Misc. backfilling...on that early Giant Eyeball in the beginning of AtD

[Dave Monroe]

On 10/23/07, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> In his essay, Nature, Emerson wrote "Standing on the bare ground, -- my head
> bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean
> egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all.
> The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or
> parcel of God." Emerson makes use of the image of a giant eyeball that sees
> all around it and, at the same time, allows us to see into it. If Emerson is
> the eyeball, he makes himself transparent to all who are around him in all
> parts of his life. Nature was the first essay to put into words such a
> concept. The appearance of the eyeball transcends its own reality.
>
> A-and as Dave Barry asks all over Google: "why is there a giant eyeball on
> the back of the dollar bill?"

Cf. ...

Romanyshyn, Robert D.  Technology as Symptom and Dream.
   New York: Routledge, 1989.

http://books.google.com/books?id=sbuESe_0so4C

Technology as Symptom and Dream approaches technology as a vocation.
It asks if technology is the Earth's way of coming to know itself
through us. It also considers the opposite possibility that technology
is the Earth's way of cleansing itself of the planet virus called
humanity, as the anthropologist Loren Eiseley once put it. Is
technology an experiment on the part of the Earth that has gone
terribly awry? Is the consciousness of the technological mind a
dubious achievement on the part of Nature, as the Jungian analyst and
scholar Marie-Louise von Franz has said?

These questions situate technology as a crisis of the imagination and
this book explores the dangers and the opportunities of this crisis by
returning to the origins of modern technology in the 15th century
invention of linear perspective vision, an artistic invention that
became the foundation for the Mind of Reason and the modern scientific
worldview. This return to origins is a psychological reanimation of
history in which cultural-historical events are re-souled as they are
re-membered as symptom and dream. As symptom these events
simultaneously recall for the collective life of humanity aspects of
the human condition that are too vital to forget, but which have been
forgotten because they were too disruptive for the Mind of Reason to
remember. And as dream these events are recovered as ways in which the
Mind of Reason has forgotten how its technological achievements are
reasons that are rooted in specific ways of dreaming the world. In
this regard Technology as Symptom and Dream is a work of anamnesis, of
un-forgetting, a cultural-historical therapeutics of the collective
soul.

The book is structured around three images that are the codes of the
technological mind. There is the image of the self as the spectator
behind the window who keeps his/her eye upon the world. There is the
image of the world as a spectacle for our measurement and use, an
image of the world as a mater of light on its way to becoming a light
matter, as evidenced in the most significant expression of this view
in the physicist's equation, E=mc2. And there is the image of the
human body as a specimen made necessary for the spectator mind whose
infinite vision would be impeded by the body as erotic bond with the
flesh of the world.

Beginning with the chapter on liftoff as the metaphor of the
technological dream of distance from the earth, the second chapter
describes in detail the invention of linear perspective. Chapter 3
deals with the spectator mind, while Chapters 4 and 5 treat
respectively the body as specimen and the cultural-historical shadows
that haunt this abandoned body.

A key theme that emerges in Chapter 5 is how the technological dreams
of departure and dis-incarnation reveal a split in the collective
psyche between its masculine and its feminine aspects. The shadows
that haunt the specimen body, from its initial 16th century
description as an anatomical object to the figure of the astronaut in
whom all human activities are translated into technical functions for
a life apart from earth, are primarily feminine in character from the
persecution of the witch, which began in 15th century Europe, to the
figure of the anorexic, who is left behind on a depleted and polluted
Earth as the psychological sister of the astronaut.

Chapter 6 takes up the theme of the world as spectacle and shows how
the technological image of the world as an assembly of facts to be
discovered is a way of dreaming the world as the stage upon which we
enact our stories and dreams, including the technological dream of the
world as a matter of light. Chapter 7 turns the book back upon itself
as the dream of liftoff becomes the dream of return. Exploring five
paths of re-entry, this chapter considers specific ways in which the
symptomatic character of technology can re-member technology as a
matter of homecoming. The earth as seen from space is both a danger
and an opportunity. It can be an image of our final farewell, or an
image of re-membrance of who we are, where we come from, and of what
under-stands us in dreaming our technological dreams....

http://www.online.pacifica.edu/romanyshyn/stories/storyReader$60