Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World

How to See the World is an introduction to the new academic discipline of the study of visual culture. Visual artefacts in the form of fine and decorative arts have been studied in universities for about a century, of course, and before that in salons and art academies. What makes 'visual culture' as a field a new departure is its focus on mass and popular imagery, which now has an unimaginable range and volume in the age of digital media. How to See the World takes us through some of the perspectives this new analysis can take. 'How to See Yourself' takes us fairly speedily from classical portraiture to modern artists such as Cindy Sherman and the ubiquitous selfie. The emphasis here is on how the self is radically unstable, and a matter of performance rather than essence, in tension with traditional social categories. ''How We think about Seeing' is an update on brain science and what it tells us about perception and processing of visual information; we see with our bodies, not simply the retina. Further chapters look at the story of mapping for military purposes from the nineteenth century to the contemporary drone; early film and its conjunction with industrialisation and the train; the rise of the modern megacity; the changing climate; and mass political protest. All of these areas of life have generated, exploited and explored the expressive and interpretive capacities of visual culture. To orient oneself in the modern world, we need to develop skills in reading images from street art to museum-housed installations to instagram snaps and video clips circulated as memes. To be active participants in our own culture, we need to be adept at using these visual codes ourselves.

I had some problems with this book, not least in finding some definition for the discipline itself. It seems to draw on many other fields: the ideas on the performative self, for example, are familiar from feminism and gender studies; the psychology of perception is central to Gombrich's Art and Illusion; and the survey of the giant city draws heavily on authors like Mike Davis.  Mirzoeff acknowledges a debt to the work of John Berger, itself drawing on Walter Benjamin. Sometimes the book felt like familiar ingredients given a slightly new twist rather than an exciting new departure. Visual culture is so vast that it surely takes in just about anything, from a school whiteboard to a weekend watercolour. Unsurprisingly, the book as a whole felt like a disparate gathering of thoughts on subjects the author is interested in (and on which he is clearly very well informed). It's not always easy to find a thread running through a chapter; rather, one item seems to auto-suggest another. 'Divided Cities', for example, uses this suggestive heading to hurtle us through Berlin, the American South, South African apartheid and Israel-Palestine in a few pages, without time to look in any detail at any of these scenarios. In these stretches, it reads as a sequence of riffs rather than an over-arching composition.


Despite these reservations - perhaps I was looking for a more traditional thesis-style book - I must admit found this a riveting read. Mirzoeff has an immediately engaging style, unencumbered by theoretical jargon. Every page offers some fascinating nugget of information, such as the surprising but convincing link between Impressionism and early industrial smog. He conveys a passionate curiosity and is an example of an academic for whom the wall between academic observation and practical action is, like other walls mentioned here, one to be dismantled. He is clearly fascinated and inspired by social protest movements, from the Arab Spring to Occupy, and sees in the visual traces such actions produce a hope for the representation of popular interests in a world in which the 99% are generally excluded by corporate media. Visual Culture is for Mirzoeff something we should do, not simply study. Only through imagining the effects of climate change can we hope to address it; and this imagining necessarily takes the form of the actual making of images. The record of mass protest in Egypt stands as an example of visual artefacts which the regime cannot erase. The commitment to action in the book makes it a refreshing change from the traditional world of formal art criticism, often  confined to a reflective discourse within the space of the museum. If the structure of the book doesn't fit the usual academic conventions, perhaps that is part of the point. 'Once we have learned how to see the world,' he concludes, 'we have taken only one of the required steps. the point is to change it.'

The Renaissance: History of an Idea

'The Renaissance' is one of the most frequently used terms in cultural history, but the idea itself has been subject to much examination and discussion. Here is a summary of some of the key points in the debate.

The Idea of Renaissance

Claims that the fourteenth century witnessed some kind of cultural rebirth in Europe go back to the period itself. The Italian poet Petrarch (1307-74) saw the rinascimento as the revival of the values of the classical world, after the barbarian invasion of Rome and the ensuing chaos of the Dark Ages. Petrarch lived in what has been called ‘the calamitous fourteenth century’ - calamities which included, among other things, the Hundred Years War, the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of the papacy in Avignon, and the horrors of the Black Death. Contrasting the glories of ancient Rome with this miserable present, Petrarch divided history into two periods, historiae antiquae, which ended with the ending of the Roman Republic, and historiae novae, from the Roman Imperial period onwards. This was an unorthodox view, as it placed pagans in the period of light and Christians in the darkness. Petrarch yearned for a return to the spirit and letters of ancient Rome. Addressing his own poem Africa (composed 1338) he says:

For you, if you should long outlive me, as my soul hopes and wishes, there is perhaps a better age in store; this slumber of forgetfulness will not last forever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past. (Africa, IX, 453-7)

The achievement of the Florentines in restoring the light was saluted by the (Florentine) humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433-99):

If we are to call any age golden, it is beyond doubt that age which brings forth golden talents in different places. That such is true of this our age [one] will hardly doubt. For this century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music ...

In his Lives of the Artists (1550), the artist and writer Vasari presented the history of northern Italian art as an upward journey, leading away from the stylized forms of the Middle Ages to the magnificent realistic art of Michelangelo. This journey was led by a series of heroic artists of genius. Through them, as Vasari tells the story, the glories of the ancient world had been reborn.  Such comments are not attempts at objective history. They appear in writings such as letters or manifestos, where poets promote their activities and seek patrons. Vasari’s Lives is also a work of propaganda: it was dedicated to the Grand Duke of Tuscany and thus naturally extols the greatness of that region.

Effusions of enthusiasm such as these are not the same as claims that the age as a whole can be characterised as a rebirth, or re-naissance of ancient thought. The use of the word ‘Renaissance’ as a serious historical term really starts in the nineteenth century. The French historian Michelet famously called the Renaissance a time of ‘the discovery of the world and the discovery of man’. In this period, Michelet points out, man looked outwards at the world around him: he explored in ships, investigated with science, and celebrated natural objects in art. At the same time, people looked inwards at themselves: in the plays of Shakespeare, or the essays of Montaigne, we see an unprecedented representation and examination of individual human consciousness. This thesis was further developed by the Swiss historian Burckhardt in his massively influential The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). For Burckhardt, the Renaissance was the birth of the modern age: medieval certainties about man, the world and God faded away, and the modern individual emerged – equipped to enquire and reason, to trade and to express himself through his behaviour and creative work.

            How convincing are these various claims? They have certainly been influential. Petrarch’s picture of a noble classical age, lost in the ‘Middle Ages’ and revived in the rinascimento has ingrained itself in the Western sense of history. Yet there is much to be said against it. Above all, it discounts the cultural achievements of the so-called ‘Middle Ages’. Latin culture could hardly be reborn in Petrarch’s time, since it had never died: Europe is built on the ruins of Rome, and throughout the Middle Ages we see Roman influence: in language, education, customs and the law. At certain points, such as the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ of the ninth century and the ‘twelfth century Renaissance’ involving scholars like John of Salisbury, classical writings had been intensively studied: indeed, the manuscripts that Petrarch and others were ‘discovering’ were earlier medieval copies, largely owing to scribal activity under Charlemagne. The image of a brilliant rebirth, so persuasively painted by Petrarch and his followers, may be more self-advertisement than historical fact.

            The theses of Michelet and Burckhardt have also been disputed by later writers. Was the Renaissance really the birth of modernity? Medieval practices and beliefs did not disappear but continued throughout the Renaissance period. As for the examination and celebration of the natural world, we can see these clearly in the work of a medieval scholar like Roger Bacon and the poetry of St Francis. Seen in this light, the Renaissance could be seen as a development of the medieval world rather than a departure from it. Perhaps the single greatest invention of the Renaissance - printing - came from the medieval guild system. Equally, Renaissance characteristics can be found in cultural achievements of the eighteenth century and even into the present. At both ends, the chronology is highly problematic.

            In short, while Michelet and Burckhardt draw our attention to important phenomena of the period, they also select out a great deal. Moreover, their books are based on a theory of history that is also controversial: this is the idea - inspired by the German philosopher Hegel - that an age has a Zeitgeist (Spirit of the Age) - an underlying essence or character which unifies its various parts. Moreover, in the Hegelian view, history is teleological: that is to say, it is moving in a certain meaningful direction. This assumption underlies the nineteenth-century historians’ emphasis on the Renaissance as a progression from past to present. This notion, too, which links with the outlook of Vasari and others, is contentious.

For these reasons, some historians and critics have avoided the term ‘Renaissance’, and preferred to employ the label ‘Early Modern’ for broadly the same period. A book like this one could also be called ‘English Reformation Literature’, since the ideas of Reformation theology had at least as much impact on the English in these centuries as the models of classical culture - and possibly more. Nevertheless, the Renaissance is a convenient term for denoting a certain period, and we can use it without committing ourselves to the thesis elaborated by Burckhardt and other historians. A period term may be used for practical convenience; indeed without them, study becomes next to impossible.

            The foregoing discussion is not intended to imply that the writers discussed may be in any way dismissed. Vasari’s Lives is one of the great books of the West. Burckhardt’s book, the result of five tears’ exhaustive travel, reading and note-taking, is still indispensable for the serious student of the Renaissance, precisely because of the discussion it has provoked. And while it has been seriously revised in the light of later scholarship, it has not been comprehensively demolished. Some contemporary writers on the Renaissance still, with various important qualifications, see the period as representing a profoundly significant shift in Western man’s modes of thinking and living. The debate on what we mean by ‘The Renaissance’ is still ongoing.

Further Reading

A classic defence of the label ‘Renaissance’ as applied to Italian art is: Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (London: Paladin, 1970), ch. 1 ‘Renaissance – Self-Definition or Self-Deception?’, 1-35.

See also the first two essays in A G Dickens and others, Background to the English Renaissance. Introductory Lectures (London: Gray-Mills, 1974): E H Gombrich, ‘The Renaissance – Period or Movement?’, 9-30; J R Hale, ‘The Renaissance Label’, 31-42.

A modern summary of the debate is given by Margaret L King, The Renaissance in Europe (London: Laurence King, 2003), ‘Introduction: The Idea of the Renaissance’, viii-xv.

'The Renaissance' on In Our Time: excellent discussion by Francis Ames-Lewis, Peter Burke and Evelyn Welch.

Renaissance Political Philosophy

Renaissance art and literature often shows a deep interest in politics, the arrangement of human society. Many of Shakespeare's plays, for example, investigate ways of managing and mismanaging states, and the consequences of decisions made at the top. This is most obviously the case with the History Plays, but it is also at the centre of the tragedies (King Lear begins with the disastrously bad idea of fragmenting a state) and even a romance like The Tempest, where the island setting works as a commentary on the ordering of a commonwealth and the duties of a ruler. The note below on political philosophies in the early modern period may, I hope, give a helpful idea of the main ideas in circulation.

 

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of the modern state. The general model was that of authoritarian monarchies ruling over extended territories, protected by permanent armies. These armies had to be funded from taxes, which in turn necessitated a central bureaucracy. This arrangement in turn required some theoretical justification, which was provided by writings on forms of government, which we would now call political philosophy. In the Tudor period, some of these were in the medieval tradition of Advice to Princes: the deeds of great men of the past were held up as case studies, and princes were encouraged to practise the Christian virtues of  Faith, Hope, Charity, Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence and Justice. In addition were the princely virtues of liberality, magnificence, clemency, honour and the keeping of good faith. In English the Mirror for Magistrates (first published 1559), a collection initially of nineteen English poems by various hands, had this purpose: the falls of great men of the past are held up for examination (typically, these leaders are ghosts examining themselves in a mirror) so that present-day magistrates can learn from the errors of their forebears.  Plutarch’s Lives, in the 1579 translation of Sir Thomas North (1535-c.1601), similarly used biography as a way of inculcating moral awareness, especially in those of positions of power.

Narratives with a moral purpose did not, though, study the workings of the state as a whole. Interest in this subject was induced by the real changes in political organisation of the time, and by the study of ancient texts. For Italian humanists such as Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) and Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), the writings of the ancients provided a model of how the public realm might be organised. These writings might take the form of treatises, like Plato’s Republic and Laws, which theorised about the organisation of the realm, or histories like Livy’s, which described states in action. Underlying the ‘civic humanism’ which applied ancient writings to present political realities was a powerful belief in the capacities of human will and reason. Through these, man can improve his condition; by the right exercise of reason, humans can amend imperfections such as injustice and inequality, and strive for a perfect polity in this life. Like the medieval books of advice to princes, the humanist belief in a better future modelled on the wisdom of antiquity posited humans as perfectible creatures, designed to use reason to serve their higher needs and capable of moral improvement. Plato, Aristotle, and St Thomas all hold that the good functioning of the state depends on the virtues of governors and citizens: to be virtuous is to be honest, sincere, just and pious; and man, as a rational creature, can be educated to put the general good before his own. Such sentiments perhaps found their purest expression in the genre of the utopia. Their idealism was countered, however, by the realism of the two most important theorists of politics of the sixteenth century, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Jean Bodin (1530-1596).

Machiavelli’s short book The Prince (1513) had a powerful and lasting impact. It was written in exile, as the author, an experienced diplomat who had served at the courts of France and Rome, had been deposed from his post in the Chancellery of Florence in 1512. Machiavelli contemplated the birth of the modern state - the word replaces res publica in the first page of The Prince – which had left the Italian peninsula behind. Power lay with the big nation states such as France and Spain (and, increasingly, England) while Italy (which was not a nation state until the nineteenth century) was a conglomeration of fundamentally weak small states, squabbled over by the larger powers of France and the Holy Roman Empire. Although immersed in humanist culture, with a deep knowledge of Cicero, Boethius, Seneca and Livy, Machiavelli did not share the Humanist faith in the innate goodness of man, which will ensure the eventual triumph of virtue. For him, experience shows that a ruler following moral precepts, such as those espoused in books of Advice to Princes, would only achieve disaster. In The Prince, Machiavelli sets out to answer the question: what is the best way to organize a cohesive and permanent state, and thereby best ensure for its citizens some degree of liberty and security? The task of the book is to provide a practical answer to this question, not a theoretical ideal one in the tradition of Plato.

In Machiavelli’s project, experience is to be taken as the guide. A knowledge of history and attentive observation of human affairs are fundamental necessities, and reflection on them will yield reliable maxims. One such reflection is that man is not a rational creature, designed to do good and live well. Experience tells us that man is perfidious: he can be wicked and envious, and the best response to that is not to attempt to reform him by an idealist education but to manage him appropriately and form the state on the realistic basis of how humans actually are, not how we would like them to be. Machiavelli’s doctrine of the reason of state holds that all means necessary must be employed to establish a powerful state in the collective interest; since humans are essentially selfish, they will pursue their own needs rather than the general wellbeing, and so must be compelled, by whatever means, to do the right thing. In the course of pursuing the greater good building the commonweal, the Prince is justified in doing wrong, including acts of violence and terror. For Machiavelli, virtù is not an abstract list of moral principles but the excellence particular to the ruler - that is, his success in achieving the intended goal. Hence the doctrine that ‘the end justifies the means’.

The type of state that will best ensure the collective good is a secondary concern. In The Prince Machiavelli argues for a principality. In the Discourses on Livy (1513), he praises the Roman republic (a republic being a commonwealth where power is distributed and not invested in one single leader). The overriding concern is the primacy of the collective over the individual good. A good republic makes the power of the state superior to that of factions; its leader - whose individual power will be limited by the constitution - will strengthen the state, for example through laws imposing conformity on the multitude: religion can explicitly be used for this end. A republic can draw on the best elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy to achieve the best possible balance between nobility and the people. In both The Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli refuses to idealize human nature. His aim is to find the best possible system of government on the basis of what we know humans to be like. His method of obtaining general precepts from observation has led to him being considered the founder of politics as an empirical science. The Prince was not published in England until 1640, but it was well known to writers before that. In several sixteenth-century writings, ‘Machiavel’ is the diabolical bogeyman ‘old Nick’: this is the figure we see in the character of Lorenzo in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and as the Prologue to Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.  These characterisations owe much to French anti-Florentine propaganda, and to post-Reformation hostility to Italian states in England itself. They certainly do not indicate a general refutation in England of Machiavelli’s picture of human nature, which must have been confirmed by ordinary experience. A Machiavellian concern with the real behaviour of flawed humans in distant and recent history can be seen in works like Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris and Tamburlaine, in Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays and Jonson’s Sejanus. Bacon wrote: ‘We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do and not what they ought to do’ (Anatomy of Learning (1605), II.xxii.9).

As we have seen, Machiavelli drew on history as the best introduction to politics, a method he continued in his history of Florence (1525). The same approach was taken by the French writer Jean Bodin (1530-1596), in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the Easy Understanding of History, 1566). Like Machiavelli, Bodin was concerned with real events rather than ideal concepts: in this book his interests include the effects of geography on different peoples, the way a state functions as an institution, and how international relations may be influenced by economic factors. Bodin’s interest in inflation gives him some claim to be the founder of the science of political economy. His most sustained study of statecraft is the Six Livres de la République (1576), published ten years later in an extended Latin version.  This work is an extended justification of absolutism. It was based on the observation of the bloody conflict between the Huguenots (French Protestants) and the Catholic League, which had caused appalling misery to the French people. Bodin saw the monarch as a necessary balancing figure, beyond parties and sects: absolutism was the best defence against anarchy and civil strife, and the security it brought was the precondition for tolerance, an ideal which Bodin promoted. Just as a family needs a paterfamilias, Bodin argued, a state naturally requires a supreme authority: this sovereignty, however, is a concept, not a person. It is ‘the supreme power over citizens and subjects, not limited by the law’ (I.8), since it is itself the law-maker. Sovereignty might lie with the person of the monarch, but it can equally well lie with an assembly: its chief responsibilities are to create judges, legislate and declare war; it is inalienable and indivisible, though it can delegate certain executive functions. How sovereignty is to be acquired, and whether power gained through violence itself legitimises the governing authority remain obscure points. But the main message of the work, in contrast to certain elements of Platonic philosophy and the utopian communism described by More, is that absolute power is the most natural defence of civil peace.

It will be noted that neither Machiavelli nor Bodin were arguing for anything resembling democracy. Such suffrage as existed, such as in the Republican government of Florence in the fifteenth century, was inevitably controlled by a few powerful families such as the Medici. The argument that the forceful exercise of power by the sovereign over the whole state was the best available form of government is echoed in the numerous books on government of the period. Many of these are in Latin, such as John Case’s Sphaera Civitatis (1588), a commentary on Aristotle’s Politics which recommends the perfect monarch as the ideal form of government. In English, Part I of Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) accepts that society is a hierarchical pyramid, with a single ruler at the top. Monarchy is described as the most natural and best form of government, and its divine sanction is clearly shown in the Bible. In the seventeenth century, absolutism was once again recommended by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1648). The natural state of things is one of ‘war of all against all’ as individuals struggle to meet their basic needs. Life in this natural state is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (xiii). In order to live as a community, individuals need to give authority to a sovereign authority, preferably a monarch. This is the beginnings of social contract theory: individuals resign many of their freedoms to an authority, which in turn protects them as a collective body. Social contract theory was further developed by John Locke (1632-1704) in Two Treatises on Government (1690), and, later, by Rousseau.

Political ideas are particularly liable to be diminished by summary: to reduce Machiavelli to the quote ‘the end justifies the means’ or Hobbes to ‘nature is red in tooth and claw’ is to turn a rich and organic process of thought into a single glib formulation. The books of Machiavelli, Elyot and Hobbes all reward study not as background to literature but as literary texts in themselves, making subtle and expressive use of language through the stylistic and logical devices of rhetoric and logical argument. In texts more usually studied in literature courses, the forms of government and their flaws are a frequent theme: Shakespeare’s Roman plays investigate and dramatise the use, misuse and varied distribution of power. They certainly do not advocate popular rule, whatever the vices of rulers: a classless and democratic society was unthinkable as a practical option, except in the fantastic world of utopias, and we should beware of hopefully making the values of Renaissance texts correspond to our own. It can be helpful to remember that the Renaissance was haunted by the threat of civil war: the Wars of the Roses – described in Samuel Daniel’s long poem The Civil Wars (1609), among other works - were not a distant memory in England; and the Thirty Years war and wars of religion in France of the sixteenth century were a reminder of the calamities ensuing on the absence of a central authority. Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays paint a vivid picture of the miseries of internecine struggle: ‘No more the thirsty entrance of this soil / Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood’ (H41, I.i., 5-6). In his epic Pharsalia, on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, the Roman poet Lucan (39-65 AD) inspired numerous seventeenth-century writers, and Hobbes’s advocacy of absolutism was a response to the travails of England’s own civil wars. While Milton’s defence of regicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649) seems to have had little influence beyond the Commonwealth period, a lasting strand of republican thought has been traced in England by the scholar David Norbrook.  Political ideas were in any event central to literary activity in the Renaissance; and politically intended critical enquiries, such as those pursued by cultural materialism remind us that the poetic and the political are inseparable.

Further Reading
Machiavelli, The Prince
Andrew Edward, Jean Bodin on Sovereignty, Republics of Letters

Mikael Hornqvist, 'Renaissance Political Philosophy', from The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (2011).

David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). Quentin Skinner: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1978). Vol1, The Renaissance; Vol 2, The Age of Reformation. Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 1981).

Bursts of Thought

There's nothing intelligent about the Internet. It seems to me something like a giant postal service, and like any postal service it carries about a lot of junk and spam, mixed up with content of real value. The trick is to get at the good stuff.
Here are three sites I think count as good stuff. They specialise in short bursts of thought - ideal for warming up the little grey cells, downloading a gadget to make train journeys more interesting, starting a discussion, and just generally opening new windows on the world.

The RSA (Royal society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) offers short lectures on a huge variety of topics on its video page. I love the RSAnimate series, where talks are accompanied by graphic annotations by artist Nick Park (of Wallace and Gromit fame). Also accessible through the RSA Youtube channel.

TED talks are short lectures by great speakers on a huge variety of issues. The TED channel on YouTube is nice and easy to navigate.

The bigthink is very focussed on the contemporary: 'Blogs, Articles and Videos from the world's top thinkers and leaders'. Plenty of stimulating material here.