the ends and means of man and machine

The artist who clings to his impossible vision at least preserves that much of heaven among us; the mad realist who turns from that vision for the sake of another "practical" measure only takes us one step further into the hell of our alienation.

In a completely technicized world, there will be whole categories of men who will have no place at all, because universal adaptation will be required. Those who are adaptable will be so rigorously adapted that no play in the complex will be possible. The complete joining of man and machine will have the advantage, however, of making the adaptation painless. And it will assure the technical efficiency of the individuals who survive it.

Only by understanding body as machine do we give human beings their humanity.

While the art and literature of our time tell us with ever more desperation that the disease from which our age is dying is that of alienation, the sciences, in their relentless pursuit of objectivity, raise alienation to its apotheosis as our only means of achieving a valid relationship to reality.

We live in an age in which the avant-garde itself has been institutionalized and deprived of its old stimulus of a stubborn and insensate opposition. We have learned so well how to absorb novelty and that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition - ‘the tradition of the new.’ Yesterday’s avant-garde experiment is today’s chic, and tomorrow’s cliche.

As the result of the whole mechanical process, we cease to live in the multidimensional world of reality, the world that brings into play every aspect of the human personality, from its bony structure to its tenderest emotions: we have substituted for this, largely through mass production of graphic symbols - abetted indeed by a similar multiplication and reproduction of sounds - a secondhand world, a ghost-world, in which everyone lives a second-hand and derivative life.