Modernity is a term that scholars use to refer to the historical, cultural, political, and economic conditions related to the Enlightenment: the rise of industrial society and scientific rationalism; and the idea of controlling nature through technology, science, and rationalism (p. 95). In modernity, technological and social changes are viewed as both beneficial and imperative to progress. The alienated worker, the liberal human subject, and the subject constituted through scientific inquiry and concepts of progress all are common to the period of modernity. Foucault as well as several influential modern thinkers challenged the concept of the autonomous, self-knowing subject. Foucault's subject is never autonomous but is always constituted in relationships of power that are enacted through discourse (p. 100).
In visual theory, spectator (the individual who looks) and spectatorship (the practice of looking) have added meanings that derive specifically from film theory. Not only is the spectator's gaze constituted through a relationship between the subject who looks and other people, institutions, places, and objects in the world, but also the objects we contemplate may be described as the source of the look in the gaze. Once again, Foucault is revisited and the gaze is said to be constituted through a relationship of subjects defined within and through the discourses of institutions. Foucault's concept of discourse is helpful to better understand how power systems work to define how things are understood and spoken about in a given society. The term discourse describes passages of writing or speech, the act of talking about something (p. 105). The gaze, whether institutional or individual, thus helps to establish relationships of power. The act of looking is commonly regarded as awarding more power to the person who is looking than to the person who is the object of the look. The photograph is a central tool in establishing difference (p. 111). The main point here is that images are central to the experience of modernity and provide a complex field in which power relations are exercised and looks are exchanged (p. 136).
The term realism typically refers to a set of conventions or a style of art or representation that is understood at a given historical moment to accurately represent nature or the real or to convey and interpret accurate or universal meanings about people, objects, and events in the world (p. 146). The goal of realist art is to produce reality as it is. Foucault, once again, discusses art's ability to reflect truths about society. He used the term episteme to describe the way that an inquiry into truth is organized in a given era. An episteme is an accepted dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in a given period of history (p. 149).
Perspective refers to a set of systems or mechanisms used to produce representations of objects in space as if seen by an observer through a window or frame (p. 151). In perspective, the size and detail of objects depicted corresponds with their relative distance from the imagined position of the observer. There are challenges to perspective. Human vision is infinitely more complex than perspective's model of a stationary viewer and a world organized around line and space suggest. Impressionism and cubism are types of art that defied the tradition of perspective. Cubism in particular is a style that deliberately challenged the dominant model of perspective through an analytic system that broke up the perspectival space of the conventional painterly style (p. 166). Cubism just so happens to be one of my most favorite periods in art history. It appears as if someone has taken the picture, dropped it, and it broke into thousands of pieces only to pick up the individual pieces and put them back together. Digital media and imagining have also presented new modes through which the viewer can experience a multiplicity of perspectives on a multiplicity of virtual worlds within the same screen.
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