Berger, John. Ways of Seeing

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Viking, 1973.

The first essay discusses how the importance and understanding of images changed with the possibilities of their unlimited mechanical reproduction. Inspired by Benjamin, Berger argues that a relationship between a person and an image is always under attack from power structures (such as authoritative texts, marketing strategies, placing of images in specially constructed places) which aims at mystifying the human past—something that privileged social groups aspire to use in order to keep people distanced from their past. Berger argues that a proper interpretation/signification of any text should, first, involve a clear understanding of one’s own historical (and social) position, the use of one’s own plane of lived experience. “A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history. This is why – and this is the only reason why – the entire art of the past has now become a political issues.” (33)

The third essay deals with the ways a women’s social presence is constructed as that of a passive object: whether a man’s social presence is defined by what he can do to objects around him, a woman’s social presence is constructed by “what can and cannot be done to her.” (46) As a result, “a woman must continually watch herself… She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself… And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.” (46) By watching herself with men’s eyes, women turn themselves into objects.

The fifth essay deals with oil painting as a way to possess things and, hence, the world. The seventh essay discusses the temporal and consumerist aspects of publicity images in the contemporary world. “The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product” (134): true, but once the spectator-buyer invests her own meanings into this product, this relationship stops being entirely passive, as Berger puts it, and becomes more active on her behalf. “Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future” (139). Therefore, an extensive use of everything related to history, mythology, poetry, etc.

“The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggest that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better” (142).