THEOSCOPYleaves it empty, for neither of these authors is in any way prepared to argue thatGodwill
actually occupy this space. Nor is either of them prepared to accept that an idealized man
or scientist can be hold such a status or position. Neither God nor Man: it is not just that
God sees everything or just that the position of perfect spectator is reconstructed in terms
that recall Him. Rather, the reconstruction also leaves open the possibility that the ever-
present spectator’s position cannot be filled in terms provided by the religious tradition.
The role of technology and architecture is precisely this: to provide such a position but
to make its operation distinct from any theological content that would tie it down to the
affirmation of God. One could perhaps go so far as to say that precisely what institutes
God, what grants him more than a metonymical status as the unfailing observer in Fou-
cault and Debord’s text, is preciselyHis ‘‘death,’’his impossibility and conceptual unavail-
ability, for it is only in such a circumstance that the formalization, dehistoricization, and
discharging of all religious content in the divine can be emphasized, that a dechristianized
Christian God can be reconstructed in order to fill in the divine where there is only
nothing, to affirm a divine presence in its conceptual and empirical impossibility, to
impose a ‘‘pure,’’ unembodied, unfounded vision, God’s gaze or His capacity to see, when
there is no one there to see.
PAGE 651651.................16224$ CH32 10-13-06 12:37:30 PS