Multimodal Ambivalence: A Manifesto for Producing in S@!#t Times

ABSTRACT

For those of us located in the Global North, 2021 began with a barrage of media content documenting a coup attempt in the United States, the United Kingdom's split from Europe after four years of Brexit deliberations, and talk of mass vaccinations amid the uneven global devastation of COVID-19. For the three of us, with our connections to South Asia, Latin America, and West Africa, current Euro-American mediatized stories were supplemented by ongoing narratives of state-sponsored sectarian violence in India and Brazil, police brutality in Nigeria, and “Southern” stories related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences.In each of these cases, social media has fostered contradictory participatory potentials. On the one hand, social media has the potential to foment the creation of shared and iterative conspiracy theories, disinformation, and right-wing plots. From QAnon to antimask and antivaccine discourses to anti-immigrant “Leave.EU” campaigns in the United Kingdom, the circulations of images, texts, and videos have sowed the seeds for an amplification of white supremacist violence, a rejection of public health guidance, and a rearticulation of virulent nativist political thought in an age of capitalist dispossession. On the other hand, just as multimodal making and circulation strategies on social media have played a role in fomenting right-wing violence and homicidal disinformation, they have also played an integral part in social movements towards justice. Grassroots mobilizations of images, videos, and texts collocating collective imaginaries towards various projects of recognition and solidarity in and across Chile, India, Thailand, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, just to give a few examples, demonstrate the ways in which the “multimodal” plays an important role in generating the potential for visualizing, articulating, and conceptualizing different futures, both online and off. This short essay—written as a manifesto and an invitation—engages with an ambivalent multimodality in three different frames the visual, the collaborative, and the sensorial. Our manifesto is a means not just to participate in the vibrant theorization of multimodality that has unfolded over the last several years in the discipline but to embrace an ambivalence towards its promise and potential and to offer an invitation for you to do the same. In short, our embrace of “the manifesto” as a rhetorical device is as much a call to action as it is about theorizing the affordances and limits of multimodality in the present conjuncture. In what follows, we briefly mark the ways in which an ambivalent multimodality has the capacity to draw our attention to the different problematics of doing ethnography in the contemporary moment while recognizing, simultaneously, the tremendous opportunity it presents for us to imagine anthropology on different grounds. We believe that when we account for those problematics in creative-critical ways—including the ways we are deeply embedded in and complicit in them—we open speculative possibilities and potentially enact anthropology otherwise. We conclude this short essay by discussing the experiments we will take up to create a different sort of review process for this type of work, one that is transparent, dialogic, and guided by the key tenets of our manifesto.