Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2011, 408 pages, $26.95 paper, ISBN 9780822349181.

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In an era when neoliberal universities are restricting our research imaginaries into short term metrics (e.g. citations, impact factors, league tables), it is heartening to read such a bold and ambitious book. While there are many excellent things about The Right To Look, the most impressive is its refusal to contain its intellectual horizon to one case study, one historical era, or one theorist. The breadth of the book – its insistence on linking multiple historical and contemporary examples of visuality’s power – is what makes it so important, and indeed, so necessary in an era when academic freedoms and research horizons are under assault.

For those of us working on the multiple intersections of visuality, power, and space, Nicholas Mirzoeff is a towering figure. His Visual Culture Reader (2002) and Introduction to Visual Culture (2009) are staples for teaching, especially when trying to convince sceptical students that the visual field is a legitimate terrain of academic inquiry. But these texts are also useful touchstones for scholars pursuing more specific interrogations of visuality: they helpfully remind us that visuality has a long history, a sophisticated theoretical apparatus, and a central concern with power.  Aside from those wider assessments of visual culture, Mirzoeff developed his own intellectual concerns in Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2004) which dissected the emerging relationship between war, imagery, and power. Certainly The Right To Look can be understood as an extension of this more specific research agenda, but it is much more than this. Mirzoeff’s book is a thumping call to action for visual studies scholars: it asks us to be both rigorous and wide-ranging in our research, careful about how we link often disparate historical events, vigilant about tracking theoretical arguments through empirical situations, and absolutely up front about the political stakes inherent in visuality. In this sense, W.J.T. Mitchell is right to say on its back cover that this book “sets a very high standard for this emergent discipline”.

The Right to Look addresses a central logic between visuality that “sutures authority to power and renders this association ‘natural’” (Mirzoeff, 2011: 6), and countervisuality, or the “right to look”, which consistently disturbs, unworks, and resists the reification of visuality and its dissemination through colonial and postcolonial contexts. Mirzoeff illustrates the emergence and development of this logic through three main complexes: the plantation (1660-1860), the imperial (1860-1945), and the military-industrial (1945-present). In each of these eras, he goes to great lengths to show the pernicious and violent effects of visual authority as practiced on the bodies of slaves, the disenfranchised, and those ‘vernacular’ lives across the Global South. But more importantly, he goes to even greater lengths to show how each enactment of visual authority was met with an array of counter-conducts, dissenting performances, and alternative ways of seeing. This focus on resistance is important because it forces visual culture scholars to engage directly with the challenges posed by postcolonialism. It is not enough to simply show how mechanisms of visual order and control do damage to a variety of Others – one must also pay careful attention to how such mechanisms were received, negotiated, and refracted by the subjects they were visited upon. In framing the visual within a wider postcolonial ethos, Mirzoeff succeeds in creating a space in which the voices, movements, visions, trajectories, and imaginaries of Others can be articulated.

One of the most compelling sections of the book that amplifies Mirzoeff’s connection between the visual and postcolonial is his reading of the French Revolution against the anti-slavery revolutions in the Caribbean. Here, one gets a palpable sense of just how specific the ‘Rights of Man’ were to Europe, and how such rights were conceived on the back of slave labour in the colonies. In his accounts of countervisiual scenarios, Mirzoeff pays particular attention to the diverse heroes that emerged (e.g. François Makandal, Toussaint Loverture, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon) and charts their positions, successes, and failures with respect to anti-slavery movements and emancipation. (‘Heroes’, here, is a slight misnomer, as these figures are analysed through their flaws, ambiguities, and contradictions). While he deploys maps and other visual aids to illustrate the different historical complexes of visuality and power, it is his critical readings of familiar and often canonical visual works that do so much to insist on the postcolonial in both its presence and its absence. In this sense, he does not rehearse the conventional readings of painters like Manet, Cezanne, Pissaro, and Degas, but rather politically situates them with respect to relevant struggles against colonialism, slavery, fascism, and Empire. Similarly, instead of adding another layer to Gillo Pontecorvo’s much analysed Battle of Algiers (1966), his genealogical ethos leads him to juxtapose it against a range of revolutionary, resistive, and dissenting visual work including René Vautier’s J’ai huit ans (1961) and Michael Hanecke’s film Caché (2005). The book closes with a provocative turn to the digital and visual technologies currently shaping the deployment of Western forces in Afghanistan. While this section follows most directly from Watching Babylon, it highlights an important institutional element by looking at how military strategies (e.g. the RMA) are using technology to further intensify and distribute visuality’s power.

While I appreciate the richness of this book and value the high standard it sets, I want to draw out two areas where I think more critical conversations need to occur.  Firstly, given the genealogical ethos of the book, the logic of visualty / countervisuality makes sense in terms of drawing out those voices, stories, and experiences that have been silenced by the historical matrices of visuality, power, and space. However, at times that logic becomes too reductive in that it foregrounds a mode of antagonism at the expense of more nuanced, complex, and ambivalent negotiation. At times, the book allows readers to get locked into a familiar relational binary which prevents us from engaging with the political as a realm of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and pluralism. While Mirzoeff does use the term entanglement, I wondered what would happen if his central logic of visuality / countervisuality had been framed more overtly through terms such as assemblage, network, imbrication, complexity, and mangle.

Secondly, the book’s title does it a slight disservice in that it suggests Mirzoeff is dealing primarily with the visual, when his analysis is patently dealing with much more than this. Such a mismatch points to the larger problem of ocularcentrism which dogs the discipline of visual studies. Mirzoeff is keenly aware that privileging the visual is problematic, and indeed, the book mobilizes Rancière’s ideas about the partition of the sensible to make this point. However, despite the rich empirical examples and the effort to show how the visuality / countervisuality logic involves more than simply vision, the book still privileges seeing as the primary ordering mechanism of space, subjects, histories, and life-worlds. What that produces is a concomitant privileging of the human as the primary figure who sees; in other words, a lingering ocularcentrism produces a form of anthropocentrism. If we restrict our understanding of visuality to human figures who see and possess agency, we fail to understand the multiple ways in which both capacities are distributed across subjects, objects, and spaces. Certainly the book addresses the conundrum of ocularcentrism, but I wanted to push that quandary further. What would happen if this rich account of visuality and postcoloniality was placed in conversation with insights from New Materialism and Post-Humanism? What if some of the objects so keenly analysed in the book – the paintings, the maps, the documents, the drones – possessed agency in a way that generated a more radically disruptive return gaze? 

References

Hanecke M (dir) (2005) Caché. Sony Pictures Classics.

Mirzoeff N (ed) (2002) Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge.

Mirzoeff N (2004) Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture. New York: Routledge.

Mirzoeff N (2009) Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Routledge.

Pontecorvo G (1966) Battle of Algiers. Criterion.

Vautier R (1961) J’ai huit ans. Les Films Grain de Sable.