[-empyre-] Camera Obscura

Thu Jul 28 00:48:02 AEST 2016

All, 

Thanks for this excellent exchange, which is prompting me to take the opportunity to comment.  I want to propose a theory of feminist perspective as an extension of our group endeavor here.

Some of you will recall that the feminist film journal founded in the 1970s in Berkeley was named Camera Obscura. The title implied an engagement with the analysis of the mechanisms of the cinematic apparatus, a phrase that included psychoanalytic theory of subject formation, in combination with feminist critiques. The image of the camera obscura, as well as the specific technology by which it operates, inscribes a static monocular position as the place from which and the place within which the image is produced. Early images of the camera obscura all bear its masculinist origins in a optics and mechanics that supports and reifies constructed perspective: depictions of male artists in full mastery of their gaze, the world projected for them onto a surface they control. Following Stephanie Strickland’s astute comments last week, I would suggest that we explore our engagement with the camera obscura as a way to consider a theory of feminist perspective in which the monocular point of view is always subject to at least a splitting into two views, which cannot be reconciled. The principles of this Feminst Perspective would be to demonstrate and embody epistemological principles of situatedness (within cultural, historical, gendered, class-based, and other conditions), of partial knowledge (the parallax between two views demonstrates the processes of selection that give rise to a representation, rather than obscuring it), constructedness (the enunciative, aesthetic, deliberate decisions of making). To me, these are the foundation of a political epistemology that recognizes specificity in every instance, differentiation as fundamental to identity, and positionality as an explicit feature of human experience and expression.

I do not, however, think we can get to that place through images of the deep penetration of a mechanical device through a domestic space that has been softened with earth. Really? Please. That image is a parodic refutation of our conversation here. Made me laugh, but that’s about it.

For those interested in a bibliography of discussions of perspective and also mechanical devices for optics, theories of vision, and other related matters, here is a brief list of fundamental texts:

            Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (finally translated into English by Christopher Wood and published in 1997 by Zone Books)
            John White, Birth and rebirth of pictorial space
            Marilyn Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting
            Richard Lindberg, Theories of Vision
            Victor Burgin, “Geometry and Abjection,” still one of the best pieces on subjectivity and vision.
	    A good bibliography on devices, mechanical and visual, also exists and Wolfgang Lefèvre's edited volume, Picturing Machines is a good place to start on that. 

Much remains to be done to bring these historical models, critical concepts, and feminist principles into an applied politics of representation/construction of knowledge. Great to think that there is so much interest among this diverse community of practioner-scholars.

Johanna

On Jul 26, 2016, at 9:49 PM, Cortez, Beatriz wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

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