ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a condensed overview of the shifting contours of visual cultural power that make fascinated receptivity so important to criminology today. Energized by historically specificity, (dis)autobiographical analysis, and subreal ethnography, power-reflexive approaches to visual criminology invite us to reckon critically with fascinating images of crime. Critical visual discernment, spellbreaking distraction, and artful uses of fascinated receptivity are among the contagious gifts offered visual criminology by power-reflexive methods. Nevertheless, by inducing sensuous contact with the "optical unconscious", "actively yielding" to fascinating visual images offers something else as well-imaginative methods for "exploring social reality" and "changing culture and society". Walter Benjamin viewed the "optical unconscious" as a locus of intensified social control, but also a potential pathway for subversion. Mills pictured media induced fascination as somnambulism-a mesmerizing mode of corporate and militarized state control. The normative modern eye that replaced the mimetic eye was an optical organ of a decidedly different sort.
