True Crime

Observations on Violence and Modernity

Mark Seltzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135867386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of the most popular genres of our pathological public sphere, and an integral part of our contemporary wound culture-a culture, or at least cult, of commiseration. If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk writes, we can at least "all [be] miserable together." The "murder leisure industry, " its media, and its public: these modern styles of violence and intimacy, sociality and belief, are the subjects of True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity.
True Crime draws on and makes available to American readers—and tests out—work on systems theory and media theory (for instance, the transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on the media apriori—work yet to make its impact on the American scene). True Crime is at once a study of a minor genre that is a scale model of modern society and a critical introduction to these forms of social and media history and theory. With examples, factual and fictional, of the scene of the crime ranging from Poe to CSI, from the true crime writing of the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami to versions of "the violence-media complex" in the work of the American novelist Patricia Highsmith and the Argentinian author Juan José Saer, True Crime is a penetrating look at modern violence and the modern media and the ties that bind them in contemporary life.

CHAPTER 1

Murder/Media/Modernity

The Media Apriori

True crime has its own weather. Consider, for example, the weather report by which the popular novelist Haruki Murakami opens his nonfiction account Underground, a “true picture” of a crime of “overwhelming violence”—the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system that killed 12 and injured thousands:

The date is Monday 20 March 1995. It is a beautiful clear spring morning. There is still a brisk breeze and people are bundled up in coats. Yesterday was Sunday, tomorrow is the Spring Equinox, a national holiday. Sandwiched right in the middle of what should have been a long weekend, you’re probably thinking “I wish I didn’t have to go to work today.” No such luck. You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a perfectly run-of-the-mill day. Until five men in disguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tip of umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid.¹

This is “normal time” in the world of the new normal: “normal, too normal” in the sense that, in the stock Western, it is “quiet, too quiet.” The weather—the residue of nature and the rites of spring—is there in order immediately to give way to second nature: the routine flow of bodies and machines (the body—machine complex) that makes up the workweek. This is the normal time and second nature of mass commuting and “perfectly run-of-the-mill” workdays, transit and work in a society of total mobilization via media technologies, technologies of body and message transport. These are the ordinary days in which “nothing out of the ordinary” is the promise, or terror, of one run-of-the-mill day after another. And hence it is the risk, or promise, of what has been called “the normal accident”: the sudden but always imminent, unforeseen, and endlessly previewed shock to the system.²

This is the abnormal normality of the world of true crime. That world—and the styles of violence and intimacy, sociality and belief, that make it up—are the subjects of the chapters that follow. True crime is one of the popular genres of the pathological public sphere. It posits stranger-intimacy and vicarious violation as models of sociality. This might be described as a social tie on the model of referred pain. And in that true crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction, it marks or irritates the distinction between real and fictional reality, holding steadily visible that vague and shifting region between truth and falsity where belief resides: what we can call, on the model of referred pain, referred belief.

The technical infrastructure of that referred pain and that referred belief today is the mass media. The mass media in the expanded sense make up the psychotechnologies of everyday life in modern society. These are the social and technical systems of body and information transport, commuting and communication—the motion industries and the message industries—that are defining attributes of that society. They make up the reality of the mass media. True crime, a media form of modern self-reflection, at once exposes and effects that reality. The combinations of communication and corporeality, synthetic witnessing, and the media apriori: these together form the working parts of what I will be calling the crime system.

True crime is thus part of our contemporary wound culture, a cul-ture—or at the least, cult—of commiseration. If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as the novelist Chuck Palahniuk concisely expresses it in his recent novel Survivor, we can at least “all [be] miserable together.”³ This is, as it were, the model of nation as support group.

Murakami’s account of the attack on the Tokyo underground as mass-public trauma—and as commiseration via the mass media—at once instances that model of nation and crime and parries it. Underground, on the face of it, is not exactly, in its form or in its cases in point, typical of true crime. We might say that it turns that typicality inside out, that it turns its cases and its “case-likeness” back on themselves (the alibi—In Cold Blood style—of self-exemption through self-reflection). But the point not to be missed is that true crime is always taking exception to itself, always looking over its own shoulder, and by analogy, inviting viewers and readers to do the same. For that reason, a brief sampling of Murakami’s account and its semitypicality will make it possible provisionally to take the measure of the world of true crime. More exactly, in that true crime is in effect always taking stock of itself, it will make it possible to locate too, at least initially, how true crime exposes and secures its truth.

“That half of the railway was absolute hell. But on the other side, people were walking to work as usual” (Underground, p. 16): there is a double reality to the scenes of violence that make up true crime, made up at once of the event and its registration (or nonregistration). The world of true crime is a self-observing world of observers; the generalization and intensification of that reflexive situation mean that “[t]he registration and revelation of reality make a difference to reality. It becomes a different reality, consisting of itself plus its registration and revelation.”⁴ Hence, it is not merely a matter of the routine traffic flow interrupted by the usual violent accident. The mass-motion industries, from the start—from railway shock to (here) a media-dependent terrorism—couple violence and its mass observation. There is everywhere a doubling of act and observation, such that public violence and mass death are theater for the living.

The doubling of act and observation has a specific form in true crime: true crime is premised on an inventory of the aftermath and a return to the scene of the crime. It consists, along those lines, in a conjectural reenactment of the crime. That conjectural reenactment takes the form of a probable or statistical realism: “you’re probably thinking,” “you get up at the usual time,” “you board the train,” and so on. The known world of true crime is the observed world—and the knowing and observation of that. Forensic realism takes as given, then, the compulsion to observation and self-observation that is a precondition of modernity. This means that forensic observation—conditional and counterfactual—is itself observed as the real work of true crime. Mapping the known world as the scene of the crime, the CNN effect is in effect coupled to the CSI one.

In Los Angeles, among other places, the in-transit eyewitnessing of the everyday accident—what is called the “spectator slowdown”—enters into the radio traffic report that runs (along with the cell phone) as a kind of soundtrack to the commuting between private and public spaces. Hence, the reporting on the event becomes part of, and enters into, the event reported on. (This is no doubt proper for a city in which the traffic jam—along with shopping and the airport queue—is the last folk ritual of social gathering.)

In Murakami’s account of the attack on the Tokyo underground system, the event and its witnessing run side by side albeit bypassing each other, even on the part of those who experience it: “‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ but I had to get to work…. Oddly enough, though, the atmosphere wasn’t tense at all. Even I was feeling strange. I’d inhale and no breath would come … I just caught the next train” (Underground, pp. 49–50). It is as if, like the news, witnessing, even self-witnessing, exists as a form of what risk society theorists call “secondhand nonexperience” (and what others, personalizing the media apriori, call trauma).⁵

This is no doubt evident enough; the self-evidence, even banality, of true crime is part of the story. If true crime forms a body of more or less mediocre and clichéd words and images, the point not to be missed is that (as everyone knows) the cliché (what everyone knows to be known) is the sense of the community at its purest. Sarin gas packets wrapped up in the daily papers, left behind amid the crush of newspaper-reading commuters: this version of the violence—media complex would read like really bad fiction if it were not the banal and everyday realism of really bad fact. In Murakami’s crime scene investigation, the scene of the crime is a “mass media scenario” (Underground, p. 5) and a “media stampede” (p. 15). There is at once the holding steadily visible of the mass media (“I recorded everything”) and the intimation of mass media as itself a form of violence (“What I find really scary though is the media. … It just made me realize just how frightening television is” [p. 134]).

There is a good deal more to be said about this self-parrying of the media within the media and about the ways in which this media reflexiv-ity holds in place what has come to be called reflexive modernity. And there is a good deal more to be said about how horror in the media mutates into a horror of it. This is nowhere more evident than in the contemporary gothic, a genre that systematically couples the media sponsorship or determination of our situation with an uncanny violence, as if each holds the place of the other. What Murakami here calls “secondary victimization” via the media—a “double violence”—is the precise register of the media apriori in modern violence, its registration and parrying at once (Underground, p. 4).

Take the form of Murakami’s account: a series of interviews, with minimal commentary: first-person testimonies of the victims, and, subsequently, of the members of the Aum cult (the religious/political group that planned and executed the attacks). In these miniature autobiographies, the individual describes and observes herself. This in turn allows readers, like readers of the novel or viewers of the cinema, to observe that—and to observe too what she does not observe, and thus to engage in self-reflection on that.

It is not merely that the individuals recorded say more than they know (that they have, say, an unconscious). Saying, recording, transcribing, printing, reading—remembering and knowing—are handed over to machines. These technical combinations of communication and corporeality make experience a matter of referred experience (“My dislike of being asked if there are after-effects might itself be a kind of after-effect” [Underground, p. 101]). And the handing over of experience to machines becomes its own theme:

Murakami: “Was there any kind of reaction because you refused to havea physical relationship with Asahara [the master of the Aum cult] ?”

“I don’t know. I lost my memory after that. I underwent electro-shock. I still have the scars from the electricity right here. … I have no idea at what point, and for what reason my memory was erased.” (Underground, p. 291)

The communication of what cannot be communicated means that the noncommunicable is not exempt from communication but media-induced too. It posits—with a shocking violence registered and erased at once, with a violence, like shock itself, intensified by self-erasure—a media apriori in persons. (It posits the media, say, as the unconscious of the unconscious.)

The coming apart of system and agency in these episodes is italicized by the state of shock but not reducible to it. The model for shock (from at least Freud on) is the railway accident. And the model for the yielding of agency to the machine is (from at least, for example, Zola’s murder novel La Bête humaine [1890] on) the runaway train. Here things are taken a step further. The underground railway system is a scale model of the modern social system and its infrastructure. The cult is another. These are, in short, working models of the sequestration and self-corroboration of modern society—by which acts, observations, decisions, and outcomes make up the systems that make them up.

The cult is an artificial social system that includes persons as aftereffects of its operations such that the reflection on that looks like an aftereffect too. The Aum cult members inhabit a sequestered microsociety; they occupy positions in a ramifying, self-generating, and self-conditioned bureaucracy—the Ministry of Health, the Chemical Brigade, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Animation Division, and so on. The terror “cell,” like the cult or the scene of the crime, thus condenses and visibilizes the modern social field, an overlit world whose border would be marked by yellow police crime-scene tape.

The direct link between the Aum organization and communication technologies is clear enough. It is visible in the mass marketing of its disciplinary practices (for example, in its video and photographic records of Asahara’s supernatural powers, such as his ability to float in the air— visual special effects played to the electronic and print press). And it is visible in its primary business activities (for example, discount sales of personal computers and pirated software). But media-sponsored life here goes de...