HUM 102: Perspective and the
Subject of Reason
Daniel HoffmanSchwartz
Subject
• Modernity of described in terms of ‘the Rise
of the Subject’
• Term with complex history and multiple
definitions that are in tension with one
another.
Subject
•In everyday usage, “subjective” means “based
on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or
opinions”; i.e., not “objective” (scientific,
rational, etc.).
Subject
• But we might also think of the term “subject”
in grammar: the agent or actor in a sentence.
E.g.,“The dog [subject] bites the man
[object].”
Subject
•Also an older, legal-political sense with which
you might be familiar: “one that is placed under
authority or control”; e.g. being a subject of the
King or a subject of the Law.
•This noun echoes an adjective and a verb: to be
subject (adjective) to the King or indeed to be
subjected (verb, past-tense) to the King.
(Subjectum, Latin, ‘to be thrown under’)
Subject
• None of these senses is the technical,
philosophical sense of the term “subject”,
though each of these is related to it.
• Though Descartes does not use the term
“Subject,” the Cartesian “I think”/Cogito is
often described as the foundation of the
modern concept of the subject.
Subject
• Cartesian (17th century) “Subject”: a being
defined by consciousness and selfconsciousness.
• Paradox of Post-Cartesian (i.e., modern)
‘Subjectivity’: it is by way of the Subject
(cogito) that we arrive at scientific Objectivity.
Subject
• Enlightenment (18th century) Expansion and
Formalization of Subject: Subject judges and
evaluates (its own) representations of the
world; world appears for Subject.
• Subject now also associated with universality:
everyone is already or should become subject
of reason.
The Subject Revised
• What if becoming a subject (of reason, of
freedom) also means being subject or
subjected, literally ‘thrown under’ (Latin:
subjectum)?
The Subject Revised
• The example of language: in order to speak
one must first accept the rules of language. All
mastery, creativity, or expression within
language requires submission or subjection to
language as a system.
• The “I”; the source of subjectivity in language
is precisely an impersonal generality; in order
to become a subject in language, one must
give oneself up to this generality.
Review/Summary
• Double-structure of Subject in Modernity:
• On one side, consciousness and selfconsciousness; freedom and reason; mastery
• On the other side, subjectivity presupposes
subjection to language, representation,
institutions.
Perspective
• In the most basic sense, perspective or linear
perspective is a technique for visually
representing a 3-dimensional world on a flat (2dimensional) surface.
• From the Latin perspectiva (literally, ‘seeing
through’).
• It is so natural for us that we hardly notice when
it is being used in visual media, but it in fact has a
history (i.e., it wasn’t always there) and can be
dated in its dominant form to the 15th century.
• In perspectival painting, the flat surface
attains imaginary depth and comes to
resemble a window ‘through which’ one sees
the world.
• Negation of actual material surface of canvas
• “Picture plane”: the outer surface of the
imaginary depth of the picture.
• Perspective, in other words, simulates a
continuity between ‘real space’ and
‘represented space,’ and the “picture plane” is
the threshold or border between these two
kinds of space.
Antonello, St. Jerome in His Study
(1460-1475)
Medieval Painting (Ca. 1125)
Figurative, “flat” (i.e. non-perspectival)
20th Century Painting (Jackson Pollock,
Full Fathom Five, 1947); flat, abstract
Beni Mguild, 1960 (Moroccan
tapestry)
Basic Principle of Perspectival
Construction: The Grid
•The perspectival window must be covered with
an (invisible or removable) grid that allows for
the ‘translation’ between ‘depth’ and ‘flatness.’
•Marking points between ‘object, picture plane,
and lines of vision’
Visual Pyramid
Albrecht Altdorfer, Study for Birth of
the Virgin (1520)
Albrecht Altdorfer, Birth of the Virgin
(1520)
Albrecht Dürer, Man Drawing Reclining
Woman (1525)
Basic rules of perspective
• Vanishing point: the ‘back’ of the imaginary
depth, where the painting ends; most obvious
illustration of vanishing point is principle that
parallel lines converge at the vanishing point.
• All perpendicular or “orthogonal” lines meet
at this vanishing point.
‘Result’ of Perspectival Construction:
• Infinite, unchanging, homogeneous, rationalmathematical space.
• But: this requires an immobile spectator, who
must – physically or in imagination – place
himself at the correct distance from the
image.
Melozzo, Fresco at Loreto (1484)
Tension between Subjectivity and
Objectivity?
• On one hand, perspective makes the human
subject the new center, the point of
orientation for the image.
• On the other hand, it ultimately posits an
infinite, ‘a-centric’ space.
Antonello, St. Jerome in His Study
(1460-1475)
Antonello, St. Jerome in His Study
(1460-1475)
• ‘Objectivism’ of perspective: frontal view,
‘straight’ approach to world; St. Jerome at a
sharp right angle to spectator.
• Coordination of viewpoint of spectator with
orientation of represented architecture.
Spectator conforms to architecture and
‘structure.’
• Picture plane functions as window and as
limit.
Antonello, St. Jerome in His Study
(1460-1475)
Dürer, St. Jerome in his Study (1514)
Dürer, St. Jerome in his Study (1514)
• Picture plane does not coincide with opening
of represented space; ‘we’ share space with
St. Jerome.
• Oblique (‘crooked’) angle signifies freedom to
take one’s own viewpoint on the world;
perspective is not ‘lined up’ with a
represented architectural structure.
Dürer, St. Jerome in his Study (1514)
‘Ideological’ Resolution of Tension
between Subjectivity and Objectivity…
•‘Ideological’ resolution: both are expressions of
‘human greatness’; art plus science; the ideal of
Renaissance Humanism…
•Re-centering of man, even though we know the
universe has no center.
•What is hidden by this self-celebration of Man?
Proto-Perspectival Painting
• Conflict between theological space (theocentrism) and mathematical space.
• On one hand, space of church/altar is marked
off as having special transcendent value, place
where infinite God *somehow* appears.
• On the other hand, there are also aspects of
mathematically infinite space.
• So: mathematization of space emancipates
man from theo-centric hierarchy.
Lorenzetti, Annunciation (1344)
Lorenzetti, Annunciation (1344)
• Proto-perspectival system: tiles on floor allow
spectator to mark depth in picture – element
of infinite/mathematical space but:
• This space is framed within picture as a
heterogeneous (‘special,’ ‘theological’) space;
• Gabriel and Mary looks upwards towards
absent or unrepresentable infinity of God
• Conflict between homogeneous mathematical
space and ‘hierarchy of being(s).’
Lorenzetti, Annunciation (1344)
Lorenzetti, Presentation at the Temple
(1342)
Botticelli, Primavera (1481-1482)
Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic
Form (1927/1991)
Or Structure of Subject/ion?
• One becomes a Subject by Subjecting oneself
to the image.
• Subject: world appears as if ‘for me’; is
perfectly rational and intelligible
• Subjection: but only if I place myself in the
position dictated to me by the painting.
• Analogy with language: I become subject in
language only by accepting rules, structure,
system of language.
Subject as Assimilation to Space:
Camouflage
Antonello, St. Jerome in His Study
(1460-1475)
Dürer, St. Jerome in his Study (1514)
Psychoanalysis
• The Psychic ≠ The Conscious; ‘discovery of the
unconscious’ (Freud).
• The Visual ≠ The Visible. In other words: can
we ‘see’ the unconscious? What is the
unconscious in images? (Lacan)
Psychoanalysis
• What do I not see, precisely because I have
taken immobile position of Subject?
• What if something (that I can’t see) is looking
at me?
• (Jacques Lacan, 4 Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a”)
Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors
(1533)
Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors
(1533)
• Image of human mastery: objects from all
domains of human knowledge (arts and
sciences), but also from various ‘discovered’
parts of the earth (Oriental rug); presence of
globe suggests sovereignty and rational
knowledge of totality.
• Ambassadors: ideal representations of
European Man.
Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors
(1533)
Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors
(1533)
• But what can’t they see? What can’t we see?
• What’s this peculiar object in the foreground
of the image? (Or at the bottom of the
image?)
• Tilt your head! Can anyone see it?
Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors
(1533)
Anamorphic skull
Anamorphosis/the blind spot
• There is no unitary viewpoint from which this
image can be apprehended, in spite of the fact
that it seems to represent totality itself.
• Technique of anamorphosis (ana-, ‘again’ or
‘back’; morphe, ‘form’); ‘reverse perspective,’
hiding another form or image within the
image.
Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors
(1533)
Anamorphosis/Gaze
• Not everything in the image is visible; it is as if
the image sees me. (Lacan: ‘the gaze,’ ‘the
stain)
• The skull serves to remind us that the
‘Ambassadors’ will die and that we will die;
presents us from enjoying our own
identification with mastery and human
greatness.
Anamorphosis/the blind spot
• But this is also achieved through scientific
knowledge and technique.
• This images ironizes or takes apart
Renaissance humanism; it uses science but
interrupt human self-celebration.
Jacques Lacan, 4 Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis (1964/1973/1977)
Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656)
Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656)
• A painting engaged with tradition of royal
portraiture.
• Again, a question of relation between two
kinds of space and two kinds of infinity.
• Representing the sovereign (who has link to
God, transcendence) within homogeneous,
rational space of perspective.
Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656)
Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656)
Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656)
• Where are the King and Queen?
• The figures reflected in the mirror appear to
be King Philip IV and his wife Mariana (who
sponsored Velazquez).
• Where are they? Based on the reflection, they
must be where ‘we’ are, the position of the
spectator. Possibility of exchange of position
between sovereignty and impersonal general
spectator…
Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656)
Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656)
Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656)
• Sovereign or Subject (or Sovereign-Subject) as
absent center.
• Dissolution of Sovereign and Subject in play of
relations/difference.
• Representation of system of Perspectival
Representation
Picasso, Las Meninas
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
(1966/1970)