Doubt-Fucking

PEG’s defense of capital punishment – the most imaginative and perhaps convincing one I think I’ve read – got me thinking more specifically (but not that specifically!) about my own objections to it. I’ll settle on the one objection that I haven’t heard anyone else air (which assures you that it will be weird). I’m not even sure it, in itself, amounts to an argument against capital punishment, as much as it is merely a characterization of what makes it politically repulsive to me: The specter of the state pondering the ultimacy of the sentence it’s about to execute – the dignity and gravity it would seem to call for, the juridical certainty it would seem to require – as against the earthy politics that underlay the prosecution and the inherently flawed procedures used to reach that sentence, and the fact that in executing the sentence it is depriving itself of the prospect of redeeming those flaws (which prospect implicitly underwrites all of its non-capital judgments), and then having the official and unofficial process of appeal and critique carry on for however many months or years, perhaps tilting the balance of judgment in the direction of greater and more reasonable doubt, if not into wide belief in actual innocence, and then having the state, anxious to avoid the appearance of self-doubt and, indeed, anxious to assert the primacy of its decisive powers over doubt and the procedures that encode it in this high-stakes moment it’s brought upon itself, stand (figuratively) at a podium with a defiant sneer on its official lips and say: “Fuck it. Kill him anyway.”

There’s an element of this in every death penalty case that reaches the public consciousness. A collective sigh naturally rises when the prisoner is finally killed, in doubt about the state’s authority to take a life, and, more tellingly, in skepticism about the procedure that brought the state and its prisoner to that particular point. In reaction, having placed itself under burdens it can’t actually meet, the state has to claim, as Rick Perry congratulated the State of Georgia for implicitly claiming, that such hypothetical doubts of academics and other professional nay-sayers have cost it not a moment of sleep. It can’t claim to have satisfied the doubts that nag its choice of punishment, and that its choice of punishment directs onto its legal institutions. But it’s obliged nonetheless to effect confidence, certainty. After you’ve killed a suspect is no time to go publicly musing on the flaws of eyewitness testimony or the idiosyncratic ways of your forensic arson voodoo specialist. So instead the state claims to float royally above those doubts. Its dignity and legitimacy at the moment of such a final decision rest upon, and attest to, the power the people have vested in it to say: “Fuck doubt.”

The disturbing thing – or perhaps the awesome and reassuring thing, depending on what you’re looking for in political legitimacy – is that this power is real. It works. People are reassured when the state negates doubt not procedurally or epistemologically but existentially. The death penalty throws citizens into a crisis of knowing that the state resolves on their behalf through a defiant willingness to act with finality in the face of valid doubts, a stance you might call doubt-fucking.

Doubt-fucking is a condition of ecstatic untruth. We all experience it, in those moments when we can give no more time to deliberation and simply must act. But it takes on surly and disquieting notes when it’s the state, and the state is ritually killing people, because as prosecutor the state has publicly draped itself in expectations pertaining directly to the truth of its criminal judgments, which capital cases force it to disavow at the last minute, and force the people who have traveled that far with the state to disavow alongside it. The state says, and invites its citizens to say: We are literally beyond caring about the truth, or, we reject that our convictions about the truth should be linked to valid procedures for discovering it. Our actions in this moment testify to our unquestioned capacity to act, our power to set the terms of legitimacy in action by acting.

Now I realize that politics is neither the review procedure of a scientific journal nor beanbag. I admit that political authority will always have this element of peremptory self-assertion. I do, however, think that policies that force the state into a repeating performance in which it trumps the epistemic scruples of its own procedures with a surly display of its decisive authority set a certain unhappy precedent, invite and perhaps condition people, in awe and maybe something vicarious, to accede to state power precisely because it is self-given, grounded in power itself.