A key concern for Jay, in Scopic Regimes of Modernity (1988) and notably in Downcast Eyes (1993) is “ocularcentrism”, a tendency towards visual metaphors, models, concepts and priorities within cultural, scientific, political and religious discourse. In his interview with Marquard Smith, Jay says it was while working on a history of Western Marxism (1984) that he became aware, “that questions of philosophy and social theory, as well as those pertaining to the position of the critical intellectual, were closely related to the privileging of vision in Western thought” (Smith 2008a: 183). Jay does not argue that this tendency has been all-powerful in fact for Jay the ocular has been a site of struggle where the effects have never been straightforward or predictable. In particular he warns against homogenizing the manifestations of ocularcentrism (1993: 36). Taking a more object-oriented approach, one might argue that the actant-objects in play have continually reconfigured the network as alliances and translations have shifted .

Jay’s shift from using the concept “scopic regime” to “ocular regime” is more than a response to an emerging discourse of “Visual Culture Studies” (Smith 2008b). In his introduction to a collection of essays exploring visual experience, the gaze and “the contexts of visuality”, Jay asks: “Is there a common denominator running through such seemingly disparate investigations of theories about vision, general visual cultures, specific visual artifacts like movies, and the role of visual metaphors in written texts?” (Jay 1996: 9). He concludes that there isn’t but what is interesting is what is missing from the list of themes he identifies – the technological. Here the focus is on the movie artifact rather than the film, projector, colorspace or protocols.

It is not that Jay disregards the technological. He observes: “insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unimagined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or the reality they purport to depict” (Smith 2008a: 183-184). Rather the technological is positioned as the background. The focus is on the “work”, the practices, the gaze. Jay’s is a story of how technologies “enhance[…] the ability to see” (Jay 1993: 587), of how “vision, aided by new technologies, became the dominant sense in the modern world, even as it came to serve new masters” (p45), the “extraordinary changes in our capacity to see wrought by technology” (p113) [My emphases].

For Jay, the technological is not the place to look. Similar in some ways to Castells’ broad sweep, Jay’s project is to map the a regime of Truth/Power. It is not that he (or Castells) deny the importance of technology in that regime. Rather he locates the “camera” (an object perhaps best seen as an assemblage of technologies rather than a unified object) in terms of “photography” –  a discourse, a practice, an experience.  It is not that apparatus determines the discourse or vice versus. For Jay technology and regime are enfolded. His mapping of ocular and anti-ocularcentrism together with his identification of a “pictorial turn” similar to the “linguistic turn” in theory, locate discussion of power and vision in terms of the experience of vision, hence his later interest in William James (2006). He refers to his interest in: “all manifestations of optical experience, all variants of visual practice” (Alpers et al 1996: 42). That experience happens through scopic/ocular apparatuses as well as thorough discourse. His concern is with the latter: “how mediated our visual experiences are by the discursive contexts in which they appear” (Smith 2008a: 187).

• Alpers, S., Apter, E., Armstrong, C., Buck-Morss, S., Conley, T., Crary, J., Crow, T., Gunning, T., Holly, M.A., Jay, M., Kaufmann, T.D., Kolbowski, S., Lavin, S., Melville, S., Molesworth, H., Moxey, K., Rodowick, D.N., Waite, G. & Wood, C., 1996, Visual Culture Questionnaire, October, 77(Summer), pp. 25-70.
• Jay, M., 1984, Marxism And Totality : The Adventures Of A Concept From Lucács To Habermas, Polity, Cambridge.
• Jay, M., 1988, Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in Foster (ed), Vision and Visuality, Bay Press, Seattle, pp. 3-28.
• Jay, M., 1993, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration Of Vision In Twentieth-Century French Thought, University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Jay, M., 1996, Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions, in T Brennan & M Jay (eds), Vision in Context, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 3-12.
• Jay, M., 2006, Songs Of Experience: Modern American And European Variations On A Universal Theme, University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif.; London.
• Smith, M., 2008a, That Visual Turn: The Advent of Visual Culture. Interview with Martin Jay, in Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers, SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, pp. 182-8.
• Smith, M. 2008b, Introduction: Visual Culture Studies: History, Theory, Practice, in M Smith (ed), Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers, SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, pp. 1-16.

Discussing his book  Jpegs (2009), the German photographer and artist, Thomas Ruff explains that while downloading images from the Internet he noticed the pixellated quality. “It created quite a painterly, impressionistic structure, and rendered parts of what was often an ugly image very beautiful. I looked into it, and found the Jpeg file-compression software was responsible,” he says (Benedictus 2009). He began blowing the images up to  2.5 by 1.8 metres. “When you see it from about 10 or 15 metres away, you think you are looking at a precise photograph, but if you go closer, to within about five metres, you recognise the image for what it is. Then if you go really close, you can’t recognise anything at all: you’re just standing in front of thousands of pixels,” he says (Benedictus 2009).

Ruff uses jpeg as one of his tools, deliberately saving and re-saving images at higher rates of compression in order to get the image aesthetics he wants, but his subject is not jpeg. He uses the effects or traces of the jpeg protocol (as found in the dot jpegs he appropriates) to “symbolise”. Talking of one of his  images he says: “I used a shot I took from a hotel room in Kyoto, Japan, in 2002. I was just looking out of the window, and I saw the scene as a symbol of how mankind changes his environment: the traditional way of living with nature, juxtaposed with modern life” (Benedictus 2009). Here the traces of jpeg are used as part of a wider exploration of aesthetics and politics. Here, “a pixellated square is ugly, but if you present it in the right context it can become beautiful” (Benedictus 2009).

For Art World magazine, “the images fracture and pixelate to reveal, or more accurately to foreground, surfaces consisting of intoxicating mosaics of coloured grids. Stand back, and an (often apocalyptic) image emerges: up front, the photograph’s constituent elements and its underlying digital structure predominate” (Lane 2009: 136). Here the jpeg form ‘reveals’. An ‘underlying digital structure’ is harnessed in a wider signifying cause. Ruff goes on to tell the magazine that he: “discovered that if you compress digital files using JPEG compression, the system creates what I felt was a very interesting pixel structure… So I started an investigation, asking myself, ‘How does it work? Where does it come from?’ And then I decided to create whole images with this kind of abstract structure” (p 136). Leaving aside Ruff’s reluctance to unpick “the system”, what is important here is that the pixelated formal traces of jpeg’s operation are the equivalent of choice of film for Ruff: Kodachrome versus Velvia, Tri-X versus Pan-F. Each has a different quality and aesthetics appropriate to a particular photographic or artistic signification.

Ruff foregrounds the traces of jpeg. He even, like pixel art, arguably foregrounds “the digital”. But this commentary is secondary to a critique of representation (whether the saturation of images or Art Photography’s penchant for the hi-res (Fried 2008)) and change or as Bennett Simpson calls it: “an allegory of dispersion” (2009). Simpson argues that it “seems impossible to view Ruff’s photographs as pictures without simultaneously viewing them as processes” (2009). It could however be argued that because the work is made up of “photographs” it is the jpeg as a protocol/process that is most ‘unvisible’. One sees pixels and digital effects. One sees and read signs. As Daniel Miller warns, semiotics can be “as much a limitation as an asset” (Miller 2010: 12) or as Jane Bennet has it, things are never entirely “exhausted by their semiotics” (Bennett 2010: 5).

Ruff’s teachers, Bernd and Hillla Becher, famously developed an objective practice, painstakingly and dispassionately cataloguing blast furnaces and objects of industrial capitalism. Ruff’s approach could do the same. He could catalogue our image-saturated web and culture. Fifty ‘jpegs’ (sic), 5,000, 50 million taken and/or donwloaded. Given the resources he could print them all 2.5 metres by 1.8 metres, an objectivist catalogue or archive to parallel Google, Yahoo and Facebook’s own. Such a work would doubtless add to his critique of aesthetics, politics and mankind’s impact on the environment. This archive could expand the range of jpeg’s traces that were foregrounded. Here one would be confronted not only with pixelation and digital compression but the ubiquity and interoperability that makes those archives and archival practices (and software) possible. It may even open up some of the alliances and translations that run through digital imag(in)ing – the enfolding of that imag(in)ing with Apple and Google business strategies, the relation between the stream of imag(in)ings and the information economy of search and data mining etc. If one were able to see ‘through’ the signification inevitable in a photographic exhibition, one could be faced with a critique beyond “mankind’s impact on the environment”.

What one could not see and would not be confronted with is the protocol that sets those significations, those aesthetic traces and those alliances in motion. That, withdraws from view.

• Benedictus, L 2009, Thomas Ruff’s best shot, The Guardian. Retrieved February 1, 2011,  from http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jun/11/my-best-shot-thomas-ruff
• Bennett, J., 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things, Duke University Press, Durham.
• Fried, M., 2008, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, Yale University Press, New Haven.
• Lane, 2009, Thomas Ruff: Space Explorer, Art World, 12 (August/September), pp. 136-43.
• Miller, D., 2010, Stuff, Polity Press, Cambridge.
• Ruff, T., 2009, Jpegs, Aperture Foundation, Inc, New York, NY.
• Simpson 2009, Ruins: Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs, in Ruff, Jpegs, Aperture Foundation, Inc, New York,.

Christian Metz is usually credited with the first using the concept “scopic regime”. Of course the term “scopic” has a different genealogy, taking in Lacan’s “scopic field” and the split between the eye and the gaze in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1986: 67-78}, through feminist film theory (Mulvey 2009) and on to Slavoj Žižek’s exploration of the gaze of the object and his realisation that “I can never see the picture from the point that it is gazing at me” (1991: 89) (an idea picked up by W. J. Mitchell in What do Pictures Want (2007)). It was Metz however who, while not rejecting the psychoanalytic basis of the concept, arguably broadened its reach, from the “scopic field” to the “scopic regime”.

In The Imaginary Signifier (1981) Metz distinguishes the cinema from the theatre: “what defines the specifically cinematic scopic regime is not so much the distance kept … as the absence of the object seen” (p61)but more widely argues against an idea that vision is universal. Alongside his psychoanalytic colleagues he of course argues for a cultural location of vision and visuality but crucially adds an historical dimension: vision, visuality and as we will see visual technologies, are located (or enfolded) in particular historical moments.

It is this insight that Martin Jay picks up in his essay Scopic Regimes of Modernity where he asks: “is there one unified ‘scopic regime’ of the modern or are there several, perhaps competing ones?” (1988: 3). He goes on to answer his own question of course by arguing for a “plurality of scopic regimes now available to us” (p20), clearly seeing the Renaissance perspectivalist, the Dutch descriptive and the baroque “ocular experiences” as not only a matter of historical detail but also co-present now. He hopes: “we may learn to wean ourselves from the fiction of a ‘true’ vision and revel instead in the possibilities opened up by the scopic regimes we have already invented and the ones, now so hard to envision, that are doubtless to come” (p20).

What is important to note is not only how these regimes enfolded artistic practices and approaches with broader philosophical epistemologies and metaphysics and how that works through in experience, but also how those ways of imag(in)ing linger, ready to enfold with those to come. Foucault of course was keen to stress that regimes of truth/power could exist coterminously. In Discipline and Punish he say: “in the late eighteenth century, one is confronted by three ways of organizing the power to punish” (1979: 130). The same is true of ways of organising imaging and imagining. Regimes are not marks on a timeline or epistemes that give way to each other, they are enfolded discursive practices.

My aim in drawing on Jay’s work is not simply to add another interesting art-philosophy double helix to Jay’s account. It would be interesting to weave an account of the distributed visuality apparent on Flickr, Twitpic and Facebook with accounts of “synthetic reason” (DeLanda 2010), the “emancipated spectator” (Rancière 2009) or even “speculative realism” (Bryant et al 2010).  But Jay’s account of Renaissance perspective and Cartesian subjective rationality; Dutch emphasis on description over narration and Baconian empircisim; the  Baroque’s “dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic surplus of images” (Jay 1988: 16) and Lieibniz’s pluralism of nomadic viewpoints is more useful as a way into a media archaeology of scopic apparatuses. Here the regime is not the point but the field of possibilities for the development of apparatuses of imag(in)ing including protocol.

• Bryant, L., Srnicek, N. & Harman, G., 2010, The Speculative Turn Continental Materialism And Realism, re.press, Prahran, Vic..
• De Landa, M., 2010, Philosophy And Simulation: The Emergence Of Synthetic Reason, Continuum, London ; New York.
• Jay, M. 1988, Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in Foster (ed), Vision and Visuality, Bay Press, Seattle, pp. 3-28.
• Metz, C., 1981, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis And The Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
• Mitchell, W.J.T., 2007, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives And Loves Of Images, University of Chicago Press, Chicago; London.
• Mulvey, L., 2009, Visual And Other Pleasures, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England] ; New York.
• Rancière, J., 2009, The Emancipated Spectator, Verso, London.
• Žižek, S., 1991, Looking Awry: An Introduction To Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..

It started with a Kinder Egg. A present from my son for a hard-working proto-academic slaving over a keyboard. Inside, a pink poodle carrying what looks like a very frothy cappuccino and talking on her mobile phone (got to be a she, pink, bow in the hair… I’ve read semiotics). A thing. Even stripping aside the connotations of the gift, the family relationship and the memories within which it is inevitably enfolded, the thing resonated – a punctum. Its materiality, its presence on my desk and in my world raised questions and ideas.

Someone, somewhere had the idea. They pitched it within the company as their design or a commission for an outside freelance. Someone got the brief to design a pink poodle with a cappuccino and a phone. Some designer, who left art college dreaming of Apple and the Bauhaus got the job. And those surreal conversations are part of the global relations of capitalism, the creation, production, distribution and marketing of things within a Global Thing Industry that parallels Scott Lash and Celia Lury’s Global Culture Industry (2007). That industry of course takes in factories in China and Taiwan, collecting subcultures and pester-power relationships in big supermarket chains. My poodle is enfolded in those capitalist, colonialist and gender relations as well as legal processes in the US where the 1983 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits embedding “non-nutritive items” in confections. My disposable, plastic, transient thing is not just a symbol of structural relations, or even simply a material trace of those processes and struggles, although clearly both. I expect May Day protestors to wield their pink poodles with one hand and their ‘smart mobs’ (Rheingold 2003) mobiles in the other.

Jane Bennett had a similar punctum moment on 4 JUne in front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore, where she came across: “one large men’s black plastic work glove, one dense mat of oak pollen, one unblemished dead rat, one white plastic bottle cap, one smooth stick of wood” (2010: 4). Through this assemblage of ‘natural’ and ‘human-made’ “debris” (an interesting word in the light of Benjamin’s ‘rags ’n refuse’ (2002)), Bennett “caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage, object appeared as things, that is as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the context in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics” (p5). One may quibble with the idea of a vitality inside but the point is well taken that these object-things extend beyond their signification, a point echoed by Daniel Miller (2010: 12). Their bright pink, plastic signifying of global capitalism does not tell the whole story. Their object alliances with the designer-object, the factory in Taiwan-object, the shipping container-object, the supermarket-object, the eBay business strategy-object (and countless other material and immaterial objects) cannot be classified using a depth ontology that treats one as base and the other as superstructure. Rather ‘capitalism’, ‘globalisation’, ‘patriarchy’ must be seen as the field in which these object relations form, dissolve and reform.

I photographed my pink poodle and uploaded it to Flickr. It automatically appeared on my site, alerted my Twitter followers and when they visited Flickr my image-object was downloaded to their browser cache. The plastic thing enfolded in object relations became an image thing still enfolded in new scopic relations, set in motion by jpeg. The two objects are ontologically and materially different. What unites them, when addressed within a flat object-oriented ontology, is their position within alliances and that that those relations are never entirely exhausted by their semiotics.

See: Thing of the day.

• Benjamin, W., 2002, The Arcades Project, Translated by Eiland & McLaughlin. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.; London.
• Bennett, J., 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things, Duke University Press, Durham.
• Lash, S. & Lury, C., 2007, Global Culture Industry: The Mediation Of Things, Polity, Cambridge.
• Miller, D., 2010, Stuff, Polity Press, Cambridge.
• Rheingold, H., 2003, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Basic Books, Cambridge, MA.