In the first luminous quarter-hour of daylight, the Place Pierre-Joseph Redouté in the 16th arrondissement of Paris was given over to philosophical and mathematical speculation. The swallows skimming the wet rooftops said: What are numbers? The sky, growing paler, said: What is being when being becomes morning? What is “five,” asked the birds, apart from “five” swallows?

Much of what now passes for incisive analysis is actually nothing more than elaborate landscape, impressionistic, futuristic razzle-dazzle spewing forth in an endless stream of paperback non-books, media extravaganzas, and global village publicity. … The Postindustrial Society? The Technetronic Society? The Posthistoric Society? The Active Society? In an unconscious parody of the ancient belief that he who knows God’s secret name will have extraordinary powers, the idea seems to be that a stroke of nomenclature will bring light to the darkness. This does make for captivating book titles but little else.

The word cut makes me think about roads and highways cutting across the landscape. Flying over major urban areas you see the countryside, and then slowly it becomes more geometric, with roads carved into the land. By the time you get to Manhattan or another center, you see all these geometric stratifications, layers of cuts. The urban planner Robert Moses leveled much of the Bronx to build highway systems. He sliced through what were then different layers of class. Ghetto communities were much more affected by this road-building project than others were. That influenced how people viewed community, which affected hip-hop music. That’s one kind of cut. Another kind of cut is the film cut. For the early filmmakers, such as Georges Milieis and the Lumiere brothers, editing and being able to splice film was part of how to put scenes together. Related to this was the collage culture of Pablo Picasso and the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, who were juxtaposing phrases and pulling random elements together to make language poems. Then there is jazz’s layering and its radical juxtaposition of totally nonsequential riffs. Film cuts, literary cuts, sound cuts-each one reflected the culture itself.