Seeing and Knowing

Are we living in a “panopticon,” as Michel Foucault argues, where we are continually being surveilled and are surveilling each other?

Visual images surround us every day: from selfies and Instagram to YouTube and animated gifs, we often communicate through pictures and video. This course focuses in part on visual literacy—learning to “read” images as well as text, and understand how both communicate meaning and shape our understanding of ourselves and others. We will explore the visual image not simply as a way to illustrate text and thereby bring it to life, but as a source of knowledge in its own right. We will consider how and why visual representations convey meaning, and how they intersect with written or spoken words.

Thinking critically about the visual also leads us to thinking about how knowledge is produced and understood; we will consider such social constructions as the many visual metaphors we use to talk about understanding (e.g., “seeing” something is true, gaining “insights” or understanding through “the mind’s eye”). Taking up these and other topics in our analyses of works including photographs, films, and graphic novels alongside texts in prose, we will study how the visual, like textual language, can reflect and shape social dynamics.

Some questions we will discuss include:

• How do words and images convey meaning differently, and what effects does each have on our interpretation of the world around us?

• How might the field of the visual perpetuate or undermine power hierarchies? E.g., what is the nature of the power relationship between those who are “seen” and those who do the “seeing?”

• With the internet and social media we are making ourselves more visible and knowable, but at what cost?

• Can a film or graphic novel shape what we know about the world differently than a text-based work? Are there some things that images are better at expressing than words, or vice versa?

• How much of our self-conception comes from how others see us? Is Jean-Jacques Rousseau right to say we live “outside ourselves,” in the opinions of others?

• Does talking about knowledge in terms of visual metaphors blind us to other possible ways of knowing?
  

  William Blake, London from Songs of Innocence & of Experience, public domain on Wikimedia Commons

We will investigate these and other questions through studying, among other works, Plato’s allegory of the cave in The Republic, Blake’s melding of words and pictures in his poetry, Foucault’s argument that we are living in a “panopticon” of continual surveillance in Discipline and Punish, Hitchcock’s depiction of the voyeur detective in Vertigo, and what the visual elements in Karasik and Mazzuchelli’s graphic novel adaptation of Auster’s novel City of Glass can add to the original text.

Credit for image of camera in camera: Watching You Watching Me, Flickr photo by Todd Huffman, licensed CC BY 2.0