Carolina QuotesIt seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.
Fredric Jameson Carolinian
Source
p. xii
- work
- The Seeds of Time (1994)
- year
- 1994
Cite this record
“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgo…” Fredric Jameson. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-BBB306B5C5. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/bbb306b5c5
More from Fredric Jameson
This matter of periodization is not , however, altogether alien to the signals given off by the expression "late capitalism," which is by now clearly identified as a kind of leftist logo which is ideologically and politically booby-trapped, so that the very act of using it constitutes tacit agreement about a whole range of essentially Marxian social and economic propositions the other side may be far from wanting to endorse. Capitalist was itself always a funny word in this sense: just using the word - otherwise a neutral enough designation for an economic social system on whose properties all sides agree - seemed to position you in a vaguely critical suspicious, if not outright socialist stance: only committed right wing ideologues and full-throated apologists also use it with the same relish.
The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in utopian or essential fashion.
If 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.