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”.

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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?