Death Sentences (37 page)

A German Catholic political and legal theorist whose theories served as an ideological foundation for dictatorship and the totalitarian state, especially for the Nazi Fiihrer, Carl Schmitt and his theorization of the "state of emergency" or "state of exception" have received greater attention in recent years, not of course for the endorsement of totalitarianism, but for the potential critique of the permanent state of crisis in the contemporary world. The rediscovery or renewed interest in the dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Schmitt has been particularly important. While some recent discussions may be accused of intensifying and even exaggerating the connection between Benjamin and Schmitt," Giorgio Agamben (among others) has shown that the two men were clearly familiar with each other's work and has argued persuasively that they share a theorization of the modern state, even if their political responses to it are almost diametrically opposed."

What, then, is the basis for Schmitt's theorization of the state of exception? Udi Greenberg writes:

In his famous critique of liberalism and the parliamentary system, Schmitt argued that the two confused politics with the logic of commerce, and sought to subordinate the former to the latter.... The central position occupied in the liberal system by free and open discussion represented its naive aspiration to transcend the political grouping of friend and enemy, which to Schmitt's eyes was the basic principle of human organization."

As a consequence of its unwillingness to take seriously the distinction between ally and opponent, the liberal system, in Schmitt's opinion, had lost the ability to put a limit on conflicts, resulting in the rise of generalized, unlimited military conflicts, a sort of war of all against all, which Schmitt also saw as an end of the world, the end of time, apocalypse: `As a result of British dominance in the world, the possibility of conducting a limited, organized political conflict would be destroyed, to be replaced by chaos and fear of total, never-ending war."20

In addition, Schmitt argued that as the logic of commerce (open and free exchange) assumed dominance over and dic tated the logic of politics (friend versus enemy), conflict would no longer depend on rationally identifying one's opponents but on irrational and generalized criminalization. The result is rather like the blurring of peace and war that occurs in George Orwell's 1984, another source for Death Sentences, in which the object of conflict perpetually shifts: "We're at war with Eurasia. We've always been at war with Eastasia." Or is it in fact Africa? The target of Orwell's critique is, of course, socialism rather than liberalism, but if we wish to take seriously the challenge of Orwell, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Kawamata, we should avoid the fashion for criminalizing particular social or political formations and think instead in terms of a political tendency within modern social formations. Both Schmitt and Benjamin thought of this tendency in terms of a permanent state of emergency, or state of exception, in which conflicts were continually posed as a crisis of the law, or outside the law. It fell to Benjamin to stress that under such conditions, instead of a limited, rationally limitable conflict between allies and enemies, conflict now settled on an unlimited conflict between the police and the criminal. Thus, as Agamben in particular has emphasized in recent years, sovereignty, constituted to operate outside the law, then comes to reside in a new agency-the sovereign police, which is not the police in the limited sense of the local police force but police in the sense of special police operations and extralegal military forces. In sum, the generalization of the state of exception results in the globalization of a "law" of commerce that operates primarily through the perpetuation of unlimited conflict between military forces unconstrained by law and criminalized others who are also placed outside the law and thus subject to unchecked exploitation and extermination.

This is precisely the political tendency that Death Sentences pushes to an extreme on Mars, as the Japanese policeman Sakamoto (head of a special operations force likened to Japan's wartime tokko, or Special Higher Police, so named by how it operates outside the law) enters into the body of the leader of a unit of the Martian Guard, Carl Schmitt. Those afflicted by the poem fall outside the law. The disease of the poem spreads too quickly to deal with them politically, medically, or legally, that is, rationally. The afflicted are to be exterminated as quickly and efficiently as possible but are in the meantime available for exploitation. They have become what Agamben glosses as "bare life" or "naked life." Thus sovereignty comes to operate outside the law in a new way, not through the agency or in the figure of the monarch, but through that of the sovereign police-as with the renewed special police in Japan or the Martian Guard.

From the point of view of the sovereign police, then, the poem appears as a windfall, for it will always escape control, thus ceaselessly opening new opportunities for exploitation and extermination. The poem promises to keep them in business, strengthening the partnership of free trade and war. This is because even though the poem threatens an apocalypse, corporate militarism acts to defer the end of time for as long as possible. The political relation, then, is one of perpetual crisis on the edge of apocalypse, expanding the sovereignty of special operations while stripping humans of all qualities, rendering them nothing but bare life. Agamben argues that this is the contemporary truth of both liberalism and fascism, the truth that Schmitt's theory exposed yet avoided: where Schmitt felt that a dictator or totalitarian state might stand against this tendency, such a bid for sovereignty only reinforced the tendency that Schmitt detected within the empire of commerce-the tendency toward the sovereign police, the German Gestapo, or the Japanese tokko, eking out the apocalypse.

In Death Sentences Kawamata does not rest content with staging the sovereignty of the police, however. He offers another relation to the poem and to the end of time. This relation does not stand in opposition to the sovereign police in the sense of presenting a different political condition or alternative society. It accepts or at least seems to agree that this is indeed the contemporary condition. Yet it tries to seize the temporal and historical implications of this modernity differently. Clearly, the poem's operation must be stopped rather than endlessly deferred, but that stopping must not be an ending, in the sense of an end of days, or apocalypse. A different relation to time is in order, neither endless expansion in space (what Benjamin called "empty homogeneous time") nor the end of time (apocalypse). If Walter Benjamin's account of modern time comes to mind here, it is not only because it stands as a response to Schmitt, but also because, like Kawamata Chiaki, Benjamin grapples with surrealism. As Michael Lowry writes, "'Fascination' is the only term that does justice to the intensity of the feelings Walter Benjamin experienced when he discovered surrealism in 1926-27. His very efforts to escape the spell of the movement founded by Andre Breton and his friends are an expression of the same fascination. As we know, it was this discovery that gave birth to the `Paris Arcades' project." 21 By way of surrealism and Marxism, Benjamin arrived at the notion of a "revolutionary spell" that might be found in the everyday life of the city.

Like Benjamin's Arcades project, Kawamata's Death Sentences strives to grasp spells, dreams, and magic from their revolutionary side, to find a spell that would be truly bad for society, that is, bad for the modern tendency toward an apocalyptic, "free and open" commerce of endless expansion and empty time. Significantly, in Kawamata's book it is the compound character of Sakamoto and Who May who discovers another relation to the poem's fatal magic spell. Rather than stop the poem's force, Sakamoto/Who May uses it to return to the past and create a time line in which Who May does not write the poem. In fact, Who May is no longer simply Who May. Thus the novel produces a vortex of the poetic vortex, which folds the apocalyptic force of its temporality back on itself. The novel then consists of two time lines, vortically entwined. Such a move recalls Benjamin's notion of weak Messianic force. Rather than embrace the strong or grand Messianic event (apocalypse) or try to prevent it (endless empty deferral), the goal is to find a weak version of Messianic time in the everyday, in the profane. In the compound rebus-like character of Who May (too weak) and Sakamoto (too strong), Death Sentences arrives at a vortical force of perfect weakness.

As Susan Buck-Morss writes, "Benjamin was at least convinced of one thing: what was needed was a visual, not a linear logic: The concepts were to be imagistically constructed, according to the cognitive principles of montage. Nineteenthcentury objects were to be made visible as the origin of the present, at the same time that every assumption of progress was to be scrupulously rejected."" Is this not precisely the logic of the "undiscovered century" in Death Sentences? Twentiethcentury surrealist objects become visible as the origin of the present, without any assumption of progress, of linearity. Yet this twentieth-century concept is not that of montage but that of the vortex. And within the accelerated linearity of that everyday literary form, popular genre fiction, Kawamata Chiaki finds a source of disruption, apparently weak, but just disruptive enough to make us discover the total historical event of our modernity, turning around a lost and maybe never written poem. It is the force of the dialectical image or revolutionary spell. It is the time of the vortex.

Foreword

1. Philip K. Dick, Martian7ime-Slip, trans. Obi Fusa (Tokyo: i. akawa, ig8o), 341. Originally translated into Japanese in 1966.

2. Ibid., chapter io.

3. Death Sentences, chapter i, "Another World," emphasis mine.

4. Nishiwaki Junzaburo, "Surrealist Poetics," trans. Hosea Hirata, reprinted in 7'he Poetry and Poetics ofNishiu aki,Junzaburo: Modernism in Translation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 9,27,39•

6. Kawamata, "Yume no kotoba, kotoba no yume" (Dream words, word dreams) (Tokyo: Kiso-Tengai Publishing, ig81), later reprinted as a paperback in 1983 by Hayakawa Publishing.

7. Ibid., 163-

8. Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-70 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

ro. Aritsune Toyota, "Daigokai Nihon SF Taisho senko hokoku" (Selection report on the winner of the 5th Japan SF Grand Prize), 7okuma's SFAdventure (January 1985): 14-15.

ii. Takayuki Tatsumi, "Kaisetsu," in Kawamata's Genshi-gari 985), 383-92• (Tokyo: Chuo koron, 1985),383-92-

12. Ezra F. Vogel, ,Japan as Number One: LessonsforAmerica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).

13. Marilyn Ivy, "Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan," in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 26.

14. Ibid., 33•

Afterward

Special thanks to Brian Bergstrom, Adrienne Hurley, Christine LaMarre, and J. Keith Vincent for their detailed corrections, suggestions, and enthusiasm.