On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King

Author(s): Allen Feldman

Reviewed work(s):
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May, 1994), pp. 404-418
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/645896 .
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comments and reflections

on culturalanesthesia: from Desert Storm to Rodney

King

ALLEN FELDMAN-National Development and Research Institutes,New York

We lost any sense of seasons of the year, and we lost any sense of the future. Idon't know when the spring
was finished, and I don't know when the summer started. There are only two seasons now. There is a war
season, and somewhere in the world there is a peace season.
-Resident of besieged Sarajevo]

In March 1992, I spoke, by invitation, at a conference titled "Violence and Civilizational

Process," which was held in Sweden. My topic was violence and everyday life in Northern
Ireland(see Feldman 1991 a). A Croatian folklorist, the other foreign guest, talked on the culture
of fear in the former Yugoslavia.2The rest of the presentations concerned the rationalization of
violence by the state in the process of Swedish nation building. The conference theme was
inspired by the work of Norbert Elias (1982), who had argued that modernization entails the
progressive withdrawal of violence from everyday life in tandem with its increasing monopo-
lization by the state. This stratification may have been felicitous coloring for "mainstream"
European modernization but could only be dismissed as a bureaucratic conceit when consid-
ering the current situations of Northern Irelandand the former Yugoslavia. Inthese locales, the
state, in various ethnic and legal incarnations, has pursued hegemony by democratizing
violence through the clandestine support of populist paramilitaryterror.3In Northern Ireland
and the various ethnic enclaves of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, the state's capacity to flood
everyday life with violence has been enabled by the sequestering of political aggression behind
legal, procedural, and nationalist facades. This potent combination of instrumentalrationality,
state formalism, and public terror cannot easily be explained by the evolutionary drive of
Norbert Elias's notion of civilizational process.
Due to their adherence to Elias's perspective and their own biographical experience in
Sweden, the local ethnologists and historians attending the meeting had difficulty conceptual-
izing political violence as a routinized element of everyday life, a concept without which it is
impossible to grasp what has been happening in Northern Irelandfor the last two decades and,
more recently, in ex-Yugoslavia. In discussion, it became clear that, for most of the scholars,
violence, like the geographies it had disordered, occupied the verges of civilizational process
and European modernity. Violence linked to, and defining of, the cultural Other confirmed the
exceptionalism of the historical and geographical periphery.
This tacit ghettoization was momentarily shaken as the Croatian folklorist delivered a paper
punctuated, in the white space between her words, by barely concealed emotional disorder
approaching public mourning. This did not seem to be the aftershock of her life in a war zone,
nor the catharsis of having momentarily exited. Rather,her distress exposed the frustration,risk,

American Ethnologist21 (2):404-418. Copyright ? 1994, American Anthropological Association.

404 american ethnologist

and uncertaintyof communicatinglocal terrorto an audienceat an historicaland experiential
remove. I was thrownbackto the enforcedspaces of silentfear I had firstencountered,doing
fieldworkin Belfast,amongthose who were intimatewith the regularityof randomviolence
andwho could nottrustme withthisintimacyof which, atthattime, Ihad no bodilyexperience.
How does one transportthe experienceof everydayterrorthat is almostinexpressibleoutside
the sensoryencompassmentof violence?The Croatiandid not speakexplicitlyof the sensory
alterityshe had made tangiblein thatconferenceroom;rather,it was borne by her body and
voice. Incarnatesensorydifferencewas the gulf at which explicittheoreticalcommunication
hesitated.TheCroatian'stensionwas aboutspeaking,withoutguaranteeof perceptualconnec-
tion, to an audience who inhaleddifferentculturalgivens, who touched differentmaterial
realities,and who did not have to sniffout immanentdeathfromonce familiarsurrounds.4
TheCroatianwas in searchof a translatablelanguageof terror,the conversionof local dread
into a mobileculturalform.She spokeof "ethnographicself-reflexivity," a concepttakenfrom
recentcriticismin Americananthropology.Butin contrastto the mentalist,confessional,and
text-centeredtendenciesof this approach,whatemergedfromherpresentationwas a palpable
and gendered5self-reflexivitythat had been channeled by the sensory remembranceof
scheduledterror.
The griefin her voice and body rewrotehertext as she spoke it and opened up a historical
and experientialchasm that no one could easily cross, but which could at least be acknow-
ledged. Recognitionof culturaldifferencewas not forthcoming.Rather,the termsof dialogue
were set immediatelyaftershe hadfinishedspeaking-mourning, as herfirstinterlocutersrushed
to insulatethe roomfromthe vortexof history-as-pain and to smooththe now-brokenplaneof
culturalpresupposition. Theyfireddefusingquestionsaboutmediaimagery,newspaperreport-
age, and the like;subjectsas reassuringlyglobal as unvoiced sensoryterrorwas deemed site
specific.Theaudiencemovedfromuneaseto animationas the discussiongravitatedto the issue
of how the Serbianand Croatianmediawere diverselydepictingthe war,thoughthey hadjust
witnesseda Croatianchokingon the experientialinadequacyof conventionalrepresentation.
Confrontedwiththe personificationof intractablematerialities,authoritative questionersforce-
fully reroutedthe conferenceto familiarculture-boundplatformsfromwhich to addressthe
questionof violence. Thisthematicshiftmay have been sheerpolitenessin the face of bared
emotions, but I could not help but experience it as culturallymediated misdirection.The
talismanic invocationof media imageryand issues provided a reassuringsocial narrative
(certainlynot limited to Swedes or scholars) on which to hang culturalanesthesia:the
banishmentof disconcerting,discordant,and anarchic sensory presences and agents that
underminethe normalizingand often silent premisesof everydaylife. The segue into media
practiceand formand the avoidanceof the Croatian'ssituatedsensibilityreplicatedthe very
effectsof the firstworld'smediaprocessingof "exotic"violence;in thiscontext,the mediawas
simultaneouslycritiquedand fetishizedby the discussants.
The audience'sresponsetherebyencapsulatedElias'stheoryas culturalsymptom:violence
was withdrawnfromthe everydayand itsdisturbingperceptualdispositionswere confinedand
silenced by invokingthe informationalnorms of a universalizingrationality.It made no
differencethatthequestionswereaftertruththroughthe documentationof the media'sdistortion
of "objectivity," forthe generaldiscussionpresupposed,to the detrimentof exposedembodied
fear, that media criticism was a more suitable forum for grasping historicalevents. The
audience'seasy identificationwithmediaimagery,to whichwe areall susceptible,symbolically
rescuedthe subjectof violence fromthe alien sensoriumevoked by the Croatianand delivered
it to an ethnocentricapparatusof historicalperception.
All of this inadvertentlydemonstratedthe extentto which violence and itsconsequencesare
automatically associated with aberrantculturaldifferenceand then tamed by exclusionsthat
enable the self-servingperceptualnegotiationof that difference.My own unvoicedquestions

on cultural anesthesia 405

were directedat the totaldynamicsymbolizedby the conferencedialogue,in which Iwas also
culturallyimplicated:How does the peripheryspeak truthto the center if the very construct
center/peripheryis conditionedby the inadmissibilityof alien sensoryexperience?When the
Otheris caughtin andeven identifieswiththe powerfuland mirroring gaze of director indirect
mass media culture,what other perceptualoptions have been banished,closed, and delegit-
imized by culturalanesthesia?
* * *

Culturalanesthesiais my gloss of Adorno's(1973) insightthat, in a post-Holocaustand late

capitalistmodernity,the quantitativeand qualitativedisseminationof objectificationincreases
the social capacityto inflictpain upon the Other6-and I would add-to renderthe Other's
pain inadmissibleto public discourse and culture.7It is upon this insightthat a political
anthropologyof the senses in modernitycan be elaborated.This formulaimplies that the
communicativeand semantic legitimacyof sensory capacities,and their abilityto achieve
collective representation in publicculture,is unevenlydistributedwithinsystemsof economic,
racial,ethnic,gender,sexual,andculturaldomination.8Adorno'spointaboutmodernity'spain
can be linkedto the respectivethesesof Lukacs(1971),Foucault(1978),Jameson(1981), Corbin
(1986),Taussig(1992),andFeldman(1995)thatthe constructionof the modernpoliticalsubject
entailed the stratification and specializationof the senses, and the consequentrepressionof
manifoldperceptualdispositions(see Seremetakis1993).9As a drivingforce in this historical
dynamic,the mass media'sdepictionof the agents and objects of violence is crucialto the
modernizingembodimentof those politicalsubjectswho occupy both sides of the screen of
public representation.This is all the more pertinentwhen the very embodied characterof
violence is evaded, ignored,or rewrittenfor collective reception.
Likeotherinstitutions (industrial, penological,psychiatric,and medical),the massproduction
of facts, and of facticityitself,are based on techniquesand disciplinesthat, in the case of the
media,materiallymolda subjectand cultureof perception.The massmediahas universalizing
capacitiesthat promoteand inculcatesensoryspecializationsand hierarchicalrankingssuch
as the priorityof visualrealismand the oftencommentedon genderedor racialgaze. Likethe
normativeoptics of gender and race, objective realism,the depictivegrammarof the mass
media, should be not be perceivedas an ahistoricalgiven; it is an apparatusof internaland
externalperceptualcolonizationthatdisseminatesand legitimizesparticularsensorialdisposi-
tions over otherswithinand beyondour publicculture.
Inthe 19thcentury,"realism" was associatedwith modesof narrationand visualizationthat
presumed an omniscient observer detached from and externalto the scenographybeing
presented. It was linked to formal pictorialperspectivismand narrativelinearitywith all its
assumptions about causality,space, and time. Yet duringthis period,culturaland scientific
attentiongraduallydetacheditselffromexclusiveconcentrationon the scene observedin order
to dissectand depictthe act of observationitself(Crary1991). Theperceivingsubjectcould no
longer remainexternalonce perceptionbecame one object among others of realistrepre-
sentation.The scientificobjectificationof perceptiondovetailedwith the commodificationof
perceptionby such forces as new media technologies,the manufactureand consumptionof
reproduciblemassarticlesandexperiences,advertising,new leisurepractices,the acceleration
of time, and the implosionsof urbanspace-all of which involvedthe remoldingof everyday
sensoryorientations.
Inthe 1930s, ErnstBloch, redefined"realism"as the cult of the immediatelyascertainable
fact,therebypointedlylinkingit to normsof rapidand easy consumersatisfaction(see Bloch
1990). More recently,David Harvey's(1989) spatialanalyses implicitlyshow the historical
connectionbetweenthe massproduction/consumption of facticityand the apparentincrease
in perceptualmobilitythat accompaniesthe space/timecompressioncharacteristicof late

406 american ethnologist

modernity.Space/timecompressioncan be definedas the implosionof perceptualsimultane-
ity-the abutmentof persons,things,and events froma pluralityof locales, chronologies,and
levelsof experienceonce discreteandseparate.Harveyattributesthisnotonlyto technological
advances, but also to the acceleratedcirculationand increasinglyefficient distributionof
commodities,and to the permeationof exchange values in which new objects, spaces, and
activitiesbecome commodifiableand measurableand, thus, interchangeablewitheach other.
When previouslyuncommodifiedthings,activities,and spaces become interchangeableand
substitutableand carrymobilevaluations,they takeon new temporaland spatialcoordinates
for humanperception(Feldman1991c).
The economic and psychic binding of perceptualcommand to consumer satisfaction,
discernment,and skillsgeneratesa pseudo-mastery over "thereal"throughthe experienceand
manipulationof simultaneity.Themedia'smassproductionand commodificationof visualand
audiofacticitybothcreatesand dependsupon a perceptualapparatusof holisticrealism.Here
the ingestionof totality,perceptualholism-the personalcapacityto encompassthingsthrough
prosthetics-becomes a valuedcommodityin itself.The holisticapparatusfrequentlyjettisons
the indigestibledepthexperienceof particularsensoryalterities.Thisis the case when sensory
differenceconflictswiththe mythof immediateandtotalizingperceptualcommandby resisting
norms of acceleratedconsumptionand the easy disposabilityof things (Seremetakis1993,
1994). These complex interactionsof perception,space, time, facticity,consumption,and
materialculture pose an eminently modernistdilemma: that the perceptionof history is
irrevocablytied to the historyof sensoryperception.l0
* * *

Culturalanesthesia is a reflexive passageway into historicalconsciousness and repre-

sentation,as AlainCorbin(1986) pointedout when he complainedthatWesternhistory,as
written,has no odor. In the massmedia, perceptualholism and culturalanesthesiaconverge
and take manyforms.Generalitiesof bodies-dead, wounded, starving,diseased,and home-
less-are pressedagainstthe televisionscreen as massarticles.Intheirpervasivedepersonal-
ization,thisanonymouscorporealityfunctionsas an allegoryof the elephantine,"archaic,"and
violenthistoriesof externaland internalsubalterns.Thepanopticismof documentarytelevision,
like its penological predecessor(Foucault1978),11creates a new cellular interventionthat
capturesand confines disorderedand disorderingcategories of bodies. Staged, mounted,
framed,and flattenedby a distillingelectronicsieve, these icons of the staticbecome moral
inversionsof the progressivelymalleablebodies of the ideal Americanviewer,whose public
body is sensualizedand mythicizedby the orchestrationof commercialmessageson cosmetics,
exercise,automobiles,fashion,dieting,recreation,andtravel.Thisvisualpolaritybetweenthe
reformablebodies of the observerand the determined,deformed,and reducedbodies of the
observed disseminatesfor the viewing public a culturalscenario first identifiedby Hegel's
master/slavedialectic:that relationsof dominationare spatiallymarkedby the increaseof
perceptual(and thus social) distance from the body of the Other. In turn, this body is
essentializedby materialconstraintsthatdeny it recognizablesentience and historicalpossi-
bility (Kojeve 1969).12
But culturalanesthesiacan also disembodysubjects,which is what occurredin crucial
segmentsof the televisingof OperationDesertStorm.Here the media both pre-emptedand
mergedwiththe Americanmilitaryarsenalthroughthe video erasureof "Arab" bodies.Inorder
to fuse perceptualdominancewith topographicconquestenemy, Orientalbodies were elec-
tronically"disappeared"likethe troublemakersinJosephHeller'snovel Catch22 (1961);Iraqis
were magicallytransmutedinto infinitesimalgrainsof sand thatthreatenedthe Americanwar
machine.Herethe body vanishedwas a priorithe body vanquished.And a masswar against
the builtenvironmentwas mystifiedas a crusadeagainstthe desertas Orientalisttopography.

on cultural anesthesia 407

 Theeulogizedsmartbombswere prostheticdevicesthatextendedourparticipantobservation
in the video occlusion of absentedIraqibodies.Whatwere these celebratedmechanismsbut
airbornetelevisions,visualizingautomata,thatwere hurleddown uponthe enemy creatinghis
conditionsof (non)visibility? Theirbroadcastimagesfunctionedas electronic simulacrathat
were injectedintothe collective nervoussystemof the audienceas antibodiesthatinuredthe
viewer from realizingthe human-material consequences of the war. Visual masteryof the
campaign pushed all other sensory dimensions outside the perceptualterms of reference.
Culturally biased narrations,abetted by information technologyhistoricallymoldedto norma-
tive conceptsof sensorytruth,precludedanyscreamof pain,any stenchof corpsefromvisiting
the Americanlivingroom.
Thespectatorship cultivatedbythe televisingof DesertStormcannotbe reducedto voyeurism
as some havesuggested(see Stam1991),forperceptualentanglementwiththe video simulation
of the warwas crucialto the manufacturing of consentand,thus,politicallyand instrumentally
impl icatedthe viewingpublic in the actionof violence.Whena voyeuractsthrougha surrogate,
it is to avoid materialcomplicity,not to sharein it. Yetin DesertStorm,the perceptualtools of
the mediaexploitedand elaboratedthe post-Vietnampoliticalfantasyof Americanreempow-
erment. This metanarrativeblurredthe effective and moral distance between viewing and
acting,therebyengenderingmaterialcomplicityon the partof the ideal electronicspectator.
Heresensoryselectionwas a productiveapparatusfashioningmutualpoliticalagency(andnot
passivity)betweenthosewho actedby lookingandthosewhose actsof deathwere cinematized.
Civiliantelevisionobservationwas continuouswith the militaryoptics of the fighterpilotand
bombardierwho were dependent on analogousprosthetictechnology and who killed at a
distancewith the sensory impunityand omniscientvision of the living-roomspectator.The
combat crews who played with aggressivedrivesby watchingpornographicvideos priorto
flying missionsdemonstratedthe uniformsensoriumbetween viewing and violence as they
up-shiftedfromone virtualrealityto another.
* * *

Itdidn't make any sense to me, I couldn't see why they were doing what they were doing.... He moved,
they hit him.... I was trying to look at and view what they were looking at.... Evidently they saw
something I didn't see. [LosAngeles Police DepartmentOfficer Theodore Briseno on the arrestof Rodney
Glen King]13

Lessthantwo monthsintoOperationDesertStorm,the effacedbodyof the Otherreappeared

close at hand with the televised beatingof RodneyKing.Originallyvisualized outside the
prescribedcircuitsof fact production,thisblackbody brokethroughthe nets of anesthesia.Its
shockeffectderivednotonlyfromlong-standingracialscars,butalsofromthe concurrentmyth
beingplayedout with DesertStorm.Themediacampaignin the desertsucceeded in sterilizing
the post-Vietnamviolenceof the state,butthe imagesof King'sbeatingshowedthe statemaking
pain. The immediateshock of the televised beating originatedin unprogrammedsensory
substitution.Eventhe viewer insulatedby race and class could experience the involuntary
projectionof his or herbodyto thatpointof thetrajectorymarkedbythe swingingpolice batons
as they came down uponthe collectiveretinathatwas suddenlyrenderedtactile.Thespectacle
of state-manufactured traumainterdictedthe visual mythof sanitaryviolence. King'sbeating
was the skeletalX-rayimageflasheduponthe technologizedsurfaceof staterationality.Desert
Stormand the beating of Rodney Kingevolved into two irreconcilablenationalnarratives.
DesertStormcelebrateda triumphalist senseof anending,while King'sbeatinglaidbareanother
of
layer wounding encounters: unfinishedhistoryas mise-en-scene-bound to returninthe near
futuredespiteall attemptsto changechannels.'4Twoantagonisticiconsof nationalexperience
impingedon the publicscreenof electronicconsciousnesswithoutresolution,withoutone set
of imagesofferinga coherentaccountof the other.

408 american ethnologist

 It is no coincidence that, a year later, the dominant tropes of Operation Desert Stormseemed
to work their way into the juridical reconstruction of King'sbeating. The trial of the Los Angeles
police officers rescripted King's video. This reconstruction successfully returned the violence
inflicted upon King to the protective corridors of state rationality. The legal restitution of state
violence drew upon the depth structuresof neocolonial racial logic that had worked so well in
the Desert Storm propaganda: qualification of the body of the Other by geography, disembodi-
ment of the Other's pain, and facilitation of cultural anesthesia for all those who could be
rendered directly or indirectly accountable for the pain of the Other.
The actual beating of Rodney Kingand its subsequent jural reconstruction mobilized a series
of spaces within which King's body could be processed as a racial, a disciplinary, and a legal
object. Through this metonymy of spaces, explicit and inferred, King achieved a dynamic
visibility within which the video of the beating was only a trailer.
Twenty minutes prior to King's car's being stopped by the police, Officer Powell15 tapped
that infamous statement into his communication unit concerning a recent case: "Sounds almost
as exciting as our last call, it was right out of 'Gorillas in the Mist' " (Courtroom Television
Network 1992). He was referringto a domestic quarrel involving an African-Americanfamily,
though he later denied any racial connotation to the remark. In gravitatingto this image, the
media and the prosecution missed its deeper significance by artificially detaching the racist
imagery of Powell's remarkfrom the everyday exercise of state power. Beyond and below state
formalism, legal codes, and official police procedures, there lies a symbolic logic of the state,
animated by empowering micropractices of depersonalization, that is readily fed by and
articulated with culturally in-place racist archetypes.
The phrase "Gorillas in the Mist" in this instance, clearly evokes the jungle, the wilderness,
the frontier-outside spaces opposed to a civi lizational interior.These are presocial, naturalized
terrain from which the sanctioned enforcer extracts the disciplinary subject as so-much raw
material to be reworked by the state.16Likewise, the mythic anti-societal zones from which the
disciplinary subject is obtained, markthe latter'sembodiment as presocial through the stigma
of animality. The bodily alterityof the suspect-as-animal predetermines the material character
and physical locus of police action on their captive. Bestial imagery continued to leak into
subsequent characterizations of King made by defense witnesses and the accused. King was
referredto as "bear-like"(Riley 1992a) and as "getting on his haunches" by Officer Powell in
testimony (CourtroomTelevision Network 1992).17
Animal imagery may have informed Officer Powell's project of both taming and caging King
within a prescribed spatial perimeter, a practice that has both penal and racial overtones. He
made the following statements during his examination by his attorneys and the prosecution:
Iyelledat him [King]to get downon theground,to laydown on the ground.... He repeatedthe motion
again,gettingup again.... I stoppedand evaluatedwhetherhe was goingto lie thereon the groundor
whetherhe was goingto get up again.... Itwas a continuingseriesof him gettingbackup on his arms,
pushingup, sometimesraisingto his knees,sometimesgettingon his haunches.Icommandedhimto get
down on the ground,andwhen he wouldn'tgo for it, I hit him in the armsand triedto knockhimback
down. [Courtroom TelevisionNetwork1992]

At one point, the prosecutor asked: "What was the reason for hitting him?"Powell replied:
-I didn'twanthimto get backup.
-What were you strikingat?
-I was strikingat his arms.... Iwas tryingto knockhim down fromthe pushup position,backdown
onto the groundwhere he would be in a saferposition. ... I was scared because he was being told
to lie down on the ground;he was gettinghit with the baton severaltimes;and he continuedto get
back up. ... I was looking up for somethingelse to keep him down on the ground. [Courtroom
TelevisionNetwork1992]

It took Officer Powell 46 blows with his baton to incarcerate King into the spatial corridor he
called "the ground." Officer Powell's geographical perception moved from "jungle" to "the

on cultural anesthesia 409

ground," a provisional and surrogate territoryof the state, while King, through violence, was
shifted from animality to a subject in compliance. Sergeant Charles Duke, the defense's police
procedures expert, described this compliance as viewed from the video:
[W]henhe was in a flatposition,wherehisfeetwerenotcocked,wheretheywerestraightup anddown,
and where his handswere above his heador at his side, he was not hit. [Courtroom
TelevisionNetwork
1992]

Sergeant Stacey Koon, the presiding officer at the scene of King's beating, also testified to the
meaning of this posture and added that at this point King'sbodily response and directed speech
to the officers beating him signaled the final level of compliance. The successful confinement
of King-the symmetry of a body lying at attention with the face in the dirt-and the acquisition
of linguistic reciprocity marked the neutering of the animalized body and its internalization of
the will of the state. A "gorilla in the mist," a black "bear" that insisted on rising on its
"haunches," was turned by violence into a speaking subject. Official LAPD procedures
underwrite this civilizing sequence. Police department directives on the use of violence while
performing an arrest locate the subject capable of discourse at the lowest end of the scale of
noncompliance and physical intervention. The subject in logos is the subject in law. The further
removed the arrestee is from language, the closer the suspect is to the body and, thus, closer to
escalating violence by the state. It is my suggestion that, for the police who beat him, this violent
passage of King from animality and the body to language and compliance intimately involved
judgments concerning his capacity to sense and to remember pain.
Rodney King had to be taken to a hospital after his beating. Medical attendants assisting at
his treatment testified to the following statements made by Officer Powell (and denied by him)
to King, who worked at a sports stadium:
We played a little hardballtonight. Do you rememberwho was playing? . . . We won and you lost. [Riley
1992a:30, emphasis added]

It is a moment of reflection and summation after the act. King'swounds are being tended at
the instruction of the man who beat him. The author of violence, grown intimate after his labors,
inquires whether his prisoner can recollect what has passed between them, and whether he
recognizes the social relation they have entered. This inquiry presumes King's participation in
common cultural ground; a mutuality that exists for Officer Powell only after the beating.
Baseball, as a ludic metaphor of male dominance, converts batons into bats. King's recognition
of this conversion, the admission of a shared culture of sport, more than being another stage in
his socialization, would normalize the violence inflicted on him, thus, placing Powell's acts
within the realm of the acceptable.
It is through this dialogue of recognition that the agent of violence retrieves what he has
authored through his acts. What is expected to answer him is his creation, his violence, and his
body doubled by the logos and submission of the subaltern. Powell's hospital discourse is too
deeply anchored in the narratology of torture to have been fabricated (see Feldman 1991 a).
Artifice follows political life here. In the second volume of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet(1978), an
analogous encounter takes place between a white English policeman and his Indian prisoner
he has just finished beating. The victim, Hari Kumar,describes "the situation"-the creation
and acknowledgment of dominance through torture-to an ex post facto government investi-
gation:
-What in fact was this situation? ...
-It was a situation of enactment.
-These ideas of what you call the situation were the DSP's [DistrictSuperintendent of Police] not your
own?
-Yes he wanted them to be clear to me.... Otherwise the enactment would be incomplete.... The
ideas without the enactment lose their significance. He said if people would enact a situation they would
understand its significance. .... He said that up until then our relationship had only been symbolic. It had
to become real.... He said ... [it] wasn't enough to say he was English and I was Indian, that he was

410 american ethnologist

 ruler and I was one of the ruled. We had to find out what it meant... the contempt on his side and the
fear on mine. .. . He said ... we had to enact the situation as it really was, and in a way that would mean
neither of us ever forgetting [Scott 1978:298-299, emphasis added]

In his own "situationof enactment," Powell confirms the socializing function of his graphic
usage of King'sbody. Through violence, King, like Hari Kumar,is meant to acquire memory; a
history of who "won" and who "lost." King is asked to recollect hierarchy, its origin, and his
position in it. He is progressively shifted from the jungle to the liminality of his beating ground
only to come home to a baseball diamond, a preeminent terrain of American normalization
(where he is subjected to hardball or becomes one). These qualifying spaces, jungle, ground,
baseball field, and their various personae, gorillas, bear, and hardball, trace the incremental
objectification of Kingand the gradated effacement of his subjecthood and his pain. King's pain
achieves presence only at the end of this progression and solely as an artifactof power; his pain
is the affective presence of the state within his body and person.
This is why Officer Powell speaks to Kingabout baseball, memory, and hierarchy at precisely
the momentthat his victim is receiving medical attention. Police violence assaulted King'sbody,
and police-ordered medical treatment attempts to redress the effaced sensory integrity of that
body, thereby crediting the now socialized King with somatic capacities denied to him during
the beating (see below). It is at this juncture that Powell asks King to remember through the
senses, through the vehicle of recalled pain. Removal and manipulative restorationof the senses
facilitates the state's coercive construction of personal memory and identity (see Feldman
1991 a:128-138). Hari Kumar, in Scott's novel, identifies the attempted restitution of sensory
integrity by his aggressor as the last act of political degradation: "the offer of charity. He gave
me water. He bathed the lacerations" (Scott 1978:299).
* * *

The final territorializationof King's body took place at court. Isolated frames of the video
were time coded by the prosecution and freeze framed and grid mapped by the defense as if
the event were an archaeological site. This reorganization of the video's surface resembled the
video grids superimposed upon their targets by the smart bombs of Desert Storm. In the Simi
Valley courtroom, fragments of action and isolated body parts achieved visibility as material
evidence through analogous optical framing. The grid mapping detached King's limbs from
each other in a division of labor that sorted out pertinent parts and actions from inadmissible
and irrelevant residues. Visual dissection of King's body provided the defense argument with
crucial perceptual fictions that were culturally mediated as objective and real. Thus, cinema-
tized time informed the following typical analysis of King's videotaped postures by Sergeant
Duke, the defense's police procedures expert: "Itwould be a perception that position 336:06
[time code] to be [sic] an aggressive position" (Courtroom Television Network 1992). This
discourse was possible because of the colonization of King's body by the virtual temporalities
of slow motion, fast forward, and freeze frame. With cinematic artifice, King's body was
montaged into a purely electronic entity with no inwardness or tangibility. His body became a
surface susceptible to endless re-editing and rearrangement, as it suited both the prosecution
and the defense. Further,by automatically admitting such cinematic fictions and grammars as
material evidence and as objective data, the court also collapsed the perceptual and temporal
divergence between watching edited video fragments and the in-situ intent and subjectivity of
the participants during the action of violence. In this variant of visual realism, the equivalent of
a refiguring pictorial perspectivism was created by foregrounding selected body parts and
actions and backgrounding others. The narration of authoritative witnesses fabricated, in the
present, the formal point of view of the spectator.
These fabrications provided the prosecution, the defense, and the jury with an extraordinary
prosthetic penetration to the same extent that the subjective and sensorial side of violence
undergone by King was eviscerated. The agency of the participants in the trial was based on

on cultural anesthesia 411

sensory privileges that were denied to Kingfrom beating to verdict (Kingnever testified in court).
As the accused policemen accounted for their actions that night, they re-viewed and re-cast
their violence through the pseudo-exactitude of the technologized eye, thereby flattening the
chasm between enactment and testimony (as re-enactment). The reediting of the video
juxtaposed temporally and spatially distanced acts, creating a perceptual apparatus of holistic
space-time compression that extended to, and empowered, the courtroom vision and discourse
of the defendants. By such means, the defense was able to convert the video into a time-motion
study in police efficiency.18 In his "expert" testimony, Sergeant Duke exploited the camera's
eye to rationalize the defendants' violence and to exaggerate their visual capacities in the midst
of their delivery of over 100 blows to King. Sergeant Duke simply invented a semiotics of King's
imminent aggression and indicted the victim through the mindless autonomy of his beaten
limbs:
The suspecthas the handflaton the ground.The armappearsto be cocked. His left leg appearsto be
bent,comingup in a kneelingposition;it appearsto be in a rockingpositionwith the otherarmflaton
the groundin a pushingposition.[Courtroom TelevisionNetwork1992]
When asked by the prosecution if he considered Kingto be an animal, Officer Powell replied
that King "was acting like one ... because of his uncontrollable behavior" (Courtroom
Television Network 1992). In other words, King was bestial to the extent that he could not feel
and therefore could resist the baton blows. Animalistic anesthesia to pain provided a negative
aura that retroactively established the sensitized and almost humanistic application of "reason-
able violence" by the police. The pol ice and Kingwere distributedalong a graded sensory scale.
It is the fictionalized visual acuity of the police in assessing the impact of their own violence
afterthe fact that separates them, in a Cartesian fashion, from their own bodies and actions, and
which becomes a contributing factor in the jury's verdict. However, King could not be
reasonable or lawful, for the police and the jury, because he was submerged in a resistantbody,
without senses and without corresponding judgment. Confronting his alleged insensate resis-
tance, the police endowed Kingwith affectivity by exploring the levels of pain that could finally
register the will of the state on his body.
Narcosis was the final ingredient in the racial stew used to make King's anesthesia. The
defendants testified to their certainty that King was under the influence of "PCP"at the time of
his arrest. Yet, no physical collaboration was ever providedfor this assertion, despite King's
medical examination. The powerful combination of racial innuendo and cinematic dismem-
berment forged the compl icity of the jury in the subtractionof King'ssenses. As one jury member
declaimed after the trial:
I amthoroughlyconvincedas the othersI believe,thatMr.Kingwas in fullcontrolof the whole situation
at all times.He wasnot writhingin pain. He was movingto get awayfromthe officersand he gave every
indicationthathe was underPCP.[Riley1992b:116, emphasisadded]

Kingwas drugged yet in control. He felt no pain because he was drugged, but he was trying to
escape through the massive cordon of police that surrounded him with baton blows that he
could not feel. The reciprocal cancellation of these assertions could only be evaded through
the alliance of subtextual racist stereotypes and an equally fictitious and decontextualizing
micrological optic. Such statements by members of the jury attest to the probity that informed
the verdict. Anotherjury member was able to deliver an auteurtheory of the Rodney Kingmovie:
"Kingwas directing all the action.... [He] was choosing the moment when he wanted to be
handcuffed"(Riley 1992b:1 16). King,drugged and knocked prostrateto the ground from which
he tries to crawl upward, presides over the violence to such an extent that it becomes
self-inflicted and self-authored.
The defendant's testimony (with the exception of Briseno) smuggled the authorial site of
violence from the police and planted it on the victim. This was embodiment by directed mimesis
and a classic Lacanian "mirrorrelation" in which an imagined and specular Other is endowed

412 american ethnologist

with ideologicalattributesby the originatingand dissimulatingsubjectwho providesthe raw
materialof the refraction,therebycovertlyrestagingitselfin thatOther(Lacan1977). Through
the aggressionoriginatingin the model (thepolice) became the qualifying
racisttranscription,
somatic attributeof the copy (King).In transferring the originsof theirviolence to King,the
police inhabit and his
possess body in an imaginaryrelationwhere the black body becomes
protectivecamouflage for state aggression.Police violence was a reenactmentof the intrinsic
violence "known"to already inhabit King'sperson. By this mimetic logic, King was the
magnetizedpole attracting,soliciting,and, therefore,animatingthe bodies of the police.
Theconversionof Kingfromthe terminusto the sourceof aggressionwas enabledby a series
of iconic displacementsthat embodied him in tandem with the disembodimentof police
violence. Blackness,bestiality,narcosis,and anesthesiacreatedboth the specularizationand
the racialdensityof King'sbody. King,once investedwith these mythemes,functionedlike a
neocolonialmirrorthatradiatedan autonomousracialmiasmathatprejustifiedstateviolence.
Stretchedout on the rackof distortedcinematictimeandspace, King'sbodycould be described
by SergeantDuke as "a spectrumof aggressivemovements"(CourtroomTelevisionNetwork
1992, emphasisadded).Inthe logic of the colonial mirror(Taussig1987, 1992), the body to be
colonized is defacedby mythandviolence in orderto turnit intoan emptyvesselthatcan serve
as repositoryfortheculturalarmatureanddemonologyof thecolonizer(Feldman1991b, 1995).
Byfashioningthe murkydensityof the Other,the colonial regimesucceeds in dematerializing
and purifyingits own violence in a crucial hegemonic transposition.The colonized mirror
creature,though specular,becomes "real"and laden with a negativematerialgravityin an
exchangewhere the violence of the colonizer becomes spiritualized-thatis, made rational
and lawful.The dematerialization of stateviolence by perceptualtechnologiescontributedto
the legitimacyof OperationDesertStormandwas also an importantdynamicin the SimiValley
courtroom,as indicatedby one jurorwho stated,"They[thejury]didn'tthinkmuch damage
hadbeendone to Kingas they lookedatthe photos[thatdisplayedhisbruises]"(Riley1992b:5).
* * *

Three littlegirls were playing tag in the living room, a small white dog was barking happily and Sgt. Stacy
Koon was rolling around on the rug, demonstrating the actions of the man who was beaten, Rodney G.
King.... The large screen television set dominates his living room, and Sergeant Koon cannot seem to
stay away from it ... "There's82 seconds of use-of-force on this tape, and there's 30 frames per second,"
he said. "There's like 2,500 frames on this tape and I've looked at every single one of them not once but
a buzillion times and the more I look at the tape the more I see in it .... When I started playing this tape
and I started blowing it up to 10 inches like I'd blow it up on this wall .. . fill up the whole wall . . . and
all of a sudden, this thing came to life! . . . You blow it up to full size for people, or even half size, if you
make Rodney King four feet tall in that picture as opposed to three inches, boy you see a whole bunch
of stuff.... He's like a bobo doll.... Ever hit one? Comes back and forth, back and forth. [Mydans
1993:A1 4]

Inthisstartlinginterviewwith Koon,he appearsto be takenover by, and obsessedwith, the

video. Throughsuch reenactmentsas describedabove, he createsa physicallymimeticbond
with King'siconic body. Here, Koonuses his own body to performKing's.It is my suggestion
thatthisex post facto mimicrynot only reflectsand extendsracialfictionsand otherconstruc-
tions in Koon'scourtroomtestimony,butalso echoes the actualpolice violencethat,with each
baton blow, simulatedand inflicteda mythic black-bestialbody on King's.When Sergeant
StaceyKoonrollsaroundon his livingroomfloor imitating,withoutsensorypainor shock,the
manhe has beaten,he merelyplaysthe blackbody thatwas alwayshis own. Thisplay before
the televisionscreen, so reminiscentof the child's improvisationsbeforethe Lacanianmirror
icon, testifiesto thatinversionin the (neo)colonialmirrorrelationwhen the possessorbecomes
the possessedand the authorhis creation(see Lacan1977; Taussig1987). Mimeticpossession
extends also to the somatic/technologicalinterface.SergeantKoon'squasi-visceralreplayof
thatnightis also a humanmimicryof the video'scapacityforflashback,fastforward,andfreeze

on cultural anesthesia 413

frame. Sergeant Koon's body and memory have now become the screen upon which the video
is played and replayed "back and forth" like a "bobo doll."
* * *

To critique cultural anesthesia is not to assume that there can be a one-to-one correspondence
of the senses to external things, for that formula is inflected by the rationalityof objectivism and
realism, which historically achieved such perceptual adequations through artifice and fictional
supplements. Likewise, in the case of Rodney King, there could not and should not be a return
to a pristine, originating event-in-itself. As I have proposed elsewhere, "The event is not what
happens. The event is that which can be narrated"(Feldman 1991 a:14). The realism of the
discrete and pristine event was argued for by the defense via the factotum of the partible video
and by the prosecution who cited the video unpartitioned. Both parties argued for the video, in
one form or another, as the true structure of the event and thereby banished, with minor
exceptions, the pre-event and postevent narrative framing of racist myth and other culturally
sedimented subtexts. Within the canon of legal realism, the video lens was truerthan the human
eye and absorbed the latter,because it could be sectioned and rationalized by time codes, slow
motion, fast forward, and freeze frame. The video's optic, as reworked by legal argument,
epitomized realism's certitude of one-to-one relations between observer and observed, pre-
cisely because its electronic prosthetics could be subjected to "realist"dissection and observa-
tion (see Crary1991).
Though the defense had initially challenged the prosecution's video as exhaustive depiction,
it then proceeded to insert another cinematic framing device, the authoritative voice-over
narrative of police experts, and the defendants. Endowed with a soundtrack, the video was
brought to cinematic completion, and the jury was given the pleasure of narrativeclosure and
a sense of an ending. As the video and its narrative grafts became the event, Rodney King was
deleted from the courtroom and from the video as a legal personality. In their courtroom
performance, the once shadowy figures of the police stepped off the screen and appeared and
spoke in the flesh, while the mute black figure remained incarcerated by the video and by
violence. King only existed at the moment of violence, only in relation to material disorder,
never in relation to language, memory, explanation, emotion, and reason, as did the police
when they testified; these mediations distanced the police from King's pure physicality.
I began by reflectingon the hierarchyof those who entertain a social and perceptual distance
from the body over those who are made to appear as captives of static materiality.This stratification
organizes long-standingand seductive strategiesfor narratingthe Other. Inthe trial,juralformalism
acceded to culturallymediatedcriteriaof materialevidence and welcomed both unexamined racial
and cinematic metaphors of embodied evil; it also gravitatedto a technological formalism that
enforced perceptual powers for the police and sensory muteness for their victim. Silent premises
surrounded the trial, which the court proved incapable of recognizing: archaeologies of racial
violence, cinematic rhetoric,and the culturalbias of public memory and perception.
Salvaging sensory alterity in this context would not be a turn to a new realism that could
compete with cinematic and legal realism. Rather,as re-perception, it would recover relativizing
materialities; stratigraphies of pain; and the historical limits, manipulative omissions, and
sanitizing censors of media and juridical realism. Sensory deviation can and must leak through
cultural censors, as did the ambient distress of the Croatian folklorist in that conference hall.
Bearersof sensory alterityhave no option but to recover truthin a historyof sensory fractureand
dispersal that can be re-perceived as the dialogical ground for emergent cultural identities (see
Seremetakis 1991:1-5, 1994). Here, truth as fragment and as situated by a world of material
discontinuity is the only counterpoint to the identification of truthwith the depictive capacity to
simulate totality: ideological posture that conflates the technological power to mass produce
and consume facts with the ownership of history itself.

414 american ethnologist

 When normativeinstitutionalprocedures,practices,and depictionsachieve literalityand
truth throughthe denial of their own materialconsequences and other people's sensory
inscription,hegemonyis created,and formsof politicalconsentareelicitedthatbarthe Other
frombeing presentat the tribunalof historicalactuality.Ratherthan being withdrawnby state
monopoly,as NorbertElias(1982) asserted,the violence of the statecan invisiblymergewith
vernacularexperience.Sensorycolonizationbroughtaboutby the articulationof stateculture,
the media, and the perceptualmythologies (racial, ethnic, and gendered) of modernity,
interdictsthe structureof the everydayas a semiautonomouszone of historicalpossibilityand
life chances. State,legal, and media rationality,separatelyor combined,can erect a cordon
sanitairearound"acceptable"or "reasonable"chronic violence to the same extentthat they
successfullyinfiltratesocial perceptionto neutercollective trauma,subtractor silence victims,
and installpubliczones of perceptualamnesiathatprivatizeandincarceratehistoricalmemory.
Inthis atomizedcontext"thememoryof the senses"(Seremetakis1993, 1994) becomes a vital
repositoryof historicalconsciousnessand, once shared and exchanged,the basis for illicit
culturalidentities.
Contrapuntal sensoryhistoriescan be recoveredfromthe scatteredwreckageof the inadmis-
sible:lostbiographies,memories,words,pains,glances,andfacesthatcohere intoa vastsecret
museumof historicaland sensoryabsence.
Rodney Kingwas the absent, the invisible man at the trial that exposed his body to the
exhaustiveopticsof advancedtechnologyand racialconclusion.Thisestablishedhis sensory
kinshipwith the Iraqis,whose deaths were electronicallydeleted fromthe Americancon-
science. Kingnot only disappeared,but also was replacedby a surrogate,a stand-in,through
the mirrordynamics of racist and cinematic fetishism.The defendantsand their counsel
transformed the SimiValleycourtroomintoa transvestiteminstreltheater,wherewhitesarmed
with special effectsand archetypalnarratives,donned blackface, wore blacksmasks,mimed
a blackbody and stageda shadow play of dominationand law.'9

notes

Acknowledgments. A version of this article was presented as the opening statement of an invited workshop
entitled "Colonizing the Body" at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology in
Austin, Texas. I would like to thank Don Brenneis for providing the initial opportunity that allowed me to
tackle this subject when my anger was still fresh, and for our discussion of "complicity " in Austin. The
theoretical direction ofthis article stems from my long-standing exchanges with C. Nadia Seremetakis,whose
work on sensory crossing and reception has been crucial to this project. Mick Taussig's discussions with
me concerning optical tactility and Jonas Frykmann'sgenerosity with his detailed knowledge of Norbert
Elias, also provided crucial vantage points.
1. As heard by the author on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" on July 15, 1992.
2. The Croatian folklorist shall remain anonymous, as she has the right to have her research received
independently of my perceptions of how and why she presented or performed her work as she did (see
below). I confirmed many of my responses to the talk and the audience's reaction in private conversation
with her. For similar reasons, I will not impose on the hospitality of my Swedish hosts by specifying the
formal details of the conference. "Sweden" here functions more as a metaphor of the Europeanor Western
metropole than as an actual place, as my argument will make clear.
3. See Feldman (1991 a) for a discussion of the state's role in Northern Irelandin integratingparamilitarism
with popular Loyalistpolitical culture, circa 1921-72. Analogous state practices of democratizing violence
by promoting community-based confessional vigilante and/or paramilitaryorganizations characterizes the
escalation of so-called resurgent ethnic violence in ex-Yugoslavia. In both cases, the state's complicity in
the refashioning of ethnic identifications through democratized violence, and the militarization of public
culture, indicates the expanding capacities of the state for the micromanagement of everyday life structures.
These patterns call into question simplistic models of the "returnof the repressed" in relation to contempo-
raryethnic resurgence and aggression.
4. Though I laterconfirmed many of these perceptions and those that follow with the Croatianfolklorist,
my responses at the time of her talk also reflected my own unreconciled fieldwork experience in Belfast.
5. I am thinking here of the gendered inflections of ritual mourning in southern Europe (Seremetakis
1991), as well as the work of Helene Cixoux (1993).

on cultural anesthesia 415

 6. In recent anthropological discourse, the term "Other"has been assumed to apply solely to a member
of another discrete culture or subculture. But in Hegelian, existentialist, and Lacanian theory, the term
denotes relational social forms within the same society without excluding its cross-cultural application. The
use of the term in this article is not meant to imply some essentialistic, fixed, homogeneous, or ahistorical
condition of an ethnic, religious, or gendered group. The Other is a plural relation and not a monadic entity.
This relation emerges from situated practices of domination and social violence. The term is not meant to
imply a uniform category, insofar as uniformity itself can be an element of the apparatusof domination, nor
is the condition of Otherhood confined to complimentary binary oppositions. It may be thought of as
analogous to Robert Hertz's notion of the "left hand" or side-that which can never be definitively named.
It is the heterogeneity and instabilitythat marks the limits of monological power as much as it stands for the
political aggression of certain acts of naming.
7. Though, in certain instances, pain itself can be objectified or aestheticised and rendered an object of
cultural consumption in which subjective noncommodifiable and/or nonaesthetic dimensions would still
be excluded.
8. See Williams (1991:57-58) on the connection between race and sensory inadmissibilityin truth-claim-
ing situations.
9. Fabian (1983), Stoller (1989), Tyler (1987), and Seremetakis (1991, 1993, 1994) have presented
significant discussions of the impact of sensory specialization and stratificationon ethnographic perception.
The relationship between state violence and sensory manipulation is analyzed in Feldman (1991 a:123-137).
10. The concept of historical perception used here is, of course, not limited to textual or even linguistic
genres, forms, and practices. It also implies that historical perception is always a re-perception.
11. Foucault's (1978) well-known model of penological visual domination and training, inspired by
Bentham's panopticon, frequently refers to the perceptual contributions of proscenium staging and back
lighting to cellular surveillance.
12. Koj6ve (1969) demarcates the Hegelian master from the slave or bondsman in terms of the former's
exclusive engagement with consumption and the latter's immersion in labor. This implies normative
sensualization of the master's body and punitive desensualization of the slave's body through alienated
labor.
13. From"The Rodney KingCase: What theJury Saw in Californiaversus Powell" (CourtroomTelevision
Network 1992). This and all other citations of Courtroom Television Network are my transcriptionsof the
commercially released videotape. All ellipses reflect my editing of the transcripts.
14. Much of this unfinished history tends to find expression in violent reenactments of the initiation,
ritualized entry, or processing of racial Others by the dominant institutionsof white society.
1 5. LAPDvehicles use a keyboard communications system.
16. Harvey (1989) refers to the reciprocal defining powers of marking certain urban zones as defiling
and transgressive as does Williams (1991). This wilderness imagery, which obscures the particularities of
community context, from which racial others are subtracted, may well be a devolved variation of what
Patterson(1982) identifies as "natalalienation." Natal alienation encompasses the renaming, branding, and
degradation practices in enslavement scenarios and may still be a symbolic moment in the "Americaniza-
tion" of racial others, including African-Americans.
17. See Feldman (1991a:81-84) and Taussig (1987) on the political relation between animal imagery
and violence.
18. There is a strong analogy between this re-editing of the video and Lukacs's(1971) description of the
bifurcation of the body of the assembly-line worker into productive, commodifiable parts and actions and
unproductive, economically devalued and "irrational"gestures. Fromthis vantage point, the link between
the defense's version of the video and the freeze-frame, time-motion photography of Fordisttheoreticians
is clear. The defense's discourse on reasonable police violence is the indirect heir of labor-efficiency
performance analysis (see Rabinbach 1990).
19. FrantzFanon (1986), in Black Skin, White Masks, identified transvestitismas an essential element of
the consciousness of the colonized. I am suggesting that it is crucial to the political prosthetics of the
colonizer once the ideological and hegemonic power of the colonial mirrorrelation is considered.

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submitted August 10, 1992

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