Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06624_Field_TCUM T189.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 924b | 16 lines

merely additive, not causative. Hume’s argument, said
Immanuel Kant, “awoke me from my dogmatic slumber.”
Neither Hume nor Kant, however, detected the hidden cause of
our Western bias toward sequence as “logic” in the all-pervasive
technology of the alphabet. Today in the electric age we feel as
free to invent nonlineal logics as we do to make non-Euclidean
geometries. Even the assembly line, as the method of analytic
sequence for mechanizing every kind of making and production,
is nowadays yielding to new forms.

     Only alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected
lineal sequences as pervasive forms of psychic and social
organization. The breaking up of every kind of experience into
uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of
form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of Western power
over man and nature alike. That is the reason why our Western