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The Social, the Psychic, and Visual Culture
Henry P. Krips
Exploring relations between the social and the individual or, in theoretical terms, between Marx and Freud has been at the heart of much recent work in cultural studies, especially that of the Birmingham School, the Frankfurt School, and Screen Theory. Because cultural artifacts mediate between the social and the individual, they have proven to be especially interesting sites at which to pursue this project. On the one hand, individuals read/consume/circulate cultural such artifacts and, it seems, respond to them at the most profound pyschic levels; on the other, these artifacts are socially produced, and carry with them the stamp of the social. The question arises, then, of how, using the resources of both marxist and freudian theory, one can trace the chain of causation connecting social structure, via cultural artifacts, to constitutive pyschic effects upon individuals. I investigate this question in the context of two well known examples: first, the encounter with a glint of light that Lacan describes in Seminar XI; second, the encounter with a photograph of an African-American slave family that Barthes describes in Camera Lucida. I argue that these two examples enable connections to be drawn between the Lacanian "gaze" and what Barthes calls "the punctum", connections which throw light upon the different ways in which photographs and other visual artifacts operate upon viewers' subjectivities.
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