D&P, on 'Torture: The Spectacle of the Scaffold', pp. 32-72

Questions that were prepared in advance of the meeting:

1. What is F’s notion of ‘truth’ in relation to ‘knowledge’
2. Relation between technological, judicial, and political; how the technique of torture express a politics.
3. Is the resistance to torture an effect of modernity/enlightenment or the natural weakness of torture?
4. What does F mean by genre/change in genre? [67-end of ch.] How does F think about change, particularly historical change?
5. ‘A mass of discourses’ [Pg. 68] – what is the relationship between actions and discourse?
6. ‘The words of the tortured’ – how did these function? And how does ‘imminent death’ operate – differently from other mentions of ‘death’? 
7. Citations vs. theorization? Theorization vs. interpretation? How to conceptualize F’s handling of the ‘data.’ Is F. taking citations as the fact and interpreting their meaning? [A methods question].

Notes from the subsequent discussion:

RE Question 1:

• FR Pg. 42:

• ‘Penal arithmetic’; this was the rationalization of punishment via torture.
• Pg. 40: ‘It was a regulated practice, obeying a well-defined procedure…’ Judicial system has to create confession under certain conditions – judges were beholden to these conditions.
• Truth can be ‘discovered’; but does confession stop the system of extrication? Note that this is a very different system of of justice. The sovereign holds dominion over ‘the Truth’: Pg. 35, Pg. 53, vs. today.
• Pg. 33: three qualifications for torture during this time period: pain, mark the victim, must make itself visible (be spectacular). The judge and the executioner were bound to the sovereign – but as an instrument for the sovereign (remember that the failure of the executioner is not a failure on the part of the sovereign).
• FR Pg. 53:

• The techniques for producing truth here are not about the practices of knowing; ‘Knowledge’ isn’t at work here, 'Truth' is. 'Knowledge' comes later (psychiatry, forensics, etc.)
• There is truth in a confession and a pardon – both demonstrate the power of the sovereign.

RE Question 2:

• Judicial/executioner are deployed by the sovereign as a tool, but is not manifested in them. 
• Punishment/torture is an imprecise system – the sovereign attempts to ‘stabilize’ (ex. by deferring failures like that of the executioner’s) through techniques. 
• RE Pg. 52: ‘hanged by the neck until he be dead’ – the sovereign maintains stability despite changes to law, again, deferring the failures of the system to flaws other than the system itself.
• Pg. 37 – the use of ‘Art’, Pg. 33 – torture as a ‘complex art of maintaining life and pain’. Penal arithmetic vs. art – perhaps art is a way to maintain stability or give the system an image of stability?
• Coding is a beautiful art, the skill of the the practitioner – art happened when the system happens as it should. The execution of torture and execution is a type of art.
• Pg. 53: “the public execution must be regarded as a political operation.” Torture and execution are very precise techniques – mechanized techniques.