Today, as the T took me from the edge of the city to the edge of the suburbs, I quit reading about The Simulation of Surveillance and visually loafed with the cityscape. Even as I passed through, no matter the train’s speed, Allston/Brighton kept still.

The snow had that effect. All morning, sticky flakes came down; by the time that I took my ride to campus, those flakes aligned themselves and produced a layer of Winter over the apartments and parked cars and skeletons of trees.

Typically, these T rides are harrowing. Cars & pedestrians test the patience of overworked conductors; in response, the conductors work the train’s horn into a nasty howl. And the rest of us, with our fragile Boston-pedestrian psyches, suffer.

But today, with the snow turning the surface of the city into a Polaroid of itself, with the hustle buried, the ride kept calm and quiet.

Thing is, from behind the window of the train, I recalled the logic of Robert D. Romanyshyn’s Technology as Symptom & Dream.

In the seventeenth century Descartes laid the philosophical groundwork for a change in consciousness which began approximately in the fifteenth century with the artistic invention of linear perspective drawing. Linear perspective drawing is a technique for representing three dimensional space on a two dimensional plane which imagines the self to be a spectator behind a window who takes the world’s measure with the eye and with the eye alone. Keeping an eye upon the world, the spectator now makes sense of the world as a spectacle for observation, measurement, and calculation. Quantity now eclipses quality as the world becomes increasingly mapped by the equations of mathematics.

Moreover, compared with other senses like touch, taste, or smell, the eye favors distance over intimacy. The spectator behind the window, therefore, begins to lose touch with the world and is increasingly unmoved by it. In fact, the body’s sensuous entanglements with the world become an obstacle to this vision which favors neutrality and detachment. Thus the animate body, like the natural world which now matters only as a spectacle, now matters only as a specimen. For the spectator on the other side of the window, this specimen body is well on its way to becoming an anatomical object on the dissecting table.

Behind the window, I enjoyed the vision but kept remembering how goddamn awful it was to trudge through the slush to go grocery shopping earlier in the day. The walk took nearly twice as long as it usually does, mainly because I had to dodge and jump cold puddles and wet snow. I got home with wet socks, wet pants, cursing myself for not remembering to wear boots.

It’s a different kind of relationship, a different kind of knowledge, but even on days like today, even when the world gets hostile, I wouldn’t trade those sopping socks for the T’s moving window image. No, I’ll take the snow, take the cold, and let me senses go ringing.

And then I’ll complain about it, and, as another graduate student put, carry myself … contort my face … maybe even mumble and grunt like every other bitter New Englander in the winter.

So it goes.
EP