Nicholas Mirzoeff is a leading figure in the interdisciplinary field of visual culture studies. He introduces the second edition of his widely-cited edited collection, The Visual Culture Reader, with the essay, “The Subject of Visual Culture,” which sketches the contours of visual culture as a field. He offers a definition up front: “Visual culture is a tactic for those who do not control such dominant means of visual production to negotiate the hypervisuality of everyday life in a digitized global culture” (4). This definition requires some unpacking.
1. Radical Politics
Let’s begin with the first part of Mirzoeff’s definition: “visual culture is a tactic for those who do not control such dominant means of visual production.” Here, he insists that visual culture is a politically subversive project. His visual culture does not include hegemonic visual forms of capitalism that dominate our fields of vision, nor the “panopticism” of our “disciplinary society” that surveilles human subjects (10). Instead it refers to the subversive tactics—in Michel de Certeau’s sense of the term—that work “across and against the imperial perspective” (7; 16). Such tactics include the creation of new images by radical artists, as well as the cultivation of new forms of looking.
2. A New Visual Subjectivity
The first part of Mirzoeff’s definition also indicates that subjects—specifically, “those who do not control such dominant means of visual production”—ought to be visual culture’s central concern. “Subjectivity is what is ultimately at stake for visual culture,” he says at another point (10); he hopes that visual culture will contribute to the working out of a “new visual subjectivity” (18).
Mirzoeff believes that such a new visual subjectivity offers liberatory potential. He argues, for example, that because gender performativity is subject to looser disciplinary forces online, we have seen “a shift in attitudes to gender and sexuality… It seems that the endless repetition of visual selves has led to a greater degree of indifference as to sexual and gender identity” (12-13). He notes that “the ebb and flow of visual differentiation across the boundaries of identity is disorienting… and dizzying, a loss of difference than can end in the loss of the self” (13). Put even more dramatically: “digital desire dissolves the self—the I/eye so often evoked in theoretical discourse—at the heart of the subject and replaces it with an endlessly manipulable digital screen.”
3. Global Networks
Let’s look at the second part of Mirzoeff’s definition: visual culture, he says, offers tactics to “negotiate the hypervisuality of everyday life in a digitized global culture.” Mirzoeff assumes that visual culture studies must be global in scope, because of the rapid changes accompanying that globalization of technology, especially digital technologies like the internet. He notes that, at the time of writing, 400 million people had access to the internet; today that number is over two billion. Though huge segments of the population remain on the other side of the “digital divide,” Mirzoeff’s point stands that the world is visually networked as never before, and that the pace of images moving across many of our visual fields has never been more rapid.
4. “The Transverse Glance”
Global networks offer a potential for subversive politics, according to Mirzoeff, because in them “events are not always fully knowable” (6). Networks provide opportunities for “unpredictable effects” and “transformative encounters” (18; 17). Webcams make the private public. Iranians covertly critique their government by leaking their video art. Subjects can take on new gender identities in cyberspace. All of these new encounters, made possible by the network, hold the potential to be transformative—they enable new forms of looking that may help us “look transversely across the gaze, across the color line, across surveillance and to see otherwise” (18). “If this seems a little utopian,” Mirzoeff acknowledges, “let is also be said that this transverse practice is at all times at risk of being undercut by transnational capital” (18). He describes his outlook as one not of utopianism but of “strategic optimism” (17).
Comments
I’m not totally sure what to do with this essay.
It’s strange that Mirzoeff has given us such a narrow definition of something that promises to be so wonderfully wide-ranging and interdisciplinary as the “visual” in “culture.” As he presents it, visual culture is the province of the artistic and academic avant-garde who are overeager to make sweeping statements about the effects of globalization and who remain nearly exclusively preoccupied with digital technologies.
Such a definition disinvites from Mirzoeff’s clique the majority of scholars who study images or vision—including historians, anthropologists, art historians, religious studies scholars, and so on—who, until they had read this essay, may have labored under the delusion that they were scholars of “visual culture.” One could not properly do visual culture, Mirzoeff implies, if one studies cultures before the late twentieth century, if one aims for ethnographic thickness before political critique, or if one dares remain pessimistic of the contemporary visual condition.
In sum: I’m not sure Mirzoeff’s analysis is all that helpful for me.
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