Requiem for an Unremembered Past

Nostalgia (or Nostalghia if we're to use the Russian Tarkovsky longing for home version) has impregnated the zeitgeist of the Neu with the mental virus of forced remembering. Traditionally, memory is a process of active effort, which requires comprehensive input from the subject, but the psychological reversal performed by nostalgia inverts this process, transforming memory into a subconscious self-reflexive operation which transforms thought and perception into a cybernetic loop of prolonged longing.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of nostalgia is the longing created for the nonexistent and the never-happened. When one longs for the past, it is never for an actual moment, for an occurrence which happened, but a grasp for a dream of something which happened, which might-have-happened, a rose-coloured illusion of a constructed history. If we remember the past as it happened, it would no longer be past, it would recur in the present, thus by necessity the past must be constructed, altered, improved.

In a similar fashion, the present is never experience in the moment of its actual occurrence. Because of the moment of lapse needed for the brain to process experience, any moment is truly occurring after it is already past. In the same sense, the present is a memory, and thus nostalgia--a longing for the past--can jointly be understood as a longing to experience the present in the moment of axion rather than as a reflexion after the fact.

This might be one reason nostalgia attaches itself to specific events and periods. Because of the constructed stylings of an era--for the most prolific example, see the 80s--desire for existence, that is presence at the time of axion, is manufactured by these images; in the same manner advertisements manufacture desire for a product, depixions of the past, whether fallacious or attempt to represent reality, manufacture desire for existence in the moment. This means nostalgia is a resultant of a kind of cultural commodification, the transformation by productive forces of reality into symbolic representation, but because of a lack of semiotic literacy, the residents of the Neu cannot decode the signs which populated this simulated reality; instead, modern observers are forced to accept this reality at face value, and by doing such they conceit the superiority of a dreamt world.

Nostalgia, is largely a form of sickness, a perversion of the omnipresent alienation which occurs under capitalism and occurs differently under different economic means. This longing for the past--for a past which is constructed and represented but does not exist in the same plane of reality as the present--is a rejexion of the present reality, a detachment from it, even a revolution against it. To remember a better past follows the same thought procedures as dreaming of a better future. Here enters our old friend, Mark Fisher and his formulation of lost futures. What Fisher describes when he outlines the disillusion of revolutionary energy by the force of Capitalist Realism is a description of nostalgia forming. The alienation and dissatisfaction with the system moves from a progress direxion which can insight change to a hypothetical direxion where those energies are directed to the dream of a future, the nostalgic reimagining of a future rooted in a preoccupation with an imagined past. As such, the revolution becomes hypothetical, it becomes a war of images and signs fought in the trenches of a simulated reality. There are still battles, but with the rules of the game changed, the established powers no longer fear large-scale disruption, they have conquered the world the war is fastened to.

Nostalgia is also a shared experience. Often it is shared among people who never had such a past, and even shared between those who didn't and those who did. It's a dive into the collective unconscious, not to mine archetypes which shape literature and myth, but the connect experience, build validity to the construction of the shared world. It's a world run by an artificial intelligence, a set of repeating algorithms which elicit a set of emotions and thoughts. It can learn an adapt and continuously gathers information from the present to perfect the idealised past--or future. It is the intelligence of all people forming a thought amalgam in an unexistent world. And the feeling it creates is a self sustaining feeling which will always redirect back to itself, remaining forever unresolved because the longing is for a coherent reality which cannot be satisfied by one existent on an adjacent plane of being.

Is then nostalgia destructive? Is it useful or healthy or worthwhile? Where does it stand in relation to our lives? Are we better off without it? The problem with nostalgia, as it stands, is the direxion of the feelings. Instead of directing longing into a space which exists only tangentially to our own, it would be wise to channel that energy into minting a reality which reflects the values of the nostalgic world, that is to say, to make the dream a reality. This can only be affected through real change, tangible change to the present reality.