Historicism means randomly cannibalizing all past styles, yielding the culture of the simulacrum

Evidence

This situation evidently determines what the architecture historians call “historicism,” namely, the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the “neo.” This omnipresence of pastiche is not incompatible with a certain humor, however, nor is it innocent of all passion: it is at the least compatible with addiction — with a whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudoevents and “spectacles” (the term of the situationists). It is for such objects that we may reserve Plato’s conception of the “simulacrum,” the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 79

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines historicism as random cannibalization of past styles and introduces Plato’s ‘simulacrum’ as the identical copy with no original.
• SEED: The ‘consumer’s appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself’ is a testable modern claim — Instagram’s retro filters and nostalgia fashion cycles could be modern examples.