Readings.docx

Practices of Looking Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Ways of Seeing Episode 1 Episode 2 Camera Lucida

Practices of Looking Chapter 1 

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To those of us who are blind or have low vision, seeing and visuality are no less important than they are to those of us who are sighted because the everyday world is so strongly organized around visual and spatial cues that take seeing for granted. (9) Like other practices, looking involves relationships of power. (9) Representation refers to the use of language and images to create meaning about the world around us. (12) Foucault: complex relationship between the drawing, the paintings, their words, and their referent (the pipe) (15) We construct the meaning of things through the process of representing them. (12) Magritte asks us to consider how labels and images produce meaning yet cannot fully invoke the experience of the object. (15) This combination of the subjective and the objective is a central tension in our regard of camera-generated images. (17) Barthes: the photograph, unlike a drawing, offers an unprecedented conjunction between what is here now (the image) and what was there then (the referent, or object, thing, or place); studium = truth function of the photograph; there is no singular truth to be identified outside the myths of ideologies of cultural expression; photographs always indicate a kind of mortality, evoking death in the moments in which they seem to stop time; punctum = affective element of those certain photographs that pierce one’s heart with feeling (17–18); The denotative meaning of the image refers to its literal, explicit meaning. […] Connotative meanings are informed by the cultural and historical contexts of the image and its viewers’ lived, felt knowledge of those circumstances—all that the image means to them personally and socially.; myth = hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are specific to certain groups, are made to seem universal and given for a whole society (20) The meaning of photographs can thus be seen as somewhat paradoxical in that they can be emotional objects through the punctum, or the emotionally piercing quality, yet they can also, through the effect of the studium, serve as banal traces of the real, documentary evidence of something that simply has happened. (18) Sekula: The photograph is imaged to have, depending on its context, a power that is primarily affective or a power that is primarily informative. Both powers reside in the mythical truth-value of the photograph. (18); both honorifically (for example, in the case of portraiture) and repressively (in the case of the use of photography for the cataloguing of citizens, police photographs, and the use of photographs to discern qualities such as pathology or deviance in human subjects) (24) The dividing line between what an image denotes and what it connotes can be ambiguous, and connotative meanings can change with changes in social context and over time. (20) One could say that ideology is the means by which certain values—such as individual freedom, progress, and the importance of home—are made to seem like natural,

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inevitable aspects of everyday life. […] The most important aspect of ideologies in the modernist period was that they appeared to be natural or given, rather than part of a system of belief that a culture produces in order to function in a particular way. (23) Saussure: language […] depends on [arbitrary, contextual] conventions and codes for its meanings (28) Pierce: meaning resides […] in the interpretation of the perception and subsequent action based on that perception (28); iconic, indexical, and symbolic (31) Semiotics Image icons are experienced as if universal, but their meanings are always historically and contextually produced. (39) There is an increased understanding that these concepts of the universal were actually restricted to specific privileged groups. (40) These codes build on one another, incorporating these historical legacies of image codes at the same time that they rework, play off, and recode them. (46) To interpret images is to examine the assumptions that we and others bring to them at different times and in different places and to decode the visual language that they “speak.” All images contain layers of meaning that include their formal aspects, their cultural and sociohistorical references, the ways they make reference to the images that precede and surround them, and the contexts in which they are displayed. (46)

Chapter 2  

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“meanings are produced through the complex negotiations that make up the social process and practices through which we produce and interpret images.” (49) Production of meaning (beside image + producer): 1) codes and conventions that structure the image, 2) viewers and their interpretation/experience, 3) context of exhibition and viewing (49) “Viewing is a relational and social practice whether one looks in private or in public and whether the image is personal […], context-specific […], or public” (50) “the audience, an entity into which producers hope to mold viewers as consumers.” (50) “images interpellate viewers”. “Images hail viewers as individuals, even when each viewer knows that many people are looking at the same image—that the image was not intended ‘just for me’ but reaches a wider audience. There is an interesting paradox inherent in this experience: for viewer interpellation by an image to be effective, the viewer must implicitly understand himself or herself as being a member of a social group that shares codes and conventions through which the image becomes meaningful.” (50) “When we use the term producer, then, we may be referring to an individual maker (as in the case of one artist who produces a painting), a plurality of creative individuals unified by a shared set of aesthetic strategies of production design and display (the art collective or collaborators creating a work), or a corporate conglomerate engaged in different phases and aspects of an ad.” (52) Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967): “texts are produced in the act of reading them and that these acts are performed from the cultural and political perspectives of readers and never fully according to the intentions of the author or producer.” (53)

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“Today it goes without saying that consumers can produce their own media images and texts, because the technology to self-produce or to copy and manipulate found images is so widely available.” (53) Foucault, “What is an Author?” (1979): “author function”  “producer function”, “‘authorship’ derives not just from who created something but often from who owns the right to something.” (53) “We usually have no way to know for certain what a producer, designer, or artist intended his or her image or structure to mean.”, “Context cannot be fully controlled by the producer.” (54) Nicholas Mirzoeff: “intervisuality”: interaction between visuals (55) “meanings are not inherent in images. Rather, meanings are the product of a complex social interaction among image, viewers, and context. Dominant meanings—the meanings that tend to predominate within a given culture—emerge out of this complex social interaction and may exist alongside alternative and even opposing meanings.” (56) Aesthetics: pleasure from its beauty, style, or creative and technical virtuosity, based on taste (56) Taste: judgment of aesthetics, based on class, cultural background, education, identity; “exercised and displayed through patterns of consumption and display” (56– 57) Connoisseurship: being capable of “passing judgment on the quality of cultural objects” (57) Bourdieu: “Taste classifies and it classifies the classifier.”, “taste is learned through exposure to social and cultural institutions that promote certain class-based assumptions about correct taste.”, habitus “a set of dispositions and preferences we share as social subjects that are related to our class position, education, and social standing.” (60) “not only that cultural values and tastes may trickle up or may develop differently among members of a politically and culturally minoritized diaspora but also that cultural values and tastes are increasingly subject to movement in a variety of directions, as markets diversify in kind laterally, as well as to globalization. In today’s culture, images and objects circulate within and across social strata, cultural categories, and geographical distances with speed and ease” (62) James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture”: semiotic square of collecting (63) Thomas Struth: fetishisation of museum art (66) Marcel Duchamp: French Dadaist artist who challenged taste and aesthetics (institutional critique) (66) “As we often accept the idea of good taste unquestioningly, taste can be seen as a logical extension of a culture’s ideology. Societies function by naturalizing ideologies, making the complex production of meaning take place so smoothly that it is experienced as a “natural” system of value or belief. […] Most of the time, our dominant ideologies just look to us like common sense.” (69)

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Marx: “Marx thought of ideology as a kind of false consciousness that was spread by dominant powers among the masses, who are coerced by those in power to mindlessly buy into the belief systems that allow industrial capitalism to thrive.” (69) Louis Althusser: “Ideology is the necessary representational means through which we come to experience and make sense of reality.”, “ideology is a set of ideas and beliefs shaped through the unconscious in relationship to other social forces, such as the economy and institutions. By living in society, we live in ideology, and systems of representation are the vehicles of that ideology.” (70) “In Althusser’s terms, we are not so much unique individuals but rather are ‘always already’ subjects—spoken by the ideological discourses into which we are born and in which are asked to find our place.” (70) Antonio Gramsci: “dominant ideologies are often presented as ‘common sense’” and “dominant ideologies are in tension with other forces and constantly in flux” (70) “No single class of people ‘has’ hegemony; rather, hegemony is a state or condition of a culture arrived at through negotiations over meanings, laws, and social relationships. Similarly, no one group of people ultimately ‘has’ power; rather, power is a relationship within which classes of people struggle.” (71) “If we give too much weight to the idea of a dominant ideology, we risk portraying viewers as cultural dupes who can be ‘force fed’ ideas and values. At the same time, if we overemphasize the potential array of interpretations viewers can make of any given image, we can make it seem as if all viewers have the power to interpret images any way they want and that these interpretations will be meaningful in their social world. In this perspective, we would lose any sense of dominant power and its attempt to organize our ways of looking.” (72) “All images are encoded with meanings in their creation and production that is decoded by viewers.” (72) Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding”: 1) dominant-hegemonic reading, 2) negotiated reading, 3) oppositional reading (72–73) “Interpretation is thus a mental process of acceptance and rejection of the meanings and associations that adhere to a given image through the force of dominant ideologies. In this process, viewers actively struggle with dominant meanings, allowing culturally and personally specific meanings to transform and even override the meanings imposed by producers and broader social forces.” (74) “This negotiation with popular culture is referred to as ‘the art of making do,’ a phrase that implies that although viewers may not be able to change the cultural products they observe, they can ‘make do’ by interpreting, rejecting, or reconfiguring the cultural texts they see.” (76) Michel de Certeau: textual poaching, “viewers of popular culture can ‘inhabit’ that text by negotiating meanings through it and creating new cultural products in response to it, making it their own” (76) transcoding, “take terms that are derogatory and reuse them in empowering ways” (78)

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bricolage, “mode of adaptation in which things (mostly commodities) are put to uses for which they were not intended and in ways that dislocate them from their normal or expected context” (78) Dick Hebdige: signifying practices, moves that “do not simply borrow commodities from their original context but rather give them new meanings, so that, in the terminology of semiotics, they create new signs” (78) appropriation, taking something for oneself without consent (83) “Since marketers began to borrow the concepts of the counterculture of the 1960s to sell products as youthful and hip, there has been a constant mining of youth cultures and marginal subcultures for mainstream fashion and other products. […] Most obviously, one of the consequences of these kinds of trends is that commodities that had been appropriated by subcultures through bricolage lose their political meaning when they are reappropriated and marketed to the mainstream.” (86) Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson: counter-bricolage, “counter-hegemonic bricolage strategies of marginal cultures are reappropriated by mainstream designers and marketers and then parlayed into mainstream designs that signal ‘coolness’” (87) “The culture industries are constantly establishing what is new style by mining the margins, and subcultures on the margins are always reinventing themselves by appropriating from mass culture and from other margins.”, “On one hand, we could see this as evidence of the complexity of cultural signs, the way that semiotic meaning can easily be remade, reworked and reconfigured in new cultural contexts. Yet this also means that important ideals and concepts can become what are known as ‘freefloating’ signifiers, floating through cultural domains with little grounded meaning.” (87) “culture is not a set of objects that is valued in some way but a set of processes through which meaning is constantly made and remade through the interactions of objects and peoples.” (88) “The viewer who makes meaning does so not only through describing and experience with images but also through reordering, redisplaying, and reusing images in new and differently meaningful ways in the reordering of everyday life.” (89)

Chapter 3 

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“Just as images are both representations and producers of the ideologies of their time, they are also factors in the power relations between human subjects and between individuals and institutions.” (93) “Looking is rarely performed in total isolation from the activities of listening and feeling.” (93) “The concept of spectatorship allows us to talk about this broader context in which looking is enacted in an interactive, multimodal, and relational field.” (93) “The concept of the gaze has been used in specific ways by visual theorists to emphasize the embeddedness of the gaze of the individual viewer in a social and contextual field of looks, objects, and other sensory information. To gaze is to enter into a relational activity of looking.” (94)

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“For Descartes, the world becomes known when we accurately represent it in thought, not when we experience it through the senses and not when we imagine it in our mind’s eye.” (95) “The philosophy of modernity was based on an ideal of the liberal human subject as a self-knowing, unified, and autonomous entity with individual human rights and freedoms.” (95) “We have inherited a world of hybrids, entities that combine human, technological, and object forms together (think of pacemakers and prosthetic devices or the ways in which we use computers as extensions of our senses). We live through associations between bodies, machines, nature, and inanimate objects and across biology, technology, culture, and science. Latour invites his readers to downplay the reductive thinking of modern binaries such as the nature-culture divide or the representationreal or man-machine distinctions. He suggests that we instead embrace the more complex concept of hybridity.” (100) Sigmund Freud: “the subject as an entity governed by the unconscious, the forces of which are held in check by consciousness. […] we are not aware of the urges and desires that motivate us.” (100) Karl Marx: “we are collectively subject to, and produced as human subjects by, the forces of labor and capital.” (100) Michel Foucault: “subject is never autonomous but is always constituted in relationships of power that are enacted through discourse.” (100) Repression o Freud: “we repress emotions, desires, taboo feelings, and anxieties unconsciously in order to keep them in check.” (100) o Foucault: “repression does not result in leaving things unsaid or not acted on; rather, repression is productive of activities, speech, meanings, and sexualities.” (100–101) Jacques Lacan: “the human subject becomes aware of itself and thus emerges as such not at birth but during a period of self-awareness and apparent autonomy that typically begins sometime between the ages of six and eighteen months.” (101) “Apprehension of oneself apart from others is always achieved in a rupture that divides the self.” (101) “’I’ exist to myself only insofar as I can imagine myself in a field in which I appear in light of others (objects, people) who make me apparent to myself.” (102) “The image or visual appearance, in this sense, is not simply a representation or a medium of information. It is one of the elements in the broad network through which the subject is constituted (or made) in a given historical and cultural moment. A person who looks achieves a sense of himself or herself as an individual human subject, not only in his or her own eyes and in the eyes of others but also in a world of natural and cultural places, things, and technologies that together make up the field of the gaze.” (103)

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“Interpellation […] is about situating the viewer in a field of meaning production (organized around looking practices) that involves recognition of oneself as a member of that world of meaning.” (103) “The versatility of the photographic image thus spawned a broad array of imagemaking activities for the purpose of surveillance, regulation, and categorization. Photographs thus often function to establish difference.” (106) Foucault on Jeremy Bentham: inspecting gaze of panopticon, “concept of seeing without being seen and of imagining oneself being seen when in fact no human subject is looking is what Bentham had in mind when he described this as a plan for gaining power of mind over mind.” (107) o “we participate in practices of self-regulation in response to systems of surveillance, whether they are in place or simply assumed to be in place.” (107) o “the camera is merely a visible presence of the inspecting gaze that we imagine, whether it is there or not, visible to us or not. In other words, the camera does not need to be turned on or even in place for the inspecting gaze to exist; merely its potential to exist will have this effect.” (107–108) “Foucault saw modern power not as a conspiracy among leaders or as authoritarian rule by particular individuals but as a system enacted among all strata of society and effective in normalizing bodies in order to maintain relations of dominance and subordination across these strata.” (108) Foucault: biopower, “Many of the relationships of power in the modern political state are exercised indirectly on and through the body” (109) o “Photographic images have been instrumental in the production of what Foucault called the docile bodies of the modern state—citizens who participate in the ideologies of the society through cooperation and a desire to fit in and conform.” (110) “The act of looking is commonly regarded as awarding more power to the person who is looking than to the person who is the object of the look.” (111) Jacques Derrida: “all binary oppositions are encoded with values and concepts of power, superiority, and worth.” (111) Edward Said: “[Orientalism is about] the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.” (113) → Europe and West as norm, binary opposition with negative and fetishistic fantasies Jane Gallop: “the mirror constructs the self, that the self as organized entity is actually an imitation of the cohesiveness of the mirror image.” (121) “According to psychoanalytic theory, in order to function in our lives, we actively repress various desires, fears, memories, and fantasies. Hence, beneath our conscious, daily social interaction there exists a dynamic, active realm of forces of desire that is inaccessible to our rational and logical selves.” (121) Lacan: “the eye and the gaze are split; they engage, within the individual subject, in a process of seeking out others in hopes of obtaining the sense of self-certainty and completion in their look.” (122)

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John Berger: “men act, women appear.” (124) “looking practices are strongly bound up in fantasy. We may use images to conjure fantasies about who we are, what we do, and what others do in frame or on screen, and these fantasies may be quite different from what we would do with our bodies and with others in life.” (132) “looking practices and pleasure in looking for any human subject are not tied to the spectator’s biological sex or social gender position. To look ‘as a man,’ or ‘as a lesbian,’ for example, may be performed by a human subject of any sexual and social identity through processes of fantasy and identification.” (132)

Chapter 6 

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“Mid-twentieth-century critics of mass society argued that urban populations lost their sense of community and political belonging and that interpersonal life and civic involvement slacked off under the pressures of crowding in the home, the workplace, and the streets.” (225) “film, television, consumerism, and cheap amusements rose to provide some semblance of social connectedness among this exhausted and alienated populace.” (225) “Whereas previously mass media were produced and distributed under the auspices of corporations […] since the 1980s consumers have increasingly been recognized by media producers as occupying smaller, niche audiences that must be addressed according to their specific tastes, interests, and language groups. Today, consumers are also more likely to regard themselves as potential producers, as well as consumers who exercise choice, with regards to the media through which they interact in their everyday lives.” (226) Jean Baudrillard: cyberblitz, “escalation of random and unpredictable media forms, images, and unpredictable media forms, images, and information that have bombarded us in postmodern society.” (227) Marshall McLuhan: “a medium is any extension of ourselves through a technological form. […] Media are forms through which we amplify, accelerate, and prosthetically extend our bodies in processes of communication.” (229) “There is no such thing as a message without a medium or a message that is not affected in its potential meanings by the form of its medium.” (229) “Television viewing has been described, since its origins in the mid-twentieth century, as a medium of distraction.” (230) Raymond Williams: television flow, “viewers’ experience of television involves an ongoing rhythm that incorporates interruptions (such as changes between programs and TV commercials).” (230) “In the media landscape of the early twenty-first century, the boundaries between news and fiction and between entertainment and information are increasingly blurred.” (231–2) “Through these conventions of cross-referencing, entertainment is made to seem as important and relevant to our lives as are politics and real-life events.” (232)

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convergence, “coming together of media forms” (→ still camera, video camera, telephone, musical listening device, Internet, video screen) (232) “even under tight state regulation the Internet remains a space of negotiation and multidirectional flow.” (233) “it should be noted that providing more networks and programs to choose from to consumers is not the same thing as providing more venues for different voices and opinions. Freedom to choose among a broader range of consumer products cannot be equated with freedom of expression.” (234) “if participation in a global network becomes recognized by the ‘haves’ as a requisite for democratic participation in everyday life, it becomes the responsibility of those with access to transfer or disseminate the technology to those who do not have the means to buy into it for themselves.” (236) Herbert Schiller: “mass media function, in effect, as a tool of cultural imperialism and provide a centralized means of mobilizing the new global mass society around a unified political ethos handed down from dominant nations to less powerful nations and populaces.” (236) spectacle: “event or image that is particularly striking in its visual display to the point of inspiring awe in viewers.” (240) Guy Debord (and the Situationists): “spectacle as a metaphor for society, in how we live in an ongoing and constant spectacle” (240) Frankfurt School: “the ‘culture industry’ is an entity that both creates and caters to a mass public that, tragically, can no longer see the difference between the real world and the illusory world that these popular media forms collectively generate.” (241)

Ways of Seeing Episode 1  

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Perspective makes the eye the centre of the visible world. But the human eye can only be in one place at a time. It takes its visible world with it as it walks. (1:37) As you look at them now on your screen, your wallpaper is round them. Your window is opposite them. Your carpet is below them. At this same moment, they are on many other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colours, different sounds. You are seeing them in the context of your own life. They are surrounded not by gilt frames, but by the familiarity of the room you are in, and the people around you. (3:59) I don’t want to suggest that there is nothing left to experience before original works of art except a certain sense of awe because they have survived, because they are genuine, because they are absurdly valuable. A lot more is possible. But only if art is stripped of the false mystery and the false religiosity which surrounds it. This religiosity, usually linked with cash value, but always invoked in the name of culture and civilisation, is in fact a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproduceable. (9:58)

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Because paintings are silent and still, and because their meaning is no longer attached to them, but has become transmittable, paintings lend themselves to easy manipulation. They can be used to make arguments or points which may be different, very different, from their original meaning. And because paintings are essentially silent and still, the most obvious way of manipulating them is by using movement and sound. (13:10) When paintings are reproduced, they become a form of information, which is being continually transmitted, and so there they have to hold their own, against all the other information, which is jostling around them to appear on the same page or the same screen. (19:01) What so often inhibits such a spontaneous process is the false mystification which surrounds art. For instance, the art book depends upon reproductions. Yet, often, what the reproductions make accessible, a text begins to make inaccessible. What might become part of our language is jealously guarded and kept within the narrow preserves of the art expert. (22:04) Children, until they’re educated out of it and forced to accept mystifications, look at images and interpret them very directly. They connect any image, whether from a comic or from the National Gallery, directly with their own experience. (25:53)

Episode 2 

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In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him, is a form of art. I would put it differently. To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others and yet not recognised as oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude. (3:57) Thus, the mirror became a symbol of the vanity of women. Yet, the male hypocrisy in this is blatant. You paint a naked woman because you enjoy looking at her. You put a mirror in her hand, and you call the painting vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you have painted for your own pleasure, thus, incidentally, repeating the biblical example by blaming the woman. (7:40) The absurdity of this male flattery, although it was not seen as absurd then, reached its peak in the public academic art of the 19th century. Prime ministers discussed under paintings like this. When one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation. (13:37)

Camera Lucida  

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“I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look.” (9) “Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.” (10) “What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffered among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) ‘self’” (12)

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“Alas, I am doomed by (well-meaning) Photography always to have an expression” (12) “Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object” (13) “Four image-repertoires intersect here […]: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. […] I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture” (13) “I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death” (14) studium: “culturally […] the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions” (26) punctum: “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27) “culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers” (28) “had to read the Photographer’s myth in the Photograph […]. These myths obviously aim […] at reconciling the Photograph with society” (28) studium functions: “to inform, to represent, to surprise, to cause to signify, to provoke desire” (28) “the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone” (32) “the photographic ‘shock’ […] consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it” (32) Surprises: 1) the rare, 2) instantaneousness, 3) prowess, 4) contortions of technique, 5) trouvaille or lucky find (32–33) “In an initial surprise, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs.” (34) “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” (38) unary photograph: “emphatically transforms ‘reality’ without doubling it, without making it vacillate […] no duality, no indirection, no disturbance” (41) “Very often, the Punctum is a ‘detail’” (43) “here, the photograph really transcends itself: is this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?” (45) “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.” (53)