tsenft

Love in the time of Snuff: Social Media, Intimacy, & the Death of Neda Agha-Soltan

 Theresa Senft, Programme Leader & Senior Lecturer, Media Studies, University of East London, UK

On a hot June day of protests in Tehran, a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan is murdered while walking towards her car in broad daylight. A doctor rushes to save her, while a friend of the doctor’s videos the event. After she dies, the doctor uploads the video YouTube. The forty-second video sweeps across the net, galvanizing both activists and casual viewers of Iranian politics. There is something about this video--a beautiful woman, staring into the camera as blood pours from her orifices, legs splayed open--that impossible to forget.

In this presentation, I plan look deeply at the production, consumption and internet-based recirculation of the Neda video. I am particularly interested in interrogating a claim that at least part of the Neda video’s impact on its viewers has to do with the fact that it is constructed like a perfect ‘snuff’ film. Using Susanna Passonnen’s writing on affect and pornography, Judith Butler’s work on the politics of photography at Abu Graib and Jacques Ranciere’s thoughs on ethics in the age of the ‘emancipated spectator’, this talk will consider my own love of social media as a tool of political change against the ‘snuff aesthetics’ of the Neda phenomenon. I argue that in order to produce an ethically robust theory of digital intimacy, we must first account for the fact that online or off it, intimacy is composed of a range of constituent localized parts including (but not limited to) affect, arousal and abjection.