Nostalgia is a form of longing: specifically a romantic longing for the past. In her critical account of the ‘social disease’ of nostalgia in postmodernity, Susan Stewart defines it as ‘the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition’. That is to say nostalgia makes the idealized and exaggerated past into the site of immediacy, presence and authenticity. Stewart further describes nostalgia as a narrative form about the past which only heightens the sense of lack felt in the present. It focuses on what has been lost rather than what it is possible to gain. The problem is that nostalgia itself recognizes the very impossibility of a return to the past: hence the irony in Stewart’s definition which captures so well the temptation facing Thomas. As she puts it, nostalgia is ‘the desire for desire; it is a desire that folds back on itself in a deliberate (and for Stewart, self-destructive) sadness which is ultimately inauthentic.
Ultimately her accusation is that nostalgia makes an idol out of the past. Is this a bit harsh? I happen to like 80s parties and Happy Days... after all? Isn't innocent fun? Well not for Stewart: she sees this stuff as symptomatic of an ideological conservatism, a desire for comfort that blinds us to the urgent present. It is a malignant cultural tendency, for her.
There has to be place for a proper traditionalism that doesn't treat the past like nostalgia does. It would be easy to slip into a kind of amnesia without some way of bringing the past present. But there certainly is a fawning traditionalism: the kind that builds neo-gothic cathedrals in the Antipodes!
Of course, this is all reminiscent of the great theologian of longing: Augustine. Stewarts definition of nostalgia as ‘desire for desire’ meets its counterpart in Augustine’s confession of being ‘in love with love’ in his Confessions. In the latter part of the Confessions, Augustine writes powerfully about memory (revealing his Platonic influence). However the best memory - and the supreme and right object of the heart's longing - is the memory of the beatific vision which lies in the future!
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 23
5 comments:
The elves are leaving Middle Earth...
:)
MJ, have you read any Badiou? He charactersises philosophy as desire...
On the nostalgia point, it makes an interesting critique of the da vinci code phenomena - it's almost an anti-nostalgia, in that it raises the spectre of a Christian history that nobody desires, and that this is an idol in that it justifies the present state of anti-historical silencing of theological discussion. It doesn't raise an idol of the past, but it is an idol in that it makes our present secular humanist society the proper telos of history... and that this is not recognised as an idol.
hey thanks for the tip:
Badiou. will read.
there is an amnesiac sin that corresponds to nostolgia too of coruse..
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of times past.
When you read the waffle of women you tend to think the fundamentalist interpretation of Paul makes some sense. Desire for the past is based from a male perspective on the clearer memory of strength and joy attending one, just as any male will speak about youth as if they are worse than in 'his day' it's just the loss of the ability to glory in our power of violence, for glory we could and despite the castrated mumblings of a feckless middle-class the exercise of wanton violence will always be joyous to those just can't stand Abel's righteousness. 'We need guns big f****** guns'. Mmm or is Freud right is it all just sexual?
Thanks for your thoughts on this book. I just found it and picked it up because of my interest in its subjects relationship to painting amongst other art forms. i think a truly meaningful discussion surrounds stewarts thoughts just from reading the first few pages. as you say it may be easy to forget everything (amnesia) but i think this book may be meant to remind us that it is altogether harder to see how the things we don't forget (desire) can obscure our vision or other senses at the present moment (thereby effecting future moments but never effecting the past.) Nostalgia becomes a "social disease" in that it does not let us simply deem the past good and move on, but seduces us with exaggerations of how it was, blinding us to how it is, thereby stalling us from coping with the present. All and all maybe she is saying NOW is the most effectual time to act in order to obtain what we desire or, rather, change what we desire in order to obtain a more desirable present...
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