Neohistorical explanation flattens history into raw material, stripping its causal function

Evidence

Neohistorical explanation thus leaves the new groups in place, does away with ontological forms of truth, and pays lip service to some more secular, ultimately determining, instance by anchoring its findings in the market rather than in the modifications of capitalism. The return to history everywhere remarked today demands closer scrutiny in the light of this “historical” perspective — only it is not a return exactly, seeming rather to mean incorporating the “raw material” of history and leaving its function out, a kind of flattening and appropriation (in the sense in which it has lately been said that neo-expressionist German artists today are lucky to have had Hitler). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 703

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines neohistorical explanation as distinct from real historical explanation — it uses history’s raw material but drops historical causality.
• XREF: Ties to the chapter’s core periodization project: history as style, echoing the belief that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing. — connects to: Reification colonizes even memory, annulling the emigré’s past as mere background data. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 42; Big Data is blind to the singular event that actually shapes history — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 176
• SEED: Could ground an essay diagnosing contemporary documentaries and biopics that mine ‘historical material’ (the Tudors, the 90s nostalgia wave) without any causal argument about why that period mattered.