Inverse, reverse perspective as subversive perspective in Florensky’s silent mutiny : a debate

Abstract

Panofsky (1892-1968) opens his Perspective as Symbolic form with Item Perspectiva ist ein lateinisch Wort, bedeutt ein Durchsehung. Perspectiva is a Latin word which means “seeing through,” a Boethius-Dürer concept of perspective as a window. This was the main Quattrocento-Cinquecento idea of perception via perspectiva: a Quattro-Cinquecento state whose re-birth one witnesses in the rationality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “positivism, linearity, and ‘singularity’ across a wide number of fields.” Florensky (1882-1937) challenges this with his own version proposing transcendental reality as one in which and through which mankind finds itself to be seen through, instead of the Kantian passive immobile subject “acting” on the world through a window. The depiction by the subject of the subject’s reality being seen through is integrally linked with what Florensky terms as Polycentredness, an intriguing parallel concept to Bakhtin’s contemporary idea of polyphonic heteroglossia. Essentially, and narrowly, this means that “the composition is constructed [stroitsa] as if the eye were looking at different parts of it while changing its position.” In reverse-inverse perspective, which Florensky finds to have been already exploited in antiquity, there are two double actions, again reflecting and appropriating Bakhtin’s philosophical concept of “the dialogic”: the action of “being seen through” and simultaneously the action of the subject perceiving the multi-view points in spatial, or rather in chronotopic movement, whilst being “seen through” and thus grasping or attempting to grasp what is essentially a nonvisual situation, i.e. that of a transcendental reality, which for Florensky is the only reality.