This is where McLuhan and Ong (for example) come in, to argue for subject-making repercussions of this disembodied, pure design. According to both writers, readers engaged with such designs have to do nothing; the order of the book and its pages takes over. Here is McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy:
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... the assumption of homogeneous repeatability derived from the printed page, when extended to all the other concerns of life, led gradually to all those forms of production and social organization from which the Western world derives many satisfactions and nearly all of its characteristic traits. (144)
... the mere accustomation to repetitive, lineal patterns of the printed page strongly disposed people to transfer such approaches to all kinds of problems. (151)
And quantification means the translation of non-visual relations and realities into visual terms, a procedure inherent in the phonetic alphabet. (161)
Religion and art are automatically excluded from a quantified, uniform, and homogeneous system of thought. (181)
Here is Ong:
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... without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations.... Literacy.... is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself. (15)
In the telling of McLuhan and Ong then, the visual order of books makes those of us who read desire to be rational, internalized, homogeneous individuals who see the world in a standardized, numerical, scientific, manner. But, also, as McLuhan points out, the way that order has been made transparent has made the design of books and book pages not worth discussing in our general practices—as has been the case in writing classrooms of this century, where at most we learned to give our pages adequate margins and double-spacing and to hand over any other decisions to publishers if our work hit the big time.
