.
Agama sinaita, Jordan: photo by Ester Inbar, 2010
The 'visual room' is the one that has no owner.
Milky Way arching across panorama of Southern Sky above the Paranal platform of European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (moon rising, zodiacal light shining above it, Milky Way stretching across sky; visible to right and below the arc, Small and Large Magellanic Clouds): photo by ESO/H.H. Heyer, 2001; image by Maedin, 2010
I can as little own it as I can walk about it, or look at it, or point to it.
Eumeces fasciatus (Five-lined Skink), having lost part of its tail: photo by Thegreenj, 2007
Inasmuch as it cannot be any one else's it is not mine either.
Bradypus variegatus (Three-toed Sloth), feeding, Cahuita National Park, Costa Rica: photo by Mehlführer, 2007
In other words, it does not belong to me because I want to use the same form of expression about it as about the material room in which I sit.
Revelation 22: 17 (King James Version): Baxter process illustration by Joseph Martin Kronheim, from The Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading, London, 1880; image by Adam Cuerden, 2010
The description of the latter need not mention an owner, in fact it need not have any owner.
Citrus paradisi (Pink Grapefruit): photo by Raeky, 2010
But then the visual room cannot have any owner. "For" -- one might say -- "it has no master, outside or in."
Earth cloud cover, 11 July 2005: Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image by Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, 2005 (NASA Earth Observatory)
One might also say: Surely the owner of the visual room would have to be the same kind of thing as it is; but he is not to be found in it, and there is no outside.
Bolshevism without a Mask, propaganda poster from Anti-Bolshevik exhibition of the NSDAP Gauleiter, Reichstag Building, Berlin, 6 November-19 December 1937: photo by Herbert Agricola, 1937 (Library of Congress)
The 'visual room' seems like a discovery, but what its discoverer really found was a new way of speaking, a new comparison; it might even be called a new sensation.
Highway 401, busiest highway in North America, closed 10 August 2008 during Toronto pipeline explosion: photo by Kenny Louie, 2008
Ludwig Wittgenstein: from Philosophical Investigations, 1945, published 1953, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe
No comments:
Post a Comment