The Dark Side of a Culture.

I recently pasted a conversation that I had with a friend to my blog which incited quite a reaction from certain people. Though there weren’t many comments on the post, a handful were inspired to text and/or email me about it, saying how troubled they were by what they had seen, or what had been said. Now, to many this sort of difficulty is just a reaction to improper manners, (to which I say, “Freedom of Speech, my friends”), but to me that discomfort comes more from that fact that it strikes at some of our personal and cultural “shadow-side” material in an unsettling way.

So, let us look at exhibit A: the posted conversation was a somewhat glib discussion of a rather grotesque porn site wherein they have a ‘scene’ in which they re-make the Abu Ghraib atrocities. In bad taste? Certainly. But I think it cuts a whole lot deeper than that. Let’s explore.

(3:52:43 AM) DamnGoodChicken: “Demonica: I’m sure you seen the news where they had those prisoners on top of the box with electrodes and a hood on the persons face, and if they fell off they would get a zap? Well we did just that. We put her up on the box with electrodes on her fingers and a hood on her head and did everything imaginable to her in her jail cell. She got double penetrated, smacked around, and got cocks shoved in her face. She was an obedient little whore prisioner. In the end we left her chained up in her cell with cum all over her face to give her time to contemplate how much of a stupid whore she is.”
(3:53:16 AM) DamnGoodChicken: oh man
(3:53:24 AM) DamnGoodChicken: i’m sorry, i just can’t keep from laughing
(3:53:35 AM) DamnGoodChicken: this is the world we live in

Start at the beginning. Lately, my thoughts have been on art-forms that confront us with our cultural “dark side.” I’m not talking Star Wars, but instead the dark side of the moon, which is never revealed to us unless if we ourselves go there. As Neitzsche rightfully recognized, this is not a safe exploration, you can’t do it entirely from behind a windshield, the “abysses we look into also look back into us.”

This sort of confrontation is only peripherally related to the work I have done in the past, where the individual shadow played a much larger role than the cultural one, but it is heavily connected to the next major work that I’m engaging in, which at this point I cannot yet speak about publicly. Let me just say that this “confrontation,” and even the idealization of fascism and oppression as a means of demonstrating their opposite, are very closely tied to what we will be doing. It is a realm that does not just arose misunderstanding, it provokes it. It demands it.

Let me provide a long quotation from the introduction to the book Interrogation Machine, which I think makes the point quite elegantly:

“In his reaction to the photos showing Iraqi prisoners tortured and humiliated by US soldiers, made public at the end of April 2004, George Bush, as expected, emphasized how the deeds of these soldiers were isolated crimes which do not reflect what America stands and fights for: the values of democracy, freedom, and personal dignity. If this is true, how, then, are we to account for their main feature, the contrast between the “standard” way prisoners were tortured in Saddam’s regime, and the US army tortures? In Saddam’s regime, the emphasis was on direct brutal infliction of pain, while the US soldiers focused on psychological humiliation. Furthermore, recording the humiliation with a camera, with the perpetrators included in the picture, their faces smiling stupidly alongside the twisted, naked bodies of the prisoners, is an integral part of the process, in stark contrast with the secrecy of Saddam’s tortures. When I saw the famous photo of a naked prisoner with a black hood covering his head, electric cable attached to his limbs, standing on a chair in a ridiculous theatrical pose, my first reaction was that this was a shot of the latest performance-art show in Lower Manhattan. (Emphasis here is mine.) The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a kind of tableau vivant, which cannot but bring to mind the whole scope of American performance art and theatre of cruelty.”

Let me mention here that Antonin Artaud‘s approach to theatre is based directly on shedding light on this unpleasant “cultural dark side,” and the reference here, though speaking of American performance art, surely is in fact speaking to the French surrealist movement that Artaud started, the Theatre of Cruelty. This is not a strictly American issue, it is a psychological one, and one which has throughout history played its role in the definition of in-group and out-group, (initiation and all other rituals which bring us in to the social circle, or which thrust us from it), the enactment of taboo, by which societies define their relations to one another and the world around us. In other words the debasement of the “sacrifice” is not merely, as the quotation would imply, an expression of our dark half, our defining “dirty bits,” it is a psychological demand of the modern, narcissistic cultural identity. Not that this particular pornographic artifact has any value, but it’s underlying impulse shows us more about ourselves than we might like to see. Nor is participation in them quite a simple or “base” an act as one may always assume (Foucault was well known in the BDSM scene.) To continue with the quotation:

“…It is in this feature that brings us to the crux of the matter: to anyone acquianted with the reality of the US way of life, the photos immediately brought to mind the obscene underside of US popular culture- for example, the initiation rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo in order to be accepted into a closed community.” (A note, again: this is not at all isolated to American culture: only it’s mode of expression is. Continuing.) “Do we not see similar photos at regular intervals in the US press, when some scandal explodes in an Army unit or on a high school campus, where an initiation ritual goes too far and soldiers or students get hurt beyond a level considered tolerable? … Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance toward a Third World nation: in being submitted to these humiliating tortures, the IRaqi prisoners wee effectively initiated into American culture. They got a taste of its obscene underside, which forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy, and freedom.”

“…In march 2003, none other than Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “there are known knowns, There are things things we known that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we known we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial forth term: the “unknown knowns,” things we don’t know that we know- which is precisely the Freudian unconscious- the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself” as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the “unknown unknowns” the threats from Saddam which we do not even suspect, the Abu Ghraib scandal shows where the min dangers are: in the “unknown knowns,” the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, although they form the background of our public values. … So Bush was wrong: what we get when we see the photos of the humiliated Iraqi prisoners on our screens and front pages is precisely a direct insight into “American values,” into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the US way of life.”

Now to the central point: what better example of our unknown knowing is there than a brutal, even horrific, re-enactment of the Abu Ghraib incident, shown on a porn website as a form of entertainment, for people to masturbate to from a safe distance- saved from the potential shame of participation, but allowed to participate by proxy? Nothing could be more to the point than this vicarious violence, enacted upon the degraded subject of our (supposed) desire. What better demonstration of precisely what is hidden behind our collective cultural mask of civility, or the outstretched hand of our “foreign diplomacy”? What better way to see it than in something so absurd?

At the same time movies like this have an unintentional element of the comedic. Even this kind of analysis of such a subject is, in its way, nothing more than comedy. Yet we shouldn’t let this mislead us: it is often only when we laugh that we are taking something seriously. To find amusement in the horrific is one of the “secrets” of many so-called Secret Societies, the Alchemical Process deals with the unification of the dark and the light. But properly understood, this process does not mean support the horrific, it does not mean condone it: it means identify the darkness, peel it back, look into its eye, and laugh. He who is illuminated with the brightest of lights, will have the darkest of shadows.

Only then can we change. Only then can we change others.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.