Nostalgia
Nostalgia
Nostalgia
begin with a personal anecdote. But I shall ask you, the reader, to take an active role: I
should like you to pretend you are me and imagine your response to the following
situation. The time is a few years ago; you are in London, England. You have just that
hour submitted to your publisher the final version of the manuscript of a book on the
theory and politics of irony.1 In a celebratory mood, you walk into a bookstore. One of
the first things that catches your eye--for obvious and deeply personal reasons--is the
cover of an English magazine entitled The Modern Review. On it is pictured the
equivalent of a "no smoking" sign, but this time the barred red circle of forbiddenness
surrounds a pair of inverted commas, reinforcing the headline: "The End of Irony?
The Tragedy of the Post-Ironic Condition." You might be somewhat nonplussed: you
know you delivered the manuscript a bit later than you had promised--but you had not
really counted on the book being utterly out of date before it was even published.
Perhaps you might react as I did: you might quickly (and not a little nervously) turn to
the article inside on the commodification of irony by the very generation (the
"twentysomething" generation) that was said to be using irony as its only defence
against commodification.2 Depending on your temperament, you might think this
entire incident was uncannily odd or disturbingly interesting or downright irritating.
But stretch your imagination a little more and consider how you might then feel if, on
the same pages as this article about the end of irony, you found a companion article
about the seven types of (not ambiguity, but) nostalgia that were said to greet the "end
of irony."
Remember, you are me in this exercise of the imagination: and you have therefore
spent not a little time and energy over the last decade arguing that (at least what you
would like to call) the "postmodern" has little to do with nostalgia and much to do
with irony.3 The forces ranged against such a reading of postmodernism were
formidable in the extreme,4 but you have always been a little stubborn. Of course, you
have never denied that a lot of contemporary culture was indeed nostalgic: you cannot
close your eyes (and ears) to everything going on around you. But there was also lots
of irony--maybe too much irony--and that is what you have been trying to think
through for the last few years. But here was irony's end and nostalgia's proliferating
types sharing not only the same page, but the same popular culture examples. What's
worse, to believe the authors of these articles, the end of irony seemed actually to
necessitate this proliferation of nostalgia. Now (use your imagination) would you feel
some kind of challenge in all this? Would you feel that welcome (or unwelcome)
sense of unfinished business? Obviously, I did. I thought this issue of the magazine
was Destiny, Fate, ... and all those other capitalized monstrosities by which we excuse
our obsessions in life. And this essay represents my attempt to deal with this
unfinished business, to try to understand why I had earlier chosen to all but ignore the
nostalgic dimension of the postmodern in favour of the ironic. It cannot simply be put
down to the fact that I am utterly un-nostalgic, though that is a personality fault to
which I must admit. I am also relatively un-ironic (and I certainly miss many
ironies)--as countless colleagues and students over the years have learned, much to
their consternation and, no doubt, amusement. I simply believed irony to be more
complicated, more interesting, more "edgy" than nostalgia, and in so believing, I all
but ignored the very real and very uneasy tension between postmodern irony and
nostalgia today.
The specific cultural forms of the postmodern are not my only focus here, because I
also want to consider more broadly certain forms of contemporary culture, not all of
which can be considered complicitously critical and deconstructing--that is, not all of
them are postmodern. But it was postmodernism that brought the conjunction of irony
and nostalgia quite literally into the public eye through the forms of its architecture.
The early debates focussed precisely on that conjunction in response to postmodern
architecture's double-coding, its deliberate (if ironized) return to the history of the
humanly constructed environment.5 This return was in reaction to modern
architecture's ostentatious rejection of the past, including the past of the city's
historical fabric. The terms of the debate were basically as follows: was this
postmodern recalling of the past an example of a conservative--and therefore
nostalgic--escape to an idealized, simpler era of "real" community values? 6 Or did it
express, but through its ironic distance, a "genuine and legitimate dissatisfaction with
modernity and the unquestioned belief in ... perpetual modernization"? 7 The question
soon became: how is it that the same cultural entity could come to be interpreted
(apparently) so widely differently as to be seen as either ironic or nostalgic? Or as
both ironic and nostalgic?8 The American television series "All in the Family" was
one example of the latter conflation. Despite its allegedly progressive intent--what its
creators intended as ironic de-bunking--it seems that Archie Bunker was popular in
large segments of various populations because of the show's conservative, indeed
openly nostalgic, appeal to attitudes perhaps consciously denied but deeply felt. 9
In general cultural commentary in the mass media--as in the academy--irony and
nostalgia are both seen as key components of contemporary culture today.10 In the
1980s, it was irony that captured our attention most; in the 1990s, it appears to be
nostalgia that is holding sway. David Lowenthal has even asserted that, while
"[f]ormerly confined in time and place, nostalgia today engulfs the whole
past."11 Perhaps nostalgia is given surplus meaning and value at certain moments-millennial moments, like our own. Nostalgia, the media tell us, has become an
obsession of both mass culture and high art. And they may be right, though some
people feel the obsession is really the media's obsession.12 Yet, how else do you
account for the return of the fountain pen--as an object of consumer luxury--in the age
of the computer, when we have all but forgotten how to write?
The explanations offered for this kind of commercialized luxuriating in the culture of
the past have ranged from economic cynicism to moral superiority. They usually point
to a dissatisfaction with the culture of the present--something that is then either
applauded or condemned. Leading the applause, an apocalyptic George Steiner claims
that the decline in formal value systems in the West has left us with a "deep, unsettling
nostalgia for the absolute."13 And, I suspect more than one reader longs for a time (in
the idealized past) when knowledge--and its purveyors--had some purchase and
influence on what constituted value in society. But even on the less contentious level
of retro fashions or various other commercial nostalgias, it does appear that the
"derogatory word 'dated' seems to have vanished from our language." 14 It has been
taken over by "nostalgic," a word that has been used to signal both praise and blame.
But, however self-evident (on a common sense level) it may seem that an often
sentimentalized nostalgia is the very opposite of edgy irony, the postmodern debates'
conflation (or confusion) of the two should give us pause.
Before beginning to tackle this conflation, I need to lay out briefly the definitions of
my principal concepts and the terms of my argument. I have already defined my
particular usage of the term "postmodern"--which is not synonymous with the
contemporary, but which does have some mix of the complicitous and the critical at
its ambivalent core. And I am going to trust that readers will all have some sort of
sense of what "irony" means--either in its rhetorical or New Critical meanings or in its
more extended senses of situational irony or, with an historical dimension, of
"romantic" irony. What exactly is "nostalgia," though? Or perhaps the first question
really should be: what WAS nostalgia? With its Greek roots--nostos, meaning "to
return home" and algos, meaning "pain"--this word sounds so familiar to us that we
may forget that it is a relatively new word, as words go. It was coined in 1688 by a 19year old Swiss student in his medical dissertation as a sophisticated (or perhaps
pedantic) way to talk about a literally lethal kind of severe homesickness (of Swiss
mercenaries far from their mountainous home).15 This medical-pathological definition
of nostalgia allowed for a remedy: the return home, or sometimes merely the promise
of it. The experiencing and the attributing of a nostalgic response appeared well
before this, of course. Think of the psalmist's remembering of Zion while weeping by
the waters of Babylon. But the term itself seems to be culturally and historically
specific.16
This physical and emotional "upheaval ... related to the workings of memory"--an
upheaval that could and did kill, according to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
physicians--was seen as a "disorder of the imagination" from the start. 17 But by the
nineteenth century, a considerable semantic slippage had occurred, and the word
began to lose its purely medical meaning, 18 in part because the rise of pathologic
anatomy and bacteriology had simply made it less medically credible. Nostalgia then
became generalized,19 and by the twentieth century, it had begun to attract the interest
Lee Quinby calls "technological apocalypse." 29 If the future is cyberspace, then what
better way to soothe techno-peasant anxieties than to yearn for a Mont Blanc fountain
pen? But there is a rather obvious contradiction here: nostalgia requires the
availability of evidence of the past, 30and it is precisely the electronic and mechanical
reproduction of images of the past that plays such an important role in the structuring
of the nostalgic imagination today, furnishing it with the possibility of "compelling
vitality."31 Thanks to CD ROM technology and, before that, audio and video
reproduction, nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual memory or desire: it can be
fed forever by quick access to an infinitely recyclable past.
That original theory of nostalgia as a medical condition was developed in Europe "at
the time of the rise of the great cities when greatly improved means of transportation
made movements of the population much easier"; 32 in other words, you would be
more likely to be away from home and thus yearn for it. The postmodern version of
nostalgia may have been developed (in the West, at least) at the time when the rise of
information technology made us question not only (as Jean-Franois Lyotard told us
we must33) what would count as knowledge, but what would count as "the past" in
relation to the present. We have not lacked for critics who lament the decline of
historical memory in our postmodern times, often blaming the storage of memory in
data banks for our cultural amnesia, our inability to engage in active remembrance.
But, as Andreas Huyssen has convincingly argued, the contrary is just as likely to be
true. In his words: "The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is
sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen," making the
past simultaneous with the present in a new way.34
Nostalgia, however, does not simply repeat or duplicate memory. Susan Stewart's
provocative study, On Longing suggestively calls nostalgia a "social disease," defining
it as "the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition." 35 The argument is
that, denying or at least degrading the present as it is lived, nostalgia makes the
idealized (and therefore always absent) past into the site of immediacy, presence, and
authenticity. And here she approaches one of the major differences between nostalgia
and irony. Unlike the knowingness of irony--a mark of the fall from innocence, if ever
there was one--nostalgia is, in this way, "prelapsarian" and indeed utopian, says
Stewart.36 Few have ever accused irony (even satiric irony) of successfully reinstating
the authentic and the ideal.
Nostalgia has certainly not lacked for defenders, most of whom are
psychoanalytically-oriented.37 This is not surprising if you think of the significant
relationship psychoanalysis posits between identity and the personal psychic past
unearthed by memory. This relationship becomes the model for the link between
collective identity and memory for those who see a move to nostalgic transcendence
and authenticity as a positive move. As one person in this camp has put it: "Longing is
come together, usually with a certain critical edge. Likewise, nostalgia is not
something you "perceive" in an object; it is what you "feel" when two different
temporal moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry
considerable emotional weight. In both cases, it is the element of response--of active
participation, both intellectual and affective--that makes for the power.
Because people do not talk about this element of active attribution, the politics of both
irony and nostalgia are often written off as quietistic at best. But irony is what Hayden
White calls "transideological": it can be made to "happen" by (and to) anyone of any
political persuasion. And nostalgia too is transideological, despite the fact that many
would argue that, whether used by the right or the left, nostalgia is fundamentally
conservative in its praxis, for it wants to keep things as they were--or, more
accurately, as they are imagined to have been. 43 But, the nostalgia for an idealized
community in the past has been articulated by the ecology movement as often as by
fascism,44 by what Jean Baudrillard calls "[m]elancholy for societies without
power."45 From the seventeenth century on, nostalgia seems to have been connected to
the desire to return specifically to the homeland. In nineteenth-century Europe, that
homeland became articulated in terms of the nation state, and nostalgia began to take
on its associations with nationalism--and chauvinism. 46 Even its more innocentseeming forms--such as the preparing and eating of familiar foods by immigrant
groups--can be seen as a nostalgic enactment of ethnic group identity, a collective
disregarding, at least temporarily, of generational and other divisions. 47
One brave anthropologist has claimed that, unlike such searches for
ethnicity, feminism has "no tendency toward nostalgia, no illusion of a golden age in
the past."48 It has been suggested that this lack of nostalgic response is because
the narratives of nostalgia--from the Bible onward--are male stories, Oedipal stories
which are alienating to women (who usually remain at home like Penelope, while men
wander the world and risk getting homesick).49 And, in support of such a theory,
literary and film critics alike have located strains of a current antifeminist, nostalgic
retreat to the past in the face of the changes in culture brought about by the rise of
feminism.50 Humankind has not infrequently responded with a nostalgic defensive
retreat into the past when feeling threatened: for example, despite its forward-looking
ideology, the late nineteenth-century United States gave great new value to its
Colonial past--as an "exclusive WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] heritage"--in
part to combat the mass immigration that was accompanying industrialization and that
felt so new and so un-"American."51
The politics of nostalgia are not only national or gender politics, of course. Think of
the popularity in the 1980s of the David Lean film of Forster's A Passage to India or
of The Jewel and the Crown, the television adaptation of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet.
The intended anti-nostalgic expos of the corruption and exploitation of empire in
India may have been less the cause of their success than either a nostalgic liberalutopian hope that two races might have been able to live as equals--despite history--or
a nostalgic memory of the time when Britain was not a minor world power but, rather,
ruler of an empire upon which the sun never set. 52 This is what Renato Rosaldo calls
"imperial nostalgia," the kind that makes racial domination appear innocent through
elegance of manners.53 But, this nostalgia puts us, as viewers, into the same position
as the very agents of empire, for they too have documented at length their paradoxical
nostalgia for the cultures they had colonized--in other words, the ones they had
intentionally and forcefully altered. This is the nostalgia of those who believe in
"progress" and innovation, a nostalgia (again, paradoxically) for more simple, stable
worlds--such as those of the putatively static societies they destroyed.
Post-colonial critics have pointed to nostalgic moments in the history of the colonized,
too, however. To some, the "ngritude" move in African cultural theory, with its focus
on the pre-capitalist, pre-imperial past, was the sign of a nostalgic search for a lost
coherence.54 Many oppressed people--Holocaust survivors and North American First
Nations peoples among them--have had a strong and understandable nostalgia for
what is perceived as their once unified identity. But most often, the post-colonial
focus of attention has been on the nostalgia of the (usually) European colonizers, on
their sense of loss and mourning for the cultural unity and centrality they once
had.55 But, as Fredric Jameson has said, "a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic
pathos."56
Jameson's own attack on the postmodern is in itself worth examining in this context
because it is an attack on both its regressive nostalgia and its trivializing irony. One of
Jameson's main targets is what he calls the postmodern "nostalgia film"--a term that
he has used to refer to anything from George Lukas'sAmerican Graffiti to Laurence
Kasdan's Body Heat. These are what he calls "fashion-plate, historicist films" that
reveal "the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past." 57 To him, these are the
inauthentic, nostalgic "celebrations of the imaginary style of a real past" which he sees
as "something of a substitute for that older system of historical representation, indeed
as a virtual symptom-formation, a formal compensation for the enfeeblement of
historicity in our own time." 58 This medicalized psychoanalytic language--"symptomformation", "compensation"--is used quite deliberately by Jameson because he feels
that the postmodern taste for such films corresponds to certain needs in what he calls
"our present economic-psychic constitution." 59
But film theorist Anne Friedberg has pointed out that what Jameson is really
protesting here is the distanced relation of every film from its historical referent. In
other words, it is the medium and not postmodernism that gives the illusion of a
"perpetual present interminably recycled." 60 Or, as Derek Jarman put it when rewriting
Marlowe in his postmodern film version of Edward II, "[f]ilmed history is always a
misinterpretation. The past is the past, as you try to make material out of it, things slip
even further away."61 But, even if Jameson is wrong in where he puts the blame for the
nostalgia, what interests me is that, when he finds something nostalgic--be it in the
theorizing of the Frankfurt School or the novels of J.G. Ballard--nostalgia is meant to
be taken negatively as "regressive."62 Yet his own rhetoric and position can themselves
at times sound strangely nostalgic: in article after article in the 1980s, he repeatedly
yearned for what he called "genuine historicity" in the face of a postmodernism
which, in his words, was "an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of
our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way." 63 And yet, it is
precisely nostalgia for this kind of "lost authenticity" that has proved time and time
again to be paralyzing in terms of historical thinking. 64 Indeed Jameson's position has
been called both regressive and defeatist. 65 Is Jameson's implicit mythologizing and
idealizing of a more stable, pre-late-capitalist (that is, modernist) world not in itself
perhaps part of an aesthetics (or even politics) of nostalgia? If so, it is one he shares
with his Marxist predecessor, Georg Lukcs, for whom it was not modernism but
realism that constituted that implied "moment of plenitude" 66 in the past around which
literary historical nostalgia revolved.
Michael Brub has, in fact, suggested that the Left, in America at least, has at times
recently seemed paralyzed "by dreams of days when things were better." As he puts it:
"it was only the repeated interventions of women, ethnic minorities and variously
queer theorists that finally shattered the pernicious sense of nostalgia to which so
many men on the antipostmodern left fell victim." 67 Nostalgia can certainly be, in Tim
Reiss's strong terms, "functionally crippling."68 Jameson's preference for science
fiction over these period-recreation "nostalgia" films is a bit deceptive, for it simply
points to his orientation toward the very common futuristic dimension of an equally
nostalgic utopian drive.69 If the present is considered irredeemable, you can look
either back or forward. The nostalgic and utopian impulses share a common rejection
of the here and now.
It is not that the here and now, the present, does not have its problems, however. All
"presents" have always had their problems, but there is little doubt that there has been,
in the last few decades, a commercialization of nostalgia, especially in the mass
media, a commercialization that many have seen as a real evasion of contemporary
issues and problems.70 Ralph Lauren's "Safari" fashion and perfume line a few years
ago allowed us to experience the nostalgic style of an era without bearing any of its
historical costs; it also offered us, as one writer put it, "a chance to relive the days of
the tragically doomed upper class engaging in their white mischief on the plains of the
Serengeti"71--"living without boundaries", as the ads said. This is a combination of
commercial nostalgia--that teaches us to miss things we have never lost--and
"armchair nostalgia"--that exists without any lived experience of the yearned-for
time.72
Endnotes