ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how capitalism has challenged and in a sense largely displaced the visual regime of normalisation and the new ‘ways of seeing’ that it has brought in as replacements. Western societies have always treated certain areas as not being reducible to the market—in other words, as not being for sale. This has not always been applied consistently: for instance, human beings are (theoretically) not for sale in the contemporary world, but they were in many places throughout history—in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, for example. Childhood is highly marketable in Western societies: wide-eyed children are used by advertisers to ‘sell’ banks, family cars and new government policies, and by social groups to promote their issues— family values, universal education, regulation of paedophilia. A capitalist visual regime is characterised by the imperative to produce the subject as an individual, which involves isolating her or him from any (continuous) sense of communal identity.
