Constant surface change and maximal standardization coexist as postmodernity’s core paradox

Evidence

[T]he paradox from which we must set forth,’ he argues in ‘Antimonies Of The Postmodern’, is the equivalence between an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything – feelings along with consumer goods, language along with built space – that would seem incompatible with such mutability… What then dawns is the realization that no society has ever been as standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogenously. … What we now begin to feel, therefore – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension – is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 121

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson’s temporal antinomy — unprecedented change rate fused with unprecedented standardization — is the chapter’s load-bearing concept, so worth preserving verbatim.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that hyper-change and total standardization are the same phenomenon — ‘nothing can change any longer’ precisely because everything changes — is a genuinely counterintuitive insight that resists quick digestion.
• CANDY: Elevator-ready paradox: ‘In a culture where everything changes, nothing can change anymore.’
• XREF: connects to: Modernism pursues the New substantively while postmodernism only clocks variations — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 8; Extreme postmodernism erases historical specificity into a millennia-old cultural constant — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 129

Related

• The demand for novelty paradoxically strengthens the conventions it appears to escape (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Modernism pursues the New substantively while postmodernism only clocks variations #corroborates (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 8
• Extreme postmodernism erases historical specificity into a millennia-old cultural constant #expands (0.72) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 129