Erasures of Perspective: Authorizing The “Voice from Nowhere” in Everyday Life

ABSTRACT: The notion of perspective has long been used as a visual metaphor for epistemology, ways of knowing. Ironically, however, by the nineteenth century, philosophers, scientists and other experts began rejecting the idea that their knowledge is perspectival and sought instead to eliminate perspective from their practices to gain an ideal of “objectivity” formulated as impartiality and impersonality. Starting with a semiotic analysis that identifies objectivity/subjectivity as an axis of differentiation in past ideologies, this article shows how current arguments about “objectivity” in politics and everyday life in Europe and the United States rely on erasures, as in the past. The article tracks three set of practices—mechanical erasure, institutional erasure, and denials of expertise—that produce authority in several social domains of decision-making through the achievement of what participants consider impersonality. Some recent reformulations, by contrast, intertwine objectivity and subjectivity to produce authority in novel ways.