not an exit’s Reviews > The Gutenberg Galaxy > Status Update

"Today our science and method strive not towards a point of view but to discover how not to have a point of view, the method not of closure and perspective but of the open "field" and the suspended judgment. Such is now the only viable method under electric conditions of simultaneous information movement and total human interdependence." aurrgghh

"That every generation poised on the edge of massive change should later seem oblivious of the issues and the imminent event would seem to be natural enough. But it is necessary to understand the power and thrust of technologies to isolate the senses and thus to hypnotize society. The formula for hypnosis is "one sense at a time.""

"The Seven Nations fled before him: they became what they beheld. Blake makes quite explicit that when sense ratios change, men change. Sense ratios change when any one sense or bodily or mental function is externalized in technological form: The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio Of the Things of Memory (...)"

"The kind of limp life so conferred by dull heads upon dull themes formalistically penetrates all existence. Since readers are as vain as authors, they crave to view their own conglomerate visage and, therefore, demand the dullest wits to exert themselves in ever greater degree as the collective audience increases."

"Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation."

"We are guilty of an anachronism if we imagine the medieval student regarded books as the expression of another man's personality and opinion. He looked upon them as part of that great and total body of knowledge, property of ancient sages. Whatever he read in an old book he would take to be not somebody's assertion but a small piece of knowledge acquired by someone long ago from someone else still more ancient."

"Van Groningen's analysis of the reasons for the Greek obsession with the past, as scientific and as psychological security, helps to explain the natural literary bias of all humanist ages in favour of ruins. For nowhere does the past speak so eloquently to the solitary musings of the scholar as from the midst of ruins. "

"but if we discard Berkeley's theory of vision, according to which we "see" a flat field but "construct" a tactile space, we can perhaps rid art history of its obsession with space and bring other achievements into focus" everything is so connected, I'd just read the first page of Berkeley and then came back to this??? On a book that hadn’t mentioned him before?? Angels everywhere omg peace and love

"This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside."

"It is a matter of "rite words in rote order," as Joyce put it. But once more any Western child today grows up in this kind of magical repetitive world as he hears advertisements on radio and TV."