By Lukas Hoffman
This essay examines a public concern: How might Deepfake videos alter the way we think
about politics, given they can create a deceptively real illustration of a faked reality? Therefore,
I will first illustrate the helpful theorem of the King´s two Bodies, as described in Ernst
Kantorowicz´s analysis of medieval political theory. Thereafter, I will give insights into a
revolutionary group, that planned to overthrow German democracy using an actor. Here,
Deepfakes can be interpreted as the act of digitally cloning well-known politicians. This will
lead to the conclusion, where I will ask about different consequences emerging from this new
technology.
England, 16th Century – The medieval history of the concept
Edmund Plowden, a law apprentice under King Elizabeth in medieval England, writes reports about judgements at the king’s court. Those reports will become source material for Ernst Kantorowicz, who will publish The King’s two bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology in 1957. This work will be “a juridical study” (Antenhofer 2016, p. 7) and will mainly elaborate the theorem of the king having two bodies. Plowden’s reports include a case “concerning the Duchy of Lancaster, which the Lancastrian Kings had owned as a private property and not as property of the crown”. The problem was that “Edward VI […] had made, while not of age, a lease of certain lands of the Duchy” (Kantorowicz 2016, p. 7). This created a legal problem because the lawyers were unsure how to deal with the fact that on the one hand, the king was a king and therefore righteous. On the other hand, the king was a minor and therefore legally incapable of making such a deal. The jurists agreed that the King’s nonage would not render the lease invalid, as
“the King has in him two Bodies […], a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural […] is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age and to the Defects that happen to the natural Bodies […]. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy” (Plowden, cited in Kantorowicz 2016, p. 7).
Those two Bodies “form one unit indivisible, each being fully contained in the other”, whereby the political body has “superiority” (ibid. p. 9). The political body acts in the representative and political practices. It can be interpreted as a form of official authority. The natural body shall not be misunderstood “as the biological body”, as it represents the “uninterrupted line of individuals through which the body politic migrates in the hereditary progress” (Antenhofer 2016, p. 12), through which a feudal system is reproduced. So, the political body is permanent, while the natural body is replaceable by inheritance. Now, to understand why the concept of the political body is helpful in raising questions about the future, we will look at a recent example of a revolutionary group in Germany.
Germany, 2021/2022 – Current case study
Sven Birkmann, an accountancy lecturer in the banking sector, and three others from National Socialist and/or anti-Corona backgrounds founded a revolutionary group with the aim of overthrowing German democracy. On 3rd of November 2022 the Bundesgerichtshof (short:
BGA, Federal Court of Justice, Germany) prolonged the defendant´s pre-trial detention. This decision provides the jurisprudential source for this essay. To overcome the German state, they agreed on the following plan: First, they needed recognition of another sovereign state, where they decided on Russia. Their plan was to travel by boat to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, to be captured there by the Russian Coast Guards, and then to ask these soldiers to meet with Putin, who – as they hoped – would invite them to the Kremlin, where he would approve their plan (BGH 2022, p. 10). After Putin’s approval, they would begin to overthrow the German State in three steps.
The first step was called “silent night” or Blackout´” (BGH, p. 11). Here, the accused would provoke a power failure. This would hinder the functioning of the government and the media (ibid.). The second step involved the kidnapping of the Federal Minister of Health, which was
planned to happen during a talk show on live TV, so that the public would be aware of the kidnapping. In this step, the defendants accepted the possibility of using the weapons they would later purchase against the Minister’s bodyguards (ibid., p. 12f). Just before the third step,
which would have been an inaugural meeting to establish a new state on the basis of the Constitution of 1871, there is a short mid-step, which will be the focus of this essay.
This intermediate step was called “False Flag” (BGH, p. 14). Here, the groups’ plan was to have an actor impersonate the head of state or the German Chancellor during a live television broadcast (how the power would have been regained by this time remains unclear). This
impersonator would declare the validity of the Constitution of the German Empire of 1871. As the actor would look like a familiar, political figure (or body), the group hoped that the broadcast would convince the public of its authenticity (ibid., p. 14). In this way, and because
of Putin’s earlier gained approval, the state would have been successfully replaced.
Fortunately, the German authorities were able to arrest the group. But regardless of the end of this specific case, we will now take a short look at what Deepfakes are capable of to raise the questions about how such a plan might be modified using new technologies.
The Political Field, Future – Conclusive thoughts
Justus Thies, a professor from the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, has been working on a project that attempts to control digital faces of people in real time. He and his team used a source actor, to control the facial expression and the voice of a target actor, as the software had access to sufficient data for a long enough time to learn how the two faces behave. This, and even more advanced software make it possible to produce fake speeches for the political field that are generated in real time, that may be impossible to detect with the human eye.
Figure 1: Real-time Reenactment (Thies 2020), screenshot at 3:02
We, as people who will live in the digital future, might use this genuine incident and the emergence of such technologies, to raise questions using Katorowicz’s theorem of the king’s two bodies: What does it mean, if the political body can be stolen or kidnapped by digitally cloning? What would happen, if such a revolutionary group could successfully broadcast an AI generated deepfake video of the head of state, the visual representation of a political body, and convince some people of its authenticity and validity? Is a natural body still necessary to govern a state or is a digital copy of a political body, “consisting of Policy and Government” sufficient for the “Direction of the People”, as Kantorowicz (2017, p. 7) wrote?
Technologies like these are still being used. The War in Ukraine shows such examples: There was a Deepfake video of President Zelensky, “that falsely urged Ukrainian troops to surrender”, (Gaspar 2023) or a video of a French television host who falsely argued that French President Macron cancelled his visit to Ukraine due to a planned assassination by the Ukrainian Government (Maxwell 2024). So, societies still have problems dealing with fake news. Trust in political systems and politicians is low, and protests with increasingly radical demands on
the political system are becoming more frequent. The technology that makes it possible to copy a political body is now freely available for the public in these societies. First, people might completely lose trust in the media because their eyes won’t be able to tell the difference between an authentic video and a deepfake. Even if the state was to install an apparatus to search for and flag deepfake videos how could you be sure, that these were actual official state institutions? These videos would be shared on social media. But these are private companies, and states or international organizations like the EU currently don’t have the tools to ban the sharing of deepfakes or to regulate the distribution otherwise. Since any digital representation can be faked, the prestige of politicians can easily fall prey to such technologies. At the same time, trust in politicians and acceptance of the state are necessary for any democracy – or even for the revolutionary group, as they tried to win Putin´s approval. But this way of establishing and stabilizing a state is in danger of becoming obsolete. The question is whether there is an alternative way of generating trust in politicians, the system and the media. That will be the challenge for the 21st century. A challenge, that will be difficult to meet and that is fraught with radical dangers. The potential loss of established ways of trust might change the way we think about, act and participate in politics. This problem revolves around the basic idea of trust in
official representation, trust in the political body, and trust in the validity of what we can see. A shift in these fields will surely change our view on politics.
References
Antenhofer, Christina (2016). The concept of the body of the king in Kantorowicz´s The King´s two Bodies. In: Giovanni Battista Lanfranchi/Robert Rollinger (Eds.). The Body of the King. The staging of the body of the institutional leader from Antiquity to Middle Ages in East and West: proceedings of the meeting held in Padova, July 6th-9th, 2011. Padova, S.A.R.G.O.N. editrice elibreria, 1–23.
Federal Court of Justice, Germany, Bundesgerichtshof Deutschland, BGH. Decision of the 3rd Criminal Senate of the Federal Court of Justice Germany dated November 3, 2022. – AK 40/22 –. Available online at https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgibin/rechtsprechung/document.py?Gericht=bgh&Art=en&Datum=2022-113&nr=131847&pos=7&anz=16.
Gaspar, Judit (2023). Deepfakes: Navigating the Information Space in 2023 and Beyond. Belfer Center Newsletter, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. (Spring 2023). Available online at https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/deepfakesnavigating-information-space-2023-and-beyond (accessed 3/13/2024).
Kantorowicz, Ernst (2016). The King’s two bodies. A study in medieval political theology. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Maxwell, Emerald (2024). FRANCE 24 journalist impersonated in new deepfake video. French 24 of 2/15/2024. Available online at https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-orfake/20240215-france-24-journalist-impersonated-in-new-deepfake-video (accessed 3/13/2024).
Thies, Justus (2020). Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUjn6SrNbSo (accessed 5/2/2024).
