ABSTRACT
This chapter connects the mediated spectacle of punishment with a penal politics of assimilation. The analysis presented explores the place of exemplary punishment within the constitution of the modern nation as an imagined community. In addition to constituting a specific geographical territory, the nation is constructed through the political arrangement of boundaries. The location and maintenance of these boundaries fosters both national sovereignty and a sense of belonging. According to Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities, the members of a nation never meet the majority of their fellows, but nevertheless retain a mental image of collective belonging. He linked the constitution of the modern nation to the political unification of populations brought by vernacular print culture. The printed word, according to him, constructed homogenized national and political spaces. A similar argument had earlier been advanced by Marshall McLuhan (1964/2002: 193), when he wrote, ‘nationalism itself came as an intense new visual image of group destiny and status, and depended on a speed of information movement unknown before printing’. He explained that novels and newspapers appealed to and constituted national reading publics by condensing various symbols into vivid and readily identifiable images. Anderson emphasized that the modern nation was imagined as limited, as contained within ‘finite, if elastic boundaries’. In this chapter, a culture of retributive punishment in turn-of-the-century France is related to the constitution of the national political space of the imagined community. The spectacle, both witnessed and mediated, of the harsh punishment of a Jewish army officer convicted of treason, brought contestation of the boundaries of the modern nation.
