The Schizophrenia of Dying

We are impelled by an irresistible power and are never, not for a single instant, in a position to steer a course in any direction except down the slope on which our feet are set. There are no virtues save those which are necessary to Nature's ends and, reciprocally, no crime which she does not need for her purposes. Nature's mastery lies precisely in the perfect balance which she maintains between virtue and crime. But can we be guilty if we move in the direction in which she pushes us?

Marquis De Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and other early tales (1992), 159.


      The untimely death or murder of a youth is almost always perceived as tragic in our culture. There exists a particular knowledge currently embedded in American mores that reinforces the status quo allowing everyone, when confronted with such a scenario, liberty to immediately react. Most wish to assign blame (whether to victim or executor), demand justice (vigilante or legal), or to mourn, and granted this final scenario encompasses the former two. The varied amounts of resistance found in the discourse(s) of how slain youth are (re)presented in the media is contingent on the type of coverage the victims' mourners, the deceased, and the executor/protector (in this case Officer Leonardo Quintana) are granted.


     The visual representations of Nathaniel Sanders II's mourners, Sanders himself, Officer Quintana (and the Austin Police Department entity in general), and a diagram showining the crime scene as depicted by the Austin Chronicle produces a discourse denying Sanders' death through a schizophrenic presentation of two different Nates in arguably the most in-depth coverage of this event. Sanders was fatally shot by Officer Quintana in the spring of 2009 in a controversial use of deadly force. In the powerful production of a visual denial of death, the media representing this incident created a space where death was never visually confirmed due to the varied living images and iconography worn by the mourners of the slain youth on one hand. The schizophrenic presentation of the deceased in the Austin Chronicle's news story "Nathaniel and L'il Nate" also allows for a psychoanalytic analysis grounded in Freud's work "The Uncanny" and Ernst Jencht's work "On the Psychology of the Uncanny," which inspired Freud's piece.


     The post-mortem memorabilia subjectifies the viewers of such anachronistic material, objects enabling us to associate Sanders with life rather than death, or rather a beyond life or second life. Roland Barthes writes that "...Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life" (Camera Lucida 92). But there are very few physically objective indexes of death when it comes to how Sanders is (re)presented with the exception of an image where we see the contours of Sanders' body underneath a sheet with his sneakers poking out from underneath. We strangely can hear the shots precipitating Sanders' death from the actual dash-cam video that was on the scene, but tellingly pointed away from the incident. This video places us in the sonic space of the moments before, during and after his death, but the video fails to visually confirm the reality of death. I imagine the video is made available because it is public record, but what does it say about the disconnect between visual and audible death? As a culture, we do not associate death with sounds, usually, and this video contributes to the competing discourses placing Sanders betwixt this world and the next. We cannot 'see' Sanders' body, but we can see, and hear, the commotion that surrounded his demise.

     It is as if Sanders is given a voice to speak to us from the uncanny position of a double personality that transcends the grave as a good individual and troubled individual. It is not my goal to propose how he should have been presented, but rather to probe the intricacies of how he has been (re)presented, and how these greater discourses interpellate us as prosumers of discourses ourselves. Nor do I aim to suggest that what is required are explicit pictures confirming death, but rather how the images that Sanders was represented through work to reinforce hegemonic or possibly counter-hegemonic norms. Barthes explicates that

...the Photograph cannot be penetrated, it is because of its evidential power...Sartre says, the object yields itself wholly, and our vision...is certain - contrary to the text or to other perceptions which give me the object in a vague, arguable manner, and therefore incite me to suspicions as what I think I am seeing...I exhaust myself realizing this-has-been (Camera Lucida 106-107).

The image above and to the right, of the t-shirts, is an uncanny representation of Sanders as a double, the image's alarming red frame surrounding the representation of his likenesses on the t-shirts, and the confrontational way he is depicted accompanied by the illegibility of his facial characteristics suggest he is here, but indecipherable concerning what emotive state he is in. Initially, I am confronted by the red of the two girls' shirts; red can be a sign of danger, heat (fire), passion, blood, and politically it has been used as an indicator of socialism and communism. The words "RIP LIL NATE FUCK DA LAWZ" anchor the color of the shirts and point toward what they are probably meant to signify. From the acronym RIP, I will rule out danger and heat as connotative meanings, for now, and choose to associate this color with death, love and blood denotatively. It is interesting to note that there is no accompanying descriptive caption for John Anderson's (photographer) image, except for the attribution appearing below the image as it appears on the Austin Chronicle's website. It is assumed that Sanders, an individual known to be deceased, is put in the position of commentator and reactionary to his own mortality. The colors and words that surround Sanders' images speak more clearly than Sanders is allowed to himself, due to the pixilation of his face. Sanders, with the assistance of these anonymous girls, proceeds to explain the context of what their shirts are supposed to represent. It is as if the editor's of the Chronicle made a conscious decision to allow the picture, and in turn Sanders, to speak in an eerie yet condemning manner. Ernest Jentsch first described the uncanny as a type of 'intellectual uncertainty' a feeling, place, or something where an individual "does not know one's way about in" (Freud 931). I take a loose interpretation to Jentsch's observations and suggest that this place,' the discourses produced by the visual (re)presentations of slain youth, is altogether foreign. Further, the image offers no coherent explanation indicating the death that the t-shirts apparently commemorate. Is it evident that 'Lil Nate' is dead? Are these mourners or protesters? Do they even know the victim? Jentsch writes that "the word suggests that a lack of orientation is bound up with the impression of the uncanniness of a thing or incident" (2). Indeed, the consumer of this image is completely alone to orient himself and why it would do little good to suggest what the uncanny is, it is much more pertinent to attempt to explain "how the affective excitement of the uncanny arises in psychological terms, how the psychical conditions must be constituted so that the 'uncanny' sensation emerges" (Jentsch 3).

     There are many denotative questions that surround the image that are left unanswered; who are these people, what are they doing, where are they, why are they doing it and when? These are all the tenets of good journalism after all. The ideology that is being presented is ambiguous, but it is strangely denying that a tragic death occurred, metaphorically and at times literally, and therefore denies death its proper role as the lead discourse to be constructed. As discourse produces subjects we must ask ourselves what type of subjects does the denial of death produce (Rose 190)? The power works to create an ambiguous knowledge of the correct time and place for our Peace Officer's to use deadly force. The Chronicle is subject as a medium within the larger cultural discourse of the media as purveyors of facts, but have ambiguously allowed these girls, who will not even look at us when they are talking to us, to tell us the facts. The anachronistic positions that the (re)presentations of Sanders' likenesses are placed in leaves us to assume that he personally has made these condemnations of "FUCK DA LAWZ." The Chronicle has clearly let the viewers fill in the blanks as they see fit, further obscuring the presentation of death as the dominant discourse.

     The physical 'double' of Sanders in the image indicates a contradiction of context. The image, by usurping the way these mourners have chosen to mourn, has denied death to be formulated as a primary discourse. We are shown Sanders engaged in action representing life while the individual wearing him on the right appears to be shaking her head and looking down, exhibiting body language commonly associated with frustration, possibly humor, and sadness. Juxtapose the representation of Sanders' life (him speaking to us from the backs of the shirts) with what we are not shown; explicitly her physical mourning and the knowledge produced is one rife with ambiguity concerning Sanders' mortal state. The shirts could be an index of death and are, but they are oddly taken out of this context. To return to the words on the shirts, at this juncture I must bring in the descriptions of danger, heat and political dissension to the connotative plane of the red shirts due to the hostility of the phrase. In "an energetic denial of the power of death" 'Lil Nate' has been allowed a platform to speak his mind (Freud 940). This image's construction of an "account of the social world" is schizophrenic, anachronistic and uncanny (Rose 195).

     Without speaking to Anderson or the editorial board of the Austin Chronicle, it is difficult to surmise the motivation for printing not one, but two representations of a slain youth without clear facial features within the same image. This distances us from the gravity of the situation by not being able to see his eyes and gaze, further reinforcing the myth that this gruesome event did not really occur. Death has been denied its proper place. 'Lil Nate' is presented as an angry caricature of uneducated inner-city youth suggested by the presentations of purposeful misspellings of the' as 'da,' and 'laws' as 'lawz' on the shirts. Schizophrenically, in the same news story Sanders is pictured as an American YouthWorks graduate with his own quote of encouragement next to a photo of his bust where he is demanding the viewer to look at his accomplishment. Here, we also see Sanders given a platform to speak to us, but the viewer is given a context from the caption clearly guiding our thoughts, and reinforcing the hegemony of the social institution of school. The schizophrenic presentation of a good 'Nate' and a bad 'Nate' fit and are the context of the news article, but they produce a discourse questioning the idea that there exists only one Nate. The power/knowledge produced subjugates the fact that this individual's life has been cut short through the use of dubious deadly force. The duality present in the text of the article galvanized by the image of the t-shirts as Freud explicates is a "preservation against extinction" (940). What is superficially preserved is the fantasy of Sanders' continued existence. Ultimately, what gets muddled and competes for the formation of a coherent discourse is the presentation of two Nate's leading us to wonder if possibly just 'Lil Nate' was shot and Nathaniel is still somewhere alive.



     There are four clear images presented as depictions of mourning/protest besides the one mentioned above. Two of the others contain depictions of Sanders directly emblazoned on t-shirts. This image to the left also contains a double of Sanders. The man in the background wearing the red ball-cap and shades has a picture of Sanders' bust on his shirt, and the man in the foreground being hugged is displaying a medium long shot of Sanders on the back of his shirt. Just as in the previous images, Sanders' facial features are illegible, but it appears Sanders is looking directly at us from the shirts, demanding contact of some sort. Freud writes that " [the] 'double' was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an 'energetic denial of the power of death', as Rank says; and probably the immortal soul was the first 'double' of the body" (940). The distinguishing "I" is possibly being preserved by Sanders' peers and becoming recontextualised through its representation in the media which leads us to ask if subconsciously the editors of the Chronicle, KVUE, and the Austin American Statesman are engaging in the same preservation by publishing these images. If, as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen suggest, "the participant's gaze (and the gesture, if present) demands something from the viewer, demands that the viewer enter into some kind of imaginary relation with him or her," what type of 'relationship' is obscured by a seemingly demanding subject given no clear visual representation (118)? Are we to identify/misidentify with Sanders as a marginalized individual attempting to preserve his ego through the 'immortal soul' carried by his mourners that clearly have intense investment in Sanders' life? I assert that these mourners have an extremely intense investment in Sanders' life as they are mobile shrines and testaments to his continued existence beyond his execution/disciplining. But I also am skeptical to propose that the reasons for the media's depictions and the mourners' (re)presentations are one in the same. They both are invested in a type of theatricality, but the former's is for profit and a technology of the municipality, while the latter's is an investment in a preservation of the ego and counter-hegemonic visual statements of resistance. These mobile and active shrines, the shirts, contain and form powerful discourses transposing Sanders' violent death onto the wearer allowing what the technology of the municipality deemed deviant and punishable by death to be condemned in a 'momentary saturnalia.' (Foucault 60). Just as we see currently with the Trayvon Martin discourses individuals are empowered to speak through the dead, and in his case to even adopt his name en masse, becoming the victim, because it is out of their reach to become the dominant voice alone. George Lipsitz writes;

People can take action only in the venues that are open to them; oppressed people rarely escape the surveillance and control of domination. Consequently they frequently have to "turn the guns around," to seize the instruments of domination used to oppress them and try to put them to other uses (35).

By becoming the victim, wearing the victim, and memorializing the victim, physically, mourners/protestors in both cases empower themselves through solidarity by adopting the victims mortality displaying the 'guns' of strength in numbers.
     What I find most striking about the (re)presentations of Sanders is that while it is clear that Sanders is dead, there is really only one image directly indexing death that was visually available in the three media outlets under analysis. In this image, printed in the Chronicle, we are looking down on Sanders' corpse covered by a sheet or shawl in a wide angle shot reinforcing distance from the tragedy. While it is difficult to make out the contours of a human individual underneath the sheet, Sanders' exposed shoes is the most concrete indication that a human individual is indeed present, and dead. Furthermore, at the beginning of a kvue.com web video, another remembrance t-shirt is pictured. This depiction is much less confrontational, and the viewers are actually able to see Sanders' facial expression. Sanders is gazing directly at us and smiling, happy and alive with his head photo-shopped onto a background of calm clouds in a sea of tranquil blue. Blue, in contrast to red, has ambiguous meanings in our culture. The color blue can indicate sadness, or happiness and tranquility, further contributing to the schizophrenic discursive formation of Sanders' death as presented in the media. He demands that we acknowledge his life as his head is wedged in-between the text of his birth date and the date he was shot, suggesting that these are the bookends to his life, but he is still in the middle somewhere, neither beginning nor ending. The striking liminality of this image, where Sanders "is caught betwixt and between the positions assigned" further implodes the boundary of death transcended by the discourses created (Ott and Mack 248). It is also telling that this shot is at the beginning of the story; it is an indication of inception and birth, as opposed to potentially closing the story with this shot which would point towards death, finality, and an end at least. Sanders begins the web video full of life, as depicted on the shirt, while the video literally ends with a lack of closure concerning the then pending settlement surrounding his death.


     Mortal and moral ambiguity seems to surround Sanders in every depiction. The double that is 'Lil Nate' and 'Nathaniel' competes for empathy and anger. As prosumers we are confronted with schizophrenic ambiguity which in turn subsumes the objective reality that a death has indeed occurred. Death as the primary discourse is supplanted by discourses formed out of assumptions, and claims of knowledge that may or may not be true (Rose 193). The question still remains to be addressed concerning what type of subjects does the discourse of the denial of death produce. While I have uncovered no tidy wrap up to this inquiry it is clear, as evidenced by this analysis, that we can at least conclude that this discourse produces a great mistrust of the supposed benevolent institutions that are supposed to protect us.

                                   
Index     Daniel Rocha: The (Re)construction of Memory     Conclusions & Implications


Images Cited:

Diagram

The three Sanders

"A.P.D. Please Let Me Make It"

Dashcam screengrab

"Never Give Up When Things Look Hopeless"

Mourners hugging

Sanders' corpse

"In Loving Memory"
Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang.

Freud, Dr. Sigmund. 1955. "The Uncanny," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol.17, pp. 217-256.

Jentsch, Ernst. 1906. "On the Psychology of the Uncanny," Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 8.22 & 8.23, pp. 195-198 & 203-205.

Lipsitz, George. 1997. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place. London: Verso.

Rose, Gillian. 2012. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials 3rd Edition. London: Sage.

Sade, Marquis de. 1999. The Misfortunes of Virtue and other early tales. Trans. & Ed. David Coward. Oxford: Oxford UP.