Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 02:45:13 -0400
Subject: HAB: Making Space / Distancing Our Selves


"The force of artistic creation, purged of it's demons, clearly had 
an existential significance for Warburg. The atlas project was to be 
introduced with the words: 'The conscious creation of distance 
between oneself and the external world may be called the fundamental 
act of civilization. Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, 
this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.'
This idea has a striking resemblance to the fundamental insight on 
which Cassirer's _Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_ also draws. ... the 
fact that sensory contact with the world is reworked into something 
meaningful through the use of symbols is the defining feature of 
human existence ... the objectifying force of symbolic mediation 
breaks the animal immediacy of a nature which impacts on the organism 
from within and without; it thereby creates that distance from the 
world which makes possible a thoughtful, reflectively controlled 
reaction to the world on the part of subjects who are able to say 
'no'."
Jurgen Habermas, "The Liberating Power of Symbols": The Liberating 
Power of Symbols (MIT Press 2001) p. 7.

"There can be no doubt that before the publication of Berkeley's book 
on Vision, it had generally been believed that the third dimension of 
space was immediately intuited, although, at present, nearly all 
admit that it is known by inference. We had been contemplating the 
object since the very creation of man, but this discovery was not 
made until we began to reason about it.
Does the reader know of the blind spot on the retina? Take a number 
of this journal, turn over the cover so as to expose the white paper, 
lay it sideways upon the table before which you must sit, and put two 
cents upon it, one near the left-hand edge, and the other to the 
right. Put your left hand over your left eye, and with the right eye 
look steadily at the left-hand cent. Then, with your right hand, move 
the right-hand cent (which is now plainly seen) towards the left 
hand. When it comes to a place near the middle of the page it will 
disappear -- you cannot see it without turning your eye. Bring it 
nearer to the other cent, or carry it further away, and it will 
reappear; but at that particular spot it cannot be seen. Thus it 
appears that there is a blind spot nearly in the middle of the 
retina; and this is confirmed by anatomy. It follows that the space 
we immediately see (when one eye is closed) is not, as we had 
imagined, a continuous oval, but is a ring, the filling up of which 
must be the work of the intellect. What more striking example could 
be desired of the impossibility of distinguishing intellectual 
results from intuitional data, by mere contemplation?"
Charles S. Peirce, Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1868) 2, 103-114.

"Now, every normal person, regardless of culture, spends the greater 
part of his waking activity in a visual world of three dimensions. If 
he thinks about the matter at all, he is inclined to conclude that 
this is the way, the only way, the world is made. It is therefore 
worth recalling that the child must *learn* to see the world as we 
know it. At or shortly after birth, his eyes are as perfectly 
developed a camera mechanism as they will ever be. In a sense they 
are too perfect and too mechanical, since they present him with a 
world in which everything is inverted, double, laterally reversed, 
and devoid of depth. In the course of time, by a tremendous tour de 
force of learning, he turns the world right side up, achieves 
binocular fusion, and reverses the lateral field so that he now sees 
his father as one person, erect, whole, and bilaterally oriented.
... Without motor movement and its attendant kinesthesis, it is hard, 
if not impossible, to believe that depth perception would develop at 
all. Imagine a child incapable of motion from birth: that child would 
live in the two-dimensional world of its own retinae. No identifiable 
person or object, as such, could emerge for him, since, as his mother 
approached, she would appear as several different people of 
progressively greater size. Nor could such a child develop an 
awareness of himself.
... [kinesthetic/tactile/] auditory space has no point of favored 
focus. It's a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the 
thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial 
space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own 
dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries; it is 
indifferent to background. The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, 
locating each object in physical space, against a background; the ear 
however, favors sound from any direction."
Marshall McLuhan, "Acoustic Space": Explorations in Communication: An 
Anthology, ed. Carpenter and McLuhan (Boston: Beacon, 1960), 65-70.

--t.m.




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