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06867_Field_TCUM T432.txt
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1996-04-10
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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