Sighs on Guantanamo

I'm trying to wrap up an article on Kathy Acker and the prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grayib. My rough argument is as follows: that while critics on left and right tend to offer sewn-up narratives with clear actors and motives (of the sort with a family resemblance to conspiracy theory), Acker's uneven, disturbing connections between power, torture, and the intimate world of the bourgeois subject offer a less easy, and so more ethically productive, way of identifying with the prisoners than do these other articulations.

The stand on the Right is more or less clear, and well summarized by David Luban in an article about the so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario, whereby the unbounded detention and even torture of a nation's others are justified by an impending mass death. I've had more trouble in finding a similarly straightforward narrative on the Left, thought the continually reiterated versions of Agamben's "state of exception" seem to offer one possibility. The problem, in part, is that there are plenty of people on the Left who are very concerned with identifying with the prisoners, perhaps too much so. When one digs into research on Guantanamo, one finds that the prisoners are indeed referenced as people with specific histories, and that the wide-ranging argument--that we're all prisoners of Guantanamo--is harder to find. That's mostly because it's a specious argument, and so not made very frequently. The stronger argument is one raised and scrutinized by Jinee Lokaneeta in a recent Theory and Event article: how do liberal states like the United States, who define themselves in part by their restraint from excessive violence (fighting "just wars," executing prisoners "humanely") justify their willingness to use forms of torture. In Lokaneeta's reading, the people of the United States and the prisoners and Guantanamo are connected not because, speciously, they too can be subject to torture under the auspices of some broad-ranging "state of exception," but because the visibility of Guantanamo and Abu Grayib violates a meaningful self-image for the United States, as a non-authoritarian, democratic state, who adheres to the rule of law and promotes individual rights. The latter point, of course, is controversial in relation to Guantanamo, since the detainees there were, by any measure, denied the same rights to speedy trial and so on accorded to Americans. Indeed, David Luban has argued that the "ticking time bomb" trope is developed in part to respond to this contradiction; the threat of immediate, mass, death represents the lengths to which the liberal state must go to justify its use of torture.

For Benjamin, history is hazily understood, and the multiple histories circulating around Guantanamo are never "accurate" but may still be meaningful. The haze of articulations that Acker offers in Empire of the Senseless, a half-understood sense of power exerting itself, coalescing and uncoalescing into authority figures, mapping and remapping onto new circumstances, new events. MK ULTRA is emblematic of a certain story about CIA information retrieval, a story that is never fully true and never fully false. Acker retains cognizance about this falsity, reminds her readers that all stories about power are in some sense myths, and so, it follows, are the stories about Guantanamo, left and right.

The ones on the right matter, I think. Listening to Arcade Fire tonight, it occurred to me just how much the reality of September 11th, and even the Obama administration, are obscured by the demonic caricatured Right (following, perhaps, in the footsteps of the disdain around Nixon's Checkers speech). The more the Left focuses on and amplifies the Right's shortcomings--even around something as obviously flawed as the practices in Guantanamo and Abu Grayib--the less the Left confronts its own political reality, in this case a rapidly shifting world from which it is all too easy to retreat from, into a tiny screen spitting back our own opinions to us.