The Feedback Loop of Torture

Abstract

The Feedback Loop of Torture Eva R. Hudecova (bio) THE SUBJECT OF TORTURE: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND BIOPOLITICS IN TELEVISION AND FILM by Hilary Neroni Columbia University Press, 2015 In her 2015 book, The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film, published by Columbia University Press, Hilary Neroni sets out to analyze the changes in the approach toward torture since 9/11, as well as the way in which these changes are represented in visual media depictions, such as documentaries and television melodramas. Throughout her book, Neroni identifies a kind of feedback loop: she highlights the importance of the study of depictions of terrorism and torture in popular culture, particularly because they are not simply “effects” or “reflections” of the changing US legislation or execution of torture, but, significantly, because these popular culture texts influence public opinion, which in turn influences legislation. Neroni gradually builds an antagonistic relationship between bio-power and psychoanalysis as she sets up the biopolitical concept of affect (horror, pleasure, and others) and the psychoanalytical treatment of pain/desire as incompatible dichotomies, and ultimately chooses the psychoanalytic approach as the “correct” one. She states: “My basic claim is that these two theoretical approaches [biopower and psychoanalysis] to the body are thoroughly opposed to each other. One cannot reconcile biopolitics with psychoanalysis or the machinelike body with the desiring subject. There is, I contend, no possible compromise position” (27). As I will show in this review, this insistence on the incompatibility of biopolitics with psychoanalysis (rather than a willingness to explore the much more fertile ground where these two [End Page 170] approaches intersect) makes many of Neroni’s arguments problematic. The question here is not that of any forced “compromise,” but rather of allowing for nuance. Using psychoanalysis in tandem with bio-power offers a way to interpret the ideology of biopolitics that sees through the pretense of biopower and understands the biopolitical administration of the body. Neroni’s critique of biopower takes it at face value. In other words, Neroni accepts that what biopower publicly presents as its goal is actually what biopower is doing. Analyzing the rhetoric of biopower with the tools of psychoanalysis allows us to figure out what may be repressed, or intentionally left unsaid by the system of biopower. The key point here is that biopower is effective in truth because it takes into account desire, but obscures it with scientific and biological rhetoric. Thus, psychoanalysis, as the approach for theorizing desire cannot be excluded in any productive critique of biopower. If biopower operated completely at face value (i.e., it would not deceive, omit, or silence), it would never survive. It is this lack of nuance regarding a more productive critique of biopower, as well as Neroni’s limited understanding of psychoanalysis (which I will examine below), that ultimately misses the mark on a potentially essential analysis of the transformative post-9/11 moment in history, when the human body (rather than the human psyche or mind) begins to be treated as a repository of truth. One of the problems with Neroni’s book is that the feedback loop she identifies, the connection between the government’s legislation and its implementation of torture and the public mood reflected in pieces of popular culture that in turn influences legislation, is not analyzed in depth. The following passage is one of very few throughout the book that addresses this connection: Representations of torture hold the key to the practice of torture and the belief system that underlies it because they interact with the fantasy that supports contemporary torture. It is not by accident that authorities seeking to justify torture turn to media representations in their defense of what seems like an indefensible practice. On the other hand, it is also through media representations that we can find a way out of the practice of torture. Representations both provide the justification for torture and reveal that torture is not our destiny today. . . . The decisive question is simply whether a film or television series generally perpetuates the belief that torture is effectual or ineffectual as a fact-finding procedure. (23–24, italics mine) [End Page 171] The above analysis imbues Neroni’s chosen...