On Nostalgia. David Berry
mind you, but sufficiently comforting that we can turn to it whenever we need (which is at least once a week, for most of us). Our memory is built for nostalgia: it may not force us to yearn to go back to the experience, but given the choice between the abject chaos of our present and a reasonably ideal past – presented to us as our actual past – nostalgic longing hardly needs the help.
And that, of course, is only if we are left to our own devices, which hasn’t really been the case since we invented external media. Whether you want to mark the starting line at cave drawings or would prefer to wait until we managed to put together entire systems of writing capable of clearly explaining complex ideas, making records of our worldly concerns – from the particulars of goat trading to the innermost thoughts of **~~iceprincezz420~~** – is such a profound thing that we may not be entirely capable of handling it.
Whatever myriad tasks we might currently use our multimedia cornucopia for, memory is the essential spark of media – the why and what of it. Wherever it pops up, the first things we try to write down are all those that presumably mean disaster if we were to forget them: the oldest instances of systemized Chinese characters we have, for instance, are inscriptions on oracle bones, literal attempts to divine the actions of the gods (some people also think some cave paintings served divination purposes, if you want to go back even further). The original Sumerian cuneiform tablets, probably the first thing humans did that could properly be called writing, were basically accounting ledgers, tracking the commerce and contracts necessary to keep a city of thousands fed and not feeling excessively homicidal toward one another. However our blinkered memories muddled through before, we eventually reached a point where an external, verifiable source was needed, and so we created it.
Whatever its uses for the collective, though, the invention of media creates two pretty serious problems for the individual that are particularly relevant to nostalgia: fallibility and mutability. By creating a history that transcends us, we reveal not only that our understanding of things – our memories – might not really be true but that our understanding of ourselves may not be as solid as we would like to think. Of these problems, the extent to which we misremember things is the more obvious: we may not be entirely incapable of recognizing our own failings without an external prod (or proof), but having one certainly has a way of focusing the issue, if only because it makes it harder to deny that we might be wrong. The reaction of the subjects of the flashbulb memory study is some proof of how profoundly uncomfortable this dissonance is for us.
But the internal dissonance that external memory – media – provokes is ultimately more troubling. The great lie of our self-identity is its consistency: we are effectively trapped in a permanent presentism, a belief that we are fundamentally the same, enhanced and emboldened by a memory that selectively edits our past to conform with that notion. The external record enabled by media reveals that there are times when we felt differently, when we experienced the world differently. Whether through an express record of our feelings (say, a diary or a piece of art we’ve created) or just an external nudge that forces us to re-experience our feelings, rather than merely live with the memory of them (say, watching a favourite movie from childhood), we are forced to confront the fact that we change, that we are less solid than our necessarily solipsistic movement through the world would have us believe.
In both of these cases, external media reveals our boundaries, how limited in our understanding of the world we truly are. Nostalgia is, I think, one of the most powerful tools we have developed to help us reconcile those boundaries. Though it’s a phenomenon that exists well beyond external media, it is thoroughly enhanced by it, in the sense that nostalgia is a powerful coping mechanism. Media does not create the longing, it creates a real past; nostalgia is what allows us to reconcile it to our present, to give it meaning and allow ourselves to carry on.
In the sense that nostalgia is a modern condition, it is only because the modern age is so thoroughly mediated – increasingly, it seems, with every generation. Illiterate peasants might go their entire lives without being forced to square these particular circles; an endlessly wired world, one where even most social interaction is inescapably mediated, will be forced to confront it endlessly. A world awash in media is a constant test of our memory – and as such a constant test of who we are, or in any case think ourselves to be. Confronted with evidence that there is more to the world – more to our self – than how we feel and experience it in this moment, we scramble to find firmer footing, to reconcile how we feel with the way things are. Trapped as we are in ourselves, this solidity is only ever available in retrospect – and because it is impossible, all we can do is long for it. Nostalgia is a form of reconciliation: not just of who we were with who we are, but with the idea that that either of those questions has a settled answer. It helps us believe we might be more than just this longing.
2
Spineless Admiration:
On Anti-Nostalgia
Though the conception of nostalgia as a disease, or even just a symptom of a troubled mind, faded away in the early part of the twentieth century, the popular understanding of nostalgia hasn’t entirely shed the hostility that usually attends disorders of the mind (or body). Nostalgia is frequently regarded with a certain pointed suspicion.
If you do not quite clock this tendency in the world at large, it is glaringly obvious in the way most academics who have studied it in psychological, sociological, artistic, and historical terms tend to write their introductions: nearly all take particular care to try to justify nostalgia, not just as a subject of inquiry but as a worthy, necessary, or at least overall helpful part of the human condition. Many of them positively reek with the nervous sweat of an author worried about being branded as some kind of misty-eyed sentimentalist reactionary, and even the calmer ones tend to take as a given the fact that most readers’ initial response to the subject is going to be negative. (This, in fairness, probably says as much about the culture of academia as it says about any background distaste for nostalgia.)
If the cloisters tend to concentrate it, though, more casual discussions of nostalgia often share the same buzzing background apprehension. This is evident in how often calling something ‘nostalgic’ or accusing someone of indulging in nostalgia is used as a sort of general slur, an easy shorthand that suggests some level of moral failure or backward thinking without much further explanation needed. This is the kind of nostalgia evoked when someone complains about Hollywood’s latest slate of revivals and reboots, or accuses teenagers of appropriating fashion trends from before their birth, or in slightly more serious cases snipes at a political opponent. This usage of nostalgia is rarely very specific: it can suggest that the target is anything from a sentimental patsy too easily seduced by saccharine stories or things that prop up their own ego, to someone who is generally naive or misunderstands history, to the kind of rock-ribbed reactionary who won’t rest until every pair of pants comes with suspender buttons by default. Its prevalence and its imprecision make the point, though: people rarely seem to have a coherent explanation for why the nostalgia might be bad; it’s just nostalgia, so it’s bad.
Before we dive more deeply into the ways nostalgia manifests itself in our society, it’s worth pausing to consider this discomfort a little more pointedly. Whether it’s an appropriate reaction or not is up to the reader, but in any case I think it’s an essential aspect of the modern experience of nostalgia, a lingering guilt or unease that tends to colour our experience of it, even if we have fully swallowed all these arguments that it’s a mostly benign, restorative force that helps give our lives meaning.
In any event, beyond its nebulous negativity, the overarching unifier of this sort of casual denigration of nostalgia is that it is almost universally applied to other people’s nostalgia. Our own nostalgia might be restorative, or interesting, or might just flit by without sparking further reflection, but other people’s nostalgia is a mark of some deep failing. This complaint – whether it exemplifies the usual dissonance between positive and negative traits (he’s cheap where I’m thrifty; she’s pushy while I’m assertive; they’re blinded by nostalgia, whereas I’m merely nostalgic) or comes from those unique types who rarely feel nostalgia but see it everywhere – is not a sustainable critique. In the vast majority of cases, people who are speaking against nostalgia have a very specific instance of it in mind, and to whatever degree nostalgia-as-insult does capture some of