We Happy Few: Perspective and Ideology

[T]he themes, concepts and representations through which men and women 'live', in an imaginary relation, their relation to their real conditions of existence […] 'Ideologies' are here being conceptualised, not as the contents and surface forms of ideas, but as the unconscious categories through which conditions are represented and lived. (Hall, quoting Louis Althusser, 1980, pp.28-9)

My response and exploration of these problems is the second image in the triptych, We Happy Few: The Vanity. This work interrogates ideas about ideology and the difficulty of the 'Western' perspective on the 'rest' of the world.

Ideology is indeed a system of 'representations', but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with 'consciousness' […] it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their 'consciousness' […] it is within this ideological unconsciousness that men succeed in altering the 'lived' relation between them and the world and acquiring that new form of specific unconsciousness called 'consciousness'. (Althusser, 1969, p.233)

I am interested in the idea of short-sightedness, as my physical condition (and therefore a condition of my seeing) which informs my thinking about the possibility, photographically, of compelling a viewer to 'see from my perspective', as a visual analogy for being able to enter my ideological position. Of course, the metaphor of spectacles as the unalterable apparatus of perception has its antecedence in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:

But although all our cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience for it could well be that even our experiential cognition is a composite of that which we receive through impressions and that which our own cognitive faculty (merely prompted by sensible impressions) provides out of itself, which addition we cannot distinguish from that fundamental material until long practice has made us attentive to it and skilled in separating it out. (1998, p.136)

The turn in my attention towards my own short-sightedness as a condition of perception to seriously consider, rather than simply a minor defect to obviate, leads me to take quite literally the notion of spectacles as mediating my own positional perspective on reality. This takes on ideological implications with the addition of Marx to Kant:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production, which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. [emphasis added] (Marx, 1971)

Kant's notion of the 'synthetic' was an attempt to reconcile knowledge with unknowable questions (divided, for Kant into a priori knowledge derived through reason and a posteriori knowledge gained through experience). For Kant, all knowledge is subject to our synthetic apparatus of perception – our metaphorical glasses – and as such we are only able to 'know' about our perception, not to know about reality as it is in itself. I combine this notion of the limits of perception with Marx's theory of social conditions being productive of experience, which in turn is productive of consciousness. Specifically, I render the physical limits of my visual perception and, simultaneously, the ideological limits of my consciousness, which has ultimately been produced by my social conditions.

The space beyond the limits of the spectacles within We Happy Few: The Vanity is at once a beautiful fantasy – in Kantian terms, the impossible moment when we remove our perspectival perceptual apparatus and see the world as it really is – and simultaneously a depiction of the world that is fictional and exists only through my perspective. What is beyond the spectacles is beyond reason and so We Happy Few: The Vanity becomes a critique of pure reason itself; a fictional Platonic moment of things as they are. In a sense it is a 'truer' vision of my real perception, unmediated by an ideology into which I have been interpellated. What is outside the frames is 'true' and what is inside the frames is mediated and therefore suspect.

The implication of applying this analogy to Canary Wharf in east London is to suggest that what we understand as reasonably 'clear viewing' – in this case, of a symbol of bellicose capitalist triumphalism; an apotheosis of Thatcherism – is that it is only possible to receive capitalism as validated when regarded from within its own ideological structures. And further, from within its own ideological structures, the viewer finds it problematic and compromised to approach a coherent critique.

The visual perception of Canary Wharf in We Happy Few: The Vanity collapses into a beauty in which capitalist modes of knowledge production are irrelevant and the symbolism of capitalism is nullified into an abstraction beyond ideology. It is this element of the image to which I am most drawn and which I sought out an application for which led me to make We Happy Few: The Vanity.

In relation to the capitalist ideological framings of Iraq, We Happy Few: The Vanity (which draws its title, like all the titles, from the source material of the concrete poems and echoes the nihilism of the opening of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, as quoted by Baudrillard) is a rebuke; a suggestion that in journeying to Iraq wearing capitalistic spectacles, all we will see is capitalistic relations, thereby casting doubt on any 'knowledge' that can be produced by that endeavour. It is a self-rebuke, also, in that it constitutes a recognition of my own position interpellated into capitalistic ideology even as I position myself as a revolutionary antagonist to it.