ABSTRACT
Since the first humans discovered within them a highly developed appetite for inflicting pain on their fellow beings, Homo sapiens have, in the millennia that have followed, assiduously cultivated the art of punishment, utilising the immense creative genius innate to their species. And each age has sought to do so, moreover, by availing itself of every technology that refinements in the forces and relations of production have made possible. In this chapter our aims are two-fold. In the first section, we will consider the relationship between technology and the punitive, prior to establishing how technology conceived both as an art or, techné, as well as a material assemblage of people and things, has been brought together to deliver pain to people in various ways. To accomplish this we will examine various forms of penal technical associations, beginning with the use of a technology as a simple extension or prosthetic of the human body (such as a whip), before studying more complex punitive machines such as the gallows and guillotine, prior to exploring more elaborate punitive assemblages in which various machines intersect with each other in elaborate social technical actor networks.
