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The labyrinth of the gaze: Nicholas of Cusa's mysticismand Michel Foucault's panopticismMohamed ZayaniPublished online: 14 Sep 2012.

To cite this article: Mohamed Zayani (2008) The labyrinth of the gaze: Nicholas of Cusa's mysticism and Michel Foucault'spanopticism, Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 24:1, 92-102, DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2008.10444076

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The labyrinth of the gaze: Nicholas of eusa's mysticism and Michel Foucault's panopticism

MOHAMED ZAYANI

Panopticism, the title of Foucault's famous chapter in his book Discipline and Punish,' derives fromJeremy Bentham's panopticon, an architectural plan to reform prisons at the end of the eighteenth century. The fundamental conception of this utopian project is to build an inspection house in which prisoners are permanently subjected to an invisible and omnipresent surveillance. The panopticon, as Bentham conceives it, is an annular building composed of a central tower pierced with windows that overlook a peripheral building. From this watch tower, and through the effect of backlighting, a supervisor can constantly spy on the individuals enclosed in segmented spaces all around it without ever being seen. Foucault uses the principle on which the panopticon is built - i.e. power through transparency and subjection by illumination - to account for the technologies of observation and the mechanisms of power that organize the social space in our contemporary society. Although Bentham's project has never been realized, Foucault finds in its 'marvelous machine'2 a perfect model for the new forms of control and exercise of power - one which is not aimed at the body, but the soul. The focus of this machine is not on punishing the individual but rather on knowing and altering him or her. Panopticism, as Foucault points out, constitutes 'the technique, universally widespread of coercion.'3 Its ultimate goal is the exercise of control and the intensification and perfection of the new methods of power.

Not unlike Foucault, Michel de Certeau finds inspiration in an old text. In search of a theoretical model, and unable to resist the invitation for an expedient historical precedent, de Certeau rediscovers a neglected work in an interesting article published posthumously entitled 'The Gaze: Nicholas ofCusa'.4 A former Jesuit himself, de Certeau goes back to The Vision qfGod,5 a treatise concerning mystic theology by Cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus - a fifteenth-century prelate, theologian, scholar, mathematician, philosopher and reformer. Michel de Certeau focuses on the preface of this treatise, a concise and propaedeutic introduction in which Cusa describes an accompanying painting he used as the basis for the argument he developed in his book. The animus informing the preface is to provide a transition from the concrete example of the painting on which Cusa bases his argument to the more abstract experience of the realization of the presence of God. It describes an exercise that permits the transformation of a perceptual visual experience into a theory of mystic vision. The preface is central and worth quoting at length:

Among the human products, I have nothing more appropriate to my intention than the image of an all-seer, whose face is painted with an art so subtle that it

1 - Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: History qf Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage: 1975)'

2 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.202.

3 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.222.

4 - Michel de Certeau, 'The Gaze: Nicholas ofCusa', Diacritics, 17/3 (1987), pp. II-12. See also de Certeau's 'Mysticism', Diacritics, 2212

(1992), pp. II-25 and 'What do we do when we believe', in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1985). 5 - Nicholas Cusanus, The VISion qfGod, trans. Evelyn Underhill (London: J.M. Dent & sons, 1929).

WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 24, NO. I, JANUARY-MARCH 2008

Word & Imuge ISSN 0266-6286 © 2008 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tf/02666286.htmI

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6- De Certeau, 'The Gaze', pp. II-12.

7- De Certeau, 'The Gaze', p. II.

8 - De Certeau, 'The Gaze', p. 24.

9-John Rajchman, 'Foucault's art of seeing', October, 44 (1988), P.90.

seems to look at everything in the vicinity .... So that you should lack of nothing in an exercise that requires the perceptible figure that was at my disposal, I am sending you a painting that shows that figure of the all-seer, which I call the icon of God. From whatever side you may examine it each of you will have the experience of being as it were the only one to be seen by it .... Knowing that the image remains fixed and immobile, he will be astonished at the movement of this immobile gaze. If he fixes his eyes on it and walks from west to east, he will discover that the image continually keeps its gaze fixed on him and that it does not leave him either if he walks in the opposite direction .... He will see that this gaze watches with extreme care over the smallest as over the largest and over the totality of the universe. Starting from this perceptible phenomenon, I propose, most loving brothers, to raise you up by an exercise of devotion to mystic theology.6

The painting so described creates a texture of mediated experience akin to the abstraction of the mystic experience that the book tries to achieve. The inferences eusa makes in this 'perceptible experimentation'7 take the visible world as its gambit though not as its game. By using a painting that is reminiscent of an almost contemporary work of distinction, the Mona Lisa (by a painter who often enough combined art, philosophy and science in his work), eusa sought to instruct the monks of Tegernsee in the right kind of observation and to initiate them to the mystic experience. In drawing a relationship between the gaze in the painting and the gaze of God, in converting an aesthetic experience to a mystical exercise, in passing from perception to vision, from sight to insight, from an optical operation to a mental exercise, eusa is arguing that theological things are better seen with the mind's eye than with the fleshly eye, and that in order to have access to the divine truth one has to follow an appropriate practice of seeing.

There is an arresting similarity between eusa's all-seeing gaze and Foucault's panoptic gaze, which invites a comparative study of the two models. The visual element occupies an eminent place in the works and minds of both philosophers. In his preface, eusa uses the gaze in the painting in a very conscious way. His ultimate goal is to draw a parallel between the all-seeing gaze and the divine gaze. For him, mystic philosophy is itself 'a discourse organized by a gaze.'8 eusa's distinction between two ways of seeing - seeing with the eye and seeing with the mind - does not just apply to the painting; it can be extended to the search for truth in general. Looking at the perceptible image is a devotional exercise in which one learns to realize the presence of divine things through human paths. eusa opens his book with the assertion that what is true about the faceless gaze is also true about the gaze of God himself; by following the eyes, one will never lose sight of God. The highest knowledge, which is hitherto inaccessible to human understanding, can be attained through contempla­tion.

Foucault also pays special attention to the gaze in his works. While the so­called politics of the gaze is part of his argument, vision is an aspect of his thought. Foucault is what John Rajchman has termed 'a visual historian.'9 Rajchman's observation is the extension of Gilles Deleuze's contention that seeing is a subject of interest as well as an underlying principle in the thought of Michel Foucault. In 'Prison talk,' Foucault argues that to write history is an exercise of magnification in which one makes visible and sclerotic what

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was previously unseen, and that his whole project is 'to make visible the constant articulation ... of Power and Knowledge."o But, as part of 'the anti-visual discourse' of twentieth-century French thought, Foucault's fascination with and use of the gaze, as Martin Jay points out," has multiple facets. In 'Eye of power,' Foucault highlights the role the gaze plays in reinforcing the techniques of power, but also insists that it is 'far from being the only or even the principle system employed."2

Beyond the role that visual discourse plays in the thought of each of these two thinkers, the two models, the all-seeing gaze in the painting and the over-seeing gaze in the panopticon, share overriding similarities. It is clear that there is a close relationship between observer/observed, on the one hand, and subject/object, on the other hand. The structure of Foucault's and Cusa's (pan)optic models is omnivoyant and their objects non­recalcitrant. They do not allow for the existence of 'a no-man's gaze.' In both instances, seeing is never a partial act. By definition, panoptic - a term provisionally used here to describe both models - is that which commands 360 degrees of vision, that which has no zone of shade - no point mort, so to speak. Under panopticism, there is no room for unruly actions; only full effects.

The kind of vision both models command seems to replicate the divine gaze. This affinity, however, should come as no surprise. Both visual apparatuses, Foucault's in principle and Cusa's in practice, assume a model that is based on or inspired by the same ideal: God's absolute and unlimited sight. While the fixed eyes in the painting are the 'iconization' of the eyes of the all-seeing God (or, to use Cusa's own words, the vision of God), the archetypal form of the panopticon, whereby one observes without being seen, is the incarnation of the divine eye. It is interesting that the epigraph to Bentham's panoptic papers'3 comes from the Bible:

Thou art about my path, and about my bed: and spiest out all my ways

If I say, peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned into day.

Even there also shall thy hand lead me; and thy right hand shall hold me. '4-

Foucault himself was not unaware of the divine aspect behind the logic of the Benthamite project. He draws a relationship between the omniscient faceless gaze of the panoptic institution and the all-encompassing vision of God. In Discipline and Punish, he asserts that the obsession with knowledge, information and detail is an old practice: 'Detail has long been a category of theology and asceticism: every detail is important since, in the sight of God, no immensity is greater than a detail, nor is any thing so small that it was not willed by one of his individual wishes. "5 With the change in the form and purpose of punishment from one that aims at the body to one that targets the soul, divine power, which has been inscribed in an 'architecture that manifested might, the Sovereign, God,,6, is now invested in a gaze that exercises invisible omnipresence. This divine archetype is also reenacted in the forms of subjection that the individual undergoes - a belief not in an apodictic truth, but in the existence of a reality one can never be sure of (or, as de Certeau puts it, one that entails 'believing without seeing"7). The ways

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10- Michel Foucault, 'Prison talk', in Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, Ig80), P.5I. II - Martin Jay, 'In the empire of the gaze: Foucault and the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought', in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy, (Oxford: Blackwell, 'g86), p. 176. 12- Michel Foucault, 'Eye of power', in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 'g80), p. 155.

13 - Jeramy Bentham, 'Panoptic papers', in A Bentham Reader, ed. Mary Pack (New York: Pegasus, Ig6g), pp. ,8g-208.

14- Psahn CXXXIX, XI, g6.

15 - Foucault, Discipliue aud Punish, p. '40.

16- Foucault, 'Eye of power', p. '48.

17- De Certeau, 'The Gaze', p. Ig.

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18- Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry: 1787-1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Ig64), p.8.

Ig- Hartman. Wordsworth's Poetry, pp. 8--g.

20 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 20g, 231.

21 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200.

in which the onlooker responds to the all-seeing gaze of the face in the painting and of the unlimited sight of God behind it and the ways in which the prisoner in the panopticon reacts to the unverifiable presence of a surveillant gaze work along lines that can best be summarized by a Miltonic term that Geoffrey Hartman uses to describe Wordsworth's vision -'surmise.'18 It is a stance whereby the poet indulges in a kind of liberty and expansiveness of spirit. Surmise, Hartman explains, 'likes "whether or" formulations, alternatives rather than exclusions, echoing conjecture ... rather than determinateness.'lg

Yet, although one can easily recognize in both visual apparatuses, the mystic and the panoptic, elements of God's unlimited vision, these parallels should be noted with caution. It is true that Bentham opens his panoptic papers with a quotation from the Bible, but it is also a fact that he did not design the panopticon; rather, he borrowed it from his brother. In the case of Cusa, while the treatise is overtly concerned with the vision of God, this vision is informed by the philosophical suppositions of the age in so far as it proposes some continuity between the empirical and the spiritual world. Cusa opens his treatise with the assertion that there is nothing which is proper to the gaze of the icon of God that does not exist in the gaze of God. The premise that underscores this assertion is as much rooted in Christian theology as it is embedded in medieval scholasticism. It reenacts the neo­Platonic understanding of the world as an ossification between the Platonic category of transcendence on the one hand - the opposition between the world of appearances and the world of ideas, between phenomena and noumena, between that which is visible and that which is invisible - and the Aristotelian principle of development on the other hand - the reconciliation between the sensible and the intelligible.

The resemblance between the Cusan and the panoptic gaze extends to other features. In both instances, the omnivoyant gaze controls the subject's space of action. Bentham's architectural apparatus is based on a simple economic geometry that isolates inmates from the external world and makes them invisible to each other. It conjures up the permanent axial visibility of the central tower with a lateral invisibility that prevents individuals in their cells from communicating with each other, thus securing discipline and order. The panoptic gaze induces the individual to believe, while constandy having before his or her eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he or she is spied on, that he or she is always observed without ever being able to verify that. Out of Bentham's panopticon, Foucault posits a paradigm to account for the dominant principles behind the operating power relations in modem societies based on knowledge. This paradigm can be schematically presented as: organization-invisibility / observation-surveil­lance-control-discipline-order. Seen within the context of Foucault's theory on the subject, panopticism summarizes the new codes that ensure the capillary functioning of power - the substitution of 'discipline-mechanism' for 'discipline-blockade.'20

The arrangement of a mechanism whereby one is the 'object of information', never the 'subject in communication', 21 is not different from Cusa's account of the spatial construction that generates the all-seeing gaze in the picture. Michel de Certeau describes the Cusan gaze as a line and

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action in space that always manipulates whoever looks at the painting. To account for the Cusan optics, he distinguishes between two types of space, that of the eye and that of the gaze. When the spectator's eyes look toward the painting, the supposed object (the image) looks and finds the eyes, never to leave them thereafter. The observing eyes are hypnotized, so to speak, by the gaze, finding themselves with no will of their own. The curious gaze is immediately turned into a cinderous gaze whereby the eyes are co-opted by what is initially an inert object of observation:

The gaze that fixes him and follows him everywhere is for the supposed spectator a question without an answer: What does it want of me, then? No visible or imaginable object can be put in the place of that question .... The gaze abolishes every position that would guarantee the traveler an acceptable place, an autonomous and sheltering dwelling, an objective 'home.' The gaze organizes the entire space.22

For Cusa, as for Foucault, the gaze is alert and everywhere, omnipresent and omnivoyant; it is inescapable and inviolable. In both models, visibility is a trap. The underlying principle that brings Foucault's and Cusa's visual apparatuses together is co-optation. The kind of co-optation the observer experiences is the outcome of what, in another context, Wai-Chee Dimock calls 'negative individualism'23 - one that produces individuals as subjects, as figures whose very freedom of action already constitutes the ground for discipline. In other words, what allows the observer to act as a free individual also determines the course of his action. In both instances, the observer is at the same time the bearer and the attribute of his own co-optation. In the case of the panopticon, the space of co-optation is imposed on and enhanced by individuals. The power that secures the operation of the panopticon is not external to its machinery but immanent to it. Power, as Foucault explains, is everywhere not because it enhances everything, but because it comes from everywhere. Power is a matter of internal organization: 'In the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.'24 The organization of space and the arrangement of visibility which the individual is subjected to make him or her the principle cause and the perpetrator of his or her own subjection such that the individual is the one who perpetuates the exercise of power.

One expects, as Foucault does not fail to posit in the History if Sexualiry, that 'where there is power there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.'25 In the case of the painting, there is no constantly visible single point in front of one's eyes. Looking entails a loss of the object of observation. There is no point de mire; instead, the center is everywhere and nowhere. The point that the all-seeing gaze constitutes is 'a quasi­nothingness.'26 This space is created by the spectator. In his or her desire to grasp the object of observation, to contain the perfection of the painting, the observer positions himself or herself in relation to the gaze in a way that he or she cannot escape; the gaze in the painting rivets the observer's attention. While looking, the observer sees that he or she is being followed. During this eye contact, the order of perception is reversed: 'Eyes do not lead to the gaze. It is the gaze that may find the eyes.'27 The observer becomes both the target and the instrument, the scene and the agent of his

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22- De Certeau, 'The Gaze', p. 20.

23 - Wai-Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics if Individualism (princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. II2.

24- Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 202.

25 - Michel Foucault, History if Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vantage, 1980), P.95.

26 - De Certeau, 'The Gaze', p. 14.

27- De Certeau, 'The Gaze', P.30.

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28- De Certeau, 'The Gaze', p. 16.

29 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp.216-17·

30 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 194.

31 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 192-93·

or her own co-optation: 'The supposed object (the painting) looks, and the subjects (the spectators) make up the tableau.'28

The similarities between Foucault's and Cusa's models, striking as they may be, conceal fundamental differences, which make them more parallel than similar. To start with, whereas in the panopticon power is exercised through transparency, in the example of the painting subjection is constructed around a spectacle. Foucault's optical model consciously rejects the notion of the spectacle in favor of seamless surveillance and omniscient invisibility. In a panoptic society, the need for the display of power is minimal. What guarantees the operation and continuation of the panoptic machine is not its outward manifestation but its internal organization: 'Antiquity had been the civilization of spectacle. To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects: this was the problem to which the architecture of temples, heaters and circuses responded .... The modem age poses the opposite problem: To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude. . .. Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance .... We are neither in the amphitheater, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.'29 The panoptic machine is neither spectacular nor theatrical. The excess of theatricality that has long characterized the old regime is useless in a disciplinary society which exercises insulation and surveillance. The Cusan optical model, however, is not one of contrivance but of coincidence. It conjures up the notion of the spectacle and that of surveillance. The all-seeing gaze is not only ubiquitous but always obverse. The observer and the observed are brought together in a visible and over­determined relationship. The eyes of the spectator and the gaze in the picture meet but do not intersect: the former rakes and turns into a tangential gaze, while the latter develops into a trammeling gaze.

It is all the more interesting to note that the distinction between a form of subjection that is based on surveillance and one that is constructed around a spectacle carries profound implications relating to individual identity. Whereas the Foucaultian subject acquires certain individuality, the Cusan observer suffers precisely a loss of individuality. While the overseeing gaze reinforces one's individuality by reforming it, the all-seeing gaze obliterates it. For Foucault, 'the individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an "ideological" representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power.'30 In a society of discipline, the subject is never dissolved. The will to knowledge on which the panoptic institution thrives does not dispense with the subject but continuously draws attention to it. The great transformational years that ushered in the panopticon also reversed the axis of individualization from an 'ascending' individualization, which depends on the accumulation of power, to a 'descending' individualization fostered by that very obfuscation of power. 31 In the panoptic machine, the ensemble of individuals is replaced by a collection of separated individualities. Surveillance means the dissociation of the community and the isolation of the individual. What is lost in the process is not the individuality of the subject, but the collective effect of individualities. Although the observer is always subjugated to the supervision

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of the powerful gaze and never oblivious to the fact that he or she is or can be under constant observation, he or she never loses his or her individuality. He or she is always insulated from his observer. The spatial organization of the panopticon always creates and perpetuates a sizable distance between the observer in the watch tower and the inmates in the cells. What surveillance means, in Foucault's words, 'is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.'32

The Cusan gaze, however, reverses the relationship between the object and the subject of observation. The reputed subject (the observer) is brought in only to draw attention away from him or her, to the putative object - the true Seer or 'le V qyant veritable' as de Certeau put it.33 The mutation of roles between co-opted and co-optive entails a certain proximity and intimacy between the observer and the observed, which persists throughout their relationship. The onlooker can never claim a distance from the painting as the two are interlaced. The more the observer tries to get out of the spell of the insidious gaze, the more ensnared he or she becomes. As he or she looks, the observer meshes into the object of observation. While both visual systems are based on the negation of a resistant object, in the Cusan gaze the viewer is converted into an object rather than a docile, knowable and controllable individual as is the case in the Foucaultian model; in fact, the viewer becomes an image - a qua-spectacle, so to speak. The observer in the Cusan model remains insistendy immanent only as an object of observation.

The second significant difference between the panopticon and the all­seeing gaze in the painting is that the former de-individualizes power, while the latter disembodies it. This distinction is significant because it contains the gist of Foucault's long and sustained work. Foucault's aim in his theoretical project is not to analyze the phenomenon of power but to address the question of the subject, i.e. the modes of objectification that transform human beings into subjects. The efficacy of the panopticon is not contingent on a specific person but rather depends on a relationship between the observer and the observed. "'Power" in the substantive sense, "leJJ pouvoir,' Foucault maintains in an interview, does not exist.34 Power does not designate a person, but a relationship. It is located in the internal arrangement of this machinery and not in the individual who arranges it. What is at stake is not 'the relations of sovereignty,' but 'the relations of discipline.'35 The panopticon is not an individual but a machine in which everyone is caught but none owns. The operating power relation that the panoptic apparatus creates and sustains is independent of the person who exercises it. The body of the king or the ruler is no longer needed; it is at the opposite extreme of this 'new physics of power represented by panopti­cism.'36 Power, as Foucault proclaims, 'has its principle not in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. '37 What this means, in part, is that the exercise of power does not come from above but from within. Power relations are deeply imbedded in the system of social networks. This interplay makes it impossible to confine power in a designated and manageable Other, be it an

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32 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 217.

33 - De Certeau, 'The Gaze', p. 25.

34- Michel Foucault, 'The Confession of the flesh', in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, I972-I977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980),

P·198.

35 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 208.

36- Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 208.

37- Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.202.

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38 - Michel Foucault, 'The Subject and power', Critical Inquiry, 8/4 (1982), P.789.

39- De Certeau, 'The Gaze', p. 16.

40- De Certeau, 'The Gaze', P.9. 41 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 201.

42 - Foucault, 'Eye of power', p. 148.

43 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.202. 44- Foucault, 'Eye of power', p. 148.

45 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 205.

46 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 202.

individual or an institution of power. The relations of power that characterize our modern age do not involve confrontation. A mode of action, in Foucault's words, 'does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action. '38

In the example of the painting, however, one can see a movement and eventually a reversal of positions between the emanating and emanated gaze. During this mutation, the gaze of the viewer yields under the spell of the increasingly forceful gaze of the painting, and eventually becomes passive. Once the gaze finds the eyes of the spectator, the object of observation is defaced and eventually effaced or better yet disembodied. This is why the image of the all-seer in the painting is not an object, but rather a supposed object, and the observer is only a pseudo-observer. By looking, the observer has disqualified himself or herself from the role of the perceiver. There is no longer a referent for whomever is being seen; it is lost in the very theatricality it creates, giving way to a faceless gaze - a contentless content, so to speak: 'the Cusan composition, by using a painting, subtracts the body that would leave the spectator's eyes to their movements and their hunts.'39 It effaces the body and retains only the gaze.

The third and last distinction between the two optical systems is that the spatial organization of the Cusan gaze is more abstract than that of the panoptic gaze. One is a concept, the other is a practice or a category of practices. While the former model is 'a "construction" of the mind'40 that is exclusively geometrical, the latter is 'an architectural apparatus'41 that is both mental and material; i.e. a system that relies on 'a disposition of space.'42 In the case of Foucault, the genius and ingeniousness of the panopticon consists of exercising power without resorting to force: 'a real subject is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. '43 This fictitious relation, however, is invested in 'a system of isolating visibility'44 that is architectural in essence. The new technology of power requires a better observation, a permanent visibility and a detailed control that involves an internal reorganization of space and a calculation of its visibility. After all, the panopticon is supposedly a building, which acts directly on individuals through no instruments other than architecture and geometry: 'the panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of optical technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.'45 What characterizes the panoptic institution is its very materiality as an instrument of power, but what distinguishes it from other institutions is its lightness: 'the heaviness of the old houses of security, with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple, economic geometry of a house of certainty.'46 It should be stressed, however, that Foucault is not confined by the architectural model of the panopticon. He acknowledges that the panopticon is an ideal building for Bentham, but finds it first and foremost a model for all sorts of modern forms of surveillance and discipline whether honored in buildings or not. The panopticon is polyvalent in its application. The principles that govern this architectural

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apparatus of observation are not limited to reforming prisons, but can serve as a model for schools, hospitals, factories and barracks, among other applications.

The Cusan gaze is a good instance of the sort of power based on the spectacle (in this case religious iconography) that Foucault contrasts to modem disciplinary power. If in its application, as Foucault tells us, panoptic power tends to be non-corporal, in the Cusan gaze it is literally non­corporal. The all-seeing gaze can even be said to be a-corporal. Although, in the preface, the vision is initially exercised on a painting, this painting is nothing more than what Sartre calls an 'alien addition.'47 The eye is ultimately to be extracted from the corporal. In its pursuit of unmediated knowledge, mysticism dispenses with the body. The kind of knowledge that Nicholas of Cusa posits is made possible through an intellectual intuition. Abstract as it may be, though, this intuition is not an epiphanic revelation or a moment of ecstasy. It is of an order that is essentially mathematical. With his principles of docta ignorantia, as Ernest Cassirer succincdy argues, Cusa points out a tension between faith and knowledge. It is in this tension that Cassirer locates Cusa's innovation: 'he requires of the symbols in which the divine becomes graspable by us not only sensible fullness and force, but also intellectual precision and certainty.'48 Knowledge is less a matter of intuition than it is a matter of measurement. Underlying the Cusan gaze is the application of geometrical principles to theology. For Cusa, geometry is both a visual language - seeing with the eye - and a conceptual practice -seeing with the mind. It is a science that applies abstract perception to visual forms. The exercise of devotion that Cusa proposes converts a scientific experiment into a spiritual quest - seeing the invisible in the visible; i.e. seeing God in the icon of God.

The distinction between the non-corporality of the panopticon and the a­corporality of the all-seeing gaze is further evinced in the difference in the level of abstraction that governs and defines the very terms of subjection. Rather than do away with the body, Foucault proposes an economy of the body. The hold on the body is moderated, but not eliminated altogether: 'it is always the body that is at issue - the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distinction and their submission.'49 Although there is no physical confrontation in the new disciplinary system, physicality is not wanting from the panoptic institution. The modem penal system, Foucault insists, is still physical. This physicality, however, does not abuse the body; rather it manipulates it. The body is only the instrument of control, not its ultimate object: 'Thanks to the techniques of surveillance, the physics of power, the hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics, according to a whole play of spaces, lines, screens, beams, degrees and without recourse, in principle at least, to excess of force or violence. It is a power that seems all the less corporal in that it is more subdy physical. '50

In the case of Cusa, however, the revulsion from the corporal is more complete. While in the panopticon power is generated through a machinery that is material in essence, in the all-seeing gaze, power is based on an elegant economy made all the more possible through what FredricJameson, in a different critical register, calls 'fantasy bribe',51 and which is invested in

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47 - Jean Paul Sartre, Critique qf Dialectical Reason: Theory qf Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Humanities Press, 1976), p. 28.

48 - Ernest Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper, 1963), P.53.

49 - Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 25.

50- Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. '77.

5' - Frederic Jameson, 'Reification and utopia in mass culture', Social Text, 1/r (1978),

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52- De Certeau, 'The Gaze', p. II.

the observer's relationship to the rudimentary expression of the gazing face in the painting. While in the panopticon, it should be remembered, the inmate is prevented from coming into contact with his companions in the adjacent cells, in the Cusan model communication between individuals is a prerequisite for the efficacy of the gaze and the ratification of its latent power. Communication is the ratifier of co-optation, so to speak. As he meshes into his supposed object of observation, the ambulatory observer requires another subject to confirm and thus realize that the gaze is omnivoyant and omnipresent: 'He will be astonished that [the image] moves immobilely and it is equally impossible to his imagination to grasp that the same type of movement is produced with a brother who is walking in the opposite direction. If he wants to make the experiment, he will arrange for a brother to be going from east to west without taking his eyes off the image, while he himself goes from west to east: he will question his partner to find out whether the image continues to turn its sight on him too, and he will learn from his ears that the gaze moves in the same manner in the opposite direction; then he will believe it.'52 So as to be effective, the visual experience of the observer has to be contrasted and constructed around the same secret. Each point of view pursues its own logic, but in the name of what it believes about the others. In order for experimenters to overcome their uncertainty and comprehend the coincidence of at once all and each which characterizes the Cusan gaze, they have to communicate. With the introduction of the second observer, the subjection of the individual is complete. While trying to challenge the visual authority of the gazing face by changing positions, the observer literally surrenders himself or herself to its movement, thus becoming someone of pliable disposition and the author of his or her own co-optation. The observer simply cannot operate outside the constraints imposed by the omnivoyant gaze.

In pointing out the differences between the two optical models, however, one should not equate implication with application. While both visual experiences can serve as illustrations of the concept and process of co­optation, each of these two models should be understood in its own register. Although they have comparable frameworks, they have distinct applications. While the all-seeing gaze is an exercise of faith that the monks have to perform in order to realize the presence of God, the panopticon is a social and economico-political project that seeks to reform and discipline society by maximizing power and minimizing its cost. This difference in application also entails a difference in the premises that underlie the Cusan and Foucaultian disquisition on the category of the subject and the relation of the subject to knowledge. While the German prelate claims that divine truth is visible and that its accessibility is ultimately a question of an exercise or, as he puts it, praxis, the French philosopher insists that the latent structure of power is altogether invisible. For the former, knowledge of the true (i.e. knowledge of God) can be seen in and inferred from the apparent (i.e. the icon of God). For the latter, the exercise of power is never visible. The subject is always a manageable subject because he or she is never cognizant of his or her own co-optation. The practice of seeing that Cusa preaches does not aim at seeing the visible, but at seeing the invisible in the visible. The kind of visual apparatus Foucault invokes, however, does not seek to

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reveal the invisible, but to show the extent to which the visibility of the invisible is invisible. While for Nicholas of Cusa experiencing the fIxedness of the gaze is a means of accessing truth and divine knowledge and thus an instrument of illumination, for Foucault it is an experience whereby one 'ceaselessly under the eyes of an inspector [is] to lose the power and even almost the idea of wrongdoing. '53 Whoever is subjected to the fIeld of visibility is ultimately a source of knowledge, discipline, control and power. While in the preface to his treatise Cusa strives to evince the transparency and continual presence of God and the availability and benefIts of the pursuit of mystic theology, in Discipline and Punish Foucault tries to account for the invisibility of the techniques and organization of power in the modern era and to explore the ways in which power in a disciplinary society is exercised through its very invisibility.

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53- Foucault, 'Eye of power', p. 154.

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