Ways Of Seeing

This titular motif is, unsurprisingly, a central motif of the text. In the first chapter, Berger makes his case for the primacy of the visual, and therefore legitimizes subsequent chapters’ focus on distinct ‘ways of seeing.’ For him, capitalist culture produces and utilizes various distinct visual languages (or ways of seeing)that dictate the psychological, social, economic, and political relations that capitalist subjects have with both each other and the world at large. Therefore, when Berger investigates these ways of seeing through the lens of history, he does so in order to dissect and identify the manner in which the rising capitalist world order produced distinct and sharply limiting visual languages that corresponded to its own political, economic, and cultural aims. (The normalization of property as both an a priori reality, and property acquisition as the ultimate human purpose are two examples of these aims.)

These visual languages, through the sheer power of the human faculty for sight, combined with the insidious potency of ideology, have the ability to transcend genre. (Berger most cogently argues this point in his case study of oil painting.) Ultimately, Berger’s purpose for this motif is dual. Firstly, he wishes to deconstruct dominant modes of seeing.