Publicity and/as objectification

Osucha examines one possible explanation for something taken for granted in our society: that having one’s private image made public is inherently degrading and, by implication, that being seen in of itself is potentially degrading. One reason that having one’s image in circulation is seen as a threat to one’s personhood, Osucha suggests, is that such publicity is associated with low social status and threatens a bourgeois ideal of privacy and domesticity. The photograph became a technology of knowing, and whites were for the most part in control of the way other races were known.

However, this does not fully address why the reproduced image in of itself — and vision in of itself — became such a powerful a tool of oppression. After all, this was not the start of it: As Osucha points out, blacks were already seen as publicly reproducible, suggesting that the public image was already seen as a sign of inferiority. The arguments of Warren and Brandeis bore a striking resemblance to feminist theories of objectification. Some feminist theory (rightfully, I think) argues that women’s to-be-looked-at-ness — like blacks’ in Osucha and also in Fanon — keeps them in an inferior position. It was particularly notable that Warren and Brandeis argued that an image produced without someone’s permission is harmful to her whether it defames her or not. Instead, “the problem lay in precisely the way in which the image transformed the unique white woman into a generalized object of exchange, a typified product — that is, into another available commodity body” (Osucha 72).

Why do people have such a strong mental association between publicity and degredation?

This question made me, like Sam, think of the aura in Benjamin. Is it possible that mechanical reproduction deprives people as well as artworks of their auras? Another hypothesis I have is that public circulation of images has always already been reserved for the Other because it others the replicated subject; the image is seen but cannot see. Or are people inherently anxious that one’s appearance, once thought to be a manifestation of an inner metaphysical essence, can instead be captured by a purely physical, man-made technology?

Also, to answer the question of whether race is still commoditized and used commercially, I’d say definitely yes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6drdI_RBt8&feature=player_embedded