Carolina QuotesIf we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life.
Fredric Jameson Carolinian
Source
Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
- work
- Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
- year
- 1991
Cite this record
“If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of t…” Fredric Jameson. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-456841B129. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/456841b129
More from Fredric Jameson
What "late" generally conveys is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.
Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature."
Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all.