These are universal issues which, unlike the Marxist’s struggle, are still very relevant today.
#JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING BOOK ANALYSIS PUBLICITY FREE#
The collection also includes the essay A Philosopher and Death, in which Berger describes the day he spent with Marxist thinker and politician Ernst Fischer in Styria, Austria-the last day in the life of his friend, with whom he shared many of his views. Berger deals with the enormous impact of publicity, image saturation, television, reproduction, the illusion of free choice, principles of capitalism, and a discussion of gender and ethnicity. By repressing animals while using their images, Berger writes, developed capitalism reproduces Europe’s old colonial practices. Both pets and animals in zoos are kept in an unnatural environment: castrated, fed artificial foods, limited in space and sex. In fact, they only exacerbate our nostalgia of real interaction with the animal world. At the same time, the absence of contact with animals is being partially compensated by special institutions: zoos, circuses, nature reserves, pets, children’s toys, animation films, and games that exploit images of nature. Today, we eat animal foods produced on an industrial scale and outside of our view: we no longer associate a supermarket burger with a real cow. Although animals were the first models for primitive artists (and their cave paintings), and until very recently supplied humanity with food, clothing, and transport, it has taken only two centuries to replace them with machines and expel them from our society. If in his famous television project Ways of Seeing and the book of the same name, John Berger shows how the society of spectacle works through visual media (fine art, mass culture and advertising), in Why Look at Animals? he approaches the same issues from a different angle, focusing on the removal of animals from the everyday life of Western society.
0 kommentar(er)
