Tag: nostalgia

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.