2023-07-16 12:02:05
July 15, 2023 Today at 05:00
Updated at 16 July 2023 14:02
A lecturer at Columbia University, the Franco-British historian Thomas Dodman, a specialist in modern France and the Empire, has published a book* in which he traces the history of nostalgia. A story that does not fail to resonate with our time where we regularly hear that “it was better before”…
You recall that the term “nostalgia” appeared at the end of the 17th century and you say that at the beginning of the 19th century “we did not feel nostalgic, but we had nostalgia”. Nostalgia was then a pathology. How did this pathology become a state of mind?
Our emotions are not timeless, they vary over time. Our emotional lives have a history. Nostalgia is clear proof of this. This emotion has not always existed and it is first and foremost a pathology. We suffer from it, we can recover from it, but we can also die from it. It is discussed in the same way as tuberculosis or cholera.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, we began to witness long-term migratory phenomena, experiences of exile and profound uprooting. There is obviously colonization, the experience of the soldiers – who are the most affected by nostalgia – or even that of the slaves of the slave trade. Nostalgia literally means “homesickness”. In the 19th century, nostalgia ceased to be pathological. We no longer consider this emotion as a disease that can cause death. There is a paradigm shift in science that invalidates the medical diagnosis of nostalgia. Doctors turn away from it while poets and writers seize it.
Starting from the analysis of this feeling, is it basically another way of making history that you are proposing?
The great transformations of history unfold in private. This is the reason why it is necessary to carry out a history of sensitivities. I don’t reject the great story, but it can’t explain everything, even if it’s what we tend to favor today. We must not lose sight of the way in which history is felt in our intimacy. The story is also part of the body and the psyche, it is lived in an intimate way. We see it today with climate change: as long as it does not affect us in our flesh, the phenomenon remains abstract.
It is obvious that there is a politics of nostalgia. Most often, we find this instrumentalization of nostalgia within the right.
Regarding climate change, we have recently seen a very specific emotion appear: eco-anxiety. Do you see a connection with the feeling of nostalgia?
Before the term “eco-anxiety”, the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht spoke of “solastalgie“. This designates the psychological distress caused by the sensation of living through an ecological disaster. If nostalgia meant “homesickness”, “solastalgia” means the suffering felt in front of a place which escapes us, which crumbles. It is literally a malaise experienced in front of a country which is collapsing. Climate change alters the landscape, the sensory world in which we live. It causes atmospheric and visual pollution. We therefore experience the nostalgia of a “purified”, “authentic” place, which has not been altered. If this feeling is obviously a pain, it can also be beneficial and cause awareness.
How do you think current politics uses that feeling of nostalgia?
It is obvious that there is a politics of nostalgia. It is found in a lot of countries, from Western Europe to Asia and Africa. Most often, we find this instrumentalization of nostalgia within the right. It’s not new, of course. Since the advent of mass politics, the right has mobilized around the nostalgia that catalyzes resentment. The crisis experienced in the present implies a past where things were better and implies the designation of a person in charge. The one who is responsible is the weakest, the most destitute, the immigrant, the illegal, etc. The political use of nostalgia is recurrent in the news, but it is not just a right-wing phenomenon.
Full screen view The nostalgic return to vinyl, for example, is an attempt to bring things back to life. We want to find something tangible.
The left also exploits nostalgia, in your opinion? How?
At first glance, the right is rather conservative while the left seems forward-looking. In principle, nostalgia should not be present in left-wing discourse. But we note that, since the fall of the Berlin wall, the future is more and more fearful while utopias have collapsed. It is therefore not surprising to see the left proposing a nostalgic discourse, the lure of a return to the era of the welfare state in particular. But this is not a solution insofar as there are problems inherent in this period: injustices once morest women, racial injustices, etc. It is totally impossible to return to this model without denying the minorities. Same thing for the environment: the environmental catastrophe is the fruit of the general prosperity that we have known with the welfare state. We can’t go back.
Do you think there is a nostalgia market today?
There are, in my opinion, two forms of temporality specific to capitalism: the acceleration of time and the feeling of the loss of a past that claims to be updated. Apart from acceleration, capitalism develops a circular temporality. We can think of the need for a systemic crisis to reset the counters to zero, for example. In politics, it’s “Make America Great Again” or Brexit. It is also the cyclical time of fashion: the new is always the old of yesterday.
Every decade has nostalgia for the past decade. This explains the success of vintage. There is therefore today a commodification of nostalgia. Nostalgia is thus modeled on this double temporality of capitalism: constant change and constant recapitulation. That’s why I think nostalgia is a modern capitalist emotion.
Nostalgia invokes the feeling of lost authenticity, which is now marketed throughout the world, captured by market logic. We are witnessing both a particularization and a standardization of nostalgia. It’s not for nothing that nostalgia has been compared to kitsch. This commercialization of the nostalgic feeling is however not new, it begins at the beginning of the 19ᵉ century.
We want to find something tangible. Digital, virtual and AI confront us with infinity. But, as humans, infinity scares us.
Has the advent of the digital world changed our relationship to nostalgia?
Our contemporary society has accelerated a phenomenon that we know well: the desire for what we do not have. In a way, digital has made us binge. Until recently, there were structural limits to having access to what one did not possess. Today, we consume at an incredible speed without being fully satisfied. We want even more TV channels, more streaming platforms, etc. But it’s endless…
It seems to me that the nostalgic returns to vinyl and CD, for example, are attempts to re-concrete things. We want to find something tangible. Digital, virtual and AI confront us with infinity. But, as humans, infinity scares us. In the future, the feeling of nostalgia might thus take on a new form by designating an attempt to find concreteness and embodying a need to slow down: slow food, slow fashion, etc.
Nostalgia, which was therefore a disease, might, in our time, become a form of care?
Yes, according to psychologists, she is already a positive emotion that gives a sense of belonging in a world losing its bearings. It responds to the need to anchor oneself, to have certainties regarding our identity in a changing world. The whole challenge will be to ensure that these ramparts are not exclusive and do not close us in on ourselves. This feeling of nostalgia should lead us to share things in common and not to produce divisions.
* Nostalgia: story of a deadly emotion, Thomas Dodman, Seuil, 320 p., 23.50 euros.
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