Absence and Uncertainty: A New Form of Terror R U NYA O FA N
During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, an unknown man was pictured confronting a column of tanks moving down an avenue. The image is widely considered a symbol of resistance against the state’s overwhelming power. But in reality, the man was pulled aside by two unidentified men after the confrontation and disappeared. Rumor has it that he was arrested by the police; his exact fate remains a mystery. In October 2018, Saudi Arabian journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi went missing after entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Only with global attention and pressure were investigations carried out, concluding that Khashoggi was ordered to be killed. Still, many details of Khashoggi’s final moments remain obscure. Instead of publicly punishing these enemies of the state, the authorities chose to keep the assassins’ fate a secret. This demonstrates the contemporary relevance of Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish that “torture as a public spectacle” (7) has disappeared. While Foucault’s main argument is that an element of torture in the contemporary penal system targets the mind instead of the body (11), I wish to go beyond it by arguing that the system’s subtlety and lack of public display create obscurity and secrecy, which work upon the people’s mind as powerfully as excessive display of cruelty. The power asymmetry is maintained by the inability to see, through which a new, arguably stronger form of terror (49) is established. In this essay, I will provide a close reading of Foucault’s portrayal of the public executions before the French Revolution as an “exercise of ‘terror’” (49), and how the element of public display has eventually been downplayed through reforms (7). Looking into the shift of the penal system as described by Foucault, I will illustrate how the features of the reformed system retain the element of terror through a different mechanism, one not supported by the excess of spectacle but the absence of it.
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EXIT 11
