Ways Of Seeing

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” 

This is the opening of the book. Here, Berger begins laying the groundwork that will give his arguments credibility and immediacy. He asserts the primacy of the human visual experience. In Berger’s view, although written language is clearly important, words are not the means by which we have our first experiences of the world, and they are never fully adequate tools by which we name and understand the world. This is because before we acquire language and learn to use it to name our experiences, we see the world. No written language can compete with the primacy of the visual, and no written language can fully capture or depict the way that we visually experience the world. Berger elucidates this preliminary assertion in order to eventually argue for the vital, critical importance of identifying and deconstructing the visual languages around us. For Berger, because of the primacy of the visual, images have an unrivaled power to form human consciousness and entrench ideology. Here, he invites us to recognize that power, so that we can see his subsequent arguments as valid and necessary.