Temporal recovery and prescience or preknowldge clearly belong to the realm of imagined time, for they brazenly threaten to disobey the unidirectional structure of successive or linear time. It goes without saying that the acts of fantasizing recovery or preknowledge belong to what becomes an expanded sense of nowness. Fantasizing trascends mere temporal imagining, for the processes of recall and expectation are transformed and accelerated into momentary wish fulfillment.

Figuratively speaking, fantasizing and imagining may be thought of as running in opposite directions along the same spatial plane. Apparently restrained by the objective mold of chronological succession, imagining in the form of recall returns the experience to the present while fantasy of recovery “succeeds” in “transporting” us to the “time” of the original experience. Expectation on the other hand, “projects” outward our feelings, hopes, and dreams as bolts of content to fill the emptiness of future while fantasies of preknowledge barely “succeed” in bringing to us, through subjective prematureness, an elaborated interpretation of a now replete future.

What is art? —That which is common to all the arts. —But what do they have in common? —This (or especially this): their products invariably lend themselves to value judgements which stem from Aesthetics.

This reply, usually tacit but invariably understood, cannot, however, repress a further question, this time a rhetorical or an ironic one: and what does not lend itself to such judgements? The consensus omnium, acquired during the last two hundred years, can do no more than at best to mark an initial approach to the desired definition.

If there is an obvious fact for the observant it is the proliferation of studies or popular writings on the history of Africa. The past of this continent has been abundantly assessed. And still, it is a long time since Egypt, who produced one of the oldest, one of the most dazzling civilizations of all time, has been known as being situated in Africa; but actually the renewal of interest does not concern that Africa, it concerns the interior, that which qualifies it to be called the “dark” continent. The non-Mediterranean Africa is the most studied, Why? First, because its peoples are in the process of liberating themselves. They are searching for their identity. They are trying, not without difficulty, to reassemble the scattered elements of their personality of which the past is one of the most important facts. Their history, which, up to now was only considered and studied as an appendix, like a piece of the history of another country, is being understood more and more from the point of view of an autonomy.

At the termination of the First World War a new social order arose which has been labelled mass society. Mass society gained impetus during and as a result of the Civil War and increased momentum during the First World War.

It was especially in the United States, but also in Great Britain, France, Northern Italy, the Low Countries, Northern European countries and Japan that mass society and its culture made its first appearance. Some of its features have begun to appear in Eastern and Central Europe, and, in an incipient way, in the Asian and African countries.

It is not as easy as one thinks to define the new dimension created by science in the life of modern societies; a considerable number of prejudices, resulting from conceptions which are often directly inspired by science itself, produce an unsuspected degree of resistance in this respect. Our only means of overcoming them seems to lie in isolating the real implications of the current scientific revolution, in breaking with the clichés which ensnare us, in becoming aware that research plays a very different part from the one that the preceding generation saw fit to attribute to it, so much so that one of the great barriers erected between art and science dissolves. Thus the hope placed by Gyorgy Kepes in “a new awareness of the interdependence of knowledge and feeling,” in “the links between the intrinsic characteristics of natural and artistic forms” would be justified, together with the efforts of such men as Buckminster Fuller to erect “a bridge between our conception of the constitutive principles of nature and the application of this knowledge to the creation of man-made forms,” and with the will to “renew the ancient marriage of art and science.”

The relationship between social science and television has been an uncomfortable one. So “conspicuously vulgar,” so “manifestly tempting,” so “clearly a waste of time,” television's “evil effects” have been pondered by social scientists ever since the first antennas were raised on the rooftops of America and Western Europe.

Sheer quantity provides perhaps the leading cause for the concern. Much as uncontrolled births, “the problem of overpopulation,” serves as fulcrum for concern with “underdeveloped” countries and as epitome for the difficulties associated with raising levels of living, so uncontrolled television viewing, the problem of over-viewing, serves as fulcrum for concern with modern societies and as epitome for the difficulties associated with improving styles of life.