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So Craig Williamson wishes he was James Bond and a generation of aspirant psychos model themselves on Hannibal Lecter. Maggie Davey listened to American theorist Mark Seltzer on the concept of a `wound culture’
Did Craig Williamson really have to reassure us that spying for the apartheid government was no James Bond fantasy? You can, it seems, take the spy to the Bahamas, but you cannot make him drink a visibly shaken Martini. More’s the pity. But Craig Williamson’s use of a fiction as a kind of last resort at the truth commission in an attempt to set the facts straight, is not as shocking as it could be.
In his keynote address to the English Academy of Southern Africa conference in Johannesburg last week, Mark Seltzer, Professor of English at Cornell University, gave a paper entitled Serial Killing for Beginners. While the audience strained in their seats, unsure as to how serial killing related to the conference title of English at the Turn of the Millennium, Seltzer delivered a frank and open reminder of the power of language and the even greater power of the banal.
Seltzer has been working on the notion of “the wound culture: the convening of the public around scenes and mass spectacles of violence”.
Seltzer maintains that through this public fascination with “torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons”, there is a fascination with new forms of representation, writing and reproduction. The collective gathering around shock and trauma and the wound has given rise to what Seltzer calls “the pathological public sphere”. And the serial killer he sees as “one of the superstars of the wound culture and the pathological public sphere”.
The killer sees in his own eyes, perhaps more clearly than most, the glare from the televised confusion of the public and the personal. Seltzer alerts us to the shift in focus from “the criminal act to the character of the actor: the positing of the category of the dangerous individual”. This shift has been accompanied by “a shift in the understanding of desire, a shift in focus from sexual acts to sexual identity …”
In the same weeks as Seltzer delivered his address, headless bodies were found in a river not far from Johannesburg. The Afrikaans edition of that evening’s television news showed the headless bodies in the river, and then in the morgue. The English edition did not. What marked out Afrikaans speakers as especially able to digest that horror? And what message is received by that single transmission?
Seltzer did not speak directly about television and cinema violence, but in an aside, he said that he felt that we should be exposed to more violence, not less, on television. Certainly, if one is to take Seltzer to heart, we should be more conscious of who is showing us these images. The headless bodies in the morgue were a literal image of Seltzer’s “wound culture”. The pathological public sphere in our sitting rooms, but this time with a language code.
Having recently had an abnormally good curry in the Dublin basement of Dracula’s creator, Bram Stoker, I was taken aback when Seltzer reminded us that Dracula was, in fact, one of the inaugurators of the lust-killing. But the tell-tale fang marks of the 1890s were not yet the fashion statement of the 1990s. Seltzer makes the point that “this is a culture centred on trauma (Greek for wound): a culture of the atrocity exhibition, in which people wear their damage like badges of identity”.
Wrapped in the warm blanket of Oprah, the damaged among us can suspend the clotting for an hour and bleed with the rest of America. Seltzer notes that mass murder in America has two popular sites: “the fast- food system (The MacDonald’s Massacre) and the postal system (Going Postal)”. In the aftermath of the Planet Hollywood bombing, MacDonald’s was put on a security alert. Having listened to Seltzer, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was not so much to do with it being a symbol of American culture, but rather it being “a site where systems, numbers and bodies collide”.
And according to Seltzer, the mass or serial killer in the digital age experiences “a perpetual looping of information and desire, technology and intimacy, violence and pleasure as (his) form of life”.
But one wonders if it is just serial killers who experience this, or if for someone like Craig Williamson, the burden of inhabiting the description of himself as “superspy” was too much to bear? And has that caused him to invoke the name of a fictional super spy?
Seltzer should come to town more often and make us ask more questions. His learning may give the spooks a fright.