Tracing common origins has ceased to be a temporal operation

Evidence

What I want to argue is that the tracing of such common “origins” — henceforth evidently indispensable for what we normally think of as concrete historical understanding — is no longer exactly a temporal or a genealogical operation in the sense of older logics of historicity or causality. The “solution” to a juxtaposition — Alaska, Lebanon — that is not yet even a puzzle until it is solved — Nasser and Suez! — no longer opens up historiographic deep space or perspectival temporality of the type of a Michelet or a Spengler: it lights up like a nodal circuit in a slot machine (and thus foreshadows a computer-game historiography of the future even more alarming). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 797

Categorization

• DEFINE: Specifies the claim that historical understanding has been respatialized — the core periodization move applied to historiography itself.
• XREF: Foreshadows computer-game historiography — connects to current debates about digital media collapsing narrative time; also resonates with the reader’s falsifiability push since Jameson makes a predictive claim about future historiography.