Democracy, Power, and The Public Execution
The execution of Robert-François Damiens is perhaps one of the most famous in history. Michel Foucault meticulously immortalized the aspiring kingslayer’s destruction in his seminal Discipline and Punish sparing no vivid detail in the process of his torture, humiliation, and killing. Of course the purpose of Discipline and Punish is far more than to recount graphic torture pornotropes. It is a book about power: how punishment acts upon the body, how authority is realized, and how obedience is produced.
We should like to think the days of past barbarity and the quartering men in the town square are behind us. As a “rational” democracy should we not be beyond engaging in punitive psychosexual torture? No. Not at all. For all the aspirations that technology, democracy, dialectics, and sterile capitalism can create an impotent subject, the human spirit endures, and so too does it’s desire to inflict pain, humiliation, and death.
Discipline and Punishment
What drew me to write on this matter is the ongoing outcry over the pending execution of Major Nidal Hasan. To those unaware he slaughtered 13 individuals in Fort Hood under the pretense of religious militancy. Using his extremist and militant interpretation of Islam Hasan claimed the attack was in “defense of Muslims”, specifically the Taliban. Regardless of the polarized debate there is to be had about his motives (which I will take no part in), what provoked my interest was his punishment; public execution.
The words “public execution” leave a bad taste in the mouth of aspiring Western moralists. As described above we deem ourselves by virtue of our “reason” and “enlightenment” to be beyond such violence. In an ethically upright society as the West, filled with moral thinkers and technological advancement how could we even imagine engaging in the lowly barbarity of our ancestors by killing a man in public? Easily.
Secretary of War Peter Hegseth proudly announced yesterday that Hasan would be executed on live stream remarking “”People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” For a man who thinks as little as Hegseth his words are thought provoking. Who are the “people” that need to understand? What are these obscure “consequences”. Why not be plain and say “We are executing a man for killing his comrades and all should watch and learn to never raise arms against the USA as he who does dies.” Occam’s Razor would say it is because he is a moron who cannot articulate his thoughts. Foucault would say otherwise.
The state relies upon the spectacle of violence to uphold it’s legitimacy. You refuse to pay your taxes, peons from the IRS break down your door and drag you to prison. You resist arrest, you are savagely beaten, perhaps shot, and accused of inciting violence. Why then should Hegseth choose to mince his words? I would hold the answer lies in a uniquely American and democratic form of contradiction that arises from power.
Democracy
In a democracy we are told that “the people have the power”. Prima facie this is quite comforting. You and I have the ability to change the world! How idealistic! How beautiful and comforting it is- until it isn’t.
When we talk about power we don’t evaluate it objectively. When a dictator has “power” he is evil, dominating, malicious, and an object of animosity. When the “people” have power it is virtuous, good, righteous, and something to be defended at any cost. But what does it mean to “have power”. Is it the ability to sway the outcomes of the world? To have control? No. It is the ability to determine life and death.
In America the people’s power is censored. It’s clean. When we exercise our power, when we vote, engage in free speech, or protest we are sanitary participants. We engage in the side of power that we deem moral or good. I might protest because I believe in a given cause, because I oppose war, or because I believe in better treatment of some people. My power is then good there. It is righteous power. But what of the end? What of the power that is those same government agents bashing down my fellow citizen’s door, beating and brutalizing him, and taking him to prison. There my power is not so “righteous”.
Get David Nemo’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
America has produced censored version of political power. One in which all “good” comes from the citizen and all “bad” some malicious and unknowable “other”. In democracy it is unthinkable, anathema even, to suggest that citizens are responsible for all of the political exercises of the state. Including deaths and brutality.
Of course this does not make every citizen equally guilty of every state action. The official who orders an execution, the hapless voter who supports it, and the dissenter who opposes it bear different responsibilities. But democratic responsibility cannot mean claiming the state’s achievements as ours while treating its violence as the work the malicious “other”.
Power
Return then now to the situation of Major Hasan. He will be executed on live stream, via the internet, for millions to watch. Democratic participants will eagerly open their phones, laptops, perhaps even TVs to tune in as he is shredded by a volley of gunfire. It might be tempting to compare the coming execution of Hasan to that of Damiens. The public killing of a “threat” to the social order, the needlessly graphic process, the public spectacle, similarities exist. They are however, superficial.
I would hold that the execution of Damiens is paradigmatically different to that of Hasan. Damiens was killed by a monarchy, he was eviscerated by a system of power in which the gawking onlookers had little part. They were the recipients of a micropolitical order, not it’s primary sculptors; in America, it is quite the opposite. In America those who would watch, and those who would recoil in disgust at the prospect are the makers of the order. We are not onlookers, but rather then ligaments that make up the arm of the the state.
Hypocrisy
It is to this end then that I am drawn specifically to those Americans who recoil in horror at the prospect of this execution; to those who call the spectacle barbaric, wanton, cruel, and unconstitutional. While I disagree with none of the aforementioned descriptions it hypocritical to react in disgust. Unlike in 18th century France where the peasantry could cheer to the screams of the flayed Damiens democratic participants are responsible. To quote Jacques Lacan “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.” You want power you will get it, and when the time comes you will come vis a vis with it’s bloody and graphic consequences through your phone screen.
The execution of Hasan is much more the killing of a “traitor”. It is the politically powerful democratic subject being forced to confront their power in all of it’s savageness and violence. No longer can “power” be censored behind an intentional ambiguous veil of “non-violence” A man will be shot and we will all watch.
A Watchful Crowd
Foucault recounts in detail that during the execution of Damiens there was a crowd drawn to the theatrics. These participants, as described, were relatively politically impotent. In the French monarchy, few were under the illusion that the common folk had anything resembling power. They were recipients, not dealers. The people then could participate in the sadistic ritual of public executions without possessing the power embodied by the state in the act.
In America, the case is otherwise. Here, we are the dealers, and yet, when the time comes for us to figuratively line the streets as the guilty man is killed in a violent spectacle, we will not. We will watch, ill at ease, queasy, and questioning. The more polarized among us will refuse; they will shout and protest. These citizens will cry “Barbarian!” and “Cruel!” as the power system they make up fulfills the purpose it was made for: to uphold itself through a cycle of violence.
In Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The execution of Major Hasan will be just that. A time for those who participate in the works of the democratic state to look. A time for them to despair. Unlike the crowds who watched Robert-François Damiens die, the crowds that will watch Nidal Hasan will be quiet. They will be still. There will be no separation. No “plausible deniability” on the grounds that they lacked the power to do otherwise. The crowd will be all the more paralyzed, confused, and frightened when the political power they hold stares back at them through the image of a dead man and the barrels of the executioners’ guns.
