The Global Eye or Foucault Rewired: Security, Control, and Scholarship in the Twenty-first Century

The great antagonist in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Sauron, is metonymically described in the novel and visualized in Peter Jackson’s cinematic trilogy as the ‘great eye.’ The ‘Eye of Sauron,’ the ‘red eye,’ and the ‘great eye’ are epithets that arguably connote an embodied feeling to the penultimate villain in Tolkien’s trilogy. This is reported in a letter sent by Tolkien to his friend Mrs. Eileen Elgar on October 3, 1963: “[...] in a tale which allows the incarnation of great spirits in a physical and destructible form their power must be far greater when actually physically present. [...] Sauron should be thought of as very terrible” (Carpenter 1981, 246). Throughout the saga, the thought of Sauron trumps the character’s materiality. Sauron is less an active driver of antagonistic action than he is a sensation of danger and fear. He is less a character than an ambiance conveyed through the terror of pervasive, continuous, absolute, and totalitarian observation. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, written roughly between 1937 and 1949, substantiates, in Sauron’s eye, a particular twentieth-century panopticophobia: the fear of universal control via sight, at a time when the tools to expand the capacity for control over populations were starting to grow exponentially. As the century unfurled, visual control widened and became pervasive, from the improvement of weapon target accuracy via optics, to the introduction of visual technologies in the public sphere.1 In fact, the very project of modernity in its dual dimension of progress on the one side, and violent exploitation on the other, is a byproduct of the Enlightenment project equating the progress of reason to the widening of a politically controlled system of images. If anything is common to the projects of late and early modernity, it is the organization around plans of total visuality. They encompass simultaneously utter control and utter sight, defined by Nicolas Mirzoeff as the mandate to see and control everything, everywhere, all the time (Mirzoeff 2015, 20). This plan of total visuality hence becomes a strategic driver in the organization of the social and in the partition of the sensible, as well as an overhaul in the wider production of meaning. As such, a twenty-first-century agenda for the study of culture will unavoidably deal with visuality beyond modes of mediation and representation to ask how and under which conditions the pro-