Rereading the School Shooter: A Deleuzean Interpretation of Surveillance in Schools

• In Event: 65.080 - Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: 65.080-11 - Me, Myself, and Meme(s): Knowledge Production and Media Culture

Abstract

School shootings are often read as a reactionary stance taken by students who feel marginalized. This paper draws on post-humanist approaches that seek to understand humans and human discourses within larger systems that include the human and the non-human. Specifically, I take a Deleuzian approach, eschewing social scientific models of cause and effect in favor of understanding the function these youths serve within larger a larger system, what Delueze terms a “machinic assemblage.” In my analysis the shooter’s body, the gun, the bullet are not sources or causes, they are sites from which excess energy flows to relieve, and maintain, the system. This approach locates pathology, then, not in the student shooter, but in the system itself.

Author

• Michelle Powell, University of North Carolina at Greensboro