Study Cards!

(So Far…)
Brought to you by the
wonderful students of
LBST1B06 !
Disclaimer: The idea of the study card activity is that students help
each other the best they can, much as we do in the in-person study
group. These students are modeling the kind of studying we should
all be doing. That is, consulting the textbook, the lecture and your
tutorial notes to form a cohesive answer. Please note that this is not
a comprehensive way of studying in itself. Use this as a building
block for the rest of your studying. Remember to primarily focus on
the exam essay questions.
Connotation and
Denotation
• Roland Barthes wrote Mythologies (1957) and was
concerned about false beliefs that circulate in everyday
life which constructs a world for us. He was concerned
about what images mean and how they function as signs.
• Charles and Saussure were interested in textual language,
and how words together create meaning in language.
• Charles Pierce was interested in signs.
• Cat and its letters doesn’t mean anything in itself.
Because we understand English we understand that cat is
what we describe an animal.
• Saussure felt that meaning came from association.
Words take on meaning only in relationship to other
words in the system. A pawn only has meaning with all the
other pieces in the chess board that have something to do
with your pawn.
• A value of the word cat comes from its
relationship with other words in the system. You
know what you are by what you are not – true/false,
man/woman, sun/moon  these are binaries. When
we use binaries we engage in dualistic thinking. I
know left because it’s not right. English is grounded in
binaries. Binaries have assumptions, that
something can be the exact opposite of something
else and that’s the foremost way of looking at it.
What if there’s something in between? We’ve had to
make up words for in betweens. Binary logic infuses
our way of thinking.
• Ideology is connotation, parading as denotation
• Denotation: apparent truths/primary meanings (ex.
Utilitarian uses). Uses art conventions to interpret.
• Ex. a microphone projects your voice.
• Connotation: cultural and historical context, and knowledge of
those. Cultural meanings affect our expectations and uses of
photographs. Also uses context (historical, sociocultural,
information about artist, etc) to interpret.
• Ex. a microphone spreads critical thought through this
lecture.
• Ex. Audi
An Audi says – sleek, class, romantic, nostalgic. Sleek and
fast in Western culture is sexy; this is not necessarily true
in other countries. The connotations are culture
specific. It is completely different from the Hyundai
which is signified with the best warranty – and its
connotations are reliability, efficient, family car, etc.
• Denotation is the factual description of what you’re looking
at: little girl, multiple bandages on head, medical person
administering care
– When you’re told the images are about Haiti,
information starts coming to you. You may have
participated in fundraising, you may be feeling national
pride for being part of a country that gave the most
aid. You may be from Haiti.
– When you juxtapose an image of a 5 star hotel and an
image of the ruins you’ll get other ideas.
– (Barthes): Denotation and Connotation Types of
meaning.
– Barthes is concerned about what sign means.
– Denotation: Face value of the sign
Example 1 - Rose
Denotation: flower
Connotation: Romantic love (Western)
Example 2 - Coors Light advertisement
Denotation: Advertisement, female cheerleaders, beer,
associated to football.
Connotation: Drink Coors Light and get girls,
sex, appeals to masculinity, etc
• Roland Barthes wrote about concepts of Denotative
and Connotative meanings as a system of
• understanding the meaning of an image. Photographic myth (Barthes) -
The myth is that it represents a moment in time as it occurred and in a
truthful matter; this no longer applies due to all of the manipulation.
• - meaning changes over time and is entirely dependant on the viewer.
• Denotative meaning is the literal content of the photograph.
• Connotative meaning is the meaning given and taken from an image in
relation to the cultural
• context and the viewers understanding and experience of the context of the
meaning.
– **Robert Frank, Trolley-New Orleans, 1955
– Butterfly comments on collectivity and the dawning of individualism that
arose from the cynical realism movement. There are dramatic features
on the faces. The encodings in the history of Western art tell you that
there may be irony present, this especially occurs in exaggerations of
the human face.
– If you were not brought up in a culture that discusses gift giving as a
form of giving affection, a red rose may not be meaningful for you. In a
different place this may connote unethical working conditions where the
workers are sprayed with pesticides alongside the roses. There are
layers and layers of decoding that can occur.
Related Terms
• Intertextuality and cross fertilization,
representation, technology, connotation and
denotation, mystification, photographic
accuracy as myth, sign/signifier/symbol,
context, interpretation, ideology, impact of
reproduction of art.

Important Theorists
• Roland Barthes
The Spectator
(From the glossary)
• A term derived from psychoanalytic theory that refers to the
viewer of visual arts such as cinema. In early versions of this
theory, the term spectator did not refer to a specific individual or
an actual member of the viewing audience but rather was
imagined to be an ideal viewer, separate from all defining
social, sexual, and racial aspects of the viewer identity.
• In contrast, film theory in the late 1980’s and 1990’s
emphasized specific identity groups of spectators, such as
female spectators, working-class spectators, queer spectators,
or black spectators. This work shifted away from the
abstraction of the category to include more specific aspects of
identity and processes such as identification and pleasure that
are shaped by specific embodied experience. In addition, film
theory has increasingly emphasized how one need not occupy
an identity within that group’s spectator position. For example,
in action film, one does not have to be male to take up in
fantasy the position of the male spectator
• Spectator- the individual that looks & spectatorship the practice of looking. Relate
to film theory. (pg 102)
• The concept of spectatorship talks about this broader context in which looking is
enacted in an interactive, multimodal and relational field. (pg. 93) ﾐ During the gaze
and spectatorship, we consider:1) the roles of the unconscious and desire in
viewing practices. 2)the role of looking in the information of the human subject as
such; and 3) the ways that looking is always a relational activity and not simply a
mental activity engaged in by someone who forms internal mental representations
that stand for a passive object ﾒout thereﾓ. (pg. 102)
• Theories of gaze and spectatorship are theories of address, rather than reception
where the methods that are used to understand how actual viewers respond to a
cultural text. This considers the ways that a image or visual text invites certain
responses from a particular viewer exe. Male or female viewer (pg. 102)Theorist:
Understanding these applies in to how a spectator will analyze and ‘decode’.
• Lacan: mirror theory ﾐ The constitutive element of the construction of the self. The
Mirror phase is an important step for an infantﾕs recognition of themselves as
autonomous with the potential ability to control their bodyﾕs negotiations of the
world. (pg. 121)
• Foucault - The human subject is constituted in modernity not through liberal human
ideals but through the discourses of institutional life of the period. The subjects as an
entity are produced through the discourses and institutional practices of the
enlightenment. The subject is never autonomous but is always constituted in
relationships of power that are enacted through discourse. (pg 100)
• Freud theory of repression - believed that we repress emotions, desires, taboo
feelings, and anxieties unconsciously in order to keep them in check. (pg. 100)
• Christian Metz- In the process of spectatorship the viewer suspends disbelief in
the fictional world of the film but also, and more important with the filmﾕs overall
ideology (pg. 120)

Related terms:
• Interpellation ﾐ an interruption where the viewer comes to recognize
him/her self as among the class or group of subjects for whom the images
message seems to be intended. It involves recognition of one self as a
member of that world of meaning. (pg. 103)
• Discourse (Focault)- means are not just spoken language but the broader
variety of institutions and practices through which meaning is produced.
Each era has itﾕs own way of making, or constituting, the meaning and
experience of the human subject. exe. Our meaning today about art is
different than the meaning was in the renaissance. see episteme (pg.
103)
 Binary
Oppositions
and the Gaze
(Chapter 3, pages 100-114)
• Binary Oppositions refer to oppositions such as
nature/culture, male/female, mind/body. These binary
oppositions can seem to be unchangeable and mutually
exclusive. This theory, however, excludes other positions
between these binaries. An example of this would be
sexuality existing along a continuum and not necessarily in
the form of the two poles of identity, male and female.
• See Cartesian Dualism

• Cartesian Dualism is a binary division theorized by Rene

Descartes (17th C French philosopher), which separates the
mind and the body. Descartes explained that the mind
contained consciousness and reasoning and the body was
merely matter.
See Marked/Unmarked
• Marked/Unmarked are terms used to designate the category
of the binary oppositions. The first category is understood to
be unmarked or the norm and the second category as marked
or the “other.” In the binary opposition, male/female, the male
is considered to be unmarked or dominant or the norm.
Female is considered to be marked or not the norm. An
example of this would be the universal use of the pronoun he.
Whiteness (of skin) is typically unmarked or considered the
default category whereas blackness is usually considered not
the norm, hence “other.”
See Structuralism
• Structuralism is a set of theories that came into prominence in
the 1960’s and premised that cultural activity could be analyzed
objectively as a science. Structuralism viewed the world and
popular culture by using binary oppositions to identify patterns
and formulas. For example, the Italian theorist Umberto Eco
wrote a structuralist analysis of the James Bond spy thriller
novels in which he argued that the books were all organized
around a limited set of binary oppositions such as Bond/villain,
good/evil. No matter how much the details change from story
to story, the structure remains the same.

• Post Structuralism criticized structuralism for emphasizing

structure at the expense of other elements that did not fit into
these formulas.
See Post Structuralism, Genre
 (Page 111)

• The gaze helps to establish relationships of power where

usually the person who is doing the looking is awarded more
power than the person who is the object of the look. The
photograph is a central tool in establishing difference.
Photography of prisoners, mental patients, and other
institutional photography as well as travel and anthropological
photography represent varying degrees of dominance and
subjugation and difference and otherness. Binary oppositions
are used to organize meaning. Philosopher Jacques Derrida
argued that binary opposites are encoded with values and
concepts of power, superiority and worth. Binary oppositions
designate the first category as the norm therefore setting up the
second category as the abnormal or less desirable.
Hegemony
(Chapter Two, lecture January 25)
• Power relationship between classes of society.
(lecture)State/condition of a culture arrived at through
negotiations of meanings. (p.70)
• Karl Marx theorized that because dominant social classes own
the means of production, they are in control of the viewpoints
that are produced and circulated in the media, resulting in
masses mindlessly buying into set belief systems. Hence, Marx
defined capitalism as an economic system of oppression,
where people are encouraged to believe in it despite ideologies
not matching reality, which instilled false consciousness. (p.69)
• He studied the role that economics play in history. He saw it
was the intent of capitalism to keep people in that working level.
They didnﾕt rebel because of false consciousness since theyﾕ
re not able to see the condition of the working system because
they believe in ideology spread by the dominant power to
masses. (lecture)
• Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci changed how we think of
practices of reception. He shifted away from Marxﾕs idea of
false consciousness toward human subjects as active agents.
(lecture)
• He said, in modern day, we have coercion, not consent. We
don’t seek resistance because to us, it’s our common sense.
Government circulates ideologies, but people take it on, so we
are responsible for it even though it’s difficult to think outside of
the dominant ideologies because media surrounds us with it.
(lecture)
• Gramsci defined 2 aspects of hegemony:
1. Dominant ideologies are often offered as common
sense.
2. Dominant ideologies in tension with other forces, hence
constantly in flux. (p.70).
• Therefore, hegemony emphasizes that the power is
negotiated among all levels of society, and not dominated by
one class over the other. (p.70 and lecture)
• By living in society, we live in ideologies that are portrayed
through systems of representations (p.70)
• All images are encoded with intended meanings. There are 3
positions viewers take to decode those meanings (Stuart Hall.
Stages of Image Production):
1. Dominant-hegemonic reading: accepting the dominant
message without questioning.
2. Negotiated reading: negotiate an interpretation from image
and its dominant meaning.
3. Oppositional reading: disagreeing with or ignoring the
meaning. (p.73 and study group)
Related Terms
• Habitus: A set of shared preferences and dispositions within a
society. (p.60)
• Taste is conditioned by habitus (lecture)
• Ideology
• Interpellation
• Encoding/Decoding
• Marxist theory: theory of human history that analyzes the role of
economics in the progress of history and how capitalism
affects/determines class relations. (textbook p.447)

Important Theorists
• Karl Marx
• Louis Althuisser
• Stuart Hall
Habitus
Definition: used to describe the unconscious dispositions,
strategies of classification, and tendencies that are part of an
individuals sense of taste and preferences for cultural
consumption. According to French theorist Pierre Bourdieu
these ideas are not focused to each individual but are derived
instead of one's social position, educational background and
class status. Each social class has a different habitus with
distinct tastes of lifestyles. (glossary p. 443)

• Bordieu established that taste by individuals are used to

enhance their position within the social order and that
distinction is the means through which the establish their taste
as different from that of the lower class of people. This is not
based on the matter of class position based on one's economic
status but based on cultural capital. These distinctions between
the different kinds of taste cultures have traditionally been
understood as the difference between high and low cultures.
(from my notes/ textbook pg. 60)
• Example: The cast of the television show Jersey Shore and Hipsters. The
people you see on the television show jersey shore have a sense of a bad
taste as they are seen as unintelligent by the way they dress and the
lifestyle that is seen on the show. The people of Jersey Shore are seen as
non intellectuals by the way they present themselves. People known as
"Hipsters" dress in a well fashionable sense of dress and lifestyle as they
seem to look smart and come from a high class opposed to the people on
Jersey Shore who are seen as having trashy lifestyles and coming from a
not so high class family by their cheesy tacky clothing. Hipsters are seen to
dress more elegant and trendy showing that they have a sense of class.
They are both seen having different lifestyles on the way they choose to
dress. Hipsters are classified under the high culture category while the
"Guido's" on Jersey shore are seen as low culture. Media has a big influence
on what people think is culturally acceptable. Although they dress
completely differently, it is not generally based on class status. It is just how
society is.

Images:
• http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/hipster2.jpg
• (hipsters)
• http://www.bscreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/jersey-shore-2.jpg
• (Jersey Shore)
Realism
Realism
A definition given shape or shaped by the cultureﾕs understanding of embodied
vision and how the mind pictures the world; as well as art in contemporary
ways of seeing, which also give rise to and reproduce worldviews (P143)
Foucault’s, The Order of Things “The real is changing with different eras based
on the knowledges of the time, the knowledges of the time that include the
power that we participate and circulating” (lecture 33:00)
Episteme - the dominate way in which knowledge is required.

Examples, different reality in different culture / era:

In Ancient Egypt to Medieval eras, 2-D spatial and pictorial codes of
representation:
Realism is not about accurate representation of space or how we see it
It’s about symbolic value- important of storytelling.
15th century Renaissance: (the importance of science moving forward to
enlightenment)
Away from the dipiction symbolism, the depiction of spaceﾑthe mechanical
eye, as human machine, how your eye will see it.
Descartes Cartesian thought: “I think therefore I am” your body’s sensory
and vision is excellent, yet to depict reality people nee help from
mathematics and science.
• Try to be realistic (use 3D grid helps the artistﾕs eye to depict the space) the
scale in relationship between objects in the painting are wrong, yet the
relationship between the spectator and the painting provides an appearance
of 3D space.
• [Period background: questioning the role of god of creating the real, center
of a picture, as the spectator determine the center, they also have the power
of the will of god. Thus SCIENTIFIC MECHANICAL ORDERING OF
NATURE–a rational, all-seeing and all-knowing human being–accurate
(real) is science not god] (Lecture and slides)
• Man with a Movie Camera, Opposed to representation, geometric form,
structure and form.Higher and Higher, depicting healthy man and woman in
revolution.Not because people in different country are that much different
but illustrating under different Episteme the reality that people perceive can
be VERY DIFFERENT.

Related Terms:
• Perspective
• Episteme
• Cartesian Space
Important Theorists:
• Michel Foucault
• René Descartes
Taste
(Chapter Two, lecture January 25)
• All viewer interpretations involve two fundamental concepts of
value: aesthetics (philosophical notions of beauty/ugliness)
and taste. (p.56 and lecture)
• Taste is informed by experiences relating to one’s class. (p. 56)
• Pierre Bourdieu wrote that taste is always connected to social
identity and [educated middle/upper] class status. (p.56)
• Taste can be learned through cultural contact. (p.57 and
p.60) These institutions teach us about correct taste. (lecture)
• In the late 20th century, the division of high/low culture has been
criticized in order to disrupt classist hierarchies. (p.60) Items of
low culture are being given scholarly attention. For example,
comic books are considered “low art” but more recently books
like Watchmen have received critical acclaim.
• Taste depends on the context in which it is experienced (ex.
Art gallery vs. fast food joint), codes that prevail in society, the
person who is making judgement. (lecture)
• Taste is a “gate-keeping” structure that enforces class
boundaries. (lecture)
• Taste seems natural but it embodies the ideologies of the society.
(lecture)
• Someone with “good taste” is a person who has good taste is considered
to be “well bred”, “gentlemanly” and who is a “connoisseur”. (lecture)
• Someone with “bad taste” is ignorant and enjoys kitsch items.
• Kitsch (Clement Greenberg): Mass produced, cheap, inauthentic (p.57)

Related Terms
• Habitus: A set of shared preferences and dispositions within a society.
(p.60)
Taste is conditioned by habitus (lecture)
• Ideology

Important Theorists
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Clement Greenberg
Perspectivism
(Chapter 4. Lecture Feb. 8)
Definition: Originating in 15thC Italy, a movement characterized by the
mathematical rendering of space - primarily through the designation
of a vanishing point(s) - to create the illusory 3rd dimension of depth
on a 2-dimentional surface. This “illusion” of depth depends upon the
presence of a single, unblinking, static viewer positioned before the
frame as if before a window, looking in. (452, 150 and lecture)
• - Codified in Alberti’s De Pictura (1435), the rules of perspective
provide for a convention of representation in which space is
conceived of as linear, uniform, and measurable. (p. 143, lecture and
slides).

Historical context: Renaissance - Given Renaissance interest in

fusing art and science, perspectivism was influential partly because it
was understood as a scientific or rational way to organize visual
space as a replica of what the embodied eye would see. (142) Its
iconic meaning can thus be seen as scientific (155).
• (i.e.)Fra Carnevale: Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple; circa
1467 is characteristic of Renaissance use of perspectivism where
architectural space becomes the subject of the painting, and
dominates the figures in the frame. (Slides Feb. 8)
• Context: Introduction in Lectures/Reading -
Conventions of representation shape and are shaped by
cultural conventions of seeing prevalent at a particular
time. As such, conventions of representation can be seen
to reflect different epistemes or epistemic systems of logic
(149-150)
• Focus is not on the origins of perspectivism, but on its
emergence as a dominant representational method and
as a metaphor of a dominant episteme (rational
objectivity) in science and art; it is not only a tool of the
Renaissance episteme, but an integral part of the
epistemes of following eras, shaping practices of
looking and seeing as a metaphor for knowledge and
being, and allowing us to consider the ways in which
images function as reproductions of ways of seeing
(150,169)
• Context: Visual Theory Perspectivism is often seen as a precursor
to the Cartesian worldview which posits an all-knowing, all-seeing,
rational human subject in the place of God at the conceptual centre of
the world. (156-157 and lecture) According to theorists arguing for
this connection, although perspectivism places the human observer
at its organizing locus, it also displaces the human subject with an
instrument of mechanical objectivity and reason (the geometric
formula of perspective) thereby externalizing the embodied seeing
eye. (156-157)

• Related Terms:
• Episteme
• Realism
• Cartesian space
• Visual metaphor

• Theorists: Anne Friedburg (153,155) Erwin Panofsky (156)

John Berger (157) Norman Bryson (157)
Analog vs. Digital
• Terms referring to methods/processes of reproduction and also the resulting
representations derived from these methods.

• Digital and Analogue in visual culture studies is discussed most often in relation to
photography. Also discussed in terms of ideas of authenticity and the concept of
‘the original’.

• Analogue refers to a process of direct impression of phenomena onto a medium,

resulting in an ‘original’, fixed recording or rendering of mechanical perceptions
that are continuous in time and value. Analogue copies are not as authentic as a first
generation analogue print as they are a generation removed from the ‘real’
information impressed onto the original.

• Digital refers to a process of technological abstraction of recorded phenomena

through data encoding, resulting in a non-continuous system of data packeting to
achieve a representation of phenomena – most often simulating the continuous,
seamless rendering of the analogue process. Further generations of digitial
‘recordings’, or digital copying, does not result in a change of the original’s
‘qualities’ as they are duplications of the already encoded data-rendered
information.
• Questions of authenticity in photography are interesting around ideas of analogue
and digital processes. They can include a discussion of Roland Barthes ideas of “the
myth of photographic truth”, and the ‘aura of mechanical objectivity’ discussed in
the text relating tensions between the indexical qualities – the ‘truth claims’- of
images, and the construct of the image as inauthentic or staged. Truth claims of the
analogue image are considered closer to the authentic than the truth claims of digital
images.

• Walter Benjamin writes about the loss of the “aura” of the real, as a change in the
experience of meaning of ‘the original’, due to the reproducibility of images of the
real (artwork). Both the analogue photograph and the digital image can be
considered in considereing ideas of the loss of “aura” of the real. The analogue
image (photograph), in contrasting with the digital however, possesses an kind of
material original of it’s own and can be considered to possess a mechanical aura of
the hand of the artist. The digital image, in contrast to the mechanical photograph,
is the result of a combination of technological processes, artists efforts and
intentions, seamless manipulations of data in digital editing and printing processes
with no necessary or necessarily evident original outside of the originary data
collected and already rendered as discrete packets of information.
• In discussing these processes in terms of Walter Benjamin’s “aura” of the real, both
processes can be said to relocate concepts of the original. And where the analogue
may be considered empowering to the viewer as patron-through the notion of
accessibility of art proper, both the digital and the analogue may be considered as
empowering the viewer as practitioner through an awareness of the inauthentic
inherently suggested through the accessibility of technological and mechanical
reproduction practices.