Comment

The body of Abu Ghraib

Abu Ghraib, now in its 10th year of interminable iteration in commentaries, reports and media coverage, has become a symbol, or a metonym, that emphatically foregrounds one key aspect of contemporary life: that political power is always, finally, sited on a body. Abu Ghraib inaugurates an entire cultural discourse of torture that, in the age of electronic communication, the hyperreal, the simulation and the disembodiment of cyberspace, reinforces the centrality of the body. It is, therefore, no surprise that the cultural discourse of Abu Ghraib has found its echo in a series of ‘torture-porn’ films from Hollywood: Saw, now in seven instalments, made the first cut the same year as Abu Ghraib, in 2004. Hostel opened its doors soon after Abu Ghraib, in 2005.

The cultural discourse of Abu Ghraib that centres the body as the site of the military-political tensions of ‘East’ and ‘West’ might be read around four key dimensions, all of which are to do with the ‘rhetoric of torture’.1

The first feature that strikes us about the Abu Ghraib visuals is that the Iraqi’s tortured body is a legal body. It is the body that provides the ‘legality’, such as it is, to the spatial structure called Abu Ghraib/prison and the ‘war on terror’. Abu Ghraib can only be a prison when it has prisoners; it is an interrogation centre in wartime only when an inmate is interrogated. It legitimizes a condition called ‘incarceration’ and ‘interrogation’ (coded as ‘information seeking’!). That is, it is possible to see the body as the evidence, to us viewers as witnesses, for what goes on in a war. The tortured body is situated at the conjunction of the war, racism, technologies of surveillance and the rhetoric of justice. Held, not-tried, subject to interrogation, classified (‘terrorist’, ‘enemy combatant’), threatened (the inmates were told that their families would be tortured as well), the tortured body also represents the USA’s skewed notions of justice (for 9/11).

The suspension of laws such as the Geneva Conventions also foregrounds the tortured body as a legal body: the Iraqi’s body is one that demonstrates the irrelevance of international laws. (In order to circumvent the Geneva Conventions about the ethical treatment of prisoners of war, the USA declared the Iraqi and Taliban soldiers interred in Abu Ghraib-Guantánamo Bay ‘unlawful combatants’ and not ‘prisoners of war’.2 ) The breached Iraqi body points to the breach of international laws. The legal body is also one that exists outside citizenship, where even his Iraqi citizenship is of no consequence. Thus the tortured body is one that is subject only to the order of pain and to a membership of a specific category: inmates.

Aligned closely with the tortured body-as-legal body is another dimension: the inmate’s broken body as a political body. This body represents for us as witnesses the material proof of the political significance of his ‘crimes’, even when it is not certain that he is guilty or innocent (as Andy Worthington in The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison¸ 2007, and Mahvish Khan in My Guantánamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me, 2008, demonstrate). But the tortured body is also political for another, perhaps unintentional, reason: that it is material evidence of the Iraqi being a subject within the political relations of two nations. The subject-position, even subjectivity or selfhood, of the Iraqi can only be perceived in the form of the tortured body. The presence of the tortured body of Abu Ghraib is, or ought to be, a reminder of the history of interventionism, war and American imperialism. In other words, the political body of the inmate serves the function of a political memory.

Some of the most pernicious images from Abu Ghraib included the human pyramid of naked prisoners, the forced acts of sodomy and masturbation, and the iconic spectacle of the naked man on a leash held by Lynndie England. Some visuals show the American women guards playing the dominatrix role. This constitutes the third dimension of the body of Abu Ghraib – the erotic or pornographed body. I use the term ‘pornographed’ to indicate a process wherein the inmate’s body becomes the object of violation, even as Abu Ghraib’s techniques focused on sexuality as the site of domination. Mary Ann-Tétreault has argued: ‘The power of Americans over Arabs is symbolized not only by the leash but also by the fact that the prisoner is naked while his captor is clothed. The message is enhanced by its inversion of conventional gender expectations: the man is the captive of the woman.’3 

Rendering the Iraqi body as a sexually abuse-able object, rather than just the object of sexual desire, positions the American, including the American one, in the classic S/M role of the master with the handcuffs and the whip. Ironically, this pornographing echoes older Orientalist stereotypes of the sexualized Arab males, even as it undergirds American dominance over the sexuality of the Iraqis.

The final dimension of the corporeality of Abu Ghraib is the moral body. This is the body of suffering, anguish, fear and pain. This moral body is one that inscribes itself upon us principally by appearing broken, scarred or frightened (the unforgettable spectacle of the cowering Iraqi prisoner when threatened by the dog, for instance). It draws attention to the fact that this, what we are seeing on TV or in the photographs, is not ‘normal’ as a body. The moral body is one that alerts us to the possibility of being rendered incomplete, injured or altered without one’s volition. This, perhaps, is the climactic dimension that imposes the inmate’s body on our social imaginary. In addition, the moral body also offers us, via the horrific spectacle, the moral condition of freedom: the ones being tortured are not free, the ones who torture are. Freedom as a moral condition within which one may lead a fulfilling life might simply be defined, after Abu Ghraib, as the freedom to be not tortured.

These four dimensions of the body, I propose, constitute a particular kind of visual spectacle, one that brings home a hitherto concealed, or ignored, part of 20th century globalization: that we all share a precarity, that a country like the USA can pick up, incarcerate and torture any-body from any geographical location.4 Demonstrated amply by US drone attacks in Pakistan and other places, globalization has a new face – the tortured body: it could be you, it could be me. With NSA’s global surveillance project founded on the assumption that anybody, in any part of the world, could constitute a potential threat to the USA and therefore the object of investigation, incarceration or annihilation, the possibility of Abu Ghraib repeating is not far-fetched. Globalization now also means the globalization not of terror but of possible torture.

Abu Ghraib is a symbol that exceeds its time (2003-04) and space (Baghdad) to encompass the world. It is the tortured body writ large that offers us a wholly different view of what globalization entails.

Pramod K. Nayar

 

Footnotes:

1. Jennifer Ballengee, The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture. State University of New York Pres, Albany, New York, 2009.

2. Pramod K. Nayar, ‘Borderless Bodies’, in Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers. CSDS, Delhi, 2007. pp. 199-210.

3. Mary Ann Tétreault, The Sexual Politics of Abu Ghraib: Hegemony, Spectacle, and the Global War on Terror’, NWSA 18(3), 2006, pp. 33-50.

4. Judith Butler, Precarious Lives: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, London, 2004.

 

Cheap labour – blessing or a curse?

TO date, large segments of India’s elite, while screening the poor and their ‘tendency to over-reproduce’ with abhorrence and contempt, have done little to push for a meaningful population policy. In large part, this is because they have benefited from this endless supply of cheap labour. However, this endless supply of cheap and largely untrained labour has serious economic consequences. It constricts demand growth and limits Indian industry to producing low quality, low value added goods. In the global market, this eventually places Indian industry at a great competitive disadvantage.

Modern production carries fat profits when labour efficiency is multiplied manifold. With some exceptions like the Gulf oil industry, even in extractive industries like mining, India’s cheap labour cannot always contend against advanced industrialized procedures. Industries that rely extensively on human labour are increasingly becoming unremunerative, and produce low rates of profit.

Higher rates of profit are in those industries where the labour force is well educated and well trained. Those Indians who wish to sell India’s cheap labour in the world market will find that the scope for selling commodities produced by cheap labour is ultimately limited and will not turn India into an ‘Asian tiger’ that they wish.

India’s industrialists ought to know that a poorly trained and demoralized workforce cannot be compensated for by simply importing tools and machinery. Even to use modern machinery effectively and to keep it in working order requires certain skills that do not come automatically.

One more dimension to the cheap labour force scenario is that the demand for labour-saving inputs and devices grows very slowly. This means that both in industry and at home, the switch to higher quality machines and tools does not take place or does so slowly. If it is cheaper to hire labour than buy a labour saving device, who will make the switch? But since human endeavour can rarely match the precision and accuracy of well designed computer controlled electronic machines, the quality of Indian commodities remains uncompetitive in the world market, even as the internal market for capital goods and appliances stalls.

A cheap labour market also implies a restricted market for consumption. When workers are well paid they are able to buy more goods produced by industry. This leads to increased demand, fuelling new investment and new opportunities for industries to expand. But if wages are so low that people can just about eat and spend on nothing else – even the market for consumer goods stagnates or shrinks. This means that industry has to constantly contend with demand recession.

If Indian industry is to ever achieve double-digit rates, the entire Indian mindset will have to change – from tolerating a growing but cheap and inexpert workforce into constructing the social infrastructure that will rapidly control the population boom and spend the money on getting a better all-round quality of India’s workforce.

While it is imperative that India quickly address its growing population, a problem that threatens to grow dangerously out of hand, it must do so without the prejudices and lackadaisical attitudes of the past. The problem should be taken up not just by the social welfare ministry but by all government and non-governmental agencies, as well as by progressive organizations and unions.

However, rather than promote inequitable and biased schemes which mock the poverty of the Hindi belt states in Parliament, calling them ‘Bimaru’, schemes ought to be designed sensitively. Issues such as gender inequality, social pressures concerning marriage and sexuality, or for having more children, especially male children, ought to be confronted. Pressures from religious orthodoxy ought to be challenged. Above all, the well-being of small families ought to be guaranteed.

So far, India’s family planning programmes have only seen limited success because they have not tackled the issue in a holistic way. There have been few concrete incentives for the poor to keep their families small. There has been little attention paid to implementing a liveable minimum wage, so that children are not pressed into work early. There has been little attention paid to guaranteeing jobs or decent schooling for those amongst the poor who do adopt family planning methods.

Of course, in practice, with the growth of capitalism, the values of the traditional family system have rapidly broken down. Consequently, there is little harmony amongst family members. Few family members chip in when a health disaster strikes or when a family member is badly injured or disabled. The elderly are often deserted by their children when they migrate far away from their ancestral villages. All the conventional reasons for having more children are disappearing. It is thus imperative that concerned social agencies educate India’s illiterate or the poorly schooled about the dangers and negative consequences of having large families.

Child labour is treated as ‘cheap labour’. Indeed, factory owners make hefty profits by exploiting children and making them work in their plants and factories. Also, working children are mostly orphans and often illegal migrants. Victims of uprisings, wars, poverty and homelessness, many are made to take to prostitution and pornography, oftentimes by the family.

India’s population policy needs to be based on concrete measures that not only address our population problem but also help the poor to improve their lives in tangible and meaningful ways. Blaming or scorning the poor and trampling on their democratic rights will not be helpful. Neither will an escapist or slovenly attitude.

Mithun Dey