Panofsky’s periodization of perspective as a single line of progress
ignores the existence of non-Western cultures in which perspective played
no role in either representation or reason. In the context of the 1920s, with
much of the world under Euro-American economic and/or political
imperialism, this elision of perspectivalism with rationalism naturalizes
the rule of Western Man in the place of God. That it does so at precisely the
historical moment that the use of perspective as a tool of artistic verisimi-
litude recedes underscores the persistence of perspectivalism as ideology,
losing nothing of its content even when divested of its form.
To acknowledge the potential of rational space without perspective
would necessitate acknowledging that using it as a paradigm for reason
produces an ideology–a concept in which Marx again repeats the optic
metaphor:“If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-
down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from
their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does
from their physical life-process.”^47 His paradigm recalls the paradox of the
mirror in Brunelleschi’s original model, representing reality by looking
away from it. Such an inverted image can only be corrected through
intellectual recognition that observes from outside the optical frame. If
the pretense of perspective to represent natural vision is merely an ideolo-
gical illusion, then the naturalness of the attitude it embodies turns out also
to be a sham. Perspective connotes the ‘West’ because it relies on
a mythology, in the sense described by Barthes, that transforms history
into nature.^48
This myth persists as a dominant model in the conceptualization of
universal reason. It implies that Western reason takes an objective, out-
ward-looking stance at the world. Yet the modern conceptualization of
reason in European philosophy depends on inversion and introspection
rooted in Catholic theories of divine omnipotence and in dreams. Finding
some roots in Islamic thought, it cannot even be conceived as entirely
Western. Like the supposedly Western technique of perspective, reason
may be less rational, and less Western, than it initially appears.
Marx’s metaphor of the camera obscura follows a long legacy of spatial
metaphors for the mind. Distancing the body from vision, the camera
obscura produces an isolated, enclosed, and autonomous viewer. This
metaphysics of interiority produces a nominally free, sovereign individual,
a privatized subject in the quasi-domestic space of the mind. John Locke
(1632–1704) considers the external senses as windows that let light into the
(^47) Marx, 1998 : 36. (^48) Barthes, 1972 : 128.
Perspectives on Perspective 321