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2006 54: 919Current SociologyMichael Pickering and Emily Keightley

The Modalities of Nostalgia

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The Modalities of Nostalgia

Michael Pickering and Emily KeightleyLoughborough University

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 offaith in the future. Nostalgia is certainly a response to the experience of lossendemic in modernity and late modernity, but the authors argue that it hasnumerous manifestations and cannot be reduced to a singular or absolute defi-nition. Its meaning and significance are multiple, and so should be seen as accom-modating progressive, even utopian impulses as well as regressive stances andmelancholic attitudes. Its contrarieties are evident in both vernacular and mediaforms of remembering and historical reconstruction. The authors argue that thesecontrarieties should be viewed as mutually constitutive, for it is in their interre-lations that there arises the potential for sociological critique.

keywords: modalities ✦ modernity ✦ nostalgia

The temporal dichotomies of classical sociology asserted a severe, if notcomplete rupture between modern and premodern societies, and werelargely weighted in favour of the present over the past in their theoriza-tions of this radical historical transition. Assumptions of irreversiblerupture created an indisposition to attend in a more balanced way topatterns of continuity across time, for change and movement away fromthe past were the key issues of focus. Positive valuations of present overpast were based not only on views of the inevitability of linear progressforward to an improved future, but were also supported by evolutionismand historicism, and later by static functionalist paradigms and theoriesof modernization. Belief in the inevitability of progress was bolstered inits orientation to the future by the generation of its antithesis – a nostal-gic yearning for the past – and yet, as the ideological components of thedogma of progress have been steadily critiqued, it is notoriously difficultto know where to turn for any viable alternative. We may look back on

Current Sociology ✦ November 2006 ✦ Vol 54(6): 919–941© International Sociological Association

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the variety of different positions that were developed in response to theabrupt social transitions experienced during modernity, ranging fromwholesale acceptance through gradual adjustment to either melancholyover unchangeable forms of social malaise or arguments for furtherradical change, but all of these seem flawed in some way or another, andso not available for adoption without considerable change and revision.

In the face of this perturbation, we feel it useful to think again aboutprogress’s conceptual opposite. In being negatively othered as its binaryopposite, nostalgia became fixed in a determinate backwards-lookingstance. This not only closed down lines of active relation to the past, butalso valorized what was set up as its single, inescapable alternative, facil-itated convenient versions of the past in favour of the present, and leftthe stage free for only avowedly conservative reactions to modern times.Nostalgia became associated with a defeatist attitude to present andfuture, appearing tacitly to acquiesce in the temporal ruptures ofmodernity by its very assumption of this attitude. Nostalgia was alsoconceived as seeking to attain the unattainable, to satisfy the unsatisfi-able. If a dogmatic belief in progress entailed an ardent longing for thefuture, nostalgia as its paired inversion entailed only an ardent longingfor the past. It is, then, as if nostalgia arises only in compensation for aloss of faith in progress, and for what is socially and culturally destroyedin the name of progress.

In longing for what is lacking in a changed present, nostalgia for a losttime clearly involves yearning for what is now not attainable, simplybecause of the irreversibility of time; but to condemn nostalgia solely tothis position leaves unattended not only more general feelings of regretfor what time has brought, but also more general questions for how thepast may actively engage with the present and future. The temporalemphasis in modernity has always been on relentless supersession andmovement beyond existing conditions and circumstances. This modernistemphasis leaves no space, remedial or otherwise, for dealing with theexperience of loss. It is as if this experience, being negatively valued, hassimply to be overcome, regardless of the pain and pathos that may beinvolved. The greatest temporal value in modernity is on what is tempor-ary, and this disorientation from any sense of continuity or durabilityincreases our sense of ethical perturbation by cutting away the groundsfor active dialogue between past and present. All that is left is the nega-tivity of nostalgia – as if, in the headlong tilt of time, all we can do is sighand lament. This suggests that we need either to reconfigure the conceptof nostalgia or move beyond it if we are to deal more adequately with theexperience of loss.

The experience of loss is endemic to living in modernity, regardless ofwhatever version of it applies in any particular time or place. Whether

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through war, revolution or regime change, mass involuntary migrationand emigration, or less dramatically through social mobility or social rede-velopment and the dispersion of existing communities built up over time,change and attendant feelings of loss have altered how the past is seenand considered. This cannot be subsumed entirely within a sense ofnostalgia, not least because feelings of loss are at times commingled witha sense of social gain or liberation, or with efforts to regain what has beenlost in new ways that actively engage with the process or consequencesof change. Modernity has changed the very conception of loss along withthe compensations offered for it, such as nationalism or inventedtraditions, but loss, lack and longing do not have any singular or absolutecondition in modernity. It follows that this is the case with nostalgia, sincenostalgia is the composite feeling of loss, lack and longing.

Rather than dismissing it as a concept, we should perhaps reconfigureit in terms of a distinction between the desire to return to an earlier stateor idealized past, and the desire not to return but to recognize aspects ofthe past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future. Nostalgiacan then be seen as not only a search for ontological security in the past,but also as a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in theuncertainties of the present. This opens up a positive dimension in nostal-gia, one associated with desire for engagement with difference, with aspi-ration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lackingin modernity. Nostalgia can be both melancholic and utopian.

It is vital that this distinction is not conceived as yet another sociologi-cal dichotomy, for it is the way these two dimensions of nostalgia informeach other, in any particular case, that is important. There are cases wherepast-fixated melancholic reactions to the present prevail, and others whereutopian longings drift free of any actual ontological basis in the present;but for us, in rethinking the concept, the key point of interest lies in themutually constitutive interrelations of both dimensions of nostalgia, sinceit is there that the potential for sociological critique arises.

In this article, we develop our rethinking of nostalgia as a sociologicalphenomenon by critically assessing how it has predominantly beenviewed, how it figures as a concept of temporality, and how in its mediaforms it has been considered in the field of study now associated withsocial memory.1

Nostalgic Assessments

The term nostalgia derives etymologically from the Greek nostos, meaningto return home, and algia, meaning a painful condition (Davis, 1979: 1). Itwas coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofner, in the 17th century,as a diagnostic label for what was then considered a disease with

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symptoms ranging from melancholia and weeping to anorexia and suicide.The apparent disease was related to prolonged and usually involuntaryabsences from home. Gradually, over the next two centuries, nostalgiabecame semantically unmoored from its medical basis, subsequentlyentering into both academic and popular vocabulary as a term referringto ‘capriciously sentimental and variously commodified’ forms of the past(Grainge, 2002: 20). By the time debate over the alleged condition and diag-nostic uses of the term disappeared from medical discourse in the late 19thcentury, its metaphorical application, associated with a sort of homesick-ness for a lost past, had become its dominant meaning in ordinaryparlance. This involved a shift from spatial dislocation to temporal dislo-cation, and the sense of feeling oneself a stranger in a new period thatcontrasted negatively with an earlier time in which one felt, or imagined,oneself at home. The metaphorical use was always aided by the multiplecrossovers of sense between people’s orientations to time–space coordi-nates (as in the commonplace deixical uses of the phrases ‘here and now’to denote the immediate present, and ‘distant past’ to denote the oppositeof temporal proximity) yet over time that which the term stood in forbecame what was predominantly meant by the actual term itself.

Following this development, nostalgia has been used in many fields ofstudy as a critical tool to interrogate the articulation of the past in thepresent, and in particular, to investigate sentimentally inflected mediatedrepresentations of the past, perhaps most of all where there is an elementof commercial exploitation at stake. Deployment of the category in suchdifferent academic domains as psychology, history and cultural studiescreates difficulties of application and reference within a coherent explana-tory framework. Taking it at its simplest, as a specifically modern conceptnostalgia has been used to identify both a sense of personal loss andlonging for an idealized past, and a distorted public version of a particu-lar historical period or a particular social formation in the past. In muchof the most recent work, nostalgia has been closely linked with the notionof collective, social or cultural memory as a way of attempting to explainhow memories are generated, altered, shared and legitimated withinparticular sociocultural environments, yet in both senses it is connectedwith the characteristic features of modernity, such as its relentless socialuprooting and erosion of time-honoured stabilities, while both thephenomenon itself and commentary on it have intensified proportionatelyto the acceleration of social and cultural change during modernity andlate modernity.

Historical acceleration has created a new sense of time, involving whatTodd Gitlin has called ‘a new velocity of experience, a new vertigo’ (Gitlin,1980: 233), which is in part associated with the construction and recon-struction of events by the mass media.2 Nostalgia is a form of reaction to


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the velocity and vertigo of modern temporality. It rejects its insistentlypositive valuation of the temporary and transient. In the face of this valu-ation, a desire to imaginatively return to earlier times is then felt to corre-late with an acute dissatisfaction with the present, and to involve anattempt to recapture a putative continuity and coherence unavailable inthe fragmented modern or late modern environment (Smith, 1998; Lowen-thal, 1989: 21). This is one side of the story. Nostalgia may also be seen asseeking a viable alternative to the acceleration of historical time, one thatattempts a form of dialogue with the past and recognizes the value ofcontinuities in counterpart to what is fleeting, transitory and contingent.

Longing for an idealized past has been considered in two, quiteopposed ways. On the one hand, it can be viewed as potentially danger-ous in that it closes down the transactional value of the past in the presentand results in various degrees of social amnesia (see e.g. Doane andHodges, 1987). There are various versions of this argument. For example,in considering the difficulties of developing or relying on a nostalgicrelationship to the past, Svetlana Boym suggests that ‘nostalgia too easilymates with banality, functioning not through stimulation, but by coveringup the pain of loss in order to give a specific form of homesickness andto make homecoming available on request’ (Boym, 2001: 339). As such itfails both historical knowledge and the historical imagination. ForJameson, an active relation to the past has become almost impossible inour contemporary condition, where we have lost a sense of historicallocation and are locked into an endless succession of depthless presents(Jameson, 1991; see also Huyssen, 1995). On the other hand, nostalgia canbe valued as potentially democratic, opening up new spaces for the articu-lation of the past and acting as a mode of assimilating this to the rapidlychanging modern environment (see Baer, 2001; Davis, 1977). This differ-ent form of valuation begins to acknowledge that nostalgia is not inher-ently negative; there are other, more favourably inclined ways ofconsidering it. It may be ‘shamelessly exploited’ by those whom JacquesLe Goff has called the ‘nostalgia-merchants’, but a broad public interestin collective memory can also be seen as an expression of the fear of socialamnesia, even when this is ‘awkwardly expressed in the taste for thefashions of earlier times’ (Le Goff, 1992: 95).

Nostalgia is centrally concerned with the concept of loss. Most of theliterature on nostalgia refers to a loss of memory or historicity (Baudrillard,1994: 44). Jameson (1991: 281) suggests that nostalgia involves the priori-tization of positive accounts of the past to the exclusion of less thanromantic aspects of experience. History may then have little or nothing todo with its reality, while mediated representations of the ‘past’ mayhamper the development of historical awareness. Postmodernist and post-structuralist accounts of nostalgia successfully problematize the mediated


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nature of contemporary understandings of the past and the tenuous linksthey may have with historical realities and historical meanings. They alsogenerally recognize how the articulation of the past in the media is integralto contemporary temporality. It is, however, too easy to see in this relation-ship a narcissistic presentism, or a drastic loss of engagement with histori-cal time. Rather than dismissing media representations of the past in thisway, we may derive from them a more complex understanding of relationsbetween time’s traces and historical reconstructions, including the possi-bilities of irony and play in rethinking history and our various relation-ships to it.

To conceive of nostalgia as the defining feature of an amnesiac culturenecessarily entails the degradation of social and cultural memory. Again,this acknowledges only the negative components of nostalgia, confiningits identification to such mass cultural tendencies as surface style, stereo-type, kitsch and pastiche. The critique of media nostalgia and retrocultural activations of the past pays close attention to the politics ofhistorical representation, involving questions of relative meaning,perspective and understanding as well as stratified forms of social remem-bering. The problem is its analytical one-sidedness. Here there is morethan a passing resemblance to earlier forms of mass cultural criticismwhere the media audience was homogenized and atomized at one andthe same time, so being stripped of active participation in everydayhistorical consciousness. On the other hand, in examining how mediatexts communicate versions of the past, we should avoid the postmod-ernist mistake of bracketing all history with subjectivist relations to it andintertextual representations of it (Hutcheon, 1989: 113–14). This assumesthat the past has no referents outside the circulation of textual represen-tations, and that historical understanding is fatally compromised.Concerns over the way in which the past is depicted, or efforts made toensure that opportunities exist for minority groups to have their experi-ence and past represented, are then irrelevant and unnecessary. What islost is any sense of what is politically at stake outside the texts themselves.

Modernity is the experience of life lived in fragments, with the swiftpace of change and the problems of semiotic overload contributing to thefragmentation of experience and our ability to assimilate it into anongoing life-process. This can create the sense of contemporary lifefloating free from the past, becoming temporally unmoored and adrift.There is nothing inevitable or absolute about this. It can be countered invarious ways. Relinkings of past and present can be sought after andnewly elevated symbolic importance may be attached to various forms oftime’s traces in the present. This has to be understood in terms of a culturalparadox, for as David Chaney has pointed out, while ‘in the onrushingprogress of modernity there has been a simultaneous discarding of the


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past’, nevertheless ‘in all sorts of ways mementoes and survivals mark awidespread concern for and sentimental treasuring of the past, ofpersonal, communal and national heritages running through so much ofeveryday life’ (Chaney, 2002: 152). The cultural amnesia thesis sees onlyone side of this and so doesn’t grasp it as a paradox. It can be summedup by saying that the more the past appears to be discarded, the more isits significance elevated in personal life and public culture. This signifi-cance includes sentimental attachments to the past, but is certainly notconfined to them.

So we need to recognize the various ways in which people are involvedin putting the situated past into some form of narrative order for them-selves, or in critically negotiating mediated representations of the past fortheir relations to collective identities and experiences. In making thispoint, we don’t mean to suggest that media consumption is always andeverywhere characterized by a critical response to forms of historicalrepresentation. If one of the preconditions of nostalgia is dissatisfactionwith the present, this illuminates one of the ways in which non-criticalmedia representations of the past are legitimated, or at least allowed topass by uncontested. The rise of the mass media throughout modernityhas changed the face of public knowledge. In the contemporary period,negative news and alarmist issues are disseminated with increasing speedand scope within a culture of risk (Beck, 1999). The message may consistof yet another poll showing a further loss of public confidence in theintegrity and credibility of politicians, yet another report of a further waveof super-bugs such as MRSA set to devastate the civilian population, oryet another account of a further rise in criminal violence and harm tothose who are socially most vulnerable, such as children and the elderly.Contemporary media provide abundant sources of knowledge aboutwhat people should worry about.

Uncertainty and insecurity in present circumstances create fertileground for a sentimental longing for the past, or for a past fondly recon-structed out of selectively idealized features, and again the media help tofill this ground even as, in other dimensions of their output, they serveto undermine it. A representational cycle of negative present and positivepast promotes meanings made by means of opposition, contradistinctionand dichotomous contrast, rather than in terms of the more ambiguous,unsettled and contested relations between past and present. The formerdeny the past its transactional role in the present, while the latter serveto open it up and allow it to be interrogated. Our point is that historicalmeaning is popularly constructed and understood in both ways, at differ-ent times and in different contexts, rather than just one or the other beingthe mode in which nostalgic assessments of social and cultural changeare made.


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Historical Assessments

The distinction we have made is often mapped on to academic historicalpractice. In How Societies Remember, Connerton (1989: 13) suggests that akey aspect of historical work is its inferentiality. Through cross-question-ing the evidence available to them, historians can extract ‘informationwhich it does not explicitly contain or even which is contrary to the overtassertions contained in it’. They are ‘able to reject something explicitlytold them in their evidence and to substitute their own interpretation ofevents in its place’. Through such critical practice, historians can remainrelatively independent from the bias of social memory in order to achievethe most objective accounts of the past possible. What they may infer fromthe historical evidence is then set in direct contrast with an affectivelyappealing nostalgic relationship to the past and as such provides a set ofbenchmarks for distinguishing between different articulations of the pastand different forms of historical representation. So, for instance, themetonymic shortcut in popular iconography that can immediately evokea period and facilitate a nostalgic response (Marilyn Monroe holdingdown her pleated skirt over an air vent, or Winston Churchill with histrademark fat cigar, are two examples from the 1950s) can be comparedwith the systematic reconstruction of a period, event or biography thatinvolves an awareness of the remaking of historical meaning and anattempt to generate new historical knowledge, new combinations of suchknowledge or new interpretations of whatever knowledge is alreadyscholarly available.

This is a fairly conventional way of distinguishing between criticalhistorical practice and a sensual, nostalgic longing for the past, but weshould be careful not to polarize the two in a fixed scaling of orientationsto the past and to historical knowledge. It is not as if the historian isimmune to social memory or the force of iconic images, nor is it the casethat social memory or symbolic figuration consist entirely of nostalgicappeals to the past. More importantly, nostalgia is not confined to trivi-alized mass representations, or sentimentalized expressions of regret andyearning for times past, as these may be found in historical tourism oradvertising culture. This point is central to our argument. Nostalgia ismore complex than that, and covers a range of ways of orienting to andengaging with the past. Polarizing historical objectivity and nostalgia inmemory work as if they are respectively the cardinal virtue and sin ofhistoriography is to underwrite simplistic versions of the concept ofnostalgia, and provide a dubious means for maintaining the legitimacyof history as an academic practice. Conventionally, this has produced ahierarchical ranking of accounts in terms of trustworthiness, authenticityand authority, with professional history at the apex and nostalgia at the


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base, regardless of whether this involves media historical representationsor vernacular forms of social remembering. These distinctions have beencalled into question, and so should perhaps be reconceived as acontinuum, ‘with history at one end, nostalgia at the other and memoryas a bridge or transition between them’ (Cook, 2005: 3).

This seems appropriate because, as a criterion of historiographicalvalue, objectivity has been subject to extensive criticism. What seems moreworkable than any strict notion of objectivity is the degree of critical ques-tioning that is operative in any transactional engagement with the pastand with time’s traces as these have been searched out and gatheredtogether as part of the practice of historical reconstruction. This providesus with a more satisfactory means of assessing the intellectual scope ofeither academic or media history, and the extent to which it encouragesreflexive connections of past and present (see e.g. Nora, 1996). When thatscope is narrow or when, say, past and present are conceived in terms ofdeterministic causal relations, historical representation can be said toprovide little alternative to banal forms of nostalgic longing.

We deliberately mention academic and media history alongside eachother because, for a variety of reasons, they are often counterposed. Theprejudices involved in this would repay critical attention in their ownright, but here we want to suggest that it is more fruitful to operate witha broader notion of what it means to engage with the past in a produc-tive and imaginative manner. Although not claiming that they are necess-arily or invariably absent in mass-mediated treatments of the past, Baer(2001: 492) suggests that ‘critical reflection and response’ are character-istic of a significant relationship with the past. Engaging with the pastbecomes significant when it involves seeing past and present as dialecti-cally related and refusing the temptation to collapse them into each other.This is where Jameson’s take on the concept of historicity is relevant, forhe claims that this allows a ‘perception of the present as history; that is arelationship to the present which defamiliarises it and allows us thatdistance from immediacy which is at length characterised as a historicalperspective’ (Jameson, 1991: 284). Historical engagement is thus about farmore than the writing of academic history. It is a way of engaging withthe past through which the present can be seen in the interrelated contextsof past, present and future. It is contingent and fluid, open to scrutiny,contestation and change but ultimately dependent on the maintenance ofa distance and distinction between past and present.

The importance of history outside the academy is acknowledged inwhat has become known as the heritage debate (see e.g. Samuel, 1994;Lowenthal, 1997), but the critics involved tend at times to rely implicitlyon the hierarchical ranking of history, memory and nostalgia and so failto get properly to grips with the complex set of processes involved in


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publicly representing, consuming and understanding the past (see e.g.Hewison, 1987). The distinctions made in criticism of the ‘heritageindustry’ between nostalgia and history or nostalgia and authenticmemory are nowhere fully investigated or conceptualized, so making itunclear how to differentiate between positive and negative representa-tions of the past. Raphael Samuel’s (1994: 259) critique of what he terms‘heritage baiting’ targeted a critical underestimation of, and lack of imag-inative sympathy with, the way in which ‘heritage industry’ and itsdiverse practices have democratized the past, or at least facilitatedprogress towards this goal, even where this has appealed to nostalgicsentiment. Although this is not to claim that Samuel provides a compre-hensive account of the distinction between reductive and democratic usesof the past, he does make the problems of nostalgia as a conceptual toolevident through a contrast between popular negotiations of the past andthe intellectual presuppositions of the heritage critics. Despite a tendencyon his part towards cultural populism over critical engagement, Samuel’sexamination of the proliferation of local museums and the amateurhistorian, archivist and oral history projects, serves to contest the claimof left-wing critics that heritage is ideology through and through, and assuch inherently serves the interests of a bourgeois agenda which dimin-ishes or glosses over the democratizing power of popular historical prac-tices. Samuel’s contention that the widening of popular participation andgrassroots activity has opened up a plurality of interpretations, memoriesand narratives of the past that were previously neglected or suppressedin deference to dominant historical accounts, suggests that heritage criticsand postmodernists alike are totalizing in their commentary of latemodern interactions with the past. Behind their backs, nostalgia has arisento serve or stand in for a critical and subversive potential where otherresources seem lacking. Assessing this always remains difficult, but it isnevertheless part of a continuum with history and not utterly divorcedfrom it.

This is why nostalgia is sometimes used as a critical tool in assessingacademic as well as popular history, because infusing our historical workwith some avowed preference, if not nostalgic longing, for a previousmode of representing or engaging with the past, remains an abiding temp-tation. Over 30 years ago, Leonore Davidoff warned fellow historians ofwomen’s history against catching historical heroines ‘in the amber of anew feminist hagiology’, while more recently, in writing on feministfiction and social remembering, Gayle Green has been accused of fallingprey to nostalgic bias in seeking to revive a former age of active feministmemory (Davidoff, 1974; Green, 1991; Tannock, 1995). Stuart Tannocksuggests that the only way to circumvent this trap is to acknowledge theexistence of multiple nostalgias – some productive and socially useful and


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others less so. This is exactly our point. Nostalgia is not all of a piece. Itis subject to circumstance, motivation and interests, and over both timeand space, to degree, variation and change.

It may seem that this entails conceiving of nostalgia in such a broadway that the concept is in danger of losing any critical edge it may havehad. In our view the opposite is the case. It is not so much its lack of speci-ficity that is the problem as the tendency to see it in a singular and deter-ministic way. The problem is in not accepting and keeping in play itsmultiple senses and manifestations. For example, it is sometimes assumedthat in applying the term to an audience’s ways of thinking and relatingto the past, it can likewise be applied to cultural texts, as if particular textsare inevitably tied to specific responses. Polysemy is played down andcausal relationships inferred. Fred Davis (1979) can be cited as usingnostalgia interchangeably to refer to both the characteristics of media andother cultural artefacts, and the temporal orientation and consumptionpractices of media audiences. This conflates the workings of the media’srelationship to the past and specific practices of media consumption. Post-modernist conceptions of nostalgia also fall prey to an assumed relation-ship between audience and text, suggesting that the reduction of meaningvia processes of media representation in passively accepted by theaudience, resulting in loss of meaning at the site of reception. An investi-gation of the ways in which audiences may actively engage in the culturalmaking of meaning is not considered. We need to investigate the inter-action between different sites of meaning-making if we are to move nostal-gia away from a nebulous characterization of a particular orientation tothe past, and engage instead with the distinct and specific ways in whichcontemporary interaction with the past is enacted.

Media Assessments

Davis’s conception of the media production of nostalgia is centrallyconcerned with the self-referential nature that mediated nostalgic remem-bering involves. Rather than remembering experiences, we are more likelyto remember mediated experiences and as such, mediation of the past isa process by which the media can fix and limit social memory (Davis,1979: 130). Lynn Spigel (1995) highlights this in her study of the increas-ing recycling of old television sit-coms. She suggests that the commercialmotivation and practices of their syndication have profound effects onthe narratives of the past available to people in the present and thereforeon their historically situated understanding of their own situation.Despite problems arising from the implied division between her students’media-informed temporal knowledge and her own, which is experien-tially informed, politically inflected yet apparently unmediated, Spigel


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highlights the key role of television reruns in women’s sense of the pastand their notions of the 1950s as compared to the present.

This supports our case for analysing the ways in which uses of the pastin contemporary media contribute to a historical imagination. It is clearlyimportant to address an environment where the past is sensuously ratherthan critically evoked, where the meanings available are juxtaposed andjumbled rather than represented in an integrally cumulative way andinstantly to hand rather than represented through a process which itselfexists through time. In refusing the notion of an amnesiac culture wherethe media treatment of the past is of no consequence as it has no histori-cal meaning, the effects of processes of mediation need to be made centralto an examination of the media construction of the past. This involveskeeping the different senses and modalities of nostalgia in view of eachother, but the difficulty of this is exaggerated by lack of attention to howit is diversely articulated. Where nostalgia primarily entails a relationbetween the modern human subject and the past as this is temporallymediated by cultural texts, there is surprisingly little attempt to discussthe modes of representation and operation involved in the communicationof nostalgia. To return to Davis, the media are simply assumed by him touse particular modes of representation that will ‘touch nostalgic “chords”in the audience’ (Davis, 1979: 82). We may grant that nostalgia is a way ofthinking and feeling rather than being directly produced or constituted byconsuming nostalgic media texts, but there are nevertheless cultural arte-facts that facilitate nostalgia as a way of feeling and thinking. AlthoughDavis’s analysis identifies a new way in which we relate to time and thepast in late modernity, he is vague about the specific ways in which thisoperates. He fails to explain how the media elicit nostalgic responses,assuming that what is really at issue are the pre-existing psychologicalstructures associated with such responses. Davis also fails to engage withthe mechanics of representing the past in a nostalgic way, so the questionof ‘what constitutes a nostalgic media text?’ goes unanswered.

Davis provides just one example. The general literature on nostalgiaoffers little in accounting for why the media represent the past in particu-lar ways, and this can leave the stage open for reductionist accounts.Where the negative sense of nostalgia prevails, there is a tendency toneglect the reciprocal relationship between audience and media in gener-ating the conditions for making sense and meaning. When used as acritical tool, nostalgia easily obscures these complex relations in themeaning-making process, being presented instead as a unified conceptthat claims to encompass the role of audience and text. Conceptually, theterm then lacks analytical purchase on the relationship between mediaaudiences and the production of texts and cannot adequately grapple withthe ways in which either media texts or media consumers are oriented to


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the past. Davis does at least attempt to develop a sociology of nostalgiathat suggests that nostalgia itself is socially useful, helping cultures adaptto rapid change, as well as hampering a more developed historical under-standing. Nostalgia is thus charged with limiting social memory yet beingnecessary to it. This is helpful, at least in initiating acknowledgement ofproductive or contestatory applications of nostalgia.

To the extent that nostalgia characteristic of western modernity testifiesto ‘the destabilisation of everyday life’, Patrick Wright has pointed to its‘critical and subversive potential’ as well as its more obvious conserva-tive or reactionary forms. This would for instance include ‘articulationsof cultural particularity’ in everyday historical consciousness that are notrepresented in mainstream or dominant versions of the ‘national past’.Such consciousness has its jingoistic expressions, but can also testify to‘radical needs which – finding neither realisation in present everyday lifenor recognition in the complacent grandeur of official symbolism – maystill be reaching out to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at amoment of danger”’, as Walter Benjamin famously put it (Wright, 1985:26). This helps us keep in view the politics of memory and representa-tion. What Davis doesn’t acknowledge is that delimiting memory mayresult in an inability to contest dominant nationalistic accounts of the pastby referring to and drawing on the situated experience of particulargroups or generations, whereas what Wright does acknowledge, in hisrewarding assessment of historical experience for those ‘living in an oldcountry’, is that issues of order and power cannot be divorced from waysof relating to the past in either social memory or historical reconstruction.

More recent approaches to nostalgia in memory studies display ratherdifferent shortcomings. Too often they suffer from a simplistic approachto the media. Hoskins’s (2001) assumption that the media operate in asimilar way to individual or collective memory proves problematic as hesuggests that traumatic, negative or difficult memories are ‘repressed’.Quite how ‘repression’ fits conceptually with the selective presentation,reproduction and discarding of particular images of past or presentbecause of media assumptions about audiences and consumer tastes ormedia values concerning cultural styles and fashions is left unexplored,while the emphasis on ‘repression’ denies the role of the media in activelyforging memory across a social formation. In a more recent article,Hoskins (2004) continues to overlook the plurality of audiences and differ-ences between social, collective memory and media representations of thepast, as if coordinated, unified media generate homogeneous narrativesthat circulate uncontested. Postmodernist theorists also simplify the roleof the media in representing the past, suggesting that decisions over repre-sentation are dictated (rather than influenced) by what has previouslybeen used to represent an event or period. This is an ahistorical view of


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media representation since any sample of it is not made once-and-for-alland simply recycled. If this were the case, historical meaning wouldrapidly become totally derelict rather than being managed or limited byrepresentational practices. Postmodernist accounts effectively removeagency or intent from representational practices. It is as if their associ-ation with a supposedly redundant humanism irredeemably damns theseterms.

In attempting to develop a more sophisticated conceptual understand-ing of nostalgia, at the very least we need to accept Paul Grainge’s (2002)differentiation between nostalgia as a structure of feeling or affective andexperiential discourse and nostalgia as a commodified style or commod-ified set of practices. He describes the former as the nostalgia mood andthe latter, the nostalgia mode. His notion of the nostalgia mode is relianton postmodernist notions of the contemporary representational environ-ment. The claim that we inhabit a media landscape characterized byhyper-reality, pastiche and repetition provides a useful perspective onhow the media represent the past from a restricted pool of textual repre-sentations, thus highlighting the process by which media representationof the past is often dependent on the use of an iconographic form ofcommunication. The coexistence of this with a nostalgia mood stops shortof the postmodern curtailment of audience agency, suggesting that modesof representation are inextricably linked to meaning-making processes buthave the potential to limit rather than determine their outcome. This morecautious and balanced account is helpful, but Grainge’s appropriation offeatures of the postmodernist account of the contemporary media is notunproblematic. In discussing nostalgia as a cultural style, he inherits someof the difficulties of postmodernist claims of declining referentiality where‘increasingly sophisticated media appropriate images from a diversity ofsocial and historical contexts’, so generating a ‘recombinant culture’ wheremedia texts are consumed on the basis of surface appearances, leading toa complete loss of meaning (Harms and Dickens, 1996: 211). Although notclaiming a complete loss of meaning, Grainge asserts that, as an aestheticstyle of memory, monochrome representation defers a text’s content to itsevocation of a generalized feeling of pastness (Grainge, 2002: 59) This failsto explain why particular images or texts are regularly used as symboli-cally representative of a period, denies that this has any consequences forhistorical meaning aside from generating an impalpable sense of thequality of being past, and ignores questions of order and power raised inthe systematic manipulation of the way the past is represented. In hisreliance on these assumptions, Grainge’s notion of a nostalgia modecannot move beyond the circulation of images themselves in order toexplore their repercussions for social understandings of the past.

Although the differentiation between the affective nostalgia mood and


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the nostalgia mode as a commodified style or practice is a useful one,there are at least potential difficulties with the distinction when the notionof mode is conceptually based on the notion of form overriding contentas a site of textual meaning. Grainge concurs with Ien Ang’s (1996) rejec-tion of totalizing postmodernist claims that cultural amnesia is a faitaccompli and so suggests a potential association between memory and thenostalgia mood. He criticizes postmodernism, as we have, for failing torecognize the agency of the audience by reducing them to an unthinkingcollectivity who passively absorb the meanings communicated to themvia the media, thus denying them a role in meaning-making processes.He goes on to claim that meaningful historical narratives can continue tobe produced ‘through the recycling and/or hybridisation of past styles’(Grainge, 2002: 6). The suggestion that meaningful narratives can be madefrom texts where the referent is semantically secondary to its stylisticattributes elides the critical distinction between mediated and broaderforms of social remembering. The importance of aesthetic style cannot beignored as it is central to the potential temporal meanings of a text, butto systematically foreground this overreferentiality as a locus of meaningnecessarily implies that a capacity to generate meaningful historical narra-tives has been seriously compromised. Grainge is right to suggest thatamong the multiples senses and applications of contemporary nostalgiaare those which are not only associated with feelings of loss for someaspect or time of the past, but also those associated with retro markers oftaste or style in the present. The problem is that these tend to blur intoeach other as Grainge gets his moods mixed up with his modes and runstogether consumption practices, lived experience and diverse public treat-ments of the past. Whose historicity is waning here?

Conclusion

Over the course of the past century, nostalgia has become the bête noireof cultural critics, sociologists and historians. We fully acknowledge thatnostalgia can delimit or diminish everyday historical consciousness aswell as undermining the credentials of historical narrative. It cancertainly operate ideologically or carry convenient ideological meanings,as for instance when it acts as a sop to the ravages of progress. RenatoRosaldo has written of imperialist nostalgia in this respect as ‘mourningfor what one has destroyed’, so that ‘putatively savage societies becomea stable reference point for defining (the felicitous progress of) civilisedidentity’. He adds: ‘ “We” (who believe in progress) valorise innovation,and then yearn for more stable worlds, whether these reside in our ownpast, in other cultures, or in the conflation of the two’ (Rosaldo, 1993:69). We endorse this point of criticism, and at the same time regard it as


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supporting our argument that the meanings of nostalgia are multiplebecause culturally and historically specific. Nostalgia is neither anabsolute nor singularly universal phenomenon.

Jo Tacchi (2003) illustrates this point in citing Serematakis’s (1994) expli-cation of the difference between the American notion of nostalgia, whichis characterized as trivializing romantic sentimentality, and the Greeknotion of nostalgia, which is understood as desire or longing with aburning pain to journey (Tacchi, 2003: 287–8). Tacchi suggests that thesevarying interpretations have different semantic consequences, where theAmerican understanding forecloses the possibility of the past having anytransformative role in the present while the Greek conception evokes arange of bodily experiences to negotiate the past and as such allows thepast a transactional role in the present. The continued unqualified use ofa term laden with culturally specific meanings prevents a far-reaching andtransferable analysis of the mediation of the past.

We have seen how ‘heritage-baiting’ has relied on a hierarchical set ofhistoriographical distinctions. Our objection to this conceptual reliance isnot made in denial of the fact that constructions of national heritage arecommercially exploited, all the way from Disney’s Mainstreet USA to retrofashion stylings, or of the ways in which, over the past 25 years, heritagehas been used ideologically in yoking imagined continuities to ruthlessneoconservative drives for economic change (see Corner and Harvey,1991). Our criticism is directed against the relentless use of nostalgia ashistory’s negativized Other. ‘Baiting’ may be the best term when it relieson simplistic notions of capitalist manipulation, but obviously does notapply tout court to the cultural critique of uses of the past in more generalterms. That is why we have found Patrick Wright’s analysis of heritagesources of social nostalgia a much more compelling account than thatoffered by Hewison, among others, for what he seeks to explain is theirpopular appeal, in all their complexities and contradictions (seeMcGuigan, 1996: 116–34). There remains, nonetheless, a constant tendencyto slide inexorably towards either cultural elitism or cultural populism incritical assessments of nostalgia. In both cases an idealization is involved.This tendency has a longer history than the ‘heritage debate’ itself. It hasbeen operative over the past century in the development of anthropology,sociology and critical theory.

When the idealized past of premodern societies has been used socio-logically in contrast to modern societies, what has often been invoked isa mythical stability, unity and ontological security, so drawing on somevariant or other of Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft polarity, or any ofthe other temporal dichotomies we mentioned at the outset. Either implic-itly or explicitly, nostalgia has also been characteristic of elite criticismsof mass culture where, again, a stark before/after historical scenario posits


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premodern art as having ‘an organic relationship to the communityexpressing ritualistically its natural forms of production and socialrelationships’ (Stauth and Turner, 1988: 510). The folk society paradigmin anthropology and folk life studies relied on exactly such an assumedorganicism and in some cases supported an anti-modern reaction to so-called mass culture in ways closely allied to Rosaldo’s ‘imperialist nostal-gia’ (Pickering and Green, 1987). Georg Stauth and Bryan Turner haveshown how nostalgia paradigmatically informed the development ofGerman social theory from Marx to the Frankfurt School, and especiallythe cultural critique of Theodor Adorno. To the extent that critical theoryand mass culture criticism relied on the dichotomy of ‘high’ and ‘low’culture, they were both elitist and nostalgic, ‘looking backward towardsa period in history when there was a greater integration between life andart, feeling and thought’ (Stauth and Turner, 1988: 518). Postmodernisttheory has involved the critical deconstruction of this dichotomy to theextent that it is now unsustainable as the ground of aesthetic evaluation,whether of popular culture or art music and the fine arts, none of whichin any case are unaffected by the cultural industries. Whether an egali-tarian potential resides in cultural commodities and modern forms ofconsumerism, since they are in principle open to all, remains debatable,but it is certainly the case that ‘mass’ cultural critique is now constantlybeset with having to avoid an elitist disdain and nostalgic withdrawal,seeing contemporary culture only through the distant lens of melancho-lia. Some form of nostalgic pathos underpins many of the critical objec-tions that have been levelled against new media, whether of the early 20thor early 21st centuries.

As these examples show, nostalgia has never been the preserve of the‘masses’ or the ‘cultural industries’. Nor can it be reduced to a final orunitary definition, since its meanings and modalities are culturally andhistorically variegated. It certainly cannot be confined to the Disneyfica-tion of the past or to selective postmodernist pastiche, as in such nostal-gia films as American Graffiti. Nostalgia is an easy commercial ploy,whether it’s rock ’n’ roll, Christmas cards or TV programmes about theSecond World War that are being marketed. And no one is fully immune.Even momentarily, we are all prey to nostalgia, particularly where avehicle of personal memory, such as a photograph of a dead parent orlost lover, may touch us emotionally. Certain media of communicationand certain art forms may reach us more directly in this respect thanothers. Since it can carry a powerful affective or sensuous charge, musiccan act as the catalyst of moving surges of memory. By extension, musicalso has a widespread association with an idealized lost past, and isclaimed to be ‘able to conjure forth the lost qualities and goods associ-ated with it’ (Flinn, 1992: 89). Indeed, in cinematography it is music that


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has repeatedly borne the burden of nostalgia, functioning ‘as a sort ofconduit to connect listeners – and commentators – to an idealised past,offering them the promise of a retrieval of lost utopian coherence’ (Flinn,1992: 50). This utopian element can thus be present in many ‘mass’cultural commodities, and not just in the reified ideals that the categoriesof ‘folk’ or ‘art’ music have been made to carry. It is clear enough in thecomposition of commercial film music, particularly that associated withfilm noir and melodrama. Carol Flinn has suggested that the investmentof classical Hollywood film scores in 19th-century romanticism was partof ‘a wider ideological nostalgia of the time’ that ‘seemed to provide anescape from then current deficiencies, both real and perceived’, as well as‘a source of restored plenitude and unity’. The historical irony in this isthat for late 19th-century romanticism, the model for integrity andstrength was found in Hellenic culture: ‘Like Hollywood’s interest inromanticism, romanticism’s own interest in Hellenic totality can be under-stood in terms of a desire to exceed contemporary experience, to getbeyond the sense of social, economic, and subjective fragmentation orimpotence’ (Flinn, 1992: 49–50).

It is not only irony that is at play in nostalgic enterprises and experi-ences. Central to our argument has been that nostalgia can only beproperly conceptualized as a contradictory phenomenon, being driven byutopian impulses – the desire for re-enchantment – as well as melancholicresponses to disenchantment. It is far too simplistic to call it ‘a flight fromthe present’, as the philosopher Harry Moody described it (Moody, 1984:161). Instead, it can be both negatively and positively charged, and so ‘canbe conceptualised as conveying a knowing and reflexive relationship withthe past, as a yearning for a better but irretrievable past, or, in more scep-tical accounts, as emblematic of an engrossing but ultimately fabricatedapproximation of the past’ (Drake, 2003: 190). Tony Blair’s accusation that‘countries wrapped in nostalgia cannot build a strong future’ glosses onlyits negative dimension (Sunday Times, 5 April 1998). Nostalgia in popularculture doesn’t necessarily operate with the dichotomous before/afterscenario we have seen associated with classical sociology and criticaltheory. More commonly, it is manifest in an ambiguous relation to thepast and present, as for instance in the music of migrants, where a senseof loss associated with the past coexists with a sense of longing associ-ated with the future. ‘Migrant music epitomises dream and nostalgiacombined’, one example being Portuguese fado and its expression of ‘asorrow that was almost hope’ (Connell and Gibson, 2003: 161–2).

Analytically, as we have been arguing, the term cannot be set off against‘strong’ history (or a ‘strong future’) but must be reconceived in itsintimate connections to both historical practice and diverse forms of socialremembering, for ‘where history suppresses the element of disavowal or


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fantasy in its re-presentation of the past, nostalgia foregrounds thoseelements, and in effect lays bare the processes at the heart of remem-brance’. This may produce ‘knowledge and insight, even though thesemay be of a different order from those produced by conventional histori-cal analysis, and may be experienced in different ways’ (Cook, 2005: 4).In this suitably nuanced estimation, rethinking nostalgia ‘may involve aredrafting of the techniques and conventions of historical analysis to takeon board the dialectic between memory and history, holding togetherobjective analysis and subjective response in a productive tension’ (Cook,2005: 17). This is close to our own position, which seeks a rapprochementof history and memory and the fields of study associated with them. Wehave suggested that rethinking nostalgia offers one way of taking on thistask, since it means overcoming the opposition between history andmemory just as much as it entails refusing to set off melancholia andutopia against each other, as if they are locked in a duel to the death.

If the future doesn’t come into being through forgetting, throughdenying or dismissing the past, especially when the present is judged tobe in some way deficient, the imperative concern is then with forward-looking uses of the past, of the past as a set of resources for the future.These have always to be critically negotiated and drawn upon, whateverhistory is in the frame, but the equally critical identification is with whathas been passively or actively set aside and neglected in the present. Forexample, the demands of certain subaltern groups for social justice and afairer future are fostered, at least in part, ‘by vigilantly returning to thepast, reinvestigating the past over and over again in order to find placesand moments of resistance to oppression that might open up a betterfuture’ (Oliver, 2001: 135). For many such groups, the past has long beena locus of possibility and source of aspiration, of providing a way of imag-ining ‘present impossibilities becoming possible in the future’, for ‘thefuture opens into otherness only insofar as the past does too’ (Oliver, 2001:136; see also Pickering, 1987 for one example utilizing popular song inthis way). When this reciprocal movement is operative, nostalgia becomesan action rather than an attitude, showing how the politics of nostalgiaare realized in its applications rather than being inherent in the affectivephenomenon itself.

Nostalgia arises because of the divergence of experience and expec-tation generated by modernity, but as we have argued throughout, it isnot a singular or fixed condition (Koselleck, 1985; Pickering, 2004). It isnot to be conceived as necessarily ‘the opposite of utopia, but, as a formof memory, always implicated, even productive in it’, for, as Huyssenreminds us, ‘it is the ideology of modernisation itself that has given nostal-gia its bad name, and we do not need to abide by that judgement’(Huyssen, 1995: 88). Nostalgia as retreat from the present and nostalgia


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as retrieval for the future are not mutually exclusive, any more than eitherimpulse is the preserve of dominant or subordinate groups. Retreat andretrieval are elements in ‘every nostalgic vision’, and this ambivalence ‘isworth keeping in mind when considering the many ways in which nostal-gia has been institutionalised in Western societies’ (Tannock, 1995: 459).

The ability of nostalgia as a concept to historically locate relationshipswith the past means that it is an invaluable tool in investigating the wayin which the media and other cultural institutions construct the pastaccording to the imperatives of modernity and late modernity, not as astatic, isolated system of representation but as part of a wider temporalorientation whose characteristics are historically grounded and subject tochange over time. Nostalgia is a term that enables the relationshipbetween past and present to be conceived of as fragile and corruptible,inherently dependent on how the resources of the past are made avail-able, how those traces of what has been are mediated and circulated, andhow they are employed and deployed in the development of a relation-ship between past and present. The acknowledgement of what is involvedin creating and sustaining a relationship between past and present makesit possible for us to conceptualize nostalgia as a critical tool and distin-guish between positive, productive, active uses of the past and thosewhich are sterile, impotent, non-transactional. The critical use of nostal-gia has been centrally concerned with the emergence of a new way ofrelating to the past in modernity that has generally, for various reasons,been considered regressive. We hope to have shown that it can just asfeasibly be considered as progressive.

Notes1. For a wide-ranging survey of the different academic contributions to this field,

see Olick and Robbins (1998).2. See Smith (1998) for an overview of late modern temporality in connection

with nostalgia and Appadurai (1990) for a more general account of contem-porary relations of time, space and culture.

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Biographical Note: Michael Pickering is reader in culture and communicationsin the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. He haspublished in the areas of cultural studies and social history as well as mediaanalysis and theory. His books include Everyday Culture (1987, with T. Green);History, Experience and Cultural Studies (1997); Researching Communications (1999);Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (2001); Creativity, Communication andCultural Value (2004, with Keith Negus) and Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour


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(2005, with Sharon Lockyer). He is currently writing a book on blackfaceminstrelsy in Britain.

Address: Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Lough-borough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK. [email: [email protected]]

Biographical Note: Emily Keightley gained her undergraduate degree in mediaand communication studies and her masters degree in media and culturalanalysis at Loughborough University. She is currently in her third year ofdoctoral study, researching in the area of media and memory in modernity. Herwork is concerned particularly with women’s uses of the past and with howwomen draw on both vernacular and media forms of social remembering andhistorical reconstruction. She has previously written an article on photographyand phonography as technologies of memory, which has appeared in theEuropean Journal of Cultural Studies (Vol. 9[2], 2006).

Address: Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Lough-borough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK. [email: [email protected]]


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