Deterritory

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; “I” am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me—an other than I who passively become other—Maurice Blanchot

Perhaps few other countries can magnify the sicknesses of the twentieth century and the adjoining self-deceptions of human “progress” better than Cambodia, a country that truly defies description and ranks perhaps with India as among the most intense experiences available to someone suitably sensitive to the struggles and hardships endured by those who dwell in what Alphonso Lingis has called the “outer zone,” the space surrounding a nucleic “archipelago,” where industrial power is centralized. Cambodia is “the” post-genocidal culture par excellence (admitting all the attending, horrid ironies that go with the term). It is at once a beautiful, idyllic and quiet land and an absurd, macabre carnivalization of its own history, an “accursed share” of the globe, a horrible aggregation of the effects of “virulent expenditure,” a term designating the broad range of excesses said to undergird the formation and cohesion of any social organization. Cambodia is a country that has undergone a collective dismemberment as evidence of the monstrous visage of capital and the murderous utopian fantasies of its previous leadership. It is a country that demands gazes, has limitless exigencies, and is literally selling itself away for whatever sustenance or financial advantage it can attain. It’s a country with few enforceable laws that can readily be broken, pending the whims of current authority; capital crimes can accordingly take place almost with impunity. What does an agrarian utopian illusion look like twenty years after it was instituted, after as much as thirty percent of its population was exterminated or starved to death? Go to Cambodia and see. Though an unfair, undeserved caricature, it would indeed be revealing to describe the country as one where all too many of the able-bodied men are cyclo and moto taxi drivers, where prostitution is rampant, despite the government’s closing of the brothels (a “sex industry” rapidly surpassing that of its neighbor, Thailand, especially in terms of pedophilia). Sadly, it is also a surreal Bunuelesque theatre of dismembered bodies, hunched-over, malnourished elderly, who were apparently “fortunate” in surviving the post-Khmer Rouge famine, and bony, ragged children circulating among visitors and urgently pressing for food or funds. And if this weren’t enough, it has a tourism “industry” touting the sorriest episode in its long history as one of its principal “attractions,” the world’s largest charnel house of despair. And who can blame a country which has suffered as much as this one for doing so?
It’s a country of living spectres, visibly wrecked from its ordeal, the psychological imprints of the effects inscribed in their very faces, who see life as little more than scrounging and hustling for basic necessities, and yet a country still possessing many charms and a morbidly incongruous but all too apparent innocence, where the people can still be the friendliest imaginable. The simultaneous presence of such inconsistency can readily evoke a madness of its own. Ultimately, one cannot but feel a deep well of empathy, compassion, and commiseration for Cambodia, for its resilience as much as for its “humanity,” no matter how alien and unfathomable its ordeal. In a year marking the twentieth anniversary of the demise of the Khmer Rouge, the dissolution of its remaining stronghold in Anlong Veng, the surrender of its ideological leadership in the figures of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, the capture of the one-legged general Ta Mok, known as “The Butcher” and the coordinator of its internal purges, and the one year anniversary of the death of Pol Pot, Cambodia is worth remembering, worth recognizing. But this significant year should not be commemorated simply for our fetishist obsessions with monsters and horror, with the ungraspable chimera that haunted the place for just under four years, which keep the newsmakers working overtime satisfying our curiosity, keeping this entire story from becoming the mere trivia that events in the Third World tend to become. Nor should it serve as yet another comforting, self-satisfying example of the “disaster” of a communism that truly has never been realized, no matter the assignation of signifiers. It will doubtless surprise no one that Cambodians are real people worthy of understanding, but this realization will scarcely be “sensed,” for no matter how “virtuous” we imagine ourselves to be, we, the consumers of information in the first world, are hardly capable of rendering these people as much more than far-removed abstractions during the normal conduct of our everyday business. Cambodia ever so gradually recovers, despite the relative indifference of the “enlightened.”
Prior to the twentieth century, genocide was primarily an instrument of colonization. It was an almost total, primarily cultural extermination, motivated principally by a powerful sense of fear and incomprehensibility in the face of the other, as well as a legitimating practice for the acquisition of wealth, a means of countering the theological-ethical supposition that what was really going on was “theft.” In the twentieth century, genocide has proliferated and multiplied. It has mostly been geographically localized, partial and not total, not necessarily directed at an “other” found to be incomprehensible, but often at one familiar and despised. But while the motivations of colonial genocide were usually greed, concealed by religious and paternal justifications, the modern form all too often violates principles of rational acquisition, in fact, destroying the very foundations of wealth itself, namely labor. During genocide, no thought ever seems to be given to the maintenance of despised and yet well-oiled “human machines,” bodies that plant rice, dig irrigation canals, nurture livestock, in short, that are capable of working and generating capital. Thus, the inspiration for genocide is very alien from rational motivations of utility, even while the machinery employed is typically rational and instrumental. And yet modern genocide has, paradoxically, developed and proliferated concurrently with the development of capitalism, with the highest forms of instrumental rationality, and has become most virulent in the latest stages of capitalism. Genocide is the spectacular manifestation of the dark “underbelly” of “progress” in the rational, material sense. It is the testament for enlightenment “success.” This is why it has prevailed so dramatically and yet is so radically incomprehensible. Genocide is the “other,” the radically “incomprehensible,” of a modernity during a moment in history where all terrain has now been traversed and “nothing” is “new” any longer, those tropes of a postmodern milieu where the impetus for “discovery” has been completely “exhausted.” With its origins located in the first movements of the transcontinental voyage, it now reaches its pinnacle during a globalized information age where no turf remains to be pioneered. In its modern form, it exceeds the “restricted” research project (of which the Cambodian Genocide Program is a primary example) of charting its movement in order to assign blame, set up a tribunal, and indict executioners. These “restricted” research projects, though indispensable, do not go far enough in explaining the general problem of genocide. They seek a rational solution for a problem that far exceeds reason itself.
Perhaps the most significant achievement of the French philosopher Georges Bataille was the recognition that a world system dedicated to the massive, rational production and accumulation of capital required in equal measure avenues for the expedient release of “irrational” forces, the surplus of energy created in production and requiring an outlet. The alternative is the emergence of these forces in far more destructive and virulent forms, as the modern history of genocide can attest. A theory of genocide must therefore be two-fold: an “internal” account of the “restricted” modalities of loss, something that the CGP, sponsored by Yale University, has done well to provide; but also an “external” account of the “general economy” of genocide, within the context of the history and manifestations of expenditure more generally and within the political amplifications of the global movements of capital. Thus, a “theory” as well as an account of “particularities” is necessary. A theory of genocide will need to become one in which the specific catalysts within particular geographies are used to explain the larger global movements of destruction generated from capitalist exploitation and inequality. Thus, the terrible irony of the Khmer Rouge is that in its puritanical effort to eradicate all vestiges of capital from daily life in Cambodia, the malevolent deeds it undertook served, unwittingly, as the most exemplary effects of uncurtailed capital movement itself. The tragedy of Cambodia lies in a world-system that perpetually refuses to recognize the forces of expenditure that, along with those of production, undergird the activities and movements of human societies.
One of the lamentable aspects of the Cambodian genocide is that it cannot be spoken about without a reference to Auschwitz, as if the Cambodian predicament should be the occasion to address the horrors of Auschwitz all over again. The comparisons are inevitable but unfortunate. Indeed, as Ben Kiernan and others have noted, racism was a prominent feature of the Pol Pot regime, and certainly vast numbers of Vietnamese, Cham, Chinese and various other ethnic tribal groups were killed. But because so many of the victims were not ethnically differentiated from their executioners, one must recognize that the comparison finally breaks down. While the Holocaust need not be restricted to being simply a “Jewish” problem, nor the Cambodian genocide limited to being a “Khmer” dilemma, it is really only the quality of the horror and the sheer gargantuan numbers that these two events have in common.
Such comparisons reveal something else, however. Mainly, one can note how much the genocide of one accursed ethnic grouping in a culturally proximate location tends to dominate public consciousness in the west and how the media work to preserve this consciousness. What is less apparent is how this concentration of attention, important though it is, often works to elide other instances, particularly present cases. A Schindler’s List unwittingly serves to obfuscate the brutality in Rwanda, even while both “events” are contemporaneous. Pol Pot becomes a useful monster to obfiscate for western powers the even more self-incriminating and embarrassing instance of East Timor. And Bosnia and now Kosovo obscure everything else, because they serve as a stark reminder of Auschwitz, itself, because the ethnic cleansing that took place was directly rooted to events of World War II (in the case of Bosnia), and because the people affected were geographically and culturally proximate to western societies, even if ethnically and religiously differentiated. The Bosnian genocide also dominates public consciousness in part due to a sense of responsibility not undertaken. It was a tragedy that, if not for political errors and miscalculations by Europe and the United States, could have been prevented. The same could be said about Rwanda, though it did not dominate public consciousness to the same degree, perhaps due to the lack of ethnic and geographic proximity previously mentioned or to racism and other more sinister explanations. It should be noted that Rwanda certainly was not publicized to the same degree as Bosnia in such journals having large audiences among the highly educated, literate public as New York Review of Books.
After genocide, the problem of the remnants and their uses remains. As we have seen with the possible international tribunal of Khmer Rouge cadres, genocides can be recalled to galvanize public paranoia, consolidate dictatorial power, justify and legitimate diplomatic whitewashes, etc. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted a decade ago about the Holocaust, “the Jewish state tried to employ the tragic memories as the certificate of its political legitimacy, a safe-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and above all as the advance payment for the injustices it might itself commit.” Thus, the dangers regarding the political use of remnants from the archives of genocide have always been immanent to memory itself.
Furthermore, due to the writing of history and the authors who carry it out, pre-twentieth century genocide is largely unrecorded and rarely acknowledged. When the attempt is made to recognize it and remember the affected peoples in the space of a museum, as the Smithsonian did a few years ago, it is by and large dubbed by the general public as “politically correct” and, therefore, a contentious subject worthy of derision. Such refusal truly is the hallmark of a totalitarian state, one that can chime along with the platitudes about Holocaust memory, while ignoring its complicity and responsibility in other instances, such as in the case of the native peoples of the United States or even the egregious example of Rwanda. Hence, an implicit tension between remembering, forgetting, perceiving, and according recognition is inherent to the problem of genocide and its aftermath.
In these past two years of elegies about Pol Pot’s victims, marking the death of Pol Pot and the final demise of the Khmer Rouge, it is striking how little is remembered about the more than half a million Cambodians killed by U.S. air attacks during the illegal covert war carried out in the country during the early 1970s. It is intriguing to watch the political maneuvering for an international trial of the former central committee members by a country whose bombs helped turn a rag-tag army, sequestered in the jungles of northern Cambodia, into a force strong enough to topple the American-backed government of Lon Nol in Phnom Penh. Nothing is mentioned of this in the memorials to Pol Pot’s victims carried in the large exposes in such journals as Time, Newsweek, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. Little is mentioned of the fact that when Pol Pot’s regime was ousted in 1979 and retreated to the Thai border, it was kept afloat by American and Chinese aid. It has not even been noted that the Khmer Rouge was granted political legitimacy to contest the United Nations sponsored elections in 1993. As an oppositional movement with power, one despising Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge were worthy of political and military support, an irony in these days when human rights abuses in Myanmar and China are so easily condemned by western powers. Once the Khmer Rouge lost power and their ranks fragmented, they became a subject of genocidal research, a political effort to correct the wrongs of history. All of this is forgotten. It’s forgotten how Pol Pot’s paranoia about CIA infiltration and Vietnamese intervention was psychologically coextensive with American paranoia about dominoes during the Cold War.
What has not yet been forgotten is the archive. As with the Holocaust memorials in Washington, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, Cambodia has its own museums of memory. There’s the stupa of skulls at the killing fields in Choeung Ek, near Phnom Penh, and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the capital city itself. These comprise the principal records of atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. These are the stores of memory as well as the archives of an “aesthetic” value, not in the sense of “art,” but rather in an affectation of the senses, a powerful capacity to overwhelm the viewer. These archives of memory have already had their impact on a large contingent of visitors. Already in the past two years the Museum of Modern Art in New York has organized an exhibition based on the photographs at Tuol Sleng (May 15-September 30, 1997). Similarly, one can find an immense proliferation of virtual archives of these images on a number of internet websites. Such attempts to disseminate these powerful images, to develop a wider understanding and awareness of Cambodia’s unique horror, are necessary and commendable. They serve to impart a sense of the experience of witnessing the photographs, the skulls, and the clothing firsthand. But in their sanitized display in a modern, air conditioned museum capable of transmitting the experience of the “abject” in only a clean, purified manner, they lack the particularly indispensable aspects of textuality: human encounters, the tastes and scents of the markets, of roasted fish on burning pieces of charcoal, of smoke from locally produced cigarettes, of dust blowing in the countryside. The display becomes something other than Cambodian; whereas, bearing witness in Cambodia is three dimensional, not in the sense of “authenticity,” but rather in the sense of a more full-fledged comprehension of the events that took place and the people that were affected. The mediated archives of the virtual space or the pristine decor of MOMA can be nothing other than wholly incomplete and perhaps misleading. For western viewers to understand and empathize with Cambodians, there can be no virtual surrogate. It is equally troubling that the photographers who prepared the prints for viewing have obtained international copyrights for the figures displayed, as if these faces could be owned by anyone other than relatives of the victims or the country that defined their identities and in which their extermination took place, as if their deaths could possibly be used for any form of commercial gain, turned back into capital once again.
Nevertheless, the reaction of viewers to the exhibition at MOMA ranged from the predictable to the intriguing, and finally to disturbing. Some viewers questioned the appropriateness of exhibiting such photographs at an “art” museum, photographs that could not purport any sort of artistic intent (presumably). Since the prints at MOMA were derived from negatives accidentally discovered on the site of the museum in a file cabinet by two American photographers, Doug Niven and Christopher Riley, then this reservation raises the question, in the first place, as to whether the production of prints from the negatives of others (in this case, the Khmer Rouge photographer Nhem Ein, who took them in his teens) can or should be viewed as “artistic.” Secondly, one must address the question of whether photographs taken without artistic intent or qualifications can still have artistic merit. Additionally, since there can be no denying the powerful “aesthetic” effects produced by the photographs, then should a museum such as MOMA be viewed only as an archive of “art” or one of “aesthetics” more generally, that is, one congruent with the particular uncertainties of modernity? Finally, should the entire question of artistic merit be superseded by the issue of the exigencies of the Cambodian holocaust, by the troubling recent events in the country, including the death of Pol Pot, and the proximity in history of the disaster evidenced in the photographs? In other words, if viewing in a museum devoted to modern art is solely the domain of assessing, determining, and judging artistic merit, then exactly what sort of diversionary pleasures can we truly be entitled to if we are motivated to insulate ourselves from the salient horrors of modernity, which are the subject of much “art” and for which we might even bear some degree of responsibility or have received some level of benefit? And could art be little more than a parochial, “diversionary pleasure” if it fails to confront the dilemmas of modernity outside the parameters of artistic intent? On the other hand, if the reactions in viewing such photographs are merely those of titillation, exemplified perhaps in the souvenir t-shirts of the museum sold in Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh, even more troubling questions about “viewing” would need to be addressed.
The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide is located on the grounds of the former Tuol Svay Prey High School on 113th Street in southern Phnom Penh between 322nd and 352nd Streets. The school was transformed into Security Prison 21 (S-21) during the Pol Pot regime. Over 14,000 people, many of them Khmer Rouge cadres who had been purged, were detained and tortured on the premises. If they managed to survive the torture at S-21, they were later executed at the killing fields in Choeung Ek, southwest of Phnom Penh, in grisly episodes of bludgeoning. Only seven people survived after incarceration at S-21. The irony of a high school deployed as a torture center is perhaps all too obvious, but is also compounded by the fact that the director of the center, Khaing Khek Iev, alias Deuch, had been a former deputy school principal of Balaing College in Kompong Thom. His chief interrogator, Mam Nay, alias Chan, a former student of central committee cadre Son Sen, the ultimate overseer of the detention center, had been the principal of Balaing College at the same time as Deuch. They left over 100,000 pages of documents, including “confessions,” when they were driven from the capital during the Vietnamese invasion in January 1979. It was the Vietnamese and the Vietnamese-installed regime in Phnom Penh, led by defectors from the Eastern Zone of the Khmer Rouge, Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, who created Tuol Sleng from the documents and thousands of photographs of victims left behind. Now a government sponsored record of genocide, it has been used as a political propaganda piece to be sure, one readily serving the interests of current prime minister Hun Sen, but it is also an archive that exceeds the sometimes questionable interests to which it often has been wedded. As any visitor will verify, the horrors of Tuol Sleng stand quite well on their own.
The debates surrounding the MOMA exhibit are finally compelling in that the Tuol Sleng Museum, itself, is ultimately an archive lacking in artistic complexity. The display honors no principles of preservation, no particular techniques of museum arrangement. What is on display is a mere gargantuan aesthetic, where the sheer numbers of images and where the artifacts themselves tell the story of an improbable, unfathomable terror. It is the conditions of the archives, the banality of the display, of the features of the rooms and the grounds, the instruments of torture that remain, the clothes of the victims, the slipshod construction of the detention chambers, the fact that the events of terror depicted in the museum once occupied the same geographic space, and the “ghosts” that remain on the premises that provide an aura unparalleled outside of perhaps Auschwitz. It is the incongruity of seeing pull-up bars and benches once used by school children on the outside of buildings that house elaborate instruments of water torture and cages that once held scolopendra and scorpions. It is the presence of children from neighboring homes, seemingly oblivious to the horror of the images contained in the buildings, circulating through the grounds and the rooms while viewers pass through. It is an unforgettable archive but one that must finally be forgotten because of the manner in which the artifacts are being preserved and maintained (the archaeo-empirical question) and because of the “politics of memory” (the ethical dilemma of elision). Tuol Sleng is ultimately an impermanent construction, a fact that need not be disappointing.
The museum is composed of four buildings, each depicting different aspects of the horrors committed in the former detention center. All of the buildings are of the same approximate size, and the paint that once covered them is largely fading away. When coupled with the large accumulation of razor wire (see photograph A-2), which covers the space above the exterior wall parallel to 113th Street, the approach to the complex is ominous and eerie. The remains of dried coconut shells and garbage dot the deteriorated and pock-marked approach on 334th Street. The ample green fronds of coconut palms extend in all directions and the street is blessed with one of the few street lamps in all of Phnom Penh.
Building A is the southernmost building and faces north. It contains ten rooms on the first floor and five on the second and third. The top two floors and the last two rooms on the first floor, however, are blocked off. This building was deployed for jailing, interrogating, and torturing high officials, presumably of the Khmer Rouge, during its notorious internal purges. The eight rooms available for viewing each contain a photograph of one of the remaining 14 victims discovered by the Vietnamese in their conquest of Phnom Penh in January 1979 (see photographs A-5 and A-6). The photographs are large, rough, and unclear and are tacked to the walls of the rooms. Each room contains the rough metal skeleton of a bed and up to five reinforcing steel hooks cemented to the floor, which were used for leg shackles (see photograph A-4). Some of the beds have a pillow, a small mat, chains, locks, and a decaying steel box previously used for human waste. The floors are composed of alternating beige and white tiles with other varieties haphazardly mixed in. The seventh cell has an old shirt from one of the victims, while others have cups and plastic jugs. Inexplicably, the photo in the eighth cell faces east, while the other seven face west. This photograph is particularly grisly—an intact but clearly tortured body with the head reduced to a skull (A-6). In the picture, one shovel lies on the floor and another on the bed. Noting as well the paintings of torture scenes made by former victims that appear in Building D, one might assume torture had been carried out with acid. The stairwells at either end of the building are completely soiled, riddled with cobwebs and garbage, with no effort made toward maintenance. All the windows in the cells are barred.
Outside and parallel to Building A is the grave memorial to the 14 victims found on the site in 1979 (see photograph A-3). These are grouped into separate rows of eight and six, and the headstones are all painted white, as are the bases of the palms on the grounds of the museum, a typical Vietnamese custom for making the trees visible at night.
At the west end and perpendicular to Building A is Building B, which faces east toward the entrance of the museum. Its top two floors are closed off and pull-up bars and benches line the front. This building had been previously used for mass detention of prisoners. The first, southernmost room contains large photographs of mostly important officials and cadres as well as foreigners, including one of New York Times correspondent and author of The Killing Fields, Sydney Schanberg, who was once detained by Khmer Rouge soldiers at the former Chruoy Changvar Bridge. At the southern wall is a huge glass case containing the dull, gray uniforms once worn by the prisoners (see photograph B-1). One can also see several photos of the fences and razor wire on the S-21 grounds. On my first visit to the museum, this room had the tattered, weathered “confession” of a 19-year-old Frenchman, M. Bernard, who was apparently detained and killed by the Khmer Rouge in April 1976, tacked to the west wall (see photograph B-2). On my second visit, the confession had been removed. The second room is much smaller and its walls bear 41 sets of mug shots grouped in frames of 36 for a total of 1436. A total of 2872 eyes in various modalities of expression, but mostly of incomprehension or terror, fix their gaze on the viewer who gazes at them, a Kafka-esque interrogation of faces already determined as guilty, as criminal, and now marshaled out of existence, out of history at the death camps by a maniacal band of grim reapers. These stares from all directions and all corners are extremely disconcerting, a perverted panopticon of a kind not described by Michel Foucault—instead of the “many” being viewed simultaneously by the “one,” we have the “one,” ourselves, being viewed by the “totality,” not of the controllers but of the “exterminated.” The genocide and its victims seem to gape at us, while in fact they are glaring at their executioners. These photographs and all the mug shots to follow were taken by the Khmer Rouge prison authorities, demonstrably meticulous archivists, and were found on the premises when the Vietnamese arrived in the capital. It is this aspect of scrupulous documentation that the S-21 authorities shared with the administrators of the Holocaust in Europe. The bureaucratic administration of murder on a grand scale is the means by which moral indifference and invisibility are produced and rationally justified, according to Bauman. Genocide, therefore, is very much a part of the “civilizing” process, an outgrowth of instrumental rationality that is incapable of being differentiated from that process, an observation that must strike one as counterintuitive.
Further along is the much larger third room, containing six huge panels of photographs of men only, including some monks, each wearing the ubiquitous numbered tags, a total of 1878 in all (see photographs B-3—B-9). Cemented to the floor of the room are an additional twenty rebar rods with curved ends, used as hooks used for leg-detention shackles(B-3). The fourth room also contains six large panels of mug shots, including 1523 men and 490 women (see photographs B-10 and B-11). Some of the photos in these larger rooms have been torn off the panels, souvenirs perhaps for visitors, while others are peeling away. Many of them are darkening and fading from external sunlight and other elements, the very elements that once and still tear apart the laterite blocks at Angkor. The fifth room comprises two busts and two bust making molds of Pol Pot, numerous leg hooks, shackles, and reinforced steel rods on a lecture stage. Twenty enlarged photographs of the “killing fields,” the huge mass graves, line the northern and southern walls of the room. The east wall contains 110 hideous photographs of victims after torture (see photographs B-13 and B-14). Again, as with Building A, the stairwells and adjoining rooms in Building B are littered with dirt, cobwebs, leaves, and trash (see photograph B-12 for a representative example). Small holes in the poured concrete walls allow in bits of light, providing a sense of the horrid conditions of confinement. Altogether, a total of 5437 faces adorn the walls of Building B. A veritable conspiracy of gazes confronts the viewer, but one that induces empathy and elicits compassion as much as it effects a disturbing state of vertiginous agitation in the viewer. We are met head on by a seemingly infinite number of faces, faces which, as Emmanuel Levinas theorized, are but the “incisions made in time that do not bleed.” And yet these are the faces that have bled, that have been denuded of flesh. The face is indeed the “incision” on time and, therefore, the “ghost” that remains. What is abstract, though, is the “skull.” It is the skull that totalizes and finally reduces the face to a core essence, one that cannot readily be differentiated from any other. The horror in Building B is one of denudation, the perdition of the flesh, of watching the tissue melt away leaving only the vacant, hollow crevices of bone, leaving only the “undifferentiated.” The gradual deterioration of the photographs that fade and peel from the panels is a metaphor for the other form of denudation, impermanence standing in the place of death and erasure, beings that have been driven out of existence and can now only be remembered in the context of the abominations that were wrecked upon them.
Building C was also a mass detention center but is distinct from Building B in that it contains 115 makeshift cells, an uncanny reminder of the historical proximity of the events that took place here. The first floor is composed of five rooms with eleven offhandedly produced brick cells with barely enough room to hold one person (see photograph C-3). Chains are cemented to the floors in many of the cells and some steel leg shackles can be found (see photograph C-4). Slipshod cutaways have been made through the masonry walls between the rooms, providing the effect of a partial panopticon from either end of the building. The second floor contains five sets of twelve wooden detention cells, including a shower room, with the scent of its prior use still lingering, remarkably, in the wood (see photographs C-5 and C-6). A scupper is carved out of the base of the wall to serve as a drain. The third floor is comprised of five mass detention rooms, each lined with numbers for organizing the prisoners against the walls. The columns along the main corridors at the front of the building are sealed with barbed wire to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide (see photograph C-2).
Passing through Building C is almost equivalent to reliving the experience of incarceration under Pol Pot. As one moves between the cells, through the inside corridor separated from the outside world by the formidable imposition of barbed wire, a powerful sense isolation, containment and despair emerges. The slovenly construction of the masonry partitions, which do not even approach the ceilings of the rooms and whose tops are caked with mortar, suggesting gestures of incompleteness or incompetence, metonymically merges with recollections of the dreary banality of contemporary makeshift architecture in the urban squalor of many major Third World cities and western ghettoes, a representation of modern forms and strategies of human immurement. Accordingly, Building C might be one of the most profoundly depressing sets of images that one can conceive, an unparalleled anti-aesthetic and unwitting fusion of Third World minimalist necessity, an abominable one to be certain, and a flat, barren First World sensibility all too willing to ignore, abet or apathetically detach from the conditions which produce monstrosities like the Khmer Rouge phenomenon.
The last of the visual records of the Tuol Sleng museum are contained in Building D, which is in the northern part of the grounds facing south. Building D is basically a summation of the Khmer Rouge period in general. Among the archives are photographs of Phnom Penh after April 1975, photographs of the S-21 leadership, interrogators, and even cooks, artistic renderings by one of the seven survivors, Heng Nath, of Khmer Rouge atrocities, and various technologies of torture. One can notice the photos of “Deuch” and Mam Nay in the first room, as well as a large photograph of one of the seven confessions of Hu Nim next to his snapshot. Hu Nim had been Information Minister under Pol Pot and was arrested on April 10, 1977 and killed almost two months later on July 6 for criticizing the party center’s handling of the peasants, suggesting the reintroduction of money as a work incentive, and ideologically supporting China’s Cultural Revolution. Additionally, the room holds a chair equipped with a vice-like mechanism that bores an iron bit into the back of the head of a victim during an interrogation (see photograph D-2). Photos of Phnom Penh after the evacuation are located on a number of the walls, as are photos of victims after the famine that followed the overthrow of Pol Pot.
The second room holds numerous instruments of torture, particularly whips but also bars, shovels, hoes, an axe, a knotted cane, leg shackles, etc. Included in this room are eight paintings of torture scenes by Heng Nath (see photographs D-4 and D-5). The third room has four more paintings of torture as well as photographs of famous Cambodians, including entertainers, who were killed. A few photographs are of clocks and lamps collected by the Khmer Rouge, as well as an infamous one of life in the countryside under Pol Pot. The room also has cages used for scolopendra and scorpions (see photograph D-3), as well as the huge wooden contraptions used for submersion and suffocation in water. The fourth room possesses enlarged photographs of deserted cities, shelled-out buildings, empty factories, as well as a map of an alleged 6186 incursions into Vietnam in an outrageous and ultimately suicidal effort to retake Kampuchea Krom, the area now known as the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam, precipitating the invasion that ended the Khmer Rouge. The room also contains numerous photos of destroyed temples, depicting Pol Pot’s concerted effort to wipe out Buddhism, and others of skulls and bones collected from the mass graves (see photograph D-1). Finally, in the fifth room are four additional paintings of torture scenes, one large wall panel photograph of the killing fields, two photographs of Phnom Penh after evacuation, and the mammoth map of Cambodia made from skulls and bones, with the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers delineated in red (see photograph D-6). A final tabulation of the Khmer Rouge achievement can be found on either side of the gruesome map in both French and Khmer: 3,314,768 killings (by murder, starvation or disease) and disappearances (according to Vietnamese estimates); 141,868 invalids; 200,000 orphans; 635,522 destroyed houses; 5857 demolished schools; 796 hospitals, infirmaries, and laboratories obliterated; 1968 Buddhist pagodas and 144 Islamic mosques destroyed; and 1,507,416 livestock animals killed. According to Ben Kiernan and the Cambodia Genocide Program at Yale University, the number of those who perished was 1.671 million. Recent satellite map surveys by Australia have indicated numbers of over two million with the discovery of over a thousand previously unknown mass graves.
Georges Bataille coined the term “informe” in order to describe phenomena that eluded the grasp of philosophers and that evaded the appropriating efforts of knowledge in general. He states that what the informe “designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.” In academia, the informe is that which escapes explanation; it eludes an appropriating discourse. The informe is the experience which does not make “sense,” the experience we are unable to make “sense” of, or are unable to “sense,” to comprehend. According to Bataille, for academics to be satisfied, “the universe would have to take shape.” But the informe is that which will not fit conveniently into prefabricated models. In comparison to Bataille’s account, Bauman has argued that genocide is precisely the phenomenon that sociologists have been completely inadequate to explain, in good part because the models deployed have been oriented too greatly to rational explanations: “sociology has been engaged since its birth in a mimetic relationship with its object—or, rather, with the imagery of that object which it constructed and accepted as the frame for its own discourse.” Thus, he concludes that it is a task of the Holocaust to educate sociology, not for sociology to explain the Holocaust. “Like it or not, Auschwitz expands the universe of consciousness no less than landing on the moon.” But it is this awareness that has yet to intervene into sociological practice and divest it from its commitments to the legitimizing discourses of instrumental rationality, of applying “mathematical frock coats to what is,” as Bataille phrases it. The methods and processes of the production of academic knowledge imitate the forces of our episteme, the very forces that create the conditions of genocide, the rational modes of production and accumulation of capital and the hoarding of energies expended during the process. The same rational bureaucratic processes are evident in the administration of the Holocaust, as well as in the documentation and maintenance of the S-21 prison under
Pol Pot. As Bauman notes, “the civilizing process is, among other things, a process of divesting the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus, and of emancipating the desiderata of rationality from interference of ethical norms or moral inhibitions.” It is the development of military apparatuses in modernity that illustrates this divorce of violence from ethical consideration, that ushers in the new ethos of a rational comprehensibility to the brutality carried out by these actors—-a stark contrast, in the case of genocide, to the irrationality of the impetus behind the deeds themselves. This then is one of the paradoxes of genocide as much as one of its tropes: instrumental reason deployed in the service of an abominable, irrational, incomprehensible action. This ethos of modernity is that of the distantiated and it defines our relationships with Third World societies as much as explains the instrumental social engineering of violence. It elucidates, as well, the paradigmatic methods of the human sciences in western academic practices, that is to say, those of verificationism and scientism.
The upshot, then, is that modern genocide is not an aberration of modernity, as if we were moving backward from “societies of control” and the “micro-physics of disciplinary power,” described by Foucault and into horrifying regimes of torture, like drawing and quartering, as if we could comfortably dismiss brutality in the Third World as simply a regression of modernity befitting its economic realities. As Foucault argued, the newer forms of discipline are far more insidious, even while less spectacular. While the experience of Tuol Sleng might be frightening from the standpoint of an experience of such a return, a restoration of the conditions of pre-nineteenth century brutality, we cannot be reassured when examining the rationalized forms of violence of modernity. The Cambodian genocide, like all other modern forms, must be seen as coextensive with the forces and movements of modernity, not as inevitable but as possible, potential, and actual.
The question, then, apropos Bauman, is not what the human sciences can tell us about the Cambodian genocide and Tuol Sleng as its archival representation. The question must be what can the Cambodian genocide and all other modern examples tell us about the human sciences. We have already been alerted to the fact that the rationalizing and distancing practices of intellectual life coextend with the rational procedures of the bureaucratic administration of genocide in terms of the Holocaust, as well as the procedures that prevailed at S-21. But is this all that Tuol Sleng can teach the human sciences?
Perhaps more than anything, Tuol Sleng instructs those who would listen that contemporary intellectual life, diverted as it usually is to improvident, disciplinary-centric, self-referential, sectarian or internecine debates and problematics, is largely inept, inattentive, or apathetic regarding the darker, more severe exigencies of modernity. And this all takes place as contemporary academia moves ever further to the left, toward positions where cultural and intellectual capital could be more appropriately invested. Modern intellectual work, despite its impact in the universities, has been “disciplined” into quietude outside. Academics become ever more resigned to being under “house arrest,” their urgencies becoming ever more localized, provincial, and careerist. As we while away the hours at our word processors producing knowledge to justify our careers, forty thousand children die every day in the “fetid slums of Third World cities, an Auschwitz every three months.” Do we need, therefore, to be reminded of the Holocaust so that it never happens
again, when in fact it goes on in one form or another, on the level of disaster if not of deed, all the time? As we employ the academic techniques of “disinterestedness,” “objectivity,” and “neutrality,” or just the ordinary discourses that deactivate our “senses” from the capacities to feel, empathize, or even become aware of the conditions endured by those who inhabit the “outer zone,” a distantiated form of life is produced, an elixir of annulment is imbibed, our bodies are tranquilized out of a capacity for affectation. Our discourses compel us to somnolence.
If, as Bauman wrote, Auschwitz expands human consciousness as much as space travel has done, then Tuol Sleng and the Cambodian genocide should have managed to perform the same operation. This could have been done by a provocation of anger as well as one of horror. Anger is that mark of subjectivity largely demanded to be liquidated from an “impartial,” unpartisan academic discourse. If academia has something to “learn” from the experience of Tuol Sleng, from the modern problem of genocide, and not simply something to “teach” about this problem, then the current manner in which intellectual work is undertaken will have to change. If critical theorists of the left and the vanguard in cultural studies are to avoid becoming intellectually as well as
politically marginalized from the dilemmas of modernity, insulated in debates about mediated forms of cultural representation, then the problems of the Third World must begin to inhabit our discourses, our conferences, our symposia, and our classes to a greater extent than they have until now. These problems must be spoken about in the same breath as one that discusses the great artists, thinkers and theorists one admires. It’s not enough anymore for one to plead being structurally “ineffectual” when confronted with modern horror. Nevertheless, such a synthesis of intellectual and political commitment will not in itself prevent further genocides nor eliminate the horrific conditions of daily life in the Third World anymore than it will guarantee an educated populace committed to these ends. Obviously, there are no assurances. But “anger,” once it is reinvested and reactivated in our collective academic “senses,” is clearly a better alternative than ineffectual passivity or an isolated absorption into arcane acrobatics. A new radical empiricism should emerge from the phenomenon of genocide. As Jean-Luc Nancy noted, “anger is the political sentiment par excellence. Anger concerns the inadmissible, the intolerable, and a refusal, a resistance that casts itself from the first beyond all it can reasonable accomplish—to mark forth the possible ways of a new negotiation with what is reasonable, but also the ways of an untractable vigilance. Without anger, politics is accommodation and influence-peddling, and to write of politics without anger is to traffic with the seductions of writing.” We have seen in the case of
Cambodia that it is not enough to simply nod our heads in unison to the platitudes with which we always already concur, to a disaster everyone recognizes as such. While such disasters are never comprehensible, if we are to be transformed by them, we need to see the actual countries and people that suffered from them, perhaps as an antidote for the distantiated analysis to which we have become all too accustomed. Dwelling in rural villages in disparate Third World countries need no longer be confined to the work of anthropological or sociological “case studies.” “Global” understanding is now a universal responsibility in all the disciplines, methodologies notwithstanding. As Lingis has noted in a prescription directed perhaps at the postmodernist fetishes of the contemporary critic, “anyone who leaves the television set with its images of consumer euphoria and goes out to visit someone’s village in the Isaan, in the favelas of Rio, the slums of Jakarta, the villages of Africa discovers the character, the bravery, and the pride of singular people; discovers also the community of the outer zone addressed in distress and in anger to us.” This community that addresses its distress must then be addressed in turn. Clearly, therefore, not enough is being done--not just governments and organizations with the political and economic clout to alleviate suffering, entities who truly have much to answer for--but also those with the necessary creative and intellectual resources, whose leadership and wisdom are desperately needed for resolving these very issues, those in whom perhaps a nihilist irony, pessimism, and cynicism have often occluded if not taken the place of serious, transformative political commitment.
The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide is, then, a geographic space pregnant with messages and pedagogical instruction for its viewers. It is a museum disclosing the informe, not as a referent but as a condition. It is, as well, an experience that might be described in similar terms, one which exceeds rational comprehension, surpassing a “limit” of what we do expect those who dwell in the community of persons to undertake. It is a horror of lists, of endless faces without names. It is a horror of gargantuan numbers. It is an “abjection” of banal and unclean spaces, of the instruments and instrumentality of modern violence. And it is a horror of a return from whence we came in terms of the technologies of confinement and control--from computerized surveillance to the panopticon to the gallows to the mass grave. It is a horror of denudation--of the flesh, of voices, of identities, of communities: from the enfleshed body to the skeleton and back again in the form of the residual photographic image, the last vestige of the beings that were once there, in the flesh, but are now but indistinguishable skulls and bones.
Tuol Sleng is also a record of the huge adversities endured in the Third World in this century, an archive of one more example of brutality within a “generalized” economic geography, of the effects arising from First World destruction and apathy, a Sadean disinterest producing monsters abetted or ignored, and finally of a responsibility assumed when it is far too late, when the immediate perpetrators of an abominable terror are dead or dying. Most obviously, the museum is a record of an organization marked by virulent hatred, paranoia, and racism, one whose ideological origins in Khieu Samphan’s University of Paris thesis of 1959 were moderate and coherent: a view that Cambodian cities were parasitic on the work carried out by peasants in the villages and that integration into the world economy retarded the country’s economic development. Such views are perfectly reasonable from today’s postcolonial/critical consciousness. But they were to become something much worse, and this is why Cambodia is such an important problem for those whose intellectual and personal
investments are on the left. As all the varied histories of Cambodia have noted again and again, the intellectuals who were to become the Khmer Rouge and who were to turn
their ire upon all other intellectuals in Cambodian society, lost all contact with the very people their movement was designed to aid. Why this occurred is one of the deep mysteries of the Cambodian experience, a mystery not as far removed as one would wish from the abstractions of intellectual life in western academic practices.
We have seen, therefore, that Tuol Sleng is a store of impermanence, of a metaphorical transience, in that its images are fading under the force of the elements, as well as the impervious whims of those who pass through and collect a bit of the material ambience. The denudation of the present is one in which the fading, deteriorating, and peeling photograph marks the final erasure of the visages contained within. This is an archive with a “shelf life,” or at least an ostensible one, assuming the negatives recently discovered are not used to produce a whole new set of prints to inhabit the walls after the current ones deteriorate. And this is how it should be, for the “archive of memory” must eventually become the “archive of forgetting,” so that those whose images are housed within are not permanently associated only with the single set of events that destroyed their existence, and so that the exigencies of the “present” are not elided in an obsession with the horrors of the past. The foremost human responsibility, then, is one of immediacy, our distresses of the “moment,” which is perhaps the ultimate lesson of Tuol Sleng.