Abstract
The ‘Note to the reader’ that opens Ways of Seeing (Berger et al., 2008[1972]) insists that the book’s principal aim is ‘to start a process of questioning’. I first encountered the slim volume while a graduate student in the early 1990s and can attest that, at least for me, this goal was met – in spades, even. The book was a required text in a freshman composition class I would be teaching. From the moment I picked up my desk copy, it fascinated me. I was drawn to the pictorial chapters, to the writing style, and to its careful attention to layout and to font, very much agreeing with Berger that ‘the form of the book is as much to do with our purpose as the arguments contained within it’ (p. 5). My very idea of what a book was or might be shifted and expanded as I engaged this lively text, planting the seeds for the publishing experiments I now undertake within electronic realms. Like Charles and Ray Eames or Marshall McLuhan before him, Berger was proto-digital and transmedia, pushing against the linear constraints of a text-ish world. Books might be unbound, reconfigured, read out of order, ported across media. As both a television series and a print object, Ways of Seeing explicitly encourages these practices.
But unlike much of the work of the Eameses or McLuhan, Berger was not exploring form for form’s sake. If the book’s form has much to do with its argument, its argument is not about form but, rather, about property, social relations, and ideology. While I was very taken with the book some 20 years ago (and continue to find it powerful and germane), I also wondered how I would go about teaching it in the particular environment in which I worked. That set off another type of questioning, a questioning that ricocheted across many aspects of my grad student self.
My graduate education took place at a large Midwestern university in an English department best known for its commitment to post-structuralist modes of inquiry and, in particular, to feminist film theory. Its intellectual hub was a research center focused on debates about postmodernism, spatiality, the emotions, psychoanalysis, and more. This rarefied experience took place in a large, post-industrial city hard hit by the Reagan era; the university itself was the secondary location of the better-funded, more prestigious central campus situated in a quaint university town some 80 miles away. My students were largely commuters, typically first-generation college students working at least one job. The average freshman was not 18. Few had been to an art museum.
As I plotted strategies for teaching Ways of Seeing, I worried that much of the subject matter might seem particularly far removed from my students’ lives. If they hadn’t logged time in museums, they certainly had not spent hours engaging the mystifying ways of the art historian. What would I have them write about? As has often been the case with my teaching, I perhaps worried too much. While the students did struggle with elements of the book, they were also quick to draw out parallels from their own worlds. They appreciated its visual elements, and we used contemporary advertisements extensively in class, exploring the differences and similarities between Berger’s 1970s images and those of 20 years later. They understood as well that ‘men act and women appear’ (original emphases); we could stockpile endless examples. Baywatch was a very popular one.
But what most spoke to the students were Berger’s arguments about class, even if they might not have phrased it quite in that way. Many of their parents had labored in factories, as had many of them. They were intimately familiar with the ‘interminable present of meaningless working hours’ (p. 149). They well understood the gap between where they were and where they would like to be. They were at university against great odds, struggling to close that gap while working long hours outside the classroom. One student, an African American woman in her early 40s, began an essay, ‘I don’t know much about oil paintings. I’ve never seen one. But I know too much about shoes.’ She went on to describe her ongoing attempts to talk her teenage son out of spending his hard-earned cash on the latest expensive basketball shoes. She was deeply frustrated at the gripping power the shoes held over her son and his friends, but she also recognized that Nike was selling the promise of a glamorous future and of personal transformation. Her essay took up gangsta rap as well, but her reading of the genre, especially in music videos, was complex and nuanced. While she was repelled by the representation of women and of consumerism in several hits, she also recognized that the genre was engaged in a critique of mass society that resonated with Berger’s own arguments. She was intrigued that this critique emerged from a commercial and popular form, a scenario Berger’s account leaves little room for. She saw possibility there, if fleetingly so, and it gave her cautious hope.
When this student entered my class, her writing skills were very minimal. She had left high school before graduating and had written very little in the intervening years. Her writing greatly improved over the course of the term, but there was never anything wrong with her thinking. I had begun teaching freshman composition as someone who seemingly had always written. I also presumed that writing and intelligence were somehow intertwined. My time teaching writing again and again underscored the error of my presumptions. Teaching Ways of Seeing to first-generation college students also forced me to engage class in very direct ways. My parents were first-generation college students who rode the buoyant post-World War II American economy to comfortable middle-class status. Many of my relatives were less lucky, and, like our grandparents before them, continued to labor in mines, factories, and low-paying service jobs.
When I reflect honestly on why graduate school was so appealing to me, I know that I was seeking cultural capital. I needed a profession that would put some distance between me and my southern white-trash roots, at least symbolically. I wanted some assurance I wouldn’t slide backwards, that my parents’ escape was not an anomaly. If I had fled north to escape those origins and to rewrite the story of my self, reading Berger with my students returned me to my past and helped me engage it anew. Ways of Seeing shaped my subsequent research, from my choice of dissertation topic to the experiments in digital writing that I am now undertaking. But, more importantly, working to make the book meaningful to a particular set of students also made my education more relevant to me.