Seminar 2... Lecture Discussion and Task Preparation

Lecture Discussion

- Base
- Superstructure
- Materialism - in philosophical sense where all things in society.
- (Base) Forces of production: materials, tools, workers, people, skills, technology - parts of scoiety; from these there are relations of production: master/slave, employer/employee - you either control these forces or are controlled by them.
- (Superstructure) Forms of consciousness religion, politics, culture, state, law.
- Ideas in politics - born out of societies' antagonisms.
- Base/structure relationship - base reconditions superstructures which gives base strength: 'dialetic' e.g. base (forces of production) - men are dominant class - statistically proven. Women - weaker, objectified - which almost reinforces how men should dominate.
- Praxis - unification of theory in relation to the world.
- Culture emerges from base so ideas of culture are ideological.
- Ideology - system of ideas - false consciousness (seem to be true but disguise or mask the real nature).
- Idea of gender: women are the asethetic sex (idea, historically constructed) - women are made to be aesthetic due to their lower/weaker position in society.
- Popular culture vs Culture (Taste: Gatekeeper - ideological - created by ruling class - 'mass culture is bad, high culture is good' - protecting their own classes.
- To have taste - must be taken from elite.
- People from council estates don't have facilities to form taste.
- Bordieu - Cultural Capital.
- Culture is possessed by the ruling class, in the pursuuit of culture you can moce upwards.
- Education now gives you cultural capital - not about development of individual - gain a 'badge' or letters which opens doors.
- Arnoldism - 'Anarchy'.
- Leavisism.
- Frankfurt School - important Marxist thinkers. Nazi's closed down the school - focussed on popular culture - most interesting project, why working class people were involved in systems that were against them.
- 'All mass culture is identical' - like car production in a line - formulaic.
- Authentic culture works on a different levels, it makes you think about it in a real way.
- Dick Hebdige - 'Youth cultural styles begin by using symbolic challenges, but they must end by establishing new conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones'.

Task

- Read Adorno and summarise the essay.
- Post a link to a Youtube pop video that epitomises Adorno's sentiments.

Lecture 3... The Gaze

Call of Duty

- 1st person player clip
- 'intense, life-like'
- 'enables me to think I'm in the game'

- 3rd person player clip
'more cinematic like an interactive movie'
'it's harder to control other people in the third - that's why I like it'

(Different perspectives)

-What motivates us to hurt?
- What motivates us to watch it?
- Can control engagement with death and violence - maximum or minimum.
- Choice is down to player.

- Psychoanalysis: analysis of options and choices we make.

Aims

- Look at ideas about the power of looking through psychoanalysis.
- Consider: scopophilia, suture, intra/extra-diagetic and narcissim.
- Introduce film theory and feminist psychoanalysis.
- Key thinkers/authors: Freud, Mulvey (Women as sex objects), Jacques Lacan and Kaja Silverman.

Different perspectives

- First lecture looked at the power of the gaze through 'discourse analysis' - how knowledge is formed. And focussed on institutional structures.

- This lecture looks at the gaze through psychoanalysis. This will focus on psychical, interpersonal and sexual relations.

Misconceptions

- Mishmash of psychology (behaviour) and psychiatry (mental illness).

Linked to both that can be applied to all aspects of society, art and design.

-It's all about sex.

It does focus on the role of sexuality, particularly at infancy but is also about how we look at other objects, and our behaviour towards them.

Laura Mulvey 'Visual and Other Pleasures'

- Hollywood films - sexist - gaze is represented as male and powerful.
- Plot of film, male driven.
- Women are seen as sex objects.


-Scopophilia

- Pleasure of looking at others' bodies as objects.
- Instinctual desire to look - this emerges in childhood.
- Extreme scopophilia - can lead to voyeurism in which the person's only sexual gratification comes from being a peeping tom.
- Narcissistic identification: (Mulvey) spectators identify with male hero.


Jacques Lacan - Mirror Stage

- Projected notion of ideal ego in image reflected.
- Child's own body - less perfect.
- Films can produce a fascination in image - lead to loss of ego.
- Comic book guy's narcissistic identification with film hero and comic book only highlight loss of ego.

Contradiction in two pleasurable structures...


1. scopophilia - sexual stimulation by sight (objectifying actors on screen).
2. narcissistic identification - with image seen.

- Cinema thrives on contradiction.
- Product of patriarchal realities.

Women as image/ Men as bearer of look

- Passive female, active male.
- Male gaze projects fantasy on to female figure.
-'male figure cnanot bear the burden of sexual objectification'
- 'By means of identification with him (male actor e.g. Brad Pitt), through participation in his power the spectator can indirectly possess her (female actress e.g. Angelina Jolie) too.

Suture (extending Mulvey's theory)

- Spectators look through eyes of the actors in the film.
- Follow gaze - without guilt.
- Can be broken - actor speaks to us.
- When broken - audience aware of gaze.
- Possibility of audience feeling guilty.
- This gaze invites audience to be part of scene.

Spectator's gaze

- Gaze of viewer at an image.
- Most common form of gaze.
e.g. Us viewing Toby (lecturer).
- We are also viewing others in audience, this is...

Intra-diagetic gaze

- Gaze of one depicted person at another within an image.
e.g. Toby sees us looking at him and looking at others

Degas: Le Vial (The Rape)

Cropped image above.

Full image.
Gaze: Intra-diagetic
- It is the character that gazes at the subject (girl).
- This exhibits the power of the gaze, we don't obtain it but recognise the power.
- Defers guilt.

Dolce and Gabbana Advert
Gaze: Intra-diagetic
- No guilt, we are not perpetrators.
- Possibility of narcissistic identification.

Edouard Manet: A Bar at the Folies Bergère
Gaze: Extra Diagetic
- Invited to be viewed as the artist.

Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (1946-1966) Mixed media.

- Go up to door look through hole.

- Translation: being given.

- Being given what? The gaze? Permission?

- Contemporary computer games use different forms of the gaze.

- Hitman pick, intra-diagetic or suture.

- Suture forces empathy, between player and protagonist.

- This is broken when we are rmeinded that the gaze is constructed.

Conclusion

- Different forms of the gaze evoke different structures of power.

- We can objectify (scopophilia) and identify (narcissistic identification).

- Visual culture employs different gazes to evoke structures of patriarchy.

Lecture 2... Critical Positions in the Media

Aims

- Critically define 'popular culture'.
- Contrast ideas of 'culture' with 'popular culture' and 'mass culture'.
- Introduce Cultural Studies and Critical Theory.
- Define ideology.
- Interrogate the social function of the mass media and the extent to which the media constitutes us as subjects.


What is Culture?


- 'One of the two or three most complicated words in the Englsih language'.

- General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society at a particular time.

- A particular way of life.

- Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance.



Marx's Concept of Base and Superstructure



Base:
Forces of production – materials, tools, workers, skills.
Relations of production – employer/employee, class.

Superstructure:
Social institutions – legal, political, cultural.
Forms of consciousness – ideology.

'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’
(Marx, Communist Manifesto)

Base… Determines content and form of… Superstructure.
Superstructure… Reflects forms of and legitimises… Base.

Marx (1857) Quote on ‘Contribution to the critique of Political Economy’
- Born into capitalistic society, with capitalist values – see through capitalist lens.

Ideology

- system of ideas and beliefs.
- masking, distortion or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creation of ‘false consciousness’.

Pyramid of Capitalist System

Superstructure:
- The State.
- Instruments of the state.
- Ideological and Physical Coercion.

Base:
- The Bourgeoisie.
- The Proletariat.

Raymond Williams (1983) ‘Keywords’

Popular:
- Well liked by many people.
- Inferior kinds of work (not high culture).
- Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people (tries to win the masses).
- Culture actually made by the people themselves (Made by people, for the people).

Inferior or Residual Culture

- Popular Press vs Quality Press
- Popular Cinema vs Art Cinema
- Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane (2005) ‘Folk Archive Archive'
- Painted eggs – Tate.
- Graffiti in South Bronx.
- Banksy piece exhibited in Covent Garden.
- Revolve around class and identity.

E.P. Thomson (1963) ‘The Making of the English Working Class’

- Bourgeois and Working Class split: physically, socially, and spiritually.
- Working Class do not have the means to go places.

Matthew Arnold (1867) ‘Culture and Anarchy’

Culture…
- ‘The best that has been thought and said in the world’ – much criticised.
- Study of perfection.
- Attained through disinterested, reading, waiting and thinking.
- Pursuit of culture.
- Seeks ‘to minister the diseased spirit of the time’.


Anarchy…
- Working Class are uncultured.
- ‘Raw and half developed.’

Leavisism – F.R. Leavis & Q.D. Leavis

- Still forms a kind of repressed common sense attitude to popular culture in this country.
- For Leavis – 20th Century sees a cultural decline.
- Standardisation and levelling down ‘Culture has always been in minority keeping.’

- Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy (anarchy).
- Popular culture offers addictive forms of attraction and compensation.
- Hollywood films are largely 'masturbatory'.
- Weak imitations and attempts of normal life.
- 'Addicts' like a disease/drug.
- Threat to ruling class.


Frankfurt School - (Institute of Social Research)

- Founded in 1923 as an appendage to University of Frankfurt.
- Critical Theory - Marxism and Psychoanalysis.
- How culture affects our thinking.


Thinkers:
- Theodore Adorno
- Max Horkheimer
- Herbert Marcuse
- Leo Lowenthal
- Walter Benjamin


Adorno and Horkhesiter


- Reinterpretted Marxism for 20th Century - era of 'late capitalism'.
- 'The Culture Industry' - homogenous and predictable.
- 'All mass culture is identical'.
- 'As soon as the film begins it's quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished and forgotten'.


Herbert Marcuse


- Popular Culture vs Affirmative Culture.
- Negation = Depriving Culture of its great refusal.


Authentic Culture vs Mass Culture


Qualities of authentic culture:
- Real.
- European.
- Multi-dimensional.
- Active Consumption – interact and think.
- Individual Creation.
- Imagination.
- Negation.
- AUTONOMOUS.

Products of the Contemporary ‘Culture Industry’

- Hollyoaks – focuses on university students, reduced to tacky strippers and sex objects for annual calendar.
- Che Guevara on t-shirts = not representing communist revolution, its the mass media that has reduced this icon to its superficial form that's purely for aesthetics.
- X Factor – talented musicians exploited by the mass media.

Williamson (1978) ‘Decoding Advertisements’

- Instead of people being identified for what they produce, they are identified by what they consume.
- ‘Workers with two cars and a colour TV are not part of the working class’.
- Made to feel we can rise and fall in society by what we can afford to buy.

Adorno ‘On Popular Music’

- Loved classical music as it is multi-dimensional.
- Popular music is mass marketed, standardised and mechanical.
- ‘Social cement’.
- Like one song – love the genre – songs very similar – makes the decision for the listener about liking the music.
- Produces passivity through ‘rhythmic’ and ‘emotional adjustment’.
- People listen to music to escape from horrors of the world.

Walter Benjamin (1936) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

- Introduction of new technologies – new possibilities.
- New techniques of mass production – challenges dominance of previous authority.

Aura: Quality and Authority

- Mona Lisa – socially important – behind bullet-proof glass in the Louvre – visit to see the work of art is like a religious pilgrimage.
- Now the Mona Lisa is printed on t-shirts, dodgy plates which challenges its importance – and allows others to create their own personal interpretation
- Mass culture creates revolutionary possibilities.
- Emergence of pop culture as a serious topic of study: England, Birmingham School, Dick Hebdige.

Conclusion

- Culture and civilisation tradition emerges from and represents anxieties about social and cultural extension. They attack, mass culture because it threatens cultural standards and social authority.
- The Frankfurt school emerged from Marxism attacking mass culture as it is a threat to cultural standards and depoliticises the working class, therefore maintaining social authority.-
-Pronouncements on popular culture usually rely on normative or elitist judgements.
- Ideology is a mask to cultural and class differences, creating the interests of few as the interests of all.
- Popular culture as an ideology.
- The analysis of popular culture and the mass media is incredibly political, and has been contested, and this needs to be taken into account with those engaging with it or practicing it.

Seminar 1... Lecture Discussion and Task Preparation

Discussion

- Panopticism - metaphor.
- Docile bodies - state of conscioussness, easily controlled, take instruction, obedient, not lazy - incredibly productive e.g. Education, Soldiers (trained and disciplined - effect on body, unthinkingly takes orders).
- Surveillance (Studies born from Foucault - D.Lyon)
- Self regulation - training/instructing the self.
- Power - only exists when exercised 'a relationship not a capacity.' One only has power over someone else when that person willingly enters the relationship - there is a possibility to challenge or rebel.
- The Gaze - institution - the Panopticon creates a situation where the Panopticon is personified - with rules and regulations.
(Institution - work places, school - personal situations can be seen as a institution such as families and marriage, as more often than not, a hierarchy exists.)
- Disciplining - shift from something that's physically exercised to a more subtle, mental form of control - like a technology no one to control it - automatic...
...leading to a disciplinarian society.
- Ideas of what is normal.

The Task

- Take 5 quotes from the text and relate to a 'contemporary panopticon'.

*Ideas of contemporary panopticons... School (register as surveillance)... Hospital (docile bodies)

Example: Hospital
Supporting Quotes: '...strict spacial partitioning...' Hospital wards.
'...each street is placed under the authority of a syndic...' Patients under nurse and doctor.
'...everything that may be observed during the course of the visits - deaths illnesses, complaints, irregularities...' Health visits.
'document bears 'the name, age, sex of everyone notwithstanding his conditions' Patient file.

Feedback

- Also makes individuals self-regulate behaviour, especially visitors.
- Not perfect Foucauldian example; MRSA there is a risk of contagion.

Other examples: Facebook, Mobile phones, Media sensationalisation of terrorism - controls behaviour, self regulation, Trains - space, only see carriage, black hemisphere as a camera, 'they' can see you, without being seen themselves, and CCTV stickers - self regulation.

Task One

Choose an example of one aspect of contemporary culture that is, in your opinion, panoptic. Write an explanation of this, in approximately 200-300 words, employing key Foucauldian language, such as 'Docile Bodies' or 'self-regulation, and using not less than 5 quotes from the text 'Panopticism' in Thomas, J. (2000) 'Reading Images', NY, Palgrave MacMillan.

An aspect of contemporary culture that may be seen as panoptic is hospitals. To back this up there are a series of quotes from the text, ‘Panopticism’ by Julia Thomas that support this view, the first one, is ‘…strict special partitioning…’ which refers to the procedures when the Plague appeared in a town, which is how the layout of the panopticon was set out. In hospitals, there are the beds in the wards with the curtain partitions, and the separate rooms for individual patients.

The next quote ‘…each street is placed under the authority of a syndic…’ , again, this is still referring to the Plague and one person (the syndic) would be responsible for the surveillance of the street, in a hospital situation, each patient is under the authority of a doctor/nurse, and is observed on a very regular basis which can alter the behaviour of that individual, knowing they are being watched and can create a self regulating, self correcting kind of behaviour, as in a normal everyday situation, that person may not behave like that, but under the institutional gaze it can change one’s mindset. In the panopticon, each prisoner was under the authority of the guard who would observe from the central tower, eventually the prisoners would be conditioned into thinking they’re being watched which can make them self regulate their behaviour.

Following on from that ‘…everything that may be observed during the course of the visits- deaths, illnesses, complaints and irregularities.’ This could tie in with the previous point about being under the authority of a doctor/nurse, and in each visit to a patient they take down any symptoms and problems etc and noted on the file at the end of the patients bed, which is always kept out of view of the patient, and contains essential information about that individual, and in the time of the Plague, the syndics would take a report and send it to the intendants to then be forwarded on to the mayor, ‘…document bears ‘the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his conditions…’ which is a similar kind of method, as this would not be seen by the public.

The last quote in support is, ‘The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment…’, in the contemporary example, a doctor has complete control over the medication given to a patient, which shows the Foucauldian concept, docile bodies, because people as patients are quite easily controlled, and unquestioningly take instruction, putting ultimate trust in the doctor as they have the specialist medical knowledge.

Quotes taken from:
Thomas, J. (2000) 'Reading Images', NY, Palgrave MacMillan.

Lecture 1... Surveillance and Society

The Panopticon

- Can be a metaphor for today's society - making people conform to values through hidden forces.



Michael Foucalt - Madness and Civilisation

(Influential French theorist)

- Looked at madness in the Middle Ages and how it was tolerated in society.



The Great Confinement (late 1600's)

- People who were deemed socially useless were put in a house of correction to curb unemployment and idleness (such as vagabonds, drunks, single pregnant women and the workshy).

- Made to work, to improve moral fibre.

- Subsequently deviance was hidden away and represssed in these correction facilities.

- Used physical punishment to those who didn't comply.

- Asylums were brought about to segregate the mentally ill from the rest of the others, where mental control was used to make them conform, in a way they were treated like children, e.g. rewarded for good behaviour.



New forms of knowledge were developed

In biology, psychiatry and medicine etc. which then legitimised the practices of hospitals, doctors and psychiatrists.



Early Method of Control

The Pillory - similar to the stocks, was used for punishment by public humiliation. The criminal would be held in the device and visibly punished in front of the town/community.
More serious punishment - public torture '...place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being alive cut down, your privy members shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you...' the quote continued to detail how the head would be severed from the body and the rest of the remains would be disposed of at the King's pleasure.

Disciplinary Society and Disciplinary Power

'Discipline' is a technology - how to control someone's behaviour, conduct and aptitudes and keep surveillance.

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1791)

- Guard to sit in middle and view all prison cells.
- Prisoner constantly being observed - internalises the individual in a conscious state that they are always being watched - self regulate their behaviour.
- Always segregated - no socialisation.
- Not used now - inhumane.
- Almost like a laboratory - allows supervisors to conduct experiments.

Aim:
- Reforms prisoner.
Could be used to help treat patients, help instruct school children, helps confine but also study the insane, helps supervise workers, helps but beggars and idlers to work.


Application to modern society

- Open plan office - workers constantly watched.
- Pubs: open plan.
- Google maps - blacked out windows in car, monitoring society.
- Constant surveillance causes us to change behaviour - anxiety.
- Fundamentally, lecture theatre is panoptic, Richard has the control, can see everyone individually. Not physically held in the theatre but we stay there.

Application to college

- 30+ cameras.
- Tutor files - can only be accessed by personnel.
- Student files.
- I.T. department - can access everyone's computers, look at all files, emails etc. (and even monitor keystrokes!)
[- Tutor clock in cards are also a form of surveillance.]

Relationship between power, knowledge and the body

- 'power relations have an immediate hold upon the body; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it...' Foucault (1975)
- Gym - discipline and gentle punishment.
- Nazi sports event

Foucault and power

- Bottom up model unlike the Marxist top down definition.
- 'Power is not a thing or a capacity people have - it is a relation between different individuals and groups, and only exists when it is being exercised.'
- The exercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted.

Facebook

- People perform for institutional gaze - create ideal identities.
- Hard to rebel/resist the gaze - public scrutiny.
- Can create social paranoia even though people willingly enter this.

Bruce Nauman

- Video Corridor Pieces (late 1960s)
- Public behaviour changes in art galleries - talk quietly and walk.
- Not instructed to behave like this, it is just the cultural norm.
- We are told what kind of art is important.

Chris Burden

- Samson (1985)
- Turnstile that when people enter it pushes against the gallery walls- until eventually the walls will crumble under the force.
- Stopped people going in, people don't want to destroy the gallery, as they are institutions that are seen as culturally important.

Key ideas

- Michel Foucault
- Panopticism as a form of discipline.
- Techniques of the bodies.
- Docile bodies.