In case you are wondering what the Wachowski brothers can possibly do in their screenplay and production for V For Vendetta after a great philosophical action film like Matrix, here is one answer: they focus on issues of contemporary political philosophy and raised questions that are the most relevant to our everyday life in this post-11/9 world of globalization with the anger to tell the world that we should simply fight for justice. And they have moved from computer world to a real world – even though it is based on a comic book – for the rabbit hole shown by the Wachowski’s this time is, at least, not virtual.
As a Hollywood Sci-Fi, V For Vendetta achieves Wachowskis’ aims by raising philosophical questions through the characters with their ideals and profound dialogues mixed into Kung Fu actions: it talks about taking the right action, or the revolution against an unjust government of extreme state control; it questions the action of vengeance by a heroic character whose actions are questionably similar to that of “terrorists”; it makes one think about the morals of “an eye for an eye” in the name of “justice”. But the film carries with it the real coolness – perhaps even “at stake” for the Wachowski brothers because one version of the posters simply says the movie is “an uncompromising vision of the future” – because the story itself outlines the idea of state of exception, camp, biopolitics, and life, all of which are ideas to be understood to uncover the façade of our everyday life. What I will try to do is to explain these ideas in relation to the movie, and to illustrate why these are the ideas that one needs to think about if we do not want to see the democratic world turns totalitarian.
Perhaps I should explain my intention here: to show you a view of the world we live in today and its relevant politics from the “outside” of it – in case you are not aware of the existence of the matrix – and I will use the movie as a tool to illustrate this. Something else I want to achieve here is to give the credits that this movie deserves, for there are reviews by movie critics – especially some of the conservative ones seen in American publications like the New York Times1 – that challenge the "subversion” in this movie without acknowledging the important ideas portrayed in the movie.
Stepping Into Tomorrow
So what are asked in V For Vendetta, in relation to today’s politics? --- What would happen if the War on Iraq never ends? What if the U.S. Patriot Act, and numerous other tactics that each nation-state employs, will not be rid of in future but be strengthened? What if the red-alert level of homeland security is to be prolonged, and for the longest time, law is only to be diminished? What if you will no longer be recognized by the state as a human being, but simply governed as a body, in the name (and convenience) of national security? All these issues are brought into question in V for Vendetta and of course, they are the most important questions of our time, especially in this post-11/9 world where politics has entered a new era.
The movie is set in the future London in the year of 2020, before which the U.S. War on Iraq and the fight against terrorism have failed and affected England such that the only way for the British Government to maintain its power is to exercise extreme control over its citizen in a prolonged state of emergency. Main character Evey (played by Natalie Portman with a stunning performance here) is our ordinary citizen who works in a TV broadcasting company and, after saved by V – the heroic character of tragedy played by Hugo Weaving – she soon comes to a realization, through V’s assitance, that the government has been manipulating citizens to maintain its state power. The movie then develops on how V, and later on Evey and the rest of England, resist this totalitarian regime.
The British government portrayed in the movie – which is in a way suggestive of the contemporary U.S., even it is only captured for a split second in the movie – is a fascist state with extreme, totalitarian control over every action of its citizens in the name of national security. To those in power, it is forever a state of emergency that it is worth any sort of sacrifice, even that of human life, to maintain a social order. It is, therefore, a state of exception, within which the only law in force is the abandonment of all laws, a state within which everything is possible. In other words, it is a state of lawlessness except one law – the law that enforces such lawlessness. The result is that the executive body of a democratic regime becomes law itself and it is creating law. For instance, the sacrifice of human beings – such as those who commits treason and are considered harmful to the state’s sovereignty – in a off-the-record concentration camp needs only one justification: the good for the state and its people, a vague idea that is self-justified.
Therefore, it is a state in which law is in its maximum power, realizing its relation with citizens, for in such lawlessness the law shows the power of law without law;or as contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has put it, the Force-of-Law (force of law without law). The state-of-exception,however, is nothing new in history: its genealogy dates back to Roman Empire,when killing was done without need for justification in state of emergency. It then reappeared in the Nazi regime during WWII. Ethically unjustified they might seem, both of such incidences of state-of-exception were carried out in a state of emergency, as the last resort that allowed the leader (or emperor) to claim all of his power and become law in order to reclaim the order of the state, and thus, sovereignty. The result was that as the leader or commander set his own laws in such a state of lawlessness, the state-of-exception allowed the state and its law to actualize its true relation – and power – to citizens.
Both incidences had their ends in history, but what the movie has shown is whenstate-of-exception is perpetuated and normalized such that citizens live in a prolonged state of emergency and the state becomes a hostile totalitarian regime in order to maintain its sovereignty. In the name of national security – or state’s interest and profit, as seen in the movie, instead of security of people – state-of-exception is conveniently carried out to allow the executive body of a democratic regime to exercise its power without constraints, to a point that citizens are no longer free. Here in future London, citizens are tightly monitored and controlled by the state, be held in a forced relationship with it, like coercion, and this was done through the state of exception.
In fact, they live with so many constraints on their freedom that one wonder what individual rights are under such a totalitarian regime: there are extreme policing and curfew that limit all sorts of individual freedoms and rights; there is biometrics technology that allows quick tracks of citizens, like the wide application of fingerprint recognition to the extent of daily tasks like getting your registered mail; there is, constantly, phone line tapping and surveillance cameras that invade every aspect of individuals’ life – all because some individuals are suspected to harm the state sovereignty, or, are enemy of the state. Because the state is holding its power on its citizens through state-of-exception, any suspected acts of undermining the state power, like the public announcement made by V, are to be eliminated. And to achieve this, the state is gradually strengthening its measures of control to maintain a constant state power – a vicious cycle that leads to a camp, a space of exception, of lawlessness, and possibly of anything.
In its most extreme form, the actual camp itself is a place where the lives of such enemies of the state are no longer valued, will be executed or maybe experimented for the “public good”. Therefore, this camp – which can exist in a conceptual form of governance besides its actual form as a prison – is a place where power of the state is exercised via the control and death of humans. In other words, as the state-of-exception is prolonged, citizens are no longer governed as individuals but simply bodies, such that it is not their beings as humans but their biological existences are governed and of state’s interests, and they are in face of the force of law in their most exposed, helpless form – the human body. Thus, the camp that is formed under the prolonged state-of-exception actualizes the ultimate power of the state and its law in its most extreme form – and this marks the exposure of biopolitics.
Welcome to the Matrix of Biopolitics
Biopolitics – the political structure that is possible in state-of-exception – is about governance of body. As Giorgio Agamben suggested in Means Without Ends, all throughout the history of western civilization men have strived to live more than just physically existing animals – or the naked life – such that different forms of life can built upon this basic form of naked life. Since Aristotle’s concept of man as “politically living animal”, these various forms of life have been the possibilities of life, or different forms of being, and they are not to be separated from the naked life itself, for their combination shall be the subject of a modern, civilized, democratic regime, such that your politico-juridical identity remains distinguished from naked life but not separated. In other words, upon our naked life, or your biological life/existence, there is a political life. Your forms of life one can be
someone’s child, an HIV positive patient, a revolutionary activist, and so on, and these forms of life lie between our physical bodies and the government, in a distance that the very last bit of our freedom – freedom over our own body – is protected. But in state-of-exception, because state power is exercised over man’s biological existence (his body), these forms of life are separated from the naked life and the naked life is in direct confrontation of the state such that the state has conquered all the possible zones for its sovereignty, and the law of the state has broken every barrier to enforce itself directly on life. Therefore when state-of-exception becomes normalized as the state’s ruling, a camp is opened up, in which biopolitics is materialized and human beings are stripped off their political identities so they are nothing more than walking bodies.
The off-the-record human experimental camp in V For Vendetta is therefore the most extreme yet most apparent form of biopolitics. In this camp, biopolitics is exercised because, through torture and experiments, life of man is completely naked and thus, completely exposed to the power of the state. Smartly put by the producers, this camp is a reflection of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, Germany; or Abu Grahib, Iraq, from which scandals of tortures and abuse of detainees by U.S. soldiers are constantly leaking out; or Guantanamo Bay (a.k.a. “Gitmo”), Cuba, a political prison for suspected terrorist-associates that is under the U.S. jurisdiction. Indeed, if Auschwitz was the birth of modern biopolitics, then Guantanamo Bay is the living continuation of this biopolitical sphere today.
The reason why I say the concentration camp in the movie is a reflection of both the Nazi camp and prisons under U.S. jurisdiction, given that I am aware I might drawing a controversial parallel between the Nazi regime and the current Bush Administraion, is that because these tortures, which strip humans’ political identity away and expose them down to their bodies only, are carried out today by the U.S. with implications that affect U.S. citizens and possibly, the rest of the world. Especially important is that what goes on in Guantanamo Bay does not live up to the standard of U.S. laws despite its jurisdiction: the normal U.S. legal procedure for prisoners, such as hearings, is abandoned and substituted by military tribunals without presence of any lawyers; suspects of terrorism are categorized as “detainees” in order to bypass international law such as the Geneva Convention so that all sorts of tortures, including those that direct at detainee’s Islamic beliefs, are employed as tactics of interrogation. Of course, there are aspects about Guantanamo Bay and the current U.S methods to enhance its national security that are not discussed in the movie, such as how international law are disregarded by a nation-state that carries with it the flag of democracy and free world. Nonetheless, the movie has successfully shown how a prolonged state-of-exception simply opens the doo to extreme biopolitical tools and camp that reminds one of the Nazi regime.
But this idea of camp will not just exist in the camp, rather it exists as a conceptual camp itself that capture every citizen’s life through the governance of their bodies and their bodies only, yet remained undiscovered to create a comforting environment with underlying instability. This is portrayed in the movie as the totalitarian state control such as censorship of information, use of biometrics and other technologies to obtain information of their citizens, and many others that simply limit individuals’ freedoms covertly. But besides the physical measures of control there are psychological ones, with the most effective one being the manipulation of one’s fear. Fear was seen throughout the film: it is shown at the very beginning since Evey is caught by police in the back alleys, and it only ends as Evey has “lost” her fear after being put through a “fake” camp by V – which also signifies the point the citizens have lost their fear of the government. This use of fear in the film does not just mark the underlying instability that runs through it, but also to show how one’s fear is a response to the biopolitical regime, for each one of the character is fear not of the various tools of governance, but of their lives being taken away by the state, their own deaths –deaths that signifies the power of the state over citizens’ biological existence, i.e. the biopower that lies in the very core of the biopolitical control.
Thus, state-of-exception is not only actualized in the camp, but it can been seen and recognized everywhere, if one looks for it – just as in Matrix, Morpheus refers to the Matrix as “control”, this biopolitical sphere of state-of-exception is also a control, a matrix that is yet to be disclosed. Being extremely open about his totalitarian control, the leader Adam Sutler in V for Vendetta is in no way fear of showing his interests in maintaining the state power and biopolitics – an interesting parallel could be drawn with how George W. Bush is completely open about being the “Commander-in-Chief” after 11/9 with full determination to eliminate the ”Axis of Evil” and the will to make any sacrifice it takes. Of course, marketing his party with patriotism, Adam Sutler in the film continued to be re-elected (at least for once) and continue with his governance, resulting in a regime that looks more like a fascist or Stalinist state than a democratic one in the movie. This could be seen as the point of which state-of-exception has alre dy been completely normalized and incorporated into the realm of law and politics, so that the camp and biopolitics could be seen everywhere – or at least, recognized and uncovered everywhere as urged by V. But if the movie itself ist he producers’ “uncompromising vision of our future”, it seems, indeed, extremely pessimistic. For even though the post-11/9 U.S. politics is gradually stepping into a normalization of state-of-exception, the leaders of the western world has not reached that phase of totalitarian control yet. For instance, in the U.S., some lawyers and the Supreme Court for judiciary constantly review the U.S. policy in the courtroom to function as the “checks and balances” of the executive of democracy. After all, we are only at some point along the path on which every move is a move towards to normalization of state-of-exception, and there is still some distance to the point that democracy completely falls apart.
Indeed, as the U.S. is in no interest in putting this war against terrorism to an end, what we have today is the state-of-exception starting to be normalized, and thus, every means that the state takes should be criticized. In fact, most measures taken by the nation-state today might be covert, but invasive, because the state-of-exception is how the state realizes its own sovereignty, and in many ways, its relation to citizens and their life in the form of biopolitics. For instance, the concentration camp in V For Vendetta is no documented officially, but it opens up the possibilities of biopolitical control by the state that is extended to all citizens later on. You might think that the indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay is rather distant to you, but it is immediately close to us because the camp is continuously submitting the biological life of humans to the power of state and if carried to an end, everyone’s life could be stripped off their political identity – and if that is normalized in the law of a state, we will simply have entered a totalitarian regime. This is why the Wachowski brothers are telling a possibility of future in the screenplay of V For Vendetta with a key message: as our technology advances, fear arises, and God is marketed as both the cause and solution to everything, we need to keep our eyes open.
Culture of Fear is Everywhere: but what are we going to do
As Hannah Arrendt suggested in Judgement and Responsibility that no German citizens could really say they were not involved under the rule of the Nazi regime, for everyone was involved in this biopolitical structure. This biopolitical structure is, in Agamben’s term, a “juridico-political matrix” that allows no escape. But resistance, as suggested in V For Vendetta, could exist in many ways: the secret collection of forbidden items underground, the never-ending research on the existence of camp by the detective, the show that mocks the chancellor, and ultimately, the decision of revolution – the power in numbers. And cool as a plot of course, we have in the movie a well-planned strategy that vacuums the power of a deteriorated democratic institution from within by our hero V so that the collapse of a biopolitical regime is to be expected like the pattern of his dominos.
But ironically in this camp, where bodies exist as nothing but their mere biological existence and are confronted with the power of state, hope arises – V was put through a camp for experiment and yet, though he might have given up his body, he was released as a man that for now and forever exists outside the state, outside the state-of-exception – a man that signifies state-of-exception, and thus, whose ideas are free from the state’s coercion. So V is a man capable of resisting the state’s biopower and ending the normalized state-of-exception, by giving up his body – and his fear, for fear has also been the interest of the state – so that his existence is free from the state’s control. Therefore, V’s vengeance here could be regarded as a form of resistance: because V has abandoned the part of him that is subject to the state’s control, he can resist the biopolitical governance that no longer has control over him.
So if the body is what the state wants and it has every means to exercise its power over it, then the battle should not begin with your own body, but to begin with the end of your own body, and thereafter, the beginning of a belief, or a thought – a non-physical belief or thought is without form or shape, and not subject to any force for no force could act on it – it is the same belief that is to exist within a man’s existence as the association between his naked life and his form of life. This non-physical domain that allows resistance, as Evey realizes during her fake camp experience that has politicizes her, includes love, the power within all human beings. When Evey is tortured in all the ways she could be (and of course, this fake camp is nothing comparable to what happens to the “indefinite detainee” at Guantanamo, or Auschwitz under Nazi), she is still touched by the love through the note – just when she thinks she has lost all her feelings and emotions, she finds love, from someone else and within her, and she is able to keep it in order to resist. The same is for V, who, without emotions and feelings, has love. And this love extends to the love for your people, your country, justice, and love for a belief -- ‘What is love anyway? It’s just a word”, said the Indian programmer in Matrix revolution. So love, the most powerful among all abstract forms of ideal, is there in human regardless of what happens to our body, or even our sensations and emotions.
But this is what bothers me about this concept of resistance in the movie – the power of the abstract that transcends and motivates the physical and in the end, solves a problem in reality. It is true that this non-physical domain, such as a thought, has been suggested by Agamben as the link between our naked life and forms of life that guards their very combination, such that one can actualize and retain his form-of-life (or political identity) even when the state is doing all it can to separate the two. In other words, intellectual thought enables man to resist against the biopolitical matrix. But how could a thought exist without a body if thought is to rely on the naked life – in other words, can V still retain a thought of his while he has already lost his body in the camp? Similarly, how is love, which in itself can be considered an emotion, retained with strength even when one has lost his emotions, like fear? Of course, V is a comic figure, and we need in a Hollywood movie a heroic figure with super-human talents to give us a satisfying ending. But unfortunately, with all the ambition to tell the important philosophical issues of biopolitics and its relation with our real world today, the complexity of human feelings and the relationship between body and mind – and possibly, though not necessarily, human nature – was one thing not specifically well done in the movie.
“Where do we go, what do we say, what do we do. Nowhere to run, nowhere to turn, when there’s nothing new.” – Hip Hop Artist Talib Kweli, Where do we go in album Quality
So do we live in a world of biopolitics in Hong Kong? Or, to put this question slightly differently, is our naked life exposed? No, we do not live under a totalitarian regime, but our naked life is certainly not unexposed.
It might seem that all the points inspired by the movie and broughtup here are to do with the U.S. situation and the democratic West, but itsrelevance and significance to situation in Hong Kong is not to be omitted.First, the U.S. as the most powerful country of the democratic world that keeps pushing the boundary of its hegemony has with its policy and political actions implications on the whole world. I am not saying that going against the U.S.means an end to all the problems in the world, but the power and influence of U.S. policy – be it political, economic, juridical, and even cultural – should be on the top of the watch list of everyone who believes in democracy. Second,because Hong Kong is right now (and hopefully, “still”) on its way to democracy and some of us – like some key members among the “democrats” circle in Hong Kong – look up to the Western powers for examples, we should be critical about the juridico-political structure of such “democratic” states. Not only because such models of democracy of the West might not fit perfectly well with our culture and political progression, but these nation-states might not be as democratic as we think they are, after all, besides their doctrine of free market and free economy that in itself, should not come before democracy, but only as a consequence.
Last, and certainly not the least, is that biopolitics is around us as we are talking about it. In Hong Kong it is certainly not in the most extreme form as in a camp, but we will submit ourselves to the potential of a biopolitical sphere if weare not aware of it: as you go and renew your HK identification card and obtainthe new, technologically advanced HKID, you are signing the contract thatsubmits your social body; as you read the news about WTO protest, fearing the“riot” on one hand and thinking how efficient our police are in controlling the“riot” on the other, you are agreeing with the possibility of biopolitics infuture, for policing is the representation of biopower in action; as the Hong Kong government suspends the legal procedure of the Korean protesters captured with a significant violation of human rights, the political space for state of exception has been opened more, not just for the Koreans who came to “interrupt our social order”, but for all of us who live under the laws of Hong Kong2. I am not suggesting a conspiracy theory and intends to sabotage Hong Kong’s image as the “Asia’s World City”, but if the potential for biopolitical governance is expanding and we remain silent, we will all be responsible forthe camp in future – because we are all involved in it.
If the Wachowski brothers consider themselves as artists, they have definitely told a lie in the movie – a lie that tells the truth about the façade of the world we live in. So keep your eyes on all the things around you, and think about their significances, for thoughts might be what can save us now.
This is the matrix. For real.
Notes:
1. If you are interested in an alternative view to mine on this movie, this serves as the best example: review by Manohla Dargis on the New York Times recently. Not only that I think Ms. Dargis missed the point addressed in the movie, possibly because of her own agenda, but it made me wonder if we are the same type of people at all.
2. Because I used the violation of human rights by Hong Kong Police Force here as an a crude example of camp and biopolitics in Hong Kong, I feel the need to briefly mention Giorgio Agamben’s views on human rights in order to clarify that this is not directly an Agamben’s argument, but my observation based on his theory. Agamben argues that the Western powers, since the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, 1789, have inscribed the concept of human rights and thus, bodies of their citizens, into their governance as nation-states and therefore, been hinting their biopolitical intentions when nation-states uphold (and certainly, suspend) human rights of citizens. This is a radical point of view that is not exactly the same as my point here: I emphasize that only when the police violates human rights by international standard then biopolitics is actualized. But defending human rights, to me, is still an important task. See: Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998, Standford University Press) and Means without End: Notes on Politics (2000, University of Minnesota Press)