Presented at ISIS Conference in Toronto, Canada, Summer 2008

On the Ethical Meaning of Torture and Resistance
Shokoufeh Sakhi

Being familiar with the history of Christian Inquisition, the reign of the KGB and Stalin in the Soviet Union, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and our own recent history we have all grappled with the phenomena of 'show-trials', 'false or forced-interviews' and 'tortured-confessions'. Although the terms 'show', 'forced' and 'tortured' identify aspects of these phenomena, however, the illusion of cause and effect rationality (instrumental reason), with which they are associated, tends to simplify the complexity of the human experiences involved; this illusion reduces the meaning of our humanity, tending as it does to imprison our understanding within a 'victim and victimizer' dichotomy. In this particular prison of signification, the roles are handed out in advance, perpetual effacement and resignation for the victim, all responsibility and subjectivity for those who wield power.
This perspective is particularly limiting in elucidating the phenomena of 'conversions', and even more particularly so in the case of apparently sincere identity transformations. We have all heard the claims of prosecutors and of a number of those who have 'confessed', claims strongly defended even after leaving prison, that the interviews and confessions, the changed ideology and identity are heart-felt and genuine.
How are we to elucidate the phenomena of 'conversion' under torture, particularly in the case of the 'sincere' adorations and devotions of those prisoners (or those who never stepped through the prison doors) who re-form and re-style their 'selves' as genuine tavabs , tavabs who inflict fear, pain, suffering and sorrow on another human being, who contribute to the submission of others, sacrificing them to their own new identities?
The issue of the tavabin has been very sensitive and enigmatic both in Iran and within the diasporas and so, understandably enough, is under-represented, under-analyzed and often misunderstood thus far in the literature. The thousands of tavabin created and deployed at the arrival of the present regime were enormously effective in the enforcement of suppression and torture inside the prison walls as well as having great political and psychological effects on those touched directly or indirectly, both inside and outside of prison, by the phenomenon. Given these effects, all the more powerful because of the ideological (religious) content, and given individual conscience, social shame, the desire not to blame the victim and the potentially abusive and violent reactions these givens entail, the retarded state of analysis is not surprising.
Actual elucidating analysis should begin, it seems to me, with the recognition that Tavabization is neither a passive nor banal phenomenon; it is not a mere withdrawal from a conflict, an admission of defeat; it is not just surrendering one's self. It is rather a process of the formation of a willing, a willingness, however over or covert, to surrender others to the forces of rot, death and destruction. It is participation in the domination and death --in the flesh and/or spirit-- of the other. Confessions here, 'forced' or 'sincere', are not merely personal, private or individual matters; none of them starts nor ends with the confessing selves. In fact, the reduction of the self to an individual, atomized unit is a phase in the intentions of the torturer. My claim, is that it is the sociality of the individual that the torturer targets: the aim is to reduce the individual to a mere object of survival. In this, I find myself in agreement with the philosopher, Emanuel Levinas, who argues adamantly that human beings are always already, first and foremost, ethical beings, responsible to and for others; when that is gone all that remains is a merely biological creature.
I contend that, beyond and aside from obtaining information, etc., it is the ethical humanity, the socially responsible being, that torture seeks to foul with its rancid touch. This ancient but occluded, most fundamental ethic, the primordial being-for-the-other may be glimpsed in the prison memoirs and wills describing the underlying whys of the prisoners' resistance. Words as simple as a mother's advice to her daughter upon their first visit: "Just try to keep your dignity. Never do anything to harm people" (We Lived to Tell, 53). Or the oath a prisoner makes as she inherits a condemned prisoner's piece of clothes: "I promise I won't turn my back on your owner's pain" (We Lived to Tell, 37). One's dignity is in her relation to the Others. One's humanity is in her response to the pain of the Other. Resistance and capitulation is, therefore, not only an individual endeavour; it is also the responsibility of the human community and the human community's response to all totalizing systems, systems, that is, with the intention of rendering everyone --at their deepest levels-- the same as them.
It is exactly this social aspect of resistance against and capitulation to the paideia of the totalizing system that urges us to analyse and understand both the success and failure of tavabization, a phenomenon that has not, of course, been limited to prison systems or Iran.
The suffering and death of the tortured prisoner is, of course, a personal experience, but, as resistance, this experience is also a relationship to the other, to alterity as such, against domination as such. The most fundamental evidence of the primordial ethical meaning and sociality of the self lays there on the torture bench. Responsibility for the other's life and death is the unspoken universal assumption behind the event of torture: torture is born and thrives on this primary assumption that its subject is first ethical, an 'other', not yet assimilated into the totalizing system. It is precisely this responsibility-for-the-other, this meaning of life and love, that torture, with all its innovations, targets to crush.
Though torture cannot grasp love and life in its totality, it can and does reach for it, and it is that impossible reaching that animates much of the experience of the torture chamber. In the cable contacting the captured body during torture there is awareness of the pain and suffering it arouses in the subject, and perhaps the pleasure this arouses in the torturer, but this is not the end for the torturer: insofar as the torture is in the service of the totalizing system, it is the ethical being he/she is after. Hence, the cycle of increased violence, of ever greater inhumanity on the part of the totalizing system, hence the omnipotent fantasies of the power of the caress of torture:
They [the Islamic torturers] see a metaphysical power in the cable, a supra-human power. For them the cable works miracles. The entire body of the prisoner must be touched by the cable for the miracle to occur: that is the person is changed from being a filthy, illegitimate creature who would be burned in the fires of hell into a clean, pure and legitimate creature who will go to heaven. Prisoner's resistance under the cable, is to the warden (Haji) like an infant…(A tavab in "Maraee Kaffar Ast", N. Khaksar, 117-18).

The torturer finds what he or she seeks slipping away and inaccessible; torture is made up of the increase of hunger; it feeds on countless hungers. When, for example, is the tavab to be fully accepted as a convert, as a true child of Islam? Never. When the guards beat a tavab for having succumbed to their torture and betrayed his friend (Look Closely; Its Real, 26), they seek to further break him down out of the sense they have that they have only reached him superficially, on the level of his will, that the full conversion is still to come; it is always still to come, no matter the evidence. When is the tavab assured of his acceptance as totally assimilated? Never.
In October 1985 we heard that Vahid had been hung in the prison yard…. All of the Tavabs were shocked by the news. For the last three years, Vahid had co-operated non-stop with the prison system. He had just begun to computerize the prison's intelligence gathering. He was in charge of gathering and collecting information and intelligence (the case of Vahid Sarie-al-Ghalam, Memories of Prison, F. Azad, 140).

This incapacity to find completion leads to yet more questions: Why, under the paideia of the totalizing system, do we so often come to doubt our very identities, to question our resistance itself, such that we capitulate in this way? Are such systems simply irresistibly powerful in their instrumental knowledge of human nature and in their control of our physical, psychical and spiritual being? Or does our capitulation have something to do with our relation to ourselves and our situation, our identities themselves, our motives for resistance? So far, at least, the former cannot be the case because not everyone capitulates and not every capitulation is final. Underlying the questions 'What about who we are makes us fail to resist?' and 'Why resist?' are again, questions of our humanity, of what we are as human beings, and thus of the fundamental meaning of resistance, specifically, I contend again, its ethical meaning.
Let us look at the evidence of the literature. Here, the initial task for the prison system is to establish a regression, to remove the existing self and its internal relations as much as possible. This task is done through torture, physical and psychological, environmental manipulation, from blind-folding to solitary confinement and panoptical effects, and 'education' or indoctrination, i.e., infusing the new identity, meaning, and its rationalization. Though prison memoirs, letters and wills of Iranian political prisoners, evince the paideia of prison as a totalizing system, the CIA's counterintelligence interrogation manual, known as Kubark, interestingly articulates a similar object for interrogation and incarceration, that is, an induced regression in the resistant prisoner. According to the CIA documents the torturer must seek a way of breaking the all residues of an autonomous self in the prisoner, pushing her into a 'child-like' state of being: helpless and hopeless, bent only on seeking refuge from fear and pain in her torturer. The manual advices in order to finalize the process of regression and demolishing the prisoner's autonomy to the level she abandons her ethical responsibility for her others, the interrogator must also provide her with the right rationalization:
Now the interrogator becomes fatherly. Whether the excuse is that others have already confessed ("all the other boys are doing it"), that the interrogatee had a chance to redeem himself ("you're really a good boy at heart"), or that he can't help himself ("they made you do it"), the effective rationalization, the one the source will jump at, is likely to be elementary. It is an adult's version of the excuses of childhood (Ibid. p.78).

The prison system in Iran after the 1979 revolution had sought the destruction of the prisoners' otherness and their ethical subjectivity to its perfection: a prolonged and systemic process of attack on the prisoner's ethical subjectivity and its reduction to a survival subjectivity, reducing the subject to an object of survival creating what I call "a survival-ego". M. Raha in her prison memoir elucidates the slippery slope of a metamorphosis from an ethical subject, into a survival-ego along the path of indifference:

They called me to participate in a public religious ceremony. I had never participated in these programs before, but, at this moment, I was in a state of indifference. I felt the heaviness of this indifference on my being; this scared me. I feared for my future. What would they want from me? How far could I retreat; where could I stop and tighten my belt again? In those days, I was thinking that I could hold out, was holding out, preserving my strength for bigger battles. Was this only a justification for my growing indifference, for allowing myself to be led (Simple Truths III, M. Raha, 22)?

She responds to her question positively as she tells her readers the downward slope she was sliding on.
I was in a state of indifference; I could feel the heavy spirit of it on my being, and that frightened me…. …. After a period of indecision and inner conflict, one day I just started doing the prayers. I call this submitting…. It was a choice between life and death. The death sentence was threatening me. … My interrogator told me …I could change my death sentence to long-time imprisonment if I adopted a more compromising position. ….
In the nightmare of death, I ran away from it, right when I felt only loathing for life. I felt wretched in my running and each time I bent to say my prayers I felt it more (25).

To facilitate M. Raha's fall and speed up the process of tavabization her interrogator arranges a 'round-table' debate on her political and ideological positions with her ex-comrade and today's tavab. She says:
I compared her with myself. In the past, we had had so much in common. Now her capitulation and wretchedness frightened me. What if I wound up like her? No, I could still resist (27).

To survive as an object, remaining alive by surrendering to the forces which annihilate one's otherness and incorporate her identity as a piece of the regime's identity, kills the human life, drains its meaning. One slides down the path of the survival-ego. M. Raha's self-reflective words are again very telling:
[Months later, after more interrogation and another 'trial':] I was more ambivalent than ever about helping myself. I loathed life as I feared death. I could not endure the life that was forced upon me, but did not have the courage to kill myself. I wanted to die naturally, without suicide. In other words, I wanted to be delivered (45). ….

The prison system in post-revolution Iran with its project of tavabization has revealed, again and again, the absurdity of the myth that one's life and death is one's own alone, that one is only responsible towards one's personal survival. Behind the torture room, on the bench and on the gallows the battle is between the agents of a totalizing system that reaches for its subject's otherness and the prisoner who is the gate-keeper of and the gate to her humanity, and through her to 'Others'. Yesterday's hero turns into today's victim or tomorrow's traitor and today's traitor into tomorrow's hero. Neither the paradigm of 'hero and villain' nor 'victim and victimizer' can grasp the complexity of our ethical essence. Both remain bound within the attributes of individuals, individual prowess and weakness making it easy for us to either point a praising or blaming finger, resigning our own responsibility to either the power of the hero or the power of the victimizer. Both paradigms fall short of capturing the human relation within and among each and every one of us. Neither reaches the ethical meaning of humanity, neither can comprehend Gholam Kohneh-Shahri's last words before execution:
I loved life dearly; however, to continue living would cost more than I can pay. ("Testaments" in The Book of Prison II, 272).