Discourses, Technologies, and Aesthetics of Corruption and Anti-corruption

Researchers of corruption and anti-corruption have noted the difficulties and ambiguities of defining and measuring the former and of assessing the latter. Political scientists and legal scholars typically define corruption as abuse of public office for private gain (Heidenheimer 2005). This definition, alas, leaves unquestioned the broader political, economic, and cultural context within which corruption is identified, defined, and targeted (see also Haller and Shore 2015). As James Scott (1969) noted early on, for some, corruption represents the appropriation of public goods, but for others, corruption could be seen as a redistribution of resources (see also Bocarejo 2018; Hetherington 2018; Roitman 2004). Some definitions of corruption focus on the breach of the law; yet others have pointed out that some of the most serious forms of corruption take the form of “legal corruption” (Kaufman and Vicente 2005) or “state capture” (Hellman, Jones, and Kaufmann 2000). Indeed, these latter forms of corruption are both most costly to the general public and hardest to prosecute, as they often take place through legal avenues.

Early works on the anthropology of corruption (many by authors represented in this issue of Current Anthropology) looked into the shifting definitions (political, social, cultural, and economic) of corruption and, most importantly, the political and socioeconomic context of acts and accusations of corruptions (among others, see Haller and Shore 2005; Schneider and Schneider 2005; Scott 1969; Smith 2007). A number of these works emphasize the ambivalent politics, ethics, and economics of corruption (Bardhan 1997; Scott 1969). Others stress the importance of the historical context and of the cultural repertoires that shape the dynamics of local political actors (Schneider and Schneider 2005) and of political practices and rituals (Lomnitz 1995). Recent contributions in the anthropology of corruption look to the production and circulations of narratives and discourses of corruption in public culture. These studies approach stories and narratives of corruption—circulating in everyday conversation, in gossip and rumor, in national and local media—as key sites of the construction of the state and/or the political arena (Gupta 1995, 2012; Lomnitz 1995; Tidey 2018) and as generative of particular publics and/or subjects (Gupta 2012; Hasty 2006; Mbembe and Roitman 1995; Muir 2016).

Informed by the broader anthropology of media and public culture, I focus on the form and content of Fiksi with an eye to “the analytical and ideological work” (Gupta 2012:114) performed by the show’s mass-mediated narratives of corruption. One crucial element of the show is its style of presentation. Fiksi is fully sponsored by the national television channel, Top Channel.⁷ The show is a rip-off of the Italian show Striscia La Notizia (“The News is Creeping”), also a popular investigative satirical program, which airs on one of Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediasete channels.⁸ The show’s structure and the overall theme of cynical and vulgar humor mimic Striscia’s format and style. At the same time, Fiksi captures a unique vernacular. The dialogue in the show reflects both a late-Communist satirical genre akin to the Soviet stiob (Yurchak 2006:249–254) and a postsocialist genre of cynical political humor that resonates with similar media formats in late-liberal (Boyer and Yurchak 2010; Molé 2013) and postcolonial (Mbembe 2001) contexts. To better appreciate the uniqueness of Fiksi, I begin by locating the show within a broader field of global and local anti-corruption agents and movements.

Corruption Discourses and Anti-corruption Agents since the Late 1990s

Corruption emerged as a target of state and global policymakers in the 1960s, as part of the broader movements of democratization and modernization that dominated postcolonial state formations in the Global South. Corruption—as a manifestation of bourgeois practices—was also an object of concern during this same time period across the former socialist world (Kipnis 2008). Having waned in significance in the 1980s, corruption reemerged as a target of global development agencies at the end of the Cold War. By the mid-1990s, the apocalyptic warnings of the “corruption eruption” (Naím 1995) and the “cancer of corruption” (Wolfensohn 2005) set the stage for the proliferation of an “anti-corruption industry” (Sampson 2010) consisting of corruption indicators and anti-corruption policies, measures, and funding. This movement targets corruption as an obstacle to free enterprise. It builds on an ideology of economic governance that advocates shrinking the public sector through privatization reforms as a means of creating more efficient markets. In the late 1990s, transnational nongovernmental organizations such as Transparency International reshaped the global discourse of corruption by reifying survey methods and composite indicators as preferred technologies for measuring and governing corruption.⁹

Over the past two decades, corruption indicators have become important factors in determining financial aid for countries in the Global South as well as in evaluating political membership in key geopolitical communities, such as the EU. In the Albanian case, I was told in 2008 by a local professional involved in the anti-corruption industry that the country’s corruption “grade” has become an important factor in a wide range of agreements—from negotiations over International Monetary Fund loans to those over EU accession.¹⁰ Still, these corruption indicators and their grades only gain or lose strength as they circulate among local political elites and policymakers (see, e.g., Musaraj 2015; Serban 2015).

Recent years have also seen the emergence of other grassroots anti-corruption agents, technologies, and tactics. In the past decade, corruption has been a target of popular dissent and revolution in a number of autocratic regimes—from the orange revolution in Ukraine to the social movements of the Arab Spring. These movements have made use of various technologies of mass mediation (such as the use of social media in the Arab Spring) as a means of denouncing government corruption. Independent actors also have used media forms as technologies of transparency; among others, these include global scandals (such as Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks or the Panama Papers) as well as local mavericks (such as the sting operations by Tehelka in India or the investigative show Striscia la Notizia in Italy).¹¹ Fiksi exemplifies this latter group of anti-corruption agents.

Fiksi seeks to make visible the “polysemous and diffuse” (Haller and Shore 2005:9) phenomenon of corruption through the use of surreptitious video footage of private conversations and transactions deemed illegal and/or illegitimate. In so doing, Fiksi presents a quasi-ethnographic account of corruption in a language and style that is remarkably different from the bureaucratic-rational language of global indicators, the rights’ discourse of social movements, and the freedom of information discourse of journalists.

Televising Everyday Corruption

Before deciding to do research on Fiksi, I watched it as pure entertainment, as a caricature of “real politics” in the short visits that I made regularly to the country while I was an international student in Canada and the United States. I grew up in Tirana, Albania, in the late-Communist period; I came of age during the tumultuous times of the postsocialist transition and experienced the early 1990s as a time filled with hope and excitement as well as utter confusion and disarray. One of the most noticeable changes of the 1990s was the explosion of sexually explicit language in public spaces and in vernacular discourse.¹² The Communist official discourse—in written, oral, and visual culture—was particularly formalist, puritan, and chaste. Before the 1990s, any acts of intimacy or sexuality (even romantic kisses) were edited out of any form of cultural production—in books, in foreign films, and in public spaces. By contrast, one of the first signs of change in the landscape of Tirana in the late 1980s and early 1990s were graffiti spelling out body parts and sexual acts. Vernacular discourse and public spaces in general became more sexualized. This change took different forms. For one thing, the display of romantic affection in public was now condoned (if not encouraged). At the same time, sexual harassment in public spaces became a norm. I experienced this latter change very vividly as I, like many of my female peers, quickly learned the art of ignoring catcalls and dodging potential harassers when walking in the city. But overall, conversation among peers about once-forbidden topics of romance and sexuality became more lax; such conversations also imparted a style of cynicism initially directed toward the morality of the Communist official discourse. By the late 1990s, following the boom and bust of the infamous Ponzi schemes, however, this cynicism intensified as the initial enthusiasm of free-market reform began to chill, confronted by the reality of economic crisis and political authoritarianism. This cynicism also fueled the desire for going abroad (jashtë shtetit).

Like many of my peers, I left Albania to pursue education abroad, first in Canada then in the United States, in the hope that I would eventually find work opportunities there that were not available to me in Albania. I remained, nonetheless, plugged in to postsocialist cynicism as I returned to Albania every summer. During these visits, I quickly reembodied my cynical self and continued to pick up new phrases or jokes from friends and family living in Albania. When Fiksi started to air in 2002, it made a big impression on me, because it was the first program to capture on television the vernacular genre of discourse—filled with cynical satire, sexually explicit language, and a sense of fatalism—that I had witnessed becoming the norm in everyday conversation. In its overidentification with this postsocialist vernacular discourse, Fiksi took off the edge from the experience of humiliation, uncertainty, and utter powerlessness that I personally felt while performing the annual rituals of waiting in long lines at the gardens and hallways of foreign embassies and government offices. Fiksi’s humor seemed to subvert and ridicule the structures of power and sense of powerlessness experienced in bureaucratic offices, both national and international.

When I began my research on discourses of corruption in Albania in 2008–2009, I became aware that people chose to watch Fiksi not just as catharsis but also as a prime source of information. Various interlocutors referenced Fiksi as a reliable source of evidence and information on issues pertaining to corruption. One resident of Vlora, for instance, praised Fiksi for having uncovered the corruption of the police in his city. Vlora is a second-tier city located on the coast that has a reputation for being a center of trafficking and other illegal activities. I was interviewing Drin (a pseudonym) regarding his experience participating in the pyramid firms of the early 1990s.¹³ Reflecting on the legacy of the firms and the ongoing difficulties of securing a stable economic life, Drin lamented the corruption that plagued the city.¹⁴ To substantiate his claims, Drin referred to one of Fiksi’s infamous investigations, known as the “Stela files” (dosja Stela).

Stela was a 17-year-old girl who contacted Fiksi to report her collaboration with the Vlora police in framing various individuals on false rape charges. In her first interviews with Fiksi, Stela described her involvement in these operations and her desire to get out of the cycle of blackmail. She turned to Fiksi as a last resort. She confessed having blackmailed some of her own relatives (her uncle and her uncle’s father-in-law), who were subsequently pressured to pay large sums of money to the police to drop the charges. Stela wore Fiksi’s hidden cameras inside the anti-trafficking unit, recording, among other things, a conversation with her alleged handler.

The “Stela files” were one of the first of Fiksi’s investigations to target important public officials and to air video footage taken inside government offices. The case was debated in the media over weeks and months, with new revelations twisting the narrative in expected and unexpected ways. Thus, Stela’s own confessions—of working as a waitress and a spy for the Vlora anti-trafficking unit; of being drawn to the discos, the miniskirts, and the money of “these guys”; of “going to the car” (Fiks Fare 2005) with the police employees; and finally of framing her own uncle—together made her an easy target of public shaming and distrust. At the same time, her complicity also provided more credibility to her testimony. Stela knew the confidential codes of several police officers in the unit and, in the sting operation, spoke on a first name basis with her alleged handler. The case intensified when Stela was found brutally stabbed near her home only a few months after the videos aired on television.

Stela’s story brought flesh and blood to rumored and second-hand accounts of a growing number of young women who had become victims of human trafficking via blackmail and coercion, often through familial networks and relations.¹⁵ While these accounts were not accounted for in the official political discourse or in the justice system, stories of human trafficking were rampant in informal conversations and personal accounts. A recent study by Jana Arsovska (2015) provides detailed accounts of such cases of trafficking, noting the role that family networks and relations have played in coercing victims to become collaborators.

Stela’s death, although officially attributed to a crime of passion by her ex-boyfriend, was widely interpreted as an act of retribution for her confessions at Fiksi. The case thus came to represent symptoms of a deep, dark form of corruption taking the shape of mafia stories that resembled those of Italian television series such as La Piovra or Hollywood films such as The Godfather.¹⁶ Fiksi often uses the soundtracks of these two as background for its video investigations. These images reinforced people’s informal discussions of the corrupt ties of local officials, especially police officials in Vlora, to trafficking networks and racketeering.

Fiksi’s hosts themselves made eerie jokes over mafia-like endings as they speculated over their own fate after the macabre end of the Stela case:

In addition to the fear of possible retribution, the dark humor in this exchange also points to the blurred boundaries of guilt and innocence that permeate the show. The “ripped-up shirt and pants” alluded to a pair of ripped-up pants that were filed as evidence (and discussed at length by the media) in the false rape case that Stela admitted to have reported to the Vlora police. Earlier in the episode, Saimiri and Doktori had speculated over the credibility of this evidence (given Stela’s confession of manufacturing evidence for her police assignments). Saimiri suggested that Stela herself, perhaps, could have ripped up those pants before turning them over to the police. The dark humor around the ripped-up pants suggested complicity (of Stela and of Fiksi) and confusion regarding who are the guilty and who the innocent.

It is this generalized sense of complicity and of blurred notions of guilt and innocence that also frames people’s imagination and experience of dealing with the courts. In the investigations of Stela’s murder, the court found the ex-boyfriend guilty and denied any connection to Fiksi’s episodes. Yet the visual record of Stela’s conversations with the anti-trafficking police officers led many to believe that the latter were capable of anything. Hence most people I talked to read Stela’s death as retribution for her whistle-blowing. Drin was certain of this explanation for her death as well. To Drin, Fiksi’s video evidence was more believable than the official story of the courts. His own experience with Vlora public authorities, especially the police, compounded his trust in Fiksi’s version of the truth.

Drin’s assessment is consistent with other expressions of trust in Fiksi that I have encountered over the past decade. However, many viewers express ambivalence over Fiksi’s ethics of investigation, alleging that Fiksi takes bribes or blackmails officials. By its very design, the show presents a partial view of a transaction, which is often aired without the knowledge of the other party. Yet Fiksi’s ambivalent ethics and complicity in acts of corruption and blackmail ironically contribute to the audience’s trust in the veracity of the information presented in the show. As I argue below, it is precisely these muddled ethics and means of procuring evidence and the ordinary yet complex (real-life) characters in Fiksi’s investigations that give the show more strength and credibility vis-à-vis other anti-corruption agents, such as internationally funded indicators, local nongovernmental organizations, or justice institutions.

In contrast with these failed (or less effective) actors, Fiksi continues to be popular and effective. Its ongoing success has confirmed that, in addition to being entertaining, the show enjoys widespread credibility as a whistle-blower.¹⁸ Indeed, Fiksi’s investigations are debated widely in the public sphere and in parliament; they have caused numerous resignations and dismissals of ministers, judges, police officials, and bureaucrats. They have prompted a few court cases (some leading to convictions, others not). What makes Fiksi so durable and credible, especially given its unorthodox forms of investigation and representation? To address this question, I bring together Fiksi’s representations of the everyday experience of corruption with accounts of similar experiences by ordinary Albanians.

Constituting Publics and Practices of Corruption

Compared with other anti-corruption agents and discourses, Fiksi ranks high for what Sarah Muir (2016) calls its “productivity.” In her study of postcrisis Argentina, Muir suggests that the widespread talk about “total corruption” is a marker of middle-class publics. In her example, the discourse of total corruption reproduces and reinforces class identity and solidarity (see also Osburg 2018). In a similar vein, Akhil Gupta (2012) outlines the various publics (the poor, the middle class, the low-level bureaucrats) that are constituted or constructed in and through representations of corruption in public culture in India. Similarly, I argue here that Fiksi narrates a general praxis of corruption and identifies specific publics of corruption in contemporary Albania.

One poignant case of corruption that Fiksi’s made public a few years ago was that of the rampant bribing at the district court of Puka, a small town in the northeast of the country (Fiks Fare 2013). In 2013, Fiksi undertook an investigation that lasted several months and resulted in the conviction of a prosecutor, an employee of the court, an attorney, and a sekser (fixer/broker) on charges ranging from abuse of power to passive corruption (accepting a bribe; Shoqata E Gazetarëve Për Drejtësi 2013). The investigation involved 150 hours of registered conversations by a resident of Puka, Pal Ndoka, who was asked to pay large sums of money for the release from prison of his kin arrested in a protest against exploitation at a mining company. When he sought Fiksi’s help, Ndoka had already paid around 2,000,000 lekë (approximately, US$20,000) for the release of four of his kin. Fiksi’s undercover journalists assisted Ndoka in obtaining digital evidence of the labyrinthine transactions with various sekserë who mediated a total of 600,000 lekë (US$6,000) in bribes to judges, attorneys, and other court staff for the release of his son.¹⁹

In addition to leading to actual court cases and convictions, the Puka investigations resonated with ordinary people by providing a visual narrative for practices and transactions that many experience in their dealings with the courts. For instance, in 2015, I talked with a family in the village of Vuno/Jalë (south of Vlora) who had sued state authorities for the unlawful bulldozing of their constructions on land that they claimed to be theirs based on the 1991 law on the privatization of agricultural land (law 7501). This was a highly publicized case that drew international attention. The bulldozing of a dozen self-built homes was justified as part of a tourism development project cofunded by the World Bank (Economist 2009). While claiming to help tourism development in the south, the bulldozing targeted precisely those local residents who had taken it upon themselves to invest in family-run tourist hotels and businesses.

Following an official complaint sent by a group of affected residents to its Washington, DC, headquarters, the World Bank withdrew funding from the project. The bank also provided legal training and funds for legal fees for the affected residents who filed court cases against state authorities demanding compensation for their damages and, most importantly, for securing their (legitimate) land titles. Although the law was clearly on their side, members of the family described how they had paid high bribes for securing the court decisions in their favor. When asked how they went about paying the bribes, the wife of the main claimant exclaimed, “It was not us who tried to bribe, their fixers (sekserë) found us. They know how to find you (E dinë ata si të gjejnë). We paid so much money to secure the verdict!”²⁰ When I asked for more detail about the transactions with the sekserë, the wife and the husband referenced Fiksi’s investigations of the Puka case: “Did you see it on Fiksi? That’s exactly how it works (fiks ashtu funksionon) [in the courts].”²¹ For the Jalë families, Fiksi’s investigations made visible general patterns of corruption in the local courts that had touched their own lives.

Through its video footage and commentary, Fiksi constructs the geography of everyday corruption and identifies specific publics that engage in these practices. Thus, the Puka investigations followed the briber (Pal Ndoka) in multiple meetings with various intermediaries over the course of 4 months. A secretly recorded meeting with one such sekser reveals the hexis of bribing a court official: “the prosecutor does not release your son without receiving the coffee (pa marrë kafen). It [the coffee] costs six hundred thousand lekë [US$6,000]. Prosecutors and judges first receive their coffees then finish the jobs (mbarojnë punët)” (Top Channel Online 2013).

Giving or receiving “the coffee” refers to a widespread cultural practice of social life in Albania. It is a daily ritual to sit down in a café with friends or colleagues to drink coffee (typically an espresso). Among friends, the coffee is “given” as a token of friendship, with the expectation of it being reciprocated another time. Often, though, in business transactions or in the exchange of personal favors with public officials, “giving a coffee” (ta jap një kafe) to a person of power is a code word for offering a bribe or a favor. The giving of “the coffee” thus is an ambiguous expression that contains a wide range of possible meanings, from a pure expression of reciprocity and friendship to flat-out corruption. In the context of Ndoka’s transactions with the sekser, it became clear that “the coffee” entailed a hefty bribe. In the aftermath of this initial interaction with the sekser, the hidden cameras of Fiksi followed Ndoka in the coffee shops, parking lots, and public offices where the cash was given, counted, and split between the involved parties.

Watching these meetings, conversations, and transactions, one gains access to an alternative space where justice (or injustice) is negotiated in a manner that seems to be routine for the public officials involved. A heightened sense of uncertainty, unclear rules of engagement, and unpredictable outcomes characterize this world. The video recordings reveal something that is familiar to many viewers from firsthand experience or secondhand reports. Webs of sekserë (fixers) mediate informal encounters where quotas for court decisions are solicited, where cash is exchanged, often without any witnesses or written evidence that such transactions ever took place.

Among the publics and subjects in this picture, the sekser emerges as a key “figure of subject” (Mbembe and Roitman 1995) that marks postsocialist corruption. Explicit or implicit accusations of corruption were also pervasive during the Communist times, but these acts typically involved the use of personal connections (i njohur) and favors to access particular public goods (see also Ledeneva 1998; Yang 1994). By contrast, postsocialist forms of corruption are distinct in that money is key to the mediations between citizens and public officials (see also Humphrey 2002; Ledeneva 2006). Such transactions are mediated by sekserë who typically collect a commission for their risky services. In Fiksi’s footage and in everyday narratives, sekserë appear as savvy entrepreneurs that communicate and manage the financial dealings of these illicit transactions. They communicate the prices of the bribes, instruct givers on how and when to give, and ensure prompt payment. They also shield the main culprits—the judges and lawyers—from negotiating directly with the bribe givers or from direct exposure to potential hidden cameras or other witnesses. Sekserë actively interpellate yet another public—the victims of corruption. Whether it is the young woman who finds herself alienated from her family and exploited by the police, a worker in a mine without labor protection, or a lower-middle-class family trying to run a small tourism business, victims of corruption are “ordinary people” (njerëzit e thjeshtë) who find themselves a target of blackmail by the police or the courts. While many of these individuals are poor or have a low income, their exclusion is mostly sociopolitical. The narrative structure of these transactions posits the bribe givers or whistle-blowers as unschooled in the habitus of corrupt dealings and as unwilling accomplices instructed (and coerced) by the sekserë. These visual characterizations of the publics engaged (willingly or unwillingly) in the acts of corruption resonate with accounts by people on the ground. In the course of identifying and constructing such subjects, Fiksi also provides a more general commentary on the form of the state in postsocialist Albania.

Complicit Anti-corruption and the Postsocialist State

Fiksi’s investigations are often performed by actors who are, at the very least, partially complicit in the acts of corruption. The show represents and further reproduces a particular culture of blackmail and distrust shared by both the perpetrators and the victims of corruption. Fiksi-style illicit recordings have become a witness of last resort for many who are situated at the extreme margins of the justice system in Albania; ironically, such methods of exposure have also become a warranty for politicians warding off potential fraud and blackmail. For instance, one infamous case that aired on Fiksi in 2011 featured a rare type of corruption: an instance of state capture (Fiks Fare 2011). Rare, because such forms of corruption are hard to witness and account for. The case in point involved the then-Deputy Minister and Member of Parliament Ilir Meta. Meta has been the head of the Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI), a minor party that splintered off from Socialist Party and that has forged coalitions with both major parties (in 2009 with the Democratic Party, in 2013 with the Socialist Party). In November 2011, Fiksi aired videos of a conversation between Meta and the then-Minister of Economy and Member of Parliament Dritan Prifti. The videos were recorded by Prifti and submitted after Meta had fired Prifti.

In a conversation that lasts for just 10 minutes, Meta runs through a list of favors he demands from Prifti—among others, a “friendly” request to hire an LSI supporter for a government job and an overt directive to “give” a public procurement contract to a specific business group. The latter is cited in the conversation for having promised a 7% kickback (valued at €700,000) for the deal. Unlike the other cases discussed earlier, this was not an investigation coached by Fiksi’s staff but a surreptitious recording submitted to Fiksi weeks after it had occurred. In the video recording, Prifti performs a role similar to that of other whistle-blowers. He reluctantly agrees to Meta’s requests, showing disapproval that is quickly disciplined by Meta’s threatening question, “Is there something wrong?”

Meta resigned after the video went public, and prosecutor Ina Rama led an investigation that reached the level of the High Court. After multiple rounds of expert analysis of the video footage, the High Court ruled against the prosecutor’s case on account of “the lack of proof for the facts to be true” (High Court Verdict 2011, 8/1). The ruling was based on the court experts’ determination that the recordings were of too poor quality to count as evidence. Meta’s resignation was not the end of his political career. He returned to government as speaker of Parliament after joining a coalition government in 2013, this time with the Socialist Party.²² In 2017, Meta was elected president of Albania through bipartisan consensus.²³

While confirming popular imaginaries of the corruption of the courts, the court ruling on the Meti-Prifti case did not undermine the credibility or use of sting operations as a means of exposing corruption and ensuring transparency. On the contrary, since this case, the use of surreptitious visual recordings as a means of citizen justice or blackmail has only intensified. Furthermore, other shows have since replicated Fiksi’s formula. Government bodies (including the police) and even politicians who have historically dismissed Fiksi’s forms of investigation have also begun to encourage similar forms of denunciation via media technologies as a way to combat corruption.²⁴ Government institutions even solicit submissions from the public, thus replicating Fiksi’s own established practice of investigation based on popular reporting.

By making illicit transactions visible to a mass audience, Fiksi advocates and performs a form of anti-corruption that relies on the use of media technologies—hidden cameras, telephones, and wiretapping—as alternative witnesses, as technologies of transparency in a context where the formal justice system fails its citizens. This use of the digital as a technology of transparency reflects a broader ideology shared by international bodies (especially the US Agency for International Development) that advocated e-governance as a quick fix for corruption. Similar initiatives promoted around the world often obscure class conflicts and socioeconomic struggles over access to and redistribution of resources by a language of corporate accountancy (see also Mazzarella 2006; Morris 2004). Fiksi certainly embodies this faith in the visual, the digital, and the raw recordings as trusted witnesses, as technologies of transparency. Yet Fiksi’s digital transparency departs from the global corporate ethics of e-governance precisely because of its overt complicity, partiality, and intimacy with the perpetrators of corruption. As evident in all the cases discussed above, the very techniques of investigation—sting operations—can be obtained only through actors who are at least partially complicit. In addition, Fiksi’s anti-corruption is inseparable from its unique style of representations—a combination of cynical satire and vulgar aesthetics.

Cynical Satire and Vulgar Aesthetics as (Ambivalent) Political Critique

Fiksi’s methods of investigation and style of presentation are deeply grounded in local histories of political dissent and cultures of critique that predate the anti-corruption movement of the new millennium. Indeed, Fiksi’s style is inseparable from the life story of its founder, Filip Çakuli. The show’s style is informed by Çakuli’s lifelong training and experience in late-socialist humor.

Çakuli was trained as a journalist during the late-socialist regime. In the 1980s, Çakuli wrote for Hosteni (“The Goad”), the only satirical journal published under the Communist regime. Although connected to the officials of the regime, Çakuli was punished for a couple of jokes that were considered politically inappropriate. One such joke broadcast live in an interview with Radio Tirana, the state radio channel. It went as follows:

Çakuli’s jokes embodied a style of humor that emerged under one of the most extreme authoritarian Communist regimes under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, who held on to power as head of state and leader of the Party of Labor of Albania from 1944 to 1985. The jokes resonate with the Russian stiob humor, popular in the former Soviet Union. Alexei Yurchak (2006) has described stiob as ironic and absurd humor that “required such a degree of overidentification with the object, person, or idea at which it was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two” (Yurchak 2006:250). This overidentification as a form of satire emerged in a context of “hypernormalization” (Yurchak 2006:50) of the official discourse; this was a discourse saturated with “overcrafted, repetitive and frequently esoteric formulations that distanced the authoritative discourse of socialism from its desired intimate connection with the language and thinking of its citizen subjects” (Boyer and Yurchak 2010:182). Albanian writer and critic Ardian Vehbiu describes a similar process of transformation of Communist discourse into a “totalitarian” language (Vehbiu 2008) that eliminated all dialects, slang, and word play from standard Albanian. By simply mimicking this over-formalized style of discourse, by exposing its absurdity, one performed critique. This was precisely the form of Çakuli’s famous jokes—they mimicked the inflated speeches about the overinflated and formalistic speeches by high-level officials, thus exposing the absurdity and emptiness of official claims to economic progress and expertise.

Disenchanted with the Communist regime, in the early 1990s, Çakuli joined the democracy movement. When the Democratic Party came to power in 1992, he took on the role of editor of the transformed Hosteni, which now ran under a different (right-leaning) editorial board and with a pro-Democratic Party stance (Top Channel Online 2010). During this time, authoritarian leader Sali Berisha consolidated his power in the party (alienating many of the original leaders of the opposition) and in government (Abrahams 2015).²⁵ Once an ally, Berisha became an enemy of Çakuli when the latter planned to run a cover with a caricature of Berisha surrounded by two prostitutes (Dita 2014, 2015).

As this (censured) cover exemplified, Çakuli’s postsocialist humor embraced the cynical and sexually explicit vernacular that had become pervasive in everyday speech. This new style of humor was, in part, a reaction against the highly moralizing and censored formal speech of Communist discourse; it was also partly influenced by the Berlusconi mediasete television shows, a source of inspiration for private television channels in 1990s Albania; finally, the style articulated the pervasive sense of cynicism and powerlessness felt by a second failure of the state in postsocialist Albania.²⁶

In its routine coverage of politicians, Fiksi deploys the “stiob sensibility” (Boyer and Yurchak 2010:183) of late-socialist humor. During Berisha’s two consecutive terms as prime minister (2005–2013), for instance, the show routinely performed acts of overidentification with his style of discourse.²⁷ At the same time, Fiksi’s style and aesthetics depart from the stiob humor in a number of ways. For one thing, the show’s humor resonates with other forms of cynical satire in late-liberal contexts (Boyer and Yurchak 2010; Haugeraud 2012; Molé 2013). Second, the show marks a break from Communist humor in adopting an explicitly sexualized discourse. In this, the discourse of the show resembles what Achille Mbembe identifies as the vulgar aesthetics of political humor in the context of the postcolony (2001). In Fiksi, this is realized mainly through the gendered and sexist setup of the show.

The cohosts perform a masculine subjectivity that is never entirely serious nor committed to a particular ethic; they can only speak about political matters through humor and sarcasm, embracing an ethic of amorality and futility.²⁸ The following exchange between Saimiri and Doktori, the iconic cohosts from 2002 through 2013, captures the spirit that runs through the show:

Saimiri’s joke represents a common narrative of the country’s “lagging behind” an imagined historical progression toward a desired modernity. It echoes an expression widely used by local residents, who often vent, “This country cannot become” (ky vend nuk bëhet). Doktori’s joke, on the other hand, sidelines teleology, progress, becoming, and religion. Instead, it undermines the sacred through the intimacy and banality of the domestic. Indeed, banal intimacies were regularly evoked in the small talk between Saimiri and Doktori as a means of ridiculing public officials. Saimiri and Doktori’s jokes, their comments to the dancers and to one another, were steeped in sexual innuendo; they overidentified with a culture of hypermasculinity that is ubiquitous in bureaucratic spaces. Gendered dynamics came through in the Stela files, for instance; cases of sexual harassment or solicitation of sexual favors for public services have indeed been a frequent target of Fiksi’s hidden cameras. In their interactions on the screen, Saimiri and Doktori overidentified with these forms of masculinity on display in the televised acts of corruption.

My attention to masculinity in representations of corruption at Fiksi resonates with several other accounts in this issue of Current Anthropology that emphasize different forms of gendered (typically male) socialities that mediate transactions deemed as corruption (see especially Osburg 2018; Schneider 2018). Often, these gendered subjectivities are rooted in localized forms of sociality and solidarity. In their interactions and body language, in their benign stupidity, Fiksi’s cohosts enact the everyday, banal intimacies between neighborhood buddies (çunat e lagjes). This is a figure of subject that had become a staple of street life in postsocialist Albania—namely, young men, often unemployed, who hang out on street corners or in neighborhood coffee shops, killing time together by engaging in rapid-fire exchanges of inside jokes about politics, about the everyday, and about nothing. Their small talk is infused with crass, sexually explicit, irreverent speech. Fiksi’s style of discourse mirrors official speech as well. Indeed, similar banal and vulgar statements are routinely exchanged among politicians in public venues such as the parliament.

In continuously replicating these forms of masculinity, Fiksi overidentifies both with figures of power and with those excluded from power. In so doing, the show generates a commentary on contemporary forms of power and of governmentality. Here the intimacy of talk among the cohosts intertwines with the “intimacy of tyranny” (Mbembe 2001:128) experienced in postcolonial and, in this case, postsocialist autocratic regimes. It is this intimacy and complicity with figures of power that makes this anti-corruption discourse effective while also trapping subjects in a closed loop of obligation and subjection.

Conclusion

In postsocialist and post-Ponzi Albania, corruption, as a discursive category, has become the ball kicked around by all political parties (Kajsiu 2016), creating an atmosphere akin to that of “total corruption” (Muir 2016) found in other postcrisis contexts. Fiksi’s cases confirm this atmosphere of total corruption by drawing upon witnesses who are also complicit in illicit transactions with public authorities. Through its particular technologies of representation and circulation, Fiksi provides a para-ethnography (Holmes and Marcus 2005) of the everyday experience of corruption. Unlike global technologies of corruption and transparency that present corruption in a bureaucratic form (e.g., the survey and statistical data), Fiksi thrives on the intimate relations between victims, intermediaries, and witnesses of corrupt transactions.

By detailing these transactions, the show captures and further constructs various publics engaged in the alleged corruption. Among others, here I discussed the figure of the sekserë, the entrepreneurial intermediaries of corruption, the public officials, and the victims of corruption. The latter are often described as ordinary people excluded from networks of power and unschooled in the business of bribing and favoritism who become unwilling participants in the illicit networks and transactions, often for the purpose of obtaining justice and inclusion. Fiksi’s viewers relate their own experiences with public officials to those of the victims of corruption featured in the show and thus come to imagine their experiences as part of a national public. At the same time, Fiksi’s ethically ambivalent practices also provide a justification for the complicity of these viewers/victims in illicit transactions.

Fiksi’s normalizing effect calls attention to the implications of its genres of representation. Its own complicity in the acts and forms of illicit transactions plays to the show’s strength as a whistle-blower and truth-teller; but it also constitutes its weakness, because it reproduces a muddled justice and ethics and normalizes coercive power. Fiksi thus provides a broader commentary on the state in postsocialist Albania that resonates well with other similar postdevelopment and postcolonial contexts in which local political institutions lack the power to enforce economic and political policies that best serve constituents (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). In these contexts, the use of vulgar aesthetics and cynical humor is inherently an ambivalent form of political critique in so far as it does not offer a way out of the vicious circle of complicity.