THEOSCOPYconcept of vision returns to organize modern everyday life, how theoscopy is recon-
structed in a society devoid of God.
Foucault and Debord? Overtures
The philosophical universes, political reference points, and intellectual genealogies of
Foucault and Debord scarcely overlap.^10 Debord never mentioned Foucault, in whom he
undoubtedly saw a conformist academic. Foucault rejected Debord as philosophically
obsolete:
Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images,
one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues
the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces;... it is not that the beautiful
totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is
rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique
of forces and bodies.... We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in
the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves
since we are part of its mechanism.^11Nonetheless, there are considerable points of theoretical congruence, which also help
explain the analogous intellectual roles each of them had within their respective philo-
sophical traditions.^12
First, both Foucault and Debord worked in and against philosophico-political con-
texts that they perceived as overdetermined and antiquated. Within and against these
backgrounds, both authors attempted to explain modernity through analyses that empha-
size the dynamics and status of power over its totalizing impetus.^13 Objecting to Sartrean,
Marxist, and psychoanalytic accounts of power, Foucault perceived his work as originat-
ing in phenomenology, history of science, and structuralism. For him, power, at once
constructive and narcotic, is notper setotalizing (or ‘‘evil’’), yet in its reorganization of
society it is always able to become so and always seeks to engage society as a whole.^14
Debord’s adventures in Western Marxism began with the recognition of Soviet failure
(for which he relied on Socialisme ou barbarie, Georg Luka ́cs, and Henri Lefebvre^15 ),
retaining certain teachings in aesthetics and politics and rejecting the contemporary left
as insufficient or stupid.^16 Debord wrote almost obsessively of totality and unity, though
he rejected its Western Marxist treatments: he understood spectacular society to be hope-
lessly divided, broken down, and reunited only in the falsehood of the spectacle itself, a
totality as boundless as it is all-encompassing, destructive, and mystifying.^17
Second, both Foucault and Debord granted the gaze, and the visual realm in general,
an imperious position in this approach to power and totality. For both, as Martin Jay has
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