Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited MARTIN JAY “What are scopic regimes?” recently asked a curious, unnamed Internet questioner on ‘Photherel’, an official European e-learning Web site dedicated to the ‘conservation and dissemination of photographic heritage’.' Although noting that the now widely adopted term was first coined by the French film theorist Christian Metz, the no less anonymous site respondent ducked answering the question head on. He nonetheless could claim that ‘the advantage of the concept of “scopic regime” is chat it supersedes the traditional distinction between technological determinism ... and social construction ... In the case of scopic regimes, culture and technology interact.’ And then to offer a ‘simple ex- ample’, he adduced the distinctions made by contemporary culture between fictional and documentary versions of reality, which are created by a number of different devices, such as the greater narrative coherence of fiction over the ‘possible fragmentation’ of documentary. Other differences between scopic regimes, he continued, include the ef- fects of gender—for example the ‘male gaze’—and class, which he defined in terms of an opposition between the formalist look of bourgeois culture and the more politically infused variant betraying the scopic regime of dominated classes. ‘The remainder of the entry stressed the important role played by photography in the generation of different scopic regimes. As this episode in random Internet knowledge dissemination demonstrates, there are at least two things that can confidently be said about the concept of ‘scopic re- sgime': firse that it has begun to enter popular discourse, arousing curiosity on the part of people who have heard about it, but are puzzled by its meaning, and second, that that meaning is by no means yet settled. In 1988, when I first composed an essay entitled ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ for a conference at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, which produced the widely read collection Vision and Visuality edited by Hal Foster (1997), only the second of these conditions obtained, as the term was familiar, if at all,SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY REVISITED, 103 to devotees of esoteric French film theory, When Metz had introduced it in 1975 in The Imaginary Signifier, he had, in fact, used it in a precise and circumscribed sense, solely to distinguish the cinema from the theatre: ‘what defines the specifically cinematic scopic regime’, he wrote, ‘is not so much the distance kept... as the absence of the object seen’. Because of the cinematic apparatus’s construction of an imaginary object, its scopic regime is unhinged from its ‘real’ referent. Representation is independent of what is rep- resented, at least as a present stimulus, both spatially and temporally. Met's distinction was suggestive, but it’s fair to say, ifa bit of self-congratulation can be excused, that ‘scopic regime’ remained only a restricted and obscure term until the publication of ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ two decades ago. Inflating its meaning and expanding its range, the essay suggested hat there were three competing regimes characterizing the era of history that has come to be called, with more or less precision, modernity. The audacity—or was it foolhardiness?—to do so came largely from the in- spiration of a seminal essay by Martin Heidegger, which was at once the stimulus to my argument and its target. In “Ihe Age of the World Picture’ of 1938, Heidegger had taken the German word Weltbild, which had been a close synonym of the more familiar term Welanschauung ox ‘worldview’, and given it a more than merely metaphorical meaning (Heidegger 1977).2 Worldview’, a term popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey and developed by later philosophers like Karl Jaspers, had pretty much lost its connection with vision (still faintly audible in the Schau in Anschauung), and become a synonym for a philoso- phy of life. Freud, for example could define it in an essay of 1933 as ‘an intellectual con- struction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly; leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place’ (1964: 158). Paying more attention to the expressly visual nature of Bild (image or picture in German), Heidegger explored the meanings of both ‘world’ and ‘picture’, at least as he understood them. And then he posed the question, does every age have a world picture? Oris it only characteristic of the age we call ‘modern’? Mobilizing his special vocabulary, Heidegger explained that Welris ‘a name for whats, in its entirety. The name is not lim- ited to the cosmos, to nature. History also belongs to it. Yet even nature and history, and both interpenetrating in their underlying and transcending of one another, do not ex- haust the world.’ (Heidegger 1977: 129). This somewhat cryptic statement was clarified in the appendix to the essay in which he linked ‘world’ to the ontological question of Being, which was of course the fundamental theme of his entire philosophy. What it did not mean, Heidegger contended, was the reduction of everything that exists to objects standing opposed to subjects viewing them from afar, This distortion was accomplished, much to his dismay, only with the introduction of the modern ‘world picture’, when ‘the world’ became primarily a visual phenomenon, available to the allegedly disinterested gaze of the curious subject. As for ‘picture’, Heidegger made it clear that he did not mean a copy of something, an image of the world. Instead, he wrote, it suggests ‘the world conceived and grasped as picture’, Crucially, Heidegger continued, not every age grasps the world in this way. It is only a function of the metaphysical biases and impoverished cultural practices of the104 HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES modern era, in which the broader reality he called Dasein, whose major trait was its con- cern for the question of Being, had shriveled into a subjectum, a punctual subject with all the myriad connotations of that word. Correspondingly, ‘the world’ was reduced to mere objects standing opposed to that subject, objects understood solely in ontic rather than ontological terms, as objects to be represented in a frame, as if through a window. ‘Thus, Heidegger emphasized, ‘the world picture does not change from an earlier medi- eval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age (Neuzeit)’ (Heidegger 1977: 130). Strictly speaking, according to Heidegger, neither the ancient nor the medieval worlds had a picture of themselves in this sense. Neither of them posited a punctual viewing subject outside of a welter of discrete objects in its visual field. For their inhab- itants, still immersed in a richly meaningful world before the split between subject and object, the mode of representing the world as if it were in a picture to be viewed through a window-like canvas was not yet prevalent. The vice of curiosity for its own sake, an ex- pression of voyeuristic inquisitiveness distracting us from attending to more important matters, was still kept under control, Only with the rise of modern technology, in which the world was reduced to a standing reserve for human domination, did a true Weltbild arise. Only with the fateful advent of Descartes’s dualist metaphysics did the radical op- position of viewing subject and viewed object supplant earlier ontological ways of being immersed in the world. “The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture,’ Heidegger boldly asserted. “The word “picture” (Bild) now means the structured image (Gebild) that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before’ (Heidegger 1977: 134). In the terminology he would adopt elsewhere, it meant putting the world in a frame (Geste), an act of ‘enframing’ that turns the world into a ‘standing reserve’ for human exploitation. Heidegger, in short, made two very broad claims in ‘The Age of the World Picture’, both of which inspired my own attempt to conceptualize the scopic regimes of moder- nity and yet seemed to me at the same time problematic. The first was his assertion that only the modern age could be understood to have possessed a true ‘world picture’ in the sense he gave those terms. Modernity was radically different from what had preceded it, at least in terms of the domination of representational enframing and the primacy of the subject over the object. Cartesian philosophy, the technological domination of na- ture and the rise of modern science were all factors in the creation of that outcome, or at least symptoms of the change, which involved the forgetting of Being and the privi- leging of the subjectum over Dasein, whose mode of relating to Sein had been care, not domination. Heidegger, however, himself provided a clue to the inadequacy of this conclusion, which too categorically differentiated historical epochs. Although insisting that ‘in the age of the Greeks the world cannot become picture’, he acknowledged nonetheless, ‘that the beingness of whatever is, as defined for Plato as eidos [aspect, view] is the pre- supposition, destined far in advance and long ruling indirectly in concealment, for the world’s having to become picture’ (Heidegger 1977: 131). That is in the Platonic system of Ideas, visible to at least the mind’s eye, there is already the kernel of the world as a picture, which anticipates in some sense the radical departure that was the modern age.SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY REVISITED, 105 Premodern cultures could therefore be understood in part to possess inchoate ‘world pictures’, even if they were not yet fully hegemonic. As I tried to show in the book that followed a few years after the Dia Foundation conference, Downcast Eyes, Hellenic attitudes towards vision had been in fact often ocu- larcentric, even if not uniformly so (Jay 19932: 21-33). The Platonic eidos was not as idiosyncratic a concept in classical Greece as Heidegger suggested. What exists ‘in con- cealment’ in a culture can, in fact, often disrupt the apparent coherence of that culture, even perhaps, to repeat Heidegger's own phrase, ‘long ruling indirectly’. So although Heidegger may well have been right to stress the uniqueness of the modern era in terms of its clear-cut privileging of the world picture, it would be wrong to ignore the antici- pations and manifestations in premodern cultures, both in the West and elsewhere, of that outcome. And, in fact, a good deal of subsequent scholarship on scopic regimes, as we will see, was to investigate precisely these prior historical instances. ‘The second bold conclusion of Heidegger's essay which seemed questionable was his characterization of the modern era entirely in terms of one dominant visual culture, that which he identified with Cartesian dualism, the technological domination of nature and the punctual subject representing a world of objects at the other end of a visual field. To be sure, what might be called ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’ was arguably the most preva- lent model of visual experience in the modern era, as Richard Rorty had also contended in his influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979). In fact, Heidegger's case would be strengthened if we add post-Albertian perspective in the visual arts to the philosophical and scientific/technological evidence he provided. Although in “The Age of the World Picture’, Heidegger did not focus on aesthetic issues, elsewhere he in- dicated that treating works of art as objects for the aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) of a subject rather than as vehicles for the disclosure of Being also characterize the modern Weltbild (Heidegger 2008). The revolution in painting during the Renaissance associ- ated with the invention or discovery of perspective can be understood, among many other ways, as supporting this general conclusion. And pethaps we might also add, as Jacqueline Rose has urged, the development of the bourgeois subject in the early mod- ern era, which from a certain political perspective might even be understood to underlie the entite epochal shift that Heidegger described (Foster 1997: 24). But however persuasive Heidegger's critique of the hegemonic Cartesian perspectiv- alist Welzbild or scopic regime of the modern era might be—and, of course, there are many ctitics sceptical of the underlying premise of his argument about the alleged ‘for- getting of Being’ in the West—a closer analysis of the complexities of the era we call modernity suggest that it was not quite as all-pervasive as he implied. Asa result, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ sought to plu to two other less prominent, but still important scopic regimes of modernity. This is not the place to rehearse the argument in all its details, but suffice it to say that they were characterized as the Dutch ‘art of describing’, a term taken from an important book of that name by the are historian Svetlana Alpers, and that of ‘baroque reason’, whose char- acteristics had been developed by the French philosopher and cultural critic Christine Buci-Glucksmann (Alpers 1983; Buci-Glucksmann 1994). Each of these was a mani- festation of what Jacqueline Rose had called the ‘moment of unease’ in the dominant ize his monolithic argument and bring attention106 HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES scopic regime of an era (Rose 1986: 233). Each manifested a different combination of philosophical, aesthetic and technological assumptions and practices. Indeed, as a later, expanded version of my initial essay tried to argue, each might also be extended to the competing urban design patterns of modern cityscapes (Jay 1993b).* And perhaps, as I sought to show in a still later effort dealing with the threatened transformation of St. Petersburg’s skyline, they might even be helpful in our understanding of the different skyscapes of modern cities as well (Jay 2008: 158-9). Ie would, of course, have been possible to multiply other examples of plausible candi- dates for modem scopic regimes, and in fact in several responses to the essay, a number were quickly suggested. One commentator, for example pointed to the importance of the ‘er (Green et al. 1989: 37)° thus drawing our attention to late-modern rather than early- modern visual cultures, those informed by that crisis of integrated subjectivity, repre- sentation, three-dimensional perspective and realism we identify broadly with aesthetic isms of Cartesian perspectivalism offered by twentieth-century art and artists’ modernism. It would be easy to locate philosophical correlates in twentieth-century thought, such as phenomenology or the later Wittgenstein's theory of language games, for this plausible fourth modern scopic regime. And with the emergence of postmodern ism still later in the twentieth century, it would be possible to posit a new scopic regime expressing its major traits, such as the triumph of simulacra over reality abetted by the digital revolution, which correlates with the philosophy of figures like Jean-Francois Ly- otard or Gilles Deleuze, although some might argue that it really was better understood asa revival of the ‘baroque reason’ of the early-modern period. Te would also be worth pausing to consider objections that have been made to the characterizations of the three scopic regimes or their relative importance in the original essay. For example the philosopher Margaret Atherton has questioned the elevation of Descartes by Heidegger and Rorty, which I then appropriated, into the philosophical inspiration for the dominant ocularcentric regime of the modern era. Doing so, she ar- gues, ‘often results in a dual oversimplification: it reduces the highly complex thought of Descartes to a caricature, and it removes attention from events that do not fit neatly the Cartesian mold. In discussions of vision, what can often get ignored is the alterna- tive account of George Berkeley’ (1997: 140).° She goes on to claim that the camera ob- scura model of vision, in which the corporeal intervention of the spectator is bracketed out in the service of a formal, geometric model of visual experience, does not accurately describe either Descartes or Berkeley, as recent commentators like Jonathan Crary have also mistakenly assumed. ‘For all of Descartes’ praise of vision of (sic) the beginning of the Optics, what he produced was an account that encouraged a distrust of vision, which was continued by later Cartesians like Malebranche’ (148). Thus, using his name as a shorthand way to label the perspectivalist regime akin to Heidegger's notion of the mod- ern ‘world picture’ is to do Descartes a disservice. Focusing instead on the implications of the alternative modern scopic regime called ‘baroque reason’, Christopher Braider, a scholar of comparative literature, ac- cepts Buci-Glucksmann’s general description of its characteristics, but questions its al- legedly subordinate status in comparison to the dominant one associated—rightly orSCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY REVISITED 107 wrongly—with Cartesian perspectivalism, “The baroque’, he claims, ‘marks indeed at once the apogee and crisis of early modern visual experience, simultaneously magnify- ing and deprecating human sight and the modes of depiction calculated to model and enhance it’ (2004: 42). By focusing on the gender relations enacted in baroque visual- ity, violent and disruptive, he suggested that even Baconian science is characterized by a self-undermining of the claims it makes on the surface to visual mastery. ‘Perhaps the essential point is just the difficulty of saying or showing as such. The Naked Lady that images both nature and truth is an idea in Kant’s strict sense, a principle that guides us precisely because it can never be realized in the realm of representable experience’ (67). It is therefore a mistake, he concludes, to date the terminal crisis of the dominant Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime to the advent of Impressionism in painting and Bergson in philosophy, as I had done in Downcast Eyes, for it was already in crisis at the outset (69). Rather, however, than speculate on the alternative candidates for scopic regimes of modernity or try to fine-tune the ideal types presented in the original essay, I want to use this opportunity co think a bit more reflectively on the larger issues raised by the concept itself. That is what can we now say about ‘scopic regime’ as a tool of critical analysis some two decades after its introduction into visual culture studies? How has it been used and what are the implications of that usage? Luckily, Internet search engines make it possible to canvas a wide variety of different cases, which might otherwise have slipped through the cracks, to artive at a tentative answer, ‘These include not only publications, but also university courses, academic conferences and even artistic production inspired by the concept, ot at least illuminated by it.” ‘What first becomes apparent after such a search is the range of applications in terms of scale. We might for shorthand purposes speak of a division into ‘macroscopic’ and ‘microscopic’ regimes. At one end are attempts to characterize epochal configurations, inevitably coarse-grained and bold in the manner of Heidegger's critique of the Neuzeit’s ‘world picture’. Such were the three scopic regimes of modernity introduced in my 1988 essay. They should be understood, it bears repeating, as heuristic devices or ideal types, which allow many exceptions to whatever rules or patterns they claim to discern. The temporal and spatial boundaries of these macroscopic regimes are, of course, impo: ble to limit with any rigour, as is the case with all period categories used by histori But attempts to provide large-scale generalizations about the visual cultures of a period, however imprecisely defined, provide at least benchmarks against which deviations and variations can be measured. They alert us to the ways in which untheorized and often unconsciously adopted background practices may inform a wide variety of phenomena during a period, from urban design and the conventions of painting to philosophical and theological doctrines to interpersonal interactions and self-images. How uniformly they may follow the patterns established is, of course, difficult to say, nor is it likely that the same pattern permeates every aspect of a regime, As is the case with all ideal types, there will always be refinements that will modify original characterizations, which are never to be understood as adequate to the reality they can only approximate.’ But enough rough coherence may characterize an epoch in ways that still allow us to speak \s.108 HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES with heuristic value of a macroscopic regime, such as ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’, ‘the art of describing’ or ‘baroque reason’. At the other end of the spectrum are those usages that focus on a very narrow and circumscribed set of visual practices and designate them as a scopic regime. To take some examples at random, the rerm has been used to describe visual dimensions of ‘the war on terror’ and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (Darts et al. 2008; Stanbury 1997; Ly 2003). It has been mobilized to investigate landscape styles under the rubric ‘land-scopic regimes’ (Gerch Clarke 2005) and to describe the erotic imag- ery of early-modern Japanese prints called Shunga (Screech 2004). It has been com- pared with the ‘spectro-scopic domains’ within the rarefied science of spectrochemistry and identified with the visual experience of shopping malls (Falk 1997; Hentschel 2002: 434). It has been introduced to make sense of orientalist encounters with the colonial other in Egypt, postcolonial photography in Mali and the antihegemonic, ‘subaltern’ novels of Bolivia (Sanjinés 2000; Pinney 2003; Gregory 2003: 224). It has been employed to understand Chaucer's Clerk Tale in the fourteenth century and the poetry of John Ashbury in the twentieth (Stanbury 1997; Dimakopoulou 2004). And the list could easily be extended in a way that would make Borges’s heteroclite Chi- nese encyclopedia, made famous by Foucault in The Order of Things, seem coherent by comparison. Te would be tempting to condemn these motley uses as a misapplication of the term, which ought to be restricted only to the most extensive macroscopic regimes, such as those postulated in ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’. They are certainly less fleshed out in terms of all the possible elements in a force field, nonvisual as well as visual, metaphoric as well as literal. But insofar as no culture is homogeneous and consistent, allowing many different subcultures to flourish or compete, it would be healthier to learn from the wider and less rigorous use of the term, which, after all, has no strong claim to intrinsic, ob- jective validity on any scale, What might be profitably explored are the congruences or lack thereof between macro and microscopic regimes. Do they reinforce or challenge the more expansive fields in which they are situated? Ate they the moments of unease on a micro-level of which Jacqueline Rose spoke? Can, for example there be a comfortable fit between the historical regime identified by Christine Buci-Glucksmann as ‘baroque rea- son’ and certain representatives of contemporary, postmodernist art, as exemplified by a recent gallery show in London with that very title?"° Can films like Sally Porter’s Orlando or Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtman’s Contract, The Belly of an Architect, A Zed and Two Noughts, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The Baby of Madcon and. The Pillow Book be understood according to the same template, as one critic has suggested (Degli- Eposti 1996a,b)? Are the visual protocols of postcolonial photographers in Mali best understood as an ‘art of describing’ challenge to Cartesian perspectivalism, a vernacular modernist ‘surfacism’ (Pinney 2003)? Can the new media as a whole be reckoned as in- lining towards a resurrection of the baroque scopic regime (Manovich 2001)? Or are there aspects of these contemporary phenomena that may escape or even contradict some of the traits Buci-Glucksmann attributed to the Baroque in its original form? Iealso may be worth addressing the issue of what elements need to be present to con- struct a complex of visual practices and habits that constitue what might justifiably beSCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY REVISITED 109 called a full-fledged scopic regime, macro or micro. In visual culture studies, we have learned to expand our focus beyond images, whether traditional easel paintings, devo- tional icons, printed illustrations, photographs or the like, which were for so long the primary preoccupation of canonical art historical discourse, to more complex, histori- cally variable force fields of visuality. What Rosalind Krauss called in her classic essay of 1979, the ‘expanded field’ of sculpture, which emerged with installations and site speci- ficity, has been extended to all visual artefacts. Within those force fields of relational elements, we have learned to question the protocols of seeing and the techniques of ob- servation, the power of those who have the gaze, the right to look, as well as the status of those who are its objects, the obligation ro be on view. The latter we have come to under- stand not only in terms of weakness and vulnerability, but also at times as the privilege to exhibit, to attract, solicit or demand the gaze of others in a struggle for recognition and attention, We have also learned to ask what is visible and what is invisible in a par- ticular culture and to different members of the culture. We have explored what Walter Benjamin famously called the ‘optical unconscious’ revealed by new technologies, reg- istering the expansion, augmentation and/or distortion produced by prosthetic devices enhancing the natural powers of the eye. We have learned to situate those technologi- cal innovations in more complicated apparatuses and practices of visuality chat include cultural, political, religious, economic and other components. All of these meanings are folded into the notion of the ‘scopic’, which thus extends beyond more limited concepts ch as a ‘regime of perception’. (Singy 2006: 57). But what precisely is added to the more genetic notion of visual cultures or subcul- tures by the terminology of a ‘regime’? As the etymology of the term itself suggests—it is derived from the Latin regimen, which means rule or guidance—it implies a relatively coherent order in which protocols of behaviour are more or less binding, As such, it fis well with what can be called the political turn in visual culture studies, in which rela- tions of power are understood to be expressed in or reinforced by visual interactions. ‘Regime’ suggests, however, more than just a governmental form with norms and rules, regulating behavior, enforcing conformity and setting limits. To cite one eminent ob- server, the political theorist Leo Strauss, si regime is the order, the form, which gives society its character. Regime is therefore a specific manner of life. Regime is the form of life as living together, the manner of living of society and in society; since this manner depends decisively on the predomi- nance of human beings of a certain type, on the manifest domination of society by human beings of a certain type. Regime means that whole, which we are today in the habit of viewing primarily in a fragmentized form: regime means simultaneously the form of a life of a society, its style of life, its moral taste, form or society, form of state, form of government, spirit of laws. (1959: 34) Strauss's remark about the ‘manifest domination of society by human beings of a certain type’ gives away something important about the inevitable connotation of the word ‘regime’. Implying coercive or disciplinary constraint, it may tacitly suggest the lack of full legitimacy based on the absent or manipulated consent of the governed. Because110 HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES of the long-standing habit of calling prerevolutionary France, the France of the late Valois and Bourbon dynasties, the ancien régime, it may connote an autocratic, unjust and un- popular order, which constrains and exploits those under its control. We rarely talk of a democratic government based on popular sovereignty asa regime. As a result, it may also inspire thoughts about deliberately subverting and discrediting it, extrapolating from the recently fashionable idea of ‘regime change’. Indeed, merely exposing what had hitherto been an unconsciously followed regime may be seen as a step on the road to subverting it. Take, for example the usage in an essay on the painter Paul Klee whose ‘private visual language’ is said to have ‘offered a “scopic regime” that challenged National Socialism’s mimetic reproduction of mimetic myths’ (Kramer 1996: 182). Although Metz’s original use of the term to describe the cinema may not seem ex- plicitly intended to discredit it, it is worth recalling nonetheless that he coined it at the very same time that he and his colleagues at the Cahiers du Cinéma were developing what became known as ‘apparatus theory’ to criticize the ideological function of film as a whole." Typically, as qwo of their number, Marcelin Pleynet and Jean Thibaudeau put it, ‘the film camera is an ideological instrument ... [which] produces a directly inherited code of perspective, built on the model of the scientific perspective of the Quattrocento’ (1969; 10). In other words, it is complicit with the Cartesian perspectivalist worldview, which was so much a target of the anti-ocularcentric discourse of the era. Icis thus not surprising to see the very idea of a dominant or hegemonic scopic re- gime, no matter what its actual content, employed as a frequent target of critique, as much ethical as political. For example in 2008, a blogger named Y. H. Lee suggested that tagging and graffiti can be understood as a way of ‘resisting the (sic) scopic regime by taking control over the visual landscape’. Similarly, in a recent book on Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Jonathan D. Katz. wrote: From the perspective of postwar gay (that is to say, closeted) culture, here is some- : this sense of interrupted or blocked desire; this unwavering, implacable self-control; this persona staged for public consumption; and most ofall this consuming awareness of audience, of a life lived under a scopic regime. (Roth 1998: 58) thing deeply, resonantly queer hei In a comparable vein, a University of Kansas literary critic, Kathryn Conrad, deliv- ered a paper at a Canadian Association for Irish Studies conference in Toronto in 2008 on ‘Queering the Scopic Regime in Northern Ireland’. In all of these uses, the very existence of a regime suggests that subversion or resistance will have progressive im- plications. With a kind of implicit anarchistic distaste for regimes of any kinds, com- mentators like these advocate subverting whichever one is in place. A regime becomes equivalent to an ideology, whose exposure and subversion are sought in the name of something truer or more just. But insofar as the fantasy of living outside of a scopic regime at all is posited as the unstated alternative to being coerced by the present dominant one, the project of sub- version or resistance loses, I would argue, its plausibility. For as in the parallel case ofSCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY REVISITED 11 Foucaule’s concept of a discursive regime, a pervasive ‘episteme’ defining an age, the only alternative is another regime, another more or less coherent form of visual life with its own internal tensions and coercive as well as liberating implications, ‘There may never be an ‘outside’ beyond a cultural filter, allowing us to regain a ‘savage’ or ‘innocent’ eye, a pristine visual experience unmediated by the partial perspective implied by the very term ‘scopic’."* Nor is it always clear that the politics of a specific scopic regime are pre- dominantly sinister with, say, surveillance and the spectacle serving the domination of those who are victimized by them, as Chris Otter has prudently argued in his detailed exploration of the liberal implications of ‘the Victorian eye’ (Orter 2008). The inherent parallel with ideology critique thus falters. Some rules may be chal- lenged and new ones introduced, although the effort may itself be less easy to realize than is the case when the rules are explicitly legislated, as in the political arena, But ic is hard to imagine living with no rules at all. Heidegger to the contrary notwithstand- ing, the hope of ending the age of the world picture, all world pictures, and somehow forging a new or restoring an old nonvisual order of interaction between humans and their environment would be very difficult to achieve. There may well be an ineluctable modality of the visual, to borrow Joyce's familiar phrase, even though the dominance of specific modalities can vary. The culturally and technologically abetted hegemony of the eye may, of course, be challenged by other senses, or at least the balance tilted back away from its domination. But it difficult to imagine that another sense can ever become dominant enough to allow us to talk ofa hegemonic haptic, vocative, gustatory or olfac- tory regime with the same plausibility we can assume for scopic regimes. Or at least no compelling cases have emerged so far, at least ro my knowledge. The example of multiple, competing scopic regimes does, to be sure, suggest that seeking other patterns in the relationship between the different senses and larger cul- tural wholes may well be fruieful.'® But for the moment, the most promising area of new inquiry remains in visual culeure, where major questions about the coherence and inte- gration of practices and protocols of interaction remain to be resolved. Although we are still groping around in the dark for ways to articulate the relationships between micro and macroscopic regimes and have by no means exhausted all the possible coherent re- gimes that might plausibly be found, we have certainly come a long way since Christian Metz first floated the idea that we might distinguish between the cinema and the theatre according to the absence or presence of the object seen and defined each in terms of a unique scopic regime. FURTHER READING Brennan, Teresa and Martin Jay, eds. 1996. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Per spectives on Sight. London: Routledge Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1994. Barogue Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camilles. New York: Sage. Jay, Martin, 1993a. Downeast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.12 HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES Jay, Martin, 1993b. Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York and London: Routledge, 1993b) Melville, Stephen and Bill Readings, eds. 1995. Vision and Textuality. London: Macmillan, NOTES 1. See hetp://www.photherel.nev/notes/relationships/ideas/rel 9aiti, When the same question was asked of Yahoo! Answers on 9 November 2008, by a student who needed to know for a class in cultural studies, the answer was the same example. hetp://answers.yah.com/ question/index2qid=20081109202323AAW0ca}. 2. Weltbild implied more of a scientific view of the world, whereas Weleanschanung can also refer to prescientific intuitions, The term had been introduced by Wilhelm Dilthey. See the discussion in Makkreel (1975: 349-54). He thought it was more strictly cognitive than a Weltanschanung. 3. For an account of Heidegger's use of the word, see the entry on it in Inwood (1999). 4, Icwas first published in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman eds., (1992) and then in my col- lection (Jay 1993b). 5. For an attempt to do just that, see Jacobs (2001). 6. In an essay in the same volume, ‘Discourse of Vision in 17th-century Metaphysics, Cath- rine Wilson also argues that seventeenth-century metaphysicians had a more nuanced un- derstanding of vision than is implied by the term ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’. 7. Ac the 2003 annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technol- ogy, there was a panel on ‘Visual Containment of Cultural Forms: An Examination of Epis- temologies and Scopic Regimes’. In September 2007, the 24th International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand was devoted to the heme of ‘Paradise: Scopic Regimes in Architectural and Urban History and Theory’. At the Uni- versity of Amsterdam in 2008-2009, there was an MA theme seminar on the topic ‘Scopic Regimes of Virtuality’ 8. Foran attempt to wrestle with the vexed question of historical periodization in general, see Jay (2008/2009: 160-1). 9. Ichas, however, been noted that perspective in the early-modern period was itself ambigu- ous, sometimes implying a single transcendental subject, sometimes a plurality of different subjects. See Somaini (2005-2006: 38). 10. ‘The show at the Keith Talent Gallery in London from February to April 2009 was entitled “Baroque Reason’, which it explained in these terms: “This is a neo-baroque reflecting the dynamics of hybridity and difference. These artists celebrate the dazzling, the disorientating, and revel in baroque’s fascination with opacity, unreadability and the indecipherability of the reality they depict. This collection of paintings present a conception of reality in which n- the instability of forms in movement creates a duality; an enchanted illusion and a di chanted world. ‘The title of the exhibition is taken from the French philosopher Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s book on the aesthetics of modernity. Buci-Glucksmann claims “If one had to single out a scopic regime that has finally come into its own in our time, it would be the madness of vision identified with the baroque.”” (http://www.te-title.com/exhibitions! KeithTTalentGallery.asp).. 11. Foran account, see my Downcast Eyes, chapter 8. 12. See htep://leeyh85.blogspot.com/2008/03/scopic-regimes-graffit-hml. 13. See http://people.ku.edu/-kconrad/.SCOPIC REGIMES OF MODERNITY REVISITED 113 14, As Hans-Georg Gadamer noves, scopi or perspective was a metaphor implying partial knowl- edge in thetoric ever since the time of Melanchthon. See Reason in the Age of Science, trans- lated by Frederick G. Lawrence (1983: 125). 15. See, for example, Classen (1993). REFERENCES Alpers, Svetlana, 1983. The Dutch Are of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 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