Spectacle,Surveillance,and the Ironies of Visual Politics in the Age of Autonomous Images

Spectacles and Imitation Games

Debord’s (1995) The Society of the Spectacle opens with a proclamation: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (p. 12). Readers of a certain intellectual formation may recognize not only the line but the source from which it borrows: the book begins by closely paraphrasing the first sentence of Capital (Vol. 1), placing “spectacles” where Marx (1976, 125) had “commodities.” The move already tells us much about what Debord is doing. It anticipates his repeated characterization of his era as one in which the image has become so central to capitalism’s workings and survival that revolutionaries must target capitalist visual means and forms. At the level of style and rhetoric, it introduces the practice that makes Society of the Spectacle both a pleasurable and exasperating reading experience, all the while blurring the more conventional argument/rhetoric distinction. Taut and aphoristic, the book is organized as a series of 221 numbered theses, many of which transform influential lines from the author’s critical forebears, altering or replacing terms or giving phases ironic inflections—a practice Debord calls détournement (diversion)—as when Hegel’s remark that the rational is actual and vice versa (Hegel 1967, 10) is reconfigured to distill what, for Debord, the spectacle proclaims: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear” (15).

The key source for this practice is Marx. On the one hand, Debord’s book relies heavily on ideas of reification, fetishism, alienation, and totality derived from Marx and key twentieth-century Marxist theorists, especially Lukács (Jappe 1999, 20–36; Jay 1993, 418–19; Wollen 1989, 30–37). On the other hand, illuminating contemporary conditions requires transfiguring even Marx. For Debord, it makes sense to say we live in a “society of the spectacle” because “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image” (24). Showing what that entails requires détourning the commodity fetishism chapter of Capital: “The spectacle is not a relation of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). ²

Debord here captures something important: no understanding of visual politics will be complete without grasping how images mediate social relations. His influence is at least in part due to the vigor with which he presses the point while seeking (as Walter Benjamin had before him) to take the measure of the growing sophistication of imaging technologies and the unprecedented volume and variety of images in the twentieth century. Yet, despite their brio, his formulations appear more problematic the more carefully one attends to them.

Let me offer one example that can stand in for the broader pattern. Here, in its entirety, is thesis 22: “The fact that the practical power of modern society has detached itself and established itself in the spectacle as an independent realm can only be explained by the self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness already present in that powerful practice” (18). Debord détourns the key moment in Marx’s (1978) fourth thesis on Feuerbach (p. 144), one of the early passages in which we can see Marxism as a distinctive form of radical theory coming into being. Where Feuerbach grasped religion as self-alienation, portraying the divine as a misrecognized projection of the earthly and seeking to reunify the former with the latter, Marx endorses the effort but counters that Feuerbach has left the key tasks undone, neglecting to explain or even properly ask why religious self-alienation takes place. To this question, the fourth thesis first offers social contradictions as the answer and then their revolutionary transformation as the program that will make both the symptoms and their sources disappear. However one ultimately assesses these claims, Marx elaborates an extraordinarily ambitious account of prevailing social contradictions and how and why they generate ideologies. Debord provides nothing of the kind, making only the most gestural reference to the contradictions and their workings, let alone how spectacle arises from them. If one asks what now leads capital to take the form of the image, or even how it does so, one will find little on offer in the text. And while, in fairness, aphoristic and epigrammatic writing relies on us to take up some of the intellectual labor ourselves, in Debord’s case what we often get through détournement is akin to sleight of hand: the substance on which such imaginative embellishments might build isn’t really there. The theses mimic Marx’s form but produce empty husks.

What’s left, for all the brilliance at the level of the sentence, are some particularly nostalgic or romantic variations on ideas such as estrangement and the like (viz., “the origin of the spectacle lies in the world’s loss of unity” [22]) and—the reason why I examine Debord in the first place—his own ideas about the image. Perhaps the latter claim seems unfair, for when Debord writes of “spectacle” he means not simply “images” or “media” but both more and less: more in that spectacle names a complex capitalist social ensemble or totality of which the image or medium is only a part, and less in that the part presumably consists of a particular set of imaging practices and solicitations—the features that, as it were, turn display or imagery into “spectacle.” Hence, for example, thesis 212’s characterization of spectacle as “the materialization of ideology” (150). Yet neither the totality nor the role of the visual within it are treated in a satisfying way, and the practices and solicitations receive nothing like fine-grained critical analysis or even description.

Instead, we get a broad indictment of spectating and its objects. Repeatedly, the book denigrates viewing as passive, indeed abject or subordinated, and the image as false, illusory, degraded, and corrupt. That’s why characterizing social relationships as “mediated by images” is a fundamental criticism: the image is unreal, the mediation false, and the social relations thus warped and fantastical. Or perhaps unreality inheres in appearance, the genus of which the image is species. Debord characterizes spectacle as “a visible negation of life—a life that has invented a visible form for itself,” but visibility seems itself a symptom of the negation, insofar as living death follows ineluctably from how “the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearance and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance” (10). ³ This line of thought or structure of feeling culminates in one of Debord’s most compressed summaries of historical development: “An earlier stage in the economy’s domination of social life entailed an obvious downgrading from being into having. . . . The present stage . . . entails a generalized shift from having to appearing” (16). The argument captures something disturbing about the visual cultures of intensely commodified societies, perhaps all the more now, when influencers rule Instagram and TikTok. This helps account for the book’s pull, and rightly so. My point, then, is hardly that all capitalist visual production is actual, and all actuality is capitalist visual production. Still, despite what such passages enable us to recognize, it remains hard to insulate them from the hostility or at least fear coursing through Society of the Spectacle, an anxiety about appearances not just in this or that moment or form but as such. That anxiety provides an inadequate basis for assessing visual politics, not least in an image-saturated era.

The fears draw support, and may even derive, from Debord’s reworking of Lukács’s account of reification, for the latter is, as Panagia (2017) shows, bound up with “a theory of spectatorship” as a kind of “passive and automatic imitation” (pp. 93, 94). But if we seek not self-conscious lineage but affinities and resonances, the comparison that leaps out is with Plato, or at least Platonism. Platonism makes thralldom to the image—spectating as bondage to the image—central, with the problem not just that spectating entails copying (imitating) others, as in the worries Panagia traces, but that spectating is necessarily directed at copies (imitations). Jacques Rancière (2009) elaborates the Platonic resonance in The Emancipated Spectator. Although most of his passages challenging the idea of passive spectatorship concern theater, and on those points, the dialogue with Debord remains implicit, the critique turns explicit at two key moments. First, Rancière suggests that “the essence of spectacle for Guy Debord” is “exteriority—that is self-dispossession” (6). In a subsequent chapter, he elaborates a Platonic parallel more robustly: “The situation of those who live in the society of the spectacle is . . . identical to the shackled prisoners in Plato’s cave. The cave is the place where images are taken for realities, ignorance for knowledge, and poverty for wealth. And the more the prisoners imagine themselves capable of constructing their individual and collective lives differently, the more they sink into the servitude of the cave” (44).

However obvious the comparison with Platonism, it’s hard to imagine Debord’s acknowledging any kind of affinity. Yet, underscoring self-dispossession and bondage, Rancière illuminates how Society of the Spectacle denigrates spectating as captivity. Debord links the bondage to the dispossession, finding the latter enacted through ontological misrecognition of the image, as Plato does in standard readings (even though texts such as the Republic portray philosophical knowledge as figurative spectatorship, reminding us that, both conceptually and etymologically, “spectacle” and “theory” are intertwined). ⁴ Whether such approaches to Plato capture his texts’ complex layers and ironies, they remain broadly influential—and understanding the cave as a site of bondage to untruth in the form of images matches Society of the Spectacle’s claims, at least in some respects, better than does the logic of Capital. ⁵

Any line of argument casting Debord’s work as too abstract and iconophobic, however, invites an objection as fundamental as it must seem obvious, at least to anyone familiar with his visual influences and practices—for he was long involved in forms of visual production. The involvement goes back to the articulation of détournement. Although Debord’s work offers the fullest theorization, the term originated with Isidore Isou, the leading figure of the Lettrist circle in which the young Debord first emerged as an intellectual and from which the Situationist movement grew; inspired by Dada, Isou used détournement to name a radical art practice of collage (Foster et al. 2004; Jappe 1999; Wollen 1989). From its origins, then, the term proposes a visual dialectic, an argument that reassembling just the right found materials is enough for a revolutionary visual intervention. The notion guided situationist practice, not only in the work of influential artists such as Asger Jorn but even in Debord’s own early ventures into collage (see Marcus 1989a, 128–29).

The central and enduring importance of visual intervention to Debord is evident from the fact that he made films, indeed preferred to identify himself first and foremost as a filmmaker (Jappe 1999, 108). Even though his films did not initially include anything we can plausibly call “images”—his first, Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952), consists of a blank screen, alternately black or white, and a soundtrack—his directorial oeuvre includes the cinematic version of Society of the Spectacle (1973), in which passages from the book are read while photos and clips from feature films, news footage, and advertisements unspool on screen, visual détournements at times interspersed with intertitles bearing quotes from major theorists. The filmmaker Debord must thus be viewed as committed to the idea that images can contest the capitalist order as well as instantiate it. If one rejects that commitment, filmic détournement loses its intelligibility as a practice aimed at political effects.

But although I do not write to convict Debord (who indeed understood his cinematic work as subverting the spectacle) of a performative contradiction, I also do not believe anything important changes if we re-read the writing in the glow cast by the films. As Martel (2006, 70, 79) observes, if in principle détournement allows escape from an otherwise closed system, as elaborated in Debord’s writing, it remains tightly bound to the search for a lost wholeness—and, I would add, a hostility to mediation and an indictment of the image. His book offers neither a robust theorization of the politics of visual skirmishes and their conditions of possibility nor a significant engagement with any particular skirmish. ⁶ To return to the resonances with if not Plato then at least Platonism, Debord’s text presents us, in our visual field, as “imprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle’s screen” (218). That Debord himself sometimes projected on the screen alters surprisingly little. ⁷ Scouring his work for escape routes is less fruitful than rejecting the premise that our visual domain is no more than a prison.

From the Critique of Spectating to Spectacle’s Visual Politics

There are many reasons why one might find the premise troubling. My reasons concern how the power of visual experience in political life bursts Debord’s temporal and societal frameworks. At a time when state actors and corporate media exercise broad control over the means of image production and distribution (including participatory and demotic domains of social media), in regimes of what we could call, say, settler, cis, heteropatriarchal, racial capitalism, it is no surprise that domination unfolds in many sites and genres across the visual field. But to treat domination as an inherent property of the visual, or to treat the enactments of any genre or regime as monolithic rather than sites of contention, is to respond with an iconophobia unable to reckon with the complexities of visual politics.

Does the problem inhere in the spectacle idiom as it unfolded in the twentieth century and beyond? I do not think so: the term Debord made so central to analyses of visual politics remains useful, as do the idea of visual détournement (however unsatisfying his own examples and practices) and his emphasis on the visual mediation of social relations. But though late capitalist technologies have indeed radically altered mediation’s forms, mediating social relations with images is nothing new—indeed, it must be much older than recorded history, receding into the deep past, as in such cases as cave painting and the myriad forms and uses of bodily adornment. Stressing not the mediation of social relations by images per se but particular sets of mediating images, forms, genres, or technologies, other versions of the spectacle idiom offer better ways of engaging the complexities of visual politics while neither naturalizing the specific visual modes that abet domination or exploitation nor simply valorizing visuality.

Consider Michael Rogin’s (1990) use of “imperial spectacle” when writing about American covert operations in the Reagan era. For him, spectacle manifests forms of hiding in plain sight. Rather than a technique of coverup, Rogin’s “spectacle” names a way of making public the ostensibly secret acts of a state that at once revels in and camouflages racist incitements to both domestic and foreign policy in the United States. He makes clear how imperial fantasies ensnare not merely onlookers but “covert operators” too, as they “constitute the spectacle [the operators] produce for one another” (102). For both the broad public and those at the summit of institutions, “political spectacles display centrifugal threats” to “the subject and the state” in order “to contain as well as to enjoy them.” Imperial spectacle for Rogin is thus a political-cultural “form for amnesiac representation” (106).

Like Debord, then, Rogin claims that spectacle provides an illusory coherence, and as Society of the Spectacle at least purports to do, he uses “spectacle” to name a specific visual modality of power (100). But where Debord makes a show of slotting “spectacle” in the place that “ideology,” “religion,” or “commodity fetishism” hold in Marx’s celebrated comments, Rogin traces in detail how the powers operate. And while Debord, as Rogin observes, treats “spectacle” as in essence a distraction from class conflict and the spectators’ true role as economic producers (106), Rogin’s examination of the intertwining of racial demonology and spectacular foreign policy engages multiple arenas, conflicts, and social levels. In his case, the details of the analysis are articulated in a psychoanalytical discourse in which terms such as disavowal and displacement become crucial, but the difference that matters for my purposes does not follow generically from relying on Freud rather than Marx (not least because Rogin draws on both, just as, if sporadically and to minor effect, Debord détourns psychoanalytic theory). Rather, it derives from how Rogin provides terms and tools for investigating the maneuvers and displays that interest him and develops a substantive analysis of the histories and myths they forget or install. Nothing in these tools and inquiries frames the visual as Debord does: “spectacle” in Rogin’s essay still carries a negative charge, but the negativity is about specific forms of imperial conduct and display, not the visual as such, and the analysis is underpinned by neither nostalgia for lost wholeness nor resistance to mediation. (The problem with “amnesiac representation” is its forms of motivated forgetting and their political consequences, not that representation necessitates amnesia.)

The uses of the spectacle idiom for engaging visual politics become clearer still if we consider how the idiom takes form in subsequent critiques of racialized representation. Stuart Hall’s survey of “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” for example, treats racial meaning as something that “floats.” It can be “fixed” semantically and politically by a successful representational strategy, but contingently and often temporarily, shifting when other, competing strategies prevail (Hall 1997, 228). Like Rogin, Hall traces mass-mediated constellations of disavowal and displacement, cataloguing pleasures at once enjoyed and disguised visually—through “what is implied but cannot be shown”—when symbols and stereotypes circulate (263). Like other critics of racial spectacle, he of course recognizes that, whether as ideology, institution, or lived experience, race is not made only by visual means, while also approaching it as in part a visual artifact, its indignities bound to ways of seeing human difference and organizing the perceptual field. Yet, if Hall’s commodity and racial spectacles enact inequities and iniquities, he also not only theorizes but exemplifies resistant “counter-strategies,” engaging in his analysis specific resistant visual interventions, forms of “trans-coding” such as reversal and reframing (269–71).

The stakes of such arguments and strategies emerge with particular gravity and emotional intensity in the related, widespread, and at times vernacular contemporary commentary on the circulation of images of the Black body in pain, ranging from the history of what is now known as “spectacle lynching” to contemporary cell phone and body camera videos of police shootings that present what Ibrahim (2022) calls “the dying Black body in repeat mode.” The critiques are varied and at times contending in ways I cannot trace fully here, but they share the understanding that, “historically,” as Claudia Rankine (2015) observes in a meditation on the long arc of such imagery and the forms of looking to which it is connected, “there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.” In such commentary, the spectacle idiom again becomes relevant, taking its critical power through claims about how gazing at the debased, injured, or otherwise abjected Black body has shaped social formations and white subjectivity while violating or traumatizing Black viewers.

Interrupting the circuits of repetition thus becomes one key political response to spectacle and spectacularization. Consider, for instance, how the artist Parker Bright protested the 2017 Whitney Biennial’s inclusion of Open Casket, painter Dana Schutz’s abstracted and thickly impastoed rendering of the murdered Emmett Till. The painting sparked an intense controversy over whether and how particular types of representation perpetuate violence by, in Hannah Black’s words, “treating Black pain as raw material” (Greenberger 2017). As some defended the painting while others (Bright included) called for it to be removed or even (as Black did) destroyed, Bright pursued interruption, protesting for two days by standing before the painting, obstructing its viewing while wearing a t-shirt emblazoned “Black Death Spectacle” (Sargent 2017). The concern over repetition as reenactment can run so deep as to preclude even certain forms of verbal transmission. Opening her now-classic Scenes of Subjection by invoking Frederick Douglass’s entry into slavery through the beating of his Aunt Hester, which Douglass’s Narrative calls a “terrible spectacle” and renders with extraordinary vividness, Saidiya Hartman (1997) underscores her decision not to reproduce his account, lest she reinforce “the spectacular character of black suffering” (p. 3). ⁸

Yet, the critical idiom of racial spectacle does not always demand these particular kinds of refusal (destruction, obstruction, withholding, etc.); it may instead allow a visual restaging, a counter-image or counter-use of existing imagery, as in the deployment of lynching photographs by anti-lynching activists in the first six decades of the twentieth century (Apel and Smith 2008). The murderous violence the activists contested was brutally material, hence hardly reducible to representation or forms of visual mediation, but the violent enforcement of the color line often took a spectacular public form that was then extended and intensified by its photographic depictions. These were sometimes shot from the point of view of the lynch mob, who used lynching postcards as tools for further terrorizing Black populations and enforcing white compliance with racial order, or as trophies to exchange among themselves (Murphy 2023; Wood 2009). Recognizing that, the activists’ campaigns sought to undercut such ways of picturing and looking by thematizing them, putting them on display in ways that made them visible (Reinhardt 2012). Although this battle unfolded in an era when spectacle discourse had not yet taken on its current contours, the position finds advocates and analogues within contemporary debates. Discussing Mamie Till-Mobley’s strategic decision to release to the press photographs of her murdered child in his casket, Rankine writes that, “the spectacle of the black body, in her hands, publicized the injustice mapped onto her son’s corpse.” Spectating here proves active, transformative. It is thus worth quoting in full how Rankine extends her reflection on a mother’s political response to loss and grief: “It’s very unlikely that her belief in a national mourning was fully realized, but her desire to make mourning enter our day-to-day world was a new kind of logic. In refusing to look away from the flesh of our domestic murders, by insisting we look with her upon the dead, she reframed mourning as a method of acknowledgment that helped energize the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.” ⁹

Till’s anguished reframing has echoes in some contemporary interventionist art practices recently catalogued by Tina Campt (2021), who examines Black artists whose works “allow us to see ourselves as discerning and uncompromising witnesses who adamantly refuse to look away” (p. 13). Some of her figures, such as Arthur Jafa, use found footage, including sequences of horrifying violence, remixing—détourning—them in such a way as to transform the significations and emotional effects (as in, for example, his most widely discussed video, Love is the Message, The Message is Death). ¹⁰ By treating the works as capable of altering racialized perception, Campt (2021) makes particularly strong claims for the potential agency of images and their audiences, arguing that in inviting “visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity,” art such as Jafa’s “shifts the optics of ‘looking at’ to looking with, through, and alongside another,” so that viewing “requires labor—the labor of discomfort, feeling, positioning, and repositioning” (pp. 8, 17). Throughout her book, Campt names such laborious viewing and display “a Black gaze” but notes that her term does not characterize “the viewpoint of Black people” and is not “restricted . . . by race or phenotype,” but, rather, “is a viewing practice and a structure of witnessing” that makes “the precarious state of Black life in the twenty-first century” a source of potential regeneration (172).

Taken together, such analyses reveal tensions, even among acute commentators, over which ways of contesting the visuality of anti-Black violence risk extending it and which evade or most justify running the risk. I do not aim—do not think it my place to try—to settle such complex and at times wrenching arguments. The important matter for my purposes is less what divides the positions than what they share. For all the responses, the idiom of racial spectacle enables a critique of scopic regimes that furthers analytical and interpretive specificity (even when those regimes express an anti-Blackness the critic conceives of as both foundational and trans-historical) while also casting the visual field as necessarily a site of contestation and thus interventions that could be part of a different politics. ¹¹ The challenges may well take the form of détournements, but their generativity both illustrates and is enabled by a more complex understanding of visuality than Debord’s version of spectacle offered us.

Inside the Machine: From Spectacle to Surveillance?

My notes on discourses of spectacle that authorize productive analyses and political skirmishes in the visual field could have included Michel Foucault, whose Discipline and Punish famously opens by discussing the 1757 public execution of Damiens, the regicide. Foucault gives readers just what Hartman conspicuously refuses when beginning her book, an extended quotation from an elaborate account of extreme violence. Foucault’s (1977) source renders the violence in enthusiastic—one might say “spectacular”—detail: here, the steel pincers; there, the horses carrying off first the right thigh, then the left; throughout, the cries and remarks of the condemned, a piercing soundtrack to a sequence of images (pp. 3–7). The details, Foucault implies, are in no way gratuitous. For him, “torture as a public spectacle” is a medium for enacting a particular “economy of punishment” (7). Not just a judicial but a “political ritual” crucial to “the ceremonies by which power is maintained” (47), the spectacle of torture “made the body of the condemned man the place where power was applied” (55). The power in question was that of sovereignty, making regicide followed by a public execution a particularly illuminating example of the regime’s operations, but in Foucault’s account, spectacle was, more pervasively, the characteristic visual form of sovereign power (e.g., 51).

Foucault finds a kind of necessity (an inner logic) to spectacle’s centrality in that sovereign power requires its own display, but he stresses the need to situate spectacles of punishment within their specific “historical conjuncture” (55) and presents the displays as fraught with risks, opportunities, and conflicts. In his account, spectating proves far from passive, spectators not easily controlled. Penal spectacles required summoning and gathering the people, and when assembled, the people behaved in unpredictable ways—at times dissenting or even riotous in response to perceived injustices, and even willing to glorify crime and criminals rather than the King. Amid these highly charged instances of a more general undecidability of the people (Frank 2021; Honig 2009), in struggles arising where large structures intersect with contingent local circumstances, we once again find the visual and political fields shaping each other. Whatever the limits of his historical analysis, a matter to which I’ll turn below, Foucault’s theorization of spectacle contributes to the understanding of visual politics we can draw from figures as different as Rogin, Hall, Hartman, Rankine, and Campt.

I engage Foucault, however, less for his account of sovereign spectacle than for how and why he left it behind. The main project of Discipline and Punish is to chart the emergence of disciplinary powers that overlay, complicate, or—if one credits the text’s most dramatic flourishes—replace sovereignty, just as his lectures of roughly the same period add governmentality and biopower to the constellation that transforms sovereign power (Foucault 2007, 2008). This displacement of sovereignty entails a shift away from spectacle. In what must be one of the more frequently quoted passages in his oeuvre, Foucault places the shift in a grand theoretical perspective:

Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it 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. We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. (Foucault 1977, 217)

As when portraying Damiens’s dismemberment, Foucault’s writing is showy. Here, it is also polemical, even if the targets go unnamed. Examining the final two sentences, one might hear skepticism toward the work of Hannah Arendt and theorists who echo her celebration of public space. But, more relevantly, my earlier arguments should make obvious how the wide-ranging but tightly structured first sentence, in which semicolons march by like so many soldiers on parade, attacks Society of the Spectacle. ¹² We should note more than that the sweeping negation of his first clause, the denial that ours is a society of spectacle, is “implicitly taking issue” with Debord, as Jay (1993) observes in passing (p. 411). The sentence offers a point-by-point challenge to the underpinnings of Debord’s concept—that is, the rooting of spectacle in capitalist abstraction, the appeal to wholeness and totality, and the view of the individual as alienated fragment rather than disciplined fabrication. ¹³ Not only Society of the Spectacle’s view of our visual environment but also its essentially orthodox grounding in the mode of production are dismissed as misreading how power operates now.

If Foucault’s swerve from the kinds of spectacle that open his book to the form theorized by Debord betrays the jockeying for prominence notoriously endemic to Parisian intellectual life, it nevertheless makes political, conceptual, and rhetorical sense. Discipline and Punish journeys not just from sovereignty to discipline but also—and thereby—spectacle to surveillance. Establishing surveillance as the key contemporary modality of (among other characteristics) visual power in disciplinary societies requires Foucault to break the hold the spectacle idiom may have on many readers who harbor no sympathy for long-vanquished forms of royal display. Leaving his target unnamed, Foucault produces what surely proves for him a fruitful conflation, entangling a recent, rival theoretical approach with a superseded historical formation so as to discard both simultaneously, thereby moving readers to engage a different visual politics. When the cave-become-screen yields to life inside the panoptic machine, the mark of imprisonment shifts from viewing images to being scrutinized, tracked, and taxonomized.

Even if, as I shall argue, Foucault’s tidy periodization and sweeping dismissal of spectacle need contesting, his turn to panopticism aids historical understanding (of imprisonment, obviously, but also liberal societies more broadly) while helping us to grasp important elements of visual politics in our era. The passage quoted previously brings to a rhetorical peak his key insight, elaborated in the final third of Discipline and Punish, that panoptic practices long ago leapt over the prison wall and spread across the social terrain. The resulting analysis of surveillance remains rich and relevant. We are awash in what Foucault’s reading of Bentham called “mechanisms that analyse distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate, and compare” (208). Amid a wild proliferation of visual devices and systems, Foucault’s key point often still holds: many aim to view subjects more closely—know them more intimately—and the circuits between power and knowledge prove mutually reinforcing. Consider the ubiquity of CCTV cameras, visual technologies that monitor, track, and compile as part of at times global surveillance networks. In a society such as the contemporary United States, Bentham’s design can only seem quaint given the means and prevalence of such devices and networks. That hardly makes the United States one extended prison, but the nation’s far-flung surveillance systems nonetheless make it easy to appreciate Foucault’s claim that while “the disciplinary modality of power” has not “replaced all others,” it has nevertheless “infiltrated all the others . . . serving as an intermediary between them” (216).

While one could offer more examples of panopticism in a technologically enhanced but still fundamentally Foucauldian form, his relevance is obvious enough, and so often acknowledged in the emergent field of surveillance studies (e.g., Galič, Timan, and Koops 2017; Marx 2016) and even by activists such as Edward Snowden (Gellman 2013) that I will instead turn to Foucault’s problems and limits as a guide. ¹⁴ It is worth noting, first, that his discussion of panopticism misses important dynamics even as a retrospective account, and that these bear on our understanding of the visual politics involved. In her illuminating intervention into surveillance studies, Simone Browne (2015) reexamines “the panopticon through the plan of the slave ship Brooks” (p. 32), thereby tracing a racial history of surveillance that Foucault elides. Browne shows how the New World’s race-based chattel slavery both relied on distinctive “information technologies” and helped constitute modern forms of surveillance (52). The reconstruction of a history occluded by Discipline and Punish informs not only Browne’s observation that “surveillance . . . is the fact of antiblackness” but also her insistence that examining spectacles of anti-Black punishment in slave-holding societies troubles any attempt to separate modern surveillance and discipline from either sovereign power or spectacle (10). Historically, and not least in the American context, all those terms are bound to what Browne calls a “racially saturated field of visibility” (21)—one key example, we might add, of how the political and visual fields shape each other. Furthermore, Foucault’s analysis of surveillance does not acknowledge, and may lack tools for fully accommodating, the peculiar combination of invisibility and hypervisibility so often bearing on Black bodies in the United States (57–58) and that informed some of my earlier discussions of the continuing importance of notions of spectacle. Although none of this recuperates the specifically Debordian moves that Foucault rejects, we have good reasons to resist Foucault’s attempts to split spectacle from surveillance by consigning them to different eras. Even Bentham’s famous invention offers grounds for resistance because, as Andrejevic (2019) observes, the classic design’s efficacy depends on the tower’s theatricality or “spectacle of surveillance” (p. 9), and something like that has held for many (though hardly all) subsequent surveillance technologies, real (e.g. conspicuous cameras) and even imagined (most recently, in Jordan Peele’s (2022) Nope, a film very much preoccupied with the spectacle of surveillance and vice versa). The question becomes how to extend and revise the inquiry into the surveillance Foucault launched while bearing in mind the understandings of visual politics opened up by Browne and treatments of spectacle from Rogin to Rankine, and what happens when we do.

Pocket Panopticons and Spectral Subjects

To think further about the entanglement of spectacle and surveillance, we might start with what is probably near at hand for most readers of this article: a cell phone. I recall a New Yorker cartoon that casts as denizens of Plato’s cave a throng of people with gazes fixed upon the portable screens they hold in front of their respective faces. Perhaps my memory deceives me, as I cannot now find the cartoon, but if the image does not exist in quite that form, we might as well invent it—or, rather, we already know it from everyday encounters with transfixed spectators. If using contemporary technologies to recuperate Debord’s account of spectacle, one might begin here. Given my argument, however, I will instead underscore what everyone also already knows—namely, that while the kinds of spectacles discussed by Rankine and others are now very often both recorded and witnessed through our phones, a phone today is not just a device for making, sending, or streaming digital “content”—a portal for the spectacle—but also a surveillance or tracking tool, a panoptic technology, from which we have reason to believe that the tower is always gathering information. (That information of course includes what spectacles we consume, and may, in good Debordian fashion, be used to sell us yet more consumer goods.) Evidence of how spectacle and surveillance intertwine resides inside everyone’s pocket, purse, or backpack.

Any allegory of Foucault’s project spun from this everyday object should, however, reveal not only the threads connecting spectacle to surveillance but also the latter’s twenty-first century transformation and what it portends for visual politics in a “networked society of ambient and ubiquitous sensors in constant communication” (Marx 2016, 4). For even as the changes confirm the continuing relevance of Foucault’s analysis, they also challenge not merely his consigning of spectacle to the past but also key aspects of his account of surveillance and its relationship to the visual field. On the one hand, the contemporary algorithmic management of the poor and the allegedly criminal in welfare bureaucracies and courtroom proceedings (Eubanks 2018) continues developments that Discipline and Punish and Foucault’s cognate arguments about neoliberalism, security, and governmentality did so much to make intelligible, both historically and conceptually. Although understanding that the contemporary politics of data may require new concepts, such as the “formatting” and “fastening” that Koopman (2019) uses to illuminate how “informational persons” are made through forms of power irreducible to discipline and biopower, the techniques in question, as Koopman argues, operate in ways that complement and extend Foucault’s analyses of subject formation.

On the other hand, contemporary surveillance practices also stretch those analyses to their limits. We might linger a little longer with the cellphone, considering its role in the “signature strikes” distinguishing America’s twenty-first-century drone wars. Unlike the “personality strikes” based on a conventional intelligence profile of a known individual, signature strikes rely on what the US security apparatus calls “pattern of life” analysis, which concerns danger signals and risk thresholds, not discrete identities. A sequence of phone calls and contacts, and the attendant mapping of social networks and communicative patterns, may render a human being subject to death from the skies. The killers may only discover the “target’s” proper name postmortem, if ever. As one operator remarked to journalists in a widely cited interview, “We’re not going after people—we’re going after their phones” (Scahill and Greenwald 2014). It’s not that the phones are tapped. As former director of both the NSA and CIA, General Michael Hayden, told the ACLU’s David Cole (2014), “We kill people based on metadata,” because with enough metadata, the content of transmissions becomes unnecessary. ¹⁵

The irrelevance of name and content in this case provides a deadly example of much broader tendencies, algorithmic operations in which subject formation is less important than in panopticism. The resulting categories are not necessarily lived from the inside as guides to self-understanding, nor need they abet normalization by imposing biographical unity and stability from without. As with Foucault’s analysis, such contemporary digitized risk management involves recursive loops of power and knowledge, but, as a number of critics influenced by Deleuze’s work on “societies of control” have emphasized (Cheney-Lippold 2017; Raley 2013; Rouvroy and Berns 2013), the knowledge that results may concern not an individual rendered in ever finer detail but the fragmentary and modulating clusters of data that constitute those distributed and “undulatory” computational subjects that Deleuze (1992) called “dividuals” (pp. 5–6). ¹⁶ Surveillance of dividuals is a matter of “dissecting the subject into degrees of risk” (Amoore 2013, 84) or what Panagia (2021) calls “barter[ing] in probabilities and correlations, not verifiable or derivable truths” (p. 118).

Such changes at times help extend surveillance beyond the visual spectrum, but also, and more important for my inquiry, underwrite related shifts in the form, capacities, and uses of imaging devices. Increasingly, data from other senses may be rendered on screens (Bousquet 2018; Marx 2016), making visible “a host of heretofore opaque flows of auditory, scent, chemical” and other stimuli (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 611). The developments might at first seem the culmination of Foucauldian visual surveillance, yet they undercut his framework. Exemplifying shifts in the relationship between race and the visual field, they strain even the ideas I drew from Browne. I do not think her subsequent notion of the “digital epidermalization” produced by “the disembodied gaze exercised by certain surveillance technologies” (Browne 2015, 110) can fully capture what now unfolds on screen. Consider the role in drone surveillance of infrared optical systems, which use thermal imaging to present persons as heat signatures. Those surveilled in, say, Somalia or Afghanistan remain within a racializing logic affecting how systems operators apprehend movement, map territory, perceive threats, and make decisions, but the images viewed may lie wholly outside the visual schema of epidermalization that has historically been so important to the visual politics of race and the making of racial formations. ¹⁷ Borrowing from Lisa Parks (2018), who explores how the “thermal abstraction” of drones’ infrared cameras alters racialized perception (p. 169), we may think of those appearing on the screens as spectral subjects—and if the specters populate what can in any sense be called a “racial spectacle,” it’s a spectacle of a novel kind. ¹⁸

Invisible Images

Beyond these examples, however, lies a still more fundamental and dramatic transformation in both surveillance and spectacle. Put it this way: the more the earth’s surface is subjected to surveillance by contemporary optical technologies, the less “visual” and “image” remain adequate terms for understanding what those technologies produce. The point is not just that surveillance drones, for instance, record vastly more footage than any human labor force could have time to review, although that surplus helps drive the search for new methods and technologies of automated image analysis; it’s that even camera-based surveillance now records footage in strange new forms not only largely unseen by human beings but also not necessarily suited to the human perceptual apparatus. Ours is an era in which algorithmic, machine-driven tracking and the related forms of circulation and storage contribute to an eerily post-visual image world.

It is precisely here that Debord proves ironically prescient, or at least resonant, in a manner unique among the critics of spectacle I have discussed, despite all of the ways in which the others remain more useful for capturing key aspects of visual politics. I have in mind a strain in his text best expressed in Society of the Spectacle’s second thesis: “The specialization of images of the world,” Debord writes, “has culminated in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving” (2). The passage may display qualities of the book to which I have objected—iconophobia and grandiose statements that imply a grounding in analyses the author does not provide—but takes on a different coloration when read in the current conjuncture and with a literalism Debord cannot have intended. Despite spectacle’s limit as a term for conceptualizing the conditions I am describing, they nevertheless confront us with something his fearful commentary invokes or figures. As Trevor Paglen (2016) emphasizes, not only are most images made today machine-readable, but the majority are produced by automated devices for other automated devices. The implications extend beyond the significant point that many contemporary images matter most for how they work as “part of an operation,” as Haroun Farocki (2003, 17), one of Paglen’s inspirations, observed in response to early twenty-first century warfare. What’s crucial now is that from the standpoint of our own, embodied experience, the operations involve what Paglen (2016) calls “invisible images”: the data recorded and transmitted may be processed in such a way as to take a form legible to human eyes as an image, conventionally understood, but also “doesn’t need to be turned into human-readable form in order for a machine to do something with it.” With neither human spectator nor necessarily any of the features of what is usually considered spectacle, what are such machine-to-machine exchanges if not the autonomization of images amid the self-directed movements of the nonliving?

Perhaps even so keen an observer as Paglen (2016), whose artworks exploring the limits of vision, images, and our optical technologies are often marked by absence and austerity, indulges in overstatement when he remarks, “We no longer look at images. Images look at us.” But however exaggerated, his claim helps to mark the distance from my opening discussion of Society of the Spectacle, for it makes our itinerary one that has moved from stupefied spectators staring at the screen to something rather like the other way around.

It is just such developments that led artist and media theorist Hito Steyerl (2017) to the query serving as one of my epigraphs: “What senses, what organs will people grow to pick up invisible images?” (p. 71). I do not know how to answer the question, and I am not wholly sure how to take it. Answering cannot be the task of any one person, and I doubt satisfying responses are yet available. But however literally or figuratively, Steyerl articulates a challenge we will have to address. The technologies and practices of the postvisual image world portend an emerging reconfiguration, maybe even in some respects a displacement, of the human sensorium. We may need to ask which organs and senses will move to the margins of politics and certainly must consider what will happen to the familiar ways of understanding them theoretically and exercising them politically.

The problem’s contours may emerge more clearly if we return one last time to the issues of racialized spectacle and surveillance that have run through my argument. In important respects, they persist. Some of the distressing spectacles of the Black body discussed earlier are contemporary, the inequities and the problems of political-visual construction they involve obviously enduring. The algorithmic operations considered previously do not alter that. They even recapitulate some dynamics identified by theorists of racial spectacle. For example, machine learning training sets, drawn from the trillions of pictures populating the internet, rely on classifications and labels that often reproduce contemporary prejudices or reanimate older ones, giving new life to such discourses as phrenology and physiognomy (Crawford and Paglen 2021). Insofar as inequities are inscribed in code, itself a form of autonomized imaging that can produce stratification or marginalization even while appearing merely neutral and technical, we might think of such inscriptions as yet more instances of what Rogin called amnesiac representation, though the forgetting often inheres now in the kinds of quotidian practices Hartman made central. ¹⁹ Those who have grasped the inequities have sought to publicize and politicize them (e.g., Benjamin 2019; Noble 2018), marking a frontier of struggle that is significant now and only likely to grow more so. But it nevertheless remains important to consider how autonomous and invisible images also confound or at least complicate the story, underwriting much thinking about visual politics.

In a schematic, perhaps simplistic form, that story goes something like this: “Certain habits of seeing and ways of organizing the perceptual field produce or sustain dominance, violence, marginality, and injustice. Visual artifacts help make up that field and contesting, altering, or replacing them can help remake it. Therefore, consider case x, which is, at least in part, a visual artifact. Now consider how intervention y, engaging that artifact, invites us to participate in the field’s remaking.” However reductive this rendering of the formula, both parts deserve unpacking. For x it is easy to insert, say, the scaffold in the royal spectacle discussed by Foucault, for which y becomes the disruptive activities of a rebellious crowd. Some may counter by emphasizing how that visual scene drew its importance from the material violence unfolding within and around it, but then we could consider a different x, another sovereign spectacle, the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, which, in keeping with his sense of pictorial agency, sought not just to depict but produce the awe that subjects owe to power (Reinhardt 2015). Something like that sense of agency has informed all those who, throughout history, have sought to strike blows against their rulers by defacing or destroying depictions of them. For all of her book’s contemporary specificity, a similar story is what enables Campt to provide as her subtitle, “artists changing how we see” and to imagine the changes as, at least potentially, politically consequential.

As should be clear by now, I share many of Campt’s assumptions and find her analyses and key figures important and compelling. I have argued that our account of politics would be richer, our sense of both oppressions and emancipating possibilities sharper, if political theorists were to attend more to cases of this kind. Yet, some of the emerging forms of visual production sketched above present novel limits and challenges, putting Campt’s “we” in question: when images move through an assemblage incorporating machine vision, it’s not clear that anything like the same kinds of interventionist tactics and strategies, or the critical terms honed in discussing them, are of use in changing or even understanding “seeing.” A viewer of a scene of militant protest, a Jafa video, the photos Mamie Till-Mobley released to the press, or the footage Darnella Frazier posted of George Floyd’s murder can be changed in the viewing—and, repeated often and widely enough, such changes to seeing can help transfigure the play of power, the terms of belonging, the forms of politics.

What happens, though, with invisible images? If, as Paglen (2016) argues, grasping their effects requires us “to unlearn how to see like humans,” perhaps some visual interventions can help reeducate our eyes. But it’s clear neither how far such unlearning can go nor what can follow from it. Even if a pedagogy of unlearning were to prove successful, the altered human vision would remain outside the most relevant “visual” field: novel spectatorial perceptions cannot, in themselves, change the operations through which invisible images shape and reshape our world. So far, then, the relevant course of democratic action and even the concepts best suited to making sense of this new terrain are not yet clear. If theory is to remain connected to its ancient etymological roots, it may have to change alongside vision.