fields

Jordan Crandall (xaf@interport.net)
Sat, 14 Jun 1997 16:02:23 -0400 (EDT)

Perhaps perspective is most useful when speaking about visualization
technologies in a historical sense: when thinking about the changing
mediations of vision in terms of some kind of projection (particularly,
but not necessarily, a representational surface) and the way this
projection situates a subject, a body, and an exterior world, either in
an illusionistic or immersive way or in a way that foregrounds its own
function as mediation. It's interesting how something as simple as the
location of the viewpoint was once something of enormous political
import, mobilizing entire communities to rally around it. So by looking
at how the viewpoint is situated, entire worlds come into view:
changing modes of signification, subjective models, bodily forms and
conceptions of fitness, political and social rights, and so on. Who was
authorized to a viewpoint? What kind of body materialized? With
what faculty? What access angle did one have, if at all, into the realms
of representation? Perspectival space is crisscrossed with
materializing vectors. It hails a subject, it generates a point in which
one stands as a corporealized and politicized being, it is embedded
within discourses and technologies whose forms and techniques it
registers and whose constructs it helps to normalize.

But then again: with its emphasis on visualization, it does seem forced
to press it into the service of many of the techniques that we're
discussing, which traffic partly in non-visual signals and frequencies
(operating on the level of routines), which contain circuits rather than
vectors, and which often don't have projected surfaces as much as
injections. Brian's analysis shows the failure of perspective in
scenarios like the Bell example. Keller's switch does indeed provide a
productive alternative. Perhaps the switch, with its mechanisms
of regulation, provides a non-planar, non-visual way of looking at the
same aspects that perspective regulates within visual regimes. (Maybe
the viewpoint implodes into a circulating packet.) Should our attention
go to the valves, the points where flow is regulated and around which
positions are mobilized?

But now I'm abusing perspective, booting it out only to thrust it back
on stage again. I want to consider it in terms of a regulatory process,
and using Keller's terms. A fitting that regulates perspective might be
the opthamologist's phoroptor--the device that tests for vision. It's that
hideous apparatus that hovers over the examining chair, lowered onto
your face after you're wedged in. It has a series of interlocking lenses
and dials around the eyes with numbers vaguely resembling old
television or radio knobs. Your vision is purposely blurred in order to
fix it; the fixing is founded upon a deception. Vision has to be adjusted
in accordance with a norm. You are fitted with lenses, the fitting par
excellence within the visual regime. And then the way you walk, the
way you see others and yourself, is the result of this corrected vision.
The lens is swiftly incorporated by the body.

Employing this device as a figure for historically-specific visual-
technical interventions and modifications, the first thing that comes to
mind is that perspective was always accompanied by such an
apparatus. It's that the apparatus was constructed and situated
differently. And today, one could regard the planar lenses of the
phoroptor or the eyeglass in terms of switches or valves, regulating a
flow. It's an easy step. They would not necessarily result in something
so antique as a lens, but would help to open up a space where the
visual faculty could be continually modified and regulated. This is
figurative for a technological apparatus whose 'lenses' operate in
extended circuits.