Panoptic Mediation: From Bentham's Panopticon to the P-Chip
Robert Craig
continued . . .
That moment of light shining from projector lens into camera lens, recording nothing but light, is an instance of representation representing itself. Could it be, as in Foucault's interpretation of Velazquez's painting, representation freed, "from the relation that was impeding it . . . representation in its pure form"? (Order 16). Foucault describes emptiness in Velazquez's painting. The subject has been omitted. So too has the subject in the Panoptic Cinema just when the camera and projector meet. The subject is seen and not seen, as in the mirror. This is representation creating an absence of representation. It is light spewing forth in an arbitrary loop, an absurd dance between camera and projector. Perhaps not as Velazquez treated it in his time, but nonetheless representation representing itself, the presence of absence and a possible opening for discourse.
The Panoptic Cinema is a broad play of presence and absence. In "The Father's No," Foucault describes how within twentieth century thought, "the presence and absence of the gods, their withdrawal and immanence, defined the central and empty space where European culture discovered, as linked to a single investigation, the finitude of man and the return of time" (Language 85). He places this against the nineteenth century conception of the historical dimension. This is a circle in which "the gods manifest their arrival and flight and men manifest their native round of finitude" (85). The death of God in human consciousness has led to a certain "fear of nothingness," a fear of absence and death (85). What has entered to fill the gap, to negate the possibility of nothingness is discourse, which "directs its speech toward this absence" (86). Foucault calls Friedrich Holderlin a key figure: "He created a link between a work and the absence of a work, between the flight of gods and the loss of language" (86).
Among others, Martin Jay has noted Foucault's drawing upon the French philosophy of science's recognition of the importance of ruptures, discontinuities, dispersions and error in the history of knowledge. These ruptures, these moments of absence, are openings that present the possibility of discourse. But what does it mean to represent nothingness? Is it the act of representation itself, as with Velazquez, a kind of discourse on representation? In this way and in other ways, absence of representation may be a discourse unto itself.
The circle, which is a geometrical figure crucial to nineteenth century thought, is perhaps the most obvious feature of Bentham's architectural design. It is this annular feature that renders the application of power and domination so complete. The eye too is circular in form, a spherical shape present in structures from the molecular to the sun, Earth and cosmos. Foucault describes the eye as a metaphor:
It is on the white beach of an arena (a gigantic eye) where Bataille experienced the fact—crucial for his thought and characteristic of all his language—that death communicated with communication and that the uprooted eye, a white and silent sphere, could become a violent seed in the night of the body, that it could give substance to this absence of which sexuality has never stopped speaking and from which it is made to speak incessantly. (Language 52)
The silent sphere, the absence of language, refers to Bataille's "indirect language" and Jean Jacques Bernard's "School of Silence" in which discourse is inferred through the absence of discourse. The speaking subject "under the weight of his own words is brought back to the reality of his death" (51).
