This teleological assertion of objectivity renders any other understanding
of the world impossible. The art history of every culture necessarily
becomes mapped onto a method that takes Western perspective as its
paradigm. To be out of perspective, then, means to have an art as well as
a history that can only be properly viewed by taking on the subject position
of the West. Perspective lies at the heart of the presumption of universalist
modernism: that the non-West can only articulate its own reality by
erasing any episteme of engagement with the world that fails to conform
to the perspectival paradigm implicit in‘point of view.’In adopting
modern subjectivity universalized along the European model, premodern
and/or non-Western subjectivities become subaltern: rendered mute
because even as they speak of themselves as the‘native subject,’the only
symbolic language with which they can legitimately speak is predetermined
elsewhere.^2
Bryson suggests that this neutralization of cultural difference becomes
natural through the competitive model underscored in Goethe’s adoption
of the Zeuxis story.
The‘Zeuxian tendency’of Western painting is only one expression of a generalized
social process to which all members of the‘community of recognition’must
submit. Where before, in elementary domination, history could be written in
terms of one body’s mastery over another, andcombatcould be seen as the
principal mode of social interaction, in secondary or managerial domination the
emphasis passes from...dispersed feuding...to a collective arena whose prime
focus is no longer the body, but the signifier, and whererecognitionis the principal
mode of interaction. All must submit to public acknowledgement of certain
legitimating explanations of the social formation and to certain discursive forma-
tions, yet submission is no longer a capitulatory yielding up to control, as in
combat, but rather acceptance on the part of each agent of aweightof consensus
that is standard throughout the community, and which presses upon each agent to
the same degree.^3
The history of Islamic art history demonstrates such acquiescence. It
signifies a shift from the physical domination of colonialism, reinforced
through the metonymic device of collection, to the consensual domination
of the Cold War era indicated through acceptance of the epistemic frame-
work governing history and its objects. It has readily accepted the disci-
plinary premises through which it emerged: the periodization of Islamic
culture as distinct from precedents, neighbors, and a supposedly universal
modernity modeled on European experience; the segregation of religious
(^2) Spivak, 1999 : 282. (^3) Bryson, 1983 : 160.
Out of Perspective 329