

Ways of Seeing Chapter 1 Analysis

Ways of Seeing Chapter 1 Analysis

In this chapter, Berger riffs on Walter Benjamin’s seminal text “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but adds a crucial element that differentiates his arguments from Benjamin’s. Namely, he argues for the primacy of the visual in the human experience.

He therefore both inflects Benjamin’s Marxist critique with his own particular framework, which concerns itself not only with the role of the physical artwork in capitalist society, but boldly asserts that capitalist society produces specific visual languages through the use and proliferation of ideology embedded in 1) images themselves, and 2) the ways in which art discourse is produced and disseminated throughout Western capitalist culture.

In Berger’s view, through both this embedded ideology and an exploitation of the cognitive fact that visual images have more immediate and lasting power than any other mode of communication or representation, capitalist society is able to both endlessly replicate and simultaneously obscure its own pernicious ideology as a means of psychological and material domination. This set of arguments is the primary theoretical conceit of Ways of Seeing.

Chapter One focuses mainly on the issue of art discourse and its dissemination, asserting that the rarified art discourse produced by an almost clerical class of elite art scholars purposefully mystifies the idea of the original work of art, in the face of new technologies which, in their ability to easily and cheaply duplicate original works of art, would endanger the honorific and inaccessible status that original works of art enjoyed in past eras ,during which easy and cheap reproduction was not possible.

In Berger’s estimation, it is that status that allowed the ruling class to claim and exercise a monopoly on art, and it is through the mystification of the original work of art, in the contemporary age of mechanical reproduction, that enables that monopoly to continue.

Berger’s writing is remarkable for its refusal to use highly-specialized Marxist jargon, while still substantially and precisely articulating a scathing critique of capitalist society and developing nuanced points which both speak directly to laypersons and add new dimension to a generalized Marxist critique of capitalism. Specifically, his focus on the languages and codes through which the visual are interpreted distinguish his argument from one that would narrowly focus on material conditions.

His theories thereby form a bridge between the economic/material concerns of textbook Marxism, and cultural studies or art history. Although the liveliness of his prose communicates a depth of passion and a lucid investment in his own ideas as well as those of his progenitors, he manages to communicate complex ideas in a conversational, accessible manner that markedly differentiates itself from the highly technical—indeed oftentimes almost esoteric— verbiage that characterizes many Marxist primary sources.

Indeed, Berger’s tendency to use a light touch with his language is undoubtedly linked to his endeavor to demystify both the notion of the original work of art itself, and the highly academic discourse which persists, like an impermeable magical aura, around those artworks. Therefore, not only does the content of his work form many bridges, its form does as well.

Ultimately, this chapter is an invitation: an invitation to deconstruct the pervasive and oppressive norms of both contemporary art discourse and art history, and an invitation for all people to harvest the potentiality of the new visual language that the ability to reproduce art and the mediums of both photography and television

have created. Through a repeated assertion of the primacy of the visual in the human experience, he laments the quashed development of a potentially revolutionary visual language, which, if allowed to prosper, could hold the power to articulate and understand the human experience in a manner which written and spoken language cannot.

Through his citation of data sets from L’Amour de l’Art, he cogently asserts both his own knowledge of the fact that an elitist ideology persists in attaching itself to the exhibition of art and the discourse that surrounds it and also ingratiates himself to any readers who may be reticent to engage in art discourse. This, too, is a bid to both free and demystify art and its potential from the oppressive grips of the ruling class.

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