untitled

STEFANOS GEROULANOS

recently, in an attempt to explain why the invisible and unavailable Creator-God served,
in the Middle Ages, as a guarantor of truth and necessity against the potentially debilitat-
ing force of contingency in human affairs, Niklas Luhmann imputes to Him (whom he
describes as no more than a ‘‘Judeo-Christian invention’’) the status of quintessential
second-order observer, one who can create and observe without being affected by His
creation:

God is the quintessential observer who created everything, who continually re-creates

... everything in the form of thecreatio continua, who sees everything and knows
everything.... The attribution of personality and power serve to establish Him as
the observer of the entire world.... In this process God provides us the chance to
observe Him, even though only as ‘‘Deus absconditus,’’ as an unobservable God.^4

Referencing Nicholas of Cusa, Luhmann treats divine observation as an explanation of
medieval man’s limited capacity to observe and create. Because of God’s unobservable
observation, His ability to create and to know the world is of an entirely other order than
man’s. What appears to man as contingent is in fact a necessity imposed by God, the
observer for whom there are no limitations and no necessity.
If Luhmann’s concept of observation corroborates a creative God, what happens once
theDeus absconditusbecomes evidence of God’s inexistence rather than of His creativity?
How does the structure of spectatorship change, and how does it continue to affect the
theologico-political once society and social theory have done away with the centrality and
authority of God? First, a series of texts crucial to the history of secularization maintained
the premise of the self ’s construction through its relation to an imputed yet ever-present
spectator.^5 In maintaining the ideality of this spectator and the failure of the seen subject
to fill the void left behind by God’s death, these texts treat the site of seeing as sovereign
over the subject, as at once human and superhuman. Similarly, the transparency of the
subject, once intimately connected in Catholicism with the purity of the soul before God
(and thus with confession), survives as a social and ethical ideal of citizenship and com-
munity, reinforcing the dependency of the self on its visibility.^6
Recent nonreligious theories of society and subjectivity have once again brought up
this connection between optics and theology.^7 In the present essay I will trace the force of
theoscopyin two such theories—the accounts of vision and modern power in Michel
Foucault and Guy Debord.^8 As I will show, these two thinkers treat the modern economies
of spectatorship and force in mutually constitutive terms on the basis of an analogy with
older, theologically based forms of sociopolitical organization.^9 I will focus on their re-
sponses to two problems: (1) the emergence of modernity out of a religious and theologi-
cally conceived past; and (2) the significance of visually coded interpersonal relationships
as bearers of that past. In these responses we will see how and why a theologically inflected

PAGE 634

634

.................16224$ CH32 10-13-06 12:37:23 PS