retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #33

"A gleaming science-fictional stasis in which appearances (simulacra) arise and decay ceaselessly…. The supreme value of the New and of innovation, as both modernism and modernization grasped it, fades away against a steady stream of momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless… Where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing can change any longer…. If absolute change in our society is best represented by the rapid turnover in storefronts…. it is crucial to distinguish between rhythms of change inherent to the system and programmed by it, and a change that replaces one entire system by another one altogether"

-- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991