In this post I want to reflect on sight and seeing. I want to reflect on the condition we find ourselves in, living in a society that is saturated with images, re-presentations that displaces the real and the authentic, questioning the “truth” of what and how we see. This is motivated by the Rodney King incident and the video footage that was used as key evidence in the first trial, which culminated in a “not guilty” verdict.
The video is a vivid and graphic depiction of Rodney King being beaten up by several police officers. Beaten with a baton, his black body is reduced to an inanimate object. The video highlights the extent to which black subjectivity, and other minorities, have been produced though violence in the modern world. Slavery, colonialism, indenture, lynchings, police violence, neocolonialism, to name a few, can be described as institutional violence that structures the world into those that are acceptable and those that are not. De Silva in Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) describes this process (the annihilation of the black body) as essential for positioning the white man as the Transcendental “I” against his Other (the person of color). Her opening sentences resonate strongly with the Rodney King incident and the narratives that haunt the pages and images of Anne Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.
That moment… between the release of the trigger and the fall of another black body, of another brown body, and another… haunts this book. What is there to do? To capture, to resignify as one remembers, reconfigures, and disasassembles what lies before those elusive moments … You are young and black. You live in a neighborhood where crime thrives. We take guns out of the streets, arrest dangerous criminals. You happen to live in a place that has the highest rates of homicides and rapes. We do our job right. We approached your building, you looked suspicious; we stopped, got out of our cars with our guns, and told you to put your hands up. We shot. We are the police. We have been very well trained to do our job. (own emphasis 2007:xi).
Da Silva begins her book by narrating the death of the body of color, state (police) violence against the body color, as a way of explaining the reasons for the ongoing struggle that people of color face in the world, as it has been structured historically.
The video of Rodney King’s beating was widely circulated through the media and used in the court case. The video is evidence that the incident occurred and pointed out the key police officers involved in the beating. The video footage can be thought of as unmediated, unhampered evidence that this is what happened on that night, here is the proof of the police brutality. It is important to note that the very fact that the video had to be used as proof of the beatings undermined Rodney King and his battered body as evidence of the police brutality. However, in a double whammy, both the video and King’s beaten body where not string enough to stand as legitimate evidence to convict the police officers during the first trial. What does this tell us about the value we place on the black body, when the body itself (and the injuries due to the beating) cannot stand as evidence of the incident?
The video footage was a key piece of evidence in the trial. Smith’s performance powerfully captures the manner in which the power of the footage, its claim to representing the “truth” and evidence of this brutality became obsolete through the course of the trial. The jury became somewhat numb to the re-presentation of King being beaten up. The first few time were powerful, the evidence was apparently clear, yet after a while, the jury could not relate or connect to the footage. It is almost as if, because the footage was widely circulated, it lost it potency, it became impotent (just as King was emasculated through his beating) and lost it “aura”, which was essential for its claims to authenticity. Look this happened, it really happened, it was captured on video, no longer had any legitimacy.
Part of the problem is the fact that we live in a world that is saturated with images. We understand and we navigate the world through images that are produced and re-produced. In a postmodern sense, the original is forever displaced by the copy, and places us in a perpetual state of liminality.
I think that Smith’s docudrama tries to speak to this complexity of the visual and the world in which we live. The very nature of her production is postmodern – the original or authentic is forever displaced and replaced by the copy, an imitation of the original, which becomes an original in itself. (Here I borrow from conversations I’ve had with Manthia Diawara who argues strongly that the copy of a copy of a copy is an original). The other striking aspect of her production is the visuality of it. Switching characters constantly, transgressing ethnic and gender spaces, and performing multiple identities Smith points us to the manner in which we are conditioned to see in certain ways. We are conditioned to see racial and gender identities through lenses that give particular meaning to particular bodies. At the same time, we understand the world we live in through the images we see of the world and through images –re-presentations – we learn to structure our perceptions of others (ethnic, racial and gender).
At some point during the trial, the jury could not see King as a human being. He was reduced to an object, just another image of a black figure in a world that does not place value on how we see and represent black and other bodies of color. The body of color is expendable, a curiosity; always impoverished, dangerous, transgressive and a spectacle. The King video became a spectacle. Smith’s docudrama is interesting as she (a black woman) uses herself as a spectacle, navigating through a multitude of personalities and people, performing stereotypes (gender, racial, ethnic, linguistic) as a way of speaking back to the manner in which we are conditioned to understand and interpret the world through particular lenses. However she points to the fact that it’s all a performance. This is powerful, as she highlights that race, ethnicity, gender and language is perceived and believed as being essential (think about the way we understand race through stereotypes that we believe are inherently true), because it serves a particular purpose through how we structure our world through knowledge/power.
The density of images in this world makes everything we see blur into same-ness and into nothing-ness at the same time. As Smith blurs the lines between races, genders and ethnicities in her performance, she reminds us that we are all the same, we have the same struggles and we should be fighting the same battle, as the enemy is a common one.
No comments:
Post a Comment