On almost bumping into someone when walking around a corner

You’re on the way to work or university, and you’re in a hurry. You walk quickly down the street, focused on getting to your destination.  Then, appearing out of nowhere someone comes from around a corner, walking directly into your path and almost bumping straight into you.

You look at each other, fury in your eyes, and you place the blame on the other individual. Perhaps you even tut, or mutter something to yourself, as you step aside and continue your rushed journey. Certainly you feel an (albeit minor) wrong has been committed against you.

But a moment’s reflection as you walk along leaves you feeling a little differently, a little disappointed in yourself for getting so angry, perhaps even a hint of fear that the other person heard your tut, as you realize that they were in precisely the same position as you. The corner has hidden a reality of perspective; you realize that from their perspective, quite literally, you were them, and they were you.

Speaking of perspective in his ground-breaking study of Walter Benjamin called ‘Ways of Seeing’, theorist John Berger commented that the contradiction in the “convention of perspective” is that “there is no visual reciprocity”: perspective structures “all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, [can] only be in one place at one time.”

The corner-incident forces the unfortunate bumper into this realisation. As you walk away you realise that it has been your mistake to imagine all images of reality. In this case the street you saw in front of you, was addressing you as a single spectator; it was precisely the same for another. But it’s more than just a reminder that you are only one of an infinite number of subjective positions. The incident shows you that at a visual level a trick is played, and that your own way of seeing is constituted by another imaginary one in which the look comes from a privileged and all seeing position.

What this shows you is that even in a predominantly secular society, the way we view our world is still structured by an imaginary omniscient and all seeing Other, which is capable of structuring how we ourselves see. When you bump into someone at the corner, you realize, perhaps unconsciously, that you aren’t in charge of your own perspective.

It’s such a big issue, some Japanese architects have designed corners to make it impossible.