Force-fed detainees: The biopolitics of the prison

The New York Times reports that United States military authorities are force-feeding detainees on hunger strike at Guantánamo. The Times writes that "guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward".

When a prisoner is force-fed, plastic tubes are inserted through the nose and pushed into the stomach. These measures have reportedly reduced the number of hunger strikers from 84 at the end of December to 4 now.

Criticized by lawyers and NGOs as brutal and inhumane, these practices are defended by the Pentagon as "steps to protect [ a prisoner's] health and preserve their life". The Times quotes the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr. as calling this a "moral question". Winkenwerder is further quoted as asking "Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?"

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One wonders, what the life of a prisoner is worth and why it is so important that prisoners not be allowed to commit suicide at Guantánamo Bay. It is true that a detainee's suicide might raise international criticism (which is the Times's explanation), but that is not a convincing explanation. After all, the Pentagon cares little about international criticism and the practice of force-feeding might also bring about a litany of outcries.

At the core of this issue is the state's capacity to kill, which is undermined by the detainees' attempts to take their own lives. As the state's last resort, the gallows serves an important symbolic function in the articulation and reproduction of the imagery of sovereignty. Once prisoners start taking their own lives, they escape the power of the state to imprint its will upon their bodies. They take charge of their own lives by doing the only thing they can, which is to end it.

But that is not quite everything. The United States is not merely an imperial state, who cannot afford to have its power subverted and its sovereign decision over a prisoner's life withdrawn from its purview. Such an interpretation falls short for two reasons, one historical and one methodological: first, even though some on the Left try to convince us, the U.S. is not the new Rome and not France under Louis XIV. We do live in a different era and to simply play the "villain" card won't do. The mere fact that the U.S. sometimes behaves like an absolutist state of Early Modern Europe does not mean that it can be analyzed in these terms. Second, to read this as just another assertion of sovereignty does not explain the words of Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr. (what a name!) and reduces them to ideology. Indeed, the very existence of such a post in the administration, of an assistant secretary of defense for health affairs is already incompatible with the sovereign interpretation.

Winkenwerder called it a "moral question" and a moral question it is. As a matter of fact, this case is much closer to that of Terry Schiavo than to the torture of Damiens, the regicide whose thousand deaths are recorded by Foucault in the first pages of Discipline and Punish. The issue is not whether someone may be killed (the question of the sovereign), but whether someone's life may be prolonged against their will. It is not about whether the state has the right to kill you and end your life, but whether it has the right to make you live, force you to live.

It may be that this is merely what Foucault meant, when - in the first volume of the History of Sexuality he argued that biopower is about making people live and letting them die, instead of the sovereign version, which is to let people live and make them die. Perhaps. But I am not sure. It may also be that there is a modal shift taking place here. After all, the Guantánamo and Schiavo cases are no longer about making live in the sense of aiding life, providing health and welfare, supplying immunizations against disease, building appropriate infrastructure, organizing public hygiene, and so on. These current issues are somewhat different. They are not concerned with abetting and inciting life. They make life obligatory, necessary and enforced. The aims here are to mandate life and prohibit death.

Schematically, we might distinguish three modal categories, in progressively increasing order of necessity: possibility, incitement, and obligation (with its inverse: prohibition). Logicians would probably scoff at this heuristic, but that doesn't matter for now. Applied to Foucault's typology, sovereign power involves the possibility to live and obligation to die, whereas biopower stands for the incitement to live and possibility to die. The Guantánamo and Schiavo cases would represent a third permutation: the obligation to live and prohibition to die.