Provocation: Torture as Rhetoric

Proponents and opponents of torture have made use of diverse rhetorics to argue their respective cases before the general public. Diverse texts focused on the issue also reveal that, while the "War on Terror" may have created an upsurge in interest in the topic, these debates are long-standing. Yet across this broad swath of discourse, a distinctive theme emerges, one that demands additional consideration by scholars of communication--torture itself as an embodied rhetoric. I believe that analysis of the rhetorical situation where juridical discourse transforms into corporeal reality through the application of pain provides a unique opportunity for exploring the disruption of standard notions of audience and rhetor, individuality and commonality, shedding light on how these dyads are reconfigured by contexts of forced identification and dissociation. TORTURE AND THE CONSUBSTANTIALITY OF THE TORTURER AND TORTURED Elaine Scarry describes torture as a powerful (and power-full) act with the capacity to destroy a person's self-identity. It can even affect his or her ability to construct reality. Comparing the agony of torture with other forms of ritualized pain, such as those associated with religious practices, Scarry determines that there is no expiatory effect that then permits "the return of the world itself' (1985, p. 34). This kind of pain can only destroy or erase, because it does not encourage a purification and renewal of perspective that nonetheless acknowledges the individual's subjectivity; instead, torture destroys a person's perspectival frameworks to realign their subjectivity with that of another. Seemingly, those tortured have the ability to ease their suffering through confession or surrender, but they have no real control over the duration and intensity of experienced and expected agony. This control which other forms of ritualized pain can foster, Scarry suggests, allows individuals to maintain individual agency. But the pain of torture denies that and, in rendering the tortured person's body a weapon or threat against itself, torture realizes "an almost obscene conflation of private and public" (p. 53). It erases fundamental boundaries between a person and his or her tormenters that encourage self-preservation, and so proves a highly efficient rhetoric that aligns the will of the receiver with that of the "rhetor." Consubstantiality occurs when individuals come together for a common purpose based on perceived commonality; rhetors create consubstantiality by persuading their audiences that their interests and those of the many are joined (Burke 1969). Through identification of "common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes," consubstantiality arises as the sharing of "substance" through an "acting-together" (p. 21). Identification also depends on an appreciation of dissociation, which stresses division rather than unity. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca explain that identification invokes dissociation automatically--since "the same form which unites various elements ... dissociates them from the neutral background" (2006, p. 190)--and vice versa, although one or the other may be emphasized in argumentation. Notably, identification and dissociation are only possible when a sense of self as an integral individual is upheld, when one's own ideals and beliefs can be compared to those of others. Torture deliberately disrupts these processes by mystifying basic divisions between the "rhetor" and his or her "audience." As the victim incorporates the aims of the tormentor through physical coercion, the torturer's power transforms into material reality even as the individual remains the "actual cause of his [own] pain" (Scarry, p. 47). By producing the illusion that he or she has the power to end the pain, the values of the oppressor become embodied expression. And, the victim's body becomes the instrument of his or her own torment. This process highlights the break of the individual's body from the private self, shattering the holistic terministic screen through which reality is constructed and interpreted. …