The documentary The
Act of Killing (Final Cut Film Production, Copenhagen) premiered in
2012 at the Telluride film festival and was also shown at Toronto International
Film Festival. The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer,
provides a unique and deeply disturbing insight into the ethical deadlock of
global capitalism.
The film – shot in Medan, Indonesia, in 2007 – reports on a
case of obscenity which reaches the extreme: a film, made by Anwar Congo and
his friends, who are now respected politicians, but were gangsters and death squad
leaders playing a key role in the 1966 killing of cca 2,5 millions of alleged
Communist sympathizers, mostly ethnic Chinese. The Act of Killing is
about “killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built.” After
their victory, their terrible acts were not relegated to the status of the
“dirty secret”, the founding crime whose traces are to be obliterated – on the
contrary, they boast openly about the details of their massacres (the way to
strangle a victim with a wire, the way to cut a throat, how to rape a woman in
a most pleasurable way…). In October 2007, the Indonesian state TV produced a
talk show celebrating Anwar and his friends; in the middle of the show, after
Anwar says that their killings were inspired by gangster movies, the beaming
moderator turns to the cameras and says: “Amazing! Let’s give Anwar Congo a
round of applause!” When she asks Anwar if he fears the revenge of the victim’s
relatives, Anwar answers: “They can’t. When they raise their heads, we wipe
them out!” His henchman adds: “We’ll exterminate them all!”, and the audience
explodes into exuberant cheers… one has to see this to believe it’s possible.
But what makes Freemen extraordinary is also the level of reflexivity
between documentary and fiction – the film is, in a way, a documentary about
the real effects of living a fiction:
“To explore the killers’ astounding boastfulness, and to
test the limits of their pride, we began with documentary portraiture and
simple re-enactments of the massacres. But when we realized what kind of movie
Anwar and his friends really wanted to make about the genocide, the
re-enactments became more elaborate. And so we offered Anwar and his
friends the opportunity to dramatize the killings using film genres of their
choice (western, gangster, musical). That is, we gave them the chance to
script, direct and star in the scenes they had in mind when they were
killing people.”[i]
Did they reach the limits of the killers’ “pride”? They
barely touched it when they proposed to Anwar to play the victim of his
tortures in a reenactment; when a wire is placed around his neck, he interrupts
the performance and says “Forgive me for everything I’ve done.” But this is
more a temporary relapse which did not lead to any deeper crisis of conscience
– his heroic pride immediately takes over again. Probably, the protective
screen which prevented a deeper moral crisis was the very cinematic screen: as
in their past real killings and torture, they experienced their activity as an
enactment of their cinematic models, which enabled them to experience reality
itself as a fiction – as great admirers of Hollywood (they started their career
as organizers and controllers of the black market in peddling cinema tickets),
they played a role in their massacres, imitating a Hollywood gangster, cowboy
or even a musical dancer.
Here the “big Other” enters, not only with the fact that the
killers modeled their crimes on the cinematic imaginary, but also and above all
the much more important fact of society’s moral vacuum: what kind of symbolic
texture (the set of rules which draw the line between what is publicly
acceptable and what is not) a society must be composed of, if even a minimal
level of public shame (which would compel the perpetrators to treat their acts
as a “dirty secret”) is suspended, and the monstrous orgy of torture and
killing can be publicly celebrated even decades after it took place, not even as
a extraordinary necessary crime for the public good, but as an ordinary
acceptable pleasurable activity? The trap to be avoided here is, of course, the
easy one of putting the blame either directly on Hollywood or on the “ethical
primitiveness” of Indonesia. The starting point should rather be the
dislocating effects of capitalist globalization which, by undermining the
“symbolic efficacy” of traditional ethical structures, creates such a moral
vacuum.
However, the status of the “big Other” deserves here a closer
analysis – let us compare The Act of Killing to an incident which
drew a lot of attention in the US some decades ago: a woman was beaten and
slowly killed by a violent perpetrator in the courtyard of a big apartment
block in Brooklyn, New York; of the more than 70 witnesses who clearly saw what
was going on from their windows, not one called the police – why not? As the
later investigation established, the most prevalent excuse by far was that each
witness thought someone else already had or surely would do it. This data
should not be moralistically dismissed as a mere excuse for moral cowardice and
egotistic indifference: what we encounter here is also the function of the big
Other – this time not as Lacan’s “subject supposed to know,” but as what one
could call “the subject supposed to call the police.” The fatal mistake of the
witnesses of the slow Brooklyn killing was to misread the symbolic (fictional)
function of the “subject supposed to call the police” as an empirical claim of
existence, wrongly concluding that there must be at least one who effectively
did call the police – they overlooked the fact that the function of the
“subject supposed to call the police” is operative even if there is no actual
subject who enacts it.[ii]
Does this mean that, through the gradual dissolution of our
ethical substance, we are simply regressing to individualist egotism? Things
are much more complex. We often hear that our ecological crisis is the result
of our short-term egotism: obsessed with immediate pleasures and wealth, we
forgot about the common Good. However, it is here that Walter Benjamin’s notion
of capitalism as religion becomes crucial: a true capitalist is not a hedonist
egotist; he is, on the contrary, fanatically devoted to his task of multiplying
his wealth, ready to neglect his health and happiness, not to mention the
prosperity of his family and the well-being of environment, for it. There is
thus no need to evoke some high ground moralism and trash capitalist egotism –
against capitalist perverted fanatical dedication, it is enough to evoke a good
measure of simple egotist and utilitarian concerns. In other words, the pursuit
of what Rousseau calls the natural amour-de-soi requires a highly
civilized level of awareness. Or, to put it in the terms of Alain Badiou:
contrary to what he implies, the subjectivity of capitalism is NOT that of the
“human animal,” but rather a call to subordinate egotism to the
self-reproduction of the Capital. However, this does not imply that Badiou is
simply wrong: the individual caught into the global market capitalism
necessarily perceives itself as a self-interested hedonist “human animal,” this
self-perception is a necessary illusion.
In other words, self-interested egotism is not the brutal
fact of our societies but its ideology – the ideology philosophically
articulated in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit towards the end of the chapter
on Reason, under the name of “das geistige Tierreich” – the “spiritual kingdom
of animals,” Hegel’s name for the modern civil society in which human animals
are caught in self-interested interaction. As Hegel put it, the achievement of
modernity was to allow “the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfillment in
the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity.”[iii] The
reign of this principle makes possible civil society as the domain in which
autonomous human individuals associate with each other through the institutions
of free-market economy in order to satisfy their private needs: all communal
ends are subordinated to private interests of individuals, they are consciously
posited and calculated with the goal of maximizing the satisfaction of these
interests. What matters for Hegel here is the opposition of private and common
perceived by those on whom Hegel relies (Mandeville, Smith) as well as by Marx:
individuals perceive the common domain as something that should serve their
private interests (like a liberal who thinks of state as a protector of private
freedom and safety), while individuals, in pursuing their narrow goals, effectively
serve the communal interest. The properly dialectical tension emerges here when
we become aware that, the more individuals act egotistically, the more they
contribute to the common wealth. The paradox is that when individuals want to
sacrifice their narrow private interests and directly work for the common good,
the one which suffers is the common good itself – Hegel loves to tell
historical anecdotes about a good king or prince whose very dedication to the
common good brought his country to ruins. The properly philosophical novelty of
Hegel was to further determine this “contradiction” along the lines of the
tension between the “animal” and the “spiritual”: the universal spiritual
substance, the “work of all and everyone,” emerges as the result of the
“mechanical” interaction of individuals. What this means is that the very
“animality” of the self-interested “human animal” (the individual participating
in the complex network of civil society) is the result of the long historical
process of the transformation of medieval hierarchic society into modern
bourgeois society. It is thus the very fulfillment of the principle of
subjectivity – the radical opposite of animality – which brings about the
reversal of subjectivity into animality.
Traces of this shift can be detected everywhere today,
especially in the fast-developing Asian countries where capitalism exerts a
most brutal impact. Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule (a
learning play written in 1929-30) tells the story of a rich Merchant who, with
his porter (“coolie”), crosses the Yahi Desert (yet another of Brecht’s
fictional Chinese places) to close an oil deal. When the two get lost in the
Desert and their water supplies are running low, the Merchant mistakenly shoots
the coolie, thinking he was being attacked, when the coolie was actually
offering him some water that he still had left in his bottle. Later, in a
court, the Merchant is acquitted: the Judge concludes that the Merchant had
every right to fear a potential threat from the coolie, so he was justified in
shooting the coolie in self-defense regardless of whether there was an actual
threat. Since the Merchant and his coolie belong to different classes, the Merchant
had all the reasons to expect hatred and aggression from him – this is the
typical situation, the rule, while the coolie’s kindness was an exception. Is
this story yet another of Brecht’s ridiculous Marxist simplification? No,
judging from the report from today’s real China:
“In Nanjing, half a decade ago, an elderly woman fell while
getting on a bus. Newspaper reports tell us that the 65 year old woman broke
her hip. At the scene, a young man came to her aid; let us call him Peng Yu,
for that is his name. Peng Yu gave the elderly woman 200RMB (at that time
enough to buy three hundred bus tickets) and took her to the hospital. Then, he
continued to stay with her until the family arrived. The family sued the young
man for 136,419 RMB. Indeed, the Nanjing Gulou District Court found the young
man to be guilty and ordered him to pay 45,876 RMB. The court reasoned,
‘according to common sense’, that because Peng Yu was the first off the bus, in
all probability he had knocked over the elderly woman. Further, he actually had
admitted his guilt, the court reasoned, by staying with the elderly woman at
the hospital. It being the case that a normal person would not be as kind as
Peng Yu claimed he was.”[iv]
Is this incident not exactly parallel to Brecht’s story?
Peng Yu helped the old lady out of simple compassion or decency, but since such
a display of goodness is not “typical”, not the rule (“a normal person would
not be as kind as Peng Yu claimed he was”), it was interpreted by the court as
a proof of Peng Yu’s guilt, and he was appropriately punished.
Is this a ridiculous exception? Not so, according to the People’s
Daily (the government newspaper) which, in an online opinion poll, asked a
large sample of young people what they would do if they were to see a fallen
elderly person: “87% of young people would not help. Peng Yu’s story echoes the
surveillance of the public space. People will only help when a camera was
present”. What such a reluctance to help signals is a change in the status of
public space: “the street is an intensely private place and seemingly the words
public and private make no sense”. In short, being in a public space does not
entails only being together with other unknown people – in moving among them, I
am still within my private space, engaged in no interaction with or recognition
of them. In order to count as public, the space of my co-existence and
interaction with others (or the lack of it) has to be covered by security
cameras.
Another sign of this same change can be found at the opposite
end of watching people die in public and doing nothing – the recent trend of
public sex in hard-core porn. There are more and more films which show a couple
(or more persons) engaged in erotic games up to full copulation in some heavily
frequented public space (on a public beach, inside a streetcar or train, at a
bus or train station, in the open space of a shopping mall…), and the
interesting feature is that a large majority of foreigners who pass by (pretend
to) ignore the scene – a minority throws a discrete glance at the couple, even
less of them makes a sarcastic obscene remark. Again, it is as if the
copulating couple remained in its private space, so that we should not be
concerned by their intimacies.
This brings us back to Hegel’s “spiritual animal kingdom” –
that is to say, who effectively behaves like this, passing by dying fellows in
blessed ignorance or copulating in front of others? Animals, of course. This
fact in no way entails that ridiculous conclusion that we are somehow
“regressing” to the animal level: the animality with which we are dealing here
– the ruthless egotism of each of the individuals pursuing his/her private
interest – is the paradoxical result of the most complex network of social
relations (market exchange, social mediation of production), and the fact
individuals themselves are blinded for this complex network points towards its
ideal (“spiritual”) character: in the civil society structured by market,
abstraction rules more than ever in the history of humanity. In contrast to
nature, the market competition of “wolves against wolves” is thus the material
reality of its opposite, of the “spiritual” public substance which provides the
background and base for this struggle among private animals.
It is often said that today, with our total exposure to the
media, culture of public confessions and instruments of digital control,
private space is disappearing. One should counter this commonplace with the
opposite claim: it is the public space proper which is disappearing. The
person who displays on the web his/her naked images or intimate data and
obscene dreams is not an exhibitionist: exhibitionists intrude into the public
space, while those who post their naked images on the web remain in their
private space and are just expanding it to include others. And, back to The
Act of Killing, the same goes for Anwar and his colleagues: they are
privatizing the public space in a sense which is much more threatening than
economic privatization.
[i] Quoted from the publicity material of Final Cut
Film Production.
[ii] One can even imagine an empirical test for this
claim: if one could recreate a circumstance in which each of the witnesses were
to think that he or she is alone in observing the gruesome scene, one can
predict that, their opportunist avoidance of “getting involved in something
that isn’t your business”, a large majority of them would have called the
police.
[iii] G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of
Right, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, par. 260.
[iv] Michael Yuen, “China and the Mist of
Complicated Things” (text given by the author).
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