i opened

i opened up the old, oh-so-important-for-me book again today:

I believe that since we now grasp social reality synchronically – in its strongest sense, which has lately been revealed as that of a spatial system – changes in daily life must henceforth be deduced after the fact rather than experienced. Bertrand Russell once evoked a very postmodern temporality in which the world itself, in fact freshly created only a second ago, was carefully “antiqued” in advance and deliberately endowed with the artificial traces of deep wear and age and use, so that it seemed to carry a past and a tradition within itself intrinsically (just as its human sbjects – as with Bladerunner’s androids – were furnished with seemingly private stocks of personal memory images.)… As for the future, it is equally absent from the synchronous mint world of the postmodern, whose entire system is, however – like the departure of the area’s only major factory – subject to reshuffling without warning, like a deck of fortune-telling cards that are real. 

– Jameson, Postmodernism: 349-5.

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