Milgram's Experiment: The Memory Experiment

In Stanley Milgram's experiment, The Memory Project- effect on punishment on learning, the concept of staging in terms of what is real and not real in relation to the photographs objects and subjects, which is conveyed through the facilitator and the learner parallels Sontag’s concept of framing and representation In Plato’s Cave, and Barthes idea of posing and theater in Camera Lucida. Sontag and Barthes’s understandings of photography’s “reality” intersect in that their notion of the object in photography being real and not real. Thus it is interesting to note the relationship between Milgram with Barthes and Sontag in terms of their ideas on photography and his experiment. The facilitator and the learner staging of the experiment distance
In the scene from 16:30 to 18:20 the experiment was explained to demonstrate the subject and object relationship. The learner was discovered to be an accomplice of the facilitator and was following the instructions of the facilitator in order to accurately assess the teacher. In explaining this, the viewer comes to the realization that the subject is changing but the object is not. The subject is the teacher and the object being the shock machine, the facilitator or the learner. A shock machine is an actual object thus, the idea that two people, the facilitator and the learner, being identified as an object relates to Barthes idea of turning a subject into an object. Barthes however, recognizes the idea of turning a subject into an object stating, “do not dispose of one of myself, they turn me ferociously into an object” (Barthes 14). Turning a person or the subject into an object removes your realness from the picture. The idea that a photograph can turn the subject of a picture into an object after the picture is taken and upon viewing the picture is puzzling. Conversely, Sontag instills the idea that “with still photographs, the image is also an object… to photograph is to appropriate the things photographed” (Sontag 3-4). It is compelling to compare both Barthes and Sontag concepts of reality in terms of the subject and object relationship. The Milgram experiment pertains to the photography aspect of the subject-object relationship by relating to the reality of what when the subject is turned into an object like in the experiment when the subject of the experiment, the teacher, is turned into an object due to the barrier created by the person's unknowingness. The preconceived