ways of seeing Ways Of Seeing

John Berger's Ways of Seeing is actually very difficult to see given it was first screened 40 years ago [but then that is exactly what capital is for]. Below are the embeds of the first episode on youtube & the whole can be found (in black and white) at ubu.

the realistic isn't real (but the monsters are)

Our sense of the realistic (cf Eastenders, Bicycle Thieves, the work of Posy Simmonds, etc) is the result of our training in the bourgeoise capitalist realism which is a part of the ideology of capitalism (whose purpose was to dismiss the monstrously - mystical - mythical - religiosity which was such a part of the ideology of agriculturalism/aristocracy: cf The Lutteral Psalter). 

The appearance of these tropes in the culture of capitalism is never a good sign as the hideous stumbling metaphor of the zombie shows us so clearly. That the modern zombie is the proletariat needs no explanation (the line from the consumers of Dawn of the Dead to the shop-workers and game show contestants of Shawn of the Dead is written in the brightest light) but what is interesting is that in a zombie horror it is the zombie that is real. 

The 'realistic' of these texts (with its ekphrastic detail of daily life turned upside-down and the world-around-us in-ruins and the now standardised [in the sense of the culture industry] tightly woven discourse of realism) is the reality of bourgeois capitalist realism that Flaubert (et al) and later the cinema wrought upon the world. The realistic is the ideological and the monster is (on the contrary) very real indeed. 


Just as the morlock (which is the true original of the modern zombie not the voodoo zombie of the first wave of Hollywood zombie films) was the proletariat as warning ('exterminate all the brutes' is the cry of Wells as much as of Kurtz) so is the zombie. The zombie is the working-class, the poor, the excluded (it almost isn't a metaphor at all) and as such is the most real thing in zombie horror texts. The zombie is not how the working-class are treated in fiction rather it is an accurate depiction of how the weakest factions of the working-class live in society right now and the methods (murder mainly) that must be used to 'deal' with 'them'. 


We must recognise that the figure of the sheriff which closes the narrative of  Night of The Living Dead is the same as the sheriff who opens the story of The Walking Dead: only now (neo-managerially) he no longer chews tobacco.

A Collection on S/Z

Barthes S/Z LXIV. THE VOICE OF THE READER

As though terror-struck: who is speaking here? It cannot be Sarrasine, even indirectly, since he interprets La Zambinella's fear as timidity. Above all, it cannot be the narrator, because he knows that La Zambinella really is terrified. The modalization (as though) expresses the interests of only one character, who is neither Sarrasine nor the narrator, but the reader: it is the reader who is concerned that the truth be simultaneously named and evaded, an ambiguity which the discourse nicely creates by as though, which indicates the truth and yet reduces, it declaratively to a mere appearance. What we hear, therefore, is the displaced voice which the reader lends, by proxy, to the discourse: the discourse is speaking according to the reader's interests. Whereby we see that writing is not the communication of a message which starts from the author and proceeds to the reader; it is specifically the voice of reading itself: in the text, only the reader speaks. This inversion of our prejudices (which make reading a reception or, to put matters more clearly, a simple psychological participation in the adventure being related), this inversion can be illustrated by a linguistic image: in the Indo-European verb (for example, Greek), two diatheses (specifically: two voices) were set in opposition: the middle voice, according to which the agent performed the action for his own sake (I sacrifice for myself), and the active voice, according to which he performed this same action for another's benefit (as in the case of the priest who sacrificed on his client's behalf). In this accounting, writing is active, for it acts for the reader: it proceeds not from an author but from a public scribe, a notary institutionally responsible not for flattering his client's tastes but rather for registering at his dictation the summary of his interests, the operations by which, within an economy of disclosure, he manages this merchandise: the narrative.

Notes on McRobbie on Neo-Liberalism and the Family

Recently I have been trying to teach my (media & sociology) students this wonderful lecture by McRobbie on neo-liberalism and the family
and trying to use the following board notes to help explain it:

p.s. and this is an edited version of all three gifs.

Directions for Living: Self Help Books, Lifestyle Magazines & Role Models as 'technologies of the self'

In his Media Gender & Identity Gauntlett outlines Foucault's idea of ‘technologies of the self’:

Michel Foucault became interested in 'techniques of the self' and 'the care of the self' – questions of lifestyle which today are tackled by self-help books. In the introduction to The History of Sexuality Volume Two, The Use of Pleasure, Foucault helpfully proposes a methodology for this kind of study: 

“A history of the way individuals are urged to constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct would be concerned with the models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the decipherment of the self by oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object. This last is what might be called a history of 'ethics' and 'ascetics,'understood as a history of the forms of moral subjectivation and of the practices of the self that are meant to ensure it.” 

Foucault, then, lends support to the idea that we can learn about our culture by looking at its self-help books; he was interested in the ways in which a society enabled or encouraged individuals to perceive or modify their self-identity.

As part of what Gauntlett describes as 'the knowing construction of identity':

Not only is there more room for a greater variety of identities to emerge; it is also the case that the construction of identity has become a known requirement. Modern Western societies do not leave individuals in any doubt that they need to make choices of identity and lifestyle – even if their preferred options are rather obvious and conventional ones, or are limited due to lack of financial (or cultural) resources. As the sociologist Ulrich Beck has noted, in late modern societies everyone wants to 'live their own life', but this is, at the same time, 'an experimental life' (2002:26). Since the social world is no longer confident in its traditions, every approach to life, whether seemingly radical or conventional, is somewhat risky and needs to be worked upon – nurtured, considered and maintained, or amended. Because 'inherited recipes for living and role stereotypes fail to function' (ibid.), we have to make our own new patterns of being, and – although this is not one of Beck's emphases – it seems clear that the media plays an important role here. Magazines, bought on one level for a quick fix of glossy entertainment, promote self-confidence (even if they partly undermine it, for some readers, at the same time) and provide information about sex, relationships and lifestyles which can be put to a variety of uses. Television programmes, pop songs, adverts, movies and the Internet all also provide numerous kinds of 'guidance' – not necessarily in the obvious form of advice-giving, but in the myriad suggestions of ways of living which they imply. We lap up this material because the social construction of identity today is the knowing social construction of identity. Your life is your project – there is no escape. The media provides some of the tools which can be used in this work. Like many toolkits, however, it contains some good utensils and some useless ones; some that might give beauty to the project, and some that might spoil it. (People find different uses for different materials, too, so one person's 'bad' tool might be a gift to another.).

We must realise that this knowing is yet another technology-of-the-self. We have arrived at a point in which society requires us to ironically and archly construct an understood presentation of ourselves in everyday life and our use of this ‘knowing’ is not  free flowing.  It is rather a matter of power and our relations-of-power to the different technologies of the self available to us in the society we inhabit.

Social Status and Symbolic Violence