The notion of ‘progress’ was coined by German philosopher Immanuel Kant the noun ‘modernity’ is the creation of Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire and ‘virtual reality’ was first imagined by the philosopher of time, Henri Bergson. Modernist thinkers not only challenged assumptions about society, but also proposed that memory has restorative potential that could benefit the alienated individual.įor instance, Marcel Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, mark new understandings of the inward dimension of memory: a return to ‘lost’ times that not only revives history, but especially the “epiphanic experience of the past in its entirety.” 5 Along similar lines, Boym reminds us that the keywords that define contemporary global society-progress, modernity, virtual reality-were made up by poets and philosophers, rather than mathematicians, scientists, or doctors. 4 When treatment was unsuccessful-when the victim and the doctor failed to locate the precise source of the illness-help was sought from poets and philosophers. Nostalgia was treated both medically (through drugs, leeches, warm hypnotic emulsions, opium, stomach purges) and culturally (Alpine folk music cured Swiss mercenaries deployed abroad the sound of bagpipes ailed the nostalgia of Scottish Highlanders away from home or, for those who could afford it, a hike in the Alps proved miraculous, hence why Switzerland is the convalescent centre of the world). The speed of change can be nauseating and individuals can enter a spiralling vortex of (self-)destructive behaviour.Īround the same time that the notion of anomie was put forward, nostalgia was considered a dangerous-but curable-disease that had effects on the physical and mental wellbeing of its victims. A modern rendition of Entfremdung (‘estrangement’ or ‘alienation,’ a dialectical reference to Hegel and Marx) lies at the core of this process that can explain a fundamental disposition toward nostalgia.Īs an affect representative of modernity, nostalgia is also able to propose a counter-reaction: an alternative narrative that encourages humankind to break the curse of time and conquer what sociologist Émile Durkheim called, at the end of the nineteenth century, anomie, or “the malady of the infinite.” 3 Durkheim’s understanding of anomie speaks of dysfunction, and what is the current global system if not an unfit organisation of power that not only amplifies dysfunction but feeds off it and its crises? Whilst studying suicide as a social phenomenon, the French sociologist showed that accelerated change in modern society confuses the social actors that inhabit it. In their diagnosis, they position the temporal and spatial dislocations of social relations in modernity at the level of social consciousness.
Boym was not the first scholar to identify nostalgia as a possible symptom of modernity: other critics, such as Arjun Appadurai and Fredric Jameson, see nostalgia as a sort of prosthesis of memory through which subjects long for past or future utopia. It may actually be more effective to read it as one of the core symptoms of a system that has been ruling the planet for the last few centuries.
Russian cultural critic Svetlana Boym-one of the key proponents of a reconfigured understanding of the term-posits that nostalgia is synchronous with the development of capitalism, arguing that it is “coeval with modernity itself.” 2 However, nostalgia does not merely co-exist alongside capitalism.
Nostalgia first emerged as a term in the mid-seventeenth century and then spread as an ailment during the industrialisation of modern Europe. Contradictory and ambiguous, nostalgia may well be a pipe dream in which idealised and essentialised pasts, whose authenticity is doubtful, are longed for. As an ascriptive idea, it typifies a distorted parallel reality in which emotion takes over reason weaponised in persistent memory wars, nostalgia is fuzzy and irregulate, partisan and murky. While in its most rudimentary understanding nostalgia is a form of homesickness-an agonising desire to return to a universal home-we have been taught that it also conveys an irrational kind of longing. The future of nostalgia is in danger, as nostalgia finds itself in existential limbo.
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