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… as individuals they lived by an entirely different calculus. They have household, auto, and health insurance for protection against vastly smaller risks at an infinitesimally smaller scale, and most did not dismiss health warnings from their doctors as a liberal plot. When it is merely the future of the Earth, however, they have been willing to risk irrevocable and irreversible changes.

– David W. Orr. Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 4-5.

Cheap tape recorders, old televisions, blurred videos that are the copy of a copy of a copy—these are the material distortions endemic to the reproduction of media goods in situations of poverty and illegality, and they shape the ways these media take on cultural value and act on individuals and groups. The dialectic of technological breakdown and repair imposes its own cultural experience of modernity, an alternative speeding up and stasis, and a world where gaps in space and time are continually annihilated and reinforced.

Brian Larkin. “Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy.” Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 310.

Any cancellation of history, in the sense of real times and real places, is essentially a cancellation of the contemporary world, in which, within limits and under pressures, men act and react, struggle and concede, co-operate, conflict and compete.

– Raymond Williams. “Effects of the Technology and Its Uses.” In Television: Technology and Cultural Form. [Middletown, Conn.] Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press University Press of New England, 1992: 129.

If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever apparent content he may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself. It is hardly surprising that this conclusion has been welcomed by the ‘media-men’ of the existing institutions. It gives the gloss of avant-garde theory to the crudest versions of their existing interests and practices, and assigns all their critics to pre-electronic irrelevance. Thus what began as pure formalism, and as speculation on human essence, ends as operative social theory and practice, in the heartland of the most dominative and aggressive communications institutions in the world.

– Raymond Williams. “Effects of the Technology and Its Uses.” In Television: Technology and Cultural Form. [Middletown, Conn.] Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press University Press of New England, 1992: 128.

One simply cannot expect more from photography than it can deliver. Its detailed impressions of the surface of events are like the impressions left behind in stone of the existence of certain strange creatures.

– Ernst Jünger. “War and Photography” [1930]. New German Critique 59 (1993): 25.

… the human being has inevitably, a futuristic constitution; that is to say, he lives primarily in the future and for the future…. man is a being of two aspects: on the one hand, he is what he really is; on the other, he has ideas of himself which coincide more or less with his authentic reality. Evidently, our ideas, preferences, desires cannot annul our true being, but they can complicate and modify it. The ancient and the modern are both concerned about the future but the former submits the future to a past regime, whereas we grant more autonomy to the future, to the new as such. This antagonism, not in being, but in preferring, justifies us qualifying the modern as a futurist and the ancient as an archaiser…. Already at the end of the XIVth Century stress was beginning to be laid on modernity, precisely in those questions which most keenly interested the period, and one hears, for example, of devotio moderna, a kind of vanguard of “mystical theology.”

– José Ortega y Gasset. Revolt of the Masses. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993: 173.

Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skill to avert evils. We must expect therefore, that the future will disclose dangers. It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. The prosperous middle classes, who ruled the nineteenth century, placed an excessive value upon placidity of existence. They refused to face the necessities for social reform imposed by the new industrial system, and they are now refusing to face the necessities for intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge. The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilisation and security. In the immediate future there will be less security than in the immediate past, less stability. It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilisation. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.

Alfred North Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. Lowell Lectures, 1925. New York: The Macmillan company, 1925: 298-299.

… modernity is always citing primal history…. Ambiguity is the appearance of dialectic in images, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an image is presented by the arcades, which are house no less than street. Such an image is the prostitute — seller and sold in one.

Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006), p. 41.

You cross Europe, the continents, airplanes, faxes, telephones, courier to the four corners of the world…. One cannot sell the same merchandise all the time. One must invent, read, imagine. Because without that, they are not content; they say that you are taking them for fools. Or even declining. You know, Marie, she has nothing more to say. Fit for the trash can.

Insomuch as things go smoothly, there is a hostess (I see her, that’s her, I’m sure) or an assistant who comes to take you to the airport in a taxi. A half-hour at the hotel to refresh yourself. Sometimes it’s been a ten-hour nonstop flight, eh? A cocktail and dinner, then the conference and a drink. Or perhaps a cocktail and the conference, then the dinner. Everywhere the same, in all the cities of the world. Sometimes they are apprehensive, sometimes enthusiastic, or a little wicked. Sometimes, also, a real friend. You are always smiling, Marie, even if you are sweetly telling sinister stories in your talk…. It’s a small world, gestures of the hand, a brief sadness, the suitcases pass through the security checks. Hi, you’re Keiko? Thanks for coming to fetch me. Is Keiko a little stream of cultural capital, she too? Evidently…. The taxi speeds along like a missile through the highways and interchanges. A stream of capital. We arrive; I am going to have my half-hour. The room is on the 58th floor and everything works.

In the shower Marie remembers that their teacher explained to them that as for capital, it’s not only that time is money, but that money is time as well. It’s the good stream that arrives the quickest. An excellent stream arrives scarcely having left. On radio and on television they call that real time, or live time. But the best feeling is to anticipate the arrival of the stream, its ‘realization,’ before it arrives. That’s the currency of credit. That’s stockpiled time, for dispensing before real time. One gains time, one borrows it. You must buy a word processor. It’s incredible, the time one gains. But what about writing? You write more quickly, the page formats, notes, corrections, you see?

Poor Maris, you’ll never get rich, you love scribbling on your paper, too bad. You are a little, sluggish stream. You will be submerged by faster little streams of expeditious culture…. true streams are subterranean; they flow slowly beneath the earth, they make sheets of water and springs. One doesn’t know where they are going to exit. And their speed is unknown. How would I like to be a subterranean pocket of black water, cold and immobile.

– Excerpt from “Marie in Japan” by Jean-François Lyotard  (translated by David Palumbo-Liu) in Palumbo-Liu, David, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (eds.). Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 47-49.

Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographic kind.

– Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1907] (Dover: Mineola, N.Y., 1998),  p. 306.