The experience and the value of perpetual change thereby comes to govern language and feelings, fully as much as as the buildings and the garments of this particular society, to the point at which even the relative meaning allowed by uneven development (or "nonsynchronous synchronicity") is no longer comprehensible, and the supreme value of the New and of innovation, as both modernism and modernization grasped it, fades away against a steady stream of momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless.

What then dawns is the realization that no society has ever been so standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social, and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogeneously. [...]

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 that henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing can change any longer. [...] The persistence of the Same through absolute Difference – the same street with different buildings, the same culture through momentous new sheddings of skin – discredits change, since henceforth the only conceivable radical change would consist in putting an end to change itself.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 17-18