I compare this to another sketch of hers, which is a Bell Telephone
television commercial of the (by now quite dated) "reach out and
touch someone" series. Haraway doesn't discuss this in terms of
perspective at all, but it seems to offer an illustration of what
network-perspective might be. This is not to draw any sweeping
historical parallels--it's to reference how visual technologies and
representational conventions (which may or may not be articulated
in terms of perspective) register and participate in producing
particular kinds of socially- and historically-situated viewers,
faculties, and ordering formations. As Haraway explains, the
commercial goes like this. A pregnant woman, who is undergoing
ultrasonic visualization of her fetus, telephones her husband (the
expectant father), to describe for him the miraculous first
appearance of the fetus. The description is performative: father,
mother, child, viewer are constituted as subjects and objects for
each other in this act of "pointing," both in the sense of articulation
and also, literally, pointing with the finger at the screen: the mother
touches the screen while she describes the fetus. The mother's
voice on the phone and finger on the screen are conduits for the
eyes of the father.
This is a perfect illustration of a kind of channelled vision, a conduit
that links body, sign, and object through the mediation of a
historically-particular technology, producing a capacity and
constituting a set of conventions that, while not representational in
the traditional sense, are about ordering subjectivity and world,
fitting or shaping them in certain ways more than other ways.
Interestingly, there is nothing like a coherent "space" in this picture:
there are circuits, planes, codes, flesh, materials and a semiotic-
social space that ties them together in particular ways for particularly
situated accessors. So space in this sense might be a kind of on-
the-spot or artifactual "environmenting."
Anyway, if something like this is contemporary perspective, then it is
obscured by readymade databases of the earlier visual conventions,
which are called up and pressed into service to offer illusions of
coherency and stability.