CAMP, COLONY, COUNTERTERRORISM
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I will also later argue with relation to
Standard Operating Procedure, Guantánamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ and The Road to Guantánamo, that testimony also has an activist political potential. Although
Guantánamo remains open, the legal process would not have achieved as many gains against it without the vital testimony of inmates, their families, and their lawyers, which has found an important platform in cultural representations. The political reach of testimony may be uncertain, and it is certainly not the only representational strategy available to those seeking to challenge the discursive operations of sovereign governmentality, but it is certainly a mode of address that can gesture towards an ethical connection such as those discussed in the previous chapter. Discipline can perhaps not be undone by testimony, but it nonetheless has a vital recuperative function, aiding to some extent both the metaphysical recovery and political rehabilitation of the victim.
2.3.2: (Neo)Colonial Cultural Racialisations
Scholars have observed that Agamben’s philosophical approach occludes the specificity of the material conditions in which the biopolitics he describes take place. Judith Butler observes that “[i]f bare life, conceived as biological minimum, becomes a condition to which we are all reducible, then we might find a certain universality in this condition.”95
However, she continues by observing that to ascribe universality to the notion of the biological minimum ignores the racialisation that so often accompanies the political constitution of a population as bare life, occluding the ways that “this power functions differentially, to target and manage certain populations, to derealise the humanity of certain subjects”.96 As discussed above, Algerian Muslims were excluded from full French citizenship, and there existed, of course, a connection between this quite deliberate political disenfranchisement and a discourse of native inferiority that operated to authorise economic exploitation and disciplinary violence. In order to entrench privilege and legitimise the financial exploitation of Algerian land and resources, a discourse around the subhumanity of the native Muslim Algerian arose. As Vidal-Naquet asserts, “the Algerian was legally a citizen of France, [but] he was not a Frenchman,” and “in the eyes of many Frenchmen, including many of those
94
Ewa Ziarek, “Evil and Testimony: Ethics ‘After’ Postmodernism”, Hypatia 18: 2 (2003), p. 203.
95 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 67. 96 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 68.
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responsible for forming French public opinion, he was not even a human being.”97
For example, the racism of pied noir attitudes towards Algerians is demonstrated by the fact that the term frequently used to describe roundups of Algerians, ratonnade, is also a word used to describe the process of purging a building of rats.
The construction of knowledge about the subject race was essential to this operation. Sartre writes in “Colonialism is a System” that “[o]ne of the functions of racism is to compensate the latent universalism of bourgeois liberalism: since all human beings have the same rights, the Algerian will be made a subhuman.”98 In order to circumambulate the obligation that human rights must apply universally, racist discourses describe populations as not entirely human in order to facilitate their availability to exclusionary biopolitical practices. In order to allow colonial subjugation of native populations, discourses of natural superiority had to surround the coloniser, supported by a body of evidence that purported to prove the natural inferiority of the native population. Richard Price writes that knowledge systems “are essential for empire.” He continues:
Naturally, the knowledge systems that are used in empire seldom capture the realities of their subjects’ lives. But this hardly matters, since the purpose of such systems is to legitimate the superiority that the colonisers know they enjoy. If the knowledge that the colonisers possess is to be functional in imperial culture, it must reinforce and feed the colonisers’ own view of themselves and of what they are actually doing in their imperial role.99
Such knowledge systems may produce volumes of data and some of the analyses may be persuasively descriptive, but their political function – their responsibility to create a discourse in terms of which colonial rule can be described as therapeutic, benevolent, and civilising – is their primary characteristic. Paul Gilroy draws connections between this form of knowledge and the operations of biopolitical violence when he observes that the intellectual prehistory of ideas such as racial hygiene – which materially contributed to the violence of the Holocaust – can be traced to the relationship between power and epistemological inquiry in German
97 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Torture: Cancer of Democracy, France and Algeria 1954-62, trans. by Barry Richard
(London: Penguin, 1963), p. 17.
98 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Colonialism is a System”, in Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. by Azzedine
Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001 [1964]), p. 18.
99 Richard Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 154. Emphasis in original.
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colonies.100 The production of knowledge about subject peoples and about the kinds of interventions appropriate to their effective administration is a central feature of this discourse, and literary production is of course not innocent of this function. The Centurions, for example, and its history as a teaching resource in military schools, demonstrates clearly that literature is one of the material factors that contribute to the discursive development of a field of intelligibility – a knowledge in terms of which situations can be explained – in which violent colonial interventions seem natural and necessary.
Said notes that the European scientist “constructs [the native], and the very act of construction is a sign of imperial power over recalcitrant phenomena, as well as a confirmation of the dominating culture and its “naturalisation”.”101 The strategic collection and organisation of knowledge about colonised people is used to objectively “prove” the superiority of the colonising culture, and to naturalise abuses as diverse as slavery, the sustained exploitation of resources, and the aforementioned systematic disenfranchisement of native populations. Fanon refers to this discourse when he stresses that “the settler is right when he speaks of knowing ‘them’ well. For it is the settler who has bought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence.”102
The purpose of attributing monstrosity to colonised people is to bolster the image of the coloniser as an improving, therapeutic and benevolent presence. As Said remarks, this is “a cultural discourse relegating and confining the non-European to a secondary racial, cultural, ontological status”, and “[t]his secondariness is, paradoxically, essential to the primariness of the European.”103
Without the imagined brutality of the native, which Fanon calls “the native correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority”, the settler would have no authority; for this reason, the apparatus of colonial rationality sets about measuring and documenting this barbarism in order to justify its own supremacy.104 Significantly, narratives such as The Centurions represent a form of such politically instrumental knowledge about the colonial apparatus and its subject races: as well as providing a narrative that is affirmative of French imperialism, Lartéguy both reproduces and reinforces colonial racism towards Asians from Indochina by referring to them as “termites” and “sexless insects.”105
100 Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (London: Allen
Lane, 2000), pp. 141-143.
101 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul Ltd., 1978), pp. 145-6. Emphasis in original. 102 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 28.
103 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1993), p. 70. 104
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008 (1952)), p. 73.
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Such logics are also visibly operational in the GWOT. Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin observe that much post-9/11 media discourse that represents Muslims unfavourably tends to place emphasis on understanding difference “racially – as an epidermal schema where the other-who-disrupts-the-nation can be recognised and marked out as visibly different on the grounds of ethnicity.”106
As is well-known, such rhetoric became commonplace in the approaches to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the international Islamist terrorist became a cultural bogeyman. Julie Mertus and Kristin Rawls discuss the way that the terrorist was constructed in the American media as a racialised totem:
As a result of the September 11 attacks, Americans – indeed, anyone, according to Bush, who “loves freedom” – are now a nation of victims, and the perpetrator, an entire group of people – Muslims. [...] Just as the actual, physical victims of terrorism were deemed immaterial, so now the actual perpetrators are immaterial. Arab and South Asian Muslims now represent the crime that was done to the American people.107
Whilst this may seem sweeping, in spirit it is correct. As seen above, inclusion in the category of “terrorist” entails the exclusion from the human community and the loss of one’s human rights as a detainee. The architects of the GWOT differentiate between ally and enemy, then, on explicitly biopolitical grounds, as Islamist terrorism and mainstream Islam become conflated in the public imagination. It is important to observe that anti-Muslim prejudice does not work straightforwardly as a form of racism, because “Muslim” is not a racially determined identity; nonetheless, it is an identity that has been the target of a great deal of reification, oversimplification, scapegoating and prejudice and that is often used in such a way as it is understood to refer simply to Arab populations. Of course, the effects of this discourse – increased surveillance and suspicion, for example, and indiscriminate attacks on communities – operate in ways that are very similar to the effects of racism. Indeed, the very heterogeneity of Islam may be what allows it to attract such a wide array of prejudice, as it can represent a great deal of things to which racists object.
106 Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, “Muslims in the Frame”, Interventions, 12:2 (2010), p. 149. 107
Julie Mertus and Kristin Rawls, “Crossing the Line: Insights from Foucault on the United States and Torture” in Discipline and Punishment in Global Politics: Illusions of Control, ed. by Janie Leatherman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 37.
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GWOT discourse mobilises colonial ways of thinking about Otherness that have historically been mobilised in favour of extreme violence. Because their callous and morally impenetrable tactics, such as suicide bombings or the use of human shields, indicate that terrorists “cannot recognise or comprehend standard means”, the terrorist fighter is seen as an objectified figure who “cannot be rehabilitated because they cannot be reconciled with our system of logic and justice”.108
This enemy was all the more amenable to exaggeration as they could hide in shadows, masquerading as the neighbour, and use unsophisticated tactics to devastating effect. Anticommunist rhetorics of the Cold War and Vietnam eras can often be read in these representations, as they fed upon popular memory of past conflicts; Christina Schwenkel observes that neoliberal US discourse constructing “the uncivilised and barbaric communist Other, in particular, reinscribes essentialist binaries that celebrate the humanitarian and economic achievements of “modern” capitalist societies while berating the presumed moral failures and deficiencies of noncapitalist ones.”109 Such moral bifurcations were common in the exceptionalist rhetoric of the early GWOT, according to which, as Trevor McCrisken summarises, “US foreign policy should not be regarded as anything other than benign” because “ultimately, the United States is a force for good in the world.”110
American values were made to appear unequivocally positive and universally applicable in contrast to the absolute moral and political bankruptcy represented by the Islamist terrorist.
The terrorist is a figure with subhuman status, who is “included in the community in the form of being able to be killed.”111
Judith Butler’s concept of grievability is also relevant here. Her argument is that pro-war media discourses dehumanise distant populations, with the result that they are often not conceived of as fully human. They are, consequently, not seen as “grievable”, which means that their deaths do not register as significant deaths. Butler stresses that ungrievable populations are conceptually distinct from bare life, because her concept of an ungrievable population refers to a foreign population whose deaths during conflict are either unreported or dismissed as irrelevant during news coverage, whereas bare life refers to a category of persons radically removed from the political community and legal protections in a relation of exclusive inclusivity.112 Nevertheless, the concept of
108 David Trend, The Myth of Media Violence (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 69. 109
Christina Schwenkel, “From John McCain to Abu Ghraib: Tortured Bodies and Historical Unaccountability of U.S. Empire”, American Anthropologist, 111: 1 (2009), p. 34.
110 Trevor B. McCrisken, “George W. Bush, American Exceptionalism and the Iraq War”, in America and Iraq: Policy-making, Intervention and Regional Politics, ed. by David Ryan and Patrick Kiely (Hoboken: Taylor &
Francis, 2008) p. 182.
111 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 82.
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ungrievability is useful when describing the representation of homo sacer; bare life is sometimes also ungrievable life. Butler contends that the “differential distribution of grievability across populations has implications for why and when we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss and indifference.”113
Certainly we are not invited to feel horror or guilt when a terrorist in 24 is the recipient of violence; indeed, such violence is often presented as a narrative satisfaction. A differential distribution of grievability is at work in the production of this effect. When an Islamic terrorist is killed, according to this logic, no crime occurs, because a human life has not been lost: likewise, torture is not understood as violence, merely the extraction of intelligence.
It is worth emphasising the materialist dimension of this critique: this cultural reification is only significant because it has definite effects in the ways that the GWOT is prosecuted. Writing in 2001, Shelley Wright argued that “[t]he truly disturbing aspect of these cartoon images is that the architects of American foreign policy seem to accept them as reality”.114
Further, in 2013 Jeremy Scahill reported that counterterrorist specialist Malcolm Nance told him that the “civilian ideologues” in the Bush Administration were fond of what experts referred to as “Tom Clancy Combat Concepts”: that is, that Rumsfeld, Cheney and their “militia of ideologues” redesigned counterterrorism after 9/11 according to cartoonish ideas about solving geopolitical problems through force that they had inherited from cultural representations.115 As described above, at the same time as this cultural demonisation of Islam was gaining widespread cultural currency, the Bush administration was establishing legal frameworks that would exclude terror suspects from the protections both of International and US domestic laws. What is important about this dehumanisation, wherein terrorist suspects are conceived of as less than human in both legal discourse and cultural representations, is that the phantasmagoric figure of the terrorist provides the military reality of the battlefield detainee with a reinforcing cultural counterpart: a fictional image legitimises real violence.
113 Butler, Frames of War, p. 24.
114 Shelley Wright, “The Horizon of Becoming: Culture, Gender and History after September 11”, Nordic Journal of International Law 71 (2002), p. 222.
115 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), p. 58. Describing the
extent to which culture was partially constitutive of military-political decisions, Nance remarks that “[t]hey came out and just started reading these books and magazines and start thinking, ‘We’re going to be hard, we’re going to do these things, we’re going to go out and start popping people on the streets and we’re going to start renditioning people.’ The decision makers were almost childlike in wanting to do high, Dungeons and Dragons, you know, dagger and intrigue all the time.”
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Conclusions
This chapter has sketched a conceptual narrative that makes possible the reading of a common constellation of juridical-political characteristics across diverse historical and political conditions. The central claim has been that the states of exception and emergency are those in which torture is made possible, as it provides the legal foundation and material conditions of possibility for indiscriminate roundups, concentrationary incarceration, and police impunity. In contradistinction to the ticking bomb justifications depicted in texts such as 24 and The Centurions, I argue, this approaches a realistic nexus through which to understand the ways in which torture is actually perpetrated; the texts that most effectively present anti-torture narratives and representations are those that talk in these terms. The Guantánamo Bay detention facility is a generative example because, I argue, its extraterritorial and extralegal spatial configuration exists within a colonial paradigm of exception and permissible violence comparable to the biopolitical logics of the colonial exception and the concentrationary. Those it incarcerates are homines sacri, a biopolitical remainder from the sovereign decision on the limits of politically legitimate life, constructed both through legal and cultural discourse to be deserving of extraordinary violence. In the chapters that follow, we will trace specific iterations of such representations across the Algerian War of Independence and the GWOT.
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