The gutenberg galaxy 135 gradual dissociation of the machine from animal form.” Printing was the first mechanization of an ancient handicraft and led easily to the further mechanization of all handicrafts. The modern phases of this process are the theme of Mechanization Takes Command by Siegfried Giedion. However, Giedion is concerned with a minute tracing of the stages by which in the past century we have used mechanism to recover organic form: In his celebrated studies of the ’seventies on the motions of men and animals, Edward Muybridge set up a series of thirty cameras at twelve-inch intervals, releasing their shutters electromagnetically as soon as the moving object passed before the plate…. Each picture showed the object in an isolated phase as arrested by each camera. (p. 107) That is to say, the object is translated out of organic or simultaneous form into a static or pictorial mode. By revolving a sequence of such static or pictorial spaces at a sufficient speed, the illusion of organic wholeness, or interplay of spaces, is created. Thus, the wheel finally becomes the means of moving our culture away from the machine. But it was by means of electricity applied to the wheel that the wheel merges once more with animal form. In fact, the wheel is now an obsolete form in the electric- missile age. But hyper-trophy is the mark of obsolescence, as we shall see again and again. Just because wheel is now returning to organic form in the twentieth century it is quite easy for us to understand how primitive man “invented” it. Any creature in motion is a wheel in that repetition of movement has a cyclic and circular principle in it. Thus the melodies of literate societies are repeatable cycles. But the music of non-literate people has no such repetitive cyclic and abstract form as melody. Invention, in a word, is translation of one kind of space into another. Giedion devotes some time to the work of the French physiologist, Etienne Jules Morey (1830–1904), who devised the myograph for recording the movements of muscles: “Morey quite consciously looks back to Descartes, but instead of graphically representing sections he translates organic movement into graphic form.” (p. 19) The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic faces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa within. The invention of the alphabet, like the invention of the wheel, was the translation or reduction of a complex, organic interplay of spaces into a single space. The phonetic alphabet reduced the use of all the senses at once, which is oral speech, to a merely visual code. Today, such translation can be effected back and forth through a variety of spatial forms which we call the “media of communication.” But each of these