BBooks from social science research on violence are not easy reading. They portray their subject – acts of excessive violence by people against people – ruthlessly. They depict things like massacres, rapes, torture, mutilations, lynchings, mass shootings, locking people in churches to burn them alive, or hanging and subsequent dismembering of the corpse into souvenirs of the collective perpetrators.
In her now posthumously published book “Showtime”, the Canadian political scientist Lee Ann Fujii describes in many pages how members of the Hutu murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. Or how in 1992 in the Omarska camp in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbian militiamen tortured, abused and killed thousands of prisoners from Bosnia and Croatia. She describes how they did it in horrifying detail. Or how George Armwood, a 22-year-old black farmhand, was killed in 1933 in the US state of Maryland. Fujii’s reconstruction of this event illustrates that what was done to Armwood in public by a white mob is, in all its monstrosity, quite unintelligible. But were it monsters that did this to him? No, they were actually normal people. What made them enthusiastic lynchers? What turned neighbors into mass murderers in Rwanda, and torturers into fellow citizens in Serbia?
Body parts as a trophy
When Fujii depicts violence in this book, it is not for educational or ethical purposes. The display of excess is not intended to serve as a warning or deterrent. For Fujii, there is no question as to whether her research could make a contribution, however small, so that “something like this doesn’t happen again”. Here she is looking for answers to the question of why people take part in such acts of violence at all. People who, after all, weren’t trained for it, who had no intrinsic reason for it and who were sort of new to it. They weren’t habitual criminals. Or mentally ill individuals. They acted collectively, as a group doing things they would never have done individually.
Fuji – this is the core concept of her research – understands this violence as “staging” or even “happening”, as a joint performance of violence by those involved. “Showtime” gathers them. The ones with the machete, cutting off the victim’s arms or crushing his skull. But also those who just stand by, cheering on the actual perpetrators, who mock the victim, take pictures of them and send the pictures around, not without first pocketing a piece of the battered corpse as a trophy.
Not even the audience remains a mere spectator
For Fujii, what is being performed is a radical “re-formulation” of belonging to a preferred social category called to dominate: Hutu, white, Serb. The public display of excessive violence becomes a particularly effective means of reorganizing a society and its political hierarchy.
The risk that the author takes with this concept is not only that she unfolds extremely disturbing scenes of violence in front of her readers over many pages. Rather, she takes the great risk of not pursuing her subject with the usual means of organizational research. We would not understand this violence if we wanted to explain it as a result of organizational action. That’s not the case. One could also use more recent events, such as the torture of prisoners in the American military prison Abu Ghraib, to justify this methodical step: these perpetrators did not follow orders either, but followed an aesthetic logic of outdoing them. Such violent excesses developed from contingent roles and improvisations, which also changed depending on the “plot” of the events and were exchanged between the participants. There is no inside and outside here, no commanders and those who simply obeyed. Not even the audience remains a mere spectator. but joins in at some point.
How far is the way from murderous violence as a staging to such phenomena as carnival, New Year’s Eve and other public spaces of crossing borders? Is there some consolation in Fujii writing about events singular in their monstrosity? Fuji’s analyzes are provocative because they “mundanize” the violence she describes, as the jargon of the trade puts it. The fact that this could be translated as “secularization” only means that you are separating them from the closed internal spaces of organizations. In this way, society, the street, and public space become the great stage for violence. In the jargon of the entertainment industry this means: It’s Showtime!
Lee Ann Fujii: “Showtime”. Forms and consequences of demonstrative violence. Translated from the English by Stephan Gebauer. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2022. 336 p., hardcover, €35.
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