By Ronald Jones
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Photographer uncredited. Bottles of the sedative midazolam, used by several states at varying doses as the first drug in their lethal injection protocol, at a hospital pharmacy in Oklahoma City, July 25, 2014. Image © 2015 The Associated Press, from the website designandviolence.moma.org
The online exhibition Design and Violence on the website of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as Justice, Harvard University’s MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) lead by political philosopher Michael J. Sandel, currently prompt the question of the relationship between justice, violence, and design. MOMA’s online curatorial experiment ‘assembles a wide range of design objects, projects, and concepts that have an ambiguous relationship with violence’
(to quote from the project’s mission statement ), while Sandel, already in the first of his online lectures, asks the question whether there can be a moral side to murder.
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At the designated time, the inmate will be brought into the execution room and secured on the table by the prescribed means with the inmate’s arms positioned at an angle away from the inmate’s side.
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Fear, intimidation, isolation, deprivation, manipulation, confiscation, loss of self-esteem and personal autonomy are just some of the subtle nuances of the violence experienced by the condemned, innocent or not. Some of the greater examples of violence are: being confined to an 8-by-12-foot cell for years on end before finally being dragged down a long dark corridor into a tiny white room, strapped to a cold slab, and pumped full of poison that may or may not kill you the first time around.
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Two descriptions, same event. In the first quote, the Arizona Department of Corrections’ Execution Procedures crisply reads just as what it is, the shadowy prelude for the executioner’s entrance. The rising voice of the second quote, campaigning for human dignity, belongs to Ricky Jackson, once condemned to death row, now exonerated. He had to play a role we can hardly imagine, a role the Execution Procedures document spells out unambiguously, at moments with bated breath. ‘When all electrical activity of the heart has ceased as shown by the electrocardiograph, the IV Team Leader will confirm the inmate is deceased and the inmate’s death shall be announced by the Director.’
Of the 262 steps described in the Arizona Execution Procedures, some unflinchingly grisly, the one that, above all, seized my attention was the first entry under ‘Contingency Procedure’ in Attachment D, on the handbook’s very last page. It reads:
‘An Automated External Defibulator (AED) will be readily available on site in the event that the inmate goes into cardiac arrest at any time prior to dispensing the chemicals; trained medical staff shall make every effort to revive the inmate should this occur.’
The stinging irony here is of course that the defibulator allows the State to rescue the inmate from the very lip of death, only to kill him immediately after he is revived.
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‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
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But again: ‘Trained medical staff shall make every effort to revive the inmate should this occur . . .’ What does this mean? Empathy turned inside out? No, it’s simply the (back-up) experience design for dispensing ‘justice’. And after carrying it out? Violence is sure to follow. Cross-examining design’s relationship to justice and violence, it must be admitted that it has always played a role, routinely reinventing the material means for extinguishing life. MoMA’s online catalogue essay begins: ‘Design has a history of violence,’ before going on to indict the long reach (professional) designers have had from, say, hacking the design of civilian trucks, weaponizing them to carry light artillery in their beds (which the Islamic State has used with lethal efficiency in Iraq and Syria), to the cocktail of drugs intentionally over-designed as the state’s lethal warranty – although even that design has been, to say the least, inadequate at times.
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Technical on the coast road B13 west of Marsa al burayqah, Libya, April 7, 2011. Photo by Andrew Chittock (British, b. 1956). From the website designandviolence.moma.org, image courtesy of the photographer.
Today, designing death is an interdisciplinary affair engaging professionals from pharmacologists (originally from the Greek φάρμακον, pharmakon, ironically meaning to poison) to industrial designers. Just as Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin once proposed the guillotine, someone, somewhere, with far greater modesty, is responsible for the bespoke, if over-designed strap-down table used today in US execution chambers. The experience of putting someone to death is ‘designed’ not only with the inmate but, just as much if not more, with the prison staff and witnesses in mind. The preferred ‘antiseptic’ design even includes designing the account of experiencing the execution for the consumption of the world beyond the death house. The abridged version of the juridical manual is designed to read like the unflinching expression of justice, sanitized of cruel or unusual means, saved as well from the diminutive role of mere pedestrian revenge. However, in one crucial respect, justice applied by execution has never been creditable other than as spectacle – and why is that? State-sponsored execution has never won its merits as a deterrent.
When dispensing justice through violence, design plays its indisputable role, which emerges starkly from MOMA’s Design and Violence but also from Sandel’s ‘Justice’ lectures. They have become immensely popular with a reach well beyond the University’s conventionally delivered curriculum. And like the museum’s online exhibition, ‘Justice’, in its very first episode raises this question: Does justice ever accompany violence? It would be a question well worth asking certain kinds of designers and artists; judges too. But instead, Sandel, puts forth the classic conundrum of the tram or trolley car that has lost its brakes, but not the ability to steer. You are driving the trolley car downhill; given the upcoming fork in the track and your inability to stop the vehicle, you will have to make a moral choice immediately. To continue straight ahead you will undoubtedly kill the five workers repairing the tracks, or you could steer the speeding car onto another track where there is but one worker whose back is to you; down on his knees, he replaces a loose spike, out of safety’s sake. The answer seems obvious: wouldn’t the moral decision before you be to kill the one and save the five? Sandel asks us to apply consequential morality, locating morality in the consequences that result from your actions. But by the same token, imagine that Ricky Jackson asks you to apply consequential morality in his case. It’s a fair question for him to ask. Jackson was imprisoned 39 years, three months, and nine days, with some of that time spent on Death Row. He suffered longer in prison than any other defendant exonerated in U.S. history. And from his four decades of experience Jackson testifies to the curators of Design and Violence: ‘Executions, by their very nature, are acts of violence.’ The judicial system that convicted Jackson might well ask itself about the application of consequential morality, of locating morality in the consequences that resulted because of its actions.
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designandviolence.moma.org
Applying consequential morality to capital punishment, that is, locating morality in the consequences of society’s decision to punish by death, is also to ask this question: If there is any possibility that the system, even in good conscious, could convict and execute the wrong person, wouldn’t that open the door to the consequence of the state committing murder, rather than justice being served? And following on, where consequential morality is concerned, mustn’t this mean that to be tolerated as both impartial and righteous, our justice system must be infallible when it comes to assigning capital punishment? Even if the answer comes back as ‘yes, in practice justice is far from infallible,’ so then by default, wouldn’t this alone exclude the death penalty as a legitimate punishment fit to any crime, however atrocious? Unless of course unbridled violence is our purpose, rather than tempered justice. This is precisely where Havard’s ‘Justice’ course and MoMA’s online exhibition share critically provocative ground – and not just in terms of the scope of their content, but just as crucially, in terms of the way culture and philosophy have just begun to be meaningfully delivered online, with the real-time effect of creating an eloquent dialogue, and even more evocative debates. Thus, it could be said, they also quietly inherit the prescience of Kynaston McShine’s seminal Information exhibition, which opened at MoMA in 1970, forty-five years ago.
The intellectually exquisite rapport between these interdisciplinary platforms, designed between expressions of culture, philosophy, and education, unblinkingly interrogates the notion that violence begets justice. In turn, justice begets violence, or indeed, as Jackson said: ‘Executions, by their very nature, are acts of violence.’
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