Practices of Looking Lecture Notes (chapter 01 03)
Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken, "Introduction," Practices of
Looking
Visual Cultural Studies is more than the study of images or objects:
it is the study of vision and the visual world.
Visual modes of communication have proliferated and become
increasingly significant in the twentieth century augmenting and
displacing written/oral forms.
A tendency toward visualizing existence has progressed throughout
modernity. This trajectory toward more elaborate forms of
visualizaton has been characterized as part of a
rational/scientific quest for increasing control over the world
through techniques for recording, documenting, and codifying
knowledge. (Power)
Nicolas Mirzoeff and others have noted that the modern world is
characterized by the drive to visualize things which are not
visible or visual: the diagram, the map, the cartiogram, the
microscope, the x-ray, etc...
What is meant by "Practices of looking"?
What are the implications of constituting a field of inquiry
around looking as a practice as opposed to a field of object?
Looking (unlike vision) is a language. It is a form of
communication that is learned and culturally specific. Visual
Literacy
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Intertextuality:
Is it possible to study diverse forms of visual culture together?
And is it useful?
Meaning isn't confined to one discipline: scientific images are
interpreted based on experiences in popular film and popular
culture.
Practices of looking can be bridges between specialized discourses
Memory has a strong role in visual experience. We understand a
visual image within a stream or network of other images and
experiences--relationally
Images are understoood historically
Meaning and Culture:
Raymond Williams: Culture is a set of shared practices for making
meaning.
The anthropological definition of culture as a "way of life".
Seeing and believing--the relationship of seeing to belief
systems.
"Meaning is shared, but not uniformly." There are always multiple
potential meanings for an image or text. The same text or image
suggests different meanings for different viewers or for the same
viewer at different times. How can we explain this? What factors
affect interpretation?
Meaning is contextual.
Making meaning is an active process--it is not purely a matter of
perception or reception.
Meanings are produced not in the heads of viewers so much as
through a process of negotiation--the play of interpretations.
Culture is a fluid and interactive process--not a set of images or
objects.
"Chapter 1: Image, Power and Politics," Practices of Looking
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Looking is active. Looking involves relationships of power
Meaning is imbedded in social relations, not in objects
themselves.
Weegee (Athur Fellig) "Booking a Suspect," (1937), "Their First
Murder" (1936) and "Hells Kitchen". Looking at others looking. How
does the image capture or convey emotion. Voyerism and the power
of looking without being seen.
Pietrer Claesz (Dutch), Still Life with Herring, Breakfast, Still
Life with Herring, Wine, and Bread, Vanitas Still Life 1630)-objects that symbolized the vanity of worldly things and the
brevity of life. The skull and bones refer to death, books and
writing instruments to excessive pride through learning, and
fragile glass goblet of wine to temporary pleasure. The golden cup
on its side suggests immoderate wealth. Reflective obects often
included distorted images of the artist.
Images are embedded in subjective relations
We live in an age of reproduction: knowledge of most images is not
first-hand.
We encounter millions of objects which are not unique.
Documentary and "photographic truth"
Photograph's "aura of machine objectivity"
Do all images created through a camera lens involve some
form/degree of subjective intervention?
Is there a truly objective or non-subjective photography?
Are some photographs more truthful?
What can we say of painterly truth or the truth of writing?
What is a document? A record?
The coincidence of the historical record and the emotional vehicle:
Robert Frank: The Americans Trolley, New
Orleans (1958)(comparison)
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Robert Frank: Charleston, South Carolina (Photo of a
black woman holding a white baby)
Woman on a BusBenetton ad with a woman nursing a baby
What photographic film records is a segment of the field of vision
depth of field
range of light intensity and color
fstop and exposure
cropping
bracketed moments in time temporality
film stock--technology is a factor in the creation of meanings-technologies are cultural formations. Consider film density test
patterns. (example 1; example 2;)
Joseph Albers' Color theory
Exercises: http://www.marilynfenn.com/color_study.html
Images and Icons:
Certain images become iconic (they become a type)--they carry an
influential interpretive weight
Iconic images are those that becomes symbolic and suggest a
universal meaning. But all icons can be read for their particular
historical meanings.
The iconic image of the Madonna and child may affect our reading
of contemporary images. Rahael, The Small Cowper Modanna (c 1505),
Joos van Cleve, Virgin and Child (1515),
Dorethea Lange, "Migrant Mother" (1936) #1, #2, #3, #4, #5,
Benneton Advertisement woman with baby
Marilyn Monro, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Dyptich(1962)
Madonna (and "with child")
Finally, one could argue that all images have an iconic register.
Value, Taste and Economies of Images:
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While the fine art object often is valued because it is unique, it
also can be valued because it can be reproduced for popular
consumption.
Museums and institutions such as universities affirm value.
Example: Van Gogh, Irises (1889) Irises (1888)(poster of the
painting, costers, jar). Value and taste as a product of history,
rarification, the interplay of interpretive, legal and economic
factors. For example, the laws surrounding the establishment of
museums as tax exempt institutions. Or the policies regarding
rights to publicity, copyright and privacy. (industry, mobility,
color and images of the landscape)
Komar and Melamid's "Most Wanted Paintings"
How do popular and expert tastes or preferences relate to economic
value of cultural artifacts?
In what ways does meaning relate to value?
"Chapter 2: Viewers Make Meaning," Practices of Looking
“The production of meaning involves…
1. The codes and conventions that structure the image and that cannot
be separated from the content of the image;
2. the viewers and how they interpret or experience the image;
3. the contexts in which an image is exhibited and viewed. (49)
Viewer =/= audience
interpellation: derived from the Marxist philosophy of Louis
Althusser, to be interpellated is to be called out to by an ideology.
“To be interpellated by an image… is to know that the image is meant
for me to understand, even if I feel that my understanding is unique
or goes against the grain of a meaning that seems to have been
intended” (50)
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm
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advertising
identification
Producers’ Intended Meanings
Who creates an image?
Death of the Author, by Roland Barthes
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm
What Is An Author, by Michel Foucault
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_foucault12.htm
Authorial intent is suspect. Barthes says “the text offers a
multidimensional space that the reader deciphers or interprets” (52).
Not that the producers of images don’t have a preferred meaning, but
Barthes and Foucault suggest that the context in which the image is
read can never fully be controlled or predicted. This is an even
bigger deal in global intercultural contexts.
Aesthetics and Taste
How do you judge an image?
This section discusses taste.
Pierre Bordieu: French sociologist who wrote that taste is always
connected to social identity, and contains a certain kind of
“cultural capital”.
Quoting Bordieu: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.
Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish
themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and
the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position
in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.” (60)
habitus: a term from Bordieu meaning “a set of dispositions and
preferences we share as social subjects that are related to our class
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position, education, and social standing” (60)
high and low culture: traditionally used to distinguish between elite
culture that only the rich/upper class can appreciate and vulgar
culture for the masses. This distinction has been widely critiqued
as condescending. (444)
Collecting, Display, and Institutional Critique
Collecting and power
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/CliffordOnCollectingArtandCulture.pdf
Institutional critique: from Foucault, institutions have acted as
invisible structures of power that produce certain kinds of knowledge
and bodies. When artists do institutional critique, they intervene
in the structure of the museum and exhibit itself to discuss how
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museums structure the kinds of meanings that are made about art and
artifacts.
Reading Images as Ideological Subjects
According to Marx, the people who own the means of production in a
society also control that society’s media and the kinds of things
that are and can be said in it. They reproduce the dominant
ideology, which he thought was a kind of false consciousness, and in
order to critique anything you have to reject that falsity.
Althusser said that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship
of individuals to the real conditions of existence” (69).
According to him, ideology isn’t false–it’s all we have to make sense
of the world. You can’t get outside of ideology. You become a
subject by being hailed by ideology.
This doesn’t give individual
subjects a lot of agency to resist or move around.
Antonio Gramsci, another Marxist, wrote about hegemony as an
alternative theory to domination. Under hegemony, power
is negotiated among many different competing groups.
The “dominant
culture” is created through struggle. Nobody simply has power, and
the situation is constantly in flux. Ideology can be contested and
undermined (through “counter-hegemonic” activity). But because of
this flux, hegemony has to be constantly be reasserted.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/index.htm
Encoding and Decoding
Stuart Hall: in “Encoding, Decoding”, Hall writes about three
different ways of reading a cultural text.
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/SH-Coding.pdf
1. Dominant-hegemonic reading: reading it the way society wants you
to
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2. Negotiated reading: somewhere between 1 and 3, both gets pleasure
from a hegemonic text and “poaches” on it
3. Oppositional reading: reading in a totally opposite way to what
culture wants you to (separatist, possibly radical)
Reception and the Audience
Reception theory: the viewer response to popular texts
De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life
textual poaching: “inhabiting” a text and taking it up in ways that
are counter to authors’ intents
strategies vs. tactics: De Certeau wrote about strategies, which are
culturally authorized ways of making meaning, and tactics, which are
unauthorized and part of radical organizing
transcoding: the re-appropriation of formerly derogatory words for
new social meanings (queer, crip, “Black is beautiful)
Bricolage: Claude Levi-Strauss, “making do”, putting this to use for
unintended but productive purposes
Appropriation and Cultural Production
Particularly in the digital era, the appropriation and reworking of
elements of visual culture is easy and prevalent.
Reappropriation and Counter-Bricolage
Sometimes culture is re-appropriated by marketers or corporate
entities and used for non-political purposes.
"Chapter 3: Spectatorship, Power, Knowledge" Practices of Looking
Key Terms
Spectator: the individual who looks
Spectatorship: the practice of looking
The gaze: the relational activity of looking (Las Meninas)
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Interpellation: process of interpretation through which an
individual viewer comes to recognize himself or herself as among
the class or group of subjects for whom the image’s message is
intended.
Discourse: group of statements that provide a means for talking
about a particular topic at a particular historical moment; a body
of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about
something
Biopower: the relationships of power that are exercised indirectly
on and through the body
Identification: process in which the spectator responds to an
image (as object of desire or view self in place of the person on
canvas/ screen)
The Subject in Modernity
Key Contributors:
Sigmund Freud: the subject is governed by the unconscious
Karl Marx: argues we are produced as human subjects by the forces
of labor and capitalism
Michel Foucault: subject is created through discourses of
institutional life
Jacques Lacan: subject never really existed, but rather is an
ideal that results from the mirror phase of human development:
subject (the infant) becomes aware of itself in relation to what
it is not (the mother) => the ego is split from the very beginning
Spectatorship
The gaze and spectatorship as concepts in visual studies allow us
to consider:
1. the roles of the unconscious and desire in viewing practices
(Freud)
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2. the role of looking in the formation of the human subject as such
(Lacan)
3. the ways that looking is always a relational activity and not
simply a mental activity engaged in by someone who forms internal
mental representations that stand for a passive image object “out
there” (Marx, Foucault); (102).
The gaze and spectatorship are theories of address, not of
reception:
Address considers the ways that an image or visual text invites
certain responses from a particular category of viewer (i.e.,
the male or female viewer)
Discourse and Power
Foucault: discourses produce certain kinds of subjects and
knowledge and that we occupy to varying degrees the subject
positions defined within a broad array of discourses
Photography a factor in social discourses: photographs used for
surveillance, regulation, categorization
Photographs used to establish difference; that which is defined as
other is posited as that which is not the norm or the primary
subject
Foucault’s panopticon: demonstrates the power of the imagined
spectator; leads to practices of self-regulation
The camera is the visible presence of the inspecting gaze that
we imagine
Foucault argues modern societies use power structures to
produce self-regulating citizens
Power relations establish the criteria for what gets to
count as knowledge in a given society, and knowledge systems
in turn produce power relations
Photographic images produces ideas of the ideal look or
body
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The Gaze and the Other
The act of looking commonly regarded as awarding more power to
the one looking rather than the one being looked at
Derrida: argues all binary oppositions (which the photograph
tends to encourage) encoded with values, and these oppositions
often overlap and are not mutually exclusive
The gaze encourages a self (or me)/ other binary =>Exotic
Other: La Grande Odalisque
The exotic other (usually operates on binary opposition between
West and East) (La Grande Odalisque)
The Gaze in Psychoanalysis
Cinematic apparatus (the traditional social space of the dark
theater) encourages viewers to suspend disbelief and identify
with characters in the film and the film’s ideology
Cinematic apparatus (the traditional social space of the dark
theater) encourages viewers to suspend disbelief and identify
with characters in the film and the film’s ideology
Female nude often understood as the project and possession of
the male artist (Venus and Cupid)
“men act, women appear” (John Berger)
the woman typically gazes at herself or outward at the viewer
who meets her look
Laura Mulvey: camera used as a tool to disempower those before
its look
Cinema geared toward male viewing pleasure, with women
positioned as objects of the gaze
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