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Today's
Stories
June 19 / 20, 2004
Diane Christian
Morality and Death: a Meditation on
Bush and Blake
Walter A. Davis
Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib
Josh Frank
How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother Nature
Col. Dan
Smith
Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis in Sudan
Brian
Cloughley
A Profound Disruption of the Senses
June 18,
2004
Chris
Floyd
Blood Victory
Dave Zirin
Danielle Green, Basketball Player &
Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Christian Question in American Politics
Gary
Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?:
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi
June
17, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
16, 2004
Lenni
Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters
Davey
D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan
Daniel
Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner
Abuse?
Bruce
Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake
Patrick
Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power
Facilities
Gary
Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads
JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop
Mario
Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers
Vicente
Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who
is Rodrigo Rato?
Website
of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch
June
15, 2004
Harry
Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe
Neve
Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
David
Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI
John
Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming
Dave
Lindorff
God Wins in TKO
Bill
Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step
In
Patrick
Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast
John
Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo
June
14, 2004
John
Stanton / Wayne Madsen
Torture, Inc: Oliver North Joins
the Party
Kathy
Kelly
Requiems: What Happens When Compassion Dies?
Bruce
Jackson
Bush Gets Testy About Torture
Lee
Sustar
Strikers Defy Visteon's Company Thugs
Kurt
Nimmo
The Desperate Censors: the Republican Plot to Kill Farhenheit
9/11
Jim
Davis
Hard Right Nativism
Eliot
Katz
Death and War
Uri
Avnery
The Nightmare Comes True
Website
of the Day
Instruments of Statecraft
June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto
and Runnymede
Team
CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary
Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe
Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt
Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg
Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st
Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
| June
19 / 20, 2004
The Bite
of the Whip
Passion
of the Christ in Abu Ghraib
By
WALTER A. DAVIS
I. The
Misfit’s Dilemma
“It’s
no real pleasure in life.”
The
Misfit in “The Misfit” by Flannery O’Connor
“When thinking comes to a stand still in a constellation saturated
with tension—there the dialectical image appears.”
Walter
Benjamin
If
we exclude the recent funeral of the Gipper, the past year has witnessed
two important Events. (The term Event is a philosophic one referring
to those singularities in history (there are few) that evidence a fundamental
change in the psyche. Two events: (1) a film, The Passion of the Christ
by Mel Gibson; (2) a body of photographs from Abu Ghraib. The two events
are united by the secret they share: that of their psychological identity
and what that fact reveals about what has happened to the American Psyche
since 9-11.
But
first a brief theoretical preliminary setting out what I take to be
the primary object for those of us engaged in the ideological critique
of American society. The task of the leftist or dialectical critic of
ideology is to find those images that lay bare, in its historical development,
the disorder at the heart of the American psyche. Image reveals the
dream life of a culture. And in our time, as I’ll show, it reveals
that life to be a psychotic one. Here in its simplest terms is the perspective
that a psychoanalytic understanding brings to the study of ideology.
(1) Official rationalizations (Samuel Huntington, neo-con babble, Bushsprach)
conceal primitive emotions Image reveals what is concealed: the centrality
of unconscious fantasies and projective identifications (the act of
taking something one finds unacceptable or avid in oneself and investing
it in another so that one can wage an attack on it) in influencing the
actions of those who make history. The study of images enables one to
reconstruct the dynamic, collective, historical unconscious and to show
the necessary connections among those things that offical ideology demands
we keep apart lest we apprehend the underlying disorder of the whole.
Always
historicize, this is the first and last commandment of leftist, Marxist
inquiry. Its cardinal implication: historical inquiry is the search
for those Events that are singular because they reveal something new
under the sun, something that cannot be subsumed under “human
nature” nor explained as a continuation of the hegemonic principles
of a given social order. The task of historical interpretation is to
conceptualize that newness. (One reason for the resistance to such an
effort: an event is the eruption of a contingency that shatters extant
ways of thinking, demanding new ways of thinking. Thought is challenged
to think in radically new ways.)
In
terms of these criteria few of the things that happen qualify as Events.
Previously I argued that the American response to 9-11 constituted an
event. I here want to argue the same not only with respect to Gibson’s
film and the Abu Ghraib but in terms of a larger argument: that there
is a necessary connection between these two events in the development
of a single disorder. Its articulation is my overarching goal.
Finally,
in keeping with the power of the image and the challenge it poses to
traditional ways of thinking, I will follow a procedure based primarily
on presenting the reader with images aphoristically apprehended. The
aim of that procedure is to address and engage the reader at what is
the correct psychological and emotional register.
II.
Moviegoers in the Hands of an Angry Filmmaker
Here,
at the start, my core thesis. Both Mel Gibson’s film The Passion
of the Christ and Abu Ghraib are results of what I’ve shown elsewhere
to be the condition of the American psyche: the deadening of emotion
and the attempt to flee that inner state through violent acts which
are needed to confer the momentary sense that one exists. Gibson’s
film is for many Christians a high point in the emotional expression
of their religion. Abu Ghraib is equally extreme in its attempt to attack
and belittle another religion. The two acts derive, however, from the
same psychodynamic: sado-masochistic activity, extreme images of brutalization
and suffering repeated, maximized in order to create in a mass audience
the only feeling of which they are capable: the overwrought glee that
comes from spectacles of cruelty.
The
following scene occurs early in Gibson’s film. As the bound Jesus
is being led to prison he is dropped over a wall. The rope catches just
in time, before he hits the ground. We hear the crunch of bone, see
the broken Jesus dangling, suffering what must be a shock to the entire
system. (We will see the same image again and soon, in the news, April
4, 2004. Only this time it will come to us from Fallujah, in the photograph
of the charred body of an American hung from a bridge over the Euphrates.)
The scene in Gibson’s film has no biblical source and thus is
particularly revealing in a film that claims absolute fidelity to Gospels
that Gibson refuses to submit to an iota of historical scholarship.
“It is as it was,” such was the imprimatur that Gibson’s
publicists claimed John Paul II pronounced after viewing the film. The
scene is in the film because it serves a far greater exigency than the
“truth.” Gibson knows what films do, what his audience craves.
He is impatient to get the blood sport underway. To offer us what follows
this scene: two hours of unrelieved sado-masochism, making Passion the
longest piece of snuff porn on record.
The
day I saw the film--the morning it opened and as what I took as my atheistic
responsibility--the theatre was packed as would be theatres throughout
the country for the next few weeks. There they sat with buckets full
of buttered popcorn, larger containers full of coke working men in shirt
sleeves and pot bellies together with their even larger Fraus (the McDonald’s
generation) tears streaming down their faces, moved as they had not
been by any film in memory. Some actually cried out. Others gasped.
Repeatedly.
(I alone could not suppress a laugh when after being beaten beyond human
endurance for nearly two hours Christ has the temerity to say “I
thirst.”)
How
do we account for the unprecedented success of this film, its status
as an icon of American fundamentalist religiosity?
Gibson
as filmmaker pays strict allegiance to the lesson that for him forms
the totality of cinematic art: the systematic administration of repeated
shocks to the nervous system in order to create visceral effects—the
counterfeit of emotion—that operate by a mechanism that delivers
film to the ministry of the special effects department. For Gibson we
live indeed in unprecedented times. Film has finally attained the development
that will enable us, for the first time in Western history, to experience
the Passion as it was for eyewitnesses.
Gibson
knows—and the unprecedented popular success of his film testifies
to the fact— that the mass audience is only capable of a single
operation, which must perforce be repeated endlessly through the production
of new and greater shocks to the system. The ooohs and aaahs, the gasps
of shocked amazement at each new special effect are the audience’s
tribute to the filmmaker’s success in devising new and bloodier
ways to assault their sensibilities.
Film
is, as Bertolucci said, an animal act, the immediacy of a convulsive
experience that eludes all reflective consciousness. As such film is
the greatest tool of propaganda yet invented. Here is the the inherent
power of film: to work directly on the response mechanism of the human
being in a way that can affect permanent alterations and corruptions
in one’s ability to feel. (Think of Gibson as the anti-Kubrick,
Passion as an unrepentant Clockwork Orange.)
Such
is the danger of this medium and, judging from audience responses, the
achievement of Gibson’s film. He knows what the audience wants.
How much of it they want. And he’s smart enough not to let anything
get in the way. All complexities, any possibility of representing Christ’s
passion as more than a spectacle, any attempt to know anything about
the inwardness of Jesus, is and must be sacrificed to the bloodbath.
Christ’s suffering must remain a spectacle outside us. About all
one can say about this Christ is that he is the greatest athlete of
his time, in perfect shape for the marathon he must run.
Of
necessity everything about the Passion is for Gibson reduced to a mechanical
sequence of sado-masochistic shocks. Which must be repeated, each more
brutal and with less time intervening. The inability to feel in any
other way—even over the Christ—is the true testimony Gibson’s
film offers in its fealty to the ruling principle of mainline Hollywood
cinema. Gibson knew his film would be the hit of the season because
it makes the Amerikan audience the offer they can’t refuse: the
pleasure of sado-masochistic cruelty. Piety disguises what is the true
object of this film: to brutalize the audience by offering them the
most extreme experience yet captured on film of the primary thing they
now go to the movies for—a feast of violence. Gibson’s project
is to indulge in an orgy of violence masked as an act of piety. Thereby
the audience is given through their tears a way both to deny and to
feel good about the sado-masochistic process needed to generate those
tears. Having paid that price they get a final benefit: identification
with God’s rage.
For
Gibson’s audience is crying only on the outside. Inside they have
been ripened for projective identification. Their sole need is violent
sado-masochistic stimuli. At films end they have supped full with that
horror and leave the feast full of rage. But with a new need—for
a target on which to vent their violence. It is a mistake to confine
this to the film’s patent anti-semitism. Gibson’s true achievement
is the creation of a war readiness readily transferrable to Islam.
Rene
Girard, ever hopeful that Christianity holds the solution to escalating
violence, said this: “ religion puts a veil over the subject of
vengeance.” Gibson rends it, letting us see beneath that veil
the insatiable lust of a mindless cruelty. This is not only what the
murderers of Christ indulge themselves in. It is what the filmmaker
takes repeated, orgasmic delight in. (We are told it is Gibson’s
own arm we see driving the nail through Christ’s hand, Gibson’s
own blood-curdling scream the sound track offers in response to that
blow. Such is true autoaffection for a compulsive sado-masochist.) Gibson
also delights in cruelty because he understands the true inner condition
of the audience. The death of affect requires extreme affects repeated
and with accelerating violence. Otherwise the audience sinks into lethargy,
returning to the void. Sado-masochist spectacle is the only thing that
keeps them alive.
In
this sense Gibson is their Saviour, the savage god.
The
goal of Gibson’s film is not purification or faith or love or
piety. His goal is the sado-masochistic bludgeoning of the audience
so that they will become abject subjects on their knees, but full of
rage, eager to find some way to “do unto others” the violence
that has been done unto them. There is no contradiction here; rather
an insight into the way in which eros and thanatos become one in Gibson’s
film. The libidinous and the violently aggressive are fused in a new
constellation. Sado-masochistic spectacle is now the condition of cinematic
pleasure. Contra Laura Mulvey the gaze of the camera is now fixated
not on eroticized (though passive) women but on suffering male bodies
in extremes of excruciating pain. The Nazi pleasure dome is achieved.
In the Christ Gibson finds the homoerotic ur-text behind the Nazi love
of the beautiful blonde boy his taut body blossoming with his own blood
at each bite of the whip.
Gibson’s
film is a sign of the desperate sado-masochism that underlies the pieties
of mainstream American religiosity. This is both Gibson’s “genius”
and his hidden despair. He may loudly proclaim his Christianity but
the world he lives in is one of utter brutalization. His project as
a filmmaker is the same as the one that informs porn: to reduce the
psyche of the audience to a mechanism that responds by command whenever
triggered by the one thing that excites it: sado-masochistic cruelty.
As such it offers us a privileged insight into the fundamentalist Amerikan
psyche, a way to understand what’s really going on in the prayer
breakfasts that have now become a daily necessity at the White House.
And
there they were, afterward, those same men and women I’d heard
gasping and shrieking for the past two hours, standing in the lobby,
dazed and confused, unable to leave the theatre, tears streaming down
their faces but with a new look in their eyes—that of a rage already
on the lookout for anyone who did not share or dared to questioned the
truth of their feeling and the depth of their belief. Such are the glad
tidings according to Mel: when most devout and most perverse the Amerikan
is the same, a psyche excited only by extremes of sado-masochism. Marx
was wrong. Capitalism won’t dispense with religion. It will require
one kind of religion. Bush and Ashcroft represent its benign—if
mindless –face. Gibson gives us its true visage.
I
can’t leave this rebarbative film without offering the antidote
to it. Listen to Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion repeatedly,
for an entire week, until your heart becomes one with the spirit of
charity that breathes through every note of it.
III.
The Non-Accidental Tourist
Abu
Ghraib, as Seymour Hersh has shown, had its genesis in a reading by
the neo-con luminaries of the Bush Administration of a text—Raphael
Patai’s The Arab Mind (NY: Scribner’s, 1973)—and specifically
a single chapter in that unremarkable book, Chapter VIII “The
Realm of Sex.” (2) Reading no doubt with their hands in their
pants a light went on in the neo-con darkness: the way to control the
other, the Arab, is to use the disorders of their sexuality to humiliate
them and thereby destroy their attachment to whatever principle gives
their life meaning. Abu Ghraib is the acting out of that project. The
languages of transmission--how the idea got from Perle to Rumsfeld to
Sanchez to Garner, England et al isn’t all that important. What
matters is the message. And it is assured, at each step along the way,
because it addresses the same shared disorder of the psyche.
Ideological
hyperconsciousness is fantasmatic. We’ve now learned much about
the naïve beliefs that inform neo-con thinking, such as the assurance
that following the Blitzkreig in Iraq Democracy would sweep the Middle
East. (We also know how adroitly Chalabi played on that pipe.) Abu Ghraib
gives us the other side of the neo-con fantasm, the perverse corollary
to the airy nothing on which it bases its articles of faith. This is
the genius of the actors who arrange the tableaus and pose themselves
for the camera eye in Abu Ghraib.
A
terrible envy underlies Abu Ghraib, one that has been working on the
psychotic register of the American psyche since 9-11. Islamic fundamentalists
have something we lack. They are willing to die for their religion.
We can have only one response to such an affront. They must be forced
to violate their religious beliefs and to do so as part of a perverse
ritual. In this regard two images from Abu Ghraib are especially revealing.
The man masturbating before his torturers forced while doing so to curse
Islam. The father and son, hoods ripped off, confronting one another’s
nakedness.
Just
as any piece of writing has an implicit audience, any posed photograph
is self-representation before an ideal viewer. As photography the key
to the project of Abu Ghraib is to desire to be the one in the picture
frame who bears that gaze that is simultaneously directed at the prisoner’s
abjection and the camera’s eye. One is thereby assured of a triumph
over the abject otherness that the former represents and the identity
that the latter alone confers. As such Abu Ghraib is the staging of
oneself for what Lacanians call the Big Other—that ultimate paternal
principle of authority and meaning whose approval one seeks. Abu Ghraib
tears away the other masks, revealing that the true Father of the American
Imaginary is not Billy Graham or Bush or Scalia or even Reagan. The
true father is “the obscene father of enjoyment.” (3) But
in confirming this Lacanian idea Abu Ghraib gives it a new twist. For
in epiphanizing the commandment to enjoy it overturns it. Contra Lacan,
enjoyment fails because it is meant to relieve a psychotic condition.
That is why it must take horrifying forms, in a repetition compulsion
that must follow a quantitative logic—that of increase, multiplication—since
for the commodified self no inner source of creative invention remains.
One is condemned to the incessant aping of the idiot grin, the phallic
pose that mimes the identity one seeks. Which is why one must be photographed
and those photographs endlessly circulated to the only audience they
can have: those who will gape back interpellated by them, hailed as
subjects who say the yes of recognition to this mirroring of their own
mindless stare. Abu Ghraib reveals the Amerikan as a serial killer trapped
in the necessity that defines that condition: repetition but always
with a new excess because every action returns one to a psychic void.
That void is the condition of affectlessness. Its result: the inability
to feel except through the extreme sado-masochistic acts through which
one tries to convince oneself that one is alive.
Abu
Ghraib also signals a transformation in the nature of Tourism. As we
all know our boys and girls now go off to war armed with digital cameras
from which those left behind on the homefront receive a daily supply
of photographs. Many of these photos bear a family resemblance to those
taken at Abu Ghraib.(4) We, not the Japanese, are now the tourists who
must photograph everything. And with a fundamental difference. The Japanese
tourist is a subject respectfully posed before the object—be it
the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi, Disneyworld, the World Trade Center,
the Golden Arches. The American tourist, in contrast, focuses the camera
on the self: on the grin, the leer, the phallic posturing, the gesture
of appropriation, the need to crow one’s mastery over the other.
Abu Ghraib is a stark revelation of the perverse desire that fuels that
need.
One
goal of these pictures is to give the folks back home a taste of what
they’re missing. Abu Ghraib as an Amerikan Kasbah, true Orientalism.
And if there is any cruelty toward that audience in these pictures it
is a function of their smug assertiveness. This is what I got by enlisting,
what you’re missing out on. Another function, of course, is to
send back home the message that the media refuses to broadcast. This,
rest assured, is what we’re doing to those Arab fucks who were
behind 9-11.
The
most striking thing in the faces and postures of the Americans at Abu
Ghraib is their commodified nature. Nothing can be spontaneous about
their pleasure. One has seen all of this before. Countless times. In
porn. Such is the mindless leer on Private England’s face, the
staple of the woman in porn, offering herself to the camera in that
look that epitomizes the Playboy bunny, the idiot look of one trying
to persuade herself and the male viewer that this is what female pleasure
looks like: “the come take me any way you want me I live just
to please you” come on. Such is the phallic assertiveness of Spc.
Garner’s posture, the smug assurance that brutality is the mark
of the true macho man.
In
Abu Ghraib sexual debasement is staged as an act of violence on a passive
victim who is forced to perform perverse actions for the sexual satisfaction
of a power that makes no attempt to hide its perversity nor the glee
it derives from that perversity. As such Abu Ghraib is not the staging
of sexuality but a perverse parody of it. The attempt of these soldiers
is to convince themselves that they have what the photographs reveal
they lack: an autonomous sexual identity. The empty mindless looks on
the faces is the most revealing thing about these photographs. Like
Gibson’s Passion, Abu Ghraib is the actions that must be taken
to escape the void, to escape a condition in which the death of affect
is the truth of subjectivity. Sado-masochism again strides forth to
fill the breach because it is the one expression adequate to the fascism
of the heart: the attempt to reduce the other to the conditions of a
thing in order to celebrate a feeling of power free of and contemptuous
of all moral and human restraints.
Friends
and relatives are quick to tell us that the Americans pictured at Abu
Ghraib were typical kids, kind, helpful, friendly, all round regular
guys and gals. There is no reason to doubt this account. For it points
to the condition that characterizes the American subject today: the
split between a benign, average public self and the underlying void
that self-hypnotic conformity is meant to conceal: a festering disorder
wedded to the perverse fantasies that alone give one a sense of being.
Abu Ghraib is a message from the heart of the American psyche back to
the heartland. It broadcasts the good news: the pleasure and the certainty
that comes from cruelty.
It
is easy to say that Abu Ghraib represents the acting out of a fantasy.
But this idea should be developed in the most rigorous way, with a rigorous
concept of fantasy. For fantasy is serious business. It is an attempt
by the psyche to imagine or perform an action that will realize a project
capable of freeing it from its conflicts while realizing its deepest
desires. By this definition Abu Ghraib is an act of genius, a psychoanalytic
masterpiece. For everything here is sexual both in terms of the humiliation
forced upon the victim and the identity claimed through that action
for the perpetrators. The latter however is a sham and that is what
the commodified looks reveal. The mindless grin, the obscene leer is
the copy of a copy of a copy, an imitation that has no source because
it was already in its pornographic genesis an attempt to counterfeit
pleasure and sexuality for the camera.
Abu
Ghraib stands in homage to and imitation of the Chief. The parent text
is Bush on the aircraft carrier, unable to delay his orgasm any longer,
unable to resist the need to gloat “We’re #1” with
that smug smile of superiority that is the only thing he learned at
Yale. But this too is imitation, the military garb and the phallic posturing
a reincarnation of President Bill Pullman in Osama bin Laden’s
favorite film, Independence Day. Abu Ghraib mirrors as privilege and
pleasure the Bush doctrine of unilaterism in its contempt for the rest
of the world, for all conventions Geneva or otherwise that would restrain
the thrust of Empire. What the Bush doctrine proclaimed abstractly,
Abu Ghraib acts out at the psychotic register. Mindless bullying is
the American sublime. The grinning, idiotic face is its objective correlative.
There is only one way we can respond to the trauma of 9-11—by
surplus revenge since that is the only way we can once again come to
feel good about ourselves. Hiroshima vivant. As Private England said:
“this wasn’t punishment. This was sport.” Because
the actors of Abu Ghraib--and they were nothing if not performers—acted
from the psychotic register of the American unconscious their actions
are uniquely revelatory: of what official rationality and its policies
conceals –and solicits. These Americans thus deserve a word of
congratulation: they made public the underside of official policy.
And
let there be no doubt about it, this was an act of worship, the creation
of a ritual, like the Mass, celebrating the fundamental article of faith:
the sanctity and magic of psychological cruelty.
In all these ways Abu Ghraib is far more than an Atrocity Exhibition.
Like Gibson’s film it offers us a privileged window into the collective
psyche. Two things come from the void: the desire to exploit suffering—especially
the suffering of Christ-- for sado-masochistic pleasure and, whenever
the opportunity presents itself, to take perverse pleasure in doing
onto helpless victims what the torturers of Christ did to Him in Gibson’s
film.
And
so to proceed to explicit ideological critique. We’ve been offered
a series of explanations for Abu Ghraib. All are wrong and all are necessary
because they supplement one another thereby revealing the working of
a shared collective ideology. Thus, we are told (1)Abu Ghraib was an
exception, not a sign of a systemic disorder. (2) It was the act of
a few bad apples (in contrast to the 99.9% of our boys and girls in
uniform). (3) No, it was a result of instructions from above; reflecting
a pathology in the upper reaches of the Bush administration and not
in America in general. (4) It was the function of the situation—of
what Robert J. Lifton calls “an atrocity-producing situation”
(5) Such things always happen in wars of oppression. There is nothing
new under the sun, no evidence of a new pathology. (5) Or, in psychological
terms as reported in one of the first interpretive essays on Abu Ghraib:
“The U.S. troops who abused Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison near
Baghdad were most likely not pathological sadists but ordinary people
who felt they were doing the dirty work need to win the war, experts
in the history and psychology of torture say.” (6)
What
we can’t confront about history is thereby denied: the possibility
of seeing Abu Ghraib as a singular event revealing a collective pathology
enacting what makes this Event unique; the use of their religion to
destroy subjects and thereby justify the contempt one feels for their
religion. Abu Ghraib, I suggest, is the coming of something new under
the sun. This is the understanding we must try to produce because it
is the one that sets our teeth on edge, the one capable of maximizing
rather than short-circuiting the trauma of that event. Ideology works
best when it tricks us into accepting false alternatives. Our debates
thereby assure that we will miss the necessary connections. Abu Ghraib
is not a matter of either/or, as in the above series, but of both/and
revealing the unity of a purpose—a mind set—that stretches
from top to bottom because it derives from the underlying pathology
that informs the whole. Making the necessary connections that ideology
strives to render impossible is the goal of dialectical or marxist understanding.
For those are the connections that reveal the disorder of a collective
psyche that found in Bush its leader, in Gibson its poet, in Abu Ghraib
its savage feast.
In
their combined functioning the explanations offered of Abu Ghraib prevent
our knowing Abu Ghraib is an unprecedented event, a historical singularity
and as such a break with the past and a tiger’s leap into the
future. It is easy to say that sadistic sexual torture is endemic to
wartime. In that, of course, Abu Ghraib is hardly unique. What’s
unique here is the religious connection. In Abu Ghraib sexual humiliation
is used to force individuals representative of a people to violate their
deepest religious beliefs so that they will be reduced to a condition
of permanent abjection.
Let
us not understate the goal of torture at Abu Ghraib: to destroy the
soul—the ability to go on being-- of those one tortures. And lest
one miss the point walk for five minutes in the shoes of the men who
had to say to themselves I betrayed my religion in order to save my
life.
Abu
Ghraib like Gibson’s Passion is the antithesis of a purification
ritual. Nothing is discharged. That is the not the American desire.
It dances to a different necessity. The desire is to inflict one’s
condition on the other. If you eat shit that means I don’t have
to. The pleasure Gibson offers is the same one that one finds on the
faces of the Americans at Abu Ghraib. That is so because both draw on
the same disorder. The void. The death of affect. The lethargy that
ensues until one is delivered from it by a new shock to the system through
a brutalization that is inflicted on one or that one inflicts on another.
Only so can one feel or, what amounts to the same thing, convince oneself
that one feels. Inadvertently Gibson gives out the truth. When being
its most devout and its most perverse the American is the same.
A
Spinozistic conclusion, a lesson in how to use mechanistic explanations
when they are historically appropriate. To summarize with the bluntness
the subject deserves, this is what feeling now is for the American psyche.
There is one constant—sado-masochism-- because it offers the only
way to feel one is alive. When we indulge it on behalf of those we “love”
we get choaked up with emotion. When we indulge it on behalf of those
we hate we take joy in expressing the manic triad: triumph, contempt,
and dismissal projected onto an object of rage in order to give one
a braying sense of victory over all inner conflicts. The Amerikan psyche
oscillates between the two behaviors because it is, qua psyche, no more
than the underlying necessity: for new and ever greater shocks to the
system as the only way to convince oneself that one is alive. From which
follow a few of what Spinoza would term adequate ideas, of use perhaps
in aiding our philosopher King, Dubya, in attaining concepts for the
words he so glibly employs for transparent ideological ends. To know
what terror, fundamentalism, and evil are one need go no further than
Abu Ghraib.
What
is terrorism, fundamentalism, evil? These three words have been on all
our lips since 9-11. By ideological demand. If, unlike Bush and the
media, we want to understand them in non jingoistic ways there is no
better place to begin than Abu Ghraib.
Terror
is the attempt (1)to humiliate another in a way that renders their psyche
permanently abject in order (2) to confer on oneself the absolute status
that comes with the liberation of a psychological cruelty beyond restraint,
indulged in as an end in itself. What is fundamentalism? Here’s
a definition offered by many historians of religion: voluntary enslavement
in the joy of mindlessness and obedience. The Germans have a word for
it: Kadavergehorsamkeit—to obey like a corpse. In this too Abu
Ghraib provides a chilling model of how true believers behave; nay,
how they worship. Evil is the desire to eradicate anything and everything
that stands in the way of achieving the absolute status, the unlimited
power that one craves. It is the effort to humiliate people in order
to destroy their soul.
IV.
Apologies to Pynchon or “The Late Late Late Show”
“The
last image was too immediate for any eye to register.”
Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 760
“Paranoia
is the ability to make connections.”
From the sayings of Thomas the Elder
We
are unable to understand contemporary history and the psychotic bases
of American ideology because we have not yet learned how to read Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow. I hope on another occasion to offer an extended
discussion of all that this seminal work offers the student of ideology,
the revolutionary nature of its insight into the capitalist mind and
how it teaches us both to read and to practice the discipline of the
image. For now I must condense that contribution into three concepts:
(1) Pynchon reveals the constitutional stupidity of official rationality
and its underlying madness; as in the fetishizing of any and all information
(as if there was a precious secret that each inmate of Abu Ghraib could
render up to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Perle et al). (2) The
excessive actions that official rationality necessarily gives birth
to are a result of the underlying paranoia and the desire for omnipotent
control that results. (3) This disorder is fatally wedded to the effort
to transform eros into thanatos so that there will finally only be one
thing—the imposition of technoscientific rationality on the entire
globe. Such is the categorical imperative of late capitalism in its
Empire phase. Study of the image remains the way to combat it because
the image reveals what it conceals. In doing so image addresses us at
those psychological and emotional registers of our being that we are
losing contact with more each day. They can be reawakened only by desperate
measures.
For
since 9-11 we’ve been given three commands with respect to the
image. First, not to picture the World Trade Center (now cropped from
many movies) because, as one psychologist put it, that image now only
reawakens traumatic pain. Second, not to picture the faces of our own
dead lest that image deliver them from statistical abstraction and the
human costs of an unnecessary war become evident to the national consciousness.
Third,
not to view, or now that the cat’s out of the bag, to severely
restrict the viewing of (by all means cropped) images from Abu Ghraib.
This
last command however proved impossible because it violated a deeper
imperative. And so late in 2004 a new show took to the airwaves becoming
a megahit of unforseen proportions, the most watched show in Television
history, a surprising occurrence given the fact that the show played
every night, from 1:00 to 7:00 a.m., ending only when a sleepless nation
readied itself for work with its morning prayer, the morning news. Only
one restriction was placed on this new show. By order of Attorney General
Ashcroft no one was allowed to tape it under penalty of being incarcerated
in Guantanamo under suspicion of terrorist activity. (Those who don’t
know that everything we do electronically is now monitored must go immediately
to the back of the class.) There was one other condition, but it operated
at first spectrally. Each night our show was preceded by Ted Koppel’s
Nightline, which was always the same now—a processional of the
faces of our dead from the Iraq conflict one by one filling the screen
while their names entered our ear. Ninety minutes of this and then what
everyone awaited: “The Late Late Late Show.” It too takes
the same form nightly, the endless repeition for six hours of a film
composed of all the images that have now been collected from Abu Ghraib.
Uncropped. Looped into one another in a film that never ends—a
perpetual orgy. (Mel the Baptist is long forgotten, his film but a dim
prefiguring of a pleasure that has now found its proper form.) But be
reminded with the prohibition against taping. And so there they sit,
every night, a hungry public waiting for the show to begin, eager to
spend another sleepless night transfixed before those images that must
be seen again and again because they alone have the power to produce
a paroxysm of pleasure. Soon most viewers found it most satisfying to
watch the show with their neighbors and co-workers.
Super
Bowl type parties with wife swapping and group sex became a national
craze. Every night—starting at 1:00 a.m. sharp. But then almost
immediately despite the clamor one could now hear from every household
the show did not begin on time. 1:01, 1:05, 2:10, the hour of the wolf,
4:07, 6:15 as images from Koppel’s show spill over, invading the
temple of pleasure with the detritus of history. Until there comes a
desperateness in the audience as the pressure builds to wring some last
tortured pleasure from the night. Until eventually nothing remains of
the images the public craves except the last few that flicker in the
last few moments before dawn for viewers who now grope one another in
a violent effort to get off one last time before they vanish forever,
those images without which the audience cannot come, and nothing remains
but the faces of the dead sacrificed to what might finally be perceived
as another Amerikan folly. Only there’s no one left who could
see it that way. Only the undead gazing at the dead in blank incomprehension.
V.
Endgame: The Christ of Abu Ghraib
“And
if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it
is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims
burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames.”
Antonin
Artaud
And
yet there is in Abu Ghraib one photo that escapes the camera. The photo
of a hooded prisoner standing on a box with his arms outstretched and
electrical wires attached to his hands, his feet, his genitals, the
arms extended downward, palms open—in a gesture of supplication,
acceptance, forgiveness? This image is uncanny and arresting because
of its allusive, iconic power. For those aware of it, an unmistakable
allusion to the beginning of Beckett’s Endgame. “Me to play.”
For the general culture an echo of another kind, a resonance of the
image that enters the Amerikan psyche in the momentary arresting of
desire. For the allusion is unmistakable. How could the prisoner know
it? How dare he…. This is the Christ being given over by Pilate
to his crucifiers, extending his arms downward, his open palms toward
the crowd in the expression of his inconceivable willingness to take
on their sins.
There
is a delicacy to this figure and a tense athleticism. Forced on the
stage of another’s disorder, he performs as Artaud said the actor
must. “The actor is an athlete of the heart.” Which is why
this man triumphs over the camera. They will not be able to look at
this image for long and yet they will not be able to forget it. Like
the image of the dying Joe Christmas, it will haunt them. But it will
not be able to work within them because the psychic register it addresses
has already been rendered irretrievably dead. The image can only call
them to a shame they are no longer able to feel, a change of heart they
find impossible. Thanks to Mel Gibson and his ilk. And in spite of them
the miraculous occurs.
Artaud’s
theatre of cruelty is incarnated in Abu Ghraib. “An image is true
insofar as it is violent.” But this violence is the antithesis
of that practiced by Mel Gibson and the inmate inventors of Abu Ghraib.
Emotion here shatters all stimulus-response mechanisms. We are forced
to live out an agon of primary emotions in their power to strip away
all the hiding places of the psyche. We feel the full burden of death
and of what would be required to reverse the force of thanatos that
ideology and mass culture has planted and nurtured in us. Artaud’s
theatre of cruelty is the search for images that are cruel because they
wrench us free from the cycle of mechanical, repetitive sado-masochism
that porn, Gibson, and Abu Ghraib feed on. We are jolted back into life
as the struggle to purge our psyche of the forces of death. Gibson or
Artaud—that is the choice we face.
Mel
Gibson’s project, in effect, is to destroy the possibility of
Artaud’s theatre of cruelty by reducing our ability to feel to
the mechanical reproduction of shocks that jolt the conditioned subject
back into the only thing that is life for it. Cruelty. Artaud’s
project is to destroy that mechanism so that we can begin to feel again
the agon of what it is to feel. That project finds one of its transcendent
embodiments in the actions of a prisoner in Abu Ghraib who found a way
to signal through the flames.
Walter A. Davis
is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He is the
author of Deracination:
Historiocity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative. He can be
reached at: davis.65@osu.edu.
ENDNOTES
(1)
This is the method of interpretation I develop in Deracination. I offered
illustrations in two previous Counterpunch articles: January 6, 2002
and September 17, 2003.
(2)
Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone,” The New Yorker (May 24,
2004), p.42.
(3)
For a quick and insightful study of this concept see Todd McGowan, The
End of Dissatisfaction (New York: SUNY P, 2004).
(4)
On this phenomenon see the fine recent article in Counterpunch by Shakirah
Esmail-Hudani, “Inside Abu Ghraib: The Violence of the Camera.”
(May 17, 2004).
(5)
See the article by Robert Jay Lifton, “Conditions of Atrocity,”
The Nation (May 31,2004) pp.4-5.
(6)
See the article by Shankar Vedantam, “The Psychology of Torture”
in The Washington Post, May 20, 2004. See also Dr. Michael A. Weinstein
“Abu Ghraib Means Impunity” in PINR (Power and Interest
News Report) Dispatch of May 24, 2004.
Weekend
Edition June 12 / 13, 2004
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