Mirrors, Maps, and the Gaze –

The Politics of Visual Culture

6 December, 2014
 The Gaze
• Jacques Lacan’s  term, psychoanalytic theory:
– the anxious state that comes with the awareness
that one can be viewed
– Effect: the subject realises that he/she is an object
loses a degree of autonomy
– Similar to the mirror stage: when a child looks into
a mirror and realises that he/she has an external
appearance
• Other theoreticians: Sartre, M. Foucault, etc
Hieronymus Bosch: The Conjurer
(1496-1520)
Being watched
 Versions of the Gaze
• The medical gaze:  Foucault’s  term to explain
power dynamics btw doctors and patients; the
hegemony of medical knowledge in society
• The male gaze: Laura Mulvey’s  feminist
concept: gender power asymmetry in film
– Heterosexual men control the camera: women are
objectified
– Female gaze: the same, bec. women look at
themselves through the eyes of men
– active/male versus passive/female
Tintoretto: Susannah and the Elders
 Venus with a Mirror
Titian Veronese
 The Venus Effect
• Psychology of perception
• Image in painting/photograph: holding a
mirror
• Viewer’s  interpretation: Venus can see her
own face, even if it is impossible
Velasquez: Venus at her Mirror
Robert Doisneau: An Oblique Look
(1948)
 Griselda Pollock: Modernity and the
Spaces of Femininity
• The female gaze is often visually negated
• Man and woman: viewing different images
– Image of nude woman: in view of the spectator
– Image that the woman is watching: unseen
• Man: distracted by nude, ignoring the woman’s  
comment on the image
• Woman: contrasted to the nude
– instead of accepting the male gaze, she actively
returns and confirms the gaze of masculine spectator
Other versions of the image
 The Gaze in Cinematic Theory
• Spectator's gaze: that of the spectator viewing the text
• Intra-diegetic gaze: in a text, a character gazes upon an
object or another character in the text
• Extra-diegetic gaze: a textual character consciously
looks at the viewer, e.g. an aside to the audience; in
cinema, acknowledgement of the fourth wall, the
viewer
• Camera's gaze: the film director’s  gaze
• Editorial gaze: emphasises a textual aspect, e.g. a
photograph, its cropping and caption direct the reader
to a specific person, place, or object in the text
 Other types of Gaze
• the gaze of a bystander - outside the world of the text,
the gaze of another individual in the viewer’s social
world catching the latter in the act of viewing - can be
highly charged, e.g. where the text is erotic
• the averted gaze - a depicted person’s noticeable
avoidance of the gaze of another, or of the camera lens
or artist (and thus of the viewer) looking up, looking
down or looking away
• the gaze of an audience within the text - e.g. televisual
texts (game shows) often include shots of an audience
watching those performing in the 'text within a text'
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
 Geoffrey Sax: Othello (2001)
• http://www.youtube.co
m/watch?v=I1JKyvryCrc
&list=PL27DAEFFFB8B7
8305&index=1
 The Imperial Gaze
• E. Ann Kaplan: post-colonial concept of
imperial gaze
– The observed: find themselves defined in terms of
the observer’s  own set of value-preferences
– Imperialist gaze: simplifies, trivialises what it falls
upon, asserting its command & ordering function
• “The  imperial  gaze  reflects  the  assumption  
that the white western subject is central much
as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the
male subject” (Kaplan)
 Bell Hooks: The Oppositional Gaze:
Black Female Spectators
• afraid to look but fascinated by the gaze: the
power in looking
• a site of resistance for colonised black people:
critical gaze, oppositional
• Watching TV: developing critical spectatorship
– Gender differences: black male gaze = rape
– Black females: presence as absence
• Oppositional gaze: choosing not to identify
with either the victim or the perpetrator
Sharbat Gula (Afghanistan), 1984
 The Map
• Symbol of colonial power: charting new
territory (for military control, etc)
• Naming (in the colonisers’  language),
homogenisation
• But also shifting, transitory, flexible spaces
• Frequency in post-colonial literary texts
– Often ironic/parodic usage
– Link between de/reconstructive reading of maps
and revisioning the history of colonialism
The Map as a Symbol of Power
The British Empire
British India
The Upside-Down Map
 Map – Mirror – Simulacrum
• Ways of representation in visual
communication:
– Image as mirror of reality
– Image as map of reality
– Image as a simulacrum (seems to reproduce but
hides reality)
 Image as Mirror
• Documentaries, newscasts
• The image persuades through its mimesis
• Clues, paratextual markers, etc claim that the
image is truthful
• Live broadcasting, presenter on location
• Photography: medium of film
 Image as Map
• Advertisements, propaganda, fiction
• Image persuades through its tellability
• Reality: structured to provide clues for helpful
or pleasurable orientation
• Clues, pragmatic contexts claim that the image
is worth looking at
• Loud colours, big letters, gratification through
pleasant images, catchy phrases, etc
 Image as Simulacrum
• Attempts to persuade through its mimesis
I’m afraid of Americans - David Bowie
• But does not actually correspond to reality
• persuasive powers are shattered
• “I’m  afraid of mimetic persuasion”
• Image as simulacrum discredits other images
through its profound scepticism
• Needs to be followed by a productive
argument to offer an alternative which can
attain a position of power in the debate
 Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
• 1892: Berlin, Jewish
banker family
• University studies:
Freiburg, Paris, Munich,
Berlin, Bern
• Influential friends: Th.
Adorno, B. Brecht, R. M.
Rilke, E. Bloch
• 1940: suicide at Spanish
border (unclear)
 Benjamin’s  Work
• Interested in philosophy and literature
• Genre theory (tragedy, German tragic drama)
• Art theory
– Art in the age of reproducibility
– History of film and photography
– Relationship between visual and verbal / word
and image; a novel representation of visual
experience
• Philosophy of history; philosophy of language
 The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (1935-39)
• Issues of repetition
• Authenticity vs reproducibility
• Historical testimony and the authority of the
object is jeopardised through reproduction
• Plurality of copies replace unique existence
• Shattering of tradition, liquidation of value of
cultural heritage
• Aura – uniqueness of a distance; desire to bring
things closer; desire to overcome uniqueness of
reality by accepting its reproduction
• Uniqueness: embedded in tradition – cult
• Ritualistic basis: recognisable in cult of beauty
• Cult value vs exhibition value (Sistine Madonna)
• Technical reproduction: absolute emphasis on
exhibition new functions for art
• Human face: last vestige of cult value
• Performance of stage actor: in person, screen
actor: presented by a camera
• Identification with actor: identification with the
camera in reality
 Film actor’s  experience
• Identification is denied: no single experience,
many separate parts
• Reflected image (mirror) has become
separable, transportable
• Shriveling aura in the studio, artificial build-up
outside the studio: star cult (preserves the
spell of a commodity)
• Illusory nature of spectacle: result of cutting
• Magician vs surgeon: painter vs cameraman
• Reaction of masses toward art: changed by
mechanical reproduction
• Individual reactions predetermined by mass
media response
• Psychology: after Freud, unnoticed things
became isolated, analysable
• Film: optical, acoustical perception: similar
deepening of self-consciousness
• Artistic and scientific uses of photography
• Contemplation impossible before film: shock
effect, constant, sudden change
• The mass/quantity: produced a change in quality,
in the mode of participation
• Contemplation: viewer absorbed by art
• Distraction: art absorbed by the mass
• Public: absent-minded examiner
• Fascism: sees its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure
• Communism responds by politicising art
Raphael: Sistine Madonna (1512)
Eugene Atget:
Corner of Rue des
Nonnains d'Hyeres
and rue de l'Hotel de
Ville, Paris (July
1899)
Eugene Atget: Rue
Mazarine (1902)
 Photography as Trace
• A trace, an impression, an index of the real
“not  only an image (as a painting is an image), an
interpretation of the real; it is also a trace,
something directly stenciled off the real, like a
footprint  or  a  death  mask”  (Susan  Sontag: “Image-
World”)
• Special status
its uniqueness derived from its production; a
photograph is a “  material vestige of its subject”