Whatever happened to history? Cultural recycling and notions of the past since postmodernism

Abstract

Fredric Jameson diagnosed postmodernism as "the disappearance of a sense of history" (1985, p. 125), implying its inability to retain its own past. This chapter raises the question of the continuity of this particular understanding of our time, which was paradigmatic of postmodern cultural recycling as it was practised in the last few decades of the twentieth century. In the age of radicalised technological reproducibility, the phenomenon of cultural recycling is more ubiquitous than ever, but has it changed in quality? Against the backdrop of the above, I will discuss the extent to which Jameson's critique of postmodernism still captures the (post)digital present. In my thesis, cultural recycling in popular cultural forms is these days often conceived of as an ahistorical practice that hides its apparent "ideologyless" consumer ideology behind nostalgia and retro phenomena. Nonetheless, the potential of cultural recycling in digital spaces will also be identified. To this end, I will dedicate some reflections to the relation between the present and the historical past, as visualised in cyberspace. To support my perspective on the subject of cultural recycling and history, I will focus on the Instagram series @ ichbinsophiescholl as an example of contemporary cultural practices on the Internet that correspond to the theoretical concepts suggested above.