On Nostalgia. David Berry
current corporate culture of Silicon Valley, with its tenets of fast and frequent failure and #hustle. (Which, for all its typographic innovation, is just the dominant permutation of what you might call American Dream capitalism, in which you are less what you came from than what you’re obviously going to be, at least until it’s time to write a memoir.) Here the past is often little but a story of inevitable becoming, something to be used as anecdote or proof of moxie, but certainly not a time for which to yearn.
Silicon Valley culture also has ties to another force that is arrayed against nostalgia: its most frequent moral justification is that it’s building a technological utopia. Utopians are not always quite as purposefully forgetful as Silicon Valley, which at times seems to want to blank-slate the world and replace it all with something that involves an algorithm, but in its purest form, utopian thinking is quite close to a nostalgia for the future – nostalgia’s polar opposite, at least along the axis of orientation to time. Here, yearning for the past is replaced by a kind of fanatic eagerness for what’s to come; given our experience of time, utopia is technically possible, which should be an important distinction. Though, of course, even avowed utopians would generally admit that their paradise is more of a direction than a realistic goal. (I am obliged by law to note that the original word as conceived by Thomas More was a pun on the Greek words for ‘good place’ and ‘no place.’) So it’s probably fair to say that utopianism and nostalgia are equally frustrated longings, and this fundamental impossibility is essential to the experience. Still, the impossibility of utopia is a spur to action. If the dominant negative image of the nostalgic is of someone frozen in a rosy amber, thwarted by glory they can never reclaim, the worst that can be said about the equally starry-eyed utopian is that they are too much a dreamer, and will have to be more practical. Ultimately, the promise of utopia is the only kind of yearning that any progressive system can swallow wholeheartedly, which makes it a natural antipode for nostalgia.
For the most part, this inexorably progressive mindset is not openly hostile to nostalgia so much as it has a philosophical predisposition against it, a general unease with the concept that anyone might think things were better before, despite all that progress. (To the extent that we live in a world where progress is a basic value, then, pervasive if low-grade hostility for nostalgia is pretty self-explanatory.) Still, for more specific attacks against nostalgia, we have to look to programs that have chosen progression as an ideal, not made it their engine. One of the prime examples of this can be found in the avant-garde, the loosely connected but definable series of cascading artistic movements that dominated the visual arts – and heavily influenced most other art forms – for most of the twentieth century (and arguably even through today). In their quest to constantly redefine art, avant-gardists inevitably arrayed themselves very explicitly against what came before, including the idea of longing for and even recreating the standards of earlier eras, often taking on nostalgia even before it had become codified and widespread.
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