The Subject of Torture

Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film

Hilary Neroni

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780231539142
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Considering representations of torture in such television series as 24, Alias, and Homeland; the documentaries Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), and Standard Operating Procedure (2008); and "torture porn" feature films from the Saw and Hostel series, Hilary Neroni unites aesthetic and theoretical analysis to provide a unique portal into theorizing biopower and its relation to the desiring subject. Her work ultimately showcases film and television studies' singular ability to expose and potentially disable the fantasies that sustain torture and the regimes that deploy it.

1

TORTURE, BIOPOWER, AND THE DESIRING SUBJECT

COMPETING REPRESENTATIONS

Recent years have seen a remarkable rise in scenes of torture on television and in film. How the scenes are depicted and situated in narratives reveals not only America’s various cultural reactions to the attacks of September 11, 2001, but also the latest development in a far-reaching ideological shift that impacts every facet of contemporary existence. The various deployments are far from simple or one-sided; instead, these violent scenes are often used in opposing ways in different films or television series. Since September 11, 2001, however, some clear patterns across these various representations have begun to establish themselves. By examining these patterns, we can understand the significance of torture and the reasons for its growing popularity. It is impossible to grasp contemporary torture without a thorough investigation of the different ways that contemporary film and television represents it. Representations of torture hold the key to the practice of torture and the belief system that underlies it because they interact with the fantasy that supports contemporary torture. It is not by accident that authorities seeking to justify torture turn to media representations in their defense of what seems like an indefensible practice. On the other hand, it is also through media representations that we can find a way out of the practice of torture. Representations both provide the justification for torture and reveal that torture is not our destiny today.

Some representations depict the body as an information depository that torture can mine, while others present the body as enigmatic and thus resistant to torture. Some representations concern torture as a policing technique, while others investigate torture as a site of sexual perversity. But the decisive question is simply whether a film or television series generally perpetuates the belief that torture is effectual or ineffectual as a fact-finding procedure. This assumption is tied, I argue, to other more fundamental assumptions about the body and about subjectivity. Throughout this book, I will be investigating these contemporary patterns of torture, what stance the narrative takes toward the violence, and how it is represented visually. I will begin, however, with a theoretical investigation into the ideological and philosophical assumptions underlying the repeated tropes within representations of torture. Such an investigation into the assumptions that inform depictions of torture will thus shed light on the role of the exponential rise in depictions of torture in the contemporary world. These assumptions provide the ideological background for every depiction of torture, and they inhere in these depictions through the possibilities and impossibilities that govern them.

Representations of torture suggest two general ways to approach and define the body. One type of body manifests itself in the official or accepted justification for torture. The other body emerges in the failure of the practice of torture to align itself completely with the official justification. The first body is a biopolitical body, a vital body oriented around its own flourishing and survival. The second body is one that doesn’t coincide with itself. This body that doesn’t coincide with itself has a precise name in psychoanalytic theory—the subject. Contrasting the official justification for torture with the practice of torture permits us to see the difference between the biopolitical body and the psychoanalytic subject. These two competing theories of the body function as the basis for the understanding of torture in the chapters that follow.

The biopolitical body and the psychoanalytic subject are not two new approaches to the body that emerge with the renewed popularity of torture. But they are organized in a very specific way in relation to our new fixation on torture. One approach sees the body as a simple biological vessel whose worth is dependent solely on its survival, and because of this the body can be controlled, contained, or eliminated, depending on what is best for the survival of the greatest number of people. Utilitarian in nature, this approach takes a quantitative approach to the good. It adheres either to the ideas of evolutionary theorists and those who champion biology above all else or to vitalist thinkers who locate an inherent value in life itself. The perpetuation of life becomes, according to this way of thinking, the driving force behind political and social decisions.

Beginning from this position, one believes that the body exists as a fact repository whose information was stored in an archive that just needs to be accessed by medical procedures, health initiatives, or even torture.¹ This biological approach to the body predominates today and provides the theoretical foundation for torture. If the body is nothing but a biological entity that wants to survive and flourish, torturing the body is the best way to retrieve the secrets that it harbors. Under the threat of pain and death, the body reveals the truths that it contains.

The other conception of the body, which is not nearly so widespread, rejects the idea that the body has an inherent vitality and that it aims at survival. The origin of psychoanalysis lies in the fact that subjects do not seek their own good but instead endeavor constantly to undermine their own self-interest. The problem for psychoanalysis is not aiding subjects in overcoming their egoism—which separates it from the confessional and from moral philosophy—but in helping them to avoid completely destroying themselves through their various modes of enjoyment. The body, as understood by psychoanalysis, is then entrenched within a subjectivity that enjoys itself through painful repetition and thus does not aim at its own good. It is a body we don’t have access to, a body that traumatizes and delights us, a body that plays a significant role in our desires and yet that we cannot totally control when it comes to satisfying those desires. This body is a body that can only exist in its connection to our psyche, and it must be understood through the complex relationship between mind and body, which is precisely where psychoanalysis places its emphasis. Because of this mind/body connection and its unpredictable results, this body is difficult to know or to control, and it is difficult to elicit any information from this body that really makes sense or is useful in a direct way. Dealing with this body, then, requires other ways of thinking about the greater good and politics.²

When Descartes first conceives the modern subject, he posits a strict division between the mind and the body. This dualistic approach both shaped subsequent centuries of philosophizing and earned him the opprobrium of many thinkers in the late twentieth century. According to Descartes, “there is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible.”³ Though Descartes theorizes a divide, he places much more emphasis on one side of the divide than the other. If subjectivity for him does include the body, it is nonetheless the mind that predominates. As he makes clear in the Meditations, the mind, not the body, is the essence of the self. The body serves as a source of doubt—we can’t trust our bodily sensations—while the mind provides epistemological certainty through the act of thinking. Contemporary emphasis on the body has emerged to counter this one-sidedness of the modern conception of subjectivity, but the result has been an inverse one-sidedness. Today’s common sense views the body as determinative in relation to the mind. This is evident in the privileged position that neuroscience holds as a popular explanatory device. Neuroscience can demonstrate the lack of any autonomy on the part of the mind in relation to the physiology of the brain. Psychoanalysis does not at all reject the insights of contemporary neuroscience, but it does insist on sustaining the idea of a split between the mind and body.

Taking the Cartesian conception as its starting point, psychoanalysis rejects both the apotheosis of the mind and the reduction of the mind to the body. According to the psychoanalytic approach, subjectivity emerges through the collision of mind and body, a collision that produces desire. Desire is born out of the intersection between the mind and the body. Desire is not reducible to biological impulses, and, in fact, it often compels subjects to act against these impulses. Unlike the knowable body, the subject of desire bespeaks the ineffectiveness of torture because the body does not hold the key to the subject. The body is instead marked by its enigmatic status. The subject’s relationship to bodily pleasure or violence is unpredictable, and the subject doesn’t always do what is best for the body. For example, in terms of bodily health, subjects notoriously undermine it through excessive eating or ingesting substances that harm the body immediately or in the long term. Though it is counterintuitive, the subject has the capacity to enjoy its suffering and thereby work to sustain it rather than put an end to it.

Both the biopolitical and the psychoanalytic body are showcased in recent cinematic and televisual depictions of torture, and they signify very different projects. When investigating the embodied nature of the representations of torture, these two theoretical positions, biopolitics and psychoanalysis, are essential to consider. They provide the foundation for the contemporary torture fantasy and for the possibility of articulating an alternative that might disrupt this fantasy. These theories have long been influential on film and television studies and have long been at odds when confronting the question of the body itself.

My basic claim is that these two theoretical approaches to the body are thoroughly opposed to each other. One cannot reconcile biopolitics with psychoanalysis or the machinelike body with the desiring subject. There is, I contend, no possible compromise position.⁴ Our contemporary political predicament depends on which approach we decide on, and this decision will also determine the role that torture will play in our political future. Today, biopower represents the ruling ideological structure and remaining within the paradigm of biopower guarantees that society will continue to live under a regime of torture.

THE BIOPOLITICAL BODY

Though I often use the terms interchangeably, there is an explicit distinction between biopower and biopolitics.⁵ Theorists who analyze biopower see it as a new form of power that focuses on the living body rather than on the threat of death, which is the way that traditional forms of power operated.⁶ These theorists are uniformly critical of biopower. Theorizing biopower as the most recent form of power does not entail endorsing it but rather critiquing it and trying to discover a mode of resistance appropriate to this new form of power. This mode of resistance, according to many of the theorists of biopower, is biopolitics, a politics that takes the body and its pleasure rather than the desire of the subject as its starting point. The apotheosis of the body as resistance to biopower finds its most straightforward expression in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who conceive of the body without organs as the opposite of the psychoanalytic desiring subject. For them, psychoanalysis is part of the problem rather than the solution.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that the body exists independently of its subjection to the signifier, a subjection that turns our attention to specific organs rather than to the body as an assemblage. The body becomes reified by the despotism of the signifier. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “There is a primacy of the machinic assemblage of bodies over tools and goods, a primacy of the collective assemblage of enunciation over language and words.”⁷ In other words, the body is more fundamental than the way it is used or the way it is taken up in language. It is the way the body speaks the words rather than the words themselves. The emphasis here on the body, combined with the critique of language, reveals the distance that separates biopolitical theorists from psychoanalysis. But, at the same time, their unapologetic investment in the body bespeaks a failure to break fully from the regime of biopower that they criticize.⁸

Though the regime of biopower and the articulation of biopolitics are distinct and in some basic sense opposed, there is a common ground that the two share, and it is this common ground that psychoanalysis contests. Both biopower and biopolitics view the body as the sole political battleground, and both see subjectivity as inessential or epiphenomenal in relation to the body. According to the premises of both biopower and biopolitics, the body has no necessary relation to signification but can be approached in its immediacy. This is why I will theorize biopower and biopolitics as similar projects, despite the explicit opposition that the proponents of the latter advance against the former. The great theoretical divide today is not between biopower and the biopolitical opposition to it. It is between biopower and biopolitics, on the one side, and psychoanalysis, on the other. For psychoanalysis, one cannot theorize the social order or politics without an idea of subjectivity as expressed in desire, enjoyment, fear, anxiety, and so on. But for biopower, and even for the biopolitics criticizing it, this aspect of subjectivity is unimportant if not deceptive. These aspects of subjectivity are considered utterly ideological and therefore misleading. This is why biopolitics speaks of bodies rather than subjects. Psychoanalysis certainly theorizes the unconscious (and its expression in desire and so on) as embroiled in ideology, but not as wholly within ideology. The potential for subjects to react against their own interest or against what ideology is asking of them is an essential part of subjectivity and is not quantifiable. While biopolitics and psychoanalysis are truly in opposition around the idea of the subject, they are united in their recent attacks on the impact of biopower. To understand biopower, it is essential to begin with its analysis by biopolitics since biopolitical thinkers, much more than psychoanalytic theorists, have made it their business to grasp how biopower functions and why it dominates today.

Theorizing the effects of biopower largely takes on momentum with Michel Foucault’s work on the body and its relation to politics. Foucault sees politics as revolving around the body itself and the use that power makes of bodies. For him, modern politics posits the body as the only essential aspect of a person, and this is the way the modern state has power over the individual. In contrast to thinkers like Kant and Hegel, who emphasize freedom, equality, and other political values, Foucault believes that the survival of the body becomes the focal point of every social institution. The politics of the body becomes a powerful way to control people, and Foucault refers to it as biopower. Biopower has not always been the predominant form that power takes, but it has taken on increasing importance since the nineteenth century.

Foucault sees biopower as the politicization of biology. Within the regime of biopower, biology becomes not just one science among others but the privileged site for the deployment of power. This begins with the consideration of humanity as a species. In his lecture course at the Collège de France entitled “Security, Territory, Population,” Foucault describes the emergence of biopower in the following terms: “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is roughly what I have called bio-power.”⁹ Biopower concerns itself with the betterment and the survival of the species, and this justifies the measures of security that leave bodies under an ever-increasing control. Power must constantly care for the bodies that constitute the species.

Biopower, according to Foucault, emerges out of the logic of the Christian pastoral. Pastoral power takes care of those who belong to its flock and occupies itself with every aspect of the lives of those it oversees. Though regimes of biopower are secular rather than religious, they have imported, he argues, the Christian pastoral into their deployment of power. This is why Foucault uses interchangeably the terms biopower and pastoral power. The Christian pastoral doesn’t retain the devotion of its members through the threat of death but through the act of giving life. This is exactly how Foucault sees biopower functioning.

The emergence of biopower changes the way that power operates. As Foucault sees it, sovereign power—the traditional form of power—creates a sense of fear in those it governs. It punishes those who disobey and it avails itself of death to punish the most egregious offenders of its law. In the lecture course entitled “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault proposes that biopower reigns in a quite different manner. He says, “Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.”¹⁰ The turn from sovereignty to biopower entails a shift in our way of thinking about power. It is not vertical but horizontal. Power is productive, not repressive.

Power exists within intersubjective relations, and thus power operates at every social level. It is not simply imposed from above but manifests itself even at the bottom of the social hierarchy. That is to say, even those who are the victims of social power can act to perpetuate this power. Foucault abandons the idea that oppression involves external oppressive force acting on a group o...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Confronting the Abu Ghraib Photographs
• 1. Torture, Biopower, and the Desiring Subject
• 2. The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer in Post-9/11 Documentary Films
• 3. Torture Porn and the Desiring Subject in Hostel and Saw
• 4. 24, Jack Bauer, and the Torture Fantasy
• 5. The Biodetective Versus the Detective of the Real in Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland
• 6. Alias and the Fictional Alternative to Torture
• Notes
• Index