On the complicity between formal analysis and tortur

2005, revised 2010-12, and uploaded July 14, 2013.] On The Complicity Between Visual Analysis and Torture: A Cut-by-Cut Account of Lingchi Photographs James Elkins What follows is not an

[Note to readers: this is chapter 6 from the book Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture, co-edited with Maria Pia Di Bella, in the series Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies (New York: Routledge, 2012)

The larger context of studies of the “death of a thousand cuts” appears in other places: see the related material in “The Very Theory of Transgression: Bataille, lingchi, and Surrealism,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 5 no 2 (2004): 5–19; “The Most Intolerable Photographs Ever Taken,” in The Ethics and Aesthetics of Torture: Its Comparative History in China, Islam, and Europe, edited by Timothy Brook and Jérôme Bourgon (London: Rowman and Littlefield, c 2012); and in Portuguese as “As fotografias mais intoleráveis já tiradas,” in Leituras do Corpo, edited by Christine Greiner and Claudia Amorim (São Paulo: Annablume, 2003), 27–63 ISBN 85-7419-358-5.

This essay was originally posted on academia.edu, and on the author’s website, www.jameselkins.com Please send all comments, criticism, etc., to jelkins@saic.edu.

The text was written c 2005, revised 2010-12, and uploaded July 14, 2013.]

On The Complicity Between Visual Analysis and Torture:

A Cut-by-Cut Account of Lingchi Photographs

James Elkins

What follows is not an ordinary analysis of a visual material, but an analysis that means to say something about analysis itself It is also a contribution to the study of the images known as

lingchi, called in English the “death of a thousand cuts.” But even there, I am only offering a

very partial and narrow kind of contribution Others have written about the social and political

contexts of the lingchi images, and I have written about the strange influence have had on the

understanding of surrealism.1 I think those kinds of investigation are important for the historical

understanding of the lingchi, and the more recent question of what counted as transgressive to certain viewers in the early twentieth century The lingchi images are complex, and involve a

diverse cast of characters from the original executioners to the French photographers, surrealists, psychologists, and, more recently, critics of various sorts from Giorgio Agamben to Georges Didi-Huberman.2

My contribution to the historical study of the lingchi images is strictly empirical: I aim to say, as succinctly as possible, what actually happened in the course of a lingchi execution, from

moment to moment, until the final dismemberment That has not been done before, and I have marked a few places in my analysis that are speculative The analysis is also limited to the three sequences that are known in sufficient detail, which means the analysis only applies to just a few

of the very last lingchi that were done in Shanghai in 1905.3 In addition, I have abridged my analysis here to keep with this book’s limitations on the number of reproductions per chapter A

full analysis of the exact method of the lingchi requires about forty images, more than can be

accommodated in this book What I am contributing is therefore only a sample of a full

discussion.4

I am also interested in saying something about analysis itself I would like to study the

effect of looking at painful images such as the lingchi so slowly and carefully that it is possible

to reconstruct every last cut in the procedure I noticed in the conference that preceded this book that most of my fellow presenters looked only very briefly at their images, and several took them off the screen when they wanted to speak at length, in order to relieve us of the necessity of seeing them too long The same can be said of the well-known writers and artists who first

disseminated these images, in particular Georges Bataille The images have traditionally been seen in glimpses You look, you flinch, you look away I wanted to see what would happen if I looked with the steady attention of a doctor or an executioner

Why do that? When the images are seen with a steady gaze, they lose something of their original power, and they gain in other ways Bataille needed the images he owned to be

transgressive, and (as I have argued in the other essay) transgression has become a central term

in post-surrealist art It infuses some of the essays in this book What happens, then, when these images cease to be transgressive, or become transgressive in an unexpected sense?

Ultimately, this is a question I put to myself and to everyone who studies representations

of pain Why do we look at these images? What effects do they have on us, and on others? At the end of the conference, in the roundtable conversation that is reprinted in this book, I raised the question of self-reflexivity Why, I wanted to know, does the Turandot Group study these

images? What does it mean to study such images now, at the beginning of the new century? Most

of us in the conference were familiar with the history of these images—made in China a little over 100 years ago; collected and disseminated in prewar France Some members of the Group said they study the images in order to deconstruct them, to see what they meant to viewers in France and in China Others, such as Jérôme Bourgon, who has published more on these images than anyone else, said they were interested in the images as evidence of the end of a long

tradition of Chinese legal scholarship We, in the Group, had various motives There was, I

a group, were interested in precisely those images, at precisely that historical moment As you will see in the Roundtable that concludes this book, there wasn’t much reflection on that issue, and I thought that our fixed relation to these images might be jarred by looking at them

differently —in this case, more systematically and slowly

There is also a third purpose to this essay, and it is one I did not expect, and did not

develop, until I had written out the first draft I think that the slow, sometimes excruciating

process of looking at the lingchi step by step has parallels with ordinary visual analysis as it is

practiced on any image, in art history classrooms around the world In the “close reading” of an image, whether it is a formal analysis, a compositional analysis, an iconographic inventory, or some unnamed kind of careful looking, the student’s or scholar’s eye is meant to travel slowly and systematically over the image, overlooking nothing, noting everything, classifying and

systematizing the image’s root meanings Only then, so it is said in the pedagogy of images, is it possible to go on and build serious interpretations What I noticed in performing the close

reading of lingchi images is that the dissection of the bodies in the photographs is structurally

similar to the dissection of any image by any eye that aims at being systematic, rational, and thorough The conclusion I draw is that visual analysis is not a neutral, heuristic, preparatory step

in the understanding of images It can be a cold, and cold-blooded, dissection of the image: a powerful, invasive and destructive operation that severs the image from itself, cuts it into pieces, and leaves it dismembered, helpless, and ready for interpretation I have only a little to say about

that here, because of this book’s limited space I expand on the analysis in a book called What Photography Is in relation to the specific medium of photography.5 (It was another motif of the conference that we spent relatively little time pondering the media we were studying, as if the message superseded its material expression.)

Analysis of the lingchi procedure

The procedure starts with the removal of the victim’s left breast (Fig 6 1) This particular event was documented with large-format stereo slides The larger image is one of the stereo pairs

Fig 6.1 Execution of an unknown prisoner by lingchi Date unknown, c 1905

Caishikou execution field, Beijing Top: stereo pair Bottom: detail

Photos courtesy of Musée Albert Kahn; details and arrows by the author

The cut is very clean, removing the skin, the superficial fat, and the chest muscle, in an egg-shaped area The procedure here would be very similar to skinning an animal, and it is

reasonable to assume that the executioner’s expertise came from butchery The shiny fascia covering the ribs and intercostal muscles are still intact, also typical in flaying an animal There

is only one thin rivulet of blood If flaying is done well, there is very little blood loss

2 In the next stereo pair, additional dissection has been done (Fig 6 2, top) The fascia have been cut away, revealing the ribs, and the arm has been opened above the elbow joint

Fig 6.2 Execution of an unknown prisoner by lingchi Date unknown, c.1905

Caishikou execution field, Beijing Details

Photos courtesy of Musée Albert Kahn; details and arrows by the author

A lens-shaped aperture has been cleared away, indicated by the arrow This same shape appears

in photographs of other lingchi The fifth and sixth ribs curve upward at this point, and the apex

of the heart would be just beneath them, covered only in a thin layer of fascia It is possible that the purpose of this cut was to reveal the beating of the man’s heart The apex of the heart could

be the form indicated by the arrow

In this same photograph (Fig 6 2, top), the front of the man’s arm has been sliced off Photographs of other executions show how this was done: the executioner pinches the biceps to raise it up, and then slices underneath it In this case the man’s arm was tied so close to his body that the executioner cut his side in two places (note the two small cuts on his side next to the cut

in the arm)

The humerus (upper arm bone) may have been cut midway along its length, and ripped out Below, the round condyles of the radius (one of the lower arm bones) are visible, indicated

by the arrow This kind of cut would be easy to do with a large cleaver Chinese cookbooks

routinely call for the breaking of even large bones with cleavers, and once the humerus was broken it would not be difficult to pull the lower portion forward and snap the cartilages at the

elbow joint In other lingchi photographs, it is evident that this was done to both arms and legs

The victim would then be disabled without amputation

The purpose of both the excision of the lower humerus and femur, and also the prosection (demonstrative dissection) of the apex of the heart, might have been to enable the victim to see his own body in the process of being dismantled.6 The same could be said of other sequences in which the humerus and femur were apparently not excised (See Fig 6 4.)

3 With the intercostal spaces scraped clean, the victim could have seen the beating of his

heart, and also the motions of his lungs In other sequences of lingchi, there is also lower cut on

his right side (our left side) may have been designed to reveal the liver One is visible in Fig 6:

2, bottom This cut goes below the ribs, and like the other cuts it seems to outline a particular area

By this time the victim will have bled more, but still much less than would cause a loss of consciousness One of the purposes of the very sharp knives and clean cuts may have been to prolong the victim’s consciousness

(I am not claiming that the purpose of these actions is to prolong the suffering of the

victim It was widely assumed by Westerners that the lingchi was an operation intended to

produce pain There is no evidence for that in the Chinese texts Rather it appears that the

purpose was to ensure that the man could not take his place with the ancestors because he would

be given an improper burial In that context, it is possible that the longer the man was conscious,

the more he would realize his eternal fate The difference between Western perceptions and non-Western intentions is one of the themes of this book, and we also discuss it in the roundtable printed at the end of the book I mention it here, even though it is not part of the analysis I am undertaking at the moment, because when I have presented this material to members of the

Turandot Group that is researching these images, it was said that I was playing into Western expectations, and reviving pernicious misunderstandings All I am doing is reporting on what the photographs may show.)

4 The executioner amputated the victim’s legs by first cutting through the fleshy part of the upper leg above the knee (Fig 6 3, top)

Fig 6.3 Top: Execution of an unknown prisoner by lingchi, detail Date unknown, c 1905

Bottom: Execution of Fu Zhuli, April 10, 1905, detail

Caishikou execution field, Beijing

Photos courtesy of Musée Albert Kahn; details and arrows by the author

Here he is posing for the camera, holding his cleaver still (That happens in a number of other photographs The poses seem to be held for especially important moments in the sequence.)

Above the cleaver the femur, the muscles above it, and the skin and fat can be seen in three

distinct layers One effect of cutting muscles and other tissues is that the cut releases tension, and the muscles spring back

It appears the sequence for the amputation of the legs was the same as for the arms Next,

the executioner would open the leg down to the knee joint, clean the muscles and fascia, hack

through the femur, and pull it out at the knee joint This is shown in Fig 6 3, bottom

Below the initial clean cut is a second, more ragged, cut through the thick quadriceps muscles The ragged cut indicates several attempts The right-hand side of the wound is

especially ragged and torn-looking, indicating at least eight separate cuts

The top arrow shows the layers of skin, fat, and muscle from the first cut; the middle

arrow indicates the mass of the muscle group called the quadriceps femoris; and the lower arrow shows the cut end of the femur (Another photograph from this same execution shows the end of the femur on the man’s left leg protruding from the severed muscles in the wound.) As with the arms, the executioner avoided the large femoral artery and saphenous vein, which could have caused massive blood loss

5 At this point, the man’s arms and legs would be amputated, which would be easily

done but would cause significant blood loss, leading to loss of consciousness (Fig 6 4) In this case the man’s humerus bones were not cut, as shown here, where the two rounded condyles of the bone are visible at the end of the stump of his left arm The joint of his right arm has been prepared for amputation by a V-shaped cut

Fig 6.4 Execution of Fu Zhuli by lingchi April 10, 1905 Caishikou execution field, Beijing

Top: whole Bottom: detail

Photos courtesy of Musée Albert Kahn; details and arrows by the author

At that point the man’s head would be bent forward and cut off by hacking between the cervical vertebrae in back The dismembered body would be thrown on the ground or the parts collected

in baskets

It would be possible to go on in detail on each of these steps, including the initial binding

of the victim, which was itself a complex procedure But this is enough to reveal the sequence of

events With this information, it becomes possible to look carefully at any photograph of lingchi,

and say approximately what stage in the execution it represents

Three conclusions

That is a brief and incomplete summary of the facts of the lingchi procedure as it is recorded in

several series of photographs made in Shanghai From this I will draw three conclusions, equally briefly

1 Of the three purposes of this essay, the contribution to the study of the lingchi itself is

the easiest to assess Even within the restricted corpus of existing photographs, all taken in the last years before the practice was discontinued, there is variety in the sequence, and over the

preceding centuries there would naturally be much greater variation And yet, in regard to the photographs, there is also surprising consistency I propose that the sequence I have set out here,

in abbreviated form, accounts for virtually all the surviving photographs This implies the

existence of a known or expected procedure, and suggests that just a small group of executioners

were responsible for lingchi in the last years in which it was practiced The most speculative

element of my analysis is the supposition that the humerus and femur were cut and their ends pulled out In some photographs that seems very plausible, but in others it is less clear.7 I think that a definite answer has to wait for new photographic material or—something that is never out

of the range of possibility in historical research—texts

2 However, I am less interested in the empirical sequence itself than in two

consequences that can be drawn from it The acts of looking that produced the conclusions I have sketched here took several days My idea, at first, was to look in a different way than people have looked at these images in the past, and in a different way than the conference participants looked when they showed the images onscreen My hope was that by instituting a different kind of

looking, we—those of us who study these images, and you, as a reader of this book—might

unsettle our habitual relation to the material, and find ways to question our engagement

It has been over ten years since the first conference I attended on this subject, in Toronto