ABSTRACT
This chapter consider, via the problem of language, how we might think of the performative dynamics of the photograph, and its political implications in what can be called performative ordering. It also considers some of the important relays from the Renaissance picture to the technology of the photograph and our own photographic spectacle of punishment. Through the case of punitive pictures from the early Renaissance, the chapter explores an outline genealogy of image-punishment in a capitalist system of commodity circulation. It aims to unpack the idea of image-making and to speak about marking the body as a visual force in a visual field, a force that also operates as in the photographic production of performative ordering. The image itself is a property of visual forces, whether found in actual or virtual marking and whether virtual marking is in the face-to-face encounter or mediated by the picture.
