Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Work in the humanities is energetically rethinking its intervention in human rights, a field bedeviled by narratives generated by and about the “individual” or the sovereign state. Rights, as many have shown, are constructed through political systems, but also narrative, culture, and representation (Hunt 2007, Slaughter 2007, Parikh 2017, Moore 2018). Cultural imaginaries shape our understanding of violence and our resort to it. This paper rethinks the application of the humanities and its tools: strategies of close reading and analysis, historical interpretation, and attention to instabilities of form. Turned from the traditional objects of study and toward the case of state torture, the American Psychological Association, its ethics directorate, and licensing boards, these tools demonstrate that professional codes, routines, and structures are powerful foundries of the imagination and thereby critical infrastructures of structural violence. In 2017, defendants settled in Salim v. Mitchell, the first case to prosecute civilian actors for post-9/11 torture. Psychologists Mitchell and Jessen were the first the US did not shield from prosecution. Singling out individual plaintiffs enabled litigation but failed to implicate decades old professional and financial entanglements among media, the Pentagon, specific networks of scholars and schools of psychology that have crafted the contemporary cultural imaginary on torture. These networks have left a clear trail of mutual benefit and social harm. Accountability (academic and otherwise) for torture requires an altered analysis of state violence as a collaborative practice perpetrated by networks, professional structures, and the imaginaries they craft and pass along.