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Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry

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The labyrinth of the gaze: Nicholas of Cusa's mysticism

and Michel Foucault's panopticism
Mohamed Zayani
Published online: 14 Sep 2012.

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

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The labyrinth of the gaze:

Nicholas of eusa's mysticism and
Michel Foucault's panopticism

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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:

1- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:

trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage: 1975)'
History qf Prison,

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).

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
WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 24, NO. I, JANUARY-MARCH 2008
Word & Imuge ISSN 0266-6286 2008 Taylor & Francis
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DOl: IO.I080!02666280701405887

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

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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
93

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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
94

MOHAMED ZAYANI

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.

18- Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry:

1787-1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, Ig64), p.8.

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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
95

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:

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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
96

MOHAMED ZAYANI

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,

29 -

'The Gaze', p. 16.

Foucault, Discipline and Punish,

pp.216-

17

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

31 93

Foucault, Discipline and Punish,

pp. 192-

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.'3 0 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.'3 2
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 Vqyant 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, "le JJ 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.'3 6 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
98

MOHAMED ZAYANI

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),
P19 8 .
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',5 1 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.'5 2 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.