metropolis m

There is an obsession and it has a name: memory fever. It refers to the penchant for arousing memories of everything, and I really mean everything. Not only do individuals suffer from it, but society as a whole is infected with memory fever. Culture is full of retro and nostalgia, there’s a neo-conservative wave in politics with its eye on the Fifties and the economy is not averse to a dose of youth sentiment in marketing its wares. Add to this everyone’s obsession with digitally preserving their own lives for posterity, and it ought to be clear: history is mass culture and thus totally up for grabs.One can only hazard a guess as to where this memory fever comes from. One factor, it is said, is that modernisation is racing ahead, as is social unrest, initially as a result of the disappearance of the major ideologies and then as a result of the creation of a new ideological struggle post 9/11. And of course there is the rise of new media, the flood of images and the possibility of recording them digitally. And there’s the fact that all this image production means that there’s simply more to remember. Andreas Huyssen, the German culture historian and author of the book Present Past, from which the term memory fever comes, has no definitive explanation either. He suggests that the world has been thrown into confusion and is looking to the past for certainties. For him, looking back is a way of holding out against the changes, but not in the sense of life models or lessons for the future. In his eyes the retrospective is mainly a demonstrative attempt at slowing down. This summer Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian and the Whitney Biennial in New York presented history as the latest plaything of a young generation of artists who, tired of all the political issues of the past years, are marking time in order to immerse themselves in the idea of progress and change, of revolution and continuity. It is time for resignation instead of renewal, deepening instead of the flight forward. Interest is assumed to be intellectual rather than trendsetting, basic rather than superficial. Even if discussed in terms of nostalgia. In the Whitney Biennial catalogue, there is a quotation by Svetlana Boym, the Russian born Harvard professor and Slavist, who has written a book in which she attempts to get to the bottom of society’s current interest in nostalgia. She establishes a difference between a so-called restorative and a reflective nostalgia. The former has to do with the idea of nostalgia we are all familiar with: restorative, stereotypical, nationalist and lacking any self-reflection. The past is literally reconstructed so that the loss that causes the unpleasant, indefinable feeling in the stomach is allayed as much as possible. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, does have in Boym’s view very much a measure of profundity. Instead of being completely bound up in foolish restoration, this form of nostalgia takes up a contemplative position and formulates statements about the times and society in which we live, just like any other form of historical reflection. The desire is not so much allayed as analysed.Boym’s The Futures of Nostalgia is not a memorable book, but her attempt at taking nostalgia seriously is certainly very provocative. She argues for nostalgia’s deserved status upgrade, an improved version of its usual wak and dismal form. Left-wing writers in particular make mincemeat of the nostalgic flight into the past, which in their eyes lacks any sense of reality and struggle. Boym shows that things are a bit more nuanced. Apart from the fact that we live in a world in which many people are uprooted and thus contend with nostalgic feelings, there’s a lot it can teach us. Escape from the present can, however imaginary it may be, offer a way out for the future and help in the formation of an individual and collective identity. Moreover, it helps us to see time not as irreversible, but precisely as a continuity and thus something to treat responsibly. This issue of METROPOLIS M is not dominated by the rehabilitation of nostalgia. The subject is historical reflection, and the ubiquitous nostalgia of today’s culture happens to be part of it. Typically enough, the retrospective gaze reinforces a sense of the future, as though the authors are talking about tomorrow rather than today or yesterday, precisely as befits good historiography.