According to Foucault, as the sovereignty power of making die shifts into biopower ((Foucault 2003, 255), The cruel punishment acts against the human body have become a discipline. Biopower enacts through technologies of power to humanize the penal system and the knowledge of man: i.e. the stereotypical persecution is the consequence of these techniques. (Girard,17) These stereotypies work in the logic of racism: by creating caesuras within a population”, a confrontational relationship is built up between “us” and “them. (Foucault 2003, 255)
In meanwhile, as the system of punishment are to be situated in a certain “political economy” of the body… it is always the body that is at the issue.”(Foucault, 23)The authority uses terror to subject the body and make invisible space in public life. People become percepticide and fail to recognize certain aspects of the society and the self, as their psychological ability to humanely response to the reality is killed by horror.In Taylor’s article, she mentioned how Population is manipulated to see and not to see, and how Propaganda acts on the population level, and build up an ideology, a collective imaginary(Taylor, 122) by The mutuality and the reciprocity of the look, the recognition between “ us and them” happens. The case study about the Argentinian artist Gambora’s work the information for foreigners is used to explain how percepticide could be used for specactors to see, to admit and finally, to act. A theatrical presentation of terror could be the Caution for us not to think of nonvisible spaces as nonspaces. (Taylor, 131) Through the illusionist quality, theatre can be a space for people to transform.
Taylor, D. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Duke University Press.
Girard, R, and Y Freccero. 1989. The Scapegoat. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Foucault, M, A Sheridan, and A M S Smith. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Peregrine Books. Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Jeff Borrow List. Allen Lane.