A Review of Alessandro Sbordoni’s Beyond the Image
“There is no gold standard for the image anymore.” Alessandro Sbordoni
There is no temptation whatsoever to read Sbordoni’s Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century as another lament over the collapse of visual truth in the digital age. Here I encounter none of the popular anxieties about deepfakes, social media, artificial intelligence, and the exhaustion of meaning. Beyond the Image successfully dodges the danger of being another nostalgic defense of representation, referentiality, and “Truth.” There is no conservative plea for the return of visual authenticity. This text is a troublesome and indispensable diagnosis of a historical mutation and a break in the regime of visibilities that condition our perception of things.
From a typical Foucauldian standpoint, I see in Sbordoni’s project an observation that another reorganization has occurred for vision as a field of power. Maybe even a potential for a line of resistance as anti-ocularity, a rejection of the algorithmic gaze in favor of parrhesiastic techniques of seeing and being-seen? What the book ultimately charts is the emergence of a post-visual regime where it is not just the case that seeing no longer guarantees knowledge; the idea that looking at something was ever a proof for something being the case is as old a lie as Platonism. Images never really promised reference, and truth was always emergent; it is always a mere superstructure, a connaissance on top of the governmentality, the savoir of the visible. What the book inaugurates is something more relevant, interesting, advanced – an accurate description of how this particular regime, the twenty-first century, manages, governs and deploys its own optical regimes. We are instructed on how perception is trained, formatted, optimized, and governed through algorithmic systems whose primary allegiance is (clearly) not to meaning but to circulation-for-its-own-sake, profitability, and control. Beyond the Image is, I argue, in its own right a genealogy of Pictorial Panopticism: a regime of images that discipline subjects according to the dictates of Capital.

Pictorial panopticism does not just operate by showing too much, it is an organizational principle of vision, a closed circuit. The image does not need to persuade, convince, or even deceive. There is no depth and everything is on the surface, the image only needs to circulate and create fiat value. Power is not invested in the content of the images, content is just the dynamism, the speed of the image; value is produced through movement alone. The rankings, indexes, repetitions that conjure up an imminence, the feeling of an impending doom that sustains anxious scrolling… The crisis diagnosed in Beyond the Image is epistemological and political.
On the one hand, classical panopticism functioned through asymmetrical visibility; on the other hand, being seen without seeing, pictorial panopticism functions through total participation and horizontal diffusion of visibility. It cuts the head off the watchtower. Everyone looks; everyone produces; everyone is exposed. The subject is no longer disciplined by the gaze of the Other but by the requirement to remain legible within an image-economy whose criteria are opaque and whose evaluative metrics are endlessly shifting. One is not punished for invisibility; one simply disappears inside a hall of infinite refractions.

This mutation also marks a deeper anthropological shift: the passage from the mirror stage to the screen stage, from the gaze to the stare. Where the mirror once structured subjectivity through misrecognition, doubling, and identification, the screen abolishes distance altogether. It absorbs directly without reflecting. The gaze, historically bound to desire, lack, and the possibility of resistance, is replaced by the stare: continuous, frictionless, optimized for meaningless endurance. The consumer becomes the regime’s preferred format of subjectivity: measurable, segmentable, endlessly adjustable. To stare is not to contemplate, but to remain operational, available, and extractable. What appears as participation is, in fact, a mode of capture in which vision is no longer oriented toward the world but synchronized with the imperatives of circulation.
This is the decisive mutation Sbordoni tracks: the passage from representation to operativity. Images no longer even pretend to stand in for reality; they stand in for other images, for data, for probabilities, for SEO optimizations (while SEOs are just words-becoming-images). Vision becomes a relay between interfaces. The image triggers an image. It activates. In this sense, pictorial panopticism is inseparable from algorithmic governance. To see is to process; to be seen is to be processed. What makes Beyond the Image compelling is its refusal to mourn this transformation in moral terms. There is no nostalgia for lost depth, no call to restore authenticity, no fantasy of returning to a pre-digital innocence. Sbordoni does not ask us to believe in images again. He asks us to recognize that belief was never the point. Images have always been technologies of power; what has changed is the speed, scale, and abstraction of their deployment.

Since I have a certain habit of reading theory in a particular way, I have to take the next logical step and search Sbordoni’s work for an opening where I can speculate on possibilities for resistance against the tyranny of the image. Clearly, the post-visual regime has no concern for truth, in fact it tosses truth around like a cheap whore, managing its distribution, deployment, and circulation. We can’t rely on better representations as forms of counter-conduct. It must take the form of interruptions, hesitations, refusals to optimize. What becomes political is not what is shown, but how visibility is inhabited. Slowness, opacity, refusal, misuse; these can be weaponized as both aesthetic and strategic gestures.
What ultimately matters, then, is not the ontology of images but their effects on the subject. Sbordoni’s analysis consistently displaces attention from visual content to the transformations images impose on modes of being, attending, and enduring. Images no longer address a viewing subject; they configure one. They train attention spans, modulate affect, recalibrate thresholds of tolerance and boredom, and normalize a state of permanent availability. The subject that emerges from this regime is not deceived or persuaded, but formatted, i.e. rendered compatible with the rhythms, demands, and extractive logics of the image-economy. In this sense, pictorial panopticism is not a theory of control through sight, but a theory of subjectivation through circulation: what images do is produce a subject for whom visibility is no longer an event but a condition of survival.
In this sense, Sbordoni’s work resonates less with traditional visual theory than with a specific and much more effective genealogy of anti-ocular practices. Beyond the Image is therefore not a theory of images but a theory of the conditions under which images govern. Its critical force lies in showing that the post-visual does not mean the disappearance of images but their total saturation of social life. We do not live after images; we live inside their logistics: it is a becoming-image of the body. The panopticon dissolves into interfaces, feeds, metrics, and predictive models. If there is a pessimism here, it is a lucid one. But it is not paralyzing. By refusing the language of loss, Sbordoni forces us to abandon false hopes and misplaced critiques. There will be no return to truth through images, because truth was never their function. The task, instead, is to learn how power perceives and how Capital trains us to perceive for it.