I’ve always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.
The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.
New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man.
All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You’re a nobody.
The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.
Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.
Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.
The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
I am not a “culture critic” because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.