DESIRING CAMBODIA

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

POLITICAL SCIENCE

MAY 2011

BY

ALVIN CHENG-HIN LIM

COMMITTEE:

MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO, CHAIRPERSON

SANKARAN KRISHNA

EHITO KIMURA

WIMAL DISSANAYAKE

REECE JONES

CHHANY SAK-HUMPHRY

Keywords: Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Aesthetics, Rancière, Genocide, Memory

ii

Copyright © 2011 by Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim.

Copyright © 2010 by Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim and The Johns Hopkins University Press.

The article “Breakfast with the Dictator: Memory, Atrocity, and Affect” was first

published in Theory and Event 13:4, 2010. Reprinted with permission by The Johns

Hopkins University Press.

iii

For my parents.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project, which began when I arrived in Phnom Penh in 2005, has been six years in

the making. The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the

kind generosity of many friends, including William Lennox Jr., Robert Slavin, Glen

Hochoy, Audrey Kubota, Frank Cibulka, Chanto Sisowath, Trond Gilberg, and Benny

Widyono. In addition, I am grateful for the support of Pannasastra University in Phnom

Penh, Cambodia, the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i at

Mānoa, and the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.

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ABSTRACT

In this dissertation I illuminate developments in contemporary Cambodia with political

and aesthetic theory. Cambodia has long been of great interest to me, in particular its

violent transition from socialism to capitalism. To understand the particularities of this

transition and Cambodia’s unfolding encounter with neoliberal capitalism, I map the

libidinal circuits of desire that flow through Cambodia from within and without.

Following this, I explore the fantasies generated by these desires, and track the

consequences of these shared imaginings in the political, literary and economic realms. In

the chapters that follow I deploy critical theory to shed new light on issues including the

Khmer Rouge trials, Cambodia’s memorial spaces of atrocity, the construction of Khmer

ethnicity, and Cambodia’s spiral repetition of violence.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKOWLEDGEMENTS iv

ABSTRACT v

INTRODUCTION: DESIRING CAMBODIA 1

Methodological Inspirations 1

Aesthetics as Method 7

The Kantian Sublime 7

The Distribution of the Sensible 10

Indifference and Imperceptibility 14

Aesthetics of Affect 19

The Traumatized Subject 24

Aesthetics of Distraction 26

Relational Aesthetics 28

The Literature of Cambodian Studies 29

Chapter Outline 45

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PART I: BECOMINGS 47

Chapter 1: Teaching Philosophy in Cambodia: Ontology, History, Praxis 48

Introduction: Coming to Cambodia 48

The Revolt on the Aventine 50

The Classroom as Assemblage 52

The Fat Man and the Unprepared Friend 56

The Political Economy of Cambodian Education 59

Intellectual Emancipation 69

Chapter 2: The Third-Worlding of Cambodia 74

Introduction: “I hope, one day, my city will look like this.” 74

Colonial Structural Adjustment 75

The Sihanoukist Legacy 77

The Revolutionary Economy 79

Cambodian Neoliberalism 83

The Kleptocratic State 90

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The Failure of Education 96

Chapter 3: The Gaze and the Tain: Cambodia and the Other 99

Introduction: Constructing Cambodia 99

Remembering the Past 99

Gazing at Cambodia 103

Asian Settler Orientalism 105

The Mirror Stage of National Construction 107

The Threat of the Other 109

The Vietnamese Other 110

Violent Cartographies 114

The Thai Other 116

After the Mirror Stage 118

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PART II: CAMBODIA UNDER THE AESTHETIC GAZE 121

Chapter 4: Spirits in the Material World: A Cambodian Hauntology 122

Introduction: The Ghosts of Violence Past 122

Specters and Memory 122

Prei and Srok 126

The Work of Mourning 133

The Plagues of Neoliberalism 140

Chapter 5: Cambodian Literature as Heterotopia: the Politics of Aesthetics 145

Introduction: The Politics of Aesthetics 145

Sokha and Apopeal 146

Heterotopia and Heterochrony 147

Preah Ko Preah Keo 150

The Distribution of the Sensible 151

Theater of Miracles: Political Subjectification 154

Writing Politics 157

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Neoliberal Bodies 160

Dissensus 165

Chapter 6: Breakfast with the Dictator: Memory, Atrocity and Affect 168

Introduction: Breakfast with the Dictator 168

Gustatory and Olfactory Affects 170

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Tour 173

Faciality Machines 179

The Soundscape of the Dead 181

Violent Cartographies 183

Scenes of Life at S-21 184

The Dialectic of Remembering and Forgetting 186

Cruel Optimism 188

The Banality of the Present 190

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Chapter 7: Reassembling Memory: Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge

Killing Machine 191

Introduction: The Conviction of Comrade Duch 191

Him Huy and S-21 192

Vann Nath and Chum Mey 197

Scouring Memory, Inventing History 199

Reassembling Memory 204

Karma and Contingency 213

Precarious Life 216

BIBLIOGRAPHY 218

1

INTRODUCTION: DESIRING CAMBODIA

In this dissertation I illuminate developments in contemporary Cambodia with

political and aesthetic theory. Cambodia has long been of great interest to me, in

particular its violent transition from socialism to capitalism. To understand the

particularities of this transition and Cambodia’s unfolding encounter with neoliberal

capitalism, I map the libidinal circuits of desire that flow through Cambodia from within

and without. Following this, I explore the fantasies generated by these desires, and track

the consequences of these shared imaginings in the political, literary and economic

realms. In the chapters that follow I deploy critical theory to shed new light on issues

including the Khmer Rouge trials, Cambodia’s memorial spaces of atrocity, the

construction of Khmer ethnicity, and Cambodia’s spiral repetition of violence.

Methodological Inspirations

I broadly view my methodology as the creation of a discursive collage, through

which I displace and assemble fragments of historical, anthropological and literary texts,

including memories of my experiences and the testimonies of my informants in

Cambodia, in counterpoint to a selection of theoretical concepts, with the goal of

illuminating both sides of the assemblage from the fresh perspective of the juxtaposition.

Distinguishing between historic events and history as a genre, Paul Veyne (1984)

observes that the historian, rather than passively recording the past, actively creates

narratives to retroactively explain past events (pp. 144-145). Texts from this genre, along

2

with their counterparts from the other academic and nonacademic genres hence constitute

the source material for my own attempt at the narrative generation of meaning.

I also draw inspiration from John Law (2004), who explains the production of

reality by methodology through his notion of method assemblages which “detect,

resonate with, and amplify particular patterns of relations in the excessive and

overwhelming fluxes of the real” (p. 14). Confronted with the chaotic noise of the other

they seek to study, Law observes that social scientists “creatively detect and select

appropriate similarities between instances whilst ignoring others” (p. 108), and

poietically generate realities “out of distinctions between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ patterns of

similarity and difference”. The repetition of this generation of pattern creates resonance

and amplification, making it easier to detect further repetitions (pp. 110-111). Jacques

Derrida (1982) however notes the “arbitrariness of the sign, the absence of any natural

relation of resemblance, participation or analogy between the signified and the signifier”

(p. 84), which suggests that Law’s “creative detection” of similarities could be better

described as the creative inscription of similarities.

I hence conceive of my methodology of assemblage as a form of poiesis, which

Martin Heidegger (1977) describes as a bringing-forth or revealing, through which

“something concealed comes into unconcealment” (p. 11). Moving beyond Heidegger’s

ontological hermeneutics, post-hermeneutic criticism has an exterior focus on what David

E. Wellbery (1990) describes as the “linkages of power, technologies, signifying marks,

and bodies” (p. xiii). Simon O’Sullivan (2006) offers for me one such post-hermeneutic

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poietic model for the use of theory: “no longer the endless critique of previous bodies of

knowledge (or not just this), but the creative invention of concepts and the intensive

mapping of affects and events” (p. 11). One such means of the poietic generation of

concepts is through what Slavoj Žižek (2006) describes as the parallax gap, “the

confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common

ground is possible” (p. 4). This echoes Jean-François Lyotard’s (1988) notion of the

differend, which is a conflict that “cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of

judgment applicable to both arguments.” In the absence of such a “universal rule of

judgment” (p. xi), the differend forces us to continually generate “new addressees, new

addressors, new significations and new referents” to attempt to close the conceptual gap.

As Lyotard notes,

What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear

witness to differends by finding idioms for them. (p. 13)

A second source of poiesis is through Cesare Casarino’s (2002) method of

philopoesis, which he characterizes as the interference between or co-optation of domains

of practice with each other, or with their own realms of the unthought or the invisible (p.

71). A third is through the short circuit of the aesthetic with the political, which Jacques

Rancière (2006) achieves through his theorizing of the distribution of the sensible, within

which art and politics collapse into the singular project of partitioning the visible from the

invisible, and the heard from the unheard (pp. 12-13). Rancière (2007a) expands this

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notion by arguing that the spectator’s hermeneutic gaze can itself be a political act which

can either confirm or change a particular distribution of the sensible (p. 277).

Structurally I aspire towards Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) poietic

model of the rhizome, which they describe as “a map that is always detachable,

connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exists and its own

lines of flight”. Such a mapping of thought “operates by variation, expansion, conquest,

offshoots” (p. 21). Deleuze and Guattari position the rhizome against the tree, and note

that thought is rhizomatic: “thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or

ramified matter” (p. 15). A rhizomatic structure for my dissertation will facilitate the

generation of short circuits of thought or lines of flight which can enrich my research or

lead it into unexpected directions.

In my research I also aspire to identify and emphasize particularities. John Agnew

(2006) highlights the epistemological binaries between contingency and universalism,

and between particularities and universalities. Theories may have universalist ambitions,

only to face falsification when unexpected contingencies intrude. Similarly, theories may

over-generalize across a given field, and face falsification from local particularities. The

importance of contingent and local particularities has been the focus on recent

metaphysical work: theorists like Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and Levi Bryant have

rejected reductive approaches to the world, for reduction does violence to objects by

stripping away their contingencies and particularities. By maintaining an attitude of

openness to unexpected contingencies and the particularities of the local, the surprise of

5

black swans will not prove fatal to our understandings of the world. The contingency and

particularity of an object stems in part from its position in both the spatial and temporal

order: hence a robust understanding of an object, especially an object of area studies like

Cambodia, demands understanding the particularities of its place as well as its history.

In addition I seek to reveal what Michel Foucault (2000) describes as the

“dramaturgy of the real”, in which the lives of the ordinary and obscure are momentarily

“illuminated” by their traumatic encounters with power (pp. 160-161). While Foucault

was focused on individuals who were negatively inscribed by society, I wish to expand

this focus to those ordinary Cambodians who have been victimized by their encounters

with the state in its various manifestations across history. In this I am inspired by Haruki

Murakami’s explanation of the enigmatic quote “Between a high, solid wall and an egg

that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.” Referring to people qua

contingent particularities, Murakami (2009) explains:

Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul

enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And

each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall.

Likewise, I am sympathetic to those ordinary Cambodians who, for example, face illegal

evictions or land grabbing from the “high, solid wall” of the rapacious neoliberal state.

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One methodological consideration I face is the question of the possible

incoherence of the conjunction of theoretical frameworks from which I draw and deploy

my selection of concepts. In my deployment of these concepts I isolate and remove these

concepts from their broader theoretical frameworks. This however raises the question,

which I am still struggling with, of the legitimacy and possible adverse consequences of

such radical theoretical decontextualization.

Another methodological consideration of importance is that of using identity as an

analytical tool. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000) argue that the polysemy of

the concept of identity makes it unsuitable as a tool for analysis, and recommend

replacing identity as an analytical tool with more appropriate concepts, including

identification as a process of group affiliation. While its role in political and social

discourse makes identity a suitable object for study, this does not guarantee its utility as

an analytical tool. Indeed, they warn that using identity as an analytical tool may

reinforce the social and political processes of identity-construction, including nation-

building and ethnic differentiation.

However, one observes that these processes of group-creation and maintenance

(Brubaker, 2002, pp. 168-171) will have created, given sufficient time, shared fantasies

and practices which are ontologically concrete in social reality, and this make it difficult

for, say, ethnicity as a category of practice to not be deployed as a category of analysis.

Would it be sufficient, for example, to simply stipulate that “Khmer language” refers to

the linguistic practices shared by the majority of individuals who imagine themselves, or

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are imagined by others, to belong to the socially constructed ethnic group known as the

Khmer?

Aesthetics as Method

In my dissertation I map the libidinal circuits of desire that flow through

Cambodia from without and within by first observing and tracking my flows of desire;

and to track these flows of my desire I track the movements of my aesthetic gaze across

the constellation of objects and relations I identify as Cambodia, for as Jacques Lacan

(1998) argues, the gaze closely maps the “grid of desire” (pp. 76-77). Given the

methodological importance of the aesthetic gaze in my dissertation, I shall now offer a

theoretical overview of the key positions in the philosophy and politics of aesthetics. In

particular, I shall focus on the critical work circulating around the aesthetic philosophies

of Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Deleuze’s partnership with

Félix Guattari.

The Kantian Sublime

Before turning to these thinkers, however, I shall first examine Immanuel Kant’s

critical philosophy and its singular impact on aesthetic theory, in particular, Kant’s

theorization of the sublime. Glossing on Kant’s theory of perception that “it is not so

much that I perceive objects; it is rather my perception that presupposes the object-form

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as one of its conditions,” Daniel W. Smith (2002) helpfully illustrates of Kant’s formula

of the object-form with an example of the perceptual synthesis of a lion:

The object = x is a pure form of perception, just as space-time is the pure form of

sensation. The object = x will receive a concrete determination (e.g., as a lion-

object) only when it is related to the synthesized parts of a spatiotemporal

diversity (a long mane, a loud roar, a heavy step…), such that I can say, “So it’s a

lion!” But the multiplicity of sensations that appear to us in the manifold of

experience would never be referred to an object if we did not have at our disposal

the empty form of the object = x, since there is nothing within sense experience

itself that accounts for the operation by which I go beyond sensory diversity

toward something I call an object (p. xvi).

This Kantian synthesis of sensory perceptions into an object is both rhythmic and

metrical, according to Deleuze. As Smith (2002) explains, “concepts are metrical: they

give one the beat, but beneath the concept there is the rhythm.”

Beneath concepts, one always finds rhythmic blocks or complexes of space-time,

spatiotemporal rhythms, ways of being in space and in time. The foundation of

perceptual synthesis is aesthetic comprehension, but the ground on which this

foundation rests is the evaluation of rhythm (pp. xviii-xix).

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Katharine Wolfe (2006) further observes that this metric of sensation “leads Kant to an

aesthetic encounter with the sublime” (§2).

This two-way relation between the mental faculty of imagination and the sensible

world opens sense experience to constant variation as new units of measure

emerge. Thus the constancy of a shared sensory world is called into question. In a

sensible world of constant variation, what could be constantly the same not only

everywhere and for everyone but even for our own senses and faculties? Here, the

sublime comes crashing in (§3).

What is the sublime? Wolfe (2006) explains that it is the “mode of aesthetic

comprehension” that emerges with the overturning of “the harmonious relation between

one's various faculties and senses” (§3), such that there is a failure of sensible measure or

synthesis of the empirical parts of the object-form of the sublime phenomenon. Smith

(1996) reads this synthetic failure as a dissension of the faculties, stemming from the

failure of the faculty of the imagination to comprehend the “totality” of sensations arising

from the encounter with “immense” or “powerful” objects like violent storms or volcanic

eruptions. This failure results in “a cleavage in the subject between what can be imagined

and what can be thought, between the imagination and reason”:

For what is it that pushes the imagination to this limit, what forces it to attempt to

unite the immensity of the sensible world into a whole? Kant answers that it is

nothing other than the faculty of reason: absolute immensity or power are Ideas of

10

reason, Ideas that can be thought but cannot be known or imagined, and which are

therefore accessible only to the faculty of reason. The sublime thus presents us

with a dissension, a ‘discordant accord,’ between the demands of reason and the

power of the imagination (p. 33).

Such dissension results in a fragility of perceptual synthesis. As Deleuze (1978) explains:

Because what the synthesis rests on is fundamentally fragile, because the aesthetic

comprehension of the unit of measure, assumed by all effective measurement, can

at each instant be overwhelmed, which is to say that between the synthesis and its

basis there is the constant risk of the emergence of a sort of thrust coming up from

underground [sous-sol], and this underground will break the synthesis.

The Distribution of the Sensible

Michael J. Shapiro (2009) argues that this very fragility of the perceptual

synthesis offers “pluralistic political implications,” as the withdrawal of dominance of

reason in the encounter with the sublime creates an unexpected space of freedom for

silenced voices to be voiced, and that it “opens up the possibility of a plurality of loci of

enunciation and thereby challenges the institutionalized perspectives that dominate those

reigning political discourses that depend for their cogency on naturalizing or rendering

necessary contingent modes of facticity” (p. 100). Rancière (2006) derives affiliated

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political implications from Kant’s critical philosophy, explaining the political as the

distribution of the sensible:

If the reader is fond of analogy, aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense –

re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining

what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of

the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines

the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves

around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to

see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of

time (p. 13).

Wolfe (2006) notes that Rancière’s philosophy views politics as “conditioned by

aesthetics, just as sense experience is conditioned by the a priori”:

Just as these a priori forms determine the organization of human experience and

provide its conditions, aesthetics comes in various structural systems that serve

both to condition the shared world of our daily experience and to partition that

world and delimit the positions one might occupy within it (§1).

Under this conception of aesthetics, Rancière (2011) argues that politics “reconfigures the

distribution of the perceptible,” such that:

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It introduces new objects and subjects onto the common stage. It makes visible

what was invisible, it makes audible as speaking beings those who were

previously heard only as noisy animals (p. 4).

Referring to the revolt on the Aventine, Rancière argues that the existing distribution of

the sensible constituted the plebeians as these “noisy animals,” such that the patricians

did not “understand the noises that came out of the plebeians’ mouths” (Rancière &

Panagia, 2000, p. 116). In order to make themselves understood, the plebeians thus had to

redistribute the sensible by mimicking the patricians, thereby reconstituting themselves as

“speaking beings sharing the same properties as those who would deny them these”

(Rancière, 1999, p. 24).

Shapiro (2004) observes that Rancière’s approach to politics is “radically

egalitarian” (p. 97), for on this approach, politics “does not happen just because the poor

oppose the rich … Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by

the institution of a part of those who have no part” (Rancière, 1999, p. 11). This

interruption is aesthetic, such that it “makes visible what had no business being seen, and

makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood

as discourse what was once only heard as noise” (p. 30). Indeed, “the distribution of the

visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection,” and for the

spectator, the very act of looking is “an action that confirms or modifies that

distribution”:

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The spectator is active, just like the student or the scientist: He observes, he

selects, he compares, he interprets. He connects what he observes with many

other things he has observed on other stages, in other kinds of spaces (Rancière,

2007a, p. 277).

However, most of the time these spectators fail to recognize their role in confirming the

distribution of the sensible, allowing the “configurations of domination and subjection” to

stand unchallenged. As Rancière explains, systems of domination necessitate the

structural blindness of the dominated masses:

What’s basic for me is a general critique of the model in which people are

dominated or oppressed because they don’t know precisely why they occupy this

position. Because of the way things are structured they cannot see; they do not

have a global view and so I’m interested in rethinking the relation between

domination and an optical model. So what’s interesting to me is the way this is

working, the presupposition of inequality: there are people who see and people

who don’t see, and if people are unequal it is because of real inequality, but they

are unable to see it. (Rancière & Power, 2010, p. 78)

This structural blindness of society is manifest in the perceptual field itself, for our

limited senses leave the distribution of the sensible necessarily deaf and blind to

significant segments of the world. We commonly realize our constitutive epistemic

limitations at moments of epistemic discovery, when our eyes suddenly open to that

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which had previously remained unseen, or when our ears suddenly hear what had

remained unheard. Rancière himself offers a powerful example of the successful

emancipation of the spectator of the distribution of the sensible in his reading of

Herodotus’ account of the Scythians’ customary practice of blinding their slaves, “the

better to restrict them to their task as slaves, which was to milk the livestock.” This

“normal order of things” was disrupted when “a generation of sons was born to the slaves

and raised with their eyes open,” with the consequence that they arrived at “the

conclusion that there was no particular reason why they should be slaves” (Rancière,

1999, p. 12). Turning to the audible and its distribution, Rancière argues that humans are

political because their “fundamental ability to proliferate words is unceasingly contested

by those who claim to ‘speak correctly’ – that is, by the masters of designation and

classification who, by virtue of wanting to retain their status and power, flat-out deny this

capacity to speak” (Rancière & Panagia, 2000, p. 115).

Indifference and Imperceptibility

Situating Deleuze “within the destiny of aesthetics as a figure of thought,”

Rancière (2004b) observes that Deleuzian aesthetics marks a “change in perspective”

such that the work of art “no longer refers to an idea of the rules of its production” but

rather “the presence within the sensible of a power that exceeds its normal regime” (p. 9).

However, Rancière argues that Deleuze’s late-period analysis of literature “opens no

passage to a Deleuzian politics” (p. 164). Focusing on Deleuze’s (1997a) image of the

world as “a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every image has a value in itself but

15

also in relation to others” (p. 86), Rancière (2004b) argues that this offers an

“interminable postponement or deferral of the promised fraternity.” The “quietism and

“indifferentism” that he thus identifies in Deleuze’s image raises the question: “how can

one make a difference in the political community with this indifference?” (pp. 162-163).

Wolfe (2006) locates the source of the problem that Rancière identifies within Deleuze’s

notion of imperceptibility:

Deleuze places ‘imperceptibility’ at the heart of a project to give birth to a new

kind of community, a new kind of relationality between beings in the world. If

politics occurs in a forced eruption into the sensible of that which aesthetic

systems, conceived on the model of the a priori, render insensible through a

partaking in and of common sense, how could imperceptibility be political? Is not

the Deleuzian turn towards imperceptibility a move altogether away from any

partaking in a shared, sensory world? (§1)

As Davide Panagia (2009) notes, under the regime of the imperceptible, “those regimes

of perception that structure one’s appraisals are disarticulated and rendered indistinct

from one another.” This notion of the imperceptible offers the possibility of an

“engagement with the world that overcomes the necessity of referentiality and the

legislative urge that accompanies a referential model” (p. 22). Deleuze (1997c) offers this

possibility as a critique of Kant’s legislative model of aesthetic judgment, which he

regards as a Kafkaesque tribunal (p. 126). This tribunal can be identified in Kant’s

account of the sensus communis in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (2000):

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By “sensus communis,” however, must be understood the idea of a communal

sense, i.e. a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of

everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its

judgment up to human reason as a whole and thereby avoid the illusion which,

from subjective private conditions that would easily be held to be objective,

would have a detrimental influence on the judgment. Now this happens by one

holding his judgment up not so much to the actual as to the merely possible

judgments of others, and putting himself into the position of everyone else,

merely by abstracting from the limitations that contingently attach to our own

judging; which is in turn accomplished by leaving out as far as is possible

everything in one’s representational state that is matter, i.e. sensation, and

attending solely to the formal peculiarities of his representation or

representational state (5: 293-294).

On Deleuze’s reading, although Kant “is willing to allow the possibility of an experience

that does not require the conditions of legislation to enable it,” he “ultimately does not

allow that experience to disarticulate the system of hierarchy that would determine it.” In

particular, Deleuze recognizes Kant’s “symbolic relation between the moral and the

aesthetic” as a hierarchy that “ultimately privileges and immunizes the moral domain”

(Panagia, 2009, p. 35). In addition, Deleuze (1997c) argues that the tribunal of judgment

has “reversed and replaced the system of affects” (p. 129). As we shall soon see, Deleuze,

in his work with Guattari, has created an aesthetic philosophy which emphasizes the role

17

of affect. Wolfe (2006) observes that Deleuze’s deployment of imperceptibility has

political implications ironically similar to that of Rancière’s distribution of the sensible:

The ‘imperceptible’ is only so from a particular perspective, that of the Kantian

object-form, the condition of perception in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and

the sensus communis in which it is key. This form is disrupted however, as

Deleuze tells us, by the force of the real itself. The imperceptible is a part of this

force and party to this disruption, functioning aesthetically as the ‘percipiendum,’

that which must be perceived but cannot be perceived according to the

delimitation of sense experience in the sensus communis (§1).

Indeed, in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) Deleuze and Guattari categorically state that “the

imperceptible is also the percipiendum”:

There is no contradiction in this. If movement is imperceptible by nature, it is so

always in relation to a given threshold of perception, which is by nature relative

and thus plays the role of a mediation on the plane that effects the distribution of

thresholds and percepts and makes forms perceivable to perceiving subjects. It is

the plane of organization and development, the plane of transcendence, that

renders perceptible without itself being perceived, without being capable of being

perceived (p. 281).

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Expanding on Deleuze’s analysis of the percipiendum, Wolfe (2006) identifies an

inversion of Kant. In the Kantian analytic of the sublime, the cogitandum emerges when

the faculties fail to comprehend the immensity of the external world:

At the moment when the faculty of imagination is confronted with its fragility in

the face of the world, the faculties are forced to stretch beyond themselves. It is

this higher power that Kant speaks of as the Ideas, and where previously the

faculties operated in the name of the cogito, the “I think,” they hereby come to

operate in the name of the cogitandum: that which ought be thought (§3).

Deleuze’s rendering of the Kantian analytic of the sublime however invokes both an

inversion of Kant and a Rancièrean implication:

For Kant's movement from the cogito to the cogitandum, Deleuze offers a like

movement from the sensible to the sentiendum, from the perceptible to the

percipiendum, and more… The movement from the perceptible to the

percipiendum is a movement from that which is only perceptible on the condition

of the object-form, and its correlated sensus communis, to that which, as Deleuze

insists, must be perceived, i.e. to that which “cannot but be perceived.” Note that

Deleuze translates Kant’s ought to a must. In this, he gives to the percipiendum an

imperative force resonant with Rancière’s politics (Wolfe, 2006, §3).

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This, then is Deleuze’s Rancièrean moment: the percipiendum is that which explodes the

distribution of the sensible:

The percipiendum is that which forcibly erupts; it cannot but be perceived,

whatever the community's will. This imperative power comes from a force of life

unrecognizable according to the partitions of the sensible, and what is generated is

a sense of that which is insensible and imperceptible in the community (Wolfe,

2006, §3).

Aesthetics of Affect

In Chapter 5, “Cambodian Literature as Heterotopia: the Politics of Aesthetics,” I

deploy Rancière’s aesthetico-political theorization of the distribution of the visible, in

which I uncover the regimes of visibility and invisibility that are articulated by

Cambodian texts, including folktales and modern short stories; then in Chapter 6,

“Breakfast with the Dictator: Memory, Atrocity and Affect,” I deploy Deleuze and

Guattari’s work on the aesthetics of affect, to which I now turn. In What is Philosophy?

(1994), Deleuze and Guattari describe the artwork as a “bloc of sensations, a compound

of percepts and affects.” Percepts, they note, “are no longer perceptions; they are

independent of a state of those who experience them.” Likewise, affects “are no longer

feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them.” Deleuze

and Guattari grant “sensations, percepts and affects” the ontological status of “beings

whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived.” The artwork hence contains its

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own reality; it is “a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” (p. 164).

Turning to the audience of the artwork, Deleuze and Guattari note of the constituents of

the artwork, its sensations, percepts and affects:

They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in

stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects

(p. 164).

The role of the artist then is to create what O’Sullivan (2006) describes as “a kind of

affective assemblage” (p. 53). Deleuze and Guattari (1994) note that the artist “creates

blocs of percepts and affects, but the only law of creation is that the compound must

stand up on its own” (p. 164). The artist organizes these assemblages of percepts and

affects with what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) describe as style:

In each case style is needed – the writer’s syntax, the musician’s modes and

rhythms, the painter’s lines and colors – to raise lived perceptions to the percept

and lived affections to the affect (p. 170).

Returning to the audience of the artwork, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) raise Aloïs

Riegel’s notion of haptic space to highlight the nonoptical tactile function of the eye, and

more generally, a sensory space which “may be as much visual or auditory as tactile” (pp.

492-492). Elsewhere, Deleuze (2002) designates the haptic as the sensory event “when

sight discovers in itself a specific function of touch that is uniquely its own, distinct from

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its optical function,” and broadens this to designate the phenomenal space he describes as

“tactile-optical” (p. 125). Martine Beugnet (2007) notes that Riegel identified the haptic

with those late Roman and Byzantine artworks that “privileged a spatial construction

based on distance and depth,” such that haptic images characteristically “dehierarchise

perception, drawing attention back to tactile details and the material surface where figure

and ground start to fuse.” Such images “encourage a mode of visual perception akin to

the sense of touch, where the eye, sensitised to the image’s concrete appearance, becomes

responsive to qualities usually made out through skin contact” (pp. 65-66). Haptic space

hence consists of the phenomenal space within which the sensations, percepts and affects

constitutive of the artwork impinge on and are perceived by the sensory apparatuses of

the audience of the artwork.

Turning back to the artwork, O’Sullivan (2006) notes that Deleuze and Guattari’s

affective conception of art is non-representational, and that “a new vocabulary is needed,

a vocabulary not from semiotics, not to do with representation” (p. 54). (This echoes

Nigel Thrift’s work on non-representational theory in geography. See, for example, Thrift

(2008).) Deleuze and Guattari (1994) helpfully offer a taxonomy of the “great

monumental types” of “compounds of sensation,” which include the various patterns of

vibration or resonance of multiple sensations (p. 168). They emphasize that artworks qua

blocs of sensation are not the same as assemblages of concepts, for their processes of

becoming are different:

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Sensory becoming is the action by which something or someone is ceaselessly

becoming-other (while continuing to be what they are), sunflower or Ahab,

whereas conceptual becoming is the action by which the common event eludes

what it is (p. 177).

These art-monuments create “universes” that “construct their own limits, their distances

and proximities, their constellations and the blocs of sensations they put into motion…

These universes are neither virtual nor actual; they are possible, the possible as aesthetic

category” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 177). O’Sullivan (2006) argues that these

possible worlds embodied in artworks are “not utopian worlds” but rather are “worlds

that are very much here and now, albeit they are worlds that must summon their own

audience into being” (p. 55).

Returning to the processes of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari elaborate that

percepts are “nonhuman landscapes of nature” and affects “nonhuman becomings of

man.” Referring to Moby Dick, they note that “Ahab really does have perceptions of the

sea, but only because he has entered into relationship with Moby Dick that makes him a

becoming-whale and forms a compound of sensations that no longer needs anyone:

ocean” (p. 169). This instantiates their larger ontology of becoming:

We are not in the world, we become with the world. Everything is vision,

becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming

zero (p. 169).

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O’Sullivan (2006) notes that this ontology of becoming can be viewed as a critique of

traditional ontology, such that while “‘Being’ is static and fixes identities for all time,

becomings are fluid and dynamic.” The world then “consists of moments of becoming,

the mingling of bodies, the meeting of forces, a constant interpenetration and

interconnection of all phenomena” (p. 56).

In his reading of Baruch Spinoza, Deleuze (1988) reconstructs a Spinozan

aesthetic philosophy of affect affiliated with his own. Referring to Spinoza’s definition of

affect as “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or

diminished, aided or restrained,” Deleuze connects affect with the body’s “passage from

one state to another” (p. 49), with different passages producing different bodily

outcomes. Ethics then is reterritorialized from a domain of morals to a domain of affects,

the study of which pursues the “organization of one’s world so as to produce joyful

encounters, or affects which are of the ‘joy-increasing type’.” Art practice is similarly

transformed into an “ethicoaesthetics” or “organization of productive encounters through

art” (O’Sullivan, 2006, pp. 41-42). Deleuze (1997b) also recognizes affects as the “dark

precursors” of concepts, such that they provide the “necessary vitality” for bodies to gain

the capability to form concepts (p. 144). O’Sullivan (2006) argues that this “terrain of the

dark precursor is the terrain of art, the production of new mixtures and new affective

assemblages.” Since affects on this Deleuzo-Spinozan account are the preconditions of

concept creation, they “are not to do with signification or ‘meaning’ as such,” bur rather

operate on a non-representational “asignifying register” (pp. 42-43). Rather than

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constituting a mode of discourse then, affects are events consisting of moments of bodily

experience (p. 44).

The Traumatized Subject

Turning next to the traumatized subject, of whom I investigate in Chapter 6, Jill

Bennett (2005) offers a non-representational aesthetics of trauma, based on an analysis of

“specific affective capacities” of art that can “exploit forms of embodied perception in

order to promote forms of critical inquiry.” This forms the basis for empathy grounded on

a feeling-for-another based not on imagining of but rather encounter with the other (p.

10). Such empathy manifests “heteropathic identification,” which is grounded on “an

openness to a mode of existence or experience beyond what is known by the self” (p. 9).

Drawing on Deleuze’s (2000) notion of “force,” in particular the “impressions that force

us to look, encounters that force us to interpret, expressions that force us to think” (p. 95),

Bennett (2005) focuses on the transactive nature of trauma-related artworks, in particular

their production of affects and how these “lead us toward a conceptual engagement” (p.

7). Art hence “is not conceptual in itself but rather an embodiment of sensation that

stimulates thought,” and it is the structure of the artwork that shapes this circuit from

affect to thought (p. 8). Writing of the opening scene of the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s

Crossing, Marco Abel (2007) identifies the Deleuzian “violence of sensation,” distinct

from the “violence of representation,” that is “rendered visible through the intensities of

the coloration of the mise-en-scène” (p. 5). Referring to Deleuze’s (2002) gloss on

Francis Bacon’s statement that he “wanted to paint the scream more than the horror” (p.

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34), Abel (2007) notes that Bacon “is more interested in painting an affect that sustains

the intensity of violence than the cause (the horror) that produced the effect (the scream)”

(p. 5). Following this post-representational trajectory, Abel approvingly describes Don

DeLillo’s non-representational aesthetic response to 9/11:

DeLillo’s style of response, his aesthetic stance, refuses to hypothesize an essence

of 9/11, toward which a subject must subsequently assume a clear position.

Instead of constituting a correct standpoint to be defended, DeLillo’s

reconfiguration of response as an aesthetic stance – as response-ability – suggests

that response is about a mood, a rhythm, or a capacity to give oneself over to the

primacy of the event (p. 217).

Abel argues that representational acts of assuming clear positions are acts of violence, for

they collapses the plurality of affect to “a set of predetermined theoretical effects,”

thereby “perpetuating the violence inherent to their own critical subjectivity” (p. 218). To

avoid such intellectual violence, Abel recommends DeLillo’s stance of deferring

judgment by “suspending the event,” that is:

Asking how the event works and what it does creates a suspenseful rhythm that

might pedagogically function to slow down the rapid speed of judgment – not in

order to escape judgment, but in order to examine the value of value itself (pp.

217-218).

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I found Abel’s notion of response-ability useful in my analysis of my affective response

to Cambodia’s powerful Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Chapter 6, and in particular,

my theorization of my somatic tendency to feel sensory affect prior to conceptualization

or representation.

Aesthetics of Distraction

Walter Benjamin’s aesthetics of distraction shares affinities with and expands on

Kant’s analytic of the sublime and Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics of affect, and which

offers for my work an important and distinct analytical perspective on the reception of

Cambodia’s places of memory, in particular Phnom Penh, which has and continues to be

a contested physical and cinematic space of violence and dreams. Observing how the

human masses receive architecture, Benjamin (1969) notes that “architecture has always

represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a

collectivity in a state of distraction” (p. 239). Such reception is achieved “by use and by

perception – or rather, by touch and sight.” This twofold appropriation is different from

that of the “attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building,” for it is habit

rather than attention that determines both optical and tactile reception of architecture (p.

240). Alan Latham (1999) explains that “with the fragmentation and shocks which are

definitive of the modern city, the distracted eye performs a very specific function,” which

is to “act as protection from the excessive stimuli within the city” (p. 464), and refers to

Zygmunt Bauman’s (1993) insight that “to live with strangers, one needs to master the art

of mismeeting,” which enables the self to “relegate the other into the background” (p.

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154). Such a distracted state enables the self to evade the noisome affects of crowds, and

offers a route of escape from the potentially crippling dissension threatened by the

sublime sensual chaos of urban life. Bauman notes that such distracted mismeetings

desocialize the “potentially social space around,” or prevent “the physical space in which

one moves from turning into a social one.” This desocialization from others is simply

achieved by abstaining “from acquiring knowledge about them,” and sending them into

the perceptual background as “featureless, faceless, empty shells of humanity” (p. 155).

However, as Latham (1999) argues, Benjamin’s notion of the aura when applied

to visual art forms like photography and film suggests the possibility of an aesthetic

reconnection of the distracted self with the overwhelming urban environment, for the

very closeness of the photographic or cinematic gaze to the object which destroys its

traditional aura, creates “a limited, but nevertheless powerful auratic experience” (pp.

468-469). As Latham glosses Benjamin, the auratic experience consists of an emphatic

mode of relation with the world, “which through the generation of a chain of

correspondences between the self and object draws a limit of the self’s omnipotence,

whilst all the while drawing the self into that world.” The modern arts of photography

and film however are capable of creating “strings of unusual and unexpected

relationships,” which in turn create a new chain of “correspondences which are capable

of reengendering by reverse effect a kind of demystified auratic experience” (pp. 467-

468). As Miriam Hansen (1987) explains, “although film as a medium enhances the

historical demolition of the aura, its particular form of indexical mediation enables it to

lend a physiognomic expression to objects, to make second nature return the look, similar

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to auratic experience in phenomena of the first” (pp. 209-210). Jürgen Habermas (1979)

elaborates that the decay of the traditional aura opens up “a whole field of surprising

correspondences between animate and inanimate nature… wherein even things encounter

us in the structures of frail intersubjectivity” (p. 46).

Relational Aesthetics

As Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) argues, key artworks in the 1990s focused on this

frail intersubjective world of humans and things, creating a genre he describes as

relational aesthetics. This genre consists of art which “takes as its theoretical horizon the

realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an

independent and private symbolic space.” While Bourriaud acknowledges that art “has

always been relational in varying degrees,” contemporary relational artworks are marked

by their thematic intensity (pp. 14-15). Relational aesthetics has emerged in juxtaposition

to the contemporary social context, which Bourriaud notes “restricts the possibilities of

inter-human relations all the more because it creates spaces planned to this end,” such

that social space has been eroded by the “general mechanisation of social functions” (pp.

16-17). Indeed, the society of the spectacle has been transformed in a society of extras,

where “we are summoned to turn into the extras of the spectacle, having been regarded as

its consumers.” Capitalism, Bourriaud explains, now enjoys “a total hold of the social

arena, so it can permit itself to stir individuals to frolic about in the free and open spaces

it has staked out” (p. 113). Relational artworks hence consist of social interstices: spaces

and moments of human encounter which suggest possible ways of being-with than those

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which actually exist, through their presentation of “free areas” and “time spans whose

rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life” which encourage “an inter-human

commerce that differs from the ‘communication zones’ that are imposed upon us” (p. 16).

Deploying Félix Guattari’s philosophical work on subjectivization, which sought to

denaturalize and reinvent subjectivity as a collective production (p. 89), Bourriaud

redefines the work of relational aesthetics as the production and staging of “devices of

existence” which ideally pursue “the production of a subjectivity that is forever self-

enriching its relationship with the world” (p. 103). Bourriaudian relationality offers for

my work a useful insight into the imaginative spaces created by contemporary

Cambodian artists and musicians who articulate their changing lifeworlds which are

refracted both by the influences of memory as well as unexpected practices of the

foreign, including those of expatriates living in Cambodia, as well as those of foreign

societies which have sheltered Cambodians fleeing their country’s eruptions of violence.

To the area studies of Cambodia I shall now turn.

The Literature of Cambodian Studies

My interest in Cambodia has been sustained by my reading of the relevant area

studies literature. First are those texts which offered for me a general overview of

Cambodian history, and for my project, historical material for further critical

interpretation. Of these texts the work of David Chandler is canonical, in particular his

History of Cambodia (2008a). Penny Edwards (2007) and John Tully (2002) explore the

French protectorate period of Cambodia, David Chandler (1991) the period ranging from

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the end of the Second World War till the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, Justin Corfield

(1994) the period of the Khmer Republic, and Craig Etcheson (1984) the rise of

Cambodian communism from its gestation in the French colonial period until the

Vietnamese occupation of the 1980s. Chandler (1996) offers an interesting selection of

his historical and historiographical work ranging from Angkor period to the post-

genocide era. Ian Mabbett and Chandler (1995) offer a useful overview of the

construction of Khmer ethnicity.

Political biographies allow for history to be traced through the careers of

particular individuals. Chandler (1999a), Milton Osborne (1994), Harish Mehta (2001)

and Harish Mehta and Julie Mehta (1999) trace developments in 20th century Cambodia

through the careers of Pol Pot, Norodom Sihanouk, Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen

respectively. Similarly, Gregor Muller (2006) explores the history of French colonial

Cambodia through the biography of the pioneer French settler Frédéric Thomas-

Caraman. Also of interest is Miroslav Nožina, Jiří Šitler, and Karel Kučera’s (2006)

exploration of the history of Czech-Cambodian relations through a biography of the

current Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni. Benny Widyono (2008) offers a useful

first-hand perspective on the internal politics of the UN mandate period in Cambodia

with his autobiographical account of his political career with the UNTAC administration.

In contrast to these biographies of personalities, Osborne (2008) traces Cambodian

history through the career of its current capital city Phnom Penh.

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A different group of texts deploy what Michael J. Shapiro (2006) categorizes as

“traditional” methodologies (p. 10) to understand Cambodia’s violent transition from the

ruins of Democratic Kampuchea. Michael Haas (1991), Nguyen-vo Thu-huong (1992),

William Shawcross (1993), Shankari Sundararaman (2000) and Widyono (2008) offer

useful glosses on the balance-of-power international politics within which occupied

Cambodia found itself embedded, and which shaped its movement from Vietnamese

occupation to United Nations mandate and beyond. Nayan Chanda (1988) reveals the un-

brotherly geo-political divisions within the Indochinese communist “brotherhood” that

led to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the retaliatory Chinese attack on

Vietnam during the Third Indochinese War of 1978-79. This geopolitical power play

remains relevant, as the struggle between China and Vietnam over Cambodia would

shape Cambodia’s international relations and domestic politics through the period of the

Vietnamese occupation until today.

While the history of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) has been

investigated by Nguyen-vo (1992) and Margaret Slocomb (2003), Evan Gottesman

(2003) benefits from his fortuitous discovery of caches of internal reports and communist

party minutes of meeting of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea/State of Cambodia

(PRK/SOC) regime which reveal the regime’s struggle against Western economic

sanctions, the continued threat from the ousted Khmer Rouge and its allied

anticommunist militias, as well as the regime’s Vietnamese “mentors”. This hitherto

secret history is relevant as the PRK/SOC regime would eventually transform itself into

the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the hegemonic party dominating the Cambodian

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democratic polity today. Gottesman also notes that the socialist regime had chosen to

deploy rather than destroy the traditional patterns of patronage and clientelism, such that

by the end of the Vietnamese occupation, the leaders of the PRK/SOC regime had

developed dense patronage networks throughout the bureaucracy, provincial

administration, and the business elite. This would allow them, as future leaders of the

CPP, to maintain political control during the period of the United Nations Transitional

Administration (UNTAC) and after. In addition, this history reveals the internal politics

of the PRK/SOC regime, in particular the skilful ascendance of Hun Sen as the

strongman of Cambodian politics, a position which he continues to enjoy today.

Following on Gottesman’s account of patronage and clientelism in the PRK/SOC

regime, David Roberts (2001) argues that democratization in post-conflict Cambodia has

been subverted by these patron/client networks, which have instead entrenched the

absolutism of the CPP regime. In a subsequent paper focusing on the three elections

between 1991 and 2002, Roberts (2003) concludes that Dankwart Rustow’s theory of

political transition offers an unsatisfactory account of Cambodia’s democratization

process. Roberts theorizes that Cambodian democratization was stable because the

political opposition accepted the norms of political behavior dictated by the hegemonic

CPP, and in return they enjoyed the rewards of clientelism.

Also focusing on clientelism, but working from the alternative theoretical

framework of the hybrid regime, Kheang Un (2005) argues that the CPP has generated

corruption by deploying and cultivating patronage politics not only with the voters but

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also with the business elites. Un (2009) extends his investigation of clientelism to the

judiciary, which has been weakened by dependence and corruption. Sophal Ear’s (2009)

analysis of the political economy of Cambodia’s dependence on international aid reveals

the complicity of the international donor community with the regime’s expansion of

corruption.

Duncan McCargo (2005) analyzes Cambodia’s transformation into a kleptocratic

authoritarian state. Under the CPP’s hegemony, with the opposition FUNCINPEC as the

royalist coalition partner legitimatizing CPP dominance, corruption became endemic

throughout the state apparatus. However corruption was not the sole prerogative of the

CPP; echoing the observation of Roberts (2003), McCargo notes that FUNCINPEC

engaged in massive corruption as well. Under his analysis, Cambodia’s transition to

liberal democracy never took off. This failure of democratization stems from Sihanouk’s

constitutional coup, as FUNCINPEC, which won the UNTAC-supervised elections, was

subordinated to the losing CPP.

Moving beyond an analysis of elite behavior, Un (2006) argues that the absence

of strong state institutions providing accountability has allowed the Cambodian

government to delay democratic consolidation and deploy violence against its opponents.

Deploying a strong structural analysis focusing on the influence of hegemonic power

structures and their relationship to external actors, Sorpong Peou (2000) argues that the

political system is a by-product of power relations between factions, and that

democratization occurs when no one faction can achieve hegemonic status. Under his

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analysis, Cambodia’s lack of democratic consolidation hence stems from the continued

hegemonic status of the CPP. Similarly, Pierre Lizée (2000) offers a balance-of-power

analysis of the behavior of the CPP and FUNCINPEC, and concludes that the Paris Peace

Accords and UNTAC failed to achieve democratization by failing to take into account the

political culture of the Cambodian factions.

In MacAlister Brown and Joseph Zasloff’s (1998) analysis, Cambodia under the

PRK/SOC regime was a failed state in need of international aid. The failure of the Paris

Peace Accords to account for the transitional period after the 1993 elections allowed for

Sihanouk's constitutional coup and the de facto negation of FUNCINPEC's electoral

victory. The subsequent Kingdom of Cambodia was a quasi-democracy, and it became an

authoritarian democracy with Hun Sen's July 1997 coup. However, their choice to ignore

the evidence of FUNCINPEC’s plans for a coup in the events of July 1997 biases their

analysis, as does their uncritical valorization of opposition leader Sam Rainsy which fails

to consider his ethnic chauvinism and rhetoric of anti-Vietnamese xenophobia.

Michael Vickery (2007) offers a counter-narrative of the history of Cambodia’s

post-conflict transition. Under his analysis, the American-dominated UNTAC primarily

sought regime change instead of democratization, as the PRK/SOC regime was seen

being as too friendly to communist Vietnam. Under the rules established by the Paris

Peace Accords and UNTAC, FUNCINPEC did not win enough seats in the 1993

elections to be able to immediately form a government, and as such the CPP was within

its rights to rule during the 3-month post-election transitional period. Sihanouk’s

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constitutional coup that established the CPP-FUNCINPEC coalition hence benefitted

FUNCINPEC more than it did the CPP. His analysis of the violence of July 1997 also

differs from that of Brown and Zasloff: the CPP successfully staged a countercoup in

response to FUNCINPEC’s attempt at a coup d’état.

In addition, Vickery (2007) offers an analysis of contemporary developments in

Cambodia, in particular the strengthening of the CPP’s relationship with Washington.

Hun Sen skillfully acceded to the Bush administration’s foreign policy demands: for

example, he supported the American War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, and declared

that no American troops would be sent by Cambodia to the International Criminal Court.

In return, the Bush administration offered support to the CPP, for example, by

imprisoning and putting on trial the anticommunist Cambodian-American leader of the

Cambodian Freedom Fighters (CFF) militia for attempting a coup d’état against Hun Sen.

Ironically, while UNTAC’s attempt at regime change failed, the CPP has since willingly

transformed itself from a socialist to a predatory neo-liberal regime.

This neoliberal predation can be observed in the realm of political ecology, where,

according to the watchdog nongovernmental organization Global Witness (2009), corrupt

high-level military and state officials are illegally selling off concessions to timber,

mining and petroleum companies owned by the regime’s political and military elite.

Global Witness (2007) notes that the Seng Keang Company, Cambodia’s largest logging

syndicate, which has been implicated in illegal logging in protected forest reserves, is

controlled by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s family. Philippe Le Billon (2007) notes that the

36

commodification of and contestation over forest resources since the 1990s created spaces

for political resistance, most notably of the Khmer Rouge after it withdrew from the UN

peace process; and subsequently, for the reconfiguration of patronage networks, with

existing patrons in the CPP regime extending their economic interests to these extractive

industries, as documented in Global Witness’ reports. Ruth Bottomley (2007) reveals the

heterogeneity of responses from local villages to the encroachments of the logging

syndicates. While some villagers have responded with resistance, others have cooperated

with the logging teams in exchange for economic reward. Kheang Un & Sokbunthoeun

So (2009) argue that the corrupt misallocation of natural resources for political patronage

and clientelism will not only increase income inequality, but will also further delay

democratic consolidation.

With respect to the regional political economy, Maria Diokno and Nguyen Van

Chinh (2006) offer a useful introduction to the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB)

Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) project which effectively repositions Cambodia

within the riparian Mekong geopolitical region (Asia Development Bank, 2009).

Armando Malay, Jr. (2006) and Vatthana Pholsena (2006) trace the historical

development and political consequences of Indochina qua colonial geographic concept.

Nguyen Phuong Binh (2006), He Shengda (2006), Doung Chanto Sisowath (2006), and

Mya Than (2006) offer perspectives on the geopolitical challenges of economic

cooperation Cambodia and her neighbors face within the GMS project.

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The next group of texts offers anthropological analyses. These texts are of great

utility for my project with their insights into Cambodian psychology and culture. By

supplementing these insights with aesthetic and political theory, I seek to illuminate the

aforementioned political issues, including genocide justice and Cambodia’s deep history

of violence. Alexander Hinton (2002) attempts a reading of the Cambodian genocide in

terms of the tropes of contamination and purification. The subsequent Hinton (2005)

offers a deeper investigation of the social and psychological causes of the genocide.

Under the Khmer Rouge, enemies of the state, in particular the Vietnamese and their

Khmer sympathizers, were demonized as race enemies, and this dehumanization

legitimized acts of violence against them. Hinton’s analyses remain relevant given the

disturbing persistence of violence and racism in Cambodian political culture today.

Simon Springer (2009) however warns that discourse focusing on Cambodia’s “culture of

violence” can be deployed by neoliberal institutions as a justification for “civilizing” the

“savage” Cambodian other. His Cambodia's Neoliberal Order (2010) explores the violent

geography of the expansion of neoliberalism across Cambodia.

Voicing racialized fears of the threat of Vietnamization on the Khmer body-

politic, the Khmer Buddhist Research Center (1986) offers a glimpse of the polarized

decades of the Cambodian civil war. Compiled in the resistance Coalition of the

Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian

border, the essays in this anthology also voice a desire to replace the atheist Vietnamese

occupation regime with a Khmer-Buddhist government. However, as Judy Ledgerwood

(2008) points out, the top leadership of the PRK/SOC regime publicly celebrated in 1990,

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a year after the 1989 withdrawal of the Vietnamese occupation army, the Buddhist rituals

of the Khmer Water Festival, distancing themselves from the prior decade of Vietnamese

occupation, and asserting both their Khmer and Buddhist identities.

Penny Edwards (1996) reveals the processes of othering and dehumanization

dating from the French colonial period which have been deployed by Cambodian

politicians to legitimate violence against targeted Khmer and non-Khmer groups, in

particular the ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese. Jay Jordens (1996) highlights how

UNTAC failed to protect the Vietnamese from racist propaganda and violence from the

CGDK factions, in particular the Khmer Rouge. Benny Widyono (2008) corroborates

Jordens’ analysis with his first-person account of UNTAC’s failure to prevent a Khmer

Rouge massacre of an ethnic Vietnamese fishing village. In her analysis of the 1998

general elections, Caroline Hughes (2007) observes that the opposition FUNCINPEC and

Sam Rainsy Party both engaged in anti-Vietnamese propaganda, claiming that the ruling

CPP functioned as a Vietnamese puppet regime, and distancing the CPP from the

electorate, who were indentified with the Khmer race. Focusing on a different ethnic

minority, the Brao in the border region between Cambodia and Laos, Ian Baird (2010)

explores how they have reterritorialized this international border from a state-imposed

barrier to a resource that can be deployed to resist or reduce state control.

Amitav Ghosh (1998) offers a poignant record of his journey in Cambodia to

interview personalities like Chea Samy, Pol Pot’s sister-in-law, and Khieu Seng Kim,

Democratic Kampuchean President Khieu Samphan’s brother. Ghosh interweaves this

39

personal narrative with an account of King Sisowath’s royal embassy to the 1906

Exposition Coloniale in Marseille, and short circuits these narratives with a psychological

explanation of Democratic Kampuchea’s excesses: the proximity of Pol Pot and other

Khmer Rouge leaders to King Sisowath’s Royal Court had injected a racial and

nationalistic strain to the development of their socialist ideology. Ghosh’s essay, in

particular, his account of traditional Cambodia’s encounter with the modernity of France,

forms the starting point of John Marston’s (2002) analysis of Democratic Kampuchea’s

peculiar vision of modernity, and of the deadly mass mobilization the regime undertook

to realize it. To realize its radical vision for Cambodia, the Democratic Kampuchea

regime deployed policing apparatuses to identify and eliminate those it perceived to be

internal threats. Chandler (1999b) and Chandler (2002) offer in-depth studies of one such

apparatus, the infamous S-21 secret prison, within which an estimated 20,000 men,

women and children were interrogated, tortured and killed. Through his analyses the

paranoid fantasies of the regime are revealed. While S-21 was the apex of Democratic

Kampuchea’s network of security centers, there also existed lower-level security centers

within this network, some of which executed more prisoners than S-21. Meng-Try Ea

(2005) explores the security system in Democratic Kampuchea’s Southwest Zone, whose

prisons killed over 153,000 prisoners (pp. x-xi).

Ian Harris (2005) offers an authoritative survey and analysis of the evolution of

Buddhism in Cambodia from the time of Angkor to its reemergence after its near-

destruction at the hands of the Democratic Kampuchea regime. Marston (2004) and

Marston (2008) reveal the transnational circuits connecting diaspora Cambodians to

40

religious cults within Cambodia, while Teri Yamada (2004) analyzes the establishment of

a Cambodian spirit cult within the Cambodian diaspora community of Long Beach,

California. In a similar vein, Kathryn Poethig (2004) examines the transnational

connections of the Dhammayātrā, Cambodia’s Buddhist peace walk. Also writing of

diaspora experiences, Frank Smith (1994) offers an intriguing examination of the

affective responses of Cambodian peasant refugees to popular movies and television

programming in the United States, while Usha Welaratna (1993) offers personal

narratives from genocide survivors among the Cambodian diaspora in the United States.

Focusing on a particular Buddhist monastery, Alexandra Kent (2009) reveals how

ecclesiastical discipline has evolved to meet contemporary demands of power and desire.

Shifting the critical gaze to the winners in Cambodia’s neoliberal transformation,

Andrew Marshall (2010) focuses on the ostentatious offspring of contemporary

Cambodia’s nouveau riche, and their path to wealth through the mechanisms of

entrepreneurship and corruption. Also shifting the critical gaze, Mona Lilja (2008)

focuses on gender politics, in particular the ascendance of Cambodian women to

positions of political power. Prior to the genocide, women in Cambodia’s traditionally

patriarchal polity enjoyed strong household economic power but almost no political

power outside the household. The Khmer Rouge genocide created powerful shared

memories of violence and survival among the survivors, and these shared experiences

and memories politicized Cambodia’s traditionally passive and apolitical women. In

addition, the reconstruction of pre-genocide patronage networks helped many women

ascend to positions of political power. As there were more female than male survivors of

41

the genocide, many women took over the positions vacated by deceased male relatives in

their families’ patronage networks. Lilja (2009) develops by line of analysis by revealing

how women politicians in Cambodia have deployed globalized images of non-traditional

political leaders to enhance their political legitimacy.

The next group of texts circulates around the theme of genocide justice, which is

one of the foci of my project. Michael Vickery (1984) and Ben Kiernan (2002) offer

authoritative surveys of Democratic Kampuchea’s human toll. The papers in Kiernan

(1993) extend this line of analysis with a broad exploration of the political ramifications

of the Khmer Rouge’s continued involvement in Cambodian politics after the fall of

Democratic Kampuchea. Nic Dunlop (2006) describes his celebrated identification in

1999 of Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Comrade Duch, the notorious commandant of S-

21 and the head of the Khmer Rouge secret police, and who is currently on trial at the

Khmer Rouge Tribunal for crimes against humanity. Of particular interest for my project,

especially in Chapters 6 and 7, is Dunlop’s discussion of the politicization of Cambodia’s

genocide memorials, in particular the Tuol Sleng genocide museum.

Susan Cook (2002) argues that the process of documentation of the Cambodian

genocide offers useful lessons for Rwanda. Cook (2006) subsequently presents an

anthology of research consisting of comparative analyses of genocide, including, for

example, the discursive and ideological roots of the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides.

Rachel Hughes’ (2006) study of the Choeung Ek Center for Genocide Crimes, a key

contribution in this anthology, reveals how the institutionalized memory of the Khmer

42

Rouge’s crimes functioned to justify the Vietnamese occupation and the rule of the PRK

regime. Following a similar line, the papers in Kiernan (2008) provide for a comparative

analysis of genocide justice in Cambodia and East Timor, while Kiernan (2007) situates

the Cambodian genocide as just one event in the global history of genocide and

extermination.

Craig Etcheson (2005) focuses on Cambodia’s political culture of impunity, and

argues that it stems from the three decades of absence of genocide justice. Pol Pot and his

fellow architects of the Cambodian genocide escaped justice for such a long time because

of domestic and international opposition to a Khmer Rouge tribunal, and even though this

tribunal has now been established, the politicization of genocide justice persists today.

Parallel to this politicization of genocide justice across the constellation of Cambodia’s

domestic and international political actors is the tragic politics of forgetting among

Cambodia’s youth, a significant number of whom are disbelieving or unaware of the

existence of the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Mneesha Gellman (2008) investigates the process of conflict resolution in

Cambodia, and identifies two levels: first is the elite level of retributive justice with the

Khmer Rouge Tribunal as its venue; the second is the grassroots level of peace-building,

with the constellation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as its venue. Gellman

offers a case study of the work of an NGO, the Khmer Institute of Democracy, and

proposes Buddhist ritual as a means to make peace-building relevant to the Cambodian

masses. However this proposal ignores Cambodia’s ethnic and religious minorities, who

43

are also in need of peace-building. For example, as documented in Ysa Osman (2002 and

2006), Cambodia’s Cham Muslim minority was significantly targeted by the Khmer

Rouge for ethnic cleansing. The Cham and other minorities continue to suffer land

grabbing and other human rights violations today.

The last group of texts I wish to consider deploy non-traditional methodologies, in

particular genre analysis. These were of great inspiration for my project, and I seek to

inform these older methods of analysis with my deployment of aesthetic and political

theory. In a good example of Paul Veyne’s (1988) account of the reconstruction of truth

from myth, David Chandler (2008c) famously reconstructs 19th century Cambodian

perceptions of order through a literary analysis of Khmer folktales and chronicles. Hinton

(2008) follows Chandler’s example with an in-depth analysis of the epic Khmer poem

Tum Teav to illuminate the violence and moral disorder of Democratic Kampuchea;

Edwards (2008) offers a comparative examination of European and Khmer folktales,

highlighting the binary distinction between the forest and human settlement in the Khmer

imagination; and Ledgerwood (1994) examines Khmer gender symbolism through an

analysis of a Khmer folktale.

In terms of source material, George Chigas (2005) offers a useful translation and

analysis of Tum Teav, while Muriel Carrison (1987) and Anthony Milne (1972) offer

translations of a selection of Khmer folktales. Frank Stewart and Sharon May (2004)

offer a selection of texts from the 1950s and 60s, some of whose authors were murdered

during the genocide, as well as a selection of contemporary texts, including lyrics from

44

the Cambodian rapper praCh’s Dalama (2004). Karen Fisher-Nguyen (1994) offers a

reading of traditional Khmer proverbs, while John Marston (1994) and Henri Locard

(2004) offer analyses of metaphors and slogans deployed by the Democratic Kampuchea

regime.

At the distant end of calendrical time is the 13th century Chinese diplomat Zhou

Daguan’s (2007) celebrated record of his diplomatic mission to the Angkorean court of

Indravarman III, which offers primary source material for possible continuities and

discontinuities between the age of Angkor and the contemporary era. Writing of more

recent history, Tauch Chhuong (1994) describes daily life in northwestern Cambodia

under Siamese colonial rule, Carol Livingston (1996) and Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait

and Andrew Thomson (2004) offer first-hand accounts of life in Cambodia under

UNTAC, and Amit Gilboa (1998) infamously offers a first-hand perspective of the

depravities of expatriate life in 1990s Phnom Penh. Teri Yamada (2009) offers a useful

history of Cambodian short fiction, of which her Virtual Lotus (2002) provides a short

selection.

One large subset of personal narratives is that of the genocide survivor memoir.

These offer useful source material for the analysis of first-person narratives of life in

Democratic Kampuchea and the Cambodian diaspora. This growing collection of texts

include: May (1986), Szymusiak (1986), Criddle and Teeda (1987), Pin and Man (1987),

Sien (1994), Dith and DePaul (1997), Clark (1998), U (1998), Lafreniere (2000), Ly

(2000), Streed (2002), Lunn (2004), U and McCullough (2005), Lim (2006), Affonço

45

(2007) and Pa and Mortland (2008). Of particular interest is Bizot (2002), primarily

because of the narrator’s unforgettable encounter with the aforementioned Comrade

Duch.

Chapter Outline

This dissertation will flow through the following sections and chapters. The 3

chapters in Part I: Becomings, track a multiplicity of modes of becoming as witnessed

by myself of the constellation of objects I identify as Cambodia. Chapter 1: Teaching

Philosophy in Cambodia: Ontology, History, Praxis situates my positionality as a

former educator in Cambodia, and maps the tripartite becomings of myself qua educator,

of my students, and of the Cambodian education system itself from the pre-colonial to its

contemporary neoliberal manifestation. This chapter will deploy the Rancièrean notion of

pedagogical liberation to analyze my students’ auto-emancipation as political subjects.

This line of becoming of my students shaped my line of becoming as a pedagogue, and

was in turn shaped by the tragic line of becoming of Cambodia’s education system. My

discussion of the tragedy of Cambodia’s education system will be expanded in Chapter

2: The Third-Worlding of Cambodia’s account of Cambodia’s tragic line of becoming

into a Third World state. Chapter 3: The Gaze and the Tain: Cambodia and the

Other will step back from these overviews of lines of becoming and instead examine one

important mode of becoming manifest in Cambodian history: the poietic construction of

the self through fantasy.

46

The 4 chapters in Part II: Cambodia under the Aesthetic Gaze offer a selection

of aesthetic readings of Cambodia’s tragic history. Chapter 4: Spirits in the Material

World: A Cambodian Hauntology reads Cambodia’s history of violence through the

lenses of Derrida’s notion of hauntology and the Khmer prei/srok binary, and Chapter 5:

Cambodian Literature as Heterotopia: the Politics of Aesthetics reads Cambodian

literature through the aesthetic lenses offered by Foucault and Rancière. In Chapter 6:

Breakfast with the Dictator: Memory, Atrocity and Affect I deploy Deleuze and

Guattari’s aesthetic theory of affect to illuminate my personal journey across Cambodia’s

memorials of historical trauma, and in Chapter 7: Reassembling Memory: Rithy

Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine I provide a re-reading of Panh’s

celebrated documentary in the wake of the recent conviction in the Extraordinary

Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia of the commandant of the Khmer Rouge’s S-21

prison. I will close this chapter, and the dissertation, with a reading of Cambodia’s

precariousness as an existential condition constituted by its tragic history.

In the field of Southeast Asian Studies, the political study of Cambodia has been

sorely neglected in comparison with her neighbors. The analyses which have been done

are methodologically traditional, and while of utility, contain lacunae regarding

Cambodia’s libidinal circuits of desire, which are of importance given their productive

potential to shape history. I hope the analyses in this dissertation will offer a significant

contribution towards traversing these lacunae and in the process illuminate hitherto

invisible aspects of the area study of Cambodia.

47

PART I:

BECOMINGS

48

CHAPTER 1: TEACHING PHILOSOPHY IN CAMBODIA:

ONTOLOGY, HISTORY, PRAXIS

Introduction: Coming to Cambodia

In August 2005 I travelled to Phnom Penh, Cambodia to begin my teaching

career. I would go on to spend the next three years lecturing philosophy at Pannasastra

University. I will explore in this chapter this period in my teaching career, and how it

shaped and continues to shape my pedagogical philosophy. First, inspired by a key

intervention in my philosophy classroom, I will deploy Jacques Rancière’s politics of

aesthetics to explain my students’ bold action, and Manuel DeLanda’s social theory to

construct a neo-Deleuzian understanding of my students and myself as forming a semi-

stable assemblage of spatiotemporal haecceities. Second, I will focus on the

incommensurability of mine and my students’ ethical understandings of the duty not to

cheat. I will situate this as the result of the tragic historical trajectory of the political

economy of Cambodian education, which has fostered an ethic of mutual care among the

students which serves to protect them in a predatory environment of bureaucratic

corruption. Finally I will reflect on the possibility of an emancipatory education in

Cambodia in relation to Rancière’s reading of the 18th century educator Joseph Jacotot’s

radical program of egalitarian intellectual emancipation. This chapter will hence reveal

not only my positionality vis-à-vis Cambodia, but also a tripartite becoming: of myself

qua educator; of my students qua political beings; and finally, of the Cambodian

education system.

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When I started work at Pannasastra University, I was armed with a M.A. in

Philosophy from the National University of Singapore, and I imagined myself imprinting

on the blank slates of my Cambodian students the philosophical concepts that had so

enlivened me during my years of study. This naïve pedagogical notion was quickly laid

to rest, however, in the second week of my Introduction to World Philosophy course,

when, after a lecture on Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment, my baffled

students decided to speak with me on the appropriateness of my selected material. Having

come from an educational system where such boldness was unheard of, I welcomed this

invitation to dialogue. The students informed me that they had to work multiple jobs in

order to pay the expensive school fees charged by the university, and as such they desired

learning outcomes that were of as much value as the effort they had expended to receive

the opportunity to be in my classroom. While esoteric arguments in the recent philosophy

of language were of interest to me, they sought philosophical insights that could enrich

their everyday lives. Hence, while they were unable to appreciate how an understanding

of Putnam’s theory of semantic externalism could improve their job prospects, they could

appreciate how an understanding of better known philosophical works like Plato’s

Republic or the existentialist philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre

could raise their cultural capital in the desirable job sector of international and non-

governmental organizations.

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The Revolt on the Aventine

While this sort of classroom intervention is relatively commonplace, it altered my

pedagogical development. In terms of the aesthetico-political philosophy of Jacques

Rancière, their intervention was political, as these students were contesting the

distribution of the sensible I had unthinkingly imposed in the regime of visibility of the

classroom. As Rancière (2006) explains, aesthetics consists of the “delimitation of spaces

and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously

determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience” (p. 13). Under

this conception of aesthetics, Rancière (2011) argues that politics “reconfigures the

distribution of the perceptible,” such that:

It introduces new objects and subjects onto the common stage. It makes visible

what was invisible, it makes audible as speaking beings those who were

previously heard only as noisy animals (p. 4).

As noted in the Introduction, Rancière glosses the revolt on the Aventine as a

redistribution of the existing sensible which constituted the plebeians as these “noisy

animals” (Rancière & Panagia, 2000, p. 116), and the plebeians, by mimicking the

patricians, reconstituted themselves as “speaking beings sharing the same properties as

those who would deny them these” (Rancière, 1999, p. 24). In the traditional Singaporean

classroom which I was familiar with, the regime of visibility accorded the teacher the

status of the Master who was expected to be heard and obeyed by his students, who in

51

turn were expected to only be seen and not heard. It was this distribution of the sensible

that my Cambodian students chose to reject.

Another Rancièrean analogy with my students can be identified in his reading of

Herodotus’ account of the Scythians’ customary practice of blinding their slaves.

Rancière notes that this “normal order of things” was disrupted when “a generation of

sons was born to the slaves and raised with their eyes open,” with the consequence that

they arrived at “the conclusion that there was no particular reason why they should be

slaves” (Rancière, 1999, p. 12). The analogy with my students is clear: like the clear-

sighted sons of the blind Scythian slaves, they did not see any particular reason why they

had to remain silent, and as such, accorded themselves the capacity to speak. And speak

they did, informing me in respectful but firm tones of the impractical nature of the

lessons I had offered thus far, and of their desire to learn philosophical concepts that they

could easily deploy to improve their material lives, in particular their jobs and careers.

Thus chastened by my students’ intervention, I adapted my syllabus to meet their needs,

while still achieving my goal of providing for them a good introduction to world

philosophy, and at the end of the term my student evaluations were strong enough to

warrant the university to upgrade me from a part-time to a full-time lecturing position.

This incident, within which my students asserted themselves as partners in dialogue,

changed and continues to change my view of how the classroom should be regarded.

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The Classroom as Assemblage

At the time, having recently completed a M.A. dissertation on Martin Buber, I

thought of the incident in Buberian terms: I read the students’ intervention as a genuine

call from the Other, and recognized that I had to reconfigure my connection with them as

an I-Thou relationship of respect rather than an instrumentalist I-It relationship. On

hindsight, a more appropriate model of the incident would be Levinas’ notion of the self

being afflicted by the other (Lingis, 1991, p. xxxi). I also thought about the students

themselves in terms of the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Their appeal to

me to provide relevant philosophical material prompted me to recognize them in terms of

the Sartrean Being-for-itself, the temporal ecstasis split between the facticity of what they

already were, and the transcendence of what they had yet to become. However, just as the

Heideggerian Dasein is characterized by its thrownness into the world, my students, for

whatever reason of the contingency of fate, had been born into a severely dysfunctional

post-conflict society, and this realization strengthened my resolve to equip them with the

best conceptual tools I could find to enable them to identify and achieve the best possible

futures in their individual horizons of transcendence.

Three years later, after I had begun my study at the University of Hawaii at

Manoa, this early understanding of the student qua temporal ecstasis would evolve with

my reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) treatment of haecceities, which

they characterize as the mode of individuation that consists “entirely of relations of

movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.”

53

Indeed, these “concrete individuations” possess “a status of their own and direct the

metamorphosis of things and subjects” (p. 261). As Deleuze and Guattari elaborate, each

haecceity is marked by its “spatiotemporal coordinates”:

You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slowness between unformed

particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a

season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration) – a climate, a wind, a fog, a

swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity) (p. 262).

This spatiotemporal aspect of the haecceity is necessary, such that the individual cannot

be considered apart from it:

This should be read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o’clock. The

becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o’clock is

this animal! This animal is this place! (p. 263).

Applying Deleuze and Guattari’s insight to the classroom, it is not just that my

students were temporal ecstases; they were also completely individuated according to

their spatiotemporal histories. Considering my students from this ontological perspective,

it is truly remarkable that these individuals, travelling on their individual paths through

time and space, found their way not just to Pannasastra University, but indeed to my

classroom at regular intervals each week each semester. While this is of course true for

any classroom, I found it to be strikingly remarkable with regard to this classroom. The

54

complexities of the conditions of possibility that allowed those 30 students to be in that

fateful Introduction to World Philosophy class that day are mind-boggling. Consider, for

instance, the bare fact that for them to have been in that classroom they or their parents

had to have survived not just the Khmer Rouge genocide but also the subsequent

deprivations of the decade of Vietnamese occupation. Their participation in my

classroom, and indeed, my participation as well, hence were completely contingent

accidents of history. This contingency would make my classroom what Deleuze and

Guattari describe as an assemblage. As Manuel DeLanda (2006) glosses, the relations

that hold between the components of an assemblage are “contingently obligatory” rather

than necessary, such that “a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it

and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different” (pp. 10-

11). This is certainly true of my classes at Pannasastra University; I would encounter

groups of students from that first Introduction to World Philosophy class across the

subsequent classes that I taught over my three years there, and the interactions of these

students within these different classes were distinctly different from one another.

DeLanda’s account of territorialization is particularly important for explaining

what happens in the classroom. As he notes,

The concept of territorialization must be first of all understood literally. Face-to-

face conversations always occur in a particular place (a street corner, a pub, a

church), and once the participants have ratified one another a conversation

acquires well-defined spatial boundaries. Similarly, many interpersonal networks

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define communities inhabiting spatial territories, whether ethnic neighbourhoods

or small towns, with well-defined borders. Organizations, in turn, usually operate

in particular buildings, and the jurisdiction of their legitimate authority usually

coincides with the physical boundaries of those buildings (p. 13).

When a particular assemblage of haecceities (the students and their teacher) gathers in a

physical room at the assigned time in the class schedule, this space is thereby

territorialized into a classroom. The progression of lessons across the semester constitutes

a non-spatial territorializing process insofar as it increases the “internal homogeneity” of

the classroom assemblage, by increasingly focusing the mental attention of the students

across time on the course material (p. 13). This pedagogical colonization of mental time-

space, as my students reminded me, is a relational process: for them to will their attention

to focus on the material, I first had to find material that they found valuable enough to

focus on. Their understanding of value was pragmatic, based on what would enable them

to achieve a better life. Pedagogy hence became a process through which I connected my

students with new knowledge and ideas, or through which I forged for them new

connections between existing knowledge and ideas, and my students expected these

epistemic connections to enable them to expand their horizons of transcendence to

include realizable futures of material prosperity. I shall now turn to the internal dynamics

within the classroom assemblage, focusing on the assemblage’s transformative effect on

the behavior of its members.

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The Fat Man and the Unprepared Friend

With the internal homogenizing tendencies of territorialization, assemblages are

known to reinforce or amplify shared attitudes or behaviors. While an Alcoholics

Anonymous meeting is the polar opposite of a bar, both assemblages function as

resonance machines, the former amplifying attitudes and behaviors supporting

abstinence, and the latter amplifying attitudes and behaviors supporting alcohol

consumption (Koerner, 2010). Similarly, the classroom assemblage can function as a

resonance machine, amplifying attitudes and behaviors among the students. I first

observed such amplification in my Introduction to Ethics class, when I asked my students

to resolve various moral dilemmas using the ethical theories they had been taught. One

dilemma which generated a significant amount of class discussion was that of the Fat

Man and the Impending Doom:

A fat man leading a group of people out of a cave on a coast is stuck in the mouth

of that cave. In a short time high tide will be upon them, and unless he is unstuck,

they will all be drowned except the fat man, whose head is out of the cave. There

seems no way to get the fat man loose without using dynamite which will

inevitably kill him; but if they do not use it everyone will drown. What should

they do? (Grassian, 1992, p. 6).

Deploying different moral calculi including Kantian Ethics, Utilitarianism, Virtue and

Buddhist Ethics, the students came up with different moral prescriptions. While a few

57

were inclined to kill the fat man with dynamite, a surprising majority opted to keep their

hands clean but drown in the process. One group came up with the happy compromise of

persuading the fat man to commit suicide, thereby allowing the rest to escape without

guilt, but I remained intrigued by the sacrificial choice of the majority, which would be

echoed in another dilemma I posed which also provoked much discussion: the

Unprepared Friend and the Examination:

You are sitting for an examination. When the teacher is not looking, your friend

asks you for the answers. You know that your friend has not prepared for the

examination, and if you don’t help him, he will fail. What should you do?

My students dutifully noted that the Kantian categorical imperative would

prescribe rejecting the friend, and that Utilitarianism would probably prescribe the same.

However, they became conflicted when applying Virtue Ethics. Many noted that, in

opposition to the virtue of Honesty, the virtue of Friendship would require them to help

their friend. Buddhist Ethics clinched the deal for many students, who insisted that the

Buddhist virtue of Compassion demanded that they help their hypothetical friend cheat.

The incommensurable prescriptions of these moral calculi reflect Slavoj Žižek’s (2006)

notion of the parallax gap, “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between

which no neutral common ground is possible” (p. 4), as well as Jean-François Lyotard’s

(1988) differend, the conflict that “cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of

judgment applicable to both arguments” (see also MacIntyre, 1991, pp. 109-110). While

some concluded from this exercise that rejecting the friend’s request was the right thing

58

to do, many were convinced that giving the friend the examination answers was what was

demanded by morality. Indeed, they kept to this conclusion even when I pointed out that

by helping their friend they risked getting caught for cheating, with its attendant

disciplinary action. As with their response to the earlier dilemma of the Fat Man, my

students recognized personal sacrifice as the inevitable price of doing the right thing.

As their educator, I was perturbed by my students’ enthusiastic ethical embrace of

cheating, and by the unsettling effect of amplification the class discussion had on this

attitude. However, as I learned more about the sad state of Cambodian education, I came

to understand that this shared positive attitude on cheating was the result of a protective

mechanism which the Cambodian student community had generated to protect itself

against the predatory culture of graft in the educational bureaucracy. In an environment

where corrupt teachers demanded bribes from students to pass examinations, the

victimized students had evolved a self-help culture through which they would help one

another pass examinations, thereby bypassing the corrupt teachers. And, as I noted

earlier, they accepted the risk of personal sacrifice for achieving what they perceived as

the ethical good. While the corruption the students challenged is arguably expected of

Cambodia’s dysfunctional post-conflict society, the conditions of possibility from which

this situation emerged arose long before the genocidal years of the Khmer Rouge

revolution. To this history of the political economy of Cambodian education I shall now

turn. As we shall see, education in Cambodia has never had a golden age.

59

The Political Economy of Cambodian Education

The 13th century Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan’s (2007) celebrated record of his

diplomatic mission to the Angkorean court of Indravarman III offers us the earliest

glimpse that we have of education in Cambodia, informing us that “when young boys

from lay families go to school, they all start by being trained by Buddhist monks” (p. 53).

As David Ayres (2000) notes, Zhou was unable to inform us of the details of Angkorean

monastic education, including “who was taught, what was taught, where, what materials

were used, and, importantly, how the provision of education diverged between the

different social strata in society” (p. 12). The French colonial administrator Louis

Manipoud would provide, centuries later, the next eyewitness report on traditional

Cambodian monastic education, describing Buddhist monks as “not only the agents of the

moral and religious truth,” but also “the guardians of total secular knowledge of their

time,” which Ayres observes shares “striking parallels” with Zhou Daguan’s

observations:

The bonzes taught the children to read sacred Cambodian texts, such as the satras,

instructed them in the precepts of Buddhism, informed them about Cambodian

oral and literary traditions, and provided them with the opportunity to develop

vocational skills, such as carpentry, that could be easily associated with their rural

lifestyle (pp. 12-13).

60

Education in pre-colonial Cambodia for the majority hence mainly consisted of the

religious training novices received at the wat, which meant widespread illiteracy among

the peasantry. While the peasants learned through oral transmission their cultural

heritage, including “the country’s proverbs, chbab (didactic poems), epics such as the

Reamker (local version of the Ramayana story), and the Gatiloke (folk tales),” most did

not learn the skills of reading or writing (Ayres, 2000, p. 13). The chbab in particular

served as “the principal textbooks of pre-colonial Cambodia,” instructing the students on

how to “confront, evade, or better the harsh conditions of everyday life,” for example by

maintaining good relations with social patrons (Chandler, 1996, p. 56).

Under the French colonial administration, this traditional education system was

reformed, with the temple schools being modernized (Ayres, 2000, p. 24). However this

should be interpreted in the context of the economic exploitation Cambodia suffered

under the French. Not only did Cambodians pay “the highest per capita taxes in Indo-

China,” French Cambodge’s natural bounty was diverted to develop the export economy

of French Cochin-China (Chandler, 1996, pp. 298-299). Evan Gottesman (2003) notes

that the “confiscation of large percentages of rice harvests also created a level of rural

indebtedness not previously known in Cambodia, which, in turn, forced Khmer peasants

into a state of increased dependence on Chinese moneylenders” (p. 15). This economic

exploitation was supported by an education policy designed to “engender indigenous

loyalty” to the French. By providing the Cambodian peasantry with a token education at

reformed temple schools, the French “could argue that they were providing people with a

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return on their taxes and possible with a means of access to the administrative corps,

considered a gateway to the Cambodian elite” (Ayres, 2000, p. 26).

The colonial education policy was not designed for the actual development of the

peasantry: the modernized temple schools suffered poor teaching standards with lax

attendance by the students, and little investment was made by the colonial regime to

expand the provision of the Franco-Khmer primary schools which offered the full

primary curriculum. In 1938-39, only 294 out of the 60,000 enrolled in the primary

schools passed the colonial Certificate of Complementary Primary Studies. The French

only offered full secondary education in 1935, and only in one school; students pursuing

higher education had to move to Saigon, Hanoi or Paris (Ayres, 2000, p. 25). Indeed,

viewing their Cambodian subjects as “lazy and simple,” the French “brought in

Vietnamese bureaucrats to staff the civil service in Phnom Penh,” hence depriving the

Cambodians of the opportunities and experience necessary to develop their administrative

knowledge and skills. The French did set up the École cambodgienne in Paris in 1886 to

train the progeny of Cambodia’s elite to replace the Vietnamese in the colonial

bureaucracy of French Cambodge, but this turned out to be a failure, with the graduates

becoming “social misfits” lacking in practical knowledge. Similar projects to train Khmer

civil servants failed to produce a sufficient number of graduates (Edwards, 2007, pp. 74-

77).

Following Cambodia’s independence in 1953, Norodom Sihanouk had a firm

hand in guiding his kingdom’s development. As we shall see in Chapter 2, his economic

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reforms failed, affecting his reform plans for the education system. Secretary of State for

Education Chau Seng introduced a policy of Cambodianization of the primary

curriculum, removing the focus on French subjects, and emphasized subjects related to

Cambodia as well as science and technology. However this new curriculum was a

mismatch with Cambodia’s developmental priorities, in particular agricultural

productivity (Ayres, 2000, p. 44). Educational reform was also adversely affected by the

overexpansion of educational facilities, in particular tertiary institutions. Sihanouk

wanted to ensure that “students could obtain almost all higher education within

Cambodia,” but he “exhibited little concern with how the new institutions were to be

financed, staffed, and resourced.” This expansion not only contradicted UNESCO’s

recommendation of “sustainable” educational expansion, it also contradicted the

government’s own five-year plan which recommended that “expansion be stabilized in

the interests of maintaining educational quality.” However, it was precisely educational

quality that was sacrificed in the expansion. The fiscal crisis led to teachers teaching

increasing numbers of students with reduced resources (pp. 48-50). Ayres cites the

example of a secondary school teacher who wanted to conduct science experiments:

When it was realized that the school did not have the basic equipment to conduct

these experiments, her task was reduced to illustrating on a blackboard how the

experiments would have appeared if, indeed, they could have been conducted (p.

51).

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As mentioned, the Sangkum era witnessed a mismatch of education with

employment. As William Easterly (2002) notes, educational growth does not

automatically lead to economic growth (pp. 72-74). Growth in education will lead to

economic growth only when it is accompanied with the appropriate investments in the

economy:

High skills are productive if they go together with high-tech machinery,

adaptation of advanced technology, and other investments that happen in an

economy with incentives to grow. Without incentive to grow, there is no high-

tech machinery or advanced technology to complement the skills. You have

created a supply of skills where there is no demand for skills. And so the skills go

to waste – with, say, highly educated taxi drivers – or the skilled people emigrate

to rich countries where they can match with high-tech machines and advanced

technology. (Easterly, 2002, p. 84)

Sihanouk’s Buddhist socialist ideology, which I shall elaborate in Chapter 2,

promoted education as the means to achieve modernity, encouraging students to see

themselves as modern citizens who were “entitled to participate in the country’s modern

employment sector” (Ayres, 2000, pp. 53-54). Education was thus valued as “the vehicle

for social advancement and not for a return to the agricultural world of the past,” and

students pursued the “liberal arts and humanities subjects they perceived would lead to

their employment in the modern sector,” rejecting vocational and technical education (p.

53). Sihanouk’s desire to achieve international prestige through the expansion of tertiary

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education increased the number of graduates and reduced educational quality (p. 50).

This mismatch of labor supply and demand created a large population of unemployed

graduates (p. 50), many of whom became politically radicalized, exacerbating the

country’s political turmoil (pp. 56-59). This turmoil would peak first with General Lon

Nol’s 1970 coup d’état, and culminate with the Khmer Rouge revolution in 1975.

The educational reforms undertaken during the short lifespan of Lon Nol’s Khmer

Republic are of interest as they sought to redress the problems that emerged under

Sihanouk. In particular, the government sought to match education with the labor

requirements of the economy. This new policy recognized that the economy “did not

require an abundance of secondary and tertiary graduates,” and instead emphasized the

needs of agricultural sectors like “maritime fishing, rubber cultivation, rice growing, and

freshwater fishing.” However, as Ayres (2000) points out, this policy would not have had

much chance of success as it ignored the aspiration of students to attain careers with the

civil service and “escape the prospect of toiling for long hours in the rice paddies” (p.

79). Within the Khmer Rouge “liberated zones” during the Khmer Republic period,

existing schools were identified as “vestiges of the old society” and shut down or

destroyed, and new schools opened to train party cadres on subjects like “revolutionary

discipline, social classes in Cambodian society, revolutionary hate, and collectivism,”

with their indoctrinated graduates tasked to raise class-consciousness in the “liberated”

villages (p. 86). As with the establishment of revolutionary schools in the Khmer Rouge

“liberated zones” before the revolution, Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea saw the

destruction of the pre-revolutionary school system and the piecemeal establishment of a

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network of revolutionary schools. The Mondolkomar (children’s barracks) replaced

primary schools, teaching children “rudimentary literacy, numeracy, revolutionary songs,

and, through slogans, revolutionary morality,” usually with illiterate peasants as the

teachers (Ayres, 2000, p. 109-114). Not surprisingly educational development declined

during this period, leaving “an entire generation of Khmer children” illiterate (Yamada,

2009, pp. 112-113).

After the fall of Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese army on January 7, 1979,

Cambodia plunged into civil war, with the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of

Kampuchea (PRK) regime facing off against the remnant Khmer Rouge and a non-

communist resistance. In this difficult economic situation, the PRK expanded education

as a means of establishing its legitimacy (Ayres, 2000, p. 135). However, the destruction

of educational infrastructure during the Democratic Kampuchea period meant schools

lacked “classrooms, textbooks, and workshop and laboratory facilities,” not to mention

“basic stationery materials.” The PRK also lacked the funds to properly train teachers,

leading to a “crisis of quality” in education (pp. 137-138). In the tertiary education sector,

the PRK depended on Vietnamese and Soviet support, with Vietnamese and Russian

becoming the “dominant languages of instruction in those tertiary faculties where there

was no adequately trained or qualified Khmer staff” (p. 139). Students had the

opportunity to pursue higher education in the socialist world, in particular “the Soviet

Union, Vietnam, East Germany, and Cuba.” However, in the black markets of Phnom

Penh a “flourishing” cottage industry emerged offering classes in the forbidden

“imperialist” languages of English and French (p. 143).

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After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in October 1991, United Nations

Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar “appealed to the international community to support

Cambodia’s rehabilitation efforts,” leading to a massive influx of foreign aid, and an

equally massive “brain drain into the aid sector from both the government and the private

sector – widely acknowledged as the engine of growth in any country” (Ear, 2007, p. 76).

This weakening of state capacity was reflected in the Royal Government of Cambodia

(RGC)’s abdication to the aid sector of its responsibility to fund basic services. In this

education sector, this is manifested in the current proliferation of schools set up by non-

governmental organizations (NGOs). While these schools offer much-needed educational

opportunities to their students, variations between these schools and the absence of a

mechanism of quality assurance has created for Cambodia’s students a patchwork system

of piecemeal education. As Moosung Lee (2006) points out in his comparative study of

two such NGO schools, variations in local factors like remuneration can lead to variations

in educational outcomes, including student enrollment and achievement.

The situation however is worse within Cambodia’s public schools, where a

culture of corruption has led to many teachers in crowded state schools demanding “extra

fees” from their students for extra tutoring or photocopies of examination questions.

Given their starting salaries of $30 a month, which is not a livable wage, these teachers

can demand an additional $60 a month from their students, in the process transforming

those whom they have the responsibility of transforming into human capital into sources

of financial capital (Lebun, 2004). Such demands for graft can force poor students to drop

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out of school, reducing their long-term opportunities for social improvement

(“Cambodia: Children miss out,” 2008). During examinations, corrupt teachers sell

answers or extract bribes from students for passing grades. In 1993, when the Ministry of

Education transferred teachers “from school to school at exam time, the pass rate fell to 7

percent, from 97 percent the year before” (Mydans, 1997). Despite attempts by the

government to prevent cheating, the practice has become normalized (Noah and Eckstein,

2001, p. 37). As Cambodian blogger Vutha (2008) recounts, “corruption always appeared

during the day of exam while students paid some cash to exam proctors and controllers to

allow them for cheating, copying and having answered checked by other students… All

of these are the starting point of corruption that is teaching next generation to follow suit.

(sic)” Indeed, over a decade earlier the New York Times noted that cheating was a

symptom of Cambodia’s culture of corruption:

Cheating on exams, hardly unknown elsewhere in the world, is a widespread

annual custom here, a rite of passage into a society where corruption plays a role

in almost every aspect of government and commerce (Mydans, 1997).

As we shall we in Chapter 2, the international aid community has been extremely

lenient with the RGC on the issue of corruption, and this has exacerbated the problem.

When the quality of education has been eroded by corruption, the linkage between

education and employability is lost. Apart from problem of cheating, the higher education

sector has also been plagued by politicization and the emergence of private schools

offering diplomas and degrees of dubious quality (Ford, 2006). This collapse of

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employability has left almost 9 in 10 recent graduates unable to find employment (Ford,

2006; Quinn and Kay, 2007). As the Bertelsmann Stiftung (2009) notes, “because

university education is of poor quality, many graduates lack the necessary skills and

qualifications for the job market. This has some impact on the labor market, which

suffers from a general lack of qualified employees.” Of the lucky minority of graduates

who find employment, many “only get employment in fields unrelated to their study,

indicating a mismatch between higher education provision and labor force needs” (Ford,

2006). As discussed earlier, this mismatch mirrors the earlier problem of unemployed

graduates in the Sangkum era. As a program manager at the Asian Development Bank

observes,

“Economic growth in the last few years has been driven mainly by growth in the

garment, construction and agricultural sectors, which don't necessarily employ a

lot of university graduates” (Quinn and Kay, 2007).

The future prospects for the development of education in Cambodia hence are

grim, as corruption and the mismatch of educational supply and labor requirements are

perennial problems that resist easy solution. It can be anticipated that the numbers of

unemployed graduates will continue to grow, unless significant changes occur in the

economy that will generate sufficient jobs that require their qualifications. It is easy to

prescribe recommendations (for example: end corruption; tailor education to the needs of

the economy; change the mindset of students) but these are difficult and maybe even

impossible to implement: the coming oil economy in Cambodia promises, for example, to

69

significantly worsen rather than end the culture of corruption (Global Witness, 2009). It

is from this political economy of corruption and structural unemployment that my

concerned students emerged to confront me.

Intellectual Emancipation

When I first arrived in Cambodia, my naïve conception of pedagogy was what

Marion Brady (2010) describes as Theory T:

Theory T says kids come to school with heads mostly empty. As textbooks are

read, information transfers from pages to empty heads. As teachers talk,

information transfers from teachers’ heads to kids’ heads. When homework and

term papers are assigned, kids go to the library or the Internet, find information,

and transfer it from reference works or Wikipedia. Bit by bit and byte by byte, the

information in their heads piles up.

Rancière (1991) sees this naïve pedagogical view as a pernicious myth which has a

political effect, separating superior intelligences from their inferior counterparts:

The pedagogical myth, we said, divides the world in two. It says that there is an

inferior intelligence and a superior one. The former registers perceptions by

chance, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed

circle of habit and need. This is the intelligence of the young child and the

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common man. The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by

method, from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is this

intelligence that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to the

intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the student had

satisfactorily understood what he learned (p. 7).

As I recounted at the beginning of this chapter, my students quickly disabused me of this

conception of myself as the intellectual Master and of them as empty vessels. Rancière

goes further than my Buberian insight of myself and my students being in an I-Thou

relationship, however. In his analysis of the 18th century educator Joseph Jacotot,

Rancière (1991) notes the profound implications for pedagogical practice of Jacotot’s

discovery that his students had taught themselves how to read in French. Jacotot’s vision

of “mutual teaching,” in which “each ignorant person could become for another ignorant

person the master who would reveal to him his intellectual power,” revealed the

possibility of emancipation, such that “every common person might conceive of his

human dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it”

(Rancière, 1991, p. 17).

In my teaching practice at Pannasastra University, I of course did not implement a

methodology of Jacototian mutual teaching; my students would have complained to the

dean if I had attempted anything like that. However, I did recognize the value of group

discussions and presentations, through which the students were empowered to share with

one another their particular understandings of the assigned readings. The unexpected and

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sharp insights occasionally offered by the students testified to the validity of this

approach. However, these discussions did not always generate such keen insights. As

Rancière himself points out,

Let’s sum up these observations and say: man is a will served by an intelligence.

Perhaps saying that wills are unequally demanding suffices to explain the

differences in attention that would perhaps suffice to explain the inequality of

intellectual performances (pp. 51-52).

As probably any teacher, including myself, can testify, it is certainly the case that

the wills of students are “unequally demanding.” While it could very well be the case that

Jacotot’s insight that all men have equal intelligence is correct (Rancière, 1991, p. 18),

the difference in willing makes the point moot. While motivated students have the

willpower to embrace self-learning, less motivated students expect their teachers to

deliver the knowledge promised in the course syllabi to them. (And of course the least

motivated don’t even have such expectations.) Indeed, it is these unmotivated students

who keep Marion Brady’s Theory T alive. However, educators have the choice to treat

their students as equals. In his gloss on Menenius Agrippa’s speech to the aforementioned

rebellious plebeians on the Aventine, Rancière politicizes Jacotot’s pedagogical insight:

But he speaks to them as men, and, in so doing, makes them into men. At the

moment when society threatens to be shattered by its own madness, reason

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performs a saving social action by exerting the totality of its own power, that of

the recognized equality of intellectual beings (p. 97).

The plebeians, who had hitherto been treated by the Roman patricians as inferior beings,

represent for Rancière those students who have been treated as inferiors by teachers. The

revolt on the Aventine was, like Jacotot’s discovery, the epochal event which

emancipated these inferiors from this consensual perception of themselves as inferior:

But that every plebeian felt himself a man, believed himself capable, believed his

son and any other person capable, of exercising the prerogatives of intelligence –

this is not nothing … any individual can always, at any moment, be emancipated

and emancipate someone else, announce to others the practice and add to the

number of people who know themselves as such and who no longer play the

comedy of inferior superiors (p. 98).

This brings me back to the ontological conception of the classroom as a

temporary, semi-stable assemblage of students and teachers qua haecceities. The

recognition of each student as a unique temporal individuality moving from the facticity

of his past to the transcendence of the future, coupled with the Rancièrean praxis of

mutual emancipation, creates a pedagogical practice aimed at showing each student that

he has the intellectual capability to teach and thus emancipate himself from the facticity

of the past, and that, having done so, he can show others that they can do the same. I

believe that this praxis of mutual emancipation will be welcome in a Cambodian student

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culture already imbued with the attitude of mutual aid and sacrifice, and hence offers a

liberatory line of flight for students weary of the corruption and venality of their

education system; and that, thus intellectually emancipated, these students will possess

the capability to expand for themselves the horizons of their own transcendence.

74

CHAPTER 2: THE THIRD-WORLDING OF CAMBODIA

Introduction: “I hope, one day, my city will look like this.”

In April 1967 there occurred a moment of historical irony. Singapore’s Prime

Minister Lee Kwan Yew was on a state visit to Cambodia, hosted by the kingdom’s

Prince Norodom Sihanouk. As Robert Turnbull (2004) recounts,

Cruising along the capital’s elegant boulevards in his Mercedes convertible, the

Singaporean premier turned to his host and mused, “I hope, one day, my city will

look like this” (p. 38).

In the years that followed this encounter, Singapore would proceed on its neoliberal path

of development, finally leaving the Third World to achieve developed country status in

1996, and by 2001 to overtake the United Kingdom, its former colonial master, in per

capita income (Easterly, 2006, p. 349).

Cambodia, however, would experience a very different political and economic

transformation, leaving it firmly in the Third World. As Turnbull (2004) notes, referring

to the Khmer Rouge revolution, “eight years after Lee’s visit, Phnom Penh lay charred

and abandoned” (p. 38). I shall examine in this chapter how Cambodia came to have such

distinct and disparate fate from Singapore.

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Colonial Structural Adjustment

Before we investigate how the newly-independent states of Cambodia and

Singapore achieved such disparate fates, it would be instructive to consider their colonial

legacies. Mike Davis (2002) reminds us of the colonial roots of the Third World:

Forcibly imposed trade deficits, export drives that diminished food security, over-

taxation and predatory merchant capital, foreign control of key revenues and

developmental resources, chronic imperial and civil warfare, a Gold Standard that

picked the pockets of Asian peasants: these were the key modalities through

which the burden of “structural adjustment” in the late Victorian world economy

was shifted from Europe and North America to agriculturalists in newly minted

“peripheries” (p. 306).

Cambodia did not escape this colonial “structural adjustment,” and the roots of its Third

Worlding can be found in the French protectorate period. Under French rule, Cambodia

suffered “the highest per capita taxes in Indo-China”, and its natural bounty was diverted

to Vietnam to develop the export economy of French Cochin-China (Chandler, 1996, pp.

298-299). Evan Gottesman (2003) notes that the “confiscation of large percentages of

rice harvests also created a level of rural indebtedness not previously known in

Cambodia, which, in turn, forced Khmer peasants into a state of increased dependence on

Chinese moneylenders” (p. 15). Viewing their Cambodian subjects as “lazy and simple,”

the French “brought in Vietnamese bureaucrats to staff the civil service in Phnom Penh,”

76

hence depriving the Cambodians of the opportunities and experience necessary to

develop their administrative knowledge and skills. This colonial Vietnamization extended

to the countryside, where the French imported “Vietnamese workers to tap the rubber

plantations” and “allowed large numbers of Vietnamese farmers and fishermen to settle”

(Gottesman, 2003, p. 15). Anti-Vietnamese resentment from these colonial policies

would later periodically explode in pogroms, especially during the nadir of the

Democratic Kampuchea period. Singapore’s “much happier colonial legacy” can be

placed in juxtaposition with Cambodia’s. As William Easterly (2006) points out,

Singapore and her sister crown colony of Hong Kong were “unoccupied territories that

the British colonized with the permission (or coercion) of the nearby local rulers”:

Even if the British were disposed to boss around or mistreat the indigenous

population, they couldn’t, because there was none. The people of the two trading

stations depended on voluntary migration, mainly from China. Since these

colonies depended on trade, the British induced Chinese merchants to settle there.

The Brits would hardly have scared the merchants away with exploitation, or any

restrictions on trade, so Hong Kong and Singapore were born free traders (p. 348).

Unlike Cambodia, Singapore’s colonial legacy hence provided the foundation for its post-

colonial economic success.

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The Sihanoukist Legacy

Following Cambodia’s independence in 1953, Norodom Sihanouk had a firm

hand in guiding his kingdom’s development. After abdicating the throne in favor of his

father Norodom Suramarit in 1955, Prince Sihanouk centralized political power through

his political machine, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (Popular Socialist Community), which

David Ayres (2000) glosses as “a vast assemblage or organization, embracing players

from both the left and the right of the ideological spectrum.” Up until 1966, when he lost

control of the National Assembly, Sihanouk controlled the National Assembly through

the Sangkum, allowing him to shape Cambodia’s development based on his ideology of

Buddhist socialism (p. 34). As Ayres explains:

Its cornerstone, according to Sihanouk, was not a Western political ideology but

the religious traditions of Cambodian life. Buddhist socialism asserted that the

ruler should treat the people equally, with empathy and with goodness. This

assertion repudiated the Marxist view that the ruled (the weak) should overthrow

and eliminate the rulers (the strong) and establish a proletarian dictatorship.

Marxist socialism advocated the abolition of private property ownership and

encouraged state or collective ownership of all capital. Sihanouk opposed this

belief, arguing that citizens should not be dispossessed of the fruits of their labor.

Drawing on Buddhist belief, the rich, the prince argued, should be encouraged to

give to the poor to gain merit (p. 35).

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By the 1960s the Sangkum had established agricultural cooperatives and state-owned

enterprises, and launched “numerous construction projects within the context of a market

economy” (Ear, 2007, p. 73). However by 1963, the third year of a five-year plan,

“anticipated returns on investment in infrastructure and education had been considerably

less than anticipated,” forcing Sihanouk to slow down the rate of infrastructure

investment. In addition, the industrialization program was showing less than optimal

results, and the government faced a growing budget deficit. In the midst of these

economic problems, Sihanouk’s growing distrust with the United States prompted him to

“erase the Americans” from the kingdom, cancelling much-needed American military

and economic assistance, thereby decreasing the government’s annual revenues (Ayres,

2000, pp. 46-47).

Public frustration over Sihanouk’s mismanagement of the economy soon

converged with anger over his failure to protect Cambodia from Vietnamese incursions as

well as the massive American bombardment of the country’s border with Vietnam,

leading to General Lon Nol’s coup d’état of March 18, 1970 (Ayres, 2000, pp. 70-72).

Sihanouk retaliated by forming a coalition with the hitherto enemy communist movement

to fight the Lon Nol regime, thereby aligning the traditional royalist sentiments of the

rural population with the communists and strengthening the rural base of the Khmer

Rouge (p. 81). As Gottesman (2003) notes, the civil war brought in a flood of American

military assistance to the Lon Nol regime, which “found its way to corrupt generals and

to officials in control of fuel, medicine, and other elements of the economy connected

with the war effort” (p. 22). The withdrawal of Vietnamese forces following the

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American and North Vietnamese peace accords of January 1973 allowed the Khmer

Rouge to conduct its revolution without Vietnamese interference. In a grim precursor of

Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge “evacuated towns, murdered educated

Cambodians, and enforced a policy of radical collectivization” in their “liberated zones”.

By 1975 the communist insurgency had reached Phnom Penh, and on April 17 the Khmer

Rouge finally seized control of the capital city (p. 24).

The Revolutionary Economy

Sophal Ear (2007) notes that “the period 1975-1989 took Cambodia to its nadir.”

This period of revolution and civil war led to a “massive loss of human resources from

death, disease and displacement,” with “most of the highly-qualified Cambodians …

living outside the country, among them Cambodia’s best and brightest, systematically

targeted by the Khmer Rouge as a threat to the regime” (p. 73). Under Pol Pot’s

Democratic Kampuchea regime, which began on April 17, 1975, the state was

transformed into “an agrarian Maoist economy,” within which “currency and private

property were banned” (p. 73). Genocide survivor Pin Yathay (2000) describes the

destabilizing effect of the Khmer Rouge’s demonetarization policy on a hapless Chinese

refugee from Phnom Penh:

I saw from his face that he was a broken man. He had lost family, business,

possessions, and now even his money was useless.

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That night, as we set up camp, we saw a small crowd of people down by the river.

The Chinaman had thrown himself in and drowned, leaving his bag full of useless

riels on the river-bank (p. 35).

Later, Pin’s father and other refugees are shaken when they encounter a Khmer Rouge

soldier who finds and angrily throws ten thousand dollars in American currency into the

river, denouncing it as “imperialist money”:

Stupefied, the passengers looked at each other. Why not keep the dollars? The

young man could easily have confiscated them. Apparently, he had no idea of the

meaning of foreign currency and how the Khmer Rouge regime could benefit

from it (p. 53).

As they would soon discover, the Khmer Rouge was working with a radical economic

plan that had no place for capitalist instruments such as money, markets or private

property. Gottesman (2003) describes the Khmer Rouge’s Great Leap Forward, in which

Cambodia’s urban populations were forcibly evacuated to rural cooperatives where

“every object, including wild edible plants and fruit, was considered communal

property.” In this agrarian utopia, malnutrition and disease reigned, with the rice

produced by the nominally self-sufficient collectives “trucked away to meet unrealistic

production goals and to feed the leadership or the army.” Medical care deteriorated with

the Khmer Rouge’s murder of “class enemies,” including educated medical professionals,

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leaving “those with supposedly pure ideological stances, including children, to serve as

doctors and nurses” (pp. 24-29).

After the fall of Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese army on January 7, 1979,

Cambodia plunged into civil war, with the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of

Kampuchea (PRK) regime facing off against the remnant Khmer Rouge and a non-

communist resistance. The PRK government faced an economy left devastated by Khmer

Rouge misrule: infrastructure and equipment had been destroyed, damaged or left in a

state of disrepair; educated citizens had either been murdered or fled the country; and the

surviving population was weakened by malnutrition and disease, and “unable to resume

normal economic activity” (Gottesman, 2003, pp. 79-80). While humanitarian aid from

the Red Cross, UNICEF and various Vietnamese provinces and municipalities helped

alleviate the immediate crisis, the West’s economic embargo of the PRK, and the PRK’s

suspicion of Western aid, postponed by over a decade the arrival of the flood of Western

aid into the Cambodian economy (pp. 84-86).

While Western aid was largely absent, aid from the Soviet bloc “helped to

stabilize and legitimize” the PRK: the regime’s distribution of rice and other necessities

helped instill “the minimum of goodwill necessary to govern and to fight off a civil

insurgency.” In the absence of a national currency, the regime disbursed the donated rice

to “pay its officials, soldiers, cadres, and state workers,” allowing for the reestablishment

of a working administration. This also saw the reemergence of corruption, with officials

and soldiers “distributing, selling, or seizing rice according to local conditions and their

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own impulses” (p. 87). This currency of rice facilitated the emergence of a black market,

where “everything was for sale: vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, noodles, and old clothes.”

The PRK, lacking a bureaucracy at this early stage to properly organize a socialist

economy, saw the necessity of allowing this spontaneous free market. The reemergence

of capitalism was also facilitated by the establishment of markets at the refugee camps on

the Thai-Cambodian border, allowing Thai goods to enter Cambodia. The PRK’s

pragmatic decision to permit and tax this border trade would “enrich local and national

leaders,” and strengthen “patronage systems that connected local authorities with a hand

in the trade to some of the most powerful people in Phnom Penh” (pp. 88-90). The

existence of these markets would influence the regime’s reintroduction of the riel as the

national currency: peasants “were refusing to sell their rice to the state below black

market prices.” In response the regime bought rice “at close to market prices while

issuing only maximum and minimum prices.” While pragmatic, this policy offered

“enormous opportunities for graft and corruption to the bureaucracy” (p. 100).

In the countryside, the PRK reintroduced agricultural collectivization in the form

of Production Solidarity Groups, which the regime took care to distinguish from the

“monstrous caricature” of Democratic Kampuchea’s killing fields. Following the

Vietnamese model, collectivization was “expected to form the backbone of a socialized

economy, channeling food to a state commercial network that would, in turn, distribute

goods throughout the country.” Within these Solidarity Groups there would be an “equal

distribution of rice, regardless of individual contribution,” but as the regime was to

discover, this system removed the incentive to work. Following similar changes of

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socialist thinking in Hanoi, the PRK attempted to encourage economic growth by

distributing land (albeit still under the ownership of the state) to individual families and

tolerating their small-scale private-sector economic activity (Gottesman, 2003, p. 91-95).

However these reforms were insufficient to make collectivization a success, as the policy

was being subverted from within by corruption. Local officials were distributing land of

low quality to the Solidarity Groups under their control, and keeping the prime land for

their families for the profitable purposes of rent or sale (pp. 272-273). By 1989, despite

the legal codification of the distinction between land use and land ownership, local

officials continued to trade in land they legally did not own. This pattern of state officials

ignoring the law for private gain would persist in the corruption of the post-socialist

neoliberal era.

Cambodian Neoliberalism

The collapse of the Soviet Union, and in particular the end of the Council for

Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in 1991 had a dire impact on Cambodia (Ear,

2007, p. 74), with the loss of aid from the former Soviet bloc contributing to triple-digit

inflation, exchange rate instability, and an “unsustainable budget deficit” in the early

1990s (Ear, 2009, p. 151). The loss of Soviet bloc aid was however soon replaced by the

arrival of Western aid. After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in October 1991,

United Nations Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar “appealed to the international

community to support Cambodia’s rehabilitation efforts,” leading to “pledges and other

commitments totaling $880 million at the first International Conference on the

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Rehabilitation of Cambodia (ICORC) in Tokyo in June 1992,” with an additional $119

million pledged the following year (Ear, 2007, p. 74). Following its UN-organized

elections in 1993, Cambodia “received five billion dollars in Official Development

Assistance (ODA), turning it into one of the most aid-dependent countries in the world,

with half of its national budget funded from ODA” (p. 69). With this acceptance of

Western aid, Cambodia accepted the structural adjustment conditionalities imposed by

donor agencies such as United States Agency for International Development (USAID),

the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These policy prescriptions,

known as the “Washington Consensus,” aimed at helping Cambodia transition from a

socialist planned economy to a neoliberal capitalist market one (Ear, 1997, pp. 73-74).

The structural adjustment program, which included measures such as “the privatization of

state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the creation of a body of regulatory statutes, and the

downsizing of the military and civil service sectors,” helped reduce inflation “from a high

of 112% in 1992 to under 10% in 1995-96,” stabilized the exchange rate, and reduced the

budget deficit from 4.6% of GDP in 1992 to 0.6% of GDP in 1995 (Ear, 1997, pp. 91-92;

Ear, 2007, p. 74). As Ear (1997) notes, Cambodia’s structural adjustment arose from its

unique context of the “absence of effective regulation due to decades of war, revolution

and foreign occupation” (p. 92). As it turned out, Cambodia’s neoliberal transformation

would be distorted by the generosity of its international donors.

At this point it would be useful to return to the juxtaposition with Singapore,

which went “from Third World to First” (Lee, 2000), without having ever received

“significant amounts of foreign aid” (Easterly, 2006, p. 349). Ha-Joon Chang (2008)

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notes that while Singapore’s development was based on free trade and foreign

investment, it strategically deviated from “the neo-liberal ideal” by offering generous

subsidies to “attract transnational corporations in industries it considered strategic,

especially in the form of government investment in infrastructure and education targeted

at particular industries.” Singapore also deviated from the neoliberal norm with its

possession of “one of the largest state-owned enterprise sectors in the world” (p. 29).

Unlike Cambodia’s unprofitable SOEs, Singapore’s SOEs, which include world-class

businesses like Singapore Airlines, are profit-making, and the Singapore government “is

not hesitant to close down or pull out of its enterprises and investments that are

unprofitable” (Lim, 1983, p. 755). Singapore’s “highly efficient and profitable”

government-linked companies operate in utilities, including “telecommunications, power

and transport,” as well as “areas that are owned by the private sector in most other

countries, such as semiconductors, shipbuilding, engineering, shipping and banking.” In

addition, Singapore’s Economic Development Board “develops industrial estates,

incubates new firms and provides business consulting services” (Chang, 2008, p. 109).

Returning to Cambodia, foreign aid created not profitable SOEs but instead

“Dutch disease,” which Ear (2007) glosses as the “brain drain into the aid sector from

both the government and the private sector – widely acknowledged as the engine of

growth in any country” (p. 76). During my 3 years as a lecturer at Pannasastra University

in Phnom Penh, I often noticed that my students, among the kingdom’s best and

brightest, invariably intended to find employment in the aid sector after graduation; for

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them the Land Cruiser was a potent symbol of this sector’s generous remuneration. As

Martin Godfrey et. al. (2002) elaborate:

Dutch disease was the name given, following the experience of the Netherlands in

the 1970s with expansion of its natural gas production, to the negative impact of a

windfall increase in foreign exchange earnings from a particular source (usually

mineral exports) on the rest of an economy (p. 357).

Godfrey et. al. identify a “resource movement effect” in Dutch disease, such that “the

expansion of the booming sector pulls factors of production towards it and bids up their

prices, and as a result other tradable sectors become less profitable and contract” (p. 357).

In Cambodia, its windfall aid inflows have contributed to this resource movement effect:

The movement of qualified people to the external assistance sector (both as full-

time staff of agencies and projects and as salary-supplemented counterparts) can

easily be observed, as can the bidding up of their wages. This raises the cost of

actual and potential skill-intensive activities in tradable sectors and reduces their

profitability and the incentive to invest in them. The spending of extra income

from the aid sector on nontradable goods (accommodation, services, etc.) also

bids up their prices (p. 360).

As Godfrey et. al. (2002) note, such increases in the prices of nontradable goods relative

to the prices of tradable goods leads to increases in the real exchange rate which in turn

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erodes the competitiveness of the affected tradable goods in domestic and international

markets (p. 357).

Ear (2007) observes that the Cambodian aid sector has crowded out the other

sectors, “becoming a tradable sector financed by ‘revenues’ in the form of aid” (p. 75).

With the Royal Government of Cambodia’s (RGC) civil servants earning “barely above

the poverty line of circa 45 cents per day per person,” it is no surprise that they would

moonlight at or quit their jobs for positions at the aid agencies. Indeed, “donor-financed

consultants working in the RGC are paid upwards of 200 times what their Cambodian

counterparts receive” (pp. 75-76). This weakening of state capacity is reflected in the

RGC’s abdication to the aid sector of its responsibility to fund basic services. As Godfrey

et. al. (2002) observe of state funding and foreign technical assistance (TA) in 1997:

TA expenditure on projects related to the Ministry of Education is 30% higher

than government current expenditure under this ministry, in the case of Health,

68% higher. In some ministries (particularly Women’s Affairs, Environment, and

above all, Rural Development) the preponderance of TA is even more striking.

While 83% of TA spending thus goes to eleven ministries/institutions which

receive only 19% of government current spending, 61% of government

expenditure goes to four ministries which receive less than 2% of TA funds –

Defense, Posts and Telecommunications, Interior and the Council of Ministers (p.

360).

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Ear (2007) notes that the situation remained the same in 2005, with one of his informants

complaining that “donor projects have stifled government initiative, placing foreign

agencies largely in charge of the government’s service provision responsibilities” (p. 75).

Outside of the aid sector, Cambodia enjoyed a boom in tourism, construction and

garment manufacturing until the financial crisis of 2008, which revealed the peril of

having an undiversified economy. In particular, the garment sector, which “accounts for

70% of Cambodia’s export income,” shed over 60,000 workers when 50 factories were

shuttered by the economic downturn (Corben, 2009). The United Nations Inter-Agency

Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP) calculated that structural unemployment in the

devastated garment manufacturing sector has led approximately 4,500 of the former

garment workers to join the entertainment sector, which includes sex work in Phnom

Penh’s “karaoke bars, massage parlors and brothels” (Mom, 2009).

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) have theorized capitalism as an

assemblage of desire writ large, an assemblage that poses a challenge to the State. As

they point out, “capitalism develops an economic order that could do without the State.

And in fact capitalism is not short on war cries against the State, not only in the name of

the market, but by virtue of its superior deterritorialization” (p. 454).

Today we can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that

circulates through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the

States, forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto

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supranational power untouched by governmental decisions. But whatever

dimensions or quantities this may have assumed today, capitalism has from the

beginning mobilized a force of deterritorialization infinitely surpassing the

deterritorialization proper to the State (p. 453).

This is why Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a war machine. As Simon

O’Sullivan (2006) explains, a war machine is the “form of organization that opposes the

dominant state form… it is the production of an assemblage, a practice, or simply a life,

that operates with different spatial and temporal coordination points to the state, we might

even say operates in a different reality” (p. 80). The primary activity of the war machine

is reterritorialization, “the production of smooth space from within the striated” (pp. 80-

81). Capitalism, not anti-capitalism, is “the smooth space of our time”, and hence is the

war machine of the modern age (p. 81).

Cambodia’s politico-economic transformation from socialism triggered this

Deleuzo-Guattarian war machine of capitalist reterritorialization. However, as we shall

see in the following discussion of corruption, instead facing opposition from the

Cambodian state, the capitalist war machine found itself entangled and enmeshed within

it. As Anna Tsing (2005) describes of General Suharto’s New Order regime, the

Indonesian state morphed into a profit-generating assemblage consisting of government

bureaucrats, military brass, and capitalist interests: “the fluidity between public and

private was a fertile space for the capital, the deals, the plans, and the appearance of the

economy itself” (p. 37). Likewise, the neoliberal Cambodian state was a reterritorialized

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space where government and military officials became profit-seeking agents of

capitalism.

While the aid sector has provided benefits for its network of members and

partners, including “donor-financed workshops and conferences” and study tours for civil

servants “with their salaries supplemented,” its actual development outcomes have been

less than impressive, with infant and child mortality rates increasing to be the highest in

the region, and poverty and income inequality similarly rising to be among the region’s

highest (Ear, 2007, pp. 76-77). Such disappointing outcomes can be connected to the

misallocation of funds through corruption, which “consumes a significant portion of the

economy – possibly as much as the entire aid budget each year” (p. 86). Kheang Un and

Sokbunthoeun So (2009) note that “the estimated amount of fees and commissions paid

to government officials in 2006 is thought to have reached $300 million, equivalent to 50

percent of total government revenues” (p. 126). Cambodia first entered Transparency

International’s (2005) annual Corruption Perceptions Index in 2005 at the rank of 130 out

of 158; in 2009 Cambodia ranked 158 out of 180, among the most corrupt in the region

(Transparency International, 2009).

The Kleptocratic State

The international aid community has been extremely lenient with the RGC on the

issue of corruption, which has exacerbated the problem (Ear, 2007, pp. 86-87). Indeed,

corruption has spread to projects “funded by multilateral institutions that have political

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leverage over the Cambodian government and some oversight capacity” (Un & So, 2009,

p. 126). While the National Assembly did finally pass in March 2010 the long-stalled

Anticorruption Law, over 15 years after it was first drafted in 1994, critics from the

political opposition and civil society organizations warned that the new National

Anticorruption Commission and Anticorruption Unit lacked independence, and could

“become a law defending corruption” (Meas, 2010). In contrast, Singapore’s independent

Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) has successfully curbed corruption in the

country’s public and private sectors (Quah, 2007). Interestingly, Cambodia’s

contemporary assemblages of corruption are repetitions of earlier phenomena. As

Nguyen-vo Thu-Huong (1992) notes, back in 1834, Truong Minh Giang, the general in

charge of the Vietnamization of the annexed Cambodian lands, complained to the

Vietnamese Emperor Minh Mang: “The Cambodian officials only know how to bribe and

be bribed. Offices are sold; nobody carries out orders; everyone works for his own

account” (p. 9).

Corruption, in particular in natural resource use, has served to exacerbate income

inequality. The highly profitable illegal logging industry has been centralized around a

network of “kleptocratic elites” who have “colluded with each other to fell tropical trees

in and around concessionary plantation boundaries, in many cases under the guise of

agribusiness investment,” thereby depriving the state of “much-needed revenue” and

local communities of “access to what were once community forests” (Un & So, 2009, pp.

128-129). The government’s treatment of its 2001 Land Law foreshadows its

enforcement of the new Anticorruption Law. As Un and So (2009) observe, the

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government has exploited “official policies to promote agribusiness” to “award vast land

concessions to politically connected businesses,” in many cases breaching the limits

specified by the Land Law. Many of these land concessions have not been put to

productive use, again breaching the Land Law which stipulates that concessions not put

to productive use within a year face cancellation. This elite concentration of land

ownership has been accompanied with cases of land grabbing and other human rights

violations (p. 129). As Tsing (2005) points out, “natural resources are not God given but

must be wrested from previous economies and ecologies in violent extractions” (p. 50).

Aihwa Ong (2006) warns that the neoliberal optic distinguishes between individuals who

possess skill-sets supportive of capitalist growth and those who do not, and “citizens who

are judged not to have such tradable competence or potential become devalued and thus

vulnerable to exclusionary practices” (pp. 6-7). Instead of enjoying the benefits of

neoliberal development, the unskilled poor hence are vulnerable to predations from the

elite. In particular, Cambodia’s kleptocratic elite has no compunction about using

coercive state apparatuses to evict the poor from land slated for “development,” with the

consequence that “violent clashes between villagers and authorities” have been reported

across rural Cambodia, as the police and military have been deployed to provide coercive

support to land grabs orchestrated by politically-connected land developers (“Violent

Land Disputes”, 2007).

Cambodia hence has been transformed into a resource frontier where the new

capitalist elite ruthlessly deploys the coercive arms of the state to dislodge local residents

from desirable lands, opening these up for “development”. Within the optic of the

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neoliberal order, Cambodia qua frontier land of extractive resources became an object of

desire. In Heideggerian terms, Cambodia’s neoliberal elite chooses to interpret or

enframe Cambodia as nothing more than a standing reserve for profitable extraction and

exploitation. Martin Heidegger (1977) prophetically warned that the hermeneutic of

enframing is hegemonic, as it “drives out every other possibility of revealing” (p. 27).

Hence, once it supplanted the former socialist order of the PRK, Cambodia’s neoliberal

drive for resource extraction and exploitation was left unhindered by alternative optics.

According to the watchdog nongovernmental organization (NGO) Global Witness

(2009), corrupt high-level military and state officials are illegally selling off concessions

to timber, mining and petroleum companies which happen to be “owned or controlled by

Cambodia’s political or military elite” (pp. 5-6). For example, Prime Minister Hun Sen’s

family has been identified as controlling the Seng Keang Company, Cambodia’s largest

logging syndicate, which has been implicated in illegal logging in protected forest

reserves (Global Witness, 2007, p. 6). Likewise, some of the targeted areas for mineral

exploration and extraction include protected wildlife sanctuaries (Global Witness, 2009,

p. 6). Apart from resource extraction, Cambodia’s land is also being expropriated for the

purpose of real estate development. As with the extractive industries, these real estate

developments are “predominantly controlled by a handful of government-affiliated

tycoons, high-ranking police and military brass, or family members of senior political

figures” (p. 12). This nepotistic assemblage of corrupt personages was long in the

making, and has solidified in the constellation of Cambodian politics:

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Nepotism and corruption follow familiar patterns, but two decades of nepotism

and carefully arranged marriages among families of the ruling elites have created

a web of alliances which many fear, if dismantled, would bring down with it the

whole structure of the state (Slocomb, 2006, p. 390).

Real estate development has been accompanied by forced evictions in Phnom

Penh, with the violent eviction of the capital city’s Dey Krahom slum, which occurred

despite the slum-dwellers holding legal title to the contested land, being a good example.

Not only did Phnom Penh municipality ignore the Land Law and Contract Law in

disregarding the slum-dwellers’ existing title to the contested land, the police physically

assaulted the slum-dwellers and NGO observers and workers during the eviction

(International Federation for Human Rights, 2009). As Raquel Rolnik, the United Nations

Human Rights Council's Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing warns, “there has

been a ‘consistent pattern’ of rights violations tied to forced evictions, including the

systematic lack of due process, inadequate compensation, and the excessive use of force”

(“Forced Evictions”, 2009).

Apart from the use of the coercive apparatuses of state to evict the poor from

valuable land, arson also appears to have been strategically used as a means of eviction.

Davis (2007) notes that slum fires “are often anything but accidents: rather than bear the

expense of court procedures or endure the wait for an official demolition order, landlords

and developers frequently prefer the simplicity of arson” (p. 127). In a notorious case,

over 228 families living in the Phnom Penh slum adjacent to Sovanna Market lost their

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homes in a suspected arson attack, and they have been barred by the Phnom Penh

municipal government from rebuilding their dwellings, “a clear sign, they say, the city

will be kicking them off their land” (Thittara and Shay, 2009). As Amnesty International

(2008) observes, “contrary to the ‘pro-poor’ policies of the Cambodian government...

thousands of Cambodian families have been forcibly evicted from their homes in recent

years, and there are at least 150,000 people throughout Cambodia who are currently

living at risk of forced evictions.” Indeed, a human rights investigator notes that “since

2004, Cambodia has evicted 15,000 families” (Thittara and Shay, 2009). As Global

Witness (2009) points out, the international donor community’s failure to intervene

against these government-sanctioned predations against the weak “has only served to

legitimize and strengthen the process of state asset stripping” (p. 58).

Already a paper tiger, the use by Western donors of the threat of aid suspension as

a means to encourage government reforms became less potent after 2006, when the

visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pledged $600 million in loans and grants to the

Cambodian government, without the conditionalities imposed by Western donors. In

2008, China became Cambodia’s largest donor, “contributing 27% of the total pledges

followed by the EU (23%) and Japan (11%)” (Baumüller, 2009). In addition, China “has

promised Phnom Penh an additional 257 million dollars of aid for 2009.” This generosity

in bilateral aid mirrors China’s earlier enthusiastic support for the Khmer Rouge and Pol

Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea regime (Bezlova, 2009). Cambodia’s desirability for China

is structured by the latter’s natural lack: China has sought international sources of natural

resources to fuel its economic growth (Perlez, 2006). Cambodia’s mineral and petroleum

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plenitude hence is an attraction for China, as is its strategic maritime location as an

alternative route for oil shipments (Baumüller, 2009). In addition, Chinese generosity has

helped silence Cambodian governmental concerns about Chinese dams on the Upper

Mekong, which could potentially devastate Cambodian fisheries in the Tonlé Sap

(Kurlantzick, 2007, p. 141). The converse desirability of Chinese aid rests in the

independence it offers the Cambodian government from the usual Western donor

demands for “environmental standards or community resettlement” (Perlez, 2006). The

arrival of China as a major aid donor has loosened Western purse-strings, and as the

Heinrich Böll Foundation notes, the subsequent “unrelenting aid flows from all sides

allows the Cambodian government to play the various donors off against each other and

thereby continue to stall on some of the much-needed domestic reforms” (Baumüller,

2009).

The Failure of Education

Another perspective on Cambodia’s Third Worlding can be found in its history of

educational development. Once again, the juxtaposition between Cambodia’s and

Singapore’s education systems is useful. In Singapore, growth in education matched with

investments in industrial capital; Robert Wade (2004) notes that by 1971 Singapore had

developed a significant stock of engineers, 10 per 1,000 people employed in

manufacturing, with 4.6 being the average (p. 65). Singapore would also experience an

expansion in higher education: in 1974, “there were three times as many Singaporeans

with no education as there were Singaporeans with a university education. Today the

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proportions are reversed” (Easterly, 2006, pp. 348-349). Of particular importance is

higher education in science and technology. Easterly (2006) notes that by 2003 the same

number of citizens from Singapore and other East Asian countries would receive

engineering Ph.D.s from American universities as American citizens, while “the number

of scientific journal articles published in East Asian countries quintupled over 1986-

1999.” This expansion in scientific expertise corresponded with the fivefold expansion in

high-technology exports from the region (p. 350). As noted earlier, education policy is

strategically “targeted at particular industries” (Chang, 2008, p. 29). Ong (2006) observes

that Singapore’s technocrats have been “assembling knowledge capital, research

institutions and sciences to develop a vibrant frontier in biotechnological research” (p.

20). The majority of Singaporeans who lack high-level scientific and technological

expertise are offered training at “subsidized and multilingual classes” to gain the basic

information technology skills to “improve their employability” and to “provide a support

system for the high-powered clusters of finance, engineering, and biotechnology devoted

to the building of intellectual property” (p. 187). In contrast to Singapore, as we have

seen in Chapter 1, Cambodia’s education system is plagued by corruption and the

collapse of employability of its graduates.

In this chapter I have traced the Third Worlding of Cambodia to two clusters of

causes: corruption and economic mismanagement. These causes can be traced to the

colonial period, when French policy left independent Cambodia a poorly-educated

population as a weak foundation for economic development. Sihanouk’s disastrous

economic and political policies helped create the conditions of possibility for the

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emergence Democratic Kampuchea, which in turn eradicated the very group of educated

people whose expertise would have been invaluable in restoring Cambodia from the

social and economic devastation of Maoist revolution. While the PRK pragmatically did

what it could to restore normalcy, its policies allowed corruption to reemerge and to

subsequently flourish in the current neoliberal era, in which Cambodia has remained

firmly in the Third World despite having received vast quantities of Western aid.

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CHAPTER 3: THE GAZE AND THE TAIN:

CAMBODIA AND THE OTHER

Introduction: Constructing Cambodia1

Writing of the young child of around 18 months of age who gazes in the mirror

and recognizes himself in his specular image, Jacques Lacan (2004a) explains that this

act of recognition triggers a “temporal dialectic” that allows this child to generate and

identify with this “imago of one’s own body,” where before he only possessed a

“fragmented image of the body” (pp. 5-6). This fantasmatic process of the construction of

the ego can be juxtaposed with the process of the construction of the imagined body of

the nation. In this chapter I shall explore the dialectical processes of gaze and mirroring

in the fantasmatic construction of the Cambodian nation. I shall open my investigation

with a consideration of the temporality of signification and its effects on memory. I shall

then examine how such memory can be deployed in the mutual gaze between the

colonizer and the colonized, with a focus on the violence thus generated in Cambodia.

Remembering the Past

In a separate discussion on the dialectic of desire, Lacan (2004b) notes that

signification has a retroactive effect, such that a signifier, functioning as a point de

1 I presented sections from this chapter at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Philadelphia, PA on March 26, 2010.

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capiton, “stops the otherwise indefinite sliding of signification” (p. 291). Slavoj Žižek

(2008c) explains signification’s retroactivity:

Signifiers which are still in a ‘floating’ state – whose signification is not yet fixed

– follow one another. Then, at a certain point – precisely the point at which the

intention pierces the signifier’s chain, traverses it – some signifier fixes

retroactively the meaning of the chain, sews the meaning to the signifier, halts the

sliding of meaning. (pp. 113)

Such points de capiton restructure the “narration of the past,” making it “readable in

another, new way.” As we shall see later, political reconfigurations of memory enable the

production of “the symbolic reality of past, long-forgotten traumatic events” (pp. 58-59).

Some metaphysical theories of time cohere with the Lacanian view of the

retroactive direction of signification. With the shrinking block theory of time, which

regards the past as having extinguished its ontological reality; and with presentism, which

regards the extinguished past and unrealized future as both being unreal; the past, having

extinguished its reality, has been rendered unreal (Loux, 2006, pp. 219-221). The only

ontological remnants then that we have of the past belong to memory, which can be

continually reshaped. This reconstruction of memory thus reconstructs the past qua

memory. (On other theories of time which allow for the reality of the past, the

reconstruction of memory could lead to a divergence of the past qua memory from the

temporal past.) Such retroactive signification can be perceived in the deployment of the

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memory of Angkor. In Geoff Ryman’s The King’s Last Song (2008), Tan Map, an ex-

Khmer Rouge soldier reminisces of the glorious achievements of the Angkorean monarch

Jayavarman VII:

“When Angkor Wat City is captured, he takes it back from the foreigners. He

makes many many new temples. Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm, Neak Pean, Preah

Khan, all those temples. He make Cambodia a Buddhist country. After there is

Hindu revolt, but Cambodians still remember him” (p. 8).

Pol Pot himself would evoke this deep cultural memory of Angkor with his

suggestion: “If our people could build Angkor Wat, they are capable of doing anything”

(Locard, 2004, p. 32); and with his regime’s choice of design for their revolutionary

national flag: the golden towers of Angkor in a field of red (p. 41). Indeed, Pol Pot’s

Democratic Kampuchea regime exhorted its enslaved masses to labor in the fields with

the goal of surpassing the achievements of Angkor (p. 73). This understanding of Angkor

qua glorious past, as David Chandler (1979) explains, came from the French, whose

archeologists “gave Cambodia back its past by deciphering inscriptions, refining

chronological frameworks and roughing out notions of Angkorean law, religion and

society.” Not only did the French archeological restoration of the ruins of Angkor

generate a locus of desire for the exotic mysteries of the Orient, the Cambodian leaders of

the future gained a new political vocabulary that looked back to their glorious past. The

future King Sihanouk, for example, “allowed his entourage to compare him favorably

with the Angkorean monarch Jayavarman VII” (p. 412). This signification of Angkor

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retrospectively changed for Chandler (2008b) when the genocidal regime of Democratic

Kampuchea highlighted for him the probable tyranny involved in the construction of the

temples. As he recounts of his return to Angkor in 1992:

The temples were still beautiful of course, but in the aftermath of the Pol Pot era,

and from a human-rights perspective, I began to wonder about the human costs

involved in hauling, raising, and carving the stones, digging the moats and

reservoirs, and raising the temple mountains. Coercion, violence and

megalomania, it seemed, had always been features of Cambodian governance (pp.

25-26).

Zhou Daguan’s (2007) late 13th century diplomatic report to the Chinese Emperor

Temür of his visit to Angkor offers a unique glimpse into daily Angkorean life, and

confirms Chandler’s post-genocide retroactive understanding of the coercion and

violence in the ancient kingdom. The Angkor of Zhou’s account possessed great wealth,

as signified by its numerous golden towers and statuary (p. 48), and was a slave-owning

society, with the slaves being “savages” from the “mountains.” Zhou reported that “most

families” possessed “a hundred or more” slaves, with “only the poorest” having “none at

all” (pp. 58-59). The Angkorean elite, consisting of the king and his family, lived in

luxurious dwellings, “very different from ordinary people’s homes”; the commoners “do

not dare emulate the styles of the great houses” (pp. 49-51). Everyday disputes could be

settled by trial by ordeal, and families had the liberty to “impose their own punishment,

whether it is detention, torture or beating” (pp. 64-65). Violence also erupted from

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without: as Zhou reported, “repeated wars with the Siamese” had devastated the land (p.

79). Angkor could hence be retroactively signified by Chandler’s identification of

“coercion, violence and megalomania” as the triple hallmarks of Cambodian governance.

Indeed, the hierarchical nature of Khmer identity that can be traced back to Zhou’s

Angkor is reflected in the Khmer language, in which the first-person pronoun khnyom

(me, myself, I) is also the noun for ‘servant’ or ‘slave’ (SEAlang Library Khmer

Lexicography).

Gazing at Cambodia

The production and deployment of memory in the fantasized construction of the

self can also be read as a function of the gaze. The colonizer’s gaze at and fantasization

of the colonized has been usefully analyzed by thinkers such as Edward Said and Frantz

Fanon in their explorations of the colonial episteme. In the discussion that follows I will

explore the deployment of this line of analysis in Asian settler colonialism in pre-French

colonial Cambodia. I hope to illustrate through this deployment the affiliation of notions

such as Said’s Orientalism and Fanon’s Manichaean colonialism to this particular case of

non-Western colonialism, and from this juxtaposition of theory and history arrive at

insights into the fantasized construction of the Cambodian nation.

According to Said (1979), Orientalism qua colonial discourse was nothing less

than a Heideggerian poiesis that generated the world of the colonized. Through this

“enormously systematic discipline,” the West brought forth “the Orient politically,

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sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-

Enlightenment period” (p. 3). The Orient, having thus been generated by the West,

became its inferior foil, allowing the West to imagine itself as the superior of its own

creation: “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the

Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (p. 3). This fantasmatic

mirroring is asymmetrical, with the West positioning itself as superior to the Orient on

the basis of its material strength. As Said notes,

And why should it have been otherwise, especially during the period of

extraordinary European ascendency from the late Renaissance to the present? The

scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought

about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very

little resistance on the Orient’s part (p. 7).

Fanon’s (2004) vision of Manichaean colonialism echoes the asymmetric

mirroring Said identifies in the discourse of Orientalism, and highlights an ethical

coloration in the colonizer’s fantasy of the colonized:

As if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns

the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil… Sometimes this

Manichaeanism reaches its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the colonized

subject. In plain talk, he is reduced to the state of an animal. And consequently,

when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms (pp. 6-7).

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Asian Settler Orientalism

While Said’s study of Orientalism was spatially bounded to the Near East and

Fanon’s analysis of Manichaean colonialism to Africa, the modes of colonial

fantasization they describe were not restricted to the Western colonial powers: in

particular, non-Western strategies of racialized othering echoing those of the West can be

identified in the history of Asian settler colonialism in Cambodia. In the 19th century,

Cambodia suffered invasion and the dispossession of its lands from the neighboring

expansionist kingdoms of Siam (known today as Thailand) and Vietnam. While the

Siamese regarded the Cambodians as children (Chandler, 2008a, p. 138), the Vietnamese

regarded them as lazy barbarians – even worse than Vietnamese criminals – who required

thorough civilizational re-education. The Vietnamese Emperor Minh Mang instructed his

colonizers of their benevolent duty to educate the Cambodians in agriculture: “teach them

to use oxen, teach them to grow more rice, teach them to raise mulberry trees, pigs and

ducks” (pp. 152-153). Over in Siamese colonized Battambang, the colonial

administration “opened schools to teach Thai in Battambang perhaps with the purpose of

transforming the Khmer of Battambang into Thai, beyond the protection of the French

Consulate” (Tauch, 1994, p. 101). Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o (2005) notes that the colonial

imposition of the colonizer’s language on the colonized is an attempt to ontologically

change the latter: “The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central

to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment,

indeed to the entire universe” (p. 143). Indeed, the Thai homophone of the Khmer verb

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for talk, niyaay, is a noun that denotes “legend, tale, fable, story” (SEAlang Library Thai

Lexicography), linguistically subordinating Khmer speech as less than truth in the Thai

imagination (J. Mika, personal communication, March 2, 2010).

As David Chandler (2008a) observes, while the Siamese and the Vietnamese had

little desire “to accept or impose authority on each other because they enjoyed roughly

similar power and prestige,” both kingdoms regarded themselves as “destined to

supervise the Khmer.” Indeed, a French observer suggested in the 1860s that “Siam was

Cambodia’s father because its king gave names to the monarch, whereas Vietnam was

seen to be the mother because its rulers provided the Khmer with seals of office” (p. 138).

The Vietnamese Emperor Gia Long declared:

Cambodia is a small country, and we shall maintain it as a child. We will be its

mother; its father will be Siam. When a child has trouble with its father, it can get

rid of its suffering by embracing its mother. When the child is unhappy with its

mother, it can run to its father for support (p. 140).

The net effect of the double Siamese and Vietnamese parental gaze on Cambodia was a

devastating century-and-a-half of invasion and subjugation prior to French annexation.

This period, particularly in the regions under Vietnamese control, severely traumatized

the affected Cambodians. The primary sources documenting this period “are filled with

references to torture, executions, ambushes, massacres, village burnings, and the forced

movement of populations” (Chandler, 2008a, p. 147). Similarly, folktales that emerged

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during this period describe a destabilized world whose moral order has been inverted

(Chandler, 1996, p. 98). Nguyen-vo Thu-Huong (1992) cites the gruesome legend in

which cruel Vietnamese colonial overlords “frequently” buried groups of three Khmer

prisoners up to their necks, using their living heads as osseous tripods to boil pots of

water. While this legend to this day continues to circulate among Cambodians to “remind

themselves of the black hearts of their Vietnamese neighbors,” the Vietnamese too

circulate it as a moral lesson about the bad karma generated by their past cruelty, which

in turn has reaped the karmic fruits of “loss of sovereignty, war, destruction, and misery

for more than a century” (p. ix).

The Mirror Stage of National Construction

Fantasizations between the colonizer and the colonized are bidirectional, given

that the colonized is not lacking in the imaginative faculties the colonizer has in

fantasizing the other. Just as the child’s gaze at his reflection in the mirror allows him to

imaginatively suture his fragmented sense of his body into a fantasized wholeness, the

mutual fantasizations between colonizer and colonized facilitate the processes of group

identification and affiliation, through which individuals imagine themselves as sutured to

larger communities such as ethnic groups or nations (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000, pp. 14-

20). As Benedict Anderson (2006) suggests, the nation is essentially a political

community connected through imagined bonds (p. 6). Slavoj Žižek (1993) concurs,

elaborating that the “elusive entity called ‘our way of life’” that connects the members of

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a community is “structured by means of fantasies,” and that if asked what this ‘way of

life’ consists in:

All we can do is enumerate disconnected fragments of the way our community

organizes its feasts, its rituals of mating, its initiation ceremonies, in short, all the

details by which is made visible the unique way a community organizes its

enjoyment” (p. 201).

This poietic process of group creation through fantasy hence binds its members together

through their imagined membership in a shared “way of life.” Indeed, the nation “exists

only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social

practices and transmitted through national myths that structure these practices” (p. 202).

Echoing Anderson’s (2006) observation that “the members of even the smallest

nation will never know most of their fellow-members, or even hear of them, yet in the

minds of each lives the image of their communion” (p. 6), Žižek (1993) notes that

members of a national community share a reflexive and intersubjective belief in their

“national Thing,” the fantasized incarnation of their shared national enjoyment: “‘I

believe in the (national) Thing’ equals ‘I believe that others (members of my community)

believe in the Thing.’ … The national Thing exists as long as members of the community

believe in it; it is literally an effect of this belief in itself” (pp. 201-202). This communal

construction of the national fantasy inverts the direction of causality, as it is this

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constructed fantasy of the nation which generates and sustains the beliefs and practices

which give rise to it:

This paradoxical existence of an entity which ‘is’ only insofar as subjects believe

(in the other’s belief) in its existence is the mode of being proper to ideological

causes: the ‘normal’ order of causality is here inverted, since it is the Cause itself

which is produced by its effects (the ideological practices it animates) (p. 202).

The Threat of the Other

The nation hence binds its members together through their imagined membership

in a shared ‘way of life’. The corollary of this process is the shared sense of threat from

the Other. As Žižek (1993) points out,

We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our

enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret,

perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the

peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that

pertains to this way: the smell of ‘their’ food, ‘their’ noisy songs and dances,

‘their’ strange manners, ‘their’ attitude to work (pp. 202-203).

This fear that the other “wants to steal our enjoyment” has historically proven to

be the impetus for violence. Fanon (2004) explains the relationship of violence between

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colonizer and colonized as one of political necessity, arguing that “for the colonized, life

can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist” (p. 50). In particular, land

stolen by the colonizer is a prime focus of desire for the colonized: “For a colonized

people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost

the land: the land, which must provide bread, and naturally, dignity” (p. 9). The

colonized’s resentment against this theft extends to the migrants who settle on the stolen

lands. As Haunani-Kay Trask (2008) writes of Asian settler colonialism in Hawai‘i: “Our

Native people and territories have been overrun by non-Natives, including Asians.

Calling themselves ‘local,’ the children of Asian settlers greatly outnumber us. They

claim Hawai‘i as their own, denying indigenous history, their long collaboration in our

continued dispossession, and the benefits therefrom” (p. 46). While Trask’s complaint is

specifically on behalf of the Native Hawaiians, her complaint of land dispossession

echoes that of Khmers today who decry the foreign dispossession of their territorial

birthright. Such essentialist short-circuits of ethno-groupism with territorial claims are

deeply problematic, but map deep desires for the land in contemporary nationalist

imaginations.

The Vietnamese Other

In The Plague of Fantasies (2008b), Slavoj Žižek reiterates the premise of

Lacanian psychoanalysis that “if our experience of reality is to maintain its consistency,

the positive field of reality has to be ‘sutured’ with a supplement which the subject

(mis)perceives as a positive entity, but is effectively a ‘negative magnitude’” (p. 105).

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This ‘negative magnitude’ is a concise description of the fantasized image of the Other,

which is a construct of fantasy but is imagined to have pose a material threat to the

nation. Writing of the difficulty of combating anti-Semitism, Žižek (2009) notes: “a

fetishist cannot be undermined with an interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of his fetish –

fetishists feel satisfied in their fetishes, they experience no need to be rid of them.” Just as

“it is almost impossible to ‘enlighten’ an exploited worker who blamed ‘the Jews’ for his

misery – explaining to him how the ‘Jew’ is the wrong enemy, promoted by his true

enemy (the ruling class) in order to obscure the true struggle” (p. 68), the traditional

Khmer fear of the national Other is resilient. The paranoid suspicion of many Khmers of

Vietnamese theft of Khmer land is a contemporary manifestation of this. As Derrida

(1994) notes, the neoliberal plague of inter-ethnic war is generated by a “primitive

conceptual phantasm of community, the nation-State, sovereignty, borders, native soil

and blood.” This ideological “phantasm” arises from an “ontopology” which connects the

“ontological value of present-being” to a particular geography, “the stable and

presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in

general” (p. 82). Thongchai Winichakul (1994) supplements Derrida’s observation by

arguing that territoriality is an integral part of the nation’s imagined image of itself:

“Geographically speaking, the geo-body of a nation occupies a certain portion of the

earth's surface which is objectively identifiable. It appears to be concrete to the eyes as if

its existence does not depend on any act of imagining. That, of course, is not the case.”

Indeed, the geo-body is a “source of pride, loyalty, love, passion, bias, hatred, reason,

unreason” (p. 17).

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The fantasized attack on the Khmer geo-body is a prime engine of contemporary

anti-Vietnamese paranoia. In late October 2009 Cambodian opposition leader Sam

Rainsy uprooted six border posts marking the border between Cambodia and Vietnam

(Meas, 2009), leading the opposition blogosphere to explode in anti-Vietnamese

invective. Using the Khmer derogatory term of reference for the Vietnamese, Socheata of

the popular KI Media blog wondered if “Yuon practical ties means encroaching on

Khmer territories at will,” slammed Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Mem Sam An for

taking “Hanoi’s marching order” (sic) (2009b), and accused the Cambodian government

of being in collusion with “Viet encroachers” (sic) (2009a). Among the outraged

comments posted in reply to Socheata’s message (2009a) were paranoiac accusations and

blood libel such as:

“POL POT said YOUN set up the killing field to kill Khmer then when he knew

YOUN mass their troops into Cambodia. YOUN was the killer and is continuing

to kill Khmer slowly. Khmer better watch out!” (sic)

Žižek (1993) suggests, however, that the “fascinating image of the Other gives a

body to our own innermost split, to what is ‘in us more than ourselves’ and thus prevents

us from achieving full identity with ourselves. The hatred of the Other is the hatred of our

own excess of enjoyment” (p. 206). Khmer anti-Vietnamese paranoia hence could point

towards the “inner antagonisms” within Khmer ethno-groupism (p. 205). I suggest that

one such source of inner antagonism could be the economic divide exacerbated by the

excesses of neoliberal development. In Cambodia this has manifested itself as the plague

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of land-grabbing that has expelled, without any hope of political recourse, the

dispossessed victims from their valuable rural lands and urban properties. According to

human rights advocates, “133,000 people, or 10 percent of Phnom Penh's 1.3 million,

were believed to have been affected by evictions since 1990.” In addition, “more than

250,000 people in 13 provinces have been hit by land-grabbing and forced evictions since

2003” (Cambodia: an “epidemic,” 2009).

The popular Cambodian blogger Khmer Young short-circuits the fantasy of the

Vietnamese devouring of Khmer lands with the contemporary fears of neoliberal

capitalist greed. In a post entitled “How do know about the Uncle Ho's Dream of Real

Estate Business in Cambodia?” (sic) (2009), Khmer Young argues:

Capitalism is about the trading, labor migration, and flows of financial and human

capitals. Vietnam has capitalized on economic development through economic

liberalization and export-led growth focus. In recent decades, Vietnam is satisfied

with its growth so it can can diffuse the ideology of Indochina Confederation any

time to neighboring countries such as Lao and Cambodia. They have used

different terms of Confederation such as eternal friendship, comprehensive

corporation, or peaceful neighborhood development etc... What Cambodia is

worrying is Vietnamese migration to Cambodia. (sic)

Despite admitting that he has no “reliable statistics” about Vietnamese migration to

Cambodia, Khmer Young warns that “80 millions of Vietnamese can access freely to

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Cambodia land” (sic). In this same post, these contemporary fears of demographic

Vietnamization are connected with past Vietnamese encroachments, in particular the

seizure by Vietnam of Prey Nokor, better known today as Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City:

In the past, Vietnamese king assured to respect Champa’s border land but

imposed their citizens to migrate and live in Champa. Prey Norkor of Jey Chettha

II had got promision from Vietnam about respecting his territory land. Vietnam

just borrowed the space to train their people. Current situation in Cambodia is the

same. Many economic contracts including border demarcation and border-pole

installation with Vietnam is just the facade of colonization because Vietnamese

labor migration is non-stop influx into Cambodia. (sic)

Violent Cartographies

Such resentment of the thieving Other can generate violence, which as Fanon

(2004) notes, has a therapeutic value: “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing

force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing

attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence” (p. 51). The long history

of Cambodian resentment of the Vietnamese exploded during Pol Pot’s Democratic

Kampuchea regime, recoding the land as a violent cartography (Shapiro, 2009, p. 18).

The xenophobic Pol Pot regime sought to therapeutically cleanse the land of the enemy

Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies, and these cleansed spaces – the killing fields and

mass graves –made manifest the violent cartography of Democratic Kampuchea. Ben

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Kiernan (2007) notes Pol Pot’s praise of the cleansing of the Eastern Zone in July 1978, a

project that had killed between 100,000 and 250,000 eastern Khmers:

“We resolved the Eastern Zone cleanly… Region 24, clean. Region 23 clean, like

the whole nation. Regions 20-21-22 are being cleaned… The Party is clean. The

soldiers are clean. Cleanliness is the foundation” (p. 550).

Within the temporal flow of history, events do not always circle perfectly back on

themselves in what Gilles Deleuze (1994) describes as bare repetition (p. 292). Instead,

events tend to repeat with differences, leading to what Deleuze describes as spiral

repetition (p. 20). Jane Bennett (2001) observes that these spiral repetitions are

transformative phenomena that generate new forms (p. 40). As will be noted in the next

chapter, Vietnamese suffering long predated the genocide of the Pol Pot era, with anti-

Vietnamese pogroms dating back to the invasions of the 19th century. In the dying years

of their Indochinese Empire, the French realized the Khmer “could be a staunch ally

against the communist-led Viet Minh,” and deployed their historic anti-Vietnamese

resentment as a weapon, for example by “staging racist propaganda against the

Vietnamese.” This political deployment of racial hatred triggered racial violence in the

1945 Kap Yuon (“behead Vietnamese”) uprising, and helped motivate Democratic

Kampuchea’s genocidal anti-Vietnamese paranoia (Men, 2009). Milton Osborne (2008)

recalls the mysterious May 1970 “unprovoked massacre of upwards of a thousand of

Vietnamese residents” in Phnom Penh, which he suggests was “a reflection of atavistic

rage directed against an ethnic group seen as traditional enemies” (p. 137). The fall of Pol

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Pot’s regime in 1979 did not end the cycle of inter-ethnic violence. This violent spiral

repetition returned on March 10, 1993 with the remnant Khmer Rouge army massacring

124 Vietnamese civilians in Siem Reap’s Chong Kneas floating village, provoking

21,000 Vietnamese, including second and third generation residents of Cambodia, to flee

to Vietnam (Widyono, 2008, pp. 96-98).

The Thai Other

As with the Vietnamese, the Thais are regarded as dangerous threats by the

Khmer. In 2003, violent anti-Thai riots broke out in Phnom Penh and the Thai embassy

was razed after reports circulated in the Cambodian media that a Thai actress had

declared that Angkor Wat belonged to Thailand (Ker, 2003). Anti-Thai resentment has

also focused on Thai military aggression against the contested Preah Vihear temple

complex on the Thai-Cambodian border (Dubus, 2008). Khmer paranoia about Thailand

dates from Siam’s 19th century colonial rule over western Cambodia, and earlier, the

traumatic 15th century sackings of Angkor by the Siamese kingdom of Ayudhya which

led the abandonment of the city (Chandler, 2008a, p. 93). The Khmer legend of Preah Ko

Preah Kaev explains the loss of Cambodia’s national strength as the fateful consequence

of the capture by the Siamese of a cache of sacred books in which “one could learn about

anything in the world.” As a result of their capture of these sacred books, the legend

explains, the Siamese became “superior in knowledge to the Cambodians, and for this

reason the Cambodians are ignorant, and lack people to do what is necessary, unlike other

countries.” Chandler (2008a) argues this legend mythologizes the migration of

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Cambodians from Angkor to Ayudhya from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, a

migration which did indeed transfer Khmer cultural capital to Siam (pp. 101-102). As

Bryce Beemer (2009) generally observes of the mainland Southeast Asian mode of

slavery prior to Western colonial control, “the large-scale movement of captured

populations, especially artisan populations, stimulated cultural change within slave-

holding societies in ways very similar to contact with extra-regional foreign groups” (p.

484).

Cambodia’s deep history of paranoid violence manifests Nandita Sharma and

Cynthia Wright’s (2008) warning of the “neo-racist” autochthonous gaze in which

“Migrants are said to take resources properly belonging to Natives, to promote the

disintegration of the ‘nation,’ thwart decolonization, and so on.” (p. 95) Sharma and

Wright read this as a reaction to neoliberalism:

Far from being a contradiction or a mere reaction, such moves toward

autochthony are deeply embedded within the processes of capitalist globalization.

Historically, as capitalist social relations have expanded, notions of “community”

have often contracted. The process continues today: over the last few decades, the

politics of neoliberalism has increasingly engendered virulent hatreds of anyone

deemed to be “foreigners.” (p. 97)

However, the case of Cambodia indicates that this process can predate neoliberalism, for,

as we have seen, Khmer autochthonous discourses and practices emerged in the 19th

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century and reached their genocidal zenith during the pre-neoliberal revolutionary era of

the Khmer Rouge. This deep history of Khmer deployment of violence in reaction to the

predatory gaze and practices of their Asian colonizers has enabled international

organizations to deploy a discourse of what Simon Springer (2009) describes as “violent

Orientalism” which justifies their neoliberal reforms, and their attendant economic and

social violence, as a “civilizing” and “rationalizing” enterprise against Cambodia’s

“barbarian” and “irrational” culture of violence (pp. 306-311). This historical irony

manifests the unpredictable consequences engendered by the processes of national

fantasization.

After the Mirror Stage

Lacan (2004a) notes that the mirror stage ends when the “specular I turns into the

social I,” inaugurating the “dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated

situations” (p. 7). It is impossible to predict how the ongoing construction of Khmer

ethnic identity will unfold in the future. However, just as the Lacanian child moves past

his self-identification with his specular image towards a social sense of self, there are

indications that with increased global linkages, the Khmer ethnic identity is generating

greater complexity. One source of complexification is the Cambodian diaspora, with

returnees introducing non-Khmer practices back to the home country. An unexpected

example of this is African-American break dancing, which has found roots in Cambodia

through the intervention of K.K., a Khmer refugee deported from the United States:

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Like many deportees, he arrived in Cambodia without possessions and without

family contacts. He was a drug counselor at first and then founded his break

dancing club, Tiny Toones Cambodia, where he now earns a living teaching about

150 youngsters and reaching out to hundreds more. (Mydans, 2008)

In parallel with influence from returnees from the diaspora, foreigners living in

Cambodia have influenced Khmer identity construction. Khmer music, for instance, has

absorbed American hip hop. As Nico Mesterharm, the director of Phnom Penh art studio

Meta House, notes,

“I think that in every country it starts with listening to foreign hip hop and from

there people start making up their own styles. In Cambodia now they have their

own lyrics and they create some of their own beats.” (Smits, 2009)

Khmer blogger Santel Phin (2007) notes of these Khmer hip hop artistes that “it’s a long

way to go so that Khmer people can reach the stage of creation. create our own to fool

out the crow and make them dance” (sic), and praises them for making “a great move to

the new age of Khmer music.”

Similarly, despite Khmer paranoia regarding the Thais, the flow of cultural

influence isn’t only one-way. Just as captured Khmer culture shaped Thai culture in the

past, Thai culture is influencing Khmer culture in the present, as is reflected in the

evolution of contemporary Khmer grammar. In standard Khmer, direct possession is

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denoted by positioning the noun or pronoun denoting the possessor adjacent to the noun

denoting the possessed object. However, in contemporary Cambodia, Khmers

increasingly use the copula roboh (belonging to) to denote possession, despite the fact

that in standard Khmer grammar roboh is only used to denote indirect possession. This

nonstandard use of roboh is a reflection of the growing popularity in Cambodia of Thai

pop culture: in the Thai language, the copula kong (belonging to) is used to denote direct

possession. With the increasing consumption of Thai language media by Khmers, Thai

grammatical constructs are absorbed and deployed in the Khmer language (C. Sak-

Humphry, personal communication, November 12, 2009). Could this linguistic slippage,

along with the aforementioned absorption of dance and music practices, be heralds of the

next phase in the dialectical transformation of the Khmer identity: perhaps less shaped by

the mutual gaze with the other and more by the mutually transformative processes of

cultural hybridity? This suggestive manifold of possibilities certainly warrants further

analysis and investigation.

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PART II:

CAMBODIA UNDER THE AESTHETIC GAZE

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CHAPTER 4: SPIRITS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD:

A CAMBODIAN HAUNTOLOGY

Introduction: The Ghosts of Violence Past

In his Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida coins the neologism “hauntology” to

describe the work of tracing the continued spectral presence of Marxism in the ostensibly

post-Marxist world. I propose in this chapter a hauntology of the violent past in today’s

post-conflict Cambodia, for the contemporary politico-economic war between the

neoliberal elites and the immiserated masses in Cambodia is but the latest manifestation

of a history of violence that has shaped the Khmer identity. The monuments of Angkor

are the ghostly remnants of its violent past; as are the subsequent cultural scars of

invasion, genocide and occupation. This chapter will explore these spectral and violent

intersections of past and present. Derrida (1994) writes: “If I am getting ready to speak at

length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say

about certain others who are not present, not presently living, either to us, in us, or

outside us, it is in the name of justice” (p. xix). This is certainly the case for Cambodia,

whose history of violence has meant justice denied.

Specters and Memory

In The Plague of Fantasies (2008b), Slavoj Žižek reiterates the premise of

Lacanian psychoanalysis that “if our experience of reality is to maintain its consistency,

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the positive field of reality has to be ‘sutured’ with a supplement which the subject

(mis)perceives as a positive entity, but is effectively a ‘negative magnitude’” (p. 105).

The Lacanian negative magnitude mirrors the ‘non-sensuous sensuous’ of which Derrida

(1994) describes: “the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible, or an invisibility

of a visible X” (p. 7). This spectral presence, which Derrida notes is a “becoming-body, a

certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit” (p. 6), I argue consists of the violent

intrusion of memory and fantasy into haptic space, by which I refer to the phenomenal

world constructed and experienced by the subject. The specter has an aura of mystery,

such that “one does not know what it is, what it is presently” (p. 6), for the simple reason

that it is “almost impossible … to make or to let a spirit speak” (p. 11). This is how

memory and fantasy sometimes manifest themselves in the phenomenal world, when

their enigmatic emergences prompt unexpected feelings like regret, fear or hatred.

Memory of course is intimately connected with temporality. As Derrida glosses: “Time:

it is le temps, but also l’histoire, and it is le monde, time, history, world.” The intersection

of haptic space and time qua history generates memory, which in turn creates the spectral

sense of time being out of joint, in particular, the sense of the “moral decadence or

corruption of the city, the dissolution or perversion of customs” (p. 19). Geoff Ryman’s

The King’s Last Song (2008) offers a fantasized account of the life of Jayavarman VII,

Angkor’s greatest empire- and monument-builder. Ryman’s Jayavarman VII is depicted

as a benevolent Buddhist monarch who leads his kingdom to grandeur through war-

making, prompting his crippled son Rajapati to detect the corruption of violence at the

core of the new Khmer paradise: “This happy kingdom, this place of peace, this giant

among nations. You gave it back to us. Did you have to make yourself inhuman to do it?

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To make all the Khmers your children, did you have to kill your real ones?” (p. 399)

Later, Rajapati confronts the king: “You, Father are war. You are war and power and

ruthlessness. You are oppression and enslavement and falsehood. And the summit of your

falsehood is that people love you for it.” (pp. 402-403) Echoing similar sentiments, David

Chandler (2008b) recounts his return to Angkor in 1992 and seeing the temples “with a

different eye”:

The temples were still beautiful of course, but in the aftermath of the Pol Pot era,

and from a human-rights perspective, I began to wonder about the human costs

involved in hauling, raising, and carving the stones, digging the moats and

reservoirs, and raising the temple mountains. Coercion, violence and

megalomania, it seemed, had always been features of Cambodian governance (pp.

25-26).

In a separate asynchronous narrative in The King’s Last Song (2008), gold-leaf

inscriptions containing Jayavarman VII’s memoirs are discovered in an archeological dig.

This discovery opens a parallel drama involving Tan Map, a former Khmer Rouge soldier

who once “guarded a Pol Pot camp”, and later “changed sides and joined Hun Sen” (p.

5). The genocide survivor Sinn Rith regards him as a horrifying reminder of the past:

“That Map, he’s just a killer who thinks he’s got away with it. I can’t stand it when he

grins; he’s grinning because he has escaped. They all escaped, all those Khmers Rouges,

from ever being called to account. He is utterly without shame, without remorse. He’s

like an animal.” (p. 298) As Rith recognizes, the ethical quandary posed by Tan Map is a

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result of realpolitik: “We had to take the Khmers Rouges back, we needed somebody to

do the work, so we let them all come back in. The result: we live with murderers. In

Samrong, there’s a guy who turned his whole family in to the Khmers Rouges. Both his

parents were killed because of him, but he still swings in his hammock.” (p. 296) Tan

Map later reveals himself to be haunted by the ghost of his brother, a suicide, as well as

the Khmer Rouge’s countless victims:

Map’s eyes look haunted. “He can’t rest. I leave him food out there…” Map jerks

his head towards the forest all around them. “He comes out of the trees like he’s

looking for blood. He holds up his stumps at me!” Map pokes the fire. “It’s why I

can’t live with people” …

“It was the war,” says Rith.

“They all keep coming at me! There are not enough stupas for them all. I give

them food, they sniff it, but are not satisfied. All those men, all those women, all

those children, they all come and ask me: Why are we dead? Why were we killed

by our own people?” (p. 304)

During my sojourn in Phnom Penh, I knew several Cambodians named Tan Map.

(This turned out to be a popular nickname for rotund adult men.) One of these was a

policeman who moonlighted as a motorcycle taxi driver at the university where I worked.

As he was friendly and charged a fair price, I would frequently hire him to drive me

around town. I soon noticed that we drew a lot of stares, as he would usually be in his

police uniform while ferrying me to my destination. Given the poor reputation of the

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Cambodian police as corrupt and violent, this Tan Map probably erupted in the haptic

spaces of these disapproving passers-by as a revenant, a fantasized spectral image

representing the repetitive return of Cambodia’s past violence (Derrida, 1994, p. 10).

Sith, the heroine of Geoff Ryman’s Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy) (2006), faces

a problem with ghosts similar to that of the Tan Map of The King’s Last Song, primarily

because of her patrilineage from Pol Pot. Immersed in contemporary Phnom Penh’s

consumerist habitus, Sith finds herself haunted by the restless spirits of her father’s

victims: they possess her electronic gadgets, including her computer printer which

spontaneously prints photographs of their stilled lives. While Sith’s predicament is a

powerful reminder of the memories of genocide lurking underneath Phnom Penh’s drive

to neoliberal modernity, Tan Map’s evocation of the ghosts of the forest is also

significant.

Prei and Srok

In the Khmer imagination, there exists a binary between the prei (wilderness) and

the srok (human settlement). As Penny Edwards (2008) explains, the prei designates the

realm of nature beyond human control, “haunted by demons (yeak) and infested with wild

animals” (pp. 142-143). The human settlements of the srok, in contrast, contain

“civilized, orderly life” (p. 142). As the autophagic fox growls in the prei of Lars von

Trier’s Antichrist (2009), “Chaos reigns!” However this binary is not bipolar; there exists

a liminal zone of becoming between the prei and the srok, within which “notions of

civilized or wild contract, expand, and shape-shift in relation or reaction to violations of

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moral or societal norms” (Edwards, 2008, p. 143). This liminal zone has become part of

the Khmer mental cartography as forest lands are cleared for agriculture, plantation

development, or mineral extraction; or when the forests are used as places of refuge from

invading armies. Khmer narratives warn of the danger of moral degeneration of the

passage from srok to prei, arising from the existential distancing from the moral bonds

that exist in the srok. The narrator of a 19th century chronicle documenting the flight

through the forest of a village from the invading Siamese army observes moral decline:

“Thefts begin. The poor become rich, and hide their loot in the forest, whence it is

plundered and lost” (p. 147).

Fears of the prei persist in taboos about the consumption of forest foods, as well

as rituals developed over time to “regulate interaction with the forest realm” (p. 148). The

plight of “jungle woman” Rochom P’ngieng manifests these long-held fears. Having

emerged into the srok after having lived in the prei for eighteen years, Rochom has found

herself unable to adapt to her newly restored life in her village, causing her family to seek

a charity to take over her care. As her father reports,

“Her condition looks worse than the time we brought her from the jungle. She

always wants to take off her clothes and crawl back to the jungle. She has refused

to eat rice for about one month. She is skinny now... She still cannot speak. She

acts totally like a monkey. Last night, she took off her clothes, and went to hide in

the bathroom” (MacKinnon, 2009).

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Writing of the abused children in the Khmer folktale Reuang Damnak Kaun Lok (“How

the Kaun Lok Bird Got Its Name”), Penny Edwards (2008) observes that “in the story,

their consciousness and place in the human world is tied to what they eat, how they dress,

and their powers of speech”. Rochom’s refusal of cooked food and clothes, and her

inability to speak mirrors the transformative experience of the girls in Reuang Damnak

Kaun Lok: abandoned in the prei by their cruel mother, the girls transform into birds after

losing the accoutrements of civilized life in the srok: cooked food, clothing and speech

(p. 151).

The borderland between srok and prei is not free of violence, however, and Lars

von Trier’s Antichrist vividly depicts the violence of this zone of liminality. Its

protagonists, named He and She, arrive at the prei of Eden to heal after the loss of their

child. There, three monstrous animals violently erupt into He’s haptic space: a deer

carrying a half-birthed stillborn fawn, an autophagic fox, and an undead crow. These turn

out to be the manifestations in the prei of the “three beggars” of Grief, Pain and Despair,

of whom She prophesizes: “When the three beggars come, someone will die.” In the

meantime, ignoring her own warning that “nature is Satan’s church,” She short-circuits

the wildness of the prei with her subterranean desires of “gynocide”, unleashing

spectacular violence on He’s body; He is thus provoked to dispose of his phallogocentric

attempts at psychoanalysis and to fulfill She’s prophecy by strangling her to death with

his bare hands. This spectacular eruption of violence in the prei leads Nina Power (2009)

to argue that Antichrist is a critique of the “misguided, kitsch attempts to harness and

tame the malevolent and unnameable.” The malevolent violence of the prei was

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reconfigured under Democratic Kampuchea from being a product of nature to being that

of the human. Under Pol Pot, the forest became “a terminal, a place where the regime

took, and frequently dispatched, suspected infidels. The forest’s function as a legitimate,

free source of sustenance was also denied… Fresh water snails and clams became a

delicacy whose clandestine foraging invited savage retribution.” (Edwards, 2008, p. 157)

Three decades later, these memories of terror of the prei appear to have retreated into the

unconscious, as suggested by the contemporary “popularity of pastoral scenes for

domestic display” (p. 160), which in turn recalls William Cronon’s (1996) account of the

sentimentalization of the wilderness in the American imagination (p. 12). In addition, as

the watchdog NGO Global Witness (2009) notes, the prei itself has fallen victim to the

rapacity of the extractive industries of Cambodia’s neoliberal order.

However, the apparent forgetting of these ancient fears is shallow, with old

anxieties over the prei often reemerging as symptoms in the psyche of the dweller of the

srok. Early in Rithy Panh’s Rice People (1994), Om, the mother of a traditional

Cambodian rice farming family, offers a prayer to the gods:

“I beg spirits of Water and Earth, who take care of this land, to aid us in our labor,

that all goes well, that we have joy, that we meet no obstacles, that we, your

children, enjoy a good harvest, that no beast, no evil spirit, disturb us.”

With the rice field marking the liminal zone between prei and srok, this entreaty to the

gods fails to stop the terrors of the prei from suffusing the fragile faming community. The

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next morning, a venomous cobra threatens Om. Despite being killed by her husband,

Poeuv, the emergence of this dangerous creature from the wild rouses the other farmers

to hunt down the dead cobra’s female companion. Om’s fears of the wild come to fruition

when Poeuv steps on a krassaing thorn while plowing the rice field and subsequently

weakens and dies from blood poisoning. The night of Poeuv’s death, Om chases away an

owl, which she calls a “bird of sorrow” and a “bird of separation.” Poeuv’s death proves

disastrous for the family: lacking his physical strength and knowledge, Om and her

children struggle to protect their precious rice shoots against a horde of wild crabs that

Om believes are “possessed by evil spirits.” Om eventually falls to insanity, which the

villagers interpret as spirit possession, leaving her children to take over the harvest. The

prei reasserts itself in the form of sparrows that devour the unharvested rice, leaving the

family with meager harvest. Om’s radical break with sanity can be read as a symptom of

the greater social break from the wildness of the prei, and of the latter’s constant attempt

to infiltrate and devour the comfortable order of the srok: the film ends with the insane

Om running haphazardly across the rice field like a wild animal.

The prei/srok binary hence informs the disclosure of the Rancièrean distribution

of the sensible of the traditional village order of Rice People: the taboos observed by the

villagers mark the boundary of visibility between the human world of politics and the

inhuman world of nature; the tragic loss of Poeuv occurs when this boundary is breached.

In the aftermath of Poeuv’s death, Om’s descent into insanity follows a series of

transgressions against the chbab srei, the traditional Khmer law governing the behavior

of women. First, her public drunkenness and unseemly flirtations with the village men

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earn her rebukes from her fellow villagers for her indecent breaches of the appropriate

behavior expected of widows. Her subsequent endangerment of her children and her

family’s rice crop caused by her paranoia and hallucinations transform her from a citizen

to a patient of the community, or what Rancière (2011) describes as a mere “noisy

animal” (p. 4). Om hence crosses over from the status of a citizen of the srok to that of an

unruly denizen of the prei who has to be caged up for the human community’s protection.

The terror of the Khmer Rouge revolution can be read in this schema as the

transformation of the srok into prei, or the emergence of something worse. Rithy Panh’s

Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy (1996) recreates from their letters and memories of

those who knew them the tragic lives of the doomed Hout Bophana and her husband Ly

Sitha, both of whom would eventually be murdered in Pol Pot’s notorious S-21 prison. In

one of these letters, Bophana writes about her unbearable life in the revolutionary

collective farm of Baray:

“I also know that in this liberated land, it’s the same everywhere. But for me

living here in Baray, it’s like living among wolves who don’t understand human

speech, who despise man, who deny human values, wolves who conspire behind

our backs…I know only too well…that one day I will be a victim of our enemies

here.” (Panh, 2004a, pp. 118-119)

The puritan distribution of the sensible imposed by the Pol Pot regime was Platonic in its

proscription of the affects of love: indeed, the discovery of Sitha and Bophana’s

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forbidden love letters led to their incarceration, torture and execution. As Sitha’s mother

wondered:

“I cannot understand why the Khmer Rouge separated children, husbands, and

wives... Even small children had to live apart... I understand how a husband and a

wife love each other, what a family is, love between children and their mother,

how villagers and neighbors can love each other…We all know this. But I cannot

understand that period. That’s why I can’t really talk about it.” (Panh, 2004a, p.

119)

There is a suggestion in Panh’s oeuvre that the revolutionary world of the Khmer Rouge

was in fact worse than the prei. The title cards that close Bophana state blandly that both

Sitha and Bophana were “officially destroyed on 18 March 1977” (Panh, 2004a, p. 126).

In Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), a surviving prisoner of S-21,

Vann Nath, observes that animals are described as killed, not destroyed, implying that the

Khmer Rouge saw its prisoners as of an existential order less than that of animals.

Earlier, Nath converses with an S-21 interrogator, Prak Khan, about official reports of

prisoners who had been designated for “Destruction for Blood”; according to Khan, these

prisoners would be chained and gagged and drained of blood to meet the demand from

Khmer Rouge hospitals. Khan observed that these prisoners, after having been drained of

all their blood, “breathed like crickets” before being buried in mass graves. This

biopolitical mode of violence in the Khmer Rouge revolutionary period marks the final

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collapse of the prei/srok binary in Democratic Kampuchea, for the utter dehumanization

of its victims radically exceeds the animalization of humans in the prei.

The Work of Mourning

Derrida (1994) observes that “haunting belongs to the structure of every

hegemony” (p. 37). Cambodia’s current neoliberal hegemony is indeed haunted by the

specters of violence past. These can be analyzed through the work of mourning, which

seeks to “ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the

bodily remains and by localizing the dead” (p. 9). The project then, of identifying and

localizing the remains of Cambodia’s neoliberal victims may lead us to the remains of

Cambodia’s earlier waves of violence. In the Khmer language, the first-person pronoun

khnyom (I, me, myself) is also the noun for ‘servant’ or ‘slave’ (SEAlang Library Khmer

Lexicography). This echoes Cambodia’s deep history of servitude. According to the 13th

century Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan’s (2007) celebrated record of his diplomatic

mission to the Angkorean court of Indravarman III, “most families” there possessed “a

hundred or more” slaves: “a few have ten or twenty; only the very poorest have none at

all”. Coercion regulated the lives of these slaves, as Zhou recounts: “if they do something

wrong they are beaten, and take their caning with heads bowed, not venturing to move

even a little” (p. 58). Servitude persists to this day. According to the International Labor

Organization (ILO) Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (2004), the use of children

for domestic servitude is common and growing in popularity. In 2004, a joint ILO and

Cambodian government survey found that “almost 28,000 children are working in

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domestic service in Phnom Penh; often seven days a week, with little or no pay or chance

to go to school.” This was “equivalent to almost one in 10 of the city's child population”,

with 60% of these children “employed in the houses of relatives - washing, cleaning,

cooking, child-minding or gardening.” Indeed, during my stay in Phnom Penh, my

landlord employed several children, who were apparently his relatives, for such domestic

chores. In addition to these child servants and the trafficked women who work in Phnom

Penh’s sex industry, Cambodia’s men too are falling prey to human trafficking rings who

kidnap them to work as enslaved labor in other countries, including Malaysia and

Thailand (Cambodia: Human Trafficking, 2008).

The ontology of servitude implies a social hierarchy with the servants or slaves

being beholden to an élite class of masters or owners, and at the time of Angkor the king

was at the apex of this hierarchy. Zhou Daguan (2007) provides a vivid description of the

Angkorean populace’s fantasized image of Indravarman III as a potent short-circuit

between the earthly and supernatural realms:

Inside the palace there is a gold tower, at the summit of which the king sleeps at

night. The local people all say that in the tower there lives a nine-headed snake

spirit which is lord of the earth for the entire country. Every night it appears in the

form of a woman, and the king first shares his bed with her and has sex with her.

Even his wives do not dare go in. At the end of the second watch he comes out,

and only then can he sleep with his wives and concubines. If for a single night this

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spirit does not appear, the time has come for this foreign king to die. If for a

single night he stays away, he is bound to suffer a disaster. (p. 49)

With his position at the apex of the social hierarchy, the king is due respect from his

subjects. Zhou notes that commoners meeting the king “all had to kneel down and touch

their head on the ground in a gesture called samba. If they did not they were arrested by

officers of protocol, who did not lightly release them” (p. 83). Writing of Marx’s

reminder that the king “is a king only insofar as his subjects treat him as one”, Slavoj

Žižek (2008a) reminds us of the “Hegelian performative” of which the “‘fetishistic

illusion’ which sustains our veneration of a king has in itself a performative dimension —

the very unity of our state, that which the king ‘embodies’, actualizes itself only in the

person of a king” (p. 133).

This performativity of the king qua embodiment of the state in turn extracts a

performativity of servitude from the populace, including the ultimate sacrifice of their

lives on behalf of the kingdom. Zhou (2007) cites reports that “when the Siamese

attacked, all the ordinary people were ordered out to do battle, often with no good

strategy or preparation” (p. 82). Disobedience against the king hence incurs severe

sanctions, as the popular Khmer literary masterpiece Tum Teav (Chigas, 2005)

emphasizes. In this epic poem, the king, described as “the august Rea-mea – powerful

and aesthetic, beloved and awe inspiring” (1015), flies into a rage when he learns that

Orh-Chhuon, the governor of Tbong Khmom, has disobeyed his royal edict concerning

the ill-fated lovers Tum and Teav:

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“As for the crime of Orh-Chhuon, his son and wife,

“And all the wealth of the entire family line,

“The brothers, sisters and grandparents of that scoundrel,

“Along with Teav’s mother, they were all of one mind.

“For their crime, they must be harrowed or plowed over!

“They must be boiled alive in a frying pan and left to dissolve

“Away to nothing!” (1005-1006)

Rea-mea qua sovereign embodiment of the Khmer kingdom has the prerogative to

demand obedience from his subjects, including high-ranking ones like the doomed

governor. Alexander Hinton (2008) notes that Rea-mea is “depicted as a potent center

whose power to reorder the world is ritually displayed during moments such as his

departure for Tbaung Khmum: before setting off, Reamea and his entourage march

around his palace, itself a representation of the cosmos, three times” (p. 75). This

elevated status explains Rea-mea’s ruthless extermination of the governor and his

lineage, whose insubordination threatened the royal façade of power (p. 76). Tum Teav

graphically describes the subsequent events in Tbong Khmom:

The Guards, compelled by the King,

Were told to go immediately and prepare for carrying out the punishment.

In accordance with their evil wrongdoing,

The guilty were gathered around the pit.

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The guards dug into the earth deep and wide,

Just neck-high. After, they summoned

Seven families, pushing aside the children.

Their relatives were overcome with misery.

The guards then took the water buffaloes and yoked them to a metal harrow.

They led them to rake over the guilty one pass.

The guards split open their heads without hesitation.

With that malicious act, the shoulders of the prisoners had disappeared.

The guards assembled the big offenders,

And brought them forth without delay

To be boiled alive. “Now, guilty ones,

Don’t you have anything to say for yourselves?”

The guards lit a fire to bring the huge vat of water to a boil.

They piled the wood up high.

When the fire lowered, and the tongues of flame ceased in the furnace,

They threw in the bodies, and in an instant, they were consumed. (1030-1034)

According to tradition, Tum Teav was based on actual events. As George Chigas

(2005) notes, “the provinces and towns in the story do in fact exist, and the modern

residents of Tbong Khmom have preserved items they believe belonged to Teav, the

story’s heroine”. In addition, the narrative appears in different and inconsistent fragments

of the Royal Chronicles (p. 4). In one fragment, King Rea-mea is identified as the

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unpopular apostate Rea-mea Thipadei (1641-56) (p. 5), and the doom of Tbong Khmom

is recounted as follows:

In 1016 of the Culla era, the Year of the Horse, sixth of the decade [1654/5 A.D.],

the king led his four ministers and his soldiers to embark on a voyage to Tbong

Khmom. Thereafter, the king ordered the arrests of Orh-Chhuon, as well as

Moeurn Amrith Snaihar and the parents of Teav, and had them all executed. Then

the king had the members of the family of Orh-Chhuon and Teav’s parents, along

with the people that were closely involved in the marriage arrangements, made

slaves. (p. 7)

Another fragment identifies King Rea-mea as the benevolent and devout Rea-mea

Thipadei (1638-1655) (p. 8), whose sovereign vengeance is succinctly described thus:

When he arrived at Por Choeung Khal, the king ordered his soldiers to bury alive

Chao Bunna Ajudhyh Jai and his family, as well as the parents up to the seventh

degree. In addition, the entire population of the village was made slaves. (p. 10).

When the French archeologist Etienne Aymonier visited Tbong Khmom in 1883,

“its residents told Aymonier that the story was true, and he learned that their resentment

for being called the descendants of hereditary slaves was the reason it was strictly

forbidden to tell the story in Tbong Khmom.” The following century, in 1960, the Khmer

Writers Association “traveled to Tbong Khmom to research the origin of the story and its

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basis in Cambodian history. They met with supposed descendents of former slaves

described in the story and were shown sites where episodes from the story were believed

to have taken place, such as the site where Teav committed suicide” (pp. 2-3). The

sovereign power of life and death exercised by the literary and historical Kings Rea-mea

extends back in time to Zhou Daguan’s (2007) Indravarman III:

If there is a dispute among the ordinary people, it must be referred up to the king,

even if it is a small matter. There are never any whippings or floggings as

punishment, only fines as I have heard. Nor do they hang or behead anyone guilty

of a serious crime. Instead they just dig a ditch in the ground outside the west gate

of the city, put the criminal inside it, fill it up solid with earth and stones, and

leave it as that. Otherwise people have their fingers or toes amputated, or their

nose cut off. (p. 64)

Alexander Hinton (2008) notes that Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea regime

propagandized itself as “a new potent center that, like powerful kings such as Reamea or

the Buddha himself, was able to move the country from a state of disintegration to one of

moral order” (p. 79). As with Rea-mea, Democratic Kampuchea deployed its sovereign

power of life and death to achieve this disciplining of the morally disordered polity,

exterminating disorderly subjects the same way Rea-mea exterminated the disorderly

Orh-Chhuon and his lineage. These memories of sovereign violence persist to this day,

returning as Derridean revenants of violence past in the intersections of Cambodia’s

haptic spaces with the expansion of its neoliberal order.

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The Plagues of Neoliberalism

Gynocide qua violence in the sex industry is a major revenant of violence past in

today’s neoliberal Cambodia, as former sex slave-turned-antislavery activist Somaly

Mam’s chilling autobiography The Road of Lost Innocence (2009) attests. With the

economic collapse of 2008, the number of women in Cambodia’s sex industry has

exploded. As Derrida (1994) notes, structural unemployment arising from deregulation is

one of the “plagues” of the neoliberal “new world order” (p. 81). As noted in Chapter 2,

the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP) has calculated

that structural unemployment in the devastated garment manufacturing sector has led

approximately 4,500 of the former garment workers to join the entertainment sector,

which includes sex work in Phnom Penh’s “karaoke bars, massage parlors and brothels”

(Mom, 2009). Another Derridean neoliberal plague is the political dispossession of the

homeless from the democratic polity (p. 81). In Cambodia this has manifested itself as the

plague of land-grabbing that has expelled, without any hope of political recourse, the

dispossessed victims from their valuable rural lands and urban properties. Henry Giroux

(2009) deploys the metaphor of the zombie to describe the violence and monstrousness of

neoliberal policies of predatory dispossession:

This is a politics in which cadres of the unthinking and living dead promote civic

catastrophes and harbor apocalyptic visions, focusing more on death than life.

Death-dealing zombie politicians and their acolytes support modes of corporate

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and militarized governance through which entire populations now become either

redundant, disposable or criminalized.

The advocates of the neoliberal order, memorably described by the Lacanians as

knaves (Žižek, 2008b, pp. 55-56), provide the intellectual support for the free market and

its devastating social consequences. Apart from this support at the intellectual level, the

neoliberal élite also depends on hired muscle for its dirty work, in particular the forced

evictions of victims of land grabbing. This amoral force of armed thugs, led by their

corporate bosses and their intellectual enablers, fits the metaphor of a zombie army “that

has a ravenous appetite for spreading destruction and promoting human suffering and

hardship” (Giroux, 2009). As noted in Chapter 3, “133,000 people, or 10 percent of

Phnom Penh's 1.3 million, were believed to have been affected by evictions since 1990,”

while, “more than 250,000 people in 13 provinces have been hit by land-grabbing and

forced evictions since 2003” (Cambodia: an “epidemic”, 2009). Materializing Giroux’s

(2009) warning of a zombie politics that renders entire populations disposable,

Cambodia’s neoliberal élite has reterritorialized the dispossessed lands into investment

vehicles:

Many evictions make way for hotels and skyscrapers in the rapidly developing

capital. In the countryside, evictions are often justified to make way for logging,

mining, resorts, casinos or plantations, say NGOs. (Cambodia: an “epidemic”,

2009).

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The rise of inter-ethnic war is another of Derrida’s (1994) plagues of

neoliberalism. As he notes, this mode of violence is generated by a “primitive conceptual

phantasm of community, the nation-State, sovereignty, borders, native soil and blood.”

This ideological “phantasm” arises from an “ontopology” which connects the

“ontological value of present-being” to a particular geography, “the stable and

presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in

general” (p. 82). Echoing the traditional Khmer fear of the Siamese tiger and the

Vietnamese crocodile devouring Cambodian lands, the blogger Khmer Young (2009)

warns: “When Thailand is so openly aggressively to Cambodia land, Vietnam is so

successfully and secretly expanding and dominating Cambodia.” While these ethnic

tensions have reemerged as revenants in the neoliberal era, they can be traced back into

the pre-neoliberal past, in particular the traumatic 15th century sackings of Angkor by the

Siamese kingdom of Ayudhya which led the abandonment of the city (Chandler, 2008a,

p. 93), the 19th century invasions of Cambodia by Siam and Vietnam (p. 141), and the

ethnic cleansings of minority groups by Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea regime. As

Ysa Osman (2002) argues, the Khmer Rouge disproportionately targeted the Cham

Muslim population, killing almost 500,000 out of the prerevolutionary population of

700,000, a mortality rate more than double that suffered by the Khmer population (pp. 2-

3). The cleansing appears to have been ideologically rooted in historical resentment. A

Democratic Kampuchea guidebook to Angkor highlights the sacking of Angkor by

Champa in 1177, and describes bas relief carvings depicting Angkorean naval battles

with the Cham as showing the “struggle of the people of Kampuchea against foreign

invasion” (Kiernan, 2007, p. 551). Apart from slaughtering the Cham, the Khmer Rouge

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also sought to “smash” Islam by closing mosques and banning Muslim ceremonies and

practices (Ysa, 2002, pp. 2-3). In addition, the Khmer Rouge “absolutely forbade the use

of Cham-style names and all Cham were made to use Khmer-style names”, and they

“prohibited the speaking of the Cham language, and to reinforce this policy killed the

hakem, toun and village elders who spoke Cham”, leaving the current generation of

Cham youth unknowing of the Cham language (pp. 4-5).

Apart from the Cham, the Chinese and the Sino-Khmer were also targeted by the

Khmer Rouge for their role in the capitalist economy, with Chinese ethnicity becoming

“practically synonymous with a bourgeois class background.” The Vietnamese too

suffered persecution, with many either “murdered or chased into Vietnam” (Gottesman,

2003, p. 28). Even before the 1975 revolution, the Khmer Rouge had been targeting the

Vietnamese – nominally their socialist brothers-in-arms. In 1971 the Khmer Rouge “were

organizing anti-Vietnamese demonstrations,” forcing ethnic Vietnamese to flee to

Vietnam; in addition, Khmer Rouge cadres who had received training in Hanoi were

ideologically suspect and were secretly purged (p. 23). Vietnamese suffering however

long predated the Pol Pot era. Ben Kiernan (2007) cites French missionaries who

witnessed “a genocidal Cambodian attack, led by a self-proclaimed Buddhist monk, on

the Cochinchinese-controlled port of Hatien in 1731.” These missionaries reported that

this “considerable army of Cambodians… made an enormous carnage” of the Vietnamese

in Hatien, and from there this army “ravaged all the provinces of the south of

Cochinchina, putting all to fire and blood.” After returning from this expedition, they

massacred all the Vietnamese “that they found in Cambodia, men, women and children.”

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Two decades later, in 1750, the Cambodian king Ang Snguon ordered the massacre of

“every Vietnamese residing on Cambodian territory, including the Mekong delta.” A

missionary reported that “this order was executed very precisely and very cruelly; this

massacre lasted a month and a half” (pp. 158-160). As noted in the previous chapter, the

fall of Pol Pot’s regime in 1979 did not end the cycle of inter-ethnic violence. The

revenant of violence past returned on March 10, 1993 with the remnant Khmer Rouge

army massacring 124 Vietnamese civilians, provoking 21,000 ethnic Vietnamese

residents of Cambodia to flee to Vietnam (Widyono, 2008, pp. 96-98).

In his hauntology of Marxism, Derrida (1994) notes that neoliberalism, today’s

“unprecedented form of hegemony”, represents “a great ‘conjuration’ against Marxism”

(p. 50), by which he means “the magical exorcism” which seeks to “expulse the evil spirit

which would have been called up or convoked” (p. 47). Would a conjuration against

Cambodia’s specters of violence be successful? Neoliberalism’s vast expansion into

contemporary Cambodia strongly suggests otherwise, for it has brought with it the

Derridean plagues of unemployment, dispossession and ethnic conflict, all of which have

the power to call up or convoke these revenants of violence past. This hauntology

suggests then that these specters will continue to persist in the Cambodian imagination,

patiently awaiting their time to once again be made manifest as eruptions of violence in

the Real.

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CHAPTER 5: CAMBODIAN LITERATURE AS HETEROTOPIA:

THE POLITICS OF AESTHETICS

Introduction: The Politics of Aesthetics1

The appreciation of the work of art offers an avenue into the political milieu. In

this chapter I shall deploy contemporary aesthetic theory in a political reading of

Cambodian literature: both in its texts and their production. I shall first deploy the

Foucauldian notions of heterotopia and heterochrony to discuss Darina Siv’s Sokha and

Apopeal's key inversions of the revolutionary history of the Khmer Rouge and the

subsequent Vietnamese occupation, as well as the moral narrative of its literary

predecessor, the popular Cambodian folktale Preah Ko Preah Keo. I shall follow this

with an application of Jacques Rancière’s analysis of the distribution of the visible to

unveil the political milieus Sokha and Apopeal and Preah Ko Preah Keo were embedded

in. I shall then enlist the Rancièrean notion of political subjectification to analyze first,

the recent manifestations of Preah Ko Preah Keo in the Cambodian political imagination,

and second, the aesthetico-political struggle of Cambodia's writers during the

revolutionary and neoliberal eras. I shall conclude with a deployment of Rancière’s

notion of dissensus in my reading of Yur Karavuth’s A Khmer Policeman’s Story to trace

the precariousness of life in Cambodia under the market forces of the contemporary

neoliberal era.

1 I presented sections from this chapter at the joint meeting of the Association for Asian Studies and the

International Convention of Asian Scholars in Honolulu, HI on March 31, 2011.

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Sokha and Apopeal

In Darina Siv’s enigmatic short story Sokha and Apopeal (2004), Sokha, a

Cambodian boy, becomes best friends with Apopeal, a young bull. When the communist

revolution arrives in 1975, Khmer Rouge cadres enforcing collectivization remove

Apopeal from Sokha’s care, almost severing this interspecies bond of friendship. When

the brutality and starvation of the killing fields becomes too much to bear, Apopeal

brings Sokha to a magical lake beyond the Khmer Rouge’s control where they expand

their interspecies friendship to a family of otters, a rabbit and the local forest community

of monkeys. Three years after their arrival at the lake, Sokha is reunited with his family,

and learns that life has been restored to its pre-revolutionary bliss:

Sokha, Apopeal, the rabbit, and Sokha’s father and brother all went back to his

village. He returned to school, joining the other children. Every day, he rode

Apopeal to school, the rabbit sitting on Apopeal’s head.

From then on, Sokha and his family lived peacefully in their village (p. 47).

The stunning affect of anguish that this dreamlike story generated in me when I first read

it stemmed from the juxtaposition of the sweet restoration of social wholeness in Siv’s

imaginative space with the bleak realities of dispossession and exile for those who fled

the civil war, and poverty and foreign military occupation for those who remained

behind. Frederic Jameson (1986) famously argues of Third-World literary texts that they

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“necessarily project a political dimension in the form of a national allegory: the story of

the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the

public third-world culture and society” (p. 69). Sokha and Apopeal appears to fit into this

allegorical model, albeit with important inversions. The pastoral bliss of village life

Sokha and Apopeal Siv depicts as enjoying just before the revolution occludes the

violence of the U.S. bombardment and the consequent expansion of Khmer Rouge

“liberated zones” that were occurring at that pre-revolutionary period (Kiernan, 1990 and

Gottesman, 2003, p. 24). The “time of hunger” Sokha and Apopeal subsequently suffer

under the Khmer Rouge is a consequence of Democratic Kampuchea’s “Great Leap

Forward” of forced collectivization. As Evan Gottesman (2003) recounts:

By 1977 almost all Cambodians were suffering from malnutrition. The rice that

the newly “self-sufficient” Cambodians produced disappeared, trucked away to

meet unrealistic production goals and to feed the leadership or the army … Most

Cambodians who survived Democratic Kampuchea recall meals of insects,

scorpions, and vermin nabbed surreptitiously in the rice fields (pp. 27-28).

Heterotopia and Heterochrony

The inversions come when Sokha and Apopeal escape to the lake, or more

precisely, when Apopeal delivers Sokha to the lake. The first inversion of course is the

absence of the Khmer Rouge. The revolution had inverted the old hierarchy: Democratic

Kampuchea’s new elite, the “old people,” consisted of the rural peasantry from whom the

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Khmer Rouge’s cadres were recruited. The “new people” in contrast were the former

urban elite, who had been forcibly evacuated into rural cooperatives after the revolution.

To them the Khmer Rouge applied the slogan: “To keep you is no gain; to destroy you is

no loss” (Hinton, 2008, p. 83). Within this radical hierarchy, Apopeal’s lake refuge would

not have been hidden from the “old people” who knew the land well. Indeed, Sokha’s

father explains to him at their reunion that Apopeal knew the lake because “he used to

come here with his mother,” indicating that this was a place known to the village (Siv,

2004, p. 47). What then is this space? A clue comes from the second inversion, which is

that of the human-nonhuman relationship. Prior to their escape to the lake, Sokha and

Apopeal’s relationship fit the traditional anthropocentric normative: Sokha the farmer’s

child cared for his family’s cow Chompa and her calf Apopeal. However the relationship

of care was inverted during the escape: it was Apopeal who brought an exhausted Sokha

to their lake refuge. At this refuge, the otters left fish for Sokha to eat, and the rabbit and

forest monkeys offered their companionship. What is presented here at this lake refuge is

a radical democracy of sentient life, juxtaposed with the anthropocentrism of the lands

from which Sokha and Apopeal escaped. These dual inversions present an otherness

which I argue create an imaginative heterotopia.

In Michel Foucault’s (1986) conception, heterotopias are real places which

function as “counter-sites” from which “all the other real sites that can be found within

the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (p. 24). Extending

this notion from the real to the imaginary, an imaginative heterotopia would hence

simultaneously represent, contest and invert those sites that normally populate the

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collective imaginations of national space. A case in point here would be Thongchai

Winichakul’s (1994) notion of the geo-body, the nation’s imagined image of itself (p.

17). Apopeal’s lake thus functions as a heterotopia that inverts the violent communist

utopia of Democratic Kampuchea. However this is still insufficient as an account of its

otherness, as Apopeal’s lake also functions as a heterochrony, which Foucault (1986)

glosses as an “absolute break” in “traditional time” (p. 26); in this case, the revolutionary

time of Democratic Kampuchea and its successor state, the People’s Republic of

Kampuchea (PRK). Sophal Ear (2007) notes that this period of revolution and civil war

led to a “massive loss of human resources from death, disease and displacement.”

Democratic Kampuchea pursued a violent transformation of the state into “an agrarian

Maoist economy” within which “currency and private property were banned” (p. 73).

After the fall of Democratic Kampuchea to the invading Vietnamese army, Cambodia

plunged into civil war, with the Vietnamese-backed PRK regime facing off against the

remnant Khmer Rouge army and a non-communist resistance. The PRK government

faced an economy left devastated by Khmer Rouge misrule: infrastructure and equipment

had been destroyed, damaged or left in a state of disrepair; educated citizens had either

been murdered or fled the country; and the surviving population was weakened by

malnutrition and disease, and “unable to resume normal economic activity” (Gottesman,

2003, pp. 79-80). When Sokha and Apopeal entered their lake refuge, they left

Cambodia’s revolutionary time-line, for when they left the lake they did not re-emerge

into the Real of civil war and Vietnamese occupation; instead they entered a fantasy time-

line of which Sokha’s father issued the invitation: “Now, everything is fine again in our

country. You can come back home without any danger” (Siv, 2004, p. 47). The mention

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of Sokha’s blissful return to school is also a significant inversion, as the destruction of

educational infrastructure during the Democratic Kampuchea period meant the PRK’s

schools lacked “classrooms, textbooks, and workshop and laboratory facilities,” not to

mention “basic stationery materials.” The PRK also lacked the funds to properly train

teachers, leading to a “crisis of quality” in education (Ayres, 2000, pp. 137-138).

Preah Ko Preah Keo

Structurally Sokha and Apopeal shares interesting parallels with, and important

inversions of the traditional Khmer legend Preah Ko Preah Keo. In the version collated

by Ly Daravuth and Ingrid Muan (2001), Preah Ko and Preah Keo are the analogues of

Apopeal and Sokha. Unlike Siv’s story, however, Preah Ko Preah Keo opens with an act

of supernatural violence: a pregnant woman fatally disregards the warning of a fortune

teller, and upon her death, her belly tears open to reveal Preah Ko, a calf, and Preah Keo,

a baby boy. Unlike the pre-revolutionary bliss of Sokha and Apopeal’s village, the

villagers in Preah Ko Preah Keo violently expel Preah Ko, Preah Keo and their father, in

the fear that the unnatural birth will result in misfortune. Preah Ko, Apopeal’s folkloric

bovine forerunner, soon reveals various magical abilities. This eventually draws the

attention of the Siamese king, who captures and imprisons Preah Ko and Preah Keo in

Siam, forever exiled from Cambodia. While Sokha and Apopeal draws attention to the

violence of the Democratic Kampuchea, Preah Ko Preah Keo draws attention to the

greed and easy violence of the Cambodian villagers and royal elite, whose bad decisions

lead to the national loss of Preah Ko’s magical prowess to the Siamese. In his History of

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Cambodia (2008a), David Chandler cites a different version of the legend in which Preah

Ko and Preah Keo are statues containing “sacred books, in gold, where one could learn

formulae, and books where one could learn about anything in the world.” As with Ly and

Muan’s version, the Siamese king captures this storehouse of knowledge, leaving the

Siamese “superior in knowledge to the Cambodians, and for this reason the Cambodians

are ignorant, and lack people to do what is necessary, unlike other countries” (p. 101). In

a visit to the temple site recognized by Cambodians as the birthplace of Preah Ko and

Preah Keo, Alexandra Kent (2008) observes that the monument space itself reminds

visitors of the vices of greed and foolishness inscribed in the legend (pp. 116-120). Sokha

and Apopeal inverts this theme of the loss of wisdom: with the restoration of the blissful

pre-revolutionary village life, Sokha resumes his interrupted education by returning to

school with the other village children (Siv, 2004, p. 47). In this respect, Sokha and

Apopeal presents an unfamiliarly optimistic moral heterochrony against Preah Ko Preah

Keo’s pessimistic ethical narrative.

The Distribution of the Sensible

What is the political function of Sokha and Apopeal’s heterochronous narrative? I

argue that this political function can be found in a reading of the narrative through the

lens of Jacques Rancière’s (2006) notion of the political as the distribution of the

sensible:

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Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who

has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and

the possibilities of time (p. 13).

Under this conception of aesthetics, Rancière (2011) argues that politics “reconfigures the

distribution of the perceptible,” such that:

It introduces new objects and subjects onto the common stage. It makes visible

what was invisible, it makes audible as speaking beings those who were

previously heard only as noisy animals (p. 4).

Rancière’s approach explains how the study of artworks offers an understanding of the

political milieu. Insofar as the artwork constitutes “a bloc of sensations” or “a compound

of percepts and affects” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 164), Rancière’s aesthetic

approach to politics can be connected with the affective turn in critical theory (Abel,

2008), such that the various somatic becomings engendered by the artwork – affects,

percepts and sensations – allow for the mapping of the distribution of the sensible. David

Chandler’s celebrated essay “Songs at the Edge of the Forest” (2008c), for example,

offers a reading of a selection of 19th

century Cambodian literary artworks: two folktales

and a verse chronicle. This choice of aesthetic source material not only allows him to

capture “the emotions and experiences of his subjects” (Hansen & Ledgerwood, 2008, p.

2), but also to identify disruptions in the distribution of the sensible which unveil the

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popular perception of moral instability arising from the political violence of 19th

century

Cambodia:

People had no explanations for suffering that would allow any but the magically

endowed to overcome it; they had no explanation for justice that led them to

question the propriety of exploitation … In a sense, the texts “answer” questions

that no one dared to ask, but in the end, what do they explain? No more, and of

course no less, than songs at the edge of the forest, as night comes on, the time

entre chien et loup (Chandler, 2008c, p. 45).

How then do Sokha and Apopeal and Preah Ko Preah Keo reconfigure the

distribution of the sensible? To answer this we will have to consider the political milieus

that existed at the time these narratives were constructed. Given its subject matter, the

poets who sang the various versions of Preah Ko Preah Keo into being probably did so in

Cambodia’s feudal age, more specifically during the era of Siamese invasion in the 19th

century. The establishment distribution of the sensible then would have brought to

visibility royal virtue and strength, and occluded the symptoms of moral and political

weakness. Indeed, as Kent (2008) notes of her visit to Longvek, the one-time royal

capital which was the setting of Preah Ko Preah Keo’s fateful confrontation with the

Siamese army:

The post-Angkorean monarch King Ang Chan (1516-1566) had moved the capital

to Longvek. Accounts describe the king’s power at the time as absolute; the

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people and the monks participated fully in his order … The success of his rule,

according to the chronicles, attributed to Ang Chan’s moral and religious

rectitude. However, power later fell to Ang Chan’s grandson Brah Sattha, during

whose reign Longvek fell (pp. 118-119).

Preah Ko Preah Keo’s account of the royal greed and foolishness which led to the loss to

the Siamese of Preah Ko and Preah Keo hence reconfigures the feudal distribution of the

visible, bringing to visibility the weakness and lack of virtue of King Sattha’s court.

Similarly, Sokha and Apopeal’s account of the terrible “time of hunger” serves to

repartition Democratic Kampuchea’s radical distribution of the sensible, bringing to

visibility and giving voice to the occluded human cost of the regime’s revolutionary

Great Leap Forward. The heterotopias and heterochronies of Apopeal’s lake and the

restored bliss of Sokha’s village life redistribute the regimes of sensibility of both

Democratic Kampuchea and the Vietnamese-occupied PRK. I argue that they achieve this

redistribution through juxtaposition: the blissful and peaceful scenes of life at Apopeal’s

lake and Sokha’s restored village radically invert the perceptible regime of deprivation

and violence of life under the Khmer Rouge and subsequently, the dystopia of

Vietnamese occupation and civil war.

Theater of Miracles: Political Subjectification

Such juxtapositions can also be perceived in the relatively recent re-emergences

of Preah Ko in the Cambodian regime of sensibility. In 1982, during the PRK’s civil war

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with a coalition of anti-Vietnamese groups, including the remnant Khmer Rouge army,

rumors circulated in the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border of Preah Ko’s

miraculous appearance. According to one telling of this event:

Preah Ko sensed great pains were experienced by the Khmer refugees as they

were oppressed by the Thais at every single moment. The time was very harsh. I

was too young to know, but my parents could attest to this. They were in Thai

refugee camp for a short period, but because they saw the harsh condition and the

fact that they had small children to contend with, they did not risk the hardship

until years later. They were in Phnom Penh at the time, and are able to vouch for

the appearance of Preah Ko in Khmer soil (sic) (Reksmay, 2007).

A subsequent appearance of Preah Ko occurred in September 1997, just after fighting

erupted in Phnom Penh between the private armies of the post-socialist Cambodian

People’s Party and the royalist FUNCINPEC. In the southern village of Bet Trang, a pair

of oxen became the mortal manifestations of Preah Ko and Preah Keo, with the former

performing two miracles, “first restoring the leg of a lame man by licking it and then

curing a chronically thin woman by drinking from the family cistern.” This eruption of

the miraculous into a time of political conflict attracted popular attention, transforming

Bet Trang into a place of pilgrimage, and the humble manger into a shrine (Cramer,

1997).

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Indeed, Bet Trang at that moment of miracles would have functioned as a

restorative heterotopia inverting the political violence of Phnom Penh, forming a divine

space of otherness “as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill

constructed, and jumbled” (Foucault, 1986, p. 27). The pilgrims themselves, with their

active choice to leave the city to attend to Bet Trang’s theater of miracles, had

reconfigured themselves as political subjects. As Rancière (2007a) notes, “the

distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection,”

and that the very act of looking is “an action that confirms or modifies that distribution”:

The spectator is active, just like the student or the scientist: He observes, he

selects, he compares, he interprets. He connects what he observes with many

other things he has observed on other stages, in other kinds of spaces (p. 277).

These hermeneutic acts come up against the distribution of the visible whose gatekeepers

include those whom Rancière (2007b) identifies as “the authorized speakers: presenters,

editorial writers, politicians, and experts, specialists at explaining or debating matters” (p.

73). In this case, such authorized speakers would include the sophisticated experts who

denounced the “obvious charlatanism” in operation at Bet Trang (Cramer, 1997). The

distribution of the visible hence manifests the “staging of the relationship between the

authority of the authorized word and the visible that it selects for our benefit: a staging of

the events that count according to what those they reach think counts” (Rancière, 2007b,

p. 74). Returning to Bet Trang, the key hermeneutic acts of observation, selection,

comparison and interpretation subjectified those pilgrims who sought miraculous

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alternatives to Cambodia’s standard “configuration of domination and subjection.” As

Michael J. Shapiro (2004) explains, Rancière’s notion of subjectification “means not the

imposition of already recognized social identities but the introduction of new voices that

are at once expressive and disruptive” (p. 25). Through their act of seeking miraculous

alternatives, these pilgrims disrupted the national distribution of the sensible.

Writing Politics

This process of political subjectification also sheds light on the long struggle of

Cambodian writers. As Teri Yamada (2009) notes, Prince Norodom Sihanouk warned

writers in 1961 that “they must support government policy at every opportunity; if they

described other political ideologies in their writings, their works would not be considered

literature.” Indeed, in the 1960s those “few clandestinely published novels that were

critical of the monarchy were banned and the writers arrested” (pp. 118-119). Writers

fared little better under General Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic, which “mimicked

Sihanouk’s suppression of politically critical fiction” (p. 122). Within this pre-

revolutionary period, writers retreated to the entertainment-oriented genres, including

adventure, mystery and sentimental narratives (pp. 119, 122). Of course, insofar as these

ostensibly apolitical genres revealed to their readers a different ordering of the sensible,

and hence new possibilities against the existing regime of domination and subjection,

these texts would have had political effects. Soth Polin’s short story Communicate, They

Say (2004), published during this era of political censorship (Yamada, 2009, pp. 119-

120), illustrates this: its alienated protagonist struggles to communicate with the young

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Cambodian woman he is interested in; eventually he discovers that successful

communication communicates not deep truths but inane and superficial ones. On one

reading, the shallowness and superficiality of Phnom Penh’s new modern elite are

denounced; on another, the protagonist’s struggle pragmatically reveals that inanity and

superficiality are indeed the communicative modes to success in Cambodia’s pre-

revolutionary modernizing economy.

After the revolution, the anti-intellectual Khmer Rouge identified and purged

educated Cambodians as class enemies, creating an illiterate generation of Cambodians.

While written forms of literature were identified as “vestiges of imperialism, colonialism,

feudalism and other former ruling classes” and vigorously suppressed, “oral traditions

and locution for the masses” were valorized (Yamada, 2009, pp. 122-123). After the

Vietnamese invasion, some of the writers who survived Democratic Kampuchea fled to

the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, and eventually into exile, where they

would create the literature of the Cambodian diaspora: Darina Siv and Soth Polin would

number among these (p. 123). In an Indochinese variant of Pascale Casanova’s (2004)

identification of the struggle of writers in postcolonial states against “the forms of

linguistic domination and economic domination (notably in the form of foreign control

over publishing)” (p. 81), the Cambodian writers who remained in the Vietnamese-

occupied PRK would have to contend with the regime’s attempts to control their work, in

particular the political requirement to support the state’s socialist agenda. Yamada notes

that “all published novels had to be approved by a state agency and produced through

state publishing houses,” with the consequence that Cambodia’s state-produced literature

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in the 1980s solely consisted of these “politically correct” novels (p. 124). However, as

Sharon May (2004) observes, a thriving black market in illegal novels emerged during

this period:

Almost as soon as the Khmer Rouge regime ended, a new literature began to

appear: novels were handwritten, often in pencil, on the cheap, graph-lined paper

of student notebooks, then photocopied and rented out by the day at market stalls.

Whether in serial form or their entirety, these books were sought by an eager

public. Because the stories did not support the socialist government – many were

about love – the books were often confiscated and pen names invented so that

authors would not be arrested (p. 30).

Yamada (2009) elaborates that these shopkeepers were “unable to advertise the rental of

this unofficial literature for fear of the authorities closing down their shops; yet readers

knew of them through word-of-mouth.” These illegal texts “circulated to the most remote

provinces and as far as the Thai border camps” (p. 125). The pseudonymous writers of

these illegal texts are analogous to the revolutionary worker-writers of whom Rancière

(1989) notes were “doubly and irremediably excluded for living as workers did and

speaking as bourgeois people did,” and whose doubled positionality constituted a

“rejection of the existing order” (pp. ix-xii). As he would subsequently elaborate:

Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes

a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and

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makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes

understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise (Rancière, 1999, p.

30).

By positioning themselves as writers, Rancière’s revolutionary workers inscribed

themselves as political actors; similarly, the pseudonymous authors of the handwritten

novels shifted themselves from the places the regime assigned to them, and revealed to

their readers imaginative spaces that had been forbidden by the PRK regime: this

imaginative heterotopia constituted by the proscribed love stories inverted the dour

socialist space prescribed by the regime, freeing the readers to imagine other, non-

prescribed relationships and positionalities.

Neoliberal Bodies

With the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1991 and the United Nations-

organized and -supervised elections in 1993, Cambodia transitioned from socialism to

neoliberal capitalism. Mey Son Sotheary’s My Sister (2002) reflects the unsettling new

social realities of Cambodia’s new market economy. The protagonist San discovers that

his older sister Keo has been working as a prostitute to support their family’s move from

Prey Veng province to Phnom Penh. In an anguished response to San’s fury, Keo

explains:

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“I am an indecent bargirl. Not only that, I sell my body. I have sex with anyone

who pays me well … I know how much this hurts you. But both of you should

realize I’m the one who hurts the most. Brother works for a famous company and

younger sister studies law with a bright future ahead of her. But I understand.

From now on don’t regard me as your sister.” (p. 50).

After Keo leaves, San confronts a prostitute about her work, and she proceeds to chide

him:

“Do you survive just for yourself and that’s it? I have brothers and sisters, and

they have to go to school. How can I pay for their education? You just want them

to be illiterate and then get a job like me? Young man, why don’t you just go back

home and ask all your sisters if there is a woman happy being a bargirl.” (p. 51).

When he returns home, San’s aunt chastises him for his selfishness and ingratitude:

“Don’t you realize whom she prostitutes herself for? Is she some goddess with

magical powers to conjure money for you to spend frivolously? Could you and

Moum have financed your university education alone? Could you have acquired

your great broadcasting job without her doing this? I don’t think so.” (p. 51).

By bringing into the domestic sphere the traumatic reality which most would prefer to

regard as an external social problem, Mey achieves a redistribution of the sensible,

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granting a voice to the bargirls and prostitutes who remain silent and invisible in official

discourse. Rancière (1999) argues that “politics exists when the natural order of

domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part” (p. 11).

Cambodia’s underclass – its part of those who have no part – typically remains out of

sight in the city’s bars, brothels, nightclubs and gambling dens, and can only make itself

visible to polite society in literary texts such as My Sister. The explanations by Keo,

San’s aunt, and the angry prostitute give voice to the bargirls and prostitutes who ply

their trade on behalf of their families in the silence and invisibility of official discourse.

My Sister hence transforms the safe domestic space of home into an imaginative

heterotopia which reflects the dangerous external spaces of the bar and brothel, and

reveals to its readers those voices which hitherto, in Rancière’s (1999) memorable

phrasing, they “only heard as noise” (p. 30).

In an interview with Davide Panagia, Rancière argues that humans are political

because their “fundamental ability to proliferate words is unceasingly contested by those

who claim to ‘speak correctly’ – that is, by the masters of designation and classification

who, by virtue of wanting to retain their status and power, flat-out deny this capacity to

speak” (Rancière & Panagia, 2000, p. 115). The short play Just a Human Being,

published in a daily newspaper during the UN transitional period by an anonymous

playwright, focuses on this fraught relationship of power and speech. Set in an unnamed

bureaucratic office, the Chief and his Assistant are confronted with a visitor who

demands to meet the former in person. Fearing that this visitor “might not just be a

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human being,” the Chief interrogates his Assistant as to the visitor’s appearance and

behavior:

Assistant: Shall I chase him away?

Chief: Don’t rush things now … just in case he might not just be a human being,

but from the inspection committee.

Assistant: Could be or could not. The sleeves of his shirt are all worn through.

Chief: Why are you telling me about his worn-through sleeves, then? Focused

and clear demeanor – right on the day I don’t receive visitors – shirt sleeves worn

through; just a human being. I am very suspicious! There’s something out of the

ordinary here (Anonymous, 2002, p. 40).

Suspecting that the visitor is an inspector, the Chief orders his Assistant to prepare to

receive him with the appropriate level of hospitality:

Chief: Wait a minute. We’ve go to do this right. Tell the secretary to make some

coffee quickly and to bring out some cognac and other things like that as well.

Pull the chairs together a little here. And you can push the flower pot away a little,

there. Now go and invite him in and don’t forget that you have to treat him very

warmly and intimately, like a member of the family (p. 40).

However, the Assistant reports that the visitor is weeping, which changes the Chief’s

mind:

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Chief: Is that so? Weeping. Then he must be just a human being after all. So then

we try to … Ho, ho. Then everything is already quite in order. You can go kick

his ass out of here, and you don’t need to say anything to anybody. Tell the

secretary that it’s not necessary to make coffee. As for the cognac, though … a

stressful situation does sap one’s energies. A human being, then … It’s a problem

we can handle by ourselves (p. 41).

With this behavioral confirmation, the Chief designates and classifies the hapless visitor

as occupying a position of no importance, hence denying his ability to speak. Were he not

to weep, however, the Chief would have received him as a fully articulate member of the

inspectorate, and welcomed him with coffee and cognac. The Chief’s gaze here manifests

what Rancière describes as the mode of the police:

The category of “the police,” as I intend it, is neither a repressive instrument nor

the idea of a “control on life” theorized by Foucault. The essence of the police is

the principle of saturation; it is a mode of the partition of the sensible that

recognizes neither lack nor supplement. As conceived by “the police,” society is a

totality comprised of groups performing specific functions and occupying

determined spaces (Rancière & Panagia, 2000, p. 124).

The visitor initially troubled the Chief’s gaze because he was unable to be positioned:

was he from the inspectorate, or just an unimportant human being? Once the visitor was

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spotted weeping, however, he no longer stood in an unknown position outside of the

police qua partition of the sensible, and instead could be safely positioned and treated as

an unimportant human being.

Dissensus

I shall close this chapter with a discussion of Yur Karavuth’s A Khmer

Policeman’s Story: A Goddamn Rich Man of the New Era (2002), which introduces the

element of dissensus into the Rancièrean mode of the police. As Rancière explains:

The notion of dissensus thus means the following: politics is comprised of a

surplus of subjects that introduce, within the saturated order of the police, a

surplus of objects. These subjects do not have the consistency of coherent social

groups united by common property or a common birth, etc. They exist entirely

within the act, and their actions are the manifestation of a dissensus; that is, the

making contentious of the givens of a particular situation. The subjects of politics

make visible that which is not perceivable, that which, under the optics of a given

perceptive field, did not possess a raison d’être, that which did not have a name

(Rancière & Panagia, 2000, pp. 124-125).

Contestation over that which is taken for granted in the social field hence disrupts

political consensus and introduces dissensus, which allows the subjects of politics to

bring to light that which has been occluded. Indeed, Rancière argues that consensus is the

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“negation of the democratic basis for politics: it desires to have well-identifiable groups

with specific interests, aspirations, values and ‘culture’” (Rancière & Panagia, 2000, p.

125). Jodi Dean (2009) however critiques Rancière’s deployment of “a string of

identifying moves that turn politics into law and law into unified community,” and notes

that the law is not a site of consensus but rather dissensus, “open and avowed political

conflict that brings to the fore the relations of power and privilege already (and

necessarily) inscribed in law” (p. 14). A Khmer Policeman’s Story illustrates this eruption

of dissensus in the constantly shifting market forces of neoliberalism. Set at the dawn of

Cambodia’s present neoliberal era, the Khmer policeman of Yur’s short story engages in

property speculation, initially reaping massive profits and becoming a “goddamn rich

man of the new era.” However, he runs afoul of a well-connected businessman and loses

a prime investment:

So this is my story – from living in a stone house with brick columns on its own

plot of land, I progressed to a spacious apartment. And from there I moved on to a

small, rather crowded apartment. Finally, I ended up in the sticks enjoying the

fresh air (p. 44).

The policeman shifts his economic position rapidly across Cambodia’s social field

according to the constantly changing rhythms of the property market, and only comes to a

halt in a fixed socio-economic position when the well-connected businessman intervenes.

At the end of the story, he gives voice to others facing the same predicament:

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I do know, though, that it’s not just me, a poor policeman, who has a story like

this. I suspect there are others who’ve received the nickname “a goddamn rich

man of the new era,” because of experiences like my own (p. 45).

These ever-shifting economic positionalities of Cambodia’s neoliberal investors and

speculators remove them from the “well-identifiable groups” required by consensus, and

their constantly changing speculative investments manifest dissensus, disrupting the

economic givens of the political field. Rather than an imaginative heterotopia then, the

precarious career of Yur’s policeman functions as a mirror to that of the hapless victims

of Cambodia’s contemporary neoliberal economy.

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CHAPTER 6: BREAKFAST WITH THE DICTATOR:

MEMORY, ATROCITY AND AFFECT

Introduction: Breakfast with the Dictator1

In early August 2007, I accompanied Frank Cibulka, a Czech political scientist,

and Thet Sambath, a senior journalist with the Phnom Penh Post, to the town of Pailin on

the Cambodian border with Thailand. We were there to meet Nuon Chea, the chief

ideologue of the Khmer Rouge and the regime’s Brother Number 2, for an interview.

This interview was to be one of his last before his arrest the following month on charges

of crimes against humanity by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

(ECCC), popularly known as the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal. For me this interview

generated a conflicted sensory bloc. Noun Chea had suffered a stroke several years

earlier, and as such suffered bodily impediments. Underneath these, his sternness of

speech and demeanor reflected a fanatical discipline that Slavoj Žižek (2008a) would

probably acknowledge as that of an authentic revolutionary. I could not fail to recognize

that Nuon Chea, under Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea regime, was most certainly not

a moderate who sought “revolution without a revolution,” that is, as Žižek explains, “a

revolution deprived of the excess in which democracy and terror coincide, a revolution

respecting social rules, subordinated to preexisting norms” (p. 163). Despite his physical

frailty, this octogenarian, who is accused of the extermination of almost a third of

Cambodia’s population, terrified me. 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Theory & Event volume 13, number 4 (2010).

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As our interview was at 6 AM, Nuon Chea invited us to join him and his family

for breakfast. Mrs. Nuon Chea had prepared a simple but quite delicious Sino-Khmer

breakfast. There was fried chicken, sour soup with pork and preserved mustard leaves,

fatty roast pork, and generous helpings of rice. The rich flavors, and the hearty quality

and quantity of the meal all reflected plenitude, and my sense of fear clashed with, but

failed to kill, my gustatory enjoyment. I ended up having three helpings, to the delight of

Mrs. Nuon Chea. Her cooking generated in me a strong sense of nostalgia, which was

interesting because this was the first time I had met her. “Patrick” (2009), the

neuroscientist who runs the Very Evolved blog, explains this sensation of false nostalgia

as “nostalgia by association.” That is, my gustatory enjoyment triggered in my mind my

childhood memories of gustatory enjoyment of family meals. (But of course this

breakfast was very different from the family meals of my childhood.) As Jonah Lehrer

(2007) points out, “our senses of smell and taste are uniquely sentimental,”

This is because smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the

hippocampus, the center of the brain’s long-term memory. Their mark is indelible.

All our other senses (sight, touch and hearing) are first processed by the thalamus,

the source of language and the front door to consciousness. As a result, these

senses are much less efficient at summoning up our past (p. 80).

My gustatory encounter with Nuon Chea – the very embodiment of Cambodia’s

recent memory of genocide – is an instance of the affective intersection of haptic space

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with places of memory. Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) valorization of the

haptic over the tactile on the basis that the former “does not establish an opposition

between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill

this nonoptical function” (p. 492), I interpret haptic space as the ever-changing

phenomenological space that the exterior senses constantly construct and reveal of the

world. This chapter seeks to explore such affective intersections of haptic space with

places of memory.

Gustatory and Olfactory Affects

Benny Widyono (2008), the “shadow governor” of Siem Reap province under the

United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia, describes in his memoirs a similar

gustatory encounter with the Khmer Rouge. In September 1992 Prince Sihanouk and

Princess Monique paid a visit to the Khmer Rouge-held town of Pailin, and Mr. Widyono

accompanied them. As he recounts:

At lunchtime I was invited to join a banquet of Khmer Rouge top brass in honor

of the royal couple. Khieu Samphan, Son Sann and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Thioun

Munn, and I flanked the Prince and Princess; Pol Pot was conspicuously absent.

Ieng Sary’s daughter, who studied in London, prepared a sumptuous lunch:

Khmer nouvelle cuisine, including fine eggshells delicately filled with fluffy dried

fish, chicken curry in individual bowls for each guest with bread, and Cambodian

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sour soup with dried fish, all washed down with Mouton Cadet, a Sihanouk

favorite (pp. 87-88).

Widyono’s gustatory enjoyment reflected plenitude, and indeed Pailin at the time

was a town of plenty, thanks to its natural riches of gem mines and lumber, so much so

that “the civilian population under the Khmer Rouge was more comfortable than civilians

in the adjacent SOC territory. Even the Khmer Rouge soldiers, who were given every

chance to defect, refused to go” (p. 89). However, the plenitude of Pailin at that time was

not representative of life under the Khmer Rouge during the Democratic Kampuchea

period. In September 2005, L’histoire Café opened opposite Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng

genocide museum, offering authentic Democratic Kampuchea-era cuisine. The

Cambodian government promptly shut the café down a fortnight later, because it lacked

the proper license (“Cambodian Police”, 2005). As the Cambodia Daily reports:

The restaurant serves a $6 fixed-price “Unforgettable Menu” that sacrifices flavor

for historical accuracy: The main course is bland rice gruel, served in a tin bowl.

“The Khmer Rouge gave a person a bit of rice or corn mixed with water and

leaves. This kind of food a person could get only a [serving] in the noon and a

[serving] in the evening,” the menu notes. (Melamed & Sambath, 2005)

The “historical accuracy” of this meal only goes so far, of course. The simple

Khmer Rouge gruel did not cost $6 during the Democratic Kampuchea period, not least

because Pol Pot’s regime had abolished the institutions of money and markets (Kiernan,

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2002, pp. 55-56). The gustatory affect of this authentically revolutionary meal remained

potent, however, despite this bald attempt to extract monetary profit from the pain of

memory. Hakpry Agnchealy, the sister of the café’s owner, reflected: “When I ate, it

made me so sad. I do not want to eat this food again” (Melamed & Sambath, 2005).

In our everyday speech, gustatory and olfactory metaphors signal embodied

epistemological moments. For example, we occasionally have to sniff out hidden truths,

or swallow unpleasant, bitter ones. Gustatory and olfactory assemblages are also

commonly deployed in the familial habitus as a means of non-verbal communication.

Pauline Nguyen writes:

A dish of bitter melon soup is a dish of reconciliation. When we quarrel, we

cannot speak the words “I am sorry” – we give this bittersweet soup instead. In

another instance, the sharing of a particular meal can offer the sentiment we crave

to hear: “It’s good to see you again – I’ve missed you”. On rare occasions, too

few to forget, I have understood the longed for words, “Please forgive me”

(Nguyen, Nguyen, & Jensen, 2007, p. 13).

Of the five senses, the gustatory and the olfactory offer the least avenue for

conceptualization, especially when compared with the visual or the sonorous. They are

rooted in chemical interactions between the world and the sense organs, and are less open

than the visual, the sonorous and the tactile to iterations of interpretation and reflection.

Jacques Derrida (1981) reminds us of the Kantian denigration of the “consuming orality

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which as such, as an interested taste or as actual tasting, can have nothing to do with pure

taste” (p. 16). Even so, gustatory and olfactory affects cannot be ignored for they are as

constitutive of haptic space as the other senses, and they also generate a pre-cognitive

narrative from sensation to thought and judgment. For example, Mrs. Nuon Chea’s

delicious breakfast created for me a gustatory affect of enjoyment, which in turn created a

pleasurable sensory frame which violently clashed with the fear produced by my

cognizance of Nuon Chea’s deep responsibility for the Khmer Rouge genocide.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Tour

While the sensory bloc of my breakfast with Nuon Chea was dominated by

gustatory and olfactory affects, that of my visit to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum was

dominated by their visual, sonorous, and tactile counterparts. Under the guidance of Pol

Pot, Phnom Penh’s suburban Tuol Svay Prey High School was transformed into S-21, the

core of Democratic Kampuchea’s internal surveillance and disciplinary apparatus. The

high school’s classrooms were crudely transformed into and deployed as prison cells and

torture chambers. In its manifestation as a charnel house, over 14,000 prisoners were

tortured and killed there (Mydans, 2009). After the defeat of Pol Pot’s forces, the

Vietnamese occupation regime transformed S-21 into the Tuol Sleng Museum for

Genocidal Crime, which has since become one of Phnom Penh’s most popular tourist

destinations. A visit to a memory site of atrocity like Tuol Sleng raises the question of

visitor’s ambiguous identity as a witness to the past or as a voyeur of the other’s pain.

Philip Gourevitch (1998) confronted this dilemma when he visited Rwanda’s Nyarubuye

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genocide memorial, where the murdered victims were left unburied as a potent means of

commemoration of their atrocious ends. Echoing Leontius, who was memorably

described by Plato in The Republic (Book IV, 439e) as unhappily succumbing to his

desire to view the corpses of executed prisoners, Gourevitch recounts:

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around

it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the

strange tranquility of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some

uninterpretable gesture there – these things were beautiful, and their beauty only

added to the affront of the place. I couldn’t settle on any meaningful response:

revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly

meaningful. I just looked, and I took photographs, because I wondered whether I

could really see what I was seeing while I saw it, and I wanted also an excuse to

look a bit more closely (p. 19).

Gourevitch’s dilemma has contemporary resonances fueled by the growing

popularity of so-called dark tourism, that is, touristic interest in sites of “death, disaster

and atrocity” (Lennon & Foley, 2000, p. 3). The commoditization and fetishization of

atrocity memorials signals the globalization of the society of the spectacle, with

backpackers and luxury tourists consuming the past pain of others for their edification.

This can be seen in the recent proliferation of cafés, restaurants, and guesthouses around

Tuol Sleng, transforming the genocide memorial into a profit-oriented tourist space. At a

deeper level, Gourevitch’s dilemma is inevitable, given the ontological status of the

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monument as an event: as Roger Luckhurst (2008) notes, “stone no longer fixes a heroic

national narrative in place” (p. 151). Instead the meaning of a monument consists in its

semiological manifold of possible perspectives and vantage points. Sven Lindqvist

(1992), another explorer of historical pain, connects memory sites of atrocity to the

European project of colonialism. Noting that the Victorian liberal theorist Herbert

Spenser had applauded the extermination of those troublesome human populations that

stood in the way of the civilizing projects of Western colonialism (pp. 8-9), Lindqvist

observes that Germans “have been made sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination that

are actually a common European heritage” (p. 9). Indeed, what memory sites like Tuol

Sleng and Nyarubuye seem to show is that extermination has a properly human, not just a

common European, heritage.

The Tuol Sleng genocide tour offers an unpleasant sensory overload. From the

outside, Tuol Sleng looks exactly like the French colonial-era high school that it was

prior to Pol Pot’s ascendance, with its neat rows of low-rise classroom blocks surrounded

by green yards. An unknowing visitor would expect boisterous schoolchildren to

suddenly erupt from the classrooms. Tuol Sleng, however, has long ceased to exist as a

school: the first sight that greeted me inside this non-school was of a row of classrooms

that had been reconfigured as torture chambers. The sight of beds that had been

repurposed into devices of pain created a visceral shock, as did the old photographs of the

bloody corpses of murdered interrogation subjects still bound to the naked bed-frames.

These torture cells are affective machines of terror. Elaine Scarry (1985) captures the

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semiological annihilation of ordinary objects that have been transformed into instruments

of torture:

Made to participate in the annihilation of the prisoners, made to demonstrate that

everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of

civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no

refrigerator, no chair, no bed (p. 41).

This semiological annihilation pinpoints the shock and nausea of S-21’s torture

chambers: the classrooms are no longer classrooms; the beds are no longer beds – they

have been perverted and transformed into places and instruments of pain and death. As

Marco Abel (2007) points out, the viewer of violent images possesses the “constitutive

ability to respond before these images represent” (p. 10). My “response-ability”, as it

were, consists of my somatic tendency to feel sensory affect prior to conceptualization or

representation. When I first saw these blood-stained non-beds, my pulse began racing like

the percussion of a skor, the traditional Khmer drum, heightening my somatic

anticipation for the horrors to follow. Unlike the gustatory pleasures of my breakfast with

Nuon Chea, the sensations I experienced at S-21 were not at all enjoyable. My sensory

overexcitation led me to contrast the routine anticipation of the students of Tuol Svay

Prey High School awaiting their examinations with the anguished anticipation of S-21’s

prisoners awaiting their interrogation sessions. The gaudy displays of the tortures of Hell

offered at Singapore’s Haw Par Villa, which I had seen in my childhood, could not

compete with the grim evidence of the actual tortures that went on in S-21. Within

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singular memory sites of atrocity like Tuol Sleng or Nyarubuye, imaginary horrors are

the pale shadows of the Real.

The Tuol Sleng genocide museum tour is linear, a legacy of the rational

architecture of the original school complex. This rationality was brought to its excess in

the rational transformation of the school into a disciplinary zone of torture and

extermination. I arrived at dim corridors of individual holding cells after leaving the row

of torture cells. The Khmer Rouge constructed these by crudely dividing up the original

classrooms: a nightmarish reterritorialization of striated space. The tactile and visual

crudeness of these prison cells, and their claustrophobic and dim interiors, created a

sensory bloc dominated by the affects of fear and horror. Apart from the tactile and the

visual, Tuol Sleng also delivers sonorous and olfactory affects. Silence dominates these

walls: even noisy tourists are shocked into silence. I recall the absence of even the

nervous laughter that would normally be voiced by tourists in exhibits less uncomfortable

than this. But Tuol Sleng, of course, is not like most tourist attractions.

S-21’s security regulations warned prisoners against the utterance of unregulated

sounds. The sixth security regulation, for example, states: “While getting lashes or

electrification you must not cry at all,” and the tenth warns: “If you disobey any point of

my regulations, you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of the electric discharge”

(Dunlop, 2005, pp. 20-21). Reading these inhuman regulations, I imagined silences

punctuated by cycles of screams. Tuol Sleng’s sonorous chill is juxtaposed with the lively

soundscape just outside its walls. I recall being surprised to find boisterous neighborhood

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children using the former school grounds as their playground. Outside the museum,

predatory tuk tuk and motorcycle taxi drivers waited patiently, calling out their services to

the emotionally drained visitors: I remember having had to flee from them – the rude

cacophony of their commercial appeals jarred unpleasantly with my fresh memories of S-

21’s mortuary silences.

In the past, the museum offered a display of the victims’ clothes. This would have

added an olfactory affect to the sensory bloc experienced by the visitors, generating

visceral nausea. The nausea thus generated would have mirrored the olfactory affect of

Rwanda’s genocide memory sites, where visitors can “smell the stench of the bodies, see

the rotting tufts of hair on their heads, and see the machete wounds deep in the skulls”

(Miller, 2007). These displays of the clothes of the dead in Cambodia and Rwanda mirror

similar displays of the remnants of lives of victims in museums commemorating the

Shoah. Jeffrey Ochsner (1997) cites the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s

poignant collections of “ordinary objects that were taken at the death camps from those

about to die – objects like shoes, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, cutlery, scissors, and the like.

These things are ordinary; indeed, they look just like similar objects that we all own and

use every day.” Indeed, the affective power of the remnants of ordinary lives arises from

their very ordinariness, as this generates a sense of empathy with the victims, even

allowing us to “experience a partial sense of the fear they must have felt” (p. 171).

There seems to be little time or distance between these things and their owners

and the similar things that we own and ourselves. Thus, these offer the

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opportunity for us to realize the similar humanity of those who were killed in the

death camps and ourselves. They can become sites for projection (linking

objects), and through them we can experience (project) a close connection to the

feeling of the lives of those who died (p. 171).

Jill Bennett (2005), analyzing the artworks of Columbian artist Doris Salcedo,

which similarly consist of remnants of the lives of victims of atrocity, points out that

these objects have undergone a radical reterritorialization of their everyday meanings (p.

62). Through their violent resituation in memory sites, these ordinary objects lose their

former functional meanings and are instead transformed into Ochsnerian linking objects:

allowing the living spectators to project onto them a sense of community with the dead.

Faciality Machines

Having walked past the corridors of prison cells, I next came to Tuol Sleng’s

displays of mug-shots of S-21’s victims. These walls of photographs of the faces of the

condemned generate a powerful visual affect. While S-21 can be described as a machine

of pain and death, these interior walls of memorial photographs can be described as

machines of grief and sorrow. These images offer an ironic counterpoint to Pierre

Bourdieu’s (1996) account of middle-brow photographic practice as centered on

“solemnizing and immortalizing the high points of family life” (p. 19). The affective

potency of Tuol Sleng’s mug-shots can be analyzed using Roland Barthes’ (1981) binary

of the studium and punctum. The studium consists of the intentional field of the

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photographic image, contested and negotiated between the photographer and the viewer.

The punctum, on the other hand, refers to the unintentional element in the photographic

image which interrupts or “punctuates” the studium (pp. 26-27). The studia of S-21’s

mug shots hence consist in Democratic Kampuchea’s bureaucratic need to document and

discipline these alleged counterrevolutionaries. Their puncta, on the other hand, consist in

those unintentional elements – drops of blood, facial grimaces, marks on the walls –

which reveal the human horror (of their impending tortures and murders) these victims

faced, and which generate, almost three decades later, sympathy and the associated

affects of sorrow and grief in the viewers today. These intense emotions stem from the

temporally frozen images of fear and hopelessness that can be discerned on the faces of

these victims.

Consider, for example, Tuol Sleng’s infamous mug-shot of Saang, the nom de

guerre of Khmer Rouge cadre Chan Kim Srun, which features her cradling her infant

baby (Dunlop, 2005, pp. 22-23). Saang’s unkempt hair and swollen eye bags punctuate

the ostensive documentary purpose of the photograph. The shadows of the curtain serving

as the backdrop signal to the viewer the existence of the horrors lying outside the frame

of the photograph, which would soon devour Saang and her baby. According to Prak

Khan, a surviving interrogator, the children of S-21’s prisoners would be murdered by

being dropped from the prison’s balconies, to “prevent them from being a nuisance” (p.

132). The puncta that signal the horrors facing Saang and her baby function as the visual

boundary which Gilles Deleuze (2002) argues separates order from chaos (p. 83). Indeed,

the formality of the disciplinary order of Saang’s mug-shot juxtaposes with the sensual

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pain expressed through her appearance, signaling the violent chaos of pain and death

soon to come.

In this way the S-21 mug-shots recode the original overcoding generated by what

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) describe as the abstract machines of faciality (p.

170). The face overcodes the pre-symbolic hermeneutic of the body, allowing the

transformation of the subject into a primal frame of meaning. The S-21 mug-shots, with

their studia and puncta, recode the faces, encoding within them Democratic

Kampuchea’s sense of righteous justice in identifying and eliminating Cambodia’s race

enemies, and also resituating the victims in the fateful context of eternal murder. Susan

Sontag (2003) succinctly describes the sense of nausea generated by these images:

These Cambodian women and men of all ages, including many children,

photographed from a few feet away, usually in half figure, are – as in Titian’s The

Flaying of Marsyas, where Apollo’s knife is eternally about to descend – forever

looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged. And the viewer

is in the same position as the lackey behind the camera; the experience is

sickening (p. 61).

The Soundscape of the Dead

Simon O’Sullivan (2006) reminds us that affects are “immanent to experience”, in

that they consist of the temporal “becomings” of our bodies triggered by sensation.

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Different sensations have the power to generate different affects, and “certain encounters

will be more productive, others less so” (p. 41). The visual affect of Tuol Sleng’s walls of

mug-shots can hence be productively contrasted with the sonorous affect of recordings of

Cambodia’s pre-revolutionary music. The vast majority of Cambodia’s musicians were

murdered during the Democratic Kampuchea period, forever altering the affective

response towards their works. This music has thus been reterritorialized from a mode of

entertainment into a funereal soundscape of the dead (Pirozzi, 2006).

Consider Sinn Sisamouth’s (2008) rendition of Quando My Love, for example. As

a Khmer cover version of a classic Italian pop song, the immediate sonorous affect is one

of amusing kitsch. However, when one remembers Sisamouth’s terrible death at the

hands of the Khmer Rouge (Kerr, 2008), the song’s sonorous affect assumes tragic and

elegiac undertones: I still feel chills whenever I hear Sisamouth’s rendition of this song.

Viewing photographs of the dead generates in my opinion a different affect from that of

listening to songs sung by the dead. The latter contains an element of the uncanny that the

former lacks. While the visual affect of viewing a still photograph of the dead is

constructed by the mind’s interpretation of the puncta – we imagine the violent torture

and murder that eternally await the condemned – the sonorous affect of a song sung by

the dead is constituted by the juxtaposition of the knowledge of the violence of the

singer’s death with the obscene dynamism of the living rhythms of his recorded

performance of the song. In the absence of a video recording of the event, we have to

visually imagine Sisamouth’s murder. In contrast, we don’t have to imagine Sisamouth’s

living voice – we immediately hear it whenever we listen to the recordings of his songs.

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The affect created by Tuol Sleng’s walls of mug-shots can also be juxtaposed

with the affect created by the wall of names at the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl

Harbor. In contrast to the violence of intense emotions created by the photographs of S-

21’s victims, the stately cadences and elegant arrangement of names at the USS Arizona

memorial generate refined emotions of restrained sorrow. The Arizona memorial’s

arrangement of names echoes the starkness of Maya Lin’s controversial and popular

Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Jeffrey Ochsner (1997) argues that the memorial’s affective

power arises from its “space of absence”, that is, the “void in which we have the

simultaneous experience of both the absence and the presence of the dead” (p. 156). The

inscription of the names of the dead on the reflective polished walls of the memorial

generates an uncanny sensation of connection between the living viewer and the

memorialized deceased (p. 164).

Violent Cartographies

A map of skulls used to be on display adjacent to Tuol Sleng’s walls of mug-

shots, marking the linear conclusion of the museum tour. Created from exhumed human

remains from S-21’s mass graves, the visual and tactile rawness of this osseous collage

generated in me the sensation of nausea. This map was a material realization of a violent

cartography, which Michael Shapiro (2009) describes as “an articulation of geographic

imaginaries and antagonisms, based on models of identity-difference” (p. 18). Through

its biopolitical security apparatuses, the xenophobic Pol Pot regime sought to purge

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Democratic Kampuchea of the enemy Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies, who were

denounced as kbal yuen khluen khmae, literally “Khmer bodies with Vietnamese heads”

(Locard, 2004, pp. 179-181). Policing agencies like S-21 were hence created to “identify

the domestic spaces where bodies were judged to be dangerous because they are

associated with foreign antagonists” (Shapiro, 2009, p. 19). These cleansed spaces

eventually evolved – through the extermination of these dangerous bodies – into the

killing fields and mass graves which made manifest the violent cartography of

Democratic Kampuchea. This decaying map of skulls was finally dismantled in 2002

(Ker, 2002).

The raw viscerality of genocide memorials like Tuol Sleng and Nyarubuye stands

in stark contrast to the cerebral abstraction of similar genocide memorials in the West.

For example, Berlin’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe consists of “a vast grid

of 2,711 concrete pillars whose jostling forms seem to be sinking into the earth”

(Ouroussoff, 2005). The economic correlation of Cambodia’s and Rwanda’s poverty, as

opposed to the prosperity of the West, could explain this; as could S-21’s and

Nyarubuye’s relatively crude technologies of killing, as contrasted with the industrial

apparatuses of genocide deployed by Nazi Germany.

Scenes of Life at S-21

The genocide memorial art of Vann Nath is also on display at this part of the

museum. Imprisoned and tortured at S-21, Vann Nath was spared execution because of

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his artistic skills: the Khmer Rouge assigned him the task of creating portraits of

Comrade Pol Pot. Stefan Ruzowitzky's Die Fälscher (2007) echoes Vann Nath’s real-life

experiences: the fictional hero’s artistic talents enable him to survive a Nazi

concentration camp: the guards commission him to paint their family portraits. Following

the fall of Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese on January 7, 1979, Vann Nath was

commissioned by the Vietnamese occupation regime to document the horrors of S-21

(Ly, 2003, pp. 71-72). In the resulting series of brutal paintings, entitled Scenes of Life at

S-21, he vividly depicts bodies in pain. Given that these paintings are displayed right next

to the torture instruments they depict – including an apparatus for water-boarding, a

torture technique recently utilized by the American Central Intelligence Agency against

al Qaeda suspects (Miller, 2008) – they inspired in me an imagined reliving of the acts of

torture, and hence an intense visceral affect of fear and horror. In terms of affect, Scenes

of Life at S-21 resembles Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings. Arthur Danto (2006)

notes that while the leaked Abu Ghraib photographs fail to “bring us closer to the agonies

of the victims,” Botero’s paintings successfully “establish a visceral sense of

identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make

vicariously our own” (p. 24).

Susan Sontag (2003) argues that S-21’s photographed victims “remain an

aggregate: anonymous victims,” and that “even if named, unlikely to be known to ‘us’”

(p. 61). While this is probably true of the typical foreign visitor to Tuol Sleng, researchers

like David Chandler (1999b) have done much to excavate and reveal the identities and

histories of these victims. And what has been revealed has the power to reshape one’s

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response to the visual records of their suffering and death. As Nic Dunlop (2006)

explains:

What is not immediately apparent to most visitors to the prison is that Tuol Sleng

was created for rooting out enemies from within the party. The majority of the

prisoners were from the Khmer Rouge’s own ranks. This adds an unwelcome

moral complication: among the photographs I now faced there were interrogators

as well as guards from the prison itself, Khmer Rouge who suddenly found their

roles reversed during the many purges. The upside-down world of Tuol Sleng

blurred the distinction between the guilty and the innocent (p. 23).

Tuol Sleng’s mug-shots hence undercode the faces of the dead: these images of

faces are incapable of signaling the facticity of past innocence or guilt. I had no way to

identify who, among the condemned, were S-21’s former torturers and executioners.

Their numbers were not insignificant: according to the Documentation Center of

Cambodia, “at least 563 members of the staff of Tuol Sleng - about one-third of the total -

were executed while working there” (Mydans, 2009).

The Dialectic of Remembering and Forgetting

It was inevitable that the fear and loathing Tuol Sleng inspired in me would be

tempered by my learning of the circumstances of the genesis of the museum. Early in

their occupation of Cambodia, the Vietnamese transformed S-21 into a genocide museum

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for the dual purposes of vilifying the Khmer Rouge and valorizing the Vietnamese

occupation army qua liberation force. The Vietnamese regarded the creation of Tuol

Sleng as politically necessary given the geo-political background of the Cold War: the

U.S. and China were offering diplomatic and material support to the ousted Khmer

Rouge in order to oppose the Soviet-backed Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. To

create the museum, the Vietnamese sent Ung Pech, himself a survivor of S-21, to

communist Poland to learn from the genocide museum at Auschwitz. Under his

subsequent directorship of Tuol Sleng, the ample evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities

was collected and put on public display (Dunlop, 2006, pp. 183-185). The political

genesis of the Tuol Sleng genocide museum is illuminated by Pierre Nora’s (1989)

account of the dialectic between memory and history in the creation of les lieux de

mémoire (places of memory):

Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in

permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting,

unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and

appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.

History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and

incomplete, of what is no longer (p. 8).

With many survivors of Democratic Kampuchea choosing not to share with their

children their traumatic memories, there exists Nora’s “dialectic of remembering and

forgetting” in Cambodian society of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities. Stéphanie Gée and Im

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Lim (2008) observe that “many youngsters in Cambodia still find it hard to presume true

the horrors committed under the regime of Pol Pot and his henchmen… Painful memories

of the regime remain kept behind a wall of silence in many a family.” Judith Butler

(2004) reminds us of the “vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life” (p. 29). It is

a condition of our existence as embodied individuals that we remain always open to the

external and internal threats of trauma and disintegration. What these survivors of the

Khmer Rouge have experienced is this existential vulnerability writ large: it is not

surprising that many have chosen silence as a means of coping with their traumatic

memories. Institutionally, the history of Democratic Kampuchea only entered the official

school curriculum in May 2009, with the introduction of a high school history textbook

of the period (Cheang and Wilkins, 2009). As Burcu Münyas (2008) points out, “the

absent or limited education since the peace agreement has culminated in sustained myths,

unanswered questions and denial in Cambodian youth” (p. 428).

Cruel Optimism

Since its establishment in 2006, the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal has become a

key site for the unfolding of the “dialectic of remembering and forgetting” in Cambodia.

As of this time of writing, the ECCC has convicted Kaing Guek Eav, a.k.a. Duch, the

commandant of S-21, of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced him to

35 years in prison. However, in an act that would be interpreted by some genocide

survivors as cruel arithmetic, this sentence was reduced to 19 years for time served and

other factors. Theary Seng, a prominent human rights lawyer who had been orphaned by

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the Khmer Rouge, calculated that Duch’s 19 year sentence “comes down to serving 11

and half hours per life that he took which is not just comprehensible or acceptable”

(“Tribunal Convicts Duch”). Chum Mey, one of the few survivors of S-21, unhappily

declared that the sentence had re-victimized all the victims of the Khmer Rouge (Mydans,

2010).

For these aggrieved survivors and relatives of victims, the judicial arithmetic had

in effect retroactively recoded their hopeful expectations for justice into what Lauren

Berlant describes as cruel optimism: their lifelong desires for justice, already so hurtful in

the long decades before the establishment of the ECCC, now engenders new pain in the

wake of what they now perceive as the leniency of Duch’s sentence (Berlant, 2006, p.

21). However, this is not the sole view held by survivors on Duch’s sentence. For

example, Thet Sambath (2010), the same Phnom Penh Post journalist who in 2007 had

brought Frank Cibulka and me to Pailin to interview Duch’s boss, Nuon Chea, argued

that “justice should never be vindictive,” and that “the judges were right to take into

account Duch's co-operation with the court and his statements of remorse.” This, despite

the fact that Sambath himself had lost both his parents and his brother to the Khmer

Rouge! The coming trials of Nuon Chea and other top Khmer Rouge leaders promise to

generate more confusion and pain among the surviving victims and the wider Cambodian

audience.

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The Banality of the Present

One common thread that I found significant in my encounters with memories of

atrocity is the juxtaposition between the painful memory of the atrocious past and the

banality of the living present. As Gilles Deleuze (1991) points out, “of the present, we

must say at every instant that it ‘was,’ and of the past, that it ‘is,’ that it is eternally, for

all time” (p. 55). This temporal flow, which transforms living outrages into glacial

memory, encourages the dilution of sensory affect. This explained the disconcerting

slippage between the banality of Nuon Chea as an elderly man enjoying breakfast, and

his past facticity as a genocidal monster; or the disturbing disconnect between the

liveliness of the surroundings of the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, filled with playful

children, begging amputees, and loud tuk tuk and motorcycle taxi drivers, and the silent

memorials of pain and death lying within.

Many discussions of memorials of historical pain either ignore or gloss over the

affective experience of viewing these exhibits. This lacuna prevents a richer

understanding of the power of these memorials. The growing popularity of ‘dark’ tourism

has increased the incidence of encounters between haptic space and memorials of

historical pain: it is my hope that this chapter has offered a useful contribution towards

the line of analysis that examines this intersection of memory and affect.

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CHAPTER 7: REASSEMBLING MEMORY: RITHY PANH’S

S-21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE

Introduction: The Conviction of Comrade Duch

On 26 July 2010, Kaing Guek Eav was convicted by the Extraordinary Chambers

in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) of crimes against humanity, which the court defined

as “persecution on political grounds … incorporating various other crimes against

humanity, including extermination, imprisonment and torture,” as well as “numerous

grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.” Kaing, better known by his nom de

guerre Duch, committed these crimes in his position as the commandant of the Khmer

Rouge’s secret S-21 prison. As the court noted:

The Chamber found that every individual detained within S-21 was destined for

execution in accordance with the Communist Party of Kampuchea policy to

“smash” all enemies. In addition to mass executions, many detainees died as a

result of torture and their conditions of detention. Although finding a minimum of

12,272 individuals to have been detained and executed at S-21 on the basis of

prisoner lists, the Chamber indicated that the actual number of detainees is likely

to have been considerably greater (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of

Cambodia, 2010).

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In the wake of this historic decision, I offer here a re-reading of Rithy Panh’s

groundbreaking 2003 documentary S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Panh’s

documentary reassembles the living memory of Duch’s S-21 by bringing together two of

its surviving victims with a group of its surviving prison guards and torturers. At the

former prison cells and torture chambers of Tuol Sleng, the central nexus of S-21, Panh

gets these former guards and torturers to reenact their daily rounds of discipline,

interrogation, and execution of their prisoners, at moments under the gaze of the two

former victims. I will read Panh’s remarkable reassemblage of the lived memory of the

victims and perpetrators in counterpoint with Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the de-

scribing effect of the Disaster and Dominick LaCapra’s readings of the memoirs and

testimonials of the Nazi Holocaust, and will conclude by reflecting on S-21 and S-21 as

signifiers of the radical contingency of the world.

Him Huy and S-21

S-21 begins with montage, opening with a slow pan of the dimly lit urban

landscape of Phnom Penh to the percussive sounds of artillery bombardment, abruptly

cutting to black-and-white footage of smiling Khmer Rouge cadres marching to their

victory, set to a cheerful revolutionary anthem. Subtitles offer the viewer a quick

encapsulation of the history of the Khmer Rouge revolution, beginning with General Lon

Nol’s 1970 coup d’état against Prince Norodom Sihanouk which triggered the civil war

that led to the revolution. As the subtitles read off the revolution’s violent horrors:

“famine, terror, executions,” and finally genocide, the revolutionary music fades off and

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is replaced with the ever-louder sound of military bombardment and a sonorous howl,

accompanied by a different slow pan of the deserted streets of Phnom Penh, whose

population the subtitles explain had been evacuated, along with the populations of other

cities, by the Khmer Rouge. This scene of deserted streets reflects the hatred of the city

that finds echoes in similar attacks on urban life in other genocidal conflicts, a notable

recent example being the destruction of Sarajevo. In his monumental world history of

genocide, Ben Kiernan (2007) identifies eliminative pastoralism, the idealized image of

pastoral land that has been cleansed of undesirable groups of people, as one of the

common “philosophical outlooks and obsessions” that creates “lethal ideological

ammunition to projects of violent militarism and territorial expansion” (pp. 21-23). The

historical growth of urban centers, in particular, intensified the romantic idealization of

agrarian life (p. 25). As we shall see, Democratic Kampuchea’s evacuation of the hated

cities would be accompanied with the creation of an agrarian utopia and the elimination

of undesirable bodies.

The scene of Phnom Penh’s deserted streets abruptly cuts to footage of black-clad

workers frantically running in disciplined lines in Democratic Kampuchea’s collective

farms, and the revolutionary music returns, now translated in the subtitles:

Bright red blood that covers cities and plains of Kampuchea, our motherland,

Sublime blood of workers and peasants,

Sublime blood of revolutionary fighting men and women.

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When the song moves into the next stanza,

The blood, changing into unrelenting hatred and resolute struggle,

On 17 April, under the flag of revolution,

Frees us from slavery …

The scene abruptly switches to a different rural scene of a family working in a rice paddy.

This bucolic scene, which is now in color, lacks the frantic urgency of the workers in the

earlier revolutionary footage, and the revolutionary song slowly fades out, signaling a

connection between Democratic Kampuchea’s blood-soaked revolution and this

seemingly harmless rural family. The scene shifts into a farm house where a mother

washes her baby, with an older toddler looking on, and she passes the infant to the farmer

who cradles him.

This unexpected scene of domesticity is followed by the documentary’s first

spoken dialogue, in which the parents of Him Huy, the farmer, chastise him for having

been the killer of “100 or 200” individuals for the Khmer Rouge, and exhort him to tell

the truth and to seek forgiveness from the dead. Huy, of whose dark history we are now

aware, contends that he is a good man who had been coerced into killing by his superiors

who had “terrorized (him) with their guns and power.” As he explains to his mother,

“death was certain there.” The “there” Huy refers to is S-21, and as Nic Dunlop (2006)

points out,

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The creation of S-21 was central to Pol Pot’s plan. Apart from the Higher

Organization, the Khmer Rouge inner party, no-one knew of its existence, since

the prison’s purpose was for cleansing the ranks of the party itself. The leadership

knew that if the location was known, they would have faced a rebellion that they

would be unable to suppress (p. 113).

This secrecy was strictly maintained. In his history of S-21, David Chandler (1999b)

notes:

The prison’s existence was known only to those who worked or were imprisoned

there and to a handful of high-ranking cadres, known as the Party Center, who

reviewed the documents emerging from S-21 and selected the individuals and the

military and other units to be purged. Interrogators, clerks, photographers, guards,

and cooks at the prison were forbidden to mingle with workers elsewhere, and the

compound soon earned an eerie reputation. A factory worker in a nearby

compound, interviewed in 1989, referred to S-21 as “the place where people went

in but never came out.” The factory workers were uncertain about what went on

inside but were ready to think the worst (p. 7).

Part of this dark reputation arose from the sonorous affect generated by this mysterious

complex. Chandler also notes that the sounds coming from S-21 during its period of

operation consisted mainly of screams:

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The noises in the 1970s were different. Almost every night in the pitch-dark,

silent city, workers at the prison who were quartered on the boulevard heard the

screams of people being tortured. Indeed, all the survivors and people who

worked at the prison share the memory of hearing people crying out in pain at

night (p. 13).

Nhiem Ein, S-21’s photographer, whom we shall meet later in S-21, recalled hearing “lots

of screaming, especially at night, when there was no noise in Phnom Penh. The cries

were so loud that we could hear them from half a mile away” (p. 128). This agonized

soundscape highlights S-21’s position as a heterotopia within Democratic Kampuchea. In

Foucauldian terms, a heterotopia is a place which functions as a “counter-site” from

which “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously

represented, contested and inverted” (Foucault, 1986, p. 24). S-21 was a perverse

inversion of Democratic Kampuchea as it was the most populated urban complex in a

state that had evacuated all urban centers and transferred their populations to massive

agricultural collectives. The prisoners’ screams could be heard half a mile away by

Nhiem Ein and his colleagues because there literally were no other urban dwellers around

to populate the soundscape with other noises.

However, in its efficient functioning as the Khmer Rouge’s machine for killing its

enemies, S-21 represented the necropolitical reality of Democratic Kampuchea, with its

death toll standing as an exemplary representative of the state’s. As Achille Mbembe

(2003) explains, necropolitics, “the subjection of life to the power of death,” is made

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manifest in the creation of a “death-world,” within which “vast populations are subjected

to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead” (pp. 39-40). Of

the living dead in the liminal zone of S-21 we shall discuss later, but the perilous

conditions of life in Democratic Kampuchea correspond to Mbembe’s account of the

death-world. Under the apex of S-21 was a network of district and regional security

centers which cumulatively killed more people than S-21; the Southwest Zone’s prisons,

for example, killed over 153,000 people (Ea, 2005, p. xi). Estimates vary of the numbers

of those who died under Democratic Kampuchea from disease, malnutrition, and

violence, but a recent demographic analysis suggests that Democratic Kampuchea’s four

years generated 2.2 million deaths in excess of the expected number of deaths under

normal demographic conditions, with 1.1 million of these being violent deaths

(Heuveline, 2001, pp. 124-125).

Vann Nath and Chum Mey

Returning to S-21, the scene now shifts from Him Huy and his family to a painter

at his easel, Vann Nath. Rithy Panh shoots this introductory scene of Nath by constantly

shifting his camera between Nath and the painting of his arrival at S-21 that he completes

on camera, shifting the camera’s focus to the relevant parts of the painted scene

according to Nath’s narration of his arrival. This deliberate movement of the camera’s

focus recreates for the viewer Nath’s visual memory of that fateful day, and the

juxtaposition of his gentle brush strokes and the calm cadences of his voice with the

brutality of his painted scene of the chained and blindfolded prisoners capture for the

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viewer the terror he describes having felt at that moment. Vann Nath’s aesthetic

translation of his private memory into the public medium of painting can be understood

in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s (1989) account of the crystallization of the time-image (p.

81). On this account, Vann Nath’s painting is a crystal of time that preserves and allows

us to gaze at the past he recalls in his memory; Rithy Panh’s cinematic capture of Huy,

Nath and the other survivors whom we will shortly encounter is another crystal of time,

one which preserves Panh’s staged encounter between these individuals, each of whom

has his own private memories of S-21. What S-21 offers then are layers of crystallizations

of time, with each layer consisting of translations of living memory into the publicly

accessible media of painting, bodily movement, and cinema. Insofar as S-21 qua artwork

is a “bloc of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects” (Deleuze and Guattari,

1994, p. 164), it can be regarded as crystallizing for the gaze of the viewer the sensations,

affects and percepts of Vann Nath, Him Huy, and the other survivors as they encounter

one another in the events of reassemblage staged by Rithy Panh on the very grounds of S-

21.

The scene with Vann Nath cuts to that of a distraught man standing on the lawn in

front of one of S-21’s prison blocks. This offers us our first external view of S-21, which

will soon become, like other architectural cinematic objects including the police station in

Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, and the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s

The Shining, “virtually a character in itself” (Corless and Porumboiu, 2010, p. 42). Chum

Mey, the distraught man standing beside Vann Nath, is torn between obsessively gazing

at the place where he had once been imprisoned and tortured, and suffering the

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unbearable feelings being in a place of unbearable memories generates. As Nath calmly

holds him and tells him, “We suffered so much. Don’t think about it,” a crying Mey holds

his hands together in prayer and moans: “My wife, my children… I lost everything.”

Mey’s tragedy ironically recalls Him Huy’s abundance of family life, and provokes

questioning thoughts of the possibility of justice which are echoed by Nath: “With the

Khmer Rouge still alive, what do we do?” Nath then offers the seemingly counterintuitive

suggestion that he and Mey were “tremendously lucky,” explaining:

“Of all those who were with us, nobody’s left. All dead, tens of thousands of

them. There are few of us left.”

Scouring Memory, Inventing History

Indeed, as Chandler (1999b) notes, the Khmer Rouge Party Center ruthlessly

maintained secrecy about S-21 by “killing nearly all the prisoners” (p. 17). This ruthless

extermination of witnesses raises epistemological issues of memory and history. As

Michael J. Shapiro (2009) explains, history, in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, consists of “the

imposition of officially inscribed molar codes, the collective identity spaces tied to the

macropolitical world of states,” whereas memory consists of “the molecular level, the

multiple layers of individual micropolitical potential for becoming, experiencing and

associating” (pp. 117-118). And it was these individual molecules of memory that the

Party Center efficiently stamped out at S-21, leaving the living memory of the prison to

persist in the heads of only a tiny handful of survivors, and its history to be officially

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written by first the propagandists of the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of

Kampuchea regime and subsequently by professional historians. This efficient scouring

of living memory makes the reconstruction of the history of S-21 particularly difficult. As

Chandler (1999b) observes of its survivor testimonies,

Since the early 1980s, only three survivors of the prison have talked at length

about their experiences. Their testimonies are valuable and heartfelt, but they

have limitations that spring from their repeated use as propaganda in the 1980s,

from the survivors’ interview fatigue, and from the blurring of their memories

over time. Moreover, the survivors cannot describe conditions in the prison in

1976, before they were arrested (p. 112).

This incompleteness of the historical reconstruction of S-21’s past reflects Maurice

Blanchot’s (1986) observation that, for those who did not experience it, the disaster “de-

scribes,” such that “it escapes the very possibility of experience,” and is “the very limit of

writing” (p. 7). This is precisely what makes the genocide survivor memoir or testimonial

in general so challenging as a source for the official inscription of history.

Dominick LaCapra (1998) notes of the genre of Nazi Holocaust memoirs and

testimonials that while these narratives have emerged as “a privileged mode of access to

the past and its traumatic occurrences,” and while they offer “insight into lived

experience and its transmission in language and gesture,” such “testimonial witnessing

typically takes place in a belated manner, often after the passage of many years,” creating

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“special challenges” for the historian (p. 11). LaCapra warns of the “tendency to go with

memory’s flow, mingle fact and fancy, provide ingratiating personal anecdotes or

autobiographical sketches, and moot the question of the relation between history and

fiction” (p. 16). In contemporary Cambodian literature, the genocide survivor memoir or

testimonial has become a rapidly growing genre, offering first-person narratives of life in

Democratic Kampuchea. While the passage of time between the Khmer Rouge genocide

and the writing of the Cambodian survivor narrative is generally not as long as that of

Nazi Holocaust survivor narratives, LaCapra’s concern about the fictionalizing of history

through memory remains valid. He doesn’t reject memory as “inherently uncritical” or

“intrinsically unreliable as a historical source” (p. 16), however, noting that memory “is a

crucial source for history and has complicated relations to documentary sources,” and

that even when unreliable it sheds light on its object’s “often anxiety-ridden reception

and assimilation by both participants in events and those born later” (p. 19). What living

memory offers for the historian, of which textual documentation can barely approximate,

are the phenomenological recollections of the individual’s affective engagements with

past events. Cinematic crystallizations of time like S-21 provide a means for emphatic

viewers to imaginatively reconstruct the affective responses captured on camera, thereby

creating an aesthetic translation of the memory of past affect from the recorded

individuals to the viewing audience.

The complicated web of relations between memory, documentary sources and

history that LaCapra describes manifests itself in the next scene in S-21. Following Chum

Mey’s traumatic return to S-21, he and Vann Nath are next seen seated in a room within

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the complex, with Nath reading to Mey the latter’s notebook of confessions which had

been coerced through torture. Chandler (1999b) notes a plausible theory that Pol Pot and

his colleagues sought detailed records of the confessions of S-21’s prisoners for the

purpose of constructing a “massive, unwritten history of the Party” modeled after Stalin’s

History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (p. 50). This conspiratorial history

would have included the confession the S-21 torturer Prak Khan coerced from the medic

Nay Nan. As he describes later in S-21, through sadistic torture he successfully elicited

from Nan a written confession inventing a conspiratorial network of traitors led by the

CIA:

“She should describe a network, a party, an activity of sabotage, a network

leader... When I interrogated her, I gave her three targets: 1. CIA, 2. KGB, 3. the

Vietnamese enemy. Of the three, she chose the CIA. So I interrogated her along

those lines, looking for her network, her chief, her accomplices, the sabotage

activities at the hospital.”

Prak Khan’s interrogation of Nay Nan serves as an instance of S-21’s industrial

production of invented memory and conspiratorial history. As he further explained, his

task had been the replacement of his prisoners’ memories with invented

counterrevolutionary histories of sabotage and treason. In this way, S-21 smashed

memories – the molecular retention of the past, and replaced these with officially

sanctioned molar histories of conspiracy. This proliferation of invented enemies allows us

to recognize in the necropolitical functioning of S-21 the modern mechanism of

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biopolitics Michel Foucault (2003) identifies as racism: the introduction of “a break into

the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and

what must die” (p. 254). Biopolitical racism hence is the gaze of the State which

differentiates those worthy of continued life from those who must be killed because they

are threats to the normalizing society (p. 256). The paranoid imagination of the Party

Center and the inventiveness of S-21’s interrogators collaborated to interpellate S-21’s

condemned prisoners not just as internal enemies, nor just as servants of external

enemies, but also as components of vast assemblages of enemies, all of whom the

fledgling State had to “smash” for its newly normalized society to survive.

Turning back to Chum Mey’s invented confessions of conspiracies, Vann Nath

notes that as recorded in his notebook of confessions, Mey had denounced between 60-64

people, and Mey admits that under torture he had “denounced whoever came to mind.”

Nath astutely suggests that Mey’s leader must have named him in a group of 50-60

conspirators in an earlier confession, leading to his arrest. And if the 60 individuals Mey

named had indeed been arrested,

“If each of them gave 50 to 60 names, and so on and so forth, within a year or

two, there was no one left. All of Cambodia would have been enemies.”

Rithy Panh emphasizes this geometric progression of denunciation with scenes of Nath

and Mey going through S-21’s voluminous photographic and documentary archives. Nath

eventually discovers his arrest record, marked in red with Duch’s handwritten notation

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that he was to be “kept for use” as a painter. In the following scene Nath is shown

painting a portrait of Pol Pot, one of the aesthetic tasks for which Duch had kept him

alive. Nath recalls, and demonstrates on the easel, the stricture that his brushstrokes had

to be respectful and gentle, painting Pol Pot’s face “in a pink shade, like smooth delicate

skin, as lovely as the skin of a young virgin.” Reflecting on the sheer contingency of fate,

Nath recalls,

“I know that lots of painters came to work for them. But they were all killed.

Some stayed a month or two, others stayed for four to ten days. Their drawings

weren’t appreciated so they were executed. I survived, fortunately, because they

liked my paintings. Sometimes, I think of my fate. There were many who came

here. They’re dead. There’s only me left. Sometimes I think of them and it haunts

me. Why them? Some painted better than I did.”

As I shall argue in the final section of this chapter, Nath’s experience, along with that of

all the other victims of Democratic Kampuchea, unveils the absolute contingency

undergirding the seeming regularities of our everyday lives.

Reassembling Memory

The following scene opens the next sequence in S-21, with the return of the

surviving prison guards and interrogators to S-21. We see Him Huy being greeted by

Nhiem Ein, the prison photographer whose portraits of prisoners we had earlier seen

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Vann Nath examining, as well as another prison guard whom Huy knew by face but not

by name, thanks to the elaborate security protocols they had worked under. Vann Nath

confronts them and is outraged when Huy and Ein admit seeing themselves as victims of

S-21: “Now, if those who worked here are victims, what about prisoners like me?” Ein

replies that “here if you didn’t obey you were dead for sure.” As Chandler (1999b) points

out, the workers at S-21 lived in a constant state of paranoia, enduring waves of purges of

their numbers (pp. 86-87). The Pol Pot regime’s paranoid Stalinist logic of internal

purges meant that multiple generations of S-21’s interrogators and guards would

suddenly find themselves arrested, tortured and executed (Dunlop, 2006, p. 23). The

numbers of these hybrid perpetrator-victims were not insignificant: according to the

Documentation Center of Cambodia, “at least 563 members of the staff of Tuol Sleng -

about one-third of the total - were executed while working there” (Mydans, 2009).

Blanchot’s (1986) dialectic of passivity offers poetic insight into S-21’s transformation of

perpetrators into victims, for these perpetrators can be interpreted as having passively

gone along with their instructions to torture, interrogate and kill their prisoners, and in

turn they passively become the next generation of victims. Blanchot inverts the relation

of self and Other such that when “the Other relates to me as if I were the Other and thus

causes me to take leave of my identity” (p. 18), the self is left in a state of passivity,

“without any initiative and bereft of present”:

And then, the other becomes rather the Overlord, indeed the Persecutor, he who

overwhelms, encumbers, undoes me, he who puts me in his debt no less than he

attacks me by making me answer for his crimes, by charging me with measureless

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responsibility which cannot be mine since it extends all the way to “substitution”

(p. 19).

Blanchot’s (1986) binary of Auschwitz’s horror (“because extermination in every

form is the immediate horizon”) and the Gulag’s senselessness (because “no one knows

why he is there”) hence collapses in the singularity of S-21, with even the perpetrators

joining their victims in its immediate horizon of extermination, knowing no good reason

for this violent fate save the regime’s paranoia (pp. 82-83). However, as Vann Nath

insists, there is a significant moral difference between the prisoners who suffered

physical abuse and the guards and interrogators who inflicted this abuse. Even if these

same guards and interrogators subsequently suffered the fatal consequences of S-21’s

multiple rounds of internal purges, their prior acts of cruelty are not thereby retroactively

erased from the past or from the memory of their victims. Rather than any principle of

moral equivalence, the principle that seems appropriate in the case of S-21’s

transformation of perpetrators into victims is the Buddhist notion of karma: past acts of

violence generate the conditions of possibility for future acts of violence. I shall return to

this notion in the conclusion of this chapter.

Returning to S-21, Vann Nath and the group of surviving perpetrators are next

seen in one of the prison chambers, standing before one of Nath’s prison paintings.

Focusing on this painting as a Deleuzian crystallization of time, Nath vividly describes

the abuse endured by him and his fellow prisoners. When the former guards point out that

they had been indoctrinated to regard all the prisoners as enemies, Nath reminds them of

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their cruel dispatch of the infants, toddlers and children of the arrested prisoners, only to

hear a reiteration from Him Huy of the Party line that everyone the Party arrested were

enemies and had to be treated as such. Nath’s dignity and moral courage in this scene is

remarkable, given the intimate history of violence between him and the men he confronts.

Chandler (1999b) notes, for example, that Nath recalled Huy as a “very cruel” member of

the prison’s extermination squad (p. 25), which emphasizes the courage of Nath’s

chastisement of him as shown in this and later scenes. Indeed, Jacques Rancière (2009)

notes that this constitutes a redistribution of the intolerable image, “demoting those who

have just expressed their power as torturers once again to the position of school pupils

educated by their former victims.” This redistribution alters what Rancière describes as

the “dispositif of visibility,” creating new ways to perceive and confer meaning on these

visible objects, and shifting the audience’s “gaze and consideration” (pp. 101-102). From

the abject prisoner depicted in his own painting, Vann Nath assumes moral authority

under Rithy Panh’s pedagogical staging, which is emphasized by close-ups of the

expression of moral disgust on his face, juxtaposed with the expressions of shame or

defiance on the faces of the assembled perpetrators.

S-21 follows this scene with a series of elaborate reenactments from the surviving

perpetrators of their daily work routines within the preserved prison spaces of S-21: the

inspection, interrogation and documentation of the prisoners. As Sergei Eisenstein

explains, architecture, like cinema, offers to the gaze “the total representation of a

phenomenon in its full visual multidimensionality” (Eisenstein and Bois, 1989, p. 117).

In a visual echo of Garrett Brown’s (1980) famous Steadicam cinematography for The

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Shining, Rithy Panh’s camera rapidly follows these former prison guards as they sweep

through S-21’s grim corridors and rooms with strikingly detailed disciplinary gestures.

As Panh (2004b) explains in an interview, these perpetrators have not forgotten their

somatic memories:

At the start of the shoot, one day when we were at Poeuv’s home, in the village,

he showed me how he closed the door of the room at S21 that he guarded.

Looking at the rushes, I saw that his gesture was prolonging his words, and I

discovered that another memory existed: the memory of the body, sharper, more

precise, unable to lie.

While the energetic bodily movements of these perpetrators recalls Antonin Artaud’s

(1958) account of the gifted actor whose movements are guided by his “affective powers”

which have their “material trajectory by and in the organs” (p. 134), Rithy Panh (2004b)

is insistent that the reenactments Poeuv and the other guards present in S-21 are not to be

viewed as theatrical inventions, but rather should be recognized as movements stimulated

by their somatic memories. Speaking again of Poeuv, Panh explains:

Poeuv was 12 or 13 years old when he became a guard at S21. He was

indoctrinated, "educated" to hit the prisoners. When we did the shoot at Tuol

Sleng, something clicked into place inside him: like a forgotten automatic

mechanism that was suddenly switched on again, he began to repeat the gestures

of the past. Poeuv is like a child who has been beaten, and when he re-enacts

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these gestures, all the pain that has been contained inside him for years submerges

him. It is not theatricalisation.

After this first series of reenactments, featuring self-recriminations from some of

the perpetrators, Vann Nath and Chum Mey are seen together again outside on the grassy

grounds of S-21, questioning the possibility of the then-proposed Khmer Rouge genocide

tribunal to offer justice to the victims. (This will be Chum Mey’s final scene in S-21.)

Nath states that, for him, preserving the memory of the events at S-21 is essential. Mey,

who expresses doubts in this conversation about the possibility of reconciliation, would

eventually come to feel betrayed by the ECCC’s sentencing of Duch in July 2010.

Having convicted Duch of crimes against humanity, the court sentenced him to 35 years

in prison. However, this sentence was reduced to 19 years for time served and other

factors, including “cooperation with the Chamber, admission of responsibility, limited

expressions of remorse, the coercive environment in Democratic Kampuchea, and the

potential for rehabilitation” (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, 2010).

Theary Seng, a prominent human rights lawyer who had been orphaned by the Khmer

Rouge, calculated that Duch’s 19 year sentence “comes down to serving 11 and half

hours per life that he took which is not just comprehensible or acceptable” (“Tribunal

Convicts Duch”). Mey unhappily declared that the sentence had re-victimized all the

victims of the Khmer Rouge:

“I am not satisfied! We are victims two times, once in the Khmer Rouge time and

now once again... His prison is comfortable, with air-conditioning, food three

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times a day, fans and everything. I sat on the floor with filth and excrement all

around” (Mydans 2010).

S-21 next shifts to a long and remarkably detailed reenactment of S-21’s night-

time prison procedures, highlighting the prison guard Poeuv’s aforementioned somatic

memory. This reenactment is set to revolutionary speeches and music played over the

prison complex’s public address system. This sonorous backdrop is an anachronism,

however. As noted earlier, the night-time soundscape generated by S-21 was constituted

by the screams of the tortured prisoners. The intense suffering and eventual murder of

these prisoners, coupled with the paranoia and purges suffered by the guards and

interrogators, allows S-21 to be modeled along the lines of the Nupta Cadavera, the

infamous torture practiced by the Etruscan pirates described by Reza Negarestani (2008)

as the “forcible conjugation with a corpse, and a consummation of marriage with the dead

as a bride,” the gruesome mechanics of which were as follows:

A living man or woman was tied to a rotting corpse, face to face, mouth to mouth,

limb to limb, with an obsessive exactitude in which each part of the body

corresponded with its matching putrefying counterpart. Shackled to their rotting

double, the man or woman was left to decay (pp. 130-131).

This physical conjunction of a living body with its “matching putrefying counterpart”

echoes the ontological correspondence of the nominally free guards and interrogators

with their matching counterparts among the doomed prisoners. This correspondence isn’t

211

perfect, of course, with only approximately 600 of the at least 12,272 murdered victims

of S-21 consisting of its purged staff members, and with the probable likelihood that most

of the prisoners were never aware of the precarious situation of their jailers and torturers.

However, phenomenologically the experience of the guards and interrogators matches

that of the Nupta Cadavera. As Him Huy stated earlier, there would be no escape from

death at S-21. Negarestani notes of the mutual gaze of the living and the dead:

It is indeed ghastly for the living to see itself as dead; but it is true horror for the

dead to be forced to look at the supposedly living, and to see itself as the living

dead, the dead animated by the spurious living. Neither Aristotle nor Augustine

tell us about this infliction upon the dead of the burden of the living, this

molesting of the dead with the animism of the living (pp. 135-136).

In the killing machine of S-21, the guards and interrogators knew that their tortured and

condemned prisoners, a group which included their purged colleagues, represented their

immediate horizon of possibility. Vann Nath, Chandler (1999b) recounts, enjoyed a cruel

moment of schadenfreude from this:

With considerable pleasure, Vann Nath recalled being held for a time in the same

room as a discredited Khmer Rouge cadre, known for his brutality but now

disgraced: “When he was in the cooperative, he acted like a king,” Vann Nath

recalled. “No one could look at his face. But now he was shackled by the legs,

looking like a monkey” (p. 121).

212

Turning back to S-21, Rithy Panh builds up the final section of his documentary

with a series of increasingly unbearable dialogues and readings from documented self-

criticism sessions focused on the torturer Prak Khan. Panh follows the appalling scene

where Khan discusses his sadistic interrogation of Nay Nan (which I had described

earlier) with a scene of Khan confessing to his fellow perpetrators of his molestation of

female prisoners, and to his having tortured Nan because of his sexual frustration at being

barred from molesting or raping her. The shamed perpetrators then discuss how the

families of purged cadres would be arrested, and how they took these prisoners and their

family members, including children, separately to the killing fields at Cheong Ek so as to

prevent them from realizing too soon that they were going to be murdered.

Before the final climax, Rithy Panh stages a confrontation between Vann Nath

and Prak Khan and Him Huy on their spiritual and physical destruction of their prisoners.

Chastising Huy for continuing to parrot the inhuman slogans of the Party Center, Nath

observes the sublime cruelty of S-21’s notion of destroying its prisoners: he notes that

even animals are killed, not destroyed, reflecting S-21’s perception of the condemned

prisoners as being of less value than animals, and indeed of no moral worth whatsoever.

When Huy confesses to suffering headaches and needing to imbibe alcohol to escape the

memories of his violent past, Nath describes his painful compulsion to confront “this

unbearable past which we can’t escape,” in the hopes of understanding what happened.

This leads to the climax: Huy’s chilling reenactment of his murder of prisoners at the

213

Cheong Ek killing fields. Panh closes S-21 with a melancholy shot of Nath grimly

examining a dusty pile of discarded clothing of the murdered prisoners.

Karma and Contingency

S-21 can be read as a cinematic response to the historical trauma of S-21 and the

Khmer Rouge genocide, alongside other responses like the establishment of Tuol Sleng

Museum of Genocidal Crime and the writing of survivor testimonials. However, I would

like to close this discussion with a different reading of S-21 and S-21 as signifiers of the

absolute contingency of the world, an existential reading which elaborates on Vann

Nath’s earlier expressions of astonishment at the sheer luck which enabled a tiny handful

of prisoners like him and Chum Mey to live while tens of thousands of their counterparts

were murdered. Radicalizing David Hume’s famous argument against natural necessity,

Quentin Meillassoux (2008) argues:

For we pose the following question: since Hume has convinced us that we could a

priori (that is to say without contradiction) conceive a chaotic modification of

natural laws, why not have confidence in the power of thought, which invites us

to posit the contingency of the laws of nature, rather than in experience, in which

alone the presentation of the apparent fixity of observable constants finds its

source? Why extrapolate the empirical fixity of laws into a belief in their

necessity, rather than adhering to the intellection of a radical Chaos which Hume

has masterfully, if implicitly, revealed to us? (p. 273)

214

The specters of S-21 and the Cambodian genocide indeed stand mute witness to this

radical Chaos. April 17, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge triumphantly marched into

Phnom Penh, marks the moment the absolute contingency of the world was revealed to

the city’s residents. (It should be noted that absolute contingency, as I am deploying it,

stands, in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, at the molecular level. The observation of

macropolitical change allows the revolution and its aftermath to be comprehensible at the

molar level; at the molecular level, however, these molar movements do not explain the

seemingly random molecular choices that, for instance, allowed Vann Nath and Chum

Mey to survive and condemned countless others to die.) Before, these residents had

unconsciously assumed that urban life would carry on as normal, regardless of which

faction won the civil war. Indeed, they cheered the victory of the Khmer Rouge,

innocently thinking the new peace would be an unproblematic continuation of the old.

This quickly proved to be a false assumption of continuity when they were forcibly

evacuated from the city, with the seemingly eternal fixities of society, money and

markets suddenly eliminated in the new anticapitalist utopia of Democratic Kampuchea

(Neveu, 2007). This violent unveiling of the absolute contingency of the world did not

just affect the city dwellers, of course. A large number of the victorious Khmer Rouge

cadres themselves would discover this radical Chaos first-hand in the secret prison cells

of S-21. In this the victims of the genocide occupied the same epistemic position of

Bertrand Russell’s (2010) tragic chicken who was misled by its “crude expectations of

uniformity” to expect the farmer to continue to feed it indefinitely into the future:

215

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its

neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature

would have been useful to the chicken (p. 44).

The existential question that this raises for us is thus: are we the contemporary

equivalents of those urban residents of Phnom Penh on the morning of April 17, 1975,

blithely expecting our ways of life to persist indefinitely into the future, all the time

unknowing of the radical Chaos lurking underneath the seemingly stable foundations of

our existence?

In his response to Meillassoux, Negarestani (2009) remarks that “the omnipresent

cruelty of life” is “the immanent outcome of the collapse of life’s ontological necessity.”

This speculative suggestion that life has no ontological priority over death, and indeed

that life has no ontological necessity at all, reveals the grim status of S-21 as a signifier of

the absolute contingency of existence: that there are no natural laws that will protect us

from suffering or death, and that our lives of flourishing are absolutely contingent on

factors beyond our control, just as Russell’s chicken’s comfortable life was contingent on

the goodwill of the farmer. This hence provides an answer to Vann Nath’s quest to

understand the unfathomable viciousness he had suffered and witnessed at S-21: that this

indeed is the true state of being that emerges when the fragile apparatuses of our civilized

life collapse and give way to new, terrible configurations. The notion of karma is of use

here. According to Buddhist philosophy, actions establish the conditions of possibility for

other actions. This basic causal relation connects each and every entity in the universe,

216

such that, as Levi Bryant (2010) puts it, “there are no individuals in isolation, but rather

that reality is a web or fabric in which all entities are interconnected and interactive”:

The metaphor of reality as a “web” should be taken rather literally. When you

encounter a spider web, if you pull one thread, the rest of the threads come with it.

It is impossible to isolate one thread from all the other threads. They are all

entangled with one another.

On this Buddhist causal ontology, our lives are usually patterned according to

stable regularities, just as Russell’s chicken was accustomed to the regularity of her

feeding times. However, such regularities are themselves contingent on other actants in

the greater web of causal interconnections, and perturbations from some or more of these

other actants can disrupt these regularities, and thereby reveal their contingent nature.

However, unexpected events can occur which disrupt significant portions of the web of

causal interconnections, affecting large populations of actants: natural disasters, man-

made disasters, or revolutions. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010) usefully classifies these

events as Black Swans, describing them as events with the characteristics of “rarity,

extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability” (p. xxii).

Precarious Life

Cambodia’s 1975 revolution was one such Black Swan that ended up destroying

millions of actants, leading Chandler (1991) to memorably describe the devastating event

217

as a “prairie fire of revolution” (p. 1). The years of agony Vann Nath, Chum Mey and

countless others suffered hence cannot be fully accounted for by everyday karma: the

causal network of events that brought about the revolution was indeed beyond their

ability to control, and as such reveals the unbearable truth of the futility of human action

against the absolute contingency of the world. Nicholas Bourriaud (2009) observes of

contemporary art that “a precarious regime of aesthetics is developing, based on speed,

intermittence, blurring and fragility,” echoing the precarious nature of the neoliberal

capitalist order, “the global economic machine that favors unbridled consumerism and

undermines everything that is durable.” The sheer precariousness of Rithy Panh’s

cinematic reassemblage in his S-21 of the surviving victims and perpetrators of S-21

similarly mirrors the absolute contingency of the world that was unveiled to them and the

countless other victims of the Cambodian revolution.

218

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