Counting the turns of a screw

When The Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel's Steven Bradbury appeared before Congress on Valentine's Day, he came bearing the present of comforting clarifications.

In truth, what he gave was more of the continual clouding of our relation between state power and illicit violence.

Bradbury was there, it seemed, to assuage the "reasonable" fears about America's policy of interrogation that many, in Bradbury's eyes, misconstrue as torture. It was meant to affirm how carefully the U.S. operates during its enhanced interrogation so as to measure its application of "pressure" in the search for intelligence. "The program [of interrogation,]" Bradbury told the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, "is operated in a professional manner, and all the methods of interrogation authorized for the program are subject to strict limitations and safeguards."

According to Bradbury, while water-boarding is no longer being used -- though he spoke of it in the present tense -- if it were to be used in the future:

"First, the Director of the CIA, together with the Director of National Intelligence, would have to determine that the new method is necessary to obtain information on terrorist attack planning or the location of senior al Qaeda leadership; second, the Attorney General would have to conclude that the use of the method, subject to all conditions, limitations, and safeguards proposed for its use, would be lawful under current law (and that includes the requirements of the Detainee Treatment Act, the Military Commissions Act, and Common Article 3); and, three, even if the Attorney General concludes that the method’s use is lawful, the President would have to personally authorize its use. In addition, Congress would be appropriately notified—including, per the commitment from the Attorney General, specific notification to the Judiciary Committees if there were a plan to add waterboarding to the program. Let me be clear, though: There has been no determination by the Justice Department that the use of waterboarding, under any circumstances, would be lawful under current law."

In other words, while water-boarding has not been determined lawful "under any circumstances," it remains lawful under certain circumstances, as determined by the Intelligence Directors and the Attorney General. Furthermore, the OLC simply does not consider the technique to be torture. The standard that "shocks the conscience" is not met because for those making the decision there may not be a conscience vulnerable to shock. The standard of extreme mental and physical suffering is rejected by the OLC because the CIA method is regulated, regimented, and much closer to to modern variants of the Khmer Rouge and French in Algeria than the medieval excesses of the Spanish Inquisition.



On the one hand, there should be nothing surprising in this. As Talal Asad outlines in his essay, "Reflections on Cruelty and Torture," the codification of pain has long been a means for modern liberal-democracies to integrate the very processes of power they denounce as antithetical to their "values." His prime example is Israel, which forbids the use of torture, but allows "pressure" to extract confessions and garner evidence. How many turns of the screw are allowed? The answer to this question of how much is given by a "classified annex . . . defining [what is] permissible." What is permissible is that which is not deemed gratuitous to the objective ends. In the U.S., defenders of the administration -- like members of the House Subcommittee or Supreme Court Justice Scalia or Bradbury and John Yoo -- use the objective ends, the circumstances, to eliminate the consideration of means. For Asad, this is just one example in a culturally complex relation of "pain" and permission.

On the other, the grotesque rhetorical gestures of Mr. Bradbury and his many ideological defenders call to mind another complex relation of violence and law, now unavoidable:

"Fascist movements seek the monopoly of non-legitimate violence: that is why they require the rule of law, which they undermine. They seek to overturn the age-old impulse and wisdom of politics: that to guarantee my self-preservation and the protection of my individually usurped property, I must grant the same guarantees to the persons and property of others. Fascist movements want universal law to apply so that they may have no rivals in their use of non-legitimate violence." (Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law)

Abdications

In order to separate ourselves from our griefs, our last resort is delirium; subject to its distractions, we no longer meet our afflictions: parallel to our pains and adjacent to our melancholies, we divagate in a salutary darkness.

--E. M. Cioran, “Abdications”

On the Sixth Day, Without Reserve

"Anyone who says life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being of animals to have intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh."

--J.M. Coetzee, "The Lives of Animals"

Alessandra Sanguinetti's photographs of Argentine ranch life go by the title, On the Sixth Day. They are images saturated with the culmination of Genesis: man given dominion over fish, fowl, and all creatures upon the earth.

The series of photographs begins with the lavish textures of farming and the hard rhythms of domestication. The grass is rich green, the dirt road well worn, and a dog, head dropped, peers into the lens. The title is "stray," but his muzzle suggests a sweet menace, a posture curious but trained for the protection of space, leaving the photography as the likely homeless interloper. Who then is making the territorial claim?

We know this. We have strayed into a strange world and perhaps will make a claim upon it, just as this dog might well have once been a stray only to become a guard dog, taken in as a family pet and a farmland tool of production. From the first photograph in the set there is the sense that the space behind this dog promises an experience at once anticipated and unpredictable.

The elements anticipated come from a nostalgia in the "free" form of the life and death. The farm may be commercial but it is not industrial. Sanguinetti strengthens this sense by shooting so much at day's dawn or close. Aesthetically, this is a standard photographic strategy. But ideologically the long shadows and cool tones seduce with a great sense of mixture: the house is a blurry backdrop for the yard full of roaming and mingling chickens, geese, turkeys; and they are just relief for the foregrounded duckling trying to escape its cardboard box in the back of a pickup.

Escape. The fight for life. And so while the images feed the mixture of outdoor and indoor, the screen-door slam marking of what makes one calloused--of ritual and routine, of the early morning and coming night toss of feed--the safe, homely familiarities are sliced through with the bloody realities.

At first the profile of the pig and the stare of the rooster close in the frame, as if in dialog. A cow's bellowing profile, the field play of horse, foal, emu. Then, only after this, a closer, more intimate portrait of a dead rabbit before a hunter's boots and the large, happy tongue of a panting dog, and there, like an afterthought that becomes the central sign, the signature of the cycle: two eggs out of focused, nestled in the grass.



After this we will encounter forms of killing and of that Genesis dominion. A wounded horse fights with wide, wild eyes against a tether. Like the hare it too will be stripped of its hide. Thus Sanguinetti exposes, without reserve.

Bursting on the broken backbone of an age

To describe the seeming connection of disparate expressions, to speak of a literature, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam called upon the language of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Comparing the unfolding fan of seamed phenomena to the lines that stitch together a literature, Mandelstam gave poetry the presence of a breathing, dying, remembering body.


He writes of language itself as a field of duration. Not as a medium of accumulation or the expression of progress, but words as both fighting to still the living flux of time and themselves the unhardened breath of being; elastic and ghosting in a commanding potency, while vulnerable to the forces that will, it is promised, diminish, deaden, and silence them:

"The age will cease its noise, culture will fall asleep, the people will be regenerated after having been given over their best energies . . . and all this current will draw after it the fragile ship of the human word into the open seas of the future, where there is no sympathetic understanding, where sad commentary replaces the fresh wind of the enmity and the sympathy of contemporaries."

Celan, in the wake of the Holocaust, described poetry as a message adrift, a bottled bundle battling to find its proper shoreline. With his ever acute sense of isolation, the analogy accentuates the islands of reception. For Mandelstam, writing before the Holocaust, but with a desperate sense of that age to come, poetry moves through those entropic waters polluted by history, linking the future to its past through the memory of what cannot be purified.

The words move with the waters, defined by their weakening and endurance, like an image flashing on the blood-sotted screen of a closed lid. They thus bind us to the most necessary expressions of the past, while the poison waters, like thinning or clotting blood, risks wrecking the reception:

My age, my beast -- who will be able
to look into your eyes
who will glue together with his blood
two centuries' vertebrae?
Blood the builder gushes
through the throat from earthly things,
the hanger-on is only trembling
on the sill of future days.

Blood the builder gushes
through the throat from earthly things
and like a burning fish it throws
warm sea-cartilage on the shore
and out of the high bird-net,
from the damp blocks of azure,
pours, pours indifferently
onto your mortal wound.

To liberate the captive age,
to make a start at the new world
the passages of knotted days
must be connected by a flute.
That's the age that rocks the wave
with human melancholy
and in the grass the adder breathes
to the age's golden measure.

And the buds will go on swelling
and the spirit of green will burst,
but your backbone has been shattered,
my beautiful, pitiful age.
Cruel and weak, you'll look back
smiling senselessly
like an animal that used to be supple
on the tracks of your own paws.

--O.M., "The Age" 1923 (Clarence Brown translation).