Nostalgia

Nostalgia

Let me start with a short quotation from a short piece "Nostalgia makes us all tick"

"Whether we are inclined, personally, to be nostalgic or we are somehow bound up in the external and contextual nostalgic webs, nostalgia dictates our lives. Beyond the intimate bittersweet immersions of nostalgia, conjured by aging, remembrance, death, time, childhood, loss, recovery, and melancholia, we are influenced by such things as retro shops, local produce, concepts of national states, xenophobia, communities, technology advancement, migration, and the climate crisis”.

Some three years ago. I wrote about “Nervous States – democracy and the Decline of Reason” (2018) - a highly original analysis of how feelings seem in recent years to have overwhelmed western societies. Its author, William Davies, is very good on how 17^th century trade led to the development of the system of trust which allowed bills to be issued and exchanged; and subsequently to the wider system of trust of middlemen and experts.

A veteran scholar of neoliberalism, Davies has drawn on a wide set of genres 
— history, philosophy, political science, medicine — to explain the “decline of 
reason” subtitle of his book.
In the seventeenth century, a twin set of abstracted languages were born: the
 abstract system of signs set up by modern commerce and science and the 
system of “abstract” representative government. Each of these moments has 
its own protagonists in Davies’s book. Not just Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes
 and Francis Bacon but, arguably, the first technocrat William Petty’s “political
 arithmetic” - as inventors of the modern state, commerce and modern science.
Then there is the anti-rationalist camp, in which we find Friedrich Hayek,
 Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, Napoléon, and Donald Trump, who together
 initiate the much-lamented “decline of reason.”
Modernity’s twin system of representation (modern science and the
 representative state) has seen a dramatic loss of legitimacy in the last
 thirty years.
- Science has lost its glow and has retreated into a citadel of expertise.
- Party-politics and parliaments, in turn, have lost their attraction, with
 decreasing memberships and increasing popularity for referendums from 
populists.

The result is a two-pronged “crisis of representation,” both on scientific and political
 fronts. But today I turn my attention to Nostalgia - 

Social scientists interested in studying emotions – which became a particularly thriving and promising research concern from the 1980s and onwards – have to a large degree neglected nostalgia and focused more intensely on emotions such as fear, love, trust, shame, guilt, anger, envy and so on. At least this was the case until quite recently, when nostalgia gradually stated to attract the attention of scholars working within the social sciences and humanities. Sociology, psychology, anthropology, historical science, political science, literary studies, business studies and so on have now discovered nostalgia as a potent and inexhaustible source of knowledge about individual behaviour as well as about ongoing cultural changes.

According to Zygmunt Bauman (2017), we now live in the ‘age of nostalgia’. In fact, it seems as if in recent years we may have witnessed nothing less than a ‘revival of nostalgia’ in many quarters of the academic world with numerous new books published on the topic and an increasing number of journal articles testifying to the fact that nostalgia is indeed still with us and alive and kicking

Nostalgia has become very fashionable in the past decade. Perhaps first noticed by Gary Cross in Consumed Nostalgia – memory in the age of fast capitalism (2015) although Post-communist Nostalgia by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille had also drawn attention to the phenomenon in 2010 but mainly for a central european audience.

Both books passed me by – and I have been able to download them only because a friend passed me yesterday "Nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe – from Literature and Film to Media" by Alexandru Condrache (2022)

Alexandru Condrache’s book scans nostalgy’s landscapes with gusto aplenty and no little faith. He knows what he’s talking about even if some of us don’t care, while others might try to not remember the scars that once were wounds, some deep. As a devoted interdisciplinarian, he chronicles the kinds and binds of (mostly Eastern European) nostalgies stalking literature and film, journalism and ads, ideologies left and right, and our less or more fictitious selves. Ostalgie, Yugonostalgia, and especially Romanian post-communist aches are taken to task, sifted through fine meshed analytic strainers, found wanting or desirous, and placed in inviting synthetic containers where nostalgias cohabitate, whether personal or collective, painful or just playful, ridiculous, dramatic, or passées. “Nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe: From Literature and Film to Media” sets up and charts off one of the most inclusive networks of nostalgias to date. At that, it is to be reckoned with as a lucid study in interdisciplinary communications

Further Reading

"Nostalgia Now – cross-disciplinary perspectives on the past" MH Jacobsen 2020 The full book

"Media, Communications and Nostalgia" 2016 useful overview 113pp