ENDLESS CINEMATIC REMAKES and sequels, nostalgic TV shows like Stranger Things, music that sounds like it was made 40 years ago but just came out yesterday, social media accounts devoted to 80s iconography these cultural staples signal our collective desire to grab onto comforting, seemingly stable aspects of the past in the face of a vertiginously perpetual present and a future that feels precarious. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, Grafton Tanner explores how we might look back not in order to freeze-frame a false, glossed-over past, but to envision other futures.
In his previous book, The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech (2020), Tanner explored digital utopianism and nostalgia for a pre-digital era as two related conditions of our time. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, when old prejudices are starting again to percolate into the present, he argued, Big Techs algorithms resist any attempt to exit the feedback loop of amnesia. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Tanner deepens this exploration of the politics of progress, citing ways in which nostalgia circulates in our culture both innocuously and destructively, from retro-themed consumer goods to social media meme accounts to political slogans like Donald Trumps promise to Make America Great Again.
Like all complicated emotions and most things that make us human, nostalgia is a contradictory and slippery phenomenon. Paradoxically, ideologies of progress actually proliferate cultural nostalgia: Tanner illuminates the sneaky ways our very human need to look back and yearn for a time before this one (imaginary or not) gets exploited, mutated, and used against us by Big Tech. Mixing personal history and anecdote with political theory, Tanner wonders how we might learn to live productively with nostalgia:
For too long, nostalgia has gotten a bad rap. Thats primarily because its been spread by political leaders to win votes and commodified by corporations to sell products. The attributes we commonly associate with nostalgia kitsch, backwardness, gross sentimentality are really just the products of its exploitation. Its often maligned due to its association with conservatism, but nostalgia isnt essentially reactionary or backwards. Its just been weaponized more frequently to carry out questionable, at times undemocratic, missions.
Its all fucking nostalgia. Its the only way they can get through the day, says Bod, a character in Derek Jarmans 1978 film, Jubilee, as someone inscribes the word LOVE on her back with a knife while someone else kisses a television while watching a punk band perform. This short scene, set around the time the punks affirmed No Future, features a pyromaniac who wants to burn the past and foretells our current temporal crisis. Nostalgia, a word whose etymological roots are to return home and pain or suffering, can be both destructive and productive, paralytic and radical a way to get through the day, to find a hold in a rootless-feeling whir of clicks and scrolls. Nostalgia can sneakily pave over the past, yet it also contains the emotional force necessary to rupture the paved-over present of neoliberal capitalism, making space for other visions of the future through flashbacks and painful desires for change.
Social media algorithms are also nostalgorithms, Tanner tells us, looping back slices of the past along with more of whatever weve previously been engaged with. The question becomes: How can we envision a future when glossy pasts repeat on feedback loops? Newness exists, but its not frontloaded. As Tanner writes, [A] future predicted by algorithms will remain stuck in the past. Things repeat, says Tanner, because decision-making is being outsourced to algorithms that rely on past data to predict the future. But predictive algorithms dont really predict anything, they just make certain pasts repeatedly go viral. While the past is thus mutated, the future seems foreclosed. We get stuck in a strange loop thats getting smaller all the time:
Part of the reason why memes and discourses have such short lives is because social media prompts users to constantly historicize the present, to archive events immediately after they happen by freezing them in posts online, thus closing the gap between experience and its memory. With social media, you can yearn for yesterday literally. Frozen into data, posts and content can be called up at whim, instead of merely forgotten. Before the age of Big Tech, nostalgic cycles were wider.
Gaps between what we experience and the memory of that experience are crucial. These gaps provide temporal grounding and perspective. Forgetting and loss happen in these gaps, pieces of the experience fall away in the dissolves that are part of human memory. What does it mean to be human during increasingly technological times? To be confronted by the technologies weve made, which now make us? To locate spaces of recollection and loss in times of digital recall when, as Mark Fisher wrote in Ghosts of My Life (2014), loss itself is lost?
In the dystopian landscape of the 1982 film Blade Runner, humans use technology to enslave rather than liberate. The importance of memory is central to android Roy Battys famous monologue, delivered as he dies: hes mourning those memories that will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Memorys messy processes of accrual and loss, dissolution and return, and the duration necessary for those processes to work, help us to mark time. As Tanner shows, this closing of the gap between experience and memory is disorienting, knocking time out of joint in a sea of data, constant calculation, and flexibility/precarity. [M]emory is not what is recalled; it is rather that which returns, writes David Rodowick in Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (1997). As humans, we need wide and unfilled gaps to mourn the past and find traction in the present, where memories might return rather than reappear instantly.
Big Techs algorithms, combined with the whizzing and fragmented way we experience history and time under digitized late capitalism, result in turbo-speed loops of nostalgia. We can be nostalgic for a year ago, for yesterday, for any number of glossed-over pasts that pop up on our feed. In a present that can feel rootless, teeming with hyperlinks and economic and emotional precarity, we turn to the past for stability, rootedness. This turning-back isnt the problem, says Tanner; its more an issue of how. Throughout the book, he draws on the two kinds of nostalgia that Svetlana Boym identifies in The Future of Nostalgia (2001): reflective nostalgia, which is generally more harmless, looks back at a moment in time and yearns, while restorative nostalgia, often destructively deployed in political and entertainment spheres, aims to recreate a moment in history. Continually highlighting nostalgias ungraspable fluidity, Tanner notes that even Boym claims her categories are not absolute and that reflective and restorative nostalgias may overlap or bleed into each other. Emotions are messy.
In a section entitled You Are Now Entering Nowhere, Tanner describes Georgia State Route 316, which funnels commuters who live in Atlanta and work at the university into the small city of Athens. On Route 316, as with so many other non-places, [t]heres no way to really know where you are. According to Marc Aug, non-places are transit points and temporary abodes that proliferate under late capitalism: malls, screens, airports, train stations. Tanner cites social media as a kind of virtual non-place, pointing out that, whether were zooming down a nondescript highway or scrolling through Instagram, we may yearn for whats been smoothed over by capital, for whats been deracinated by constant movement, clicking, and scrolling.
In her 1990 essay On Art and Artists, Kathy Acker wrote that Culture is one way by which a community attempts to bring its past up out of senselessness and to find in dream and imagination possibilities for action. When culture isnt this, theres something wrong in the community, the society. In Tanners book, this diagnosis might also be a cure. Writing that nostalgia can inspire social change in ways other emotions cannot, Tanner compellingly proposes a radical nostalgia that can perhaps create space for what Acker says a healthy culture must do. Radical nostalgia might act as a stop cord, halting what Walter Benjamin called the storm of progress in order to widen the gap between experience and memory so that we can envision something new.
It makes sense, Tanner reminds us, that we yearn to escape to the past or the woods or wherever in anesthetizing times when humans get reduced to data. Perhaps the pain/suffering portion of nostalgias etymological roots is instructive here. In his 2020 book The Palliative Society, Byung-Chul Han argues that our society values information over knowledge, but information lacks the negativity of transformation and radical change only arrives through pain: Without pain, it is impossible to produce that kind of knowledge which radically breaks with the past. [] The negativity of pain is constitutive of thought. Pain is what distinguishes thinking from calculating.
Nostalgia cant be cured, as Tanner reminds us. So, we have to live with its pains and yearnings, which point to our human lack a lack that cannot be filled with content, consumer goods, or information. Indeed, to relate to the lack and break from the past, we need to regard the wreckage, to experience pain so that we can think and feel the incommensurability of nostalgia and other complex emotions, unhooking them from anesthetizing market forces. Like Mark Fisher, who argued for a new politics of mental health organized around the concept of public space against capitalisms tendency toward the privatisation of stress, Tanners book importantly invites a political and collective concept of nostalgia.
Because nostalgia has, as Tanner writes, the emotional power to conjure up the potentials of the past that are constantly being paved over by capital, it can serve as a kind of reawakening. As he points out, progressive politics have long been associated with looking forward, conservative politics with looking back. This is an outdated and false binary. There are many ways to look back/forward. Under neoliberal capitalism, with its pervasive ideologies of promise, progress, and optimization, radical nostalgia might help us to imagine a more habitable present.
Radical comes from the Latin for root. To pull from the root, to get to the source of a problem, requires time and commitment. We have a right to our roots, which nurture us and keep us grounded, Tanner writes. However, capitalism tears up these roots and then tells the rootless that staying put will hinder their ability to compete for a job. Indeed, late capitalisms atomized economy of entrepreneurialism, which extols the virtues of flexibility and mobility, is also an economy of precarity that fetishizes nimbleness and side hustles. To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul, wrote Simone Weil in The Need for Roots (1949). Might we find rootedness in the puncture of radical nostalgia, opening up possibilities for the negative space of thought, as opposed to the mere accrual of information, data, and false promises?
In the books moving conclusion, Tanner notes that, as humans, we are irreducible to data, variables, and parameters, even though worshippers of technology like to think otherwise. When we try to fit a complex emotion such as nostalgia into calculable or clear-cut categories free of contradiction, we delete thought. Tracking nostalgia as an emotion, as well as the myriad ways in which that emotion gets mobilized and mutated by conservative and progressive forces, Tanner offers an illuminating examination of our now. What would happen if we were to refuse both technological utopianism and conservative, restorative nostalgia? To refuse both a calculative nostalgia that marginalizes past, present, and future and slick promise-oriented narratives that claim wholeness? To exit the loop and embrace the lack?
Emmalea Russois a writer living at the Jersey shore. Her booksareG(2018) andWave Archive(2019). Her recent writing has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and SF MOMAs Open Space. She is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and she edits Asphalte Magazine.
Read more from the original source:
- Pagani's New Utopia Is an Ode to Old-School Hypercars With a V-12 and Manual Transmission - Yahoo Canada Shine On - April 20th, 2024 [April 20th, 2024]
- Book Review: Tripping on Utopia, by Benjamin Breen - The New York Times - January 30th, 2024 [January 30th, 2024]
- Cynthia Erivo's Stark New Film Is Already More Relevant Than She ... - Vanity Fair - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Why Travis Scott's Utopia is the Album of the Year - Hamilton County Reporter - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Vampire Empire and the Toxicity of Leak Culture - 34th Street Magazine - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Artist Melissa Joseph Uses an Unsung MediumFeltto Explore ... - Cultured Magazine - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Customizable Bathroom Fittings With Re-Purposed and Crystal ... - ArchDaily - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- The grouse, the gamekeepers and the ethics of the shoot - Financial Times - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- I sort of flippantly say: 'All guitars sound the same and go for ... - Guitar World - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- How MJM Marine is helping to create a cruise utopia - Cruise and Ferry - October 13th, 2023 [October 13th, 2023]
- Everything You Need to Know About the Solar Eclipse in Central ... - Austin Monthly - October 13th, 2023 [October 13th, 2023]
- Explore Programming for the Inaugural SXSW Sydney: Oct 15-22 - sxsw.com - October 13th, 2023 [October 13th, 2023]
- The Daily Heller: The Art of Invented Scripts, Meaning Optional - PRINT Magazine - October 13th, 2023 [October 13th, 2023]
- Andrea Branzi, visionary architect and designer, 19382023 - ArtReview - October 13th, 2023 [October 13th, 2023]
- Female hotel manager handed a 33 per cent pay cut during Covid ... - People Management Magazine - October 13th, 2023 [October 13th, 2023]
- NAPALM DEATH's SHANE EMBURY Talks New Book And Life In ... - BLABBERMOUTH.NET - October 13th, 2023 [October 13th, 2023]
- A Step-by-Step Guide To British Airways' 49-Year Livery Evolution - Simple Flying - October 13th, 2023 [October 13th, 2023]
- How Constructed Languages Help People Find Community - The New York Times - October 13th, 2023 [October 13th, 2023]
- Royal Caribbean Wows Cruisers With Short Beach Cruise Vacations - Wealth Of Geeks - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- The Graham and Brown wallpaper of the year 2024 is revealed - Ideal Home - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- Museum Curators Evaluate A.I. Threat by Giving It the Reins - The New York Times - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- The Media Store: Does the growth of AI signal utopia or dystopia for ... - Marketing magazine Australia - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- MIPCOM Cannes to host world premiere screening of Concordia - Prensario Internacional - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- The Best New Cruise Ships Coming in 2024 - Cruise Critic - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- Bioshock: 10 Pieces of Important Lore New Players Need to Know - CBR - Comic Book Resources - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- 8 Best Bagels in New York City - Eat This, Not That - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- Luxon doubles down on bed tax opposition | Crux - Local News ... - Crux News - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- Indie Film: Midcoast film festival keeps building on an impressive ... - Press Herald - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- Dangerous visions: How the quest for utopia could lead to catastrophe - Salon - July 29th, 2023 [July 29th, 2023]
- Travis Scott Spends the Day in NYC Amid the Release of His New ... - Just Jared - July 29th, 2023 [July 29th, 2023]
- The 5 Best New TV Shows of July 2023 - TIME - July 29th, 2023 [July 29th, 2023]
- The influence of Kanye West's 'Yeezus' is clear as day on Travis ... - Yahoo Lifestyle UK - July 29th, 2023 [July 29th, 2023]
- How Utopia shaped the world - BBC Culture - December 28th, 2022 [December 28th, 2022]
- Dystopia - Wikipedia - December 21st, 2022 [December 21st, 2022]
- 17th Amendment Weakened Balance of Power Between States, Federal Government - Heritage.org - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Games Of Thrones EP Frank Doelger To Helm Surveillance Thriller Series Concordia For ZDF, MBC, France Tlvisions and Hulu Japan - Deadline - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- How Mao's Cultural Revolution Made War On The Private Mind - The Federalist - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- The Russian musical instrument that infiltrated pop culture and aided espionage - Far Out Magazine - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- The Handmaid's Tale: What Is New Bethlehem? Map & Theories - Post Apocalyptic Media - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Wrtsil Oyj : Five ways the Wrtsil 46TS-DF helps you decarbonise now and in the future - Marketscreener.com - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Ditching tech is the new tech fad - Rest of World - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Martin Scorsese feels that box office obsession is "insulting" to cinema - Yahoo Entertainment - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- X-Men Monday #175 - X Me Anything With the X-Office AIPT - AIPT - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- The Difference Between A Supercar And A Hypercar - SlashGear - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- The Spanish government reactivates the tunnel project to link Morocco with Spain - Atalayar - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Why the Wing, a once buzzy womens coworking startup, shut down - Fortune - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- World's first zero-energy cruise terminal to be opened at Port of Galveston - Offshore Energy - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Letters to the editor: On baroclinic instability - Las Cruces Sun-News - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Why autumn is the new glamping season | Travel | The Sunday Times - The Times - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- The East Is ... White? Xi Jinping Is A Cracker? - The American Conservative - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Winter Wonderland Vacations- Places You Have To Visit This Year - msnNOW - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- A new series immerses us in Russias 90s trauma and the human cost of economic shock - The Guardian - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- Why the communal utopia was hard work for its children - Aeon - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- The Best and Coolest New Gadgets of September 2022 - Gear Patrol - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- Here's a list of pumpkin patches in and around Austin - Austin American-Statesman - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- As time for meaningless jobs comes to an end, reinvent to stay relevant - The New Indian Express - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- Layered subsurface in Utopia Basin of Mars revealed by Zhurong rover radar - Nature.com - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- Conductor is in trouble with his name, and his no-names - Slippedisc - Slipped Disc - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- Deepak Chopra & Seva.Love Announce "ChopraVerse: House of Enlightenment," the Metaverse for Wellbeing in Collaboration with Utopia -... - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- New this week: 'Reasonable Doubt,' 'Blonde' and Bjrk - Star Tribune - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- New movie releases this weekend - ABC4.com - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- Utopia In The Desert - Cowboys and Indians Magazine - Cowboys & Indians Magazine - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- Fascism from Italy to Hibbing and back again - Minnesota Reformer - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- EDITORIAL: Cambodia's Khmer Rouge tribunal a proper model of justice | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis - - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- Nexi S p A : September 26th 2022 Nexi and Global Blue sign a strategic partnership to provide frictionless omnichannel payment experience for the... - September 27th, 2022 [September 27th, 2022]
- Pagani thumbs its nose at electrification, unveiling all-new V12 Utopia - September 15th, 2022 [September 15th, 2022]
- Paganis New Utopia Is an Ode to Old-School Hypercars With a V-12 and Manual Transmission - Robb Report - September 15th, 2022 [September 15th, 2022]
- Whats That Shiny New Marketing Toy Youve Got There? || Googles Out Of Home Ads - Legal Talk Network - September 15th, 2022 [September 15th, 2022]
- The future of New England Republicanism is... - POLITICO - September 15th, 2022 [September 15th, 2022]
- Disney continues to botch their animated classics with Pinocchio - Shield - September 15th, 2022 [September 15th, 2022]
- Inside the Experimental Town That King Charles III Created - VICE - September 15th, 2022 [September 15th, 2022]
- Ian Cheng imagines a world where the internet inhabits our nervous systems - Dazed - September 15th, 2022 [September 15th, 2022]
- The aura of Shakers, the influencers of good design - Domus - September 15th, 2022 [September 15th, 2022]
- Utopia Revisited: Residents Reunite to Share Stories of 12th Street Childhood - Jewish Exponent - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- 'Wonder' Playlist: The sounds that inspired our new issue - RUSSH - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- "This Building Belongs to the People": Cape Verde's New Centre for Art, Crafts and Design - ArchDaily - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Bjrk Parties at a Mushroom Rave in Video for New Song Atopos: Watch - Pitchfork - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- The girlbosses who girlbossed too close to the sun: The demise of womens utopia The Wing was long overdue - The Independent - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Technology Is the Only Thing That Can Potentially Save Us: A Conversation with Brad DeLong - Observer - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Cant We Come Up with Something Better Than Liberal Democracy? - The New Yorker - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]