The readings for this week focus on the technologies used to control and exercise power over populations. Taylor (1997) focuses on how systems of terror use the spectacle of violence to petrify people’s reaction. Taking the dictatorship in Argentina, Taylor analyzes the power dynamics between spectacle and spectatorship where seeing helps to construct the nation’s identity; “Complex exchange of look and gaze contribute to the simultaneous formation of the individual and social subject” (121). Here, she uses the term “percepticide” which is the self-blinding of the population that, because of the fear imparted on them by the state, pulled back and did not react. The theatricality of terrorism has the effect of making people react in their minds, but not physically. With this split, populations are controlled to see torture but not react. Taylor sees the necessity of getting empowered by seeing and confronting the spectacle of terror, not as a way to find pleasure or to construct ourselves as moral subjects, but rather as to “confront the monster without turning into stone and being petrified” (137) Foucault (1975) analyzes the appearance/disappearance of the body in relation to penal repression. The abstraction of the law is necessary for the justice system not to be responsible for the physical pain that the body suffers when imprisoned. This system of punishment then is one that creates a relation of power and domination where knowledge and strategy are essential; “in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue – they body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.” (25) Finally, Girard (1986) uses the image of the scapegoat of the nation to exemplify how the persecutors convince citizens that a small group signifies a big threat for the entire society, where minorities and the “abnormal” are used as the ones to be blamed and to exercise violence on.