Hunger for voice: transformative argumentation in the 2005 Guantanamo Bay hunger strike.

• Author: Vicaro, Michael P.
• Position: Essay

Sometime during the third week of July 2005, Army Colonel Mike Bumgarner, the military official in charge of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center (GTMO), found himself persuaded. Detainees had quietly organized a widespread collective hunger strike, and with over two hundred men moving toward the brink of death, the medical staff was overwhelmed and the prison was spiraling out of control. After years of relative voicelessness, detainees created a rhetorical situation charged with urgency sufficient to gain a hearing. They did so by harnessing the force of demonstrative body rhetoric, and moving toward the locus of the irreparable, impending mass death by starvation (Cox, 1982; Hauser, 1999; Hauser, 2006, 2013). In the face of this collective strike, Bumgarner listened to arguments, he negotiated, he acceded to the strikers' demands, and the prison changed. For a brief moment, a group of detainees had succeeded in collectively transforming Guantanamo from within, establishing the conditions for a nascent deliberative, participatory rhetorical community in what must be among the least democratic places on earth (Smith, 2007). However, it was only temporary. Bumgarner's judgment was soon overruled, concessions were retracted, and the military broke the strike with a policy of daily systematic naso-gastric force-feeding that has continued to this day (Leopold, 2014).

This article develops a theory of politically transformative argumentation with the 2005 GTMO hunger strike as its exemplary case. It argues that certain forms of disputation must create their own conditions of possibility for being heard as arguments. Particularly in cases in which disputants are presumed to have no legal or institutional standing, the essential features of a deliberative situation-forum, speaker, audience, voice-must be invented as an accomplishment of the act of protest itself. The article draws upon the work of the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Ranciere (2004, 2006, 2009), whose theory of political speech helps to explain this ironic form of argumentative invention that I detect in the 2005 GTMO hunger strike. Equipped with this conception of political speech, I engage current scholarship on hunger striking and argue that in order to understand the possibility of radical change in places such as GTMO, critics should focus on the significance of the listener (rather than the persuasive speaker) in the context of politically transformative argumentation. After providing an account of the hermeneutics of listening in the case of the Guan-tanamo hunger strike, I then conclude on a less hopeful note--examining the eventual collapse of the deliberative forum through a policy of forcibly feeding all striking detainees.

LOGOS AND POLITICAL SPEECH

The goal of this article is to explore the extent to which effective political argumentation is possible in highly controlled environments such as GTMO-style supermax prisons. As might be expected, the findings offer little to warrant optimism. When thought of as a dialectical exchange between independent self-conscious actors, argumentation in GTMO is simply not possible. The conception of argument as persuasive speech presumes a rhetorical situation, the relational features of which do not obtain in places such as GTMO. For instance, the typical deliberative situation presumes that speakers and audience members have the right to appear together in a public forum that exists independently of the participants and establishes the norms of decorum that underlie their deliberations and agonistic displays. Further, the speaker is presumed to have the time and techne needed to assess the available means of persuasion in the given situation. Likewise, the speaker must address individuals willing to become an audience-witnesses to the spectacle of speechmaking and capable of reasoned judgment about what they see and hear. Moreover, the speaker and audience are presumed to share a common language, both in the colloquial sense of sharing common doxa and values, and in the literal sense of sharing common meanings for spoken words. Argumentation, traditionally figured, can only take place in a shared polis in the broadest sense of that term.

None of these prerequisites for deliberation could be found in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 2005. Inmates of highly controlled, quasi-legal carceral environments such as GTMO occupy a subject-position (not unlike that of certain deportees, stateless people, and inmates of administrative segregation units in U.S. prisons) defined by near-total exposure to state violence with none of the protections granted to convicted criminals or internationally recognized prisoners of war. Denied the rights of speech and assembly and without standing under normal federal and international law, such persons face a unique challenge if they wish to effectively protest the conditions of their detention or petition for the redress of grievances. They must first appear within a regime dedicated to the erasure of their status as rights-bearing citizen-subjects. Stated otherwise, radically transformative argumentation in hostile environments must often create its own conditions of possibility for being heard as deliberative discourse. It is my contention that in such situations, a successful argument will in fact refigure prevailing assumptions about what counts as speech. Further, a speaker-centered view of persuasive speech fails to account for such a transformation; if political argumentation in such an inhospitable situation becomes effective, it may best be described as an outcome of listening rather than speaking.

The work of the contemporary philosopher Jacques Ranciere can shed light on the radical quality of argument that emerges from persons, such as GTMO detainees, who are presumed to be politically speechless (2004, 2006, 2009). He claims that any assessment of the logos appeals of a speaker rests on a set of underlying assumptions about which symbolic acts should properly count as politically relevant speech and which are equivalent to the irrational noise of human animals (Ranciere, 2004). Evoking Aristotle's distinction in the Politics between logos and phone. Ranciere (2004) notes that the "political destiny of man is attested by a sign: the possession of the logos, that is, of speech, which expresses, while the voice simply indicates" (p. 2). The distinction occurs in the discussion of those who are presumed to be "natural-born" slaves-Aristotle suggests that such a person "participates in reason so far as to recognize it (aesthesis) but not so as to possess it (hexis)" (as cited in Ranciere, 2004, p. 17). Such individuals can take orders, but they could not take the podium and properly speak about questions of justice, beauty, and truth.

Of course, what Aristotle presents as an empirical observation (that some animals participate in logos but do not possess it) can be seen as part of deliberate effort to invent and police a condition of inequality. As duBois (1991) has argued, the institutionally enforced distinction between those with logos and those without (e.g. slaves, foreigners, women) stood at the heart of the ancient Athenian polls, shaping juridical and deliberative norms about who was presumed to have access to public forums. According to duBois, the Greeks invented an array of activities (e.g. juridical torture) designed to actively suppress the barbarian/slave's capacity for speech. Through torture and other forms of violence, citizens constrained the voice of "others"-reducing it to the grunts of pleasure and pain [phone]-and then used this as evidence of their own exclusive possession of "proper" speech [logos). She concludes that "civilization" actively produced barbarism through a primary violence that renders the "other" (e.g. the slave) speechless (duBois, 1991).

In Ranciere's (2006) terms, such practices constrain the realm of what might count as proper speech and produce an inegalitarian "distribution of the sensible" (p. 12) ("sensible" is taken here to mean both reasonable and apparent-i.e. able to be sensed). Norms about access to forums for argumentation thus act as a "police" force-disciplining unruly, potentially transformative, speech. As Stoneman (2011) explains, Ranciere uses the term "police" to denote "an inegalitarian ordering of society's parts, one that invents a range of communicative and behavioral norms that it then distributes on the basis of the body's nature, function, and occupation" (p. 134). He further explains,

These performative and occupational attributes serve to institute a collective social body that is differentiated in terms of status, rank, and social privilege, thereby ensuring that the demos is always already excluded from playing an active, decision-making role in the organization and distribution of power, (p. 134)

Ranciere uses the term political to describe acts that break with this police function. A properly political act, then, is one that contests the prevailing distribution of the sensible, finding a way to utter speech from a place formerly thought to be inhabited by an inarticulate beast. Such speech "shifts a body from the place assigned to it. . . . It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise" (Ranciere, 2004, p. 30). To reiterate, the term policing refers to the ordering and maintenance of the partition of the sensible/perceptible, while the political refers to an event that disrupts these categorical partitions. The emergence of political speech, in Ranciere's sense, entails an aesthetic transformation whereby the invisible is made visible and the inaudible is heard. As I argue below, this kind of transformation is, paradoxically, both an outcome of and prerequisite for effective political disputation. In Ranciere's (2004) terms, "the demonstration proper to politics is always both argument and opening up the...