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08804_Field_TCGG T569.txt
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1996-04-10
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Applied knowledge has no mysteries then. It consists in
segmentation of any process or any situation or any human
being. The Machiavellian power technique is exactly the one
ridiculed by Ben Jonson and Shakespeare in the passages
above. One observes a human being to see “what makes him
tick.” That is, you reduce him to a machine. Then you isolate
his ruling passion, the fuel of the machine. Then you have him.
Wyndham Lewis has given a fine account of these Machiavellian
techniques as they appear in Elizabethan drama in The Lion
and the Fox , from which we had seen earlier his description of
the Hollywood aspect of Italian princely architecture.
It is not only people that are reduced to things by the
segmental itemizing methods of the new print culture. Father
Ong points out in “Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind”
(p. 167):