NOTES TO PAGES 642–43established surveillant regime is overturned by the sheer presence of an active counter-gaze. I think
that, counter to de Certeau’s and Jay’s claim that Foucault ignored the potential of resistant micro-
practices, Foucault was specifically unwilling to accept that they operate outside, or even on a
different foundation from, the panoptic apparatus characteristic of ‘‘the hegemonic ocular appara-
tus’’ (Downcast Eyes, 415, 415n.124).
- As Jay has written, ‘‘the Panopticon, with its hidden and invisible God, was an architectural
embodiment of the most paranoid sartrean fantasies of the absolute look’’ (Downcast Eyes,410). - Foucault explicitly reduces an observer to the gaze in ‘‘The Eye of Power,’’Power/Knowl-
edge, 155. - Bentham,The Panopticon Writings.
- Foucault suggests that the rules of the Panopticon still apply in a more complicated and
less surveillant social space, though in a somewhat different manner. Scopic asymmetry breaks into
dissymmetry but does not disappear: the viewers multiply, as do the viewed, and the connections
between them become less absolute. The basic fact, however, does not change: you still do not know
when or how you are being watched, what the other sees, and so forth. The trick to the Panopticon,
to Foucault’s power theory in general, follows from this premise: being seen no longer requires an
actual spectator, a specific or literal observer. - Foucault,Discipline and Punish, 206.
- Greil Marcus’s remarkableLipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century(Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), treats the Anabaptists of Mu ̈nster as part of the same
antinomian, negationist spirit as punk and the situationists but, for obvious reasons, an extended
analysis of the ‘‘affinity’’ cannot be substantiated. Situationist-inspired tracts on religion tend to
identify religion with religious authorities (‘‘the Church’’) and these with the spectacle—which is
not Debord’s attitude. See the pamphlet by SI translator Ken Knabb, ‘‘The Realization and Suppres-
sion of Religion’’ (http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/85; last accessed Aug. 1,
2002). - A good example is the line ‘‘The Cathars Were Right,’’ from the LI journalPotlatch, (Guy
Debord, ed.Potlatch[Paris: Gallimard, 1996], 33–34). See Marcus’s analysis inLipstick Traces,
399–406. - Marcus describes the incident inLipstick Traces, 279–96.
- I am not reducing Debord’s spectacle to its visual dimension, but rather using his own
note inSociety of the Spectaclethat ‘‘the spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western
Philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision’’
(Society of the Spectacle, §19). This negotiation of the problematics of vision makes possible my
discussion of visual themes. - This concerns especially the questions of time, the sacred, and the issue of potlatch. Both
Debord’s group and Bataille picked up on Marcel Mauss’s discussion of potlatch, though their
respective analyses differ fundamentally. Also compare to Debord Bataille’s rejection of capitalism
as destructive of intimacy and productive of a false, illusory historical mission, inThe Accursed
Share, vol. 1 (New York: Zone, 1991), 76–77, 126–27, 140–41. - Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §25.
- Ibid., §§138, 102, emphasis in original.
- Debord uses ‘‘seemingly’’ to denote the pointlessness of such choice, which he considers
equivalent to the presentation of modern society with the glittering distractions of the spectacle. - All quotes in the above paragraph are from Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §59; emphasis
is Debord’s. - There is a significant reference in Jappe’sGuy Debordto Luka ́cs’s reliance on Max Weber,
though it seems to me that Jappe has ignored the profound difference between Debord’s consider-
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