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ms3305

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We live in a world where there is more and more information, and ... The hegemony of the eye. Empire of the Gaze. apparent in the growth of ocular technologies ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: ms3305


1
ms3305
2
Aims of the lecture
  • To engage with Foucault's concept of
  • Knowledge/Power
  • And apply it to the information society debate

3
Knowledgecertainty gtgtgtgtgtgtgtgtInformationuncertaint
y
  • We live in a world where there is more and more
    information, and less and less meaning. Jean
    Baudrillard, 1981 p. 79

4
From Warren Weavers Introduction toClaude
Shannons The Mathematical Theory of
Communication1949
  • The concept of information at first seems
    disappointing and bizarre--disappointing because
    it has nothing to do with meaning, and bizarre...
    Because the two words information and
    uncertainty find themselves to be partners

5
A shift
  • Lecture 1
  • From knowledge certainty
  • a visual culture defined by language
  • lecture 2
  • To information- uncertainty
  • an information culture defined by
    events

6
From the Nobility of Sight to the Inverted Eye of
the Panopticon
7
Perceiving the World
  • We could say that our knowledge of the world is
    determined by our senses
  • Sight
  • Hearing
  • Touch
  • Smell
  • Taste

8
A worldly perceptual process
  • starts with unprocessed information chaotic
    environmental stimuli
  • enters the perceptive field - low-level sensory
    organs of the body
  • then organized into high-level mental
    representations at the cognitive level (see
    Chalmers et al, 1992)

9
Bass Cleff language
Bass frequencies
Sensory organ
10
central nervous system
11
Idealism versus Empiricism
  • Idealism
  • internal perception comes before sense data
  • form comes before information
  • Idea of bass precedes bass frequencies

12
Idealism versus Empiricism
  • Empiricism
  • sense perception is the sole source of human
    knowledge
  • We are informed about the world
  • bass frequencies lead to the concept of bass

13
Forms or Informs?
  • How sensory data becomes a shared language is
    something of a black box
  • Robots cant do it yet!
  • Low frequency Bass
  • Bass fish

14
Despite the debate - Western philosophy has
broadly agreed that there is a hierarchy of
the senses
  • See Martin Jay, 1994

15
hierarchy of the senses
  • Touch
  • Smell
  • Taste
  • Hearing
  • Too close to the objects we observe
  • Top of the hierarchy
  • The distancing function of sight

16
Ocularcentricism
  • dominated by vision
  • Understanding of the objective world by the
    all seeing eye

17
Ocular permeation of language
The mirroring of perception and language
18
Ocular permeation of language
  • The ability to visualise something internally is
    closely linked with the ability to describe it
    verbally. Verbal and written descriptions create
    highly visual memory, and specific mental
    images. The link between vision, visual memory,
    and verbalisation can be quite startling
    (Riven and Gravelle in Jay, 1994 p. 8)

19
  • Read the next slide and tell me how it relates to
    the link between vision, visual memory, and
    verbalisation

20
  • If we focus our attention on the object in front
    of us, we can keep an eye out for any useful
    insights that may enlighten our worldview. At the
    same point in time, we might develop an outlook
    that is blinded to the truth of the matter.
    Nevertheless, as we further inspect the world
    around us we might at least be able to set a few
    foreseeable goals. There is scope for added
    scrutiny of the facts, despite the slight dimming
    of our senses.

21
Around 15 visual metaphors
22
The Nobility of Sight
  • All the management of our lives depends on the
    senses, and since that of sight is the most
    comprehensive and the noblest of these, there is
    no doubt that the inventions which serve to
    augment its power are the most useful that there
    can be (Descartes,
    Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and
    Meteorology in Jay, 1994 p. 71)

23
The Nobility of Sight
  • The eye of a philosopher on the diverse actions
    and enterprises of all mankind
    (Descartes 1637)

24
Language, the senses and the intellect
  • Rene Descartes (1596-1650) maintained that false
    perceptual judgments are ultimately the result of
    confused ideas (Descartes in Jay, 1994 p. 73)

25
Ocularcentric Discourse
  • Renaissance 1400-1600s
  • Perspectivalism
  • the rationalisation of sight
  • The visual rendered to a set of coordinates
  • Enlightenment Rationalism 1650s-1790s
  • (Jay, 1994)
  • elevated the Ocularcentric notion of reason to a
    universal truth

26
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The Enlightenment
  • What is an idea? It is an image that paints
    itself in my brain Ive ideas only because I
    have images in my head
  • (From Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary in Jay,
    1994 p. 83)

Author and Philosopher 1694 - 1778
28
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Ocular technologiesTechnical enhancement of the
eye (Jay, 1994)
  • Extension of the the range and power of our
    ocular apparatus
  • Camera obscura
  • Microscope
  • Telescope
  • A trip to Titan
  • The improvement of our ability to disseminate the
    results
  • Printing press
  • Visual media technologies
  • The Web

30
Recap
  • Ongoing debate about perception
  • Senses, ideas and images are linked mirrored in
    language
  • Development of ideas linked to the dominant sense
    of sight
  • Representations are images of the mind that
    underpin our understanding of the world

31
A challenge to the Ocularcentric Discourse
32
Michel Foucaults Ocular discourse
  • Discourses are practices - Not just
    conversations, linguistic systems or texts
  • They situate the speaker and the listener
  • They can constrain action control truth
  • Psychiatric discourse
  • Makes link between criminal and pathological
    behaviour
  • Classifying criminal behaviour as madness

33
Michel Foucault
  • With Foucault the Nobility of Sight not so much
    rejected as inverted
  • The visual as a means of domination
  • The hegemony of the eye

34
Empire of the Gazeapparent in the growth of
ocular technologies
  • The dominant discourse of observation
  • Prisons
  • Schools
  • Clinics
  • Factories
  • Evident in
  • Open plan office space
  • Learning spaces
  • CCTV
  • Road cameras

35
The Birth of the Clinic An Archaeology of
Medical Perception
Power relations function in the construction of
images painting, photography etc - images work
within specific institutional practices .

36
Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison
  • Panopticon
  • an ocular technology of power
  • A prison designed with a central observation
    tower
  • The prisoners visible at all times

37
The Panopticon
  • The permanent visibility that assures the
    automatic functioning of power (Foucault, 1979
    p. 201)
  • The inmate of a prison internalises the
    mechanism of surveillance which the building
    establishes (Foucault, 1977)

38
Panopticon Surveillancein the Information
Society
  • Applied to the network society by Robins and
    Webster (1999)
  • Dystopian approach counters McLuhans global
    village utopia
  • Managed networks
  • Surveillance technologies
  • Transactional surveillance
  • Cybernetic control

39
The dark side of information revolution (Robins
Webster, 1999 p. 92)
  • Two interrelated parts of the information
    revolution
  • mechanism for social management, planning and
    administration
  • surveillance and control
  • knowledge/information and power are always
    interrelated
  • The Ambiguous Panopticon Foucault and the Codes
    of Cyberspace by Mark Winokur
  • http//www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick371

40
Another challenge to the Ocularcentric Discourse
41
The problem with representation
  • Objects and the environment
  • We return to the problem of environment
  • A worldless or worldly sense of it all

42
Self-referential
43
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44
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45
"The fascination here is that the drawings are
interpreted as representing objects, but the
objects represented could not be constructed
because the spatial constraints of the
environment have been contravened.
Wade, 1980 Visual Allusions Pictures of
Perception. Lawrence Erlbaum
46
http//www.lipsons.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/escher/asc
ending.html
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