“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.”