For a day or so I've been thinking, on and off and in a rather pedestrian way, about the following sentence from a post at Alphonse (read the whole thing):
'Now, from the point of view of the rats, the building doesn't exist as a building; its just more space. And from the point of view [pov] of the building, the rats are indistinguishable from the inhabitants'.
I think this passage contains a vital insight. But first, an anticipated objection. To talk about the 'point of view' of the building is, stricto sensu, meaningless. Only humans have a 'pov'. At best it is an example of pathetic fallacy. It is the stuff of imagination.
Indeed, literature is full of fabulations wherein the world of a rat or dog is opened up magically to our vision. Hitherto neglected objects and unseen dangers suddenly swim into obscene visibility, human priorities are bracketed off, replaced by a world organised around the imperatives of canine or insect existence. The familiar world is rendered suddenly alive and menacing. I remember seeing a Spanish film, Vacas, i think, in which it seemed to me that we were seeing things, somehow, from 'the point of view of Nature'. I could put it no better than that, although I realised that my formulation was, in a sense, senseless. Nonetheless, things seemed to be filmed from a point of view eccentric to the World of the human. And perhaps film lends itself to the inhuman view because, as Benjamin reminds us, we are in a sense empathising with a mechanical device, an 'inhuman contrivance' - the camera.
But these 'inhuman' points of view are by no means confined to literature and art. We are not speaking only of aesthetic estrangment techniques. Such pov lie dormant in our figures of speech, they can be found forms as diverse as scientific discourse and political journanism. When a journalist talks of the government's point of view he is not referring to the opinions of an individual or even set of individuals, he is speaking of the position appropriate to a government qua government - i.e., stemming from the kind of thing a governement is, irrespective of the psychological profiles of its members. How more/ less illogical is this compared to talking about the pov of a building? Will not a scientist like Dawkins speak of how we humans are, from a gene's point of view, merely this or that. And he will imply, or perhaps some of his acolytes will, that this is the point of view from which we ought to 'see' things. Now obviously a gene does not have a point of view in the same sense that some TV pundit does, but the notion is perfectly intelligible. Or we are told that from the point of view of evolution certain aspects of our behaviour are perverse anomolies. And so on. Nonetheless, what these examples make clear is that when we talk about a 'point of view' we are not speaking psychologically, we are not speaking about a subject who has a point of view.
What then, does it mean to talk about human beings from the 'point of view of the building' (or whatever). This is perhaps obvious and yet, as they say, blindingly so. Provisionally, I would say it means: how we figure in its [the building etc] world qua the kind of thing it is. From the pov of a building, rats and humans are, equally, a drain on its materials and resources. Implicitly, one has defined what it is to be a building, and reconfigured the world around this definition. This is the sense in which things can be 'seen' from the point of view of the building. From the 'point of view' of a rat the building is no 'building' at all but another pocket of colonisable space. Any entity carries with it a 'point of view', in the sense that this pov is our description of how thing relate to it according to the kind of thing that it is, or according to the logic of its nature. And we and our environment can be 'seen' from an infinite multiplicity of 'points of view': inanimate objects, institutions, abstract nouns (from the pov of Justice), ideological movements or whatever. To all these we can easily attribute a 'point of view'. Again, we do not need psychology or a Subject.
It seems to me that such 'points of view' are indispensable to thinking itself. The 'pathetic fallacy' of attributing points of view to non-human things - whether material artefacts, animals, or abstractions like 'Government', helps us to delimit the boundaries of our own World by seeing it from another place. Without the 'point of view of the building' etc, critical thought would be impossible.
Finally, from Derek Mahon's translation of Nerval, a related and useful reminder:
Be strong if you must, your brusque hegemony
Means fuck all to the somnolent sunflower
Or the extinct volcano.
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