A Cure For Nostalgia
Nostalgia For Nostalgia: The recent nostalgia for Back To the Future, itself a “perfect” movie made entirely out of nostalgia, amounts to a nostalgia for nostalgia. In other words, there is no there there. 1950s America, for certain Americans, has been and remains the “privileged lost object of desire”—at least until we started desiring the 80s. MAGA attempts to make this object manifest, and make this desire a weapon. One Jordan Peterson, who complains at length about “postmodern neomarxists” is yet unaware that his very nostalgia for the so-called Judeo-Christian values of the pseudohistorical past is itself postmodernism in its most virulent form; this is what Freud refers to as a screen memory; a fabricated memory, or dream, that functions as a bunker from which to wait out the future.
Future Shock: And yet this is no new affliction. In the 18th century nostalgia was considered to be a disease; a pathology of the soul. Another name for this pathology is Romanticism. Pathological nostalgia (Romanticism) is a recoil from the velocity of history. In other words: a kind of future shock: The 18th century saw a shrinking world, rising industry, downfall of monarchy, revolution, growing cities, a dying god; religion spilling into nature; nature as lost object; it is an era in which parts of the Anthropocene are beginning to become visible. An indulgence in the anxiety caused by this force-of-history turns pathological and becomes nostalgic—nostos: homecoming, algos: pain. The infected person enters a dream from which to withstand (or deny) the ceaseless and irrevocable flux of the universe; a point of refraction (screen memory) by which the non-existent past speeds the ever-receding future in a timeless and indestructible now.
The Russian Cure: The Russian army in 1733 (marching into Germany in the War of Polish Succession), realized that many of its soldiers were suffering from the contagion of nostalgia—exhibiting listlessness, melancholia, a desire to return home. Intolerant of such low-moral the generals devised a cure: the nostalgic soldier would be condemned to death by being buried alive. After burying a number of nostalgic young men the cure began to work: there was no more nostalgia to be found in the ranks.
