Western scientific tradition may have only been made possible by Cartesian
perspectivalism or its complement, the Baconian art of describing. There may
well have been some link between the absence of such scopic regimes in Eastern
cultures, especially the former [e.g. that of Cartesian perspectivalism], and their
general lack of indigenous scientific revolutions.^40
Thus even in recent art history, perspective remains not simply a technique
of the Western artistic canon, but a symbolic mark of intrinsic superiority
over Eastern cultures which lack scientific growth, psychoanalytic matura-
tion, or birth as that enabled by the solely Western province of Reason. As
Damisch points out:
In the art of painting...perspective...has this in common with language, that in
and by itself it institutes and constitutes itself under the auspices of a point, a factor
analogous to the‘Subject’or‘person’in language, always posited in relation to
a‘here’or‘there,’accruing all the possibilities for movement from one position to
another that this entails...Incrementally perfected over time...no longer
responding to changing needs emerging through the evolutionary process, it
must be replaced by another one better adapted to those needs: if the role of
perspective in the realm of representation were a thing of the past, which is far from
a settled question, the model it proposes would still retain its pertinence, precisely
asmodel, one that might serve thought in the project of discovering what, in
painting, are the conditions prerequisite to the making of statements.^41
He responds to an apparent anxiety emerging from the loss of perspective
in the era of post-modernity by asserting its preservation as an underlying
paradigm. As Margaret Iversen indicates, he proposes history as an echo
chamber, constantly recast in light of the resonance of changing knowl-
edge, and writes it retrospectively as a logical extension of consequences
that enable a model.^42 Perspective as a model (of reason, of modernity, of
‘the West’) must be preserved (in the third person, as if there were no agent,
as if man or the critic has replaced God) at all costs as true, regardless of its
supporting evidence. There is no alternative outside this narrative; there
can be only one perspective, one image, one truth.
The irony is that perspective, like the reason it models, is based on an
artifice. Like the Kantian objective observer, we view the worldas ifit were
in perspective, then behave accordingly (seeIntroduction 0.1). We often
see even the most perspectivally organized paintings from multiple points
of view, yet we insist that perspective demands afixed position. How has
perspective become so integral to our symbolic world that we deny the
(^40) Jay, 1988:19–20; Damisch,1995: 45. (^41) Damisch,1995: 53. (^42) Iversen,2005: 202.
Perspectives on Perspective 319