Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08499_Field_TCGG T264.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

the Gutenberg take-off. Throughout the centuries of
manuscript culture it will appear that the visual did not become
quite dissociated from tactility, even though it diminished the
auditory empire drastically. This matter will get separate
discussion apropos of medieval reading habits. The relation of
tactility to the visual, so necessary to an understanding of the
fortunes of the phonetic alphabet, only became starkly defined
after Cézanne. Thus Gombrich makes tactility a central theme
of Art and Illusion , as does Heinrich Wolfflin in his Principles of
Art History . And the reason for this new stress was that in an
age of photography the divorce of the visual from the interplay
of the other senses was pushed all the way into reaction.
Gombrich records the stages of nineteenth-century discussion
and analysis of “sense data” leading to the Helmholtz case for
“unconscious inference” or mental action even in the most
basic sense experience. “Tactility” or interplay among all the