Reading Guantánamo: The Bourgeois Subject and Torture in Kathy Acker

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndrew StrombeckAndrew Strombeck is Associate Professor at Wright State University. His essays and reviews have appeared in Cultural Critique, African American Review, Science Fiction Studies, and Postmodern Culture. He is currently at work on a larger project addressing the literature of the Lower East Side in the 1970s and 1980s.NotesNelson observes "There is evidence to suggest that the advent of glorified torture in popular entertainment serves a political function, insofar as it creates a network of identifications through which people find themselves warming to torturers at a time when our government has begun to permit and utilize torture" (63).The Left is not exempt from deploying relatively simple narratives, though these are less easy to categorize in broad terms. To take one example, Left critics frequently focus on the rights of detainees, as in the regular reference to Giorgio Agamben's "state of exception," whereby liberal states suspend their citizens' rights in the name of war or other emergencies.While her texts have been frequently read as deconstructive attacks on the patriarchal word, Acker herself hinted that her project was more than simply deconstructive in aim. In her long interview with Andrea Juno, which appeared in the RE/Search collection "Angry Women" Acker observed of her work: You get through trauma by re-living the trauma, be it in fiction or in play. You don't get through trauma by burying it and not saying that it happened. If your attitude to 'evil' or something bad that happened is to just say 'Oh no, it didn't happen'—to shove it away—that just throws away an opportunity to grow. So if you want to say 'Women are totally equal to men; how can you say that women are submissive?' (in other words; you can't be a feminist if you say women are 'submissive'), that's just shoveling it underground. Of course women are submissive: they've been trained to be submissive—that's the problem. And we get nowhere by not announcing the problem. (185) Acker, therefore, viewed her project as helping her readers "grow" by allowing them to re-live trauma—a project more humanistic than some of her critics have suggested.In The Prestige of Violence, her critique of postwar fiction's tendency to reify violence as "unspeakable," Bachner sharply counters Scarry's claim, situating it in a broad literary and theoretical tradition figuring language and violence as diametrically opposed (24). I argue here that Acker's work does precisely the opposite: by eschewing the comforts of narrative distance, Acker's texts (ideally, at least) confront readers with national forms of violence which are inevitably "unspeakable" for the bourgeois subjects of Bachner's study (8).Catani's group summarizes the literature on PTSD and combines this literature with accounts of torture.The "repetition compulsion" around trauma was famously analyzed by Cathy Caruth in The Unclaimed Experience, a work that both departs from and continues the poststructural theoretical framework which influences Acker's own use of repetition. In the early 1990s, Caruth was one of the key figures in trauma studies, along with Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. As Bachner summarizes, the field had wide influence on fields from Holocaust studies, to queer studies, to African American Studies. While it has been generally influenced by Caruth and Felman, my work here draws specifically on clinical accounts of torture in showing the applicability of Acker's techniques to such.Burning Bombing of America was one of two previously unpublished Acker novellas edited by Amy Scholder and published by Grove Press in 2002 Acker, Kathy, Amy Scholder, and Dennis Cooper. Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker. New York: Grove Press, 2002. Print. [Google Scholar].The degree to which the Administration materially supported the coup remains controversial, but Nixon is on record supporting the coup verbally.In a compelling article that nevertheless reads Acker through a narrow lens, Giles argues that Acker's work only makes sense in the context of Reagan and Thatcher, and is ultimately "politically pessimistic," reinforcing these conservative ideologies in masochistic style (25).In doing so, Acker points to the disruptive character of power as theorized by Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power, as well as Deleuze and Guattari, who in A Thousand Plateaus describe the distributed nature of power: "The face of the father, teacher, colonel, boss, enter into redundancy, refer back to a center of significance that moves across the various circles and passes back over all of the segments. The supple microheads with animal facializations [from primitive societies] are replaced by a macroface whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere" ("Micropolitics and Segmentarity" 211).Acker critics have described this project in terms of poststructural theory, framing her work, for example, in terms of the "feminine writing," formulated by French feminists like Heléne Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. They describe Acker's challenge to male-dominated linguistic orders, such as rationalism. For example, in his groundbreaking account of New York downtown writers of the eighties, Suburban Ambush, Robert Siegle reads Acker as describing "Irigarayan pleasure" in a "non-phallomorphic" society filled with literal and metaphorical references to female sexuality. Similarly, Glenn Harper reads her work as embodying the feminized textual desire theorized by Deleuze/Guattari, Irigaray, and Kristeva. In her book-length work on Acker and Angela Carter, Nicola Pitchford describes this poststructural reading as characteristic of much Acker criticism, in part because Acker herself makes this connection.A range of Acker critics note a shift in Empire of the Senseless from the relatively more local stories of the earlier work. In an early article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, a journal that paid particular attention to Acker in the 1980s, Siegle observes: "Acker departs from her earlier work in the first part of the novel by translating 'The Father' from a personal nexus of power, oppression, and meaning to the rather different patriarchy of the era of multinationals" (71).Rejali questions McCoy's "exporting" of torture hypothesis—the idea that the CIA deliberately and effectively replicated its torture techniques across the globe but acknowledges "the techniques not commonly used in interrogation rooms and prisons around the world had their roots in the main democratic states" (407).Indeed, McCoy constructs a genealogical relationship between the techniques used at Guantánamo and the MK-ULTRA program. In McCoy's reading, while the program's early (1950–1956) experimentation with drugs and hypnosis tends to receive public attention (as it does in Empire of the Senseless), it is the program's second phase, from 1956 to 1963, that actually lays the groundwork for the recent "enhanced interrogations"—in particular, sensory deprivation and self-inflicted injury. Drawing on state-of-the-field knowledge of human psychology (and top psychologists from Yale, McGill, and other universities), the second phase of the program focused on psychological manipulation. While psychological torture is still widely banned, its distinction from physical torture is in part what allowed its defenders to justify it: most detainees at Guantánamo, for example, were never physically beaten ("leaving no marks," in the words of an non-governmental agency's account of psychological torture) but the vast majority of them were psychologically manipulated in an effort to get them to produce useable information.

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