Cinematic Rupture: Reading Cambodia’s Genocide through Deleuze and Guattari

This paper will deploy Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy to read the political economy of contemporary Cambodia as a stratum that emerged from the deterritorializing mechanisms of the Khmer Rouge genocide and politicide. The recent documentary Enemies of the People offers a cinematic space for the unpunished and now-elderly executioners of Democratic Kampuchea to share their memories of these foundational events of mass murder, thereby forcing ruptures in the body politic of Cambodia through their revelations of the violent processes of deterritorialization that allowed the emergence of this high growth Southeast Asian economy. The paper will proceed by examining the double articulation of stratification in Cambodia, thereby excavating the bodies hidden by the processes of reterritorialization and overcoding, and will conclude with a speculative look at what these cinematic ruptures portend for becoming-Cambodia.

This paper will deploy Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy to read the political economy of contemporary Cambodia as a stratum that emerged from the deterritorializing mechanisms of the Khmer Rouge genocide and politicide. The recent documentary Enemies of the People offers a cinematic space for the unpunished and now-elderly executioners of Democratic Kampuchea to share their memories of these foundational events of mass murder, thereby forcing ruptures in the body politic of Cambodia through their revelations of the violent processes of deterritorialization that allowed the emergence of this high growth Southeast Asian economy. The paper will proceed by examining the double articulation of stratification in Cambodia, thereby excavating the bodies hidden by the processes of reterritorialization and overcoding, and will conclude with a speculative look at what these cinematic ruptures portend for becoming-Cambodia.
The diagram that DeLanda mentions consists of the abstraction of the arrangement of the physical components and forces within a particular assemblage and its products, such that it is "a map of the function of an assemblage," namely the production of "affects and effects" (Livesey, 2010: 18). In DeLanda's example, the arrangement of the components and forces within a hurricane can be abstracted to the same arrangement of components and forces, and the forces thereby produced, within a steam engine.
Insofar as countries can be seen as vast assemblages of components and forces (ranging from the individual bodies of their inhabitants and smaller-scale assemblages like societies, institutions and markets, to the natural forces of climate and geology, as well as social forces, including culture, politics and economics), they too may be abstracted to complex diagrams that similarly map the formation of largescale structures in the physical world; for example, geological strata and meshworks.
At one level, the formation of social hierarchies can be abstracted to the same diagram that corresponds to geological stratification: the "double articulation" of sedimentation and folding, through which new forces emerge from the sorting of an undifferentiated mass into distinct layers of related physical components (Bonta & Protevi, 2004: 151). In the complex forces that drove the growth of cities like Phnom Penh-including the flows of migration, trade, and colonization-one may discern the abstract diagram of stratification. At a broader temporal level, stratification may be discerned in not just the historical formation of social hierarchies, but also in the complex formation and transformation of political economies. At this level of analysis, the political economy of a territory prior to colonization may be seen to constitute a stratum that is buried below that of the colonial period, and likewise, the political economy of the period of independence may be seen as being built on the stratum of the colonial political economy. In this same way, one may view neoliberal Cambodia as emerging from the stratum of its revolutionary period of genocide and politicide. To understand how mass killing enables one stratum to change to another, one has to shift to the level of the individual body. DeLanda (2008) reminds us that "politically it is impossible to effect any real social change if the targets of one's Lim: Cinematic Rupture 4 interventions are non-existent entities" (176). Bodies are physical entities through which change may be effected by their deployment or elimination. In such a grim logic, should specific assemblages of bodies be identified as constituting impediments to desired change, their physical removal from the greater assemblage of the State may hence be warranted. The planners of Democratic Kampuchea understood this lesson, and effected social change through the brutal and rigorous elimination of hundreds of thousands of troublesome bodies.

Troublesome Bodies
While the actual number of victims of Democratic Kampuchea's revolution of 1975-79 will probably never be known, Heuveline's (1998) demographic analysis concludes that violent deaths during this period range from "a minimum of 1.1 million and a maximum of 2.2 million, with a medium estimate of 1.4 million" (60).
The mass killings in Cambodia during the Democratic Kampuchea period straddle politicide and genocide. As Ea (2005)  led a group of Khmer Rouge killers during the Democratic Kampuchea period. She admits to having received orders from senior officials to "solve" the "ethnic minority problem." This solution involved rooting out and murdering these "traitors" and their "associates." Suon, one of Em's killers, observes that Em cannot remember how many were killed simply because "there were so many." The Cham Muslim minority was especially targeted for extermination. Osman (2002) estimates 400,000 to 500,000 Cham Muslim deaths during the Democratic Kampuchea period, and that "their mortality rate was double to nearly triple that of the general Khmer population" (2).
Apart from genocide, politicide also occurred during the Democratic Kampuchea period (Hamilton, 2013: 173). These mass killings targeted the regime's internal enemies, of whom two sub-groups can be distinguished. The first consisted of "soldiers and police of the Lon Nol regime, and those in the feudalist and capitalist classes." These class enemies also included "those in the bourgeois class or who leaned toward capitalism" (Ea, 2005: 5). Indeed, De Walque's (2005) demographic analysis confirms that "individuals with an urban or educated background were more likely to die, establishing that they were especially targeted" (351). The second sub-group of internal enemies consisted of Khmer Rouge cadres who were suspected of treason (Ea, 2005: 4). Pol Pot's secret S-21 prison was the site of the torture and murder of at least 12,000 of these internal enemies, about 600 of whom were former S-21 guards who had fallen under suspicion (Lim, 2013a: 109, 112). The horrifying segment of Rithy Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) where the torturer Prak Khan confesses his sadistic interrogation of the doomed medic Nay Nan reveals the paranoia of the Khmer Rouge Party Center, in particular its proclivity to identify-without any evidence-hitherto innocent individuals as members of vast counterrevolutionary conspiracies, and to subsequently "smash" these invented enemies (Lim, 2012: 124).
Given the heterogeneity of killers and victims, each of whom exists or existed as a haecceity with his or her own facticity and spatiotemporal history, spatial and temporal variations can be observed in the mass killings of the Democratic Kampuchea period. Each space and event of mass killing should hence be considered as a unique assemblage. Chandler (1993) highlights the temporal and regional variations in living conditions across Democratic Kampuchea, where the Eastern Zone, for example, transformed over time from "one of the most humane in DK to one of the most brutal" (271). Indeed, the act of genocide or politicide can be seen as a function of "absolute deterritorialization," which as Bonta and Protevi (2004) warn, "can also overcode the earth in the worst of all dangers, the fascist State" (79). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) observe that at this point of deterritorializing intensity, "the lines of flight are not only obstructed and segmented but turn into lines of destruction or death" (510). The act of genocidal or politicidal deterritorialization erases the assemblages constituted by the destroyed enemy bodies, and this is followed by the overcoding that creates new assemblages to replace the old: The State apparatus can act directly on any stratum of human society, any regime of signs, and any ecosystem. It has and is the force and power to overcode anything, to put anything to work, to turn anything into stock . . .
Once resonating, the overcoded territories can be stratified and organized in numerous ways, segmented and striated to the limits of human tolerance. official transition to neoliberal capitalism in the 1990s with its implementation of "Washington Consensus" structural adjustment policies, including the privatization of its state-owned enterprises. Unlike other developing countries which suffered economic calamity after undergoing structural adjustment, Cambodia's transition was a success, and it has subsequently become one of the world's fastest growing economies (Lim, 2013b: 61-63;Lim, 2014b: 86-89). However, the PRK's reintroduction of money and markets also facilitated the emergence of patronage networks that survived the country's transition to neoliberal capitalism and which persist to the present day (Lim, 2013a: 29).

Cinematic Rupture
In the alloplastic stratum, the political and economic transformation of Cambodia that followed its revolutionary period of mass killing was accompanied by occlusions of memory. Among the survivors, the killings became open secrets that were seldom spoken of. The Cambodian state, for its part, politicized the official memory of these killings. Parr (2006) (Lim, 2012: 125;Lim, 2013a: 109). Which of these victims had served as S-21's interrogators or killers before they themselves had fallen afoul of the regime?
At another level, one may draw on Deleuze's understanding of the present as constituted by both an actual and virtual present, the latter of which remains real even though it has not been actualized in the present moment. In this sense, the virtual present represents what the actual present could have been and could still be (Deleuze, 1989: 79;Deleuze, 1991: 96-7). In the same way that Al-Nakib ( The present, on the contrary, is what we are and, thereby, what already we are ceasing to be . . . It is not that the actual is the utopian prefiguration of a future that is still part of our history. Rather, it is the now of our becoming. In his reading of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Bogue (2011) identifies the different modes of the future connected with Deleuze's passive syntheses of time. Of interest is the third synthesis of time, which tears an asymmetric cut in time, creating Lim: Cinematic Rupture 13 not just a "before" and "after," but also a temporal split in the subject. This temporal division in the subject is echoed in Deleuze's notion of the people to come: "in the present there is no people, and the people to come, le peuple à venir, is only possible in some future that has not yet arrived" (78-79). The creation of the people to come is nothing less than the creation of new "modes of existence" and "new possibilities of life" (Deleuze, 1997: 4;Bogue, 2011: 89). In the case of post-genocide Cambodia, what would the people to come look like? Hybridity is key to understanding the possible futures for becoming-Cambodia. In terms of Deleuzian geophilosophy, the process of hybridization is akin to the geological process of composition that assembles heterogenous components like fossils and minerals into limestone (Bliss, Hayes, and Orris, 2012: 1). Cambodia's past has likewise been shaped by the process of hybridization. This dates from the Angkorean period, whose culture has been revealed by archeologists and historians to be hybrid and cosmopolitan, with Buddhism (Harris, 1999: 54;Harris, 2005: 22-24;Heder, 2007: 290;Mabbett and Chandler, 1995: 114-116). Angkorean culture itself was eventually superseded by a regional hybrid culture that encompassed both the ethnic Thai and Khmer. Even after the Angkorean period, the precolonial Khmer kings continued to recognize the multiculturalism of their realm as a sign of their royal power (Chandler, 2008: 95;Heder, 2007: 292).
Today, new hybrid identities continue to be created in Cambodia (Lim, 2014a: 492). One of the key hybridizing forces today is the Cambodian diaspora, which has reshaped local Cambodian culture through the influence of overseas Cambodians like the Cambodian-American rapper praCh Ly, or returnees from the diaspora like Tuy Sobil, whose school Tiny Toones promotes hybrid musical and dance forms like Khmer hip-hop and Khmer breakdancing (Amery, 2011: paras. 7-13;Mellen, Lim: Cinematic Rupture 14 2010: para. 26). The strong influence of American hip-hop culture in the current wave of hybridization reflects the urban lives of diasporic Cambodian-Americans like Tee Cambo and CS, whose rap music "reflects the gang culture and hard-knocks life that have characterized their experience" (Bennett 2014, paras. 5-8 While the ethnic Vietnamese, as we have seen, remain Cambodia's despised "other," this could change (Villadiego, 2014). The mutating fate of Cambodia's ethnic Chinese shows a possible path forward for the ethnic Vietnamese. During the Democratic Kampuchea period, the ethnic Chinese were persecuted by the anticapitalist Khmer Rouge because of their pre-revolutionary capitalist activities. Many Chinese quickly learned that they had to pass as Khmer in order to survive, and this occlusion of their ethnic identity continued even after the ouster of the Pol Pot regime in 1979. By 1991, when Cambodia was on the cusp of its transition to neoliberal capitalism, few Chinese "were willing to openly converse in Chinese, or to share any claim to a Chinese heritage or name, with an outsider" (Edwards, 2012: 127-130).
This "legacy of fear" has ended under the rule of the current Royal Government of Cambodia, with the reemergence of the Chinese press and institutions like associations, schools, and temples marking the ethnic Chinese minority's confident reassertion of their identity (Edwards, 2009: 175). While the late King Father Norodom Sihanouk did not include the Chinese in his classificatory scheme of favored ethnic minorities who could be assimilated under an expanded definition of the Khmer, Cambodia's Chinese have taken it upon themselves to designate their community as "Khmer Chen" (Chinese Khmer), performatively invoking their membership in the Khmer nation (Ehrentraut, 2011: 789).
A similar challenge by the ethnic Vietnamese to claim their place in the Cambodian nation would exemplify the ceaseless political struggle of the Deleuzian "people to come," as the people to come is a people "perpetually generating differences," with their politics defined "from within . . . as that people continues its becoming" (Bogue, 2011: 90). The flows of capital that characterize Cambodia's contemporary neoliberal political economy will be key factors in this generation of difference, as it is the tendency of such flows to challenge the State in their perpetual task of recoding all social flows into the commodity form (Bogue, 2005: 19-20 (Verver, 2012: 31-32). Increased flows of capital from Vietnam could have similarly beneficial effects for Cambodia's ethnic Vietnamese. One of the popular anti-Vietnamese stereotypes in Cambodia is of the Vietnamese as economic exploiters of the Khmer people (Lim, 2013a: 60-63). The establishment of Vietnamese enterprises in Cambodia that create jobs with decent wages, if done in sufficient numbers, could effectively recode the Vietnamese people in the Cambodian imagination as good neighbours and economic partners. This would also set an important precedent for future foreign direct investment as neoliberal Cambodia is a magnet for international capital precisely because of the low cost of Cambodian labour. Cambodia's garment sector-which has become the country's primary export sector-offers wages that are so low that wages in the sex industry appear as attractive to the underpaid garment workers (Alvi, 2014). This optimistic possible future for Cambodia's ethnic Vietnamese, if actualized, would mark a significant departure from the spiral repetition of ethnic violence that characterizes Cambodia's deep history, of which the Khmer Rouge genocide was just a recent iteration (Lim, 2013a: 68-69).
Returning to geophilosophy, one may be reminded that while Cambodia is an exemplary case of a neoliberal economy built on a stratum of mass killings, it is unfortunately not unique in Southeast Asia. Joshua Oppenheimer's recent documentaries The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) reveal the parallel case of Indonesia, whose politicide of 1965-66 helped establish the foundation of the country's neoliberal economy (Ransom, 1970: 48-49;Klein, 2008: 85). These events of mass killing were not the last to occur in Southeast Asia. Today in Myanmar, state-sponsored violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority that amounts, in the eyes of some experts, to a "slow-burning genocide," serves to consolidate majoritarian Buddhist control over the liberalizing economy (Maung Zarni & Cowley, 2014: 684-686;Shams & Wolf, 2015: para. 7). A clear-sighted recognition of the violent foundations of Southeast Asia's high growth economies will be necessary for the region to find an ethical path for its future development. A political economy built on a stratum of mass killing is not destined to fall into a spiral repetition of violence, as its people to come may decide on a better course.