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What Rumsfeld Doesnt Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib

By Slavoj Zizek

Does anyone still remember the unfortunate Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf? As Saddam’s information minister, he heroically would deny the most evident facts and stick to the Iraqi line. Even as U.S. tanks were hundreds of yards from his office, al-Sahaf continued to claim that the television shots of the tanks on Baghdad streets were Hollywood special effects. Once, however, he did… return to article

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    The one thing Zizek misses in his analysis is that the prisoners, although being initiated into the supplement of U.S. culture, are not allowed in, and they had no choice in the matter.  When someone joins a team or a unit of soldiers or a frat house, they go in knowing and expecting the hazing and torture.  And they’ll pass it on later.  This is something different; there’s no inclusion and passing of tradition, there’s just exclusion and a tradition’s imposition.  What we’d do well to remember is that when we identify someone as an enemy, we are externalizing those aspects we don’t want to identify with ourselves, yet since we are the ones who determine those aspects, they’re already within us.  Torture like this doesn’t come out of a desire to initiate someone into some grand cultural tradition, no matter how vulgar.  It comes out of a desire to externalize that which we find most abhorrent in ourselves.  If there’s a critique of American culture to be made, it’s that we’ve not learned how to come to terms with our own differences in a mature manner.  We were in a better place when we prided ourselves on treating our enemies with the respect we would want for ourselves.  This scandal just shows we’ve lost self-respect.

    United States Posted by wyth on May 21, 2004 at 7:17 PM

    Is it not the case that the reason given for taking the theatrically staged photographs at Abu Ghraib was the interests of efficiency?
    Hersh’s May 24 New Yorker piece on the torturing of prisoners reports: “It was thought that some prisoners would do anything —including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends.”
    By this technique of ‘shaming’, mercenary investigation units could speed up their process of interrogation, by blackmailing prisoners into revealing whatever information they possessed without the time-consuming and humdrum routine of stripping, tieing, buggering with night sticks, etc.? Thus a strange twist of logic might argue that the dramatisation of the cruel scenarios at Abu Ghraib was actually a compassionate act that limited the amount of actual torture. It was certainly driven by pecuniary considerations. (It also may have had the grotesque side-effect of rewarding soldiers with a bit of ‘recreational’ special duty, to compensate for the long hours and apalling conditions…) And it is likely that the scenarios were only discovered because they were recorded. Is it not almost a ‘cinematic’ irony that perpetrators of torture now record their own evidence - in the manner of proud serial killers collecting press clippings of their deeds - thus further saving state investigative resources?
    The obscene underbelly that Slavoj Zizek so delights in tickling would seem to be the abstraction of money, every bit as much as American culture’s fetish with spectacles of ritual humiliation. And is not attraction to the abstraction of money, truly the absent centre of American culture?
    ‘The disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values’, are financial, just as the cinematic culture of spectacle is predicated on finance.  Gilles Deleuze (… and Jonathon Beller in his essay ‘Capital/cinema’) build a cogent argument around Fellini’s statement, that ‘the film is over when the money runs out’.
    Slavoj Zizek himself has a personal investment in cinema; it is one of the main tools of his trade of cultural analysis. And, I believe, a personal joy. He is right to say that ‘the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners is precisely a direct insight into “American values,” into the core of an obscene enjoyment that sustains the American way of life’.  But isn’t ‘insight into American values’ what sustains his life also? Aren’t almost all published analyses already co-opted – by that need/desire that is the root of all fascination: money?  It was money that inspired the recordings at Abu Ghraib, just as it is money that made America interested in ‘freeing’ Iraq, in the first place, just as it is the symbolic value of the Twin Towers that made them so ugly, and so vulnerable.
    Nietzsche’s analysis of the dangers of knowledge might be appropriate to consider here, alongside Chief Seattle’s recommendation that the U.S.  government learn to eat money. The engineered inflictions of the modern era, whether Abu Ghraib-style humiliations, Guantanamo’s orange incarcerations, or the violent stripping of DNA defenses in order to insert a foreign gene with a gene gun…. or the dissection of communities by highways, and the environmental rape of mining, factory farms, and economic forestry, etc… are all legitimised by the needs of capital, right down to the ‘need’ to make weapons in order to protect the economy.
    The catastrophe of the Twin Towers is that it is so resonant a symbol of our times, while babies dying of diarrhoea (…which originates in diarrhein: to flow freely) as a result of bad water, are forgotten in the stream of things. Ironically, Abu Ghraib was rescued from being another invisible catastrophe by the gaze of cameras.  Jonathon Beller’s essay referenced above, points out how cinema makes attention the new commodity of exchange-value; the root of ‘attention’ suggests a military state of alertness, an expectancy that demands an event. Abu Ghraib is an example of media-darwinism: the survival of the noticed.
    Money (honey…) is the real sticky stuff: the cult of abstraction that dehumanises, and disembodies… so that the prisoners are not even homo sacer instead they are pure material for the camera’s enlightened purpose, which is efficient capture.

    New Zealand (Aotearoa) Posted by Jai on Aug 17, 2004 at 6:37 PM
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