This document discusses various concepts related to discourse, power, knowledge, and representation. It discusses Michel Foucault's theories on discourse and how identities are constructed through discursive strategies. It also discusses the relationship between knowledge and power and how they act as an "apparatus" to create paradigms in society. The document discusses the concept of "otherness" and how representations of others can be contested. It references theorists such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, and their work on orientalism and the relationship between the self and other.

1. the gaze: spectatorship, power,
& knowledge
culture, identity, and mass media

2. to do
• discourse and power
• the other
• orientalism
• gaze and psychoanalysis
• gaze in feminism

3. discourse
• discourse is a system of representation
• what interested foucault were the rules and
practices that produced meaningful
statements and regulated discourse in
different historical periods
• discourse is “a group of statements which
provide a language for talking about a
particular topic at a particular historical
moment

4. • discourse, contrsutcts the topic
• it defines and produces the objects of our
knowledge, it governs the way that a topic
can be meaningully talked about and
reasoned about
• for example: hysteria, sexuality, homosexuality
• romantic love in the 19th century. nothing
which is meaningful exists outside of
discourse
• “nothing has any meaning outside of
discourse”

5. • discourses themselves are the bearers of
various subject-positions that is, specific
positions of agency and identity in relation to
particular forms of knowledge and practice.
subject-produced within discourse, subjected
to discourse
• subject-positions (for us to become the
subject of a particular discourse, and thus the
bearers of its power/knowledge)

6. power and subjectivity
• we must locate ourselves in the position
from which the discourse makes most
sensse, and thus become its subjects by
subjecting ourselves to its meanings,
power, and regulation

8. Hysteria: Production of Knowlegde
Painting represents a visually discursive event
New regime of knowledge: Charcots discovery of hysteria and the use of
hypnosis in practice
Tells us about representation – performing with the body the symptoms she is
suffering
The painting re-represents them
So it is not the painting that produces our knowledge but rather what discourse
says so the patient in the clinic
The medicalization of hysteria/bodies/mental illness
Classificatory systems and the discourses surrounding/produced by them

9. • "Foucault reads the painting in terms of representation and the subject"
• (the painting tells us something about how representation and the subject work).
• Diego, Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656.

10. subject positions
• The meaning of the picture is produced through this
complex inter-play between presence (what you see, the
visible) and absence (what you can't see, what has
displaced it within the frame). Two centers -- the Infant
and the Royal Couple. Far from being finally resolved into
some absolute truth which is the meaning of the picture,
the discourse of the painting quite deliberately keeps us
in this state of suspended attention. Our look -- our
identification with one subject position For the painting
to work, the spectator. . . must subject him/herself to the
painting's discourse and, in this way, become the painting's
ideal viewer. Three subject positions.

11. power/knowledge
• The practices involved in “power/knowledge” stem from the French
philosopher Michel Foucault’s theories on discourse and the ways in which
our identities are constructed through varying forms of discursive strategies.
Foucault was interested in the relationship between knowledge and power
and how they in turn acted as an “apparatus” to create particular paradigms
within society. Foucault saw the two as intrinsically linked and that through
their application in discourse we would be able to have a clearer
constructionist framing of cultural representation “There is no power relation
without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any
knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time, power
relations.” The theory of “power/knowledge” therefore concerns itself with
the wider framework of discourse which Foucault discusses and are key to
the systematic development of representation, so we can therefore see the
two combining in operational shifts to implicate power within society.

12. Kuhn
• a paradigm: contains a world view – a set of statements which serve to define subjet
matter
paradigm shift: occurs when familiar things are seen in revolutionary ways. Prime
example is when we talked about gender – definining it. So Judith butler, the American post
structuralist philosopher from u c Berkeley who wrote gender trouble and revolutionized our
thoughts of gender – gender performativity – the idea that one iterates and reiterates
gender norms as a form of performance – this is seen as a paradigm shift. Science
undergoes periodic "paradigm shifts" instead of progressing in a linear and continuous way
These paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would
never have considered valid before
How does Kuhn factor into cultural studies? Well, its his view that theories about nature
come into sciences and characterize new theoretical systems. These in turn act or serve as
clusters – and they characterize our systems of knowledge, known as paradigms
•

13. the ‘other’
• ‘Other’ as monsters, savages, aliens
• ‘Others’ include death, unconscious, madness,
oriental, non western other, foreigner, homosexual,
the feminine
• The other is a place outside of the exterior to the
normal, values of western culture
• Otherness is alterity

14. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=ALx1MEW2P3U
•

16. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV0tguuYsJ8

17. otherness
• A practical notion of otherness allows us to discover how people
different than us are represented
• How such representations can be
contested
• Why representational regimes matter
• How difference is represented in popular
culture

18. Emmanuel Lévinas

19. totality and infinity
• Levinas redefined ethics as the moment in which the transcendental
self discovers that it is already in relation to the other before it is fully a
self
• For Levinas, ethics is nothing more than the singular event in which
the Self encounters itself in an ethical relation to the face of the ‘other’

20. edward said

21. orientalsim
• For Said ‘otherness’ is a core concern in post-colonial studies
The Orient is one of Europes ‘deepest and most recurring images of the
other’ (Said 1977:1)
He describes how orientalism controls the non western world by defining it
as the other of europe
•

22. The Bath, French Artist Jean-Leon Gerome, 1885

23. la Grande Odalisque

26. Text

33. for next week
• read chapter 4: realism and perspective