Radical Perspectivalism

Lines of Sight sounds a call for radical perspectivalism. It calls for getting to the root of perspective and aims for a transfiguration of the values associated with a regime initially articulated by René Descartes in the registers of one-point perspective, coordinate geometry, and rationalist dualism. It may seem odd to make so much fuss about a mode or system dating from the seventeenth century. After all, subsequent developments in science and mathematics may be said to have surpassed Cartesian geometry and perspective, or at least to have shown their restrictions and limitations. The Cartesian paradigm may thus appear outdated today, easily relegated to a transitional role within classical or early modern sciences, or to the status of a precursor, an incomplete articulation outstripped by modern and contemporary forms of knowledge.

But Lines of Sight is not first and foremost concerned with the bare materiality or scientific accuracy of Cartesian geometry or one-point perspective. Rather it is concerned with Cartesianism. As Martin Jay reminds us in the context of visual culture, Cartesianism is not simply a structurally determined outcome of the use of one-point perspective or coordinate geometry. It is the combination of this mathematical mode with “Cartesian ideas of subjective rationality in philosophy” that served to make Cartesianism appear to be “the dominant, and even totally hegemonic, visual model of the modern era.” ¹ In other words, Cartesianism is a historically articulated mode of rationalism, implying a highly specific field of rationality. Central to Cartesian rationality is the establishment of a series of conceptual and practical divides—between space and time, between body and mind, between object and subject. These divides became so entrenched and so identified with Enlightenment thought and rational thinking that modern Western thought is still frequently characterized in terms of such unrelenting dualism with its corresponding sense of a subjective mastery over nature implicit in certain modes of visual ordering, scaling, and mapping.

The problem, however, is not only that Cartesianism has dominated conceptualizations of modernity, providing the hegemonic model. But also, as a systematic attempt to ground various forms of inquiry, Cartesianism has shaped the ways in which we make connections across different disciplines or domains of knowledge—aesthetics, mathematics, history, biology, ethnography, physics, and philosophy. Nonetheless, while this collection of essays on Japanese media and popular culture proposes to go to the root of perspective and thus to overturn key aspects of Cartesianism, its goal is not, for instance, to denounce one-point perspective as inherently or deterministically fated to produce a hegemonic regime of modernity. Instead, the aim is to get to the root of this received regime of perspective in order to explore other modes and practices, other potentialities of perspective, which may have radical implications for determining what counts as art, or what makes for identity, and how we work across disciplines today. Indeed, as the use of the term “radical perspectivalism” indicates, Lines of Sight does not dispense with perspective. It is concerned with the radical potentiality of perspective, and not only in the field of vision. The emphasis on sight in the title is a lure or point of departure, designed to attract and activate a broader engagement with questions pertaining to aesthetics and to multisensory operations across fields of inquiry.

As such, even as it aims to uproot and overturn Cartesianism, Lines of Sight makes no claims to supersede or overcome it. This is not because we feel that Cartesianism plays such a deterministic role in modernity that it can never be overcome but only incessantly displaced or deconstructed. Rather the problem for us is that Japan has so often been situated outside Western modernity, as a site of overcoming Western modernity, that is, Cartesian dualism—yet such a gesture merely reinscribes and reinforces Cartesian dualism in a geopolitical register, usually in the form of an opposition between the spirituality and nondualism of the “Orient” or “Asia” versus the materiality and dualism of the West. The effect, if not the intent, of such a gesture is to shore up a divide between Japan and the West in order to consolidate their identities.

Take, for instance, a...