metropolis m

Over recent years the boom in nostalgic entertainment – a phenomenon that Fredric Jameson drew attention to twenty years ago – has only increased in intensity.1 One only need think of the endless series of programmes like I Love the 70s and I Love the 80s: each decade is reduced to a series of trends, fashions and hypes which pass the review of a host of more or less famous Dutch or British celebrities. These recent nostalgia shows construct a chillingly homogenous past in which everyone watched The Dukes of Hazzard, was a fan of Wham! and wrestled with the Rubik’s Cube. One can often detect a touch of embarrassment in these surveys: how on earth could we have thought these hairdos were ‘cool’? Moreover, not everyone seems to remember the topics that, according to the programme makers, were so definitive of the year in question. Still, the list has to be gone through – even if the celebs are clearly unable to say anything remotely interesting about the preordained items.Jameson based his analysis of nostalgic entertainment largely on the nostalgia films of the 1970s and 1980s, of which George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) was an early instance: the 1950s and early 1960s came back to life, transformed into an easily-recognizable set of signs: rock ’n’ roll, Cadillacs, diners. This is the world of Grease or of the TV series, Happy Days, followed in the 1980s by Back to the Future and in the 1990s by Forrest Gump, in which the longing for an unsullied age before the Fall of the protest movement and hippie culture was made even more explicit. A few years ago the wave of nostalgia for the early 1950s itself became a subject of – ironic – nostalgia. In 1995 Spike Jonze’s ingeniously directed and edited music video for the Weezer song Buddy Holly recycled the 1950s recycling that Happy Days perpetrated from 1974 to 1984. Naturally the nostalgia machine did not remain stuck in the 1950s. American TV put on the That ’70s Show and the I Love…-series and by now their clones have covered the whole second half of the twentieth century. The question arises just how far back in time nostalgia can go. With nostalgia, isn’t it necessarily a case of a personal sense of being adrift in time, a longing for a bygone youth? Can there be such a thing as a nostalgia for a time that no living being has lived through? For the eighteenth century? Or the Stone Age?That nostalgia often does have this link with one’s own youth can be seen from the way in which pop music has become a vehicle for nostalgia; it is with good reason that pop music, in its most jukebox-compatible guise, is one of the main ingredients of the I Love… -series. Concerts of ‘historical’ acts, whether it is Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson or the Pixies, are largely attended by a public that is in a distinctly nostalgic mood. This can be expressed–for instance–in clothing or behaviour. At a recent Pixies concert everyone seemed to have suddenly discovered T-shirts from the late 1980s in their closets, and the fact that Dylan audiences regularly go wild during some of the most dated and clichéd moments of his work suggests that one is attending a kind of therapy session for baby boomers. A prominent result of the wave of nostalgia in pop music is the fashion for reunions. Recently The Doors toured again with Ian Astbury as replacement and look-alike for Jim Morrison. They were preceded by The Velvet Underground and the Sex Pistols, while recently the Pixies again came onstage for the nostalgic masses who stay away when Frank Black or Kim Deal are playing with their current bands in much smaller venues.In visual art, Mathias Poledna responds to the nostalgia trend in the music industry. In his films he shows details of a band in eternal rehearsal, immediately recognizable as an 80s post-punk band (Actualité, 2001), or the interior of the studio where the Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds, in which a retro-looking kid sings a 1960s-type song (Western Recording, 2003)(see METROPOLIS M, n. 4, 2004, ed.) Crucial in these films is that the show does not consist of polished readymade performances of well-known numbers, but of rehearsals and recording sessions, warts and all. The result is a sort of historical no man’s land, jarringly anachronistic rather than nostalgic.

Time past and the production of signs

The term ‘nostalgia’ originated in the late seventeenth century as a medical term for homesickness. But in the course of time it began to refer less to homesickness for a place and more to a longing for a lost time, that of one’s own youth.2 It is with good reason that, in the literature on nostalgia, Proust’s work is often described as quintessentially nostalgic. This is admittedly somewhat ironic: after all, Proust was a master of modernist literature, and Jameson stated that postmodernism distinguishes itself from modernism amongst other things through a blossoming of nostalgia which results from the decay of the historical awareness that modernism possessed. But what is involved here is a number of different phenomena that are labelled with the same term. Proust’s work is a monumental act of Erinnerungsarbeit; the memory activated through the taste of the madeleine cake makes possible a detailed reconstruction of the narrator’s childhood and thus, indirectly, of the culture and social stratum in which he grew up. It would be hard to call this nostalgic on the same grounds as the cartoon-like Fifties that Happy Days dishes out. In the present-day mass-media nostalgia culture, the element of the personal, labour-intensive assimilation of one’s past is subordinate to a replication of a number of signs for ‘nostalgia’ as a prefabricated product. It is the world of the Jack Rabbit Slim’s restaurant in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), in which clones of 1950 stars serve food and drinks in a setting that contains all the ‘right’ signs; the production of instant nostalgia is boosted here to such a degree that it is almost transformed into horror. The restaurant in Pulp Fiction is hardly less grisly than the bar in The Shining, but its uncanny character is the result of a past that has been smoothed over by immaculate simulacra, and not of a past that still haunts the present. In series that appear to allow room for personal recollections, such as I Love the 70s and its successors and derivatives, these memories are at the service of what a specific decade symbolizes, of what for instance ‘Eightiesness’ means. It is no more than logical that at a certain moment young celebrities are required to dredge up memories of something that happened before they were born (after all, young people won’t switch on the set to watch some old guy rummage through his memories of former times). In music too this industrialized nostalgia becomes detached from personal memory: not only baby boomers, but people in their teens or twenties can also wax nostalgic over the Doors or Dylan. One can see the first Back to the Future film (1985) as a symbol of the renouncing of personal experience: the protagonist lands in the 1950s where he has to make sure that his (future) parents get together – otherwise he won’t be born. In other words, he doesn’t land in his own past but in that of his parents, which is once again reduced to typical 1950s clichés. A period is thus turned into style, into pure sign value. As a consequence, it is indeed possible for decades and centuries that nobody alive today has lived through to fall prey to nostalgia. If American Graffiti or Grease are nostalgia films, so is Sense and Sensibility. Artists too like Jorge Pardo or Tobias Rehberger also participate in this nostalgia culture. In their installations they combine elements from the design and autonomous (abstract) art of the past century in ways that are often witty and surprising; the symbols are often jumbled up together instead of being recombined according to their original guidelines. Even so, their work remains a rather technocratic manipulation of signs; where it is awkward or recalcitrant, it is so in a nice and friendly way. Philosophers of history from Walter Benjamin to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have frequently contrasted a form of active repetition that testifies to a genuine historical understanding with a purely consumerist, passive repetition of forms and styles, that implies a denial of history. Benjamin declared that the French revolutionaries brought ancient Rome back to life in a Jetztzeit, a now-time; they didn’t contemplate history, they activated it. Not that an active relation with the past has to be heroic and revolutionary by definition; Benjamin also admired Proust’s literary recreation of the past that was made possible by the opening up of his mémoire involontaire. In contrast with such forms of active, creative and, in the most extreme cases, revolutionary treatment of history are those nineteenth-century bourgeois citizens who surround themselves with historicist bric-a-brac and who daydream over the novels of Sir Walter Scott.3 In the one instance, the past is rendered fertile for and in the present, in the other it is essentially used for escapism. One could think of our contemporary nostalgia culture as a new version of the culture of historicism – or at any rate the more banal manifestations of this culture, such as indiscriminate insertions of neo-styles, many historical novels, salon-style painting. What has evaporated is the ideology behind historicism, the faith in the importance of History – especially that of one’s own people – for one’s own identity and that of the nation. All that remains is nostalgic entertainment that consists of indulging in signs that signify historical otherness in ways that are immediately recognizable and familiar.The distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ historical repetition is a convenient analytical aid, but historical reality is often more muddled. Take the immense interest taken in the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s by the art world of the past ten to fifteen years: some of the best artists, critics and curators have probed approaches from that age to see if they can still provide fruitful impulses. There seems to be no nostalgic temptation here, and yet the enthralled manner in which some works of the 1960s are presented seem to imply a reproach to contemporary artists for failing to live up to the standards set by former giants. neo-avant-garde becomes thus a nostalgic brand, not unlike The Beach Boys.

The storm of history

If an apparently active and critical approach to the past can take on nostalgic traits, can’t nostalgia also provide an impetus for an artistic practice that transcends the culture industry’s style management? The important thing is to regain a sense of personal commitment in the midst of our forest of signs. The starting point for this could be the implicit indictment against the course of the history concealed in any form of nostalgia – namely that things used to be better. Maybe the fashions and trends of our youth were stupid, but at least they were ours – at any rate we had the illusion they were – and we have been deprived of them by a culture industry that piles stupidity upon stupidity. In a sense, this is a popular version of Benjamin’s Sturm der Geschichte; the storm of progress-cum-destruction that is history.4 David Thomas, the singer of the renowned proto-punk group Pere Ubu, deploys an aggravated, aggressive nostalgia against the stylised nostalgia that is so rampant in the pop industry. Thomas consistently emphasizes that he remains attached to a city that no longer exists, the Cleveland of the 1970s with its urban decay and industrial ruins: ‘I knew the Cleveland of that moment, before they changed it from being a magnificent sort of lost view of the world to a boutique or a coffee shop.’ 5 Thomas’s nostalgia does not remain a purely private affair: in records like Pennsylvania (1998) and St Arkansas (2002) by Pere Ubu or 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man’s Chest (2004) by David Thomas and Two Pale Boys, the sound of the early Pere Ubu is reactivated in enriched form, sharper and more poignant due to the awareness of lost time. ‘I began to notice they were taking things away from me without asking me,’ Thomas – with his typical ironic megalomania – once expressed the feeling that he had been deprived of a world that was precious to him.6 This feeling of being robbed of one’s roots and ending up stranded in the ruins the storm of pop history leaves in its wake, is in the end more fruitful than the control and total disposability over the past that one gets in the work of artists like Pardo. Thomas’s 1970s are not any matter of nostalgic design but a broken promise, a secret history that people want to erase and that is momentarily revived over and again in guitar riffs, whining analogue synthesizers and sinister tales of ghost towns and lost highways. It is not inconceivable that a form of productive nostalgia is also possible with relation to (much) earlier periods; given that present-day nostalgia culture has prised itself loose to such a degree from personal experience that everything and anything is potentially its prey (even the holocaust, judging by the film La Vita è Bella), this extended nostalgia can be infiltrated by an attitude that attaches itself with equal intensity to a long-gone period like that of childhood.For instance, an artist like Ian Hamilton Finlay endeavours to bring the French Revolution back to life and although the ‘totalitarian’ character of this work is not unproblematic, it can also be viewed as a valuable antidote to a dominant cutlure of nostagia that in fact is equally totalitarian in its pluralist lack of engagement. Just as the Revolution brought antiquity back to life in a now-time, Finlay for his part sees the Revolution and neoclassicism as radically contemporary; consequently the same becomes true of Greece and Rome themselves. ‘For the temples of the Greeks our homesickness lasts forever’: while antiquity in films like Gladiator and Troy remain pure nostalgic entertainment, Finlay rediscovers nostalgia in the original sense of the word.7 His nostalgia for antiquity and revolution is a historical homesickness that accepts no compromise.1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, USA, 1991. (The title essay was originally published in 1984.)2. See: Linda Hutcheon, ‘Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern’, www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html3. For Benjamin’s remark about the French Revolution, see thesis XIV of ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’(1940), in: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I.2. Abhandlungen (ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser), Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1991, p. 702; for the nineteenth century, see various passages from the Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften Vols. V.1 and V.2 (ed. Rolf Tiedemann), Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, et. al. in V.1 p. 286. 4. See thesis IX of ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (note 4), pp. 697-698.5. ‘David Thomas with David Robbins’, in: Index, February 1996, p. 11 . 6. Greil Marcus, ‘Pennsylvania at the End of the Twentieth Century’, in: Double Trouble. Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, Londen, Faber and Faver, 2000, pp. 165-166. 7. For the Temples of the Greeks… is a 1997 print by Finlay and Michael Harvey