The image now sits at the centre of global culture; there is a seemingly inexhaustible process of production and circulation of images that distinguishes contemporary life. Individuals are exposed to a succession of images flowing across every realm of culture including the workplace and the home. The specific mode or model of visuality of a certain age (a scopic regime), that is a culturally specific ways of seeing, enables us to that replace the traditional definition of "vision" as a universal and natural phenomenon.

Martin Jay argues that the scopic regime of modernity may best be understood as a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices. The dominant regime is the Cartesian one with its rational and uniform ordering of space---the junction of the gaze presupposed by the perspectival image together with Cartesian epistemology.with its reduction of perceptual space to mathematical and homogeneous space, with its understanding of vision as monocular, static, fixed and immediate, distant and objectifying, purely theoretic and disincarnated.

The resulting regime is "ocularcentric" in the sense that it privileges the eye, which is equated with the "I." The perniciousness of this regime, according to its 20th-century critics, lies particularly in its claims to objective rationality and unmediated visual truth. Instead, it is argued, the rationalized, abstract space of perspective construction and the dispassionate, monocular observer it postulates should be regarded as hallmarks of a specifically modern, historically constructed form of visuality that underpins everything from our exploitative relation to nature to the capitalist mode of production.

The alternative model is less the art of describing –the photographic precision of Dutch painting--- seems to be more a variation rather than an alternative with respect to the ocularcentrism of Cartesian perspectivalism – but rather the so-called madness of vision, with its emphasis on obscurity rather than on transparency, on the haptic rather than on the optical, on the indecipherability of the visual rather than on the panoptic gaze of a transcendental subject.