In addition to looking at Jameson, I needed to go back to my bookshelf. One of the formative works for me before I went to grad school was Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion. I haven’t talked much about it here (though I did bring it up in the August newsletter, which was composed while this post was being drafted).
But it led me to a longer form work of his, the 2001 title On Equilibrium, which covered many of the same themes in a more traditional structure. In it he talked about “the six essential qualities of humanity” that help us be responsible individuals. These qualities are common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason. These qualities don’t stand in isolation; they are assistive. They help each other up.
That being said, it’s worth taking a look at what Saul has to say on Memory, in the context of our look at Nostalgia, and Soylent Culture.
“Art consists in bringing the memory of things past to the surface. But the author is not a passeiste. He is linked to history; to memory; which is linked to the common dream.”
J.R.Saul On Equilibrium (2001, p.236)
and there is some more on the source, Le Clezio, see footnote 22
What this means for Soylent Culture, is that with AI (art), the artists have access to everything; all the memories scanned and stored within it; and the artist then becomes a curator of what to display.
AI Art is a digital art form. In the same way that a painter working on a painting is limited to the colors on their pallette (or within their budget), whereas a digital artist working on a tablet has a nigh-unlimited range of colors and hues to select from, and must decide from that range of what is possible, what best suits the piece.
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan described how the content of any new medium is that of an older medium. This can make it stronger and more intense:
The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either or print or of speech.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964).
In 2024, this is the promise of the generative AI tools, that we currently have access to, tools like ChatGPT, Dall-E, Claude, Midjourney, and a proliferation of others. But this is also the end result of 30 years of new media, of the digitalization of anything and everything that can be used as some form of content on the internet.
Our culture has been built on these successive waves of media, but what happens when their is nothing left to feed the next wave?
It feeds on itself, and we come to live in an era of Soylent Culture.
Of course, this has been a long time coming. The atomization of culture into it’s component parts; the reduction in clips to soundbites, to TikToks, to Vines; the memeification of culture in general were all evidence of this happening. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, it was just a reduction to the bare essentials as ever smaller bits of attention were carved off of the mass audience.
Culture is inherently memetic. This is more than just Dawkins’ formulation of the idea of the meme to describe a unit of cultural transmission while the whole field of anthropology was right over there. The recombination of various cultural components in the pursuit of novelty leads to innovation in the arts and the aesthetic dimension. And when a new medium presents itself, due to changing technology, the first forays into that new medium will often be adaptations or translations of work done in an earlier form, as noted by McLuhan (above).
It can take a while for that new media to come into its own. Often, it’ll be grasped by the masses as ‘popular’ entertainment, and derided by the ‘high’ arts. It can often feel derivative as it copies those stories, retelling them in a new way. But over time, fresh stories start to be told by those familiar with the medium, with its strengths and weaknesses, tales told that reflect the experiences and lives of the people living in the current age and not just reflections of earlier tales.
How long does it take for a new media to be accepted as art?
First they said radio wasn’t art, and then we got War of the Worlds They said comic books weren’t art, then we got Maus They said rock and roll wasn’t art, then we go Dark Side of the Moon (and Pet Sounds, and Sgt Peppers, and many others) They said films weren’t art, then we got Citizen Kane They said video games weren’t art, and we got Final Fantasy 7 They said TV wasn’t art, and we got Breaking Bad And now they’re telling us that AI Generated Art isn’t art, and I’m wondering how long it will take until they admit they were wrong here too.
But this can often happen relatively ‘early’ in the life-cycle of a new media, once creators become accustomed to the cultural form. As newer creators began working with the media, they can take it further, but there is a risk. Creators that have grown up with the media may be too familiar with the source material, drawing on the representations from within itself.
F’rex: writers on police procedurals, having grown up watching police procedurals, simply endlessly repeat the tropes that are foundational to the genre. The works become pastiches, parodies of themselves, often unintentionally, unable to escape from the weight of the tropes they carry.
Soylent culture is this, the self-referential culture that has fed on itself, an Ourobouros of references that always point at something else. The rapid-fire quips coming at the audience faster than a Dennis Miller-era Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” or the speed of a Weird Al Yankovic polka medley. Throw in a few decades worth of Simpson‘s Halloween episodes, and the hyper-referential and meta-commentative titles like The Family Guy and Deadpool (print or film) seem like the inevitable results of the form.
And that’s not to suggest that the above works aren’t creative; they’re high examples of the form. But the endless demand for fresh material in the era of consumption culture means that the hyper-referentiality will soon exhaust itself, and turn inward. This is where the nostalgia that we’ve been discussing come into play, a resource for mining, providing variations of previous works to spark a glimmer in the audience’s eyes of “Hey, I recognize that!”
But they’re limited, bound as they are to previous, more popular titles, art that was more widely accessible, more widely known. They are derivative works. They can’t come up with anything new.
Perhaps.
This is where we come back to the generative art tools, the LLMs and GenAIs we spoke of earlier. Because while soylent culture existed before the AI Art tools came onto the scene, it has become increasingly obvious that they facilitate it, drive it forward, and feed off it even more. The AI art tools are voracious, continually wanting more, needing fresh new stuff in order to increase the fidelity of the model, that hallowed heart driving the beast that continually hungers.
But the model is weak, it is vulnerable.
Model Collapse
And the one thing the model can’t take too much of is itself. Model collapse is the very real risk of a GPT being trained on LLM generated text. Identified by Shumailov et. al. (2024), and “ubiquit(ous) among all learned generative models”, model collapse is a risk that creators of AI tools face in further developing the tools. In an era of model collapse, the human-generated content of the earlier, pre-AI web becomes a much valuable resource, the digital equivalent of low-background steel sought after for the creation of precision instruments in an era of atmospheric nuclear testing, where the background levels of radiation made the newly mined ore unsuitable for use.
(The irony that we were living in an era when the iron was unusable should not go un-noted.)
“Model collapse is a degenerative process affecting generations of learned generative models, in which the data they generate end up polluting the training set of the next generation. Being trained on polluted data, they then mis-perceive reality.”
(Shumailov, et. al., 2024).
Model collapse can result in the models “forgetting” (Shumailov, et al, 2023). It is a cybernetic prion disease. Like the cattle that developed BSE by being fed feed that contained parts of other ground up cows sick with the disease, the burgeoning electronic “minds” of the AI tools cannot digest other generated content.
Soylent culture.
But despite the incredible velocity that all this is happening at, it is still early days. There is an incredible amount of research being done on the effects of model collapse, and the long term ramifications for it on the industry. There may yet be a way out from culture continually eating itself.
We’ll explore some of those possible solutions next.
Writing on a topic like nostalgia is a path many have gone before, so my own thoughts – summed up over the last handful of posts (and a little bit on the newsletter too) – are unlikely to be wholly new to to the world. That by no means the exercise is wasted, as those reflective moments are wh0ere we can put together what we know, and what we think we know, about a given topic. That reflection can also allow us to compare those thoughts with other works on the subject.
As I outlined in my post on Nescience, I’m aware of at least one major author who has written on Nostalgia: Fredric Jameson. There are a few others that we may get to in time (but I’m not the biggest Freud guy, tbh, so there might be some skips along the way too). Jameson’s essay “Nostalgia for the Present” was published in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1989, and has been reprinted in various books and collections of his since, such as 1992’s Postmoderism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Which, given our previous discussion on commodities and such, may come as a surprise to hear is on my TBR rather than “fully digested”. There’s a lot to chew on out there, and we come to these things as we are meant to, I guess.
Before we get to Jameson’s thoughts on nostalgia, a quick summary of what we’ve covered so far here:
Nostalgia is representational (in a memetic way)
Nostalgia is an assemblage
The perceived value of the nostalgia of a property can impact financing
This value is subjective, and also relative
Nostalgia is also subjective, and can be constraining
Nostalgia can be contrasted with Novelty
Real nostalgia can be the audience longing for something actually produced
Imagined nostalgia is something the audience thinks they’ve seen before
Nostalgia can be organic (from the audience) or manufactured (by the producers)
Nostalgia is substrate neutral – it can happen in nearly any field
With the above in mind, what does Jameson have to say, and how does his work compare with the above? Let’s check out…
1989
(from the author’s collection?)
Whoops…
(Apparently 1989 was a pivotal year).
“Nostalgia for the Present” (1989)
Fredric Jameson is a literary critic and philosopher who is – as of the writing of this in 2024 – the Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. He’s written in a lot of fields, most notably on post-modernism and capitalism, and “Nostalgia for the Present” fits in this vein, coming 30 years after the publication of his PhD. He’s been working on these ideas for a while at this point. For the piece, he looks at the role of nostalgia in three works: Philip K Dick’s novel Time out of Joint (1959), Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which is as unique a selection of content as one might to choose to analyze as any, I suppose.
(Though looking over what we cover here on the blog, I’m not going to criticize the selections. Glass Houses (not the album) and all that.)
Time Out Of Joint (hereafter, TOOJ) is a faux time travel story, where a man who is apparently trapped in the 1950s notices small differences are errors in reality, which leads him to suspect that something weird if going on, kinda like the “Deja Vu” moment in The Matrix. These themes are typical of Philip K Dick: representations of reality, false consciousness, things moving behind the scenes. Looking at it in 2024, we’ve seen it in so many of the adaptations of his work, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report, and more.
Here in TOOJ, the protagonist is quite astute: he is in a “potemkin village” of the 1950s, rebuilt in 1997 during an interstellar civil war (Jameson, p.521). Not quite our current reality (well the interstellar part, at least), and again like much older science fiction, now rooted firmly in our past, in a future that will not come to be, as we noted in a previous post. While at times TOOJ feels more like a rough draft of The Truman Show, with the apparatus moving around to ensure the world is static for this one particular man, and this feeds into our various narcissistic, main-character desires, the film clip that would best describe TOOJ would be the epilogue to Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), where he wakes in a room, and recognizes from the radio broadcast that things are not what they seem. If there were a way to cliff notes a 221 page novel, this would be it.
There’s more going on in the novel, of course. Jameson notes how TOOJ is set up to be a model of the 1950s, as something that the protagonist will accept, echoing the Machines’ creation of the late 1990s virtual world in order to pacify the humans kept in the endless rows of creches in The Matrix (1999). Elements of the work of PKD have been copied so many times (at least six, by last count) that it’s hard to recognize the original source. We find it here in TOOJ, but that’s what Jameson is arguing (what with the Matrix being released a decade later and all).
TOOJ: “(The novel) is a collective wish fulfillment and the expression of a deep unconscious yearning for a simpler and more human social system, a small-town Utopia very much in the North American frontier tradition” (Jameson, p.521). I guess here’s where we’ll put a pin in our discussion to talk about the Fallout TV series, and Westworld too, but for now we need to press on.
There are details of the other two titles Jameson refers to – Something Wild and Blue Velvet – and they are fantastic films as well, but here they are to bolster his case, provide further evidence and allow him to triangulate towards the elements of nostalgia he is looked for. As our remit, familiarity, and focus here in the Implausiverse is more on the sci-fi side of things, we’ll see what he says about that and then use that to figure out what nostalgia is all about.
Jameson on Science Fiction
Science Fiction is a “category” in Jameson’s words, with bunny ears included, though we might just wanna call it a genre that came about during that Eisenhowerian period, of the US conquering space and battling “communists” at the same time, and this ideology is inherent within the lit. The “category” might be bigger, going large to include some real lit like Moore’s Utopia, and others, or it might be more tightly bound to the pulps. I like the expansive view of sci-fi for our POV here, though it seems best to loop in Shelley’s Frankenstein by definition and intent, and pin down the start of sci-fi proper to ‘sometime around when Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Centre of the Earth‘ (1864 for those keeping track), which scoops up HG Wells’ stuff as well, and gives us a strong foundation.
The classic 1950s era of sci-fi is kinda the “Golden Age”: a particular vision of the future both technologically and aesthetically. Its goal is to help us process our history, to come to terms with it and understand how we fit into the current era. Jameson contrasts sci-fi with the historical novel, a cultural form (along with costume films and period dramas on TV) that reflected the ideology of the feudal classes, and had fallen off throughout the late 20th century as the (then new) middle class sought something different, something that amped up their own achievements. Enter sci-fi. The historical novel failed not simply due to the feudalist ideals, but because, according to Jameson: “in the postmodern age we no longer tell ourselves our history in that fashion, but also because we no longer experience it that way, and indeed, perhaps no longer experience it at all” (p.522).
(This may have been true at the time, though the recent rise in historicism and historicity in its forms in the 21st century may suggest Varoufakis is more correct about Technofeudalism than one might suppose. Or rather then, the other way around: did Shakespeare in Love preceed Technofeudalism? Or succeed because of it? Was it the harbinger or the aftershock?)
(We’ll put another pin down here for the fantasy vs. sci-fi debate too, while we’re at it.)
So for Jameson, science fiction is an aspirational vehicle for the masses who are rejecting the previous historical viewpoint. Compared to the historical novel: “Science Fiction equally corresponds to the waning of the blockage of that historicity, and particularly in our own time, in the postmodern era, to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression” (p.523). A lot of the reasons why this occurs have less to do with the content (though there are parts of that too, to be sure), or at least particular aesthetic choices that are made, and more to to with the socio-economic conditions of post-WWII USA (and to a lesser extent Canada and the UK).
And this is where nostalgia starts to come in. Because both historical novels and sci-fi have a tie to the imagination, an imagined past or an imagined future. They use representation in their relationship with the past or future (p.523), but they are really ‘a perception of the present as history’, a way, that we can look at our situation through a few steps removed. This is the conceit throughout the Star-Trek-War-Hammer(s), the alien “other” is but an aspect of our selves, our society, our culture, that we try to take a closer look at.
Nostalgia for the 1950s (in the 1980s)
Describing TOOJ, Jameson presents us with a list of things that “evoke” the 1950s: Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, PTAs, etc., and if it reads like a certain Billy Joel song, that’s not by accident (though “We Didn’t Start the Fire” also being released in 1989 is most certainly coincidental). Nostalgia can often look like a collection of stuff in some hoarders back room. The items are referrents to the era, not facts per se, but ideas about those facts. The question Jameson asks is “Did the ‘period’ see itself this way?” PKD was writing TOOJ in 1959, looking at the decade that just passed and choosing what the essential elements might look like from the perspective of 1997, the year of the fictional interstellar war in his novel, and for the most part getting it right.
There is a “realistic” feel to how PKD describes the `1950s, a feel that arises from the cultural referents that are used. Jameson notes: “If there is ‘Realism’ in the fifties, in other words, it is presumably to be found there, in mass cultural representation, the only kind of art willing (and able) to deal with the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town, of normalcy and non-deviant everyday life.” (p.518, emphasis mine). To the spectator looking back from the 1980s, the image of the 1950s comes from the pop-cultural artifacts that the people in the 1950s understood themselves by. We’re just looking at it from a distance, through a scanner, darkly, and darker over time.
What this accomplishes is “a process of reification” (p.523). The reality gets blurred by the nostalgic elements, and this ends up becoming the signifier that represents the whole. So our sense of our selves, and of any moment in history, may have little or nothing to do with reality, objective reality that is. Which is the biggest PKD-style head trip out there. Though it’s hard to put into words. Show, don’t tell, and in the works of PKD and all of the PKDickensian-inspired media out there, they keep trying to show, over and over again. It’s tricky though. It requires a lot of speculation.
And TOOJ is ultimately a piece of speculative fiction. “It is a speculation which presupposes the possibility that at an outer limit the sense people have of themselves and their own moment of history may ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with its reality” (Jameson, p.520). How we think of ourselves, our histories, and our generations, are only tied to a fraction of the things that are out there, and much of it may be that “imagined nostalgia” we talked about a few posts ago.
Fitting the pieces together
Which brings us back to the goal we had near the top of this post: What did Fredric Jameson have to say about nostalgia, and how does it jive with our own concept of the nostalgia curve. We can elements of what Jameson was talking about in at least four of our categories:
Nostalgia is representational
Real nostalgia
Imagined nostalgia
Nostalgia happens in different media
Tackling these in turn, we can see how our idea of nostalgia being a representation of a thing, rather than being the thing itself is fundamental in Jameson’s work, and carried throughout it. The ideas of thing, not the things themselves. And for Jameson, those mediated examples coming from pop culture versions, and then informing the generational logic for successive viewers is important too; it connects with our idea of “imagined nostalgia”, the kind that the audience thinks they are remembering, rather than actually experienced.
Jameson doesn’t distinguish between different “kinds” of nostalgia, or at least at the source of where it is produced, but looks at what the the nostalgia is “for” (hence the title, natch). A 1980s audience longing for the imagined view of the `1950s; a interstellar warrior (in the text) longing for their imagined view of the same; or a writer from the decade of the 1950s constructing a longing for that decade while it is still going on. These are all “nostalgia” writ large, to Jameson, whereas we’ve increased the granularity a bit to fine tune our analysis of the Nostalgia Curve/
Jameson also looks at the construction of nostalgia in various media – novels and film in this case, though there could be others – tying in with our “substrate neutral” idea above. The Nostalgia Curve is a transmedia property, and not particular to any one kind or another.
The elements of nostalgia that focused on value are largely absent from his work. Not completely, but as he was looking at the reification of ideology that takes places via nostalgia, and not necessarily the production culture and political economy elements, this is understandable.
Next steps: Memory and Soylent Culture
There’s more to nostalgia than just the media aspect, though, and we’ll need to take a deeper look at the connection it has with memory. There are a few authors I have on the bookshelf that talk about it, and we’ll get into them soon.
The other place nostalgia is showing up in is as part of our Soylent Culture, where bits and pieces of past properties we like or love are dredged back up by the cultural sieves that are our Generative AI tools, and the Platforms that encourage their use as Spreadable Media. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan talked about how new media is built out of the pieces of the old, and nowhere is that more true than in our current online culture. We’ll look deeper into these pieces soon.
References:
Jameson, F., (1989). “Nostalgia for the Present”, The South Atlantic Quarterly 88:2, Spring 1989. Duke University Press,
(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:
The original Rumsfeld Matrix
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
Banks, (1996) Excession. Cover from the author’s collection.
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:
Dr Implausible’s Knowledge Matrix
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.
(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
(Cue the soundtrack)
No, not that one.
More like this:
Star Trek: the Original Series, the Fotonovella
Science fiction isn’t immune to nostalgia, and for what is ostensibly a forward-looking genre, there is a lot of looking to the past that takes place within the fiction presented to the audience. Not just with time travel jaunts to the past, like in the Star Trek episode above (which involved a hop to the next sound-stage and the prop closets as much as in any early Doctor Who episode, where production constraints shaped the creative direction as much as anything), but also in the endless tales of past historical battles like Marathon, Thermopylae, and Hastings being waged anew with the serial numbers closely filed off.
It isn’t just the props, the battles, and the ideology (I’m looking at you, Starship Troopers) that can be was retrograde; science fiction often gives us nostalgia for a future that will not come to be. This is retro-futurism, science fiction with the aesthetic appeal of an earlier age, seen best in the recent Fallout video games and TV series, and the short story “The Gernsback Continuum” by author William Gibson. Longing for past visions of the future. Which brings us to:
Technological Nostalgia
Dial-up pastorale (2024)
(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…
