Response to Scarry’s “The Structure of Torture” in The Body of Pain

The Breakdown

Two aspects of Scarry’s The Body in Pain presented itself to me; (1) the psychological and physical inescapability of torture, as well as (2) the opposing groups of words deriving from the Latin root, “hos.” 

Like the Latin root “hos” is capable of going in two opposing directions, so is one’s attitude towards the body. “ ‘Hos’ meaning house, shelter, or refuge,” is comparable to one’s own image of the body as a sanctuary; however, that is juxtaposed with the root's dual meaning, “hostility,” or being a "hostage" in one’s own body.  

Throughout the reading, Scarry emphasizes and delves into the meaning of inescapable torture. The thought of being physically incapable of escaping torture by being held captive behind prison bars is taken one step further when Scarry writes “…the person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony” (47). The body is therefore thought of as another form of prison. What was once seen of as a blessing, a mouth to eat with, feet to walk with, ears to hear with, eyes to see with, are now potential avenues one can inflict torture on another. The body is a burden by allowing torture to be felt and experienced. 

Response to "The Structure of Torture" in The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry

One of the main concepts Scarry discusses in The Body in Pain is body and voice and how pain is always present. The psychological pain caused to a prisoner disappears when there is physical pain because that pain makes the mind unable to think of anything else. As physical pain increases and everything around someone can be viewed as a weapon they begin to prepare for death by the loss of meaning in the world. Once a prisoner loses their world they lose their voice. Elaine Scarry explained the use of “mock execution” and how any form of physical pain is mock execution. The use of this technique starts the process of dying for the prisoner just like how when someone knows they will die soon from an illness they have already started to die. I found it very interesting how she explained the necessity of duration, control, and purpose for something to be qualified as torture.

Scarry also repeatedly analyzed how the experience for the prisoner and torturer are inverted. Pain can only be felt by the person being tortured, so pain will mean everything to the prisoner but mean nothing to the torturer. The question and answer though are very important to the torturer because without finding information they have failed to fulfill their duty. The pain is so much to the prisoner though that the question is so insignificant.

These two concepts come together because once the prisoner loses their world, self, and voice they will say anything even if it is not true and is not their words. The person doing the interrogation will cause pain until the prisoner is forced into saying what the interrogator wants to hear. “If they are not guilty, beat them until they are.” It is so obvious to the prisoner that there is no chance of the torture ending until an answer to the question is given. Specifically while reading about “The Submarine” I realized how shocking it is that a lot of prisoners did not commit suicide.

Response to Scarry's "The Structure of Torture"--- Christine Gabel

I found the relationship Scarry developed between the torturer and the tortured, within “The Structure of Torture,” fascinating. Scarry breaks apart the actual act of torture into its two necessary parts, the physical and verbal acts, or torture and interrogation. As never having been tortured myself I can’t fully understand Scarry’s idea that the more physical pain experienced by the victim, the more distance that individual feels from their life and the earthly world. Similar to when one’s fight or flight response is intact ( as reality seems to stop or move in slow motion), it makes sense that experiencing extreme pain would have a similar effect. The distance between the prisoner and torturer, both literally and symbolically, is another interesting relationship Scarry presents. Scarry claims that regardless of the physical distance between these individuals, “the distance separating the two is probably the greatest distance that can separate two human beings.” This sadly makes perfect sense. The torturer, with a lack of physical pain and incredible amount of power is so alive in this moment and grounded in the earthly world whereas the prisoner, with incredible amounts of pain, is so far removed from their life that even the most personally important earthly possessions or ideas have no meaning. That is why Scarry claims that confessions are far from betrayal, a prisoner is so far from conscious and earthly matters that confessing no longer has any meaning to themselves or their values. I found this piece fascinating, disturbing because it made torture and the experienced mindset so real, but nonetheless fascinating.

Response to Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Wall"

     Sartre's "The Wall" tells a fictional story from the point of view of a prisoner - Pablo Ibbieta - and two of his cell-mates being sentenced to death during the Spanish Civil War. While Pablo's two cell-mates display a variety of emotions, including expected signs consisting of sadness, distress and depression to the end, Pablo takes in this news through another view. Though he is also distraught initially, Pablo shows the unexpected - eventually comes to accept his inevitable demise, seemingly losing all form of emotion in the process. 

     However, the next day comes and though his cell-mates have been executed, Pablo is left with a chance of survival should he cooperate with interrogation. When asked where the rebel leader (by the name of Ramon Gris) is, Pablo decides he has nothing to lose, and gives them an answer, despite just being supposedly false information. Ironically, Pablo's answer turns out to be the truth, and he is spared (at least for the timebeing. Granted the fact that Pablo never intended to betray his comrade, this situation can be compared to what Scarry points out in "The Body in Pain", which gave the idea that torture and agony can destroy a person's world and essentially erase their loyalties to confess - the payoff being no further torture; in this case, the "torture" being used is giving a payoff of the opportunity to live.

     The significance of the story's title, "The Wall", seemingly refers to the division of those people with hope remaining and those without. Pablo, having believed that there is no point in sustaining life any further if he would be dead anyways the next day, clearly has lost all sense of hope. Hunger, warmth, health - Pablo had discarded them all in his acceptance of his death.

Response to Elaine Scarry, “The Structure of Torture” in The Body in Pain

   Scarry defines torture to be in two parts: the inflicting of pain and the interrogation. For most of the torture, Scarry's definition applies. However, there are exceptions. As one might seen in Hostel, many victims have been "torture" just for the pleasure of the rich without any form of interrogation involved. Obviously, it is a movie and many things might be made up. However, it is hard to eradicate the possibility of such action. In that case, is it not torture that those victims have undergo? Scarry seems not to believe in torture as entertainment.

   Scarry's writing can pretty much link to Abu Ghraib. As the war against terrorists was fought in Iraq, US soldiers often capture Iraqi for interrogation purpose. Terrorists are not official army. They are made up by civilians with their own ideology. Thus, anyone in Iraq seems to US soldiers a potential enemy - men, women, and even kids. In such cases, information serve an important role. Frustrated by the little amount of information obtain by their prisoners, US army started to use torture (inflicting pain and questioning) as a method to obtain information. In addition, as Scarry quoted, "If they are not guilty, beat them until they are," "If you are not a Vietcong, we will beat you until you admit you are; and if you admit you are, we will beat you until you no longer dare to be one," (41-42) the answers in torture are already determined by the torturer. If unable to obtain desired answers, torture will only last on. In the case of Abu Ghraib, it is clear the the prisoners know nothing of the situation and the questioning becomes merely a reason for torture. It is a method for entertainment as the US soldiers stressed out in the long and unpredictable war against unconventional enemies and IEDs. Torture, in many cases, turn out only to be a way to crush the soul of the victim and a display of power.

Response to "The Body In Pain" by Elaine Scarry

In “The Body In Pain”, Elaine Scarry makes it clear that torture consists of three main things: the infliction of pain, the objectification of subjective attributes of pain, and the transformation of pain into power. First of all, in torture, pain is almost always accompanied by interrogation. This is so the torturer has a way of justifying the “world-destroying” level of pain he/she inflicts onto the prisoner. The objectification of pain is done through the torturer’s weapons, actions, and words. Throughout the torture process, physical objects surrounding the prisoner (such as a chair, door, or room) become weapons and eventually lose their original purpose. Institutions, primarily the court and medicine, are also transformed into sources of torture. At last, language is perverted and converted into, what Scarry considers, the most expansive method of the objectification of pain. What Scarry seems to convey in this passage is that the prisoner literally exists in “a world of pain” when being tortured. In this realm of torture, all aspects of the prisoner’s world are attributed to pain. We should sympathize with the prisoner, in this case, because every personal aspect of the prisoner’s life (friends, family, native country) is destroyed, and because those things cease to exist, “betrayal” of those things is, essentially, impossible. This brings us to the third component of torture because it seems that through torture, the prisoner’s pain is actually mistakenly perceived as the regime’s agency. Instead of recognizing the prisoner’s pain, we see the regime’s power—the power to wrench from the prisoner a confession that is, in fact, the regime’s words—and are unable to feel sympathy for the prisoner, which is a very convoluted turn of events, indeed.

Fleshing Out The Body in Pain

An Examination of Elaine Scarry's Text

          

  Torture, according to Elaine Scarry, does not qualify as such unless the physical act of torture is accompanied by the verbal act of interrogation. This interrogation does not rely on content, but on tone, as there is no truthful motive for torture - except, of course, the search for power. For torture itself is a language based on agency, and agency as a weapon: the objectification of a personal human response to agony, that places power on the interrogator and fortifies a shaky regime. Torture can deny and twist a prisoner's reality, through what Scarry deems a dissolution of the victim's world.

   Confession cannot be betrayal, for when someone is made to feel pain in ever-intensifying ways, all thought and feeling that is present in the absence of pain is thus absent in the presence of it. No friend, paramour, or cause can be betrayed because they no longer exist once a person's world is destroyed by all-consuming physical agony. This kind of pain lasts for an eternity, and has no control and no purpose for the sufferer, and so the content of the confession does not matter as long as it is uttered. That is how the torturer splits the sentience and the conscience and sets them against each other for the sake of a twisted truth.

Response to "The Structure of Torture" by Elaine Scarry

In "The Structure of Torture" from the philosophical study The Body in Pain, Scarry argues that pain can ultimately define one's reality from opposite points of the psychological spectrum. This aspect of pain is very useful politically, specifically during torture. The juxtaposing experiences of the torturer and the prisoner cause one to deteriorate and another to claim power. For the prisoner, his reality greatly diminishes to an awareness and presence of pain, where "every conceivable aspect of the event and the environment" is converted into "an agent of pain" (27-28). On the contrary, the torturer's reality expands into an illusion of dominance as the prisoner sees the agents of pain as the torturer's sources of power. Usually the motive for torture is interrogation, the "process of disintegrating perception brought about by great pain and objectified in confession" (30). In a general interrogation setting, an interrogator might physically and verbally "soften" the prisoner by crushing his sense of identity and "civilization," then coax a confession out of the prisoner and take control of his voice. This setting might play out differently depending on the type of interrogator as well, such as the militant, perfectionist, and the sadist. But from the interrogator's perspective, if he doesn't gather information, he fails. Subjected to the pressure of doing his job correctly, the interrogator eventually is dehumanized and views the torture as a means to gathering information. The torture is fruitless because the torturer asks questions that the prisoner is no longer concerned with, questions that are outside of the prisoner's reality. In the end, the motive ends up being a sham; instead, the real motive is to win the game of power.

Response to "Part One: Torture" by Michel Foucault

In “Part One: Torture”, Foucault makes a distinction between the older judicial systems (from before the 18^th century) and the modern judicial systems. The modern system of punishment ceased to be a public spectacle that exploited the torture and crime of the accused person. Instead, modern punishment became more of a means of correcting the behavior of the criminal rather than inflicting exorbitant amount of pain in the eyes of the public. There are several reasons for this shift in the judicial system: some may say the punishment has a “higher aim” in correcting the “soul” of the criminal rather than the body. Also, the shame of the crime is placed less on the judge or executioner through this more mediated system of punishment. Some may say that this type of system distances the executioner from the physical body of the criminal; however, one may also consider this type of punishment even more personal between the judicial system and the criminal. The criminal’s behavior is judged and his/her state of mind is assessed in order to determine the most appropriate sentence. It seems that the intimacy between punishment and the criminal is unavoidable in either judicial system.  In “The spectacle of the scaffold”, Foucault clearly describes the involvement the executioner has in public executions. Often times, the executioner becomes a victim of the audience’s revolts when the accused is deemed innocent. This fact may further prove the reason for less corporeal and public punishments.