A properly Heideggerian analysis proceeds to the true ‘by means of what is correct’ (QCT 6). This approach finds in everyday common sense a particular attitude towards the question of being – through it we access the manner in which the world is made present to us, and at the same time access history that reveals the singularity of such a comportment toward things. So in considering torture, it is fitting to begin by staking out the terms in which it is presently discussed. What is the correct way to talk about it? For this we look to arguments given ‘for and against’ torture, the first by President Obama and the second by former Vice President Dick Cheney. These speeches were delivered almost simultaneously on May 21, 2009:
Obama: I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more… I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation…. they did not advance our war and counter-terrorism efforts – they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.
Cheney: The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.
What is taken for granted in this debate? What are its limits? Notice how both Obama and Cheney speak about torture in terms of its efficiency in ‘advancing our war and counterterrorism efforts,” and in “preventing the violent death of thousands…of innocent people.’ Both sides take for granted that the ultimate horizon for the validity of torture is its success in serving our national security interests. Accordingly, both consider torture a means to an end. That is why the debate around torture has waged within this narrow line of questioning: Do the enhanced interrogation techniques constitute torture according to its juridical definition? Are there circumstances wherein torture is justified? Do such techniques produce good, ‘actionable’ intelligence? Do the benefits of using such techniques outweigh the costs? Are they the best way to advance our counterterrorism interests?
This essay draws on Heidegger’s concept of Gestell (enframing) in order to go past this level of questioning, whereby we attend to torture only on the basis of its effectiveness in meeting our discrete objectives. Instead we ask: How do we characterize a general comportment to the world that restrains our questioning of torture to an inquiry into its efficiency? What is our relationship to truth such that, when in a state of urgency, torture appears the most surefire means by which to access it? What is truth considered as intelligence?
Heidegger begins his Question Concerning Technology by interrogating the ‘correct’ definition of technology, which, like torture, treats it as a means to an end. This is what Heidegger calls “the instrumental” definition of technology, and we find the same definition of torture in both Obama and Cheney’s reflections. For Heidegger, the instrumental, ends and means, belongs to the broader consideration of causality. When viewed in relation to the Greek’s thinking of the four causes, causality becomes in turn a question of how things are brought forth into presence – a question of how things are made present to us[1]. “Technology is therefore no mere means,” he says, “technology is a way of revealing,” (12). Heidegger uses the word Gestell (enframing) to name this mode of revealing at work in technological instrumentality. Gestell is the manner in which technology reveals the world, makes it present to us. In translation, gestell (enframing) requires an exhaustive enumeration of approximate definitions, which required extensive footnotes from the editor. Herausfordern, literally ‘to demand out hither’ or ‘to challenge’ is one such approximation: “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging (Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such,” (14 QCT). In the same discussion, Heidegger says that gestell is “…a kind of setting-in-order…it sets upon in the sense of challenging…sets upon to yield…expedites in that it unlocks and exposes,” (14-15 QCT). All this language could easily be used to describe the manner of accessing truth at work in the torture under discussion. This truth is approached as something to be extracted from the detainees in the manner that we extract oil from the earth. Gestell may be alternatively described as a way of revealing the world through “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Gestell does not merely designate a comportment toward the physical world or toward information. It proclaims the manner in which the world is made present, which means that it is operative at the most fundamental level of phenomenal experience. Far from describing a simple relation, Enframing conditions what is present at any given time to relate to in the first place. Man is not the arbiter of revealing or the source of enframing. As a mode of revealing, enframing conditions the way in which humans too, are made present to us:
‘when … man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing reserve. …man stands within the essential realm of enframing (QCT 27, 24).
Man, along with the rest of the world, is enframed, demanded-out-hither into presence by the mode of revealing that ‘sets upon to yield.’ Heidegger’s term for what is brought forth in this way is bestand, which roughly translates as standing reserve. Bestand denotes the ontological status of a resource, something at all times available for ordering and for use. Bestand does not have the character of an object that stands over-against man, but of a kind of homogenous baseline of raw material, appropriated, transformed, and circulated at whim. As we have seen, gestell confers this status upon man himself. Having established gestell as the mode of enframing, that it brings the world to presence as standing reserve, we can now approach questions untouched by our conventional discourse on torture[2].
A central point when drawing out the implications of gestell for the CIA torture program is that the detainees were rendered as standing reserve long before they arrived at the detention center. Andrew Mitchell presents this problem succinctly in Torture and Photography:
Prophylactics: What is troubling in these digital photographs from Abu Gharib are the questions they raise concerning a world already transformed into so many piled bodies, a world that can only reveal itself as tortured, and this by the very technology that has traveled out from Iraq and into the wired homes of American to bring us these insistent images of cruelty and abuse. The camera calls attention to the filth that it itself creates.
When revealed as bestand, the detainees are ordered about in the manner that corresponds to their way of being present, which curiously precedes their interrogation process. It is precisely in this sense that Heidegger proclaims “the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, already happened,” (The Thing, 164). Gestell accomplishes the annihilation and debasement of the detainees at an ontological level - long before they become detainees.
This observation calls our attention to a number of disturbing facts about the torture controversy that were never rendered controversial within the narrow confines of our conventional debate. Perhaps the most pressing is the fact that some of the most heinous and dehumanizing treatment occurred during the ‘softening up’ process, prior to any formal interrogation. The state that the interrogator found his detainee literalizes in a profound way the manner in which gestell renders everything always-already-debased:
…on a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. – Email from FBI agent 11 (Seton Hall Law School Report)
The infamous pictures of the Abu Gharib abuses come from this part of the interrogation process – namely, the part without any interrogation. They were preliminary to any pointed effort at gleaning the truth or obtaining intelligence. Rather, they were designed to create the conditions under which to extract the sought after information. Utterly dehumanized, the detainee shivering naked on the floor is the coarse literalization of bestand, “the mere final emission of what has long since taken place.” A passage from Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead explicates how this ‘fixing of conditions’ belongs to the essential movement of Enframing:
…the will’s surrounding itself with an encircling sphere of that which it can reliably grasp at, each time, as something behind itself, in order on the basis of it to contend for its own security. That encircling sphere bounds off the constant reserve of what presences (ousia, in the everyday meaning of the term for the greeks) that is immediately at the disposal of the will. This that is steadily constant, however, is transformed into the fixedly constant, i.e., becomes that which stands at something’s disposal, only in being brought to a stand through a setting in place. 83-84
The detainees were “brought to a stand by a setting in place,” that is – made present to the interrogators as something “fixedly constant,” “standing at [their disposal].” Again – this movement is accomplished preliminary to the posing of an actual question. The detainee lying fetal in his own waste is the condition for the US being able to ‘contend for its own security’…”necessary to prevent the violent death of thousands” (Cheney).
Another place we can trace enframing is in the character of the ‘truth’ that the interrogation process was supposedly designed to obtain. A passage from the CIA Inspector General Report, issued in 2004, orients us to the kind of ‘truth’ under consideration:
The agency’s detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the US and around the world. The CTC Detention and Interrogation Program has resulted in the issuance of thousands of individual intelligence reports and analytic products supporting the counterterrorism efforts of the US Policymakers and military commanders. 100
This report provides an essential reworking of the instrumental definition of torture. We saw how for both Obama and Cheney, torture is considered as a means, good or ill, for advancing US counterterrorism interests. But in the ‘wherefore’ in this report is altogether different; torture is instead evaluated for its capability to produce “intelligence” and “analytic products” that may in turn serve those working to advance our counterterrorism interests. The immediate end to which torture is a means is, explicitly, the “issuance of analytic products.” This is an important distinction that conventional discourse overlooks. It shows how the ‘truth’ extracted for the detainees holds the same value of the detainees themselves: that of a resource, available at whim, mobilized toward a specific purpose. That is why the entire interrogation process bears only a nominal relationship to the truth, and also why the great majority of the detainees were innocent men picked up on bounty, far from the “high value suspects” that Cheney consistently evokes. They were merely the material condition for the CIA’s data mining (The quality of the intelligence/data is of little consequence – recall Iraq and the WMD controversy. I am yet to make full sense of how, despite the fact that the invasion was arbitrary and inevitable, the Bush administration went to such lengths to provide false evidence). It should come as no surprise in a today where vast amounts of human resources are mobilized in the service of information, where inconceivable lives of arduous toil are deployed to produce its smooth surface.
[1] I have omitted a number of Heidegger’s conceptual maneuvers (the fourfold, occasioning, poesis) in order to expedite the analysis to the question of enframing and how it applies to the data on torture.
[2] I have also omitted a discussion on Gestell as the consummation of Western metaphysics. This would involve a (long) detour into the revelation of truth as something esoteric and hidden, to be accessed by a kind of process. I chose to focus instead the ‘softening up’ process that the CIA treats as a condition of possibility for interrogation itself.
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