Jens Andermann's work has been extremely helpful toward understanding the cultural environment of late nineteenth-century Brazil and Argentina. In this book he analyses the state in its visual form, and makes clear that there is a particular way of seeing that should be analysed carefully in order to comprehend the role of its transformative action. He makes a compelling case for the study of visual cultures that brings new insights to the scholarship of this well-researched period. The other important contribution of this book is that in using Brazil and Argentina to make its case it reveals how connected these two countries were, and highlights the similarities they shared in the process of state formation.

Andermann's use of archival materials and discussion of visual images bring our understanding of institutional representations of nature, and the role of the population in them, into unfamiliar territory. This book points out ‘that the optic of the state in the late nineteenth century exposed to the gaze the empty place of the people’ (p. 209). More importantly, it affirms that this ‘was a place reserved for some vague point in the future, when there would be a subject to occupy it, a people entitled to take its place where nature and history had already indicated it’ (p. 209). The strength of this work is precisely in its conclusions, in its observations about the changing and contradictory nature of seeing and the instability that is evident in the visual culture of the period covered. As the book seems to imply, the state's gaze comprehended nature, as both visual form and emblem of nationality, in the context of evolutionary ideas. If we are constantly changing, and in the process of becoming something different, how can the state enforce a way to see? The past and the future are always perceived, in the evolutionary language of the day, as drastically different from the present. In this sense, as Andermann shows, the gaze is by the end of the nineteenth century an exercise in explaining real or imagined emptiness. There is a perpetual tension between what there is and what should be. The instability caused by the impossibility of permanence is evident in most visual manifestations analysed in the book.

My main reservation about the way in which the argument unfolds, though, is the support used by Andermann to sustain his correct conclusions. It is surprising that in a book that deals with museums and science in the late nineteenth century, Darwin's name appears only five times, Lamarck's only twice, and Haeckel's just once and in passing. There is recognition that the narrative of evolution ‘allowed natural history to become the temporality of state formation’ (p. 26), but there is no clear explanation about the meaning of this temporality. Evolutionary ideas were not cohesive in this period, and they employed different temporal notions. A Darwinian conception of time, for example, was very different from a Lamarckian one, a fact that Andermann does not explain when talking about ‘spatiotemporal emanations’ (p. 7). To be sure, one need not always explain science when writing about the visual culture of the late nineteenth century, but in a book that deals with scientific ideas, one would expect that the revolution which transformed the gaze so accurately portrayed in the book should not only be discussed, but also contextualised.

Instead, in The Optic of the State institutions acquire a logic of their own, unconnected to the actual works and individuals that originated them. So, the army ‘was the virtual embodiment of a capital pressing to expand into its exterior in order to absorb the surplus generated by the technological revolution in the industrial centers of northern Europe’ (p. 173). Or, the state became responsible for ‘the production of space in Argentina and Brazil’ and ‘sought to generate regimes of symbolic and material flows’. These claims are not always clear, and disembody the (human) events analysed in the book. If it is true that ‘the state became the transcendental condition to the real itself’ (p. 8), this fact might be connected with the ontological changes induced by Darwin's ideas, their approach to the reality of the species, and the corrections made by Ernst Haeckel's reintroduction of romantic idealism. In this context, it is surprising that Tony Bennett's Past Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums and Colonialism (2004) is not used as a reference to clarify this precise point, since its content is so close to Andermann's own interests.

On another note, the pairing of the visual depiction of the desert campaign in Argentina in the 1880s with the work of Deleuze and Guattari contains some confusing affirmations that muddle what is otherwise a compelling argument. A reader might wonder, for example, about the precise meaning of the following sentence: ‘The violence of the state always presents itself as preaccomplished, in the same way as it is the state that constitutes the exteriority of the outside onto which it deploys its repressive action’ (p. 171). In the same context, a few paragraphs later, it is mentioned that the capture of the indigenous communities meant the creation of a cheap workforce, and that the Church was ‘entrusted with the task of producing civil subjects (subjects with a proper name and a “soul”)’ (p. 172), a curious affirmation when the state was in the process of removing the Church from such functions at the national level. An explanation about the origin of this contradiction could have been very helpful.

The previous criticism does not diminish at all the merits of this book. In fact, Andermann makes way for new questions and possibilities. It is in this respect that the book is an important contribution to those interested in the cultural manifestations of the late nineteenth century. It will certainly remain fundamental reading for those concerned with the relationship between visuality and power in Argentina and Brazil.