Ways of Seeing - John Berger - Part 2

Ways of Seeing - John Berger

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 135

  May 15, 2017 

Book 38 - Ways of Seeing
John Berger (1972)
 Part 2 - pages 83-155
Reading Time - 1 hour

A whole essay on oil paintings - 1500s to 1800s and how... well... the paintings are really about the things that people back then valued. That they were wanting to live a certain lifestyle, and owning oil paintings brought them some of that. I must admit, I didn't totally get this chapter...

The last essay though... did make more sense. It's essentially about advertising and publicity. The idea that publicity "proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer-- even though we will be poorer by having spent our money." Ads show us people who have been "transformed" and are enviable... we want to be like them. "The state of being envied constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour." Well... that explains the Kardashians... seriously, I still have no idea why these people are in the news all the time and why they are so enviable... but obviously I am not watching the right ads... The thing with publicity is... it's all about being the envy of others. We want to own that Jaguar because then other people will envy us...

There was an interesting thought in this last essay:... "the industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped halfway..." ... "existing social conditions make the individual feel powerlesss. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy..." Well... that's fascinating and succinctly put. We are only halfway to democracy... stuck in a capitalistic cauldron where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Food for thought. Here's another one.... "publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy"... that makes sense!

It's a fascinating little book although... the images that are reproduced are tiny and in grey-scale which really detracts from the impact of the work. Some essays were just photographs and I didn't really get them at all, mostly due to the poor quality of the images. I know that there is a series of YouTube videos of John Berger discussing this topic... which might be worth viewing. Episode 1 is here... apparently there are a total of 4 episodes, each about half an hour in length.