[syndicate] The Aestheticization of Torture
integer at www.god-emil.dk
integer at www.god-emil.dk
Sat Nov 10 03:13:50 CET 2001
>
>http://visceral.net/aezthetk.organ
>
>
>The Aestheticization of Torture, Diffused Through History and the Future
>by David Goldberg
>
>
> From early July to mid-October the Herbst International Exhibition
>Hall displayed evidence of some of our species' most brutal cultural
>practices, on loan from the Criminal Medieval Museum of San Gimignano
>(Siena), Italy.
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I had heard of being "broken on/with the wheel,"
>didn't know it involved weaving the shattered limbs of its victims
>through the spokes, lifting them into a horizontal position on the
>wheel's axle and, according to a seventeenth-century German
>chronicler, leaving these "huge screaming puppet[s]" to be "picked
>apart by crows." The breaking actually took place before mounting,
>the crushing blows from wheel's iron tire creating "a sea monster, of
>raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed
>bones." Unfortunately the artistic earnestness behind the medieval
>engravings reproduced for the exhibition can be hard to appreciate
>through the fog of a postmodern vision clouded with images of
>concentration camps, atomic destruction, lynching photos, and the
>logging chain used to drag James Byrd Jr. to death in 1999. From the
>year 1200 to abolitionist pamphlets to CNN's website, torture has
>been aestheticized by the arts of writing and image-making, and
>hopelessly bound to the machinations and styles of religious,
>military, and folk-cultural repression, control and punishment.
>Complicating the already difficult relationship between visual
>representation and ideology is our species' impetus to refine and
>value the craftsmanship of its tools. This assembly of hand-made
>items had the power to draw forth a guilty admiration of an iron
>ring's geometric perfection, the blacksmithing skill behind an
>anthropomorphic cage, and the ghastly minimalism of wedges that
>victims were forced to ride with weighted ankles. "I like this one,"
>said one male visitor, breaking the grim silence that tended to
>accumulate in the exhibition hall. His female companion did not
>respond, as she was absorbed in the accompanying curatorial text. It
>offered supplementary descriptions of how, when and on whom the
>devices were used: "In various places at various times - in some
>regions of France and Germany until the early nineteenth century - a
>'bite' with a red-hot ripper was inflicted upon one breast of
>unmarried mothers, often whilst their creatures, splattered with
>maternal blood, writhed on the ground at their feet." Frequently,
>powerful descriptions like this also discussed how these
>centuries-old implements have been updated for contemporary use in
>the prisons and police basements of the post-colonial world: the
>spiked interrogation chair is now electrical, and modern head
>crushers are padded, so as not to leave any evidence of use. The text
>ostensibly took viewers out of a purely aesthetic interaction with
>the devices, to engage them with the taxonomy, geneology and
>evolution of torture. If we are expected to become aware of current
>human rights violations by looking at centuries-old implements of
>brutality, contemporary torture-related art and commentary on
>display, can we not become aware of future human rights violations by
>doing the same thing? Are there any current, highly-aestheticized
>means of social control and repression that will one day be collected
>in one place for the simultaneous purposes of admiration, indictment
>and historical benefit?
>
>Some sentence fragments pulled almost at random from the chapter on
>torture in Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" should set the
>stage: "...political technology of the body..." "...multiform
>instrumentation..." "...a micro-physics of power..." "...a perpetual
>battle..." "...power is exercised rather than possessed..." "...these
>relations go right down into the depths of society..."
>"...innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability..."
>Foucault is asking us to not only look at the history of the torture
>devices themselves, and at the ideology that surrounds them, but to
>be aware of this torture-power's diffusion into society at large.
>Contemplating the items on display shows that the art of torture's
>"pre-history" was assembled and refined from disparate, informal
>practices in every day life. Some of the simpler torture elements
>like hooks, bridles, pincers, and blades are no different from items
>used for animal husbandry, warfare, metal working, butchering and
>building. Even the more elaborate apparati that turned, hoisted,
>stretched and ground the victim had a recognizable geneology
>connecting them to mill wheels, threshers, wagons, pre-industrial
>cranes and elevators. Similarly, if we look at one "post-history" of
>torture which inherited a shadow body of medical knowledge regarding
>the limits of human physiology and psychology, we see the specialized
>devices that were used to wrench open and mutilate human orifices as
>unmistakable prototypes of modern surgical instruments like the
>"Sawyer Rectal Retractor with Sklar Grip? Handle," the vast array of
>flower-like speculums used in gynecology, and the
>fantastically-shaped tools that open cavities, eyes, ears, and
>throats for medical inquiry. Dark iron and hard wood on display at
>the exhibition has been replaced with stainless steel and rubber
>available for purchase online. Though the intuitive connection
>between the two practices is disturbing, it is not meant to equate
>surgery itself with torture. However a Google search with the phrase
>"unnecessary surgery" yields over 100000 links that represent the
>opinions of doctors, citizens acting in the role of medical
>watchdogs, the survivors of botched operations, investigative
>journalists, and naturopaths. While surgery is frequently a sure
>means of extending life, the very real recognition that it can be
>misapplied illustrates one of Foucault's "innumerable points of
>confrontation," in this case between the medical establishment and
>the patient's human rights. Being aware of this struggle while
>perusing the illustrated online catalogs for medical instrument
>companies like Sklar Instruments, Allen Surgical, and the American
>Surgical Instruments Corporation introduces critical noise to a
>normally-clear channel reserved for commerce between suppliers and
>consumers. Behind the visual display of digitized line drawings,
>professionally-lit photographs and airbrush paintings of the
>instruments on these corporate websites, lurk the hysterectomies,
>circumcisions, tonsilectomies, caesarian sections and arthroscopic
>procedures. As surgical technique continues to develop towards
>infiltration rather than invasion of the body, shrinking its
>implements and relying increasingly on the reflection of energy
>waves, what is medically necessary risks obfuscation by what is
>convenient. Fortunately some future curator collecting today's
>"primitive" instruments for a museum show will not have to look back
>on and contextualize medical instrument trade shows that featured
>live demonstrations.
>
>Along with the technological outgrowths of medieval torture are the
>harder-to-catalogue paths of cultural dispersion: Foucault's
>"perpetual battle." As an African-American it was hard to look at the
>collars, stocks, shackles and chains without contemplating the Middle
>Passage, slave-breaking practices in the Caribbean, and
>slave-disciplining systems on plantations throughout the Americas.
>While African Slavery in North America gathered steam in 1690, people
>were being broken on the wheel in the squares of Europe. A passage
>from the exhibition catalog states: "hundreds of depictions from the
>span 1450-1750 show throngs of plebeians and the well-born lost in
>rapt delight around a good wheeling." It is a short cultural
>hyperlink to Cairo, Illinois on a night in 1909, where a mass of
>people gathered beneath the electric lights studding the ironwork of
>Hustler's Arch on Commercial Avenue to witness a lynching. This scene
>would grace a circulated postcard reproduced in James Allen's book
>"Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America." Like medieval
>torture, American lynching was a hybrid of terrorism, law enforcement
>and religious ideology. But because medieval torture devices and
>representations of their use are treated as objects of art history,
>while lynching photography is part of mass media, their abilities to
>seize our consciousness are very different. Because of a subliminal
>awareness of racist violence in America, a hypothetical exhibition of
>American slavery's capture and control devices presented with the
>same goals as the Herbst torture show would be less likely to elicit
>viewers' ironic or heartfelt admiration of neck-ring craftsmanship,
>the twisted genius of a treadmill dedicated to punishment, or the
>packing efficiency of a slave ship's hold. Not only would
>representing the historical torture of African Americans reveal its
>miscegenation with that of Europeans, but slide effortlessly into
>aesthetic images of "happy" servants on our food packaging, cast iron
>cariacatures, tapdancing automata, white entertainers in blackface,
>and virulent mockery in cartoons, radio and early television. The
>emergence and superficial dilution of African American torture-media
>marks the transition to our contemporary democratization of
>humiliation and market-driven disruption of human relationships. We
>overlook the menacing spirit which endlessly repeats the images and
>narratives of "reality television," talk shows and advertising at
>superhuman scales; because so many of the bodies are white and
>beautiful, sculpted by exercise machines, regimented diets, and harsh
>photographic sessions that are readily compared (if only ironically)
>to torture practices. It is as if dizzying narcissism has prevented
>us from imagining the system in its totality. This is our present,
>directly descended from Inquisitions and witch-hunts, their systems
>of fear-induction softened, turned lighter than air, and completely
>decentralized (unless you are a poor). In two hundred years, an
>exhibition anologous to the Herbst torture show won't show
>televisions, non-ergonomic computer keyboards, or the cars that
>immobilize us in traffic for hours at a time. Instead of Foucault,
>this future exhibition might invoke the declassfied CIA torture
>manual which states that the goal of the art is to induce regression,
>rendering the subject open to suggestion. Recommended tactics include
>humiliation, the disruption of regular physiological cycles, constant
>shifting of the "rules" of victim interaction, and the threat of pain
>rather than its actual administration. With that theoretical context
>established, some representation of our contemporary media and its
>attendant economic system serve as a harsh reminder of what the
>species is capable of, and probably still doing. In a spirit derived
>from our laughing at the very commercials that insult us, future
>people will doubtlessly admire and cringe at the facility with which
>we are "broken."
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