“How to See the World”.
Author: Nicholas Mirzoeff
ISBN No: 978-0141977409
Pages: 312
Publisher: Pelican Books
Price: Rs 641/- (Paperback)
Visual culture permeates our everyday lives with very little resistance and much influence. The book offers interesting insights into reading the significance of images in the world today. The book is an introduction to an education in visual culture that can foster the creation of a society that can think critically about images it is exposed to everyday and thus, make informed choices. Drawing from theoretical perspectives of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and philosophies of thinkers like Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Lyotard, Griselda Pollock Judith Butler and Gilles Deleuze (to name a few), Mirzoeff explains the political and ethical connections with the images around us that shape your lives.
Rejecting the idea of visual perception as a kind of passive reception, he explains it as a kind of multifaceted performance where digital technology has radically been predetermining and shaping our understanding and interaction with the world. Citing staggering statistics, the author explains how the visual culture impacts political and social change.The book offers numerous insights into ‘reading’ the significance of images in the world today by presenting us with a history of art and by historically exploring new mediums of visual culture. Discussions of images range from battlefield maps, astronauts’ selfies in space, war images, protest marches, YouTube and film stills to explain how visual culture has transformed in to a practice called visual thinking.
The book starts with a discussion on selfies as a form of self portrait once available only to the elite sections of the society. Selfies have now a created a new global self’s conversation with itself on social media, selfies are thus used to depict oneself to others. The book also discusses the role of the brain in how we perceive and comprehend images, the book explains in detail the act of seeing as a system of sensory feedback from the whole body (and not just the eyes). A very thought provoking section discusses role of images in wars and the role that drones play in bringing about a new global visual culture. Tactical aggression of leaders like Alexander and Napoleon encouraged visualisation, that is, their leadership merged physical sight with knowledge and intuition to form a complex image of the battlefield that enabled them to conquer several lands. In the wars of twentieth century, visualizations became technological tools for providing aid to military services.
The First World War planes and long-range cameras and aerial photography provided images that could help fight battles. The author then dramatically explains how battlefields are minimized as visual culture progressed to unmanned drones and targeted executions that has created “zones of surveillance”. Thus, Mirzoeff explains that using airborne technology, visualizing depicts the world as a space for war. The discussions then move to development of moving screen images (cinema) and railway network as mediums that produced a new way of seeing the world. Though they appear to offer unlimited freedom they are carefully controlled and present filtered world views.
The key sites of these networks are mega cities/ global cities where one learns ‘to perceive’ as a skill for survival. He explains them as spaces of erasures and fakes. Simultaneously, the global cities are also sites of unrest and rebellion as the youth claim new ways of representing themselves and thereby transforming the politics of unrest and uprisings. The book also contains a detailed discussion on climate change and how the earth is converted into an enormous artefact of human world. Through these discussions the book aims to highlight how our capacity to perceive is an extension of how we perceive the world through data networks, camera clicks, moving images and selfies. It is something we engage with in an active way to create a change on a global scale.
The book ends with a detailed discussion on visual culture as activism. Discussions on images of political events of protest and role of street art in political protests the book explains how visual culture and visual thinking transforms the way in which activism is made effective. The book appears to present a powerful case against ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s claim of in-authenticity of sensuous images that has dominated philosophy and claims of knowledge. In book VII of the Republic, Socrates famously asks his interlocutors to picture people living in a cave, bound in chains and able to see only shadows/ images reflected on the wall by the light of the fire at the end of the cave.
The allegory basically presents us with two worlds, a real and a virtual world, both interwoven in complex and perverse ways. While Plato claims that the world of images is unreal, the book proclaims the contemporary techno transcendental world image of the world presented to us as perfectly real (though may not be actual). They are real engagements with the world as new forms of collective, collaborative, archiving, networking, researching and mapping visual tools provides new ways of understanding and changing the world. In fact it is the pre condition of our existence and understanding visual conversations as activism is fundamental to engaging with democracy.
