English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

There is a wealth of scholarship on spectator positions, thanks to film studies. Rather attempt a review of all of this, I'll highlight a few pieces of scholarship that look at the visual contruction of subjectivities outside of film.

First is Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, which I have only dealt with thus far through secondary sources. The Arcades are proto-shopping malls and Benjamin was fascinated with how they used architecture, excessive visual stimulation and capitalism to construct the subject as a mobile gaze. As film theory also notes, the very act of looking can construct a position of power. Leisure is crucial to this work and the failure of intimacy and implication between the spectator and the spectacle is something that I, and hopefully, Benjamin, see as crucial to how modernist subjectivity assumes class, gender, race and nationalistic priviledges to isolate the subject from the external world. Benjamin's canonical essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" partakes of a similar logic that considers the nature of community and the spectator.

More recently, one of the chapters in Susan Bordo's Flight to Objectivity "looks" at art and asks how the invention of perspective in painting was representative of an ideological shift that priviledged objectivity as a way of knowing. In Medieval art, the spectator had to choose which image to gaze upon, but by the Enlightenment, the picture presented itself to us as a consumable whole.

This linking of ideology and technology is crucial and can be traced further though the invention of the camera. Within Victorian Studies there is an interest in proto-photography, which can be traced in poetry and elsewhere.

I first got interested in this field after reading a collection of essays edited by Linda Williams entitled Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. the book has essays on Benjamin, the Camera Obscura and horror films. Carol Clover's "The Eye of Horror" was an examination of how the eye works as an orafice in the viewing of horror films, both as an objectifying gaze and as a point of vulnerability. Anne Friedberg's essay "Cinema and the Postmodern Condition" picks-up where Benjamin left off and explored how Arcades created modern male subjects while shopping malls create postmodern female subjects. The difference is that the postmodern subject is self-referential, she sees herself as an object in addition to a subject.

It is my suspicion that internet-based subjectivities will pick-up on the nuances that Friedberg and Clover noted, breaking down the isolation of priviledge that cloistered the modern subject. what is not addressed explicitly, however, is how identification changes. In novels, we were established as spectators who could observe. In film, identification with characters became possible in a way only possible through visual representation. With the internet, however, with the removal of the body (skin as the boundary of self) from interactions, the ways in which the self is defined and that boundary is policed will have to change. Of course, there is one part of the body that is not forfiet in the surfing subject, that being the eyes. As participants in the internet, we are addressed as eyes.