Not of course our awareness of our potentiality as artists ourselves. Yet why should an artist's way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality.Selected Essays of John Berger (2014) Selected Essays of John Berger. Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied zoo visitor is alone. … That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal.Today behaviourists like Skinner imprison the very concept of man within the limits of what they conclude from their artificial tests with animals. As were also the methods of so-called intelligence testing. Taylor who developed the “Taylorism” of timemotion studies and “scientific” management of industry proposed that work must be “so stupid” and so phlegmatic that he (the worker) “more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type.” Nearly all modern techniques of social conditioning were first established with animal experiments. The mechanical view of the animal’s work capacity was later applied to that of workers. Indeed, during this period an approach to animals often prefigured an approach to man. … This reduction of the animal … is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units. Animals required for food are processed like manufactured commodities. Later, in the so-called post-industrial societies, they are treated as raw material. In the first stages of the industrial revolution, animals were used as machines.What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but. A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.In their superficial anatomy - less in their deep anatomy - in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal.Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.Ībout Looking (1980) Electronic edition: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015
We know that the earth is turning away from it.
JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING CHAPTER 7 SUMMARY FREE
Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of "The Free World." For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they in the East lack.
It is closely related to certain ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers - and thus the national economy.The nude is condemned to never being naked.
By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.