Visual Pleasure Tuesday May 17, 2005
Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema (here) was not the first analysis of visual enjoyment, but it formalised and established this aspect of cinematic experience. “It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty destroys it. That is the intention of this article”, she said. The very term ‘scopophilia’ implies psychological imbalance, a Freudian aberration like a strange man in a dirty raincoat. It’s an extreme position to take, supported by films like Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, where the lens mediated gaze is perceived as unhealthily voyeuristic. It is the same situation with photography: on the one hand it’s an abundant resource for simple visual pleasure, and on the other hand we can deconstruct this and reveal the narcotic effect of narrative and beauty. One of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs shows a concentration camp victim denouncing a guard, and newsreel footage of the same incident reveals an entirely different meaning. The guard’s sneer was an involuntary flinch, and the victim’s accusing finger was in fact an unrepresentative moment of a larger arm movement. His ‘decisive moment’ was an arbitrary and misleading edit, a frozen moment presented complacently as a revelatory image.
In these postmodern times, ‘deconstruction’ has acute sociological value. We are no longer subject to implicit ideological hierarchies, to a tradition of received opinion. It is open season on established order, and it has been for many years. It’s a valuable enterprise when critical intelligence is the idiom by which we perceive and (arguably) create the world because this is essentially a process of thinking about thinking, and thus a metacognitive strategy. Almost anything anyone says reflects not an absolute truth, but a relative and political position. Postmodernism, Class 101. The problem with this academic trend is the way it focuses on historical context, when the analysis is actually presented in philosophical terms. The term ‘truth’ has been so thoroughly battered in the university arena, it is now so meaningless no one dares use it. When it is completely embedded in the discourse of cultural relativity and fashionable political analysis, ‘truth’ is like an old map of the world, showing a distorted representation of the British Empire. It’s a concept you rapidly discard at an early educational age, years before you arrive at university. This derives from a situation where philosophy is not part of the general curriculum, and cultural studies replaces the deeper work no one has any time for. In that respect ‘truth’ has to be wrested away from the contemporary theorists, because they have adopted only part of its meaning, and convinced everyone they are being conclusive. But ‘truth’ – what it is, what it isn’t, and what criteria it rests on – is an inherently philosophical enquiry, beyond the clever-dick complexities of currently fashionable theory. The cultural studies angle is a valid intellectual enterprise, but it is not the only one and it is thus partial. Thinking about thinking is a conceptual strategy eminently applicable to historical context, but this deconstruction is not embedded in or confined to relative cultural parameters. It is a ridiculous assumption, or even a conclusion, that our sophisticated postmodern outlook is a satisfactory way of addressing philosophical ideas.
Deconstruction deconstructs, i.e. analyses and breaks down into component parts what is arbitrary, questionable, and disguised as unassailable authority. Much contemporary art is postmodern, avoiding ‘beauty’ and presenting domestic and clinical ephemera as a conceptual possibility: this is interesting and valuable as anything else. Beauty is a myth, boring, hierarchical, and elitist. Like Cartier-Bresson’s concentration camp image, it is contrived, false, tissue-like. The postmodern outlook is a kind of alertness, a knowing acknowledgment of the tricks and deceptions of a more naïve world. But – and it’s a very big but – it gets to a particular cognitive level and then stops, satisfied it has arrived at a definitive place and assuming there are no other places. It deconstructs everything but itself; it thinks about thought but only the preceding thought of historical context. And eventually you have to deconstruct deconstruction itself i.e. the suppositions on which it is based, continuing its elegant and powerful logic into philosophical domains that are not and never have been circumscribed by cultural relativity. It becomes necessarily phenomenological, where the thinker is acknowledged and included in the analysis, and a human being is fundamentally the same thing regardless of social and historical context. What arrogance, to insist that anything I think is derived from and located in my own cultural context. I can do more than that.
Keats believed that “truth is beauty”. It is easy to deconstruct and deny this statement; with the Cartier-Bresson’s picture I referred to, the beauty is sleight-of-hand deception, adept-with-Leica manipulation. Photographic truth is a particularly slippery concept; in 2004 David Hockney spoke about the trickiness and thus failure of digital photography, when the image is easily distorted. This was media froth more than worthy commentary, coinciding with his latest painting projects. From the earliest camera obscura days we have understood the ambivalent signification of the photographic image, and over a period of many decades we acknowledged how documentary work in particular can mislead and misrepresent. The digital image is different in degree only. It is easier to edit, but that is not a revolutionary photography-changing fact.
A photograph can be ‘read’ like a text, as much as any other cultural achievement. It embodies ideological assumptions, and beauty may be construed as elitist or even ‘transcendentalist’ – suggesting that nothing actually is transcendental, that we live in a universe of artificially made thought: a discourse to which everything can be reduced, when you add ‘ist’ to the end of the word. But this thesis ignores phenomenology, forgets emotion, and is effectively a castle in the air idea strangely abstracted from human experience. We don’t smile when we see a baby defecate, we smile when we see it chuckle; we don’t feel content when we hear gunfire, we do when we listen to Bach. Unmade beds and dead sharks are boring and unpleasant. My flat is a nicer place to live when it is clean and tidy. A dirty suburban ghetto is nasty, compared to unspoilt landscape. Photography doesn’t have to be beautiful, and some of the famous canonical images definitely are not. The camera is uniquely capable of recording and thus questioning all aspects of human experience; a photograph can awaken and educate, encouraging mature and reflective thought. But it can also be beautiful, and this is not a facile or inferior endeavour.
Analytic thought is like a knife, dissecting a surface appearance to understand and define the component effects. Emotion, intuition and beauty are right brain experiences, important in their own terms. When the aesthetic experience is interpreted as political affectation or as unfashionably pre-postmodern, the world becomes sterile – like a formaldehyde shark, it looks bad, smells bad, and is an unpleasant place to live. Life is not a political project, a revolution against bourgeois pleasure, a post-Marxist struggle against material conditions. Those are cultural-anthropological concerns, a part of Western intellectual life that is irrelevant and meaningless for many parts of the world. For various reasons, UK academia is culturally aligned with Karl’s tired old thesis: dialectical materialism does provide an elegant critique of inequality and exploitation, but since when has the universe been wholly material? Most of the time, the academic or critical outlook is tied to the left wing perspective that denounces pleasure and criticises beauty. Beauty synthesises where analysis dissects; it nourishes where criticism is ultimately depressing. It builds up rather than breaks down, and like the concept ‘creativity’ it is never fully defined or understood by the formula-seeking mind.
The film industry is notoriously capitalist, formulaic and predictable, eminently suitable for post-Marxist analysis. The psychology of the darkened theatre has already been investigated; the psychoanalytic dimension of film is a specialised but fruitful part of film studies. Photography has never been institutionalised and capitalised in the same way; there was a time when it was an expensive hobby for wealthy people, but technological advance and production line economics allowed for a rapid democratisation and dissemination of photographic practice. Anyone can do it, millions of people do, and as a result the photographic critique is a more elusive and unformed tradition. But in simple non clever-dick terms, we can probably say that visual pleasure underlies a very substantial part of photography, and is not to be derided.