...the people never felt closer to those who paid the penalty than in those rituals intended to show the horror of the crime and the invincibility of power; never did the people feel more threatened, like them, by a legal violence exercised without moderation or restraint

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (1977), 63.

What exactly does it mean when we as individuals wake up with our morning coffee, open the newspaper, or turn on the computer to ingest the news, and witness the coverage of a youth slain by a Peace Officer in the line of duty? There is no single discourse that completely dominates; it is an overlapping and shingling melange of visual, textual, emotional, factual, and editorial representations that belie a coherent cartography. Beyond the written text we are presented with a visual text, the image, that will continue to represent these individuals for the remainder of their second lives. This representation is all we will ever know of the individual, and his or her story; it is the formation of a new meaning that is possibly in disjunction with that individual's life. To echo Roland Barthes, we must ask ourselves, "How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond" (32). Yes, 'how does meaning enter an image,' but how also does it enter into our person and create the citizenry we are, and are becoming? How do the uncanny representations push an individual into the beyond, where it is no longer the individual and his autonomous existence that we are concerned with, but this other life after death, that is a rebirth of sorts, creating a new individual shaped by the discourses surrounding their untimely passing. Barthes writes, "The Language [the totalizing abstraction] of the image is not merely the totality of utterances emitted (for example at the level of combiner of the signs or creator of the message), it is also the totality of utterances received: the language must include 'the surprises' of meaning" (47).

   Recently, with the media circus surrounding the shooting death of 17-year old Trayvon Martin, his (re)presentations are how we have come to formulate an image of this individual and know him. In the image above Martin is presented as youthful, solemn, and demanding our attention, 'look what happened to me, it could happen to you too.' What do we really know of Martin, and in the public discourse does it matter any longer who he once was? Now he is a symbol of injustice/injustice, fear, racial tensions, loss, and oddly vicarious identification. At many protests and demonstrations surrounding the incident signs were emblazoned with the words 'Trayvon Martin is my friend,' Trayvon Martin is my son,' and 'Trayvon Martin is me.' Do these visual and textual images grant power to the individuals who present them to speak against or for something they otherwise lacked the power to accomplish before his death? If Martin is their 'friend,' 'son,' and embodied in themselves who exactly is Trayvon Martin, and as he is now immortalized through his execution will he ever be allowed to rest? Susan Sontag writes that "This sleight of hand allows photographs to be both objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality - a feat literature has long aspired to, but could never attain in this literal sense" (26). Martin has now been allowed to speak on many platforms, testifying one way or the other, and how does this work on the public's interpretations of the event? How do we give voice to someone long dead, possibly through their image? As Martin is used as a puppeteered 'dummy' the ventriloquists shout and whisper from either side, reformulating the essence of a new individual speaking to an outraged and empathetic public, shaping a multitude of discourses. Foucault writes that "the essential point, in all these real or magnified severities, is that they should all, according to a strict economy, teach a lesson: that each punishment should be a fable" (113). What do we learn from Martin, what has the power/knowledge produced from George Zimmerman's gun left us with?

  Eighteen year-old Daniel Rocha was fatally shot in the back at point blank range by Austin Police Officer Julie Schroeder in June of 2005 during a traffic stop. Four years later eighteen year old Nathaniel Sanders II was fatally shot in the chest by Officer Leonardo Quintana while sitting, or sleeping, in a parked automobile early in the morning. Both individuals died under similar circumstances, and while the visual representations of Sanders II are more in number as presented in Austin’s local media outlets, the discourses produced by these images speaks to a greater discourse of violent death at the hands of the same benevolent entity that is supposed to prevent such incidents. The purpose of examining these two discourses is not to display a sense of right or wrong, guilty or absolved, but to understand how these visual texts work on, and through us, and interpellate us as social subjects. Brian L. Ott and Robert L. Mack echoing Louis Athusser claim that

                                 ...ideology is so infused into the social structure that it actually serves as the force to interpellate us, or the force that calls us into existence as social subjects. Individuals, far from being unique or original, are actually a collection of different ideological systems fused into one identity through the process of "hailing." Hailing occurs when individuals recognize and respond to an encountered ideology and allow it to represent them (129).

  It is important to realize that the media outlets that feed us these representations are a reflection of our dominant, and therefore acceptable, mores and ideological system(s) that produce us as citizenry. In recontextualising these visual texts within a discourse analysis I would hope to discover more anecdotal information than anything, but anecdotal information that brings us closer to how we let these representations speak towards the apparent, and not-so-apparent, dominant ideologies of our culture. As Officer Schroeder and Officer Quintana shift from the realm of protector to judge, jury, and then executioner, it is telling their representations (or lack there-of) as victims/public servants/executioners and "...how they may have been, in a sense, the king's sword, but...[they now]...share the infamy of his adversaries" (Foucault 53).


The Schizophrenia of Dying     Daniel Rocha: The (Re)construction of Memory