Secret torture merged with information extraction becomes a form of policing, not sovereign display

Evidence

But Foucault’s thesis about disciplinary power is not subverted by evidence of surreptitious torture in the modern state. On the contrary, when torture carried out in secret is intimately connected with the extraction of information, it becomes an aspect of policing. Policing presents itself as a governmental activity directed at defending a fundamental “interest of society”: the ordinary and extraordinary security of the state and its citizens. It is also an institution in which knowledge and power depend upon each other. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 506

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the analytic category ‘policing’ as the name for modern secret torture linked to information extraction.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how state violence is reframed through institutional vocabularies (‘security’, ‘interest of society’) — echoes the sacrifice article’s account of ritual violence as order-maintenance. — connects to: Torture aimed to bind victims to practical purposes, not merely extract recantations. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1285