The Public Spectacle

In addition to sexuality and sexual relationships serving as venues through which power can exert influence, the penal system is a second institution identified by Foucault as a staging area for power. Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, provides another genealogical glimpse at changes in forms of punishment. Foucault identifies a transition from torture to punishment and finally to discipline, all the while showing that the body itself stands as the place of action. Though more recent developments in discipline appear more humane in their methods, they nonetheless use the body as a site for conflict. Foucault’s description comes to a point in his discussion of the panopticon, a prison designed for maximum efficiency and control over the prisoners. Taken literally and metaphorically, it can become a microcosmic image of power itself. The panopticon, or the penultimate prison, becomes for Foucault a place where a technology of power exerts itself over the human body.

The public spectacle of torture allowed the state to exert power directly over the body of the individual to be punished. The method plainly shows that the body itself presents as the site of the punishment. Instead of imprisonment, the public spectacle visited violence directly and physically instead of mentally or socially. Foucault cites accounts of a drawing and quartering in Paris in 1757, quoting the precise instructions given at the prisoner’s sentencing:

"the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the wind" (3).

Little is left to the imagination; none of the punishment lands anywhere than squarely on the criminal’s body. Foucault presents this event as a precursor to the power exerted through modern prisons. With the nation state reigning, often held together by fragile alliances and fickle monarchs, the simplest way to control subjects was by fear – fear of physical harm. Public torture certainly accomplishes this, especially when the torture does not go smoothly. At the aforementioned torture, eyewitnesses report that the horses were not aptly trained for the event and that due to the strength of the convict’s body they were forced to “sever the sinews and hack at the joints” (3). Certainly this public punishment serves actual and figurative purposes; not only does the criminal receive physically the justice imposed on him by the court but the observers become truly subjects out of fear. This can be seen as an archaic method of control and power.