Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

AN INTRODUCTION
empiricist tactics and positivist diktats, produces a closure and a
restriction of vision but one moderated through the removal of irksome
questions of choice. 35 Societal members have not, through modernity,
expressed their concerted outrage at this narrowing of the visual field as
they have been, at some other level, tranquillised by the pictorial
reciprocity of perspectives and interchangeability of standpoints that this
‘tunnel vision’ provides for them in their everyday interaction. Our
culture has seemingly acquiesced to the denigration of visual potential.
Picture then, a contemporary social bond tenuously located on the
assumption of a common imagery. That it is ‘common’ does not mean
that it is ‘shared’, the latter would require negotiation and an active
engagement with the finite character of the ‘real’ image. Semiotics
cannot proceed on the basis that signs mean different things to different
people; on the contrary it depends on a cultural network that establishes
the uniformity of responses to/readings of the sign. This network is our
scopic regime. It is essential that we cast our critical gaze upon
constellations of interests inherent in and protected by any social order
of signs and images, or rather the consensus world-view that they seek
to promote—it is essential because we are now addressing the exercise
of power! Commenting on the ‘birth of the Western eye’ in this context
Paglia stated:
Social order and the idea of social order emerge. Egypt is history’s
first romance of hierarchy. Pharaoh, elevated and sublime,
contemplates life’s panorama. His eye was the sun disk at the apex
of the social pyramid. He had point of view, an Apollonian sightline.
Egypt invented the magic of image…. Social order becomes a visible
aesthetic, countering nature’s chthonian invisibilities. Pharaonic
construction is the perfection of matter in art. Fascist political power,
grandiose and self-devinizing, creates the hierarchical, categorical
superstructure of western mind. 36
Modern power has the deft touch of a ‘look’ in interaction. It no longer
requires the hard-edge and the explicit realisation of the ancien regime,
through a ‘look’ it can absorb all and do so without being noticed, or say
all without ever revealing its true intentions. Modern power is pervasive,
though not omnipotent, because it cautiously acts on and in relation to the
scopic regime; but it is not in its sway. The ‘gaze’ and the conscious
manipulation of images are the dual instruments in the exercise and
function of modern systems of power and social control.
The model for this delicate power is provided by Bentham’s Panopticon
and appropriated by Foucault to epitomise a vision of modernity’s optical
discipline at once combining abstract schematisation and a range of
practical applications. It represented, for Foucault:
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