, the traces of resistance suffered onslaughts of erasure.

In this scenario, the different media reproduce the feeling of insecurity and chaos, at the same time that they ‘glamorize’ the police framing and sustain narratives in favor of increasing the severity of legal penalties, among other authoritarian measures. The Brazilian media continues to (re)produce an aesthetics that contributes to reinforcing discourses that build society’s enemies, from naturalization of violence and incitement to aversion towards the poorest layers of the population (Coimbra, 2001), gaining strength without precedents, concomitant with the annual growth of people with internet access in their homes (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE], 2018). Cecília Coimbra, talking about this process for almost two decades, writes that the ‘mass media’ has played an important role in the reproduction of a “[…] linear reasoning, of cause and effect, that where poverty lies, there is marginality, criminality” (Coimbra, 2001, p. 58) which, in the words of Ervin Goffman (2012), produce frames.

Let us remember that Goffman (2012) called framing the process of capturing the experience with a reflexive overlap of the visual field, of thought and/or language, in order to present a place and a limitation of action for certain people in the world. This framing produces forms of life⁵ and, from scripts related to the way of interacting, organizes the forms of interaction. Goffman also makes an important contribution when he said how the overflow of conventional framing, the ‘ruptures in the frame’, usually generate the fabrication of negative experience and the displacement to pathological and marginal framing, as occurs with police framing.

It is not by chance that the residents of the periphery mirror the ‘profile’ of criminals, hegemonically presented by the media, and are called upon to deal with accusations against them, most of the time unfounded, becoming objects of discussion for the observant public, both online, with regard to the convergence process pointed out by Henry Jenkins (2009) on the phenomenon of simultaneous sharing of these materials in various social networks and fragmented information, as well as in the offline sphere.

As a result, we have that out of every 100 people murdered in Brazil, 71 were young males and blacks (Cerqueira et al., 2017). At a time when the poor are increasingly ‘left over’ “[…] because they are no longer profitable, they are no longer required to spend their labor within a broad productive process [...] they are expelled and thrown into the informal and precarious market, on the margins of the city, etc.” (Hilário, 2016, p. 203), start to be disregarded as people and are subjected to death policies.

In this article, we discuss how journalistic material available online can offer elements for understanding biopolitical tensions, that is, this process of media framing and its effects on the legitimation of the Brazilian necropolitics. Therefore, we used the theoretical contributions of Cecília Coimbra, Achille Mbembe and Judith Butler to analyze the repercussions of fake News on social media directed against the young boy Marcos Vinícius da Silva, who died in 2018 in the favela of Maré, in Rio de Janeiro, while on his way to school. More specifically, we explored how the production and ratification of framing Marcos Silva in the ‘involved’ character has been used to justify the deaths of people who participated (or not) in illicit situations during police operations, placing them as killable subjects in the current Brazilian necropolitics.

Necropolitics as a form of government in the permanent state of exception

Democratic life has become the apolitical life of the indifferent consumer “[…] of goods, minority rights, the culture industry and laboratory-produced babies”, producing what Jacques Rancière (2014, p. 43) describes as ‘hatred of democracy’. It is true that democracy cannot be reduced to a form of government or form of society. As a result, there is no such thing as a democratic government, as it will always exercise the power of a minority over the majority. This does not mean that democracy has not been reduced and appropriated, quite the contrary.

Forgotten of all politics, the word democracy [has become] then the euphemism that designates a system of domination that no longer wants to be called by name and at the same time the name of the diabolical subject that takes the place of this obliterated name: a composite subject, in which the individual who suffers from this system of domination and the one who denounces it are mixed. (Rancière, 2014, p. 112).

Here, democracy has been reduced to a form of society and government. In it, the promise made even during President Lula’s government, was that the state of emergency in which we live would be temporary and that the economy would be structured with access to consumption. But it did not resist the political crisis and the economic crisis were amalgamated and used in internal maneuvers for mobilization of the masses against the government, resulting in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousself (Lima, 2017) and making room for the election of an ultra-conservative government.

Democracy became, on the one hand, definitely hated. With the support of the mainstream press, there was a resumption of hegemony by those who, in fact, defend the existence of inequalities and authoritarian forms of government that came to power through the empty discourse of truculent public safety. This is because, quickly, it was realized that the possibility of suspending the Law, the implementation of arbitrary and violent interventions against certain groups could be legitimized as proper actions to guarantee democracy. Not by chance, we believe that the concept of necropolitics presents itself as a powerful tool for the analysis of postcolonial societies, favoring a conceptual shift in order to reflect on the living conditions of these societies and their exposure to countless massacres, mutilations and reduction of populations to ‘undead’.

Presented by Achille Mbembe (2017), the concept of ‘necropolitics’ offers an opening for the discussion of an unrevealed opacity, present at the foundation of modern democracies, a kind of ‘nocturnal body of democracy’, founded on a policy of death and, hence, of absolute terror. Despite writing in a different context from the Brazilian one, the motto of the theoretical construction carried out by the author is to answer questions involving democracy contradictions, such as, for example, the foundation of so-called democratic societies being the assertion that there was a ban on violence of their structures and, at the same time, behave in such an exclusive way in relation to other countries. In this regard, he states that:

[…] the brutality of democracies has never been hidden. From their origins, modern democracies have shown tolerance for even illegal political violence. They integrated into their culture forms of brutality carried out by a series of private institutions acting as a surplus, whether they are frank bodies, militias or other paramilitary or corporatist formations (Mbembe, 2017, p. 33).

It is evident that, in order to justify such actions and maintain the appearance that democracy remains the system of greatest concern with representation in political organization, without having to admit its mistakes, the State developed a strategy for characterizing groups of people, so that they consider themselves non-similar. For Mbembe (2017), this problem is the administration of a society of enmity, based on the maintenance of a war policy, “[…] a State policy that, clearly distinguishing its citizens (those who belong to the circle of similars) from other people, resolutely removes all non-similars” (Mbembe, 2017, p. 73).

In other words, in order to violate the prohibition of ‘you shall not kill’, it is ‘necessary’ to produce a state of war, where, in the name of the survival of some, many others have to die, a form of government that is not new, when we return to the writings by Franz Fanon (1968) on colonial violence:

The city of the colonized, or at least the indigenous city, the black city, the medina, the reserve, is a disreputable place, populated by men of disrepute. Then you are born no matter where, no matter how. You die no matter where, no matter from what. It is a world without gaps, where men are on top of each other, houses on top of each other. The city of the colonized is a hungry city, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, light. The city of the colonized is a squatting, kneeling city, wallowing. A cornered city is a city of blacks, a city of Arabs [...] (Fanon, 1968, p. 29).

The necropolitics implemented by the State operates as a form of managing the death of certain people, based on very specific parameters in capitalism, especially with regard to social class and race. In this regard, it is worth bringing an excerpt from the reflection of Michel Foucault (2005) on what he called ‘state racism’, addressed in the 1976 course, translated as ‘Society Must Be Defended’, specifically with regard to analysis about sovereign power and biopower, undertaken by this author in his genealogical study. By deepening the social aspects that enable its support, through a critique of the war policy justified by the concept of race, Foucault questioned:

Indeed, what is racism? It is, first, the means of introducing, after all, a cut in that domain of life for which power is responsible: a cut between what must live and what must die. In the biological continuum of the human species, the appearance of races, the distinction of races, the hierarchy of races, the qualification of certain races as good and others, on the contrary, as inferior, all this will be a way of fragmenting this biological field that power has undertaken; a way to lag, within a population, groups in relation to others (Foucault, 2005, p. 304).

The observation that racism is based on historically and culturally located power relations, and not strictly biological differences such as skin tone, demonstrates, for Foucault, the need to feed the discussion about the existence of extermination policies for black populations. It is evident that certain social norms, reproduced daily by different devices, delimit what ‘is’ and what ‘is not’ life based on power relations: which ones can appear and disappear, exist or be exterminated, who is recognized as a person, who is liable to grief and ‘deserves’ the social commotion.

Judith Butler (2015), despite also writing in a different context from the Brazilian one, in her recent works presents the concepts of precarious life, social commotion, vulnerability and non-grievable lives, which provide us subsidies for thinking about the issues present in our reality, in addition to offering some inflection points with Mbembe’s thinking. The author defends the thesis that all lives are precarious, and the understanding of the existence of this precariousness becomes possible when we realize that our body is a “[…] social phenomenon […]” and dependent on “[…] social conditions and institutions […]” meaning that to survive “[…] the body has to rely on what is outside it” (Butler, 2015, p. 58), making our life possible or not, depending on the relationships of recognition with the other. This finding, however, does not assume that one life is precarious in the same way as another, and this is related to certain conditions. First, there are social mechanisms governed by power relations, acting in the production of meaning for what we understand as ‘life’ and ‘death’, which makes these issues much more than biological. Second, we should ask ourselves “[…] under what conditions is it possible to apprehend a life, or a set of lives, as precarious, and under what conditions this becomes less possible or even impossible” (Butler, 2015, p. 14-15), as it is not enough for people to be recognized. We must pay attention to the conditions for their recognition.

Thus, according to the philosophical argument of Judith Butler (2015, p. 17), even if the person is recognized, they do not escape from submission to framings “[…] that act to distinguish the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot […]” and “[…] not only they organize the visual experience as well as generate specific ontologies of the subject”. Each person is recognized differently, according to a production of meaning about who can (or should) be protected or annihilated (Butler, 2015, p. 20), establishing conditions of “[…] maximum precariousness”. The author even points out that it is exactly in the context of war that the precariousness of life takes its maximum form.

We can think of war as something that divides populations between those people for whom we grieve and for those we do not. A life not liable to mourn is one whose loss is not mourned because it was never lived, that is, it never really counted as life (Butler, 2015, p. 64).

For analysis of the Brazilian society, marked by the colonial past, social inequality, racism and several other forms of violence, where the commodification of death becomes extremely profitable and legitimate, Butler’s discussion seems to contribute a lot. After all, if from a formal point of view we cannot say that we live in a context of war in Brazil, from a practical point of view, in turn, the social demand for security (public and private) has generated reductionist proposals, which ignore historically produced social inequalities and have led to various state actions that refer to warfare modus operandi, such as the war on drugs, mass incarceration, persecution of enemies produced by hate speech and segregationist content, which act as necropolitical devices (Mbembe, 2017), for carrying out the management of death aiming to justify the extermination. We live in an open war of the State against its population. A form of social administration that, as Quijano (2010) pointed out, shows us that even with the end of the colonial system, the logic that founded its existence remains the standard, that is, the sovereign power of the State to make people die continues to place death in the calculations of politics, in a war policy promoted daily (Foucault, 2005).

The production of death and non-grievable lives: the ‘involved’ character

Walter Benjamin, almost like a psychoanalyst, in the work of Passagens (Benjamin, 1982-2018) already pointed out the existence of a ‘hidden repression’ as a context that generates a phantasmagoria: repression of anxiety, repression of the fact that the production of goods is the determinant core of society, repression of an unfulfilled revolution, class dominance repression, etc. This phantasmagoria represented, for the author, the repressed self-image of society and expressed the possibility that a misleading image of reality could be produced, a desiderative and idealized image. For Benjamin (1982-2018), submitted to the production of images that began to outline all cultural, architectural, literary and social manifestations linked to daily life, we not only succumbed to its ghostly appearance, but we became empathetic to it.

In these times of illusions and apolitical policies, great disillusionment is no longer liberating, but destructive of the very foundations of culture. Culture not only masks violence, it has also been reduced to it. The way the media produces reality, truths, fantasies, memory and history “[…] cross the themes of violence when they are being marked and identified by these same media, the suspects, the sick, the discriminable, the dangerous, the infamous” (Coimbra, 2001, p. 58). The production of miserable, abandoned and considered dangerous lives, against which a series of actions aimed at imprisoning, segregating or simply annihilating will be unleashed, feeds the economy through security devices, such as the construction of prisons and the manufacture of weapons, presented and narrated by a media industry that is fueled by the profits that necropolitics produces. Enemies of the Brazilian homeland, as Coimbra (2001) points out, have always existed and, if at other times there was a concentration on the figure of the communist, this term being applied to all those who contested the established order and social inequalities, today the enemies they materialize in the most impoverished social strata, that is, in those considered ‘suspicious’ or ‘involved’.

In current police and journalistic jargon, there is a term commonly used when referring to the representation of one of these enemies of the State, of the person considered a threat to public security: the ‘involved’. In periods of intensifying public security policies that are premised to be the use of force to solve social problems, the articles show that being ‘involved’ in crimes implies a justification for indiscriminate killings, from the perspective of the ‘dark side of democracy’ mentioned by Mbembe (2017). This enemy, which is socially differentiated through the narratives produced about him, becomes incomprehensible to those who follow the News and starts to be seen as a problem to be solved by the State at any cost.

The fact that the internet is accessible to approximately 69.3% Brazilians (IBGE, 2018), albeit precariously, has allowed the media - analogue and digital - to have even more strength in their work of (re)production of narratives that aim to legitimate the practices of violence against the poorest population, through the production of fear and hatred, incitement against supposed enemies belonging to the ‘dangerous classes’. After all, on the one hand, we live in a historical-social context in which the production of content for the media allows public participation, in which “[…] the convergence of the media impacts the way we consume these media” (Jenkins, 2009 , p. 44), allowing both to contest and contribute to the dissemination of these discourses; on the other hand, the spectator is invited to participate through “[…] ironic and cynical identifications […]”, that is, “[…] identifications in which, at all times, the subject asserts his distance from what he is representing, or even, in relation to his own actions” (Safatle, 2005, p. 132).

If we type ‘involved’ in a quick Google search, we realize that the term is often used in headlines or parts of journalistic texts to refer to people accused of crimes, which is worrying, especially given the fact that today we live under the convergence paradigm, which “[…] assumes that new and old media will interact in increasingly complex ways” (Jenkins, 2009, p. 32-33). A closer look also allows to identify that the term is specifically designed for a specific segment of the population: blacks and poor people, heirs of the slavery regime and colonization of Brazil. In other words, they are people who represent what Mione Sales (2007) called ‘scarce citizenship’, configured as a “[…] historical modality of subalternized socio-ethical inscription of various groups and social segments in the social division of the country [...]” (Sales, 2007, p. 48). The dissemination of News related to cases of violence resulting from police approaches, perceived as disastrous and inconsistent for selectively assuming condemnation rather than the innocence of citizens, becomes a powerful necropolitical device that reinforces the stigma and segregation of certain groups.

A case of great repercussion in 2018 offers the possibility of analyzing with more elements what, so far, we have discussed theoretically in this article. Due to the growing demand for public safety, under Michel Temer’s government, military intervention was decreed in the state of Rio de Janeiro. From then onwards, police operations were undertaken which, according to data from the Intervention Observatory, linked to the Center for Security Studies at the Cândido Mendes University (CESEC), became more intense and worsened compared to periods prior to the intervention, between shootings, executions and stray bullet episodes (Intervenção Federal: um modelo para não copiar, 2018). Among the results of the intervention, on June 20^th, 2018, the Brazilian Army and the Police executed six ‘suspects’ when carrying out an operation in the community in search of the murder of a Civil Police inspector. At the time, Marcos Vinícius, late and on his way to school, was running down the street where he lived and was shot in the abdomen. His last words, according to his mother, were: “It was a guy from the armored [car]. Didn’t he see that I was in a uniform?” The episode yielded several reports, including the disclosure that the police report delivered to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and to justice assessed the operation that murdered Marcos Vinícius as a ‘great success’ (“Grande êxito” é o que diz a polícia sobre operação que matou Marcos Vinicius na Maré, 2018), showing that the purpose of the interventions is not in the arrests they can carry out, but in the extermination of people supposedly ‘involved’, that is, in the legitimacy of the extermination of certain people before any investigation of the facts.

The housing condition to which Marcos Vinicius was subjected, which placed him within the framework of a stigmatized territory, where people are considered suspicious and ‘involved’ when Marcos was hit, and the simple fact of being next to a friend who was not wearing a school uniform, caused the emergence and circulation of fake News two days later on social networks, especially on Facebook, after posting an edited photo in which the teenager’s face was attached to the body of another young black man who supposedly carried a firearm, with the obvious objective of characterizing Marcos Vinícius as a criminal and ‘justifying’ his death. As it occurs in posts of this type of photo, several comments that tried to delegitimize the social commotion caused by the murder were published, through unfounded assertions against his image.

As noted throughout the article, Mbembe and Butler, among other contemporary authors in the field of Philosophy and the Human Sciences, draw dialogues with Michel Foucault’s studies on biopower and biopolitics, updating their discussions and shifting them into relation to their limits. On this issue of the extermination of some at the expense of others, it is particularly worth returning to Foucault’s notion of state racism (Foucault, 2005), given its possibility of interlocution with the Mbebean concept of necropolitics and with the Butlerian discussion on lives not liable to grief. In the Foucauldian thematization of biopower and biopolitics, in the 18th century, in Europe, the emergence of a power that enhances and values life to the point of making people live and let them die stands out. With his discussion of necropolitics, in view of the context of different diasporas and genocide of Afro-descendant populations, Mbembe allows to question: who does power make live and let die? Including, from a scathing critique of coloniality, the Cameroonian thinker uses the Foucauldian notion of state racism to remind that race is a shadow for Western thought and that, among the functions of racism, are the regulation of distribution of death and the viability of the murderous functions of the State, fragmenting the population through the division of races so that the death of the racialized other is seen as necessary for the lives of the living (Barros, Nunes, Sousa, & Cavalcante, 2019).

Obviously, these comments circulated not only on social media, but also on major newspaper websites such as G1⁶. By way of illustration, it is worth presenting some of them:

Comment 1: “Slum people, the evil of the century.”

Comment 2: “Now they treat him as a saint. A photo of the saint with a pistol in his hand is already circulating. When he dies, it’s a blah blah blah”.

Comment 3: “I don’t understand why no one goes into a story asking the state to put an end to banditry in the slum and saying that they can’t stand having their life put at risk anymore, if the population helps to end the banditry there won’t be any more clashes and there will be no more deaths”.

Comment 4: “How could the boy claim that the bullet that hit him was the police if he had his back turned? Those damn communities always make the police their scapegoat. The good guy from the slum is the drug dealer and the maidens are the funk ladies with provocative clothes and indecent gestures.” (Intervenção Federal: um modelo para não copiar, 2018) (our transcription from the textual interaction of Facebook users and the G1 platform).

In addition to representing the total lack of empathy and respect for the pain of family members due to the premature death of the teenager, the comments above suggest that there would even be a need to exterminate ‘some’ so that others can live in safety, in the sense that frames would matter more than the reality left out. There is even the possibility that the boy had lied during his last minutes of life, while he was lying on the ground, shot and in his mother’s lap. The stigmas directed at the territory of residence are reinforced by assigning slum people the category of ‘dangerous class’, through the simplistic association between the slum, peripheral popular culture, funk music style and criminality. In short, the comments refer to the statement of Butler (2015) about the existence of lives that are not considered lives due to their disposability, attributed by normative discourses that circulate and are reproduced in society.

These populations are ‘losable’, or can be sacrificed, precisely because they were framed as having already been lost or sacrificed; they are seen as threats to human life as we know it, and not as living populations in need of protection against illegitimate state violence, hunger and pandemics. Consequently, when these lives are lost, they are not the object of lament, since, in the distorted logic that rationalizes their death, the loss of these populations is considered necessary to protect the lives of the ‘living’ (Butler, 2015, p. 53, emphasis added by the author).

The case of Marcos Vinícius offers a strong example of how it becomes possible to justify the killable bodies of the Brazilian necropolitics, in the maximization of the precariousness of life, in the abandonment of the other and in the refusal to recognize their humanity. It is more than evident that crying and mourning are selective. In addition, we notice that there is an ambiguous character in the article published in G1, especially with regard to the visibility it attributed to the murder of the young man. The article followed the standard formula of exposition of a “[…] media ‘face’ that unilaterally simplifies, homogenizes and, at the same time weakens, makes certain events spectacular” (Coimbra, 2001, p. 249-250, emphasis added by the author) and opened space for the comments of blaming the victim and naturalizing his condition of being killable, of a subject not worthy of mourning, as well as resulted in the emergence of questions that could indicate a search for investigation of the causes of his death.

This allowed the case of Marcos Vinícius to present a different configuration of most cases that take place daily in poor communities, allowing to extend our analysis to what Butler (2015, p. 31) called “[…] the right to appear […]”, which is a “[…] exercise - which can be called performative […]”, which “[…] demand [...] for a set of more livable lives […]” and in this sense, worthy of being cried, producing a rupture (although temporary) in the frame that imprisons these people in the condition of suspects and the character ‘involved’.

The exposure of the deaths of the young man in social networks and news sites also opened space for the growth of a national commotion, especially after the public demonstrations of discontent uttered by the mother of Marcos Vinícius and the presentation of the bloody shirt that the son used on the day of his death. “I'm going to make this piece of cloth an instrument of justice!” (Rodrigues, 2018), she said on the day of her son’s burial, when she exhibited the shirt that was part of the typical uniform of Brazilian public-school students, that became a symbol of struggle and proof that Marcos Vinícius was not an ‘involved’.

The display of the shirt and the fact that Marcos Vinícius was on his way to school have led him to another frame, “[…] within certain standards that govern recognition” (Butler, 2015, p. 47). The rupture of the first framing that had been attributed to him, even resulted in an action moved by lawyers of a political party which, on June 29, 2018, demanded that justice withdraws Facebook fake News and identified the disseminators of this (Lang, 2018).

However, the unfolding of the case indicate that this did not guarantee the overcoming of his condition as a killable subject and the migration to another framing. Some of the factors that allowed his recognition as ‘involved’, as poor, a resident of a vulnerable territory and being running during the shooting, still remain and hamper the capture and punishment of those responsible for their death, as the report of March 11^th 2019 demonstrates, on the battle of the young’s mother for justice (Franco, 2019). A radical rupture of a frame is only possible when a reality accepted without discussion is placed in check and it is then possible to expose the devices that legitimated and produced its authority. “This suggests that it is not just about finding new content, but also working with interpretations received from reality to show how they can break - and effectively do it themselves”, as Butler (2015, p. 28) pointed out, but it does not seem to be the case. At most, the perverse recognition conditions (Lima, 2010) to which are submitted so many other young people from this country, were updated.

Final considerations

The elements addressed here, we believe, allow to say that the Brazilian death policy has been fueled by news disseminated by the different media that (re)produce the image of the enemy. In summary, we discussed as a state of exception implemented in Brazil, where a war policy has become the rule in our society, necropolitics became even more intense. Nevertheless, the contributions of Achille Mbembe in dealing with the production of lives for death, and those of Judith Butler concerning the existence of non-grievable lives framed in the maximum precarious condition, were potent for the analysis and criticism of how news has been presented in times of a culture of convergence.

Necropolitics implemented by the Brazilian state materializes as a form of administration of death of certain persons, from parameters related to social class, race and gender. Thus, its action depends on the production of perverse visibility, which prevents access to social rights that could result in full citizenship and (re)produce a representation of poor and peripheral populations as ‘the problem’ to be faced, serving as an absurd justification to the most varied forms of extermination and violations of rights.

The analysis of media repercussions of Marcos Vinícius’s death, mainly from fake News that aimed to characterize him as an ‘involved’ with the purpose of impede mourning and commotion for his death, served to point out as news before accessible only in printed News and in online portals have become disseminated in social media, with more speed and interaction, contributing to increase social damage, the perpetuation of frames that reinforce inequalities, exposure of the vulnerability of certain territories where life has no importance because the lives there do not deserve to be lived, and the naturalization of necropolitics.

The tensions in response to fake News were significant in the transformation of the young man’s death into a motto to political acts from his mother and groups of mothers from other young people murdered in disproportionate and disastrous police approaches. When raising the blood-stained school uniform T-shirt, Marcos Vinícius’s mother produces a performative action in search of justice for the death of an innocent student, forcing the boundaries between the ‘unrecognizable’ and the ‘recognizable’. This symbol sustained by the mother becomes a political act that is also framed by the media and questions the character of ‘involved’ that was attributed to Marcos Vinícius, causing (even if ephemeral) ruptures the previous framing.

The unfolding of the case reinforces the need for an analysis of the News and its readers comments, which often meet the hegemonic interests when they reinforce inequalities or justify exterminations. These aspects require from us a critical stance and engagement to denaturalize the consolidated power relations up to now, centered on racism and elitism. The challenge revolves around our ability to produce a criticism that can deepen the elements that are invisibilized and naturalized for legitimation of necropolitics, making visible and unbearable the maintenance of the state of exception in which we live.

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• 5
  Form of life is understood here as a category that allows both to understand the administration of existence in capitalist society, from the guidance on how people and groups should live (Jaeggi, 2005, 2015), as it offers the possibility of analyzing contradictions and impossibilities of adaptation to the established order, pointing out ways of resistance (Agamben, 2015).
• 6
  The article can be found at the following link: https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/adolescente-morto-na-mare-foi-atingido-por-disparo-pelas-costas-diz-laudo.ghtml. For more details about it, see the references section of this article (Intervenção Federal: um modelo para não copiar, 2018).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 May 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  05 Aug 2019
• Accepted
  25 Nov 2020