From Physiological Viewing To Technological Viewing

The Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie,along with Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro,is known as the three masters of British literary immigration.His work Midnight’s Children has been hailed as the most amazing magic realist novel after One Hundred Years of Solitude.Set against the backdrop of the Twentieth Century British colonial movement in India,the novel combines fictional narratives with historical facts,telling the story of the mutual game between British colonists and Indian nationalists,revealing the existential dilemmas faced by the Indian people under the visual discipline of the colonists.This study uses visual culture theory to provide an in-depth analysis of the visual discipline of the British colonists and the revolt of the Indian people in Midnight’s Children.The study divided visual discipline into two forms: One is physiological viewing with the naked eye.The essence of viewing with the naked eye is the active perception of all things in the world.This perception stimulates the possessiveness of humans.Guided by desire,the British colonists aspired to make the objects of knowledge graspable,observable,and occupiable.The other is the technological viewing with the mechanical eye.The emergence of photography marks that the lens(the mechanical eye)enhances human vision,breaking the limitations of the “body” and visualize more non-visual things.The Mechanical Eye was an indispensable tool of British colonial rule and was used to represent Britain’s mastery and hegemony over the colonized on a visual level.Under these two visual disciplines,the colonized are domesticated,exploited and commercialized.But viewing is a two-way interactive process,and just as important as native people’s viewing is the colonial subject’s resistance to visual discipline.On the one hand,in resisting the colonizer’s viewing with naked eye,the colonized often dissipate the power in viewing by creating viewing games and setting up visual barriers.On the other hand,the local people rebelled against the colonizers’ technological viewing by deconstructing the authenticity of photography and the direct acts of violence.The study argues that the visual discipline of the British colonizers linked to the Orientalist imagination.The colonizers justified their colonial movement by feminizing and commercializing India.Under the indomitable struggle,the Indian people appropriated the colonial discipline as a viewing behavior blurred by misinformation,misconceptions,and stereotypes,and finally defended the dominant position of the Indian nation.