Visual Sociology: Journal 1
1/22/2008
Andras laughs at my Weberianism. I guess he’s right as little as I like to be pigeonholed. I look at my approach to the concept of power and the pictures I took and sigh, albeit with a smile. How does power operate on Loyola’s campus? There are many differing ways to approach the concept of power, let alone its operation over the scope of an entire campus. I could go with the predictable routes of the religious icons and the massive buildings, or the sign over the Administration building and all the NO, NO, NO signs plastered around campus.
I’m not sure if it was an attempt to come off as a grad student rather than an undergraduate in my choice of abstract concepts or an honest appraisal of power operations around us. If I was consciously trying to be more sophistocated than other students I present a more sophomoric portrait of myself than I guess I’d like. In any case, the images that I finally selected from my options skew toward the concept of academic power in the confines of an educational institution. The whole package demonstrates the institutional power over learning and content. Who teaches? Who is taught? What is taught? How is it taught? How is this regulated? Taking this direction eschews more personal contacts with power that occur each day in terms of financial, legal, or dogmatic vignettes that we participate in each day. I look instead at the power wielded by the instituion as academic. Why does the college exist? If one believes the college motto, it is to prepare people to lead extraordinary lives. Quite a concept “preparing people.” I picture my mother preparing the Thanksgiving turkey complete with stuffing and the protective oven bag to keep it from drying out. (I’ll leave the reader to unpack that metaphor to one’s own taste.) This is what drives my pictures.
Briefly I will try to give a rough explication of each photo choice. First, the name board.
Each of these names occur in many places written (even spoken) in all sorts of media. Curiously enough the department board is constructed in such an impermanant medium of a moveable letter board. This implies an invisible hand behind the faculty and department that is able to shift, alter, add, or remove from this list. While the names on which the university rests its academic and spiritual foundations (image two) are literally carved in stone, the current actors in the institution see their names in fragile plastic. Sure, the case is probably locked, but the list lacks the import, weight, and permanance of those names ringing the chapel and information center – names of academic eternity. 
It is these lofty thinkers which the university brings down to the students, teaching them from the past to prepare them for the future.
This brings me to the last pictures.
I can think of no better way to represent the American educational experience than the third image. No matter who occupies those chairs, no matter the background of the individual, no matter the time and setting, the sea of uniform chairs waits to be filled with a student, each student waits to be “prepared”. This is the ultimate in academic power operation: some are teachers, some are taught. And, in the ultimate show of power of the instution, the cameras of the security state watching over (of all things the most Orwellian) the Peace Studies program.
The instituion holds sway over the activity of learning and teaching, regulating the Loyola canon and manipulating the flow of commodified knowledge on campus.
(That was the end of the assignment; the rest of these I took but didn't include. I took others, but these are the highlights and I'm tired of posting. For the next posting, I have to take near-random images that illustrate race relations.)
