Reading Visual Arts

Ma. Claire Ann S. Duque

PPT 3
 DIFFERENCE of Habit, Mannerism & Routine
Habit
• a behavior pattern acquired by
frequent repetition or physiologic
exposure that shows itself in regularity
or increased facility of performance.
• Mode of behavior that has become
nearly or completely involuntary.
• a learned behavior that becomes
reflexive over time. The behavior is
often triggered by a certain context.
For example, you may automatically
go brush your teeth after finishing
breakfast as part of your morning
routine. It can be healthy, unhealthy,
or neutral.
Mannerism

• a characteristic and often

unconscious mode or peculiarity of
action, bearing or treatment.
• Someone's manne r i s ms ar e the
gestures or ways of speaking that
are very characteristic of them, and
which they often use.
• Ex.: Biting Fingernails, Clears
Throat, Flipping your hair
Routine

• a sequence of actions regularly

followed; a fixed program.
• the usual series of things that you do
at a particular time.
 Who is Pierre Felix Bourdieu?
ØRe n o w n e d F r e n c h S o c i o l o g i s t ,
Philosopher & Anthropologist
ØBorn on August 1, 1930, Denguin,
France and died on January 23, 2002,
Paris)
ØHis work had a major impact on the
social sciences in the second half of
the 20th century.
ØHe made significant contributions
to general sociological theory,
theorizing the link between
education and culture, and research
into the intersections of taste, class,
and education. He is well known for
pioneering such terms as "symbolic
violence," "cultural capital," and
"habitus."
 WHAT IS HABITUS?

Ø One of Bourdieu's most influential yet ambiguous concepts. It refers to the

physical embodiment of cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills,
and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences.
Ø The learned set of preferences or dispositions by which a person orients to the
social world. It is a system of durable, transposable, cognitive 'schemata or
structures of perception, conception and action' (Bourdieu, 2002: 27).
ØIn education, Bourdieu developed the concept of habitus by which he meant a
culture or worldview that is associated with a social class or social group. Our
life experiences, as a member of that group, deeply embed in us habits, skills
and ways of behaving and thinking.
ØExample: Taste for cultural objects such as art, food and clothing depends on
social class positions (upper class, working class/middle class and lower class
individuals)
ØOur cultural history and trajectories naturalize certain values and ideas,
and effectively determine our worldview—that is, they predispose us to
see and evaluate the world in certain ways.
Some examples of habitus are:
1. The way you dress
2. Your accent
3. Your body language
4. Things you feel naturally good at
5. Your values
DISTINCTION

• Termed by Bourdieu
• This is tied up with the notion of taste, which generally means
having a refined, educated, sophisticated and aesthetic
worldview, rather than simply seeing, evaluating and
categorizing things naively. (e.g. The Gardener and the
Professor, a photograph of a pile of dishes and utensils)
• The act of perceiving someone or something as being not
the same and often treating as separate or different. Ex.:
With Distinction
WHAT IS THE CONCEPT OF HABITUS?

Habitus is 'the way society becomes deposited in persons in the

form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured
propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which
then guide them' (Wacquant 2005: 316, cited in Navarro 2006: 16).

One example of this is law, which produces subjects who see the
world in particular ways, and whose actions come to be
conceptualized as such (for example, as lawful or unlawful).
WHAT IS CULTURAL LITERACY?

ØCombination of knowledge and skill

ØA general familiarity with and an ability to use, the official and
unofficial rules, values, genres, knowledge and discourses that
characterize cultural fields.
ØAn understanding of how to think and see in a manner that is
appropriate to the imperatives and contexts of the moment.
EXAMPLES:
ØCulture is often described as being like an iceberg. Above the
water are the aspects of the culture that you can easily see and
experience: language, dress, food, festivals and the like.
ØBelow the water, where you can't see it, are the aspects of the
culture that those within the culture know and understand, often
without thinking about it or questioning it.
ØThe unspoken aspects of a culture are influenced by its history,
values, and assumptions, and range from perceptions of right and
wrong, gender and other roles, and customs like use of personal
space, to idiomatic language use (language based on assumed
knowledge).
 SEEING AS READING
Our habitus disposes us to see certain things, but occasionally there is
a misfit—or an anomaly— regarding what we expect to see and what we
visually ‘register’. Once this anomaly is repeated, we might start to
reconsider what it is we are seeing—or overlooking. We can exemplify this by
returning to Verlaine’s reference to the ‘actor’s advice’ about things needing
to happen twice. What this means is that we sometimes fail to see the
significance of something until we are aware of what we could call a pattern.

The activities of seeing:

Examples:
ØDifference between taking a photograph (is usually conscious, deliberate
and self-reflective) and driving a car (a relatively unreflective activity and
even below the level of consciousness)
ØDistinctions such as human/alien - same as what is involved when we
categorise ‘real people’ or groups within our culture.
• What is the difference between reading and seeing?
-If something is in your field of view, you see it. If you can understand its meaning,
you can read it.
• What is the main difference between looking and seeing in art?
-To look means to gaze upon something with your eyes and acknowledge its
presence. But to see requires time, patience, open mindedness and, sometimes even
effort. In order to see, not only do we have to look at the object, but we also have to
pay attention to it until a new understanding arises.
• What is the difference between looking and seeing in art appreciation?
-Three simple steps to understand art: look, see, think
• What's the difference between looking and seeing in the context of art?
-Looking is about literally describing what is in front of you, while seeing is about
applying meaning to it.
• What is the difference between looking and seeing in photography?
-To look suggests both the beginning and end of the action, whereas to see
suggests the beginning of a process of investigation. When speaking about portrait
photography we often speak about the need to transcend the surface to reach the
inner person.
 Techniques of Seeing as Reading
1. Selection – ex: candid shot
2. Omission and Frame
3. Signification and Evaluation
4. Arrangement
5. Differentiation and Connection
6. Focus
7. Context

*Whatever we see that catches our attention is what our eyes select while
what we do not look at is omitted.
• It is important to keep in mind that there is no necessary
temporal distinction between these techniques: they are part of
the same process of making the visual, and one cannot be
conceived without regard to the others.
• Selection, Omission, Framing and Evaluation produce a visual
text.
• For example, we usually treat a book as a text which is made up
of signs that possibly include the name of the author, the color
of the cover, the title and the publisher’s name. In other words,
a text is made up of signs that are considered to exist in
relation to other signs, the sum of which is denoted by a frame
of some kind.
 Seeing in Time and Motion
ØThis process of production is an ongoing and transformational
one, and the status of signs and texts is always relational.
ØEx.: photograph of the woman and dog to which we referred
earlier
ØThe photographer who took that shot could have taken a second
photograph from 10 metres further away, this time including the
whole of the house, more of the garden, and fourteen other
dogs standing in the doorway. This would have produced a
different text because the potential relationship between the
various signs (and therefore the meanings available to anyone
making sense of the text) would have been considerably altered;
 Text and Intertext
ØIn academic terms, a text is anything that conveys a set of meanings to the
person who examines it.

ØFigure 1.4 provides a good example of the relational character of signs and texts.
There are five photographs arranged on a single page. They were not originally
taken as a series, intended to be placed together, or considered for public
consumption; rather, they were private family photographs which we have put
together, not entirely arbitrarily, to make a text.

ØWe might take this text as being about the family and its history, which would
involve identifying the different generations and their relationship to one
another, through reference to features such as clothes and physical
characteristics. Each of these photographs as signs would have meaning in
relation to the way they were read and contextualized with regard to the other
signs—that is, their meanings and status would be determined by their textual
place.
Sign
- is anything that is treated as a meaningful part of the unit that is the text.

Intertextuality
- the use of other texts to create new texts.
• the relationship between texts, especially literary ones.
• "every text is a product of intertextuality“
• Ex.: Roar - Katy Perry. The intertextuality in 'Roar' is within the lyrics. The line "I
got the eye of the tiger, a fighter" in the chorus suggests a deeper meaning. The
song was written with the purpose of the audience knowing the meaning of the
phrase "eye of the tiger".

Genre
- term for text-types which structure meanings in certain ways, through their
association with a particular social purpose and social context’ (Schirato and Yell
2000: 189).
- It represents a pattern or set of rules that a given text follows in order to
communicate its message effectively to its intended audience.
Which of these would be a kind of text?
• A graphic novel or comic book
• A journal written by a 15 year old
• A series of photographs
• A poem
• A movie
Answer: All of these are texts! Each one meets the criteria of containing
information that we can explore and from which we can derive ideas and
information.

You might have thought that texts were limited to written materials, such as
books, magazines, newspapers, and ‘zines (an informal term for magazine
that refers especially to fanzines and webzines). Those items are indeed
texts—but so are movies, paintings, television shows, songs, political
cartoons, online materials, advertisements, maps, works of art, and even
rooms full of people. If we can look at something, explore it, find layers of
meaning in it, and draw information and conclusions from it, we’re looking
at a text.
• Consider your favorite film: it has surface messages and a basic story, but
it also has deeper meanings that work sort of like buried treasure.

• Or take the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” for example. On
the surface, it’s about a little girl, a bear family, and what happens when
she wanders into their forest home. But what about the deeper meanings.
Is “Goldilocks” a commentary on the importance of privacy rights? A story
of juvenile delinquency in its earliest stages? A text can have different
meanings for different people.
 Conclusion
What is important, in any consideration of how we read the visual, is
that as ‘readers’ we are also ‘writers’, selecting, editing and framing all
that we see. Most of the time this work is unconscious, but even when our
seeing is conscious and attentive, we will still make what we see by using
the same kinds of techniques (such as selection and omission), and be
limited in what we see by factors such as context, habitus and cultural
literacy. In our next chapter, we extend this inquiry to take into account
what we could call the ‘prosthetics of seeing’—that is, we consider the
relationship between visual apparatuses and technologies, and the types of
‘visions’ they produce.
 Quiz
Exploring the Impact of Photojournalism
• Photojournalism is a powerful medium that combines the art of
photography with the storytelling techniques of journalism.
Through captivating visuals, photojournalists have the ability to
shed light on important social issues, spark conversations, and
ultimately foster social change.
• In relation to our topic for today which is Seeing in Reading, using
Photojournalism as your medium, capture a certain scene or event
that tells a story and has an impact to the society. The scope of
your subject is around PSU, Capitol Grounds and Lingayen Town only.
Do not go beyond the said places. Submit it to me until 6PM today
via google drive.
 References

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• https://blog.reedsy.com/characters-mannerisms/
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• https://www.coursehero.com/file/180698478/UNIT-2-Techniques-of-Seeing-as-Reading-
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• https://www.yellowbrick.co/blog/journalism/photojournalism-igniting-social-change-with-
visual-storytelling