Objectives:

• Here we continue exploring the conventions of cultural analysis composition by closely reading strong examples of the genre. This lesson is organized around another inventional topoi ("events") and use a subject timely for the moment it was taught; practitioners will be providing us suggestions for teaching other "events" next week.

 

Cultures of Torture

 

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Abu Ghraib & American Culture

 

Zizek

 

 

Genre: Writing an Event

 

Thesis: What we get when we see the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners is precisely a direct insight into "American values," into the core of an obscene enjoyment that sustains the American way of life.

 

 

 

Two Kinds of Torture: This theatricality leads us to the crux of the matter: To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture - say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard. Far too often we are treated to images of soldiers and students forced to assume humiliating poses, perform debasing gestures and suffer sadistic punishments.

 

Homo Sacer: the prisoners are now what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, those who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, their lives no longer count. If the Guantanamo prisoners are located in the space "between the two deaths" - legally dead (deprived of a determinate legal status) while biologically still alive-then the U.S. authorities that treat them this way are in an in-between legal status that forms the counterpart of homo sacer. They act as a legal power, but their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law - they operate in an empty space that is nonetheless within the domain of the law. Hence, the recent disclosures about Abu Ghraib display the consequences of locating prisoners in this place "between the two deaths."

 

 

The government seems to have felt that prisoners between deaths were not considered human anymore. This made it easier to turn the cheek and ignore their screams of terror or pain. “One does not see what one chooses not to see” seems to be a favorite of the higher ups in this country. What would be bad is if someone else saw what was going on and worse had a camera to record the events. Then the U.S. government would be screwed, no one would believe they were virtuous anymore. And if people believe you are a cold hearted murderer, it is hard to make them think otherwise.

 

I thought we'd read the Zizek piece for three reasons:

• It's about an "event" and about the same event as the Sontag piece, so we might compare/contrast the two to discuss how one goes about "writing events."
• It uses a style similar to the one we encountered in the Davis piece last week. Davis is indebted to the dialectical style developed in the political theory of Hegel and Marx: thus, as we discussed last week, many of Davis' arguments are based on "flipping" or "inverting" the surface or what might be taken for granted (so, for instance, the celebratory language used to describe LA is only a triumphal gloss laid over the brutalization of its inner-city neighborhoods and the stark divisions of class and race represented in its built environment, etc.). Zizek writes out of that tradition and also that of the psychological theory of Freud and Lacan (as he mentions) that is also indebted to dialectic. Hence, in the piece we learn that the Iraqui propaganda minister (who is always lying) was actually telling the truth about Americans when he stated they can't even control themselves and that the torture in Abu Grahib was not an exception to "the American way" but its consistent "underside," that Rumsfeld thinks he has identified all angles on about "known" and "unknowns" in Iraq and their corresponding dangers but has in fact missed the most important category -the "unknown knowns" and so on. This is a central move in Zizek's corpus of writing: he often speaks of the "perverse core" or "obscene underside" of a variety of phenomena.
• It's a really short piece - only 11 paragraphs long and two of those 'graphs are only a single sentence - and thus is close in length to the kind of piece you might writing. It also has a very interesting (and I would say, accessible) structure that might be itself instructive.

 

I

Let's begin with what we might mark as the "introduction" to the piece, the first two paragraphs. The second paragraph is when we really get into the topic under review. However, if Zizek had begun by stating Bush's response to the AG scandal, you might think "I've already heard this before" and get bored. Instead he begins with a brief argument starting with a rhetorical question:

• Does anyone still remember the unfortunate Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf?" and makes the argument that the Iraqui information minister, known precisely for denying the obvious, was actually correct in stating that the Americans "cannot even control themselves"

 

II

The next three paragraphs all lead us closer and closer to the hear to the matter. Notice that they all begin with "condensing" transitions:

• However, a number of disturbing features complicate this simple picture...
• But the main complication is...
• This theatricality leads us to the crux of the matter...

You get a very clear picture that Zizek is moving you very carefully through an argument.

 

 

III

Zizek makes two pretty clear arguments in this piece. One is major and one minor,

One is pretty uniquely his own (though Sontag will make a kind of similar statement) and one is borrowed from another theorist...

 

The first is that the goings-on at AG are not an exception to American values but the "perverse underside" of these values. He makes this argument with reference to two items: American pop media culture and American "hazing rituals."

 

• The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a kind of tableau vivant, which brings to mind American performance art, “theatre of cruelty,” the photos of Mapplethorpe or the unnerving scenes in David Lynch’s films.

• To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture—say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard.

 

 

IV

• These two, taken together, prove for Zizek that The torture at Abu Ghraib was thus not simply a case of American arrogance toward a Third World people. In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture’s obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom.

 

• If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns, that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns”—the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.

 

FUN FACT

 

 

In a vast departure from their usual work, Zizek wrote the ad copy for the 2003 edition of Abercrombie & Fitch's notorious "Back to School" catalog

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Regarding the Torture of Others

 

 

Genre: Writing an Event

 

Thesis: For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib.

 

 

I

Importance of photography to our documentation of the present & past:

 

• For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib.
• The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word torture. The prisoners had possibly been the objects of abuse, eventually of humiliation -- that was the most to be admitted. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.
• To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, unfair. A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., not by everybody) -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.

 

II

(Pop) American culture and AG

 

• Photographs vs. the events they depict: So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to suspects in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken - with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives.

 

• Continuity and change in regards to photographs of torture and "technologies of * capture"-our means of "capturing time" and events: The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies -- taken by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers -- recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities -- and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.

 

• The confluence of pornography and violence, the way or pop cultural practices can easily (?) lend themselves to the worst kind of brutality: But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet - and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.

III

Everything bad is bad for you:

 

• Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more -- contrary to what President Bush is telling the world -- part of the true nature and heart of America. It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys -- can the video game Interrogating the Terrorists really be far behind? -- and on to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's 1993 film, Dazed and Confused -- to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun.

 

IV

 

At the same time, however, Sontag will also insist that these incidents are evidence of not only broad pop cultural practices but a very specific political/military policy:

 

• The notion that apologies or professions of disgust by the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient response is an insult to one's historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war -- for the war on terror is nothing less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless incarcerations. Those held in the extralegal American penal empire are detainees; prisoners, a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized countries. This endless global war on terrorism -- into which both the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by Pentagon decree -- inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.

 

V

 

Of course, Sontag also wants to make a point about the lack of availability of these pictures as well and how we should act in response to present and future attempts to restrict dissemination of the photos either because they are "possible evidence" for future court cases or because they will endanger soldiers overseas:

 

• But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq -- to identify outrage over the photographs with a campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an implicit criticism of the war to show on television photographs of American soldiers who have been killed in the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of America.

 

• Conclusion: After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more so than any of the people who got us into this rotten war seem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.

 

FUN FACT

 

 

Sontag was in a 10 year+ romantic relationship with famous photographer Annie Leibovitz (whose photos are on exhibit this month at the Detroit Institute of Art) and caused a lot of controversy when she made the comment "The white race is the cancer of human history."