Unboxing Berger’s "Ways of Seeing" ❤️

So who came first? Mulvey or Berger?

Ways of Seeing | John Berger

When the Cover is… Chapter 1 !!! 😊

A Cornerstone Book for Cultural Studies

It’s a fact, universally acknowledged, that a literary being in possession of a good collection of books, must be super-excited to gift it to a kindred spirit! 😊

And so it was, that, when Dr. Ganesh, my kindred spirit called me up this morning, (I was then in the Council Room along with our Principal, Deans and a host of other officials, facilitating the signing of two MoUs – one with USA and one with South Korea - an eventful MoU Signing it really was, today, since for the first time, in a long time, we had two MoUs with two International Universities happening on a single day - and more on that in a special post),

I impulsively rushed down to meet him, and after exchanging that memorable hug, - there he was, as ever, gifting me a lovely book – a lovelyyy gesture that I cherish a lot!

It’s titled, Ways of Seeing by John Berger.

Interestingly, just this morning, we were discussing “Ways of Seeing” and the “Politics of the Gaze” in my II MA English class and the III BA English class as well.

We are all of the opinion that it was Laura Mulvey who first popularised the term, ‘male gaze’. However, we are slightly mistaken here. It was indeed Berger who deserves the ‘pioneering’ credits. 😊

Berger identified the social behaviour of looking at women as objects in art history, in 1972. Later, in the year 1975, Mulvey gave that behaviour its academic name and analysed it within the context of film.

It was Berger who famously pointed out the difference between being “naked” and being “nude” –

“To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others… A nude has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude,” he observes.

He demonstrates how Western oil painting has historically positioned women as objects to be looked at by a male spectator! By this - his rock-the-boat remarks, he brought art criticism down to earth-level, insisting that art is a reflection of power, property, and class!

Again, just this afternoon, over lunch, when I saw a vibrant I MA student reading Orwell’s 1984, I asked him what he particularly liked about the book. He came up with some amazing responses. I was so happy to listen to his observations on the book. More so, just because of the fact that he carried a book with him, all the time, and spoke with such excitement about the book.

Felt so happy, and so I also exhorted him to read the ‘paratexts’ of the book – which refers to everything in a book that isn’t the main body of the text – it could be the cover, the font, the layout, and even the “blurb,” which conveys and transmits ‘significations’ in equal measure.

In that sense, in Berger’s Ways of Seeing the Paratext is revolutionary by all means!

That’s because it was designed in such a way to deconstruct or to ‘destruct’ the traditional authority of ‘the book’. 😊

Starting from the cover, you’ll be surprised to find that, the text of the first chapter actually begins on the front cover itself. OMG! 😊

Added, the book uses a heavy, sans-serif font, which feels quite thick or dense – in a way which we haven’t seen or read before! In short, the typesetting isn’t quite elegant on the eyes at least in this book!

Curiously enough, even the images do not find a separate section at the centre of the book. Rather, they seem to be forcibly dropped into the flow of the sentences, often interrupting our readability, and thereby forcing us to ‘look’ while we ‘read’.

In essence, Berger seems to say that, looking also is a form of reading. Or, a book doesn’t communicate to us through the verbal argument, alone! Everything in the ‘text’ then becomes a ‘text!’ 😊

Now, let’s just look at the front cover of the book –

The statement “Seeing comes before words” is both the first sentence of the book and perhaps his life motto as well! (Reminds us of J. Krishnamurti here] 😊

In fact, Berger has used Rene Magritte’s painting for the cover which heightens the poetics and the radicality of the paratext!

Magritte shows a horse labelled “the door,’" a clock labelled “the wind,” a pitcher labelled “the bird,” and a suitcase labelled “the valise”.

Berger uses these images to immediately destabilise our trust in language. It forces us to realise that the labels we put on things (words) are often arbitrary and can actually distract us from the reality of what we are seeing.

If we carefully look at the sentence right above the painting –

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

This is indeed the “wow” moment of the cover, you see! Berger is so subtly telling us that even though the reader knows that it is a horse, the word “door” creates a friction. This friction is where critical thinking happens, and it’s exactly what he wants the ‘critical reader’ to apply to every painting and advertisement in the chapters to come. 😊

And lastly, if you observantly look at the very bottom of the cover, the sentence is cut off – “The way we see things is affected by what we...”

A real cliffhanger of a sentence. What does this mean?

Well, let’s continue our discussions on this aspect, tomorrow 😊

You may want to read more on Dr. Ganesh HERE on our past blogpost!