Visual Culture: The Reader

The signified is often humiliated due to the distracted gaze of the urban consumer. 'The Face' magazine is laid out in such a way as to ease the restless passage of this distracted gaze, as an integrated package of graphic, typographic and photographic (dis)information it invites the reader to wander through picking up whatever they find attractive, useful or appealing.  The reader is licensed to to use whatever has been devoted in whatever way and in whatever combination proves most useful and satisfying.  Introduced as a post-structuralist strategy for going beyond the strict confinement of critical activity, cruising allowed the reader to take pleasure in a text without being obliged at the same time to make some form of pledge/commitment.

This Second World model is contrasted by the First World, housing critics such as John Berger who takes up a different position regarding what photography and writing on photography is. Berger has been seeking to bind the photography back to its original context, attempting to place the photography within a web of narratives which are designed to authenticate its substance. On the other hand, disciples of the Second World (Post) do not seek to recover the truth captured in an image, but rather to liberate the signifier from the constraints imposed upon it by the rationalist theology of representation. By retaining a belief in a beyond and a beneath, members of the First World are seen by Post critics to be continuing submission to an old fashioned, disabling metaphysic.

Furthermore, the direct project of the Post is to replace the dominant Platonic regime of meaning (Representation) with a radical anti-system, promoting the articulation of difference as reasoning itself. It is a multi-aspected attack on the authoritarian structure which is seen to shadow all First World discourse guaranteeing truth. The consequences of the assault on representation for image makers, are on the whole, rather more mundane. There is the disappearance of the referent and the signified, leaving us with no meaning, no classes, no history; just a ceaseless procession of simulacra.

Following on, Baudrillard claims that  appearances can no longer be said to falsify reality, and that reality is no more than the never knowable sum of all appearances. Implying reality flickers and that it will never stay still, that we cease to exist as rational beings capable of standing back and understanding the basis of our experience. In fact it's implied that there is no ledge for us to stand back on due to the information we handle continuously changing without us ever owning or storing the material that we process.

Evans, J & Hall, S. (1999). Visual Culture: The Reader. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. p107-110.