In “Stereotypes of Persecution,” René Girard analyzes the mobilization of hatred in collective persecutions (mob formation) during times of crisis, what he delineates for his study as “acts of violence…that are legal in form but stimulated by the extremes of public opinion” (12). In giving one example of crisis, Girard includes an extract of Portuguese monk Fco de Santa Maria’s writing, from which I’d like to locate a few key terms that characterize a spectacularization of crisis as well as apply to the texts this week more generally.
The first is confusion; “Everything is reduced to extreme confusion” (13). The second, pity; “No pity is shown to friends since every sign of pity is dangerous” (13) (I’d like to extrapolate to distance and empathy here as well; “All the laws of love and nature are drowned” (13)). Here specifically, I am interested in how crisis propels egocentrism at the same time that it precludes empathy: in its stead, there are processes of othering. And the third, blindness; “Men…act like desperate blindmen, who encounter fear and contradictions at every step” (13). These terms are not distinct but interrelated; for example, within confusion is also the element of distraction that leads to blindness and the location of blame within targeted populations (the notion of scapegoats); “[Men] are disconcerted by the immensity of the disaster but never look into the natural causes” (14).
Taylor takes up this point of “never looking” concretely in her chapter “Percepticide.” In examining the Argentine population’s reaction to spectacles of power during The Dirty War, Taylor argues that people were “forced to focus on the given-to-be-seen and ignore the atrocities given-to-be-invisible” (119), that is to say, vision and visibility operated within certain frames dictated by the State, destroying kinship bonds by forcing people to look away from the atrocities committed and rendering the population blind (122-3). However, Taylor also distinguishes percepticide as “self-blinding,” that is, individuals chose not to look out of fear, colluding as spectators who disavowed their spectatorship. It is interesting to note that within the context of crisis, a communal identity was shaped, but one that positioned the “us” vs. the “them.” I’d like to briefly linger on positionality because it is from there that the logic for political action, whether moblike or resistant in nature, often derives. Girard writes that in choosing the persecuted, “the persecutors always convince themselves that a small number of people, or even a single individual…is extremely harmful to the whole of society” (15). The formation of the mob is interpellative for Girard –”The crowd’s act of becoming a crowd is the same as the obscure call to assemble or mobilize, in other words to become a mob” (16)– he shows how hatred can also mobilize a call to assembly. Here, the “othering” of the victimized is rationalized along infectious lines because to the mob, the preservation of society itself is at risk. Taylor’s analysis of photographs during the Malvinas/Falkland Islands war illuminates how the construction of an “us” during wartime is also performed in the name of national unity; “Spectators are encouraged to enter into the narrative…in the staging of a singular ‘body'” (121).
Taylor’s analysis of Griselda Gambaro’s Information for Foreigners is fascinating in working through how the playwright stages the techniques of “blinding” and the perception of this process together. One of the central aspects seems to be how Gambaro forces the spectators to see, and towards the recognition of their complicity in what is seen, eliminating the possibility of deniability. In the play, the “audience is being invited to transgress, to see that which should never be seen” (126), namely, staged scenes of torture and terror in practice. Gambaro’s work also invites the audience beyond the theatrical frame (that also operates along Taylor’s visual frame of the given-to-be-seen and given-to-be-invisible) to the offstage: our Brecht reading on alienation effects came in handy here, and Taylor notes that Gambaro doesn’t allow for close identification in the play (130). At the same time, The Guide in Information acts as a figure of authority, censoring what the viewers can see, demonstrating how sight is imbricated in relations of power. An important contribution of Taylor’s text is not only how it brings forward the audience’s role in systems of terror (129), but also how it explicates the population’s role as audience in State spectacles of violence meant to “prove to the population at large that the regime has the power to control it” (130).
The photos in Taylor’s text that depict military violence in broad daylight seem to challenge Foucault’s argument for the disappearance of punishment as a spectacle. However, Foucault is working specifically within the context of penal law; it is worth noting that public State repression is often justified as extrajudicial during “states of emergency” (Chile immediately comes to mind), although some have argued that we now live in a permanent state of exception along Agambenian lines. Foucault also argues that the body mediates power relations and a system of subjection (here there is an intersection with Taylor’s text); “the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” (26). What is critical for me in Foucault’s text is how punishment is disappearing from visibility –it becomes the “most hidden part of the penal process” and leaves “everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness” (9)– under the guise of a State handling of justice in respectable terms by not explicitly and publicly targeting the body, a transformation that resembles a distraction; “justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice” (9). Foucault argues that this distraction is achieved through distancing (that is becoming increasingly inverse to recognition and responsibility through this week’s texts): autonomous sectors carry out the penalty for example, “bureaucratic concealment” is at work (10). In the age of mass incarceration and migrant detention centers, we should not be fooled that this distribution of visibility and concealment of bodily harm means that justice is operating upon the premise of universal rights.