Representing “torture,” acting with deliberate cruelty

Pain is not always regarded as insufferable in modern Euro-American societies. In warfare, sport, scientific experimentation, and the death penalty—as well as in the domain of sexual pleasure—inflicting physical suffering is actively practiced and also legally condoned.

17. “Reformative theory presented punishment to offenders as being ‘in their best interests’ while utilitarian theory cast it as an impartial act of social ne­cessity. In rejecting retributive theory, the reformers sought, in effect, to take the anger out of punishment. As it was legitimized to the prisoner, punishment was no longer to be, in Bentham’s words, ‘an act of wrath or vengeance’, but an act of cal­culation, disciplined by considerations of die social good and the offenders’ needs” (M. Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, Penguin Books, 1989, p. 75). This account fails to note, however, that vindictiveness can inhabit calculated anger.

18. Jerrold Tannenbaum demonstrates how difficult it is to define cruelty to animals in the law. However, he identifies a number of general criteria often used to determine whether “unnecessary” or “unjustifiable” pain has been in­flicted in the case at hand: (1) The severity and duration of pain, (2) perceived legitimacy (by “society as a whole”) of the particular activity involving animals, (3) avoidability of the pain given the activity or aim, (4) motivation of the defen­debate. When transitive pain is described as “cruel and inhuman” it is of­ten referred to as torture. And torture itself is condemned by public opin­ion and prohibited by international law.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the many liberal-democratic governments^{[78] [79] that have employed torture have attempted to do so in se­cret.}

Needless to say, other governments in the region (for example, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran) have also condoned torture, and unlike Israel, which tortures only non-citizens, they have used it freely against their own citizens. But the remarkable feature of the Israeli case is the scrupulous con­cern of a liberal-democratic state with calibrating the amount of pain that is legally allowable. There is evidently a concern that too much pain should not be applied. (The thought “too much” relates here not to subjective experi­ence, the unbearability of pain, but to objective means—to what is strictly necessary to secure the desired ends.) It is assumed that “moderate physical and psychological pressure” is at once necessary and sufficient to secure con­fession. Beyond that quantity, pressure is held to be excessive (gratuitous), and therefore presumably becomes “torture.”^[81] Other states in the Middle East are rarely so punctilious. Or so modern in their reasoning.

The use of torture by liberal-democratic states is part of their attempt to control populations of noncitizens. In such cases torture cannot be at­tributed to “primitive urges”—as Scott suggested. Nor to governmental techniques for disciplining citizens, as Rejali has argued. It is to be under­stood as a means used strategically for the maintenance of the nation-states interests.

The category of torture is no longer limited to applications of physi­cal pain: it now includes psychological coercion in which disorientation, isolation, and brainwashing are employed. Indeed “torture” in our day functions not only to denote behavior actually prohibited by law, but also desired to be so prohibited in accordance with changing concepts of “in­humane” treatment (for example, the public execution or flogging of crim­inals, and child abuse, as well as animal experiments, factory forming, and fox hunting).

This wider category of torture or cruelty could in theory be applied to the anguish and mental suffering experienced by people in societies obliged to give up their beliefs and act “humanly” (in the sense understood by Euro-Americans). But by a curious paradox it is a secular relativism that prevents such an application of the category. For that anguish is seen as the consequence of a passionate investment in the truth of beliefs that guide behavior. The modern skeptical posture, in contrast, regards such passion­ate conviction to be “uncivilized”—a perpetual source of danger to others and of pain to oneself. Beliefs should either have no direct connection to the way one lives, or be held so lightly that they can easily be changed. Otherwise secularism as a political arrangement cannot work very well.

One might be inclined to think that at least in humanizing societies more sorts of inflicted pain come to be considered morally unacceptable with the passage of time. In some cases, however, pain-producing behavior that was once shocking no longer shocks. Or if it does, then not in the way it did in the past. Putting large numbers of people in prison for more and more kinds of offense is one example. Inflicting new forms of suffering in battle is another.

Scarry has claimed that war is “the most obvious analogue to tor- ture.”^[82] However that may be, it is significant that the general concept of “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment” is not applied to the normal conduct of war—although modern, technological warfare in­volves forms of suffering, in number and in kind, that are without prece­dent.

The military historian John Keegan wrote of the new practices of “deliberate cruelty” over two decades ago when he described some of the weaponry employed in twentieth-century warfare: “Weapons have never been kind to human flesh, but the directing principle behind their design has usually not been that of maximizing the pain and damage they can cause. Before the invention of explosives, the limits of muscle power in it­self constrained their hurtfulness; but even for some time thereafter moral inhibitions, fuelled by a sense of the unfairness of adding mechanical and chemical increments to man’s power to hurt his brother, served to restrain deliberate barbarities of design. Some of these inhibitions—against the use of poison gas and.explosive bullets—were codified and given international force by the Hague Convention of 1899; but the rise of ‘thing-killing’ as opposed to man-killing weapons—heavy artillery is an example—which by their side-effects inflicted gross suffering and disfigurement, invalidated these restraints. As a result restraints were cast to the winds, and it is now a desired effect of many man-killing weapons that they inflict wounds as terrible and terrifying as possible. The claymore mine, for instance, is filled with metal cubes..., the cluster bomb with jagged metal fragments, in both cases because that shape of projectile tears and fractures more exten­sively than a smooth-bodied one. The HEAT and HESH rounds fired by anti-tank guns are designed to fill the interior of armoured vehicles with showers of metal splinters or streams of molten metal, so disabling the tank by disabling its crew. And napalm, disliked for ethical reasons even by

Reflections on Cruelty and Torture 117 many tough minded soldiers, contains an ingredient which increases the adhesion of the burning petrol to human skin surfaces.

One might add to this that the manufacture, possession, and de­ployment of weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, and nu­clear) must be counted as instances of declared governmental readiness to inflict cruel death upon civilian populations even when these weapons are not actually used. In brief, cruel modern technologies of destruction are in­tegral to modern warfare, and modern warfare is an activity essential to the security and power of the modern state, on which the welfare and identity of its citizens depends. In war, the modern state demands from its citizens not only that they kill and maim others but also that they themselves suf­fer cruel pain and death.²⁶ Human life is sacred, but only in particular con­texts that the state defines.

So how can the calculated cruelties of modern batde be reconciled with the modern sensibility regarding pain? Precisely by treating pain as a quantifiable essence. As in state torture, an attempt can be made to meas­ure the physical suffering inflicted in modern warfare in accordance with the proportionality of means to ends. That is the principle supported by the Geneva Convention. The principle states that the human destruction inflicted should not outweigh the strategic advantage gained. Only neces­sary punishment of noncombatants should be used. But given the aim of ultimate victory the notion of “military necessity” can be extended indefi-

24. J. Keegan, The Face of Battle, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1978, pp.

25. Daniel Headrick, “The Tools of Imperialism: Technology and the Ex­pansion of European Colonial Empires in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Modem History, vol. 51,1979, p. 256.

26. The paradox here is that the modern citizen is a free individual and yet he is obliged to forgo the most important choice a free human being can make—■ that affecting his life or death. The modern state can send its citizens to their un­willing deaths in war and can forbid them from willingly ending their own lives in peace.

nitely. Any measure that is intended as a contribution to that aim, no mat­ter how much suffering it creates, may be j ustified in terms of “military ne­cessity.” The standard of acceptability in such cases is set by public opin­ion, and that standard varies as the latter moves in response to contingent circumstances (for example, who the enemy is, how the war is going).

I want to stress that I am making no moral judgment here. My con­cern is simply to identify the paradoxes of modern thought and practice that relate to the deliberate infliction of pain in conflicts between states as well as within them. If I focus on state-condoned cruelty this is not because I assume that the state is its only source today, but because our moral dis­course about cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment is closely linked to legal concepts and political interventions.

In the instances discussed so far, I have tried to suggest that the in­stability of the concept of physical suffering is at one and the same time the source of ideological contradictions and of strategies available for evading them. I now shift my attention to the domain of interpersonal relations that the modern state defines as “private.” Here we meet with a contradic­tion that has deeper roots, and one that cannot be resolved simply by, say, redefining the concept of torture as “moderate pressure” or by prohibiting excessive cruelty in military combat.

Subjecting oneself to “cruel and degrading treatment”

So while the category of “torture” has in recent times been expanded to include cases of induced suffering that are primarily or entirely psycho­logical, it has also been narrowed to exclude some cases of the calculated infliction of physical pain. And this sometimes leads to contradictions. But there is another kind of contradiction that is characteristic of modern sec­ular life.

It has always been recognized that there are situations in which a sharp separation cannot be made between the experience of pain and the experience of pleasure. Sadomasochism is disturbing to many people pre­cisely because here they are confronted with suffering that is no longer sim­ply painfid. It is at once pain and not pain. And its object is excess. Two centuries of powerful criticism directed at the Utilitarian’s calculus of pleas­ure versus pain has not destroyed the common view that these two experi­ences are mutually exclusive and that each can, in some sense, be meas-

Reflections on,Cruelty and Torture 119 ured. Yet in the eroticization of suffering the two are intimately linked, and it is actively sought by some.

Here is an extract from a sadomasochist Handbook published recently in New York: “Because I consider any attempt to define SM in a single concise phrase to be the ultimate exercise in futility—or masochism—I shall forego the temptation to add yet another version to the great dis­carded stack of unsuccessfill, inadequate verbal garbage. Instead let me suggest a short list of characteristics I find to be present in most scenes which I would classify as SM:

1. A dominant-submissive relationship.

2. A giving and receiving of pain that is pleasurable to both parties.

3. Fantasy and/or role playing on the part of one or both partners.

4. A conscious humbling of one partner by the other (humiliation).

5. Some form of fetish involvement.

6. The acting out of one or more ritualized interactions (bondage, flagellation, etc).”^[84]

Notice that this text speaks not about representing pain but about pain ex­perienced and inflicted, in which both partners, the active and the passive, are jointly agents. So why is sadomasochism not rejected by all moderns who condemn pain as a negative experience?

One answer, according to some interpreters, is that not everyone “confuses the distinction between unbridled sadism and the social subcul­ture of consensual fetishism. To argue that in consensual S/M the ‘domi­nant’ has power, and the slave has not, is to read theater for reality.”^[85]

However, the point of my question is not to dismiss the distinction between “unbridled sadism” and the “subculture of consensual fetishism.” It is to ask what happens when individual self-fashioning embraces the dif­ference between “pain” and “pleasure” within an aesthetic whole. We are sometimes told that the hybridization of categories, including those that organize our sensual experience, is a mode by which stable authority may be subverted in the name of liberty. But it is possible also that the eroti- cization of pain is merely one of the ways in which the modern self at­tempts to secure its elusive foundation.

Recently, an article in a London newspaper gave the following ac­count of a local performance by an American artist at the Institute of Contemporary Arts: “With his face set in a mask of concentration, Ron Athey allows his head to be pierced with a six-inch needle just above the eyebrow. You watch, transfixed, as the needle snakes along beneath the skin like water pulsing through an empty hosepipe. A droplet of blood wells up at the point where steel meets scalp. This is the first spike of Atheys crown of thorns—a body piercer’s tribute to the power of Christ­ian iconography, an ex-junkie’s flirtation with the needle, and a gay man’s defiance of infection with HIV.

“By the time the macabre ‘sketch’ is finished, Athey is encrusted with needles, garlanded with wire and oozing blood, in what appears to be a parody of the crucifixion. Ah, but is it a parody, defined in the dic­tionary as ‘an imitation so poor as to seem a deliberate mockery of the original’? Or is it—as Athey’s supporters would claim—an exploration of the nature of martyrdom, as manifest to a worldwide gay community in the era of Aids?”²⁵

What is remarkable about these opening paragraphs is that the writer of this account finds herself having to put the familiar theatrical word “sketch” in quotation marks—but not so the equally familiar theological word martyrdom. The reader is given to understand that this is a real trib­ute to the power of Christian iconography, a real exploration of the nature of (Christian) martyrdom, but that it only “appears” to be a form of the­ater, an “imitation.”³⁰ It is a mistake to see it as an illusion. _s

I stress that I am not here challenging this interpretation but underlin­ing the writer’s recognition that in the discourse of modern self-fashioning, the tension holding “real” and “theatrical” apart can collapse. It is espe­cially in a modern culture, where the split between the real and its mere representation has become institutionalized, that it becomes necessary to

29. Claire Armistead, “Piercing Thoughts,” Guardian Weekly, July 17, 1994, p. 26.

30. Cf. McClintock, op. cit., p. 106: “S/M is the most liturgical of forms, sharing with Christianity a theatrical iconography of punishment and expiation: washing rituals, bondage, flagellation, body-piercing, and symbolic torture." But why only symbolic*. In traditional Christianity surely punishment, expiation, and suffering are very real.

Reflections on Cruelty and Torture 121 assert from time to time that a given performance is merely theatrical, or that another performance is not really theater. My point here, however, is that it is the difference between “the real” and “the mimetic”^—like the dif­ference between “pain” and “pleasure”—that is available to modern self­fashioning. And that consequently the tension between “real” and “pre­tend” bondage is itself aestheticized, and the clarity with which consent can be distinguished from coercion becomes problematic.

Of course S/M as defined in the text I quoted earlier is different from this performance at the I.CA.. For one thing, in the latter there fa a separa­tion between performers and observers. No experience of giving and re­ceiving pain binds the two together in mutual pleasure. We find only a one-sided representation (presentation?) of an evocative image of suffering, which is preceded by a painful construction of that image on the stage. Furthermore, its intention is not the production of private pleasure. We can’t know whether the various members of Atheys audience respond pri­marily to the icon of Christs last passion, or to the painful construction of that icon on the stage—or to both. Nor can we tell what difference it would make to those who would like to ban this performance if they were to be told that Athey suffers from a malfunctioning of the nervous system so that he actually feels no pain. Or—more tellingly—that like a religious virtuoso he has learnt to experience it positively.

Think of the Shi a Muslim flagellants mourning the martyrdom of the Prophets grandson Hussain annually every Muharram. That instance of self-inflicted pain is at once real and dramatic (not “theatrical”). It has even less to do with “pleasure” than does Atheys performance. It differs from the latter in being a collective rite of religious suffering and redemp­tion. It is not a secular act that borrows a religious metaphor to make a statement about political prejudice. Nor is it premised on the right to self­fashioning and the autonomy of individual choice. Yet both strike against the modern sensibility that recoils from a willing, positive engagement with suffering. Because, in very different ways, for ascetics, as for sado- masochists, pain is not merely a means that can be measured and pro­nounced excessive or gratuitous in relation to an end. Pain is not calculated action but passionate engagement.

One of the earliest attempts to theorize excess as an element in the secular formation of modern subjectivity is Edmund Burkes notion of the sublime. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sub­lime and Beautiful (1757), Burke argued that pain and pleasure are not op-

posites but different positive experiences, the latter to be distinguished from “delight.” Pain, he says, is always the stronger, evoking greater pas­sions—and even drawing us to it. We are drawn to the sight of disasters, Burke claims, by a delight: “there is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity; so that whether the mis­fortune is before our eyes, or whether they are turned back to it in history, it always touches with delight. This is not an unmixed delight, but blended with no small uneasiness.”³¹ Delight is distinguished from positive pleas­ure because it can be attached to pain and danger. The power that excites the mixture of pleasure and horror is Burkes “sublime,” a power that can not be clearly defined (delimited). Hence infinite emptiness, darkness, and silence are all terrible, all manifestations of great obscurity and therefore of great terror. Sublime power is always imperial; it imposes itself on us, and ' has no utility.³² Although Burke does not say this, we can see that this submission to the experience of horror-and-delight opens the way to a modern understanding of “the sacred” as well as to an aesthetics of excess. The implications of such an aesthetic for secular self-fashioning, both in­dividual and national, are intriguing—especially in a culture whose moral and legal domains valorize measure and calculation.

These brief references to pain willingly endured in modern society help us to raise some questions at the transcultural level.

The interesting thing about the criteria enumerated in the S/M text I quoted above is that they come up against Article 5 of the Universal Dec­laration of Human Rights·. “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” This rule is not quali­fied by the phrase “unless the parties concerned are consenting adults.” In the same way and for the same reason that one may not consent to sell one­self into slavery, even for a limited period. Not even if the parties con­cerned find the relationship of bondage erotic.

So, too, the liberalized Church strongly disapproves of monks being whipped at the command of their abbot for penalizable faults—even when the penance has a ritual closure and a dramatic character. And even if the

31. Part One, Section XIV.

32. “Whenever strength is only useful, and employed for our benefit or our ₄ pleasure, then it is never sublime; for nothing can act agreeably to us, that does not

act in conformity to our will; but to act agreeably to our will, it must be subject to us; and therefore can never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception” (Part Two, Section V).

Reflections on Cruelty and Torture 123 monks have taken monastic vows of obedience voluntarily. This disap­proval follows from the modern rejection of physical pain in general, and of “gratuitous” suffering in particular. But it is more precise to put it this way: the modern hostility is not simply to pain, it is to pain that does not accord with a particular conception of being human—and that is there­fore in excess. “Excess” is a concept of measure. An essential aspect of the modern attitude to pain rests on a calculus that defines rational (calcula­ble) actions. But another aspect has to do precisely with the aesthetic pursuit of excess.

Needless to say nothing I have said so far is an argument against S/M. I am not denouncing a “dangerous” sexual practice.³³ Nor am I con­cerned to celebrate its “emancipatory” social potential.³⁴ These antagonis­tic positions seem to me to assume that “sadomasochism” has an essence. They are mirror images of each other. But the essence of what legal and moral discourse constructs, polices, and contests as “S/M” is not the object of my analysis. As in the field of “abnormal and unnatural” sexual practices generally, state power is, of course, directly and vitally involved—helping to define and regulate normality. My concern here, however, is with the structure of public debate over the valorization of painful experience in a secular culture that regards it negatively. In that debate argument is sharp­ened because on the one hand moderns disapprove of physical pain as “de­grading.” On the other hand they are committed to every individuals right to pursue unlimited physical pleasure “in private”—so long as that con­forms to the legal principle of consenting adults and does not lead to death or serious injury. Thus one way that moderns attempt to resolve this con­tradiction is by defining cruelty in relation to the principle of individual autonomy, which is the necessary basis of free choice. However, if the con­cept of “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” cannot be consistently deployed without reference to the principle of individual freedom, it be­comes relativized.

33. See for example R. R. Linden et al., eds., Against Sadomasochism: A Rad­ical Feminist Analysis, San Francisco: Frog in the Well, 1982.

34. The radical social criticism allegedly expressed by S/M is eloquendy ar­gued for in McClintock’s article, but the liberatory implications of S/M are ex­plicitly retracted at the end. (See also the clever book by Angela Carter entided The Sadeian Woman, London: Virago, 1979.) While such writings typically provide radical political decodings of S/M narratives, they also seem to be saying that, as a mode of obtaining orgasm, S/M is the product of socially distorted and sexually repressive relations.

This becomes clearer in the transcultural domain. For here it is not simply a matter of eliminating particular cruelties, but of imposing an en­tire secular discourse of “being human,” central to which are its ideas about individualism and detachment from passionate belief. Thus while at home the principle of consenting adults within the bounds of the law works by invoking the idea of free choice based on individual autonomy, the pres­ence of consenting adults abroad may often be taken to indicate mere “false consciousness”—a fanatical commitment to outmoded beliefs— which invites forcible correction.

Yet only the skeptical individual—always suspicious of his or her own beliefs as well as of others—can be truly free of fanatical convictions. And continuous suspicion introduces instability at another level: that of the secular, autonomous subject.

(In this connection it is worth noting that Jeremy Schneewinds mag­isterial survey of early modern moral philosophy—The Invention of Au­tonomy [Cambridge University Press, 1998]—contains virtually no men­tion of cruelty, except in passing in the few paragraphs on de Sade. In the writings discussed by Schneewind there are many arguments concerning the place of divine, punishment in a system of sanctions—the fear of pun­ishment and the hope of reward as motives for obeying Gods natural law. In that sense the infliction and suffering of pain are part of a quasi-legal discourse—of morality construed on the analogy of law, and of “responsi­bility” as essential to it. De Sade, of course, had no interest in constructing a theory of morality. His concern was to disrupt civilized convention through the relentless pursuit of desire, to reject altogether the idea of “re­sponsibility.” The continuous experience of violent pain-pleasure was, for de Sade, the expression of an indifferent Nature that gave the lie to reli­gious claims about reality.^[86])

In the next chapter I explore further the autonomous subject that hu­man rights seeks to redeem. In doing this I move directly to an aspect of secularism as a political doctrine.