This week’s authors posit three fundamental questions: When is a body persecuted? Under what conditions is a body persecuted? What role do we play in the persecution? In respective order, Girard, Foucault, and Taylor’s texts create a triptych where concepts such as abnormality and difference, torture and punishment, and concealment and spectatorship are fleshed out in order to understand what Foucault identifies as the “Political Techonology of the Body (Foucault, 26).” Understood as the knowledge and ability to conquer the forces of the body, these tactics and techniques of power permeate judicial and non-judicial forms of punishing, controlling, and subjecting a body.
As the authors touch on ideas of visibility, or lack thereof my mind quickly travelled to one of the most famous cases of modern torture which has been concealed, but not eliminated: the 2003 Abu Grahib report of torture and prisoner abuse. Deeply intertwined with the United State’s historical use of torture to profit from marginalized bodies, the images released in 2003 showed the choreographies created by the US soldiers in order to punish, humiliate, and dehumanize Iraquí subjects: in one of the most famous released images one can see US solider Lynndie England, a white woman, standing proud wearing her military uniform, while holding a leash, which is attached to the naked, tortured body of a prisoner who is on the floor next to her. : “The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body (Foucault, 26).” This case raises interesting questions which stand in dialogue with Taylor’s reflections on spectatorship and our relationship to seeing, viewing and surveillance. The audience of this photos was meant to be controlled, the photos were meant for the sadistic enjoyment of the US military members only, but how does the scope of “an audience” change in a time when technology rearranges the possibilities of visibility and surveillance? As Taylor says on page 131 of Percepticide, “Old maps no longer correspond to, or guide us through this world.”