Page 168 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

calculated. Yet neither do I believe it arbitrary that the “transparency” of the
political demanded by students during the heyday of reformasi was, by May
2000, no longer regarded as a serious possibility within a political climate where
the space for democratic reform and the political will to put it in place were
increasingly compromised. In such circumstances along with political convic-
tion, prudence as well as perhaps customary practice for those who had worked
under the constraints of the New Order fostered self-censorship. 11

Specters and Spectacles of Violence
Here I would like to re®ect further on what the possible consequences
are of this journalistic practice of erasure for the relationship between repre-
sentations of violence and its actual collective and individual occurrences; or
what, in other words, a violence that is subject to such erasure does to the un-
derstanding or practice of violence on the ground, that is, what kinds of possi-
bly violent social and political effects such representations might have—and, by
extension, what form of public such practices might help to put in place. Per-
haps because of the continuity of some of the same constraints on “transpar-
ency” as those operative under the New Order, the abstraction of violence out
of the circumstances in which it is produced and made meaningful and its
effect—the representation of a violence without a clearly identi¤able origin—
dovetails in certain important respects with the production and representation
of violence under the former New Order regime.
Take, for instance, Petrus, an acronym for the so-called “Mysterious Killings”
(Pembunuhan Misterius), a paramilitary operation of the early 1980s aimed at
eliminating underworld ¤gures, gang members, and petty criminals (gali-gali),
and resulting in the point-blank killings of at least four thousand persons. Ini-
tially “mysterious,” when they ¤rst began the killings took place under the cover
of anonymity, were carried out at night by masked men, and followed a pattern,
as Barker (1998, 18) puts it,

very similar to less violent operations which were such a prominent feature of New
Order life: operations against becak, drugs, prostitution, vagrants, women’s fertility
(i.e. Family Planning), and the like. Just as the operasi aimed at drugs, for example,
the agents descended on their targets and removed them from the scene in order
to maintain an image of order. The removal was then followed by the staging of a
spectacle in which the targeted objects or people were shown to have been truly
eliminated (the dead bodies displayed for all to see and the drugs crushed or
burned). 12

On the one hand, then, the spectacle prepared for public consumption of the
corpses of those persons killed were left exposed, often for many hours, in pub-
lic places, and, on the other, what Siegel calls “the structure of blindness that
leaves criminals out of sight” meant that the corpse, and the excessive violence
that produced it, was supposed to be read as a sign of something beyond it
(Siegel 1998b, 119). Following Siegel, the violence of the criminals killed and

Media and Violence in an Age of Transparency 157