Uniformitarianism is Visual

[Demosophist]

In his book *Through the Vanishing Point* Marshall McLuhan lays out the way the visual space created by the printed page deceives us. The fixation of modern physics on uniformitarianism is an effect of print, which turns the eyes into ears:

"[The poet, Wallace Stevens] indicates that the slightest shift in the level of visual intensity produces a subtle modulation in our sense of ourselves, both private and corporate. Since technologies are extensions of our own physiology, they result in new programs of an environmental kind. Such pervasive experiences as those deriving from the encounter with environments almost inevitably escape perception....

"In discovering the joys of matching or of realistic representation, the Greeks were not behaving like free men, but like robots. In the representation of reality stress is laid upon the visual sense usually at the expense of all other senses. Such representation began with the rise of phonetic literacy and cannot occur at any time or at any place without the presence of a technology that favors the visual sense at the expense of all the other senses... The phonetic alphabet, as explained in *The Gutenberg Galaxy*, is the only form of writing that abstracts sight and sound from meaning... By contrast, pictographic writing tends to unite the senses and semantics in a kind of gestalt. When the visual sense is played up above the other senses, it creates a new kind of space and order that we often call "rational" or pictorial space and form. Only the visual sense has the properties of continuity, uniformity and connectedness that are assumed in Euclidean space. Only the visual sense can create the impression of a continuum... To touch and hearing each moment is unique, but to the sense of sight the world is uniform and continuous and connected. *These are the properties of pictorial space which we often confuse with rationality itself*....

"Thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous story line, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations *exclude* participation whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or noninvolvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses."

When McLuhan uses the term "visual" in connection with a medium he's talking about the effects of print as a kind of industrialization of phonetics. It's visual because it turns the eyes into ears and gives the impression of continuity in a kind of fake tactility. For McLuhan tactility is the "resonant interval" depicted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel. The artist is depicting a tactile world, visually. It is a kind of lament. The separation should be, has to be, RESONANT, which print forbids. Thus, the despair of modernity: no room for resonance. Just a bland uniformity.

[Roy]

I don’t exactly understand the argument. Because scientists learn to read, they turn off their analytical abilities? The physicist Alvarez investigated Iridium anomalies in the K-T boundary. Follow-on work resulted in the Chicxulub crater discovery, putting paid to uniformitarianism.

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” - Nikola Tesla, (1934)

[Demosophist]

I don’t exactly understand the argument. Because scientists learn to read, they turn off their analytical abilities? The physicist Alvarez investigated Iridium anomalies in the K-T boundary. Follow-on work resulted in the Chicxulub crater discovery, putting paid to uniformitarianism.

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” - Nikola Tesla, (1934)

A phonetic script turns the eyes into ears and immerses all of the senses in a visual universe. The letters have no metaphorical meaning, thus nothing graspable intuitively. This is why if you ask someone in a Western country to describe the color red they'll first try to describe color as a wavelength of light and then narrow that to a specific range of wavelengths, or some other austere and non-intuitive breakdown. The big thing is composed of smaller things, which are composed of things smaller still, and so on... and this is considered an sufficient and accurate description. This became the dominant cultural mentality when phonetic text was industrialized in the 15th century. One of the first things that happened as a result was nationalism, so that learning was taught in national languages whereas before it had always been taught in Latin no matter what the national language happened to be. This was a first level fragmentation that became the dominant way of seeing things: a way that as Kant unwittingly demonstrated, didn't actually make sense. The visual world was composed of figures in which wrestle with one another for dominance in the phonetic mentality. There is no room for a ground. Even space itself is conceived of as an enveloping figure.

A Chinese person, having been raised in the context of an ideographic text in which the sigla actually have metaphorical meaning, and are not just stand-ins for sounds, never experienced this turning the eyes into ears. If you ask them to describe the color red they'll show you a red rose, an apple, and perhaps a raspberry... and let it go at that.

Or to put it another way that's closer to Tesla's description, print produces angelism: a kind of fortress illusion of detachment. Any move in the direction of the audile or tactile is "seen" as a threat.