The Solitudes of Testimony by Max Rankenburg a Dissertation
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At a Distance: The Solitudes of Testimony by Max Rankenburg A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN – MADISON 2013 Date of final oral examination: 12/11/2012 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Michael Bernard-Donals, Professor, English Craig Werner, Professor, Afro-American Studies Jon McKenzie, Associate Professor, English Sara Guyer, Associate Professor, English Rachel Brenner, Professor, Hebrew and Semitic Studies © Copyright by Max Rankenburg 2013 All Rights Reserved i Contents Introduction 1 – 15 1. The Specter 16 – 78 2. Object Lessons 79 – 111 3. Naming Names 112 – 156 4. Fiat Lux 157 – 192 5. The Disappeared 193 – 218 6. The Hooded Man 219 – 278 Epilogue 279 – 285 Acknowledgements 286 Bibliography 287 – 295 1 Introduction Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o’er the sickle bending; – I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more. – William Wordsworth, from “The Solitary Reaper” “In the second scene at the night shift, I saw a new guard that wears glasses and has a red face. He charged his pistol and pointed it at a lot of the prisoners to threaten them with it. I saw things no one would see, they were amazing.” – Mohamed Juma, quoted in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth One way to think about solitude is to imagine uninhabited, pristine landscapes, to imagine poet-wanderers and mystic-hermits, to imagine a place of salubrious retreat, of freedom, of being alone with one’s thoughts. In all cases, I’ll posit, this idea of solitude is not far from an idea of the individual. Whether imagined as a space for self fulfillment or as a space for self- release or escape, solitude, in this view, is already occupied and filled by a willful subject. At a Distance: The Solitudes of Testimony questions this view of solitude. It does so by considering two things. First, the following analysis defines the solitaire not as a willful subject, not as an extension of community, but as a kind of product, a rejection, a severance of a community. Second, At a Distance considers solitude not as a distant place and frame of being, but as a scene of engagement between the solitaire and community that is forced onto these two parties by a violent event. Solitude, here, is not an object for the subject’s retreat. Rather, At a 2 Distance asks us to consider solitude as a social condition, as a system of relationships between communities and their outcasts, as a scene fraught with various questions of responsibility. A few years ago, as President Barack Obama was beginning his first term in office, and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, circulated with some frequency in the news and political discourse, Atul Gawande published an article, an unequivocal exposé, addressing inconsistencies in cultural and political statements regarding solitude and solitary confinement. 1 Citing accounts by victims of solitary confinement (it’s “as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse” (39)), citing psychological studies (solitary confinement causes brain damage), and citing the “bipartisan national task force, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons,” which “calls for ending long-term isolation of prisoners” (44), Gawande’s investigation clearly articulated the paradoxical and ideological problems in how American culture thinks about solitude. As punishment in prison, solitary confinement starves the prisoner for companionship, but simultaneously affects him in such a way that he becomes incapable of relating with others (40). Similarly, that prisoner who, in order to survive, resists the punishment by disorderly behavior, is then forced to endure the punishment until he’s docile; but the docile prisoner, adapting to his condition, who is then likely to be released, will be unable to readjust to the dynamics of society (41). In this punitive mode, solitude is dehumanizing. It is such a severe form of punishment that he who endures it returns to society unfit and incapable of reintegration. Moreover, as if putting someone in a closed box erases him from awareness, Gawande connects the cultural blindness for carceral solitude with analogous moments of ideological dehumanization. 1 Atul Gawande, “Hellhole: Is Solitary Confinement Torture?” The New Yorker, 85.7 (March 2009), 36-45. 3 In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement. (44) One of the difficulties about solitary confinement – apart from studies measuring its efficacy, apart from the moral claim that humans should not treat humans and animals in this way – is its opacity. Solitude is out of sight. Solitude, like some forms of torture, leaves no extrinsic mark on its victim. Solitude is near such an extremity of cultural imagination as to be impossible to take, comprehend or speak of, in practical terms. Because of its mystery – its literal abstractness, as a concept for being apart – solitude becomes an idea easily deployed for ideological purposes. Solitude fits narrative insofar as it is nominally unfit for real conditions. Gawande’s evidence is, if limited, incontrovertible. Still, the relationship between solitude, community, and the law is not always so explicit. In fact, solitude could be said to be merely an effect of how a community responds to the appeal of a stranger. At the threshold of community – on the frontier, say – our response to what lies beyond recognition risks placing the figure who requests entry into our community into a manner of confinement. David Cole, in his concise summary of the ongoing case of Maher Arar’s with the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, “Getting Away with Torture,” exposes this dimension to solitude. 2 Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, returning home from Tunisia, was detained by US police at JFK. Arar hired a lawyer. Just prior to an initial hearing, Arar was removed by US federal agents to Jordan, and sent from there to Syria, where he was interrogated and tortured. (His lawyer, incidentally, when she got word of Arar’s disappearance, was lied to by his former detainers, who said Arar had been moved to a jail in New Jersey.) “After a year, the Syrians released Arar, concluding that he had done nothing wrong” (39). Arar is suing the US officials 2 David Cole, “Getting Away with Torture,” The New York Review of Books, 57.1 (January 2010). Because I will return to similar matters in this dissertation’s final chapter, I will only summarize Arar’s case here. 4 responsible for his detainment, and the Second Circuit court of appeals has all but closed the door in his face, arguing that the case will implicate “sensitive issues of national security, foreign policy, and secret diplomatic communications between the US and foreign governments” (39). Is the disclosure of information grounds for the postponement, or even dismissal, of a case concerning the violation of human rights? Cole’s argument is not along such a simple line; instead, he points out, and questions, precedence. The Second Circuit court has not let diplomacy interfere with justice in other cases (cases that did not, however, scrutinize US federal agents); nor has diplomacy interfered with justice in courts in other countries, where violations of human rights answer to tenets of international law established, Cole argues, in the Nuremburg Trials following World War II. 3 Arar’s case reveals how we have, in Gawande’s words, “countenanced legalized torture.” There is no question about whether or not Arar was tortured by the Syrians, or whether or not US agents were accomplices to this crime. But his case is being postponed by what amounts to secrecy, “sensitive information” that cannot be disclosed. Who knows this information? Where is it kept? At this threshold of justice, a structural breakdown in communication places Arar, and others like him, into a condition of solitude. To be sure, this solitude is not explicit; no study will show the physical damage the Second Circuit court’s irresponsibility causes on Arar. Nevertheless, this case reveals the complex relationship between abduction, “extraordinary rendition,” and legal discourse. Interrogation might have its model and method, but our capacity to listen and respond to the particular abductee, if and when he returns to the community, does not. When his appeal claims a violation of human rights and calls out to a regime of secrecy, our understanding of the solitaire seems to have no recourse but to silence. 3 The comparative case he cites, of “extraordinary rendition,” concerned abduction similar in form to Arar’s, and recently concluded in Italy, where the court convicted US CIA agents (39). 5 Solitude’s Incongruity How do we speak of solitude? If language mediates the relationship between one speaker and another, how solitary is the speaker of solitude? The conventional view of solitude holds that solitude is subordinate to an autonomous self. Such are the woods around Walden Pond for Thoreau. And according to such a view, the solitaire’s dilemma – and one of the reasons why such figures remain fascinating for a culture that valorizes individualism and “freedom” – concerns the desire for freedom from social constraints, on the one hand, that come up against the need for human interaction on the other. As we find in Coleridge’s Mariner, the solitary condition is fraught with a compulsive need to narrate the pain of solitude regardless of how this act of speech mitigates, in unloading on the poor wedding guest, the force of the experience itself.