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Article Excerpt
A reading of Golding's Lord of the Flies as an allegory of a biopolitical or postpolitical society that elevates "security" to the most sacred principle of organization as a permanent state of exception and attempts to combine it with consumerism. It is in this context that spite, an impotent and self-sacrificial violence, reemerges as a postpolitical strategy. KEYWORDS: spite; security; exception; postpolitical; political infantalization
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The Lord of the Flies is expanding his Reich. All treasures, all blessings are swelling his might.... Down, down with the handful who doubt him! --Stefan George, 1907
The film Lord of the Flies, based on William Golding's novel of the same title, (1) is a dystopic comment on war. For Golding, as for his contemporaries such as Adorno and Horkheimer, war was more than just a dark spot, an exception, in the history of civilization. The life of a group of boys on a desert island, depicted in the film with ruthless precision, does not illustrate a case of regress to pre-social forms but rather an ever-present possibility of our system, a state of exception. Indeed, in stark contrast to the standard interpretations, the two clans that the boys establish on the island, led by Ralph and Jack respectively, explicate the two sides of the same social bond. The upside consists of the image of society as rule-governed and institutionalized, the citizens being law-abiding; on the downside, we encounter fantasies of transgression, potlatch, and perversion: democratic utopianism versus fascist violence, society versus the mob. The two topologies coexist, and thus it would be a mistake to see one of them as being closer to nature, more true or more revealing than the other, which is also why there is always a fragile balance between the two topologies.
It is this fragility, the split character of authority, that Lord of the Flies dramatizes. Ralph continually appeals to reason and order, while Jack empowers his discursive position through references to an enemy, the "monster" on the hill. Ralph's mistake, and the shortcoming of democracy in general, is his denial of what Bataille called "heterogeneity": the importance of expenditure, play, war, and disorganization in social life. What Jack, on the other hand, can neither predict nor perceive is that his disorganizing lines of flight potentially can turn into an orgy of violence and, ultimately, a spiteful death.
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The film opens with an accident: A plane evacuating military students from England during World War II crashes in the Pacific Ocean. The only survivors, a group of boys aged from five to thirteen, end up on a tropical desert island, where they are determined quickly to reestablish civilization. Indeed, in this respect the story brings to mind Robinson Crusoe, where the world is recreated on a desert island. Thus, as soon as two of the central figures in the film, Ralph and Piggy, meet each other, they try to find the other boys and start reestablishing the social order. An important object in this context is a conch shell they find on the beach. Functioning as a symbol of civilization (its sound being used as a call for gatherings of the castaways), the conch holds the boys together: the one who holds the conch has the right to speak, et cetera. In a sense, therefore, the conch is an instrument of democratic governance and legitimacy, a token necessary for preserving the agora and holding violence at bay. At this stage, even Jack, the figure who represents the antidemocratic tendency in the film, is content, when he loses the leadership election to Ralph, with remaining the leader of his own pack, the "hunters." As a whole, he is uneasy with the thought of violence; thus, when he finds a pig caught in a tangle of vines in the jungle, he hesitates, together with the other boys, unable to kill the pig. The boys watch the pig free itself and run away. However, the similarity with Robinson's island ends here. Because in Robinson Crusoe
[e]verything is taken from the ship. Nothing is invented. It is all painstakingly applied on the island. Time is nothing but the time necessary for capital to produce a benefit as the outcome of work. And the providential function of God is to guarantee a return. God knows his people, the hardworking honest type, by their beautiful properties, and the evil doers, by their poorly maintained, shabby property. Robinson's companion is not Eve, but Friday, docile towards work, happy to be a slave, and too easily disgusted by cannibalism. Any healthy reader would dream of seeing him eat Robinson. (2)
In a sense, this anti-Puritan dream is realized in Lord of the Flies, in which invention and creativity are abundant, "work ethic" does not work, God too easily abandons its subjects, and evil thrives in the boys' increasing fear. Thus, things change quite early in the film: The boys start to drift away from order/civilization; and toward the end of the film, as the group moves further and further away from civilization, even the conch loses its attraction and is crushed by one of the boys, Roger, the sadist who also kills Piggy, the "inventor" of the conch.
It all starts when the boys find out that they are alone. They think their life on the island will be like in a comic book, a life without adults: "until the grown-ups come to fetch us we'll have fun." (3) The disappearance of authority figures and the prospect of fun, however, also bring with them fear, for the boys are scared of the possibility of long-term abandonment on the island, a fear that is to be reinforced later by the "monster." In fear, the boys expect to be rescued and, helped by Piggy's intelligence, they decide to build a signal fire to attract the attention of passing ships. This fire, one of the most significant metaphors in the film, signifies a bond with, a desire for (returning to) civilization: As long as the fire is alive, the boys can retain the hope of escape. However, from the very start, the fire turns out to be a double-edged sword. Thus the first fire the boys make runs out of control and a tree is set on flames. What promises escape can bring with it destruction. As the boys get more and more violent in the scenes that follow, they completely lose interest in the signal fire. Their process of disconnection from civilization reaches completion when the fire finally burns out. At this stage, the boys return to the state of nature.
Initially, the fire accidentally burns out because of the search for "fun." For their collective survival, everybody in the group must work. There are many things to be done: building huts, finding fruits to eat, securing the well-being of the smaller boys so that they stop having nightmares, and so on. Ralph is keen on division of labor. But Jack and his group are using hunting as an excuse to escape from real work. As Ralph and Jack grow increasingly hostile toward each other, the thematic conflict of the film (civilization versus violence, building huts versus hunting, territorialization versus deterritorialization) is articulated in the form of verbal arguments. Ralph defends the common good; Jack is obsessed with power. Concomitantly, Ralph's group is held together with reference to reason, Jack's in identification with a charismatic leader. At this stage, however, Jack still has to justify hunting partly with reference to the common good: "the boys want meat." As a whole, life has a normalcy to it: The boys live according to a daily rhythm: mornings are play time; in the tropic afternoons they sleep; in the evenings they tell each other horror stories about the "beast"; they eat fruits, suffer diarrhea, and so on. There are, though, some signs of violence and perversion of this normalcy. Thus, we see that the bigger boys bully the others. But such violence primarily works against the background of a normality, as an exception that proves the rule.
One day, unexpectedly, Ralph and Piggy see a ship on the horizon. Precisely at the same moment, they realize that the signal fire has gone out. And it turns out that on that particular day, the signal fire should have been the hunters' responsibility. Ralph and Piggy are enraged with Jack. Jack and his boys, however, are increasingly obsessed with hunting and are totally unaware of the ship. Ralph and Piggy find them on their way back from the jungle, covered with blood and carrying a killed pig. Significantly in this context, killing the first pig is Jack's first taste of sovereignty, the power to decide on life and death: "a knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long, satisfying drink." (4) It is at this point that we get the first real confrontation between Ralph and Jack and the first signs of serious violence breaking out: "Ralph made a step forward and Jack smacked Piggy's head. Piggy's glasses flew off and tinkled on the rocks. Piggy cried in terror: 'My specs!'" (5) Excited with bloodlust, Jack and his boys ignore Ralph's and Piggy's criticism. In this scene, for the first time Jack explicitly denies Piggy the right to...
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