[Nettime-bold] Re: [syndicate] The Aestheticization of Torture

[integer@www.god-emil.dk]

>
>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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