Background
Here I explain how this project was generated by the research I undertook for my book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke University Press, 2011).
In this book, I explore the formation of visuality in the Atlantic world as a strategy of autocratic authority. Its first deployment was on the fields of the plantation where an overseer controlled the labor ofmany slaves by his visualized surveillance. It was understood as a strategy in the thinking of late eighteenth-century military theorists,above all Karl von Clausewitz. For Clausewitz, then-modern warfare was distinguished by the expansion of the battlefield beyond the possibility that any one person could physically see it. The task of the General was, then, to visualize the battlefield, bringing together what he could see with information, ideas, intuition and insights from past campaigns.
In 1840, Thomas Carlyle generalized this strategy to represent the capacity of what he called the Hero: an autocratic and aristocratic leader whose right to lead was merited by his (always) ability to visualize History as it happened. For the "mob," lost without capacity to visualize in the phantasmagorias and fogs of modernity, the only right was this right to be led.
Against such authority, I claim the right to look. Not for the first or the last time but in affiliation with a lineage of anti-slavery, anti-imperial and anti-fascist claims to be every bit as capable of envisioning history as a means of sustaining autonomy, rather than supporting autocracy. As a claim of right, the right to look is prior to all law, a performative invention of the other by which one also finds oneself.
Indeed, the very need to name visuality as such was motivated by the success of the anti-slavery revolutions in France (1789), and above all Haiti (1791) that demonstrated that the authority of the overseer was always already resisted and, after Haiti, foundationally defeated. Visuality knows that it is opposed and plans as such. The right to look has the right of way in the circulation of modernity.
I identify three dominant complexes of visuality, so named because they are at once formed in complex ways (which is not to say obscure or unknowable) and indicate certain mental formations. In the first instance, I look at the plantation complex formed around 1660 and challenged by the anti-slavery revolutions of the 1790s. In response, visuality was named as such and it took on the role of what was known as the imperial complex, Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden," the task of conquering and civilizing. The foot soldiers of this visuality were the missionaries that spread across the globe, envisioning themselves as Carlyle's Heroes, bringing light to darkness.
The complexes were, as noted, always subject to resistance, and under the effects of that resistance "intensified" into a more economic and dynamic form. In the case of imperial visuality, this intensification led to fascism. In Europe, fascist leaders and apologists drew direct inspiration from Carlyle, seeing in his Hero a precursor to the Führer or Duce. Indeed, it is said that Hitler's final reading in the Berlin bunker was Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great.
In thinking through fascist visuality, I kept coming up against the place of Algeria and the battle for Algiers during and after the revolutionary war (1954-62). The Algerian war was a crucial turning point for European and Third World intellectuals alike, a scission point that has reemerged in the present crisis of neo-imperialism. Independent Algeria was further the site of a second disastrous war in the 1990s, between the Army as the defenders of the 1962 revolution and what has been called "global Islam" that is ongoing. Both the country and the city were and are, then, key locations on the border between North and South, as a place of oscillation between the deterritorialized global city and the reterritorialized postcolony.
"Algeria" is thus a metonym for the difficulties of creating a neo-realism that can resist fascism from the point of view of the "South." From Delacroix's Women of Algiers to Frantz Fanon and the novelist/filmmaker Assia Djebar, Algiers was and is a key node in the network that has attempted to decolonize the real, to challenge segregation and to imagine new realities. It is not exactly the same as the historical Alger, as the city was known under colonialism, or Al-Djazair, as it is known in Arabic. Its visualization on the border between North and South recalls Giorgio Agamben's definition of the fascist state of emergency as a "zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other."
The Algerian decolonization movement led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and the revolutionary war of 1954-62, in particular the contest for control of its capital city, Algiers, in 1957, radicalized a generation of European intellectuals and was noted for the participation of the Caribbean theorist Frantz Fanon. It was Fanon, having escaped from Vichy-controlled Martinique to enlist in the Free French Army, who later posed the question in his decolonial classic The Wretched of the Earth: "what is fascism but colonialism at the heart of traditionally colonialist countries?"
This rewriting prefigures the recent turn to understanding coloniality as the very being of power.
By considering Algeria as a locale of antifascism, I continue the decolonial genealogy that motivated my entire book. Last but not least, the Algerian war has become a test case for the war in Iraq that began in 2003 and the subsequent United States strategy of global counterinsurgency. The battles for Algiers in psychiatry, film, video and literature have raged since the end of the Second World War to the present.
At stake was the imaginary of decolonization and the post-colonial imperial power. Was decolonization a victory or a gift? Were the rebels terrorists or nationalists? As for France, was it the moral victor of the Second World War, the inventor of human rights, or just another tired European power trying to maintain its dominion?
In this book, I explore the formation of visuality in the Atlantic world as a strategy of autocratic authority. Its first deployment was on the fields of the plantation where an overseer controlled the labor ofmany slaves by his visualized surveillance. It was understood as a strategy in the thinking of late eighteenth-century military theorists,above all Karl von Clausewitz. For Clausewitz, then-modern warfare was distinguished by the expansion of the battlefield beyond the possibility that any one person could physically see it. The task of the General was, then, to visualize the battlefield, bringing together what he could see with information, ideas, intuition and insights from past campaigns.
In 1840, Thomas Carlyle generalized this strategy to represent the capacity of what he called the Hero: an autocratic and aristocratic leader whose right to lead was merited by his (always) ability to visualize History as it happened. For the "mob," lost without capacity to visualize in the phantasmagorias and fogs of modernity, the only right was this right to be led.
Against such authority, I claim the right to look. Not for the first or the last time but in affiliation with a lineage of anti-slavery, anti-imperial and anti-fascist claims to be every bit as capable of envisioning history as a means of sustaining autonomy, rather than supporting autocracy. As a claim of right, the right to look is prior to all law, a performative invention of the other by which one also finds oneself.
Indeed, the very need to name visuality as such was motivated by the success of the anti-slavery revolutions in France (1789), and above all Haiti (1791) that demonstrated that the authority of the overseer was always already resisted and, after Haiti, foundationally defeated. Visuality knows that it is opposed and plans as such. The right to look has the right of way in the circulation of modernity.
I identify three dominant complexes of visuality, so named because they are at once formed in complex ways (which is not to say obscure or unknowable) and indicate certain mental formations. In the first instance, I look at the plantation complex formed around 1660 and challenged by the anti-slavery revolutions of the 1790s. In response, visuality was named as such and it took on the role of what was known as the imperial complex, Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden," the task of conquering and civilizing. The foot soldiers of this visuality were the missionaries that spread across the globe, envisioning themselves as Carlyle's Heroes, bringing light to darkness.
The complexes were, as noted, always subject to resistance, and under the effects of that resistance "intensified" into a more economic and dynamic form. In the case of imperial visuality, this intensification led to fascism. In Europe, fascist leaders and apologists drew direct inspiration from Carlyle, seeing in his Hero a precursor to the Führer or Duce. Indeed, it is said that Hitler's final reading in the Berlin bunker was Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great.
In thinking through fascist visuality, I kept coming up against the place of Algeria and the battle for Algiers during and after the revolutionary war (1954-62). The Algerian war was a crucial turning point for European and Third World intellectuals alike, a scission point that has reemerged in the present crisis of neo-imperialism. Independent Algeria was further the site of a second disastrous war in the 1990s, between the Army as the defenders of the 1962 revolution and what has been called "global Islam" that is ongoing. Both the country and the city were and are, then, key locations on the border between North and South, as a place of oscillation between the deterritorialized global city and the reterritorialized postcolony.
"Algeria" is thus a metonym for the difficulties of creating a neo-realism that can resist fascism from the point of view of the "South." From Delacroix's Women of Algiers to Frantz Fanon and the novelist/filmmaker Assia Djebar, Algiers was and is a key node in the network that has attempted to decolonize the real, to challenge segregation and to imagine new realities. It is not exactly the same as the historical Alger, as the city was known under colonialism, or Al-Djazair, as it is known in Arabic. Its visualization on the border between North and South recalls Giorgio Agamben's definition of the fascist state of emergency as a "zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other."
The Algerian decolonization movement led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and the revolutionary war of 1954-62, in particular the contest for control of its capital city, Algiers, in 1957, radicalized a generation of European intellectuals and was noted for the participation of the Caribbean theorist Frantz Fanon. It was Fanon, having escaped from Vichy-controlled Martinique to enlist in the Free French Army, who later posed the question in his decolonial classic The Wretched of the Earth: "what is fascism but colonialism at the heart of traditionally colonialist countries?"
This rewriting prefigures the recent turn to understanding coloniality as the very being of power.
By considering Algeria as a locale of antifascism, I continue the decolonial genealogy that motivated my entire book. Last but not least, the Algerian war has become a test case for the war in Iraq that began in 2003 and the subsequent United States strategy of global counterinsurgency. The battles for Algiers in psychiatry, film, video and literature have raged since the end of the Second World War to the present.
At stake was the imaginary of decolonization and the post-colonial imperial power. Was decolonization a victory or a gift? Were the rebels terrorists or nationalists? As for France, was it the moral victor of the Second World War, the inventor of human rights, or just another tired European power trying to maintain its dominion?
Discussion of "Background"
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