performs what it utters, like the words“Welcome!”or“Behold!”Islam is the
act of greeting (s-l-m) God not only in prayer, but potentially in all mani-
festations of the Divine. The study of perceptual culture invites us to
recognize this practice as it is embedded in Islamic discourses, and to resist
resisting expression of God in them regardless of our own creed [Plate 18].
Thus the boundary of its inquiry is not geographical or temporal, nor bound
by the faith of an artist or a political rule under Islam, but framed by an artist
or a work’s engagement with the discursive frame of Islam.
As a method, the study of perceptual culture combines visual, sonic, and
literary traces to modify analytical practices. Focusing on reception over
production, it undermines the value ofdistinguishingbetweenmediaasa
means of approaching culture. Featuring experience over materiality, it
includes non-material entities such asmusic and dreams. Rejecting the hier-
archy of the eye, it valorizes the ear and the heart as sensory organs. It
recognizes the possibility of physicalpreservation only through the concomi-
tant preservation of ideas. Recognizing the body as an agent, it undermines the
hierarchical dualism between mindand body. Diminishing the agency of
demonstrative prose, it embraces a full range of rhetorical tools, including
the exhortative agency of the fable, the entertaining agency of the anecdote, the
analytic agency of the image, and the mimetic agency of music. It invites us to
invent a practice of cultural engagement that inhabits the unfamiliar rather
than reporting on and thereby reconfiguring the exotic into familiar forms.
These shifts offer new paradigms for the ways in which art history might
function as a globalized analytical discipline. It invites us to leave the perspec-
tival frame of art history and learn to perceive a world from multiple and
mobile positions of authority.
The overarching power of perspective in the Western artistic tradition plays
a central role in the difficulty of imagining meaning and subjectivity in the arts
of other cultures, including that of Islam. As Stephen Melville explains:
The Renaissance achievement of rational perspective becomes the condition of
possibility of the art-historical discipline, and we are compelled to its terms
whenever we look to establish another world view that would not, for example,
privilege the Renaissance, because we can neither‘look’nor imagine a‘world view’
without reinstalling at the heart of our project the terms only the Renaissance can
expound for us...[Panofsky’s] valorization of perspective forges an apparently
non-problematic access of the rationalized space of the past. We are freed then to
imagine ourselves henceforth as scientist of a certain kind, and within this imagi-
nation the grounds of privilege become invisible and profoundly naturalized.^1(^1) Melville, 1998 : 409.
328 Out of Perspective