Blackwell Reference Online

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The French film theorist Christian Metz coined the term “scopic regime” in The imaginary signifier (1982 , 1st pub.1975) to distinguish 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” (1982, 61). Because of the cinematic apparatus's construction of an imaginary object, its scopic regime is unhinged from its “real” referent (→  Cinema ). Representation is independent of what is represented, at least as a present stimulus, both spatially and temporally (→  Visual Representation ). Others employ the term more broadly to define visual experiences mediated, even constituted, by other technologies, such as photography, television, and digital computers, as well as to postulate significant gender differences (more often a regime fostered by the “male gaze”; →  Spectator Gaze ). Certain activities like shopping and spectator sports have been granted their own local scopic regimes. More ambitious theoreticians have posited general systems of visuality constructed by a cultural/technological/political apparatus mediating the apparently given world of objects in a neutral perceptual field. In this more totalizing usage, “scopic regime” indicates a non-natural visual order operating on a pre-reflective level to determine the dominant protocols of seeing and being on view in a specific ... log in or subscribe to read full text