Nostalgia and the Task of the Critic

I attended a colloquium given by my colleague Jason Sperb yesterday on images of Detroit and the kinds of nostalgia that articulate a really complicated racial politics (as a point of reference, he posted the first few pages of the argument here a few days earlier). It was an incredibly smart paper, well deserving of the awards it has received, and it left me with a few scattered thoughts about nostalgia and critical methodology.

The first thing that came to mind as he concluded the paper is the manner in which his view of nostalgia is radically different than that of many people who study it. He embedded those critical views of nostalgia and its discontents that circulate in the academy into his argument, but his tone was much more personal, and, as a result, he was more willing to concede the point (so often ignored by other scholars) that, much as we want to critique the implications of nostalgia, it isn't going to go away simply because we're critiquing it. Such an argument would be the equivalent of Laura Mulvey's notorious claims from the 1970s that we as critics should actively work toward the destruction of cinematic pleasure. Not gonna happen. And, even if it could, that wouldn't be productive of any alternative affect that could take its place.

No, Jason highlighted for me (and, in the Q&A it became clear that I may be the only person to come away with this message, so he'll have to correct me if I've just radically misinterpreted his work) the ways in which nostalgia is an affect that actively produces things. It produces a complicated and potentially harmful racial politics, to be sure. But it also can be productive of a certain "humility," as he describes it, a humility to the power of the affect itself and to all that it represents on a purely non-linguistic level. Most importantly, he suggests (by his own example in this paper) that nostalgia can ideally be productive of its own critique. There is thus a productive capacity here (not in the standard marxist sense; I mean the term in the more Deleuzian sense of a kind of imaginative creation that is not really produced by anything other than pure affect itself) that often goes ignored in the academy.

This is especially important to realize since nostalgia (almost by definition) implies the fond remembrance of something that never actually existed. Nostalgia only ever refers to an idealized past, one that intrudes affectively into the present and thus determines present and future politics from a non-existent ground. (Brief aside: For an example of how this is even working in the election right now, compare Clinton to Obama in their appeals to the history of American politics. Clinton seems to promise a return to form before Bush, in other words a return to the Clinton years: Clinton, Part Deux, if you will. Obama uses the complicated networks of history to promote a change into the future. The politics of a productive nostalgia versus that of a presentist historian. What I find so interesting is that so few people have stopped to ask themselves, "What was so great about the 90s? Was that our Golden Age?!" This is nostalgia actively producing a movement into the future that is also a movement into a non-existent past. What we need to do is to allow nostalgia to produce its own critique, in the manner that Obama uses it fairly frequently.) But if we allow nostalgia to produce its own critique even as we are affected by it, we can use this nostalgia in an oppositional manner to produce a new ideal in the future. In some ways, this coalesces with how I discussed the Hitchcock images that only exist for the sake of nostalgia for a past that literally never existed (it is a past of Hollywood fictions): not a desire to produce something that moves forward, but to produce a fake past within the present. And this again provides another contrast with the Lohan/Monroe images: these are a brand of nostalgia that produces a criticism of its own nostalgic affect. It's something that requires more investigation in all kinds of facets of our collective nostalgic experiences, in any case.

The second thing that struck me was the personal tone of his paper. Not a minute passed in which he didn't use the personal pronoun "I" in order to define his own position in relation to the material. As a result, not only the tone but also the structure of the argument shifted: it was occasionally meandering into personal asides that became crucial to the overall argument a few moments later, an recursively worked backward at times to mimic the kinds of nostalgia he discussed. It resembled nothing so much as a blog (I mean this in the most affectionate way possible--I find I read much less "real" criticism ever since I set up my RSS feeds). What was so great about this is that it tended to foreground not only the mediating role of the critic in relaying this argument to an audience: it also foregrounded the contingency of that mediation. This argument could not have been delivered in the same way had Jason not given it; had he not lived in Detroit to get his MA; had he not randomly decided to indulge his nostalgia one day to watch a 46-second clip on YouTube. The same could certainly be said about all of us and what we do as critics, but we so rarely acknowledge that our understanding of culture and the politically-inflected arguments we construct around it are defined entirely by how we are affected by pure contingency. It's a lesson that should provide the scholar with some humility...