In his chapter “Stereotypes of Persecution” in The Scapegoat, Rene Girard discusses a form of targeting or, further, mobilization of the affects; specifically, the mechanism of the accusation and the interaction between representation and acts of persecution. Focusing on a process of creating uniformity through negative reciprocity, especially in time of crisis (which is spoken of in this essay along similar lines of Habermas’ “legitimation crisis”), Girard details the movement from the identification of a particular group or individual as a threat, based on appearance, to the stereotypical accusation which circulates through crowds, in the form of “They are going to harm our society!”. Girard’s concern is to show that the pattern of collective violence crosses cultures and that its broad contours are easily defines; his shows this through an enumeration of the qualities that tend to polarize violent crowds against those who possess them.
Michel Foucault, in his investigation of torture as a mechanism of punishment in Discipline and Punish, expounds upon this interaction between stereotypical accusation (representation) and acts of punishment (persecution). Foucault positions the body in direct involvement with the political field: power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carryout tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. In line with Girard, Foucault sees the body (although Girard speaks not so much of ‘the body’) as bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations (where Girard focuses exclusively on negative reciprocation). Foucault extends this idea of the body–the ‘body-politic’–to the mechanisms of interrogative torture, where the body constitutes the point of application of the punishment and the locus of extortion of the truth.
In his genealogy of the penal spectacle, Foucault demonstrates the movement from the theatrical public execution to the tendency of punishment to become the most hidden part of the penal process. A few consequences of this movement are that it leaves the domain of the “more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime.
Diana Taylor, in her essay titled “Percepticide,” extends some aspects of Foucault’s arguments and challenges others. Like Foucault, Taylor also regards punishment as a political tactic, a complex social function. She agrees with Foucault that everyday perception enters abstract conscious, but challenges it by positioning this ‘percepticide’ as existing also as a survival strategy. She agrees effectiveness is connected to perceived inevitability, but challenges Foucault’s assertion that this perceived inevitability is not always lacking in visual intensity, positing instead that the theatrical visual demonstration of power (public arrests rather than public executions) give weight and force to that invisible penal process which dances around our anxious imaginations. Further, it is this argument of Taylor’s that gives added support to Foucault’s argument that it is the certainty of being punished and not the spectacle that must discourage crime. Though this seems hard to fully grasp, I think what is being argued is that, in the theater of penality, it is not that the public spectacle of execution has been removed from the plot, but that the public spectacle has been demoted to the role of support for the new mechanism of punishment: that which is invisible. Are we more afraid of a terror we can’t see or a terror we can see?