The Aestheticization of Torture

[a at e8z.org]

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. 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."