Jump Cut, No. 47

Editors’ note: This essay is a long monograph that develops an important new theoretical approach to the understanding of AIDS in the United States. We are pleased to be able to present a work of such substance and original thought about one of our most existentially and socially pressing problems. We present the essay in two formats, a briefer, abstracted version and the full length version. Each section of the briefer version is also linked to that part of the longer version which considers the ideas from a given section in greater detail. Thus the brief version of the article is both an abstract of the longer version and can be profitably read just as is. The essay in its full length is available for printing out in text form. We encourage readers to make such a print out so as to have time to consider Tobias’ complex argument as a whole.

If you wish you can go to the complete version of the text now. If you print this page out, you will get first the abstracted version, then the full text version.

Meditation on a freeway suicide:
the sacrifice of autobiography

1. Introduction to an event:
framing a life ended

On April 30, 1998, at approximately 3:00 PM, Daniel Victor Jones, an HIV positive man, drove his pickup truck to the top of a south Los Angeles freeway interchange. After making threatening gestures at other drivers, he stopped the truck and effectively shut down two Los Angeles freeways during the afternoon rush hour. On the roadbed, he displayed a large banner, weighting it with a heavy container against the power of the wind. Clearly visible from the air, it proclaimed to the news helicopters capturing the scene from above, “HMO’s are in it for the money. Live free, love safe, or die.” Jones made a 911 call which was routed to the Highway Patrol. He explained that he was in pain and claimed mistreatment by the HMO in whose care he had been placed. (Doctors confirmed after the event that Jones in fact had developed cancer.)

At one point, Jones set his truck, and himself, on fire. His dog, a golden retriever, perished in the burning truck. Hurrying out of the pick-up, he extinguished his own burning clothing, then, stepped up on the freeway wall, perhaps with the intent of being seen by motorists caught in the traffic below or of jumping off. However, he only threw off a bag containing a videotaped statement. According to news reports, the videotaped statement gave details of his symptoms, explained his anger at the HMO which had refused him treatment, announced his decision not to fight the disease any longer, and stated that he was “a dead man.” He ended the tape with a sardonic, “See ya.”

Moments after throwing the bag off the overpass, after close to 50 minutes of a stand-off during which Los Angeles Police Department sharpshooters stood at ready with Jones in their sights, Jones aimed a shotgun into his mouth, leaned over it, and shot himself instead. Jones’ graphic display of self-inflicted violence was broadly televised. Jones’ self-inflicted carnage left a torrent of blood streaming away across the concrete. His banner had become partially obscured, folded by a gust of wind. Jones died at approximately 3:50 PM. All four directions of freeway traffic impacted by the event were released by 7 PM that evening.

Visibly and visually, Jones directed the framing of his life in terms of the threats he experienced to his body, the medical organizations that abused their responsibility to secure it, and, finally, its effacement. In this essay, I will argue that Jones’ freeway suicide constitutes an act of authoring—the authoring not simply of a life story or of a news event, but more importantly, of an event that happened to television. In this authoring, Jones locates and identifies the system of televisuality, as he brings it to reveal its own operations. His claims speak beyond the frame and its emergency broadcast system to name a broader order of mediation and corporeality—of justice and punishment, of health and illness, of sanctity and sanction, of life and death— in service of which the “live” networked medium operates. The authoring of this televisuality through a system of reportage equipped to gauge the relative market value of emergency situations reads finally as an act of autobiography— albeit under conditions and in terms with which we may not be familiar or comfortable.

[go to expanded discussion of section 1]

2. Media coverage, confusion, and contradictions

The fact that afternoon television viewing is aimed at significant numbers of children and homemakers who constitute the daytime viewing public deserves consideration in an accounting of Jones’ actions along with, for example, the timing of his suicide during rush hour traffic. Numerous scholars (among them, Williams 1974, Morley 1986, Spigel 1992a, 1992b, or Haralovich 1992) have observed a specificity of television viewing by analyzing television programming as it intersects with social dynamics and cultural practices. Viewer habits have been understood in relation to, for example, youth- or family-oriented programming as media companies have sought demographic targets such as the suburban housewife or the teenage. Here, strategies of appeal may build on social identity (Morley or Spigel). More generally, Williams noted the larger problematic of television in relation to “mobile privatization.”“Televisual flow” enables a conflicted knitting together of private experience necessitated by the loss of public, social built space incurred in the process of suburbanization (Williams). The timing and placement of Jones’ television suicide and the conflicting responses it prompted becomes clear within these large-scale critical perspectives. Jones’ death interrupted the flow of traffic through a key freeway intersection of greater Los Angeles at the time of day commuters begin their return home, and so delineate the difference between afternoon and evening viewing.

[go to expanded discussion of section 2]

3. Reality television:
an economy of pre-emption

Historically, Jones’ suicide broadcast comes at the juncture of two periods in television reporting. An earlier period deployed advanced visual technologies (for example, extending real-time remote coverage to freeway pursuit, or offering immersive camera set-ups for sporting events, giving producers or consumers a choice of framing angle) and established new conditions for the reporting of reality, apparently bringing “the real” ever closer to the grasp of mediation. Our own later period, on the other hand, claims the video footage of the stricken and falling World Trade Towers, available because of now ubiquitous video capture of the everyday, as a temporal icon for a bruised national psyche. And the national psyche’s anxiety of the real exceeds what can be securely mediated through the “embedding” of journalists in warfare or the staging of a “heroic landing” by a president on an air craft carrier. The difference here is in televisual orientation towards capturing what is real: An earlier emphasis on renewed possibilities for technological capture gives way to a more recent emphasis on somehow recouping, re-framing, or restoring the symbolic import all the more important because of the amount of material available. This process today extends beyond what Williams understood as mobile privatization.

Media producers, in pronouncing events worthy of receivers’ attention, make a performative claim to capture or articulate reality that is novel to, exclusive of, opposed to, ignorant of, or otherwise incommensurate to the experience of life held by the interpreter. This is in spite of the fact that it is precisely this interpreter to whom the event is supposed to matter. The operative distinction — producer/receiver, narrator/interpreter — historically has been seen to be structural and dynamic. But television’s rhetoric of mediatic eventuality revolves around one element above all others. That distinction between narrator and interpreter, between representation and social experience, is framed most powerfully as televisual violence. For these reasons, an understanding of Jones’ freeway suicide matters not only in relation to the historicity of the media event, but also in relation to mediations of identity and social being—technology-intensive processes of living speech.

[go to expanded discussion of section 3]

4. Performativity and medial agency

Jones engaged the performativities of violence, of information, of mediation generally, to author from outside the system of “live media” even as he was captured within its televisual frame. If the coverage of Jones’ violent death was, indeed, shaped within a larger framing of discursive violence, that discursive violence itself became part of the meanings of the event, as I demonstrate below in a discussion of the varied responses to Jones’ death in the form of Internet postings and letters to the editor.

In this case, a body takes a direct action amid networks of historical and discursive violence—and our mediated communications or knowledge thereof. So this event, tied to a reviled body as its origin, is hard to “localize” in a collective investing of identity. Here, as the body performs the very abandonment to which been subject socially, a correspondence of act and reception beyond Hall’s encoding or decoding frameworks takes hold. This event goes beyond merely discursive struggle in an economy of pre-emption. This correspondence of act and reception suggests that even broadcasters attempting to retake control of a message stolen away from them (in Hall’s terms, dominant readings decoding an oppositionally encoded event) are in important ways already implicated in the exceptional event itself. The dominant framework of production and reception here is reversed as reception becomes an act of authorship. In this reversal, television’s power to assert the historical is undermined as a life is, literally, historically inscribed.

[go to expanded discussion of section 4]

5. The sacrifice of autobiography

To read Jones’ death as an act of autobiography might impose a distorting lens in two ways. Kaplan (1992) cautions as to the viability of autobiography understood as a Western genre dedicated to recounting psychosocial growth stages over time in an individual life (118,127). More to the point, Kaplan argues for narratives articulating life in resistance to the laws of the privileged Western subject and the laws of autobiographical genre alike. For Kaplan, testimonial literature, women’s prison narratives, and other documents marginal to the practice of autobiography as literature constitute crucial “out-law” genres. In the context of a transnational feminist criticism, these genres are seen to challenge the generic conventions and forms of autobiography. Kaplan is careful to say that these “out-law” genres must be read as more than merely autobiographical.

“Instead of a discourse of individual authorship, we find a discourse of situation; a ‘politics of location’” (119).

In this way, we might read Jones’ death as an out-law autobiography which instead of engaging the melancholy of the subject instead forces a political challenge. Daniel Jones’ last words were delivered in a spectacular suicide made for the local news, designed to present his death to the people of Southern California and beyond.

But might this “out-law” death end in mere mediatic transgression, or worse, capitulation—the satisfying of a phobic desire to maintain order by exterminating the Other? Precisely how would Jones’ display on that freeway interchange constitute autobiography? Is this a performative text or an act of terror? Can an author be produced in an act of self-destruction? If so, is such authorship partially accomplished in the media coverage of that act? Are the protests, debates, or empathies expressed in the aftermath of such an act part of the “text”? What did Jones have to say about HMOs, sex, love, and freedom? And who exactly was Daniel Jones?

[go to expanded discussion of section 5]

6. Responsibility, abandonment, dehumanization:
Daniel Jones’ life after death

In this case there is ultimately no clear-cut distinction between a public and private identity for the individual subject. Instead, we see that the bodies of the medical subject, the legal subject, and the mediated subject co-occur and overlap, and in ways that may be threatening to receivers. Given that medical, legal, and media regimes routinely work to assert their own mutual boundaries, we rarely glimpse the overlap. Jones managed to author a situation in which this overlap became visible. Rather than say that Jones’s body moves from the private to the public, it’s more appropriate to say that Jones’ death placed these three regimes of the corporeal subject on display all at once. The medical and the juridical visibly coincide as media event.

To accept Janet Jones’ conclusion that Daniel was suicided by an HMO is perhaps, then, to suggest that Daniel’s freeway suicide enacts perhaps the spirit, if not the letter, of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. But at the same time, it is crucial to place the larger measure of responsibility, agency, or intent with Jones himself. Jones acted as an author, not of a text, but of an event. In this authoring, he availed himself of the enunciative aspects proper to a a specific network and mode of mediation. Jones exercised a form of medial agency. He was not simply a man suicided by the social—and there are ways in which the social was injured by his suicide. The discursive riot noted above is an indication of that injury.

[go to expanded discussion of section 6]

7. Liveness as a game of violence

Where television treated the incident as a game of violence, minimized the political implications of Jones’ critique of for-profit health care, and branded Jones an irresponsible subject so as to motivate further televisual control over live broadcasting, that is not to say that these official responses were the only response to Jones’ death. One important point missing from television’s account of the incident was precisely how much of the incident had been planned by Jones.

Jones death occurred as a contradictory instance of authorial agency working between the levels of the built and the mediatic city, the local and the national, the public and the private, to transform potent silences into plural responses. It’s necessary to see this medial agency at work in Jones’ actions, not only in order to understand his power grab of the regions’ thoroughly troubled real and imaginary systems of place, but in order to understand the reactions it provoked as well. Against the performativities of abandonment motivating Jones’ death and accumulating in its wake, empathy responds across differentials of identity, to the point of demanding the elimination of HMOs.

[go to expanded discussion of section 7]

8. Transformations of affect:
queer artists and AIDS activism

Still, Jones’ specific demand for “safe love” speaks to his experience of living with HIV or AIDS. If one of his objects was criticism of the national health industries, lack of treatment for HIV-related illness was a primary motivator for his protest. But even HIV/AIDS activists were taken aback by Jones’ performance. Shared identity within the various sectors of AIDS demographics did not guarantee comprehension of Jones’ death. AIDS activist and critics tended to see the voluntary death of an HIV+ man as a tragic suicide, an unnecessary death by a person unable to overcome his social marginalization.

There is no futurity in the tragic gay suicide; self-deliverance implies some such futurity. To the degree that some meaning is found in voluntary death, the self that undertakes that death can is delivered from the abandonments by which its body had been violated, and the social may perhaps become subject to transformation. The social ceases to be an eschatalogy for the marginal subject. Yet this futurity is also an impossible one. It is not a future that can be seen exemplified in a body, now gone, that would warrant the intents of the person, now silent. This futurity can not be securely grasped or taken as evidence, a model. If abandonment is ended by voluntary death, history as impossibility, as diasappearance or as exclusion, opens to its reverse: futurity without a secured history. This futurity can not be linked to a body constrained or supported, violated or cared for, within the social.

In just this way, Jones’ release from the social which he condemned engages a larger problematic of, simultaneously, an impossible futurity and an impossible historicity—like every other HIV/AIDS death in the so-called “post-AIDS” era, he dramatizes the transformation of the impossible itself, as a long-hoped for future care in a history-destroying pandemic arrives but comes up short.

[go to expanded discussion of section 8]

9. Articulating the impossible:
discourses of self-deliverance

While it has been difficult for HIV/AIDS activists and critics to differentiate the suiciding subject from the subject of self-deliverance, Jones’ actions were not entirely singular or unimagined. Before retroviral therapies were available, artists and poets had already explored the limits of the interruption of history and futurity which Jones brought home.

In “Vital Signs,” for example, poet Essex Hemphill (1994) had already provided exactly the kind of consideration of affect and responsibility that Watney would call for (see above). If Watney condemned “irresponsible” individual gay men abandoned to their loss, Hemphill explores responsibility in terms of erotic mutuality. Here, rather than a demand on the irresponsible other, a desire for mutual protection is satisfied within the passional communicativity of the body. The meanings of death here waver from healing transformation, self-deliverance, to murder, against which the polyphonous narrator builds his textual speech. The claim of the self extends from life to death and is recovered in affect that poses the search for the self in terms of a love for another.

The deliverance of this love, in the hindsight of an impossible future that precedes the impossible past, is a reality whose manifestation does not fail, even though this truth comes as a “thorny dream.” The “I” posits in its transformations a corporeal poesis before, through, after death, as pronominal struggles for presence gain over meaninglessness. Facing nothingness, it recovers all, including its own impending loss. While there is never any final dramatic exit, the “I” writes to move past the overlaid perimeters of carefully delimited textual architectures to see the “vital signs” of love. The self is thus distanced from the self in a textual performance. Death becomes an opening, not an ending.

What Jones’ death shares with Hemphill’s poem is a characterization of a physical communication of the receptive male body as a site where violence occurs. This characterization diverges from many feminist theoretical accounts which locate the site of violence as the feminine, precisely as it finally diverges from performance art by undeniably exploding the terms of active and passive through which the male body is supposed to direct its actions. For the finality of his physical death requires an account of enactment— not merely the effects of performance. In interrupting media time, in his anticipatory and posthumous positioning of the media between failing medicine and overzealous law, Daniel Jones demonstrated a particular kind of medial agency, not individual or personal agency. Daniel Jones, a self delivered: from death by AIDS, from death by abandonment. But delivered from what else? Repentance.

[go to expanded discussion of section 9]

10. Los Angeles in the world

Agamben ([1993], 2000) argues that instead of either the prison, the clinic, or the madhouse (those institutions through which Foucault tracked the particular epistemic ruptures of modernity), the abandonment of the subject takes another location: the camp. The camp refers not simply to the physical forms of concentration or refugee camps, but any “de-localized location” in which those who do not fully qualify as “people” or rather, those who have already become merely “bare life,” are to be kept. The camp is not a physical or natural place. It is a liminal space, coordinated in the name of the sovereign state for the abandonment of the subject whose body will be nakedly exposed to power there. By claiming in the video tape which he threw over the freeway overpass to police that he was already “a dead man,” Daniel Jones suggested the scene of his freeway suicide as yet another camp, another “de-localized location.” The former Eagle Scout and military medical technician placed his televisual location in the no-man’s land between home and city, between HMO and prison, but also between the marginalized “bare life” that he refused to become and the mediation through which he would communicate the senselessness threatened in his abandonment.

In order to properly recognize the sense of Jones’ actions, we concentrate not, finally, solely on the state of exception through which he lived, but that through which he enacted his death: mediation. In mediating the story of his life as an end to the state of abandonment in which he lived, Jones’ story can be seen, problematically, as autobiography. But the difficulties in taking this life story as autobiography can perhaps be solved by posing the biopolitical, or in Agamben’s alternative term, “thanatopolitical” context explicitly here. Jones’ life story, even as it continues to stream on the Internet, is not simply autobiography, but “auto-thanatography” as well.

Above the city and its viewers, an HIV + worker, displaying a banner condemning his abandonment by the health institutions charged with his well-being, self-destructs as cameras hover, traffic stopped below. Police sharpshooters lower their rifles unused as his body falls, while the image of the bare life he exposed refracts back into the public eye. Ending his life with the weapon of choice of American men, Jones terrorizes popular representations of the AIDS victim. He makes his body unable to perceive this scene and himself impossible to recognize.

In the creation of this irreparable misrecogntion, he upsets the specular rhetoric of visibility and perspective that gives HIV and AIDS their coherence in our popular, legal, and medical imaginations. At the same time, he brings the bare life abandoned in biopolitics, in thanatopolitics, into view. He marks a point of exchange between the orders of speaking and perceiving, of phantasmatic and historical reality, of public and private, of the camp and a state without sovereignty. The message he extends from this point addresses the health care system writ large, to finally say: Born for love and learned of pleasure, this body faced abandonment from ones meant to help. So might yours.

“Live free, love safe, or die.” These words, on the other hand, describes the conditions of the biopolitical imperative from which Daniel Jones delivered himself. That terrible injunction served once as the script for his spontaneous performance, but serves now, to name the system which he made to appear. With the lives of health institutions more important than the lives of the humans which animate them, their maintenance more important than our nurturing or our deliverance, their goals more loudly pronounced than our needs—the name of this system is terror.

[go to expanded discussion of section 10]

Complete version of text:

Meditation on a freeway suicide:
the sacrifice of autobiography

By James Tobias

The being which, under a human name, is me, and whose coming into the world—across a space peopled with stars—was infinitely improbable, nevertheless encloses the world of the totality of things precisely because of its fundamental improbability (which is opposed to the structure of the real giving itself as such). The death that delivers me from the world that kills me has enclosed this real world in the unreality of the me that dies.

—Georges Bataille, “Sacrifices,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) 136.

I am searching for whatever
we relinquished that was
deemed sacred between us.
A living memory of this exists
and I want to find it.
Whatever commonality we shared
that at one time would not betray us,
I want to find it.

—Essex Hemphill, “Vital Signs,” in Thomas Avena, ed., Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS. (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994) 36.

Sections:

1. Introduction to an event: framing a life ended
2. Media coverage, confusion, and contradictions
3. Reality television: an economy of pre-emption
4. Performativity and medial agency
5. The sacrifice of autobiography
6. Responsibility, abandonment, dehumanization: Daniel Jones’ life after death
7. Liveness as a game of violence
8. Transformations of affect: queer artists and AIDS activism
9. Articulating the impossible: discourses of self-deliverance
10. Los Angeles in the world

1. Introduction to an event:
framing a life

“HMO’s are in it for the money. Live free, love safe, or die.”

Jones made a 911 call which was routed to the Highway Patrol. He explained that he was in pain and claimed mistreatment by the HMO in whose care he had been placed. (Doctors confirmed after the event that Jones in fact had developed cancer.)

Visibly and visually, Jones directed the framing of his life in terms of the threats he experienced to his body, the medical organizations that abused their responsibility to secure it, and, finally, its effacement. In this essay, I will argue that Jones’ freeway suicide constitutes an act of authoring—the authoring not simply of a life story or of a news event, but more importantly, of an event that happened to television. In this authoring, Jones locates and identifies the system of televisuality, as he brings it to reveal its own operations. His claims speak beyond the frame and its emergency broadcast system to name a broader order of mediation and corporeality—of justice and punishment, of health and illness, of sanctity and sanction, of life and death—in service of which the “live” networked medium operates. It’s as if the receiver finally managed to direct the producer, as if the subject had finally managed a third term between body and discourse, between performance and performativity, between materiality and event. For a moment, Jones managed to grasp the devouring tiger of mediation by its tail—before being, momentarily, devoured. The authoring of this televisuality through a system of reportage equipped to gauge the relative market value of emergency situations reads finally as an act of autobiography—albeit under conditions and in terms with which we may not be familiar or comfortable.

2. Media Coverage, Confusion, and Contradictions

The above reconstruction of Daniel Jones’ death is based on videotape of the event from official and unofficial sources, network news coverage of the event after the fact, official and unofficial news web sites, radio and television roundtables on journalism and ethics in the days following, and press reports accessed in a variety of print and electronic forms. Media coverage had been immediate, lasted for the duration, and was broadly disseminated, with six local television stations (KTLA, KNBC, KTTV, KCOP, KCAL, KCBS) covering at least the last 15 minutes of the event live. Web sites affiliated with local and national news networks such as KCBS Channel 2000 posted images and reportage, and provided discussion forums for viewer and reader feedback. The graphic footage itself circulated months and years afterward, on the Internet and in disaster video compilations. For example, one site www.everwonder.com (accessed 10/28/98) posted video clips of Jones in particularly dramatic moments for viewer download. interactive links from the page offering clips of Jones’ suicide led to additional pages providing digitized footage of the deaths of Kennedy and Rabin. Was everwonder.com simply exploiting gruesome consumer interest for graphic violence—or editorializing as to the import of Jones’ actions by associating his death with political killings?

The site’s presentation of this material indicates the nature of the significance of Jones’ death at the same time as it points to difficulties in grasping that significance. The fact that everwonder.com leads viewers from footage of Jones’ suicide to footage of the assassinations of Kennedy or Rabin suggests an ad hoc identification of this event as a political one. Since neither was Jones a recognized political figure nor was criticism of HMOs featured on the site apart from the banner visible in the video clips, Jones’ televised death operated in terms of a spectacular excess which both prompted response but interfered with accurate categorization of its content.

National news broadcasts also followed the story in their evening broadcasts, while viewer outrage prompted apologies beginning the night of Jones’ death. Local broadcasters who had eagerly pre-empted regular viewing to follow the Jones story, though, claimed Jones’ final act of suicide to be a surprise, with some stations saying that they had had insufficient warning to pull cameras to a more distant view or to switch to another view altogether in order to avoid broadcasting the fatal shot that ended the standoff. However, these claims may have been based as much on ratings as on viewer comments. Ratings figures indeed indicated shifts from normal daytime and evening news patterns: as ratings rose, coverage was maintained. After ratings dropped, apologies were issued. According to The Hollywood Reporter (5/4/98), combined ratings rose 2 points to 18 shares for the six stations carrying the event at 3:45, near the time of Jones’ death, rather a less momentous jump than the controversy might suggest. The same six stations’ 5:00 PM news shows gained 2 share points, while the 6 PM news broadcast showed an smaller increase of only 1 point. However, 4 PM news programs lost a combined 3 points. (Higher than average shares for the 10 PM news market were attributed by journalist Jonathan Davies to a lead-in by a Lakers basketball game.) At any rate, fluctuating ratings indicated contradictory reactions on the part of the audience.

As if in search of a formula for a calculus of violence, information, and mediation, arguments articulated by viewers and by television producers and journalists in a variety of forums held after the event found support for and against the censorship of live news in controversial broadcasts from recent memory: a shooting in a Burbank bank robbery the year before; the 1991 police beating of Rodney King, the 1992 riots against the ensuing verdicts (with the beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny cited numerous times); the notorious Jerry Springer talk show; the flight of O.J. Simpson and the particular genre of freeway pursuits that event helped to solidify; and so forth. There were also general references to social violence, fire arms, and memories of the rash of “road rage” freeway shootings from earlier years. In my research, the events cited as precedents belonged overwhelmingly to events having social and political dimensions, not natural disasters. This distinction between natural and unnatural disaster implied an agency, intent, responsibility. Broadcasters were widely, although by no means unanimously, condemned for breaking into afternoon viewing schedules and turning the attention of young, uninterested, or unwilling viewers to the catastrophic scene

The fact that afternoon television viewing is aimed at significant numbers of children and homemakers who constitute the daytime viewing public deserves consideration in an accounting of Jones’ actions along with, for example, the timing of his suicide during rush hour traffic. Numerous scholars (among them, Williams 1974, Morley 1986, Spigel 1992a, 1992b, or Haralovich 1992) have observed a specificity of television viewing by analyzing television programming as it intersects with social dynamics and cultural practices. Viewer habits have been understood in relation to, for example, youth- or family-oriented programming as media companies have sought demographic targets such as the suburban housewife or the teenage. Here, strategies of appeal may build on social identity (Morley or Spigel). More generally, Williams noted the larger problematic of television in relation to “mobile privatization.” “Televisual flow” enables a conflicted knitting together of private experience necessitated by the loss of public, social built space incurred in the process of suburbanization (Williams). The timing and placement of Jones’ television suicide and the conflicting responses it prompted becomes clear within these large-scale critical perspectives. Jones’ death interrupted the flow of traffic through a key freeway intersection of greater Los Angeles at the time of day commuters begin their return home, and so delineate the difference between afternoon and evening viewing.

In the media environment of the late 1990s, more specifically, the differentiation of less “serious” programming generally slotted for daytime viewing and the more serious nighttime news or other prime-time programming had already become porous with the increased profitability of local news operations and the steady availability of events with which to fill emergency coverage. In this context, the coverage of Jones’ suicide epitomized the ways in which ubiquitous news coverage, increasingly important for maximizing the profits of network affiliates before and after prime-time network broadcasts, had already frayed long-standing assumptions about television’s role and authority in framing the often contradictory aspects of our social world as symbolically cohesive events (see, for example, the problematic of television and crisis in Doane 1990; television and liveness, in Feuer 1983, see discussion below; and on the media event, Dayan and Katz 1992, Fiske 1996). In this sense, it is not surprising that the debate ensuing in the wake of Jones’ suicide tended to center on broadcasters, the regulation of live television news, and the mandate for social responsibility that ensures their licensing: when to broadcast and when to censor. Of course, in that debate, these two questions—when to broadcast, when to censor—were not articulated in mutually exclusive terms. Jones’ criticism of health maintenance organizations was largely sidelined by media organizations as they grappled with their own vulnerability to public criticism.

3. Reality television:
an economy of pre-emption

Historically, Jones’ suicide broadcast comes at the juncture of two periods in television reporting. An earlier period deployed advanced visual technologies (for example, extending real-time remote coverage to freeway pursuit, or offering immersive camera set-ups for sporting events, giving producers or consumers a choice of framing angle) and established new conditions for the reporting of reality, apparently bringing “the real” ever closer to the grasp of mediation. Our own later period, on the other hand, claims the video footage of the stricken and falling World Trade Towers, available because of now ubiquitous video capture of the everyday, as a temporal icon for a bruised national psyche whose anxiety of the real exceeds what can be securely mediated through the “embedding” of journalists in warfare or the staging of a “heroic landing” by a president on an air craft carrier. The difference here is in televisual orientation towards capturing what is real. An earlier emphasis on renewed possibilities for technological capture gives way to a more recent emphasis on somehow recouping, re-framing, or restoring the symbolic import all the more important because of the amount of material available. This process today extends beyond what Williams understood as mobile privatization. Reality on television is a valiant fiasco when it comes to presenting what it promises—the reconciliation of the local and the remote—because the documentation of public events for mass audiences is no longer necessarily a specialized, professional segment of production.

Any such reconciliation of the dynamics of displacement is necessarily related to a demand to articulate social being. Together, these processes entail a form of symbolic work perhaps more successfully, if less spectacularly, accomplished over the Internet. This symbolic work can be understood as the work of identity—a drive for speech as social being. So “reality television” of the sort seen in Jones’ suicide is more than a fast-buck genre for television’s industrial producers.

It is also an assertion of television’s primacy in narrating crisis

within a media environment comprised of such competing and convergent forms as television, radio, film, the Internet, or telephony;
within the context that contemporary social being requires the speaking of identity as an increasingly media-intensive production of self.

In these terms, televisual media events (whether delivered through analog, or digital broadcast or interactively over the Internet) emphasize a specific vector of social being and speech. Televisual media events articulate a now that is being contested. They articulate this moment as organizations or institutions speaking to, and in the name of, but without the direct force of, mass publics. And they articulate this “mass moment” across both disparate geographical areas as well as economic and cultural divisions.

In moments when transformation is sudden, as social being drives the television event in order to speak a living but already historical moment, identity is recast. The meanings of social being and of speech, of person and nation, of history and life, are transformed. Events distant in time and space and significant only in these much broader terms are often, in the process, paradoxically “localized” for distributed audiences. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, apparently long planned and involving global coordination, are localized as “New York, Ground Zero.” Evaluation of these emergencies by producers and audiences alike as to their importance works to modulate the state and status of the national profile. However, as distant events become paradoxically localized through their distribution in the media, the mediated version of the event, because of its importance to the national, may tend to exclude either the local bodies originally affected by it, or understanding of the broader complexities—history, cause, responsibility—in which social and national itself is embroiled. Televisual media events may mask and divide as much as they may inform or reconcile.

Reality television, more than simply a flawed assertion, is a conundrum in the narrative articulation of identities local and remote. These events—spontaneous, scripted, staged, or simply captured—rely on a particular economy of exception. They must always be somehow exceptional in order to be important enough to pertain to a local, regional, or national profile, which may then be seen to transform in response to historical events. This sense of an identity gained in the throes of change underlies the compelling visibility of the media event. But in order for the event to be exceptional, any such crisis articulated in televisual time must also seem to resound in its own right. It must be identifiable as an event in its own right, and so it must speak of otherness even as it speaks of its own extreme relevance. The economy of mediation within which televisual events take shape and are received is one of pre-emption, and of excess.

What might such media events pre-empt? Media events (in this case, Jones’ suicide) can only pre-empt two other kinds of events. First, they may momentarily pre-empt other media events granted visibility for their own apparent singularity (routine television programming, or historical events such as Kennedy’s or Rabin’s assassination). Second, media events necessarily pre-empt routine history whose complexity goes largely unapprehended in the media. For example, the everydayness of care or need experienced in relation to HIV/AIDS might conceivably be programmed as a nightly primetime feature until the pandemic is stopped—instead, HIV/AIDS tends to be a “special report” or an “update” spoken by media, political, or medical authorities, not survivors.

The perversity of this conundrum lies in the fact that while the televisuality of the news asserts its ability to report all that is of consequence, only events that have developed through a neglect that is itself excessive can sufficiently provide the surprise necessary to re-orient the regulatory economy which weighs the programming of one media event against another. All that is not spectacularized in this televisual economy may be taken for the undifferentiated conditions of the everyday, and therefore becomes unremarkable even when urgent. At the same time, as the momentous appearance of an already historical event, the media event presupposes its own outdating within the looming everyday beyond television’s interest, or beyond its capacity to show. This perverse economy of “reality television” materializes, finally, in relation to the ways that the speaking of social being is differentiated as production, distribution, and reception in media sectors. What a producer won’t share with its viewers, file-sharers on the Internet might share with one another.

Media producers, in pronouncing events worthy of receivers’ attention, make a performative claim to capture or articulate reality that is novel to, exclusive of, opposed to, ignorant of, or otherwise incommensurate to the experience of life held by the interpreter, in spite of the fact that it is precisely this interpreter to whom the event is supposed to matter. The operative distinction—producer/receiver, narrator/interpreter—historically has been seen to be structural and dynamic. But television’s rhetoric of mediatic eventuality revolves around one element above all others. That distinction between narrator and interpreter, between representation and social experience, is framed most powerfully as televisual violence. For these reasons, an understanding of Jones’ freeway suicide matters not only in relation to the historicity of the media event, but also in relation to mediations of identity and social being—technology-intensive processes of living speech.

4. Performativities of the media and medial agency

Writing in 1973, Hall (1980) carefully differentiated the “structures of thought” within the production process of television from those informing television’s interpretation by audiences. Arguing that televisual representations of violence are not violent, but messages about violence, Hall complains that researchers tended to analyze television violence as if they were unaware of the fact that “the dog in the film can bark but it cannot bite!” (131) For Hall, television production encodes “dominant” or “preferred” meanings received via one of three kinds of decoding:

hegemonic interpretations, which accept the encoded framework of reference and operate “inside the dominant code.”
negotiated readings, which inflect dominant referential frameworks with “their own ground rules.”
oppositional readings, which recast the message entirely within an alternative frame of reference (136—138).

These engagements are carried out through “performative rules” of competence and use, requiring attention to the practices of interpretive work performed by receivers (134).

The tendency Hall noted on the part of television observers in the 1970s to conflate the decoded message of violence with the act of violence encoded in the message was continued in a specific way in the 1998 broadcast of Daniel Jones’ suicide. That steps were taken to prevent a similar event from being broadcast again after the fact [1] indicates that viewers putatively unable or unwilling to properly receive this event were perceived to be so harmed by it that its very broadcast produced the conditions for its prevention after the fact. However, there are several reasons why Jones’ act calls for a somewhat different approach than that derived from Hall’s notion of cultural decoding.

First, while Hall believed that audiences are ultimately the source of ideas encoded into television production, those audiences are alienated from the means of production, and will draw on a rather different set of experiences to decode them. For Hall, there is an asymmetric relationship rather than an identity framed between producer and audience. However asymmetric the relationship between broadcast production and audience in the age of reality television, Jones dictated the terms and conditions of this event, even though belonging more clearly to one or more reception communities than to any professional or alternative production organization. Second, Hall’s three types of decoding not only take as fundamental the distinction between audience and producer, but further that discursive struggles form the terrain for the interaction of these two terms. We can accept Hall’s distinctions between production and reception but only to observe that Jones radically undermines their structural opposition.

Jones’ self-destruction in staging the capture of what I argue is a life story produces more than discursive struggle. It also reproduces that which Hall’s interpretive framework finds unthinkable and which contemporary reality television threatens as its limit: the final effacement of the material, intellect, affect, and spirit of the body which originates the mediated event. Following Hall, we might say that the broadcast of Daniel Jones’ suicide was not the suicide itself. But such an account would emphasize, wrongly, the interpretation of the event over the event itself. In this case, both have to be considered together and in terms of one another, precisely because Jones’ authoring of this media event took place from a position outside the network system. Jones authored, or at least invited, media coverage of his own death not as a television producer but as a television receiver who had observed the rules governing the generation of the media event.

5. The sacrifice of autobiography

Autobiography is not generally a genre associated with television news. Yet in the context I have presented here, studies of autobiography helpfully suggest that we broaden our understanding of the form beyond traditional literary or cinema studies approaches. Autobiography may be the communicativity of a self making claims on the act of living. The form of the life story may vary depending on the ways and means in which these claims are made. Accordingly, accounting for our technologically mediated social being and the performative aspects of identity will contribute to a more subtle understanding of the ways we make our claims to life. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have it,

“Autobiography is contextually marked, collaboratively mediated, provisional. In telling their stories, narrators take up models of identity that are culturally available” (Smith and Watson 1996, 9).

This much may be true in many unconventionally delivered life stories. Certainly, as subject of the reportage, and as its instigator and organizer, Jones relied on a corps of aerial camera operators as much as on a corps of armed police. Yet while his is not a case of individual authorship by any stretch, his method was anything but collaborative.

As to the ways Jones carried out his death, was the HIV-positive Jones availing himself of the cultural identity of the PWA, a person whose death, according to conventional wisdom even after the advent of combination therapy, is inevitable? Even a cursory interpretation of the event suggests that Jones’ death contradicts this suggestion. If anything, Jones carried out a high-wire act between life and death for the greater part of the time he appeared in the camera’s view. It was this more general, more random, and so more ostensibly dangerous possibility of violence that compelled television to cover the event. Further, his death came with a specific if sudden decision, not a grudging acceptance of death by illness. While Smith and Watson’s focus on context, provisionality, and mediation are helpful, Jones’ entry from the freeway overpass into the television broadcast system begs other descriptors than “collaboration” or “cultural availability” in order to account for the agonistic agency exhibited in that event, along with its broadly resounding effects.

More fundamentally, reading autobiography as a tactical construction of viable identities from within the cultural options given doesn’t help us understand the stories of those who do not live on—whose stories produce meaning in death. What stands as the story of a self which no longer has a viable option on life? While Jones’ actions can usefully challenge recent nontraditional considerations of autobiography, of course, autobiography as literary genre has long made a point of recording a life in the face of death. The genre as literary canon is a virtual archive of recorded observations on the meanings of life for posthumous reflection by others. The impending or threatened effacement of the self constitutes one of this genre’s salient features.

Montaigne’s well-known essays, for example, while offering meditations on sadness, government, liars, prompt or slow speech, vanity, practices of taste and distinction, or the lessons of history, return again and again to the question of dying. In “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne suggests that since death is always the same, it must be the specifics of the way death happens which so frighten us.

“We must strip the mask from things as well as from persons; when it is off, we shall find beneath only that same death that a valet or a mere chambermaid passed through not long ago without fear. Happy the death that leaves no leisure for preparing such ceremonies.” (Montaigne [1572—1574] 1965, 68.

Whether due to the capacities of the genre, his medium of articulation, the essays’ encyclopedic embrace, Montaigne’s advancing age, or his own experience of painful kidney stones, Montaigne’s essays considered not only learning to die, but more specifically, suicide. In “A Custom of the Island of Cea,” Montaigne relates account after account of suicide illustrating the contradiction between the privilege of the free, self-authorizing subject and death. Not too surprisingly from our vantage point, perhaps, for Montaigne’s privileged subject,

“...the most voluntary death is the fairest” (252).

Yet Montaigne attends to the complications brought by the interests which God and country alike have in human life. Some believe, he writes, that it is up to “he who has placed us in the world” to allow our leave, and further,

“...the laws demand of us, for their interest, an accounting of ourselves, and can take action for homicide against us.”

Even more fundamentally, Montaigne writes, the desire to take leave of the world may be the work of illusion:

“It is a malady peculiar to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and disdain himself. It is by a similar vanity that we wish to be something other than we are” (254).

Montaigne presents, in his prolix way, a long and variegated list of suicides drawn from Biblical legend and classical literature, whose depictions well put contemporary media violence to shame and whose enumeration in Montaigne’s hands makes our own debates on television violence seem downright unambitious. There’s the (literal) political suicide of twenty seven provincial senators who, unfortunately, mix their poison with wine at a last supper, slowing the effect of the poison and nearly preventing them from dying with honor before the sure carnage of an approaching Roman legion (259). An Old Testament Hebrew man’s hastily inflicted, and insufficiently lethal, sword wound to his own gut in the face of enemies who would kill or enslave him leads him to stand before them, grasp his own entrails, and project them at the marauders before they finally killed him (257). The list goes on.

Montaigne’s litany closes with the peaceful death of a ninety year old woman, fulfilled with memories of a happy life, but now bedridden, and who, in full presence of mind, directs her two daughters and their children to live in peace and unity, and ends her life by swallowing poison. Still, Montaigne concludes,

“...unendurable pain and fear of a worse death seem to me the most excusable motives for suicide” (262).

Similarly, sufferers of HIV/AIDS have experienced both painful physical devastation and social exclusion, especially in the years before combination therapy became available but by no means completely alleviated at the time of Jones’ death or since. Here, the term of choice may often be a rather different one. Rather than suicide, we may discuss “self-deliverance.” This phrase compounds the motivations of medical euthanasia and the language of political liberation with a confidence finally resting in the spiritual.

Of course, Montaigne’s autobiography is not an act of suicide. Nor are the cases of refigured autobiographical practices which appear in Smith and Watson’s analysis. To read Jones’ death as an act of autobiography might impose a distorting lens in two ways. Kaplan (1992) cautions as to the viability of autobiography understood as a Western genre dedicated to recounting psychosocial growth stages over time in an individual life (118,127). More to the point, Kaplan argues for narratives articulating life in resistance to the laws of the privileged Western subject and the laws of autobiographical genre alike. For Kaplan, testimonial literature, women’s prison narratives, and other documents marginal to the practice of autobiography as literature constitute crucial “out-law” genres which, in the context of a transnational feminist criticism, are seen to challenge the generic conventions and forms of autobiography. Kaplan is careful to say that these “out-law” genres must be read as more than merely autobiographical.

“Instead of a discourse of individual authorship, we find a discourse of situation; a ‘politics of location’” (119).

Kaplan’s Gramscian “out-law” autobiographies and Smith and Watson’s emphasis on acts of self-inscription in the everyday remind us that contemporary autobiographical practice may challenge the more traditional life story of the literary subject, and that the stakes of autobiography extend beyond a recollection of life lived and towards resistance to domination. And in these ways, we might read Jones’ death as an out-law autobiography which instead of engaging the melancholy of the subject instead forces a political challenge. Daniel Jones’ last words were delivered in a spectacular suicide made for the local news, designed to present his death to the people of Southern California and beyond.

6. Responsibility, abandonment, dehumanization:
Daniel Jones’ life after death

At his death, a few facts were published about Jones. Describing him as a passionate man, his sister, Janet, confirmed that Daniel was infected with HIV. White, 40 years old, most recently he had been employed as a maintenance worker at the Renaissance Long Beach Hotel. He quite his job shortly before his death. Previously, he had been an emergency medical technician in the Air Force. As a child, he was an Eagle Scout.

Jones had a history of neglect by his health providers. Prior to his death, he had recently been denied care by the HMO administering his medical plan. This possibly catalytic experience, though, followed an earlier episode some years prior in which Jones’ appendix burst after he had been sent home by an HMO doctor to whom he complained of severe abdominal pain. [2] Before his May 1998 suicide, his sister said, “His records [had been] transposed with someone else’s records and he was not rendered the care that he needed and he became sicker and sicker.”[3]

A co-worker confirmed that Jones was concerned about declining health in the days before the incident, and feared that a growth that had appeared on his neck was cancerous. [4] In the videotape he prepared before his death, Jones himself reportedly stated that he was “a dead man” and had chosen not to fight the disease. [5] He believed that immune system damage caused by the HIV virus had already resulted in neuropathological dysfunction. He feared, in addition to the signs of illness visibly manifesting on his body, the invisible—nerve damage, AIDS dementia. [6] While Jones’ identity and a short, inconclusive, and largely anecdotal medical history have been filtered to the public, no news report that I have read bothered to find out the identity or history of the health organization that was responsible for his care.

In life, Janet Jones said, Daniel was “a good man,” “obsessive about safe sex,” “the type who would help old ladies across the street.” Friends were also surprised. Neighbor Don Lee commented,

“I can’t believe he killed himself. I can’t believe he killed his dog.”

The Jones family was intimately if remotely involved with Daniel’s death, which not only disturbed news agencies but also his loved ones.

“I don’t think they should show my brother blowing his brains out. It’s pretty horrible for the family to see it.”

Jones was careful to announce that his declining health and his HMO treatment had much to do with his suicide, but media coverage of him relied on guesses about his mental state and intentions. CNN monitored the event as it was happening, but did not go live with the story because Jones appeared “a disturbed man who didn’t warrant live national coverage,” according to executive Sid Bedingfield. In concluding that Jones’ televisual claims did not merit national attention and that any fault lay with a disturbed individual disturbing primarily his local environs, CNN’s observation that Jones was not sufficiently newsworthy suggests a capacity for neglect similar to that engaged by Jones’ HMO to deny his claims of medical need.

Network news the following day continued to report the incident, but with a shift of emphasis presaged by Janet Jones’ complaint of insensitivity. The disturbance that Jones offered as the story developed did extend beyond the immediate scene and to the national level, contrary to CNN’s mistaken first impression. National coverage of the event emphasized anger expressed at the local television operations which had interrupted children’s shows and game shows alike to bring the event home to Angelenos. Stripped of Janet Jones’ belief in her brother’s character, and devoid of investigation as to the charge of HMOs’ structural incompetence, coverage of Jones’ death turned into a problem of violence and mediation. Television’s authority to mediate the social was again a national concern, expressed in terms of a event whose details were selectively trimmed to emphasize its “local” occurrence. The characterization of HMO malfeasance, certainly not an issue limited to the local domain, was largely dropped.

In this vein, KCBS’ Channel 2000 web site ended a report on Jones by soliciting visitors’ feedback, but not on the question of health coverage. Rather, the site queried visitors as to whether “news coverage goes too far” or whether the broadcast was justified as legitimate public interest reporting because it “involved the safety of thousands of afternoon freeway commuters.” In doing so, KCBS turned the question away from the meaning of Jones’ act to a question of television’s competing responsibilities—to protect viewers at home or to assist in traffic safety. By turning questions away from the meaning of Jones’ protest, KCBS, like the HMO, like CNN, employed a discursive abandonment of Jones’ need for care even while prompting audience response.

While a variety of points of views were posted on the site, a number of posts were revealing in regards to this corporeal and performative abandonment. Analyzing the content of these responses to Jones’ death as presented in the television news, we see that interrelated questions of responsibility for care, responsibility for violence, and responsibility for coverage are now thoroughly confused. One visitor posting as “Ed” returned the subject of KCBS’ question to the capacity for action on the part of Jones himself, but not to describe problems with the health coverage provided by Jones’ private employer:

“I think the only problem here is people always looking to blame someone else. (the media) [sic] They never blame the idiot who kills himself. If anything this guy is more to blame than the media. Personally I’m glad he’s dead and not ending up in some gov’t paid institution or program sucking on my tax money because he ‘couldn’t deal with his problems.’”

“Ed’s” incoherent comments reveal a particularly violent form of the performativity of abandonment. While placing full agency with Jones by attributing responsibility for the broadcast to him (an attribution that is not wrong), “Ed” is happy that a person with AIDS is dead and will not be needing public assistance or any form of subsidized medical care—an issue that would be completely irrelevant had Jones’ HMO operated efficiently.

“Ed’s” response recapitulates a long standing and broadly circulating rhetoric blaming HIV/AIDS and the needs it incurs in humans on the humans challenged to live in resistance to HIV/AIDS. The logic is well-documented (among many treatments, see Watney 1988, 1993, 1996 or Sturken 1998; I discuss certain points made by Watney or Sturken below). Further, “Ed” insists that the primary cost here is likely to accrue to the public—in spite of Jones’ private employment and private insurance. For the moment, I want to note the strange attribution of responsibility and irresponsibility “Ed” provides. Jones is publicly irresponsible, an “idiot,” for causing the violence with which the local CBS affiliate interrupted scheduled programming. But at the same time, for “Ed” personally, Jones is also not an idiot, apparently, since he “privately” has taken responsibility for his “own” problems by killing himself in public. The economical ends justify the illogic of “Ed’s” discursive means.

The way that responsibility is attributed here allows a logic of abandonment to proceed, and this abandonment entails dehumanization. Another poster, “A Nonymous,” who wrote a series of comments praising the media for their coverage, stated simply in one of his posts:

“The horrible thing was the dog’s death, definitely NOT the man’s death.”

Here, the figure of the “innocent” dog allows “the disturbed individual” to be more fully distanced from any legitimate political speech. Neither the HMO nor the man’s death matter at this level of neglect. The media coverage is shocking because an animal died.

Other posts also show the way that attributing or denying responsibility functions discursively in the service of a social abandonment, one which ultimately entails Jones’ dehumanization. “Bernie Foster” writes:

“What’s the big deal? I hope that every station should [sic] cover the suicide of this MORON. This idiot has removed himself from the gene pool and society should be ecstatic. Don’t like to see it? Don’t watch!”

“Bernie” is overjoyed because Daniel Jones, incompetent as a “moron,” has quarantined himself not only from human society but from all of human biology. Yet here again blame and responsibility waver uncertainly. The incompetent viewer appears to be of little more “competence” than Jones, who, Bernie admits, has effected a rather decisive result. Bernie helps the viewer out by suggesting a spectacular sequence of leaping illogic. Since this kind of exceptional, pre-emptive interrupt coverage should be ubiquitously imposed, the viewer will have to assume the responsibility of deciding that they don’t like it before they don’t watch it.

These responses demonstrate the virulence of the discursive performativities of abandonment, and the ways these performativities produce a logic of violent dehumanization. But they are interesting in that they routinely miss what seems most apparent in the event: Jones’ careful planning. These posts thus testify to a collective tendency to first engage, then to defer or deny, Jones’ political protest against living as abandoned. If we recall that Jones took care to rewrite the slogan of “safe sex” as a demand to “love safe,” these posts become even more revealing.

As speech denying the coherence of a demand for love and for care, these posts recapitulate the violent exclusion of the person with AIDS on the basis of a homophobic projection which disavows the passional dimension of gay sex. According to this logic, those who engage in gay sex, and more broadly, any sex that does not take place within a relationship of lifelong fidelity, “deserve” AIDS (see Watney 1996, 126). These postings thus bear out the overlap, observed by Watney and others, of homophobia and AIDS-phobia. The “disturbed individual” circulates through these responses specifically as both “the homosexual marked for death” and “the murderous homosexual.” The larger framing discourse here is that of the “disturbed individual” whose abnormal, diseased sexuality wreaks violence on the very notion of social responsibility as such.

While responsibility and agency are divested from Jones in this logic, that divestiture invites the appearance for a powerfully, properly gendered and sexed figure on the scene: someone whose steady hand, or steadfast gaze, will restore omniscient authority and reliable truth-value amidst a general discursive collapse of responsibility. Or, as “M. Kay” put it in criticizing the “comfort addicts” who cried foul in regards to television coverage of the event,

“If there were just one so-called News Director with a pair a [sic] balls between his legs, we would see our world as it really is, not through primrose [sic] -colored glasses. This, contrary to the fears of the trembling masses, would be a healthy option. Because denying that we live in a violent, AID’s-infested [sic], narco-punk populated world of fornicating carjackers only plays into the hands of the dysfunctional sectors in our midst.”

“M. Kay” goes on to suggest that concerns regarding media violence equate to a desire for feminized coddling. Such affective insulation simply denies the reality of disturbance which requires us to remove our “primrose glasses” in order to “see.” This vision of the news would oddly be a more immediate one, even as this “healthy” gaze would be entirely apart from the dysfunctional world it views. We lack only “one” fully endowed male “news director” in order to generate this impossible scene.

Opposed to this great (news) communicator are violence, AIDS, narcotics, petty crime, and libidinally excessive carjackers. Symptoms of social and maternal irresponsibility. Together, a combustible mixture of oversexed, drugged-out “punks” and mediated feminization synthesize a decay that is invisible to most of our eyes—in spite of its being rampant. Here, Jones’ person loses any remaining specificity, and falls from even from a position of abandonment to become entirely invisible amidst the havoc of the social. Jones is generalized into an abandonment of social relations understood as a mediation produced by and for a healthy masculine vision. The passional capacity of the positive body incites a visual riot, from which this body becomes essentially indistinguishable.

While his HMO’s abandonment of the HIV positive worker is refigured again and again as abandonment in legal and mediatic terms, the denial of Jones’ personhood is always situated as a permutation of the question of “responsibility.” The televisual address of this question results in the following outcome. If Jones was disturbed, and if his HMO was beyond access, television might shoulder the responsibility. In this crisis of authority and responsibility, Jones is now situated on very different grounds. His body becomes the marker of an epistemic crisis in addition to marking a public health “threat” or an illegal siege of public space. Removing agency from his person risks television’s authority but only to television’s advantage. Television gains in its controlled articulation of historical events.

Nonetheless, political demand and political abandonment played out in public view instead of the private channels of health maintenance and HIV/AIDS medicine. Merely noting, however, this shift as a transition from private to public is too easy. It is, after all, the hallmark of HIV medicine as well as HIV/AIDS legislation that the responsibility of the private individual is bound up with the public health concerns of the state, and vice versa. For example, it is illegal for non-citizens infected with HIV to enter this country. In at least one state, those testing positive for HIV are signed into registries. In others, contact with others that might conceivably result in infection is a felony, even if no infection occurs.

So in this case there is ultimately no clear-cut distinction between public and private. The bodies of the medical subject, the legal subject, and the mediated subject co-occur and overlap, and in ways that may be threatening to receivers. Given that medical, legal, and media regimes routinely work to assert their own mutual boundaries, we rarely glimpse the overlap. Jones managed to author a situation in which this overlap became visible. Rather than say that Jones’s body moves from the private to the public, it’s more appropriate to say that Jones’ death placed these three regimes of the corporeal subject on display all at once. The medical and the juridical visibly coincide as media event.

The unusual visibility of this display explains why the legality, intent, and effect of Jones’ acts were named and re-named in terms that wavered between law, medicine, and spectacle. Wire service City News Service headlined its report the day of the incident, “Sniper.” The next day the same wire service corrected the mischaracterization as the dust settled: “Suicide.” The Chicago Tribune called the scene “bizarre,” and quoting a California Highway Patrol officer who spoke to Jones via mobile telephone, reported that Jones had “rambled on” about a “grudge” against his HMO. If CNN had pronounced Jones crazy, the CHP and the Tribune found him incoherently reacting to unjustified anger.

Janet Jones challenged those stories, but unpersuasively as far as media reports were concerned. Coming to her own conclusions about responsibility, “I believe my brother was killed by an HMO,” she said. Janet Jones’ belief that Daniel was suicided by an HMO reflect Daniel’s own videotaped last words, as well as somewhat later headlines in the HIV press. At the same time, her conclusion completes the discursive knot binding considerations of agency, intent, and mediation.

Who is responsible for the events captured in the arresting gaze of the media event? This problematic has grown no less urgent since Jones’ death, given the horrific documentation of horrific torture at Abu Graib prison in 2003, for example, or the absurd formulation of “wardrobe malfunction” required of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake as an apology for their musical performance of a rape narrative at the 2004 Superbowl. The repetitions of this problematic of responsibility, abandonment, and dehumanization in the media event ultimately requires imagining, albeit through the license granted media producers and the producers of media technologies, the abandonment of bodies which haunt the regional, national, or international political scenes. This knot of agency, intent, and mediation hearkens back through debates over coverage of the Vietnam War, for example, but reaches to the very nature of the relationship between the sovereignty of the state and the life of the person.

To accept Janet Jones’ conclusion that Daniel was suicided by an HMO is perhaps, then, to suggest that Daniel’s freeway suicide enacts perhaps the spirit, if not the letter, of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. But at the same time, it is crucial to place the larger measure of responsibility, agency, or intent with Jones himself. Jones acted as an author, not of a text, but of an event. In this authoring, he availed himself of the enunciative aspects proper to a specific network and mode of mediation. Jones exercised a form of medial agency. He was not simply a man suicided by the social—and there are ways in which the social was injured by his suicide. The discursive riot noted above is an indication of that injury.

7. Liveness as a game of violence

As indicated above, the economy of abandonment and dehumanization operating in the production, distribution, and reception of Jones’ death resulted in a gain of the responsibility for control by the television networks. Between the reception of shock and the formulation of television ethics and procedures, the story of Daniel Jones was processed in a rehash of ongoing debates on the competencies of televisual subjects and spectators, framed as concerns around children’s exposure to television violence, the race for high ratings during sweeps week, and the implications of technological convergence. Media discussion of Jones’ suicide indeed focused on whether the event should have been televised, how technological solutions could provide safeguards against this kind of situation, and why editorial policies allowed such sensationalism. But television news also demonstrated evidence of the ways its goals and procedures were undermined by Jones’ actions.

Most of the print and television reporting surrounding Jones’ death gave the impression, contrary to the responses cited above, that audiences interpreted the event as a call for television to more effectively censor itself. These producers apparently see audiences as volatile qualities. They seek information and entertainment violent in appearance, but are angered by the spectacle of self-destruction when it appears too real. (In fact, as I will further clarify below, audience postings to web forums and letters to editors of local newspapers suggest no such consistency.) In keeping with this perspective of official media producers, roundtable discussion ensued on NPR and ABC’s Good Morning America attempting to pinpoint journalists’ responsibilities, some ethical safespot for television broadcasters, and technological solutions. MSNBC took action by implementing a longer delay (by several seconds) between capture and broadcast, giving the network even greater editorial control in streaming live reports to the public. The measure of liveness was being redefined.

Yet the quality of liveness in television shows such as Good Morning America, Jane Feuer argued in 1983, always emerges as an ideological construction somewhere between a media “effect” and “unconscious work.” Rather than being a function of temporal limits, liveness as an ideological construction works to unify a diverse audience as “family” or “nation.” Amplifying Feuer’s point, Bersani (1988) argues that in relation to the coverage of HIV/AIDS on national television,

“The ‘general public’ is at once an ideological construction and a moral prescription. Furthermore, the definition of the family as an identity is, inherently, an exclusionary process, and the cultural product has no obligation whatsoever to coincide with its natural reference. Thus the family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister” (203).

Bersani is concurring with Watney’s (1987) close documentation of this dynamic of exclusion observed in British television coverage of HIV/AIDS.

I’m as concerned here with the broadcast of Jones’ suicide as the subsequent reporting of it in various media forms, but Feuer, Watney, and Bersani’s discussions help us understand the slippage from Jones’ experience into the media debates that ensued. Television attempted to refine the rules for its privatized censorship in terms of a moral prescription to defend the family and to exclude its others. And so a violent political protest against inadequate healthcare becomes a discussion of the responsibility of commercial television to “protect” children, its own technological capacities, or its ability to differentiate “exploitive” local news from “serious” national journalism which can make, as CNN believed it had, the “right call.”

But there are important critical and historical differences here. Feuer analyzed Good Morning America, a show regularly scheduled as a live event. Bersani and Watney were observing, similarly, scheduled news programming. In the case of Jones, in an age in which reality coverage had already emerged to compete with more traditional news and talk offerings, an unprogrammed live event pre-empted regularly scheduled features in a landscape of digital convergence, expanded cable television, and of course, continuing media tendencies to neglect the experience of those suffering HIV/AIDS, but increasingly manageable and visibly marketed combination therapies. In this changed environment, live television begins to attempt to rescript Jones’ death, but the contradictions inherent in a live interrupt coverage planned outside the system of television production were harder to mask successfully.

Local channel 11 pre-empted an episode of Power Rangers to provide coverage, and for many parents, some of whose reactions were posted to CBS’ web-based forum on the event, the televisual montage of children’s programming with freeway showdown was especially threatening. Local channel 4 interrupted a broadcast of The Rosie O’Donnell show. Then-closeted lesbian O’Donnell’s Emmy-award winning talk show was marketed to parents and children, so pre-emption here takes on particular ironies as programming shifted to coverage of a visually horrific protest suicide by a person with AIDS from the comic’s humorously earnest presentation of may have been a more socially inclusive “prescription for family” than that which Bersani observed. For those viewers that saw the event as simply more of TV’s increasingly common reality programming, the shunting aside of syndicated game show Debt on local channel 2 might perhaps have been only somewhat more of a disturbance than their own channel surfing.

For television producers and spokespersons’ parts, apologies for and defenses of the broadcast began the night of the event as news programs attempted to assuage the massive insult some viewers vocalized. This reversal on the part of television professionals from provocation to contrition indicates that coverage of Jones worked to express unwanted contradictions, not to suppress them. Rather than the bonds of the social imaginary being successfully addressed to the public as “family” or “nation,” the legal, medical, and mediatic performativities of Jones’ actions gave the news a dramatic instance of the violent exclusion of the “dysfunctional” other whom television news had long pursued but for whom the news had most often provided a more reassuring conclusion in the observation of his apprehension by police.

Here, then, the “disturbed individual” is the negative image of the ideological coherence of the nuclear family in an age of increasing media traffic between domestic and work spheres. An “outsider” to the family home had not only terrorized domestic space but had stopped home-bound traffic. While on one level, the bogey man was back, the most important difference here was that in this case, the outsider was more lure than fugitive, situated in a scene he had scripted himself. Even for live-interrupt coverage, this scene was an exceptional and confusing state, for after all, while constituting a bonafide emergency, this interruption had been planned—but not by news producers.

News professionals struggled to articulate direction amidst the state of exception precipitated by Jones’ actions. Warren Cereghino, executive producer for Chris-Craft TV, the Los Angeles production company which owns KCOP, appeared on the May 3 1998 edition of Good Morning America to insist that while the Jones suicide “fell through the cracks” of what he felt was justifiable coverage of “chases, … fires, riots, [and] earthquakes,” nonetheless, coverage was “inevitable” given the informational needs of a sprawling megalopolis and television market demands. The suggestion is that violence that can be secured by successful police action or that results from “natural disasters” would not give such offense. Daily Variety television critic Ray Richmond’s response was that while Jones’ televised death was “revolting, and it hurt to watch,” still, he admits, “violence is part of the game.”

“I mean, [news producers] are apologizing on the one hand, and on the other hand, this was the money shot that they’ve all been waiting for. This was the ultimate moment for them. I mean, … here we had some—a man doing the ultimate momentous act right there on their screen.”

Prompted by the uncertainties in the economies of liveness and authority, the rationality of censorship was directly pitted against the claim as to the subject’s unreason. The debate that raged, like the responses above, continued to paint Jones’ act as senseless. While the Internet postings discussed above indicate the injury to the social that the spectacle of Jones’ death produced, media authorities’ responses are more revealing of the ways television’s capacity to communicate the historical event was undermined.

Los Angeles Times television commentator Howard Rosenberg depicted the story as “a massive traffic tie-up before it spun out of control.” After noting that the anti-HMO banner Jones displayed for news helicopters indicated that the actions were planned for television, Rosenberg borrowed from Jones the figure of the gun but turns away from Jones’ overtly political act to question the broadcasters’ technical and editorial capacity to assure program quality. Rosenberg commented,

“Live coverage of a volatile situation is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette,”

He stated this in a particularly callous granting of all agency or responsibility even in chaotic or random situations to the very networks, whose role had been limited by Jones as relatively passive “ambulance chasing.” He continued on to insist, as numerous other commentators had insisted, and as MSNBC already had taken steps to achieve, that broadcasters maintain the ability to pull back to safety to avoid televising violent accidents. The discursive point here, of course, is to make violence a certain kind of thing. Something that is visual can play out on or against an individual body in a localized place: a body which television can frame.

In this account, violence does not begin with the refusal of medical treatment that resulted in Daniel’s ruptured appendix some years earlier. Nor does violence here begin with seroconversion to HIV positive status or the general emergence of the AIDS pandemic. Nor does it begin with institutional intransigence in the face of this health crisis. Rather, this account places the event of violence at a point within live television’s scope, a point that like any other could only have been predicted afterwards, given Jones’ tactically unpredictable behavior. In this account, that point of violence should have been indicated at some point in the broadcast. Accordingly, MSNBC redefined its live broadcast standards as if the violent event in question could be pinpointed precisely. But Daniel’s freeway occupation lasted forty minutes, and in fact, the duration of this event, as opposed to its momentariness, provided the appeal for news broadcasters.

Rosenberg’s suggestion that there was a point when this “traffic tie-up” turned into a violence too horrific to witness can not be specified, really. This desire for a constraint on mediated violence is on the one hand suggested by the competing regimes of law, medicine, and mediation attempting to produce a strained visual order for this violent event, and on the other hand, this desire is countermanded by Daniel Jones’ staging of the co-occurrence of the legal, medical, and mediatic regimes locating the corporeal subject. Rosenberg’s demand that the line be held against violent spectatorship indicates a critical fantasy rather than an action-item, and that fantasy is further indexed by Rosenberg’s appropriation of Jones’ very terms of articulation. Suicide by firearm slips from being Jones’ chosen means of making his point and moves into place in Rosenberg’s argument as “Russian roulette”—a “loaded dial” of sorts that turns violent intent against the self, that turns the situation of the body into a televisual numbers game.

Rosenberg’s fantastic appropriation of Jones’ method of action doesn’t stop there. In December 1998, Rosenberg advocates broadcasting state execution of capitol offenders in order to incite the public against the death penalty, but his logic again revolves around Jones and the firearm. Rosenberg reconciles his position that coverage of the suicide should have been cut off with his support of televised execution of death-row inmates by claiming once more that Jones’ act was “Russian roulette, a reckless, high risk spin of the chamber by TV news that just happened to end violently.” The firearm that first established Daniel as a threat to order comes to rest finally, in Rosenberg’s continued revision of the event, in the hands of television journalists and producers. Over time, Rosenberg attempts to lay Jones’ story to rest as but another act of random roadway violence, everyday bad traffic gone horribly wrong. At the end of the day, Rosenberg’s metaphorics delimit a fantasy according to which it is the networks who hold the gun.

Because of the frightening proximity of “disturbed loner” and “domestic security” revealed and relayed between the freeway and the home, local television on the crest of the act, however insincere the later apologies or justifications, was positioned in a very different way from the secondary revisions of Good Morning America. Local framing of the event was indeed an issue, as Rosenberg claims, not because technology outstripped editorial policy, but rather because of Jones’ tactics. Jones framed his act for aerial capture as well as for freeway viewing. His banner was spread out on the roadbed of the freeway overpass itself. He made obscene gestures at the police who maintained sharpshooters at ready with Jones in their sights. Jones’ actions were directed at Los Angeles, the Los Angeles of OJ’s flight in the white bronco, the Los Angeles of the riots, the real and virtual Los Angeles.

There’s no way, for example, that anyone could say about Jones what is sometimes said about snuff films or the moon landing: that the events portrayed are only a Hollywood fabrication. The interruption in the transportation network and the television networks guarantees that the actuality of Jones’ claims goes recorded. This tactical synchronization between the orders of the real and the virtual ensure that each order warrants the operation of the other. That synchronization was an effect of the detailed mise-en-scene Jones supplied to the mise-en-cadre of news cameras and police rifles.

Jones was outfitted with Molotov cocktails, a can full of gasoline, and a shotgun. He set fire to his truck but jumped out to extinguish his burning clothing. He stepped up on the freeway wall to jump to his death, but turned away from the brink. Finally, he shot himself. Why the gun? Perhaps he recognized that had he jumped to his death his body would be difficult to track as he fell, or that the sight would be too easy for cameras to pull away from before he actually died. Fire was too painful, clearly, but moreover, in a fire he might have disappeared into the smoke and flame, out of camera view. Perhaps by shooting himself he provided the least painful, as well as the most graphic, the steadiest shot, of his death. This way, he might make his death appear most intentional, but it would also be fast. Finally, his body lay destroyed near the banner that broadcast the words that no journalist’s microphone could ask him to speak.

His careful scouting of locations, his display of last words, the videotaped message, his anticipation of “live interrupt,” his rush hour timing. In anguish, Daniel Jones scripted his actions carefully, with insight, expertise, and any viewer’s knowledge of exactly what TV might do with the image of his death. And something happened to television’s operators as a result of his actions, something which explains why television was so slow to pull away, and which leveled the differences between news producers and consumers. Said KCOP news director Steve Cohen:

“Many of us became observers instead of journalists.”

More than the moment at which the traffic situation became a violent suicide, it is this moment that matters. In this moment, television producers became receivers.

By making himself both receiving subject and primary producer of television’s violent symbolic processes, Daniel made spectators of those lives intending his death as spectacle. All the ways that television, print and web-based media tried to regain control of itself from his grasp—by monitoring but not broadcasting, by calling him crazy, by increasing censorship, with edited and editorialized versions of his death, by offering apologies and crocodile tears, even by attributing his actions to his sexuality or his HIV status—all of these gestures only became necessary because even as television rechanneled his life story, he had already succeeded in telling it.

Daniel’s performance was not foiled by television’s reactions to it—far from it. Television’s reactions were only the least of the results that he planned. These reactions appear to have prompted Jones’ choice of elements in his hijacking of the live broadcasting of Los Angeles. Television’s injury was the degree to which it became a passive witness instead of a forceful narrator. The news only marshaled gains in its capacity for self-censorship as a result of having lost the authority to enunciate the meanings and implications of the event.

While television news never accurately reported or responded to Daniel Jones’ political claims, Jones’ message was received, even given television’s predictable distortions of it. The public reaction was not only, as television editorials would have it, outraged at a vision of human self-destruction ported into the home. In fact, the public response went far beyond either censorious demands for the protection of domestic space or gleeful nihilism. “Tamara Tate,” a respondent to CBS’ web query (mentioned above) suggested that the media take responsibility for the representation of violence:

“NAME THE HMO and let the burden of proof be on the HMO. […] I, too, am the victim of an HMO doctor and it’s about time the HMO’s carry the burden of proof.” “

Response to the violence inflicted on Jones’ body took more empathetic forms as well, in a small number of letters to the editor and email postings. Lois Yung of Downey wrote to the Los Angeles Times of her experience of alienation and despair when receiving treatment for fibromyalgia. Yung suggested that she could understand “a little of what he may have felt”:

“There is no soul in medicine today, and this is most evident in HMOs, where profits, not patients are their main concerns. I hope that Jones’ dramatic suicide was not in vain and that, perhaps, some changes in medical care will come as a result of it.”

In the same edition of the Times, another letter writer proposed that the public should join together to ban HMOs just as people should unite to rid the world of nuclear weapons. In other words, both HMOs and nuclear weapons kill, en masse.

As these responses make clear, Jones wasn’t only talking about HIV treatment. Significantly, a year after his death, national studies on the efficacy of HMO-based healthcare confirmed Jones’ claim that these enterprises sacrifice treatment for profit. Studies commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the National Committee for Quality Assurance found HMOs to work most effectively for those who are healthy, not those who are sick.

Jones death occurred as a contradictory instance of authorial agency working between the levels of the built and the mediatic city, the local and the national, the public and the private, to transform potent silences into plural responses. It’s necessary to see this medial agency at work in Jones’ actions, not only in order to understand his power grab of the regions thoroughly troubled real and imaginary systems of place, but in order to understand the reactions it provoked as well. Against the performativities of abandonment motivating Jones’ death and accumulating in its wake, empathy responds across differentials of identity, to the point of demanding the elimination of HMOs.

8. Transformations of hope:
queer artists and AIDS activism

“Anyone who needs drugs in this state can get them,” stated James Loyce of AIDS Project Los Angeles, changing the subject of Jones’ claim, then blunting it by re-stating it as a policy query which could not be immediately answered:

“The HMOs have specialists. The question is, do they have the numbers to accommodate the number of patients?”

Priscilla Munro, executive director of the AIDS Services Foundation in Irvine, stated,

“Managed care companies are very reluctant to be involved in any kind of experimental medications. It’s very shocking to think this man reached that level of despair. There are organizations like ours that are willing to go to the wall for people like that. Hopefully, we’ll never see anything like this again.”

Jones knew that treatments exist for HIV. As I’ve explained above, while HIV motivated his actions, the object of his critique was for-profit health care, not access. In addition, Munro’s implication that the emergency health care organizations established to handle the large numbers of uninsured persons and underserved HMO clients have succeeded in bringing the pandemic under control is disturbing. Most fundamentally, the medical failure to produce a cure is re-cast here as adequate management. Yet there is also in Munro’s comment a tacit indication that her knowledge that all patients who need care can get it is rather a “hope,” although any hesitancy on her part is framed in terms of a preference not to “see” violence.

Perhaps Loyce and Munro responded in muted denial of the fact that while AIDS drugs have increased in efficacy, the high cost of their patented formulas continues to ensure that most AIDS patients in highly populated but less wealthy countries worldwide will never receive them. But even today, five years later, the economic determination of patented treatments for HIV/AIDS within world markets continues to be itself subsumed within a larger set of legal determinations made at the level of the nation-state. U.S. trade representatives to the WTO held up agreements allowing trade in generic versions of patented formulas through two years of delays (and deaths), only in August 2003 finally allowing generic versions of HIV/AIDS drugs to be manufactured and traded among poorer nations as long as the visual appearance of the medications can be distinguished from domestic versions, thus preventing generics produced in India or Brazil from entering the U.S. market and driving down the costs of treating American HIV/AIDS patients.

Some activist commentators on Jones’ suicide had a perhaps more insightful, if in certain ways more trivializing, understanding. In a wrap-up of the year’s events entitled “The Best, Worst, and Weirdest 1998,” POZ magazine gave Jones another brief mention:

“Out with a bang! Off the LA freeway, under circling news choppers broadcasting live, in front of a banner reading ‘Live Free, Love Safe or Die,’ PWA Daniel Jones blew his head off. Why? To avenge an HMO mix-up of his records and because he feared an ugly AIDS death. ‘He wanted his death to mean something,’ his sister said. We read it as flipping the bird to the post-AIDS chorus.”

The cynicism dripping from this interpretation points to a queer set of camp, if mean-spirited, strategies marked by an arch use of the ridiculous. Jones’ death here appears as grande guignol, performing abjection through live horror with comic overtones. Kafkaesque bureaucratic malfeasance is archly characterized as a mere “mix-up” that is outweighed by a righteously excessive “avenging” while the vanity of narcissism is celebrated even as it is mocked, with Jones’ motive ascribed to a desire to forestall an “ugly” death—rather than one marked by the enduring pain and the loss of self-recognition that his past medical history had led him to expect.

Here, Jones is seen as signifying horror through camp to reject a false sense of security given in a refrain by a mocking, tragic “choir.” Jones is taken for a kindred spirit by writers attempting to blunt dangerous new illusions through a brand of subversive humor. Rather than Jones’ death specifying a political valence for a televisual and Internetworked public, the POZ writers appear to be aiming at “post-AIDS” administrators like Loyce and Munro who believe the growing global crisis has become somehow manageable. This deployment of a darker camp sensibility is by no means unique to POZ, and in fact has long been deployed in HIV/AIDS zines, theatre, and activist video.

Video artist and activist Gregg Bordowitz, characterizing his work as an attempt to make the AIDS crisis “visible” in the face of official neglect and lack of attention or accuracy from mainstream media (Bordowitz 1993), writes:

“There are historical, material conditions that create a situation of crisis, but there is no reason why some people die, why some people get sick, why I am infected. There is no reason, but there is meaning. My experiences are filled with meaning. They’re filled with pain, irony, and hope” (211).

Bordowitz writes of his appreciation of Charles Ludlam’s “Theatre of the Ridiculous.” Ludlam’s theatre articulates what Bordowitz calls “queer structures of feeling” through which countercultural communities of resistance are forged. Surveying a number of activist video projects and his own work, Bordowitz notes that while topics addressed in these videos ranging from HIV/AIDS, safer sex, homophobia, women’s health and reproductive rights, political action or the work of remembrance, they share a demythifying rhetoric of the ridiculous by engaging mockery of self and antagonist alike. Noting that Ludlam’s theatre developed over years and positioned itself within the broader history of theatre, Bordowitz explains that HIV/AIDS activist videos have faced a very different temporality. Participants were often sick or would become ill, or might die. With no time to lose, goals had to be pragmatic and well-defined (217). In Bordowitz’ video activism, as in his critical writing, crisis may be tempered by humor with no loss in urgency. Theatricality may be tested against the exigencies of medical politics.

1. Introduction to an event: framing a life

1. Introduction to an event:
framing a life