This week’s readings shed new light on the deeply political role of spectators in the face of the political spectacles of corporeal violence, namely persecution, torture/execution, and disappearances.
In The Scapegoat, Girard defines the practice of scapegoating as both transcultural and transhistorical, mapping the ways in which cultural, religious, and physical stereotypes whip up public mentality into violent mobs, and how certain bodies are inscribed as the source of the plague which must be expiated from the centripetal corpus of society. For the analysis of political spectacles, this provides a framework for identifying how political actors commodify the spectacle of persecution into the theatrics of politics by igniting mob mentalities and discordant affective inclinations towards minorized polulations. The spectators, then, mobilized through prosecution, become persecutors; we cannot forget that these mobs, invariably, thirst for the spectacle of corporeal violence—lynching, guillotines, stoning, etc.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the development of the modern European penal system and, in judicial practices, the foregoing of the torture of the body in favor of the reformation of the soul. Foucault identifies the body as the locus of political subjectivation, where the authority of the sovereign is (re)inscribed through judicial torture and gruesome public executions. Spectators were meant to cower and acquiesce to the spectacle of violence, in the face of tortured bodies reaching their final scaffold; by shifting towards a shadowing of torture and execution, now the invisible investigations and uses of torture and execution offer the spectators, the public, the guarantee of punishment for their criminal activity. In this shift from the hypervisibility of corporeal violence to its invisilibization, from public torture of the body to private interventions on the soul (through psychiatry, medicine, criminology, etc.), a more efficient form of population control is achieved.
In “Percepticide”, Taylor analyzes a similar shift in the gaze of the spectator. In the public’s reaction to state violence during Argentina’s Dirty War, the overwhelming omnipresence of repression and disappearance, spectators were taken aback, aghast, “silent, deaf, and blind” (123). This self-blinding in the face of extreme state violence, defined as percepticide, turned populations silent, ever-wary, of unexpected attacks, and made witnesses turn a blind eye in the hopes of not being involved or swept up in the waves of violence. Percepticide is useful in the analysis of political spectacles by foregrounding how the state, in moments of crisis, manipulates bodies into being complicit through the spectacle of in/visible corporeal violence, and by reminding us that terror, therefore, is in principle artificial (in the sense that it is theatrics, artifice), reminding us, therefore, that we need only fear fear itself and what it can do to populations: to mob it out, or to look the other way.