STEFANOS GEROULANOSwhose overcoming can only occur with the inversion of power and religious inflection of
time in the exuberant festival.
It is indicative of Debord’s intentions that section 5 ofSociety of the Spectacle, ‘‘Time
and History,’’ does not use a single word that can be understood visually. The exact
opposite occurs in section 6, ‘‘Spectacular Time,’’ where illusion, appearance, and spectac-
ularity make a triumphant reentry. The significance of such a reentry is paramount. Not
only is the appearance of the commodity equivalent to the entry of the visual realm into
the realm of time, butthe spectacle is the only period in history whose structure is understood
at once religiously and visually. In other words, religion and the triumph of the visual
coincide inand only inthe spectacle to complete the commodity-based and disciplinarian
aspects of society in a world moving toward closure and totality.
Theoscopy
It is in this coincidence that the spectacle appropriates for itself the privileged position of
consequential spectatorship that it otherwise occludes from all those living under its reign.
Debord’s thought relies heavily on the construction of an implied spectator, a figurative,
idealized counter to the infinite number of incompetent spectators who determine the
present of the subject without locating themselves in a superior position vis-a`-vis the
spectacle. Every participant in the spectacle serves as its component, as an imperfect seer,
an insufficient yet ever-present eye and object of another’s eye—trapped in a temporality
that extends almost infinitely, to envelop and undermine the possibility of an overcoming
of the spectacle. Debord’s subjects arecontinuouslyspectacularized, just as much as they
themselves watch—what matters in the spectacle is that people unmistakably subject
themselves to the economic, disciplinary, and visual conditions of separation by submit-
ting their gaze and desire to it. Against Foucault’s Panopticon of centralized vision, with
the God hiding within its tower, Debord locates a weak and anaesthetized spectatorship
at every possible position within the spectacle, quite literally everywhere,and thus no-
where—in that none of these spectators can actually see the structure of the spectacle.In this
sense, the sheer proliferation of spectators and subjects of spectatorship, the all-pervasive-
ness of the empire of the spectacle and the multitude of individual spectacles help to
suggest a larger epistemology of nonspectatorship—as in the Panopticon, whose central
spectator is epistemologically unavailable yet nonethelessever-present, impliedevery-
where.^114 Indeed, Debord seems willing to accept some sort of reversed Panopticon in his
idea that spectators and subjects are all bound to a ‘‘center’’ through one-way relation-
ships:^115 while they watch, they maintain the spectacle in its tautology, as an impossible
divine spectator.
The positions of irreversible time and religion serve precisely to enclose man in this
visual reign. Against spectacular time, which forces a relationship between man and God
by reconstructing (while denying) the latter in a paralyzing barrage of exchange, image,
PAGE 648648.................16224$ CH32 10-13-06 12:37:29 PS