THEOSCOPYand technology, Debord sets an apocalyptic humanist imagination based on communal
participation, one whose temporal form and advent are not only incomprehensible to
modern man but also dependent on man’s hope of overcoming time itself.^116 This would
be the ‘‘festival,’’ which should be read within a tradition of apocalypse, prepared in the
theory of time and coded as the triumphant arrival of transparency and the end of distort-
ing representation. Just as the spectacle defines its temporality as the triumph of pseudo-
cyclical time, the festival defines itself as the inversion of that time in a perpetual construction
of situations—in fact, as a complete rejection of the role of time (cyclical, pseudocyclical,
or otherwise) as a human order and as an attack on both ‘‘the visual’’ and ‘‘the religious’’
as they define the era of the spectacle. The dual character of time is then at once: (1) what
locks man into the impossibility of overcoming this kind of existence, and (2) that whose
overturning promises the end of the spectacle and its inexistent yet all-seeing God.
Identified with the time and observation of the spectacle itself, the inexistent God is
here the impossible yet necessary eye that imposes time, the eye that the subject (even
more, the situationist) fantasizes about controlling but from which it always suffers, to
which it is always subject. The subject’s position in the spectacle, suspended between the
spectacular time of an eternal present and the fantasy of a nontemporal, nontheological,
and postapocalyptic purity of the festival, is, once again, organized as a perfect believer,
watched by a God that has extended from and escaped the subject’s own powers and exists
everywhere around him, controlling and ordering all of his moves, work, and leisure, even
his own vision. Interpersonal relations come to bear the religious past—and to recon-
struct it through the visual that masks socioeconomic power. What Debord demonstrates,
in other words, is the modern worldasempire of theoscopy, ruled by a highly advanced,
diffuse, theocratic visuality in which everyone and everything is subject to the orders and
order of the gaze in all its imperfect manifestations.
Eyes of an Absent God
The basic connection between the philosophical arguments of Foucault and Debord is
their shared investment in theological and visual terms, the construction of a modern
scene of existence as controlled by a spectator at once impossible and divine who orga-
nizes everything without ever acting or participating, by virtue of man’s inability to con-
trol his own construction. It is significant, in this regard, that in each of them the
historical derivation of modernity not only does not rely on a secularization process but
implicates the religious and the historical aspects of this argument in the visual ones in
this organization of modernity.
Accordingly, the role played by ‘‘the order of man’’ in Foucault is largely mirrored
in Debord’s conception of the temporal and metaphysical rise of the spectacle in the
modern period. In the former, modernity is marked not only by the lack of a distinct
PAGE 649649.................16224$ CH32 10-13-06 12:37:29 PS