[-empyre-] Camera Obscura

[Cortez, Beatriz]

Hello again,


Since we are talking about the eye and vision, I wanted to share a few ideas that I have been thinking about as I have been putting together a proposal for a site specific installation. My intention is to build a Camera Obscura:


Throughout history, philosophers have theorized about our perception of reality. In the Ethics, and in his Letters, Baruch de Spinoza wrote about the dislocation between the idea of man and the scientific idea of man. Marx also wrote about a skewed version of reality in 1846, in The German Ideology. For Marx, consciousness emerges out of the material conditions of existence. Within that context, ideology functions as a Camera Obscura because it shows an inverted perspective of reality. However, Marx believed in the possibility of overcoming the distorted vision produced by ideology, in the possibility of seeing reality as it actually is, of achieving objective vision. Wilfrid Sellars stated in Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, a lecture he delivered at the University of Pittsburgh in 1960, that the "manifest image is a refinement or sophistication of what might be called the 'original' image; a refinement to a degree which makes it relevant to the contemporary intellectual scene" (7). In other words, for Sellars, the original image gained content as it was placed in relation to the historical context of Western philosophy. In this sense, the manifest image was based on the construction of the concept of a "person" (10), a concept that is linked to one of the most prevalent ideas of Western philosophy, the idea of the transcendental identity of man. For Sellars, however, the combination of the manifest image and the scientific image has the potential of producing a stereoscopic vision, a virtual reality of sorts. As Ray Brassier explains in Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Sellars' concept of the manifest image is inscribed within humanist (5-6). Brassier is interested in Sellars' stereoscopic vision, as he strives to move beyond historically conditioned meaning," and therefore, towards other speculative possibilities that are beyond humanism, beyond a transcendental construction of identity, and that are closer to what Rosi Braidotti calls nomadic collective identities.




Beatriz Cortez
Http://www.beatrizcortez.com

http://www.csun.edu/humanities/central-american-studies/beatriz-cortez
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