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.'

Erich Fromm, Fear of Freedom

The basic thesis of Fear of Freedom is this. We want more freedom for ourselves, but at the same time we are afraid of it. As individuals, we grow up and become more independent. But the more independent we are, the more alone, the more isolated we are: the help of our elders is taken away and at the same time we see others as competitors for the same goods – success, attention, comfort. It’s hard to be alone and embattled for too long.  So it becomes natural to seek refuge in a group, in a system which gives us guidance and protection. We say we dislike authority, then, but at the same time we want it. At a deep level, we feel a need to submit to something which makes us feel part of something bigger: membership of a religion, of a class or a political movement can all do this.

All of this is part of Fromm’s attempt to explain the rise of fascism in the twentieth century, the phenomenon of modern society renouncing the freedoms it has won and embracing the most authoritarian of codes. Here are three kinds of authority which Fromm talks about: these we can call external, internal and invisible.

External authority we can cover very quickly. It is simply anyone out there who is in some position to tell you what to do, or stop you doing something. Parents, teachers, policemen, religious leaders, doctors, perhaps writers – depending on the circumstances, people such as this will have some authority over us. That authority might be legitimate or illegitimate, we might be right to obey it or morally obliged to rebel against it, it might be exercised benignly or maliciously, it might have been acquired honestly or by corruption. The only point here is that it is external to us, we can clearly see that it comes from outside us.

The second kind of authority is internal. This is when the rules we gathered from the outside become internalized, become part of the way we regulate ourselves. The whole point of making young people go to bed at certain times, I suppose, is that eventually this becomes second instinct. In the same way, the various codes and values that we pick up in our early lives will get internalized. To a large extent, they become our conscience, the little voice inside us telling us what’s right or wrong. Conscience is actually a massively important element in Western culture. In the Protestant Reformation, a huge weight was placed on the importance of the individual conscience, which took over from the external authority of the Church. Moral philosophers like Kant elaborated on this idea at length. Just possibly we might be living at a time when that idea is weakening. I can only speak anecdotally, but there seem to be many examples of people acting without any reference to internal conscience at all: some MPs bleating that their expenses were within the rules is a case in point. But I suspect that a lot of the anger directed at politicians comes from an uneasy feeling that they in some way reflect our own behaviour. What can I get away with? How can I play the system? We all dislike those who remind us of our own faults.  Is conscience still a strong determining factor in modern daily life? Maybe it is. In today’s paper, the boarding card airport shop story, where retailers have been making millions in VAT savings and not passing them on to cutomers;  on another page, City of London people collectively lifting a car off someone who’s got hurt. Evidence points all ways.

After external and internal, Fromm’s third type of authority is what he calls ‘invisible’. This is when you’re obeying an authority without even realizing it. How does this work? If you’ve ever seen someone being hypnotized, you’ll know how easy it is to plant ideas in another person’s mind. A person can genuinely believe he is lost and feel distressed, for example, simply because those thoughts have been put in his mind by the hypnotist, even though he has no recollection of having these suggested to him. According to Fromm, you and I are for much of the time in a very similar condition. We all have, say, likes and dislikes in music, political opinions, preferences for particular clothes and so on. But how did those ideas arise? Much as we like to think that we figured it all out ourselves, we would also recognise that a lot of opinion forming is going on around us: advertisements, newspapers, and so-called common sense can all provide us with pre-packaged views that we willingly make our own. And, like the hypnotized man, we come to believe they are our own. It’s useful. We don’t have time or energy to think through the whole of politics for ourselves, for example, so we read our preferred newspaper to learn what our opinions are on a range of subjects. Influential figures in the media can help us too. Except, of course, we think those really are our opinions. Here’s a scenario to illustrate the point.  You watch a football match on TV. You listen to the analysis of an authority figure, a pro. You think, yes, that makes sense. And, later, when someone asks you your opinion of the game you more or less repeat what he said. Only, when you’re saying it, you actually think it’s your own analysis. I’ve expressed opinions on books and films and realized later that I’ve really just repeated a review I read. And I’ve heard highly educated people do just the same thing. Partly it’s because we all need to belong to a group – it’s a basic human requirement – and membership depends on sharing the same ideas as others in the group. The group might be a religious community, or a class, or a union, or a group of political activists; or we might yearn to be accepted into a wine-tasting and opera-loving set, or a merry band of computer game fanatics. Any such group will have its required set of beliefs which you need to embrace to get the full benefits of membership.  And pretty soon and pretty painlessly you’ll believe that they really were your own private views and tastes all along.

So, one suggestion in this book is that while we’re considering, and maybe resenting, one external authority we’re very much in the grip of another authority altogether, the current of popular opinion that carries us along.  Does it matter? To some extent, it must be inevitable that we simply pick up certain views from what’s going on around us. It’s impossible to think everything through individually, and there’s no great shame in adopting at least some of the fashions of the time. But if we really want to stand as individuals, we should leave some space to think some things through ourselves. Academic work provides some opportunity for that, though maybe not much. But everyone knows the satisfaction that comes from thinking something through in some area of life. You might really think about the football match and find Alan Hansen thinks the same thing. Fine, your thought is original because it originated in you, not outside you. Man is a pack animal, and we will all to an extent go with the pack. But we also have a capacity to pull away for a moment, and do the incredibly hard work of actually forming thoughts and judgements in our own minds. We can draw on external authority if it helps; we are free to reject external authority, if we have good grounds for doing so and it’s not just disagreement for its own sake. That way we begin to develop our own voice, to be authentic. That is where our real authority as persons begins.