Page 169 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

the fear they generated while alive, an “uncontrollable origin,” was symbolically
recuperated by the Suharto state following a complex trajectory that began with
the spectacle of the corpse, led through the excessive violence of the killing in
which the state as perpetrator mimicked and, crucially, exceeded the criminal
violence of those killed, and became therewith, ideally, not only “a new criminal
type in Jakarta” but the mother of all criminal types and, somewhat reassur-
ingly, the source of a generalized fear (ibid.). If the corpse was thus turned into
a sign, it was—as any other sign—always unstable and in excess of its possibili-
ties of signi¤cation. But if the Petrus corpse did not at all times and for everyone
open up the communicative chain leading back to the state, this state under
New Order conditions was more generally available to reassure anyone who
needed it that fear, having an origin, also had an ultimate source of control.
By the time of the next wave of mysterious killings, less than half a year after
Suharto’s May 1998 stepdown, the so-called ninja killings in east Java that tar-
geted dukun santet (sorcerers) and, much like Petrus, were carried out by un-
identi¤ed masked men, often in the dead of night, show, in Barker’s opinion,
“no clear signs of having established a symbolic recuperation” (Barker 1998,
42). Put somewhat differently, it was no longer clear who or what one should
fear. Under new circumstances and with a state in crisis, the relationship be-
tween violence and its recuperated origin had been severed. The result of the
rupture of this relationship is a violence set loose, free-®oating, and no longer
traceable back to an easily identi¤able or ready-made origin. This is also the
failure of terms like elit politik, pihak tertentu, and provokator. Too amorphous
and elusive to serve as an origin elit politik oscillates between an old elit politik
that is/is not in the picture and a new (emergent) one that is not clearly consoli-
dated, pihak tertentu/certain parties remain “certain” but unnamed, while a
provokator as an extension of violence rather than something beyond it is only
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known in retrospect after the fact of a violence “provoked.” Nowhere locatable
and thus potentially everywhere, violence roams like a specter in the post-New
Order landscape of Indonesia.
One can surmise that the logic of the politics outlined here and that of mass
media more generally collaborate in the spectralization of violence. Add to this
the practices of the Manado Pos journalists which take the generalizing, univer-
salizing, indeed spectralizing impulse of mass media—both print and perhaps
even more televisual—to a last extreme. If the mass media need and feed on
events, they also transform the events they seize upon—which, like crime and
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like violence, are necessarily eventful. Concerning this tendency, Ernst Jünger
observes,
Today wherever an event takes place it is surrounded by a circle of lenses and
microphones and lit up by the ®aming explosions of ®ashbulbs. In many cases,
the event itself is completely subordinated to its “transmission”: to a great degree,
it has been turned into an object. Thus we have already experienced political trials,
parliamentary meetings, and contests whose whole purpose is to be the object of a
planetary broadcast. The event is bound neither to its particular space nor to its

158 Patricia Spyer