Two histories of torture

I begin with a discussion of two books that together show very dif­ferent ways of writing histories of cruelty. The first, by G. R. Scott, repre­sents physical cruelty as a feature of barbaric societies—that is, societies that haven’t yet been humanized.

a distinction between two kinds of physical cruelty, one appropriate to pre­modern and the other to modern societies, and describes that difference in the context of contemporary Iran.

Scott was a fellow of several British learned societies, including the Royal Anthropological Institute. His History of Torture is perhaps the first modern story of its kind.¹ It deals at length with “Savage and Primitive Races,” ancient and early modern European peoples, and Asian “civiliza­tions” (China, Japan, and India). On the one hand it tells a story of pun­ishments now largely discontinued or suppressed; on the other it speaks of motives for inflicting suffering that are deep-rooted and pervasive. His indebtedness to Krafft-Ebing’s ideas is evident not only in explicit form in his chapters oh “Sadism” and “Masochism,” but also in the general evolutionary scheme he employs according to which the primitive urge to inflict pain remains a latent possibility (sometimes realized) in civi­lized society.

Scott is somewhat unusual for his time in wanting to include the mistreatment of animals in his account of torture, and in describing their plight as a: consequence of the nonrecognition of rights, for like other mod­erns he sees the extension of rights to be crucial for the elimination of cru­elty. But in the course of arguing this thesis he hits on a profound and dis­turbing ambiguity. It is not entirely clear whether he thinks that human cruelty is merely an instance of bestial cruelty—that is, a working out of the supposedly universal instinct of stronger animals to hunt or attack the weaker.

It is worth noting that the instances of physical pain Scott describes as “torture” belong sometimes to the involuntary submission to punish­ment and sometimes to the practices of personal discipline (for example, tests of endurance, ascetic techniques). He makes no distinction between the two: pain is regarded as an isolable experience, the visible reaction of a ^[75]

Reflections on. Cruelty and Torture 105 mistreated body. If Scott had read Haller he would have understood him perfectly.

In the encounter between “Savage Races” and modern Euro­Americans, Scott has no doubt that “torture” is something the former do to the latter—perhaps because it is synonymous with "barbarity.” At any rate the sufferings inflicted on Native Americans by white settlers and the expanding U.S. state has no place in his history of torture.

This is not to say that Scott asserts torture to be entirely absent in modern society. On the contrary, he is quite explicit about its use by the police to secure confession (“the third degree”). His position is that the story of modernity is in part a story of the progressive elimination of all morally shocking social behavior—including what is now described in in­ternational law as “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punish­ment.” Scott does not claim that that intention has been fully realized, only that progress has been made. In this story of progress, he tells us, the states definition and defense of rights is the most effective protection against cruelty.

In his important book, the Iranian political scientist Darius Rejali makes the interesting argument that, far from being a barbaric survival in the modern state as Scott’s story suggests, torture is in fact integral to it.² Although he classifies torture into two types, modern and premodern, he shares with Scott the view that the term “torture” has a fixed referent. More precisely, both of them take it that to speak of torture is to refer to a prac­tice in which the agent forcibly inflicts pain on another—regardless of the place that the practice occupies within a larger moral economy.

Rejali offers a sophisticated account of the role of political punish­ments in Iran both before and after the inception of modernization in that country. Modern torture, he tells us, is a form of physical suffering that is an inseparable part of a disciplinary society. In Iran the practice of torture is as essential to the Islamic Republic today as it was to the Pahlevi regime it replaced. Both in their own way are modern disciplinary societies.

Rejali believes that his book refutes what Foucault had to say about torture in Discipline and Punish? He maintains that torture does not give place to discipline in modern society, as Foucault claimed, but persists in a

2. D. M. Rejali, Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and State jn Modem Iran, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.

3. So also Page DuBois, Torture and Truth, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 153—57.

major way. But this belief arises from a misreading of Foucault, whose cen­tral concern was not with “torture” but with “power,” and consequendy with a contrast between sovereign power (which¹’ exhibits itself through the­atrical displays of tortured bodies) and disciplinary power (which works through the normalization of bodies in everyday behavior).

Public rituals of torture are no longer deemed to be necessary to the maintenance of sovereign power (whether they were ever necessary to the maintenance of “social order” is, of course, another question).

Modern torture linked to policing is typically secret partly because inflicting physical pain on a prisoner is considered “uncivilized” and there­fore illegal. It may also be secret because policing agents claim they do not wish to advertise what they learn from (tortured) prisoners—if and when they learn anything of significance. After all, the effectiveness of certain kinds of disciplinary knowledge is enhanced by its secrecy. The secret char­acter of knowledge acquired in policing therefore relates at once to the un­certainty of outside critics as to whether, and if so how often, something il­legal has been done by bureaucratic power to obtain it (“torture is intolerable in a civilized society”), and also to how, when, and where that power chooses to act given that it possesses secret information (“every so­ciety must protect itself against criminal and terrorist conspiracies”).

Critics sometimes claim, that “the extraction of information” is not the real goal of torture, but rather torture’s justification. But I suggest that there is no such thing as “the mz/goal of torture.” The motives (conscious and unconscious) of someone who carries out specific acts of torture are usually varied and mixed. The idea that specific acts of torture should be understood by the agent’s motivation is either circular or based on the sen­timental (and false) belief that only peculiar psychological types are capa­ble of great cruelty.

My argument here is that “torture” as now used in the law is a form of cruelty that liberal societies do not approve of. That’s the main reason why modern authorities typically generate a rhetoric of public denial—of disclaiming that “torture” has actually taken place within their domain of „ responsibility (“it was the unauthorized activity of undisciplined officials”), or of claiming that what appears to be “torture” is really something less reprehensible (“reasonable pressure”). This rhetoric is an important ele­ment in the public culture of modern liberalism, and it generates an air of secrecy around the subject—and therefore an air of “exposure” when inci­dents of torture are “made public.” In premodern societies of the kind Fou­cault called Classical, “torture” was carried out unapologetically and in public. It was the object not of exposure but of display. From the point of view of the problem I pursue, the motives of those who carried out such theatrical torture are irrelevant—even if it were possible to determine them. What matters is that the public discourse on inflicting pain on a prisoner in the two cases (modern and premodern) is quite different. The rhetoric of denial, which is the other side of a rhetoric of accusation, is typ­ical of modern or modernizing governments, and is linked to a liberal sen­sibility regarding pain.

Rejali’s definition of torture as “sanguinary violence condoned by public authorities” slips uneasily between the legitimate and public prac­tice of classical torture on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the secre­tive because “uncivilized” character of policing torture in modernizing states like Iran. Unfortunately, his argument doesn’t address this difference. Modern torture, he insists at length, is integral to what Foucault called dis­ciplinary society. It is, if not itself quite identical with discipline, then very close to it.

There are valuable insights in Rejali’s book relating to the cruelty in­flicted on people in the process of modernization, but I do not have the space to dwell on them.

The other objection is this: Rejali does not explain why, unlike disci­pline, modem state use of torture requires the rhetoric of denial. The brief answer to this question, surely, is that there is now a new sensibility re­garding physical pain. Although it occurs frequently enough in our time, the modern conscience regards the inflicting of pain “without good reason” (to perform a medical operation, say, or to slaughter animals for meat) as reprehensible, and therefore as an object of moral condemnation. It is this attitude to pain that helps define the modern notion of cruelty.

The modern conscience is also a secular conscience, a category that subsumes moralized religion. (For Kant, “pure religion” is nothing more than conscience-based morality, and it stands apart from the dogmas of historical religion.)⁴ Christianity, which was traditionally rooted in the doc­trine of Christ s passion, consequently finds it difficult to make good sense of suffering today. Modern theologians have begun to concede that pain is essentially and entirely negative. “The secularist challenge,” writes a mod­ern Catholic theologian, “even though separating many aspects of life from the religious field, brings with it a more sound, interpretive equilibrium; the natural phenomena, even though sometimes difficult to understand, have their cause and roots in processes that can and must be recognized. It is a man’s job, therefore, to enter into this cognitive analysis of the mean­ing of suffering, in order to be able to affront and conquer it.... Through his works, even before his words, Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed the goodness of life and of health, as the image of salvation. For Him pain is negativeness.”^{5 ;}

The writer in this passage is clearly thinking of disease, but since pain can also be a consequence of human intention, it follows that such pain should be eliminated from the world of human interaction—even from re-

4. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, New York: Harper and Row, i960.

5. A. Autiero, “The Interpretation of Pain: The Point of View of Catholic Theology,” in Pain, ed. J. Brihaye, F. Loew, H. W. Pia, Vienna/New York:

* Springer-Verlag, 1987, p. 124. Incidentally, there is a curious paradox in invok­ing a metaphor of military violence (“to affront and conquer”) to describe the compassionate work of healing. But such paradoxes abound in Christian his­tory, of course.

ligious disciplines, and from the enactment of martyrdom, where it once had an effective and honored place. The secular Christian must now abjure passion and choose action. Pain is not merely negativeness. It is, literally, a scandal.