Nostalgia Curve – Page 2 – The Implausi.blog

Nescience and Excession

(Part 5 of the Nostalgia Curve. Click the numbers for Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4).

In February of 2002, then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld introduced the wider world to the concept of “unknown unknowns” – those things that we don’t know that we don’t know. Adopting a framework familiar to those within the risk assessment fields, it was more the delivery of the idea that caused it to go viral and to stick. Uttered in a statement along with other elements of the type: known-knowns and known-unknowns, it flowed like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, and became instant fodder for the late-night comedians.

The full matrix looks something like this:

Laid out like this, it seems rather obvious. Now, Rumsfeld only mentioned three, and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek (among others) pointed out the missing fourth, the unknown-knowns (seen in the lower left quadrant). According to Zizek, these are “the things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge which doesn’t know itself,’ as Lacan used to say.” But these are not without contention. The unknown-knowns can include the “the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values” according to Zizek.

Which, agreed, can be highly dangerous indeed.

But the unknown-knowns are a much broader category that Zizek intimates at. Unmentioned (or perhaps elided) are two great unknowns: tacit knowledge, and memory.

Tacit knowledge is that which we’ve learned but we struggle to explain. As Michael Polanyi states it: “we know more that we can tell”, and while this may seem to fit within the “known-knowns”, our struggle with verbalizing and explaining it, of bringing it forth into the world save through our actions hints at the “unknowing” part of its inclusion here. Memory, of course can sometimes be with us constantly, and other times the forgotten comes to the surface – sometimes triggered, oft unbidden – rushing like a flood.

And this gets to why I’m talking about this in the context of The Nostalgia Curve. Those seeking to evoke our nostalgia often key them to those unknown-knowns, those long forgotten memories of childhood – of toys and cartoons, of lazy Saturday mornings and long summer days – and seek to market them to an older, more mature, more gainfully employed audience of carefully diagnosed market segments. And there is a lot that has been written on nostalgia up til now.

It became obvious early on in writing the elements of The Nostalgia Curve that I needed to engage with Fredric Jameson. I had not, to this point, aside from in passing, in the way that he gets cited in other works I had read, but I had never engaged with his texts directly. It was a known unknown. I realized Jameson’s writing may have a significant impact on my work, so I wanted to get my own thoughts down, as they stood, before engaging with his work. To do so required an intentional act on my part, an act of nescience.

Nescience

*Note: I have also never seen this film. Intentionally.*

Nescience is the lack of knowledge. Full stop. This contrasts with something like ignorance, which is the act of not knowing. But wait, you ask, wouldn’t your intentional act of not engaging with Jameson be better described as ignorance? Is that a gotcha?

Well, no. They’re similar, for sure, but nescience lacks the pejorative associations we have with ignorance. Nescience is the unknown, in this case both the known unknown that Rumsfeld spoke of above, and the unknown unknown – the thing that we don’t know that we don’t even know. Much of the mysteries of the universe fall within this category, for we are creatures, tiny and small.

Besides, nescience sounds better. Let’s lean into the poetic if possible.

So we’re adopting nescience to mean that act of intentionally not engaging with something, of something that we may have heard of in passing, but don’t really know.

By way of disclosure, some other things that I am nescient about:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (as mentioned above)
The Eternals
Titanic (the movie, not the boat)
Schindler’s List
The Sopranos
Lost
Batman: The Animated Series
and the list goes on…

Obviously I know of them, else they wouldn’t be on this list, and given their pervasiveness in popular culture, one would be hard-pressed to not at least have heard of the above titles. Everyone will have similar lists – there are more videos uploaded to YouTube every minute than can be seen in a lifetime. So we will all have gaps in our knowledge. Nescience in this case is the wilful act of not engaging.

However, having nescience cover the full range of unknowns – both the known unknowns and unknown unknowns – leads to a bit of a conundrum. How do we separate between the wilful unknown, and the truly unknown-unknown?

What happens when we encounter an Excession?

Excession

The Culture is a series of science-fiction books written by the Scottish author Iain M. Banks, on-and-off over 25 years. In it, it describes a galaxy-spanning post-scarcity society in which various AIs are full citizens alongside the other various biological creatures. Excession, published in 1996, is the fifth book on the Culture, perhaps my favorite book in the series, and one of my favorite books of all time. Within it, the AI minds that control the ships discover something completely outside their frame of reference, something from outside the known universe (perhaps?)

An Excession is an outside-context problem. It is more than simply a Black Swan event, it is by definition unknowable. It is the unknown unknown of the Rumsfeld Matrix we mentioned at the start of this post. And it is within this frame that I’m bringing it into use. (Possible spoilers for a nearly 30-year-old novel).

The appearance of the Excession in the story demands immediate reaction – what do you do when you run into something completely outside your reality? Further observation, marshalling of resources, outright flight, all these and more are options. But the big takeaway is that an outside context problem may be exactly that – so detached from the frame that the best solution is to just let it pass on by. Of course, the nature of an excession is such that one can’t know that, at least not at first. So it can act as an inciting incident for all manner of other things. The very presence of an excession changes the worldview, the context for everything that come after.

Welcome to a wider universe.

So with the ideas of Nescience and Excession, our version of the Rumsfeld Matrix looks a little bit more like this:

But, all this nescience only goes so far. At some point one must do their diligence and get to the work of engaging with the unknown.

So what does Jameson have to say about Nostalgia, and how (or would) that change what we’ve come to know about the Nostalgia Curve? We’ll investigate that, and share it with you soon.

The Nostalgia Curve in other fields

(Part 4 of the Nostalgia Curve. Click the numbers for Parts 1, 2, and 3).

So, following up on our the previous posts, it seems obvious that the Nostalgia Curve is more generalizable to other properties than just those that shape and deliver the content that is brought to our doorstops. We hinted at how the Nostalgia Curve gets adopted by one type of social activity – gaming – and a keen observer will recognize appeals to nostalgia in culture, politics and technology too. Let’s deal with those in turn:

Gaming Nostalgia

DCC, DMG, 40K RT (2024, from the author’s collection)

I’ve long held that interesting things arise out of the periphery, and gaming (especially tabletop gaming) has existed on the fringes in some fashion or other for most of my adult life, recent surge in popularity (thanks Stranger Things and Critical Role) not withstanding. Gaming culture has been both an area of entertainment and academic interest for me for a long, long time.

Nostalgia has been fuelling gaming since at least the 1980s – it was pretty much baked in from the outset, with the Appendix N of the original Dungeon Master’s Guide for Dungeons and Dragons detailing the titles that the games creators were nostalgic for. It was also present in every new title and media tie-in RPG released, whether it was for Westerns and Spy Thrillers, or Conan, Capes, and Cthulhu inspiring the current crop of adventures. This nostalgia might have kept the lights on, but with the dawn of the new millennium, a new wave of titles kicked it into overdrive. Following the release of the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons by Wizards of the Coast in 2000 and the creation of the Open Gaming License (OGL) along with it, the portal was opened and a number of retro-clones spilled forth.

This read to the rise of the Old-School Renaissance (OSR), a series of the games that looked to the hobby’s (TTRPGs) roots for inspiration, sometimes in terms of game design, often in look and feel, and sometimes both, like in the copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics seen in the picture above. Evoking a simpler time in gaming, they each tried to emulate that earlier era, either to bring in old or lapsed fans, or to court new players with simpler mechanics (and often cheaper entry points too). But while the OSR began with small publishers putting out material they wanted to use, and finding a like-minded community, WotC has also re-issued classic books in new formats, or adventures that connect with the rich history of the classic era of early tabletop RPGs, revisiting Strahd, Vecna, and other iconic entities from time to time.

Dungeons and Dragons isn’t alone in this either, as WotC regularly places products along the Nostalgia Curve in order to move product for its other major property too. M:tG is no stranger to nostalgia, either internal or external. First and foremost it finds itself locked in to the design of its early 90s-era cardback, which by necessity of competition needs to maintain the same image for every set produced (save for special instances). It also digs back into the deep wells of its own past, for artwork, creatures, game mechanics, characters, planes, and themes all resurfacing from time-to-time to renew or maintain interest in the property. Sets like Ravnica, Mirrodin, Urzas, and others evoke a host of associations for the long-time gamer.

Extrinsically, M:tG reaches outwards to other properties with its Secret Lair sets, bringing in fans of other media properties (Warhammer, Dr. Who, The Walking Dead, Lord of the Rings, even Transformers) for specially themed cards and decks. Seeking out these Fans, or Lapsed Fans* (if we were to lay out a typology) to come back to Magic by engaging with that other thing that they love.

WotC isn’t the only company that does this either, as Games Workshop will engage heavily in the rich lore and history of their various game worlds, putting games on hiatus for years and then bringing them back in a new edition or a re-imagining to fans that will leap at the opportunity to grab them lest they disappear once more. FOMO as a Factor on the Corporate Quarterly Reports.

Cultural Nostalgia

Strathmore Rodeo (2024, from the author’s collection)

Cultural nostalgia exists too, and this extends far beyond media properties. Not quite “lifestyle”, though there is an element of that too, but more a combination of time and place, and often historical (though again, this can be “real” or “imagined” to various degrees, as we pointed out previously). Locally, the Calgary Stampede, Heritage Park, and Edmonton’s Klondike Days all trade on cultural nostalgia. Celebrating a time long past, and arts, dance, music and more that seem anachronistic. Historical recreationists are a large part of this too, whether it is for medieval Europe, Imperial Rome, Shogun-era Japan, or other periods. (Though I will note it the connection that if you can image a “World” for it Westworld, it probably exists.

At certain inflection points “historical recreation” can tip over into “experimental anthropology”, of which I have spoken of elsewhere. And a large part of historical recreation is done via military re-enactors: Civil War, WWII, Napoleonics, and the like. Live Action Role play (LARP), after a fashion, and the deep ties between gaming and LARP need to be examined. The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) was formed in 1966, preceding the invention of Dungeons and Dragons, but rising roughly with the development of the tabletop wargaming hobby more broadly. Within the SCA, we see the development and creation of an imagined nostalgia, for a place and time that didn’t quite exist, but was co-created as a mutual social imaginary.

Political Nostalgia

But above all, the most glaring example of the Nostalgia Curve in other fields are those taking place in the political arena. There are examples aplenty of movements evoking “the good old days” in the modern era. And yet, this is not a political blog, not is it seeking to be. This political nostalgia is mentioned for completeness, lest we be remiss in their omission. And yet, they do have a connection…

Future Nostalgia

No, not that one.

Technological Nostalgia

(And by technology, we’re referring to all types; this isn’t limited to recent hi-tech items.) Tech is no exception to evoking feelings of nostalgia. From classic cars to phones that go “brrr”, these tools that we use and have grown up with are deeply connected to us, and can evoke those lost feelings as soon as they are seen or held. Now, often we can remember why we moved on from them once we try and use them, but the feelings remain. We’ve covered this here before with respect to recent computing technology in our discussion of the recent return movement known as the dial-up pastorale, and we’ll return to it soon.

What’s next?

So in this – in all these fields and categories – The Nostalgia Curve is present, and in many more besides, as we intentionally avoided whole realms where it could be seen. Sports, Food, Fashion, Language, Music, all these and more could be explored further, if we desired. There is a through line in the ones chosen, that I hope is apparent, from gaming to LARPing to historical cosplay to historical politics to shared imagination of the future to a longing for how technology was in our youth. But there’s only so much room.

This intentional avoidance – this Nescience – has been happening in another area too, that of academia, and we need to compare the summary of my thoughts above, and in the previous parts, with some of what has gone before. So let’s have a look at Fredric Jameson. Just as soon as I explain what Nescience means…

The Value of Nostalgia?

This is part 2 of the Nostalgia Curve; part 1 and part 3 are already posted.*

In the first post of this series we described how nostalgia functions as a factor in the calculus of content production, how it feeds into the algorithm of whether something gets made. So that leads to the question: how to determine the value of nostalgia.

Now, I’m not particularly privy to the internal calculations of Hollywood finance, but it might be worth plotting those out, comparing released titles in a franchise versus the real (or subjective) value they held for the franchise owner. For illustrative purposes, we’ll use the Star Trek series released during the streaming era. Those include the following:

Star Trek Discovery (2017-2024): a prequel series with an all-new cast, and the first Star Trek series in 10 years, with a premiere on regular television before the rest of the episodes were released via streaming. There was some contention over earlier episodes, but it received high praise, and was noted as a driver of subscriptions.

Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023): a series following the captain of the Enterprise from Star Trek: the Next Generation, with eventual appearances of other cast members from that series. It received critical acclaim, with reviews generally around the 80% range, and it was a driver of subscriptions to the Paramount+ online channel.

Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-ongoing): an adult animated series based on a premise from a Star Trek: the Next Generation episode from 1994, following the misadventures of low-ranked characters. Lower Decks has gathered critical praise and generally positive reviews, but it doesn’t appear to be the driver of the ongoing Star Trek stories in the way that the other series are.

Star Trek: Prodigy (2021-ongoing): a computer animated Star Trek show aimed at children, with a tie-in to Star Trek: Voyager. Appearing on Nickelodeon, it was cancelled after one season despite critical praise and an Emmy, and picked up by Netflix for the second season, and possibly more.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022-ongoing): follows the Enterprise before Kirk became the captain and the events depicted in Star Trek: the Original Series (1966-1969). Feeling in some ways like a direct homage of the original show, it has received accolades, with a third season in production and a fourth ordered.

For all these series, we can see a number of commonalities: varying degrees of nostalgia, with some series tying more directly to past properties and the extended universe; there is a difficultly judging the impact as the streaming services are reticent to provide their viewership data; and tailoring each show to appeal to different segments of the larger Star Trek fandom.

Plotting these series out, we start to see what the curve looks like:

There are several takeaways:

Value is subjective; absent real data on the viewership, it can be tough to place the titles on the curve, or to judge their impact
Value is relative; for a show like Prodigy, it wasn’t worth it for Nickelodeon, but Netflix was more than happy to pick up and release the show.
Nostalgia is also subjective, but the more closely tied a property is to what has gone before – the trappings and tropes of the extended universe – the more constrained the creators can be in what they can make.

But there are other approaches we can take: value isn’t the only way to rate nostalgia. Perhaps point three can give us a clue: comparing the nostalgia a show evokes versus the novelty that it approaches the subject with. Let’s take a look at the Shape of that Curve in our next post.

* Disclaimer: due to the vagaries of blogging and this being an exercise in “thinking through writing”, this piece (part 2) ended up getting posted after part 3 on “the Shape of the Curve“. Whoops! My bad. Hope it didn’t cause too much confusion.

The Shape of the Curve

Lost in all the excitement of this new idea, I realize I forgot to actually show you what the curve looks like. Whoops. Let’s rectify that.

The first challenge is that the curve is still under development; this is all a work in progress, an act of thinking by writing, if you will. The second challenge is that my skills in data science and graphic design are somewhat lacking. (The overall website design should have been a hint). Nevertheless, we’ll try our best; though we’re currently stuck somewhere between MS Paint and R.

For the sake of example, we’ll use the Star Trek series released during the Streaming Era that we mentioned in our initial post as data points along the curve. The shape of the curve will depend on some choices we make. Let’s see what our options look like.

Curve 1: Nostalgia vs. Novelty

If we picture series (or media titles, generally) as containing elements that evoke either Nostalgia in the audience, then we can quantify* that in some form. This degree of nostalgia would exist along a continuum, where we can say something is more or less nostalgic relative to other titles in the brand. With the Star Trek Streaming Titles (ST:ST for short), that continuum might look something like this:

Star Trek is not unique in long-running media titles, in that they all trade in nostalgia to a degree, but here we see titles like Picard and Strange New Worlds leaning heavily on other characters, settings, and aesthetics to bring the audience on board, where as Discovery and Prodigy are further removed.

This is useful, but a more complete look at Nostalgia might contrast this with Novelty, where something new is introduced to the setting or the larger universe, and the traditional tropes and aesthetics of the universe are muted. Here we can see that Nostalgia isn’t absent with the more Novel titles, but their focus on Novelty moves them further along the curve.

However, this isn’t the only way we can picture the Curve, so it may be useful to lay out some alternative formulations.

Curve 2: Real vs Imagined

One way to think about Nostalgia is to think about the extent it is real or simply imagined, on the part of the audience. (I guess that creatives and other content producers can be part of this audience as well, as it’s not uncommon for the producers to be fans or marks for the product, but that’s an aside for a later date.)

Real nostalgia would be the fans longing for something that was actually produced (and published) in the past. It can be cited, looked at, enjoyed. Imagined nostalgia would be for something that the audience think they have seen, but never actually happened. For a more recent example, we could look deeper at some of the elements in Deadpool & Wolverine, like the yellow costume, or Gambit’s appearance in the film.

Neither of them actually happened before; they’re both adaptations of elements that have shown up previously in other media. Granted, the nature of transmedia storytelling necessarily means that there is going to be a lot of adaptation going around. The audience is doing a lot of the lifting here, getting something (close to) what they think they wanted.

Mapping real v. imagined nostalgia, this is what the ST:ST curve would look like:

Less of a curve, and more of a straight slope downhill. Hmm. But wait, in the previous post we also talked about the “incepted” nostalgia, that which was created by the content producers to evoke nostalgia. What does that look like for the ST:ST titles?

Curve 3: Organic vs. Manufactured

Organic nostalgia is that experienced by the audience on their own. It is somewhat inherent in the thing. Again, this can occur due to elements, aesthetics, and tropes of the shared universe, but it is on the audience. Organic nostalgia is also related to curve 2, as both real and imagined nostalgia could count as “organic”, having been experienced by the audience.

Manufactured nostalgia is that incepted form. Something brought in for the express purpose of pushing the audience’s nostalgia button. And Star Trek as a franchise pushes this button hard, with each series relying on it to some degree.

So much so that “series” may not be the right analytic unit for this. It may be worthwhile to go inter- or intra- series for the analysis, comparing the series on an episodic basis, or comparing the series versus other series for other franchises.

Current Examples

What is driving the current trend? The summer box office seems to be thriving on it. This series of posts was originally spawned by the release of Deadpool & Wolverine in late July 2024, and as I’m working on the next part Alien: Romulus has been released, drawing heavily on James Cameron’s (1986) Aliens, so much so that people are pointing out shot-for-shot scene comparisons where the A:R directly compares. This happened in D&W as well, with fight choreography coming directly from Sam Raimi’s (2002) Spider-Man, among many other elements.

And these movies are doing well, with positive word of mouth circulating about each film. So something is in the air. What else is pushing us along the Nostalgia Curve?