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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！

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。

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）

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

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.

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

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

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

numbers in margin.
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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:
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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
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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
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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