The Disembodied Eye : Ideology and Power in the Age of Nihilism

Abstract

Kafka's metamorphosis is a expression ofthe alienation of power in the modern age from the realm of facticity . The image of the body as cockroach, with its themes of disembodiment and rule by the dominion of signs, only means that we are reaching the apogee of a great curvature in the arc of modern power : a curvature which now circles back, hurtling us towards the site of exterminism of culture and society in the perspectival space of a purely abstract power . For the great secret of modern power is that its existence is that of a pure abstraction : a disembodied, symbolic and cybernetic process of exchange which is driven onwards by its own lack. Power is never what it seems to be : a pure, localizable, intrinsic, and (finally) real multiplicity of force relations (Foucault) .' Instead, we are confronted by an abstract power which is structured from within by the rules of optics and which is, in any event, fictitious because it is a pure signsystem (Baudrillard) . 2 The eye of the flesh opens to find itself in the carceral of an abstract power . This is a power which is neither historicist nor structuralist, neither solely a matter of material effects nor exclusively a process of symbolic effectors . The abstract power of the modern age is, in fact, poststructuralist and posthistoricist : it is a coming home to the perfect nihilism (Nietzsche) which has always been at work in western consciousness and which only now, in the fully realized technological society, reveals itself in the fateful meeting of power and the sign . In the political discourse of power and the sign (the information society), everything is decentered, disembodied, and transparent . Indeed, the genuinely menacing quality of a power abstracted from corporeal existence is that its reality is only that of a bi-polar field of symbolic and material effects . In The Will to Power, Nietzsche said that the reality of a nihilistic power was the