Anthropocentrism, in Walt Disney films or plans for wildlife management, is clearly an evil we wish to avoid. But when we take stock of our situation as language users with brains and organs of perception which dictate that we see and describe the world in human ways, we can see that, at bottom, a human perspective is impossible to avoid. Though we may devote attention to the screech owl or the cat-tail moss, we are inevitably translators of their being, at least wen we come to representation. "Isn't art," [Emmanuel] Levinas asks rhetorically, "an activity that gives things a face?" Even an artist like Cézanne, whose work, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, renders a perspective "from below the imposed order of humanity" as if "viewed by a creature of another species," has not truly managed to escape the perspectival cage. He is still daubing pigment on stretched canvas, as no other species has been known to do.
So here's how I'm reading the Face: it's an address to the other with an acknowledgment of our human-centredness built in, a salutary and humbling reminder. But we can perform artistic acts in such a way that, in 'giving things a face,' the emphasis falls on the gift, the way, for example, a linguistic community might honour a stranger by conferring upon her a name in their language. Homage is, perhaps, simply appropriation with the current revered; 'here,' we say to the thing, 'is a tribute from our culture, in which having a face is a premier sign of status.' We can, in short, try to be like Cézanne rather than Mount Rushmore.
- Don McKay, from his essay "The Bushtits' Nest" in Thinking and Singing: Poetry & the Practice of Philosophy (ed. Tim Lilburn, Cormorant Books, 2002).
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