The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.

If everything were transparent, there would be no ideologies.

The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.

A further point is that, little by little, in the current universe, everything is slowly being named; nor does this have anything to do with the older Aristotelian universals in which the idea of a chair subsumes all its individual manifestations.

In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles... Contemporary or postmodernist art... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

The more worrying feature of the new global corporate structures is their capacity to devastate national labour markets by transferring their operations to cheaper locations overseas.