spectatorship, power, and knowledge we invest images with the power to incite emotions within us,...
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Modernity, Spectatorship, Power,
and Knowledge
Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge
We invest images with the power to incite emotions within us, and images are also elements within the power relations between human subjects, and between individuals and institutions.
This section focuses away from reception to concepts of address.
Address refers to the way that an image constructs certain responses from an idealized viewer, whereas reception is about the ways in which actual viewers respond.
Modernity:(Modo = now)
A state of affairs characterized by innovation, experimentation, and certain
kinds of distancing from the past
Modernization:Advances in technology and science
Development of nation states
Democratic political systems
Expansion of capitalist modes of production
Modernization:Humanism and the Enlightenment
Colonialism
European and American imperialism
Modernity: 1500-2002
Major Problem of Modernity
René Descartes(1596-1650)
Cartesian Method:Traditional knowledge fails the test
My senses can deceive me
Memory is frail and vulnerable to deception
Language can deceive me
So, what is left?Cogito ergo sum
So, what is left?Cogito ergo sum
“I think, therefore I am”
Challenges to Modernism
Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis and Image making and
viewing
Freud and the Unconscious:
The Conscious Mind
Preconscious
The Unconscious Mind
Freud’s Structural Hypothesis
The Organism: The Id
Freud and the Ego
The Superego:Conscience and Ego Ideal
The Pleasure Principle vs. the Reality
Principle
Freud and the “Poetic Imagination”
For “poet” insert “artist”
Phantasy: Psychoanalytic term to describe unconscious desires,
fears, drives, etc.
ID EGO SUPEREGO
Barbie Doll Dictionaries Bible
Playboy Magazine Textbooks Book of Fables
Bottle of liquor Science toys Holy Water Vessel
Defense Mechanisms: Ambivalence
Avoidance
Denial
Fixation
Identification
Rationalization
Regression
Repression
Suppression
Symbols
Symbols: things that stand for other things
When we look at Images:
Consciousness (what an image does)
Preconscious (aspects of the image’s functionality which we may be aware)
Unconscious (unrecognized symbolic meanings connected to the object/image)
The Levels of Meaning:Conscious: Light cigarettes
Preconscious: Power to summon fire
Subconscious: Sexual union (“Baby won’t you light my fire”)
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
The Mirror Stage
The mirror phase and “Mimicry”
Construction of Self:First stage is at six months (mirror phase)
Second stage is at eighteen months (language phase)
Spectatorship
Spectator and Spectatorship
The roles of the unconscious and desire in viewing practices
The role of looking in the formation of the human subject
The ways looking is always a relational activity by an engaged subject and not a passive activity
I. Psychoanalysis and the Image Spectator
Psychoanalytic theory has addressed most directly the pleasure we derive from images, and the relationship between our desires and our visual world.
Spectatorship theory emphasizes the role of the psyche – particularly the unconscious, desire, and fantasy – in the practice of looking.
When psychoanalytic theory talks of the spectator, it treats it as an “ideal subject.”
Michel Foucault Critiques Modernity
Foucault’s ErasThe classical era (1660-1800)
The modern era (1800-1950)
“Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and proceeds from domination to domination” (Foucault 1977)
Foucault and Archaeology
"For many years now, historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events”.
Click icon to add picture
Foucault and IdentityIdentity and Power
Foucault Rejected this Idea:
Created Concept of Discourse
Foucault’s Work:Early
Great Impact
Gloomy
Foucault’s Method:Deconstruction
Discourse
Institutions
Spectatorship and the Gaze:
The role of the unconscious and desire in viewing practices
The role of looking in the formation of the human subject
The ways that looking is a relational activity
The Gaze = Address
Foucault on Spectatorship
Foucault and Power Relations
Power, Foucault, And The Asylum
Incarceration
Carceral Society
“The Norm”
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1791)
Pan=all and optic=seeing
"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (Foucault, Discipline 202-203).
Effects of the Panopticon:
Internalization of rules and regulations
Rehabilitation rather than cruel and unusual punishment
Surveillance into even more private aspects of our lives
Information society
Bureaucracy
Efficiency
Specialization
Back to Power….
What he Rejects: Foucault denies Marxian notion of power but does not
deny that power exists.
He is interested in institutional power (schools, hospitals, prisons).
He rejects the idea that power is generated by the state over lower classes or even by men over women or race over race.
He denies all these grand schemes and says power is found only in discourse itself.
He also dispenses with ideology; the language of ideology is deceptive to help fool you (e.g., debate over crime is a battle of discourses: conservatives v. liberals, etc.)
Foucault and Post-structuralism
Problems with Foucault?
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