Representation is relational to social structures. These are expressed as relations of power (as per Foucault), of commerce, and of use-value (as per Marx). Within the visual space – a photograph in a fashion magazine or a painting of a Great Master – these interactions of power and representation .
Feminist ideology has made valid, considered analyses of the effects of the widespread consumption of degraded images of women and all forms of sexism and violence.[i] The highly contested nature of such analyses begs the question of whether to cover up nudity when there are so many other readily available strategies for de-objectifying women, Foucault argued that power is not the preserve of individuals or groups, nor can it be found within a centralised site. In Foucault’s work, power is construed as a network of relations.[ii] This implies that subjectivities are constructed and perpetuated through complex forms of regulation, rather than physical limitations: ‘There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself.’[iii]
Bourdieu explains that interaction between individuals who are socially distant – through intersectional dynamics of power and exclusion – is often obscured or masked through ‘strategies of condescension.’[iv] That is, one’s position within the social body, the polity, or even the household is contingent upon one’s actual place in the wider world. I am the point of origin within the social from my lived experience, so what may be self-evident to me from this position may not actually reflect my value, worth or contribution within the social body. My potential for ‘world-making’ is hindered by all manner of symbolic struggles with the social body regulated by ontologies, of which the objectification of bodies is a critical element.[v]
References and Additional Reading
[i] See Christopher Berry Gray, ed., The Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 1999). The link between pornography and violence continues to be contested – is pornography a cause or a symptom of violence? Pro- and anti-regulation lobbyists, independent committees and social scientists in many countries, including the US and the UK, analyse empirical research and make recommendations to governments on their own interpretation of the data. To date, there has been no successful prosecution for injury caused by pornography.
[ii] Foucault (1988), citing Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in Irene Gammel, Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove (Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1994), p. 155. Foucault (1977) also speaks of the ‘laboratory of power.’
[iii] Judith Butler (1987: 133-134), ‘Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault’ in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds. Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late Capitalist Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 128-142
[iv] Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power,’ Sociological Theory 7:1, (1989), pp. 14-25 (p. 16).
[v] Ibid.
