BODILESS OBSERVER

The arc of technology is detachment.

Each technological breakthrough has come at the expense of our bodily involvement with the world.  The more advanced the technology, the greater our physical removal.

Name any technological breakthrough and it will increase our bodily detachment from the world.  The spear enabled us to eat without wrestling an animal to the ground.  The QUERTY keyboard meant that we don’t have to write with a pencil anymore.  Etc.

The Renaissance perspectival system was a technological break thru.   This visual ordering system allowed a technological extension of the eye.

As with all technological innovations, the promise of the perspectival picture plane was enormous.  Here we had a visual ordering system which could explain the world.

The perspectival geometric worldview provided what was then thought as objectivity.  And with this objectivity came the beginning of a scientific understanding.

And bodily detachment came right along with it.

With the rational picture plane, our need to understand the world with our bodies was significantly reduced.  As with any technology, we swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

Since the world could be explained with rational geometry, we began to be reduced to mere observers.  The linear picture plane promoted the bodiless observer.  Entire worlds could be understood from one viewpoint, and it did not involve moving around.

Technology always does things for us.  And the perspective made, by creating it’s own world within our world, something that appeared complete and explanatory.

Thus, the technology of perspective did what tech does, it removed some of our bodily involvement with the world.

For more on our continued assault on the linear perspective system, please see here (LINEAR PERSPECTIVE – THE CRITICS) and here (UNLEARN THE PICTURE PLANE) .