The Modalities of Nostalgia

Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley

Loughborough University

CS

abstract: Nostalgia has been viewed as the conceptual opposite of progress,

against which it is negatively viewed as reactionary, sentimental or melancholic.
It has been seen as a defeatist retreat from the present, and evidence of loss of
faith in the future. Nostalgia is certainly a response to the experience of loss
endemic in modernity and late modernity, but the authors argue that it has
numerous manifestations and cannot be reduced to a singular or absolute defi-
nition. Its meaning and significance are multiple, and so should be seen as accom-
modating progressive, even utopian impulses as well as regressive stances and
melancholic attitudes. Its contrarieties are evident in both vernacular and media
forms of remembering and historical reconstruction. The authors argue that these
contrarieties should be viewed as mutually constitutive, for it is in their interre-
lations that there arises the potential for sociological critique.

keywords: modalities ✦ modernity ✦ nostalgia

The temporal dichotomies of classical sociology asserted a severe, if not

complete rupture between modern and premodern societies, and were
largely weighted in favour of the present over the past in their theoriza-
tions of this radical historical transition. Assumptions of irreversible
rupture created an indisposition to attend in a more balanced way to
patterns of continuity across time, for change and movement away from
the past were the key issues of focus. Positive valuations of present over
past were based not only on views of the inevitability of linear progress
forward to an improved future, but were also supported by evolutionism
and historicism, and later by static functionalist paradigms and theories
of modernization. Belief in the inevitability of progress was bolstered in
its orientation to the future by the generation of its antithesis – a nostal-
gic yearning for the past – and yet, as the ideological components of the
dogma of progress have been steadily critiqued, it is notoriously difficult
to know where to turn for any viable alternative. We may look back on

Current Sociology ✦ November 2006 ✦ Vol 54(6): 919–941

© International Sociological Association
SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
DOI: 10.1177/0011392106068458

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the variety of different positions that were developed in response to the

abrupt social transitions experienced during modernity, ranging from
wholesale acceptance through gradual adjustment to either melancholy
over unchangeable forms of social malaise or arguments for further
radical change, but all of these seem flawed in some way or another, and
so not available for adoption without considerable change and revision.
In the face of this perturbation, we feel it useful to think again about
progress’s conceptual opposite. In being negatively othered as its binary
opposite, nostalgia became fixed in a determinate backwards-looking
stance. This not only closed down lines of active relation to the past, but
also valorized what was set up as its single, inescapable alternative, facil-
itated convenient versions of the past in favour of the present, and left
the stage free for only avowedly conservative reactions to modern times.
Nostalgia became associated with a defeatist attitude to present and
future, appearing tacitly to acquiesce in the temporal ruptures of
modernity by its very assumption of this attitude. Nostalgia was also
conceived as seeking to attain the unattainable, to satisfy the unsatisfi-
able. If a dogmatic belief in progress entailed an ardent longing for the
future, nostalgia as its paired inversion entailed only an ardent longing
for the past. It is, then, as if nostalgia arises only in compensation for a
loss of faith in progress, and for what is socially and culturally destroyed
in the name of progress.
In longing for what is lacking in a changed present, nostalgia for a lost
time clearly involves yearning for what is now not attainable, simply
because of the irreversibility of time; but to condemn nostalgia solely to
this position leaves unattended not only more general feelings of regret
for what time has brought, but also more general questions for how the
past may actively engage with the present and future. The temporal
emphasis in modernity has always been on relentless supersession and
movement beyond existing conditions and circumstances. This modernist
emphasis leaves no space, remedial or otherwise, for dealing with the
experience of loss. It is as if this experience, being negatively valued, has
simply to be overcome, regardless of the pain and pathos that may be
involved. The greatest temporal value in modernity is on what is tempor-
ary, and this disorientation from any sense of continuity or durability
increases our sense of ethical perturbation by cutting away the grounds
for active dialogue between past and present. All that is left is the nega-
tivity of nostalgia – as if, in the headlong tilt of time, all we can do is sigh
and lament. This suggests that we need either to reconfigure the concept
of nostalgia or move beyond it if we are to deal more adequately with the
experience of loss.
The experience of loss is endemic to living in modernity, regardless of
whatever version of it applies in any particular time or place. Whether

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through war, revolution or regime change, mass involuntary migration

and emigration, or less dramatically through social mobility or social rede-
velopment and the dispersion of existing communities built up over time,
change and attendant feelings of loss have altered how the past is seen
and considered. This cannot be subsumed entirely within a sense of
nostalgia, not least because feelings of loss are at times commingled with
a sense of social gain or liberation, or with efforts to regain what has been
lost in new ways that actively engage with the process or consequences
of change. Modernity has changed the very conception of loss along with
the compensations offered for it, such as nationalism or invented
traditions, but loss, lack and longing do not have any singular or absolute
condition in modernity. It follows that this is the case with nostalgia, since
nostalgia is the composite feeling of loss, lack and longing.
Rather than dismissing it as a concept, we should perhaps reconfigure
it in terms of a distinction between the desire to return to an earlier state
or idealized past, and the desire not to return but to recognize aspects of
the past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future. Nostalgia
can then be seen as not only a search for ontological security in the past,
but also as a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the
uncertainties of the present. This opens up a positive dimension in nostal-
gia, one associated with desire for engagement with difference, with aspi-
ration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lacking
in modernity. Nostalgia can be both melancholic and utopian.
It is vital that this distinction is not conceived as yet another sociologi-
cal dichotomy, for it is the way these two dimensions of nostalgia inform
each other, in any particular case, that is important. There are cases where
past-fixated melancholic reactions to the present prevail, and others where
utopian longings drift free of any actual ontological basis in the present;
but for us, in rethinking the concept, the key point of interest lies in the
mutually constitutive interrelations of both dimensions of nostalgia, since
it is there that the potential for sociological critique arises.
In this article, we develop our rethinking of nostalgia as a sociological
phenomenon by critically assessing how it has predominantly been
viewed, how it figures as a concept of temporality, and how in its media
forms it has been considered in the field of study now associated with
social memory.1

Nostalgic Assessments
The term nostalgia derives etymologically from the Greek nostos, meaning
to return home, and algia, meaning a painful condition (Davis, 1979: 1). It
was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofner, in the 17th century,
as a diagnostic label for what was then considered a disease with

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symptoms ranging from melancholia and weeping to anorexia and suicide.

The apparent disease was related to prolonged and usually involuntary
absences from home. Gradually, over the next two centuries, nostalgia
became semantically unmoored from its medical basis, subsequently
entering into both academic and popular vocabulary as a term referring
to ‘capriciously sentimental and variously commodified’ forms of the past
(Grainge, 2002: 20). By the time debate over the alleged condition and diag-
nostic uses of the term disappeared from medical discourse in the late 19th
century, its metaphorical application, associated with a sort of homesick-
ness for a lost past, had become its dominant meaning in ordinary
parlance. This involved a shift from spatial dislocation to temporal dislo-
cation, and the sense of feeling oneself a stranger in a new period that
contrasted negatively with an earlier time in which one felt, or imagined,
oneself at home. The metaphorical use was always aided by the multiple
crossovers of sense between people’s orientations to time–space coordi-
nates (as in the commonplace deixical uses of the phrases ‘here and now’
to denote the immediate present, and ‘distant past’ to denote the opposite
of temporal proximity) yet over time that which the term stood in for
became what was predominantly meant by the actual term itself.
Following this development, nostalgia has been used in many fields of
study as a critical tool to interrogate the articulation of the past in the
present, and in particular, to investigate sentimentally inflected mediated
representations of the past, perhaps most of all where there is an element
of commercial exploitation at stake. Deployment of the category in such
different academic domains as psychology, history and cultural studies
creates difficulties of application and reference within a coherent explana-
tory framework. Taking it at its simplest, as a specifically modern concept
nostalgia has been used to identify both a sense of personal loss and
longing for an idealized past, and a distorted public version of a particu-
lar historical period or a particular social formation in the past. In much
of the most recent work, nostalgia has been closely linked with the notion
of collective, social or cultural memory as a way of attempting to explain
how memories are generated, altered, shared and legitimated within
particular sociocultural environments, yet in both senses it is connected
with the characteristic features of modernity, such as its relentless social
uprooting and erosion of time-honoured stabilities, while both the
phenomenon itself and commentary on it have intensified proportionately
to the acceleration of social and cultural change during modernity and
late modernity.
Historical acceleration has created a new sense of time, involving what
Todd Gitlin has called ‘a new velocity of experience, a new vertigo’ (Gitlin,
1980: 233), which is in part associated with the construction and recon-
struction of events by the mass media.2 Nostalgia is a form of reaction to

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the velocity and vertigo of modern temporality. It rejects its insistently

positive valuation of the temporary and transient. In the face of this valu-
ation, a desire to imaginatively return to earlier times is then felt to corre-
late with an acute dissatisfaction with the present, and to involve an
attempt to recapture a putative continuity and coherence unavailable in
the fragmented modern or late modern environment (Smith, 1998; Lowen-
thal, 1989: 21). This is one side of the story. Nostalgia may also be seen as
seeking a viable alternative to the acceleration of historical time, one that
attempts a form of dialogue with the past and recognizes the value of
continuities in counterpart to what is fleeting, transitory and contingent.
Longing for an idealized past has been considered in two, quite
opposed ways. On the one hand, it can be viewed as potentially danger-
ous in that it closes down the transactional value of the past in the present
and results in various degrees of social amnesia (see e.g. Doane and
Hodges, 1987). There are various versions of this argument. For example,
in considering the difficulties of developing or relying on a nostalgic
relationship to the past, Svetlana Boym suggests that ‘nostalgia too easily
mates with banality, functioning not through stimulation, but by covering
up the pain of loss in order to give a specific form of homesickness and
to make homecoming available on request’ (Boym, 2001: 339). As such it
fails both historical knowledge and the historical imagination. For
Jameson, an active relation to the past has become almost impossible in
our contemporary condition, where we have lost a sense of historical
location and are locked into an endless succession of depthless presents
(Jameson, 1991; see also Huyssen, 1995). On the other hand, nostalgia can
be valued as potentially democratic, opening up new spaces for the articu-
lation of the past and acting as a mode of assimilating this to the rapidly
changing modern environment (see Baer, 2001; Davis, 1977). This differ-
ent form of valuation begins to acknowledge that nostalgia is not inher-
ently negative; there are other, more favourably inclined ways of
considering it. It may be ‘shamelessly exploited’ by those whom Jacques
Le Goff has called the ‘nostalgia-merchants’, but a broad public interest
in collective memory can also be seen as an expression of the fear of social
amnesia, even when this is ‘awkwardly expressed in the taste for the
fashions of earlier times’ (Le Goff, 1992: 95).
Nostalgia is centrally concerned with the concept of loss. Most of the
literature on nostalgia refers to a loss of memory or historicity (Baudrillard,
1994: 44). Jameson (1991: 281) suggests that nostalgia involves the priori-
tization of positive accounts of the past to the exclusion of less than
romantic aspects of experience. History may then have little or nothing to
do with its reality, while mediated representations of the ‘past’ may
hamper the development of historical awareness. Postmodernist and post-
structuralist accounts of nostalgia successfully problematize the mediated

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nature of contemporary understandings of the past and the tenuous links

they may have with historical realities and historical meanings. They also
generally recognize how the articulation of the past in the media is integral
to contemporary temporality. It is, however, too easy to see in this relation-
ship a narcissistic presentism, or a drastic loss of engagement with histori-
cal time. Rather than dismissing media representations of the past in this
way, we may derive from them a more complex understanding of relations
between time’s traces and historical reconstructions, including the possi-
bilities of irony and play in rethinking history and our various relation-
ships to it.
To conceive of nostalgia as the defining feature of an amnesiac culture
necessarily entails the degradation of social and cultural memory. Again,
this acknowledges only the negative components of nostalgia, confining
its identification to such mass cultural tendencies as surface style, stereo-
type, kitsch and pastiche. The critique of media nostalgia and retro
cultural activations of the past pays close attention to the politics of
historical representation, involving questions of relative meaning,
perspective and understanding as well as stratified forms of social remem-
bering. The problem is its analytical one-sidedness. Here there is more
than a passing resemblance to earlier forms of mass cultural criticism
where the media audience was homogenized and atomized at one and
the same time, so being stripped of active participation in everyday
historical consciousness. On the other hand, in examining how media
texts communicate versions of the past, we should avoid the postmod-
ernist mistake of bracketing all history with subjectivist relations to it and
intertextual representations of it (Hutcheon, 1989: 113–14). This assumes
that the past has no referents outside the circulation of textual represen-
tations, and that historical understanding is fatally compromised.
Concerns over the way in which the past is depicted, or efforts made to
ensure that opportunities exist for minority groups to have their experi-
ence and past represented, are then irrelevant and unnecessary. What is
lost is any sense of what is politically at stake outside the texts themselves.
Modernity is the experience of life lived in fragments, with the swift
pace of change and the problems of semiotic overload contributing to the
fragmentation of experience and our ability to assimilate it into an
ongoing life-process. This can create the sense of contemporary life
floating free from the past, becoming temporally unmoored and adrift.
There is nothing inevitable or absolute about this. It can be countered in
various ways. Relinkings of past and present can be sought after and
newly elevated symbolic importance may be attached to various forms of
time’s traces in the present. This has to be understood in terms of a cultural
paradox, for as David Chaney has pointed out, while ‘in the onrushing
progress of modernity there has been a simultaneous discarding of the

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past’, nevertheless ‘in all sorts of ways mementoes and survivals mark a
widespread concern for and sentimental treasuring of the past, of
personal, communal and national heritages running through so much of
everyday life’ (Chaney, 2002: 152). The cultural amnesia thesis sees only
one side of this and so doesn’t grasp it as a paradox. It can be summed
up by saying that the more the past appears to be discarded, the more is
its significance elevated in personal life and public culture. This signifi-
cance includes sentimental attachments to the past, but is certainly not
confined to them.
So we need to recognize the various ways in which people are involved
in putting the situated past into some form of narrative order for them-
selves, or in critically negotiating mediated representations of the past for
their relations to collective identities and experiences. In making this
point, we don’t mean to suggest that media consumption is always and
everywhere characterized by a critical response to forms of historical
representation. If one of the preconditions of nostalgia is dissatisfaction
with the present, this illuminates one of the ways in which non-critical
media representations of the past are legitimated, or at least allowed to
pass by uncontested. The rise of the mass media throughout modernity
has changed the face of public knowledge. In the contemporary period,
negative news and alarmist issues are disseminated with increasing speed
and scope within a culture of risk (Beck, 1999). The message may consist
of yet another poll showing a further loss of public confidence in the
integrity and credibility of politicians, yet another report of a further wave
of super-bugs such as MRSA set to devastate the civilian population, or
yet another account of a further rise in criminal violence and harm to
those who are socially most vulnerable, such as children and the elderly.
Contemporary media provide abundant sources of knowledge about
what people should worry about.
Uncertainty and insecurity in present circumstances create fertile
ground for a sentimental longing for the past, or for a past fondly recon-
structed out of selectively idealized features, and again the media help to
fill this ground even as, in other dimensions of their output, they serve
to undermine it. A representational cycle of negative present and positive
past promotes meanings made by means of opposition, contradistinction
and dichotomous contrast, rather than in terms of the more ambiguous,
unsettled and contested relations between past and present. The former
deny the past its transactional role in the present, while the latter serve
to open it up and allow it to be interrogated. Our point is that historical
meaning is popularly constructed and understood in both ways, at differ-
ent times and in different contexts, rather than just one or the other being
the mode in which nostalgic assessments of social and cultural change
are made.

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Historical Assessments
The distinction we have made is often mapped on to academic historical
practice. In How Societies Remember, Connerton (1989: 13) suggests that a
key aspect of historical work is its inferentiality. Through cross-question-
ing the evidence available to them, historians can extract ‘information
which it does not explicitly contain or even which is contrary to the overt
assertions contained in it’. They are ‘able to reject something explicitly
told them in their evidence and to substitute their own interpretation of
events in its place’. Through such critical practice, historians can remain
relatively independent from the bias of social memory in order to achieve
the most objective accounts of the past possible. What they may infer from
the historical evidence is then set in direct contrast with an affectively
appealing nostalgic relationship to the past and as such provides a set of
benchmarks for distinguishing between different articulations of the past
and different forms of historical representation. So, for instance, the
metonymic shortcut in popular iconography that can immediately evoke
a period and facilitate a nostalgic response (Marilyn Monroe holding
down her pleated skirt over an air vent, or Winston Churchill with his
trademark fat cigar, are two examples from the 1950s) can be compared
with the systematic reconstruction of a period, event or biography that
involves an awareness of the remaking of historical meaning and an
attempt to generate new historical knowledge, new combinations of such
knowledge or new interpretations of whatever knowledge is already
scholarly available.
This is a fairly conventional way of distinguishing between critical
historical practice and a sensual, nostalgic longing for the past, but we
should be careful not to polarize the two in a fixed scaling of orientations
to the past and to historical knowledge. It is not as if the historian is
immune to social memory or the force of iconic images, nor is it the case
that social memory or symbolic figuration consist entirely of nostalgic
appeals to the past. More importantly, nostalgia is not confined to trivi-
alized mass representations, or sentimentalized expressions of regret and
yearning for times past, as these may be found in historical tourism or
advertising culture. This point is central to our argument. Nostalgia is
more complex than that, and covers a range of ways of orienting to and
engaging with the past. Polarizing historical objectivity and nostalgia in
memory work as if they are respectively the cardinal virtue and sin of
historiography is to underwrite simplistic versions of the concept of
nostalgia, and provide a dubious means for maintaining the legitimacy
of history as an academic practice. Conventionally, this has produced a
hierarchical ranking of accounts in terms of trustworthiness, authenticity
and authority, with professional history at the apex and nostalgia at the

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base, regardless of whether this involves media historical representations

or vernacular forms of social remembering. These distinctions have been
called into question, and so should perhaps be reconceived as a
continuum, ‘with history at one end, nostalgia at the other and memory
as a bridge or transition between them’ (Cook, 2005: 3).
This seems appropriate because, as a criterion of historiographical
value, objectivity has been subject to extensive criticism. What seems more
workable than any strict notion of objectivity is the degree of critical ques-
tioning that is operative in any transactional engagement with the past
and with time’s traces as these have been searched out and gathered
together as part of the practice of historical reconstruction. This provides
us with a more satisfactory means of assessing the intellectual scope of
either academic or media history, and the extent to which it encourages
reflexive connections of past and present (see e.g. Nora, 1996). When that
scope is narrow or when, say, past and present are conceived in terms of
deterministic causal relations, historical representation can be said to
provide little alternative to banal forms of nostalgic longing.
We deliberately mention academic and media history alongside each
other because, for a variety of reasons, they are often counterposed. The
prejudices involved in this would repay critical attention in their own
right, but here we want to suggest that it is more fruitful to operate with
a broader notion of what it means to engage with the past in a produc-
tive and imaginative manner. Although not claiming that they are necess-
arily or invariably absent in mass-mediated treatments of the past, Baer
(2001: 492) suggests that ‘critical reflection and response’ are character-
istic of a significant relationship with the past. Engaging with the past
becomes significant when it involves seeing past and present as dialecti-
cally related and refusing the temptation to collapse them into each other.
This is where Jameson’s take on the concept of historicity is relevant, for
he claims that this allows a ‘perception of the present as history; that is a
relationship to the present which defamiliarises it and allows us that
distance from immediacy which is at length characterised as a historical
perspective’ (Jameson, 1991: 284). Historical engagement is thus about far
more than the writing of academic history. It is a way of engaging with
the past through which the present can be seen in the interrelated contexts
of past, present and future. It is contingent and fluid, open to scrutiny,
contestation and change but ultimately dependent on the maintenance of
a distance and distinction between past and present.
The importance of history outside the academy is acknowledged in
what has become known as the heritage debate (see e.g. Samuel, 1994;
Lowenthal, 1997), but the critics involved tend at times to rely implicitly
on the hierarchical ranking of history, memory and nostalgia and so fail
to get properly to grips with the complex set of processes involved in

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publicly representing, consuming and understanding the past (see e.g.

Hewison, 1987). The distinctions made in criticism of the ‘heritage
industry’ between nostalgia and history or nostalgia and authentic
memory are nowhere fully investigated or conceptualized, so making it
unclear how to differentiate between positive and negative representa-
tions of the past. Raphael Samuel’s (1994: 259) critique of what he terms
‘heritage baiting’ targeted a critical underestimation of, and lack of imag-
inative sympathy with, the way in which ‘heritage industry’ and its
diverse practices have democratized the past, or at least facilitated
progress towards this goal, even where this has appealed to nostalgic
sentiment. Although this is not to claim that Samuel provides a compre-
hensive account of the distinction between reductive and democratic uses
of the past, he does make the problems of nostalgia as a conceptual tool
evident through a contrast between popular negotiations of the past and
the intellectual presuppositions of the heritage critics. Despite a tendency
on his part towards cultural populism over critical engagement, Samuel’s
examination of the proliferation of local museums and the amateur
historian, archivist and oral history projects, serves to contest the claim
of left-wing critics that heritage is ideology through and through, and as
such inherently serves the interests of a bourgeois agenda which dimin-
ishes or glosses over the democratizing power of popular historical prac-
tices. Samuel’s contention that the widening of popular participation and
grassroots activity has opened up a plurality of interpretations, memories
and narratives of the past that were previously neglected or suppressed
in deference to dominant historical accounts, suggests that heritage critics
and postmodernists alike are totalizing in their commentary of late
modern interactions with the past. Behind their backs, nostalgia has arisen
to serve or stand in for a critical and subversive potential where other
resources seem lacking. Assessing this always remains difficult, but it is
nevertheless part of a continuum with history and not utterly divorced
from it.
This is why nostalgia is sometimes used as a critical tool in assessing
academic as well as popular history, because infusing our historical work
with some avowed preference, if not nostalgic longing, for a previous
mode of representing or engaging with the past, remains an abiding temp-
tation. Over 30 years ago, Leonore Davidoff warned fellow historians of
women’s history against catching historical heroines ‘in the amber of a
new feminist hagiology’, while more recently, in writing on feminist
fiction and social remembering, Gayle Green has been accused of falling
prey to nostalgic bias in seeking to revive a former age of active feminist
memory (Davidoff, 1974; Green, 1991; Tannock, 1995). Stuart Tannock
suggests that the only way to circumvent this trap is to acknowledge the
existence of multiple nostalgias – some productive and socially useful and

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others less so. This is exactly our point. Nostalgia is not all of a piece. It
is subject to circumstance, motivation and interests, and over both time
and space, to degree, variation and change.
It may seem that this entails conceiving of nostalgia in such a broad
way that the concept is in danger of losing any critical edge it may have
had. In our view the opposite is the case. It is not so much its lack of speci-
ficity that is the problem as the tendency to see it in a singular and deter-
ministic way. The problem is in not accepting and keeping in play its
multiple senses and manifestations. For example, it is sometimes assumed
that in applying the term to an audience’s ways of thinking and relating
to the past, it can likewise be applied to cultural texts, as if particular texts
are inevitably tied to specific responses. Polysemy is played down and
causal relationships inferred. Fred Davis (1979) can be cited as using
nostalgia interchangeably to refer to both the characteristics of media and
other cultural artefacts, and the temporal orientation and consumption
practices of media audiences. This conflates the workings of the media’s
relationship to the past and specific practices of media consumption. Post-
modernist conceptions of nostalgia also fall prey to an assumed relation-
ship between audience and text, suggesting that the reduction of meaning
via processes of media representation in passively accepted by the
audience, resulting in loss of meaning at the site of reception. An investi-
gation of the ways in which audiences may actively engage in the cultural
making of meaning is not considered. We need to investigate the inter-
action between different sites of meaning-making if we are to move nostal-
gia away from a nebulous characterization of a particular orientation to
the past, and engage instead with the distinct and specific ways in which
contemporary interaction with the past is enacted.

Media Assessments
Davis’s conception of the media production of nostalgia is centrally
concerned with the self-referential nature that mediated nostalgic remem-
bering involves. Rather than remembering experiences, we are more likely
to remember mediated experiences and as such, mediation of the past is
a process by which the media can fix and limit social memory (Davis,
1979: 130). Lynn Spigel (1995) highlights this in her study of the increas-
ing recycling of old television sit-coms. She suggests that the commercial
motivation and practices of their syndication have profound effects on
the narratives of the past available to people in the present and therefore
on their historically situated understanding of their own situation.
Despite problems arising from the implied division between her students’
media-informed temporal knowledge and her own, which is experien-
tially informed, politically inflected yet apparently unmediated, Spigel

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highlights the key role of television reruns in women’s sense of the past
and their notions of the 1950s as compared to the present.
This supports our case for analysing the ways in which uses of the past
in contemporary media contribute to a historical imagination. It is clearly
important to address an environment where the past is sensuously rather
than critically evoked, where the meanings available are juxtaposed and
jumbled rather than represented in an integrally cumulative way and
instantly to hand rather than represented through a process which itself
exists through time. In refusing the notion of an amnesiac culture where
the media treatment of the past is of no consequence as it has no histori-
cal meaning, the effects of processes of mediation need to be made central
to an examination of the media construction of the past. This involves
keeping the different senses and modalities of nostalgia in view of each
other, but the difficulty of this is exaggerated by lack of attention to how
it is diversely articulated. Where nostalgia primarily entails a relation
between the modern human subject and the past as this is temporally
mediated by cultural texts, there is surprisingly little attempt to discuss
the modes of representation and operation involved in the communication
of nostalgia. To return to Davis, the media are simply assumed by him to
use particular modes of representation that will ‘touch nostalgic “chords”
in the audience’ (Davis, 1979: 82). We may grant that nostalgia is a way of
thinking and feeling rather than being directly produced or constituted by
consuming nostalgic media texts, but there are nevertheless cultural arte-
facts that facilitate nostalgia as a way of feeling and thinking. Although
Davis’s analysis identifies a new way in which we relate to time and the
past in late modernity, he is vague about the specific ways in which this
operates. He fails to explain how the media elicit nostalgic responses,
assuming that what is really at issue are the pre-existing psychological
structures associated with such responses. Davis also fails to engage with
the mechanics of representing the past in a nostalgic way, so the question
of ‘what constitutes a nostalgic media text?’ goes unanswered.
Davis provides just one example. The general literature on nostalgia
offers little in accounting for why the media represent the past in particu-
lar ways, and this can leave the stage open for reductionist accounts.
Where the negative sense of nostalgia prevails, there is a tendency to
neglect the reciprocal relationship between audience and media in gener-
ating the conditions for making sense and meaning. When used as a
critical tool, nostalgia easily obscures these complex relations in the
meaning-making process, being presented instead as a unified concept
that claims to encompass the role of audience and text. Conceptually, the
term then lacks analytical purchase on the relationship between media
audiences and the production of texts and cannot adequately grapple with
the ways in which either media texts or media consumers are oriented to

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the past. Davis does at least attempt to develop a sociology of nostalgia

that suggests that nostalgia itself is socially useful, helping cultures adapt
to rapid change, as well as hampering a more developed historical under-
standing. Nostalgia is thus charged with limiting social memory yet being
necessary to it. This is helpful, at least in initiating acknowledgement of
productive or contestatory applications of nostalgia.
To the extent that nostalgia characteristic of western modernity testifies
to ‘the destabilisation of everyday life’, Patrick Wright has pointed to its
‘critical and subversive potential’ as well as its more obvious conserva-
tive or reactionary forms. This would for instance include ‘articulations
of cultural particularity’ in everyday historical consciousness that are not
represented in mainstream or dominant versions of the ‘national past’.
Such consciousness has its jingoistic expressions, but can also testify to
‘radical needs which – finding neither realisation in present everyday life
nor recognition in the complacent grandeur of official symbolism – may
still be reaching out to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a
moment of danger”’, as Walter Benjamin famously put it (Wright, 1985:
26). This helps us keep in view the politics of memory and representa-
tion. What Davis doesn’t acknowledge is that delimiting memory may
result in an inability to contest dominant nationalistic accounts of the past
by referring to and drawing on the situated experience of particular
groups or generations, whereas what Wright does acknowledge, in his
rewarding assessment of historical experience for those ‘living in an old
country’, is that issues of order and power cannot be divorced from ways
of relating to the past in either social memory or historical reconstruction.
More recent approaches to nostalgia in memory studies display rather
different shortcomings. Too often they suffer from a simplistic approach
to the media. Hoskins’s (2001) assumption that the media operate in a
similar way to individual or collective memory proves problematic as he
suggests that traumatic, negative or difficult memories are ‘repressed’.
Quite how ‘repression’ fits conceptually with the selective presentation,
reproduction and discarding of particular images of past or present
because of media assumptions about audiences and consumer tastes or
media values concerning cultural styles and fashions is left unexplored,
while the emphasis on ‘repression’ denies the role of the media in actively
forging memory across a social formation. In a more recent article,
Hoskins (2004) continues to overlook the plurality of audiences and differ-
ences between social, collective memory and media representations of the
past, as if coordinated, unified media generate homogeneous narratives
that circulate uncontested. Postmodernist theorists also simplify the role
of the media in representing the past, suggesting that decisions over repre-
sentation are dictated (rather than influenced) by what has previously
been used to represent an event or period. This is an ahistorical view of

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media representation since any sample of it is not made once-and-for-all

and simply recycled. If this were the case, historical meaning would
rapidly become totally derelict rather than being managed or limited by
representational practices. Postmodernist accounts effectively remove
agency or intent from representational practices. It is as if their associ-
ation with a supposedly redundant humanism irredeemably damns these
terms.
In attempting to develop a more sophisticated conceptual understand-
ing of nostalgia, at the very least we need to accept Paul Grainge’s (2002)
differentiation between nostalgia as a structure of feeling or affective and
experiential discourse and nostalgia as a commodified style or commod-
ified set of practices. He describes the former as the nostalgia mood and
the latter, the nostalgia mode. His notion of the nostalgia mode is reliant
on postmodernist notions of the contemporary representational environ-
ment. The claim that we inhabit a media landscape characterized by
hyper-reality, pastiche and repetition provides a useful perspective on
how the media represent the past from a restricted pool of textual repre-
sentations, thus highlighting the process by which media representation
of the past is often dependent on the use of an iconographic form of
communication. The coexistence of this with a nostalgia mood stops short
of the postmodern curtailment of audience agency, suggesting that modes
of representation are inextricably linked to meaning-making processes but
have the potential to limit rather than determine their outcome. This more
cautious and balanced account is helpful, but Grainge’s appropriation of
features of the postmodernist account of the contemporary media is not
unproblematic. In discussing nostalgia as a cultural style, he inherits some
of the difficulties of postmodernist claims of declining referentiality where
‘increasingly sophisticated media appropriate images from a diversity of
social and historical contexts’, so generating a ‘recombinant culture’ where
media texts are consumed on the basis of surface appearances, leading to
a complete loss of meaning (Harms and Dickens, 1996: 211). Although not
claiming a complete loss of meaning, Grainge asserts that, as an aesthetic
style of memory, monochrome representation defers a text’s content to its
evocation of a generalized feeling of pastness (Grainge, 2002: 59) This fails
to explain why particular images or texts are regularly used as symboli-
cally representative of a period, denies that this has any consequences for
historical meaning aside from generating an impalpable sense of the
quality of being past, and ignores questions of order and power raised in
the systematic manipulation of the way the past is represented. In his
reliance on these assumptions, Grainge’s notion of a nostalgia mode
cannot move beyond the circulation of images themselves in order to
explore their repercussions for social understandings of the past.
Although the differentiation between the affective nostalgia mood and

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the nostalgia mode as a commodified style or practice is a useful one,

there are at least potential difficulties with the distinction when the notion
of mode is conceptually based on the notion of form overriding content
as a site of textual meaning. Grainge concurs with Ien Ang’s (1996) rejec-
tion of totalizing postmodernist claims that cultural amnesia is a fait
accompli and so suggests a potential association between memory and the
nostalgia mood. He criticizes postmodernism, as we have, for failing to
recognize the agency of the audience by reducing them to an unthinking
collectivity who passively absorb the meanings communicated to them
via the media, thus denying them a role in meaning-making processes.
He goes on to claim that meaningful historical narratives can continue to
be produced ‘through the recycling and/or hybridisation of past styles’
(Grainge, 2002: 6). The suggestion that meaningful narratives can be made
from texts where the referent is semantically secondary to its stylistic
attributes elides the critical distinction between mediated and broader
forms of social remembering. The importance of aesthetic style cannot be
ignored as it is central to the potential temporal meanings of a text, but
to systematically foreground this overreferentiality as a locus of meaning
necessarily implies that a capacity to generate meaningful historical narra-
tives has been seriously compromised. Grainge is right to suggest that
among the multiples senses and applications of contemporary nostalgia
are those which are not only associated with feelings of loss for some
aspect or time of the past, but also those associated with retro markers of
taste or style in the present. The problem is that these tend to blur into
each other as Grainge gets his moods mixed up with his modes and runs
together consumption practices, lived experience and diverse public treat-
ments of the past. Whose historicity is waning here?

Conclusion
Over the course of the past century, nostalgia has become the bête noire
of cultural critics, sociologists and historians. We fully acknowledge that
nostalgia can delimit or diminish everyday historical consciousness as
well as undermining the credentials of historical narrative. It can
certainly operate ideologically or carry convenient ideological meanings,
as for instance when it acts as a sop to the ravages of progress. Renato
Rosaldo has written of imperialist nostalgia in this respect as ‘mourning
for what one has destroyed’, so that ‘putatively savage societies become
a stable reference point for defining (the felicitous progress of) civilised
identity’. He adds: ‘ “We” (who believe in progress) valorise innovation,
and then yearn for more stable worlds, whether these reside in our own
past, in other cultures, or in the conflation of the two’ (Rosaldo, 1993:
69). We endorse this point of criticism, and at the same time regard it as

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supporting our argument that the meanings of nostalgia are multiple

because culturally and historically specific. Nostalgia is neither an
absolute nor singularly universal phenomenon.
Jo Tacchi (2003) illustrates this point in citing Serematakis’s (1994) expli-
cation of the difference between the American notion of nostalgia, which
is characterized as trivializing romantic sentimentality, and the Greek
notion of nostalgia, which is understood as desire or longing with a
burning pain to journey (Tacchi, 2003: 287–8). Tacchi suggests that these
varying interpretations have different semantic consequences, where the
American understanding forecloses the possibility of the past having any
transformative role in the present while the Greek conception evokes a
range of bodily experiences to negotiate the past and as such allows the
past a transactional role in the present. The continued unqualified use of
a term laden with culturally specific meanings prevents a far-reaching and
transferable analysis of the mediation of the past.
We have seen how ‘heritage-baiting’ has relied on a hierarchical set of
historiographical distinctions. Our objection to this conceptual reliance is
not made in denial of the fact that constructions of national heritage are
commercially exploited, all the way from Disney’s Mainstreet USA to retro
fashion stylings, or of the ways in which, over the past 25 years, heritage
has been used ideologically in yoking imagined continuities to ruthless
neoconservative drives for economic change (see Corner and Harvey,
1991). Our criticism is directed against the relentless use of nostalgia as
history’s negativized Other. ‘Baiting’ may be the best term when it relies
on simplistic notions of capitalist manipulation, but obviously does not
apply tout court to the cultural critique of uses of the past in more general
terms. That is why we have found Patrick Wright’s analysis of heritage
sources of social nostalgia a much more compelling account than that
offered by Hewison, among others, for what he seeks to explain is their
popular appeal, in all their complexities and contradictions (see
McGuigan, 1996: 116–34). There remains, nonetheless, a constant tendency
to slide inexorably towards either cultural elitism or cultural populism in
critical assessments of nostalgia. In both cases an idealization is involved.
This tendency has a longer history than the ‘heritage debate’ itself. It has
been operative over the past century in the development of anthropology,
sociology and critical theory.
When the idealized past of premodern societies has been used socio-
logically in contrast to modern societies, what has often been invoked is
a mythical stability, unity and ontological security, so drawing on some
variant or other of Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft polarity, or any of
the other temporal dichotomies we mentioned at the outset. Either implic-
itly or explicitly, nostalgia has also been characteristic of elite criticisms
of mass culture where, again, a stark before/after historical scenario posits

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premodern art as having ‘an organic relationship to the community

expressing ritualistically its natural forms of production and social
relationships’ (Stauth and Turner, 1988: 510). The folk society paradigm
in anthropology and folk life studies relied on exactly such an assumed
organicism and in some cases supported an anti-modern reaction to so-
called mass culture in ways closely allied to Rosaldo’s ‘imperialist nostal-
gia’ (Pickering and Green, 1987). Georg Stauth and Bryan Turner have
shown how nostalgia paradigmatically informed the development of
German social theory from Marx to the Frankfurt School, and especially
the cultural critique of Theodor Adorno. To the extent that critical theory
and mass culture criticism relied on the dichotomy of ‘high’ and ‘low’
culture, they were both elitist and nostalgic, ‘looking backward towards
a period in history when there was a greater integration between life and
art, feeling and thought’ (Stauth and Turner, 1988: 518). Postmodernist
theory has involved the critical deconstruction of this dichotomy to the
extent that it is now unsustainable as the ground of aesthetic evaluation,
whether of popular culture or art music and the fine arts, none of which
in any case are unaffected by the cultural industries. Whether an egali-
tarian potential resides in cultural commodities and modern forms of
consumerism, since they are in principle open to all, remains debatable,
but it is certainly the case that ‘mass’ cultural critique is now constantly
beset with having to avoid an elitist disdain and nostalgic withdrawal,
seeing contemporary culture only through the distant lens of melancho-
lia. Some form of nostalgic pathos underpins many of the critical objec-
tions that have been levelled against new media, whether of the early 20th
or early 21st centuries.
As these examples show, nostalgia has never been the preserve of the
‘masses’ or the ‘cultural industries’. Nor can it be reduced to a final or
unitary definition, since its meanings and modalities are culturally and
historically variegated. It certainly cannot be confined to the Disneyfica-
tion of the past or to selective postmodernist pastiche, as in such nostal-
gia films as American Graffiti. Nostalgia is an easy commercial ploy,
whether it’s rock ’n’ roll, Christmas cards or TV programmes about the
Second World War that are being marketed. And no one is fully immune.
Even momentarily, we are all prey to nostalgia, particularly where a
vehicle of personal memory, such as a photograph of a dead parent or
lost lover, may touch us emotionally. Certain media of communication
and certain art forms may reach us more directly in this respect than
others. Since it can carry a powerful affective or sensuous charge, music
can act as the catalyst of moving surges of memory. By extension, music
also has a widespread association with an idealized lost past, and is
claimed to be ‘able to conjure forth the lost qualities and goods associ-
ated with it’ (Flinn, 1992: 89). Indeed, in cinematography it is music that

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has repeatedly borne the burden of nostalgia, functioning ‘as a sort of

conduit to connect listeners – and commentators – to an idealised past,
offering them the promise of a retrieval of lost utopian coherence’ (Flinn,
1992: 50). This utopian element can thus be present in many ‘mass’
cultural commodities, and not just in the reified ideals that the categories
of ‘folk’ or ‘art’ music have been made to carry. It is clear enough in the
composition of commercial film music, particularly that associated with
film noir and melodrama. Carol Flinn has suggested that the investment
of classical Hollywood film scores in 19th-century romanticism was part
of ‘a wider ideological nostalgia of the time’ that ‘seemed to provide an
escape from then current deficiencies, both real and perceived’, as well as
‘a source of restored plenitude and unity’. The historical irony in this is
that for late 19th-century romanticism, the model for integrity and
strength was found in Hellenic culture: ‘Like Hollywood’s interest in
romanticism, romanticism’s own interest in Hellenic totality can be under-
stood in terms of a desire to exceed contemporary experience, to get
beyond the sense of social, economic, and subjective fragmentation or
impotence’ (Flinn, 1992: 49–50).
It is not only irony that is at play in nostalgic enterprises and experi-
ences. Central to our argument has been that nostalgia can only be
properly conceptualized as a contradictory phenomenon, being driven by
utopian impulses – the desire for re-enchantment – as well as melancholic
responses to disenchantment. It is far too simplistic to call it ‘a flight from
the present’, as the philosopher Harry Moody described it (Moody, 1984:
161). Instead, it can be both negatively and positively charged, and so ‘can
be conceptualised as conveying a knowing and reflexive relationship with
the past, as a yearning for a better but irretrievable past, or, in more scep-
tical accounts, as emblematic of an engrossing but ultimately fabricated
approximation of the past’ (Drake, 2003: 190). Tony Blair’s accusation that
‘countries wrapped in nostalgia cannot build a strong future’ glosses only
its negative dimension (Sunday Times, 5 April 1998). Nostalgia in popular
culture doesn’t necessarily operate with the dichotomous before/after
scenario we have seen associated with classical sociology and critical
theory. More commonly, it is manifest in an ambiguous relation to the
past and present, as for instance in the music of migrants, where a sense
of loss associated with the past coexists with a sense of longing associ-
ated with the future. ‘Migrant music epitomises dream and nostalgia
combined’, one example being Portuguese fado and its expression of ‘a
sorrow that was almost hope’ (Connell and Gibson, 2003: 161–2).
Analytically, as we have been arguing, the term cannot be set off against
‘strong’ history (or a ‘strong future’) but must be reconceived in its
intimate connections to both historical practice and diverse forms of social
remembering, for ‘where history suppresses the element of disavowal or

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fantasy in its re-presentation of the past, nostalgia foregrounds those

elements, and in effect lays bare the processes at the heart of remem-
brance’. This may produce ‘knowledge and insight, even though these
may be of a different order from those produced by conventional histori-
cal analysis, and may be experienced in different ways’ (Cook, 2005: 4).
In this suitably nuanced estimation, rethinking nostalgia ‘may involve a
redrafting of the techniques and conventions of historical analysis to take
on board the dialectic between memory and history, holding together
objective analysis and subjective response in a productive tension’ (Cook,
2005: 17). This is close to our own position, which seeks a rapprochement
of history and memory and the fields of study associated with them. We
have suggested that rethinking nostalgia offers one way of taking on this
task, since it means overcoming the opposition between history and
memory just as much as it entails refusing to set off melancholia and
utopia against each other, as if they are locked in a duel to the death.
If the future doesn’t come into being through forgetting, through
denying or dismissing the past, especially when the present is judged to
be in some way deficient, the imperative concern is then with forward-
looking uses of the past, of the past as a set of resources for the future.
These have always to be critically negotiated and drawn upon, whatever
history is in the frame, but the equally critical identification is with what
has been passively or actively set aside and neglected in the present. For
example, the demands of certain subaltern groups for social justice and a
fairer future are fostered, at least in part, ‘by vigilantly returning to the
past, reinvestigating the past over and over again in order to find places
and moments of resistance to oppression that might open up a better
future’ (Oliver, 2001: 135). For many such groups, the past has long been
a locus of possibility and source of aspiration, of providing a way of imag-
ining ‘present impossibilities becoming possible in the future’, for ‘the
future opens into otherness only insofar as the past does too’ (Oliver, 2001:
136; see also Pickering, 1987 for one example utilizing popular song in
this way). When this reciprocal movement is operative, nostalgia becomes
an action rather than an attitude, showing how the politics of nostalgia
are realized in its applications rather than being inherent in the affective
phenomenon itself.
Nostalgia arises because of the divergence of experience and expec-
tation generated by modernity, but as we have argued throughout, it is
not a singular or fixed condition (Koselleck, 1985; Pickering, 2004). It is
not to be conceived as necessarily ‘the opposite of utopia, but, as a form
of memory, always implicated, even productive in it’, for, as Huyssen
reminds us, ‘it is the ideology of modernisation itself that has given nostal-
gia its bad name, and we do not need to abide by that judgement’
(Huyssen, 1995: 88). Nostalgia as retreat from the present and nostalgia

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as retrieval for the future are not mutually exclusive, any more than either
impulse is the preserve of dominant or subordinate groups. Retreat and
retrieval are elements in ‘every nostalgic vision’, and this ambivalence ‘is
worth keeping in mind when considering the many ways in which nostal-
gia has been institutionalised in Western societies’ (Tannock, 1995: 459).
The ability of nostalgia as a concept to historically locate relationships
with the past means that it is an invaluable tool in investigating the way
in which the media and other cultural institutions construct the past
according to the imperatives of modernity and late modernity, not as a
static, isolated system of representation but as part of a wider temporal
orientation whose characteristics are historically grounded and subject to
change over time. Nostalgia is a term that enables the relationship
between past and present to be conceived of as fragile and corruptible,
inherently dependent on how the resources of the past are made avail-
able, how those traces of what has been are mediated and circulated, and
how they are employed and deployed in the development of a relation-
ship between past and present. The acknowledgement of what is involved
in creating and sustaining a relationship between past and present makes
it possible for us to conceptualize nostalgia as a critical tool and distin-
guish between positive, productive, active uses of the past and those
which are sterile, impotent, non-transactional. The critical use of nostal-
gia has been centrally concerned with the emergence of a new way of
relating to the past in modernity that has generally, for various reasons,
been considered regressive. We hope to have shown that it can just as
feasibly be considered as progressive.

Notes
1. For a wide-ranging survey of the different academic contributions to this field,
see Olick and Robbins (1998).
2. See Smith (1998) for an overview of late modern temporality in connection
with nostalgia and Appadurai (1990) for a more general account of contem-
porary relations of time, space and culture.

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Biographical Note: Michael Pickering is reader in culture and communications

in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. He has
published in the areas of cultural studies and social history as well as media
analysis and theory. His books include Everyday Culture (1987, with T. Green);
History, Experience and Cultural Studies (1997); Researching Communications (1999);
Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (2001); Creativity, Communication and
Cultural Value (2004, with Keith Negus) and Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour

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 Pickering and Keightley The Modalities of Nostalgia

(2005, with Sharon Lockyer). He is currently writing a book on blackface

minstrelsy in Britain.
Address: Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Lough-
borough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK. [email: M.J.Pickering@lboro.ac.uk]

Biographical Note: Emily Keightley gained her undergraduate degree in media

and communication studies and her masters degree in media and cultural
analysis at Loughborough University. She is currently in her third year of
doctoral study, researching in the area of media and memory in modernity. Her
work is concerned particularly with women’s uses of the past and with how
women draw on both vernacular and media forms of social remembering and
historical reconstruction. She has previously written an article on photography
and phonography as technologies of memory, which has appeared in the
European Journal of Cultural Studies (Vol. 9[2], 2006).
Address: Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Lough-
borough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK. [email: E.Keightley@lboro.ac.uk]

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