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09103_Field_TCGG T868.txt
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consciousness, as he declared on the last page of the Wake . He
knew that he had solved the dilemma of Western individual man
faced with the collective or tribal consequences of first his
Gutenberg, and next his Marconi, technologies. Pope had seen
the tribal consciousness latent in the new mass culture of the
book-trade. Language and the arts would cease to be prime
agents of critical perception and become mere packaging
devices for releasing a spate of verbal commodities. Blake and
the Romantics and the Victorians alike became obsessed with
the actualization of Pope’s vision in the new organization of an
industrial economy embedded in a self-regulating system of
land, labor, and capital. The Newtonian laws of mechanics,
latent in Gutenberg typography, were translated by Adam
Smith to govern the laws of production and consumption. In
accordance with Pope’s prediction of automatic trance or
“robo-centrism,” Smith declared that the mechanical laws of