Mediating, bodily

[Like last time, my bolding will help your skimming.]

Like our old companions Briggs and Burke, Paul Starr talks a great deal in these chapters about the controversial status of print and free expression during those early printed centuries (17th-18th centuries, in particular). One thing that Starr mentions that particularly struck me was his description of the exacting, violent punishments that were meted out to those found guilty of “seditious speech” in the early American colonies. Starr explains that one such seditionist, Richard Barnes, had “his arms broken, his body beaten, and his tongue ‘bored through with an awl,’” and he suggests that “these penalties reflected the harsh practices of the time” (56). Starr concludes in his reportage of this era’s penalties, “Among punished cases of seditious speech in the 1620s, more than 50 percent involved ‘bodily correction’ [. . .]” (57).

This discussion of “bodily correction” brought to my mind Foucault, who is very much interested in the public, “spectacular” role that the punished body plays in his Discipline and Punish. Foucault explains that the visibly punished body in effect “confesses” the crime that the individual committed. If you’ll bear with me, two quick sentences from Foucault will prove instructive here: “It was the task of the guilty man to bear openly his condemnation and the truth of the crime that he had committed. His body, displayed, exhibited in procession, tortured, served as the public support of a procedure that had hitherto remained in the shade; in him, on him, the sentence had to be legible for all” (43).

Here Foucault, in light of Starr, carries some cool implications for our course. First of all, I want to suggest that, just as many of our authors have said that marked paper in the form of novels, newspapers, etc. helped to give rise to the public sphere, marked bodies played the same catalytic function. Foucault’s comment that the exhibition of such bodies “served as the public support” of the right to punish the culpable assumes a public sphere, I think. The question, however, could be whether or not such exhibition helped to give rise to a public sphere or whether a public sphere was necessary as a precondition for such exhibition to be truly effective (chicken and egg, anyone?).

Also interesting is the symbolism of punishing someone of “seditious speech” by driving an awl through his tongue. This purposeful punishment is clearly meant to serve a public role—to “broadcast” or “advertise” to the public the dangers of speaking incorrectly. For this reason we could say that Barnes’s body served a mediating function, boldly establishing judicial clout to instruct the public. In this way, maybe Barnes’s body did something that not even a well-phrased poster or pamphlet could have: it was, in Foucault’s words, “legible for all.” Starr himself notes that, outside Boston, most colonies had rather low rates of literacy. Well, I think we’ll agree that you don’t need to be literate to read the terror of an awl through a tongue.

To broaden this question, I wonder in what other contexts we see the body used for mediation. For instance, rhetoric about dating often cites the body as something that elicits an initial interest: usually we say that we first want to be attracted to someone, and then we want to get to know his or her personality or whatever. How else does the body serve as a cultural mediator?