Is Torture A Juridical Question

When one reads through both media and scholarly accounts of torture, there is a common assumption that torture is a juridical question. The question is whether there as to be a reference to the law when analyzing the problem of torture; i.e., is the legal sphere the necessary reference point of inquiry?

In many ways, I think social theory has been hoodwinked by Walter Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence." Giorgio Agamben, who draws heavily on Benjamin's work, is no doubt correct when he outlines how the "state of exception" underlies the legal apparatus, as well as the movement in democratic societies towards increaseing the powers of executive branches, which can be understood as buttressing a "sovereign will."

But, the question remains as to how relevant law is to contemporary governmentalized states? In orther words, is there an assumption on the part of Agamben and others, since they rely heavily not only on Benjamin and Schmitt but German legal theory in general, that a site such as Abu-Ghraib can only be understood in terms of its relation to a state's legal apparatus (and its lacuna) that permit's it? Or is the "force of law" merely what Alfred Hitchcock called a "McGuffin" -- the "almost irrelevant plot device that just gets a story rolling."

Or should we take the lessons that Foucault was outlining towards the end of his life that attempted to understand power outside of juridical terms.

I am stating here that I do not think that torture and its produced sites can be understood as a juridical question.

A Question of Universality/Particularity

In many ways, I believe the question of torture deals with the contemporary crisis over "universality" and "particularity" that has been grappled by contemporary theorists (e.g., Laclau, Zizek, and Butler, in their book Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality) . In terms of hegemony, I think there is a synonomous dynamic at work between the ability of spaces of torture to be produced, recognized, and consented to by a general public (I think most people condone torture under certain circumstance; the question is why?), and what the cultural critic Mike Davis understands to be the prevailing theme in contemporary global urbanization:

"The problem that military planners, and some geopoliticians, are talking about is actually something quite different: that’s the emergence, in hundreds of both little and major nodes across the world, of essentially autonomous slums governed by ethnic militias, gangs, transnational crime, and so on. This is something the Pentagon is obviously very interested in, and concerned about, with Mogadishu as a kind of prototype example. The ongoing crisis of the Third World city is producing almost feudalized patterns of large slum neighborhoods that are effectively terrorist or criminal mini-states – rogue micro-sovereignties. That’s the view of the Pentagon and of Pentagon planners. They also seem quite alarmed by the fact that the peri-urban slums – the slums on the edges of cities – lack clear hierarchies. Even more difficult, from a planning perspective, there’s very little available data. The slums are kind of off the radar screen. They therefore become the equivalent of rain forest, or jungle: difficult to penetrate, impossible to control.

I think there are fairly smart Pentagon thinkers who don’t see this so much as a question of regions, or categories of nation-states, so much as holes, or enclaves within the system. One of the best things I ever read about this was actually William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light. Gibson proposes that, in a world where giant multinational capital is supreme, there are places that simply aren’t valuable to the world economy anymore – they don’t reproduce capital – and so those spaces are shunted aside. A completely globalized system, in Gibson's view, would leak space – it would have internal redundancies – and one of those spaces, in Virtual Light, is the Bay Bridge.

But, sure, this is a serious geopolitical and military problem: if you conduct basically a triage of the world's human population – where some people are exiled from the world economy, and some spaces no longer have roles – then you’re offering up ideal opportunities for other people to step in and organize those spaces to their own ends. This is a deeper and more profound situation than any putative conflicts of civilization. It is, in a way, a very unexpected end to the 20th century. Neither classical Marxism, nor any other variety of classical social theory or neoliberal economics, ever predicted that such a large fraction of humanity would live in cities and yet basically outside all the formal institutions of the world economy."

It is this "leak space," these materially identifiable autonomous "rogue micro-sovereignties" that operate under the "universal" radar that I believe may be a correlative dynamic in relation to the torture question. Of course, this is merely a theoretical speculation on my part, but I think is still something worth pursuing and needing to flesh out.

Torture and the Question of Sovereignty

In the coming months, I will be engaging in critical research that delineates the social conditions and relations which allow the contemporary dynamic of torture to take place, within the context of the "war on terror." Further, I am concerned with what sort of geographical imaginaries are produced from the images of torture, since I would argue that the negotiation with those images (e.g., the Abu-Ghraib photos) becomes a way to sanction torture as an effect of power.

My basic interest around the question of torture is whether the phenomenon should be understood as an act of sovereignty that produces a "state of exception" in which a person can be reduced to "bare life" (as Giorgio Agamben, in a revision of Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, has outlined in his work Homo Sacer and State of Exception), or whether torture should be primarily understood as a sanctioned activity within what Michel Foucault has identified as contemporary "governmentalized" biopolitical states.

The motivation behind this research stems from my skepticism of identifying "postmodern" power relations with acts of sovereignty. Hence, when reading various works that attempt to grapple with the question of torture, one sees a general acquiescence toward adopting Agamben's general thesis that torture takes place under the auspices of a sovereign power, within a space sanctioned by a sovereign (e.g., Guantanamo Bay, Abu-Ghraib, and new gulag archipelago discovered by reporters at the Washington Post), that ultimately allows a person to be violently acted upon or even killed without punishment or retribution. In fact, even though I have not yet read the article, the current issue of the New Left Review contains an article by Susan Willis that seeks "strategies—active and passive—for resisting reduction to ‘bare life'," and thus accepting the thesis of the ability to reduce a person to "bare life."

I should note that I find Agamben's work both admirable and haunting, and I think his theoretical analyses of contemporary power relations, history, social thresholds, etc. are indispensable. I should further note that I named this blog after one his books Means Without End, which I hope makes an impression about the amount of respect and appreciation I have towards his work.

But, when one begins to analyze torture, when one begins to scratch the surface on the dynamic of torture, it becomes clear that the dynamic is indeed a process--a carefully articulated process that comes with training and manuals, and is largely conducted through multiple conduits and personnel, and is extremely hard to trace back to some sort of sovereign act of power. When one looks at Guantanamo or Abu-Ghraib, who should be identified as the sovereign? When was the moment that the "state of exception" came about? Who or what is creating that "space of exception?" Indeed, why should it, or any other site of torture, be understood as a "space of exception?" What is exceptional about it?

In answering these questions, Agamben references the "state of emergency" caveat embedded in most contemporary legal systems, and the ability of a state to centralize power in the hands of a few individuals when a territory is threatened in such a state of emergency. In turn, these individuals (along with multifarious personnel acting as sovereigns, ranging from doctors in concentration camps to the military) are thus given the ability to make the decision of what constitutes as the exception (borrowing from Schmitt). There is no doubt that such legal measures are carried out (as evidenced in the extraordinary push to reconstitute powerful executive authority by the Bush Administration once the so-called "war on terror" was announced; an authority that has been met by a "resistance" that seems to be more curious about what this kind of power could mean if sanctioned, rather than actually preventing such a centralization from taking place), but there seems to me to be a sort of theoretical slight of hand taking place in the way the topic is being discussed; i.e., the "head of the king" is being left intact.

The dynamism behind the work of theorists like Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and their progeny is their insistence on power relations being understood as operative in ways much different than anachronistic accounts of sovereign power. According to Foucault, power can be better identified with various "technologies" (technologies of domination; technologies of the self; etc.). I have plenty of time discuss these technologies in the future, as well as my own thoughts on conceptions of power (which is, in fact, what my project is ultimately about)--I am merely trying to outline my project here.

Thus, when we are confronted with a situation such as (post)modern torture practices, I would argue that the question needs to be approached in such a vain that Foucault was beginning to articulate towards the end of his life. In other words, is torture a governmentalized process? How does torture fit into Deleuze's formulation (in his analysis of Foucualt's work) of a transition of society from a "society of discipline" to a "society of control?" How is the tortured victim identified as a subject by his violent inquisitors? Is he understood as an animal, or do the torturers assume that they are dealing with a "neoliberal subject?" What are the measures carried out when conducting torture, and to what end? What makes torture biopolitical? And so on. This is the project I tend to carry out, and will use this blog to work out the details (along with other commentary on current social affairs, and the building of a transitional social praxis away from "capitalism.")

Beginnings...

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146.