Page:The Myth of the Burning Times and the Politics of Resistance in Contemporary American Wicca.pdf/5

 and take hold of its power and appropriate it. Scarry formulates this: “Across this set of inversions pain becomes power. The direct equation, ‘the larger the prisoner’s pain, the larger the torturer’s world’” (37). The mechanism, however, is the most insidious aspect of the process. Strategies allow the tormenter to disassociate from his or her actions, while the onus of guilt shifts to the subject. The torturer seeks information, thereby justifying the actions, and the subject must surrender this data. And, in so doing, the subject commits an act of betrayal internalizing the transgressors’ guilt and further legitimizing their actions (Scarry: 28). Worse, torture destroys the subject’s own voice and replaces it with the shadowy, impotent voice of its oppressors. Michel de Certeau summarizes:


 * What the torturer in the end wants to extort from the victim he tortures is to reduce him to being no more than that rottenness, which is what the torturer himself is and knows that he is, but without avowing it (1997: 41).

[12] Thus, the overarching goal is to erase the subject and its previous codes and replace them with the marks of the torturing society. The latter, which existed previously only in the minds of the tormentors, inscribes itself onto the body of its victim, with the prior invisibility of personal pain now made into a political manifesto (Scarry: 28; de Certeau 1997: 41).

The Burning Times Narrative: Opening a Space for Resistance

[13] One could read the Wiccan revival as an attempt to throw off the shackles of the torturing society and re-assert their subjectivity by creating narratives of resistance, an effort to re-inscribe a nature-based spirituality in place of an order that exploits the Earth. But, Michel de Certeau argues, social marginals, or in my usage, witches, have only limited means of resistance. Whereas the dominant culture moves through “strategies,” practices that assume a base of operations and an external target, marginals must use “tactics” - “calculated actions determined by the absence of a proper locus. . . . The space of the tactic is the place of the other.” Whatever one wins through tactics must be surrendered; any victory is only temporary (de Certeau 1984: 36-37). While campaigns are not possible, one can constantly find weak points and attack, however, especially through the interpretation of texts, or the “practice of everyday life” as a cultural text.

[14] De Certeau’s research takes place within consumer societies. Some theorists, like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari might assume that the capitalist order controls one’s demand and thus one’s space for resistance, but de Certeau rejects this notion, asserting that cultural consumers do not blindly appropriate products, despite the mass media’s best efforts” (de Certeau 1984: 31). He continues:


 * The technology of the media does not touch the assumption that consumption is essentially passive - an assumption that is precisely what should be examined. . . . The result of class ideology and technical blindness, this legend is necessary for the system that distinguishes and privileges authors . . . in contrast with those who do not produce (1984: 167).

The act of reading culture for de Certeau must not be literal or “scriptural”; rather, one must read the text as open and not as a “private hunting reserve” (1984: 168-172).

[15] De Certeau labels the individual act of appropriating meaning subversively as an example of la perruque. La Perruque represents the worker’s attempt to construct his own projects on “company time,” using company materials. The worker, imbricated within a large, faceless Journal of Religion & Society