Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 14 Number 2, August 2013

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Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2011, 385 Pages, ISBN 978-0-8223-4895-5 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4918-1 (pbk.), $89.95 (cloth), $26.95 (pbk.)

 

Reviewed by 

 

Juneko J. Robinson

State University of New York at Buffalo

 

One of the most creative, interesting, and certainly ambitious books I have read in a long time is Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Taking an multidisciplinary approach, Mirzoeff, a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, utilizes sources taken from history, journalism, the writings of Christian missionaries, legislative history, fine art, and fictional and documentary films such as Pan’s Labyrinth and The Battle of Algiers to flesh out his theory of visuality. In doing so, he draws upon the works of Foucault, Derrida, Rancière, W.E.B. DuBois, Lacan, Deleuze, Lévi-Strauss, Fritz Fanon, and William Blake, as well as the work of activists such as Sojourner Truth, to level a critique of imperialist world views as promulgated by the likes of Thomas Carlyle, British missionary Robert Henry Codrington, and proponents of the Bush-Rumsfeld doctrine. Over the course of the book, readers will find themselves on a whirlwind tour of Saint-Domingue/Haiti, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Jamaica, Algeria, and Iraq, to name a few of the geographic locations covered. The effect is a sobering, wide-ranging survey of the rise of the plantation economy, Caribbean slave revolts, the colonization of New Zealand, the French Revolution, European fascism, the Algerian War, Hurricane Katrina, Gulf War II, and the current global war on terror.  Mirzoeff focuses on the ways of seeing that have made all of these events possible.

 

Although it takes a bit of conceptual unpacking, “visuality” might best be described as a set of social engineering methodologies that, together, control the way reality itself is apprehended. According to Mirzoeff, these methods are deployed in such a manner that 1) the fact of control is rendered invisible, 2) the methodologies are seen as innovative, desirable, and emblematic of great leadership, and 3) the ways of seeing are deemed both proper and objectively true, as if occurring without the guiding hand of particular human interests.  As such, “visuality is not the visible,” nor is it a newly spawned neologism.[1] It is, rather, an early nineteenth century concept that links heroic leadership and the legitimization of authority with the ability to visualize (and, by implication, control) the trajectory of history.  

 

Historically, the methods used to promote visuality have been key to legitimizing western hegemony. “An empire requires…an order of things,” according to Michel Foucault.[2] Hence, visuality is about the particular means deployed by the state and its agents throughout western history in order to gain military, economic, and political control through the monopolization of the exclusive claim to look. For these reasons, Mirzoeff focuses his attention on modern western expansionism because this is where imperialist tendencies have linked most successfully with capitalism. In doing so, Mirzoeff attempts to render visible the prevailing framework that shapes our “ways of seeing;” processes that usually remain hidden and thus self-perpetuating.

 

Characterizing the entire history of modernity as an on-going contest between the forces of race-based, hegemonic, imperialist capitalism, and those who would resist it, Mirzoeff reconstructs a genealogy of visuality and the various counter-movements it has spawned by identifying three methods by which it came to control our ways of seeing. First, visuality names, categorizes, and defines the objects and people within its ambit. Second, visuality “separates groups of people so classified as a means of social organization.”[3] And, third, visuality makes its distinctive form of classification seem right and, hence, aesthetically correct and desirable. Although each of these methods have manifested themselves in slightly different ways at various times in history, all have formed a crucial part of western hegemony.

 

Mirzoeff identifies three decisive periods in history in which visuality was deployed in such a systematic and all-encompassing manner that it effectively formed new life-worlds. For Mirzoeff, these three historically decisive forms of visuality or “complexes” were the plantation complex, the imperial complex, and the military industrial complex. Each encompassed both the production of certain social organizations and processes and the resulting psychic economy of those individuals who live within it. The visualization of these new life worlds thus allowed them to pass from the planning stage to their full-fledged realization as actual worlds inhabited by real flesh and blood individuals caught up in the orchestrated march of history.

 

The plantation complex, for example, which lasted from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, was made possible by visualized techniques that were used to order reality and justify the enslavement of Africans around the world. These “techniques of oversight” consisted in the invention of mapping systems, the creation of a science of natural history, which centered on observation, and the establishment of a legal system, which formalized the new race relations made possible by the other two systems. Advancements in cartography allowed for what Mirzoeff refers to as “visualized domination” and, hence, new techniques of governance, as well as the consolidation of the nation-state, which itself is based on certain understandings about the division of property. As Mirzoeff points out, the significance of the map stems from its use as a medium of communication, “one that makes claims about the understanding of exterior reality.”[4] With the formal adoption of mapping as a technique of seeing, the “actual work of the overseer was now complemented by this abstract representation of land as colonial plantation within a functioning system of imperial power.”[5] Maps thus not only created a legal account of the ownership of land, they served as a functional guide for the overseer as to where the boundaries of his authority lay.[6] In turn, this system of visualized surveillance allowed the sovereign to govern far-flung plantations in a more efficient fashion. The overseer, then, not only became the embodiment of the sovereign within the plantation economy but, in doing so, claimed the exclusive right to see.[7]

 

This new method of mobilizing visual representation as a form of domination was further reinforced by the newly emerging science of natural history, which introduced new techniques for seeing  the “natural” order of things. Scientific discoveries allowed race to become visualized in terms of a binary (and, hence,  hierarchical) distinction made between black and white. In turn, biblical parables, such as Ham looking at Noah’s nakedness in The Book of Genesis, which came to be interpreted as the Biblical reason behind the “blackness” of Africans, were then used to justify the shift towards the use of the  “scientific” hierarchy of the races.  Finally, laws were promulgated codifying the division of property, made possible by mapping, as well as the racial hierarchy “discovered” in natural science. These laws allowed for the separation of the races, which was underscored by their former relationship to property. On its face, the explicit purpose of the Barbadian slave code passed in 1661, which was highly influential throughout the Anglophone Atlantic world, was the “better ordering and governing of Negroes,” thereby justifying their being treated as personal property.[8] Similarly, a Jamaican assembly act of 1681 permitted any person or persons to survey, divide land, and draw up maps, but “person” was defined as “free, white settlers.” Slaves, on the other hand, being the property of the sovereign, enjoyed no such rights to see. Hence, any claim on the part of slaves to re-imagine their relationship to the land represented a challenge to these official ways of seeing, thus constituting a challenge to the sovereignty and its landowning, land-governing agents.

 

Although Mirzoeff characterizes all forms of visuality as imperialist, the emergence of eighteenth century imperialism and the present-day military-industrial complex represent a kind of intensification of the visualization techniques first put into place with the plantation economy. With the rise of imperialism, the “hero with a vision,” touted by Thomas Carlyle came to be seen as embodying the authority imparted by mana, a modern theory of mystical power first articulated by the British missionary Robert Henry Codrington as part of a newly devised approach to missionary practices in New Zealand.[9] Although a gross mischaracterization of the Melanesian cultural understanding of mana, Codrington’s theory provided the imperial elite with a mythical lineage, thereby tying them to the elite of past civilizations. “In the imperial worldview, there was now an ethnographic hierarchy of time in which people, living and dead, were allotted places on the ladder of civilization,” writes Mirzoeff.[10] When combined with the newly emerging scientific fields of statistics and eugenics, the heroes of empire became the standard deviation from the statistical norm of dark-skinned cultural “backwardness.” Again, heroism came to be seen as “a gradually accumulating form of Truth,” as verified by the mutually-reinforcing fields of religion, science, history, and law. Unfortunately, although the end of the Cold War might have been expected to usher in a new era of postvisuality, the global Revolution in Military Affairs has continued the legacy of imperial visuality through its use of digital technology in its never-ending war against global insurgency.

 

Because each of these complexes is about who has the right to produce the means of seeing and hence determine the nature of reality, who is excluded from “vision-making,” and who dares to challenge the official world view, are thus inherently political issues. “The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity,” writes Mirzoeff.[11] “It means requiring the recognition of the other in order to have a place from which to claim rights and to determine what is right.”[12] Indeed, from its inception, various peoples, usually those excluded from or victimized by official ways of seeing, have sought to challenge visuality through various tactics, which Mirzoeff refers to collectively as “countervisuality” and he recounts their struggles, which are far too numerous for me to discuss here.

 

Of course, my account is rather simplified and barely does Mirzoeff’s argument justice. Within each complex, he offers a tremendous—even dizzying—array of historical information. His style is dense, but enjoyable. The numerous charts and illustrations provided throughout the book—Mirzoeff’s own, as well as those taken from the history of fine art, cartography, photojournalism, film stills, and other popular media—are both useful and enlightening. I have one criticism: although he offers a cogent argument, it is a rather complex one and, unfortunately, his writing style can be a bit convoluted. It takes a bit of effort on the part of the reader to glean exactly how his premises are connected to his conclusions. As a philosopher, I both want and expect a much clearer and tighter argument structure—particularly when the arguments are as intricate as these are. But, having said that, Mirzoeff’s work must be applauded for its sheer boldness. It is a work that is both wide-ranging and deep, and, as such, it is highly satisfying, his historical examples rich and fascinating, his examples both revelatory and trenchant.

 

“These modes of visuality are psychic events that nonetheless have material effects,” writes Mirzoeff[13]  and, ultimately, it is his hope that his works on countervisuality, will allow us to reclaim our autonomy and political subjectivity by confronting those agents of the state who would say to us, “Move on, there’s nothing to see here.”[14] Although The Right to Look is filled with a panoply of oft-times disturbing historical imagery, Mirzoeff has also provided us with a myriad of ways in which people have sought to counter visuality. In doing so, he has provided an intriguing blueprint of hope to those seeking to “democratize democracy,”[15] as well as a fascinating study for those with an interest in the power of aesthetics and rhetoric, those who are concerned about the discourse of war and capitalism, American hegemony, and the theory of epistemological justification. I cannot recommend this book enough.

 

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