Trench, trail, screen: scenes from the scopic regime of sovereignty

Abstract

Christian Metz coined the phrase 'scopic regime'' to express the idea that not just what we see but how we see it and make sense of it is structured differently in different times and places. Nowhere is this clearer than in the depiction of acts of sovereign power. Since the US Civil War, visual images have played a key role in the representation of State-sanctioned violence. More generally, they frame the relationship between legal authority and its subjects. How violence and death is justified in war is not unrelated to how it is justified in peace. As Tom Conk)' writes in his foreword to Louis Marin's Portrait of the King, 'in the arts of representation are found the real origins and organs of social control. '2 Marin insists that 'the representation of power' and 'powers of representation' arc much the same.3 Since power is best exercised when least expended, discourses of representation allow it to be to 'modalized' (i.e. put into action) and 'valorized' (i.e. legitimated) almost infinitely. The painting of a monarch or a state waging war is almost the paradigm of a claim to its sovereign authority.