Demet Adiguzel Annotation Spectatorship, Power and Knowledge

“Spectatorship, Power and Knowledge”

The book Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture is written by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. The third chapter of the book specifies in spectatorship, power and knowledge. The chapter starts with notations on psychoanalytic theory and its relation to the image spectator. The authors elaborate Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror phase, in which he proposed infants of 18 months begin to develop their egos by looking at a mirror body image and fantasize having control and mastery over it. The authors then emphasize on the gaze and seeing the image as oneself and also as an ideal – treating the image as the mirror in which being both the same and not being the same as oneself. The gaze is explained in detail with the examples of films like Read Window and Peeping Tom in which it takes an important role. By notations from Laura Mulvey’s (1975) essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, the concept of women appearing as objects of a male gaze is explained. Mulvey proposes that the images offered in the cinema target the male pleasure. The authors also emphasize on how the painting throughout the history of art, geared toward male viewers and the reason is related to the commerce of art: Until recently most collectors were men therefore the primary audience was men. The authors then approach to the tradition of the art defining the female nude in which the men gaze upon the female figures as possessions making the women as objects. Then the authors consolidate this idea with John Berger’s(1972) “men act, women appear” notion. In the next section, the authors emphasize on how the concept of the gaze is changing in the new era we are surrounded by images of fashion models whose looks conform to a rigid set of normative codes about beauty (p82). Women are socially defined by their work in addition to their appearance so that the pleasure of female viewers became also important. While traditionally the spectator was always perceived to have more power than the object of the gaze, this is not the case in all contemporary media. The authors elaborate this idea by giving the example of the coke ad in which women office workers gather everyday at 11:30 to watch the highly masculine construction worker. In this example the power of the female gaze is stopped by the neglection the male gets towards it. The chapter gives plenty of examples from various media to make the point. In the next section Foucault’s concept of discourse takes place. Later on, this is linked to the next section on power relations and panopticism. This section discusses Foucault’s idea of how the knowledge of being gazed upon, self-regulates the subjects in the contemporary world where surveillance is a very big part of. The last section is about binary oppositions and how the photograph became a central tool establishing difference by emphasizing on the idea of exotics and orientalism where the photographs of different cultures create the representation of binary opposition of culture/nature hence the idea of other.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York and London: Penguin, 1972)
Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979)