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63 3 TraumaTV TWElvE STEPS BEyONd THE PlEASuRE PRINCIPlE channel twelve: Ethics has been largely confined to the domains of doing , which include performative acts of a linguistic nature. While we have understood that there is no decision which has not passed through the crucible of undecidability, ethics still engages, in the largest possible terms, a reflection on doing. Now what about the wasted, condemned bodies that crumble before a television? What kinds of evaluations, political or moral, accrue to the evacuated gleam of one who is wasting time—or wasted by time? There is perhaps little that is more innocent, or more neutral, than the passivity of the telespectator. Yet, in Dispatches, Michael Herr writes, “it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes.”1 What might especially interest us here is the fact that responsibility no longer pivots on a notion of interiority. Seeing itself, without the assistance of cognition or memory, suffices to make the subject responsible. It is a responsibility that is neither alert, vigilant, particularly present, nor in-formed. headline news: Testimonial video functions as the objet petit a for justice and the legal system within which it marks a redundancy and of which it is the remainder. channel eleven: The defense team takedown involved approaching George Holliday’s video tape by replicating the violence that had been done to Rodney King.2 The unquestioned premise upon which the team of lawyers based their defense of the police called for an interpretation of video in terms of a “frameby -frame” procedure. No one questioned this act of framing, and the verdict which ensued unleashed the violence that would explode the frames set up by the court. In the blow-by-blow account, counting and recounting the event 64 of the beating, the defense presented a slow-mo sequencing of photographs whose rhythm of articulation beat a scratchless track into the court records. The decisive moves that were made on video require us to review the way in which media technology inflects decisions of state. That would be the larger picture. The smaller picture, encapsulated by the larger one, concerns the legal ramifications of distinct interpretive maneuvers. Thus, the chilling effects of warping video into freeze-frame photography cannot be overlooked—even where overlooking can be said to characterize the predicament in which testimonial video places the law. For the duration of the trial, the temporization that reading video customarily entails was halted by spatial determinations that were bound to refigure the violence to which King was submitted. No one needs to read Derrida’s work on framing in order to know that justice was not served in Simi Valley, California. But, possibly, if one had concerned oneself with the entire problematic of the frame, its installation and effects of violence—indeed with the excessive force that acts of framing always risk—then it would have been something of an imperative to understand what it means to convert in a court of law a video tape into a photograph. For the photograph, according to the works of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and a number of others, draws upon phantomal anxieties as well as the subject’s inexorable arrest. I need not stress to what extent the black body in the history of racist phantasms has been associated with the ghost or zombie. Perhaps we ought to begin, then, with the astonishing remarks of Jacques Lacan when he was on Television: —From another direction, what gives you the confidence to prophesy the rise of racism? And why the devil do you have to speak of it? —Because it doesn’t strike me as funny and yet, it’s true. With our jouissance going off the track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only insofar as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies—unheard of before the melting pot. Leaving this Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own on him, by not thinking of him as underdeveloped .3 It would appear that, in Television, the incompletion of our jouissance is marked with some measure of clarity only by the...

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