I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.
I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to another.
The media is the message. It carries the full intention and the meaning. Once you change it...it's very disturbing.
Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
Democritus said, words are but the shadows of actions.
There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.
A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.
Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.
The human body is always treated as an image of society.
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
All our knowledge is symbolic.
Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.
The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.
In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?
It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.
Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.
The sign for which I forge an image has no value if it doesn't harmonize with other signs, which I must determine in the course of my invention and which are completely peculiar to it.
