The Right to Look

Desde la recuperación del proyecto de la visualidad como justificación estética de la dominación, el presente artículo defiende el derecho a mirar como la capacidad de confrontar los mecanismos visuales sobre los que se ha venido asentando el ejercicio de poder en momentos históricos concretos. Para ello, se lleva a cabo un recorrido a partir de los distintos complejos de visualidad, desde las plantaciones esclavistas y sus dispositivos de vigilancia hasta la violencia militar-industrial de nuestros días ejercida a través de drones, con el fin de dibujar una intensificación de la visualidad y su evolución contemporánea hacia una forma necropolítica.The following article defends the right to look in the face of visuality understood as the aesthetic justification of domination; an aesthetics of the proper, of duty. In this context, the right to look is conceived as a right to oppose the visual mechanisms that sustain power at different historical junctures. Different complexes of visuality are identified from surveillance methods at slave plantations to current military-industrial violence exerted by unmanned aerial vehicles in a contemporary intensification of visuality towards necropolitical forms of power

THE RIGHT TO LOOK

I want to claim the right to look. This claim is, neither for the first nor the last time, for a right to the real. It might seem an odd request after all that we have seen in the first decade of the twenty-first century on old media and new, from the falling of the towers, to the drowning of cities, and to violence without end. The right to look is not about merely seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails. As such, it is un-representable. The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity: “the right to look. The invention of the other.

I Like Cities; Do You Like Letters? Introducing Urban Typography in Art Education

This article proposes a study of the letters and graphics found in the city, while at the same time opening up unusual spaces linked to the cultural arena and visual geographies for the creation of learning spaces in art education, introducing urban typography for training teachers. The letters in urban spaces can help us reinterpret the patrimonial fabric of cities. With the help of typography, visual arts educators have a powerful graphic resource with which to articulate the complex communicative network of streets. We suggest walking as an aesthetic practice; strolling around the city as a very cultural means to motivate our students. We have at our disposal in our cities a genuine museum woven together with the threads of the alphabet

How to humiliate and shame: A reporter's guide to the power of the mugshot

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Social Semiotics, 24(1), 56-87, 2014, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/The judicial photograph – the “mugshot” – is a ubiquitous and instantly recognisable form, appearing in the news media, on the internet, on book covers, law enforcement noticeboards and in many other mediums. This essay attempts to situate the mugshot in a historical and theoretical context to explain the explicit and implicit meaning of the genre as it has developed, focussing in particular on their use in the UK media in late modernity. The analysis is based on the author's reflexive practice as a journalist covering crime in the national news media for 30 years and who has used mugshots to illustrate stories for their explicit and specific content. The author argues that the visual limitations of the standardised “head and shoulders” format of the mugshot make it a robust subject for analysing the changing meaning of images over time. With little variation in the image format, arguments for certain accreted layers of signification are easier to make. Within a few years of the first appearance of the mugshot form in the mid-19th century, it was adopted and adapted as a research tool by scientists and criminologists. While the positivist scientists claimed empirical objectivity we can now see that mugshots played a part in the construction of subjective notions of “the other”, “the lesser” or “sub-human” on the grounds of class, race and religion. These dehumanising ideas later informed the theorists and bureaucrats of National Socialist ideology from the 1920s to 1940s. The author concludes that once again the mugshot has become, in certain parts of the media, a signifier widely used to exclude or deride certain groups. In late modernity, the part of the media that most use mugshots – the tabloid press and increasingly tabloid TV – is part of a neo-liberal process that, in a conscious commercial appeal to the paying audience, seeks to separate rather than unify wider society

Ludic maps and capitalist spectacle in Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro is undergoing a makeover that is undeniably spectacular. Redevelopment schemes are dramatically rearranging the urban landscape, and crucially, this economic growth hinges on the production and circulation of images of the city. This paper explores a site of alterity and resistance where a favela youth collective has re-created Rio from its margins. This miniature world, known as Morrinho and built of bricks, mortar, and re-used materials, hosts a role-playing game featuring thousands of inch-tall avatars. This paper argues that re-visioning the world anew through play makes the society of the spectacle inhabitable and thus contestable. How does the society of the spectacle become a terrain for struggle in Rio? Locating spectacle production in nation-state formation and the urban process, the paper provides a genealogy of the spectacle beyond the modern North Atlantic metropole. Locating the favela within a Brazilian geographical imagination frames ethnographic data collected as an observer and participant in the Morrinho game. While the spectacle may hinge on the relationship between visuality and power, this essay observes how signs take on material lives through ludic re-appropriation. Play becomes a form of commentary, an alternative mode of knowledge about the city, and functions dually as both description of and participant in the social world in which it is embedded