STEFANOS GEROULANOSTransparency also reappeared as a problem once the single order of discourse breaks
down: ‘‘There was no longer any transparency between the order of things and the repre-
sentations that one could have of them; things were folded somehow into their own
thickness and onto a demand exterior to representation. It is for this reason that languages
with their history, life with its organization and its autonomy, and work with its own
capacity for production appeared.’’^53 Sidestepping the religious and secular philosophical
problem of transparency (in Jansenism, Rousseau, Luka ́cs, etc.), Foucault defines moder-
nity as involving the breakdown of a transparent order of things and representations, man
and the world of signs. In the breakdown of this order, transparency became a problem:
its lack and its recognition as a lack denote man’s inability to regulate properly his relation
to things. As such a problem, transparency became a nostalgia for a world in which God,
not yet dead, guaranteed the interaction between men and things, a fantasy that man
should break through the new separation indicative of the limits of the order of man. As
we shall see, transparency returns in Foucault’s study of power as a social and ethical ideal
of panopticism.
As knowledge became a fundamental aspect of Foucault’s later conceptualization of
power and the regulation of subjectivity, territory, and interactions, the two (religiously
conversant) elements of finitude and transparency, which underpinned knowledge, main-
tained the theological premise of aspects and structures of power. Foucault articulates this
reinvestment in the form of a question and an invocation, a camouflaged assertion:
‘‘What Great Observer will produce the methodology of examination for the human sci-
ences?’’^54 The demand for transparency and the impossibility of an admission of finitude
pure and simple serve to elide both God and man: only a Baconian ‘‘Great Observer’’ will
produce the methodology for a pure examination for the human sciences. Thus not only
is the seemingly secular present shown to be isomorphic to and historically derivative of
the political and social forms of the religious past, but man understands himself in a way
that foregrounds, perpetuates, and religiously intones central theological themes that re-
late him to such a ‘‘Great Observer’’—one that cannot be God (who is dead) and that
cannot be a mere subject of observation and control, a mere man.
But whence the need for a ‘‘Great Observer’’? The answer is brought out in Foucault’s
conception of the Panopticon as a paradigm for modernity. Bentham’s device typifies
power’s production of reality as ‘‘the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its
ideal form’’;^55 it is ‘‘a marvelous machine which... produces homogeneous effects of
power.’’ Through it:
one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary [surveillante] society in this move-
ment that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social ‘‘quarantine,’’ to an
indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘‘panopticism.’’ Not because the disciplinary
[surveillant] modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infil-
trated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary be-PAGE 640640.................16224$ CH32 10-13-06 12:37:26 PS