The Act of Killing and the modern trend of “privatising public space”

...(A)ccording to the People’s Daily (the government newspaper) which, in an online opinion poll, asked a large sample of young people what they would do if they were to see a fallen elderly person: “87 per cent of young people would not help . . . People will only help when a camera was present.” The reluctance to help signals a change in the status of public space. Even in a public space, I am still within my private space, engaged in no interaction with other people. In order to count as public, the space has to be covered by security cameras.

Another sign of this change can be found in the recent trend of public sex in hardcore porn. There are more and more films which show a couple (or more) engaged in erotic games up to full copulation in a heavily frequented public space (a beach, a tram or train, at a bus or railway station). The majority of passers by (pretend to) ignore the scene – a minority throw a discreet glance at the couple, even fewer make a sarcastic obscene remark. Again, it is as if the copulating couple remained in a private space, so that we should not be concerned by their intimacies. This brings us back to Hegel’s “spiritual animal kingdom” – that is to say, who behaves like this, passing by the dying or copulating in blessed igorance? Animals, of course. The animality with which we are dealing here – the ruthless egotism of each of the individuals pursuing his or her private interest – is the paradoxical result of the most complex network of social relations (market exchange, social mediation of production). That individuals are blinded to this network points towards its ideal (“spiritual”) character: in the civil society structured by market, abstraction rules more than ever.

It is often said that today, with our exposure to the media, culture of public confessions and instruments of digital control, private space is disappearing. One should counter this: it is the public space proper that is disappearing. The person who displays on the web his or her naked images or intimate data is not an exhibitionist: exhibitionists intrude into the public space, while those who post their naked images on the web remain in their private space and are just expanding it to include others. The same goes for Anwar and his colleagues in The Act of Killing: they are privatising the public space in a sense that is far more threatening than economic privatisation.