Getting the Make: Japanese Skateboarder Videography and the Entranced Ethnographic Lens

In an event he describes as “good luck,” ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch lost his tripod only two weeks into making his first film, a 1947 project about the Niger River (148). This loss immediately destabilized his camera, forcing Rouch to use it in the field in ways that undermined traditional cinematography. By transforming the camera into a mobile extension of himself, Rouch found himself in a new relationship with his subjects. The tripod had physically produced—and conceptually supported—a specific, static distance between the anthropologist and the everyday world in motion before the ethnographic lens, making the camera a stable platform and neutral tool with which to observe and record. As the camera was put into motion, however, the ethnographic mise-en-scène could no longer be taken as a stable field of human action or as a phenomenon from which data could be extracted by the systematic deployment of the (ethnographic) camera.¹ Rouch’s subsequent technique of placing himself and his camera directly into the lives of his subjects is often depicted as the collapse of “an invisible wall” (Young 112), or perhaps as the abandonment of an “observation post” (Rouch 38). His method—the camera—in full view of his subjects, Rouch engages with his subjects in an improvisational, mobile dynamic and claims himself transformed: his newly shifting relation to his subject causes him to alternately lead and follow action. At the same time, the boundary between camera and human operator seems to collapse into the “living camera” that Vertov dreamed of. Rouch and his unmoored camera are not simply reducible to an idealized cyborg dyadic unification or a dialectical reformulation of anthropological labor in which the anthropologist, already hard at work in the field, becomes a mediated laborer or a “watchman and regulator” to the (visual) machine of ethnographic production (Marx 705). Instead, Rouch finds himself within an ebullient field of shifting relations—relations between movement, mediation and method triangulating anthropology at the site of loss and luck.

When an earlier anthropology, equipped with the tripod-steady technique of observational cinema, is destabilized and cast out on its luck, we enter with Rouch into the magical space of this triangulation. It is a contact zone between the mobile physicality of bodies creating social space, the technological membrane mediating experience, and the ethnographic methods engaging the culture through which movement and media are made meaningful. This magical space is significant for anthropology because it describes a contact zone of seeing machines and sensuous bodies, contacts both virtual and explicitly haptic. The question of action connects movement, mediation, and method: how are the contacts made through media and around bodies? What is the mode? How is the anthropologist touched and thus transformed in the process of haptic and machinic transaction? How does the anthropological subject handle the media-striated matter of culture? These questions frame my interrogation of the camera’s relations with anthropological method and movement with a specific emphasis on Rouch’s concept of the ciné-transe and how it inscribes a particular ethnographic medium of engaged, haptic experience within the field site. I turn then to my own highly mediated field site of Tokyo to explore the mode of contact and transactions between myself, my own ethnographic camera, and skateboarders in Tokyo who video record their successful tricks, or mei-ku, and then create short videos that circulate digitally through global skate culture.

Getting Close to Machine and Method

First, let us return to the haptic and virtual contact: our “contact” with the world or our experience of life has always been through “the prism of culture” and thus virtual, states Boellstorff in preparing the ground for his own ethnography of the digital world of Second Life (5). “Human being has always been virtual being,” and technologies, especially visual ones, intensify this virtual being by reconfiguring and re-presenting our ways of knowing ourselves (5). But the contact is also sensuously embodied in an anthropology that seeks “to escape the visualist paradigm by rediscovering the full range of human senses” (Grimshaw 6). This dual form of contact underscores the interplay of sensual bodies with embodied media. Immediate, sensory experience requires us to reground media within the contact zone of the body. To invoke digital media is perhaps to conjure people flowing seamlessly through layered modes of technologized interactions while seemingly disconnected from “reality,” documenting everyday minutiae through smart phones, and crafting digital identities through channels as public as YouTube to the more selective tunings of social media and texting. Envisioned in this way, media is expansively utopic and universal, and must be regrounded in lived, varied experience, where bodies can be altered, re-imagined and transformed. The human in contact with the machine “provincializes” media and, in such proximity to the body, “allows us to consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world” (Coleman 3).

The tripod’s loss liberates Rouch to form new, generative contacts between the camera and his subjects, to experience the sensuousness of space, and to bond ecstatically with his recording machine. This loss or destruction produces an intimate effect of incorporation when the camera comes into close contact with bodies. Through physical proximity and as an extension and alteration of the ocular sense and the physiological apparatus of the human that supports it, the camera takes on the motion of the head and the body and amplifies, amplifying the eye. As the body is transformed by the incorporation of the camera, so too is the machine affectively transformed. When he walks with the camera, Rouch tries “to make it as alive as the people it is filming,” and in so doing he comes under its spell. “He is no longer himself,” becoming instead a newly mediated, possessed subject in a ciné-transe (39). As the camera takes on more liveliness, it requires not only more living energy from the anthropologist but also more of what Guattari terms “abstract human vitality” (36). Occult vocabulary has potency for Rouch, and we see the machine’s magic even more vividly in Marx’s own otherworldly assertion when he channels Goethe:

What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself – ‘as though its body were by love possessed’

(704).

Eliding the subjectivities of work in field and factory, the substitution of “anthropology” for “capital” reveals a figure of double possession: the good luck of Rouch’s lost tripod signals not a freedom from the transfixing power of machinic discipline but the uncanny mobilization of the camera as vector for a new ethnographic method of close but mediated contact. Changing the way he sees through the camera produces a state in which “[Rouch] is no longer himself” and is “absorbed” by the ethnographic camera he puts into motion. Rouch’s possession by the camera transpires as the camera seems to objectively “absorb” the truth of the subject—a point we will return to in considering Margaret Mead’s own experiments with visual ethnography. Rouch’s ciné-transe and Marx’s “coarsely sensuous form” of labor’s absorption describe the affective power of close contact with machines and the methodological and disciplinary regimes which structure the relations that emerge from these contacts. As ethnographic medium, the camera alters the researcher, compels new movement through space, and intercedes with the field site on behalf of the researcher, rearranging the modes of contact between Rouch and his informants. Anthropology, as a site of knowledge and a method of knowing, takes up the labor of those before the camera and transfigures them into subjects, while transforming their active energy into the recorded matter of raw academic data. But this process of transformative possession depends on the researcher embodying the form and techniques of anthropology.

The camera, with the authority of scientific sight and as the author of ethnographic vision, absorbs the anthropologist into itself and in turn takes on a living presence able to reconfigure social relations. This phrasing gives the camera a mystical power, or perhaps simply the unwarranted force of technological determinism. But I draw attention here to the camera as part of an assemblage of knowledge production where the anthropologist is already situated as a recording apparatus with alert ear and ready notebook, but apparently and inexplicably never falls under the spell of the keyboard. Among anthropologists I know, other substances are necessary to produce an adequate “typo-trance” that might feebly approximate Rouch’s ciné-transe, which requires nothing more than the writer’s familiar panoply of sideboard chemicals, on the rocks or rolled. What is it about the ethnographic camera that channels at once anthropology’s disciplinary power and the strange enactments of embodied techniques before hazing back into a seductive aesthetic and intellectual form of the “imponderabilia of actual life” when viewed at close range (Malinowski 16)? There are the countless small details of sound and sight clouding the celluloid, the videotape, the digital SC card, with one effortless sweep of the lens across a scene, across many scenes, in long, uninterrupted takes. Perhaps it is not simply the pull of the photogenic (and our distrust of what becomes comely once taken in through the apparatus), but also the charm of the camera, the way we’re taken in—the way it touches us. Fatimah Toby Rony proposes the idea of conversion as both mode and discourse in the filmic encounter between anthropological science and Native Other. Conversion, she argues, is “both a crossing over and a translation through various different visual media” (7). She is especially concerned with the process whereby Western procedures of truth-telling convert the experience, performance and beliefs of the Other into purportedly objective records, such as the films made by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson of Balinese trance. In this converting act, she says, “the Native is often seen as the subjugated Silenced one, and the European, who leaves behind his autobiographies, books, photographs, films, etc. is the Voice” (7). Rouch’s account of his own conversion by the camera describes a newly charged cyborg Other, taken in through a socially complex trance between himself, the camera, and those engaging knowingly in front of the lens. So there is the question of this conversion, to double Rony’s conceptualization back on itself, where the possessive power of anthropology and doing “good work” in the field is repossessed by the means of its own production, an already delicate alchemy of the camera and those that perform for it.

Anthropology, despite its traditional insistence on the supremacy of written text, is not immune to the energy of the visual field or the charm of its machinic capacity for conversion, despite some suspicion. Perhaps anthropology is more receptive to the camera because it depends anxiously upon its own field agents’ to become recording (or writing) machines for its elusive data (to become Rimbaud’s “pen hands”) (Rouch 43). The compulsion, or disciplinary need, to generate records, documents, and images that are “true” and thick with raw veracity saturates the bodies of anthropologists such that they might say, echoing the title of Jean Jackson’s famous essay, “I am a fieldnote.” Surely the ontological calm of embodying the alchemy of anthropology’s revered fieldnote comes as the labor of the senses is drawn through the discipline’s membrane to become text as a “meditative vehicle for a transcendence of time and place [that is] a transcendental return to time and place” (Tyler 129). Writing becomes the site of the out-of-body experience: ethnography’s power exercised in the writing out of a sensory distillation of the field replete with its putative subjects. The writing body writes out the lived knowledge in the most ideal state of anthropological possession, “as though . . . by love possessed.” The writing machine recombines a disordered or fragmented world and recollects the body bursting with data, albeit as “an object of meditation that provokes a rupture with the commonsense world and evokes an aesthetic integration whose therapeutic effect is worked out in the restoration of the commonsense world” (134). Ethnographic writing, Tyler argues, is an enigmatic, occult document “to read not with the eyes alone” and to which the vision machine—the ethnographic camera—responds, intervening in this corpographic alchemy with a challenge to and enhancement of the body (136). In so doing, it unsettles my appropriation of Marx: labor, I maintain, is transmogrified into product through the camera; the unedited video or film is a raw ethnographic text, already an evocative visual representation of rhythm and proximity, and thus exerts “a kind of magical power over appearances” that Tyler eschews (131). However, the body-camera assemblage is never totally absorbed into the disciplinary spell of even a richly ambiguous post-modern anthropology. The method of trance and the effects of conversion remain to be considered.

The entranced ethnographic camera does not put the world of the field site into the soft focus one might imagine corresponds to something as sensuous as a ciné-trance. Instead Rouch desires a paradoxical proximity again shaded by the magic of machines: “We have become invisible by being close and by having an extremely wide view [through the use of wide angle lenses]; that’s the model of disorder” (155). Rouch describes a technique of sharp intimacy confounded by the eclipse of the human-operator within the camera assemblage. Although he may sense himself to be invisible while seeing everything, his claims to “disorder” only point to the collapsed distances between himself and his subjects. He shares the space and moves with his subjects, following the flow of information emanating from them. He must improvise his method in order to comprehend visually and haptically what is happening in the field around him. Ethnographic writing “…uses everyday speech to suggest what is ineffable, not through abstraction, but by means of the concrete,” and yet is continually at risk of converting the subject or native Other into a concrete, if uneasily fragmented object under the sign of anthropological authorship (Tyler 136). The ethnographic camera is not entirely exempt from this dilemma, yet it operates within the contingency of the visual vernacular, moving within the everyday as an entranced and entrancing scopic machine, capable of converting the familiar into something that seems truer but somehow transfigured into a magical alterity. The field site is literally re-presented through the camera’s gaze, but Rouch’s method afflicts the truths that the camera might claim with disorders of movement, especially amidst the dizzying, mediated vortex created when the field site itself is a cultural space contingent on mobilizing cameras and bodies in front of them.

Entranced Movement and Moving Truths

Rouch’s camera-in-motion is revelatory of the ethnographic film project because it redirects our gaze from the fleshy subject on screen and beckons us to contemplate how motion itself—the motion of the camera and of the world around it—constitutes what we behold as the filmic object. Deleuze argues that in watching projected images, we do not see “a figure described in a unique moment” but instead witness “the continuity of the movement which describes the figure” (Cinema 1 5). This inversion of the relation between actor and movement dissipates any assumed solidity of the ethnographic subject simply enacting (cultural) motion before the camera, and in turn forces us to grapple with the ethnographic film as a much larger assemblage-in-motion or a “whole which changes” (Cinema 1 22). For if the ethnographic film is a moving artifact of a researcher’s attempt to frame action as the subject’s embodied and performed cultural truths, then what is the researcher’s mode of action when appended to the catalyzing machine of the camera? The figure on screen is a machinic trace of the camera’s movement in the field, and the frame itself marks the territory of site. Movement is always within the frame and its very containment is the effect of the ethnographer’s mode—for Rouch, one of a mobile immersion, so close as to disappear right into the movement of the subject: “we film with wide angles, that is, seeing everything, but reducing ourselves to proximity, that is, without being seen by others” (154). Who are these others, whom Rouch describes as unseeing but who are certainly seeing his entranced movements? Is this an attempt to become the motion that creates the ethnography, rather than the field researcher possessed so sensuously by the discipline that every action contributes to the vitality of a carefully structured truth? The film is not only an object of knowledge activated as moving images on screen (upon which Deleuze’s analytical focus is primarily fixed); it also comprises the field-site within which the camera is moving. The field-site exists primarily out of frame, serving as a kind of invisible ether of an authenticating reality that emanates from the moving images and fixes the unstable chemistry of their truth.

Rouch’s lost tripod represents a symbolic challenge to the panoptic dreams of celluloid culture-capture that were conjured by Margaret Mead, who seeks to fix the camera as a tool and sign of a scientifically rigorous anthropology.² Mead is convinced of the singular power of ethnographic image -making to secure material evidence in the present and to ensure knowledge in the future. The camera represents a mechanical, dispassionate rationality and expresses “the idea that one can truly understand a people through the copious use of recording” (Rony 11). Here, the camera seems to ameliorate the deep anthropological anxiety over the “whole that changes” through its capacity to “preserve materials… … long after the last isolated valley in the world is receiving images by satellite” (Mead 9). Mead imagines 360 -degree camera arrays long before they were to create the spectacularly frozen motion of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, and she insists on long, uninterrupted sequences of footage (or the long take) that can be “repeatedly reanalyzed with finer tools and developing theories” (10). Against this version of truth-making contingent on cameras harnessed to fixed modes of acquisition and analysis, Rouch demonstrates an ethnographic approach to the camera and to anthropology’s elusive, mobile object. This approach is far less rigidly self-assured: “You have to set off a series of actions to see, all of a sudden, the emergence of the truth, of the disquieting action of a person who has become disquieted” (149). Setting aside the temporal moment in which “truth” emerges, I want to emphasize the “series of actions” as the movements of cameras and of the ethnographic field site in order to contemplate a productive “disquieting” in anthropological practice whereby the stability of both the field site and the researcher are challenged.

Mead values the camera’s production of a material record, and her research with Gregory Bateson generates a deep archive. This emphasis on the material value of truth-artifacts resonates strongly with the visual practices of skateboarders in Tokyo among whom I conducted fieldwork for two years. However, they put themselves and their cameras in repetitive motion on the streets, relentlessly attempting a trick, shifting angles to capture an image or sequence of images to evoke an intense embodied sensation in the viewer, searching out new locations to try new tricks and acquire new images and footage. By this repetitive circulation through the streets, alleys, and industrial labyrinths of Tokyo, skaters carefully accumulate a folio of visual documents that will continue to do particular kinds of definitive and signifying work once put into circulation; much like ethnographic writing, they hope to express the ineffable through the concrete. They use image technologies to document skateable architecture and to record themselves riding and performing tricks across Tokyo’s varied surfaces. Their camera equipment ranges from the intimate to the assertive: multi-use, portable technology including personal cell phones equipped with cameras, and expensive, high -definition digital video cameras such as the favored DCR-VX2000.³ The cameras supplement and alter the central experience of the skater: the body is in alert and risky contact with city space, a relation exemplifying what Elizabeth Grosz describes as the “productive constraint and inherent unpredictability” of the corporeality of cities and bodies (49). Image-making technologies create a precarious relay of haptic and representational signals, contributing to the “relations of exchange and production, habit …and upheaval” between body and urban space (49). From the position of the anthropologist, the skaters’ cameras frame the representation of mobile relations of body and space while calling attention to the force of movement itself in producing these relations. These cameras also incite questions about how the visual machines—video cameras, cell phones, computers, digital playback programs, and editing software— structure the terms and affects of those relations when images are circulated and commodified in the global networks of skate culture, where they put into motion bodily “habit” and “upheaval” as techniques of mediated skaterly identities. The skaters’ use of visual technologies creates habituating structures as they record the “upheaval” of skaters’ bodies, including serious injury and conflict with authority. The mediated/filmic self-representations of anthropology’s Others have become as significant to the discipline as the self-deployment of cameras by skaters, since Sol Worth’s famous attempt in 1965 to mediate Malinowski’s charge to the ethnographer “to grasp the native’s point of view…to realize his vision” by equipping Navajo informants with 16mm movie cameras (25). What is crucial here are the new terms of mediation introduced by the intensely corporeal zone of the skaters’ action. I encountered upheaval in my own ethnographic video practice—a rhythmic crisis of my own visual apparatus, a crisis akin conceptually to Rouch’s lost tripod. What is this capacity of the camera to simultaneously orchestrate the body-rhythms of the skaters and the machine-rhythms of the anthropologist? How does movement itself operate in the dynamic frisson created between skaters inhabiting a spectacularized corpus or mode of the body created by their own cameras and the force of video capture exerted by the ethnographic camera?

Making It

From this tripartite formation of skater, urban space, and visual technology emerge ritualized modes of movement for skaters and cameras, modes that are dense with repetition and failure, and which are used to get hold of a specific event. A mei-ku, or successfully completed or landed trick, stabilizes and grounds skaterly identity and its meanings when encoded within the spectral circulations of the moving image. (The word “Mei-ku” borrows the English word “make” for Japanese skater slang.) Arising from this dense set of contingencies are haunting questions about the authorizations, authorities, and authoring that occur between the skaters behind and in front of the cameras, and between the skaters and the ethnographic lens.

On a computer in the editing studio far away from my field site of Tokyo, I play back ethnographic footage on a small viewing window arranged among four other windows. I am using Final Cut Pro, digital video editing software. Seated in front of my screen-machine, I watch a key informant, 31 year-old Koji, sitting in front of his own computer screen and illuminated in its spectral glow. He is also watching footage play back inside the same visual architecture of Final Cut Pro. Koji’s versatility with recording and editing video has made him unexpectedly visible in my own ethnographic videography; he frequently shows up in front of my camera while behind his own. Koji has been critical to my research on skateboarders in Tokyo, not only because he co-owns and manages a skateboard company, but also because he films and produces nearly all of its video content. He records hours of footage of the fledgling company’s four professional and amateur riders. He was once a promising amateur snowboarder before he suffered injuries in Colorado. This change in his physical ability led him to experiment with videography, and he began producing short snowboard videos with his friends. He then moved to Tokyo and made a skateboard video entitled Catch Me (2005), followed by Barcelogy (2007), which features Japanese skaters in the emerging skate hotspot of Barcelona. After collaborating on Barcelogy with Itoshin and Junichi, two respected pros, Koji started a skate company with them in December 2007. In the company “office”—the living room of a rented suburban home in western Tokyo where the team lives collectively amid boxes of skateboard decks and t-shirts—Koji sits in front of his screen, intensely focused. He is staring at images he has seen countless times. He leans forward, his body intimate with the machine, watching the spectacle replay on the small window before him. Koji is showing me a YouTube video of Masataka, an amateur skateboarder from Okinawa who rides for Koji’s recently formed underground skate company, Lesque.⁴ Koji has uploaded the video only days before, and he is obsessed with checking the viewing statistics. He refreshes the page and hollers in delight because a few more hits have been registered in the past few minutes.

Koji shot and edited all the footage in Masataka’s video—thirty five separate clips comprising a total of two minutes and nineteen seconds. Now that the video is in global circulation, he sits like Marx’s watchman, attending to its progress. In checking the number of hits and reading viewers’ comments, Koji returns again and again to the digital artifact, the site/sight of so much of his labor. Though filming and editing are done, he exerts more effort, attempting to assess the effects of the video on its audience so he can calibrate his next project. He nods along to the soundtrack of Mobb Deep’s “Quiet Storm,” its dark, East Coast hip hop beats filling the spare office where we sit. The short video is the culmination of hundreds of hours of work spent coordinating logistics, traveling as far as Seoul and Taipei in search of new skate spots, collaboratively preparing a trick’s choreography with Masataka at every location, and filming every attempt and the final “make,” or successful landing, of the trick. Another series of labors followed: importing and logging hours of footage, editing, negotiating with Masataka and other team riders over the final choices of tricks and their sequence, color-correcting, adding secondary sound beds with music, and then rendering and finalizing the digital file that is then uploaded to YouTube. All this effort is expended in the hope that the combination of location, filming, editing, and music choice will display and enhance Masataka’s technical skill and style on a skateboard. The goal is a sensuous image -experience powerful enough to stimulate affective responses in viewers that will in turn alchemize the magic of branded financial sponsorships from U.S. companies for Masataka.⁵ While Masataka’s movement on his skateboard is the ostensible subject here, this brief narrative outlines the labor and moving parts necessary to put the filmic skate object —whose subject is ostensibly Masataka’s movement on his skateboard—in motion across time and space. The circulation via YouTube of a locally produced visual commodity saturated with signs of authenticity is crucial in articulating Lesque’s value to the global skateboard community and, more specifically, Masataka’s value to U.S. skate companies. The camera tracking Masataka’s deft movements is certainly about commodification. The performance captured is a form of exchange: the labor of the subject’s body before the camera is returned to the viewer as confirmation of an ideal, authentic self. To see Koji and Masataka’s relations to one another, to the camera, and to the global “screen” of YouTube only in terms of labor, however, is to overlook how movement constitutes the skaterly figure, both as a commodity and as an ethnographic object.

The literal movement of the skater and the camera in the skate video illustrates Deleuze’s notion of the “whole that changes.” At the same time, it exhibits the skaters’ need for a fixed subject available for close analysis and authentication within a global network of visual skateboard artifacts. Much like Rouch’s paradoxical claims of closeness and invisibility, or Deleuze’s inversion of the relation on screen between actor and motion, these skateboarders continually work at the play of skating to create the necessary video footage that would solidify their figures and present ideal selves immobilized against the backdrop of the city even as the real bodies roll and tumble in constant motion. The imagining and subsequent performance of the supposedly immediate skateboard trick is a spatial and temporal event that demands enormous physical and improvisational energy and generates repetitive failure, often resulting in physical injury as the skater attempts to manipulate the board in and over the architecture of the city street. The skater’s attempts at a trick are repetitive not because they are a circular habit,⁶ but because of the way flowing movements of different orientations and trajectories are organized in, activated by, and felt throughout the energetic body. What the skaters desire, however, is to land the trick and ride away, continuing the exploratory, ebullient relationship of board, body, and city through a series of complex motions. Each attempt, bounded as it is by an incompletion or interruption of the desired telos of the landing and continued flow, is itself comprised of the body’s arriving and passing through intense arcs of motion that are understood as “failure.” This unachieved telos is in fact part of the structure of the trick, a disordered potential fraught with the risk of bodily damage that in itself constitutes a corpus of practice undergirding the authenticity of the mei-ku captured by the patiently tracking camera.

“The trick” is a kind of destination, and the desire for continuous flow drives the skater to persist in experiments involving the body, skateboard, and physical space and to endure their concomitant risks. Iain Borden emphasizes the primacy of the trick, or “move” as he terms it, in the desires of skaters who “spend perhaps more time than any other sports practitioners actually failing to do what they attempt” (121). The camera extends a field of desire that relates the skater to the space of the trick. With the extension of this field, desire is relayed back to the camera from the skater in a kind of synergy. The skater wants to be more than they are in being captured by the camera, while the quotidian indexicality of the photograph is of interest only to the police and the anthropologist (Pinney 214). While physically so destabilized, the skater longs for the camera’s unblinking focus to cut short the repetition of failure with a decisive take—a hold on the momentary experience of the mei-ku manifested through the intimate but invisible power of the camera. The constant failures in front of the lens represent repetitious time spent turning back and forth and setting up for the next shot. But they also represent accumulation, as all those attempts accrue on digital tape or as bits on chips secreted within the dark chambers of the patient cameras.

The skateboarding film desires the mei-ku for its aura of authenticity derived both from the implicit risk to the skater’s body in motion and from the unique specificity of the location. The mobile and mutable forms of visual technology exert exuberant and unrelenting force on physical bodies and conceptions of being and practice. If practices such as skateboarding have been transformed to include the specular as much as the haptic and now infuse ordinary action with the potential for ritual and spectacle, how is research practice also similarly transformed? It is not enough to suggest, as George Marcus and Michael Fischer do, that anthropology is uniquely positioned “with its ethnographic insistence on in-depth knowledge of localities and their interactions with global processes” (xxi). Anthropologists themselves are uncertainly marked by and made coherent through the visual field exerted on them in the very terrain they call their field site (xxi). The method as a “whole that changes” requires us to abandon Mead’s precious panopticons of eternally recording cameras (even though this dream persists in surveillance fantasies). The field site itself, as a space of visual action, techniques, and documents, includes the anthropologist within its autopoietic process. Among the skaters, I find my own abstract vitality synchronizing with the machines around me.

A Total Machine on Screen

As Koji watches Masataka land trick after astounding trick in rapid succession in the YouTube Sponsor Me video, he murmurs in English, “Masa is a total machine,” before lapsing back into focused silence. This brief comment has dense implications with respect to the energies and desires flowing through and around the skateboarding male body, the vector of the visual and attendant spectacle, and the mobility and mobilization of young people like Masataka within a historically specific matrix of social forces: a “social machine.” The first machine is the impossible performance of uninterrupted success created by Koji’s editing. The editing produces a dizzying, ecstatic rush of chaotic events. In thirty five clips in less than two and a half minutes, Masataka moves quickly and deliberately toward, over, and down familiar street architecture made incomprehensible through his skaterly transformation of them into something dangerous, thrilling, and unplaceable. In some shots, the camera is static, as in one scene in which the camera’s wide-angle lens points up a long set of stairs from the bottom. There is only a millisecond of stillness before Masataka appears and launches off the top stair, moving incredibly fast and descending past the camera that pans to track him as he clears the entire double set of stairs and rides away. In other, longer takes the camera pursues Masataka as he performs a series of tricks in quick succession, moving from obstacle to flat ground, never slowing as he engages yet another obstacle. The “machine” here is one that repeats without failing, but in doing so it points out the reformulation of Masataka’s haptic presence in space. It compresses this frenzied ritual of the “make” into something that streams uninterrupted and can loop endlessly—a reformulation possible only through the circuits of video and editing software. The real is intensified into an orgy of speed and risk, then precisely arranged in relentless images of what Japanese skaters long for, the mei-ku completed in a unifying flow of energy. Success is repeated with a smooth, ecstatic consistency across a shifting cityscape. The machine engages in a kind of ciné-transe that at once accumulates and occludes failure within the massive digital residue generated through the assemblage of videographer, camera, and skater.

The “make” is the exquisitely visible trace because of the repression of another aspect of Masataka’s machine-like performance: his persistent repetition of failure. Around each edited filmic event is a zone of failure, excised as a new regime of disciplined truth is exerted over the spectacularized body. Koji’s hard drive is clotted with gigabytes of “failure” as Masataka bails on trick after trick, attempt after attempt. This accumulation of cut footage is not surprising in the least. There is no chance that we might mistake the carefully selected and edited footage of the final video as “unreal” or “less true” because of the absence of failed attempts and falls. Indeed, the signs of the real are exhibited in movement, in Masataka’s intense contact with handrails, ledges, and streets where the implicit risks of speed and bodily chaos are ever-present. The repetition of failure surrounding each mei-ku is rendered invisible, and so the serial crisis of the fall, injury, and trauma is deferred, kept out of circulation, and in reserve. The digital artifacts authenticate the few seconds of video into which the most intense spectacular value is condensed.

Seemingly impervious to the vicissitudes of gravity, Masataka endlessly makes his tricks through the machinic grace of Koji’s editing software. On- screen before us, he permanently averts skateboarding’s inevitable corporeal brutality—the total vertigo of what Caillois calls ilinix, the most chaotic and nonsensical form of play that is most threatening to the corporeal body and to the social organization of that body. In repetition, each mei-ku banishes this vertigo and “prevent[s] it from being transformed into disorder and panic” (144). Masataka is a “machine” that depends on other (scopic) machines to transform him and to produce a desirable object, one that alters the very practice of skateboarding.

This short video is an attempt to attract capital heavily distributed and anchored throughout the youth culture/skateboard metropole of SoCal. The video is pleasurable, but it also congeals labor and represents an effort at securing an economic future. Skateboarding on the streets of Japan is an innovative, improvisational practice where young men (and it is almost always men), many of whom are under-employed or out of work altogether, exert their bodily energies in play that reorganizes the meaning of capitalist urban space. At the same time, skateboarding opens a new field of possibilities by generating economic value within global youth culture in the face of Japan’s prolonged economic malaise. This possibility explains Koji’s excitement over the viewing statistics on YouTube, testifying to his hope that the video will get Masataka noticed where being seen can have material results—in the skateboard industry networks situated in southern California cities like Costa Mesa, Carlsbad, and Irvine. The video is an economic product, but also a form of self-representation that synchronizes idealized visions of the potential city and the creative, autonomous skater. It articulates these two figures of city and youth within a global grammar of “youth culture.” Kids’ social realities and virtualities are shaped by ad agencies, video game companies and the worlds they design, branded extreme sports events, media networks, and underground companies like Lesque. This complex represents what Deleuze calls the “social machine” that “selects or assigns the technical elements used” (Dialogues 70). In this sense, too, Masataka is “a total machine,” a component in the formation of the social. He is a critical body-in-motion that can construct a visual field for Lesque’s immediate social and economic spaces and their aspirations to shape Japanese skate culture. To be more specific: Masataka is an active machine insofar as he produces the haptic experiences necessary for a particular kind of skate practice that can jump scale from the local spatiality of the Tokyo street—where authenticity is alchemized through painful wrecks, creativity, and bodily skill—to the global networks where legitimizing capital and media exposure might become accessible. At the same time, Masataka is a target machine for Koji’s “seeing machine” that comprises not only the video camera but the entire assembly of software and relay platforms like Youtube—the digital membrane through which visual artifacts pass into global circulation.

One could ask, “What might be the effects of the repressed zone of failure upon the video and its social relations, should it return?” But I am more interested in the absence of failure and how its “return” is intimated by the anthropologist’s second camera, positioned like a shadowy second gunman to finish a job. Koji and Masataka’s video does not for a moment undermine the subordinated relation between the world as object and the mechanical eye. The video works feverishly within a theater of truth that Antonin Artaud would surely appreciate, emphasizing in its negative space “effects that are immediate and painful—in a word … Danger” (Artaud 42). The unseen space of “what could happen” coincides precisely with what is visible on screen, the machined empire of facts, the unquestioned history of the mei-ku. Like Rancière’s description of Chris Marker’s experimental documentary film The Last Bolshevik, Koji’s video echoes from the absented zone of failure: “The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” (38). Having taken up Masataka’s labor in its entirety, as failure contributes through its massive negative displacement to the value of the mei-ku, Koji creates a videographic identity that is lush with the movements and spaces of “authentic” skateboarding. This identity is produced through both hard work and intense pleasures and is too dull, too painful, and too intensely and briefly ecstatic, to be thought. Only in the artifact’s repeating itself again and again on computer screens around the world can Koji access the real of viewing statistics that confirm his labor and serve to calibrate his next project.

The Skateboard Mei-ku: Ito-shin, frontside noseblunt slide, Kyoto, Japan, 2008

Trance-action

Where does this leave the anthropologist with the other, externalized camera? In studying the relations between skaters, cameras, and city, I am conscious of deploying my own video camera as a recording tool set to “deep focus”—not focused on any particular detail or person but set so the foreground, middle-ground and background are all equally sharp —certain to snare data indiscriminately. Beneath its modernist masquerade of “scientific rigor,” my position is helpless. I watch Koji enviously from behind my own camera as he skillfully pursues the visible events necessary for a theater of the immediate and painful. He skates fast behind his subject, pushing, while keeping his eyes fixed on the small viewing screen that frames his shot. With small adjustments, he keeps the skater in focus and gracefully times his motions to sweep to the edge of a staircase just as the skater launches off. I begin filming as if I can trust my own epistemo-kinaesthetics to tell me when to turn the camera on, when to pause, when to save it for later. On tour through southern Japan with the Lesque team, we spend a night in Kyoto, skating till the early morning hours. We leave for Nagoya around midday in a steady grey drizzle. But just outside Kyoto we pull over alongside a rice field that borders a massive elevated superhighway, flanked on either side by a major surface road. Beneath the superhighway is a pristine concrete embankment stretching for several hundred meters, interrupted only by the highway’s enormous vertical pilings, and enclosed by a fence. The spot is incredible: perfectly smooth concrete and an imposing setting made deliciously and, more importantly, visibly illicit by being fenced off from the street, which marks it as a totally authentic site of unintentional public architecture waiting to be discovered and liberated. One of the Lesque pro riders, Itoshin, is determined to “make” a trick on the bank. Yamada, the pro photographer, gathers his gear: remotely synced strobe flash and stands, camera bag, and tripod. Koji readies his expensive video camera. I insert a fresh DV tape into my own inexpensive, borrowed video camera. We climb the fence. Each participant takes up his place beneath the faint shadow of the superhighway above that shields us from the unrelenting rain.

Initially I let my camera run continuously, but nothing spectacular is happening. I turn the camera off. The battery needs to last. Itoshin makes a few attempts at a frontside noseblunt slide on the lip of the bank, attempting to slide over a protruding box on the face of the bank before popping off his nose and re-entering into the bank past the obstacle. He increases his speed. Changes his angle of approach. Pops into the trick later. Yamada shoots a few test frames. Moves a strobe flash. I film these things. Itoshin pulls a white T-shirt over his black tank top. The shirt is emblazoned with his new, American skate-clothing sponsor’s logo. The company hasn’t asked for any footage or photos from him. He is so intent on keeping the sponsorship that he takes any opportunity he has on tour to get a mei-ku on video or jpeg. The other riders lounge against a piling. I don’t film them. The ritual begins in earnest. The flash bursts again and again as Itoshin miscalculates, or loses his balance, or bails before he even gets to the top of the bank. Koji doggedly films every attempt, following just behind Itoshin on his own skateboard, giving the camera a mimetically smooth motion in relation to Itoshin’s own body. I film their approach from atop the bank and after almost every failure, I stop recording, just like Koji. Koji asks me to move because I am in his shot: the anthropologist is contaminating the reality of the trick. I shift down to the flat section of concrete, behind Yamada, who crouches with his reflex camera mounted to an intimidatingly professional tripod. I zoom in on Itoshin and Koji beginning their approach and zoom out to keep Itoshin fully in frame as he fails the trick yet again. Subtly, without thinking, I have ceased to remain in deep focus where I can catch all motion and interactions at once, including Yamada’s and Koji’s uses of their respective cameras. Zooming in, I have made Itoshin’s performance-spectacle the object of my own filmic gaze, synchronizing my own scopic machine with those of my subjects. The ritual has pulled me into its rhythm and texture. The repetition is dulling and hypnotic. The near-misses accumulate into an unbearable deferral of the mei-ku. This is what I want: to be subjected to the ritual without terminus, when the cameras fixate on machinic repetition. This is frustrating, painful data. But it is also relentlessly soothing in its ever-present promise of the moment that will captivate us all: the instant when Itoshin will make the trick and ride out smoothly. That tape has seventy three clips, sixty eight of which show Itoshin attempting the trick. The anthropologist’s camera emerges as the perverse counterpart to Koji’s obsessive attention to viewing statistics on Masataka’s YouTube video. I accumulate the statistics that comprise the zone of failure, an accumulation possible only because I am taken over by the machine of the visible that involves the skaters’ cameras in their own rituals of the mei-ku. I bend to read the counter on the video camera like Marx’s watchman and regulator, immersed in painstaking labor that exceeds the parameters of what my body understands as work. I am entranced, waiting for the make and simultaneously under the spell of the rhythm and movements of this complex embodied ritual of cameras, skateboards, illicit space and agile bodies.

The long, continuous take is the defining mode of so many canonical ethnographic films, based on the idea ardently pursued by Mead, that the camera is a neutral and greedy machine for accumulating visual data. If well positioned and left alone to record uninterrupted, like a surveillance camera, it will “naturally” pull into itself the unique spectacle of culture in action. But under the highway in Kyoto, I cannot make the camera record the long take. It is an aberration to keep the camera running with the CCD sensor continuously converting light into electronic signal. In the midst of this ritual I am not easily hypnotized by the imperceptible whispering of the unspooling tape or the uninterrupted duration of the shot sequencing an “objective truth.” Letting the camera run without my interference feels as though I was forcing myself out of a trance. The timecodes of my tapes are punctuated with stops and starts, the skaters around me intent on creating a spatio-temporal zone within which the field of the visible can take hold at close range. Long after the event, the deep, unblinking gaze now broken, I survey my data in its temporally perforated form. Having been recorded through this method of stopping and starting, the tapes display a visual artifact that Rouch calls the ciné-monte, the edited filmic event created in the moment the real is enacted and failed. I am gazing back at myself in the data and discovering the limits of the “‘film-trance’ (ciné-transe) of the one filming the ‘real trance’ of the other” (99). In this ritual, which depends so heavily on the presence of multiple cameras, what is the function of my spectating camera, the ethnographic camera that intends to produce knowledge or evoke the ambiguous and lively intersections of movement and mediation? That is, while the skaters always anticipate the camera as a necessary component of the event they themselves were making, I do not seem to be absorbing the event. Instead, my ethnographic gaze is absorbed into the skaters’ mediated movements, arcing through a socially organized sense of time. The transactions between the haptic experience of the skaters’ bodies and their cameras are pre-conditioned to include yet another layer of mediation. The cultural event I sought to record was already established around the terms of mediated/machinic visuality, so that the skaters, videographer, and photographer had entered into a ritualized series of intense repetitions—entranced by their own work of cameras on bodies moving dangerously through an out-of-bounds space. My own ethnographic lens is made coherent through inclusion in their social and scopic relations. Even though I am swept up in the same rhythmic pacing of their bodies and cameras, I am engaged in trance-action with their own framing of the world. My body-camera assemblage is enlarging the field of experience through its desiring predisposition toward retrieving the extraneous and peripheral—what Benjamin calls the “unconscious optics” of the camera (21). Itoshin’s repetitions and failures produce so much discarded visual data for Koji and Yamada yet are fundamental to the ecstatic “realness” of the event, just as trespassing below the highway confers authenticity. The failures, though invisible in Koji’s final video edit or in Yamada’s careful photo selection, demonstrate a collective agreement between the three young men to persist in achieving the mei-ku and each failure itself confirms their willingness to endure. Itoshin “leads,” as the focus of action and energy circulates around him, but all three participants share in a flowing series of negotiated choreographies upon which the mei-ku and its documentation depend. These failures and the social relations cohering within them ethnographically endure in my own footage. My punctuated recording method reveals the strength of the temporal rhythms of the ritual within which I was immersed, but the moving frame of my shot draws in the intense inter-relations of the three men.

Though my camera also follows Itoshin’s lead, the unconscious optics of my camera emerge intensely within the contact zone comprised of laboring bodies behind and before cameras, in spaces mediated through grueling repetition. The series of flowing exchanges I have described above depend on trance-action: a mode that incorporates the methods of creativity and labor for the skaters and myself, as well as our haptic understandings of what it means to ride a skateboard, amplified through our own mediations of that embodied knowledge. Destabilized along with Rouch, trance-action becomes my ethnographic method, the effect of multiple movements and mobile mediation. Situated dangerously at the moment where youthful bodies engage the city in play and spectacle, working hard to manufacture a visual document saturated with realness, the ethnographic camera attempts to assemble meaning from the “upheaval” of corporeality reinscribed by the skaters’ cameras that track it, coming in so close. It is a delicate exchange: my camera never out of touch but never close enough to become invisible to the very cameras awaiting its gaze and deepen the modes of mediated possession.

The trajectories of our bodies and cameras in this fraught space are unruly, and their effects on one another produce tense relational oscillations that threaten to recapitulate Caillois’s ilinix of disordered play. By marking out instead the contact zone of movement, mediations, and methods, the focus turns toward the mode that shapes these contacts. Rouch’s ciné-transe is transformed through new relations between sensuous bodies and scopic machines, and in the methods and spaces where the bodies and machines trance-act. The field site, as conceptual ground and lived space, is in turn powerfully possessed by these social and machinic exchanges—trance-actions—before it becomes a mei-ku, or the site of knowledge making. The transformation of this site presents a significant, sometimes uneven, and “disquieting” challenge to anthropology. The authoritative distance of the tripod is long lost for rich, proximal contact between researcher, subjects, and their media—contact that undermines the very stability of those subject positions and their affects in relation to media. Movement is transmuted into a bodily knowing through senses and camera. And new ethnographic media-rhythms are gained in research with young people choreographing their own encounters between the mediated and the haptic.