Petre Mogoș
“Sire, I am from another country!”1
1 Gilles Ivain, “Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau,” [Formulary for a New Urbanism] Internationale Situationniste 1 (1958), 15.
The future of nostalgia is in danger, as nostalgia finds itself in existential limbo. 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. 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. Contradictory and ambiguous, nostalgia may well be a pipe dream in which idealised and essentialised pasts, whose authenticity is doubtful, are longed for.
Nostalgia first emerged as a term in the mid-seventeenth century and then spread as an ailment during the industrialisation of modern Europe. 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. 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. 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. In their diagnosis, they position the temporal and spatial dislocations of social relations in modernity at the level of social consciousness. 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.
As 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. The speed of change can be nauseating and individuals can enter a spiralling vortex of (self-)destructive behaviour.
2 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvi.
3 Also translated as “a morbid desire for the infinite” in Émile Dukheim, Suicide, (London: Routledge, 2005), 234.
Melancholic solitude (1971). Péterffy István collection, Fortepan (142229).
Around 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. 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).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. Modernist thinkers not only challenged assumptions about society, but also proposed that memory has restorative potential that could benefit the alienated individual.
For 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. 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.6
4 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 4.
5 Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation, and Memory (London: Routledge, 2011), 9.
6 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvii.
In its post-medical era, nostalgia is no longer a physical condition, but a state of mind, more clearly delineated as the by-product of cultural displacement and forces of change that are storming our realities, and the result of alienation, depression, or disgruntlement with the present. In our current circumstances, created by neoliberal capitalism, nostalgic murmurs of discontent will inevitably continue to reverberate; nostalgia will continue to exist as long as we live in atomised societies that focus on individuality, profit, and competition instead of communities that cooperate in solidarity. Ultimately, as long as we are citizens of a capitalist world, we are bound to be nostalgic. If nostalgia is here to stay—in as much as capitalism is here to stay7—then it is imperative that we critically interrogate and reclaim it as a possible source of social, cultural, and political emancipation. So, how can twenty-first-century nostalgia be cured? Or, closer to the intentions of this essay, does it even need to be? What if nostalgia itself is not the disease but rather the therapy that heals ‘victims’ from the sickness of capitalist alienation?
If nostalgia has historical idiosyncrasy, as is visible in the way novelists and poets relate to it, it may actually lose its geographical particularity in contemporary understandings of it in the era of technocapitalist globalisation. Although more abundantly evoked in the fertile terrain of the East, nostalgia is not an inherently ‘Eastern’ notion. A linguistic excursion around Europe takes us from Portugal (with the Gothic melancholic saudade) to France (malaise, a dysfunction between body and soul), from Germany (Sehnsucht, caught between aspiration and sentimentality) to Romania (dor, with its folk metaphysics), and from the Czech Republic (the tormenting misery of litost) to Russia (toska, the elusive concept of despair): the pit stops are nothing but linguistic samples of untranslatables that have, not unexpectedly, entered a philosophical lexicon.8 This kind of local longing—or, equally, localised desire—is rendered alive by various traditions that try to claim such sentiments through unique words. The paradox of these instances is that despite their regional particularities—each term relates to the specificity of the area in which it appeared—they also reveal a universality. All human beings are brought together under the same affective canopy; we are all animated by similar conditions of angst, melancholy, aspiration, desire, or nostalgia.
This pervasiveness of sentiment also shows us that social constructs are well-embedded in our being, like national borders, local customs, and habits, and are just a facade that we have learned to performatively put on: a ritual mask that we equip ourselves with as we grow up, only to mimic the possibility of distinction. Instead of seeing all these affects as uncanny readings of national uniqueness, they in truth embody the same historical emotion: although they differ in nuances, they speak of a shared grammar of romantic nostalgia. As Boym puts it: ‘I long, therefore I am’ was the Romantic motto and is one that seems to return in this day and age.9 Anthropologist Dominic Boyer relies on the ideas of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to explain that nostalgia is neither stable, nor unitary or static. It is perpetually evolving—it is ours and it is concomitantly nobody’s—and because of this it is heteroglossic: the lingua franca of globalisation is not a monolith of knowledge and meaning. Rather, it is distinct varieties of ‘languages’ and, therefore, of the ‘nostalgias’ that coexist in them.10
Physical examination (1910). Kurutz Márton collection, Fortepan (203849).
7 It is perhaps timely to remind the readers of this well-known characterisation of the current state of affairs by thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Fredric Jameson: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
8 Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
9 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 13.
10 Dominic Boyer, “From Algos to Autonomous: Nostalgic Eastern Europe as Postimperial Mania,” in Post-Communist Nostalgia, eds. Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 19.
Picnic at the turn of the century (1910). Lakatos Mária collection, Fortepan (22059).
An overly-zoomed-in view of the world does not take into consideration that in the twenty-first century we are all migrants; that we have been in motion for the past hundreds of years—moving across time as well as geography. If we take a step back and put things into perspective, we realise that over the course of our lives, we transit through fleeting memories, childhoods, photos, and homes to such an extent that we all invariably become refugees: dislocated individuals that long for something that we lost and cannot reclaim—or for something that we never had or that never existed in the first place. We all encounter the anxiety of the new and the sorrow of the old. And just like time that does not move forward uniformly, so our circuit of migration has followed labyrinthine routes, prompted by environmental uncertainties and physical dangers and wars, shifting through a world of borders and weaponised surveillance. We arrive at the conclusion that we may never be home and that our home—in its romanticised, fixed understanding—does not exist; that we will always develop a kind of nostalgia for imaginary times or possibilities, for lost futures that never materialised.
It is the epidemic of progress frenzy that triggers these nostalgias for temporal and spatial ‘elsewheres.’ As Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman puts it, this chase of an indefinite past or future goes on uninterrupted.11 While it may change directions, it never stops. Franz Kafka, the quintessential prophet of twentieth-century disorientation and dislocation, also sought to encapsulate this constant flux in the relay race of history. The action that moves the plot of his short story “The Departure” is a longing for an ‘elsewhere:’
I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked my servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate, he stopped me and asked: “Where is the master going?” “I don’t know,” I said, “just out of here, just out of here. Out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can reach my goal.” “So you know your goal?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied, “I’ve just told you. Out of here—that is my goal.”12
Embracing nostalgia, with its potential to debunk the mythologies of modernity and to obliterate monolithic interpretations of contemporary society, may be our trigger for a new trumpet sound to reverberate. The question that remains unanswered, however, is what next...? After we hear the deafening siren of change, where are we headed? If Kafka’s metaphysical ‘out of here’ or ‘elsewhere’ is the answer, then we better start formulating some more precise conditions that define this spatial and temporal dimension. Similar imaginative exercises have been proposed by thinkers like Fredric Jameson and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi: the former hints at an analogous conundrum in his essay, “The End of Temporality,” and asks “after the end of history, what?”; the latter takes this dilemma a step further and proposes an inverted interrogation in the form of “what comes after the future?”13 The future used to be a great myth that, in spite of everything, lost its credibility; the future as we thought we knew it, these thinkers claim, has long been dead. However, we don’t need to revive the future in a new form (understood not as a myopic interpretation of ‘what-is-to-come,’ but rather as a revised atemporal vision that replaces thinking in paradigmatic patterns), because the promise of the future is over and the era of post-future has already begun.
11 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 4.
12 Franz Kafka, “The Departure,” in The Collected Short Stories of Franz Kafka (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 449.
13 Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29(4) (Summer, 2003), 695-718; Franco Bifo Berardi, After the Future (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011).
Sunbathing or dreaming forward. Szent-tamási Mihály collection, Fortepan (12400).
Strand on Lake Balaton (1956). Kieselbach Tamás collection, Fortepan (210845).
A nostalgia of and for the future—one that dreams forward—does not need to be anchored, but, rather, freed from its limiting roots: a free-flowing and free-floating sense of longing that refuses to be static or idle—not stuck in time or space—and continues to evolve and grow. The proliferation of nostalgia is connected not only to changes of political regimes or the alienation of individuals in contemporary society, not only to the dislocation of space (as the original definition of nostalgia has it), or to a mere longing for better-established ideals. Rather—and this perhaps doesn’t work in opposition to the previous hypotheses, but with them—nostalgia has to do with the changing perception and conception of time. Nostalgia tries to defeat time: temporal irreversibility is key in this struggle because, unsurprisingly, it is also at the very core of the modern condition, what Boym calls a “symptom of our age.”14
Against this background, in his magnum opus The Principle of Hope published in three volumes between 1954–1959, Ernst Bloch tries to rehabilitate the notion of utopia and in doing so, he regards the utopian impulse as a fundamental multiform human faculty. For Bloch, utopian dreams are not idealistic and impractical projections and they do not merely compensate for the lack of fantasy in contemporary society. On the contrary, they are ventures beyond temporality; what Bloch invariably aims is to provide the conditions for future liberation from an oppressive past, so his philosophy of hope is established on the uncanny idea of dreaming forward (Vorwärtsträumen), a projection of a vision of a kingdom to come:
the concrete imagination and the imagery of its mediated anticipations are fermenting in the process of the real itself and are depicted in the concrete forward dream; anticipating elements are a component of reality itself.15
With this in mind, it may be that avoiding the lure of nostalgia is not just futile but also foolish, whereas succumbing to its fermenting anticipation may represent a first step on the path of liberation from it. In the words of Boym, “in the end, the only antidote for the dictatorship of nostalgia might be nostalgic dissidence.”16 By exploring nostalgia, we are able to open up a negotiation between antiquated temporal vectors (the present, the past, the future) and to reach a more complex understanding of how our realities are being shaped—for better or for worse, for pain or for pleasure. And this negotiation relies on a necessary amount of self-reflexivity that takes place within nostalgia itself. This kind of backward gaze into the past is, in effect, future-oriented. In Bloch’s practice of concrete utopia, the past (what has been) contains not only the sufferings, tragedies, and failures of humanity (what to avoid and redeem), but also its unrealised hopes and potentials (which could have been and can yet be).17
Gazing into the night (1958). Kotnyek Antal collection, Fortepan (20135).
14 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvi.
15 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 197.
16 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 355.
17 Douglar Kellner, “Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, eds. Jamie Daniel and Tom Moylan (London: Verso, 1997), 81.
The city is on fire (1945). Fortepan (32053).
If the past is a repository of possibilities that are living options for future action, then a specific kind of awareness in which the historicity of the present is prominent is needed. After the Second World War, the Situationist International sought to re-introduce history in the everyday life of the city through radical gestures and playful spirit: the movement’s revolutionary task—although not nostalgic in essence—is similar to the reconfiguration of time proposed above. Like Guy Debord’s spectacular society, in which historical time has been overturned and distorted by ‘frozen time’ (what Debord himself calls “an anti-historical ‘false consciousness of time’”18), our utopian, hopeful, dream-like nostalgia becomes synonymous with a temporal and historical reawakening. The Debordian society as spectacle—arguably as relevant today as it was in the 1960s, when initially formulated—is characterised by a passive attitude, a condition that has separated society from its own history. Life has become alienated (and equally alienating, I would add); historical time unfolds in it as a detached object of contemplation. Debord’s society is not ‘spectacular’ as in sensational or splendid, but rather it proclaims that we have become spectators of our own lives, mere observers of a historical existence that we could potentially and consciously shape. By articulating this historical time and nostalgic poetry of the future, we not only actively take hold of time and refuse to repress our despair, but we especially dare to dream new futures.
Another such dreamer of times-to-come was Ivan Chtcheglov, also known under the pseudonym Gilles Ivain. A French theorist and poet, he provided key inspiration for the Situationist movement and other experimental avant-gardes of the era with his prescient 1953 manifesto, “Formulary for a New Urbanism.” Although nostalgia is not a direct object of critique in Chtcheglov’s work, his background (born in Paris to Russian parents) and interests (in how the geology of the past reconfigures presents and futures) speak of a remarkable longing for other times and elsewheres. The motto that launches his proto-take on the idea of belonging in lost cities—“Sire, I am from another country!”—touches upon various dimensions: displacement and deracination, nostalgia for imaginary grounds, unbalanced power relations, and a desire to change the current state of affairs. His brief yet vivid epigrams (“We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun,” or “You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built.”19) evoke a surrealist viewpoint, in which narratives of loss and dissatisfaction are confronted and not brushed aside, put to use and not repressed. This nostalgic longing is critically reconfigured not as an element of mourning and loss, but as a spark that triggers the utopian reconstruction of the world. An inversion is proposed here: we will not get rid of nostalgia, although its monumental tomb has already been erected. Its grave—made from the illusion that to stop looking back is a form of salvation—needs to be occupied and filled with other reactionary agents that impair our freedom instead: inequality, discrimination, debt, hyper-consumerism, authoritarianism, colonialism, and de-humanisation. The list is endless.
Being nostalgic can also be an act of rebellion against a uni-dimensional understanding of history, modernity, time, and progress. Nostalgia can be an effective device to imagine possible futures, in which nostalgia must not be seen as the end of a quest, but a possible means of arrival and becoming. Through radical, subversive, and disruptive reminiscence, the tables of antiquated assumptions can be turned and some progressive potential recuperated. With every second passing by, we enter our futures with the fuzziness of memory and a longing for utopia. And it is this contradictory twilight zone that nostalgia inhabits. In order to overcome this limbo, nostalgia needs to maintain its criticality: to go beyond longing for romantic ruins and, rather, be regarded as a transitory stage of inquiry into our future selves; not an elegiac sentiment that manifests itself in the form of regret, but a distant prospect of amelioration. We are not blank sheets, tabula rasas, or pieces of blotting paper, but dynamic, evolving, and agile entities that use nostalgia to formulate hope out of burning postmodern anxiety. We are all rootless and migratory, with no home to return to. In the end, we may all become Chtcheglov and scream at the top of our lungs:
“Sire, we are from another country!”
18 Guy Debord, quoted by Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Continuum, 2010), 140.
19 Gilles Ivain, “Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau,” [Formulary for a New Urbanism] Internationale Situationniste 1 (1958), 15.
Burning fire (1958). Nagy Gyula collection, Fortepan (51265).
Petre Mogoș is a writer and co-editor of Kajet, a Bucharest-based journal that proposes an internationalist exploration of Eastern Europe. In an attempt to decolonise the imagination and thought of the region, his work approaches the complicated relationships between East and West, periphery and centre, as well as the legacy of the past and the possibilities of the future.
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