psychopathology of everyday life. In the age of the photograph, 
language takes on a graphic or iconic character, whose 
“meaning” belongs very little to the semantic universe, and not 
at all to the republic of letters.

     If we open a 1938 copy of Life , the pictures or postures 
then seen as normal now give a sharper sense of remote time 
than do objects of real antiquity. Small children now attach the 
phrase “the olden days” to yesterday’s hats and overshoes, so 
keenly are they attuned to the abrupt seasonal changes of 
visual posture in the world of fashions. But the basic experience 
here is one that most people feel for yesterday’s newspaper, 
than which nothing could be more drastically out of fashion. 
Jazz musicians express their distaste for recorded jazz by 
saying, “It is as stale as yesterday’s newspaper.”