STEFANOS GEROULANOStranscendental, because of its omnipotence and near-divine force.^64 And what acquires
divine status (in a very real sense) is not the person in the tower but the very possibility
of a person looking from the tower—in other words, the very center of the structure.^65
The architecturalized omnipotent gaze formalizes the all-seeing God, at once present and
absent, and reinscribes him as a Great Observer: whether it is the whole of society or
nobody that is watching, the Great Observer reappears, served by the precarious yet un-
confirmed absence of any real gaze. The epistemological unavailability, the absence, of a
divine observer confirms his existence.
A moral dimension to this argument points to the imposition of society’s ethic and
morality on the prisoner/subject. Foucault points to Bentham’s postulate that the popula-
tion of the entire town where the prison is built could take turns in the tower, thereby
enforcing a morality common to the society that stands outside the Panopticon and
profits from it.^66 The production of a religiously inspired morality, fueled by the omnipo-
tence in the tower, follows from there: it is a local God, one that ‘‘agrees’’ with the jailer’s
world, that imposes the constraints of this local morality. Incarceration has precisely these
effects: it ties a subject to a community in a manner that is conceptually as well as episte-
mologically inaccessible to this subject but involves the self-idealization of this commu-
nity. The presence and power of the society in and around the prison, and the resulting
reflexive and self-reflexive effect, serves precisely to produce morality. The moral implica-
tions of the Panopticon, of a society watching and imposing, also involve a connection to
questions of the divine—for if God is to exist only insofar as he is epistemologically
conceived and determined, then a local, indeed imputed God is reinscribed as the Great
Observer.^67 In an ostensibly secularized realm, the indiscernible divine reappears in more
than a merely aporetic form: as the ground of contemporary discourse, as the force behind
the construction and homogenization of individuals, as the Great Observer, as the opera-
tor of human self-knowledge, as the constitutive nucleus of modern power.^68
Debord, Religion, Time, and the Effusive Passivity of the Gaze
Guy Debord’s engagement with religion was less extensive than Foucault’s; there is, to
date, no extended discussion of the religious thematics in Debord.^69 The occasional refer-
ences to religious movements in the journalsPotlatchandInternationale Situationnisteare
too occasional to form a consistent argument.^70 In fact, the best-known religious incident
involving Debord’s circle concerned a man who disguised himself as a Dominican priest
during Easter Mass at Notre-Dame in 1950, to announce God’s death before hundreds of
shocked worshippers.^71
Nonetheless, a religious dimension to the spectacle not only exists but is significant
to an understanding of even the general aspects of Debord’s thought.^72 Debord writes of
the realm of the sacred and the problems of religion throughoutSociety of the Spectacle—
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