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“Always historicize” is a good, deep slogan for cultural diagnosis on the left, but it tells us very little about what to do once the test results are in. This weakness was less significant in the 1980s, when Fredric Jameson formulated the slogan, than it is today. For the last generation or so, much artistic, literary, and cultural criticism has contented itself with “historicizing” in the simplified sense of “writing history.”
“Always historicize!”, exclaims Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, although to tell the truth I actually tracked down where the quote came from on his Wikipedia page.1 It sounds definitive, determinative, orthodoxly Marxist, until one reads the book carefully and realizes that he is in fact suggesting the opposite: that at the end of this process of “historicization” we will discover what it is about the work of art that cannot be historicized, cannot be explained by history, that remains outside of its designated time and place.
Perhaps because I began the study of literature and visual art with the illuminated books of William Blake, I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of anachronism. Was Blake a throwback, a medieval monk creating hand-made illustrated poems in the age of the printing press?