被尼奥抑或基努·里维斯询唤的隐形者
(作者：秀之树)
人气:408 waddle于2004-2-16 8:49:57提交 

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《骇客帝国》三部曲是人类跨入网络时代以来，对自身处境进行的一次最奇幻的宏伟构思。在资费奢靡的特技和袁和平精益求精的动作设计联手之下，基努.里维斯犹如这件精美织物上一根贵重的金属纬线，令人目眩神迷。观看影片或者碟片的我们，安静地坐在电影院的幽暗中，或是猫在光线昏暗的房间内，肉身一如既往地呼吸，心跳，血液流动，神经则陷入绷紧的高度集中，浑然忘我。主角尼奥或者明星基努的奋战成为我们的奋战，导演的视线取代我们的视线，技术的超越冒充日常体验，情节的虚构掩盖现实的贫瘠。此刻物质的我们真实存在，但是具备个体意识的我们却失踪了。

几乎没有人迅速而警觉地意识到这是一场彻头彻尾的收购。

影片中的尼奥率先被拯救人类命运这一崇高理想和使命所收购，为此经历了死亡、重生、顿悟的修炼，从凡人进化到救世主，再还原到程序。而身为观者的我们则被救世的尼奥所收购，他自始至终略带忧郁的典雅姿态，简洁流畅的打斗身手，一波三折的神奇经历，都令这个形象张力十足。从普通常人的起始点出发，最终到达英雄的高度，这个过程布满了逐步驯化的机关。就根本而言，观众都是理想主义者。人们愿意和认同基努.里维斯饰演的尼奥，是因为一旦回归到经验主义者的身份，则意味着重返真实的自我，必须接受现实中不愉快的经验，重新成为一个经常感到羞耻和脆弱，对许多问题和阻碍无能为力甚至自觉懦弱的庸常之辈，一个肉身会轻易腐烂的渺小有机体，一个被神圣俯瞰的卑微人物。一旦从理想主义者返回经验主义者，没有了尼奥伟大的使命，影片中鼓舞人心的热情，个体的我们真实地湮没于苍茫人海，与蝼蚁没有区别。

观众接受驯化是被动的。因为影片中的角色无论善恶，正义还是敌对，表现在大银幕上的，全部是经过特效和武指雕琢修饰的举止言谈，以彬彬有礼的绅士风度或未来战士不可思议的能力，营造出华美流畅的视觉效果。《骇客帝国》三部曲连同它的演员，时尚，光滑，全部是被刻意打磨过的工业产品。其光洁的外表如同骇客们的黑衣，镀上了一层闪亮的精致，充满后现代的金属感，冷酷而直接，计算精确无误，尽在掌握。

人类本性中的黑暗、粗鄙、蒙昧、残暴需要被驯化，其方式就是给予文明和优美的教诲。
优良的视听享受引发心理愉悦，观众在不知不觉中坠入催眠的陷阱，被巨大的诱惑所俘虏，接受电影运用各种手段进行宣传的思想。

同时接受驯化又是一种主动行为。人们的成长过程是社会意识形态灌输各种观念的过程，正如基努.里维斯的成功是好莱坞发挥金钱机制的结果。尽管在清一色光鲜的明星外壳下，基努拥有许多为人津津乐道的独特之处：血统中所谓的1/8亚洲成分；来自夏威夷土语的“基努”二字本意为“远处山谷吹来的清风”；颠沛流离的童年往事和粗糙的成长经历；对自己被耻笑为五流水平的“天狼星”乐队的忠诚和不遗余力的维持；对出演莎士比亚作品的念念不忘以及动辄引用莎翁名言的痴狂；当电影公司抱怨导演阿尔·帕西诺过于昂贵的时候，主动自掏腰包为《魔鬼代言人》捐助100多万美元；当演员吉恩·哈克曼因为身价过高将被《替补队员》制片方弃之不用时，基努再次解囊相助；在《骇客帝国》取得全球性胜利之后，他又放弃自己近一个亿的分红给幕后人员，理由是“没有他们就没有电影的成功”，而对他自己来说，“钱已经足够用了，多一些和少一些没有什么区别”……这样的基努打破了人们对明星的模式化认知，显示出他的特立独行，与众不同的气质。

然而上述内容之所以能够广为人知，则取决于一个基本前提：被好莱坞收购。任何一个娱乐明星的出现都无法脱离资本机制的运作，基努并无不同。如果他的英俊不被电影产业青睐，忧郁的气质没有被银幕放大并渲染成蛊惑的魅力，那么尼奥仍可能与《骇客帝国》一同风靡世界，而在观众的视野中，“基努.里维斯”这个名字却不会有任何意义。只有首先获得被电影产业收购的资格，才能进入明星生产线。基努.里维斯或尼奥的崛起是好莱坞权衡利弊后的决策，是反复试探娱乐市场和受众反映的产物。二者的成功并非偶然。好莱坞选择了现实中的基努和电影中的尼奥，是因为大众需要这类产品。观众的口味决定了他们的存在，人们主动接受驯化的行为产生了基努式的明星和尼奥式的电影形象。

二者的“酷”顺因了这个时代的前卫潮流，然后又为潮流的继续前进推波助澜。尽管续集《重装上阵》和《矩阵革命》在亚洲仍旧雄霸天下的时候，并没能在欧美大获全胜，但是没有人能否认它的震撼性影响。骇客们的经典装束、各款墨镜、先进武器等等，诸如此类大量成为人们追逐效仿的对象，甚至产生了最极端的社会效果——引发出仿骇客式的恶性杀人事件。

这是一个互为因果的循环。基努的明星光芒和尼奥英雄行为让个体产生误认，在二者看似坚强的自由意志的询唤下，我们超越了平凡的自己，忘记了现实的镣铐，从而获得飞升的幻境。然而误认并不能开出真实的鲜花，更无法结出等同影像的果子，两者之间的差距让电影外的人们愈发寻常，却因此更加深了对幻境和偶像的迷恋，对不存在之事物的追捧。

实际上，造就人们渴望理想并仰视英雄的，是意识形态的询唤。也正是这一强大的力量支配好莱坞建立取舍标准，迎合道德范畴，紧随时尚变化，生产出合乎要求的电影和明星。意识形态无形无声无色，却又无所不在。它是一个虚拟的名词，却又真实地体现在社会生活的方方面面。人们很少觉察到它的存在，却在言行举止甚至思想中自觉地遵守它制订出的各项准则。意识形态是人类社会最强势的虚构主体，当它询唤基努.里维斯时，我们看到的是来自好莱坞、资本运作、明星机制、传播媒介的询唤；当它询唤尼奥时，我们得到的印象则是来自电影工业、英雄情结、观影机制、理想主义甚至隐秘的窥视癖在询唤。

正是在这层层叠叠的伪装之下，我们被询唤为悬浮的主体，想象性地主宰了一切。然而电影内充满借助尼奥所篡取的超验快感，电影外却是资本运营的天罗地网。向前迈进，是一触即发的重重机关，向后倒退，则是环环相扣的陷阱。观众受制于电影机器，却被躲藏在电影机器背后的意识形态牢牢掌握。意识形态无孔不入，人们无法彻底洗刷自己的头脑，更无法摒弃意识，这是一个无法澄清的时代，存在就意味着混淆。甚至可以说，哪里有对错之分，哪里就是意识形态滋长的土壤。

面对强大的询唤体系和力量，是否真的就没有罅隙？人类是否只能成为被询唤的个体，无所遁形？《骇客帝国》的世界试图作出一个完美的假定，即人类无论清醒还是无知，都被封在密不透风的程序世界里。但是正如假定不等同于事实一样，人类存在本身就是有缺憾的，个体不可能完美无缺，相反，它是一次不完善，是一次亟待修补的失误，生老病死、软弱无能、蒙昧无知，都是个体真实存在的漏洞。因此，电影中的尼奥没有被塑造成大无畏的耶稣基督，身为明星的基努.里维斯可以作出不符合经济规律的举动。

没有缺憾的个体被完整的询唤，只是理论上的一次完美假定和设置。

不可否认，即便认识到意识形态的存在，不断靠近权力中心的真相，我们依然在个人迷雾中踯躅蹒跚，依然不知道自己身在何处。在尼奥或者基努.里维斯的参照下，光影的绚丽和明星的辉煌，甚至一度让观众忘掉现实中卑微的自身，成功地脱胎换骨。

我们是被尼奥或者基努.里维斯询唤的隐形者。正因如此，当《骇客帝国》以其强大的询唤令观众迷途时，它也成为揭示意识形态的出色的电影文本。

据说导演沃卓斯基两兄弟曾要求演员阅读后现代作家让.鲍得里亚的论著，以体味“虚拟对真实的完美罪行”，从而领悟影片所要传递的精神。但依据互为因果的原理，我们相信片场的对白应该是这样的——

沃卓斯基兄弟：你是否按要求去读鲍德里亚的书了吗？
演员：读了。
沃卓斯基兄弟：读懂了吗？
演员：呃……这个……说真的……好像有点……
沃卓斯基兄弟：干脆点！
演员：没有！鲍德里亚简直不是人读的。
沃卓斯基兄弟：你可以参加拍摄了！

 

電影機器與國家機器

在《投射幻象》一書中，作者艾倫（Richard Allen）
分析拉崗式主體論述對於「電影機器」（cinematic
apparatus）論述發展的影響。他指出，「電影機器」理論
主要是處理電影機器如何將觀者置入意識型態中，以及影片
不同的再現與敘述方式如何以各種不同的方法來支持或者質
疑電影機器的意識型態（Allen 25）。

此派電影評論者對於意識型態與觀視主體的重視，以及
電影機器的命名，很難不讓讀者聯想到法國馬克思主義學者
阿圖色（Althusser）的看法，他提出「國家機器」（State
 Apparatus）如何透過各種細緻的體制化運作來召喚主體於
執政者的意識型態中。艾倫指出，阿圖色的「意識型態國家
機器」的論述是借用了拉康的「鏡像誤識」的概念，而阿圖
色也將其運用於觀者與電影機器的討論；「電影機器」派評
論者便學習阿圖色的途徑，向拉康的主體論述取法，欲借助
拉康對語言主體的討論來釐清並修正阿圖色有關「意識型態
電影機器」對主體影響的看法。

主體認同與抗拒

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笛卡爾僅瞭解到真相的一部份——即「確立的主體」及
以此思想的主體來質疑推翻傳統累進的知識。經由佛洛
伊德的探索，我們得以看到真相的另外一面，即「潛意
識主體」的存在所傳達的訊息——主體的思考在達成確
定性之前即已展開。
——《精神分析的四個基本要素》(Lacan 1977: 37)

 

從病人的言談中我們看到了語言能表項(signifier)網
絡的崩解，形成能表項與感官經驗的分離，病人不斷藉
由說話告訴我們兩件事實——一是有關那些存在於他心
裡不屬於他的語言，另外則是他必須透過重新尋回屬於
他的言語來獲得新生。
——《恐懼的力量》(Kristeva 1982: 50)

 

拉康堅持精神分析應「回歸佛洛依德」的思考模式，清楚地表明
無法認同並批判「自我心理學派」（ego-psychology）對主體掌握之
不夠深入，更重申佛氏潛意識的概念對於主體分析的重要性。拉康對
潛意識的重視，亦顯現在他對笛卡爾式的思考主體（cogito）的分析
上；對拉康而言，僅活躍於意識層次的笛卡爾式主體漠視了屬於感官
或慾望層次的主體活動，因而無法處理那個以「不在的狀態」而存在
的潛意識（it reveals itself as absent）對主體產生的種種影響
（Lacan 1977: 36）。

拉康式主體論述的迷人之處在於其巧妙地揉合了心理結構與語言
結構，進一步開發佛洛依德的分析論述中已留意到的表意問題。其後
的克莉絲提娃亦承襲這樣的論述路線，將表意活動與潛意識的聯結廣
泛運用於文學藝術等表述活動（Lechte 33）。就拉康的主體論而言，
主體性的形成即代表著主體進入象徵秩序，具備了表意及掌握知識的
能力，但符號的操作僅是滿足主體對暢力（jouissance）的需求；正
因大對體（the Other）的介入，將主體切割出想像、象徵與真實等
三種不同層面的運作，使主體與大對體之間無法被簡化為單純的從屬
關係。真實層的回返並非為使主體回復符號前的快樂，它具有真理與
主體自覺的色彩，欲使主體察知自己貪樂而不願面對閹割事實的虛枉
狀態（Lacan 1977: 53-4）。若主體抗拒大對體的吸引，拒絕主體性
的形成，拒絕成為語言的主體，便會成為如精神失常者般無法正常操
作語言符號（Fink 50）！

從拉康對精神失常者的分析中不難看出主體進入象徵秩序的必要
性，雖說這樣的語言主體有可能成為大對體的發話機而已！克莉絲提
娃的主體傳述中亦強調象徵秩序的語言有逐漸封閉僵化的傾向，必須
透過來自辨識層的力量來活化象徵秩序，而符號層卻必須依賴象徵層
的運作來進行表意活動（Kristeva 1984: 81；Lechte 129-30），
若脫離象徵層的符號層只會是一團不可理解、無法表意的驅力
（an asocial drive），對於象徵秩序難以產生任何積極的顛覆作用
（Kristeva 1984: 70-1）。從拉康與克莉絲提娃對主體的形成、僵
滯與復甦等討論中來看，主體與大對體/象徵秩序的互動具有被動與
主動兩種面向——為了進入社會體系（the socio-symbolic order），
個體必須認同對體，選擇開放自我、納入它性（otherness），而非
抗拒秩序（ordering）致使主體性無法形成！但主體必須高度自覺，
才得以突破意義充盈的符號遮蓋，認知到符號布幕下存在著空洞
（void），這個空洞而未符號化的意符，具備破壞既有固定意義體
系的潛在力量，抗拒個體被社會完全吸納，亦是抗拒社會體系的完全
僵化（Kristeva 1982: 50-1）。這同時也顯示著主體亦有被馴化
（harnessed）而成為如封閉體系般僵化主體的可能。

拉康所開展的非單線化的主體傳述也因而受到諸多文化評論學者
的青睞。以電影理論為例，拉崗的「鏡像誤識」、「小對形」、或
「凝視」等概念，常被用以討論電影機器（cinema apparatus）、
意識型態、及觀視主體之間的互動關係（Allen 25）。電影影像所欲
形成的結果常依意識型態與主體的關係而分為兩類——建立認同與破
壞認同。電影機器與觀視主體間並非單純的宰制與被宰制的關係，觀
視主體（spectator-subject）對於影像的認同、對於媒介介入的不
敏感（medium awareness）並非僅代表著觀視主體認同電影機器所欲
傳播的意識型態與真實性，影像認同的運作亦牽涉主體的觀視慾望與
追求暢力的需要，藉由影像的鏡像作用來抗拒主體分裂的真相。由此
角度觀之，「認同」與「抗拒」不該被理解為前者「消極被動」、後
者「積極主動」的單一對應關係，而是必須置入主體與對體互動關係
的不同進程中來理解。

在拉康式主體傳述的思考脈絡下，主體必須接受對體的馴化以促
成主體性的形成，成為像對體一樣具有語言能力的主體。符號化後的
主體是語言的主體亦是慾望的主體（Fink 58），在語言中繼續異化
自己、在慾望對體中操作語言符號而想像與小對形結合得晌暢力。在
此架構下所謂的認同，主要是指主體在想像與象徵層接受了對體的召
喚，將對體的價值觀作為自己的價值觀。這樣的認同架構便是阿圖色
運用了拉康的概念而發展出主體與意識型態的想像認同，主體接受意
識型態的召喚而成為對體所期望的馴化主體。無論在抽象的表意結構
下，或是具體的社會國家與個人的運作，主體與對體維持某種認同關
係確有其必要；然當對體產生質變或過度僵化（如由獨裁走向民主、
或一黨獨大等情況），主體必須抵抗威脅其主體性繼續運作的因素。
然而主體的抗拒亦有可能是主體病癥的顯現（如忠貞共產黨員無法適
應國家進入民主政體）。無論是個人主體或國家主體，表意僵化與封
閉將對主體發展構成極大的危機，拉康的潛意識主體或真實層的設置
便代表主體仍有轉化僵滯狀態的可能。主體在認同的結構中抗拒僵化、
在僵化的體系中取消認同——在這樣的前提下，表意活動才得以有意
義的繼續開展。

形象/机器/形象：电视理论中的马克思与隐喻
 
作者：理查德·戴恩斯特著 | 2005-01-21 | 原始出处： 文化研究网 
 生活的整体看起来必须如同一份工作，通过这种相似来掩盖那些还没有直接用于谋取金钱利益的成分。
     ——西塞多·阿多诺《最低限度的道德》
    
     在电视应该操纵的所有经济中，最难理解的还是这个最为基本的，即我们只能沿用旧名加以称呼的政治经济。尽管几乎不能将电视误认为是一块完全未经商业染指的纯美学领域，然而也不可将其降低到粗俗的商业套语的地位。价值的电视视觉形态同时在好几个区域运作，在图像转播的动态过程中，就交叉于金钱、政权、文化利益等一长串力的链环之中。如果说电视一方面在最为全球化的交换水平上运作，另一方面又在最平凡的日常生活水平上运作，那么任何关于这一体系的可行性理论都应必备一套易于变通的、能够认识存在于这些完全相异领域之间的联系的抽象概念。因此，我在此提供一幅地图，将可能受电视操纵的经济用两个概念轴极加以规范，这两个概念轴以高度凝练的简略方式表达，即"机器"和"形象"。任何对电视的具体分析都必须处理名为"机器"和"形象"的问题，而我们对这些术语的定位又决定着如何定义另一个逃避不掉的术语——资本主义，这个术语一直在使用中且在此至关重要。
     先看一个简单的断言：电视是全球性资本主义这台机器的一个组成部分。每个字的分量以及这句话的对称全取决于"一个部分"这几个字的意思：就字面意义来看，这一论断可还原为一个简单的意思，即电视是资本主义关系体系的产物，它刻画这些关系且在其中扮演某种角色。千真万确，但是空话一句：尽管我们知道电视技术的发展主要以资本主义的需要为依据，但是电视从来就不是资本主义积累的简单工具，也不仅仅只是众多商品中的一种。电视与资本的关系促成了从微观模仿到宏观社会总括在内的许许多多比喻活动。在电视的视觉关联中，政治经济与文化即刻并永远借助彼此而传播。
     至关重要的是，这些比喻性构型（电视作为机器，资本作为形象）不应成为那种常见于电视研究中的超稳定理论构架，在这类理论构架中，批评家往往堆砌"话语"、"象征"或"情感"经济之类的辞藻，而对于经济作为模式本身的地位不加质疑。构成经济隐喻学魅力的原因是一种寻求系统的动机，即试图从一种不在场的或隐匿的价值逻辑角度对现象进行关联。即便如此，这种模式还需总是就其单位或最后术语做出重要选择：一旦"劳动力"一词被拒纳而"能指"或"欲望"一词受青睐，整个错综复杂的问题群必须回头迎战系统思维和理智本身对真理权利的要求（70年代理论的一个主要系支即以此为路线：利奥塔便是其中一例）。如果我们要说电视同时操纵几个经济体系，我们必须要问的不仅只是那种情形如何可能，还要问我们如何才能对此加以谈论。
     作为第一步，重要的是要认识到任何理论术语都有不能根除的比喻之维。解构主义批评已表明隐喻的根本可能性如何切入"经济"的模式，将其揭示为对特定种类的形象（或用另一种符码来说：表征）的散发和聚集。此外，隐喻还能成为一种具有生产力和推动力的措施，一种建构之物，一部名副其实的为意义服务的机器。每当知识、意义和表征之间的关系成了问题时，"经济"不仅只是一个顺手拈来的陈腐隐喻：在其辞格本身就含有关于价值和结构的公理，这些公理应能确保话语本身对真理权利的要求。同样道理，"机器"不仅只是一个描绘经济过程的便捷隐喻；它是对铁面无情的客观事物的形象说明，指涉社会生活中所有必然的、不受人为因素左右的和僵死不变的事物。下一步我们将如何使用这些互相交叉的形象和机器，隐喻和经济？一方面，在阅读关于政治经济的学科类话语时，可视其为对那些被吸收进来使其知识显而易见的概念和隐喻的动态组合，另一方面，可将银屏上一连串的可视形象读解为拆解成价值的抽象标志并以动态形式呈现的经济流通的各个时刻。这是一个双向运动：对"电视的政治经济"所做的任何论述都不可只以形象的价值为依据，而同时也须以价值的形象为依据。
     "机器"（正如"机械装置"、"器械"、"马达"等等）在至关重要的阐释性语言中，尤为突出的是在那些源出心理分析和马克思主义的阐释性语言中作为一种构形比喻而出现，是毫不足为奇的。由于它所发挥的作用，电影理论大量利用这类设备，将摄像机和投影机的保险丝接入到力比多或认知的配电板上，以便使阐释成为对已接受了特定输入的感觉和象征的输出进行合乎标准规范的预测。于是电影机器本身在各种力之间起着万无一失的连接者、传送者、中介者和交流者的作用，作为一种物体替代了一种过程，且既无主观性动因，也无偶然性变化。"机器"也赫然出现在由德曼、福柯或德勒兹与盖特里对这类方法所做的批判中也不足为奇，在他们的批判中，由阐释所连接的隐喻距离最终失去效用，"机器"（作为配置和装配）成了论述权力的"内在性"的"真正"模型。"机械的"这一术语无可抗拒地进入到我们的批判词汇中来，说明在一个有序的社会环境中权力的构成。所以，"写作"和"理论"已不再是在一个诗学的、元机器的真理空间运作了，而是凭借本身资格就成了工具和机器。
     再看一个例子：在《判断力批判》中，康德在给不同职业分发"美学价值"时，严厉申斥修辞，斥之为"诱劝的机械"——无疑这在当时是一幅喧闹而龌龊的形象，然而，无论是当时还是现在，又都是一幅成熟的形象。1正如德里达在《经济模仿》中所指出的，对修辞和机器的一概驳斥仍属传统：它是对一种没有使动意图的言语的指责，对一种不以内在意图为动机，完全不受控制的语言的指责。2实际上，它是对作为机KKD的，即复述的、言表的、与意识脱节的表征本身的定义。如同修辞，机器也是空洞无物，纯属一种功能；它不添加任何东西，拿不出任何属于自己的东西。它在进行麻木不仁的复制时，把在最初的言说或制作行为中曾经是独到的、创建性的或完整的东西再生产一遍并使之平庸化。一如康德的语句中那明确无误的因循性所表明的，在一套在商业和言语中分配合适或不合适的价值标签的综合性先验图式中，机器从否定的一端获得自己的隐喻性意义。赋予"机器"这层意义，尽管与一种对工艺学的哲学态度有关，却不是出自于对"科学"——无论是自然科学还是应用科学——的批判。相反，机器在此意味着利益——不仅只是依赖于机器而不依赖于手艺的那种经济利益，而是任何将表征机制作为经济手段而不是表达手段来操作的利益。于是在一个特定关头——康德将此简便地定在18世纪末——"机器"作为一个在全世界通用的公共比喻脱颖而出；它不仅只是一个适用于日常经济世界的隐喻，它完全成了一个替代普通隐喻的隐喻。3事实上，"机器"可以成为最普通、最不引人注目的比喻，一个在语言中顺利劳作的比喻：它在"毋庸言说"的背景水平上辛勤劳动在日常事物中。对于诗人和哲学家来说，机器总是指明某个"真实"物，并不仅仅是因为它本身必定有物相，还因为它服务于利益和经济世界。
     "机器"成了一个贪婪的比喻，完全是由于它不知适可而止或外在限制：它往往在每一处都改变自己的疆界和活动，既决定部分又决定整体，既决定原因也决定效果。机器这一形象有可逆转的两面，一面对着经济和概念性，另一面对着隐喻性、表征和表象的活动。在一特定的文本中，由于它介于所讨论的经济体系的任何结构性缺失的东西和其产品，即形象的直观和自显性之间，于是机器这一比喻在近几个世纪中充斥于各种话语，调整着表述和行动的空间。如今，当经济和形象正在各个层次上经历着彻底的重新估价时，机器的语义混乱——这点已是现代性实质的缩影——已被电视和电脑的银屏空间承接过来。
     因此，问题不应该是电视在何处能容入经济机器？也不应该是电视形象如何形成一种经济或一部用于表征的机器？而应该是对电视（从可视性和力的角度）的定义问题在何处交叉于对政治经济（从结构和价值的角度）的全新理解？有三条交叉线需要检测。每条线最终都并非偶然地经由马克思，他很久以前即对此有一定的了解。第一条线关注在理论中对价值的表征；第二条线关注在经济中对价值的表征以及这种表征的历史；第三条线则关注电视银屏对价值的表征。说道底，如果有哪种研究对象迫使我们同时沿着好几个运动方向行进，则非电视而莫属。
     运作即物
     德里达上场，装出一副雄辩的样子："严格说来，隐喻难道不都是概念吗？把隐喻和概念相对立意义何在？"4这个修辞问题不是为隐喻辩护而反对概念或为概念辩护而反对隐喻，也不是用来反对"虚假"对立的常识性借口。以上问题集中反映了德里达在《白色神话：哲学文本中的隐喻》一文中的部分论点，在那篇论文中，他追寻了长期以来西方哲学和科学试图通过在一定程度上排除隐喻和形象来形成概念的努力，因为隐喻和形象由于带有相像性和"糟糕"模仿的特点，所以作为真理的载体是靠不住的。在这个问题出现的段落中，德里达指出，概念在传统中被视为思想的稳定工具，它却无法将一种隐喻性的语言改正为或翻译成一种纯粹的形而上学或科学语言："难道科学批判所做的纠正不是从一种构造糟糕、不称职的比喻概念演化到另一种在一特定领域和科学过程的某一特定阶段更为精细、更为有力的操作性比喻概念吗？"正如他所澄清的，在隐喻和概念之间没有明智的选择（选择一旦是"明智的"，也就是与可感知的和有意义的合而为一的），因为彼此都有转向对方的方式，彼此都是以对方为太阳的花朵。德里达在此描绘的这种在受语境限制的话语中对隐喻和概念的安排，简而言之，也就是一种经济：在任何特定的场合，一种"不称职的"、构造糟糕的写作单位都将不如一种"操作性的"、可应用的写作单位更受珍视。
     《白色神话》也是德里达在没有受对话者的迫使而主动读解马克思（尽管他会第一个指出这种说明多么脆弱）的几篇论文之一。6对马克思的提及很简略，主要出现在脚注中。德里达认为马克思和尼采是起草有关"语言学内容和经济学内容之间的交换"，即指义和价值的相互交叉的资产收欠表的哲学家。德里达补充说，这后一种区分也表明了索绪尔在语义和句法系统之间、指义交换的共时和历时模式之间所做的区分。通过这一基本模式，可归纳德里达对表征的一个批判：即揭露指义和价值在通过不稳定的语境传播书写符号的过程中无法消除的互相干扰（见第七章）。通过将马克思与尼采对真理的描绘——"隐喻的流动部队"——和索绪尔对结构的 "发现"相关联，德里达给了马克思一种诸如弗洛伊德、柏格森、列宁等人所享受不到的特权，后者一概被指责为将他们文本中的隐喻问题隐匿在大量的隐喻背后。可能出现的情况是，一旦我们同意概念和隐喻可以形成一套相对稳定的"概念隐喻"这一观点，对于马克思的解构主义阅读就能够欣赏政治经济的官方概念被一种对隐喻的使用所解放出来时的那种谨慎了。
     路易斯·阿尔图塞一字一句地读着《资本论》上场·阿尔图塞以隐喻在理论文本中的出现标志着概念的失误或困难为前提来定位马克思的那些"征候"隐喻。允许我在此归纳其中的几个，尤其是被德里达引用过的几个。
     （1）阿尔图塞通过"倒置"和"理性内核"的形象来分析马克思与黑格尔的关系。他拒不承认在马克思的成熟的思想中仍有黑格尔的思想一说，无论是"倒置"说也好还是"深植"说也罢。7
     （2）在其关于意识形态的著名论文中，阿尔图塞赞成经济基础-上层建筑模式，但只是作为意识形态对经济基础的结构依赖关系的一种"地形学"意义上的形象描绘。8
     （3）在其他著述中，阿尔图塞详尽论述了马克思主义"话语地带"的空间"视野"和"地势"；尽管他感到这些形象过于带有"诱惑性"和现象学色彩，他还是将它们作为一种科学语言发展过程中虽然短暂但却必要的环节保留下来。9他明确指出，马克思使辩证法从属于地形学隐喻，目的是要"认清其自身的比喻是由其自身条件的物质属性所规定的"。10
     （4）在此基础上，他又补充了一个经典性描绘，即将认识论描绘为一种眼力或视觉：知识以其经过改造的、"训练有素的凝视"看得见经验主义以透视法凝视所忽略掉的东西。空间和视觉在此当然是相关联的比喻：批评对话语地带的合适建构将产生一种结构视域，在此视域中，该地带"从自己所界定的对象或问题中看到自己"。11阿尔图塞所创建的无主体历史科学重复了他在对资本主义结构本身的理论创建中的步骤，因其只能在概念的层面上被思考，因此只能从其局部和有限的效果（即，个别主体，成为物神的商品，金钱）上加以识别。
     因此，历史科学的具体任务就是将这些因素作为资本主义结构的比喻（隐喻、换喻等等）来"读解"，更进一步说，即资本主义结构只包括这些可见的踪迹。"结构仅仅产生于其特定成分的具体组合，因而仅存在于其效果之中"。12为了能识别作为一个价值链，更确切地说，作为一种经济的资本的总体效果，历史科学必须揭示资本对价值的生产和分配，即对其转换和传播的内在机制。在前几页中，阿尔图塞借用马克思的基本概念命名这种机制，Darstellung，即表征，"在马克思主义关于价值的全部理论中，这是一个关键性的认识论概念，该概念的目的，严格说来，就是要指明结构在其效果中存在的方式，由此而标出结构性因果关系本身。"13
     总之，对资本主义的根本机制，即对具体经济状况的决定性力量的把握，只能通过将其看做名为Darstellung（还有待于界定）的表征来实现。需要注意的是，阿尔图塞所说的"因果关系"、"功效"并不是一种单向的、倒置的关系，而是一个指出所有可能的经济成分同时相互作用的名称。
     在他写的《解读〈资本论》》一文的末尾，阿尔图塞最后对"机制"这一隐喻本身做了一番考察。
    
     每当马克思将资本主义制度表现为一种机制、一种机械、一台机器、一种构造（蒙太奇）......或表现为一种"社会新陈代谢"的错综复杂的事物时，通常所见的内、外部差异消失，与可见的无序相对立的现象内部的"紧密"联系也同时消失：我们得到一个不同的形象，一个新的准概念，完全自由于可知觉物的主体性和本质的内在性这类经验主义的自相矛盾；我们得到一套客观的体系，在其最具体的限定方面，受其构造（蒙太奇）和机械法则、其概念规范的控制。现在，我们可以回顾那个高度征候性的术语Darstellung了，可以将其与这种"机器"加以比较并按其字面意义理解为这种机器在自己效果中的存在。14
    
     对此加以释义：作为马克思文本中的核心形象，"机器"和"新陈代谢"超越了隐喻性表征的界限（既不是作为"可知觉物的主体性"［Anschauung］的表征，也不是作为"实质性的内在性"［Vorstelung］的表征）。"机器"和"新陈代谢"在其喻体本身就具有可视性和知识之间的联系：因此它们实现了一种哲学表征（Darstellung）。通俗的叠入晦涩的——"部分"成为"整体"，反之亦然——结构完全在其效果中标示出来。
     所有其他隐喻都是结构在其效果中的"形象"，惟有"机器"（请注意"新陈代谢"如何退出）已经是一个"几乎完善"的概念，一个"准概念"，一个效果上的概念。机器形象将机器的概念限定（Darstellung）吸收进来并将此"按字面意义解释"。比如，阿尔图塞好象已经解决了抽象与具体、知识与对象之间的对立。机器不仅在比喻意义上适合于"资本主义体系"这一对象，而且还足以以"生产概念"指涉由这一体系所操作的结构限定。机器既在阿尔图塞的认识论中代表着表征力，又在资本主义经济中调度着表征力。表征与机器如此融入一个概念隐喻，对此可从两条途径加以读解。
     （1）既然Darstellung是马克思借以思考资本主义制度中价值运行路线——对特定劳动力投资的转换/表征，而这又只呈现为价值（金钱-资本-商品）形象——的哲学概念，那么，"机械"既可以作为Darstellung的比喻，又可以作为其具体的存在方式。
     （2）既然表征被如此定位为资本主义经济的结构机制，那么，价值的每一具体实现都在一种特殊意义上"代表"着一个机械过程：价值既不是被"表达"，也不是被"复制"出来的，而是通过对现成材料的使用和再造一步一步"构造"或"加工"出来的。回顾一下法语的蒙太奇这个词，它有电影"画面拼接"的意思。对表征的这种定义满足了阿尔图塞在论战中反对笛卡儿意义的"机械论"功效——如同简单机器中那种单一方向的功效——和莱布尼茨意义的"表述"功效——本质主义和先验主义的功效——的要求。
     就这一点来说，还是在句子中间处，阿尔图塞的"理论生产"已成为一种认识论机器，在这台机器中，所有运行中的概念零件都"在思想中"自动复制资本的"真实"运作。15面对一种完美而枯燥的对称结构，他遁入隐喻。"［Darstellung机器就是］这个剧院舞台说明（miseenscene）的存在方式，这个剧院同时自任舞台、剧本、演员。其观众有时之所以能成为观众完全是由于他们首先被迫成为演员，受制于剧本和角色的限定，却不可能成为其作者，因为这原本是个无作者的剧院。"16
     这个比喻已被引申到另一面。这个被腾空了的剧院被当做对结构机器的隐喻引介进来，似乎一个隐喻之隐喻可以是一个概念。正如麦克尔·斯布里克所指出的，这个舞台形象引出了Darstellung的另一层意思，即在一内在性的结构中（之所以是内在性的，是因为其限定关系只存在于舞台本身而不在别处）对可视成分的定位。17阿尔图塞竭力想借助隐喻赋予他的概念以形态和形式，这暴露了他的立论中一个清晰可辨的美学维度：的确，"戏剧"比喻与一种机械的（经济学的、认识论的）结构在文本层面的冲突可被看做是对阿尔图塞的基本阐述方式的微缩归纳。
     "无作者剧院"的整个剧本提要是完全机械的，也是理想化和想象性的：它所有的努力和戏剧性场面从一开始就被"亮相"。然而，命运容许撤换场景和演员。所有的作者都走了，但是控制剧情的法则却从每个角度都到处可见。只有当这些可见点被当做一个整体、被当做承载多元指义（即决定）的连接点加以思考时，那个不在场的以理念给宇宙以形态的造物主似的结构才能自我呈现在思想面前。对于阿尔图塞来说，对结构决定论剧院的读解需要一种盲目，他称之为"科学"，一门如此严厉的学科，我们只能瞥它一眼，如果我们使之失望，就会落得与奥菲斯和欧律狄克一样的下场。正如阿尔图塞所熟知的，看得见的事物带有强制性：资本主义到处坚持自我表征和自我再生产，任何试图以一个词或一句短语将其归纳的努力都注定被它挫败。它把自己的那些形象作为惟一的自我映象。那么，如何才能对资本进行比喻，或至少，如何才能超越其自我表征而将之带入一种表征的范围内？
     在此，再让我们回顾一下兹格·沃托夫的梦想：有一种电视，可将世界的经济呈现在生产这一经济的工人们眼前。在《拥有摄像机的人类》（1928）中，沃托夫用机器的形象来表现制造形象的新机器（电影院）；这些表征的矢量合起来组成了一个无法祛除视觉类比之魔法的闭合电路。18但是电视却不适合这种联系，因为它不仅制作形象，还将它们组装和发送。它的表征运作、它的结构戏剧和它的可视性规则只能从资本主义体制的价值法则角度来理解。
     马克思机器
     诚然，马克思的著述充斥着隐喻：空间、视觉、有机、机器的隐喻。但在此与我们相关的对马克思的读解却不是"文学"或"字面"性质的，而是当代读解，旨在恢复流通概念在马克思式的经济批判中的核心地位。说得更确切一些，这种对马克思的读解将"生产"这一概念原有的稳定性转向了它最动态的发展前途，并追溯了价值在社会的各个领域摸索前行所留下的运动轨迹。马克思考察了资本如何间歇性流通，这一描述决不仅仅只是粗略相似于对作为形象传播的电视的描述。的确，这种相似极其密切：对马克思的读解可以表明为什么机器这种远非惰性的物质总是被卷入表征问题，以及对机器体系的历史性引申怎样在历史的特定时期赋予电视以新的价值区域和新的能量通路。
     "一般意义上的价值总是一种结果，而不是原因，"马克思在《政治经济学批判〈导言〉》中解释道。19在该书中，他不懈地用他的关键性概念——劳动力做文章，竭力试图找到一个途径，避免使之成为价值的形而上学的根源。他提出"价值在过程中"这样一个概念来指明资本的连续性和不停歇的转换，并用此指向资本得以在整个社会领域环绕航行的具体历史路线。20资本行程线上的每一站点——劳动力、金钱、商品、机器、资本——都通过具体操作和各种条件而被连接到并形成于其他站点；术语之间的每一变动都是对价值的重新比喻和重新表达，既是表征的一种抽象运动，也是争议的一个具体焦点。21"价值在过程中"这一概念的形式课程，人们必定已从当代理论中学熟：在一种经济中可能被一个术语所指涉的对象将是那个经济中的另一个术语，即，这一指涉是动态的。22
     由于资本热爱运动，所以每当它被长期滞留，每当它成为"固定"状态时，它就呈现奇异、古怪的形态。机器是马克用于比喻固定资本的最一贯的例子和隐喻，以至于已成为资本的表征运动的内在完美形式。"于是，机器呈现为固定资本的最合适的形式，并且，固定资本就资本与本身的关系而言，呈现为一般资本最恰当的形式。"23然而，他补充说，对于"外部关系"来说，金钱是资本最恰当的形式，由于这一原因，他才花费了如此多的时间另撰文解释作为"表象形式"的金钱如何掩盖了资本的内在运作。在固定资本和流动资本的根本性区别中，无论视其为一种现象还是一个概念，都不可能说哪一个更主要；更进一步说，除了作为对固定情形的一种定格描绘，没有可能保留那种区别。当马克思把金钱说成"一台节省流通时间的机器"时，他将机器和金钱的比喻做了引申。24金钱和机器都把时间作为价值，但分别采取适合于完全不同变形速度的形式。这种理论建构使得资本能够把作为一个由支离破碎的时间间隔所构成的景观的世界进行重建。25如今，在由利益、信贷、投机的急流所驱动的晚期资本主义的全球化变动性领域中，借助于电子金融系统的各种装置，每一个体资本都可以几乎同时从一处撤出而转向另一处，安然度过区域命运和货币气候的急速变迁。覆盖全球、其能量可同时服务多种用途的信息和电信机器最初问世的动因就是为了满足资本尽快流通和转型的需要。当马克思指出"资本的趋势就是不花费流通时间的流通，因此也是把仅用于缩短流通时间的工具仅仅假设为被它（流通时间）所假设的形式因素"时，就已经看到了这些可能性。26换句话说，资本必定是被刻写（在具体表征或形象上）和抽象出来的，但又确确实实具有象征性和可转换性，它寻求其流通的每一刻都"理想化"，目的是扩大自己活动的空间。因此，资本利用不同的工具——生产性和金融性的——以便在不同的地点、以不同的速度碾出价值，每一局部总量总是寻求找到最佳效率的速度比例。金钱与机器因此而完成不同的综合：交换关系的扩大开拓了原先疏远的经济之间的合作，机器的安置则建立了所有劳动的社会化，并昭示了资本关系的全球化保障。27
     再回到作为固定资本的机器：其象征或抽象性何在？这里一台动力织机，那里一幢厂房；当然资本家购买这些东西无非是为了生产剩余价值。但是由于固定资本是由投放在生产领域的商品所构成，所以难免不受物恋癖的影响。马克思竭力对其加以定义："固定资本，实际上就是被固定在一处的资本，它被固定在某一不同的具体方面、阶段，而它的运动必然经由这些方面或阶段。"28固定资本并不是完全拥有自我的，并不是全在那里，"从来都不是完全被占用"。29也许它心不在焉或处于休眠状态，但并没有死亡。从马克思对"活的"劳动力和固定资本的一贯性对比的角度来看，机器在劳动过程中的作用具有双重性，分别对应于它在投资的微观合理性中的地位和它在对社会关系的宏观组织中的确切作用。
     首先，机器是价值持续流通中的一个组成部分。它将价值递增性地（暂且不谈它的价格问题）转到它协助制造的产品中去，直到它再没有价值可分发为止（废弃和最终贬值）。我们可将此称作它的资本价值圈：它储存并分发一些先前生产的价值量。在《资本论》第二卷中，马克思从资本的"固定"价值逐渐散播的角度详尽分析了固定资本的成本结构。30固定资本的不确定的"固定性"与三个因素有关联：物质性事物（固定资本的"使用形式"）的使用期限，固定资本向流动资本转换的兑换性，以及现有技术变化的水平。这些标准也适用于机器制造的价值和它在一定情形中的功效，决定着一台机器何时可用于生产。只有当一台机器能够将自身价值转换到商品上时，它才能继续作为资本的一部分而存在：马克思的经济循环论即建立在这一规则上，经济的循环则与对废旧固定资本的周期性替换相关联（正如以下所论及的）。31从资本的角度来看，每台机器所走的都是一条毁灭性的熵的道路，维修则减缓毁灭，新型和更完善机器的出现则加速它的毁灭。
     第二，也是更为重要的一点，机器对无法简单进行量化的劳动过程施加一种社会力量。作为一种强大的新型物体，机器获得了统治权，这种统治权甚至达到了它似乎 "不花力气"就发挥作用的地步，"如同一种自然力"，它成了一个征服了劳动的"庞大的有机体"。32在此，马克思所做的关键类比不是在机器和金钱之间，而是在机器和劳动者之间（但是两种类比又都是描绘一种具体的中介）。在资本主义体制下，工人和机器进入各种不可逆转的相互构造的关系中来，两者都变成资本的 "效果"，在作为"普通价值"的共同层面上运行；然而，与"价值"不同的是，他/它们也许被含混和虚幻地定位为生产过程中的"原因"或"使用价值"。在马克思试图理出机器和工人之间的因果线索时，机器的隐喻学与人体的隐喻学互相融合，达到了其差异既至关重要又不可分辨的地步。由于剩余价值的生产只能通过 "活的"劳动才可能发生，所以有关劳动时间耗费的某种因素必定始终具有不可降低的有机性，而不被机械过程所吞并。同时，机器被赋予了能够在时间过程中保存和消耗自身能量的机体质量，因此人类和机器之间的差异界限与其说是对立的，还不如说是类比的：适合于劳动肌体的能量被调换到资本机体上，反之亦然："在人体中，正如在资本中，不同因素的交换并不是以同样的再生产率进行的，血液的自我更新比肌肉快，肌肉又比骨头快，就这方面来说，骨头可被视作人体的固定资本。"33
     从资本的角度来看，这种以人体著称的生命物质的残渣很容易操纵——它的第一个武器当然是机器本身。马克思在《资本论》的第一卷中，从历史根源上清楚地展示了从属于机器的物质因素，在这种从属性中，现代人体从属于一种新的权力技术（即福柯所说的"规训"）。需要强调的是，按阿尔图塞的意思，机器在社会再生产中的作用从根本上来说是"意识形态性质的"。价值的机器形式可以取得商品交换所无法取得的成就：它作为有意识的（自我）表征而构造机体，而这种表征是在对经济过程的技术筹划中已得到协调的。马克思是这样讲述这个故事的："劳动手段一旦被采纳到资本的生产过程中来，它就经历了不同的变形阶段，其最终形态是机器，或者说，一个全自动的机械体系......这个自动装置由众多的机械和智力器官所组成，以便工人们只扮演有意识的角色。"34工人也和机器一样沿同样的双重线路接力价值的传递：首先，作为挣工资并购买商品以便自我再生产的可计算的劳动力，再者，作为"工头"或作为资本的加速机器时间表的"管理人"，大体如同一个为固定资本和流动资本逆转所设置的有效转换点，"被吸收进资本的机体内"。35对社会劳动力这种抽象和吸收进一步赋予了机器以"人的"衣着。"机器，而不是工人，拥有技能和力量，机器本身是艺术鉴赏家，在借助自身而实施的机器法则中，拥有自己的灵魂。"36正如自《弗兰肯斯泰因》以来的许多科幻小说所描绘的，当机器获得了人的成分，它的灵魂因狂喜而动荡，"好象它的身体中了爱的魔法"（马克思引用了《浮士德》中喧闹的饮酒歌， "alshattesLiebimLeibe"，来唤起那一时刻）。37随着集体的人体被转换和变形成机器系统，所谓的"普遍智力"——以科学和知识体制的形式而存在——就变成了新的社会机器的标志和"器官"（请注意，马克思对"器官"一词的使用是从身体到机器的又一个横跨两者的比喻）。超越所有这些从属和服役行为，资本主义生产最后的、但却被耽搁了的结果是："社会"自身，即一套实现于活动的身体（人与人）之间的关系，以不同的速度出现和消失于人们彼此之间，在这套关系中，留给人类的主要任务是要"他们像更新他们所创造的财富世界一样更新自我"。
     资本作为一具自我再生产的机器骷髅的形象比以往更鲜明地出现在萨特的后期作品《辩证理智的批判》中。在描绘工人工作的情景时，他首先注意到的是，机器和工厂仅仅是作为前几代人的"死亡"劳动而存在的（"无生命实践"）。马克思的《资本论》提供了对出自于"死亡"劳动的社会经济结构的阐述，而萨特的《批判》则描绘了在历史的坍塌中死亡劳动在存在意义上的命运。在资本主义体制下，社会存在被"结晶"到物质客体和建成的空间中，后者于是对那些后来人施加一种他者性的综合力量。萨特以一个女工为例，看出一种"将生产力和生产关系相对立的条件"，他在这里的意思是指无生命实践客体和女工之间的对抗。萨特得出了最极端的结论：这一对抗"迫使女工生活在已构织好了的命运中，并以此为现实"，这种命运作为某一不在场的人类团体所施的强加物从别处而至。无论是她还是资本家都不是"有意"而为。他引述了一项研究，从中发现女工在半自动化的机器旁工作时，产生支离破碎的性幻觉，从这项研究中，他得出结论，"但是，是机器借她们在做春梦"。39因为机器要求某种半清醒的关注，所以思想的节奏就合上了机器时间的拍子。这些女工的幻觉是作为身体、大脑和机器这样一个客体组合的被截断的、不连贯的投入而产生的。相比之下，男人不以这种方式放任自己（萨特如是说）；大概是他们无论在工作中还是在做爱时总是积极的，注意力不分散的，不会被冷淡的。然而，无论如何，机器限制了在同一时间可想和可做的事，标示出一个几乎空洞的时间框架，这个框架留下了供想象活动的空档，而这种想象活动却嵌入到机器的运转节奏中。尽管萨特还不至于说机器"生产"了在工人大脑中闪过的形象，但他确切无疑地认为意识的活动完全被机器所掌握。因此，心理形象只是为商品交换而生产的对象的一种副产品。这并不是说资本可以估价生产的尾流所搅动出来的任何幻觉、白日梦和自我形象。马克思在《资本论》的第一页就认识到，松散的主观因素贯穿经济：在那里，它们被称作"需求"。萨特指出这些因素在识别、表征和支配的辩证法中被抓住并被循环。
     萨特所描绘的那个作为容器将集体幻觉和机器的劳动时间相混合的女工形象，引起了一种对其支配程度深入到主体性的每一个角落的完全支配的恐惧。尽管我们不必按其表面意思来理解，但这个形象有助于使人想起马克思在《资本论》第一卷中所提出的一个关键论点：将妇女和儿童引进工资劳动"是资本家使用机器的第一个结果"。40在工业化的早期阶段，机器将无产阶级全家引入工资环道。它打破了存在于劳动分工中的性别界限，并将所有随后而来的在工厂和家庭中的分工都算做直接经济剥削的具体事例——对谁的工作能算价值的争斗。41至少自从资本主义体制出现以来，妇女在家庭中的劳动一直是劳动力再生产的重要组成部分，但却被从根本上排除在使剩余价值本身成为可能的价值之外。同时，妇女还在各种明显的限定条件下出入于工资关系，既取决于当时社会现有的生计起落，又取决于当时资本需要哪种工作。作为劳动分工的物质场所，机器从一开始就产生了。它需要社会所指定的技能，或换句话说，它需要社会所强加的某种技能的缺乏。事实上，它可能是被造出来像耗尽原材料一样快速地耗尽工人们，用尽他们的一种体能（如眼力）以后才把他们从工资劳动中放走（即去养家。这正是太平洋沿岸地区作为新的信息技术生产核心的微电子工业目前的主要模式）。
     劳动的性别分工中的历史延续性可通过女工所操作的机器来追溯，这些机器包括从早期工业主义的动力织机到都市帝国主义时期办公室中使用的打字机，直到我们自己的时代所使用的资料处理和家用装置。如果我们把电视也包括在内，就会更进一步加强这种延续性。塔尼亚·莫德来斯基、季廉·代尔以及其他人的研究工作已表明电视如何以大体类似于萨特所描绘的情景方式将家庭工人的劳动和思想"分散"：在两种（电视和萨特所描述的）情形中，妇女都找到了一种方式来选择她无法避免的情形，因而借助于形象来活动一下她仅有的一点主体性。42
     正如妇女劳动的可变性和可塑性所表明的，身体对机器的依附，无论是在某一刻，还是在一生中，都不是绝对的。英勇无畏的机器化的男工，他们在20世纪早期的艺术和政治中已为人熟知，却决不是资本的理想人物。相反，资本主义机器一直在发展以便能使用尽可能便宜的劳动力。无论劳动力是否以力量、精细或智力为特征，机器存在的目的都是为了占有它。机器在两种力量——结构力量和主体性力量——之间标出并保持距离和差异。在马克思式文本一分为二的光学仪器中，对机器的分析始终与关于价值的劳动理论和关于意识的主观理论连在一起，在经济文本中，这断裂的两部分被表达为机器隐喻和有机隐喻。43这种断裂甚至在最有戏剧性的当代经济新论中依然存在：当德勒兹和盖特里把资本主义重新界定为"已被解译的大量劳动和积累的财富的普遍公理"时，他们小心翼翼地做了如下区别：仅仅只是简单地将人类作为机器的一个"组成部分"而包括进来的"机器奴役"；人类即使不是自由于、但至少是外在于机器的"社会服从"。44无须赞成马克思的历史时代划分或辩证法程序，德勒兹和盖特里照样忠实于他的概念性比喻的实际运作。
     借助这一文本断裂，马克思式的隐喻学可使其理论焦点用于电视研究。由于把机械概念化为资本机体而将人类身体引进了价值的通道，因而使我们能够询问世界的"经验"之维——诸如视觉和时间——如何能在资本流通中得以产生。
     电视，我们时代的机器
     以马克思对资本主义尚且还未实现的机器世界的阐述来开始一项文化分析，将会与仅仅从其商品角度来看待资本主义文化，以物化、异化和画面为主题的讨论大相异趣。然而，无论如何，非常清楚的是，马克思本人对文化的综合描述更多地将重点放在生产技术的状态而不是其产品上，更多地放在经济的差异性运动上而不是放在对物品的毫无结果的迷恋上。随着60年代稍带启示论色彩的"消费者社会"和"信息社会"理论的式微，几种后现代主义讨论重新开始了将资本作为一种巨大、复杂的生产部门总和的分析。譬如，最近一些对资本地貌的论述就是从固定资本作为已建成的空间这一定义着手（亨利。莱福伯、曼纽尔·卡斯太尔、戴维·哈韦、爱德华·索耶）。所谓的后马克思主义对"相关联"的权力网的描述保留了马克思对经济分析的结构观点，但抛弃了下列观点，当然下列观点不一定是马克思的，即经典的"经济"决定论路线穿越一个社会空间的每一个细胞。任何对资本主义制度的物质器器的强调必然会提出关于力的（支配、强制、抵抗）关系的难题——凡是有生产关系再生产的地方必然展现这些力——这一难题即刻将这一"经济"景象转换为政治和文化的景象。45
     如果电视仅仅被视为一种娱乐商品或宣传喇叭，如果它在当代资本中的地位能被孤立在一个特殊的消费领域（一个甚至包括享乐在内一切都有可能的领域），那么，它就几乎不值得被叫做机器，也几乎不值得被推崇到偶像物和时代精神载体的地位。但由于我们现在所处的地位更有利于认识到资本主义制度的机器包括价值可以转形的任何转换点，那么也就更容易认识到下列事实：即电视形象本身总是过程中的价值，而不是新异漂亮的二手图画，这种与其他形式的资本的绝对近似，表明电视的特定价值形式在当前是极为重要和必需的。
     一种认为电视远不止是为当代资本主义制度所布置的橱窗的模糊想法在以前也曾有所表达。因此，弗雷德里克·詹姆逊将电视置于机器的历史框架中而做出引人入胜的立论："如果我们愿意接受以下推论，即资本主义制度可以用量子跃迁或资本主义借以对其根深蒂固的经济危机作出反映的技术突变来划分时代，那么，电视—— 如此紧密地与晚期或第三阶段资本主义中占支配地位的电脑和信息技术相关联——何以有巨大的权力成为晚期资本主义卓越的艺术形式这一问题就会变得稍许清楚一些了。"46将这一问题换个角度：晚期资本与电视的紧密关系的实质是什么，且那种关系将采取何种形式？电视成为晚期资本主义的宠儿是否为时已晚，是否它因此反倒成为其主要但不是新兴的文化形式？为了表明电视如何行使其历史职责，我将重温从现实经济论立场到思辨理论立场的四种不同论述。
     已有论者指出，固定资本贬值的价值圈定下了经济循环的模式。马克思认识到机器的周期更替需要生产手段领域（部门1）的大量再投资。商品生产（部门2）率可能会发生变化，但这并不能说明资本主义自第一次全盛期以来所经历的周期性危机。存在于这些部门之间的技术和经济关系通常名为"资本的有机构成"（这一有效的概念-隐喻是马克思的）。
     恩斯特·曼德尔的《晚期资本主义》的大部分内容是关于作为各个部门关系的"生产结构"的，因为它为他的历史图表：即一种最新形式的康德拉捷夫 (kondratiev)循环——约每六十年一次的资本主义发展与衰亡的长波——提供了物质基础（关于康德拉捷夫长波的文献卷帙浩繁，我们不必在此驻足。这些文献可被描绘为一种关于资本主义长期利率和投资的环滑车道式运动潜在能量模式）。曼德尔极为强调技术转换。"资本主义生产方式的最显著因素......在于以下事实：每一新的扩大再生产的周期都以新的而不是原有的机器开始。"47这些变化每次都产生于两种加速增长：科技知识体制的增长和整体资本容纳新发明的能量的增长。48曼德尔将马克思的历史论述扩展为几个附加的阶段，49从工具到手工制作的机器是第一阶段。从机器到机动机器是第二阶段，也是完全的资本主义阶段，这一阶段又有三种主要变化：1）蒸汽（马克思的时代）；2）电力和燃气（这时引擎本身为机械所制造）；3）电子和核能。50因此资本的每个阶段都有其标志性的或特有的能源技术，这种技术导致所有其他生产部门的划时代转变，包括商品和农产品。这种能源的能量和界限赋予每一时代以形态和跨度，开辟新的赢利生产和消费领域。在眼下这个核能和电子的时代，门代尔的例子是"喷气运输机、电视、电传打字机、雷达和卫星通讯网，以及核能驱动的货物集装箱。"51稍后，他又以另一种方式对此加以归纳："除了其他特征以外，这个新时期（1940-1965）的特征为：除了机器制造的工业化消费者产品（诸如19世纪前期的产品）和机器制造的机器（诸如19世纪中期的机器），我们现在又有了机器生产的原材料和食品。""晚期资本主义......因此表现为一个所有经济部门首次完全工业化的阶段。"52
     因此，电视被列为——而不是被挑选为——第三阶段的重要产品和典型消费者产品之一。除了与其他例子一样具有全球性使用范围，电视似乎并没有对于晚期资本主义体制的内在必然性。它并不表现消费模式或为一系列新产品（即信息和文化）而建立的世界市场的变化。它原本的祖先无非就是资本为前一百五十年所粗制滥造的所有其他消费者产品。再者，电视在传播曼德尔在"晚期资本主义时代的意识形态"一章中所描绘的那种占支配地位的"工具意识形态"方面，或在他于该书的末尾所描绘的与生产相关联的潜在的革命危机中似乎也没起作用。
     然而，曼德尔在为马克思《资本论》第二卷所写的序言中倒是给予了电视经济上的解释：
    
     电视机和电影（包括电影拷贝）显然是一种商品生产方式，而且投入其中的工资劳动也是生产性劳动。但是雇佣已完成的电影或将一台电视出租给连续不断的顾客却不具备生产劳动的特点。同样，虽然在制作广告电影时所使用的工资劳动是生产性质的，但诱劝潜在的客户购买这些电影却与所有商业代理的劳动一样均不属生产性质的。53
    
     在试图区别什么构成"社会价值"和什么不能时，曼德尔选择的是一条最正统的路线：对电视的"使用"，无论采取何种形式，作为对生产关系的再生产也好，作为对顾客的欲望的"哄骗"也罢，还是作为建立世界范围市场的主要渠道，都是"非生产性的"。然而，对于广告的排除表明曼德尔承认那些扩大消费领域，因而有助于减缓"实现困难"（出售商品）的产品和服务（诸如顾客信贷）具有一定的作用。54
     这样的界限容易划分吗？除非我们置以下可能性而不顾：即电视——不仅只是电视，而是整个文化工业——在其为具体产品所做的广告和对完全由资本主义的鲜明特征所构成的社会环境进行大规模的表征之间是不做区分的，这点，从某种意义上来说，对除了最自信的符号学家以外的任何人都是可裁定的。从另一方面来说，如果文化工作从这一意义上来说对资本是富有成效并不可或缺的，那么电视就应该被看做价值的"非官方"渠道。
     在对长波理论做公允的辩护时，彼德·霍尔和巴斯克尔·普林斯敦已论证特定技术和一系列经济长波之间的关联。55他们的研究焦点集中于信息技术与经济模式越来越重要的关系，这种关系尤其以时下承载康德拉捷夫第四次长波的电子学、计算机和电视通讯为最高形式。56信息技术，其定义为任何"记录、传送、处理和分发信息"的能源的技术，5740年代以前还只是一项次要工业；只有在对实验室研究实行巨额联合投资以后，它们才能以赢利所必需的国际性规模投入生产。这一兴起的先决条件是超越了勇敢的发明者和企业家阶段的资本对科学工作的深入参与，以及世界劳动分工新阶段的建立。作为这一攻势中的"消费者产品"因素，电视一开始（50到60年代之间）竭力支持这一浪潮，最终却将自己的关键组件全部拱手交给了"生产者产品"或用作固定资本（卫星、监测、电脑屏幕、军事硬件）。与曼德尔相反，霍尔和普林斯敦认为电视也就是这个时代决定性的经济电路，这些电路同时既是资本激增所固有的又是由它所产生的。在由诸如计算机网络和电视所承载的"信息"之间没有再做进一步比较和区分：霍尔和普林斯敦在放弃了价值的劳动理论后，无法区分这些传媒，他们也无法确定超越了信息技术范围的传播和估价方式对于资本来说是否有着不同的经济和政治用途。但他们还是将电视放在与曼德尔所放的不同序列中：它表现为在一特定历史关头得以解决的各种不同发明的最终赢利形式。"信息"在被收集并被推进到由机器所覆盖和重新规划的全部地理区域时，终于可成为一项全球化的商品。
     在戴维·哈韦的马克思主义经济分析手册《资本的局限》中，可发现一种将电视放在机器与商品之间的中介性定位。他把电视放在虽然不甚明确但却绝对逻辑化的经济种类中：即"消费基金"，该术语的定义为："在消费领域中扮演与固定资本在生产过程中所扮演的几乎相同角色的商品"。58"消费基金"这一短语在《资本论》第二卷中提得最明确，在那里指确保可消费商品在漫长的再生产均衡中转换的"消费手段"。电视与餐叉、汤匙、人行道、洗衣机、甚至住房平起平坐：所有这些差不多都是使消费成为可能的东西。这有一定的明确意义所在：如果没有爆米花制作者的"消费基金"，你就不会购买爆米花。但是这个解决方案解决不了任何问题：如果这个术语可以如此轻易地被引申，不仅包括那些我们可能并不立即就吃掉、喝掉或扔掉的商品，而且包括所有公共和私有空间，那么就几乎是无用的。它也不提供关于下述这些关键问题的线索：消费如何"产生于"消费工具？消费基金（如一台冰箱或一台电视）中的项目是否"生产"不同种类的消费和不同渠道的花消？哈韦的新书《后现代性状况》直截了当地回答了这些问题：是的，"电视使用"促进了需求的必要增加，推动了消费文化的进步。但是他公开放弃了对使电视能够完成这一任务的文化与美学的新技术的分析；在正确地驳回了在电视和后现代主义本身所做的简单等同后，他就使这个问题的重要性退居第二位了。59
     爱里克·阿列兹和麦克尔·费荷在对后福特主义和法国后结构主义理论所做的感人的综合中指出，资本对"信息"的动用提供了"对后现代主义的经济定义"：现在，信息不再用于意识形态，而是根据信息的成本以严格的交换价值来计算，"信息成本以其构成和被理解所需要的必要时间来衡量；其被参考的次数的倍增使其被广大的公众所拥有，其交换价值便随之增加，而其费用则须降至最低限度。"60这种新经济可以按其机器主体所构成的集合为特征：电视观众现在完全被同化到了 "永久性的场景"中。61（信息）形成和理解的思维活动对应于简单生产，即以时间来衡量的观看劳动；另一方面，消费或接受被认为是机器的，是被"指涉"为或作为接受者的消费者的一种功能。"增加被参考的次数"对于阿列兹和费荷来说是一个关键性短语：它描绘了信息形式的和内在的转换，在这种转换中，"参考" 被构建到每一个单位中，以便它能具有作为自足的普遍商品的功能。但是数控论意义上的完善只能是单一资本的野心；如果许多资本共同运作，各离心力将总是把信息商品驱向差别和非交流的渠道。
     阿列兹和费荷并没有给后现代的新商品提供正式的定义，相反，他们实际上只是沿用电视节目制作和播放的"最小公分母"理论，根据该理论，确切而具体的意义之丧失被归咎于这个大众媒体。在这一点上，他们似乎更以鲍德里亚（以及支持鲍德里亚的德鲍）的理论而不是后福特主义为重要依据。他们似乎还从卢梭关于欲望无可指责的观点中有所借鉴。所以，一台被称做"电视"的机器和一群被称做"观众"的人统统被算做"画面"，即一种电视形象应该在其中流通并以数控的效率和透明度出现的绝对空间。在这种生产中，什么也没有发生转换：信息和思维劳动融合为一个在画面的白噪音燃烧中消费掉的单一商品。正如其他具有德鲍—鲍德里亚倾向的人一样，阿列兹和费荷讲述了一个形象形式的资本完成了最后突破的故事：资本变成了决定形象的纯粹多元和内在不确切性的同质但隐藏的原因。但是，即便这种论述极其准确，其逆向过程也应加以追溯，在这个逆向过程中，形象成了许多不同的资本，扩大其总量但不全部或同时实现。阿列兹和费荷借助电视无法找到逃避之路，但是他们对逃离电视却抱着希望。在完成这幅完全工具资本主义的画像的最后一笔时，阿列兹和费荷有所迟疑，指出资本对"时间整体"的包括无论如何还在边缘地带留有余地，被它所忽略而不是由它所创造，这块空地等待着复苏来填充。无论这些力量是什么，无论它们出现在哪里，都与价值和形象在电视上的流通毫不相干。阿列兹和费荷以坚定的拒绝作为希望的惟一姿态。
     因此，我们可以勾勒出关于电视为资本而运作的辩论中的两个极端。如果说曼德尔对电视与资本主义经济的比喻性关系有足够的警觉，阿列兹和费荷则对此过于敏感，将所有时间和价值的生产压缩为惟一一个顺畅、壮观的过程，而不考虑这一电路中不断重复的短路和不停闪烁的形而上学跳动（而这些毕竟是使文化有价值的东西）。尽管电视对于价值在晚期资本下独具特色的运动来说是不可或缺的一部分，它同时也将经济从抽象的边缘拽到集体想象力的混乱领域。的确，电视必须跨越变化的可视性时间，即它只能以人类主体那古老而执意缓慢的视觉和情感时间来为资本行使职责，根据这一事实，可将电视与同时代的其他机器区别开来。尽管电视可能是新信息流的一部分，永远与其他事物合流，但是它总发现自己需要有一个"内容"。它的播放可能如同通过金融线路的货币微粒标记一样即刻完成，但是对它的形象的接受却还是需要一点一点地体验。
     看电视
     电视的任务是什么？它生产什么？现在我们必须将迄今为止所提出的两种推论加以综合。首先，电视按照马克思式的基本论述而运作，在已被定为价值的时间量中充当转换点，在形象的时间和观看的时间之间（总是不能完美地）进行转换，由此而进一步促进生产和流通。第二，电视出现在某一特定历史时刻，借助形象媒体将日常生活和文化作为"自由"时间而纳入资本的机体内。尽管这两种推论都忽略了以具体地点为特征的操作，但必须视为前提的是，每台机器都将被放在特定的地点（"语境"），且系统的输出将因此而以几个（当地）局部因素为轴心。但是同时，正如我们已看到的，机器是在其发展的某一特定时刻作为世界资本主义体系的前哨阵地——行使代表权的代表——而运作的，将（当地）局部主体的和再生产的溪流与整体的生产洪流合而为一。
     这个全球性机器如何通过（全体、单个和每一个）电视形象使自己具有可视性？
     正如詹姆逊所表明的，电视在新的时空内生产形象。电视形象并不是在其时空框架"以后"或"以内"被生产出来的，这些只是这一装置的工作维度。电视形象的框架的发散性把它与照相和电影区别开来，这后两种形象商品形式对应于先前时代的生产结构。即便如此，电视具有改变自己最初成像方式的能力。看一个熟悉的例子：所谓对事件的"直播"或"现场"转播在没有对事件进行更大的技术处理和编排的情况下，被证明是不能充分赢利的，所以对"现场性"的表现是需要不断重新捏造的。62无论电视经历了怎样的形式变革，它的基本经济使命在于将物质形象通过新的流通框架转换为价值单位。但在描绘这一运作之前，我们应该切记"流通"远远不仅只是简单的运动或运输；的确，电视的形象运动最好被看做那个只有在屏幕上才成为可视的更大的生产过程的一部分。
     如果说大规模工业的机器系统极大地使社会劳动时间集体化并根据资本主义的需要对其加以重新分配，那么，电视现在则对其他的时间段行使着同样的职能：娱乐时间、公共或社团时间、家庭时间、家长时间、儿童时间，甚至动物和植物时间。总之，惯常被叫做"可支配性"时间的一部分被交由电视来支配，因此非工作时间也从属于对抗劳动时间的那种对抗性。更确切地说，电视在资本主义体制内的运作同时朝向两个方向，分别对应于它的机器特征。
     第一个方向对应于前缀——"远距离"（tele），涉及空间：通过传送形象，这个机器（电视）在一个新的潜在估价的语境中给它们以形式和价值。马克思认为，把商品带入市场的行为也应该被视为该商品生产的一个组成部分；63然而，就电视来说，这个机器自己携带着"市场"。在任何从单频道的死水到多元输入的蜂窝状东西的地理规模上，电视都制作了镜像似的形象市场。正如我们在第一章中所看到的，这点也适用于国营体系，在那种体系中只不过电视市场被控制得比其他体系更严格，因而使用面更狭窄而已。在任何现有体系的层面，电视把握着距离并通过将自己确立为一套物体来划定自己的社会疆域：它作为一大批分散的机器而存在，这些机器由一种同时在别处和在所有的地方发生的生产的散发所连接。大多数生产和转播手段（转播设备、有线电视和卫星）还掌握在经济和国家机构中；但是通过一种表达资本主义实质的安排，每个人都被允许花钱购买这整台机器的股份。从这种意义上来说，电视可被看做——通过"经济民主"——是对先前传播技术的持续延伸，当然这种延伸改变了世界市场的构成和策略。期待电视对每个人的生活有同等程度的渗透将是错误的：它得以扩展的条件是价值的不断消长状态为其努力提供依据。
     电视形象的第二个功能涉及通过对时间的新的生产所带来的资本主义体制生产力的转变。这一转变的最明显、最极端——尽管有限——的一面是广告本身。关于广告的时间与电视上价值的关系已有几种论述了。我在此将重温其中两种最贴切和最有启发性的论点。尼克·布朗关于"电视超文本"的重要论文所采纳的立场是：电视时间按两种分类安排："现实主义表征符码"和工作日、周、年等的各种不同时间跨度。64对于布朗来说，这两个种类之间的关系遵循一条清楚的逻辑：第一个时间秩序属于电视视觉流的内容，它在捕获由人类（自由）时间所构成的第二秩序时是一种精心策划的诱饵。一种熟悉的二元对立产生了："话语"或"文本"经济的时间逻辑来自于由广告人和节目制作人所控制的"普通"经济。按布朗的阐述，分析的单位是节目预告的可见片段；这些必须由评论家加以组合来重建节目，而这正是广告人和演播者利益的逻辑总和。以对大众习惯和趣味的市场调查为导向，节目沟通普通经济和文本经济。广告形象——因为他们直接参与消费生产——被认为以一种方式发挥作用，即具有直接和可数据化的现成结果，而其他形象的作用则是保持视觉流不断并维持观众的注意力，因而不动声色地强化了商品宣传。沙特里将这种分层进一步引申，将"节目安排"定义为演播者被一种神秘的社会需求所迫使而放弃的"必要"时间，并把广告确认为盈利，即从观众身上榨取的"剩余价值"。 65
     尽管上述两种论述都将电视形象的不同形式与不同资本的竞争相关联，但它们都继续将广告作为电视的首要经济机制，而实际上这只是一种可能而已。换句话说，这些论述非常接近广告人自己对这一过程的论述，这是每一部商业广告的意识形态协议的一部分：这些公司都坚持说，他们仅仅是要购买由一定数量的人口目击的节目时间。我们这些观众应该理解、同情和奉陪。但随着频道的倍增和录像机的配备，这一安排，这一共谋的协议已变得更加明显的无力。看看电视网借助更成熟的数据方法所做的那些试图支持其拙劣的收视模式的努力吧（嵌入电视的新装置从里面监视着观众，把握他们坐在室内并且将脸转向电视银屏）。正如现金交易和利率，构造以广告为基础的阐释，其信条是：某种交易总会成交；大体等价物（收视率）的确总代表着另外的东西（注意力、观看、接受

梦醒之间的象：比较德勒兹与弗洛伊德 

彭耘 

 

 

　　福柯在1970年发表的一篇关于德勒兹的文章中写道，当代哲学中至关重要的问题，如德勒兹向我们展示的那样，是哲学与非哲学，思与不思（non thought）的关系。思想是一种行动。它必须首先让自己从愚蠢中诞生；同时思想的诞生只能发生在它与愚蠢的关系中。愚蠢的反面不是聪明。哲学家并非聪明过人，而是擅长模仿愚蠢，让愚蠢慢慢长上身来，在模仿重复中等待异变突发的时刻。所以福柯将德勒兹的哲学比作戏剧，称它是“思想的场景（scene）”。

 

　　场景一词值得注意。综观德勒兹的哲学，不难发现“场景”或“象”在其中享有特殊地位。在《什么是哲学？》一书中，德勒兹（与郭塔利）指出，一切真正的哲学无不源于一个前哲学，非概念性的“思想之象”（image of thought，本文中的“象”不是纯视觉意义上的，更接近卦象之义）。仿佛在开始思想之前，哲学先要能够梦见自己。每次“场景”与“象”出现，总是事关哲学与非哲学，思与不思的关系。在《电影1》（cinema1）和《电影2》（cinema2）中，德勒兹更是提出了“水晶象”（crystal image）的概念。可以说水晶象正是德勒兹哲学的“思象”。它打破了哲学史上由来已久的本质与表面的二元对立。水晶象是一种重迭，其中真实与想象，实与虚“彼此追逐，交换角色，变得不能区分。”在水晶象中，原本对立的两面由它们之间的异质（heterogeneity）沟通起来，而这种沟通与重合并不消抹它们之间的不同。为了更好地理解德勒兹的水晶象，我们有必要绕道到弗洛伊德那里去。

 

　　弗洛伊德《梦的解析》的最后一章，开篇叙述了一个梦。这个拉康称之为“自成一格”的梦是这样的：

 

　　一个父亲日夜看护在病儿床边。孩子死后，他到隔壁房间去躺下休息。可是门开着，他从自己睡觉的房间里看得见隔间孩子的尸体停放在那里，四周立着高烛。一个雇来守灵的老人坐在床边低声祈祷。睡过几个钟点后，父亲梦见孩子站在他的床边，抓着他的胳膊，悄声责备地说：“父亲，你没看见我烧着了吗？”他醒来，注意到邻室闪出火光，跑进去发现守灵的老者睡着了。裹盖，连同爱子尸体的一只胳膊被倒下的蜡烛烧着了。

 

　　这个梦特殊的地方在于梦与现实结构上的对应。梦与醒在这里似只有一纸之隔，却又分属两个不同世界。梦景与现实之间究竟是什么关系？

 

　　拉康举了个例子来分析这个梦：比方说他睡觉的时候有人敲门。他没有马上醒来，而是开始做梦。梦中敲门声变成了其它的声音，为的是让他可以多睡几秒钟。醒来他意识到有人敲了门。然而此刻敲门声已经从感觉领域中消失了。所以拉康说，意识中的敲门声是一种再现（re－presentation），也就是说，敲门声再现于意识中，是因为它被吸收进了他醒来之后马上重建起来的现实网络（“我在这里”，“我醒了”等等）。我们发现感觉与意识之间出现了分裂。主体在睡眠中接收到了敲门的冲击，可是这一冲击却未进入意识中；主体只在事后才以再现的形式意识到敲门声的存在，而这时它已从感觉中消失了。因而作为事件的叩击，从来得太早的感觉与来得太晚的意识的裂隙中溜走，为主体所错过。同时，梦与再现不同，它虽然没有复制事件，却传达了它的效力：主体醒过来了。

 

　　弗洛伊德的梦结构与此相似。醒来意识到的现实（火光，动静，等等）属于再现，或用拉康的话说是“借现实的手段”的再现。梦则不同。梦景是在为某种不在者占位；这不在者就是拉康所谓的“真实”（Real）。主体错过了与真实的相遇；所谓梦景乃是这一错过的相遇的重复。因为梦孕育的乃是真实的种子，拉康认为梦比所谓现实更接近真实。可是这里更重要的是现实与梦的分叉，因为与真实的相遇正是在梦与醒之间错过的。真实于是就座落在这个裂隙间，在两条线分叉的地方；真实通过分散它们把它们聚集在一起。事件的叩击如同一颗空的子弹，穿通了梦与醒对称的双壁，生出这样水晶一般的结构。

 

　　这种结构正是一个水晶象。梦景与真实的关系，正可以用德勒兹的话来形容：两者之间不仅仅是有关联，而变得不可区分，不断交换角色。水晶象与梦之间的相似也并非偶然。水晶象这一概念的提出，是与德勒兹对现代性危机的思考密切相关的。具体说来，他认为水晶象在现代电影中出现，是因为现代主体失去了行动的能力。感官接收到的外界刺激不再延伸到相应的行动中去；主体于是迷失在一种纯粹的声光状态中。战后电影中的人物就是这样。他们的角色从行动变成了观看——有时茫然旁观生活从眼前掠过，有时却成了凝视水晶球的先知。总而言之，现代社会的危机使我们都处于一种做梦状态。对德勒兹来说，主体行动能力的丧失是与现代社会所特有的“震惊经验”（shock experience）分不开的。人之所以不能有所作为是因为他们面对的情景“过于强烈，过于美丽，过于痛苦”。战后电影于是可以比作弗洛伊德所谓的“原始场景”（primal scene）：眼前的一幕自动展开，既不堪承受，又慑人魂魄。

 

　　将电影与原始场景相比并不是要把一切还原为俄狄浦斯情结——这在德勒兹那里为一大忌。两者之间根本的共同之处在于它们特殊的时间结构。在梦与电影中时间都发生了错位。弗洛伊德在分析狼人案例时提出了“延迟”（deferral）的概念。他强调，所谓原始场景乃是分析过程中的建构。由于父母的性交超过了幼儿意识把握的限度，狼人并没有真正地经历这个事件。但当他进入俄狄浦斯阶段时，无意识中关于原始场景的记忆暗中印证了阉割的真实性，过去事件的创伤这才以恐惧症的形式表现出来。这样在事件与后果之间存在着时间上的延迟。正是这一点造成了主体本质性的被动观看状态，因为某种为采取行动不可或缺的东西不在主体把握之中：他／她不是太早就是太晚。也就是说，场景总不在现时。

 

　　时间性的延迟要求我们重新考虑何为可见性。按德勒兹的说法，象与视觉形象不同，因为它既非隐蔽，又不可见。现代电影中可见的形象下总是浮着不可见的幽灵，我们看见的因而恰恰是不可见的。怎么理解“既非隐蔽，又不可见呢”呢？首先我们得明白问题不在于表面与埋藏在下面的东西的对立。这里的模式毋宁更像一条电影胶片，上面不同的形象迭加在一起。一切都在同一表面上，要想辨识上面的东西，只需要找到合适的“放映速度”。在狼人案例中，“原始场景”作为分析性，甚至哲学性建构的意义正在于它在原本一团乱麻的线条中建立起了时间结构。可以说弗洛伊德发明了阅读这条胶片的电影机。

 

　　如此理解，象与其说与可见性相关，不如说是个“可读性”的问题。在这一点上德勒兹与弗洛伊德以及本雅明都很接近。弗洛伊德把梦比作象形文字；本雅明则说现代摄影画面如同“犯罪现场”，非要配上说明才可读。对三人来说，可见（象）必须与可言（言语）放在一块来理解。对德勒兹来说，现代电影对哲学的重要启示就在于它对两者之间关系的探索。电影中，可见与可言各自成为对方开放的极限；我们面对的是有待阅读的形象和有待观看的语言。这样可见与可言通过沟通它们的不可逾越的界限向他者开放。

 

　　弗洛伊德在结束关于燃烧的孩子的梦的讨论时说，这个梦不存在解析方面的疑问。然而就在这里调子忽然一变：自此后“每条道路都将引向黑暗。”这一刻的黑暗或可与笛卡尔写《沉思录》的焦虑相比。如果说梦是徘徊在笛卡尔确定性哲学后面的幽灵，到了弗洛伊德这里，梦与醒的问题变得愈加尖锐和复杂了，醒以什么作参照？向什么而醒？主体处于何种状态？特别是在这样的夜里：万籁俱寂，本来应当守灵的人也睡着了。这个梦的象征意义不能不让我们想到刚刚过去的二十世纪。

 

　　对德勒兹来说，电影和苏醒密切相关。他借安托南·阿尔托（Antonin Artaud）的话，说电影是“对眼睛的叩击”；电影的作用是刺激思想的诞生。因为思想并非一向存在；思想的作用在于自我诞生，它永远在重复自己的诞生。思想需要激发。如海德格尔所说：“我们发人深思的时代最为发人深思的是我们还不在思想。”激发思想的是不思，是愚蠢。不思的隐退造成的真空有着漩涡般的吸引力。德勒兹因此说，迫使我们思想的是思想的无能为力（impouvoir）。

 

　　思与不思之间的关系正是醒的结构；作为行动的思因此不断重复着醒的一刻。醒不再像笛卡尔考虑的那样是个确定性的问题。我们从弗洛伊德的梦中已经看到，真实（Real）的“叩击”既不在梦中也不在醒后，而是在梦与醒的裂隙间错过。醒是梦与作为再现的现实之间的空白，是一段间隔（interval），在区分两种状态的同时沟通了它们。这段非空间性的间隔具有本体论上的先在地位。在德勒兹哲学中，间隔居于因的位置。因只有通过不断二元分化外化实现，如同博尔赫斯笔下分叉的花园小径；因本身并非实体，而正是小径分叉之处。间隔因此并不是通常所谓的空间。这里又让人想起弗洛伊德，因为梦也可以看成非空间性的空间，即他所谓的“梦在别处”。这样梦的秘密就不仅仅在于愿望的满足了；梦像裹着真实（Real）的信封，隐蔽中有显露，显露中有隐蔽。

 

　　德勒兹的水晶象也正是一种非空间性的空间化。对他来说，现代电影的思想潜能来源于对间隔力量的释放。德勒兹具体分析了大量影片，本文中不能一一详述。简要说来，他特别强调的是电影中声音与画面的交互作用。这样，间隔就不仅仅与剪接有关；声音与画面各自对对方起到“加框”的作用，同时又被两者间共同的界限加框。言语内在的间隙因为画面显露了出来；同时画面因为言语所设的界限提升到了可读性的高度。象作为信封式的框架于是将不可思的东西引入了思的中心，就如同是给愚蠢染了颜色。

 

　　这样，德勒兹所谓的象就与视觉形象完全不同。象标记着一段间隔，标记着异质间不可逾越的鸿沟，所以对象而言不可见的东西比可见的重要。好似狼人梦中令他恐惧的黄蝴蝶：那薄薄的一小片黄颜色里颤动着一个深渊。对哲学来说，象如同一道门，将哲学引向与自己异质的东西，引向物。如莫里斯·布朗肖（MauriceBlanchot）所说：通过象来经验一个事件不同于美学以及安详明朗的古典艺术理想中所谓的从事件中的解脱，却也不是通过自由决定而介入事件。而是由着自己为事件所左右，从现实界——在这里我们与物保持距离以便更好地利用它们——进入另外的一个领域。在这个领域中我们被距离所把握。这种距离，现在是不生（unliving）不给（unavailable）的深度，一种难以察觉的疏远，在某种意义上成了物至高和最后的力量。

 

（Cinema1：Movement－Image，UnivofMinnesotaPr，1986；Cinema2：TheTime－Image，UnivofMinnesotaPr，1989；WhatIsPhilosophy？ColumbiaUnivPr，1996）

本雅明技术批判视野中的受众观

 

王向前

 

    [摘要]本文主要从本雅明技术批判思想出发，指出在他对科学技术、大众传媒以及大众文化的批判中，处处隐藏着对于受众的清晰的态度。他看到了科学技术促成大众传媒的飞速发展，进而带来了大众文化的大面积扩张，在这种变化过程中，受众的地位得到了大幅度提升。在他的眼中，随着技术时代的到来，受众的角色、地位乃至存在的意义都发生剧变。依据于此，本文从技术批判视野出发进行了论述。

 

    [关键词]受众   技术    技术批判   机械复制

 

[Abstract] By using Walt·Benjamin’s technology criticize thought, This text point out that he has many clear attitudes about audience when he criticize science and technology, mass media and mass culture. He discovery science and technology facilitate mass media development at full speed, and then has brought a large scale expanding of mass culture. In the course of this kind of change, audience’s position has been promoted greatly. In his eyes, technological era own to the change of audience role, position and even meaning existing. Basis this, the text described it from Benjamin’s technology vision in detail.

 

[Keywords] audience   technology    criticism of technology   machinery duplicating

 

 

 

瓦尔特·本雅明(1892—1940)，这位从技术角度对大众文化批判产生巨大影响的法兰克福学派边缘成员，一直以批判态度明显不同于学派其他成员著称，在上个世纪八十年代末九十年代初开始受到中国学者的重视，然而，这些研究大部分都止于对其机械复制思想的重复，其实，在本雅明的技术批判思想深处，隐藏着他对于受众的独特认识。本雅明生活的时代，正是大众传播兴起的时代，也是传播学的起步阶段，传播学的奠基人基本都己露面，他们分别从社会学、心理学等学科介入传播学科，并开始崭露头角。但这一时期，科学技术、大众传媒、大众文化等是人们关注的焦点，受众分析虽然是不可缺少的组成部分，但并未受到多大的重视，相对于整个传播学，受众研究无疑是一个滞后的过程。在初期有关受众的认知中，“枪弹论”流行一时，受众在传者的眼中，基本上只是一个任人宰割的被动的靶子，显得那么的弱小和无助。如宣传分析的创始人、传播学的奠基者之一的哈罗德·拉斯维尔就曾经认为，宣传就是“运用实义的符号，以控制（人们的）集体态度。”1 受众在接受宣传时，是被控制的，毫无抵抗的。这一理论一直延续到六十年代，研究者才发现受众在接受过程中的主动性和选择性。

 

与几位传播学奠基人相比，本雅明更亲身体会了大众传媒、大众文化、科学技术带来的翻天覆地的变化。1929年，本雅明开始切入传媒业，担任柏林电台和法兰克福电台的记者和撰稿人，据统计，其一生发表的新闻类稿件约有300多篇。通过一段经历，本雅明真切地感受到受众在剧变的传播进程中的地位。1931年，本雅明创作了短文《摄影小史》，初步提出了自己的机械复制思想。1933年，流亡中的本雅明正式成为法兰克福社会研究所的一名研究员。自此之后，《经验和贫困》、《关于模仿能力》、《说故事的人》，尤其是1936年发表在《社会研究杂志》上的《复制技术时代的艺术作品》相继问世，本雅明技术批判思想日渐成熟。我们细细分析本雅明的相关作品，可以惊喜地在其中发现，他在对科学技术、大众传媒和大众文化的批判当中，己经显示了他截然不同的受众观，其中很多对于后来受众理论的发展无疑起到了先导作用。

 

一

 

    先来看一下本雅明科学技术批判思想中的受众观，这一点集中表现在《机械复制时代的艺术作品》当中。经过在巴黎、法兰克福、莫斯科等地的多年研究考察，本雅明清楚地认识到，科学技术己经在社会中取得了支配性地位，艺术作品己经迈步进入机械复制时代，艺术开始批量生产与消费，这一剧变让艺术作品的消费主体——受众也产生了相应的变化。本雅明从纷繁复杂的世界中看到了这一点：

 

    首先，本雅明指出，在机械复制时代，科技的发展使得受众群体和接受内容不断增大，作品面前人人平等不再是一个梦。在科学技术征服世界之前，受众群体的人数是极为有限的，只有文化精英或贵族才有权去享受各类作品，普通人是被排除在受众的范围之外的。然而，二十世纪初科学技术的迅猛发展，使得艺术作品的复制成为可能，作品可以批量生产，人人都有可能接近艺术作品，每一个人面对的也都将是同样的作品。“它那‘世间万物皆平等的意识’（约翰·V·耶森）增强到了这般地步，以致于甚至用复制方法从独一无二的物体中去提取这种感觉。”2 在本雅明眼里，技术使得万物平等，尽管独一无二的“韵味”（aura）在技术的魔力下不复存在，但是正因为如此，才使得任何人都可以领略到艺术作品内部所蕴含的震撼。在某种意义上，艺术不再唯一，而成了共享，它带来了受众群体的急剧扩张，使得更多的人能够有机会、有能力接触乃至接受到原本只能为极少数人准备的作品。

 

    除此之外，急速发展的科技开始将更多的东西纳入自己的视野，向受众提供更为丰富的接受资源。“摄影机从现实中所摄取的各个方面大多存在于通常的感觉世界之外。在电影中，视觉所能触及的许多畸形和刻板的东西、衰变和灾难性的东西，其实是在精神变态、幻觉和梦境中出现的。”3 在现实中人们无法看到、无法展示或者不愿展示、不好展示的内容都可以利用科技一一在作品中表现，受众不仅在地位上平等，认知内容上也不断丰富起来。

 

    其次，受众开始了对作品的主动解读。在本雅明以前，受众在作品的传受过程中，并不是作为一个主体而存在，他只是作品意义最终获得阐释的一个接收器，毫无抵抗力，只要他们被传者的思想击中，就会完全接受，受众本身是不会有任何思想的。科学技术发展之后，作品流通的渠道更广，不同的群体对作品也开始了不同的解读，本雅明指出，虽然机械复制使艺术作品缺少了“韵味”，但是“人们可以把己经排除掉的成分纳入‘韵味’这个术语之中。”4 借助于这一点，人们可以对同样的作品，做出丰富多彩的理解。这样，文学作品、电影、摄像等复制品在受众的俯视之下，“不复具有神圣性和神秘性，越来越接近日常生活，满足于大众展示和观看自身形象的需要”，5 不再充满艺术魅力，相反，受众的态度己经开始感染作品。

 

    而在《暴力批判》里，本雅明则以艺术作品为例，提出了一个概念，即“内在批判”。在本雅明看来，作品的意义是由两部分构成的，一部分是作品本身固有的，由作品的内在结构决定的，另一部分则是其潜在的倾向。作品诞生以后，其意义是不完整的，残缺的部分必须由受众去完成。受众通过对作品的解读，不仅能够展示作品本身内在的核心意义，而且还有可能发掘出其潜在性的意义，通过融会贯通，在作品意义的基础上超越作品本身。换句话说，作品的意义是由生产者和消费者共同决定的，两者的通力协作才有可能使作品达到最大程度。另外，“觉醒”——本雅明提到的另一个概念，即受众的批评性解读，会增加作品的反思性，导致作品自身的意识和认识。当然，这种批评性解读，“不是对艺术品作出价值判断，而是要通过不断的反思，再反思，展示艺术品与其他艺术品乃至艺术理念总体性的关系，从而不断揭示作品自身固有的新的意义，不断地完成和完善作品。”6 也就是说，正是因为受众的存在，才使得作品有了更加丰富的意义，受众本身就是作品意义展示不可缺少的部分。

 

    再次，在一个科技为先的时代，受众接受作品的方式在悄然无声中发生着改变，受众融入社会的程度越来越大，私人空间受到了不断的挤压。在机械复制时代到来之前，大众文化并未形成，真正意义上的“大众”也是不存在的，然而科学技术的进步，一切复制都成为可能，精英意识发生了不可避免的融解，人们开始接受同样的作品，做出程度不同的类似反应，作为个体的受众，私人反应会日趋减少。“电影院中的主要特点在于，没有何处比得上在电影院中那样，个人的反应会从一开始就以眼前直接的密集化反应为条件的。个人反应的总和就组成了观众的强烈反应。个人的反应正由于表现了出来，因而，个人反应也就被制约了。”7 这无疑与传播学奠基人之一库尔特·卢因提出的“场动力”和“群体压力”有异曲同工之妙，集体反应在某种程度上是凌驾于个体反应之上的。另外，在《俄国作家的政治组合》一书中，本雅明以文学为例证明，“在一个革命国家里文学的功能是创造出一个‘完全公共的领域’”。8 社会主义制度己经使俄国不再是资产阶级精英实现自我认识的环境，相反，它开始服务于把知识交给大众的事业。虽然与西欧相比，当时的俄国更注意政治因素在作品中的意义，但是没有科学技术的进步，公共领域也必然无法实现。在这里，本雅明无疑跳出了“文化精英”的圈子，指出了作品的公共性意义，作品存在最重要意义就是服务于数目众多的大众，而科学技术的兴盛，也使得这一点成为可能。

 

    另一方面，科学技术使受众可以面对的世界大大扩充，他们接受作品时，开始有选择有目的，以更好地满足自身需要。“极其广泛的大众的参与就引起了参与方式的变化，”9 大众在艺术作品中寻求消遣，而艺术爱好者却需要凝神专注地走向艺术品。科学技术的进步，使得人们在日常的工作生活中压力加大，他们接受作品时的态度，不再是欣赏，相反是解脱。作品存在的目的不是提供艺术享受，而是使人们从紧张的压力中至少暂时地脱离出去，快餐式的大众文化一时占据了人们的视野，人们开始“轻快地步入现在”。10

 

二

 

    科学技术的进步，在传媒业体现最明显的无疑是大众传媒本身。在本雅明时代，摄影、电影、电报、电话、广播等媒体形式己经完全成熟，1936年电视节目在英国的正式播出也标志着电视技术的初步成型。传媒本身的飞速变化，使人们面临着眼花缭乱的诱惑，一切似乎都只是现在时，这种情况迫使人们不得不紧急转变，以适应这种变化。受众概念的提出，事实上是相对于大众传媒而言的。本雅明以摄影和电影为例，集中对大众传媒进行了批判，并就此提出了自己对受众的独特理解。

 

    首先，在大众传媒出现之前，是不存在传播学意义上的受众的。从传播角度来看，所谓受众，有一点最明显的特点就是数目众多，而在十九世纪末传媒技术取得突破性进展之前，能够接近艺术作品的人是很少的，明显不能称之为受众。伴随着摄影、电影、广播等新兴传媒的大批出现，很多人身不由己，卷入大众文化浪潮，成为自觉或不自觉的受众，作品面对的对象迅速扩大。随着摄影技术的发展，摄影从最初的艺术转变为对日常生活的关照，成为大众生活中的重要组成部分，在大众的影响下，艺术的功能也逐渐发生了变化，正如本雅明所言：“由于艺术在机械复制时代失去了它的膜拜基础，因而它的自主性外观也就一去不复返了。可是，由此出现的艺术功能的演化却脱离了19世纪的人的视野。”11 艺术功能转变，平等意识开始普及，精英意识淡化，一般意义上的受众层面开始形成。

 

    虽然阿多诺、霍克海默等人就这一点，鲜明指出科学技术的进步，使得文化工业的商品化、标准化、齐一化、平面化趋势不断加大，当今社会的商品拜物教特性持续加强，不仅艺术本身固有的原创性、独一无二性等都被抹杀，艺术精神悉数沦落，更严重的是人们处于商品化流潮中，己经失去选择的自由，阿尔库塞甚至为此预言：长此以往，人将不人，成为“单面人”。然而，本雅明似乎看得更远，在他眼里，受众失去选择的自由，是因为他们有了更多的选择，他们面对的是众多的诱惑，琳琅满目，以至于无从选择，而不是像过去那样，面对的只是单一的世界，根本就没有自由。技术的发展带动了工业社会的降临，批量生产让社会产品大幅度增长，物质财富与精神财富逐渐包围了世人，人们开始从无物可选走向无法选择，自由空间剧烈增长，人们困惑的不再是没有自由，而是如何充分利用这种自由。

 

    其次，新兴传媒的高科技化，己经使得受众可以至少部分地参与被接受作品的制作过程。在传播技术取得突破性进展之前，作品的制作与接受是截然分开的，接受者完全被摒弃在制作的过程当中。然而，“随着新闻出版业的日益发展，新闻出版业不断地给读者提供了新的政治、宗教、科学、职业和地方的喉舌，越来越多的读者——首先是个别地——变成了作者。”12 本雅明认为，日报在版面上设立“读者信箱”，发布读者意见，完全改变了过去那种“没有机会在某一个地方发表劳动经验、烦恼、新闻报道或诸如此类的作品”13 的状况，有的时候，甚至区分作者和读者都失去了意义，生产者和消费者的角色处于随时变化的历程中。“在艺术生产过程中，作为生产者的作者应该清醒地意识到自己在这一生产中的主导地位，主动自觉地采用先进的生产手段，即新的艺术技术，才能生产出具有正确政治倾向与艺术倾向的作品。从另一方面看，接受者（读者、观众、听众等）也不仅是从前意义上的消费者，而成了艺术生产积极的参与者。”14

 

    如上文所言，机械复制时代，各类作品存在的最大意义就是向人们提供消遣，因而，在艺术作品的生产制作过程中，不能再像往日那样只提供制作者的思想或只按照制作者的审美价值和审美标准进行创作，相反，必须考虑作品受众一方，即他们的所需所想是什么，以及怎样才能满足他们的需求，从而使创作达到最大的效果。“电影演员知道，当他站在摄影机前时，他就站在了与大众相关联的机制中。这是一些将主宰他的大众。而当他完成将受大众检验的艺术成就时，他无法见到这些大众，对他来说，这些大众还不存在。然而，随着大众的这种不可见性，大众那种主宰作用的权威性就得到了提高。”15 事实上，在这一时期，作品能否发挥作用，产生其想达到的最初目的，在很大程度上是由受众决定的。受众是隐匿的，是不存在的，但他又是无所不在的。作品从创作到发布到产生影响的过程，也是受众从后场走上前台的过程。

 

    再次，大众传媒的发展，形成了一个虚拟的媒体环境。在这一环境里，本雅明认为受众依然是主动的，他对受众的态度在很大程度上是乐观的。在十九世纪上半叶，社会对于媒体几乎是一片声讨之声，“传播机器每日通过报纸、电台和电视把民族主义、沙文主义、自由主义、道德论等等按时按量硬塞给每个‘公民’。”16 大众传媒通过传播大众文化，创造了人类无法逃离的虚拟环境，媒体作为一种霸权武器，执意向受众进行灌输，而受众却只能眼睁睁地接受这种灌输，它麻痹了受众，磨掉了人们的斗志，受众得到虚假的满足，其“非人性”的本质使得社会上的一切都发生异化，马尔库塞甚至就此断言，长此以往，人只会成为“单向度的人”。

 

    本雅明不这样认为，他在《作为生产者的作家》一文中，从艺术生产关系这一角度出发，指出艺术的生产绝不只是生产者一方就能够完成的，换言之，即传播的过程并不仅仅是一个传——受的过程，它应该是相互的，作为消费者的受众，对于生产者亦有影响，艺术正是在这种矛盾运动中得到发展的。因此，媒体创造的虚拟环境，并不仅仅是生产者和媒体运作的结果，受众也是这一环境的重要组成部分。而且伴随着技术的发展，它“能够超越形式与内容、政治倾向和艺术质量的二元分析”，17 “第一次把艺术作品从其对宗教仪式的寄生状态中解放了出来，”18 最终改变艺术的功能，受众与作品的关系改变了，受众的被动地位彻底改变。

 

三

 

    在众人皆醉，纷纷指责科技带来“工具理性”扩张、人文理性缩减的时候，惟本雅明发出了异声，他热切地拥抱了科学技术，指出“社会现实并没有准备把技术变成自己的器官，而技术也没有强大到足以控制社会的原始力量。”19 他希望人类“在技术中占有的不是对毁灭的崇拜，而是通向幸福的钥匙。”20 作为科学技术的创新者、拥有者、利用者，人们应该将科学技术化为找到幸福的工具。

 

    诚然，在本雅明的技术批判思想中，受众不是一个主要的组成部分，他看到更多的是科学技术、大众文化、大众传媒等机械复制时代发生的巨大变化，并进而对它们进行理性的反思与批判，然而我们还是能够在这些批判中不时看到受众的影子。他从科学技术带来的大众文化大面积扩张出发，大幅度提升了受众的地位。在他眼里，受众不是任人宰割的羔羊，而是大众文化必须面对的对象，而且只有通过受众，才能实现大众文化存在的意义。我们亦不可否认，本雅明对于受众的态度大多体现于其对于文学作品、艺术作品的批判当中，直接针对于传播主体和受众的不多，但窥一斑而知全豹，他的受众观毫无疑问对于当代的受众观也有很大的引导作用。

 

 

 

[注释]

 

1 《美国大百科全书》第7卷，美国1975年版，转引自《大众传播学总论》，中国人民大学出版社1993年版，张隆栋，P23

 

2 、3 、7 、9 、11 、12 、13 、15 《机械复制时代的艺术作品》    （德）瓦尔特·本雅明王才勇（译） 中国城市出版社2002年版，P14、P56、P52、P62、P27、P44、P36

 

4 《机械复制时代的艺术作品》《西方马克思主义美学文选》漓江出版社1988年版，P243

 

5 《大众文化与传媒》   潘知常、林玮   上海人民出版社2002年版，P59

 

6 《本雅明文选》（德）瓦尔特·本雅明  陈永国 马海良（编）中国社会科学出版社1999年版，P14

 

8 《本雅明思想肖像》刘北成  上海人民出版社1998年版，P136

 

10 《文化的嬉戏与承诺》王德胜  河南人民出版社1998年版，P75

 

14 《本雅明文选》（德）瓦尔特·本雅明  陈永国、马海良（编）中国社会科学出版社1999年版，P28

 

16 《意识形态和意识形态的国家机器》   （法）路易·阿尔都塞    转引自马克·波斯特《第二媒介时代》 南京大学出版社2000年版，P13

 

17 《本雅明思想肖像》刘北成  上海人民出版社1998年版，P176

 

18 《本雅明文选》  （德）瓦尔特·本雅明   陈永国、马海良（编）    中国社会科学出版社1999年版，P31

 

19 、20 《德国法西斯主义的理论》 （德）瓦尔特·本雅明，转引自《本雅明思想肖像》，P160

Seeing is Believing: Depictive Neuromodelling of Visual Awareness

Igor Aleksander, Helen Morton and Barry Dunmall

Intelligent and Interactive Systems Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London SW7, 2 AZ

{I.Aleksander, Helen.Morton, B.Dunmall}@ic.ac.uk

 

Abstract. The object of seeing is for the brain to create inner states that accurately model the world and recall it for purposeful use.  In this descriptive paper we present virtual neuro-architectures called ‘depictive’ which have been developed to create hypotheses for the mechanisms necessary for such depiction and explain some elements of verbally induced visual working memory. Early work on applications to understanding visual deficits in Parkinsons’ sufferers is included.

1           Introduction

This work discusses the development of hypotheses regarding the generation of visual awareness in the modular architectures found in the living brain. These architectures are modelled using digital neuromodels [1].  The accent is not on the neural modules but the behaviour emerging from the interaction of such modules.  As an example we work with  the perception and recall of both broad shape of a pattern and the detail which makes it up.  This is best illustrated by fig. 1.

Fig. 1.  From left to right these objects are called ‘cross’, ‘tee’ and ‘square’.  The detailed shapes from which the object is composed have both shape and colour.

These are typical figures that are used in visual working memory experiments with human beings [2].  The subject is allowed to observe one or more objects, and is then questioned about the detail in some position within the object (e.g. “What is  the top left shape of the cross?”) .  In this paper we are not concerned with the prowess of individuals in executing the task, we enquire into the possible neurological mechanisms which allow the observer to have such an ability at all.  We develop a hypothesis about this operation that involves eye movement and attention. This is based on what is known about the neuroscience of the system. An implementation of the proposed scheme is tested through neuromodelling and it is shown that the hypothesis is supported. The key questions that this procedure seeks to answer are, how does the system go from a retinotopic image to a coherent sensation of both object and the detailed makeup by its shapes?  How is the process of recall organised at the two levels of object and shape? How does attention operate in visual working memory.

2           Neuroscientific highlights of vision mechanisms

The features that can be extracted from the literature on the neuroscience of vision and that form the elements of this work feature in fig. 2 and are the following. 

-          The prime anatomical area that causes eye movement whether saccadic or smooth is the superior colliculus.  ([3] is a good reference for pursuing this material).

-          The superior colliculus receives direct input from the retina which is capable of causing movement to direct the fovea to areas of high contrast in the in the retinotopic image (including the perifoveal fields).

-          The image pathways diverge into specialisms through primary areasV1 into V2, V3 etc.. 

-          Importantly, in the parietal cortex, the prefrontal and the frontal cortex (broadly dubbed ‘the extrastriate cortex’ following the practice in [5]), there are projections from the motor activity which includes that caused by the superior colliculus. 

-          A most important piece of evidence is the discovery of cells that, on receiving positional signals originating from the muscular output, only fire for specific positions of the eyes.  These are called ‘gaze-locked’ and their presence in areas such as V3 has been known for over ten years [4]. 

-          On the question of memory, it is generally proposed that prefrontal structures which are responsible for perception are also involved in the process of visual memory. Fig. 2 summarises this structure and indicates what needs to be built in a simulation.

 

Pathway X is an important feature of the hypotheses set out in this paper as it serves several purposes.  The salient among these is that higher visual awareness, postulated to take place in the extrastriate areas [5] (as the main ‘purpose’ of these areas) also influences the superior colliculus. For example, this is thought to be at work in context-dependent tasks such as face exploration or visual planning as may be involved in solving stacking problems “in one’s head” [6]. The further postulated function of this pathway is discussed in part 4 of this paper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Movable retinal projection

REAL VISUAL WORLD

Superior Colliculus

Main Visual Pathway

Movement

Primary Areas (V1, V2, …)

Extrastriate Areas

Auditory Triggers

Gaze Locking j

Pathway X

Non-ocular Motor Activity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. 2.  A monocular diagram that summarises the neurophysiological data available for neuromodelling 

3.       The Depictive Hypothesis

The material of this section is an elaboration of a previously enunciated hypothesis about the asynchrony of visual awareness [7].

-          Any sensory activity which has the potential of being reported (whether the agent can find the actual verbal expression or not) must be supported by rich neural activity which is at least on a one-one basis with world events that the organism is aware of. We call such neural support a depiction. (See Appendix A for a brief elaboration of this argument)

-          Such depictions can only occur where there are gaze-locked cells as other areas cannot be compensated for eye and other (e.g., head,) movements. We call the vector of all gaze-locking information ‘referent j’.

-           Neurons in areas receiving j need not be physically adjacent in order to achieve binding.  For example a shape sensitive neuron and a colour sensitive neuron will encode information about the same element of the external visual world if they are indexed by the same values of j. We note that this is a a resolution of the extreme postions on binding existing between the binding theory of Crick and Koch [5] which espouses the existence of tuned 40 Hz signals between binding neurons, and the hypothesis by  Zeki and Bartels [8] that there is no need for binding and that the elements of a visual sensation arise asynchronously (as microconsciousnesses).

-          We note that the area of depiction can be defined as the total area of visual awareness available to the observer at any point in time. We further note that, in reality, this involves not only eye and head movement but bodily movement as well. 

In this paper we consider eye movement alone to establish how this contributes both to depiction and visual working memory. This opens the way to the study of other motor activity in a similar way.

4.       The Visual Memory Hypothesis

The literature on visual working memory (e.g.[2])  clearly points to the fact that recall is intimately bound up with attention. It can relate to both broad and detailed reports of previous visual experience.  Attention could be said to be an internalisation of the movement process, and it is a simulation of this which is at the focal centre of this paper.

-          The feedback loop shown in fig.2  involving the superior colliculus, the gaze-locking path to the extrastriate, and the return to the superior colliculus via pathway X forms a learning state machine which allows for the inward exploration of a visual scene  .

-          Recall of both detail and shape of  images such as those shown in fig.1 is achieved by the retention of the gaze locking signals as a subset of the state variables of this state machine.

-          In the absence of visual input the state machine becomes autonomous and generates gaze-locking signals which now become described as inner attentional control patterns.

-          Both foveal and perifoveal information is therefore retained. The state machine when triggered by auditory input (e.g. ‘imagine the tee shape’) is able to imagine the overall perifoveal shape, and highlight the detail of it through inner gaze locking to the extent that the detail can be decoded and output as a voice signal.

 

5.        The experimental system

Fig. 3.  The NRM virtual vision system during perception (only 14 of the 24 areas are shown for clarity). Every dot is the output of a neuron. Input 1 is the visual world containing the foveal and perifoveal areas, 6 and 7 are parts of the superior colliculus, while 1,5,and 13 are the primary areas. 24 is the crucial extrastriate ‘awareness’ area.

Without going into detail, a simulation comprising 24 neural areas and a total of approximately 360,000 neurons has been set up using the Neural Representation Modeller (www.sonnet.co.uk/nts).  Only 14 of these areas are shown in figure 3. Here the superior colliculus, under the influence of perifoveal inputs is controlling the movement of the ‘eye’ in order to highlight and identify verbally both the overall shape (20) and the foveal detail (16).

 

 Fig. 4.  This shows the NRM system in visual memory mode.

Fig. 4 shows the behaviour of the system where there is no visual input (blindfold or eyes closed) but it is asked to imagine the ‘square’(at 21).  There is no activity in the primary areas but the superior colliculus activity is sustained in the loop by pathway X.  24 shows that there is a vague awareness of the whole shape, but attention as mediated by the superior colliculus and gaze locking enables the detail (bottom right of 24) to be described in 16 (this appears as ‘Green Dee’ as the experiment is being done in colour.

6.      Application: Visuo-Cognitive Deficits in Parkinson’s Disease

It has been shown through measurements of eye movements that there is a distinct difference between unaffected subjects and PD affected ones in the strategic use of such movements in the solving of visual problems [6].  Unaffected subjects move their eyes to imaginary targets where objects have to be ‘parked’ temporarily in order to find a suitable sequence of moves that solves the problem.  It is well known that PD is the result of dopamine deficit in the substantia nigra, which directly affects the basal ganglia which, in turn, have strong inhibitory synaptic connections to the superior colliculus. It is also known that hallucinations are not uncommon in PD sufferers. This suggests that the feedback loop discussed in this paper may be prone to falling into hallucinatory state-space minima and be less responsive to retinal signals as a result the reduced inhibition from the basal ganglia in the superior colliculus.  We are initiating discussions with PD sufferers to obtain an understanding of their visualization difficulties in solving visual puzzles, and using the model discussed in this paper to attempt to predict (in area 24 of the model) what distortions PD-afflicted people might suffer.

7.      Conclusion and Directions of this Work

Visual awareness has both perceptual and imagining components.  In this paper we have proposed a modelling technique which addresses hypotheses about the sources and of both of these elements.  The work is based on a depictive hypothesis of very rich neural activity that is world-centered, making perception (neural activity in  part of the extrastriate areas) world-representative depending on eye movement and its compensation in creating the depiction.  Central to this operation is the action of the superior colliculus and its action on gaze-locked cells that ensure awareness in extra-striate areas of the cortex.. It has been argued that visual working memory is due to sustained feedback activity which involves the superior colliculus and the extrastriate cortex to the extent that gaze-locking information becomes encoded in the feedback variables.

We note the distinct departure in this work from classical models of visual working memory in the cognitive sciences (e.g. [2]).  These classical descriptions invoke computational terms such as ‘central executive’, ‘buffer memory’, ‘circulatory registers’, ‘attention window’ and so on.  Of course such components do not exist in this computational form in  the brain, they are merely descriptions of functions or algorithms that a computer would need to have visual working memory.  The process of depictive neuromodelling creates models which are based on existing elements of neural processes such as the superior colliculus, and the other areas involved in the specific model discussed here.  These have emergent stability and they contribute to explanations of real functions within the brain. This is particularly important when creating hypotheses that attempt to achieve a better understanding of departures from the normal, as was suggested above in the case of Parkinson’s disease.

Much work remains to be done on visual working memory, in particular when more complex verbal descriptions of events are involved. This is the subject of current work.

8.    Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Wellcome Trust for granting us a Wellcome Showcase Award for the development of this work in the area of investigating mental deficits.  The invaluable contribution of our collaborators in the Neurosciences division of the Imperial College School of Medicine, namely Chris Kennard and Tim Hodgson, is much appreciated.

Appendix A

Depiction and coherence: To support the hypothesis of depiction, we define an elemental event of visual awareness as the change in the visual world with the smallest geometrical dimensions that the observer can report.  A tiny fly landing on a wall may be an example of such an event. Were the fly smaller it would not be seen.  This change must cause an elemental change in the activity of at least one neuron otherwise, without which, it could not be seen.  The same can be said for a second elemental event in the visual world an so on by induction leading to the conclusion that neural events stand in at least one-one relation to visual events in the external world. The implication of this is the support for many physiological findings that accurate depiction occurs in the extrastriate parts of the brain. Note that depiction does not imply ‘pictures in the head’ that could be discovered by a super-accurate brain scanner.  The elemental events could be arbitrarily distributed in a geometrical sense.  It is also known that the same event is broken down in V1 and partly depicted in deeper areas of the cortex, such as V3, V4 .. etc.. Therefore the ‘at least one-one’ description is stressed. The coherence of the experience is guaranteed by the hypothesized referent j .

References

1.        Aleksander, I., Dunmall, B.,  Del Frate, V., Neurocomputational Models of Visualisation: A preliminary report,  Proc. IWANN 99, Alicante – Spain (1999)

2.        Logie, R. H., Visuo-spatial Processing in Working Memory.  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38A (1986) 229-247

3.        Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H. and Jessel, T. M.,  Principles of Neural Science, Fourth Edition, McGraw Hill, (2000).

4.        Galletti, C. and Battaglini, P. P., Gaze-Dependent Visual Neurons in Area V3A of Monkey Prestriate Cortex.  Journal of Neuroscience, 6, (1989), 1112-1125

5.        Crick, F., and Koch, C., Are we Aware of Neural Activity in Primary Visual Cortex? Nature, 375, (1995)

6.        Hodgson, T.L.,  Dittrich, W. H., Henderson, L and Kennard, C.,  Neuropsychologia, 37: 8, (1999), 927-938

7.        Aleksander, I. and Dunmall, B.:  An extention  to the hypothesis of the asynchrony of visual consciousness. Proc R Soc Lond B 267, (2000)  197-200

8.        Zeki, S., and Bartels, A., The asynchrony of consciousness. Proc R Soc Lond B 265, (2000) 1583-1585.

 

The Gaze
Definition
To look steadily, intently, and with fixed attention.--American Heritage Dictionary
The Gaze in visual media theory
The concept of gaze (often also called the gaze), in analysing visual media, is one that deals with how an audience views other people presented. This concept is extended in the framework of feminist theory, where it can deal with how men look at women, how women look at themselves and other women, and the effects surrounding this. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze [Dec 2004]
Shot reverse shot
Shot reverse shot is a film technique wherein one character is shown looking (often off-screen) at another character, and then the other character is shown looking "back" at the first character. Since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the viewer subconsciously assumes that they're looking at each other (a'la the 180 degree rule). However, shot reverse shot is also often combined with creative geography to create the sense that two characters are facing each other, when in fact they're being filmed in completely different locations or at completely different times. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_reverse_shot [Dec 2004]

Image
Image (art)
 An image (from Latin imago) or picture is a visual reproduction of an object or a person, either by using technology, or by artistic methods such as drawing or painting. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image, Mar 2004

VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA

Laura Mulvey

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey
Originally Published - Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18

I. Introduction
A. A Political Use of Psychoanalysis

This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It takes as starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.

The paradox of phallocentrism in aIl its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarise briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold. She first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis, and second thereby raises her chiId into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and Ianguage except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud's famous phrase). Woman's desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman stiIl tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order. It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings an articulation of the problem closer, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female unconscious which are scarcely relevant to psychoanalytic theory: the sexing of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexuaIly mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina.... But, at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught.

 

B. Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon
As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions of the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed over the last few decades. It is no longer the monolithic system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's. Technological advances (16mm, etc) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an alternative cinema to develop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always restricted itself to a formal mise-en-scene reflecting the dominant ideological concept of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it, and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions. A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint.

The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in phantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions.

This article will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the image of woman. It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.

II. Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form

A. The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally. in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples center around the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and the forbidden (curiosity about other people's genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in Instincts and their Vicissitudes, Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pre-genital auto-eroticism, after which the pleasure of the look is transferred to others by analogy. There is a close working here of the relationship between the active instinct and its further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.

At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen of the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the fiIm is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantIy one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer.

B. The cinema satifies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingIe with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for rhe constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child's physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject. which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others. This mirror-moment predates language for the child.

Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the 'I' of subjectivity. This is a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother's face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Ouite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego. The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostagicallyreminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition. At the same time the cinema has distinguished itself in the pro- duction of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars centering both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary).

C. Sections II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. AIthough he saw the two as interacting and overIaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be a dramatic polarisation in terms of pleasure. Both are formative structures, mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they have no signification, they have to be attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagised, eroticised concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity. During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particularillusion of reality in which this contradiction between libido
and ego has found a beautifully complementary phantasy world. In reality the phantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of irs birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox.

III. Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look

A. 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. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream fiIm neatly combined spectacie and narrative. (Note, however, how the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, , yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Rudd Boetticher has put it:

"What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather whatshe represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance."

(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the 'buddy movie,' in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.) Traditionally. the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in The River of No Retum and Lauren Bacall's songs in To Have or Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimiIitude to the screen.

B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror-recognition in which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technoiogy (as exempified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism) all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.

C.1 Sections III, A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male phantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuaIity, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.)

But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately assodated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occuring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focussed on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simpIy by using works by Hitchcock and Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or subiect matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex, as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg's work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.

C.2 It is well known that Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projected upside down so that story and character involvement would not interfere with the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is revealing but ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of films with her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable. But revealing in that it emphasises the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than narrative or identification processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct
recipient of the spectator's look. Sternberg pIays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers, etc, reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the contrary, shadowy presences like La Bessiere in Morocco act as surrogates for the director, detached as they are from audience identification. Despite Sternberg's insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that they are concerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction. There are other witnesses, other spectators watching her on the screen, but their gaze is one with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Morocco, Tom Brown has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks off her gold sandals and walks after him. At the end of Dishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see.

In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees. However, in the films I shall discuss here, he takes fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism as the subject of the film. Moreover, in these cases the hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Marnie and Rear Window, the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. As a twist, a further manipulation of the normal viewing process which in some sense reveals it, Hitchcock uses the process of identification normally associated with ideological correctness and the recognition of established morality and shows up its perverted side. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law-- a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power (Marnie)--but their erotic drives lead them into comprimised situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned on to the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanaiytically speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness--the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock's skilful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema. In his analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so Iong as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their reationship is re-born erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her. Lisa's exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries'voyeurism and activity have also been established through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the phantasy position of the cinema audience.

In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from flash-back from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result. he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the second part of the fiIm, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism. She knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorienting: the spectator's fascination is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal super-ego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a faIse sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking.

Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark RutIand's gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words, he can have his cake and eat it.

III. Summary

The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this article is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopophilic instinct (pleasure jn looking at another person as an erotic object), and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanisms, which this cinema has played on. The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form - illusionistic narrative film. The argument returns again to the psychoanalytic background in that woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat. None of these interacting Iayers is intrinsic to film, but it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows, etc. Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as
controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged.

To begin with (as an ending) the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the charafters at each other within the screen ilIusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being alwavs to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has agued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity ol the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera's look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and erotic image on the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishisation, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him.

This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (aIready undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the 'invisible guest,' and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.

--Laura Mulvey, originally published - Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18

Male Voyeurism and Female Spectatorship:
John Berger and Feminist Theoriets

Starting Questions: Why are women objects of gaze?  How do women look at men or women (e.g. Pre-Raphaelite women or Images of Women on the Ads)?
 
What are the possible subject positions in a painting (or any text) and in viewing a painting?
 Foucault
Berger--Ways of Seeing--"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at."
introduction to the chapter one of Ways of Seeing.
Laura Mulvey--active/male vs. passive/female (psychoanalytic view)
Mary Ann Doane--Female Spectatorship
Other Ways of Seeing --Lynne Pearce
Related Links
 

Foucault's analysis of "Las Meninas" --major arguments (from Representation pp. 58-60)
The painting tells us something about how representation and the subject work.
Representation is not reflection.
Although painting is "visible," its meaning is as much constructed around what you can't see as what you can.
A number of substitution or displacement is at work in this painting.  (e.g. The King and the Queen).
Our look ...follows the relationships of looking as represented in the picture.  ..So the spectator (who is also 'subjected' to the discourse of the painting) is doing two kinds of looking.
Looking at the painting from the position outside, in front of, the picture.
looking out of the scene, by identifying with the looking being done by the figures in the painting.  Projecting ourselves into the subjects of the painting help us as spectators to see, to 'make sense' of it.
Meaning is therefore constructed in the dialogue between the painting and the spectator.
Different subject positions in the paintings
that of the spectator--identifying with the Sovereign or the infanta or the painter?
of the painter inside the painting and outside
of the King and the Queen inside the painting and outside

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Ways of Seeing  by John Bergr -- Major Arguments in Chap 1:
With the technologies of reproduction, traditional oil paintings are deprived of their original "sacred" contexts (e.g. church, museum).
Massive reproduction of art work can lead to its re-contextualization.  Meaning thus can be transmitted and distorted.
Paintings are open to manipulation and re-interpretation especially because they are still and silent.
contemporary "aura" of traditional art work--its authenticity=its market value
paintings, or art work in general, should be treated as words (or signs), but not holy relics.
Major Arguments in Chap 2:
nudity is a sign
The nude in traditional oil paintings either look at "us" (the spectator-owners in the past) or look at the mirror
The nude shows signs of submissiveness (e.g. being languid, passive and thus available).

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Lynne Pearce. Women/Image/Text.  NY: Harvester, 1991.
 
Reading Strategies 1: Feminist Critique: a radical rereading of canonical and popular texts which exposed their sexism, misogyny and pornography, and frequently laid explicit blame on their authors/producers. (3)
(e.g. 1. Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969) and 2. John Berger's Ways of Seeing.)
Reading Strategies 2: Symptomatic Reading: The practice of reading texts according to their 'gaps' and 'absences' (9).
    or reading for contradictions or the textual unconscious.
(e.g. 1. Pierre Marcherey's cracked mirror model--"The text...according to Macherey's metaphorical model is a cracked surface, discontinuous both with the 'outside world' and with itself; a site of 'contradictory expressions,' of eloquent faps and silences' (10).)
(e.g. 2  Griselda Pollock on Rossetti: love vs. fear and Othering of PR women
"she finds that the paintings betray a fear and anxiety about women peculiar to the art of the late nineteenth century: aa castration complex that, in its effort to control the 'threat', sought to make women increasingly non-specific, two-dimensional, rhetorical: 'These were not faces, not portraits, but fantasy'(p. 122).  It is significant that in this analysis Pollock has effectively broken through the rules of production and consumption ..." (14)  ... "'[Astarte Syriaca] raises to a visible level the pressures that motivated and shaped the project of 'Rossetti'--the negotiation of  masculine sexuality in an order in which woman is the sign, not of woman, but of that Other in whose mirror masculinity must define itself (153)'" (15).
Reading Strategies 3: Pleasurable Reading: viewers can take pleasure in images that are ostensibly negative ('ideologically unsound') (p. 16)
Why do women take pleasure in images of themselves? --1. Transvestism (or double identification), 2. Narcissism
Where women viewers ought to feel alienated and indignant, they are constantly seduced (18). --the female spectator being seduced into viewing images of women through men's eyes.
Narcissism--According to Simone de Beauvoir's reading of Freud in The Second Sex, narcissism, like lesbianism, is a psychic phase that all girls must pass through on the road to womanhood.  [For Beauvoir, narcissism is dangerous and psychotic if it persists into adulthood.] ...recent feminists have searched for a more positive and enabling interpretation of narcissism.
e.g. Rosemary Betterton "How do women look?: The female nude in the work of Suzanne Valadon"
the narcissistic reflex may be celebrated as a positive sign of female difference; a different way of looking....
 Women need and desire other women to compensate for what they lack themselves.  Women need and desire images of other women for the same reasons.
fascination between women(Jackie Stacey)--something far more complex than either simple sexual desire for, or narcissistic identification with, a female other.  "[Fascination] is a desire to see, to know and to become like an idealised feminine other, in a context where the difference between the two women is repeatedly re-established." (22)

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The position of female spectator of traditional Hollywood film: 
passive/female + active/male, masculinisation, masochism, marginality and what else? 
Laura Mulvey the active/male vs. passive/female (1975 essay)  e - text (remote)

Men consciously and unconsciously control the production and reception of film, creating images that satisfy their needs and unconscious desires. cinema uses the images of woman to dissipate male castration fears by forms of voyeurism, containing aspects of sadism and fetishism.

"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"

male viewers in the audience identify with the male protagonist on the screen, the character who controls both events and "the look"

1. voyeuristic-scopophilic pleasure (sadistic)
--using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight

2. fetishistic-scopophilic pleasure 
the position of the spectator in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.

Woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat.
 

Mulvey's 1981 revision: --develope a more mobile position for women  (Cf. 394 "Desperately Seeking Difference"  Jackie Stacey  from Visual Culture: the Reader)
Women are forced to oscillate between masculine and feminine identifications
In order to identify with active desire, the female spectator must assume an (uncomfortably) masculine position: 'the female spactator's phantasy of masculinisation is alwys to some extent at cross purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes.'
Female Spectatorship--  Mary Ann Doane, et al. 
Alternative Views: 
Bellour (as discussed by Stacey)--women as complete victim, taking a masochistic position.
Jackie Stacey -- 

p. 391  use a detailed textual analysis to demonstrate that different gendered spectator positions are produced by the film text, contradicting the unified masculine model of spectatorship. 
accept a theory of the masculinisation of the spectator at a textual level, but argue that spectators being different subjectivities to the film acording to sexual difference, and therefore respond differently to the visual pleasure offered in the text.
 Rich, B. Ruby--She argued that women's viewing experience under patriarchy is always dialectical, a process of absorbing and reprocessing (often resisting) what emanates from the screen.
Bergstrom--bisexual responses which would allow for multiple identificatory positions, which could occur either successively or simultaneously.

e.g. Psycho--male voyeurism is thematized. audiences punished for their illicit voyeuristic desire
 --not only women are objects of male voyeuristic gaze, they are also recepients of most of the punishment. e.g. Marion's sightless eye; Marion's sister confront the corpse, the focus on the eye sockets of the female corpse, Mother is aware of being stared at --sexual asymmetry in desire and its punishment

Mary Ann Doane --

1982  women being totally other to patriarchy; 
(Stacey  392) . . . the split between seeing and knowing [women's lack], which enables the boy to disown the difference which is necessary for fetishism, does not occur in girls. 
Spectatorship revolves around questions of proximity and distance. This is especially problematic for the female spectator as she is the image, the object to be viewed. Thus, women are given two options: 
they can masochistically overidentify with female images on the screen (becoming overly involved--a frequent female response to melodrama), 
or they can narcissistically become their own image of desire.--in assuming the image in the most radical way. (54)
"the masquerade"
--excess of femininity--
Joan Rivere "Womanliness ...could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it...The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance." The fact of this distance in part solves the problem of women's overidentification and transvestism. The masquerade...enables viewers to critique the socially constructed role of the feminine. In film, however, the masquerade often brings itw own punishment--e.g. femme fatale in film noir, or any woman who attempts to take over the masculine activity of "looking."

Male voyeurism

Spectatorial desire, in contemporary film theory, is generally delinated as either voyeurism or fetishism, as precisely a pleasure in seeing what is prohibited in relation to the female body. The image ochetrates a gaze, a limit, and its pleasurable transgression. The woman's beauty, her very desirability, becomes a function of certain practices of imaging--framing, lighting, camera movement, angle. (43)

Female spectator

...a tendency to view the female spectator as the site of an oscillation between a feminine position and a masculine position, invoking the metaphor of the transvestite. Given the structure of cinematic narrative, the woman who identifies with the female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position, while identification with the active hero necessarily entails an acceptance of what Laura Mulvey refers to as a certain "masculinization" of spectatorship. --masquerade and transvestism

Masquerade doubles representation; it is constituted by a hyperbolization of the accoutrements of femininity. ...By destabilizing the image, the masquerade confounds this masculine structure of the look. It effects a defamiliarization of female iconography.

The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman.

Female Look -- denied in tradition

e.g. Women who wear glasses--e.g. Betti Davis in Now Voyager
removing her glasses, from spectator to spectacle

e.g. Un Regard Oblique 

(source)
The photograph displays insistently, in microcosm, the structure of the cinematic inscription of a sexual differentiation in modes of looking. 
the woman's gaze, empty and framed by shop window. 
her gaze is encased by two poles defining the masculine axis of vision: 
the male gaze is centred, in control--although it is exercised from the margin.
fetishitic representation of the nude female body -- insures a masculinisation of the spectatorial position. 
Women: 
It's not sure what she is looking at, herself or the painting.
"On the far left-hand side of the photograph, behind the wall holding the painting of the nude, is the barely detectable painting of a woman imaged differently, in darkness--out of sight for the male, blocked by his fetish." (771) 
"The feminine presence in the photograph, despite a diegetic centering of the female subject of the gaze, is taken over by the picture as object. . .  .The spectator's pleasure is thus produced through the framing negation of the female gaze." (Doanne Film Theory and Criticism 770) 
Doane "Misrecognition and Identity" 

three kinds of identification: 
identification with the representation of a person; --secondary identification, presupposes a disavowel of the two dimensionality of the image and an investment in the reality-status of the diegesis. 
identification of particular objects, persons, or actions
primary identification (for Metz) -- identifying himself as look.
 
merging of the primary and secondary identification
(p. 16 Exploration in Film Theories) Freud "'The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.'  In this sense, it is not only the protagonist of a film who initiates the mechanisms of identification, but any represented body on the screen--offering .  . .a recomfirmation of the spectator's own position and identity. "
Cindy Sherman's photographs "Untitled Film Still"
function as mirror-masks that reflect back at the viewer his own desire (and teh spectator posited by this work is inivariably male)--specifically , the masculine desire is to fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing identiy. But this is precisely what Sherman's work denies: for while her photagraphs are always self-portraits, in them the artist never appears to be the same...while Sherman may pose as a pin-up, she still cannot be pinned down. (Anti-Aesthetics 75)

e.g. Kruger--both the gaze and the art reify

the gaze--objectifies and masters.
 
Notes on the Gaze?

Daniel Chandler

Looking is not indifferent.
There can never be any question of 'just looking'.
Victor Burgin (1982c, 188)

Introduction

Forms of gaze

Direction of gaze

Angle of view

Apparent proximity

The eye of the camera

The social codes of looking

John Berger's Ways of Seeing

Laura Mulvey on film spectatorship

Related issues

Categorizing facial expressions

References and supplementary reading

Introduction
I make no great claims for these somewhat fragmented notes which are offered by way of introduction to students concerned with examining the functions of 'the gaze' in the visual media (in particular in relation to television and to advertising in all its forms). 慣he gaze?(sometimes called 憈he look? is a technical term which was originally used in film theory in the 1970s but which is now more broadly used by media theorists to refer both to the ways in which viewers look at images of people in any visual medium and to the gaze of those depicted in visual texts. The term 'the male gaze' has become something of a feminist clich?for referring to the voyeuristic way in which men look at women (Evans & Gamman 1995, 13). My aim here is to alert students to existing material and frameworks which may assist them in their own investigations of the issue of the gaze in relation to media texts.

Mutual gaze is now possible in forms of interpersonal communication other than direct face-to-face interaction: current examples are video-conferencing and the use of 'cam-to-cam' communication via the World Wide Web. In the case of mass media texts as opposed to interpersonal communication, a genuine exchange of gazes through the textual frame is of course not possible - the viewer can look at those depicted in the text and cannot be seen by them - giving the viewing of all mass media texts and 憆ealistic?figurative art a voyeuristic aspect. The unseen viewing which is enabled by such indirect or 'mediated' viewing can be seen more positively as serving an 'information-seeking' function (Argyle 1975, 160) - an observation which alerts us to the issue of the viewer's purposes. The impossibility of mutual gaze between viewers and those depicted in media texts unfortunately means that much of the research by social psychologists which relates to the human gaze tends to be of limited relevance to media theorists. However, where possible I have tried to refer to empirical evidence which relates to the various theories discussed.

 

Forms of gaze
In the case of recorded texts such as photographs and films (as opposed to those involving interpersonal communication such as video-conferences), a key feature of the gaze is that the object of the gaze is not aware of the current viewer (though they may originally have been aware of being filmed, photographed, painted etc. and may sometimes have been aware that strangers could subsequently gaze at their image). Viewing such recorded images gives the viewer's gaze a voyeuristic dimension. As Jonathan Schroeder notes, 'to gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze' (Schroeder 1998, 208).

Several key forms of gaze can be identified in photographic, filmic or televisual texts, or in figurative graphic art. The most obvious typology is based on who is doing the looking, of which the following are the most commonly cited:

the spectator抯 gaze: the gaze of the viewer at an image of a person (or animal, or object) in the text;
the intra-diegetic gaze: a gaze of one depicted person at another (or at an animal or an object) within the world of the text (typically depicted in filmic and televisual media by a subjective 憄oint-of-view shot?;
the direct [or extra-diegetic] address to the viewer: the gaze of a person (or quasi-human being) depicted in the text looking 憃ut of the frame?as if at the viewer, with associated gestures and postures (in some genres, direct address is studiously avoided);
the look of the camera - the way that the camera itself appears to look at the people (or animals or objects) depicted; less metaphorically, the gaze of the film-maker or photographer.
In addition to the major forms of gaze listed above, we should also note several other types of gaze which are less often mentioned:

the gaze of a bystander - outside the world of the text, the gaze of another individual in the viewer抯 social world catching the latter in the act of viewing - this can be highly charged, e.g. where the text is erotic (Willemen 1992);
the averted gaze - a depicted person抯 noticeable avoidance of the gaze of another, or of the camera lens or artist (and thus of the viewer) - this may involve looking up, looking down or looking away (Dyer 1982);
the gaze of an audience within the text - certain kinds of popular televisual texts (such as game shows) often include shots of an audience watching those performing in the 'text within a text';
the editorial gaze - 'the whole institutional process by which some portion of the photographer's gaze is chosen for use and emphasis' (Lutz & Collins 1994, 368).
James Elkins offers ten different ways of looking at a figurative painting in a gallery (Elkins 1996, 38-9):

You, looking at the painting,
figures in the painting who look out at you,
figures in the painting who look at one another, and
figures in the painting who look at objects or stare off into space or have their eyes closed. In addition there is often
the museum guard, who may be looking at the back of your head, and
the other people in the gallery, who may be looking at you or at the painting. There are imaginary observers, too:
the artist, who was once looking at this painting,
the models for the figures in the painting, who may once have seen themselves there, and
all the other people who have seen the painting - the buyers, the museum officials, and so forth. And finally, there are also
people who have never seen the painting: they may know it only from reproductions... or from descriptions.
In relation to viewer-text relations of looking, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen make a basic distinction between an 憃ffer?and a 慸emand?

an indirect address which represents an offer in which the viewer is an invisible onlooker and the depicted person is the object of the look - here those depicted either do not know that they are being looked at (as in surveillance video), or act as if they do not know (as in feature films, television drama and television interviews); and
a gaze of direct address which represents a demand for the viewer (as the object of the look) to enter into a parasocial relationship with the depicted person - with the type of relationship indicated by a facial expression or some other means (this form of address is the norm for television newsreaders and portraits and is common in advertisements and posed magazine photographs).
(Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 122ff)
Some theorists make a distinction between the gaze and the look: suggesting that the look is a perceptual mode open to all whilst the gaze is a mode of viewing reflecting a gendered code of desire (Evans & Gamman 1995, 16). John Ellis and others relate the 'gaze' to cinema and the 'glance' to television - associations which then seem to lead to these media being linked with stereotypical connotations of 'active' (and 'male') for film and 'passive' (and 'female') for television (Ellis 1982, 50; Jenks 1995, 22).

Here perhaps it should be noted that even if one's primary interest is in media texts, to confine oneself to the gaze only in relation 'textual practices' is to ignore the importance of the reciprocal gaze in the social context of cultural practices in general (rather than simply a textual/representational context, where a reciprocal gaze is, of course, technically impossible).

Direction of gaze
It is useful to note how directly a depicted person gazes out of the frame. A number of authors have explored this issue in relation to advertisements in particular.

In his study of women抯 magazine advertisements, Trevor Millum distinguished between these forms of attention:

attention directed towards other people;
attention directed to an object;
attention directed to oneself;
attention directed to the reader/camera;
attention directed into middle distance, as in a state of reverie;
direction or object of attention not discernible.
(Millum 1975, 96, 115, 139)
He also categorized relationships between those depicted thus:

reciprocal attention: the attention of those depicted is directed at each other;
divergent attention: the attention of those is directed towards different things;
object-oriented attention: those depicted are looking at the same object;
semi-reciprocal attention: the attention of one person is on the other, whose attention is elsewhere.
(ibid.)
Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins note that 'the mutuality or non-mutuality of the gaze of the two parties can... tell us who has the right and/or need to look at whom' (Lutz & Collins 1994, 373).

In his study, Millum found that:

Actors by themselves are likely to look at the reader. Women accompanied by women tend to look into middle distance, while women in mixed groups are more likely to look at people (though less so than men are). Women alone tend to regard themselves or to look into middle-distance. (Millum 1975, 138)
In a study of photographs accompanying articles in the magazine National Geographic, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins found that:

To a statistically significant degree, women look into the camera more than men, children and older people look into the camera more often than other adults, those who appear poor more than those who appear wealthy, those whose skin is very dark more than those who are bronze, those who are bronze more than those who are white, those in native dress more than those in Western garb, those without any tools more than those using machinery. Those who are culturally defined by the West as weak - women, children, people of colour, the poor, the tribal rather than the modern, those without technology - are more likely to face the camera, the more powerful to be represented looking elsewhere. (Lutz & Collins 1994, 370)
They add that 'if the gaze toward the camera reflected only a lack of familiarity with it, then one would expect rural people to look at the camera more than urban people. This is not the case. One might also expect some change over time, as cameras became more common everywhere, but there is no difference in rate of gaze when the period from 1950 to 1970 is compared with the later period' (ibid., 371-2).

In everyday interaction, a high level of gaze is widely interpreted as reflecting liking (Argyle 1975, 162). In some well-known studies Hess found that pupil dilation can also be a reflection of sexual attraction, and that photographs of female models in which the pupils had been artificially enlarged elicited unconscious pupil enlargement from male viewers (Hess & Polt 1960, Hess 1972, cited in Argyle 1975, 163). Knowledge of this has led some 'glamour' photographers to enhance their photographs in the same way and thus to increase the attractiveness of the model.

Richard Dyer (1982) describes the gaze of males in images aimed at women (pin-ups, star-portraits, drawings and paintings):

Where the female model typically averts her eyes, expressing modesty, patience and a lack of interest in anything else, the male model looks either off or up. In the case of the former, his look suggests an interest in something else that the viewer cannot see - it certainly doesn抰 suggest any interest in the viewer. Indeed, it barely acknowledges the viewer, whereas the woman抯 averted eyes do just that - they are averted from the viewer. In the cases where the model is looking up, this always suggests a spirituality...: he might be there for his face and body to be gazed at, but his mind is on higher things, and it is this upward striving that is most supposed to please... It may be, as is often said, that male pin-ups more often than not do not look at the viewer, but it is by no means the case that they never do. When they do, what is crucial is the kind of look that it is, something very often determined by the set of the mouth that accompanies it. When the female pin-up returns the viewer抯 gaze, it is usually some kind of smile, inviting. The male pin-up, even at his most benign, still stares at the viewer... Since Freud, it is common to describe such a look as 慶astrating?or 憄enetrating?.. (Dyer 1992a, 104-9)
Stereotypical notions of masculinity are strongly oriented towards the active. Dyer argues that the male model feels bound to avoid the 慺emininity?of being posed as the passive object of an active gaze.

Paul Messaris notes that historically, 慸irect views into the camera have tended to be the exception rather than the rule in some ads aimed at men? (Messaris 1997, 45). However, 慸uring the past two decades or so, there has been a notable countertrend in male-oriented advertising, featuring men whose poses contain some of the same elements - including the direct view - traditionally associated with women?(ibid.). This seems likely to indicate both 慳 more explicit concern about how men look in the eyes of women?and an acknowledgement of the existence, interests and spending power of gay consumers (ibid. 46). It may also reflect the rise of 'homosociality' - with 'straight' men becoming more accustomed to looking at images of other men (Mort 1996, Edwards 1997).

Charles Lewis reports that from the mids-1980s onwards American teenagers have chosen to be portrayed differently in their high-school yearbooks - the focus of their eyes has shifted from a straightforward, open look to a sideways glance resembling glamour poses in fashion magazines (cited in Barry 1997, 268).

The amount of gaze can also be related to status or dominance: higher status people tend to look more whilst they are talking but less when they are listening (Argyle 1975, 162). Joshua Meyrowitz notes that 'a person of high status often has the right to look at a lower status person for a long time, even stare him or her up and down, while the lower status person is expected to avert his or her eyes' (Meyrowitz 1985, 67).

In conventional narrative films, actors only very rarely gaze directly at the camera lens (though in comedies this 'rule' is sometimes broken). Paul Messaris notes a common assumption that a direct gaze at the camera lens by a depicted person may remind viewers of their position as spectators, but that where such shots are subjective point-of-view shots within a narrative this effect is negated (Messaris 1994, 151). Direct addresses to camera are much more common in the world of television than in the world of film. However, in television only certain people are conventionally allowed to address the camera directly, such as newsreaders, programme presenters and those making party political broadcasts or charitable appeals.

In studying social interaction, Michael Watson (1970) found cultural variability in the intensity of gaze. He distinguished between three forms of gaze:

sharp: focusing on the other person's eyes;
clear: focusing about the other person's head and face;
peripheral: having the other person within the field of vision, but not focusing on his head or face. (cited in Argyle 1988, 59)
Of the groups studied, Watson showed that the sharpest gaze was found amongst Arabs, followed by Latin Americans and southern Europeans; the most peripheral gaze was that of the northern Europeans, followed by Indians and Pakistanis and then Asians.

Angle of view
Directness of gaze is closely related to the issue of the camera's angle of view. In an experiment reported in The Psychology of the TV Image, Jon Baggaley found that a person talking for one minute on law and order was considered 'less reliable and expert' when addressing the camera directly than when seen in profile. He comments:

Intuition may suggest that the direct to camera shot should connote directness of approach and its attendant qualities of authority and reliability; the present data, however, suggest otherwise. If a general rule for such effects is to be argued from this evidence it should perhaps be as follows: that a full face shot suggests less expertise than a profile shot since in popular broadcasting those who address the camera directly are typically the reporters and link men, who transmit the news rather than initiate it. The expert on the other hand is more often seen either in interview or in discussion, and thus in profile. Unless the speaker may be assumed an expert on some other basis - which... the conventional TV reporter is not - the probability is that he is expert and reliable in what he says will therefore be weighed as greater if he is seen in profile than if he addresses the camera directly. (Baggaley 1980, 28-30)
Baggaley added that another reason why profile views on television led to speakers being rated as more expert might be that where an autocue is being used, the full-face angle might make this more obvious, whereas 'in the profile condition signs of autocue usage conveyed by a performer's eyes are less apparent' (ibid., 67). Even if an autocue is not being used, the 'unusual intensity' of the speaker's eye-contact with the viewer may tend to diminish the speaker's credibility (ibid., 30). One experiment suggested that 'the greater visibility of a performer's eyes may increase his perceived tension' (ibid., 68). This might not apply, however, in the case of a skilled actor who could treat the camera to 'the repertoire of temporary looks and glances that he would use in normal "unscripted" social interaction', varying eye-contact discreetly even when reading from an autocue (ibid.). Gaze can signify persuasive intent (Argyle 1975, 161). Perhaps it is relevant here that another televisual context in which direct address is often used is in advertisements, the persuasive purposes of which typically lead adult viewers to be cautious and sceptical, although in face-to-face interaction 'those with higher levels of gaze are seen as credible and trustworthy, and are indeed more persuasive' (ibid.).

Peter Warr and Christopher Knapper found that significant differences in viewers' perceptions were generated by front-view photographs compared to side-view photographs, although neither view generated more favourable or more extreme impressions (Warr & Knapper 1968, 307).

An empirical study of a commercial suggested that direct views were more conducive to identification than side views (Galan 1986, cited in Messaris 1997, 47). Following a major research review, Cappella argues that human beings probably have an inherent disposition to empathise in reaction to the facial expression of emotion by others (Capella 1993, cited in Messaris, 47), and Messaris suggests that a direct gaze is likely to enhance the likelihood of both empathy and identification.

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen have also discussed the issue of the adoption of either a frontal angle or an oblique angle in scenes which already have a linear orientation. Where there are straight lines in a scene (such as in the outside or inside edges of a building or people standing in a line) the image-producer has the option of choosing a frontal angle in which such lines are parallel to the picture plane or of shifting the horizontal angle of the depiction to a more oblique point of view. Kress and van Leeuwen argue that the horizontal angle adopted represents 憌hether or not the image-producer (and hence, willy-nilly, the viewer) is "involved" with the represented participants or not?(Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 143), with the frontal angle representing involvement and an oblique angle representing detachment. They do not, however, cite empirical studies in support of this argument. John Tagg argues that frontality is a key technique of 'documentary rhetoric' in photography, offering up what it depicts for evaluation (Tagg 1988, 189). He shows that historically the frontal portrait has been associated with the working class, and that frontality is a 'code of social inferiority' (Tagg 1988, 37).

The function of vertical angles is widely noted: high angles (looking down on a depicted person from above) are interpreted as making that person look small and insignificant, and low angles (looking up at them from below) are said to make them look powerful and superior. Kress and van Leeuwen modify this standpoint slightly, arguing that a high angle depicts a relationship in which the producer of the image and the viewer have symbolic power over the person or thing represented, whilst a low angle depicts a relationship in which the depicted person has power over the image-producer and the viewer (ibid., 146). Empirical studies have supported the idea that low angles can make those who are depicted in this way appear more powerful, provided that they are already recognised as having some authority rather than as having equal status with the viewer (Mandell & Shaw 1973; Kraft 1987; McCain, Chilberg & Wakshlag 1977; Tiemens 1970; all cited in Messaris 1997, 34-5; Messaris 1994, 158). Messaris notes that a low angle combined with a frontal view and a direct gaze at the viewer may be interpreted as overbearing, intimidating or menacing, and that when the intention is to use low angles to suggest noble or heroic qualities, side views are more common (Messaris 1997, 38).

In rear views we see the back of a depicted person. As Paul Messaris comments, 慽n our real-world interactions with others, this view from the back can imply turning away or exclusion?(Messaris 1997, 24). In travel advertisements where there are rear views of people this tends to be either in longshots of landscapes or in midshots or close-ups of semi-naked bodies in seascapes (Messaris 1997, 24-7). In the landscapes, Messaris suggests that there may be echoes of a painterly tradition in which this signifies turning away from the everyday world in order to marvel at the spectacle of nature. In the seascapes, exposed flesh clearly invites sexual curiosity. However, in both, there is an implicit invitation to 憌ish you were here?

Regarding viewpoint, Kress and and van Leeuwen suggest that we should ask ourselves, ?quot;Who could see this scene in this way?" "Where would one have to be to see this scene this way, and what sort of person would one have to be to occupy that space?"?(ibid., 149).

Michael Watson (1970) found cultural variability in how directly people face each other in social interaction. Of the groups he studied, he showed that those adopting the nearest to a frontal axis of orientation were southern Europeans, followed by Latin Americans and then Arabs; those who adopted the most oblique stance were Indians and Pakistanis, followed by northern Europeans and Asians (cited in Argyle 1988, 59).
Apparent proximity
Apparent physical distance also suggests certain relationships between a person depicted in a text and the viewer.

In relation to camerawork, there are three main kinds of shot-size: long-shots, medium shots and close-ups.

Long shot (LS): showing all or most of a fairly large subject (for example, a person) and usually much of the surroundings:

Extreme Long Shot (ELS): the camera is at its furthest distance from the subject, emphasising the background;
Medium Long Shot (MLS): in the case of a standing actor, the lower frame line cuts off feet and ankles.
Medium shots or Mid-Shots (MS): the subject or actor and the setting occupy roughly equal areas in the frame. In the case of the standing actor, the lower frame passes through the waist; there is space for hand gestures to be seen.
Medium Close Shot (MCS): The setting can still be seen; the lower frame line passes through the chest of the actor.
Close-up (CU) shots show a character's face in great detail so that it fills the screen:

Medium Close-Up (MCU): head and shoulders;

Big Close-Up (BCU): forehead to chin.

In an influential book, The Hidden Dimension (1966), Edward T Hall illustrated how physical distances between people in face-to-face interaction reflected degrees of formality. He referred to four specific ranges:

Intimate: up to 18 inches;
Personal: 18 inches to 4 feet;
Social: 4 to 12 feet;
Public: 12 to 25 feet.
In an earlier book, The Silent Language (1959), Hall had drawn attention to a marked degree of cultural variability in the formality of such modes of face-to-face interaction and to the way in which differences in cultural norms of appropriate distances could lead to misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication. His observation that Arabs stand closer together than Americans was confirmed by Michael Watson (1970), who found that amongst the groups studied, those who chose to stand closest together were Arabs, followed by Indians and Pakistanis, and then southern Europeans, whilst those who stood furthest apart were northern Europeans, followed by Asians and then Latin Americans (cited in Argyle 1988, 59).

In camerawork these 'modes of address' are reflected in shot sizes - close-ups signifying intimate or personal modes, medium shots a social mode and long shots an impersonal mode (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 130-35; see also Tuchman 1978, 116-20). Close-ups focus attention on a person's feelings or reactions. In interviews, the use of BCUs may emphasise the interviewee's tension and suggest lying or guilt. BCUs are rarely used for important public figures; MCUs are preferred, the camera providing a sense of distance. In western cultures the space within about 24 inches (60 cm) is generally felt to be private space, and BCUs may be felt to be invasive.

Charles Lewis reports that there has been a shift from the mids-1980s onwards in the way in which American teenagers have chosen to be portrayed in their high-school yearbooks - from a traditional full-face close-up to a three-quarter or full-body pose (cited in Barry 1997, 268).

Empirical studies have shown that tighter close-ups lead to increases in both attention and involvement (Lombard 1995; Reeves, Lombard & Melwani 1992; both cited in Messaris 1997, 29). Zooming in to a tight close-up can also enhance the perceived importance of a person on television (Donsbach, Brosius & Mettenklott 1993, cited in Messaris 1997, 29).

The eye of the camera
Looking at someone using a camera (or looking at images thus produced) is clearly different from looking at the same person directly. Indeed, the camera frequently enables us to look at people whom we would never otherwise see at all. In a very literal sense, the camera turns the depicted person into an object, distancing viewer and viewed.

We are all familiar with anecdotes about the fears of primal tribes that 'taking' a photograph of them may also take away their souls, but most of us have probably felt on some occasions that we don't want 'our picture' taken. In controlling the image, the photographer (albeit temporarily) has power over those in front of the lens, a power which may also be lent to viewers of the image. In this sense, the camera can represent a 'controlling gaze'.

In her classic book, On Photography Susan Sontag referred to several aspects of 'photographic seeing' which are relevant in the current context (Sontag 1979, 89):

'To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed' (ibid., 4);
'Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention... The act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging what is going on to keep on happening' (ibid., 11-12);
'The camera doesn't rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate - all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment' (ibid., 13).
The functions of photography can be seen in the context of Michel Foucault's analysis of the rise of surveillance in modern society. Photography promotes 'the normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates and judges them' (Foucault 1977, 25). Photography was used in the second half of the nineteenth century to identify prisoners, mental patients and racial types (Tagg 1988). However, looking need not necessarily be equated with controlling (Lutz & Collins 1994, 365).

Both film and television, of course, involve audio-visual 'motion pictures' - which sets them apart from still photography - but it is important to bear in mind key differences between these two media. John Ellis argues that 'gazing is the constitutive activity of cinema. Broadcast TV demands a rather different kind of looking: that of the glance' (Ellis 1982, 50). Whilst there is a danger of such viewpoints reflecting a certain 閘itism about 'art film' versus 'popular television' it is clear that the conditions of viewing in the cinema are significantly different from the conditions of viewing in the home. For instance, in the cinema one watches a narrative which is beyond one's own control, in dreamlike darkness, in the company of strangers and typically also with a close friend or two, having paid for the privilege; it is hardly surprising that in the context of the nuclear family, with companions one might not necessarily always choose as co-viewers and with channels which can easily be changed, viewing is often more casual - indeed, many televisual genres are designed for such casual viewing. Ellis argues that the conditions are such that 'the voyeuristic mode' cannot be as intense for the television viewer as for the cinema spectator (ibid., 138).

Film theorists argue that in order to 'suspend one's disbelief' and to become drawn into a conventional narrative when watching a film one must first 'identify with' the camera itself as if it were one's own eyes and thus accept the viewpoint offered (this is, for instance, an assumption made by Mulvey 1975). Whilst one has little option but to accept the locational viewpoint of the film-maker, to suggest that one is obliged to accept the preferred reading involves treating viewers as uniformly passive, making no allowance for 'negotiation' on their part. There are many modes of engagement with film, as with other media.

The film theorist Christian Metz made an analogy between the cinema screen and a mirror (Metz 1975), arguing that through identifying with the gaze of the camera, the cinema spectator re-enacts what the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan called 'the mirror stage', a stage at which looking into the mirror allows the infant to see itself for the first time as other - a significant step in ego formation. Extending this observation to still photography, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins observe that 'mirror and camera are tools of self-reflection and surveillance. Each creates a double of the self, a second figure who can be examined more closely than the original - a double that can also be alienated from the self - taken away, as a photograph can be, to another place' (Lutz & Collins 1994, 376).

In relation to film and television narrative, camera treatment is called 憇ubjective? when the viewer is treated as a participant, as when:

the camera is addressed directly; or
when the camera imitates the viewpoint or movement of a character (a 憄oint-of-view? shot); here we are shown not only what a character sees, but how he or she sees it.; or
the arms or legs of an off-frame participant are shown in the lower part of the frame as if they were those of the viewer (one parody of this technique involved putting spectacles in front of the lens!).
An empirical study has shown that a subjective version of a television commercial received higher scores and better evaluations on measures of viewers?involvement (Galan 1986, cited in Messaris 1997, 32), supporting the notion that subjective camera treatment can help to make the viewer feel more involved in the situation depicted.

The social codes of looking
Looking is socially regulated: there are social codes of looking (including taboos on certain kinds of looking). It can be instructive to reflect on what these codes are in particular cultural contexts (they tend to retreat to transparency when the cultural context is one's own). 'Children are instructed to "look at me", not to stare at strangers, and not to look at certain parts of the body... People have to look in order to be polite, but not to look at the wrong people or in the wrong place, e.g. at deformed people' (Argyle 1975, 158). In Luo in Kenya one should not look at one's mother-in-law; in Nigeria one should not look at a high-status person; amongst some South American Indians during conversation one should not look at the other person; in Japan one should look at the neck, not the face; and so on (Argyle 1983, 95).

The duration of the gaze is also culturally variable: in 'contact cultures' such as those of the Arabs, Latin Americans and southern Europeans, people look more than the British or white Americans, while black Americans look less (ibid., 158). In contact cultures too little gaze is seen as insincere, dishonest or impolite whilst in non-contact cultures too much gaze ('staring') is seen as threatening, disrespectful and insulting (Argyle 1983, 95; Argyle 1975, 165). Within the bounds of the cultural conventions, people who avoid one's gaze may be seen as nervous, tense, evasive and lacking in confidence whilst people who look a lot may tend to be seen as friendly and self-confident (Argyle 1983, 93).

Goffman (1969)... describes the sustained 'hate stare' as exhibited by bigoted white Americans to blacks. The directed eye contact violates a code of looking, where eye contact is frequently broken but returned to, and leads to depersonalization of the victim because an aggressor deliberately breaks the rules which the victim adheres to. (Danny Saunders in O'Sullivan et al. 1994, 205)
Noting Pratt's (1992) exploration of 'the colonial gaze', Schroeder comments that 'explorers gaze upon newly discovered land as colonial resources', and adds that John Urry (1990) refers to 'the tourist gaze', which reflects status differences, emphasizing that it is historically variable (Schroeder 1998, 208).

Codes of looking are particularly important in relation to gender. One woman reported to a male friend: 慜ne of the things I really envy about men is the right to look? She pointed out that in public places, 憁en could look freely at women, but women could only glance back surreptitiously?(Dyer 1992a, 265). Brain Pranger (1990) reports on his investigation of 'the gay gaze':

Gay men are able to subtly communicate their shared worldview by a special gaze that seems to be unique to them... Most gay men develop a canny ability to instantly discern from the returned look of another man whether or not he is gay. The gay gaze is not only lingering, but also a visual probing... Almost everyone I interviewed said that they could tell who was gay by the presence or absence of this look. (in Higgins 1993, 235-6)
John Berger's Ways of Seeing
 In Ways of Seeing, a highly influential book based on a BBC television series, John Berger observed that 慳ccording to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at?(Berger 1972, 45, 47). Berger argues that in European art from the Renaissance onwards women were depicted as being 慳ware of being seen by a [male] spectator?(ibid., 49),

Berger adds that at least from the seventeenth century, paintings of female nudes reflected the woman抯 submission to 憈he owner of both woman and painting?(ibid., 52). He noted that 慳lmost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it?(ibid., 56). He advanced the idea that the realistic, 慼ighly tactile?depiction of things in oil paintings and later in colour photography (in particular where they were portrayed as 憌ithin touching distance?, represented a desire to possess the things (or the lifestyle) depicted (ibid., 83ff). This also applied to women depicted in this way (ibid., 92).

Writing in 1972, Berger insisted that women were still 慸epicted in a different way to men - because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him?(ibid., 64). In 1996 Jib Fowles still felt able to insist that 慽n advertising males gaze, and females are gazed at?(Fowles 1996, 204). And Paul Messaris notes that female models in ads addressed to women 憈reat the lens as a substitute for the eye of an imaginary male onlooker,? adding that 慽t could be argued that when women look at these ads, they are actually seeing themselves as a man might see them?(Messaris 1997, 41). Such ads 慳ppear to imply a male point of view, even though the intended viewer is often a woman. So the women who look at these ads are being invited to identify both with the person being viewed and with an implicit, opposite-sex viewer?(ibid., 44).

We may note that within this dominant representational tradition the spectator is typically assumed not simply to be male but also to be heterosexual, over the age of puberty and often also white.

Laura Mulvey on film spectatorship
Whilst these notes are concerned more generally with 憈he gaze?in the mass media, the term originates in film theory and a brief discussion of its use in film theory is appropriate here.

As Jonathan Schroeder notes, 'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view' (Schroeder 1998, 208). The concept derives from a seminal article called 慥isual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema?by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. It was published in 1975 and is one of the most widely cited and anthologized (though certainly not one of the most accessible) articles in the whole of contemporary film theory.

Laura Mulvey did not undertake empirical studies of actual filmgoers, but declared her intention to make 憄olitical use?of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (in a version influenced by Jacques Lacan) in a study of cinematic spectatorship. Such psychoanalytically-inspired studies of 'spectatorship' focus on how 'subject positions' are constructed by media texts rather than investigating the viewing practices of individuals in specific social contexts. Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other people抯 bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects. In the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an 慽deal ego?seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society 憄leasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female?(Mulvey 1992, 27). This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. Conventional narrative films in the 慶lassical?Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator. 慉s the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence?(ibid., 28). Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such films objectify women in relation to 憈he controlling male gaze?(ibid., 33), presenting 憌oman as image?(or 憇pectacle? and man as 慴earer of the look?(ibid., 27). Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films 慳re obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego?(ibid., 33). It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'.

Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the film spectator: voyeuristic and fetishistic, which she presents in Freudian terms as responses to male 慶astration anxiety? Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey argues that this has has associations with sadism: 憄leasure lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness?(Mulvey 1992, 29). Fetishistic looking, in contrast, involves 憈he substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone? Fetishistic looking, she suggests, leads to overvaluation of the female image and to the cult of the female movie star. Mulvey argues that the film spectator oscillates between these two forms of looking (ibid.; see also Neale 1992, 283ff; Ellis 1982, 45ff; Macdonald 1995, 26ff; Lapsley & Westlake 1988, 77-9).

This article generated considerable controversy amongst film theorists. Many objected to the fixity of the alignment of passivity with femininity and activity with masculinity and to a failure to account for the female spectator. A key objection underlying many critical responses has been that Mulvey's argument in this paper was (or seemed to be) essentialist: that is, it tended to treat both spectatorship and maleness as homogeneous essences - as if there were only one kind of spectator (male) and one kind of masculinity (heterosexual). E Ann Kaplan (1983) asked 慖s the gaze male?? Both Kaplan and Kaja Silverman (1980) argued that the gaze could be adopted by both male and female subjects: the male is not always the controlling subject nor is the female always the passive object. We can 憆ead against the grain? Teresa de Lauretis (1984) argued that the female spectator does not simply adopt a masculine reading position but is always involved in a 慸ouble-identification?with both the passive and active subject positions. Jackie Stacey asks: 慏o women necessarily take up a feminine and men a masculine spectator position?? (Stacey 1992, 245). Indeed, are there only unitary 憁asculine?or 慺eminine?reading positions? What of gay spectators? Steve Neale (1983) identifies the gaze of mainstream cinema in the Hollywood tradition as not only male but also heterosexual. He observes a voyeuristic and fetishistic gaze directed by some male characters at other male characters within the text (Stacey notes the erotic exchange of looks between women within certain texts). A useful account of 'queer viewing' is given by Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman (1995). Neale argues that 慽n a heterosexual and patriarchal society the male body cannot be marked explictly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated, its erotic component repressed?(Neale 1992, 281). Both Neale and Richard Dyer (1982) also challenged the idea that the male is never sexually objectified in mainstream cinema and argued that the male is not always the looker in control of the gaze. It is widely noted that since the 1980s there has been an increasing display and sexualisation of the male body in mainstream cinema and television and in advertising (Moore 1987, Evans & Gamman 1995, Mort 1996, Edwards 1997).

Gender is not the only important factor in determining what Jane Gaines calls 'looking relations' - race and class are also key factors (Lutz & Collins 1994, 365; Gaines 1988; de Lauretis 1987; Tagg 1988; Traube 1992). Ethnicity was found to be a key factor in differentiating amongst different groups of women viewers in a study of Women Viewing Violence (Schlesinger et al. 1992). Michel Foucault, who linked knowledge with power, related the 'inspecting gaze' to power rather than to gender in his discussion of surveillance (Foucault 1977).
Related issues
As already noted in relation to Laura Mulvey抯 theories, the issue of the gaze is closely related to that of identification. The viewer may subjectively identify with the camera抯 point of view, with that of a person which it depicts or with both (Burgin 1982c, 189). Whilst it is often observed that men tend to identify with men and women with women in film and television narratives, John Ellis (1982) argues that this is a gross oversimplification. We may, for instance, experience shifting 'identifications' with different characters, and these may not necessarily be characters of the same sex (or sexual orientation) as ourselves. Indeed, we may 'identify' with feelings or experiences rather than characters as such. And such identifications may sometimes even be contradictory.

Erving Goffman抯 slim volume Gender Advertisements (1979) concerned the depictions of male and female figures in magazine advertisements. Although it was unsystematic and only some of of his observations have been supported in subsequent empirical studies, it is widely celebrated as a classic of visual sociology and deserves at least a brief mention in the current context. Probably the most relevant of his observations in the context of these notes was that 憁en tend to be located higher than women?in these ads, symbolically reflecting the routine subordination of women to men in society (Goffman 1979, 43). The extensive selection from advertisements of the period also makes the book a useful resource for those interested in the phenomenon of the gaze, as also in the case of Judith Williamson抯 equally celebrated work, Decoding Advertisements (Williamson 1978).

Another concept which may be useful in investigating 'the gaze' is 'face-ism'. The term 慺ace-ism?was coined to describe a tendency for photographs and drawings to emphasize the faces of men and the bodies of women. An analysis of magazine and newspaper photos found that 65% of a man's picture was devoted to his face, compared to 45% of a woman's (Archer, Iritani, Kimes & Barrios 1983).

Categorizing facial expressions
Rather than 憆einventing the wheel?it is useful for those undertaking their own research to refer to existing categories where appropriate, although clearly the system adopted needs to relate to the specific purposes of the study, and the lists offered here are of course time-bound and domain-specific. Indeed, the dates and genres of these studies make their frameworks and their findings potentially fruitful for comparisons with current material in the same genre or in other genres.

Marjorie Ferguson (1980) identified four types of facial expression in the cover photos of British women抯 magazines:

Chocolate Box: half or full-smile, lips together or slightly parted, teeth barely visible, full or three-quarter face to camera. Projected mood: blandly pleasing, warm bath warmth, where uniformity of features in their smooth perfection is devoid of uniqueness or of individuality.
Invitational: emphasis on the eyes, mouth shut or with only a hint of a smile, head to one side or looking back to camera. Projected mood: suggestive of mischief or mystery, the hint of contact potential rather than sexual promise, the cover equivalent of advertising抯 soft sell.
Super-smiler: full face, wide open toothy smile, head thrust forward or chin thrown back, hair often wind-blown. Projected mood: aggressive, 憀ook-at-me?demanding, the hard sell, 慴ig come-on?approach.
Romantic or Sexual: a fourth and more general classification devised to include male and female 憈wo-somes? or the dreamy, heavy-lidded, unsmiling big-heads, or the overtly sensual or sexual. Projected moods: possible 慳vailable?and definitely 慳vailable?
In a study of advertisements in women抯 magazines, Trevor Millum offers these categories of female expressions:

Soft/introverted: eyes often shut or half-closed, the mouth slightly open/pouting, rarely smiling; an inward-looking trance-like reverie, remov

Practices of Seeing:
Visual Analysis: An Ethnomethodological Approach
Charles Goodwin
Applied Linguistics
UCLA
cgoodwin@humnet.ucla.edu
Pp. 157-182 in
Handbook of Visual Analysis
edited by Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt
London: Sage Publications
2000
© Charles Goodwin
Practices of Seeing
Visual Analysis: An Ethnomethodological Approach
Charles Goodwin
A primordial site for the analysis of human language, cognition and action
consists of a situation in which multiple participants are attempting to carry out
courses of action together while attending to each other, the larger activities that
their current actions are embedded within, and relevant phenomena in their
surround. Vision can be central to this process.1. The visible bodies of
participants provide systematic, changing displays about relevant action and
orientation. Seeable structure in the environment can not only constitute a locus
for shared visual attention, but can also contribute crucial semiotic resources for
the organization of current action (consider for example the use of graphs and
charts in a scientific discussion). For the past thirty years both Conversation
Analysis and Ethnomethodology have provided extensive analysis of how
human vision is socially organized. Both fields investigate the practices that
participants use to build and shape in concert with each other the structured
events that constitute the lifeworld of a community of actors. Phenomena
investigated in which vision plays a central role range from sequences of talk, to
medical and legal encounters, to scientific knowledge.
The approach taken by both ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to
the study of visual phenomena is quite distinctive. At least since Saussure
proposed studying langue as an analytically distinct subfield of a more
encompassing science of signs, different kinds of semiotic phenomena (language,
visual signs, etc.) have typically been analyzed in isolation from each other.
However in the work to be described here neither vision, nor the images or other
phenomena that participants look at, are treated as coherent, self-contained
1 Vision is not, however, essential as both the competence of the blind and
telephone conversations demonstrate. Below it will be argued that situated
action is accomplished through the juxtaposition of multiple semiotic fields,
only some of which make vision relevant.
Final Printed page

numbers in margin.
p. 157
2
domains that can be subjected to analysis in their own terms. Instead it quickly
becomes apparent that visual phenomena can only be investigated by taking into
account a diverse set of semiotic resources and meaning-making practices that
participants deploy to build the social worlds that they inhabit and constitute
through ongoing processes of action. Many of these, such as structure provided
by current talk, are not in any sense visual, but the visible phenomena that the
participants are attending to cannot be properly analyzed without them. The
focus of analysis is not thus not representations or vision per se, but instead the
part played by visual phenomena in the production of meaningful action.
Both the methodology and the forms of analysis used in this approach can
best be demonstrated through specific examples.
Gaze between Speakers and Hearers
In formulating the distinction between competence and performance Chomsky
(1965: 3-4) argued that actual speech is so full of performance errors, such as
sentence fragments, restarts and pauses, that both linguists and parties faced
with the task of acquiring a language should ignore it. Investigating a corpus of
conversation recorded on video Goodwin (1980a, 1981, Chapter 2) indeed found
precisely the “false starts” and “changes of plan in mid-course” that Chomsky
describes. In the following instead of producing an unbroken grammatical
sentence the speaker says:2
2 Talk is transcribed using the system developed by Gail Jefferson (see Sacks,
Schegloff and Jefferson Sacks, et al. 1974: 731-733). Talk receiving some form
of emphasis is marked with u nderlining or bold italics. Punctuation is used to
transcribe intonation: A period indicates falling pitch, a question mark rising
pitch, and a comma a falling contour, as would be found for example after a
non-terminal item in a list. A colon indicates lengthening of the current sound.
A dash marks the sudden cut-off of the current sound (in English it is
frequently realized as glottal stop). Comments (e.g., descriptions of relevant
nonvocal behavior) are printed in italics within double parentheses. Numbers
within single parentheses mark silences in seconds and tenths of a second. A
degree sign (°) indicates that the talk that follows is being spoken with low
p. 158
3
Cathy: En a couple of girls- O ne other girl from there,
However, when the video is examined it is found that the restart occurs at a
specific place: precisely at the point where the speaker brings her gaze to her
addressee, and finds that her addressee is looking elsewhere:
Pam: En a couple of girls- One other girl from the:re,
Speaker Brings
Gaze to
Recipient
Restart
Hearer Looking
Ann: Away
Hearer Starts
Moving Gaze
to Speaker
Gaze Arrives
Moreover, the restart acts as a request for the Hearer’s gaze. Thus immediately
after the restart the hearer starts to move her gaze to the speaker.
Paradoxically, if the speaker had not produced a restart at this point she
could have said something that would appear to be an unbroken grammatical
unit if one examined only the stream of speech (e.g., “En a couple of girls from
there …”), but which would in fact be interactively a sentence fragment since her
addressee attended to only part of it.
The identities of speaker and hearer are the most generic participant
categories relevant to the production of a strip of talk. The phenomena examined
here (which occur pervasively in conversation) provide evidence that the work of
volume. Left brackets connecting talk by different speakers mark the point
where overlap begins.
p. 159
4
being a hearer in face-to-face interaction requires situated use of the body, and
gaze in particular, as a way of visibly displaying to others the focus of one’s
orientation. Moreover speakers not only use their own gaze to see relevant action
in the body of a silent hearer, but actively change the structure of their emerging
talk in terms of what they see.
What relevance do processes such as these have to the other issue raised by
Chomsky (1965 :3), that of determining “from the data of performance the
underlying system of rules mastered by the speaker-hearer”? Many repairs
involve the repetition, with some significant change, of something said elsewhere
in the utterance:
We wen t- I went to
If he could- If you could
Such repetition has the effect of delineating the boundaries and structure of
many different units in the stream of speech. Thus, by analyzing what is the
same and what is different in these examples one is able to discover: First, where
the stream of speech can be divided into significant subunits; second, that
alternatives are possible in a particular slot; third, what some of these
alternatives are (here different pronouns); and fourth, that these alternatives
contrast with each other in some significant fashion, or else the repair would not
be warranted. Repairs in other examples not only delineate basic units in the
stream of speech (noun phrases for example), but also demonstrate the different
forms such units can take, and the types of operations that can be performed
upon them (see Goodwin 1981 :170-173). Repairs further require that a listener
learn to recognize that not all of the sequences within the stream of speech are
possible sequences within the language, e.g., that “I” does not follow “to” in “We
went t- I went to …”. In order to deal with such a repair a hearer is thus required
to make one of the most basic distinctions posed for anyone attempting to
decipher the structure of a language: to differentiate what are and are not
possible sequences in the language, that is between grammatical and
ungrammatical structures. The fact that this task is posed may be crucial to any
learning process. If the party attempting to learn the language did not have to
5
deal with ungrammatical possibilities, if for example she was exposed to only
well-formed sentences, she might not have the data necessary to determine the
boundaries, or even the structure of the system. Chomsky’s argument that the
repairs found in natural speech so flaw it that a child is faced with data of very
“degenerate quality” does not appear warranted. Rather it might be argued that
if a child grew up in an ideal world where she heard only well-formed sentences
she would not learn to produce sentences herself because she would lack the
analysis of their structure provided by events such as repair. Crucial to this
process is the way in which visual phenomena, such as dispreferred gaze states
can both lead to repair, and demonstrate that the participants are in fact
attending in fine detail to what might appear to be quite ephemeral structure in
the stream of speech.
What has just been described provides one example of the methodologies and
forms of analysis used to investigate visual phenomena within Conversation
Analysis. Several observations can be made. First, the focus of analysis is not
visual events in isolation, but instead the systematic practices used by
participants in interaction to achieve courses of collaborative action with each
other — in the present case the interactive construction of turns at talk, and the
utterances that emerge with those turns. Visual events, such as gaze, play a
central role in this process but their sense and relevance is established through
their embeddedness in other meaning making tasks and practices, such as the
production of a strip of talk that is in fact heard and attended to by its addressee.
This links vision to a host of other phenomena including language and the visible
body as an unfolding locus for the display of meaning and action. Second, what
the analyst seeks to do is not to provide his or her own gloss on how visual
phenomena might be meaningful, but instead to demonstrate how the
participants themselves not only actively orient to particular kinds of visual
events (such as states of gaze), but use them as a constitutive feature of the
activities they are engaged in (for example by modifying their talk in terms of
what they demonstrably see). Third, in addition to the spatial dimension that is
naturally associated with vision, these processes also have an intrinsic temporal
dimension as changes in visual events are marked by, and lead to, ongoing
changes in the organization of emerging action. If one had only a static snapshot,
p. 160
6
or measured only a single structural possibility, such as mutual gaze instead of
looking at the temporally unfolding interplay of different combinations of
participant gaze, the type of analysis being pursued here would be impossible.
Fourth, such analysis requires data of a particular type, specifically a record that
maintains as much information as possible about the setting, embodied displays
and spatial organization of all relevant participants, their talk, and how events
change through time. In practice no record is completely adequate. Every camera
position excludes other views of what is happening. The choice of where to place
the camera is but the first in a long series of crucial analytical decisions. Despite
these limitations a video or film record does constitute a relevant data source,
something that can be worked with in an imperfect world.
Fifth, crucial problems of transcription are posed. The task of translating the
situated, embodied practices used by participants in interaction to organize
phenomena relevant to vision poses enormous theoretical and methodological
problems. Our ability to transcribe talk is built upon a process of analyzing
relevant structure in the stream of speech, and marking those distinctions with
written symbols, that extends back thousands of years, and is still being modified
today (for example the system developed by Gail Jefferson (Sacks, Schegloff and
Jefferson 1974: 731-733) for transcribing the texture of talk-in-interaction,
including phenomena, such as momentary restarts and sound stretches, that are
crucial for the analysis being reported here). When it comes to the transcription
of visual phenomena we are at the very beginning of such a process. The arrows
and other symbols I’ve used to mark gaze on a transcript (see Goodwin 1981)
capture only a small part of a larger complex constituted by bodies interacting
together in a relevant setting. The decision to describe gaze in terms of the
speaker-hearer framework is itself a major analytic one, and by no means simple,
neutral description. Moreover a gazing head is embedded within a larger
postural configuration, and indeed different parts of the body can
simultaneously display orientation to different participants or regions (see
Kendon 1990b, Schegloff 1998), creating participation frameworks of
considerable complexity. Thus on occasion a transcriber wants some way of
indicating on the printed page posture and alignment. In addition, not only the
bodies of the participants, but also phenomena in their surround, can be crucial
p. 161
7
to the organization of their action. To try to make the phenomena I’m analyzing
independently accessible to the reader so that she or he can evaluate my analysis,
I’ve experimented with using transcription symbols, frame grabs, diagrams, and
movies embedded in electronic versions of papers. Multiple issues are involved
and no method is entirely successful. On the one hand the analyst needs
materials that maintain as much of the original structure of the events being
analyzed as possible, and which can be easily and repetitively replayed. On the
other hand, just as a raw tape recording does not display the analysis of
segmental structure in the stream of speech provided by transcription with a
phonetic or alphabetic writing system, in itself a video, even one that can be
embedded within a paper, does not provide an analysis of how visible events are
being parsed by participants. The complexity of the phenomena involved
requires multiple methods for rendering relevant distinctions (e.g., accurate
transcription of speech, gaze notation, frame grabs, diagrams, etc., see also Ochs
1979). Moreover, like the two-faced Roman god Janus, any transcription system
must attend simultaneously to two separate fields, looking in one direction at
how to accurately recover through a systematic notation the endogenous
structure of the events being investigated, while simultaneously keeping another
eye on the addressee/reader of the analysis by attempting to present relevant
descriptions as clearly and vividly as possible. In many cases different stages of
analysis and presentation will require multiple transcriptions. There is a
recursive interplay between analysis and methods of description.
Work in Conversation Analysis has provided extensive study of how the gaze
of participants toward each other is consequential for the organization of action
within talk-in-interaction. Phenomena investigated include the way in which
speakers change the structure of an emerging utterance, and the sentence being
constructed within it, as gaze is moved from one type of recipient to another, so
that the utterance maintains its appropriateness for its addressee of the moment
(Goodwin 1979, 1981); how speakers modify descriptions in terms of their
hearer’s visible assessment of what is being said (M.H. Goodwin 1980b); how
genres such as stories are constructed not by a speaker alone, but instead
through the differentiated visible displays of a range of structurally different
kinds of recipients (speaker, primary addressee, principal character, etc. See
8
Goodwin 1984); the organization of gaze and co-participation in medical
encounters (Heath 1986, Robinson 1998); the interactive organization of
assessments (Goodwin and Goodwin 1987), gesture (Goodwin in press, Streeck
1993, 1994), the use of gaze in activities such as word searches (M.H. Goodwin
and C. Goodwin 1986), etc. Though not strictly lodged within Conversation
Analysis the work of Kendon (1990a. 1994, 1997) on both the interactive
organization of bodies as they frame states of talk, and on gesture, is central to
the study of visible behavior in interaction. Haviland (1993) provides important
analysis of the interactive organization of gesture within narration (for extensive
analysis of gesture from a psychological perspective see McNeill 1992).
Scientific Images
The visible, gazing body, and the orientation of participants toward each
other as they co-produce states of talk is central to the work in
ConversationalAnalysis just examined. By way of contrast much work within
Ethnomethodology has focused not on the bodies of actors, but instead on the
images, diagrams, graphs and other visual practices used by scientists to
construct the crucial visual working environments of their disciplines. As noted
by Lynch and Woolgar (1990:5):
Manifestly, what scientists laboriously piece together, pick up in
their hands, measure, show to one another, argue about, and
circulate to others in their communities are not “natural objects”
independent of cultural processes and literary forms. They are
extracts, “tissue cultures,” and residues impressed within graphic
matrices; ordered, shaped, and filtered samples; carefully aligned
photographic traces and chart recordings; and verbal accounts.
These are the proximal “things" taken into the laboratory and
circulated in print and they are a rich repository of “social”
actions.”
Despite important differences in subject matter and methodology both fields
emphasize the importance of focusing not on representations or other visual
phenomena as self-contained entities in their own right, but instead on how they
are constructed, attended to, and used by participants as components of the
p. 162
9
endogenous activities that make up the lifeworld of a setting. Thus, in
introducing their important volume on Representation in Scientific Practice Lynch
and Woolgar (1990: 11) define their inquiry as follows:
Instead of asking “what do we mean, in various contexts, by
‘representation’?” the studies begin by asking, “What do the participants,
in this case, treat as representation?”
Note that what must be investigated is specified both in terms of the orientation
of the participants, and with respect to the features of the relevant local setting
(e.g., “in this case”). This leads to a distinctive ethnomethodological perspective
on reflexivity:
“Reflexivity” in this usage means, not self-referential nor reflective
awareness of representational practice, but the inseparability of a “theory”
of representation from the heterogeneous social contexts in which
representations are composed and used” (Lynch and Woolgar 1990 12).
In a classic article Lynch (1990 :153-154) formulates the task of analyzing
scientific representations as that of describing the publicly visible “externatized
retina” that is the site for the practices implicated in the social constitution of the
objects that are the focus of scientific work:
This study is based on the premise that visual displays are more
than a simple matter of supplying pictorial illustrations for
scientific texts. They are essential to how scientific objects and
orderly relationships are revealed and made analyzable. To
appreciate this, we first need to wrest the idea of representation from
an individualistic cognitive foundation, and to replace a
preoccupation with images on the retina (or alternatively ‘mental
images’ or ‘pictorial ideas’) with a focus on the ‘externalized retina’
of the graphic and instrumental fields upon which the scientific
image is impressed and circulated.
Using as data images from scientific journal articles and books Lynch describes
two families of practices used to constitute the visible scientific object: “selection”
and “mathematization.” Selection, illustrated through double images in which a
photograph and a diagram of entities visible in the photograph are presented
side by side, is described as a host of practices that iteratively transform one
p. 163
10
image of an entity into another (e.g. the photograph to the diagram) while
simultaneously structuring and shaping what it is that is being represented.
Crucial to this process is that fact that different selective/shaping practices,
including Filtering, Uniforming, Upgrading and Defining can be repetitively
applied creating not just a single image, but a linked, directional chain of
representations Indeed much of the work of actually doing science consists in
building and shaping what Latour (1986) (see also Latour and Woolgar 1979)
have called inscriptions in this fashion. “Mathematization” refers not simply to
the use of numbers, but instead to the host of practices used to transform
recalcitrant events into mathematically tractable visual and graphic displays e.g.,
graphs, charts and diagrams. Thus an image showing a map of lizard territories
is assembled through, among other operations, driving stakes into the lizards’
environment to create a grid for measurement (and thus injecting a scientifically
relevant Cartesian space into the very habitat being studied), repetitively
capturing lizards, distinguishing them from each other by cutting off a different
pattern of toes on each lizard, recording each capture on a paper map of the
staked out territory, and finally drawing lines around collections of points to
create the map. As noted by Lynch (1990: 171) the product of these practices, e.g.,
the published map, “is a hybrid object that is demonstrably mathematical,
natural and literary.” Note how in all of these cases the focus of analysis is on the
contextually based practices of the participants who are assembling and using
these images to accomplish the work that defines their profession.
Though emerging from psychological anthropology, rather than
ethnomethdology, Hutchins’ (1995) ground breaking study of the cognitive
practices required to navigate a ship outlines a major perspective for the analysis
of both images and seeing as forms of work-relevant practice. Hutchins
demonstrates how the practices required to navigate a ship are not situated
within the mental life of a single individual, but are instead embedded within a
distributed system that encompasses visual tools such as maps and instruments
for juxtaposing a landmark and compass bearing within the same visual field,
and actors in structurally different positions who use alternative tools and, in
part because of this, perform different kinds of cognitive operations, many of
11
which have a strong visual component (e.g., locating landmarks, plotting
positions on a map, etc.).
Images in Interaction
All of the work discussed so far takes as its point of departure for the
investigation of visual phenomena the task of describing and analyzing the
practices used by participants to construct the actions and events that make up
their lifeworld. Rather than standing alone as a self-contained analytic domain,
visual phenomena are constituted and made meaningful through the way in
which they are embedded within this larger set of practices. However, within
this common focus, two quite different orders of visual practice have been
examined. Research in science studies has investigated the images produced by
scientists, and the way in which they visually and mathematically structure the
world that is the focus on their inquiry, without however looking in much detail
at how scientists attend to each other as living, meaningful bodies, or structure
what they are seeing through the organization of talk-in-interaction. By way of
contrast studies of the interactive organization of vision in conversation looked
in considerable detail at how participants treat the visual displays of each
other’s bodies as consequential, and how this is relevant to the moment-bymoment
production of talk, but did not focus much analysis on images in the
environment. Clearly all of the phenomena noted — the visible body,
participation, gesture, the details of talk and language use, visual structure in the
surround, images, maps and other representational practices, the public
organization of visual practice within the worklife of a profession, etc. — are
relevant. The question arises as to whether it is possible to analyze such disparate
phenomena within a coherent analytic framework.
Before turning to studies that have probed such questions several issues must
be noted. First, it is clearly not the case that the only acceptable analysis is one
that includes this full range of all possible visual phenomena. Both participants
and the structures that provide organization for action and events use visible
phenomena selectively. Parties speaking over the telephone can see neither either
other’s bodies nor events in a common surround. A scientific journal can be read
in the absence of the parties who constructed its text and diagrams. More
p. 164
12
interestingly within face-to-face interaction participants can continuously shift
between actions that invoke, and perhaps require, gaze toward specific events in
the surround, and those make relevant gaze toward no more than each other’s
bodies, and even in this more limited case there may be a real issue as to whether
it is relevant to attend to everything that a body does, e.g., some gestures made
by a speaker may not require gaze toward them from an addressee. There is thus
an essential contingency, not only for the analyst but more crucially for the
participants themselves, as to what subset of possible visual events are in fact
relevant to the organization of the actions of the moment. Moreover, this means
that in addition to investigating how different kinds of visible phenomena are
organized, the analyst must also take into account how participants show each
other what kinds of events they are expected to take into account at a particular
moment, for example to indicate that a participant, gesture, or entity in the
surround should be gazed at. There is thus not only communication through
vision, but also ongoing communication about relevant vision (Goodwin 1981,
1986; in preparation, Streeck 1988).
Second visual events are quite heterogeneous, not only in what they make
visible, but more crucially in their structure. Consider for example the issue of
temporality. Both gestures and the displays of postural orientation used to build
participation frameworks are performed by the body within interaction.
However, while gestures, like the bits of talk they accompany, are typically brief
(e.g. they frequently fall within the scope of a single utterance) and display
semantic content relevant to the topic of the moment, participation displays
frame extended strips of talk and typically provide information about the
participants’ orientation rather than the specifics of what is being discussed.
Bodily displays with one kind of temporal duration (and information content)
are thus embedded within another class of visual displays being made by the
body which have a quite different structure.
Third, the structure of visual signs, including their possibilities for
propagation through space and time, can be intimately tied to the medium used
to construct them. A major theme of Shakespeare’s sonnets focuses on the
contrast between the temporally constrained human body, condemned to
inevitable decay, and the (limited) possibilities for transcending such corruption
p. 165
13
provided by language inscribed on the printed page which can remain fresh and
alive long after its author and subject have passed into dust. This contrast
between the temporal possibilities provided by alternative media (e.g., the body
and documents) constitutes an ongoing resource for participants in vernacular
settings as they build, through interaction with each other, the events that make
up their lifeworld. In addition to the displays made by a fleeting gesture or local
participation framework, participants also have access to images and documents
which can encompass multiple interactions and quite diverse settings. This arises
in part from the specific media used to constitute the signs they contain. Rather
than being lodged within an ever changing human body, such documents
constitute what Latour (1987: 223) has called immutable mobiles, portable
material objects that can carry stable inscriptions of various types from place to
place and through time.
However, despite the way in which crucial aspects of the structure of images
and documents remain constant in different environments, they are not selfcontained
visual artifacts that can be analyzed in isolation from the processes of
interaction and work practices through which they are made relevant and
meaningful. The same image or document can be construed in quite different
ways in alternative settings. For example, a schedule listing all arriving and
departing flights was a major tool for almost all workgroups at the airport
studied by the Xerox PARC workplace project (Brun-Cottan et al. 1991, Goodwin
and Goodwin 1996, Suchman 1992), and indeed it linked diverse workers
throughout North America into a common web of activity. However while
baggage loaders carefully structured their work to anticipate arriving flights, so
that planes could be speedily unloaded, these same arrival times were almost
ignored by gate agents looking at the same schedule, but concerned with the
departure of passengers. Each work group highlighted the common document in
ways relevant to the specific work tasks it faced. Similarly, on the oceanographic
ship reported in Goodwin (1995) a map showing where samples would be taken
in the Atlantic at the mouth of the Amazon, was a major document at all stages
of the research project. Before the ship sailed the places where samples could be
taken was the focus of intense political debate between different groups of
scientists and the Brazilian and American governments; after the project was
14
completed the map provided an infrastructure for graphic displays that could be
used in published journal articles to show what the scientists had found about
how the waters of the Amazon and the Atlantic interacted with each other, i.e., a
way of making visible relevant scientific phenomena; during the voyage itself the
map not only provided a common framework for the quite different work of
various teams of scientists and the crew navigating the ship, but could also be
looked at by lab technicians not able to go to bed for days at a time because of the
map’s incessant sampling demands, to locate places where stations were far
apart and rest was possible. In brief, though the material form of images and
documents gives them an extended temporal scope, and the ability to travel from
setting to setting, they cannot be analyzed as self-contained fields of visually
organized meaning, but instead stand in a reflexive relationship to the settings
and processes of embodied human interaction through which they are
constituted as meaningful entities. To explicate such events analysis must deal
simultaneously with the quite different structure and temporal organization of
both local embodied practice and enduring graphic displays.
Finally, the visual (and other properties) of settings structure environments
that shape, on an historical time scale, the activities systematically performed
within those settings. A very simple example is provided by the bridge of the
oceanographic ship which not only had a window facing forward so the
helmsman could steer the ship and watch for trouble, but also a window facing
backwards. This was used by a winch operator who had the task of lifting heavy
instrument packages in and out of the sea. Though being used here to do science,
this arrangement is in fact a systematic solution to a repetitive problem faced by
sailors, such as fishermen using nets, who have to maneuver heavy objects while
a sea. Solutions found to these tasks, such as the rear facing window with the
visual access it provides (as well as the forward window facilitating navigation),
are built into the tools that constitute the work environments used by subsequent
actors faced with similar tasks. See Hutchins (1995) for illuminating analysis of
this process, including tools that visually structure complex mathematical
calculations, as well as maps. Both work environments and many of the tools
used within them (computer displays, etc.) structure in quite specific ways the
embodied visual practices of those who inhabit such settings.
p. 166

15
In an attempt to come to terms with such issues Goodwin (in press) has
proposed that images in interaction are lodged within endogenous activity
systems constituted through the ongoing, changing deployment of multiple
semiotic fields which mutually elaborate each other. The term semiotic field is
intended to focus on signs-in-their-media, i.e., the way in which what is typically
been attended to are sign phenomena of various types (gestures, maps, displays
of bodily orientation, etc.) which have variable structural properties that arise in
part from the different kinds of materials used to make them visible (e.g., the
body, talk, documents, etc.). Bringing signs lodged within different fields into a
relationship of mutual elaboration produces locally relevant meaning and action
that could not be accomplished by one sign system alone. Consider for example a
place on a map indicated by a pointing finger which is being construed in a
specific fashion by the accompanying talk. Neither the map as a whole, that is a
self-sufficient representation, nor the pointing finger in isolation from a) its
target (the spot on the map) and b) the construal being provided by the talk, nor
the talk alone would be sufficient to constitute the action made visible by the
conjoined use of the three semiotic fields, each of which provides resources for
specifying how to relevantly see and understand the others (see the brief
discussion of the Rodney King data below for a specific example; see Goodwin
in preparation for more detailed analysis of pointing). The particular subset of
semiotic fields available in a setting that participants orient to as relevant to the
construction of the actions of the moment constitutes a contextual configuration.
As interaction unfolds contextual configurations can change as new fields are
added to, or dropped from, the specific mix being used to constitute the events of
the moment. Thus, as contextual configurations change there is both unfolding
public semiotic structure and contingency(and indeed in some circumstances
actions can misfire when addressees fail to take into account a relevant semiotic
field, such as the sequential organization provided by a prior unheard utterance
– see Goodwin in preparation for an example).
Professional Vision
Work settings provide one environment in which the interplay between situated,
embodied interaction, and the use of visual images of different types, can be
p. 167
16
systematically investigated. In many work settings participants face the task of
classifying visual phenomena in a way that is relevant to the work they are
charged with performing. Frequently they must also construct different kinds of
representations of visual structure in the environment that is the focus of their
professional scrutiny. We will now briefly examine how such vision is socially
organized in two tasks faced by archaeologists: 1) color classification and 2) Map
making, and then look at how such professional vision was both constructed and
contested in the trial of four policemen charged with beating an African
American motorist, Mr. Rodney King. The key evidence at the trial was a
videotape of the beating.
Color Classification as Historically Structured Professional Practice
As part of the work involved in excavating a site, archaeologists make maps
showing relevant structure in the layers of dirt they uncover. In addition to
artifacts, such as stone tools, archaeologists are also interested in features, such the
remains of an old hearth or the outlines of the posts that held up a building. Such
features are typically visible as color differences in the dirt being examined (e.g.,
the remains of a cooking fire will be blacker than the surrounding soil, and the
holes used for posts will also have a different color from the soil around them).
Field archaeologists thus face the task of systematically classifying the color of
the dirt they are excavating. The methods they use to accomplish this task
constitute a form of professional visual practice. As demonstrated by the
discussion of Lynch’s analysis of scientific representation, and the brief
description of the oceanographers, crucial work in many different occupations
takes the form of classifying and constructing visual phenomena in ways that
help shape the objects of knowledge that are the focus of the work of a profession
(e.g., architects, sailors plotting courses on charts, air traffic controllers,
professors making graphs and overheads for talks and classes, etc.). Such
professional vision constitutes a perspicuous site for systematic study of how
different kinds of phenomena intersect to organize a community’s practices of
seeing.
Goodwin (1996, in press) describes how archaeologists code the color of the
dirt they are excavating through use of a Munsell chart. The following shows two
17
archaeologists performing this task, the Munsell page that they are using, and
the coding form where they will record their classification:
17 Pam: En this one. ((Points at color patch))
18 (0.4) ((Jeff moves trowel))
19 Jeff: nuhhh?
20 (1.8)
21 Pam: Or that one? ((Points at color patch))
Within this scene are a number of different kinds of phenomena relevant to
the organization of visual practice, including tools that structure the process of
seeing and classification, and documents that organize cognition and interaction
in the current setting while linking these processes to larger activities and other
settings. These archaeologists are intently examining the color of a tiny sample of
dirt because they have been given a coding form to fill out. That form ties their
work at this site to a range of other settings, such as the offices and lab of the
senior investigator, where the form being filled in here will eventually become
part of the permanent record of the excavation, and a component of subsequent
analysis. The multivocality of this form, the way in which it displays on a single
p. 168
18
surface the actions of multiple actors in structurally different positions, is shown
visually in vivid fashion by the contrast between the printed coding categories,
and the hand written entries of the field workers.
The use of a coding form such as this to organize the perception of nature,
events, or people within the discourse of a profession carries with it an array of
perceptual and cognitive operations that have far reaching impact. Coding
schemes distributed on forms allow a senior investigator to inscribe his or her
perceptual distinctions into the work practices of the technicians who code the
data. By using such a system a worker views the world from the perspective it
establishes. Of all the possible ways that the earth could be looked at, the
perceptual work of field workers using this form is focused on determining the
exact color of a minute sample of dirt. They engage in active cognitive work, but
the parameters of that work have been established by the classification system
that is organizing their perception. In so far as the coding scheme establishes an
orientation toward the world, a work-relevant way of seeing, it constitutes a
structure of intentionality whose proper locus is not the isolated, Cartesian mind,
but a much larger organizational system, one that is characteristically mediated
through mundane bureaucratic documents such as this form.
Rather than standing alone as self-explicating textual objects, forms are
embedded within webs of socially organized, situated practices. In order to make
an entry in the slot provided for color an archaeologist must make use of another
tool, the set of standard color samples provided by a Munsell chart. This chart
incorporates into a portable physical object the results of a long history of
scientific investigation of the properties of color.
The Munsell chart being used by the archaeologists contains not just one, but
three different kinds of sign systems for describing each point in the color space
it provides: 1) a set of carefully controlled color samples arranged in a grid to
demonstrate the changes that result from systematic variation of the variables of
Hue , Chroma and Value used to define each color (each page displays an
ordered set of Value and Chroma variables for a single hue); 2) numeric
coordinates for each row and column, the intersection of what specifies each
square as a pair of numbers (e.g., 4/6 on the 10YR Hue page); and 3) standard
color names such as “dark yellowish brown” (these names are on the left facing
p. 169
19
page which is not reproduced here). Moreover these systems are not precisely
equivalent to each other. For example several color squares can fall within the
scope of a single name.
Why does the Munsell page contain multiple, overlapping representation of
what is apparently the same visual entity (e.g., a particular choice within a larger
set of color categories)? The answer seems to like in the way that each
representation as a semiotic field with its own distinctive properties makes
possible alternative operations and actions, and thus fits into different kinds of
activities. Both the names and numbered grid coordinates can be written, and
thus easily transported from the actual excavation to the other work sites, such as
laboratories and journals, that constitute archaeology as a profession. The
numbers provide the most precise description, and do not require translation
from language to language. However locating the color indexed by the
coordinates requires that the classification be read with a Munsell book at hand.
By way of contrast the color names can be grasped in a way that is adequate for
most practical purposes by any competent speaker of the language used to write
the report. The outcome of the activity of color classification initiated by the
empty square on the coding form is thus a set of portable linguistic objects that
can easily be incorporated into the unfolding chains of inscription that lead step
by step from the dirt at the site to reports in the archaeological literature.
However, as arbitrary linguistic signs produced in a medium that does not
actually make visible color, neither the color names nor the numbers, allow direct
visual comparison between a sample of dirt and a reference color. This is
precisely what the color patches and viewing holes make possible. In brief, rather
than simply specifying unique points in a larger color space, the Munsell chart is
used in multiple overlapping activities (comparing a reference color and a patch
of dirt as part of the work of classification, transporting those results back to the
labe, comparing samples, publishing reports, etc.), and thus represents the
“same” entity, a particular color, in multiple ways, each of which makes possible
different kinds of operations because of the unique properties of each
representational system.
In addition to its various sign systems it also contains a set of circular holes,
positioned so that one is adjacent to each color patch. To classify color the
p. 170
20
archaeologist puts a small sample of dirt on the tip of a trowel, puts the trowel
directly under the Munsell page and then moves it from hole to hole until the
best match with an adjacent color sample is found. With elegant simplicity the
Munsell page with its holes for viewing the sample of dirt on the trowel
juxtaposes in a single visual field two quite different kinds of spaces: 1) actual
dirt from the site at the archaeologists’ feet is framed by 2) a theoretical space for
the rigorous, replicable classification of color. The latter is both a conceptual
space, the product of considerable research into properties of color, and an actual
physical space instantiated in the orderly modification of variables arranged in a
grid on the Munsell page. The pages juxtaposing color patches and viewing holes
that allow the dirt to be seen right next to the color sample provide an
historically constituted architecture for perception, one that encapsulates in a
material object theory and solutions developed by earlier workers at other sites
faced with the task of color classification. By juxtaposing unlike spaces, but ones
relevant to the accomplishment of a specific cognitive task, the chart creates a
new, distinctively human, kind of space. It is precisely here, as bits of dirt are
shaped into the work relevant categories of a specific social group, that “nature”
is transformed into culture.
How are the resources provided by the chart made visible and relevant
within talk-in-interaction? At line 17 Pam moves her hand to the space above the
Munsell chart and points to a particular color patch while saying “En this one.”
Within the field of action created by the activity of color classification, what Pam
does here is not simply an indexical gesture, but a proposal that the indicated
color might be the one they are searching for. By virtue of such conditional
relevance (Schegloff 1968) it creates a new context in which reply from Jeff is the
expected next action. In line 19 Jeff rejects the proposed color. His move occurs
after a noticeable silence in line 18. However that silence is not an empty space,
but a place occupied by its own relevant activity. Before a competent answer to
Pam’s proposal in line 17 can be made, the dirt being evaluated has to be placed
under the viewing hole next to the sample she indicated, so that the two can be
compared. During line 18 Jeff moves the trowel to this position. Because of the
spatial organization of this activity, specific actions have to be performed before
a relevant task, a color comparison, can be competently performed. In brief, in
p. 171
21
this activity the spatial organization of the tools being worked with, and the
sequential organization of talk in interaction interact with each other in the
production of relevant action (e.g. getting to a place where one make an expected
answer requires rearrangement of the visual field being scrutinized so that the
judgment being requested can be competently performed). Here socially
organized vision requires embodied manipulation of the environment being
scrutinized.
It is common to talk about structures such as the Munsell chart as
“representations.” However exclusive focus on the representational properties of
such structures can seriously distort our understanding of how such entities are
embedded within the organization of human practice. With its viewholes for
scrutinizing samples, the page is not simply a perspicuous representation of
current knowledge about the organization of color, but a space designed for the
ongoing production of particular kinds of action.
We will now look at how a group of archaeologists make a map. This process
will allow us to examine the interface between seeing, writing practices, talk,
human interaction and tool use (see Goodwin 1994 for more detailed analysis).
Map Making and the Practices of Seeing it Requires
Maps are central to archaeological practice. The professional seeing required to
produce and make use of a visual document, such as a map, encompasses not
only the image itself but also the ability to competently see relevant structure in
the territory being mapped, mastery of appropriate tools, and on occasion the
ability to analyze the work-relevant actions of another’s body. These different
kinds of phenomena can be brought together within the temporally unfolding
process of human interaction used to accomplish the activity of making a map. In
the following, two archaeologists are making a map to record what they have
found in a profile of the dirt on the side of one of the square holes they have
excavated. Before actually setting pen to paper some relevant events in the dirt,
such as the boundary between two different kinds of soil, are highlighted by
outlining them with the tip of a trowel. The structure visible in the dirt is then
mapped on a sheet of graph paper. Typically this task is done by two
participants working together. One uses a pair of rulers (one laid horizontally on
the surface, and the other a hand held tape measure used to measure depth
22
beneath the surface) to measure the length and depth coordinates of the points in
the dirt that are to be transferred to the map, and then speaks these coordinates
as pairs of numbers (e.g., “at fifteen three point two)”. The second person plots
the points specified on the graph paper, and draws lines between successive
measurements. What we find here is a small activity system that encompasses
talk, writing, tools and distributed cognition as two parties collaborate to inscribe
events they see in the earth onto paper. Here Ann, the party drawing the map, is
the senior Archaeologist at the site, and Sue, the person making measurements is
her Student:
p. 172
23
1 Ann: Give me the ground surface over here
2 to about ninety.
3 (1.6)
4 Ann: No- No- Not at ninety.
5 From you to about ninety.
6 (1.0)
7 Sue: °Oh.
8 Ann: Wherever there's a change in slope.
9 (0.6)
10 Sue: °Mm kay.
11 Ann: See so if its fairly flat
12 I'll need one
13 where it stops being fairly flat.
14 Sue: Okay.
15 Ann: Like right there.
Line Drawn
With Trowel
Surface
Tape
Measure
Ann Sue
Ruler
24
The sequence to be examined begins with a directive. Ann, the writer, tells Sue
the measurer, to “Give me the ground surface over here to about ninety.”
However before Sue has produced any numbers, indeed before she has said
anything whatsoever, Ann in lines 4 and 5 challenges her, telling her that what
she is doing is wrong: ”No- No- Not at ninety. From you to about ninety.”
Directives are a classic form of speech action that sociolinguists have used to
probe the relationship between language and social structure, and in particular
issues of power and gender. Here Sue formats both her directive and her
correction in very strong, direct “aggravated” fashion. No forms of mitigation are
found in either utterance, and Ann is not given an opportunity to find and
correct the trouble on her own. Directives formatted in this fashion have
frequently been argued to display a hierarchical relationship, i. e., Ann is treating
Sue as someone that she can give direct, unmitigated orders to. And indeed Ann
is a professor and Sue is her student.
Issues of power do not however exhaust the social phenomena visible in this
sequence. Equally important are a range of cognitive processes that are as
socially organized as the relationships between the participants. For example, in
that Sue has not produced an answer to the directive, how can Ann see that there
is something wrong with a response that has not even occurred yet? Crucial to
this process is the phenomenon of conditional relevance first described by
Schegloff (1968). Basically a first utterance creates an interpretive environment
that will be used to analyze whatever occurs after it. Here no subsequent talk has
yet been produced. However, providing an answer in this activity system
encompasses more than talk. Before speaking the set of numbers that counts as a
proper next bit of talk, Sue must first locate a relevant point in the dirt and
measure its coordinates. Both her movement through space, and her use of tools
such as a tape measure, are visible events. As Ann finishes her directive Sue is
holding the tape measure against the dirt at the left or zero end of the profile.
However, just after hearing “ninety” Sue moves both her body and the tape
measure to right, stopping near the “90” mark on the upper ruler. By virtue of
the field interpretation opened up through conditional relevance, Sue’s
movement and tool use can now be analyzed by Ann as elements of the activity
she has been asked to perform, and found wanting. Sue has moved immediately
p. 173
25
to ninety instead of measuring the relevant points between zero and ninety. The
sequential framework created by a directive in talk thus provides resources for
analyzing and evaluating the visible activity of an addressee’s body interacting
with a relevant environment.
Additional elements of the cognitive operations and kinds of seeing that Ann
requires from Sue in order to make her measurements are revealed as the
sequence continues to unfold. Making the relevant measurements presupposes
the ability to locate where in the dirt measurements should be made. However
Sue’s response calls this presupposition into question and leads to Ann telling
her explicitly, in several different ways, what she should look for in order to
determine where to measure. After Ann tells Sue to measure points between zero
and ninety, Sues does not immediately move to points in that region but instead
hesitates for a full second before replying with a weak “°Oh” (line 7). Ann then
tells her what she should be looking for “Wherever there’s a change in slope”
(line 8). This description of course presupposes Sue’s ability to find in the dirt
what will could as “a change in slope.” Sue again moves her tape measure far to
the right. At this point, instead of relying upon talk alone to make explicit the
phenomena that she wants Sue to locate, Ann moves into the space that Sue is
attending to and points to one place that should be measured while describing
more explicitly what constitutes a change in slope: “See so if it’s fairly flat I’ll
need one where it stops being fairly flat like right there.”
One of the things that is occurring within this sequence is a progressive
expansion of Sue’s understanding as the distinctions she must make to carry out
the task assigned to her are explicated and elaborated. In this process of
socialization through language there is a growth in intersubjectivity as domains
of ignorance that prevent the successful accomplishment of collaborative action
are revealed and transformed into practical knowledge, a way of seeing, that is
sufficient to get the job at hand done, such that Sue is finally able to understand
what Ann is asking her to do (that is to see the scene in front of her in a manner
that permits her to make an appropriate, competent response to the directive). It
would however be wrong to see the unit within which this intersubjectivity is
lodged as simply these two minds coming together in the work at hand. Instead
the distinction being explicated, the ability to see in the very complex perceptual
p. 174
26
field provided by the landscape they are attending to, those few events that
count as points to be transferred to the map, are central to what it means to see
the world as an archaeologist, and to use that seeing to build the artifacts, such as
this map, which are constitutive of archaeology as a profession. Such seeing
would be expected of any competent archaeologist. It is an essential part of what
it means to be an archaeologist, and it is these professional practices of seeing
that Sue is being held accountable to. The relevant unit for the analysis of the
intersubjectivity at issue here — the ability of separate individuals to see a
common scene in a congruent, work-relevant fashion — is thus not these
individuals as isolated entities, but instead archaeology as a profession, a
community of competent practitioners, most of whom have never met each
other, but who nonetheless expect each other to be able to see and categorize the
world in ways that are relevant to the work, scenes, tools and artifacts that
constitute their profession.
The phenomena examined so far provide some demonstration of how what is
to be seen in a map, scene, human body or image stands in a reflexive
relationship to other semiotic structures that participants are using to constitute
visual phenomena as a relevant component of the events and activities that make
up their lifeworld. These structures include language, the constitution of action
and context provided by sequential organization, and ways of seeing events and
using images of different types that are lodged within the practices of particular
social communities, such as the profession of archaeology.
Professional Vision in Court
Parties who are not competent members of relevant social communities can lack
the ability, and/or the social positioning, to see and articulate visual events in a
consequential way. These issues were made dramatically visible in the trial of
four Los Angeles policemen who were recorded on videotape administering a
beating to an African American motorist, Mister Rodney King, whom they had
stopped after a high speed pursuit triggered by a traffic violation. When the tape
of the beating was shown on national television there was outrage, and even the
head of the Los Angeles police department thought that conviction of the officers
was almost automatic. However, at their first trial (they were later tried again in
p. 175 Federal rather than state court for violating Mister King’s civil rights) all four
27
policemen were acquitted, a verdict that triggered an uprising in the city of Los
Angeles, with neighborhoods being burned, federal troops being called in, etc.
The crucial evidence at the trial was a visual document: the videotape of the
beating. Rather than transparently proving the guilt of the policemen who were
seen on it beating a man lying prone on the ground, the tape in fact provided the
policemen’s lawyers with their evidence for convincing the jury that their clients
were not guilty of any wrongdoing. They did this by using language, pointing
and expert testimony to structure how the jury saw the events on the tape in a
way the exonerated the policemen. In essence they used the tape of the beating to
demonstrate that Mr. King was the aggressor, not the policemen, and that the
policemen were following proper police practice for subduing a violent,
dangerous suspect (see Goodwin 1994 for more detailed analysis of such
professional vision). Crucial to their success was their use of another policeman,
Sargent Duke, as an expert witness. It was argued that laymen could not
properly see the events on the tape. Instead, the ability to legitimately see what
the body of a suspect was doing, such as Mr. King’s as he lay on the ground
being beaten, and specifically whether the suspect was being aggressive or
compliant, was lodged within the work practices of the social group charged
with arresting suspects: the police. The ability to see such a body, and code it in
terms of its aggressiveness, was a component of the professional practices that
policemen use to code the events that are the focus of their work. It so far as such
vision is a public component of the work practices of a particular social group,
someone who wasn’t present but who is a member of the profession, a
policeman, can make authoritative statements about what can be legitimately
seen on the tape. However, while policemen constitute a socially organized
profession, suspects and victims of beatings don’t. Therefore there is no one with
the social standing, i.e., membership and mastery of the practices of a relevant
social group, to act as an expert witness to articulate what was happening from
Mister King’s perspective.
What was to be seen on the tape was structured through the way in which
different semiotic fields, such as structure in the stream of speech, pointing
which highlighted specific places and phenomena in the image being looked at,
and events in the image itself, mutually elaborated each other to provide a
28
construal of events that served the purposes of the party articulating the image.
The following provides an example. At the point where we enter this sequence
the prosecutor has noted that Mr. King appears to be moving into a position
appropriate for handcuffing him, and that one officer is in fact reaching for his
handcuffs, i.e. the suspect is being cooperative.
1 Prosecutor: So uh would you,
2 again consider this to be:
3 a nonagressive, movement by Mr. King?
4 Sgt. Duke: At this time no I wouldn't. (1.1)
5 Prosecutor: It is aggressive.
6 Sgt. Duke: Yes. It's starting to be. (0.9)
7 This foo

视觉文化语境中的电影 

［ 作者：周宪    转贴自：《电影艺术》2001年第2期    点击数：890    更新时间：2004-3-26    文章录入：okuc ］

 

 

 

    视觉文化"狼烟四起"

   

    任何一个敏于文化风向变化的人，都可以切身地感受到，我们正面临着一个深刻的文化转型：从以语言中心的文化向以形象中心的文化的转变。图像不断地驾驭、凌越乃至征服文字。一场新的文化战争序幕已经拉开。

   

    有人戏称现在是一个"读图时代"。图配文的书籍充斥着书店货架。与传统的"文配图"（如扫盲识字）不同，文字业已沦为图像的"奴仆"而退居次席。文学名著不断被拍成电视连续剧，越来越多的人乐于通过看电视剧而不是阅读来了解这些名著。在这个图像横行的年代，电影一方面施行自己的权威，另一方面又在捧杀文学。小说家期待着电影导演的青睐。电影无疑捧红了一些作家，如今的法则是作家借电影来"增势"，图像的力量为文字壮胆！

   

    图像崇拜和狂欢成为新一代的生活方式，视觉僭越文字的霸权几乎无处不在！从主题公园到城市规划，从美容瘦身，到形象设计，从音乐的图像化（MTV），到体育运动的视觉礼赞，从广告图像美学化，到网络、游戏或电影中的虚拟影像……图像成为这个时代的日常生活资源，成为人们无法逃避的符号追踪，成为我们文化的仪式。很难想象，我们的日常生活如果离开电影、电视、形象和广告，那会是什么样子？

   

    当然，这种文化转型早在世纪之初就被思想家们注意到了。巴拉兹在世纪之交曾预言，随着电影的出现，一种新的"视觉文化"将取代传统的印刷文化。[1]海德格尔30年代著名的表述"世界图像时代"，指出了世界作为图像被把握和理解。[2]60年代，德波作惊人之语，宣判一个充斥着图像的"景象社会"的到来。[3]

    80年代末以来，"语言学的转向"已寿终正寝，越来越多的思想家迷恋于"视觉的转向"，或"图像的转向"，或"视觉文化的转向"。[4]

   

    面对新的视觉文化，我们该作何思？该作何应对呢？这里，我们需要讨论两个问题，第一，电影在视觉文化转型中经历了什么变化？第二，为什么视觉文化僭越话语（语言）文化成为"主因"。

 

    从"叙事电影"到"景观电影"

   

    电影是一种重要的视觉艺术，这一点无须论证。巴拉兹当年论证视觉文化出现的重要依据就是电影。但是，值得注意的一点是，如果确实存一个从以语言为中心的文化，向以图像为中心的文化的转变的话，那么，电影这种主要的视觉艺术形式是否也有一些值得注意的变化呢？

   

    首先，我们必须指出，电影作为一种主要的视觉艺术具有不可替代的优势功能。如前所说，当代文化中文字形态的文化显然被形象形态的文化所征服。视觉文化的霸权无所不在。"不读小说"（张抗抗），而转向电影和电视等视觉形态，名著改变热或历史影片的流行，这种现象本身就表明视觉的诱惑远远大于语言。看比阅读更具直观和感性特征。在比较的意义上说，阅读属于传统接受方式，它倾向于本雅明所说的"韵味"形态，用传统的美学术语来说，就是静观。它可以反反复复来来回回地玩味，恰如他在《机械复制时代的艺术作品》中所描绘的，在一个日后的下午，一边歇息一边凝视地平线上连绵起伏的山峦或婆娑树影。电影改变了这种观赏方式，电影是一往无前的，它不允许回复留连，也不允许停顿歇息，所以看电影需要的是一种"震惊式"的体现。用本雅明的话来说，就是向一颗子弹击中观赏者一样。

   

    有趣的是，本雅明的比较并不只是涉及文字作品和图像作品之间的差异，"韵味"和"震惊"的差别也反映在对视觉文化不同的形态之间。比如，传统的绘画作品和当代电影的巨大差异。在这方面，桑塔格的分析也颇有代表性。她曾经分析过照片与电视的区别，这个区别也适合于说明这里的问题。她写道："照片比移动的形象更具纪念意义，因为它们乃是一小段时光，而非流逝的时间。电视是一连串不充分的形象，每个形象都会抵消其前在的形象。每张静止的照片则变成了意见纤巧物品特定的一刻，人们可以持有他并一再观赏。"[5]这里桑塔格的看法实际上恰好道出了问题所在。照片的静止和可以使人留连，但它远不如电影来得更具形象逼真和视觉吸引力。运动的形象显然比静止的图像更具诱惑力。静观作为语言中心文化的观赏方式，日益让位于图像中心文化的动态观赏。埃柯从符号学角度指出，语言和形象之间的区别，在于视觉符号是通过符号与现实图像上的相似来表达现实，而语言则相对来说要武断得多，不必追求这种相似。所以，形象可以表达出语言所无法表达的东西，它更加接近人的感性欲望和更具情感煽动性。

   

    较之于语言或类似语言的作品，电影的优势是无须争辩的。但我想思考的问题是，电复印件身是否也有语言中心和形象中心的不同模式。从美学上看，电影作为视觉艺术体裁，自身就具有语言和视觉形象两个方面（这不仅是指有声影片出现以后）。电影作为一种本文，其语言学方面不仅体现在电复印件身具有对白和脚本等语言要素，而且呈现为电影叙事结构的语言学特征。或者从历史角度看，电影乃是从戏剧演变而来，而戏剧在相当程度上更带有话语的语言学特征。比如，戏剧结构本身作为一种线性结构（如亚里士多德的封闭戏剧结构），叙事所展现的故事性和情节因素，都使得戏剧倾向于语言特性。我以为，早期电影带有很大的戏剧成份，因此带有明显的话语中心特征。比如一些希区克柯的悬念片，其戏剧性和戏剧因素十分突出。再比如中国30-40年代的电影，叙事因素亦十分突出。这类电影与其说是电影，不如说是文学作品的视觉再现。因此，文学性在电影中占有很大的比重，诸如剧本、对白、画外音、剧情结构、电影叙事性等等。但是，电影在其发展的过程中，似乎又一个逐渐摆脱语言中心模式影响的历程，它逐渐地找到了电影所以成为电影的根据所在--景观。这个过程似乎论证了艺术史家格林伯格的看法：现代艺术在其发展的历程中，都有一个寻找"自身合法化"的的艰难过程。也就是一门艺术安身立命的根据绝不能寄生在其它艺术中。绘画通过转向二维平面性，告别和雕塑相互竞争制造"空间深度幻觉"的历史，于是绘画回到了绘画自身。[6]假如我们以这种观念去看，戏剧通过活人面对面的表演，区别与电影，小说以其叙述故事有别于诗歌，电影则以其运动图像的景观，既区别于摄影，又有别于戏剧和文学。

    

    依据话语（语言）和形象（视觉）的基本二分，我们有理由在共时和历时两个层面上，将电影区分为以叙事为主的电影和以景观场面为主的电影，两者形成了叙事主导与景观支配的不同结构性模式。在作出这种区分的同时，紧接着必须申明，这种区分只是在比较的意义上提出的，这绝不意味着叙事电影没有景观成份，反之亦然。比较起来，叙事电影趋向于以话语为中心，讲究电影的叙事性和故事性，注重人物的对白和剧情的戏剧性。因此，虽然画面不可或缺，但这类电影仍以语言中心为模式，而不是去可以追求形象的逼真和视觉冲击力量。甚至可以为了叙事性和情节性（戏剧性），牺牲某些画面的视觉效果。反之，景观电影突出了电影自身的形象性质，淡化甚至弱化戏剧性和叙事性，强化视觉效果和冲击力。景观和场面成为电影最基本的视觉手段，其它一切语言性的要素退居次席。从国外电影晚近的实践来看，叙事电影和景观电影的二分还有更复杂的含义。

   

    美国电影理论家玛尔薇发现，进入80年代以来，电影经历了某种深刻的转变。这种转变主要体现为从"叙事的电影"模式，向"景观的电影"模式的转变。在她看来，自由市场化的电影是依照女性景观来结构的。她认为电影的叙事性与弗洛伊德所说的"自我"相关，而电影的景观性则和弗洛伊德的"本我"有关。传统的写实主义电影往往服从于某种叙事模式，场面和画面最终是叙事意图的形象再现。而当代电影遵循"本我"的"欲望原则"，看画面和人物成为主要导向，尤其是主动注视的男性（镜头？观众？）不断地捕捉被动的被看的女性形象。所以，景观往往打断叙事展现在观众面前，叙事性已变得无足轻重。[7]英国社会学家拉什在玛尔蔚二分的基础上更进一步，他直接提出，叙事的电影也就是写实的电影，服从于电影自身的叙事性（文学性或话语中心），而景观的电影则相反，它关注的不是叙事成份，而是场面、画面的视觉性，因此，电影的逻辑发生的倾斜，叙事让位于画面，景观支配着叙事。他进而指出，叙事电影是现代主义艺术，而景观电影则属于后现代电影。[8]我们只要对好莱坞电影稍加留意，便会发现这个重要的转变。如今，身体、自然风景、都市风情、侏罗季时期的恐龙、未来世界或航天员，无论是曾经存在过抑或完全是想象产物的形象，皆可逼真地呈现在银幕上。电影史家海斯注意到，从历史片中身体的凸显（如《基督耶稣》），到色情影片中身体展示压倒了对白的语音，再到商业片中一切音响（包括人的声音）都屈从于画面形象（尤其是身体形象，这与一些传统电影中画外音所起的结构和统领作用相比，显然是一个巨大的变化），这是自60年代以来电影从叙事电影向景观电影转变的重要标志。最典型的例子莫过于前几年流行的《泰坦尼克号》，较之于传统的版本，这本作品在文学性或叙事性上并无甚突破，但在视觉性效果和景观性上，却是前所未有地成功。这种成功同时还表明，观众对那种叙述故事的电影传统已经淡忘了，他们也许更乐于接受具有撼人心力视觉效果的景观电影。更有甚者，如果我们把景观电影与虚拟性结合起来考虑，那么，一个显而易见的结论是，景观电影必然导向"超现实"（波德里亚）。因为，景观电影真正实现了"假的比真的更真实"的原则，现实和虚构的逻辑可以轻易地颠倒，电影为大众通向想象的乌托邦开辟了一条新的道路。

   

    如果我们透过这个视角来看中国当代电影，这一倾向也非常显着。张艺谋和陈凯歌的电影就带有明显的景观化倾向。文学内容对电影来说已经降至极低的地位，场面、画面、身体和服饰等视觉因素被无限夸大了，甚至对白变得可有可无，剧本也无足轻重，叙事性就范于景观性的视觉因素。《红高粱》、《霸王别姬》这类特征非常明显。在这种情况下，一个很有意思的"倒错现象"应运而生。倘使说过去是电影家倚重于小说家或剧作家，文学剧本对电影的制约是至关重要的。现在的情况似乎颠倒过来了，小说家借电影来"增势"和获得象征资本，小说作品的面世似乎似乎只是一个"初级产品"，它等待着电影的遴选和垂青。因为视觉文化在中国兴起，无可争辩地使电影拥有一种远比小说更权威的力量，小说家可以通过搭上电影的"车"来为自己获取在文学场内无法获得的更多的象征资本。然而，作家们似乎对电影所走的"反文学"和"压制叙事"的道路并无察觉，他们不但期盼这电影的惠顾，而且更重要的是，电影的视觉景观表现也成为许多"新生代"作家极力效仿的技法。殊不知，当叙事文学依照景观电影模式来创作时，文学已是岌岌可危了。

    视觉文化的解释范式

   

    视觉文化的兴起，有其深刻的社会-文化原因。巴拉兹在世纪初提出"视觉文化"的概念（1913），意在强调自印刷术发明以来，视觉的作用在日常生活中开始衰落了，许多意义的传达可以通过印刷符号来进行，而无需通过面部表情来传达。于是，"可见的思想就这样变成了可理解的思想，视觉的文化变成了概念的文化。"[9]

   

    电影的诞生使人类文化重新回到了视觉文化，印刷文化所代表的那种语言的优势和中心开始消解了。"可见的人类"重新回到了我们的文化中，尤其是人的表情、姿态、动作和形体语言。"电影将在我们的文化领域里开辟一个新的方向。每天晚上有成千上万的人坐在电影院里，不需要看许多文字说明，纯粹通过视觉来体验事件、性格、感情、情绪，甚至思想。因为文字不足以说明画面的精神内容，它只是还不很完美的艺术形式的一种过渡性工具。"[10]值得注意的是，"视觉文化"和"概念文化"（亦即语言为核心的印刷文化）相对的。

   

    巴拉兹之后，对视觉文化现象有重要发展的是德国思想家本雅明。他对机械复制时代艺术的讨论，也集中在电影等可复制艺术样式上。本雅明虽然没有直接采用"视觉文化"的概念，但他的理论中渗透了关于视觉文化的深刻见解。他认为，机械复制时代是人类文明的一次巨大变革，电影作为一种技术的新发明，把一种新的文化带入人类社会生活。传统社会那种韵味的艺术已经无可挽回地衰落了，而电影塑造了一种进步的艺术与大众的关系（如卓别麟和大众），这很不同于传统的艺术与大众的落后关系（如毕加索与大众）。新的视觉文化特征在于传统的审美静观已经衰退，取而代之的是一种"震惊"个触觉效果。电影这一大众艺术形式，通过复制使得艺术的民主化成为可能，也是艺术的革命潜能成为现实。[11]到了50年代，电视的广泛运用，扩大是视觉文化的范围，图像的霸权越加明显地呈现出来。加拿大学者麦克鲁汉把视觉文化的研究推向一个新阶段。他从媒介和传播方式的变革角度，论证了电子媒介文化的到来，这种文化将视觉和听觉文化整合起来，对受众的效果超过了以往任何一种媒介，尤其是电视的出现。[12]

    80年代以来，视觉文化的概念已被普遍接受，出现了几种重要的理论范式。

   

    首先是消费社会理论。这种理论认为，随着消费社会取代了生产的社会，一种追求感官愉悦的消费主义意识形态膨胀起来。恰如贝尔所说，"目前占统治地位的是视觉观念。声音和景象，尤其是后者，组织了美学，统率了观众。在一个大众社会里，这几乎是不可避免的。"[13]从表面现象上看，大众社会需要大众消费和娱乐，其主要形态是视觉的。更深一层的原因在于两个方面："其一，现代世界是一个一个城市世界。大城市生活和限定刺激与社交能力的方式，为人们看见和想看见（不是读到和听到）事物提供了大量优越的机会。其二，就是当代倾向的性质，它渴望行动（与观照相反）、追求新奇、谈吐轰动。而最能满足这些迫切欲望的莫过于艺术中的视觉成份了。"[14]贝尔一方面揭示了当代趋向于都市文化，它客观上为人们看提供了机会，也为人们看的欲望的攀升创造了条件。如果说贝尔的理论着重于社会二空间环境与视觉文化崛起的关系的话，那么

    ，法国哲学家德波的景象社会理论，则更加深入地触及形象作为商品的特性。在他看来，当代社会就是将一切转化为形象的景观，生产和消费都和景象密切相关。景象成为一种"中介性的社会关系。"[15]恰如马克思以商品概念来剖析资本主义社会，德波是通过景象的概念来透视。他指出"景象即商品"，景象出现在商品已整个地占据了社会生活之时，"景象使得一个同时既在又不在的世界变得醒目了，这个世界就是商品控制着生活一切方面的世界。"[16]商品以其显着的可视性入侵到社会生活的各个层面。在这样的社会中，与其说是在消费商品，不如说是在消费景象价值。商品的使用价值逐渐被其外观的符号价值或景象价值所取代。一些知名的商品品牌，从可口可乐到好莱坞电影，从麦当劳到耐克运动鞋，这些世界性的商品其形象价值远远超过了其使用价值。德波提出，景象对人的征服就是经济对人的征服，它已走过了两个阶段：第一个阶段是马克思曾经说到"从存在转向占有"的堕落，人们从创造性的实践活动退缩为单纯地对物品的占有关系；第二个阶段则导向了"从占有向炫示"的堕落，特定的物质对象让位于其符号学的表征。德波的重要发现在于：首先，世界转化为形象，就是把人的主动的创造性的活动转化为被动的行为，即是说，景象呈现为漂亮的外观，"它所要求的态度原则上是被动的接受，实际上是通过没有回应的显示方式获得的，是通过其外观的垄断所获得的。"[17]其次，视觉获得了优先性和至上性，它压倒了其它观感。"景象是由于简单易学事实所导致的，即现代人完全成了观者。"[18]第三，景象避开了人的活动而转向景象的观看，从根本上说，景象就是独裁和暴力，它不允许对话，因为"景观因而是一种对所有其它人言说的特殊活动。它是分层的社会策略性的表征，在这个社会中，其它所有的表现将被禁止。"[19]最后，景象的表征是自律的自足的，它不断少扩大自身，复制自身。这个主题后来我们在波德里亚那里看到了进一步的发挥。）

   

    第二种解释范式是虚拟社会理论。法国哲学家波德里亚认为，文化的发展经历了符号与现实的不同关系四个阶段。即符号反映现实，符号掩盖现实，符号掩盖了现实的缺失，符号与任何现实无关。第四阶段即当代社会，它本质上是一个虚拟的社会，真实与虚拟的关系被颠倒了，假的比真的更真实（如好莱坞电影，网络虚拟空间和电脑合成图像，等等），出现了模拟和仿像。如果说过去形象生产是依照原本来模仿再现的话，那么，当代影像生产则是没有原本的模拟和复制。这就形成了所谓的仿像，其特征在于它倾向于一个"超现实"的世界，一个没有原本的大量复制的世界。虚拟导致了仿像的大量流行，仿像则把视觉文化凸显出来，在这种文化中，传统的原则被颠倒了。如果说传统的形象生产是依据"地域在先原则"（即先有原本后有摹本），现在则是依据"地图在先原则"（即先有摹本，然后大量复制）这一转变揭示了形象生产在当代社会所以无穷泛滥，超越现实并导致虚拟的逻辑制约着人们对真实世界理解的严峻现实。[20]

   

    魏瑞里奥的理论与波德里亚的理论又异曲同工之妙。他发现，技术的进步有两个趋势性的现象尤为值得注意：一是时间对空间的征服，二是速度的提高。从交通工具的速度转向了远距传播的速度，乃是实时对延时的胜利。在一个讲求效率的时代，视觉凌越听觉，图像统治文字，因而电子媒介的图像实时（现场时间）传播具有不可比拟的优越性和诱惑力。他进一步认为，视觉图形的实时传递，对写作是一个很大的威胁，这个威胁并不是直接来自形象，而是来自电视屏幕。相对于银屏的"实时"图像，传统的图像则显得苍白无力。"威胁写作的是实时。写作总是、总是在一种延时的时间中，总是延时的。一旦形象现场直播，就有一个延时与实时的冲突。正是在这里，对写作和作者存在着一种严峻的威胁。"[21]正是这种速度的提高，图像优于文字，这便导致了深刻的文化转变。魏瑞里奥把这个转变称之为从现代文化的"形象辩证逻辑时期"，向后现代文化的"悖论逻辑时期"的转变。

   

    从延时的图像，到即刻的、当下的图像，这就是速度提高的结果。电视直播改变了电影将过去延时记录下来的做法，把远处发生的事情同时地呈现出来，使写作这种古老的方式变得过时了。速度不但提高了效率，更重要的它还意味着主体将更紧张更有效地去看、听和感知生活世界。整个世界在瞬间被远程地呈现出来，而关于这个世界的幻想也毫无限制地迅速传播开来.这也就从另一个角度解释了运动的图像为什么比静止的图像更具逼真性和视觉诱惑力的原因所在。魏瑞里奥慧眼还在于他注意到，速度的后果并不是人的交往和流动范围的扩大，毋宁说是相反，它导致了人类流动前所未有的"惰性"。恰如画家克利所言："如今是物像感知我"。英国学者伯格则把这种关系的转变准确地表述为：传统文化中是人趋近图像，而当代文化则是图像逼近人。[22]我们总是生存于一个图像所包围的世界中，画家不再需要像古人那样踏遍名山大川，电影工作者也无须亲临险恶环境去拍摄，一切均可以通过高科技手段去完成。

 

   

    过去，形象的传播是一种"公共表征"，是在公共领域里进行的，比如在大街上的广告，电影院里放映的影片等。而私人空间是完全私人化的，诸如家庭生活和私人话语等。然而，随着电视、电脑和网络侵入我们的日常生活，家庭这个传统的私人空间如今已变得不再是私人性的了，我们在家里看电视，玩电脑，在因特网上游弋等。私人空间也就消失了。我以为，这个转变对于我们思考当代视觉文化现象具有及其重要的意义。所谓视觉文化时代的到来，并不只是说形象生产和传播的急剧膨胀，也不只是我们接受形象的方式的转变，更重要的是，在本来属于私人化话语的家庭生活中，话语形式不但变得公共了，而且也视觉化了。只消翻检一下发达国家人均收看电视的平均时数，就足以说明这种变化。中国作为一个发展中国家，作为一个重视家庭文化的国度，电视、电脑的家庭化却更值得重视。我们的家庭私人领域既被公共化了，又被视觉化了，最明显的例子莫过于每年春节电视晚会。几亿人在家同时收看同一个节目，这景象是一个寓言，还是一个神话？也许，它意味着一种交往方式的终结，一种意识形态的终结，一种价值观的终结。

 

    结语与疑问

   

    如果我们从语言和图像的二元关系来思考的话，可以把视觉文化及其电影（以及电视）对日常生活的征服，视为人类文化发展的一个重要标志。拉什区分了两种文化的主要差异：第一，媒介的差异。话语的文化以语言为核心，语言具有至高无上的有限性；而在形象的文化中，形象压倒了语言转而成为主导因素；第二，由于媒介不同而导致了审美对象的区别。在话语的文化中，审美对象或符号表征物重视的形式规则，而形式规则实际上就是文本性，它与理性原则密切相关；相反，在形象的文化中，重视的是对象的表层甚至是反形式的方面，日常物不再经过严格的审美纯化而直接进入审美领域。如果说形式原则是理性原则的话，那么，表层和日常事物的关注则倾向于欲望原则。第三，理性至上的原则必然导致说教和文化伦理关怀，而欲望原则占据主导地位的文化则不再关心什么是文化的内核，它更关注行为或表演（performance）。最后，话语的文化是一种主体与审美对象有距离的观照和欣赏，是一种传统美学所说的"静观"。阅读乃是这种静观的最典型形式，它允许读者不断地体验作品的深刻涵义，反复地吟咏和解读，在读者与文学世界之间是存有一个心理的距离的；而形象的文化则相反，主体与对象之间的距离消失了，主体直接进入对象，或者成为对象的一部分。主体进入对象，也就是欲望进入对象，理性主义的那些原则在这里都失效了。电影就是要把观众直接卷入一个身临其境的超现实的幻觉感。[23]

   

    视觉文化所提出的哲学问题是深刻而尖锐的：何为真实的逻辑？何为虚拟的模拟？在一个真假界限日趋模糊的日常世界中，这一疑问的难以回答的。当我们越来越受制于影像、图像和视觉物的诱惑时，我们的理性原则是否终会屈从于欲望法则？我们是否会沦为一个"图像的囚徒"呢？

 

    注释：

 

    [1] 巴拉兹：《电影美学》，中国电影出版社1979年版。

    [2] 《海德格尔选集》，上海三联书店1996年版，下卷。

    [3] Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, New York: Zone, 1994.

    [4] W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; Nicholas Miroeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, London: Routeldge, 1999.

    [5] 桑塔格：《论摄影》，湖南美术出版社1999年版，第28-29页。

    [6] 格林伯格指出："每门艺术都为了自身的缘故而导致了这样的证明。这类证明必需表明的东西不仅在一般艺术中是独特的不可还原的，甚至在每一门特殊艺术中也同样如此。每门艺术都不得不通过自己特有的东西来确定非它莫属的效果。显然，这样做就缩小了该艺术的涵盖范围，但同时也更安全地占据了这一领域。"见拙译格林伯格:《现代主义绘画》，《世界美术》，1992年第3期，第50页。

    [7] Laura mulvey, "Visual pleasure and narrative cinima", in T.Bennett et al. (eds), Popular Television and Film, London: Macmillan, 1981.

    [8] Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 1990, pp.187-188.

    [9] 巴拉兹：《电影美学》，中国电影出版社1979年版，第28页。

    [10] 同上，第29页。

    [11] 详见本雅明：《机械复制时代的艺术》，浙江摄影出版社1993年版。

    [12] 麦克鲁汉曾经做过一个实验，受众分别以阅读、听广播和看电视来接受同一信息，结果他发现，看电视的受众在接受和理解信息方面超过了其它方式。可见电视作为视觉文化的一个重要形式的重要功能。见拙译麦克鲁汉：《视听新媒介》，载《国外社会科学》1994年第1期。

    [13] 贝尔：《资本主义文化矛盾》，三联书店1989年版，第154页。

    [14] 同上，第154页。

    [15]Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (1967), New York: Zone, 1994, #4.

    [16]同上，#37。

    [17]同上，#12。

    [18]同上，#200。

    [19]同上，#23。

    [20] Mark Poster, (ed), Jean Braudrillard: Selected Writings, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.

    [21] James der Derian, (ed), The Virilio Reader，Oxford: Blackwell, 1998，p.16.

    [22]John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin, 1973, p.20.

    [23]同[8]。

 

 

 

 

运用科技表现之视觉艺术 

张恬君  

 

　　Utilizing Technology in Visual Arts Expression

　　　　　

　　

　　摘要

 

 

　　回顾二十世纪人类在科技上的急遽发展，新世纪对人类的启示是未来人类将面临超越传统价值经验发展的挑战。我们所处的世界不再是单一世界，未来将会是由原子构成的真实物理世界与数字文化共同建构的社会。信息数字化后的虚拟世界，将艺术创作带向超越时间、空间、与影像经验的新创作思考领域。科技所提供的互动性对艺术创作充满了新的可能性，沉浸式的环境预告着新世纪的艺术形式，而现在这个时代已经来临。在艺术创作的领域里，不管是否运用科技，艺术家都是反映当时生活的心灵转换过程。尽管世纪末由科技技术主导的计算机艺术突破人类视觉创作中媒材的限制，但是未来以个人处境与社会脉络结合的心灵形式将取代科技成为推动视觉艺术的动力。当今相当多的视觉艺术创作者，尝试以网际网络、虚拟实境等等高科技为一个艺术的新形式，在与数字媒体互动的过程中，我们不难发现科技艺术，不只是一个科技与高度文明的产物，更是人类纯化心灵的〝高感度〞作品。

　　

　　Abstract

 

 

　　We are entering a world where there are won't be one but two realities: the actual and the virtual. Spaceless, timeless, imageless experiences have entered the domain of art. Interactivity might generate art for which we still can not describe. Current immersive artistic environments are dictating a new discourse. For the arts creation, no mater what media, hi-tech or low-tech are used, art comes from a true sense of life experience and memory. In visual arts, the hottest media art creations are now spawning through world wide web, virtual reality, video and high definition technology. In the interaction with digital media, we find that "hi-tech" arts are not only a product of machines, or advanced civilization, but also the creation of "hi-touch" world of creators' soul. We might now ask, what will be the content of memory if we can no longer distinguish simulated events and experiences from "real" one? Perhaps the merging of "the real" and "the virtual" in art, as well as in life, will be in the future what the merging of  "art" and the "every day" has been in the old days.

　　

　　

　　一﹑前言

　　

　　艺术活动反应时代的现象，且在各种意义上，艺术与时代革新或改造的根本精神，有着密切的关系。若从其中抽去创造与革新的特质时，艺术便无任何价值可言。在艺术创作的过程中，感情的自发形成占了大部分，但在有些状态下理性的计画性成分亦占有相当的比例，尤其在新媒体、新美学观念、新素材及新的科学技术高度发展的今天，以理性为诉求的创作灵感，已占有绝对的重要性及审美价值。

　　

　　科技的革新，如摄影术、电影、录像、计算机、网际网络到虚拟实境，在艺术创作上产生极大的变化，具有实验精神的先驱艺术家们热衷于新媒材与新艺术形式的探求，。从十九世纪末到今天，其中发生了难以计数的艺术运动，一部新媒体艺术史，几乎就是一部近代科技史，而我们仍活在其中，变化日新月异，很难去归纳风格，或下任何定论。到目前为止，网络艺术、包括虚拟实境的交互式装置(Interactive Installations)，似乎是互动艺术(Interactive Art)的主流。本文试图以Frank Poper (1993) 与Michael Rush (1999)的论述为本，将运用科技表现的视觉艺术划分为录像艺术、计算机艺术、网络艺术、虚拟实境，几个部分分别介绍。

　　

　　

　　二﹑科技与艺术

　　

　　科学的发明与发现，大量地运用在改善人类生活上，不过是近五十年的事，却带给人类前所未有的便捷与刺激。 改变的不仅是物质的层面，在精神上的意义也相当深远。尤其是60年代末70年代初，当电子媒体与计算机科技开始普及之时，媒体深深影响我们对世界的认知，人们视野变宽了，世界变小了。当时，艺术、科技与科学间的关系常受争议。这些争议在由美国兴起的艺术与科技运动(Art and Technology movement)中相当显着。以Billy Kluver为首，艺术与科技运动吸引许多艺术家、科学家、工程师以及业者参与，意图发展出跨领域的合作架构，在这时期艺术与科技的关系已不再只是「对话」(dialogue)的层次，甚而「联姻」(marriage)一词亦曾被提及(Bijvoet, 1990)，然而时至今日，这种系统化的合作模式，仍然只是一个理想。因为科技、艺术都是文化有机整体的一部分，原本就不容分割，一旦提出「对话」、「握手」或「联姻」的概念，分立两边的预设立场便已形成。所以要真正做到没有争议，是要从观念上的建立开始的。

　　

　　运用科技的视觉艺术，一个明显的议题便是科技带来的艺术品复制性与真实性的问题，Benjamin (1996) 在1936就曾以复制行为对艺术品原件所造成的灵光(aura)消逝的影响做说明，以先知的姿态，提供一种新的观点，教人们如何正确地审视机械时代的艺术品，了解复制行为对艺术品的影响，并以全新的态度来面对复制的艺术品，而不是以传统的艺术观点强套在新形式的艺术品上。Robert Rauschenberg 在1969年也曾极力尝试透过电视屏幕，创造感官的幻觉 (sensory illusion)，一切展演都只是以复制品 (reproduction) 呈现，要观赏者破除原有的观赏习惯，在传统上的艺术价值包含了独创性、唯一性、与真实性，都将被重新思考。

　　

　　Benjamin所提出的复制现象也还跳脱不出线性的物理世界，Rauschenberg所使用的素材在当时是模拟式的。数字化科技成熟后，讲求光与速度，去物质化 (dematerialized)的虚拟影像透过媒体四处传播，复制已经不再是模仿、替代真实或是真实的幻觉，数字世界已然成为另外一种真实(Rush, 1999)。因为影像可被转换为数字语言，可被任意操弄，因而影像成为一种信息，于是艺术行为也大大不同于前，艺术家在庞杂的影像信息中，选择、过滤、重新组装，不只是利用技术来解决视觉问题，开发新的视觉经验，更利用新媒体去呈现人们生活中的种种困境，作品意义的产生存在于事件的脉络还有与观赏者的互动中。观赏者从最早的被动接受，到目前已然成为参与者，甚而是展演内容的提供者。

　　

　　

　　三﹑录像艺术 (Video Art)

　　

　　工业革命为世人带来了摄影术和电影，而电子时代则带来了录像技术。录像艺术的发生只有三十多年的历史，但在现代艺术正趋于综合性媒体的激流中，它却扮演着另一种视觉语言的角色，为科技与艺术的结合。录像艺术的产生，是艺术家们想利用它，跨越电视的历史，而与现代艺术相结合，呈现的多样化内容。1962年美国传播电视号卫星升空，传播媒体讯息大量流通，电视文化侵入每个家庭;电视普及后带动了外围设备商品化的市场，录放机及小型摄影机也发展成廉价的家电商品，艺术家便马上对这种新的创作媒材产生兴趣。

　　

　　第一件使用电视为艺术创作媒材的作品，是在1963年由韩裔美籍的艺术家白南准 (Nam-June Paik，1932)：在德国吴柏托的帕纳斯画廊 (Galerie Parnass) 的个展作品「音乐的说明-电子电视」 (Exposition of Music - Electronic TV)，这个展览奠定了白南准操控电视的艺术手法。他当时扭曲了电视节目播送的接收，并把电视机朝上或朝侧散置于整个房间。同时，他也做了观众和媒体互动的录像作品，扭转了两者间的关系。在这过程中，白南准改变了我们对电视机作为文化形式的看法。白南准认为电视机是后现代艺术的一种形式，对他来说，大众将电视机看作娱乐品，或把它看作是有画面的广播机，这些都是短视的看法。作为一个艺术家，他有意将这种错误观念改正过来，就如他在文章中、演讲中、录像创作中所表示的，电视代表了一种新的沟通科技，同时也预视了后工业时代的开始。白南准视电视的电子媒体为社会、文化、政治与经济的发言者，就像计算机的发明，电视所造成的影响与工业革命具有同样的重要性。

　　

　　对于此一新媒体感兴趣的艺术家，除了影像创作者之外，作曲家、雕刻家、诗人等亦都不在少数。录像艺术也依其为期不长的发展史间，一直朝着极为多样化的方向发展，具体的分类可区分为下列几个项目：

　　

　　1. 视觉艺术倾向录像艺术

　　主要表现方式，是利用影像律动、节奏作出具有动感、半抽象的画意性表现。1970年代，由于电子音响合成乐器的积极开发，录像艺术结合了音乐与影像，发展出视听效果俱佳的影像音乐节目MTV。1980年代则出现了以数字式图象合成技术所制作的影像表现，强调视觉效果。

　　

　　2. 作为社会性媒体的录像艺术

　　从60年代末到70年代，关心社会议题，以及对大众传播媒体单向性、独占性的特质与现象不满的艺术家们，试图利用摄录像的技术来开拓新的传播管道;或专题追踪探索大众媒体所不取材的题目。对被间接、调整过或由媒体延生出的经验，提出质疑与批判。

　　

　　3. 与表演艺术、观念艺术结合的录像艺术

　　此类录像艺术将视身体为一表现的素材，重视与公众的对话，经常采取仪式性的形式，具浓厚的戏剧性。与1960年代末的观念艺术(Conceptual Art)同样都是重视行为的时间流程，受特定时间因素制约的艺术表现形式。录像技术发挥了记录、保存、传播或作品再构成、再表现的功能。

　　

　　4. 环境中的录像装置

　　以摄录像机与录放机或计算机设备来构成整个展示空间，并由观赏者直接参与作品的整体构成。摄录像机拍摄下来的影像直接在显示器上显现出来，或观赏者藉感应器与作品互动，实际表现出作品设置场所的状态;观众的形影与行为动作也在显示器上实时显现．这种作品的构成方式一般称为「观众参加型的录像装置」。

　　

　　

　　「录像」本身为视觉性强烈的媒体，当视觉、造形艺术家使用这媒体，就成为录像艺术。早期的录像艺术或可归纳于观念艺术或装置艺术的范畴里，因为影象本身属于一个观念组合体，或者一组图像架备，成为作品整体关系的一部份。观者必须面对面在特定的时间、地点、或距离下，才能进行有求欣赏。表现形式可分为:以摄影机为纪录影像机器，制作个人化的影像作品，以影像为作品的主体，这类称为「单体录像艺术」例如T. R. Uthco 与Ant Farm 所拍摄的Eternal Frame再创出甘乃迪被刺的情景;另一个是将屏幕(影像显示器)视为一个表面的色彩与图形会变化的物体，结合其它材料与环境组合，形成作品的整体，这称为「复合录像艺术」或称「录像装置」，如山口胜弘的Magic Square(苏守政，民83)。到了90年代，尖端科技和艺术以电视、录像、装置、表演、雕塑等多媒体形式综合起来，将实时性与互动性的介入创作，创造出新时代「媒体艺术」。

　　

　　以往视觉艺术的形式，可大分为平面的绘画与立体的雕刻，而影像的领域今后将与前述二者并列为视觉艺术的重要形式之一。未来随着计算机图像处理，多媒体、高画质等新媒体技术的高度发展，传统的录像技术也将面临新的整合。

　　

　　

　　四﹑计算机艺术

　　

　　1970年以后高科技产品发展迅速，计算机、雷射光线、传真机、复印机、卫星传播等。这些尖端科学技术，都成为创造想象和架构的创作工具，这些新的媒介能仿真真实世界，也能创造出幻想境界中的奇景。高科技艺术 (High-Tech Art)是1970年代以后，兴起于美国的新艺术。它是泛指以运用高科技创造的现代美术作品，诸如计算机艺术、雷射光艺术等作品，在美学领域中带来明显意义，结合了人类智能和科技产生的大量新颖技巧。潜藏在这种深具潜力的新视觉技巧下，有一个更深入的意义：在高科技的辅助下，视野更加瞭阔，并为艺术创作，提供了新的美学向度，跳跃连结代替线性思考，多向度空间取代绘画透视，前所未有互动性功能。

　　

　　尤其是，自从计算机出现以后，因为可以储存、修改，容易重新绘制及复制，所有有关绘画的行为起了很大的改变。1952年美国的Ben F. Laposky利用计算机作出一个抽象的图像，1956年才开始能创作出彩色的电子影像，1960年德国K. Alsleben及W. Fetter发表最早的计算机绘图作品，直至1994年网际网络开始盛行，四、五十年间，人们对于空间的思考模式随之改变，我们离开了复杂而趋向一个快速沟通、大纲式了解的理想。我们不再需要画一堆很复杂辅助线去处理放置一个三维物体于二维平面上的问题，计算机影像帮我们解决了这些问题。因此，艺术家已把兴趣放在如何避免复杂的建构，因为人们想象的空间已经改变，波浪的、拥挤的西方绘画已被纯粹的、无限空间的现代绘画所取代。

　　

　　计算机对现代艺术造成的冲击及影响之巨，超乎想象。计算机一般被认为是一个空间可视化的简单辅助工具，但它不只是一件工具，一种媒材，更重要的是一种新的美学方向，新的再现可能。举例来说，"undo"与 "layer"两项功能已经改变了创作模式。多数计算机艺术的创作者，深信虽然计算机本来不是为艺术创作的理由而发明，但它会持续发展出特有的本质，继续为艺术家提供最好的工作伙伴。

　　

　　早期的绘画技术持续到现今的计算机绘图上，大部份的计算机使用者，是把新的事物以旧的方式来呈现。世界的内涵不会为观者凝结成一种不变的形式，而观看的方式也不会永远保持同一种模式，它是一股鲜活有力的理解形式，自有其内在的历史，且穿越无数阶段而来，我们对类型的论述要到什么程度，一切都在转化中，历史是无止尽的流动，但如果要求我们根据少数几个结果，替事件的无限性做归纳，那也是很困难的。

　　

　　通常，计算机比传统铅笔的方式更简单、便宜、快速地生产，计算机让艺术家与音乐创作者更快速的生产，这也就是我为什们称之为“罐头艺术”的原因，然后，计算机也可提供一种艺术替代品更快速的方法，这也是我为什么称其为“麦当劳艺术”  (Nadin,. 1989)。艺术的产生就像别种生产品一样，发生于人与人的互动性，人与别种物体、与自然、与工具、与产品和与过去经验的互动。艺术的工作，或许是一种在文化与经验性中建构的计画。在过去历史中，人们的互动方式一直在变。艺术也是，而这种改变是不可预测的，我们要了解艺术的方式依赖人们的方式及科学和科技的方式。

　　

　　当然，计算机艺术有它的隐忧。虽然计算机为艺术带来发展的新契机，却也有不少令人诟病的地方。第一：由于计算机也是科技的产物，自然有现代和传统的冲突，如何把过去的传统艺术，配合新的计算机媒材，加以融合表现出来，呈现附合时代的新风貌而被接受，是值的深思的问题。因为全世界都是用相同的软件和设备，如果一窝蜂的跟着主流，则艺术创作则会划地自限，而显露大量复制和类似的肤浅平面感，失去艺术的美感和深度。第二：如同之前提到的，工具的方便，却造成个人风格的丧失，并且失去敏锐度，因为一旦创作者习于依赖计算机的修改功能，创作的动力则渐渐退去，例如：惯用PHOTOSHOP的摄影者很可能因此，不在意拍照的决定性时刻，因为可以透过计算机仿真修改 ，不怕拍不好，但即使效果逼真，却失去艺术价值了。第三：即是计算机艺术虽然有决然不同于过去的表现方式和媒材。但本质上，仍脱离不了过去模仿、拼贴.....等创作风格，如何走出过去的艺术观念，找到属于计算机艺术的观念、想法和创作空间，将会是影响他是否能自成一派的重要关键，而非只是为艺术带来新的表现法。

　　

　　

　　五﹑网络艺术

　　

　　最早的网际网络(Internet)，发生在70年代，必需使用高深的程序语言，使用族群在当时仅限于特定的计算机菁英，多为政府部门或军事用途服务。1989年英国计算机工程师为了国际间的物理研究，设计了全球信息网(World Wide Web)，直到1993年第一个图形使用接口的流浏览器Mosaic问世以来，人们才真正体验到网际网络无垠的网际空间。

　　

　　最早网络上的艺术，通常是事先做好的影像再放上网页，真正以计算机为媒体制作艺术网站的代表性艺术家 John Simon， 于1997 开始进行的类似艺术游戏的作品"Every Icon" 中，直接运用计算机程序语言以概念性配置将时间艺术(Time Art)推到极致。他以一个32x32，包含1,024个小方块的方格，一次一列，以黑白交替，进行无穷尽的组合，光是第一列就要花一年四个月的时间跑完，第二列就要花60亿年去跑，他的网站作品主要目的是藉由让浏览者看着格子之间永远看不完的明灭变化，去可视化一个无限(Infinity)的概念。

　　

　　1995年就已有5000个艺术家个人网站(Druckrey, 1996)，到2000年已经突破十万个，同时网络人口也以每一百天增加一倍的速度持续激增中。而真正以Web为媒体，被美术馆认可作为一个新的创作形式是近在1998夏天的事。纽约Guggenheim 美术馆，首度邀请Shu Lea Cheang 发表网络艺术作品"BRANDON"，探讨性别与文化议题。网络艺术可以说是极具前卫精神的，往往需要观者去参与甚而完成，虽然很容易流于娱乐性或商业性，但艺术家们很努力的不被技术拉着走，而以具说服性与艺术价值的设计呈现，目前具特色的网站相当多。值得注意的是，将来网页的浏览不再是一个按键一个连结，一页接一页的隐喻形式会被打破，代以星系银河的概念，这对艺术家来讲是一个有趣的挑战，不出两年网络艺术将有新风貌，我们可以拭目以待，也可以积极参与。

　　

　　

　　六﹑虚拟实境

　　

　　虚拟实境(Virtual Reality, 简称VR) 一词，于1989年由美国VPL Research Inc.的董事长Jaron Lanier所创，用来描述计算机信息空间中栩栩如生、令人完全沉浸的仿真世界。此一概念源于1965年Sutherland教授所提出之"Ultimate Display"的想法，他希望透过计算机图形的显示，人们可以进入爱丽斯的梦游仙境，并感受到如同处于一个真实的环境。1984，美国科幻小说作家William Gibson提出另一个名词--Cyberspace，它是指可以在世界的范围内，几千人同时体验的计算机虚拟环境。

　　

　　VR技术原本用于飞行训练、医疗训练、与游戏，因限于经费与高技术的需求，很少艺术家愿意去尝试。1990年澳洲艺术家Jeffrey Shaw 与Dirk Groeneveld开始营造虚拟城市"The Legible City"，以事先录好3D的城市景象，包括街景、街道转弯、标志‥等等，都是以文字与句子构成。纽约市是以名人所说与城市相关的句子建构，而阿姆司特丹则是以该城市的历史为主。作品的设置是将一部脚踏车放在三面投影屏幕中间，手把与踏板都连接上电子感应器，当观者采动踏板，或转动手把，便可以感受乘骑脚踏车，悠游于曼哈顿或城市中阅读之旅的乐趣。

　　

　　沉浸式的VR "The Cave" 于1992年在SIGGRAPH第一次展示，在一个方形小房间里，观者戴上立体目镜(stereo glasses)，操作3D鼠标（wand）可以实时看到完全由观者操控的虚拟景象。完全沉浸式的虚拟环境，让使用者感受到新创的时间与空间。但是为这些贵重的仪器不是在大学就是在研究机构，所以用途多半偏向教育训练或应用层面，一旦这些设备可为艺术家所利用，VR的内容便可以较具艺术价值。或许这样的高科技，也像暗箱(camera obscura)一样，在艺术史上昙花一现，因为科技的追求可能已经到了极限，或许还会有新科技，但是二十一世纪的今天，在网际空间中彷徨的人，或许会反过来看看朝露，或路旁忠实绽放的小花，重新感受晨风吹在脸上的触感，这样的情境所引起的视觉影像，应该才是人类共同的记忆吧！

　　

　　

　　七﹑结论

　　

　　身处一个新世纪的黎明阶段，审视当今现代艺术的表现形式，千变万化、无奇不有，可说是前所未有的新美学创作年代，传统的美学概念及体系，起了一些新的转机及变化，属于二十一世纪的新视觉美学体系，以包含瞬息万变的新美学思潮，是亟待建立的。而在这由「后现代」转换为「后信息时代」(Negroponte,1995)的年代里，美学已不再被视为形式或是风格的问题，却是哲学上的问题（张恬君，民89）。而且也不再是脱序、解构与断裂，而是需要意识到每一事件，甚而每一思维，都与人类整体息息相关（Arnheim, 1996）。

　　

　　于新美学的发展建构中，除了充分了解媒体的特性，吸收科学上的新知，还有东方的智能是不容忽视的。其实科技带来最大的危险是促使人们过于外求，缺乏内省。在身处科技洪流中，要跳脱、要保持相当大的弹性。庄子应帝王篇里提及「至人之用心若镜，不将不迎，应而不藏，故能胜物而不伤。」意思是说至人的用心有如镜子，任凭事物的来去而不加迎送，如实反映而无所隐藏，所以能够胜物而不被事物所损伤。在科学上，Briggs, J. & Peat, D. (1989) 以镜子(turbulent mirror)作为浑沌(chaos)与秩序 (wholeness)之间的接口。Siler (1990)也用镜子（心灵反射镜 ，psychomirror）为隐喻来说明人类容易将同一件事的两面当成两件不同的事，例如质量与能量或时间与空间，而事实上他们是一体的，就像是科学与艺术。科学是人类对物质世界的解释，但在寻求解释的过程中，不仅只是透过人类的感官来收集资料、归纳就可以形成科学知识，而是人类将所收到的资料赋予主动地解释，因此科学知识并不是外在物质世界的翻版，它富含着人类的创造、想象，所以科学知识的形成过程就和艺术作品的形成过程一样。

　　

　　Steve Diskin在《设计创意「心」革命》一文中提到，「一片云可能暗喻着对美和真理的追寻。科学家看到的是水分子的舞动；艺术家关注的是形状、颜色和光线...」（汉宝德、张振益等，民88），而开悟的人看到的是「云在青天，水在瓶」。如果是云就以云的立场在天空逍遥；是水就以水的立场安逸自在，适情适性，各得其所。就如科技与艺术的产生都是为了人的理由，只是形态不同罢了，本质是相同的（张恬君，民88），可见知识的开始在于懂得分别差异，而智能的开端，却恰恰是以平等心如实、如常的生活。

　　

　　科技帮人类突破了心灵的藩篱(Siler, 1990)，也改变了人们思考与创造的方式(Holtzman,1997)，但相对的，科技高度发展也带来了一些危险与不安(Naisbitt J. & Naisbitt N. & Philips D. , 1999)，因为人们几乎忘了所处的地球仍然有其极限性，而艺术心灵的可贵其实是在于透过限制的穿孔，呈现出无穷的创造力。艺术的价值不在艺术品本身，而是艺术的哲思，有非常多科技艺术家同时也是大自然的爱好者，不管用的是高科技或低科技，来自生活的智能与大自然的启发，才是艺术创作最好的素材。不论世界如何转变，也只有艺术家意志延伸的作品，才算是“高感度”的创作，也才有美学上的价值。

　　

　　

　　参考文献：

　　

　　张恬君（民88），从艺术观点看《科技与人文的对话》，艺术观点，10(4)，80-81。

　　张恬君 （民89），虚拟世界的网络美学。教学科技与媒体 ，51，页 9-13 。

　　汉宝德、张振益等着 （民88），科技与人文的对话。台北：雄狮美术。

　　苏守正（民83），浅谈录像艺术。艺术家，235期，332-335。

　　Arnheim, R. (1996). From chaos to wholeness. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.54(2),117-120.

　　Benjamin, W.(1996). The work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations. (pp.217~51).  New York:Schucken.

　　Bijvoet, M. (1990). How intimate can art and technology really be? - A survey of the Art and Technology Movement of the sixties. In P. Hayward (ed.). Culture, Technology & Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century (pp.15-38).London, U.K.: John Libbey & Company Ltd.

　　Briggs, J. & Peat, D. (1989). Turbulent mirror: An illustrated guide to chaos theory and the science of wholeness. New York: Harper Collis Pub.

　　Druckrey, T. (ed.) .(1996).  Electronic culture. New York.

　　Elkins, J. (1994). Art history and the criticism of computer-generated images. Leonardo, 27(4),335-342.

　　Gigliotti , C.  (1995).Aesthetics of virtual world. Leonarde,.28(.4), 289-294.

　　Holtzman, S. (1997). Ditial mosaics: the aesthetics of cyberspace.New York: Simon & Schuster.

　　Lovejoy, M. (1992). Postmodern currents: Art and artists in the age of electronic media. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

　　Nadin, M. (1989). Emergent aesthetics- Aesthetic issues in computer arts. Leonardo. Computer Art in Context Supplemental Issue. pp.43-48.

　　Naisbitt J. & Naisbitt N. & Philips D.  (1999). High Tech, High Touch: Technology and our search for meaning, New York: Broadway Books.

　　Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital, New York: Commonwealth Publishing.

　　Popper, F.(1993). Art of the electronic age.  Singapore: Themes and Hudson LTD.

　　Rush, M. (1999). New media in late 20th-Cnetury art. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd,.

　　Siler, T. (1990). Breaking the mind barrier: The artscience of neurocosmology.New York: Simon & Schuster.

　　

 

 

远离图像，亲近文字 

——关于文化工业时代阅读的社会意义的思考

 

 

赵维森

 

摘  要：本文对作为文化工业技术的视觉媒体对传统阅读行为的巨大冲击作了具体全面的分析批评，从而对阅读的永恒价值尤其是在文化工业时代的特别意义进行了较祥备的阐述论证。

 

 

关键词：阅读、文化工业、视觉文化、视觉媒体、印刷媒体

 

 

   一、视觉媒体技术的发展对传统阅读行为的重大影响

   

科学技术的发展为人类带来文明曙光的同时，总是忘不了又投下斑斑灰暗的阴影。作为文化工业技术的视觉媒体的兴盛给人类文化传播领域带来的革命性影响和它对传统阅读行为的巨大冲击，正体现了这种二律背反的效应。

 

   

视觉媒体的兴起是以本世纪初电影技术的诞生作为标志的，本世纪中叶出现的电视技术则使视觉媒体的发展如虎添翼，而近年来日臻完善的电脑多媒体技术，以其对图象的生成、加工、复制的优势和凭借网络通讯传输对影视技术的综合运用，表征着现代文化工业对传媒领域革新的全面完成。毫无疑问，视觉媒体比传统的基于语言文字的印刷媒体具有更为丰富的异质多样的意向，它创造出了与以往时代迥然相异的言说方式，它以手法灵活、图象逼真、素材丰富、活动力强、影响力巨大并向所有人开放的特征，使社会涵量与覆盖面空前增大，从而对人类文化的传播，使高雅艺术走进文化大众，以及对提高人类的文化素养作出了和正在作出不可磨灭的贡献。但是，我们也痛心地看到，以影视为代表的视觉媒体同时又对人类的精神生活产生着极其消极的影响。其中尤以对传统阅读行为的冲击为甚，它使现代文化大众的阅读对象、阅读方式、阅读性质、阅读质量发生了根本性的逆转。

 

   （一）读者注意力的转移

   

一明显的事实是，进入文化工业时代，文化大众对一切社会信息、一切文化意蕴的接受理解企图脱离语言文字而获得。影视的联姻，电视机、影碟机的普及，电子游戏的泛滥，电脑多媒体开始走进家庭，使得到处是流光溢彩的图象，满眼是生动直观的画面，光和影的交织笼罩了一切。当我们看影视等视觉媒体时，图像符号充当了正文，而语言文字被简化为时有时无的只言片语萎缩到屏幕的一角，成了图象符号的附庸和注释。于是，语言文字在读者视野中日渐消失，阅读行为由对语言文字的关注转为对图象符号的青睐，古老的印刷文化逐渐被新兴的视觉文化所取代。

 

   

传统阅读行为的这一转变，固然是由于阅读主体面对的客体信息符号发生了变化，但更深层次的原因是，这种变化了的客体信息符号本身对阅读主体具有一种符号意义以外的超强吸引力。它不是通过自身包含的意义指令来召引读者，而是通过自身拥有的娱乐性吸引读者对它的青睐。它直白、简单、快捷、透明，充满感官刺激，使读者甘于放弃对单一枯燥的印刷符号的观照而趋之若骛。在印刷媒体中，语言符号因直接指涉意义，所以读者对它的关注，除了意义以外，别无所求；而视觉图象在意义之外，更具有种种诱人的特性，于是对视觉媒体的青睐，必然导致对意义的较少关注、甚至对意义的完全漠视。同时，视觉媒体技术是文化工业的产物，在浓厚的商业意识驱动下，它的出现不是为了使读者建立一种更加科学合理的阅读行为，不是为了通过改变阅读的方式和性质而使阅读质量有所提高；而是因为视觉文化比印刷文化更能迎合文化大众所具有的现代主义的冲动和追求感官刺激的欲望。可见，图象和感官消费之所以能成为时尚，在很大程度上体现了一种商业操作的广告效应，从而也就注定了视觉媒体在对文化作积极而多视角传播的同时，又包含着一定的反文化性。

 

    （二）阅读行为由直接阅读转变为间接阅读

   

显然，由读者亲自持有文本并通过自己的视觉亲自流览文本信息，从而获得对文本内容意义的理解把握的直接阅读行为，比只通过别人的转述介绍了解文本内容意义的间接阅读行为，能获得对文本对象的更真切的感受、体认，能更加逼近作者的心灵，从而能获得更多的真知灼见。但是，基于视觉媒体的观赏阅读行为恰恰失去了这种直接性特点而更具有间接阅读的性质。人们不再以亲自持有原始文本一行一行解读语言文字代码为读书人的荣耀，不再以拥案自读时或而喜、或而悲、或而沉思、或而遐想、或而朗声吟诵、或而窃窃私语为读书人的理想境界；人们习惯了一种通过观赏或聆听影视编导的转述介绍——对语言文本的改编——来领会原始文本内容意义的间接阅读方式。而影视编导们更怀抱一种宏伟的企图，欲将人类历史上所有以语言文字为媒体的文本作品全部转换为图象媒体的影视作品。于是，对《红楼梦》、《三国演义》、《安娜。卡列尼娜》、《战争和和平》……的阅读欣赏，人们很少再有耐心去理会原著而径直通过观看影视来完成。从前，读者因母语以外的语言障碍，对外国作品的阅读必须借助翻译文本来实现，而现在，对母语作品的阅读也要依靠影视编导的翻译诠释；而对已由别国文字翻译为本国文字且又改编为影视作品的观赏阅读，实际上变成了对其原著的“影子的影子”观照。试想，原著的光彩，经过“影�