In the spring and summer of 2015, the American Psychological Association (APA) occupied an uncomfortable place in the media spotlight when it was revealed that it had clandestinely provided support for US government and military use of torture after 9/11. Two individual psychologists had recently been exposed for advising on the use of specific torture techniques, and a group of concerned psychology and human rights professionals produced a report that shed light on the question of psychologists’ involvement in torture.Footnote 1 The APA also commissioned a lengthy independent investigation – now known as the Hoffman Report – which found that the organization had ensured that its own ethics policies allowed for psychologists to take part in “enhanced interrogation” sessions.Footnote 2 As it turns out, this was just the latest expression of a strong decades-long relationship between psychology and US military interests, one which has spurred ongoing contestation over the discipline's proper role in state-sponsored security projects that continues as rebuttals and counterrebuttals are offered to the Hoffman report.Footnote 3
In the wake of these most recent exposures, the APA adopted a resolution banning psychologists’ involvement in national security interrogations.Footnote 4 It has also implemented plans for “moving forward” that include “the importance of diversity issues being more central in the discourse,” “the need to include input from Muslim psychologists,” and prioritizing “issuing rapid public statements from the psychological perspective in response to news stories about overt discrimination or violence tied to minority status.”Footnote 5 Notably, these plans follow the typical trajectory of diversity initiatives: training in increased individual awareness of the importance of difference, greater inclusion of individual scholars from marginalized groups. Such measures do not necessarily address a collection of long-standing problems, including what specific understanding of difference “diversity” indexes, and why particular racialized groups have been targeted for violence. Similarly, the narrative of the APA's covert support for and then public rejection of torture – of horrified initial discovery, painstaking evidence gathering, intellectual questioning of the value of torture, and finally organizational recognition and restructuring – forecloses any serious inquiry into the continuing relationship between the university and state-sponsored torture, a relationship which began long before the supposedly catalyzing event of the US military response to 9/11 (often cited as fomenting enhanced and more brutal interrogation projects).Footnote 6 Taking into account the arguably collaborative relationship between the development of psychology as a discipline post-World War II and the US state's pursuit of new forms of torture,Footnote 7 the question of the APA's culpability only becomes more complex. Concurrent US governmental efforts to legitimate torture further heighten the stakes of this question, as psychologists’ ongoing conflicts over whether and in what form torture might be acceptable or even importantFootnote 8 follow similar lines of reasoning as the debates over the legality of torture as described by scholars Colin Dayan and David Luban.Footnote 9 Indeed, that the US government's own official prohibition of torture has served as a key mode of torture's legitimation – through the passing of legislation banning torture in name but providing for the use of torturous activities under certain conditionsFootnote 10 – indicates the intellectual and ethical intricacies that are at play.
In this context, arguments over what constitutes torture, as well as its validity and effectiveness, themselves serve a sort of animating function for both the “harder” purposes of state authority and the “softer” purposes of academic reckoning on questions regarding morality. Acknowledging that in fact “torture and associated practices of state violence have continued uninterrupted in the United States from colonial times through the present,”Footnote 11 it becomes apparent that such arguments very often preclude consideration of the actual functions of torture. Highlighting these functions, Talal Asad urges us to see torture as a hermeneutic, a method of interpretation that produces meaning through the violent transmogrification of tortured people's bodies and minds.Footnote 12 For Asad, torture as practiced specifically on Muslim individuals post-9/11 is a response to a general anxiety over the “polysemy of signs,”Footnote 13 or the impossibility of a foolproof discernment of who might be a “terrorist” or why particular individuals engage in “terrorist” acts. Examining theories of just warfare, which often claim to distinguish between moral war and immoral terrorism on the basis of assumptions about the intentions of combatants, what Asad finds is logical redundancies: terrorism is committed by terrorists; war is engaged in by people who understand the full gravity of war.Footnote 14 Such assertions about what “soldiers” and “terrorists” think and feel – in, for example, the claim that “[t]he just modern soldier incurs guilt when he kills innocent people; the terrorist does not”Footnote 15 – appeal to a knowledge of the psychological workings of what are amorphous and undefinable groups of individuals. So the claim about motive commonly used to support the War on Terror finds itself resting upon exactly no evidence at all. Somehow, that evidence must be lent an aura of existing.
This is the very function of torture.Footnote 16 As a hermeneutic, torture does (at least) two things. First, torture produces evidence of the existence of the terrorist psyche within certain types of bodies. As Asad reveals in glossing the logic of torture techniques, suffering is instrumentalized in order to infer meaning from the minutest of corporeal details:
One begins with a human body having an appropriate appearance and origin: racial, sexual, and religious categories are what give the interrogator his starting signs. But he has to go beyond the words spoken by the subject to other signs – mode of speech, gesture, posture, etc. – that indicate hidden meanings.Footnote 17
As an act that aims to “discover” the psychological mechanisms animating these bodily signs, torture is a technique for producing and enforcing the illusion of a signifying connection between morphology and psychology. Second, the act of torture creates the conditions for the development of an advanced moral capacity in those who “witness” torture (those who know of it, comment on it, reason about it). Torture reveals and utilizes the damaged and ill-functioning psyche of the “terrorist,” over and against which the optimally functioning psyche can then be delineated and defined (whether in a cruel or a sympathetic mode). Due to their presumed deficiencies, the body and mind of the “terrorist” are made available for the use of the torturer or the witness, just as that use provides evidence of those deficiencies, in a circular logic of infinite despair-making. Thus for Asad, the debates over what constitutes torture and whether or not it is effective in its stated aims are not only beside the point, but also, perhaps, even purposely facetious: “Whether the systematic torture of captives is always inefficient is a topic of considerable debate in the liberal media, but what it certainly does do is produce two categories of human being: torturables and nontorturables.”Footnote 18
This essay is a call to intentionally reflect on the murky distinction between the work achieved by inflicting torture and the work achieved by reflecting on it, to find ways to be responsible to the potential for the most horrific violence in seemingly more benign academic operations, and to take the example of this one discipline not as exceptional but rather as indicative of a general institutional mode. While there have been important critical analyses of torture's function in biopolitical and necropolitical machinations of racialized power, little attention has been paid to the relationship between torture and academic knowledge production, and to the minutiae of the individual moral conditioning guided by questions about torture that those of us who are denizens of the university are called to participate in.Footnote 19 It is crucial to understand torture not just as a problem to be responded to by the university, but also as an animating problematic of the university, given that (1) the understanding of difference produced by torture is synergistic with the university model of difference known as “diversity,” and (2) the university has played a central role in producing the moral apparatus for sustaining state claims to legitimate violence. Diversity, as a form of knowledge production that arose to mitigate the critiques of state-sponsored violence made by various groups who were and are its target, characterizes racialized difference as something that might, and perhaps even should, be recognized and included, but that is ultimately a problem to be managed. Thus eliding the necessary and constitutive nature of difference to the very idea and structure of the university – even and perhaps especially in the mode of exclusion – diversity as an institutional project externalizes and instrumentalizes difference, making it an object of knowledge to be used.
Following Rod Ferguson, this response to the student movements against racialized state power has secured a privileged place for the university in “training state and economy in its methods of representation and regulation … the American academy and things academic would become the place where enfeebled institutions might make sense of difference.”Footnote 20 Diversity operates to “make sense of difference” in the mode of what Jodi Melamed describes as “racial abandonment”: “multicultural ideas of integration, representation, and recognition in culture” have facilitated the forsaking of structural approaches to dismantling racialized inequality.Footnote 21 Diversity does not just name and describe – rather it demarcates and marks bodies, constituting a set of techniques for using bodies as evidence of meaning. It is thus neither the solution nor the benevolent alternative to more violent approaches to dealing with difference. As Chandan Reddy argues,
The institutionalization of the study of race can become dangerously aligned with the normalization of the repressive functions of the state. These functions have historically produced race as the limit of ideological and discursive struggle, the illegible matter that we can interpret only through the vigilant infliction of legitimate violence.Footnote 22
Understood as “illegible matter,” racialized embodiment might seem to necessitate violence in order to contain and resolve the political, intellectual, and moral confusion it is taken to cause.
It is in this context that I want to consider psychology professor Philip Zimbardo's infamous Stanford prison experiment (SPE) as one key event in the development of institutional knowledge of difference as diversity. Frequently invoked as an iconic study of violence and social control, in this experiment college students “played” the roles of prisoners and guards in a mocked-up jail created in a Stanford University basement, for six days in August 1971, with brutal results – indeed, the experiment was ended early as some participants enacted their roles most violently and several experienced breakdowns. By Zimbardo's own reckoning, the SPE demonstrated that evil is not a phenomenon of individual pathology, but rather of extreme social situations that could cause anyone (or those Zimbardo refers to as “good people”) to engage in acts they would otherwise find abhorrent.Footnote 23 Part of the wave of psychology research funded by US military interests during the so-called Cold War,Footnote 24 it seems likely that the SPE owes at least part of its fame to contemporaneous fears of communist infiltration and social breakdown in the midst of protest movements, given how quickly these apparently normal young men lost almost all sense of moral orientation. As such, I see the SPE both as a discrete incident and as a broader cultural phenomenon, a significant reference point cutting across popular and scholarly accounts of the human condition, morality, and supposedly universal features of the psyche. The SPE has gained renewed attention lately as Zimbardo's lengthy account, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, made the New York Times best-sellers list in April 2007.Footnote 25 Foreshadowing the events surrounding the Hoffman report, the publication of The Lucifer Effect also coincided with a period of reckoning by the APA on what role psychologists should or should not have in military operations – giving The Lucifer Effect further timely relevance, as in it Zimbardo reflects on what his original experiment reveals about the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal.Footnote 26
I take up a close reading of The Lucifer Effect for several reasons. First, even though Zimbardo is an open critic of war and torture, his explanations of why people engage in violence seem to unwittingly articulate with state-sponsored legitimations of torture. Second, the solutions to violence that it proposes, which focus on the individual's correct psychological orientation toward social pressures, elide the histories of socially sanctioned violences (particularly racialized and sexual ones). The two framing events of The Lucifer Effect, the SPE and Abu Ghraib, align with two key moments in psychology as a discipline: CIA-sponsored psychological experiment programs meant to aid US imperial and Cold War efforts during the 1950s through the 1970s,Footnote 27 and the fallout from the APA's support for torture in the War on Terror. They also index two critical historical moments – “1968” and “9/11” – in which the depredations wrought by US imperial endeavors threatened to burst the seams of prevailing triumphalist narratives. Yet the very structure of the book's account, in which the SPE and Abu Ghraib are equated with each other, reduces the complex political and intellectual connections between these two moments to issues of individual mental health – thus calling the reader to participate in a rendering of the politics of US militarism that alibis the individual scholar and, ultimately, the institution of the university.
In The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo treats the Stanford prison experiment as a kind of particularly prescient guidebook to the psychological characteristics of the Abu Ghraib torturers, revealing the latter to be involuntary victims of intense social pressures just as the experimental subjects were. Ironically, it is precisely this understanding of the SPE that suggests it has helped to produce – and that its own ongoing cultural prominence is sustained by – those legal and cultural discourses establishing the moral precedence for torture. As Colin Dayan and David Luban both reveal, the main feature of recent attempts to establish the legality of torture is precisely this sort of focus on the motive of the torturer: did he intend to inflict suffering for its own sake, or did he undertake the act reluctantly and only as a last resort in the interest of saving innocent lives?Footnote 28 Luban's analysis of the “ticking-time-bomb” scenario reveals the disturbing logics at play here: this hypothetical scenario featuring a terrorist suspect who has knowledge of an imminent danger to US citizens yet will only give up this information quickly enough to save people if tortured, familiar now given its appearance in everything from television shows to Congressional hearings, has done much to authorize torture by emphasizing the principles of necessity, expediency, and the greater good.Footnote 29 Both authors also raise concerns about what I will call a dubious ethics of minimalist calculation, where a cost–benefit analysis yields the only possible conclusion that torturing one individual is necessary to save the many,Footnote 30 or where “constitutional minimums” and the “minimal civilized measure of life's necessities” serve as the (very low) bar for determining if a prisoner has been mistreated,Footnote 31 or where extreme cruelty and unnecessary punishment are implicitly defined against cruelties and punishments that have long been seen as the normal and necessary fate of slaves and criminals.Footnote 32
Central to these lines of reasoning is the instrumentalization of torture for the purposes of defining liberal democratic principles of freedom, justice, and ethical propriety. This brings me to the third reason for engaging in a close reading of The Lucifer Effect: it treats torture as an occasion for the student's and scholar's individual moral development. As a story of one well-intentioned academic's ethical journey, in which reason is lost and regained and in which the problems of institutional power are resolved through individual willpower, it offers a model for how the reasoned academic should comport himself. Indeed, in being almost exclusively about men, The Lucifer Effect inadvertently reveals the knotted entanglements of gendered forms of power, sexual assault, racist violence, and Islamophobic torture both in the War on Terror and on the university campus.Footnote 33 It also epitomizes institutionalized diversity projects’ approach to difference as an object to be reflected on in the interest of individual enlightenment, and to be managed in the interest of the university's physical, intellectual, moral, and racial boundaries. Even in the guise of critique, making the event of torture an object for moral discernment makes torture about the individual torturer, about what his actions reveal about his goodness or badness, about his degree of success in understanding and enacting social values. In such a discussion, the tortured become inert masses of degradable flesh and nervous-system response, never considered as subjects who are themselves capable of moral development. As Angela Davis puts it, “The victims of torture have been objectified as a problem liberal U.S. citizens must seek to solve. In many ways, this recapitulates the vexed history of struggles against anti-black racism within the United States.”Footnote 34 Reading through the discourses produced by and about the SPE, we can gain some insight into this vexed history of various differently racialized subjects being constituted as problems to be solved: as terrorists, criminals, and torturables; as targets of a violence perceived as a necessary violence; as figures who materialize difference; as subjects-made-objects whose use and abuse enables the cultivation of conscience in others.
1968: THE “SELF-IMPOSED PRISON,” OR, THE UNIVERSITY AND ITS VIOLENT OTHERS
The Lucifer Effect is my attempt to understand the processes of transformation at work when good or ordinary people do bad or evil things … Let's begin with a definition of evil. Mine is a simple, psychologically based one: Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others – or using one's authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf.Footnote 35
The explicitly stated aim of The Lucifer Effect is the “need to better understand the how and why of the physical and psychological abuses perpetrated on prisoners by American Military Police” at Abu Ghraib,Footnote 36 and to do so Zimbardo mobilizes the lessons about human evil that are revealed by the SPE. The above definition of evil founds Zimbardo's claim that “[a]ny deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us – under the right or wrong situational circumstances.”Footnote 37 This claim invites the reader to imagine oneself in the place of another, someone who has committed a horrific violence that one (presumably) could not conceive of oneself. And so here, the differential basis of what is presented as a universalist argument is exposed: the two objects of “evil” and “difference” are compounded in their simultaneous location outside the ethical subject's consciousness, in someone else. Given that many such horrible deeds have been predicated on the supposedly essential difference (and hence noninterchangeable social positions) of the perpetrators of violence and their targets, who is this “any of us” imagined to be, and could in fact just anyone stand in for this archetypal any-person who might become evil? Here we see an animating paradox of The Lucifer Effect: to make its claims about “known psychological processes that operate on all of us” it relies on difference,Footnote 38 and more specifically on a figuring of difference as racialized threat.
In the narrating of what the SPE has to teach us about Abu Ghraib, violence is treated as an object at a distance, to be studied in the “controlled” environment of the university experiment, for the purposes of providing knowledge about moral decay and moral development. This becomes abundantly clear in a key feature of the SPE's design: the stringent assessment and selection of “young men who seemed to be normal, healthy, and average on all the psychological dimensions we measured” to play the roles of prisoners and guards.Footnote 39 The normalcy of these young men is meant to secure the integrity of the conclusions to be generated by the experiment, where individual mental flaws can be ruled out as the origin of violence:
In real prisons, defects of the prison situation and those of the people who inhabit it are confounded, inextricably intertwined …
Systematic selection procedures ensured that everyone going into our prison was as normal, average, and healthy as possible and had no prior history of anti-social behavior, crime, or violence. Moreover, because they were college students, they were generally above average in intelligence, lower in prejudice, and more confident about their futures than their less educated peers. Then, by virtue of random assignment, the key to experimental research, these good people were randomly assigned to the role of guard or prisoner, regardless of whatever inclination they might have had to be the other.Footnote 40
The use of young, male, middle-class, mostly white college students as stand-ins for “good or ordinary people”Footnote 41 implies that goodness is indeed fundamentally tied to ordinariness. So when, despite the direct injunction to the research subjects to not engage in violent behavior,Footnote 42 “guards” quickly begin to enact a series of psychological, physical, and sexual brutalities on “prisoners,” it is explained as a discrete and measurable event – clearly having nothing to do with other institutions, or with any particular qualities of those individuals even as a result of prior socialization. Thus while the exceedingly obvious answer to the question of what the SPE tells us is that what a group of young, mostly white, US college men know to do when they are granted positions of authority and privilege is to be violent, their behavior is rendered as exceptional and unexpected.
The presumed necessity of the study participants’ lack of difference from each other – this was by explicit design “a homogeneous group of students … quite similar to each other in many ways”Footnote 43 – points to the SPE's production of exactly such difference (which is needed in order to produce the baseline normalcy of this group of good young men). And as this relied-upon difference threatens to show up on the Stanford campus, The Lucifer Effect engages in a narrative management of it. Zimbardo sets the historical scene for the development of the SPE and establishes his own liberal credentials by referencing key examples of contemporary social-justice activisms within the historical moment of “1968.”Footnote 44 He is, for example, careful both to articulate his support for the antiwar cause and to distinguish his own “pro-peace tactics” from those of antiwar activists, whom he charges with inciting “a level of violence that had never before been seen on this bucolic campus.”Footnote 45 Zimbardo also refers to the Black Panther Party, and George Jackson in particular, at key points in the text. Jackson is employed as a rhetorical figure, in order to gesture toward the social context in which the SPE took place,Footnote 46 and to bolster claims made by Zimbardo about the psychology of imprisoned men.Footnote 47 Furthermore, Jackson's death is invoked as a precipitating event in Zimbardo's own rise to national prominence and recognition as an expert witness on the prison systemFootnote 48 – a dreadful irony, as Jackson's intellectualizing and politicizing of the experience of being imprisoned led to his killing.Footnote 49 Thus the actual violence against students and prisoners of color contemporaneous to the SPE are effaced, while antimilitary and prison abolition work are made invisible. As Zimbardo himself puts it, “What transformed our experiment into a major example of the psychology of evil was a series of dramatic, unexpected events that occurred shortly after our study ended – a massacre at California's San Quentin State Prison and a massacre at New York State's Attica Correctional Facility.”Footnote 50 Such gestures not only efface the construction of justifiable and necessary violence as the birthright of “normal” subjects, but also attempt to define the university as a space separate from the prison – one that, it is implied, does not itself abide violence or violence-doers, which is precisely what grants it the authority to study violence. “1968” thus appears in The Lucifer Effect as an event necessitating the protection of the space of the university campus. And in the treatment of the research participants’ turn toward violent behavior as an exceptional effect of the experiment as a discrete incident, white, educated, able-bodied, putatively straight masculinity is rendered as inherently nonviolent, as is the university itself – a remarkable feat, given how thoroughly racial profiling, sexual assault, and the other routine violences of campus life must be obscured.
However, several of the research participants have notable distinctions that threaten to introduce confounding differences into the conclusions to be drawn from the study. There is Glenn, “our only Asian-American participant,”Footnote 51 as well as graduate research associate Curt Banks, “a light-skinned African-American man in his late twenties.”Footnote 52 References to these men largely serve to highlight the racially unmarked status of the other participants, or, in the case of Glenn, to reify racialized understandings of individual psychology (here, that Asian American men supposedly suffer from a lack of ego rooted in a supposedly smaller physical stature).Footnote 53 Most interestingly there is the consultant Carlo Prescott, described as a former prisoner and indicated to identify as black. Prescott is credited with bringing to the SPE “a kind of situational savvy never before seen in any comparable social science research,”Footnote 54 his former life as a prisoner meant to ensure the experiment's simulation of the conditions inside an actual prison as closely as possible.
The part that his racialized difference is made to play in the story of the SPE is on display in the description of Prescott's major role in the fake parole board hearings that the “prisoners” in the SPE are subjected to:
At first, he [Prescott] gave a truly outstanding improvisational performance, like a Charlie Parker solo … However, as time wore on, he seemed to embrace his new authority role with ever-increasing intensity and conviction … Forgotten were the years of suffering he had endured as a brown-eyed inmate once he was granted the privileged position of seeing the world through the eyes of the all-powerful head of this Board. Carlo's statement to his colleagues at the end of this meeting showed the agony and disgust his transformation had instilled in him. He had become the oppressor.Footnote 55
Prescott's response to the experience of power is meant to point to a general truth of human nature (where violence in the face of difference is a natural human response) as well as to mark him as fundamentally distinct from the normal/ordinary research participants (in that his response to having power for the first time is understood through the lens of race). As a figure in a narrative, he serves both as an alibi for white men's violence (because “anyone is capable of such acts”) and as an exaggerated version of what could happen to our normal young college men were they to be subjected to the same rigors of power as actual prisoners are: breakdown, a degradation of the rational faculties.
In telling the story of the SPE's progression and premature ending, Zimbardo continually marvels at how the students came to see their roles as very real indeed.
Not one prisoner later told us that he had even considered that he could quit the experiment because virtually all of them had stopped thinking of their experience as just an experiment … [I]f they were, as indeed they were, experimental subjects, each of the students always held the power to stay or quit at any time.Footnote 56
This, I argue, is the anxiety that subtly animates The Lucifer Effect – that “otherwise normal” subjects could so quickly become captives of their own fears, unable to access their free will, and thus fundamentally impeded in their moral capacities. For this precipitous degeneration threatens to break down the distinction between the psychologically normal and abnormal and indeed the distinction between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous on which it is predicated.
The sense of alarm over the fact that such paragons of normalcy, intelligence, and confidence could so readily fall prey to power is not Zimbardo's alone. Similar concerns drove state-funded research into mind control and indeed the forms of psychological torture now euphemized as “enhanced interrogation.” Anxieties about American POW experiences during the Korean War, including fears of their indoctrination into communism through “brainwashing,” led to the development of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) programs used to train military personnel in resistance to interrogation techniques.Footnote 57 Later, such concerns also engendered programs for the torture of US enemies, as fascination with the idea of mind control was turned toward aggressive military applications during the so-called Cold War. One example is the CIA's notorious MKUltra program, through which it secretly funded behavioral research from 1950 to 1963, collating its findings in the equally notorious Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual of 1963. Similar research was funded by the Office of Naval Research and the Department of Defense, which in fact funded the SPE.Footnote 58 These programs emphasized the development of new “no-touch” techniques of “self-inflicted pain” (such as stress positions and sensory deprivation), which sought to achieve the breaking down of the very sense of self in a way that, moreover, made the causes of that breakdown seem to lie within the tortured subject.Footnote 59
This “reverse engineering” of SERE techniques originally used for the protection of US soldiers from the effects of torture for the new purpose of instruction in how to tortureFootnote 60 exemplifies how the creation of pathological torturables is the very ground for psychological normality. In this sense, it is perhaps unsurprising that the psychologically debilitating aims of modern “intelligence-gathering” methods are explicitly couched in the terms of white-ascendant, Western, masculinist progress, as Mark Danner shows in citing the Kubark manual: “All coercive techniques are designed to induce regression … The result of external pressures of sufficient intensity is the loss of those defenses most recently acquired by civilized man.”Footnote 61 Another section of the Kubark manual states that “By ‘thwarting’ the detainee's effort ‘to keep track of time, to live in the familiar past,’ interrogators are ‘likely to drive him deeper and deeper into himself, until he is no longer able to control his responses in an adult fashion’.”Footnote 62 A memo issued by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez in 2003 sanctioning the use of specific psychological torture techniques in Iraq included the following, similarly racially inflected, item: “Presence of Military Working Dogs: Exploits Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations.”Footnote 63 In these contexts, so-called self-inflicted harm takes on even more brutal connotations, as torture aims to produce regressive people who then serve as evidence for the torturability of entire populations, in a kind of feedback loop driven by the process of “caus[ing] victims to feel responsible for their suffering.”Footnote 64
In advocating a model of moral reckoning characterized by its subject's clear discernment of reality, exercise of rational choice, and refusal of obedience, The Lucifer Effect ends up being an argument for a specific kind of normative psychological make-up, one that takes its definition and meaning from the countless and often nameless many who have been subject to the “debility, dependency, dread” scenario of modern interrogation/torture programs.Footnote 65 Thus the student subjects of the SPE who could no longer discern the fake prison from a real one become mirror reflections of the tortured subject and his “self-inflicted” pain, lessons in what is ultimately described as a problem of individual psychological deficits. To wit:
The Stanford Prison Experiment went from initially being a symbolic prison to becoming an all-too-real one in the minds of its prisoners and guards. What are other self-imposed prisons that limit our basic freedoms? Neurotic disorders, low self-esteem, shyness, prejudice, shame, and excessive fear of terrorism are just some of the chimeras that limit our potentiality for freedom and happiness, blinding our full appreciation of the world around us.Footnote 66
In our basement jail, prisoners surrendered their basic freedoms in response to the coercive control of the guards. Yet in real life beyond the laboratory, many people voluntarily give up their freedoms of speech, action, and association without external guards forcing them to do so. They have internalized the demanding guard as part of their self-image: the guard who limits their options for spontaneity, liberty, and joy in life … In response to that inner guardian, the prisoner-self shrinks back from life, retreats into a shell, and chooses the safety of the silent prison of shyness.Footnote 67
Elsewhere, Zimbardo suggests that “shy people make themselves anonymous and create this self-fulfilling prophecy that isolates them from the Human Condition. It is a self-inflicted surrender of personal freedoms of association and action.”Footnote 68 I am disturbed by the ways in which this intense focus on shyness as self-imposed surrendering of freedom articulates with the methods of psychological torture,Footnote 69 in particular the pathologizing implications this has for its victims and indeed the insinuation that they are not fully human.
In The Lucifer Effect, the “self-imposed prison” of the nervous college student's mind becomes more real than the experience of the prisoner in the actual prison; in a familiar iteration of racial and class supremacy, the experience of the person of color must pass through the white man's psyche in order to have any meaning, and actual prisons and prisoners serve as the material foundation for the intellectual work of the SPE. And with the focus on the “self-imposed prison” as analogous to and displacing the actual prison, it is at least implied that those who find themselves in the latter got there by way of the former. The tortured individual becomes the archetype for the kind of psychological decrepitude that leads to immorality; he is both the beginning and end point in a horrific circular logic that locates the origin of evil in those who are the targets of its violence. Here it is thus torturers themselves who are the subjects of concern and rehabilitation, from whose stories we can learn “how to combat mind control tactics used to compromise our freedom of choice to the tyranny of conformity, compliance, obedience, and self-doubting fears.”Footnote 70 Abu Ghraib will become, in The Lucifer Effect, a case study in the necessity of defeating such “self-doubting fears.”
9/11: MORAL EDUCATION IN THE FACE OF MORAL DISENGAGEMENT
As The Lucifer Effect turns toward a consideration of Abu Ghraib, the tone becomes one of profound shock and disbelief, and then sorrowful commitment to resisting the desire to turn away from the horror; there must be something to be learned here. This account is indicative of a general mode that belies the fact that what happened at Abu Ghraib is alarming precisely for its utter predictability and routineness. As William Pinar argues, Abu Ghraib can be situated within “cultural traditions of racialized torture in the United States,” a history which he traces through discussion of the practices of lynching, the convict-lease system of forced labor (often to the death), and prisoner abuse, thus revealing the mutual constitution of carceral and “free” spaces.Footnote 71 Similarly, reading through the grim details of such practices quickly exposes the historical, social, and cultural precedents for the kind of behavior on display in the SPE – precedents unacknowledged by Zimbardo and indeed by most commentators on the experiment. The protestations of unwitting astonishment, about both the SPE and Abu Ghraib, are repeated many times over: “It is hard to imagine that such sexual humiliation could happen in only five days, when the young men all know that this is a simulated prison experiment”;Footnote 72 “It seemed inconceivable that American soldiers were tormenting, humiliating, and torturing their captives by forcing homoerotic poses upon them”;Footnote 73 “It was amazing to see that in many of the images in this horror show the perpetrators themselves appeared along with their victims.”Footnote 74
This reiterated astonishment centers the psyche of the witness and even the perpetrator of torture. It also erases the long history of sexual violence against the imprisoned under heteromasculinist, racist, and imperial regimes of state power, in part by reversing the language of sexual vulnerability to describe both the torturer and the scholar as the defenseless ones: “The narrative chronology of this study … vividly reveals the extent to which ordinary, normal, healthy young men succumbed to, or were seduced by, the social forces inherent in that behavioral context – as were I and many of the other adults and professionals who came within its encompassing boundaries.”Footnote 75 Thus “what happened” at Abu Ghraib is, according to The Lucifer Effect, less about the captive individuals subject to deadly violence, and more about what the student and the scholar can learn from the soldier's potential to be overcome by those dark urges brought out by a situation beyond their control. The compounding of sexuality and racial difference as a single force of obscure compulsion is evident in the nameless mass of Iraqi prisoners being implicitly characterized as the very reason for the soldiers’ inability to resist being “seduced” into becoming violators, as the latter come to be figured as prisoners themselves. Abu Ghraib here is portrayed as like the archetypal modern US prison – a receptacle for unreason, a site for the removal and containment of those whose essentially racial character makes them insensible conduits of irrationality.Footnote 76 Their punishment serves to make those who are the targets of what Jessi Lee Jackson calls “racial–sexual terror” into its seeming perpetrators.Footnote 77
For Zimbardo, the broken-down architecture of Abu Ghraib, “the permanent debris in and degradation of the prison site,”Footnote 78 leads its military personnel to experience deindividuation, a social process in which the individual is made anonymous and hence more likely to commit violence: “Deindividuation creates a unique psychological state in which behavior comes under the control of immediate situational demands and biological, hormonal urges.”Footnote 79 Physically driven, uncontrollable obedience and conformity – characterized as a kind of slavery – is, as we saw in the last section, what is blamed for the acquiescence to prisoner status. But it is also used to explain how an otherwise good individual becomes a torturer. One man who Zimbardo has worked on behalf of, a military policeman who was found guilty of various crimes at Abu Ghraib, is declared to have been “a tabula rasa, a clean slate, which would soon become boldly etched upon by a pathological prison setting.”Footnote 80 His moral “cleanness” is demonstrated through descriptions of his physical and mental fitness, his love for his family, his patriotism, and indeed his attention to a neat appearance.Footnote 81 For Zimbardo, this man's involvement in torture demonstrates the “shyness–conformity link,”Footnote 82 which explains his vulnerability to the very environs of the prison:
the physical setting in which he found himself conferred total anonymity by its barren ugliness. Anonymity of place combined with anonymity of person, given that it became the norm to stop wearing their full military uniforms while on duty. And all around them, most visitors and the civilian interrogators came and went unnamed. No one in charge was readily identifiable, and the seemingly endless mass of prisoners, wearing orange jumpsuits or totally naked, were also indistinguishable from one another. It was as extreme a setting for creating deindividuation as I can imagine.Footnote 83
The ugliness of the place and the purported indistinguishability of the Iraqi individuals from each other not only reference well-worn racialist aesthetic codes – where what is ugly is also what is evil – but also suggest the extent to which a breakdown in knowledge production is at stake here, in the form of the barrier that race puts up to the normal individual's ability to discern the identities of individuals and thus, it is implied, the proper way to treat them. Zimbardo's continued insistence that “this young man brought no pathology into that situation”Footnote 84 suggests that his innocence is predicated on his health prior to his exposure to a deranging difference.
Viewing Abu Ghraib as a kind of experiment itself – one in deindividuation –allows Zimbardo to propose not only that it is possible for a “moral education” to arise from such a horrific event, but also that perhaps such an event is the principal way in which moral development becomes possible. In discussing the follow-up sessions he conducted with the participants in the SPE, Zimbardo notes the following:
I also tried to make the debriefing a lesson on “moral education” by explicitly discussing the moral conflicts we all faced throughout the study. A pioneering theorist in moral development, Larry Kohlberg, has argued that such discussions within the context of moral conflict are the primary, perhaps the only way to increase an individual's level of moral development.Footnote 85
This statement has troubling implications: what are the actual conditions of moral conflict? Who faces the severest effects of these conditions? And indeed who is presumed to be capable of such development? The focus on necessary conflict reiterates that the real problem here is not the torture itself but rather “moral disengagement,” where the individual's “self-regulatory mechanisms,” developed through “normal socialization processes during their upbringing,” are circumvented.Footnote 86
The characterization of Abu Ghraib as an instance of moral conflict allows for the following kind of assertion, arrived at after due consideration of the many horrors of that prison:
We will end the next chapter on an upbeat note because in fact, a plan was put into place at Abu Ghraib to better train MPs, MI personnel, and interrogators in the exercise of their power. My psychologist colleague Colonel Larry James was sent to that prison recently (May 2004) to install a new set of operational procedures intended to deter the kind of violence we have examined in this chapter. Of special interest is the provision that all MPs and other relevant personnel view the DVD of the Stanford Prison Experiment as part of their training. How that came about and what effects it is having will be part of the good news to come out of this bad-news place.Footnote 87
This passage presents several challenges to its own logic. There is evidence that James supported and participated in torture: he served as a psychologist for the military at both Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and was a member of the PENS task force for the APA that authorized psychologists’ involvement in torture.Footnote 88 The treatment of the SPE as an unproblematic knowledge object here is also notable because it has informed torture practices at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo (and perhaps in other contexts) through its use in SERE training. This is a fact which Zimbardo himself admits,Footnote 89 but that admission is used to posit ethical questions about the SPE as already resolved.
The eleventh chapter of the book, “The SPE: Ethics and Extensions,” does much work along these lines. Zimbardo seems to want both to acknowledge the irresolvable questions of the study and, at the same time, to provide evidence that a reasoned consideration would in the end find the experiment to have been worthwhile (the knowledge it has produced outweighing the suffering it inflicted). At one point he at least gestures toward the possibility that pain exceeds the terms of such a cost–benefit analysis.Footnote 90 But from there, he goes on to “balance the SPE's ethics slate a bit”Footnote 91 in a discussion that ranges from an overview of how individual study participants integrated the SPE into their lives and careers, to its importance to Zimbardo's own continuing work on various issues of psychology and prison reform, and the usefulness of the research to women's shelters and the US military alike.Footnote 92 In declaring the ultimate importance of the SPE in serving as a “warning against abuse of power,”Footnote 93 Zimbardo sidesteps (though cannot help but implicitly raise the question of) the possibility that the SPE actively facilitated the event of Abu Ghraib. Moreover, the explanation of how and why Abu Ghraib happened that (according to Zimbardo) the SPE singularly provides turns out to be old information: the fact that “almost any individual is capable of torture” was one of the “three key behavioral components,” along with sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain, that the CIA paid academics to identify as part of its project of developing new forms of psychological torture.Footnote 94 What the military and the CIA already knew is evidenced by the exporting of such techniques to so-called Third World police and security forces long before 9/11 and the ensuing US military response.Footnote 95
What, then, is the work of The Lucifer Effect, if the knowledge it offers is not new at all, but rather already used by the very institutions that would supposedly be reformed by its revelation? Perhaps it has to do with a backloading of moral virtue onto the university, an institution whose deep imbrication with US imperialism had already been exposed. Stephen Soldz points out that during the debate within the APA over the PENS report's sanctioning of psychologist involvement in interrogation,
APA leadership deflected the issue by repeating its claim that “psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, and effective” … This statement might appeal to psychologists who wish to believe, for defensive or other reasons, that their profession has some unique moral quality that makes them able to resist the situational pressures that affect others involved in intelligence work …Footnote 96
This forces us to reckon with the university's role in a kind of laundering scheme for military ethics. Money flows from military and state agencies to university centers of research, and emerges on the other side as the equally fungible, though morally “clean,” commodity of psychological principles.Footnote 97 In this transaction, the role of the individual university denizen – the student, the researcher – is key, for it is through his mind that the raw material of emotion must pass in order to be transformed into a meaningful, useful bit of understanding.
In this sense, we must also question the repetition, ad nauseam, of the specifics of torture techniques and their results. Positioning himself as one of those agents who can process the unrefined shock and horror of Abu Ghraib into something useful, Zimbardo includes copious visual evidence of torture as well as a narrativizing of his own process of working through bewilderment to arrive at understanding. These hyper-specific details of the torture serve as evidence of Zimbardo's own appreciation of the value of difference:
Although I have seen many horrifying images of extreme abuse in conducting research on torture in Brazil and in preparing lectures on torture, something at once struck me as being different and yet familiar about the images that were emerging from the exotically named Abu Ghraib prison. The difference had to do with the playfulness and shamelessness displayed by the perpetrators … Nevertheless, a sense of the familiar was haunting me. With a shock of recognition, I realized that watching some of these images made me relive the worst scenes from the Stanford Prison Experiment.Footnote 98
The careful discernment of the relationship between the “different” and the “familiar” in this passage makes the recognition of others’ suffering into an event of the witness's own moral improvement. Similarly, in describing the SPE, Zimbardo characterizes suffering as something that both he and the imputed reader are not used to seeing but that must be looked at anyway:
I will invite you to walk in their shoes and see through their eyes in order to give you an insider's perspective upon evil … At times, the view will be downright ugly, but only by examining and understanding the causes of such evil might we be able to change it, to contain it, to transform it …Footnote 99
This quite explicit inhabiting of the sufferer's position, to facilitate one's own transversal from less to more morally advanced, is just one of the more hyperbolic expressions of the instrumentalization of oppressed experience that is arguably the central process in the sovereign Western subject becoming “the master and controlling author of his or her own meaning.”Footnote 100 Certainly the moral development that is supposed to become possible through the reasoned reflection on evil is not a process assumed to be available to all.
Of course, the recognition of suffering via the circulation and analytic discussion of such knowledge might also serve as a reminder of some peoples’ torturability. Where suffering is imagined as an exceptional experience (as it is when Zimbardo registers astonishment about Abu Ghraib), routine socially sanctioned violence is rendered unremarkable and unmarked, and suffering that is the result of such routinized violence is made to seem “necessary or commonplace.”Footnote 101 The possibility that the circulation of knowledge of torture can also be “an instrumental means of perfecting the methods of torture”Footnote 102 raises yet another ethical dilemma in regard to the monitoring of tortured detainees by medical and psychological professionals, or even “just” the discussion of and reflection upon torture. Even supposing that such work could be clearly delineated and disentangled from the work of supporting torture, the issue remains of what items of information are taken away from such monitoring and reflection, and the various and subtle ways in which they might be instrumentalized elsewhere. That, furthermore, Zimbardo never addresses the profound controversy in the APA around torture at the time of The Lucifer Effect’s publication suggests that the book can be read as, among other things, an attempt to offer commonsense solutions to immensely complex ethical problems and what may ultimately be irresolvable questions of culpability.
NOW: EXPOSURE THERAPY FOR THE EASILY OFFENDED
Recently, the Department of Defense publicly declared its desire for the APA to end the ban on psychologists’ involvement in “national security” interrogations.Footnote 103 Chandan Reddy allows us to contextualize this call to participate in supposedly necessary violence within the longer history of university disciplinary formation around figures of racialized unreason:
Historically racialized groups and nonnormative sexualities gained their meanings in the early-twentieth-century US nation-state as modern irrationalities, atavisms, and perversities from the professional disciplines and institutional bodies that collectively constituted the first fully developed expression of the US research university. Institutions of knowledge were central, then, to the process by which the state could exert its monopoly on force because they produced racial and sexual differences to designate the horizon of irrationalities against and through which state violence became identical to legitimate force.Footnote 104
Markers of this horizon beyond which the reasoning mind cannot travel, incarcerated black individuals, antiwar activists, “terrorists,” and other racialized subjects are characterized by the failure of moral process; in them there is indeed presumed to be no capability of process, but rather an irrational reaction to difference in the form of immediate violence.Footnote 105 As Reddy illuminates, this cruel characterization of the targets of socially sanctioned violence as themselves the origin of violence is codified in the knowledge object of “hate,” defined as an inherent feature of these individuals’ flawed psychology that must be first understood and then eliminated: “any violence not sanctioned by the state is characterized either as nonpolitical or antipolitical ‘hate’ … Practices of hate, then, are the kinds of violence that the state has an obligation to eradicate, so that political society can remain free.”Footnote 106 Reddy's point is that state claims of legitimate violence are premised on the idea that preserving equality requires opposing by any means necessary those so deeply marked by difference that they are intellectually and emotionally marred by it (and hence are constitutive threats to the achievement of equality). I am interested in how this effort to annihilate sources of hatred, or the “moral obligation to attack evil” that is symptomatic of liberalism,Footnote 107 articulates with the work of the university to manage difference, justifying violence against precisely those populations whose bodies are socially encoded as available for others’ use or whose simple presence on campus is read as an act warranting suspicion. Two recent events – the extension of concealed-carry gun laws to university campuses in several states, and the conservative backlash against trigger warnings and safe spaces – have emerged as twin sites of that management's intensification.
One inaugural and symptomatic example of the second is Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's 2015 article for The Atlantic magazine, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”Footnote 108 Its core argument is that students who critique inequality, thus asserting a right to freedom from discrimination's injuries, suffer from mental illness – namely anxiety disorders, characterized by distortions of reality. The list of “Common cognitive distortions” that appears at the end of the article is remarkable for how blatantly it presumes to know and represent the inner workings of the minds of an essentially undefined group of people, and for how little it claims to find there. Exposure therapy is recommended for the coddled mind: those with such anxiety disorders must be forced to face that which scares them. The claim, which as it turns out is a very old and very tired one, is that these students who have been treated as objects of difference by the university are themselves the ones who fear and hate difference. Given that what many of these students actually fear is being targets of the sorts of violence that are often committed with impunity, and given the vehemence of the insistence that such students should neither desire nor expect safety from such violence, it becomes difficult not to conclude that the mass exposure therapy being called for is, implicitly, systematized physical and psychological violence.
The potential ramifications of concealed carry take on even more urgency in a context where students from marginalized groups are charged with violating the freedoms of those who might harm them. Both materially and symbolically, the gun is a complex object of power. Its long-lived status as the proper object of white people enables its use to “protect” the campus from interlopers. The rise of concealed carry is intimately related to a belief in the capability of the right kind of people to see and recognize the wrong kind of people – and to act quickly, through the judicious use of violent force if necessary, to protect deserving US citizens from vaguely defined threats to national security.Footnote 109 And here we are back to The Lucifer Effect, the very last chapter of which – “Resisting Situational Influences and Celebrating Heroism” – summarizes what we can learn from the SPE and Abu Ghraib as a set of guidelines for “resisting the impact of undesirable social influences and at the same time promoting personal resilience and civic virtue.”Footnote 110 This privileging of heroism as an essentially individualist solution to the problems laid out in the book is not unlike some other calls for “resilience” training to end “victimology” within the American citizenry, calls which have sutured the implicit blaming of the marginalized for their problems (due to lack of personal resilience) to the explicit project of “securing” the US from terrorist attacks.Footnote 111
This insistent emphasis on individual psychological fitness as the key to understanding why violence happens and how to end it serves a special function in the knowledge production scheme of the so-called War on Terror: to conceal the failure of “enhanced interrogation” techniques to produce any knowledge at all. Writing about the case of Abu Zubaydah – tortured by the CIA, Zubaydah was, among other things, waterboarded eighty-three times before it was determined that he was not in fact a member of al Qaeda – Mark Danner notes the following:
It's an epistemological paradox. How do you prove what you don't know? And from this open question comes this anxiety-ridden conviction that he must know, he must know, he must know … You see that CIA headquarters is absolutely convinced that these people know about pending attacks. And what the torture proves is that they don't know it.Footnote 112
He goes on to point out, “The use of these techniques let them alleviate their own anxiety.”Footnote 113 Perhaps then we can read the diagnosis of anxiety disorders in the marginalized as a sort of transference, one that covers over the “normal” individual's nervousness about the work of marginalized peoples to create meaningful social change at the level of institutions. Here I cannot help but think about the Stanford prison experiment, and how it proposed to offer a solution to moral problems through the designed homogeneity of its participants – thus offering a story of good and evil in which vulnerability is coopted as a quality of proper university denizens, and the experiment itself an allegory in which the university is free of the differences that injustice dwells upon. The basement is where normal men go to become evil, but only briefly and in the interest of science, so that the classrooms above can remain seemingly clean of moral predicaments and so that violence can seem to be something other rather than foundational to the university.
As I draw this essay to a close, it strikes me that the main appeal of the concept of morality in these widely accepted attempts to understand violence is precisely, as Angela Davis puts it, “the inability of morality to transform the sphere of politics.”Footnote 114 I have attempted in my own small way to respond to Davis's call to challenge the political and institutional conditions that authorize (if never justifying) certain violences, by suggesting that torture is abhorrent not just because of the irremediable suffering it causes, but because of its particular and peculiar hermeneutic function. It instrumentalizes perceived human difference, making those people “marked” by difference into objects whose use facilitates understanding, knowledge, and morality in others. To use torture as an object of reflection for resolving moral problems is to some extent to participate in its hermeneutic function, and – if we follow Chandan Reddy – it is also to participate in the delineation of legitimate violence. I thus refer to Reddy's call to commit to race as a modality of difference that resists the work of the hermeneutic. He argues that “to embrace race is to restore to intellectual endeavor and the public university what both have lost almost entirely in our current moment, their immanent ambiguity.”Footnote 115 I take Reddy, in part, to be rejecting the role that “race” as an object of knowledge is so often forced to play, that of equality's other. The liberal moral values of “mimesis, equivalence, and abstract equality” rely on race as one of their “deconstructive conditions of possibility,”Footnote 116 and yet that foundational reliance must be elided if equality is to have any content at all: in the service of equality, race is located on certain people, who are made the placeholders of the difference against which equality is defined. To embrace race is thus to refuse to force it, and the people who are made to signify its presence, to play this role of stagnant object. It is to honor its animating capacities both destructive and creative, as well as its abiding incapacity to tell us anything at all about the “morality” of violence. It is to maintain a committed skepticism toward attempts to define exactly who and what the university is for. And perhaps most urgently, it is to maintain a commitment to understanding – rather than attempting to resolve through the reparative work of the alibi – the routinized violences that many (perhaps most or even all) of us working in the university bear some responsibility for.
