Babel

I. "The Spectacle of the Scaffold"*
Four hundred years ago, the King was the sovereign. Ruling divinely as the keeper of peace, it was his duty to protect his subjects and the realm, to maintain the regal order and balance upsets. Back then, any ungodly affront to the order of things, any imbalance, be it murder, thievery, assault, or sedition, was rectified through public displays of regal power.

Murder, perhaps the worst affront to the King's Peace, was penalized through such gruesome rituals as stretching, immolation, quartering, spearing, hanging and decapitation. Charred, scarred, bloodied, broken and beaten, the body of the condemned served to reassert and vindicate the King's sovereignty over the flesh, his agency over life and death.

It was for a balance, for a primeval imperial justice, then, that the condemned murderer became an object, a spectacle.

Centuries later, the methods would change though the ends would not. Justice would still be a game of balance but its acquisition would become an economical craft, a science. Likewise murder would develop alongside justice.

The grandest of murders would never again be attributed to petty vagabonds and sneak thieves, rather they would be attributed to the madly intelligent, the meticulous, the unconquerable. These murderer geniuses would earn their ironic sainthood not through the spectacle of the scaffold, but through their carefully chosen and often symbolic final meals and final statements, through the circus-like judicial process that condemns them.

.

II. The Nemesi

THE NEMESIS OF NEGLECT
"There floats a phantom on the slum's foul air,
Shaping, to eyes which have the gift of seeing,
Into the Spectre of that loathly lair.
Face it--for vain is fleeing!
Red-handed, ruthless, furtive, unerect,
'Tis murderous Crime--the Nemesis of Neglect! "

- Punch, or The London Charivai.
By John Tenniel. Published September 29, 1888.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, a new breed of justice would emerge along with a new breed of murderer following two crucial developments: the construction of the humanistic 'liberal civil society' and the formal institutionalization of the police and the penal system. These two developments, marked by the period's concern for humanism and economy (expediency), saw the rise of a new justice: a scientific justice that creates over destroying—even when killing. This justice, via the work of a broad body of agents (police, lawyers, scientists and savants), diagnoses, disciplines, cures, and [re]creates the criminal, instead of compressing, immolating, quartering, injecting, spearing, hanging and decapitating him.

With justice now produced in a rationalized factory--with it being churned out by police, lawmen, psychiatrists and analysts--policing and punishing would become a 'humanistic' science. Justice would become a question of 'how does one, in the most humane, economic manner, discipline, punish, diagnose, and cure the criminal?' Out of this inquiry we see the emergence of standard issue batons, tasers, and rubber bullets—humanistic means of domination for disciplining; the emergence of police manuals, intricate dossiers, and the DSM-IV—humanistic means of classification for curing; and the emergence of the panopticon, 24-hour digital surveillance, and enhanced interrogation techniques—humanistic means of surveillance and information acquisition. Out of this inquiry we see too the emergence of instrumentalized death. For justice this means the introduction of 'humane' super-efficient methods of killing (i.e. lethal injection). For the criminal this means something entirely different: maximized, blueprinted acts of violence with carefully marked escape plans: the work of a McVeigh or a Kaczynski.

It is for a balance still, for yet another primeval justice that the condemned is painlessly and privately put to death. The change is rather subtle: he is put to death as a curative measure, i.e. for his own good, and put to death painlessly—a symbolic testament to the reality and justness of justice and its means of self-sustainment. This justice is self-perpetuating; it always wins: the genius' destruction vindicates abstract justice and grounds it further in truth, just as the genius' victory, his escape, highlights the inhumanity noble justice must conquer and match.

In light of these developments, the murderer became more than an imbalancer; he became mad, mad for killing, certainly, but mad moreover because he breached the social contract, because he did not fit. From then on he became the genius evader, the mechanical object of desire for Scotland Yard or the FBI, a man with a profile and a modus operandi: "Our subject is an experienced hunter with low self-esteem, and a long history of being rejected by women. He probably feels compelled to keep 'souvenirs' of his murders, such as a victim's jewelry or body parts. He suffers from acute depression and has a penchant for necrophilia and dendrophilia. He is clinically insane, unfit for trial. If apprehended, I recommend constant surveillance in a state penitentiary and a steady regiment of Aripiprazole and Ziprasidone."

.

III. A Stock of Warriors
Unbeknown to itself, the justice system has bred (and still does breed) a stock of warriors that live and die to challenge its mettle, grit and gut. By constituting objects to correct—the armed and dangerous, the sociopath, the 'Most Wanted'—justice has made the clever mouse for which it is to be cat; or perhaps the dangerous cat for which it is to be mouse. It has made crime, serious crime, a sport for celebrities; only the wise, the stealthy, the meticulous, after all, can hope to ever evade the panopticon unclassified and unscathed.

And like so rose a whole slew of super-marginal figures, criminals made famous for their murderous escapades: Jeffery Dahmer, Robert Hansen, The Zodiac Killer, Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh, the Unibomber, Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad, to name a few.

And like so rose a benign copycat culture, a pop-culture of criminal fiction depicting the morbidly virtuous, the genius killer testing justice's mettle for its own good (for the mad do bear forbidden truth). The murderer's crime is depicted to be more than a delinquency; its a science, a master craft.

We all know the scene: the investigator sits at the scene of the crime, pondering, searching up and down, down and up, for that clue, that crypt, left behind by the wise[r] riddling deviant. "What does he want? What is he telling me?!" he asks himself. The investigator, the symbol of justice, is admired for his innocence, for his steadfastness, for his insecurity, while the murderer is admired for his craftiness, his superiority, his inhumanity. Sherlock Holmes, M, Silence of the Lambs, SeVen, Saw, CSI, Murder She Wrote, Law and Order, et cetera, all depict this lucrative interplay.

.

IV. Murder, We Wrought
According to the FBI, 85% of the world's serial killers are in the USA [1]. Though I cannot ascertain the validity of this bold figure, I propose that its worth lies in its confessionary nature, in the fact that its high number is a product of the cult of discipline that pervades our military, prisons, schools, and family system.

The confession this figure offers is subtle one:  we live in a disciplinary society (why else would such figure ever be a topic of discourse?) that is also a criminal society (85% is a large number!); a disciplinary culture that is also a criminal culture. Do we not cheer for the criminal we also loathe? Do we not consume the criminal culture when we applaud for Jeff Costello or Hannibal Lector or Tony Soprano when they make their narrow escapes?

Certainly, we love the 'bad guy' because through him we vicariously affront the King and are, just for a moment, the free agents of Grand Theft Auto IV, living a life without norms and manuals.

Dare I say (with the risk of looking childish) that one Universal exists: we all, as the governed objects of discipline, want to be the Batman or the Joker.

.

V. Cat and Mouse, Mouse and Cat

*: This post is indebted to works and theories put forth by M. Foucault.

[1] http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/serialkiller.htm