Murder/Media/ModernityMark Seltzer

Abstract: This article has been drawn from a larger study by the author,True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. Here the focus is ona minor genre—true crime—thatat the same time is a scale model ofmodern society. True crime is crime fact that reads like, or looks like,crime fiction. It is one of the popular genres of our pathological publicsphere and an integral part of our contemporary ‘‘wound culture.’’ Truecrimemaps that vague and shifting region between real and fictional realitywhere mass belief resides. Thus, the known world of true crime—the worldas the scene of the crime—is bound up through and through with thereality of the mass media. Via instances of true crime (from the workof Haruki Murakami to the forensic work of CSI) and via instances ofits fictional codependent, the crime novel, this account traces the mediaa priori of modern society and ‘‘the crime system’’ that binds modernviolence and the modern media today.

Keywords: crime, violence, systems, media, modernity

Resume : Le present article est tire d’une etude plus vaste de l’auteur,True Crime : Observations on Violence and Modernity.L’accent est mis ici surun genre mineur – le crime proprement dit – qui est en meme temps unmodele a l’echelle de la societe moderne. Le crime veritable est un faitcriminel qui semble, ou qui se lit comme, un roman policier. C’est l’undes genres populaires de notre sphere publique pathologique et il faitpartie integrante de notre « culture des plaies » contemporaine. Le veritablecrime s’etale sur cette region vague et mouvante entre la realite et la fictionou reside la croyance des masses. Ainsi, le monde connu du crime pro-prement dit – le monde comme scene du crime – est completement liea la realite des medias de masse. Par le truchement du crime veritable(du travail d’Haruki Murakami au travail legal de la CSI) et des instancesde son codependant fictif, le roman policier, ce compte rendu retraceles medias a priori de la societe moderne et le « systeme criminel » qui liede nos jours la violence moderne et les medias modernes.

Mots cles : crime, violence, systemes, medias, modernite

�Canadian Reviewof American Studies/Revue canadienne d’e¤ tudesame¤ ricaines 38, no.1, 2008

The Media A Priori

True crime has its own weather. Consider, for example, the weatherreport with which the popular novelist Haruki Murakami openshis nonfiction account Underground, a ‘‘true picture’’ of a crime of‘‘overwhelming violence’’—the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyosubway system that killed twelve and injured thousands:

The date is Monday 20 March 1995. It is a beautiful clear springmorning. There is still a brisk breeze and people are bundledup in coats. Yesterday was Sunday, tomorrow is the SpringEquinox, a national holiday. Sandwiched right in the middleof what should have been a long weekend, you’re probablythinking ‘‘I wish I didn’t have to go to work today.’’ No suchluck. You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, andhead for the subway station. You board the train, crowded asusual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a perfectlyrun-of-the-mill day. Until five men in disguise poke at thefloor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas,puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid. (7)

This is ‘‘normal time’’ in the world of the new normal: ‘‘normal, toonormal’’ in the sense that, as in stock Westerns, it is sometimes‘‘quiet, too quiet.’’ The weather—the residue of nature and therites of spring—is there in order to give way, immediately, tosecond nature: the routine flow of bodies and machines (thebody-machine complex) that makes up the workweek. This is thenormal time and second nature of mass commuting and ‘‘perfectlyrun-of-the-mill’’ workdays, transit, and work in a society of totalmobilization via media technologies, technologies of body, andmessage transport. These are the ordinary days in which ‘‘nothingout of the ordinary’’ is the promise, or terror, of one run-of-the-millday after another. And hence it is the risk, or promise, of what hasbeen called ‘‘the normal accident’’: the sudden but always immi-nent, unforeseen, and endlessly previewed shock to the system(Perrow 1999).

This is the abnormal normality of the world of true crime. Truecrime is one of the popular genres of the pathological publicsphere. It posits stranger intimacy and vicarious violation asmodels of sociality. This might be described as a social tie on themodel of referred pain. And, in that true crime is crime fact thatlooks like crime fiction, it marks or irritates the distinction betweenreal and fictional reality, holding steadily visible that vague and

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shifting region between truth and falsity where belief resides: whatwe can call, on the model of referred pain, referred belief.

The technical infrastructure of that referred pain and that referredbelief today is the mass media. The mass media, in the expandedsense, make up the psychotechnologies of everyday life in modernsociety. These are the social and technical systems of body andinformation transport, commuting and communication—themotion industries and the message industries—that are definingattributes of that society. They make up the reality of the massmedia. True crime, a media form of modern self-reflection, atonce exposes and effects that reality. The combinations of com-munication and corporeality, synthetic witnessing, and the mediaa priori: these together form the working parts of what I will becalling the crime system.

True crime is thus part of our contemporary wound culture, aculture—or at the least, cult—of commiseration. If we cannotgather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror,trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, asthe novelist Chuck Palahniuk concisely expresses it in his recentnovel Survivor, we can at least ‘‘all [be] miserable together’’ (278).This is, as it were, the model of nation as support group.

Murakami’s account of the attack on the Tokyo underground asmass-public trauma—and as commiseration via the mass media—at once instances that model of nation and crime and parries it.Underground, on the face of it, is not exactly, in its form or in itscases in point, typical of true crime. We might say that it turns thattypicality inside out: that it turns its cases and its ‘‘caselikeness’’back on themselves (the alibi—In Cold Blood style—of self-exemption through self-reflection). But the point not to be missedis that true crime is always taking exception to itself, alwayslooking over its own shoulder, and by analogy, inviting viewersand readers to do the same. For that reason, a brief sampling ofMurakami’s account and its semi-typicality will make it possibleprovisionally to take the measure of the world of true crime.More exactly, in that true crime is in effect always taking stockof itself, that sample will make it possible to locate too, at leastinitially, how true crime exposes and secures its truth.

‘‘That half of the railway was absolute hell. But on the other side,people were walking to work as usual’’ (Murakami 16): there is

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a double reality to the scenes of violence that make up truecrime, made up at once of the event and its registration (or non-registration). The world of true crime is a self-observing world ofobservers; the generalization and intensification of that reflexivesituation means that ‘‘[t]he registration and revelation of realitymake a difference to reality. It becomes a different reality, consistingof itself plus its registration and revelation’’ (Baecker, ‘‘Reality’’561). Hence it is not merely a matter of the routine traffic flowinterrupted by the usual violent accident. The mass-motion indus-tries, from the start—from railway shock to (here) a media-dependent terrorism—couple violence and its mass observation.There is everywhere a doubling of act and observation, such thatpublic violence and mass death are theatre for the living.

The doubling of act and observation has a specific form in truecrime; true crime is premised on an inventory of the aftermathand a return to the scene of the crime. It consists, along thoselines, in a conjectural re-enactment of the crime. That conjecturalre-enactment takes the form of a probable or statistical realism:‘‘you’re probably thinking,’’ ‘‘you get up at the usual time,’’ ‘‘youboard the train,’’ and so on. The known world of true crime isthe observed world—and the knowing and observation of that.Forensic realism takes as given, then, the compulsion to observa-tion and self-observation that is a precondition of modernity. Thismeans that forensic observation—conditional and counterfactual—is itself observed as the real work of true crime. Mapping theknown world as the scene of the crime, the CNN effect is, ineffect, coupled to the CSI one.

In Los Angeles, among other places, the in-transit eyewitnessing ofthe everyday accident—what’s called the ‘‘spectator slowdown’’—enters into the radio traffic report that runs (along with the cellphone) as a kind of soundtrack to the commuting between privateand public spaces. In this way the reporting on the event becomespart of, and enters into, the event reported on. (This is no doubtproper for a city in which the traffic jam—along with shoppingand the airport queue—is the last folk ritual of social gathering.)

In Murakami’s account of the attack on the Tokyo undergroundsystem, the event and its witnessing run side by side, albeitbypassing each other, even on the part of those who experienceit: ‘‘‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ but I had to get work. . . . Oddlyenough, though, the atmosphere wasn’t tense at all. Even I was

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feeling strange. I’d inhale and no breath would come . . . I justcaught the next train’’ (49–50). It is as if, like the news, witnessing,even self-witnessing, exists as a form of what risk society theoristscall ‘‘secondhand non-experience’’ (and what others, personalizingthe media a priori, call trauma).1

This is no doubt evident enough; the self-evidence, even banality,of true crime is part of the story. If true crime forms a body of moreor less mediocre and cliched words and images, the point notbe missed is that (as everyone knows) the cliche (what everyoneknows to be known) is the sense of the community at its purest.Sarin gas packets wrapped up in the daily papers, left behindamid the crush of newspaper-reading commuters: this version ofthe violence–media complex would read like really bad fiction ifit were not the banal and everyday realism of really bad fact.In Murakami’s crime scene investigation, the scene of the crime isa ‘‘mass media scenario’’ (5) and a ‘‘media stampede’’ (15). There isat once the holding steadily visible of the mass media (‘‘I recordedeverything’’) and the intimation of mass media as itself a form ofviolence (‘‘What I find really scary though is the media . . . It justmade me realize just how frightening television is’’ [134]).

There is a good deal more to be said about this self-parrying of themedia within the media and about the ways in which this mediareflexivity holds in place what has come to be called reflexivemoder-nity. And there is a good deal more to be said about how horror in themedia mutates into a horror of it. This is nowhere more evident thanin the contemporary gothic, a genre that systematically couples themedia sponsorship or determination of our situation with anuncanny violence, as if each holds the place of the other. WhatMurakami here calls ‘‘secondary victimization’’ via the media—a‘‘double violence’’—is the precise register of the media a priori inmodern violence, its registration, and parrying at once (4).

Take the form of Murakami’s account, which is a series of inter-views, with minimal commentary, starting with first-person testi-monies of the victims, and, subsequently, of the members of theAum cult—the religious/political group that planned and executedthe attacks. In these miniature autobiographies, the individualdescribes and observes herself. This in turn allows readers, likereaders of the novel or viewers of the cinema, to observe thatand to observe too what that individual does not observe, andthus to engage in self-reflection on that.

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It is not merely that the individuals recorded say more than theyknow (that they have, say, an unconscious). Saying, recording,transcribing, printing, reading—remembering and knowing—arehanded over to machines. These technical combinations of commu-nication and corporeality make experience a matter of referredexperience (‘‘My dislike of being asked if there are after-effectsmight itself be a kind of after-effect’’ [101]), and the handing overof experience to machines becomes its own theme:

Murakami: ‘‘Was there any kind of reaction because you refusedto have a physical relationship with Asahara [the master of theAum cult]?’’

‘‘I don’t know. I lost my memory after that. I underwentelectro-shock. I still have the scars from the electricity righthere . . . I have no idea at what point, and for what reasonmy memory was erased.’’ (291)

The communication of what cannot be communicated means thatthe non–communicable is not exempt from communication butmedia-induced too. It posits—with a shocking violence registeredand erased at once; with a violence, like shock itself, intensifiedby self-erasure—a media a priori in persons. (It posits the media,say, as the unconscious of the unconscious.)

The coming apart of system and agency in these episodes is itali-cized by the state of shock but not reducible to it. The model forshock (from at least Freud on) is the railway accident, and themodel for the yielding of agency to the machine is (at least, fromthe appearance of Zola’s murder novel La Bete humaine [1890],for example, on) the runaway train. Here things are taken a stepfurther. The underground railway system is a scale model of themodern social system and its infrastructure. The cult is another.These are, in short, working models of the sequestration and self-corroboration of modern society—by which acts, observations, deci-sions, and outcomes make up the systems that make them up.

The cult is an artificial social system that includes persons as after-effects of its operations such that the reflection on them looks like anaftereffect too. The Aum cult members inhabit a sequestered micro-society; they occupy positions in a ramifying, self-generating, andself-conditioned bureaucracy—the Ministry of Health, the ChemicalBrigade, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Animation

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Division, and so on. The terror ‘‘cell,’’ like the cult or the scene ofthe crime, thus condenses and visibilizes the modern social field,an overlit world whose border would be marked by yellow policecrime-scene tape.

The direct link between the Aum organization and communicationtechnologies is clear enough. It is visible in the mass marketingof its disciplinary practices (for example, in its video and photo-graphic records of the supernatural powers of its leader, Asahara,such as his ability to float in the air—visual special effects playedto the electronic and print press), and in its primary businessactivities (for example, discount sales of personal computers andpirated software). But here, media-sponsored life goes deeper.The technologies of Aum Shinrikyo had as their goal, in part, thedevelopment of ‘‘a mode of communication without any [external]medium’’ or, more exactly, the ‘‘informationalization of the body’’such that the body is, in effect, nothing but an externalization ofthe media.2 The mingling of technologism and esotericism—theoccupation of the crossroads between meditation and mediation—is held steadily visible in the technical bureaucratization andmilitarization of a self-sufficient anti-society. The Aum organizationof life and death is shot through by media forms and protocols.This ‘‘scale’’ version of a military media machine is set up ascounter to it, to social systems of body and message transport:to an endless everyday life, an eventless commuting, withoutpurpose.3

One finds here then, in the media-driven and media-exposed terrorunderworld, three linked premises of modern life and moderncrime. First, there is the intensified turn of interiors, bodies, andacts into communication (the media a priori). Second, there is thesequestration and self-reflection of the contemporary social field(the locked-room model of the world, modeled, above all, in thesmall closed space of the scene of the crime). And, third, thereis the radical entanglement of violence and technical media ofinformation, transmission, and observation (the violence–mediacomplex).

Murakami makes the connection between the modern socialsystem and the crime system, albeit by proxy, by way of quotation.He quotes from the ‘‘Unabomber Manifesto’’ (published by theNew York Times and Washington Post in April 1995, a month afterthe sarin attack). In the Unabomber’s words,

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The system organizes itself so as to put pressure on those who donot fit in. Those who do not fit into the system are ‘‘sick’’; so tomake them fit in is to ‘‘cure.’’ Thus, the power process aimed atattaining autonomy is broken and the individual is subsumed intothe other-dependent power process enforced by the system. (quotedin Murakami 199)

The Unabomber’s scare quotes point to criteria of evaluation(‘‘sick,’’ ‘‘cure’’) that are strictly relative to, and only make sensewithin, self-induced and self-corroborated systems of valuation(rival ‘‘power processes’’). This is a snapshot version of a popularsociology and a popular psychology; in that popular sociology andpopular psychology sociality and psychology are, in effect, in scarequotes. They are, like cliches, the quotation of no one in particular,the generalization of a latent, everyday culture sponsored andheld in place by the mass media (in this case, the newspapers).

The world in scare quotes indicates the impasse of a way of think-ing that has seen through itself but goes on anyway. This is whatI call (following Poe, the inaugural true-crime writer) the situationof half belief or ‘‘half-credence,’’ the collective idiom of reflexivemodernity. That situation of half-credence calls less for an archae-ology of knowledge than for what might be called an archaeologyof knowingness.

This self-discrediting style of belief is the style of belief proper tothe society that makes itself up as it goes along, and whose indivi-duals are compelled to do the same. Modern social systems makethemselves from themselves, and in the process generate an archi-pelago of working models.

These many variants of the bioscript and the educating, correcting,training, grading, and self-realizing institution or associations are,we know, the social microsystems, the small worlds, that calibrateand compare and realize individuals and that lend incrementalform to the lifestyle called a career. Here, in these microsocieties,the possibilities of personally attributable action, evaluation, reflec-tion, and belief are distributed.4 (The sequestration of theacademy—the extreme narrowness of its citation circles—providesone ready-to-hand version of that.) Modern society, to the extentthat it generates and dispels its own criteria of uncertainty, decision,and outcome, is, as it were, re-reflected in these microworlds thatmodel this self-generation and self-conditioning. They are, in effect,

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scale models of the modern social field, which is, in effect, a life-sizemodel of itself.

This is the case for genre institutions, such as grade schools ortwelve-step programs, cults or supports groups, the workplaceand self-realization regimes. And it is the case too, then, for thoseartificial social systems that provide a free trial period for them:genre forms and genre fictions such as true crime and its double,the crime novel. That is to say, the self-modeling of society ispremised on the media doubling of the world. What Murakami’strue-crime stories set out—the situation of spectation withoutaction, the failure of individuals to apply ‘‘the news’’ to themselves,a training in observation without the pressure or capacity to act orto decide and the experience of oneself as an aftereffect—is nothingbut the presumption of that media doubling of the world.

The world in scare quotes is premised on—as in these cases ofcrime, cult, and the modern underground system—an everydayintimacy with the systems of things that come and go, vanish andreturn, on schedule, like newspapers or trains or commuters. Thisis what I call (following the crime writing of Patricia Highsmith)the sociality of those who walk away, the media-sponsoredintimacy, for example, of strangers on trains who listen orview, commiserate, and forget. The model for this—for the self-conditioning and self-corroboration of events, evaluations, andends in its media reflection—is the novel itself. That’s one reasonwhy I take many of my examples from the novel. The novelprovides the field manual for the autopoeitic, or self-organizing,conditions of the modern social system (and then gives itselfan aesthetic self-exemption from them). This is nowhere moreevident than in the crime novel, where the possibilities for deci-sion and indecision, plan and counterplan, self-delusion and self-disclosure, are socially distributed, individualized, and mapped inhigh relief. And it is nowhere more compelling, nowhere morecompulsively or rigorously systematized, than in the cult genre oftrue crime, which knowingly takes the crime novel as its prototypeand tries it out on real life.

Synthetic Witnessing

In true crime—the scene of the crime, the media a priori in persons,its electroshock effects—one finds, localized and pathologized, theshock modernity recoils from in its own realization. One finds too

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the mass witnessing of these effects, which is, in the case ofMurakami, among others, a witnessing of witnesses. Witnessingself-witnessing—and the self-conditioned deconstruction ofboth—has been a proof test of the media of real life, from SamuelRichardson’s Pamela (the phrase ‘‘real life’’ was first used by theeighteenth-century model letter writer and novelist Richardson)to The Bachelorette. Here the modern compulsion to observe—self-observation and mass observation—is itself staged andobserved in the contemporary and popular genre of the spokes-victim. That focus on individual description (the interview andthe self-interview) is part of true crime’s mode of operation andpart of its strange attraction. One finds here (as in witness literaturemore generally) a compulsive self-description. Stated very gene-rally, modern crime and modern violence—that is, the mass-mediated spectacle of torn bodies and torn persons—providepoints of crystallization for the intensified relays of bodies andthe technical media in contemporary life. For one thing, themanner in which the event takes the form of its observation andself-observation fuses the media a priori and the social compulsionthat requires self-describing individuals:

The nature of modern society doubtless makes it seem obviousto presuppose second order observation in all communication.This is true with regard to the attribution of communicationto individuals, whose individuality in the modern view consistsprecisely in this individual observing himself as an observerand not simply living his life. (Luhmann, Risk 228)

If the unobserved life, on this view, is not worth living, then livingone’s life cannot be separated from its media doubling.

For another, ‘‘ethically objectionable acts must have victims’’(Douglas 11). Consequently, the spectacle of violent crime providesa point of attraction and identification, an intense individualizationof these social conditions, albeit a socialization via the media spec-tacle of wounding and victimization. To the extent that action, likemotive, must be attributed to individuals, these small and intensemelodramas of the wound acclimatize readers and the viewers totake these social conditions personally. These social conditions then,in turn, take on the form of a pathological public sphere.

In wound culture, act and motive take the form of the case or casehistory, an act conscripted by a norm. As Murakami expresses it,

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his attempt to work through the ‘‘Tokyo gas attack and the Japanesepsyche’’ was aimed at this:

What were the people at the time? What did they see? What didthey feel? What did they think? If I could, I’d have includeddetails on each individual passenger, right down to theirheartbeat and breathing, as graphically represented as possible.The question was, what would happen to any ordinary Japanesecitizen—such as me or any of my readers—if they weresuddenly caught up in an attack of this kind? (196).

The intense individualization of these accounts by interview iscoupled with an intensive anonymization and systematization:any ordinary citizen or reader, anatomized ‘‘as graphically aspossible.’’ The double logic of the ‘‘graphic’’—vividly lifelike anddiagrammatic at once—is the logic of the case.5

Here we might take as a case in point the cover image of theAmerican edition of Underground: a map of the Tokyo undergroundnetwork superimposed on a male torso. More precisely, the subwaysystem is superimposed on an anatomical drawing of the muscu-latory and circulatory systems open to view beneath the skin. Thesystem map takes the place of the lungs, and a series of entrancearrows mark the intake route (a line drawing in place of mouthand throat) to the body’s interior. It is not quite then that a machinesystem has invaded the body: the system beneath the skin andthe transit system, anatomy and the media, meet and fuse, twointerpenetrating systems, each transparent to the other—thecoordinate geometry of the body-machine complex.

Here we might consider too the recurrent tendency of the victimsinterviewed to see the event not as a terrorist act but instead asan accident: they ‘‘just happened to be gassed on their way towork’’ (41); ‘‘had I died, I probably could have accepted it in myown way as just a kind of accident’’ (44); ‘‘it feels more like I hadan accident’’ (51); and so on. In the logic of the accident, the victimof the sarin attack is a statistical victim, one of an indeterminatenumber of others, a victim of the law of large numbers.

If the constitutive feature of act, like motive, is that it must beattributed to individuals, then the self-experience of act as accidentconserves individuality (‘‘in my own way’’) by negation. Otherwise,living one’s life as a matter of deciding one’s individuality for

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oneself—setting oneself in motion, reflecting on it, and in doingso realizing oneself—would give way to a merely statistical indi-viduality. And act and motive—most graphically, criminal actsand motives—would enter into a social calculus of probabilityat the expense of persons and their acts and motives or, as onevictim puts it, make visible ‘‘[j]ust how weak the individual is’’(57). All acts and motives would be locked into a ‘‘world machine’’(Luhmann, Social Systems 558).

This is nowhere clearer than in the part of life that centresMurakami’s interviews: ‘‘I would ask the interviewees about . . .their job (especially their job)’’ (6). This special emphasis becomesprogressively intelligible. If what the media a priori looks like formsone side of Murakami’s version of true crime, what work lookslike forms the other. The point not to be missed is that work andthe media here are the two sides of a single formation, opposed ontheir surfaces but communicating on another level.

The true-crime world is a mass-observed world: the observation ofviolence directed against bodies and persons. But the work world,seen this way, is already about a violence against bodies andpersons, and not merely because the attack murders and woundscommuters getting to work. It is also because of the manner inwhich it exposes the compulsion of a work drive that resembles—in the media automatisms of act, motion: the life process itself—a death drive: ‘‘After Korakuen [station] it got more and moresuffocating . . . I began to think, ‘I’ll never make it to worktoday’’’ (99). ‘‘My main thought was, ‘I can’t be late for work.’Of course I felt bad about leaving people just lying there on theplatform, but it was an important day for me so the pressure wason not to be late’’ (122). ‘‘That’s when I knew I’d breathed the gas.‘I’d better call the office,’ I thought . . . ‘There’s been some terroristactivity. I’m going to be late’’’ (183). ‘‘Whereas most people,although they were in a bad way physically, still tried to get towork somehow . . . in fact, one guy near me was crawling!’’ (133).

Work—self-fulfilling work, therapeutic working through, recrea-tional working out—and making it to work are bound up throughand through with the unremitting drill in the work of modern self-making, in which body and nature know their place. The greaternumber of the victims interviewed are ‘‘salary men,’’ the oftenhighly self-ironized Japanese version of the white-collar worker:‘‘Once out of college I became your typical salaryman’’ (182).

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And, on the logic of a work ethic conscripted by the new corporateethos (a world machine), ‘‘[W]hat choice does a salaryman have?’’(96). Murakami’s account then might be seen as part of that largeliterature devoted to diagnosing the torn emotional life of middlemanagers, the life of the organization man, the man in the grayflannel suit, the life of ‘‘office-dwelling hominids’’: ‘‘Their truesocial life is the office,’’ as the contemporary novelist J.G. Ballardput it; the office is ‘‘their key psychological zone.’’6

We know that what is alternatively called ‘‘the control revolution,’’‘‘the second industrial revolution,’’ and the emergence of the ‘‘infor-mation society’’ involved a basic transformation in work and theworkplace. We know too that the real achievement of the manage-rial and control revolution was not the invention of a system ofindustrial discipline (that system extended throughout the socialbody from the late eighteenth century on). The innovation of thecontrol revolution was the redescription of managerialism, super-vision, and observation, in the idiom of production: that is, the realinnovation becomes visible in the incorporation of the representa-tion and observation of the work process into the work processitself or, better, the incorporation of the representation and obser-vation of the work process as the work process itself.

To the extent that this transformation is popularly seen as thereplacement of real persons, real bodies, and real work by theirrepresentation and observation—to the extent that the new worldof work is popularly seen as a way of doing away with bodiesand persons—the generalization of observation and its technicalmedia looks itself something like a crime. At the same time,the real work of observation and the reality of the mass media,de-realized as the opposite of real work, can then remain unob-served. The media presumption of reflexive modernity is, in thegenre of true crime as in its codependent crime fiction, at oncegeneralized and pathologized, hence acclimatizing readers andviewers to it and self-exempting them from it at once. Put anotherway, the media a priori—as in Poe’s ‘‘The Purloined Letter,’’ hisinaugural story of the exact coincidence of detective work andthe technical media (in this case, the letter)—seems ‘‘a little tooself-evident’’ to be seen.

For the moment, it is possible less to explain this complex of media,work, and violence than to exemplify it. Take, for example, thepopular media in which the scene of the crime and the new

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world of work are drawn into such an absolute proximity that eachincludes the other. On the ramifying franchise television show CSI,for example, in which the virtual nation, city by city, is mapped ascrime scene, the scene of the crime is not merely an information-processing zone.7 Like ER, the most popular television programbefore it, CSI is premised on the work-centred life, along with theendless spectacle of a series of torn and opened bodies that definea wound culture and the technical processing of torn and openedbodies that define the body-machine complex that defines thatlife—with the difference that, in CSI, observation replaces act andthe only real work is the work of observation via machines. Bodyprocessing and information processing become two ways of doingthe same thing, via the stylish thrill of a media-saturated workplace,with great appliances and a pretty good soundtrack.

CSI, of course, stands for crime scene investigation. The acronym,as with PTSD, ADHD, or OCD in the DSM,8 indicates that expert,professional work is going on, has located its ‘‘object’’—and black-boxed it. (The tendency toward acronym instances what Marcusecalled the ‘‘syntax of abridgement’’ marking the social media ofinformation in a self-informing modernity.) The black box here isthe crime scene itself, the ritualized demarcation of physical spaceas information zone and the technical processing of physicalevidence, which is nothing but that which can be technicallyprocessed. The technical media determine the situation, allowingthe moral neutrality of the media technician itself to be moralized.CSI is not interested in law (which is full of lawyers) and notinterested in psychology (which is full of psychologists and talkshow hosts). The media phenomenon of CSI is interested in theperfect functioning of the media, which provides the extremetest of the reality of the mass media: the crime system and themedia doubling of act and observation double each other. Themedia dictates its own content—here, that bodies and personsare processed in its own terms, and that there is nothing‘‘deeper’’ than that.

The real social life of these workers is the office and laboratoryworld, and the media-saturated workplace is their key psycho-logical zone. Outside of their workplace, there is nothing buttorn bodies and torn lives. Inside of it, there are recollections ofthe workers’ past lives (the sex and intimacy that preceded whatamounts to a posthumous life in forensics) and reconstructionsof the victims’ past lives (reconstructed as machinic life).

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The return to the scene of the crime takes the technical form of theconjectural re-enactment (the counterfactual flashback) and of astrictly material and technical reconstruction of bodies and acts(a technics of observation, and bio-scripting, via trauma-processingmachines). There is, in short, in this work nothing but the work ofobservation and self-observation—and, of course, the mass-mediaviewing of that: the mass observation of the work of observing, at thecentre of the murder leisure industry.

The policy of conjectural re-enactment makes another and crucialcontribution to the mass media’s cultural institutionalization ofwhat acts and actors look like. The postmortem body centres theCSI episode; on the autopsy table, we know, forensics and porno-graphy meet and fuse.9 Here too—in the piece-by-piece reassemblyof bodies and acts and the reattachment of both to actors—actsand persons are put back together.

The typical true-crime account imitates the opening of the classiccrime novel in that it typically opens with a brief factual summaryof the case, something like a bare press release on the event andscene. This is the scene to which the novel then returns and pro-ceeds to narrate in an extended aftermath. True-crime stories, likethe classic murder novel, begin at the end and proceed to recon-struct both motive and act, returning both to single actors.10

True crime, like crime fiction, singles out acts and actors, and rejoinsbodies and intentions, torn bodies and interior states, that havecome apart. But it’s not merely that the crime story makes acts,choices, and consequences luridly explicit and explicitly consequen-tial. It makes explicit how difficult it is—given the double con-tingency or overdetermination of motives, causes, and effectsin modern social systems—to single them out (to ascribe them toindividuals who are then individualized through that ascription).The mass media today at once performs this function anddisplays it:

The media favour attributing things to action, that is, to actors.Complex background circumstances which might havemotivated, if not coerced, an actor to do what he or she didcannot be fully illuminated. . . . [Following Weber, it may berecalled that] neither actions nor actors are given as empiricalfacts. The boundaries (and therefore the unity) of an action orof an actor cannot be seen nor heard. In each case, what we are

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dealing with are institutionally and culturally congruentconstructs. (Luhmann, Reality 32–3)11

Hence the retroactive constructs of true crime—by which causesand motives are reattached to the effects of acts (the torn body).This is what it looks like to recombine effects and causes, bodiesand psychologies—and, therefore, to refer acts back to persons. Thetrue-crime show performs the public service of locating indivi-duals—finding missing persons—albeit via a generalization of thescene of the crime as the boundaries of the modern social field.

True and False Crime

True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. If one goesinto a chain bookstore today, one will find a large section of bookscalled ‘‘crime’’ and a much smaller one called ‘‘true crime.’’ Thelarge section consists of crime fiction; the second consists of crimefact. This is crime fact of a specific kind: a species of paperbacksociology that, for the most part, retells real-life cases of crime.However, these popular real-life case histories do their retellingby following the conventions of popular crime fiction.

‘‘Crime’’ on its own, then, is crime fiction, or ‘‘false crime.’’ Thepresumption seems to be that ‘‘crime’’ is a fictional genre and thatone must bend fiction toward fact by adding the word ‘‘true’’ tocrime. This interestingly paradoxical relation between true andfalse crime points to the manner in which crime in modern societyresides in that interval between real and fictional reality: the uncer-tain and mobile, conditional and counterfactual reality of a ‘‘reflex-ive modernity,’’ which includes the self-reflection of its reality aspart of its reality, and as one of its defining attributes. This is a realitybound up through and through with the reality of the mass media.Put somewhat differently, true crime points to the media a prioriin modern society because the technical infrastructure of modernreflexivity is the mass media. It points to the fact that the realworld is known through its doubling by machines, the doublingof the world in the mass media that makes up our situation.

The known world today is a mass-mediated one. But, to the veryextent that the known world is known via the media, and tothe very extent that it can only be known, and known to beknown about, via the mass media, real life seems to yield to its

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fictionalization (or to what is euphemized as the ‘‘social construc-tion of reality’’).

In the accounts of true crime that follow, I move between crimefiction and crime fact. This is not because there is no distinctionbetween them but because the distinction between the two iseverywhere at play within them. This is the case from Poe’s crimefiction, saturated with factual newspaper accounts, to PatriciaHighsmith’s novels (from Strangers on a Train on) about a violencebound to a media rivalry, a media rivalry that includes, amongother things, novels.

The presumption of a reflexive relation between crime fact andfiction is never in doubt in ‘‘classic’’ true crime. Here we mightinstance the extensive writings of William Roughead, who, from1889 to 1949, attended every high-profile murder trial held in theHigh Court in Edinburgh, and published a series of best-sellingaccounts of them—a criminological graphomania that capturedthe attention of the general public and of fiction writers such asHenry James. There is everywhere in these cases a double focuson act and media, not least in that the question of motive is oftenbound to the question of media sensation (‘‘she did not committhe crime for the sake of notoriety’’) and to the ‘‘ebullition ofpublic feeling’’ in the ‘‘public prints’’ (‘‘the inexhaustible persist-ence of a public spirited and resourceful Press! Word of her release‘transpired’; speedily she was pursued, run to earth, and takencaptive by enterprising journalists in quest of copy’’).12 There is,internal to the cases, an ongoing comparison of fact and fiction(‘‘to compare her story of the crime with the facts established atthe trial . . . will furnish an intellectual pastime more entertainingand worthier the effort than the solving of many crosswordpuzzles’’ [259]). There is, internal to the cases, the entry of fictioninto the interior of the crime (for example, in case of the impostorand ‘‘double-dealing’’ thief Deacon Brodie, whose ‘‘histrionictastes’’ and identification with literary rogues—his ‘‘Macheath com-plex’’—were remodeled in turn in Stevenson’s The Strange Case ofDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [43–4]). There is a commutability of murderand writing (Roughead: ‘‘it was the best murder he had ever read’’[218]). Also, these easy transitions from fact to fiction and back(‘‘someone has since made a fiction out of the old facts’’ [260])mean that the mass media emerges as its own theme (‘‘the reportof the trial extended to 173 columns . . . contained 52,000 words,and the verbatim report 346,000 . . . the total number of words

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telegraphed from Edinburgh in connection with the case was1,860,000’’ [861].)

I have elsewhere taken up this commutability of word counts andbody counts, and its implications. It also will be necessary to takeup elsewhere the exact coincidence of the autonomy of moderncrime—what Roughead calls ‘‘mischief for mischief’s sake’’—andthe autonomy of modern art (an ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ that providesthe model for murder as one of the fine arts).13 However, mysampling of the relays between fact and fiction that centre truecrime is, for the moment, directed somewhat differently. It is byway of giving some indication of the sheer banality and utter con-ventionality of the genre’s self-deconstruction: the reflexivity of truecrime—the self-organization and self-reflection of its own plausi-bility—is never in doubt, which indicates that its media a priori isnever in doubt either.14

Literacy Tests

‘‘Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she couldnot read or write.’’ This, the opening sentence of popular murderwriter Ruth Rendell’s novel A Judgement in Stone (1977), makesabsolutely explicit the popular understanding of modern crime:the presumption that the question of criminality and the questionof the media are two sides of the same formation. Here are thenext two sentences: ‘‘There was no real motive and no premedita-tion. No money was gained and no security’’ (1). Modern crimeis motiveless crime in the sense that its motivation is strictlyinternal and phantasmatic. Modern crime makes itself fromitself—and that is the autopoeitic (self-making and systemic) styleof crime proper to the autopoietic society: a society that, tendingtoward tautology, submits itself to its own terms, its own socialmedia.

There is a direct connection between the presumption of a mediaa priori in crime and this ordinance of motives. Here the fact ofliteracy, or the exclusion from it, makes personhood a function ofthe media—in this case, reading and print. The fact of literacy andthe interest in reading are both the condition of individualizationand the condition of the interest in individualization. Moderncrime fiction and true crime, from the 1830s on, is premised onthe manner in which reading had become a ‘‘necessity of existence’’(Sigourney 39). If the modern individual is one who observes his

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or her own observing, the new self-observing world was ‘‘thenew ‘reading world’’’ (Sedgwick 27). Or, as another novelistexpressed it toward the end of the nineteenth century, ‘‘All civili-zation comes through literature now. . . . [W]e must read orwe must barbarize’’ (Howells 104). In Rendell’s narrator’s insis-tently cliched terms, ‘‘Literacy is one of the cornerstones ofcivilization’’ (1).

But if the media then reveal us to ourselves, how are we to under-stand this operation of self-revelation by media proxy? The mur-derer’s illiteracy exempts, at a stroke, the reader from complicityin crime—since the act of reading excludes the reader (as reader)from not merely the act and the motive for it but also from theunderstanding of either. In this media-saturated novel, intimacyand sociality both are understood as effects of shared life viamedia proxies: what Rendell calls vicarious life. The relays betweenvicarious life and what I call vicarious crime turn out to be crucialhere.15

If the subject of the media is thus individualized via vicarious life,it’s not hard to see that that situation reveals a series of paradoxes.The narrator’s cliche-driven narrative makes that exorbitantlyvisible; the narrative often reads as if Bartlett’s Familiar Quotationswere time-sharing the author’s voice and her mind.16 For if allcivilization is seen to come from literature now, or then, it willbe recalled that early print culture—the early modern novel, forexample—endlessly rehearsed the dangers to behavior as a conse-quence of print and the style of deviance and criminality that goeswith it.17

This means that the novel is not exactly a reflection of the self-conditioning of act, evaluation, and outcome—the universalizationof self-reflexivity—that marks the ‘‘sequestration’’ of modernforms of life (the second modernization or reflexive modernity).The novel is not exactly a reflection of that self-corroboration inthat, from the later eighteenth century on, it has been a dressrehearsal for it.

Rendell’s fiction proceeds by imitating the (fiction-imitating) formof true crime. The novel opens with a brief summary of the actorsand the scene of the crime (miming a newspaper account, with allits ‘‘human interest’’ cliches), and then goes on to flesh out thebare bones of the plot (retroactively adding psychology, intentions,

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relations, a childhood, motives, and so on). The plot pivots onsomething like a literacy test:

The magazine on the table intimidated [Eunice] as much as aspider might have intimidated another woman . . . .‘‘Oh, I thinkit’s fun.’’ Melinda turned the page. ‘‘Here’s a questionnaire.Twenty Questions to Test If You’re Really in Love. I must do it,though I know I am. Now, let’s see. Have you got a pencilor a pen or something?’’ (130–1)

The exposure of Eunice’s illiteracy (and its murderous conse-quences) thus takes the form of a test of mass-media literacy. Thequestionnaire tests out the credibility of a media-sponsored love.This is a matter of ‘‘entertaining’’ beliefs: the half-credences of noone in particular, recited, seen through, and installed as the referredbeliefs one sort of believes (‘‘I must do it, though I know I am’’).These are referred beliefs that everyone else like oneself holds:temporary positions that may be occupied for a time beforemoving on to the next—rehearsed, communicated, and forgotten,with the turning of a page.

The standard bioscript of reflexive modernity standardizes a mul-tiple-choice outlook on life: ‘‘But he realized the difficult of findingan American who (a) had a flat or a house in Venice and (b) wouldbe Bohemian enough to take in a stranger. . . . [H]e must take upthe pieces of his life again. He could make a list of four or five’’(Highsmith 57, 166). These are the play-at-home versions of theself-educating and self-realizing microsociety, with all the para-doxes of its self-transparent knowingness.18

One consequence of the multiple-choice outlook on life is not hardto detect. The individual does not know who he is because he mustdecide that for himself; this is the individual who winds himselfup to see here he goes. That means that his ‘‘determinations mustbe recognizable as self-determinations,’’ and thus must be madevisible and observable.19 Along these lines, identity is transformedinto its communication—at once made visible and exposed asperhaps nothing but its communication.

The multiple-choice effect makes decisions visible decisions; theintense anatomization of individual acts in true and false crimesingularizes action; and the observed and self-observed resolutionof the act finalizes it. This is what Erving Goffmann, writing on

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‘‘where the action is’’ in modern mass-mediated life, describes asthe ‘‘fatefulness’’ in the manufacture and distribution of ‘‘vicariousexperience’’ through the media:

Fatefulness involves a play of events that can be initiated andrealized in a space and time small enough to be fully witnessed.Unlike such phenomena as the rise of capitalism or World War II,fatefulness is something that can be watched and portrayed intoto, from beginning to end to end at one sitting; unlike theseother events, it is inherently suited to watching and to portraiture.(262–3)

The point not to be missed is that this ‘‘vicarious contact’’ is thusthe means by which a ‘‘frame of reference is secured for judgingdaily acts, without having to pay its penalties’’ (266). The vicariousexperience of action, such that act and witnessing, event andmedia spectacle, indicate each other at every point, is nowheremore intensely realized and secured than in true and false crime.

We are by now thoroughly familiar with the spectacle of themultiple-choice outlook on life and the transformation of identityand act into communication.20 After all, this is the terrain of thepopular media from the realist novel to reality television. Thecrime novel and true crime make these literacy tests as explicitas possible. After all too, the stakes of the test—the staging of thechoice of love or money, life or death—could not be more explicit,more urgent, or more generic and self-discrediting; if we mustread or view, or we must barbarize, then barbarity—acceleratingviolence, crimes against humanity—appears as the antidote to thereality of the mass media. The media solicitation of violence asalternative to the media a priori thus returns as its own topic:Welcome to the desert of the Real!21

Crimes against Humanity

It is as if each successive media technology is re-imagined as a res-ervoir of the humanity it was initially seen to endanger. The individ-ualization of oneself in writing was, after all and from the start, alsothe compromise of oneself in writing (the betrayal of secrets, includ-ing one’s own, in print). The media condition of individuality can,then, get in the way of that individuality from the start.22 This is, inpart, because new media technologies become visible in terms ofwhat I have elsewhere called a double logic of prosthesis (technology

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as at once self-extension and self-extinction).23 New technologiesare first experienced in the idiom of pathology and wounding.The typewriter, for example, was, we know, originally designed forthe blind, and the telephone was designed to supplement hearingloss.24 This intimate and paradoxical relation of personhood to thetechnical media—media-sponsored interiority—makes for the melo-dramas of uncertain agency that run through these technoir wounds-capes and these communities of risk and danger (and this not leastin the violent reassertions of that media-sponsored and media-endangered singularity).

That is to suggest that it is not merely that the reality of the knownworld is the reality of the mass media, in true crime as in othergenres of modernity’s self-reflection. There is a deeper relationbetween crime and the media a priori. The known world—theworld known and known to be known about (and thus, via itscollective communication, making up social reality)—is bound tothe technical media. But, to the very extent that the known worldis indissociable from its media situation, the reality and credibilityof the known world seems imperilled. It is, as we say in the risksociety, ‘‘everywhere at risk.’’ And, to the very extent that realityseems at risk, the media a priori in modern crime and modernviolence seems itself a form of violence and a kind of crime. Thismisapprehension of the media (a lethal misapprehension, it willbe seen) is a version of what Jean Baudrillard calls the perfectcrime: the mass-media murder of reality, accomplished withouta trace. On the logic of this misapprehension, violent crime comesto be seen as, and perversely comes to promise, a return to thereal. Modern crime and the modern mass media, vicarious crimeand vicarious life, thus include each other—and the media a prioriappears in itself as a crime against humanity. True crime is pre-mised on that double contingency of violence and the media.

The Known World

Juan Jose Saer’s remarkable novel The Witness tells two stories atonce: a story of the European conquest of America around 1500and a story of its witnessing. The ‘‘witness’’ had voyaged to theNew World as a young boy, been taken captive (or taken in) bya tribe of Indians, and then sent back after ten years. Havingreturned to Europe, and after performing his ‘‘status as real-lifesurvivor’’ in a series of popular plays devoid of anything like reallife, the unnamed narrator becomes a self-isolated man of letters.

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A half century after his return from the experience of a devastatednew world that remains his real world, he turns to writing aboutit, not least ‘‘to make real with his quill’’ those now-vanishedpeople (59).

For Saer, the matter of the conquest is the story of its witnessing,and the matter of witnessing the story of observation and self-observation in writing. That shift from act to observation, and thedoubling of both in writing, is by now familiar enough. It is one ofthe markers of modernity and its self-reflection or theorization.It also indicates the manner in which Saer’s novel of the conquest(whatever its accuracy about that) is a story of the modern media,and, more exactly, of the synthetic witnessing via what might bedescribed as the media of modern violence.

The name the witness is given by the Indians (a name that hedoes not understand, since it seems to stand for many things)is ‘‘def-ghi.’’ The name he is given is an alphabetic sequence ofletters—in effect, the common name of the alphabetization ofthe world. ‘‘The exemplary history of the conquest of America,’’it has been observed, ‘‘teaches us that Western civilization hasconquered, among other reasons, because of the superiority inhuman communication’’ (Todorov 251).25 But if technical superior-ity in communication (writing) was one among other things thatmade for the conquest, it was then not, on this account, just onething among others; the conquest of America, on this view, wasthe first modern media war (which is to say, both the firstmodern war and the advent of modernity).

The doubling of reality in writing is, here, the premise of conquestand witnessing both. A new world of writing and print developedand intensified the possibilities of social communication withoutinteraction; the modern world is a new world that includes itstechnical self-reflection as part of its reality.26 The witness notmerely hand writes his story, a story then performed on stage.In something like an astonishingly condensed genealogy of themedia, as casual aside, the writer brings the printing presshome from Northern Europe; print becomes the family business(a modern composite-family, an adopted set of characters); andthe printed text of the novel we read contains, we come to realize,typographical errors–the print media’s self-reflection (novel asreprint, and mechanical recording making possible both culturalrelativism and historicism).That reflexivity is then irreducible to

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the self-consciousness that is its individualized correlate. Thenarrator-witness writes ‘‘to carry the news of that annihilation’’(Saer 145). And, to the extent that the annihilation cannot be sepa-rated from a superiority in communication, the doubling and exter-iorization of the world in ‘‘the news’’ is also the news it carries.

The exteriorization of the world in writing–and the cultural compar-ativism made possible, or inevitable, by the print copy-archive–areset against an observed incapacity for that self-observation. Thepremodern world is seen as subject to ‘‘the uncertain fascinationof the visible’’ (74) and the dubious reality of the things that moveand vanish, things that they had ‘‘no way of verifying from outside’’;and it is subject to the ‘‘additional uncertainty of not knowing whatthe universe thought of itself’’ (131). For the witness, then, this is anunreflective world utterly dependent on its externalized observationby an ‘‘outsider’’; collaterally, its reality is utterly dependent on anunremitting witnessing that holds the world in place and so takes itsplace. For the outsider-witness, the violence he observes is a violenceoriented entirely toward its public witnessing.

Saer’s story of the violence of the conquest and its witnessing isalso, then, a fable of the media. The known world is the mediaworld and knowing what the world thinks of itself–the self- obser-vation that holds the world together—is the self-sustaining form(performance and score) of the media doubling of the world. Itposits a witnessing of violence that at once solicits and memoria-lizes it—what Murakami calls the mass media’s ‘‘double violence.’’

It is not, for the moment, a matter of periodizing that modernitybut of observing that what one means by modernity, and how oneperiodizes it, cannot then be separated from its media forms. Ifthis looks like the media determines our situation (a media deter-minism) and if it looks like a subjection of sociality to its forms ofcommunication (the system of society), it also points to the experi-ence of that technical self-extension as a form of self-annihilation,as a crime against humanity. And, hence, it points to the solicitationof the real violence that will undo that; as one corporate logo hasit, ‘‘all but war is simulation.’’27 The public scene is the scene ofthe crime, and an obsessive observation takes on the ethicized auraof witnessing (along with a new class of professional mourners).Carrying the news to the outside becomes the special providenceof the mass media; the uncertain fascinations of the visible, thefugitive reality of things that move, vanish, and regularly return,

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become the everyday compulsion of the motion and leisure indus-tries (the reality of motion pictures, for example).28

It is usual to see this media witnessing as a kind of parasitism, onethat we are more or less at home with, from the surrogate sensua-lities of novel reading onward. And, it is possible to indict the syn-thetic witnessing of violence in the mass media as nothing butspectator slowdowns:

disgust at collective killing is a very recent phenomenon andshould not be overestimated. Today everyone takes part inpublic executions through the newspapers. Like everything else,however, it is more comfortable than it was. We sit peacefullyat home and, out of a hundred details, can choose those tolinger over which offer a special thrill. (Canetti 52)

But the mistake, again, is to understand observing as the oppositeof real work and media observation as the opposite of ‘‘the realworld’’ in the name of it. It may be that in modern societies ‘‘thedifference between private and public is temporalized and trans-formed into the difference between leisure and work.’’29 But thedifference between leisure and work—and between private andpublic life—is transformed in the burgeoning systems of observa-tion and self-observation that more and more define both. Thesetransformations are part of the strange attraction of the murderleisure industry, the media a priori that is the subject and form oftrue crime. They enter into the formation of a pathological publicsphere and its infrastructure—the psychotechnologies of everydaylife that make up the known world. They point to how the crimesystem and the system of modern society work, and work together,in the relays between crime and modernity.

Notes

1 See Beck.

2 See Masachi Osawa, ‘‘Why Did Aum Use Sarin?’’ in Gendai (October2005), cited in Yazawa; Castells; Drew.

3 Shinji Miyadai, Owarinaki Nichijo of Ikiro [Live in Endless EverydayLife] (Tokyo: Chikuma-Shobo, 1995), cited in Castells 107.

4 See Luhmann, Reality 86–7.

5 Here it may be recalled that ‘‘case’’ derives from and remains linkedto casus, or ‘‘fall,’’ and that the fallen person or body is the modelfor becoming a statistic (the statistical person).

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6 Ballard 93. The Aum cult members inhabit a parallel bureaucraticzone: modern workplace and cult mirror each other, such that‘‘the system’’ is at once exposed (universalized) and criminalized(delimited).

7 My thanks to Mark McGurl and Sianne Ngai for sharing some ofthe reasons why they watch CSI.

8 These acronyms stand for posttraumatic stress disorder, attentiondeficit with hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder,and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,respectively.

9 This is exactly the centre of Zola’s advent modern murder novel,Therese Raquin (1867), a novel that puts in place many of thecomponents of modern ‘‘motiveless’’ crime and its mediascapes.The centring scene of the novel is in the public morgue, a scene ofhyperbolic public exposure that makes the spectacle-world visiblein the world, fusing the pornographic and the forensic:

Every morning when he was there he could hear the publiccoming and going behind him. The Morgue is a spectaclewithin the reach of every purse, something which passers-by,rich and poor, can enjoy for nothing. The door is open; anyonewho wishes to walk in can do so. There are connoisseurs whogo out of their way not to miss a single one of these morbidsights. When the slabs are bare, people go away disappointed,feeling they have been swindled and muttering between theirteeth. When they arewell coveredwith a fine display of humanflesh, the visitors jostle each other for cheap thrills, exclaimingin horror and joking, applauding, or whistling as if theywere atthe theatre, and go away well satisfied, declaring that theMorgue has certainly put on a good show for the day. (76)

The burg morgue scene and its gathering of passersby is aprototypicalization of the pathological public sphere convenedaround spectacles of violence and the wound. Not surprisingly,the Paris public morgue closed around the time the first movietheaters opened there; see Schwartz 45–88.

10 The burgeoning of the true crime genre has meant that crimefiction, the prototype of true crime, has itself turned to imitateits imitation. In a moment, I will be looking at one such case inpoint: Ruth Rendell’s novel A Judgement in Stone.

11 For an account closely related to the analyses of action and evaluationand the conditions of reflexive modernity articulated in social systemstheory and modernization theory, but referred to the Benthamitelogic of utilitarianism, see Ferguson.

12 Roughead 214, 259.

13 See Seltzer, True Crime, esp. ch. 5, ‘‘Vicarious Crime.’’

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14 The novelization of real crimes has, of course, a long history (aslong as the history of the novel, for instance). The novelists TrumanCapote (In Cold Blood) and Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song)—despite advertisements for themselves—scarcely self-originated thenovelization of real crime, or the true crime genre. The recursivenovelization of true crime (again, taken as its own theme in Capoteand Mailer) is a version of the media a priori in modern society(its emergence as a self-describing and self-observing system). Theself-reflexive text repeats this insight, but as if foregrounding itsself-observation and self-description were a way of getting back ofit. The same goes for other versions of this ‘‘postmodern’’ turn:self-reflexivity is taken to mark a critical postmodernism, as opposedto a conservative or affirmative one. (The distinction between criticaland affirmative postmodernism—that is, between good and bad—proceeds as if a politics or an ethics were hardwired into objects. Hencethe same artworks tend to show up on both sides of the divide—anembarrassment that leads to the discovery of ambivalence itself asthe sign of the critical, if not of art itself.) To the extent that reflexivityis the social and philosophical condition and dilemma of modernity,it is not as if reflecting on it exempts oneself from it (nor doesreflecting on that). The presumption continues that exposing socialmechanisms undoes them. But the situation today is exactly theopposite: it is the exposure of these mechanisms that installs them,in that self-exposure is absolutely fundamental to their operation.

15 See Seltzer, True Crime, ch. 5.

16 In Rendell’s novel A Demon in My View (1976), this recirculation ofBartlett’s and the literary cliche is itself literalized. The transparencyof the media of communication in true and false crime is somethingmore than generic self-consciousness. It is one measure of the mannerin which the modern media survive their transparency and continueto function—or, rather, require that transparency in order to function.Put somewhat differently, if the media everywhere arises as its ownsubject in true crime and crime fiction, calling that ‘‘postmodern’’does not take things very far. In fact, it points to the ways in whichan attentiveness to medium specificity in a range of recent art theoryand literary theory is often the sign of a remarkable inattentivenessto the specificity of the media in that theoretical work.

17 My concern here is not to survey the range of true or false crime butto indicate its media a priori and the style of reflexivity to which itacclimatizes readers and viewers. Consider, for a moment, anotherexample: Eoin McNamee’s extraordinary novel The Blue Tango (2001).This novel too installs the CSI effect. It also imitates true crime inopening with a bare case summary that then gives way to its narration:‘‘The narrator’s voice falls away into conjecture. Her slaughterhas been told but not the motive for it, and the face of her killerremains hidden. The narrator’s voice falls away into hypothesis

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and surmise’’ (ix). One difference here is that The Blue Tango does not,or does not merely, imitate true crime in fictional form: it turns out tobe a thorough investigation via novelization of a real-life case. Thenovel is thus a counterfactual forensic investigation. The mass mediadirectly enter into the case and its prosecution—a real-life murder casethat was on all counts bound up with media-sponsored life. (The coldcase had, at the time of the novel’s writing, recently resurfaced in thepress after the long incarceration of the man convicted of the crimewas overturned.) McNamee’s fiction is then (like Poe’s ‘‘Mystery ofMarie Roget’’) an attempt to solve a real crime: a real crime that (aswith Poe) is bound up through and through, from motive to prose-cution, with the media—and its mix of moral and feral intentions. Butthe registration of the media a priori goes beyond that: McNamee’snovel is hyperliterary, often congealing in images and often taking onmedia dialects and ideolects. There is no indication within the text thatthe case is a real one (since any indication of that within the text wouldbe self-disqualifying). Hence the novel inhabits the self-reflexive spaceof a media a priori that orchestrates its own dance (the blue tango).

18 On such bioscripts as part of the reflexive historicity of modernity,see Giddens, especially ch. 3, ‘‘The Trajectory of the Self.’’ For asomewhat ‘‘default’’ critique of this way of thinking about the modernsubject and its psychology as a fall from real to popular psychology,see Zizek 341–7. My concern here is with the popularity of popularpsychology and its media—with the paradox of psychic and socialeffects that survive their self-transparency and keep going anyway.

19 See Luhmann, ‘‘Redescription’’ 511; see also Luhmann, Reality 114.

20 That is, we are by now thoroughly familiar with the problems with‘‘the risk society’’: with the radical expansion of the scope and obli-gation to make decisions along with the disbalancing of the groundsfor making them (the multiple choices of the risk society); with thepromiscuous media construction and sampling of possible worlds (theinformation-saturated world that thus compels and obviates makinginformed choices); with the compulsions of a decisionism that turnsdecision into something observed—without the capacity, or even thepressure, of deciding or acting.

21 See True Crime, ch. 7, ‘‘Postscript on the Violence–Media Complex (andOther Games).’’

22 See Siegert.

23 See Kittler.

24 See Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, particularly part 5, ‘‘The Love-Master.’’Here I would add that the prosthesis model is itself part of the con-dition it diagnoses, in that it posits the human body (and by extensionpersonhood) as technology’s axiom or point d’appui—which is pre-cisely what is in question.

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25 On the links between alphabetic writing and the praxis of reflexivityand critique, see also Detienne.

26 It posits and includes therefore too its own state of exception, markingits self-distinction. The political notion of the state of exception istheorized by Carl Schmitt, specifically in relation to the discovery ofAmerica as the positing of Europe’s state of exception (the new worldas a sort of ‘‘violence brothel,’’ a zone of legal and moral exemption).Schmitt’s notion of the state of exception has, more recently, beenreadapted and generalized as the contemporary state in the work ofGiorgio Agamben, particularly in Homo Sacer: ‘‘the political space ofmodernity’’ as the violence of the state of exception (with the deathcamp as its model) and the technological killing field as ‘‘the nomosof the modern.’’ Agamben’s argument, historical only in the mostmessianic sense, registers modern life in terms of ‘‘the perfectsenselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it’’(Homo Sacer 11). (For an astute account of Agamben in relation toBenjamin and Schmitt, see Rasch.) And, since it’s scarcely necessary tomake sense of the perfectly senseless, the ‘‘society of the spectacle’’ isocculted and media observation remains in effect unobserved, itsviolence generalized. The generalization of violence as the politicalspace of modernity is the logic of a pathological public sphere, of awound culture: a world of trauma and witnessing whose anthem is‘‘everybody hurts’’ (REM) and whose slogan is ‘‘history is what hurts’’(Fredric Jameson). (This is, as Jacques Ranciere traces, in his The Politicsof Aesthesics, part of the by now routine ‘‘transformations of avant-garde thinking into nostalgia’’ such that ‘‘the tradition of criticalthinking has metamorphosed into deliberation on mourning’’ [9]). Butthe exact ‘‘fit’’ between the theoretical and popular self-descriptionof the state of the modern may itself indicate the limits, the symp-tomatic character, of these descriptions and it may open the possibilityof a redescription that does not await, as for Agamben (among others),the advent, indefinitely postponed, of a ‘‘completely new politics’’(the ‘‘pure potentiality’’ of a ‘‘pure’’ law and language). At the least,Saer’s story of media witnessing and the state of exception pointsto their mutual contingency and to the relays between modernviolence and the media system, which are what concern me here.

27 Corporate logo for Illusion, Inc.

28 See Seltzer, True Crime, esp. ch. 4, ‘‘Medium.’’

29 See Corsi.

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