Visual Culture 101

Art Education 255
love is a force of nature

A couple of things that hurt my brain and or I find interesting that I want to write down before I throw away my notes. Yes, I throw away my notes, even to classes specific to my major. Like this one. You dont? oh. OH WELLLL MWAHAHAHHA

-Seeing versus Looking
-To look is an act of choice

"I'm not sure who discovered water, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the fish"
---> swimming through and absorbing what seems natural instead of removing self and looking at the importance of "water" and how it shapes us.

-medium is the message.

-Threat of violence forces people to do things
-w/out that threat what makes people do things? esp. in masses?
= Hegemony and Counter Hegemony

-perspective is not the way something really is, it is one view.
technologies and ways of seeing are products of particular social and historical contexts

-The cultural preference for full-figured women was replaced in the late twentieth century by an idealization of a thin or athletic Body.
-Glamour is the quality of being envied
-We want what she has precisely because it appears to be beyond our reach
-Monroe emphasizes that cultural icons can and must be mass-distributed in order for them to have mass appeal.

-Scopophilia: pleasure in looking and being looked at
-Voyeurism: is the pleasure of looking while not being seen

-"Men act, women appear"

Psychoanalytic theory (mirror phase):
*The concept of the unconscious is crucial to [psychoanalytic theories]. One of the fundamental elements of psychoanalysis lies in its demonstration of the existence and mode of operation of unconscious mental processes.
*According to psychoanalytic theory, we repress various desires, fears, memories, and fantasies...beneath our conscious, daily social interaction there exists a dynamic, active realm of forces of desire that is inaccessible to our rational and logical selves
*According to Lacan, children go through a developmental stage at about 18 months that establishes fundamental aspects of their notion of selfhood and separateness from other human beings. In the mirror phase, infants begin to establish their egos through the process of looking at a mirror body-image of themselves, and recognize themselves to be both selves and different.
---> you only see yourself through what others want/desire of you.
---> there is no one true self
---> the search for IDEAL moves us foreward
---> misrepresentations: mirrors of mirros of reflections

Ideology:
*the broad but indispensable, shared set of values and beliefs through which individuals live out their complex relations to a range of social structures
*example: "It's always been that way." "That's just the way things are."
---> "A diamond is forever..." turns into an ideology, fetish signifies
*Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence
*We are hailed or summonned by ideologies, which recruit us as their "authors" and their essential subject
*We are not so much unique individuals but we are "always already" subjects-- spoken by the ideological discourses, into which we are born and are asked to find our place.
*Ideologies are presented as "common sense"
*Ideologies are in tension wiht other forces and constantly in flux
*One of the most important aspects of hegemony is that these relationships are constantly changing, hence dominant ideologies must be constantly reaffirmed in a culture precisely because the social existence of many people's daily lives can work against it
*The concept of hegemony and the related term negotiation allow us to acknowledge the role that people may play in challenging the status quo and effecting social change in ways that may not favor the interests of the marketplace
*Interpellation: a process by which we are constructed by the ideologies that speak to us every day through languages and images (we are their subjects from birth)

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"Active Construction".

Consumer Culture:
*Consumer society is based on capitalism
*images are a central aspect of commodity culture and of consumer societies dependent upon the constant production and consumption of goods in order to function.
*Consumer societies emerged in the context of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centruy wit hthe rise of mass production, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and with the consolidation of populations in major urban centers
*A consumer society is one in which the individual is confronted with and surrunded by an enormous assortement of goods, and in which the characteristics of those goods change constantly
*A consumer culture is a commodity culture -- that is, a culture in which commodities are central to cultural meaning. Commodities are things bought and sold in social system of exchange
*The concept of commodity culture is intricately allied with the idea that we construct our identities, at least in part, through the consumer products that inhabit our lives.
*Commodity fetishism... refers to the process by which mass-produced goods are emptied of the meaning of their production (the context in which they wer produced and the labor that created them) and then filled with new meanings in ways that both mystify the product and turn it into a fetish object.

Representation:
Throughout history, debates about represenation have considered whether these systems of represntation reflect the world as it is, such that they mirror it back to us as a form of mimesis or imitation, or whether in fact we construct the world and its meaning throught the systems of representation we deploy.

This is not a pipe.

se·mi·ot·ics
1.the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior; the analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures, or clothing.
2.a general theory of signs and symbolism, usually divided into the branches of pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics.