DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5235/17521483.8.1.

1 (2014) 8(1) Law and Humanities 1–18

The Light of High Modern Discipline:

Viewing the Birth, Life and Death of the
Disciplinary Society in William Hogarth,
Joseph Wright of Derby and Edward Hopper

Ronnie Lippens*

Introduction: Viewing, Light and Discipline

Scholars often discern a number of historical stages in the development of moder-

nity. Early modernity saw the birth of modern, existential man (he or she, of course;
henceforth: he). Man, so to speak, awoke to himself. The gradual emergence, during
the fifteenth century, of opportunity and possibility, indeed of emergence itself, together
with the confrontation with the difference of otherness, led to the generation, in the
early modern burgher, of a delicate, almost tactile awareness of his intricately contingent
world and his uncertain place in it. High Modernity then witnessed a preoccupation
with light, particularly with the light that enlightens modern man on his excursions in
the world. This is a light that does not just illuminate (or is supposed to illuminate) the
path which the self is encouraged to carve out of the sheer potential of the world. It is not
just a light that throws light on the carving self itself. It is also a light that should bathe
the very process of carving itself in brightness. And more: this light, the light of High
Modernity, is a light that is productive. It is a light that produces paths, carving selves,
and the process of carving itself. This is a light without which nothing could possibly be
carved out of the sheer rock of nature (or so it is assumed in High Modernity). Nothing
could ever be produced without this light. This light is a productive light. It produces
selves, paths, things, ways of seeing, ways of thinking, ways of governing, indeed, it pro-
duces ways of life. In short, it produces forms of life. This is perhaps another way of
putting it: High Modern light produces High Modern forms of life. Without this light,

* Professor of Criminology, Keele University, UK. The author wishes to thank both reviewers for Law &
Humanities for their very supportive comments and suggestions. They have improved the argument made
here in this paper. All remaining flaws and errors are the author’s.
2 Law and Humanities

there would be—or there would have been—no High Modern forms of life. This High
Modern light differs from Plato’s light of reason or the divine light of scholasticism in
that it is actively and directly productive. It does productive work. It produces subjects
and societies. It produces forms of life. And it is produced by the latter in turn.
The question of course then immediately arises: what is a High Modern form of life?
Let us answer this question provisionally here (we shall however revisit this issue below):
in a High Modern form of life the realm of light, ie the realm of visibilities, takes centre
stage. In other words, it is a form of life that creates a sphere where the visual, where
sheer visibility, is of crucial importance, ie the public sphere (as distinct from the private
sphere). The public sphere is where a dominant code of conduct structures the visible
field of action. There is a racial aspect to this. Authors such as David Lloyd, for example,
have argued how, in the West, the ‘colour’ of enlightened civilisation in the public sphere,
since the Enlightenment, became ‘white’, ie the white of light, the white of Reason, the
white of visible contractual interaction, the transcendent white of the universal.1 But
light always casts a shadow. The light of High Modernity did too. In the dark shadow of
the light of High Modernity dwelled all that was repressed: the unenlightened fleshiness
of mere desire, for example; or unproductiveness, to put it slightly differently. It is about
the importance and centrality of this light, ie the light of High Modernity, that we hope
to be able to contribute a few insights, however provisional, in the essay at hand.
The light of High Modernity would gradually fade away until, after World War Two,
it all but vanished. The light of late modernity is no longer the light of production. It no
longer produces selves, paths or objects. It merely falls on them, physically. Late mod-
ern life is life spent somewhere on the spectrum between, on the one hand, blind and
mute experience, and utter transcendent reflection on the other. Life in what we now
know as late modernity has taken its leave of the High Modern light of production. Late
modernity is the age of aspiring sovereigns, aspiring radical sovereigns.2 Radical sover-
eigns have no need for a light that shapes and kneads and that lays bare, for all to see, a
law, or a code, to aspire to. The only form of life that aspiring radical sovereigns aspire
to is one that discards, very often with utter, dizzying contempt, even the merest whiff
of construction and production as well as the laws and codes that inevitably go hand in
hand with those. The only desire of aspiring, radically absolute sovereigns is to either
experience the pure potentiality of dark, earthy life, or to dwell in the sublime shimmer
of utter, abstract reflection. The aspiring late modern radical sovereign has no need for
an enlightening light. He is (or at least he thinks he is) beyond enlightenment. He has no
need for enlightenment. He has no need for anything at all. In his dreams of total, abso-
lute sovereignty he either plunges into the pure potential of the earth, that is, into the
realm of pure energy, into the zone before all law and code. Or he transcends the earth,

1 See eg David Lloyd, ‘Race under Representation’ in E Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M Peck (eds), Culture/
Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies (University of California Press, 1996) 249.
2 On radical sovereignty, see Georges Bataille’s posthumously published La Souveraineté (Lignes, 2012).
 The Light of High Modern Discipline 3

high up into the realm of what he believes is sheer unfettered reflection and contempla-
tion, that is, the realm of pure emptiness, the zone beyond all existing law and code.
In the late modern life par excellence, light, if there is to be any at all, is light that is
almost never put to productive, constructive use. There is nothing to construct. There is
nothing to produce. Aspiring radical sovereigns cannot allow themselves to be dependent
on anything, and that includes law and codes that are meant to lead to a yet-to-be-
constructed future. Late modern governance, ie governance of and by aspiring radical
sovereigns, is no longer governance that works through construction (which would need
lots of coding, structuring light, or indeed ‘enlightenment’). Late modern governance,
in the words of Gilles Deleuze (in his paper on post-disciplinary societies), no longer
structures futures and subjects around ‘order words’. It contents itself to merely ‘control’
situations through the generation, circulation and application of situational, contextual
‘passwords’.3 Late modern light, then, is just … light, the mere presence of photons. It
has lost its constructive, coding properties. But late modernity is not the subject of this
contribution (we shall however say something more about this at the end of this essay).
The light in, or better: the light of High Modernity, is the topic of this essay. By ‘High
Modernity’ we refer to the period that spans, roughly, between 1750 and 1950. One might
be able to distinguish three more or less separate moments. The first moment is, once
again, one of awakening. This is the moment, to use Nietzschean terminology,4 when
a diagnosis is made: ‘there is a problem, and these are its signs’. The second moment
is when the problem is being addressed. The third and final moment again involves a
kind of awakening. This is a moment when it is realised that the intervention has run its
course and has run out of steam. In turn this realisation may then lead to another ‘diag-
nostic’ process and a new cycle. But for the purposes of this essay we shall focus on the
three moments in High Modernity only.
Our focus will be on how those three moments emerged in painting. Painting, one
could argue, is one of the more pre-conceptual art forms. Closer to immediate sensory
experience than, say, theatre, or political satire, or any of the more conceptual arts, paint-
ing is sometimes said to have ‘prophetic’ qualities that are simply lacking in art forms
that need a passage through the conceptual sphere first before they are able to produce
an outcome in the form of a work of art.5 As such, painting could have the potential
not just to express or witness or illustrate moments of emergence, or ‘newness’, but to
announce them as well. We hope to be able to illustrate this for what we have termed
‘High Modernity’ by studying paintings by artists such as William Hogarth, Joseph
Wright (of Derby) and Edward Hopper.

3 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Post-Script on Control Societies’ in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (Columbia University
Press, 1995) 177.
4 But see also Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
5 On this see eg Francis Haskell’s essay on ‘Art as Prophecy’ in Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and
the Interpretation of the Past (Yale University Press, 1993) 389.
4 Law and Humanities

In the work of all three painters, light—the centrality or peripheral position of its
source, its direction and effects—was of crucial importance. Hogarth was, arguably, one
of the great ‘diagnosticians’ of his time. Light in his painting was often absent. The centre
was often left vacant, and the promise of redemption situated in the periphery. Hogarth’s
diagnosis pointed towards the lack, in his eyes, of structure and order, or discipline, in
what he painted as a society in near total, chaotic, moral collapse. In many of Wright’s
paintings, on the other hand, light—nearly always positioned centrally—is the radiant
source of redemption, and that redemption, in Wright’s paintings, usually takes the form
of focused labour and almost mechanical self-discipline. In Hopper’s painting the source
of light has moved to the periphery. Indeed, in many of his paintings it has actually
moved out of sight completely, or at least out of the frame of the painting itself, where
it remains invisible to the eye of the viewer. It seems to have lost all capacity to make an
impact, however small, on the figures in Hopper’s paintings. Hopper’s light has run its
course to the fullest extent, leaving his protagonists—placed by him at the very centre of
the paintings—dazed, in a kind of stupor, but, and simultaneously so, also slowly awak-
ing to the idea that something isn’t right, that something is about to happen (as it would,
in post-war painting, and in post-war life and governance).

Methodological Interlude

Before we go into some detail on these points, allow us to make a few preliminary com-
ments. The broader aim of this contribution is to illustrate how painting can be seen
to be not just the witness but also the harbinger of newly emerging forms of life and
governance. Forms of life are ways of seeing, ways of knowing, and ways of acting; in
short: ways of life, in constant formation. Forms of life, then, are also and inevitably,
forms of governance. They emerge, develop, and then gradually fade away. No form of
life emerges pure, and no form of life ever disappears completely. All appear in constant
formation and hybridisation with other forms of life, and usually include a bewildering
and often highly contradictory variety of statements, norms, rules, and practices. How-
ever, for the purpose of this essay we have focused on the birth, development and death
of what has been called ‘disciplinary society’ during High Modernity (roughly, between
1750 and 1950).
Painting is one of the art forms that can shed additional light on, or at least illu-
minate, the birth, life and death of particular forms of life and governance. The formal
elements in painting in particular are useful here: the lines of the brush strokes, the use
of colour, the distribution of light and dark on the canvas, the relationship between cen-
tre and periphery, and so on. Forms of life and governance are formal, ie they are forms
within which their contents, ie statements, norms, rules and practices, become possible.
Their form is what resonates in the form of the artwork, painting in particular. Their
contents are much more conceptual and take a longer time to actualise in writing, or in
 The Light of High Modern Discipline 5

the choice of themes and topics in art, including painting. This means that if one wished
to use paintings in order to see to what extent they might be able to betray something
about the emergence, life and death of forms of life and governance, one should focus
first and foremost on their formal aspects. Changes in the formal aspects of painting have
a slightly more ‘prophetic’ weight than changes in its contents. ‘Newness’ in the former
usually not only illustrates but also has the potential to announce newness in forms of
life and governance, more so than changes in the latter. In Gilles Deleuze’s words (who
in turn took them from Foucault), the form of the diagram of virtual possibilities that
resides at the heart of a form of life can be traced in the forms left behind, or actualised,
on canvas.6 What was painted may be important; how it was painted even more so. Our
focus, then, in this essay, will be on the formal aspects in the paintings, much more than
on the themes depicted in them.
But let us be very modest here. The art historian and theorist Michael Baxandall
once argued7 that the artistic intentions of the painter, during his work, are actually,
and inevitably so, the result of what he (ie the painter) considers to be his ‘charge’ (ie his
task, either explicitly formulated or implicit) and his ‘brief ’ (ie the survey of the condi-
tions, material or otherwise, of his painterly project). The problem of course arises when
we realise, with the deleuzoguattarians and other neo-Spinozists8 that any perceived
combination of ‘brief ’ and ‘charge’ could never be anything more than a hopelessly tiny
collection of fragmentary aspects of the full reservoir of energetic potential that is the
world. To be more precise: the painter’s brush strokes, or the choice and application of
colour to canvas, have their origins in a rhizomatically complex and ultimately untrace-
able network of energies that stretch into infinity and that traverse ‘a thousand plateaus’
of energetic intensity, virtuality and materiality. It is impossible even to determine with
any degree of certainty which of the elements in this infinite rhizome of sources have
had an impact on that which ultimately appeared on canvas, and which didn’t. And, to
make matters incurably worse, the same applies to the spectator’s viewing or reading
of the artwork. The sensory perception of the lines and colours in the painting, and,
subsequently, the strings of words that come to the spectator’s mind—they too are only
a speck of fragmentary aspects whose origins stretch into the vast, infinite ocean of the
world’s enigmatic rhizome.
These ‘spectacular’ reductions taken together can lead the researcher or scholar to
despair. The only thing we’re left with is the faint possibility that an attentive eye for
traces and clues in, on the one hand, paintings, and, on the other, other cultural products
(such as political or scholarly tracts, etc) may allow for the detection (however fragile

6 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Continuum, 2002) 70–77. See also Gilles Deleuze,
Foucault (Athlone, 1988) 89–90.
7 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (Yale University Press,
1985).
8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Editions de Minuit, 1980). Benedictus (or Baruch) de
Spinoza’s work that is referred to here is of course his posthumously (1677) published Ethics (Penguin,
1996).
6 Law and Humanities

and provisional) of watershed moments in the emergence and development of particu-

lar forms of life and governance. It is to such an undertaking that we hope to be able to
contribute, albeit perhaps to a very minor extent, here in this essay. We also intend to
demonstrate that a close analysis of painting can contribute to a better understanding
of the emergence, development and decline of forms of life and governance. As said, the
formal aspects of paintings in particular, much more than the themes depicted in them,
hold such a promise.

Awakening: Hogarth

Hogarth is well-known for his Progresses. There is something ironic about the word
‘progress’ here, as we shall see. The Progresses have something theatrical, indeed filmic,
about them.9 They typically use a number of panels to depict the arrival in the city, and
subsequent gradual demise there, of the protagonist (eg the harlot, or the rake). The
harlot’s or the rake’s ‘progress’ in the city is one of steady decline into utter, complete
physical and moral depravity. Hogarth thus used a technique which could be described
as highly structured and ordered to depict the near total absence of structure and order,
or discipline, in the city. There is a problem in the ‘centre’ (that is: in the city), Hogarth
diagnoses. Anyone who arrives in the centre/city from the periphery (some of Hogarth’s
protagonists are country gents) with a certain amount of innocent naivety is bound
to fall prey to the complete lack of discipline, and self-discipline, there. In the centre/
city, pure lust, fleshy desire and indeed savagery reign. And there, in the centre/city, this
absence of discipline, structure and order, in turn engenders a chaos of pure, unreflec-
tive desires running wild.10 The centre doesn’t hold in the centre/city because there is no
centre there in the first place. The centre is vacant, empty.
Let us have a look at the painting ‘An Election Entertainment’ (1755) (Figure 1).
The theme here is politics. The centre of the painting is covered by the empty, whitish
expanse of the tablecloth. Around the table are seated dozens of people engaged in a
variety of activities that all refer to the desires of the flesh (drinking, gluttony, sexual
behaviour, and so on). Indeed, the very reason why the centre of the painting (the table
top) is completely empty is to be found in the fact that one of the figures (a woman sit-
ting to the right of the table) has managed to rake all the foodstuffs towards her side in
preparation for a highly selfish gluttonous feast. The political in this painting ultimately
boils down to a chaos of pure desires around a vacant, empty centre. This centre is white.
But there is little if any discernable light in the painting. The white at the centre merely
indicates a lack, or an absence: the absence of reasoned, reflective (self-)constraint, the

9 Philip Momberger, ‘Cinematic Techniques in William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress’ (1999) 33(2) Journal of
Popular Culture 49.
10 David Dabydeen, ‘Hogarth: The Savage and the Civilised’ (1981) 31(9) History Today 48.
 The Light of High Modern Discipline 7

Figure 1
William Hogarth, ‘An Election Entertainment’ (1755)
Sir John Soanes Museum, London

lack of discipline, the lack of a centre that structures and orders. Hogarth’s paintings,
including ‘An Election Entertainment’, were painted well before Cesare Beccaria pub-
lished his Dei Deliti e Dele Pene in 1764, in which he made a plea for criminal justice
systems (and governance more broadly) to operate according to a calculated mechanics
of costs and benefits, as far removed as possible from the passions of desire. Beccaria,
in other words, would, about a decade after Hogarth, fill the latter’s vacated centre
with a natural or physical mechanics of justice. Beccaria and Hogarth shared a ‘post-
Newtonian’ universe.11 Hogarth’s work also precedes, by a considerable margin, Jeremy
Bentham’s on the Inspection-House (published in 1787). The latter would propose filling
the centre not so much with a natural mechanics of justice, as with light, that is, with a
centrally positioned, enlightened and enlightening eye. The gaze of governance would, it

11 Amal Asfour, ‘Hogarth’s Post-Newtonian Universe’ (1999) 60(4) Journal of the History of Ideas 693.
8 Law and Humanities

was hoped, produce disciplined subjects, and therefore also order and structure. We shall
revisit these Foucauldian12 themes below.
But if the centre is vacant (or completely absent even) there is hope, or at least a
window (literally as we shall see) of opportunity, for improvement to take place. Hogarth
situates redemption in the periphery. Not so much in the naively innocent countryside,
as in the difference of other cultures that, he believes, have the capacity to generate or
introduce more enlightened reason and therefore also (self-)constraint in a world ruled
by desire and passion. In one of Hogarth’s prints, ‘Credulity, Superstition and Fanati-
cism’ (1761–2) (Figure 2), this becomes clear.
Much of the space in the picture is taken up by a writhing mass of religious (and
superstitious) fanatics. The slightly whitish spaces near the centre of the image only serve
to highlight the level of lust and superstitious fanaticism in the congregation. However,
in the window—the peripheral source of light—we see the face of an oriental (a Turk
perhaps) who is calmly smoking his pipe whilst surveying and contemplating the scenes
that play out below him. As Bernd Krysmanski has pointed out,13 the Turk probably
stands for enlightened contemplation and reason.14 Those are still peripheral, but could
ultimately become central and bring redemption, if only they were allowed to pour
inside with the peripheral light of enlightenment. Hogarth arguably deserves the credit
for having performed the first substantive diagnostic of a lack in a Western culture that
had hitherto failed to realise that its emerging High Modern form of life needed Light.
It needed Enlightenment. It needed light to make visible the paths to an orderly, struc-
tured future. Something had to be done at the very heart, at the very centre and soul of
modernity. Light—productive, ordering, structuring light—had to be brought in. Now,
putting the light of Enlightenment at the centre of modernity was what Joseph Wright
(of Derby) did in most of his paintings.15

Productive Light at the Centre: Wright of Derby

Although Joseph Wright was a portraitist, he spent a lot of time painting scenes that
focused on scientific discovery, industry and manufacturing.16 Some commentators
have dubbed him the painter of the industrial revolution17 but there is much more to his

12 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Penguin, 1977).
13 Bernd Krysmanski,‘We See a Ghost: Hogarth’s Satire on Methodists and Connoisseurs’ (1998) 2 The Art
Bulletin 292.
14 See also Bernd Krysmanski, ‘Lust in Hogarth’s Sleeping Congregation—Or, How to Waste Time in Post-
Puritan England’ (1998) 3 Art History 393.
15 On this see eg Ronald Paulson, ‘Zoffany and Wright of Derby: Contexts of English Art in the Late Eight-
eenth Century’ (1969) 2 Eighteenth-Century Studies 278.
16 For more information on Wright’s output and development, see eg Stephen Daniels, Joseph Wright (Tate,
1999), and Jane Wallis, Joseph Wright of Derby (1743–1797) (Derby Museum & Art Gallery, 1997).
17 Krzysztof Z Cieszkowski, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of the Industrial Revolution’ (1983) 33(5) His-
tory Today 41.
 The Light of High Modern Discipline 9

Figure 2
William Hogarth, ‘Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism’ (1761–2)
Ashmolean, Oxford
10 Law and Humanities

work. Nearly all his thematic paintings use the chiaroscuro painting technique. Wright
invariably paints a bright light source at the centre of the picture and allows it to radi-
ate outwards, brushing, as it were, the faces and features of human figures as it travels
through space.
Let us have a look at just two of his paintings. The first, ‘A Philosopher Lecturing
on the Orrery’ (Figure 3), dates from 1766. It depicts a scientist who demonstrates the
movements and trajectories of the planets using an orrery in which is placed a fixed light
source. The light illuminates the features of the audience. But it does more than just illu-
minate them. The light has a clear impact on the individuals gathered around the orrery.
They are clearly captivated by what is going on in front of them. The experience, indeed
the light of the experiment itself, engenders in them a particular state of mind and feel-
ing. In other words, it is productive. It produces certain subjective states. In the words
of Mikkel Bille and Tim Sørensen, this light—ie Wright’s light—has ‘agency’.18 But that
which produces certain subjective states here in this painting is only a simple mechanical
device, one that merely mimics the planets’ rotations at that.
Wright worked on the painting at about the same time as Beccaria was writing his
pamphlet on the mechanics of justice. The painter, however, gradually progressed in his
choice of themes thereafter. In his ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’, completed
only two years after the ‘Orrery’ painting, the light source was placed at the centre of an
experimental installation comprising an air pump and a vacuum bulb holding a slowly
suffocating bird. This installation still has something of the simple mechanics of mim-
icry about it, but already an element of production is emerging here: an air pump is a
productive machine that, productively, causes particular effects (eg a vacuum, a suffocat-
ing bird) to occur.19 A few years later still, ie from 1770 onwards, Wright would go on to
paint scenes in which the productive light source is itself the result of a highly productive
and quite labour-intensive process.
The painting ‘An Iron Forge’ (1772) (Figure 4) is one of the more well known. The
French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once described the light of a flame using words
that seem to capture exactly what goes on in many of Wright’s pictures, this one in
particular.20 The light, writes Bachelard, ‘takes its time to light the whole room progres-
sively’. It is a light whose productive ‘wings and hands … move slowly as they brush the
walls’.21 Two labourers are working a brightly glowing ingot. Again the light radiates out-
ward, ‘brushing’ walls, bodies and faces. This light too seems to have productive ‘agency’.
It clearly produces pride in the owner of the forge, who, arms crossed on his chest, looks
contentedly upon his family for which he is able to provide comfortably.

18 Mikkel Bille and Tim Flohr Sørensen, ‘An Anthropology of Luminosity: The Agency of Light’ (2007) 3
Journal of Material Culture 263.
19 For a similar argument, see Daniels (n 16) 39.
20 My reading of this painting has benefited a lot from Bille and Sørensen’s paper (n 18).
21 Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle (Dallas Institute Publications, 1988) 68.
 The Light of High Modern Discipline 11

Figure 3
Joseph Wright of Derby, ‘A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery’ (1766)
Derby Museum and Art Gallery

Figure 4
Joseph Wright of Derby, ‘An Iron Forge’ (1772)
Tate Britain, London
12 Law and Humanities

The latter are in turn visibly captivated by the glow of the ingot. The light emanating
from the ingot stirs, in all those it touches, willingness (or indeed a certain discipline) to
productively contribute to the production of even more productive light. In the words
of Stephen Daniels, who writes about this and other similar paintings by Wright: ‘These
nocturnes are each in their way concerned with processes of change and transformation,
in the objects observed and in the subjects who observe them.’22 It is important to note
that the productive light in Wright’s paintings always occupies the centre. The centre, in
Wright, does exist, and it does hold. The light itself may have been put there, and it may,
itself, have been produced, but it also produces in turn. It casts its glow on all and every-
one it ‘brushes’ past and, in the process, engenders willingness, eagerness even, to focus
or centre thoughts and effort, and to take part in the very productive process itself. Out
of the sheer chaos of nature, out of the utter miasma of earthy desire, Wright’s light—
following Locke and Hume—produces focus, and centred stability and order.23 The light
in Wright’s paintings focuses, structures, orders and disciplines selves and subjects. In
Wright’s ‘Forge’ it is not only iron that is hammered into shape. Subjectivities are forged
there as well. Joseph Wright painted most of his chiaroscuro paintings one or two dec-
ades before Jeremy Bentham began to think about writing his essay on the Panopticon.
It may be a bridge too far to suggest a link between Wright’s paintings on the one
hand and Bentham’s writings on the other. But both authors did share a world where sci-
entific enlightenment began to dominate the intellectual climate of the day. Critics may
object that in Bentham’s Panopticon model the centrally positioned tower was blinded,
and therefore dark. But that would be missing the point. The main point that is made
here is that both Wright and Bentham seem to agree on the importance of the visual
sphere in the production of structured, ordered, disciplined societies. And this visual
sphere should be focused, or centred. It should radiate outwards, beginning from the
centre, then productively ‘brushing past’ walls, bodies and faces. The result of this proc-
ess was supposed to be an equally focused, centred or disciplined subject (a point well
rehearsed since Foucault).
Light—and enlightenment—is the most important vehicle of this whole process of
subjectivation. In Bentham’s panoptic society this is the light that, as it were, shoots rays
outwards from the guards’ gazing eyes, or the light that reaches into the farthest nooks
and crannies of the Inspection-House (the very word ‘inspection’ too of course has vis-
ual connotations), lighting the latter up in all brilliance. In Wright it is the light at the
centre of eager, willing productivity—a certain productivity that in turn wills to produce
productive selves. In both, the gazing eye is the organic instrument par excellence, and the
sine qua non, for anything like enlightenment (that is: focused, reasoned, reflected pro-
ductivity) to be able to emerge at all. In the eighteenth century this was no longer God’s
eye. A whole host of other ‘central’ instances took over this productive role (the State, the

22 Daniels (n 16) 26.

23 David Solkin, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby and the Sublime Art of Labor’ (2003) 83(1) Representations 167.
 The Light of High Modern Discipline 13

nation, the revolutionary vanguard, the party, and so on).24 And the eye’s productivity,
it should be noted in passing, was not just about achieving strict discipline; the eye also
often stood for providence, care or protection.25

Mere Light, Peripheral: Hopper

Although he started his artistic career in the French impressionistic tradition, painting
landscapes and city views, Edward Hopper is well known for his paintings which, from
the early 1920s onwards up until a few years before his death in 1967, very often portray
solitary or non-communicative human figures, often but not always women, either sit-
ting or standing in what seems to be a pensive, contemplative posture, in everyday spaces
or near everyday objects (office furniture, house walls, a porch, a petrol forecourt, a diner
or café, a hotel lobby, a train carriage, and so on). Many of his paintings do not even
show human figures at all. Some of the more recognisable of those signature paintings
depict scenes that appear to be located in a city. This has led many critics to state that
Hopper’s fundamental themes are the anonymity, isolation and aloneness that charac-
terise life in the modern metropolis, as well as, with reference to Richard Sennett’s work,
the end of public life in American culture.26 Some scholars even go so far as to situate
Hopper’s paintings in the anti-urbanism movement whose work expresses fear of the
city and fear of the dangers lurking in city life.27 Sometimes allusion is thereby made to
Hopper’s own biography (Hopper lived a very reclusive life; his uneasiness in the pres-
ence of others was well known). But that may not be correct. Hopper’s paintings did not
particularly focus on city life. Many of his paintings show scenes that are located in small
towns or in rural settings.28 Hopper’s theme was not so much city life as modern life, or,
in Rolf Renner’s29 view, modern civilisation. The problem depicted in his paintings was
not so much the anonymity and loneliness of city dwellers as the predicament of modern
life, indeed, of modern civilisation as such, in the early to mid twentieth century. A closer
study and analysis of Hopper’s use of light may allow us to clarify this issue.
Light is one of the crucial elements in Hopper’s paintings, and according to some
critics it even ‘plays an essential role’ in his work.30 Hopper, who otherwise spoke and
wrote very little, if at all, about his work (which, in the light of what follows below will

24 On all these points see especially Michael Stolleis, The Eye of the Law (Birkbeck Law Press, 2009).
25 Ibid.
26 Ivo Kranzfelder, Edward Hopper (1882–1967): Vision of Reality (Taschen, 2006) 140.
27 See eg Tom Slater, ‘Fear of the City 1882–1967: Edward Hopper and the Discourse of Anti-Urbanism’
(2002) 2 Social & Cultural Geography 135.
28 Kranzfelder (n 26) 133.
29 Rolf G Renner, Edward Hopper (1882–1967): Transformation of the Real (Taschen, 1993).
30 Lloyd Goodrich, John Clancy, Helen Hayes, Raphael Soyer, Brian O’Doherty and James Flexner, ‘Six Who
Knew Edward Hopper’ (1981) 41(2) Art Journal 122.
14 Law and Humanities

not come as a surprise), did himself once state: ‘I didn’t want just to paint people ges-
turing and grimacing, what I wanted to do was paint light on the side of the house.’31
This often cited statement is an important one. Two things can be noted straight away.
The first is that ‘all that Hopper wanted’ was ‘to paint light’. The second is that the light
falls ‘on the side’ of objects and houses. Hopper’s light source must then be peripheral.
As indeed it is in nearly all of his many paintings. There is one more thing to be noted
about this light. Its source is never directly visible. It invariably falls outside the frame of
the painting.
Let us have a look at one of Hopper’s earliest paintings about modern life, ‘Automat’
(1927) (Figure 5). Here, very exceptionally, the light source is visible, albeit not directly.
We only see the reflection of the light in the window and as such it appears to be com-
ing from elsewhere. It is peripheral. It is, so to speak, on its way out. It would disappear
beyond the borders of the frame in nearly all later paintings. In ‘Automat’ it just falls on
the objects in the room as well as on the young woman who is sitting at one of the tables.
The falling light however seems to have no impact whatsoever on her. There is no ‘ges-
turing’, no ‘grimacing’. There is just light falling on an arrangement of bodies and objects.
This is a mere natural, physical process. Peripheral, this light no longer has ‘agency’. It is
just a natural phenomenon. It just falls on things and on bodies.
The woman seems to be thinking, or better perhaps, wondering about something. It
is as if she has just realised something and is now mulling over it. Nearly all of Hopper’s
human figures have this slightly enigmatic, pensive aura about them. Pensive she may
be, but the woman, like most of Hopper’s human figures, does take centre stage. She is
pondering, thinking, or wondering. She is at the centre. She is the one doing the acting,
albeit that this action is reduced to mere inner contemplation. Inner contemplation is
at the centre of life in modern life. The question now arises, what are Hopper’s figures
contemplating?
There could be a clue in the title of this particular painting, ie ‘Automat’. The
word refers to what was then, in the 1920s, a novelty—self-service cafés with vending
machines. But one could read more into this title. Fordist modernity has reached its
highly regimented, almost automated peak. The light of productive, creative modernity,
once so central, had, certainly by the 1920s, produced societies where standardisation,
regimentation and normalisation—themselves the products of creative productivity—
had almost completely over-coded that original forward-looking momentum, and had
replaced it with a certain automatism, indeed with a discernable robot-like regularity.
The light of High Modernity, that is, the light of discipline, had by then reached its full-
est extent, and in the process it had lost its productive, creative thrust. It no longer had
‘agency’ and thus, reduced to the mere presence of photons, it had to recede into the
background. Hopper’s light had played its part, and that part was now over. As Robert
Hobbs wrote in 1987, in a similar vein, and with reference both to industrialisation and

31 Ibid, 126.
 The Light of High Modern Discipline 15

Figure 5
Edward Hopper, ‘Automat’ (1927)
Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines
Bridgeman Art Library, London

modernity, in Hopper ‘[t]he machinery of industrialisation is no longer operative, and

the illusion of progress as a motivating life force is no longer believable’.32
It is this moment which, we argue, Hopper’s contemplative protagonists have come
to realise, and are mulling over, time and time again. In other words, Hopper’s human
figures, alone with their thoughts, and still slightly dazed it seems, have just awoken to
the fact that modernity had reached quite a paradoxical watershed moment. But apart
from this mulling over the awakening and self-awakening (out of the robot-like state)
that they have just gone through, nothing in particular seems to happen in Hopper’s
paintings. There is no resistance. There is no despair. There is no attempt to do any-
thing about anything. There is nothing but peripheral light falling on bodies and objects.

32 Cited in Slater (n 27) 142.

16 Law and Humanities

There is silent contemplation, but the protagonists do not feel the slightest need to com-
municate about this. They do not even direct their gaze.33 And how could they, in an age
when robotic-like automatism is still dominant, albeit on its way out? The light of the eye
too is just … light, mere physical light.
Let us have a look at another of Hopper’s paintings. In ‘Summertime’ (1943) (Figure
6) the human figure again takes centre stage. The woman is contemplating something,
possibly an event that she witnessed a few moments before. We cannot be certain though.
The event—if indeed there was an event—falls outside the frame of the picture, as does
the source of light. The light has no impact on this woman. The slight breeze doesn’t
either, even though it makes a curtain blow into the interior of the house (a recurrent
theme in many of Hopper’s paintings). But that too is a mere physical phenomenon: that
which is peripheral (mere light, a breeze) and which moves towards and even into the
centre has no real impact on the objects inside, or on the pensive figures that are doing
their contemplative work there. This light has reached the end of its active, creative,
productive life.
There is a least one more thing to be said about ‘Summertime’, though. While the
breeze may have no discernable impact on the woman in the picture, it does however
accentuate her curvaceous body quite considerably. There is, in other words, a whiff
here of the possibility that the repressed (fleshy, uncontrollable desire) might be about
to return. In other paintings the possibility of the return of the repressed is suggested by
the presence of fragments of ‘Nature’ (a grove, a winding path, a segment of dark forest,
and so on).34 There is thus, in most of Hopper’s painting, a sense of anticipation. The old
form of life is about to fade away, but no alternative has yet crystallised at the horizon.
Hopper almost never paints horizons, by the way. Something is about to happen. But we
have no way of knowing what or where or how or when (which is why Hopper’s work
has often been linked to Hitchcock’s thrillers).35
‘Summertime’ is by no means the only painting where this atmosphere of appre-
hensive anticipation, possibility and anxiety is hinted at. But with Hopper this never
transcends the status of a hint, or a suggestion. Nothing ever actually happens; nothing
really materialises. Hopper never draws conclusions. He remains content to just cap-
ture the moment of awakening, of mulling over, the moment of quiet contemplation.
In anticipation, bodies are ‘merely things in the light’. But this of course is why Hopper
needs the human figure—if there be human figures at all—at the centre of his paintings.
He needs a human figure in order to capture and express this moment of awakening and
wonder. Hopper was always scathing about the abstract expressionists who, after the war,
did in fact draw conclusions and who thus moved beyond the human figure altogether in

33 Kranzfelder (n 26) 37.

34 See eg Kranzfelder (n 26) 76–113; Renner (n 29) 44–63.
35 Kranzfelder (n 26) 86.
 The Light of High Modern Discipline 17

Figure 6
Edward Hopper, ‘Summertime’ (1943)
Delaware Art Museum
Bridgeman Art Library, London

order to express what they believed was the predicament of life in late modern times.36
They thought late modern life was or should be about attempting absolute, sovereign
control, either through a plunge into what could be called unrelenting non-human,
un-enlightened and un-lightened transgressions in a pure physical world,37 or through
transcendence into the pure, void-like light of radical reflection.38 Both life strategies in a
way form the opposite sides of the spectrum which one could call the late modern, post-
disciplinary form of life and governance, or ‘control society’. The emphasis in control
societies is no longer placed on the kneading and forging of the self and subjectivity, but
only on the mere control of situations.

36 See eg Wallace Jackson, ‘To Look: The Scene of the Seen in Edward Hopper’ (2004) 1 South Atlantic Quar-
terly 133.
37 eg Jackson Pollock. See on this Ronnie Lippens, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Flight from Law and Code: Theses on
Responsive Choice and the Dawn of Control Society’ (2011) 1 International Journal for the Semiotics of
Law 117; Ronnie Lippens, ‘Control over Emergence: Images of Radical Sovereignty in Pollock, Rothko and
Rebeyrolle’ (2012) 3 Human Studies: International Journal for Philosophy and Social Sciences 351.
38 eg Mark Rothko. See Lippens 2012 (n 37).
18 Law and Humanities

In other words: whereas Hopper records how mere light merely falls on mere objects,
and how the subject awakens to himself for the last time in what we call High Modernity
(only to mull over this very awakening), post-war abstract expressionists seem to have
split this process up and focused either on the sheer physics of the earth (away from the
light) or on the abstract emptiness of reflective light itself. Both imply the abandonment
and actual effacement of self and subject altogether. But Hopper himself never joined
this vogue of abstract expressionism, not even in his works painted after the war, cap-
tivated as he was by the moment of inner contemplation which, sometime during the
interwar years, preceded the post-war moment of conclusion and action (in fact, later
expressionists would locate the late modern desire for absolute sovereignty in superhu-
man-like creativity and would eventually return to the figural).39

Conclusion

The aim of this essay was to attempt to illustrate how painting can shed additional light
on the birth, life and death of forms of life and governance. The focus was on the form
of life and governance which we now know as ‘disciplinary society’. We have made an
effort to illustrate the birth, life and impending death of that particular form of life and
governance through a closer analysis of the work of three ‘High Modern’ painters, ie
William Hogarth, Joseph Wright (of Derby) and Edward Hopper. In the paintings of
each quite sudden changes (or ‘newness’, if you wish) in the formal aspects of the paint-
ings in particular (eg the location and direction of the light) tell us something about
how watershed moments in ‘disciplinary society’ were announced on canvas before they
crystallised in conceptual work.
We have, in a methodological intermezzo (see above), highlighted the almost insur-
mountable problems and issues raised by such an approach. We do however believe
that the study and analysis of painting—of the formal aspects of and in painting to be
precise—at least hold a certain amount of promise which might prompt students and
scholars of, for example, governance, regulation, crime and criminal justice to engage
more thoroughly with painting as a source of knowledge and understanding of govern-
ance and justice.

39 eg the French painter Paul Rebeyrolle. See on his work: Ronnie Lippens, ‘Sovereignty and Control Society:
Images of Late Modern Sovereignty in Rebeyrolle’s “Le Cyclope”’ (2012) 1 Crime, Media & Culture 23.
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