SubStance

I

"Philosophy is essentially homesickness—the urge to be everywhere at home."¹ This fragment, a "single gesture" of thought toward an object,² is equally about philosophy and about nostalgia. If philosophy is the loss of self (that very memento of loss), which it was for Novalis, then so is the way home. If our struggles abroad, our self-preservation and self-discovery, solidify our self, or multiply it as they did Odysseus's, then our homecoming is a flight into fluidity or else a shedding of selves. We should arrive vulnerable, not ourselves, as if never having been exposed to the tempest of the elements or confronted with alterity. The self is a journey homeward, the homely return ever beyond the horizon.

The transformations to nostalgic experience over the last century, particularly in the wake of two world wars, tell a dramatically different story. As the affective landscape and everyday life of Western culture were being reshaped, nostalgia—that erstwhile fulcrum of philosophy—began to change course, increasingly bound to the flow of capital. With the emergence of consumerism, utopias of newness and dictatorships of speed, nostalgia "as it once was" became a reactionary vice and risked obsolescence. Capitalism, however, saw nostalgia's potential for profit and, channeling it now into its waters, gave it unprecedented currency. We face questions about a belatedly "new," late-modern nostalgia, questions we nonetheless still struggle to formulate. With affect bound for world capital, is nostalgia the last intervening station? How was this itinerary conceived? When did we depart? And can we turn back if we have nearly arrived at our destination?

II

The confluence of nostalgia and capitalism infects as it affects. Historicist delights and privations determine the price of longing for the past and continually expand the possibilities of its manufacture. Nostalgic fulfillment, no matter how elaborate, is by design provisional, since unfulfillment—the addiction behind the addiction—becomes infinitely more desirable. I consume out of curiosity, boredom or envy, and it is what/ how I consume that, as if by chance, consumes me by opening onto a new lack, expressed as nostalgia for a past gratuitously laid bare or gestured [End Page 52] at. The pined-for past holds out against our desirous inroads. It is this ineluctable logic so vital to nostalgia that capitalist praxis perverts.

Nostalgia reproduces rapidly through the channels of symbolic economy. The opportunities that accompany consumer capitalism—to construct our identity by "sharing" or "giving access" to personal history representing some significant, privileged ("living") connection with the past, in case the link corrodes or the chain linking the past in collective memory loses its hold on the imagination—these same "opportunities" excoriate the remembrance and with it the things remembered, their autonomous life in our memory, beyond any justification and benefit.³

The more we are strip-mined for our past, coaxed out of circumspection, and led to articulate our experiences, the lesser, generally speaking, becomes our intimacy with what we lived and witnessed. On the one hand, this process is culturally responsible: depositing one's memories into the archive of culture seems the only way of preserving them from time's ravages and sure oblivion. From the naïve point of view of cultural sustainability, individual memory can change hands, with the sum knowledge of the past not merely undepleted, but enriched. Yet the most intimate relationship with a past can be overwritten by abstract memories; we have learned from books that memory is a palimpsest, and that only such intimacy, even a modicum of it, can make the submerged meaning legible. Gradual estrangement from our memories suggests we are losing the art of decipherment. Likewise, excessive nostalgia affords us the means to ignore the radically unfamiliar and turn away from blank, unclaimed futures.

If the public commemoration of bygone events makes us work for their restitution, if we cling to the recent past and put it on record, and if we have begun to speak of "nostalgia for the present," it is because there seems no breaking the nostalgic chain forged in capital. With the exhaustion of firsthand experience, secondhand memory comes to serve nostalgia...