Publication Type: Article

Video Ethnography:
Toward a Reflexive Paradigm for Documentary

By Eric Margolis

Division of 
Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Arizona State University 
margolis@asu.edu

This article was originally published in the journal Jump Cut as “Video Ethnography” (1994, Jump Cut 39, pp. 122-131). The web version has a number of additional photographs but the text is the same.

Introduction

Between 1974 and 1984 I produced a series of documentaries on coal miners in the Rocky Mountain West. Because I am a sociologist first, and a documentary maker only second, I bring a set of theoretical/methodological concerns to the enterprise of shooting and editing, that are in many ways different from those of the documentarian. My interests revolved around questions like: What is the nature of history and social life? What is the proper role for the sociologist as researcher/theorist with respect to the people and communities that (s)he studies? In oral history/ethnography, what standards can be used to evaluate the stories that we collect? And, how can these stories be utilized? The tentative answers to these questions with which I approached the miners’ world were drawn from the tradition of critical theory, specifically from the Existentialist Marxism of Jean Paul Sartre. While some of the social theory is fairly abstract, many of the issues that are problematic for sociologists have concrete applicability to the work of documentary including interviewing and editing. As much as possible I will try to illustrate the theoretical and methodological discussions with concrete referents from the coal project.^[1]

Developing the Project

Publicly funded arts, humanities, and social science projects do not occur in a vacuum. In the same way that anthropology rested upon the foundation of colonialism, specific social, political, and technological relations allowed the coal project to get funded.^[2] In 1974 Jimmy Carter had recently been elected, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was using a revenue sharing model to establish state-based humanities programs. The Colorado Humanities Program (CHP) issued a request for proposals that would involve the “out of school adult public” and “local humanities scholars” in discussions of “public policy issues.”

In the seventies the western states were in the midst of an energy boom that included oil and natural gas development, experimental oil shale and synfuel projects, and renewed coal mining much of it from large surface mines associated with mine-mouth power plant construction. Boom-towns and the environmental and social impacts of large scale energy development constituted one set of public policy issues. Another set of policy issues stemmed from history. Coal had been mined in the West at least since the 1860’s and legacies of that earlier coal age included “bust-towns,” environmental damage, and black lung disease. The social impacts of both the old and the new coal industry constituted the kind of “public issues” upon which the CHP was interested in bringing humanities expertise to bear. I want to emphasize that there was a very narrow window for programs such as the coal project. During the Carter years the NEH funded a number of documentary programs with labor history topics: films were made on the Wobblies, Rosie the Riveter, and the Lincoln Brigades for example. After Reagan was elected the window shut tight, moreover Reagan’s shift to a market-driven energy “policy” produced a dramatic recession in the West and drove boomtowns into bust-towns faster than ever before.

The coal project began with a CHP grant for about $20,000. The money funded us to conduct life history interviews with miners living in Colorado coal towns. We interviewed working miners and photographed in both surface and underground mines. But most of the interviewees were retired miners living in towns that had been all but abandoned when the first coal age ended in the 1950’s.

The Regressive Moment: Interviewing and Data Collection

We asked the old timers to recount the events of their lives beginning with stories they had heard from their parents and continuing with immigration experiences, recollections of childhood, working life, retirement and the experience of growing old. We probed to discover the big events of mining history like strikes and disasters, but we also searched for the mundane reality of everyday life. We sought the communities’ articulation of their identity, recognizing that this included contrary positions and community conflicts. Only the most general interview schedule was prepared in advance; interviews were not interrogations, questions were conversational and open-ended. There was no time limit, the interview technique assumed agency on the part of the respondents and provided space for them to determine their own agenda. As a sociologist I hoped to discover “natural” social and historical explanations in the mining communities. Film makers would of course be appalled at a shooting ratio of 100 to 1 or more.

As part of the interview we asked subjects to suggest other respondents. Through this snowball sampling process a network of interviewees was developed which spanned the coal fields and included: union and non-union miners, union organizers, mine operators, bosses and foremen, mining engineers, occupational health and safety specialists, government officials, coal miners’ daughters, wives and widows, shopkeepers, doctors and others who lived in the coal communities but did not work the mines. We also took steps to make sure that the sample represented the many ethnic groups that came west to mine coal — Italians, Welsh, Slavs, Greeks, Mexicans etc. We interviewed people representing the range and variety of factions, social groups, and specific viewpoints found in coal communities. The community participated in and welcomed the coal project. The miners’ felt that their perspective had been systematically ignored or devalued and relished the opportunity to talk. Perhaps the situation was best summed up by one old timer who after an interview said: “who’d have ever thought you guys from the university would come down here and want to hear all this stuff.” We quickly had far more people volunteer to participate that we would ever be able to interview.

Interviews ran as long as three hours and audio recordings were made so that excerpts could be used in a slide-tape production. With a 35mm camera we photographed the miners, their families and the environment. The recording technology, rather than making people shy, seemed to raise the event in importance. With a couple of visits to libraries and historical museums we began to uncover the rich visual history of black-and-white photographs. Many subjects volunteered family albums and documents which were copied as part of the record. Thousands of additional historic photographs were copied from archives, and company files. We used Panatomic X film and Kodak’s direct positive development kits to make beautiful sharp black-and-white slides.

The recounting of historic events is one way that individuals make community. Oral history is thus a social process that occurs whether someone is there with a tape recorder or not. The other kind of oral history, the research process, is fraught with problems. In essence an outsider is attempting to enter the community process for a “higher” purpose. That is, they seek to “discover” or “preserve” or “bring to a wider audience” the taken-for-granted realities of a community to which they do not belong. Outside interviewers must therefore “negotiate access,” “establish rapport,” protect the confidentiality of human “subjects” and so on. In sum, they must construct an identity acceptable to community members so that they will talk with them. Anyone who has done much interviewing is aware of the ways that questions overdetermine the answers. If you ask “What was life in a company town like” they will tell you about the exploitation of company stores and scrip. If you ask, “What was life in a small town like?” they will tell you how everyone got along and helped one another in ways that they don’t today. Experience as an interviewer also makes you aware that while questions elicit information they frequently get in the way — that is they side-track people, lead off on tangents, are distracting etc. Most of us also live with the feeling that the person sitting across from us would tell a good story, if only we knew the right question to bring them out. Not being members of the community, however, we do not know what to ask. We fumble around. Frustrations with the interview process and the notion that oral history was going on all the time led me to try to develop procedures that allowed us to record history-speaking while avoiding some of the pitfalls of interviewing.

I noticed that old timers got together at certain formal locations as well as informally to tell stories, “mine coal” and “swap lies.” So we went to some of these places and recorded. A day was spent in a clinic where miners went for the medical tests necessary to proving that they were eligible for federal black lung benefits. We also recorded a meeting crowded with retired miners where officials from the Department of Labor explained the rules and administrative procedures for black lung benefits. We set up situations allowing us to record discussions of history between participants — bringing together husbands and wives, brothers, friends, or small groups of subjects. Recording sessions were held in bars and restaurants as well as living rooms, kitchens, and front porches. In one remarkable session, a man who had operated a small mine took us through a collection of artifacts he had accumulated. Everything he picked up had stories connected to it and we simply recorded while things asked “what is this and what does it mean.” In these situations the role of interviewer shrank to asking an occasional question while subjects took over directing the discussion.

I was the naive interviewer at first. I had not studied the written history; in fact the first time someone mentioned Mother Jones I did not recognize the name. There were two theoretical/methodological reasons to begin with interviews, rather than the more usual scholarly process of reviewing the literature. In the first place, I was forced to ask questions which frequently led to important explanations. (later, as I became more “expert” I had to feign ignorance to elicit information and this never felt natural or worked as well). The second reason is more subtle. Sociologists including critical theorists, and Marxists, tend to begin with theory and frequently ignore the messy empirical features of the lived reality. Ethnic relations, the generation gap, voluntary organizations like labor union locals, particular local towns, the idiosyncratic psychology and comprehensions of individuals, etc., have all too often been relegated to the realm of accident, tagged with pejorative labels like superstructure or false consciousness, or simply reduced to the mean, merged and glossed into abstract categories of subculture, role, class, etc. In place of the detailed historiography which Marx, Weber and Durkheim practiced, recent sociologists (and post-modernists are among the worst offenders) substitute slogans, abstract generalizations, or the exegeses of sacred tests.

By the end of the first interviewing phase several dozen interviews had been recorded on audiotape and the tapes had been transcribed. Several hundred color slides of the interview subjects had been made and a couple of thousand historic photos had been copied as black-and-white slides. We sat down to edit a multimedia document portraying the history and present conditions of the Colorado coal community.

The Progressive Moment: Editing

I conceived of editing as a place where biography and history intersected. Editing was the process which would transform individual biographies into a historical progression elucidating the individual’s role in history. Employing Sartre’s theoretical suggestions (discussed more thoroughly in the conclusion), I planned the editing process to be alternately regressive and progressive. In the regressive moment transcripts became the basis of the script. They were analyzed, cut apart, and organized topically: mine explosions, mules, Mother Jones, Ludlow, company scrip, etc. Photographs were similarly indexed. This analytic procedure converted heterogeneous interviews into homogeneous categories. Many people providing perspectives on similar or identical events portrayed the unity or conflicts of events in the coal miners’ history. The progressive moment was the attempt to produce synthesis. Efforts at “totalization” produced scenes utilizing juxtaposition, montage, agreement and contradiction that further developed the process intended to create a document that captured the movement of history.^[3]

I intended to use the editing process to produce “documents” rather than documentaries. My role as editor was not that of providing the sociologist’s standard of objective truth, but rather to arrange an order that reflected the living relation between biography and history. I wanted to capture the emphasis of knowledge held in common by communicating people’s analysis in their own words. As much as possible I wanted to avoid relying on a narrator or expert commentator to impose an overview or legislate meaning. The process was designed to avoid forcing a preconceived analysis on the material. Ethnographic editing techniques allowed the raw materials to inspire both form and content. Certain topics brought up in almost every interview suggested scenes: immigration, ethnic relations, changing techniques and technology of mining, exploitation in the company town, the struggle to organize, the Ludlow strike, the IWW Strike, disasters, etc. Each individual biography lent unique content even as people recounted history that they made in common. Historical categories were not imposed by the editor but were nominated by coal people out of their own experience.

The assembled documents were architectonic in the same sense as Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings: historical structures were constructed out of materials available in the local environment, depicting historic relations that gathered together coal, technology and man. Editing itself was a materialist process concentrating on assembling and ordering thingsthat had been collected including: recordingsof people’s talk about the past; photograph and other iconswhich remain after the things they represent have gone; and objectsleft over the coal age, including the miners’ bodies, tools, and other things that were preserved. The edited document was intended as a model of the relation between biography and history. Art and artifice entered the process. In order for the finished documents to be worth watching they had to be artistic creations able to engage the audience and keep their attention. Craft was important. Aesthetic concerns and the ability to capture both reality and an audience were essential. Music and sound or visual effects were employed to emphasize a mood or make the program flow.

The initial production was a multimedia slide show. When the paper transcript files were completed, sound clips were taken from the interviews and were assembled as the backbone of a sound track which included music and sound effects. Black-and-white slide copies of historical photographs were used to flesh out the program, they were selected to illustrate the events being spoken about. Color slides of the interview subjects introduced the narrators. Once the program was assembled a pulse track was created that drove four slide projectors with dissolves. The program was shown on a nine by twelve foot rear projection screen.

The program had three documents: history, modern mining, and black lung disease. The history document began with an introductory discussion of immigration experiences, testifying to how coal towns became polyglot communities and drawing attention to conflicts between ethnic groups. “Immigration” segued into a montage of voices explaining the work process and organization of production; company towns, scrip, crooked checkweighmen, and other forms of exploitation led to safety issues, disasters and the need for a union. In pattern the scene mirrored the structure of biographical accounts given by individual miners. The second history scene briefly discussed the 1927 Colorado strike led by the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). Using this scene at this point interrupted the historical progression, it was an editorial decision based on pacing. The IWW strike was not the most important strike, but it introduced strike violence and was used to build towards the bloody climax of the Ludlow Massacre.

From 1927, the program “flashed back” to the 1913-14 strike and Ludlow massacre which were mentioned by every miner interviewed; it was the most important event in the community’s history. The Ludlow scene occupied about a third of the one hour program. A tremendous collection of historical photographs and excerpts from interviews with several participants and one of the union organizers brought the story to life. Structurally, an interview with Barron Beshoar, who wrote a book on the strike, provided a framework upon which we “hung” first person accounts.^[4] Sound effects and montage technique helped build the pace to a climax, but actually with the exception of a few gun shots little artifice was needed for this section. Strike events had their own relentless pace: the UMWA issued a strike call; strikers and their families were evicted from the company towns; tent colonies were set up; company guards and strikebreakers arrived; violence ensued; the militia were mobilized; Mother Jones arrived and was arrested; a women’s march was broken up by saber wielding troopers; a small tent colony was destroyed by the militia. Eight months after the strike was called the Ludlow tent colony was set afire by the militia and eleven children and two women suffocated beneath a tent. Funerals were held while enraged miners attacked mines along Colorado’s front range. Finally federal troops arrived and an uneasy truce was established.

The Ludlow scene ended with a totalization from Beshoar:

As you know, the miners’ lost the strike and the miners never became the people they are today until Roosevelt became President…. And finally, the UMWA, years and years later, gets a contract–a proper union contract in the mine. But from 1913 until the Roosevelt administration they had not won anything really.

After a fade to black, the sound of modern mining machinery faded up to a roar. Dark slides of underground mechanical miners filled the screen. A montage of voices, old and young, exclaimed an optimism that coal mining was coming back to the mountains and prairies. The visuals switched to brilliant sundrenched photos of strip mines and 100 car coal trains. A kaleidoscope of topics were brought up but not fully explored: modern technology, safety, young miners rejecting the union, social and environmental impacts. The modern mining document was brief, about ten minutes, and offered no conclusions. It was meant to reinforce the orientation toward the future that made the entire program a “document” rather than a historical documentary.

The last document, “black lung,” took twenty minutes to explain the causes and symptoms of the disease from the miners’ perspective. They discussed problems applying for and receiving federal black lung benefits. Miners and a medical doctor frustrated with the federal bureaucracy were intercut with representatives of the Social Security Administration, and an Administrative Law Judge who explained why applications were turned down. Parallel cutting techniques raised this to a confrontational level. Slides of old timers on tread mills, having blood drawn, and in hospital beds, the miners’ voices and the bureaucratic rational for rejecting applications indicted the system. The essence of the document was contained in one miner’s comment that “You’ve always had to fight for everything you’ve gotten.” The comment totalized the miner’s experience: they fought the coal, they fought to build a community on the frontier, they fought for wages, for working conditions, for a union, and now they fought the bureaucracy for the benefits they felt entitled to.

For the sociologist qua editor, the attempt to create a totalizing document began as a process of cross-referencing, seeking to enumerate the historical particularities of the life of the coal miner. Transcript analysis altered the order of the material from biographical to historical. The goal was:

[to] progressively determine a biography… by examining the period, and the period of examining the biography. For from seeking immediately to integrate one into the other, it will hold them separate until the reciprocal involvement comes to pass of itself and puts a temporary end to the research. (Sartre, 1960:135)

This description of editing is not to argue for some kind of mechanical procedure or formula, nor to suggest that the program produced itself. The work of making “documents” was in large part no different from any editing project. For the multimedia show hundreds of hours of interviews were cut down to less than sixty minutes. Thousands of historic photos were similarly winnowed, selected and incorporated. Historic and modern music was located, selected and added to the production. But behind it all we sought to establish a certain understanding.

The social scientific approach which Sartre recommended gives concrete content to the method of “comprehension” or Verstehen. Comprehension is not a specialized method that is the property of professionals; it is no more (and no less) than the natural understanding each one of us uses every day to guide our lives. The comprehension of any human action simply requires knowledge of the conditions which led to action and the actor’s goal. A example is the editing decision which brought together comments by Kate Livoda, and Donald Mitchell.^[5] Both grew up in Southern Colorado coal towns and talked about experiences in a company school:

Kate: And then we had to walk several miles to school and all such as that. And of course there was the miners’ kids and they weren’t treated any too good, cause the superintendent’s children had the front seat, of course

Donald: Even in the schools we wasn’t, we was treated different. Hell, I fought my way through school here and I got to be quite a fighter, from just over that, heh, heh, heh.

Kate Livoda provided the regressive understanding of how deep the class system penetrated into coal camp life to reproduce the structures of exploitation. Donald Mitchell, however, thrusts our understanding into the future by telling us how he made himself a fighter. Mitchell showed how historic circumstances lead to action which takes place within a world of objective conditions and is motivated by intentions. Comprehension of an action, in Sartre’s (1960:155) terminology, “…is the totalizing movement which gathers together my neighbor, myself and the environment in the synthetic unity of an objectification in process.” In sum, comprehension is not abstract passive activity which remains in a world of contemplation; comprehension exists as part of our living praxis. Sociological comprehension is action, is social, and is itself part of history. Historical events are comprehended as unique, but this, very comprehension introduces a new possibility:

In fact, when the object is rediscoveredin its profundity and its particularity, then instead of remaining external to the totalization…it enters immediately into contradiction with it. In short, the simple inert juxtaposition of the epoch and the object gives way abruptly to a living conflict. (Sartre, 1960:148-149)

Public Editing

In Being and Nothingness,written before he declared himself a Marxist, Sartre (1943:643) paraphrased Marx in an observation about the work of social science: “The historian is himself historical; that is, he historicises himself by illuminating ‘history’ in the light of his project and those of this society.” This critical observation destroys the possibility of an objective “social physics” and indicates the path to a social science based on “revolutionary practice,” praxis. Sartre argued that praxis, the movement of surpassing which unites knowing and being, is the only adequate ground for a historical and structural anthropology. Sartre asserted with Marx that people, not prior conditions, make history.

Social scientists can no longer maintain an attitude of “ethical neutrality” or the “disinterested observer.” As Sartre (1960:179) demonstrated: “The foundation of anthropology is man himself, not as the object of practical knowledge, but as a practical organism producing knowledge as a moment of praxis.” The historical process produces an understanding analogous to self-consciousness as a moment of its development. History and social science cannot avoid being reflexive; because of this the human sciences should become cognizant of their role as a historical actor and develop methods to reduce the distinction between the investigator, and the human subject. Whether we admit it or not, our findings will be subject to modification imposed by our “subjects.” The constructions of the film or video editor likewise take their place in history as one of several competing explanations: a kind of self-consciousness which emerges from the social process.

The slide program had been underwritten by a state based humanities program and was intended to spark public discussion of policy issues. The research process drew to a close as the slide show was completed. What was being created at this point was a “work in process.” The program was not simply an end in itself but a methodological tool, a provisional portrayal to be taken back to the communities where it originated. The methodology provided an totalizing process in the reflexive phase which I termed “public editing.” Public editing was a way to operationalize the concept of reflexivity. COAL MINING AS A WAY OF LIFE was shown and the audience was invited to comment on, criticize, and amplify the production.

As an example, I will discuss a single public editing meeting held in Trinidad, Colorado on April 21, 1978. About 50 people viewed the program in a room at the junior college. A panel of old timers, including Edgar Chinowith, a political figure and local judge in his nineties, sat at a long table in front but they did not make formal presentations or dominate the discussion. When the lights came on the video cameras were rolling and the project director set an agenda:

Do you think this was a fairly accurate reflection of life, the early part of the movie, of life around 1913 or 14 around here?

There was a general chorus: “I think it was,” and the discussion started. For the first few minutes people gave testimonials in the form of “I was there,” “I remember mules in the mine.” Then someone observed that Trinidad was bigger and better twenty years ago. The judge then gave his perspective on the future: “Our trouble right now is that we need more mines around here because we’re down to two mines… oh I guess forty or fifty years ago there must have been at least thirty different mines and coal camps going.” The judge’s discussion connected the past to speculations on the possibility of renewed mining. He then expressed Trinidad’s self-identity as a coal boom-town:

Trinidad was essentially a coal mining town. At one time the Chamber of Commerce of the United States designated Trinidad as the outstanding city of its size for business in the entire United States. We showed a trading area of 30,000 as far as they do to coal. Course those days are gone now. Natural gas has come in and you’ll never see those days again as we knew them at that time.

The project director asked what Trinidad was like at that time.

A booming town. A booming town in every respect. there were streetcars running between a number of the coal camps… C&W railroad bringing in miners. Stores open till 10:00 at night, Saturday night, midnight. A boom town, lots of business, lots of money.

I understood this as an implied critique of the program’s emphasis on strikes and hardship. The refutation of our negative presentation was picked up by a second generation Yugoslavian who eulogized his parents:

They had to leave there because they couldn’t make a living over there. They come over here to make a living and thought this was a wonderful country even with all the hardships.

Another second generation resident, an Italian, brought the criticism to a sharp focus:

As you pointed out here there was a lot of negation against the companies. But I was born and raised up here at Morley, about 11 miles up the road, CF&I coal camp. And I remember as a young boy they provided a YMCA for us, they had a little library there, pool tables, bowling alleys, gymnasium …. So there was a lot of fun along with it—Of course this was in the 30s and 40s. It wasn’t–strikes was going on but not as severe as this.

In the slide show some of speakers had used terms like Wop and Bohunk, Amidst a general murmur of agreement, another member of the audience felt it necessary to clear up any wrong impressions of ethnic relations:

I think there’s one thing that could very well be emphasized in a documentary like this. There wasn’t all this racial undertone at that time. I know. I grew up as the dumb Swede and I suppose Ernest was the Wop, but we never worried about it. I was in his home, anytime. I was welcome. And he was in mine. I had friends from south of the border and Slavish people, we had lots of them in Money.

The discussion ranged for about 45 minutes, generally celebrating the miners’ way of life, but most of the second half was devoted to expressions of anxiety about the future. In the midst of the great western energy boom of the nineteen seventies, Trinidad was being passed by. The economy remained depressed with few jobs, young people leaving, and most of the oldtimers living on social security and union pensions. The transition was accomplished by the ninety year old judge who said:

Go to Washington, to the archive building, it says: “What is past is prologue ….” Many mistakes were made on both sides. But it’s gone now. Now what are we going to do about coal? I thought that was frankly what was the purpose of this meeting here tonight.

According to Sartre (1960:96), “Society is presented to each man as a perspective on the future not as a past which rules men like the cause rules effect.” Human action can only be understood in relation to the historical material situation in which it occurs and in relation to a future object which the action is intended to produce. This is what Sartre called the project. It is the transcendent concept of the project which contains the dialectic between biography and history. Without this totalizing process at the heart of understanding, social science can only remain a misplaced abstraction (Marxism) which speaks in generalities, and an abstracted empiricism which has only a certain idealism in place of theory (sociology).

Only on the ground of the “project” can the meaning of history can be discovered. The progressive-regressive reflexive method is precisely a social science project. The long-term goal of the paradigm is to enter the ongoing totalization. The reflex meetings produced a agenda for the second round of interviewing and photo research. It led to far more emphasis on everyday life, childhood, actual relations between ethnic groups, and the tenor of women’s lives. Public editing meetings produced other effects and understandings as well. After the Trinidad meeting a young man came up to me to thank me and shake my hand. His grandfather was dead he told me, and he had always told stories about the mines and strikes. But he had not paid attention to the old man, and it was only after seeing it in TV that he realized that it might have been important and that he might have missed something. To me, this brought a profound realization that the mass media’s imitation of life was indeed more real than the community’s oral tradition.

In another instance a reflex meeting taught me an off camera lesson about the complexity of social relationships in coal towns. One of the central people that we interviewed, Victor Bazanelle, had been a striker at Ludlow in 1913 and had died shortly after the interview. We had arranged a another reflex meeting in Trinidad, this one was co-sponsored by the United Mine Workers and held in the Eagles Hall which was also the UMWA hall. I phoned Victor’s son Aldo and invited him to attend. As it turned out, in inviting Aldo I had violated local norms. Despite Victor’s role in helping found the union, and the fact that Aldo had been a union member, he had turned in his union card and was currently a master mechanic at CF&I’s Allen mine. This was a salaried position, Aldo had become a boss. He and his wife came to the union hall because I had requested it, but they were extremely uncomfortable. The union miners felt their space was being infringed upon, and as soon as the media program was over Aldo left without participating in the discussion.

The slide show had provoked the community into an oral historic discussion which was recorded. Tapes of reflex meetings were handled like other program material and incorporated into later generation documents. In this way the processes of inquiry became incorporated in the structure of the document; the subjects of the program participated in the editing process and made meaningful decisions on how their history would be comprehended. The reflexive method made it possible to produce programs reflecting the vertical and horizontal complexity of the coal community. Non-print media facilitated an “electronic dialogue” between individuals and communities that had historically been isolated from one another both geographically and socially. The basis for communication was history and the common future lying beneath the mountains and plains, while the medium made information exchange possible despite physical and social distance.

The Video Project

In 1976 more than fifteen reflex meetings were held in Colorado towns with a history of coal mining.^[6] At one of the meetings, at the Aspen Humanities Institute, a representative of the NEH saw the program and invited us to apply for a grant to continue the process using video. To make a long story short, the coal project received a large public media grant in 1977. We purchased the first generation of one-inch highband color video equipment (Ampex VPR-1’s). We transferred the slide show to video and continued to use it in public editing meetings while recording the audience discussions on video. As might be expected, one of the benefits of public editing was to introduce us to an enormous number of new potential interview subjects. After every meeting people offered names and addresses of new subjects. In spring and summer of 1978 we began another round of oral history interviewing with the new equipment and in the second round of interviews we recorded more than one hundred hours. We enlarged our geographic scope from Colorado to include coal towns in Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico. All of the ethnographic data was transcribed. More than 10,000 additional historic photos were collected and cataloged. A search of the archives yielded many hours of historic film footage, period music including folk and ethnomusicological recordings, and a number of historic documents.

Public editing had become part of the ongoing research process, not simply a stage in a production plan. The entire investigation thus became methodical and replicable. However, instead of a written report, the research findings appeared on videotape. By 1981 two new one-hour video documents had been produced: TOIL AND RAGE IN A NEW LAND portrayed the history of the western coal community from the turn of the century through 1913, OUT OF THE DEPTHS told the story of the 1913-14 Colorado strike. In 1984 a third program, HARD TIMES, SOFT COAL, carried the story from 1914 through the 1927 IWW strike. The video documents followed a historical temporal logic, except that the first program included a fifteen minute section introduced with the title “Public Editing.” The reflexive chapter had three sections, each beginning with a shot taken from the Trinidad reflex meeting: good times in the coal camps, racial and ethnic relations, and the lives of women and children. The goal was to demonstrate the manifold, contradictory, and interpretative nature of history and social life.

Out of the Depths — The Miners’ Story

Eventually OUT OFTHE DEPTHS–THE MINERS’ STORY made its way to public television. It was aired in 1984 as an episode of the PBS series, “A Walk Through the 20th Century with Bill Moyers.” Moyers’ production house recut the two “documents” as an hour long documentary. The first half described working and living conditions, the second focused on the strike and the Ludlow massacre. Public editing was omitted. The documentary was subtly different from the preceding documents. More polished, less tentative, it was “finished;” there was nothing more to add. The conveyed message was emphatically not “What’s past is prologue” but that history “was past and gone;” history speaking was not presented as part of the living reality of the coal communities. “Historification” was accomplished by Moyers’ narration, which in typical documentary fashion interrupted the old timers’ talk to provide summaries of what they “meant.”

Moyer’s PBS documentary collapsed a multi-faceted and contradictory reality always oriented towards the future, into the expected story, abused and exploited miners were forced to fight back against overwhelming odds but through their struggle achieved higher wages, shorter hours, and a safer workplace-or even more grandiosely: a better America. In essence the meaning was transformed from “coal mining as a way of life” to “lo the poor miner.” As just a brief example, consider the introductory sequence. The program begins with a montage of old timers’ voices, the last of which is Alfred Owens, an African American miner from Walsenburg, Colorado. Alfred says:

Well before, when the mines was running here it was good times. The people, you know, they had plenty and they would have dances and things like that, and they had places to go. Well of course it isn’t – Now the mines is all shut down, there’s nothing here but just old people.Washington, to the archive building, it says: “What is past is prologue ….” Many mistakes were made on both sides. But it’s gone now. Now what are we going to do about coal? I thought that was frankly what was the purpose of this meeting here tonight.

Moyers breaks in at this point to say:

Just old people. But where there are old people there are memories, and through these memories run the veins of the American past like seams of coal winding deep in the rock of the earth. In this broadcast you’ll meet some people who helped to build America by putting the pick to that rock and freeing its treasure for the industrial expansion of the 20th Century. This is their story. Its a story of struggle. They had to rest their livelihood from the stubborn earth, and their rights from men even more stubborn.

Many things can be said about Moyers re-reading of the miner’s story. Alfred Owens’ living history and biography, totalized as a lack of things for old people to do and a town in which all the young people have left, has simply vanished. Deindustrializing processes which result in cast-off old people and dying towns are not one of Moyers’ problematics. It might have been read as a continuing form of exploitation, but Moyers program portrays the miners’ as having successfully struggled not as being exploited. Next, Moyers describes the memories of old people, history, as a kind of natural resource to be exploited. Presumably we are to learn a lesson. In the next sentence we learn that this history consisted in providing the fuel for progress “the industrial expansion of the 20th Century.” Now the lesson is applied, struggle over adversity is rewarded. Obviously the miners “wrested” their living and their rights from stubborn natural forces (rocks or capitalists).

The subtle “historification” and “naturalization” accomplished by Moyers re-cut of the coal project was emphasized by the fact that the name “Rockefeller” was never mentioned. A brief description of my contacts with the Moyers group will make it clear how curious was this omission. One of Moyer’s producers called me seeking still photographs or historic footage of the Ludlow massacre for a program they were working on. THE IMAGE MAKERS, one of the “Walk Through the 20th Century” programs, was going to examine the growth of the public relations industry. The first half of the show focused on the campaign created by Ivy Lee to improve the image of the Rockefellers after the deaths of women and children at Ludlow had tarnished the family name. I provided them with photographs and other material for that program and sent Bill Moyers copies of my tapes. As it turned out, one of the programs planned for the series had fallen through and Moyers decided to contract with me to replace it with a program on the Colorado miners.

In essence, then, Moyers produced two programs. The first showed Ludlow in a quick montage to establish the teirible events which led Rockefeller hire Ivy Lee to manipulate and recast his image. According to the program this was the first time that public relations had been used to create a personal image. One legacy of Lee’s effort is the image of the old man giving away dimes and JDR Junior as the great philanthropist. The blurb for THE IMAGE MAKERS sums up the program: “Practitioners of public relations claim they are exercising their democratic rights to inform and persuade, but Moyers points out that this powerful tool must be carefully scrutanized since truth can be disguised at many levels.” This program is recommended for “business, advertising, marketing and public relations training” (PBS, 1987-88).

The second program, OUT OF THE DEPTHS-THE MINERS’ STORY, was recommended for “labor relations, sociology and American history courses.” In Moyers’ introduction to the program he sets the strike in a curious far away land:

Our story takes place in that part of the old west where the Rockies meet the prairies in Southern Colorado. If you don’t live there, and not many of us do, your idea of that country was perhaps forged as mine was by the tales of Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, the cowboys and Indians of Hollywood. It was the wild wild west. Bat Masterson was the sheriff of Trinidad, the biggest town around. Farmers fought cattlemen, cattlemen fought sheepherders, and there were shootouts just like in the movies. But there was another way of life that doesn’t fit the romanticised image of the old west. I mean the life of the coal miner.

The program might have been contextualized quite differently. In 1903 John D. Rockefeller had acquired a controlling interest in the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. By 1913, when the strike began, absentee capitalists controlled the company which was both the largest employer in Colorado and the dominant coal operator in the state. CF&I refused to negotiate with the United Mine Workers of America and their lead was followed by the other operators. The company hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency of West Virginia which specialized in breaking mine strikes and was responsible for widespread violence. In my program these events were emphasized and repeatedly discussed by a number of interview subjects. Miners held Rockefeller personally responsible for the strike and the escalating climate of violence, and they attributed the deaths at Ludlow to Baldwin-Felts mine guards who had been inducted into the Colorado Militia.

All of this was left out of Moyers’ re-cut. When I was invited to help write narration for Moyers, I tried to write the Rockefellers back in, arguing that it was a central part of the story. But my arguments did not prevail. One might be tempted to attribute the shift in context to a decision on Moyers’ part not to bite the hand that fed him. “A Walk Through the 20th Century” with Bill Moyers was funded by Chevron, AKA Standard Oil of California. Certainly many of the residents of southern Colorado are convinced that the long arm of the Rockefeller family continues to suppress attempts to tell the Ludlow story. But even without a conspiracy, it is clear that, as Moyers’ put it “truth can be disguised at many levels.” In this case it was accomplished by re-contextualizing the strike to make it just another example of widespread violence between cowboys and Indians, cattlemen and sheepherders, etc.; truth was further, disguised by leaving Rockefeller out, and by segmenting the audience. One program sold as suitable for business and the other for sociology classes, making it unlikely that viewers could put the story back together again.

Broadcast television plays a reflexive role in our culture, gathering images and reflecting them back to us in various self-amplifying or self-correcting ways. However the reflection offered is generally pacifying and therapeutic, as in Moyers’ presentation; the struggle took place long ago in a distant place but the miner’s sacrifice made possible the modern world where everything is much better. However, the fact that television has not been used critically or in rigorous scholarship is more a critique of scholars than of television. Interviewers who have been privileged to encounter history in the first person know how exciting the experience can be. Oral history/ethnography offers a sense of immediacy but more importantly conveys “participation” which is utterly different from the “one-way” experience of written or documentary history. It makes clear that meaning is negotiated. Oral history allows scholars to develop more active roles than “expert commentators” on documentary or “talk” shows, and goes a long way toward raising the level of discourse in the “global village.”

Sartre’s work pointed the way to reconstruct history and social science in a fundamentally different relation to the society which produced it. He suggested that explanation shift from narrow, technical, and manipulative languages of control based on the earlier model of physics, to a reflexive “comprehension,” in which historians and social scientists function as translators and communicators rather than law givers. The paradigm for a historical structural anthropology is not limited to either oral history or videotape, but this technology offers one way to operationalize the concepts, and perhaps to revive history-speaking as a community building activity.

In Conclusion

Marx and others observed that historians are products of history and sociologists members of society. I began the coal project from this perspective but in the course of the research I formulated a corollary: oral histories are not merely accounts elicited by a researcher with a tape recorder; historyspeaking is a big part of an ongoing social process which creates communities out of groups of individuals. These realizations were critical in my attempts to develop a “reflexive” approach to doing ethnographic and oral historical research. Briefly, the term reflexive describes a different role for the investigator who recognizes that they are working within society and history. In this essay I sketched some of the implications of that observation.

Film, audiotape and videotape are appropriate media to record communities’ spoken traditions. Documentary also offers new ways to address a deep and profound contradiction within the social and human sciences. Sartre (1960:9) described the human sciences as suffering from a crisis which arose from the contradiction between knowing and being, existence and knowledge: “We are not only knowers, in the triumph of intellectual self-consciousness, we appear as the known.” On an epistemological level, the crisis resulted from the failure of the anthropological sciences to recognize the Heisenberg principle. “The only theory of knowledge which can be valid today is one which is founded on the truth of microphysics: the experimenter is a part of the experimental system” (Sartre, 1960:32N). This observation is just as true, of course, for film and video makers. There is no place “outside” society or history for us to stand. The quest for objectivity is mis-taken.

The use of non-print media offers opportunities for the investigator to record social processes directly, to explicitly enter into the process, and to record the effect of that interaction. At the same time that I “studied” coal miners, I intended to explore the developing relations between what I was doing and the miners. Not only do cameras and tape recorders open up new possibilities to record social interaction and for sociologists to present their findings, they also have the potential to reduce the dualism experimenter/experimental subject. Reflexive research designs utilizing non-print media have the potential to provide checks on the work by encouraging “subjects” to participate actively in the research and take a critical role in the presentation of research findings. With this in mind, I set out to utilize audio-visual technology within the epistemological framework set forth by critical theory. This essay sketched the theoretical and practical dimensions of a documentary project which used non-print media in specifically dialectical and non-positivist processes of social research. In essence the project had three “moments”: oral history interviewing, editing, and presentations of edited programs to the community which included the interviewees. This entire process was repeated more than once at expanded levels.

Sartre (1960:52N) praised Henri LeFebvre, the French sociologist, for suggesting “a simple and faultless method for integrating sociology and history in the perspective of a materialistic-dialectic.” In LeFebvre’s studies of rural communities he first studied horizontalcomplexity: environment, the existing state of technology, the social structure, community relations, ideology, the relations between the community and its neighbors in the state, the region and the rest of the world. Horizontal complexity was merely one moment of verticalor historical complexity: we know that it was not always thus. ie two dimensions “react upon one another.” In order to ep all the complex relations clear, LeFebvre devised certain ethodological procedures:^[7]

• Descriptive: Observation but with a scrutiny guided by experience and by a general theory…
• Analytico-regressive: Analysis of reality. Attempt to date it precisely.
• Historical-genetic: Attempt to rediscover the present, but elucidated, understood, explained.

Although LeFebvre was recommending a methodical apoach to be employed by professional sociologists, it is imirtant to understand that these are not specialized techlues. Material and dialectical moments of comprehension part of our everyday understanding. Consider for instance following observation by Claude Amicarella, a retired miner:

You depended on a little coal stove to keep you warm. And you had to deal out of a company store. And if you didn’t deal out of the company store your job was at stake. And if you didn’t bend over backwards to the people that were your superior, your job was at stake. So you had to take these and graciously swallow them and hope that someday things would be different, but they haven’t changed,

Amicarella began horizontally, describing the objective state technology. His next sentence rises to a description of sod structure and the exploitation embedded in the “truck sysn,” company stores and scrip which required miners to end their wages in the coal camp. His analysis continues in ; description of having to kowtow to petty bosses and superintendents who controlled jobs and patronage in the mine urns. Claude then moves beyond horizontal description. He alizes his historical experience using his analysis to recover the present. The last sentence bears repeating because it is key in what I hoped to convey with the coal project: “So u had to take these and graciously swallow them and hope it someday things would be different, but they haven’t changed.”Claude’s sentence illuminated the present. He did t mean, of course, that we still had company towns, but that ; fundamental structure of exploitation, that he had starkly pealed in its vertical and horizontal complexity, still haunt the world.

To Lefebvre’s paradigm Sartre had only one addition, albeit an important one:

This method with its phase of phenomenological description and its double movement of regression followed by progress is valid–with the modifications which its objects may impose on it…

Sartre’s addition to LeFebvre’s methodology distinguished it rm all other sociologies whether they are adopted a priorilike Marxism and academic sociology, or practice “atheoretical” description like phenomenology or ethnomethods. None these approaches encourage the “objects” of investigation modify the science’s methods. The problem comes when etries to operationalize Sartre’s concepts. I offer the coal oject as one way to do historical-structural social science.

END NOTES

[1] – The “coal project” was an ethnographic investigation exploring the intersections between biography and history that sought to develop methods for presenting oral history research to a wide audience. The project was begun by two graduate students in sociology at the University of Colorado, Eric Margolis and Ronald L. McMahan. Randall C. Vik was the technical engineer, but made many substantive contributions, to shooting and editing. Kai Schuman served as still photographer, Oliver Ask operated the video camera, and Ruth Astor helped with the editing. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs in this paper were taken by the coal project.

[2] – Sartre (1960:72) emphasized that “Research is a living relationship between men (sic.),” in which “the sociologist and his’object’ form a couplet, each of which is to be interpreted by the other; the relationshipbetween them must be itself interpreted as a moment of history.” For instance, “The sociology of’primitive people’ is established on the more profound relation, which may be …colonialism.”

[3] – As I am using the term, “totalization” defines both the movement of history and the editor’s practical attempt to situate an event, a person, or an interpretation. As Sartre (1960:108) explained:

Every action has many significations and exists in relation to a future and is determined by a past; every action can be analyzed, isolated and broken down to its diverse significations. But the movement which has joined them together in life is, on the contrary, synthetic.

[4] – Barron Beshoar is a pivotal figure in the oral history and the production, not exactly a narrator but more an expert witness. A third generation resident of Trinidad, Colorado, where the strike took place, his father was the union doctor in 1913. In 1943 Batron wrote Out of the Depths,the first book on the Ludlow incident, and later went on to be a Bureau Chief for Time-Life. When I met him he had returned to Trinidad to retire. He took an interest in the project, providing an extensive personal photograph collection, taking us on tours of the region, giving several interviews and reading from his book.

[5] – This excerpt was selected from the video program TOIL AND RAGE IN A NEW LAND, which was the first of the series produced with NEH funding.

[6] – Towns included Trinidad, Aguilar, Walsenburg, Lafayette, Louisville, Erie, Craig, Meeker, Hayden, Durango, Crested Butte, Gunnison, Carbondale, Denver and Boulder.

[7] – Henri LeFebvre: “Perspectives de Sociologie Rurale,” Cahiers de Sociologie,1953: as quoted by Sartre, (1960: 52N).

REFERENCES

• Beshoar, Barron [1943] Out of the Depths: The Story of John R. Lawson a Labor Leader, Golden Bell Press, Denver Colorado.
• PBS Video. Catalog Supplement, Public Broadcasting System, 1987-88. Alexandria, VA.
• Sartre, Jean Paul. [1943] Being and Nothingness,Tr. Hazel E. Barnes, Washington Square Press, 1966
• [ 1960] Search for a Method.Tr. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963.
• [ 1960] Search for a Method.Tr. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963.
• [1960a] Critique of Dialectical Reason.Tr. Alan Sheridan Smith. London: New Left Books, 1968.

Blind Spots: Thoughts for Visual Sociology
Upon Reading Martin Jay’s
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision
in Twentieth-Century French Thought

Reviewed by Eric Margolis
Associate Professor
Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Arizona State University
margolis@asu.edu

Ranging from Plato to Lyotard, Jay’s remarkable book is a 600 page introduction to the role of vision in western thought focusing on 20^th century French philosophy. Among many other themes, the investigation chronicles the systematic interrogation of visible evidence and the disinterested observer that is the ground of every social science. Jay is the perfect guide. While admitting an affinity to the Enlightenment “ideal of illumination,” and recognizing the distancing and pitfalls of the totalizing gaze, (17-18) Jay remains agnostic, neither worshiping nor denigrating vision, but like Dante’s Virgil, he makes it clear to readers that the only path is to go through hell itself.^{[Note 1]} He examines writers, artists and thinkers who doubt the centrality and trustworthiness of vision: “French thought in a wide variety of fields is in one way or another imbued with a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era” (14). Yet, in the end, Jay concluded that “…it cannot be denied that for all its hyperbolic rhetoric, for all its inclination to demonize, the antiocularcentric discourse has successfully posed substantial and troubling questions about the status of visuality in the dominant cultural traditions of the west” (589). In my reading of Jay’s book I will try to address some of the questions that are most troubling for visual sociologists. We visualistas, sociologists who look the world straight in the face, who gather it as data with our eyes and cameras, have a lot to learn from those for whom seeing is not believing, who are not from Missouri, who denegrate vision and view the world through downcast eyes. In approaching Jay’s book through the eyes of a visual sociologist I will look specifically at four themes raised repeatedly in this history of ideas: The centrality of vision, looking at and being looked at by others, surveillance, and photography.^{[Note 2]} At the end I’ll briefly consider the image world

I. The Dominant Scoptic Regime

Over hearing, touch or smell, western thought has privileged vision at least since Plato’s cave allegory. In his chapter called “The Noblest of the Senses,” Jay develops the point made by Hans Jonas “that the externality of sight allows the observer to avoid direct engagement with the object of his gaze. Thus the very distinction between subject and object and the belief in the neutral apprehension of the latter by the former, a distinction so crucial for much later thought, was abetted by the ocularcentrism of Greek thought” (25). Vision further wormed its way into the heart of “objective” science as it came to be modeled after the passive Copernican contemplation of the night sky; but it was Descartes who enthroned vision as the master sense in Western thought. In describing the journeys he undertook in preparation for his philosophical investigations, Descartes ?(1637 [1960]:22)wrote that for nine years “I wandered here and there throughout the world, trying everywhere to be spectator rather than actor in all the comedies that go on.” He further proposed that the attitude of the spectator was ethically neutral: “the mental process of knowing a thing is good or bad is distinct from, and can occur without, the mental process of knowing that we know it” (Descartes 1637 [1960]:19). Anticipating the gaze of street photographers like Eugène Atget or Helen Levitt, Descartes adopted the modern attitude of the Flâneur or, for our purposes, the disinterested observer. This stance underpins much of sociology in general and visual sociology in particular.?

Jay embellished the first chapter with a Cartesian epigraph celebrating vision and further supporting those of us who favor cameras in social research:

All the management of our lives depends on the senses, and since that of sight is the most comprehensive and noblest of these, there is no doubt that the inventions which serve to augment its power are among the most useful that there can be. (21)

In one of three treatises appended to the Discourse on Method, La Dioptrique (1637), Descartes set out views on vision which, as Jay noted, laid the ground for the modern “visualist paradigm:”?

…[Descartes] tacitly adopted the position of a perspectivalist painter using a camera obscura to reproduce the observed world. “Cartesian perspectivalism,” in fact, may nicely serve as a shorthand way to characterize the dominant scoptic regime of the modern era (69-70).

The Cartesian mind/body duality relates consciousness to matter as if a deduction machine in our head was gazing through a window on the world. Jay quoted Richard Rorty’s contention in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that:

In the Cartesian model, the intellect inspects entities modeled on retinal images…. In Descartes conception – the one that became the basis for modern epistemology – it is representations which are in the “mind” (70).

There are two consequences to Cartesian perspectivalism. One is what Jay termed the “modern epistemological habit of ‘seeing’ ideas in the mind” (70). Descartes did not imagine ideas to be mere sensory reflections of the material world; in his famous epoché, it was the reasoning process not empirical evidence that he found undoubtable (73). The other consequence, of particular importance to visual sociologists, is the “legitimating mode of scientific investigation through visual observation of evidence (from the Latin videre)…” (70-71). Going back to the Greeks, Jay noted the identification of the mind’s eye with “speculation” and binocular vision of two eyes with “observation” (29). As visual sociologists we thus engage in a distinctly Cartesian project; treating the visually observed world (including photographs and other representations facilitated by instrumentation) as empirical evidence from which we deduce such mental constructs as social relationships and speculate on their meaning. Prefiguring some of the discussions in semiotics, Descartes’ Optics opened yet another window for the visual sociological imagination:?

We should consider that there are many other things besides pictures which can stimulate our thought, such as, for example, signs and words, which do not in any way resemble the things which they signify …. There are no images that must resemble in every way the objects they represent – for otherwise there would be no distinction between the object and its image – but that it is sufficient for them to resemble the objects in but a few ways (75-76 quoting Descartes, Optics).

As Jay explained, “Images in the mind were thus perceptual judgments, not mere simulacra. They involved the intervention of language to read them correctly” (79). Nonetheless, in his search for a guarantor of truth, Descartes rejected popular belief, custom, the “testimony of the majority,” and the wisdom of the ancients refusing, as Jay put it, “the voices of the past and trusting instead only to what one could ‘see with one’s eyes.’” The bulk of Downcast Eyes consists of Jay brilliantly guiding the reader through the variety of criticism’s of the dominant scoptic regime. As he noted, this critique was not restricted to Descartes: “Insofar as the Enlightenment was premised largely on that same attitude, the antiocularcentric discourse often took on a self-consciously Counter-Enlightenment tone” (82). The territory Jay covers is encyclopedic, in one of his comprehensive summaries he lists the following critics of ocularcentrism:

Bergson’s critique of the spatialization of time, Bataille’s celebration of the blinding sun and the acephalic body, Breton’s ultimate disenchantment with the savage eye, Sartre’s depiction of the sadomasochism of the “look,” Merleau-Ponty’s diminished faith in a new ontology of vision, Lacan’s disparagement of the ego produced by the mirror stage, Althusser’s appropriation of Lacan for a Marxist theory of ideology, Foucault’s strictures against the medical gaze and panoptic surveillance, Debord’s critique of the society of the spectacle, Barthes’s linkage of photography and death, Metz’s excoriation of the scopic regime of the cinema, Derrida’s double reading of the specular tradition of philosophy and the white mythology, Irigaray’s outrage at the privileging of the visual in patriarchy, Levinas’s claim that ethics is thwarted by a visually based ontology, and Lyotard’s identification of postmodernism with the sublime foreclosure of the visual… (588)

All this hostile terrain is not necessarily of equal interest to visual sociologists. To my way of thinking one of the most telling attacks on Cartesian perspectivalism is what Sartre termed “the look.” Let me briefly examine four issues: Sartre’s statement of the look in Being and Nothingness that Jay castigated as a “paranoid ontology of the gaze” (408), an alternate formulation of Le Regard associated with Merleau-Ponty, the feminist argument that the gaze is male, and the oddly compelling notion that the eye projects emotional meaning.?

Here’s Looking at You:

We become conscious of another’s subjectivity when we become aware of them looking at us and conversely we feel our selves as object in the same instant. We want to be in control, we want others to exist for us, but when we observe that we are fixed in the other’s gaze we become aware that we exist for them; that we are an object for them. We experience the other’s look as an attack on our freedom because it is an alien point of view over which we have no control. Thus Sartre wrote: “To be looked at is to apprehend oneself as the unknown object of unknowable appraisals – in particular, of value judgements. … Those subjective reactions to the Other’s look (include) fear (the feeling of being in danger before the Other’s freedom), pride, or shame (the feeling of being finally what I am but elsewhere, over there for the Other, the recognition of my slavery (the feeling of the alienation of all my possibilities)” (Sartre 1943 [1971]:358). Sartre thus denied Descartes formulation that knowing could be non-judgmental and that it was possible to avoid complicity or maintain the “clean hands” of the disinterested observer (284). For Sartre (1943 [1971]:358): “A judgment is the transcendental act of a free being.” In Jay’s summary “the Cartesian self-reflecting cogito is replaced by a self that is constituted by the gaze of the other” (288). ^{[Note 3]} When two subjectivities encounter one another, then, the look is a duel similar to the conflict expressed in English as being “eyeball to eyeball.” The loser is the one who “blinks,” thus, in an instant, turned into an object for the other. Dogs and people know the stare as an aggressive act.

Jay is correct as far as he goes, but I think that his discussion of Sartre’s ontology was weakened by the failure to include in his account Sartre’s use of the plural subject “we” which can be traced from Being and Nothingness through the Critique of Dialectical Reason:

In the “we,” nobody is the object. The “we” includes a plurality of subjectivities which recognize one another as subjectivities. Nevertheless this recognition is not the object of an explicit thesis; what is explicitly posited is a common action or the object of a common perception. “We” resist, “we” advance to the attack, “we” condemn the guilty, “we” look at this or that spectacle. Thus the recognition of subjectivities is analogous to the self recognition of the non-thetic consciousness. More precisely it must be effected laterally by a non-thetic consciousness whose thetic object is this or that spectacle in the world (Sartre 1943 [1971]:535).?

Sartre described the epistemological ground for “we projects” accomplished not by staring at each other, which becomes the game of mirrors, but by being co-intent on the world. We recognize each other’s subjectivity as we work matter together. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre ([1960] 1968:351ff.) wrote a chapter on the storming of the Bastille that develops the we project into social “groups in fusion” in which “an injury to one is an injury to all.” This is a far more open and hopeful possibility than Jay’s slogan “paranoid ontology of the gaze” suggests.?

Admittedly this is pretty esoteric stuff. It has however a number of consequences for visual sociologists. Despite the fact that, as Jay put it, “we are beings to be looked at” (359), visual sociologist’s tend not to include themselves in the frame. ^{[Note 4]} This practice is similar to, and just as curious as, the general practice in writing up qualitative research and editing out the questions. It is common to include one’s “questionnaire” as an appendix, a far different effect than including the actual words that provoked the quoted response. Similarly, we often present photos of our subjects as if they occurred sui generis and the observer was not there.? ^{[Note 5]} This might be an act of omission, of denial, or a form of aggression.? We might consider what it means not to stare directly at the other but to cultivate peripheral vision; to focus on things or spectacles in the world alongside the other so that a we project might emerge. Some of Doug Harper’s (1987) photos in Working Knowledge come close to realizing this possibility. A we project is accomplished as Willie shows Doug (and the camera) how he cuts, shapes, bends and welds metal.

Regards, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Jay observed that the word “regard” has two meanings; in both English and French it means to look at but also to care for. The second meaning was highlighted by Merleau-Ponty who disagreed with Sartre on this point and “more optimistically posited a cooperative, complementary world of intersubjectivity in which mutual regard is a visual as well as emotional phenomena” (312). Merleau-Ponty rejected classical schools of perception which he classified as “empiricist” or “intellectualist:”

… empiricism because it turned the subject into an object in the world like all others, intellectualism because it made the cognitive subject all-powerful, turning perception into a mere function of thought, an effect of judgment. In both cases the world was. construed as a spectacle to be observed from afar by a disembodied mind (308).

In opposition Merleau-Ponty posited “being in the world ” to, as Jay contended, “mingle the viewer with the world on view” (309). “Wild Being, the flesh of the world, thus became the fundamental category for Merleau-Ponty, grounding both subject and object, viewer and viewed, mind and body” (319). ^{[Note 6]} Jay contended that, Merleau-Ponty confronted the Sartrean ossifying look with language:

“What is it like when one of the others turns upon me, meets my gaze, and fastens his own upon my body and my face?” His answer was that “unless we have recourse to the ruse of speech, putting a common domain of thoughts between us and a third party, the experience is intolerable. There is nothing left to look at but a look. Seer and seen are exactly interchangeable. The two glances are immobilized upon one another . . . . Vision produces what reflection will never understand – a combat which at times has no victor …. Speech . . . would interrupt this fascination” (324).

Merleau-Ponty was nonetheless critical of vision and the Cartesian project. If indeed language makes perception intelligible then there can be no Cartesian or Sartrean subject constituted by the eye or the look alone. But language’s relation to perception is ambivalent; it may add to perception; it can contradict it as well. Jay quoted Merleau-Ponty’s position in The Visible and the Invisible:

“… there is all the same this difference between perception and language, that I see the perceived things and that the significations on the contrary are invisible. The natural being is at rest in itself, my look can stop on it. The Being whose home is language cannot be fixed, looked at” (324).

This point was further elucidated by Emmanuel Levinas who quipped “Even when he does not regard me, he regards me” (543). Levinas argued that: “the two meanings of “regard” should therefore be rigorously separated, for to care for the Other meant refusing to turn him or her into an object of visual knowledge or aesthetic contemplation” (556). The relation of language and visual perception might be recognized as the essential ground for a visual sociology seeking to unify the senses rather than privileging vision over other sources of information about the world. The invisible meanings – concept, social relationship, ideology, and so on that exist solely as language – cannot be dispensed with. Although we use images in our texts, words flow all around them. It is curious to me that so many visual sociologies, especially visual ethnographies, documentaries, and photo elicitation studies are as much aural as visual. We talk to people, quote them at length, and together with them explicitly seek the visible and invisible in the “flesh of the world.” This can be the very essence of Sartre’s concept of the “we project,” yet we endlessly call for respect as visual sociologists not aural sociologists or “whole body” sociologists. ^{[Note 7]} If sight is “othering,” if words bring us to community, if we intend our “regard” of the other to mean “care for,” then I think we do not pay nearly enough attention to the talk that fills pages between photographs.

A central question raised by Merleau-Ponty and by Martin Jay is: How do visual sociologists regard our subjects? Is our regard the medusan look that petrifies and objectifies, or the regard that “cares for”? Be careful! There is no easy answer despite every researcher’s knee-jerk reaction of identification and sympathy with their subjects. Once we manufacture and present an image of the other, and despite the blizzard of words we offer in support of this or that sympathetic reading, we cannot control the gaze of the viewer. We must heed Levinas’s warning about not turning our subjects into “the objects of visual knowledge.” As Sartre wrote in a broader discussion of language:

…the “meaning” of my expressions always escapes me.?I never know exactly if I signify what I wish to signify nor even if I am signifying anything. … Thus the word is sacred when I employ it and magic when the Other hears it. Thus I do not know my language any more than I know my body for the Other. I cannot hear myself speak nor see myself smile (Sartre 1943 [1971]:486,487).

What is true for words is doubly true for images. We cannot control how others see the images we produce or highlight. To the extent that sociology is part of the dominant perspectivialist regime it transfixes the Other as an insect on a pin. Moreover, we don’t know how we look when we are looking, that is how we are regarded. Visual sociologists typically look and are not looked at. As we’ll investigate later in discussing photography; motion, sound, history are stopped, objectified. Whether we love our subjects or not, the act of writing about them and showing their images is objectifying. That is the epistemological problem; there is a related political problem.?

Despite our regards, or perhaps because of them, we overwhelmingly look down. ^{[Note 8]} In a quick and dirty review of past issues of Visual Sociology/Visual Studies I found no one looking on the level examining professors, students, or university life, the mall, suburbia – although I’ll warrant most visual sociologists spend their lives in these places. Apparently we don’t look up either – where are the visual sociologies of the life styles of the rich and powerful? Where is the C. Wright Mills of visual sociology? Our pages seem overwhelmingly to be illustrated with working class cultures and exotic others: Samoans, Asylums, Palestinians, African Americans, Sports Fans, Coal miners, Demonstrators, Farmers in Cape Breton in the 1950’s, Swiss farmers in the 1940’s, Advertising images of sexuality, gender, and race, Black Stereotypes, Tattoos, Homeless persons in various urban and rural settings, Motorcycle riders, Drag queens, and the like. These are people who cannot resist our gaze. Visual sociology seems, perhaps inadvertently, to be reproducing the dominant scoptic regime that so clearly differentiates subject from object.

Flâneur or Voyeur?

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one? flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. (Baudelaire [1863] 1964).

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishBaudelaire’s description of the flâneur captures many of the qualities of the ethnographic stance. One of the most telling criticism’s of the dominant view of observation as a non-judgmental, disinterested activity forces us to recognize that looking is pleasurable even lustful. There is a pornography of the gaze stemming, in some accounts, from Freud who, as Jay informed us, “came to believe that the very desire to know (Wisstrieb), rather than being innocent, was itself ultimately derived from an infantile desire to see, which had sexual origins” (332). As Jay also noted: “Bryson goes so far as to claim that ‘the life of vision is one of endless wanderlust, and in its carnal form the eye is nothing but desire.’ It was, however, by and large the decarnalized eye that characterized the Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime” (166). Many antiocularcentric writers, especially Georges Bataille, emphasized, not the nobility of vision but its involvement with base desire. For French feminists ocularcentrism was phallocentrism (526). I first encountered the curious relationship between the eye and the phallus in the early 1970’s in a talk by Norman O. Brown in which he deconstructed the Greek myth of Actaeon ^{[Note 9]} who, you’ll recall, was out hunting and peeked at Diana as she bathed naked. She splashed water in his face; horns grew where his eyes had been and he was hunted down by his own dogs and torn to pieces. Tracing the myth through history, Brown made much of horny eyes: “Caught in a thicket by his horns, the cornea of his eyes. Some interpret the gates of horn as the eyes, taking the part for the whole, in that the outermost covering of the eye is horny” (Brown, 1991:40)..es. His passion and his profession are to become one? flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. (Baudelaire [1863] 1964).

Actaeon; alien horns added to his forehead; the dogs that sated themselves in the blood of their own master; all for the sin of seeing. Cur aliquid vidi? ?Why did I have to see something? (Brown 1991:31)

Lust and remorse are as much a part of seeing as clarity and objectivity. Jay noted that after 1968 French feminists turned to the investigation of how vision contributed to patriarchal domination, adding deeply to the attack on ocularcentrism:

For as Alice Jardine has remarked, in France, “woman” or “the feminine” has not only been a metaphor for a certain kind of reading and writing, but also “a tool for declaring war on the Image within the more general twentieth-century iconoclastic imagination” (528).

For Irigaray the gaze was male and as impersonal and threatening as Sartre’s look (538); but the intertwined questions of visual pleasure and whether the gaze was male intrigued many feminist theorists including Teresa de Lauretis and Laura Mulvey on moving pictures, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s examination of photography. For our purposes as visual sociologists, the issue is probably not Lacanian or Freudian notions of castration complexes or even the linguistic similarity of horns and cornea. We need to confront two issues: the first, scopophilia/scopophobia, asks us to consider the pleasures and terrors of seeing: Why do visual sociologists like to look? What do we like to look at? What are we afraid to look at? What is the role of desire in the work of visual sociology? Does visual sociology manifest a desire to penetrate to the core of society? Do we enjoy the Flâneur’s search for secret places? Are we attracted to glossy surfaces? Are there things we are afraid to see? I am not sure visual sociologists ask themselves often enough or deeply enough why we like to look. Once the issue of dispassionate social science has been debunked with the recognition that like everyone visual sociologists have dirty eyes, a second issue arises. It all too clear that the gaze of visual sociology cannot be raceless, genderless, classless. Jay quoted Sartre from Black Orpheus on the gaze of the white man and at the white man:

I want you to feel, as I, the sensation of being seen. For the white man has enjoyed for three thousand years the privilege of seeing without being seen. It was a seeing pure and uncomplicated; the light of his eyes drew all things from their primeval darkness. The whiteness of his skin was a further aspect of vision, a light condensed. The white man, white because he was a man, white like the day, white as truth is white, white like virtue, lighted like a torch all creation; he unfolded the essence, secret and white, of existence. Today, these black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our gaze is thrown back into our eyes …. By this steady and corrosive gaze, we are picked to the bone (294).

Not only are there male and female gazes, gay and straight gazes, and Black and White gazes. There are political gazes, aesthetic gazes, artistic gazes, ethnographic and positivist gazes and so on.? Does visual sociology have a gaze or gazes? The identity, position and stance of the observer central to understanding the work of visual sociologists, is captured in the elegant title to an essay on documentary photography by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Who is speaking thus” (1991).

The Evil Eye:

The fourth element of the look, the ability to project a look, anticipates the human ability to read the eyes of the other. Jay described this at length:

For the eye-broadly understood as including the complex of muscles, flesh, and even hair around the eyeball – can clearly project, signal, and emit emotions with remarkable power. Common phrases such as “a piercing or penetrating gaze,” “melting eyes,” “a come-hither look,” or “casting a cold eye” all capture this ability with striking vividness. Aided by its capacity to overflow with the tears necessary to bathe it with constant moisture, a capacity triggered by a multitude of different stimuli, some physical, some emotional (the latter found only in humans), the eye is not only, as the familiar cliches would have it, a “window on the world,” but also a “mirror of the soul.” Even the dilation of the pupil can unintentionally betray an inner state, subtly conveying interest or aversion to the beholder.

There is, moreover, a learned ability to use the eyes to express something deliberately, a skill more sharply honed than in the case of the other senses. Ranging from the casual glance to the fixed glare, the eye can obey the conscious will of the viewer in a way denied the other more passive senses, once again the only competitor being touch with its ability to strangle as well as caress. The phenomenon of the evil eye, mentioned above, is only one manifestation of this potential for sending powerful messages (10).

Many cultures have a concept of the “evil eye,” that (like superman) one can literally project a deadly force with their eyes. More broadly, this quality of the eye helps make it possible for viewers to interpret facial expressions. Interpretation of face value is explicitly or implicitly a requirement of much of visual sociology. Cassius is not the only one with a lean and hungry look. English offers an enormous vocabulary to describe sent gazes: blindly, hooded, bedroom eyes, shameless, guileless, pitiless, askance, veiled, threatening, glassy, dull, bright, darkly, furrowed, suspiciously, sharply, blandly, menacing, looking daggers and so on. Visual sociology relies on the human ability to discern meaning in the gaze of those we observe and portray, but the discipline has not focused on “the look” as of sociological interest. Are the abilities to “read” the look physiological, psychological, or culturally determined? What does age, race, gender, sexuality etc. have to do with giving and receiving eye messages? How do various readers interpret the look?

II.Surveillance

Jay dealt with Jacques Lacan’s contribution to the antiocularist position in great detail. For this discussion I will attend only to a small part of Lacan’s psychoanalytic perspective. For Lacan the eye defined Cartesian perspectivalism.? The gaze locates the subject in “a general perceptual field,” “Caught, manipulated, captured in the field of vision,” as Lacan wrote (364). Lacan thus retained much of Sartre’s concept of the petrifying look, but transformed from the one-on-one relationship into the gaze, the characteristic of a general social field. For example, Jay noted that “In trompe l’oeil painting … the gaze in fact triumphs over the eye” which I take to mean that socially constituted perception easily undermines Descartes’s (1637 [1960]:29) principle that “all those things that which we conceived very clearly and distinctly are true.” The gaze is thus not a quality of the individual other, but of the collective in which, as Jay explained “vision … may be understood as a conflictual field in which the looker is always a body to be observed” (368). In other words, the individual look is here replaced with a social field of vision, a general surveillance that includes everyone.


I doubt there are many sociologists not at least passingly familiar with Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the panopticon prison, so I will not reiterate the architectural description. Sociological interest in the panopticon is usually credited to Foucault’s (1995) essential text Discipline and Punish. ^{[Note 10]} Foucault published in 1975 but Jay traced the concept two years earlier, to an essay by Lacan’s son-in-law, a psychiatrist named Jacques-Alain Miller who wrote of the panoptic prison:

This configuration sets up a brutal dissymmetry of visibility. The enclosed space lacks depth; it is spread out and open to a single, solitary central eye. It is bathed in light. Nothing and no one can be hidden inside it – except the gaze itself, the invisible omnivoyeur. Surveillance confiscates the gaze for its own profit, appropriates it, and submits the inmate to it (382).

At the center of the panopticon is nothing less than the ubiquitous watcher, the eye of Mordor, the cameras in Orwell’s 1984. It is simultaneously the fulfillment of social scientific projects of the enlightenment like Comte’s social physics, the Protestant ethic as described by Weber, and Durkheim’s social solidarity – each sought mechanisms to produce a rational and well-ordered society. In Jay’s summary of Miller’s essay, the panopticon:

…struck at the older Enlightenment project of linking reason and illumination. “The Panopticon,” he wrote, “is the temple of reason, a temple luminous and transparent in every sense: first because there are no shadows and nowhere to hide: it is open to constant surveillance by the invisible eye; but also, because totalitarian mastery of the environment excludes everything irrational: no opacity can withstand logic.” Even the jailor is subjected to the controlling gaze of the public, which provides the ultimate moral sanction against deviance from the norm (382).

Foucault’s contribution was to expand the notion of panoptic surveillance into grand social theory. “Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance,” he contended, “We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism” (Foucault 1995:217) (381):

The object of power is everywhere penetrated by the benevolently sadistic gaze of a diffuse and anonymous power whose actual existence soon becomes superfluous to the process of discipline. The Panopticon, Foucault wrote, is a “machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine” (410).

Foucault’s concern with vision was not solely with the panopticon prison. He had earlier investigated the cool, calculating, therapeutic gaze in The Birth of the Clinic:

The new medical gaze differed from the Cartesian privileging of internal vision at the cost of the actual senses, and rejected its belief in a transcendent, ideal Spectator. Instead, it emphasized the totality of observers, whose “sovereign power of the empirical gaze” played over the solid and opaque surfaces of the body. “No light could now dissolve them in ideal truths; but the gaze directed upon them would, in turn, awaken them and make them stand out against a background of objectivity. The gaze is no longer reductive, it is, rather, that which establishes the individual in his irreducible quality” (393).

“What this individualizing gaze ‘sees,’” argued Jay, is “an epistemic field, constructed as much linguistically as visually” (393). ^{[Note 11]} Moreover, this became the mode for all the human sciences (394). Echoing Hegel, Foucault wrote: “man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as subject that knows; enslaved sovereign, observed spectator” (406). The consequence as Jay explained, was that:

the external look becomes an internalized and self-regulating mechanism that extends the old religious preoccupation with the smallest detail that was still immense “in the sight of God.” Although by no means restricted to its ocular dimension, this new mechanism of control was first and foremost a part of the visual economy of the modern world (410).

Foucault’s investigations were deeply concerned with the mechanisms by which human beings have domesticated themselves. Visuality is both a mechanism and a metaphor for the watchfulness by which power insinuated itself throughout the social. Constituting what Jay termed an “epistemic shift,” the projects of humanism were accomplished by replacing “the absent spectator, the king, by the ‘observed spectator,’ Man in a still visually constituted epistemological field” (406). Given that even in its most neo-positivist guise, much of modernist sociology is both humanist and involved with social order maintenance functions, in considering Foucault’s work we need to interrogate the relationship between visual sociology, the therapeutic gaze, and the panopticon. We must even ask if visual sociology might be a gaze of the evil eye: Quoting Lacan, “For the evil eye operates as the fascinum, ‘that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally killing life” (367). Jay concluded that the evil eye: “emerged from superstition to become the ruling metaphor of social control and political oppression at its most insidious” (378). What we need to consider is not only our intent and practices in individual investigations, but the uses to which others may put our work, and most importantly the aggregate effect of a “visual sociology.”

III. The Pleasures and Dangers of Images

Not all visual sociologists employ cameras, those that do typically proceed from the realist perspective that a photograph is a window on the social world: the world we photograph is objective; it will go on whether we study it or not; and given the coincidence of certain optical and chemical processes, this object world can leave traces on film. This naive realism lurks behind the insistence that visual sociologists use “straight” photography. Our journals are filled with photographs taken at eye level, showing full frame, sharply in focus, well exposed, etc. ^{[Note 12]} The camera is assumed to depict what any observer with normal vision would see if they were present at the instant the shutter was released. Only because of this can the camera be considered neutral, a device for gathering visual data from which we then analyze (deduce) certain social patterns and meanings. For the antiocularists, on the other hand, the camera is not simply another instrument to augment the power of sight like the lenses Descartes might have had in mind. Jay quoted Joel Snyder’s (1980) important statement on the difference between sight and photograph:

To begin with, our vision is not formed within a rectangular boundary; it is, per Aristotle, unbounded. Second, even if we were to close one eye and place a rectangular frame of the same dimensions as the original negative at a distance from the eye equal to the focal length of the lens [the so-called distance point of perspective construction] and then look at the field represented in the picture, we would still not see what is shown in the picture. The photograph shows everything in sharp delineation from edge to edge, while our vision, because our eyes are foveate, is sharp only at its “center.” The picture is monochromatic, while most of us see in “natural” color (and there are some critics who maintain that the picture would be less realistic if it were in color). Finally, the photograph shows objects in sharp focus in and across every plane, from the nearest to the farthest. We do not-because we cannot-see things this way (131).

Cameras and photographs add another important layer to Jay’s analysis of the antiocular discourse. There is a voluminous literature on the development, history and meaning of photography; while a large sub-set of that literature denigrates cameras and photographic images, only a small part originated with the French antiocularcentrists. ^{[Note 13]} Jay himself, in his earlier study of the Frankfurt School, examined the profound distrust of images in the works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin (Jay [1973] 1996). In that investigation, as in the one under discussion here, Jay traced at least part of the suspicion of photographic images about as far back as one can go in western thought – to the breaking of the tablets, the icon of the golden calf and old testament prohibition of graven images. While not overlooking French anti-Semitism, Jay identified a new interest in Judaism and (re)incorporation of iconoclasm in the antiocular discourse:

An explicitly acknowledged reason for this new fascination with Jewish themes was the importance of the biblical interdiction of graven images. Interestingly, one of the justifications for their hostility advanced by earlier anti-Semitic French intellectuals like Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach was precisely the atomizing effect of the taboo, which they claimed undermined the beneficent power of images in films to create a popular community. Now the reverse implication was drawn, as a multitude of scholars, Jews and Gentiles alike, pondered its wisdom. Literary critics like Jean-Joseph Goux explored the implications of iconoclasm for everything from modern abstract art and the fall of the gold standard to the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Marxist theory of commodity fetishism. Theologians like the Protestant Jacques Ellul claimed that Christianity properly understood was no less hostile to the primacy of sight than Judaism, and vehemently denounced the current “humiliation of the word” in the society of the spectacle (548).

In surveying French rejections of the image, Jay traverses a wide expanse of obscure terrain: Emmanuel Levinas’s biblical distrust of images, Roland Barthes on photographs, and the image world from Debord’s concept of the spectacle to Baudrilliard’s simulacrum.? Jay commented that: “Bergson set the tone for many who followed with his suspicious disdain for both the snapshot’s violent interruption of the flow of temporal duration and the cinema’s inept attempt to restore its vitality” (436). Once again this review will only skim the surface and try to draw some implications for visual sociology

Roland Barthes, well-known as a semiologist, examined denotative and connotative capacities of photographs. Jay contended that Barthes maintained the denotative/connotative paradigm through all the twists and turns of his remarkable oeuvre. “Connotatively, photos bore an iconic relation to the object represented as, in Barthe’s term, “analogical perfection;” denotatively, they simultaneously existed as signs whose symbolic meaning required cultural capital to decode (442). Barthes wrote that science “interprets the gaze in three (combinable) ways: in terms of information (the gaze informs), in terms of relation (gazes are exchanged), in terms of possession (by the gaze, I touch, I attain, I seize, I am seized): three functions: optical, linguistic, haptic. But the gaze seeks: something, someone. It is an anxious sign: singular dynamics for a sign: its power overflows it” (441). This restlessness was in part addressed in John Berger’s claim that, “In every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning.” (Berger 1982:117). But Jay also noted that “Barthes’s identification of photographic denotation with emotional trauma … provides a clue to … why the seeking gaze produced anxiety (443). Jay suggested that Barthes believed extremely traumatic images could escape the denotative: “trauma is a suspension of language, the blockage of meaning …. One could imagine a kind of law: the more direct the trauma, the more difficult is connotation; or again, the `mythological’ effect of a photograph is inversely proportional to its traumatic effect” (442). The photograph viewer is not conscious of, as Jay wrote:

… the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. ?What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. The implication of this argument was profound, for now Barthes had uncovered a further source of the anxiety surrounding the photographic image. That is, beyond the fact that the denotative power of photographs was most evident and when they showed explicit traumas, the inevitable aura of a lost past attached to all photographs suggested an implicit trauma as well: the pain associated with mourning that loss (443-444).

This is not about nostalgia. In summarizing Barthes, Jay wrote (Photography) “provides no anamnestic totalization, no means of making history – personal or collective – intelligible. …” Quoting Barthes from Camera Lucida: “The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.” Jay concluded that “what precisely cannot be ignored is its message of what Barthes called ‘flat death,’ yielding up no meaning beyond mortality” (455). If photography is necrophilia, if a photograph is memento mori, if, as Barthes famously wrote about posing:

once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image …. I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice… The Photograph is the advent of myself as other, a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity (452).

Then the camera is truly an evil eye accomplishing black magic, transmuting subject to object: “I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person,” wrote Barthes (452). Visual sociologists, I think, intend the opposite. We regard our subjects highly, in fact referring to them as “subjects” not objects. Our goal is for our subjects to “live” through being seen, for their cultures and societies to be brought to life through our exposure. Yet there is something in what Barthes described: there (is) in every photograph the return of the dead” (452). We shoot our subjects, but I do not think we intend to kill – yet people wind up just as dead from friendly fire, or collateral damage. The “flat death” effect seems particularly strong with black and white images. Can our sociological goals be reconciled with Barthes’ (and many others) skeptical view of the photographic process itself? Why are we, ourselves, so rarely in the picture? Perhaps we resist posing because of the gut level resistance to “creating” or “mortifying” our bodies. More precisely, I think that as camera operators, visual sociologists seek to become pure subject to, as Sartre put it, “claim the right of seeing without being seen” (290). There have been several attempts to squirm out of this dilemma, notably the “Shooting Back” series (Hubbard 1991; Hubbard 1994). Whatever the benefits, however, of putting camera’s in the hands of poor children, the practice does not allow escape for the investigator who has removed himself even further from the scene. ^{[Note 14]}

Jay observed that “… the invention of the camera can be credited with helping educate Western eyes to new aesthetic possibilities. From another perspective, however, the extension of the range of Western aesthetic experience could be interpreted as an example of the dominating anthropological gaze at the ‘other’” (140). I would argue that, especially in visual sociology’s concern with deviance, the downtrodden, the exotic, our discipline continues to be deeply implicated in both these practices. Part of the problem can be traced to photography itself, straight photography of the mundane familiar patterns of everyday life tends not to be very interesting. It seems difficult to create “new aesthetic possibilities” from the quotidian. Visual sociology has our own version of the well-known problematic of the news media “if it bleeds it leads.” Thus we find a visual study of a dying professor compelling, and don’t have any visual ethnographies of a professor’s life (Pillar 1996).??

In several places in the book Jay described Surrealism’s contribution to antiocular discourse as a counter to realist photography. He noted, for instance that in pictures like “Cici n’est pas une pipe” and “the key of dreams” “Magritte put the visual image on trial, stressing its weakness and demonstrating the subordinate character of figures of speech and thought” (247). In doubting the relationship between signified and signifier, Surrealists contributed their challenge to the “crisis of ocularcentrism” visually (251). “Surrealist photography proved a scandal for what can be called the dominant tradition of “straight photography,” with its assumed spectator still the unified subject of the Cartesian perspectivalist tradition” (253). However, following Simon Watney, Jay concluded that the political project undertaken by the Surrealists to “expose social contradictions” with “estrangement and defamiliarization,” (250) had failed:

(Watney) contends that different contexts of reception have to be taken into account as well, because certain contexts more easily absorb shocks than others. The history of Surrealism’s refunctioning for advertising purposes bears out his warning (250).

“Refunctioning,” of course, is a problem faced by all photography even the realist and earnest tales of visual sociological . Nevertheless, one might easily conclude that some of our downward gaze stems from a similar desire to reveal contradictions and oppositions in society.? Might sociologists use photography to interrogate the social by using less “straight” technique? Shouldn’t we put the visual on trial in our own photography in the same way, for example, that Goffman did in Gender Advertisements (Goffman 1976)?? Given the above criticisms of the visual and photography, some of which are quite trenchant, why does visual sociology remain stuck in the realist mode of Cartesian perspectivalism?? Might not visual sociologists imagine surreal projects, perhaps a visual ethnomethodology using photography to discover and test social rules by violating expectations? The use of doubling and jarring juxtaposition, montage, and so on offer the possibility to reveal truths of social structure and social relations that undergird the surface gloss of realist photography. Perhaps a little more of the disruptive – a la Dianne Arbus or Weegee – would make it seem less like visual sociology inherited the mantle of 1930’s Farm Security Administration documentarians.

IV. Living in the Archive

In much the same way that “the look” morphed into “the gaze” and general concern with a social field of surveillance, the single image exploded into self-referential media worlds of spectacle and simulacrum. There are two crucial questions that stem from the endless multiplication of images in the modern/post-modern era. The first was raised by Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard: What is the nature of this whatchamacallit media world we have created? The second I will raise for our discipline: The term “visual sociology” suggests a totalization of our various projects; do visual sociologies add up?

For Debord and Baudrillard, humanity has breathed life into a Golum by creating a image world that, while clearly our creation, has taken on a life of its own. Images have torn themselves loose from their referents. Jay used this quotation from Guy Debord as an epigram:

The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation (381).

Debord and the Situationist movement that bloomed with the revolutions of 1968, proposed that the modern world of commodity capitalism was no longer experienced directly but only through the mediation of an image world. This world of commodities and representations he called “spectacle”.? In Jay’s summary: “the visible form of the commodity totally occupied everyday life, uniting production and consumption in one monstrous system” (429). Debord’s account drew on both the iconoclastic Christianity of Ludwig Feuerbach (a member of the young Hegelian circle that included Marx and Engels) and from the Marxian analysis of fetishism and reification (426). Like Marx who saw capitalism as a stage in human development, Debord saw spectacle as a product of the commodity fetishism of later stages of capitalism, but held forth the possibility for an unalienated “festival” celebrating human qualities. The hoped for transcendence faded with the hippy-like Situationist movement, and, as Jay noted:

In the 1980s, postmodernist writers like Jean Baudrillard stopped worrying and found a way to accept and even celebrate what Debord and his colleagues had found so troubling: the ubiquity of images without referents and the reification of experience. Baudrillard, who also exhorted his readers to “forget Foucault,” ‘ giddily embraced rather than castigated the “hyperreal simulacrum” of reality. (433)

For Baudrillard, The world is composed of maps that refer to no territory, representations of other representations. He called the world “hyperreal” and “simulacrum” implying copies of copies of copies with no original referent. Photographs refer to photographs; symbols in the system refer only to other symbols. Basic to the discussion of the image world is Baudrillard’s (1983:3) observation that: “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality…”

Whatever one’s position on the media world – neutral, good, or ill – it is clear that this is a recent and very important development in the human condition. Jay pointed out the remarkable way the word “image” refers to “graphic, optical, perceptual, mental or verbal phenomena” (8-9). The whatchamacallit becomes more encompassing as all images, visual, aural, and written are reduced to the digital strings of ones and zeros. Music, film, video, talk, text, photographs all are shrunk to an underlying pattern that can be accessed with the flick of a wrist. Moreover, there is no outside for the observer – visual sociology is inside and contributes to the whatchamacallit. We have had a journal since the 1980’s. Our words and photos are bound in books, sedimented in archives and have found their way onto the web, that grand repository of digitized images. We need to consider how visual sociology contributes to spectacle, simulacrum, or whatchamacallit in our imag(ining) of society.

Regards for the Discipline

So, Captain Kirk, is the enterprise doomed? Much of antiocular critique seems harsh, perhaps hyperbolic, simply because there is no way to escape the visual. Certainly there is no reason to abandon visual sociology. But it is also true that everyone is more skeptical of visual images than we were in the 1840’s when the camera was thought to be a “pencil of nature” or a century later when the Roosevelt administration sent photographers to “document” the depression.? Moreover questions once raised cannot be ignored. We have come to a place where we need to ask ourselves how visual sociology looks as a whole. Do the elegant visual ethnographies, life histories and oral histories; the critical studies of images and photographs that unveil propaganda, ideology, stereotype and other “hidden” functions of the image; the panoramic views of social change and urban spaces; the intimate investigations of family photography; our critical and theoretical papers, and so on constitute a whole? Or, does this work exist solely as individual gems to be admired, collected, and shown to students.

Perhaps visual studies are exemplars. I am asking first if visual sociology constitutes a scientific “paradigm” as Kuhn defined it to: “include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together and provide models from which spring coherent traditions of scientific research” (Kuhn 1970:11). We have instrumentation and application, do we have theories to counter or accommodate the antiocular philosophies? Is visual sociology a mere method like interviewing or counting that contributes data to other paradigms – say, Symbolic Interaction or Critical Theory? Do we have a sociological stare to mimic Foucault’s medical gaze? Are we building an application, a language, a spectacle, a simulacrum? Following Foucault, Jay would ask us to consider how visual sociology develops, by the accretion of sense data – facts and images collected by the social scientific eye? Or is visual sociology primarily a conceptual activity that works with verbal and visual images absent “real verification by sense data” (388-89)?

My second question is whether “art” or “literature” are better metaphors for what we do than “science”? Are our works better conceived of as narratives than studies, as parts in a mosaic depicting, adding, contradicting, multiplying and constituting possible viewpoints of some vaguely “intuited” social whole? Are our papers, websites, multi-media presentations, films and videos pastiche imitating other styles of art or literature?? Jay raised the contributions of the deconstructionists to again make the point that authors cannot legislate the meaning of their work:

“Derrida challenged any univocal reading of the images, which takes the “right to inspect” as license to hold the “thread of the labrynth” to tightly. So too he sought to unsettle the initial power of the photographer to fix meaning (519).

Readers have as much to do with the meaning of poetic images as poets, viewers contribute as much to the meaning of photographs as photographers. This fundamental truth may govern the rest of sociology, working with words and numbers, as well. There can be nothing but limited and partial views of a whole, the parts do not add up:

It was, moreover, impossible to reach the absolute by harmonistically combining partial viewpoints into a unified whole (a ploy suggested by later thinkers like Karl Mannheim, whose “relationism” sought to overcome relativism in precisely this way). “Though all the photographs of a city taken from all possible points of view indefinitely complete one another,” Bergson protested, “they will never equal in value that dimensional object along whose streets one walks …. A representation taken from a certain point of view, a translation made with certain symbols still remain imperfect in comparison with the object whose picture has been taken or which the symbols seek to express. But the absolute is perfect in that it is perfectly what it is.” Only intuition, he lamely concluded, can provide the sympathetic entry into the interiority of the object, which is blocked by intellectual analysis, linguistic symbolization and visual representation. (202)

This would suggest eschewing “abstracted, monocular, inflexible, unmoving, rigid, ego-logical and exclusionary” viewpoints with a visual sociology that is “multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary, horizonal, and caring” (275).? A worthy goal for a “whole body” sociology.

Regards for the Discipline

Adler, P. A. and P. Adler (2003). “The promise and pitfalls of going into the field.” Contexts 2(2): 41-47.

Barrett, T. (1990). Criticizing Photographs: An introduction to understanding images. Mountain View ca., Mayfield Publishing Company.

Baudelaire, C. ([1863] 1964). The Painter of Modern Life. The painter of modern life, and other essays, by Charles Baudelaire. J. Mayne. London, Phaidon: 1-41.

Baudrillard, J. (1983). “The Precession of Simulacra.” Art and Text 11: 3-47.

Becker, H. (1963). Outsiders: studies in the sociology of deviance. Glencoe, Ill, The Free Press.

Berger, J. a. J. M. (1982). Another Way of Telling. New York, Pantheon.

Brodsky, J. (2002). “How to “see” with the whole body.” Visual Studies 17(2): 99-112.

Brown, N. O. (1991). Metamorphoses II Actaeon. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley, University of California Press: 31-45.

Descartes, R. (1637 [1960]). Discourse on method and meditations. Indianapolis and New York, Bobbs-Merrill.

Emmison, M. and P. Smith (2000). Researching the visual. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, Vintage Books.

Goffman, E. (1976). “Gender Advertisements.” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 3: 69-154.

Harper, D. (1987). Working Knowledge. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Hubbard, J. (1991). Shooting back: A photographic view of life by homeless children. San Francisco, Chronicle books.

Hubbard, J. (1994). Shooting back from the reservation: A photographic view of life by Native American youth. New York, The New Press.

Jay, M. (1994). Downcast Eyes: The denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press.

Jay, M. ([1973] 1996). The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950. Berkeley, Ca, University of California Press.

Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Margolis, E. (1994). Video ethnography: Toward a reflexive paradigm for documentary. http://courses.ed.asu.edu/margolis/videth2001.html

Pillar, H. (1996). “Living while dying: A professor’s last lesson.” Visual Sociology 11(1): 60-74.

Sartre, J. P. (1943 [1971]). Being and nothingness. New York, Washington Square Press.

Sartre, J.-P. ([1960] 1968). Critique of dialectical reason. London, New Left Books.

Snyder, J. (1980). “Picturing Vision.” Critical Inquiry 5(3).

Solomon-Godeau, A. (1991). Who is speaking thus? Some questions about documentary photography. Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. A. Solomon-Godeau. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 169-217.

Tagg, J. (1988). The burden of representation: Essays on photographies and histories. Amherst, MA, The University of Massachusetts Press.

Wagner, J. (2002). “Contrasting images, complementary trajectories: sociology, visual sociology and visual research.” Visual Studies 17(2): 99-112.

END NOTES

[1] – Throughout this review numbers in parentheses refer to pages in (Jay 1994). All other works will receive full citations.[2] –It is nearly impossible to write without using visual figures of speech, and fun to use them where they work as puns, but I can’t come close to Martin Jay’s introductory paragraph in which he consciously employed 21 visual metaphors. As he noted: “…vigilant is derived from the Latin vigilare, to watch, which in its French form veiller is the root of surveillance. Demonstrate comes from the Latin monstrare, to show. Inspect, prospect, introspect (and other words like aspect or circumspect) all derive from the Latin specere, to look at or observe. Speculate has the same root. Scope comes from the Latin scopium, a translation of a Greek word for to look at or examine. Synopsis is from the Greek word for general view. These are latent or dead metaphors, but they still express the sedimented importance of the visual in the English language.” (n 1)[3] – This ontological perception should be familiar to symbolic interactionists as the “looking glass self,” although Cooley did not examine it as an arena of conflict and struggle.[4] – Isn’t it interesting that Howard Becker’s first book Outsiders, (1963) reeks with the scent of marijuana and perhaps even more deviance on the part of the participant observer ? This was far more involved sociology than anything I can recall in visual sociology. It was precisely that Becker, a self confessed jazz musician, was in the picture that led credence to his humanizing argument about how deviance was learned.[5] –Oddly enough, this practice of “othering” our subjects is repeated in the Adler’s (2003) recent article on field work They solicited photographs of sociological field workers on the job and reproduced them for our viewing pleasure. Of course they did not include themselves in this presentation.[6] – Jane Brodsky (2002) paid homage to Merleau-Ponty and addressed the issue of unification of the senses in her recent article in Visual Studies discussing how art works are made and viewed.[7] –But see, Brodsky (2002) “How to “see” with the whole body.”[8] – Visual sociologists are not the only ones with this problem. In a recent list of eleven “Notable Ethnographies” in Contexts (Spring 2003:43), only 4 could be said to be on the level: a study of mushroom collectors, a study of doctors, a study of people with depression, and a study of people with canine companions. The other eight are looking down. Two focus on street people, one on female gang members, one on immigrant domestic workers, one on crack dealers, one on inner city violence, and one on rural survivalists.[9] –This piece was published (Brown 1991), but it was a far better talk than article. In print it appears precious, stilted and odd.[10] –The roles photography played in the general surveillance were explored deeply in John Tagg’s (1988) important collection of essays The Burden of Representation.[11] – Foucault was interested in the surrealist paintings of René Magrit and thought of works like “this is not a pipe” as the opposite of trompe l’oeli “because they refused to close the gap between image and word” (400).[12] – We are in good company here, this was the position and practice of master photographers like Paul Strand, Minor White, and Ansel Adams, see (Barrett 1990).[13] – There are even visual sociologists who denegrate the use of the camera. In a review essay in Visual Studies, Jon Wagner (2003) examined Emmison and Smith’s (2000) argument against the exclusive use of cameras in visual sociology that “reveal(s) visual data to be much more varied, complex, and ubiquitous than photographs or other fixed ‘images’.”? No doubt this is true, and visual sociology which uses cameras extensively needs to be especially aware of the troubles with “fixed” images. At the same time, it is naive to think that trading cameras for eyeballs solves any of the ontological or epistemological issues raised above that cleave deeply into the enterprise of visual sociology.[14] – I tried to escape this dilemma with a notion of reflexivity – involving the coal community that was the object of my investigation in the telling of their story through a process of “public editing” c.f., (Margolis 2003). These devices, however, become an infinite regress. As Jay drew from the work of Christian Metz:

Reflexive films seeking to bare the device are still the prisoner of the apparatus they seek to disrupt. “When one undertakes to raise the purpose of the film one degree higher, the imaginary raises itself (without being wished or invited) the same degree higher because you have to shoot the second degree thing, the second degree imaginary, and you can shoot it only from a third degree imaginary point of view” (484).