John Berger: looking for a Brexit A teleology of the gaze

• Main Author: Mauricio Espil
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata 2017-03-01
• Series: Estudios de Teoría Literaria
• Subjects: Berger; Cultura; Marxismo; Cubismo; Modernidad; Política
• Online Access: http://fh.mdp.edu.ar/revistas/index.php/etl/article/view/2071

This paper reviews the articles by John Berger published in the book About looking. In this sense, this production is chronologically examined. In this way three production moments would be observed.  The first moment marked by the imprint of Cubism –in so much symbolic revolution– in modern culture and the debates of British Marxism about the working class, culture in the mass media and the use of a suitable language in order to achieve The greatest possible number of accessions for democratic political action. A second moment of active participation in the social debate publishing in New Society and making the program of television emitted by the BBC. In these interventions he not only insists on the need for political action but also tries to explain the field in which this action takes place (an outline of Bourdieu's theories accompanies those arguments) and, above all, clearly exposes the role Of the spectator as a consequence of the revolution in the symbolic that led the Cubism. Finally, in a third moment, the theoretical scaffolding used to analyze the development of what we call culture annexes the concepts of aura and experience of W. Benjamin and hegemony of A. Gramsci. In this way he describes the end of an era, modernity, and the continuity of history in something unnamed that sees as a consequence of the pre-eminence of "high finance."