On Imperial Spectacle: The Dialectics of Seeing in Colonial Nigeria

Abstract

Critical studies of visual culture have established profound connections between capitalism, state power and the “scopic regimes of modernity” (Jay 1988). As the dominant philosophical leitmotif of the European enlightenment, visuality characterized the domain of reason and truth, modeling both the clear and distinct ideas of Continental rationalism and the sense-based epistemology of British empiricism. Compelling in its “given” transparency, the rhetoric of vision continually conceals the historical conditions of its production. Indeed, as Marx first stated in the 1844 manuscripts, the history of seeing belongs to that political economy of the senses so deeply embedded in historical materialism (Marx 1978:89). Critical models of visuality and spectacle, however, remain largely overdetermined, either as bourgeois forms of consumption and display (Debord 1977; Richards 1990), strategic stagecraft serving political ends (Edelman 1988; Falasca-Zamponi 1997; Scott 1998), or as hegemonic forms of objectification incorporating citizens and subjects into the discursive armature of modern states and empires (Crary 1990; Diehl 1986; Foucault 1995; Morris 1982; Mitchell 1988; Coombes 1994:63–108).I do not mean to reduce these theoretically rich and innovative studies to such banal and simplistic propositions, but rather to characterize the dominant orientations within which they fall. For a nuanced collection of perspectives on scopic regimes of surveillance and desire, see Brennan and Jay (1996), with special reference to de Bolla's (1996) discussion of Adam Smith's theory of spectatorial subjectivity. For a more dialectical approach to visual economy, applied to visual images in the Andes, see Poole (1997).