What matters for punishment is not an event’s visibility but its objectification

Evidence

Wherever there was a predominance of the object in the positive sense, there would also be a surplus of subject'. 22 The object must be conceived without the subject. But one could only speak of a precedence of the object in an emphatic sense where there was a subject that had the freedom of differentiated perception, where a differentiatedly perceiving subject concerned itself with the object as a matter neither of concession nor of necessity, neither obsequiously nor deceitfully. Instead, the subject must yield to the object’ and make itself an organ capable of blending the faculty of mimetic reaction' with conceptual discipline. — <cite>Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 637</cite> (#complicates`, via linked claim)

Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms. As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice. If it too strikes, if it too kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength, but as an element of itself that it is obliged to tolerate, that it finds difficult to account for. The apportioning of blame is redistributed: in punishment-as-spectacle a confused horror spread from the scaffold; it enveloped both executioner and condemned; and, although it was always ready to invert the shame inflicted on the victim into pity or glory, it often turned the legal violence of the executioner into shame. Now the scandal and the light are to be distributed differently; it is the conviction itself that marks the offender with the unequivocally negative sign: the publicity has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence; the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man; so it keeps its distance from the act, tending always to entrust it to others, under the seal of secrecy. It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 45 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Legal punishment requires objectification of events, not mere visibility; Anti-art action-events made non-events the point of the piece — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 1442; The form of coercion matters more than its specific content — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 7373 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Objectivity requires a freely perceiving subject, not its erasure #complicates (0.76) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 637
• Punishment’s deterrent power migrated from visible spectacle to certainty of apprehension #complicates (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 45