The constructed image of the primitive past serves a hermeneutic, not historical, function

Evidence

Thus we measure, indeed for the first time we understand—in the strongest sense of the term—the quality of experience in our own culture and in our own moment of history by weighing it against this hypothetical reconstruction of a more primitive, a more natural and original past. The image of that past therefore serves, we may say, not so much a historical function (for such cultures have never existed), as rather a hermeneutic one. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 176

Categorization

• XREF: This is Jameson’s method of using a hypothetical reconstructed past as a comparative device — traces to Adorno’s negative dialectics and to the historicist comparison Benjamin criticized, yet Jameson repurposes it as dialectical. — connects to: Engels’s primitive-communism narrative secretly repeats the Eden-and-fall myth — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481; Sartre’s scarcity-based starting point restores a nightmarish, myth-free reading of primitive history — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481; Historical fiction offers a subjective interpretation rather than a photographic replica — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 766 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how this hermeneutic use of a fictional past differs from the ‘nostalgia’ of cultural heritage industries — is Jameson naming a criterion for legitimate historical memory?
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a past ‘such cultures have never existed’ can still do real cognitive work for us is dense and stays with you: the past as a thought-instrument rather than a fact.

Broader Connections

• Historical fiction offers a subjective interpretation rather than a photographic replica #expands (0.80) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 766
• Historical writing reflects the historian rather than the past #corroborates (0.80) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 301
• Comparing past and present through modern eyes merely compares two modern views #corroborates (0.75)