Melissa Jane Hardie

DEAD SPOTS IN THE CASE OF KITTY GENOVESE

In her article ‘Notes on Gridlock’, Elizabeth A. Povinelli asks ‘Why does the recognition of peoples’ worth, of their human and civil rights, always seem to be hanging on the more or less fragile branches of a family tree?’ (2002, 215). As her epigraph from Deleuze and Guattari implies, such a precarious, pendulous formulation is contrary to thought itself. ‘Thought’, they say, ‘is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter’ (quoted by Povinelli 2002, 215). How, then, to think through the question of worth, and its genealogical implications, when that worth is tested outside genealogical bounds? One way in which this thought has been held, given its own fragile branches from which to hang, has been through the logic of exemplarity, the instancing of particular moments when human worth arises unpredictably as a live question to be thought about. If care does not arise because the wounded are dear to us, thought might still arise because we can learn by thinking. The example explored in this article links an occasion in which a thought about human worth arose and has been thought through (with all the ambiguity that formulation implies) a set of relations unreliant on genealogy, a space of thought neither arborescent, nor rooted, nor ramified, but rather thought as it might exist in freefall, existent in a space defined in the first case as one where thoughts arose. In this article I consider the extraordinary circumstances that came to define the murder of Catherine (Kitty) Genovese. Interpretations of the case have pivoted around its exemplarity, generating rich archives of affective sets to manage a discourse of national affective ‘deadness’ characterised as a modernist deliquescence of community; race, gender, sexuality and class have all been used as interpretative indices. Kitty Genovese’s story and the testimonies of the witnesses to her murder generated work that found the ‘problem’ of the case to be the psychological parsing of the ‘unresponsive bystander’; an instance of the ‘diffusion of responsibility’ and ‘plural ignorance’. To what extent can her murder help us to think about the way in which crime events and narratives come to be circulated in national and international contexts? This crime and its context had a telescoping significance: beginning as a local news story it became the basis for a pervasive psychological theory of ‘bystander indifference’. Bronski (2005, 29) writes that ‘The power of the ‘‘true crime’’ story is that it is often an emblematic cultural citation that represents a social problem or fixation.’ This paper addresses a story whose status in analyses of crime in its social aspect is undoubtedly emblematic, representative of anxieties about the social that true crime invariably provokes or assuages. Equally, the interest in Kitty Genovese’s murder offers ground for thinking through the nature of exemplarity. This article moves through an account of her murder to consider the question