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| Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee, Summer 2015 |
The enclosed is a draft of a paper I have the pleasure to present at the 30th Retrospective Conference of Elaine Scarry's landmark work, The Body in Pain at University of Brighton. Following out some of the themes of my original critique of what I argue is Scarry's implicit dualism, (On the (im) materiality of Violence), I argue here that her analysis of the body in pain is distorted by the absence of any really probing account of the role that institutionalized violence plays in the formation of identity. Rooted as far back, at least, in Aristotle's re-inscription of mind/body dualism in de Anima and the social order it legitimates, Scarry's "body in pain" reiterates that dualism, and in so doing reinforces the very "spectacles of power" she'd no doubt see undermined. Perhaps more importantly, however, Scarry misses an opportunity to articulate the ways in which subjugation--even in its most brutal forms--can inform identity, and thus give voice to resistance.
I sincerely appreciate any and all comments, suggestions, criticism my fellows might have, and I am very grateful to the organizers of the conference at University of Brighton for giving me the opportunity to present my work.
Thanks,
Wendy Lynne Lee
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Mind/Body Dualism as the Algorithm of “Civilization”
In “On the (Im)Materiality of Violence” I argued that the dualistic impulse
Bibi Bakare-Yusef identifies in Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the experience of
pain is rooted in Western philosophy reaching back at least to Aristotle’s hylomorphic conception of the subject,
and that an understanding of the role that impulse plays in Scarry’s view sheds
valuable light on the strengths and limitations of The Body in Pain. For Aristotle, the hylomorphic “soul” (psyche)
acts as the principle of animation of
a living thing—not as a separable entity (de
Anima, hereafter DA 414a 26-8). “Hylomorphism…
comprehends ‘mind’ not as something external to ‘body,’ but as a defining
ontological and existential algorithm which differentiates species according to
the unique characteristics of their form (DA 412a 19-21, 412a 27-8, 412b 5-6,
412b 15-17). The trouble with hylomorphism,
at least for Aristotle, is that it fails to differentiate within species, or at least within the human species, in the manner
necessary to legitimating a hierarchical social order anchored in subjugation
according to race, sex, and class. It’s thus not surprising that he retreats to
dualism in order to posit intellect as the un-enmattered potential for the
activity of knowing (a pure becoming of the object known) available exclusively
to those whose leisure of mind is guaranteed through the laboring bodies of others.
While scholars debate the best way to interpret these passages, it seems clear
that for Aristotle the subject of the intellective “soul” is essentially dualist, reasserting the authority
not only of mind over body, but of all those identified with mind over those
identified with body in Aristotle’s psychic hierarchy.
Aiming to reserve knowing to a knower “unpolluted” by
embodied experience (DA 429a 10-13, 429a 21-8), Aristotle’s turn to dualism naturalizes
a social order within which race, sex and class determine social status for the
hierarchies of household and state, themselves analogues of his psychic
hierarchy—and the contortions it undertakes to exempt its privileged knower.
That aristocratic Greek men occupy the Zenith of this hierarchy isn’t
surprising; in the end, the ethnocentric and masculinist social order of the Politics triumphs over de Anima’s fleeting intimation of epistemic,
moral, and civic equality. Or perhaps closer to the truth: the need for slaves
(war booty or wives) to perform the labor that liberates the patrician class to
its philosophical pursuits wins out over the integrity of such pursuits themselves.
In any case, what in Aristotle is legitimation of a regime rooted in race, sex,
and class is for many to follow, Scarry included, a missed opportunity to theorize
a “subject” in whose identity these factors play a formative role. This is not
to say that Scarry fails to recognize that
institutions play key roles as causal agents in the somatic, perceptual,
cognitive, affective, and epistemic experience of slaves, torture victims, rape
victims, prisoners of war, refugees, and others. She clearly recognizes this, if
somewhat obliquely, when she observes of slaves that
The
slave still authorizes the movement of his body as he each day wakes up, walks
to the pyramid, puts his hand to the stone, and begins to lift and carry.
Perhaps he believes that the very beautiful artifact to which he contributes
his embodied labor implicitly includes him in its civilizing embrace, that he
is its partial author. Perhaps instead he perceives himself as excluded, but
chooses… to devote his lifetime to this aimless project rather than to the
shorter life’s project of rebellion. (The
Body in Pain (TBIP), p. 156-7).
Although Scarry situates her example in the Egypt of the pyramid
builders, it feels as if it could have hailed from anytime, anywhere. Indeed,
she reinforces this sentiment when she later remarks that “[s]lavery, whether
occurring in ancient Egypt or in the nineteenth century American South, was an
arrangement in which physical work was demanded of a population whose
membership were themselves cut off from the ownership, control, and enjoyment
of the products they produced” (TBIP, p. 170).
The trouble with this approach, however, is that while
it’s true that varieties of subjugation like slavery share similar practical characteristics
across time, these facts cannot speak to the specific ways in which the
institutions responsible for enslavement affect and actuate the identity of the
slave. Speculation about what slaves might believe, in what they might be
invested, what they fear isn’t the same thing as investigating how pyramid
building as an artifact of ancient Egyptian civilization, its cultural
practices, its structures of government, agriculture, arts, its military
conquests, its language, and its specific forms of institutionalized violence—the ways in which “the slave” instantiates
“the laboring body”—inform not merely the slave’s beliefs, but the experience
of the stone under his hands, the feel of his “lift and carry,” the attenuation
of his hope by the end of the day. Recognizing in ancient Egypt, nineteenth
century America, or 21st century Malaysia causal agents responsible
for the production of “the body in pain” qua slavery isn’t the same thing as
probing the specific conditions under which subjugation imbues identity—how the
“civilization” of such regimes is made manifest in the very ways in which the
subjugated experience and conceive themselves, their lives, and their labor.
The ways in which pyramid building might be inscribed on the Egyptian’s body
may resemble the scars of the slaver’s whip on the back of the nineteenth
century African’s or the bruises disfiguring the face of a 21st century
sex-trafficked child. But recognizing family resemblances among enslaved “bodies
in pain” is no substitute for interrogating how “civilization” comes to be inscribed
on the identities of those whose laboring bodies form the brick and mortar of
its achievements.
The Vocabulary of
Torture
In a fashion similar to her discussion of slavery, Scarry argues that the
language used in acts of torture “goes on to deny, to falsify, the reality of
the very thing it has objectified by a perceptual shift which converts the
vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the
regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power,” (TBIP, p.
27). Scarry recognizes, in other
words, that as a “spectacle of power,” violence functions to legitimate and
enforce the hegemonic institutions that deploy it, and that the words used to
“convert the vision of suffering” into that spectacle are crucial not only as manipulative
or misleading—but as weapons every bit as important to the interrogator’s
“achievement” as are the physical tools of his trade. She writes that it’s “precisely
because that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that
torture is being used” (TBIP, p. 27). And this is equally true of the language
through which confession, information, or capitulation is “achieved.” Not only,
however, does language facilitate and augment acts of torture, torture also
demolishes the use of language for its victims. When Scarry argues, for
example, that “[a] fifth dimension of physical pain is its ability to destroy
language,” and that among the achievements of torture is the damage it does to the
capacity for speech, (TBIP, p. 54), she implicitly acknowledges the extent to
which the formulation of words is embodied in the tongue, mouth, and vocal
chords, and that this ability is vital to the identity and integrity of the
tortured.
It’s thus that much more disappointing that Scarry’s
insight about the relationship between language and torture is obscured by her omission
of that relationship’s role in the larger context of institutionalized violence.
As Ludwig Wittgenstein might put it, the meaning of a word is not merely its
use, but its usefulness, in this
case, for maintaining the spectacle of power personified in the intimate relationship
between the torturer and the tortured. It’s the destruction of the latter’s
capacity to give voice to pain that the interrogator can count on, indeed by
design, to be among his first achievements. This isn’t because the subjugated
is deprived of words per se; it’s
because the right to speak is itself preemptively
precluded for any utterance other than that elicited by the torturer. What
such preemption shows is that the interrogator isn’t just a worker hired to do
a grisly job; indeed, he’s situated epistemically, kinesthetically, psychologically,
socially in that larger context as a candidate for a position elevated and
concealed by its title: “interrogator.” He’ll have a suitable disposition for
achieving the presumptive goals of torture, and he’ll likely be a male
beneficiary of the regime. Yet
without an analysis of that larger context, including how language comes to be
appropriated by the regime that empowers the torturer, the picture that
ultimately emerges is bound to omit precisely the factors that make the
institution of torture possible.
Scarry’s missed opportunity is thus threefold:
·
First, even an insightful description of the effects of the uses of violence—such as
silencing the subject—isn’t the same thing as an analysis of the institutions that incorporate violence as a
naturalized part of their claims to power. Power cannot come to be the “spectacle”
Scarry references save for the larger context within which it can create
lexicon of its enforcement.
·
Second, omitting to examine how such “spectacles”
come to be institutionalized itself exemplifies the dualist impulse Bakare-Yusef
identifies in Scarry’s view of suffering, particularly with respect to how that
impulse seduces us to believe that we can turn to “the body in pain” without
undertaking an investigation into subjugated subject’s identity as enslaved,
tortured, raped, imprisoned, evicted, etc.
·
Third, however otherwise insightful Scarry’s
discussion of language and torture, references to the “body in pain” as if
these could be made sense of in abeyance of that dualist impulse reinforces the
role language plays in subjugation .
Abstracting “the body in pain” as an object dissociable from the specific
contexts within which its subjects are likely already positioned as vulnerable
to subjugation reiterates a psychic hierarchy within which even language functions
to insure the segregation of laboring bodies and the regimes who subjugate them.
Hence, giving examples from Greece, Chile, the Philippines, or South
Vietnam—but treating “the body in pain” as if its experiential characteristics are
largely the same for each—functions not only to elide the many ways in which violence
is utilized to specific objectives, it effectively erases it as institutionalized, yielding a distorted
picture of a subject embodied in and by that violence, yet without moorings in
the very institutions responsible for it.
Other as points of reference or departure, the bodies
of Scarry’s ruminations seem to float free of any facts that might get in the
way of turning to the pain. Yet it’s precisely the historical, cultural,
political, and religious facts of these institutions that inform the processes through
which any subject comprehends and affects herself as a subject, that is, as a subject of experience. We call such
processes “subjectification.” The
subject whose identity is affected as an instrument for maintaining
institutions that rely on the threat of violence, we call the subjugated subject. Such subjects
experience pain not only in the body, but in expectation itself formed within regimes whose oppressive
“spectacle” pervades every aspect of experience, emotion and perception;
institutionalized violence is that violence which saturates every facet of a
subject’s epistemic situation—not only that which we identify as suffering. Put differently: did we take Aristotle’s
hylomorphic account of living things seriously
all the way up the psychic hierarchy, we’d see that human identity consists at least in crucial part in our
relationship to and within the institutions that affect or actuate us as subjects; so too as subjugated subjects.
The key difference is that in a society not only stratified on the basis of
race, sex, and class, but segregated into privileged minds and laboring bodies,
many institutions (if not all) must sustain themselves via whatever forms of repression
are necessary to preserve that status quo. That language is such a regime’s
primary weapon and the first casualty for the body in pain is hardly
surprising, though it seems symptomatic of Scarry’s dualist impulse to align
words with a still composed subject and inarticulate wailing with the body in
pain, as if minds speak but bodies wail.
The upshot is this: Mind/body
dualism functions as an institutionalized algorithm to naturalize authority,
affect the subjugation of bodies for the performance of labor, and justify
whatever means are necessary to maintain those institutions for their beneficiaries.
It facilitates the elision of the destructive effects of that subjugation, and it
contains admission of its bodily and psychic damage to specific instances of
violence, effacing the roles that race, sex, and class play in the larger context.
Mind/body dualism functions to institutionalize violence as both immediate spectacle
and enduring imprimatur of regimes that reserve even language—the crucible of
the knower—to themselves. To ignore these dynamics is to effectively
re-inscribe them by omission. To invoke the body in pain as if it can be
dissociated from the histories within which violence has become as ordinary as
a language that swaps words like “Muslim” for “Nigger,” “Democrat” for
“Commie,” or “migrant” for “alien” is to effectively muzzle its subject long
before pain becomes the warp and woof of her/his reality. Such bodies can
generate empathy—but they cannot foment
resistance. And that is what the regime counts on.
The Function of Erasure,
Elision, and Effacement
Scarry recognizes that erasure of the effects of institutionalized
violence is crucial to legitimating a social order whose beneficiaries, like its
casualties, are defined by race, sex, and class. Of torture, she argues for
example that “[t]he most radical act of distancing resides in [the torturer’s]
disclaiming of the other’s hurt. Within the strategies of power based on denial
there is… a hierarchy of achievement, successive intensifications based on
increasing distance from… the body” (TBIP, p. 57). By attributing to the torturer as achievement the capacity to
distance himself from the body of the tortured, however, Scarry not only
re-inscribes mind/body dualism to the purposes of the torturer, she describes—though unwittingly—one of the
ways in which the subject becomes the subjugated through the torturer’s “achievement.”
The subject is affected as subjugated
not only in the torture, but through the torturer’s disclaimer with respect to the
subject’s pain (as ancillary, for example, to acquiring information). The
subject is affected as subjugated, in other words, through the torturer’s
social position as empowered to inflict pain under specific (and further
empowering) conditions.
While the torturer, for example, is likely paid for his
services, the tortured subjugate can never in fact be recognized, much less
humanized, as a subject. The
achievement of the torturer is to distance himself from the body in pain; the subject never enters
this equation; he/she is simply a conduit for information (or the fiction of
information), a public iteration of repression understood by that public as
such. Put differently: the infliction of pain legitimated through the
institutionalization of violence can be applied only to bodies, and only to
particular bodies, and in that context torture forms a specific commission or service. The torturer’s
job is to actuate “the body in pain” and what this requires is ignoring the
fact that the wails emitted from the mouths of the tortured belong to a
subject, and thus constitute atrocity. Ignoring inconvenient facts is part of the
design not only of torture, but of terrorism, rape, and war, as it must be if
their commissioned agents are to ascend in the hierarchy of achievement. That
design comes to form what is expected not only by the subjugated, but by the
body politic. The social hierarchy is itself, after all, dependent upon eliding
the subject as subjugated in that
“subjugated” implies repressive action undertaken to enforce otherwise unjust convention, a human-made artifice. But
the goal of violence institutionalized
is to naturalize subjugation within
the very processes through which subjects comprehend themselves as, say, black,
or female, laborer, or refugee, terrorist or insurgent. From this perspective,
the torturer (like the terrorist, the sweatshop capitalist, the slaver, the
rapist, the war-monger) stands merely as a metaphor for an achievement of much
greater magnitude, namely, insuring that the subjugated conceive themselves not
as subjugated but simply as victims of particular events, horrific to be sure,
but not necessarily an indictment of civilization.
A perverse metaphor for Aristotle’s psychic hierarchy
imposed on the body politic, acts of torture, terrorism, rape, slavery, and war
signify “civilization” insofar, as Scarry puts it, “[e]very act of civilization
is an act of transcending the body in a way consonant with the body’s needs”
(TBIP, p. 57). No doubt, Scarry would find my formulation of “civilization” anathema
to any transcendence “consonant with the body’s needs.” But insofar as the
laboring body is a projection of the dualist algorithm, its only needs are to
sub-serve civilization’s transcendence—and these can surely be met more
effectively through torture, terrorism, rape, slavery, and war than through
art, music, philosophy and literature. Transcendence, in other words, is itself
a euphemism. It serves to elide the objectives of institutionalized violence;
it tamps down the possibility of revolt against an unstable regime by offering
cursory acknowledgement to the body as a locus of need. But it nonetheless
accords to acts of violence a legitimate and natural vehicle for transcending,
or better: walking over, the bodies of labor that form the stepping- stones of
that hierarchy.
“Torture,” writes Scarry, “is a condensation of the act
of “overcoming” the body present in benign forms of power” (TBIP. p. 57). Indeed,
but what Scarry fails to see is that the algorithm that informs her construal
of bodies, subjects, and power precludes the benign in favor of a regime whose
stratification of race, sex, and class into laboring bodies has less benevolent
objectives. She turns to the body in pain, but away from the “civilization”
through which the subject is affected,
a social order whose survival depends upon the elision of subjugation as
subjugation. “Elision” elicits two meanings in this context: first, and most
obvious, as the dissociation of the “body in pain” from the epistemic situation
of the experiencing subject from the point of view of transcendence, and second
as a metaphor for a subject preemptively silenced, a subjugate whose voice is
elided, “suppressed, struck out, left out of consideration,” by the terror
which inscribes her epistemic situation as, for example, enslaved, tortured, raped.
Turning to the “body in pain,” Scarry forecloses the side of affect; she leaves
out of consideration violence institutionalized as a strategy to sustain the regime,
legitimating its effacement as the cause of suffering, and thereby helping to
elide, in both senses, the subjugated
subject.
The Algorithm of the
Regime:
The “Body in Pain”
and the “Reader of the Body in Pain”
Scarry is not alone in what constitutes a kind of existential myopia. As
reader/listeners we too turn to the body in pain, and away from the violent
dynamics responsible not merely for suffering itself, but for the subject who suffers.
Perhaps we do so because, confronted with suffering our first reaction is
empathy or compassion. Perhaps we value opportunities to be modest heroes. Where
suffering is compounded by injustice, we’re indignant and incredulous. We
respond with an all-encompassing compassion; we’re outraged by the Islamic
State bombings in Paris; we demand a higher minimum wage; we condemn Malaysian
sex-traffickers. Still, insofar as we attend solely to “the body in pain,”
we’re as liable as any for silencing the subjugated subject—regardless how loudly
we may evince our incredulity. Indeed, we may even delude ourselves into
thinking that calling out the injustice of suffering counts as calling
attention to the institutions responsible for it. But discharging anger is in
no way the same thing as engaging in resistance, though the former all too often
passes for the latter, thereby effacing even more effectively the subjugation
of those whose bodies function both as laboring disposables and as
opportunities for privileged others to discharge empathy.
Perhaps, however, it’s an overly cynical reading of empathy
to cast it as something merely discharged. Empathy, evinced through the
ministrations of others, argues the reader/listener is what helps the
subjugated subject to regain her voice. The trouble is that it doesn’t; indeed,
precisely the reverse may be true. Insofar as we as privileged others undertake
no real risk in attending to the body in pain, insofar as our actions, even if voluble,
remain well behind the safe walls of any substantive challenge to the social
order, “discharge” is all that remains. Getting to be those who turn to the body
in pain reminds us that we’re good, that we’re capable of empathy, and that
we’re not them—either the tortured or the torturer. Theorizing the body in pain
helps to reinforce our exemption from whatever amalgam of race, sex, or class
that might otherwise threaten us with subjugation. In effect, we turn to the body in pain in order to turn away from the
subjugated subject and the possibility that we stand on the side of the
torturer’s civilization, legitimating subjugation not merely by turning
away, but by reinforcing the mind/body dualism that underwrites it.
The turn itself is structured to reassure the
reader/listener of The Body in Pain that
it will not be interpreted as resistance to the institutions culpable for it;
it’s myopia makes it safe. Its discharge of anger sans any substantive demand
for change reinforces the regime’s spectacle of power by omission. However
contrary to Scarry’s intention, The Body
in Pain invites just such a reading when she argues that pain is unlike
other states of consciousness because, unlike love of, fear of, or hatred of,
“physical pain has no referentiality.’” As Bakare-Yusef puts it, its nonreferentiality,
prevents
and inhibits the transformation of the felt experiences of pain, leaving it to
reside in the body, where the sufferer reverts back to a prelinguistic state of
incomprehensible wailing, inaudible whisper, inarticulate screeching, primal
whispering, which destroys language and all that is associated with language:
subjectivity, civilization, culture, meaning, and understanding (Bakare-Yusef,
1999, p. 314).
In other words, according to Scarry, pain de-subjectifies; it deconstructs the subjective integrity of the
subject by undermining the safety and self-possession of her body. Pain, for
Scarry, “resides in the body” like the horrific infection depicted in The Walking Dead; it compels the
“sufferer” to revert to a primal state, inarticulate and screaming, and in so
doing its nonreferentiality posits the reader/listener of “the body in pain” as
“empathetic” precisely because we recognize and accept pain’s nonreferentiality.
We’re neither required nor solicited to look further.
The trouble with this construal is that both the
subject who’s reduced to inarticulate wailing and the reader who empathetically
turns to her are in fact fictions supplied by the institutions in whose
interest it is to create occasions for deflating the tension and anguish that foment
resistance. On the side of the body in pain, that occasion consists either in
resignation, dissimulation, even death, or in the promise that should any turn
in its direction, it will be to the pain alone—that its nonreferentiality will
be honored, that empathy will fill the vacuum where language has been
abandoned. On the side of the reader/listener, it consists in getting to be the
one who extends concern—so long as the rules that govern turning to the pain
are strictly observed—that any further analysis of its responsible parties is
strictly omitted. In other words, the relationship of the de-subjectified
subject—the body in pain—and the empathetic reader are not merely contained by
the institutionalized violence of “civilization,” they are an essential part of
its algorithm, its legitimation and maintenance. Neither can be made sense of
outside the dualistic impulse that governs turning to “the body in pain,” yet
neither in fact exist or could exist outside the regime which deposits each in
their respective places as “the sufferer” and “the angel of mercy.” Both are therefore
subjugates.
It’s only, moreover, within the context of this
perverse fiction that we can make sense of the reversion of the subject to a prelinguistic
state: only that subject could be so
destroyed since only that subject would be
unprepared to experience that pain. If, in other words, the experience of
pain has no causal reference, no origin not preemptively consigned to the
merely incidental, the subject’s in no position to expect it. But this seems
absurd since, however cursory is the acknowledgement of the reader/listener,
it’s also because the causes are, for example, torture or slavery, that the
reader turns to the body in pain at all. It will do no good to object that my
critique of Scarry’s nonreferentiality downplays the experience of pain as a
blocking out of all but the pain itself—that such is the phenomenal character
of at least great pain. Pain is at least in part made great by being expected;
yet expectation precludes nonreferentiality. Indeed, terror—expecting a future infliction of pain—forms
a crucial feature of subjugation, insuring compliance not through pain itself,
but through the terrorizing anticipation of suffering. We can make no sense of
this anticipation save for the institutionalized violence that makes it real
for the subjugated subject.
Pain cannot, therefore, be nonreferential. It can be
overwhelming; it can crystallize the meaning of subjugation; it can render the
subject temporarily speechless. But insofar as terrorizing expectation is an
aspect of pain at least under the conditions Scarry discusses, pain always and
necessarily refers—even if the subject doesn’t know it, and even if the reader
is destined to ignore the object of that reference. A subject subjectified via
the terror intrinsic to institutionalized violence experiences pain as no less
painful, but also as no less subjectifying since its systemic effect in
undermining her bodily self-possession—its
capacity to affect subjugation—is itself intrinsic to her identity. The
experience of pain thus signifies the subject’s status both as a laboring instantiation of “body” and, however
epistemically opaque to her, as a subject capable of resistance if only to
particular experiences of pain, if only to herself, and even if as an act of
sheer survival.
“Civilization”
A final, perhaps maximally concrete, way of articulating the trouble with
The Body in Pain is that Scarry has
the relationship between particular experiences of subjugation and the regimes responsible
for them backwards. While she insists pain de-subjectifies the subject by
destroying the subject’s linguistic tether to “civilization, culture and
meaning,” thus reducing the capacity for resistance to inarticulate “whispers,”
she casts “civilization” as largely generic, eliding the constitutive role
played by violence in the institutions within which “civilization” itself
consists. To attribute the silencing of the subject to the experience of subjugation
miscasts the silencing and the subjugation as effects when they’re in fact
essential preconditions of the social order. This isn’t just because silence is
a constitutive characteristic of the
subjugated subject, it’s because the infliction of pain cannot be understood as
a threat to that constitution except under conditions where it’s unexpected; and it isn’t unexpected.
Torture doesn’t subjugate; it signifies subjugation. Torture doesn’t threaten to unravel
civilization; it instantiates it as the terror necessary to preserve its always
unstable spectacle of power. The terrorist, for example, is well-acquainted
with the protocols of water-boarding; the slave comprehends whipping as a regular
feature of life; the sex-trafficked child learns very quickly to associate
sexuality and brutality. The meanings of words like “expectation” or “silence” are,
as Wittgenstein might have it, in their uses; their acculturated meaning
inseparable from the institutions within which language functions to naturalize
power. Thus it cannot be the particular experience of pain that affects the
silence, but rather the expectation of its recurrence; silence is not an effect
of suffering, but rather its precondition. It’s not that the de-subjectified
subject is reduced to pre-linguistic whispers; it’s that the regime assigns
voice only to its beneficiaries. The best description of a civilization that
relies on institutionalized violence might, indeed, simply be “terror.”
In his 2013 review of The Body in Pain, Samuel Moyn offers one
way to conceive this form of terror. He argues that “between the nether pole of
torture and the high summit of creation, a crucial piece of terrain is missing
in Scarry’s thought: the place where the real politics of workaday
institutions—the very ones that both cause torture and can avert it—happen,” (https://www.thenation.com/article/torture-and-taboo-elaine-scarry/).
These “workaday” institutions turn out to be critical to understanding the
extent to which Scarry’s argument that the experience of pain (necessarily)
agitates against the processes of subjectification is undermined by her failure
to appreciate the role that even the most violent and oppressive of
institutions play in it. The issue here is not, however, merely that she misses
the possibility of conditions under which the experience of pain contributes to subjectification, but
that because these are the conditions of institutionalized violence, she misses
what’s essential to subjectification
in a world made and unmade by the beneficiaries of that violence, namely, the many
varieties of resistance through which the subject can reclaim themselves
against the relative safety of conformity to subjugation.
It’s hard to imagine an example of
either the material or the psychic space where such a reclamation might occur
than along the unstable interstices which characterize the relationship between
the terrorism of the Islamic State, calls in the United States and elsewhere to
return to methods like water-boarding to extract information from ISIS suspects,
and the current flight of Syrian refugees. But in light of our subversive reading
of Scarry’s “body in pain,” I
think we can say this much:
·
The acts of terrorist organizations like the
Islamic State are not departures from civilization, but realizations of it.
However much terrorism is cast as a reaction to Western values, culture or
consumption; however much ISIS represents itself as religious jihadism, its
carefully orchestrated brutality instantiates “civilization” as one of its most
unadorned “spectacles of power” to date. The Paris bombings illustrate the
“workaday” politics of an organization that could not have come into being
without the ideological and material infrastructure supplied by a militarized and
fully capitalized planet that depends at a minimum on war, torture, and the
subjugation of laboring bodies human and nonhuman. That this regime can trace
its roots to ancient efforts to justify a stratified social order based on
race, sex, and class only restates the claim that “the body in pain” is best
understood as a meme for the relationships upon which civilization is realized
as terror, or perhaps a metaphor for the sheer intransigence of a dualist
worldview instantiated not only in beheadings and bombings, but in sweat shops
and factory farms, drug cartels and the Syrian, Mexican, or Aboriginal
Australian flight from drought.
·
Calls to bring back, say, waterboarding as a
strategy to extract information from Islamic State terrorists is neither
surprising nor inconsistent with “civilization.” Just as terrorism instantiates
“civilization” as a challenge to the claims of the nation state to authority,
so too torture legitimates the utility of violence in the “good” nation, that
is, the regime that wages so-called war on terror. Republican presidential
candidate Donald Trump, for example, recently said that he
“would bring it [torture] back,” and that “waterboarding is peanuts compared to
what they’d do to us…” (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/trump-would-bring-back-waterboarding-216133#ixzz3svMpDPMi).
While there’s much to say here, what’s especially significant is that Trump has
been treated to considerable applause for an argument that’s plainly
retributive—not in keeping with at least our more romantic notions of “civilization.”
Consider too his speculation that Syrian migration might be a Trojan Horse for
Islamic jihadists. Although (or perhaps because) no reliable evidence supports
such claims, what allows him to make them and rewards him for doing so with
rising poll numbers, is that these are
the claims we expect to hear because
we identify the war on terrorism with what a civilized society is entitled if not
morally required to do. What’s remarkable about Trump is not that he’d
“bring back” a torture strategy outlawed by the Geneva Conventions; it’s not
that the evidence is abundantly clear that torture doesn’t work. It’s that the
claim passes for unremarkable in a country that advertises itself as the
epitome of Western civilization. The irony, of course, is that that may well be
true.
·
Lastly, were we to stick to Scarry’s view of how
pain desubjectifies the subject, we’d not be able to adequately or accurately
understand the actions—much less the lives—of, for example, the Syrian
refugees. Dehumanized in the mercenary rhetoric of privileged men like Donald
Trump, forced from their homes by not merely civil war but the creeping effects
of desertification, the plight of Syrian refugees—like nearly all
refugees—indicts “civilization” as the abject failure of power wielded as
capitalist excess, military incursion, religious unreason, and government
sponsored oppression. As we’re now beginning to experience via anthropogenic
climate change, violence institutionalized as multinational capitalism may foreshadow
the most damning evidence to date of the consequences of “civilization.”
Should
our focus remain squarely on the “bodies in pain” of the Syrian refugees, we’ll
not only fail to comprehend the larger forces at work in their migration, we’ll
also not be able to see how these forces that subjugate simultaneously subjectify.
But they do. From the young man or woman who becomes radicalized by Islamic
State recruiters to the family who waits the 22 months to be approved to move
to Indiana—only to be told they can’t settle there—subjugation creates the
subject of “civilization” as surely as its hierarchy of race, sex, and class
creates its buildings, its machinery, its weapons, and its institutions. That
such a subject is judged to be damaged can only be assessed from the point of
view of some more ideal, even romanticized, notion of civilization. But while
that may form the un-interrogated backdrop of Scarry’s “body in pain,” it does
not describe the world that, even in Aristotle’s flirtation with justice and
equality, bears little more than a family resemblance to our own. Hence we
cannot judge the radicalized jihadist to be “damaged,” at least not more so
than the sweatshop laborer or the sex-trafficked teenager. Each mirrors the
social order of the subjugated subject upon whose bodies are inscribed quite
literally the body politic in pain.
Each, however, are also potential sites of resistance.
The trouble is that what “resistance” can mean in this context is more than murky
since it can as readily take the form of the Jihadist’s explosive belt, the
laborer’s suicide from the factory roof, or the sex-trafficked girl’s retreat
into heroin. That is, insofar as institutionalized violence remains the
hallmark of “civilization,” insofar as it constitutes the primary ingredient in
what subjectifies us all, affecting our dispositions and dispossessing us of
the capacity for epistemic dispassion, we have no obviously stable ground upon
which to stake a claim for humanity, and against which we can decide to condemn
the jihadist, unionize the laborer, treat the child-addict, or resettle the
Syrian refugees. Crucial, nonetheless, is that insofar as we can get even to
this juncture, we can be sure of one thing: we are not reducible to bodies in
pain, and while the silence of conformity may form the conditions of our
workaday lives, we cannot be de-subjectified short of death.
We
have already said too much.
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