ABSTRACT
This chapter examines whether modern ways of visualising the distant or the foreign do necessarily take an inhuman form. It examines the limits as well as the strengths of methods of observing distant objects which depend on the reliability of inhuman or non-human witnesses. The chapter draws a contrast between such inhuman technologies, and techniques which depend on the 'human' qualities of experience and commitment as the basis on which distant objects may be visualised and acted upon. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault primarily employed the notion of surveillance to refer to the observation of human subjects within a variety of spatially enclosed institutions such as the prison, the school and the hospital. The notion of the liberal gaze refers not so much to the immediate vision or sight of illness but to the ways in which invisible structures and events are revealed.
