Scopic Regime Research Articles

‘Blessed Is He, Who Has Seen’: The Power of Ritual Viewing and Ritual Framing in Eleusis

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Horn. Hymn. Cer. 480-2 [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Pindar, fr. 121 Bowra [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Sophocles, fr. 837 Pearson-Radt Blessed is he, who has seen these, among the mortal men who live on earth; but he who is not initiated in the sacred rites, who has had no share in them, he does not have a lot of similar things when he is dead under the vast darkness, says the author of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. These lines have traditionally been interpreted as referring to the spectacles offered to the initiates in the course of the secret initiation of the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of Eleusis, often referred to as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE INASCII] by our sources. (1) Analogous emphasis on the visual aspect of the spectacle is also given by several other sources, which are conventionally taken to refer to the secret initiation ceremony of the Greater Mysteries of Eleusis: Sophocles, fr. 837 Pearson-Radt (Thrice-blessed among the mortals are those who having seen these sacred rites enter Hades: for them alone there is life, but for the others all is evil); and Pindar, fr. 121 Bowra (Blessed is he who having seen these things has gone under the earth; he knows the end of life; but he also knows the god-given beginning). (2) None of these or any other of our sources gives us a detailed and reliable account of what the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] saw or, as a matter of fact, how the things seen conferred this sense of blessedness, and in what ways this blessedness eased the pain (or was it the fear?) of entering the chambers of Hades, and made the after-death existence endurable. Scholarly speculation on the nature of the things seen (and undoubtedly heard too) by the initiates is abundant. (3) A collage of textual evidence (consisting primarily of testimonies from late Christian and, therefore biased, authors) and iconographical evidence (not necessarily any less ambiguous) has been constructed and reconstructed in almost every possible way; and yet no account can be privileged without the essential leap of faith. Although a summary of some of the most learned reconstructions will be given here, the primary focus of the present essay is not so much on the nature of the things seen, as on the possible ways they were perceived by the initiates and the culturally defined scopic regimes that informed that perception. (4) Vision, Visuality, and Ritually-Centred Visuality A particular focus of this paper will be to introduce, and test the efficacy of, some recent and some more or less well-established developments in the disciplines of art history and visual culture in the study of the mysteric cults in general, and the study of the initiatory process ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) in the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of Eleusis in particular. Effectively, I argue that, when studying the sources that speak of the process of mystic initiation in Eleusis, more may be gained if we shift our focus from the idea of unqualified and unmediated visual experience (vision) onto the cultural construct that mediates between the eye of the beholder and the things seen (visuality). The point of this exercise is to show that even if we could actually look at what happened within the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], it is quite unlikely that we would be able to see what the initiates saw, as it is extremely difficult to reconstruct with any certainty the complex nexus of sociopolitical and cultural discourses that shaped their gaze, their ways of viewing. Furthermore, I examine Jas Eisner's notion of ritual-centred visuality, not as a possible conceptual framework for understanding the gaze of the pilgrim in the Imperial era, but for considering how ritual framing allows the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the Eleusinian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] to see sacred visions beyond the constraints of secular visuality. …

The Female Gaze in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

To possess the gaze has traditionally meant in Western culture to occupy a male subject position in relation to one’s objects of vision. While critics have often identified the omniscient narrator of George Eliot’s Middlemarch with the all-powerful male gaze, this paper aims to challenge and undermine the dominance of the male gaze in the novel by examining narrative points of view as well as the various masculine discourses of vision―such as artistic, scientific, and medical gazes―which subject women under the scopic dominance of the male. By applying the concept of the gaze to narrative stance as well as examining how women are represented through the male gaze, I claim that the male gaze associated with its omniscient narrative is not dominant or monolithic, but that it is possible to locate a version of the female gaze, as exemplified by Dorothea’s sympathetic gaze, that can be a powerful resistance and alternative to the masculine gaze and its scopic regime. By focusing on the interrelated issues of the gaze, gender, aesthetics, and narrative, this reading of Middlemarch clearly demonstrates the radical nature of the feminist project Eliot was engaged in her critique of oppressive masculine system of viewing and its power relations. (Konkuk University)

The Geographical Gaze. Towards a history of science of Geography’s scopic regimes

It is commonplace within the discipline to regard Geography as a visual discipline. Nonetheless it often remains unclear that this means and how it relates to questions of communicating or constructing geographical knowledge. This article tries to focus on Geography’s scopic regimes, i. e. historical and disciplinary modes of seeing, showing and describing, from the perspective of a history of science. Visuality, it is claimed, is closely linked to disciplinary paradigms and theories. Making things visible is a key moment of scientific practices and rationalities. Focusing on the Landschafts paradigm, aerial photography and early contributions to the Quantitative Revolution, this article illustrates how it might be fruitful to read paradigms in Geography through the lenses of its scopic regimes.

Objects of vision: the polymorphic cinema of Michael Snow

This paper explores how the sensory spaces within the works of Michael Snow represent kinesthetic and audile-tactile modes of vision, proposing an integrated form of visuality that functions in tandem with the other senses, relating to the sensus communis proposed by Aristotle. While Snow’s cinema is often characterized as more objective, technological, and immaterial than the subjective and poetic aesthetic of Brakhage, Snow’s films present a similar yet distinctly idiosyncratic paradigm of multisensory perception through their sculptural, deconstructive nature. While Snow’s camera lens remains focused on the exterior world, his films present spaces that journey far from the illusory and disembod ied nature of the scopic regime that Martin Jay (1988) terms “Cartesian dualism,” instead seeking out a unified field of energetic vision through relationships between movement, duration, sight, sound, and the embodied limits of vision itself, and are deeply informed by a sustained multidisciplinary approach.

Konstruowanie rzeczywistości politycznej

Political reality constructing. „Uważam Rze” and „Polityka” weekly magazines covers analysis The article presents the results of semiotic analysis conducted for 78 weekly socio‑political magazines covers: „Uważam Rze” and „Polityka”. The research was connected with the problem of presenting and constructing the political reality on the covers of the magazines. It was assumed, that each of analysed titles functions in a contrary scopic regime and, as a consequence, presents different images of politics. The article is also an attempt to answer the questions: Which signs were used in constructing the political reality? In which way politicians activities were commented on the magazines covers? What kind of references to value systems and to social and political divisions were presented on the covers? The remarks concerning knowledge transmission and social worlds formation centered around magazines are also described in the paper. Synthesis of research outcomes is presented in article summary.

The Birth of a Stereoscopic Nation: Hollywood, Digital Empire and the Cybernetic Attraction

This article argues that Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) is a key moment in the development of stereoscopy, cinematography and animation. On both an aesthetic/formal level and in terms of its narrative, Avatar talks back to the origins of Victorian stereography, American cinematography and the racist discourses of ethnography and ecocide that ensued. Echoing 19th-century stereographs of ‘natives’ and their resource-rich environments, together with DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Avatar also attempts to negotiate the atrocities of the past and to relate them to our present. But this negotiation also takes place on a more subtle ontological level: originating within the structures of a ‘cybernetic empire’, Victorian stereographic imaging is strikingly indicative of Avatar’s contemporary position as a work of culture in the age of cybernetic systems. It has been argued that monographic imaging reputedly replaced stereographic forms in popularity because the latter disrupted the scopic regimes of modernity by emphasizing the role of the body in the process of vision. Avatar’s computer generated composite form circumvents this equation, however; while photography may have sought to minimize viewers’ awareness of their own bodies in the process of beholding the indexical form, such a framework is questionable in an age of fabricated CG composites. If the origins of stereography predated photography, and if its founding image was hand drafted, then what originally appeared a technical footnote in the history of stereography now becomes a key factor in understanding Avatar and the new ‘cybernetic regime of modernity’.

THINKING HISTORICALLY WHEN THE MARGINS BECOME THE CENTER: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS HISTORICAL CRITIQUE IN MARTIN JAY'S ESSAYS FROM THE EDGE

ABSTRACTThis review of Martin Jay's recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth‐construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth‐telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process.

Six Theses on Targeted Killing

This article presents six theses on targeted killing as a form of political violence. These explore the power relations, lawfare, scopic regimes, forms of spatial management and symbolic communications which suggest that the practice of targeted killing arises from the failures of the Western global counter-insurgency campaign to achieve its aims. Therefore, rather than demonstrating omniscience and omnipotence, targeted killing is indicative of the Western position of weakness in the wars of ‘the colonial present’.

Cindy Sherman: uma criptografia corpórea*

This essay invites us to reflect on the relationship we have both with time and in the time we call our own. As a result, the value of contemporary here alluded implies not simply belonging to a context defined chronologically, but a reading operation that problematizes this belonging, the context and its limits and timeframes, making use of the photographic series of visual artist Cindy Sherman as intercessor.Keywords: Visual culture, scopic regimes, dispositif * This article was originally published in v. 8, no. 2, July/Dec 2010 and reprinted by technical problems. In the previous edition, the references and footnotes were not printed.

Cindy Sherman: uma criptografia corpórea

This essay invites us to reflect on the relationship we have both with time and in the time we call our own. As a result, the value of contemporary here alluded implies not simply belonging to a context defined chronologically, but a reading operation that problematizes this belonging, the context and its limits and timeframes, making use of the photographic series of visual artist Cindy Sherman as intercessor.Keywords: Visual culture, scopic regimes, dispositif

Stand-up comedy and the legacy of the mature vagina

This article explores the work of older female comedians who explicitly refer to their sexed bodies, and their vaginas in particular, as a playfully political discursive strategy. At its heart are a number of stand-up performances made since 2000 by Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr, informed and supported by their performances in a variety of other forms and media (including reality television, talk shows and auto/biographical writing). These performances draw attention to the relationship between performative utterance and visuality through the tropes of public confession and allusions to cosmetic surgery and aging genitalia. This can be risky in a genre in which staged persona, body and performance material are so closely yoked. Despite their different ages and signature practices, Diller, Rivers and Barr can be seen to be working in a professional lineage of female comedians, including Sophie Tucker, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Belle Barth, Pearl Williams and LaWanda Page, who have foregrounded their own sexuality as aging women. In their redeployment of taboos which mark the female body as grotesque and unruly, these women expose the scopic regimes that limit how post-menopausal women are read, and thereby erased, in the public realm.

“Give the People What They Want”: Bodies on Display in Marlene Van Niekerk’s Triomf

Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf has attained both literary acclaim and notoriety since it was first published in Afrikaans in 1994 (English translation 1999). This darkly comic novel is set at the dawn of the democratic election and as such, the fictional context mirrors the historical moment in which it was published. The novel relates the misadventures of the incestuous and indigent Afrikaans family, the Benades, whose grotesque bodies are described in minute detail. The paper examines the reason for this visceral corporeality in the context of Louise Bethlehem’s classification of the post-apartheid literary canon as one “in which the abject body is a privileged trope.” During apartheid, relationships were governed by racist laws, stereotypes, and perceptions (rather than intimate conversations or reciprocal interactions). Van Niekerk explores this dominance of the visual in encounters with others, and in the process unpacks the “ensemble of practices” which made up what Allen Feldman calls the apartheid “scopic regime.” Van Niekerk enquires whether looking at the other could potentially facilitate empathy and understanding, or whether this remains merely an act of voyeurism. In this regard, the paper examines the meaning of the motif of binoculars and peepholes in Triomf, and argues that the Benades’ thwarted desire for connection and empathy is enacted through the visual medium. The reader, too, acts as literary voyeur, yet in this manner begins to care for and empathize with the Benades. In conclusion, Van Niekerk’s visceral descriptions should not be classified as merely sensationalist or exhibitionist. Rather they represent an ethical intervention and an attempt to explore the formation of intimate relationships which, for Van Niekerk, are always mediated by the body.

“Give the People What They Want”: Bodies on Display in Marlene Van Niekerk’s Triomf

Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf has attained both literary acclaim and notoriety since it was first published in Afrikaans in 1994 (English translation 1999). This darkly comic novel is set at the dawn of the democratic election and as such, the fictional context mirrors the historical moment in which it was published. The novel relates the misadventures of the incestuous and indigent Afrikaans family, the Benades, whose grotesque bodies are described in minute detail. The paper examines the reason for this visceral corporeality in the context of Louise Bethlehem’s classification of the post-apartheid literary canon as one “in which the abject body is a privileged trope.” During apartheid, relationships were governed by racist laws, stereotypes, and perceptions (rather than intimate conversations or reciprocal interactions). Van Niekerk explores this dominance of the visual in encounters with others, and in the process unpacks the “ensemble of practices” which made up what Allen Feldman calls the apartheid “scopic regime.” Van Niekerk enquires whether looking at the other could potentially facilitate empathy and understanding, or whether this remains merely an act of voyeurism. In this regard, the paper examines the meaning of the motif of binoculars and peepholes in Triomf, and argues that the Benades’ thwarted desire for connection and empathy is enacted through the visual medium. The reader, too, acts as literary voyeur, yet in this manner begins to care for and empathize with the Benades. In conclusion, Van Niekerk’s visceral descriptions should not be classified as merely sensationalist or exhibitionist. Rather they represent an ethical intervention and an attempt to explore the formation of intimate relationships which, for Van Niekerk, are always mediated by the body.

Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in <i>Kuroshitsuji</i>

Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in Kuroshitsuji Waiyee Loh (bio) In 2007, Toboso Yana began publishing Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler), a manga series set in late Victorian England about a beautiful butler named Sebastian, who is actually a devil in disguise, and his young master, Count Ciel Phantomhive. With its Western European setting, its aestheticization of the demonic and the deathly, and its penchant for roses, Rococo motifs, and the color black, Kuroshitsuji exemplifies a type of “Gothic” style that has become popular in postwar Japanese shōjo culture since Hagio Moto’s classic vampire manga Pō no ichizoku (1972–76, The clan of Poe).1 Through a reading of Kuroshitsuji as a representative case study, I examine this shōjo Gothic style and its relation to Japanese national identity in the age of postmodern globalization and post-colonial reevaluations of the legacy of nineteenth-century Western imperialism.2 In the first part of the essay, I consider the relationship between the superflat visual aesthetic and the postmodern condition of simulation, which the shōjo Gothic style makes explicit. I then discuss how the shōjo Gothic style, as a postmodern and postcolonial practice of enunciation, simulates, recontextualizes, and reinvents a Western European past in order to articulate the enduring desire of the contemporary Japanese nation for an idealized “Western modernity,” characterized by “tasteful” consumption. In the last [End Page 111] part of the essay, I argue that Kuroshitsuji, through its Gothic style, paradoxically intervenes in its own idealization of Western modernity to celebrate contemporary Japan’s ability to hybridize different cultures and to disseminate its hybrid cultural commodities around the world as a cultural superpower in the age of postmodern globalization. The shōjo Gothic style in Kuroshitsuji thus expresses the profound ambivalence of postcolonial Japanese national identity vis-à-vis the West in the twenty-first century. Through reinscribing the signs of a Western European past, Kuroshitsuji articulates the split in the Japanese “Self” between the endless striving for the ideal of “Western” modernity and the nationalistic affirmation of an empowered “Japanese” (post)modernity, while eliding the inherent cultural hybridity of the shōjo Gothic style and of the national identity articulated through this style. Lastly, it is important to note that Japan was (and is) a (neo)colonial power in Asia, and I touch on the significance of this double postcolonial relationship at the end of the essay. Murakami Takashi first introduced the concept of “superflat” within the context of an art exhibition titled Super Flat, which was presented in 2000 at the PARCO department store gallery. He later developed the concept through two more exhibitions: Coloriage (2002) and Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (2005). Murakami and several other critics, including Azuma Hiroki and Sawaragi Noi, interpret superflatness as a visual manifestation of the postmodern collapse of hierarchies and the fragmentation of the modern Cartesian subject.3 In this essay, I will argue that the shōjo Gothic style points to a connection between superflatness and another principal element of the postmodern condition: simulation. In “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), Fredric Jameson reads the formal planarity of Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes as a symbolic expression of “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality” in our world where objects “now become a set of texts or simulacra.” 4 Likewise, the shōjo Gothic style suggests that the superflat visual aesthetic implies a particular postmodern mode of vision and knowledge—a “way of seeing” (John Berger) or “scopic regime” (Martin Jay)—that “flattens” all “real” phenomena in the world into hyperreal signifiers “without origin or reality.” 5 Kuroshitsuji illustrates this connection between literal and figurative flattening through its depiction of the Undertaker’s shop. In Figure 1, the façade of the shop is depicted in a highly planar, nongeometric perspectival [End Page 112] style. The figures of the characters, the door of the shop, and the coffin and tombstones flanking the door are positioned in a highly linear arrangement, and the speech bubbles add to the planarity through their superimposition, also in a linear fashion, over the picture...

O realismo entre as tecnologias da imagem e os regimes de visualidade: fotografia, cinema e a “virada imagética” do Século XIX

The article begins with a discussion of theoretical and methodological concerning about the relation between scopic regimes and image technologies. Then, it questions the objectivity of the notion of realism and, avoiding technological deterministic approaches, seeks to analyze some historical transformations that deeply affect the scopic regimes in the 19th century and that may help to explain why, in this specific moment, the development of the photography and afterwards, of the cinema became viable, thinkable and desirable.

After-Images: Visual Cultures and Subaltern Pasts

In February 1856, the Illustrated London News published a wood-cut print of Sido Murmu, a captured leader of an anti-colonial rebellion in India led by indigenous Santal headmen. Known as the Hul, this movement has been re-visited by exponents of subaltern historiography in an effort to understand insurgent consciousness, and the parameters of ‘minority’ history. Working across these parameters, this article employs a visual and historical ethnographic methodology, in order to question whether the interplay between colonial-era and post-independence representations of the Hul may inform a new understanding both of British scopic regimes and of Santal (tribal) and Adivasi (Indigenous) assertion in India. The concept of ‘after-image’ is used metaphorically, to trace how a seemingly imperialist portrait of Sido Murmu has assumed multiple afterlives. I question how these afterlives intersect with the intangible heritage of the Hul especially in the new state of Jharkhand (eastern-central India), to generate an approach to heterotopian encounters that has applicability in both visual studies and subaltern studies.

Interview with Laura Mulvey

This conversation between Laura Mulvey and Roberta Sassatelli offers a historical reconstruction of Mulvey’s work, from her famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to her most recent reflections on male gaze, film technology and visual culture. The conversation initially deals with the socio-cultural context in which the ‘Visual Pleasure...’ essay was produced by outlining a number of possible theoretical parallelisms with other scholars, from Foucault to Barthes to Goffman. Then, on the basis of Mulvey’s latest book, Death 24× a Second, and of a variety of contemporary examples, the emphasis is on the relative shift in Mulvey’s work from gender to time and visual technology. Finally, the conversation focuses on the concept of ‘gendered scopic regime’ and the potential re-articulation of the male gaze through the technological re-direction and control of the visual.

From “Having it all” to “Away from it all”: Post-feminism and Tamara Drewe

This paper focuses on Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel Tamara Drewe (2007) as a post-feminist text that negotiates the contradictions of the eponymous heroine’s desire to get “away from it all” in order to “have it all.” Despite its twenty-first century concerns, Tamara Drewe also alludes to nineteenth-century forms in its loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) and Simmonds’s mimicry of Victorian landscape painting for the background of her text. This anachronistic approach enables Tamara Drewe to resist the totalizing efforts of the “post” and dismantle the singularity implied by “feminism.” Specifically, Simmonds exploits the graphic novel’s scopic regime to critique the presumed irrelevance of issues coded as “feminist,” such as “the gaze” to post-feminist culture. Finally, Tamara Drewe represents the experience of feminism as itself necessarily anachronistic, consisting of simultaneous and often conflicting histories.

Race on display: The ‘Melanian’, ‘Mongolian’ and ‘Caucasian’ galleries at Liverpool Museum (1896–1929)

This paper examines a form of evolutionary display that emerged at Liverpool Museum between 1896 and 1929, one based on racial types. It traces the formation and early history of this institution, as well as the development of evolutionary theories in the mid‐late nineteenth century. The paper moves on to analyse the beliefs and exhibitionary practices of Liverpool Museum's director, Dr Henry Ogg Forbes (1851–1932), and the influence of A.H. Keane's work on the organisation of collections. In 1896, notably, the Annual Reports began to list all new accessions under three races – Melanian (or ‘black’), Mongolian (or ‘yellow’), and Caucasian (or ‘white’) – terms closely linked to those articulated by A.H. Keane in his books Ethnology (1895. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Man: Past and Present (1899. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, revised and largely re‐written by A. Hingston Quiggin and A.C. Haddon). By 1901, this tripartite racial categorisation was translated to the spatial layout of the museum: the basement was devoted to Melanian objects, in the main entrance were the Caucasian displays, while the upper floor housed the Mongolian gallery. As the collections became reassembled into these new configurations, so the conditions of viewing artefacts also changed. The paper contends that the physical reorganisation of spaces and the implementation of new scopic regimes carried with them ideological messages which reinforced the intended hierarchy of peoples and material culture. It concludes by reflecting on the power ethnographic museums wielded in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain in promoting notions of scientific racism in popular culture.

State Formation, Visual Technology and Spectatorship: Visions of Modernity in Brazil and Argentina

How can we conceive of the relation between technologies of image-making and the formations of political power, without reducing the former to merely superstructural effects of a pre-existing ideology or deducing the latter from the functional determination inherent in technical apparatuses? In this article, I revisit the notion of the state as a visual form I proposed in an earlier work, arguing that in order to understand the articulation between politics and visuality in modernity we need to pay attention to the performance of showing and seeing that mediates between the spectacle and spectatorship. To grasp the way in which historical change (political and technological) impacts on this constellation, in particular in the transition from photographic to cinematic regimes of visuality between the late 19th and early 20th century, I take these questions through two rather different ‘case studies’: photographer Juan Gutiérrez’s images of Brazilian state rituals in the mid-1890s and Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Aleph’ of 1949. Whereas Gutiérrez’s photographic series, I argue, announces the cinema and its ways of mobilizing actors and spectators alike, as the limit of a 19th-century visuality primed on the stability and self-enclosedness of viewers and objects, Borges’s story retrospectively enacts the transition from photographic to cinematic seeing in an intratextual battle of acts of transcription from the impossible object at the centre of the plot, which grants infinite, universal visibility to the one who beholds it. Reading the two together, or against one another, then, allows us to see the dimension of transience undercutting the apparent solidity and timelessness with which scopic regimes promise us access to the real.