“Imagine you are falling, but there’s no ground” No thanks. That sounds cold.
For my second week had to write a journal on the theme “What does the world look like?”.
The first piece of reading we were given to read was piece by a Japanese-German woman named Hito Steyerl. Normally I’d put my thoughts on this journal into my response to the subject as a whole. But this is one of the things I’ve ever read. To lump it in with everything else we’ll be looking at would be to do the other speakers a disservice.
Let’s get this garbage out of the way now.
We begin with an untitled introduction about being in freefall and how it undoes our understanding of the world. Our senses. Our subject/object relationships. And the way we see things. It reads like ammatur mysticism. But seems harmless enough.
I just want to point out the changes experienced in freefall have probably less to do with the loss of social paradigms or new ways of seeing being open up than the fact
it’s more than our extra senses like equilibrioception and proprioception aren’t used to this kind of feedback and so much of it.
It’s dizziness. Not enlightenment.
So far it’s not too bad. But the pain has only just begun.
We move into Part One: A brief History of the Horizon. And the cracks start appearing
“First, let’s take a step back and consider the crucial role of the horizon in all of this. Our traditional sense of orientation—and, with it, modern concepts of time and space—are based on a stable line: the horizon line. Its stability hinges on the stability of an observer, who is thought to be located on a ground of sorts, a shoreline, a boat—a ground that can be imagined as stable, even if in fact it is not”.
I hate this smug way we have at looking at the past. “Look at this 16th century sailors with their sextants and spy glasses. So primitive. Relying on things like the horrorzenline and the sun on the stars for their world view!”
These people were smarter than any of you. They reinvented the world and often risked their lives doing so. How dare people from the past rely on a paradigm that was utterly groundbreaking at the time. Urgh!
But so far this is unremarkable for a 21st century writer. But it doesn’t take long for things to become extreme.
Then the attack on western culture becomes explicate. “The use of the horizon to calculate position gave seafarers a sense of orientation, thus also enabling colonialism and the spread of a capitalist global market, but also became an important tool for the construction of the optical paradigms that came to define modernity, the most important paradigm being that of so-called linear perspective”. Steyerl is talking about the sextant and perspective like they were evil magic made by a laughing dark lord Sauron thinking about how many people the orcs will kill with them.
Considering Hito Steyerl is of Japanese decent, a people bent on conquest of of nations and religious based genocide durinf the 15th and 16th centuries and have embraced captailism harder than most european nations I don’t think she should throw stones about how evil western socity was. Hers were and are doing fine on their own.
As a consequence, linear perspective not only transforms space, but also introduces the notion of a linear time, which allows mathematical prediction and, with it, linear progress.
We had the concept of linear time long before perspective! Augustine anyone!
“the spectator’s importance is also undermined by the assumption that vision follows scientific laws. While empowering the subject by placing it at the center of vision, linear perspective also undermines the viewer’s individuality by subjecting it to supposedly objective laws of representation”.
No, no, no, no, no, no! This woman has a PhD in Philosophy? I have to wonder how she got it. I don’t even know where to start. If she hates perspective this much may I suggest she go live on south sea island where she can live among people who never invented it. One may as well say the language is disempowering because you have to use the words other people invented. Or claim books disempower people because they are written from the point of view of the author and we are “oppressed” into seeing their worldview.
Perspective does not disempower people. It is a system that replicates vision in a two dimensional space. It only disempowers you if you think you can see the world in cubist vision if you’re just raised to do so.
And vision DOES follow scientific laws. Even people who consider themselves real world magic users wouldn’t deny this point.
Needless to say, this reinvention of the subject, time, and space was an additional toolkit for enabling Western dominance, and the dominance of its concepts”.
Hito Steyerl was raised Germany. Has western society been that cruel to her that she see any advancements it makes as just being a scheme to take over the world?
Does she know down history more advanced civilizations have always oppressed less advanced ones? When the Mongols invented a system of warfare than any other nation in the world they didn’t use it to invite people to tennis matches. The Aztec and Mayan empires didn’t use their greater science and economics give all the neighbouring nations hugs.
All of these components are evident in Uccello’s six-panel painting, Miracle of the Desecrated Host (1465-69)… [] The date of these panels shortly prefigures the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492, also the year of Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the West Indies. In these paintings, linear perspective becomes a matrix for racial and religious propaganda, and related atrocities. This so-called scientific worldview helped set standards for marking people as other, thus legitimizing their conquest or the domination over them.
You do release the racial and religious propaganda would still exist without perspective? It’s not like these things didn’t exist before. Rome excelled in using it’s writers to jusify racial and political genocide.
And again. Claiming that the most scientifically advanced nations in the world at the time were unscientific because she doesn’t like them.
In the second part titled “The Downfall of Perspective” she starts by siting The Slave Ship by J. M. W. Turner. Turner did use perspective. If you told him he didn’t he’d throw his arms up in dispair.
At this point I had the horrible suspicion that Steyerl’s “More scientific ways of seeing” are just infact less literal ways of painting.
And as we move into Part 3: Acceleration, she invokes montage in film. I was correct.
“Painting abandons representation to a large extent and demolishes linear perspective in cubism, collage, and different types of abstraction. Time and space are reimagined through quantum physics and the theory of relativity”.
Quantum theory and Relativity do not end the concept of linear time. They show on macro level time is not linear, But they do not change how life is lived or experienced. Testament for this can be found in Watchmen by Alan Moore. Doctor Manhattan doesn’t experience time in a linear fashion. But he is obliged to act as if he does by fate because Moore does not have the capacity to show how living all of your life at once would change your behavior if you had free will. The fact that all our phones have clocks shows that Linear time is far from dead.
Her argument that because we can look down in outer space or freefall end the tyranny of perspective is also bunk. We have three-point perspective to show such extremities. And that that photographs taken in these situations and they still follow three point perspective shows the theory is scientific and grounded in reality.
She also invokes 3D cinema. 1: 3D films still use perspective. 2: I now have to question her taste in movies.
As we move into Part 4: Free Fall, my will to live starts to leave me.
“ …many of the aerial views, 3D nose-dives, Google Maps, and surveillance panoramas do not actually portray a stable ground. Instead, they create a supposition that it exists in the first place”.
Ground does exist woman! What do you think you walk on?
In this chapter she double down on her belief that the simple act of looking on it’s own kills the merit of linear perspective. This article opened with Hans Vredeman de Vries, plate in Perspective. A plate showing the view looking down from courtyard. This was made in 1604. Just because we can now look down from greater heights doesn’t change how we are perceiving the world.
Why do so many people in these types of journals view subject to object relationships as the worst thing ever? Maybe it’s not a bad thing that we aren’t squashed into happy little ball like in the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Maybe us having our own identity is a good thing.
In Part 5 The Politics of Verticality we get so bogged down in philosophical-political jargon that I can’t understand her anymore. Assuming I ever did. And most of the parts I do understand I’m too tired to argue against.
I just want to point out that even in space pictures still have horizon lines. They’re just invisible.
Even using things like fish-eye lenses or multi-screens in film can only bend perspective. Not break it and we will always return proper cinema because coherent storytelling beats out visual gimmicks every time. Just as classical illustration still endures while abstract art has been abandoned by the art world for not being pure enough.
And even taking Steyerl’s word as gospel. That perfective IS dead. Has it ended tyranny, bigotry, and exploitation? No it hasn’t! Her ideas are worthless.
I suspect a lot of what has been said by Steyerl as going to be defended as metaphor. Is It? I don’t know. I doubt she’d complain if anyone took her literally and thought she was right. I need to get this done quickly and I’m not going waste time looking for some deeper meaning that might not even be there to this nonsense.
Here is a link to the original article if you want to read it. But I don’t recommend it. This was painful to read.
Fuck!
John's Learning Journal 