This Tortured Body: Memory and the stripping of identity in the free-market society
We
are to hold the past in remembrance and not let it slide away. For in history
we find God.
- Wolterstorff,
1987, p. 28
In our own era we are uncomfortable with
memory. We are hesitant to call facts historical because everything has become
subjective, everything is open to interpretation. We have become images
divorced from history. In this divorce we, in the industrial west, no longer
know how to define ourselves as a culture. In this essay I propose to
investigate this spirit of historical dislocation as a phenomenon of the free
market age and show its parallels to the mind-space created by a totalitarian
regime, to show both create an atomized individualization in a society that
sabotages any effort to for a population to become a cohesive community. I
shall then argue further that a religious identity is a necessary antidote to
the anxiety that both said environments create, and that religious identities
are necessary tools for a population to have in order to move beyond this
anxiety.
To
begin this paralleling let us look first at the non-person that Richard
Rubenstein introduces us to: the Muselmanner,
“the person who is dead while alive and whose death is no longer a human
death.” (Rubenstein, 1992, p. 184). Here we see the incarnation of the “logic
of destruction” that the Nazis levied upon the Jews “in which technical
intelligence, planning, and rationality were employed in the death camp
universe to bring about, first, the most extreme form of Jewish self-loathing
and, then, mass Jewish self-destruction.” (ibid, 1992, p. 184
emphasis original). Here we see the ideology of the Holocaust made manifest in
the non-person that the Muselmanner
becomes.
But
what has been taken from these people that has made them (or rather, unmade
them) into these beings for whom death is a formality rather than an event? Emil
Frackenheim, through Rubenstein, speaks of how the Holocaust “was both an
ordered and a disordering universe designed to leave its victims with no
possibility of reorientation so that they might escape the fate of becoming Muselmanner.” (ibid, 1992. p. 186) The
Jews were order into disorder; they were so completely submerged into chaos as
to have their very humanity nullified. The success of the Holocaust was in the
totality of its negative ontology: it took away people’s will to be.
Frackenheim
goes on to argue that the anti-thesis to this, the act of resistance, was
twofold: “to survive and, if the worst came, die the death of a human being.
The second was to grasp the nature of the ‘logic of destruction.’” (ibid, 1992.
p. 186) I will preface Frachenheim here, and say that the choice to survive is
not always a choice to remain human, as some of those who survived via
collaboration with the Nazis may have lost their humanity along the way, but
certainly the latter of the two comes to the heart of the matter. To not become
the Muselmanner meant to give one’s
death the type of dignity that was present in the film God on Trial, where the prisoners, even after finding God guilty of
“violation of contract,” still go to the gas chambers praying. It meant
becoming aware, as Pelagia Lewinska did, of the Nazis’ designs to eliminate
“every vestige of humanity” that the prisoners held to, and then to refuse to
be co-opted by that design. (ibid, 1992, p. 187). In these quiet acts of rebellion what was
taken is reclaimed.
A
more subtle answer, then, to the question of “What makes a Muselmanner?” is to be found in Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son, when he likens the resistance of amnesia to
renouncing oblivion. (Wolterstorff, 1987. p. 28) The ontology of the Holocaust
is the enforcing of amnesia, an enforcing of the negation of what the Jews are.
To make them less than human, to strip them of their identity, was to take away
their history and force them to endure a bleak present that had no future. Why
then would death not look the better opinion (not choice) in this scenario? To
resist the oblivion that the Muselmanner
option offered was to be a participant in memory, to hold on to past ideals
that refute the present. For the Jews of Auschwitz to hold onto themselves was
to hold on to their history. “For in history we find God.” (ibid, 1987. p. 28) And
it is the God who acts in history that defines Judaism.
Now
let us look at a different type of bondage, turning from the Nazi death camps
to the disappeared of Chile during the reign of Pinochet. Here we go from the
overt attack upon the Jews, to the subversion of a country’s population via the
pervasive use of torture. While both events happen in vastly different contexts
there is a chilling similarity to the ontology of both regimes that is shown in
William Cavanaugh’s observation that “the regime [of Pinochet] strategy was to
produce not martyrs but victims.” (Cavanaugh, 1998, p. 66). This smacks of
Rubenstein’s remark that “martyrdom no longer made sense in or after the
Holocaust,” as to die was to play into the agenda of the Nazis. (Rubenstein,
1992, p. 187). In both spheres the work of those in power was to create an
identity of perpetual victimhood, abuse without end.
Both
authors are speaking from a religious background and take the ideal of
martyrdom seriously. Cavanaugh’s usage of the term, however, is more
intentional in terms of invoking the ideal of “public witness.” He describes
this in his work Torture and Eucharist,
by way of explaining the dichotomy at work in Chile, in which the state had
successfully dismantled all other social bodies, with the exception of the
Church. Hence the title of the book: The state that tortures, and the Eucharist
of the Church. Whereas the Eucharist was the ritual that demonstrated the unity
of the social body that was the Church, torture by contrast became “a kind of
perverted liturgy, a ritual act which organizes bodies in the society into a
collective performance, not of true community, but of atomized aggregate of
mutually suspicious individuals. Just as liturgy is not merely “spiritual”
formation which then must be applied to the physical world, torture is not
merely physical assault on bodies but a formation of a social imagination.”
(Cavanaugh, 1998, p. 12).
The
elaborate and elegant argument that Cavanaugh makes in the work is,
essentially, that the Church and the State were diametrically opposed in terms
of the types of imagination they were cultivating. Where the state created a
social imagination of isolation via the mechanism of torture, the Church’s
ritual of the Eucharist became all the more powerful in its symbolism of unity.
“For precisely this reason [of public testimony] the regime’s strategy was
predicated on the elimination of spectacle, and therefore the disappearance of
the visible church.” (ibid, 1998, p. 66). The emphasis in this regime was to be
invisible in its operations, to hide the torture, and the bodies that did not
survive it – to make them disappear.
The
result, and the goal, of this strategy was to induce in the population a
crippling anxiety which destroyed their ability to be political actors in their
country. In the aftermath of Pinochet’s rise to power and in the maintenance of
that power, the people were left in a collective state of post-traumatic
stress. Their language and their neighbours had been taken from them in both
literal and figurative ways, as the reality of torture and the tortured created
such internal and external instability and insecurity that the kind of social
cohesion needed to resist was impossible to create (ibid, 1998, p. 40).
While the Nazis pinpointed their
techniques upon a very specific portion of the population of Germany, the
regime of Pinochet had loftier goals. They sought to make Chile a country of Muselmanner, a people so completely
detached from their lives and the lives of those around them that collective
action would be impossible. This brings up a finer point that I shall quickly
address: that the fascism of the Nazis was ideologically a different flavour
from the dictatorship of Pinochet. The Nazis were still a political party,
still fascists in that classical sense, whereas the rule of Pinochet was geared
toward depoliticizing the people. Whereas the Nazis used the scapegoat of the
Jews and other minorities to unite Germany, Pinochet’s scapegoats were the
phantoms of socialists, marxists, terrorists, anyone that could be anyone (Cavanaugh,
1998, p. 39). It is in this environment that Wolterstorff’s words about how “shared grief isolates the sharers from each
other” (Wolterstorff, 1987, p. 56), takes on a new meaning when we envision a
society collectively grieving yet forbidden to do so publicly.
At this point I wish to draw some
wider parallels to the cause and effect sequencing that brought about both of
these environments of injustice. Both the holocaust and the reign of Pinochet
are the effects, but their cause is to be found in a deep tension of modern
civilization, and while I would hesitate to stand behind Rubenstein’s premise
that “genocide is an intrinsic expression
of modern civilization” (Rubenstein, 1992, p. 123, emphasis original), I do
believe that he makes a powerful argument about how the capitalist colonial
process of modernization creates “vast social dislocation” (ibid., 1992. p. 125)
for both the population being colonized and for the colonizers. I find this to
be an easier pill to swallow having seen this argument supported in the work of
Bruce Alexander who, in The Roots of
Addiction in Free Market Society, argues that “[f]ree markets require that
participants take the role of individual economic actors, unencumbered by
family and friendship obligations, clan loyalties, community responsibilities,
charitable feelings, their values or their religion, ethnic group, or nation.”
(Alexander, 2001. p. 4)
Alexander’s observation should come
as no real surprize when we see this ideal of “unencumberedness” reflected in
the understanding of freedom that Milton Friedman, the godfather of the Chicago
School of economics, advocates:
So long as effective freedom of exchange is
maintained, the central feature of the market organization of economic activity
is that it prevents one person from interfering with another with respect to
most of his activities. The consumer is protected from coercion by the seller
because of the presence of other sellers with whom he can deal; the seller is
protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom she
can sell; (Friedman, 1962. p. 14-15)
In Friedman’s view freedom is
defined negatively: as freedom from
something, notability a centralized authority like government. But whereas
Friedman praises this free-floating individuality in which market-relations
supposedly flourish, Alexander paints this ideal as the grounds for “social
dislocation,” the precursor to addiction, and argues that in the cultural void
that the free market perpetuates people construct “substitute lifestyles [that]
can be creative, as in the case of eccentric artist or high-tech wizard, but more
usually they are banal and dangerous, as in the case of youth gang member or a
street addict” (Alexander, 2001, p. 4).
While the work does focus mainly on the
indigenous population in Vancouver as a population that has been culturally
dislocated via the colonial free market process and hence prone to substituted
lifestyles of addiction, Alexander draws upon the same examples Rubenstein
uses, the Australian sheep farming, the British systematic destruction of
highland society in the 18th century, etc., to show how the modern state is
prone to creating dislocation as a means of propelling its markets. In this
regard I think Rubenstein gets it right when he says that, “In Hitler’s eyes
the Slavs were destined to become Europe's ‘Indians.’ They were to be displaced,
uprooted, enslaved, and, if necessary, annihilated to make way for Germany’s
surplus population. Unlike earlier European colonizers, Hitler had no illusions
concerning the genocidal nature of such an undertaking” (Rubenstein, 1992, p.
128). I appreciate here how Rubenstein refers to Hitler, correctly I believe,
as a colonizer; taking the idea of colonization beyond “the something that
happens abroad” assumption that I think we traditionally make with the term.
The Nazis were colonizers, beginning internally, which made their external
colonizing, WWII, easier.
Now to return to both Friedman and
Chile, for that economist’s philosophy was to have significant impact on the
internal colonization of Chile and its people. Cavanaugh elaborates:
After consolidating power, Pinochet turned to
a group of economists known in Chile as ‘Los Chicago Boys’ to reconstruct the
economy. They had studied under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger at the
university of Chicago, and were now given free reign to implement their
free-market ideas. They privatized state-run enterprises, deregulated banking,
and dismantled labor unions...Chile was subjected to market competition, and
Freidman’s underlying vision: ’a ‘country’ or a ‘society’ is a collection of
individuals;...only individuals can have moral obligations.’ On a highly
publicized visit to Santiago in March 1975, Milton Friedman announced that the
Chilean economy needed ‘shock treatment.’ This was more than a metaphor to
those strapped to the ‘grill’ in Chile’s secret prisons (Cavanaugh, 1998, p.
39).
Naomi Klein spends much time
unpacking this idea of economic ‘shock treatment’ in her work The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster
capitalism. The main premise of the book is that in the interest of
advancing corporate goals, namely acquiring more capital, corporations in
partnership with governments use “moments of collective trauma to engage in
radical social and economic engineering” (Klein, 2007, p. 8). Klein argues
“that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of
Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning - the fundamentalist form of
capitalism has always needed disasters to advance” (Klein, 2007, p. 9). The
rule of Pinochet centers large in her work, given that Friedman himself was an
advisor to Pinochet.
Klein, like Cavanaugh, also stresses
the similarities of how the reality of torture existed individually and
collectively for the Chilean people. The first chapter of her book is spent
delving into the techniques that were developed at McGill university via
funding from the CIA, where psychologists experimented with unsuspecting human
subjects to achieve the “massive loss of all recollections.” This process was
called ‘depatterning,’ the logic behind it was that once the patient/victim’s
mind was wiped, the doctors could rebuild them into normal functioning citizens
again (Klein, 2007, p. 32). This attack on memory, which included
electro-shocks and a host of hallucinogens, would eventually be exported to
Chile by the CIA. Both the work of Klein and Cavanaugh are in mutual agreement
that the regime’s tools of coercion, namely torture, was used to rupture the
memory of individuals and thus make them ready to be “repatterened.” They are
in further agreement as to how this was reflected in regime’s desire to
manufacture a societal ‘clean slate’ so as to radically restructure Chilean
society as a whole. Therefore, say both authors, torture was the reality of
Chilean life.
Up to this point my argument has
been that in both the cases of Pinochet Chile and Nazi Germany we see the how
the victims were stripped away of their dignity and security as a means of
making them less than human, and thus politically inactive in every sense. What
looms large within this stripping away is, as both Klein and Cavanaugh show,
the attack upon memory. My argument now is that what restored people to their
humanity, or at least gave them the hope for that restoration, was provided for
by a sense of identity that was independent of the environment of attack;
namely, a religious tradition. For what is a tradition if not a very long
memory?
Rubenstein affirms this stance
making the claim that it is only by affirming the “system of religious belief that legitimates Jewish survival. The
alternative is to abandon Jewish identification altogether” (Rubenstein, 1992,
p. 199. emphasis original). At this point, though, Rubenstein is speaking more
about the struggle of post-Holocaust Jews in returning to the grounds of their
faith after the Holocaust. But the sentiment of the statement is echoed by Frackenheim,
again through Rubenstein, when he speaks of how “[a]ny refusal to die and thus
outlive the infernal process [of the holocaust] became holy, not only for the
individual survivors but for the religious tradition that National Socialism
sought to destroy” (ibid, 1992, p. 187). To pray when forbidden to pray (ibid,
1992, p. 185) was to show loyalty to the tradition that maintained the grounds
of the Jewish identity, it was to remember and be who they were in the death
camps, where they were told not to be.
In Chile, Cavanaugh speaks of how the
Church’s Eucharist -- both as an action of memory, recalling those disappeared
and martyred as Christ was; and as an action of re-membering, of bringing back
together the broken body of Christ -- made
the Church “a body able to provide counter-discipline to state terror. If
torture is the imagination of the state, the Eucharist is the imagination of
the Church” (Cavanaugh, 1998, p. 229). It should be stressed that this theology
goes beyond ‘feel-good-vibes.’ By practicing the incarnation of the body of
Christ, the church became “almost a parallel state,” “[o]ffering a wide range
of programmes covering legal and medical assistance, job training, soup
kitchens, buying cooperatives assistance to unions, and more, these
organizations became the focus of church resistance to the regime” (ibid, 1998,
p. 264).
My intention in this essay has been to show
the value of a religious identity as an alternative viewing point to the
environment of a ruthless regime that seeks to co-opt a societal narrative;
that having this alternative identity allows for the individual to have a
‘buffer’ between him/her and the regime that seeks to define who they are. Given
the consistency, however, of the types of regimes that engage in that
co-option, namely ones that are entrenched in a free-market ideology, we must
all take pause for thought when we read Gordon Bigelow’s proclamation that:
Economics, as channeled by its popular
avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our
contemporary culture. More than religion itself, more than literature, more
than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation
narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe
we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a
marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all
striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural
pattern of existence: the market. This understanding of markets—not as
artifacts of human civilization but as phenomena of nature—now serves as the
unquestioned foundation of nearly all political and social debate. (Bigelow,
2005, p. 33)
Bigelow,
who is writing for Harper’s magazine three years before the financial crisis,
describes a cosmology of markets that could have escaped the lips of Friedman
himself. A society “of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone” all free
from being “from interfering with another with respect to most of his
activities…And the market does this impersonally and without centralized authority.”
(Friedman, 1962, p. 14)
Cavanaugh has been robustly critical
of this society of non-interference, he argues that “the free market has no telos, no common end to which desire is
directed…To claim that desires can be ordered rightly or wrongly to objective
desirable ends has no place in the free market. To stake such a claim within
the market itself would be to interfere in the freedom of the market”
(Cavanaugh, 2008,p. 5). Ultimately the market is agnostic on whatever moral
claims we choose to levy upon it; if we try to insist that there is a moral
base line that must be operated from we are “interfering” with the natural
order of the market, opposing an externality upon something that is suppose to
be self-regulating.
Intertwined with this moral
agnosticism is the necessity of cultural amnesia, for in order for the market
to deliver upon its promises it must be free from the interference of an
engaged public. This requires that there be no memory of a time when the public
was engaged, the battles won after the great depression, the regulations
imposed upon corporations so that they were forbidden to gamble with investor’s
retirement plans in risky finical speculation. Unions, government,
environmental regulations, all these “barriers to trade” must be cut down for
the market to be truly free to provide for all. Such as been the mantra of
Freidman’s disciples for the past 30 years, and they have won decisive battles.
For both Germany and Chile it is the action
of memory that defines resistance, and it is memory that is attacked by the
oppressors. The words of George Orwell ring sharply as we consider the
enforcing of amnesia, and the allure of oblivion: “He who controls the past
controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Orwell, as
a prisoner of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, was tortured himself
and understood what torture was. He showed us that in 1984 when Winston is subjected to “repatterning.” The techniques of
torture demand we forget, become docile, and allow our memories to be morphed
into something not our own. All the more reason for us, in this era of cultural
amnesia and Free Market fundamentalism, to hold onto what strands of tradition
remain lest we become a new type of Muselmanner.
Bibliography:
Alexander, Bruce. The
Roots of Addiction in Free Market Society. Centre of Canadian Policy
Alternatives: 2001.
Cavanaugh, William. Torture
and Eucharist. Blackwell Publishing: Malden. 1998.
Cavanaugh, William. Being
Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire. Eerdmans Publishing
Company. 2008.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism
and Freedom. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. 1962.
Rubenstein, Richard. After
Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism. John
Hopkins Univ. Press: Baltimore
& London. 1992.
Klein,
Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books:
New York. 2007.
