Four Notes in Guise of a Prologue

1

I decided to write this book in July 2012, after reading about the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, that had taken place at a movie theatre screening the latest Batman film. A mixture of repulsion and perverse fascination has always lured me to read voraciously about the perpetrators of this kind of mass murder, a kind that seems to be proliferating at the moment – particularly in the United States of America. But it was only when I read about James Holmes and the Aurora massacre that I decided to write about the subject. I was not spurred into action by the violence and absurdity of a country where any person, no matter whether mentally disturbed, can buy deadly weapons. We are all quite accustomed to that. What most impressed me was the metaphorical density of an act that could be interpreted as breaking the separation between spectacle and real life (or real death, which is the same). I doubt that James Holmes has ever read Guy Debord. Often, people act without reading the relevant texts. Yet Holmes’s gesture carried a tang of situationism. The whole history of the twentieth-century vanguard was reconvened there, and monstrously restaged. ‘Abolish art abolish daily life abolish the separation between art and daily life’, the Dadaists said. Holmes, it struck me, wanted to eliminate the separation between the spectator and the movie; he wanted to be in the movie.

So I began to read compulsively about the massacre at the screening of the Batman movie. My interest led me to news stories about other males (white, black, old, young, rich, poor, but only males, no women at all – who knows why?) who shoot and kill people, and to further research into previous mass murders. From these studies, I came to the realization that the current becoming of the world could be better understood if observed through this kind of horrible madness, rather than through the polite madness of economists and politicians. I saw the agony of capitalism and the dismantling of social civilization from a very peculiar point of view: crime and suicide.

The naked reality of capitalism is today on display. And it’s horrible.

2

The subject of this book is not merely crime and suicide, but more broadly the establishment of a kingdom of nihilism and the suicidal drive that is permeating contemporary culture, together with a phenomenology of panic, aggression and resultant violence. This is the point of view from which I’m looking at mass murder, focusing in particular on the spectacular implications of these acts of killing, and on their suicidal dimension.

I don’t care about the conventional serial killer, the brand of secretive sadistic psychopaths who are attracted to other people’s suffering and enjoy seeing people die. I’m interested in people who are suffering themselves, and who become criminals because this is their way both to express their psychopathic need for publicity and also to find a suicidal exit from their present hell. I write about young people like Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and Pekka-Erik Auvinen, who killed themselves after trying to attract the attention of the world by ending the lives of innocent people. I also write of James Holmes, who committed a sort of symbolic suicide without actually killing himself.

I write about spectacular murderous suicides because these killers are the extreme manifestation of one of the main trends of our age. I see them as the heroes of an age of nihilism and spectacular stupidity: the age of financial capitalism.

3

In the book The Wretched of the Screen, Hito Steyerl recalls David Bowie’s 1977 release of the single ‘Heroes’.

‘He sings of a new brand of hero, just in time for the neoliberal revolution and for the digital transformation of the world. The hero is dead – long live the hero! Yet Bowie’s hero is no longer a subject, but an object: a thing, an image, a splendid fetish – a commodity soaked with desire, resurrected from beyond the squalor of its own demise. Just look at a 1977 video of the song and you’ll understand why: the clip shows Bowie singing to himself from three simultaneous angles, with layering techniques tripling his image; not only has Bowie’s hero been cloned, he has above all become an image that can be reproduced, multiplied, and copied, a riff that travels effortlessly through commercials for almost anything, a fetish that packages Bowie’s glamorous and unfazed post-gender look as product. Bowie’s hero is no longer a larger-than-life human being carrying out exemplary and sensational exploits, and he is not even an icon, but a shiny product endowed with post-human beauty: an image and nothing but an image. This hero’s immortality no longer originates in the strength to survive all possible ordeals, but from its ability to be xeroxed, recycled, and reincarnated. Destruction will alter its form and appearance, yet its substance will be untouched. The immortality of the thing is its finitude, not its eternity. In 1977, the punk band The Stranglers delivers a crystal-clear analysis of the situation by stating the obvious: heroism is over. Trotsky, Lenin, and Shakespeare are dead. In 1977, as leftists flock to the funerals of RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan Carl Raspe, The Stranglers’ album cover delivers its own giant wreath of red carnations and declares: NO MORE HEROES. Anymore.¹

In the classical tradition, the hero belonged to the sphere of the epic imagination, separate from tragedy and lyrics. The hero was someone who subjugated Nature and dominated the events of history with the strength of will and of courage. He founded the city and warded off the demonic forces of chaos. This vision can still be found in the time of the Renaissance, and Machiavelli’s prince can be considered the hero of modern political narration: the man who establishes the nation state, builds the infrastructures of industry and gives shape to a common identity.

This epic form of heroism disappeared towards the end of modernity, when the complexity and speed of human events overwhelmed the force of the will. When chaos prevailed, epic heroism was replaced by gigantic machines of simulation. The space of the epic discourse was occupied by semiocorporations, apparatuses for the emanation of widely shared illusions. These games of simulation often took the shape of identities, as with popular subcultures like rock, punk, cyberculture and so on. Here lies the origin of the late-modern form of tragedy: at the threshold where illusion is mistaken for reality, and identities are perceived as authentic forms of belonging. It is often accompanied by a desperate lack of irony, as humans respond to today’s state of permanent deterritorialization by enacting their craving for belonging through a chain of acts of murder, suicide, fanaticism, aggression, war.

I believe that it is only through irony and through a conscious understanding of the simulation at the heart of the heroic game, that the simulated hero of subculture still has a chance to save itself.

4

In the year 1977 human history came to a turning point. Heroes died, or, better said, they disappeared. They were not killed by the foes of heroism, rather they transferred to another dimension: they dissolved, they turned into ghosts. So the human race, misled by mock heroes made of deceptive electromagnetic substance, lost faith in the reality of life and its pleasures, and started believing only in the infinite proliferation of images. 1977 was the year when heroes faded and transmigrated from the world of physical life and historical passion to the world of visual simulation and nervous stimulation. That year was a watershed: from the age of human evolution the world shifted to the age of de-evolution, or de-civilization.

What had been produced by labour and social solidarity in the centuries of modernity started to fall under finance’s predatory process of de-realization. The conflictive alliance between industrious bourgeois and industrial workers – which had left the public education system, health care, transportation, and welfare as the material legacy of the modern age – was sacrificed to the religious dogma of the Market-God.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century the post-bourgeois dilapidation took the form of a financial black hole. This new system started to swallow and destroy the product of two hundred years of industriousness and of collective intelligence, and transformed the concrete reality of social civilization into abstraction: figures, algorithms, mathematical ferocity and accumulation of nothing in the form of money. The seductive force of simulation transformed physical forms into vanishing images, submitted visual art to spam spreading, and subjected language to the fake regime of advertising. At the end of this process, real life disappeared into the black hole of financial accumulation.

The question now is to see what’s left of the human subjectivity and sensibility and of our ability to imagine, to create and to invent. Are humans still able to emerge from this black hole; to invest their energy in a new form of solidarity and mutual help? The sensibility of a generation of children who have learned more words from machines than from their parents appears to be unable to develop solidarity, empathy and autonomy. History has been replaced by the endless flowing recombination of fragmentary images. Random recombination of frantic precarious activity has taken the place of political awareness and strategy. I really don’t know if there is hope beyond the black hole; if there lies a future beyond the immediate future.

Where there is danger, however, salvation also grows – said Hölderlin, the poet most loved by Heidegger, the philosopher who foresaw the future destruction of the future. Now, the task at hand is to map the wasteland where social imagination has been frozen and submitted to the recombinant corporate imaginary. Only from this cartography can we move forward to discover a new form of activity which, by replacing Art, politics and therapy with a process of re-activation of sensibility, might help humankind to recognize itself again.

1 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, p. XX.

Chapter 1

The Joker

Very Real

Twentieth of July 2012. The young man buys a ticket, enters the theatre and sits in the front row. About thirty minutes into the film, he leaves the building through an emergency exit door that he props open. He goes to his car, changes into protective clothing and retrieves his guns. At 12.30 a.m., he re-enters the theatre through the opened door. He is wearing a gas mask, a ballistic helmet, bullet-resistant leggings, a throat protector and tactical gloves.

Some people in the audience see the masked gunman, but they take him for one of the many enthusiastic batman fans who have dressed up for the screening. A man who is at the theatre with his family will later say that at first the attack looked like a publicity stunt for the film’s premiere. Then, he will add, the show became ‘very real, very quickly’.

About 20 minutes into the movie, there was sort of a solemn moment in the movie and a gas canister sort of type thing – I thought it was a firework at the time – kind of flew across the screen and landed kind of in front of me and to the side. People there started to get out of their seats and started moving. And then, from the bottom right from where I am sitting, from the bottom right corner of the theatre, there started being the muzzle flash of the gun. At the time, I thought it was still fireworks. And then I was hit here (pointing at lower shoulder and chest) and I realized it was something much more serious. And people started screaming. There was a lot of chaos.

At 12.38 a.m. the gunman throws a smoke bomb. As the gas begins to fill the theatre, he fires a shotgun, first at the ceiling, then at the audience. He also fires a Smith & Wesson M&P15 semi-automatic rifle with a 100-round drum magazine, and a Glock 22 handgun. Some of the bullets pass through the wall and hit people in the adjacent theatre, where the same film is screening.

He must have shot 19 or 20 rounds. People were scrambling left and right. Somebody behind us, maybe a straggler, was hurt. He said ‘I am hit’. The guy looked like the Terminator. He didn’t say anything. He was just shooting and shooting and shooting. There were people crawling down the stairs trying to escape the hail of gunfire. It was a very bad scene. Very bad.

The alarm system goes off soon after the attack begins and the staff helps people to evacuate. Some people report the shooting via tweets or text messages rather than calling the police. Twelve people are killed, and seventy others are injured. At 12.45 a.m. the shooter is arrested next to his car. He does not offer any resistance.

He has reddish-orange hair, he seems dazed and scarcely aware of his surroundings, and a few hours later investigators will disclose his name as James Holmes. Apparently, the shooter acted alone and was not part of a larger group or terrorist organization, and one of his classmates will later reveal that Holmes said several times that he wanted to kill people.

According to a jail worker interviewed by the Daily News, Holmes wants to know how the movie ends. The shooter keeps saying to his Colorado jailers that he doesn’t understand why he is locked behind bars. Some jailers who are in contact with him believe he’s faking amnesia.

Art and Life

Within days, a rubber mask depicting John Holmes’s face, expressionless and with orange hair as it appears in his first mugshot, is available for purchase on eBay for $500.

Halloween is only a month away. SHOCK EVERYONE YOU KNOW! He was referred to as ‘The Joker’, ‘The Dark Knight Shooter’, ‘The Ilama’, ‘The Extraordinarily Gifted’ but his real name is JAMES HOLMES! There is nothing scarier than crawling into James Holmes’ mind and wearing his face. His ‘soul penetrating eyes’ and ‘The Joker’ orange hair makes this mask the most disturbing object you will ever own. Imagine owning the mask of supposedly the most dangerous mass murderer in US history. This is a high quality latex rubber mask which was custom designed for a private collector overseas. I won this mask playing high stakes poker tournament when I was in Europe. I guaranty you that this is the only mask in the world and it is practically priceless because it was used in the production of the most controversy documentary which will come out in 2013. This mask is sold as it is and there are no returns. If you have 0 feedback and you are interested to bid on this item you have to contact me first. I will ship the mask immediately after I receive the payment. Good luck!

Soon after publication of the announcement, however, eBay removed the mask offered by user ‘realface13’. eBay told ABC News: ‘The listing was removed because it did not comply with our Offensive Materials policy. Out of respect for victims of violent crimes, eBay does not allow listings that attempt to profit from human tragedy or suffering.’

Catwoman’s Heart Is Broken

I read the news: I can’t stop. I spend part of the night surfing one website after another.

Holmes – who shot dead 12 people including 8-years-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan – entered jail to shouts of ‘kid killer’. Prisoner Wayne Medley, 24 – who was at the Arapahoe Detention Centre, Colorado, when Holmes was brought in – said: ‘All the inmates were talking about killing him. Everyone was looking for an opportunity. It’s all they could talk about.’

James Holmes told the cops that he was Batman’s enemy, the Joker. His answering machine message was also inspired by the Joker. Once in jail, he kept spitting at the guards. One prison insider said of the gunman, who was under suicide watch in solitary confinement: ‘He hasn’t shown any remorse. He thinks he’s acting in a movie.’

In the wake of the shooting, Catwoman actress Anne Hathaway commented: ‘My heart aches and breaks for the lives taken and altered by this unfathomably senseless act. I am at a loss for words how to express my sorrow. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.’

Christopher Nolan, the director of The Dark Knight Rises, issued a statement:

Speaking on behalf of the cast and crew of The Dark Knight Rises, I would like to express our profound sorrow at the senseless tragedy that has befallen the entire Aurora community. I would not presume to know anything about the victims of the shooting but that they were there last night to watch a movie. I believe movies are one of the great American art forms