numbering is supported by the pervasive visual culture of 
literacy.

     Nonliterate societies are quite lacking in the psychic 
resources to create and sustain the enormous structures of 
statistical in-formation that we call markets and prices. Far 
easier is the organization of production than is the training of 
whole populations in the habits of translating their wishes and 
desires statistically, as it were, by means of market 
mechanisms of supply and demand, and the visual technology 
of prices. It was only in the eighteenth century that the West 
began to accept this form of extension of its inner life in the 
new statistical pattern of marketing. So bizarre did this new 
mechanism appear to thinkers of that time that they called it a 
“Hedonistic calculus.” Prices then seemed to be comparable, in 
terms of feelings and desires, to the vast world of space that