RIP Fredric Jameson

 "The future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like." - Fredric Jameson, 2015

"The return to history everywhere remarked today… is not a return exactly, seeming rather to mean incorporating the 'raw material' of history and leaving its function out, a kind of flattening and appropriation"

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

"Randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles.... the 'historicism' of the new painting [enables] its secession from a genuine history or dialectic of stylistic evolution, 'frees' it to recover painting styles... as a sort of objet trouve... an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for all the styles and fashions of a dead past"

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991

"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

"[Spectrality is that which] makes the present waver: like the vibrations of a heat wave through which the massiveness of the object world--indeed of matter itself--now shimmers like a mirage.”--Fredric Jameson

retro-quotes #6868584 (the return)

"For stasis, as I intend the term, is not an absence of novelty and change — a total quiescence — but rather the absence of ordered sequential change. Like molecules rushing about haphazardly in a Brownian movement, a culture bustling with activity and change may nevertheless be static." 

from Leonard B. Meyer's 1967 book, Music, The Arts, and Ideas 

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #37


"... That's an anxiety it’s hard to not have if you're making art, or writing or making music. It seems more of an acknowledgement that everything is a reference to something else – that everything is an amalgam of references to a certain extent. Everything that you present is either a continuation of something that already exists, or it's a refusal. The problem - or the opportunity - is how you negotiate those choices"--Sam Riviere, poet, interviewed at the Quietus