Foucault's Spectacle of Torture

Foucault's Spectacle of Torture

Michael Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a historic look into the penal system. He attempts to break down all the aspect of punishment and how the role of power affects the punishment. Also, he follows the development of the penal system into modern society. Discipline and Punish covers and array of issues dealing with the penal system. These issues range from Judging of the Criminal Soul to his idea of Docile Bodies. This paper, however, is going to focus on Foucault's idea of The Spectacle of Torture and how it relates to Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. I believe that "In the Penal Colony" follows Foucault's theories more directly than The Bluest Eye.

According to Foucault, the definition of torture involves an exact, measurable quantity of pain. In his book he states that the role of torture is to reveal the truth of a crime. In terms of the penal system, torture has a defined structure and logic. A popular form of torture in this text is the public execution. It was designed so that the criminal's body showed the truth of the crime. Foucault considered the execution as a remembrance or reenactment of the crime. Also, it gave the public a direct punishment for a specific crime and warned them of the consequences if they too committed a similar crime.

Foucault implements a certain hierarchal system when dealing with the spectacle of torture. At the very top of this chain is the sovereign. He is considered to be the king with all the power. In this system, to commit a crime is to challenge the sovereign's power.

The audience was the most important part of an execution. The spectators must witness order being replaced for the ceremony to work correctly. If they did not see order being restored, then there would be no meaning to the execution. However, the spectators are only allowed to watch the execution. If they decide to attack the sovereign or try to free the convict, they too will be condemned. When witnessing a public execution, the spectator is to understand the power of the sovereign through the spectacle.

When these ideas are applied to the events in Kafka's "In the Penal Colony", I see a number of similarities. There is a link between the main characters in each of these texts. The traveler and the spectator are related in many ways. The traveler has been invited to the Penal Colony by the resident Commander to witness the execution of a prisoner. The prisoner is ordered to be executed because he failed to salute the Commander's door hourly. The traveler is then introduced to a powerful killing machine. The device involves a steel needle, called the Harrow, inscribing a lesson to be learned on the constrained body of the condemned man. The needles do not stop impaling the flesh of the prison until he is killed, twelve hours later. The long lasting painful experience is to reveal the truth of the crime and to make an example of the victim. This goes along with the public execution in Discipline and Punish as the ceremony is used to remember the crime that was committed. The role of the explorer is very similar to that of the spectator in Foucault's idea of the spectacle of torture. The explorer is to understand the torture of the killing machine and also the power of the Commander, while the spectator is to understand and obey the power of the sovereign.

The Commander and the Officer can also be linked to the sovereign when talking about Foucault and Morrison. The officer is in charge of the execution, but he does not have all the power. Meanwhile, the Commander has control of all the power in the Colony, but does not directly operate the killing device.

Both the Commander and the Sovereign use their power frequently it in order to maintain order. They both deal with the spectacle of capital punishment as a justification of the crime committed. In addition, they are both trying to convey lessons with the executions. In the case of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," the harrow tattoos the lesson to be learned onto the condemned man. In Foucault's Spectacle of Torture, he has the public audience learn from the mistakes committed by the victim.

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye does not reflect the same ideas expressed by Foucault's concept of the spectacle of torture. The main character, Pecola Breedlove, is a young, abused black girl who is desperately seeking blue eyes in order to make herself beautiful. She believes

...