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Understanding McLuhan
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08288_Field_TCGG T53.txt
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dimensions, one behind the other. By giving these flat panels a
diagonal twist they succeed each other, as it were, in a
perspective from the “stand still” point. He is utterly aware that
the disposition to this kind of illusionism results from the
separation of the senses. Milton learned to make the same kind
of visual illusion after his blindness. And by 1709 Bishop
Berkeley in his New Theory of Vision was denouncing the
absurdity of Newtonian visual space as a mere abstract illusion
severed from the sense of touch. The stripping of the senses
and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synesthesia
may well have been one of the effects of the Gutenberg
technology. This process of separation and reduction of
functions had certainly reached a critical point by the early
seventeenth century when King Lear appeared. But to
determine how far such a revolution in the human sense life
could have proceeded from Gutenberg technology calls for a