Technology as Symptom and Dream
Romanyshyn, Robert D. Technology as Symptom and Dream. London, UK, and NYC: Routledge 1989.
Robert D. Romanyshyn is a professor of psychology at the University of Dallas, teaching also in Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, and a practicing clinical psychologist. The on-line Routledge book description, as of 10 March 2023: "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. [...T]he development of linear perspective vision was and is indispensable to the emergence of our technological world. It [the book ... tells] the story of how an artistic technique has become a cultural habit of mind."[1]
Before a sentence of pretty pure puffery, the second paragraph of the back-cover blurb of the 1992/94 reprint reads: "Ranging through art, literature, science, medicine, and contemporary technological events, and using many illustrations" — the book is indeed richly illustrated — "Romanyshyn treats historical and contemporary events in terms of their symbolic and symptomatic value." As of March 2023, much of the back-cover blurb is to be found as the Abstract on the APA PsycNet website, although we haven't checked who's quoting whom:
[...T]echnology as a cultural-historical dream which, since the fifteenth century, has radically transformed our self understanding of the material world and the human body. Technology is deeply rooted in a special kind of vision, linear perspective vision, which developed the modern sense of the self as detached spectator, the world as a measured spectacle, and the body as an observed specimen. If we apply this perspective to technology itself, we establish the illusion of a well-ordered, highly rational world. . . . He [Romanyshyn] invites readers to approach the technological world as reincarnating a shared cultural dream, telling the story of who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be. [...H]is book enables readers to explore the psychological depths of technology and to come to a richer understanding of the world in which we live. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)[2]
As of date of this citation, a review of the paperback edition remains on-line: on the Dreamflesh site, by GYRUS, 24 May 2008.
Romanyshyn finds world-historical significance in the fact that a common term for “vanishing point” in the 15th century, when linear perspective was being formalized, was punto di fuga, or “point of flight”. For his contention is that the root desire driving the evolution of linear perspective into an unconscious world outlook is the desire to shed the body, to leave the Earth. Space flight is taken as an almost teleological conclusion to the scientific-technological project, motivated as much by flight from the body’s intimate involvement with the Earth as by a desire to reach the stars. When we discover that the year of the publication of Copernicus’ landmark work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (the same year as Copernicus’ own death) also marked the publication of Vesalius’ The Fabric of the Human Body (the first accurate book on human anatomy), Romanyshyn isn’t slow in teasing out the psychohistorical implications. “The corpse” he sees as a specific mode of the human body, one facilitated by the distanced analysis of linear perspective vision, and one necessary for the vision of the “astronautic body”, the body as mere technical function. “In the same year that the Copernican self officially departs the earth — 1543 — the body of this self is abandoned as a corpse lying on Vesalius’ dissecting table.” (p. 95) {More exactly, pp. 94-95 — RDE}[3]
Cf. and contrast the flight from the body into cyberspace in much cyberpunk and related SF, of this period: dealt with ambivalently in William Gibson's Sprawl novels, starting with Neuromancer, and with various attitudes in Greg Egan's Permutation City and the works cross-listed there.
Of immediate interest, Chapter 5, "The abandoned body and its shadows" (sic on capitalization), III.D-E, "The Body of the industrial worker" and "From worker to robot (pp. 144-47). Starting from Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and its praise of the division of labor (with Karl Marx in the background, to be cited soon, with Friedrick Engels, in another context) —
Smith's division of labor is in effect the anatomization or dismemberment of work, a fragmentation of it which converts the worker into a mechanical performer of repetitive functions.
[...] Work and body are both divided and mechanical in character. [...] In this respect, therefore, the industrial worker, who is heir to this invention of the division of labor, is the consequence of the anatomization of the body resurrected as machine and animated via the reflex. (III.D, p. 145)
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is discussed in other sections of the book; in this part Romanyshyn moves to the worker/robots in Karel Čapek's R. U. R. (1928) — and to the automobile, cars.[4]
The car [...] as an instrument of technology, actually does epitomize reflex man and woman. It is the vehicle through which and within which the person and his or her body are divided. [* * *]
The robot, then, in its modern sense [from the Czech] of "forced labor," is the industrial worker in his or her car. That is in any case how the robot is born [in Čapek's telling of how he began to conceive of R. U. R.]. It (since we cannot say he or she) is conceived in a car through the grim faces of early morning laborers. What Čapek saw that morning and in that setting, he tells us, was the mechanization and dehumanization of humanity. And what he described in his drama was the robot worker , efficient, free from distractions of memory or desire, with the body of man or woman remade and now superior to nature — a body designed to work, as body whose death would simply mean the absence of motion. (III.D, p. 146) </blockquote]
RDE, finishing, 11Mar23
