VISA 1Q98 – Introduction to Visual Culture
Week 3 January 21 and 23 2013
Modernity – Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge
Rene Descartes
Widely know for his contributions to a rationalist philosophy that places
man at the centre of the universe
Interested in using the sciences and mathematics to establish rational
certainty about the world and nature; emphasized the importance of
techniques and instruments of objectivity designed to shore up
perception in the production of knowledge about the world
World becomes known when we accurately represent in thought, not
when we experience it through the senses and not when we imagine it
in our minds eye
The philosophy of modernity was based on the idea of the liberal
human subject as a self-knowing, unified, and autonomous entity with
individual human rights and freedoms
Modernity
• Term that scholars use to refer to the historical, cultural, political,
and economic condition related to the Enlightenment and the idea
of controlling nature through technology, science, and rationalism
• Belief that industrialization, human technology, mass democracy,
and the introduction of market economy are the hallmarks of social
progress
• Emergence of modernism- refers to a group of styles and
movements in art, architecture, literature, and culture around the
world dating from approximately the 1880-1900s Jurgen Habermas
Concept of the modern has been used over and over again by society
Present culture sees itself as the product of a transition from old to
new, modeling itself on a past era that is regarded as embodying
timeless and classical principles
Enlightenment thinkers and practitioners emphasized rationality and
the idea of achieving moral and social betterment through scientific
progress
Modernity hit its high in the in the 19 century with the increased
movement of populations from rural communities into cities and the
rise of industrial capitalism; Upheaval and change with optimism and
belief in a better, more advanced future
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument of the third international,
1919-20
• Intended to be a 1,312- foot high structure
consisting of a metal spiral frame tilted at an
angle, enclosing three glass structures
housing conference spaces
• Wanted to capture the vitality and dynamism
of the latest engineering and architectural
forms and technologies that the Soviet Union
Flaneur
• Kind of urban dandy who strolls through a modern city, a space that is
newly organized in modernity to encourage a mobile and specular
relationship to urban space and the new consumer goods of mass
manufacture displayed there
• Observes urban life through the glass windows and reflective surfaces
of a new city, and newly available goods for consumption
Karl Marx Criticized industrial capitalism for the systems economic and physical
exploitation and social alienation of workers; however, this is against
the labor system instituted under capitalism
Charles Baudelaire (Poet)
The urban experience of being lost in a crowd; Generates significant
cultural anxiety
Loss of the feeling of security and social connectedness that came with
old tradition
Charlie Chaplin
In the 1936 film Modern Times
Critique of the impact of modernity and industrialization has on the
body of the everyday man
Chaplin is swallowed up by the world of machines that surround him in
modern industrial society; attempts to retain his integrity as a human
subject while working on a brutally fast assembly line
Bruno Latour
Argues that we have never been truly modern, the rational, self
knowing human subject understood to stand at the center of the world
view associated with science and the enlightenment never existed
Sigmund Freud
The founder of psychoanalysis
Wrote that the subject is an entity governed by the unconscious, the
forces of which are held in check by consciousness; we are not aware
of our urges and desires that motivate us
Believed that we repress emotions, desires, taboo feelings, and
anxieties unconsciously in order to keep them in check
With this Foucault argues that…..
Instead repression does not result in leaving things unsaid, but is
productive of activities, speech, meanings, and sexualities Jacque Lacan
Argued that liberal human subject never really existed as such but was
an ideal against which emerges a subject who is radically split at the
very time it comes into being
The human subject becomes aware of itself and thus emerges as such
not at birth but during the period of self awareness and apparent
autonomy that begins around the age 6-18 months “The mirror
phase” where the infant gains motor skills to venture away from the
maternal body
Emphasizes that the gaze is a property of the object and not the
subject who looks; the object functions to make the subject look,
making the subject appear to himself or herself as lacking
Not only can objects make us look, but they can also make us
understand ourselves as subjects who want to look and who cannot
help but look, even if we do not see ourselves as the one who the
object hails – the one by whom the object is meant to be seen
Identification an important area of scholarship on spectatorship has
been devoted to understanding how we respond to images through
identification with them, or with the figures/objects
Christian Metz
Film Theorist wrote “ What fundamentally determines me is the look
which is outside” this means: “I” exist to myself only insofar as I can
imagine myself in a field in which I appear in light of others who make
me apparent to myself
The viewer suspends disbelief in the fictional world of the film and
identifies not only with the characters but with the films overall
ideology; this identification puts into play fantasy structures that
derive from the viewer’s unconscious The concept of the unconscious is crucial to film spectatorship because
the fundamental elements of the psychoanalysis gaze lies with the
unconscious mental process
Beneath our unconscious, daily social interaction there exists a
dynamic, active realm of forces of desire that is inaccessible to our
rational and logical selves that has been repressed
Film is like externalized places for the activation of the kinds of
memories and fantasies that typically work their way to the surface in
dreams
Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656
• Composed in a manner that positions the
spectator ambiguously; the painting is a
depiction of a room within the kings palace
in which several figures interact
• At the centre of the painting is the daughter
and behind her, at the deepest space within
the room the composition is split; On one
side there is a doorway where the artist
appears himself
• The artist looks through the doorway at us
and at the backs of the figures facing us in
the foreground of the painting.
• Foucault discusses that the spectator in the
relationship not only to the royal couple but
also to the looks of the painter and child;
this painting challenges verisimilitude of
paintings during this period by introducing
instability in a previously stable system of
Discourse
representation
• Used to describe passages of writing or speech, the act of talking
about something • Foucault was interested in the rules and practices that produce
meaningful statements and regulate what can be spoken in different
historical periods; a group of statements that provide a means for
talking about a particular topic at a particular historical moment
Panopticism
• A prison structure designed by the English philosopher Jeremy
Bentham to emphasize the inspecting gaze
• Building composed of rings of cells, at the centre of which stood a
guard tower and when positioned in the tower, the guard could see
and hear activity in the prison cells, but the guard could not be seen by
the inmates
• Observation ports were covered in blinds and designed to block visual
evidence from the presence or absence of the observer, making it
possible for prisoners to imagine the presence of a guard when it is in
fact unmanned
• Prisoners would come to i
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