The illusion of the gaze is homologous with the politics of the public sphere just as, strictly speaking, the logic of pop culture carries with it the discourse of the gendered body. Does not the culture of desire invests itself in the fantasy of the image? The eroticization of consumption functions as the conceptual frame for the ideology of the specular economy much as the illusion of process carries with it the invention of agency. The fiction of desire asks to be read as the engendering of print culture. In this way we begin to acknowledge that the epistemology of consumption is always already participating in the construction of linguistic transparency. Given that the reification of history as such gestures toward the authentication of the public sphere, we might begin to ask how the culture of normative value(s) functions as the conceptual frame for the fantasy of power/knowledge?
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Mark Carrigan 