Torture: Three Bodies and the Mythical Digit
In his Thesis for a Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin wrote: “there are two ways to treat fascism: the one, as an exception to the rule of progress, an inexplicable “regression”, a parenthesis in the evolution of humanity. The second, as the most recent and most violent expression of “a permanent state of emergency”, that is the history of class oppression”1. For reasons inherent to the capitalist political economy, white hegemony and their ideological mystification, the torture exposé about the Baghdad prison of Abu Ghraib has been – in its being but mere scandal- a guarantee of the first way. Torture committed by American occupation forces has been consistently talked about as an anachronism, a medieval living-dead, an un-modern embarrassment.
Besides being a gross whitewash over one of the most widely exercised techniques of modern state power, this discourse reinforces a vital node of the bourgeois dialectic. Amidst the temporal dust of condemnation and disbelief, a truth-effect is silently enforced: torture aims at information, or, to use the words of General Taguba, “actionable intelligence”2. It is thus an irregular, immoral or exotically brutal method for obtaining not just something concrete and universally recognizable, but the mythical/ digital telos of civilized society, the sublime object of late bourgeois ideology, the very doxa of capitalism; what these failed soldiers were after is the undeniable reality of all life, value and meaning: 0-1.
Thus, the Abu Ghraib debate painlessly degenerates into the old means-ends dilemma, leaving the core of our civility, our humanity, and above all our moral economy intact. And yet hundreds of state-power apologists since St Augustine openly admit that information obtained through torture is wildly unreliable. So why has this method been so widely employed and experimented upon in the last fifty odd years? As a relic of sovereign power in an age of discipline? As a sadistic perversion of some uniformed officers? Or as the irrational kernel of the rational, the mythological engine of a power taking pride in its reason? As Louis Althusser has claimed, “we have to understand that the dominant ideology is indeed the ideology of the ruling class, and that it functions not only so that this class dominates the exploited class, but also so that it can itself be constituted as the ruling class, forcing itself to accept as real and legitimate its lived relationship with the world”3. Keeping this in mind, it can be reasonably claimed that in fact torture has three interlaying planes of consistency: three bodies on which its power is constituted and exercised.
a) On the body of social reproduction, torture functions as a ritual of secrecy. This is achieved by constantly involving the civilian population as participant in the supposed restoration of truth and justice. In his work Divine Violence, Frank Graziano produces some truly valuable insights into this mechanism. Writing on the Argentine Junta, he claims that the rumour of torture creates an immense tension in social relations, suspending them in a plane of policed unresolved silence4. State violence as an abstracted spectacle “is ever present in its absence, vague but insistent, never completed nor resolved, an endless ephemeral, indefinable, uncertain torture…the precise nature of that secret was always suggested but never revealed: its enactment as a secret assured the abstract spectacle’s efficacy”5. Every repressive regime depends on the destruction of public bonds, on the experience of community loss, on the sensation of being in danger even amongst neighbours, family, comrades, “on an implied condemnation to solipsism”6. As meaning is necessarily a collective experience, now its agents have no other choice but to rely on symbolic acts that destroy its very means of production. Acts which “construct the milieu in which an elite carries out the dirty sacred task, in which atrocity is not merely possible, but also essential and meaningful”7. Thus social actors begin “to retreat, to guard their silence, to modify their behaviour, to recode their perceptions and at the same time, without intention and perhaps against their will, to function solely by virtue of their presence in the panoptic system as agents causing the same reaction in others”8. All social relations are reduced to this common experience of a secret-producing ritual, a desiring-production of doubt, silence and mistrust, a perverse investment by and reproduction of a panoptic anti-production apparatus which forges the citizen into the audience-guarantor of his or her own destruction.
b) On the body of revolutionary groups, torture functions as to transform a collective from a subject-group into a subjugated-group. The escalation of state violence with the introduction of torture has been shown to force open-ended organizations and movements characterized by an exceptional degree of social engagement and creativity into closed, secretive, ideologically entrenched cells relying not on social ties but on the force of arms. The repression apparatus puts in place “anti-production, that is, signifiers which plug and prohibit the emergence of all subjective expressions of the group”9.The scope is not to terrorize the group, but to lead it into getting caught up in its own representations of its own organization: to leave it no other means of expression than militarization; “group subjectivity [will then] have no other means to express itself except in a phantasmatization which confines it to the sphere of the imaginary”10. Thus, seeking “not an escape point from reality, but…a social reality which will allow it to escape a traumatic desire”11, the revolutionary group initiates an intricate process of fetishising its organizational structures which soon acquire an autonomous value, a life of their own. As a result, social creativity gives way to an ideological ritual of survival, and the subject-group is subjugated by the desire to retain its symbolic consistency-as-Real despite the shifting conditions of concrete social reality.
c) On the body of the individual victim, torture functions as to impair his or her affective abilities. In CIA’s 1963 KUBARK manual on counterintelligence interrogation we read: “all coercive techniques are designed to induce regression…the result of external pressures of sufficient intensity is the loss of those defences most recently acquired by civilized man….the circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring, and of being plunged into the strange…once this disruption is achieved, the subject’s resistance is seriously impaired. He experiences a kind of psychological shock, which may only last briefly, but during which he is far…likelier to comply…Frequently the subject will experience a feeling of guilt. If the “questioner” can intensify these guilt feelings, it will increase the subject’s anxiety and his urge to cooperate as a means to escape”12. The destruction of civilization within the victim as prescribed above is according to Graziano achieved by cultivating a sense of profound alienation brought about by “converting the physical place and its objects into an arsenal implementing the prisoner’s destruction”13; “made to participate in the annihilation of the prisoners, made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves and with them the fact of civilization are annihilated…civilization is brought to the prisoner and in his presence annihilated in the very process by which it is being made to annihilate him”14. This disappearance of objects of civilization in turn objectifies the disappearance of the social world, and enforces an unprecedented “conceptual obliteration of social reality beyond the ritual context”15. In what Elaine Scarry called a cyclical economy of embodiment and disembodiment16, torture constitutes a ritual that denies the victim any reality beyond itself, any consciousness beyond pain.
The aim of this affective amputation is to leave the victim no course of action other than unconditional submission to the totalizing chain of repressive command. But rather than being a single moment, sensationalized in popular literature under the term confession, this is a gradual, contradictory and often unresolved process of subjectivation. Through generating an “overwhelmingly painful confusion in which the prisoners themselves would entertain the possibility of their own guilt”17, torture confines the victims’ desiring-production to a quest for the optimal position from which they can “invest with passion the system which represses them”18. A passion for truth, for as Foucault claimed, torture is always the torture of truth: “rather than a means of interrogation, torture is the ritual by which a reorganized truth is instituted and the power to defend that truth generated”19. A mythological construction, a theatre of identity, a terrible mnemotechnique, the body of the victim becomes an enchanted surface of inscription, a coding/ decoding flesh machine which is not limited to being coded by truth regimes or to codifying the social with these truth regimes, but pertains to the fundamental false consciousness that it is itself the producer of truth. This belief is what makes the process of confession much more similar to a psychoanalytic séance than to the Holy Inquisition, and what makes medical involvement in torture indispensable.
The complicity of medical doctors in torture is well documented. Only recently with regards to the Abu Ghraib case, M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks remark: “not only did caregivers pass health information to military intelligence personnel; physicians assisted in the design of interrogation strategies including sleep deprivation and other coercive methods tailored to detainees’ medical conditions. Medical personnel also coaches interrogators on questioning techniques”20. And if the role of medicine in these brutal acts has been systematically downplayed as some form of mere complicity (clearly distinct from the Megele atrocities of the Nazis), this is because modern bourgeois society insistently refuses to recognize the “deeply rooted convergence between the requirements of political ideology and those of medical technology”21.
In contrast to Graziano, however, it must be argued that this destruction is not unilateral or total, but a process strategically unresolved, an unfulfilled prophesy which always nears yet always escapes its logical conclusion through the employment of medicine and its ritual practitioner. The intervention of the doctor within the space of death goes beyond ensuring the viability of the victim during another course of the torture machine. It introduces a deus ex machina effect, a magical reappearance of purity and civilization within an environment where every trace of human culture has been liquidated. To paraphrase Michael Taussig22, by bringing forth distinct historical modes of memory production and reproduction, the purpose of medicine is to rework and if possible to undo the history of civilization with the use of its memory. Memory, according to the tortured Argentinean publisher Jacobo Timmerman
“is the chief enemy of the solitary tortured man – nothing is more dangerous at such moments…I refused to remember anything that bore on life-experience…at times, something in the mechanism would fail, and I had to devote several hours to reconstructing it: some lingering physical pain following an interrogation, hunger, the need for a human voice, for contact, for a memory. I always managed to reconstruct the mechanism of withdrawal and thus be able to avoid lapsing into that other mechanism of tortured solitary prisoners which leads them to establish a bond with their jailer or torturers”23.
The doctor mobilizes a profound but tacit knowledge of society’s collective representations to craft the appropriate myth that will rebuild the shattered experience of the victim into a sheltering architecture of significance, a spectacle of what has already been denied to the victim; life. This objectified Weltanschauung is not merely an assemblage of images, but a social relationship mediated by images24. A social relationship which aims to re-establish the codes and modes of emotional organization inherited from the family: shame, guilt, and the hope to rescue desire by desiring a place in the apparatus of order. We thus have a collapse of the symbolic, of the very background, the foundation against which human intersubjective communication takes place, followed by a process of transference where the doctor forges the delusional as a ground or guarantee for the symbolic. As Guy Debord said, in a truly reverted world, the real is a moment of the false25.
Within this grotesque retournament, both the tortured, the revolutionary collective and society as a whole are able to find their proper place in the human grinding machine26, in the moral debt/ doubt economy, and exclaim like A. Weissberg, German communist victim of the Stalinist Great Terror:
“I went over the events of the last ten years in my mind. I considered everyone with whom I had been in personal contact, or with whom I had corresponded. And in the end I found nothing at all which could reasonably offer grounds for suspicion…Suddenly a long-forgotten incident which had taken place in 1933 came to my mind and what calmness I had left was utterly destroyed. My god, I thought, that must be it!”27.
That must be it, that’s what it has always been: this is the only acceptable articulation in any repressive truth regime28.
“That must be it, that’s what it has always been”: this is the only acceptable enouncement within all and every repressive regime of truth. The secret of the form, as Slavoj Zizek29 insists, is far more significant than the secret hiding behind it.
For the essence of torture induced truth is not to be found in the hidden knowledge confessed, in some latent withheld content, but in the work which gives this truth its particular, secret form – the repressed-form: “that’s what it really was all the time, though I myself could not remember it”. This is an anti-productive desiring machine, which sets in motion a truly pious return to debt. For guilty conscience, this act of always-returning-to-debt, to that which persists, is the metaphysical nucleus of every repressive regime, as the false-consciousness of its very self. This debt-guilt (Schulden-Sculd) is founded on the desire to discover again and again something that despite all your arduous efforts remains as lack: the accursed share, the irrepressible remain, the general equivalent. Torture is but the basest, bloodiest, most savage function of this mechanism of inscribing debt on the three bodies, thus verifying in a most frightening manner Nietzsche’s ominous aphorism:
«Perhaps there is nothing more terrible, more upsetting in the prehistory of man than his mnemotechnique…when man decided to create a memory for himself, he always did so by recourse of torture, maim and bloody sacrifice»
This mnemotechnique is a machine both dyspeptic and bulimic. On the one hand, the tortures of truth suspending within the three bodies the active work of forgetfulness, the positive work of inhibition described so well by Nietzsche as a mechanism allowing humans to produce their present: «the man whose inhibitory mechanism has been damaged and can no longer function can be compared (and not only compared) with the dyspeptic – he cannot finish anything». He or she can only return, internalise, recycle, what he or she has already vomited. This is the bulimic aspect of this desiring machine. Like a cat that eats what it has just aborted from its sick entrails, the three bodies are urged to invent a new sense of the physical and psychological pain which transverse them, as the coordinate of an internal process which externalises and reifies its own violence. Thus, the three bodies are set to experience the cause of their suffering as imbedded in a piece of guilt, in a repressed morsel of the past. They no longer seek to understand what is happening to them as a synthesis of antagonistic relations, but rather abandon their experience to an internal point, a felt sign. This point of the Real, or rather on this process of signifying reality, is the target of torture. Torture aims not to detach information, the vital 0-1, for its victim, from the revolutionary collective, or form society itself, but rather to inscribe the mythical digit, the sign of guilt on these three bodies. Deadly mnemotechnique that mobilises all the resentful and suffocating closedness of christian confession mechanisms and all the metaphysical shine of modern technocracy, torture thus aims to encode the social, the revolutionary and the suffering body under a regime of information – to make it scream thrice in guilty relief: Yes that is all I am, a series of digits!
References
1. Michael Löwy (2001) Walter Benjamin: Avertissement d’ Incendie, Une Lecture de Thèses “Sur le Concept d’ Histoire”, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, thèse viii, pp. 106-107.
2. Major General Antonio M. Taguba (2004) Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade, in Mark Danner (2004) Torture and Truth; America Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, New York Review Books, New York pp. 279-329.
3. Louis Althusser (1965), Pour Marx, Ellinika Grammata, Athens, p. 56.
4. For a similar treatment of silence in the context of Guatemala see Linda Green (1994) Fear as a Way of Life, Cultural Anthropology 9 (2): 227-256 esp. pp. 239-241.
5. Frank Graziano (1992) Divine Violence; Spectacle, Psychosexuality, & Radical Christianity in the Argentine “Dirty War”, Westview Press, Boulder, pp. 73, 76.
6. Frank Graziano, ibid, p. 82.
7. Frank Graziano, ibid, p. 74.
8. Frank Graziano, ibid, p. 84.
9. Gary Genosko (2002) Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, Continuum, London, p.72.
10. Félix Guattari (1972) Psychanalyse et Transversalité, François Maspero, Paris, pp. 160-161
11. Slavoj Zizek (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London, p. 43.
12. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 122, Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past, http://www.gwu.edu/-nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/index.htm. also in Mark Danner 2004) Torture and Truth; America Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, New York Review Books, New York pp.
13. Frank Graziano, ibid, p. 87.
14. Frank Graziano, ibid, p. 87.
15. Frank Graziano, ibid, p. 87.
16. Elaine Scarry (1985) The Body in Pain; the Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, New York.
17. Frank Graziano, ibid, p. 97.
18. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1972) The Anti-Oedipus, Rappas, Athens, p. 101.
19. Frank Graziano, ibid, p. 102.
20. M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks, When Doctors Go to War, New England Journal of Medicine 352.1, Jan. 6, 2005.
21. Michel Foucault (1963) The Birth of the Clinic, Routledge, p. 45.
22. Michael Taussig (1984) History as Sorcery, Representations 7:87-109..
23. Jacobo Timmerman (1981) Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, Wisconsin Press, p. 37.
24. Guy Debord (1968) The Society of the Spectacle, Diethnis Bibliothiki, Athens, p. 2.
25. Guy Debord, ibid, p.1.
26. Eduardo Galeano (1981) The Open Veins of Latin America, Vol. 2, Theoria, Athens.
27. A. Weissberg Conspiracy of Silence, Hamilton, London, p.166
28. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1972) The Anti-Oedipus, Rappas, Athens
29. Slavoj Zizek (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London.
