leonardo reviews - the right to look
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8/13/2019 Leonardo Reviews - The Right to Look
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The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality
Nicholas MirzoeffDuke University Press, Durham, NC, 2011408 pp., illus. 11 col., 64 b/w. Trade, $89.95; paper, $26.95ISBN: 978-0-8223-4895-5; ISBN: 978-0822349181.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
Nicholas Mirzoeff's new book is one of the few to take to its most radicalconsequences the new approach of visual culture defended by WJT Mitchelland all those who, to quote James Elkins, want to make visual studies "moredifficult". Visual culture is much more than just the study of images and theirincreasing presence and influence in modern society. If it does not add newquestions and new perspectives to the disciplines that have been studyingimages until now, visual culture is just an update of art history, and there willbe a real danger of missing what is really crucial in today's changes, namelythe opening towards the other (not as an object to be studied, but as a subjectthat is looking back) and to the political dimension of the image (and forMirzoeff the basic political implication of visual culture is precisely the issue ofthe right to look back). Defined along these lines, visual culture is no longernecessarily about images, but about ways of world making, and it is this shiftthat occupies a key position in Mirzoeff's thinking, which brilliantly continuesand broadens the author's already major contributions to the field.
The redefinition of visuality in The Right to Lookoffers a good example to thisparadigm shift. For Mirzoeff, the notion of visuality actually refers to a set ofmechanisms that order and organize the world, and by doing so naturalize theunderlying power structures that are replicated and implemented by these(violent) transformations of the real (the author speaks illuminatingly ofvisuality in terms of the Derridean supplement: it is what makes authorityvisible, visuality is the expression of the self-authorizing tendencies ofhegemonic thinking). More specifically, he connects visuality with threecomplexes that have, historically speaking, established the Westerndomination of the word : first the plantation slavery (1660-1860), as a way ofreordering the post-colonial reality through management techniques of
"visualized surveillance"; second imperialism (1860-1945), as a new system ofgovernance of the overseas empire, mainly through the action of "great men"(Mirzoeff focuses more specifically on the role of the missionaries, but moregenerally he has in mind the impact of the notion of "hero" as theorized byCarlyle); third the military-industrial complex (1945-present), which isreinterpreted in terms of panoptic visuality (yet no longer the Benthamianversion in which the guard wants to be seen by all those already in prison andwhom he does not necessarily observe himself, but tries to see all possibleinsurgents without being seen by them). Countervisuality, then, is not just adifferent way of seeing or a different way of looking at images, but the tacticsto dismantle the visual strategies of the hegemonic system. It is, in otherwords, "the attempt to reconfigure visuality as a whole" (p. 24) and thus "theright to look", which goes even further than just the right to look back, althoughlooking back is the first step towards countervisuality.
If, as Mirzoeff convincingly argues, the right to look is, finally, the right to the
real (for visuality is not only a point of view on reality, but a reshaping of it),
one can understand why his approach of countervisuality, although deeplyrooted in visual analysis and the political rereading of visual culture, is notabout images in the first place, but about political struggle against hegemonyas instrumentalized in the three visual complexes that he distinguishes. In allcases, the countervisuality addressed by Mirzoeff is linked with the Gramsciannotion of the "south," both as the locus and as the issue (and to a certainextent also the metaphor) of counterhegemony.
The results of this reorientation are extremely challenging, and it does notseem an exaggeration to claim that visual studies will no longer be the samebefore and after this book. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude thatvisual studies should abandon the analysis and interpretation of material visualdocuments, for this is certainly not what Mirzoeff is promoting. What changesis the perspective as well as the specific material under scrutiny. From thatpoint of view as well, The Right to Lookis highly innovative, as can be inferredimmediately from the table of its figures and plates. Mirzoeff is interested in thebattle plan of Waterloo, powerpoint illustrations used by the military to frame
the "legitimacy" of their operations, the schematic representation of sugar caneproduction in handbooks on tropical agriculture, which one does not reallyexpect in the traditional visual culture studies, but also on Czanne's paintingof the Negro Scipio, ball scenes by Camille Pissarro or Degas' "Interior of acottons buyer's office in New Orleans", all works by major artists which areoften overlooked by specialists in their respective fields. Mirzoeff's work does itall: offering new perspectives, blurring the boundaries between disciplines,
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