Oh, the marvelous independence of the human gaze, tied to the the human face by a cord so loose, so elastic that it can stray alone as far as it may choose...
Proust, Swann's Way
In Discipline and Punish Michele Foucault gives an account of the paradigm shift that characterized the post-Enlightenment judicial methods for constructing criminal guilt. He writes that “judges have gradually...taken to judging something other than crimes, namely, the 'soul' of the criminal.”1In short, Foucault argues that the object of modern justice, that which it seeks to lay hold of and punish, is no longer the corporeal presence, or body, of the individual; instead, the the law uses apparatuses of scientific/juridical knowledge to construct and punish an individuated subjectivity, or 'soul.' Although this 'soul' is never physically manifest, it constitutes the constellations of knowledge that relate the individual, along with her/his body, to the power of the law. Ultimately, Foucault concludes that this relationship between the body, the 'soul,' and power has come to define not only modern penal institutions but the whole of modern society. And although I will have some occasion to discuss the issue of criminality in this paper, I primarily intend to examine the nexus of power, bodies, and Foucaultian 'souls' more broadly as a general framework for understanding the formation of subjectivities at large.
As an illustrative example, I turn to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, which offers a microcosmic model of Foucault's formulation of the relationship between power and subjectivity or 'soul.' As I intend to show, there are several points of contact between Foucault's ideas and the themes developed in Rear Window. First, like so many Hitchcock films, Rear Window is fascinated by the idea of “watching,” and, like Foucault, is eminently concerned with how power is articulated through fields of vision. Second, Rear Window exhibits a certain anxiety that takes the form of a preoccupation with the physicality of the human body, which I contend is indicative of the increasingly mediated, and thus tenuous, relation between individual subjects and their bodies in modern economies of power. Finally, Rear Window offers a striking analysis of how modern modes of knowledge (photography and the cinema specifically) construct identities which subject individuals, body and 'soul,' to the coercion of social power. Through this analysis of Rear Window, this essay will offer a partial genealogy of vision, one that will characterize and trace the movement of visual mechanisms of power away from physical/architectural orientations and towards a non-corporeal/photographic modes. As I intend to show, this shift in visual discourse is marked by an increased physical diffusion of power and subjectivity and is responsible for a commensurate increase in the pervasion and efficacy of power with respect to individuals.
The Broken Panopticon
A seriocomic crime thriller, Rear Window's plot is well known. Jeff (James Stewart) is a photojournalist, wheelchair-bound as he recuperates from a broken leg. Thus immobilized, he spends his time peering out his titular rear window into the courtyard shared by several other Greenwich Village apartment buildings. As he becomes engrossed in observing the intimate affairs of his neighbors, Jeff begins to suspect that the tenant adjacent to him, one Lars Thorwald, has murdered his wife. Intuitively convinced of Thorwald's guilt, Jeff's amateur sleuthing becomes characterized by an epistemological question of criminality; that is to say, Rear Window asks how it is we come to know 'the criminal,' how we attach the status of the subjective status of 'criminal' to his or her body. Through the processes of Jeff's investigation, Rear Window interrogates the mediums of knowledge by which a person is situated within the category of ' the criminal,' and more broadly, it considers how these (explicitly visual) mediums contribute to the construction of individual subjectivities. In Rear Window traditional methods of investigation and proof are cast as ineffective, even obsolete: the victims body is never produced, nor is any other physical evidence of Thorwald's guilt; meanwhile, testimonial evidence consistently proves false. Instead, Rear Window privileges various modes of optical surveillance as means of constructing identity, specifically Thorwald's identity as 'criminal.' Vision in Rear Window works to, in Foucault's words, “[assign the] individual his 'true' name, his 'true' place, his 'true' body.”2 In Thorwald's case, vision constructs the name, place, and body of 'murderer.' Given the significance Rear Window attaches to vision, it is no surprise that the plot unfolds almost entirely, but for a few important exceptions to be discussed later, as the exposition Jeff's gaze.
Much attention has been paid to this voyeuristic dimension at Rear Window's core, but this paper is less interested in the libidinal dimensions of the gaze than the political ones . What I hope to explore is precisely what role vision plays in relating people to society at large; that is to say, how does vision (especially photographic vision) contribute to structuring an individual's subjective status and experience. I think Hitchcock and Rear Window can help us here. The director himself has remarked that the film is “structurally satisfactory because it is the epitome of the subjective treatment. A man looks, he sees; he reacts. Thus you construct a mental process. Rear Window is entirely a mental process, done by use of the visual.”3 Of course we should probably understand Hitchcock's references to 'structure' in terms of the film's narrative; however, I wish to emphasize that much of the plot itself is a function of the physical structures of the film's mis-en scene. That is to say, the axis of Rear Window is the architectural space it describes: a symmetrical, walled enclose in which individuals are contained within observable and discrete compartments. The plot, then, is partly concerned with how such a space, and specifically the type of vision it enables, inscribes (or fails to inscribe) the exercise of power over the individuals it contains.
There are significant parallels between the structural dynamics at work in the Rear Window's courtyard space and those of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon as explicated by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Both architectural structures feature “at [their] peripheries an annular building [containing cells.]... They are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. [They] arrange spacial unities that make it possible to see constantly and recognize immediately.”4 Both the panopticon and Rear Window elaborate visual regimes in space. These essentially analytical spaces are both sites wherein the central concern is the invasive scrutiny and control of objects of a gaze. In the ideal panopticon “all power would exercised soley through exact observation” of inmates. Similarly, in Rear Window, Jeff's power to indict Thorwald is not a product of some heroic show of force or cunning, rather Jeff's power operates almost exclusively through his (camera's) gaze. I am not the first to draw a connection between the panopticon and Rear Window. Slovaj Žižek writes that:
Rear Window reads like an ironic reversal of Bentham's Panopticon...For Bentham, the horrifying efficacy of the Panopticon is due to the fact that the subjects [it contains] can never know for sure if they are actually observed from the all-seeing central tower...In Rear Window, the inhabitants of the apartments across the yard are actually observed all the time by [Jeff's] watchful eye, but far from being terrorized, they simply ignore it. On the contrary, it is [Jeff] himself, the center of the Panopticon, its all-pervasive eye, who is terrorized, constantly looking out the window, anxious not to miss some crucial detail. Why?5
To begin answering Žižek's question, one might first point out that, in an attempt to provide a psycho-sexual reading of the film, the details of which I will not go into here, he makes crucial misstatements about the film's spacial/structural organization. Rear Window may privilege Jeff's perspective, however, it does not make him the 'center of the panopticon.' In fact, the plot will not position him at the central point within the enclosed courtyard until the film's dramatic climax, about which I will have more to say later. Furthermore, contrary to what Žižek suggests, the neighbors are not akin to Benthamite inmates, possessing “the sentiment of an invisible [observational] omnipresence”6 which they chose to 'simply ignore.' Rather than disregarding Jeff's gaze, his neighbors are genuinely oblivious to it, at least until very near the film's end.
But despite Žižek's simplifications, his question still seems relevant. What is the source of Jeff's terror and, consequently, the audience's suspense? This question can be more thoroughly answered by a careful comparison of Rear Window's architectural space to its analog, the panopticon. There is a key difference between the respective spaces constructed by Bentham and Hitchcock that I have so far neglected. Bentham's Panopticon plans call for a central observational tower, an acknowledged locus of authority. Thus, the fields of vision created by the panopticon are given a unequivocal hierarchical structure; authority and control issue from this central point onto the subjects contained in the periphery. But in Rear Window there is no architectural feature analogous to the panopticon's observation tower since the courtyard's center is essentially empty. Furthermore, each inhabitant of the courtyard posses a gaze that is a penetrating as Jeff's. This absence of a pivotal center of authority, a point from which the exercise of power is total, exclusive, and legitimate is the source of Jeff's anxiety and Rear Window's dramatic tension. In this way, the situation created by Rear Window's architectural space is not so much a reversed panopticon, as Žižek would have it, but an unsettled one in which power is ambiguous, decentered, or even suspended. Furthermore once Rear Window's space is properly read as an anarchic one—a place in which, as we shall see, power is unable to operate—it becomes clear that Jeff's mania for establishing Throwald's guilt (to assign his subjective identity) is the method he uses to attain his broader, implicit goal of reintroducing an ordered center of power into his tiny panopticon. Here, Rear Window recognizes that the project of constructing subjectivities is central to and essential for the smooth operation of power.
So, to answer Žižek's question about Jeff's anxiety and obsession, it seems clear to say that Jeff's actions represent an attempt to remedy the anarchic structure of his decentered and ineffective 'panopticon.' But this answer begs other questions, namely: what went wrong with Rear Window's 'panopticon' to begin with; what change has occurred in its visual dynamics so as to radically decenter its locus of power? An answer to this question can be found by pursuing another obvious distinction between Bentham's and Hitchcock's respective models: the apartments which contain Jeff's neighbors are not prison cells purpose-built for observation, but private living spaces. Therefore, if power is to operate through fields of vision in the non-penal environment of society at large, its must work through a mode surveillance that is more nuanced and subtly invasive than a monolithic observation tower. Here, Rear Window recognizes the fact that different spacial/architectural environments (I have in mind here the difference between institutional and urban spaces) inevitably entail to different visual articulations of power. Rear Window, then sets out to depict how the peculiarities of vision created by the panopticon's tower can be reproduced in the typical environments of society at large, outside of the institutional settings of prisons.
For Foucault, the omnipresence and omniscience made possible by the peculiarities of the panopticon's structure are like a “political dream”7 of total control. The absolute surveillance it allows makes it possible for figures of authority to “[regulate] even the smallest details of everyday life.”8 But as it turns out, it is not the actuality but rather the belief in this omnipresence and omniscience on the part of the observed individual that is essential for the panopticons efficacy. Its visual relationship must be such that it “arrange[s] things [so that] the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.”9 Rear Window, however suggests that in the context of a place like New York City (read: all modern urban societies) strictly architectural schemes fail to inculcate individuals with this belief in an ubiquitous, regulatory gaze. Contrary to Foucault's description of the detainees of the panopticon, those “[individuals] who are subject to a field of visibility,” the denizens of Rear Window do not initially “assume responsibility for the constraints of power;” until the introduction of Jeff's photography, they never “make them play upon [themselves;] inscribe in [themselves] the power relation in which [they] simultaneously play both roles; [and thus] become the principles of [their] own subjection.”10 As the film begins, the private lives of the inhabitants of Hitchcock's version of the panopticon seem perfect examples modern urban anonymity and they violate nearly every convention of the conservative bourgeois morality (i.e, temperance, monogamy, chastity, productivity, etc.) typically espoused by Hollywood films of the era. Why?
I suggest that simply by virtue of the complexity of the sprawling, chaotic, amorphous nature of modern urban space (as opposed to the rigidly organized institutional setting of the panopticon) that vision will direct, physical observation of a populace is destined to be “discontinuous in its action,” and in this sense not omniscient. And clearly, there are things in Rear Windows urban landscape (blinds, walls, etc) that obscure Jeff's vision. But, as Foucault explains, this literal omniscience of the gaze is less important that the belief that it exists. But this belief is, at least initially, absent among Hitchcock's characters. Even if there were a literal observation tower posted outside their windows, they know they can close the shade, like the young newlyweds next door to Jeff do. The ability to avoid the gaze of power by means of the obstructions of the urban environment means that individuals do not maintain “a state of consciousness [marked by] permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”11 Clearly, the purely architectural 'fields of visibility' at work in Rear Window are not sufficient to cause individuals to internalize the demands of the prevailing social power. This failure of spacial/ architectural visual regimes is what leads to the photographic turn. The type of vision made possible by the camera is effective not because it removes the physical barriers that obstruct powers view of individuals in the, unorganized physical world. Rather, photography renders the individual 'permanently visible' by separating their visible existence (their photographic image) from its often elusive physical existence (the body in urban space). As I will elaborate in the coming pages, it is this introduction of a split between the body and the image of the body that will create a sense of the ubiquity of power's gaze within the individual. Thus, in Rear Window 'absolute surveillance' (and thus the individual's internalization of power) rely increasingly on the mediation of vision through various optical technologies (Jeff's binoculars, zoom lenses, and camera flashes, and ultimately the cinematic apparatus itself). The camera replaces the tower because it can extricate an observable image from the impenetrable complexities of the real world, complexities which that panopticon removes, but only through an exhaustive rigorous control of spacial conditions.
This shift away from away architecturally constructed visual fields and towards photographic ones is also consistent with what Foucault writes about power's tendency towards strategies that minimize the expenditure of material resources while maximizing tactical efficacy of control. “External power throw[s] off its physical weight; it tends toward the non-corporeal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound, and permanent are its effects.”12 In this sense, Rear Window can be seen as a depiction of the change in the modes around which visual mechanisms of power are oriented. The kind of surveillance engendered by 19th architectural models like the panopticon are fundamentally spatial; that is, they manipulate physically existing structures to spatially organize, categorize, observe and control. The power dynamic inherent in photographic surveillance, on the contrary, requires no great stone and mortar edifices to contain, order, and subject individuals. Indeed, if the panopticon's great virtue was that it required only modicum of physical intervention for power to operate within it's bounds, then the lens of the camera does it one better, for it requires absolutely no physical contact at all. The photographic process is truly a non-corporeal one. This non corporeality represents two further advantages for regimes of visual power: first, it requires fewer material resources to be built and is less obvious to those being obsereved; second, it makes the incarceration or physical apprehension of subjects' bodies less and less a necessary component of the operations of power.
Non Habeas Corpus
As we have seen, the deployment of photography means an increased 'disembodiment' of the instruments used by power's tactical gaze. Film historian Tom Gunning puts this 'bodyless' aspect of the camera within the context of Foucault's thought by asserting that it partly fulfills the need for the furtive operation of authority's vision as called for in the panopticon. “As Foucault's discussion of the panopticon establishes, the regime of the visible as the instrument of power is partly founded on concealing the apparatus of the gaze from view.”13 Gunning continues, “The photographed party on the other hand is inflicted with an ineradicable visibility, betrayed by a body he or she cannot conceal but which is always available and readable to [authority]” 14 Gunning's use of the word 'body' here is slightly deceptive. What photography makes 'ineradicably visible' is not an individual's body, but the almost spectral image of their body. This substitution of the body by a its photographic image allows for a drastic deemphasis of the physical body of individuals and accompanies the physical abatement of power's visual regime.
This deemphasis of the body as the direct object against which power is directed has two causes. First, as stated earlier, power tends to economize with respect to the modes through which it operates. It is constantly “throw[ing] off its physical weight [as it becomes more] profround,”15 and this is likely a factor in the move away from the spatial/architectural model of surveillance as a means of conditioning subjects. Second, it also seems the increasing non-corporeality of the configurations of visual power is a response to the exigencies of increasing modernity. In fact, the technological and cultural changes that marked the late-19th /early-20th centuries led to a radical reconceptualization of the relationship between individual identity and the physicality of the human form. According to Gunning, the increasing rapidity of production and transportation that marked the beginning of the last century caused a
collapse of previous experiences of space and time through speed, an extension of the power and productivity of of the human body; and a consequent transformation of of the body through new thresholds of demand..., creating new regimes of bodily discipline and regulation based upon a new observation of (and knowledge about) the body.16
Foremost among these 'new observations' employed by systems of authority was the photograph. “Within systems of power and authority...the possibilities of photography could also play a regulatory role, maintaining a sense of the unique and recognizable, tying the separable image back to its bodily source.”17 As Gunning points out, this regulatory function of photography is especially relevant to the procedures and discourses of criminology: “The [criminal] body at issue was traced and measured rather than marked [while] the photograph and the body it portrayed became a text that is articulated into morphological features which can be... analyzed and rationalized.”18 Gunning uses the example of the invention of the 'mug shot' as a tool of law enforcement at end of the 19th century. Rather than physically detain a suspect physically, a mug shot was taken, this individual's body was reduced to a photographic image. By extension, this image makes the individuals body permanently visible to authority. The image of the body could thus be cataloged, cross-indexed and linked to an array fields according to the individual's morphological, medical, racial, legal, psychological records. What emerges from this process, is an account of the individual, an 'objective' corpus of knowledge about a subject anchored in an image that separate from its worldly physical existence. From the perspective of authority, the individual is reduced to an object (its photograph) upon which it can exercise unfettered power. This is because the photograph makes it possible for systems of power to begin constitute a subject by focusing disparate classificatory discourses (scientific, racial, especially juridical and criminological, and so on) around the image of the body, not the body itself.
So, just as the photograph divests the tactical gaze of its physical accouterments, so to does it begin to strip the physical human body of its preeminence as the immediate source of individual identity. The photograph produces a fixed and external identity for a person through a collection of data all invested in an image which can be possessed by authority (the mug shot, for example). Thus authority can, with out ever apprehending an individual physically, construct for a subject an identity which is consistent and independent from, though ineluctably linked to, their bodily existence. Gunning argues that the advent of this photographic discourse had significant repercussions regarding the modern conception of the body. “The body itself appeared to be abolished, rendered immaterial, through the phantasmagoria of both still and motion photography. This transformation of the physical did not occur through the sublimation of an ethereal idealism. The body, rather became a transportable image fully adaptable to the systems... that modernity demanded.”19 In other words, the 'phatasmagoria' of photography creates a system in which the 'self' and the body are no longer identical, in which a socially constructed subjectivity is reified as an image external to the body, and thus beyond the control, of a given individual. Further consideration of this 'phantasmatic' status, in which even an individual's own body seems to lose its autonomous coherence in the face of systems of power, will be crucial for a further analysis of the effects of the visual fields of power depicted in Rear Window.
Gunning helps us to understand how the photograph introduces a gap between the body and the identity of the subject. But how is this separation, this visual bodilessness experienced by the individual? Rear Window can help here as well. Given the photographic gaze's potential to radically alienate the concept of 'self' from its traditional locale, the body, we can begin to understand why, from its very beginning, Rear Window is fraught with grotesque themes of the traumatic dissolution of the physical human form. Significantly, many of these allusions to the 'phantasmatic' disintegration of bodily unity are expressed through explicit reference to vision and sight. For example, several of the character spend a considerable amount of time in a morbid speculation about dismemberment of Thorwald's wife's corpse. And we should also remember that it is Jeff's shattered leg and his consequent physical impotency that leads to his obsession with surveillance in the first place.
Perhaps the most important example of the general anxiety that attends the body's relation to the power of the gaze can be found in the admonishing lecture delivered to Jeff by his nurse, Stella, as she first discovers him gazing into the windows of his neighbors. She states brusquely that: “the New York State sentence for a peeping tom is six months in the work-house—and they got no windows in the work-house. You know, in the old days they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker... Oh, dear, we've become a race of peeping toms.” In addition to providing a succinct summary of the Foucaultian view of the changes that marked the development of Western penal procedures—a transition from punitive, torture-based legal programs, to the 'reform'-oriented carcareal systems of the post-18th-century era—Stella's remarks also highlight authority's interest in circumscribing the legitimate exercise of the gaze by drawing to itself the exclusive exercise of the power vision. The formation of the category of the 'peeping tom,' or a legal discourse which delineates forms of licit and illicit looking is but one way in which seeing functions within networks of power. Still, the most significant aspect of Stella's remarks is the recognition of dual and antithetical functions of vision. First, as has already been discussed in depth, vision is an important instrument through which power operates. It is the gaze of surveillance that identifies and monitors the individual. It is, however, also the object against which the punitive action of authority is directed. That is to say it is also the gaze of the subject, that which is controlled, re-formed, and assaulted by power. In Rear Window, power inscribes itself onto subjects through an address to their physical faculty of sight and—whether through the symbolic blinding of a 'work-house without windows' or the very literal insult to the eye with a 'red-hot poker'— this address always figures as an assault which is less interested in the physical than the specifically ocular integrity of the individual.
The Criminal's Eye/I
Rear Window's most helpful contribution to the understanding of the visual dimensions of power is this recognition of sight as the locale for both the tactical agency of authority and the object of regulation, coercion, and domination. Perhaps we should not be surprised to find such cross-currents contained within one field, for, as Foucault points out in The History of Sexuality: “where there is power, there is resistance.”20 Still, Rear Window offers an incredibly insightful demonstration of the way in which the subject/object relation of power is synthesized and integrated into the operations of vision with remarkable efficacy. This demonstration comes at the film's climactic confrontation between Jeff and Thorwald, the moment when Jeff's struggles to unequivocally establish the 'truth' of his nemesis' guilt, to construct around Thorwald's individual subjectivity the status of the 'criminal.'
A shot-by-shot analysis of this scene will be helpful for a thorough exegesis of Hitchcock's exceptional examination of the photographic/cinematic gaze and its mobilization as a discourse which produces both 'objective knowledge' about the criminal and the subjective internalization of the socially constructed categories of guilt and criminality all within the unified operation of the photographic gaze. The scene begins as Thorwald enters Jeff's darkened apartment. Hitchcock immediately signals the importance vision will play in the coming exchange with a close-up of Thorwald, whose eyes are given specific emphasis by the shot's chiaroscuro (Frame 1). The shot that follows is a first in Rear Window, an eye-line match that gives us Thorwald's, not Jeff's point of view. This shot, which is the audience's first glimpse of Thorwald's own interiority, initiates a shot/countershot sequence— an editing pattern marked by the cyclic alternation between the gazes with which the two characters regard one another— which must be examined. The shot/countershot is one of the most common and frequently unremarkable devices in the repertoire of the classical Hollywood editing style, and is generally relied on to efficiently and unobtrusively depict conversations between characters in films. However, in this instance in Rear Window, Hitchcock makes a more productive use of the technique by recognizing that at the crux of the colloquial application of the shot/countershot form, there is an essentially dialectical process at work. It is this dialectical process, which Hitchcock employs on the manifold levels of formal, dramatic, and thematic conflicts that I wish to examine in this scene.
First, as mentioned above, the formal technique of the editing style used in this scene is itself dialectical: one image (a shot of Thorwald's point of view) is set against another (a shot depicting Jeff's ) and the juxtapostion of the two creates the concept of an event, i.e. a conversation, in the mind of the film's spectator. Second, Hitchcock felicitously grafts the formal conflict inherent in the construct of the editing onto the dramatic conflict between Thorwald and Jeff. Thus what exists on a purely dramatic level as life-and-death struggle between the two men is transposed by Hitchcock's dialectical editing to contest for narrative authority in the film itself. That is to say, the ultimate crisis of Rear Window can be expressed in the following questions: 'Whose gaze will be the film's, and thus our (the audience's) gaze? Thorwald's? Or Jeff's? Which ways off seeing do and do not become legitimate? And by what means is this legitimacy affected and utilized in the procedures of subjection and control?'
The answers to these questions can be found in the exact interaction of the various gazes which are at the core of Jeff and Thorwald's confrontation. We see Thorwald enter the apartment via Jeff's gaze (Frame 3). Seen from this perspective, Thorwald is a manifestly corporeal figure. Excepting his eyes, he is a massive, mysterious, nearly undifferentiated bulk of bodily presence. The film then cuts to Thorwald's view of Jeff (Frame 2, 4). He appears less like a human figure and more like an almost robotic collection assorted technological apparatuses. Thus the scene becomes a literal rendering of the friction between the diametrical oppositions of resistance and power. Next, Thorwald begins to approach Jeff, and the film cuts to another point of view. But this time it is specifically not Jeff's point of view, as he has covered his own eyes; instead what we see is the gaze of the camera itself (Frame 4.) It is with the scrutiny of photographic gaze, which has now become disembodied (detached as it is from any individual human) that Thorwald's body emerges from the darkness as a knowable, analyzable figure of capable image of subjection. (Frame 5) It is only in this light (pun intended) that the details of Thorwald's body can become invested by the discourses of criminality. With the gaze of the camera, his body is transformed into a political anatomy and thus becomes a subject of the law. The swift arrest and de facto conviction which immediately follow Thorwald's photographic showdown with Jeff indicates that it was, indeed, this photographic discourse that was necessary to construct the 'truth' of Thorwald's criminal guilt. So far we have seen how this scene sets up the opposition between the individual and the apparatuses by which they may be reduced to an object of empirical 'knowledge,' but we still must consider the highest dialectical process represented in this scene—the mediation of the corporeal body by the mechanisms of political technology. As we shall see, it is through the resolution of this duality of of the biological eye of individual and the mechanical eye of authority that the power which was suspended in Rear Window though the inadequacy of its architectural panopticism is reasserted from a new locale situated in the individual's interior visual experience—their subjectivity.
Continued examination of this scene will reveal that, through the interpolation of the disembodied photographic gaze within the gaze of the very individual it takes as its object—that is to say, via a synthesis of two gazes which actually create the subject—power reveals it true character as an essentially non-binary, all-permeating force. For, as Foucault writes,
There is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations and serving as a general matrix—no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depth of the social body. [...] Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships [...] but are immanent in the later.21
Power is not a thing possessed and executed from one point (the authority, the camera, exteriority) and suffered at another (the criminal, the body, interiority). Rather, power is nothing more than the cumulative products of the peculiarities of the interrelation, the synthesis, of these points. Chief among these products is the subject, or to return to Foucault's term, the 'soul.'
The scene at hand provides a glimpse into the exact moment at which these mobile relation coalesce into a subject. In what is perhaps the most interesting moment of the film, Hitchcock shows us the photographic birth of Thorwald's 'soul.' This moment almost immediately follows the shot in which the camera's flash illuminates Thorwald's body. In an expressionistic rendering of the effects of the flash upon Thorwald's eyes, Hitchcock superimposes expanding, semi-transparent orange spots onto the point-of-view shots of Jeff and his wheelchair (Frames 8, 9). Obviously, this is done to replicate the visual experience that follows from the retina's sudden exposure to high-intensity light. But this device warrants closer consideration. First, the imposition of the camera's gaze, as experienced by Thorwald, betrays its place in the lineage of torture-oriented punitive procedures; it is clearly painful for Thorwald (Frames 6, 7). I do not, however, mean to suggest that the power at work in the photographic gaze operates exclusively (or at all) through the infliction of physical pain or that it takes as its object the individual's body. But we should pause to consider the ontological status of these optical spots. They do, of course, involve the physicality of the individual's body (his optical nerves) but the spots have no material existence themselves. None the less, they are still expressions of a very real subjective experience. So, while intimately related and connected to Thorwald's bodily existence, the spots maintain only a quasi-physical status. They remain, to adopt the term Gunning uses apropos photography, 'phantasmatic.' These phantasmatic spots (Frames 8, 9), along with the ghostly, illuminated photographic image of Thorwald (Frame 5), perfectly symbolize the Foucaultian definition of the 'soul': “This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge , and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power.”22 I would like to take pains to point out that I do not wish to suggest that power or the Foucaultian 'soul' are literally orange spots—these, in Rear Window, are purely symbolic—rather these spots point to power's marking of an individual's vision, to the creation of the subject via the insertion of a 'way of seeing' within the individual. Here, one can finally understand that power, as it is exercised in fields of vision, is constituted in the form of the phantasmatic 'soul' through the mutual interplay of authority and resistance, between the the gazes of the camera and the human individual. Perhaps the old cliché about the eyes, which are the site of these complex interactions, should be revised; they are not the 'gateway' to soul, but rather the point at which the shackles of the 'soul' are attached.
Having described how the photographic apparatus, not only builds a body of knowledge by capturing a person's image from a point of exteriority, but also by marking, assaulting, or, if you will, colonizing the individuals own visual experience, we can finally understand the role photographic vision plays in constructing subjects. We need only consider the content of Thorwald's power-marked vision. This content, or what he sees, is Jeff and the camera, the film's arbiters of order and executers of authority, returning his gaze. It is only after this internalization of Jeff's/the camera's gaze that Thorwald admits to the his murder and thus allows the himself to be inscribed by the discourse of the 'criminal.' Thorwald's experience here represents the exact operation of power upon individuals, 'criminal'' or otherwise: first, power creates for itself a place within the individual (the subject or soul); it then proceeds to reproduce, and thus internalize itself within the individual. Power, Foucault writes, “is implanted in bodies.”23 Thus, the superficial dichotomies involved in the 'photographer/photographed' binary are synthesized. The photographic subject does not maintain an autonomous gaze which can be diametricaly opposed to that of the camera. Instead, the photographic subject exercises a gaze that is implicitly conditioned by her/his status as an object within the photographer's field of vision. It is in this way that the subject is constituted as the internalized gaze of another.
Rear Window's denouement nicely illustrates the functioning of this disembodied, pervasive, and coercive articulation of the power via an imaginary gaze. After Thorwald throws Jeff from the window of his apartment into the central courtyard below, the film ends with a final floating shot of a pan across the courtyard. This shot is identical to the earlier shots of the yard as seen from Jeff's point of view. We in the film's audience assume (thanks to the rather predictable conventions of Hollywood storytelling) that our hero, Jeff, has survived and that in this final shot we are again being given his perspective. However, as the camera pulls away from the courtyard and into the apartment, we find that Jeff's eyes are closed as he peacefully sleeps. The surprise is that, although we imagine we are gazing from his point of view, we are not seeing with Jeff's eyes, but our own. At this point Rear Window cease to function simply as a dissection of its character's gazes and transforms itself into a radical meta-critique of its own medium and audience. Rear Window unmasks it's spectator's own subjectivity as an imagined, disembodied gaze which is conditioned by the assumed presence of a spectral figure of authority (Jeff or any other set of normative and regulatory demands). We see the world as though through eyes saturated by powers presence. We implicitly see our social situation according to the demands of power. In this sense what Foucault writes about the panopticon seems even more applicable to the the photographic/cinematographic apparatus: it is a “machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person [i.e. Jeff/authority] who exercises it; in short; the inmates [i.e. the audience/subjects are]caught up in a power situation in which they themselves are the bearers.”24 In this way power operates ubiquitously through the minimal agency of a (real or imagined) authority behind the subject's own gaze. Hitchcock shows us that this internalized assumption of of an all-seeing authority (created through the unique formal attributes of photography and film) which has replaced the guard tower missing in his version of the panopticon. Having correctly relocated the point at which power operates—within subjects, through the specific construction of their visual experience—bourgeois moral order finally (and amusingly) descends upon Jeff's neighbors: the murder is punished; the lonely drunken woman across the yard quits drinking; the bohemian musician next door finally embraces the corporate world and sells his composition; the alluring ballerina upstairs dismisses her many lovers for a monogamous relationship, with an army man, no less; and the amorous honeymoon of the newlyweds next door comes to an abrupt end when the bride insists 'If I'd known you didn't have a job, I'd never have married you in the first place!”
Conclusions
Surveying the development of visual regimes of power through the transition from spacial/panoptic to non-corporeal/photographic surveillance, one significant trend stands out: the continued and increasing separation of knowledge and subjectivity from material existence as a result of the mediation of vision by human technology. Evelyn Fox Keller provides a more compact description of this process than I can. “As [...] vision becomes more explicitly technical, the eye itself a more mechanical device, the active knower is forced ever more sharply out of the bodily realm. The subject becomes finally severed from the objects of perception.”25 This split between the subject and their body is crucially related to modern modes of visual power. First, by forcing the subject out of the body and into the 'soul' as represented by the photographic image, power makes individuals 'permanently visible' as objects of knowledge, and thus controlled by the analytical discourses of power. Second, by transcending the physicality of both the instruments and objects involved in the operation power, the visual discourses of the camera and the photographic image 'throw off' the material weight previously entailed by power. This move liberates power to operate through the gaze without any hindrances of physical constraints. Finally, by constituting the subject as a disembodied 'soul,' visual power is able to impose itself fundamentally and ubiquitously within the individual's view of the world.
Proust26 was right to marvel at that unique quality of human sight—it is detachable. Vision is so built into the Western sense of self, yet not a 'part' of us. It proceeds from our eyes and into the world and there it is caught-up, interposed upon, formed and modified by the intricate complexities of power and resistance. In Rear Window, Hitchcock recognizes that in this visual space, in this spectral distance between our eyes and the objects of perception a tremendous and intricate array of forces are at work. Rear Window, taken together with Foucault's insights, shows how the mediated, phantasmatic, relation between observer and observed—the photograph and its subject—can contribute to “a real subjection...born mechanically from a fictitious relation.”27 It is with this understanding that the film offers a radical critique of human relation to vision: seeing is a way that power tells us the story of our relation to the world, but by acknowledging the unavoidably situated status of vision within power's movement, we may also understand how it can be resisted.
Frame 2.
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Frame 4.
Frame 3.
Frame 5.
Frame 6.
Frame 7.
Frame 8.
Frame 9.
Frame 10.
Frame. 11
1Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 19.
2Ibid. 198
3Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. (New York: Anchor, 1976) p. 224
4Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 200
5Slovaj Žižek, Looking Awry. (Boston: MIT Press 1991) p. 92
6Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 194
7Ibid. p. 195
8Ibid. p. 196
9Ibid. p. 201
10Ibid. p. 201
11Ibid. p. 201
12Ibid. p. 203
13Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body.” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Leo Charney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p. 36
14Ibid. p. 36
15Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) 203
16Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body.” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Leo Charney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p. 16
17Ibid. p. 19
18Ibid. p. 21
19Ibid. p. 18
20Michelle Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage, 1990) p. 95
21ibid. Pg. 94
22Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 29
23Michelle Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage, 1990) p. 44
24Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 201
25Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Mind's Eye.” Feminism and Science. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 194
26Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1:Swannn's Way. (New York: Modern Library, 1998) p. 248
27Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 202
As an illustrative example, I turn to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, which offers a microcosmic model of Foucault's formulation of the relationship between power and subjectivity or 'soul.' As I intend to show, there are several points of contact between Foucault's ideas and the themes developed in Rear Window. First, like so many Hitchcock films, Rear Window is fascinated by the idea of “watching,” and, like Foucault, is eminently concerned with how power is articulated through fields of vision. Second, Rear Window exhibits a certain anxiety that takes the form of a preoccupation with the physicality of the human body, which I contend is indicative of the increasingly mediated, and thus tenuous, relation between individual subjects and their bodies in modern economies of power. Finally, Rear Window offers a striking analysis of how modern modes of knowledge (photography and the cinema specifically) construct identities which subject individuals, body and 'soul,' to the coercion of social power. Through this analysis of Rear Window, this essay will offer a partial genealogy of vision, one that will characterize and trace the movement of visual mechanisms of power away from physical/architectural orientations and towards a non-corporeal/photographic modes. As I intend to show, this shift in visual discourse is marked by an increased physical diffusion of power and subjectivity and is responsible for a commensurate increase in the pervasion and efficacy of power with respect to individuals.
The Broken Panopticon
A seriocomic crime thriller, Rear Window's plot is well known. Jeff (James Stewart) is a photojournalist, wheelchair-bound as he recuperates from a broken leg. Thus immobilized, he spends his time peering out his titular rear window into the courtyard shared by several other Greenwich Village apartment buildings. As he becomes engrossed in observing the intimate affairs of his neighbors, Jeff begins to suspect that the tenant adjacent to him, one Lars Thorwald, has murdered his wife. Intuitively convinced of Thorwald's guilt, Jeff's amateur sleuthing becomes characterized by an epistemological question of criminality; that is to say, Rear Window asks how it is we come to know 'the criminal,' how we attach the status of the subjective status of 'criminal' to his or her body. Through the processes of Jeff's investigation, Rear Window interrogates the mediums of knowledge by which a person is situated within the category of ' the criminal,' and more broadly, it considers how these (explicitly visual) mediums contribute to the construction of individual subjectivities. In Rear Window traditional methods of investigation and proof are cast as ineffective, even obsolete: the victims body is never produced, nor is any other physical evidence of Thorwald's guilt; meanwhile, testimonial evidence consistently proves false. Instead, Rear Window privileges various modes of optical surveillance as means of constructing identity, specifically Thorwald's identity as 'criminal.' Vision in Rear Window works to, in Foucault's words, “[assign the] individual his 'true' name, his 'true' place, his 'true' body.”2 In Thorwald's case, vision constructs the name, place, and body of 'murderer.' Given the significance Rear Window attaches to vision, it is no surprise that the plot unfolds almost entirely, but for a few important exceptions to be discussed later, as the exposition Jeff's gaze.
Much attention has been paid to this voyeuristic dimension at Rear Window's core, but this paper is less interested in the libidinal dimensions of the gaze than the political ones . What I hope to explore is precisely what role vision plays in relating people to society at large; that is to say, how does vision (especially photographic vision) contribute to structuring an individual's subjective status and experience. I think Hitchcock and Rear Window can help us here. The director himself has remarked that the film is “structurally satisfactory because it is the epitome of the subjective treatment. A man looks, he sees; he reacts. Thus you construct a mental process. Rear Window is entirely a mental process, done by use of the visual.”3 Of course we should probably understand Hitchcock's references to 'structure' in terms of the film's narrative; however, I wish to emphasize that much of the plot itself is a function of the physical structures of the film's mis-en scene. That is to say, the axis of Rear Window is the architectural space it describes: a symmetrical, walled enclose in which individuals are contained within observable and discrete compartments. The plot, then, is partly concerned with how such a space, and specifically the type of vision it enables, inscribes (or fails to inscribe) the exercise of power over the individuals it contains.
There are significant parallels between the structural dynamics at work in the Rear Window's courtyard space and those of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon as explicated by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Both architectural structures feature “at [their] peripheries an annular building [containing cells.]... They are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. [They] arrange spacial unities that make it possible to see constantly and recognize immediately.”4 Both the panopticon and Rear Window elaborate visual regimes in space. These essentially analytical spaces are both sites wherein the central concern is the invasive scrutiny and control of objects of a gaze. In the ideal panopticon “all power would exercised soley through exact observation” of inmates. Similarly, in Rear Window, Jeff's power to indict Thorwald is not a product of some heroic show of force or cunning, rather Jeff's power operates almost exclusively through his (camera's) gaze. I am not the first to draw a connection between the panopticon and Rear Window. Slovaj Žižek writes that:
Rear Window reads like an ironic reversal of Bentham's Panopticon...For Bentham, the horrifying efficacy of the Panopticon is due to the fact that the subjects [it contains] can never know for sure if they are actually observed from the all-seeing central tower...In Rear Window, the inhabitants of the apartments across the yard are actually observed all the time by [Jeff's] watchful eye, but far from being terrorized, they simply ignore it. On the contrary, it is [Jeff] himself, the center of the Panopticon, its all-pervasive eye, who is terrorized, constantly looking out the window, anxious not to miss some crucial detail. Why?5
To begin answering Žižek's question, one might first point out that, in an attempt to provide a psycho-sexual reading of the film, the details of which I will not go into here, he makes crucial misstatements about the film's spacial/structural organization. Rear Window may privilege Jeff's perspective, however, it does not make him the 'center of the panopticon.' In fact, the plot will not position him at the central point within the enclosed courtyard until the film's dramatic climax, about which I will have more to say later. Furthermore, contrary to what Žižek suggests, the neighbors are not akin to Benthamite inmates, possessing “the sentiment of an invisible [observational] omnipresence”6 which they chose to 'simply ignore.' Rather than disregarding Jeff's gaze, his neighbors are genuinely oblivious to it, at least until very near the film's end.
But despite Žižek's simplifications, his question still seems relevant. What is the source of Jeff's terror and, consequently, the audience's suspense? This question can be more thoroughly answered by a careful comparison of Rear Window's architectural space to its analog, the panopticon. There is a key difference between the respective spaces constructed by Bentham and Hitchcock that I have so far neglected. Bentham's Panopticon plans call for a central observational tower, an acknowledged locus of authority. Thus, the fields of vision created by the panopticon are given a unequivocal hierarchical structure; authority and control issue from this central point onto the subjects contained in the periphery. But in Rear Window there is no architectural feature analogous to the panopticon's observation tower since the courtyard's center is essentially empty. Furthermore, each inhabitant of the courtyard posses a gaze that is a penetrating as Jeff's. This absence of a pivotal center of authority, a point from which the exercise of power is total, exclusive, and legitimate is the source of Jeff's anxiety and Rear Window's dramatic tension. In this way, the situation created by Rear Window's architectural space is not so much a reversed panopticon, as Žižek would have it, but an unsettled one in which power is ambiguous, decentered, or even suspended. Furthermore once Rear Window's space is properly read as an anarchic one—a place in which, as we shall see, power is unable to operate—it becomes clear that Jeff's mania for establishing Throwald's guilt (to assign his subjective identity) is the method he uses to attain his broader, implicit goal of reintroducing an ordered center of power into his tiny panopticon. Here, Rear Window recognizes that the project of constructing subjectivities is central to and essential for the smooth operation of power.
So, to answer Žižek's question about Jeff's anxiety and obsession, it seems clear to say that Jeff's actions represent an attempt to remedy the anarchic structure of his decentered and ineffective 'panopticon.' But this answer begs other questions, namely: what went wrong with Rear Window's 'panopticon' to begin with; what change has occurred in its visual dynamics so as to radically decenter its locus of power? An answer to this question can be found by pursuing another obvious distinction between Bentham's and Hitchcock's respective models: the apartments which contain Jeff's neighbors are not prison cells purpose-built for observation, but private living spaces. Therefore, if power is to operate through fields of vision in the non-penal environment of society at large, its must work through a mode surveillance that is more nuanced and subtly invasive than a monolithic observation tower. Here, Rear Window recognizes the fact that different spacial/architectural environments (I have in mind here the difference between institutional and urban spaces) inevitably entail to different visual articulations of power. Rear Window, then sets out to depict how the peculiarities of vision created by the panopticon's tower can be reproduced in the typical environments of society at large, outside of the institutional settings of prisons.
For Foucault, the omnipresence and omniscience made possible by the peculiarities of the panopticon's structure are like a “political dream”7 of total control. The absolute surveillance it allows makes it possible for figures of authority to “[regulate] even the smallest details of everyday life.”8 But as it turns out, it is not the actuality but rather the belief in this omnipresence and omniscience on the part of the observed individual that is essential for the panopticons efficacy. Its visual relationship must be such that it “arrange[s] things [so that] the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.”9 Rear Window, however suggests that in the context of a place like New York City (read: all modern urban societies) strictly architectural schemes fail to inculcate individuals with this belief in an ubiquitous, regulatory gaze. Contrary to Foucault's description of the detainees of the panopticon, those “[individuals] who are subject to a field of visibility,” the denizens of Rear Window do not initially “assume responsibility for the constraints of power;” until the introduction of Jeff's photography, they never “make them play upon [themselves;] inscribe in [themselves] the power relation in which [they] simultaneously play both roles; [and thus] become the principles of [their] own subjection.”10 As the film begins, the private lives of the inhabitants of Hitchcock's version of the panopticon seem perfect examples modern urban anonymity and they violate nearly every convention of the conservative bourgeois morality (i.e, temperance, monogamy, chastity, productivity, etc.) typically espoused by Hollywood films of the era. Why?
I suggest that simply by virtue of the complexity of the sprawling, chaotic, amorphous nature of modern urban space (as opposed to the rigidly organized institutional setting of the panopticon) that vision will direct, physical observation of a populace is destined to be “discontinuous in its action,” and in this sense not omniscient. And clearly, there are things in Rear Windows urban landscape (blinds, walls, etc) that obscure Jeff's vision. But, as Foucault explains, this literal omniscience of the gaze is less important that the belief that it exists. But this belief is, at least initially, absent among Hitchcock's characters. Even if there were a literal observation tower posted outside their windows, they know they can close the shade, like the young newlyweds next door to Jeff do. The ability to avoid the gaze of power by means of the obstructions of the urban environment means that individuals do not maintain “a state of consciousness [marked by] permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”11 Clearly, the purely architectural 'fields of visibility' at work in Rear Window are not sufficient to cause individuals to internalize the demands of the prevailing social power. This failure of spacial/ architectural visual regimes is what leads to the photographic turn. The type of vision made possible by the camera is effective not because it removes the physical barriers that obstruct powers view of individuals in the, unorganized physical world. Rather, photography renders the individual 'permanently visible' by separating their visible existence (their photographic image) from its often elusive physical existence (the body in urban space). As I will elaborate in the coming pages, it is this introduction of a split between the body and the image of the body that will create a sense of the ubiquity of power's gaze within the individual. Thus, in Rear Window 'absolute surveillance' (and thus the individual's internalization of power) rely increasingly on the mediation of vision through various optical technologies (Jeff's binoculars, zoom lenses, and camera flashes, and ultimately the cinematic apparatus itself). The camera replaces the tower because it can extricate an observable image from the impenetrable complexities of the real world, complexities which that panopticon removes, but only through an exhaustive rigorous control of spacial conditions.
This shift away from away architecturally constructed visual fields and towards photographic ones is also consistent with what Foucault writes about power's tendency towards strategies that minimize the expenditure of material resources while maximizing tactical efficacy of control. “External power throw[s] off its physical weight; it tends toward the non-corporeal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound, and permanent are its effects.”12 In this sense, Rear Window can be seen as a depiction of the change in the modes around which visual mechanisms of power are oriented. The kind of surveillance engendered by 19th architectural models like the panopticon are fundamentally spatial; that is, they manipulate physically existing structures to spatially organize, categorize, observe and control. The power dynamic inherent in photographic surveillance, on the contrary, requires no great stone and mortar edifices to contain, order, and subject individuals. Indeed, if the panopticon's great virtue was that it required only modicum of physical intervention for power to operate within it's bounds, then the lens of the camera does it one better, for it requires absolutely no physical contact at all. The photographic process is truly a non-corporeal one. This non corporeality represents two further advantages for regimes of visual power: first, it requires fewer material resources to be built and is less obvious to those being obsereved; second, it makes the incarceration or physical apprehension of subjects' bodies less and less a necessary component of the operations of power.
Non Habeas Corpus
As we have seen, the deployment of photography means an increased 'disembodiment' of the instruments used by power's tactical gaze. Film historian Tom Gunning puts this 'bodyless' aspect of the camera within the context of Foucault's thought by asserting that it partly fulfills the need for the furtive operation of authority's vision as called for in the panopticon. “As Foucault's discussion of the panopticon establishes, the regime of the visible as the instrument of power is partly founded on concealing the apparatus of the gaze from view.”13 Gunning continues, “The photographed party on the other hand is inflicted with an ineradicable visibility, betrayed by a body he or she cannot conceal but which is always available and readable to [authority]” 14 Gunning's use of the word 'body' here is slightly deceptive. What photography makes 'ineradicably visible' is not an individual's body, but the almost spectral image of their body. This substitution of the body by a its photographic image allows for a drastic deemphasis of the physical body of individuals and accompanies the physical abatement of power's visual regime.
This deemphasis of the body as the direct object against which power is directed has two causes. First, as stated earlier, power tends to economize with respect to the modes through which it operates. It is constantly “throw[ing] off its physical weight [as it becomes more] profround,”15 and this is likely a factor in the move away from the spatial/architectural model of surveillance as a means of conditioning subjects. Second, it also seems the increasing non-corporeality of the configurations of visual power is a response to the exigencies of increasing modernity. In fact, the technological and cultural changes that marked the late-19th /early-20th centuries led to a radical reconceptualization of the relationship between individual identity and the physicality of the human form. According to Gunning, the increasing rapidity of production and transportation that marked the beginning of the last century caused a
collapse of previous experiences of space and time through speed, an extension of the power and productivity of of the human body; and a consequent transformation of of the body through new thresholds of demand..., creating new regimes of bodily discipline and regulation based upon a new observation of (and knowledge about) the body.16
Foremost among these 'new observations' employed by systems of authority was the photograph. “Within systems of power and authority...the possibilities of photography could also play a regulatory role, maintaining a sense of the unique and recognizable, tying the separable image back to its bodily source.”17 As Gunning points out, this regulatory function of photography is especially relevant to the procedures and discourses of criminology: “The [criminal] body at issue was traced and measured rather than marked [while] the photograph and the body it portrayed became a text that is articulated into morphological features which can be... analyzed and rationalized.”18 Gunning uses the example of the invention of the 'mug shot' as a tool of law enforcement at end of the 19th century. Rather than physically detain a suspect physically, a mug shot was taken, this individual's body was reduced to a photographic image. By extension, this image makes the individuals body permanently visible to authority. The image of the body could thus be cataloged, cross-indexed and linked to an array fields according to the individual's morphological, medical, racial, legal, psychological records. What emerges from this process, is an account of the individual, an 'objective' corpus of knowledge about a subject anchored in an image that separate from its worldly physical existence. From the perspective of authority, the individual is reduced to an object (its photograph) upon which it can exercise unfettered power. This is because the photograph makes it possible for systems of power to begin constitute a subject by focusing disparate classificatory discourses (scientific, racial, especially juridical and criminological, and so on) around the image of the body, not the body itself.
So, just as the photograph divests the tactical gaze of its physical accouterments, so to does it begin to strip the physical human body of its preeminence as the immediate source of individual identity. The photograph produces a fixed and external identity for a person through a collection of data all invested in an image which can be possessed by authority (the mug shot, for example). Thus authority can, with out ever apprehending an individual physically, construct for a subject an identity which is consistent and independent from, though ineluctably linked to, their bodily existence. Gunning argues that the advent of this photographic discourse had significant repercussions regarding the modern conception of the body. “The body itself appeared to be abolished, rendered immaterial, through the phantasmagoria of both still and motion photography. This transformation of the physical did not occur through the sublimation of an ethereal idealism. The body, rather became a transportable image fully adaptable to the systems... that modernity demanded.”19 In other words, the 'phatasmagoria' of photography creates a system in which the 'self' and the body are no longer identical, in which a socially constructed subjectivity is reified as an image external to the body, and thus beyond the control, of a given individual. Further consideration of this 'phantasmatic' status, in which even an individual's own body seems to lose its autonomous coherence in the face of systems of power, will be crucial for a further analysis of the effects of the visual fields of power depicted in Rear Window.
Gunning helps us to understand how the photograph introduces a gap between the body and the identity of the subject. But how is this separation, this visual bodilessness experienced by the individual? Rear Window can help here as well. Given the photographic gaze's potential to radically alienate the concept of 'self' from its traditional locale, the body, we can begin to understand why, from its very beginning, Rear Window is fraught with grotesque themes of the traumatic dissolution of the physical human form. Significantly, many of these allusions to the 'phantasmatic' disintegration of bodily unity are expressed through explicit reference to vision and sight. For example, several of the character spend a considerable amount of time in a morbid speculation about dismemberment of Thorwald's wife's corpse. And we should also remember that it is Jeff's shattered leg and his consequent physical impotency that leads to his obsession with surveillance in the first place.
Perhaps the most important example of the general anxiety that attends the body's relation to the power of the gaze can be found in the admonishing lecture delivered to Jeff by his nurse, Stella, as she first discovers him gazing into the windows of his neighbors. She states brusquely that: “the New York State sentence for a peeping tom is six months in the work-house—and they got no windows in the work-house. You know, in the old days they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker... Oh, dear, we've become a race of peeping toms.” In addition to providing a succinct summary of the Foucaultian view of the changes that marked the development of Western penal procedures—a transition from punitive, torture-based legal programs, to the 'reform'-oriented carcareal systems of the post-18th-century era—Stella's remarks also highlight authority's interest in circumscribing the legitimate exercise of the gaze by drawing to itself the exclusive exercise of the power vision. The formation of the category of the 'peeping tom,' or a legal discourse which delineates forms of licit and illicit looking is but one way in which seeing functions within networks of power. Still, the most significant aspect of Stella's remarks is the recognition of dual and antithetical functions of vision. First, as has already been discussed in depth, vision is an important instrument through which power operates. It is the gaze of surveillance that identifies and monitors the individual. It is, however, also the object against which the punitive action of authority is directed. That is to say it is also the gaze of the subject, that which is controlled, re-formed, and assaulted by power. In Rear Window, power inscribes itself onto subjects through an address to their physical faculty of sight and—whether through the symbolic blinding of a 'work-house without windows' or the very literal insult to the eye with a 'red-hot poker'— this address always figures as an assault which is less interested in the physical than the specifically ocular integrity of the individual.
The Criminal's Eye/I
Rear Window's most helpful contribution to the understanding of the visual dimensions of power is this recognition of sight as the locale for both the tactical agency of authority and the object of regulation, coercion, and domination. Perhaps we should not be surprised to find such cross-currents contained within one field, for, as Foucault points out in The History of Sexuality: “where there is power, there is resistance.”20 Still, Rear Window offers an incredibly insightful demonstration of the way in which the subject/object relation of power is synthesized and integrated into the operations of vision with remarkable efficacy. This demonstration comes at the film's climactic confrontation between Jeff and Thorwald, the moment when Jeff's struggles to unequivocally establish the 'truth' of his nemesis' guilt, to construct around Thorwald's individual subjectivity the status of the 'criminal.'
A shot-by-shot analysis of this scene will be helpful for a thorough exegesis of Hitchcock's exceptional examination of the photographic/cinematic gaze and its mobilization as a discourse which produces both 'objective knowledge' about the criminal and the subjective internalization of the socially constructed categories of guilt and criminality all within the unified operation of the photographic gaze. The scene begins as Thorwald enters Jeff's darkened apartment. Hitchcock immediately signals the importance vision will play in the coming exchange with a close-up of Thorwald, whose eyes are given specific emphasis by the shot's chiaroscuro (Frame 1). The shot that follows is a first in Rear Window, an eye-line match that gives us Thorwald's, not Jeff's point of view. This shot, which is the audience's first glimpse of Thorwald's own interiority, initiates a shot/countershot sequence— an editing pattern marked by the cyclic alternation between the gazes with which the two characters regard one another— which must be examined. The shot/countershot is one of the most common and frequently unremarkable devices in the repertoire of the classical Hollywood editing style, and is generally relied on to efficiently and unobtrusively depict conversations between characters in films. However, in this instance in Rear Window, Hitchcock makes a more productive use of the technique by recognizing that at the crux of the colloquial application of the shot/countershot form, there is an essentially dialectical process at work. It is this dialectical process, which Hitchcock employs on the manifold levels of formal, dramatic, and thematic conflicts that I wish to examine in this scene.
First, as mentioned above, the formal technique of the editing style used in this scene is itself dialectical: one image (a shot of Thorwald's point of view) is set against another (a shot depicting Jeff's ) and the juxtapostion of the two creates the concept of an event, i.e. a conversation, in the mind of the film's spectator. Second, Hitchcock felicitously grafts the formal conflict inherent in the construct of the editing onto the dramatic conflict between Thorwald and Jeff. Thus what exists on a purely dramatic level as life-and-death struggle between the two men is transposed by Hitchcock's dialectical editing to contest for narrative authority in the film itself. That is to say, the ultimate crisis of Rear Window can be expressed in the following questions: 'Whose gaze will be the film's, and thus our (the audience's) gaze? Thorwald's? Or Jeff's? Which ways off seeing do and do not become legitimate? And by what means is this legitimacy affected and utilized in the procedures of subjection and control?'
The answers to these questions can be found in the exact interaction of the various gazes which are at the core of Jeff and Thorwald's confrontation. We see Thorwald enter the apartment via Jeff's gaze (Frame 3). Seen from this perspective, Thorwald is a manifestly corporeal figure. Excepting his eyes, he is a massive, mysterious, nearly undifferentiated bulk of bodily presence. The film then cuts to Thorwald's view of Jeff (Frame 2, 4). He appears less like a human figure and more like an almost robotic collection assorted technological apparatuses. Thus the scene becomes a literal rendering of the friction between the diametrical oppositions of resistance and power. Next, Thorwald begins to approach Jeff, and the film cuts to another point of view. But this time it is specifically not Jeff's point of view, as he has covered his own eyes; instead what we see is the gaze of the camera itself (Frame 4.) It is with the scrutiny of photographic gaze, which has now become disembodied (detached as it is from any individual human) that Thorwald's body emerges from the darkness as a knowable, analyzable figure of capable image of subjection. (Frame 5) It is only in this light (pun intended) that the details of Thorwald's body can become invested by the discourses of criminality. With the gaze of the camera, his body is transformed into a political anatomy and thus becomes a subject of the law. The swift arrest and de facto conviction which immediately follow Thorwald's photographic showdown with Jeff indicates that it was, indeed, this photographic discourse that was necessary to construct the 'truth' of Thorwald's criminal guilt. So far we have seen how this scene sets up the opposition between the individual and the apparatuses by which they may be reduced to an object of empirical 'knowledge,' but we still must consider the highest dialectical process represented in this scene—the mediation of the corporeal body by the mechanisms of political technology. As we shall see, it is through the resolution of this duality of of the biological eye of individual and the mechanical eye of authority that the power which was suspended in Rear Window though the inadequacy of its architectural panopticism is reasserted from a new locale situated in the individual's interior visual experience—their subjectivity.
Continued examination of this scene will reveal that, through the interpolation of the disembodied photographic gaze within the gaze of the very individual it takes as its object—that is to say, via a synthesis of two gazes which actually create the subject—power reveals it true character as an essentially non-binary, all-permeating force. For, as Foucault writes,
There is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations and serving as a general matrix—no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depth of the social body. [...] Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships [...] but are immanent in the later.21
Power is not a thing possessed and executed from one point (the authority, the camera, exteriority) and suffered at another (the criminal, the body, interiority). Rather, power is nothing more than the cumulative products of the peculiarities of the interrelation, the synthesis, of these points. Chief among these products is the subject, or to return to Foucault's term, the 'soul.'
The scene at hand provides a glimpse into the exact moment at which these mobile relation coalesce into a subject. In what is perhaps the most interesting moment of the film, Hitchcock shows us the photographic birth of Thorwald's 'soul.' This moment almost immediately follows the shot in which the camera's flash illuminates Thorwald's body. In an expressionistic rendering of the effects of the flash upon Thorwald's eyes, Hitchcock superimposes expanding, semi-transparent orange spots onto the point-of-view shots of Jeff and his wheelchair (Frames 8, 9). Obviously, this is done to replicate the visual experience that follows from the retina's sudden exposure to high-intensity light. But this device warrants closer consideration. First, the imposition of the camera's gaze, as experienced by Thorwald, betrays its place in the lineage of torture-oriented punitive procedures; it is clearly painful for Thorwald (Frames 6, 7). I do not, however, mean to suggest that the power at work in the photographic gaze operates exclusively (or at all) through the infliction of physical pain or that it takes as its object the individual's body. But we should pause to consider the ontological status of these optical spots. They do, of course, involve the physicality of the individual's body (his optical nerves) but the spots have no material existence themselves. None the less, they are still expressions of a very real subjective experience. So, while intimately related and connected to Thorwald's bodily existence, the spots maintain only a quasi-physical status. They remain, to adopt the term Gunning uses apropos photography, 'phantasmatic.' These phantasmatic spots (Frames 8, 9), along with the ghostly, illuminated photographic image of Thorwald (Frame 5), perfectly symbolize the Foucaultian definition of the 'soul': “This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge , and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power.”22 I would like to take pains to point out that I do not wish to suggest that power or the Foucaultian 'soul' are literally orange spots—these, in Rear Window, are purely symbolic—rather these spots point to power's marking of an individual's vision, to the creation of the subject via the insertion of a 'way of seeing' within the individual. Here, one can finally understand that power, as it is exercised in fields of vision, is constituted in the form of the phantasmatic 'soul' through the mutual interplay of authority and resistance, between the the gazes of the camera and the human individual. Perhaps the old cliché about the eyes, which are the site of these complex interactions, should be revised; they are not the 'gateway' to soul, but rather the point at which the shackles of the 'soul' are attached.
Having described how the photographic apparatus, not only builds a body of knowledge by capturing a person's image from a point of exteriority, but also by marking, assaulting, or, if you will, colonizing the individuals own visual experience, we can finally understand the role photographic vision plays in constructing subjects. We need only consider the content of Thorwald's power-marked vision. This content, or what he sees, is Jeff and the camera, the film's arbiters of order and executers of authority, returning his gaze. It is only after this internalization of Jeff's/the camera's gaze that Thorwald admits to the his murder and thus allows the himself to be inscribed by the discourse of the 'criminal.' Thorwald's experience here represents the exact operation of power upon individuals, 'criminal'' or otherwise: first, power creates for itself a place within the individual (the subject or soul); it then proceeds to reproduce, and thus internalize itself within the individual. Power, Foucault writes, “is implanted in bodies.”23 Thus, the superficial dichotomies involved in the 'photographer/photographed' binary are synthesized. The photographic subject does not maintain an autonomous gaze which can be diametricaly opposed to that of the camera. Instead, the photographic subject exercises a gaze that is implicitly conditioned by her/his status as an object within the photographer's field of vision. It is in this way that the subject is constituted as the internalized gaze of another.
Rear Window's denouement nicely illustrates the functioning of this disembodied, pervasive, and coercive articulation of the power via an imaginary gaze. After Thorwald throws Jeff from the window of his apartment into the central courtyard below, the film ends with a final floating shot of a pan across the courtyard. This shot is identical to the earlier shots of the yard as seen from Jeff's point of view. We in the film's audience assume (thanks to the rather predictable conventions of Hollywood storytelling) that our hero, Jeff, has survived and that in this final shot we are again being given his perspective. However, as the camera pulls away from the courtyard and into the apartment, we find that Jeff's eyes are closed as he peacefully sleeps. The surprise is that, although we imagine we are gazing from his point of view, we are not seeing with Jeff's eyes, but our own. At this point Rear Window cease to function simply as a dissection of its character's gazes and transforms itself into a radical meta-critique of its own medium and audience. Rear Window unmasks it's spectator's own subjectivity as an imagined, disembodied gaze which is conditioned by the assumed presence of a spectral figure of authority (Jeff or any other set of normative and regulatory demands). We see the world as though through eyes saturated by powers presence. We implicitly see our social situation according to the demands of power. In this sense what Foucault writes about the panopticon seems even more applicable to the the photographic/cinematographic apparatus: it is a “machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person [i.e. Jeff/authority] who exercises it; in short; the inmates [i.e. the audience/subjects are]caught up in a power situation in which they themselves are the bearers.”24 In this way power operates ubiquitously through the minimal agency of a (real or imagined) authority behind the subject's own gaze. Hitchcock shows us that this internalized assumption of of an all-seeing authority (created through the unique formal attributes of photography and film) which has replaced the guard tower missing in his version of the panopticon. Having correctly relocated the point at which power operates—within subjects, through the specific construction of their visual experience—bourgeois moral order finally (and amusingly) descends upon Jeff's neighbors: the murder is punished; the lonely drunken woman across the yard quits drinking; the bohemian musician next door finally embraces the corporate world and sells his composition; the alluring ballerina upstairs dismisses her many lovers for a monogamous relationship, with an army man, no less; and the amorous honeymoon of the newlyweds next door comes to an abrupt end when the bride insists 'If I'd known you didn't have a job, I'd never have married you in the first place!”
Conclusions
Surveying the development of visual regimes of power through the transition from spacial/panoptic to non-corporeal/photographic surveillance, one significant trend stands out: the continued and increasing separation of knowledge and subjectivity from material existence as a result of the mediation of vision by human technology. Evelyn Fox Keller provides a more compact description of this process than I can. “As [...] vision becomes more explicitly technical, the eye itself a more mechanical device, the active knower is forced ever more sharply out of the bodily realm. The subject becomes finally severed from the objects of perception.”25 This split between the subject and their body is crucially related to modern modes of visual power. First, by forcing the subject out of the body and into the 'soul' as represented by the photographic image, power makes individuals 'permanently visible' as objects of knowledge, and thus controlled by the analytical discourses of power. Second, by transcending the physicality of both the instruments and objects involved in the operation power, the visual discourses of the camera and the photographic image 'throw off' the material weight previously entailed by power. This move liberates power to operate through the gaze without any hindrances of physical constraints. Finally, by constituting the subject as a disembodied 'soul,' visual power is able to impose itself fundamentally and ubiquitously within the individual's view of the world.
Proust26 was right to marvel at that unique quality of human sight—it is detachable. Vision is so built into the Western sense of self, yet not a 'part' of us. It proceeds from our eyes and into the world and there it is caught-up, interposed upon, formed and modified by the intricate complexities of power and resistance. In Rear Window, Hitchcock recognizes that in this visual space, in this spectral distance between our eyes and the objects of perception a tremendous and intricate array of forces are at work. Rear Window, taken together with Foucault's insights, shows how the mediated, phantasmatic, relation between observer and observed—the photograph and its subject—can contribute to “a real subjection...born mechanically from a fictitious relation.”27 It is with this understanding that the film offers a radical critique of human relation to vision: seeing is a way that power tells us the story of our relation to the world, but by acknowledging the unavoidably situated status of vision within power's movement, we may also understand how it can be resisted.
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1Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 19.
2Ibid. 198
3Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. (New York: Anchor, 1976) p. 224
4Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 200
5Slovaj Žižek, Looking Awry. (Boston: MIT Press 1991) p. 92
6Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 194
7Ibid. p. 195
8Ibid. p. 196
9Ibid. p. 201
10Ibid. p. 201
11Ibid. p. 201
12Ibid. p. 203
13Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body.” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Leo Charney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p. 36
14Ibid. p. 36
15Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) 203
16Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body.” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Leo Charney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p. 16
17Ibid. p. 19
18Ibid. p. 21
19Ibid. p. 18
20Michelle Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage, 1990) p. 95
21ibid. Pg. 94
22Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 29
23Michelle Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage, 1990) p. 44
24Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 201
25Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Mind's Eye.” Feminism and Science. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 194
26Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1:Swannn's Way. (New York: Modern Library, 1998) p. 248
27Michelle Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (New York: Vintage, 1979) p. 202
