[The Industrial Revolution] was the creating of a world in the left hemisphere's own likeness. The mechanical production of goods ensured a world in which the members of a class were not just approximate fits, because of their tiresome authenticity as individuals, but truly identical: equal, interchangeable members of their category. They would be free from the 'imperfections' that come from being made by living hands. The subtle variations of form that result from natural processes would be replaced by invariant forms, as well as by largely 'typical' forms, in other words the shapes which the left hemisphere recognises: perfect circles, rectilinear forms such as the straight line, the rectangle, the cube, the cylinder. (Delacroix wrote that it would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains'; as Leonard Shlain has pointed out, straight lines exist nowhere in the natural world, except perhaps at the horizon, where the natural world ends.) Such regular shapes are not produced by natural processes and are inimical to the body, which is after all a source of constant variation, change, and evolution of form, both in itself, and in everything it goes to create. Thus as far as possible evidence of the body would be eliminated from what is made. It would above all make tools, mechanisms, the sort of of inanimate objects preferentially dealt with by the left hemisphere, and it would make machines that make machines, self-propagating parodies of life that lack all the qualities of the living. Its products would be certain, perfect in their way, familiar in the 'iconic' sense (preferred by the left hemisphere), not in the sense of 'special things that have value for me' (preferred by the right): identical entities, rectilinear in shape, endlessly reproducible, mechanistic in nature, certain, fixed, man-made. - Iain McGilchrist, The Master And His Emissary
Food for thought! Surely more interested in the un-identical entities, curvilinear, un-reproducible and ever-changing. What made you think about this text?
I guess because traditional tanning is truly a 'hand-skill' where each item is truly unique; kind of the opposite of industrial-era interchangeable items.
[The Industrial Revolution] was the creating of a world in the left hemisphere's own likeness. The mechanical production of goods ensured a world in which the members of a class were not just approximate fits, because of their tiresome authenticity as individuals, but truly identical: equal, interchangeable members of their category. They would be free from the 'imperfections' that come from being made by living hands. The subtle variations of form that result from natural processes would be replaced by invariant forms, as well as by largely 'typical' forms, in other words the shapes which the left hemisphere recognises: perfect circles, rectilinear forms such as the straight line, the rectangle, the cube, the cylinder. (Delacroix wrote that it would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains'; as Leonard Shlain has pointed out, straight lines exist nowhere in the natural world, except perhaps at the horizon, where the natural world ends.) Such regular shapes are not produced by natural processes and are inimical to the body, which is after all a source of constant variation, change, and evolution of form, both in itself, and in everything it goes to create. Thus as far as possible evidence of the body would be eliminated from what is made. It would above all make tools, mechanisms, the sort of of inanimate objects preferentially dealt with by the left hemisphere, and it would make machines that make machines, self-propagating parodies of life that lack all the qualities of the living. Its products would be certain, perfect in their way, familiar in the 'iconic' sense (preferred by the left hemisphere), not in the sense of 'special things that have value for me' (preferred by the right): identical entities, rectilinear in shape, endlessly reproducible, mechanistic in nature, certain, fixed, man-made. - Iain McGilchrist, The Master And His Emissary
Food for thought! Surely more interested in the un-identical entities, curvilinear, un-reproducible and ever-changing. What made you think about this text?
I guess because traditional tanning is truly a 'hand-skill' where each item is truly unique; kind of the opposite of industrial-era interchangeable items.
Yeah spot on!