"The Art of Killing by Electricity": The Sublime and the Electric Chair

Martschukat, Jürgen

doi:10.2307/3092345

Cited by 16 publications

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“…At the end of the nineteenth century, the technological sublime was perfectly illustrated by the electric chair, located as it was at the intersection of natural wonder and supernatural power (Martschukat 2002;Ruddick 1998). The original argument for the electric chair was scientific and humanitarian.…”

Section: Early-modern Excitement: Between the Carnivalesque And The Smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A year later, the electric chair was used again in another New York prison. Everything went according to plan, and the public response was enthusiastic; some were celebrating the execution as one of the most humane of all times (Martschukat 2002). The sublime at Kemmler's execution turned out to be somewhat of an anomaly.…”

Section: Early-modern Excitement: Between the Carnivalesque And The Smentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Pleasure of Punishment

Hörnqvist¹

2021

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Based on a reading of contemporary philosophical arguments, this book accounts for how punishment has provided audiences with pleasure in different historical contexts. Watching tragedies, contemplating hell, attending executions, or imagining prisons have generated pleasure, according to contemporary observers, in ancient Greece, in medieval Catholic Europe, in the early-modern absolutist states, and in the post-1968 Western world. The pleasure was often judged morally problematic, and raised questions about which desires were satisfied, and what the enjoyment was like. This book offers a research synthesis that ties together existing work on the pleasure of punishment. It considers how the shared joys of punishment gradually disappeared from the public view at a precise historic conjuncture, and explores whether arguments about the carnivalesque character of cruelty can provide support for the continued existence of penal pleasure. Towards the end of this book, the reader will discover, if willing to go along and follow desire to places which are full of pain and suffering, that deeply entwined with the desire for punishment, there is also the desire for social justice. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, philosophy and all those interested in the pleasures of punishment. Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: articulating the problematic of desire 1 The disappearance of pleasure? 2 The impossible flight from passion 3 The ambiguous desire for recognition 4 The paradox of tragic pleasure 5 Two paradigms of enjoyment 6 Ressentiment: moral elevation through punishment 7 Obscene enjoyment: between power and prohibition Index This book has a long prehistory and I am grateful to all people who have offered input along the way, starting with David Scott, who, as the editor of the anthology "Why Prison?", encouraged me to think further on the Foucauldian idea of the productivity of power, and thus initially set me on this track. It became a chapter on the pleasure of punishment, specifically focused on the prison and the middle class. When Tom Sutton at Routledge asked me to write a book on the theme a few years ago at a criminology conference, the task first struck me as too daunting. I also needed much more time, more material and a wider scope. My colleagues at the department of criminology at Stockholm university have been a great support; especially thanks to Henrik Tham, Anders Nilsson and Janne Flyghed for useful comments on early drafts. Intelligibility has been the key challenge throughout, and they have reminded me of that. Being granted the RJ Sabbatical 2018, by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (SAB18-0161:1), to write a research synthesis on the pleasure of punishment, entirely relieved me of teaching obligations for a full year, which I spent re-reading works in the philosophical tradition and making notes. The grant also allowed me to spend the autumn of 2019 as a visiting professor at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology in the London...

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Section: Early-modern Excitement: Between the Carnivalesque And The Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Early-modern Excitement: Between the Carnivalesque And The Smentioning

confidence: 99%

The Pleasure of Punishment

Hörnqvist¹

2021

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“…-введение казни на электрическом стуле в США -становится объектом возвышенного. Нововведение продвигалось и воспринималось сразу на нескольких уровнях -как способность современных инженеров и ученых подчинить прежде мистическую силу электричества и использовать ее цивилизованно, а также как грандиозный научный эксперимент и эстетику «электрической смерти», когда даже уничтожение человеческой жизни осуществляется как конструктивный инженерный акт [Martschukat, 2002].…”

Section: технологическое возвышенное встреча с техникой как аффективный опытunclassified

Aesthetic dimension of technology: dynamo as technological Sublime at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries

Nikiforova¹

2020

PhST

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In the second half of the XIX century technology saturated urban space and transformed factory production around the world. Reception of technologies in everyday life was connected with aesthetic comprehension. Besides, perception of new technologies was a complex emotional experience that fostered reflections on possibilities of human mind and of man-made power, on historical role of technology and its future development. This article is devoted to the aesthetic characteristics of interaction with technology as an affective aesthetic experience of the technological sublime. As an example, the representation and reception of the dynamo in the public discourse at the turn XX century will be considered. The concept of the technological sublime develops the classical category of the sublime, which was interpreted as an extreme degree of tension of the senses when meeting objects and phenomena that exceed the possibilities of human perception. In the XVIII century, the aesthetics of the sublime was discovered in nature, and in the XIX century new machines and technologies began to claim the role of objects of the sublime aesthetic experience. Technological sublime can be regarded as a transgressive experience (collision with the limits of human perception and limits of possibilities) and as existential experience (human awareness of the finitude of being).

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“…The Commissioners recommended the use of the electric chair. 23 Death by electrocution, it was believed, did not mutilate the body, was instantaneous, was certain to bring about death, and would therefore be kind to the inmate, witnesses and executioners. 24 This view was informed, in part, by the experiences of one of the Commissioners, Alfred Southwick.…”

Section: The Electric Chair: Welfare's Precursormentioning

confidence: 99%

Beastly Humans: The Welfare Model Of Executions

Jones

Malkani

2017

Law, Culture & the Humanities

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In determining whether executions are “humane,” authorities in the USA tend to balance the interest of the condemned person to be free from suffering with the interest of observers to be free from distress. This “welfare model” mirrors the approach to terminating the lives of companion non-human animals. We argue, therefore, that lethal injections are unconstitutional not because of the risk of pain that they present, but because, as a matter of principle they relegate human beings to the same moral space as non-human animals. This conflicts with the Eighth Amendment requirement that punishments respect the dignity of the person.

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"The Art of Killing by Electricity": The Sublime and the Electric Chair

Cited by 16 publications

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The Pleasure of Punishment

The Pleasure of Punishment

Aesthetic dimension of technology: dynamo as technological Sublime at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries

Beastly Humans: The Welfare Model Of Executions

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