In her account of the distinction between public and private, Hannah Arendt claims that “the experience of great bodily pain is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all” (50). For her, the site of the body is firmly situated within the private as its experiences cannot be transferred or shared. Pain, in particular, prevents the victim for speaking or acting, removing an individual’s potential from participating in the public realm. The readings assigned for this week develop a very different account of pain and torture. Both Foucault and Taylor consider the nuanced ways in which violence, pain and visibility can interact to sustain political regimes and to produce a particular sense of terror or control among its subjects.
In her chapter “Percepticide”, Diana Taylor advances the idea that torture carries a distinct intention, not merely for the victim, but for the spectator. While Taylor makes reference to make performances, plays and images throughout, the text is primarily structured around an analysis of Griselda Gambaro’s 1973 play Information for Foreigners. This allows for the author to draw parallels between theatre’s conventions and its demand of the gaze with the particular ways in which terror and torture operated in Argentina in the 1970s. The way the audience followed the guide through graphic and violent performances in Gambaro’s play is also the complicit way in which the Argentinian people lived through a regime of terror. In the same way as the victim of torture is rendered powerless, so is the spectator. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault sets up the body as a concrete site for the exertion of power. For him, the body is “directly involved in the political field; power relations have an intimate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (25). Foucault develops a genealogy of practices of punishment to ultimately present the mechanics of power as operating within a ‘political economy’ or ‘political technology’ of the body.
Despite dealing with similar themes, the two texts diverge in several significant ways. I am interested in particular in the ways in which they might account for a critical position or some kind of resistance to the exertion of power through direct corporal violence. While Foucault’s account seems to exclude any exteriority to the discursive constructions of the body through punishment, by centering her analysis on the analysis of a particular theatre piece, Taylor might point us towards a potential site of critique and struggle.
Although these two texts operate very differently, I was struck by the account of invisibility and secrecy that each presents as a necessary complement to the hypervisible spectacles of violence. The parallel between the terror of a violent regime (especially one characterized by regular disappearances) and theatre is also significant in this respect. Taylor tells us that “dealing in disappearance and making the visible invisible are also profoundly theatrical. Only in the theatre can the audience believe that those who walk offstage have vanished into limbo” (132). Foucault, on the other hand, discusses the ways in which the criminal procedures in much of Europe were completely secret up until the moment of sentencing. Neither the accused nor the public had access to the identity of the accuser, to the evidence presented, or to other information which might point to the legitimacy of the case. Both Taylor and Foucault are accounting for the role of what is not known, the opaque processes that rule violence, as key ways of exerting power and developing an environment of terror.
René Girard’s “Stereotypes of Persecution” develops a slightly separate account of the ways in which extreme and visible violence becomes legitimized socially in times of crisis. This text particularly seeks to identify the key elements that consistently leads to the persecution of particular groups. His account of the patterns of collective violence is striking because of its lack of differentiation between those enactments that are widely considered to be broadly emancipatory (like the French Revolution) from those associated with tyranny and genocide. Given our previous class conversations on the power of assembly and the mobilization of individuals in the context of resistance, I was struck by Girard’s account of assembled masses as “mobs”. Is there some substantive difference between a group collectively claiming rights against power and a mob mobilizing against a scapegoated group? Can we account for the mechanics of political persecution (and, in the case of our project, the mechanics of political spectacle) without distinguishing between cases of resistance and those of authority? Just some questions to keep in mind as we move forward in our project together.