Ray Rice and the Objective Violence of the NFL

“There are some things you can cover up … Then there are some things you can’t.” (Ray Lewis, CBS Sports, September 21, 2014)

The Ray Rice affair that has, in one way or another—and along with other domestic violence and abuse incidents—been dominating media headlines about the National Football League in recent days, obviously raises many troubling questions. There are, of course, the league- and team-related questions: what did Commissioner Roger Goodell and the Ravens’ front office know, and when did they know it, regarding the damning video evidence from the casino elevator of Rice knocking his then-fiancée Janay Palmer out cold with two vicious left hooks. Is Goodell lying about not having seen the video until TMZ released it? Did the Ravens try to cover up Rice’s actions early on, allegedly against the counsel of their head coach John Harbaugh?

Beyond the level of these Watergate-esque, scandal-related issues, other kinds of questions are raised by the incident, questions that exist on a more perceptual or epistemological plane. For example, why did it take the existence of a videotape of the incident to spark outrage and action? The most obvious answer is that this enabled us to “see” the violence in its true, horrifying “reality”—before, we had only a partial view provided both by a grainy tape of the aftermath (horrifying enough) and by various conflicting narrative accounts. But this seems unsatisfactory on a number of levels, not least of which is that video footage extracted from an elevator security camera and broadcast across various cable networks is not the real. We have been culturally conditioned to privilege the visual order of perception, when, as numerous historical examples attest, we can no more inherently trust visual representation mediated by technological networks than we can the supposedly more misleading oral account of an event. Nonetheless, as members of a culture dominated by social media and, more particularly, by the seemingly infinite archive of YouTube, we seem to lend more and more credence to what Shakespeare once called—ironically, needless to say—“ocular proof.” The historian Antoinette Burton has similarly noted that even as we become more and more aware of the untrustworthiness of optical representational technologies we also seem to seek a deeper affective engagement with such phenomena, effectively coming to view them with awe as a kind of infallible magic.

But there’s another kind of “magic”—perhaps sleight-of-hand is a more accurate term—at work here, beyond the supposed unveiling of the truth effected by the TMZ video. For all its sheer visibility, the explicit, undeniably shocking footage of the Rice incident is actually part of a grand disappearing act—one which, like those old magic shows, has disassembled or violated women’s bodies centre stage.

In a recent book the Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek talks about two very different kinds of violence. “Subjective” violence is what we normally take to be violence: war, rape, assault, torture, and so on. It is visceral and singular—an irruption that appears on the scene seemingly out of nowhere and is thus often seen to be irrational and inexplicable (“a senseless attack …”). Even so, subjective violence is, in a sense, easily understandable and digestible as well: hence, it becomes fodder for a 24-hour news cycle that still lives by the dictum “if it bleeds it leads.” Because of its media exposure, subjective violence has a certain allure: we become fixated by its bloody spectacle. If one result of this is a crass voyeurism, another, Žižek tells us, is a desire to do something to stop it: we must act; we couldn’t live with ourselves if we don’t do something immediately to reduce the level of violence in—[insert requisite space of violence here: the “Third World,” “Africa,” “the inner city,” “the Middle East”]. Ever the sceptic, Žižek claims that this desire to act against subjective violence is, at best, ineffectual, at worst a kind of self-serving hypocrisy that makes us feel better about our privileged, “First-World” selves. The key problem, though, is that our media-influenced focus on obvious, subjective violence also works to obscure a second order or level of violence, what Žižek calls “objective.” Objective violence is the largely invisible violence that is the corollary of the smooth functioning of a socio-economic system. It appears as its opposite, peace and non-violence, but is actually the “structure” that enables the first order of violence, the subjective, to appear as such.

A recent double murder in the town of Ashburton, New Zealand provides a perfect example of what Žižek is talking about. A man walks into a government office and shoots two women to death with a shotgun. The media cries out, How could this happen?! This is a savage, crazy person! The man is eventually apprehended by heavily armed police, and newspaper profiles follow describing him as a “loner,” a drifter, someone with mental problems. Other articles appear, paying tribute to the deceased victims and brave police officers. Finally, the media moves on to new, more alluring topics. They have drained the story of significance; now, we wonder what the next violence incident will be that will disturb the peace. But there is something missing here. The media reports of the crime include brief, unelaborated references to the murderer’s “homelessness,” his “poverty,” his long struggle to find work and a place to live in his hometown after years trying to make it in the harsh world of Australian mining.

What is hinted at here? If we believe Žižek’s theory, we could argue that these moments are fractures in mainstream media discourse that allow a brief glimpse of an otherwise invisible objective violence: the “normal” conditions of life in 21^st century New Zealand, a country that for much of the past three decades has been ruled by doctrinaire neoliberals who have succeeded in unpicking New Zealand’s traditional social safety net in the interests of a “user pays,” laissez faire economic system that privileges deregulation, corporatism, resource extraction, and foreign ownership of land and state assets. This system does not, in the main, appear as “violence.” Indeed, it is figured as the opposite: the means of New Zealand’s economic “progress,” its ability to foot it on the world stage, to punch above its weight. The public generally buys into the system: Prime Minister John Key’s centre-right National government won an unprecedented majority in the recent general election. Interviewed voters spoke of wanting to keep the status quo, not wanting to rock the boat—tranquility. What does not make itself apparent in Keys hokey, “New Zild” populism (like all “common men” in politics, the Prime Minster is actually astoundingly wealthy and privileged: a multi-millionaire who made his fortune on Wall Street) are the inevitable social consequences of these policies: unemployment, forced migration, decimated rural communities, insufficient or inaccessible healthcare (especially mental health), psychological dissociation and alienation, a perverse and growing gap between rich and poor, the sacrifice of the environment (and thus the future) in the name of “growth,” and so on. In Žižek’s terms, these phenomena should be seen as conditioning the emergence of the double murders in Ashburton—not in a strictly causal sense, but in a broader, constitutive way. All of which is by no means to justify or explain away the killer’s actions, which are obviously horrific and should be condemned. Rather, what Žižek’s theory calls upon us to do is resist the immediate temptation to condemn violence out of hand without thinking about its root and often hidden causes. Indeed, too often a somewhat understandable initial condemnation becomes a politically expedient form of amnesia—a way for people in charge (John Key, Roger Goodell, Ravens General Manager Steve Bisciotti) to shore up their power while insuring nothing fundamental changes in the way society, the NFL, or the Ravens are run.

The problem, then, with the outrage at the Ray Rice video is this: it allows Goodell and the NFL, however chastened they might be due to their belated, ineffectual response to the scandal, to appear to be doing something proactive about the League’s domestic violence problem, on the one hand, while distracting the public from the more intractable problem of the NFL’s indissociability from violence more generally. Ok: Ray Rice has been punished (which, let me be clear, was fully deserved). But what about the ongoing problem of concussions? What about the rash of ex-players’ suicides due, the scientific evidence seems to be saying, to traumatic brain injury? What of the possible connections between the dangerous working conditions of players and issues like domestic violence? How many of these latter incidents might have something to do with personality changes due to chronic head injury? And, more broadly, what about the very culture of violent hypermasculinity that the NFL builds on and obviously helps to reproduce? The NFL is arguably the most successful and widely disseminated corporate “product” in North American culture; for many males in that culture, it thus functions as a model for conduct, behaviour, and general outlook or ontology. What are the fruits, then, of such a deeply influential brand being, at its very core, a kind of primitive, chest-beating contest—war by other means—in which the ability to intimidate and physically injure one’s rivals equates with economic success, social acceptance, and cultural relevance? The putative unveiling of violence in the Rice video is, in the end, a way of shielding—Protect the Shield! is the NFL Commissioner’s raison d’être—these other violences from our collective gaze.

Ocular Proof: Gender, Ray Rice, and Othello

Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore!
Be sure of it. Give me the ocular proof,
Or, by the worth of mine eternal soul,
Thou hadst been better have been born a dog
Than answer my waked wrath.

 

NFL running back Ray Rice has been suspended indefinitely and released by his team, the Baltimore Ravens. He will likely never play in the NFL again.

 

This morning at 1am the celebrity gossip website TMZ released a video of security footage showing Rice violently attacking his fiancé, Janay Palmer, in an elevator, knocking her unconscious, and then dragging her unconscious body out of the elevator. In response to the video the Ravens have promptly cut ties with Rice, terminating his contract.The NFL has stated that Rice is now suspended indefinitely.

 

Typically we’d be praising the NFL and Goodell for their tough stance on domestic violence were it not for the fact that Ray Rice committed this act in February, news broke about it shortly after, Rice admitted to the domestic violence and apologized in July, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell already handed Rice a controversial 2 game suspension.We – NFL and Ravens included – already knew that Ray Rice hit his fiancé so hard that she was rendered unconscious. Somehow, hearing the story of a man knocking out a woman in an elevator caused Goodell to issue a mild 2 game suspension, but seeing the video of the exact events that were previously described and confessed to caused Goodell to break out the “suspended until I say so” punishment. What can account for such a discrepancy? Does Goodell lack the ability to visualize that which he hears? Does he not know the definition of “unconscious”? Or could it be that “ocular proof” has greater purchase than a simple detailed confession and admission to a violent act — that seeing something has a different impact than listening to it described?

 

I use the phrase “ocular proof” as a deliberate reference to Shakespeare’s Othello because not only is it a play where visual evidence is used to justify a punishment, but also because Shakespeare is something that we read more often than we view, and because, despite being separated by centuries, there are startling parallels in gender stereotypes. For those unfamiliar with the plot I will briefly summarize the important (for this article) parts: having only heard Iago’s suggestions that his wife, Desdemona, was being unfaithful with the soldier Cassio, Othello demands that Iago produce “ocular proof” or face punishment himself.  Iago hides Desdemona’s handkerchief in Cassio’s house and uses it as his proof, leading to Desdemona’s (and, unexpectedly, his own) death. Iago’s ocular proof manages to work Othello into a frenzy but it, much like the Ray Rice video, does not actually change what was actually known. If Desdemona’s infidelity was only anecdotal before the handkerchief, it is only suspicious now that her handkerchief is missing. For Othello, then, and perhaps for Goodell as well, the consumption of a visual form of proof — regardless of its literal impact on the case — caused a dramatic reinterpretation of the events in question leading to a more severe punishment.

 

A more crucial connection between Othello and the Ray Rice case may not be the ocular proof itself, but the way that ocular proof interacts with a preconceived gendered perception of the victim. Yes, Othello saw Desdemona as his beautiful and beloved wife, but he also saw her within the context of a play that consistently generalizes women as promiscuous and (ironically, compared to Iago) deceitful. Othello’s gender bias is shown through his interpretation of the ocular proof as evidence of the aforementioned gendered generalization: the missing handkerchief, a gift from Othello to Desdemona that symbolizes his love and her fidelity, is read as a truth that women are unfaithful.

 

For Roger Goodell and the Baltimore Ravens the video of Ray Rice attacking his fiancé may have had the opposite effect of undoing instead of reinforcing gender bias. Othello existed in a world where men imagine that women are unfaithful, we live in a world where rape culture and victim blaming are real things. Without the video footage that shows Rice as the attacker and Janay as the victim, it is possible for a more insidious narrative of gender to pervades where Janay is the instigator and Rice is somehow defending himself with his knockout punch. Why else would the Ravens official twitter account so emphatically tweet “Janay Rice says she deeply regrets the role that she played the night of the incident“, effectively victim-blaming Janay while shielding their star running back, immediately following Ray Rice’s press conference?  Why else would the Ravens delete that tweet today, four months after it was posted, only after having seen the video?

 

Connecting this back to Goodell, we might remember how Othello ends. Before he took his own life, Othello spoke concern about the legacy he would leave behind. To those around him he said:

I pray you in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.

Roger Goodell, a man so caught up in the value of public perception that he already did one about face on the NFL’s policy regarding players charged with domestic abuse, is no doubt doing the same thing. Goodell likely saw the release of the TMZ video as an opportunity to re-write history and hand down a punishment on Rice that the public would perceive as fair. So far that has not been the case as media outlets are questioning whether or not Goodell saw the original video, and some are even calling for him to be fired / resign. Othello ends with him killing himself in dishonor, accepting his fate and hoping those around him will at the least remember him as “an honorable murderer” who “loved not wisely, but too well.” The Ray Rice saga ends with Roger Goodell making changes to the NFL’s policy on players charged with domestic assault, and making several rhetorically laden speeches to the public about the the league’s ironic stance against violence. It will definitely not end with Goodell taking the fall for his mistakes.

 

In the end, though, we need to remember that Othello and Goodell are two very different people. Othello is noble general and a war hero who is betrayed by his friends, while Goodell is the man responsible for maintaining a billion dollar sports industry. In other words: Othello is a character in a play, Goodell is an actor.