The Many Deaths of Luigi Mangione
A shooting on a sidewalk: a symbolic image without velocity. When the event is said and done, the dust which remains is swept up in the passing of taxi cab — back home for break early, I see? where do you go? — and spreads out across the clash and din of a swelling fury. The event’s images — the engraved bullet casings, the suppressor, hood, mask, suit, sidewalk — are separated from each other, suspended in mid-air, frozen, repeated, turned inside out, modeled. In other words, dead. The bullets are lodged into the back, and mournful messages have been sent out, retroactively binding the moment into an event (or — the anatomy of a murder, death slowed down, pieced apart, surgically prodded). In a panoply of cameras, trackers, and information, the moments leading up to the moment are frozen. The smallest details are ‘on tape,’ so-to-speak. Data analytics, sequences of timestamps and vectors, headily maintain a breakdown of information into a pure, diachronic code.
Let it be said that this is no elegy. To argue that no death can be equated with a moral underpinning in the act of exchange, the discharge of the pistol, is as murderous an image as that which assumes the necessity of a non-generalized economy (or, the implied reasoning of the moment — the possible exchange of a monetary exchange smothered by the towering, though base, symbolic exchange). The assumptions of shooting as ‘zero death’ — outdatedly, the implacable vengeance of a ‘zero death’ as a final return — are the symptoms of a non-localized value, and so the locus of exchange remains in the Maussian endowment of value through movement. There has been a death — the prestation of a gift which cannot be returned, which has been exacted, which has been notarized — but no elegy.
This is the truth which the consensus disavows; that, yes, “it is unethical,” but he doesn’t deserve death. On the other hand, there is the quixotic soapbox of “this is THE moment of revolution!” or, “wholeheartedly, this is powerful!” But what is lost here is the singularity. Straddled between two poles — the banishment to castrated mundanity and the visionary dream of a New Earth — the event opts for neither. This is no catalyst for a Marxian domino effect (no, an Ivy Leaguer shooting a CEO will not spur some beautiful explosion of class consciousness worldwide, or even catalyze any class awakening in the first place; listen to yourself), nor is it the approval of a ‘safe-edgy’ Kaczynskian revolt. It is neither something noteworthy nor insignificant. This is its second death.
The retroactive “coolness” of this folk-heroic epic which has writhed its way into those pixels. The bullets are engraved “with” symbolism; the despotism of the sign is reified. Another deferral into the oedipal economy: the desire for eventhood and ‘the moment’ is reorganized, any radical potential castrated from even before the event.
A pulse of the times — the stake of discourse is around this, not the event proper. But to see the cross-section of a moment, the pulse, there would have to be a constant unknown; does the heart not constantly pump blood? It is in the act of checking that diachrony is collapsed into synchrony, and the event is purported to be an event. In any case, it is already dead.
The third death came with the reveal, yesterday, December 9th. The unveiling ritual constitued the birth of a ghost but the death of a body.
Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up! Here is...
The primacy of the image is no more, but this does not imply a primacy of the event. What is at stake is the appeal to moral truth and justice, the symbolic sacrifice and death (the larger they are...), an exchange which is the just thing. What matters is the uptake into the after-life, the post-event image, the suppurated revelry of an audience-by-scale fractured and dispersed equally.
Is this “the first act of terrorism by a radical centrist”? This ‘ideology’ (if you can even call it that; the volition of murder as something belonging to something strictly ‘political’ in an outright sense? I have some doubts) does not stretch across any poles of a political spectrum but rather is outright active. It is not a matter of debating where his reactionary radicalism — perhaps a (leftist?) hint of parochial luddism, perhaps a touch of crypto-fascism — really lies. Regardless of an originary ‘voice’ internet investigators strive towards, the encryption maintains itself as a mark and reveals a substrate which has never existed. His social media pages remain a mirage of an origin, a displaced non-origin whose very persistence is enabled by a phallogocentric desire. A grotesque mutation of the ‘archive fever.’
It is here that we pivot to the politics of the ‘everyman vigilante.’ The gist is that everybody is fed up with neoliberalism, but this death does not mark the beginning of an end. Nor is it the catalyst of anything larger. The obvious answer to that question is that it is all systematized, regardless, and that this only has the ‘puncturing force’ of a symbolic rupture — and even then, this is questionable. But this is not where the lesson to be learnt is — instead, the value of this situation lies in the symbolic capital, the exchange and discourse, the private-turned-public, the retroactive diachrony. In other words, this is something produced.
Two degrees from Penn, back surgery, software engineering and — emblematic of a similar private ‘digging’ — the realm of the sexual. A chiseled face, bisexuality, and the claim that the source of an originary ‘insanity’ was a forced celibacy. He is ‘admirable’ in his ‘confusion,’ in being the discrete location of separate parts — that is, in being a qualitative multiplicity. The distinction of bisexuality comes to represent a universe of its own, the idea of freedom and untethered-ness, but also as the optimistic vision of an ideal associated with — for ‘everybody’ at least — the future partner, that person who has been ‘hiding all along’ (and this appropriately explains the way in which he has attained the status of a rebellious heartthrob, a brazen young man, charismatic and dashing, really). When we see him in a suit (or shirtless), we see the crystallization of an event and its aftershocks at once. (His health issues remind us that he is flesh and we, too, are human.) The pain of the back, with those metal implants, finds its form recast in the violence of a gunshot — that is, the lodging of metal into another back. But it all falls into the same logic, the same symbolic enterprise. He is, for lack of a better word, “iconic.” Perhaps it is fitting that he stopped by a Starbucks and was found at a McDonalds. As the ego-ideal of the ‘everyman,’ he is already dead, fake, un-real. The recycled image is what is rendered as actuality.
The manifesto contains critiques we are all familiar with. If anything, it will backfire and sacrifice itself for the libidinal economy. Critically, flows will become recoded due to his quasi-pastoral radicalism; the very backfiring will create new methods of maintaining desire; it will abstract the chokehold of control. This is perhaps most clearly represented by the paranoid — not ‘schizophrenic’ — conspiricizing. The concept of a governmental, systematized narrative — Luigi as ‘the fall guy,’ as silly as that sounds — is a counter-narrative nonetheless, where sense is made only where it has been already prompted, confirming the impossibility of a bona fide deconstruction. “Yes, when I’m creating an intricate conspiracy, I’m going to leave behind arbitrary clues, empty signifiers, so that people actually get caught up in them.” This symbolic terorrism has lost its terror and symbolism; the cockroaches will just scutter into the dark.
What remains as residue is the profound sadness of the emerging narrative — not just an empathetic sadness, but a true sadness, a very real dejection, the momentum of an unforunate chain of events materialized into something hopeful, but a hope which comes with the recognition of an absence or impossibility. The sadness is also subconsciously located in the emergence of the narrative therein, the recognition of the fact that there can be no more ‘rupture’ from the normal, that events have lost their symbolic exchange value, and are all destined not to a contingent or deferred death but an absolute death — the cessation of life function. The violence of the real is condemned to a necessary transparency, but this is where it ends for all. This is just another form of war porn, but even more sullen and saturated — now, we directly participate in the image-production. This is not an elegy, but it is certainly an autopsy.