“What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general consensus that “true” knowledge is fundamentally non-political (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not “true” knowledge) obscures the highly, if obscurely organized, political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced.” – Edward Said, Orientalism.
“You have to see it before you see it.”-Dr. Kelli Morgan, “Rewriting the Rules on Art, Whiteness, and Empire”.
I teach an undergraduate art history course, and one of the first assignments I introduce is a game in which, as students learn the names of various classical architectural elements (capital, stylobate, pediment, metope), they can receive extra credit for every time they spot one of them in their own local and contemporary world. Just as when you buy a new car and suddenly begin seeing it everywhere on the road around you, students often tell me they are amazed to realize these architectural elements have been around them everywhere their whole lives but they’ve never seen them.
Vision, insofar as it is a tool of recognition and identification, requires language. If you don’t have a name for something it becomes incredibly difficult to see it, to recognize it.
Language, like all systems of representation, does not merely mirror reality, but rather constructs reality. The language we are taught from a very early age structures and classifies the world for us, by shaping what Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget referred to as our schemas—the mental structures we use to categorize the world. These schemas are shaped by our own lived experiences, as well as by the cultures that form our ways of seeing the world. The schema becomes an incredibly powerful concept for understanding the role of culture in the world.
As a child you are born with no knowledge of what anything in the world is, you have no schemas. But as you begin to have your own experiences and are taught about the world around you, you begin to develop schemas—which is to say mental categories, such as, “this is a chair”, “this is a dog”—and you begin to learn the patterns that will help you understand the world, and to survive within it.
Schemas are also where problems such as racism , sexism, classism, xenophobia, and all other forms of categorical essentialism take form in our imaginary. We unconsciously apply the associations we have with all of these different socially constructed categories to new individuals that we come across day to day in the world and on our screens. We pre-categorize them, we frame them. Let’s look at a couple more examples of how schemas are formed and operate, but this time instead focusing on how the visual culture around us shapes them:
Let’s set the scene– it’s the early 19th century, the Enlightenment is in full swing, European science and reason are beginning to supplant religion as the dominant explanation for phenomena, “democratic republics” are beginning to take the place of monarchies, and the “civilizing missions” of settler colonialists like Napoleon Bonaparte and Andrew Jackson are predicated on this supposedly objective superiority of Western civilization.
As Napoleon makes his way through the “mysterious” and “unknown” “Orient” he not only is operating as a general and political figure, he is also operating as a classifier. He has brought with him a team of over one hundred scholars, as well as hundreds of image-makers, to create what will be the largest ever published work at the time, Description de l’Egypte, a 26 volume work that attempted to comprehensively catalog all of ancient and modern Egypt, including both its cultural and natural history.
“This country, which has transmitted its knowledge to so many nations, is today plunged into barbarism”. – Jean Baptiste-Fourier in the “Préface Historique” to Description de l’Egypte.
“Napoleon appreciated the influence that this event would have on the relations between Europe, the Orient, and Africa, on Mediterranean shipping, and on Asia’s destiny…Napoleon wanted to offer a useful European example to the Orient, and finally also to make the inhabitants’ lives more pleasant, as well as to procure for them all the advantages of a perfected civilization.”- Ibid.
Napoleon’s Description is but one of seemingly infinite examples of European attempts to classify and categorize all of the non-European world. Other examples include Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque Orientale, essentially an alphabetical encyclopedia of the Orient and its phenomena designed for the Western layperson, or the many maps of continents yet to be seen, mapped, and categorized by European men, such as this 1861 map of Africa made by August Peterman in 1861, with many areas left completely blank. Certainly people lived in these areas and gave them names, but those were not considered.
And perhaps the best example of the Enlightenment and its blindingly Eurocentric approach to science is Diderot’s Encyclopédie, one of the first ever general encyclopedias that sought to objectively name and categorize the world. It was made by around two-hundred scholars and artists, all of whom were European men.
But what about here in the United States? How are our ways of seeing (aka schemas) still shaped by colonial science and its unexamined biases? Let’s examine some of the ways in which indigenous peoples and their cultures have been represented in the United States, beginning with the art of George Catlin¹.
George Catlin was a mid-19th century American painter who is best known for his depictions of several indigenous American peoples who were in the process of being forcibly removed from their homeland east of the Mississippi by way of the Native American Removal Bill signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on April 24, 1830. Catlin, like President Jackson, saw this as benevolent move that was meant to help stave off what they saw as an inevitable reality: the vanishing race theory, which suggested that indigenous peoples were destined to become extinct as Europeans began to arrive to the continent.
“Surrounded by whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay.”- President Andrew Jackson, December 1829.
Out of this pseudoscientific belief in racial evolution, Catlin began to paint various indigenous peoples, such as the Mandan, in an effort in his mind to preserve their true image and ways of living for future generations. However these images, like the aforementioned encyclopedias and maps, were less clear and objective visions of nature and reality as is, and more subjective depictions of Western perspectives of nature and reality as is. Take for example the picture below which Catlin used as the cover for his book, Letters and Notes, titled, The Author Painting a Chief at the Base of the Rocky Mountains. It illusionistically suggests to us that Catlin created each scene we will see in this book directly from the source. At a time in which photography has not fully codified yet as a technology, this is the most objective representation we can hope for. And Catlin treated the image as such, touring it around the United States and Europe in his travelling, “Indian Gallery.”
The problem is what we are looking at is far from the scientific truth it is being represented as. The images of the Mandan painted by Catlin are not the true-to-life mirrors of reality they present themselves as, but are instead collages of Catlin’s sketches, memories, and imagination. Here the Mandan chief is represented in front of a wigwam, a structure that was not used whatsoever by the Mandan, who instead lived in thatch huts. The clothing that the Mah-To-Toh-Pa, the Mandan chief, is wearing is incongruous with Catlin’s own writings of the meeting. It is a generalization. In Catlin’s mind all of these diverse and distinct indigenous cultures are interchangeably one and the same. His stereotypical rendering becomes our scientific image.
But even as photography then emerges in the 19th century as a new and supposedly more objective form of image-making technology (free from the artist’s errors, biases, and imagination) it is bound by the same problems of subjectivity. Note the photograph below of White Swan², one of several Crow scouts who served the United States in the Battle of Little Bighorn. The photograph is again a construction of an imagined idea of authenticity, as the photographer has contextualized White Swan with props that have no relation to his own culture, but rather reinforce European and white American stereotypes as fact.
But what about today? How do these issues of bias and subjectivity still infiltrate our ways of seeing and knowing the world? What about in the form of Artificial Intelligence, where a new form of non-human vision is beginning to supplant human ways of seeing the world? How are these new black boxes being trained to see and classify the world? Whose schemas are they reproducing? Whose databases of images are being used to generate new and seemingly neutral images of our world?
Trevor Paglen’s new book How to See Like a Machine comes out later this month, exploring these very questions. I want to finish by looking back on an earlier installation he did that explored AI, entitled From Apple to Anomaly³, in which he used a database of images used by an artificial intelligence company to generate new images. For the installation, Paglen arranged all of the database’s images around the various words they were labeled as, so for example around the word “apple” we see images of apples which will then be synthesized to generate a new image of an apple. But Paglen wondered about the reproduction of bias, perhaps most contentious when we get into images that reflect fluid concepts like race and gender. If the databases of images that we are pulling from are shaped by centuries of racism and ethnocentrism, then the images our new and seemingly magical technology produces will reproduce these fallacies.
Who is generating the language that you use today to categorize the world around you? How has that language constructed your imagination? How do we see it if we can’t see it? This is one of the many jobs of culture, making a new and better future visible.
-Danny VanZandt
¹Katheryn S. Hight, “Doomed to Perish”: George Catlin’s Descriptions of the Mandan.
²Jakob Dopp, “Looks Can Be Deceiving: Issues Regarding 19th Century Native American Photographs”
³The Louisiana Channel, “Artist Trevor Paglen: At the Expense of Everybody Else”