Introduction: Speaking to the Eye

In an obscure footnote to his entrepreneurial proposal for a multipurpose institution tellingly labelled the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham wrote his epigrammatic injunction to the modern age: 'lose no occasion of speaking to the eye'. The phrase was deliberately declaratory, and it contained an inherent sensory hierarchy. Power was to be registered through the eye, by seeing and by making visible. Aural sensation, by speaking, was referred to only metaphorically. In this paradigm, the sound of power was subordinate to the power of vision. If Lord Chancellor Bacon's legal maxim was 'Nihil ex scena' (nothing outside of the public eye), Bentham asserted his must be 'Multum ex scena' (everything outside of the public eye).