Technology as Symptom and Dream
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0415007879
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The development of linear perspective in the 15th century represented a radical transformation in the European's sense of the world, the body and the self. Robert Romanyshyn's latest book examines the claim that the development of linear perspective vision was and is indispensable to the emergence of our technological world. It does so by telling the story of how an artistic technique has become a cultural habit of mind.
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still carry within ourselves, within every bone and muscle, within every gesture, a living reminder of our tie to earth. To cheat life of the death we owe it we would have to cleanse ourselves completely and totally of all that, of every touch, taste, and smell of matter, of its stench of corruption. To defeat death we would have to rid ourselves of the scourge of aging and its signs of decay. To conquer death we would have to purify ourselves of all traces of how we matter. Our ascent would have
2.4 and construct two drawings of the vanishing point. Then, following the steps outlined for Figure 2.7, project a distant point drawing onto each of the vanishing point constructions. The closer the reader places the vertical line to the distance point the greater the depth of the drawing. Two conditions characterize Alberti’s distance point procedure. First, the distance point, which marks the viewer’s position on this side of the window, is placed at the same level as the centric or vanishing
in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly.4 An estranged self, a self in retreat from the world, a self born in distance behind the window as genesis of the astronaut! But, of course, few, if any of us, are judged insane on these grounds, and probably only a few become aware that they are ghosts lost in the cosmos of their own abstractions. The sun continues to rise in spite of what one knows about the earth’s rotation, and each of us
increasingly practice a distancing and detached vision which fragments the body into a spectacular dis-membered specimen. B The corpse as spectacular dis-membered specimen In the space of linear perspective vision the spectacular nature of the body, its primary identification as a spectacle, is quite evident. Over there on the other side of the window-grid, the body is an object to be seen. Over there, placed within the neutral, homogeneous space of geometrical perspective and thereby displaced
is primarily and essentially alive with energy, and not simply, like the corpse, a dead thing to be energized. In the final chapter of our tale we shall take up a consideration of this issue.