Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punishment” traces a “genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases” (23) “against the background of a history of bodies” (25). According to the author, the function of the penal system is to maintain social order and to reinforce “sovereign power”, by preserving the pre-existing power structure. More importantly, as Foucault notes, in the penal and juridical system, “the body is invested with relations of power and domination” and inserted in a system of subjection, where “the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” (26). That is why “the sentence that condemned or acquits is not simply a judgment of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization.” As René Girad also notes, the “difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality” (Girad 21).
If “torture is a technique” (Foucault 33), its objective is to exert the “sovereign power” by means of revealing the “truth” (Foucault 44) of the crime and the criminal – the abnormality of it -, as well as “the operation of power” (Foucault 55) that established this dissymmetry of forces and its mechanisms – “its visible manifestations” (Foucault 57).
As a “political ritual”, the public execution sought to “recharge” (Foucault 57) the “sovereign power”. The spectacle surrounding it had the effect of educating the people on the consequences of disturbing the social order and defying the “sovereign power”; that is the consequence of acting abnormally. This was possible because the people were to “take part in it” (Foucault 58) both as spectators and witnesses of this power, dismantling any possible trace of solidarity with those who had been condemned, for “[I]t is not enough for the social bond to be loosened; it must be totally destroyed” (Girard 15).
The political problem posed by solidarity was that it led to the intervention of the people in the spectacle of the executions, questioning the “right to punish” attributed to the “sovereign power”: If the execution “spectacle” was poorly performed, it carried with it the danger of turning into a “carnival” (Foucault 61), where roles were flipped, and so was power – authorities were mocked while criminals were transformed into heroes.
The threat posed by “solidarity” is then neutralized in the modern penal system, where visibility turns into secrecy. Diana Taylor addresses this operation of power in her analyze of Griselda Gambaro’s play Information for Foreigners, where the theatrical representation of Argentina’s violent politics is made visible. By staging this visibility in a “theatre” setting, Gambaro’s confronts the spectator’s position as a passive bystander, also calling into question the lack of solidarity in the face of political repression. Gambaro not only de-normalizes the spectator passivity but by “showing” what was intended to be “invisible” to the public, she also exposes the “percepticide” (Taylor 123) that prevents kinship to take form as a political affect.