If you hadn’t heard, two Penn State students dressed up for Halloween as victims of the Virginia Tech campus shooting. These pictures popped up on facebook, and last weekthe mainstream media caught the story. This week, Northern Illinois University rescheduled the first day of final examinations after a threat was found scrawled in a dorm bathroom. These two events are linked, not merely because the NIU threat made reference to the Virginia Tech shooting, but because both events, and the Virginia Tech tragedy along with them, are funded by individuals’ odd attachment to a kind of transgressive iconic visual performance.
Certainly, it seems disrespectful and tasteless that anyone would dress up as victims of a tragedy as part of a playful party. But part of the trouble with the Penn State incident is that the offenders didn’t merely cross the line for their own pleasure, but for some perverted form of civic pride. One student explained: “It's not that it was funny, it's that we are notorious and infamous in the state college, so we have to do things that push the envelope just for shock value." In his estimation, offensive is what Penn State is known for, and so to be recognized, to be seen, to be the embodiment of a state college student, you have to produce something severe.
A Penn State official counters the offensive sentiment by saying: “Most Penn Staters are as offended by this as anyone from Virginia Tech would be-- and rightfully so. These two people do not represent 90,000 Penn State students. They represent themselves.” The struggle, once these images become broadly public, is a fight over the iconic Penn State student.
Of course, how the images reached the public is significant. Many a college career counselor is fully aware of the damage a social website can do to a student. But these websites are so pervasive that it seems innocuous to place visible details of one’s history on the internet for all to see. We are hyper-visible, and our students more so, and the result is a presumed devaluation of the visibility we have. What’s the harm of posting pictures if they won’t cut through the noise? And what are the chances of the images cutting through the noise? It certainly is difficult to gain a kind of broad recognition in a facebook age, but as these students show us, it is possible.
But what these students did in costume is a re-enactment. Not merely a re-enactment of the tragedy, but a re-enactment of the twisted visual imagination that is at play in these public spectacles of violence. The Virginia Tech shootings were the end result of a student who felt anonymous, and whose recourse to that invisibility was to imagine a kind of undeniable visibility that comes with being an agent of violence. The middle ground of visibility falls out for both the Penn State students and the campus shooter. One is either invisible or iconic, there is no middle ground in the visual noise of a facebooked world.
But of course, that isn’t true, and that may be the lesson we can learn from the NIU incident. At NIU, the Black Student Union came out to increase their visibility on campus rather than be visible only in the epithet scrawled on a stall door or potentially visible only as victims of threatened violence. This is a group that does not want to escape banal visual anonymity by way of the extremist’s iconicity.
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