VMS Midterm

The gaze

1) different ways looking practices play out 2) a mode of looking undertaken by spectators as particular viewers (male, hetero, white, Western, etc), often theorized as shaped by the unconscious or desire The field of the gaze positions and produces the viewer as the subject of a particular gaze. It is a "structural" position. address - how an visual representation invites certain types of responses from particular categories of viewer, e.g. male, female, cis, hetero, LBGTQ*, white, BIPOC, etc.

Walter Benjamin

1892-1940 Major works/contributions → German, Jewish, Marxist cultural critic Relationship between modernism and modernity Modernist texts that rely on modernity itself → dialectic relationship How does Benjamin present himself? Wants to be perceived Using body to express that he is thinking Rodin's thinker Photograph → fundamentally modern media

Hegemonic/Hegemony (Gramsci)

A "preferred reading or interpretation, the dominant ideology offered as "common sense", their dominance is never guaranteed/always in lock with opposition

Visualization / Visuality

A claim on the authority to look/see and determine the visible and, consequently, what is real. imaginary and not necessarily perceptual authority over a field too complex and extensive for one person to physically apprehend mental / internalized, as well as material A complex of "techniques" that work together Maps, diagrams, architectures, spatial divisions, technologies, media, images. Writing a version of history or "the real"

Irony

A contrast between expectation and reality

Modernity

A historical period (starting in 18th century with the Enlightenment) with particular social, economic, epistemological, and ideological shifts

Encoding

A message is created and encoded by the producer, it circulates and is decoded by the consumer

Negotiated

A negotiated reading, accepting some of the preferred reading but negotiating some

Brands as media

A signifier also attached to non-commodities as well, like religion, family, personal identity; ideas and values An "intersecting relationship between marketing, a product, and consumers" (PoL: 259)

Interpellation

A strategy of positioning you (the subject) into an ideology

Medium Specificity vs. Media Convergence

A way of approaching media studies, following McLuhan's point that "The Medium is the Message," that attends to the specific qualities and effects of a specific medium (like film), often in a comparative manner (how is film different from still photography or from radio). It is often thought about in relation to and in tension with Henry Jenkin's idea of media convergence, where historically different mediums now converge on a single device (e.g. your phone as telephone, television, newspaper, still and moving image camera, etc) Henry Jenkins Convergence towards an audience of one? Mass Media, 1920s-1980s(Broadcasting) ↓ Niche Media (e.g. cable television, web 1.0), 1980s-2000s(Narrowcasting) ↓ User Profiling (e.g. Netflix, Web 2.0, suggestion engines)2000s - Present

AI's challenge to the concept's legal foundations

AI essays - copyright

Globalization

Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope.

Connoisseurship

Aesthetic Judgment ("taste")

Taste

Aesthetic Judgment ("taste") Taste as "cultivated" Connoisseurship

Modernism

An artistic, literary, and scientific movement. Not a synonym for modernity.

Postmodernism

An artistic/architectural and literary movement. Art/Architecture: Rejected and replaced modernism in art. Characterized by anti-authoritarianism, or refusal to recognize the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be; and collapse of the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture, and between art and everyday life. Postmodern art/architecture can be also characterized by a deliberate use of earlier styles and conventions, and an eclectic mixing of different artistic and popular styles and mediums. (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, Carolee Schneemann, Michael Graves) Literature: a form of literature which is marked, both stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary conventions as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humor and authorial self-reference. (Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace)

Postmodernity

An historical period associated with particular social, economic, epistemological, and ideological shifts: after World War II, especially the changes occurring after 1968.

Polysemy

An image that carries multiple meanings

Counter image

An image that contradicts or is compared or contrasted with another image Challenging normal representations Ex: Apple using phones to take beautiful photos in contrast to people taking selfies

subject position

An individual's unique position in the world, which is shaped by social variables such as class, gender, and socioeconomic status.

Media Infrastructure

Another approach to media studies, one that focuses on the infrastructures that enable contemporary mediated communication: from TCP internet protocols (Alexander Galloway) to undersea cable networks (Nicole Starosielski) to satellite infrastructures (Lisa Parks). the media vehicles and their structure in an international target market Nicole Starioleski, The Undersea Network (2015) Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (2005) Alex Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (2004) Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (2015) Parks & Starioleski, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (2015) Hockenberry, Starosielski, & Zieger, Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021)

Culture

Anthropological view of culture "The shared practices of a group, community, or society, through which meaning is made out of the visual, aural, and textural world of representations."

Ideology (Marx)

As false consciousness. (Marx) Economic relations between classes Propaganda We are suffering from the idea of false consciousness True objective is to understand world as it really is Suffering from ideology

Habitus

Bourdieu's term to describe the self-perceptions and beliefs that develop as part of one's social identity and shape one's conceptions of the world and where one fits in it Aesthetics, Aesthetic Judgment and Taste related to socio-economic class

Brands as culture

Brand culture is both economic and affective (emotional) "Consumer-Citizenship": identification of personal values, sense of national and community belonging through participation in brand culture Self-as-brand - esp. as experienced through social media Brands "operate as cultures" that people "participate in as a way of life" (PoL: 258)

Chinese 'Copy-Culture'

Chinese workers copying paintings by Van Gogh Woman imitating the artFactory Child work Supply international companies with copies of van gogh Consumers buy copy paintings One chinese village sells most painting replicas in the world Mass-produced → print designs so they only have to paint in the lines 50 in one day

Consumer Citizenship

Consumer societies attached to "mobility" -- literal and social Advertisers "manufacture" desire Centrality of "consumer choice" (again, see also: consumer citizenship) Necessary for "growth-based" economies (foundational to capitalism) Banet-Weiser's term for how contemporary subjects increasingly understand their sense of national and community belonging through participation in brand cultures, as well as the idea, critiqued by Debord, that being a good citizen means stimulating the economy through consumption.

Mobile Gaze of Consumption

Continuous Scroll

Globalization & Subjectivity

Cosmopolitan Tourist Immigrant Refugee Exile refugee, cosmopolitan, tourist, exile

Image

Description that appeals to the senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste)

Culture as a whole way of struggle

Dominant ideologies offered and experienced as "common sense" Dominant ideologies are locked in struggle with other "counter-hegemonic forces" so their dominance is never guaranteed Stuart Hall

Decoding "Positions"

Dominant/Hegemonic, Negotiated, and Oppositional/Counter-Hegemonic

Jean Baudrillard

Extremely prolific social & cultural critic: 50+ books Associated with French post structuralist and postmodernist thought Early work within a semiotic frame, focused on social and symbolic capital of identifying with one's possessions; valorized "symbolic exchange": symbolic or cultural activities which do not contribute to capitalist production Later work posited a postmodern "break" with modernity and thus with Marxist political economy: hyperreality and spectacle replace economic determinism as the space of everyday life.

Technoscapes

Fluid, global configuration of technology Technology - mechanical & informational - moves at high speeds across previously impervious boundaries Differential distribution of technologies

Postmodern Nostalgia

Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984) the collective social desire to appropriate an idealized past through aesthetic representation (or, to use Baudrillard's term, simulation). Emptying signs of the past of their historical referents, and reinscribing these signs with connotations of a vague "pastness" that construct Barthesian "mythologies" of the past. Privileging the past as "lost object of desire" while effectively effacing "real history" ("genuine historicity")

The Experience Economy

General shift from labor of production to service labor in most developed economies: the buying/selling of services, staged as experiences Companies that supply "platforms" rather than products (e.g. Instagram) DIY culture as "authentic" (e.g. Etsy) Incorporating the labor of the consumer through reviews (e.g. Yelp)

The World Image / construction of the global now

Global Gaze - The World (as) Image

Financescapes

Globally interconnected markets Massive amounts of "megamonies" Nation-state no longer the top of the food chain Speculative markets and derivatives

Index

HIGH Degree of Motivation A sign that has an "existential" relationship, "co-existing" with its referent. It is often PHYSICALLY PRODUCED by its referent. Examples: Smoke is an index of fire Sneezing is an index of a cold A fingerprint is an index of a thief

History of Media Criticism

Horkheimer & Adorno's critique of "sameness"/mass culture Stuart Hall's "decoding positions" John Fiske's readerly "culure from below" James Scott. "arts of resistance" Guy Debord and the Situationists - art and everyday life Nestor Garcia Canclini's "hybridity"

Circulation

How an image is shared

Flaneur

Idea that shopping moves from being a chore to leisure activity - rise of wealthy consumers Changing Spaces of Consumption Arcades 19th century Europe Precursor to 20th century shopping malls Mobile gaze

Military-Industrial Complex

Image: Declassified aerial photographs from the Second Iraq war showing what US intelligence interpreted as evidence of the development of chemical weapons. Aerial photography — the world seen from above — is both a political viewpoint and a set of strategic interpretations.

Decoding

In decoding we carry with us as a consumer all of our own thoughts, beliefs, and histories

Brands signification vs. affect

In terms of signification vs affect - this is a broader topic introduced at various points in class . . . we discussed at length signification, how signs come to have meanings and carry ideologies . . . but the idea of affect points to something that exists alongside or orthogonal to meaning: emotion/feeling/impact. What Barthes called the studium relation to a photograph was the order of meaning and ideology, but the punctum was affective, being struck or moved by an image, even if you can't explain why (indeed, being dumbstruck is one way of describing punctum). In relation to brands, I brought up the distinction in relation to the idea of neuromarketing: Brands have for a long time worked to draw us in on both levels: at the level of meaning/ideology (interpellation), but also at the level of affect/emotion, compelling us to want or need something even if we're not entirely able to always explain why. Indeed, contemporary neuromarketing research suggests that the meaning behind an ad is secondary to how it works on the pleasure and desire functions in our brain...their focus groups aren't people sitting around talking about what meanings they associated with a potential ad campaign; instead, they put people in fMRI machines and measure what parts of their brain are affected by what imagery, color, sounds, and make their ads accordingly.

Imperial Complex

In the imperial complex (1860-1945), a centralized authority reframed the plantation's racial hierarchies in terms of cultural difference, adapting the scientific taxonomy to include the more mutable binary of primitive/civilized. A faith in European cultural superiority helped to regulate the increasingly complex geographic scope of colonial power.

satellite transmission

Interconnected Global Village (McLuhan) Remote Sensing Satellite Panopticon Total Surveillance "Outside Looking In" Weather Satellites Google Earth

Indigeneity / Epistemologies of and from the Global South

Land "Recognition" "We acknowledge that we stand, live and work on the ancestral homeland of the Coharie, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Haliwa-Saponi, Lumbee, Meherrin, Occaneechi Band of the Saponi, Sappony, and Waccamaw Siouan peoples whose lands include what is known today as North Carolina. We recognize those peoples as well as the many Indigenous people who live and work in the region today."

Ethnoscapes

Landscape of persons Tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers Mobility versus emplacement Diaspora

Brands - historical evolution

Late 1800s - early 1900s: Industrially produced goods needed to distinguish themselves from competitors Brands have developed into increasingly complex business and cultural entities, designed and managed by agencies" - design, platform management, analysis of impact and consumer psychology, market research, etc. With the goal of building "affective relationships with consumers" (PoL: 262)

sameness

Life becoming indistinguishable from movies, as a culture industry makes mass culture that is exclusionary of the new causing reification of Hegelian Dialectics.

Symbol

Low degree of motivation The relationship between the sign and its referent is completely arbitrary or based on social convention

Icon

MODERATE Degree of Motivation A sign which RESEMBLES or LOOKS LIKE its referent.

de Certeau

Media & "everyday life" Shift from what do media do to people? to what do people do with media? Media mediates our everyday lives and practices Everyday Life: quotidian, everyday, mundane, ordinary human subject is mobile, mediated, and mediating, engages in world by negotiating spaces Practices of Everyday Life de Certeau's tactics of everyday life vs strategies of dominant power

Marshall McLuhan

Media as "Extensions of Human Sensorium" "The Medium is the Message" Transmission: Channel as Affordance The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception.

Episteme

Michel Foucault's concept "the way an inquiry into truth and the real is organized in a given era. An episteme is an accepted, dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in a given historical period" (S&K, 147) From the word "epistemology," the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge The use and development of perspectival techniques in the Renaissance reflect the embrace of science and rationalism central to that era's episteme.

Mathematization of space and the operative image

Most images are constructed by humans in order to represent something to one or more other humans. Operative images aren't produced to represent something to other humans; instead, they are images rendered as data to be operated on by a computer algorithm and the data they represent wouldn't be recognizable as representation to humans. Photogrammetry is a great example.

Ideology (Barthes)

Myths Ex: idea that a perfect family is a nuclear family Does this reflect our values? Relates to semiotics → distinction between signified and sign Meaning vs. appearance Etiology

The Spectacle

Not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. Both the outcome and goal of the dominant mode of production. Specific Manifestations: News or Propaganda Advertising The Actual Consumption of Entertainment The spectacle is real, even though it falsifies reality Feuerbach: "the present age...prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality" Proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life is mere appearance. The "chief product of modern society" Being → Having → Appearing

Neoliberalism

Organizing all aspects of society according to free market logics will lead to cooperation, prosperity and peace for all Competition is the defining characteristic of human relations; "There is no such thing as society," only individuaal citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. A form of economic Darwinism

Paradigm

Paradigms refer to sets of signs that can be substituted for each other and still convey meaning. Convention or logic indicates a set of signs that "can" or "should" be substituted for each other: "John cooked fish." | "John cooked corn." | "John grilled corn."

Complexes of Visuality

Plantation Imperial Military-Industrial Power maintained through classification, separation, normalization

Ideoscapes

Political landscapes Ideologies of states Counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented toward capturing state power Ideograms: freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation and democracy

Copyright

Pursuant to 17 U.S. Code § 102, U.S. copyright applies only to: "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression" What about ideas? Can you copyright an idea? 17 U.S.C. § 102(b) codifies that copyright protection does NOT extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

Franchise Culture / Format Programming

Reality Television Big Brother The Bachelor ...Got Talent Museums Louvre Guggenheim

Ekphrasis

Refers to written or verbal description of a visual representation Paint it in words

Linear Perspective (and challenges to its hegemony)

Renaissance Realism: Linear Perspective Codified by Renaissance thinkers like Filippo Brunelleschi & Leon Battista Alberti (early 1400s) Brunelleschi: image as a mirror or frame through which to view the world Use of instruments, mathematical calculation & measurement for precise depiction of space & form Thought of these rules as rational & derived from nature itself Centering of the human observer/spectator, at the same time a sort of "replacement" of the seeing eye with mathematical techniques and instrumentation (152) "The Renaissance era embraced the idea that it is art's social function to reproduce human vision through drawing instruments designed to replicate vision" (155) Method — mathematization of space Metaphor — produces a singular subject position (Cartesian subject) → one point in space, not fragmented nor fragmentary

Connotation

Social, cultural, & historical meanings that are "added" to denotation (Barthes)

Realism as historical set of conventions

Socialist Realism - Stalin's mandate, 1930s: "Art for the People" How does realism function in a historical time period? Use realism to promote political ideology

Orders of Simulation

Successive phases of the image: It is the reflection of a basic reality. (mimesis) It masks and perverts a basic reality. (ideology) It masks the absence of a basic reality. (simulate being/having) It bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulation. (hyperreal / precession of simulacra)

Mimetic reflection

Taking real life and mimicking it Mimesis of representation means mimesis, or imitation, of external things—art, speech, mannerisms, dress, etc. Mimetic desire, the real innovation of Girard, means that what is being imitated is not any kind of superficial, external representation but desires themselves.

Guy Debord

The "Spectacle" - Situationists, derive, detournement, "separation perfected"

Death of the Author vs. the discursive role of the Author-Function

The Death of the Author - Roland Barthes Narrated directly on reality vs. intransitively Prestige of the individual Attached the greatest importance to the 'person' of the author The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. "We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." Reacting against idea that meaning comes from the author's intention or background Both agree author is dead Author is a societal construct → replaced God with prestige of individual author dies when he finishes writing, author is a myth, creativity and generation happens when the reader interacts with it and gives it meaning in that moment

Three Orders of the Psyche

The Imaginary - an image of the ideal, whole self. Coherent, not fragmented. At first external but internalized. The Symbolic - self as constituted by (interpellated by) culture and language, difference from the Other / the "not-I" The Real - the order of the psyche which resists representation, what cannot be symbolized and loses its "reality" once it is made conscious through language.

Blindness

The absence of sight viewing strategy

Creolization

The blending of African, European, and some Amerindian cultural elements into the unique sociocultural systems found in the Caribbean.

Mediascapes

The distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and distribute information The images of the world created by media, which provide repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers Scripts formed of imagined lives

Cultural Imperialism

The dominance of one culture over another.

Spectatorship as modern practice of looking

The gaze and theories of address gaze - a mode of looking undertaken by spectators as particular viewers (male, hetero, white, Western, etc), often theorized as shaped by the unconscious or desire The field of the gaze positions and produces the viewer as the subject of a particular gaze. It is a "structural" position. address - how an visual representation invites certain types of responses from particular categories of viewer, e.g. male, female, cis, hetero, LBGTQ*, white, BIPOC, etc.

Myth

The hidden set of rules, codes, & conventions through which meanings, which in reality are specific to certain groups, are rendered universal and given for a whole society. They are naturalized. Myths are mythical when they universalize a meaning that is contested (only true for specific groups) (Barthes)

economic determinism

The idea that the economic "base" determines everything else (the "superstructure": culture, ideology, social relations)

Indeterminacy

The indeterminacy of something is its quality of being uncertain or vague → playing with two kinds of representations → puts us in a state of unease Ex: optical illusions, salvador dali

Denotation

The literal meaning of a sign (Barthes)

Glocalization

The process by which people in a local place mediate and alter regional, national, and global processes

Intertextuality

The referencing of one text (or image) within another. In popular culture, intertextuality refers to the incorporation of one text within another in a reflexive fashion. Intertextual references assume that the viewer knows the people, events, and/or cultural products being referenced. Politics of knowledge → distinction between insider and outsider

Negation of Life

The replacement of living desires with pseudo-needs The construction of "situations": "the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality." Practices that capture "Living Desires" and help us distinguish them from "Pseudo-needs"

Separation Perfected

The separation of art from everyday life

Syncretism

The unification or blending of opposing people, ideas, or practices, frequently in the realm of religion. For example, when Christianity was adopted by people in a new land, they often incorporate it into their existing culture and traditions.

Representation

The use of image as a means to translate a type of linguistic meaning

Conspicuous consumption

Thorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Denotes the way material objects were (are!) paraded as indicators of social position and status. Display: the power of "being seen" If conspicuous consumption involves the worship of luxury, conspicuous production involves the worship of labor. It isn't about how much you spend. It's about how hard you work. (The Guardian, April 24, 2017)

Dissimulation versus Simulation

To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. [Yet] to simulate is not simply to feign. Feigning...leaves the reality principle intact, whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false," between "real" and "imaginary."

Center/Periphery model

Viewing oneself as center of the earth, everything else is peripheral

Agency

Where/How might one assert agency over the visual field in each space Zoom provides more opportunity to show dominance through screen sharing and muting others In-person provides a place for people's emotions to really be seen and heard Descartes' ideas about agency

Oppositional/counter-hegemonic

Whole-heartedly opposed to preferred reading

Appadurai's 'scapes

Why "-scapes"? Perspectival Imagined Worlds Dimensions: ethnoscapes mediascapes technoscapes financescapes ideoscapes

The other

Wilhelm Hegel, the eighteenth-century German philosopher who introduced the concept of "the other" to describe self-consciousness as a component of the self-aware individual. Hegel illustrated this through a vignette about an interaction between two subjects. Each constitutes the other through a struggle for mastery. The Second Sex, de Beauvoir describes the relationship between men and women as a political and sexual dialectic in which women are made to occupy the place of the other, and men thereby acquire agency and authority. "The Orient" = colonial era construction "Timeless beauty" = white and western

Marx' idea of alienation (and its relation to wage labor)

Workers are Alienated Alienated from the products of their labor. The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is the objectification of labour...[T]he worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. (324) Alienated from their labor itself. [L]abour is external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. (326) Workers are Alienated Alienated from themselves and each other, from their species being. [P]roductive life is species life. It is life-producing life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life activity, and free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man. (328) Estranged labour reverses the relationship so that man, just because he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his being [Wesen], a mere 'means for his existence. (328)

Panopticon

a circular building composed of an inner ring and an outer ring designed to serve as a prison in which the guards, housed in the inner ring, can observe the prisoners without the detainees knowing whether they are being watched a specific technology where the prisoners are arrayed outside, guardhouse in the center that is dark, prisoners are lit, can always see each other but not guards, assume at every moment they could be watched so they become their own police Foucault - discipline, subjectification, organization of visual field, control of lines of sight through visibility and invisibility

Critical theory

a contemporary form of conflict theory that criticizes many different systems and ideologies of domination and oppression

Gaze

a mode of looking undertaken by spectators as particular viewers (male, hetero, white, Western, etc), often theorized as shaped by the unconscious or desire

Modern

a quality or condition of "being modern" → breaking from the traditional or from the past

Studium

a relationship to the photograph characterized by "general and . . . polite interest," the order of "liking" focus on the informational (semiotic) character of photography: what did the photographer ("operator") intend to convey? apprehended "in reverse", as spectator

Foucault: Discipline & Subjectification

argues that prison did not become the principal form of punishment just because of the humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of prison via the body and power. Prison is used by the "disciplines" - new technological powers that can also be found, according to Foucault, in places such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks. In a later work, Security, Territory, Population, Foucault admitted that he was somewhat overzealous in his argument that disciplinary power conditions society; he amended and developed his earlier ideas.

Kitsch

art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way. A mispronunciation of the English word sketch, or an inversion of the French chic (fashionable) Cheap, popular mass produced objects made only for consumer consumption

Realism

artistic representation that aims for visual accuracy A key tenet: "the realist image depicts something as if it would be seen by the human eye." The goal is to produce reality "as it is." historical

Ideology

as the naturalization of the contingent (Barthes), as propaganda, as false consciousness (Marx), as "the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Althusser)

Binary Oppositions

black/white; male/female; the West/the rest

Syntagm

collection of signs in linear sequence (letters<word) Poets and artists and ad execs play with the syntagmatic grammar of visual and textual signs

Critiques of Public Sphere - Nancy Fraser

concept of unified public sphere is fallacy based on exclusion: of women because of relative immobility in relation to the private sphere of the poor because of the necessity of being relatively free from the vicissitudes of the economic sphere theorization of: counterpublics: groups subordinate to dominant public but still sites from which people can speak up in society networked publics: publics and counterpublics formed in online discussion forums

perceived obsolescence

continually changing consumer concepts of acceptable styles to encourage more and earlier buying the creation of the perception that a good or service is no longer useful because it doesn't have all the features of the latest technology (again, a way to keep us buying things like new iPhones because we feel like we need the latest, fastest technology, even though last week it was good enough, even awesome). These are strategies engaged in by capitalist corporations to drive continued consumption (where continued consumption = profit).

Horkheimer & Adorno

culture industry (occasion for their project, key arguments) - Sameness as a problem for the Hegelian dialectic

Media

definitions (channel-"Medium is the Message; milieux for life, etc) channelling between planes of existence "the media" -- communications industry - print media, publishing, news media, cinema, broadcast (radio/television/cable tv), advertising, networks, multi-platform companies ("mass media") plural form of medium Latin: "middle" biological medium (growth medium): media as environment for life spiritual medium Any means to store or transmit data

Postmodern

definitions / economic argument for shift After, or in reaction to, or a rejection of the modern However, the "post" is always already a modern logic: of breaking from the past/from tradition. Recognition of the above can invoke an affect of despair:There is no "outside" of modernity? of late capitalism?or perhaps nihilism → ("f*ck it, let's party") A certain kind (ironic?) of nostalgic relation to the past: nostalgia for nostalgia

The Modern Subject

emerges in enlightenment, different from form of identity or subjectivity that came before could be replaced by something new - autonomous - endowed with rights - liberal human subject - freedoms - source of knowledge production and creativity (not all things come from God)

Media Practice

engagement with everyday social space through media

Exhibitionism

exposing the genitals to become sexually excited or having a strong desire to be observed by other people during sexual activity.

Counterpublic

groups subordinate to dominant public but still sites from which people can speak up in society

address

how an visual representation invites certain types of responses from particular categories of viewer, e.g. male, female, cis, hetero, LBGTQ*, white, BIPOC, etc.

Degrees of Motivation

how much a sign aims to look like its referent

Parody

imitates to critique

Ideology (Althusser)

is "the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" "has a material existence" (e.g. ideology exists in/as an apparatus: an institution, a power structure, and its practices.) "hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects." Althusser says ideology is imaginary version of truth People don't have direct access to the truth, they have imaginary/socially constructed relations to the truth Doesn't juxtapose ideology to the truth No one has access to the truth → everyone has different version Thinks Marx's idea is too simple

Empiricism and the Medical gaze

novel way of seeing that involves the physician in a "double system of observation" — one that discovers the disease process and "circumscribes its natural truth." Under the medical gaze, a person's "constitution" — the structural body and its functional idiosyncrasies — is a conglomeration that can be traversed by a physician aware of an array of telling signs. The gaze asserts a cognitive relativity, such that the facts about the body are dependent upon the physician's medical gaze — his sensations, perceptions, experiences, etc. Though subjective by definition, the medical gaze also offers the physician his understanding of the medical knowledge and a foundation for his judgments, so that his knowledge and observation of the body may be made useful. physicians sought empirical evidence by looking inside the body, not only cutting it open to see but also using tools to seek out aspects that could not be discerned directly by hand or by eye.

Classical liberalism

political tradition that has existed for centuries. It is the belief that our country should live in a free-market, with full economic freedoms similar to Neoliberalism, but unlike neoliberalism classical liberalism also includes more social political actions and consider civil liberties under the rule of law, freedom of speech, small government, small taxation and large deregulation to be important tenets to a well-functioning country.

Visibility

power may be negotiated by making things visible "Shining a light on injustice" Recognition and democracy "The right to look"

The glance

practice of looking, gazing vs. a glance what meaning does this hold

Practices

practices of looking at images

Prosumer

producer + consumer with access to the means of media production: smartphones, computers, design software. Also, you are always producing data for platforms, even as you are consuming information, media, advertising (production/consumption in the same act) DIY, Peer-to-Peer commerce, alternatives to global, mass-produced brands ("authenticity"?) Participation / Interaction with brands, feedback

The Prosumer

producer + consumer with access to the means of media production: smartphones, computers, design software. Also, you are always producing data for platforms, even as you are consuming information, media, advertising (production/consumption in the same act) DIY, Peer-to-Peer commerce, alternatives to global, mass-produced brands ("authenticity"?) Participation / Interaction with brands, feedback

Networked Publics

publics and counterpublics formed in online discussion forums

Contextual

related to surrounding content

Baudrillard

simulacra, simulation, hyperreal main concern: simulation breaks representation's relationship with the "reality principle" - the "authentic fake" (Umberto Eco)

Visuality

socialized vision; knowledge, interests, desires and social relations between perceiver and perceived

Anatomical Theater

specialised building or room, resembling a theatre, used in teaching anatomy at early modern universities. They were typically constructed with a tiered structure surrounding a central table, allowing a larger audience to see the dissection of cadavers more closely than would have been possible in a non-specialized setting.

Dérive

studying the terrain of the city (psychogeography) and emotional disorientation

Lacan's Mirror Stage and the formation of subjectivity

talking about how babies perceive themselves in the world, perceive themselves as fragmented but see the wholeness of their parent who is not them -- when they encounter and recognize themselves in the mirror is the moment when they see themselves as an "I" -- idealized image of themselves in the mirror, imaginary that body seems to have a whole body -- how do we use mirrors to get a sense of our coherent self? Narcissism and the mirror phase Jubilant assumption of one's spectacular image Symbolic - symbolic function of the person in the mirror Imaginary - the subject in the mirror not really being you but an ideal reflection Real - the subject in the mirror is a direct reflection of the real you

Anthropocene Visuality

the Anthropocene is a human- created machine that is now unconsciously bent on its own destruction, a purposiveness without purpose, to repurpose Immanuel Kant's famous definition of the aesthetic. As I have argued elsewhere (Mirzoeff 2011), a complex of visualization usually comprises three steps: classification, separation, and aestheticization. In this case, however, the first two steps are essentially redundant: the Anthropocene defines the entire planet, whether we like it or not. The last moment of human agency comes in the rendering of this phenomenon into an aesthetic, comprising both the ancient concept of bodily perception and the modern sense of the beautiful. Perhaps surprisingly, to visualize the Anthropocene is to invoke the aesthetic. There are many aesthetics that are not those of the Anthropocene, of course, but that is not my concern here. In the brief compass available here, the first step is to recognize how deeply embedded in our very sensorium and modern ways of seeing the Anthropocene- aestheticcapitalist complex of modern visuality has become

Visual Culture

the aspect of culture expressed in visual images

technological determinism

the idea that machines and their development drive economic and cultural change

Signified

the meaning we associate with the sign The signified is the thought, concept, or mental image "conjured up" by signifier physical form of the sign Pencil marks Vocal sounds Pixels on a screen The part of the sign that we perceive with our senses

Scopophilia

the pleasure of looking at another person as an erotic object

Voyeurism

the practice of gaining sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity.

Spectatorship

the practice of looking

planned obsolescence

the practice of modifying products so those that have already been sold become obsolete before they actually need replacement the designing of goods to fail after a certain amount of time (like the lightbulb), often by using inferior materials, so that consumers have a reason to purchase new goods.

Hybridity

the process of mixing genres within a culture and across cultures

Invisibility

the quality of not being able to be seen Eluding surveillance - right to look

Countervisuality

the struggle for the "right to look" not just a different way of seeing or a different way of looking at images but the tactics to dismantle the visual strategies of the hegemonic system. It is, in other words, "the attempt to reconfigure visuality as a whole" (p. 24) and thus "the right to look," which goes even further than just the right to look back, although looking back is the first step towards countervisuality.

Aesthetics

the study of beauty

Semiotics

the study of signs and symbols (Peirce) Denotation, Connotation, Myth (Barthes)

Cult Value

the value of something because it is deemed significant through history, exclusivity, ritual and tradition

Exhibition Value

the value of something that is shown, shared and interpreted

Referent

thing that a sign/symbol represents

Time-space compression

through processes such as globalization time is accelerated and the significance of space is reduced Geographer David Harvey notes that globalization reconfigures time and space, introducing the term "time-space compression." This refers in part to the way that the acceleration of economic activities "shrinks" distance, for example, by bringing together business colleagues who live across borders quickly and easily over the Internet, or by facilitating the flow of goods over borders via the relaxation of inter-national trade restrictions. Time is compressed as well through the speed of these transactions: business associates can meet without the time it takes to travel; goods are delivered faster and further due to enhancement of services to accommodate the expanded world market.11 With this escalated rate of production, circulation, and exchange, all supported by advanced technologies of communication, logistics, and transportation, Harvey argues, our experience of space and time is radically transformed. Space and time are compressed through the patterns and qualities of global flow

"Aura"

unique quality of art object that calls out to us 2 part description Physical → physical and unique presence in space and time Social → provenance, social history, has been handed from one person to the other A photograph does not have the same aura as a painting which would have a connection to history like pre-photographic mediums Is a postcard auratic? Benjamin criticized the prior emphasis on the original for reifying the artwork as commodity in a capitalist system. Reproducibility moved the artwork away from the centuries-long emphasis on uniqueness and authenticity, and yet the concept of the aura still held strong. Benjamin wrote that "even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be."14 It is precisely this "presence in time and space" that Benjamin refers to as giving the original an aura, which he ties to its authenticity. Traditionally, authenticity refers to that which is true and real.

Copyright - definition; what does it protect

vs. patents and trademarks - relation to "creative commons" licensing

Optical Unconsciousness

was primarily referring to the psychoanalytical perspective: photography opened a new realm of experience that was not accessible to the naked eye - the same way that psychoanalysis provided an access to the physic unconscious.

Culture as a Whole Way of Life

where culture relates to everything we do

Brand

"A class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer" (Merriam-Webster) A signifier also attached to non-commodities as well, like religion, family, personal identity; ideas and values Brands "operate as cultures" that people "participate in as a way of life" (PoL: 258) An "intersecting relationship between marketing, a product, and consumers" (PoL: 259)

Reflexivity

"Distanced" knowing - audience knows things Cultural reflexivity is defined as an open-ended form of using cultural objects to mediate the self, and then compared to other types of practice - traditional and rationalised. The comparison proceeds in three dimensions: the criteria of validity, the mode of meaning, and the attitude of the acting subjects.

Mulvey's theorization of the gendering of the cinematic gaze

"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness"

Plantation Complex

"Indigo Terie," by Jean-Baptiste du Tertre (1667). Note the clear labeling and division of space, with the overseer in the center with a surveillant view (oversight) of the plantation

Gender and the Gaze / "men act/women appear"

"One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight." — John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972), p. 47

Umberto Eco

"Reality principle" "authentic fake"

Culture as Distinction

"The best thing that has been thought or said" → high culture vs. pop culture vs. low culture, etc.

Pastiche

"an imitation that announces itself as such" (PoL 325) Etymology: French pastiche → from Italian pasticcio ("pie, something blended") → from Vulgar Latin pasticium → from Latin pasta ("dough, pastry cake, paste") → from Ancient Greek παστά (pastá, "barley porridge") → from παστός (pastós, "sprinkled with salt"). If parody imitates to critique, then pastiche imitates to pay homage, or simply just to mimic.

Commodity fetishism

"the perception of economic value as something that arises from and resides within the commodity goods themselves, and not from the series of interpersonal relations that produce the commodity and evolve its value" (Wikipedia) Consumers have little idea of how products are actually produced, instead their value is affixed to abstract meanings like coolness or authenticity (PoL: 279)

Realism Key Tenets

"the realist image depicts something as if it would be seen by the human eye." The goal is to produce reality "as it is." "a set of conventions or a style of art or representation that is understood at a given historical moment to accurately represent nature or the real or to convey and interpret accurate or universal meanings about people, objects, and events in the world."

Punctum

"this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me" Latin word: wound, prick, or mark made by a pointed instrument "that accident which pricks me" NOT the result of analysis: "In order to perceive the punctum, no analysis would be of any use to me"

Public Sphere

(definition and critiques; idea of "counterpublics") Benedict Anderson: National-scale media help foster an "imagined community" of the nation "Mass media" - experience of simultaneity (commonality of experiencing events at the same time) "Public Sphere" - "private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state" (Jurgen Habermas) (idealized) space of democratic politics, a democratic "commons" Distinct from "private sphere" (domestic space) Public Sphere - "private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state" (Jurgen Habermas) (idealized) space of democratic politics, a democratic "commons" A discursive space (Michael Warner) - where political discourse happens