“The Right to Look” by Nicholas Mirzoeff presents the reader with political and historical approaches to the subject of visual culture. Mirzoeff’s book is rich in examples of various artworks and historical events, illustrating and explaining the ideas of visuality and the right to look. The following essay will examine the core concepts in “The Right to Look” and compare them to the works of other visual culture experts.
There are two core concepts integrated into Mirzoeff’s theoretical framework. The central concept is visuality, which refers to the imaginary processing of reality and the visualizer’s place in it. Visuality is the result of the imagination of ideas rather than the perception of them. Thus, the ability to visualize gives the visualizer the authority. However, such authority is temporary, as reality changes every day, so visualization requires constant renewal. The examples of plantation owners, colonialists, and surveillance officers demonstrate how our society’s history was written from the perspective of visualizers, or authority figures. Visuality understands authority as the only reasonable and self-evident option in many historical and political contexts. In order to achieve a dominant status, visuality uses classification, separation, and the aesthetics of power, which altogether create a “complex of visuality”.
Another core concept is the right to look, which is the opposite of visuality. The concept hidden in the title of the book represents the autonomy from visuality and authority. Autonomy is the key element of democracy and the stance against classification, separation, and aestheticizing of power. The right to look should not be perceived as the act of seeing, but rather as a way to express friendship, love, and sympathy to others. Moreover, the autonomy created by the right to look serves for the political subjectivity, which should not be confused with individualism. Therefore, the right to look is a vital instrument for opposition to the authority and its unjust historical manifestations such as slavery, colonialism, and political domination.
It is worth analyzing the differences and similarities between the concepts offered by Nicholas Mirzoeff and other authors. One of the prominent works in aesthetic theory and visual culture studies is “The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation” by Jacques Ranciere, which contains the core concepts of emancipation vs. stultification and the circle of power vs. the circle of powerlessness. The work by Ranciere agrees with Mirzoeff’s political approach to visuality in terms of its domination over the students and the public in general. Like Nicholas Mirzoeff, Ranciere emphasizes the growing need for resistance against the visuality and suggests the techniques for counter-visibility, which would help break free from the authority. The techniques include education, democracy, and the aesthetics of the body. Another book covering the topic of visuality is “Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn” by Margaret Dikovitskaya. The work’s core concept is visuality, which was covered by Mirzoeff and Ranciere as well. However, Dikovitskaya examines visuality from the cultural point of view and defines it as an ability of vision in the digital domain, avoiding political or historical implications.
All in all, “The Right to Look” introduces the core concepts of visuality and authority in contrast with the right to look and autonomy. The concepts of Nicholas Mirzoeff are supported by Jacques Ranciere, who offers the political approach and possible solutions to the problem of visuality. Another view based on the cultural perspective might be observed in the study by Margaret Dikovitskaya, who approaches the same issue from a different angle. Thus, visuality and the right to look are important concepts in the field of visual culture studies.