67 pages • 2 hours read
John BergerWays Of Seeing
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Corrosive Ideology of Capitalism
The corrosive ideology of capitalism instantiates itself by producing distinct manners of interpreting the visual world, or “ways of seeing.” These ways of seeing, in turn, produce an artificial and corrupt understanding of the self and the world, while simultaneously posing themselves as natural, inherent, and indisputably true.
Each chapter in the book articulates and dissects a particular “way of seeing”—hence, the title of the book. Subsequently, each chapter is related to the other because the end goal of each chapter’s discrete investigation is to deconstruct a “way of seeing” which capitalism produces. Ultimately, however, Berger’s goal in each investigation is to point out the way in which these highly constructed, mediated, and artificial ways of seeing normalize themselves as simply natural, and therefore become entrenched in both our culture and individual psyches as the basic starting point for recognizing and interpreting our visual worlds. Therefore, Berger’s moral dispute with capitalism lays itself bare. For Berger, not only are these ways of seeing highly artificial, but they empower and normalize the corrupt and greedy domination of the minority ruling class. Therefore, each chapter is an entreaty to the reader to understand and recognize the particular ways in which they are being manipulated by a capitalist visual order.
The Entrenchment of the Common Person through the Manipulation of the Visual
By entrenching ideologically-engineered ways of seeing, the cultural and economic capitalist order sharply limits laypeople’s’ capacity to imagine a world that is other than capitalist domination.
Berger begins his book with the assertion that “seeing comes before words.” Throughout the book, he invokes this central premise. He does this in order to foreground the immense power that capitalist ‘ways of seeing’ wield. These ways of seeing essentially indoctrinate capitalist subjects into literally and psychologically seeing the world according to the imposed mandates of capitalism and the oppressive class stratification that capitalism creates.
By dictating the manner in which both the visual and psychological world are understood, these ways of seeing sharply limit any possible meaning that can be made through visual communication. Oil painting, for example, reduces the world to that which can be owned, while other possibilities for envisioning both the world and the human’s relationship to it are, in reality, myriad. However, because of the manner in which these ways of seeing obscure and naturalize themselves as the only and ultimate methodologies for making meaning out of visual phenomena, they limit the scope of the human imagination and even dictate the manner in which visual communication is made. Indeed, they do not pose themselves as methodologies at all, but essentially as a priori reality. Berger intends to indict these ways of seeing as artificial constructions, in order to subsequently free his readers’ minds and unlock their capacities to imagine both the world itself and alternative ways of seeing that world that move beyond the narrow confines of property relations and an unopposed domination by the minority ruling class.
Theory as Accessible and Promoting Critical Thinking and Positive Change
Berger’s relaxed, conversational diction implicitly communicates this theme. Through his accessible voice and the marked absence of outside sources, he communicates that theory does not need to be heavy in jargon or complicated esoterics in order to speak to peoples’ present economic, political, or social condition. In fact, in this book, Berger seems to be completely uninterested in producing theory that adheres to either academic or industry standards. As his criticism of the prevailing modes of art scholarship elucidate, he feels that industry- or institutionally-sanctioned theory, at best, is largely insular, myopic, and self-aggrandizing—and at worst, complicit in promoting an exploitative and oppressive class hierarchy.
He doesn’t, however, completely build his theoretical formulations from scratch. In fact, at various points in the text, it is apparent that he draws directly on pre-existing bodies of theoretical work, including feminism, linguistics, semiotics, and Marxism. The marked absence of direct, cited reference to these bodies of work communicates that Ways of Seeing can be merged with previously existing bodies of academic work in order to form a hybrid methodology that speaks to the masses while synthesizing specialized academic discourse. In so doing, he forges a populist theoretical framework that could be called revolutionary in both its deconstruction of oppressive ideology and the ease with which it can be used and understood by laypeople.
