Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty

Abstract

In 1975 Michel Foucault published Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, a landmark book that opened with two astonishing chapters, "The Body of the Condemned" and "The Spectacle of the Scaffold," harrowing accounts in gruesome detail of the performance of capital punishment in the premodern era. 5 These chapters served as points of departure for charting the historical shift from the dramatic infliction of corporal and capital punishment to modernity's more subtle and insidious infiltrations of power through mechanisms of discipline linked with knowledge. Punishment transformed, Foucault argued, from a theatre of violence and repression to a medical model of rehabilitation metonymically connected to other normalizing mechanisms and internalized techniques of coercion, compliance, and surveillance. According to Foucault, the performance of power in modern society has changed radically from spectacular capital punishments—that point at which the violence of the state is most nakedly displayed—to undercover capillary penetrations, insinuations, secretions, and circulations of power that is difficult to flesh out. He closed the book with the confident claim that "we are now far away from the country of tortures," the spectacle of the scaffold, because contemporary legal punishment "appears to be free of all excess and all violence." 6

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