Nostalgia Traps: Politics, Commodities and their Seductions

Modernity, Politics and History

A central reference point in the literature of nostalgia comes from the work of Svetlana Boym, who was a Harvard professor and literary critic. In her 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia, Boym was less interested in nostalgia as an individual sickness than with its broader features as a “symptom of our age.”[1]  She makes a few central arguments about the connection between nostalgia and the modern human condition worth unpacking. Her inquiry is particularly rich for how it unveils, with beauty and precision, the complexities and ambiguities of collective nostalgia.

First and foremost, despite what many may think, nostalgia is not “anti-modern.” Nostalgia and progress often appear to double one another or to work as mirror images of one another, but in figurative terms are better linked to the likes of Jekyll and Hyde. If follows that “[n]ostalgia, like progress, is dependent on the modern conception of unrepeatable and irreversible time.”[2] Though nostalgia is often thought of as a yearning for a place, Boym argues that it is instead a rebellion against the modern idea of time itself: “The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time as space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”[3] [4] Although traditionally nostalgia is thought of retrospectively, Boym does not want to ignore the ways nostalgia can defy our ordinary temporal and spatial understanding. In fact, she argues that, suffocated by the established confines of time and space, nostalgia sometimes moves sideways. Nostalgia doesn’t always play by societal rules or norms.

This resistance to the straightforward or linear, and the push to function outside of space and time can shed new light on our understanding of nostalgia.  Boym unpacks the possibility of this form of nostalgia through a critical reflective tradition called the “off-modern. The “off-modern” considers the condition, but in a way that operates off the beaten path, allowing us to “explore side-shadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress.”[5] Off-modern artists, then, attempted to illustrate their conception of modernity with temporal ambivalence and cultural contradictions. This only highlighted their deep frustration and anguish with traditional, linear understandings of time, “In this version of modernity, affection and reflection are not mutually exclusive but reciprocally illuminating, even when the tension remains unresolved and longing incurable.”[6] The off-moderns utilized nostalgia both as a tool for their own creativity and a window to reconcile and comprehend their inability to return home. Not surprisingly, for many of the people involved in this off-modern culture, exploring these tensions also meant living them:

Among the off-modern artists there are many exiles, including Igor Stravinsky, Walter Benjamin, Julio Cortazar, Georges Perec, Milan Kundera, Ilya Kabakov, Vladimir Nabokov, who never returned to their homeland, as well as some of the most sedentary artists, such as the American Joseph Cornell, who never traveled but always dreamed of exile. For them, an off-modern outlook was not only an artistic credo but a lifestyle and a worldview. The off-modernists mediate between modernists and postmodernists, frustrating the scholars.[7]

Boym resonates with the off-modern desire to dwell in the ambiguous, open-ended spaces of non-conformity.  She wants to set nostalgia free, so is unimpressed or unconvinced by those thinkers who tried to establish any sort of a cure or solution to nostalgia, somehow nailing it down. For Boym, “Nostalgia remains unsystematic and un-synthesizable; it seduces rather than convinces.”[8] Nostalgia, for her, is not something that colors within the lines or fits neatly into any sort of interpretative box—it is a uniquely historical emotion that functions as a mediator between collective and individual memory. Philosophical and poetic interpretations too often depict nostalgia outside the realm of history. Thus,

Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.[9]

While Boym recognizes the depth of nostalgia’s operations in the gray, she nevertheless offers a typology, considering two foundational forms of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. These forms can be particularly useful especially when trying to understand the roots of more mainstream nostalgia, or the nostalgia characteristic of the contemporary world. Restorative nostalgia “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home.”[10] She describes it as a desire to protect absolute truth and tradition. If this form of nostalgia is more interested in nostos (the return home) then the other main type of nostalgia, the reflective form, is more interested in álgos (the longing). While restorative nostalgia seeks to restore and protect the absolute truth, reflective nostalgia calls that supposed truth into question. Her words are helpful here, “If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and specialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and demoralizes space.”[11] In a fascinating turn, Boym prioritizes the reflective form of nostalgia and warn us from falling into the trap of the restorative. Boym seems perfectly fine with us acknowledging the universal “mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility” so long as we don’t believe in an objective shared experience of “returning home.” This relates directly to problems of political or historical nostalgia, which she is quick to critique: “The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill.”[12] While as human beings we can all share in álgos (longing) we can easily be divided over the concept of nóstos (the return home).

Commodified Nostalgia, Tourists, and Traps

Boym’s concerns come to light especially in her account of the relationship between history and nostalgia. Nostalgia can shed light on unrealized possibilities. Yet it can also romanticize violence and disguise horror. We see how this controversy plays out in the battlefield tourism industry:

Civil War battlefields have been turned into nostalgic sites where history might be buried but the “experience of battle” can be thoroughly recreated. The attention to detail is great: every element of the uniforms and type of gun is catalogued with utter precision, to make the experience of the battle “as real as possible.” Everything short of killing.[13]

 

Nostalgia and history often overlap when something is worth selling. Boym contends that Eastern and Western traditions differ when it comes to the commodification of nostalgia, “Whereas the objects of past regimes were carefully purged from sight in Eastern Europe as well as in China and Southeast Asia (an oblivion enforced by destruction), in the West objects of the past are everywhere for sale. ”[14]  Commercialized nostalgia, like all other forms of nostalgia for Boym, directly depends on time. When we step into a gift shop on a Civil War battlefield, the goal is often to trick us into missing something we never even lost. In this way, time itself becomes money. The past dissolves into the present, such that “[t]he present costs as much as the past. Transience itself is commodified in passing.”[15] This form of nostalgia is unique because it doesn’t the require the consumer to have the element of lived experience or collective historical memory to feel nostalgic. One could argue that gift shop marketing strategies involve something entirely different from nostalgia. Yet there still seems to be something worth exploring in the possibility of nostalgia for an historical era or event that one has never belonged to or even been a part of. If one buys World War II memorabilia or some other sort of historically commodified product owing to feelings of nostalgia, is there a measure of truth to that longing? Or, does the tourist merely fall into the trap, as it were, having been tricked into missing something they had never even lost?

There is no shortage of literature concerning the relationship between capitalism, commodity, and nostalgia. Just as we can witness various manipulations of nostalgia for political and historical purposes, nostalgia forms an intimate part of contemporary consumer experience. S.D. Chrostowska makes the argument that “to capitalize on nostalgia is to profit from the sale of such memories on the premise that they are reproducible and transferrable, and, in ideological terms, that emotions, no matter how manipulated, retain their naturalness and remain a counterweight to materialism.”[16] This is troubling because commodified nostalgia tricks one into thinking that the past we long for can be recovered. Chrostowska argues this is not the case, because,

The logic of nostalgia dictates that nothing can really be recovered, only re-collected, re-imagined. But nostalgia collaborating with capitalism has this message to convey: with a little ingenuity and investment, we, as a society of individualists, can regain desired aspects of the past. Such verisimilitude rejects the historical integrity of the original. What was strange transitions as exotic or quaint toward assimilation into the superficially familiar. The more distant a past, the better it can serve as a playground for the commercially bound imagination.[17]

Here we begin to see more clearly how commodified nostalgia manipulates the consumer, making a product more marketable. By converting a society or individual’s nostalgia for a past time or moment into a commodity, any degree of authenticity coming from the history itself is stripped away because the product sells the illusion that one could recreate something original. If we typically think of nostalgia in relation to one’s own past, this sort of commercialized historical nostalgia might strike us as odd. For Chrostowska, nostalgia involves a strong desire to revel in unexplored possibilities or lost experiences. With this depiction of nostalgia, it makes sense that we could have nostalgia for a time we were not a part of, “a past exerts a pull on us because it is an open door to (real and imagined) possibilities- or in the case of a past we either were not alive or have not lived to see, to historical realia that to us nonetheless signify the unexplored, that since have become defunct.”[18] There seems to be something rather seductive about imagining not a return to a physical home but to a time when we stood on the threshold of possibilities, the moment before certain decisions were made. For Boym and Chrostowksa, we can fall prey to the intoxicating mode of pondering what life could have been in terms of missed opportunities or if different choices had been made.

The confluence of nostalgia and capitalism infects as it affects. Historicist delights and privations determine the price of longing for the past and continually expand the possibilities of its manufacture. Nostalgic fulfillment, no matter how elaborate, is by design provisional, since unfulfillment-the addiction behind the addiction-becomes infinitely more desirable. I consume out of curiosity, boredom or envy, and it is what/ how I consume that, as if by chance, consumes me by opening onto a new lack, expressed as nostalgia for a past gratuitously laid bare or gestured to. The pined-for past holds out against our desirous inroads. It is this ineluctable logic so vital to nostalgia that capitalist praxis perverts.[19]

Both of the accounts that have been explored are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to discussions about the phenomenon of nostalgia in contemporary context. While they both offer insightful and original contributions to the conversation, they neglect to offer any sort of psychologically satisfying solution to the reader. Though their investigations are not entirely pessimistic, both clearly reject any sort of proposition where nostalgia might serve as a helpful tool for human wellbeing. There is no denying that nostalgia can be manipulated in problematic ways: whether it be in a capitalistic sense or when used to justify the resurrection of past ideals or controversial practices of one’s homeland. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that these concerns arise from only a sampling of the many avenues for thinking about nostalgia, in and among its kaleidoscope of side streets and unfulfilled longings.

[1] Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. 2001. 58.

[2] Ibid. 64.

[3] Ibid. 27.

[4] It is interesting to note the way Immanuel Kant’s interpretation of nostalgia acted as a foreshadowing of Boym’s position who commented around 1798 that those who did return home were usually disappointed “because, in fact, they did not want to return to a place, but to a time, a time of youth. Time, unlike space, cannot be returned to—ever; time is irreversible. And nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact.” (19)

[5] Ibid. 27.

[6] Ibid. 104.

[7] Ibid. 105.

[8] Ibid. 15.

[9] Ibid. 14.

[10] Ibid 30.

[11] Ibid. 150.

[12] Ibid. 25.

[13] Ibid. 122.

[14] Ibid. 123.

[15] Ibid. 124.

[16] Chrostowska, S.D. “Consumed by Nostalgia?”, The John Hopkins University Press. 53.

[17] Ibid. 54.

[18] Ibid. 55.

[19] Ibid. 52-53.