THEOSCOPYtween them, linking them together, extending them and above all making it possible
to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an
infinitesimal distribution of power relations.^56Even if in their everyday life people do notliterallyand continually live under a watchful
eye, they share these effects. At least four reasons account for the ubiquity of the power
apparatus and turn it into the central paradigm of Foucault’s disciplinary conception of
power:
- Scopic asymmetry;^57
- The subsumption, by the prisoner, of the ethic of visibility and transparency that
‘‘assures the automatic functioning of power’’;^58 - Social moralization’’ of the prisoner or subject;^59 and
- A more general process of homogenization and disindividuation.^60
These four categories are significant for several reasons, not least because they explain the
connections between power/knowledge, power/gaze, and power/ethics, some of which
lead in turn to the close connection between power, theology, and the gaze under the
panoptic umbrella. In many ways they codify Foucault’s attentiveness to the persistence
of religion as ground (derivation, structural isomorphism, etc.) in the modern period—
and locate this interest solidly within the question of panopticism. The Panopticon con-
tains allusions to religious architecture and institutions,^61 analogies to a theologically
conceived society in general, and crucial aspects that bring up the problematic of theoscopy.
The most important aspect of the Panopticon isscopic asymmetry. Scopic asymmetry
encodes the power differend in the relation between two parties, one seeing and one seen.
Here, it postulates that the prisoner is incapable of knowing when, how, by whom, and
in what manner he can be observed. While the prisoner is entirely transparent to his
observer, he cannot see back. As a result, he is made to believe that a gaze is always
watching, watching him; as Foucault describes, he is also pushed to internalize that gaze.
In other words, a gaze that can see every prisoner at once without being seen and that
can be imputed to a presence (or even an absence) in the tower transforms the power
imbalance built into spectatorship into an absolute foundation for disciplining the seen.
Moreover, vision does not require an active or even an actual spectator, a body with eyes.
Thus the imputed gaze becomes a technology that supplants the human observer or spy.^62
Power can be constantly and unfailingly enforced without any need for the actual or
continuous presence of a guard in the tower; it acquires a ethical control over the prison-
er’s behavior.^63
Lacking evidence of the presence of a supervisor, the subject turns avisualunavail-
ability into anepistemologicalone. He assumes a spectatorial presence that is at once
empirical and transcendental: empirical, because of the very real threat of punishment;
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