What seemed to be intimidating the students was not the idea that I wanted something specific from them and they didn’t know what it was or how to give it to me, but rather, precisely, that I didn’t. It was the very openness of the question that was frightening.
When I began teaching humanities courses to college students, none of my (admittedly meager) pedagogical training as a graduate student prepared me for just how much of the job involved managing emotions, a manner that is best described in the psychoanalytic terms of transference and countertransference. I expected to have to manage the sometimes intense ways my students might react to texts I assigned, or to things each other said, but I had not realized how much of the emotion involved would consist of their reactions to me. Or, more precisely stated: how I felt about how I perceived them to be feeling toward me.
Because I was unprepared, the range of affects that disturbed me tended to be negative; when there was, say, hermeneutic excitement or good humor or respectful sociality in the room, I was on terra firma. But I was unprepared, for example, for the slow drip of dread when confronted with twenty or so faces displaying (what I saw as) the most utter boredom and indifference in the face of my strenuous efforts and careful planning, or the hot splash of embarrassment when (I believed) they could see I was in over my head, or the obviously unfair and misdirected resentment that seeped in if I was not vigilant. Eventually, I grew used to all of these feelings, whether mine or theirs, or my fantasies about theirs, or their fantasies about mine: I learned to name them, to work through them, to anticipate them, and finally to become placidly aware of but unbothered by them.
The most difficult emotion to manage, though, was the most common one: fear. Over time, I began to see a certain fear mixed into students’ affective responses that seemed anything but fearful—boredom, ridicule, frustration, and so on. While I learned strategies to keep this fear at bay, even dissolve it, I also came to find that such strategies would always have to be ad hoc and creative. My students’ fear was not only perennial but also protean. I mean here a very specific kind of fear: the kind that occasionally swamped an entire class whenever I asked them to share what they thought about what we had read. For a classroom of non-humanities majors who had neither background nor much interest in the material, but did have a grade on the line, any “easy” question like, What stands out to you about this poem? could induce a sudden freeze.
At first, I thought this was because they thought I was seeking a single correct answer to the question and were afraid to get it wrong, so I endeavored clearly to establish accommodating principles, such as polysemy, as ethical and hermeneutical tenets for class discussions: There’s no wrong answer! As it turned out this not only misdiagnosed the source of the fear, but made it worse. What seemed to be intimidating the students was not the idea that I wanted something specific from them and they didn’t know what it was or how to give it to me, but rather, precisely, that I didn’t. It was the very openness of the question that was frightening. The relative freedom and responsibility of interpretation produced a banal terror. (Or so, at least, I imagine.)
In my first year of teaching, I turned to Ways of Seeing, the 1972 book by John Berger, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis, based on the BBC Two series hosted by Berger, as a kind of therapeutic text as well as a pedagogical handbook. (The book is typically attributed to “John Berger”—the cover identifies him as the author—but the first page’s “Note to the reader” makes immediately explicit its collective authorship, a collectivity that in the context of this particular book must be understood as politically loaded: “This book has been made by five of us.” For ease of reading, I will refer to the author of this book as John Berger, but the reader should always infer scare-quotes around this proper name. That is, “John Berger” in this context is not an individual but an incorporated author-function, in the Foucauldian sense. At any rate, it seems at least worth noting, given the book’s importance in feminist art history, that all five of the authors are men.)
I had first been assigned this text as a high school student, and had returned to it many times over the years; it constituted one of my primary reference points for both Marxist and feminist criticism, two traditions I was interested in learning about and participating in. After becoming a teacher, however, my relationship to the book changed: as familiar as the text was to me by that point, the dynamic experience of reading Ways of Seeing elicited in me the fearful response I now imagined I recognized from my students.
Ways of Seeing begins with the following sentences: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” As anybody who has read this book will tell you, it is an intensely visual experience, not only because of the extraordinary things it does with images, but because it does not materially resemble other books of its kind. A pocket-sized Penguin paperback, Ways of Seeing is printed on the sort of stiff, glossy paper usually reserved for art books—in a sense, it is one—stamped with the unorthodox typeface Monophoto Universe: squat, iconic. Those opening words, in their blocky black type, appear in a stark white void on the first page of the first chapter; the third sentence (“But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words”) opens a new paragraph about three-quarters of the way down the page, separated from the first two by a blank abyss. The arrangement of the page demands that the reader look at it, to approach the opening lines as an aphorism, and at the phenomenological level to experience reading as seeing words. For those of us who read using our eyes—although the phenomenological point would also apply, mutatis mutandis, to those who read tactilely or aurally—doesn’t seeing indeed come before words? I cannot read what I do not see.
Although the third sentence purports a contrast, the ensuing paragraph follows from and unfolds the aphorism: “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” The opening invocation of the child—indeed the infant, in the technical sense of the preverbal stage of development: in-fans—as the seeing subject, caught up in this never-settled relation, already sets in motion the critical energies of Berger’s argument, which turns out to be, in part, an argument about education: not so much about the child per se as about the student, whatever her stage of life.
To see the contours of this argument, look at the first object-lesson in Ways of Seeing. This lesson concerns two paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Frans Hals, Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House and Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House, as well as the interpretation of these paintings offered by the art historian Seymour Silve. Hals, writes Berger,
an old man of over eighty, was destitute. Most of his life he had been in debt. During the winter of 1664, the year he began painting these pictures, he obtained three loads of peat on public charity, otherwise he would have frozen to death. Those who now sat for him were the administrators of such public charity.
Silve, Berger continues, “mystifies” these paintings—variants of the word mystify appear eleven times in these pages of Ways of Seeing—by systematically rejecting and refusing even to consider the possibility that these paintings might enact a critique of the sitters or an indictment of the politico-economic system, capitalism, which has produced the very situation of the painting: a desperately impoverished man painting the portrait of those on whose philanthropic goodwill he depends for survival. “Very little is known about Hals or the Regents who commissioned him,” Berger admits. “It is not possible to produce circumstantial evidence to establish what their relations were. But,” he adds, “there is the evidence of the paintings themselves: the evidence of a group of men and a group of women as seen by another man, the painter. Study this evidence and judge for yourself.” The two paintings are reproduced on page 12; on the next two pages, details of three of the sitters’ faces are provided.
Berger charges that the art-historical institution—credentialed scholars and their interpretations, universities and museums, etc.—is not only not necessary for apprehending images, but in fact throws a veil of ideological mystification over them in order to secure their commodification. “[…W]hen an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art,” assumptions which “justify the role of the ruling classes” and are perpetuated by the institution of “art history” itself.
“But there is the evidence of the paintings themselves…. Study this evidence and judge for yourself,” Berger writes. This imperative positions “the child” invoked on the first page of Ways of Seeing as the exemplary critical subject. If all it takes to see the artwork for what it really is—the product of a material history riven by class antagonism: a critique of class power, for instance, or an instrument of ideological domination in the interests of the ruling class—is to look at the evidence and judge for yourself, these are capabilities he attributes to the child. Nobody has to teach the child to look (or, again, mutatis mutandis to use any of her other senses to apperceive the world in which the child finds herself). What is learnt, in fact, is precisely the “whole series of assumptions” that obscure her view of the object. The child is indoctrinated in capitalism’s ideology from the moment she opens her eyes, long before she is subjected to the disciplinary coercions of the schoolroom. The agential power of seeing, knowing, and judging cannot finally be expropriated, because it is innate to the sensate subject, and so this subject must instead be taught neither to use this power nor even to suspect that it exists. Thus, although she already possesses it, by the time the subject is aware of this power, it is always already too late for her simply to access it. Seeing and judging for herself requires her to undergo the education that Ways of Seeing administers, an education in which learns first how not to see and then, perhaps, how to see anew. The student in this situation is almost certainly not an infant, but rather encounters Ways of Seeing in the college classroom, or even, in 1972, at home, watching the TV version on the BBC. (It is significant, for Berger’s political pedagogy, that Ways of Seeing began as a program on public television, where it by definition reached an audience of far more diverse educational backgrounds and statuses than could, say, the writings of Silve.)
The point here is not to restitute infantile naïveté—itself already a retrospective adult fantasy, as we learn from psychoanalysis—as a sort of noble-savage phenomenology capable apprehending the “pure” artwork (as if such a thing were either possible or desirable!). Rather, the appeal to the child prepares the reader-viewer for the experience of seeing and judging for oneself. Like the experience of infancy according to psychoanalysis, the experience of seeing for oneself is an intensely vulnerable ordeal of exposure to the unknown. When the ideological guardrails imposed upon our gaze by art history and related ideological apparatuses are withdrawn, there is little to orient us upon confronting images that turn out to be more complex and less innocent than they had previously seemed. This is the ideological trick: it makes us believe that images are very simple, that any complexity is the result of distortion—by some imposed “jargon” or “theory”—when it is really the other way round. The child, then, does not function as the nostalgic, even reactionary image of a precapitalist phenomenology without mediation, but rather as the text’s figuration of the intense vulnerability involved in looking, thinking, and judging for oneself. Being Berger’s student can feel like being a child: scared, alone, anxious, confused.
When I reread Ways of Seeing after having become a teacher, I experienced this vulnerability in a radically new and more intense way by identifying it with the fear my students sometimes expressed in my classes. For Berger’s imperative to look at the evidence and “judge for yourself” is a prelude for the far more confrontational and demanding pedagogy of the book’s even-numbered chapters. Devoid of any text whatsoever, these chapters present me with images, sometimes framed by the stark white borders of the page and sometimes constellated in collage form. There are no words to tell me what the images are, what I should think about them, or why they have been chosen. Reading these sections of Ways of Seeing is more bracing than, say, perusing the artworks in a museum, where wall-mounted plaques readily inform the confused or ignorant or exhausted viewer of what to think, à la Silve. What does it mean to place advertisements for lingerie, lipstick, deodorant, and tanning oil, all featuring sexually charged images of parts of women’s bodies, alongside a recipe for pheasant soup, a photograph of deli meats, and Reubens’s The Judgment of Paris? The answer is not waiting on the next page in discursive form. There is no way to be certain whether I have “gotten the answer right,” because that is not what Ways of Seeing is teaching me to do. It is teaching me to take a risk, by withholding any recourse to other ways of engaging the images it contains. Seeing comes before words.
In its endeavor to help its reader-viewer, its student, un-know ideology and arrive at the ironic knowledge of her non-knowledge, Ways of Seeing has something in common with Plato’s dialogues. As Barbara Johnson writes of Plato’s Socrates: “To teach ignorance is, for Socrates, to teach to un-know, to become conscious of the fact that what one thinks is knowledge is really an array of received ideas, prejudices, and opinions—a way of not knowing that one does not know.” Berger’s pedagogy differs from Plato’s, however, in that it does not persuasively lead the student to this non-knowledge but instead tears away the “array” of art-historical framing. What is left behind are images which, even when surely familiar (many of them are very famous artworks or are lifted from popular advertisements), are transformed into something terribly alien by their de- and re-contextualization.
In “The Problem of Ideology” (1986)—an essay that emerged from the same British Marxist milieu as produced Ways of Seeing—Stuart Hall famously calls for Marxist theory “without final guarantees.” I would say that Ways of Seeing demands from its students a praxis of seeing without final guarantees. What is remarkable about revisiting the book some fifty-odd years after its initial publication and fifteen years since my first reading is that the pedagogical impact of its subtraction of all guarantees has not grown any less disorienting or frustrating, any more predictable, or any easier to endure. Professionally, I am a teacher, but Ways of Seeing has the unusual power to make me feel like a student (and a child) again. In each of its images and juxtapositions, no matter how many times I have considered them, there remains a lesson unlearned.
Samuel P. Catlin is the Shuman Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Among his achievements is having completed graduate school without ever actually reading the Phenomenology of Spirit.