Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08729_Field_TCGG T494.txt

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

Rabelais and some Elizabethans like Nashe. Then it divides
steadily from language until Hopkins and the symbolists began
to work at it in the nineteenth century. The point in all this will
appear more plainly when we turn to the sixteenth century
obsession with quantification. For number and measure are the
mode of the tactile, and they are soon to be found departing
from the visual humanist camp of letters. A great divorce
between number, the language of science, and letters, the
language of civilization, occurred in the later Renaissance. But
the earlier phase of this divorce, as we shall see, was the
Ramist method for “use” and applied knowledge by means of
printed literature. For it cannot be sufficiently explained that
the mechanization of the ancient handicraft of the scribe was
itself “applied” knowledge. And the application consisted in the
visual arresting and splitting up of the scribal action. That is
why, once this solution to the problem of mechanization was