Meggie Macdonald

To anyone who enjoys reading in detail about sex, power, violence and society, one of the best and most satisfyingly prolific writers you can turn to is the French philosopher (although he did not consider himself one), Michel Foucault.

This man carefully and conscientiously studied history in a variety of ways and then deconstructed each aspect point by point, bringing out the details that many historians and scholars had missed because of assumptions and biases within their discipline that precluded such an approach.

One of Foucault’s most famous works, The History of Sexuality, in 6 books (3 of which he completed before his death in 1984), catalogues the nature of human society’s approach to sexuality throughout the ages and how it has interlocking attributes within structures of power.  However, a short excerpt of another work, The Spectacle of the Scaffold, is what has recently restored my attention to this enigmatic and fascinating writer.

Foucault suggests that the spectacle of a public execution that went out of practice in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it was inhuman, ineffective, or simply went out of fashion (depending on who you talk to) has severely limited our perceptions of the visibility and exercise of power.

Throughout history, the purpose of a public execution had multiple layers.  First, it was meant to punish the individual for crimes against ‘the Crown’ (this can also be the State, the Nation, the People, etc – basically any socially binding and recognised force of law).  Second, it was meant to deter others from committing similar crimes and the severity of the punishment was directly proportional to the severity of the crime against the Crown.  Third, it was meant to demonstrate the power of the Crown in society – both in its presence and its action against the criminal.  And fourth, the publicity of the punishment made the audience a player on this stage wherein the power of the Crown, the vitality (and eventual death) of the criminal, and the audience’s power to react were played out.

The intricacies of these events were sometimes neither clear nor conscious, particularly to the participants, but it was a vital element in the nature of society’s approach to crime.  When punishment was taken behind closed doors – into a prison, into a private death chamber – the people as a player in state punishment ceased to exist.  This removal of punishment as a visible manifestation of power has driven underground society’s concepts of punishment, justice, and social cohesion.  Foucault suggested that this turn away from the transparent observation and participation of power has prohibited society from appreciating punishment on a societal level.

Punishment, he argues, is the collective action of society against those who threaten its framework and stability.  If punishment is no longer societal and instead has a personal association, the display of power is no longer that of a latent agreement between the people and the Crown.  It is the ambiguities of this situation that drew my attention, and so I offer you this:  if the people cannot agree that the force of law is just and powerful through the observation of justice and power in action, what does that say about society’s understanding of justice and power in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?  I believe this is the question (one of many) that Foucault himself left hanging for his readers to contemplate themselves.