Time & Perspective Quote by John Berger

Berger’s line lands like a bleak diagnosis of time itself: a culture that can’t imagine tomorrow and won’t remember yesterday is condemned to an eternal, chattering now. The first cut is philosophical. Post-modernism, in his telling, doesn’t merely “question grand narratives”; it hollows out the very idea that history points anywhere. If everything is pastiche, irony, and endlessly remixable surfaces, the future stops being a destination and becomes just another style choice.

Then Berger turns to the daily media as the second blade. News cycles don’t simply forget; they actively sever. Yesterday is not a foundation but a discarded tab, replaced by the next alert. That’s not neutral acceleration. It’s a structural amnesia that makes continuity feel quaint and context feel like a luxury good.

The kicker is the phrase “critical opinion is often orphaned.” Berger isn’t mourning manners; he’s describing how critique loses its parents: memory (the past) and projection (the future). Without those, opinion becomes reactive, personal-brand flavored, easily monetized and easily replaced. It can be loud but not rooted; indignant but not strategic.

Coming from Berger - an artist and critic shaped by Marxist humanism, attentive to how images train desire and how power edits perception - the intent is political as much as aesthetic. He’s warning that when culture collapses into an endless present, institutions win by default: people who can’t narrate their history can’t organize, and people who can’t picture a future can’t demand one.