class: title, smokescreen, shelf, no-footer # Visualization, Countervisuality, <br />& Colonialism ### <br /> September 26, 2022 --- class: 2-col, img-right-full, fit-h1 # Today's Theorist: [Nicholas (Nick) Mirzoeff](http://nicholasmirzoeff.com/)  * Visual culture theorist and a Professor in the department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University. * Interested in technologies and techniques of visuality, decolonial thought, and the politics of vision. * Author of _How to See the World_ and _An Introduction to Visual Culture_, two great primers on the field of visual culture/visual studies. --- # Visualization > "This practice must be __imaginary__, rather than perceptual [ ... ] the ability to assemble a visualization manifests from the __authority of the visualizer__ [ ... ] Visuality supplemented the violence of authority and its __separations__ [ ... ] this process is not composed simply of visual perceptions in the physical sense, but is formed by _a set of relations combining information, imagination, and insight into a rendition of physical and psychic space_." > — Mirzoeff, pp. 2-3 ??? It's world-building . . . --- class: compact, col-2 # Visualization / Visuality A claim on the authority to look/see and determine the visible and, consequently, what is real. * imaginary and not necessarily perceptual * authority over a field too complex and extensive for one person to physically apprehend * mental / internalized, as well as material * A complex of "techniques" that work together * Maps, diagrams, architectures, spatial divisions, technologies, media, images. * Writing a version of history or "the real" <br /><caption><small>Redaction is a technique of visuality where an authority decides what can be seen in public documents.</small></caption> --- class: center <br /><caption><small>Visualizing the Battlefield: Historical map of the Battle of Waterloo, June 18, 1815</small></caption> ??? Information fed by low-ranking soldiers --- class: center <br /><caption><small>Battle Plan Visualization continues: RAF Fighter Command Operations, WWII ( 1941-45) at the RAF Uxbridge Operations Room, UK. Visualizing by bringing all of the information to the commander, symbolically representing the battle space in real time </small></caption> --- class: center <br /><caption><small>Bird's Eye View of Manhattan & New York City in 1873. (The Brooklyn Bridge is obviously imaginary as the bridge would not be completed for another 10 years.) The image is an artificial rendering, essentially a map, and also shows all of the things the territory is DOING: shipping, industry, commerce, etc.</small></caption> --- For Mirzoeff, modern visuality has its roots in (is constituted in and by) _colonialism_. These practices shift historically but survive into present in different forms and keep their political valence. Authority is maintained through: * Classification * Separation * Normalization / Naturalization --- class: roomy, fit-h1 # Three Major Historical "Complexes" of Visuality * Plantation Complex * Imperial Complex * Military-Industrial Complex ??? Plantation -- classification: human and slave (slave as species other than/less than human, as property); separation of free vs enslaved spaces; naturalization (quote on page # 11: Plantation owner John Hammond: "You will say that man cannot hold property in man. The answer is that he can and actually does around the world over, in a variety of forms, and has always done so." (e.g. it's the natural order of things) -- the countervisuality of antislavery Imperial: classification: cultured vs savage; separation; naturalization . . . Military-Industrial -- classification is never ending and requires vigilance: insurgent vs counter insurgent . . . everywhere, including at home --- class: center, compact # Plantation Visuality <br /><caption><small>"Indigo Terie," by Jean-Baptiste du Tertre (1667). Note the clear labeling and division of space, with the overseer in the center with a surveillant view (oversight) of the plantation.</small></caption> --- class: center, col-2 # Imperial Visuality <br /><caption><small>Theodore de Bry, "Christopher Columbus arrives in America, 1594"</small></caption> <br /><caption><small>Theodore de Bry, "Bird’s-eye view of a native American village (Secoton), 1590"</small></caption> ??? division of culture / primitive; christian missionaries as foot soldiers; --- class: center # Military-Industrial Visuality <br /><caption><small>Image: Declassified aerial photographs from the Second Iraq war showing what US intelligence interpreted as evidence of the development of chemical weapons.</small></caption> Aerial photography — the world seen from above — is both a political viewpoint and a set of strategic interpretations. --- class: compact # Post-Panoptic Visuality   <span class="w-50pct">The Mobile Drone Command Post. A combination of visual technologies an other information, often information computed algorithmically based on massive data-surveillance; decision-making power is partially removed to machines; the seeing/being seen dyad is completely asymmetrical with remote viewing/sensing and targets often not being allowed to know about the information used to target them.</span> ??? always trying to parse insurgent from civilian population, in order to target counter-insurgent strategies of control. --- class: roomy > **Countervisuality**, then, is not just a different way of seeing or a different way of looking at images but _the tactics to dismantle the visual strategies of the hegemonic system._ It is, in other words, "the attempt to reconfigure visuality as a whole" (p. 24) and thus "the right to look," which goes even further than just the right to look back, although looking back is the first step towards countervisuality. > Jan Baetens [reviewing Mirzoeff, in _Leonardo_, 2013](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493132) --- class: fit-h1, compact # Countervisuality → a Claim for the "Right to Look" > It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other, or it fails. (Mirzoeff, 1) * Autonomy from authority, "from below" * Egalitarian, symmetrical * A "right to the real," to determine for oneself what _is_, alongside others, in common with others * Not just in the future, but in the present alongside practices of countervisuality throughout history: anticolonial, abolitionist, and antifascist politics & movements (23) * Not merely "opposed" to practices of visualization but instead "the attempt to reconfigure visuality as a whole," a "claim for the right to look," and "a dispute over what is visible." (24) --- # Discussion: tactics of countervisuality today? Mirzoeff discusses several historic forms of countervisuality, from representations of abolitionist heroes, to the 19th century realist paintings of peasant and working-class life, to photographic documentation of the conditions of poverty. In his words, "countervisuality proper is a claim for the right to look," which is also always a claim over the right to determine and make visible what is real, as well as a claim about history and what versions of history are valid. The right to look is a resistance to an authority that says _"this is what happened,"_ _"this is all there is,"_ or _"there is nothing to see here."_ What forms of countervisuality or claims for the right to look do you see at work in the world today, or in the recent past? --- # For Wednesday Read: * _Practices of Looking_, Chapter 3 (pp. 113 – 138)