VINCENT LÊ - ENTRY NO. 7 (KHALILI)

THE COVERT INCARCERATIONAL PROXY REGIME OF INVISIBILITY AND UNACCOUNTABILITY: In Chapter 3 of TIME IN THE SHADOWS, Khalili exposes the way in which covert prisons operated by proxy state militias and private mercenaries on behalf of the great empires constitute a regime of rendering invisible and unaccountable the spaces and actors of war respectively. The very difficulty that Khalili has in finding evidence for such proxy prisons in leaked and unclassified FBI and CIA files, which have censored or simply omitted any and all references to incarcerational spaces and agents, is in itself evidence for this. In any case, Khalili’s thesis of the covert incarcerational proxy regime of invisibility and unaccountability is, nonetheless, confirmed by the few known incarcerational black sites, which are not directly maintained and operated by the great empires themselves, but by an alliance of subordinate ‘sovereign’ State-apparatuses and private mercenaries doing so either with an eye cast to their own reward and gain, and/or from fear of non-compliance. Khalili identifies three advantages for the outsourcing of the spaces and agents of war by the great empires that outweigh its singular disadvantage: 1. MILKING THE (SCAPE)GOAT Niccolò Machiavelli taught us long before Claude Levi-Strauss or Khalili that such trickster figures as the proxy prison permit the great empires to distanciate themselves from the distasteful tasks of torture and interrogation conducted in said proxy prisons. Only Machiavelli went much further in situating the trickster at the very telltale heart of our societies by identifying it with the parliament. That is to say, the king/ruling classes, knowing how unpopular oppressive mechanisms like exorbitant taxations are, relieved themselves of the blame by establishing the third judicial body of the parliamentary state in order to impose them. In Machiavelli’s own words, ‘There could be no better or more prudent an institution than this [trickster one], nor could there be a better explanation for the security of the king and the kingdom […] princes must delegate distasteful tasks to others, while pleasant ones they should keep for themselves’. To provide a topical incarcerational example, my wager is that such Machiavellian trickery is behind the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott’s efforts to widely publicize the Australian military’s direct participation in locating the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, while simultaneously outsourcing the dirty work of brutally incarcerating refugees to Australia’s ‘ex-colony’, Papua New Guinea. As such, even if these covert proxy prisons are ever unveiled, the great empires can always endow themselves positively to the outraged public by betraying the proxy agents and holding them criminally liable for the empires’ own proxy acts of violence. As Machiavelli also portended so long ago that one would think we would have learnt our lesson by now, this FINAL SOLUTION is crucial for the empires because the singular weakness of the incarcerational proxy regimes is that the hired mercenaries and state militias who run them are neither reliable nor loyal to them. 2. LINGUIStricks It is precisely such judicial linguistricks that permits the proxy regimes to justify and cloak their violence in the language of legality and confidentiality. Consider Khalili’s anecdote in a footnote about how some French lawyers, who asked the Israeli military to visit a detainee whom they were representing in Khiyam prison, were informed that the South Lebanese Army controls the prison. When pressed by the lawyers to order the SLA to permit them visiting rights to the prison, Israel added that they do not operate the prison or perform any other joint operations with the SLA, but merely finance, train, arm and provide intelligence to them, such that Israel cannot hold itself or the SLA legally accountable. To add insult to injury, when the French lawyers then asked the SLA directly for visitors’ permits, they were told that the SLA is unaccountable for prisons operated by Israel! Given how such linguistricks function to cloak and sustain regimes of torture and violence, the French madman, Jacques Lacan, was all too farsighted indeed to have said that ‘LANGUAGE IS THE TORTURE HOUSE OF MAN’. 3. IMPERIALISM: THE HIGHEST STAGE OF RACIALIZATION AND GENDERIZATION The proxy states, Khalili continues, are not only used to wage wars on behalf of the empires, but also to divide those proxy states themselves into an antagonistic contradiction between those who work for the state and manage the prisons, and those who are their victims in a process that Khalili calls ‘racialization’. In this way, the target of the empires’ offensives are not simply those who their proxy states target, but the proxy states themselves. Again, this is nothing new under the sun insofar as it recalls Marx’s writings on the British colony in India, which are much hated by anthropologists (‘The British Rule in India’: http://www.marxists.org/archive/mark/works/1853/06/25.htm and ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm). But I do not mention these texts only so as to be frivolously provocative in an anthropology class. For in these texts, Marx demonstrates that the British colonizers did NOT unite a disconnected, roadless, tribalized India by laying the material foundations for a Western nation-state to emerge. It would be absurd, after all, for the colonizers to mobilize a brutally oppressed colony against themselves. It is true enough that the British did indeed break up local native ties and village community structures that served as impediments to mass industrialization, and hence surplus appropriation by the British, but only so as to also revive and nationalize the native Indian caste system and hereditary division of labour that impeded national consciousness and revolution. Moreover, according to Khalili, this colonial process of racialization is intimately connected to another process of ‘genderization’; viz., feminization of the colony/proxy as timid, receptive, cowardly, penetrable, dominated and slavish, and contradistinctive masculinization of the empire as brave, active, dominant, moral, masterful, and impenetrable. Simply put, genderization is the process of emphasizing that the imperialists’ tanks are bigger and their steeled foreskin harder than those of the proxy tricksters (120). WHEREFORE ART THOU POLITICS? Another way of formulating the function of the covert incarcerational proxy regimes is to say that these proxy tricksters constitute a REGIME OF DE-POLITICIZATION. That is to say, if Clausewitz is right and war is simply politics by other means, then the erasure of the agents and spaces of war functions to negate political participants and spaces as such so as to perpetuate the status quo. Consequently, by censoring political spaces from maps and signs and situating political participants in international wars where cameras and courts cannot reach, the regime of depoliticizaiton perpetuates the illusion the given visible set of apolitical behaviours and actions, such as voting and signing petitions, constitute the totality of possible modalities of political expression. But what Jacques Rancière, whom Khalili cites, would call ‘le partage du sensible’, and Derek Gregory might call ‘the scopic regime’, is as much a mode of exclusion and censorship from the sensible framework as it is a mode of making perceptible, visible, audible and thinkable. Such texts as Khalili’s and such actions as Assange, Manning and Snowden’s, which unveil the political spaces and agents of war, thereby constitute a REdistribution of the sensible, a kind of counter-regime of making visible, perceptible, thinkable and conceivable again politics as such. This is what Rancière and Khalili alike name ‘democracy’. There is, however, a crucial difference between Khalili and Rancière’s prescriptions. For Khalili, democracy is the monitoring of the covert incarcerational proxy regimes by the very superegoic Law that precisely concealed such regimes in the first place. To lend support to his prescription, Khalili, thus, misquotes Rancière, who, on the contrary, asserts that every redistribution of the sensible, or what Khalili calls by the neoliberal moniker of ‘transparency’, is by necessity an illegal act of war that violently transgresses the present distribution of the sensible such as it is always upheld before the Law.