Violence, representation and rutina1

Ivan Pojomovsky.
1. Introduction
During May 2013, having few months into our fieldwork inside a
Venezuelan prison, our relationship with the inmates was suddenly
transformed. We had entered the prison collaborating with a group of
film activists, and our first idea was doing simple exercises where the
inmates could show us aspects of their every day life inside bars, and
eventually lead to more complex workshops where they could express
their viewpoints on the prisons reality.
However, a group of the most excluded inmates approached us
and changed suddenly our plans. They were part of those who, having
violated the internal norms (commonly the failure in paying the
weekly tax, or causa) are confined by the carro 2 in a place called
rehabilitation center. Here, they have restricted displacement and
serve as almost slave work force in the prison. They asked us if
those cameras can be used to film a movie? and in short time, we
could assess that they had a very clear idea of how this movie should
be.
Although our approach was permeated by the idea that all
ethnographic survey always implies an intervention in which the
relationships established by the researcher are constitutive part of the
inquiry and should be part of what is reflexively looked upon in the
analysis (Bourdieau and Wacquant, 2005) we were faced with the
many aspects that were crossed by the audiovisual enterprise. This
encounter brought several problems related with the amount of power
over the representation between researcher and subjects (Ruby,
2000); the power effects and (un) balances introduced in a social
space by the empowerment of those who gain the capacity to
produce a film (Turner, 2001); the ethical dilemmas over to whom and
in which form is given a voice and the many contradictions and
internal conflicts it brings; but creating, in the middle of all this, a film
product crossed by the cultural categories of those who produce it,
building an interesting ethnographic document in itself and ots
construction process (Ruby, Turner, Gainsbourg, 2005)
2. Enthusiasm and filming as ethnographic entry
We thought that this proposal could serve to establish a
relationship with some subjects distant from us until that moment.
However, what we encountered when we agree to film a fiction film
1 Excerpts from this paper were presented (in spanish) in the LASA
congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico on May 28th, 2015
2 The carro is the internal power structure that rules the everyday
life inside the prison. Is guided by armed inmates inside what is
known as open prisons in which the State doesnt have control of
life inside bars (Antillano, Pojomovsky, et al, 2015)

with them surpassed our wildest expectations. From that moment, in

every visit we faced a growing group of inmates (more than 40 at a
time) eager to act for hours in any exercise, or spend the couple of
days between our visits manufacturing dozens of fake clay weapons,
or write 30 pages for a script proposal. They also could spend endless
sessions during months debating the precision of a scene and its fit
with the reality of the life in the prison, or improvising hours of acting
facing the camera. All this showed an amazing level of discipline and
concentration during the activities, more surprising coming from such
disenfranchised subjects that had so many problems having some
level of stability or behavior in their everyday lives. When I asked
one of the leaders of the group, remembering impressions from some
professional actors, if they tired after those long scenes, he answered
me are you crazy? We rather wanna keep going on all day long
practicing. I go to sleep thinking on the movie, I gariteo 3 thinking on
the movie, I don think of anything else.
For us, on the other side, the filming was a privileged door to
understand the rutina4 of the prison, in at least 3 different senses.
First, the sessions where we elaborated a technical script from the
initial ideas, dividing it in concrete actions and scenes, initiated a
process where the inmates developed a thorough exercise of
searching for the feasibility of the scenes, contrasting their
experiences and having bitter discussions over the rutinary way of
doing things in each case, with each member competing for showing
an scholastic knowledge of the prison reality. Second, on the acting
level, all the debates on the appropriate gestures, positions and
interactions helped us to inquire on the habitus (Bourdieau, 2007),
in the sense incorporated schemas for action that constitute this
reality. Third, the debate around the different possible messages of
the film, allowed us an ideological lecture of how this messages
were intended, to whom were directed and the way the inmates
wished to be represented.
3. The Spartan Character of performance
The way the participants engaged the essays and performance
exercises verified their works constancy. Far from an exercise, were
it was necessary to coordinate actions or focus the attention, the
sessions of rehearsal and filming were fluid spaces, where
improvisation developed uninterrupted (or even where, having more
than one group to be filmed, the performers were capable of
spontaneously create scenes, just for the camera to stick with them).
This was curious coming from the same persons that, being punished
3 garitear or do the garita is performing an armed guard in one of
the posts that limit with rival carros. Every inmate has to take a
turn in doing a guard, sometimes for several hours.
4 The rutina (routine) is how the inmates of the open prisons call
the code that rules the everyday life inside bars. It could become an
adjective, being persons or situations called rutinarias

for their ruptures to the order the carro entitled, we have

characterized by their disperse behavior and excluded origins.
Even more, their relationship with performance acquired an
spartan character, as we could assert once in the middle of a long
rehearsal, where an spontaneous order from a member of the carro
allowed the inmates to recollect freely some fruits that were being
carried out. A human stampede soon burst, taking advantage of the
opportunity, however, our actors (some of the most deprived men in
the prison, and the ones that in other circumstances had been the
first in rushing out to the chance), holding their clay weapons and
improvising their dialogues in the middle of disorder, remained on an
easily to be postposed exercise.
This disdain, in people that in other context didnt have any
problem in asking us for money or begging us for any favor, implied a
kind of ascetic dignity maybe parallel to those described by
Wacquant (2006) achieved by boxers in the Chicago ghetto. The
performance gave these persons a place of renounce that, in its
same possibility, allowed them to relocate themselves in the social
space of the prison.
4. The breach in everyday rules, the interchange between
reality and fiction.
The impulse that the inmates showed became the principal
force that turned the film in a whirlwind of frenetic activity, at the
pace of some actors that appeared to think of the exercise as a
matter of life and death. Inside this, some ruptures emerged that
neared this territory to the Carnival (DaMatta, 2002), to the temporal
inversion of order, where the limits between reality and drama, the
spaces of entrance and exit from the representation became fuzzy,
acquiring a bigger and more open rythm and intensity, more than
our classification system can simply digest (DaMatta, 2002, pp125).
During the whole process we had the impression of having initiated a
dangerous experiment, where the participants (like in the infamous
Zimbardo experiment) had taken more seriously what it should be
just a game.
In this scenario, it was difficult to sustain a clear distinction between
reality and fiction, and our professionalized work perspective
frequently would clash with this mix of spheres. Here, the
representation of a role implied much more than just a fantasy
exercise. It was incredibly difficult, for example, to get people to
perform the un-prestigious roles the plot offered (a thief, a coward,
someone who insult a visitor). Even more, there was a continuous
transfiguration, an amazing mimesis between the acting roles and the
social roles inside the film crew. The actor performing as the
principal5 began to exercise a tyrannical leadership over the crew,
awarding roles and demanding favors. This was only more surprising
coming from a very excluded man in the prison hierarchy, who only a
couple months back we had witnessed under the most humiliating
5 leader of the carro (Antillano, Pojomovsky, et al, 2015)

relationships with members of the carro. In a sense, the mask

appeared to take the body of the actors.
This carnival deranged all kinds of distinctions inside the prisons
everyday life. Working with a crew of penalized subjects, that had
restricted movement inside the prison, and a series of labor
obligations, the film introduced a parenthesis that allowed them to
skip these prerogatives. Also, the filming exercise an our implicit
perspective on it (work group, labor division, collaboration among
crew members, etc.) introduced all kinds of problems for the statuary
distinctions inside the rutina. When the carro tried to introduce a
director in the film, the figure rapidly failed, as it promoted,
between a carro member and the actors, all kinds of interactions that
soon became problematic.
5. Violence and rutina: tactical uses of the representation
Why these men showed this amazing dedication to the filming
exercise? What elements in the filming representation do they found
that generated a situation where reality and fiction barriers became
blurred? There are 3 aspects in which the representation allowed
them to re-inscribe, invert and reposition themselves in the reality
that gave sense to their actions.
First, to understand the films scope it was necessary to confront our
prerogatives on what is a creative space or of artistic production, and
understand that, for these men, and the social position from where
they performed, the representation exercise involved different
elements than those in different contexts. Here, representation aimed
less at imagine hypothetical situations and more to re-inscribe, in a
legible and tactically convenient way, the surrounding violence.
Maybe the way in which we understand this was during the
shooting of a shooting scene, where the camera man (an activist
friend) asked us to look for stones to throw to the wall where one of
the actors fired with his clay weapon. Coming out to the yard to
collect some stones, one of us found himself with a bullet in his hand,
surely result of one of the frequent shootings with the other carros or
the National Guard. That bullet (in that situation a bullet pretending
to be a stone pretending to be a bullet) remind us how, unless the
sometimes nonsensical filming exercise, the realities it represented
surrounded permanently the every day life of these inmates. It was a
good way to understand that in the movie the primal matter of the
ritual is the same that those of everyday life (DaMatta, 2002, pp94).
The movie in its recreation became a form of making intelligible and
reinscribe in a rational order, far beyond the satire or the scape, the
terrible violence that flood the everyday life of the inmates.
Secondly, the representation exercise implied for the actors the
possibility for, momentarily, re-positioning in the local context, and
situating in the top of a hierarchy they normally suffer. Therefore, the
crosses between quotidian and performed roles allowed a parenthesis
where, inversing the structure, its importance was actualized,
remembering its inevitability:

In the carnival the party emphasizes a social positions and

roles system dissolution, because it inverse them in the process,
although in the end of the ritual, when its submerged again in the
everyday world, those roles and position systems are retaken
(DaMatta, 2002, pp. 80).
In third place, the other spaces and auditoriums meant for the
representation entailed the most important repositioning. The filming
exercise, with the fidelity of representation as key, imply leaving aside
the local position definitions in he carceral camp and to highlight the
fact of being imprisoned, even in a subordinated position, as a sign of
the know how of a very codified violence. In this sense, the
representation, permitting them to present themselves to a bigger
audience, allowed the actors to enforce a carceral credibility that,
even experiencing it daily from a subordinated position, enables the
actors to present themselves as rutinarios in a context where this
have a growing importance.
6. Beyond symbolic representation: the cultural capital of la
rutina
Beyond constituting only a place of symbolic vindication, the capacity
of being rutinario would deal with the possibility of exercising a
coded violent habitus that enables the insertion in a whole set of
material circuits, essential for excluded young men. This way we can
understand the necessities of script precision and corporal
spontaneity as the show of a domesticated and almost martial version
of a rage habitus (Bourgois, 2012).
The endless sessions where the crewmembers discussed over the
scenes feasibility, and their almost scholastic debate over the
rutina denoted the importance it has inside their social trajectories.
This was evident for the inmates that didnt form part of the crew,
who continuously criticized that chocones (people who dont
understand rutina appropriately and violates it) were filming it. As a
member of the carro expressed me once that movie should be filmed
by real malandros and not those crackheads, and this probably was
the real reason behind the short time designation of a carro member
as director of the film. The necessity of faithfully representing the
rutina was seen as a requisite that the only truly rutinarios (those
who entitle power positions in the carro and that had shown that
know how to conduce themselves) could achieve.
This seems essential in the carceral context where the precision over
the rutina could be sought in relation with the violent relational
threads that surround the inmates. As one of the actors expressed:
what we were talking, we have to speak with the truth, if we are
going to do this thing, we have to do it good, because, as I told you,
this can cost us our life out on the street if we say something that
doesn`t fit, in the street we are in problem, we are compromised
This level of detail over the rutina acquires even more sense if we
focus it on a wider context. Being rutinario is a proof that a whole
scheme of behavior have been incorporated, part of those who know

how to exercise violence in this context. It shows how the capacity to

exercise violence becomes part of the human capital that enables
to develop in underground illicit economies (Bourgois, 2010). These
profoundly incorporated schemas are part of exaction circuits where
excluded subjects interiorize dispositions that allow them to survive. A
survival that takes place inside material circuits where violence is a
necessary part of the accumulation practices, which intertwine with
solidarity networks and where the prison is a vital link (Bourgois,
2012). The rutina, however, is a rage habitus characterized by its
profoundly regulated character, part of a carceral context where a
process of violence hierarchization (Antillano, Pojomovsky, et al.
2015), a behaviour code is elaborated that regulates life inside jail
up to its smallest details (Nunes, 2011, pp 216.). It is from the
knowledge of these rules that inmates can inscribe this cultural
capital that allows the recognition of being apt to participate in illicit
economies.
The importance of this rage habitus in the insertion possibilities of
excluded young men exceeds the illicit activities. In a conversation
with a slums community leader he bitterly complained on the unions
role in the public works in the neighborhood. When I asked if it wasnt
at least a labor alternative for young men, he replied: yes, but they
want them for the same thing that the malandros (gang members),
to act like thugs and clash, they only pick the most violent and have
them only to malandrear
This has a great importance in a context where these networks (and
the violent parctices that come with it) constitute themselves in one
the few ways in which young men from slums can reclaim a place of
respect (Zubillaga, 2007). The material circuits where the exercise
of violence gains importance becomes fundamental in a national
context where exclusion conditions are particularly insidious for
youngsters (youth unemployment in Venezuela has averaged more
than double than general unemployment during the last 10 years) 6 in
the broader frame of a profoundly un-formalized economy (42.6 % of
the Economically active population during the last 6 years; INE 2014)
which promotes a hunters logic (Merklen, 2010) and that has
historically configured an urgency culture (Sanchez y Pedrazzini,
1992) among young men.
The importance of showing yourself capable of exercising violence,
and furthermore, of knowing the specific codes that regulate this
violence in the carceral context, has a growing significance in a
context where the increase in prison rates (Antillano, Pojomovsky, et
al, 2015), generates a growing intertwining between the codes of the
prison and the social dynamics of the slums, where the bridges are
built on an experience increasingly common for the young poor. The
knowledge of the prison rutina becomes more and more a signal of
6 in the 2009-2014 period general unemployment has averaged 6.1 %
while youth unemployment rises to 12.4% (Encuesta hogares por
muestreo I.N.E. 2014)

distinction, but also, in a fundamental way, part of the reciprocal

knowledge needed to establish trust relationships the minimal
capacities to survive in the violent practices that becomes the only
alternatives for young men in excluded neighborhoods.
In this context the representation of these realities acquires
preeminence, because more than reflecting a reality or give a
voice to an experience, allows the actors to establish a position that
the continuous humiliations and the symbolic violence they suffer
denies them systematically. In their creativity and enthusiasm we
found the footprints of an structural order that drives them to lifes of
violence, in whose breaches are born the possibilities of granting
spaces of carnivals, where the momentary inversion of order serves
as an scape and as an impulse to fight against the pegue de cana7

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