The past becomes a collection of images, the referent effaced into texts

Evidence

The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time. The past is thereby itself modified: what was once, in the historical novel as Lukacs defines it, the organic genealogy of the bourgeois collective project -what is still, for the redemptive historiography of an E. P Thompson or of American “oral history,” for the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future — has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum. Guy Debord’s powerful slogan is now even more apt for the “prehistory” of a society bereft of all historicity, one whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles. In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as “referent” finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 80

Categorization

• DEFINE: Describes how the spatial logic of the simulacrum converts lived historical time into a photographic simulacrum, bracketing the referent.
• SEED: The claim that the past as referent is ‘effaced, leaving nothing but texts’ is exactly the sort of periodizing thesis the reader wants to test for falsifiability — what counter-examples would falsify it?
• XREF: Connects to poststructuralist linguistics (the ‘nothing but texts’ doctrine) — read against reader’s goal of mapping own position in the world system. — connects to: Reification colonizes even memory, annulling the emigré’s past as mere background data. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 42