S. D. Chrostowska. Consumed by Nostalgia

Consumed by Nostalgia?
Author(s): S. D. Chrostowska
Source: SubStance, Vol. 39, No. 2, Issue 122 (2010), pp. 52-70
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Consumed by Nostalgia?
S. D. Chrostowska
"Philosophy is essentially homesickness - the urge to be everywhere

at home/'1 This fragment, a "single gesture" of thought toward an object,2
is equally about philosophy and about nostalgia. If philosophy is the loss
of self (that very memento of loss), which it was for Novalis, then so is
the way home. If our struggles abroad, our self-preservation and self-
discovery, solidify our self, or multiply it as they did Odysseus' s, then
our homecoming is a flight into fluidity or else a shedding of selves. We
should arrive vulnerable, not ourselves, as if never having been exposed
to the tempest of the elements or confronted with alterity. The self is a
journey homeward, the homely return ever beyond the horizon.
The transformations to nostalgic experience over the last century,
particularly in the wake of two world wars, tell a dramatically different
story. As the affective landscape and everyday life of Western culture
were being reshaped, nostalgia - that erstwhile fulcrum of philosophy -
began to change course, increasingly bound to the flow of capital. With
the emergence of consumerism, utopias of newness and dictatorships of
speed, nostalgia "as it once was" became a reactionary vice and risked
obsolescence. Capitalism, however, saw nostalgia's potential for profit
and, channeling it now into its waters, gave it unprecedented currency.
We face questions about a belatedly "new," late-modern nostalgia, ques-
tions we nonetheless still struggle to formulate. With affect bound for
world capital, is nostalgia the last intervening station? How was this itinerary
conceived? When did we depart? And can we turn back if we have nearly ar-
rived at our destination?
II
The confluence of nostalgia and capitalism infects as it affects. His-

toricist 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 un-
fulfillment - 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
52 © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2010
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
Consumed by Nostalgia? 53
at. The pined-for past holds out against ou

ineluctable logic so vital to nostalgia that c
Nostalgia reproduces rapidly through
economy. The opportunities that accompan
construct our identity by "sharing" or "giv
representing some significant, privileged
past, in case the link corrodes or the chain
memory loses its hold on the imagination
excoriate the remembrance and with it th
autonomous life in our memory, beyond an
The more we are strip-mined for our past,
tion, and led to articulate our experiences,
becomes our intimacy with what we live
hand, this process is culturally responsible
into the archive of culture seems the only
time's ravages and sure oblivion. From the
tural sustainability, individual memory can
knowledge of the past not merely undeplet
intimate relationship with a past can be overw
we have learned from books that memory
such intimacy, even a modicum of it, can
ing legible. Gradual estrangement from ou
losing the art of decipherment. Likewise,
the means to ignore the radically unfamilia
unclaimed futures.
If the public commemoration of bygone events makes us work for
their restitution, if we cling to the recent past and put it on record, and
if we have begun to speak of "nostalgia for the present," it is because
there seems no breaking the nostalgic chain forged in capital. With the
exhaustion of firsthand experience, secondhand memory comes to serve
nostalgia as well if not better, redoubling our longing for the firsthand.4
The more we indulge in our feeling for "good old" anachronisms, the
more sentimentally we look back at our life, the cheaper our nostalgia is
to evoke and the costlier it is to appease. Before long, we have pawned the
better share of our past, our nostalgia subsisting on borrowed memories.
Subtending this economic model is the commodification of affec-
tive memories that constitute nostalgia and nostalgia-driven activity. To
capitalize on nostalgia is to profit from the sale of such memories on the
premise that they are reproducible and transferable, and, in ideological
terms, that emotions, no matter how manipulated, retain their natural-
ness and remain a counterweight to materialism. Ultimately, however,
capitalized nostalgia costs us part of our ability to bear the weight of
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
54 S.D. Chrostowska
private memory - that is,

its solitude. It puts into
reproduction - patented
talgiogenic. Such recreate
it provides is devised as
Commodified nostalgia i
One corollary of the ho
dered by this process is
to the smallest detail. The
be recovered, only re-col
with capitalism has this
investment, we, as a soci
of the past. Such verisimil
nal. What was strange tr
into the superficially fam
serve as a playground fo
result, we come to regard
what once lay largely in
literary study has becom
media entertainment and
Mass production and
down its heterogeneity f
tion. Whatever the past
in our current existence.
repertoire" when its ima
and association with the
in this way, is thus atte
death" or lying low in
its recrudescence - when
recognition, as if from
cliché that one buries th
framed by individual ex
another limit in instinct
not command our dreams.
Despite the artist's proverbial aversion and resistance to consum-
erism, capital lays claim to the artistic past in tandem with the artistic
present. This is a simple matter of manipulating cultural perspective:
nostalgia is discovered at the root of every avant-garde; the present
state of art is attributed to declining aesthetic standards; critics reward
the return to classical technique; and art is proclaimed as a thing of the
past. Similar rhetoric is applied to things commercial and /or practical
in purpose, which often gain artistic value in the process. As Claude
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
Lévi-Strauss observed in New York in th

self with these objects not because they
beauty has become inaccessible to all but
place, a sacred character . . ." (263). It is i
reversal of fortune that this entails: wh
may, with the passage of time, become s
charge spent, it is retired from mass cult
of economic exchange, and given a shimm
across it, not knowing what to make of
arresting. Their decommissioning is an
cial or utilitarian to begin with, things o
worn out, to redeem themselves throug
disavows but cannot prevent.
Ill
Nostalgia in its "uncompromised" form

but this romanticization is not synonym
chological security, moral hygiene, beau
the house as a symbol of quiescence, of
the womb - one's first dwelling, probably
safe and felt so comfortable" (36). Yet no
to this "safe home/' but to home as a sce
of unmade decisions, of excitement at t
reversible mistakes, of preparations for
imagined along with that past's uncertainty
thrill arising from that precariousness and
death (then relative to now, or now relat
on us because it is an open door to (real
in the case of a past we either were not
historical realia that to us nonetheless s
have since become defunct.5
Nostalgia involves, then, a departure from the definite past for the
indefinite; its "Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which
we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-
garden" (T.S. Eliot, 171). We long to forsake the actual past as our memory
swells with apparent missed opportunities. At its extreme, nostalgia is
a revolt against the past as fait accompli, against the past's facticity. As a
recourse to what has passed away, it defies mortality and foreclosure of
the possible futures it brings. Its epigraph: "Only through time time is
conquered" (ibid., 173).
Because nostalgia is often spurred by regret,6 it illuminates the mar-
gins of what came to pass. Its manipulative use of the past consists in
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
56 S.D. Chrostowska
excavating and multiplyi

By the same token, how
and exploited. Feelings of
quite nebulous - that acc
the pastness of the past
reminiscent of that past, i
Nostalgia marketing do
our dormant emotive at
more resonant associatio
and disposable goods m
more cursory, more eph
investment is everyday
"impugns all values and
the unjustifiable differen
Devoid of responsibility
commodities, the necessity
of the expenditure and ren
sure (to consume). It is no
tireless, invites the fabric
ticity and dispensing wit
spontaneity, anomie, priv
nostalgic daydreams poin
consumption does the am
not actively, through diale
mind off of what some
does not allow itself to b
everyday have the power
to overcome it, they leav
and (auto)critique (Blanc
lies in the negative-dialect
and finally in the quicken
Those remarking on th
objects or sites often m
cation of the past/' to re
attachments to the past
nostalgia draws on the r
tions are its condition of e
heightening a product's d
the product itself is an a
"reenacted," "relived" pa
are used to elicit the desi
its potential repetition,
Substance #122
nostalgic resources. Our indifference to th

of marketing potency. The mediation of no
(artistic or mechanical) is of course nothin
mediation, however, differs in commercia
multi-tier marketing strategy.
The paramount historical role of pho
tion and marketability of nostalgia should
the mid-nineteenth century, notes Walter
"greatly extend[ed] the sphere of commod
the market with countless images of fig
which had previously been available either
for individual customers" ("Paris, the Capita
36). It was not long before the utility of m
harnessed to documentation and the expans
Photography's influence grew apace with
and for posterity, in what was fast becomi
immediacy and accuracy of relations betw
sual reality compensated with authenticity
what this mechanical medium lost in artis
increasingly preserved not just images of th
and loci of near and remote pasts. These
recognizable in an expanding mass-market
to epitomize the era they referenced for a g
The mass market soon began to capitalize
by old photographs and to use them to sel
and replicas of sought-after relics. Nostalg
existence to the photograph.9
Once, however, they have spent their co
contents cease, at least for a time, to circul
ties. Despite being "unchained" from capit
had taken its toll. Their dignity is violated,
The waning of their efficacy indicates they h
value, abandoned for good - such, anyhow,
of the modern consumer, an after-image of c
competitiveness (the search for lower price
For these reasons, only through an extende
authenticity of historical contents be recup
all intents and purposes, left the circuit of ex
mercy of chance encounters with strangers
for it; a longer period of convalescence may
time and misrecognition when it finally re
The diagnosis of nostalgia's perversion
most far-fetched inference to be drawn fr
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
58 S.D. Chrostowska
will end up entirely con

used to pass for it) will b
that this literal "nostalgi
regress of self-alienation
transvaluation of nostalg
berance - to affective re
simulate it, we can lose a
unless we destroy all its
To predict this is to inv
cultivating nostalgia for
sympathy for Peter Frit
face. I am referring to t
without melancholy/' wh
the nineteenth century,
(melancholic) sense.11 E
nostalgia with the "melan
development.12 More per
two types /phases of nos
choly - is the continuity
edging nostalgia's histor
conceptual displacement,
longer a matter of envis
ponderance of the eviden
shifted. For some, this new
it expands nostalgia's exper
of the past's phenomeno
to "the old nostalgia," t
tions - are they not the p
Do private collectors of
preserve the traditional
expression of nostalgia, r
ous collector can long refr
collecting. The inevitable
a collection is likely to tra
contemplation of one's p
exclusive possession (alon
'personal' mooring back i
162]). A collection only o
items' mythic reference
carry its owner "back be
farther still, back to a pre
conflate itself metaphori
Substance #122
where desire, not yet in conflict with reason,

knowledge. Collectors whose passion exc
to have some advantage in this regard, a
to their precious possessions. Indeed, th
than invariably corrupting one's sensitivi
profound intimacy, especially when one's
offers a personal example of this in "Unp
cultural functionality of collected objects
intact even in a sequestered collection. Th
is merely physical; they continue to circul
replicas and catalogue images. Lest collecto
ing things from misrecognition or the mas
must be at the back of their mind if the obje
gravity and nostalgic allure.
A form of liberation more radical than t
effectiveness is directly proportional to h
would be one that does not rely on the ob
charge from uselessness, but, on the contr
oversupply (without relative or objective
Such hypothetical liberation could hardly b
the manufacturer. Yet it is a fact that, wit
and quite despite itself, capitalism periodi
such - not merely for individual, but for
This apology of capitalism is nothing if
sure about the long-term effects of the all
the past? The virtuality and hyperreality
spectacle of the "eternal present" - their co
time. It is not here yet, but the future is in
can meet its harbingers in the street.14 M
prognosis tenuous, and my choice to focu
economy's redeeming qualities seems an am
be able to reenter the historical dimension? W
ings to forgotten objects upon its encounte
their full and continued existence?
Ironically, it is when we fail to recognize it - and our failure deprives
this moment of its epiphanic throughline - that the extant, foreign thing
regains its provenance and becomes "present" to us not as a reification of
the past, not through symbolic representation and marketing optics, not
as signal or fetish, but as apparition and remainder, by way of contiguities
with other times and places. In the instant of its apprehension, it func-
tions as an index of time in letting our reflection pass through it. Because
the first question we would ask of this half-lit other is: where has it come
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
60 S.D. Chrostowska
from? Perhaps our vestig

differently: where has all
exactly where it is, mute
former circumstances, its f
speak. This next step - to
precisely where the nosta
IV
Philosophers of progre
endism, tend to turn a bl
and paradoxically, history l
the Hegelian contention t
scars. The manufacture of
the production line of posit
tissue, it turns out, is just
the age spot - for derma
scar could reveal of Ody
cannot long sensu stricto
Philosophers of that ilk p
sive history advances acr
relative. Hence the static n
which is no proof of the
man fear and desire. Nost
naturally seem to be its r
world, unconstrained by
retain its hold on imaginati
not only to the Greeks an
my translation) - must h
can in theory be encompa
infinitude of infinitely div
the past appears, before
being, when the human e
painful realization of (near
form attachments to it th
comparison, our ties to the
and scientific. In contrast t
The sacred plenitude of
time - despite our skepti
empirical, they appear to
present is time tightly w
ing of time. Let the past
an originary ontic fullnes
Substance #122
Consumed by Nostalgia? 6 1
adumbration. Naturally, the visions project

closer to such a plenum than is the present
about the future transform the latter into
This notion, crucial to experiencing nostalg
at least some epistemic basis: the further b
focus, the more diluted and permeable tim
becomes our speculation, the freer, more all
whose peripheries the sacred is at home.
Commodifíed nostalgia does away with
past. It divides the past into a finite series
in accordance with accredited chronologi
increasingly ousts deep commitment to rem
parturiency in its own right (emotional, sp
its truth insofar as it links, or links up with
historical high points. It would seem that, th
parity, the two economies of nostalgia - th
found" - can coexist. In all probability, howe
lines in our evolutionary past, the more robust
the weaker to extinction.
Modern nostalgia is often described as a compensatory phenomenon,
"a reaction to the surfeit of forgetfulness, that is, to a sense that the present
is undergoing an evacuation of meaning that is too rapid and too total"
(Gross, 177, n. 3). It was certainly coeval with a new experience of time
that merged the world-historicalness of progress with the compression of
quotidian temporality. The "far side" of modernism matched subjective,
private time and nostalgic anamnesis (the spontaneous remembrance of
one's past) against standard, public time, sentimentalistic antiquarianism,
and positivistic historicism. The contest between these modernist ideolo-
gies had two correlatives: on the one hand, anxiety and deracination, in
light of an acute awareness that the past was linear and irretrievable, that
time, closed to interpretation, also cannot be suspended, and, on the other
hand, the sense of being historically anchored and of optimism about the
future. The industrial revolution's effect on travel and communication
offered a solution to this crisis in the shape of a collective secular fantasy:
the time machine.16 What could be more symbolic of that momentous
Zeitgeist? But the fantasy of physical time travel, the pedantic elaboration
of its premises, is incompatible with nostalgia. The former is concerned
with the past as spectacle, subject to consumptive forays from the future,
and as raw material, subject to the time surveyor's gaze and, ultimately, to
modification in fulfillment of the desire to master human destiny (thereby
enhancing human survival in the future). Time travel is as egotistic and
desecrative as nostalgia is ecstatic and consecratory in its relation to the
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
62 S.D. Chrostowska
past. Abetting capitalism

ingly uneasy attitude to
Continuity with the p
and - owing to modern
fallibility - museology e
"cool didacticism of system
museums revolutionized
the past in nineteenth-cen
and reproducing museal
for public consumption.
didacticizing nostalgic ex
One could say that, thro
tion sped up the process
growing demand for the "
If nostalgia is the longi
sibilities imaginatively r
ness of the constraints and
Through nostalgia, we ar
we do not rush to reinser
the scale of dates" without
Of course, a vigorous sen
as weeds do once arable soil. It is the dissociation and tension between a
consciousness of the past as such, the past as it has been, and the past as
it might have been that qualifies nostalgic soundings of memory, and that
prevents us from surrendering to a totalitarian fantasy of rerouting the
stream of history and erasing its scars - as facilitated by the convergence
of nostalgia and consumerism. In ethical terms, the nostalgist benefits
from self-sabotage.
A nostalgic disposition is discernible in the configuration of phi-
losophy as a mental journey "home," where home stands for truth about
the world, the absolute, and ourselves. Philosophical thinking of this
kind - predicated on the principle of ontological change - was once the
highest expression of nostalgic sentiment. Life without philosophy was
one of vagrancy and errancy, of pleasures and illusions masking the self's
divinity or absurdity, in either case occluding its happiness. Although
Camus dismissed the idea that "a man's thought is his nostalgia" as spuri-
ous, nostalgia's spiritual dimension still lay within the bounds of "lucid
reason constating its limits."18 Nostalgia revealed itself as a lack that only
the return to an elusive origin - not beyond existence but somewhere
within it - could eliminate. And, if we reason lucidly, that origin is at
once everywhere and nowhere in particular.
"[I]t is no longer possible for a Westerner to be displaced. Every-
where he finds himself at home . . ."3 (Agacinski, 7). Given our globalized
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
economy, this point seems almost incon

(business travlers, etc.) today deny that
their own reflections, in the form of f
of the arrangements of global cosmo-cap
ing, tourism is no longer the culturally u
was. The connotations of "home" are now
By extension, the prevailing economy of
naturalized mobility as our manner of in
to develop little or no affinity for any one
sophical thinking opposes (and complicat
in material security as inauthentic (even
reminding us of the full meaning of roo
always already in the past and its attainm
spective is everything; everything is per
against nostalgic excess thus: "Even what
Nothing past should be sought so faithfully
One often dreams of it, but one should b
can only mimic the impossible nostalgic
Above all, reunion with an utterly vanished a
has some of the self-pity that is revealed in the
such moments. Only then does the worst catast
the completely airless space: the reunion with
what is sealed up within them, easily becomes a
as from someone who never became. A dead man has then returned
. . . (Bloch, 63)22
In truth, modern reunions, Odysseys, and imitations of Homeric sensibil-

ity are awkward, conflicted, and unconvincing. What did a scar reveal
of Odysseus? That, in spite or because of his wandering curiosity, he
had returned. A souvenir of his youth, no less illuminated for having
occurred long ago, it was also the proof of his identification with that
island, a mark of his nostalgia, deep yet plain to see.23 But where had he
arrived? In a place twenty years thence, at first unrecognizable, though
he and this once-home - united at last - appeared essentially unchanged.
On Ithaca time has not stood still, measured by waiting, by deferral, by
the winding and unwinding of memory. Neither did time stop for Odys-
seus; it was, rather, he - self-possessed and nostalgic - who stopped for
time. The true return is to his preserved core: his former role of king and
husband. Paradoxically, the mutual dissemblance - of Odysseus and his
native island, when he first awakes on its shore - is truthful: it manifests
their mutual strangeness. When his core identity is finally discovered, it
is in an act of hospitality in which Odysseus remains both stranger and
host. His undisguising is the end of his passage, in which he had not only
to return but also to prove himself the same Odysseus.24 In the tortuous
voyage home, temptations uncovered to him the plurality of self. He has
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
64 S.D. Chrostowska
long longed to be true to

would have (in lieu of a d
become almost unrecogni
own land - reminded of a
of his return. Would he
like Robinson Crusoe, not
smaller of the two islan
Odysseus a permanent, co
he is returned to it almos
not go out of the flesh").
one with which he aligns
shifting sense of "home"
fect, never wholly satisfi
embark on new adventures.
The historical morphology of nostalgia reveals at least three modes

of nostalgic experience based on distinct economic models. The one with
which I have concerned myself here, capitalist nostalgia, issues from an
economy of representations simulating ("retrieving," "repossessing") lost
pasts, indeed, lost temporalities. What can be called romantic nostalgia is,
by contrast, rooted in an economy of representations in which the past
is experienced as irretrievable. Philosophical nostalgia - the sublation of
romantic nostalgia into systematic thought - is predicated, in turn, on an
economy of statements that makes the irretrievable past the precondition
for insight.
Plunging into the deep waters of nostalgia, we re-sensitize ourselves
to the vertical dimension of past phenomena. This is where human exis-
tence can find its retreat, an asylum for its full potentiality, and where it
most resembles myth. Romantic or philosophical nostalgia re-enchants
and cuts both ways: it has the power to make the superficially familiar
deeply strange, and the superficially strange deeply familiar. The dif-
ference between it and the capitalistic form lies in the mass appeal, the
side-effects, and the far lesser affective intensity of the latter. Consumerist
nostalgia, while ostensibly tributary to empathy with the past and to the
reinvention of one's identity, is aggregative; it expands and multiplies the
self by staging encounters with and assimilating familiar, homogenized
pasts. Romantic nostalgia, meanwhile, is a longing to survive oneself, to
become other than one is; in the arithmetic of the self it is subtraction. The
poignancy of nostalgia in the modern world stems from a coincidence in
it of excitement and suffering, salvation and self-sacrifice. The Romantic
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
diction of this conclusion need not be off-

Romantics - Novalis at their helm - knew th
perfect irony of yearning for meaning wit
without self?
University of Toron
Notes
I am indebted to John Noyes for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
1. Novalis, "Fragment 857/' Das Allgemeine Brouillon: Materialien zur Enzyklopädistik

1798/1799, by Novalis (Hamburg: Meiner, 1993), 194, my translation. The German
text reads: "Die Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh - Trieb überall zu Hause zu seyn."
Heimweh is literally "home-" or "homeward-ache," while nostalgia (a modern coinage)
combines "pain" with "to return home." A 1745 reprint of the 1688 dissertation which
introduced nostalgia to the medical community bears a title aligning three terms (see
my italics), evidently treated as equivalents: "Dissertano Curiosa-medica de Nostalgia
Vulgo: Heimwehe oder Heimsehnsucht quam Perantiqua, etc." The reprint of Hofer's
work from 1710 added yet another term, replacing nostalgia with the more descriptive
pothopatridalgia (comprised of pothos, variously rendered as "erotic desire," "sorrowful
regret," "yearning" for an unattainable object, a word used in the Homeric epics to evoke
a kind of yearning-unto-death, and patris-algos, or "pining after the fatherland") as the
medical equivalent of Heimwehe (see Carolyn Kiser Anspach, "Medical Dissertation on
Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688 [Book Review]," The Bulletin of the Institute of the His-
tory of Medicine 2 [1934], 376). See also James Hillman's "Pothos: The Nostalgia of the
Puer Eternus," eds. J. Hillman et al., Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology
(Dallas: Spring, 1975), 49-63.
2. Walter Benjamin, "Epistemo-Critical Prologue," The Origin of German Tragic Drama, by
W. Benjamin, trans. John Osborne (New York: NLB, 1977), 32.
3. In such "production" of nostalgia, affective alienation is concealed as self-actualization.
A few words about nostalgia's relation to the self are unavoidable. Nostalgia of any type
and intensity plays an important role in the self's crystallization, owing to the contingent,
storied and processual character of identity. From this perspective, life narratives process
and organize personal experience, enabling the recognition of experiences qua experi-
ences. In our attempts to define ourselves through our stories, we both describe and
construct our manner of being in the world, its factual, perceptual, and emotional features.
There is a core of this identity that may resist change. Its immutability is mythical - and
we find it in ancient and modern mythologies. Because we exist in constant motion,
we continually look back upon what we leave in our wake. While life narratives may
involve nostalgic reflection, recent work on the subject distinguishes between nostalgia
and autobiographical memory (i.e., "about the self and events in one's life") (Darrel D.
Muehling and David E. Sprott, "The Power of Reflection: An Empirical Examination of
Nostalgia Advertising Effects," Journal of Advertising 33.3 [2004], 26). This distinction
is vital to appreciating the philosophical character of nostalgia, which counteracts self-
representation with other-reflection.
It is rare, in our day especially, to go through life without ever feeling nostalgic.
Nostalgia of some degree is all but ensured by the condition and consciousness of ex-
istence. Despite, or because of, the buoyancy of adventure, we often feel uprooted (as
if we belonged elsewhere /else when), or downright rootless. We may long for (hence,
belong to) a particular place /time, or we may long to belong. The effects of nostalgia
vary depending on our self-constitution. One common effect is self-assertion and self-
SubStance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
66 S.D. Chrostowska
reinforcement. From it no dou

good old days/' for a more fu
effects is self-repudiation and s
tary self that internalizes other
of nostalgic experience - let us
unified self. Given the above c
identical. The philosophic searc
deconstruction; what we posit as
the self's dissolution.
4. Legislated nostalgia, coined by Douglas Coupland in 1991, describes a closely related phe-
nomenon. His term misleadingly suggests force and legal parameters as defining char-
acteristics. The simpler coinage seems to be simulated nostalgia from Stacey Menzel Baker
and Patricia F. Kennedy, "Death by Nostalgia: A Diagnosis of Context Specific Cases,"
Advances in Consumer Research 21.1 (1994): 169-74. Other existing terms for nostalgia for
another's experience (e.g., historical, communal, vicarious, or phantom nostalgia) fail to evoke
the increasingly commercial character of such transgenerational memory-experiences.
5. There is no indication here of a precondition or cause of nostalgia - that the present is
perceived as a blind alley, that nostalgic sentiment necessarily or typically arises in situ-
ations where possibilities are drastically narrowed. I do believe that nostalgia involves
both juxtapositions of the present with the past and the retrojection of aspects of the
present - a "double exposure," to use Svetlana Boym's metaphor, "a superimposition
of two images - of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life" (Svet-
lana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia [New York: Basic, 2001], xvi). Boym's conception
of nostalgia as, among other things, a longing for the past's "unrealized possibilities,"
"unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete," has ob-
vious similarities with my ownxvi). I am also partial to Boym's and Fred Davis's view
that nostalgia is a response to the threat of a perceived or actual discontinuity of identity,
the causes of which range from the private to the social, the economic, and the epochal.
Its consequence, however, is not necessarily the restoration of the (teleological) nexus of
identity but, rather, in my opinion, of the potentiality of alternate identities. As Davis
himself points out, there is in the "nostalgic dialogue" between past and present "nearly
always . . . some risk" of succumbing to melancholy or depression (Fred Davis, Yearning
for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia [New York: Free P, 1979], 16). The rigidity of Davis's
relational perspective on nostalgia comes through in his assertion "that points at issue
[in the dialogue] are intended to arrive at the foregone conclusion of the superiority of
times and things past" (16). It seems to me, however, that every "romance" with the
past has its own trajectory and can conclude with the present, the definite "leaver" in
this relationship, feeling superior.
6. To Camus nostalgia appears as the "phantoms of regret" (Albert Camus, The Myth of
Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien [New York: Vintage-Random, 1991], 137).
7. I defer here to Guy Debord's distinction: "Cyclical time was the time of a motionless
illusion authentically experienced; spectacular [pseudocyclical] time is the time of a real
transformation experienced as illusion" (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith [New York: Zone, 1995], 113).
8. This is not to say that alienable goods deriving all or part of their value from the nostal-
gia they are meant to elicit cannot remain conducive to a deep nostalgia. Nevertheless,
the general tendency in the world of mass-produced commodities is, again, toward the
replacement of necessarily insatiable nostalgia with (seemingly) infinite but satiable
longings.
9. Photography may aid the production or historical narratives, out it is also me aeatn masK
of the past- it does not "call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph)" but only
marks the absence and attests to the past existence of its objects (Roland Barthes, Camera
Lucida, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Farrar, 1981], 82). Barthes's photographic
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
punctum, "more or less blurred beneath the abun

rary photographs, is vividly legible in historical
of Time in them/' a "vertigo of time defeated"
clearly assimilable to philosophical nostalgia. Ph
in nostalgia's commodification. Even it has seen
is not without its own nostalgia. Benjamin admir
raphy - despite encroaching commercialization -
our "optical unconscious" (Walter Benjamin, "Li
Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, Selected W
et al. [Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 199
illumination characteristic of them, these first i
proachable, from the darkness of our grandfath
was regrettably short-lived. The medium's almo
technology, and retouching techniques reinforced
of mass seduction and persuasion: its faux creativ
10. What is meant here is nostalgia's transvaluation f
condition, first identified in the late seventeenth
disease (a dysfunction of military body and spiri
if retrogressive social malaise (signifying unprod
ment to and antithesis of progress, into a genera
untapped desire and profit), in line with econo
concurrent with homesickness's/ nostalgia's tempo
metaphor, which James Phillips illustrates with
longs for home; Proust was in search of lost tim
Descriptions, eds. Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman
offers a modern, nostalgic reading of the Homeric
for he recovers his home but not his youth. Eve
The temporal loss is thus more profound, alway
As Boym reminds us, the shift has not been per
modified form as restorative nostalgia, stubbornly
(Boym, 49; cf. note 20 below).
11. Peter Fritzsche, "Specters of History," 1618. Frit
the new nostalgia. Rather than merely acknow
also describes it as a turn for the worse. Explaining
on "nostalgia film," he owns that "passionate ex
called nostalgia" should not be confused with th
a 'return of the repressed' of the twenties and thir
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capita
Peeling back the layers, Jameson calls attention to
nostalgia" - since "the way back to the modern
12. See Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Mod
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004). Melanchol
pathologies; their separate "aetiologies" - even
ized by way of the familiar, as a kind of melanch
cultural manifestations. If, in its broadest sense
sive or ruminative state - a sense of loss, vag
object-image - nostalgia is always for something
the two, the experiential purview of nostalgia, w
affective-reflective orientation toward the past
traditionally associated with it (and with melan
spectrum between pleasure and pain, the ratio of
absent) object, to algia, the desire for that object (it
definitive of nostalgic experience. As everywher
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
68 S.D. Chrostowska
relative and unbound by conv

might sometimes elicit all-bu
all that, as an object of longi
present" can come to exert a
71). Although nostalgia first
and discomforts of military se
the battlefield), it is also true
"who have seen corpses, maim
(S. Ansky, The Enemy at His Plea
World War I, trans, and ed. J
In the aftermath, the soldier's
past beckons and he comes. N
nostalgia for the negative was
first glimpsed in his own, an
stores" of ravaged Galician sh
13. The majority of sociological
content- and experiencer-based
Nostalgia emerges as a chimera
bivalent, or bittersweet, to t
supply source-based models.
the qualitative, purpose- and
for one, distinguishes existent
Goulding, "Heritage, Nostalgia,
Applied Marketing Science 5.6/
and the Nostalgic Consumer,"
earlier, Davis, who noted the
an important structural disti
(idealizing the past), reflexive
interpreted (questioning one's
(see Davis, 16ff, 24). Nostalgi
nostalgia (see Susan L. Holak a
Old Days: Observations on No
Consumer Research 18.1 [1991]:
and reflective nostalgia - the f
lost home," the latter "delayi
since longing lies in belongin
historicization of the two vari
in her cautionary "Unreflecte
14. 1 take but little comfort in
a phenomenological impossib
tendency" that is "in any cas
sensitivity (Fredric Jameson, "
15. Though its fate is a far cry
sion of a future now past, ou
the brotherhood of things exp
"ghostlike" proprietor of a jun
his depleted stock (which gives
Winston's encounter with a g
much [for] its beauty as the ai
from the present one"; the in
the simplicity of a sentence -
Orwell, 1984 [New York: Sign
1984, the spirit of a bona-fid
attached to them," scattered
Substance #122
happening (155). Their very existence and prescrib

into the monolith of official history; their speech, pr
remembrance, would - if it ever left this neglected,
thodically falsified, supplanted, silenced. And this in
16. The first literary text to feature this invention was
[The Anacronopede]. The anacronopede, capable of
debut at the 1878 World's Fair in Paris. The machin
chastens bourgeois vanity (the travelers' obsession wi
ity). (For a discussion see, for example, Augusto Urib
Gaspar's Anacronópete," New York Review of Scienc
concept of the time machine was popularized by H
The few characters in Wells's book spend time talk
machine's inventor - a man identified only as The T
travel through time?). Tellingly, though his machine
The Time Traveler teleports himself to the distant
into a post-consumer-capitalist utopia. Since the pub
travel has received countless treatments in science fiction literature and film. One of
them, Chris Marker's 1962 film La Jetée, is of particular interest, being both a deconstruc-
tion and a nostalgic phantasmagoria of sorts. Reflecting the nostalgia-driven narration
is the film's elliptical structure. It consists of black-and-white freeze-frames arresting
action with eerily photographic poise. These are displayed at irregular intervals, as in
a slideshow, and punctuated by filmic fades and dissolves. The images are impelled
by the hallucinatory desire of the nameless protagonist, whose effort to retain certain
moments - lucid dreams of an alternate past - as memories is perhaps the reason for
their resistance to cinematic protensity (Barthes, 90). The procession of images that is
La Jetée conveys not a once-lived past but a dream of another time and the experience
of nostalgia. In the end, the man chooses, instead of the future, to once more return
to this image-paved past: to a vague and ominous event obsessing his memory since
childhood - where now as a grown man he will meet his demise. His return: a lethal
rupture of self.
17. An overview of nineteenth-century debates concerning the museum can be found in
chapter one of Didier Maleuvre's Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1999).
18. Camus, 48, modified translation. Camus here cites Plotinus's notion of the metaphor-
based, aesthetic use of reason, in which reason is reconciled with the eternal. As for
Husserl and the phenomenological school, Plotinus's reason is "an instrument of thought
and not thought itself" and, thus, without limit (ibid.). Absurd reason, on the other hand,
does not see the world as either rational or irrational, but as unreasonable; thus, reason
has limits, and the absurd frame of mind is a nostalgic constatation of these limits.
19. For a brief discussion of the transformation of the concept of home in relation to nos-
talgia, see Davis, 5-6.
20. Heidegger's reflections on nostalgia run in this vein (for a summary, see Agacinski, 16-
18). Taking his lead from precisely the Novalis aphorism, he identifies homesickness as
the "fundamental attunement" of philosophy (Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts
of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker
[Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995], 9).
21. A remark by Bryan S. Turner drives this point home: "we may therefore appropriately
talk about an ontology of nostalgia as a fundamental condition of human estrangement,
thereby simultaneously linking the notion of nostalgia to the philosophical traditions
of Marx and Heidegger" (Bryan S. Turner, "A Note on Nostalgia," Theory, Culture &
Society 2.4 [1987], 150).
22. Bloch then advocates philosophical anti-nostalgia (if nostalgia is seen as re-entering
the past or its remnants with self-pitying sentimentality) as "a rehearsal, even a double
rehearsal, for death" (63-64).
Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
70 S.D. Chrostowska
23. 1 refer the reader to Erich A

resentation of Reality in Wester
UP, 1953).
24. The possibility of this mythical self-sameness is doubtless one of the sources of Georg
Lukács's nostalgia for the age of the epic and his implicit, anti-modern reading of the
Homeric hero's way of being in the world: "There is not yet any interiority, for there is
not yet any exterior, any 'otherness' for the soul. The soul goes out to seek adventure; it
lives through adventures, but it does not know the real torment of seeking and the real
danger of finding; such a soul never stakes itself; it does not yet know that it can lose
itself, it never thinks of having to look for itself" (Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel:
A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock
[Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1971], 29). These reflections, written in "the mood of permanent
despair over the state of the world," are introduced, once more, by Novalis's equation of
philosophy with nostalgia, which makes Lukács both historicize and consign all philo-
sophical quests to timeliness: "That is why philosophy, as a form of life or as that which
determines the form and supplies the content of literary creation, is always a symptom of
the rift between 'inside' and 'outside', a sign of the essential difference between the self
and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed. That is why the happy ages have no
philosophy, or why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are philosophers,
sharing the Utopian aim of every philosophy" (12, 29).
Works Cited
Agacinski, Sylviane. Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, trans. Daniel
Russell. Boston: Beacon, 1969.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. "Epistemo-Critical Prologue," The Origin of German Tragic Drama by W.
Benjamin, trans. John Osborne. New York: NLB, 1977.
ings, vol. 3, eds. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA: Belkn
W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1999.

Blanchot, Maurice. "Everyday Speech," Yale French Studies 73, (198
Bloch, Ernst. Traces, trans. Anthony N. Nassar. Stanford, CA: Stanfo
Eliot, T.S. "Burnt Norton," in The Complete Poems and Plays. London
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLi
2002.
Fritzsche, Peter. "Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity," The American
Historical Review 106.5 (2001).
Gross, David. Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture. Amherst: U
of Massachusetts P, 2000.
Herbert, Zbigniew. Barbarzynca w ogrodzie. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1973.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss
New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Novalis. "Fragment 857," Das Allgemeine Brouillon: Materialien zur Enzyklopädistik 1798/1799,
by Novalis. Hamburg: Meiner, 1993.
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Consumed by Nostalgia?

"Philosophy is essentially homesickness - the urge to be everywhere

The confluence of nostalgia and capitalism infects as it affects. His-

52 © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2010

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

at. The pined-for past holds out against ou

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

private memory - that is,

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

Lévi-Strauss observed in New York in th

Nostalgia in its "uncompromised" form

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

excavating and multiplyi

nostalgic resources. Our indifference to th

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

will end up entirely con

where desire, not yet in conflict with reason,

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

from? Perhaps our vestig

adumbration. Naturally, the visions project

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

past. Abetting capitalism

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

economy, this point seems almost incon

In truth, modern reunions, Odysseys, and imitations of Homeric sensibil-

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

long longed to be true to

The historical morphology of nostalgia reveals at least three modes

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

diction of this conclusion need not be off-

1. Novalis, "Fragment 857/' Das Allgemeine Brouillon: Materialien zur Enzyklopädistik

SubStance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

reinforcement. From it no dou

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

punctum, "more or less blurred beneath the abun

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

relative and unbound by conv

happening (155). Their very existence and prescrib

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

23. 1 refer the reader to Erich A

ings, vol. 3, eds. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA: Belkn

W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1999.

Substance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010

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