suture: after the violence

Music: The Charlatans: Us and Us Only (1999)

This Saturday I was listening to the radio when it was announced that 22 year old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire---with semi-automatic Glock and an extended magazine of 30 bullets---into a crowd gathered in a Safeway grocery store parking lot. The group had assembled to talk to and meet democratic representative Gabrielle Giffords, who regularly held "meet and greet" style gatherings in public. The massacre left six people dead and thirteen wounded.

It appears Loughner is mentally unstable, and a quick study of the young man's Internet presence indexes psychosis: paranoia, aggression, and an inability to adhere to the basic rules of grammar (which, he notes, is deployed by the government as a means of mind control). It's difficult to deny the claim this man was not in his "right mind."

The more interesting claims circulating in the MSM this week, however, concern whether Loughner's violence was indicative of "the Right mind." Some have suggested, for example, that although he was deranged, rightist rhetoric may have "pushed him over the edge." Sarah Palin's infamous map featured rifle sight cross hairs over the districts of candidates she'd like to, er, take-out. The implication here is that weapon metaphors may have influenced Loughner to shoot. This reminds me of the famous Judas Priest case from the 1980s when the parents of suicidal teens charged the band with planting subliminal messages in their music ("do it!"). Of course, the difference is that there was no subliminal messages in the heavy metal tunes, whereas cross hairs are indicative of weaponry (as is Palin's motto, "don't retreat, reload").

Others on the right, such Prof. Richard Vatz, have responded that forging a link between extreme rhetoric and physical violence is "fallacious," and the charge is really only registering the frustration we feel because of the senselessness of the rampage.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times is probably responsible for catalyzing this national discussion because of his Monday column "Climate of Hate." He argues the shootings are a symptom of a larger, "eliminationist" rhetoric coming from the right. The line crossed is, apparently, ad hominem: whereas the dems are apt to criticize and idea or policy or argument, the "conservative Right" (particularly pundits) are much more likely to "make jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post." Response from folks like Palin has been swift; Palin argued yesterday in an Internet address that violent rhetoric has always been a part of our political landscape and that no one's perfect. She also insinuates the calls to "tone down" the tenor of political rhetoric are attempts to stifle free speech.

I find this public discussion fascinating, especially because it is one of those rare moments in which large audiences are asked to think about rhetoric and the nature of persuasive influence. The question that is being asked is this: Did the tone and character of our contemporary, mainstream political rhetoric have something to do with Loughner's violence? It's just an excellent question, and one that forces us to think critically about rhetoric as such.

The answer, of course, is both "yes" and "no."

On the side of the "no," of course, direct, causal claims are impossible to make. It is no longer a question that Loughner was mentally disturbed. And, as my colleague Dana Cloud has argued relentlessly in the past couple of years, calls for a more "civil" discourse are often sounded to drown-out dissent. In this respect Palin has a point---something White House spokesman Robert Gibbs conceded today a press conference.

On the side of "yes," however, we have to consider the ways in which reducing violence to a singular, individual's deranged mind participates in the rhetoric of monstrosity, the transformation of flawed human being into an agent of evil. This form of "projection," of course, absolves us of responsibility and causes to overlook larger, systemic ills. Did Palin cause Loughner to lose it? No. Is Palin's rhetoric part of a larger discourse that makes violence part of a master narrative? Yes.

Let me put this differently, with apologies Mick Jaggar: "I shouted out, / Who killed the kennedys? / When after all / It was you and me."

I was very impressed with Kathleen Hall Jamieson's recent appearance on the PBS News Hour. She was careful to suggest that there are likely, statistically, no more mentally unstable folks in the general population than, say, a century ago. What has changed, however, are media technologies---technologies that make it possible for folks of a like mental character to gather and swarm, and technologies that make it possible, increasingly, for an individual tailor media exposure to his or her tastes. In other words, we live in a time in which media exposure is selective.

To extend Jamieson's analysis here we can turn to Jodi Dean, whose recent book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive captures something else (and, thankfully, in the stable form of "the book). Dean suggests that we live in a time of "communicative capitalism," which refers to, among other things, a society in which communication is exploited via the superegoic command, enjoy! Drawing from the Lacanian work of Slavoj Zizek, Dean argues we are living in a time of the "decline of symbolic efficiency" (yes, Rufo, can already anticipate your eyes rolling). The argument is complex, but is more easily grasped with common examples. The first one Dean uses is blog comments: sometimes its difficult to know when someone is being ironic or serious, playful or simply mean. The anchor or master signifier that "fixes" meaning is eroding or gone. Or, to quote a favorite Jane's Addiction song, "camera got them images/camera got them all/ Nothing's shocking/ Showed me everybody/ Naked and disfigured/ Nothing's shocking." Dean also refers to the decline of symbolic efficacy as "whatever culture" (I had an exgirlfriend who often said, "whatevs!" and it drove me up the wall). The decline can be described, alternately, as the fading of the Big Other or the decline of the Master; opinions proliferate, that's all there is, just one more profile, one more unstable joke, one more flame work. Whatever. Nothing's shocking.

I think Dean captures quite well the context in which these new calls for "civility" are taking place. The call is not for civility at all, but rather, for the Big Other to fix things, to anchor it down. "We want our suture!"

In film studies, suture theory has a long and complicated history. The idea of the suture refers to the way the spectator is bound to the story world of the film in ways that escape her conscious perception. Traditionally, the debate has boiled down to whether or not it is a singular shot sequence (e.g., from secondary to primary identification) or if "suture" refers to a broader range of techniques. I subscribe (following Silverman) to the latter understanding of suture.

I think, in the context of this week's violence, that the conception of the suture is apt. Like the point de caption in Zizek's conception of ideology, suturing in this context represents the reassignment of a master narrative that fixes meaning, however temporarily, when we encounter the Real (here, the realization that violence is a rupture, death awaits, and so on). Was Loughner's act of violence senseless or unspeakable? Well, of course not. We've all seen Palin's map. The narrative of political assassination is a common film plot---as it is in American political history (check out this map, for example). I think Jamieson's observations about the end of isolation, combined with Dean's take on the decline of symbolic efficacy, helps to explain how Loughner's act of violence, while of individual volition, was nevertheless systemically produced.

Which brings me, sadly, to Obama's eulogy from last night. Yesterday my friend and advisee Sean Tiffee defended his prospectus; he's writing about horror film as a form "working-through," and we talked a lot about master narratives and their failures after Nine-eleven. I started writing this blog some days ago, before I knew Obama was giving this speech. Then, last night, I found myself perplexed by the memorial service: people were hooting and hollering, as if at a pep rally. That improper audience tone gradually disappeared once Obama started speaking. The tone changed. What was a strangely celebratory mood became somber.

What was going on? Of course, it was the return of the Big Daddy who would, once again, sew it up. Obama referenced Christina-Taylor Green repeatedly, the nine-year-old shot by Loughner who was born on September 11th, 2001. Green became the condensation symbol for "healing," and Obama declared if there were rain puddles in heaven, she was dancing in them. Obama turned this latest rampage into the master narrative of Nine-eleven, that wound that is continuously sutured (still) as the dominant narrative of the national political will. This massacre had nothing to do with Nine-Eleven. But Obama made it so. Thereby, kitsch was used to suture and the systemic reasons behind the violence were covered over, once again . . . until, of course, the next eruption.