Nostalgia (Part Two)

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My formative years were founded in the temporary – moving towns far too frequently to establish any kind of stability or peer group – and I find myself often confusing and misremembering exactly where I was when an event took place. I travel back to find a way forward. Perhaps, I have substituted people for ‘place.’ Not having a peer group throughout my final years at school, the landscapes I inhabited took on a more profound meaning to me.

I wonder whether my reaction to a long-term home (I have been in the same house for ten years now, the longest I have lived anywhere) is to be unable to leave it; artificially creating the stability I desired as a child? In filling the space with nostalgic objects and ephemera, which includes tracking down vintage items that adorned our many houses (Murano fish, Ravenhead trifle bowls, Tupperware jugs, to name but a few), I have subconsciously trapped myself in the past.

The more important aspects of ‘home’ for me now are the aspects of community and belonging. As I was never able to engage in a community and achieve long-lasting friendships at school, leaving home and early adolescence became a maelstrom of engagement, community and of something that was mine. I had, at last, found me. Then, it is no coincidence that as my various communities eroded with time, movement and growth, the will to leave the house has diminished. Belonging became longing. Longing became nostalgia, nostalgia became melancholy, and I became unable to move forward.

With the wider change in emphasis between ‘home’ and ‘community,’ and the gulf between old and new understanding, nostalgia has become a nostalgic word, a nostalgic concept.

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Svetlana Boym suggests that there are two aspects to Nostalgia: the reflective and restorative. The restorative emphasises the ‘nostos’ part of its etymology and deals with returning to homes and patching up gaps in memory; restoring or trying to restore truth. She typifies this as methodically rebuilding and trying to restore a past based on an ideal that in all probability never existed. (Boym, 2002)

The ‘restorative’ nostalgic constructs an absolute state from incomplete and imagined elements, based on personal proclivities and prejudices. She warns that an over reliance on restorative nostalgia can lead to nationalist revivals and anti-modernist mythmaking. Restorative nostalgia manifests in total reconstructions of monuments of the past. Sadly, the ‘reconstructions’ are based entirely on bias and bear no resemblance to the reality of that which is being reconstructed. For example, the visions of a return to the halcyon pre-European where England was still green and pleasant, and everyone lived in dinky Cotswold cottages with cream teas on tap was never going to happen. This ideal was unachievable but nostalgia – for something that did not exist except as a plastic stereotype – and the notion of ‘taking back control’ won out.

From the outcome of the Brexit vote, and the catastrophic downturn the country has taken since its implementation, one can only assume that her thesis is correct. [Submerged]

Boym beautifully illustrates the extremist nature of restorative nostalgia by what she calls ‘Jurassic Park Syndrome.’ ‘Dinosaurs,’ she says, ‘are ideal animals for the nostalgia industry because nobody remembers them. Their extinction is a guarantee of commercial success; it allows for total restoration and global exportability. Nobody will be offended by the improper portrayal of the dinosaur, not even animal rights activists.’ Boym indicates that Jurassic Park syndrome may be a new form of nostalgia: that of packaging nostalgia to children who, as discussed, do not – on the whole – feel nostalgia until post-puberty. Although I can see this is a rich area of study, particularly in relation to the conditioning of children to accept nostalgia as a ‘lifestyle,’ it strays too far into Mark Fisher’s ideas of ‘Post-Capitalist Desire,’ to be of value to this non-post-Marxist exploration.

What is interesting, though, is that the logical conclusion of restorative nostalgia comes in the form of the collapse of the restorer’s dreams. Chaos ensues.

The second form concentrates on the ‘algia’ part of the word, the loss and longing and ‘the imperfect process of remembrance…lingering on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and time.’

Where reflective nostalgia differs from restorative is that reflective mourns the past and moves on. It recognises that the past has gone, that it left evidence of its presence, but that that time is now past. However, restorativism rejects the future, the now, in favour of a false and idealised past. It does not get lost in Chapel Perilous so much as refuse to enter, instead running as far away from the potential of change as it can.

Reflective nostalgia presents the past as a commodity rather than deifying it. This re-presenting of the past is problematic, as Huyssen says ‘Commodities in general do not age well. They become obsolete and are thrown out or recycled. (Huyssen, 2006) Organs such as English Heritage and the National Trust constantly ‘update’ the ruin to make the past more accessible and pleasing to more consumers, updating aspects of exhibitions to coincide with current social mores and obsessions. In the 2010’s much emphasis was placed on how the slave trade played its part in the rise of the Country House only to be eclipsed by the popularity of the movie ‘Gosford Park’ which led to the sudden highlighting of the ‘downstairs’ life of the kitchen staff. The past becomes a playground.

In ruined castles are found gift shops, tea rooms, local farm produce (one I visited sold green-lipped mussels, imported New Zealand, which defied the term ‘local’), child-friendly spaces, re-enactments, all de-authenticating the past, confusing the passage of time and memory while still allowing the past to be present. Perhaps the difference between the two types of nostalgia is varying degrees of nationalistic fervour.

Huyssen continues, ‘Buildings are thrown out or destroyed. The chance for things to age and to become ruins has diminished…’ and this again is problematic. The archaeologists of the future will find nothing from this present. Built-in obsolescence is almost expected in white goods and electronic equipment, but it is sobering to think that all that may exist to prove our passing are architect’s plans, locked away in council archives. Buildings can be so efficiently removed from landscape, that they may as well not have existed in the first place.

Even architecture can become spectral.

Boym claims that nostalgia is a labyrinthine concept and Brodsky confirms this saying, ‘nostalgia takes the shape of a maze, composed of many visible and invisible cities,’ an idea expanded on creatively in ‘Last Train from London Dark.’ If nostalgia is a maze, then perhaps my psychological maze is more complex than most, having lived in so many different cities and towns. This is not necessarily a good thing, and I claim no superiority, as nostalgia can overwhelm and therefore stop the forward movement of Time’s Arrow, constantly making the past the present and delaying the future. 

The maze metaphor is particularly interesting as it implies a thwarted, or at least a difficult search, in this case, a search for home, for identity. It is a search that is almost doomed to failure, with so many ‘homes,’ a specific, single location can never suffice and the quest for ‘completeness’ fails. Nostalgia has become about ‘things’ rather than ‘places.’

David Berry makes this idea concrete in his comment about Marcel Proust’s novel sequence, ‘À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ (In Search of Lost Time), suggesting that ‘for Marcel Proust, remembrance is an unpredictable adventure in syncretic perception where words and tactile sensations overlap. Place names open mental maps and space folds into time.’ (Berry, 2020) Mental mapping, like hauntology, is a very subjective tool. Based almost entirely on experience, extrapolation and conjecture, it is used as a kind of shorthand for personal navigation.

In any town, city or country location, one may navigate by those things that appeal to the self and may prove useless when trying to explain the position to another without a similar frame of reference. A simple example would be when directing someone to a specific aisle in a supermarket. If they know the store, they are more easily able to find the requested item with knowledge of the layout than not.

A more complex example would be along the lines of agreeing where the borders of a country are located. Transnistria, for example, has its own currency and passport system, and sits between two other countries. Neither of the other countries, Ukraine and Moldova, accept that Transnistria exists as an independent country with Ukraine believing it to be part of Moldova and Moldova claiming that it is a Russian-occupied state. It is not recognised as a separate country by the rest of the world and is considered a breakaway state of Moldova for international trade. This comes with much frustration for the Transnistrian people, who would prefer to manage their own imports and exports, and to be recognised as an independent country rather than a ‘frozen conflict zone.’

Transnistria lives in a permanent state of liminality, both existing and not existing. For the Moldovans, the Ukrainians and Transnistrians, the area of Transnistria is subject to contradictory mental maps.

The image of location within one’s mind, based on experience, is how mental maps form.

Having lived in so many towns, I have many mental maps. This is sometimes confusing when I have not visited a town for a long time and often, I will confuse two towns with similar architecture. Tunbridge Wells and Leamington Spa both have historical waters and white Georgian architecture. On my last visit to Tunbridge Wells, I spent several hours looking for something I later realised was in Leamington Spa. Mental maps are subjective, fallible and bleed into one another.

Living in different towns, years apart, the two merging mental maps cause a minor crisis in the flow of recalled time. Two parts of ‘Time’s Arrow’ that should be separated by temporal distance touch. Time folds and becomes another layer of one’s personal hauntological dimension with one’s position in space bombarded by fragments of pasts and futures lived and not lived, experiences well remembered or confused, but the information received may not be recalled correctly. Is hauntology, in part, the study of misremembered or even false events?

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Grafton Tanner discusses the effects of sampling technology at length in his book ‘Babbling Corpse’ (Tanner, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, 2016) He illustrates the ideas of deconstruction and entropy with current trends in music. I say current, but as both he and Reynolds point out, ‘current’ trends have not changed significantly in over twenty-five years. The advent of sampling technology has effectively stalled creativity and the forward motion of musical invention. The past is constantly referenced in the use of samples and arrests the evolution of musical expression. If you have not heard the original song, it is easy to think that a riff is an original composition. It is easy to then sample the sample, creating nostalgia for a track borne of nostalgia. The past is cut, pasted, rearranged, and divorced from its original context. It is as Sebald says in The Rings of Saturn ‘On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.’ (Sebald, 2020)

Considering the rush of musical invention and genres or movements between the mid-50s and the late 80s, sampling technology, after a flurry of sound collage hits (e.g., ‘Theme from S-Express’ by S-Express, ‘Pump Up The Volume’ by M.A.R.R.S. and almost everything recorded by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu and The KLF) has created a stagnation of musical evolution. The best we can call it is ‘musical re-invention,’ at worst, ham-fisted collage.

Reinvention is not a concept that applies to Jive Bunny. Whereas M.A.R.R.S et al. sought to try out the limits of what straightforward sampling could achieve, Jive Bunny cynically cut together entire verses or choruses of songs on a single theme and laid a back beat against them. In trying to evoke a particular era or mood, this was a purely commercial endeavour, playing on and repackaging the past and presenting it with a singular lack of panache. The use of sampling made this easier, but even the idea was not an original one. In the early 1980s, a flurry (slurry?) of hits from the likes of Startrax and countless imitators, spliced together fragments of either thematic or bizarrely random choices of song to an idiot backbeat. Even the London Philharmonic Orchestra succumbed with the woeful ‘Hooked on Classics.’

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For my own part, I enjoyed making music when the TEAC 8-Track reel-to-reel tape recorder was king. I enjoyed the tactile qualities of splicing taped sounds into ‘rhythm beds,’ measuring tape cuts to create a perfect time signature and engaging in ‘musique concrete.’ This is mostly because of the inspiration provided by the BBC Radiophonic workshop and in particular, the works of Delia Derbyshire. While it is true that electronic sound editing has made the collaging aspect easier, it has removed the tactile element. This saddens me. As my favoured technology has become obsolete and unavailable, it has ultimately led to me abandoning music as a form of expression.

Tanner states ‘Whereas postmodernism captures and appropriates the past, hauntology sets the past free to disestablish time as a sequence and transform it into a looping construction.’ (Tanner, 2016) Fisher expressed a similar concern that since the 1990s ‘cultural time has folded back in on itself.’ (Fisher, 2014) Both comments suggest that we are living in a system of permanent nostalgia. Both indicate that Time’s Arrow is being tampered with, knowingly or not.

There is a similar argument to be levelled at the movie industry. With modern Hollywood ‘sampling’ their back catalogue, churning out endless remakes, reboots, and sequels, often forgetting that the reason for their initial success was their originality. Such cynical repetition rarely – and I stress rarely – constitutes originality.

‘Babbling Corpse’ is mainly interested in a form of music known as ‘vapourwave,’ a form that deliberately sets out to subvert time. ‘One of the defining characteristics of many vapourwave tracks,’ Tanner explains, ‘is this element of repetition, which draws attention to the uncanniness of audio looping. Usually focussing on one fragment of an entire song, a vapourwave producer will then loop that phrase ad nauseum, often for the length of the entire track. The effect is absurd, hilarious, unnerving, and sometimes boring.’ It offers the listener a state of meditation at its best, and an audio form of water torture at worst.

Where sampling often seeks to hide or distort the original sample, obscuring the audio presence of the original writer and song, vapourwave makes no bones about where it comes from. There is a relentless honesty to constantly thrusting the same barely treated sample into one’s face, time and time again; the same time, removed from context, repeated, celebrated, denounced, objectified, abjectified.

Vapourwave is, perhaps the audio equivalent of Andy Warhol’s¹ repeated screen prints placing it more in the arena of fine art, rather than music. That is not to say that the extreme repetition of sound does not occur within music. Phillip Glass, for example, can take a small musical phrase, repeat it, stretch it and warp it to breaking point in pursuit of a minimalist ideal. Even within pop music, a simple two bar phrase can be repeated ad infinitum and attain chart status.

Consider the ‘sample of a sample’ scenario. This is an exemplary illustration of the concept of deconstruction. Where deconstruction was – in part – concerned with breaking the barriers between polar opposites – essentially creating infinite greys between the black and white – so sampling creates a disruption of Time’s Arrow by presenting the past as the future; by distorting evolution; by utilising ‘sonic inbreeding.’

As a further irony, the avant-garde ‘future of music’ (i.e., sampling technology) has become the established order – which is the ultimate fate of all avant-gardes – and frozen music’s evolution. Simon Reynolds, in his book ‘Retromania’ (Reynolds, 2012) describes sampling as ‘a mixture of time travel and séance.’ Suggesting that the past is forced to the fore and refused a dignified end. ‘Franken-Music’ is perhaps a little cruel but no crueller than ‘ham-fisted collage.’

A similar dichotomy exists in the music of Kraftwerk. Once the future of music, it is now cosily familiar and nostalgic, more so when you consider they still play live, but have produced no new music since 2003, and even that – Tour de France Soundtracks – is a fantasia built around a song from ten years earlier. With only one of the original band members remaining, they have become their own tribute act, trading on a past of future music. The ‘music of the future’ refuses to progress, and now presents their past catalogue as a cosily familiar failed future.

What confuses Time’s Arrow here, aside from the obvious future/past scenario, is that Kraftwerk is one of the most sampled bands of all time. Their past influenced future music genres that have come and gone, while their past remains intact.

This promised future of music is now ‘the jumbling up of time, the montaging of earlier eras. [It] has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that it is no longer even noticed.’ (Fisher) has been tricked into a permanent present by the past. Time’s Arrow has been frozen in its path. It is flailing, looking backwards, and trying to connect with home.