2. 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.

3. Modernity: (Modo = now) A state of affairs characterized by innovation, experimentation, and certain kinds of distancing from the past

4. Modernization: Advances in technology and science Development of nation states Democratic political systems Expansion of capitalist modes of production

5. Modernization: Humanism and the Enlightenment Colonialism European and American imperialism

7. Modernity: 1500-2002

8. Major Problem of Modernity

9. René Descartes (1596-1650)

10. Cartesian Method: Traditional knowledge fails the test My senses can deceive me Memory is frail and vulnerable to deception Language can deceive me

11. So, what is left? Cogito ergo sum

12. So, what is left? Cogito ergo sum “I think, therefore I am”

13. Challenges to Modernism

14. Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis and Image making and viewing

15. Freud and the Unconscious: The Conscious Mind Preconscious The Unconscious Mind

25. IDEGOSUPEREGO Barbie DollDictionariesBible Playboy MagazineTextbooksBook of Fables Bottle of liquorScience toysHoly Water Vessel

26. Defense Mechanisms: Ambivalence Avoidance Denial Fixation Identification Rationalization Regression Repression Suppression

27. Symbols

28. Symbols: things that stand for other things

29. 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)

30. The Levels of Meaning: Conscious: Light cigarettes Preconscious: Power to summon fire Subconscious: Sexual union (“Baby won’t you light my fire”)

31. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

32. The Mirror Stage

33. The mirror phase and “Mimicry”

34. Construction of Self: First stage is at six months (mirror phase) Second stage is at eighteen months (language phase)

35. Spectatorship

36. 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

37. 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.”

38. Michel Foucault Critiques Modernity

40. Foucault’s Eras The 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)

41. Foucault and Archaeology

42. "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”.

43. Foucault and Identity Identity and Power

44. Foucault Rejected this Idea: Created Concept of Discourse

45. Foucault’s Work: Early Great Impact Gloomy

46. Foucault’s Method: Deconstruction Discourse Institutions

47. 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

48. The Gaze = Address

49. Foucault on Spectatorship

50. Foucault and Power Relations

51. Power, Foucault, And The Asylum Incarceration

52. Carceral Society

53. “The Norm”

54. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1791)

55. Pan=all and optic=seeing

56. "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).

57. 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

58. Back to Power….

59. 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.)

61. Problems with Foucault?