IT is the end of the year and it is time to take stock — of the books that we indulged in, books we should have read and books we must read “before we die”.
But there is a dimension beyond books. It is the language of images and visuals — things that we see with our eyes, and their images linger in our consciousness. Perhaps even in our dreams.
We see first before we speak. Sight comes before words. And it is said that “what we see changes who we are”. Seeing is not a neutral, objective activity. What we see of artifacts, symbols and images are structured by cultural and artistic canons, worldviews and religions.
Some call it ideology. And so, the so-called hidden ideologies conspire to make sense to our eyes, mind and consciousness. The consciousness itself has been built up by the very ideologies permeating in us
over time.
Ways of Seeing was a four-part British Broadcasting Corporation television series created in 1972 by the writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. The series dealt with the visible world. We only see what we look at.
In the same year, a book based on the series and with the same title criticised traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images.
Berger argued that looking is an act of choice, and that choice of sight is brought within our reach. The object of the gaze makes the eye the centre of the visible world. That act of seeing is a convention, creating a perspective. And we never look at just one thing — we look at things in relation to ourselves, and the relationship between the objects themselves.
It is not only seeing, but also being seen — the combination of our eyes and the many eyes in the visible environment. An image is created — produced and reproduced. Be it a photograph, painting, building, an object or people — images are conjured. Berger asserted that images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent.
If we link this to the phenomena of identity and cultures, we find that an image carries infinite assumptions. The world, as it is, is more than objective fact. It is consciousness. And this, according to Berger, obscures the past. It mystifies rather than clarifies.
Students of images and representations produced and reproduced by social institutions and the media will do well to take some lessons from the 1920s Soviet film director Dziga Vertov, cited by Berger, who parodied the invention of the camera. Vertov wrote: “I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement.
“I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them, I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies.
“This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording on movement after another in the most complex combinations.
“Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.”
What the camera leads us to see is dependent on who and where we are in time and space. If perspective in the Renaissance posited a centre — the camera — and Berger was referring to the movie camera then, he demonstrated that there was no centre.
Before the advent of the camera, buildings were committed to memory. Icons and images were kept.
But now with what we call multimedia, meaning changes — it multiplies, fragments and diversifies itself into many meanings. We say it goes viral.
Or in the Foucaldian sense, how we see can be contextualised in the rise of surveillance in modern society. Photography, as Foucault put it, normalises the gaze, making it possible for surveillance to qualify, classify and punish.
Modern visual technologies create visibility over individuals.
The reproduction of images leads to their consumption by just about anyone, and in turn, their creation and production. It becomes a daily discourse accessible in our palms, twisting the notion of the Foucauldian authority and control in the panopticon.
What we see breaks up the illusion of taste, standards and what is desirable. It dismantles authority and diffuses power. Many years ago in my former workplace, I was advocating for the field of visual studies to be the foundation of the larger curricula of communication, media and art studies in the university.
Visual studies — and not just media and visual literacy or visual communication, representation and image studies — ought to be a powerful tool for education across the humanities and the sciences.