THE “DOUBLE MOVEMENT” OF VULNERABILITY

How do we understand the unequal distribution of vulnerability to violence? Why do certain lives become more exposed than others to violence, injury, and death? Through what kinds of norms and processes are such lives negated and effaced, dispossessed of their social reality and moral worth, and rendered expendable and eliminable? How do these lives continue not to matter even after death, as their loss cannot be publicly acknowledged and mourned? These important questions have been at the center of Butler’s work, especially since the publication of Precarious Life in 2004, which offers a critical-normative account of vulnerability particularly by grappling with the response of the US government and public to the 9/11 attacks. Focusing on policies such as “the war on terror,” indefinite detention, and torture, Butler critically examines “normative schemes of intelligibility” (e.g., Islamophobia, “just war” theory, international humanitarian law) that delineate the boundaries of “the human” and establish which lives will be deemed “livable” and which deaths “grievable” (Butler Reference Butler2004a, 146). This critical inquiry is animated by the normative concern to minimize such differential allocations of livability and grievability and serves as the point of departure for imagining “a non-violent ethics” based on the presupposition of a “primary vulnerability” common to all embodied, social beings (Butler Reference Butler2004a, xvii, xiv).

The question of why and how certain lives become disproportionately vulnerable to violence can be answered from a wide range of perspectives, including those that foreground the political-institutional mechanisms or socioeconomic factors that contribute to the exacerbation of vulnerability. Butler’s critical inquiry places a distinct emphasis on the “representational regimes” that organize “the perceptual and normative field” and inform determinations of which lives are worthy to be recognized as properly human (Feola Reference Feola2014, 137, 140). Focusing on “the limits of a publicly acknowledged field of appearance” and “[t]he constraints … on what ‘can’ be heard, read, seen, felt, and known” (Butler Reference Butler2004a, xviii, xx), Butler critically examines the “politically saturated” frames “by which the world is given and by which the domain of appearance is circumscribed” (Reference Butler2009, 1, 180). This focus is in continuation with their early works that examine how the “norms of cultural intelligibility” that govern gender and sex render non-conforming bodies humanly unintelligible, turning them into “developmental failures or logical impossibilities” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 24; see Chambers and Carver Reference Chambers and Carver2008, 87–91; Rae Reference Rae2022; Rushing Reference Rushing2010, 287, 291).

This continuity notwithstanding, normative concerns, which have always been present in Butler’s works, become much more explicitly articulated starting with Precarious Life. More specifically, the focus on the unequal distribution of vulnerability due to norms and frames that permeate the perceptual field gives rise to a normative question: On what grounds can we take issue with this differential allocation and call for its minimization? In response, Butler introduces the presupposition of a “primary vulnerability,” understood as a condition common to all embodied, socially constituted beings whose lives are exposed to, entangled with, and touched by the lives of others from the very beginning, as underscored most forcefully by the dependence of newborns on the support of their caregivers and on various material and affective infrastructures (Butler Reference Butler2004a, 45, 31–2; Reference Butler2015, 7).

For Butler, vulnerability is an ineliminable characteristic of embodied life in that it is our attachment and exposure to others through our bodies that render us vulnerable to (and capable of) violence: “[T]he skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well” (Reference Butler2004a, 26). Once embodied vulnerability is foregrounded in this way, we come to see the subject differently, not as bounded or self-enclosed but rather as “ec-static,” one that is “outside” and “beside” oneself in the sense that its body, as a publicly appearing “social phenomenon,” is entangled with other bodies and “bears their imprint” in ways that can never be fully known, anticipated, or controlled by the subject (Butler Reference Butler2004a, 24, 26). It is this condition of vulnerability inherent in embodied life that is “exploited and exploitable, thwarted and denied” (Butler Reference Butler2004a, 31). Taking into account how the exploitation of “primary vulnerability” exposes certain subjects disproportionately to violence, Butler proposes “a non-violent ethics” informed in part by a critical engagement with Emmanuel Levinas. Responding to the moral claims made upon us by the other, this ethics strives to minimize violence by engaging in a continuous “struggle to keep fear and anxiety from turning into murderous action” (Butler Reference Butler2004a, xviii).

Butler’s critical-normative account of vulnerability, with its emphasis on norms and frames that permeate the perceptual field as well as its attention to the worldly embodiment of living beings, brings to view the phenomenological strands in their thinking, as I discuss in the next section. For now, I would like to draw attention to two interrelated sets of criticisms that take issue with Butler’s presupposition of a “primary vulnerability” as “a collective condition, characterizing us all equally” (Reference Butler2005, 35) and raise concerns about the risk of ontologizing vulnerability.

The first set of criticisms revolves around the problem of depoliticization, understood as the positing of vulnerability as “an extrapolitical truth about human life as such”: one that exists prior to and outside of power relations and stays above the fray of political conflicts and contestations (Shulman Reference Shulman2011b, 233; see also Cole Reference Cole2016; Dean Reference Dean, Terrell and Chambers2008; Honig Reference Honig2013; Lloyd Reference Lloyd, Terrell and Chambers2008; Vázquez-Arroyo Reference Vázquez-Arroyo2008). By working in an increasingly ethico-ontological register, critics contend, Butler risks obscuring the worldly conditions and political-institutional contexts that are important for understanding the complex sources of vulnerability and the possibilities of addressing them (Myers Reference Myers2013; Shulman Reference Shulman2011b). These criticisms have been countered by readings that underscore Butler’s deeply political understanding of ethics and ontology throughout their work (Chambers and Carver Reference Chambers and Carver2008, 92–118; Gies Reference Gies and Moya2015; Henao Castro Reference Henao Castro2020; Rushing Reference Rushing2010; Reference Rushing2021, 104–5). Yet, there still remains the charge that, in invoking vulnerability as “a fundamental ontological fact that makes an ethical claim on us” (Kramer Reference Kramer2015, 33), Butler risks making an appeal to the kind of pre-political or extra-political foundation that they themselves criticized in earlier work (e.g., Butler Reference Butler1995).

The second set of criticisms underscores a slightly different risk of ontologization by shifting the attention to the problems with thinking about vulnerability in terms of an anonymized body that appears to be abstracted from the distinct historical contexts and specific sociopolitical formations in which it is embedded. Of particular interest in this regard is Butler’s claim about “our radical substitutability and anonymity” in relation to the norms that constitute us as subjects (Reference Butler2009, 14; see Murphy Reference Murphy2011, 582). For critics, this claim places the vulnerable body “outside historically-shifting or sociopolitical institutions” (Oliviero Reference Oliviero2016, 19) and “risks a kind of totalisation that says, despite our differences, we are all human, that is, vulnerable” (Mills Reference Mills and Moya2015, 59). This line of criticism also suggests that Butler’s account hinders an understanding of racialized embodiment and vulnerability: moving too quickly from an ontological assumption about the interdependencies characterizing all embodied life to conclusions about the unequal exposure of certain populations to structural and institutional forms of violence, it obscures the distinctive vulnerabilities that arise from racialized embodiment shaped by the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism (e.g., Danewid Reference Danewid2017; Michel Reference Michel2016; Tsantsoulas Reference Tsantsoulas2018; Walker Reference Walker and Moya2015).

As this brief overview highlights, Butler’s understanding of vulnerability in terms of a “primary” condition common to the living has come to be read as an ontologizing move that depoliticizes and dehistoricizes vulnerability by treating it as an existential, pre-political feature of an abstract and ahistorical body. Read in this way, the term “primary” takes us to a pre-political condition that is temporally anterior to the field of power relations. As such, it serves as an ontological foundation that is supposed to ground and secure the claims that Butler makes in criticizing the unequal allocation of vulnerability and articulating their alternative political-ethical vision.

While I agree with the critics that the presupposition of a “primary vulnerability” involves a risk of ontologization, especially if “primary” is understood to denote a pre-political condition, I also suggest that Butler’s works offer crucial resources for cultivating a critical alertness to this risk. For this purpose, and as a preface to the phenomenological discussion in the second section, I read “primary vulnerability” in terms of a “double movement” that historicizes, politicizes, and renders contingent the foundation it posits—not unlike the critical operation that Butler introduces in their discussion of categories such as “women” and “human.”Footnote ²

In Bodies That Matter, for example, emphasizing the impossibility of invoking “women” as an impartial, all-inclusive category, Butler (Reference Butler1993a) proposes “a double movement”: one that invokes the category “provisionally to institute an identity” while also opening it “as a site of permanent political contest” (168). Such a gesture is necessary in order to “interrogate the exclusions by which [the category] proceeds” and “ameliorate and rework [its] violence” (168). A similar argument can be seen in Undoing Gender, with regard to the category of the “human.” In discussing Frantz Fanon’s and Sylvia Wynter’s invocations of this category without resorting to a conventional humanism, Butler again speaks of a “double movement” that unsettles and interrogates that which is posited as universal: Fanon and Wynter appeal to the “human” but do so to attend to its circumscription by “the existing differentials of power” and to “[open] up the category to a different future” (Reference Butler2004b, 13–4). In both of these examples, “double movement” denotes a critical operation that works outside the conventional alternatives of foundationalism and anti-foundationalism, as it calls not for the renunciation of foundations but rather for their critical examination. If “[it] seems that theory posits foundations incessantly,” to adopt Butler’s phrasing, then the theorist has to be attuned to the risk of turning such foundations into “metapolitical” premises situated above and outside “the play of power” (Butler Reference Butler1995, 39). “Double movement” is necessary precisely because of this risk, as it renders the foundational premises of a theory “contingent” by subjecting them to critical interrogation and situating them in a field of power so as to release them from their “metaphysical lodgings” (Reference Butler1995, 51).

I propose reading Butler’s presupposition of a “primary vulnerability” as a “contingent foundation” generated by such a “double movement”—hence, neither “a transcendental thesis that would dismiss power from the equation” nor a secure metaphysical ground (Butler Reference Butler2007, 184). We see an example of this “double movement” in Precarious Life, when Butler invokes “a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself” (Reference Butler2004a, 31) or “a primary helplessness and need” (32). That presupposition, however, is “relieve[d] … of its foundationalist weight” (Reference Butler1995, 41), as it is followed up by the discussion of the differential, unequal allocation of vulnerability across the world, as underscored by, among other examples, the unnamed and unmourned Palestinians killed by the Israeli military (32). The presupposition of a “primary vulnerability” allows Butler to take issue with this problem, the recognition of which in turn gives rise to a critical interrogation of the norms that “derealize” or “negate” certain lives, relegate them to “a state of suspension between life and death,” disproportionately expose them to violence, and render the injurious effects of that violence unrecognizable and unregistrable in public discourse (33–4).

Relatedly, if the presupposition of “primary vulnerability” rests on “a more general conception of the human” (31), the kind of critical examination I associated with the “double movement” above also unsettles and destabilizes what we understand to be “human”: not an abstract, fixed, and all-inclusive term that serves as the irrefutable ground of egalitarian claims but rather “a historically variable concept, differentially articulated in the context of inegalitarian forms of social and political power” (Butler Reference Butler2020, 59). This politicized and historicized understanding of “the human” alerts us to the disproportionate vulnerability of racialized bodies to violence, as exemplified by Butler’s analysis of the US policies of detention and torture that targeted individuals of Middle Eastern descent in the post-9/11 era (Butler Reference Butler2004a and Reference Butler2009) and their critique of Europe’s immigration policies that cling to the fantasy of “whiteness” at the expense of migrants’ lives (Butler Reference Butler2020, 120–1, 142; cf. Danewid Reference Danewid2017).

In short, the “double movement” both posits a common bodily vulnerability and insists that vulnerability “cannot be properly thought of outside a differentiated field of power and, specifically, the differential operation of norms of recognition” (Butler Reference Butler2004a, 44). Reconsidered within this field, Butler’s presupposition of a “primary vulnerability” can be read as a claim, the truth of which cannot be taken for granted but rather depends on its iterated utterance in the name of a politics and ethics that strives to minimize the unequal allocation of vulnerability:

The “double movement” renders the presupposition of a “primary vulnerability” then a provisional authorizing ground for such claims-making in an ongoing politico-ethical struggle against norms that negate certain lives and disproportionately expose them to violence.

If theory cannot help but posit certain foundations for its political and ethical claims, to recall Butler’s argument, then the question of how to render these foundations contingent becomes crucial (Kramer Reference Kramer2015). By reading the presupposition of a “primary vulnerability” in terms of a “double movement,” I located in Butler’s works one possible way of doing that. In the next section, I turn to their phenomenological engagements over the years in order to further develop this critical operation that resists the pull of ontologization. Additionally, revisiting these engagements can help us rethink vulnerability in terms of its racialized allocations and understand why and how racialized subjects become disproportionately vulnerable to systemic forms of violence such as police brutality, as discussed in the sections titled “The Verdict on Vulnerability” and “A Sociogeny of Racialized Vulnerability.”

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL TURN

In an interview with Gayle Salamon in 2017, Butler reflects on Maurice Natanson, their teacher at Yale and a philosopher known for his work on Sartre and Husserl, to note some of the phenomenological ideas that have informed their thinking. One key idea, particularly manifest in Butler’s early work on gender, is that of “sedimentation,” which highlights “the weight of history in the act” (Butler and Salamon Reference Butler and Salamon2017, 337), in effect revealing the historical constitution of that which we take to be natural. Another key idea concerns the phenomenological interest in “our sense of belonging to the world,” which takes Butler to a critical inquiry into the problem of “dispossession or non-belonging” to examine the conditions and processes that can sever one’s relation to the world (Butler and Salamon Reference Butler and Salamon2017, 327). Both of these ideas can help us rethink Butler’s presupposition of a “primary vulnerability,” along the lines of the “double movement” discussed in the previous section, and resist the pull of ontologization, while also serving as a departure point for understanding racialized embodiment and vulnerability.

The first point about sedimentation plays a crucial role in Butler’s early efforts to theorize gender, as can be seen in a 1989 article that calls into question Merleau-Ponty’s presupposition of sexuality as a “‘natural’ current” that is later given distinct historical expressions “through the concrete acts and gestures of embodied subjects” (Butler [1989] Reference Butler, Maitra and McWeeny2022a, 180). Criticizing this presupposition on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenological insight that the body is a “historical idea” (175), Butler highlights the impossibility of “confront[ing] a ‘natural’ sexuality which was not already mediated by language and acculturation” (180). From this perspective, history not only shapes the choices that subjects have but rather serves “as the very condition for the constitution of the subject” (180). Butler’s critique suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s naturalizing moves turn the embodied subject into “an existential constant” (180) and obscure its constitution through a wide set of historically changing relations, norms, and institutions. Leaving aside the question of whether these criticisms of Merleau-Ponty are valid,Footnote ³ this 1989 article deserves attention in light of the criticism that Butler understands vulnerability in terms of an abstract, anonymized, and ahistorical body. Phenomenology posits the “body” as “our living bond” with the world, one that establishes our belongingness to the world, intertwines us with other embodied living things, and serves as the “pivot” of our consciousness of the world and our sense of reality (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty, Lefort and Lingis1968, 27; [1945] Reference Merleau-Ponty and Landes2012, 84). Yet, phenomenology presupposes corporeality, or more precisely, inter-corporeality (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty, Lefort and Lingis1968, 143), only to call for a critical inquiry into the ways in which the body carries the weight of history, including the sedimentation of various forms of domination and inequality. If the body is a “historical idea,” as Butler argues by thinking with and against Merleau-Ponty, then vulnerability can be posited as a common characteristic of embodied life, but only to be critically interrogated in its historically shifting worldly configurations. Without such a critical interrogation, that presupposition would amount to, using the terms in Butler’s critique of Merleau-Ponty, “a metaphysical obfuscation” that would obscure, rather than illuminate, lived experiences of vulnerability (Butler [1989] Reference Butler, Maitra and McWeeny2022a, 187).

Interestingly, Butler makes this last point against Merleau-Ponty by using the example of infant helplessness, which they also frequently invoke to describe the condition of “primary vulnerability” in their later work (e.g., Reference Butler2004a, 31; Reference Butler2005, 70–1; Reference Butler2020, 37, 94). It is tempting to read infant helplessness in terms of a “diachronic” account of subject-formation (Mills Reference Mills and Moya2015, 53), which would suggest that “primary vulnerability” is temporally anterior to our insertion into the field of power relations. Butler’s critique of Merleau-Ponty, however, cautions us against such a reading, particularly with its destabilization of his distinction between “leben,” denoting the biological processes of subsistence, and “erleben,” standing for the intersubjective experience of the world (Butler [1989] Reference Butler, Maitra and McWeeny2022a, 180–1):

It is worth noting here that the “radical dependence” of the infant is entangled in social institutions and norms starting with birth itself, which suggests that even the most fundamental activities such as eating and breathing presuppose a social life in which subsistence is organized and guaranteed in particular ways. The example of the infant introduces us to a worldly context in which vulnerability is institutionally organized and unequally allocated from the very start, highlighting the impossibility of understanding “primary vulnerability” in terms of a pre-political condition antedating our formation in and through power relations.

This last point brings us to the second key idea that Butler takes from phenomenology: the need to consider political and ethical questions by foregrounding the world as the key site of critical inquiry. Particularly in more recent engagements with phenomenology in works such as Senses of the Subject (Reference Butler2015) and What World Is This? (Reference Butler2022b), Butler calls into question dyadic conceptions of ethics that focus on the encounter between “I” and “you” and adopts “the world” as a “third term” that “disarticulates the subject/object dichotomy as it traverses them both” (Butler Reference Butler2022b, 82). This worldly focus is in alignment with the phenomenological presupposition of the world as the taken-for-granted horizon of lived experience, which rests on what Merleau-Ponty calls “the perceptual faith,” or an “unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world common to us” (Reference Merleau-Ponty, Lefort and Lingis1968, 3, 11; emphasis added; see also 28). Yet, in ways reminding us of the “double movement” discussed in the previous section, Butler opens this premise to critical interrogation by drawing attention to the conditions that sunder this commonness and give rise to radically different experiences of the world: if the body is enmeshed in the world from the start, that means that it is implicated in worldly institutions such as language (Reference Butler2015, 23) and all sorts of infrastructures that provide support not just for its survival (Reference Butler2015, 7) but also for “sense, action, and speech” (Reference Butler2015, 12). To the extent that these institutions and infrastructures do not attend to the embodied needs and vulnerabilities of all living things equally, there is a need to engage in a critical reconsideration of the phenomenological assumptions about the world by taking into account the problem of “radical inequality” (Butler Reference Butler2022b, 54). This problem takes us to “the vexed and striated world in common,” which gives rise to radically different forms of experience, including that of vulnerability, among the living (Butler Reference Butler2022b, 82). We can see this argument, for example, in What World Is This?, where Butler takes issue with Merleau-Ponty’s generalizations about the body’s coordination of its movements with ease in its dialectical interaction with the world and aligns instead with a “critical phenomenology” that inquires into “how social structures are lived and, in the living, reproduced at the level of the body” (70). What appears to Merleau-Ponty as a “harmonious embrace” between the world and the subject, Butler (Reference Butler2022b) argues, could turn out to be “a chokehold that deals pain rather than joy” (78). The various forms of inequality and domination that characterize the world, as underscored by this last point, can give rise to problems of “dispossession or non-belonging” (Butler and Salamon Reference Butler and Salamon2017, 327) and undo the connections of certain subjects to the world and other living beings.

The critique that Butler directs at Merleau-Ponty’s assumptions about the nature of the relationship between the world and the body is strikingly similar to the one that Fanon develops in Black Skin, White Masks, wherein he draws attention to the ways in which racism shapes our embodied experience of the world and permeates the perceptual field that we inhabit ([1952] Reference Fanon and Philcox2008, 89–119). It is to that account that Butler turns in the wake of the Rodney King trial to understand why and how excessive force targeting racialized subjects goes unpunished even in the face of overwhelming evidence. In what follows, I discuss Butler’s phenomenological account of the trial in order to understand vulnerability in its worldly contexts and manifestations and with particular attention to its “specific racialized materializations” (Michel Reference Michel2016, 243).

THE VERDICT ON VULNERABILITY

On March 3, 1991, Rodney King, an unarmed Black motorist, was brutally beaten by LAPD officers during an arrest for drunk-driving. Twenty-five law officers were at the scene; four were directly involved in the beating, while the others watched (Cannon Reference Cannon1997, 28). Unbeknownst to the officers, George Holliday, an amateur cameraman, recorded the beating for over nine minutes. The video became the principal piece of evidence in CA v Powell, et al. (Court TV 1992) in which the four officers, all white, were put on trial for using excessive force against King. The prosecution used an 81-second footage from the video, which showed the officers repeatedly beating King with their batons (56 blows, according to the official count) and kicking him. The prosecution was confident that the video constituted irrefutable proof of police brutality, as illustrated by the closing argument of the chief prosecutor, Terry White: “What more could you ask for? You have the videotape that shows objectively, without bias, impartially, what happened that night…. It is something that can’t be rebutted” (Court TV 1992, Video 108). In a strange twist of plot, however, the video became the very ground of the jury’s decision to acquit all four officers and their conclusion that King himself was responsible for the violence directed at him.

“How could this video be used as evidence that the body being beaten was itself the source of the danger, the threat of violence, and, further, that the beaten body of Rodney King bore an intention to injure, and to injure precisely those police who either wielded the baton against him or stood encircling him?” (Butler Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 15; emphasis in the original). This question guides Butler’s analysis of the strategies used by the defense to convince the jury that, far from being a vulnerable victim, King threatened the police officers with violence. The prosecution’s presumption that the video evidence spoke for itself exemplifies a common tendency to understand “the realm of the visible” as “the natural result of human sight” rather than “as the product of a specific form of perceptual practice” that is informed by “sedimented contextual knowledges” (Alcoff Reference Alcoff2006, 180, 184). Butler calls into question this presumption with the crucial phenomenological insight that visual perception is itself imbued with social norms and values. Accordingly, within a racist social order, “[t]he visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful” (Butler Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 17).

To understand the perceptual field as “a racial formation,” Butler turns to Fanon’s famous chapter in Black Skin, White Masks, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” which details his account of an encounter he had on the train with a white boy who pointed to him and shouted to his mother in fear—“Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!” (Fanon ([1952] Reference Fanon and Philcox2008, 93). Fanon recounts this encounter in ways that question certain generalizations that phenomenologists make about the body’s relationship to the world, and he takes aim, in particular, at the concept of “the body schema” that Merleau-Ponty ([1945] Reference Merleau-Ponty and Landes2012) adopts from Jean Lhermitte. This concept denotes, in Fanon’s words, “[a] slow construction of my self as a body in a spatial and temporal world,” one that is “not imposed on me” from outside but rather formed through “a genuine dialectic between my body and the world” (Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon and Philcox2008, 91).Footnote ⁴ To capture how racism radically transforms the perceptual field, Fanon revises the phenomenological concept of the body schema by introducing two interrelated concepts: “historical-racial schema” and “epidermal racial schema.” In the case of Black subjects, the experience of the world via the body is significantly shaped by the mythologized narratives constructed “by the Other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories” (Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon and Philcox2008, 91). These artificial constructs, forming the “historical-racial schema,” assign sedimented negative meanings to Black bodies, associating them with “cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania” (92; see also Gordon Reference Gordon1995, ch. 3; Yancy Reference Yancy2005).Footnote ⁵ Fanon’s concept of “an epidermal racial schema” points to the ways in which these historical representations become naturalized as they are fixed and inscribed onto the skin (Hall [1996] Reference Hall, Gilroy and Wilson Gilmore2021, 342). It also denotes the Black subject’s internalization of the racist representations, which are so tightly affixed to one’s body image that they become like “a second epidermis” (Gooding-Williams Reference Gilmore and Gooding-Williams1993, 164). The racist gaze locks the Black body into its exterior, hyper-visible, and stigmatized surface and reduces it to “a single black thing, unindividuated, threatening, ominous, Black,” turning it into a phobic object to be surveilled, disciplined, and punished (Yancy Reference Yancy2008, 861; emphasis in the original).

Butler draws on Fanon to elucidate the “racist organization and disposition of the visible” (Butler Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 17) and focuses especially on the peculiar operations of what Fanon ([1952] Reference Fanon and Philcox2008) calls “phobogenesis” (130) to understand how King’s injured body was turned into a source of violent threat. As Butler underscores, the jury’s “seeing” of the tape, far from being direct or immediate, was “culled, cultivated, regulated—indeed, policed” (Butler Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 16). Cutting the 81 seconds of the video into frame-by-frame stills and presenting the jury with frozen images that focus primarily on King’s body, isolated from its surroundings and the actions of the police officers, the defense lawyers “not only violently decontextualized, but violently recontextualized” the video (Butler Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 20). Within these frozen images, the baton blows and kicks were not seen as relentless as they were on the original tape; they instead assumed the guise of reasonable officer conduct following the procedures for proper escalation of force (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1994, 617; Stuart Reference Stuart2011, 327).

These strategies of violent decontextualization were accompanied by those of violent recontextualization. As the defense turned the attention away from police brutality, it refocused instead on King himself, who was presented as the only person “in charge of the situation” (Court TV 1992, Video 2). Demarcating the contours of King’s body with white lines in each frozen frame, the defense rendered his every move suspect and relegated the police officers to “an amorphous background” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1994, 620). Removed from its environs, King’s body was then disassembled into its parts, each attributed an “intention” to inflict violence. King’s palm held above his head, for example, was no longer perceived in terms of “self-protection” but rather as the harbinger of a violence to be directed at the police officers (Butler Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 16).

Such visual strategies are informed by the racial schemas that saturate the perceptual field and transform Black bodies into phobic objects. Building on Fanon’s phenomenological account of racialized embodiment, Butler invites us to understand the attribution of culpable intent to Rodney King by paying attention to this perceptual field. As the jury disavowed the violence of the police officers and attributed culpability instead to King’s body, Butler (Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b) underlines, they participated in “the inverted projections of white paranoia” (16). In inviting the jurors to view the tape from the perspective of the police officers, the defense was calling on them, in effect, to identify with the myth of white victimization, or “to join in that community of victimized victimizers” (19).Footnote ⁶ Through complex processes of disavowal, reversal, and projection, the blows that King suffered at the hands of the police were construed as the blows that the jurors themselves would suffer if it were not for the intervention of the police (19); within this racialized field of adjudication, King was declared culpable rather than vulnerable.

Butler’s Fanonian reading of the Rodney King trial, reconsidered in light of the phenomenological points discussed in the previous section, brings to view the devastating effects of racism on any sense of commonality that could be imagined on the basis of a condition of “primary vulnerability” characteristic of all embodied life. As an ideology that hierarchically ranks human beings, racism rests on a forceful disavowal of inter-corporeality, or the embodied intertwinements of the living, which could serve as “an opening toward the world and toward a radically egalitarian collectivity” (Butler Reference Butler2006, 19). Permeating the perceptual field and radically transforming one’s sensory experience of the world, it undermines the very conditions for having a shared reality or even inhabiting the same world. It warps one’s sense of reality so much so that even the visible and tangible evidence of injury can be discarded, to the effect of disavowing responsibility for the violence inflicted on racialized bodies.

If theory cannot help but posit foundations, to recall Butler’s argument discussed in the section titled “The ‘Double Movement’ of Vulnerability,” this phenomenological account operates with certain presuppositions regarding the embodiment and worldliness of living things, yet these presuppositions are posited only to prepare the way for their critical interrogation: the racialized body that Butler’s Fanonian account presents bears the weight of historically sedimented racial schemas, which radically sunder its connection to the world that is supposed to house it.

This last point highlights the need to examine the sociohistorical constitution of racial schemas. Butler’s reading of the Rodney King trial examines closely how these schemas operated in the courtroom but does not go into how they have come to be forged in distinct forms within the American racial order, with its enduring legacies of slavery. As a result, it does not account for why we see certain white myths and projections rather than others, and what kind of cultural and political work these do in the American context. To conduct such an analysis, there is a need to extend Butler’s account by undertaking what Fanon ([1952] Reference Fanon and Philcox2008) calls a “sociogeny” (xv), which involves a “dually third person and first person exploration” of the sociohistorical production and lived experiences of racism (Wynter Reference Wynter, Mercedes and Gómez-Moriana2001, 31).Footnote ⁷ After all, the techniques and strategies used by the defense not only “violently decontextualized” King’s body from its immediate background and the violence of the police officers, as Butler’s analysis demonstrates (Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 20), but also “divorc[ed] the effects of racial power … from their social context and from their historic meaning” (Crenshaw and Peller Reference Crenshaw, Peller and Gooding-Williams1993, 63). What was disavowed was not only the violence on the screen, in other words, but also the well-established tradition of state-sanctioned racial terror in the US. Just as the racialized encounter between Fanon and the white boy on the train cannot be isolated from “a world of colonial domination” (Adalet Reference Adalet2022, 8), the verdict in the King trial cannot be detached from a world generated by slavery and the torturous, unfinished journey of Black emancipation in the US. In what follows, I outline a “sociogeny” of racialized vulnerability by building on the first- and third-person perspectives drawn from Rodney King’s memoir, trial archives, jurors’ public statements, and media coverage.

A “SOCIOGENY” OF RACIALIZED VULNERABILITY

To the extent that “violence against black bodies has never not been a constitutive feature of American society” (Gooding-Williams Reference Gilmore and Gooding-Williams1993, 168), there is a need to rethink the Rodney King case in light of the history of racial terror, especially the routinized violence under slavery and the public spectacles of lynching (Alexander Reference Alexander1994; Gilmore Reference Gilmore and Gooding-Williams1993, 32).Footnote ⁸ In fact, it is precisely that history that is summoned in Rodney King’s account of the beating in his memoir The Riot Within: “I began to think about all the blacks down South who were slaves and had been beaten and lynched. I felt a strange power at that moment, as if their spirits were all coming together to help me through this” (King Reference King2012, 47). A critical phenomenology, complementing Butler’s account of the trial with a Fanonian sociogeny, can help us understand the sociohistorical genesis and lived experiences of racial schemas, illuminating the distinctive myths, phantasms, and phobias that give rise to the racialized allocations of vulnerability and culpability in the American racial order.

The perceptual field within which the Rodney King trial unfolded cannot be understood without the racial schemas that have come to associate Blackness with animality since slavery in the US. In describing the media coverage of the Los Angeles uprising following the verdict in the Rodney King trial, Butler refers to “[t]he bestialization of the crowds” (Butler Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 21). That “bestialization” was also at the heart of the beating and the trial. In describing King’s response after being tased, Stacey Koon, the sergeant in charge of the officers at the scene, said that King “gave out a bear-like yell” and a “groan similar to a wounded animal” (Court TV 1992, Video 39). To clarify why he initially thought that King was under the influence of PCP, a drug associated with violent behavior, Koon argued that King “had exhibited this hulk-like strength” (Court TV 1992, Video 39).Footnote ⁹ Melanie Singer, who, along with her husband, Tim Singer, initiated the chase that led to King’s arrest, compared King’s stagger after being tased by Koon to that of “a monster” (Court TV 1992, Video 9). Such “bestialization” was central to the defense strategy to draw a “thin blue line” between savagery and civilization, associating the latter with whiteness and depicting it as under threat from “the likes of Rodney King” (quoted in Williams Reference Williams and Gooding-Williams1993, 54; see also Alexander Reference Alexander1994, 80; Gooding-Williams Reference Gooding-Williams and Gooding-Williams1993, 166; Jones Reference Jones2005, 32).

To create such a “siege mentality” (Mydans Reference Mydans1992), the defense tapped into the mythologized narratives that form what Fanon ([1952] Reference Fanon and Philcox2008) calls the “historical-racial schema” (91), including the racist trope of the animalistic Black “brute” that was so central to the institution of slavery and the white fears of Black revenge in the aftermath of formal emancipation. Particularly important in this regard were the racial myths and phantasms revolving around the figure of “Nat,” “the original Black male archetype,” personifying the white slave masters’ anxieties and paranoias in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution and the several slave revolts in the US, most importantly the deadliest one organized by the enslaved preacher Nat Turner in 1831 (Jones Reference Jones2005, 19; see also Blassingame Reference Blassingame1973, 134, 139–43).

Revisiting this archetype helps us understand the sociohistorical genesis of this “white paranoia” and its “inverted projections,” which, as Butler points out, enabled the defense lawyers and the jury to attribute the white police officers’ violence to Rodney King’s injured body (Butler Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 16). The racial trope of the Black male as the “beast” allowed whites to project “their own animality” onto the Black slaves, justify the use of brutality and torture to discipline their bodies, disavow legal and moral culpability for these violent acts, and maintain white innocence (Jones Reference Jones2005, 20). Viewed through such racially paranoid projections, the slightest movement of the slave’s body could be perceived as an act of resistance and a threat of violent assault, as highlighted by Frederick Douglass: “Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self-defense, the white assaulting party is fully justified by southern, or Maryland, public opinion in shooting the slave down” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass2014, 104). When the defense lawyers of white police officers and the jury read the slightest action of Rodney King’s body—for example, putting his palm above his head to protect himself from the blows—in terms of a violent intent, it is impossible not to note the continuing influence of these historical-racial schemas on the contemporary perceptions of Black masculinity.

To understand how vulnerability and culpability were interpreted and adjudicated during the Rodney King trial, there is also a need to pay closer attention to the ways in which the racist tropes that animalized King were sexualized through and through. Highlighting “the repeated references to Rodney King’s ‘ass’ by the surrounding policemen,” Butler draws a connection between “white paranoia” and homophobia (Butler Reference Butler and Gooding-Williams1993b, 18, 21). Without ruling out this interpretation, it is equally important to attend to what occurred before the beating: when Melanie Singer demanded King to show his hands, King allegedly put his hands on his buttocks. In the manuscript of his memoir, Koon, the sergeant in charge, described King’s actions as follows: “He grabbed his butt with both hands and began to shake and gyrate his fanny in a sexually suggestive fashion. … As King sexually gyrated, a mixture of fear and offense overcame Melanie. The fear was of a Mandingo sexual encounter” (Serrano Reference Serrano1992).Footnote ¹⁰ “Mandingo” is the term used for “a member of a people of Western Africa in and near the upper Niger valley,” according to Merriam-Webster. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Koon claimed that the phrase “Mandingo sexual encounter” was not meant to be derogatory, though his own explanation belied that claim: “In society … there’s this sexual prowess of blacks on the old plantations of the South and intercourse between blacks and whites on the plantation. And that’s where the fear comes in, because he’s black” (Serrano Reference Serrano1992).

Koon’s use of the term “Mandingo” takes us back to the racial myths, phantasms, and phobias represented by the archetype of “Nat” as the Black “brute,” who was “not merely a criminal but the quintessential sexual outlaw,” threatening the chastity and honor of white women, in white “psychosexual” fantasies about Black masculinity (Jones Reference Jones2005, 19). Racial anxieties about the purity of white womanhood continued with more intensity following the formal emancipation due to “a conflation of political and sexual fears that regarded the political enfranchisement of black men as a catalyst to the ‘rape’ of white women” (Apel Reference Apel2004, 24). The racial myth of the Black “brute” authorized the lynchings of Black men suspected of insulting or assaulting white women. These lynchings purported to preserve the purity of the white race against the threat of “miscegenation” and reassert the racial hierarchies that were threatened by the formal end of slavery (Apel Reference Apel2004, 25, 44). As Koon’s later recollection of King’s actions demonstrates, the racial myth of the Black “brute” threatening white female purity was once again the trope that provoked the white police officers into action, as they took it upon themselves to punish King for what they saw as a sexual innuendo against a white woman. They stepped in as the “[d]efenders of white womanhood, white honor, and white glory,” not unlike the Klansmen at the end of “The Birth of a Nation” (Bogle [1973] Reference Bogle2001, 12).

In providing “state-sanctioned terror” (Gilmore Reference Gilmore and Gooding-Williams1993, 32) with an aura of legitimacy, the Rodney King trial demonstrated once again the inability of Black citizens of the US to stand before the law as equals, or what Elizabeth Alexander (Reference Alexander1994) calls their “countercitizen relationship to the law” (80). That inequality is directly linked to the legacies of slavery as an institution that relegated the enslaved to the status of “property,” ineligible for rights and legal personhood. The only exceptions to this rule were cases of injury resulting from excessive cruelty or adjudications of culpability for their transgressive acts, but these exceptions endowed the slaves with nothing more than a “savagely truncated” form of personhood before the law (Hartman Reference Hartman1997, 94). Within a system of racial domination in which “routine acts of barbarism were considered not only reasonable but also necessary,” their claims as injured subjects were discarded, as illustrated by the systematic disavowal of sexual violence experienced by slave women in the hands of slave masters (Hartman Reference Hartman1997, 97). Relatedly, to the extent that this same system operated with racial tropes of the Black “brute,” it could assign legal personhood and moral agency to slaves only to hold them culpable for crimes against whites. The Rodney King trial shows the persistent legacies of the “legal knotting together of slave and beast” in the US (Jones Reference Jones2005, 21): King appeared before the law as an injured subject, but within a legal order in which police violence against Black subjects is routinized and justified as reasonable and necessary, his embodied vulnerability, physically evidenced by his injuries, was simply disavowed. In turn, within this racialized perceptual field, he could appear before the law only as a culpable subject, one who was responsible for even the injuries inflicted on his body.

To understand why Rodney King was brutally beaten by the police and how that violence was disavowed during the trial, there is a need to conduct a critical phenomenology that examines the sociohistorical constitution and lived experiences of racial schemas. Such an approach can also shed light onto the radically different experiences of the same event, including the diametrically opposed perceptions of the same video evidence. King barely survived the beating, which left him with “a fractured eye socket, a broken cheekbone, a broken leg, bruises, facial nerve damage, a severe concussion and burns from a police stun gun” (AP Reference Bogle1991). When King describes in his memoir “the most horrible pain” he experienced due to the repeated baton blows, he says that “it was as if I was some damn human piñata and the cops were all in a rush to see who could smash me open first” (King Reference King2012, 47).

Within a racialized perceptual field, however, King seemed neither vulnerable nor in pain. In interviews where they kept their anonymity, the jurors shared their impression that King “did not seem to be hurt excessively” and that “his injuries were minimal” (Washington Post 1992).

Historically entrenched racial ways of seeing, exploited strategically by the defense, inverted the positions of “vulnerable” and “culpable,” as Rodney King himself notes in his memoir: “What you see is not what happened. You’ve grown up knowing that color is blue, but for this trial, we’re going to say it’s red, and that’s what you must agree to believe” (King Reference King2012, 60). It was not just sight that was mediated by racial schemas but even the purportedly more immediate sense of touch, which is often considered to be “the sense in which the original encounter with reality as reality takes place” (Jonas Reference Jonas1954, 516). Feeling the heavy weight of an LAPD steel baton in their own hands (Almond, Bailey, and Neumeyer Reference Almond, Bailey and Meyer2017, 12), the jurors still concluded that “not that much damage was done” to King’s body as a result of relentless baton blows (Mydans Reference Mydans1992). Judging with their senses permeated by racial schemas bearing the weight of history, they declared that King was not the vulnerable victim who was under attack but rather the culpable villain threatening the white police officers.

That peculiar inversion demands a critical phenomenological account of racialized vulnerability, inquiring into the sociohistorical constitution of racial schemas that permeate sensory perception. Racial myths, phantasms, and phobias that comprise these schemas have the power to warp one’s sense of reality to the effect of justifying the infliction of violence on Black bodies and absolving the perpetrators of responsibility for their actions. A critical phenomenology provides insights into the distinct forms that racial schemas take in specific sociopolitical orders as well as the distinct purposes for which they are mobilized. In the case of anti-Black violence in the US, for example, we see how the archetypal figure of “Nat,” which associates Black masculinity with animality, violence, criminality, and sexual effrontery, is routinely mobilized to justify the brutal subjugation of Black bodies, reinscribe the object status of Black citizens, and secure white supremacy.