67 pages • 2 hours read
John BergerWays Of Seeing
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Ways of Seeing
This titular motif is, unsurprisingly, a central motif of the text. In the first chapter, Berger makes his case for the primacy of the visual, and therefore legitimizes subsequent chapters’ focus on distinct ‘ways of seeing.’ For him, capitalist culture produces and utilizes various distinct visual languages (or ways of seeing)that dictate the psychological, social, economic, and political relations that capitalist subjects have with both each other and the world at large. Therefore, when Berger investigates these ways of seeing through the lens of history, he does so in order to dissect and identify the manner in which the rising capitalist world order produced distinct and sharply limiting visual languages that corresponded to its own political, economic, and cultural aims. (The normalization of property as both an a priori reality, and property acquisition as the ultimate human purpose are two examples of these aims.)
These visual languages, through the sheer power of the human faculty for sight, combined with the insidious potency of ideology, have the ability to transcend genre. (Berger most cogently argues this point in his case study of oil painting.) Ultimately, Berger’s purpose for this motif is dual. Firstly, he wishes to deconstruct dominant modes of seeing. Secondly, and of equal importance, he wants to rid these ways of seeing of their power and enable humans to use their incredible visual faculties to imagine and instantiate relations beyond which those that capitalism imposes and enforces.
Mystification/De-Mystification
This recurring motif is the label that Berger uses to identify the manner in which capitalist ideology obscures its own production and thereby poses itself as a self-evident truth. By identifying and indicting the processes of mystification, Berger hopes to free art discourse from the cloud of elitism that persists in enveloping it, and also to reach beyond the norms of art criticism through his investigations of the visual. Indeed, what Berger does in this book cannot even strictly be called art criticism, as he is more concerned with the visual as an economic, political, and cultural formulation than he is with a rarefied conception of ‘Art.’ This sustained concern is, in itself, a de-mystification. Berger therefore makes his populist aims very strongly known through this motif.
The Nude
This motif is the central theoretical term of Chapter Three. For Berger, the nude is a particular visual form that is completely distinct from the human experience of nakedness. Specifically utilized to entrench and promote the sexual objectification of women under patriarchy, the nude is an aesthetic form with its own norms and dictates. The conventions of the nude, for example, dictate that a woman’s body must appear hairless and therefore without its own sexual agency. The nude is the means by which the naked female body becomes objectified as a sight to behold. In turn, through the normalization of the consumption of female bodies in the aesthetic form of the nude, the ideology of sexist, misogynistic patriarchy implants itself into the minds of both women and men. The nude teaches women to surveil themselves as objects that must act in accordance with ultimate aim of ingratiating and satisfying the male gaze. It teaches men, in turn, that they have the right to claim ownership and mastery over women.
Oil Painting
In Chapter Five, Berger examines the historical development of oil painting as both a genre and a distinct visual language. He uses the motif of oil painting to articulate a specific way of seeing. He argues that oil painting was the first visual language of capitalism, as the rise of the genre corresponded with the rise of global capitalism. The genre’s obsession with rendering objects in hyper-realistic detail was corollary to the capitalist assertion that all of the world can be reduced to the status of property, to be owned by the ruling class. The conventions of oil painting, then, ultimately entrenched, served, and normalized the capitalist worldview and its attendant class domination. Furthermore, he argues that, due in no small part to fact that global capitalism is still a dominating force, the conventions of oil paintings continue to exercise considerable influence on the ways that Western cultures both produce and understand visual material, such as the depiction of food, mythology, and landscapes.
Publicity Images
This motif provides the central focus of Chapter Seven. Building upon his explicit investigation of capitalism, Berger uses Chapter Seven to elucidate and deconstruct the manner in which prolific ‘publicity images’—or advertisements—propagandize the masses and promote adherence to capitalist exploitation. Firstly, publicity images posit a future temporality that promises escape from the drudgery of labor and into unburdened pleasure. Even though that escape never comes to satisfactory fruition, publicity images—by virtue of the perpetual proliferation of consumer goods—provide an inexhaustible outlet for the frustration and lack of fulfillment which capitalist subjects perpetually feel. Secondly, by positing this illusory escape as the only conceivable means of accessing pleasure, publicity images sharply curtail the imaginative capacities of Western “democratic” subjects. Publicity images, therefore, erect and abide by their own set of distinct visual conventions. Those conventions ultimately reproduce and entrench capitalist exploitation and oppression.
