The recent past is the least accessible period to direct understanding

Evidence

In the old days, abstraction was surely one of the strategic ways in which phenomena, particularly historical phenomena, could be estranged and defamiliarized. When one is immersed in the immediate — the year-by-year experience of cultural and informational messages, of successive events, of urgent priorities -the abrupt distance afforded by an abstract concept, a more global characterization of the secret affinities between those apparently autonomous and unrelated domains, and of the rhythms and hidden sequences of things we normally remember only in isolation and one by one, is a unique resource, particularly since the history of the preceding few years is always what is least accessible to us. Historical reconstruction, then, the positing of global characterizations and hypotheses, the abstraction from the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of immediacy, was always a radical intervention in the here and now and the promise of resistance to its blind fatalities. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 856

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to why periodization as a cognitive strategy matters — reader wants to test whether the postmodern ‘cultural dominant’ is falsifiable; this passage frames global abstraction as itself an intervention, not a retreat. — connects to: For Bloch the present moment is structurally unknowable, a blind spot in experience
• SHARE: For a friend who works in media analysis — the point that the just-passed few years are the least legible to us is a sharp framing of why contemporaneous cultural commentary is so unreliable.