Memory, temporality, the very thrill of the "modern" itself, the New, and innovation are thus all casualties of this process in which not only Mayer's residual ancien regime is obliterated but even classical bourgeois culture of the belle epoque is liquidated. Akira Asada's proposition is thus even more grimly profound than it is witty, that the usual figuration for the stages of capitalism (early, mature, late or advanced) is a misnomer that ought to be reversed: the earliest years now being designated as senile capitalism because it is still the affair of boring traditionalists from an older world; mature or adult capitalism would then retain its characterization, in order to reflect the coming into their own of the great robber barons and adventurers; whereas our own, hitherto late, period can henceforth be known as "infantile capitalism," inasmuch as everyone has been born into it, takes it for granted, and has never known anything else, the friction, resistance, effort of the earlier moments having given way to the free play of automation and the malleable fungibility of multiple consumer publics and markets: roller skates and multinationals, word processors and overnight unfamiliar postmodern downtown high rises.