The ethical and legal consequences of it are something to think about.
With all the outcry about the horror of Mohammed’s crimes, very little was heard about the fate our societies reserve for the hardest criminals—to be judged and severely punished. It is as if, by the nature of his acts (and by the nature of the treatment to which he was submitted by the US authorities), Mohammed is not entitled to the same treatment as even the most depraved murderer of children, namely to be tried and punished accordingly. It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, but also fight against them has to proceed in a grey zone of legality, using illegal means. We thus de facto have “legal” and “illegal” criminals: those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers etc.), and those who are outside legality. Mohammed’s legal trial and punishment are now rendered meaningless—no court which operates within the frames of our legal system can deal with illegal detentions, confessions obtained by torture, and so on.
This fact says more than it intends. It puts Mohammed almost literally into the position of the living dead, occupying the place of what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer: legally dead (deprived of a determinate legal status) while biologically still alive—and the US authorities which treat them in this way are also of an in-between status which forms the counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law—they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law, and yet not regulated by the rule of law.
So, back to the “realistic” counter-argument: the “War on Terror” is dirty, one is put in situations where the lives of thousands depend on information we can get from our prisoners. (Incidentally, the torturing of Mohammed was not a case of the “ticking-clock” situation evoked by the advocates of torture as the reason for its legitimization: Mohammed’s confession saved no lives.) Against this kind of “honesty,” one should stick to the apparent hypocrisy. I can well imagine that, in a very specific situation, I would resort to torture—however, in such a case, it is crucial that I do not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle. Following the unavoidable brutal urgency of the moment, I should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very impossibility of elevating what I had to do into a universal principle, do I retain the proper sense of the horror of what I did.
In a way, those who, without outrightly advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of debate, are in a way more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It only thrives if it is sustained by what Hegel called “objective spirit,” the set of unwritten rules which form the background of every individual’s activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. For example, the sign of progress in our societies is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is “dogmatically” clear to everyone that rape is wrong, and we all feel that even arguing against it is too much. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, it would be a sad sign if one had to argue against him—he should simply appear ridiculous. And the same should hold for torture.
This is why the greatest victims of publicly admitted torture are all of us, the public that is informed about it. We should all be aware that some precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.
Nowhere is this clearer than in a significant detail of Mohammed’s confession. It was reported that the agents torturing him submitted themselves to water-boarding and were able to endure it for only ten to fifteen seconds before being ready to confess anything and everything, while Mohammed gained their grudging admiration by enduring it for two and a half minutes, the longest time anyone could remember someone resisting. Are we aware that the last time such statements were part of public discourse was way back in the late Middle Ages when torture was still a public spectacle, an honorable way to test a captured worthy enemy who gained the admiration of the crowd if he bore the pain with dignity? Do we really need this kind of primitive warrior ethics?
Are we, then, aware of what is at the end of this road? When, in the fifth season of 24, it became clear that the mastermind behind the terrorist plot was none other than the President of the US himself, many of us were eagerly waiting to see if Jack Bauer would also apply to the President—“the most powerful man on earth”, “the leader of the free world” (and other Kim-Yong-Il-esque titles that he possesses)—his standard procedure for dealing with terrorists who do not want to divulge a secret that may save thousands of lives. Will he torture the President?
Unfortunately, the authors did not risk this redeeming step. But our imagination can go even further, making a modest proposal in Jonathan Swift style: what if part of the procedure to test the candidates for the US presidency were also the public torture of the candidate? Say, a water-boarding of the candidates on the White House lawn, transmitted live to millions? Those qualified for the post of the leader of the free world would be those who could last longer than Mohammed’s two and a half minutes.
2 The Family Myth of Ideology
Numerous treatises have been written about the perception of a historical Real in the terms of a family narrative as a fundamental ideological operation: a story about the conflict of larger social forces (classes and so forth) is framed into the coordinates of a family drama. This ideology, of course, finds its clearest expression in Hollywood as the ultimate ideological machine: in a typical Hollywood product, everything, from the fate of the knights of the Round Table through the October Revolution up to asteroids hitting the Earth, is transposed into an Oedipal narrative. (A Deleuzian cannot resist the temptation of pointing out how the main theoretical justification of such familialization is psychoanalysis, which makes it the key ideological machine.)
“Capitalist realism”
Our first step should be to analyze this family narrative at its most elementary, kitsch, level. Exemplary here is Michael Crichton, today’s successor of Arthur Hailey, the first great author of “capitalist realism” (whose bestsellers, back in the 1960s—Hotel, Airport, Cars. . .—always focused on a particular site of production or complex organization, mixing a melodramatic plot with lengthy descriptions of the site’s functions, in an unexpected echo of the Stalinist classics of the late 1920s and 1930s such as Gladkov’s Cement).1 Crichton added to the genre a postmodern techno-thriller twist, in accordance with today’s predominant politics of fear: he is the ultimate novelist of fear—fear of the past (Jurassic Park, Eaters of the Dead), of the nanotechnological future (Prey), of Japan’s economic strength (The Rising Sun), of sexual harassment (Disclosure), of robotic technology (Westworld), of the medical industry (Coma), of alien intrusions (Andromeda Strain), of ecological catastrophes (State of Fear). State of Fear, his most recent book, brings an unexpected final addition to this series of shadowy forces which lurk among us, poised to wreak havoc: America’s fiercest enemies are none other than the environmentalists themselves.2
As many a critic has noted, Crichton’s books are not really novels, they are more like unfinished drafts, prospectuses for screenplays; however, it is this very feature which makes his work interesting for an analysis of contemporary ideology: the very lack of stylistic qualities, the totally “transparent” mode of writing, allows the underlying ideological fantasies to be staged at their embarrassingly desublimated purest, in naked form, as it were. Exemplary here is Prey,3 in which a nanotechnological experiment in a laboratory in the Nevada desert goes horribly wrong; a cloud of nanoparticles—millions of microrobots—escapes. The cloud—visible
