Magnificent Theatre!
“By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out…” Michael Foucault
graphically elaborates on the subject in, Discipline & Punish, The Birth of the Prison.
But today the exhibition of punishment--torture/ psychological torture-- as a public
spectacle has gained currency, or so does it seem to me, thanks to the mainstream
media and news channels.
The uproar over Supreme Court's annulment of the death sentence, awarded by lower courts, to a rape and murder case convict in Kerala is a case in point..
Adding nausea to the putrid farce show is politicians (the keepers of carceral city?) belonging to ruling as well as opposition parties. While the CPI (M) leaders make all sort of confused noises, former chief minister Oommen Chandy, whose party by now infamous for corruption was shown the door by the voters in the assembly polls, to add flavor to the whole episode, visits the victim's mother and mouths drivel in front of microphones, accusing the government of helping the convict escape noose. The chief minister and his cabinet colleagues, who are not far behind, assert and reiterate that they will file a review petition to ensure that the accused gets hanged.
Let me go back to Michael Foucault. In Discipline & Punish, he quotes a correspondent who wrote to La Phalange in 1836, "Moralists, philosophers, legislators, flatterers of civilization, this is the plan of your Paris, neatly ordered and arranged, here is the improved plan in which all like things are gathered together. At the centre, and within a first enclosure: hospitals for all diseases, almshouses for all types of poverty, madhouses, prisons, convict-prisons for men, women and children. Around the first enclosure, barracks, courtrooms, police stations, houses for prison warders, scaffolds...Lastly the ruthless war of all against all."
And Foucault concludes the book thus: That, consequently, the notions of institutions of repression, rejection, exclusion, marginalization, are not adequate to describe, at the very centre of the carceral city, the formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, 'sciences' that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual. In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected to multiple mechanisms of 'incarceration,' objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle."
The uproar over Supreme Court's annulment of the death sentence, awarded by lower courts, to a rape and murder case convict in Kerala is a case in point..
Adding nausea to the putrid farce show is politicians (the keepers of carceral city?) belonging to ruling as well as opposition parties. While the CPI (M) leaders make all sort of confused noises, former chief minister Oommen Chandy, whose party by now infamous for corruption was shown the door by the voters in the assembly polls, to add flavor to the whole episode, visits the victim's mother and mouths drivel in front of microphones, accusing the government of helping the convict escape noose. The chief minister and his cabinet colleagues, who are not far behind, assert and reiterate that they will file a review petition to ensure that the accused gets hanged.
Let me go back to Michael Foucault. In Discipline & Punish, he quotes a correspondent who wrote to La Phalange in 1836, "Moralists, philosophers, legislators, flatterers of civilization, this is the plan of your Paris, neatly ordered and arranged, here is the improved plan in which all like things are gathered together. At the centre, and within a first enclosure: hospitals for all diseases, almshouses for all types of poverty, madhouses, prisons, convict-prisons for men, women and children. Around the first enclosure, barracks, courtrooms, police stations, houses for prison warders, scaffolds...Lastly the ruthless war of all against all."
And Foucault concludes the book thus: That, consequently, the notions of institutions of repression, rejection, exclusion, marginalization, are not adequate to describe, at the very centre of the carceral city, the formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, 'sciences' that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual. In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected to multiple mechanisms of 'incarceration,' objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle."
"The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power."
Michael Foucault.
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