The Modalities of Nostalgia

Abstract

Nostalgia has been viewed as the conceptual opposite of progress, against which it is negatively viewed as reactionary, sentimental or melancholic. It has been seen as a defeatist retreat from the present, and evidence of loss of faith in the future. Nostalgia is certainly a response to the experience of loss endemic in modernity and late modernity, but the authors argue that it has numerous manifestations and cannot be reduced to a singular or absolute definition. Its meaning and significance are multiple, and so should be seen as accommodating progressive, even utopian impulses as well as regressive stances and melancholic attitudes. Its contrarieties are evident in both vernacular and media forms of remembering and historical reconstruction. The authors argue that these contrarieties should be viewed as mutually constitutive, for it is in their interrelations that there arises the potential for sociological critique.

Screened History: Nostalgia as Defensive Formation

“…The backward glance of nostalgia is thus a means of mediating the present and the prospective future. Nonetheless, Pickering & Keightley (2006) argue that nostalgia occurs within multiple registers; it has numerous manifestations, its meaning and significance are diverse; it "should be seen as accommodating progressive, even utopian impulses as well as regressive stances" (p. 919). Their hope is that we might be able to distinguish between the desire to return to an earlier state or idealized past, and the desire not to return "but recognize aspects of the past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future" (p. 921).…”

“…Pickering & Keightley (2006) stress repeatedly the mutually constitutive interrelations of both such dimensions of nostalgia; it is by virtue of this relation "that the potential for sociological critique arises" (p. 921). Such an emphasis on the complexity of nostalgia and the simultaneity of its regressive and progressive movements is to be welcomed; it warns against any naïve idealization of the phenomenon, and signals the political ambiguity of nostalgic reminiscence.…”

“…Whereas the former takes nostalgia to be a trivializing form of romantic sentimentality, the Greek conceptualization emphasizes ongoing pain, an inability to adapt, the persistence of longing and desire for transformation. As Pickering & Keightley (2006) emphasize, the American view forecloses the possibility of the past ushering in a transformative role in the present; the more visceral Greek conception "evokes a range of bodily experiences to negotiate the past and…allows the past a transactional role in the present" (p. 934). It is perhaps through the adaptation of the Greek notion into the American, through the anesthetization of nostalgia's qualities of pain and disturbance in favour of ego-enhancing aspects, that much of the critical potential of the notion has gone amiss.…”

Communism and the Meaning of Social Memory: Towards a Critical-Interpretive Approach

“…Nostalgia has moved from being an accepted and "acceptable catchword for looking back", a "pervasive, bitter-sweet feeling not yet taken too seriously" (Lowenthal, 1989: 18-19) to "topic of embarrassment and a term of abuse" (p. 20; see also Pickering and Keightley, 2006). For Susannah Radstone, for instance, nostalgia is not the outcome of some social process, but rather "point of departure, opening out into … questions of knowledge and belief, temporal orientations and cultural … politics that it condenses" (2010, p. 189).…”

La nostalgia en la producción urbana: La defensa de barrios en Santiago de Chile

“…Sin embargo, en este artículo se afirma que la nostalgia no tiene solamente que ver con una relación activa con un pasado para compensar una pérdida (Pickering y Keightley, 2006), ya que su experimentación y expresión permiten también "una crítica moral del presente y propone alternativas para afrontar los cambios sociales" (Angé y Berliner, 2015, p. 5) 4 . En esta perspectiva, los registros nostálgicos y anti-nostálgicos además coexisten y a veces se confrontan en los mismos espacios.…”