On Matrices (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom." (Benjamin N Cardozo, Palko v. Connecticut, 1937) 

"Human experience in its immediacy, in its factual character, is like the liquid matrix before the crystal grows - unorganized, irregular, and largely bare of meaning. (Henry Margenau, "Open Vistas Philosophical Perspectives of Modern Science", 1961) 

"It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place... (Clifford D. Simak, "Time is the Simplest Thing", 1961)

"Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media, 1964)

"Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone." (Stanisław Lem, "The Cyberiad", 1965)

"Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result." (John K Galbraith, "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went", 1975)

"We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically. On the other hand, if we know that we are part of an open universe, and that our minds are a matrix of reality, we will live more creatively and powerfully." (Marilyn Ferguson, "The Aquarian Conspiracy", 1980)

"Thought is a matrix which engenders its own reality. The ideas, concepts, belief-systems that your ancestors trapped have become your trap." (Alfred A Attanasio, "Radix", 1981)

"Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination." (Judith Butler, "The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection", 1997)