engravings, there would never have come the photograph. For 
centuries, the woodcut and the engraving had delineated the 
world by an arrangement of lines and points that had syntax of 
a very elaborate kind. Many historians of this visual syntax, like 
E. H. Gombrich and William M. Ivins, have been at great pains to 
explain how the art of the hand-written manuscript had 
permeated the art of the woodcut and the engraving until, with 
the halftone process, the dots and lines suddenly fell below the 
threshold of normal vision. Syntax, the net of rationality, 
disappeared from the later prints, just as it tended to 
disappear from the telegraph message and from the 
impressionist painting. Finally, in the pointillisme  of Seurat, the 
world suddenly appeared through  the painting. The direction of 
a syntactical point of view from outside onto  the painting 
ended as literary form dwindled into headlines with the 
telegraph. With the photograph, in the same way, men had