STEFANOS GEROULANOSprocess of secularization but also by the survival and persistence of idealist and theologi-
cally laden motifs, according to which man comes to know and understand himself. In
Foucault, the historical shift between the classical age and modernity is thus set up, on
the one hand, in terms of an isomorphism, and, on the other, by a gradual emphasis on
the use and application of (fundamentally scopic) technologies and machines that, though
belonging to a religious and in some ways ‘‘premodern’’ worldview, come to the fore in
dechristianization. Social transparency, the analytic of finitude, and (above all) panoptical
modernity are the most important of these, regroundingtheoscopyas a major marker of
the status and position of man in modernity. Debord, by contrast, dispenses with the
secularization thesis because he wants to present modern life and modern images not as
liberated from forms of the sacred but as reliant on their bastardization. His prehistory
of the spectacle can be read as a compounding of different kinds of time—and it is time
that determines historical epochs and the permeation of the religious tradition into every-
day life. Rather than overcoming the gods of the past and the religious organization of
society, the rise of the spectacle is a new immanent idolatry, to which man is tied above
all through his submission to spectacular time and the weakness of his status as spectator.
Both Foucault and Debord thus present a modernity in which a decentralized and
pseudo-secularized form of control enforces powerful religious themes so as to maintain
a radical (one could even say totalitarian) subjection of modern man. Both code it in
terms of transparency, representation, and the rise of this modernity out of a theologically
conceived past. It is worth noting, however, that the locus of ‘‘God’’ in the theoscopic
organization or system is somewhat different in each of the two thinkers. For Foucault,
the univectoral gaze locates the spectator in a position that the panopticon’s ‘‘inhabitants’’
can only see and recognize as strictly transcendent. In Debord’s writings, by contrast, it is
the very insufficiency of human spectatorship that suggests the formal possibility (and
formal significance) of a superhuman agency amidst men, one that results from their
construction of modernity and would see what they cannot. If such a metaposition is,
strictly speaking, available (to Debord himself ), this is not to say that it is properly held,
for holding it would mean holding the capacity to impose time, to control perception, and
so on. For the spectacle to continue to function, embodied spectators must be incapable of
seeing through it, while such a possibility or position remains at least imaginable. In short,
both authors take the management of vision away from a embodied observer partaking
and coping in the world, and identify it—abstractly, formally, conceptually—with a per-
fect spectator who can only be emulated or fantasized in the world as it is.
Power and spectacle in Foucault and Debord accordingly result from their religious
and visual formulation; I have argued that these dimensions are best understood together.
This necessary epistemological unavailability of the God’s-eye-view makes it possible to
speak of a cultural, theopolitical technology that is foundational in the two writers’ con-
temporary pertinence. The peculiarity of theoscopy after Foucault and Debord is its need
to operatewithoutGod: it sets up a position of divine spectatorship but at the same time
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