NOTES TO PAGES 633–35- Augustine describes this torment in part in theConfessions, e.g., 5.20, pp. 85–86.
- Niklas Luhmann, ‘‘Contingency as Modern Society’s Defining Attribute,’’Observations on
Modernity(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 51–52. - See, e.g.: Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Emile, trans. and ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
1979); Jeremy Bentham,The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso, 1998). Fou-
cault himself explicitly connects Rousseau to Bentham in his interview ‘‘The Eye of Power,’’Power/
Knowledge(New York: Pantheon, 1981), 152. A list of texts that redrew the maps of surveillance,
regulation, and pedagogy by humanizing yet also problematizing univectoral scopic regimes should
also include the early discussions in Thomas Hobbes’sLeviathanand Etienne de la Boe ́tie’sDiscourse
on Voluntary Servitude. - The path of this motif can be traced from Protestantism and seventeenth-century Jansenism
through Rousseau’s social contract, democratic theory, utopian socialism, and Marxism (most sig-
nificantly, Georg Luka ́cs’sHistory and Class Consciousness). Writing on Rousseau, Jean Starobinski
has argued that the divine gaze posited the transparency and opacity of man with regard to the gaze
of God and hence recreated the conception of the Fall, this time as within (recent) human history.
See hisJean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988), cited in Martin Jay,Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 90–91. T. J. Clark links Debord with
Rousseau in his foreword to Anselm Jappe’sGuy Debord(Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999), viii. - By contrast, in the recent outburst of scholarship on Western visuality this link is underex-
amined, and theological implications and subtexts to vision-related themes and the political regimes
these facilitate are ignored. See, e.g., David Michael Levin, ed.,Modernity and the Hegemony of
Vision(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jay,Downcast Eyes; and Jonathan Crary,
Techniques of the Observer: Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century(Cambridge: MIT Press,
1990). But see Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, ‘‘The All-Seer: God’s Eye as Proto-Surveillance,’’ in
Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds.CTRL[SPACE](Cambridge: MIT Press,
2002), 17–31. Schmidt-Burkhardt provides a more elaborate, but far from exhaustive art-historical
view of God the All-Seer. Jay does study the relationship between religion and spectatorship, though
not really past the nineteenth century, and he treats it only as a metaphor in his discussion of
Foucault and Debord. - For the purposes of the present essay, I will consider mainly the Foucault of the mid-1970s
and the Debord ofSociety of the Spectacle,trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books,
1994; with references to paragraph, not to page). In the case of Foucault, this choice does not
express the range and transformation of his work but addresses his work on power, which is my
main interest here. - Luhmann and certain other thinkers could be discussed in the same context. But Luh-
mann’s concept of observation is much closer to cognition and intentional activity than the ones of
Foucault and Debord, which center on the visual (and indeed, passive) aspects of the gaze. Fou-
cault’s concept of observation also shares a cognitive dimension (Foucault,Birth of the Clinic[Lon-
don: Routledge, 1997], 107), but it presupposes agaze—a specificallyvisualapprehension of the
world. - The distance is suggested by, among others, Jappe,Guy Debord, 133. The New Left’s suspi-
cion of Foucault is described well by Cornelius Castoriadis inWorld in Fragments: Writings on
Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 34, 51ff. - Foucault,Discipline and Punish, 217. Note Foucault’s use and rejection of terms that have
situationist resonance: spectacle, abstraction of exchange, surface of images, amputation of the
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