Postmodern interest in the past functions as an in-group hobby, not genuine engagement

Evidence

What the past has to tell us is therefore little more than a matter of idle curiosity, and indeed our interest in it — fantastic genealogies, alternate histories! — comes to look a little like an in-group hobby or adoptive tourism, like the encyclopedic specialization in the late show or Pynchon’s interest in Malta. The salute to non-great-power languages or extinct provincial traditions is, of course, politically correct and a cultural spinoff of the micropolitical rhetoric discussed earlier. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 771

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s task of explaining pastiche vs parody — Jameson here characterizes the postmodern relation to history as tourism/hobby, which closely tracks his account of pastiche as imitation without parody’s critical bite. — connects to: Prestige seeking replaces genuine enjoyment in cultural consumption; Nostalgia operates as a civic practice enabling non-committal interaction — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 912; Deliberate trivialization of culture functions as passive nihilism under end-of-history conditions — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1207 (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Prestige seeking replaces genuine enjoyment in cultural consumption; Nostalgia operates as a civic practice enabling non-committal interaction — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 912; Deliberate trivialization of culture functions as passive nihilism under end-of-history conditions — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1207 (+1 more)