The fact is that this might very well be the year of the Taser. In two other, widely-publicized incidents in the past twelve months, Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle has repeatedly and quite literally shocked the world.
Earlier this month, I had the privilege of taking part in an interdisciplinary symposium held at the University of California, Berkeley. The panel discussion that I participated in was entitled “Media Insurgencies”-a topic which attracted a wide range of papers on the politics of the visual in an age of digital reproduction. As our roundtable discussion drew to a close, one of the discussants expressed concern over the infamous University of Florida Taser incident of September 17, 2007, in which Andrew Meyer, a twenty-one year-old journalism major was “drive stunned” by a Taser and then arrested by police when he asked Senator John Kerry a question after the latter’s speech during a Constitution Day forum held on campus.My colleague was troubled by the fact that the audience remained seated and apathetic during the event itself, and that it was only when a digital video recording of the event was posted online that the incident earned widespread condemnation.The fact is that this might very well be the year of the Taser. In two other, widely-publicized incidents in the past twelve months, Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle has repeatedly and quite literally shocked the world.
On November 14, 2006, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, an Iranian-American student at UCLA-also in his early twenties-was stunned multiple times by a Taser when he refused to present his student ID to campus police at Powell Library.
Robert Dziekanski, 40, a Polish immigrant died after having been stunned by a Taser after a tragic inability to communicate with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at the Vancouver International Airport on October 14, 2007.
Both the incapacitant weapon in question and the digital media through which its brutality has been disseminated in each of these cases invoke, in my mind, a politics of distance: from those in power and those who might be call after-the-fact insurgents.
In all three instances, we find manifestations of an embryonic police-state mentality captured by individuals whose ability to gaze into the abyss undeterred is equally troubling.
We are told again and again-and especially in the aftermath of such incidents-that electroshock weapons are designed specifically not to cause sustained bodily harm, and are therefore better alternatives to lethal force.
This logic seems to evade what is really at stake: the fact that those in power can no longer fathom the possibility of a (potentially) subversive body, and that our visual-centric culture is increasingly thwarting the possibilities of on-the-spot collectivities.
Editor’s Notes:
YouTube Video of man in Utah being tasered for refusing to sign papers. Viewer discretion advised.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IMaMYL_shxc
Video of the Polish immigrant being killed by taser at Vancouver Airport. Not for the faint of heart.
http://www.cknw.com/news/news_….._local.cfm
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