mariko mori, subway, 1994 1 introduction. todays lecture is entitled, blinding us with science. with...
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Guillame Duchenne (Dr. Duchenne), Figure 58 of Illustrations for ”Mechanisme de la physionomie humaine”, 1854 Chapter 8 “Scientific Looking, Looking at Science” attempts to deal with the blindness that science casts over our eyes. But it does not attempt to do this by teaching us scientific formulas or by conducting laboratory experiments. No. Chapter 8 rather illustrates how visual cultural analysis can help us to understand the SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION of much that is called scientific knowledge. This is the idea that science can not be understood outside of social and cultural contexts in which such knowledge is produced. As Sturken and Cartwright insist “Scientific looking is as culturally dependent as the other practices of looking we have examined. Our view of scientific images must take into account the culture and experience of looking at art and popular media and the way in which we look at advertising images, because scientific looking does not occur in isolation from these other contexts.” (p. 279) ATTEMPT TO RECORD HUMAN EMOTIONS with early use ELECTRODES.TRANSCRIPT
Mariko Mori, Subway, 1994 1 Introduction.Todays lecture is
entitled, Blinding Us With Science.With this title, I appropriate
and reworked a song by a new wave musician from the 1980s named
Thomas Dolby whose song was called: She Blinded Me with
Science.What does it mean to be blinded with science?It means that
we live in a world where science and technology have achieved a
level of unquestioned authority and power. We do not question
science, we often do not really understand it.How many of us know
the exact workings of an atomic bomb or even of a personal
computer? Science has become mysterious and mystified and only an
elite group of scientists, engineers, and technicians (who can be
viewed as post-modern magicians) know how and why it works.We (the
laypeople) merely have faith in it accepting the wonders and
achievements of science and technology. Given this mind set, we
assume that scientific imagery represents objective knowledge. In
putting on a futuristic space suit on the Tokyo subway, conceptual
photographer Mariko Mori makes herself fashionably scientific and
invests herself with its mystery and authority. Guillame Duchenne
(Dr. Duchenne), Figure 58 of Illustrations forMechanisme de la
physionomie humaine, 1854 Chapter 8 Scientific Looking, Looking at
Science attempts to deal with the blindness that science casts over
our eyes.But it does not attempt to do this by teaching us
scientific formulas or by conducting laboratory
experiments.No.Chapter 8 rather illustrates how visual cultural
analysis can help us to understand the SOCIAL AND CULTURAL
CONSTRUCTION of much that is called scientific knowledge.This is
the idea that science can not be understood outside of social and
cultural contexts in which such knowledge is produced.As Sturken
and Cartwright insist Scientific looking is as culturally dependent
as the other practices of looking we have examined.Our view of
scientific images must take into account the culture and experience
of looking at art and popular media and the way in which we look at
advertising images, because scientific looking does not occur in
isolation from these other contexts. (p. 279) ATTEMPT TO RECORD
HUMAN EMOTIONS with early use ELECTRODES. Frank and Lillian
Gilbreth, Chronocyclegraph of Woman Staking Buttons, 1917
From this perspective, the pure objectivity of scientific knowledge
begins to falter and we begin to think about the particular
ideological and cultural interests that are invested in science and
its visual representation.We have already touched upon the
questioning of scientific authority in Chapter 3 when we studied
the work of Michel Foucault and his ideas regarding the
interconnection between power (which is invested in institutional
authorities) and the production of knowledge and the way that this
interconnectedness of power and knowledge challenges the neutrality
of scientific truth. In this chapter, we will return to these
dynamics by investigating a number of studies that deal with
scientific looking specifically. WHAT ARE THE INTERESTS of the
GILBRETHs PROJECT? Carl David Anderson, The Discovery of the
Positive Electron or positron, 1932
2. IMAGES AS EVIDENCE.Since the beginning of photography, claims
have been made about machine-made images with the capacity to
exceed the power of the naked eye and, with such extended powers of
vision, to offer us new truths about the body and about the
universe.This has been one of the ruling assumptions of the
discourse of SCIENTIFIC PHOTOGRAPHY with its claims to see both the
very near and the very far.In the first category, MICROSCOPIC
PHOTOGRAPHY has captured and magnified images that are too
miniscule for the naked eye.For example, here you see C.D.
Andersons micro-photographic image of a positron, a sub-atomic
particle that can only be seen through a high-powered microscope.
William Anders, Earthrise, December 24, 1968
In the latter category, TELESCOPIC photography has allowed us to
see distant galaxies or when combined with space travel to look
back and to contemplate spaceship Earth as accomplished by the
Apollo astronauts of the 1960s and 70s. THE VIEW FROM SPACE has now
reached MARS in its latest NASA installment. Wilhelm Conrad
Rontgen, X-Ray of Frau Rontgens Hand with Ring, c 1895-96
The power to see into the beyond has also been coupled with the
power to see through things.This recalls the magic of X-RAYS a mode
of scientific photography that was discovered by the German
scientist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen in the 1890s (1895-6) and which
produced interior images of the body that revealed bone structure
and density. Unknown Artist, Ballyhoos Candid X-Ray Cameraman,
1934
The idea of X-ray vision entered into popular culture and it has
been a source of erotic voyeuristic and superhero fantasies (e.g.,
Superman) as seen in Ballyhoos Candid X-Ray Cameraman
(1934).Whatever the type of imagemaking - x-ray, micro-photography,
or tele-photography, every one of them has been viewed as providing
visual evidence of the how the universe really looks and
works.These visual images are valued and invested with authority
offering scientific proof for such disciplinary practices as
biology, astronomy, and biomedicine. Francis Galton, Frontispiece
from Inquiries into Human Faculties, 1883
However, in its looking at science, Chapter 8 looks at a number of
cases of images as evidence that do not appear to be so innocent
and where the scientific looking has been conditioned by racist
ideologies. For one, there is the use of photography in the
questionable science of EUGENICS. Eugenics emerged in the mid- to
late- nineteenth century through the work of the British
statistician, Francis GALTON who authored such books as the
Inquiries into Human Faculties (1883).Eugenics was devoted to the
study and control of human reproduction as a means to improve the
human race. It made use of composite photography to classify and
categorize human beings, to represent general types of people as
visual evidence of norms and ideals on the one hand or of deviance
and pathology on the other.This was clearly a case of categorical
photography where people were classified into us and them on the
basis of racial and other presumed heredity traits. Francis Galton,
Galtonian Composite Criminal (from Havlock Ellis The Criminal) ca
1880
Eugenics proposed that intellectual and moral qualities were
hereditary and that some races were therefore superior to others.As
well as conveniently providing a justification for European
colonialism, eugenics represented class differences as biological,
viewing the inclination of the lower social classes towards
deviance as a result of a lack of hereditary good qualities. Thus
Galton made composite images of the criminal type believing that
photography could offer a visual archive of pathology that could
read disease off the surface of the body.(p. 282) Francis Galton,
Criminal Composites from the Life, Letters and Labours of France,
1878
In his important essay The Body and the Archive, Allan Sekula
reviews Galtons search for a biological determined criminal type in
the following manner.Through one of his several applications of
composite portraiture, Galton attempted to construct a purely
optical apparition of the CRIMINAL TYPE.This photographic
impression of an abstract, statistically defined, and empirically
non-existent criminal face was both the most bizarre and the most
sophisticated of many concurrent attempts to marshall photographic
evidence in the search for the essence of crime.(p. 353) Francis
Galton, The Jewish Type, Plate 35, 1883
Even more problematic is the fact that eugenics was later embraced
by the Nazis to serve their racist ideology and their goal to
eliminate certain racial types whom Nazi science claimed were
degenerate in contrast to the ideal Aryan race.Thus, Galtons
composite photographs of the Jewish type (1883) used as scientific
evidence of an inferior racial type appear quite eerie in light of
the Holocaust sixty years later. George Halliday, Rodney King Video
Still in colour, 1991
3. RODNEY KING VIDEO. When Rodney King was beaten by the Los
Angeles police in 1990, the event was recorded by amateur cameraman
George Halliday.With such visual evidence in hand, a conviction on
the charge of police brutality seemed to be just a matter of
course.But, as counter-intuitive as it might sound, the defense
turned to that very same visual evidence to undermine the
prosecution.By slowing down the tape and analyzing it frame by
frame the lawyers managed to make a case that King had presented a
threat to the police.Your textbooks reviews the technical tricks
that were used by the defense on p. 287:slowed projection, freeze
framing, blowups of portions of the full frame, digitized markings
on the frame directing viewers where to look and computerized
stills (frame grabs) excerpted from the tape. George Halliday,
Rodney King Video Still in black and white, 1991
Rather than a video recording being understood to provide
self-evident PROOFS of certain facts in line with a positivist
model of photographic truth, the truth of reproduction is up for
grabs. In the Rodney King trial, the video footage was subject to
reframing, manipulation, and editing in line with the particular
agendas of both the prosecution and the defense. The traditional
notion of the objective eyewitness has now become a VIRTUAL WITNESS
mobilized to support a range of differing interpretations. Court
TV, LAPD Defense with Rodney King Video Still, 1992.
Does the tape show Rodney King as a passive victim getting the crap
beat out of him by the aggressive policemen?Or does the tape show
Rodney King making threatening moves towards the officers and
provoking the beating through his own behavior? The latter argument
on the part of the defense attorney was sufficiently credible for
an all-white jury who were no doubt predisposed to acquit the
policemen of any wrongdoing. Anonymous, Portrait of Rodney King,
1996.
What your textbook does not mention is that the Rodney King verdict
led to riots and outrage on the streets of the black ghettos of Los
Angeles and raised the specter of racism that plagues American
society.Rodney King pleaded for sanity and community when he said
at the time: Can we all just get along? But unfortunately, the way
in which the Rodney King video had been used at the trial
illustrates that the use of video footage as legal evidence in the
service of SCIENTIFIC LOOKING (now in scarequotes) raises the
question -- whose evidence? and whose interpretation? Portrait of
Muybridge, ca 1885
4. ANIMAL LOCOMOTION AND THE PERFORMANCE OF GENDER.In Chapter 4, we
were introduced to the work of Eadweard Muybridge and how his
time-motion studies of animal and human locomotion (the so-called
photography of movement) lead to the discovery of the cinema.
Eadweard Muybridge, Man Hurling a Discus, ca 1887
Muybridge set up batteries of camera (12 or 24) and from different
angles that enabled him to observe human physiology and to analyze
movement to the 1/1000 of a second.Therefore, the camera was turned
to as an objective eyewitness that could see beyond the powers of
the naked eye in this earlier case study of frame by frame
analysis.This means that the camera and the photography of movement
were both invested with scientific authority and placed in the
service of PHYSIOLOGICAL SCIENCE. John Lamprey, Anthropometric
Study, 1868
Like the photo-colonialist photographers and their anthropometric
studies (of whom the time-motion studies were contemporaries),
Muybridge made it a point to set up his subjects (most of who are
naked in these experiments) in relation to the Cartesian grid the x
and y coordinates that nvoke and reinforce the codes of science.
Eadweard Muybridge, Man Throwing a Heavy Rock, ca 1887
However, before one gets carried away with the scientificity of
these images, it is important to take a step back and think about
how these visual representations are culturally constructed and to
do so in ways that challenges their neutrality and their
objectivity.For one, there are the GENDER ISSUES that are raised by
these images.As your book reviews on page 290, men are cast in
macho roles and perform tasks with bats and balls and other
athletic activities Eadweard Muybridge, Woman Kicking a Hat,
1887
while women are confined to domestic and frivolous tasks like
sweeping, pouring a jug a water, or the very bizarre NUDE KICKING A
HAT.One might ask what is the scientific meaning of such a gesture
or of another performative action where a nude woman is shown
climbing into bed.Indeed, such actions and the codes of gender upon
which they depend appear to say a lot more about SCIENTIFIC DESIRE
than they do about SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE.From this perspective,
Muybridge enacts his erotic fantasies in staging these
mini-performances that are far from objective and rational and that
mark them as a cultural construction. Keeping this in mind, let us
look at this videotape produced by James Shelton which animates
Muybridges TIME-MOTION STUDIES and that allows us to see such
GENDER-CODING in action. Portrait of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, ca
1870
THE CASE OF DR. CHARCOT.The same type of critical analysis is
applicable to the photographs of the French neurologist and
clinical psychologist, Jean Martin CHARCOT at his Saltpetriere
asylum in France in the late 19th century Jean Martin Charcot.
Attitudes passionnelles: menac from his Iconographie photographique
de la Salptrire ( ). Charcot used photography (both stills and
series) to observe and extract knowledge from female patients who
were classified as hysterical and therefore as insane. As in the
case of Dr. Diamond, the camera was turned to as a scientific
instrument to record the symptoms of HYSTERIA and produce
scientific knowledge.Butthis visual evidence of hysteria also
indexes power relations and the inscription of institutional
authority.In other words, it is important to apply a Foucauldian
lens of power/knowledge to these images. Andre Brouillet, A
Clinical Lesson given by Charcot at his Clinic, 1883
From this perspective, Charcots photography is to be viewed as an
exercise of power and authority by male scientists over female
subjects who produce knowledge that further reinforces their
institutional power.Functioning as scientific evidence, these
images only serve to reinforce gender stereotypes that suppress the
voices of their patients and that blinds us to the underlying
social fabric and cultural forces that created the FEMALE HYSTERIA
in the first place i.e., the repressive gender roles that confined
(and contained) women in Western cultures in the nineteenth
century.