Instagram captions w images

For their final projects students will use the class Instagram account to curate a ten image assemblage building on our course inquiry. Using the thematics and theories included in our weekly course inquiries students will curate ten images (either taken by the students themselves or culled from other sources with due credit given and cited) to help explain and unpack the theory/thematic the student has chosen.

For example, if a student may choose broad themes postmodernism or realism, or smaller themes like the medical gaze, pastiche, or Orientalism. They will then choose images that help illustrate, explain, or exemplify the meaning of the term and/or how it works as an analytic for understanding the visual.

All images should be from outside our class. Do not use images from the textbook, lectures, or presentations.

Students will post these images to the class Instagram account with a 200-250 word explication of each image in the caption. The explication should, 1. Explain the concept and 2. analyze the image in light of the concept. class PowerPoints below!  SCIENTIFIC LOOKING
COMM 432
NOVEMBER 7, 2022
GUIDING QUESTIONS
• How have gazes at the human body are inflected with epistemic concerns?
• How have science and medicine been informed by classifications of
difference and dominant ideas about what constitutes healthy and normal.
How are those ideas shaped by dominant ideas of race and gender?
• Relationship between looking, technology, and knowledge- influence our
understanding of visual science as uninhibited truth…
PREMODERN EMPIRIC GAZE
• Greece- Empiric School of Thought- relied on
observation and comparative analogy• unified in the view that illness was caused not
by divine powers but by natural forces.
• Medical illustration of Wound Man- a spatial
index, a diagram of battle injuries
• But body is cut open and peeled back to
reveal “hidden truths” in the body.
INVENTING THE MEDICAL GAZE
• Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic
• Investigated the concept of bodily truth
• emergence of the concept of looking inside the body as a privileged form of medical
knowledge in late 18th century
• Influenced by epistemic conditions of Enlightenment- Declaration of Rights of Man and of
the citizen were introduced, along with humanistic hospital based medical teaching
• medicine seeks to go inside the body to get at deeper truth
ROLE OF DISSECTION IN THE MEDICAL GAZE
• Late 18th century- Rise of anatomical dissection- practiced by Marie- Francious Xavier
Bichat
• processes of inquiry and interpretation
• physicians sought empirical evidence by looking inside the body.
• a new way of understanding and classifying the body as a system.
• A new way of looking and knowing→ involved not just seeing directly but also defining
seeing itself as something that required instruments.
• Scientific seeing becomes mediated- no longer takes place through touch and handling bodies,
but through instrumentalized sight.
MEDICAL GAZE
• elicits hidden truths about life by looking inside dead
bodies, through which one could, paradoxically, see the
structure of the living system
• “rediscovers not the geography of the body, but the order
of classifications.”
• Looking linked to other activities that give meaning to what
vision uncovers: experimenting, analyzing, and orderings
MEDICAL GAZE AND CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS
• Classification system- not a reflection of objective truth about the order of
nature, but a social system that both creates and reinforces systems
of knowledge and power.
• a new clinical regime of knowledge in which vision plays a distinctive role
• The interiors of the body becomes a new frontier for social management and the
execution of power through knowledge.
• Medical gaze, even when it doesn’t go inside the body shapes visual productions of
“truth”.
• Uses bodies as sites of evidence and opportunities for classificatory systems.
EVIDENCE, CLASSIFICATION, AND IDENTIFICATION
• Photograph Bears the legacy of positivism- philosophical belief that true and valid
knowledge is derived from objective scientific method
• Positivism embraced by practictioners who favor objective study and measurement as
means of perceiving reality over empirical and subjective orientation
• Idea that Instruments/technology provide more objective way of seeing
• Photographic camera seen as a useful tool for mechanically observing, measuring, and studying
the world
• Idea that it would correct errors in human perception
TAXONOMY
• Carl Linnaeus→ 18th century, Swedish botanist
• Binomial classification- a form system for classifying each form of animal, plant, and
mineral life
• Linneaus placed humans in animal kingdom, but classified them as races.
• German naturalist Johann Blumenbach switched to physical appearance for
classification→ hierarchical systems purporting to show truth through taxonomic
scheme.
• Taxonomic scheme- reflects evolutionary history
• These schemas were used in promulgating racial science during the 19th and 20th centuries.
From Here I Saw What Happened, and I Cried (19951996)
• Tension between external body and inner
truth. Role of scientific or medical gaze in
producing “truth” in bodies.
• Weems addresses the role of photography as
a mode of positivism in racist science and
the project of classification. Taxonomy and
evolutionary history used against people’s
humanity.
• Objectifies people’s bodies as surface
evidence for social inequality.
TAXONOMY IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
• use of scientific truth as basis for social programs.
• Desire to keep track of institutionalized populations
• Document and classify social subjects like poor, infirm, criminal, and disabled.
• Stem from understanding that you could use classificatory systems for social organization and
control.
• Biopower→ Foucault→
• Techniques used in culture to subjugate bodies and control populations by targeting biological life of
human species
• Managing populations through social hygiene, public health, education, demography, census taking,
and reproductive regulation
• Camera used as a tool by
social bureaucrats and managers
to document and classify the
many residents of institutions like
jails, schools, and hospitals.
• Visual science of
body’s appearances/behaviors used
to support racist and sexist
cultural ideologies
• conflates science and semiotics.
POSTMODERNISM
COMM 432
OCTOBER 31, 2022
IF MODERNITY WAS KNOWN FOR…
• Belief in science and technology as means of improving society
• Guided by Englightenment beliefs: unified selves/subjects (ex. Descartes, I think therefore
I am) and universal truth attained through rationality.
• Positivism and rationality→ truth was universal and arrived at through scientific
positivism
• liberal humanism- people had the “right” to self govern bc they are conscious, unitary
subjects that had the capacities for rationality and abstraction (Always gendered and
racialized).
THEN POSTMODERNISM NAMES…
• Skepticism of science and rationality to guide and shape humanity and the world
• questioning of the supposed universality of structural knowledge
• skepticism in modern belief in progress
• Self-consciousness and irony
• Contingency and change
• Decentered subjects and destabilized master narratives→ Fragmentation of the unitary
subject, multiplicity of narratives of progress and norms.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR POSTMODERNISM
• Changes occurring after 1968 and WWII→ skeptical views towards science in the wake
of Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Japan.
• Post-Fordist economy- deindustrialization, globalization, and turn towards a service
economy.
• Social movements and decolonization- the destabilization and critique of white
patriarchal man as the gold standard of humanity
• Escalation of contingency and change in a world increasingly characterized by mobility,
transformation, fragmentation, and a multiplicity of beliefs and experiences.
READING QUESTION
What French philosopher wrote The Postmodern Condition?
JEAN FRANÇOIS LYOTARD’S POSTMODERN CONDITION
• Criticized modernity’s quest for truth
• Period of escalating globalization, computerization, and information technologies differently
distributed pursuits for knowledge..
• The grand narratives/metanarrative of Enlightenment progress that dominated modernity had
destabilized.
• Shaped by a metanarrative→ belief we can know something at its core and that these knowledges
would solve social problems
• Metanarrative= narratives that reveal the structural basis of all narrative systems. Marxism, religion,
science, psychoanalysis.
• Enlightenment ideas like universal truth, unified self, positivist science, and
foundationalism/rationalism thrown into flux.
GLOBALIZATION AND POSTMODERNITY
• David Harvey
• Recognition of the irony of global trade liberalization in a world becoming increasingly uneven in terms of flow of
resources, money, and goods.
• Postmodernism as an economic, post-Fordist, culture of flexible accumulation, relating to globalization’s time-space
compression
• New organizational forms and production technologies, acceleration of production and distribution→ shifting bases
from goods to services.
Has a disorienting and disruptive impact upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural
and social life.”
POSTMODERNISM IS CULTURAL LOGIC OF
LATE CAPITALISM
• Fredric Jameson
• With changes in epistemological foundations and economic structures come changes in
culture and aesthetics
• PoMo as turn in art, philosophy, and architecture toward recognition of the
value and meaning of mass media, popular culture, and everyday culture and
design
• Practitioners emphasize mediation and structural instability,
• questioning the idea that there is a singular modern subject or essence of humanity
• acknowledging the relativity, situatedness, and mess indeterminancy of human experience.
The Portland Building, Portland Oregon
READING QUESTION
Another French theorist, Jean Baudrillard, described post-modern life as
characterized by what?
SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION
• Jean Baudrillard
• Collapse between counterfeit and real
• Experiences the world as a domain of signs and information flows
• Distinction between representation and simulation.
• Representation→ The real in this view precedes the copy
• Simulation→ the simulacrum may precede the real itself.
• Simulation is process by which an action or
• process is imitated, but a similacrum is the actual substitution for the real.
Main Street, USA
Disneyland
• theme parks make visitors feel like
they’re in the real place.
• simulacrum functions as pure signifier,
no need to recourse to a “real”
signified.
• the real is no longer necessary to
defining legitimacy or valuable
experience
REFLECTION QUESTION
Have you been to a theme park? What “real” was
the park a simulacrum for? What was your
experience like?
• Simulacra takes precedence over the real→
more real than the real
HYPERREAL
• Condition generated by escalation of the
design model- not the copy- but the
simulation that precedes the real.
• hyperreal= era of digitization and emerging
information economy- simulacra would come
to precede the real and become a condition
for its production
• State of constant mediation
SIMULACRUM AND IMAGES
• Sites of Disappearance of meaning and representation–> images are
polysemic and open up the flux of meaning
• In modernity structure and form constituted basis of knowledge and
truth, in pomo, style and surface reign.
• Ex. politicians produce themselves as a style and a set of values→ not an actual
life
• Instead appearances→ images and texts about that life.
Postmodernism requires an ironic acceptance of
one’s own immersion in and production through
popular culture→ our unitary, individual selves do
not pre-exist image culture, instead we are made by
it.
READING
QUESTION
• In Post Modern critiques of colonialism, what
taken for granted category came to seen as a
political fiction?
GENDER, COLONIALISM, AND POSTMODERNISM
• Selya Benhabib–> Decentering Enlightenment concept of human subject
• the human came to be widely recognized as a political fiction that shores up existing
power dynamics.
• Concepts of mankind and progress have been used to privilege European, male, and white
subjects over “others”–> All others were premodern, irrational, not-quite-human
• “Demystification of the male subject of reason”–> questions the patriarchal, whitesupremacist foundations of liberal humanism and Enlightenment category of the human.
• Mass culture becomes high art.
REFLEXIVITY
AND
DISTANCED
KNOWING
• Objective: appropriate aspects of low culture as a style
in high-art.
• Vulgarization
• Postmodern texts usually speak to viewers as subjects
who are in the know about codes and conventions of
representation and simulation.
• A viewer who is not fooled by propaganda and
illusionism. Someone who is tired of conventions, who
will get the joke, media and image savvy.
CITATION AND
QUOTATION
• Mass culture as point of reference for real life
• Reference other texts
• Isolate or repeat key images by framing or
cutting in
• Creates a pointed, focalized, distancing irony
READING
QUESTION
What modernist theorist of theater does the
postmodern technique of distanciation derive
from?
• Origins in modernist aesthetics→ Bertolt Brechtplaywright 1920s and 30s.
• Distantiation as narrative strategy
DISTANCIATION
• Narrative communicates ideology- so wanted to break
and rupture that identification.
• Structuring narrative in a way that interrupts the viewer’s
smooth engagement with fiction. Spectators actively,
critically, and reflexively thinking about narrative lures us
into ideology.
• Postmodern pop culture takes the modernist
reflexivity and incorporates the modes of
distantiation into entertainment.
JADED KNOWING
• There is no new
• Questions the value of innovation- always contingent on
the old, always partial and relative.
• Fatigue around the idea that it’s all been done before
• Quoting, citing, and referencing, remaking, mash-up, and
knowing address have their limits
• Our reflexive awareness of these conditions can
create remake old culture in new directions.
READING
QUESTION
Irony is a core attribute of post modern aesthetics. What
does Irony refer to in postmodern projects?
IRONY
• Definition- statements and styles that mean the opposite of their literal meanings
• Speaking to audience that knows that the opposite meaning is being inferred.
• Also refers to situations of incongruity- outcomes are unexpected, sometimes
humorously so.
• Irony a kind of stance that recognizes our self-awareness and jaded knowing.
• Viewers occupy multiple positions at once→ both interpellated and seeing the illusion.
• Term to describe culture of imitation,
remake, and parody
• An imitation that announces itself.
PASTICHE
• Rarely intend to make a statement
about a historical era, but instead
gesture back to remix and remake with
abandon
• Relationship to history→ pilfers and combines historyempties signifiers of their historical meaning.
PASTICHE
• The act of remix is the important part.
• Commentary on the impossibility of pure knowledge
(of the past) and questions the status of original
history.